Writing the Empire: Robert Southey and Romantic Colonialism

WRITING THE EMPIRE: ROBERT SOUTHEY AND ROMANTIC COLONIALISM Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb i 01/06/2007 11:53:20 The Enlightenment World: Political and Intellectual History of the Long Eighteenth Century Series Editors: Series Co-Editors: Michael T. Davis Jack Fruchtman, Jr Iain McCalman Paul Pickering Titles in this Series Harlequin Empire: Race, Ethnicity and the Drama of the Popular Enlightenment David Worrall The Cosmopolitan Ideal in the Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1776–1832 Michael Scrivener Forthcoming Titles Adam Ferguson: History, Progress and Human Nature Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle The Evolution of Sympathy in the Long Eighteenth Century Jonathan Lamb Adam Ferguson: Philosophy, Politics and Society Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle The Scottish People and the French Revolution Bob Harris Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism Jacqueline M. Labbe www.pickeringchatto.com/enlightenmentworld Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb ii 01/06/2007 11:53:21 WRITING THE EMPIRE: ROBERT SOUTHEY AND ROMANTIC COLONIALISM by Carol Bolton london PICKERING & CHATTO  Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb iii 01/06/2007 11:53:21 Published by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited 21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH 2252 Ridge Road, Brookfield, Vermont 05036-9704, USA www.pickeringchatto.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior permission of the publisher. © Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited 2007 © Carol Bolton 2007 british library cataloguing in publication data Bolton, Carol Writing the empire: Robert Southey and Romantic colonialism. – (The Enlightenment world) 1. Southey, Robert, 1774–1843 – Criticism and interpretation 2. Southey, Robert, 1774–1843 – Influence 3. Romanticism – England – History – 19th century 4. Great Britain – Colonies – In literature I. Title 821.7 ISBN-13: 9781851968633 ∞ This publication is printed on acid-free paper that conforms to the American National Standard for the Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb iv 01/06/2007 11:53:22 CONTENTS Acknowledgments List of Illustrations vii ix Introduction 1 1 ‘Once more I will cry aloud and spare not’: Southey’s Responses to the African Slave Trade 15 2 ‘Taking possession’: Southey’s and Wordsworth’s Romantic America 69 3 ‘Eden’s happy vale’: Romantic Representations of the South Pacific 113 4 Thalaba the Destroyer: Southey’s ‘Arabian romance’ 167 5 The Curse of Kehama: Missionaries, ‘monstrous mythology’ and Empire 207 Notes 257 Works Cited Index 299 321 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb v 01/06/2007 11:53:24 For John, Catherine and John Jnr Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb vi 01/06/2007 11:53:24 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many colleagues and friends have been supportive and inspirational over the period in which this book has been written and I wish to thank them all. My immense gratitude goes particularly to Tim Fulford and Lynda Pratt for reading and commenting on large parts of Writing the Empire, as well as in the invaluable example of their own work, which has transformed Southeyan scholarship and made the task easier. Bill Speck has also been kind enough to comment on sections of the book and Ian Packer has positively assisted throughout the writing process. My thanks to Averill Buchanan for her thorough proof-reading and indexing contributions, as well as to Julie Wilson for her editorial services. John Goodridge, Lynne Hapgood, Claire Jowitt, Carl Thompson and David Worrall have all provided encouragement in various ways. The support of my family has been much appreciated, but my greatest debt of gratitude, for all aspects of the unfailing help he provides, is reserved for John Bolton. For permission to reproduce the illustrations included in this book, I would like to thank the British Museum, London, the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, and The Wordsworth Trust. I am also grateful to the following for permission to quote from manuscripts held by them: the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; the Berg Collection, New York Public Library; the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; the British Library, London; the Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library; the Hispanic Society of America, New York; the Pforzheimer Collection, New York Public Library. Some of the material that appears here was published, in earlier form, in: Lynda Pratt (ed.), Robert Southey: Writing and Romanticism, a special edition of Romanticism on the Net, 32–3 (November 2003–February 2004), gen. ed. Michael Eberle Sinatra, http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/; Lynda Pratt (ed.), Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Claire Lamont and Michael Rossington (eds), Romanticism’s Debatable Lands (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). I am grateful to the editors for permission to incorporate it. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb vii 01/06/2007 11:53:24 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb viii 01/06/2007 11:53:24 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Frontispiece. William Henry Egleton, engraving after John Opie, Robert Southey (1806) Figure 1. Isaac Cruikshank, The Abolition of the Slave Trade (1792) Figure 2. Frontispiece, from Madoc (1805) Figure 3. ‘Mexican Priest’ and ‘Mexican Warrior’, from Francisco Clavigero, The History of Mexico (1787) Figure 4. ‘A Common Sacrifice’, from Francisco Clavigero, The History of Mexico (1787) Figure 5. ‘Sketch from Recollection and Anchor Bearings of the North Part of Otaheite from Point Venus to Taowne Harbour’, from William Bligh, A Voyage to the South Sea (1792) Figure 6. ‘The Garden of Aloadin’, from William Hawkes Smith, Essays in Design from Southey’s Poem of Thalaba the Destroyer (1818) Figure 7. ‘Domdaniel’, from William Hawkes Smith, Essays in Design from Southey’s Poem of Thalaba the Destroyer (1818) Figure 8. W. Skelton, engraving after William Hodges, ‘Procession of a Hindoo Woman to the Funeral Pile of her Husband’, from William Hodges, Travels in India (1793) Figure 9. B. J. Pouncy, engraving after William Hodges, ‘Banyan Tree’, from William Hodges, Travels in India (1793) Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb ix x 48 91 93 94 126 195 203 237 238 01/06/2007 11:53:24 William Henry Egleton, engraving after John Opie, Robert Southey (1806). By permission of the Wordsworth Trust. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb x 01/06/2007 11:53:24 INTRODUCTION This book is about one of the most popular writers of one of the most studied eras of English literature. Described as ‘the only existing entire man of letters’, Robert Southey was a writer whose very variety led, during the twentieth-century professionalization of literary criticism as an academic discipline, to his disappearance from the scholarly map.1 Neither a ‘prophet of nature’ in the Wordsworthian mould, nor an architect of the Victorian novel in that of Eliot, Southey fitted into no critic’s ‘great tradition’. Yet in his own mind, it was ‘the man of letters’ – the writer professional in many genres – who truly commanded the cultural field. He considered the implications of his role in a journal article of 1808: For whom however is the purest honey hoarded that the bees of this world elaborate, if it be not for the man of letters? The exploits of the kings and conquerors of old serve for nothing now but to fill story books for his amusement. It was to delight his leisure, and stimulate his admiration that Homer sung, and Alexander conquered. It is to gratify his curiosity that adventurers have traversed deserts and savage countries and explored the seas from pole to pole. The revolutions of the planet which he inhabits are but matters for his speculation, and the deluges and conflagrations which it has undergone, the sport of his philosophy. He is the inheritor of whatever has been discovered by persevering labour, or created by genius; the wise of all ages have heaped up a treasure for him which rust doth not corrupt, and which thieves cannot break through and steal.2 As the central repository for all the ‘treasure’ of knowledge in the world, Southey allocates himself a position of supreme importance.3 The ‘exploits’ of history are for his ‘amusement’, and for his benefit ‘adventurers’ explore the world. Even planetary events are for his ‘speculation’. Southey creates an impression of the world’s vastness and historical longevity, in order to put himself at its centre and remind readers of his prominent role in early nineteenth-century British culture. The epistemological egocentrism that Southey displays here is indistinguishable from his anglocentric viewpoint, which he felt qualified him to take a global scope within his grasp and bring it home to a domestic centre, where its true worth could be divulged to readers. Southey’s consciousness of himself as an –1– Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 1 01/06/2007 11:53:25 2 Writing the Empire ‘inheritor’ of all the world’s knowledge suggests he saw himself in a powerful position of trust. It also implies, through the process of inheritance, a further transmission to posterity of this knowledge. On the face of it, given the twentieth-century neglect of his work, Southey’s conception of the man of letters can be considered mere vain self-promotion. I will argue in this book, however, that his egotism should not blind us to his importance: he was not only a pioneer in many genres, but he became a vital ideologue of, and commentator on, empire. This was a culturally crucial role in setting the agenda for the British imperialism of the Victorian age, at a time when significant events were taking place all over the world: The history and politics of the years 1785–1830 were marked not just by the French Revolution, but by the loss of the American colonies, the impeachment of Warren Hastings (the Governor of Bengal), the transportation of convicts to Australia, the campaign to abolish the slave-trade, the acquisition of new colonies in the Mediterranean and Africa, the development of Canada and the administration of older colonies in India, Africa and Ireland.4 As its title, Writing the Empire, suggests, this book takes as its subject texts from the British Romantic period (1780–1830) that reflect these global events. In doing so it examines Southey’s significant public role in communicating them to British readers. Southey was pre-eminent among his literary peers for his direct and consistent engagement with colonial issues. This was because (as his attitude towards Britain’s political structures changed) he considered the British Empire a crucial political entity. This book presents a close analysis of his writing on this theme – writing that was often intended to be foundational in the context of nation and empire-building. Southey has been unjustly neglected since his own time, largely because one strand of writing (with one kind of author) has taken precedence over others in the formation of the Romantic canon.5 The presentation of Romanticism as an aesthetic movement that privileges introspective, self-expressive forms of writing (and writers) has seen the subjugation, until recently, of other forms and authors. In the same way that the positions of female and labouring-class writers have often been sidelined, so have the views of those, like Southey, who had a wider, global perspective than the eurocentric one which previously dominated Romantic studies. Southey’s work contributes to the ‘public face’ of Romanticism – that he keenly engaged in through the social and political topics he discussed in his journalism and poetry (and in his position as Poet Laureate, after 1813) – and which has often been overlooked in prioritizing a ‘private’ form of Romanticism. The canonical revisionism of the last decade has resulted in a massive resurgence of interest both in Southey’s life and writing and in his relationship to Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 2 01/06/2007 11:53:25 Introduction 3 Romantic period culture. His early and mid-career poetry is now available for the first time in a scholarly edition – the Poetical Works, 1793–1810 (2004)6 – and four further volumes covering his later career will appear in 2010. In addition, new biographies by Mark Storey and Bill Speck have allowed a more comprehensive (and complex) picture of Southey to emerge than the peripheral figure who existed previously in the margins of the life-histories of Wordsworth and Coleridge.7 This new Southeyan scholarship has also reinvigorated the idea of him as a public figure, rather than a reclusive ‘laker’. Southey emerges as a reliable, industrious source of support to a large group of relations and friends (including Coleridge’s family). He is also (re-)placed at the centre of a much wider social and political network. Southey met and communicated with politicians (William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, John Wilson Croker), literary figures (Anna Seward, Walter Scott, James Montgomery) and social reformers (Mary Wollstonecraft, George Dyer, Thomas Beddoes), and discussed with them (sometimes controversially) many of the important issues of the day. An even more complete understanding of the central and public role he played in Romantic period culture will emerge from another major editorial project – the first ever edition of Southey’s Collected Letters. Under the general editorship of Tim Fulford and Lynda Pratt, this will be published between 2007 and 2014 and will make his surviving correspondence available on a free-access website. Writing the Empire builds on current critical interest in Southey. It augments the work of Marilyn Butler, Tim Fulford, Nigel Leask and Lynda Pratt by restoring him to the canon in a historicized manner that illuminates the relationship of Romantic writing to the politics of empire.8 My intention in this book is to demonstrate how crucial Southey was to the development of ideas on non-European cultures and societies during the Romantic period. I examine his writing within its original contexts of the journalism, political commentary and explorers’ narratives that originated from this period of colonial expansion and settlement. This demonstrates the direct link between the political and the personal in the literature he created from his source material, as he interposed his own views and values on colonialist discourse to present it in fictional form for his readers. Southey’s increasingly dominant position as a member of the literati meant that his own ideas in turn were transmitted through other writers. The literary relationships between Southey and Wordsworth, Coleridge and Byron, as well as less well-known authors such as Mary Russell Mitford and James Montgomery, are explored in detail here, by examining the similarities (and differences) between these writers who often publicized Southey’s world-view, whether by promoting it or reacting against it. My methodology comes primarily from the fields of new historicism and post-colonialism, in order to highlight the relationship of the avowedly aesthetic Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 3 01/06/2007 11:53:25 4 Writing the Empire discourse of Romanticism to the explicitly imperialist discourses of the period in which Britain acquired its second empire.9 At its base is the recognition that literary texts are embedded in their socio-political history and that this history itself is not a homogenous and completely stable ‘background’ of events. The early nineteenth century is considered a watershed in British colonial history before a more formalized Victorian imperialism came into place – it was therefore a time in which there was not necessarily one common, governing, dominant ideology, just as there was never only one style of discourse. While Edward Said has demonstrated that the occidental fascination with all things eastern created ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient’, Homi Bhaba and Gayatri Spivak have questioned such solid distinctions.10 The (re-)examination of colonialist discourse in the light of this analysis reveals the indeterminacies that fracture such hegemonic constructions (even in the moment of their production), so exposing the illusory nature of binary distinctions between the positions of colonizer and colonized. The critical analysis of Romantic texts through this methodology – by John Barrell and Nigel Leask, for instance – has revealed similar ambiguities and contradictions, so mirroring the fragmented, diverse nature of the British colonies, rather than projecting a concrete image of empire.11 Writing the Empire focuses upon these ‘anxieties and instabilities’, which (often unwittingly) undermine the projected ‘positivities and totalities’, so discovering a productive dialectic.12 As Bhaba states, one of the reasons for these ‘instabilities’ was that writers like Southey discussed foreign cultures in terms of their own society and, while ‘othering’ them, attempted to domesticate them.13 This was especially true of colonial societies, where, despite his fascination for unfamiliar cultural practices, Southey often considered them moral aberrations to be extinguished by correct (British) models of government and society. Although he used the exotic strangeness of foreign locations to make his poetry more exciting, Southey’s assimilation of the alien attributes he found there to make them more ‘like’ Britain created much of the ambiguity in his texts. These ambiguities also originate in Southey’s inability to express his poetic or political manifesto explicitly, as Lynda Pratt has pointed out.14 A representative example of this is his journalism on foreign affairs, which, rather than clearly stating his colonial ambitions for Britain, presents his own subjective and idiosyncratic reactions to events. It is only through the iterative style of his writing and his concluding summations that the policy behind his prose is revealed. But it should be remembered that much of what we now consider as solid legislative or political fixities in the imperial arena originated in the (often tentative) exploratory ideas of individuals who were faced with administering alien territories and governing indigenous native populations (of which they sometimes Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 4 01/06/2007 11:53:25 Introduction 5 had little knowledge). Southey’s speculative responses to colonial matters simply reflect the uncertainties and anxieties that beset others in implementing imperial strategy – and which could disrupt the coherence of political (and literary) aims and ambitions. In Southey’s case, his technique of ‘commingling’ elements, by combining constituent (often disparate) parts in his construction (including elements from very different locations and temporalities), meant that they always threatened to fall apart again, so problematizing the totality of his ‘empire-building’ vision.15 Southey’s inability to express his ideas directly causes another ‘instability’ in his writing, which manifests itself as ‘a resistance to affirmation on its own terms, a means of being positive via the negative’.16 This also applies to the topics Southey chose to represent. Despite his declaration that ‘England should be the scene of an Englishman’s poem’, he was reluctant to write the history of England as a national epic.17 No doubt this was due to the ideology (as well as the discourse) of radicalism that he had adopted in his youth, making it impossible to write about English mythological or historical subjects. Instead Southey used a foreign ‘negative’, criticizing the inadequacies (as he saw it) of other races and cultures for the edification of his readers. His development as a writer was synchronous with his awareness of the responsibility his role entailed as a social and moral watchdog. Therefore he felt it his civic and Christian duty to comment on social mores, whether at home or abroad, to inculcate what he considered to be an appropriate moral rectitude in the British public. The impossibly virtuous heroes of Southey’s poetry were designed to inspire an empathetic ambition in his readers to discover these similar qualities in themselves. His articles for periodicals such as the Annual Review (1802–9) and the Quarterly Review (1809–39) were written to instruct Britons in a correct ethical code and criticize those that he felt had strayed from it. The fact that he made foreign territories his specialism in his journalism (as he had in his poetry) meant that again he was holding up the ‘other’ he found there for public disapproval. Even in his biographies and histories, his representation of his subjects’ deeds and actions are intended to contribute to his code of morality. That Southey was trying to define such qualities as ‘British’ can be seen in his Life of Nelson (1813), with its ‘eulogy of our great naval hero’.18 However, his promotion of British values often publicized his own subjective personal likes and dislikes. Southey’s individual principles – which had in the past been used to oppose British society – were made ‘safe’ over his lifetime by being assimilated into national (rather than autonomous and therefore dangerous) values. Through this process of change his nationalism became established. The historical sense of what Britishness is, which he promotes in his writing – his ‘inheritance’ from the ‘treasure’ trove of the past – is no less than Southey himself, parading in the imposing costume of Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 5 01/06/2007 11:53:25 6 Writing the Empire Britannia for his readers. In promulgating his own personal code he intended to build a moral empire, with Britain at its centre. This desire to instil in the British public his own moral code – which encouraged qualities such as decency, duty, piety and purity – had its roots in Southey’s radical youth. In 1794 when he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge at Oxford, the two men defined a system by which they could live their lives, governed by the democratic principles that they embraced. Their plan to found a new society, Pantisocracy, set out their egalitarian ethos based on abolishing private property and endowing all community members with equal rights. Though Southey felt later that this ‘mania of man-mending’, as he referred to it, had passed away with his youth, it would in fact mark his writing for the rest of his life.19 While the political content of his manifesto changed, his ethical values never did and this was what he aspired to impose on the British public. In later life, once Southey had come to present his own conservative beliefs as ‘British’, the demonization of other cultures that he often indulged in was intended not only to demonstrate to his readers proper forms of behaviour, but also to teach them the worth of their own government and society (which reinforced these values). Writing the Empire tracks the changes over Southey’s life and literary output from his youthful rejection of British ‘systems’ to a position in which he felt able to accept the British political establishment and even reinforce it in his writing. The progression it delineates was also crucial in forming Southey’s responses to colonial politics. Whereas in the 1790s he had advocated emigration in order to escape what he saw as Britain’s restrictive political regime for a dream of democracy, by 1810 he could recommend the expansion of empire in order to export British institutions and values across the world. Southey’s political position only became more entrenched after what Geoffrey Carnall refers to as his ‘conversion to conservatism’.20 Carnall’s study, more than any other, follows this political progression, however what he does not elucidate, is how Southey’s movement from radical to reactionary was represented in his opinions on colonial affairs, or – by the time The Curse of Kehama was published in 1810 – his overt nationalism. The purpose of this book is to explain this trajectory in terms of Southey’s responses to colonial, as well as domestic, politics. First, however, it is necessary to explain what Southey felt his poetical impulses to be, as his poetry was so important in transmitting his ideas to the public. In his review of Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) for the Edinburgh Review in 1802, Francis Jeffrey recognized that Southey was creating a new kind of aesthetic in his poetry. In accusing him of being the leader of a new ‘sect of poets’, Jeffrey used religious dissension as a metaphor for poetic individualism. For Jeffrey, Southey’s poetry attempted to challenge the work of established writers – which he saw as a transgression against literary ‘laws’: Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 6 01/06/2007 11:53:26 Introduction 7 Poetry has this much, at least, in common with religion, that its standards were fixed long ago, by certain inspired writers, whose authority it is no longer lawful to call in question.21 Jeffrey’s review points out other such misdemeanours by Southey and the ‘disciples of this school’ of poetry, of which he claims he is the leader. They have ‘abandoned the old models’, show ‘discontent with the present constitution of society’ and ‘constitute, at present, the most formidable conspiracy that has lately been formed against sound judgement in matters poetical’.22 In the same way that Wordsworth and Coleridge were laying down their poetical manifesto in Lyrical Ballads, Southey was laying down his in poems such as Thalaba. The ‘affectation of great simplicity and familiarity of language’ that Jeffrey objected to in Thalaba was part of Southey’s drive to make his credo clear to his readers.23 And when Jeffrey went on to accuse Southey of ‘childishness’ for his dualistic vision of the world in Kehama, he was again attacking this same impulse.24 But for Southey it was important that his message was clearly conveyed to the public, and belief in his own moral purpose meant he could shrug off these negative comments on Thalaba to produce another oriental ‘epic’ that employed the same ethical framework. It was probably for Jeffrey’s benefit that Southey included a motto from George Withers at the beginning of Kehama: FOR I WILL FOR NO MAN’S PLEASURE CHANGE A SYLLABLE OR MEASURE; PEDANTS SHALL NOT TIE MY STRAINS TO OUR ANTIQUE POETS’ VEINS; BEING BORN AS FREE AS THESE, I WILL SING AS I SHALL PLEASE.25 It declares Southey’s independence from poetic pedantry and also confirms that he is creating a new aesthetic in his writing. As early as 1803 Southey felt that he had given up financial reward in the expression of his literary and moral individualism: I am pleased and satisfied with my lot. In a profession I might have made a fortune. I shall yet make what will be a fortune to me, and that in a way obedient to the call and impulse of my own nature, and best adapted to develop every moral and intellectual germ implanted in me. How I must by many be regarded as an improvident man, squandering talents that might have made him opulent and raised him to a high rank! Upon their views I confess the charge; but it is a virtue for which I already receive the reward of my own applause, and shall receive the highest rewards as the feelings and truths which I shall enforce produce their effect age after age, so long as our language and our literature endure.26 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 7 01/06/2007 11:53:26 8 Writing the Empire For Southey, writing was a course of moral improvement, enabling him to work out his principles on paper. His career would have its own ‘highest rewards’ in those true feelings which would be inculcated in his readers and endure for eternity. His concern with his future reputation does not just refer to his literary career but to his position as a moral custodian, as the following incident reveals. Southey had entrusted supervision of the publication of one of his works, Specimens of the Later English Poets (1807), to his close friend Grosvenor Charles Bedford. When Southey saw the published text he was outraged, not simply by the amount of uncorrected errors he found, but that Bedford should have: selected anything immoral, and sent it into the world under the sanction of my name. As for my literary character, I am sufficiently careless about it; so much so that even the errors which deface almost every page of this book … do not give me five minutes’ concern; but this is not the case with respect to my character as a moralist – of that I am as jealous as a soldier of his honour.27 Southey had a moral test for literature which he had instructed Bedford to apply to all the material in the Specimens – ‘that which a woman would not like to read aloud, ought not to be inserted’.28 Southey regarded his primary role as a writer to be to inculcate correct moral principles in his readers (many of which he assumed to be female), so conflating his own ethics into a public value-system. Southey did not stop fighting battles all his life. He had high principles and held on to them despite risking unpopularity with others. The youthful ideals he held of liberty and equality became a middle-aged, narrow desire to impose his own code of beliefs on others and a concern to protect Britain from political and moral danger. Despite his changing political beliefs (which made him a target for contemporary attacks) he remained consistent in his opinion that a ‘storm’ was coming to Britain; the anticipation of a bellum servile that haunts his letters. In his youth he embraced such massive political and societal change because he would, he believed, be in America with his family, far from its terrors. From Southey’s more conservative perspective and Lake District domicile (after 1803) he greatly feared such an event. It is easy to forget now the impact of having lived through a time which was marked by the American and French (and industrial) revolutions and – as Carnall rightly points out – ‘His beliefs were a response to [these] alarming political and social movements’.29 Wherever we, as readers, stand on Southey’s apostasy, it makes sense of his colonialist policy. Growing comfortably more reactionary himself and seeing huge change around him, he found little difference in his fears of the ‘mob’, whether they were at home or abroad (reinforced by his largely negative experiences of Portuguese society and religion). But by concentrating simply on Southey’s representations of other nations it is too easy to assume that he delib- Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 8 01/06/2007 11:53:26 Introduction 9 erately intended to reinforce the divisions between them and Britain. In fact his distinction is more refined than this, it marks the difference between moral, upright Christian citizens (like himself ) and those, wherever they may be, who seek to undermine them. Unfortunately he elides this distinction so that a ‘British’ figure is compared against a religious, political, moral, inferior ‘other’. While during this period of colonial history there was ‘no fully crystallised stereotype about the peoples who were subjected to empire’, certainly towards its end these structures were becoming evident.30 The responses of those who travelled to new territories – explorers, settlers and colonial administrators – as well as those who wrote about them at home, were crucial in presenting these places to their metropolitan readers. As Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs point out, ‘Writing and travel have always been intimately connected’.31 Because in ‘travelling’ abroad Southey used his depictions of other cultures to define correct British values – in which he often employed a negative, foreign ‘other’ – his representations contribute to modern racial stereotypes. Retracing the origins of these opinions, from the primary sources of travel narratives, through secondary (often fictional) accounts, to their subsequent existence in the public imagination, demonstrates the egocentricity (and fragility) of such constructions. Travellers, writers and readers often relied on fulfilling their own personal and cultural expectations, so finding in new locations and strange cultures those things they were looking for. This is because Romantic colonialism – evinced as much in the writing of Coleridge and Wordsworth as Southey – entails a psychological self-exploration, in which the writer’s own values and concerns are (often unknowingly) projected onto the peoples and places that are ‘discovered’, in a process of ‘psycho-imperialism’. My analysis of Southey’s writing deconstructs this combination of subjective values and objective knowledge to demonstrate his method of appropriating and domesticating the foreign. However, one of the problems of analysing colonialist discourse is using its terminology without incorporating the contemporary value judgments of the ‘colonizer’. Because terms such as ‘Indian’ (for native American), ‘negro’ or ‘Mohammedan’ were prevalent in Romantic writing and it would be anachronistic to avoid them, they are used here without intending any negative connotations. Place names that were in common usage have also been replicated for accuracy and historical authenticity, while recognizing the colonialist ideology that brought them into existence (Chapter 2 particularly discusses this issue in depth). For instance in the South Pacific, to take just one example, loco-descriptive terms, such as the ‘South Seas, ‘Polynesia’ and ‘Melanesia’, were in common usage, as were British names given to islands, such as ‘St Christina’ for Tahuata, in the Marquesas Islands. In over two hundred years geographical regions and their political boundaries or colonial identities have often changed, therefore territories are discussed as they existed in textual references at the time. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 9 01/06/2007 11:53:26 Writing the Empire 10 However more correct terms and names are given in each chapter in parentheses. A further proviso applies to the different applications of the term ‘colonial’ in this book. It is often used to refer to Britain’s intervention in non-European countries at a time before the more concrete Victorian structures of the British Empire came into place – and by this definition it is used interchangeably with ‘imperial’, not simply as a reference to settlement. In this respect, Britain’s relationship with America (after it gained independence in 1783) is still a colonial one – especially because, due to the recentness of the American revolution, many contemporary writers still referred to it in these terms. And of course many accounts of life there, which included topographical, climatic and agricultural detail – such as Thomas Cooper’s Some Information Respecting America (1794) – were written to encourage British settlement in America. Representations of the Middle East and the Islamic religion (in Chapter 4) can be said to be ‘colonialist’ in that orientalist writers were often attempting to impose a western value-system on the alien structures of society and religion that they found there. ‘Romantic colonialism’ is a blanket term that covers a great many diverse examples of imperial expansion and government (as well as referring to literary engagement with its policies). Andrew Porter identifies the different imperial models that were in place at the end of the eighteenth century: An Empire of white settlement, truncated by losses in America, was already growing again by 1800; an Empire in India had expanded enormously since 1756; and an Empire of conquests or wartime acquisitions, the ‘dependent empire’ was continually added to between 1780 and 1914.32 Within these three strands of colonial expansion, there were several different departments that were responsible for governing these territories, as well as varying forms of control over them. For instance the British settler colonies of Canada increasingly became self-governing, whereas ‘Crown Colony’ territories (such as in Australia and the West Indies) were governed by British colonial administrators. In the South Pacific, however, despite the ‘colonial’ intervention of explorers such as Louis Antoine de Bougainville and James Cook, neither they, nor their representative governments, envisaged these islands as imperial outposts settled by Europeans.33 In conformity to a post-colonial (as opposed to a colonialist) view of the world, each chapter of Writing the Empire deals with one geographical place or discrete geo-political issue. This avoids replicating the conflation of cultures and locations that often occurs in Romantic literature, as well as providing a coherent structure for navigating Southey’s textual representations of Africa, America, the South Pacific, the Middle East and India. This book, while being grounded in historical and political contextual realities, largely presents an imaginative Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 10 01/06/2007 11:53:26 Introduction 11 engagement with the issues of colonialism, in that Southey’s responses were literary (rather than political). In this respect, Southey differed from those officials and administrators whose task it was to implement imperial policy. He had the freedom to apply his creative energies to this topic, unbounded (except ideologically) by the practical realities of its execution. However his published views on these matters were, and still are, influential. Southey’s journalism presented topical issues to the public and suggested solutions to the problems he identified, so providing his readers (past and present) with a valuable source of contemporary reaction to colonial policy. His poetry, which sought to instruct by entertaining, created lasting impressions on those who read it. Both in the original context of its creation and in analysis of its representations in the twenty-first century, it demonstrates the ways in which reactions to new places and cultures could operate in the public imagination. The value of Southey’s work can be seen in the effect it had on his peers. Whether they responded positively, in imitative works and public approbation, or negatively, by vilifying him in the press, Southey was never ignored, revealing the dominant status he held among his contemporaries. One of the most important colonial issues that Southey was keen to address, and which some of his earliest published poetry reacts against, was British involvement in the slave trade. This saw its apogee in the 1780s, at the ‘exact moment that the British also began to dominate abolition efforts’, as Debbie Lee points out.34 Chapter 1 examines Southey’s poetry and journalism on the subject of abolition, as well as his collaborative attempts with Coleridge to oppose the slave trade in his home town of Bristol. Southey’s abolitionist position was just one strand of his radical rejection of the British polity. But in later life (and after the slave trade had been abolished in 1807) he attempted to construct Britain as a responsible example of justice and morality for the rest of the world, as this chapter demonstrates. It also considers Southey’s proposals for the future of Africa and the West Indian colonies, in which the latter would benefit from a loyal African work-force, ‘civilized’ by English education and Christian religion. Southey’s literary output on this subject over his lifetime reflects its importance as a political issue during the Romantic period, but his changing priorities also demonstrate how responses to the slave trade could be impelled as much by domestic concerns as by humanitarian impulses to alleviate African suffering. As British expansion incorporated ‘new’ and unfamiliar territories all over the globe, written accounts of these regions and their inhabitants were brought back to an enthusiastic reading public. Many of Southey’s opinions on colonial politics were formed by reading these narratives, and he was particularly interested in those that originated from Britain’s ‘first empire’ in America, which influenced him and Coleridge in their scheme to emigrate there in 1794. Chapter 2 traces the origins of Southey’s Pantisocratic ideas in his long narrative poem, Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 11 01/06/2007 11:53:26 12 Writing the Empire Madoc (1805), which depicts the institution of a Welsh colony in America. The idea of this continent as an imaginative solution to the problems of Britain in a period of revolution, war and social change operated strongly on Southey. It also influenced Wordsworth in creating his poem ‘Ruth’ (1800), while the tropes of discovery and exploration that he found in travel accounts contributed to his own poetic ‘journey’ through the Lake District in ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’ (1800). However this chapter also demonstrates that, while American travel narratives provided these writers with source material for their poetic constructions, they also contributed to their destabilization. America was not the only geographical location that Southey perceived as an ideal setting for human society in the 1790s. The published accounts of the expeditions of Bougainville and Cook to the South Pacific (during the 1760s and 1770s) had a huge impact on the British reading public, as Bernard Smith has shown.35 Chapter 3 discusses the influence of these accounts on Southey, as well as his enthusiasm for Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse Upon the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality among Mankind (1755). These texts contributed to Southey’s impression that the Polynesians were ‘noble savages’, existing in a state of nature that he felt contrasted vividly with his own corrupt and enfeebled society. However this youthful idealism was eroded after reading and reviewing missionary accounts of these islands for the Annual Review and the Quarterly Review.36 This chapter examines the way in which reports of excessive female sexuality in the South Pacific were projected onto Southey’s concerns for the morals of his own society. Other representations of the South Pacific – by P. M. James, Mary Russell Mitford, Byron and James Montgomery – are compared and contrasted to Southey’s journal articles and narrative poems to consider the extent of his influence on these writers, as well as the dialogic nature of aesthetic responses to colonial discourse during this period. As Southey became increasingly conservative – reinforced by his visits to Portugal in 1795 and 1800 – he became more censorious of foreign cultural practices and religious beliefs that did not conform to his moral precepts. He brought this critical spirit to other regions of the globe, including the Middle East, which he used as the setting for his long narrative poem Thalaba the Destroyer (1801). Chapter 4 demonstrates the hybrid nature of this poem, which amalgamated the disparate accounts of European travellers to the region, orientalist fantasies (such as the Arabian Nights), as well as Southey’s reading of the Koran. My analysis of this poem shows that Thalaba’s divinelyordained mission against superstition, magic and rationalism in fact serves to criticize Southey’s own society and religion – as well as Middle Eastern culture and the Islamic religion – in holding up his virtuous hero as a moral exemplar to both. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 12 01/06/2007 11:53:26 Introduction 13 As Southey constructed a code of values for Britain, based on what he despised in other cultures and religions, this contributed to his representation of India in his writing. At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, the future of India – as a mercantile outpost under the control of the East India Company, and after 1813 as a territory of the British Empire – was an important topic of debate in Britain.37 Southey’s discussion of this subject in his journalism demonstrates British responses to India at this time, as well as contemporary aspirations for how these territories should be governed. The debate over how India should be ruled (which created a division between ‘Orientalists’ and ‘Anglicists’) influenced Southey greatly in the writing of The Curse of Kehama (1810), as Chapter 5 demonstrates. His depiction of India in this poem is related to his articles on the Baptist Missions there, as well as to Britain’s imperial policy in the subcontinent.38 This chapter argues that, in his poem, Southey constructed an extreme example of oriental tyranny that reflected his fears of Napoleon’s expansionist plans in Europe and Asia, but that also revealed his anxiety over the future of the British Empire in India. By 1810, Southey was attempting to create, through his writing, a nationalist aesthetic that relied on projecting British institutions and values against (what Southey considered to be) less developed, less moral nations. This ideological position that Southey came to therefore closes this book, but also remains its point of entry, in that such representations are open and circular, always revealing new positions, new justifications of the imperial project and new anxieties in its depiction. The process through which Southey came to justify British nationalism and an imperial policy of intervention and control, as delineated in Writing the Empire, demonstrates the methods by which advocates of imperialism constructed a personal vision of the British Empire and then sought to impose it on the world. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 13 01/06/2007 11:53:26 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 14 01/06/2007 11:53:26 1 ‘ONCE MORE I WILL CRY ALOUD AND SPARE NOT’: SOUTHEY’S RESPONSES TO THE AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE Majestic BRISTOL! to thy happy port Prolific COMMERCE makes its lov’d resort; Thy gallant ships, with spacious sails, unfurl’d Waft, to thy shore, the treasures of the world!1 Half a century ago Bristol was in size the second city in England. Manchester now holds that rank, and several other towns have outstripped it in population. There is less mercantile enterprise here than in any other trading English city: like the old Italians, the Bristol merchants go on in the track of their fathers, and, succeeding to enormous fortunes, find the regular profits so great that they have no temptation to deviate from the beaten way. The port is therefore yielding its foreign trade to bolder competitors; but it will always remain the centre of a great commerce with the Welsh coast, with Ireland, and all those inland counties which communicate with the Severn, a river navigable into the very heart of the kingdom. There is in the streets nothing like the bustle of London, nor like the business of Liverpool on the quays. The Quay, however, is still a busy as well as a striking scene, and remains a noble monument of the old citizens, who made it in the thirteenth century. On one side, the shipping, the bridges, the church towers, and the neighbouring hill which overlooks the town of which it now makes a part, form a fine picture. On the other there is the cathedral with the old trees in its front, and the distant country. A third view has a wider foreground with cranes and trees, and piles of goods intermingled, shipping of larger size, a fine row of houses upon a high terrace on the opposite side, and apart from them the Church of St. Mary Redclift, which is the finest parochial church in the kingdom, and is indeed far more beautiful than the cathedral.2 Robert Southey’s description of Bristol, published in 1807 – in the pseudonymous guise of the Spanish tourist, Don Manuel Espriella – sets the scene of the early nineteenth-century commercial city. Written from the perspective of a foreign traveller, it incorporates the striking elements of a visitor’s first impressions: the shipping on which the city depends, the cranes and ‘piles of goods intermingled’ on the quay, and the ‘fine’ houses and churches, framed by the surrounding hills. But it also betrays Southey’s own familiarity with the city’s – 15 – Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 15 01/06/2007 11:53:26 16 Writing the Empire history, its mercantile nature, and unique character as an inland river-port, compared to the larger, more industrious ports of London and Liverpool. Bristol had become prosperous from its trade with America, the West Indies, Africa, northwest Europe and the Baltic, as well as Ireland (while London preserved the East Indian trade for itself ). Though the port engages with a wide range of global markets, Southey nevertheless recognizes Bristol’s parochial identity – a result of its rural setting and the geographical hinterland of counties that it serves. The river Avon flowing out from the ‘distant country’, through hills and trees to the Severn and the sea, allows the intersection of foreign trade up-river into this rural city and beyond, connecting the south-west of England with the world.3 Tidal rivers such as the Avon and Severn, that provided access to sea-going ships, had long been agents of Britain’s colonial ambition. As Simon Schama notes, when commenting on the significance of the river Thames to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, ‘lines of imperial power have always flowed along rivers’.4 While Bristol is ‘yielding its trade to bolder competitors’, Southey is proud of the city’s innate ability to generate wealth, in spite of its merchants’ relaxed attitude to commercial profit. This wealth can be seen in the city’s fine architecture – still evident today in Queens Square, College Green and many parts of Clifton, as well as in municipal buildings such as the Exchange and the Guildhall – built by its merchants from the profits of colonial trade. Southey’s own family, who were linen drapers (though never particularly successful), exported ‘calicoe’ goods to America, as the trading records of the Bristol Record Society’s Publications for 1790 show.5 It is not surprising that Southey, when casting around for sites on which to found an egalitarian society for his friends and family, should have hit on either America or Wales as alternatives – the two places were not that far apart for a citizen of Bristol. My point is that this city, where Southey grew up, shaped his character and his politics. Its cosmopolitan flavour, from many years of foreign trade, made him a global citizen – in that he could imagine a close relationship between Britain and the rest of the world – despite the anglocentric nature of that vision. It is not surprising that Southey put Britain at the centre of the world in his writing, when daily the exotic evidence of its far-flung locations poured into the port in front of his eyes. The close environs of the city, while retaining the reassuring familiarity of the pastoral landscape of ‘Albion’, also provided experience of all that was foreign, strange and exciting – both elements that he would celebrate in his poetry. Southey’s description of his native city provides the backdrop for a very important phase of his life, when he was living in Bristol with Coleridge after meeting him in 1794, at the age of nineteen. Their friendship was an intellectual partnership that found common ground in their radical politics and shaped their early plans for emigration to America. Bristol was a significant location for their activities because of their collaborative opposition to the African slave Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 16 01/06/2007 11:53:27 ‘Once more I will cry aloud and spare not’ 17 trade with which this port still had strong connections. Southey and Coleridge were ideologically opposed to the concept of slavery, as well as to the inhumane practices of the slave trade, and this chapter examines their attempts during the 1790s to promote abolitionist arguments in their writing. It also argues that the two writers’ opposition to the slave trade was just one strand of their total rejection of establishment politics and that the ideas behind their call for abolition, as well as the language used to phrase it, were borrowed from ‘Jacobin’ ideology. Their ‘levelling’ condemnation of distinctions in class, property and wealth was extended to oppose the yet more iniquitous disparity between master and slave in their attack on slavery. For Southey, Coleridge and another Bristol radical, Thomas Beddoes, the excessive consumerism of the period widened the gap between rich and poor, as well as creating a desire for exotic commodities, which in turn fuelled the slave trade. My discussion demonstrates how their arguments contributed to, and were motivated by, the philosophical, moral and economic critiques of luxury that were circulating at this time. Southey’s abolitionist poetry is examined in the context of other literary responses to the slave trade. For instance, his ‘Poems on the Slave Trade’ (1797) adopt the sentimentalizing language and imagery common to many anti-slavery poems by writers such as Hannah More and Ann Yearsley. Through this medium, Southey intended to attract sympathy to the cause of abolition, by making his readers ‘feel’ the effects of African suffering. This is also the intention of his poem ‘The Sailor who had Served in the Slave Trade’ (1799), the origins of which are discussed in comparison to Coleridge’s more diffuse response to the slave trade and maritime exploration in ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ (1798). Once Southey’s fervour for remodelling his own society began to wane, the anti-slavery campaign became a respectable outlet for his activism. In this political arena he could still use the rhetoric of radicalism to support abolition, but without making the British polity, which he came to support, his target – as my discussion of his later poetry demonstrates. Southey’s more conservative responses to the subjects of slavery and colonial development are considered by examining the articles he wrote for periodicals on these topics – including a review of the Chronological History of the West Indies (1827), written by his brother, Thomas Southey (1777–1838). My discussion of Southey’s letters and journalism written in the years running up to the Emancipation Act (1833) shows him engaging in the far-reaching debate over how Britain’s relationship with Africa and the West Indian colonies should be maintained. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 17 01/06/2007 11:53:27 Writing the Empire 18 Bristol Radicalism First, however, I will consider the effect on Southey’s political ideas of spending many of his formative years in Bristol and the reasons for his attack on the economic basis of its existence. What Southey’s description of Bristol omits is that in the 1730s and 1740s the port had the largest share of Britain’s African trade and that the city’s wealth (invested in its fine houses and municipal buildings) was primarily gained by profits from slavery.6 Ships owned by Bristol merchants were fitted out with trade goods (textiles, guns, iron, spirits and beads) to be exchanged for slaves on the West African coast (usually known as the ‘Guinea coast’, which stretched from Cape Verde to the Congo).7 Those slaves that survived the ‘middle passage’ from Africa to the colonies of North America or the West Indies were sold there, and ships’ captains bought plantation goods to sell in Britain before returning home. Ascendancy in the slave trade had passed to Liverpool in the 1740s, but nevertheless in the second half of the eighteenth century this trade still contributed to at least 12 per cent of Bristol’s overseas commerce.8 The major part of Bristol’s foreign trade in the 1790s was directly with the West Indies, particularly Jamaica, from where merchants imported goods grown by slave labour. According to W. E. Minchinton, ‘Molasses, rum, cotton, dyewoods and other products found their place in this trade but chief of them was sugar which was refined in the twenty or so sugar houses in Bristol’ and became ‘the most important ingredient of Bristol’s prosperity in the eighteenth century’.9 Bristol merchants therefore still supported the African slave trade because their West Indian imports depended on a regular supply of slaves for the plantations. Evidence of the slave trade in the Bristol of Southey’s youth must have been hard to avoid. This city was certainly the first destination for the abolitionist, Thomas Clarkson, on his fact-finding tour of the slave ports of Britain for the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in June 1787. As well as the sailors and merchants engaged in the trade there was a small, but nevertheless visible, black population in the city.10 Joan Baum points out other prominent indications of the slave trade: Signs of the trade could also be found in notices of slave auctions, advertisements for runaways, announcements of the return of ship captains, mates, and surgeons with their ‘privilege’ Negroes – the young blacks they got to keep, sell, or smuggle north to work in the mines or the homes of the wealthy. Other evidence was more grim, including shops that blatantly displayed slave-restraining mechanisms such as thumbscrews with torture keys and ‘African pacifiers’, muzzles three feet long for the neck.11 Almost every citizen of Bristol in the eighteenth century, whether wittingly or not, had links with the African or West Indian trade. For instance many of the Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 18 01/06/2007 11:53:27 ‘Once more I will cry aloud and spare not’ 19 boys that Southey went to school with were the sons of West Indian planters. Edith Fricker, the woman that Southey was to marry in 1795, was the daughter of a man who manufactured pans for the sugar-refining industry. Their marriage took place in the Church of St Mary Redcliffe (mentioned by Southey in the opening passage), and it was in the crypt of this church – built by the merchants of Bristol as an imposing manifestation of their religious conviction and wealth – that African slaves were supposed to have been held before being sold.12 Despite Bristol merchants’ reliance on the African and West Indian trade, Baum comments that ‘Whether owing to smaller size or longer intellectual tradition, however, Bristol was also home to inquiring minds and crusading spirits’.13 Though Clarkson encountered much initial opposition to his inquiries in Bristol in 1787, the Quakers of the city assisted him in his quest for information and his departure saw a culture of opposition established in the form of the Bristol Abolition Committee. Local newspapers encouraged debate of the issue by publishing pro- and anti-abolition articles.14 In 1793 the city had suffered a depression – due to falling economic confidence as a result of the prospect of war with France – which led to a further decline in its slave-trading activities.15 So, in 1794, Bristol provided enough evidence of the slave trade to inspire those committed to its abolition, like Southey and Coleridge, but it could also accommodate such independence of mind as this trade was no longer its economic mainstay.16 Coleridge was first introduced to Southey at Oxford University in June 1794. Southey was finding it difficult to commit to his studies and felt uncomfortable about accepting financial support from his uncle, Herbert Hill, who assumed that his nephew would have a career in the Anglican Church. This was becoming impossible for him due to his opposition ‘on political rather than doctrinal grounds’.17 Southey’s indeterminate career plans – which at various times included medicine and the civil service (until his friend Charles Wynn advised against the latter due to his ‘republican’ reputation) – and his irritation at the university’s erratic discipline and dissolute undergraduates, caused him to look further afield for a solution. The idea of emigrating had occurred to him at least a year before and his meeting with Coleridge reinforced these plans, becoming more concrete under the guiding principles of Pantisocracy that they devised.18 Southey left Oxford at the end of the summer term, returning to Bristol without graduating. He would later describe his time at Oxford as ‘the least beneficial and the least happy of my life’.19 When Coleridge turned up unexpectedly in Bristol in August 1794, the two men, along with their fellow Pantisocrats, made plans to leave for America by the following spring.20 At this time, Southey was at the height of his firebrand radicalism that had manifested itself at Westminster School – from which he was expelled for his anarchic views in the spring of 1792 – and Oxford. He found a congenial com- Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 19 01/06/2007 11:53:27 20 Writing the Empire panion in Coleridge, who shared his unorthodox politics and his enthusiastic response to the French Revolution. But Southey’s ‘Jacobinism’ came as much from his historical reading of oppressed ‘peasants’ exploited by the ‘nobly born’ of his own country, as the following extract from his poetical drama Wat Tyler (written in July 1794) shows: While the peasant works, – to sleep, What the peasant sows, – to reap, On the couch of ease to lie, Rioting in revelry: Be he villain, be he fool, Still to hold despotic rule, Trampling on his slaves with scorn! This is to be nobly born.21 By equating the position of ‘peasants’ with ‘slaves’ in this drama, Southey finds common, if extreme, ground between the English labourers of his own day and the vassals of the fourteenth-century feudal society of Wat Tyler.22 However use of the term ‘slaves’ also resonates with the colonial politics of the day and the extension of Southey’s radicalism to the arena of abolitionism. Southey replays the theme of power relations between master and servant/slave, or king and subject, continuously in his poetry; in his ‘Inscriptions’ (1797–9), and also in such seemingly ‘innocent’ nature poems as ‘To a Bee’ (1800).23 In this poem he warns: Thou art a fool, thou busy, busy Bee, Thus for another to toil! Thy master waits till thy work is done, Till all the latest flowers of the ivy are gone, And then he will seize the spoil He will murder thee, thou poor little Bee!24 The basis of Southey’s political diagnosis of society in terms of mastery/slavery can be found in the details we have of his early life in Bristol. He had been born into a family that often experienced the effects of economic instability, due to his father’s disinclination for the drapery business. For much of his childhood Robert lived with his aunt, Elizabeth Tyler, a member of the minor gentry by virtue of the fact that she had inherited the estate of her uncle, a clergyman. Tyler was a colourful character who ‘had acquired a taste for high life by hobnobbing with the local gentry’.25 The boy cannot fail to have noticed the inequalities of wealth in the life he led, between his aunt’s house and his parental home, which supported a large family on a small income. In Bristol extreme examples of prosperity and poverty could be seen as profits rose and fell, subject to the vagaries of trade, taxes and war. The Bristolian poet Thomas Chatterton, in 1770, had recog- Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 20 01/06/2007 11:53:27 ‘Once more I will cry aloud and spare not’ 21 nized the city’s dichotomy of wealth when he described ‘Bristols narrow Streets, / Where Pride and Luxury with meanness meets’.26 Southey’s own father was bankrupted in 1792, and died shortly after, leaving his family without income. The disparities of wealth and social position within Southey’s family and his surrounding native city – at a time when it was losing profits to Liverpool and London – must have influenced Southey’s crusade to highlight social and political injustice. Certainly the letters he wrote in the years 1793 and 1794 often refer to his own lack of finances. In one particular letter to his friend Grosvenor Bedford, he ‘blushes’ that he is unable to return a loan to him and bemoans his lack of wealth, or even a ‘trade’ in life, to remedy his situation. Rather than dissect the problems of his personal situation, however, he deflects them into a complaint about society generally, exclaiming ‘Why is there not some corner of the world where wealth is useless!’ and asking Bedford: Do you not really think that affluence and prosperity are dangerous blessings? Occupied by variety of pleasure and reclining upon the couch of happiness man is but too apt to forget from whence those blessings flow.27 The radical element of Southey’s philosophy was that he did not simply argue for the assistance of the impoverished, but endeavoured to prick the consciences of those who occupied superior positions of wealth. His writing attempted to open the eyes of those ‘reclining upon the couch of happiness’ (a line which echoes Wat Tyler’s ‘On the couch of ease to lie’) to their faults in maintaining an unequal position. With the affluent members of society as his target, his early reading of Thomas Paine lent him ammunition and sharpened his youthful antagonism into a ‘levelling’ principle. For instance Geoffrey Carnall has pointed out that even the idea for Southey’s Wat Tyler could well have come from his reading of Paine’s Rights of Man (1791).28 Paine had identified the attempts of political commentaries in ‘several of the Court newspapers’, and in Edmund Burke’s Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), to make opprobrious parallels between the fourteenth-century poll-tax rebels and eighteenth-century ‘Jacobins’.29 In the Rights of Man, Paine sought to defend the posthumous reputation of Tyler, holding him up as an example of working class, crusading ‘valour’, who was ‘sacrificed’ to the political ambitions of the powerful of his day.30 He was of course the ideal hero for Southey’s dramatic representation of Paine’s tenets. Lecture on the Slave Trade The corresponding enthusiasm that Southey discovered in Coleridge for the writings of Paine and other political commentators of the day led to a period of great intellectual industry for both men. They spent much of the years 1794 and 1795 living and working together in Bristol, studying and writing, while they Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 21 01/06/2007 11:53:27 Writing the Empire 22 attempted to raise funds to overcome the practical difficulties of establishing their egalitarian society in America. The registers of the Bristol Library Society for this period provide evidence of their close working practices, with books often being borrowed by one of them and returned by another, with marginal comments written in them in both hands.31 Their collaborative drama, The Fall of Robespierre, was written in August 1794, and Southey commented prophetically on their intimacy at this time, ‘Coleridge is writing at the same table; our names are written in the book of destiny, on the same page’.32 Another project that the two poets were jointly engaged in was a series of lectures (delivered at first in the Plume of Feathers public house in Wine Street and then in the Assembly Coffeehouse on the Quay) in order to raise funds for their emigration to America. Although the texts of Southey’s lectures are not extant, he did leave some record of them in his letters, as well as a prospectus listing the historical topics he intended to cover.33 He claims that in one lecture his reverential commitment to Paine’s politics so overtook him that he eulogized him as the: hireless Priest of Liberty! unbought teacher of the poor! Chearing to me is the reflection that my heart hath ever acknowledged – that my tongue hath proudly proclaimed – the truth and Divinity of thy Doctrines!34 This was strong language for the time, given the sedition trials of 1794, and shows the level of Southey’s commitment to Paine’s radical principles. But Southey’s youthful crusade against inequality was already developing into a growing interest in political philosophy. For instance, among the books that Southey read during this formative period were: Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and William Godwin’s An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793).35 The excitement that Southey felt for Godwin’s vision of political equality – he later said of his response to it, ‘I read, and all but worshipped’ – was communicated to Coleridge.36 The extreme similarity between Coleridge’s lectures and Southey’s letters during this period shows how much Godwin’s ideas were in common currency between them. For instance, Godwin asserts in Political Justice that while the wealthy are sporting the ‘splendour of their equipage, the magnificence of their retinue and the sumptuousness of their entertainments’, they drive the ‘poor man’ to work harder (perhaps in providing these comforts) because he aspires to such things himself and ‘mistakes opulence for felicity’.37 Coleridge gave a lecture on the Quay in Bristol in June 1795, on the subject of ‘Equality, Inequality, the Evils of Government’ that addressed these same issues.38 In his attack on the ‘Government’, Coleridge conflated luxury with ‘Commerce’, recognizing, as Godwin had before him, that luxury or ‘superfluity’ (a product Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 22 01/06/2007 11:53:27 ‘Once more I will cry aloud and spare not’ 23 of inequality) is an evil that keeps the manual labourer in his over-worked position.39 According to Coleridge, even the healthy, pastoral existence of those who work the land becomes perverted by the selfish demands of the wealthy, because the ‘field Labourer’ is forced into ‘unnatural Toil by unnatural Luxuries’.40 A letter written by Southey on this subject replicates such Godwinian arguments, combining them with the ‘computation of Adam Smith’ to insist that society would be healthier if every man played a part ‘in providing the necessaries and comforts of life’. This would replace the existing system which consigns ordinary men to the position of ‘brutes by obliging them to hard labour … so to acquire a poor pitiful livelihood – while kings, nobles and priests fatten on their toil and cry out “all is well!”’.41 In taking this tack, Southey and Coleridge were politicizing a philosophical tradition of opposition to luxury. And in doing so they did not just intend to attack the wealthy, but to expound their belief that affluence and a desire for the commodities it can bring could have a pernicious effect on all members of society. As John Sekora shows, in his historical survey of debates on the topic of luxury, the biblical supposition that it operated detrimentally on human morality was one that had also influenced the arguments of classical philosophers.42 In turn, eighteenth-century thinkers (such as William Blackstone) had developed their theories on the subject from Plato, Aristotle and the Stoic philosophers, who ‘saw the great majority of men enfeebled by luxury, a multitude that, lacking moral discipline, could not conceivably achieve virtue and rationality’.43 In this way an opposition was set up between ‘luxury’ and ‘virtue and rationality’ that Coleridge and Southey argued was irreconcilable in their attack on consumerism. Relinquishing individual claims to wealth, property and luxury, as Coleridge advocated, was morally and religiously justifiable, as ‘Jesus Christ forbids to his disciples all property – and teaches us that accumulation was incompatible with their Salvation!’.44 But it could also be rationally substantiated because a more equable society would ensure less disaffection among the labouring classes and therefore greater political stability. It is likely that part of the inspiration for these ideas came from Edmund Seward, a fellow student of Southey’s at Balliol College, whom he had met in 1793. Seward’s beliefs had been the greatest influence on Southey’s adult philosophy before he met Coleridge. Seward lived by the edict of Epictetus (the Greek Stoic philosopher) that men are slaves to their own desires and that freedom from them can be achieved only through abstinence. He instilled in Southey the idea ‘for the rest of his life that the practice of self-restraint was more conducive to contentment than self-indulgence’.45 What Southey sought to achieve in practice, he also developed into a political theory of asceticism, to publicize his and Coleridge’s radical ideas on the immorality of consumerism; the evidence of Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 23 01/06/2007 11:53:27 Writing the Empire 24 which could be seen in the perverse, obdurate behaviour of the wealthy towards the poor. But in fact Southey and Coleridge were far from being modern young radicals in their ideas. They were reactionary in their adoption of classical and religious precedents and were also (no doubt deliberately) out of step with the recent theories of political economists. For instance David Hume and Adam Smith, while not ignoring the plight of labourers, advocated the benefits to the British economy of greater consumerism. This drove commerce, making trade more profitable. To them, Britain’s financial condition was as much a priority as its moral health. While the opponents of luxury believed that it would impede self-sufficiency, increase dependence on others and influence public affairs, economists did not necessarily see these consequences as detrimental. They also sought to explode fears that luxury would cause political or moral instability. In fact, they argued, luxury would spur labourers on to work harder for such goods themselves, so creating a more industrious workforce that could earn higher wages. For Southey and Coleridge this was only a fallacious and heinous reinterpretation of their claim that workers were forced into ‘unnatural Toil by unnatural Luxuries’. And it was the proliferation of these morally corrupt views – as Southey and Coleridge considered them – that engendered their primitivist response to them. The values they advocated in their plans for Pantisocracy, for instance, suggested a different kind of dependence, a ‘natural’, shared, egalitarian purpose, rather than the selfish consumerism that preoccupied ‘men of all ranks consumed with blind craving for what they did not need – fame, wealth, possessions’.46 It is easy to see where the two men’s philosophical and humanitarian objections to the slave trade would lie. Coleridge’s next lecture, given a week later (Lecture on the Slave Trade), was co-written with Southey, as E. H. Coleridge’s transcript of the original manuscript (now lost) shows, where he noted several sections written in Southey’s hand.47 In this lecture the ‘politics of luxury’ are extended to attack colonial slavery. This system too unnaturally enforces servitude in order to satisfy a demand for ‘artificial Wants’: Perhaps from the beginning of the world the evils arising from the formation of imaginary wants have been in no instance so dreadfully exemplified as in the Slave Trade & the West India Commerce! We receive from the West Indias Sugars, Rum, Cotton, log-wood, cocoa, coffee, pimento, ginger, indigo, mahogany, and conserves – not one of these are necessary – indeed with the exception of cotton and mahogany we cannot with truth call them even useful, and not one is at present attainable by the poor and labouring part of Society.48 Coleridge claims that these unnecessary imports are the demands of the ‘polished Citizen [who] lies framing unreal Wants, and diverts the pains of Vacancy Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 24 01/06/2007 11:53:27 ‘Once more I will cry aloud and spare not’ 25 by the pestilent inventions of Luxury’.49 Here he invokes the metaphorical figure of affluence that Southey invented – ‘reclining upon the couch of happiness’ – as the embodiment of his opposition to the concept of luxury. In the lecture, luxury is shown to be enervating, causing indolence and moral disease at the imperial centre, through its vehicle the colonial slave trade. The lecture is imbued with images of perversion and rottenness, implying a sickness in society, where even the most affluent suffer in their ‘pains of Vacancy’. The slave trade itself is infected with a moral malady in all stages of its operation, from its method of alluring reluctant men to sea by intoxicating them, to the ‘profligate’ habits of such seamen once caught.50 Sailors and slaves are prey to physical disease from the ‘unwholesomeness of the Climate through which they pass’ and ‘the hot & pestilent vapours’ rising from the confined bodies of the slave ship, so ‘that the very timbers of the vessel are rotted by them’.51 Images of disease are even employed to show that the desire for luxury infects Africans themselves with this European epidemic: They inoculate the petty tyrants of Africa with their own vices – they teach them new wants, to gratify which they bribe them to murder, that they themselves may inflict the most grievous ills of slavery upon the survivors.52 The idea that the demand for luxury could cause disease, whether moral, social or physical, could well have come from the Bristol physician and writer Thomas Beddoes (who was influenced himself by George Cheyne’s theories on the subject).53 He shared the radical sympathies of Coleridge and Southey and became interested in them through their plans for Pantisocracy. Joseph Cottle, the Bristol publisher who befriended the two poets, certainly refers to Beddoes knowing the two men at this time in his Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey (1847). Though the Reminiscences are often considered to be unreliable, Dorothy Stansfield, in her biography of Beddoes, asserts that he and Coleridge were acquainted with each other by the time of the 1795 lectures: Inevitably, Coleridge’s lectures came increasingly to deal with current topics and there are a number of threads linking him and Beddoes at this time. They shared, metaphorically and in the end literally, the same platform on public affairs and there are verbal echoes and details of style which suggest not so much formal collaboration as the enjoyment of exchanging ideas.54 Beddoes certainly assisted Coleridge in the publication of The Watchman, a political and literary journal that originated in his desire to publish the texts of his lectures. The journal only had ten issues (running from March until May 1796), but its pacifist nature and anti-Pitt sentiments attracted Beddoes as a contributor. Beddoes never abandoned his commitment to political reform and often wrote on the subject, but his radical beliefs were largely channelled into concern Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 25 01/06/2007 11:53:27 Writing the Empire 26 for the health of the poor. He recognized the prophylactic benefits of improved living and working conditions and published many practical suggestions to this end.55 His ‘Pneumatic Institute’ in Bristol (originally set up to experiment with ‘factitious airs’, such as nitrous oxide) gradually became a medical institution, with a clinic and dispensary, where he treated the poor and advocated preventive medicine. Like Southey, Beddoes not only championed the poor, but also felt the levelling impulse, endeavouring to bring the rich to recognize their own shortcomings and reform their luxurious lifestyle. This he saw as a primary factor in causing disease, whether from the excesses of fashion (such as all-night parties, and the ‘lacing-up’ of women) or because young people who are ‘confined to frivolous pursuits, grow up to be so many stocks, on which consumption, or some other complaint of debility, does not fail to engraft itself ’.56 Beddoes argued that the health of the physical body, as with the body politic, depended on avoiding excessive indulgence of its appetites. His medical philosophy appeared in a collection of essays, published under the title Hygeia in 1802, in which he instructed the poor in ways to improve their health and counselled his wealthy readers to curtail their self-indulgent lifestyle. The widely different spectrum of health problems between those living in poverty and those in superfluity was one more indication of the growing divisions in society caused by the ‘ascendancy of commodity capitalism’.57 Like Southey and Coleridge, Beddoes perceived that while the lives of the wealthy became more comfortable, many workers manufacturing commodities for their consumption worked in increasingly confined and polluted conditions to provide them. And he was similarly critical of the demands of the wealthy for deleterious luxuries at the expense of those who strove to produce them, ‘fixed down beside machines whose eternal rotation produces no greater variety of sounds than the rattling of the turnkey’s bunch of keys or the creaking of the prison doors’.58 For Beddoes, both classes of society – those that demanded luxury, and those that worked to provide it – were ‘inseparably linked by the chain of destructive vanity’.59 In making connections between the problems in society and the increasingly industrialized manufacturing processes of their consumer-driven economy, all three men were prescient commentators. But while Beddoes sought pathological remedies for Britain, Southey and Coleridge gained inspiration for their radical Pantisocratic community in successful societal models abroad. In the Lecture on the Slave Trade, Southey – as this section of the lecture is in his hand – employs the obvious device of utopian primitivism to oppose the invidious, all-encompassing effects of luxury on society: The Africans, who are situated beyond the contagion of European vice – are innocent and happy – the peaceful inhabitants of a fertile soil, they cultivate their fields in common and reap the crop as the common property of all. Each family like the Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 26 01/06/2007 11:53:28 ‘Once more I will cry aloud and spare not’ 27 peasants in some parts of Europe, spins, weaves, sews, hunts, fishes and makes basket fishing tackle & the implements of agriculture, and this variety of employment gives an acuteness of intellect to the negro which the mechanic whom the division of Labour condemns to one simple operation is precluded from attaining.60 This passage – which was taken from Carl Bernhard Wadstrom’s An Essay on Colonization (1794–5) – reveals how much Coleridge and Southey were still influenced by their enthusiasm for a ‘Golden Age’ existence; one that they could more readily imagine in the less civilized societies of America, Africa, or even the South Pacific, than Britain.61 The image of noble, industrious Africans and their pastoral, egalitarian lifestyle contrasts vividly with Europe’s indolent ‘polished Citizen’ and his counterpart, the ‘mechanic’, whose efforts to provide luxuries stultify his mental faculties. As the title of Wadstrom’s book implies and his introduction states, it was written to encourage the colonization of Africa and so describes a peaceful, industrious, malleable people, who ‘with proper encouragement’ would ‘make excellent workmen’.62 For Wadstrom, the solution to African slavery was to promote colonies in Africa where sugar cane could equally well be grown, and so provide Europe with an alternative source of sugar to that of the slave plantations of the Caribbean.63 This would have the double benefit of keeping consumers’ consciences clear and developing the African colonies as trade partners. However, despite advocating colonization, as Deirdre Coleman points out, Wadstrom’s theories were nevertheless ‘anti-imperial and anti-commercial, with Africa figured as a zone of anti-modernity’.64 This was because Wadstrom, who was a Swedenborgian, perceived Africans as being of equal status to Europeans, if not superior to them in their potential for spiritual knowledge.65 He therefore accorded a greater respect to African culture than other proponents of colonization had done, and it was this aspect of his Essay that Southey and Coleridge found attractive and which they employed in their opposition to the slave trade. Anthony Benezet’s Some Historical Account of Guinea … with an Inquiry Into the Rise and Progress of the Slave Trade (1771) was also a source of information for the two writers that provided an ideal example of African life. Benezet was concerned to expose the lie that the people of Guinea ‘are a rude treacherous people’, depicting them as ‘sensible’ and ‘courteous’ and inhabiting a rich country where ‘the commerce [is] advantageous’.66 Southey used these idyllic accounts (themselves propagandist constructions in the cause of colonialism) as weapons in an ideological war, in which African humanity – evinced by their peaceful, communal existence, agricultural skill and craftmanship – was emphasized to oppose the pro-slavery lobby’s argument that Africans were racially inferior to Europeans. For instance, in direct contrast to writers such as Benezet and Wadstrom, Edward Long, in his History of Jamaica (1774), had made his own survey Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 27 01/06/2007 11:53:28 Writing the Empire 28 of African characteristics, in which he stated that the inhabitants of Guinea were ‘bestial’ and ‘stupid’, due to the extreme blackness of their skin.67 He also contradicted any idea that Africans had the intellectual abilities of Europeans, in surmising that ‘In general, they are void of genius, and seem almost incapable of making any progress in civility or science’.68 These comments reinforced his polygenist account of race, which he employed to argue that African inferiority to Europeans predetermined their servility. Southey’s and Coleridge’s goal was therefore to show the common humanity of Africans and Europeans in order to negate these claims by advocates of slavery. To do so they employed radical rhetoric, Christian doctrine and the rational tools of western philosophy, as well as emotive imagery of the cruel treatment of Africans once in captivity: the wretched slaves taken on the field of battle, or snatched from the burning ruins of their villages are led down to the ships – they are examined stark naked male and female, and after being marked on the breast with a red hot iron, with the arms and names of the company or owner, who are the purchasers; they are thrust promiscuously into the ship.69 Coleridge builds on these ‘horrid enormities’ to close the empirical gap between the lives of African slaves and European consumers, asking his audience to make an imaginative leap in considering themselves in the predicament of African villagers: Would you choose that Slave Merchants should incite an intoxicated Chieftain to make War on your Tribe to murder your Wife and Children before your face and drag them with yourself to the Market.70 Christ’s fraternal appeal – ‘to do unto others as ye would that others should do unto you!’ – is also employed here to encourage the audience to feel the imaginative effects of such actions themselves, as Coleridge asks, ‘Would you choose that others should do this unto you?’.71 By invoking Christian ideology of a brotherhood of man, Coleridge attempts to bring down distinctions of creed, race and colour in their shared humanity – in which all its members are reminded of the impact of their actions on others. According to Coleridge, the only difference between Africans and Britons are those imposed upon them by European commercial practice, which positions the latter as consumers of the luxury that the former are enslaved to provide. He addresses this aspect in asking his audience: what is the first and constantly acting cause of the Slave Trade – that cause by which it exists and without which it would immediately die? Is it not self-evidently a the consumption of its Products! and does not then the Guilt rest on the Consumers?72 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 28 01/06/2007 11:53:28 ‘Once more I will cry aloud and spare not’ 29 The ‘artificial wants’ that British consumers demand drive the process of slavery, and while they live in their discrete luxury they inhabit ‘the couch of ease’ that Southey and Coleridge reprehend. They also benefit from a further luxury in their complete detachment from the plight of the African people. However, Coleridge forbids such insouciance here, making Britons accept their participatory role in the slave trade and linking them by a chain of ‘Guilt’ to Africans. By these methods the two poets’ egalitarian doctrine operates to ‘level’ the positions of Africans and Britons in their lecture, adapting existing arguments and styles to form a new discourse which applies their radical principles to the cause of abolition. As Debbie Lee points out, it was writers like Southey and Coleridge who ‘forged the Romantic imagination, in large part, because of their continued attempts to write creatively about the complex and glaringly unequal relationships between Africans and Britons’.73 In the Lecture, the argument against luxury continues in Coleridge’s demand that his audience renounce sugar from the West Indies. This product he expressly links to the exertions and sufferings of the slaves who produce it on the plantations. A source for Coleridge’s argument was no doubt William Fox’s pamphlet on the subject, An Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Propriety of Abstaining from West India Sugar and Rum (1791). Fox took a passage from William Cowper’s ‘The Negro’s Complant’ (1788) as the text for his Address: Why did all-creating Nature Make the plant for which we toil? Sighs must fan it, Tears must water, Sweat of ours must dress the Soil. Think ye Masters, iron-hearted, Lolling at your jovial Boards, Think how many Backs have smarted For the Sweets your Cane affords!74 This was a text, as well as an image, that Southey was familiar with in its picture of ‘Masters’ ‘lolling’, while slaves provide luxury (‘sweets’) for their table. In his pamphlet Fox extends Cowper’s image of sugar-cane being nourished by the bodily secretions (‘Sweat’ and ‘Tears’) of the slaves, to imagine that the violence inflicted on their ‘Backs’ while tending the plants produces sugar ‘steeped in the blood of our fellow creatures’.75 And in his turn Coleridge adopted this idea in the ‘blood-sugar topos’ of his lecture, as well as the strong rhetoric of Fox’s pamphlet and its hard-hitting revelations, designed to shock his audience.76 In Fox’s Address he outrageously suggests that ‘in every pound of sugar used, (the produce of slaves imported from Africa) we may be considered as consuming two ounces of human flesh’.77 This lent Coleridge the image of transmutation of food into the ‘Blood of the Murdered’ for his lecture, which dramatically presents Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 29 01/06/2007 11:53:28 Writing the Empire 30 European consumers as cannibals, existing not only on the luxury of sugar, but on the luxury of African bodies.78 The calls for abstention from West Indian luxuries, made in Coleridge’s lecture and Fox’s pamphlet, were not unique. According to Timothy Morton, ‘Boycotting was a feature of Romantic consumerism, a mode of consumption that could reflect on itself ’.79 For the majority of the population, excluded from parliamentary power, this was a way to voice their opposition to the slave trade and many ‘anti-saccharine’ groups were set up across the country. Thomas Clarkson estimated after a tour of Britain in late 1791 and early 1792 that 300,000 people of ‘all ranks and parties’ had given up West Indian sugar.80 But abstention was limited in its efficacy to cause direct detriment to the West Indian trade and certainly those plantocrats who were aware of the boycott did not feel threatened by it. Southey was to complain within a few years of the apathy towards abstention among his own acquaintance: The Slave Trade has much disheartened me. That this Traffic is supported by the consumption of sugar is demonstrable – I have demonstrated it to above fifty persons with temporary success – & not three of those persons have persevered in rejecting it. This is perfectly astonishing to me – & what can be expected from those who will not remedy so horrible an iniquity by so easy an exertion!81 For Southey, in the enthusiastic ecstasies of righteous opposition, abstention was ‘easy’. This was because his moral attack on the slave trade was underpinned by his ascetic nature and the emphasis of Epictetus (via Seward) on self-renunciation. Like Fox and Coleridge, Southey spoke to the individual conscience, asking people to take responsibility for their part as consumers in the process. Clare Midgeley points out how important the abstention campaign was for ‘the role it played in creating in large numbers of men and women a sense of individual responsibility for slavery, and a belief in the possibility of achieving its downfall through extra-Parliamentary action’.82 However short-lived this campaign may have been, it provides evidence of increasing awareness of the importance of ‘self ’ in individual opposition to national policy.83 Such individualism can be considered a peculiarly Romantic consciousness, often expressed in the politics, literature and art of the period. Southey’s belief in the power of an individual, imbued with moral purpose, to change society (replayed constantly in his poetry), was one that he held onto all his life, despite his changing political allegiances in the fulfilment of it. However at this stage his moral and political development still owed a great debt to the radical writers of the 1790s, who contributed to his personal determination to eradicate unequal power relations between men.84 In his collaboration with Coleridge in the Lecture on the Slave Trade, Southey had extended his radical critique of British social relations to the context of colonial politics. But how far did the unhesitating call Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 30 01/06/2007 11:53:28 ‘Once more I will cry aloud and spare not’ 31 for equality of his domestic poetry influence his depictions of slavery? To answer this question I will examine the poetry that Southey wrote on this subject, which spans the period from 1794 to 1811. ‘Poems on the Slave Trade’ Among Southey’s first poetic compositions protesting against the slave trade were six sonnets, written in 1794 or earlier,85 which were published together under the title of ‘Poems on the Slave Trade’ in 1797.86 An indication of how Southey’s depiction of slavery was viewed by his contemporaries comes from a review in the Monthly Mirror, where the sonnets were commended.87 Southey was not alone in drawing attention to the abolitionist debate. As Peter Kitson and Debbie Lee have pointed out, many of his contemporaries also felt unease about a practice that was increasingly at odds with humanitarian principles but was nevertheless an established part of the British economy. This accounts for the huge amount of literature published during this period on the subject of slavery: While British people consumed slave products, they also consumed written accounts of slavery. The anti-slavery movement in Britain, in fact, coincided with the rise of print culture and a middle-class reading public. Consequently, a massive outpouring of literature in the forms of parliamentary debates and newspaper columns, sermons and speeches, poems and novels and stage performances, medical tracts and anatomical inquiries, African travelogues and West Indian histories flooded the British market alongside tobacco, coffee, rum, cotton, indigo, mahogany, sugar.88 Though Southey’s sonnets were well received at the time, they contain ambiguities. As Morton states, the sequence includes ‘several contradictory modes and objects of address’ that obfuscate his position and leave the reader unsure whether he advocates ‘supporting a slave rebellion or reform by planters and consumers’.89 The former position is obviously the more radical of the two and, knowing Southey’s anti-establishment stance in 1794, it would not be unfeasible. The 1797 preface to the poems suggests that either of these two alternatives will lead to the abolition of the slave trade. According to Southey it will be brought about ‘By the introduction of East-Indian or Maple Sugar, or by the just and general rebellion of the Negroes: by the vindictive justice of the Africans, or by the civilized Christians finding it in their interests to be humane’ and he hovers between these solutions in his poetry.90 My discussion of Southey’s sonnets particularly examines his commitment to the ideas of slave rebellion or ‘humane’ behaviour on the part of ‘civilized Christians’ in achieving abolition. It also assesses the ways in which the levelling principle of his domestic politics adapts to deal with the racial complications of the white master/black slave relationship. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 31 01/06/2007 11:53:28 32 Writing the Empire The first sonnet in the group does not depict Africa as Wadstrom’s pastoral idyll, but as a scene of conflict and slaughter: Hold your mad Hands! for ever on your plain Must the gorged vulture clog his beak with blood? For ever must your Niger’s tainted flood Roll to the ravenous shark his banquet slain? Hold your mad hands! what daemon prompts to rear The arm of Slaughter? on your savage shore Can hell-sprung Glory claim the feast of gore, With laurels water’d by the widow’s tear Wreathing his helmet crown? lift high the spear! And like the desolating whirlwinds sweep, Plunge ye yon bark of anguish in the deep; For the pale fiend, cold-hearted Commerce there Breathes his gold-gender’d pestilence afar, And calls to share the prey his kindred Daemon War.91 The poem depicts a chain of guilt and barbarity that feeds – and feeds off (as does the ‘gorged vulture’) – the slave trade. The natives who engage in tribal warfare (presumably to capture and sell each other as slaves) are complicit in this guilt, as are the traders in their ‘bark of anguish’. At the top of this chain is ‘the pale fiend, cold-hearted Commerce’, who drives the whole process with ‘his gold-gender’d pestilence’. The poem echoes the imagery and sentiments of Coleridge’s ‘Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement’ (1796), where he identifies a ‘wealthy son of Commerce’ that he sees from his cottage window as ‘Bristowa’s citizen’, because of his ‘thirst of idle gold’.92 The obtruding moral of that poem is that this servant of commerce – having profited from Bristol’s West Indian or African trade – has become indifferent to the simple pleasures of life. He recognizes his alienation: from nature in Coleridge’s ‘Valley of Seclusion’, and from human love in that ‘Blessed Place’ that is Coleridge’s cottage.93 The commercial activity of the slave trade, as both Southey’s and Coleridge’s poems imply, is inhuman and unnatural in its ‘thirst’ for riches and in engendering obduracy in those who engage in it. Nevertheless, by attacking it through the abstract figure of ‘Commerce’, Southey does not directly blame his countrymen who engage in slavery for profit. This, combined with the unspecific target of the opening address – the reader is never precisely told whose ‘mad Hands’ these are – means that the central accusation of guilt is therefore displaced and the aggressive tone of the poem is defused. The second sonnet moves from general declamation to directly address an African woman: Why dost thou beat thy breast and rend thine hair, And to the deaf sea pour thy frantic cries? Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 32 01/06/2007 11:53:28 ‘Once more I will cry aloud and spare not’ 33 Before the gale the laden vessel flies; The Heavens all-favouring smile, the breeze is fair; Hark to the clamors of the exulting crew! Hark how their thunders mock the patient skies! Why dost thou shriek, and strain thy red-swoln eyes, As the white sail dim lessens from thy view? Go pine in want and anguish and despair, There is no mercy found in human-kind – Go Widow to thy grave, and rest thee there! But may the God of Justice bid the wind Whelm that curst bark beneath the mountain wave, And bless with Liberty and Death the Slave!94 Southey calls the woman ‘Widow’ to make the point that the act of forcible abduction is as final as death, in that she will never see her husband alive again. The woman’s weakness, her individual suffering, is perceived as inefficacious against the might of the ‘exulting crew’. The poem is intended to exercise the sensibilities of the reader with its vicarious concentration on the unhappy effects of the separation. The extent to which readers of this period would react emotionally to human suffering was considered a moral register, indicating a degree of personal virtue. Literature written to publicize abolitionist arguments therefore frequently relied on overly sentimental depictions of its subjects, as in this sonnet, with the woman’s cries and ‘red-swoln eyes’ providing evidence of her broken heart. Depictions of African slaves as ‘sentimental heroes’ were, according to Brycchan Carey, intended in turn to ‘break the hearts’ of their British readers.95 In this way in anti-slavery poetry ‘emotions are quickly raised and the reader is encouraged to adopt political positions on the strength of those emotions’.96 In this poem there is no solution in ‘human-kind’, any act of vengeance can only be located in ‘the God of Justice’ who in Southey’s vision could ‘Whelm that curst bark beneath the mountain wave, / And bless with Liberty and Death the Slave!’. This call only serves to heighten the absence of human power to prevent such deeds. Southey seems to display a lack of empathy with his subject in his empty recourse to divine justice, dispatching his heroine to her lonely fate with the words, ‘Go Widow to thy grave, and rest thee there!’ But this is a deliberate device that intensifies the ‘heart-breaking’ effect of her plight in the face of human impassivity. It also draws attention to the helplessness of Britons to intervene in colonial affairs; they can only adopt a moralizing pose, rather than advocate a political remedy. Southey, no doubt, despite his attempts to ‘break the hearts’ of his readers, recognized the impotence of dilettante, intellectual abolitionists like himself to effect any meaningful change in the system. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 33 01/06/2007 11:53:28 34 Writing the Empire The third sonnet’s confusing multiple address to an ‘inhuman trader’, as well as the poem’s reader, has the effect of conflating both under the apostrophe ‘Pale tyrant!’: Oh, he is worn with toil! the big drops run Down his dark cheek; hold – hold thy merciless hand, Pale tyrant! for beneath thy hard command O’er wearied Nature sinks. The scorching Sun, As pityless as proud Prosperity, Darts on him his full beams; gasping he lies Arraigning with his looks the patient skies, While that inhuman trader lifts on high The mangling scourge. Oh ye who at your ease Sip the blood-sweeten’d beverage! thoughts like these Haply ye scorn: I thank thee Gracious God! That I do feel upon my cheek the glow Of indignation, when beneath the rod A sable brother writhes in silent woe.97 In this cruel tropical environment every element is complicit in the crime of slavery. Even the natural force of ‘the scorching Sun’ is related to commercial interest in being described as ‘pityless as proud Prosperity’. However this attack on commercialism again extracts human agency from these events. In a world governed by unnatural economic forces – where even the benign influence of sunlight becomes harsh – all humans are driven, as the ‘trader’ is himself, by ‘pityless’ commerce. In conformity to the conventions of the sonnet form, the first line of the sestet splits to change the address to the reader. Simultaneously the poem’s vision switches from the violent scene of a slave being whipped, to Southey’s readers, ‘who at your ease / Sip the blood-sweeten’d beverage’. The figure of the indolent receiver of West Indian goods who reclines ‘at ease’ at the slave’s expense is of course an explicit allusion to the ‘politics of luxury’ employed in the Lecture on the Slave Trade. The description of tea as a ‘blood-sweeten’d beverage’ draws directly on the ‘blood-sugar topos’ of this lecture too. The juxtaposition of colonial violence with drawing-room safety, is a powerful technique for forcing the reader to compare his/her own position with that of the slave. This is also the effect of the phrase ‘sable brother’, where difference (‘sable’) and similarity (‘brother’) are invoked oxymoronically to elide the distinctions between Southey’s white reader and the slave. For the first time in this sequence we hear the narrator speak in the first-person instead of ventriloquizing for others. His is the voice of individual conscience (‘I thank thee’, ‘I do feel’) even if here that tone is self-congratulatory and sanctimonious. Skin colour, as a mark of difference between people, is also used explicitly here for the first time, as the dignified euphemism, ‘sable brother’, is juxtaposed Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 34 01/06/2007 11:53:28 ‘Once more I will cry aloud and spare not’ 35 with the pejorative epithet, ‘white tyrant’.98 However by avoiding reference to the black skin of his central characters (except through euphemisms) they lack conviction. Presumably Southey found difficulty in representing their blackness in a positive way, as Alan Richardson points out: Southey’s attempt to reproduce a radical Enlightenment critique of slavery … for the most part founders on his apparent inability to represent a black subject without setting off the negative associations with blackness which had become so deeply engrained in British discourse by the end of the eighteenth century.99 However in this sonnet the issue for Southey is not so much blackness but whiteness. The problem he faces is that all white people can, by the colour of their skin, be seen as complicit in the egregious acts he describes. Southey, in response, discovers a third colour that places him outside the Manichean system of guilt that slavery creates. In that scheme a black skin equals suffering innocence, the treatment of which demands compassion from the reader, while white skin suggests flagitiousness at worst and complicity at best. The ‘glow / Of indignation’ that the narrator/Southey feels alters his colour in the poem. While he cannot be his ‘sable brother’ and does not wish to be allied with the ‘Pale tyrant’, he marks himself out as different because he is able to ‘feel’ and therefore ‘glow’. His body displays the effects of his superior sensitivity and virtue, setting him apart from the ‘pale’ tea-sipping reader, who does not feel as he does and so retains the pigmentation of guilt. Southey does not, as Richardson says, discuss blackness, which has historically and culturally been perceived as having ‘negative associations’, but he does attempt to display the ‘negative’ effects of being white. In the fourth sonnet Southey paints another sorrowful picture that conforms to the stock sentimentalism of the period. Here the reader’s gaze is brought back to the effects of separation on the slave and his ‘Widow’, in the double effect of their divided grief: ’Tis night; the mercenary tyrants sleep As undisturb’d as Justice! but no more The wretched Slave, as on his native shore, Rests on his reedy couch: he wakes to weep! Tho’ thro’ the toil and anguish of the day No tear escap’d him, not one suffering groan Beneath the twisted thong, he weeps alone In bitterness; thinking that far away Tho’ the gay negroes join the midnight song. Tho’ merriment resounds on Niger’s shore, She whom he loves far from the chearful throng Stands sad and gazes from her lowly door With dim grown eye, silent and woe-begone, And weeps for him who will return no more.100 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 35 01/06/2007 11:53:29 Writing the Empire 36 Southey relies again here on what was to become a formulaic figure of anti-slavery literature, the weeping slave; a trope that as I have stated (after Carey), sought to ‘break the hearts’ of readers. However it is a device that loses its effect by overuse, in signalling to the reader that he/she ought to feel sympathy rather than naturally inspiring it. A common criticism of anti-slavery poetry is that it fails to engage its readers because it relies on the effects of emotions described, rather than creating empathy through realistic characterization. Richardson claims that Southey’s ‘inability to convincingly represent a black subject in his abolitionist verse’ is due to his reluctance to ‘get under the skin’ of his black protagonists, so suggesting a lack of true sympathy for them.101 While it could be the case that Southey’s like other ‘anti-slavery poems frequently deploy sentiment to mask racial anxieties’, the lack of empathy with his characters is a common criticism of Southey’s work generally.102 He finds it almost impossible to realistically portray his characters, whether black or white, male or female – an accusation that has been levelled at him since earliest reviews of his work.103 His portrayal of African slaves also suffers from this inability to make an imaginative connection with their predicament. There are two reasons for this. The first is that Southey is promoting his moral message – the impetus for all his writing – which is often as didactic and sanctimonious as Hannah More’s Cheap Repository Tracts (1795–8). The second reason can be drawn from biographical evidence and is not due to a lack of sincerity or sympathy on Southey’s part, but as a result of feeling too much for others in his youth: Once, indeed, I had a mimosa sensibility, but it has long ago been rooted out. Five years ago I counteracted Rousseau by dieting upon Godwin and Epictetus; they did me some good, but time has done more. I have a dislike to all strong emotion, and avoid whatever could excite it. A book like Werter gives me now unmingled pain. In my own writings you may observe I dwell rather upon what affects than what agitates.104 Southey’s letter presents an explanation of how the ‘cult of sensibility’ is employed in his writing, to portray that which ‘affects’ rather than ‘agitates’. The overt sentiment of his poems is in fact a literary convention that does not require the reader to engage in depth with the pain of his protagonists. By conjuring up stock situations and figures that evoke a weaker degree of emotion than may be felt in his readers’ own lives, Southey protects them from painful feelings. And because another’s suffering can provide a distraction from one’s own, it could even be said to provide a pleasurable experience. This is often a problem for modern readers, who find themselves insulated from, rather than exposed to, raw emotion. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 36 01/06/2007 11:53:29 ‘Once more I will cry aloud and spare not’ 37 The suppressed emotion of this sonnet does not prepare the reader for the violent act of the next poem in the sequence: Did then the bold Slave rear at last the Sword Of Vengeance? drench’d he deep its thirsty blade In the cold bosom of his tyrant lord? Oh! who shall blame him? thro’ the midnight shade Still o’er his tortur’d memory rush’d the thought Of every past delight; his native grove, Friendship’s best joys, and Liberty and Love, All lost for ever! then Remembrance wrought His soul to madness; round his restless bed Freedom’s pale spectre stalk’d, with a stern smile Pointing the wounds of slavery, the while She shook her chains and hung her sullen head: No more on Heaven he calls with fruitless breath, But sweetens with revenge, the draught of death.105 Southey’s reader has by now realized that the sonnet sequence is dedicated to the life history of this ‘bold Slave’. Because he is designed to stand as a black ‘Everyman’ figure – representative of general acts of cruelty against his race – one of the effects of this is to forfeit the reader’s sympathy for him. As he is not drawn with any psychological depth he remains a stereotypical, vengeful character. Nevertheless Southey’s poem provides a plausible motive for the recent slave uprisings in several West Indian islands, by displaying the simmering resentment that individual slaves feel. This would indicate that he does advocate slave rebellions – such as those that had taken place in 1791 in British Dominica and St Domingue – as a solution to slavery. But the act of revenge in this poem is portrayed as one of individual ‘madness’ rather than the ‘just and general rebellion’ of Southey’s ‘Preface’. Instead of a powerful attempt to gain freedom and equality, the futility of the slave’s act, and the harsh consequences that ensue, depict his impotence to change his situation. Sonnet 6 contains the deepest feelings of the sonnet sequence as well as the most obvious disempowerment of Southey’s black subject: High in the air expos’d the Slave is hung, To all the birds of Heaven, their living food! He groans not, tho’ awaked by that fierce Sun New torturers live to drink their parent blood! He groans not, tho’ the gorging Vulture tear The quivering fibre! hither gaze O ye Who tore this Man from Peace and Liberty! Gaze hither ye who weigh with scrupulous care The right and prudent; for beyond the grave There is another world! and call to mind, Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 37 01/06/2007 11:53:29 38 Writing the Empire Ere your decrees proclaim to all mankind Murder is legalized, that there the Slave Before the Eternal, ‘thunder-tongued shall plead Against the deep damnation of your deed’.106 Southey justifies the bloody violence of his depiction by informing his readers of its authenticity, as one ‘Hector St. John was an eye-witness’ to this punishment meted out on a slave who committed murder.107 Again the cruel jurisprudence of the slave plantation is extended to the natural elements of this tropical environment; the ‘fierce sun’ and the scavenging birds that attack the slave. In this poem Southey reminds the plantocracy of the shared spiritual essence that binds humanity, thus qualifying slaves to stand beside them at the final judgment. In this respect he adopts the conservative Christian stance of abolitionists such as William Wilberforce, who were as much concerned for the souls of slaves as their physical wellbeing. The slave is strangely silent in this poem, as he is throughout the sonnet sequence. His thoughts are never voiced for the reader and, in spite all his sufferings, ‘He groans not’. Because his voice is absent, subsumed by the narrator’s until his death, when his appeal for justice is heard in heaven, the poem does not show any agency for change in the real world. In his domestic poetry, as well as in his anti-slavery poetry, Southey replicates the same ‘power politics’ interminably, of suffering slave/servant/labourer against a powerful oppressor, but without positing a political solution. The fixed nature of the social hierarchy he presents makes any question of equality between men seem unachievable, and especially so when applied to issues of race. However it is easy to demand that earlier periods of history conform to modern humanitarian concepts and nowhere does Southey claim to be addressing racial inequality in his abhorrence of slavery. Even if at this point in his life he could see a ‘general rebellion by the Negroes’ as a ‘just’ act, he does not posit a role for freed slaves as equal citizens of society. The ‘Genius of Africa’ The subject of slave rebellion occurs in two further poems written by Southey at this time. ‘To the Genius of Africa’ was also included in Southey’s collection, ‘Poems on the Slave Trade’, in which he calls on the ‘Genius’ (or protective spirit of Africa) to ‘Arise thy children’s wrong redress!’108 Images of black suffering are invoked in the poem to justify its subject of retributive violence. However the poem locates all hope of this in the apocalyptic forces of this abstract deity, which Southey imagines has: … o’er their blood-fed plains Swept thine avenging hurricanes; Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 38 01/06/2007 11:53:29 ‘Once more I will cry aloud and spare not’ 39 And bade thy storms with whirlwind roar Dash their proud navies on the shore; And where their armies claim’d the fight Whither’d the warrior’s might; And o’er the unholy host with baneful breath There, Genius, thou hast breath’d the gales of Death.109 It has been claimed that in this poem Southey is ‘celebrating the Haitian revolution’ that had begun in 1791.110 The only real evidence for this is in the last section: Justice shall yet unclose her eyes, Terrific yet in wrath arise, And trample on the tyrant’s breast, And make Oppression groan opprest.111 These lines could be interpreted as depicting African revenge on white slave owners, but because Southey introduces the abstract figures of ‘Justice’ and ‘Oppression’, he creates ambiguity. No doubt this reflects the anxiety he felt about advocating rebellion, despite his radical politics. That he came to regret the political implications of the poem’s ending in later life, can be seen in the omission of this passage (and not just the last line that Coleridge objected to) from the Poetical Works (1837–8).112 A further poem from 1797, entitled ‘To Horror’, also touches on this subject, although it was not written explicitly to oppose the slave trade. The poem presents a wide-ranging exploration of sources of horror in the world, ranging from a Gothic Abbey to the icy regions of Greenland, taking in shipwrecks, battlefields, a dead child on a mother’s ‘frozen breast’ and the ‘phantoms of the murder’d’, with typical Southeyan fascination for ghastly subjects.113 One further image that the abstract figure of ‘horror’ conjures up for the poet is slavery: HORROR! I call thee yet once more! Bear me to that accursed shore Where round the stake the impaled Negro writhes. Assume thy sacred terrors then! dispense The blasting gales of Pestilence! Arouse the race of Afric! holy Power, Lead them to vengeance! and in that dread hour When Ruin rages wide I will behold and smile by MERCY’s side.114 The poem’s call to ‘Arouse the race of Afric’ and ‘Lead them to vengeance!’ is inflammatory, but although it is the likeliest version of a ‘celebratory’ poem on the subject, it too contains ambiguities. Southey introduces abstract figures again in the form of ‘Horror’ and ‘Mercy’ – rather than plausible details of an Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 39 01/06/2007 11:53:29 40 Writing the Empire uprising – and some of his images are questionable. Why does he describe this rebellion, which he sees as justified, as a ‘dread hour / When Ruin rages wide’? Is the ‘horror’ solely contained in the vision of the ‘impaled Negro’ writhing, or can it be extended to the effects of this – the ‘vengeance’ that Southey seems to advocate? It should not be if Southey is genuinely suggesting rebellion as a solution to slavery. However the puzzling elements of this poem and ‘To the Genius of Africa’ can be solved if one considers that Southey is subscribing here to the millenarian beliefs of the period, in depicting the slave uprising as part of the wars forecast in Revelation before the end of the world.115 Poems that Coleridge was writing at the same time – such as ‘Religious Musings’ (begun in 1794 and published in 1796) and ‘Destiny of Nations’ (intended in 1794 as part of Southey’s Joan of Arc, but not published until 1817) – like Southey’s, subsume contemporary political events in apocalyptic rhetoric. For instance in ‘Religious Musings’ Coleridge considers the French Revolution in terms of biblical apocalypse and millennium. This was a customary response among English revolutionary sympathizers during the 1790s, so that the revolution itself becomes a metaphor for divine retribution – ‘Even now the storm begins’116 – rather than a human act. It was an attractive belief that the evils of humanity would be punished by an ‘omnific’ God, and Coleridge includes those who engage in slavery in his list of transgressors who will face the Judgment Day, berating them in the tone of an Old Testament prophet: But o’er some plain that steameth to the sun, Peopled with Death; or where more hideous Trade Loud-laughing packs his bales of human anguish; I will raise up a mourning, O ye Fiends!117 Millenarian rhetoric allots the retributive power of God to the poet. Like Southey, Coleridge moralizes but does not provide the difficult specifics of a political solution. Millenarian beliefs are comforting because they make the need for individual action in the sphere of human society or politics unnecessary.118 But such beliefs undermine any positive attempt to change society and encourage a compassionate complacency that Southey certainly exhibits. Given the millenarian tone of these poems, therefore, there seems to be no genuine commitment on Southey’s part to his belief that a ‘just and general rebellion of the Negroes’ would end slavery. The anxiety involved in depicting revolution prevents him envisaging a general uprising, except in conventional apocalyptic imagery. There are historical and biographical reasons for this. By the time these poems were published in 1797, Southey had begun to move on from the radical beginnings in which he originally wrote them. His friendship with Coleridge was quickly deteriorating due to Southey’s waning interest in Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 40 01/06/2007 11:53:29 ‘Once more I will cry aloud and spare not’ 41 their Pantisocratic scheme, but also because Coleridge was beginning to regret his marriage to Sara Fricker (who was by then Southey’s sister-in-law). Though it is hard to pinpoint a specific moment at which Southey’s radicalism began to ebb, it certainly coincided with the realization that he and Coleridge had different ambitions, and their decision to go their separate ways. As early as May 1796 Southey wrote to his friend Grosvenor Bedford in a quieter tone of his more mature responses to the world; ‘How does time mellow down our opinions! Little of that ardent enthusiasm which so lately fevered my whole character remains’.119 Southey had not long returned from visiting his uncle, Herbert Hill, in Portugal; a trip designed by the latter to quell his nephew’s political fervour. The poverty, filth and superstition that Southey reports finding there led him to conclude that, ‘The higher classes are despicable, and the whole body of people depraved beyond all my ideas of licentiousness’.120 This created the genesis of patriotic respect for his own countrymen, whom he felt contrasted so vividly with the Portuguese. On his return to England, Southey took the career path that his friend and patron Charles Wynn had suggested for him, and so was studying law reluctantly in the daytime, while writing poetry eagerly at night. His railings against the injustices of society would, in the next few years, be channelled into practical schemes to assist individual cases of indigence; such as the widow of his friend Robert Lovell and the female dependants of Thomas Chatterton, by publishing the two poets’ works by subscription. His energies were also directed towards setting up a ‘Convalescent Asylum’ for impoverished invalids (even if that scheme did not become a reality). A further reason for Southey’s waning radicalism can be found in the reactions of his own countrymen to events in revolutionary France. Much of the youthful enthusiasm of his generation for envisioning a new society, whether French, British or American, had been crushed. As Carnall states: Jacobins had reason to be vexed in the last four years of the eighteenth century. Their hopes in the French Revolution itself were dashed, and reaction seemed firmly established at home and abroad. Repressive laws made political agitation difficult or impossible.121 Against this background Southey’s interest in radical politics was curbed by the examples of activists (such as John Thelwall and Thomas Hardy) who had suffered imprisonment and persecution for their political beliefs. Any depictions of mass uprisings would be considered inflammatory at a time when the press risked reprisals. In fact support for the abolition of the slave trade waned generally towards the end of the eighteenth century because Britons could see the disruptive effects of challenging authority, whether in Britain or the colonies. Thomas Clarkson for instance, an active abolitionist and supporter of the French Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 41 01/06/2007 11:53:29 Writing the Empire 42 Revolution, had to suppress his unpopular ‘Jacobin’ views in order to preserve the backing he had for his opposition to the slave trade.122 Southey therefore, rather than advocating large-scale rebellion by slaves (or anyone else), very much relies on the second proposition given in his ‘Preface’ to ‘Poems on the Slave Trade’ – that it will be abolished due to ‘civilized Christians finding it in their interests to be humane’ – and he assists in this humanitarian project by publicizing the plight of slaves. In a further poem Southey wrote on this subject, it is possible to see that his moral crusade was bound up with concern for his own countrymen engaged in slavery, as much as for the slaves themselves. For Southey, abolishing slavery is in the best ‘interests’ of the British people, as well as Africans. ‘The Sailor who had Served in the Slave Trade’ ‘The Sailor who had Served in the Slave Trade’ (completed by September 1798, published in Poems, 1799) provides an important insight into Southey’s changing sympathies in promoting the cause of abolition. It is also interesting for what its origins reveal about Coleridge’s contemporaneous composition, ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ (1798), and both aspects of Southey’s poem are discussed here.123 ‘The Sailor’, like the ‘Ancyent Marinere’, is a ballad, engaging the reader with its simplicity and immediacy, in a way that the declamatory style and abstract figures of his sonnets do not. The ‘Ancyent Marinere’ was published in the first edition of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, in October 1798, which was reviewed by Southey for the Critical Review as soon as it appeared. Southey said of the poem: Many of the stanzas are laboriously beautiful, but in connection they are absurd or unintelligible … We do not sufficiently understand the story to analyse it. It is a Dutch attempt at German sublimity. Genius has here been employed in producing a poem of little merit.124 Whether Southey’s opinion was affected by his quarrel with Coleridge or not, he did not like the poem, referring to it privately as ‘nonsense’ because its meaning was obscure.125 It is likely that Southey would have concurred with Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s pronouncement that ‘it had the fault of containing no moral’.126 Southey was not prepared to accept the ‘Ancyent Marinere’ as an enigmatic commentary on the human condition because his own style of writing was often moralistic, didactic and even heavy-handed in making its point, as his friend and correspondent at the time, Charles Lamb, recognized. Lamb wrote to Coleridge and Southey at various times between 1797 and 1799 on the subject of their poetic compositions. He was unusual among his contemporaries in liking the ‘Ancyent Marinere’ – which he described as ‘miraculous’ – and took Southey to Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 42 01/06/2007 11:53:29 ‘Once more I will cry aloud and spare not’ 43 task for his critique of it in the review.127 Lamb recognized that, unlike Coleridge’s poetry, Southey’s was ‘too apt to conclude faulty, with some cold moral’.128 He had already realized how different the two poets were several years earlier, when he told Coleridge, ‘Southey certainly has no pretensions to view with you in the sublime of poetry but he tells a plain tale better than you’.129 Lamb’s comments expose the rationale behind Southey’s own account of a voyaging mariner in ‘The Sailor’. He wrote a ‘plain tale’ as a public protest against the slave trade, to further the cause of abolition. Alan Richardson suggests that, due to the similarities between the ‘Ancyent Marinere’ and Southey’s poem, ‘The Sailor’ should be read as ‘a gloss’ on the former, or as a ‘companion piece’ to it.130 In the light of critical works that have highlighted the colonial guilt that the ‘Ancyent Marinere’ is steeped in, this seems a sensible claim to make. J. R. Ebbatson has pointed out that Coleridge’s abolitionist agenda during this period bears close comparison to other contemporary writers (including Southey) and that an apolitical reading of the ‘Ancyent Marinere’ that does not recognize this fact leads critics and readers to an erroneous understanding of it. Ebbatson states: I am therefore proposing that the central act of The Ancient Mariner, the shooting of the albatross, may be a symbolic rehearsal of the crux of colonial expansion, the enslavement of native peoples; and that the punishments visited upon the Mariner, and the deaths of his shipmates because of their complicity, may represent European racial guilt, and the need to make restitution. The Mariner, in regaling strangers with his ghastly tale, and leaving them sadder and wiser, is acquainting them with crimes committed in their name, and warning of the wrath to come – a common theme in abolitionist literature.131 Because much of Coleridge’s energy during this period was taken up with fighting political injustice, including his vehement protestations against the slave trade in his poetry, letters and the Bristol lectures, it is easy to read the ‘Ancyent Marinere’ in this way. J. L. Lowes, in his pioneering study The Road to Xanadu (1927), first suggested the links between the poem and the accounts of voyages that Coleridge had read.132 William Empson, Ebbatson and more recently Patrick Keane, Peter Kitson and Debbie Lee have all examined the poem in terms of its theme of European maritime exploration and guilt at the effects of colonial expansion on other cultures.133 The lesson that humans should consider the complex (even global) consequences of their actions is evident both in the poem’s denouement and in its trite moral, ‘He prayeth well who loveth well, / Both man and bird and beast’ (ll. 645–6). If the slave trade was intended to be one of the themes of the ‘Ancyent Marinere’, its paratactic events contribute to make it an overly enigmatic and ambiguous abolitionist protest when compared to Southey’s ‘plain tale’. But as Southey is often considered to have ‘borrowed’ from Coleridge’s poem (despite Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 43 01/06/2007 11:53:29 Writing the Empire 44 having written ‘The Sailor’ before the ‘Ancyent Marinere’ was published) it is worth examining this connection between them.134 Jonathan Wordsworth discusses the authorial links between the poems in his introduction to the 1997 facsimile re-publication of Southey’s Poems (1799).135 His discussion (oddly enough at the beginning of a volume of Southey’s poetry) points out that he is not one of ‘the greatest poets’ and accuses him (as many have done before) of a lack of generosity in his review of Lyrical Ballads, as well as various acts of plagiarism against Wordsworth and Coleridge. He states: Nowhere is it more difficult to be sure of Southey’s motivation than in his attack on Lyrical Ballads … and subsequent plagiary. To call the Ancient Mariner ‘a Dutch attempt at German sublimity’ is one thing, then to publish a ballad that plainly borrows from it is another. The Sailor who had Served in the Slave Trade is not an isolated case: other and more blatant, plagiarisms are found in Southey’s borrowings from Wordsworth. He can’t be unaware of what he is doing.136 Wordsworth’s assumption that Southey ‘can’t be unaware of what he is doing’ is accurate, but not with regard to plagiarism, rather in terms of the competitive nature of the three poets’ engagement with each other. Such accusations are an inevitable result of working closely and interrelatedly on similar themes, styles and sources. The topical concurrence of their poetry meant that inevitably ‘borrowings’ would occur (by all three writers) and such events were not unusual in the domain of magazine poetry, where many of Southey’s poems first appeared. In the light of this competitive element, Southey’s review of the Lyrical Ballads was at worst the act of someone ‘quite prepared to put the opposition in its place, and even damage it a little’.137 By reconsidering Southey’s important contribution to Romantic period poetry – in his ‘Inscriptions’ (1797–9), ‘Poems on the Slave Trade’ (1797), ‘Botany Bay Eclogues’ (1797) and ‘English Eclogues’ (1799) – it is possible to see that all three writers inhabit an equal (if disputatious) place in their rural, radical literary milieu. The similarities therefore that Jonathan Wordsworth identifies in the ‘Ancyent Marinere’ and ‘The Sailor’ are quite likely to have occurred because both writers were interested in the topics of maritime exploration and slavery, as well as the popular ballad form. However their intentions in presenting these poems to the public differed, as Coleridge’s assessment of Southey’s poetic ability reveals. Coleridge believed that Southey relied ‘too much on story and event in his poems, to the neglect of those lofty imaginings, that are peculiar to, and definitive of, the poet’.138 While Coleridge’s ‘Ancyent Marinere’ was a work of ‘lofty imaginings’ (and he regretted having given too much away by its moral), Southey saw its disjointed narrative as ‘absurd’ and ‘unintelligible’ – something that his own poem, ‘The Sailor’, could not be accused of. Christopher Smith considers that Poems (1799) was published in response to Lyrical Ballads, so Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 44 01/06/2007 11:53:29 ‘Once more I will cry aloud and spare not’ 45 that ‘The Sailor’ is ‘one answer to The Rhyme of the Ancyent Marinere: an intelligible, authentic story of contemporary social concern publicly told without embellishment, with the reinforcing statement that such tales need publicity’.139 My contention therefore is that ‘The Sailor’ should not be read as a ‘gloss’, or as a ‘companion piece’ for the ‘Ancyent Marinere’, but as Southey’s rewriting of Coleridge’s poem.140 When it was published in 1799, it was intended as an important contribution to the abolitionist cause in its own right, as well as a didactic lesson in how such a poem should be written. My discussion of ‘The Sailor’ which follows links the explicit moral and political agenda of the poem to the anti-slavery contexts of its creation. It also explores the similarities and differences between Southey’s poem and the ‘Ancyent Marinere’. The most obvious connection between the two poems is in the opening lines, with the first line of Southey’s poem; ‘It was a Christian Minister’, echoing Coleridge’s opening, ‘It is an ancyent Marinere’. However this now more familiar beginning did not feature in the first publication of 1799, but was a later revision of 1815. Furthermore the narrator in the earlier version has no religious status and plays a much more anonymous role. Nevertheless both poems are ballads written in the third person, have a sailor as the central figure, and deal with guilt; specifically situated in a recognizable crime in Southey’s poem, but more abstrusely located in Coleridge’s. The themes in both poems are individual suffering, alienation and the absence of Christian redemption for their central characters, each of whom are sailing: Alone on a wide wide sea: So lonely ’twas that God himself Scarce seemed there to be. (‘Ancyent Marinere’, ll. 631–3) In his short preface to ‘The Sailor’, Southey claims that the poem was based on a factual account, so giving his poem authenticity, as well as demonstrating that he took his ‘public’ role in supporting abolition seriously: In September, 1798, a Dissenting Minister of Bristol, discovered a Sailor in the neighbourhood of that City, groaning and praying in a hovel. The circumstance that occasioned his agony of mind is detailed in the annexed Ballad, without the slightest addition or alteration. By presenting it as a Poem the story is made more public, and such stories ought to be made as public as possible.141 The sailor’s story accounts for his mental state of ‘such heart-anguish as could spring / From deepest guilt alone’ (ll. 19–20). He recounts: I sail’d on board a Guinea-man, And to the slave-coast went; Would that the sea had swallowed me When I was innocent! Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 45 01/06/2007 11:53:30 46 Writing the Empire And we took in our cargo there, Three hundred negroe slaves, And we sail’d homeward merrily Over the ocean waves. But some were sulky of the slaves And would not touch their meat, So therefore we were forced by threats And blows to make them eat. One woman, sulkier than the rest Would still refuse her food, – O Jesus God! I hear her cries – I see her in her blood! The captain made me tie her up And flog while he stood by, And then he curs’d me if I staid My hand to hear her cry. She groan’d, she shriek’d – I could not spare For the Captain he stood by – Dear God! that I might rest one night From that poor woman’s cry! (ll. 57–80) The beatings the sailor gives to the woman result in her death, but the sailor’s torment does not end there: They flung her overboard; – poor wretch She rested from her pain, – But when – O Christ! o blessed God! Shall I have rest again! (ll. 97–100) Unlike the mariner’s guilt in Coleridge’s poem, which is given haunting effect by the uncertainty of his crime, the blame here can be placed squarely on the sailor’s shoulders for beating the female slave. This central act of the poem is designed to outrage the sensibilities of Southey’s reading public in its violent treatment of, not only a slave, but also a woman, who under the reigning ideology demanded protection from, rather than exposure to, such cruelty. There was a precedent for publicizing violence against female slaves at this time by abolitionist activists, who realized the power of such imagery in highlighting the iniquity of the slave trade.142 One infamous case which came to light in 1792 was Captain Kimber’s flogging of ‘a young black woman to death for refusing to dance naked for him on Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 46 01/06/2007 11:53:30 ‘Once more I will cry aloud and spare not’ 47 deck’.143 Southey might well have drawn upon this incident as a source for his poem because Kimber was the captain of the Bristol slave ship Recovery and therefore Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal had covered the story in great detail.144 Kimber was tried for the murder of the girl in the Admiralty High Court in June 1792, but was ‘acquitted to general amazement’.145 The episode was publicized by Wilberforce, as parliamentary champion of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, to further the cause of abolition. A cartoon by Isaac Cruikshank illustrating the case, was circulated in London in the same year. It depicts the leering, sadistic Captain Kimber (whose phallic sword-hilt makes plain his sexual intentions) about to flog his hanging, faceless victim (Figure 1). The illustration relies for effect on its graphic (even gratuitous) depiction of physical abuse, as does Southey’s poem.146 In the ‘Ancyent Marinere’, as in ‘The Sailor’, events are triggered by crucial acts on the part of each of the central characters. The mariner shoots the albatross of his own volition, and the reader is left to presume that this act of free will singles him out for individual punishment and alienation. In Southey’s poem, the sailor’s crime is representative of general acts of inhumanity by those engaged in the slave trade. That his act is an involuntary one is clearly stated: The captain made me tie her up And flog while he stood by, And then he curs’d me if I staid My hand to hear her cry. (ll. 73–6) The compression of ideas in the lines, ‘So therefore we were forced by threats / And blows to make them eat’ (ll. 67–8), suggests that the coercion of ‘threats and blows’ would be applied to the crew if they disobeyed their captain’s instructions. Here there is another link between Cruikshank’s illustration and Southey’s poem. Both texts highlight the abusive regime that sailors, whether on merchant or naval ships, existed under on a daily basis in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The cartoon shows the crew members as refractory, yet complicit in their captain’s guilt, whether by turning their backs, as the group at the rear do, or by reluctantly assisting, as the sailor on the right does. Southey had some knowledge of how brutal naval captains could be from following the story of Captain William Bligh, whose intolerant pedantry had contributed to the mutiny on board his ship the Bounty in 1789.147 He also received information from his brother, Thomas, who was pursuing a career in the navy and was subject to the vagaries of authoritarian commanders. One particular letter written by Southey, in July 1797, attests to his indignation that Thomas is exposed to such abuses of power: Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 47 01/06/2007 11:53:30 48 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 48 Writing the Empire 01/06/2007 11:53:30 Figure 1. Isaac Cruikshank, The Abolition of the Slave Trade. Or the Inhumanity of Dealers in Human Flesh Exemplified in Captn. Kimbers Treatment of a Young Negro Girl of 15 for her Virjen Modesty (1792). By permission of the British Museum, London. ‘Once more I will cry aloud and spare not’ 49 My brothers Captain is a worthless wicked man & behaves very unkindly & insolently to Tom because he thinks him friendless … I feel very angry at reflecting that such a life as my brothers should be at the mercy of a sea captain. It is not many months since he was sent to board a vessel in such weather that the boat must inevitably have sunk in attempting to reach her – & yet he could not refuse or [remonstrate?], & would have perished if a Lieutenant with him had not ordered them to give over the attempt. This is called discipline.148 Against the claims of those who believed that slave ships provided a ‘nursery’, or training ground, for naval seamen, Thomas Clarkson, in his Essay on the Impolicy of the African Slave Trade, published the findings of his investigation into conditions on slave ships. Apart from the dreadful environment in which the slaves were kept, he also discovered the extent of the maltreatment of ships’ crews. In the Essay he presents graphic examples of abuse that often ended in death, in order to counteract: the argument, upon which so great a stress has been laid, that the slave trade is a nursery for our seamen. The truth of this argument I deny in the most explicit and unequivocal manner. I assert, on the other hand, that it is a grave for our seamen, and that it destroys more in one year, than all the other trades of Great Britain, when put together, destroy in two.149 Clarkson provides the figures of all the crew members who have died, ascertaining that in every ship engaged in the slave trade, ‘between a fourth and a fifth [of the crew] may be said to perish’.150 He publicized such information because he realized that he could not achieve the support he needed solely through descriptions of suffering black humanity. He had to bring the debate closer to home by showing the effect of the slave trade on British seamen, in order to appeal to the nation’s sympathies. Clarkson and Southey both rely on exposing their country’s collective guilt by asking readers to examine those members of its society that are complicit in slavery, though as much oppressed by it, as Africans themselves. In ‘The Sailor’ the common humanity of the female slave, the sailor and the captain is made explicit in the phrase (from the 1815 revision of the poem), ‘What woman’s child a sight like that / Could bear to look upon!’.151 They share the same origins, having all been a ‘woman’s child’. The chain of abuse stretches from victimized slave, through oppressed sailor and brutalized captain, to the nation that profits from it. The subject of Southey’s poem is not actually the female slave at all. She is again a stock, abused figure, operating in the text as a vehicle to explore the sailor’s own suffering, and so publicize the detrimental effects on British subjects of their involvement in the slave trade. The reader also does not hear the slave speak, although the sailor is haunted by her cries: Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 49 01/06/2007 11:53:31 50 Writing the Empire She groan’d, she shriek’d – I could not spare For the Captain he stood by – Dear God! That I might rest one night From that poor woman’s cry! (ll. 77–80) Because she is displaced from her central position by the sailor, and without any description of her (or dialogue that includes her) she becomes faceless and voiceless (as in Cruikshank’s cartoon), an ‘object’ rather than its subject. Southey is more concerned with how slavery affects the moral health of his own country at the imperial centre than individual black lives. The long-standing argument of abolitionists was that it was not only Africans who were abused by slavery, but that it was morally detrimental to their ‘masters’, and by extension to those who supported them. The protracted opposition of the Quakers to slavery, for instance, stemmed as much from consideration of the ethical and spiritual consequences of ownership as from humanitarian concern for slaves, as the dire imprecation of one ‘Friend’ reveals, ‘Thus shall God shed the blood of those persons who enslave their fellow-creatures’.152 In Southey’s poem, the slave’s death at the sailor’s hands causes him to be haunted by supernatural manifestations. She remains a visible reminder of his act even after her corpse is thrown overboard: I saw the sea close over her, Yet she was still in sight; I see her twisting every where; I see her day and night. (ll. 101–4) However a more powerful agent of vengeance is ‘the wicked one’ who follows the sailor everywhere (l. 106). The haunting of the sailor by this nemesis has an obvious correlation with the ‘Ancyent Marinere’. In the 1817 version of Coleridge’s poem the agents of retribution are identified as the ‘Polar Spirit’ and its ‘fellow daemons’.153 There is a similar struggle between the forces of good and evil in both poems, although ‘The Sailor’ is more obviously rooted in conventional Christianity; with the devil, Christ and God all represented. At the end of the poem the sailor receives Christian solace and the reader hears no more of him, presuming that the act of prayer concludes his mental torture. Coleridge’s poem also seems to steer closely towards the conventional consolation of the ‘kirk’ as his mariner nears land and begs a religious figure (the ‘Hermit of the wood’) to help him, crying, ‘O shrieve me, shrieve me holy Man’ (ll. 466, 514, 607). However, unlike Southey’s sailor, even after telling his story, the mariner finds no redemption. He is compelled to repeat it as a penance: Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 50 01/06/2007 11:53:31 ‘Once more I will cry aloud and spare not’ 51 Since then at an uncertain hour, Now oftimes and now fewer, That anguish comes and makes me tell My ghastly aventure (ll. 615–18) The image of constantly recurring horror suggests that, in an age dominated by the commercial concerns of the slave trade, such cycles of guilt will continue. Southey’s trite, contrived ending, with the ‘cold moral’ that Lamb accuses him of, implies that while this individual sailor’s story is over – with his resolve never to go to ‘the Negroe shore’ again (l. 110) – there is no real closure while the slave trade and Britain’s involvement in it continues: Poor wretch, the stranger he replied Put thou thy trust in heaven, And call on him for whose dear sake All sins shall be forgiven. This night at least is thine, go thou And seek the house of prayer, There shalt thou hear the word of God And he will help thee there! (ll. 117–24) The final stanzas display anxiety over the issue of slavery because, while they are meant to be consolatory, the ending is not powerful enough to redress the wrongs in the poem. The ‘stranger’, or Christian minister (of the later version), is helpless in the face of such an irreligious and immoral system. The final message of the poem is to passively accept the wrongs of this world, including the slave trade. There is no earthly solution to the sailor’s sins or the system of slavery that engenders them, so he must ‘trust in heaven’ for redemption. Southey’s poem is not an aggressive clarion call for change because it anxiously reflects the religious conservatism of quietist reformers such as Hannah More. In her poem ‘The Sorrows of Yamba, or the Negro Woman’s Lamentation’ (1795), Yamba states, after her conversion to Christianity: Now I’ll bless my cruel capture (Hence I’ve known a Saviour’s name), Till my Grief is turned to Rapture, And I half forget the blame.154 Slaves (and sailors) should passively accept the problems of this world – in order to gain a heavenly place in the next – until such time as British consciences are awakened (or they find it in their ‘interests’ to abolish the slave trade). Such Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 51 01/06/2007 11:53:31 Writing the Empire 52 sentiments would of course come to be spoken through that icon of suffering acquiescence, Tom, in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s American abolitionist novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Nevertheless, Southey intended ‘The Sailor’ to be an overt and unmistakable attack on slavery, announcing proudly, ‘I know it prevented a West Indian planter from buying my first volume; so it made the fellow feel’.155 His intention was to benefit mankind, by making readers (including planters) ‘feel’ – even if the much needed funds he required from his writing were forfeit by doing so – as the following extract from a letter reveals: I may not live to do good to mankind personally – but I will at least leave something behind me to strengthen those feelings & excite those reflections in others, from whence virtue must spring.156 Southey’s desire to improve society was a fundamental aspect of his literary oeuvre. The critique of colonial guilt that is only implicit in Coleridge’s ‘Ancyent Marinere’ – while not forgetting that other poems like ‘Religious Musings’ and ‘Fears in Solitude’ are more critical – is made explicit in ‘The Sailor’ because Southey wished this poem to make a real difference to humanity. Rather than presenting an obscure (if sublime) exploration of the psychology of colonialism, Southey’s criticism is firmly rooted in the abolitionist debate. ‘Verses. Spoken in the Theatre at Oxford upon the Installation of Lord Grenville’ Southey’s later, more conservative responses to the slave trade can be seen in ‘Verses. Spoken in the Theatre at Oxford upon the Installation of Lord Grenville’ (1811). It is likely that this poem was written several years before it was published, but certainly after the 1807 bill abolishing the British slave trade had been passed by the House of Lords, to which it makes reference.157 The poem praises William Wyndham Grenville (responsible for founding the ruling coalition of the ‘Government of All the Talents’, as it was known, in 1806–7) for his efforts in preserving justice and liberty throughout the world on England’s behalf. Southey begins by applauding Grenville’s role in resisting the ‘upstart tyranny’ of Napoleon Bonaparte’s (now Emperor Napoleon I) French regime (l. 33). England is portrayed as a repository for all those virtues and values that Southey sees Europe in danger of losing, under siege by Napoleon: And thou, O England, who dost ride Serene amid the waters of the flood, Preserving, even like the ark of old, Amid the general wreck, thy purer faith, Domestic loves, and ancient liberty (ll. 40–4) Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 52 01/06/2007 11:53:31 ‘Once more I will cry aloud and spare not’ 53 The differences in Southey’s portrayal of England from his earlier radical poetry can be accounted for by the years that have passed since it was written. Now his country and its government, headed by Grenville, are not attacked for social or political injustices but are portrayed positively in comparison to the foreign threat that Napoleon represents. Nevertheless Southey warns that there have been times when his country has been in moral peril. One of these dangers was England’s links with colonial slavery, which Lord Grenville has now protected his country from: … bless thy name, Grenville, because the wrongs of Africa Cry out no more to draw a curse from heaven Upon us; (ll. 51–4) As in his poem ‘The Sailor’, Southey is still concerned to preserve England from the stain of slavery and so attempts to dissociate his nation from those of her ‘children’ who continue to engage illegally in the trade. The implication is that, while some of England’s citizens may ‘set at nought / Thy laws and God’s own word’, nevertheless only such a country as his own – where ‘purer faith’ and ‘ancient liberty’ reside – could have produced such a ‘son’ as Grenville, who holds dear these values (ll. 43–4, 62–3). Napoleon’s ‘midnight murders and perfidious plots’ only serve to show how much more virtuous and noble Grenville (and by extension England) is in comparison (l. 74). Southey’s panegyric rises to beatific heights in his veneration of the statesman: … Grenville, even then Thy memory will be fresh among mankind; Afric with all her tongues will speak of thee, With Wilberforce and Clarkson, he whom heaven, To be the apostle of his holy work, Rais’d up and strengthen’d and upheld through all His arduous toil. (ll. 78–84) Grenville (assisted by Wilberforce and Clarkson) is the saviour of Africa and Britain, and Southey totally effaces any black agency in achieving abolition.158 For instance his ‘canonization’ of white abolitionists ignores the efforts of black writers in Britain – such as Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano and Robert Wedderburn – who were active in the campaign against slavery.159 In Southey’s poem, black people are marginalized to the position of an adulatory audience in order Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 53 01/06/2007 11:53:31 54 Writing the Empire to celebrate this white British champion of oppressed Africans, who takes centre stage in the abolitionist drama: … Long ages hence, Nations unborn, in cities that shall rise Along the palmy coast, will bless thy name; And Senegal and secret Niger’s shore, And Calabar, no longer startled then With sounds of murder, will, like Isis now, Ring with the songs that tell of Grenville’s praise. (ll. 92–8) Again Southey is not concerned with the black experience in his poem but only with how Lord Grenville’s role in abolishing slavery reflects on his country. As the ‘ark of old’, England maintains her (morally) upright position floating above the floods and ‘general wreck’ of Europe and, like that other ‘Ark’ (of the ‘Covenant’), a further image that Southey’s term conjures up, she also contains and preserves all the sacred probity of God’s laws. Southey’s consistent engagement with the subject of abolition during his poetic career demonstrates his commitment to the cause and his humanitarian ethics in publicizing its abusive effect on Africans. The approach he chose however was rather limited. His attempt to ameliorate black suffering by a conventional route that publicized the harsh predicament of slaves relied on a ‘cult of sentiment’ that demanded victims. By showing his black protagonists as victims of traders, sailors, planters and even British consumers of West Indian products, Southey may have gained his readers’ sympathy, but his poetry conforms to the stereotypical depiction of slaves as helpless and passive. Trapped within their subordinate positions, they are shown to be as dependent on the good will of white abolitionists for their welfare as they are on the planters who purchase them. The nugatory role that slaves were given in abolitionist writings by their British contemporaries was common. For instance, Peter Kitson and Debbie Lee point out that ‘the writings of abolition and emancipation … subsume these people into a discourse that at times drains them of their humanity, stereotyping their experience for the sake of parliamentary debates and changes in the law’.160 While the depiction of black people as powerless and dependent might have been effective abolitionist propaganda in a literary period that employed sensibility to agitate for their freedom, it also risked reinforcing contemporary ideas of their inferiority. Though Southey did not subscribe to the polygenist theories of the pro-slavery lobby, or their racist polemic, the visionary claims for human equality of his levelling politics do not stand up in the colonial arena.161 Making his fellow humans ‘feel’ was at the end of the day all that Southey intended to do; his poetry was not calculated to change white society’s views of black people. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 54 01/06/2007 11:53:32 ‘Once more I will cry aloud and spare not’ 55 Articles on the Slave Trade Southey’s appreciation of Lord Grenville’s efforts to free England from the twin evils of Napoleon and slavery is an indicator of his growing political conservatism at this time. Grenville had held office in William Pitt’s ministry before being invited by the king to form a Whig government in 1806 on Pitt’s death. The scourge of all radicals, the latter’s demise was seen as a ‘great event’ by Southey.162 The fact that Grenville is eulogized in Southey’s poem, despite his Pittite affinities (and continued support for Catholic Emancipation, something that Southey could never countenance), shows how far Southey had moved from his radical principles.163 Carnall argues that, from 1810 onwards, Southey began to support the Tory ministry (under Spencer Perceval and then Lord Liverpool) for several reasons. The primary motive was that he became increasingly worried about mob violence, which he thought would be instigated by the challenges of radicals (such as Francis Burdett, whom he had previously championed) to the government, as well as by pressure from the economic crisis of 1810–11. Secondly, Southey was in close contact at this time with his friend John Rickman who, as a Tory statistician, and after 1814 as an official in the House of Commons, influenced him considerably.164 Southey’s changing political loyalties also affected his opinions on African slavery and can be traced in the articles that he wrote on this subject. Southey’s reviewing career began in 1797 when he was employed by the Critical Review (in which his article on Lyrical Ballads appeared) and continued almost throughout his life for various periodicals. Most of his articles on the slave trade were written after the publication of his abolitionist poetry and are interesting for the way they extend his thoughts on this issue. After all, the ‘Poems on the Slave Trade’ were written with a specific polemical urgency, while his articles, though still often hotly opposing the slave trade, are more reflective in their appreciation of the wider colonial context. Southey’s journalism reflects his abiding interest in the work of missionaries and colonists to create outposts of British society abroad; whether Polynesian, Indian, African or Caribbean. Several of his articles discuss developments in the West Indies and Africa and, while they are often disparate, ruminative and digressive, the frequency of his contributions and the conviction with which they are written show how important they were in establishing his ideas and values. By working out his arguments, based on intensive reading about the places and peoples he discussed, Southey developed strategies that he believed would make a very real contribution to colonial policy. Southey’s articles had to conform to the demands of journalistic prose and so he was forced to systematize his ideas in a logical way. Therefore, while his poems are emotive responses to the predicaments of individual victims of slav- Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 55 01/06/2007 11:53:32 Writing the Empire 56 ery, designed to rouse reciprocal feelings of pity and anger in his readers, his articles contain more coherent political arguments for abolition. Nevertheless, at times Southey’s postulations seem contradictory, for instance, while he objects to slavery and the practices of slave-owners in the West Indies, he nevertheless enthusiastically advocates the colonization and development of the region.165 This, the plantocracy maintained, could not be carried out without slaves to work the land. Bryan Edwards, a Jamaican planter, encapsulated the pro-slavery lobby’s argument in 1789: there is not a man in the perfect exercise of his understanding, who can seriously believe that, if the Slave-Trade be abolished, any part of this great territory will ever come into cultivation. – Mr. Wilberforce is silent upon the subject. – The great aim of his Propositions is to demonstrate that we may, by various means, keep up our present cultivation: He does not venture to go a step further. Every acre of uncultivated property must, therefore, on his own admission, remain an unexplored, unimproved, unproductive wilderness.166 Objecting to colonial slavery while recommending the possession of foreign territories in the name of Britain might seem at odds in the light of modern humanitarian principles, but Southey comfortably straddled both ideas in his ethos of how colonization could benefit Britain’s economy and its citizens. He realized that without the ‘machinery’ of slave-labour – as well as what he believed to be greater African resistance to tropical diseases – many Britons could not envisage the development of West Indian territories. Therefore Southey exercized his mental faculties on this subject in his review articles, as I will demonstrate. First, however, I will examine his arguments against the slave trade. Southey’s pro-abolition articles do retain some of the philippic of his protest poems. But in 1803, six years on from the publication of ‘Poems on the Slave Trade’, he seems to accept the institution of slavery as an established evil and his concern is as much with ameliorating the living conditions of slaves in the West Indies as with abolition. In Southey’s review of the Transactions of the Missionary Society for the Annual Review (1804) he reports with incredulity that ‘in certain of our West Indian islands, the missionaries have been forbidden to attempt the conversion of the negroes’.167 He continues: If such tenets as they inculcate can any where be useful, it must be in those accursed islands, where the sight of a plantation would soon reconcile the most scrupulous humanity to the doctrine of fire and torments for the wicked … the disbelief or disregard of a God in the sugar islands, converts the planter into the image of a devil. Southey objects to the fact that the planters do not want to ‘civilize’ or ‘christianize’ the slave population of the islands, and so are condemning both themselves and their slaves to ‘eternal punishment’. Here he is in tune with Wilberforce again, who argued that the worst privation that West Indian slaves suffered was Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 56 01/06/2007 11:53:32 ‘Once more I will cry aloud and spare not’ 57 the absence of ‘moral improvement, and the light of religious truth, and the hope full of immortality’.168 A twin concern for Southey was that, by allowing this situation to continue, ‘We have one set of laws for the sugar islands, and another for England; one set of feelings, one set of morals for each’. Southey refers here to the West Indian plantocracy’s long resistance to the British justice system. A well-publicized example of this was the case of James Somerset, a slave from Virginia who was rescued in London from his plantation-owning ‘master’, Charles Stewart, as he was about to be transported to Jamaica for sale. Lord Chief Justice Mansfield’s famous ruling of 1772 on the trial was that Somerset could not be forcibly deported (despite Stewart and his fellow planters advocating the opposite) as there was no British legal precedent for enforcing the state of slavery on him. This was seen as a triumph for British justice over the colonial ‘custom’ of slave-ownership and local laws which had presumed to challenge the authority of the metropolis. Abolitionists used the judgment, which they implied made slavery illegal on British soil, in their fight to end the slave trade.169 For Southey, this evident difference between British and colonial laws demonstrated a corresponding want of ‘feelings’ and ‘morals’ in the planters, who sought to protect themselves, rather than their slaves, from ‘injustice’. Southey wanted to bring this imperial outpost back into line under the regulating umbrella of Christian religion and British justice. Any benefit for Britain would be in this region being an extension of empire, not an immoral and irreligious, separate community. In the following year Southey discussed an anonymously-written pamphlet on the subject of slavery for the Annual Review, entitled No Slaves, No Sugar: Containing New and Irresistible Arguments in Favour of the African Trade (1804). He describes the text he is reviewing succinctly: This pamphlet is an ironical defence of the slave trade, in which the author, by stating in plain and naked language the arguments of its advocates, exposes the folly, the impudence, and the impiety of the reasoning, and the hard-heartedness of the reasoners.170 The review repeats the exaggerated, specious arguments of the pamphleteer, in order to expose the sophistry of the slave-trade lobby. For instance the writer proposes that it is against God’s ordinance to oppose slavery, as it has been biblically decreed that Ham’s descendants (i.e. black people, who have historically been identified with the Canaanites) should fulfil this role. This is a familiar argument brought by the slave trade’s defendants. Southey repeats the author’s questioning (which has much in common with Edward Long’s theories) of how all the races of man can be related when ‘they are black and ugly, and stupid? … We may just as well believe that we are connected with the oran outangs, as that the negro savages are of the same race with ourselves’.171 Slavery is considered to Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 57 01/06/2007 11:53:32 Writing the Empire 58 be beneficial as it will ‘remedy the inequalities of situation and civilization; to awaken savage man from the lethargy in which he lies’.172 The review of the pamphlet reiterates many of the original’s outrageous fallacies, in order to demonstrate the extreme absurdities that pro-slavery advocates will go to. An example of this is the suggestion that if African natives were not removed from their country, the remaining inhabitants would suffer from famine, and ‘who can doubt that the negroes would eat one another were it not for the slave trade?’173 The pamphlet goes on to parallel the slave trade with iniquitous acts of British society, in order to justify the practices of the former. Slave-traders are smoothly compared to naval press-gangs and ‘crimps’ who increase military numbers by purchasing ‘simple young lads’ with ‘an insignificant bounty, to serve for their whole natural lives’.174 Southey observes that these are ‘dangerous statements of the comparative happiness of the negro slaves and the English poor’ (as they diminish the impact of examples of black suffering), but they are nevertheless, along with ‘such sneers, such obstinacy of ignorance, such impudent assertions’ as the pamphlet exposes, the only weapons that the pro-slavery lobby can wield in what had by now become a propaganda war.175 Southey intersperses the review with his own opinions on slavery and warns his readers of the dangers of ignoring oppression: Only a few quakers had regarded the slave trade as sinful, till Mr. Clarkeson [sic] called the public attention to its atrocity. The people of England redeemed themselves by the feeling which they immediately discovered, – but the sin still remains. The speedy assent of the legislature to the abolition is now become of less interest to the moralist, and more to the politician, since the triumph of the negroes in Hayti.176 Southey argues that the moralizing sentiment or ‘feeling’ that gave abolition its impetus in earlier years should be replaced by political expediency if the British government wishes to avoid ‘the triumph of the negroes’ in their own colonies. He refers to the slave rebellions against the planters in the French West Indian colony of St Domingue, that began in 1791 and continued to erupt, repelling British, Spanish and French forces in their fight for self-government and black emancipation. The colony was proclaimed as the new ‘Republic of Haiti’ at the beginning of 1804 by its rebel leaders, and the black Jean Jacques Dessalines was proclaimed as Governor General. Abolitionists had closely followed the events in St Domingue, and James Stephen (brother-in-law of William Wilberforce) had advocated helping the rebels in a pamphlet entitled The Opportunity or Reasons for an Immediate Alliance with St. Domingo in 1804.177 Certainly the figure of Toussaint L’Ouverture, who had led the slaves and maroons of St Domingue to victory before being captured by Napoleon’s forces and dying in prison in 1803, had become a romantic figure of liberty and equality for many. Because L’Ouverture was regarded as a ‘black Jacobin’ it is of course a moot point Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 58 01/06/2007 11:53:32 ‘Once more I will cry aloud and spare not’ 59 whether he was valued as an opponent of the French autocratic government, or as a champion of black liberty. Wordsworth’s sonnet addressing the imprisoned ‘Chieftain’ in the year of his death suggests the spirit of rebellion that he has inspired will continue, ‘Thou hast left behind / Powers that will work for thee’.178 Southey too intimates in his article that the continual threat of rebellion from the black populations of the West Indies will be a motivating factor in abolishing slavery: The Romans, in their greatest power, durst not suffer their slaves to wear a badge, lest the oppressed should count their own numbers: the Creoles cannot imitate them in this; they can neither keep their slaves ignorant of their strength, nor conceal themselves from their fury when the day of retribution arrives. If they prevent it not by acting according to religion, and common humanity, and common wisdom, that day inevitably will arrive, and their blood be upon their own heads!179 Although Southey yet again avoids discussing the issue of colour – the slaves’ black skin is equated to a ‘badge’ – he does concede to the African slaves a more powerful image of kinship and common identity in their shared colour with which to oppose the ‘Creoles’. But despite the apocalyptic warning that this passage contains, Southey seems hopeful that ‘religion and common humanity and common wisdom’ will prevail. Again he veers off from appearing to endorse any form of slave rebellion, employing his imprecation to avert, rather than encourage, colonial violence. The reference to Thomas Clarkson in the review is one of many to be found in Southey’s poems, letters and articles that reveal the esteem in which he held this dedicated campaigner. Clarkson and his wife had moved to Ullswater in the Lake District in 1796, and became friends of Dorothy and William Wordsworth in 1799, when they too were looking for a home there. Coleridge, the Lambs and Southey all became acquainted with the Clarksons through their friendship with the Wordsworths. Southey met Clarkson when he came to live in the Lake District and recommended him to his friend Charles Danvers as a man ‘who so nobly came forward about the Slave Trade to the ruin of his health – or rather state of mind – and to the deep injury of his fortune’.180 He added that, when he talks on the subject of slavery, ‘he agitates every one who hears him’. Like Clarkson, Southey also admired the Quakers for their pacific principles, and both men were interested in the developing Pennsylvanian colony that the Quaker William Penn had founded, where native Americans and British colonizers existed in a peaceful, harmonious existence. This colonial community was one that Southey was to hold up as a model for the British Empire all over the world, including Africa and the West Indies.181 Southey went on to write very positive reviews of Clarkson’s A Portraiture of Quakerism (1806) and The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 59 01/06/2007 11:53:32 Writing the Empire 60 the Abolition of the African Slave Trade (1808) for the Annual Review. Southey’s article on the latter comprises a comprehensive history of the abolition campaign from Clarkson’s perspective, concentrating particularly on his personal trials and triumphs. His review also repeats documented instances of abuse carried out on sailors and slaves from the triumphalist position of one who advocated abolition, in the year after it was achieved. Among those that he berates are royal supporters of slavery, a fact that Clarkson’s History hints at, but states ‘is much too delicate to be mentioned’.182 However Southey is less coy on the subject, having attacked the Duke of Clarence in previous articles for his backing of the pro-slavery lobby.183 While he notes Clarkson’s reserve, he claims that if it had not been for the ‘notorious predilection of the royal family for the African slave trade’ then ‘that traffic would have been abolished ten years earlier, and all the guilt and misery accumulated in consequence during those years would have been spared’.184 Despite his admiration now for British justice and humanity in abolishing the slave trade, he still feels the levelling impulse to attack those in power, whom he feels have neglected their moral and patriotic duty as leaders of their country. Making the British government aware of their duty towards their fellow humans was also a priority for domestic reformers. William Cobbett, for instance, was keen to draw analogies between the lives of slaves and Britons in order to focus attention on the harsh working and living conditions of the English labouring classes. In his Political Register (a weekly periodical that was established in January 1802) Cobbett compares the lives of the British poor to plantation slaves, in order to demonstrate that the former are more oppressed.185 This was a common comparison to make as Southey’s review article ‘No Slaves, No Sugar’ shows. Deirdre Coleman also notes Edward Long’s efforts in the 1770s, on behalf of West Indian planters, to undermine the abolitionist debate by making ‘fluid and suggestive analogies between warm, well-fed West Indian slaves and poor white English labourers and indentured apprentices’.186 It is therefore disconcerting to find Southey, in later life, in the company of Long and Cobbett, making what he had considered in 1805 to be ‘dangerous’ comparisons. By this time though, Southey’s concern for abuses in the colonial outreaches had been replaced by a more introspective solicitude for the welfare of his own society, as a letter to his friend John May, in 1833, makes clear: I have gone thro the whole Evidence concerning the treatment of Children in the factories; & nothing so damnable was ever brought to light before. The slave trade is mercy to it, <& a Jamaica plantation is a Garden of Eden.> We know how the slave trade began, & imperceptibly increased, – nothing in the beginning being committed that shocked the feelings as was contrary to the spirit of the age: having thus grown up it went on by succession & of latter years has rather been mitigated than made worse. But this white slavery has arisen in our own days, & is carried on in the midst of this Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 60 01/06/2007 11:53:32 ‘Once more I will cry aloud and spare not’ 61 civilized & Christian nation. – Herein it is that our danger consists; the great body of the manufacturing populace – & now of the agricultural – are miserably poor. Their condition is worse than it ought to be. One after another we are destroying all the outworks by which order, & with it property & life – are defended; – & this brutalized populace is ready to break in upon us. The prelude which you witnessed at Bristol was a manifestation of the spirit that exists among them: but in the manufacturing district when the wages of the adults are at a starvation rate, & their children are – literally – worked to death, murdered by inches, – the competition of the masters being the radical cause of these evils, there is a dreadful reality of oppression, – a dreadful sense of injustice, – of intolerable misery, – of intolerable wrongs, – more formidable than any causes which have ever moved a people to insurrection, – Once more I will cry aloud and spare not, – these are not times to be silent.187 The abuses of the slave trade, that had previously stirred Southey to poetic protest, are palliated here. Now he suggests that in earlier times they were only one more manifestation of ‘the spirit of the age’ and so were acceptable on those terms. More recently the slave trade has been ‘rather mitigated than made worse’, suggesting Southey is relinquishing his philosophical opposition to the concept of slavery, which now simply operates as a metaphor for him to draw attention to the iniquities of his own society. His anger (evident in the hyphenated sentences) is now reserved for the British manufacturing industry, compared to which ‘the slave trade is mercy’ and ‘a Jamaican plantation is a Garden of Eden’. While the hyperbole is intended to heighten readers’ impressions of the ‘white slavery’ that exists in their own country, it also makes light of the African slavery that Southey had previously reserved his outrage for. This letter was written a few months before the Emancipation Act was passed through parliament, establishing the freedom – although limited by a system of apprenticeship – of slaves in the British colonies. Where once Southey had felt obliged to ‘cry aloud and spare not’ on the subject of African slavery, he now does so on behalf of British workers and their children who are ‘murdered by inches’. The black slave is sacrificed for the white one he identifies, diluting or even negating the experience of black suffering. This was because the anti-slavery campaign was not now a priority in his life, in fact ‘he believed in a slower method of abolition than that proposed by emancipators’.188 A letter written two years earlier reveals his position: The Anti-Slavery Society have sent me some papers wishing me to stir the question in this neighbourhood. I got a petition for them on one or two former occasions; but will lend them no assistance now, when Government stands less in need of the spur than of the curb.189 Southey’s displacement of humanitarian concern, from the colonies to the metopolis, occurred because of his greater fear for the welfare of his own country and his belief that industrial oppression and popular demands for enfranchisement would end in violence, as in the Bristol riots he alludes to. These disturbances Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 61 01/06/2007 11:53:32 Writing the Empire 62 took place in 1831 in response to the failure of the second Reform Bill (extending the franchise) to pass through the House of Lords. The connection that Southey makes between slavery and the violence wreaked by a ‘brutalized populace’ on its ‘masters’ deliberately recalls the slave revolutions of the West Indies. Southey makes the same warning about ‘white slavery’ as he did about black, that there is a likelihood of violent rebellion as a response to oppression. The terrifying colonial uprisings are ‘imported’ to Britain, and Southey’s fears for society (‘property and life’) reach a fevered pitch in his letter. He is still positing revolt and riot, but the consequences now for him are fearful rather than laudable. Southey’s impulse to criticize society is hampered by his reactionary desire to avoid appearing as a political agitator, so he uses the safe analogy of a much more distant colonial ‘slavery’ to warn others. Though still attacking ‘masters’ who oppress their labourers, as well as the manufacturing industry that is at the heart of his country’s economic ambitions, now he wants to preserve the status quo rather than upset it. The West Indies Southey had an abiding interest in West Indian affairs, as well as access to direct information on these territories from his brother, Thomas, who served several times on ships that voyaged there. Southey’s letters to his brother often ask him to gain information on the customs of the Africans he sees, even suggesting the questions he should ask regarding their ‘superstitions’ and their ‘beasts’ to direct his inquiries, saying: This is the way to collect facts respecting the native Africans and their country. I would engage, in twelve months, were I in the West Indies, to get materials for a volume that should contain more real importancies than all travellers have yet brought home.190 In a further letter he pursues the subject again: Your extracts are very interesting … Go on as you have begun, and you will soon collect more, and more valuable, materials than you are aware of … Lose nothing that a Creole, or any man acquainted with the islands, tells you concerning them.191 Such ‘valuable materials’ eventually led to the publication in 1827 of Thomas Southey’s Chronological History of the West Indies.192 It is tempting to speculate how far Robert was involved in his brother’s project, knowing his enthusiasm for it and considering that by this time he was a well-known author with a penchant for writing history.193 Even in the field of poetry, many of his epic contributions are annotated with ‘mini-histories’ themselves in the exhaustive range of facts they provide to support his fiction.194 However much Southey was involved in Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 62 01/06/2007 11:53:32 ‘Once more I will cry aloud and spare not’ 63 the writing process, he certainly assisted his brother once it was published, by writing a long, favourable (and anonymous) review of it for the Quarterly Review in 1828, saying of Thomas, ‘he has searched widely, and compiled diligently’.195 The review provides a synopsis of the Chronological History, which discusses the first Spanish colonial expansion in the West Indies (incidentally condemning the ‘Romish faith’ of that nation) followed by that of the British and the French.196 Southey’s article conforms to his established reviewing technique of picking out from the historical account of the colonization of the islands – which includes ‘much that is revolting, much that is bloody, and more that is base’ – the ‘romantic incident’ that will appeal to his reader.197 Towards the end of the article he discusses the ‘evil’ result that occurred on St Domingue due to ‘the multiplication of the negroes’.198 He suggests that the rebellions by the slaves could have been averted if the Spanish and French had not made laws preserving their racial purity. Because the races were not allowed to mix, the black population was segregated, and so found strength in their ‘badge’ of blackness. Southey suggests a solution to such problems in the colonies: in those regions the only proper course of policy was indicated by the course of nature; that in the mixed breed, the European mind is engrafted upon the African constitution; and that if the French government had understood its own interest, it should have encouraged the growth of that race, capable by nature, as they are, of labouring under a tropical sky, and educated, as they might, and ought to have been, in those artificial wants, which are the wholesome and needful incentives to industry, and in those moral and religious principles, which are the only safeguard of society.199 This passage is curious for its positive vision of miscegenation, which however depends not on a mixing of blood or colour, but on the ‘engrafting’ of ‘the European mind’ upon the ‘African constitution’, thus creating a strange image of a white head on a black body. This dislocated incarnation is of course what Southey intends because the physical (African) body that needs to be strong enough to withstand disease and hard work should nevertheless be subordinate to a superior (European) intellect that has inculcated ‘moral and religious principles’. Incidentally, this new race will be ‘educated’ in ‘those artificial wants, which are the wholesome and needful incentives to industry’. The perceived benefit of ‘artificial wants’ to the civilizing process is very different from his 1795 philosophy of them as inequitable and iniquitous aspects of society’s demand for luxury. Southey’s racial solution, he believed, would prevent insurrection because the colour distinction would no longer exist, but it would also solve the proslavery lobby’s contention that without African slaves the West Indies could not be settled and cultivated. It was well known that diseases such as yellow fever annually wiped out many of the islands’ white populations – while Africans were generally considered to be immune – and it was also perceived that Europeans Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 63 01/06/2007 11:53:33 Writing the Empire 64 were physically unfit for heavy work in a tropical climate.200 In an account of the parliamentary debate for the abolition of the slave trade in 1791, the opinions of General Tarleton, apologist for slavery, were paraphrased: Many attempts have been made to cultivate the lands in the different islands by white labourers but it was found that from the difference of climate, and other causes, population had decreased, and those who took the greatest pains to accomplish this, found that in ten years time they could not have any proportion of whites capable of purposes of cultivation at all. He therefore agreed in the necessity of the Slave-Trade, if we meant to carry on the West India commerce and cultivation.201 The problem of how to develop the West Indian colonies without slaves is solved by Southey in his ‘super-race’ that combines what he sees as the best elements of Europeans and Africans. This was not a new idea for Southey; he had proposed such a solution to the development of the West Indian colonies in a letter to John May in 1814. His ideal colonial inhabitant there too is described as ‘of a mixed race, uniting so much of the European mind and African conformation as may render them the fit inhabitants of a tropical climate’202 – his kit for building a composite colonist. An article that Southey wrote a year after his review of Thomas’s book promotes his solution to colonial development (this time in Africa) further. The article discusses The Life and Services of Captain Philip Beaver for the Quarterly Review (1829) and includes an account of Beaver’s superhuman attempts to colonize the island of Bulama, off the West African coast, in 1792.203 Beaver’s colony began with a population of 275 Britons, but many died or returned home, and within two years Beaver had also abandoned the colony. Despite the idyllic descriptions of the verdant landscape given in the account, Southey concedes that it is not a place for Europeans: It was not at that time notoriously known, that ‘white man’ cannot live there: that the European homo can no more bear the climate of Western Africa, than the African simia can bear that of northern Europe.204 Again he posits his theory of the kind of people that he thinks can survive there, in order to solve the problem of developing these regions. While Beaver opines that Bulama was ‘produced in one of Nature’s happiest moods’. Southey replies: But not for white colonists! It is from negroes and mulattos, trained in European civilization, that the civilization of Western Africa must come; and proper colonists, fitted by such training, as well as by constitution, will be raised up in the course of one generation, from the time in which the humane, and temperate, and just, and wise measures of our present colonial policy shall be fairly carried into effect in the Columbian Islands.205 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 64 01/06/2007 11:53:33 ‘Once more I will cry aloud and spare not’ 65 Southey’s colonial strategies for Africa therefore include the West Indies too. Like the Creole planters (and earlier writers, such as Wadstrom and Benezet) Southey sees the solution to West Indian development in an African workforce, who will be bound, not by the bonds of slavery now, but by the ‘humane’, ‘wise’, paternalism of European colonial policy. Still seeking imperial control, but without the benefits of modern medical science, Southey is convinced that only ‘negroes and mulattos’ can live in the tropics. Europeans in West Africa were particularly prone to malaria and did not have access to the life-preserving benefits of prophylactic medicines (like quinine) until the mid-nineteenth century. And Gad Heuman’s account of the post-emancipation period in the West Indies relates that European migrant workers, who were encouraged to the islands in order to solve the labour problem, also ‘suffered very high mortality’.206 In consequence the planters turned to Africa (as Southey had predicted) and India, for their workforce.207 In terms of government, Southey advocates Britain’s role as a paternalistic imperial authority, governing from the metropolis, rather than exposing settlers from his own country to such unhealthy tropical locations.208 If control of these areas had to be relinquished because of disease and enervation, then links could be maintained by ‘training’ Africans in British ‘colonial policy’; a precursor to the twentiethcentury administrative system of the British Commonwealth. Southey therefore recognized Britain’s inability to lay claim to African territories because (as he stated in a review of the Report of the Committee of the African Institution in 1808) ‘the geographical divisions of nature are permanent, her colour on the map admits of no shiftings … that which is black must remain so’, but his plan was to claim the loyalty of its people for Britain.209 His complaisant black colonists would: have nothing to apprehend from the climate, and being English by language and by religion, their convenience and their interest would always attach them to England, even if no reliance were to be placed upon gratitude and the goodness of human nature.210 Nevertheless Southey anticipated the dangers of his plan to anglicize Africans. One of these he identifies in a review of the New Testament in the Negro Tongue for the Quarterly Review (1830). In this article Southey discusses the use of ‘talkee talkee’, a ‘childish’ corrupt ‘lingo’ – a mixture of Dutch and English, used by the slaves of the Dutch South American colony of Surinam – in which a version of the Bible had been published.211 Despite the ostensible desire of promoting Christianity, Southey sees this bastardized language as a vehicle for slave owners to keep slaves in a degraded position, ignorant of the true meaning of the Bible, literature, and especially legal knowledge, with which to oppose their captivity. His article concludes that the proper parent languages of white settlers, whether Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 65 01/06/2007 11:53:33 Writing the Empire 66 English or Dutch, are the most suitable for their colonies abroad, because of the access to knowledge that this promotes. Being aware of Southey’s plans for black English colonies in Africa, it is easy to follow his reasoning. For him, English is the language of knowledge but also the ideal tool for training black colonists in, in order to ensure that ‘their interest would always attach them to England’. Southey’s review of Thomas Southey’s History of the West Indies concludes by admitting that past events in this area have generally been depressing: In the annals of the last century, military and naval operations occupy a large space; they are melancholy details of lives sacrificed by thousands to a fatal climate, and of expeditions producing nothing but evil in their course.212 But he looks to the future for hope and improvement in an exciting new period when slavery has ended, and model colonies, inhabited by ‘proper colonists’, are run along the lines of the Pennsylvanian example, for the greater benefit of Britain: New colonies are now rising in the remotest part of the world; and under whatever form of government they may settle when the foundations are firmly laid, the language, at least of England will be retained there. Great Britain which may truly be called the hive of nations, is sending and must continue to send, forth its swarms.213 Conclusions The narrative of this chapter, which spans the literary output of most of Southey’s adult life, owes much of its structure to his progression from young radical to cautious conservative. His youthful protests against the slave trade can be seen as one more aspect of his radical politics, but nevertheless should not be dismissed lightly. By measuring the actions, rather than the words, of Southey and Coleridge, their ambitions to change society for the better had failed. Their Pantisocratic society never became a reality; Southey’s plans to create homes for invalids and impoverished women never materialized; both men became reactionary members of the society they had once opposed. However by engaging in the abolitionist arena, Southey and Coleridge added their voices to a loud, if often marginalized, call for an end to the slave trade – the most useful manifestation of their radical politics. The debate among historians over how influential such individual voices were continues. But by lending his weight to the cause of abolition Southey assisted in publicizing the inhumane treatment of African slaves, through the medium of his poetry and his reviews. His writing was aimed at a specific section of British society, and so was published in periodicals and volumes that found their way into the lives and homes of the educated and wealthy; those who had the power to pressure the government into abolishing Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 66 01/06/2007 11:53:33 ‘Once more I will cry aloud and spare not’ 67 the slave trade. Southey’s opposition may have originated in the revolutionary politics of the 1790s, but it contributed to a humanitarian campaign that came to embody the beliefs and conscience of the Romantic period. As this chapter reveals, Southey attempted to envisage Britain’s relationship with Africa and the West Indies in the decades after the abolition of the slave trade (1807) and before the Emancipation Act (1833). While he can be accused of apostasy in his over-cautious approach to emancipation, it is necessary to remember that the focus of his attention had changed from wide-ranging, generalized calls for the improvement of the human condition to a more specific concentration on how colonization abroad would benefit Britain. Southey observed global matters through a domestic lens and so discussed these issues from a peculiarly parochial and paternalistic position. Despite his belief that Africans would benefit from the civilizing influence of Britain, this was largely a subsidiary advantage. His primary aim was to extend Britain’s colonial power into African territories. While this may seem overly narrow or anglocentric now – and the legacy of such arguments is obvious in post-colonial terms – Southey’s approach must be appreciated within its historical context. His contribution was not only as a poet and commentator of the moment, he also attempted to imagine Britain’s future relationship with the world. For better or worse, the colonialist projects advocated by Romantic intellectuals like Southey became the imperial legacy of the Victorian period. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 67 01/06/2007 11:53:33 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 68 01/06/2007 11:53:33 2 ‘TAKING POSSESSION’: SOUTHEY’S AND WORDSWORTH’S ROMANTIC AMERICA In May 1768 the Admiralty appointed Captain Cook to command a voyage to the Pacific Ocean. It was a scientific and imperialist mission: Cook was to observe the transit of Venus, make collections of unfamiliar flora and fauna, and find evidence of the ‘Great Southern Continent’. On this voyage and the two subsequent ones he undertook (1772–5, 1776–80) Cook was also expected to discover and claim new land for his country, as the sealed ‘Secret Instructions’ from his third voyage make explicit: You are also with the Consent of the Natives to take possession of convenient situations in the name of the King of Great Britain, or if you find the country uninhabited, take possession for his Majesty by setting up Proper Marks and inscriptions, as first discoverers and possessors.1 Cook took possession of new lands in the southern half of the globe by naming them for the ‘King of Great Britain’. He named new places for their physical characteristics and abundance, or lack, of necessary materials for the survival of his ships’ crews (for example ‘Duck Cove’ and ‘Thirsty Sound’).2 He named them after his crew members and friends (‘Clerke’s Rocks’, ‘Shepherds Isles’)3 and also from a direct emotional response to events that happened there, for instance ‘the name “Unfortunate Cove” indicates where a powder horn blew up in Cook’s hand, nearly bringing his surveying career to a premature end’.4 Cook’s inscribing of new territories formally established British claims to the land, as well as locating and familiarizing unknown places for his countrymen, by giving them English names and putting them on the map. The narratives of Cook’s voyages, and those of many other explorers of the period, combined novelty with excitement and were consumed by an enthusiastic reading public at home, including most of the Romantic poets. The process of ‘taking possession’ by British explorers, such as Cook, in the eighteenth century can be examined in the light of a number of recent studies which deal with the significance of place in the shaping of human self-consciousness and national identity. Simon Schama, for example, in Landscape and – 69 – Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 69 01/06/2007 11:53:33 70 Writing the Empire Memory (1995) considers human relationships with the landscape as a formative element in creating a common cultural currency that is inextricably linked to how groups of people, bound by similar ethnic or national origins, perceive themselves. Within the field of Romantic studies, the collection of essays Romantic Geographies (2000) examines the importance of location (and dislocation) on the writings of the period.5 More particularly, Michael Wiley has demonstrated that spaces/places were the subject of ideological contests in the Romantic period, and that the acts of configuring and representing places, and especially naming them, were not innocent ones.6 Despite the awareness in these studies that literary texts are embedded in their socio-political background, I feel there is a more direct link to be made between the political and the personal, both in the travel writing of the Romantic period, and in the creation of literature which was dependent on such narratives for its source material. The critical focus of these studies is therefore developed here by exploring the ways in which Southey and Wordsworth appropriated territory for themselves in their poetry. This process, which often includes (re-)naming places, makes an emotional investment in the landscape, as Cook had done (albeit in this case an imaginative one), which has nationalist and imperialist dimensions. The poetry of both writers is examined in the context of the contemporary discourse of travel narratives, a genre on which they were dependent for their knowledge of America. The explorers whom Wordsworth and Southey admired, and whose accounts they used as source material for their own fictional narratives, were men whose projects were directly related to the expansion of empire; such as James Cook, Samuel Hearne, William Bartram and Jonathan Carver. Despite the two poets’ reliance on these contemporary popular travel accounts, they used their sources in different ways. As Tim Fulford and Peter Kitson have pointed out, because these narratives contributed to ‘a composite genre, travel writing was able to contain contrasting and even contradictory perspectives and discourses. No one expected it, like epic poetry, to achieve a unique vision or consistency of voice.’7 Just as there were multiple forms of travel writing – despite generally conforming to a narrative of quest, as Patrick Brantlinger identifies – there were multiple forms of texts produced by writers who absorbed and ‘recycled’ these primary accounts for their readers.8 So because Southey and Wordsworth extracted selective information from these hybrid and dialogic texts, that conformed to the vision they wanted to promote in their own writing, they produced two quite distinct versions of colonial life. Southey’s long narrative poem Madoc (1805) imitates the tropes of discovery and exploration from the travel accounts Southey read, in order to appropriate the American territories for his poem. His political motivation for naming the landscape, which is revealed in my analysis, is traced back to the radical inscriptive poetry he wrote in the late 1790s. Written contemporaneously, Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 70 01/06/2007 11:53:33 ‘Taking possession’ 71 Wordsworth’s ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’ (1800) also reveal the impetus to (re-)name places, as well as the influence of travel narratives on his work, in the way he too ‘takes possession’ of the landscape around his Lake District home. While both men desire to efface official place-names by supplying their own, their motives for doing so, and the naming aesthetic employed by each of them, are manifestly different. Such artistic and ideological disparities are yet more evident in comparing Southey’s depiction of the Welsh settlement of Florida in Madoc and Wordsworth’s colonial vision of America in his poem ‘Ruth’ (1800), thereby demonstrating the variety and ambivalence within Romantic literature, particularly when viewed in the context of empire. It is a modern recognition that history ‘inevitably tells the same dismal tale: of land taken, exploited, exhausted; of traditional cultures said to have lived in a relation of sacred reverence with the soil displaced by the reckless individualist, the capitalist aggressor’.9 This often repeated scenario, in which established ‘cultures’ are jeopardized by the private ‘reckless’ individual servicing his own needs, is the effect of colonization at its most primary level. But can this individualism which causes displacement of other cultures on the ground be seen to operate at other levels? For instance, can Romantic writers, such as Southey and Wordsworth, who emphasize the primacy of private emotion and the importance of the individual in their writings, be said to have contributed to this ‘tale’? And if this historic ‘tale’ becomes a familiar fable, disseminated through Romantic literature, does its cultural habituation encourage the idea that it is acceptable? Marlon Ross has argued that ‘In a very real sense the Romantics, some of them unwittingly, help prepare England for its imperial destiny. They help teach the English to universalise the experience of “I”.’10 If Ross is right, then one way in which this has been done by Romantic writers (as well as explorers) is by putting themselves in the centre of the landscape they discover. By prioritizing their own concerns and ideas and projecting their egos onto the territories they navigate, Southey and Wordsworth engage in an imaginative appropriation, or ‘psychoimperialism’ of them, that effectively silences any other claims. And by absorbing and recycling such narratives unquestioningly, writers (and readers) are thereby complicit in disseminating a conceptual acceptance of the processes of colonization, even if they do not enact them in practice. With this in mind I want to consider how Southey’s fictional ‘colonization’ of America, in Madoc, was initiated by his radical engagement with the idea of that continent as a place of personal and political liberty for himself, during his Pantisocratic phase. This enthusiasm for America, I will demonstrate, caused him to reject his home country and ‘re-inscribe’ familiar English landmarks in a poetical protest instigated by his conviction that ‘Ambition Hatred Envy Slaughter Injustice and England’ had become one.11 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 71 01/06/2007 11:53:33 Writing the Empire 72 ‘Southeyopolis’ In the 1790s, Southey’s desire for political and intellectual freedom led him to see America as a new unmapped and uncorrupted land where he could found a colony, settling and naming the wilderness, making it a home for him and his fellow Pantisocrats.12 Among the joint reasons Southey and Coleridge had for emigrating, one was to avoid the potentially serious consequences of prosecution and even imprisonment for embracing ‘Jacobin’ principles. Another was to escape the polluting influence of British society and its demand for religious and political conformity. Southey and Coleridge harboured large-scale plans of beginning a new community, based on binding ties of friendship and familial bonds and governed by their philosophical principles of ‘the generalization of individual property’ and ‘the equal government of all’.13 But as well as being attracted to the political ideal of liberty that the infant republic seemed to represent, they were also enamoured by the descriptions of American colonial life that they avidly read in texts such as Jonathan Carver’s Travels Through the Interior of North America (1778), William Bartram’s Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida (1791) and Thomas Cooper’s Some Information Respecting America (1794). The latter particularly, in its enthusiastic endorsement of Pennsylvania, the new home of Joseph Priestley (Cooper’s father-in-law), as a location for British settlement of the American territories, influenced their decision to settle on the banks of the Susquehannah River, and reflects the colonizing agenda of such texts.14 Jonathan Carver suggests several reasons why Britons would leave home to settle far away in another continent. America is a place: Where future generations may find an asylum whether driven from their country by the ravages of lawless tyrants, or by religious persecutions, or reluctantly, leaving it to remedy the inconveniences arising from a superabundance of inhabitants; whether I say, impelled by these, or allured by hopes of commercial advantages, there is little doubt but their expectations will be fully gratified in these rich and unexhausted climes.15 Southey and Coleridge eagerly absorbed the idealistic representations of colonial life written to attract British emigrants to America. Southey particularly envisioned a simple, happy, pastoral existence in which he ‘could till the earth, and provide by honest industry the meat which my wife would dress with pleasing care’.16 Life in America would also ease the burden of responsibility he felt as the head of the family since his father’s death: To go with all I love … to live with them in the most agreable [sic] and most honourable employment, to eat the fruits I have raised, and see every face happy around me, my Mother sheltered in her declining years from the anxieties which have pursued her, my brothers educated to be useful and virtuous.17 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 72 01/06/2007 11:53:33 ‘Taking possession’ 73 At the heart of the Pantisocratic scheme was a desire for the stability of a domestic centre in both poets’ lives; no doubt because they had felt the lack of this in their youth.18 While their correspondence on the subject posits a future of domiciled companionship and affection, their poetry written at this time reveals a yearning regretfulness for its absence in their present lives. In poems written during 1794 Coleridge asks ‘on what holy ground / May Domestic Peace be found?’19 and Southey writes of the dispossessed who are alienated from their homes (long before this became a theme for Lyrical Ballads), including one solitary figure, ‘Who loaths the lingering road, yet has no home of rest’.20 Nevertheless it is obvious from reading the letters of Southey and Coleridge during the period in which they planned to emigrate (which was actually little more than a year), that they had different ambitions for their model society, despite hanging the same label of Pantisocracy on it. As Nicholas Roe points out, in Coleridge’s wildest flights of fancy he intended their philanthropic community to reform the destructive, self-centred impulses of humanity, by founding an exemplary brotherhood of man.21 But Southey’s motives were governed as much by personal considerations – such as securing his family’s future in a period of economic uncertainty – as philosophical ones. He too wanted to gain ‘the advantages and yet avoid the vices of cultivated society’, abolish individual property and live in a self-governing democracy.22 But it was his pursuit of domestic and economic stability for his dependent family – and his proposed future one, after marriage to Edith Fricker – more than altruistic reasons concerning the perfectibility of mankind, that spurred him on. And while Coleridge delighted in entertaining fantasies of the kind of society they would create, it was often left to Southey to consider the practical realities of the project, particularly when it came down to the financial implications of making such a trip.23 Southey’s colonial ambitions were in fact not significantly different from those of many pioneers preparing to relocate with their families to the new world during this period. According to James Horn, a combination of factors, including the ‘resurgence of Dissent … together with harvest failures and economic dislocation following the outbreak of the French wars, created the conditions for an abrupt upturn in emigration during the 1790s’.24 And unlike previous waves of emigration, this time it was not the rural poor who left in large numbers, but members of the middle classes who sought financial stability, or political and religious liberty from a reactionary Pittite government. The idealism of ‘highsoul’d Pantisocracy’,25 with its radical rejection of established political systems, nevertheless conformed to a pattern of colonialism, which at its least ambitious level planned to establish a ‘cottag’d dell’,26 and at its most extreme led to the British justice system transporting convicts to Botany Bay. James McKusick sums up Pantisocracy as: Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 73 01/06/2007 11:53:34 Writing the Empire 74 a fairly typical example of European expansionism, intellectually justified by an ideology of political equality and religious freedom, yet grounded at a more unconscious level in an economics of colonial exploitation.27 Southey’s plans to emigrate and ‘find an asylum’ (to use Carver’s phrase) for himself and his family combined with the juvenile ambitions his letters reveal of founding a perfect state. Based on classical examples, he could imagine it ‘people[d] with philosophers’ and ‘governed by the laws of Plato’. 28 After meeting Coleridge he assumed that they would similarly mark the American land in the image of their Pantisocratic values. Southey’s ideal society would be one of domestic and republican virtue, ‘the new colony of “Southeyopolis”’ that he planned to ‘be as great as the famous cities of the ancient world, but to have that democratic vigour which America already possessed’.29 For Southey naming the new land would be not only an emotional investment in that place, but a first step towards controlling it, making its laws and founding a society governed by his principles. However, like many other utopian schemes, Pantisocracy, despite its liberal roots, relied on (communal) ownership of land. Tracing the process by which an imaginative appropriation of territory, as part of a grandiose project, could have evolved into a colonial reality (given the financial wherewithal), we can see how crucial individual initiatives were in creating such transatlantic movements. Southey’s plans to institute ‘Southeyopolis’ in America, as I have stated, arose from a resistance to, and rejection of, the British state, in common with many other thousands of emigrants at this time. And it was his political awareness of the implications of naming the land that caused him to reject such territorial appropriations in his own country by undermining the British state’s historical narrative of ownership in his ‘Inscriptions’. Southey’s ‘Inscriptions’ As early as 1793, before Southey had even met Coleridge, he had posited a future life for himself in Britain as ‘dark and gloomy’, while conversely ‘the only ray enlivening the scene’ would be one that ‘beams on America’.30 Southey’s dream of settling in America with Coleridge and their communal friends and family soon disintegrated in ideological disunity (signifying their growing disenchantment with each other), adverse reactions from members of both their families to the scheme, and financial difficulties. On Southey’s part, he soon realized that he was the only member of the party, in practical terms, who was capable of implementing the plan.31 However in relinquishing his plans to emigrate, Southey’s radicalism, which was at its highest point during his association with Coleridge, did not abate.32 His gall, perhaps further embittered by the recognition that he now had to make a living for himself at home, was still reserved for the British state and particularly its monarchy. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 74 01/06/2007 11:53:34 ‘Taking possession’ 75 Southey’s state of mind at the time can be seen in his sequence of eight inscriptions included in Poems (1797), which serve as a critical vehicle to display his frustration with British politics.33 Southey was attracted to the inscriptive form, and particularly admired the writing of Mark Akenside, whose 1772 collection of poems included nine inscriptions.34 This meditative form (of classical origin) that commemorates the deaths of loved ones, or worthy public figures, by explaining the moral value of their lives to the reader, provided Southey with a useful poetical framework for his own ideas.35 Akenside’s inscriptions commemorate the literary legacy of Chaucer and Shakespeare as well as the more anonymous pastoral lives of a shepherd (Edmund) and his beloved maiden (Matilda). His inscriptions combine lyrical descriptions of the natural landscape with the edifying moral influence of those he memorializes. His most political poem commemorates the signing of the Magna Carta at Runnymede, insisting that the viewer of ‘the verdant plain’ remember the place: Where England’s ancient barons, clad in arms And stern with conquest, from their tyrant king (Then render’d tame) did challenge and secure The charter of thy freedom.36 This example was one that Southey found inspiring for his own more politicized inscriptions, which remind his readers of the evil acts of tyrants, or celebrate the ‘gallant deeds’, of those who resist them.37 Southey’s speaker, like Akenside’s, is the exhortative, imperious voice of the epitaph/inscription tradition, stating ‘This is the place’38 or ‘Gaze Stranger here!’39 In his inscriptions Southey takes the British monarchy to task. He rewrites well-known locations from the perspective of their historical significance, and his political bias gives them new meaning.40 For instance his poems, ‘Inscription. For a Column at Newbury’ and ‘Inscription. For a Monument in the New Forest’ deal with the tyrannies of Charles I and the Norman King William respectively, who abused their positions of power by oppressing their own subjects: This is the place where William’s kingly power Did from their poor and peaceful homes expel, Unfriended, desolate, and shelterless, The habitants of all the fertile track Far as these wilds extend.41 In this poem Southey champions the underdogs and seeks to undermine the official map of Britain by marking locations of martyrdom against royal authority. And by making obvious the political implications of place names and radically reinscribing them, he simultaneously reworks and rejuvenates the inscriptive Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 75 01/06/2007 11:53:34 Writing the Empire 76 form.42 His technique, which Lynda Pratt describes as ‘the conceit of writing onto a place or thing, of writing for structures that might have a potential, as opposed to an actual, existence’, allows Southey to imaginatively appropriate places with his own fictional ‘monuments’, that he considers no less important for being commemorated on paper rather than stone.43 Naming is a human, rather than a natural, process and in these poems ‘Man [who] creates the evil he endures’44 is judged against nature and found lacking. Southey’s ‘Inscription. For a Tablet on the Banks of a Stream’ conforms to the Greek epigrammatic tradition which directs the weary traveller to the best place to drink, and has the descriptive power to literally refresh on the page: Stranger! awhile upon this mossy bank Recline thee. If the Sun rides high, the breeze That loves to ripple o’er the rivulet, Will play around thy brow, and the cool sound Of running waters soothe thee. The poem concludes however: But passing on amid the haunts of man, It finds pollution there, and rolls from thence A tainted tide.45 This poem is the only one in the sequence which is not located by a place name, as if Southey wished to free it from human processes such as naming and becoming one of the ‘haunts of man’ which bring ‘pollution’. Traditional place names are simply memorials of shameful, evil deeds by ‘the wicked rulers of mankind’. In response to this political tyranny Southey directs his ‘Stranger’ to seek happiness in ‘the woodland cot / Of INNOCENCE’.46 His own reasons for going to America had been to discover just such an idyllic retreat, so that his plans for emigrating combined the political precept of his inscriptions – that one should resist tyranny – with his personal desire for a life of pastoral domesticity. Both these elements, which were important formative principles in his plans for Pantisocracy, would become themes of Madoc, his emigratory ‘epic’.47 Madoc Pantisocracy is often simply regarded as a moment of radical madness, a failed ideological scheme that played a minor part in the lives of two Romantic poets. However it was very important to both Coleridge and Southey in terms of their lifelong relationship with each other, as well as in contributing to their individual intellectual and literary development.48 In Southey’s case a letter written by him after his separation from Coleridge sums up, in the tone of one who is now sadder but wiser, what he has learnt from the affair: Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 76 01/06/2007 11:53:34 ‘Taking possession’ 77 Experience never wasted her lesson on a less fit pupil – yet Bedford my mind is considerably expanded – my opinions are better grounded & frequent self-conviction of error has taught me a sufficient degree of scepticism upon all subjects to prevent confidence.49 That the Pantisocratic period was a time of intense, intellectual excitement is attested to by the borrowing records of the Bristol Library Society which show not only the two writers’ interest in radical politics, but in poetry, history and travel narratives.50 The foundations for Southey’s reading (and writing) interests were laid at this time and among them he developed an abiding fascination for foreign cultures and colonial affairs, as his poetry and journalism reveal. These were interests that he developed further in writing Madoc, where his study of travel narratives and histories was influential in the story of his fictional hero’s journey to America. Southey’s own posited emigration and institution of a model colony would be achieved vicariously in Madoc. With the failed Pantisocratic project behind him, Southey held the confident conviction that ‘Madoc is to be the pillar of my reputation’.51 In this two-volume poem, completed for publication in 1805, Southey’s hero, the twelfth-century Welsh prince Madoc, mortified by the murderous politics of the Welsh court, sails to America to escape it and establish a colony there. The plot has obvious parallels with Southey’s own dissatisfaction with British politics and his desire to emigrate to the banks of the Susquehannah River. This poem too is written from Southey’s humble first principle that his hero, like himself, needs to find a home abroad as a ‘resting place for peace’ (Part 1, III.288).52 However, as in Pantisocracy, Madoc’s emigratory design becomes more ambitious and he returns to Wales for new recruits to swell the community’s numbers. Rather than assimilating himself into another culture, Madoc, like Southey, intends to create his own society/colony. Much of the interest in reading Madoc comes from tracing the faint outline of Southey’s egalitarian society behind the imperialist project that Madoc institutes. It is also possible to discover the radical spirit in which Southey’s inscriptions were written in descriptions of the Welsh court, which is governed by the ‘jealous arm of power’ (Part 1, III.191). Belonging to the royal line of Owen, Madoc’s family name is inextricably linked with the land he lives in, with far-reaching consequences. When Owen dies his sons raise armies to contest for the throne, causing the conflict of ‘Briton with Briton in unnatural war’ (Part 1, III.80). As Madoc shares the Welsh king’s name with his brothers he has the choice of being ‘the victim, or the murderer’ (Part 1, III.197). Rather than live there with these consequences, he is compelled to find a new world entirely. As Carver points out, often the impetus for colonization comes from those, like Madoc (and Southey), who feel they are political refugees from their own country.53 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 77 01/06/2007 11:53:34 78 Writing the Empire The first book of Madoc is structured as ‘a tale within a tale’, so that Madoc’s narrative describing the journey and colonization of the new land is enveloped by the political action in Wales. In this way Madoc’s radical search for freedom is contrasted with the conservative claustrophobia of the medieval Welsh court. The emphasis in the old land is on tradition and the continuation of the monarchy through the new King David’s political union with a ‘Saxon’ bride, to preserve the royal family name. As Madoc praises his father, saying ‘King Owen’s name / Shall live in the after-world without a blot!’, the irony of his father’s own crime in usurping his nephew’s lands is divulged to him (Part 1, III.108–9). This act of violence shadows the deeds of tyrannical kings in Southey’s ‘Inscriptions’. The ‘wicked rulers of mankind’ depicted there are relocated in the Welsh royal family, which is a vehicle in Madoc for Southey to portray the evils of the British system of primogeniture. This sets the scene for a rejection of old world values, as Madoc vows to be one of those men ‘who the unfrequented path / Of Justice, firmly treads’.54 Madoc’s embarkation to America, as Southey’s fictional solution to his discontent, implies that such a ‘path’ cannot be followed in Britain. ‘Justice’ requires a new land of liberty and democracy and further demonstrates that Southey’s ambition to ‘take possession’ of other lands was born out of his rejection of the British political establishment. That Southey had political motivations for writing Madoc is undeniable. In order to link his personal politics to those in his poem it is necessary to examine the manuscript fragment he wrote in 1794–5, which includes the text of one and a half books of the first draft.55 Kenneth Curry points out the importance of this text for its declaration of Southey’s democratic politics, where Madoc ‘cries out against the wars waged by tyrants, speaks of the brotherhood of man, and boldly lectures the King on his duties’.56 Though this text was subsequently revised by Southey in 1797 – as his note to the manuscript states – it reflects the fact that it was written at the height of his impassioned support for the French Revolution.57 As Southey said himself of his hero, he ‘will be as Jacobinical as heart can wish’.58 In the 1794–5 manuscript, Madoc’s rejection of the tyrannical rule of the Welsh monarchy, whose personal ambitions cause conflict and war to be let loose on their people, is vociferous, while Southey provides a contrasting example of princely qualities in his crusading hero: Ill fall the {evil-minded} man whose evil minded heart wiles Embroils his country. Conscience shall enfix Her scorpion sting in his dark brooding breast Who from her hamlet haunt scares Peace away With Wars shrill clarion. drenching the red earth With human blood to aggrandize himself. So did not Madoc. Him wave-wandering chief Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 78 01/06/2007 11:53:34 ‘Taking possession’ 79 Guiding his prow where never mariner Rushd thro the deep, & on the distant shore Far over ocean rearing Cambrias flag A blameless warrior, sing I.59 But even this early draft contains instabilities that are magnified in the 1805 text. Madoc shares the same territorial ambitions as his aggressive brothers. He is a ‘blameless warrior’ for Southey simply because he preserves his own country’s stability by going abroad to conquer other lands. Over the ocean Madoc still intends ‘rearing Cambrias flag’, and is only exporting ‘Wars shrill clarion’ to another location. As in Southey’s own idealistic motives for emigrating to America, such ambitions involve territorial acquisition elsewhere and by emerging from the same Welsh (or British) political context, can never be entirely innocent. On Madoc’s return to Wales from his first foray across the Atlantic, he regales his royal relations with the story of his adventures, saying: In search of peace, return I. not forlorn In poverty but bearing store of gold The liberal produce of that happy clime.60 So Southey’s ‘philosophic’ hero, as he considered him, quests for peace, but returns laden with the spoils of another country in order to impress a domestic audience who value such things.61 Madoc’s stated aims are constantly undercut even in this early text. His ‘taking possession’ is not a radical step, because it conforms to the territorial and economic concerns of British society. The 1794–5 text ends before Madoc can relate his ‘discovery’ of America. In the 1805 publication this is a seminal moment. He says: But who can tell what feelings filled my heart, When, like a cloud, the distant land arose Grey from the ocean, .. when we left the ship, And cleft, with rapid oars, the shallow wave, And stood triumphant on another world! (Part 1, IV.229–33) Southey presents Madoc’s journey as a traveller’s ‘tale’ within the main text of his long narrative poem – a device that refers directly to the travel-writing genre on which Southey was so dependent. Fittingly the fourth book of his text ends here, hanging with all the optimism of a new beginning in ‘another world’. For Southey, as for Keats, this moment of potential discovery and encounter is a sublime one – like all those other first moments in Keats’s poem; looking into Chapman’s Homer; finding a new planet; or standing in Cortez’s shoes looking out onto the anticipated, but still unexpected Pacific – it is as yet uncomplicated by the later realities that will follow.62 As Madoc’s ship approaches the new con- Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 79 01/06/2007 11:53:34 80 Writing the Empire tinent, the land is seen as a ‘cloud’, lacking the solid outline of reality and heavy with unknown potential. It is ‘grey’ because it is as yet ‘undiscovered’ by Madoc (or any other European traveller if the legend is to be believed) and so unpainted in the reader’s imagination by Southey. Madoc’s description of his discovery replicates the exultant diction of other such revelatory moments in the travel narratives Southey had read. Such a device enables his readers to suspend disbelief and see America, as Southey did in this period, as truly a ‘new world’ that could remain detached from the European field of politics and war. However the description of Madoc’s disembarkation as ‘triumphant’ reveals the problematic nature of his text. While Southey could be simply referring to the successful conclusion of Madoc’s quest to ‘find’ America, these victorious first steps incorporate an act of appropriation. Such an act is constantly denied by Madoc: … I come not from my native isle To wage the war of conquest, to cast out Your people from the land which time and toil Have rightly made their own. (Part 1, VIII.51–4) But it is nevertheless reinforced by his actions. The 1794–5 text hints at the problems Southey would encounter in trying to combine idealistic motives with the practical difficulties of Madoc’s colonization of America. This moment of discovery therefore constitutes a high spot in Madoc, after which, I will argue, Southey’s clear Pantisocratic vision of America becomes muddied by colonial politics and racial anxiety. ‘Man’s asserted empire’ Soon after Madoc’s ship ‘discovers’ America, he and his Welsh emigrants are welcomed by the Hoamen Indians, whom Madoc befriends and then champions in battle against their oppressors, the hostile, warlike and irreligious Aztecs. The subdued Aztecs plan revenge on the Welsh colony and after acts of retaliation by them Madoc expels them for good, aided by a convenient earthquake and volcanic eruption. The poem is constructed so that Madoc, as a superior being, is morally bound to defend the rights of the ‘noble savages’ (the Hoamen tribe). Disconcertingly this acknowledgment is made to come from the mouth of the Hoamen’s high priest, who: With reverential awe accosted us, For we, he weened, were children of a race Mightier than they, and wiser, and by heaven Beloved and favour’d more: (Part 1, VI.3–6)63 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 80 01/06/2007 11:53:34 ‘Taking possession’ 81 The justification for Madoc’s actions in America is that he comes from a race that is morally and religiously superior to the native Indian tribes – a familiar vindication for many colonizing projects. It is necessary that the British colonizers are not seen as such simply by themselves, or Southey’s readers, but that those they colonize are made to articulate this recognition. As Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson state, ‘Colonialism (like its counterpart, racism) then, is an operation of discourse, and as an operation of discourse it interpellates colonial subjects by incorporating them in a system of representation’.64 This discourse becomes more powerful when those being colonized recognize themselves in the terms of the colonizer, as here. So ostensibly Madoc, as western empire builder, gradually comes to dominate the Hoamen tribe, who are dependent on him for protection, expelling the ‘foul idolatry’ of the Aztec empire who previously colonized and dominated the Hoamen lands themselves, so that by the end of the poem Madoc is ‘left sole Lord’ in the land (Part 2, XXVII.392, 388). Madoc is a text of colonization, not Pantisocracy, and why this came about can be seen by comparing Southey’s own uneasy vision of settling in America with his description of the Welsh colony in Madoc. The following excerpt comes from a letter he wrote in December 1793: fancy only me in America; imagine my ground uncultivated since the creation, and see me wielding the axe, now to cut down the tree, and now the snakes that nestled in it. Then see me grubbing up the roots, and building a nice snug little dairy with them: three rooms in my cottage, and my only companion some poor negro whom I have brought on purpose to emancipate … till at last comes an ill-looking Indian with a tomahawk and scalps me, – a most melancholy proof that society is very bad, and that I shall have done very little to improve it!65 In this passage, Southey projects himself as the first man on the land – this is ‘ground uncultivated since the creation’, and images of a single tree and snakes resonate the idea of America as Eden.66 Southey sees himself in a relationship with the land where he is physically in control – ‘wielding the axe’ and building his own home. He constructs a humorous picture of himself in control of his idyllic world, until he is scalped by an Indian, killing his claim to the land, and his vision, with one fell swoop. Though Southey wants to ‘emancipate’ someone to fulfil his dream of instituting a paternalistic and egalitarian society, this will not be an Indian unknown quantity who he imagines a threat, but ‘some poor negro’; a tamed and grateful companion, who is ‘brought on purpose’ – a less dangerous, because domesticated, alien. In Madoc Southey depicts a colony in complete control of its environment: … Here had the Chief Chosen his abiding place, for strength preferred, Where vainly might an host in equal arms Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 81 01/06/2007 11:53:34 Writing the Empire 82 Attempt the difficult entrance; and for all Which could delight the eye and heart of man; Whate’er of beauty or of usefulness Heart could desire, or eye behold, being here. What he had found an idle wilderness Now gave rich increase to the husbandman, For Heaven had blest their labour. Flourishing He left the happy vale; and now he saw More fields reclaimed, more habitations reared, More harvests rising round. The reptile race, And every beast of rapine, had retired From man’s asserted empire; and the sound Of axe, and dashing oar, and fisher’s net, And song beguiling toil, and pastoral pipe, Were heard, where late the solitary hills Gave only to the mountain cataract Their wild response. (Part 2, I.93–112) The two passages are manifestations of the same dream. The ‘ground uncultivated since the creation’ of Southey’s letter, is the previously ‘idle wilderness’ of Madoc. In both passages, Southey wants to domesticate a wild but paradisiacal land and then protect it from invasion of any kind. The descriptions of land cultivation and house-building are not just poetic images, they are important steps in justifying Madoc’s claim to ownership, based, as Astrid Wind points out, on the ‘stadialist myth of civilization’.67 This Enlightenment theory, that man progresses towards civilization by increasingly sophisticated stages in his development, originates from the anthropological evidence that primitive (or ‘savage’) men were hunters first, who progressed to a higher level of civilization (the ‘barbarian’ stage) by living in settled societies, based on a pastoralist economy. Humans develop to a yet more civilized level once they engage in farming, commerce and manufacturing.68 In such an ideological framework, those who do not apply agricultural processes to the land are further down in the chain of civilization and, by living off the land rather than on it, lose their claim to it. Though originally applied to European ‘savage’ cultures such as the Scottish or Germanic tribes, this idea travelled transatlantically to become the justification for invalidating native American claims to the land. According to George Dekker: the only people in North America who depended on hunting for their subsistence were red; and so, by way of an inference contrary both to elementary logic and to the environmentalist thinking of stadialists, red men must be hunters, i.e. savages and inferior, by nature.69 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 82 01/06/2007 11:53:34 ‘Taking possession’ 83 The fact that many Indians were engaged in agricultural activities, as well as hunting, was ignored in this convenient social thesis which justified the westward colonization of America by ‘civilized’ Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The ‘wilderness’ that Madoc found is an unowned space (and an unnamed place) because its usage does not conform to European ideas of how land should be utilized, whereas Madoc’s cultivation of it and erection of ‘habitations’ there, makes it his (in European terms; the audience that the poem is written for). The enterprise is doubly sanctioned; by progressive empiricism and God (as ‘Heaven had blest their labour’), two crucial foundation stones in building civilizations, and key elements of the British (and American) colonial project. In this civilized world all threats to the community, whether Indian or ‘reptile race’, are, unlike Southey’s fearful imaginings in his letter, forbidden entry to ‘man’s asserted empire’. The colony is located in a ‘natural bulwark’, chosen because it forms a defensive fortification to protect the pastoral existence of the community from those outside who seek to destroy it (Part 2, I.86). By portraying a utopian dream of life and then banishing any form of threat to it – as Southey can do in his fictional America – he shows a paranoid realization of just how frail that dream is. The description of the colonization process that takes place in Madoc is the closest that Southey gets to working out the fears and aspirations of his own journey and settlement in America. In Madoc, Southey faces the disintegration of his utopian vision, as his hero is in the predicament of having to control native populations (the Hoamens) or expel them (the Aztecs). Southey’s private anxieties and fears about his own projected emigration and life in a hostile landscape with aggressive natives are reflected in the uneasy colonial politics of his text. While Madoc is in Wales, recruiting colonists for his project, the settlement is named in his honour: Caermadoc, .. by that name Cadwallon’s love Call’d it in memory of the absent Prince, .. Stood in a mountain vale, by rocks and heights, A natural bulwark, girt. (Part 2, I.83–6) The naming of the colony is an emotional investment in the landscape. Love, liberty and language create the headquarters of Madoc’s (and Southey’s) colonial ambitions. The sentence sets up, as a decree, a new entity; ‘Caermadoc … Stood’, the unmarked space now exists as a place because it has been named. But there is a tension in naming places in a new land, as it is often a political act that carries consequences. Many travel accounts show new territories being named by explorers as an extension of old world values in order to perpetuate the Brit- Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 83 01/06/2007 11:53:35 84 Writing the Empire ish political system and its monarchy. Cook, for example, records his naming of Prince of Wales Island and Queen Charlotte Sound for the royal family, as well as the Sandwich Islands for the Earl of Sandwich – an eminent political figure who had recently been reappointed First Lord of the Admiralty.70 On the other hand, a name could be used to distance a new land from the aegis of tradition, creating a political challenge to the old world by making it a site of new values and a symbol of renewal. ‘Caermadoc’ means ‘home of Madoc’ and, while implying a safety and security impossible in the Welsh court, it also represents the new beginning instituted by Madoc. If it is an anti-monarchical name in Wales, it nevertheless symbolizes the imposition of an old-world Prince on a new land in America. ‘My father’s bones’ In fact this assumption of a new beginning is undermined by the text. As is often the case in Southey’s plots, the denouement complicates his political argument. Madoc’s rejection of his own country and his father’s throne is undermined by his unexpected compliance with precisely that patriarchal tradition that Southey means his hero to escape from. As Madoc prepares to return to his American colony, he finds his father’s bones being exhumed by a ‘Saxon Prelate’, and decides to take them with him: My father’s bones Shall have their resting-place, where mine one day May moulder by their side. – He shall be free In death, who, living, did so well maintain His and his country’s freedom. (Part 1, XV.251–5) This event, following on so quickly from confirmation of all that is bad in a state rooted in bloodshed, causes the reader to query why one who seeks freedom and peace in a new land would wish to transport the tyrannical trappings of the old with him? Does Madoc take his father’s body with him to America as a victory for ‘freedom’? Or as the reinstatement, and even rejuvenation, of the Welsh monarchy in a place where it can begin again, cleansed of the polluting ‘Saxon’ influence which was to eradicate so many Welsh names? But this confusion in the text only reinforces the ambivalence of Southey’s own changing political position. Madoc was written over a period of sixteen years and, as Pratt states, ‘contains evidence … of what has traditionally been charted as his move from incendiary young radical to older belligerent Tory apostate’.71 The act of naming is only the first step in the process of situating and locating the colony. ‘Caermadoc’ in fact now has the ideal justification for its existence in the enshrined remains of its founder’s ancestors. Madoc’s burial of his father’s Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 84 01/06/2007 11:53:35 ‘Taking possession’ 85 remains from the old world creates the foundations for life in America, where an imported past and tradition is brought into the present and future of the new land. Generational longevity is a justification for land ownership, so this device by which the Welsh king’s bones are relocated in America constructs the exodus, despite its American hybridization, as a further episode in the Welsh historical narrative too. And therefore, while ‘Caermadoc’ originates from Madoc’s rejection of his nationality, it retains its status as a Welsh colony, rather than appearing to the reader as the inaugural headquarters of a new American state. The importance of ancestry to the living’s claim on the land is not just a Welsh preoccupation. The Aztecs are also a colonial power with similar priorities. Driven out by Madoc, at the end of the poem they have to relocate the bodies of their forbears, in order to justify their claim to a new land (in this case Mexico). The Aztec king asks for the ‘Ashes of my Fathers’, as Madoc had done in Wales, to ensure the colony’s patrilineal roots survive elsewhere (Part 2, XXVII.154). His people are offered the choice of staying behind: But they who would not have their children lose The name their fathers bore, will join our march. (Part 2, XXVII.197–8) The emphasis is on naming again, with the right to have a name in a new place validated by the ancestry of the old one. Bartram’s Travels, which Southey knew well and was another source for Madoc, consistently displays the ghosts of ancient civilizations. Their earthworks and the remnants of their settlements haunt the landscape of the new settlers’ mansions where Bartram is hospitably entertained. But when Bartram questions the local population, he discovers that the name of those ancient people, along with their place names and history, have been displaced by the new settlements.72 The desire for the name of a tribe or family to be inextricably linked to a place is shown by appellations such as ‘Caermadoc’, ‘Southeyopolis’ or Georgia (for George III). The impetus of the Welsh and the Aztecs to retain the name of their dead ancestors can be seen as a necessary part of holding onto land in a place where colonies come and go. Controlling the Foreign There are other methods that Southey employs in his text for ‘taking possession’ of his American vision. The ‘grey’ new land that Madoc finds is fleshed out for the reader through the authorial eyes of one who is a native of another country, and so the foreign is domesticated by being compared to the familiar. As Said says of the western style of orientalism: Something patently foreign and distant acquires, for one reason or another, a status more rather than less familiar. One tends to stop judging things either as completely Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 85 01/06/2007 11:53:35 Writing the Empire 86 novel or as completely well known; a new median category emerges, a category that allows one to see new things, things seen for the first time, as versions of a previously known thing. In essence such a category is not so much a way of receiving new information as it is a method of controlling what seems to be a threat to some established view of things.73 So in Madoc: Here, Urien, cried the Prince, These craggy heights and overhanging groves Will make thee think of Gwyneth. And this hut, Rejoined Cadwallon, with its roof of reeds Goervyl, is our palace: it was reared With lighter labour than Aberfraw’s towers; Yet, Lady, safer are its wattled sides Than Mona’s kingly walls. (Part 2, I.112–19) The different visions are conflated in such a way that the hut is also a palace, the ‘roof of reeds’ becomes ‘Aberfraw’s towers’ and the ‘wattled sides’ are also ‘kingly walls’. The two visions of two different lands, one foreign, and one familiar, are superimposed on each other. The reader sees both at the same time and they become one. In this way Southey has his colonizers control the foreign landscape, by overlaying the outlines of a familiar knowledge system onto one that is alien and still largely unknown. Such a precedent is evident in the travel narratives that Southey read. Explorers predicate an act of ‘discovery’ in finding something new, but then try to assimilate or contain that novelty, by using more familiar terms of reference to describe it. Southey’s preoccupation with controlling the ‘foreign’ is extended to the indigenous inhabitants as well as their land. In his first encounter with the natives Madoc takes pleasure in hearing the friendly Indian, Lincoya, speak their language, saying: Nor light the joy I felt at hearing first The pleasant accents of my native tongue, Albeit in broken words and tones uncouth, Come from these foreign lips. (Part 1, V.162–5) His ‘joy’ comes from imposing his familiar (‘native’) language on ‘foreign lips’. It is accepted that the inhabitants of this country will learn the Welsh language and so the Welsh names for places, thereby erasing existing Indian names. The colonial desire of the Cambrians to relocate and perpetuate their language in a new land can be seen as a reaction to the eradication of Welsh place names by the English. The new colony provides compensation for cultural obliteration in their homeland. The name ‘Caermadoc’ (‘home of Madoc’) preserves the culture Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 86 01/06/2007 11:53:35 ‘Taking possession’ 87 and language of the old country as well as providing a new beginning. Madoc’s desire to take the bard, Caradoc, with him to America has to do with reinforcing his colony by appealing to the colonists’ collective memory of their Welsh national history: The harp of Cambria shall, in other lands, Remind the Cambrian of his fathers’ fame; (Part 1, XI.157–8) The bardic songs are rooted in the tradition of the past, but can also be used to justify the future and Madoc’s claim to the new land. Madoc’s bard serves to inscribe the landscape and make a song in a new place, rather than die with the old culture as the poet/prophet of Thomas Gray’s poem ‘The Bard’ (1757) did. Gray’s bard’s curse on the English king – ‘Be thine Despair and scep’tred Care’ – is the fate of all those who have colonial aspirations in another land and indicates the troubled mood in which Madoc’s dominion continues.74 Madoc’s colonization preserves the Welsh way of life in a new land, but leads to the eradication of the Aztec culture. To retain their identity the Aztec people also have to make a long journey, to resite their name, ancestors and language. ‘Sole Lord’ Madoc’s return to America in the second part of the poem, ‘Madoc in Aztlan’, sees him trying to create a new kind of society; a ‘united people’, combining the Welsh and Indian communities. This alliance, by which Madoc offers joint rule of the Hoamen lands to Erillyab, their queen, conveniently obscures her primacy of possession in the idealistic rhetoric of Pantisocracy: Sister and Queen, Said he, here let us hold united reign. O’er our united people; by one faith, One interest bound, and closer to be linked By laws and language, and domestic ties, Till both become one race, for ever more Indissolubly knit. (Part 2, XXIV.29–35) However despite the ‘domestic ties’ alluded to, Madoc is not proposing marriage to Erillyab. She is plainly a ‘Sister’/’Queen’ and her positive response to his suggestion, because, she says, ‘The last of all my family am I’, shows that she regards him as her ‘brother dear!’ (Part 2, XXIV.36, 39). She also, as Tim Fulford points out, subjugates her own claim to the land by appealing to Madoc’s chivalric code of protection, in requesting that she and her people can ‘Beneath the shadow of thy shield to dwell’ (Part 2, XXIV.40).75 The basis for this infant society is Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 87 01/06/2007 11:53:35 Writing the Empire 88 structured upon an inequitable social hierarchy, whereby Welsh paternalism is invoked to shelter the Hoamen queen and her tribe from Aztec aggression, so that they too are similarly feminized. Though Southey perceives the two tribes, of Welsh and Hoamen, becoming ‘indissolubly knit’ as one ‘race’, he avoids any hint of sexual miscegenation. ‘Knit’ implies separate entities being entwined together, a chaste familial relationship of ‘sisters’ and ‘brothers’, on the model of his and Erillyab’s relationship, rather than a mixing of blood between them. Southey prefers a separatist stasis, with his ‘Welsh contingent not mingled but eternally stranded’, to a future of regeneration and renewal through transracial integration.76 Similarly, in imagining a Pantisocratic society, Southey and Coleridge found such important details as marriage and child-rearing difficult to resolve in a scheme prioritizing fraternal harmony – especially when it was conceived within the framework of Godwinian philosophy and his well-publicized ideas on the abolition of marriage. Such a familial experiment would of course be tried at Greta Hall where the Coleridge and Southey families would live together, protected by Southey in the role of ‘sole Lord’ over a community of sisters, brothers, aunts and cousins. The absence of Madoc’s marriage, in a poem where patrilineal name and landownership are inextricably linked, threatens to disrupt the future of the colony. It also shows how even imagined colonial ventures could suffer from instabilities in their inception. One of the heartiest supporters of Southey’s poem, Anna Seward, felt that Madoc’s marriage was an important and necessary resolution.77 Southey tells Seward in a letter that Madoc: is past the age at which love is necessary for a hero, & as it is to be taken for granted that he had loved at that age, it would have lowered my conception of his character to have made him marry politically. Otherwise Erillyab would have been his fit wife.78 But Seward still argues for the marriage, saying ‘if the poem had not been published, I should have persisted in imploring you for a wife for Madoc’.79 Such genetic duties are deflected onto Madoc’s sister, Goervyl, whose role it will be in her union with Malinal (a member of the Aztec royal family, who assists in saving her from attempted rape), to ensure the survival of the colony.80 Madoc decrees: … Goervyl hath my charge To quite thee, for thy service, with herself; That so thou mayest raise up seed to me Of mine own blood, who may inherit here The obedience of thy people and of mine. (Part 2, XVII.220–4) Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 88 01/06/2007 11:53:35 ‘Taking possession’ 89 As in the plans for Pantisocracy, female partners in colonial enterprises are shown to be adjuncts to the enterprise. As sisters/queens/wives, such as Erillyab and Goervyl, or Edith and Sara Fricker, they are imagined as home-makers (preparing food for the Pantisocrats with ‘pleasing care’) or ensuring the genetic viability of the colony. In the absence of his own marriage, Madoc decrees that the children of Goervyl and Malinal will be his ‘seed’ and ‘of mine own blood’. Thereby Malinal, the feminized colonial subject, is subsumed in the fathering process, while Goervyl requires Madoc’s permission (‘thou mayest’) to become the repository of his royal genes. These children of female and colonized dependants will inherit the ‘obedience’ of their parentage and so make them compliant to Madoc’s rule. As the poem continues, Madoc’s position as the colony’s leader becomes increasingly isolated as he is unable to mediate a peaceful settlement between all three parties of Welsh, Hoamen and Aztec, largely because of their religious differences. His imperial design, to perfect a new kind of society away from British politics, becomes an old-world imposition of Christianity on ‘ignorant’ unbelievers, not dissimilar to missionary activities taking place in America, Africa, India and the South Pacific. In this way Southey’s vision falls back on the conventional ideological structures of other contemporary imperial projects, as he seeks to eradicate the superstitious practices of the Hoamen Indians and the bloody Azteca gods of Aztlan, with his own monotheistic faith. This begs the question, why does Southey reject the literature (epic poetry), history (Columbus’s discovery of America) and politics of his own country, to then show Madoc imposing the values of his home culture on the new world? And why does his radical hero perceive unfamiliar belief systems as foreign evils that need to be eliminated through his own brand of Christian imperialism? The answer to this is probably biographical, in that when Southey found himself on foreign soil (in his case Portugal), the problems of his home culture became virtues when compared to the alien structures of society and religion that he found in place. Southey’s own radicalism was abated by visiting Portugal in December 1795 (for six months) and again in 1800 (for over a year). While there he reported on the religion and politics of Portugal as ‘the double despotism of their church and State’, a recognition that caused him to value the structures of his own society more.81 There are obvious links between Southey’s hatred of the Catholic structures of church and state in Portugal (an abiding detestation that meant he opposed the movement for Catholic emancipation in Britain all his life) and his depiction of the ‘Paba’ priests of the Azteca. This is because Southey made negative comparisons between systems of ‘priestcraft’ in any religion, be that Aztec, Muslim, Hindu or Catholic. In the same way that Southey resisted political structures of ‘tyranny’, he also rejected such abuses of power in religion too. For him the Cath- Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 89 01/06/2007 11:53:35 Writing the Empire 90 olic clergy were some of the worst perpetrators. In his attacks upon Catholicism therefore the word ‘priest’ becomes a loaded term, an abusive shorthand signifier for what he considered to be its corrupt agents. So when Madoc’s horror of Aztecan blood-sacrifice leads him to counter such practices with the religion of his homeland – despite having resisted ‘the yoke / of Rome’ in Wales – Southey shows him selectively importing his own non-conformist brand of Christianity (Part 1, XV.111–12). This is justified, as Elisa Beshero-Bondar points out, by the source for the Madoc myth having its basis in Elizabethan propaganda, which intended to subvert the Spanish claim to America. It also ‘asserts the claims of a native British church’ in order to make a post-reformation statement of antiCatholicism.82 So in his poem Southey’s personal disinclinations combine with his polemical source material to launch an attack on the ‘priestcraft’ of both Aztlan and Rome, one graphic example being his conflation of transubstantiation with the blood-drinking practices of the Aztecs.83 In Madoc’s own institution of Christianity no priests figure and he takes on the form of an avenging crusader/priest himself, who comes to plant the ‘Cross triumphant’ (Part 2, II.7). This tone of Christian militancy is reinforced by the frontispiece engraving for the poem, in which a cross planted in the ground bears the insignia ‘In hoc signa vinces’ (under this sign you will conquer; Figure 2). Madoc’s imperial mission is sanctioned by God as he comes ‘with authority / from Heaven to give the law, and to enforce / Obedience’ (Part 2, VIII.52–4). The Aztec priests are blamed for resisting their Christianization by inciting war against the Welsh, whereas the Aztec kings, colonial rulers like Madoc, are shown to be honourable, principled monarchs who have been manipulated by priestly guile. As such these kings recognize Madoc’s own example of moral kingship, as ‘The valiant love the valiant’ (Part 1, VI.153). Priestcraft in its various manifestations is blamed for corrupting political affairs. It causes the demise of the Aztec race in America, while in Wales its ‘Saxon’ influence literally attempts to destabilize the monarchy by disinterring King Owen. Against their machinations Madoc stands alone as moral and spiritual watchdog of his infant colony. The way in which he defends it, ironically, is to wield the religious and cultural influences of his homeland against the native systems he finds in place. By this method the structures he sets up for his colony are defensive reinforcements of old-world values, rather than utopian initiatives. As Madoc comes to an end there is no clear vision of Caermadoc’s future, except that the expulsion of the competing Aztec regime ensures its continuance. As Pratt recognizes: The poem, as a whole … lacks a central focus. It also, and quite crucially, pays only scant attention to the exact nature of the new state founded by the Welsh prince. Instead it concentrates largely on those old societies which Southey wishes to replace, the European and the Aztec.84 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 90 01/06/2007 11:53:35 ‘Taking possession’ 91 Figure 2. Frontispiece, from Madoc (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1805). By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 91 01/06/2007 11:53:35 92 Writing the Empire Southey could not envisage his new heterogeneous society of Welsh, Hoamen and defeated Aztecs and so there is no final conviction that the problems of colonization are resolved.85 Madoc’s appointment as ‘sole Lord’ implies a lonely position of authority (the ‘White Man’s burden’) over the disparate residual tribes, which does not bode well for the stable existence of Caermadoc. Premonitions of conflict are reinforced by the final passage of Madoc, which deflects the reader’s attention from Madoc’s colony to the dark future of the Aztecs at the hand of ‘the heroic Spaniard’s unrelenting sword’, as if to comment on the fragility of empires (Part 2, XXVII.395).86 The bleak picture of colonial life that Southey created in Madoc dominates his poem, skewing its Pantisocratic origins into a defensive belligerence. The reason for this can be found in Southey’s source material, as well as in his other writings on America, such as his ‘Songs of the American Indians’ (written in 1799).87 In these five poems, death is a continual presence and intertribal as well as interracial conflict dominates.88 His poems are radical in exploring the inverse perspective of colonial encounters through first-person accounts of Indian lives and belief systems.89 But despite the sympathy Southey felt for the Indians he depicts, and the anti-colonialist viewpoint of the poems, his characterizations resort to stereotypical depictions of vengeful natives who will go to excessive lengths to conquer their enemies, including the white settlers (or ‘Strangers’). This reputation had been gained particularly during the American War of Independence, when Indians had been employed as guerrilla fighters on both sides of the conflict and were extremely influential in the outcome of the war.90 Indignation that Indian savagery had been harnessed for the political gain of ‘civilized’ nations ensured that reports of the violent and cruel acts they committed became a subject for parliament and the press and so were widely circulated.91 That Southey was rather obsessed with colonial conflict in America is not only evident in his writing of Madoc and the ‘Songs’, but also in his reading. He copied many pages of accounts of life in America into his Common-Place Book, several extracts of which became notes to underpin his poetical account in Madoc. One particular section of his Common-Place Book that displays his fascination for the subject replicates at least twenty pages from William Hubbard’s Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians (1677).92 Despite having been written at a much earlier stage in American colonial history, its detailed reports of attacks by Indians on white settlers filtered through into Southey’s fiction.93 More recent narratives that Southey drew on for Madoc were Samuel Hearne’s A Journey from Prince of Wales Fort in Hudson’s Bay to the Northern Ocean (1795), and Carver’s Travels.94 In both accounts the daily struggle for survival is strikingly evident. Apart from coping with the problems of being strangers in an unknown environment, travellers and settlers had to deal with Indian (and often French) hostility towards them. Carver’s and Hearne’s texts include graphic Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 92 01/06/2007 11:53:36 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 93 ‘Taking possession’ 93 Figure 3. ‘Mexican Priest’ and ‘Mexican Warrior’, from Francisco Clavigero, The History of Mexico, Collected from Spanish and Mexican Histories, from Manuscripts and Ancient Paintings of the Indians, trans. Charles Cullen, 2 vols (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, London, 1787). By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. 01/06/2007 11:53:36 94 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 94 Writing the Empire 01/06/2007 11:53:37 Figure 4. ‘A Common Sacrifice’, from Francisco Clavigero, The History of Mexico, Collected from Spanish and Mexican Histories, from Manuscripts and Ancient Paintings of the Indians, trans. Charles Cullen, 2 vols (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, London, 1787). By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. ‘Taking possession’ 95 accounts of Indian ‘savagery’, as they saw it. For instance Carver recounts the details of a particularly ferocious attack (by Indian allies of the French military forces during the ‘Seven Years’ War’) on English troops at Fort William Henry in 1757, where ‘the savages drank the blood of their victims, as it flowed warm from the fatal wound’.95 Samuel Hearne survived his journey to the Arctic Ocean with the aid of the Indian members of his expedition, but nevertheless witnessed and recounted their ‘barbarous’ massacre of Innuit tribes.96 Despite both travellers providing cameos of individual native Americans that depict more positive qualities (in European terms), the image of incomprehensible bloodthirsty savages abides with the reader. Because life in the American colonies of this period is portrayed as an arduous struggle for survival between skirmishes and wars, these problems also dominate Southey’s text. It was inevitable that the peaceful philosophical precepts of Pantisocracy should founder in the instability and anxiety of the colonial frontier in Madoc. This is the most obvious legacy that Southey, probably unwittingly, adopts from the American travel narratives that he uses as his source material. Madoc is empowered with the right to name, or have a place named after him, but like his father before him finds that his colony has to be protected from others who would claim it and name it themselves. Naming is an act of possession that has to be defended by force if necessary. The idealism of the colonial dream disintegrates in the ‘contact zone’ of Southey’s text with its inevitably violent trajectory of colonial relations. One feels that ‘Southeyopolis’ would have met the same fate. As Madoc concludes, the tone is flat rather than triumphant, as if Southey realized that the bright new beginnings of Madoc’s colony had only two precedents within his text to follow: the intrigue and bloodshed of the Welsh court, or the Aztec fate of being exiled by new colonizers – either leading to erasure of the colony’s name. ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’ In 1798 another avid reader of contemporary travel narratives, William Wordsworth, walked around the landscape surrounding his Grasmere home in the Lake District, and named parts of it for friends and family members. He recorded this process in his ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’, which he published in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, with the following Advertisement attached: By persons resident in the country and attached to rural objects, many places will be found unnamed or of unknown names, where little Incidents must have occurred, or feelings been experienced, which will have given to such places a private and peculiar interest. From a wish to give some sort of record to such Incidents, and renew the gratification of such feelings, Names have been given to Places by the Author and some of his Friends, and the following Poems written in consequence.97 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 95 01/06/2007 11:53:38 96 Writing the Empire The ‘unknown’ places and ‘little incidents’ of Wordsworth’s Lake District seem, on the face of it, miles away from the vast territories over which travellers such as Cook, Carver and Hearne were roaming and fighting in America, Africa, India and the South Seas. Yet they were closer than they seem, for Wordsworth was influenced by his reading of explorers’ narratives to make an aesthetic out of one of the most fundamental processes of colonial expansion – the act of naming. Wordsworth’s ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’ are an extension of the traditional poetic forms of inscription and epitaph. These often quite similar forms were popular with many eighteenth-century poets, who, as discussed previously, influenced Southey to create his own political inscriptions.98 While the epitaph form was more firmly rooted in the graveyard location of monument or tomb, inscriptions (and particularly Wordsworth’s ‘nature-inscriptions’) take the reader out of the graveyard and into the wider vista of the natural world for their commemorative value.99 In these poems the reader is posited as a traveller in a landscape which has no emotional meaning to him or her, until progress is halted by the poet’s voice speaking with secret knowledge as the votive spirit of the place. A problem with inscriptive poetry, however, is that the poet is often overwriting a place which already has significant meaning given to it by its public name, a tradition that, as we have seen, Southey sought to subvert in his radical inscriptions. In Wordsworth’s case, to find a space for his own voice in order to make an emotional investment in the landscape, the anonymity of the place has to be stressed. Wordsworth does this in his poem ‘Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree, which stands near the Lake of Esthwaite, on a desolate part of the shore, commanding a beautiful prospect’ (1798).100 The poem’s long title, intended as a prelude, seeks to obscure the location of the poem rather than identify it for the reader. Thereby instead of competing with an ‘official’, or wellknown place-name, the poem’s effect is gained by inscribing this special place, but nevertheless resisting the specificity of its appellation or position. Its message relies on the combination of anonymous nature – a ‘lonely Yew-tree stands / Far from all human dwelling’ – and the unrenowned life of a ‘lost Man’ who is remembered only by the poet at ‘this seat his only monument’.101 The place only becomes invested with importance by having its hidden life in nature revealed and its emotional significance explained to the reader. But, as Geoffrey Hartman shows, by intertwining place, person and poet (Wordsworth’s imagination), the inscription is liberated from its dependence on location.102 In this way what becomes important is not the poem’s natural setting, or even the human life commemorated, but the imaginative process of the act of inscription itself and the poet’s role in creating it. Wordsworth’s directive in his ‘Essay on Epitaphs’ states: Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 96 01/06/2007 11:53:38 ‘Taking possession’ 97 it is to be remembered, that to raise a monument is a sober and reflective act, that the inscription which it bears is intended to be permanent and for universal perusal and that for this reason, the thoughts and feelings expressed should be permanent also.103 Though he refers specifically to inscriptions in stone on a grave or monument, his literary act of commemoration in ‘Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree’ assumes the same tone of gravity, objectivity and universal moral significance that he recommends in his ‘Essay’. But despite the various apostrophes to ‘Traveller’ and ‘Stranger’ that Wordsworth traditionally incorporates, his gentler narratorial voice lyrically and discursively reminisces on the life of the solitary central figure, delaying and diffusing the moral conclusion. The poem describes the natural, rural landscape of Esthwaite Water, rather than incorporating the usual, prescribed, stagy elements of the formal eighteenth-century garden of many inscriptions (in homage to what was often their origin and setting). The subject of this poem is likely to have been modelled on a solitary and disaffected figure, William Braithwaite, whose disappointed career expectations seemed to prefigure Wordsworth’s own at this time.104 Wordsworth says of him: Who he was That piled these stones, and with the mossy sod First covered o’er, and taught this aged tree, Now wild, to bend its arms in circling shade, I well remember.105 In this passage the poem’s creator is placed beside its subject as he recounts him building the yew-tree bench, so drawing attention to the physical relationship between them, as well as the poet’s cognitive role in interpreting his life. Whether or not one can read biographical evidence into the poem, by having a narratorial interjection in the first person with the words ‘I well remember’, Wordsworth’s inscription is set apart from those of Southey or Akenside. The inscriptions of these writers rely on a third-person speaker, or the rhetoric of a votive spirit, thereby disallowing the intimacy and subjectivity which Wordsworth accomplishes by speaking in his own voice. As James McKusick points out, Wordsworth’s contributions to Lyrical Ballads were crucial to his poetic development, in that he learned to ‘dramatize the involvement of the speaker in the places and events that he describes’, in order to construct an intimacy between reader, subject and poet.106 In this way his emotive account of one of his earliest ‘solitaries’ draws attention to itself, and his generalized admonition, ‘O, be wiser thou!’, seems to apply as much to himself as the posited ‘Stranger’ of the poem.107 Wordsworth, like Southey, adopts some of the generic conventions of the inscriptive form but also incorporates his own distinctive elements to produce a different kind of poem. In both Southey’s and Wordsworth’s attempts to rein- Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 97 01/06/2007 11:53:38 98 Writing the Empire scribe places, therefore, authorial egotism prioritizes the creator’s own political or personal sentiments, thus demonstrating how loco-descriptive poetry could be romanticized and personalized. However the differences in their inscriptions reveal the potentially different routes that disaffected poets of the 1790s could take; the solitary, introspective, autobiographical one adopted by Wordsworth (lauded by proponents of canonical romanticism) and the public (and often controversial) one, followed by Southey, which has been written out of Romantic period literature until now. Wordsworth’s ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’ build on the inscriptive genre of ‘Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree’, by not only inscribing a place with memories of a loved one, but by naming it after that person. In these poems aesthetics combine with a powerful emotional desire to put loved ones on the map; an elegiac attempt to people the landscape with those who have left it.108 The imperious tone of inscriptive poetry has been abandoned completely and they speak directly to the person for whom they are written, the poems themselves becoming the inscribed monuments of the loci. Conversational and affectionate, they permit the reader to eavesdrop on the intimate memories of the loved ones for whom the places are named. However, because Wordsworth relies on his own personal or group memories, the intimacy conveyed is illusory, with the reader engaged, but yet excluded. Combining mental circumlocution of memory with the meandering path of the poet discovering hidden vistas and vales, Wordsworth often describes coming upon parts of the Lake District which were hitherto unknown to him, as if he were exploring uncharted territory. In the poem ‘To M.H’ (Mary Hutchinson), he says: Our walk was far among the ancient trees: There was no road, nor any woodman’s path; But a thick umbrage – checking the wild growth Of weed and sapling, along soft green turf Beneath the branches – of itself had made A track, that brought us to a slip of lawn, And a small bed of water in the woods.109 In his ‘Advertisement’, Wordsworth has already claimed that these places are ‘unnamed or of unknown name’. Like colonial explorers, he and his intimates are discovering a new landscape, populated by its native inhabitants (shepherds, reapers, ‘peasant’ and ‘woodman’), but alien to the general public. In the poem ‘To M.H.’ the reader is told that there is no road to this place – no such civilizing influence here – the only route through is a ‘track’ that is nature’s own as: The spot was made by Nature for herself; The travellers know it not, and ’twill remain Unknown to them110 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 98 01/06/2007 11:53:38 ‘Taking possession’ 99 Nature has paved the way for his discovery but other ‘explorers’ will never see it – the ‘traveller’ of Wordsworth’s inscriptive poetry is not welcome here. This place exists for Wordsworth and his friends alone, and he stakes his claim on it, saying, ‘And therefore, my sweet MARY, this still Nook, / With all its beeches, we have named from You!’.111 Wordsworth constructs himself as an explorer so that the English Lake District becomes a blank, seemingly unmapped area – a ‘virgin’ field like those recounted in travellers’ tales – which he can then take imaginative possession of by naming features for himself.112 The description of the landscape makes no mention of the marks of economic ownership, and so these prior claims to the land are negated, at least in his poetry. He who walks the land is close to the land, and so claims a relationship to the Lake District, like one ‘who tills the field’ in ‘Home at Grasmere’ (1800–6), because ‘He, happy Man! Is Master of the field’.113 Examples of colonial naming, such as the events which led to Cook’s nomenclature ‘Unfortunate Cove’, or more famously, ‘Cape of Good Hope’, show how discoveries of new lands are identified in terms of an emotional response to them. Wordsworth’s fourth poem in the ‘Naming of Places’ sequence narrates a process of naming very like Cook’s, where a landmark is identified in terms of Wordsworth’s emotional and moral reaction to discovering it: My Friend, Myself, and She who then received The same admonishment, have called the place By a memorial name, uncouth indeed As e’er by mariner was given to bay Or foreland, on a new-discovered coast; And, POINT RASH-JUDGEMENT is the Name it bears.114 The place becomes important for the personal investment made in it by Wordsworth and his ‘two beloved friends’, who assume that a fisherman in ‘peasant’s garb’ is idling away his time when he should be helping with the harvest. When they discover that he is ‘worn down / By sickness’ this is taken as an ‘admonishment’ to be less hasty in condemnation of their fellow humans, as well as a reason for naming the place.115 Like Cook’s naming, Wordsworth’s relies on a process whereby a private name, endowed with emotional significance, claims the importance of a common universal currency. In naming the point ‘Rash Judgement’, Wordsworth makes a deliberate comparison between the Lake District and the new world, so that his presentation of home is conditioned by his reading about abroad. Wordsworth’s adoption of the role of explorer, with the ideology of discovering and naming, leads to images of distant lands – a ‘new-discovered coast’ – being transposed onto the scenery of the Lake District. Consequently, as Michael Wiley states, the ‘landscape that he Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 99 01/06/2007 11:53:39 Writing the Empire 100 describes in the poems is an allegorical one, implying alternative worlds within its narrow scope’.116 Wordsworth overlays the Lake District with these images to make it distinctively his own, so taking imaginative possession of the landscape around him. Colonial Naming But why did Wordsworth look to the example of explorers to take imaginative possession of his own world? One answer is that, as shown here, explorers’ narratives lent their precedent of naming the land to his own text, thereby strengthening his bid for emotional ownership of the Lake District. Another is that Wordsworth lived in a culture that avidly read new travel narratives as they appeared.117 One of the most recent of these published journals, which Wordsworth knew well, was Samuel Hearne’s Journey.118 The mission given to Hearne by the Hudson’s Bay Company was to make a journey from Hudson Bay to ‘the Northern Ocean’ for ‘the Discovery of Copper Mines’ and to find evidence of a Northwest Passage. More explicitly he was told to find: This river which is called by the Northern Indians Neetha-san-san-dazey, the Far Off Metal River … And if the said river is likely to be of any utility, take possession of it on behalf of the Hudson’s Bay Company by cutting your name on some of the rocks, as also the date of the year, month, etc.119 Hearne’s mission failed in its stated intentions, as he found no evidence of a Northwest Passage, nor enough copper supplies to make extraction feasible. Hearne in fact only returned safely by relinquishing command of the expedition and becoming dependent on his Indian companions for survival. He did not even have the proper implements to carve his name on the rocks by the river, having to make do with painting his name on an Indian ‘target’ (or shield) as a monument, so adding irony to the tale.120 In other ways, though, Hearne’s journey could be considered a success, as his efforts paved the way for others (such as Alexander Mackenzie) to follow in their bid for British possession of the Canadian Northwest. The Hudson’s Bay Company instructions for ‘taking possession’ in unknown territories is the method that Wordsworth adopts when he names Joanna’s rock in his poem ‘To Joanna’: I chiselled out in those rude characters Joanna’s name deep in the living stone.121 Here Wordsworth makes a more physical claim on the landscape (at least within his text) to ensure that the rock will be known by his name, despite any other Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 100 01/06/2007 11:53:39 ‘Taking possession’ 101 claim to ownership. Precedents for this kind of taking possession exist in the Lake District, as his footnote to the poem makes clear: In Cumberland and Westmoreland are several Inscriptions, upon the native rock, which, from the wasting of time, and the rudeness of the workmanship, had been mistaken for Runic. They are, without doubt Roman.122 Whether Roman or Runic, the stones point to long dead colonial powers, who also took possession of the landscape by etching their names on it. These names were often replaced by those of new colonizers and similarly the Indian ‘Neethasan-san-dazey’ river of Hearne’s text will now be known in terms of its possession by the Hudson’s Bay Company. The company’s interest in acquiring the river is due to its potential as a utility, with its reserves of mineral wealth. Wordsworth’s ‘Naming’ poems use explorers’ methods, and borrow the ideology of discovery and ownership of the new world, but to make a personal, rather than an economic, investment in the landscape of the old world. But, as Wordsworth feeds on the language and concepts of colonialism for his own naming of the Lake District, his idealistic, personal motives for ‘taking possession’ could be said to betray similar economic motives as those behind colonial acts of possession. His recycling of the colonial process as a subjective narrative of emotional exploration becomes widely accessible and is given universal importance by being promulgated in the form of a cultural product. And this product, ironically, Wordsworth sells to make a living from the landscape, showing that even his own emotional possession is not entirely free from economic motives. Possession often involves others’ dispossession; naming demands their silencing. Wordsworth could have seen as much in that other popular travel narrative of the 1790s, Jonathan Carver’s Travels, which describes his foray into the previously unmapped land above the Mississippi River.123 For Carver the land comes into being when he, the first (white) man, walks upon it, as ‘the Mississippi has never been explored higher up than the River St Francis’.124 Peter Taylor has argued that space and place are distinguished by different understandings of their meaning, ‘with space treated as general and place as particular: space is everywhere, place is somewhere. Moreover, place has content’.125 If we read Carver’s narrative in this way, space is what was there before it was given a name, and then it becomes a place, not an imaginative area any more, but a real locus with certain known characteristics. Carver finds a huge unmapped space, discounting the only other maps of this area as Indian ‘sketches made in a crude manner’.126 Like Cook and Wordsworth, he invests meaning into the landscape he finds as an empty space by naming it, personalizing it and making it a place on the map; ‘his’ map now, after he has converted the ‘crude’ Indian sketches into his own plan. He says: Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 101 01/06/2007 11:53:39 102 Writing the Empire I arrived at a small branch (of the river) that fell into it from the north; to which as it had no name that I could distinguish it by, I gave my own; and the Reader will find it in the plan of my travels denominated Carver’s River.127 There is significance in being known/unknown, named/unnamed in travel accounts of the period. While land is unnamed it remains untamed and unpossessed. Carver’s river literally did not exist for him until he named it, pronounced his ownership of it and identified it on a map. When he discovered yet another ‘unnamed’ river, he named it ‘Goddard’s River’ after a friend and also designated it on his plan.128 Thus Carver literally mapped himself and his associates onto the landscape, allocating himself primary importance in it and giving little credence to the validity of native American names that were silenced by this process. This gave Wordsworth the precedent for placing himself and his intimates on an emotional map of the Lake District. By giving English names to the landscape which would eventually become common currency, a two-fold loss was incurred. On the one hand renaming is an act of emotional plundering that takes place long before the land becomes economically viable and in doing so eighteenth-century explorers and settlers were erasing significant names for features that existed prior to their discovery. For instance Carver tells us that an island he finds ‘is known by the name of Manataulin, which signifies a Place of Spirits, and is considered by the Indians as sacred’.129 Respect is accorded to this place by native Americans because it plays a role in their belief system. The loss of its name and significance therefore would have a detrimental impact on the indigenous culture by invalidating its existence. On the other hand, names are often meaningful for the information they contain about the features they designate, encoding important knowledge for others. Examples of these names are: ‘Whool dyah’d Whoie’, an Indian name meaning ‘Pike lake’, because of the abundance of that fish in it, or ‘Mosquettoe’ country because of the amount of those insects there.130 The Indian names that were silenced were often informative, containing a native intelligence system that went unrecognized by naive or uninitiated Europeans. By renaming these features according to their own value systems and semiotics the vital information contained in these older names was lost. It could be argued that Wordsworth displayed a pattern similar to these explorers when he obscured local indigenous names (and people) by claiming places for himself in his ‘Naming of Places’ poems. The first poem in the sequence names a ‘wild nook’ as ‘Emma’s Dell’ (‘Emma’ being a literary pseudonym Wordsworth often used for his sister Dorothy). He says: And, of the Shepherds who have seen me there, To whom I sometimes in our idle talk Have told this fancy, two or three, perhaps, Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 102 01/06/2007 11:53:39 ‘Taking possession’ 103 Years after we are gone and in our graves, When they have cause to speak of this wild place, May call it by the name of EMMA’S DELL131 It is clear that Wordsworth intended not just to name the place for himself, but to have the local population of ‘Shepherds’ call it that too. However the poem’s tone remains hopeful rather than imperative. The desire to ‘take possession’ does underlie Wordsworth’s name for the place, but it is merely prompted by his ‘fancy’ that a few people ‘may call it by the name of EMMA’S DELL’ (my italics). In Wordsworth’s poetry names are his and his readers to share, but do not find their way onto maps or become adopted by the population, as they did in America. Wordsworth’s colonization is a personal, emotional and subjective process relying on the power of thought, recaptured as the printed word on the page, rather than the power of subjugation. His intention to colonize – not just the figurative shepherds in his poem, but also his readers – does not aim to alter the official map of the landscape.132 ‘Ruth’ Hearne’s and Carver’s accounts of their journeys were not the only popular travel narratives to shape Wordsworth’s developing aesthetic. Another text which Wordsworth read (during the years 1797–9) and which was clearly an influence on ‘Ruth’ (Lyrical Ballads, 1800), was William Bartram’s Travels.133 This text records a journey Bartram was commissioned to make into Florida by the British naturalist Dr John Fothergill. William Bartram’s father had been a botanist and William had gained his botanical experience by accompanying him on field studies and making many drawings of plants and animals, some of which were published in the Gentleman’s Magazine.134 Bartram’s role was part of a drive to render new, unfamiliar varieties of plant-life as known and classified species. The collection and systematization of alien flora, by botanists in the colonies, can be seen as a colonizing process in itself, with its naming and categorization of species and in the exportation of knowledge (of potential commercial value) back to Europe.135 While Bartram was on a ‘scientific’ expedition to identify, name, collect and draw the botanical specimens he found for despatch to his English patron, he was also an enthusiastic naturalist who gloried in the wild nature he found – his descriptions often ending in jubilant praise of their creator. As well as documenting his naming of new species, Bartram’s account of his journey records his investment in the landscape, where he names new places for their botanical value, as in ‘Mount Magnolia’ after ‘a new and beautiful species of that celebrated family of flowering trees’ and the ‘Dog Woods’ after ‘a very remarkable grove of dog wood trees’.136 Bartram gives an account of mainly settled territories where Indian villages exist among landowners’ plantations, and in recounting the locations he passes through he reveals a long tradition of nam- Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 103 01/06/2007 11:53:39 Writing the Empire 104 ing the land, as well as its flora. He mentions that he ‘ran by Mount Hope, so named by my Father, John Bartram’, and describes ‘a large plantation near the white cliffs, now called Brown’s cliffs in honour of the late governor of West Florida’.137 Although Bartram does record some Indian names, second-generation Americans like himself are concretizing the names given to places by their forebears, and so erasing the emotional investment made in the landscape by native Americans. Bartram also uses literary analogies from the old world, to make the foreign elements he encounters more familiar and so take control of the strange and sometimes hostile landscape he finds himself in. Bartram describes an encounter where he and his companions come across some ‘young, innocent Cherokee virgins’ picking strawberries in a ‘sylvan scene of primitive innocence’.138 While some are resting in the shade of exotic shrubs: other parties more gay and libertine, were yet collecting strawberries or wantonly chasing their companions, tantalizing them, staining their lips and cheeks with the rich fruit. The scene, Bartram says, is ‘too enticing for hearty young men long to continue idle spectators’ and they pursue the girls. The description of events is sexually charged, with images of taking possession – the ‘nymphs’ being hunted until the men ‘gained ground on a group of them’ whereby they ‘presented their little baskets, merrily telling us their fruit was ripe and sound’. But in presenting this scene to the reader, Bartram deals with the obvious desire the group of men feel for these Indian girls by containing the descriptions of the new world within literary and cultural references from the old world, so that they become ‘nymphs’, or a ‘gay assembly of hamadryades’, in a scene of ‘Elysian fields’. He conjures up pastoral scenes from classical mythology in order to render the real, seductive danger of foreign sexuality safely appealing. While Bartram made his American encounters ‘safer’ by his systematization of the botanical world, his record of naming and European literary analogies, Wordsworth used the novel descriptions and travellers’ idiom he found in Bartram to make his poetry more ‘foreign’ and exciting. In Wordsworth’s poem, his central character, the young girl Ruth, is at home in the Somerset landscape, where she wanders over ‘dale and hill / In thoughtless freedom, bold’ (ll. 5–6).139 A Rousseauesque native, she: Had built a bower upon the green, As if she from her birth had been An infant of the woods. (ll. 10–12) Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 104 01/06/2007 11:53:39 ‘Taking possession’ 105 In her harmonious relationship with the land, she is self possessed (‘Pleased with herself ’) and evenly balanced (‘nor sad, nor gay’) until a ‘lovely Youth’ bursts onto her existence (ll. 16, 37). He is impressive in ‘a military casque’, and exotic, ‘with splendid feathers drest’ (ll. 20–1). But he is also described in terms of the animals that inhabit a strange and dangerous shore: The panther in the wilderness Was not so fair as he; And when he chose to sport and play, No dolphin ever was so gay Upon the tropic sea (ll. 38–42) This ‘youth’ seduces Ruth with tales of life in America, so that she longs to go there with him and be part of his world, as his ‘helpmate in the woods’ (l. 92). She sees herself – also exoticized through his eyes – becoming his ‘sylvan huntress’ to ‘drive the flying deer’ (ll. 95–6). But as they prepare to depart, he abandons her and she never leaves her native shore to live ‘in the wilderness’, instead becoming mad and ‘in a prison housed’ (l. 195). When Ruth escapes her prison she becomes a vagrant, and only recovers her identity back in the Quantock countryside, where: Among the fields she breathed again The master-current of her brain Ran, permanent and free (ll. 211–13) Much of the poem’s beauty comes from its descriptions of the American landscape – which Wordsworth gleaned from the Travels, selecting ‘highlights’ from Bartram’s lyrical, exuberant portrayal that were exotically unfamiliar to his British reader. Examples of features from the Travels in Wordsworth’s poem are the descriptions of magnolia and cypress trees, ‘green savannahs’, ‘lonesome floods’ and ‘wild woods’. But in places Wordsworth has obviously heightened these unusual scenes even further for his own purposes. Bartram describes the shrub Gordonia lasianthus: It at the same time continually pushes forth new twigs, with young buds on them; and in the winter and spring, the third year’s leaves, now partly concealed by the new and perfect ones, are gradually changing colour, from green to golden yellow, from that to a scarlet, from scarlet to crimson; and lastly to a brownish purple, and then fall to the ground. So that the Gordonia lasianthus may be said to change and renew its garments every morning throughout the year; and every day appears with unfading lustre.140 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 105 01/06/2007 11:53:39 Writing the Empire 106 Wordsworth was evidently impressed with this passage, adapting it in his poem to become part of the fabulous tale told by the ‘lovely Youth’: He spake of plants that hourly change Their blossoms, through a boundless range Of intermingling hues; With budding, fading, faded flowers They stand the wonder of the bowers From morn to evening dews. (ll. 55–60) In Wordsworth’s retelling of the wonders of this plant, it is the blossoms that change colour, not the leaves, making a fantastic spectacle even more incredible. And in his less botanical version, the plants ‘hourly change’, so that the reader imagines it happening before one’s eyes, as the line ‘budding, fading, faded flowers’ describes a process of continual decay and renewal taking place. However, the impetus for this atemporal description could well have come from Bartam’s choice of genre. As Pamela Regis points out, Bartram’s text is not simply a travel account, it also seeks to compete with, or take its place among, the botanical texts of the day.141 Bartram’s static Linnaean descriptions of plants (and the plates he drew) conform to the scientific requisite that all aspects of a plant (bud, leaf, blossom and fruit) should be incorporated in the same description.142 The seasonal, cyclical time-frame of Bartram’s descriptions therefore compete with the linear narrative of his journey, and it is this aspect of his text that Wordsworth absorbs and replicates here. However this fantastical reworking of the Travels occurs elsewhere in the poem. Bartram’s journal gives a lengthy account of: Pistia stratiotes, a very singular aquatic plant. It associates in large communities, or floating islands, some of them a quarter of a mile in extent, which are impelled to and fro, as the wind and current may direct … These floating islands present a very entertaining prospect; for although we behold an assembly of the primary productions of nature only, yet the imagination seems to remain in suspense and doubt.143 In Wordsworth’s poem, the floating islands – always of interest to Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy in their domestic poetry – become ‘fairy crowds / Of islands’ (ll. 69–70). Perhaps the hint in Bartram’s text about what ‘the imagination’ could make of these islands leads Wordsworth to see them as ethereal. Excerpted passages from Bartram’s text – themselves ‘the imposition on nature of a visual ideal that one carried into the wilderness rather than the representation of a real wilderness’ – have become the stuff of exotic fables in Wordsworth’s hands, rather than realistic accounts of the landscape of another continent.144 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 106 01/06/2007 11:53:39 ‘Taking possession’ 107 Wordsworth in fact, while using Bartram’s Travels to make his own poem more exciting, unusual and beautiful, aims to civilize the foreign elements he finds there. The picturesque appeal of Bartram’s writing is released in the poem, only to be encased in Ruth’s story, with its unhappy outcome, to warn against exciting fantasies of other lands. Wordsworth exposes the reader to its exoticism in order to inoculate him/her against the unbalancing effects of American climate and landscape, where nature will ‘feed voluptuous thought’ (l. 133).145 This place has a detrimental effect on those who inhabit it: The wind, the tempest roaring high The tumult of a tropic sky, Might well be dangerous food For him, a Youth to whom was given So much of earth – so much of heaven And such impetuous blood (ll. 121–6) The passage reads as if an infection of the blood, brought on by the tropical environment, has caused this failing in the ‘lovely youth’ to be faithful and true. This continent has led to character changes in him, so that his good intentions have gone awry in a lawless wilderness of ‘wild men’s vices’, and ‘His genius and his moral frame / Were thus impaired’ (ll. 149–52). Wordsworth portrays America as a heady, exotic land that has disfigured the youth’s ‘moral frame’ and now has ruined Ruth’s life with its seductive foreign images. He advocates taking possession of what is familiar, and accepting the limits of lived experience in one’s own world, instead of desiring another existence. But is Wordsworth really blaming the ‘tropic sky’ of another continent for the mental imbalances that take place in ‘Ruth’, or is he critiquing Bartram’s account of his travels in America, if not the genre of travel narratives itself ? Ruth is not seduced by a factual account of a known continent but by the rosetinted production of a traveller there. While Bartram’s narrative is based on a real journey, it is a fictional construction in that it relies on authorial intent and traditional literary devices, as much as on the landscape it describes. And texts like Bartram’s, describing a picturesque landscape and idealized accounts of Indian life, certainly influenced Coleridge and Southey in their plans to emigrate to America. Like the Georgian youth, they were blinded by a vision of liberty: Before me shone a glorious world – Fresh as a banner bright, unfurled To music suddenly: I looked upon those hills and plains, And seemed as if let loose from chains, To live at liberty. (ll. 169–74) Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 107 01/06/2007 11:53:39 108 Writing the Empire In ‘Ruth’ Wordsworth responds to contemporary idealizations of colonial life in America, the apogee of which can be seen in Southey’s and Coleridge’s 1794 scheme of Pantisocracy.146 Wordsworth constructs an idyllic vision of the American landscape, but he does so in order to expose the fallaciousness of such idealizations, replicating the contrived nature of colonial visions in order to critique them. He is not blinkered by the Pantisocrats’ search for a utopian existence and in fact provides the ‘antidote’ to such infectious enthusiasm for the American colonies. ‘Ruth’ is written to combat the misplaced feelings of his contemporaries, by demonstrating how unbalancing an idealized vision of America could be. Several of the passages in ‘Ruth’ – and notably those describing Indian life – are not exotic at all, in fact they could have taken place in the safe and familiar Somerset countryside. The ‘youth’ envisions married life in America for Ruth and himself not as the harsh and dangerous reality that most settlers faced, but as a ‘pleasant’ existence where the couple are free to find ‘a home in every glade’ (l. 78). And in ‘Ruth’ the strawberry-picking passage from Bartram, discussed above, loses any hint of sexuality to become a safe, homely description, which without reference to the ‘Indian town’ could well have been a Quantock outing; He told of girls – a happy rout! Who quit their fold with dance and shout, Their pleasant Indian town, To gather strawberries all day long; Returning with a choral song When daylight is gone down. (ll. 49–54) Wordsworth has the youth seduce Ruth with his idyllic construction of American life in his poem, as Bartram could be said to seduce his readers with descriptions of life as a ‘noble savage’ in his narrative. Bartram’s enthusiasm is infectious, ‘What an elysium it is! Where the wandering Siminole, the naked red warrior, roams at large.’147 His intimate admission that he has himself been ‘Seduced by these sublime enchanting scenes of primitive nature and these visions of terrestrial happiness’ contributes to make his text ineluctably appealing.148 So Wordsworth replicates the seductive images of Bartram’s Travels in ‘Ruth’, but in order to expose the illusion of pioneering life in America as a pastoral utopian dream. And his portrayal of Ruth’s own self-sufficient, rural Somerset life, before being attracted by another world, supports the message of the poem. Wordsworth’s didactic intent is to show that we should be happy living in our own world, or discontent may lead to mental instability. By Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 108 01/06/2007 11:53:39 ‘Taking possession’ 109 reworking Bartram’s idyllic construction, he takes possession of the fantasy in order to create alienation in his characters. Their displaced and dysfunctional position as a result of desiring an idealized life in another land underlines his message that identity and self-possession rely on being content at home. The lesson that Wordsworth advocates in ‘Ruth’ is the one that he also employs in ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’. He uses the ideology of exploration to claim his place on the land around him in his poetry, but confines the limits of his art to what he knows – his own world. While ‘foreign’ images make his poetry more exciting, his writing is underpinned by a cultural pact of knowledge with his metropolitan reader. Rather than travel abroad to make an emotional investment for posterity in a new land, Wordsworth’s reading of travel narratives enabled him to claim imaginative possession of his domestic landscape. Conclusions So what can we conclude about the way in which Southey and Wordsworth ‘take possession’ in their poetry? Naming the landscape is just one aspect of that process. While each writer has his own motives for poetic naming, and his own distinctive practice, each nevertheless contributes to a discourse of appropriation. Naming may begin as a private process, but a personal act of poetic possession acquires a public dimension through the very act of publication, just as it did in the explorers’ journals and on official maps. Wordsworth’s claim that his places are ‘unnamed or of unknown names’, or Carver’s that ‘there was no name that I could distinguish it by’, can be seen as ground-clearing exercises which turn someone else’s place into their free space.149 Naming that ‘cleared’ space converts it into Southey’s and Wordsworth’s place, silencing other voices, other claims to it. And once a place has been renamed, it too becomes a territory to be defended against those whose name for it has been obscured. Southey, then, is simply more explicit in Madoc about the process that Wordsworth implicitly develops in his ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’. Naming is an essential element of colonization because it silences prior claims to the land, and the Romantic aesthetics of these poets legitimize this first step in the process. As has been shown in this chapter, techniques learnt from travel narratives were adopted by both Southey and Wordsworth in order to ‘take possession’ in their poetry. The contradictions that are evident in their different poetics reflect the dichotomy found in these narratives, between the optimistic, self-confident explorer – of William Bartram’s narrative, for instance – and pragmatic accounts of the tensions and hardships of pioneering life. Each writer brings his own polemical intentions to these texts, so that the descriptions of the wild open spaces of America from travel accounts can be recycled Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 109 01/06/2007 11:53:40 110 Writing the Empire as either Wordsworth’s ‘green savannah’ or Southey’s ‘savage lands’. When Wordsworth describes America in ‘Ruth’ he overturns the conventional picture of eighteenth-century colonial politics that is found in Madoc. He also reverses the ‘cultural imperialism’ of such texts that attempt to impose the author’s vision on the American territories. In ‘Ruth’ it is America – or more correctly, the idea of America – that exerts an influence on British nationals, through the vehicle of Wordsworth’s active colonial character, who seduces the passive Ruth. Ultimately Wordsworth’s version of America resists the ideology of colonization, because whilst being shown as exotic and exciting it is also shown as ‘irregular’, ‘dangerous’ and unassimilable. The foreign dangers that Southey’s text imports and then implausibly attempts to control are released in ‘Ruth’ in order to challenge conventional, beneficent views of colonialism. Southey systematically writes about cultures he has little knowledge of – whether that may be the medieval Welsh court or native American culture – relying on the observations of pseudo-scientific ‘authorities’. Madoc is therefore imbued with the dangerous realities of the travel narratives Southey read, but he manipulates his text speciously to expel or suppress them and so present the territories as ultimately governable. One of the reasons why Madoc fails to present a plausible vision of colonial relations is due to the depiction of its colonizing hero. Southey does not permit Madoc to question his conduct and so he is untouched by the anxieties harboured by Southey himself regarding colonization of the American territories. He is presented as a one-dimensional figure, remote from those he governs – as well as Southey’s readers – an inadequate model of an imperial administrator or ‘governor’ of colonial territories.150 In the wake of exploratory expeditions and voyages by travellers like Cook, Carver, Bartram and Hearne, it was Southey’s and Wordsworth’s generation of writers, settlers and politicians that was faced with solving the problems of colonizing new territories. Southey was committed all his life to Britain’s colonial future, and his subsequent poetry and journalism provided a literary forum for him to discuss the complexities of colonizing new lands.151 Unlike Southey, Wordsworth could indulge in exotic fantasies because he was not attempting to solve the problems of colonial life in his writing and so was free to resist the colonizing impetus of the period. It is worth noting that such an ‘anti-colonial’ position is also the message of his poem ‘The Female Vagrant’ (Lyrical Ballads, 1798). Southey however felt that colonization of land abroad would provide opportunities for those like himself who were disenchanted with the British political system. He would also come to embrace foreign expansion for nationalist reasons, claiming that Britain’s future depended on its position as a colonial power. Wordsworth’s later poem The Excursion Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 110 01/06/2007 11:53:40 ‘Taking possession’ 111 (1814) shows how much the ideology of colonialism has been absorbed and recycled by his generation of writers, with its unselfconscious promotion of the idea of ‘taking possession’ for Britain: So the wide waters, open to the power, The will, the instincts, and appointed needs Of Britain, do invite her to cast off Her swarms, and in succession send them forth; Bound to establish new communities On every shore whose aspect favours hope Or bold adventure; promising to skill And perseverance their deserved reward.152 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 111 01/06/2007 11:53:40 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 112 01/06/2007 11:53:40 3 ‘EDEN’S HAPPY VALE’: ROMANTIC REPRESENTATIONS OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC At this moment I could form the most delightful theory of an island peopled by men who should be Xtians not Philosophers and where Vice only should be contemptible. Virtue only honourable where all should be convenient without luxury all satisfied without profusion – but at the moment when Imagination is almost wrought up to delirium, the ticking of the clock or the howling of the wind reminds me what I am and I sigh to part with so enchanting a delusion. If the Bounty mutineers had not behaved so cruelly to their officers I should have been the last to condemn them. Otaheitia independent of its women had many inducements not only for the sailor but the philosopher. He might cultivate his own ground and trust himself and friends for his defence – he might be truly happy in himself and his happiness would be increased by communicating it to others. He might introduce the advantages and yet avoid the vices of cultivated society. I am again getting into my dreams and sober Reason has so little to balance them that I can scarcely wake myself ...1 The long letter from which this passage comes was written by Southey over a period of a fortnight in his undergraduate rooms at Oxford and provides an important insight into his hopes and fears for the future. Waking early to study and write to his close friend, Grosvenor Bedford, he breaks off from a rambling lamentation of his lack of ‘trade’ or wealth, into a reverie in which his escapist fantasies and utopian plans for mankind converge.2 Though the physical realities of his situation intrude (‘the ticking of the clock’ and ‘the howling of the wind), his mind continues to wander into a pleasant daydream of a South Pacific island community of ‘friends’, living off the land and avoiding the ‘vices of cultivated society’, which even ‘sober Reason’ finds difficult to dispel. No doubt memories of what was ‘so enchanting a delusion’ stayed with him and contributed to his plans to emigrate to America in the following year, because there are notable similarities between this fictive creation and the Pantisocratic venture he planned with Coleridge. A crucial element of his ‘delightful theory’ was that it should be tried away from conventional civilization; whether in the South Pacific, America or even Wales. Possibly one of the loci he imagined for his proposed ideal society of ‘Southeyopolis’ at this stage was Tahiti (or ‘Otaheitia’ as it was known to – 113 – Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 113 01/06/2007 11:53:40 Writing the Empire 114 eighteenth-century explorers). The South Seas region certainly exerted a great deal of influence on Southey and, although it might seem an unlikely place for a West Country poet to dream of, his links with Bristol made him more aware than many of the possibility of global travel. The Pacific islands became an abiding area of interest for him, not least because of the mutiny on board the naval ship HMS Bounty in 1789, that he refers to here and which many attributed to the sailors’ preference for Tahitian women. This chapter explores the twin enthusiasms of Southey’s epistolary vision: his fascination for the South Pacific islands and his proclivity for sociological analysis. Southey’s thought processes at this time were greatly influenced by Rousseau, whose discussion of the merits of ‘savage’ and ‘civilized’ societies in A Discourse Upon the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality among Mankind (1755, translated into English in 1761), provided a frame for questions of how one’s own society could be improved. Rousseau traced human existence from man’s primitive condition to its present depraved state and mourned the ‘Golden Age’ when people subsisted in small groups by hunting and gathering. He presented a positive view of the savage in a natural state, contrasting his physical strength and robustness with civilized man’s vulnerability and dependence on ‘machines’.3 In the early 1790s, when Southey felt that British society would not answer his needs, the Rousseauesque dichotomy of ‘savage’ and ‘civilized’ societies was one that he often employed as a metonym for his understanding of the oppositional values of ‘community’ (positive) versus ‘society’ (negative).4 A further letter, written in 1793, reveals how much Southey considered himself and his circle of friends to be out of step with mainstream society: The more I see of this strange world, the more I am convinced that society requires desperate remedies. The friends I have … are many of them struggling with obstacles, which never could happen were man what nature intended him.5 His view of ‘man’ as a perverted version of humanity that is no longer as ‘nature intended him’ dramatically exemplifies Rousseau’s arguments against ‘civilized’ man in his Discourse.6 This was why, in the next year, Southey went on to propose his Pantisocratic ‘community’ of like-minded associates, who could together return to the simple values of a state of nature. South Pacific travel accounts were another formative influence on Southey’s ideas because they described an environment in which he could be ‘truly happy’. The conditions would not only cater for his physical requirements, but would provide a ‘savage’ model of society that answered his philosophical needs too. Published accounts of South Pacific exploration were, like those of America, avidly consumed by late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European readers, who were totally reliant on them for knowledge of newly ‘discovered’ territories.7 Reports of primary encounters between Europeans and indigenous Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 114 01/06/2007 11:53:40 ‘Eden’s happy vale’ 115 races shaped perceptions of other cultures by being absorbed and recycled in British fiction and disseminated to a wide audience. Southey and other writers were inspired by their reading to discuss these new cultures, but they were also selective, extracting those aspects that conformed to their ideology. This chapter will examine the information that Southey and his contemporaries drew on from these accounts and show how it was reworked in their own literary productions to provide a commentary on both British and South Sea societies. One of the most important aspects of South Pacific travel narratives was the insight they offered British readers into a culture and society governed by a totally different set of morals and constraints than their own. Journals of voyages to the South Pacific predicated it as a land of liberty – sexual, political and societal. This was of concern to Southey, who, as a social commentator, recognized the implications of such a vision, not just for Polynesia, but also for Europe. Southey’s reading of these narratives led him to see the indigenous population as having certain essential characteristics. For instance, first encounters with this culture reported the active sexuality of Tahitian women, which he perceived as being at odds with his own society. The descriptions of female behaviour in South Pacific travel narratives provided an ideological focus for Southey and other writers to compare ‘savage’ models of society with their own. This chapter examines how far such discussions led to a curtailment of female roles in British society, as well as restrictions in the textual representation of women, so feeding into the gender politics of the period. It also considers Southey’s own ideas within the context of other Romantic writers. As a leader in contemporary opinion, he influenced poets such as P. M. James, Mary Russell Mitford and James Montgomery, as well as Byron, who was provoked by attitudes like Southey’s to challenge his version of the South Pacific in his own poem The Island (1823). Southey’s impact on these writers – and society in general – demonstrates how influential he was as a poet and a reviewer on literary constructions of the South Pacific, as well as foundation narratives of empire. European Encounters with the South Pacific Southey’s views on Polynesian culture and society were formed by his own encounters with South Pacific travel narratives. From the 1760s onwards the South Seas had become a focus for European navigators, whose primary motives were territorial and scientific. For instance explorers were expected to increase anthropological, geographical, botanical and zoological knowledge of the area, through specimens and drawings that they brought home at the behest of entrepreneurial, gentleman ‘scientists’ such as Sir Joseph Banks. In Britain these ‘exhibits’ (as they became once out of their native environment) formed the basis of important collections for the Royal Society, and the advances in knowledge Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 115 01/06/2007 11:53:40 116 Writing the Empire the voyages provided were disseminated to British readers through published travel accounts.8 Explorers were also expected to claim new, potentially valuable territories for Britain, though as Rod Edmond points out they were not particularly ‘looking for colonies of settlement, and this conditioned their approach and response to indigenous populations’.9 A different kind of colonial policy operated in the wake of European explorers, as the remote islands of the South Pacific, rather than attracting farmers and settlers, instead became a target for the activities of traders and missionaries, who attempted, often unsuccessfully, to impose their own forms of commerce and religion on the islands. For this reason, transactions between Europeans and natives took place largely in the porous contact zone of the ‘beach’, Greg Dening’s metaphor for the liminal space that allowed both cultures to integrate, yet preserve their own identities.10 Following the example of the first explorers, most Europeans skirted the edges of island culture, ‘mapping’ and commentating on Polynesian society, rather than embracing its core values. European voyages of exploration to the South Seas could take at least six months, or even longer if stops were made en route, or adverse weather conditions were encountered.11 However once there the islands could be surveyed and mapped quite easily by ships’ crews. Moreover the society, food and even sexual relations of an island like Tahiti were instantly accessible to European sailors from the safety of their floating wooden fortresses. Accounts of voyages increasingly reported sexual relations between European sailors and female Polynesians; important first encounters that transgressed the boundaries between the two alien cultures, affecting both. Though sexual involvements could enable greater understanding between sailors and islanders, and often led to loving relationships, there were wider social implications such as miscegenation and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Historians have shown the deleterious effects of these sexual encounters on Polynesian social structure, as well as the increase of practices such as abortion and infanticide.12 The descriptions in travel accounts of relationships between sailors and native females were largely responsible for creating a mythical status for Polynesian women as the sexual ‘other’ of European society.13 This was because explorers understood these sexual exchanges within the restrictive morality of their own society, rather than in Polynesian terms. The texts that I will be examining in this context refer specifically to Polynesia rather than to the westerly Melanesian Islands (also known to European explorers) such as the Fiji group. As Peter Kitson shows, European sailors valued more highly the paler skinned and lighter haired inhabitants of these islands (whom they considered themselves physically and culturally closer to) than the darker skinned Melanesians, who were portrayed as depraved cannibals.14 The sexual reputation of Polynesian women was Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 116 01/06/2007 11:53:40 ‘Eden’s happy vale’ 117 therefore created in a specific cultural moment, when sailors first encountering them were open to seduction by natives who most closely resembled themselves on what Vanessa Agnew terms the European ‘yardstick’ of racial proximity.15 The first recorded visit to the Polynesian island of Tahiti was by the British captain Samuel Wallis in 1767. The report of the visit shows it to have been governed by mutual mistrust, with the guns of Wallis’s ship, HMS Dolphin, opening fire on the islanders on several occasions. Eventually to placate the British sailors and peacefully resolve the situation, the Tahitians offered their women to the ship’s crew in the first recorded sexual exchange of this kind. However Wallis himself concluded in the ship’s log that ‘notwithstanding all their civility, I doubt not but it was more thro’ fear than love that they respected us so much’.16 The French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville provided a more positive representation of native populations than that found in previous accounts. This was particularly true of his description of the Tahitians, from the first sexually charged moments of weighing anchor there. They had, it seemed, learnt from Wallis the best way to propitiate their visitors, because, as Nicholas Thomas suggests, while sex was used for trade, it did also absorb visitors into Polynesian culture, giving them a role in their social and belief systems.17 Bougainville describes ‘periguas’ (native boats), coming out to the ship containing naked ‘fair females’, as ‘the men and the old women that accompanied them, had stripped them of the garments which they generally dress themselves in’. It is clear to Bougainville that the crew are expected to take advantage of the women’s sexual favours. He says ‘they pressed us to choose a woman, and to come on shore with her; and their gestures, which were nothing less than equivocal [sic], denoted in what manner we should form an acquaintance with her’.18 Bougainville goes on to relate what happened when the ship’s crew continued in their work: It was very difficult, amidst such a sight, to keep at their work four hundred young French sailors, who had seen no women for six months. In spite of all our precautions, a young girl came on board, and placed herself upon the quarter-deck, near one of the hatchways, which was open, in order to give air to those who were heaving at the capstern below it. The girl carefully dropt a cloth, which covered her, and appeared to the eyes of all beholders, such as Venus shewed herself to the Phrygian shepherd, having, indeed, the celestial form of that goddess. Both sailors and soldiers endeavoured to come to the hatch-way; and the capstern was never hove with more alacrity than on this occasion.19 This first encounter with Tahiti, then, is a sexual one. To describe this world, which is as strange to the sailors in terms of the new sights they see and people they meet as it is in terms of social mores, Bougainville retreats into the safety of classical precedent. The attempt to seduce the ship’s crew by artless young women and artful ‘men and old women’ is in fact a very familiar commercial exchange, which he transforms into a divine manifestation. The native female Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 117 01/06/2007 11:53:40 Writing the Empire 118 body is elevated to a ‘celestial form’ appearing ‘upon the quarter-deck’ with the worshipping multitude of ‘sailors and soldiers’ below in the hatchway. Bougainville finds a proper classical frame to dignify the sex show, as well as the French sailors’ responses to it. Bougainville endeavours to describe the islanders’ social structures, their food, the plants they grow and the landscape of the island in a proto-scientific way. But it becomes a romantic presentation, having more to do with the ideological and cultural baggage he brings with him than what he actually finds there. Looking for the paradise, or ‘Golden Age’ of his European literary heritage, he describes Tahiti in biblically and classically inspired terms. In his explorations into the interior, he is ‘transported into the garden of Eden’, where he observes the casual way in which property is shared and food is consumed freely by its inhabitants, as ‘every one gathers fruits from the first tree he meets with’.20 In this paradise the native woman (‘Venus’) is worshipped and the sexual atmosphere is all pervading: The very air which the people breathe, their songs, their dances, almost constantly attended with indecent postures, all conspire to call to mind the sweets of love, all engage to give themselves up to them.21 Bougainville even goes so far as to name the island ‘La nouvelle Cythere’ in honour of Aphrodite (or Venus), so dedicating the island to the worship of the ideal female form and spontaneous female sexuality. Rousseau’s Discourse had already preconditioned the perceptions of European explorers so that they were looking for the ‘noble savage’, assimilating him with the heroes of Homer and Ossian – those other cultural influences that relied on the cult of primitivism – rather than providing an open-minded report of what they found. Bougainville’s representation of the Tahitians and his emphasis on the island as a paradise on earth, with female sexuality freely available to visiting males, was to influence European perceptions of the Pacific islands into the twentieth century. But one of the first responses to his account was made by a contemporary French writer, the philosophe Denis Diderot, who made use of Bougainville’s depictions of Tahitian society in his own critique of European morality, the Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville (written in 1772 when the Voyage first appeared, although it was not published until 1796). Diderot at this time shared the concerns of Rousseau that life as a ‘savage man’ had many advantages to that of ‘civilized man’, which had made the latter ‘weak, fearful and mean-spirited’.22 In his Supplement, Diderot employs Bougainville’s description of ‘free’ love to criticize the European institution of marriage, which he demonstrates to be (in the modern editor, Peter Jimack’s words), ‘an utterly unjustifiable extension of the right of property over another’. Diderot goes on to argue that European society is based on a morality which overrules male sexual- Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 118 01/06/2007 11:53:40 ‘Eden’s happy vale’ 119 ity, ‘demanding of men a kind of behaviour which is simply alien to them’ and leading them to become ‘racked by internal contradictions, torn between the demands of nature and those of moral laws’.23 Diderot’s discussion of Tahiti is an example of the gap between documentary ‘reality’ – employed by Captain Cook, for instance, in his descriptions of the island – and its literary portrayal, which is primarily indebted to the male writer’s fantasy of a sexual paradise. Diderot even ignored the contradictory details of Bougainville’s account, which provided evidence of syphilis and instances of social inequality, preferring to foreground the explorer’s first impressions of the land as ‘Eden’, populated by the readily accessible female Eve/Venus. Cook’s visit to Tahiti closely followed Bougainville’s, but his journals do not evoke the idyllic, sexual paradise of the French explorer’s account, or even the murderous exchanges of Wallis’s visit, generally preferring a tone of calm, scientific detachment. Cook’s first voyage to the South Pacific (1768–71) was instigated by the Royal Society, who had instructed him, among his other tasks, to build an observatory on the island of Tahiti, for observing the transit of Venus. Cook’s visit was successful, but dominated by a long, stressful balancing act, of keeping his crewmen busy and the natives happy, between sporadic attempts at theft by the latter, and retaliatory violence by the former. Though there are individual accounts of sexual encounters between the crew and the native women, Cook is quite circumspect on this subject and, in the manner of a dispassionate observer, he also seems reluctant to make overarching statements about Tahitian society. However in the account of his second voyage to the South Pacific (1772–5) he was more concerned to put the record straight with regard to claims about the islanders’ sexuality, such as Bougainville’s: Great Injustice has been done the Women of Otaheite and the Society Isles, by those who have represented them, without exception, as ready to grant the last favour to any man who will come up to their price. But this is by no means the case; the favours of married women and also the unmarried of the better sort, are as difficult to obtain here as in any other country whatever. Neither can the charge be understood indiscriminately of the unmarried of the lower class, for many of these admit of no such familiarities. That there are prostitutes here as well as in other countries is very true, perhaps more in proportion, and such were those who came on board the Ship to our people and frequented the post we had on shore. By seeing these mix indiscriminately with those of a different turn, even of the first rank, one is, at first inclined to think that they are all disposed the same way, and that the only difference is in the price.24 Cook rationalizes Bougainville’s idealism, to reveal Tahiti’s sexual paradise as a commercial marketplace. However it is also likely that Cook himself is guilty here of overlaying his own cultural expectations on the Polynesians, so attributing European ideas of prostitution to these sexual encounters.25 Cook’s account is, of course, also a construct, and originates from his need, as a senior naval Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 119 01/06/2007 11:53:40 Writing the Empire 120 officer, to be perceived as sober and detached. He was particularly anxious to avoid speculation in the narrative of his second voyage because the first one had gained notoriety from the scandalous details included by John Hawkesworth, who was commissioned by the Admiralty to publish an official account of Cook’s first voyage. Hawkesworth’s An Account of the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of His Present Majesty for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere (1773) had titillated the British reading public by including descriptions of sexual acts, such as: A young man, near six feet high, performed the rites of Venus with a little girl about eleven or twelve years of age, before several of our people, and a great number of the natives, without the least sense of its being indecent or improper, but, as appeared, in perfect conformity to the custom of the place. Among the spectators were several women of superior rank … who may properly be said to have assisted at the ceremony; for they gave instructions to the girl how to perform her part, which, young as she was, she did not seem much to stand in need of.26 It had also outraged many. The presentation of Polynesian women as sexually active seductresses was already becoming less attractive to some parts of the British reading public, at a time when female readers were increasing in number.27 It also gave impetus to contemporary opinion that would restrict the way in which women could be represented in literature. Southey by the 1800s was in the vanguard of such opinion. And, by 1809, he was quite ready to perceive Tahiti (the focus for his early enthusiasm) as an island governed by a ‘lasciviousness which degrades the Taheiteans even below the brute creation’.28 As I will demonstrate, Southey reviewed several South Pacific texts during his career as a journalist and his estimation of Tahitian society underwent a sea-change. As a social commentator, Southey reflected, but also precipitated, the changing perception of the British public towards the South Pacific. One of the reasons for this popular apostasy was the death of Cook, in Hawaii in 1779, which was elegized for many years in the poetry, art and theatre of the period.29 As Gananath Obeyesekere argues, such portrayals of a ‘mild and liberal’ Cook30 being hacked to death by brutal natives led to his deification in British terms, if not Polynesian.31 Cook’s death, however, did not deter others from voyaging to the South Seas and engaging in commercial (and cultural) exchanges which, while they led to greater knowledge of Polynesian society, also produced a less favourable (because less idealized) view of island life. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 120 01/06/2007 11:53:41 ‘Eden’s happy vale’ 121 Southey’s Reviews of the Polynesian Missions One of the largest changes in public opinion was caused by graphic accounts of Polynesian society sent back to Britain by missionaries in the South Pacific. Southey reviewed the London Missionary Society’s publication, Transactions of the Missionary Society in the South Sea Islands, for the Quarterly Review in 1809. The Transactions recount the efforts made by the LMS to raise money by subscription, as well as their selection of thirty candidates, from ‘Christians of all denominations’, for their missionary project.32 The company embarked in the naval ship HMS Duff, under the command of Captain Henry Wilson, in August 1796.33 On arrival in the South Pacific, the missionaries were distributed in groups on ‘Taheite’ and ‘Tongataboo’ (Tongatapu, or Amsterdam Island) and two were left to begin a mission on ‘St Christina’ (Tahuata, in the Marquesas Islands). The Duff did not return to Britain but maintained a patrol between the three islands to support and, if necessary, protect the missionaries from the islanders. The only mission of the three that survived for any length of time was the Tahitian one (although reinforcements were despatched by the LMS to follow this first project). In his account of the first visit of the missionaries to ‘St. Christina’, Southey relates their responses to the native women: The missionaries had been disappointed in their expectations of Taheitean beauty. They were not so here, and they say of the women that as models for the statuary and the painter their equals can seldom be found.34 Southey is as concerned as the missionaries to dispel the myth of Tahitian sensual beauty, so that they will not be idealized in European literature, which has set up a secular, sexual version of Eden, in opposition to the biblical one. The women of St Christina, though beautiful, should not be appreciated for their sexuality, but for their aesthetic value, in terms of artistic representation. However this beauty is shown to mask the dangerous nature of the Marquesan women, who easily intimidate the more circumspect British males. While one of the missionaries on St Christina sets off to explore the island in the company of the ‘Chief ’, the other, named Harris, stays behind at the native settlement, close to where the British ship that brought them is anchored. On their departure: The Chief to accommodate him in the most obliging manner he could, left him his wife to be treated as if she were his own, till he came back. It was in vain that poor Harris protested he did not want the woman! She was left with him – and finding herself neglected, called some of her female friends to satisfy themselves concerning his sex while he was asleep. This inquest was not made without awakening him; his fear at being awakened, and his horror at the thought of remaining among a people so ‘given up to wickedness’ then completely overcame him. He got down to the beach with his chest, at evening; none of the crew were ashore, and the ship lay out of hail; Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 121 01/06/2007 11:53:41 Writing the Empire 122 there he remained sitting on the chest till about four in the morning when the natives drove him away, and stole his clothes. A fisherman had compassion enough to swim off to the vessel and tell the Captain of his situation; the boat was sent for him, and he was found in a pitiable condition, like one out of his senses.35 After this encounter Harris refuses to return to the island. The terror he feels is revealed in the fact that he returns to the safety of the Duff ‘like one out of his senses’, having been rescued by a, if not British, at least male, ‘fisherman’. Southey brings to light the disturbing sexuality – as he considers it – of Polynesian females, in that Harris is shown to be at the mercy of not just one, but several native women. In fact the story’s comedic element (that is no doubt unintended) occurs in the appearance of the chief ’s wife’s sexual appetite as a natural urge, while Harris seems absurdly repressed. And the fact that the Marquesan women are so disbelieving in the face of British male chastity probably has more to say about first encounters with British sailors than native female sexuality. Southey’s review intends to convey more than just the sexual aspects of the Polynesian nature. On Tongatapu the islanders are shown as irreligious and superstitious, engaging in ritual self-mutilation and the torturing of prisoners. Tribal war breaks out on the island and three of the missionaries and an American sailor are killed, while the rest escape by boat. One of their number, who has engaged in ‘profligate habits’, remains safely among the natives because he has ‘accommodated himself to their vices’.36 Again the natives seem more ‘natural’ than the missionaries; sceptical of those who repress human desires and accommodating of those who succumb. Southey sets up a separation in the text between those Europeans who are aligned with the natives – living a life described as ‘profligate’ and given to ‘vices’ – and those who maintain their independent lives, their chastity and their piety. The missionaries cannot just rely on marking the boundary between their religious beliefs and native ‘superstitions’, but have to maintain physical boundaries too, preserving the body as well as the spirit from intercourse with the indigenous population. Fearful of native sexuality, they construct a barrier between those who ‘go native’ and their core group, who maintain sexual purity as well as their distinct British identity. Therefore those who succumb to the temptations of the flesh are despised, as was one ‘Mr. Lewis’ for taking ‘one of the natives to wife’. Disowned by the other missionaries, despite having been ‘one of the best educated and most useful members of the mission’, the story ends in ‘biblical’ justice: He continued to live with her about sixteen months … At the end of that time he was murdered: the woman with whom he cohabited grew tired of him, she had formed a connection with another man, his presence was an interruption to them, and his property a temptation.37 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 122 01/06/2007 11:53:41 ‘Eden’s happy vale’ 123 Again the strong sexual nature of female islanders is portrayed as dangerous, in fact life-threatening, as Lewis’s death is shown to be the result of female promiscuity. The Tahitians of Southey’s report, based on the missionaries’ accounts, are examples of fallen humanity. They indulge in human sacrifice, they are cruel to their sick and old people, and practise infanticide. As such they are unrecognizable to Southey as the idealized inhabitants of Eden described by first voyagers there: When Taheite was re-discovered in our fathers’ days, it became the admiration and envy of Europe. The philosophists who placed happiness in the indulgence of sensual appetite and freedom in the absence of legal and moral restraints, were loud in their praises of this ‘New Cythera’ and even men of healthier intellect and sounder principles, regarded these islanders as singularly favoured by Providence, because their food was produced spontaneously, and they had no other business in life than to enjoy existence. But now that they are better known, it appears indisputably that their iniquities exceed those of any other people, ancient or modern, civilized or savage; and that human nature never has been exhibited in such utter depravity as by the inhabitants of these terrestrial Paradises!38 Southey’s invective comes from his resentment at having been deceived by the ‘philosophists’ in his youth, when he rejected British civilization in favour of such primitive models. As a result, the Tahitian fall from grace is primarily the responsibility of European writers and thinkers. Nevertheless part of Southey’s extreme reaction towards the Tahitians here – for their ‘iniquities’ and ‘utter depravity’ – as the scales fall from his eyes, can be attributed to his desire to blame them (like the English labouring classes and French Jacobins) for not conforming to his ideal model of society. This passage provides an interesting insight into how European views of other races were formed. The period of first encounter, reported in travel narratives and discussed in secondary commentaries on them, created concrete ideas of previously unknown people and places. But new contradictory information, rather than diluting such opinions, could cause a swingeing reaction against the first impression, as here, leading to a similarly inaccurate representation, which nevertheless supercedes the initial one. The common factor in both these misrepresentations (whether positive or negative) is that an extreme measure of difference is created between Tahitians and Europeans. This occurred because popular fascination with travel accounts depended on ‘discovering’ races that were interesting for their great dissimilarity. These distinctive markers of cultural difference provide fertile material for the idolization or demonization of other races depending on the moral or political point a writer intended to convey. In this way some of the abiding stereotypes of the modern period can be attributed to the public demand for such literature. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 123 01/06/2007 11:53:41 Writing the Empire 124 To identify the Tahitian nature as the depraved ‘other’ for his British readers, Southey produces a catalogue of atrocities that they have committed, including those ‘crimes not to be named [which] are habitually committed without shame’.39 Their offensiveness is deliberately heightened by not being identified, but the fact that he shrouds them in this way hints at sodomy. The diseases that are rife on Tahiti have the significance of Old Testament plagues after Southey’s imprecations against its inhabitants. He comments on the presence of venereal disease: The most destructive is that dreadful malady which seems destined, as an appropriate punishment and consequence of their vices, to exterminate this most sinful and most wretched people.40 Southey’s moralistic solution to Tahiti’s problems – an ‘appropriate punishment’ for their lascivious behaviour – is to have that same disease ‘exterminate’ the sexually active inhabitants of the island. This is because, in Southey’s writing, physical disease is often understood, as here, in terms of a moral or political sickness within society, as Philip Connell points out.41 But the evidence of an increase in sickness, and particularly venereal disease, in the South Pacific, as each subsequent explorer reported new ravages on the bodies of the islanders, also relates to what has been termed the ‘fatal-impact’ theory. This was the belief, at a time when the South Pacific was perceived as an innocent Eden, that European civilization would contaminate the native inhabitants with its ‘immoral’ diseases, which ‘rebuked the explorer for his intrusion and contradicted the purity of his intentions’.42 However now that Southey perceives Tahitian society from the obverse point of view, such disease is morally defensible as a just infection meted out to a people more ‘sinful’ than Europeans. Southey’s portrayal intends to eradicate the European fascination with Tahiti as a ‘second Eden’. This was also the missionary imperative; if Tahiti is shown to be a lapsed Eden then their presence in the islands is justified, as Bernard Smith points out: During the succeeding years [after the establishment of the Tahitian mission] the missions to the Pacific gradually substituted for the noble savage of the eighteenth century a strikingly contrasting type; an individual thoroughly treacherous and deceitful in his native state who could yet be transformed into a Christian citizen obedient to the laws of God and the laws of Europeans as a result of the intercession of the Holy Spirit in Christian conversion.43 So effective was the missionary campaign that Coleridge, like Southey, conformed to this view of Polynesian society: Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 124 01/06/2007 11:53:41 ‘Eden’s happy vale’ 125 The missionaries have done a great deal for us in clearing up our notions about savage nations. What an immense deal of harm Captain Cook’s Voyages did in that way! Sailors after being a long time at sea, found a fertile island, and a people of lax morals, which were just the things they wanted; and of course there never were such dear, good, kind, amiable people. We know now that they were more detestably licentious than we could have imagined.44 The warm welcome given to needy sailors of the eighteenth century had become the ‘lax morals’ of the nineteenth. But the denigration of the Tahitian people by the missionaries is of course tied to another agenda – that of colonial politics. Southey was convinced that: It is, however, only by colonization that these countries can be civilized, and that it is our interest and the interest of the whole commercial world that they should be civilized will presently appear.45 Many missionaries of the period would have considered themselves in conflict with commercial empire, but Southey saw the two as closely related. Religious instruction would be in the vanguard of a programme of civilization and colonization, leading in turn to commercial gain. Southey went on to demonstrate, in his 1809 Quarterly Review article, why, and how, Tahiti and the other ‘Society Islands’ should be colonized. However his argument for this had been made as early as 1803, not just in the service of European commercial interests, but sincerely for the benefit of ‘savage’ societies, who had to progress, as his own had done, in order to improve: Upon my view of the moral government of the world, these progressive steps have all been needful, a state of innocence is necessarily insecure. The Tree of Knowledge must be tasted, & good and evil must be experienced before mankind can obtain a state of wisdom.46 Faulty as ‘civilized’ societies may be, they are further advanced than ‘savage’ societies in progressing towards ‘a state of wisdom’. Southey creates a hierarchical scale of societal models which will justify the colonization of the South Pacific. And the beneficent paternalism of European civilization is to be physically imposed upon less advanced societies if necessary: The only atonement which can be made to this wretched people, for the injury we have done them, and the disease we have communicated, is to communicate also our religion, our morals and our knowledge; our religion foremost and first, not only as of first importance, but as the necessary and only possible means of imparting morality and science. This is to be done by colonization and by force.47 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 125 01/06/2007 11:53:41 126 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 126 Writing the Empire 01/06/2007 11:53:41 Figure 5. ‘Sketch from Recollection and Anchor Bearings of the North Part of Otaheite from Point Venus to Taowne Harbour’, from William Bligh, A Voyage to the South Sea, Undertaken by Command of His Majesty, for the Purpose of Conveying the Breadfruit to the West Indies, in his Majesty’s Ship the Bounty (London: George Nichol, 1792). By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. ‘Eden’s happy vale’ 127 ‘The Otaheitean Mourner’ The idea of Tahiti as a haven for free love and uninhibited sexuality played its role in an event that had important consequences in Britain; the mutiny on HMS Bounty in April 1789. The Bounty (with William Bligh in command) left England for the South Pacific on 23 December 1787, arriving in Tahiti in October 1788.48 Bligh’s orders were to collect indigenous bread-fruit plants and transport them to the West Indies, where they were intended to provide a cheap source of food for the slave plantations there.49 The ship spent over five months in Tahiti, and approximately three weeks after its departure the mutiny occurred, for reasons still open to speculation. Bligh and nineteen crew members who had remained loyal to him were forced to leave the Bounty in the ship’s launch.50 The captain and his men were exposed to many dangers, but most of them survived a two-month voyage to Timor. The mutiny became public knowledge after Bligh’s return to England on 14 March 1790. It was soon a settled opinion, due to Bligh’s report, that it had occurred because of the bonds formed between the women of Tahiti and the ship’s crew in their long sojourn there. The report of the mutiny in the General Evening Post of 16 March 1790, in an account which greatly contributed to the mythologized sexuality of Tahitian women, stated that the mutineers ‘were so greatly fascinated by the Circean blandishments of the Otaheitean women, they took this desperate method of returning to scenes of voluptuousness unknown, perhaps, in any other country’.51 The subsequent journalistic reporting of events simply added to the high level of public interest in the island, which had been growing since Wallis’s first visit there.52 And the court martials of those involved – in October 1790 (to investigate the loss of the Bounty) and in September 1792 (to try the ten officers and men who were recaptured by a naval force sent to Tahiti) – as well as Edward Christian’s defence of his brother, Fletcher Christian, who was the perceived ringleader, only fuelled the fire.53 One of the most widely publicized accounts was Bligh’s own book, A Narrative of the Mutiny on Board His Majesty’s Ship Bounty, which he rushed to publication in June 1790. This did much to sustain the idea of Tahiti as the ‘Eden’ of Bougainville’s account in readers’ minds, particularly in Bligh’s speculation on the reasons for the mutiny: It will very naturally be asked, what could be the reason for such a revolt? In answer to which I can only conjecture that the mutineers had assured themselves of a more happy life among the Otaheiteans, than they could possibly have in England, which, joined to some female connections, have most probably been the principal cause of the whole transaction.54 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 127 01/06/2007 11:53:43 Writing the Empire 128 The idea of the women’s and the island’s seductive power was an attractive one, and while it is plausible that Bligh gave this reason to detract attention from his own actions in causing the mutiny, he had in fact created a valid justification in the public imagination. While comparisons were being made between the Pacific Islands and Eden, the mutiny could be perceived as having been caused by men wanting to return to the idyllic life they found there. As Diderot had shown in his Supplement, there was a conflict in society between men’s ‘natural’ desires and the imposition on them of a strict moral code. Southey had also identified this conflict between society and its individual members when he saw men ‘struggling with obstacles, which never could happen were man what nature intended him’. It seemed that the mutiny had occurred as a result of that strain and Southey certainly sympathized with the mutineers, referring to them as ‘poor fellows’ and to Bligh as a ‘thorough rascal’.55 The story of one of the mutineers, George Stewart, and his Tahitian ‘wife’ was particularly appealing owing to its unhappy ending: Peggy Stewart was the daughter of an Otaheitan Chief, and married to one of the Mutineers of the Bounty. On Stewart’s being seized and carried away in the Pandora Frigate, Peggy fell into a rapid decay, and in two months died of a broken heart, leaving an infant daughter, who is still living.56 When Stewart and some of the other recaptured mutineers were returned to Britain in HMS Pandora to face court martial, this story became even more tragic. The ship was wrecked on its way home and he was among the prisoners who drowned. A poem, named ‘The Otaheitean Mourner’, was written on the subject of the lovers’ tale by P. M. James and was published in the Monthly Magazine in 1808.57 Southey read and admired the poem and gave it wider publicity by the inclusion of two stanzas from it in his review of the Transactions of the Missionary Society for the Quarterly Review of 1809.58 James’s poem sets up an opposition between the authoritarian actions of ‘civilized’ Britain and the ‘natural’ emotional reactions of Peggy. Southey approved of its sentimental depiction of monogamous romantic love centred on the familiar western motif of the lovelorn damsel who is faithful to her hero. Because the poem is written from Peggy’s point of view, simple language incorporates an idyllic vision for the reader: From the isle of the distant ocean My white Love came to me; I led the weary stranger Beneath the spreading tree. With white and yellow blossoms I strew’d his pillow there; And watch’d his bosom’s heaving, So gentle and so fair. (ll. 1–8) Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 128 01/06/2007 11:53:43 ‘Eden’s happy vale’ 129 As if he is sick and certainly ‘weary’ from the life he leads, Peggy’s ministrations, combined with the beneficent beauty of Tahiti, heal and refresh Stewart and the two fall in love: Before I knew his language, Or he could talk in mine, We vow’d to love each other, And never to resign. O then ’twas lovely watching The sparkling of his eyes; And learn the white man’s greeting, And answer all his sighs. (ll. 9–16) Stewart’s condition improves, until his eyes are ‘sparkling’. Though Peggy seems to be a passive lover who is prepared to ‘answer all his sighs’, in the rest of the poem the native female is an active figure: I taught my constant white Love To play upon the wave To turn the storm to pleasure, And the curling surge to brave. How pleasant was our sporting, Like dolphins on the tide; To dive beneath the billow, Or the rolling surf to ride To summer groves I led him, Where fruit hangs in the sun; We linger’d by the fountains, That murmur as they run. By the verdant islands sailing, Where the crested sea-birds go; We heard the dash of the distant spray, And saw through the deeps the sunbeams play, In the coral bow’rs below, (ll. 17–33) ‘Peggy’ is queen of the natural elements; the storm, the ‘curling surge’, and as ‘Nature’s Goddess’ she initiates Stewart into a knowledge of nature, such as the islanders have. The active verbs, employed in the first person to describe her actions (‘I led’, ‘I taught’, ‘I strew’d’) attribute her a dominant, active role in the landscape. The differences in culture and colour of the two lovers is emphasized. There are barriers of language between them but these are brought down by their mutual attraction, so that they can speak their love (‘We vow’d to love each Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 129 01/06/2007 11:53:43 130 Writing the Empire other’). While Peggy is not described, the insistence on Stewart being her ‘white love’ (repeated several times) heightens the difference between them, though this is also depicted as a source of value to her: My kindred much would wonder, The white man’s love to see; And Otaheitan maidens Would often envy me (ll. 38–41) The poem’s author assumes that the racial qualities of the ‘white man’ are prized above Polynesian characteristics by ‘Otaheitan maidens’. The implication of this is that in their relationship, the female gender and darker skin are given equal, lower status, thereby reinforcing white male superiority. This is of course an ambiguity in the poem, as Peggy, despite her lower status, takes the dominant role in the relationship, albeit briefly. However this position of female dominance is one that is happily allocated to her by James. She controls a sexual paradise, but is deferential, loyal and bereft without her man, so conforming to an idealized picture of female obedience and dependence. Peggy teaches Stewart to ‘play upon the wave’ and ‘turn the storm to pleasure’ in this idyllic ‘play area’, but only because it is divorced from any real location of power. The feminine world of the South Pacific islands is one that men of ‘duty’ find attractive, but the true source of power, in terms of British male authority, is safely located elsewhere. This is what claims Stewart at the end of the poem as he is re-constrained – ‘in iron bands they bound him’ – in order to return to the male world of duty and accountability (l. 54). Peggy, who is alienated from any appeal to the disciplinary processes of the British navy by her gender and her race, is powerless to prevent her lover being taken – ‘they tore him from my clasping’ (l. 56). The only thing she can wish for is to become a ‘little bird’ to ‘chase / My lover o’er the deep’ (ll. 84–5), a lightweight, ineffective response to the might of the British navy. Her insignificance (in terms of British priorities) is highlighted by the way in which she passively ‘pined away, and died’ of a broken heart.59 The poem is a lamentation that evokes pity but, without any plausible alternative ending envisioned, the lovers’ fate is seen as inevitable. Southey’s admiration for the poem comes from its conformity to conventional morality. Authority and duty are bowed to and Peggy (despite her playfulness; a metaphor for her sexuality) is a model of feminine virtue in her fidelity to her ‘husband’, even to death. The exotic escapism of the poem is therefore constrained by the values of western patriarchal authority. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 130 01/06/2007 11:53:43 ‘Eden’s happy vale’ 131 Christina, The Maid of the South Seas Southey’s respect for the virtues of monogamous love and feminine fidelity, which led him to promote James’s poem, were to influence another contemporary writer, Mary Russell Mitford. Her narrative poem, Christina, The Maid of the South Seas (1811), like James’s, owes its existence to fascination with the mutiny and the subsequent reporting of the fate of the mutineers, and particularly the account of their settlement on Pitcairn Island. An American ship, the Topaz, had discovered the mutineers’ presence on the island in 1808. In the ‘Advertisement’ that prefaces Christina, Mitford attributes information about Pitcairn to ‘the kindness of a gentleman, who heard from several officers of the Topaz an account of the manners, the virtues, and the happiness, which she has attempted to pourtray’ [sic].60 The Quarterly Review of February 1810 had also reported details of Captain Folger’s visit and the discovery of the post-mutiny community. Folger is told the history of the Pitcairn settlement by one of the mutineers, John Adams – named Alex Smith in the account, as he gave this name when enlisting on the Bounty.61 Adams’s story was subsequently corroborated by other ships’ captains visiting the island – though historians have identified instances where he changed details to protect himself.62 According to Folger, after the Bounty had left Tubuai (the first island the ship visited after the mutiny) with the mutineers on board, it returned to Tahiti where some of the men elected to stay (such as the ill-fated George Stewart) and were captured by the naval force from the Pandora and shipwrecked; or survived to return for trial to Britain. The rest of the mutineers, Fletcher Christian, Adams/Smith and seven others, with twelve Tahitian women and six Polynesian men (from various islands that the ship visited), settled on Pitcairn.63 The island was divided into plots between the British sailors, and the Polynesian men were expected to work the land with their ‘masters’. Each of the British men had a ‘wife’ and the Polynesian men shared the other women. The lack of available women as partners for the Polynesian men caused resentment in the community. Folger relates Adams’s story: About four years after their arrival (a great jealousy existing) the [male] Otaheiteans secretly revolted and killed every Englishman except himself [Adams/Smith], whom they severely wounded in the neck with a pistol ball. The same night the widows of the deceased Englishmen arose and put to death the whole of the Otaheiteans, leaving Smith the only man alive upon the island, with eight or nine women and several small children. On his recovery he applied himself to tilling the ground, so that it now produces plenty of yams, cocoa nuts, bananas and plantains; hogs and poultry in abundance. There are now some grown up men and women, children of the mutineers, on the island, the whole population amounting to about thirty five, who acknowledge Smith as father and commander of them all; they all speak English, and have been educated by him (Captain Folger represents) in a religious and moral way.64 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 131 01/06/2007 11:53:43 132 Writing the Empire This ‘official’ account, taken from the log-book of the Topaz, was a source for Mitford’s poem and is also reproduced in the notes.65 Though her work is framed by the love story between two fictional characters, Christina (supposedly the daughter of Christian and his Tahitian wife) and Henry (a British sailor on the Topaz), the main action is provided by the story of the island’s settlement in ‘Fitzallan’s Narrative’. Fitzallan is the romanticized name that Mitford allocated to Adams/ Smith in her fiction because she found his name to be ‘the most unpoetical appellation by which ever hero was distinguished’.66 Mitford depicts her male heroes as romantic adventurers (in the vein of Madoc) – who ‘long’d on other worlds to gaze’ (II.ix.8). In Mitford’s letters she acknowledges a debt to Coleridge for correcting Christina and adding some of ‘his own beautiful lines’.67 Mitford was also grateful to Captain James Burney (Fanny Burney’s brother) ‘for the friendly assistance which he has rendered her in arranging and revising her notes’.68 However her greatest literary indebtedness was to Southey, whose long narrative poems provided important models for her, both in terms of form and content. Southey ’s influence on Mitford emerges in her correspondence, where she regularly refers to him and reviews his latest works.69 In her notes to Christina she quotes from The Curse of Kehama (1810), referring to it as a ‘sublime poem’.70 However her particular favourites were Madoc and The Life of Nelson (1813), for their celebration of heroic, masculine valour that Mitford was keen to replicate in her own work.71 Christina also follows the pattern of Southey’s epics in its division between the main poetic content and exhaustive notes. Mitford was concerned to provide documentary evidence about the South Pacific to support her fiction, citing her main sources as Hawkesworth’s Account of the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of His Present Majesty (1773) and Bligh’s A Voyage to the South Sea (1792), which included the account of the mutiny from his earlier Narrative of the Mutiny.72 Her literary representation too conforms to Southey’s techniques in the deliberate selection of apposite details for her construction, leaving out those elements that contradicted the moral programme of her fiction. Mitford’s writing presents an archaic, idealized vision of England as ‘Albion’, and Christina, despite its exotic setting, does not deviate from this. In fact it is her British male hero, who looks back longingly from the South Pacific to his homeland, that sets the poem’s tone of nostalgic longing for the cottage society of an earlier (if imaginary) period in British history. Such constructions were popular responses to the escalating urbanization and industrialization of society, indicating that Mitford’s choice of Southey and Coleridge as mentors was not an arbitrary one.73 Southey’s writing (both his published works and his private correspondence) displays a high level of anxiety about the increasingly mechanistic manufacturing processes of British industry, so much so that it became an important theme of his fictional survey of Britain, Letters from England by Don Manuel Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 132 01/06/2007 11:53:44 ‘Eden’s happy vale’ 133 Alvarez Espriella (1807). In this, the use of a fictional Spanish narrator gave Southey the freedom to discuss the problems besetting British society and to highlight the issues that he felt were exacerbated by the growth of industrialization. He rails against the circulation of wealth that leaves the poor excluded, and the manufacturing system that does not value its members, except for how they contribute to its revenue.74 His correspondence reveals similar anxieties: the condition of the greater part of society – of the poor, is more uniformly miserable now than it ever has been in any former period, & that, in consequence of the inevitable effects of our commercial system … the peasantry and labourers of England in old times enjoyed a degree of comfort & plenty which they now never can obtain. Their morals & their health were not poisoned by the soul-&-body murdering plan of herding together in large & unwholesome manufactories.75 Southey’s radicalism embraces England’s past, and idealizes peasant life in order to uphold the rural values he feared were quickly becoming obsolete. As an antidote to the spread of manufacturing industries and the growth of the cities, the cottage society of ‘England in old times’ is romanticized and elegized, for instance in his collection of poems that formed the ‘English Eclogues’ (written between 1798 and 1809).76 ‘The Alderman’s Funeral’, for instance, contrasts a ‘natural’, pastoral childhood with the old man’s actual existence dominated by commercial interests: When yet he was a boy and should have breathed The open air and sunshine of the fields, To give his blood its natural spring and play, He in a close and dusky counting-house Smoke-dried and sear’d and shrivell’d up his heart.77 Like Southey, Mitford endeavoured to find a location for her rural idyll in opposition to the industrialization of society; an idyll that she also depicts in her later, more famous prose writings, such as Our Village (1824), which is also concerned to uphold rural lives and values.78 However in Christina she chose a South Pacific island as the setting for her ‘Albion’. My discussion explores her reasons for doing so, as well as the precedents for such a construction in Southey’s own writing. Christina is a sentimental portrayal of the love story of Fletcher Christian and his Tahitian ‘wife’, Iddeah, paralleled with the more successfully concluded romance between Christina and Henry. Focusing on these latter, imaginary characters, rather than the controversial instigator of the rebellion himself, allows ‘a displacement of Christian in order to contain the troubling sympathies he provoked’.79 The second-generation love story enables Mitford to distance herself as a writer from the mutiny and also from Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 133 01/06/2007 11:53:44 134 Writing the Empire the less moral love affair of the first generation, but nevertheless to include details of this event that were so fascinating to the public. Christina’s name indicates her close blood link to Christian, but her role in the poem is to make recompense for his actions by her recognition of duty and her display of piety and morality. The reader is introduced to Mitford’s hero first, ‘British Henry’, who is sailing to the Pacific aboard the American ship (I.v.61). He is adventurous and resilient; the innate national characteristics of his island heritage: A Briton calmly pac’d the deck; Can storms the British spirit check? That spirit which still higher soars, As tyrant threats, or cannon roars! No, firm as Albion’s rugged rock, He stemm’d old Ocean’s rudest shock (I.ii.21–6) As the sun rises on the numerous islands of the South Pacific, his first sight of this scene of exotic novelty is described in exuberant terms: How many a fair and desert isle Basks in the southern sunbeam’s smile! Numerous they glow upon the main, Like stars that gem the peacock’s train Whilst the high mountain’s purpled blue Brightens o’er Ocean’s verdant hue. (I.vii.78–83) A view only to be surpassed by the first sighting of Pitcairn, which takes on a mythical status: With quick surprise, and new delight, The sailors view’d that island bright: Fair as the fabled isles it rose, Where erst Ulysses found repose; (I,ix.102–5) Mitford is very careful to distance her text from representations of the island as a sexual paradise, as was common in depictions of Tahiti. Pitcairn, though also beautiful, is presented as a moral paradise, so that the ‘Eden’ that was lost to Christian and Iddeah by their immoral relationship will be regained for Christina and Henry through their respectable courtship and marriage and the expiation of sin. Therefore even the first description of Pitcairn portrays it as a civilized outpost where the land has been cultivated and contained by Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 134 01/06/2007 11:53:44 ‘Eden’s happy vale’ 135 garden walls, distinguishing it from the more lush, primitive (and hence more sexually corrupt) Tahiti: But not o’er hut or rude morai Wav’d lofty bough or flexile spray; No! those luxuriant branches fall O’er garden trim and cottage wall: Cots, such as Thames’ mild waters lave, Or shine in Avon’s mirror wave; Where English peasants feel the power Of evening’s sweet domestic hour; Where wearied veterans cease to roam; Where comfort cries ‘here is my home!’ (I.xi.130–9) As well as creating a false impression of Pitcairn as a quaintly neat, pastoral village scene – where did the house-building materials come from if not the reclaimed planks of the Bounty? – this description owes much more to the idealized literary version of England, which mythologizes the ‘trim’ pleasant ‘cots’ of happy ‘peasants’, than a perfunctory infant settlement in the South Pacific. This is because Mitford wants to create a fully-formed version of a British rural utopia in the South Pacific; an idea that does not seem so unlikely when we remember that the writers she admired, Southey and Coleridge, had planned to settle the ‘new world’ themselves and return to the agrarian society of the ‘cottag’d dell’.80 The seeds of Pantisocracy’s failure were of course in its conception as an English cottage society, ruled over by English gentleman farmers and incongruously imposed on colonial territories. Such a vision could never survive, even in fiction, as is evident in Madoc. But the eulogization of cottage society, both in Southey’s domestic poetry and his foreign epics, goes to the heart of the debate about British society and his fears that it was being corrupted by industrial expansion and urbanization. His marked influence on Mitford’s writing can be seen in her ‘new world’ settlement of Pitcairn, which relies on the ‘exportation’ of an English village setting. The rural idylls which both writers construct are early instances of the colonial imperative to create a British model for life in any land and one which numerous writers and colonizers were to impose on many different locations – despite unsuitability of climate or terrain. Henry’s first sight of the Pitcairn natives through his ‘glass’ describes them in the same ideal terms as the island: A bright pair trod the simple plank. In baskets, gayly deck’d, they bore Refreshing fruits and flowery store. The towering youth, the graceful maid, Were both in Indian garb array’d; Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 135 01/06/2007 11:53:44 136 Writing the Empire But not a trace of Indian feature Appear’d in either glorious creature: For his warm blood as brightly glow’d As if in British veins it flow’d; And she – the roses of her cheek Might shame the dawn’s refulgent streak. (I.xiii.163–73) Despite their ‘Indian garb’, Mitford carefully detaches the island couple from any innate ‘savage’ qualities that might be found in their physiognomy, dismissing any ‘trace of Indian feature’. For instance, the fact that both Christina and Hubert (her fiancé) have rosy (fair-skinned) complexions is highlighted here. Undoubtedly Mitford encountered problems in depicting the Pitcairn natives. Writers of the period often display an anxiety towards other races in their progressively polarized descriptions of indigenous populations, portraying them either in positive or negative generalized terms (although descriptions of specific individuals are usually more complex). Examination of Southey’s journalistic career has already shown, for instance, his incorporation of the change in perception between two strands of thinking about Polynesians – the Enlightenment view of the ‘noble savage’, and the missionaries’ reports of them as ‘ignoble’, irreligious and immoral.81 This dichotomy in the depiction of indigenous races is one that Southey employs in Madoc, where the dutiful, obeisant Hoamen tribe are contrasted with the aggressive, deceitful Aztecs. Southey’s description of his ‘noble’ Indians differs from Mitford’s in attributing them distinctive racial traits: What men were they: of dark-brown colour, tinged With sunny redness; wild of eye; their brows So smooth, as never yet anxiety Nor busy thought, had made a furrow there; Beardless, and each to each of lineaments So like, they seem’d but one great family. Their loins were loosely cinctured, all beside Bare to the sun and wind; and thus their limbs Unmanacled, displayed the truest forms Of strength and beauty: …82 But the contrast between Southey’s and Mitford’s representations has more to do with ideology than geography. Madoc puts the question ‘What men were they’ in his inquisitive listeners’ mouths, so suggesting that, while their alien characteristics are as alike as ‘one great family’, they are nevertheless very different to Madoc and his Welsh audience as a race. Southey’s explorer observes them through western eyes and they become Rousseau’s perfect physical specimens, with their lives unscarred by the ‘anxiety’ of civilized society. Mitford solved the Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 136 01/06/2007 11:53:44 ‘Eden’s happy vale’ 137 ideological dilemma that Southey encountered of having to make native populations ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in proportion to the essential characteristics attributed to them by European observers. She distanced her text from that debate by making her miscegenetic natives more British than Tahitian, more ‘civilized’ than ‘savage’. Though the description of their clothing pays lip-service to the demands of cultural conformity, their essential ‘British’ nature is still perceptible to Henry. Recognizing their common ancestry he cries, ‘the English air / I trace in yonder blooming pair’ (I.xv.194–5). By drawing attention to their shared consanguinity, Mitford also surmounts the difficulty of portraying mixed-race relationships in her poem, so the love between Henry and Christina is unencumbered by the cultural differences that Iddeah and Christian encountered. The attraction Mitford’s lovers feel for each other is therefore not that of the explorers’ accounts, where exotic difference creates sexual magnetism. It is chaste and decorous and could equally well be played out in a British drawing room as on a South Pacific island. The problem of how to depict interracial relationships was one that Southey had come up against in Madoc. Early sketches for the poem in Southey’s Common-Place Book show that he intended a tighter plot resolution through transracial integration.83 But apart from the promised (but deferred) marriage of Goervyl and Malinal in the published version of Madoc, there are no depictions of relationships between the races.84 The effect of this is to portray the Welsh forces as a conquering imperialist army who maintain a hierarchical and divisive bipartite structure of white rulers and subservient natives. Mitford’s text, despite its unrealistic portrayal of ‘civilized’ natives, avoids these troubling connotations through the genetic affinity she creates between islanders and visitors. Even cultural markers of difference do not become problematic. Mitford is careful to show that her descriptions of Pitcairn clothing come from authentic accounts. In her notes she attributes the native dress to two sources – Wallis’s description of Tahitian ‘white cloth’ and Cook’s description of ‘borders’ on New Zealand dress, which are stitched like ‘the samplers which girls work at school’.85 To create one costume, Mitford combines the accounts of two very different locations: Freely their ample garments flow, In graceful folds of spotless snow; Save that a border richly dight, Of vivid scarlet mantles bright, And fringe, by rosy fingers twin’d, Sports, like gay plumage, on the wind, Where the long sash floats wild and free In ever-varying drapery. (I.xviii.248–55) Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 137 01/06/2007 11:53:44 138 Writing the Empire The lyrical description of the costume’s soft, white, draping folds, terminating in a colourful border, transforms it into the classical dress of the ancient world; a further (and unattributed) influence on Mitford’s depiction being that of western neoclassicism. Like Southey, she uses notes to give verisimilitude to verse which serves to anglicize (and thus appropriate) the ‘Indian’. Indeed ‘clothing’ can be seen as a metaphor for the whole poem – for what Southey does and teaches Mitford to do as well – to clothe the foreign in English garb. This literary ‘clothing’ parallels the missionary programme of imposing the conformity of western dress on the South Pacific natives. It was a move that Southey approved of in his Polynesian reviews, stating that ‘the change is for the better, however much may be lost in picturesque appearance’.86 Similarly the language used by the natives in Christina is described as being like that of the sailor’s ‘own native accents clear’ (I.xix.259). In fact the Pitcairn settlers spoke ‘an odd dialect’, being a corrupted form of English, rather than the lyrical and correct examples of their speech given by Mitford.87 Her islanders display the civilized attributes of western culture in their classically-inspired dress and well-bred use of the English language. The pseudo-British ‘noble savages’ here are most noble and certainly not very savage, conforming to a strict code of morality, instituted by the pious Fitzallan (Smith/Adams), that sets an example for contemporary western society. They are idealized citizens of a utopian community that has succeeded in its conquest of nature by civilization – revealed in the controlled, cultivated beauty of the island and the restrained sexuality of its inhabitants – as they attempt to throw off the stain of mutiny. The story of the mutiny is told by ‘Fitzallan’, portrayed as a noble old patriarch, who finds relief in hearing from the ship’s crew that Bligh has survived – ‘Oh! say we did not kill’ (I.xxviii.431) – and is still alive. ‘Fitzallan’s Narrative’ (like other narratives of the time) portrays the Tahitian females as sexually active, seducing the sailors with their charms: With melting look, with merry glance, They glided thro’ the wanton dance; Or softly trill’d the plaintive measure, Or wak’d the song to notes of pleasure, Told tales of love and joy elate, Nor miss’d one art to fascinate. (II.xvi.274–9) Because Mitford is describing Tahitian rather than Pitcairn qualities, and the events are safely in the past, she feels free to refer to their sexual nature. Christian’s native lover becomes pregnant – ‘a living pledge of love she bears’ (II. xxiv.383) – while the ship is at ‘Otaheite’. He realizes that if he leaves her, the ‘Arreoys’ (higher status natives, of which she is one) will destroy her child and Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 138 01/06/2007 11:53:44 ‘Eden’s happy vale’ 139 so he determines not to abandon her to this fate. Despite Mitford’s acknowledgement that Bligh’s account of the mutiny is the source for her poem, here a material difference occurs as a result of the demands of British morality.88 The source of the dispute between Christian and Bligh is portrayed as moral rather than sexual; it is a matter of personal honour and duty. As Bligh will not let Christian take Iddeah to Britain with him, the implication is that he is forced to mutiny because his honourable intentions towards his lover and child are undermined. Made to leave with the ship, Christian’s dilemma becomes ‘his bosom’s festering wound’ (II.xxv.411). While Mitford intends to avoid ‘the charge of palliating a most fatal conspiracy’, she admits that she is ‘Irresistibly attracted by the character of the gallant and amiable Christian’.89 Her text abounds with strong, honourable and heroic male characters – Fitzallan, Seymor (the American ship’s captain), Henry and Hubert – in the same vein as the Christian she depicts. Even Christian’s death, as a result of delusions, is caused by guilt at having put his wife and child above naval duty. This is because Mitford (like James) presents a version of the South Pacific that, while it is idealized and sentimentalized, is not feminized. It is firmly governed by its white male characters and increasingly conforms to a British vision of patriarchal society. This is the most obvious similarity between Christina and Southey’s own narrative poems. In Madoc, Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (where Ladurlad fulfils this role), a central male figure, around whom the plot revolves, is driven to action by the exigencies of his situation. And, like Spenser’s Faerie Queene (a text that exerted a huge influence on Southey), these ‘knights’ are on a righteous quest, actively resisting political evil, immorality or superstition. The male heroes act honourably, protecting those weaker than themselves: women and children or, as in Madoc, compliant native races. Of all Southey’s characters, Mitford was influenced most in Christina by his colonizing hero, whose honourable, masculine strength is undoubtedly a model for her own male authority figures: Madoc, the British Prince, the Ocean Lord, Who never for injustice rear’d his arm; Whose presence fills the heart of every foe With fear, the heart of every friend with joy;90 ‘British Henry’ and Madoc are ‘new-world’ pioneers whose relationships with the native inhabitants are governed by restraint and honourable intentions. In Southey’s poem, Madoc’s motives for leaving Britain are governed by radical politics, whereas Henry is spurred on by patriotism to spread the civilizing ethics of old ‘Albion’. However Madoc’s original motives soon disappear, leaving him an ‘exporter’ of old world values, much like Henry. Because Madoc and Mitford’s heroes conform to a standard of controlling, superior government that strives to Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 139 01/06/2007 11:53:44 140 Writing the Empire be firm but compassionate, they appear as interchangeable stereotypes without any psychological depth. In order to rule fairly and temperately it seems that individual character traits must be suppressed. Even when these colonial heroes act aggressively it is shown to be justifiable; Madoc is forced to oust the Aztecs due to their duplicitous hostility and acts of cruelty towards other native Americans and Henry draws his ‘falchion’ on the native Hubert to show the strength of his love for Christina. The heroes of both texts conform to ideals of patriarchal leadership and are rewarded at the end. Madoc becomes rightful ‘sole Lord’ of the Hoamen lands; Christina marries Henry and Fitzallan bequeaths his leadership to their offspring, who will inherit the best qualities of both races. Both poems therefore conform to Southey’s imperial project – as the Hoamen lands and Pitcairn Island become British territories through the nationality of those who govern them – that civilization should be spread through colonization. Nevertheless the events of the mutiny, which have the potential to subvert the ordered conclusion of Mitford’s poem, need resolution and absolution through the retelling, so that the next generation can govern Pitcairn. After the mutiny, despite returning to save Iddeah, Christian’s transgressive actions make Mitford’s honourable hero unhappy, so that ‘on his brow of care / He wore the livery of despair’ (II.xxxii.502–3). Mitford’s mutineers cannot relax in paradise, unreleased as they are from naval duty: We were not born unnerv’d to lie Basking in woman’s sunny eye, Neglecting every nobler claim, Soft ditties to those eyes to frame. (II.xxxiii.525–8) Christian’s intention is to found a virtuous community by leaving the ‘female’ pleasures of Tahiti: No! far from that enfeebling land, To seek some fair, yet lonely strand, Where comrades, servants, children, wives, Might gild with tranquil beams our lives, Where joys, which virtue can bestow, Where piety’s diffusive glow, Where years to peaceful duty given, Might lead each wandering soul to Heaven, Was Christian’s plan. (II.xxxiv.529–37) While writers such as Byron would celebrate Tahiti as an area of feminine agency and vitality, Mitford perceives it as an ‘enfeebling land’ that saps masculine energy. Male authority needs to be relocated in a new place where ‘servants, Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 140 01/06/2007 11:53:44 ‘Eden’s happy vale’ 141 children, wives’ can be controlled by ‘virtue’ and ‘piety’. Christian has become an allegorical figure of crusading Christianity and, in order to regain the ‘true’ Eden of the South Pacific, he has to throw off the vices of Tahiti, the false sexual paradise which originally seduced him.91 He also has to convince the rest of the ‘rebel crew’ and lead them to righteousness, as the evangelizing tone of the author suggests: In luxury and vice they trod, Woman their idol, sense their God. Few were there wise. Well was it time To quit this soft voluptuous clime. (II.xxxiv.538–42) If Tahiti has become a lapsed Eden, Mitford’s literary paradise on Pitcairn will not be allowed to make the same mistake. Pitcairn is not depicted as a land of ‘soft primitives’ like Tahiti, whose population by being exempt from God’s curse on Adam – ‘in the sweat of your face / you shall eat bread’92 – has become a corrupt, libidinous, fallen humanity. Fitzallan’s story breaks off with Christian’s band voyaging in search of an island to found a community with their servants and wives – the ideal ingredients for a British colonial outpost in the South Pacific. ‘Work’ was the solution that Southey advocated for human excesses in his South Pacific journalism because he was convinced that it was the Edenic existence of Tahiti’s population that had caused many of their problems: The cause of their degradation is equally certain. It exists in the very circumstances for which they were envied by the sensual sophists of Europe – their food was produced spontaneously, and they had no other object in existence than enjoyment.93 So in Mitford’s text the luxuriant nature of Pitcairn comes under the control of the ‘British spade’ (III.xvi.253), differentiating between her moral Pitcairn colony and the laxness of Tahitian society. In Madoc too, Southey’s hero’s superiority to the more backward Hoamen tribe that he colonizes is depicted in these terms. They also inhabit ‘A waste of rank luxuriance’ in their passive relationship with the natural world.94 The changes that Madoc makes on the landscape, and his industry and application in cultivating the land and protecting his colony from ‘savages’ and wild animals, show him to be an active and therefore ‘deserving’ possessor of the land. The example Tahiti offered was of a people who, despite being blessed with all the advantages of paradise, had lapsed into sin and immorality. If the cause of this could be attributed to their Edenic existence, then the native Eve was also culpable. To counteract the idea of Polynesian temptresses, the central female figure in Mitford’s text, Christina, is a demure and chaste early nineteenth-century female heroine. Mitford’s construction of idealized feminine Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 141 01/06/2007 11:53:44 142 Writing the Empire virtue represents the growth in female conduct literature during this period, as I will show, but Southey’s reviews of South Pacific society, demonstrating his abhorrence of female ‘depravity’, were also widely read. These articles were often written as much from his fears for British society as Polynesian. Southey envisaged a similar cultural decline in the less Edenic Britain, where the increasing poverty of the lower classes was creating a corresponding deterioration in moral standards, as ‘Want fills our streets with prostitutes’.95 As a response to this, Southey intended to write ‘an essay upon the state of women in society and its possible amelioration’, which would publicize the plans of himself and his parliamentary friend John Rickman, to create a series of institutions for women so enabling them to work in honest occupations.96 This was because he felt that, in overpopulated Britain, men had monopolized all the opportunities to earn a living, leaving women without any respectable outlets to do the same.97 His plans for British labouring class women would act as ‘a leaven which must ultimately ferment and purify society’.98 Southey’s Polynesian reviews therefore – in acting as a warning to British readers of the dangers of human sexuality at a time when female conduct was under discussion – should be seen in the context of his wider programme to improve society. Questions of how women should behave were also linked to how they should be represented in literature. Many writers, such as Southey himself, Hannah More and Richard Polwhele, felt it their duty to depict women in a morally restrictive way. Mitford was influenced by portrayals such as those in More’s didactic literature on feminine virtue. Coelebs in Search of a Wife for instance, which More intended to be character-forming in its display of ideal female qualities, was published in 1808 at the height of public interest in the debate over female roles in society.99 More’s novel, like her other writing, was imbued with a ‘robust Christianity’ and ‘an overarching concern with social stability and the effectiveness of women in their proper domestic spheres’.100 Mitford’s position as a writer was therefore particularly delicate at a time when conduct literature was attempting to restrict female activities and texts such as Richard Polwhele’s The Unsex’d Females (1798), which contained dire imprecations against female authors, were being published. In his poem, Polwhele divided female writers up into those who comprised ‘a female band despising NATURE’S law’ and a second group who were ‘By modest luxury heighten’d and refin’d’.101 The first group included, among others, Mary Wollstonecraft and Helen Maria Williams, who had become ‘unsex’d’, according to Polwhele, by their radical politics and their desire to reinscribe the female role in British society. Polwhele sought to defend the popular, sentimental ideal of femininity in the literature of the period, which depicted women as irrational, emotional beings. For Wollstonecraft, such portrayals led to the assumption that women were inferior to men in their capacity for rational Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 142 01/06/2007 11:53:45 ‘Eden’s happy vale’ 143 understanding, a perception that allocated women a narrow role in society, condemning them to trivial occupations and domestic activities.102 If women were seen to stray outside their proper sphere – as Wollstonecraft was accused of doing by Polwhele – they were portrayed as unfeminine (or ‘unsex’d’), lacking the proper female qualities of modesty, virtue and deference.103 In fact women like Mitford and Wollstonecraft, in the public eye as authors, could not simply avoid setting a bad example, they had to provide a positive role model in their lives and writing, or suffer public vilification. Mitford’s female character Christina therefore conforms to these pressures. She is circumscribed by a domestic role in the text, and is an exemplary figure (such as More’s heroine Lucilla in Coelebs) of modest virtue. Mitford had already discovered that reviews of her poetry concentrated as much on the (male) reviewer’s perceptions of what was considered appropriate for a female writer, as on her technical ability. Her Miscellaneous Poems (1810), which contained poetry on the ‘male’ sphere of politics, was severely criticized in the Quarterly Review: In the present case, we must take the liberty of hinting to Miss Mitford, that in selecting the objects of her admiration, she has manifested as little female delicacy as judgement.104 Mitford’s vision of the South Seas therefore would always have to be depicted within the limitations of what would be considered ‘female delicacy’, and, as a result, was (unlike Southey’s or Byron’s) constrained by gender politics. Her subsequent poetry, such as Narrative Poems on the Female Character (1813), is also carefully conservative in its depiction of feminine virtue, with which she intends to ‘exemplify, though in very different degrees and situations, the nearly similar virtues of sweetness, gentleness and forbearance’.105 In Christina, therefore, the female and male roles are firmly inscribed, with separate spheres of activity designated, providing a decorous setting for Mitford’s lovers. As Fitzallan’s narrative of Pitcairn’s settlement breaks off, the day ends in feasting and native ‘manly sport’, enabling the development of the parallel love story between Henry and Christina to develop. Henry plays music for Christina from ‘a rustic flute’, or ‘the sylvan pipe of England’ (III.iii.59–60), a representation of the pastoral as a plaything of those, like Henry, who work and have authority. When Christina cannot play the flute, having ‘spent her fragrant breath in vain’ (III.iii.68), she gives it back to Henry, saying: It bows but to its Lord’s command; And, like a Briton bold and free, Will own no foreign mastery (III.iv.70–2) Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 143 01/06/2007 11:53:45 144 Writing the Empire Within this text which sees mutual attraction between male and female in terms of chaste, idealized love this is a curious passage, where the strong feelings that Henry has for Christina are brought out as she asks him to play for her again. The action becomes sexually charged in the passing of the flute from Christina’s mouth to Henry’s: Her breath on the smooth ivory dwelt, His lips the balmy moisture felt, While to his heart’s emotion true, Trembling and faint the notes he drew; Yet could those trembling notes entrance That girl of love-inspiring glance, – Bewitching in her ignorance. (III.iv.77–83) But in fact this passage highlights the difference between Christina’s Tahitian female forbears and herself. It is not an active or overt seduction that takes place here, but an involuntary one. It is Christina’s naivety and ‘ignorance’ that seduces Henry. Mitford, restricted by social mores, depicts female sexual ‘power’ as unconscious and innocent. As such she contributes towards the dominant ideology of passive female sexuality which would find its place in the literary and pictorial representation of women during the Victorian period. This portrayal was one that Mitford had inherited from the sentimentalized heroines of Southey’s narrative poems. As part of his drive to ‘purify society’, his promotion of monogamous love, like Mitford’s, demands an ideal female partner for his active, protective, hero. In Thalaba the Destroyer, the female heroine Oneiza is faithful and chaste in her love for Thalaba. The central couple face not only mortal but also moral perils. Thalaba saves Oneiza from rape and has to resist the temptation of dancing girls in a paradisiacal garden. Overt female sexuality in Thalaba is a trap set to catch the hero and, like Polynesian sexuality, is portrayed as perilous, endangering the poem’s moral mission. Thalaba chooses his monogamous relationship with Oneiza over the seductive dancers in a test of his virtue and both characters are rewarded by his triumph over evil and their marriage in heaven.106 As in the divinely-ordered events of Thalaba, God is placed firmly at the top of Mitford’s masculine hierarchy, where creation, society and nature are under his patriarchal care: Eternal nature! when to man Unveil’d appears thy mighty plan; Imperishable, high design, A sweeter, holier voice is thine! A voice which leads where saints have trod, ‘Thro’ nature up to nature’s God.’ (III.xiii.205–10) Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 144 01/06/2007 11:53:45 ‘Eden’s happy vale’ 145 But divine power is delegated to Fitzallan as the island’s religious patriarch, and he also controls the story of the mutiny (as Adams did). Shortly after settling on Pitcairn, Fitzallan recounts that Christian’s wife gave birth to a baby boy who died. Christian saw it as a punishment for his actions, even imagining that he saw the ‘spectre’ of Bligh, and in his deranged state jumped off a cliff and died. His wife later gave birth to Christina. After Christian’s death the islanders lived in peace until ‘one Otaheitean boy, / Tupia, a wild and wayward youth’ (III. xxii.335) persuaded the natives to rebellion.107 All the British men were killed except Fitzallan.108 The women then killed the murderers of their husbands, leaving themselves, the children and Fitzallan to begin the community again. Despite modern historians pointing to the murders of the native men as an autonomous act of retribution and control by the women – who are also given much credit for their part in successfully colonizing the island – Mitford’s women are much more passive.109 The reason given for their murderous actions is one overlaid with British morality; they do so to protect their honour. The ravaging native men are too much for Mitford to describe – ‘how faint / Are words those fiendlike slaves to paint’ (III.xxx.444–5) – in their attempt to violate ‘those chaste matrons’ who repel them (III.xxxi.459). Female aggression is justified here only because they must defend their chastity, and therefore the honour and authority of their dead husbands, from the native men. Nevertheless they are ‘soft and gentle’ murderers: They rose. The soft and gentle fair, Who even the creeping worm would spare, Who wept the kid’s gay life to spill, Those fearful women rose – to kill! (III.xxxii.480–3) As Fitzallan’s narrative ends and the sailors prepare to leave, Christina is torn between love for ‘British Henry’ and Hubert, her fellow islander and mutineer’s descendant, whom it is her duty to marry. When the two men argue over her, it is Henry who draws his ‘falchion’ on Hubert. The latter is shown as being the more ‘civilized’ and restrained of the two. He is a physically strong but gentle ‘noble savage’ and therefore stands apart from ‘polished Europe’s treacherous men’ (IV. xxxv.551). Hubert, realizing that Christina loves Henry, ‘gives’ her to him in a scene controlled by the two men, saying, ‘Take her, bright stranger, she is thine!’ (IV.xxxvii.585). The poem ends with paradise firmly located in this moral corner of the South Pacific and the new beginning implied by Henry and Christina’s marriage. Henry colonizes the island for Britain in his love relationship with Christina, who is given to him by Hubert. The triangular relationship between Henry, Hubert and Christina rewrites the tragic struggle between British mutineers, Polynesian men Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 145 01/06/2007 11:53:45 146 Writing the Empire and women in settling the island, this time resolving their differences in cordiality and mutual esteem. The mutineers’ descendants also make reparation for the mutiny itself by submitting to British authority and government. Evidence for such a depiction can be found in the accounts of subsequent visitors to Pitcairn, who reported that the mutineers’ descendants ‘prayed for their sovereign and all the royal family with much apparent loyalty and sincerity’.110 The Pitcairn natives have successfully shaken off the infamy of the mutiny, which can now be seen in terms of a naval crime, rather than a moral one. In separate verses, appended to her narrative poem, Mitford claims the South Pacific as a paradise which she has recreated for her readers ‘To ’scape awhile life’s sad realities’ (l. 587). Her construction will serve as a balm to the soul that suffers at home, ‘From want, from war’ (l. 560), and in this respect the virtuous, ennobled Pitcairn community that she depicts is intended as a criticism of British society. Her foreign, idealized ‘Albion’ is a model that Britons should aspire to, held up as it is even to Britain itself. Paradise can only be regained in this textual reconstruction, made by ‘fancy’ if not reality, which is: Pure, unpolluted, as the crystal stream, Perfect, as joy in Eden’s happy vale; (ll. 599–600) The controlled, pious community of Pitcairn was one that came to be much admired by the British public throughout the nineteenth century. It also became of abiding interest in the discussion of issues such as female behaviour and morality, and, as Mitford predicted, was used as an example for British society. She planted the roots of this vision in her poem’s ending, which highlights the submissive virtue and piety of Christina, controlled by the British masculine authority of Henry. Eden’s new inhabitants, future Pitcairn generations, will incorporate the best aspects of both the British and Polynesian races, as Christina does already, a literal blend of her racial forbears: For virtue here with beauty join’d And modesty with grace combin’d. (IV.xxvii.426–7) The colony’s future will merge the British and Polynesian nations, but in moral, monogamous marriage, not the unrestricted sexuality of Tahitian female seduction. As in Madoc, the implication is that the ‘nobility’ of the native races (the Hoamen tribe/the Pitcairn islanders) will combine with, but show deference to, the superior controlling ability of British colonizers. The original motives for the mutiny can be seen as a reaction against British authority and morality. However, on Pitcairn it is the ‘civilizing’ influence of British morality and Christianity (or Adams’s version of it) that saves the island- Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 146 01/06/2007 11:53:45 ‘Eden’s happy vale’ 147 ers from the detrimental effects of sexual desire and jealousy that caused violence and murder in the first-generation mutineers. For these more morally restrained descendants, Britain is their utopia, a ‘civilized’ Eden, to which, as the children of exiled nationals, they are unable to return. Mitford describes the plight of these fallen angels: England, my country! That some patriot hand From thy majestic brow would wipe this stain! How many banish’d from thy rocky strand Pour forth their sad lament in foreign land! (II.i.11–14) British society now, rather than Tahitian, is a model to aspire to. Southey’s 1809 Quarterly Review article published a letter from the Tahitian ‘king’, Pomare, asking Britain to send ‘a great number of men, women, and children here’ as well as ‘property and cloth … muskets and powder’ and ‘all the curious things that you have in England’.111 No longer would ‘savage’ societies be able to teach ‘civilized’ Britons how to live. Opinion had gone full circle, with Britain now at the cultural centre, disseminating Christianity as well as ‘arts and virtues’ to its colonies. The Tahitian ‘Golden Age’ had passed away and become relocated in that true repository of morality and civilization, Great Britain, proclaimed by Mitford as ‘Bright Empress of the main!’ (II.i.10). Southey’s review depicts Britain as a strong protecting parent, encouraging the ‘correct’ growth of dependent infant colonies. Mitford simply developed an agenda that Southey had publicized and defined already. In writing her South Seas ‘epic’, she had one eye on the verse romances he had already written for Arabia, America and India, and the other on the colonialist ideology he expressed in his journalism. The Island Southey’s influence as a poet and reviewer can also be identified in Byron’s work. The two writers produced exotic romances that were in direct competition with each other; particularly in presenting a diametrically opposed form of morality, as a reviewer for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine summed up: Mr. Southey is, and always was, too much of a monk, to understand a man of the world like Byron; and Byron was too decidedly, or rather too exclusively, a man of the world, to understand a monk like Southey.112 As this review shows, by 1824 Southey was regarded as a writer who claimed the moral high ground in his work. This impression was underpinned by his attack on Byron (and Shelley) in 1821, for ‘lewdness and impiety’ in his ‘Satanic’ offerings to the public.113 The deliberate exaggeration of Southey’s morality as Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 147 01/06/2007 11:53:45 148 Writing the Empire monkish shows sympathy for Byron in their disagreement. It also conforms to a contemporary discourse that enjoyed speculating on Southey’s sexuality, often combining derogatory personal references with literary criticism. Byron was in the vanguard of such writings, due to Southey’s slur on his character, which, because it appeared in A Vision of Judgement (1821) – his public elegy for the death of George III – had the weight of his position as Poet Laureate behind it. Byron attacked him in turn in Don Juan (1819–24) and in his own satirical version of Southey’s poem, The Vision of Judgment (1821), in a public dispute that fascinated readers. The moral polarity between the two writers operated at every level; in their literature, philosophy, politics and views on society. One area, however, in which they shared a common interest, was in the attraction they both felt, at one time or another, for a South Pacific idyll. In Byron’s narrative poem The Island: or Christian and His Comrades (1823), which fictionalized the Bounty mutiny (as Mitford had done), the issue of Polynesian (and British) morality was paramount. My discussion of The Island compares Byron’s and Southey’s writing on South Pacific society to investigate how diverse their views actually were, once relocated to this less constrained, exotic environment concocted by European fantasy. Byron, like Mitford, uses Bligh’s accounts of the mutiny as his source material, but for very different purposes. His poem is structured around the reasons for the event given by Bligh, that the mutineers desired a ‘more happy life’ with their ‘female connections’. In this it exemplifies the Diderotesque conflict between men’s ‘natural’ desires and their constrained role as members of the British navy, repressed by the authoritarian exponent of government and law, Captain Bligh. To provide a motive for the mutiny therefore and, like Diderot, to comment on the morality of European society, Byron was also concerned to highlight the sexual aspects of South Pacific culture. Like the mutineers, he wrestles with the same conflict between ‘duty’ and ‘desire’ in writing his poem. James McKusick suggests that in this way Byron is caught between his source material – which (because he uses Bligh’s account for information about the event) prioritizes the ‘normative role of European observer’114 – and his obvious sympathy for those in conflict with authority (Christian) or those seeking sexual freedom (like George Stewart, the ‘Torquil’ of his poem).115 Therefore Byron is surprisingly sympathetic to Bligh’s viewpoint, even referring to him as a ‘gallant Chief ’ (I.ii.19).116 In his correspondence Byron shows his reluctance to be publicly accused of ‘eulogizing Mutiny’ and going against the grain of British morality yet again.117 But because of his ‘profound alienation from the prevailing values of “civilization”, particularly his aversion to Britain’s vindictive treatment of mutineers, deserters, homosexuals, and freethinkers’, he naturally empathizes with the predicament of Christian and Torquil in the poem.118 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 148 01/06/2007 11:53:45 ‘Eden’s happy vale’ 149 Byron’s poem opens with a description of the Bounty at sea, with the captain asleep, unaware of the mutiny and dreaming of ‘Old England’s welcome shore’ (I.ii.19) – locus of morality, naval discipline and government authority. His restless, mutinous crew are comprised of: Young hearts, which languished for some sunny isle, Where summer years and summer women smile; Men without country, who, too long estranged, Had found no native home, or found it changed, And half uncivilized, preferred the cave Of some soft savage to the uncertain wave (I.ii.27–32) The case for the mutineers is put. They are ‘men without country’, displaced by a life of service in the British navy. The idea that this way of life is unnatural is reinforced further when the British imperative of exploration and possession is contrasted with the ‘unexploring navy’ of the Tahitian canoeists (I.ii.46). The oxymoronic resonance of these two words – in an age of conquest and colonization – highlights the political naivety of the Tahitian nation, so contributing to the island’s construction as an artless prelapsarian idyll. The British ‘young hearts’, influenced by their exposure to ‘summer women’ and the ‘soft savage’ way of life, have become ‘half uncivilized’ and no longer members of a disciplined naval crew. They contrast greatly with Southey’s and Mitford’s colonial heroes, who maintain duty and authority, spreading ‘old world’ values in their colonization of the new. Byron’s description of island life encourages his readers to empathize with the mutineers’ decision to remain there: The gushing fruits that Nature gave untilled; The wood without a path but where they willed; The field o’er which promiscuous plenty poured Her horn; the equal land without a lord; The wish, – which ages have not yet subdued In man – to have no master save his mood; The Earth, whose mine was on its face, unsold The glowing sun and produce all its gold; The freedom which can call each grot a home; The general garden, where all steps may roam, Where Nature owns a nation as her child (I.ii.33–43) This paradise is created not only in terms which depict its ‘promiscuous plenty’, but also by the inversion of importance given to those political and economic elements which European society values: private land-ownership, commodity possession and sources of wealth. Here the mineral wealth is in ‘the Earth’ and Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 149 01/06/2007 11:53:45 150 Writing the Empire it is ‘unsold’. The only ‘gold’ is that created by the ‘glowing sun’. It is an ‘equal land without a lord’; a ‘general garden’ belonging to everyone. Byron produced a version of paradise that was as appealing to a contemporary European reader in its stable, egalitarian vision of society (despite its radical content) as its lyrical evocation of the South Pacific. After the mutiny, the ship with its new captain steers for ‘Otaheite’ where: Nature, and Nature’s Goddess – Woman – woos To lands where, save their conscience, none accuse; Where all partake the earth without dispute, And bread itself is gathered as a fruit; Where none contest the fields, the woods, the streams:– The Goldless Age, where Gold disturbs no dreams (I.x.211–16) In calling it the ‘Goldless Age’ Byron makes a pun on explorers like Bougainville who sought the ‘Golden Age’ of classical tradition. By doing so he places his island outside conventional notions of paradise, which, as the metaphor ‘Golden’ reveals, is dominated by European economic values. Byron’s depiction is of a more truly alien land, where the desire for commercial wealth ‘disturbs no dreams’. He conforms in this to Southey’s pastoral ideal, where nature is abundant and riches redundant, echoing the polemical cry of the earlier writer’s youth; ‘Why is there not some corner of the world where wealth is useless!’.119 Here Byron is consciously writing the radical, idealistic poetry of the 1790s that he had criticized Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey for abandoning. In The Island, where commerce has no sway, fecund ‘Nature’ rules through her ‘Goddess – Woman’, so that sex is the currency that circulates. Though many accounts of voyages to the South Pacific relate economic exchanges of sex for iron (and nails particularly), Byron portrays this sexuality as innocent, a spontaneous overflow of natural bounty without the legal and social constraint of marriage. It fulfils just one more social need, in the same way that the desire for food is answered in a land where ‘bread itself is gathered as a fruit’. As such it is overt, available, unashamed and unrestricted by European moral strictures. The prelapsarian innocence of the first couple’s relationship appears to be recoverable here for Byron in this paradise, however unobtainable it is in European society. The sexual freedom that Byron allocates his characters deliberately controverts Southey’s views that society needs to be more constrained, or that female sexuality is an unfit subject for literary representation. Southey, who in his youth had opposed the official censorship of literature, was prepared to say in 1821 in his ‘Preface’ to A Vision of Judgement that ‘The publication of a lascivious book is one of the worst offences that can be committed against the well-being of society. It is a sin’.120 It was published opinions like these that led Byron to lampoon Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 150 01/06/2007 11:53:45 ‘Eden’s happy vale’ 151 Southey as a sexless, impotent prude in Don Juan – a ‘monk’ in the words of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine.121 Canto II of The Island incorporates ‘the songs of Toobonai’ within it from Byron’s other main source for the poem, John Martin’s An Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands (1817).122 This book tells the story of a young sailor, William Mariner, who was captured by the Tongan islanders and lived amongst them for many years. The published text was based on Mariner’s communications to his editor, John Martin. The loose, prosaic aspects of ‘A Tonga song’ in the Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands are skilfully reworked into the rhyming iambic pentameter of Byron’s poem, as are the language and spiritual beliefs of the natives. The Tongan Islands (or Friendly Islands as they were known) were actually geographically quite separate from the ‘Toobonai’ (or more properly Tubuai) of Byron’s account, which is part of the Austral Islands group. Byron ignores any differences in language, societal structure or customs that may have existed. His locus is an imaginary amalgam of Mariner’s Tonga Islands and the paradisiacal Tahiti that had filtered down to European readers from travellers’ tales and fictional reworkings. Byron’s ‘song’ is a remnant of a past, happier time in the South Pacific, before the ‘fatal impact’ of European society on islanders: Thus rose a song – the harmony of times Before the winds blew Europe o’er these climes. (II.iv.65–6) Thus Eden’s second lapse occurred when European explorers brought the ‘sordor of civilization’ with them (II.iv.69). Byron’s ‘song’ is a product of his desire to locate a sanctuary for political and personal liberty away from the malign influence of civilization – a desire that Southey shared in his youth with his dreams of Pantisocracy – and which also inspired Byron’s Greek songs in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18) and Don Juan (1821).123 The idyll that Byron depicts (which owes much to Rousseau’s perspective on savage societies) is lamented as a world that has been lost through contact with Europe and can only be recaptured in a ‘song’ that locates it in a far-flung exotic location and an idealized past. Like Southey and Mitford, Byron created a utopian pastoral society in order to project his values. But Byron’s poem was politicized further by his support for Greek independence from Ottoman domination, as it was completed within a year of his joining the Greek militants in Missolonghi. Angus Calder has exposed the ideological purpose behind Byron’s amalgamation of Romantic savagery in the idyllic ‘Tonga songs’, his Scottish boyhood landscape and ancient Greece, thus incorporating these sites of resistance to dominant, imperial powers within his vision.124 Despite their differences, Byron and Southey both adopted foreign Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 151 01/06/2007 11:53:45 152 Writing the Empire cultures and landscapes to promote their own political ideologies, which were initially similar in seeking a geographical location for liberty, based on Rousseau’s philosophy. Southey however became an apostate in colonial as well as domestic politics, making the same ideological progression as his hero Madoc, from radical crusader to conservative imperialist. The major difference between the two writers is that Byron (in The Island, but also in Don Juan) used sexual freedom as a metaphor for political and social freedom – and as a stick to beat Southey with for his apostasy. For Southey, the libidinous lifestyle of the Polynesians (as he considered it) was a warning to his own society of the dangers of immorality to its infrastructure. Byron’s description of a harmonious South Pacific society was achieved by ignoring those elements in Mariner’s account that did not conform to his construction. The sensual, tranquil existence of the islanders is designed to contrast with the tempestuous, discontented relations between the mutineers and British authority. But Mariner’s account is dominated by descriptions of political intrigue, assassinations and constant warfare between the natives of the Tongan island group. By omitting these details – witnessed by a knowledgeable commentator who spent many years there, and who ‘evinced no disposition to overrate or to embellish what to him was neither strange nor new’125 – Byron deliberately contributes to a mythical European perception of these islands (as his literary predecessors, Diderot, Southey and Mitford did before him). Byron selects the most picturesque or Romantic aspects from Mariner’s ‘song’, such as the ‘charming young girls’ of ‘Licoo’.126 They are transformed into: Ye young enchantresses of gay Licoo! How lovely are your forms! how every sense Bows to your beaties, softened, but intense, Like to the flowers on Mataloco’s steep, Which fling their fragrance far athwart the deep: (II.iii.58–62) Byron makes much of the female beauty of the islanders. By likening them to flowers, with a pervasive ‘fragrance’ that spreads far from them, it appears as if a female sexual presence hangs over the islands. Like Bougainville’s account, ‘the very air’ does ‘conspire to call to mind the sweets of love’.127 Another part of Mariner’s account which is reworked in The Island is the tale of a beautiful young girl who is saved from death by her lover, a young chief, by being hidden for months in a submarine cave on the island of ‘Hoonga’. The story’s appeal was identified by Southey in 1817 when he reviewed Mariner’s Account for the Quarterly and predicted that ‘it will probably be sung in more than one European language, so beautifully is it adapted for a tale in verse’.128 Southey focused on the narrative because it exposed the evils of Polynesian soci- Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 152 01/06/2007 11:53:46 ‘Eden’s happy vale’ 153 ety and politics, which are shown to be triumphed over by moral strength and fidelity, in the traditional form of a love story. As such it conformed to a western epic tale along the lines of Southey’s own construction in Thalaba the Destroyer, where virtue is shown to overcome all obstacles. Byron, however, uses the material differently in The Island, making it a device whereby his mutinous hero, Torquil, is saved from recapture by a naval force from Britain by his female Tahitian lover. Neuha, though young, is portrayed as ‘Aphrodite’ (Venus) and at the height of her sexual maturity: A form like Aphrodite’s in her shell; With all her loves around her on the deep, Voluptuous as the first approach of sleep; Yet full of life – for through her tropic cheek The blush would make its way, and all but speak; The sun-born blood suffus’d her neck, and threw O’er her clear nut-brown skin a lucid hue, Like coral reddening through the darkened wave, Which draws the diver to the crimson cave. (II.vii.132–40) The ‘blush’, or flush of sexual awareness, makes its way over her skin, creating the heat of ‘sun-born blood’ throughout her body, and encouraging the ‘diver’ or explorative lover to discover the secrets of the ‘crimson cave’. However, previously Neuha has been described in terms of innocence. Eve-like, she is ‘The infant of an infant world, as pure / From Nature’ (II.vii.127–8). It seems that Byron, like Bougainville and Diderot, combines those aspects of female iconography that are valued in European culture, so finding a locus for ‘Venus’ and ‘Eve’ within the Tahitian woman. One of the reasons why Byron reworked Mariner’s account of a native love affair is because the romance for him, as for Mitford and James, is in the love between a native woman and a British man. In the presentation of these islands as Eden (where man does not even have to work to earn his daily bread), and where the female native figures as ‘Eve’, the logical literary extension is to place an ‘Adam’ in the ‘Garden’ with her. ‘Adam’ is not a native man but a British male seeking to live out his ‘natural’ desires, and return to a state of innocence. In their origins, therefore, these texts display (sometimes unconsciously) a discontent with their creator’s political and social environment. Romantic literature explores in fiction other possibilities for British society, even if this often ends conventionally in a reinforcement of just those values that their writers seemed opposed to. The British Torquil finds peace from the inner conflict that has beset him since the mutiny in Neuha’s innocent love: Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 153 01/06/2007 11:53:46 154 Writing the Empire No more the thundering memory of the fight Wrapped his weaned bosom in its dark delight; No more the irksome restlessness of Rest, Disturbed him like the eagle in her nest, Whose whetted beak and far-pervading eye Darts for a victim over all the sky; His heart was tamed to that voluptuous state, At once Elysian and effeminate, (II.xiii.306–13) In this ‘effeminate’ paradise, Torquil becomes a passive character like James’s Stewart in ‘The Otaheitean Mourner’. He surrenders his active masculine role, leaving the other mutineers to fight their last battle. Byron’s male heroes are not like Mitford’s or Southey’s authority figures, who are firmly in control of themselves and the native population. In a reversal of Mariner’s original story, where the resourceful chief saves his young lover, Neuha is given the operative role. The sexual freedom that Byron allocates to her in the relationship means that she becomes ‘an active autonomous being’, as Caroline Franklin points out.129 She leads Torquil to the cave: Young Neuha plunged into the deep, and he Followed: her track beneath her native sea Was as a native’s of the element, So smoothly, bravely, brilliantly she went (IV.vi.105–8) Her knowledge of the cave, lack of fear and her ability in the ‘element’ of her island home – the ocean that surrounds it – makes her supreme, and in control, in a way that the British sailors can never be. Neuha is ‘mistress’ of her environment, like Peggy in James’s poem – although neither woman is given a voice in either text and is only in control of a limited ‘playground’. Torquil is quiescent; he follows Neuha, is hidden and nourished by her and released when it is safe. As ‘Nature’s Goddess’ (a conflation of Eve and Venus), Neuha’s position of control parallels the sexual power she has over Torquil. She initiates him into the secrets of the concealed cave: And Neuha took her Torquil by the hand, And waved along the vault her kindled brand And led him into each recess, and showed The secret places of their new abode. (IV.viii.161–4) The metaphor of the ‘diver’ seeking the ‘crimson cave’, used to describe Neuha’s sexual readiness, parallels the events in the story, when the ‘diver’ is shown the secrets of this cave too. In the womb-like grotto, Neuha is the hierophant (and Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 154 01/06/2007 11:53:46 ‘Eden’s happy vale’ 155 goddess) at the altar of nature’s ‘chapel of the Seas’, so that Byron’s heroine is conflated into this feminized landscape (IV.vii.160). The couple’s love is sanctified under the quasi-religious ‘self-born Gothic canopy’ of the cave, where the ceremonial music is provided by the ocean, in a marriage made by nature, not the church and patriarchal society (IV.vii.146). Franklin considers that ‘it was a vision of how sex relationships could be different in a non-European cultural situation that inspired The Island and constitutes the real revolutionary agenda of the poem’.130 In a period of retrenched morality, governed by conservative representations of female behaviour in conduct literature, aspects of Byron’s poem are ‘revolutionary’. Neuha is unconstrained by society, authority or sexual mores, and so is as free in the Garden of Eden as the biblical Eve. And, like the first woman, she is the active partner in the relationship – here preserving her lover’s existence in the garden rather than initiating his expulsion. But in other ways it is still a conventional vision. While Neuha gives her love freely, she is protective and caring rather than independent. This is because she conforms to a patriarchal view of women as virtuous and faithful partners. She is more like James’s Peggy, Mitford’s Christina and Southey’s Oneiza than their obverse, the dangerously sexual Polynesian women reported by the missionaries. Byron’s text includes elements that would be approved of by Southey – the idealization of romantic love, the innocence of Neuha, and the monogamy of the central couple’s relationship. Byron may give his women sexual appetite but he conforms to similar British ideals in other respects. Byron’s reasons for fictionalizing the outcome of the mutiny have often been questioned, as the events were reported at various times in the British press.131 The mutineers did go to Tubuai (or ‘Toobonai’), but they left after failing to live in harmony with the natives there, eventually settling on the uninhabited Pitcairn Island. The fates of Christian (who died on Pitcairn) and George Stewart were reported in newspapers and journals before The Island was written, so it can only be concluded that Byron preferred to substitute the real ending for his own.132 His version of events is more romantic than the reality. Christian is a truly Byronic hero with a terrible secret that haunts him. In Bligh’s Narrative, when he reports questioning Christian as to his reasons for leading the mutiny, the only answer he receives is, ‘I am in Hell!’.133 These words are replicated in the poem and imaginatively interpreted, in order to depict Christian as a character, who ‘like Conrad or Alp … represents a quasi-heroic mentality torn by conflict between conscience and will’.134 When facing recapture, Byron’s Christian attempts a last stand on a cliff, preferring to dash himself on the rocks below rather than be taken back to British justice. Another departure from reality in The Island is that Torquil escapes due to Neuha’s efforts – instead of the couple suffering separation and death, as George Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 155 01/06/2007 11:53:46 156 Writing the Empire Stewart and his wife did. The importance of this central relationship to the text could well be the reason for it differing from the ‘official’ account. If Byron’s poem does constitute for him a vision of an ideal sexual relationship – and also a utopian fantasy of a new society beginning in a rediscovered paradise – then he may have been reluctant to sacrifice his idyll in the true ending of the story. Byron’s earlier depiction of ideal love in Canto II (1819) of Don Juan, between Haidee and his hero, had been killed off in Canto III (1821) when Juan was forced by Haidee’s father, Lambro, to leave their island and she dies of a broken heart. Instead of the ‘dead end’ of that story, where all hope for liberated love and sexual freedom in society is shown as unrealistic, in this rendition the couple’s union is an optimistic hope for a new society. Torquil and Neuha figure as the central ideal couple who salvage humanity from the wreck of the mutiny and will unite the best of both British and Tahitian cultures. When the British ship sent to capture the mutineers has left the island, and Torquil and Neuha emerge from their cave, the poem ends on hope for the future: Again their own shore rises on the view, No more polluted with a hostile hue; No sullen ship lay bristling o’er the foam, A floating dungeon: all was Hope and Home! A thousand proas darted o’er the bay, With sounding shells, and heralded their way; The Chiefs came down, around the People poured, And welcom’d Torquil as a son restored (IV.xv.401–8) The island belongs to the couple now, the shore is ‘their own’, retrieved from the influence of the British ship which ‘polluted’ it. Torquil returns to jubilation ‘as a son restored’ to the community. The couple’s reward is: A night succeeded by such happy days As only yet the infant world displays. (IV.xv.419–20) This is an ‘infant world’ because Byron posits it as the beginning of society, as the original Garden of Eden was. For him then the ‘best’ aspects of society – God’s race on earth, made in his own image – are united in the combination of native ‘Eve’ and British ‘Adam’, as in Mitford’s Christina, where hope for a better future resides in uniting the two races. This story was of course actually played out on Pitcairn and there has been an abiding interest ever since in the combination of cultures and the legacy for the children of the two races of that ‘infant’ society. So with regard to the specific area of gender politics, South Pacific texts can be seen as battlegrounds in the conflict over how women should be portrayed in the Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 156 01/06/2007 11:53:46 ‘Eden’s happy vale’ 157 literature of the period. At first sight the Byronic version of female sexuality, despite being also a construct (if not a fantasy), seems to give more agency to women than Mitford’s or Southey’s. But despite Neuha’s sexual autonomy, she speaks through her male creator, who envisions her as an ideal woman (symbolic of natural liberty in the New Cytherea), and she does not act outside the gender stereotype of a monogamous lover. The Island does not simply conform to Southey’s view of a ‘lascivious book’, but is more complex, incorporating aspects that uphold traditional moral values. Rather than having a ‘revolutionary agenda’, Byron uses his poem to preserve an Enlightenment idyll (founded on Rousseau’s and Diderot’s philosophies of ‘savage man’) that he found to be quickly vanishing from European literature. Because Byron creates a positive vision of island society and female sexuality – which opposes the more conventional one created by Southey and his missionary sources – he preserves for posterity the views of those explorers and settlers who looked at the South Pacific through Rousseau’s eyes. These dichotomized depictions of South Sea islanders would resurface throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – in texts such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s South Sea Tales (1889–90) – and are still present in the modern consciousness. But this analysis shows that they are in fact less opposed than might at first appear, intertwined as they are in all colonialist fantasies and centring on western models of romantic monogamous love. The Pelican Island Southey’s optimism for missionary activity and settlement in the territories of the ‘New World’ was shared by the evangelical poet and journalist James Montgomery (1771–1854). Indeed the latter regarded Madoc as ‘the noblest narrative Poem in the English language, after the Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost’.135 The marked similarities between the two former radicals – and the personal, political and religious sympathies generated by these – emerge very clearly in their correspondence, which lasted from 1811–30.136 Southey’s respect for Montgomery’s religious principles meant that his letters to him contained some of the fullest statements of his own beliefs.137 Presumably Montgomery’s ecumenical position enabled Southey to reveal the ‘Pilgrims Progress’ he had taken through his own life, from ‘lip-service’ at university, to ‘the Socinian scheme’ in Coleridge’s company and finally a return to the Anglican faith (with Quaker sympathies) of 1811, when they began corresponding.138 For Southey, many forms of religious conviction (excluding Catholicism) were preferable to none at all, as he found himself ‘shocked by the consequences of irreligion’ in all models of society, all over the world.139 Therefore, Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 157 01/06/2007 11:53:46 158 Writing the Empire while ridiculing the individual quirks and vanities (as he saw them) of the Baptists or the Methodists, he was prepared to turn a blind eye to them in order to encourage their missionary enterprises abroad. Montgomery’s commitment to spreading Christianity to the outposts of Britain’s colonial territories (as well as his Moravian Mission parentage) had led to him being dubbed the ‘Missionary poet’, and from the start Southey was quick to reassure him that he felt ‘as ardently as you do respecting the Missions’.140 Though Southey’s views on the missionary project were often more politically motivated – and more publicly broadcast through his journalism – than Montgomery’s, the latter too advocated further British expansion abroad as it would support the spread of Christian values, bringing progress and education in its wake. The British possession of India, for instance, meant that ‘a better day has dawned on that land of darkness’, breaking the ‘chain’ of ‘ignorance, debasement and superstition’.141 In support of these views, in 1827 Montgomery wrote a curious, lyrical long poem called The Pelican Island, which is most striking for the quasi-evolutionary theory of creation that it espouses. As such it echoes Erasmus Darwin’s poem The Economy of Vegetation (1791), which was also concerned with the theory of the formation of continents.142 The Pelican Island describes in epic form the evolution of a coral island; its population by plants, animals and humans until it forms a major continent. It is also concerned to show the progression of ‘savage’ man from a benighted state to enlightenment and Christianity. Pelican Island contributes to the genre that Southey began of long epics in foreign climes, versifying explorer’s accounts but also promoting the idea of Britain as a model of civilization to which the whole world should aspire. Montgomery was, like the previous writers I have discussed, influenced by reading accounts of South Pacific voyages and their descriptions of idyllic islands, so that his imaginary island too is ‘A world unsoil’d by sin; a Paradise’ (III.98).143 Despite the poem’s celebration of God’s handiwork, however, the less conventional deities of ‘Earth’ and ‘Nature’ are personified in the poem to conjure up a pleasant vision of the island’s ‘luxuriant foliage’ that conforms to contemporary representations of South Sea islands (III.118). When Montgomery’s newly-formed island is ravaged by a hurricane, it is ‘renovated’ by resourceful ‘Nature’, however the only members of its population that return are two pelicans – hence the poem’s title (IV.48). The pelican dynasty develops from its first parents: Love found that lonely couple on their isle, And soon surrounded them with blithe companions (IV.173–4) Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 158 01/06/2007 11:53:46 ‘Eden’s happy vale’ 159 After a time the island becomes populated by an ever-expanding community of pelicans: They bred, and rear’d their little families, As they were train’d and disciplined before. Thus wings were multiplied from year to year, And ere the patriarch-twain, in good old age, Resign’d their breath beside that ancient nest, In which themselves had nursed a hundred broods, The isle was peopled with their progeny. (IV.305–11) Montgomery ‘peoples’ his island with a race of ‘noble’ birds, as he refers to them, rather than human inhabitants (V.261). But due to the amount of space dedicated to describing the pelicans, and the human qualities he allocates to them, they are obviously meant to represent, or be compared to, human society: Nature’s prime favourites were the Pelicans; High-fed, long-lived, and sociable and free, They ranged in wedded pairs, or martial bands, For play or slaughter. (V.244–7) Fantastical as it may seem, Rousseau’s ‘noble savages’ have been transformed into pelicans. This was because the idea of an innocent ‘natural’ humanity obviously appealed to Montgomery, but to depict his native races in such a way would have tied him into idealized Enlightenment thought, rather than Calvinist belief in man’s sinfulness and crime. In portraying humans as ‘noble’, his agenda for bringing morality and Christianity to the ‘New World’ would have been restricted, with no agency left for the missionary impetus that he advocated. Oddly enough therefore, the repository for ‘noble’ (human) values that Montgomery proposed instead was the pelican.144 However, that he intended his poem to be taken seriously can be divulged from the Miltonic solemnity of tone that he adopts for his heavenly narrator. It is also evident in the enormity of the subject-matter, which only brushes on pelicans incidentally, in order to hit the greater target of human behaviour. And when comparing the positive attributes of Montgomery’s pelicans to the brutish humans he depicts, it is possible to see why he distinguishes between them in this way. Montgomery is anxious to show that humans have lost all their noble qualities, having sunk to the level of beasts, while the pelicans emerge more favourably: Man’s history, in that region of oblivion, Might be recorded in a page as small As the brief legend of those Pelicans, Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 159 01/06/2007 11:53:46 160 Writing the Empire With one apalling, one sublime distinction, (Sublime with horror, with despair appalling,) – That Pelicans were not transgressors (VIII.160–5) When Montgomery does eventually populate the island with humans it has evolved to become an archipelago and his description of it conforms to a European vision of paradise: … gardens redolent with flowers, And orchards bending with Hesperian fruit, That realized the dreams of olden time. (V.41–3) Finally the island group spreads to become a continent and Montgomery’s aerial narrator ranges across the whole world, looking at human examples from a heavenly perspective. Moving east he encounters prelapsarian Adam: Amidst the crowd of grovelling animals, A being more majestic stood before me; I met an eye that look’d into my soul, And seem’d to penetrate mine inmost thoughts. (VI.181–4) However due to the biblical fall from grace, the next time he encounters humanity, it is a very different figure he meets – an irredeemable ‘Caliban’: I saw him sunk in loathsome degradation, A naked, fierce, ungovernable savage, Companion to the brutes, himself more brutal; (VI.249–51) God’s curse that Adam must toil for his bread, which became a focus for debate in South Pacific texts, is also mentioned here, but for Montgomery the ‘curse’ is not that man must work for his ‘bread’ but rather that he does not need to: That curse was here, without the mitigation Of healthful toil, that half redeems the ground Whence man was taken, whither he returns, And which repays him bread for patient labour, – Labour, the symbol of his punishment, – Labour, the secret of his happiness. (VI.256–61) In Montgomery’s Christian philosophy, work is the source of man’s redemption. Without ‘labour’ native populations are not noble inhabitants of Eden but Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 160 01/06/2007 11:53:46 ‘Eden’s happy vale’ 161 degenerated versions of humanity, feeding off the land like beasts, ‘Fed without care or forethought, like the swine / That grubb’d the turf ’ (VI.274–5). Here Montgomery is responding to the eighteenth-century travel narratives that had been so keen to emphasize the natural luxuriance of South Pacific islands, where food grew naturally without the necessity for agriculture. The implication of such reports was the (European) interpretation that if ‘bread itself is gathered as a fruit’, the islanders were therefore exempt from the biblical curse that they should work to earn their food.145 Joseph Banks emphasized this point in his account of Cook’s first voyage to Tahiti (1768–71): These happy people may almost be said to be exempt from the curse of our forefather; scarcely can it be said that they earn their bread with the sweat of their brow when their chiefest sustenance Bread fruit is procurd with no more trouble than that of climbing a tree and pulling it down.146 Such comments had of course influenced the European imagination to find an Eden in the South Seas, an idea which Southey also had to overturn in order to justify the missionary project. He too reinterprets Adam’s curse for his Quarterly readers: That which was supposed to be their blessing has been their curse; it is in their exemption from labour that the efficient cause of this unparalleled wickedness is to be found. When the Creator decreed that in the seat of his brow man must eat bread, the punishment became a blessing; a divine ordinance necessary for the health of soul as well as body while man continues to the imperfect being that we behold him.147 Southey’s answer to the ‘utter depravity’ of the Polynesians is his belief in the moral value of work, which drives civilized societies and edifies the body and soul of men.148 Montgomery, like Southey in his journalism, gives much space to negative descriptions of the ‘unparalleled wickedness’ of the natives. And because in his poem he conflates island and continent into one, there is also a compression of ideas relating to the natives he describes, so that the reader is never sure whether he is discussing Polynesian, Australian, Indian, African or North American races. As such he follows in the footsteps of Rousseau and Southey, by producing a homogenous species of ‘savage’ men. Montgomery’s unidentified natives represent all the native communities of the ‘New World’ in their ‘ignoble’ nature: Large was their stature, and their frames athletic; Their skins were dark, their locks like eagles’ feathers; Their features terrible; – when roused to wrath, All evil passions lighten’d through their eyes, Convulsed their bosoms like possessing fiends; (VI.301–5) Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 161 01/06/2007 11:53:46 162 Writing the Empire Interestingly, Montgomery imports some of the positive attributes of Rousseau’s ‘savages’ into his description, in the strong physical stature he apportions them. But his motives for doing so are different as he intends to exaggerate the terrifying strength they have at their disposal in the exercise of their ‘evil passions’. Montgomery’s depictions display even more than Southey’s the Hobbesian tenet that life in a state of nature is ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short’.149 They are shown as ferocious, treacherous, aggressive cannibals, who, governed by ‘The pride of tyranny and violence,’ oppress the ‘weak and innocent’ of their tribe (VI.380, 388). One of their worst crimes is in their treatment of women: Woman was here the powerless slave of man; Thus fallen Adam tramples fallen Eve, Through all the generations of his sons, In whose barbarian veins the old serpent’s venom Turns pure affection into hideous lust (VI.438–42) Here ‘savage’ men are more culpable of ‘hideous lust’ than women. The female natives Montgomery portrays are not the sexually active Polynesian stereotypes of the works of Bougainville, Diderot and Byron. They conform instead to the sentimental, idealized vision of ‘woman’ as native man’s ‘meek companion’ (VI.444). Through her virtuous nature and ‘self-denial’ the male will be lifted out of his denigrated state as a ‘sordid, selfish savage’ (VI.493–4). So in a glorification of female values, Montgomery allocates women the power to redeem men by the influence of their virtuous lives. This strand of female representation belongs to the sentimentalized literature that Mitford adopted and Southey applauded. Montgomery’s call for missionary influence on ‘savage’ man is justified by the ignorance they display of their own spiritual nature: Oh! ’twas heart-sickness to behold them thus Perishing without knowledge; – perishing, As though they were but things of dust and ashes. They lived unconscious of their noblest powers, (VII.118–21) At last, however, the narrating ‘spirit’ meets a chieftain who appears to have more nobility and intelligence than the rest of mankind. The chieftain is looking for some spiritual quality in his life and on being shown evidence of God’s existence he weeps for joy. Though the old man dies he passes on the spiritual lesson to his grandson, who ‘lived to see / The Patriarch’s prayer and prophecy fulfill’d’ (IX.410–11). The poem’s message of evangelical hope is invested in this final figure of Christian patriarchal authority and his grandson, who, in promoting Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 162 01/06/2007 11:53:47 ‘Eden’s happy vale’ 163 his spiritual teachings, will transform humanity. Thereby Montgomery depicts not simply a process of physical evolution, but a spiritual one: Changes more wonderful than those gone by, More beautiful, transporting, and sublime, To all the frail affections of our nature, To all the immortal faculties of man; Such changes did I witness; not alone In one poor Pelican Island, nor on one Barbarian continent, where man himself Could scarcely soar above the Pelican: (IX.422–9) Conclusions By showing how humans learnt to ‘soar above the Pelican’, Montgomery’s poem depicts a narrative of ‘savage’ man’s spiritual redemption. With Christianity also comes civilized values. This fictional progression parallels Southey’s view of Polynesian enlightenment and the benefits of civilization to the South Pacific islands. In 1830, Southey ‘revisited’ Polynesia in his review of William Ellis’s Polynesian Researches (1829) for the Quarterly Review.150 Southey’s earlier reviews of such texts had shown that, while he was convinced of the efficacy of missionary influence in these islands, he had his doubts about the abilities of the first missionaries, regretting ‘that their zeal has not been accompanied with more knowledge, or directed with more wisdom’.151 The Tahitian mission had been forced to leave the island in 1809 due to internecine war there, but had returned to the Society Islands two years later, settling on the island of Eimeo (also known as York Island, now Moorea) with the Tahitian ‘king’ Pomare. The 1830 review now relates the success of the missionary programme in a triumphant tone, ‘We have nowhere so full and satisfactory an account of any national transition from paganism to Christianity, as in the case of these islands’.152 Pomare’s conversion to Christianity is eased by the death of his wife, who conforms to Southey’s view of Polynesian women in being ‘addicted to all the vices of her country’, including infanticide.153 Pomare’s fervent desire to convert the rest of his people to Christianity is therefore unhampered by her corrupting influence. His crusading religious enthusiasm – supported by the missionaries – spreads to other nearby islands, colonizing them for himself and Christ. Southey’s report of events depicts an uneasy relationship between politics and religion as Pomare’s forces (sanctioned and supplied by the missionaries) invade Tahiti and attack the ‘idolaters’ there. A prolonged battle ensues until the missionaries report that ‘Pomare was now, by the unanimous consent of Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 163 01/06/2007 11:53:47 164 Writing the Empire all, reinstated in the supreme authority’.154 Other islands such as Huahine and Tubuai also adopt Pomare’s Christian laws and his rule. According to Southey’s review, the programme of education and Christian instruction (and construction of ‘the cathedral of Tahiti’) brings peace, religion and progress to the island of Tahiti.155 The development of the Polynesian missions that are delineated in Southey’s article provide an important example of how local politics could be employed to further the Christian religion. Southey finds no contradiction in the missionaries’ political opportunism, advocating that they should ‘procure for their church the best human security that can be obtained, by connecting it with the state’.156 Whereas in The Pelican Island Montgomery envisages a Christian Empire, rather than a British one – in which the civilization of natives is a shoring-up process in the wake of evangelical Christianity – Southey is more interested in ‘whether the missionaries have proceeded as wisely and as unexceptionally in the civil as in the religious part of their ministry’.157 Bringing (British) civilization to the islands is still Southey’s priority. He approves the fact that the Tahitians are prevailed upon to build houses, adopt western dress and farm their land. He is also concerned to relate the political development of the island and its governance by civil laws punishing adultery, infanticide, abortion and murder. Infanticide and abortion in particular were for Southey the most extreme examples of female iniquity, which he identifies in his reviews as the logical extension of their promiscuity. With laws constraining these actions female behaviour is brought under control. Also important to Southey is the introduction of property laws – gone are his Pantisocratic days when he advocated the egalitarian ideal of ‘aspheterism’ – and a representative government for the islands. Southey is still projecting his vision of an ideal society on other nations, however now this vision is very far from his youthful enthusiasm for Rousseau’s ‘savage’ model and is much more closely linked to the example that Britain offers. The Society Islands can successfully ‘import’ the efficacious models of British society and government by following the example of its laws and constitution, and by disseminating learning and literacy to the Polynesians from that cultural centre. That the Tahitians recognize the beneficial effects of these structures is evident for Southey in reporting their ‘frequent exclamation’ of ‘O Britain, land of knowledge!’.158 By tracing the transition in Southey’s writings from his early idealism to his mature views on colonialism, it is possible to see the impact he had on other writers of the Romantic period. He influenced James, Mitford and Montgomery – as a reviewer and a poet – by putting the South Seas on the imaginative stage and creating a fictional discourse whereby Britons could define their imperialist ideology. As an authoritative figure during the Romantic period and beyond Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 164 01/06/2007 11:53:47 ‘Eden’s happy vale’ 165 – in his role as Poet Laureate, ‘man of letters’ and social commentator – it was precisely Southey’s perceived power in this capacity that made Byron so keen to challenge his supremacy in his own poetry. Southey was crucial in transforming the imaginative strain of Rousseau’s Enlightenment thought – with its more sympathetic approach towards female members of society and the native populations of the ‘New World’ – into a literature and politics dominated by white, male, patriarchal society. However because Southey was a radical as well as a reactionary during his lifetime, there are still important complexities and ambiguities in these versions of the South Seas that display anxiety about the dominance of such values. Similarly Byron’s oppositional construction is undermined by his conformity to the values of the patriarchal society to which he belonged. Such tensions in the texts highlight the tentative colonial and gender politics of the Romantic period – a watershed in British history before a more restrictive moral code and structured imperialism took its place. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 165 01/06/2007 11:53:47 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 166 01/06/2007 11:53:47 4 THALABA THE DESTROYER: SOUTHEY’S ‘A RABIAN ROMANCE’ The publication of Thalaba the Destroyer in 1801 marked a shift in Southey’s career as a writer. The poem was his initial attempt in an ambitious project to depict all the mythologies of the world in epic form.1 Moreover, it provided evidence of Southey’s growing political orthodoxy. By the late 1790s much of his youthful radical fervour was evaporating. His first visit to Portugal (1795–6) had engendered a violent hatred of (what he perceived to be) the religious despotism of Roman Catholicism in that country and laid the foundations for his later conservatism. By 1801 he was of the opinion that the English constitutional monarchy and the Anglican Church were superior to other models of polity and religion abroad. Even the ideals of the French Revolution, which he had particularly admired in his youth, he felt were unravelling into corruption and tyranny. This was a transitional period for Southey in which he had not totally abandoned his earlier radicalism, but he could observe that his former political hot-headedness was being replaced by a ‘sombre assumption of gravity’.2 Letters written while Thalaba was being composed show him to have been hovering between two positions. On the one hand he was critical of British policy with regard to France, and supportive of Bonaparte: ‘I do not hesitate in pronouncing him the greatest man that events have called into action since Alexander of Macedon’.3 On the other hand he considered – on his second visit to Portugal, in 1800–1, where he finished Thalaba – that being abroad, ‘makes an Englishman proud, and [you] will easily conceive that I am all Anglicized already’.4 Thalaba was still informed by Southey’s quest for political enlightenment and a way for society to progress, but his poem came into existence on the cusp of his changing views. This chapter argues that Southey’s more conservative approach to the values of his own culture (which he was at odds with for so long) was formed by his responses to the orientalist material of his poem (which in turn were a reaction to the foreign ‘other’ that he found in Portugal). Having more empathy now with British politics and religion, his investigation of other cultures as material for Thalaba only reinforced these views. In fact the abatement of Southey’s radicalism during this period relates directly to his research into the – 167 – Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 167 01/06/2007 11:53:47 168 Writing the Empire customs and religious practices of other cultures for Thalaba and Madoc, thus showing how his conservatism, and his later overt nationalism, was developed through these ethnological explorations. Always repressing English mythological and historical themes, Southey preferred to choose aspects of other cultures and countries as the setting for his imperialist epics, often employing this foreign material to make an unfavourable comparison with what he considered to be the more worthy values of his own, British, society. I will therefore examine Thalaba the Destroyer within the context of other orientalist texts, in order to reveal the ways in which it conforms to, but also reacts against, this strand of literature to which it contributes. This will highlight the paradoxical relationship that Southey had with his oriental material, valuing the information it contained for his own ‘Arabian romance’, but more often than not denigrating the beliefs and customs contained within as they compared unfavourably, in his eyes, to western examples.5 Even a brief description of the plot of Thalaba reveals the paradoxical elements of the poem. It is the story of a young Arabian man’s quest to find the murderer of his family and avenge their deaths. This entails Southey’s hero renouncing human love until his quest ends and he is united in heaven with the object of his love, Oneiza. Thalaba has many trials to go through in the meantime against forces of evil in the form of wicked sorcerers, who from their subterranean stronghold attempt to abrogate God’s power. Thalaba is not simply constructed as a personal revenge plot, because the retribution the hero seeks is divinely inspired and predetermined by God. As Southey noted, ‘It must be remembered that the most absolute fatalism is the main-spring of Mohammed’s religion, and therefore the principle is always referred to in the poem’.6 Nevertheless, as I will show, the poem contains many conventional Christian aspects, as Southey combined his knowledge of Islam with his own religious precepts to construct an orientalist fantasy, rather than provide a realistic reflection of the Islamic faith or Arabian life. Thalaba is therefore a curious mixture of his responses to Islam, a Christian quest, and an oriental tale of tyranny and magic (such as the Arabian Nights and William Beckford’s Vathek). This conglomeration forms a text that comments on the oriental world in order to define Southey’s own principles – which he increasingly considered to be ‘British’ values. So, if Thalaba breaks away from Southey’s earlier, more radical works (such as Wat Tyler and Joan of Arc) because of his increasingly ambiguous political allegiances, what were its creative sources and influences? An embryonic form of Thalaba is mentioned as early as July 1796 in Southey’s plan to write ‘My Oriental poem of The Destruction of the Dom Daniel’.7 At the beginning of 1797 Southey went to London to begin the studies that his patron Charles Wynn hoped would lead to a legal career.8 Reading law books in the daytime and writing Madoc at night meant that by 1799 the projected poem on the ‘Dom Daniel’ Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 168 01/06/2007 11:53:47 Thalaba the Destroyer 169 was still one of his ‘unborn family’.9 However, after finishing Madoc later that year, he announced that his ‘brain [was] now ready to receive the Dom Daniel, the next labour in succession. Of the metre of this poem I have thought much, and my final resolution is to write it irregularly, without rhymes’.10 A major influence on the form and content of the poem was Frank Sayers, whose use of unrhymed, irregular verse and mythological subject matter in the Dramatic Sketches of the Ancient Northern Mythology (1790) had made Southey long to produce his own ‘mythopoesis’.11 In addition, Southey’s comparativist interest in world cultures had been stimulated by Bernard Picart’s The Ceremonies and Religious Customs of the Various Nations of the Known World (1733–9). In order to create Thalaba, Southey read poetry, travel accounts and ethnological descriptions of the Middle East and Africa, and by incorporating these texts in his writing his narrative poem became a synthesis of them all.12 Other sources for Thalaba were popular literary representations of the Orient, such as the Arabian Nights Entertainments, made available via Antoine Galland’s translation Les Mille et Une Nuits (1707–14). Southey had loved these stories since his youth, and their depiction of the intervention of magical ‘machinery’ in the human world was to find a place in Thalaba. His poem was also influenced by the Arabian Tales; or, A Continuation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments (1788–99) as Southey explained in the preface to the fourth edition: In the continuation of the Arabian Tales, the Domdaniel is mentioned; a seminary for evil magicians, under the roots of the sea. From this seed the present romance has grown.13 The Arabian Tales were an orientalist confection that were purported to be translations from the Arabic by Dom Chavis and M. Cazotte. One tale is devoted to Maugraby, a magician whose evil operations emanate from: the formidable Dom-Daniel of Tunis, that school of magic, whose rulers tyrannise over all the wicked spirits that desolate the earth, and which is the den where those monsters are engendered that have over-run the country of Africa.14 If the notion of the ‘Dom-Daniel’ (the ‘seed’ for Thalaba) particularly resonated with Southey, so too did the idea of oriental magic. Indeed, his desire to use magic as a means of commenting on the nature of tyranny, evil and love in an unfamiliar oriental landscape of exotic excess owed much to William Beckford’s Vathek (1786). It was a debt that Southey was willing to acknowledge, observing that Thalaba ‘compares more fairly with “Vathek” than with any existing work, and I think may stand by its side for invention’.15 Two further creative progenitors particularly influenced the design of Southey’s ‘Arabian tale’, the first of which was Walter Savage Landor’s Gebir (1798). Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 169 01/06/2007 11:53:47 Writing the Empire 170 Gebir Over the summer of 1799 Southey read and reviewed Landor’s poem for the Critical Review.16 In his opinion it contained ‘some of the most exquisite poetry in the language’.17 It also impacted on his own writing, as he later explained: Gebir is the only contemporary poem to which I am, as a poet, in the slightest degree indebted, and it was certainly from Gebir that I learnt ever to have my eye awake – to bring images to sight, and to convey a picture in a word. I know no poem from which I have ever derived so much improvement.18 Landor’s poem describes the invasion of Egypt by an Iberian prince, who then falls in love with the Egyptian queen, Charoba. The poem subscribes to a generalized, picturesque orientalism that is loosely linked to its ‘Egyptian’ landscape through objects of local colour (such as crocodiles), references to the Nile and descriptions of the architectural remnants of ancient civilizations. A second strand of the story is strangely at odds with the ‘Egyptian’ setting, having a classical, pastoral element, in which Gebir’s brother Tamar, a shepherd, falls in love with ‘a nymph divine’.19 This combination of different literary traditions and disparate geographical locations is not unusual in orientalist texts and Southey replicates Landor’s method of hybridization in his own poem. The aspects of Gebir that Southey valued can be identified from his review – the exotic love story, the descriptions of ancient ruined cities (and their rebuilding), and a journey to the underworld to view the consequences of oriental tyranny, where: Here are discover’d those who tortured law To silence or to speech as pleased themselves; Here also those who boasted of the zeal, And lov’d their country for the spoils it gave.20 The selections Southey made for his review provide a potted discussion of imperialism, incorporating sovereign authority and responsibility, topics that he was also concerned to discuss in Thalaba. A further passage Southey selects is one describing the occult, partisan actions of the witch-like Dalica, which result in Gebir’s death on his wedding day. In this way Gebir’s imperial and amorous aspirations end before the Iberian and Egyptian nations can be united. The fact that Gebir’s father (whom he meets in Hell) comes to reject the project he initiated of invading Egypt – combined with Gebir’s death on the point of victory – has contributed to the poem being read as ‘an anti-colonialist fable’ by Marilyn Butler.21 But the poem’s message is ambiguous, because Landor also commends Napoleon – ‘A mortal man above all mortal praise’22 – who was at this time ‘sweeping through northern Italy’ and went on to invade Egypt in the same year that Gebir was published.23 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 170 01/06/2007 11:53:47 Thalaba the Destroyer 171 Southey was impressed with Gebir because Landor employed a similar political, as well as poetical, agenda to his own. For both writers the occult was a central theme, with the Orient portrayed as ‘a land / Of incantation’.24 Southey was also to include the story of the destruction of an ancient civilization in Thalaba (the ‘Adites’ – in Gebir, the ‘Gadites’), as well as portraying ruined cities in his hero’s wanderings. The antique, ruinous landscapes of both poems serve to remind readers of the vanity and frailty of their present concerns.25 Southey, like Landor, comments on tyrannical pride and imperial rule, and Thalaba also visits the underworld – which as in Gebir underpins the narrative of events on earth. Finally Landor displays the same ambivalence to imperial politics as Southey and many other ‘Jacobins’, in celebrating Napoleon’s achievements while rejecting imperialist strategies. Both men used the Orient as an imaginative space in which to discuss contemporary European politics – detached from criticism or censorship – and comment on political and (in Southey’s case) social morality. The major difference between the two texts is that, while Landor’s poem is set in a pre-Christian and pre-Islamic time and not framed by any recognizable religious system, Southey made Islam a central theme of Thalaba. The reasons for this can be found in a further influence on his poem, which originated from Southey’s renewed friendship with Coleridge. ‘Mohammed’ Southey and Coleridge spent August and September 1799 touring the west of England. Their reconciliation was marked by a return to collaboration, as once more they attempted to write ‘at the same table’, producing a satirical ballad, ‘The Devil’s Thoughts’, and a plan for a poem on the life of Mohammed.26 Southey’s interest in Islam was fuelled by his reading of George Sale’s Koran (1734). As he explained, ‘I am most engaged by the Koran: it is dull and full of repetitions, but there is an interesting simplicity in the tenets it inculcates’.27 It was that perceived ‘simplicity’ – the rudimentary principle that all things are achievable by submitting to the will of God – that Southey later attempted to communicate through Thalaba. Southey originally intended to use his Koranic researches in ‘Mohammed’, but the collaboration was abandoned, leaving only a fragment that was published much later (as was a separate and quite different section by Coleridge entitled ‘Mahomet’).28 The four extant pages of ‘Mohammed’ follow very closely the details of the prophet’s life given by Sale in ‘A Preliminary Discourse’ to his translation of the Koran.29 For instance Sale includes an account of Mohammed’s escape from the ‘Koreish’ (more properly Quraysh – the Arab tribe to which Mohammed belonged), who reject his teachings and attempt to kill him. In both Sale’s account and Southey’s poem, Mohammed is saved by his cousin Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 171 01/06/2007 11:53:47 Writing the Empire 172 Ali, who masquerades as him in his room until morning, when his assassins break down the door and find they have been tricked. Meanwhile Mohammed has escaped from his persecutors by concealing himself in a cave, where a pigeon (two in Sale’s version) and a spider are instrumental in saving his life. In following Sale’s account so closely in his own poem, Southey obviously approved of the orientalist’s ethnological intent to make the ‘law of Mohammed’ more accessible to European readers.30 And it was this same desire that led him to attempt his own poetic biography. However the problems that he had in writing ‘Mohammed’ – and which led him to abandon it – also haunt the ‘Arabian romance’ that he was writing at the same time. These problems can be seen by examining Southey’s responses to the Koran. Sale’s translation reveals a guiding principle of Enlightenment relativism, that to be ‘acquainted with the various laws and constitutions of civilized nations, especially of those who flourish in our own time, is, perhaps the most useful part of knowledge’.31 In fact, according to Mohammed Sharafuddin: So striking was his knowledge of and identification with Islam, in an age of dogma and prejudice, that he was known in some conservative circles by the title ‘half-Mussulman’ for his positive view of the Koran.32 Where Southey would find the Koran full of ‘dull tautology’,33 Sale was enthusiastic, finding the style in which it was written to be ‘generally beautiful and fluent’, with parts of it even ‘sublime and magnificent’.34 Nevertheless, Sale was writing from a Christian tradition that, as Edward Said has pointed out, had constructed Mohammed as a fraudulent ‘other’ for Jesus Christ, the inspired prophet of its own belief system.35 The stumbling block Sale had with the Koran (and which he shared with other western commentators) was the belief of the Islamic faithful that it constituted the word of God, transmitted through his mouthpiece, the divinely inspired Mohammed. Sale often terms this a ‘pretence’ in his ‘Preliminary Discourse’.36 This leads to an ambiguity in his presentation of the Koran to the British public. While he argues for the study of Islam and criticizes those who are hostile without knowledge of it, he cannot prevent his text being imbued with western scepticism. This ambivalence may have been due to nervousness about the reception of his work because: The remembrance of the Calamities brought on so many nations by the conquests of the Arabians, may possibly raise some indignation against him who formed them to empire37 But a more likely reason is that the ‘detestation with which the name of Mohammed is loaded’ is due to his ‘imposture’, perceived by Christians as the act of ‘a most abandoned villain’.38 Nevertheless Sale feels that ‘Mohammed gave his Arabs the best religion he could, as well as the best laws’ and so deserves ‘equal Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 172 01/06/2007 11:53:48 Thalaba the Destroyer 173 respect’ with other prophets, ‘tho’ not with Moses or Jesus Christ, whose laws came really from heaven’.39 He falls short of attributing the same importance and validity to Islam as he does to Christianity because for many of his readers the latter is the only true revelation. While Sale might have intended his translation to be a positive attempt to present the Koran dispassionately to a critical public, there are other reasons why he can be considered an unwittingly equivocal commentator on the Koran. As Sharafuddin states: Sale’s major innovation, the importance of which cannot be exaggerated, was his readiness to depend on the famous Muslim exegetists of the Koran – such as Beidawi and Zamakshari; and on fundamental controversies he insisted on quoting Islamic rather than western authorities.40 While such scholarly detachment can be applauded, it also means that, for good or ill, Sale made little personal investment in the text (unlike biblical exegetists in Hebrew and Greek translations) except in his precursory essay. And in this discussion, as has been shown, he detached himself further from his text by presenting a familiar version of Mohammed as a false prophet to his western readers. Sale’s approach to the Koran was one that Southey inherited. He too had a comparativist interest in other cultures and religions and also questioned the prophet’s motives: What was Mohammed? self-deceived, or knowingly a deceiver? If an enthusiast, the question again recurs, wherein does real inspiration differ from mistaken?41 This problem could not be resolved and in Thalaba, therefore, Southey does not distinguish between real or misguided faith in order to justify his hero’s beliefs, as he felt he would have had to do in ‘Mohammed’. Because Thalaba is a fictional character, with no Islamic precedent, Southey could avoid proving the verity of his beliefs. Instead he simply relied on the dramatic effects of that intuitive faith. Southey’s poem becomes a Protestant epic (such as Spenser’s Faerie Queene) as much by this omission of stated religious tenets – and therefore the authorial assumption of a shared belief system with his readership – as anything else. There was to be a further complication with using the Islamic prophet as the hero of a poem: But of Mohammed, there is one fact which in my judgement stamps the imposter – he made too free with the wife of Zeid, and very speedily had a verse of the Koran revealed to allow him to marry her. The vice may be attributed to his country and constitution; but the dispensation was the work of a scoundrel imposing upon fools.42 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 173 01/06/2007 11:53:48 Writing the Empire 174 The fact that Mohammed committed adultery with another man’s wife and then licensed his act in the Koran was outrageous to Southey. He saw sexual desire as part of that ‘vice’ particularly endemic to such a ‘country and constitution’, whereas Sale was much more forgiving of what his own culture considered to be eastern sexual anomalies. For instance Sale states of polygamy – another practice attributed to Mohammed – that though it was: forbidden by the Christian religion, was in Mohammed’s time frequently practised in Arabia and other parts of the east and was not counted an immorality, nor was a man the worse esteemed on that account.43 For Sale, Mohammed should only be judged in terms of his own society’s cultural mores. But for Southey, even if Mohammed’s act in taking another man’s wife could be (reluctantly) understood in terms of racial or cultural difference, nevertheless his position as a religious leader should have placed him above secular, physical desire. Southey does two things here, firstly he treats lechery as an Arabian vice and secondly he overlays the morality of his own culture and religion (as he did with Polynesia) onto Islam. In writing ‘Mohammed’ Southey faced the problem of the gap between the poetic sincerity he needed to invest in his text and his source material. Such a poem would make Islam the central belief system in his project as well as holding the prophet up as a hero, in spite of his having been, in Southey’s eyes, an immoral imposter.44 As Bernhardt-Kabisch points out, the project was abandoned because Southey ‘could not suspend his disbelief sufficiently to create Mohammed as the hero of a serious work’.45 Unable to empathize with the figurehead of another faith and an alien culture, Southey transferred all his research on the Koran and Arabian society into Thalaba – leaving him free to explore Islamic belief, but also to syncretize it with what he valued from the Protestant religion. Southey therefore overlaid his reading of European commentaries on Arabian life with his own version of a spiritual quest, featuring a pious hero who could never be considered an imposter, and who is virtuous to the point of prudishness. That Thalaba owed as much to his Christian beliefs and morality as his oriental source material was not strange or indefensible for Southey. Southey’s ‘patchwork’ In writing Thalaba, Southey was, like William Beckford (and Samuel Henley) in Vathek, modernizing the established genre of oriental tales by effectively incorporating two ‘texts’ within a single framework.46 Thalaba’s obvious ‘text’ is the long narrative poem, providing an eastern fantasy story, which could still exist without annotation, in an unanchored, ahistorical and geographically unspecific location – as did the first edition of Gebir, which was produced without Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 174 01/06/2007 11:53:48 Thalaba the Destroyer 175 any accompanying notes.47 In fact versions of Thalaba existed like this in later nineteenth- and twentieth-century editions, when the notes were often excised altogether.48 The second ‘text’ is formed by Southey’s impulse as a cultural historian to append footnotes to his poem (as with his other long narrative poems), providing a synthesis of all his reading on the subject. The notes therefore comprise a general survey (or ‘history’, in the looser, eighteenth-century meaning of the term) of the customs, religious practices, climate, geography, history and natural history of the modern Arabs – limited only by their relevance to the poem. Arguably, the factual information of the notes was made more accessible and digestible for a general European readership when presented in this way, promoting knowledge of other cultures. But rather than being enriched by this process Thalaba became more problematic because Southey, a keen and able history writer, tried to combine the two genres within one publication.49 Therefore Southey made the loose associations within his fictional text fit his ‘factual’ material, or, what is more likely, fictionalized in his poem his documentary accounts – admittedly constructions themselves – in a ‘method of writing his poems to fit his footnotes’.50 Francis Jeffrey, in his article on Thalaba for the Edinburgh Review of 1802, commented on the poem’s ‘patchwork’ nature, noting: The author has set out with the resolution to make an oriental story, and a determination to find the materials of it in the books to which he had access. Every incident, therefore, and description, – every superstitious usage, or singular tradition, that appeared to him susceptible of poetical embellishment, or capable of picturesque representation, he has set down for this purpose, and adopted such a fable and plan of composition, as might enable him to work up all his materials, and interweave every one of his quotations, without any extraordinary violation of unity or order. When he had filled his commonplace book, he began to write; and his poem is little else than his commonplace book versified.51 While Southey could be admired for making his oriental fantasy more realistic and accessible to his reading public, in fact he was more culpable of making sweeping assertions, or imprecise associations, between fictional events and documented social and religious practices. Moreover Southey’s universalist approach often elided specific differences, producing one homogenous vision that combined pre-Islamic and Islamic religious beliefs, ancient and modern social practices and ignored geographical and historical disparities. His fiction is given the credence of fact by ‘cherry-picking’ from his sources those elements that he found interesting or peculiar, or that fitted his own moral code. As William Haller says of Southey’s motives, ‘All his reading was done … not to enlarge his own spirit, but merely to confirm his preconceptions about life, and to condemn what disagreed with them’.52 One of the most obvious manifestations of this is the way in which Southey chooses the Islamic faith and Arabian culture Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 175 01/06/2007 11:53:48 Writing the Empire 176 as the central theme of his story and then denigrates his subject matter at every opportunity in his notes. Southey’s awareness of his moral responsibility to his readers made him reluctant to unwittingly seduce them into an unmediated appreciation of the positive aspects of an alien culture. His notes therefore counterbalance the stimulating visions of his poem. Nigel Leask comments on the ‘poetic affect; namely, the actual discrepancy, rather than desired unity, between poetic text and annotation’ in Thalaba.53 Comparing eighteenth-century panoramic images to the exotic poetry of Southey and Thomas Moore, he notes that: the absorptive pull of the exotic visual image or allusion … is constantly checked and qualified by a globalizing, descriptive discourse which draws the viewer/reader away from dangerous proximity to the image, in order to inscribe him/her in a position of epistemological power; nothing other than the commanding vision of imperialist objectivity.54 Certainly from a presentational aspect, the first edition of Southey’s poem was continually ‘checked and qualified’ by his notes; as he recognized himself, ‘There is an unpleasant effect by the manner of placing the notes; for many pages have only a line of text, and so the eye runs faster than the fingers can turn them over’.55 Thereby the ‘eye’ that desires to enjoy the ‘exotic visual image’ of Southey’s ‘Arabian romance’ is restrained by the ‘imperialist objectivity’ of the notes. I will consider these issues by examining the opening book of Thalaba in order to discover his motives for castigating the subject-matter of his poem, despite using it to illustrate his moral and religious tenets. Thalaba begins in an unspecific desert setting at night where two figures are wandering – the young Thalaba and his widowed mother, Zeinab. The rest of Thalaba’s family have been killed by the evil sorcerers who inhabit the underground caverns of the Domdaniel, and Thalaba angrily questions why God should have allowed this to happen. Zeinab rebukes him for his lack of faith in God, saying, ‘He gave, he takes away’, linked by Southey’s footnote to these words in the ‘Book of Job’ (I.41).56 Southey’s notes include several passages from the Bible, which, while aiming at relativity, provide a Christian frame for the ‘Islamic’ text, with Southey claiming that ‘an allusion to the Old Testament is no ways improper in a Mohammedan’.57 These references provide a familiarity for Southey’s European readers by expressing ‘a feeling of religion in that language with which our religious ideas are connected’.58 However these more familiar points of reference could be accused of nudging out, or even negating, the less familiar aspects of Arabian society and Koranic material in his text. Similarly Southey’s inclusion of material in his footnotes from western commentators (such as Sale, Carsten Niebuhr and Constantin Volney) may have dialogically enriched his text, but it also interposed European (often critical) viewpoints into Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 176 01/06/2007 11:53:48 Thalaba the Destroyer 177 his material, preventing the reader from engaging fully with the Islamic content. Southey’s footnote to the words ‘He gave, he takes away’ points out that the resignation of this statement is ‘particularly inculcated by Mohammed, and of all his precepts it is that which his followers have best observed: it is even the vice of the East’.59 As the word ‘Islam’ means ‘peace through surrender or submission to God’ and requires a Muslim to surrender unconditionally to his divine will, this prompted Southey to make an Islamic ‘vice’ of a Christian virtue.60 While he admired (Christian) resignation himself – and his hero is the model of such virtue, with his unwavering faith against all odds – in applying it to the East, Southey converts it into a common stereotype of excessive oriental passivity. Therefore what seems like an autonomous desire for revenge on Thalaba’s part is channelled into a holy crusade against the Domdanielite magicians by presenting it as part of that ‘absolute fatalism’, or resignation to God’s will, which is ‘the main-spring of Mohammed’s religion’.61 As Thalaba swears to ‘hunt’ his father’s murderer ‘thro’ the earth!’ the dialogue is interrupted by the appearance of ‘a stately palace’ (I.77, 101). Southey was intrigued by the story of the Adites – and their ruler, the oriental despot, Shedad, who built an incomparable palace in the desert – as his lengthy footnotes testify. His information came from Sale’s Koran and ‘Preliminary Discourse’, and Barthélemy D’Herbelot’s Biliotheque Orientale (1776), as well as Gebir.62 Shedad’s palace is described as: Fabric so vast, so lavishly enriched, For Idol, or for Tyrant, never yet Raised the slave race of men (I.107–9) The palace is an artificially-fabricated edifice that symbolizes secular power and challenges God’s authority. Even the trees in the garden are a product of ‘art’ rather than God’s nature: Tall as the Cedar of the mountain, here Rose the gold branches, hung with emerald leaves, Blossomed with pearls, and rich with ruby fruit, (I.405–7) Southey’s notes incorporate the comments of orientalist authorities, providing a discussion of eastern arts, methods of building, ornamentation and literature. While Southey’s hyperbolic description builds a magnificent palace in his poem, he comments drily in his notes, ‘I have ornamented his palace less profusely than the oriental writers who describe it’, suggesting that his own description is governed by western reserve and self-restraint, and that he has preserved his text from the extravagant flourishes of orientalists.63 While indulging in such Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 177 01/06/2007 11:53:48 178 Writing the Empire ‘ornamentation’ in his poem, he can qualify it by referring to a more extreme example. Southey further destabilizes these ‘excessive’ descriptions of the palace with western cynicism: ‘A waste of ornament and labour characterizes all the works of the Orientalists’.64 The lavish descriptions of the building are as much a ‘waste’ as the ‘labour’ expended on its construction. This moralizing, tendentious voice of the captious critic is one that Southey built into his footnotes. While he could purge his fiction of the excessive ostentation of eastern influences if he chose, his scholarly desire to include footnotes (exemplifying these faults) undermined his intention and therefore could not stand without comment. This is the reason for the dichotomy in his text between the poem and the footnotes. His fiction retains those aspects of the culture he admired, while his notes (over which, as direct quotations he has little control) had to be moderated by the voice of western probity. Southey further complicates this position by his comments in the preface to Thalaba, where he speaks of the form of his poem as suiting the content because it is ‘the Arabesque ornament of an Arabian tale’.65 It is precisely because such ornamentation was attractive and may have tempted him into indulgence that the abstemious Southey felt he needed to suppress that element in his text. Oriental Tyranny Southey had another reason for undermining the ‘stately palace’ of his fiction. He wanted to discuss eastern models of government and especially what he considered to be a peculiarly oriental form of despotism. In Thalaba, as Zeinab and Thalaba are wandering through the palace gardens they come across a young man (Aswad) sleeping. He awakes, surprised that Zeinab has been able to see the palace through the ‘shadow of concealment’ that has kept it hidden ‘so many an age, / From eye of mortal man’ (I.156–8). Aswad claims they have been directed there by God so that he can tell them a cautionary tale about the fate of the inhabitants of the ‘Paradise of Irem’ (I.187). He explains that the Adites worshipped idols rather than God and held his prophet’s warnings in contempt. Despite a three-year drought, which still failed to convince the Adites to turn to God, they built Shedad’s ‘kingly pile sublime’ as a symbol of his ‘magnificence and power’ and worshipped him as ‘a God among mankind’ (I.235, 431, 489). In response a black cloud brought ‘the Icy Wind of Death’ as God’s retribution on all the Adites, except Aswad, who was saved because of an act of kindness to a camel (I.556). The story’s obvious moral speaks for itself. Aswad has subsequently been preserved from death in the palace, even though now that is what he most desires, but at the end of the first book Azrael, the angel of death, comes to release both him and Zeinab from their sorrows. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 178 01/06/2007 11:53:48 Thalaba the Destroyer 179 The tale of Irem that Southey digressed to include here is important because its choice as source material, and the obvious way in which it is employed in his poem, reveal his cultural and political values. While the story is peripheral to the main action in Thalaba, Southey had found its portrayal of oriental tyranny so intriguing that he had initially intended to write a separate poem on the subject, copying the lengthy details from Sale’s Koran into his Common-Place Book.66 Southey’s early Jacobinism, which opposed royal despotism in all its forms and which he still embraced in the form of quiescent republicanism, is conspicuously displayed in the familiar western motif of the oriental despot. It was a useful device for Southey (repeated several times in Thalaba) because he could employ it variously to criticize Britain’s monarchical rule or to highlight the benefits of the British democratic government over foreign models. Southey’s own position is ambivalent, though either response could have been equally valid at a time when he was less sure of his convictions, so reflecting his own divided position with regard to British politics. Either way it reveals Southey’s method of relocating his domestic radicalism abroad, to a safer, more remote, geopolitical arena. In Thalaba, Shedad’s palace is a symbol of human vanity – exemplifying the same principle as the ‘colossal wreck’ of Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ (1818) – with its ‘waste of ornament and labour’, and those who built it no longer have access to the luxury and power it stands for.67 However there is a new twist to Southey’s opinions on despotism here. He despises the slavish race of Adites as much as he does their ruler, also blaming them for allowing Shedad to dominate their lives and religious beliefs from his ‘pedestal of power’ (I.411). Sharafuddin identifies this as a specifically Islamic idea, originating in the Koran, which explicitly criticizes both the tyrant and those who submit to his tyranny.68 While this corrupt compact might have been abhorrent to Southey when he was writing Wat Tyler – his levellers actively resist political oppression – he includes it here to criticize oriental passivity, even indolence, the negative side of ‘resignation’, that eastern ‘vice’ that cannot distinguish between subjection to the will of God or evil despotism; an iniquitous form of Locke’s social contract. No doubt Southey’s criticism of inertia in the face of tyranny was intended to have a more proximate relevance for his readers. It could equally well have served as a commentary on British subservience to Pitt in 1798 (when Thalaba was begun), that Southey considered misplaced and Coleridge described as ‘mad idolatry’.69 Magic and Miracles In Thalaba the powerful secular leaders who challenge God’s laws are themselves in thrall to a system of sorcery and superstition, imposed on them by the Domdanielite magicians. This dualistic distinction between those who have religious faith and those who believe in and benefit from superstition and magic is drawn Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 179 01/06/2007 11:53:48 180 Writing the Empire throughout the poem. At the end of the first book of Thalaba, the hero’s desire for retributive justice against the murderers of his family becomes – in being sanctioned by Azrael, God’s emissary – a divinely-ordained mission to eradicate evil: To work the mightiest enterprize That mortal man hath wrought. Live! and remember Destiny Hath marked thee from mankind! (I.666–9) Thalaba’s task becomes a combination of the Islamic jihad – in the sense of a personal struggle by an individual believer against evil and oppression – and the heroic quest of the western Christian tradition. This is signalled by Southey’s choice of the word ‘romance’ for his poem, implying the influences of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485) – with the quest for the Holy Grail at its centre – and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590 and 1596), one of Southey’s favourite poems. Southey prefaced the first book of Thalaba (in editions after 1801) with a quotation from The Faerie Queene that reiterates the idea of justified vengeance, highlighting it as a Christian priority as well as an Islamic one.70 The form this quest will take is a journey to the subterranean headquarters of the sorcerers in the ‘Domdaniel caverns / Under the Roots of the Ocean’ (II.7– 8). Southey draws a scene of horror for the reader, in which the magicians are grouped around their ‘Teraph’ – a severed baby’s head on a plate – which gives them the power of divination (II.26). They discover through their magic processes that they have failed to kill all of Thalaba’s family, one of whom it has been predicted will take revenge on them (hence Thalaba’s name ‘the Destroyer’). A witch, Khawla, recognizes that God’s power is stronger than their own: Ye can shatter the dwellings of man, Ye can open the womb of the rock, Ye can shake the foundations of earth, But not the Word of God: But not one letter can ye change Of what his Will hath written! (II.217–22) While the power of the sorcerers is manifestly great, it is shown to be circumscribed by God. Southey’s tale therefore conforms to the Miltonic, Manicheistic tradition in which evil is licensed but controlled. The sorcerers can physically change the material shape of God’s creation, but they have no control over his ‘Word’ and ‘Will’, which govern destiny and supply his followers with spiritual strength. Belief in destiny, or the Islamic ‘kismet’, manifests itself as a potent force in Thalaba, against which the sorcerers are ineffectual. For the reader, however, Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 180 01/06/2007 11:53:48 Thalaba the Destroyer 181 this has the undesirable effect of making the predestined events that occur on earth unsurprising, rather than awe-inspiring. Southey was very interested in the occult, demonology and superstitious belief; both within his own and other cultures. These practices are a common theme of both his foreign ‘epics’ and his domestic poetry. For instance ballads that he was writing at the same time as Thalaba, such as ‘Donica’ and ‘Rudiger’, share a similar fascination with demonic forces of evil (including tales of vampirism) as his longer poem.71 The balladic tradition of dealing with horrific subjects in verse form, initiated by Bürger and Goethe and popularized in England by William Taylor, was one that Southey was keen to imitate.72 And the taste for superstitious beliefs and supernatural events, that he unleashes in the less constrained ‘mini-narratives’ of his ballads, also invade Thalaba. Though he packs the plot with them, giving them inordinate space and licence – one reviewer commenting that it was ‘Tales of Terror, run mad’73 – his concern that they should not unbalance the moral narrative meant that they had to be constrained within a predictable, schematic plot, where good inevitably triumphs over evil. Because the magical practices of the sorcerers originate from an evil source that opposes God, Southey has to find another way for his hero to counteract them, without depending on similar ‘black’ arts. One of the sorcerers, Abdaldar, is sent out to find Thalaba and kill him. After much searching he finds him among a family of Bedouins in the desert. While the ‘pious family’ are prostrate in prayer, the irreligious (and therefore vertical) Abdaldar is killed by a ‘Simoom’ or ‘Blast of the Desert’ which passes over the others (II.397–9). Southey does not need to conjure up magical forces with which to dispel evil in his fiction. Instead he employs natural phenomena as weapons of God, which are nevertheless miraculous to readers from a temperate climate. Southey uses extracts from Constantin Volney’s Travels Through Syria and Egypt (1788) and Carsten Niebuhr’s Description de l’Arabie (1774), which describe vividly the impact of this hot desert wind. For instance Niebuhr states that ‘The effects of the Simoom are instant suffocation to every living creature that happens to be within the sphere of its activity, and immediate putrefaction of the carcases of the dead’.74 Volney corroborates these details, adding that by the wind’s ‘extreme dryness it withers and strips all the plants’.75 Southey uses the natural forces of this exotic environment to replicate miracles of biblical proportions. And despite the incredibility of these events, the scholarly footnotes reassure the reader that they have been verified by European travellers. For Southey’s reader, the Orient is a land where ‘magical’ miracles are founded in facts rather than superstition, to which educated, western observers bear witness. Southey makes use of other ‘natural’ events at various times to direct his hero’s travels. The desert camp where Thalaba lives – with his new Bedouin family (who adopted him after his mother’s death) – is overtaken by locusts. One of Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 181 01/06/2007 11:53:48 182 Writing the Empire them, falling from the sky, carries a message written in ‘Nature’s own language’ telling Thalaba to depart from his family when the sun is eclipsed from the sky (III.441). Despite the implausibility of this device, Southey did attempt to incorporate a heavenly directive in as natural a way as possible. That he found difficulty in achieving this can be seen in the 1799–1800 manuscript of the poem, where he deleted another passage that was intended to surmount the problems of directing Thalaba’s quest.76 In this section Thalaba was to find a seashell with lines written on it instructing him to go to Babylon, but this was supplanted by a guiding vision of his mother.77 Southey says in his Common-Place Book, ‘The shell incident must be altered. I wished to make it of the same class of miracles, of natural agents supernaturally acting, as the locust. But it is flat and very bad.’78 Southey’s design is to show God’s acts as natural, and therefore legitimate, rather than artificial and magical like those of the sorcerers. While there are no bounds to his construction of magic and evil, he is aware of the responsibility that representations of God entail. Southey’s poem relies on superstition for narrative interest, asking the reader to suspend disbelief, only then to condemn it in his notes. These notes incorporate western and eastern, ancient and modern superstitious practices, suggesting that despite differences in local customs, they are universally adopted throughout the world. Preoccupied as Southey was with finding common truths in the world’s religions, so he tried to find a link between the world’s superstitions too. But nevertheless he felt that ‘No nation in the world is so much given to superstition as the Arabs, or even as the Mahometans in general’.79 Intending to demonstrate how difficult it is to assess where faith ends and error begins, Southey presented Islamic rituals and superstitious beliefs in parallel in Thalaba. And the fact that he rarely distinguished between them suggests that he found them very similar. Bedouin Arabs In the second edition of Thalaba (1809), Southey introduced as a motto to the third book a quotation from the ‘The Poem of Tarafat’ from The Moallakát, or Seven Arabian Poems which were Suspended on the Temple at Mecca (1782).80 These poems were translations made by William Jones, known as ‘Persian Jones’ at this stage in his life, for his interest in Arabic language and literature.81 Jones attempted to raise the prestige of this literature in the West by publishing his translations, and by drawing attention to the uniquely graceful imagery and language of the poetry – which he claimed, in his Essay on the Poetry of the Eastern Nations (1772), was due to inspiration provided by the ‘sublime’ and ‘beautiful’ ‘natural objects, with which the Arabs are perpetually conversant’.82 Southey was familiar with Jones’s translation of the Mu‘allaqāt, copying several verses into his Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 182 01/06/2007 11:53:49 Thalaba the Destroyer 183 Common-Place Book and making reference to the poems in his notes to Thalaba.83 The names of some of the characters in Thalaba are likely to have come from the Mu‘allaqāt – for instance Southey’s heroine, Oneiza, is probably based on a young girl named Onaiza who figures in ‘The Poem of Amriolkais’. Khaula, the mistress of Tarafa in ‘The Poem of Tarafa’, could well have been the source for the name of his witch, Khawla.84 Michael Franklin says of the Mu‘allaqāt: These poems, according to legend, were transcribed in gold upon Egyptian linen and hung from the Kaaba at Mecca. They are, nonetheless, pre-Moslem and decidedly hedonistic, mingling as they do the lyrical and the sensual with heroic vaunting. In the Mu‘allaqāt Hellenistic tradition is fully assimilated to a specifically Bedouin mentality, and these poems represent the supreme art of the herding and hunting nomad. This outburst of poetry in its unexpected confidence and maturity seemed to confirm Jones’s contention that the pastoral genre was more alive in the Yemen than in Europe. Despite the difficulty of these poems, Jones was fascinated by their wild beauty, their vigorous and precise imagery, and felt that they should be introduced to a modern European audience.85 Southey admired these poems for the same reasons that Jones did, as they were expressive of what he perceived to be the simple, harsh, but also rewarding lives of the Bedouin tribes of the Middle East. Southey’s interest in the lives of the Bedouins guided his reading of orientalist texts and provided him with material to draw on for Thalaba. The reader learns in the third book that the Bedouin patriarch, Moath, who took Thalaba in after finding him wandering in the desert after his mother’s death, views him as a son. With regard to Moath’s own daughter, Oneiza, Thalaba ‘More fondly than a brother, loved the maid, / The loveliest of Arabian maidens she’ (III.209–10). Southey says of Thalaba’s new life: It was the wisdom and the will of Heaven That in a lonely tent had cast The lot of Thalaba. There might his soul develope best Its strengthening energies; There might he from the world Keep his heart pure and uncontaminate, Till at the written hour he should be found Fit servant of the Lord, without a spot. (III.213–21) Southey’s Bedouins supplied him with the image of the ‘noble savage’ – that repository figure that he sought in all cultures as the holder of the virtues he valued – to provide a suitable upbringing and lifestyle for his hero. Southey extracted examples from Niebuhr’s Description de l’Arabie and Volney’s Travels that would provide a moral framework for Thalaba’s development, and then Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 183 01/06/2007 11:53:49 Writing the Empire 184 built on the information they contained in his fiction. Volney, particularly, in a long section on the customs and manners of the Bedouins, admires their simple and austere habits. He respects them for existing in an environment that, while it is ‘sterile and ungrateful’, does not prevent their ‘manners’ being more ‘sociable and mild’ than the ‘savages of America’, due to their pastoral lifestyle.86 This also imbues them with a moral purity not found in civilized European countries, so that ‘they are no strangers to property; but it has none of that selfishness which the increase of the imaginary wants of luxury has given it among polished nations’ and ‘they are less exposed to temptations which might corrupt and debase them’.87 Western commentators readily perceived the nomadic lifestyle of the Bedouins as one of independence and resistance to the corruption of political systems, particularly those of the Ottoman Empire. Tilar Mazzeo reports that in the Romantic period the Bedouin Arabs were conceived to be: sprung from the ‘original stock’ of Moses and his people, they represented the golden age of Eastern antiquity. In this respect, the Bedouins were viewed by Western travellers in much the same way as the native Greeks were imagined – as positive representations of Europe’s own cultural origins in Asia.88 These aspects impressed Southey and he promulgated them in Thalaba, contributing to a romanticized view of the Bedouins that has lasted into the twentieth century. In Southey’s notes to Thalaba, he includes the following passage from Volney’s Travels: We must not, therefore, when we speak of the Bedouins, affix to the words Prince and Lord, the ideas they usually convey; we should come nearer the truth by comparing them to substantial farmers in mountainous countries, whose simplicity they resemble in their dress as well as in their domestic life and manners. A Shaik, who has the command of five hundred horse, does not disdain to saddle and bridle his own, nor to give him his barley and chopped straw.89 Compared to the oriental potentate, Shedad – as well as the other examples of eastern despotism that Southey includes in Thalaba – the Bedouin ‘Prince’ is modest, pastoral, egalitarian; a model ruler. Volney’s description contributes to a strand of Romanticism that valued inhabitants of sublime landscapes – such as the Arabian deserts or the mountainous Alpine regions of Europe – because this was perceived to have an edifying influence on moral character. This passage therefore resonates with the idea of the Swiss model of pastoral republican virtue that was a motif of eighteenth-century poetry. For instance Wordsworth’s Descriptive Sketches Taken During a Pedestrian Tour Among the Alps (1793) depicts the ‘pastoral Swiss’ as ‘Nature’s child’, whose ‘native dignity’ and close ‘communion’ with God means he will fight for ‘Freedom’.90 While this compari- Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 184 01/06/2007 11:53:49 Thalaba the Destroyer 185 son may seem at odds with the desert life that Volney is describing, it should be remembered that he was, like Southey, a relativist who looked at social models in various cultures. Volney also shared a similar political pedigree to Southey’s. A philosophe, who in The Ruins of Empire provided a salutary warning of the dangers to civilization of man’s ignorance and greed, he looked to nature and reason (from which he believed equality and justice originated) to provide a solution. His comments were intended for a European readership who would find improvement in having such comparisons made between their own society and other cultures. Because their ideas originate from the same political agenda, Volney’s reports of Bedouin life become a moral pastoralism in Southey’s hands, with his venerable and pious patriarch providing a model example for those in civilized societies: Nor rich, nor poor, was Moath; God had given Enough, and blest him with a mild content. No hoarded gold disquieted his dreams; (III.275–7) The ambiguity of Southey’s position is revealed here in that, while he values his own society more now, he is still prepared to compare it with a foreign exemplar. However any anomaly is resolved by Volney’s opinion that the ‘manners of [the Bedouins] agree precisely with the descriptions in Homer, and the history of Abraham, in Genesis’.91 This gives the Bedouins a historical line that joins them to recognizable Christian and classical traditions for Southey’s readers. It also relates to the work of orientalists, and particularly – through Jones’s scholarly investigation of oriental languages, and his suggestion that the European, classical and Sanskrit languages came from an ancient Persian source – the idea that Greek and Roman civilization and even the Christian religion itself had oriental origins.92 Southey presents the Bedouin existence as lonely and isolated, emptying the Middle East of almost all other forms of population, so that they become the central focus of his fiction – apart from the stereotypically villainous sorcerers and despots. This has important consequences on his text, as the Manichean Orient he portrays is divided absolutely between ‘good’ Bedouins and those who hold positions of power to do evil; magicians and potentates (and the passive orientals they rule). The reason for this construction can be understood in John Barrell’s terms of reference to ‘this/that/and the other’ or Gayatri Spivak’s distinction, which Barrell draws on, between a ‘self-consolidating other’ and an ‘absolute other’, where subjects or writers construct themselves in terms of what is similar to them and what is different.93 That which is more nearly the same is identified with, whereas that Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 185 01/06/2007 11:53:49 Writing the Empire 186 which is unacceptably different is pushed further away. In Southey’s text as in other western constructions of Asia: There is a ‘this’, and there is a something hostile to it, something which lies, almost invariably, to the east; but there is an East beyond that East, where something lurks which is equally threatening to both, and which enables or obliges them to reconcile their differences.94 Therefore Southey endows his Bedouins with those qualities he admires, portraying them as ‘self-consolidating others’, whereas his ‘absolute other’ is depicted at various times as tyrannical, licentious and duplicitous. Southey had of course recently seen British monarchs in these terms and he is detaching himself from his radical youth, yet still employing its discourse, in order to posit a further, distant and therefore less dangerous ‘other’. This divison between a ‘self-consolidating other’ and an ‘absolute other’ also occurs in one of Southey’s letters, where he questions ‘To what is the great superiority of Europeans over Orientalists attributable and the stationariness or even retrogression of the Orientalists?’95 Southey’s letter first focuses on ‘Persia’, in order to consider whether oriental ‘retrogression’ is attributable to climate or religion. His conclusion is that: Perhaps Polygamy is the radical evil. The degradation of females in consequence of it is obvious, and its perpetual excitement is probably the chief cause of the voluptuousness attributed to climate, hence premature debility, hence a brutalized nature, hence habits of domestic despotism, and the inference that what is best in a family, is best in a state. In Arabia women are not slaves, and the Arabs are mostly monogamous. Here then are a people under a burning climate, unenslaved, by no means remarkable for voluptuousness, and among whom I have never heard of the crime, elsewhere universal in the East, which is probably another scyon from the same root.96 Southey therefore makes a distinction between the moderate and monogamous Arabs, to which his Bedouin family belong, and the ‘voluptuousness’ (of which he implies sodomy is a result) and ‘brutalized nature’ of the ‘Persians’. In order to make sense of ‘the great superiority of Europeans over Orientalists’, Southey divides his subject up into two distinct groups, one that is a model more nearly ‘like’ his own society and therefore presumably redeemable (though still ‘other’), and one that is very different (due particularly to its sexual aberrations) and so is an inferior ‘absolute other’.97 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 186 01/06/2007 11:53:49 Thalaba the Destroyer 187 Islam Southey’s method of ‘othering’ is also applied to the way in which religious faith is presented in Thalaba. This is a more central theme than in any other of Southey’s poems and so it is an important text for assessing his beliefs. Southey describes the Bedouin family at prayer: Before their Tent the mat is spread, The old man’s aweful voice Intones the holy Book. What if beneath no lamp-illumined dome, Its marble walls bedecked with flourished truth, Azure and gold adornment? sinks the Word With deeper influence from the Imam’s voice, Where in the day of congregation, crowds Perform the duty-task? Their Father is their Priest, The Stars of Heaven their point of prayer, And the blue Firmament The glorious Temple, where they feel The present Deity. (III.298–311) This passage makes a direct contrast between the religious faith of the multitude of Islamic worshippers – the ‘crowds’ who ‘Perform the duty-task’ confined within the ‘marble walls’ of the mosque, with its ‘Azure and gold adornment’ – and the family’s simple act of prayer. Certain images Southey chooses in his description of conventional Islamic worship ring oddly. For instance the ‘Imam’s voice’ seeks to ‘influence’ the congregation, which could be understood in the sense that they are persuaded against their will. The idea of ‘flourish’d truth’ is also strange. It could mean that ‘truth’ thrives there, but it actually relates to the ornamentation of the walls of the mosque, which as we know Southey considered to be a ‘waste’. In this place of worship, therefore, the ‘truth’ adorning the ornamented walls could be similarly perceived as embellished (or exaggerated) as the walls are themselves. Lastly this religious service is a ‘duty-task’, not given freely in the way that the Bedouin family offer prayers under the ‘blue Firmament’, their ‘glorious Temple’. Consequently the latter ‘feel / The present Deity’, unlike the ‘crowds’, who only pay lip-service. Moath, the Bedouin father, is a patriarchal figure – connected by a historical line to a pure source of faith – contrasting with the priestly figure of the ‘Imam’. The centre of religious life for the family is not the mosque, but the natural world around them. Southey’s presentation of Islam in this passage has much to do with his opinion that modern Islamic belief ‘has been miserably perverted’.98 By providing evidence of Islamic public worship in his footnotes, but valuing Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 187 01/06/2007 11:53:49 Writing the Empire 188 a less orthodox, private faith in his text, Southey has it both ways. In relying on the nomadic Bedouins for his construction of Arab life, he can avoid dealing with the Islamic religion of the masses, which is dominated by the mosque. To Southey all structures of religious hierarchy were anathema; he abhorred Roman Catholicism because of its ‘bloody and brutalising spirit’, but also because of what he saw as the tyranny of its system of priesthood – which he referred to as ‘popery’ – over its faithful.99 In a letter written in the same year Thalaba was published he said: I cannot argue against toleration, yet is popery in its nature so very damnable and destructive a system, that I could not give a vote for its sufferance in England. I could no more permit the existence of a monastic establishment, than the human sacrifices of Mexican idolatry.100 This was a very extreme reaction, and one that he felt bound to repeat in Madoc, where he made many such comparisons between ‘Mexican idolatry’ and Catholicism. The relevance of this to the argument here is that Southey also equated aspects of Islamic practices to Catholicism: for instance, the telling of beads, and belief in the torments of the wicked after death by angels, of which he says ‘Monkish ingenuity has invented something not unlike this Mohammedan article of faith’.101 In Southey’s much later review of the Travels of Ali Bey (1816), where he attacks the author – a Spaniard who disguised himself as a Muslim in order to travel freely through the Middle East – for stating that Islam is free of ‘priests’, this link is more explicit: What then are the scheiks, the khatibs, and the imams? And what were the caliphs? The Ulemahs also are a religious body, for the civil and religious professions are united in Mahommedan countries, and the very title of Mufti, or Sheikh Islam, as he is also called, implies his religious character … But had he seen and reported things as they are, he would have acknowledged that Islam has been not less corrupted with monkery, and a monstrous apparatus of mythological fable, than the Christianity of Spain.102 The association that Southey made between Islam, Catholicism and even ‘Mexican idolatry’ was the common reliance of their followers on a structure of belief that enabled the figure of the ‘priest’ to dominate them, holding them in thrall with ‘a monstrous apparatus of mythological fable’. This links to Southey’s abhorrence of tyranny of any kind, whether secular or religious, oriental or occidental. In the 1790s Southey was searching for religious truth in many of the different faiths and defined his own beliefs by what he disliked in other religions. Brought up in the Anglican Church, he was unable to find the religious commitment for a clerical career, despite the ambitions for him of his uncle, Herbert Hill. Recounting his disgust at the ‘withering … lip-service’ paid to religious Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 188 01/06/2007 11:53:49 Thalaba the Destroyer 189 faith at university, he claims that he ‘became enamoured of a philosophical millennium’ there.103 After being exposed to Coleridge’s Socinian beliefs, he became more disposed towards Christianity, but by 1809 he had rejected these too, for their ‘union with the degrading and deadening philosophy of materialism’.104 Of his religious convictions while he was writing Thalaba, Daniel E. White notes: Like Coleridge, Southey in the 1790s was a kind of dissenter from Dissent; heterodox in religion and radical in his politics, he nonetheless remained unassociated with any denomination and, indeed, opposed to the very idea of sects.105 As time went on Southey became more attracted to the Quaker faith, due to what he perceived as its absence of dogma, however he could never commit himself fully to these beliefs either.106 Nevertheless, he makes a revealing comment on the religion of Thalaba, stating ‘Simplicity would be out of character: I must build a Saracenic mosque – not a Quaker meeting house’.107 Southey recognized that his text was going awry – ‘simplicity’ he now felt was not an Islamic quality (although that was what had attracted him to the Koran originally) – and he was in danger of representing the precepts of Quakerism, not Islam, in his portrayal. This is because Southey presents the religion of the Bedouins as a private and personal relationship with God, that imposes no intercessors or intermediaries between individuals and their faith – except in the pious, benign example of their patriarch, Moath – that part of Quakerism that he was particularly drawn to. This private form of worship, guided by intuitive faith, has more to do with his own values, drawn from the syncretization of various religions, and much less to do with the Islamic religion, a system that governs the state – and its social, political, administrative and economic affairs – as well as spiritual belief. In Southey’s ‘Preface’ to the Curse of Kehama, published in his Poetical Works (1837–8), he voices a contemporary criticism of his portrayal of Islam in Thalaba: Mr. Wilberforce thought I had conveyed in it a very false impression of that religion, and that the moral sublimity which he admired in it was owing to this flattering misrepresentation.108 For this Christian evangelical reader, the admirable aspects of the poem are those which do not represent the Islamic faith accurately. A later critic, the ‘Tractarian’ John Henry Newman, in 1850 (after he had converted to Roman Catholicism) also described Thalaba as ‘morally sublime’.109 Southey was obviously in harmony with his readers, who preferred the version he offered to a more realistic account of Islam. Southey goes on to defend his representation: But Thalaba the Destroyer was professedly an Arabian Tale. The design required that I should bring into view the best features of that system of belief and worship which had been developed under the Covenant with Ishmael, placing in the most favourable Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 189 01/06/2007 11:53:49 Writing the Empire 190 light the morality of the Koran, and what the least corrupted of the Mohammedans retain of the patriarchal faith. It would have been altogether incongruous to have touched upon the abominations engrafted upon it; first by the false Prophet himself, who appears to have been far more remarkable for audacious profligacy than for any intellectual endowments, and afterwards by the spirit of Oriental despotism which accompanied Mahommedanism wherever it was established.110 Southey’s reference to the ‘Covenant with Ishmael’ is the belief (from evidence in Genesis) that the twelve original Arabian tribes came from Ishmael, the son of the patriarch Abraham, whereas the Christian religion originated from Abraham’s other son, Isaac. This passage confirms that what Southey values in Islam are the ancient origins of that religion, rather than the modern ‘abominations engrafted upon it’ by Mohammed. His portrayal of Islam in Thalaba therefore reflects that perspective and leads to the further dichotomy in his text between his fictional construction of the ‘best features’ of Islam – which even if accurate are frozen in a historical stasis – and evidence of its modern corrupted practices, which he feels obliged nevertheless to detail in his notes. The corrupting influence of Islam is most obvious in the Middle Eastern cities that Southey depicts. Consequently Thalaba’s travels mainly take place alone in the desert so that Southey can provide a depopulated ‘moral’ landscape for his hero. Arabia is presented as a deserted, sublime, moral environment (unlike Byron’s or Moore’s oriental settings), as William Taylor pointed out in his review of Thalaba for the Critical Review (1803) – an article that Southey judged a fair evaluation of his poem. Taylor said of Thalaba: It is a gallery of successive pictures. Each is strikingly descriptive: the circumstances strongly delineated, and well selected; but the personages, like the figures of landscape-painters, are often almost lost in the scene: they appear as the episodical or accessory objects.111 While this might have been due to problems Southey had in portraying Arabian society, isolating Thalaba from ‘personages’ suited his representation of a spiritual mission (as it would Shelley in his poem Alastor, 1816). Thalaba’s situation emphasizes the spiritual purity of his quest, uncontaminated by contact with other humans and untainted by wordly concerns. When Thalaba does come across large centres of population he views them as an outsider. Thereby Southey continually makes a contrast between the private, moral lives of his desert dwellers and the degenerate, iniquitous worshippers of superstition and tyranny who inhabit Islamic cities. Thalaba’s travels take him to ‘Bagdad’ and because the poem is set in the past (in the time of Harun-alRashid) the city is described as prosperous and attractive: Its thousand dwellings o’er whose level roofs Fair cupolas appeared, and high-domed mosques Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 190 01/06/2007 11:53:49 Thalaba the Destroyer 191 And pointed minarets, and cypress groves Every where scattered in unwithering green. (V.69–72) Southey constructs this vision of the Persian capital from various disparate accounts of eastern cities, including Alexandria, because in the modern world, he laments: Thou too art fallen, Bagdad! City of Peace, Thou too hast had thy day! And loathsome Ignorance and brute Servitude Pollute thy dwellings now, (V.73–6) The modern city is compared to the ancient one so that Southey can show how the Islamic religion has been perverted. In his correspondence he revealed his responses to modern Islam: Bagdad and Cordova had their period of munificence and literature; all else in the history of the religion is brutal ignorance and ferocity. It is now a system of degradation and depopulation, whose overthrow is to be desired as one great step to general amelioration.112 This letter illuminates Southey’s representation of Baghdad in Thalaba. Its deterioration is conflated with what Southey saw as the degeneration of Islam, motivating him to detach his ancient story from a modern ‘system of degradation’. One hope remains for Baghdad: So one day may the Crescent from thy Mosques Be plucked by Wisdom, when the enlightened arm Of Europe conquers to redeem the East. (V.84–6) This relates to the same sentiments as Southey’s letter (above), where he sees the ‘overthrow’ of the Islamic ‘system’ as a desirable improvement. The image of ‘the Crescent’ being removed by ‘Wisdom’ subscribes to this argument, as does the idea of an ‘enlightened’ conquering of the East by Europe. The term ‘redeem’ has been interpreted as a desire to reinvigorate the East to its past glory by Sharafuddin, but if this passage is read in the light of Southey’s letter, it can be understood in the Christian sense of redemption, as deliverance from sin.113 Southey justifies the use of force to impose an ‘enlightened’ form of western imperialism on Islamic cities, but it is nevertheless portrayed as very different from the aggressive political machinations of oriental despots. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 191 01/06/2007 11:53:50 Writing the Empire 192 An ‘earthly Eden’ The pure Bedouin environment in which Thalaba grows to maturity also provides him with a suitable female helpmate. While Southey’s hero has become faithful, pious and courageous under the moral influence of Moath, Oneiza is shown to have become worthy to be his bride. Their love develops, so that in the evenings while Thalaba composes poetry, Oneiza watches him with ‘an ardent gaze’ (III.336). This reference to the hero’s poetic skill is footnoted with a quotation from William Jones’s Essay on the Poetry of the Eastern Nations as well as an extract from Volney on the Bedouin tradition of story-telling, which often depicts ‘the adventures of some young Shaik and female Bedouin’.114 In this format, the male pursues his female prize and the story inevitably ends, after the couple have dealt with various obstacles (including ‘the invasions of the enemy’ and ‘the captivity of the two lovers’), with their being united in the ‘paternal tent’.115 These romances rely on a convention that minutely describes the lovely fair, extols her black eyes, as large and soft as those of the gazelle; her languid and empassioned looks; her arched eye brows, resembling two bows of ebony; her waist, straight and supple as a lance; he forgets not her steps, light as those of the young filley, nor her eye-lashes blackened with kohl, nor her lips painted blue, nor her nails, tinged with the golden coloured henna, nor her breasts, resembling two pomegranates, nor her words, sweet as honey.116 Volney’s description replicates the heavy reliance of Arabian literature on comparisons with the shapes, sounds and colours of nature. Jones’s translation of the Mu‘allaqāt conforms to this pattern, often relating a seduction process that is depicted through sensual, natural imagery. Jones argues in his Essay on the Poetry of the Eastern Nations that these elements – which invigorate Arabian poetry with a spirited liveliness that has been lost to European literature since the death of Shakespeare – originate from the purer, pastoral environment that their writers inhabit.117 In doing so he presented ‘the first comprehensive discussion of an eastern poetry as a tradition shaped by a particular culture and a specific environment’, which ‘transformed the reception of Oriental poetry’.118 Southey was well aware of Arabian literary models therefore, and employed elements of them in his own ‘romance’. However he avoided the more voluptuous aspects of the Mu‘allaqāt, as well as the sexual charge of the sheikh’s pursuit of his female quarry that Volney reports. By the 1800s, writers like Southey were reacting to Jones’s revivification of oriental poetry. So while finding much value in it for his own Middle Eastern exoticism, Southey’s poem was nevertheless innovative in its own right, in providing a distinct corrective strand to western orientalism – even if that aspect of it was largely ignored by Byron and Thomas Moore in their own oriental productions. The Onaiza of ‘The Poem of Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 192 01/06/2007 11:53:50 Thalaba the Destroyer 193 Amriolkais’ is shown to have maternal virtues, but is nevertheless portrayed as tantalizingly responsive to the seduction of her suitor: When the suckling behind her cried, she turned round to him with half her body; but half of it, pressed beneath my embrace, was not turned from me.119 In contrast Thalaba and Oneiza, in Southey’s poem, are chaste and modest. Moreover, because Thalaba is constructed as a quest, in the European literary tradition, love is deferred until the goal is achieved. Thalaba has to deserve Oneiza’s love. She will only become his ‘black-eyed houri’ when his mission is complete and they are in paradise together – a spiritual rather than a sexual consummation. After falling in love with Oneiza, therefore, romantic fulfilment for Thalaba is postponed by a divine directive, instructing him to continue his mission alone. His commitment to faith over love is constantly tested. As his quest continues over mountainous terrain, he discovers a glen containing a gate set in rock. On the other side he emerges into an ‘earthly Eden’, containing ‘palaces and groves’, ‘rich pavilions’ and ‘the joys of Paradise’ (VI.205, 216–17, 230). This description is based on an account of the garden of Aloadin from Samuel Purchas, His Pilgrimage (1613), extracted as a footnote to the text: In the N. E. parts of Persia there was an old man named Aloadin. a Mahumetan, which had inclosed a goodly vally, situate between two hilles, and furnished it with all variety which Nature and Art could yield, as fruits, pictures, rilles of milk, wine, honey, water, pallaces, and beautifull damosells, richly attired, and called it Paradise.120 Another influence is John Mandeville’s description of such a garden in his Travels (which first appeared in the fourteenth century).121 The fact that Southey adopted the story of this ‘undaunted liar’, and the account of the notoriously unreliable Purchas, shows that veracity was not as important to him as descriptive imagery. He says ‘The story is told by so many writers and with such difference of time and place, as wholly to invalidate its truth, even were the circumstances more probable’.122 Southey recognized that such constructions were likely to be works of fantasy, promoted in western literature because they conformed to prescribed preconceptions of oriental luxury and magnificence. This trope certainly gives Southey an excuse to describe a scene of exotic opulence that appeals to all the senses, as Thalaba, tired and hungry, comes across a banquet: Here cased in ice, the apricot, A topaz, crystal-set: Here on a plate of snow The sunny orange rests, And still the aloes and the sandal-wood From golden censers o’er the banquet room Diffuse their dying sweets. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 193 01/06/2007 11:53:50 194 Writing the Empire Anon a troop of females formed the dance Their ancles bound with bracelet-bells That made the modulating harmony. Transparent garments to the greedy eye Gave all their harlot limbs, That writhed, in each immodest gesture skilled. (VI.345–57)123 However the reader soon learns that the garden is an artificial imitation of God’s paradise. It is like Purchas’s, one of ‘Nature and Art’ combined – also a source for Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ (composed 1797). Like Coleridge, Southey enjoyed capturing a sensuous and luxurious Orient in fiction for his reader, at a time when, as Diego Saglia points out, ‘Eastern products and objects become visible and increasingly available in Britain through an intensification of eighteenth-century forms of “exotic consumerism”’.124 The garden’s artificiality is heightened by its improbable setting among rocky, sterile mountains, and the contrast between the heat of the desert and the ‘delightful coolness’ that Thalaba finds there (VI.305). The forbidden pleasures of ‘the delicious juice / Of Shiraz’ golden grape’ and ‘unveiled women’, further delineate it as an unnatural paradise, because unlicensed by Koranic law (VI.319, 344, 388). The virtuous Thalaba only imbibes water – the ‘cool draught of innocence’ – and conjures up a vision of ‘His own Arabian maid’ to protect himself from the temptation of ‘impure’ dancing girls (VI.329, 359, 366). Any hint that Thalaba might yield to their temptation is presented not as a sexual motivation, but because he is ‘from all domestic joys/ Estranged’ (VI.370–1). This minor moment of doubt is engendered by his desire for familial contentment, sanctioned by marital love, rather than sexual fulfilment. All aspects of this artificial paradise challenge God’s natural creation and seek to compete with the true heavenly paradise of Islamic teaching, with its ‘cool fountains, green bowers and black-eyed girls’.125 This conforms to Southey’s plan in his Common-Place Book that ‘The Paradise of Aloadin should mock Mohammed’s as much as possible’.126 The garden is a test of Thalaba’s faith, but it also promotes Southey’s own moral values through his hero’s rejection of sexual temptation, and his monogamous love for Oneiza. However there are further trials for Thalaba to go through. He runs away from the ‘tents of revelry’ and ‘unveiled’, inveigling women to find Oneiza also running, her ‘veil all rent’, from a ‘ravisher’ (VI.375, 388, 404, 405). Thalaba rescues her and the two attempt to leave the garden, but the iron gates are impassable, as are the precipitous mountains on all sides (see Figure 6). To make their escape they have to follow a river through the base of a mountain, in a similar episode to that in which Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas attempts to flee from his own artificial Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 194 01/06/2007 11:53:50 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 195 Thalaba the Destroyer 195 Figure 6. ‘The Garden of Aloadin’, from William Hawkes Smith, Essays in Design from Southey’s Poem of Thalaba the Destroyer (Birmingham: W. Hawkes Smith, J. Belcher & Son and W. Suffield; London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1818). By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. 01/06/2007 11:53:50 196 Writing the Empire oriental paradise of the ‘Happy Valley’.127 However Thalaba and Oneiza are foiled in this plan too and are forced to face their captor. Armed with club and bow respectively, they kill the sorcerer who has confined them in this ‘Paradise of Sin’, at which the vision is destroyed and they are left alone and free to leave the vale (VII.256). The couple then encounter Aloadin’s enemy, a sultan, who rewards them for their actions against his foe, making a prince of Thalaba. At this point Thalaba gives in to wordly ambition – despite the examples of arrogant, monarchical rule that have been paraded for his education, ranging from Shedad, to the powerful sorcerers Nimrod and Aloadin and now this sultan, who also shares ‘the proud eye of sovereignty’ (VII.296). Thalaba also succumbs to his desire for domestic happiness with Oneiza, whom he marries in the flush of his success, despite her warnings that his quest is not yet accomplished. As a result, on their wedding night the angel of death comes to take Oneiza, before their love can be consummated. It could be argued that Thalaba’s fallibility, in succumbing to temptation rather than preserving an unrealistic virtue throughout, provides a more rounded figure than many of Southey’s other heroes. However Thalaba is finally tempted, not by sexual love, but by a desire for monogamous, conjugal love with a sister/wife, therefore still conforming to the moral programme of Southey’s poem. Oneiza, who is consistently a figure of virtue and piety, setting an example even for Thalaba in his wavering moments, comes back to haunt him after her death as a vampire. Southey’s copious footnotes on this subject reveal its fascination for him, as does his poem, ‘Donica’ (composed 1796), which also depicts the reanimation of a dead girl’s body through demonic possession. Southey was familiar too with Matthew Lewis’s Gothic construction, The Monk (1796), in which a similar incident occurs.128 Thalaba meets his adopted father again, at Oneiza’s tomb, where she appears to haunt them both, but the virtuous old man recognizes that she is a demon, rather than his daughter. He strikes her and she flees, to be replaced by Oneiza’s true spirit who urges Thalaba on to complete his quest, after which they will be united ‘in the Bowers of Paradise’ (VIII.156). Oneiza is, therefore, as well as the object of Thalaba’s desire, a chaste reminder of his immortal soul. This spiritualization of Southey’s female character was one solution to the sexual examples he found in eastern literature. But the notes to Thalaba also make reference to a strand of oriental love poetry that contrasts with Jones’s less reserved examples from Arabian literature. This was Charles Fox’s publication of A Series of Poems, Containing the Plaints, Consolations and Delights of Achmed Ardebeili, A Persian Exile (1797).129 Ardebeili’s poems, such as ‘To Selima’, are decorous and conventional (in terms of a western readership) and written in a courtly, sentimental style: Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 196 01/06/2007 11:53:51 Thalaba the Destroyer 197 O Angel of delight! Of thee possest, Not Paradise should bribe me from my love, Ev’n the fond hope that animates my breast Speaks the pure raptures of the blest above.130 In this poetry, as in Thalaba, sexual love is contained and deferred, with the narrator equating the ‘pure raptures’ of romantic love with spiritual fulfilment. Ardebeili published his poetry in England – as he was a refugee from the violent politics of ‘Persia’ – and so wrote in a way that would be acceptable to his audience. Fox’s introduction to the poems provides his readers with an insight into Ardebeili’s personal history: The Persians had been long an indolent and voluptuous people … Even the early habitudes, or the cultivated and reflecting mind of Achmed, seem to have afforded no insuperable barriers against the seductive pomp and luxury of the court, the banquet and the harem. But there was an unthought of remedy in the hand of Providence against the prevailing influence and evil tendency of these.131 This ‘remedy’ was Ardebeili’s removal from the ‘seductive pomp and luxury’ of the Orient to Britain. Fox does all he can to divorce the British perception of Ardebeili from conventional attitudes to Muslims and their beliefs. He is also keen to present his protégé’s work as distinct from the free licence of much oriental poetry, so he states that Ardebeili’s poems ‘contain more than the wild sportings of oriental fancy’.132 Ardebeili’s ‘Selima’ is presented within the context of British sentimental poetry as a chaste, unattainable ideal of perfection. In this way, Ardebeili adopts the moral values of his new homeland, placing the woman he loves on a pedestal, where she curbs his desire while stimulating it. He learnt from the same poetic school as Southey to produce a corrective form of oriental poetry, that restrains sexuality within the text, rather than giving it free rein. In Thalaba any hint of sexuality is constrained and the fulfilment of Thalaba’s and Oneiza’s love manifests itself as a spiritual reward. Southey uses the attractive theme of the Bedouin love story, in which a young sheik undergoes trials that test his strength, in order to be rewarded by the object of his love. But his version ends in ‘heaven’, rather than the sexual consummation of the ‘paternal tent’. While Beckford, Moore and Byron used the genre of oriental poetry to provide an imaginative space – away from the constraints of domestic poetic settings – in which to explore sexual love, Southey domesticated it by subjecting it to his own (though increasingly presented as ‘British’) moral code of sensibility and restraint. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 197 01/06/2007 11:53:51 198 Writing the Empire Sorcerers and Sultans In Thalaba, the champion of Southey’s moral code is not only tested by love but by other worldly temptations, as the sorcerers attempt to inveigle him into accepting the benefits of black magic. As much as Southey’s Bedouin characters delineate his moral values, the sorcerers and sultans that he parades for his readers embody negative aspects of society. They represent irreligion, superstitious belief and the abuse of power, the targets for Southey’s invective in much of his fiction. This section of my argument investigates the new pressures that Southey put on these familiar enemies of his domestic poetry by orientalizing them. Much of the sorcerers’ evil power is symbolized by a magical ring they have forged and which Thalaba possesses for much of the poem. He uses it at various points to protect himself, until he is brought to recognize that ‘The Talisman is Faith’ rather than a magic ring (V.515). At one point a magician, Lobaba, tries to reconcile Thalaba to the use of magic, saying, ‘nothing in itself is good or evil, / But only in its use’ (IV.251–2). Thereby he cleverly repeats the argument that Thalaba has already used himself to justify keeping the ring: In God’s name, and the Prophet’s! be its power Good, let it serve the righteous: if for evil, God and my trust in Him, shall hallow it. (III.59–61) However, the metaphysical reasoning that Lobaba uses to argue with Thalaba differs in that it leaves God out of the equation. Thalaba knows that what may seem like free will to do good or evil has been removed by his submission to God’s will (the doctrine that underpins Thalaba), but this is something that the materialist magician cannot comprehend. Lobaba leads Thalaba astray in the desert, where after three days wandering and suffering from acute thirst they: Saw a green meadow, fair with flowers besprent, Azure and yellow, like the beautiful fields Of England, when amid the growing grass The blue-bell bends, the golden king-cup shines, In the merry month of May! (IV.419–23) This is an example of how Southey introduces information from his western authorities into Thalaba without giving much thought to the consequences. This moment of ‘short-lived joy’ from James Bruce’s Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile (1790) is out of place as a mirage experienced by his Arabian hero in a desert landscape.133 Inspired by Bruce’s vision of ‘green grass and yellow daisies’ – a pastoral vision of the British countryside that a western traveller might have Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 198 01/06/2007 11:53:51 Thalaba the Destroyer 199 – Southey elides any difference of knowledge systems, by overlaying his own (and his readers) western consciousness and familiarity with English (or Scottish, in Bruce’s case) natural history onto his Middle Eastern characters.134 The plants that grow there turn out in fact not to be beneficent British ones, but, as befits this fiercer oriental climate, inedible ‘bitter leaves’ (IV.433). The mirage, as an example of visual deception, underlines the principle that Thalaba defends in his debate with Lobaba – that good and evil do exist as separate entities, and the magician’s attempt to convince him otherwise is a trick. Despite the illusory superimposition of them on each other at times, there is a real, distinguishable difference between them, as here, which a believer can discover. By juxtaposing Bruce’s memory of ‘home’ in the mirage, with the metaphysical debate between the two characters, Southey implies that good resides in the benign, domestic familiarity of an English meadow, whereas evil is a constant potential in an alien landscape dominated by superstition and magic. The dualistic world of Thalaba is therefore employed here to promote Southey’s imperialist agenda. Lobaba’s continued attempts to trick Thalaba into using the magical ring fail, as he resolves not to ‘distrust the providence of God’, even when a large red column of sand whirls towards them (IV.489). Again, rather than imprecate God’s works as magic, Southey uses a natural force that has the necessary power to work a miracle for his readers, so that ‘Driven by the breath of God / A column of the Desert’ (or tornado) kills Lobaba (IV.568–9). But as one source of wickedness is defeated, another rises up to depict the magnitude of evil that individual faith has to surmount. In Southey’s 1799–1800 manuscript of the poem, Thalaba encounters another temptation in the spirit of Nimrod. This character is introduced on the side of evil because, according to Southey, he was ‘The first who made the multitude / Bow to the throne of power’, so setting the standards for secular tyranny.135 This specious reasoner argues that ‘Allah’ is not in control of the world, as the fight for supremacy between Satan (or Eblis) and God is in the balance. This reinterpretation of the poem’s eschatological power politics reinforces its dualism, but complicates Thalaba’s deterministic belief that God’s might will prevail (which is presumably why it was later omitted). Nimrod suggests that the wisest person would choose between good and evil by adopting the system with the least onerous duties. When he asks what Thalaba has to do as a Muslim, his hero replies: Fasting, prayer, Ablutions; to acknowledge God but one, Mohammed as his prophet. to abstain From wine, to do no wrong & with the lot That Allah hath assigned to be content.136 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 199 01/06/2007 11:53:51 200 Writing the Empire Southey creates an ascetic vision of the abstention and resignation of Islamic belief for his western readers, by paring it down to a basic list of its most recognizable elements. Nevertheless, in Southey’s moral programme, Thalaba still rejects Nimrod’s conventional temptation of ‘joys, riches & rule’.137 Later revisions of the manuscripts of Thalaba avoid these explicit manifestos of Islamic belief, so that Southey’s text is less underpinned by its tenets. For instance another passage from the 1799–1800 manuscript is expunged towards the end of the poem, when Thalaba is in the Domdaniel caverns and explicitly uses the Koran itself – which he carries with him as a ‘buckler of salvation’ – against poisonous liquid exuding from the roofs of the caves.138 In fact the greatest changes that Southey made to Thalaba – from manuscript to the last edition that he oversaw (his Poetical Works of 1837–8) – were, apart from presentational emendations, in excising the overtly Islamic aspects of his text. To reinforce the evil that Thalaba has to overcome, the ninth book describes the entrance of yet another despotic, cruel sultan who controls his followers: On either hand the thick-wedged crowd Fall from the royal path. Recumbent in the palanquin he casts On the wide tumult of the waving throng A proud and idle eye. Now in his tent alighted, he receives Homage and worship. The slave multitude With shouts of blasphemy adore Him, father of his people! him their Lord! Great King, all-wise, all-mighty, and all-good! Whose smile was happiness, whose frown was death, Their present Deity! (IX.594–605) Again the worshipping crowd are inculcated in the crime of tyranny, by replacing God with this ‘present Deity’. The eastern city – depicted as a place of slavish sycophancy and corruption – turns out its people to observe the execution of a Christian prisoner. The sultan in his luxuriant covered litter watches his victim being beaten to death, as part of a ritual to endow the sorcerers with more magical power, by extracting ‘the foam that in his agony, / Last from his lips shall fall’ (IX.633–4). The officiating ‘Priests begin their song, the song of praise, / The hymn of glory to their Devil-God’ (IX.625–6). The sultan’s followers subscribe to the sorcerers’ cult of magic and: They clap their hands for joy And lift their children up To see the Christian die. (IX.644–6) Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 200 01/06/2007 11:53:51 Thalaba the Destroyer 201 Thalaba’s personal (even hermeneutical) relationship with God contrasts vividly with the superstitious, priestly hermeticism of the magicians. If Southey intended to depict the latter as a facet of Islam, he exaggerates the bifurcation of its representation here, with the faith of Thalaba linked to the ancient ‘Covenant with Ishmael’, and the sorcerers’ priestly cult allegorizing the modern ‘abominations engrafted upon it’.139 Secular despotism and priestly tyranny are still very much linked in Southey’s mind as iniquities of human society. However now he is displacing these evils to a convenient oriental distance, where he can examine them without criticism. The ‘race of Hell’ After further trials against oriental magic and tyranny, Thalaba’s journey to the Domdaniel caverns, to confront the ‘race of Hell’, continues (XII.85). He encounters another enchanted garden, where again a potential source of human comfort (in the form of the ‘damsel’, Laila) is withheld from him by her death. After a long sledge ride, and a further journey by boat across an ocean, Thalaba reaches the shore. Standing there he watches the tide coming in: Meantime with fuller reach and stronger swell, Wave after wave advanced; Each following billow lifted the last foam That trembled on the sand with rainbow hues; The living flower that, rooted to the rock, Late from the thinner element Shrunk down within its purple stem to sleep, Now feels the water, and again Awakening, blossoms out All its green anther-necks. (XII.36–45) This description, Southey tells us, comes from his observations of the sea at Falmouth in 1800, while he was waiting to catch a ship to Portugal from there. His ‘Preface’ to the 1837 edition contains the details: I walked on the beach, caught soldier-crabs, admired the sea-anenomies in their ever-varying shapes of beauty, read Gebir, and wrote half a book of Thalaba … the sea-anemonies (which I have never had any other opportunity of observing) were introduced in Thalaba soon afterwards.140 The detailed description of the sea anemones in Southey’s poem has a vivid immediacy that is also found in several other passages, revealing the influence that he considered Landor to have had on his writing; learning ‘to have my eye Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 201 01/06/2007 11:53:52 202 Writing the Empire awake – to bring images to sight, and to convey a picture in a word’.141 This form of descriptive, close-up observation – especially of scenes of nature – lyrically conveyed, is Southey at his best and contrasts vividly with the magical ‘machinery’ of the rest of the poem. As Thalaba moves nearer to the conclusion of his quest, more of this ‘machinery’ intervenes. The boat he is carried in is steered into a cave where Thalaba alights. Entering a rocky passage which leads down towards a black pit, Thalaba comes across a man fettered to a rock. This is Othatha, the last ‘Champion of the Lord’, who is being punished for falling in love and neglecting his duty to God – a reminder to Thalaba of his moral mission (XII.84). Thalaba is transported by a winged car into the abyss. Landing he kills an Afreet (a powerful evil demon) who guards the doors in front of him. At the mention of God’s name the doors open and inside Thalaba finds two of the sorcerers, Khawla and Mohareb. Seeing the sword of his father, Hodeirah, in the fire, Thalaba goes to grasp it, killing Khawla who tries to stop him. The ‘Living Image’ of Eblis strikes ‘the Round Altar’ (see Figure 7) at which all the ‘Sorcerer brood’ are compelled to come to the summons (XII.349–50, 354). Thalaba drives his sword into the heart of the ‘Living Image’, at which point: The Ocean-Vault fell in, and all were crushed. In the same moment at the gate Of Paradise, Oneiza’s Houri-form Welcomed her Husband to eternal bliss. (XII.500–4) The plot’s hurtling conclusion, in which events rapidly follow each other in the dark world of the Domdaniel caverns, is even more complicated in its manuscript form by more magical effects and several extra characters – for instance there are many more demons, five boatmen, a giant tyrant, named Leoline, and his mother, a hag. The poem is much improved by being made simpler. Southey obviously later intended that Thalaba should avoid the deliberate obfuscation and confusion of Beckford’s oriental world, or of becoming simply another implausible ‘fairytale’, such as the Arabian Nights. However there are many similarities still between this ending and the story of Maugraby’s downfall in the Arabian Tales. Much space is given in that text to describing the magician’s evil deeds in the human world, but eventually a Syrian prince, over whom Maugraby has attempted to exert his evil influence, rebels against him and enters the ‘Dom-Daniel’. Here he finds a ‘golden colossus’ who wears a powerful ring, which he removes and, striking the statue with the hand on which he has placed the ring, the statue is destroyed.142 Though the cavern does not fall in and has to be destroyed by another champion, the Syrian prince emerges and eventually marries a lovely Princess of Egypt. The parallels with Thalaba are obvious, but Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 202 01/06/2007 11:53:52 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 203 Thalaba the Destroyer 203 Figure 7. ‘Domdaniel’, from William Hawkes Smith, Essays in Design from Southey’s Poem of Thalaba the Destroyer (Birmingham: W. Hawkes Smith, J. Belcher & Son and W. Suffield; London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1818). By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. 01/06/2007 11:53:52 Writing the Empire 204 Southey, by adopting, like the Arabian Tales, a statue, or ‘Living Image’ of ‘Eblis’, as the centre of the world’s evil, makes the ending of his poem less powerful than it might have been (XII.349, 373). Thalaba does not have to confront what Southey sees as the real source of evil, Satan (as the authentic form of Eblis), in the conclusion of his quest. Therefore Thalaba does not become a sublime epic battle between good and evil in the Miltonic tradition, as Southey intended. Instead it takes its place among those other fantastical, oriental ‘fairytales’ (of his source material) in which superstition and magic predominate. Conclusions Thalaba may contain ‘morally sublime’ moments, but in the end it conforms to a sterotypical portrayal of the supremacy of spiritual faith over evil worldly forces, with little psychological depth in the characters on either side, or osmosis between them (unlike Paradise Lost). Southey’s morals obtrude on his characterization and his voice intrudes on the text. Unlike Byron’s presence as poet/narrator in Don Juan, which amuses the reader as it undercuts the narrative, Southey’s tone is often moralizing, didactic and preachy, or overly sentimental, and in Thalaba he writes for an audience that he assumes shares a common currency of moral and political values. It would seem that Southey had relocated his radicalism to the Middle East by finding there a corrupt and degenerate political and religious ‘other’ that would benefit from the reforming influence of a rational, and morally upright, western faith and polity. However the situation is made more complicated by his ambiguous political position at this time. For instance, in his comments on his own society Southey was also less than complimentary: The ablest physician can do little in the great lazar-house of society. it is a pest-house that infects all within its atmosphere; he acts the wisest part who retires from the contagion; nor is that part either a selfish or a cowardly one; it is ascending the Ark like Noah to preserve a remnant which may become the whole.143 Even more revealing are Southey’s notes on Thalaba in his Common-Place Book, ‘Cannot the Dom Danael be made to allegorize those systems that make the misery of mankind?’ and ‘Can the evils of established systems be well allegorized?’144 Southey uses the term ‘systems’ in a Blakean sense to mean the structures of society, that is the church and state that govern it and who for him perpetuate ‘the misery of mankind’. In a letter written while he was composing Thalaba, Southey speaks of his conviction ‘that every fact may be warped to suit a system, and that every system must be erroneous’.145 Southey’s rejection of all systems, including British examples, is in fact very important to our understanding of Thalaba, and crucial to the development of Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 204 01/06/2007 11:53:53 Thalaba the Destroyer 205 his values at this time. Thalaba’s title of ‘Destroyer’ and his act in obliterating the man-made ‘systems’ of the Domdaniel caverns at God’s behest should carry wider social consequences than the narrow resolution of Thalaba’s union with his sister/bride, Oneiza, in ‘eternal bliss’. But Southey’s political ambivalence infects his text, because while he is on the cusp of arguing for major changes in the ‘systems’ of society – and so employing the familiar rhetoric of radicalism from his youth – he is actually advocating a much more personal, quiescent rebellion, that finds a solution to the ills of society in piety, morality and monogamous love. To have reached this position, Southey also shows how much he and Coleridge were in tune again in their thinking. It was only a few years earlier that Coleridge’s poems ‘France: An Ode’ and ‘Fears in Solitude’ were published in the Morning Post (1798), depicting his own personal reaction to the evils of society as a retreat into ‘nature’s quietness / And solitary musings’.146 After 1803, Southey’s move to the Lake District did constitute a form of withdrawal from society in his pursuance of a sedentary literary career, rather than his engagement in the public employment he had envisaged (as a lawyer or doctor) in either of the two cities he was familiar with, Bristol and London.147 Bernhardt-Kabisch demonstrates the problems of reading Southey’s poem as a ‘political’ text in the face of these ambiguities: At once merely personal and vaguely metaphysical, daemonic and domestic, Thalaba’s quest wholly lacks a political middle ground: his victory, while purporting to be an act of universal redemption, produces no visible practical good other than his own promotion to beatitude.148 This is because Southey uses the language of radicalism, but for him the meaning of the words has changed. Bernhardt-Kabisch, reading Southey’s semiotics, comes to the conclusion that ‘the poem represents, in fact, a complete political disengagement’.149 But this contradicts Southey’s ambitions for his poetry to be morally useful and ‘strengthen those feelings & excite those reflections in others, from whence virtue must spring’.150 And given his radical background, and his later conservative sympathies, it is unlikely that he advocates such a ‘disengagement’. Southey is in fact urging upon his British readers the importance of cultivating the personal qualities of self-government and reliance on intuitive faith – emphasized throughout Thalaba’s quest – as important tools with which to negotiate the ‘systems’ that govern human lives. Indeed Southey can be seen as being at his most political in taking this critical stance of societal ‘systems’ – whether by taking that position he is denouncing the sceptical materialism of the ‘magicians’, or the ‘priestly’ structures of organized religion. Certainly the first edition of Thalaba was considered to be radical in choice of form, style and language – and an indication of a growing, modern ‘sect of poets’ who were ‘dissenters from the established systems in poetry Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 205 01/06/2007 11:53:53 206 Writing the Empire and criticism’, as Francis Jeffrey labelled Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Lamb.151 Southey is in some respects therefore, like his hero, still the ‘revolutionary’ of his youth, ‘destroying’ what he sees as the old perverted regime, but what has changed now is that he does not explicitly advocate another ‘system’ in its place (of republican virtue or Pantisocratic ‘aspheterism’). Instead he recommends a solution in personal morality and probity, based on the heroic role models of his ‘epic’ poetry, that will inspire his countrymen navigating all such faulty ‘systems’ at home and abroad (throughout the Victorian period). Southey’s ‘disengagement’ merely gives him a stronger position from which to attack ‘the great lazar-house of society’, and increasingly he would do so by relocating his radicalism in the Orient, as is also evident in The Curse of Kehama (1810), in order to bid for a national (yet Southeyan) code of values. The supremacy of such ‘British’ values in Thalaba is a device to criticize Southey’s own society, but also justifies their dissemination into other cultures and societies, promoting here, as in his other works, Britain’s imperial policy abroad. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 206 01/06/2007 11:53:53 5 THE CURSE OF KEHAMA: MISSIONARIES, ‘MONSTROUS MYTHOLOGY’ AND EMPIRE Thalaba the Destroyer was the first step in Southey’s ‘design of rendering every mythology … the basis of a narrative poem’.1 As it neared completion, he was already moving into new mythological territory, intending next to create a ‘wild’ and extravagant ‘Hindoo romance’ that would be called the ‘Curse of Keradou’.2 Yet as it took shape, Southey’s ambitions were tempered by an increasing reluctance to mould his Indological source material into an ‘epic’ poem. This was due to the aesthetic, cultural and religious reservations that he had in writing it and which are present in the irregularities and discontinuities that fracture its coherence. Much of Southey’s disinclination for the topic, and his problems in presenting it to the public, came from British perceptions of Hinduism, which contemporary commentators, such as John Shore, compared unfavourably with British cultural and religious practices: Were the same superstitions, or the same barbarous and licentious rites, which are now exhibited on the banks of the Ganges, to be practised on the banks of the Thames, or even the remotest part of the British islands, they would excite the strongest possible feelings of horror, and stimulate our efforts to substitute a purer and more benign system in the place of this compound of cruelty and crime.3 Southey may have advocated a ‘more benign system’ in Kehama, but (as elsewhere in his writing) his fascination with ‘horror’ emerges in the poem’s detailed descriptions of ‘barbarous and licentious [Hindu] rites’. Nevertheless, despite his distaste at ‘importing’ alien religious practices for consumption by British readers, Southey was also aware of the excellent political and cultural reasons for continuing with the poem. The case for writing The Curse of Kehama, as it was renamed, was put by his friend William Taylor: Take the Hindoo superstition for your machinery, and your country here and your readers there have both an interest in its celebrity, which must grow with the national power and extend with the national empire.4 – 207 – Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 207 01/06/2007 11:53:53 Writing the Empire 208 Over the next nine years that Southey spent writing Kehama, he too shared Taylor’s ambitions for Britain’s ‘national empire’. Colonial expansion would create territories abroad which, in ‘being English by language and by religion’, would provide a corrective model of behaviour – particularly for the ‘barbarous’ Hindus – and make ‘their convenience and their interest … always attach them to England’.5 Such comments reveal how much the political ambivalence that Southey had felt while writing Thalaba began to resolve itself into support for his own country. His increasing conservatism during the first decade of the nineteenth century is evident both in his new antipathy for that previously admired repository of republican values, Napoleonic France, as well as in his ambitions for the British Empire that provided the focus for much of his journalism. Over the period in which Kehama was written, Southey was also working for the Annual Review (1802–9). His articles covered travel accounts, missionary reports, and other writings on colonial affairs. Important evidence of Southey’s developing political views, they are also fundamental in understanding the ideological origins of Kehama. This chapter explores the ways in which Southey’s colonial ambitions manifested themselves in his ‘Hindoo romance’ and provided a political and social context for his representation of India. While it was ostensibly the Hindu ‘mythological’ subject matter that first attracted Southey to write Kehama, his poem also provided an arena in which to explore issues in India that were of contemporary relevance to himself and his fellow Britons. ‘This magnificent empire’ At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, the British holdings in India became a topic of great interest to many Britons, due to the prominence they assumed in their own political affairs. This was a period in which humanitarian issues (such as the anti-slavery campaign) and contentious debates over the nature of government (in the wake of the American and French revolutions) came to the fore. These concerns converged in responses to India, where many felt more responsible and visible structures of control should be applied, in order to humanely govern the people of these territories. John Thelwall for instance, who took an anti-colonial stance in his political commentaries for The Tribune, was concerned to investigate the abuse of political power at all levels within Britain’s ‘magnificent empire’ (as he ironically termed it). His opinion was that: These colonies promote patronage, and strengthen the powerful hand of ministerial influence. The minister and his creatures get the power of appointing all sorts of officers, from the high and mighty Governor, who represents Royalty in miniature, to the little Constable, who parades the streets, and who will also tell you that he, in his turn, represents the same sublime character.6 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 208 01/06/2007 11:53:53 The Curse of Kehama 209 Those like Thelwall, who believed that colonial power and influence corrupted all those who administered it – from the highest ‘nabob’, who perceived himself as ‘Royalty in miniature’, to the ‘little Constable’, who benefited from his extended arm of influence – felt that such practices should be curtailed. Thelwall’s description was particularly apposite in terms of the British East India Company, which in the 1780s linked together three Indian territories under its controlling interests, of which: The largest, Bengal, was administered from the important trading post of Calcutta. The two other ports in British hands, Madras and Bombay, had smaller hinterlands. The East India Company, which owned the monopoly of trade with India, was governed in London by a Court of Proprietors, or shareholders, and a smaller, elective Court of Directors. The latter, the executive body, transmitted decisions on policy to a Governor (later Governor-General) in Bengal, who in turn headed a company administration which in 1800 employed approximately 4,500 soldiers and civilians in India.7 However Britain’s role in India was, from the beginning, commercial rather than colonial. In order to protect its mercantile interests, the East India Company did not allow colonization of its territories by British subjects. This led to a different relationship between Britain and Bengal – as well as a unique form of government – from that of Britain and her ‘settler’ colonies. Discussions of British India during this period were therefore very much concerned with examining the practices of the East India Company and its officials who administered these territories, although these matters would increasingly become an extension of government policy. At the time Southey was writing Kehama, the East India Company, under the aegis of the British government, was employing an expansionist policy in order to maintain stability in the regions surrounding the British territories. As P. J. Marshall notes: By 1815 the British position in India had been totally transformed by a series of conquests that had brought the whole of eastern India, most of the peninsula, and a large part of the Ganges valley under direct British rule, still administered through the East India Company. A contemporary estimate was that 40 million Indian people were by then living under the Company’s rule.8 As the native populations of these territories grew, questions of how they should be governed became of increasing concern. Many Britons feared that the East India Company’s growing power over its native employees was becoming cruel and despotic. Edmund Burke’s famous impeachment of the Governor-General of Bengal, Warren Hastings, in 1788, on charges of corruption and extortion, combined with humanitarian concerns to present India ‘as an ancient civilization that must be protected from the barbarism of the East India Company’.9 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 209 01/06/2007 11:53:53 210 Writing the Empire By the time Kehama was completed, the East India Company’s commercial monopoly had been curtailed (and would end completely with the East India Company Charter Act of 1813).10 Nevertheless the increasing awareness of Britain’s responsibility towards its Indian subjects was manifested by a growing evangelical movement to convert them to Christianity, as well as by controversy over the form its government should take. Such concerns became a significant theme of Kehama, where Southey combined oriental ‘extravagance’ with imperial politics in his poetical commentary on government and power. The examples that Southey saw of native Indian politics (for instance in Tipu Sultan’s rule of Mysore) – as well as the political machinations of the East India Company and the trial of Warren Hastings – combine in an enduring stereotype of oriental despotism. The poem portrays the ambitious actions of a fictitious Indian ruler, Kehama, in his attempt to gain dominion over not only the world, but heaven and hell too. The effects of his actions are traced on the lives of two ordinary people, Ladurlad and his daughter Kailyal, who resist his tyranny with the assistance of the gods of the Hindu religion (based on material from English translations of the Hindu scriptures). The oppressive nature of Kehama’s regime is enacted in the attempt of his son, Arvalan, to rape Kailyal. When her father intervenes to protect her, killing Kehama’s son, this sets in motion the narrative chain of events, in which the father and daughter attempt to evade and resist Kehama’s imperial forces as he seeks revenge on them. The Hindu gods eventually bring about the downfall of the oriental despot – who has also challenged their authority in his bid for power – and Ladurlad and Kailyal are rewarded for their virtuous resistance in the afterlife. It can be seen from this brief plot résumé that Southey, despite no longer embracing radical politics, was repeating the familiar theme that forms the organizing structure of all his long narrative poems (from Joan of Arc (1796) onwards), of virtuous, decent individuals opposing oppression by powerful rulers (whether kings, sultans or emperors). In this particular version of the motif, Southey chose India and the Hindu religion as the setting for his idealized dénouement of the downfall of tyranny, relocating the radical theme of his youthful politics to the subcontinent. His abiding concern was to delineate the correct principles of government, but to do so he employed a prescriptive, negative example of oriental tyranny. This avoided the difficult specifics of constructing a positive role-model, as well as permitting him to release the strong social and political inclinations he felt to criticize corruption and immorality wherever he found it. In this instance his impetus was employed not to attack his own society, but a foreign tyranny, with the British government portrayed, in contrast, as a responsible, benevolent polity, particularly in its own engagement with imperial policy. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 210 01/06/2007 11:53:53 The Curse of Kehama 211 There were several themes and issues that Southey intended to discuss in his poem. One of these obviously was the Hindu subject-matter that appealed to him as an attractive setting for his story. But his motives also related directly to contemporary political debate over the future of India in Britain. Javed Majeed and Saree Makdisi have shown that, during the opening decades of the nineteenth century, attitudes to India were becoming increasingly riven by a political ‘fault-line’, dividing the conservative and ‘romantic’ view – that valued Indian culture and its traditions, disseminated by Sir William Jones and Warren Hastings – and the utilitarian and evangelical belief that India should be governed by English law and administrative systems.11 While both attitudes posited India’s future as an imperial outpost, the former (and earlier) view advocated that ‘the languages and laws of Muslim and Hindu India should not be ignored or supplanted, but utilized and preserved, as foundations of the traditional social order’, and so implemented as instruments for governing the empire.12 But this attitude was gradually eroded by the changing demands of Britain’s relationship with India, indicated in the Hastings trial, which, despite the latter’s acquittal, led to diminishing support for ‘Orientalists’ against the centralized, metropolitan demands of the ‘Anglicists’. In his review articles on India (as well as his prefaces to Kehama), Southey does appear to be firmly aligning himself with the ambitions for India of James Mill, as Majeed demonstrates.13 But the significant role that the research of William Jones and the Asiatic Society of Bengal, in Calcutta, played in the construction of Kehama has to be taken into account. Because Southey incorporated both the ‘Orientalist’ and the ‘Anglicist’ viewpoints in his poem, it is similarly divided by this political fault-line. In Kehama, Hinduism is presented as a ‘foreign’ curiosity for Southey’s readers, creating an opportunity for him to negatively contrast these beliefs and practices with Christian teachings and morality. There are ambiguities in Southey’s representation of the Hindu religion however. Kehama’s absolute rule is underpinned by an alliance with the priestly ‘Bramins’, suggesting that religion is an instrument of his oriental tyranny. But by placing the priests in a position of conflict with their gods, Southey promotes intuitive belief over the invidious sphere of priestly influence (as he often did in his own religion). He criticizes the Brahmans for their role in oppressing the lower castes of India, and this relates to his general disapprobation of the clerical hierarchy of all faiths. By separating the ancient ‘history’ of the gods from the practices of contemporary Hindus, Southey felt free to condemn such customs as ritual sacrifice and infanticide, without denigrating his source material. Nevertheless this did not work in practice and the religious rituals of Kehama dominate the poem, as they do in Southey’s reviews of the Indian missions, in which he supports the missionary project to abolish the demands of a ‘most burthensome and inhuman superstition’.14 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 211 01/06/2007 11:53:54 212 Writing the Empire In Southey’s writing, his representation of foreign lands often reflects contexts much closer to home. His own experiences of an ‘alien’ culture and religion, from his two sojourns in Portugal (1795–6 and 1800–1), were brought into his poem, as my analysis demonstrates. The process of ‘othering’, that was an integral part of colonialist discourse during the Romantic period, allows the boundary between Occident and Orient to shift subjectively for each commentator, as John Barrell and Tim Fulford have shown.15 In order to define other cultures against British moral values, it was not implausible, in Southey’s eyes, to see parallels between Portuguese and Indian society. Equivalent comparisons could also be made with a specific enemy of Britain, at a time when the European political arena was dominated by war with France. Therefore Southey’s construction of Kehama, his tyrannous eastern potentate, reflects his attitudes to the imperial aggression of Napoleon at this time.16 The embattled territories of the Napoleonic wars were in the East as well as the West and Napoleon’s oriental ambitions – which had not abated, despite abandoning his Egyptian campaign in 1800 – could well have had repercussions for the British in India. The French had formed alliances there with anti-British princes in the past, such as Haidar Ali, ruler of Mysore, in 1780. Haidar Ali was the father of Tipu Sultan (‘the tiger prince’), who was to become a yet more dangerous adversary for the British in India.17 The British territories, surrounded by ambitious, martial Indian principalities, were susceptible not only to Indian aggression, but also to hostile western imperial projects. My analysis of The Curse of Kehama, in the light of these issues, reveals the effect of Southey’s increasing political (and religious) conservatism on his poem. It also exposes the dichotomy he faced between representing an image of India that conformed to ‘Orientalist’ respect for the customs and beliefs of the Hindu religion, and imagining a future for India as part of the British Empire, ruled by a paternalistic government and underpinned by British education and morality. Part of Southey’s response to that dilemma was to attempt to domesticate the Orient in his poem, depicting his Hindu heroine as a model of feminine virtue for his western readers. Francis Jeffrey castigated Southey for this ‘Childishness’ in trying to combine ‘the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments’, from which his ‘variety and novelty of wonders’ falls short, with overly moral, infantile characters who ‘lisp like sucklings’.18 Kehama presents a domesticated, western vision of India, enveloped in Hindu ‘mythology’, in which Southey endeavours to control those foreign aspects of it that he considered ‘monstrous’. While revelling in the splendour of oriental ‘fable’, Southey constantly undercut and modified it in his prefaces and his annotation, overlaying its ‘extravagance’ with Christian morality. The links he found in his research, between the ‘Trimourtee’ and the Trinity, and Christ and the Hindu avatars, as well as with classical mythology, Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 212 01/06/2007 11:53:54 The Curse of Kehama 213 reconciled him to the use of his Indological material, which he then incorporated and moulded for his own ideological purposes.19 For in Kehama, Kailyal and Ladurlad are, no less than Thalaba, on a Christian mission through a world of superstition – dominated by gods and demons – on the path to heaven. Southey believed that he could use any system of ‘mythology’ as a framework, as long as it was constructed so that a ‘moral grandeur’ shone through, thereby converting the ‘monstrous’ into the moral.20 His christianized version of Hinduism delineates his adoption of ‘Anglicist’ attitudes to India. The conflict between the denigratory, yet defensive, tone of his prefaces (and annotations) and the central role of the Hindu religion in his poem represents its division between two imperial ideologies. Kehama incorporates both ‘Orientalist’ and ‘Anglicist’ attitudes to India and so manifests the instabilities that exist in colonialist discourse. This division is evident over the period in which Southey was writing the poem, in the difference between his ambitions in constructing Kehama, and his opinion much later when he looked back at it and tried to make sense of its orientalism. A letter of 1808 shows that his plan had been to include those aspects that he considered constituted an oriental poem: There must be quicker, wilder movements; there must be a gorgeousness of ornament also, – eastern gem-work, and sometimes rhyme must be rattled upon rhyme, till the reader is half dizzy with the thundering echo.21 The preface Southey wrote for the 1838 edition condemns such intentions, attempting to replace them with a western poetic tradition in his claim that ‘The spirit of the poem was Indian, but there was nothing Oriental in the style. I had learnt the language of poetry from our own great masters and the great poets of antiquity.’22 The Indian content has been relegated to its ‘spirit’ because, at this much later date, Southey wanted it to appear more conventional than it was perceived to be by those who reviled it in the name of the ‘great masters’ of literature. Kehama therefore could not have been written at any later point in Southey’s life, as his writing on Hinduism after its publication shows him rising to new levels of invective on ‘the Brahminical system [which] produces the utmost excesses of false humanity and of hideous cruelty’.23 Moral Spectacle The long period in which Southey was writing Kehama reflected his discouragement over the slow sales of Thalaba and Madoc, as well as the problematic nature of constructing his vision of India. Southey’s concern that his poem would violate public taste often led him to abandon it for other projects. The fact that it was published at all was due to Walter Savage Landor’s encouragement. According to Southey’s correspondence reporting his visit to Landor in 1808, it was his Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 213 01/06/2007 11:53:54 Writing the Empire 214 faith in Southey’s ability and his offer to pay the printing costs of Kehama that spurred him on to finish it. Southey did not accept Landor’s offer, but the confidence that his fellow writer exhibited in his ability enabled him to continue with the poem – as well as inspiring him to start a new poetic project, ‘Pelayo’, which eventually became Roderick the Last of the Goths (1814).24 On the subject of his renewed interest in writing poetry after his visit to Landor, Southey said: I cared nothing for present popularity or present emolument, but would willingly cast my bread upon the waters, [this] has been the main, almost the only, motive, for my resuming an amusement which I had totally disused for the last three years.25 As with his other narrative poems, Southey felt that it would be left to posterity to provide proper recognition of their greatness; revealing how much he felt out of step with the contemporary literary milieu. Southey’s fears that Kehama would be unpopular with the reading public can be related to its ideological schism. The largest source of imaginative material for his poem came from Hindu scriptures (translated by ‘Orientalist’ scholars), but Southey still wanted to promote his own Christian standards of morality. When he realized there was a discrepancy between his intentions and the ‘monstrous’ material of his text, he attempted to curb the Indological material and mould his readers’ expectations, fearing they would misinterpret his use of such ‘alien’ representations. As Balachandra Rajan point outs, ‘the stubborn enmity between Kehama and its prefaces’ is due to the fact that Southey was trying to fulfil the contradictory ideologies of fictional writer and imperial advocate: Southey’s project runs afoul of this difficulty so that the relationships between the two transactions, between the literary and the political, between the Indian other and the English self, and eve-n between resistance and domination are written inescapably into the engagement between the delinquent poem and the disciplinary behavior of its prefaces.26 Southey was also very aware of the moral responsibility of literature and quite willing to condemn contemporary immorality, as he saw it, in the writing of Byron, Shelley and Thomas Moore. Whereas in the past he had been prepared to challenge the western literary tradition, aesthetic conformity became more important in the general trend towards conservatism in all aspects of his life. The reluctance he felt to write Kehama became a physical repugnance for the project. Among the early letters in which he proudly proclaimed his plans for the poem, he revealed his concerns: I have just and barely begun the ‘Curse of Keradon [sic]’, which literally is stopped from some scruples of conscience in matters of taste. It is begun in rhymes, as irregular in length, cadence, and disposition as the lines of ‘Thalaba’. I write them with equal rapidity, so that, on the score of time and trouble, there is neither loss nor gain. But it Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 214 01/06/2007 11:53:54 The Curse of Kehama 215 is so abominable a sin against what I know to be right, that my stomach turns at it. It is to the utmost of my power vitiating, or rather continuing the corruption of public taste … My inducements are to avoid any sameness of expression, any mannerism, and to make as huge an innovation in rhyme as ‘Thalaba’ will do in blank verse.27 Southey appears to refer to the form rather than the content of Kehama here. But in his poetical code, the ‘Triads’, that he had laid down in the preface to Madoc, form and content were inextricably linked in his aim to provide ‘simplicity of invention’ with ‘pure truth, pure language, and pure manners’.28 Southey’s ‘innovation in rhyme’, which would become Kehama, contributed to the ‘extravagance’ he felt the poem had, but concerned him that its aesthetic nonconformity would cause a ‘corruption of public taste’. As the poem was about to go to the press, Southey said of it, ‘you will see that I shall be paid for it with plenty of abuse, and less money than will be got by others for abusing it’.29 Despite his fears, Kehama was more successful than he had assumed it would be (going through four editions in eight years). Southey reported in July 1811 that it ‘succeeds better than any of my former books’ and that ‘Nobody can be so much surprised at the comparative success of the poem as I am myself ’.30 It is likely that this success was due to the subject material, which fed what Madame de Staël identified, and Byron reported, as an ‘orientalizing’ trend among readers.31 However the most revealing comment that Southey made about the poem was after a preview of Walter Scott’s review of it for the Quarterly, where he asked his friend Grosvenor Bedford to insert some paragraphs that would: point out the moral grandeur of the fable, and how it becomes of universal interest and application, founded as it is upon a particular superstition – and also to show the value of works of high imagination, in taking us out of ourselves, and busying the mind about something which is not connected with the ordinary passions and pursuits of life. Sharon Turner’s wife said of Kehama that she ‘felt it elevate her conceptions, and occasion an excitement of mind which made her feel superior to herself.’ This is precisely what it ought to do. Insert something to this purport and rescue me from the imputation of having written a poem of 5000 lines for the purpose of teaching Hindoo mythology.32 While providing the excitement and novelty of Hindu ‘mythology’, Southey also intended his poem to have a moral sublimity that would ‘elevate’ his readers and make them ‘feel superior’. Extravagant, unfamiliar, even horrific sights, while being imaginatively stimulating, could transcend ‘the ordinary passions and pursuits of life’, to reveal edifying truths. This relates to the role of ‘spectacle’ in Kehama, as well as his intentions in creating it for his readers. Southey certainly intended his poem to be awe-inspiring. A letter he wrote just after Kehama was completed pre-empts his correspondent’s response to it: Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 215 01/06/2007 11:53:54 Writing the Empire 216 It will not surprise me if you rather wonder at the work than like it, for if half a dozen persons in the world should enjoy it, it will be more than I expect. This feeling should have prevented me from beginning it. It had the effect of making it lie unfinished for seven years.33 Not expecting many readers to like the poem, Southey settled for its effect to be one of ‘wonder’. The initial overwhelming effect of the first book of Kehama contributes to this intention, with the Orient presented as a scene of ‘spectacle’, thrusting the reader directly into a crowded funeral procession: Midnight, and yet no eye Through all the Imperial City clos’d in sleep! Behold her streets a-blaze With light that seems to kindle the red sky, Her myriads swarming thro’ the crowded ways! Master and slave, old age and infancy, All, all abroad to gaze; House-top and balcony Clustered with women, who throw back their veils, With unimpeded and insatiate sight To view the funeral pomp which passes by, As if the mournful rite Were but to them a scene of joyance and delight. (I.1–13)34 The strongest impression of this opening stanza is the crowded humanity it describes, with its ‘myriads swarming’ and ‘Clustered’ streets. The techniques that Southey used for creating the effect of ‘wonder’ in his poem were learnt from the spectacular street scenes he witnessed in Portugal, as can be seen from his letters. Of one Portuguese procession, he said in 1800, ‘I never saw aught finer than this, nor, indeed, to be compared with it – the crowd closed behind, the music, the blaze of the dresses, the long street thronged, flooded with people’.35 Nevertheless, Southey’s letter qualifies his appreciation of the scene, because it is limited by his ideological stance with regard to Portugal’s religion, so that in his comment, ‘it ought to be seen with Catholic eyes’, he detaches himself from the Portuguese crowd. While Southey was attracted to Portugal – even tentatively planning to live there among a growing British expatriate ‘colony’ – he was also repelled by aspects of Portuguese life. His correspondence, and his reports of his first visit there – contained in his Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal (1797) – were particularly critical of the Portuguese capital, Lisbon. His complaints range from minor annoyances, such as dirt and fleas, to irate condemnation of the Roman Catholic Church, which he felt dominated the lives of the people to their detriment. But above all, what emanates from South- Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 216 01/06/2007 11:53:54 The Curse of Kehama 217 ey’s letters is the idea of ‘spectacle’, a word he often used to refer to the public scenes he witnessed, such as religious and royal events, as well as bullfights. The descriptions of parades, festivals and processions and the crowds of followers attendant on these scenes are portrayed as overwhelmingly alien sights, as they are in Kehama. One way in which Southey could define his Englishness in Portugal was by presenting himself as a spectator at these events; so witnessing the action, rather than playing a culturally central role in it. Describing a ‘procession of the Body of God’, he stands back from the scene to interpose his own judgment on it, stating, ‘I hate this idolatry as much as I despise it; for I know the bloody and brutalising spirit of popery’.36 Such overwhelming scenes of cultural and religious collective enthusiasm only confirmed for him the difference between a ‘Romish’ culture and his own, that he felt bound to identify. And in Kehama too, the narrator’s voice intrudes between the sight and his readers, to separate them from the foreignness of the spectacle, and the culture that approves it. This relates to Southey’s increasing acceptance of his own country’s systems of church and state that he had inveighed against so stridently in his youth. His visit to Portugal made him increasingly disposed to defend these structures, that he believed to be free of the ‘brutalising spirit’ he found abroad. The fascinated repulsion that Southey felt towards public national and religious events in Portugal was central to his depiction of the participatory role of crowd scenes in Hindu ritual for Kehama. He also employed such techniques in Thalaba, where the detrimental effect of religious enthusiasm is contrasted with the merits of private, individual faith. By the time his Indian poem was written, the ‘myriads swarming thro’ the crowded ways’ have become a trope for an intimidating, oriental form of fanaticism. Southey magnifies the size of the crowd by including all of humanity between the extremes of ‘Master and slave, old age and infancy’. The impression is thereby given of a densely populated eastern city, in danger of being swamped by an indistinguishable multitude. As John Barrell comments on the presence of ‘the enormous population of Asia’ in De Quincey’s terrifying opium dreams, most Europeans ‘conceived of Asia beyond the Tigris as a place where people seemed to run into each other, to replicate each other, to compose one mass without divisions or features’.37 Southey’s focus switches in the second stanza, from this watching mass of humanity to the bright effect of the spectacle against the night sky: Vainly, ye blessed twinklers of the night, Your feeble beams ye shed, Quench’d in the unnatural light which might out-stare Even the broad eye of day; And thou from thy celestial way Pourest, O Moon, an ineffectual ray! For lo! ten thousand torches flame and flare Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 217 01/06/2007 11:53:54 218 Writing the Empire Upon the midnight air, Blotting the lights of heaven With one portentous glare. Behold the fragrant smoke in many a fold, Ascending, floats along the fiery sky, And hangeth visible on high, A dark and waving canopy. (I.14–27) A contrast is made between the ‘unnatural’ blazing light of the funeral procession and the dimmer natural ‘lights of heaven’, the stars. The ceremony’s bright artificiality does not endow its followers with divine enlightenment. Instead it divides them from it by the smoke of its torches, that form a ‘dark and waving canopy’, so ‘Blotting’ out ‘heaven’. In this way Southey imposes spectatorial/narratorial judgment on the Hindu religion and its intimidating crowd, who are shown to be inspired by a heathen ‘unnatural light’, rather than ‘the lights of heaven’. While these opening stanzas are designed to be dramatic, absorbing and thrilling in the ‘spectacle’ of Hindu ceremony, its ‘portentous’ nature is also implied. The idea that it is ‘unnatural’, and even dangerous, is increased in the third stanza, as the overwhelming ‘noise’ of the crowd is added to the vision: Hark! ’tis the funeral trumpet’s breath! ’Tis the dirge of death At once ten thousand drums begin, With one long thunder-peal the ear assailing; Ten thousand voices then join in, And with one deep and general din Pour their wild wailing. The song of praise is drown’d Amid the deafening sound; You hear no more the trumpet’s tone, You hear no more the mourner’s moan, Though the trumpet’s breath, and the dirge of death, Swell with commingled force the funeral yell. But rising over all in one acclaim Is heard the echoed and re-echoed name, From all that countless rout; Arvalan! Arvalan! Arvalan! Arvalan! (I.28–44) The persistent auditory imagery increases the noise and scale of the human presence, as the daunting multitude ‘Swell with commingled force the funeral yell’. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 218 01/06/2007 11:53:54 The Curse of Kehama 219 The repeated chant of ‘Arvalan’ is an aggressively artificial rather than a natural sound, denoting their frenzied submission to the cult of despotism. Again, such images were inspired by events closer to home. Though the crowd here is ostensibly an eastern one, Southey employed ‘mob’ imagery in letters displaying his fears of civil insurrection in Britain. In describing the much later Bristol riots (1833), for instance, he speaks of the reformist crowd as an unstoppable force, a ‘brutalized populace [that] is ready to break in upon us’.38 In the Portuguese parade too, the crowd threatens to become a ‘flood’, while in Kehama they are a ‘swarming’ mass. The pressure of so much humanity in one place, combined in a common goal, is described as a powerful freak of nature, which on this scale is now ‘unnatural’. So too, in The Prelude (1805), Wordsworth refers to the huge crowds of London as an immense force, which threatens to overwhelm him in its ‘roar’ and ‘tide’.39 He attempts to halt this process of alienation by identifying individual human characteristics, dividing and categorizing them, as Makdisi points out: Wordsworth’s ongoing effort to distinguish individual faces in the crowd is an attempt to keep the crowd from working any sudden (and not quite understood) transformation into a mob – as though to reassure himself, as he wanders through the streets of London, that what he sees is still ‘only’ a crowd, and not yet the mob of his nightmares.40 Southey, in contrast, does not try to control his ‘mob’ in Kehama, but deliberately releases this huge, overflowing, intimidating element of his Indian world, so employing Wordsworth’s ‘nightmares’ to exacerbate the horror of the scene. This sense of alienation and impending disaster that Southey builds up, ends in a climactic description of the act of ‘suttee’ (sati). Those leading the ‘death-procession’ are ‘Bramins’, and the body of Arvalan is carried in state, followed by his father Kehama, the ‘mighty Rajah’ (I.50, 52, 79). The female members of the royal household, who will play an active part in the ceremony, are also in the procession: O sight of grief ! the wives of Arvalan, Young Azla, young Nealliny, are seen! Their widow-robes of white, With gold and jewels bright, Each like an Eastern queen. Woe! woe! around their palankeen, As on a bridal day, With symphony, and dance, and song, Their kindred and their friends come on. The dance of sacrifice! the funeral song! And next the victim slaves in long array Richly bedight to grace the fatal day, Move onward to their death; (I.83–95) Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 219 01/06/2007 11:53:54 Writing the Empire 220 The funeral therefore is not just an occasion for mourning the death of Kehama’s son, but is also a day of general grief and death, in which his wives and many ‘victim slaves’ are destined also to die. The procession – ‘Incessant as the roar / Of streams which down the wintry mountain pour’ – stops at the funeral pyre, where Arvalan’s wife, Azla, meekly climbs onto it (I.120–1). The distress of his other widow, Nealliny, is evident in her facial contractions; ‘in her face you see / The supplication and the agony’ (I.165–6). Her cries are drowned by the ‘wild dissonance’ of the people, and as she struggles ‘Towards the crowd in vain for pity’, they force her on to the pyre (I.164, 171). The two different responses of the women reflect those in the notes on sati (particularly from François Bernier and Pietro Della Valle) that Southey incorporated to verify his fictional construction. These include reports of submissive, passive widows, as well as more defiant acts of resistance, as women are forced to their death – either reaction providing equally gruesome material for Southey’s poem. The first book concludes with Kehama and the ‘Bramins’ setting fire to the funeral pyre and the ‘victim band’ of slaves dancing around it, throwing themselves into the fire, or falling into it in their demotic frenzy: While round and round, in giddy wheel, Intoxicate they roll and reel, Till one by one whirl’d in they fall, And the devouring flames have swallowed all. (I.194–7) Southey’s reviews and his notes to Kehama show him to have been morally opposed to the Hindu practice of sati, so why did he construct it as a thrilling spectacle, drawing the eye on while also repelling it? Southey’s letters from Portugal assist again in revealing his motivations. He repeats a conversation he had with a lady in Lisbon, who told him that the English residents used to enjoy such a ‘fine sight’ as an auto-da-fé (the ceremonial burning of heretics by the Inquisition) as much as the Portuguese people.41 This practice is described as a regular occurrence in Lisbon in Voltaire’s Candide (1759), and Southey makes reference to that text as if it is a factual account of the level of incidence. For Southey these religious burnings are evidence of the barbarous nature of the Portuguese and he is disgusted by the revelation, saying ‘No English eye ought to have seen so cursed a spectacle’.42 Southey is also critical of other Portuguese cultural practices: I cannot understand the pleasure excited by a bull-fight. It is honourable to the English character that none of our nation frequent these spectacles. I am not quite sure that my curiosity in once going was perfectly justifiable; but the pain inflicted by the sight was expiation enough.43 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 220 01/06/2007 11:53:54 The Curse of Kehama 221 Despite his dislike of animal cruelty, as an alien in Portugal – like the English spectators of auto-da-fés in Lisbon – he finds such a sight curious enough to justify experiencing, if only ‘once’. But writing to his English correspondent, he retreats behind incomprehension at the difference in values of his ‘honourable’ countrymen and the Portuguese. Because it is not just his disinclination to view bullfights – it is part of the ‘English character’ – he uses such ‘spectacles’ to define national attributes against Portuguese practices. He confesses that the sight of the bullfight impressed itself so strongly on him, that it caused him ‘pain’. This is the intentional effect too of the first book of Kehama – as well as parts of Thalaba and Madoc – where, in recoiling from gruesome scenes, readers are expected to make a distinction between alien cultures and their own. Southey describes sati closely and deliberately to inflict ‘pain’ on his readers. The moral abhorrence he felt in Portugal was intended to be engendered in the ‘audience’, who ‘watch’ the act of sati – in order to create a similarly strong reaction within them to oppose its practice. While the fictional spectators in Kehama ‘throw back their veils, / With unimpeded and insatiate sight’ (I.9–10), exhibiting an unpleasant fascination for the scene, such sights should effect a moral reaction in an English spectator. There was, therefore, such a thing as a ‘moral spectacle’ for Southey, against which his reader could define his or her ‘English character’. Though no English person would engage in such cruel cultural practices (according to him), the prurient act of watching (or reading) can be excused, as it allows the English writer (and reader) to measure themselves against races who do engage in them. However, in the process of defining this national character, Southey also creates an abiding image in his nation’s consciousness of Indian (and Portuguese) barbarity. ‘This Eastern Bonaparte’ As the plot of Kehama progresses, the ‘mournful Spirit’ of his son appears to the grieving ‘Rajah’, taunting him to retribution against his murderer with the words ‘Art thou not powerful … even like a God?’ (II.11, 15, 18). This reiterates the idea that Southey developed in Thalaba, of secular oriental rulers abrogating God’s power. His treatment of this theme in Kehama, however, is based on a more familiar, western model, provided by representations of Napoleon Bonaparte (proclaimed Emperor of France in 1804) during the war with France. The connection between Bonaparte and Southey’s fictional potentate was one that he was keen to make, facetiously suggesting in the year after his poem’s publication that ‘If Canning would but compare Bonaparte to Kehama in the House of Commons, I might get half as much by my next poem’.44 To understand this conflation of Napoleon into Southey’s fictional ‘King of the world’ (II.134), it is Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 221 01/06/2007 11:53:55 Writing the Empire 222 necessary to consider Southey’s changing views of the republican leader that he had once so much admired. The period over which Southey was writing Kehama shows, in the resolution of his political beliefs, a new patriotism for his country at war with France, that was integral to his depiction of imperial tyranny. His youthful support for the nascent French republic meant that, when Pitt had declared war on France in 1793, he had posited him as the oppressor of liberty. This blinded him to the political reality of Napoleon’s increasingly autonomous actions, and when he seized control of France in November 1799 Southey was shocked, reflecting sadly that ‘The cause of republicanism is over and it is now only a struggle for dominion’.45 His dejection reflects Coleridge’s earlier responses (in April 1798) to Napoleon’s invasion of that other republican symbol of liberty for British radicals, the Swiss Cantons. In Coleridge’s ‘Recantation’ (later named ‘France. An Ode’, 1798), France’s actions are an ‘insult [to] the shrine of Liberty’, proving that there was no place for such ideals in human society, or the political systems that governed it.46 Southey had been slower to recognize this danger but, in a letter written towards the end of 1801, he detailed his changing responses: France has played the traitor with liberty. Mary Barker, it is not I who have turned round. I stand where I stood, looking at the rising sun – and now the sun has set behind me!47 Southey’s common defence against charges of apostasy was that his values and principles had not shifted, but that the world (in its revolutions) had left him behind on the moral high ground.48 He continues: England has mended – is mending – will mend. I have still faith enough in God, and hope enough of man, but not of France! Freedom cannot grow up in that hot-bed of immorality; that oak must root in hardier soil – England or Germany. A military despotism! popery reestablished! the negroes again to be enslaved! Why had not the man perished before the walls of Acre in his greatness and his glory?49 Southey reveals his acute disappointment that Bonaparte, whom he had defended and compared to the heroic Alexander (even after the 1799 coup d’état), was not proving worthy of his admiration. His shared opinion with Coleridge now was that Napoleon had brought himself and his country so low, as ‘To mix with Kings in the low lust of sway’.50 Nevertheless Southey was relieved when the Addington administration brought about the Treaty of Amiens in March 1802 and the long-desired end of the war with France. Looking back on that time in later life, he said of its effect on him: Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 222 01/06/2007 11:53:55 The Curse of Kehama 223 No act of amnesty ever produced such conciliatory consequences as that Peace. It restored in me the English feeling which had been deadened; it placed me in sympathy with my country, bringing me thus into that natural and healthy state of mind upon, which time, and knowledge, and reflection, was sure to produce their proper and salutary effect.51 However the disastrous consequences of the treaty meant that Britain was left with no territories in the Mediterranean from which to protect its overland trade routes to India (via the Levant, Egypt and the Black Sea). One of the terms of the treaty was that Malta – which had recently been occupied by Britain (after a two-year siege) as a defensive measure to protect British interests in the East – was to be handed back to the knights of the Order of St John. It was British reluctance to relinquish Malta that led to war with France again over this issue in May 1803.52 The battle for control of the Orient provides an insight into the crucial influence that eastern territories had on the European balance of power. This time when war broke out Southey supported his own country, stating, ‘the conduct of France quite vexes and irritates me … France must suffer by war, or she will war on to all eternity’.53 The two countries had changed roles in his perspective, as ‘tyranny infinitely monstrous was embodied in France’, while ‘England was fighting for liberty and natural goodness’.54 This was a complete reversal in Southey’s political philosophy and it can hardly be incidental that the momentous events which caused it were occurring while Southey was writing Kehama. His overweening ‘Rajah’, a slave to ambition and pride, also aspires to conquer all the territories of the world to create his empire. In a letter written as war broke out again, Southey said of Kehama, ‘[it] gives a good sketch of the general state of the Universe in consequence of this Eastern Bonaparte’s proceedings’, so revealing how much he considered the actions of the ‘Man-Almighty’ (II.136) of his fiction, to reflect Napoleon’s conduct.55 Increasingly Southey perceived French imperial control as a dictatorship, separating the abhorrence he felt for Napoleon himself from the French people – who were in thrall to him as much as Kehama’s subjects were to their emperor. Southey’s letters reveal his desolation in 1805 at Napoleon’s victory at Austerlitz and the death of Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar in the same year. These events only convinced him that Britain was at war with Napoleon personally, an opinion he publicized at every opportunity – especially after the invasion of Portugal in 1807 and Spain in 1808, with the institution of his brother, Joseph Bonaparte, as King of Spain. Writing on the subject of his political commentary for the Edinburgh Annual Register in 1809, Southey said, ‘I have laid down therein my principles about tyrannicide, and the necessity of carrying on the war personally against Bonaparte; that is to say, proclaiming that we are at any time ready to Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 223 01/06/2007 11:53:55 Writing the Empire 224 make peace with France, but never while he retains his power, nor, under any circumstances, with him’.56 The fact that Southey considered an oriental ‘Rajah’ as the fictional embodiment of Napoleon shows how alien to western models of polity – such as the British government (that he now endorsed) and the democratic ideals of the French Revolution – he felt his actions to be. The orientalization of Napoleon into Kehama pointed to another threat – his increasing domination of territories in the East. Napoleon’s combative strategy to block the British trade routes to India – disrupting commerce and communications between the metropolis and its imperial outreaches – was part of his plan for a French invasion of India. And as Michael Duff y claims, such Napoleonic aggression had a direct influence on British policy in India: Napoleon’s eastern threat was used to justify the extension of British dominance over India by defeating its most dangerous native rivals, Mysore (1790–2, 1799) and the Marathas (1803–4) and building up an immense Indian army of 227,000 men (86 per cent native sepoys) by 1815 which gave it complete dominance of the shores of the Indian Ocean.57 Britain’s defensive response to French bellicosity, however, points to the permanent danger it felt its Indian possessions to be under from the territories surrounding it. For Southey, this position was yet more perilous to the British holdings than the actions of Napoleon himself: India is perpetually in danger, – not from Buonaparte, – that would be the last object of his ambition, – he is not idiot enough to believe that England is to be conquered there, nor is it for Asia that Providence seems to have appointed him its executioner upon degraded nations. But no century has ever elapsed in which Asia has not produced some Buonaparte of its own, some villain, who setting equally at defiance the laws of God and man, collects the whole contemporary force of evil about him, and bears down everything in his way.58 A greater threat to the British empire is a ‘Man-Almighty’ who is a product of Asia, not Europe. His contempt of ‘the laws of God and man’ would employ the ‘force of evil’ to conquer all and the French emperor is a tame adversary when compared to his Asian facsimile. In writing Kehama, Southey replicates (and exaggerates) his fear of such a ‘villain’, who takes on the grandest mythological (and allegorical) proportions of power, in challenging the gods as well as humanity. Such a vision reflected not only Southey’s fear of an unknown oriental tyrant – who is more fearsome than the familiar enemy, Bonaparte – but also the western tradition of constructing such a figure in fiction. As is obvious now, it is western anxiety about an unknown future relationship with alien eastern territories that builds an evil of such proportions in its literature. Southey’s article continues to Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 224 01/06/2007 11:53:55 The Curse of Kehama 225 disclose his fears that ‘Some new Timur [Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine] or Khouli Khan [Coleridge’s Kubla Khan] may rush down from Tartary like a hurricane … and sweep us from the land’.59 The fear of western empire-builders generally is that a greater force than themselves will dispossess them. In creating the character of Kehama, Southey warns his readers of the threat to Britain’s imperial ambitions of turning a blind eye to mushrooming power bases in India (as the Hindu gods do). But he also holds up his ‘larger than life’ figure of eastern dictatorship as a model of aberrant imperialism; a negative example, who oppresses people to the point of rebellion. The character of Kehama should not be taken as evidence that Southey opposed all forms of imperialism, his eastern ‘Rajah’ is simply the obverse of the paternalistic western empire-builder that he constructed in Madoc. Coming from a European philosophical background that valued the writings of Gibbon and Volney, Southey was well aware of how precarious imperial politics could be.60 It was in response to this threat that he advocated the role of the Baptist missions in India – to introduce the strong foundations of empire, in the form of the English language, religion and morality – so making it less likely that cataclysmic Asian forces would ‘sweep’ Britain ‘from the land’. The ‘fabric of human fraud’ Kehama’s power to oppress his subjects is manifested in the force of his anger against the poem’s central characters, Kailyal and her father Ladurlad, for their role in his son’s death. Awaiting their punishment, Kailyal clings to the idol of the Hindu goddess Marriataly, whom she worships. As she is swept into a nearby river, the ‘image’ buoys her up and takes her to safety, demonstrating as a plot device what Southey had learnt about the centrality of domestic gods to the lives of Indians. Kehama, meanwhile, turns his attention to Ladurlad, cursing him with a piece of simple but powerful incantatory poetry: I charm thy life From the weapons of strife, From stone and from wood, From fire and from flood, From the serpent’s tooth, And the beasts of blood: From Sickness I charm thee, And Time shall not harm thee; But Earth which is mine, Its fruits shall deny thee; And Water shall hear me, And know thee and fly thee, And the Winds shall not touch thee When they pass by thee, Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 225 01/06/2007 11:53:55 Writing the Empire 226 And the Dews shall not wet thee, When they fall nigh thee: And thou shalt seek Death To release thee, in vain; Thou shalt live in thy pain, While Kehama shall reign, With a fire in thy heart, And a fire in thy brain; And Sleep shall obey me, And visit thee never, And the Curse shall be on thee For ever and ever. (II.144–69) Ladurlad’s punishment – like the inhabitants of the halls of Eblis in Vathek – is to live with a heart ‘enveloped in flames’.61 He is marked out from others by his destiny and shunned like Beckford’s sinners in the total preoccupation of his own suffering, as he stands with ‘eyes of idiot wandering’ (II.173). Kehama’s curse relates to Southey’s representation of the ‘Bramins’. The evil emperor is very much in league with these ‘priests’, who maintain his pre-eminence over the people by their arcane knowledge of the Hindu gods, their sacred position as presiding officials over sacrificial rites, and their power to make outcasts of those who defy them. In the Common-Place Book, Southey planned the curse to be a ‘Braminical’ banishment from caste. The original character of ‘Keradou’ (renamed Kehama) was in Southey’s plan a ‘Bramin’, whereas ‘Cartamen’ (the original of Ladurlad) was a ‘Paria’ (or pariah) – a low-caste member of Indian society.62 During the course of the confusing plot detailed in the Common-Place Book, Cartamen is cursed by Keradou. This takes the form of being ‘cast out’: May he be shunned by all his own cast, and be in the same abomination to them that they are to the rest of the world; the sun shine to scorch him; no wind cool him; no water wet his lips. He shall thirst, and the cool element fly from his touch; he shall hunger, and all earthly food refuse its aid.63 In the final version of Kehama, Southey omitted the section of his plan in which Ladurlad is cast out of Indian society by the emperor and his ‘priests’. In the published text his punishment is to suffer alienation from the natural elements that surround him, as Kehama’s power gives him dominion over all the earth. Ladurlad wanders alone, having left his daughter to save her from persecution through association with him; an Ahasuerus of the Indian world. In Kehama, where the indigenous population is barely depicted (as in Thalaba), nature is repelled by Ladurlad’s touch rather than his family or society. Southey avoided representing the issue of caste, which he considered Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 226 01/06/2007 11:53:55 The Curse of Kehama 227 a shameful and specifically Indian act of religious tyranny. His curse was aesthetically (and morally) modified to become a more appalling, sublime version of Hindu social law, which had a wider universal application and was better suited to poetry. The connection between the curse and the Hindu religion was not simply a plot device. Such acts of ‘oppression’ were of constant consternation to Southey, as his reviews of the Baptist Missionary tracts make plain. However he feared that protecting Indians from their powerful religious leaders would create another threat to British rule: That the people are happier under our government than they have ever been at any time within the reach of history, is beyond all doubt; yet the very circumstance which renders them so, does in some degree lessen our security. By taking the exercise of authority into our own hands, we preserve them from the cruel extortion and oppression to which they had always heretofore been exposed; and that whole class of men who would otherwise have thriven by oppressing them, are thereby made our enemies.64 This ‘class of men’, Southey tells us, are the ‘Bramins’. Southey’s reviews were intended to defend the Baptist missionaries from accusations (in the Edinburgh Review particularly) that their proselytization of the territories owned by the East India Company would create dangerous tensions between British officials and their Indian employees. Southey perceived the ‘Bramins’, rather than the missionaries, as a source of instability in the region and they are the target for his invective throughout the article. The ‘Bramins’ (or more properly Brahmans) that Southey refers to derive their name from the Hindu god ‘Brahma’, as well as from an Indian term for the source of all creation, so that in Hindu belief, ‘Nothing, from the tiniest atom to the largest planet, sun or star, can exist independently of Brahman’.65 On the strength of such traditions the Brahmans became the most elevated of the Hindu social classes, whose important role was the ‘transmission of the Sanskritic sacred traditions (VEDA), and the performance of priestly sacrificial rituals’.66 They therefore had great prestige and power over Hindu society for many centuries. In Southey’s eyes they form an oppressive priestly regime, who subjugate the populace with ‘despicable mythology’ in order to maintain their pre-eminence.67 Southey castigated the Brahmans for imposing the iniquitous caste system on the Hindus, as well as for presiding over what he considered to be outlandish and barbaric religious rituals. However he was convinced that the spread of Christianity had the power to release the Indian people from their authority. By coming into conflict with monotheism, ‘The religion of the Bramins must be given up the moment it is attacked; like the Paganism of the Greeks and Romans it has nothing which can be defended’.68 Southey made a Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 227 01/06/2007 11:53:55 Writing the Empire 228 common assumption of the period that the complex Hindu religion was simply a polytheistic paganism, due to its representation by western scholars who did not realize, or chose to ignore, the monotheistic belief in Brahman at its core. It certainly suited Southey’s agenda to contrast this polytheistic version of Hinduism with Christianity (and even Islam – which he holds up as less ‘monstrous’ than the Hindu religion). Southey goes on to argue that, unlike other religious groups (such as the Muslims and the Parsees for instance): the Hindoos have no prophet or teacher to refer to, no system wherewith to shelter themselves; for their mythological books consist of fables of which it is not possible to say whether they are most foolish, most beastly, or most extravagant.69 In fact the fabulous nature of their religious beliefs is unsupported by any conventional structures that would allow Orientalists to investigate the veracity of their traditions: Bramins have no facts to which they can appeal in corroboration of these books, no history which is capable of demonstration connected with them: by their internal evidence they must stand or fall, and their self-contradictions and absurdities may be made evident to the meanest capacity.70 For Southey, the burden of proof, under the rigours of western epistemology, lies with the Brahmans and, because they cannot produce a ‘history’, scrutinized and verified by European scholars, Southey perceives their religion as no more than a system for maintaining their pre-eminence. His dislike of the clerical hierarchy of the Anglican Church, as well as ‘priestly’ figures of authority in all belief systems – including the Islamic, Roman Catholic and Azteca religions – caused him to perceive a causational link between them all. This was not based on the scrutiny of their scriptural origins, however, but in (his perception of ) their common desire to oppress their followers. However he reserves his greatest disapprobation for the Brahmans: Except the system of Mexican priestcraft, no fabric of human fraud has ever been devised so deadly as the Braminical; and though the Mexican rites were bloodier, they were less heart-hardening, less injurious to society, less pernicious to the moral nature of man. There was a time when the custom of burning widows was disbelieved in Europe, as a fiction of lying travellers.71 The practice of sati is just one of the Hindu rituals that is so incredible, rational Europeans cannot give it credence. For Brahman practices to equate to those of ‘Mexican priestcraft’ meant they had plumbed the depths of Southey’s global comparative study of bloody religious ritual. It also meant he could justify the conversion of Hindus to Christianity, in order to outlaw this ‘fabric of human fraud’. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 228 01/06/2007 11:53:55 The Curse of Kehama 229 Asiatick Researches In the world of Kehama, where imperial tyranny is supported by the ‘Bramin’ hierarchy, Southey’s heroes find protection from the Hindu gods and their agents. Kailyal is assisted by a ‘Glendoveer’ (or angel) named Ereenia – one of ‘The loveliest race of all of heavenly birth’ (VI.18). Described as a muscular, powerful angel, he is a spiritual being with a strong physical beauty that reveals a Blakean preoccupation with the divine in human form. The two characters fall in love, whereupon they are transported to Swerga (heaven) in an aerial car, to protect Kailyal from the wrath of Kehama – as well as Arvalan’s rapacious spirit, which pursues her. Ereenia is a virtuous, pious hero, but more successful than many of Southey’s characters, simply because the reader accepts his angelic qualities, so relinquishing expectations of psychological realism. In Swerga the reader learns that Kehama is preparing to invade heaven and that even the powerful Hindu gods (Brama, Veeshnu, Indra and Seeva) are fearful of the outcome. After Kehama (and the ‘Bramins’) have conquered heaven, the next imperial goal is hell, so leaving no place of safety for them. At this point the poem takes the reader more squarely into the realms of Hindu belief and it is here that the Hindu scriptures, as represented by western commentators, play their greatest part. Southey’s dependence on this source material creates an interesting division in the poem, between his moral condemnation of Brahman ‘oppression’ and his positive depiction of the Hindu deities, who assist the victimized heroes against their own sacerdotal intermediaries. Among the translations of Hindu sources that Southey used for his poem were Nathaniel Brassey Halhed’s A Code of Gentoo Laws (1776), Charles Wilkins’s Mahabharata, containing the Bhagavad-Gita (1785), Jones’s Sacontala (1789) and William Carey’s (the Baptist missionary) The Ramayana of Valmeeki (1806–10). Southey quotes extensively from this latter text, saying ‘the reader will be less disposed to condemn the fictions of Kehama as extravagant, when he compares them with this genuine specimen of Hindoo fable’.72 He anticipates his reader’s reaction – as he had throughout Kehama’s pre-publication period – to be one that would consider his text immoderate, even though he had revelled in its extravagance himself in his early letters. However Southey indicates that his reader will be comforted by knowing that he has filtered out some of the excessive material of the ‘genuine specimen’ in his own version. The implication is that ‘Hindoo fable’ needs to be mediated by a western writer and in fact Southey relied on such mediated texts himself in writing Kehama. He used western translations of the Hindu epics (being unable to read Sanskrit, or their Persian translations) and depended even more heavily on the scholarly commentary that accompanied them – as well as the accounts of European travellers and residents in India. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 229 01/06/2007 11:53:55 230 Writing the Empire The role played by William Jones and his fellow members of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in the construction of Kehama was a crucially formative one – both for supplying much of the material that Southey drew on and also in terms of the value they placed on Indian literature. Southey often attempted to obscure his dependence on Jones’s writing (and his ‘Orientalist’ viewpoint) in the personal animosity he directed at him, as well as his stated preference for the French Orientalist Anquetil-Duperron.73 However many of the poetic descriptions of the Hindu gods and their habitat in Kehama are accompanied by notes from essays published by Jones and his colleagues in their Asiatick Researches. Southey was very familiar with these essays – reviewing newlypublished volumes for the Annual Review until 1809 – and Kehama contains extracts from essays by Jones (as the society’s President until his death in 1794), as well as Francis Wilford, Henry Thomas Colebrooke and several others. In an 1807 review of the Researches, Southey described them as the ‘treasures of the East’, which will ‘outlive the ill constructed and baseless empire in which they have originated’.74 The Asiatick Researches, and particularly Jones’s essay ‘On the Gods of Greece, Italy and India’, provided Southey with descriptions of the Hindu god Indra and his heavenly domain, Swerga.75 Jones’s work, as Michael Franklin points out, was ‘Pioneering in its attempt to discover universal connections between Oriental and Occidental religions and cultures’ and was ‘immediately and widely influential in its day’.76 In Jones’s essay (reproduced in Southey’s notes) he compares the attributes of this Indian god to aspects of classical mythology. For instance Indra ‘has the character of the Roman Genius, or chief of the Good Spirits’ and ‘his Olympus is Meru’.77 Several of the other notes to Kehama from this essay also make comparisons between the deities and other ‘pagan mythologies’. For instance Southey quotes Jones’s opinion that ‘A very distinguished son of Brahma, named Nared, bears a strong resemblance to Hermes or Mercury’, and a connection is made between the offspring of the ‘Sun’ god, Surya, and Castor and Pollux.78 Jones’s essay moves on from these specific examples to state, ‘We must not be surprised at finding all the pagan deities, male and female melt into each other and at least into one or two’.79 Southey included Jones’s comparisons between the Hindu religion and classical mythology in the notes to his poem because this justified his use of material that might otherwise be considered abstruse and self-indulgent by the European reader he posited. This preoccupation with finding a common link between eastern and western religions and cultures only reflected the wider programme of the Asiatic Society. Jones and his fellow essayists had a polemical and pedagogical agenda that attempted to make Indian culture and the Hindu religion accessible (and acceptable) to their European contemporaries. Even more ambitiously, as John Drew points out, ‘From the outset of his career Jones had hoped that a study of Oriental cultures might help Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 230 01/06/2007 11:53:55 The Curse of Kehama 231 reinvigorate European culture’.80 In order to investigate a culture so vastly different from their own, the Asiatic Society members applied scholarly method to their field of study to make its alien structures more comprehensible for western readers. Asia had historically been perceived as an ancient, marvellous and immeasurable continent, a perspective that Jones’s account of his arrival displays: When I was at sea, last August, on my voyage to this country, which I had long and ardently desired to visit, I found, one evening on inspecting the observations of the day, that India lay before us, and Persia on our left, whilst a breeze from Arabia blew nearly on our stern. A situation so pleasing in itself, and to me so new, could not fail to awaken a train of reflections in a mind, which had early been accustomed to contemplate with delight the eventful histories and agreeable fictions of this eastern world. It gave me inexpressible pleasure to find myself in the midst of so noble an amphitheatre, almost encircled by the vast regions of Asia, which has ever been esteemed the nurse of Sciences, the inventress of delightful and useful arts, the scene of glorious actions, fertile in the productions of human genius, abounding in natural wonders, and infinitely diversified in the forms of religion and government, in the law, manners, customs, and languages, as well as in the features and complexions, of men.81 As Jones ‘surveys’ Asia, he is overwhelmed by its vastness and its infinite attributes. The excitement and passion he reveals in his declaration that he had ‘ardently desired’ to visit this unknown continent, has been inculcated by a textual knowledge of its ‘eventful histories’ and ‘agreeable fictions’. As Said points out, such literary preconceptions of Asia were a contributory factor in shaping the expectations and therefore the ideology of European Orientalists.82 Positioning himself in the middle of this ancient ‘amphitheatre’, Jones is surrounded and swamped by Asia – but to his delight, rather than the fear De Quincey experienced in his ‘survey’ of the ‘vast empires’ of Asia that constituted his opium dreams.83 While others may feel intimidated by the vast repository of knowledge that Asia contains, Jones is inspired by the revelations it can provide, positing the Orient as a feminine, and therefore yielding, ‘fertile’ resource for investigation by the energetic male scholar. In this discourse, which discusses the aims and ambitions of the newly-formed Asiatic Society – so providing an introductory essay to the first volume of Asiatick Researches – Jones sweeps acquisitively over all the territories of Asia. He sees the continent as one composite mass, comprising a treasure-chest of resources, but he also deconstructs it into separate parts – as fabulous jewels to be taken out and admired individually in his lyrical descriptions of ‘the ancient and wonderful empire of China’ and ‘Japan, with the cluster of precious islands’, as well as the ‘immeasurable deserts of Arabia’.84 Jones insists in his ‘Discourse on the Institution of a Society’ that there will be no rules for the Asiatic Society, taking it for granted that the industrial spirit Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 231 01/06/2007 11:53:56 Writing the Empire 232 of western scholarship will be applied to their researches. However these guidelines are laid down: you will investigate whatever is rare in the stupendous fabrick of nature, will correct the geography of Asia by new observations and discoveries; will trace the annals and even traditions, of these nations, who from time to time have peopled or desolated it; and will bring to light their various forms of government, with their institutions civil and religious.85 Society members are expected to take an active, even a corrective, role in their studies. This is because, as Jones states in his ‘second anniversary discourse’, they are endowed with ‘the superiority of European talents’. He observes that ‘reason and taste are the grand prerogatives of European minds, while the Asiaticks have soared to loftier heights in the sphere of imagination’.86 Jones thereby creates a distinction between the rational and scholarly essayists of the Asiatic Society and the imaginative writings of the ‘Asiaticks’. This division is a result of Jones’s western education in the Enlightenment tradition, which caused him to value knowledge of a philosophical, scientific and rational nature. Nevertheless it also created respect for the literary output of other cultures, so that he could acknowledge the attraction of the inspirational poetry and religious writings of the Orient. However the prioritization of a scholarly approach to the society’s studies points to the problems that Jones and his essayists would report in using academic method to analyse Hindu sacred texts. The Asiatick Researches often construct an India, and indeed an Asia, that is ahistorical, lacking any approved scientific method of chronology. The version of India that Jones and the Asiatic Society presented to the European public is governed by a tone of scholarly bemusement, in their efforts to construct a logical system of knowledge from what are considered to be intriguing, but exasperatingly vague, oriental apochryphal fables. Jones gave several reasons for a structured investigation of Asian history. One of these was that it would facilitate British rule in India: The civil history of their vast empires, and of India in particular, must be highly interesting to our common country: but we have a still nearer interest in knowing all former modes of ruling these inestimable provinces, on the prosperity of which so much of our national welfare and individual benefit, seems to depend.87 Another reason was because Jones believed that, despite the ‘degenerate and abased’ state of the present Hindus: in some early age they were splendid in arts and arms, happy in government, wise in legislation, and eminent in various knowledge: but since their civil history beyond the middle of the nineteenth century from the present time is involved in a cloud of fables, we seem to possess only four general media of satisfying our curiosity concerning it; Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 232 01/06/2007 11:53:56 The Curse of Kehama 233 namely, first, their Languages and Letters; secondly their Philosophy and Religion; thirdly, the actual remains of their old Sculpture and Architecture; and fourthly, the written memorials of their Sciences and Arts.88 So Jones tried to discover more about India’s glorious past that contrasted so tellingly with the modern Hindus he saw. Frustrated by finding it enveloped ‘in a cloud of fables’, Jones was forced to investigate other, more obscure sources. As well as being confounded in his attempts to unravel the ‘civil history’ of the Hindus, Jones was faced with untangling their other ‘Sciences’: Geography, astronomy, and chronology have in this part of Asia, shared the fate of authentic history; and like that, have been so masked and bedecked in the fantastic robes of mythology and metaphor, that the real system of Indian philosophers and mathematicians can scarce be distinguished.89 With regard to chronology, Jones’s colleague Francis Wilford – who also expressed bewilderment in the face of the Hindu’s ‘monstrous system’ – stated that he had ‘rejected [it] as absolutely repugnant to the course of nature, and human reason’.90 And according to S. N. Mukherjee, Jones’s attempts to rationalize the Hindu chronology by his ‘scholarly’ methods caused him to draw erroneous conclusions, because he ‘used so-called etymology and astronomy in reconstructing the chronology’, which led him to fix the dates with unreliable calculations’.91 What Southey took from the Asiatick Researches, as much as anything else, was this bafflement in the face of a ‘cloud of fables’, where ‘fiction and history are so blended “as to be scarce distinguishable”’.92 In Kehama, Southey constructed a loose, free-floating version of India, that is timeless, unanchored in any secure historical fact, and as obscure and recondite as the beliefs he recounts. Even the annotation that Southey’s ‘mythology’ is embedded in is anachronic, intermingling different representations of the ancient Hindu epics with more modern texts. The narrative of Kehama therefore takes place in a composite time-frame that combines the events of several epochs. This includes the earliest Indian scriptures, the more recent history of François Bernier’s The History of the Late Revolution of the Empire of the Great Mogol (1671–2), as well as contemporary travel accounts – such as Pierre Sonnerat’s A Voyage to the East Indies and China (1788) – and the newest reports of British missionary interventions in India (Periodical Accounts relative to the Baptist Missionary Society, for Propagating the Gospel among the Heathen, 1800–19). As well as creating an ahistorical version of India in Kehama, Southey presents the subcontinent as a vague, unmapped region. In fact more emphasis is placed on mythological sites, while the ‘real’ Indian landscape remains unidentified, as well as unlocated in any precise geographical area. Many of the notes to Kehama Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 233 01/06/2007 11:53:56 234 Writing the Empire come from Francis Wilford’s essays. His exasperated exclamations in the face of historical imprecision are brought to the subject of Indian geography, as he concludes that ‘Indeed their systems of geography, chronology, and history, are all equally monstrous and absurd’.93 Because ‘the Hindus have no regular work on the subject of geography’, Wilford found himself ‘under a necessity of extracting [his] materials from their historical poems, or, as they may be called more properly, their legendary tales’, in which he ‘could not expect to meet with requisite data for ascertaining the relative situations of places’. He was therefore obliged to ‘follow the track, real or imaginary, of their deities and heroes’.94 This quasi-scientific method, that attempted to incorporate mythological sites with existing locations, provided the geographical background for Kehama. So the path of the Ganges, constructed through fabulous and factual accounts, originates in the ‘sweat on Seeva’s forehead’ which arises as a ‘secret fountain’ on the ‘top of Meru Mountain’ (X.32, 35, 36). It gathers force and ‘springs at once, with sudden leap, / Down from the immeasurable steep’ (X.48–9) – much like the ‘Cataract at Lodore’ (1820) which Southey would fondly depict in his domestic poetry. The ‘mighty cataract’ (X.51) rushes on until: A mountain-valley in its blessed breast Receives the stream, which there delights to lie, Untroubled and at rest, Beneath the untainted sky. There in a lovely lake it seems to sleep, And thence, through many a channel dark and deep, Their secret way the holy Waters wind, Till, rising underneath the root Of the Tree of Life on Hemakoot, Majestic forth they flow to purify mankind. (X.62–71) From this reservoir on Mount Hemakoot, the Ganges flows down onto earth. Notes to this passage from Wilford’s essays speak with authority of the rivers that originate in heaven and divide into four branches on Mount Meru – the ‘celestial north pole’ of Hindu belief – one of these being the Ganges.95 Ranging from the ‘Indian’ landscape of the Ramayana to the account of a ‘Raining tree’ in the Canary Islands, Southey fitted his disparate pieces together to create his own mythological geography.96 Despite using western scholars to filter out the ‘extravagant’ element of ‘Hindoo fable’, Southey ended in constructing his own from his sources. Though the researchers of the Asiatic Society applied scientific method to their field of study, at one and the same time they reported the limitations of employing such measures to investigate the Asiatic ‘sphere of imagination’. The mixture of Indian ‘mythology’ and European method created mystery while trying to solve it. The Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 234 01/06/2007 11:53:56 The Curse of Kehama 235 effect of the essayists’ comments, as well Southey’s representation in Kehama, is to add to the romantic perception of Asia as a mysterious, timeless, unmappable continent – an idea that has percolated into the modern period contemporaneously with the image of Africa’s ‘heart of darkness’. While Jones, as Michael Franklin has demonstrated, did make his reading public more aware of the structures and beliefs of the Hindu religion, by valuing Indian literature as part of a golden age of culture, he nevertheless added to ‘the identification of the Orient as static and fixed in a timeless past’.97 Jones’s respect for India originated in an idea of its ancient past, rather than its ‘degenerate’ present. It is hardly surprising that this Asian fantasy became a source of inspiration for Romantic poets. Only in such an arena of imaginative potential could Kubla Khan create a ‘miracle of rare device’, in which the oppositional elements of fire and ice coexist harmoniously.98 And as in Coleridge’s oriental poem, Southey built his own ‘pleasure-dome’ in a palace of ‘the Elements’ for Indra: On that etherial Lake whose waters lie Blue and transpicuous, like another sky, The Elements had rear’d their King’s abode. A strong controuling power their strife suspended, And there their hostile essences they blended, To form a Palace worthy of the God. Built on the Lake the waters were its floor; And here its walls were water arch’d with fire, And here were fire with water vaulted o’er; And spires and pinnacles of fire Round watery cupolas aspire, And domes of rainbow rest on fiery towers, And roofs of flame are turreted around With cloud, and shafts of cloud with flame are bound. (VII.168–81) The unlikely combination of the ‘hostile essences’ of fire and water echo Coleridge’s poem, but it is likely that the constructions of both poets found their precursor in Jones’s own fabulous ‘Palace of Fortune’ (1769): A spacious lake its clear expanse display’d; In mazy curls the flowing jasper wav’d O’er its smooth bed with polish’d agate pav’d; And on a rock of ice by magick rais’d High in the midst a gorgeous palace blaz’d The sunbeams on the gilded portals glanc’d, Play’d on the spires, and on the turrets danc’d,99 Other similar elements in Kehama point to Jones’s poem being a source for it (as well as Shelley’s Queen Mab, 1813).100 In ‘The Palace of Fortune’ the hero- Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 235 01/06/2007 11:53:56 236 Writing the Empire ine is transported through the air in a ‘golden car’ to a paradisiacal garden, in the same way that Kailyal is taken to Swerga in Kehama.101 Jones’s fabulous, romantic version of India is what appealed to Southey and this was what he replicated in Kehama, claiming Asia as a region where poetic inventiveness is uncircumscribed. The Orient is therefore created in such texts as an unrestricted, imaginative ‘other’ for rational Europe.102 Domesticating India As Swerga falls to the conquering Kehama, Southey’s heroic father and daughter are reunited on earth, where they seek respite from persecution in the Indian landscape. Southey’s depictions of Indian scenery are supported by the descriptions of British residents in India, as well as various travel writers, one of which was William Hodges. Hodges’s artistic talent (as well as his career as an explorer) was enhanced by his role as a draughtsman on Cook’s second voyage to the Pacific (1772–5), and he brought this expertise to his Travels in India (1793).103 In his account he presents Bengal ‘as a land straight out of a picture of the Orient, vividly described as an aesthetic tableau consisting of a wealth of colourful impressions’, as Indira Ghose points out.104 This effect is enhanced by the engravings of his paintings, that he included to ornament the book (see Figures 8 and 9). So too in Southey’s poem, we have a series of tableaux creating frames for his characters’ adventures. Drawn with a painterly/poetic eye, they give precedence to picturesqueness over realism. The fact that Nigel Leask describes this quality in Kehama as ‘a picturesque template for figuring subcontinental realities’, suggests that Southey was fulfilling a polemical impulse to construct the Indian landscape as orderly and therefore controllable.105 Those, like Southey, who surveyed India from the metropolis, constructed a vision that conformed to European aesthetics, so providing another method for imposing authority over ‘monstrous’ material. Captain Thomas Williamson’s Oriental Field Sports (1807) was a frequent source of information for Southey’s depictions of Indian plants and animals. The graphic descriptions and finely drawn, yet intensely colourful plates (by Samuel Howett) that dominate the text, were another precedent for the painterly style of Kehama. Williamson’s book provides a eurocentric view of India, with hunting scenes dominated by white mounted riders on horses and elephants, attended by large groups of native employees. The plates portray the drama of the hunt, depicting the capture, and often the killing, of their quarry (buffaloes, tigers, warthogs and bears). However the scenery framing the action is not specifically ‘Indian’, it is depicted in the generalized, conventional neoclassical style that Bernard Smith shows predominated in European painters’ first encounters with foreign landscapes, whether in India or the South Pacific.106 The version of Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 236 01/06/2007 11:53:56 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 237 The Curse of Kehama 237 Figure 8. W. Skelton, engraving after William Hodges, ‘Procession of a Hindoo Woman to the Funeral Pile of her Husband’, from William Hodges, Travels in India, during the Years 1780, 1781, 1782 and 1783 (London: J. Edwards, 1793). By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. 01/06/2007 11:53:56 238 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 238 Writing the Empire 01/06/2007 11:53:58 Figure 9. B. J. Pouncy, engraving after William Hodges, ‘Banyan Tree’, from William Hodges, Travels in India, during the Years 1780, 1781, 1782 and 1783 (London: J. Edwards, 1793). By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. The Curse of Kehama 239 India produced, therefore, is not that of an alien, tropical landscape, but a tame background, where the potentially fierce wildlife is easily vanquished by superior human ability. Southey reproduced this moderated version of India in Kehama, while adapting it for his own purposes. The natural world of his poem – apart from a poisonous ‘manchineil’ (V.7) – is tame and even beneficent, providing a protective ‘aged Banian’ tree to shelter Kailyal and Ladurlad (XIII.53). It provides a fitting sanctuary for the saintly couple: Beneath was smooth and fair to sight, Nor weeds nor briars deform’d the natural floor, And through the leafy cope which bower’d it o’er Came gleams of chequer’d light. So like a temple did it seem, that there A pious heart’s first impulse would be prayer. (XIII.68–73)107 The description of the temple-like tree – that Southey based on an example in Oriental Field Sports – contributes to the moral landscape (and message) of the poem.108 With this protection, the couple are kept safe from even the fiercest animals that inhabit the jungle. In any case, the growl of a prowling tiger is shown to be less frightening than the predatory ‘human’ spirit of Arvalan. In the same way that the fauna of Oriental Field Sports are shown to be ultimately controllable, Kailyal, in the peaceful interlude of life in the jungle glade, subdues the animals around her. This is not done through the violent methods of the chase (as in Williamson’s book) but by taming them ‘like another Sakuntala’.109 The very presence of Southey’s paragon soothes the animals around her: A charm was on the Leopard when he came Within the circle of that mystic glade; Submiss he crouch’d before the heavenly Maid, And offered to her touch his speckled side; (XIII.149–52) In this way, Southey domesticated India in his text, presenting the landscape as aesthetically pleasing (by western standards) and its fauna as submissive to human control. His agenda here is similar to that in Madoc, where the success of his hero’s imperial venture is judged by the fact that ‘every beast of rapine, had retired / From man’s asserted empire’.110 Southey repeated this trope throughout his narrative poetry, thus showing ‘nature’ to be imbued with the integrity to recognize a superior moral code. As Scott pointed out in his review of Kehama, Kailyal’s ‘moral character’ is, throughout the poem, completely opposed to the ‘omnipotent wickedness of Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 239 01/06/2007 11:54:00 240 Writing the Empire the Rajah’.111 While Southey’s idea of an oriental dictator reaches its apogee in Kehama, and his example of male virtue (Ereenia) is now all-angel, Kailyal is the ultimate example of female probity and purity in Southey’s dualistic world. The characters of Southey’s previous ‘epics’ – which like Kehama also omit any attempt at three-dimensional representation – reach their culmination in these extreme examples of the dichotomy between good and evil. Kailyal’s role in this episode is to demonstrate the efficacy of her ‘moral character’ – which incorporates Southey’s own values (that he posited as British) – on a potentially hostile land, over which his ‘Indian’ Kehama nominally holds dominion. In Kehama, no less than Madoc, therefore, Southey endeavours to show the benefits of the civilizing mission on foreign territories. The literary project of Kehama combines here with the imperial ambitions for British India of his letters and reviews. The subcontinent is either depicted as a jungle landscape in which wild animals roam – so demanding the benefits of cultivation and civilization – or as a crowded eastern street scene, where ‘strong error’ predominates (XXI.59). In either case, the civilizing project of the Indian missions – for which the episode with the ‘heavenly Maid’ is a figurative image – will bring the ‘peace of Heaven’ to India (XIII.146, 151). Kailyal’s rejection of the attributes of Indian culture are a further representation of (Southeyan) ‘western’ morality: For never Nymph of Mountain, Or Grove, or Lake, or Fountain, With a diviner presence fill’d the shade. No idle ornaments deface Her natural grace, Musk-spot, nor sandal-streak, nor scarlet stain, Ear-drop nor chain, nor arm nor ankle-ring, Nor trinketry on front, or neck, or breast, Marring the perfect form she seem’d a thing Of Heaven’s prime uncorrupted work, a child Of early Nature undefil’d, A daughter of the years of innocence. (XIII.194–205) In constructing his virtuous heroine, Southey compares her ‘natural grace’ and ‘innocence’ (as he did with Oneiza in Thalaba) to the cultural practices of women within the society she is supposed to inhabit, in order to create a contrast.112 Those decorations that are intended to endow beauty on Indian women – the ‘scarlet stain’, ‘Ear-drop’ and ‘ankle-ring’ – are shown as gaudy and artificial cultural impositions.113 Kailyal’s virtues have an ancient but everlasting value that dates back to ‘early nature’, before the accretions of Indian society were imposed Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 240 01/06/2007 11:54:00 The Curse of Kehama 241 on its people. Whereas in his youth Southey used the image of a ‘Golden Age’ as a nobler time in human history to oppose British society and politics, now he presents Kailyal as ‘A daughter of the years of innocence’, to expose what he considers to be aberrant Indian cultural standards. Kailyal’s brief respite from oppression is soon over, as Southey’s virtuous, passive victim of the corrupt systems of political and religious tyranny has further ordeals in store. Recognized as a ‘maid divine’ after being endowed with ‘heavenly grace’ on her visit to Swerga, she is abducted (by a group of marauding ‘Yoguees’) to be a fitting bride for their god ‘Jaga-Naut’ (XIV.13–19). Placed in a ‘bridal car’ she is taken into their temple, crushing many ‘self-devoted bodies’ en route, where she is placed on a bed at the mercy of ‘The Bramin of the fane’ (XIV.37, 64, 145). In the 1809 manuscript of Kehama this passage is longer and more detailed, as the narratorial voice berates the ‘lustful Bramin’ and his fellow ‘juggling clan’, for abusing their position of power.114 ‘Bramin’ domination is here extended to a physical and sexual oppression, so that Southey can depict the true horror of their tyranny. However Kailyal’s rapacious aggressor is killed by the spirit of Arvalan, who (with the magical powers endowed on him by a witch, Lorrinite) reanimates the dead body of the ‘Bramin’ so that he can ravish her. In order to escape from Arvalan, Kailyal sets fire to the bridal bed in an ironic parody of sati-like self-immolation: Yamen, receive me undefil’d! she said, And seiz’d a torch, and fir’d the bridal bed. Up ran the rapid flames; on every side They find their fuel wheresoe’er they spread, Thin hangings, fragrant gums, and odorous wood, That pil’d like sacrificial altars stood. Around they run, and upward they aspire, And, lo! the huge Pagoda lin’d with fire. (XIV.201–8) The fact that Southey positions this event here, as an act of self-sacrifice by his heroine to protect her honour, suggests that while he may have been repelled by the practice of sati, he also saw it as an expression of female virtue. He therefore intended to have it both ways in his poem, because while his representation of sati in the first book drew on an alien moral code that he felt to be reprehensible, he also felt free to use it as a device for promoting his ideal of female chastity. This creates an interesting ambiguity in the poem, because Kailyal has previously been portrayed as resistant to Indian cultural practices in her embodiment of the British civilizing project. But here Southey sacrifices colonial politics to gender politics in creating an exemplar of feminine virtue. In Kehama, Kailyal is the victim of a ‘double colonisation’.115 She is forced to conform to Southey’s colonialist ideology, but also to the morality of the patriarchal society he promotes, which at this point demands she should give up her life to protect her virginity. Southey’s ambivalent representation of sati conforms Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 241 01/06/2007 11:54:00 242 Writing the Empire to the time in which it was written. As Ghose states, ‘During the Romantic period, sensationalized and eroticized images of widow-burning were circulated, where voyeuristic horror was juxtaposed with admiration for a symbol of womanly chastity and faith’.116 This representation of feminine purity under the exigencies of Hindu abuse would be employed during the Victorian period by evangelical missionaries, in order to popularize the image of ‘the downtrodden Indian woman, victimized by her own society and in need of the strong British arm to save her’.117 Indian Missions Kailyal is saved by her father, who, by the special power endowed on him through Kehama’s curse, can walk through the flames that surround her. This magical immunity also allows Ladurlad to effect the release of Ereenia from the ‘Ancient Sepulchres’ of the submarine city of Baly, where he has been imprisoned. The structural irony of Southey’s plot provides a device to save his self-determining heroes, as well as commenting on Kehama’s limited capability to control destiny. This is also the message of Southey’s motto at the beginning of the poem (‘CURSES ARE LIKE YOUNG CHICKENS, THEY ALWAYS COME HOME TO ROOST’), with its comforting sub-text that acts of tyranny will cause reprisals at their source.118 As Southey’s poem nears its conclusion, Ladurlad and Kailyal, guided by Ereenia, embark on a ship manned by an invisible crew, in a passage reminiscent of the ‘Ancyent Marinere’: Self-hoisted then, behold the sail Expands itself before the gale; Hands which they cannot see, let slip The cable of that fated ship (XX.109–12) The travellers are transported across the ocean to the ‘penal’ colony of ‘Padalon’ (or hell) for the final confrontation with Kehama (XXII.2, 12). Here they find the souls of the dead in purgatory. As well as discovering those who are ‘Foul with habitual crimes, a hideous crew’, they also find others who have been the victims of this ‘race of rapine and of blood’ (XXI.36–7). These are the defenceless women and children at the mercy of Hindu doctrine: Widows whom, to their husbands funeral fire, Force or strong error led, to share the pyre, As to their everlasting marriage-bed: And babes, by sin unstain’d, Whom erring parents vow’d To Ganges, and the holy stream profaned With that strange sacrifice, rite unordain’d Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 242 01/06/2007 11:54:00 The Curse of Kehama 243 By Law, by sacred Nature unallow’d: Others more hapless in their destiny, Scarce having first inhaled this vital breath, Whose cradles from some tree Unnatural hands suspended, Then left, till gentle Death, Coming like Sleep, their feeble moanings ended (XXI.58–71) These crimes of sati, infanticide and child sacrifice, licensed by the ‘strong error’ of Hinduism, are shown being enacted on the weakest members of society. This is intended to engender compassion in the reader and therefore determination to eradicate such practice through support of British missionary endeavours. The information for this passage (and several others) comes from the Periodical Accounts relative to the Baptist Missionary Society (1802). Southey knew these accounts well as he had reviewed them for the Annual Review (1803) as well as the Quarterly Review (1809), recycling substantial parts of his earlier contribution in the latter. These articles were very sympathetic to the missionary project, supporting it for several reasons: Because the moral institutes of Christianity are calculated to produce the greatest possible good, individual and general; because it would root out polygamy with its whole train of evils; because it would abolish human sacrifices, infanticide, and practices of self-torture; because it is a system best adapted for our happiness here as well as hereafter.119 Southey can be seen here setting aside his youthful reservations about the Christian church in his utilitarian advocacy of ‘a system’ which is ‘calculated to produce the greatest possible good’. This was because he realized that Christianity could play an important role in colonial affairs, despite his concerns about this Nonconformist sect in his own country. In coming up against Indian inhumanity, Southey’s religious prejudices mutate, so that the Baptists are now – in the service they can provide to the British Empire – more favourably viewed as the lesser of two evils. Southey does not advocate Christianity as an instrument of divine revelation here, but as one ‘system’ to oppose another, making his political intentions evident. Christianity in any form was a useful moral tool against foreign ‘evils’, as he corroborated in a letter written some years later, where he stated that, ‘In thinking of the merits of a missionary therefore I never consider his Creed’, adding more specifically ‘[I] could not take a deeper interest in the proceedings at Serampore if I had been dipt in Andrew Fuller’s baptistery’.120 In his Annual Review article of 1803, Southey gives the history of this ‘sect of dissenters’, who have ‘undertaken to preach the gospel in Hindostan, a duty shamefully neglected by the church of England’. He is particularly impressed Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 243 01/06/2007 11:54:00 Writing the Empire 244 with their leader, William Carey, who had been a ‘shoemaker’ but, having educated himself and become fluent in many languages, had ‘translated the Bible into the Bengalee dialect, and printed it himself ’. This was a work that Southey considered to be of ‘magnitude’ and ‘importance’.121 However he had his doubts about the Baptist interpretation of Christianity: This is, indeed, a religion for which bedlams, as well as meeting-houses, should be erected. If the mission to Hindostan were connected with nothing but the propagation of such a faith, we should hope the natives would continue to worship Veeshnoo and Seeva, rather than the demon whom Calvin has set up!122 For Southey it is almost immaterial what gods the people of India worship, far more important are the moral teachings which the missionaries are well placed to promulgate. He argues that the ‘English’ – even the merchants – in India ‘have yet some character, and some honour, and some decency to support’ and this can be imparted to the natives.123 The article replicates sections of the tracts that deal with the erroneous fatalism of the natives (as he sees it) in believing that any crimes they carry out are predestined by God, as well as details of ‘religious self-torture’, infanticide and ‘suttee’.124 He comments: These are evils which the English government might and ought to check which can only be destroyed by the destruction of the cursed superstition which recommends them as duties. But these are trifling evils, compared to the system of casts … In what manner force and fraud established so detestable and ruinous a system, is, and perhaps will be for ever unknown: but this system it is which, for so many centuries, has prevented all possibility of improvement in Hindostan; for this Christianity is the certain and effectual and only remedy.125 Southey shared the preoccupation of many of his contemporaries with the Hindu caste system (Varnadharma), the imposition of which he lays at the door of the Brahmans, as in Kehama. However he failed to appreciate the subtleties and gradations of profession and class, which Hindu apologists argue creates a less fixed system than is perceived by westerners. Southey observed India as he had perceived Britain in his ‘Jacobin’ days, as a system of inequality and injustice that oppressed the lower classes and was supported by the religious establishment. Now he advocates Christianity as a way to release ‘Hindostan’ from these problems. His article concludes by recommending the ‘church of England to exert itself and send labourers into the vineyard’, in order to reap the harvest begun by the Baptists.126 Southey went on to review the Transactions of the London Missionary Society in Polynesia, as well as reporting on the Dutch mission in South Africa of Dr Vanderkemp – a project he wholeheartedly supported, commenting ‘I feel the whole heroism of such a man’.127 In these reviews he defends the attempts of Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 244 01/06/2007 11:54:00 The Curse of Kehama 245 the missionaries and, despite detailing their failures, is confident that in the end the civilization they bring will prevail: ‘This is the order of nature: beasts give place to man; savages to civilized man’.128 In 1808, when the Edinburgh Review published an article by Sydney Smith attacking the Baptist Missions in India, Southey’s first article for the newly-formed Quarterly gave him the enjoyable opportunity of defending them, as well as taking this rival magazine to task.129 Smith’s review opens with a dramatic description of a murderous attack by Indian soldiers (‘two battalions of Sepoys’) in the service of the East India Company, on their European officers.130 He then considers various reports on these events in India (mostly by those with an interest in the East India Company), as well as the Transactions of the Missionary Society, to make an explicit link between the mutiny in Vellore (1806) and the preaching of missionaries in the district. Smith argues that the missionaries are jeopardizing the empire in India by their actions, and to no very useful end because the Hindu religion ‘extends its empire over the minutest actions of life’, and therefore Christianity is unlikely to succeed. While the ‘Hindoos have some very savage customs, which it would be desirable to abolish’, Smith questions whether this justifies sending out ‘little detachments of maniacs’ to spread ‘the most unjust and contemptible opinion of the gospel?’131 Smith reveals how precarious metropolitan observers considered the empire in India to be – an insecurity that would dominate methods for governing it throughout the nineteenth century – in his belief that: Upon the whole, it appears to us hardly possible to push the business of proselytism in India to any length, without incurring the utmost risk of losing our empire. The danger is more tremendous, because it may be so sudden; religious fears are a very probable cause of disaffection in the troops; if the troops are generally disaffected, our Indian empire may be lost to us as suddenly as a frigate or a fort; and that empire is governed by men who, we are very much afraid, would feel proud to lose it in such a cause.132 Despite discussing Indian matters, Smith’s target is much closer to home as he makes the link between colonial and domestic politics explicit. For Smith the ‘maniacs’ in the Indian missions merely reflect the religious ‘fanaticism’ of ‘the government at home’. He argues that because the Hindus are ‘already highly civilized’ they should be left to their own beliefs and British officials in India should be free to govern these territories as they see fit, so conforming to his periodical’s laissez-faire, Whig editorial principles.133 Southey’s reply to this article in his own account for the Quarterly defends ‘This mission, which is represented by its enemies as so dangerous to the British empire in India’. He refutes the link between missionaries and mutiny, stating that they are being used as ‘scape-goats’.134 In fact, he concludes, it was probably Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 245 01/06/2007 11:54:00 Writing the Empire 246 the imposition of government regulations on the ‘Seapoys’ dress code (replacing turbans with helmets, and forbidding forehead caste marks) that caused the insurrection. Despite the ‘outcry [that] has been raised in England’ against the missionaries – by Smith and those with links to the East India Company – Southey was prepared to upset public opinion to state his views, in the same way that he was willing to upset public taste, if necessary, in publishing Kehama.135 Southey’s opinion of the Edinburgh Review’s position on the Indian missions was conveyed in a letter to William Taylor while he was writing his article in defence of them: What a precious article is that in defence of polygamy! … I am writing a view and vindication of the existing Protestant Missions for an unborn Review, which has never yet been heard of, and has neither name not existence, but will hoist the bloody flag, run alongside the Edinburgh, and engage her yard-arm and yard-arm. What wretched work has Sydney Smith made of this subject of the missions! It were better to be a fanatic than such a buffoon as this, for fanaticism implies some feeling, some sincerity, some heart of flesh and blood!136 Southey’s strong invective employs the terminology of naval engagement to display how much he felt he was at ‘war’ with Smith over this issue. And discussion of the future of India, important as Southey felt that was, would also have the added benefit of attacking those in Smith’s party who would settle for peace with Bonaparte and allow the Catholics a stronger presence in Britain. In Southey’s eyes, the differences between his views and the Edinburgh were not just a matter of colonial policy but of morality. He therefore converted Smith’s attack on the missionaries into a defence of Indian social practices, including polygamy. This allowed him to question not just his ethics, but those of his journal, which he considered presented a threat to British security in its policy on India, France and Catholic Emancipation. Southey was not averse to waging war on anyone that he felt was opposed to the reinforcement of ‘British’ values at home and abroad. The satisfaction he felt in firing a broadside at the Edinburgh for its immoral political agenda (on behalf of a new, Tory, rival publication) reveals how much colonial affairs were inextricably linked with the political (and personal) preoccupations of the metropolis. Southey’s defence of the missionaries clearly aligned him with the growing evangelical movement in Britain, against those (particularly in India) who opposed their intervention. The political implications of these arguments would be more far-reaching than squabbles in the British press. William Carey and his Baptist missionaries in India had been forced to settle in Serampore (a Danish territory) because they were not permitted to establish a mission in lands belonging to the East India Company. The fact that the company obstructed Christian missionaries in its territories – because it saw their attempts at conversion as Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 246 01/06/2007 11:54:00 The Curse of Kehama 247 a threat to government and commerce – became a contentious issue at board meetings, but also in the British parliament. William Wilberforce’s concerted attempts on behalf of the missions saw the successful incorporation of a clause in the India Bill of 1813, which allowed ‘missionaries of all denominations’ to be ‘free to trawl for converts throughout the Company’s territories so long as they possessed an official licence’.137 The fact that this legislation was supported by many of the British public – ‘Between April and June 1813 some 500,000 people signed nearly 900 petitions’– demonstrates how crucial the ‘civilizing’ of the subcontinent was considered to be.138 The India Bill had important consequences in limiting the East India Company’s power, as well as providing a clear indication that the British government saw India’s future as its responsibility. Whatever level of control Britain was to have over its imperial possessions, Southey imagined a harmonious future for them: Imagine these countries, as they would be a few centuries hence, and must be, if some strange mispolicy does not avert this proper and natural course of things; the people enjoying that happiness and those domestic morals, which seem to proceed from no other root than the laws and institutions with which Providence has favoured us above all others: imagine these wide regions in the yet uncultivated parts of the earth flourishing like our own, and possessed by people enjoying our institutions and speaking our language. Whether they should be held in colonial dependence, or become separate states, or when they may have ceased to depend upon the parent country, connected with her by the union of reverential attachment on one side, and common interests on both, is of little import upon this wide view of things.139 The paternalistic relationship invoked, of ‘parent country’ and those ‘in colonial dependence’, is designed to inculcate in the latter British values, ‘institutions’ and ‘language’, so creating a ‘reverential attachment’ to Britain. Despite the naive idealism of Southey’s vision, he did, however, anticipate the ‘Anglicist’ policy of the next generation of politicians, such as Lord Macaulay (President of the Council on Education in India) in his ‘Minute’ of 1835: It is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.140 As well as dominating India with English ‘taste’ and ‘morals’, Macaulay suggests an educational system that encourages Indians to employ ‘terms of science borrowed from Western nomenclature’. Here can be seen the culmination of Jones’s attempts to apply western scholarly method to India. But unlike Jones’s approach, Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 247 01/06/2007 11:54:00 248 Writing the Empire which engaged with the Indian language (as well as Hindu texts), Macaulay’s cultural imperialism attempts to control ‘dialects’ and ‘render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge’, a further step in domesticating India. ‘Perfect discipline’ That Southey and many of his contemporaries outside (as well as inside) the legislature felt a responsibility for the future of India can be seen in the level of public engagement in the missionary debate. Macaulay’s ‘Minute’ on India also reveals how this new awareness of responsibility would manifest itself in strategies for social control (through English education, language and morals) as the imperial project sought to supervise and govern those in its dominions. In Southey’s fiction (no less than in the political topics of his journalism) it is possible to see him attempting to impose further structures of control, in the same way as in his literary representation of India, Kehama’s oppressive regime is brought to an end. The final battle for world dominion ends in hell, where all the evil souls who have committed crimes are incarcerated in ‘penal dens’: Over these dens of punishment, the host Of Padalon maintain eternal guard, Keeping upon the walls their vigilant ward. At every angle stood A watch-tower, the decurion Demon’s post, Where rais’d on high, he view’d with sleepless eye His trust, that all was well. And over these, Such was the perfect discipline of Hell, Captains of fifties and of hundreds held Authority, each in his loftier tower; And chiefs of legions over them had power; And thus all Hell with towers was girt around. (XXIII.109–20) This is the domain of Yamen (the ‘Death-God’), who is responsible for ensuring that all those who have committed crimes on earth remain imprisoned in the underworld. He needs to be particularly vigilant at this time as his prisoners are becoming restive in anticipation of Kehama’s plans to release them. In describing the ‘penal dens’ of hell, there are several similarities between Southey’s poem and his interest in prison reform. This is particularly evident in the use he makes of Jeremy Bentham’s plans to build a ‘Panopticon’ penitentiary, employing it as a metaphor for the way in which the rulers of his oriental hell impose control on their inmates. As Southey grew older and more concerned about the threat of an insurrection, particularly with regard to popular unrest during the economic depression Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 248 01/06/2007 11:54:00 The Curse of Kehama 249 at the end of the war with France, he became more hardened in his views on criminal law. In 1816 he could recommend transportation for those who attempted to spread political disaffection through their writing – due to his expressed belief that bad members of his own society had the ingenuity and resourcefulness to make good colonists elsewhere. He also advocated suspension of Habeas Corpus, and ‘laying the most mischievous of the revolutionary writers in confinement’, demonstrating a complete reversal from his radical antipathy to such measures in the early 1790s. Though he could make specific exceptions, he saw himself as one who would ‘upon the general question stand up for the vindictive character of penal justice’.141 His interests in prison reform and criminal law are evident in a Quarterly Review article of 1818, which discusses this topic in its review of works on the poor laws.142 Despite having been attributed to Southey, this review was largely the work of his friend John Rickman, the parliamentary statistician and clerk to the House of Commons. He regularly supplied Southey with material for his articles in the Quarterly and as Southey became closer to him he also absorbed his high Tory views. While he was writing Kehama, Southey sent one of his regular requests for information to Rickman, asking ‘Can you send me an old report about a whimsical prison which Jeremy Bentham obtained an act of Parliament to erect. It was called a Panopticon – or some such heathenish name’.143 As a government statistician Rickman was aware of Bentham through his utilitarian economic theories, as well as having access to his plans for a ‘penitentiary inspection-house’.144 The report enabled Southey to produce a sublime version of Bentham’s ‘whimsical prison’ for his oriental hell (above), in which the issues of surveillance that Bentham’s plans delineate are replicated in the constant observation of Southey’s prisoners. The ‘watch-tower’ raised on high compares to Bentham’s proposed inspection tower. Each ‘decurion Demon’, in each of these towers, can observe below, but those incarcerated in their cells cannot see them. The inmates are therefore governed by an ‘all-seeing gaze’, an imperative principle if the Panopticon was to operate effectively.145 The idea of each ‘loftier tower’, one above the other, linking back to Yamen’s central throne of power in the ‘Diamond City’ (another oriental architectural miracle) means that he maintains control, but is also veiled from the prisoners’ view, so maintaining his sublime omniscience. Bentham’s ideas for the Panopticon, which he never saw realized, was that it would provide ‘a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example’ in which ‘the possessor of this power is “the inspector” with his invisible omnipresence, “an utterly dark spot” in the all-transparent, light-flooded universe of the panopticon’.146 Certain aspects of this description also resonate with Southey’s description. Yamen, the god of hell, can be seen as ‘the inspector’ who maintains his pre-eminence or ‘omnipresence’ over the inmates. In a prison permanently lit by the garish light of the molten floor of Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 249 01/06/2007 11:54:01 Writing the Empire 250 hell, he is the ‘dark spot’, the ‘King of Terrors, black of aspect’ (XXIII.236–7) who inculcates their fear, so that he has ‘power of mind over mind’. Southey’s oriental underworld is also, however, a very conventional depiction of the Christian hell, with Yamen as a universal Satan/‘Death-God’/‘Eblis’ from all the religious traditions with which he was already familiar. Nowhere, in fact, does Southey extend his representation of Hinduism to the belief in reincarnation, preferring the eschatological system of Christianity. And, in Southey’s conventional hell, he seems to be representing a domestic issue as well as an oriental one, that of maintaining social control over a ‘brutalized populace’.147 As Anne McClintock states, Bentham imagined his Panopticon as ‘an architectural solution to social discipline’ in which: Factories, prisons, workhouses and schools would be constructed with an observation tower as the center. Unable to see inside the inspection tower, the inhabitants would presume they were under perpetual surveillance. Daily routine would be conducted in a state of permanent visibility.148 The Panopticon therefore, as well as playing a role in proposed penal reform, could provide a model for various other forms of social control too. For Southey, in Kehama, it was a way of imposing ‘perfect discipline’ on his rebellious criminals, but it also serves as a metaphor for his desire to control large groups of people (whether oriental or British) that he depicts as potentially fanatical, or unmanageable. This desire to keep others in a state of ‘permanent visibility’, which is imperative within the walls of a penitentiary, is also desirable among those in any position of government. Southey incorporated these ideas in order to restrain and subdue the inmates of his fiction, but it also reveals other aspects of his ambition for greater governmental control at home and abroad, particularly in his ‘Anglicist’ agenda for India. Southey and the missionaries, as well as Mill and Macaulay, all desire that Indians, who have very different cultural and religious values, conform to their controlling ‘gaze’. By imposing the English language and systems of government and education on India, they intend to remake it in their own British image. As Mary Louise Pratt argues, even from their first encounters the controlling vision is an integral process of British travellers and writers engaging with alien territories. The traveller, facing new scenes, institutes a ‘rhetoric of presence’ that incorporates an aesthetical and ideological colonization through the terms of descriptions that are used.149 It is the ‘seer’ who controls the scene, ‘remaking’ what he or she observes, to conform to western preconceptions – consider Jones’s description on his arrival in Asia, and Hodges’s and Williamson’s own ‘rhetoric of presence’ in their artistic representation of India. Southey absorbed this controlling impulse from the travel accounts he read and imposed it on his fiction in his metropolitan observations of India. In Kehama he creates ‘Indian’ Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 250 01/06/2007 11:54:01 The Curse of Kehama 251 characters that conform to his values, as well as a ‘moral’ landscape that reinforces his message, while those who oppose his agenda are shown to be defeated in an emphatic ‘childish’ dualism that cannot be misconstrued. Southey’s moral programme is particularly noticeable in the ending of the poem, where Kehama’s ‘chickens’ at last ‘come home to roost’. For Southey’s British readers, undoubtedly appalled at the triumphant career of Napoleon (who by 1810 seemed invincible), there was some consolation in seeing one aspect of imperial tyranny overturned. Kehama is tricked, by his own ambition and pride, into drinking from a cup which he believes will endow him with eternal life. This comes not in the form of imperial immortality, but in a more prosaic eternity, as the fourth columnar statue supporting Yamen’s throne. All Southey’s virtuous heroes are rewarded conventionally, by being reunited in heaven, where Kailyal and Ereenia are joined in angelic conjugal love. The downfall of Southey’s oriental tyrant, albeit by Hindu divinities, is in fact the contrivance of a western writer imposing his rational, Christian morality on the Indian world of Kehama. Southey’s fiction is therefore imbued with the controlling ideals of the ‘Anglicist’ lobby, which also sought to impose a template of British morality, education and religion on the Indian territories. ‘Through a glass darkly’ William Jones was aware of the different ways of ‘seeing’ that Europeans at home and those residing in India employed, observing that: in Europe you see India through a glass darkly: here, we are in a strong light; and a thousand little nuances are perceptible to us, which are not visible through your best telescopes, and which could not be explained without writing volumes.150 In this passage Jones resists the compulsion to ‘see’ India through European eyes.151 This is because the important ‘little nuances’ of Indian culture and society are lost through distance and cannot be traced by observing India from abroad, as Southey attempted to do. The ‘bifocal’ vision of Jones’s description, separating near and far perspectives, represents the divided positions of the ‘Anglicist’ and ‘Orientalist’ debate. Despite the opinions of those, like Jones, who felt they saw India by a ‘strong light’ and were therefore best placed to decide on its future, the controlling vision of those propounding ‘Anglicist’ policy, such as Southey, would dominate. The evidence for Southey’s adoption of these views can be seen in Kehama, as well as in his political progression from radical to conservative. However they are also dramatically demonstrated in Southey’s report of a scene played out in India, that he detailed for his British readers of the Annual Review. The argument for supporting ‘Anglicist’ aspirations came from the Asiatic Society itself, Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 251 01/06/2007 11:54:01 Writing the Empire 252 in the newly-published eighth volume of Asiatick Researches. In an essay by Francis Wilford, he reveals that previous assertions he had made (in the third volume of Asiatick Researches), connecting elements from the Hindu sacred texts to a geographical construction of Egypt, were less reliable than he had first thought. Wilford relates a tale concerning an Indian ‘pandit’, who was employed to assist him in his researches by explaining the links between ‘mythology’ and geography. On checking through the materials he had collated, Wilford found that his (unnamed) assistant had carried out forgeries on the original documents, that sometimes appeared as altered words but also as larger amendments, to cover the tracks of his inventions. After discovering these forgeries, it was also revealed that his assistant had embezzled the research funds set aside to pay other Indian scholars for their labours. The tone of Southey’s review is one of outraged condemnation for the actions of the ‘pandit’. He quotes the whole episode verbatim from Wilford’s essay, adding: This sort of deception is nothing new, but there is something shocking in the conduct of the Pandit when he was discovered. He flew into the most violent paroxysms of rage … and he brought ten Bramins to swear by what is most sacred in their religion to the genuineness of these extracts.152 For Southey, oriental literature is not just harmlessly fantastical any more, but is founded on a totally unreliable and even deceitful base. The fact that ‘ten Bramins’ will perjure themselves (and their religion) illustrates for him how reprehensible the Hindus, in thrall to their priesthood, are. In contrast, Southey describes Wilford’s conduct in confessing the erroneous conclusions he has made based on his research assistant’s unreliable evidence. His actions manifest ‘perfect candour and sincerity’, demanding ‘high respect for his industry and erudition, his love of antiquity, and his love of truth.153 Southey deliberately draws a striking contrast between the scholarly, sincere (British) Wilford, and the deceitful ‘pandit’, the product of a culture dominated by Brahman ‘oppression’. This vignette exemplified for his readers the need for Indological unreliability and ‘error’ to be replaced by corrective English standards of investigative ‘industry’ and ‘truth’. Representations of India as unknowable and unassimilable – whether in fiction such as Kehama, or in Asiatic Society reports of frustration in the face of a ‘cloud of fables’ – only contributed to the ‘Anglicist’ case for imposing more familiar epistemological structures on the Indian territories. Such a picture of India resisted any form of external control and led to James Mill’s application of the rigorous methods of ‘discrimination, classification, judgement, comparison, weighing, inferring’ to his own account of the History of British India (1817– 36), in order to counteract the version produced by Jones and his associates.154 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 252 01/06/2007 11:54:01 The Curse of Kehama 253 This was because Mill held a similar opinion to Southey of the ‘Orientalist’ in India: Sir William Jones, and others, recognized the demand for a code of Indian law; but unhappily thought of no better expedient than that of employing some of the natives themselves; as if one of the most difficult tasks to which the human mind can be applied, a work to which the highest measure of European intelligence is not more than equal, could be expected to be tolerably performed by the unenlightened and perverted intellects of a few Indian pundits.155 Replacing Indian ‘pundits’ with ‘European intelligence’ and its systems of knowledge would be the answer to the future of India. In fact, as Majeed states, Mill’s work ‘was an attempt to define an idiom for the British empire as a whole which would replace the dominant conservative one’.156 In this ambition, Mill supported Macaulay’s agenda of creating a ‘class of persons’ who, by being ‘English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’, would impose cultural conformity on the individual characteristics and attributes of Indian society. Such structures were considered a necessary aspect of governing Britain’s territories by this next generation of imperial administrators. Southey simply anticipated these concerns in The Curse of Kehama, which, despite its fictional nature, is in the vanguard of this agenda. The tyrannical and irreligious ‘mighty Rajah’ (representing India) is brought to his knees by a heroine (and her auxiliaries) who, in Southey’s portrayal of her as chaste, restrained and pious, comes to represent British morality (like Spenser’s Britomart). However unrealistic that might be, Southey holds up this example as a role model for Britons everywhere, not just those attempting to govern India. This was because the dominant message of Southey’s poem was that a code of values, which he nationalized, should be imposed not just on India, but on the whole British Empire (including the metropolis), through its responsible, paternalistic government. In Kehama, more than any other of his texts – though Southey was developing this theme in Madoc and Thalaba – he expounds a newly-found nationalism, in which he uses other polities, religions and societies (in India, Portugal and France) against which to project an ideal image of Britain. The strong opinions and radical values of Southey’s youth had undergone a transition, impacted upon by his emerging conservatism, to form the nationalistic project that emerges in Kehama. ‘The world as my country’ The strongest evidence for Southey’s nationalism can be seen in his long narrative poems, in which he superimposes his own values, the product of an anglicized, christianized culture, onto various geographical locations. Southey’s heroes have to complete a journey through time and space (as in the travel narratives of his source material) as well as a moral quest against oppression and evil (of the west- Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 253 01/06/2007 11:54:01 254 Writing the Empire ern literary tradition). Madoc, Thalaba, Kailyal/Ladurlad (as well as Wat Tyler and Joan of Arc) are all highly moral, righteous individuals who pursue their missions through a vale of evil to emerge victorious – whether by founding a colony in America, or finding conjugal love in paradise. Despite reviling the form of epic poetry as ‘degraded’, Southey’s narrative poems all have some ‘epic’ characteristics – they are written on a serious subject and the fate of humans (if not humanity itself ) depends on the success of their central heroic figures. The fact that he replayed this story so often points to a consistency in his poetical – if not his political, social and religious – programme. The ambiguity of Southey’s frequent assertion that he remained dedicated to the same ideals all his life is resolved in recognizing that he was not affirming a belief in radical politics any more, but alluding to the high moral code to which he was committed – both on a personal and national level. Because ‘in the 1790s there was no consensus about what made the ideal, modern national poem’, Southey had the freedom to create his own form, which may have originated in his anti-British politics, but in promoting his moral values was transformed into a national epic.157 Southey’s original intention to provide a sequence of poetic mythologies, became a recycled saga of his moral vision for Britain. In this way he created a ‘national’ story, to champion the qualities he admired, in his ‘national’ heroes. And the very fact that these characters lack psychological depth, means they appear as quasi-divine heroes, against which other races can only compare unfavourably. Southey’s ‘colonization’ of the locations of his poetry, whether in America, the Middle East or India, provided a supporting moral background that emphasized his message, while combining a foreign exoticism to hold his readers’ interest. These locations also provided examples of other races and cultures against which Southey could define the ideal nature of ‘Britishness’, thereby creating a nationalist narrative in a new place. As Linda Colley states, it was during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that ‘a sense of British national identity was forged’, which has ‘shaped the quality of this particular sense of nationhood and belonging ever since’.158 This national identity was formed, by Southey and others, largely against continued hostilities with France, but also against other forms of cultural foreignness encountered through colonial expansion. Southey’s poetry contributes to the Victorian, jingoistic, self-perpetuating myth that Britain is a morally fit guardian to govern a large proportion of the world’s territories. Therefore, through his writing, he prepared the British people for their imperial destiny. Siting Southey within his political and social context inevitably means taking the long view of his position within the Romantic period. From 1810 onwards, he could be considered a ‘proto-Victorian’ in his early anticipation of several aspects of that period, for instance in his dissemination of a restrictive moral code (particularly for women), his contribution to conservative political ideals, Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 254 01/06/2007 11:54:01 The Curse of Kehama 255 his crusading imperialism, as well as in his elevation of the ‘man of letters’ to a culturally central role. His ideas were formed by the social and political controversies of the Romantic period, but he increasingly slipped free of these origins over his lifetime. Southey’s transition from ostracized leader of a ‘sect of poets’ to Laureate was fundamental in creating a national poet who would shape the values of the Victorian era. A self-made man who relied on his own talents to carve out his career as a writer, he then maintained his pre-eminence as a figure of the establishment. Southey was, in fact, inculcating in his writing the beliefs and values of an emerging British middle class – and he spoke to that class of what was important to them in terms of morality, nationalism, aesthetics and imperial politics. But if Southey was such an important figure in his own time, why did he fall from favour by the end of the nineteenth century? This was because if Southey was an early Victorian, he was also a late Romantic. The answer lies in his crossgeneric literary output, because the idiosyncratic oeuvre he created aimed at the Romantic sublime of poetry, as well as the detailed immediacy of Victorian prose (in his biographies and essays). Southey inhabits the ‘no man’s land’ created by the generic distinctions and rigid periodizations applied to literary studies. While, like his fellow ‘lake’ poets, he mourned a lost idyllic (mythical) pastoral existence, he also looked forward to a future for the British Empire where he felt this could be recreated, so presaging a new age of imperial rule in his writing. Southey’s anticipation of Britain’s imperial future (much of which came to pass) was a personal vision, disseminated by the authorial imposition of his values through the medium of published texts. His self-confident assertion, that ‘I have long learnt to look upon the world as my country’, does not succeed in suppressing those anxieties and ambiguities also incorporated in his vision.159 But this application of naive egotism to an anglocentric view of the world created the language for such imaginative acts of global appropriation – a language that Southey taught future generations of Britons to voice. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 255 01/06/2007 11:54:01 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 256 01/06/2007 11:54:01 NOTES The following abbreviations are used in the notes: Annual Anthology AR Asiatick Researches BCPW Carnall CPW CSMP L&C Lects 1795 Madden NL PI PW QR Ramos Robert Southey (ed.), The Annual Anthology, 2 vols (Bristol: Biggs and Co.; London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1799–1800). Annual Review. Asiatick Researches; or Transactions of the Society Instituted in Bengal, for Inquiring into the History and Antiquities, the Arts, Sciences and Literature of Asia, 20 vols (Calcutta: Manuel Cantopher; London: P. Elmsly, 1788–1839). Lord George Gordon Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–6). Geoffrey Carnall, Robert Southey and his Age: The Development of a Conservative Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960). Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. H. Coleridge, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912). The Contributions of Robert Southey to the ‘Morning Post’, ed. Kenneth Curry (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1984). Robert Southey, The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. C. C. Southey, 6 vols (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1849–50). Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion, ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann (London and Princeton, NJ: Routledge and Kegan Paul and Princeton University Press, 1971). Lionel Madden (ed.), Robert Southey: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972). New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Kenneth Curry, 2 vols (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1965). James Montgomery, The Pelican Island and Other Poems (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1827). Poetical Works of Robert Southey, 10 vols (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1837–8). Quarterly Review. The Letters of Robert Southey to John May, 1797–1838, ed. Charles Ramos (Austin, TX: Jenkins Publishing Company, 1976). – 257 – Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 257 01/06/2007 11:54:01 Notes to pages 1–3 258 Robberds RSCER RSPW SL Speck Storey WPW J. W. Robberds (ed.), A Memoir of the Life and Writings of the late William Taylor of Norwich, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1843). Lynda Pratt (ed.), Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). Robert Southey, Poetical Works, 1793–1810, gen. ed. Lynda Pratt, 5 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2004): vol. 1: Joan of Arc, ed. Lynda Pratt; vol. 2: Madoc, ed. Lynda Pratt; vol. 3: Thalaba the Destroyer, ed. Tim Fulford; vol. 4: The Curse of Kehama, ed. Daniel S. Roberts; vol. 5: Selected Shorter Poems, 1793–1810, ed. Lynda Pratt. Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, ed. John Wood Warter, 4 vols (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1856). W. A. Speck, Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2006). Mark Storey, Robert Southey: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940–9). Introduction 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Extract from Byron’s Journal, 22 November 1813, quoted in Madden, p. 157. Southey, ‘Asiatic Researches’, AR, 6 (1808), ch. 10, no. 18, pp. 643–54; p. 643. As Marilyn Butler comments on Southey (as well as Coleridge, Wordsworth and Burke), he was concerned with ‘interpreting the intellectual as a learned man, priest, preserver of a society’s past and keeper of its conscience, the champion of an old order but in an ideal form’, Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 165. Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson (eds), Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire 1780–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 2. However there have been exceptions, in the work of Kenneth Curry particularly: NL, CSMP and Southey (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975). See also Jack Simmons, Southey (London: Collins, 1945); Carnall; Madden; and Christopher J. P. Smith, A Quest for Home: Reading Robert Southey (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997). See list of abbreviations above. See list of abbreviations above. Marilyn Butler, Literature as a Heritage, or Reading Other Ways (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Marilyn Butler, ‘Plotting the Revolution: The Political Narratives of Romantic Poetry and Criticism’, in Kenneth Johnston, Gilbert Chaitin, Karen Hanson and Herbert Marks (eds), Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 133–57; Tim Fulford, ‘Heroic Voyagers and Superstitious Natives: Southey’s Imperialist Ideology’, Studies in Travel Writing, 2 (Spring 1998), pp. 46–64; Fulford and Kitson (eds), Romanticism and Colonialism; Tim Fulford, ‘Plants, Pagodas and Penises: Southey’s Oriental Imports’, in RSCER, pp. 187–201; Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Lynda Pratt, ‘Revising the National Epic: Coleridge, Southey and Madoc’, Romanticism, 2:2 (1996), pp. 149–63; RSCER; Lynda Pratt, ‘“Where … success [is] certain”?: Southey the Literary East India- Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 258 01/06/2007 11:54:01 Notes to pages 3–9 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 259 man’, in Michael J. Franklin (ed.), Romantic Representations of British India (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 131–53. Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s ‘History of British India’ and Orientalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); John Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1991); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992); Marilyn Butler, ‘Orientalism’, in David B. Pirie (ed.), The Romantic Period, The Penguin History of Literature, vol. 5 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), pp. 395–447. Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978; rev. edn Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), p. 3; Homi K. Bhaba, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); Homi K. Bhaba, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, in Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh (eds), Modern Literary Theory: A Reader (Lojndon and New York: E. Arnold, 1989), pp. 234– 41; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds (New York and London: Methuen, 1987); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory (London and New York: Longman, 1994), pp. 66–111. Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey; Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East. Ibid., p. 2. Bhaba, The Location of Culture, pp. 70–1. Pratt, RSCER, p. xxi. Nicola Trott, ‘Poemets and Poemlings: Robert Southey’s Minority Interest’, in RSCER, pp. 69–86; p. 77. Pratt, RSCER, p. xxi. Southey, Common-Place Book, ed. John Wood Warter, 4 series (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1849–50), p. 17. From Southey’s preface to The Life of Nelson (1813), quoted in Curry, Southey, p. 94. On this subject see Fulford, ‘Heroic Voyagers and Superstitious Natives’. Southey to J. May, 26 June 1797, L&C, vol. 1, p. 317. Carnall, p. 200. Quoted in Madden, p. 68. Quoted in ibid., pp. 69–70. Quoted in ibid., p. 70. Francis Jeffrey, ‘Southey’s Curse of Kehama’, Edinburgh Review, 17:34 (February 1811), pp. 429–65; p. 433. RSPW, vol. 4, p. 6. Southey to J. May, 1803, SL, vol. 1, p. 217. Southey to G. C. Bedford, 14 March 1807, SL, vol. 1, p. 419. Southey to G. C. Bedford, 14 March 1807, SL, vol. 1, p. 420. Carnall, p. 2. Tim Fulford, Introduction, in Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson (gen. eds), Travels, Explorations and Empires: Writings from the Era of Imperial Expansion, 1770–1835, 8 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001), vol. 1, p. xvi. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 2. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 259 01/06/2007 11:54:02 260 Notes to pages 10–18 32. Andrew Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998–9), vol. 3, ed. Andrew Porter, p. 4. 33. Rod Edmond, Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 12. 34. Debbie Lee, Slavery and the Romantic Imagination (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), p. 17. 35. Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960); Louis Antoine de Bougainville, A Voyage Round the World, in the Years 1766, 1767, 1768 and 1769, trans. John Reinhold Forster (London: J. Nourse and T. Davies, 1772); James Cook, A Voyage Round the World Performed in His Britannic Majesty’s Ships the Resolution and Adventure in the Years 1772, 1773, 1774, 1775, 4 vols (Dublin: W. Whitestone, S. Watson, R. Cross, J. Potts, J. Hoey etc., 1777). 36. Southey, ‘Transactions of the Missionary Society’, AR, 2 (1804), ch. 2, no. 62, pp. 189– 201; Southey, ‘Transactions of the Missionary Society in the South Sea Islands’, QR, 2:3 (August 1809), pp. 24–61; Southey, ‘Polynesian Researches’, QR, 43:85 (May 1830), pp. 1–54. 37. See P. J. Marshall, ‘Britain Without America – A Second Empire?’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.)The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, ed. P. J. Marshall, pp. 576–95. 38. Southey, ‘Account of the Baptist Mission’, AR, 1 (1803), ch. 2, no. 71, pp. 207–18; Southey, ‘Account of the Baptist Missionary Society’, QR, 1:1 (February 1809), pp. 193– 226. 1 ‘Once more I will cry aloud and spare not’ Romaine Joseph Thorn, Bristolia, a Poem (Bristol: Owen Rees; London: J. N. Longman, 1794), ll. 7–10, p. 7. 2. Southey, Letters from England (1807), ed. Jack Simmons (London: The Cresset Press, 1951), pp. 480–1. 3. ‘In its own right Bristol was a large centre of consumption and production but, standing at the web of land and water communications, it also served as the focus of economic activity for a large area of south-west England, south Wales and the south-western Midlands. For this hinterland it acted as the market, distribution centre and source of capital’, W. E. Minchinton (ed.), The Trade of Bristol in the Eighteenth Century, Bristol Record Society’s Publications, vol. 20 (Bristol: Bristol Record Society, 1957), pp. xiv–xv. 4. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: Harper Collins, 1995), p. 5. 5. Minchinton (ed.), The Trade of Bristol in the Eighteenth Century, p. 57. 6. David Richardson (ed.), Bristol, Africa and the Eighteenth Century Slave Trade to America: The Years of Ascendancy, 1730–45 (Gloucester: Bristol Record Society, 1987), pp. vii–xxiv. 7. Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870 (London and Basingstoke: Picador, 1997), pp. 313–29. 8. Ellen Gibson Wilson, Thomas Clarkson: A Biography (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 30. 9. Minchinton (ed.), The Trade of Bristol in the Eighteenth Century, pp. xiii. 10. Thomas, The Slave Trade, p. 301. 11. Joan Baum, Mind Forg’d Manacles: Slavery and the English Romantic Poets (North Haven, CT: Archon Books, 1994), p. 17. Thomas Clarkson gives details of these instruments that he found in Liverpool in The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment 1. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 260 01/06/2007 11:54:02 Notes to pages 18–20 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 261 of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade (Philadelphia, PA: James P. Parke, 1808), p. 300. This is just one of several apocryphal stories that have grown up about St Mary Redcliffe. The church’s crypt was used to incarcerate French prisoners of war in the eighteenth century, but there is no record of slaves being held there. It was also this church’s bells that were supposed to have rung out in celebration of the defeat of Wilberforce’s 1791 abolition bill in parliament. Many churches did express support for the defeat of the bill in this way, but there is no record of payment for bell ringers in the accounts held for St Mary Redcliffe (Madge Dresser and Sue Giles (eds), Bristol and Transatlantic Slavery (Bristol: Bristol Museums and Art Gallery with the University of the West of England, 2000), pp. 95–6). However the fact that such stories exist only serves to reinforce how closely linked Bristol was to the African trade through its wealthy and influential parishioners. The church’s lofty position, towering over the docks, provides a visible manifestation of the wealth and power of those citizens who profited by the trade. Baum, Mind Forg’d Manacles, p. 3. Peter Marshall, ‘The Anti-Slave Trade Movement in Bristol’, in Patrick McGrath (ed.), Bristol in the Eighteenth Century (Newton Abbot: Bristol Historical Association, 1972), pp. 187–215. Ibid., pp. 212–14. As Ian Haywood shows, several of the anti-slavery texts of the period originated in Bristol because its ‘status as a major slaving port made it a highly-charged, literal and imagined community in which to conduct the debate about slavery’, Bloody Romanticism: Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation, 1776–1832 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 25. Simmons, Southey, pp. 33–6. Chapter 2 contains a fuller discussion of these principles. Southey to C. H. Townshend, 17 August 1816, L&C, vol. 4, p. 194. However by 1816 Southey was also prepared to acknowledge the universities of Oxford and Cambridge as ‘the great schools by which established opinions are inculcated and perpetuated’, quoted in Simmons, Southey, p. 41. The Pantisocratic members changed at various times, but in a letter to his brother Southey writes, ‘In March we depart for America: Lovell, his wife [Mary Fricker], brother, and two of his sisters: all the Frickers [Sara, Edith, Martha, Eliza, George and their mother] – my mother, Miss Peggy and brothers; Heath, apothecary and man and wife; G. Burnett – S.T. Coleridge – Robt Allen and Robert Southey. Of so many we are certain, and expect more’, Southey to T. Southey, 7 September 1794, NL, vol. 1, pp. 74–5. Southey, Wat Tyler, II.i.13–20; PW, vol. 2, pp. 33–4. It is worth pointing out here that Southey enjoyed an imaginative, if not truly a blood, link, with the leader of the Peasant’s Revolt, through his grandmother’s first marriage to a John Tyler. When he began writing poetry for the Morning Post in 1798 he used the pseudonymous signature ‘Walter’, saying ‘I assume the name of Walter Tyler, in honour of my good old uncle, an ancestor of whom I am very proud, and with reason’, quoted in CSMP, p. 29. For instance the inscription ‘For a Monument in the New Forest’, which traduced the tyrannical acts of enclosure carried out by William I, was published in Poems (1797). Several other inscriptions opposing autocratic crimes, such as ‘For a column in Smithfield where Wat Tyler was killed’, were published in the Morning Post (see CSMP). The Annual Anthology also included inscriptions which sought to create monuments to victims of Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 261 01/06/2007 11:54:02 Notes to pages 20–5 262 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. abusive rulers. Southey is, by this means, creating his own popular and radical history of Britain in opposition to the dominant national version. See Chapter 2 for further discussion of Southey’s inscriptions. Southey, ‘To a Bee’, ll. 25–30; Annual Anthology, vol. 2, p. 135. This poem was first published in the Morning Post, 10 October 1799. That this was a familiar theme for Southey can be seen in his earlier poem, ‘Sonnet. The Bee’, also published in the Morning Post, 31 January 1798 (CSMP, p. 31), where he makes a similar comparison between the exploitation of ‘the Peasant’ and this insect. Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch, Robert Southey (Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1977), p. 14. Thomas Chatterton, ‘A Burlesque Cantata. 1770’, ll. 1–2, in A Supplement to the Miscellanies of Thomas Chatterton (London: T. Becket, 1784), p. 75. Southey to G. C. Bedford, 25 January 1793, NL, vol. 1, p. 19. Carnall, pp. 31–2. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man. Part the Second (Dublin: P. Byrne, 1792), note to pp. 111– 12. Ibid., pp. 111–12. George Whalley, ‘The Bristol Library Borrowings of Southey and Coleridge, 1793–8’, The Library, 5th series, 4 (1950), pp. 114–32. Southey to G. C. Bedford, 8 February 1795, L&C, vol. 1, p. 231. Storey, p. 75. Southey to T. Southey, 9 May 1795, NL, vol. 1, p. 94. Whalley, ‘The Bristol Library Borrowings of Southey and Coleridge’, pp. 116–17. Southey to G. C. Bedford, 1–10 October 1795, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, 2 vols (Dublin: Luke White, 1793), vol. 1, p. 34. Coleridge, ‘Lecture 6’, in Lectures on Revealed Religion. The comment on the lecture’s subject as ‘Equality, Inequality, the Evils of Government’ comes from Ernest Hartley Coleridge’s preliminary note to it (Lects 1795, p. 214). Ibid., pp. 214–29. Ibid., p. 223. Southey to H. W. Bedford, 22 August 1794, NL, vol. 1, p. 70. John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). Ibid., p. 33. Lects 1795, p. 227. Speck, p. 30. Sekora, Luxury, p. 33. Coleridge gave the lecture on 16 June 1795 (Lects 1795, p. 232). A revised copy of it was printed in the fourth number of The Watchman, 1796. This essay is reproduced in Carol Bolton (ed.), Romanticism and Politics, 1789–1832, 5 vols (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), vol. 5, pp. 327–36. Lects 1795, pp. 236–7. Ibid., p. 236. Thomas Clarkson, An Essay on the Impolicy of the African Slave Trade (London: J. Phillips, 1788), pp. 32–3. This book was borrowed from Bristol Library by Coleridge the day before his lecture was given (Whalley, ‘The Bristol Library Borrowings of Southey and Coleridge’, p. 121). Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 262 01/06/2007 11:54:02 Notes to pages 25–9 263 51. Lects 1795, pp. 238, 241. 52. Ibid., p. 241. 53. George Cheyne (1671–1743) was a Scottish physician who suggested that the British upper classes, in enjoying a luxurious lifestyle, were particularly prone to gluttony, indolence and heavy drinking; a way of life that damaged their constitutions. In The English Malady: or, A Treatise of Nervous Diseases of all kinds, as Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal, and Hysterical Distempers, &c. (London: G. Strahan, 1733) he went on to identify the psychiatric disorders and neuroses that he observed in the aristocratic classes as symptoms of a malaise in civilized society caused by their deleterious habits. However Roy Porter argues that it was precisely this identification of mental anguish and emotional disorder as a ‘civilized’ disease that perversely made it a fashionable condition, with the (often female) sufferers being credited with sensitivity and delicacy (Doctor of Society: Thomas Beddoes and the Sick Trade in Late-Enlightenment England (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 86–111. 54. Dorothy A. Stansfield, Thomas Beddoes M.D. 1760–1808: Chemist, Physician, Democrat (Dordrecht and Lancaster: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1984), p. 127. 55. For instance Beddoes’s idea of a ‘broth machine’, as well as other measures to make food for the poor more substantial and nutritious, were published in A Letter to the Right Hon. William Pitt, on the Means of Relieving the Present Scarcity, and Preventing the Diseases that Arise from Meagre Food (London: J. Johnson, 1796). 56. Thomas Beddoes, Hygeia: or Essays Moral and Medical on the Causes Affecting the Personal State of our Middling and Affluent Classes, 3 vols (Bristol: J. Mills; London: R. Phillips, 1802), vol. 2, p. 18. 57. Porter, Doctor of Society, p. 60. 58. Quoted in Stansfield, Thomas Beddoes, pp. 213–14. 59. Beddoes, Hygeia, vol. 1, p. 63. 60. Lects 1795, p. 240. 61. Carl Bernhard Wadstrom, An Essay on Colonization, particularly applied to the Western Coast of Africa, &c. (London: Darton and Harvey, 1794–5). This description combines direct quotation with Coleridge’s and Southey’s own interpretation of the information gleaned from Wadstrom. 62. Ibid., p. 14. 63. Ibid., p. 4. 64. Deirdre Coleman, Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 71. 65. Ibid., p. 64. 66. Anthony Benezet, Some Historical Account of Guinea … with an Inquiry Into the Rise and Progress of the Slave Trade (Philadelphia, PA: printed by Joseph Crukshank, 1771), p. 18. 67. Edward Long, History of Jamaica, 3 vols (London: T. Lowndes, 1774), vol. 2, p. 354. 68. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 353. 69. Lects 1795, p. 241. 70. Ibid., p. 247. 71. Ibid., p. 248. 72. Ibid., p. 247. 73. Lee, Slavery and the Romantic Imagination, pp. 3–4. 74. William Fox, An Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Propriety of Abstaining from West India Sugar and Rum (London: sold by M. Gurney, T. Knott and C. Forster, 1791), Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 263 01/06/2007 11:54:02 Notes to pages 29–32 264 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. title page. Cowper’s poem, originally entitled ‘The Negro’s Complaint, a Song’, was first published in The General Magazine and Impartial Review, 2 ( June 1788), pp. 323–4. Fox quotes ll. 17–24. Fox, An Address to the People of Great Britain, p. 1. See Timothy Morton, ‘Blood Sugar’, in Fulford and Kitson (eds), Romanticism and Colonialism, pp. 87–106; Timothy Morton, The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 171–206. Fox, An Address to the People of Great Britain, p. 2. Lects 1795, p. 248. Morton, The Poetics of Spice, p. 171. Quoted in Clare Midgeley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns 1780–1870 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 38. Southey to J. May, 26 June 1797, Ramos, p. 26. Midgeley, Women Against Slavery, p. 40. It was also synergistic with the economic individualism that marks Britain’s development as a modern capitalist democracy during this period, as Eric Williams shows in Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1944). A recent entry into the debate over whether humanitarian or economic causes had primacy in the abolition movement is Christopher Leslie Brown’s Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), in which he argues that many British abolitionists became involved because they were seeking moral value in the demoralized period after the loss of the American colonies. In the politically-charged climate of the French Revolution it was inevitable that manifestos for social change would also lead to questions about the treatment of more peripheral groups such as African slaves. As F. O. Shyllon shows in Black Slaves in Britain (London, New York, Ibadan: Oxford University Press, 1974), celebrated court cases during the 1770s and 1780s had already questioned property rights regarding slaves (for instance the case of the slave ship Zong in 1783), so initiating debate over whether the trade in ‘human cargo’ should continue. The genesis of these poems (two of which were extant in earlier versions by 1792) is discussed in RSPW, vol. 5, pp. 48–54. Poems (1797), ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1989), pp. 31–8. These sonnets were revised at several times, most heavily for republication in Southey’s Poetical Works of 1837–8 (PW, vol. 2, pp. 55–70), and were renamed ‘Poems Concerning the Slave Trade’ from 1815 onwards. Monthly Mirror, 3 (February 1797), p. 102, quoted by Kenneth Curry, Robert Southey: A Reference Guide (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall and Co., 1977), p. 2. This text contains a very useful survey of Southey’s publications, as well as critical reviews of his work, from first publication to 1975. Peter J. Kitson and Debbie Lee (gen. eds), Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period, 8 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999), vol. 1, pp. x–xi. Morton, ‘Blood Sugar’, p. 98. RSPW, vol. 5, p. 49. RSPW, vol. 5, p. 50. Coleridge, ‘Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement’ (1796), ll. 11–13; CPW, vol. 1, p. 106. These lines were not in the original Monthly Magazine publication of October 1796 but were included in the version for Poems (1797). William Empson and Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 264 01/06/2007 11:54:02 Notes to pages 32–40 265 David Pirie, in Coleridge’s Verse: A Selection (London: Faber, 1972), criticize the lines for making too obvious a ‘moral exemplum’ (p. 219). 93. Coleridge, ‘Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement’, ll. 9, 17; CPW, vol. 1, p. 106. 94. RSPW, vol. 5, pp. 50–1. 95. Brycchan Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment and Slavery, 1760–1807 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 74. 96. Ibid., p. 73. 97. RSPW, vol. 5, pp. 51–2. 98. As Southey shows, the term ‘brother’ was a useful one for highlighting the shared humanity of Britons and Africans and was used on the seal adopted by the Society for the Abolition of Slavery in 1787, in its slogan ‘Am I not a man and a brother’. 99. Alan Richardson, ‘Race and Representation in Bristol Abolitionist Poetry’, in Fulford and Kitson (eds), Romanticism and Colonialism, pp. 129–47; pp. 143–4. 100. RSPW, vol. 5, p. 52. 101. Richardson, ‘Race and Representation in Bristol Abolitionist Poetry’, p. 145. 102. Alan Richardson, Introduction, in Kitson and Lee (gen eds), Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation, vol. 4, p. x. 103. For instance Dorothy Wordsworth said of his writing, ‘the characters in general are not sufficiently distinct to make them have a separate after-existence in my affections’, D. Wordsworth to Lady Beaumont, 11 June 1805, quoted in Madden, p. 101. 104. Southey to W. Taylor, 12 March 1799, L&C, vol. 2, p. 13. This letter was written in reply to one from William Taylor, in which he accused Southey of having a ‘mimosa sensibility, an imagination excessively accustomed to summon up trains of melancholy ideas, and marshal funeral processions; a mind too fond by half, for its own comfort, of sighs and sadness, of pathetic emotion and heart-rending woe’ (L&C, vol. 2, p. 12). For the letter in its entirety, see Southey to W. Taylor, 4 March 1799, Robberds, vol. 1, pp. 256–61. 105. RSPW, vol. 5, p. 53. 106. RSPW, vol. 5, pp. 53–4. 107. RSPW, vol. 5, p. 49. 108. Southey, ‘To the Genius of Africa’, l. 27; RSPW, vol. 5, p. 55. 109. Ibid., ll. 49–56; RSPW, vol. 5, p. 56 110. Richardson, ‘Race and Representation in Bristol Abolitionist Poetry’, p. 144. 111. Southey, ‘To the Genius of Africa’, ll. 63–6; RSPW, vol. 5, p. 56. 112. Coleridge’s opinion of this poem in a letter to Southey, 27 December 1796, was that it ‘is perfect, saving the last line … who after having been whirled along by such a tide of enthusiasm can endure to be impaled at last on the needle-point of an Antithesis?’, quoted in Madden, p. 51. 113. Southey, ‘To Horror’, ll. 46, 54; RSPW, vol. 5, p. 104. 114. Ibid., ll. 60–8; RSPW, vol. 5, p. 104. 115. In his letter to John May, dated 26 June 1797, Southey employs this rhetoric again, saying ‘The savage and civilised states are alike unnatural, alike unworthy of the origin & end of man. Hence the prevalence of scepticism & atheism, which from being the effect become the cause of vice; <& the civilised world sunk into a depravity dreadful as that which characterises the last ages of Rome seems again about to be renovated by a total revolution. it is covered by pestilential fogs which nothing but tempests can scatter & those tempests are begun>’ (Ramos, p. 26). Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 265 01/06/2007 11:54:02 266 Notes to pages 40–4 116. Coleridge, ‘Religious Musings’, l. 315; CPW, vol. 1, p. 121. 117. Ibid., ll. 139–42; CPW, vol. 1, p. 114. 118. However Southey was not a committed millenarian. His letter to J. May, 26 June 1797 (see note 115 above) continues on this subject, ‘The necessity of another revelation I do not see myself. What we have had with the right exertions of our own reasoning faculties appear to me sufficient. but in a Millenarian this opinion is not ridiculous, & the many yet unfulfilled prophecies give it an appearance of probability’ (Ramos, p. 26). 119. Southey to G. C. Bedford, 27 May 1796, L&C, vol. 1, p. 275. 120. Southey to C. W. W. Wynn, 26 January 1796, SL, vol. 1, p. 21. 121. Carnall, pp. 38–9. 122. Wilson, Thomas Clarkson, pp. 79–87. 123. Unless otherwise stated, all references in this chapter to ‘The Sailor who had Served in the Slave Trade’ are from RSPW, vol. 5, pp. 288–92, and all those to ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ are from CPW, vol. 2, pp. 1030–48. 124. Southey, ‘Lyrical Ballads’, Critical Review, 24 (October 1798), pp. 197–204; pp. 200–1. 125. Southey to C. W. W. Wynn, 17 December 1798, NL, vol. 1, p. 177. 126. Quoted in Duncan Wu (ed.), Romanticism: An Anthology, 3rd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 209. 127. C. Lamb to Southey, 8 November 1798, The Letters of Charles Lamb, ed. Alfred Ainger (London and New York: Macmillan and Co., 1888), p. 95. J. R. de J. Jackson claims in The Critical Heritage: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London and New York: Routledge, 1968), p. 4, that the poem was ‘universally abused’ by critics. However Richard Haven disputes this, saying that contemporary critics treated the poem ‘first with coolness and then, for some years, with neglect. The poem did not, as is sometimes said, meet with universal disapproval’, Richard Haven, ‘The Ancient Mariner in the Nineteenth Century’, Studies in Romanticism, 2 (1972), pp. 360–74; p. 365. 128. C. Lamb to Southey, 15 March 1799, The Letters of Charles Lamb, p. 104. 129. C. Lamb to S. T. Coleridge, 5 January 1797, The Letters of Charles Lamb, p. 58. 130. Alan Richardson, ‘Race and Representation in Bristol Abolitionist Poetry’, p. 145. 131. J. R. Ebbatson, ‘Coleridge’s Mariner and the Rights of Man’, Studies in Romanticism, 2 (1972), pp. 171–206; p. 198. 132. John Livingstone Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin, 1927). 133. William Empson, ‘The “Ancient Mariner”, Critical Quarterly, 6 (1964), pp. 298–319; Ebbatson, ‘Coleridge’s Mariner and the Rights of Man’; Peter Kitson, ‘Coleridge, the French Revolution, and “The Ancient Mariner”: Collective Guilt and Individual Salvation’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 19 (1989), pp. 197–207; Patrick Keane, Coleridge’s Submerged Politics: The Ancient Mariner and Robinson Crusoe (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1994); Debbie Lee, ‘Yellow Fever and the Slave Trade: Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, ELH, 65 (1998), pp. 675–700; Peter Kitson, ‘“Bales of living anguish”: Representations of Race and the Slave in Romantic Writing’, ELH, 67 (2000), pp. 515–37. 134. It is quite likely that Southey saw the manuscript of Lyrical Ballads over the summer of 1798 (while Wordsworth and Coleridge were in Germany) as it was being prepared for the press in Joseph Cottle’s printing shop in Bristol, but there is no definite proof that this was the case. 135. P (1799), ed. Wordsworth, Introduction, p. [10] (unnumbered). Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 266 01/06/2007 11:54:02 Notes to pages 44–52 267 136. Ibid., p. [5] (unnumbered). There is not space here to discuss the well-known issue of Southey’s ‘plagiarism’. Elsewhere Wordsworth points out that several of Southey’s poems pre-empt those in Lyrical Ballads: ‘Two years before the Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads (September 1798) he had developed a plain style that was quite as “experimental” as anything in Wordsworth and Coleridge, and quite as affronting in its social implication’, Poems (1797), ed. Wordsworth, p. 2. 137. Christopher J. P. Smith, ‘Robert Southey and the Emergence of Lyrical Ballads’, Romanticism on the Net, 9 (February 1998), http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/1998/v/ n9/005792ar.html [accessed 5 April 2007]. 138. S. T. Coleridge to J. Cottle, early April 1797, quoted in Madden, p. 53. 139. Smith, A Quest for Home, p. 285. 140. Further to this, Mark Storey points out that several noted similarities between Southey’s ‘English Eclogues’ (1799) and Lyrical Ballads are likely to have occurred because Southey ‘in some instances, “rewrote” Wordsworth’s poems, to accord with his own view of how feeling should be portrayed in poetry’, Storey, p. 119. 141. RSPW, vol. 5, p. 289. 142. In order to make an impact on readers and stir them to action Southey had to, like other writers, ‘mobilize the resources of spectacular violence: hyperbolic realism, sentimentality, the sublime and a whole repertoire of extraordinarily bloody crimes’, Haywood, Bloody Romanticism, p. 11. 143. Midgeley, Women Against Slavery, p. 20. 144. Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 7 April 1792, covered the incident on both its front and back pages and went on to report Kimber’s London trial in detail (9 and 16 June 1792) due to local interest in the story (Marshall, ‘The Anti-Slave Trade Movement in Bristol’, pp. 206–11). Southey certainly knew of the case by 1808 (if not earlier) as he refers to it in his review article, ‘Clarkson’s Abolition of the Slave Trade’, AR, 7 (1809), ch. 5, no. 8, pp. 127–48; p. 141. 145. Wilson, Thomas Clarkson: A Biography, p. 85. 146. See Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility, pp. 180–5, on Kimber’s trial and Cruikshank’s cartoon. 147. See Chapter 3 for a fuller discussion of Southey’s interest in the mutiny debate. 148. Southey to J. May, 25 July 1797, Ramos, p. 28. 149. Clarkson, An Essay on the Impolicy of the African Slave Trade, pp. 49–50. 150. Ibid., p. 53. 151. Southey, ‘The Sailor’, variant of ll. 81–2; RSPW, vol. 5, p. 291. 152. Quoted in Thomas, The Slave Trade, p. 457. 153. CPW, vol. 1, p. 202. 154. Hannah More, ‘The Sorrows of Yamba, or the Negro Woman’s Lamentation’, ll. 109–12, in Cheap Repository Tracts, published during the year 1795. Forming Volume I (London: J. Marshall, R. White; Bath: S. Hazard, Edinburgh: J. Elder, 1797), p. 9. 155. Southey to C. W. W. Wynn, 9 April 1799, SL, vol. 1, p. 70. 156. Southey to J. May, 26 June 1797, Ramos, p. 27. 157. Southey had known Grenville since the 1790s and also had cause to be grateful to him for the award of an annual government pension of £200 in 1807 (RSPW, vol. 5, p. 432). See also Southey to J. Rickman, 10 April 1807, NL, vol. 1, p. 444. All references to ‘Verses. Spoken in the Theatre at Oxford upon the Installation of Lord Grenville’ are from RSPW, vol. 5, pp. 432–3. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 267 01/06/2007 11:54:03 268 Notes to pages 53–7 158. Several writers portrayed British abolitionists as strong ‘saviours’ of a weak and helpless Africa, often personified as a ‘sentimental hero’ in need of rescue. For instance in James Montgomery’s poem The West Indies, Africa, ‘entranced with sorrow’, appeals to Clarkson so that his ‘victorious course’ against slavery will begin, while Wilberforce, in his endeavours ‘fought like Michael till the dragon fell’ (Part 4, ll. 123, 129, 138; The West Indies: A Poem in Four Parts, in James Montgomery, James Grahame and E. Benger, Poems on the Abolition of the Slave Trade (London: R. Bowyer, 1809), p. 40. 159. See Kitson and Lee (gen. eds), Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation, vol. 1. 160. Ibid., vol. 1, p. xxiii. 161. Southey seems to have subscribed to the alternative ‘monogenist hypothesis’ of racial origins – proposed by Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, and developed by Kant and Blumenbach – which accounts for different racial characteristics between human beings as ‘degeneration from biological and climatic causes’, Kitson, Introduction, in Kitson and Lee (gen. eds), Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation, vol. 8, p. xiii. An interesting poem by Southey appeared in the Morning Post, 28 June 1799, as ‘A Midsummer Poem’ (CSMP, p. 23), later published as ‘Cool Reflections During a Midsummer Walk’ in The Annual Anthology. Here Southey imaginatively portrays the effect of unnaturally hot conditions on its white narrator: ‘Help Me. O Jupiter! My poor complexion! / I am made a copper-Indian of already, / And if no kindly cloud will parasol me, / My very cellular membrane will be changed – / I shall be negrofied’, ll. 52–6; Annual Anthology, vol. 2, p. 31. Though intended to be comical, the poem’s depiction of the theory of climatic degeneration, from light skin through the intermediate stage of becoming ‘copper-Indian’, to a ‘negrofied’ conclusion, has an uneasy effect. This may be caused by the necessary ‘speeding up’ of the metaphor for the poem, but also because it shows the idea of degeneration to be inherently racist in positing a white ‘norm’ – embodied by the narrator – from which other races deviate. 162. Southey to M. Barker, 31 January 1806, SL, vol. 1, p. 354. 163. By 1817 he could even opine that while the hated Pitt’s ‘conduct of the war appears to me to have been miserable, & his domestic policy perilously erroneous in some momentous points, – more especially in the Catholic question. I do however full justice to his intrepidity, his talents, & his English feelings’, Southey to W. Wilberforce, 10 December 1817, Berg Collection, New York Public Library. 164. Carnall, pp. 117–20. 165. The British West Indies in the eighteenth century consisted of Barbados, Jamaica, the Leeward Islands, Dominica, St Vincent, Grenada and Tobago. St Lucia, Trinidad and British Guiana were additions in the nineteenth century, while a British presence was maintained in the Bahamas, some of the Virgin Islands and British Honduras (Gad Heuman, ‘The British West Indies’, in Louis (gen. ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 3, pp. 470–93; p. 471). 166. Kitson and Lee (gen. eds), Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation, vol. 2, p. 327. 167. All references to the article in this section are from ‘Transactions of the Missionary Society’, AR, 2, p. 201. 168. William Wilberforce, A Letter on the Abolition on the Slave Trade; Addressed to the Freeholders and Other Inhabitants of Yorkshire (London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1807), p. 203. Wilberforce initiated a correspondence with Southey in 1813 on the subject of the East Indian missions (Speck, p. 170). With this encouragement Southey suggested that his friend Henry Koster should translate Clarkson’s History of the Slave Trade into Portuguese, for dissemination in Brazil against the slave trade there (Southey to W. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 268 01/06/2007 11:54:03 Notes to pages 57–62 269 Wilberforce, 16 July 1816, Berg Collection, New York Public Library). Southey’s letters to Wilberforce, which provide a useful insight into his abolitionist sympathies, his fears of mob violence and the moderation of his political values, will be published in The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, gen. ed. Tim Fulford and Lynda Pratt (forthcoming 2007–12). 169. F. O. Shyllon gives a comprehensive account of these events in Black Slaves in Britain, pp. 82–124. 170. Southey, ‘No Slaves, No Sugar’, AR, 3 (1805), ch. 12, no. 4, pp. 644–8; p. 644). 171. Ibid., p. 644. 172. Ibid., p. 645. 173. Ibid., p. 646. 174. Ibid., p. 644. 175. Ibid., p. 647. 176. Ibid., p. 648. 177. See Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London and New York: Verso, 1988), pp. 161–264; also C. L. R James, The Black Jacobins (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001). 178. Wordsworth, ‘To Toussaint L’Ouverture’, ll. 9–10; WPW, vol. 3, p. 113. 179. Southey, ‘No Slaves, No Sugar’, p. 648. 180. Southey to C. Danvers, 7 November 1803, NL, vol. 1, p. 335. 181. Southey discusses this model colony in his article, ‘Civilization of some Indian Natives’, AR, 5 (1807), ch. 13, no. 5, pp. 589–93. 182. Southey, ‘Clarkson’s Abolition of the Slave Trade’, p.145. 183. See Southey, ‘No Slaves, No Sugar’, p. 644. 184. Southey, ‘Clarkson’s Abolition of the Slave Trade’, p.145. 185. ‘The blacks, when carried to the West Indies are put into a paradise compared with the situation of these poor white creatures in Lancashire and other factories of the North’, The Opinions of William Cobbett, ed. G. D. H. Cole and Margaret Cole (London: The Cobbett Publishing Company, 1944), p. 179. 186. Coleman, Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery, p. 9. As Coleman points out, Long’s campaign on behalf of his fellow planters arose in response to the 1772 Mansfield ruling against James Somerset’s deportation to Jamaica. 187. Southey to J. May, 1 March 1833, Ramos, p. 256. It is interesting to note that, despite Southey’s very different political position in 1833, he still employs the radical rhetoric of his youth. In 1797 he had written ‘he who cries aloud and spares not, will at least reap the reward of feeling that he has done his duty’, Southey to J. May, 26 June 1797, Ramos, p. 26. Over thirty years later he is still doing ‘his duty’. 188. Curry, Robert Southey, p. 53. 189. Southey to C. W. W. Wynn, 28 June 1831, SL, vol. 4, p. 227. 190. Southey to T. Southey, 17 December 1803, L&C, vol. 2, p. 241. 191. Southey to T. Southey, 7 December 1805, L&C, vol. 2, p. 358. 192. Thomas Southey, Chronological History of the West Indies, 3 vols (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1827). 193. For instance History of Brazil, 3 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1810– 19), The History of the Peninsular War, 3 vols (London: John Murray, 1823–32), The Book of the Church, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1824). 194. See Chapter 4 for a more detailed discussion of Southey’s ‘epic’ notes. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 269 01/06/2007 11:54:03 270 Notes to pages 63–6 195. Southey, ‘Chronological History of the West Indies’, QR, 38:75 ( July 1828), pp. 193–241; p. 215. 196. Ibid., p. 197. 197. Ibid., p. 206. 198. Ibid., p. 238. 199. Ibid., p. 239. 200. Lee, Slavery and the Romantic Imagination, p. 47. 201. Anon., The Debate on a Motion for the Abolition of the Slave-Trade, in the House of Commons on Monday and Tuesday, April 18 and 19, 1791 (London: W. Woodfal, 1791), p. 43. 202. Southey to J. May, 1 July 1814, SL, vol. 2, p. 358. 203. Southey, ‘Life and Services of Captain Beaver’, QR, 41:82 (November 1829), pp. 375–417. Southey was also very interested in the Sierra Leone colony for freed slaves, established by the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787. Of the colony’s first settlers (331 black men and women and 70 white women) half died in the first year and were reinforced by 1,000 black loyalists at the end of the American War of Independence. The colony was subject to attacks by the neighbouring African population and the French revolutionary army, the latter destroying the capital, Freetown, in 1794 (Helen Thomas, Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 1–13). Southey’s poem ‘On the Settlement of Sierra Leona’ was published in the Morning Post, 16 January 1798. In his enthusiastic vision, ‘the sons of England leap to land’ in Africa, no longer to ‘oppress’ but ‘to greet at length the injur’d race, / With peace and happiness’, ll. 5, 7, 9–10; CSMP, p. 29. See also RSPW, vol. 5, pp. 168–9. 204. Southey, ‘Life and Services of Captain Beaver’, p. 391. 205. Ibid., p. 392. 206. Heuman, ‘The British West Indies’, p. 484. 207. According to Heuman, the Sierra Leone colony was the largest African source of labour for the West Indies until 1838, when huge numbers of Indian immigrants provided the most successful solution to the problem (ibid., pp. 484–5). 208. Though the plantations of the British West Indies were still in the hands of white colonists rather than African ones, a similar system of government to that suggested by Southey did exist in several of the islands by the 1870s, in the form of Crown Colony government administered by a British governor. 209. Southey, ‘Reports of the African Institution’, AR, 7 (1809), ch. 5, no. 9, pp. 149–52; p. 152. 210. Ibid., p. 152. 211. Southey, ‘New Testament in the Negro Tongue’, QR, 43:86 (October 1830), pp. 553–64; p. 555. 212. Southey, ‘Chronological History of the West Indies’, p. 239. 213. Ibid., p. 240. This passage, with its metaphor of Britain as a ‘hive of nations’, echoes the sentiments in Wordsworth’s poem The Excursion (1814), where Britain is also advocated to send out its imperial ‘swarms’ (see Chapter 2, p. 110). Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 270 01/06/2007 11:54:03 Notes to pages 69–73 271 2 ‘Taking possession’ 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. James Cook and James King, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, in the Years, 1776, 1777, 1778, 1779 and 1780, ed. John Douglas, 3 vols (London: W. and A. Strahan et al., 1784), vol. 1, p. xxxvii. The Journals of Captain Cook, prepared by J. C. Beaglehole for the Hakluyt Society, 1955–67, ed. Philip Edwards (London: Penguin, 1999), pp. 135, 264. Cook, A Voyage Round the World, vol. 2, pp. 39, 221. David Andrew, ‘The Charts and Coastal Views of Captain Cook’s Voyages’, in Annual Report and Statement of Accounts for 1987 (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1987), pp. 11–20; p. 11. Amanda Gilroy (ed.), Romantic Geographies: Discourses of Travel, 1775–1844 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Michael Wiley, Romantic Geography: Wordsworth and Anglo-European Spaces (London: Macmillan, 1998). Fulford and Kitson (eds), Travels, Explorations and Empires, vol. 1, p. xxv. ‘The great explorers’ writings are nonfictional quest romances in which the hero-authors struggle through enchanted or bedeviled lands toward a goal, ostensibly the discovery of the Nile’s sources or the conversion of the cannibals. But that goal also turns out to include sheer survival and the return home, to the regions of light’, Patrick Brantlinger, ‘Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent’, in Henry Louis Gates Jr (ed.), ‘Race’, Writing, and Difference (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 185–222; p. 195. Schama, Landscape and Memory, p. 13. Marlon B. Ross, ‘Romantic Quest and Conquest’, in Anne K. Mellor (ed.), Romanticism and Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 26–51; p. 31. Southey to G. C. Bedford, 14 July 1793, NL, vol. 1, p. 28. Southey’s interest in founding a utopian colony was not unique and Deirdre Coleman suggests that this impetus was caused by disappointment at the outcome of the American revolution, which ‘generated numerous fantasies about establishing colonies which might compensate Britain for its losses’, Coleman, Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery, p. 1. Southey’s definitions of Pantisocracy and Aspheterism come from a letter to T. Southey, 7 September 1794, NL, vol. 1, p. 75. When the radical writer, dissenting minister and chemist Joseph Priestley was forced to leave Birmingham in 1791 by a loyalist ‘Church and King’ mob, he settled near the Susquehannah River in Pennsylvania, a place that Cooper describes as ‘the most flourishing state in the Union’ (Thomas Cooper, Some Information Respecting America (London: J. Johnson, 1794), p. 17). Jonathan Carver, Travels Through the Interior of North America, in the Years, 1766, 1767 and 1768 (London: for the author, 1778), p. 122. Southey to H. W. Bedford, 13 November 1793, L&C, vol. 1, p. 194. Southey to G. C. Bedford, 1 August 1794, NL, pp. 67–8. Southey’s childhood was divided between his aunt’s house in Bath, his grandmother’s house in Bedminster, and his own home in Bristol, as well as various schools (Speck, pp. 3–23). Coleridge’s father died when he was nine and he was sent away from his family to be educated at Christ’s Hospital shortly afterwards (Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989), pp. 21–6. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 271 01/06/2007 11:54:03 272 Notes to pages 73–5 19. Coleridge, ‘Domestic Peace’, ll. 1–2; CPW, vol. 1, p. 71. 20. Southey, ‘Think Valentine, as speeding on thy way’, l. 14; RSPW, vol. 5, p. 85. 21. Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 113. 22. Southey to G. C. Bedford, 25 January 1793, NL, vol. 1, p. 19. 23. J. R. MacGillivray considers that it was Coleridge ‘who sought out the opinion of the experts, who read the books of travel, consulted with persons who knew the country, counted the cost, learned about land values, Indians and mosquitoes, and was generally the practical man of the party’, however he admits that Coleridge had no clear idea of where the money would come from for the trip, a responsibility that was left to Southey ( J. R. MacGillivray, ‘The Pantisocracy Scheme and its Immediate Background’, in M. W. Wallace (ed.), Studies in English by Members of University College Toronto (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1931), pp. 131–69; p. 162). This essay includes an interesting discussion of the French influences on Thomas Cooper and the Pantisocrats, particularly Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville’s Nouveau Voyage dans Les États-Unis de L’Amerique fait en 1788 (Paris: Chez Buisson, 1791), published in English as New Travels in the United States of America: Performed in 1788 (London: J. S. Jordan, 1792). For another useful essay on this subject see Stuart Andrews, ‘Fellow Pantisocrats: Brissot, Cooper and Imlay’, Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, 1:1 (April 1997), pp. 35–47. 24. James Horn, ‘British Diaspora: Emigration from Britain, 1680–1815’, in Louis (gen. ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, pp. 28–52; p. 39. 25. Coleridge, ‘To a Young Ass: its Mother being Tethered Near it’, variant of l. 28; CPW, vol. 1, p. 75. 26. Coleridge, ‘Pantisocracy’, l. 5; CPW, vol. 1, p. 69. 27. James C. McKusick, ‘“Wisely forgetful”: Coleridge and the Politics of Pantisocracy’, in Fulford and Kitson (eds), Romanticism and Colonialism, pp. 107–28; p. 108. 28. Southey to G. C. Bedford, 26 October 1793, L&C, vol. 1, p. 187. Plato was the ideal classical hero for Southey as he advocated that society would be improved if property ownership and government were dispensed with. 29. Smith, A Quest for Home, p. 66. Southey uses the term ‘Southeyopolis’ for such a state in a letter to G. C. Bedford, 26 October 1793, L&C, vol. 1, p. 187. 30. Southey to H. Bedford, 22 December 1793, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. 31. Southey said himself of the project’s weaknesses, ‘… for the founders of such a system fortune, ability, <energy> & virtue were indispensable. the first we were all deficient in – of the second there was a quantum sufficit. energy was confined to me alone …’ (Southey to H. W. Bedford, 12 June 1796, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford). This letter is published in Lynda Pratt, ‘The Pantisocratic Origins of Robert Southey’s Madoc: An Unpublished Letter’, Notes and Queries, 244 (1999), pp. 34–9. 32. Speck, p. 44. 33. Reprinted with variants in RSPW, vol. 5, pp. 61–8. 34. Mark Akenside, Poems (London: J. Dodsley, 1772). 35. According to Paul Jarman, the political inscription was a form that Southey ‘practically privatised in the 1790s’, his PW including forty-five examples (‘Feasts and Fasts: Robert Southey and the Politics of Calendar’, in RSCER, pp. 49–67; p. 59. 36. Akenside, ‘Inscription VI. For a Column at Runnymede’, ll. 4–8, in Poems, pp. 397–8. 37. Southey, ‘Inscription. For a Monument at Silbury-Hill’, l. 5; RSPW, vol. 5, p. 65. 38. Southey, ‘Inscription. For a Monument in the New Forest’, l. 1; RSPW, vol. 5, p. 66. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 272 01/06/2007 11:54:03 Notes to pages 75–7 273 39. Southey, ‘Inscription. For a Cavern that overlooks the River Avon’, l. 14; RSPW, vol. 5, pp. 63–4. 40. Christopher Smith refers to this process as a ‘re-mapping of England … which could therefore be endlessly remade, endlessly re-inscribed upon and within the most portable and convenient object, a book of poems’, Smith, A Quest for Home, p. 190. 41. Southey, ‘Inscription. For a Monument in the New Forest’, ll. 1–5; RSPW, vol. 5, p. 66. 42. My thanks to Lynda Pratt for drawing my attention to an essay written by a contemporary critic of Southey’s, Nathan Drake, ‘On Inscriptive Writing’, in Literary Hours or Sketches Critical and Narrative, 2 vols (London: T. Cadell, Junior, and W. Davies, 1800), vol. 1, pp. 119–36. In his essay Drake traces the influences of Shenstone and Akenside on inscriptive poetry, stating, ‘The rustic and civic inscriptions of Akenside are well known, and possess considerable merit; his language is nervous, impressive and chaste. Mr Southey, however, seems to have rivalled him in these respects, while he evidently surpasses him in pathos’ (p. 130). Where earlier inscriptions had applied this ‘pathos’ to the figures commemorated, Southey manipulates the generic expectations of the reader, by depicting pitiful acts of tyranny in British history, so politicizing this form. 43. Lynda Pratt, ‘Southey in Wales?: Inscriptions, Monuments and Romantic Posterity’, in Damian Walford Davies and Lynda Pratt (eds), Wales and the Romantic Imagination (Cardiff : University of Wales Press, 2007), pp. 86–103; p. 92 44. Southey, ‘Inscription. For a Cavern that overlooks the River Avon’, l. 20; RSPW, vol. 5, p. 64. 45. Southey, ‘Inscription. For a Tablet on the Banks of a Stream’, ll. 1–5, 12–14; RSPW, vol. 5, p. 67. 46. Southey, ‘Inscription. For a Tablet on the Banks of a Stream’, ll. 15–16; RSPW, vol. 5, p. 67. 47. Of course Southey did not apply such a term himself to his poem, declaring ‘It assumes not the degraded title of Epic’ in his preface to Madoc (1805), RSPW, vol. 2, p. 6. Southey’s challenge to literary tradition also contains an attack on the political establishment, in that an epic or ‘heroic’ poem often depicts the fate of a tribe or nation. Fiona Robertson takes Southey’s declaration further to see Madoc as an ‘anti-Columbiad’, in his preference for a conjectural account of the discovery of America over the historical version (Fiona Robertson, ‘British Romantic Columbiads’, Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, 2:1 (April 1998), pp. 1–23; p. 11. 48. That the idea of Pantisocracy itself was a recurring theme in Southey’s work can be seen in A Tale of Paraguay (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1825), where he imagines a new society of noble savages originating from one Indian couple: ‘from them a tribe should spring renew’d, / To people and possess that ample solitude’ (I.xxxiv.305–6; PW, vol. 7, p. 28). Left alone in their solitary woodland idyll, this new society would reject the ‘degenerate instincts’ of other humans and particularly of ‘their poor depraved forefathers’ (I.xxxvi.317–18; PW, vol. 7, p. 29). 49. Southey to G. C. Bedford, 1–10 October 1795, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. 50. For instance Southey was reading Dante, Burns, Cowper’s translations of Homer, classical histories, travels in Poland, Canada and the West Indies, studies of the Orient and Africa and histories of Paraguay and Mexico. This description only includes the books taken out in his own name, but he and Coleridge often shared their borrowings, as their signatures on the records attest (see Whalley, ‘The Bristol Library Borrowings of Southey and Coleridge’, pp. 116–22). Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 273 01/06/2007 11:54:03 274 Notes to pages 77–87 51. Southey to G. C. Bedford, 1–10 October 1795, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. 52. Unless otherwise stated, all references to Madoc in this chapter are from RSPW, vol. 2. 53. Carver, Travels, p. 122. 54. Madoc (1794–5), II.5–6; RSPW, vol. 2, p. 369. 55. The first poetic draft anyway. There was an earlier prose version of Madoc, drafted in 1789, which is now lost. See RSPW, vol. 2, pp. xxii–xxiv, for a useful discussion of the poem’s pre-publication history. 56. Kenneth Curry, ‘Southey’s Madoc: The Manuscript of 1794’, in Philological Quarterly, 22 (October 1943), 347–69; p. 348. 57. This revision became the fifteen-book complete draft of his poem that he finished in 1799. According to Pratt it was widely circulated among his friends and this is the version that Coleridge urged him to publish, ‘Revising the National Epic’, pp. 149–63; pp. 150–1. 58. Southey to J. Rickman, 30 January, 1801, NL, vol. 1, p. 238. 59. Madoc (1794–5), I.1–11; RSPW, vol. 2, p. 356. 60. Madoc (1794–5), I.375–7; RSPW, vol. 2, p. 367. 61. Southey to M. Barker, 6 July 1805, SL, vol. 1, p. 332. 62. John Keats, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ (1816), Poems, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1970), pp. 60–2. 63. There is an interesting disparity here between Southey’s text and the sources he used. The Welsh technological superiority is portrayed as a fixed marker of difference between them and the indigenous population, with little evidence that this stasis will discontinue. However in the cited source – Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America: or, An Help to the Language of the Natives in that Part of America called New-England (London: printed by George Dexter, 1643), pp. 5–6 – Williams suggests a progressive desire existed among native Americans to ‘improve’ themselves using the English model as their example. 64. Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson (eds), De-Scribing Empire: Post-Colonialism and Textuality (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 3. 65. Southey to G. C. Bedford, 14 December 1793, L&C, vol. 1, p. 196. 66. An implication of presenting himself as Adam is of course that he is also empowered to name this new world. 67. Astrid Wind, ‘“Adieu to all”: The Death of the American Indian at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century’, Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, 2:1 (April 1998), pp. 39–55; p. 49. 68. George Dekker, The American Historical Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 73–98. 69. Ibid., p. 80. 70. The Journals of Captain Cook, ed. Edwards, pp. 108, 171, 536–7. 71. Pratt, ‘Revising the National Epic’, p. 152. 72. William Bartram, Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws (Philadelphia, PA: James and Johnson, 1791), pp. 37, 53, 455. 73. Said, Orientalism, pp. 58–9. 74. Thomas Gray, ‘Ode II’, III.iii.141, in Odes by Mr. Gray, Author of an Elegy in a Country Church-Yard (Dublin: G. Faulkner, and J. Rudd, 1757), pp. 9–16. Madoc could be said Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 274 01/06/2007 11:54:03 Notes to pages 87–92 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 275 to bolster this bardic tradition, through Southey’s notes, which exploit contemporary research being carried out into Welsh culture by prominent Welsh men of letters such as Iolo Morganwg and William Owen Pughe. Tim Fulford, Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture 1756–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 134. Robertson, ‘British Romantic Columbiads’, pp. 15–16. As discussed in Lynda Pratt, ‘Madoc’s Missing Rib? Robert Southey and Anna Seward’ (unpublished paper). Southey to A. Seward, 25 July 1807, Pforzheimer Collection, New York Public Library. Southey’s letters to Seward will be published in full, in The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, gen. ed. Tim Fulford and Lynda Pratt (forthcoming 2007–12). Anna Seward, Letters, 6 vols (Edinburgh: A. Constable and Co., 1811), vol. 6, pp. 360– 1. Incidentally the only sexual act delineated in the text – the attempted rape of Goervyl by the ‘ignoble’ Hoamen, Amalahta – is a negative portrayal. From Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal (Bristol: Joseph Cottle; London: G. G. and J. Robinson and Cadell and Davies, 1797), p. 59. Elisa E. Beshero-Bondar, ‘British Conquistadors and Aztec Priests: The Horror of Southey’s Madoc’, Philological Quarterly, 82:1 (2003), pp. 87–113; p. 96. For further discussion of the origins of the myth see Gwyn A. Williams, Madoc: The Making of a Myth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). For further discussion of this see Fulford, Romantic Indians, pp. 137–8. Pratt, ‘Revising the National Epic’, p. 160. The poem’s ending – with the suicide of a prominent Aztec warrior, the Aztecan expulsion and the absence of pronouncement on the Welsh colony’s future – is an odd one in a foundation narrative. A new manuscript which has come to light reveals Southey’s earlier intentions of concluding Madoc more positively. In 1796, while abroad in Spain and Portugal, Southey intended ‘The poem to conclude with a civil marriage – the first harvest & a hymn to Deity – & here may be compressed the system which founds society on domestic virtue’, Southey Notebook, Hispanic Society of America, New York. He obviously felt unable to deliver this confident ending or the ‘system’ of ‘domestic virtue’ he envisaged, which appears to echo his Pantisocratic ideals. My thanks to Lynda Pratt for sharing this information with me. No doubt Southey also had in mind the empiricist studies of Enlightenment history to support this pessimistic view of the cyclical nature of civilizations, such as Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1776–88) and C-F. Volney, Les Ruines, ou Méditation sur les Révolutions des Empires (Paris: Desenne, Volland, Plassan, 1791). These poems were first published in the Morning Post at various times during 1799. See RSPW, vol. 5, pp. 372–4, 385–9, 395–7, 517. The titles of these poems are ‘The Huron’s Address to the Dead’, ‘The Peruvian’s Dirge over the Body of his Father’, ‘Song of the Araucans, during a Thunderstorm’, ‘The Dirge of the American Widow’ (retitled ‘Song of the Chikkasah Widow’) and ‘The Old Chikkasah to his Grandson’. That death and the afterlife were considered to be important parts of native American culture can be seen in several of the poems’ titles. Fulford, Romantic Indians, p. 149. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 275 01/06/2007 11:54:04 276 Notes to pages 92–7 90. ‘With about 35,000 warriors east of the Mississippi River, Indian allies on both sides of the revolutionary war determined its course to a great extent’, Wind, ‘“Adieu to all”’, p. 45. 91. Fulford, Romantic Indians, p. 183. 92. William Hubbard, A Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New England, from the First Planting Thereof in the Year 1607 to this Present Year 1677 (London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1677); Southey, Common-Place Book, ed. John Wood Warter, 2 series (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1849–50), pp. 539–59. 93. As did the many Spanish accounts of the conquest of South America that Southey drew on as source material (by Bernal Diaz, Francisco Lopez de Gomara and Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, to name but a few) due to his original idea of modelling Madoc on Manco Capac, the legendary founder of the Peruvian empire. Southey had an ambiguous relationship with these sources, in that they provided him with a great deal of information for Madoc, but he also reacted against them in trying to construct a reformist, paternalistic, morally-justified British colonial model, which he considered to be very different from Spanish examples. One text that he drew on particularly, which provided visual imagery of the Aztec people and their practices, was Francisco Clavigero, The History of Mexico, Collected from Spanish and Mexican Histories, from Manuscripts and Ancient Paintings of the Indians, trans. Charles Cullen, 2 vols (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, London, 1787). Examples of these images are provided in Figures 3 and 4. For a more detailed discussion of these sources see Nigel Leask, ‘Southey’s Madoc: Reimagining the Conquest of America’, in RSCER, pp. 133–50. 94. Samuel Hearne, A Journey from Prince of Wales Fort in Hudson’s Bay to the Northern Ocean … in the Years 1769, 1770, 1771 and 1772 (London: A. Strahan and T. Caddell, 1795). Southey mentions reading Hearne’s account in a letter of 1800, where he says ‘It is, indeed, one of the most interesting books I have ever seen’, Southey to J. Rickman, 3 February 1800, SL, vol. 1, p. 92. 95. Carver, Travels, pp. 313–25; p. 319. 96. Hearne, A Journey, pp. 148–64. 97. WPW, vol. 2, p. 111. 98. For example, Mark Akenside, William Shenstone, Chiabrera, see Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth (London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 31–46. 99. The term ‘nature-inscription’ is given by Hartman to a distinctive form of inscription that, instead of being attached to an object, such as a gravestone, sundial, monument or bench, is ‘a free-standing poem, able to commemorate any feeling for nature or the spot that had aroused this feeling’, ibid., p. 32. 100. Wordsworth’s inscription is often seen as a response to Southey’s poem ‘Inscription. For a Cavern that overlooks the River Avon’, see Mary Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s ‘Lyrical Ballads’ (1798) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 77–80. 101. Wordsworth, ‘Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree’, ll. 1–2, 44, 47; WPW, vol. 1, p. 92. 102. Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth, p. 40. 103. Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism, ed. Howard Mills (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1980), p. 94. 104. See T. W. Thompson, Wordsworth’s Hawkshead, ed. Robert Woof (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 256–64; Kenneth R. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth (London: Pimlico, 2000), pp. 45–6. 105. Wordsworth, ‘Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree’, ll. 8–12; WPW, vol. 1, p. 92. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 276 01/06/2007 11:54:04 Notes to pages 97–101 277 106. James C. McKusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 56. 107. Wordsworth, ‘Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree’, l. 55; WPW, vol. 1, p. 92. 108. The ‘Naming’ poems, as well as ‘The Thorn’ and ‘We Are Seven’ could be considered as contributing to a Wordsworthian genre in which he retains those who have died in the landscape itself – so that they are embedded in it literally as well as in spirit. 109. Wordsworth, ‘To M. H.’, ll. 1–7; WPW, vol. 2, p. 118. 110. Wordsworth, ‘To M. H.’, ll. 15–17; WPW, vol. 2, p. 118. 111. Wordsworth, ‘To M. H.’, ll. 23–4; WPW, vol. 2, p. 118. 112. Michael Wiley suggests that it was the precedent of naming the Lake District in antiquarian studies that led Wordsworth to the ‘apparent conviction that the central characteristics of places do not emerge from the people who have economic rights over them, but from the people who live most upon them, working their soil, suffering hardships, enjoying family life or even traveling on foot over them’, Wiley, Romantic Geography, p. 84. 113. William Wordsworth, Home at Grasmere: First Book of First Part of ‘The Recluse’, ed. Beth Darlington (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), ll. 462–3, pp. 68–9. Of course I refer to an imaginative process here as Wordsworth and his family were all too aware of who did own the land, due to Wordsworth’s father’s employment as land agent for the powerful Lowther family. For references to Wordsworth and land-ownership see: Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth; Tim Fulford, Landscape, Liberty and Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Anne Janowitz, England’s Ruins (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 114. Wordsworth, ‘A narrow girdle of rough stones and crags’, ll. 75–80; WPW, vol. 2, p.117. 115. Wordsworth, ‘A narrow girdle of rough stones and crags’, ll. 6, 51, 64–5; WPW, vol. 2, p.117. 116. Wiley, Romantic Geography, p. 81. 117. For instance, ‘The first edition of Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa [by Mungo Park] appeared in April 1799, and its 1,500 copies sold out in a month’, Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 34. 118. As Wordsworth’s note to the poem ‘The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman’ relates, Samuel Hearne’s description of the Indian practice of leaving the sick and weak to die when they are travelling was a source (WPW, vol. 2, p. 40). Duncan Wu suggests Wordsworth read Hearne’s Journey in April/May 1798 (Wordsworth’s Reading 1770– 1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 72). 119. Hearne, A Journey, p. xxxviii. 120. Painting or carving one’s name on a rock was a common device used by explorers in Canada to claim land on behalf of the company they worked for. Alexander Mackenzie records his arrival at the Pacific coast in this way in his Voyages from Montreal, on the River St. Lawrence, through the Continent of North America, to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans; in the Years 1789, and 1793 (London: T. Caddell et al, 1801), p. 349. 121. Wordsworth, ‘To Joanna’, ll. 82–3; WPW, vol. 2, p. 114. 122. WPW, vol. 2, p. 114. 123. Duncan Wu claims that Wordsworth probably did not read this text until 1802, however my intention is to demonstrate the idiomatic similarities between Carver’s narrative (as an exemplar of travel narratives from the period) and Wordsworth’s ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’ (Wordsworth’s Reading 1800–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 43). Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 277 01/06/2007 11:54:04 278 Notes to pages 101–8 124. Carver, Travels, p. 73. 125. Peter J. Taylor, Modernities: A Geohistorical Interpretation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), p. 97. 126. Carver, Travels, pp. 83–4. 127. Ibid., p. 74. 128. Ibid., p. 105. 129. Ibid., p. 144. 130. Hearne, A Journey, p. 77; Carver, Travels, p. 106. 131. Wordsworth, ‘It was an April morning: fresh and clear’, ll. 38, 42–7; WPW, vol. 2, p. 111. 132. Even Wordsworth’s own book on this subject – A Guide Through The District of the Lakes in the North of England (1810), 5th edn (Kendal: Hudson and Nicholson, 1835) – conforms to place names of general consensus, rather than providing an ‘emotional’ route through the area, as might be expected from his poetry. 133. Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading 1770–1799, p. 9; Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s ‘Lyrical Ballads’ (1798), pp. 198–203. 134. Two of Bartram’s drawings of the ‘Horn-tailed Turtle’ were published in the Gentleman’s Magazine (1758), see William Bartram, Botanical and Zoological Drawings, 1756–1788, ed. Joseph Ewan (Philadelphia, PA: The American Philosophical Society, 1968), p. 22. 135. See David Philip Miller and Peter Hans Reill (eds), Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany and Representations of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 136. Bartram, Travels, pp. 337, 399. 137. Ibid., pp. 96, 428. 138. All references to this passage are from ibid., pp. 354–6. 139. All references to ‘Ruth’ in this chapter are from WPW, vol. 2, pp. 227–35. 140. Bartram, Travels, p. 159. 141. Pamela Regis condemns critics for reading Bartram’s Travels, as well as other contemporary accounts of North America, as ‘sublime and picturesque travel narratives or as novels. They are not. They are works of science’, Describing Early America: Bartram, Jefferson, Crevecoeur and the Rhetoric of Natural History (De Kalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992), p. xi. However the influence of Bartram’s text on contemporary literature cannot be negated and interdisciplinary readings reveal its richness as a source for other writers, as well as demonstrating the close nexus between science and literature during the Romantic period. 142. Ibid., pp. 54–8. 143. Bartram, Travels, pp. 86–7. 144. Regis, Describing Early America, p. 70. 145. ‘One immunizes the contents of the collective imagination by means of a small inoculation of acknowledged evil … this protects it against the risk of a generalized subversion’, Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Vintage, 1993), p. 150. 146. Wordsworth first met Coleridge in August 1795 when the two Pantisocrats’ enthusiasm for the scheme was disintegrating into bitterness and resentment after Southey’s suggestion that they carry out the project in Wales. For the influence of Pantisocracy on Wordsworth, see Nigel Leask, ‘Pantisocracy and the Politics of the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads’, in Alison Yarrington and Kelvin Everest (eds), Reflections of Revolution: Images of Romanticism (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 39–58. 147. Bartram, Travels, p. 105. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 278 01/06/2007 11:54:04 Notes to pages 108–16 279 148. Ibid., p. 105. The references to Seminole Indians and sections of text copied from Bartram’s work into Coleridge’s notebooks suggest that he was also so seduced (The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, M. Christensen and A. J. Harding, 5 double vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957–2002), vol. 1, entries 218, 220, 222, 228). 149. Carver, Travels, p. 74. 150. See note 103 to Chapter 1, above. Dorothy Wordsworth commented on the limitations of Southey’s characterization, saying ‘I had one painful feeling throughout, that I did not care as much about Madoc as the Author wished me to do, and that the characters in general are not sufficiently distinct to make them have a separate after-existence in my affections’, quoted in Madden, p. 101. 151. There is not space here to list the many reviews in which Southey promotes his colonial vision. See, Kenneth Curry and Robert Dedmon, ‘Southey’s Contributions to the Quarterly Review’, The Wordsworth Circle, 6 (1975), pp. 261–72. 152. Wordsworth, The Excursion, ll. 375–82; WPW, vol. 5, p. 298. 3 ‘Eden’s happy vale’ Southey to G.C. Bedford, 25 January–8 February 1793, NL, vol. 1, p. 19. Southey’s daydream of an island utopia is representative of a cultural trend in which ‘the island has often been simplified and mythologised by continental cultures nostalgic for some aboriginal condition’, Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith (eds), Islands in History and Representation (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 12. 3. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse Upon the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality among Mankind (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1761), p. 19. In An Inquiry into the Nature of the Social Contract (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1791), however, Rousseau argues that life in a state of nature is precarious, due to the absence of property rights and civil law, from which arbitrary exercises of power may ensue; whereas the civil state gives stability and legitimate authority to all its people based on their general will. 4. These oppositions would be summed up by German social philosophers, such as Max Weber (1864–1920), who distinguished between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 5. Southey to H. W. Bedford, 22 December 1793, L&C, vol. 1, pp. 198–9. 6. Southey was of course also influenced in his views of society by his reading of William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). 7. Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, pp. 8–35. 8. See Tim Fulford, Debbie Lee and Peter J. Kitson, Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 11–15. 9. Edmond, Representing the South Pacific, p. 12. 10. Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land, Marquesas 1774–1880 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1980), p. 32. 11. ‘The average voyage from the South of England to Tahiti took about six months – provided that the ship stopped only once on the way, usually at the Canary Islands for water and fresh food’, Trevor Lummis, Life and Death in Eden: Pitcairn Island and the Bounty Mutineers (London: Victor Gollancz, 1999), p. 19. 12. See Donald Denoon (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 1. 2. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 279 01/06/2007 11:54:04 280 Notes to pages 116–24 13. Abdul R. JanMohamed demonstrates how such perceptions of the ‘other’ were constructed in colonialist literature in ‘The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature’, in Gates (ed.), ‘Race,’ Writing and Difference, pp. 78–106. 14. Peter J. Kitson, Introduction, in Fulford and Kitson (gen eds), Travels, Explorations and Empires, vol. 8, p. xiv. 15. Vanessa Agnew, ‘Pacific Island Encounters and the German Invention of Race’, in Edmond and Smith (eds), Islands in History and Representation, pp. 81–94; p. 91. 16. Quoted in Neil Rennie, Far-Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South Seas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 87. 17. Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 91–2. 18. Bougainville, A Voyage Round the World, pp. 220–1. 19. Ibid., p. 221. 20. Ibid., pp. 230–1, 255. 21. Ibid., p. 260. 22. Rousseau, A Discourse Upon the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality among Mankind, p. 30. 23. Denis Diderot, Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville, ed. Peter Jimack (London: Grant and Cutler Ltd., 1988), pp. 40–1. 24. Cook, A Voyage Round the World, vol. 1, pp. 183–4. 25. On this subject see Jocelyn Linnekin, ‘Contending Approaches’, and Malama Meleisea and Penelope Schoeffel, ‘Discovering Outsiders’, in Denoon (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders, pp. 3–36; pp. 10–11, and pp. 119–51; pp. 130–1, respectively. The authors speculate on the reasons for these relationships from a native, rather than a European perspective. 26. Quoted in Rennie, Far-Fetched Facts, pp. 98–101. 27. ‘The establishment of the lending library, which spread rapidly through England in this era, meant that books were widely accessible to a new and ever-growing readership, a readership composed in large part of upper- and middle-class women’, Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 1–2. 28. Southey, ‘Transactions of the Missionary Society in the South Sea Islands’, p. 33. 29. Edmond, Representing the South Pacific, pp. 23–62. 30. Hannah More, Slavery. A Poem (London: T. Cadell, 1788), l. 237, p. 17. 31. Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 32. Southey, ‘Transactions of the Missionary Society in the South Sea Islands’, p. 25. 33. Wilson had also commanded The Antelope, which was shipwrecked in the Pacific in 1783 and whose narrative formed the basis of George Keate’s An Account of the Pelew Islands, Situated in the Western Part of the Pacific Ocean (London: G. Nicol, 1788). Wilson was responsible for bringing the ill-fated (Prince) Lee Boo to England. 34. Southey, ‘Transactions of the Missionary Society in the South Sea Islands’, p. 28. 35. Ibid., p. 29. 36. Ibid., pp. 36, 38. 37. Ibid., pp. 49, 50. 38. Ibid., p. 45. 39. Ibid., p. 45. 40. Ibid., p. 47. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 280 01/06/2007 11:54:04 Notes to pages 124–31 281 41. See Philip Connell, Romanticism, Economics and the Question of ‘Culture’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 247–57. 42. Edmond, Representing the South Pacific, p. 194. 43. Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, p. 108. 44. Quoted in ibid., p. 109. 45. Southey, ‘Transactions of the Missionary Society in the South Sea Islands’, p. 55. 46. Southey to J. May, 1 May 1803, Ramos, p. 76. 47. Southey, ‘Transactions of the Missionary Society’, AR, 2, p. 200. 48. See Figure 5 for Bligh’s map of the northern part of the island. 49. Tim Fulford, ‘Romanticism, the South Seas and the Caribbean: The Fruits of Empire’, European Romantic Review, 11:4 (Fall 2000), pp. 408–34. 50. Lummis, Life and Death in Eden, pp. 65–6. 51. Quoted in Rennie, Far-Fetched Facts, p. 146. 52. See reports in the following articles by John Barrow: ‘Dentrecasteaux – Voyage a la Recherche la Perouse’, QR, 3:5 (February 1810), pp. 21–43; pp. 23–4, and ‘Porter’s Cruize in the Pacific Ocean’, QR, 13:26 ( July 1815), pp. 352–83. 53. See Anon., Minutes of the Court-Martial held at Portsmouth, August 12, 1792, on Ten Persons Charged with Mutiny on Board His Majesty’s Ship Bounty with an APPENDIX (by Edward Christian) Containing a Full Account of the Real Causes and Circumstances of that Unhappy Transaction (London: J. Deighton, 1794). 54. William Bligh, A Narrative of the Mutiny on Board His Majesty’s Ship Bounty; And the Subsequent Voyage of Part of the Crew, in the Ship’s Boat, from Tofoa, one of the Friendly Islands, to Timor, a Dutch Settlement in the East Indies (Dublin: L. White, P. Byrne, J. Moore, J. Jones, B. Dornin et al., 1790), p. 14. 55. Southey to G.C. Bedford, 23 October 1809, NL, vol. 1, p. 519. Southey’s sympathy for the mutineers, his association with the radical publishers Symonds and Ridgeway (who were sent Wat Tyler for publication) and his visit to Ridgeway in Newgate prison in 1795 have led to the suggestion that he was the writer of the apocryphal work Letters from Mr Fletcher Christian, Containing a Narrative of the Transactions on Board His Majesty’s Ship Bounty, Before and After the Mutiny, with his Subsequent Voyages and Travels in South America (London: H. D. Symonds, 1796). However Southey’s report of his visit to Ridgeway and their negotiations – that ‘I am to send them more sedition to make a 2 shilling pamphlet’ (Southey to E. Fricker, 12 January 1795, SL, vol. 1, p. 91) – would seem to contradict this claim, as does the style of prose in which the Letters are written. 56. Monthly Magazine, 26 (December 1808), p. 457. 57. P. M. James, ‘The Otaheitean Mourner’, Monthly Magazine, 26 (December 1808), pp. 457–8. All references to the poem are from this text. 58. Southey, ‘Transactions of the Missionary Society in the South Sea Islands’, p. 50. 59. Ibid., p. 50. 60. Mary Russell Mitford, Christina, The Maid of the South Seas (London: F. C. and J. Rivington, 1811), pp. vi, ix [these two pages follow sequentially, but their numbering is incorrect]. All references to the poem are from this text. 61. Richard Hough, Captain Bligh and Mister Christian (London: Chatham Publishing, 2000), p. 131. 62. For instance see ibid.; Glynn Christian, Fragile Paradise (Sydney and London: Doubleday, 1999); Lummis, Life and Death in Eden. 63. Rennie, Far-Fetched Facts, p. 166. 64. ‘Dentrecasteaux – Voyage a la Recherche la Perouse’, p. 24. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 281 01/06/2007 11:54:04 Notes to pages 132–8 282 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. Mitford, Christina, pp. 315–16. Ibid., p. 318. Quoted in Rennie, Far-Fetched Facts, p. 169. Mitford, Christina, pp. ix–x. See James Burney’s A Chronological History of the Discoveries in the South Sea or Pacific Ocean, 5 vols (London: G. and W. Nicol, 1803–17). For instance, see The Life of Mary Russell Mitford Related in a Selection from her Letters to Friends, ed. G. A. L’Estrange, 2nd edn, 3 vols (London: R. Bentley, 1870); Letters of Mary Russell Mitford, ed. R. Brimley Johnson (London: John Lane, 1925). Mitford, Christina, p. 201. Mitford’s response to Kehama was nevertheless equivocal, as in her comment, ‘The wonder is how the author of “Madoc” could condescend to throw the enchantment of his genius upon such a parcel of worse than nursery legends’, The Life of Mary Russell Mitford, ed. L’Estrange, vol. 1, p. 120. In the year that Christina was published, Mitford expressed surprise that Madoc had only run into its second edition, stating ‘I wonder there are not twenty. Walter Scott has nothing half so fine’, The Life of Mary Russell Mitford, ed. L’Estrange, vol. 1, p. 121. In her opinion The Life of Nelson was ‘one of the most beautiful pieces of biography I ever met with; simple, interesting and eloquent in the style; and carrying with it an air of candour and sincerity and right good feeling worthy of the great and good man whom it celebrates’, The Life of Mary Russell Mitford, ed. L’Estrange, vol. 1, p. 251. In fact Southey was careful to leave any salubrious details about Nelson’s sexual exploits out of his biography, because it was his heroic defence of Britain that he wanted to publicize in creating a national hero. William Bligh, A Voyage to the South Sea, Undertaken by Command of His Majesty, for the Purpose of Conveying the Breadfruit to the West Indies, in His Majesty’s Ship the Bounty (London: George Nichol, 1792). Raymond Williams discusses literary responses to industrialization in The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). Southey, Letters from England, ed. Simmons. See particularly Letter XXXVIII, ‘The Manufacturing System’, pp. 207–13. Southey to J. May, 1 May 1803, Ramos, p. 76. The ‘English Eclogues’ consist of ‘The Old Mansion House’, ‘The Grandmother’s Tale’, ‘The Funeral’, ‘The Sailor’s Mother’, ‘The Witch, ‘The Ruined Cottage’, ‘Eclogue, by Robert Southey, The Last of the Family’, ‘Eclogue. The Wedding’ and ‘The Alderman’s Funeral; An English Eclogue. – Original’. See RSPW, vol. 5, pp. 306–29, 380–4, 397– 403, 427–32. Southey, ‘The Alderman’s Funeral’, ll. 104–8; RSPW, vol. 5, pp. 427–32. Mary Russell Mitford, Our Village: Sketches of Rural Character and Scenery (London: Geo. B. Whittaker, 1824). Edmond, Representing the South Pacific, p. 80. Coleridge, ‘Pantisocracy’, l. 5; CPW, vol. 1, p. 69. The term ‘ignoble savage’ was coined by Bernard Smith to explain this dichotomy in representation. See European Vision and the South Pacific, pp. 243–7. Madoc, Part 1, V.20–9. For instance between Goervyl and Herma, and Cadwallon and Melamin, with the latter providing ‘the first born of the colony’, Common-Place Book, ed. Warter, 4 series, p. 209. See Chapter 2, pp. 87–9, for a fuller discussion of this aspect of Madoc. Mitford, Christina, pp. 209, 211. Southey, ‘Polynesian Researches’, p. 40. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 282 01/06/2007 11:54:05 Notes to pages 138–47 283 87. Hough, Captain Bligh and Mister Christian, p. 271. 88. In her notes to Christina, Mitford reproduces the whole chapter containing the details of the mutiny from Bligh’s A Voyage to the South Sea (1792). 89. Mitford, Christina, p. vi. 90. Madoc, variant of Part 1, X.101–4; RSPW, vol. 2, p. 71. 91. In fact, according to the historical accounts, it was John Adams who instituted Christianity on Pitcairn after Fletcher Christian’s death. 92. Genesis 3:19. 93. Southey, ‘Transactions of the Missionary Society’, AR, 2, p. 199. 94. Madoc, Part 1, V.43. 95. Southey to J. May, 18 February 1800, Ramos, p. 52. 96. Southey to J. May, 18 February 1800, Ramos, p. 51. 97. Southey proposed colonization as a solution to the problems he perceived in Britain of overpopulation and rising levels of criminal activity: ‘O what a country might this England become did its government but wisely direct the strength & wealth & activity of the people! every profession, every trade, is overstocked. There are more adventurers in each than possibly can find employment. hence poverty & crime. do not misunderstand me as asserting this to be the sole cause, but it is the most frequent one, a system of colonization that should offer an outlet for the superfluous activity of the country would convert this into a cause of general goods, & the blessings of civilization might be extended over the desarts that to the disgrace of man, occupy so great a part of the world!’, Southey to J. May, 18 February 1800, Ramos, p. 52. 98. Southey to J. May, 12 March, 1800, Ramos, p. 53. 99. Hannah More, Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1808–9), ed. Mary Waldron (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995). 100. Ibid., p. viii. 101. Richard Polwhele, The Unsex’d Females (London: Cadell and Davies, 1798), ll. 12, 40, pp. 6, 10. 102. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (London: J. Johnson, 1792), pp. 109–70. 103. In the 1790s Southey much admired Wollstonecraft, even writing a sonnet in her honour, ‘To Mary Wollstonecraft’, included in Poems (1797), see RSPW, vol. 5, pp. 35–6. 104. John Mitford and William Gifford, ‘Mary Russell Mitford’s Poems’, QR, 4:8 (November 1810), pp. 514–18; p. 516. 105. Mary Russell Mitford, Narrative Poems on the Female Character, in the Various Relations of Life (London: F. C. and J. Rivington, 1813), p. ix. 106. See Chapter 4 for a fuller discussion of these aspects in Thalaba the Destroyer. 107. Though it is not attributed by Mitford, the name comes from the account of Cook’s first voyage in John Hawkesworth, An Account of the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of His Present Majesty for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hempisphere (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1773). 108. There were actually three men left: Adams, Matthew Quintal and Edward Young. 109. See for instance Lummis, Life and Death in Eden, pp. 107–23. 110. F. W. Beechey, Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Beering’s Strait, to Co-operate with the Polar Expeditions Performed in His Majesty’s Ship Blossom, in the Years 1825, 26, 27, 28, 2 vols (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831), vol. 1, p. 121. 111. Southey, ‘Transactions of the Missionary Society in the South Sea Islands’, p.57. 112. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 16 (1824), p. 711. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 283 01/06/2007 11:54:05 284 Notes to pages 147–57 113. This reference comes from Southey’s preface to A Vision of Judgement (1821), PW, X, p. 203. 114. James C. McKusick, ‘The Politics of Language in Byron’s The Island’, ELH, 59 (1992), pp. 839–56; p. 852. 115. While Stewart is generally considered as the source for Torquil, Rod Edmond differs in opinion: ‘Stewart, who became Fletcher Christian’s lieutenant, was too involved in the mutiny for such an innocent role and, if an original there must be, Peter Heywood better fits the bill’, Representing the South Pacific, pp. 75–6. 116. All refernces to the poem are from The Island, in BCPW, vol. 7, pp. 26–148. 117. Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols (London: J. Murray, 1973– 82), vol. 10, p. 90. 118. McKusick, ‘The Politics of Language in Byron’s The Island’, p. 852. 119. Southey to G.C. Bedford, 25 January 1793, NL, vol. 1, p. 19. 120. PW, vol. 10, p. 204. Southey’s views on the freedom of the press had changed drastically from his championship of radical literature in the early 1790s. In reference to an attack on Coleridge in the Examiner he states, ‘Gentlemen who make this kind of use of the liberty of the press must expect that the liberty of the horse whip will be the natural consequence’, Southey to J. J. Morgan, 1 July 1812, Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library. 121. Byron’s reference to Southey as ‘a-dry, Bob!’, Don Juan, ‘Dedication’, iii.24; Wu (ed.), Romanticism, p. 934. 122. John Martin, An Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands in the South Pacific Ocean … Compiled and Arranged from the Extensive Communications of Mr. William Mariner, Several Years Resident in those Islands, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1817), vol. 1, pp. 307–8. 123. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, II.i–xv.1–135; BCPW, vol. 2, pp. 44–9; Don Juan, III.i–xvi (inserted between stanzas lxxxvi and lxxxvii), ll. 689–784; BCPW, vol. 5, pp. 188–92. 124. Angus Calder, ‘“The Island”; Scotland, Greece and Romantic Savagery’, in Angus Calder (ed.), Byron and Scotland: Radical or Dandy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), pp. 132–50. 125. Martin, An Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands, vol. 1, p. vii. 126. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 308. 127. Bougainville, A Voyage Round the World, p. 260. 128. Southey, ‘Accounts of the Tonga Islands’, QR, 17:33 (April 1817), pp. 1–39; p. 33. 129. Caroline Franklin, Byron’s Heroines (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 92. 130. Ibid., p. 91. 131. See notes 52 and 53 above. 132. Byron mentions ‘Toobonai’ as ‘the last island where any distinct account is left of Christian and his comrades’, BCPW, vol. 7, pp. 146–7. 133. Bligh, A Narrative of the Mutiny, p. 13. 134. Calder, ‘“The Island”; Scotland, Greece and Romantic Savagery’, p. 144. 135. Montgomery, The West Indies, pp. 67–8. 136. Like Southey, Montgomery’s youth was shaped by radical politics. He was imprisoned in York Castle for several months in the years of 1795 and 1796 for printing seditious literature on the press of his newspaper, the Sheffield Iris. 137. Southey’s letters to Montgomery will be published in The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, gen. eds Tim Fulford and Lynda Pratt, forthcoming 2007–12. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 284 01/06/2007 11:54:05 Notes to pages 157–67 285 138. Southey to J. Montgomery, 5 May 1811, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 139. Southey to J. Montgomery, 5 May 1811, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 140. Southey to J. Montgomery, 29 November, 1811, NL, vol. 2, p. 14. 141. James Montgomery, Lectures on Poetry and General Literature (1833; London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1995), p. 300. 142. Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden: A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1. Containing the Economy of Vegetation. Part II. The Loves of the Plants (London: J. Johnson, 1791). 143. All references to the poem are to PI. Montgomery was particularly influenced by Matthew Flinders, A Voyage to Terra Australis, 2 vols (London: G. and W. Nichol, 1814). He quotes a passage from Flinder’s text in his preface to the poem, which demonstrates that pelicans inhabit islands over many generations (due to the piles of bones around them). Flinders thereby surmises that nothing ‘can be more consonant to their feelings, if Pelicans have any, than quietly to resign their breath, surrounded by their progeny, and in the same spot where they first drew it’ (PI, p. vi). From this statement, Montgomery created his extraordinary account of monogamous pelicans rearing their families through the ages. As far as I have been able to ascertain, there is no other precedent in Romantic literature (or indeed in encyclopaedias or works of natural history of the period) for treating pelicans in this way. 144. Perhaps a reason for choosing this bird was because of its Christian iconography. The pelican was thought to provide its young with the blood from its breast when food was scarce, so leading to its adoption as a Christian symbol of self-sacrifice. 145. Byron, The Island, I.x.214. 146. Quoted in Fulford, ‘Romanticism, the South Seas and the Caribbean’, p. 410. 147. Southey, ‘Transactions of the Missionary Society in the South Sea Islands’, p. 45. 148. Ibid., p. 45. 149. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 89. 150. William Ellis, Polynesian Researches: During a Residence of Nearly Six Years, in the South Sea Islands (London: Fisher, Son and Jackson, 1829). 151. Southey, ‘Transactions of the Missionary Society’, AR, 2, p. 200. 152. Southey, ‘Polynesian Researches’, pp. 1–54; p. 5. 153. Ibid., p. 6. 154. Ibid., pp. 15, 22. 155. Ibid., p. 29. 156. Ibid., p. 54. 157. Ibid., p. 31. 158. Ibid., p. 25. 4 Thalaba the Destroyer 1. See Southey to G. C. Bedford, June–July 1801, SL, vol. 1, p. 163; Southey to A. Seward, 28 May 1808, NL, vol. 1, p. 476; Southey to J. M. Longmire, 4 November 1812, L&C, vol. 3, p. 351. Marilyn Butler states that Madoc is the first poem in Southey’s plan to write a narrative poem on all the world’s mythologies (‘Orientalism’ p. 413). However Madoc does not easily fit into the class of a single world mythology, dealing as it does at various points with Celtic, Catholic, Aztec and native American belief systems. It may be added Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 285 01/06/2007 11:54:05 Notes to pages 167–71 286 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. retrospectively to Southey’s plan, for convenience, but the absence of his stated intention that it is one of his ‘mythologies’ and its overt colonial subject matter suggest that Southey wrote Madoc with a different agenda in mind. Southey said himself: ‘I know not how it was that in my youth the mythologies and superstitions of various nations had strong hold on my imagination & struck deep in it, so that before I was twenty one of my numerous plans was that of exhibiting the most striking portion of each in a long poem. Thalaba & Kehama are the fruits of that early plan, – Madoc partakes of it, but only incidentally. If I had gained money as well as reputation by these poems, the other series would ere this have been completed’, Southey to J. Montgomery, 26 March 1812, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Southey to G. C. Bedford, 22 June 1796, NL, vol. 1, p. 110. Southey to T. Southey, 2 February 1800, NL, vol. 1, pp. 221–2. Southey to J. Rickman, 2 May 1800, NL, vol. 1, pp. 224–5. Southey to J. May, 19 July 1799, Ramos, p. 46. Southey to J. May, 1803, SL, vol. 1, p. 214. Southey to G. C. Bedford, 31 July 1796, L&C, vol. 1, p. 288. While in London, Southey met several important writers and thinkers of the time, particularly the Joseph Johnson circle (through his friend George Dyer) including William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Batten Cristall and Gilbert Wakefield. Southey to E. Southey, 9 May 1799, L&C, vol. 2, p. 16. Southey to T. Southey, 12 July 1799, L&C, vol. 2, p. 21. Bernhardt-Kabisch, Robert Southey, pp. 81–5. William Haller includes a comprehensive list of the sources that Southey used in writing Thalaba, in The Early Life of Robert Southey, 1774–1803 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1917), pp. 254–63, Appendix B. PW, vol. 4, p. xv. Dom Chavis and M. Cazotte (eds), Arabian Tales: or A Continuation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, trans. Robert Heron, 4 vols (Dublin: R. Cross etc., 1792), vol. 4, p. 308. Southey to W. Taylor, 27 July 1801, Robberds, p. 371. Southey, ‘Gebir; a Poem’, Critical Review, 27 (September 1799), pp. 29–39. Southey to J. Cottle, 22 September 1799, L&C, vol. 2, p. 24. Southey to A. Seward, 28 May 1808, NL, vol. 1, p. 476. Walter Savage Landor, Gebir; A Poem (London: Rivingtons, 1798), I.136, p. 6. Ibid., III.284–8; p. 32. Butler, ‘Orientalism’, p. 411. Landor, Gebir, VI.185; p. 60. Mohammed Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism: Literary Encounters with the Orient (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 1996), p. 3. Landor, Gebir, II.196–7; p. 18. Thereby applying the same agenda as one of his sources, C-F. Volney, Les Ruines, ou Méditation sur les Révolutions des Empires (Paris: Desenne, Volland, Plassan, 1791). See, Tim Fulford, Introduction, in RSPW, vol. 3, p. xi. Southey to C. Danvers 20 August 1799, SL, vol. 1, p. 78. ‘The Devil’s Thoughts’ was later retitled ‘The Devil’s Walk’. For the various revisions of this poem see RSPW, vol. 5, pp. 451–74. Southey to J. May, 29 July 1799, SL, vol. 1, p. 77. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 286 01/06/2007 11:54:05 Notes to pages 171–5 287 28. ‘Mohammed’ was published posthumously in Oliver Newman: A New-England Tale (Unfinished): With Other Poetical Remains, ed. H. Hill (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1845), pp. 113–16. 29. Though Southey’s knowledge of the Koran also came from Ludovico Marracci’s Alcorani Textus Universus (1698), as his letters reveal: ‘Maracci’s Refutation of the Koran, or rather his preliminaries to it, have afforded me much amusement, and much matter’(Southey to S. T. Coleridge, 8 January 1800, L&C, vol. 2, p. 41). 30. George Sale, ‘Dedication’, The Koran, Commonly Called The Alcoran of Mohammed: Translated into English Immediately from the Original Arabic; with Explanatory Notes, taken from the most Approved Commentators (London: J. Wilcox, 1734), p. [3] (unnumbered). 31. Ibid., p. [3] (unnumbered). 32. Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism, p. xxix. 33. RSPW, vol. 3, p. 193. 34. Sale, ‘A Preliminary Discourse’, Koran, p. 61. 35. Said, Orientalism, p. 60. 36. Sale, ‘A Preliminary Discourse’, Koran, pp. 62–3. 37. Sale, ‘Dedication’, Koran, p. [2] (unnumbered). 38. Ibid., p. [2] (unnumbered). 39. Ibid., p. [2] (unnumbered). 40. Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism, p. xxix. 41. Southey to J. May, 29 July 1799, SL, vol. 1, p. 77. 42. Ibid. 43. Sale, ‘A Preliminary Discourse’, Koran, p. 40. 44. Southey said in a letter to William Taylor, ‘Whether Mohammed be a hero likely to blast a poem in a Christian country is doubtful, my Mohammed will be, what I believe the Arabian was in the beginnning of his career, sincere in enthusiasm’, 3 February 1800, Robberds, vol. 1, p. 325. 45. Bernhardt-Kabisch, Robert Southey, p. 84. 46. Vathek could be said to have had two authors as well, Beckford writing the French text, while Henley translated it and provided the notes (William Beckford, Vathek, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. xiv–xviii). 47. Interestingly the subsequent editions of Gebir did supply notes to the text, perhaps on Southey’s advice – ‘Landor was responsive to the criticism, particularly from his most favourable reader, Southey, that the first edition of the poem was unnecessarily obscure. Accordingly he provided explanatory summaries and notes, and certain amplifications to the text’, Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism, p. 37. 48. For instance The Poems of Robert Southey, ed. Maurice H. Fitzgerald (London: Oxford University Press, 1909). 49. The comprehensive annotations of Southey’s ‘epic’ poems conform to his desire to ‘trace the moral order of things in the history of the world’, Southey to J. May, 1 July 1814, SL, vol. 2, p. 358. It is this idea of a ‘moral order’ that he seeks to impose on all forms of religion and society, past and present. 50. H. N. Fairchild, The Noble Savage: A Study in Romantic Naturalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1928), p. 205. 51. Quoted in Madden, pp. 68–90; pp. 83–4. 52. Haller, The Early Life of Robert Southey, p. 258. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 287 01/06/2007 11:54:05 288 Notes to pages 176–82 53. Nigel Leask, ‘“Wandering through Eblis”: Absorption and Containment in Romantic Exoticism’, in Fulford and Kitson (eds), Romanticism and Colonialism, pp. 164–88; p. 168. 54. Ibid., p. 168. 55. Southey to J. May, 12 October 1808, SL, vol. 2, p. 102. Southey was unhappy with the first edition’s layout, which, as he was in Portugal, he did not see through the press himself. He was aware that the placement of notes meant that the verse text was often ‘lost’, with some pages only having notes on them. This was amended in subsequent editions, with the notes being placed at the end of each book. See Fulford, Introduction, in RSPW, vol. 3, p. xxi. 56. All references to Thalaba are from RSPW, vol. 3. 57. RSPW, vol. 3, p. 213. 58. RSPW, vol. 3, p. 193, my italics. 59. RSPW, vol. 3, p. 193. 60. David Norcliffe, ‘Islam’, in Jeaneane Fowler, Merv Fowler, David Norcliffe, Nora Hill and David Watkins (eds), World Religions (Brighton and Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 1999), p. 130. 61. Southey to J. May, 1803, SL, vol. 1, p. 214. 62. Barthélemy D’Herbelot, Bibliothèque Orientale, ou Dictionaire Universel Contenant Généralement Tout ce qui Regarde la Connoissance des Peuples de l’Orient, 2 vols (Maestricht: Chez J. E. Defour and Ph. Roux, 1776). I am presuming that this was the edition used by Southey, as it was listed in the sale catalogue when his library was sold in 1844. For this useful list of Southey’s collection of books, see Roy Park (ed.), Poets and Men of Letters, Catalogues of Libraries of Eminent Persons, vol. 9 (London: Mansell, 1974) pp. 75–288. 63. RSPW, vol. 3, p. 202. 64. RSPW, vol. 3, p. 194. 65. RSPW, vol. 3, p. 3. 66. Common-Place Book, ed. Warter, 4 series, pp. 98–9; Sale, ‘A Preliminary Discourse’, Koran, p. 40. 67. Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Ozymandias’, l. 13; Wu (ed.), Romanticism, p. 849. 68. Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism, p. 69. 69. Coleridge, ‘Fears in Solitude’, l. 172; CPW, vol. 1, p. 256. 70. ‘Worse and worse, young Orphane, be thy payne, / If thou due vengeance doe forbeare, / Till guiltie blood her guerdon do obtayne’, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, II.i.550–2. 71. See RSPW, vol. 5, pp. 118–28. These poems were first published in Poems (1797), pp. 173–200. 72. William Taylor’s English translation of Bürger’s poem ‘Lenore’, which was published in the Monthly Magazine, 1 March 1796, attracted Southey to this genre of poetry and prompted him to write to Taylor, visiting him in 1798. 73. British Critic, 18 (September 1801), pp. 309–10; p. 310, quoted in Madden, p. 64. 74. Carsten Niebuhr, Travels Through Arabia, trans. Robert Heron, 2 vols (Dublin: Gilbert, Moore, Archer and Jones, 1792), vol. 2, p. 318. 75. C-F. Volney, Travels Through Syria and Egypt, 2 vols (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1788), vol. 1, p. 63. 76. A copy of the first draft that Southey kept for himself and which includes a dated record of the alterations that he made to the original (RSPW, vol. 3, pp. xxxii–xxxiii). Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 288 01/06/2007 11:54:05 Notes to pages 182–9 289 77. Southey, ‘Thalaba the Destroyer’ (1799–1800), British Library, London, Add. MS 47884, ff. 64–5. 78. Common-Place Book, ed. Warter, 4 series, p. 184. 79. RSPW, vol. 3, p. 249. 80. RSPW, vol. 3, p. 38. 81. Jones had already published several works on the subject, including A Grammar of the Persian Language (London: W. and J. Richardson, 1771) and Poems, Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Languages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1772). 82. William Jones, Selected Poetical and Prose Works, ed. Michael J. Franklin (Cardiff : University of Wales Press, 1995), p. 322. 83. Ibid., pp. 193–4, 211; Common-Place Book, ed. Warter, 4 series, pp. 106–7; RSPW, vol. 3, pp. 221, 223, 228, 229, 236, 294. 84. Jones, Selected Poetical and Prose Works, ed. Franklin, pp. 193–211. 85. Ibid., p. 189. 86. Volney, Travels Through Syria and Egypt, vol. 1, pp. 388, 409. 87. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 413–14. 88. Tilar J. Mazzeo, Introduction, in Fulford and Kitson (eds), Travels, Explorations and Empires, vol. 4, pp. ix–x. 89. RSPW, vol. 3, p. 216; Volney, Travels Through Syria and Egypt, vol. 1, pp. 404–5. 90. Wordsworth, Descriptive Sketches Taken During a Pedestrian Tour Among the Alps (1793), ll. 450–1; WPW, vol. 1, pp. 70–4. 91. RSPW, vol. 3, p. 216; Volney, Travels Through Syria and Egypt, vol. 1, pp. 404–5. 92. Jones, Selected Poetical and Prose Works, ed. Franklin, pp. xxii–xxiii. 93. Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey, p. 10. 94. Ibid., pp. 10–11. 95. Southey to J. Rickman, 16 January 1800, NL, vol. 1, p. 216. 96. Ibid. 97. Further to this, in his discussion of ‘moveable Easts’, Tim Fulford argues that ‘Coleridge and Southey made the East into an imagined culture, embodying their fear and desire of religious and political fanaticism, which could be mapped onto southern Europe, western Ireland and the East Indies at will’, ‘Plants, Pagodas and Penises’, p. 200. This literary process of overlaying unattractive ‘oriental’ characteristics on others is shown to be reversible in the case of Southey’s Bedouins, who absorb positive attributes of European culture in their representation. 98. Southey to J. May, 29 July 1799, SL, vol. 1, p. 78. 99. Southey to C. Danvers, June 1800, SL, vol. 1, p. 106. 100. Southey to C. W. W. Wynn, 30 April 1801, SL, vol. 1, pp. 145–6. 101. RSPW, vol. 3, p. 277. Southey makes a convenient link between the Islamic subha (or as he terms it ‘Tusbah’) and the Catholic rosary (RSPW, vol. 3, pp. 246–7). 102. Southey, ‘Travels of Ali Bey’, QR, 15:30 ( July 1816), pp. 299–345; p. 310. 103. Southey to J. Montgomery, 5 May 1811, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 104. Southey, ‘Account of the Baptist Missionary Society’, p. 222. 105. Daniel E. White, Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 155. 106. Southey describes the Quakers as ‘a body of Christians from whom, in all important points, I feel little or no difference in my own state of mind’, Southey to G. C. Bedford, 22 March 1807, SL, vol. 1, p. 426. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 289 01/06/2007 11:54:05 290 Notes to pages 189–200 107. Southey to William Taylor, 15 April 1799, Robberds, vol. 1, p. 272. 108. RSPW, vol. 4, p. 4. 109. Quoted in Bernhardt-Kabisch, Robert Southey, p. 84. 110. RSPW, vol. 4, p. 4. 111. Quoted in Madden, pp. 91–5; p. 91. 112. Southey to J. May, 29 July 1799, SL, vol. 1, p. 78. 113. Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism, p. 66. 114. RSPW, vol. 3, p. 222; Volney, Travels Through Syria and Egypt, vol. 1, pp. 407–9. 115. RSPW, vol. 3, p. 222–3; Volney, Travels Through Syria and Egypt, vol. 1, pp. 407–9. 116. RSPW, vol. 3, p. 222; Volney, Travels Through Syria and Egypt, vol. 1, pp. 407–9. 117. Essay on the Poetry of the Eastern Nations (1772), in Jones, Selected Poetical and Prose Works, ed. Franklin, p. 324. 118. Fulford, ‘Plants, Pagodas and Penises’, p. 190. 119. Jones, Selected Poetical and Prose Works, ed. Franklin, pp. 194–5. 120. RSPW, vol. 3, p. 259; Samuel Purchas, His Pilgrimage (London: H. Fetherstone, 1613), p. 317. 121. John Mandeville, The Voiage and Travaile of Sir John Maundeville (London: Woodman and Lyon, 1727), pp. 336–9. 122. RSPW, vol. 3, pp. 260, 259. 123. Southey’s description of an oriental banquet as a scene of illicit temptation was no doubt a source for Keats’s gastronomic seduction in ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ (1820). 124. Diego Saglia, ‘Words and Things: Southey’s East and the Materiality of Oriental Discourse’, in RSCER, pp. 167–86; p. 169. 125. Essay on the Poetry of the Eastern Nations (1772), in Jones, Selected Poetical and Prose Works, ed. Franklin, pp. 329–36; p. 324. 126. Common-Place Book, ed. Warter, 4 series, p. 186. 127. Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas (1757), in A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Donald Greene (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 335– 418; pp. 342–3. 128. Southey referred to him as ‘Lewis – the Monk-man’, Southey to W. Taylor, 30 May 1799, Robberds, vol. 1, p. 281. 129. Achmed Ardebeili, A Series of Poems, Containing the Plaints, Consolations and Delights of Achmed Ardebeili, A Persian Exile, ed. Charles Fox (London: J. Cottle, G. C. and J. Robinson, 1797). Southey and Coleridge were among several notable Bristol residents on the subscription list. Southey does not refer to this text in the 1801 edition, but a note on it was added in later editions, see RSPW, vol. 3, p. 297. 130. Ardebeili, A Series of Poems, ed. Fox, p. 18. 131. Ibid., p. vii. 132. Ibid., p. vii. 133. RSPW, vol. 3, p. 234; James Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, in the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773, 5 vols (Edinburgh: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1790), vol. 4, p. 594. 134. RSPW, vol. 3, p. 234; Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, vol. 4, p. 594. 135. RSPW, vol. 3, p. 304. From legend and biblical accounts, Nimrod was an ancient Mesopotamian monarch who encouraged his followers to challenge God’s power by building the tower of Babel. 136. RSPW, vol. 3, p. 303. 137. RSPW, vol. 3, p. 303. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 290 01/06/2007 11:54:06 Notes to pages 200–11 291 138. RSPW, vol. 3, p. 328. 139. RSPW, vol. 4, p. 4. 140. RSPW, vol. 3, p. 4. 141. Southey to A. Seward, 28 May 1808, NL, vol. 1, p. 476. 142. Chavis and Cazotte (eds), Arabian Tales, vol. 4, p. 328. 143. Southey to J. May, 26 June 1797, Ramos, pp. 25–6. 144. Common-Place Book, ed. Warter, 4 series, p. 182. 145. Southey to J. Rickman, 3 February 1800, SL, vol. 1, p. 91. 146. Coleridge, ‘Fears in Solitude’, ll. 229–30, CPW, vol. 1, p. 263. 147. However Southey did not retreat into rural retirement as has often been claimed. It was not until 1807 that he decided to settle permanently in Keswick (Speck, p. 101). As Southey’s Collected Letters will reveal, he still considered himself part of an active network of public figures, who were in regular contact on a wide range of political and social topics. 148. Bernhardt-Kabisch, Robert Southey, p. 94. 149. Ibid., p. 94. 150. Southey to J. May, 26 June 1797, Ramos, p. 27. 151. Quoted in Madden, p. 68. 5 The Curse of Kehama 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. Southey to J. M. Longmire, 4 November 1812, L&C, vol. 3, p. 351. RSPW, vol. 4, p. 273. In a letter to his patron, Charles Wynn, Southey states his purpose of ‘manufacturing a Hindoo romance, wild as Thalaba’, Southey to C. W. W. Wynn, 23 July 1800, L&C, vol. 2, p. 97. In another, he informs Coleridge that he has ‘planned a Hindoo romance of original extravagance’, Southey to S. T. Coleridge, 28 March 1801, L&C, vol. 2, p. 136. It is not always clear in the manuscripts whether Southey intended the poem to be called ‘The Curse of Keradou’ or ‘The Curse of Keradon’. John Shore, Lord Teignmouth, Considerations on the Practicability, Policy, and Obligation of Communicating to the Natives of India the Knowledge of Christianity (London: John Hatchard, 1808), p. 57. W. Taylor to Southey, 2 August 1801, Robberds, vol. 1, p. 375 Southey, ‘Reports of the African Institution’, p. 152. John Thelwall, ‘The Blessed Efforts of the System of Colonization’ (1795), in Bolton (ed.), Romanticism and Politics, vol. 5, pp. 211–12. Butler, ‘Orientalism’, p. 401. Marshall, Introduction, in Louis (gen. ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, p. 4. P. J. Marshall, ‘Britain Without America’, p. 582. As Saree Makdisi shows, this movement towards tighter imperial control was paralleled by economic change, in the form of the gradual replacement of colonial mercantilism by industrial capitalism, controlled by the metropolis. Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 108–10. See ibid. and Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings. A. L. Macfie, Orientalism (London: Longman, 2002), p. 3. Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, pp. 47–86. Southey, ‘Account of the Baptist Missionary Society’, p. 217. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 291 01/06/2007 11:54:06 292 Notes to pages 212–22 15. Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey, pp. 10–11; Fulford, ‘Plants, Pagodas and Penises’, p. 200. 16. For further discussion of the links between Napoleon and Kehama, see Simon Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 119–225. 17. Lawrence James, Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (London: Little, Brown, 1997), pp. 67–8. 18. Francis Jeffrey, ‘Southey’s Curse of Kehama’, Edinburgh Review, 17:34 (February 1811), pp. 429–65; pp. 433, 452. This method of attack continues throughout the review in its accusation that Kehama employs ‘babyisms’ and is ‘full of namby-pamby and affectation’ (pp. 444, 452). The review, despite its criticism, is very lengthy, providing many extracts from the poem. It concludes by attributing Southey with genius, despite his ‘childish taste’ (p. 465). 19. For instance see ‘the brief explanation of mythological names prefixed to the Poem’, where Southey compares the ‘Trimourtee’ to the Trinity, RSPW, vol. 4, pp. 3, 7. 20. The epithets ‘monstrous’ and ‘mythology’ are applied to the Hindu religion in the 1838 preface to The Curse of Kehama, RSPW, vol. 4, p. 4. The term ‘moral grandeur’ comes from a letter to G. C. Bedford, 1 January 1811, NL, vol. 2, p. 1. 21. Southey to W. S. Landor, 20 May 1808, L&C, vol. 3, p. 145. 22. RSPW, vol. 4, p. 4. 23. Southey, ‘A Review of James Forbes’ Oriental Memoirs’, QR, 12:23 (October 1814), pp. 180–227; p. 220. 24. David M. Craig, ‘Subservient Talents? Robert Southey as a Public Moralist’, in RSCER, pp. 101–14; pp. 102–3. 25. Southey to C. W. W. Wynn, 11 June 1808, SL, vol. 2, p. 69. 26. Balachandra Rajan, Under Western Eyes: India from Milton to Macaulay (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 143. 27. Southey to C. Danvers, 6 May 1801, SL, vol. 1, pp. 155–6. 28. RSPW, vol. 2, p. 6. 29. Southey to M. Barker, 24 October 1809, SL, vol. 2, p. 174. 30. Southey to C. W. W. Wynn, 19 July 1811, SL, vol. 2, pp. 228–9. 31. Philip Martin, Byron: A Poet Before his Public (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 43. 32. Southey to G. C. Bedford, 1 January 1811, NL, vol. 2, p. 1. 33. Southey to H. C. Robinson, 1 December 1810, NL, vol. 1, p. 545. 34. All references to The Curse of Kehama are from RSPW, vol. 4. 35. Southey to C. Danvers, June 1800, SL, vol. 1, p. 106. 36. Ibid. 37. Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey, p. 5. 38. Southey to J. May, 1 March 1833, Ramos, p. 256. 39. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1805–6), ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), ll. 168, 190, p. 231. 40. Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism, p. 29. 41. Southey to C. Danvers, June 1800, SL, vol. 1, p. 107. 42. Ibid. 43. Southey to J. May, 23 June 1800, SL, vol. 1, p. 116. 44. Southey to G. C. Bedford, 16 February 1811, L&C, vol. 3, p. 303. 45. Southey to S. T. Coleridge, 23 December, 1799, NL, vol. 1, p. 211. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 292 01/06/2007 11:54:06 Notes to pages 222–30 293 46. Coleridge, ‘France. An Ode’, l. 83; CPW, vol. 1, p. 246. 47. Southey to M. Barker, 1801, SL, vol. 1, p. 180. 48. For instance in another letter he also writes, ‘It is the world that has changed, not I. I took the same way in the afternoon that I did in the morning, but sunset and sunrise make a different scene’, Southey to N. Lightfoot, 8 February 1806, L&C, vol. 3, p. 22. In a further use of natural imagery to demonstrate the same idea, he states ‘At present I am swimming with the stream, but it is the stream that has turned, not I’, Southey to G. C. Bedford, 11 November 1808, NL, vol. 1, p. 492. 49. Southey to M. Barker, 1801, SL, vol. 1, p. 180. 50. Coleridge, ‘France. An Ode’, l. 81; CPW, vol. 1, p. 246. 51. Southey to Lord Sidmouth, 1822, SL, vol. 3, p. 320. 52. Tilar J. Mazzeo, Introduction, in Fulford and Kitson (gen. eds), Travels, Explorations and Empires, vol. 4, pp. xii–xv. 53. Southey to C. W. W. Wynn, 7 June 1803, NL, vol. 1, p. 313. 54. Haller, The Early Life of Robert Southey, p. 302. 55. Southey to G. C. Bedford, 20 May 1803, quoted in Storey, p. 159. 56. Southey to T. Southey, 18 October 1809, SL, vol. 2, p.169. 57. Michael Duff y, ‘Contested Empires, 1756–1815’, in Paul Langford (ed.), The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 213–42; p. 241. 58. Southey, ‘Account of the Baptist Missionary Society’, p. 210. 59. Ibid., p. 210. 60. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88); Volney, Les Ruines. 61. Beckford, Vathek, ed. Lonsdale, p. 114. 62. Southey’s Common-Place Book, ed. Warter, 4 series, p. 12. 63. Ibid., p. 13. 64. Southey, ‘Account of the Baptist Missionary Society’, p. 211. 65. Jeaneane Fowler, ‘Hinduism’, in Fowler et al. (eds), World Religions, pp. 180–249; p. 183. 66. John R. Hinnells (ed.), The Penguin Dictionary of Religions (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), p. 80. 67. Southey, ‘Account of the Baptist Missionary Society’, p. 213. 68. Ibid., p. 213. 69. Ibid., p. 213. 70. Ibid., p. 213. 71. Ibid., p. 217. 72. RSPW, vol. 4, p. 226. 73. For instance in one letter he states, ‘Anquetil du Perron was certainly a far more useful and meritorious orientalist than Sir Wm Jones, who disgraced himself by enviously abusing him. Latterly, Sir William’s works are the dreams of dotage’, Southey to C. W. W. Wynn, 23 July 1800, L&C, vol. 2, pp. 95–6). For Southey’s attitude to Jones, see also Tim Fulford, ‘Poetic Flowers/Indian Bowers’ in Franklin (ed.), Romantic Representations of British India, pp. 113–30; p. 128. 74. Southey, ‘Asiatic Researches’, p. 643. 75. William Jones, ‘On the Gods of Greece, Italy and India’, Asiatick Researches, 1 (1788), pp. 221–75. 76. Jones, Selected Poetical and Prose Works, ed. Franklin, p. 348. 77. RSPW, vol. 4, pp. 206–7; Jones ‘On the Gods of Greece, Italy and India’, p. 241. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 293 01/06/2007 11:54:06 294 Notes to pages 230–6 78. RSPW, vol. 4, pp. 217, 236; Jones ‘On the Gods of Greece, Italy and India’, pp. 262–3, 264–5. 79. Ibid., p. 267. 80. John Drew, India and the Romantic Imagination (Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 49. 81. William Jones, ‘A Discourse on the Institution of a Society, for Inquiring into the History, Civil and National, the Antiquities, Arts, Sciences and Literature of Asia’, Asiatick Researches, 1 (1788), pp. ix–xvi; pp. ix–x. 82. Said, Orientalism, pp. 92–6. 83. Thomas De Quincey, ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’ (1821), in Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Other Writings, ed. Grevel Lindop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 72–4. 84. Jones, ‘A Discourse on the Institution of a Society’, pp. xi–xii. 85. Ibid., p. xiii. 86. William Jones, ‘The Second Anniversary Discourse’, Asiatick Researches, 1 (1788), pp. 405–14; p. 407. 87. Ibid., p. 407. 88. William Jones, ‘On the Hindus’, Asiatick Researches, 1 (1788), pp. 414–32; p. 421. 89. William Jones, ‘On Asiatic History, Civil and Natural’, Asiatick Researches, 4 (1795), pp. 1–17; p. 9. 90. Francis Wilford, ‘On the Chronology of the Hindus’, Asiatick Researches, 5 (1798), pp. 241–95; p. 241. These comments pre-empt James Mill’s opinion in The History of British India (1817–36), where he says: ‘To the monstrous period of years which the legends of the Hindus involve, they ascribe events the most extravagant and unnatural: events not even connected in chronological series; a number of independent and incredible fictions. This people, indeed, are perfectly destitute of historical records’. Quoted in Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism, p. 1. 91. S. N. Mukherjee, Sir William Jones: A Study in Eighteenth-Century British attitudes to India (London: Sangam, 1987), p. 96. 92. Jones, ‘On Asiatic History, Civil and Natural’, p. 7. 93. Wilford, ‘On the Chronology of the Hindus’, p. 241. 94. Francis Wilford, ‘On Egypt and Other Countries Adjacent to the Ca’li’ River, or Nile of Ethiopia. From the Ancient Books of the Hindus’, Asiatick Researches, 3 (1792), pp. 295–462; p. 295. 95. RSPW, vol. 4, p. 224. 96. RSPW, vol. 4, p. 211. 97. Indira Ghose, Introduction, in Fulford and Kitson (eds), Travels, Explorations and Empires, vol. 6, p. xi. 98. Coleridge, ‘Kubla Khan’, l. 35; CPW, vol. 1, p. 298. 99. William Jones, ‘The Palace of Fortune. An Indian Tale’, ll. 96–102, in Poems Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Languages, pp. 9–37; pp. 14–15. 100. Drew, India and the Romantic Imagination, p. 233. See also Warren U. Ober, ‘Southey, Coleridge, and “Kubla-Khan”’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 58 (1959), pp. 414–22. 101. Jones, ‘The Palace of Fortune’, l. 32, p. 11. 102. Said, Orientalism, pp. 94, 167. 103. William Hodges, Travels in India, during the Years 1780, 1781, 1782 and 1783 (London: J. Edwards, 1793). Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 294 01/06/2007 11:54:06 Notes to pages 236–45 295 104. Fulford and Kitson (eds), Travels, Explorations and Empires, vol. 6, p. 131. 105. Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 190. 106. Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, pp. 23, 52. 107. It was this description of the ‘Banian’ tree that Mary Russell Mitford found ‘sublime’ in her response to the poem (see p. 132). She was, like Southey, influenced by the neoclassical plates of Cook’s voyages, to make a similar beneficent environment for her Pitcairn natives. 108. Another source for the ‘Banian’ tree was Hodges’s Travels (see Figure 9). 109. Bernhardt-Kabisch, Robert Southey, p. 101. 110. Madoc, Part 2, I.93–112. 111. Walter Scott, ‘Southey’s Curse of Kehama’, QR, 5:9 (February 1811), pp. 40–61; p. 56. 112. See pp. 194–6. Southey also does this with his female character Mooma in A Tale of Paraguay (1825), III.xliv; PW, p. 71, thus demonstrating that this was a model of female propriety he held true to all his life. 113. See also Saglia’s discussion of how the Orient’s material nature is represented in human dress and ornamentation in Thalaba and Kehama, ‘Words and Things’, pp. 179–81. 114. Southey, ‘The Curse of Kehama’ (1809), British Library, London, Add. MS 36485, ff. 181–2. 115. Kirsten Holst Petersen and Anna Rutherford (eds), A Double Colonization: Colonial and Post-Colonial Women’s Writing (Oxford: Dangaroo Press, 1986). 116. Ghose, Introduction, in Fulford and Kitson (eds), Travels, Explorations and Empire, vol. 6, p. xii. 117. Ibid., p. xii. 118. RSPW, vol. 4, p. 2. 119. Southey, ‘Account of the Baptist Mission’, p. 207. 120. Southey to J. Montgomery, 26 March, 1812, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 121. Southey, ‘Account of the Baptist Mission’, p. 208. 122. Ibid., pp. 216–17. 123. Ibid., p. 215. 124. Ibid., pp. 217–18. 125. Ibid., p. 218. 126. Ibid., p. 218. 127. Southey, ‘Transactions of the Missionary Society’, AR, 2; Southey, ‘Transactions of the Missionary Society’, AR, 3 (1805), ch. 12, no. 2, pp. 621–34. His comments on Vanderkemp come from a letter to J. Montgomery, 26 March 1812, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 128. Southey, ‘Transactions of the Missionary Society’, AR, 3, p. 623. Southey retained this conviction all his life, writing to a friend in 1828, ‘in the belief that the Missionaries are rendering the greatest services that can be rendered to civilization & humanity, no one can agree with you more entirely than I do. The older I grow the more clearly I perceive & the more forcibly feel that in religion the foundations of society must be laid, & that no other basis can be secure’, Southey to T. Pringle, 3 May 1828, Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library. 129. The Quarterly Review was set up in opposition to the Edinburgh Review in March 1809 by Walter Scott, John Murray, George Canning and William Gifford. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 295 01/06/2007 11:54:06 296 Notes to pages 245–53 130. Sydney Smith, ‘Indian Missions’, Edinburgh Review, 12:23 (April 1808), pp. 151–81; p. 151. 131. Smith, ‘Indian Missions’, pp. 174, 179. 132. Ibid., p. 173. 133. Ibid., pp. 172, 180. 134. Southey, ‘Account of the Baptist Missionary Society’, pp. 196, 206. 135. Ibid., p. 204. 136. Southey to W. Taylor, 6 December 1808, Robberds, vol. 2, p. 231. For more discussion of Southey’s attitude to the Edinburgh Review, see Craig, ‘Subservient Talents?’, p. 105. 137. James, Raj, p. 224. 138. Marshall, ‘Britain Without America’, p. 584. 139. Southey, ‘Inquiry into the Poor Laws, &c.’, QR, 8:16 (December 1812), pp. 319–56; p. 355. 140. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (eds), The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 430. 141. Southey to G. C. Bedford, 10 September 1816, NL, vol. 2, p. 141. 142. Southey and John Rickman, ‘On the Poor Laws’, QR, 19:37 (April 1818), pp. 259– 308. 143. Southey to J. Rickman, 18 May 1805, NL, vol. 1, p. 386. That Southey and Bentham came to share similar views on social and political topics (including their ambitions for India) can be seen in a comment Southey makes in a letter to the Quarterly Review editor, William Gifford, ‘I have inserted in these proofs a few lines in honour of our friend Jeremy Bentham. He loves the Quarterly Review and he calls me St Southey; I hope therefore you will not think the compliment ill-bestowed’, [Spring 1823], NL, vol. 2, p. 245. 144. Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, ed. Miran Bozovic (London and New York: Verso, 1995), p. 35. 145. Ibid., pp. 1–27. Bozovic’s introduction to this text explores ideas of God, omniscience and ‘the gaze’ in relation to Bentham’s Panopticon. 146. Ibid., p. 1. 147. See p. 219. 148. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York, London: Routledge, 1995), p. 58. 149. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, pp. 201–8. 150. Letter to the Second Earl Spencer, 4–30 August 1787, quoted in Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, p. 160. 151. See also Michael J. Franklin, ‘Accessing India: Orientalism, anti-“Indianism” and the Rhetoric of Jones and Burke’, in Fulford and Kitson (eds), Romanticism and Colonialism, pp. 48–66, where he discusses the different ‘visions’ for India of Jones and Burke. 152. Southey, ‘Asiatic Researches’, pp. 650–1. 153. Ibid., p. 651. 154. Quoted in P. J. Marshall, ‘British-Indian Connections c. 1780 to c. 1830: The Empire of the Officials’, in Franklin (ed.), Romantic Representations of British India pp. 45–64; p. 56. 155. Quoted in Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism, p. 100. 156. Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, p. 8. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 296 01/06/2007 11:54:07 Notes to pages 254–5 297 157. Lynda Pratt, ‘Patriot Poetics and the Romantic National Epic: Placing and Displacing Southey’s Joan of Arc’, in Peter J. Kitson (ed.), Placing and Displacing Romanticism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 88–105; p. 95. 158. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London: Vintage, 1996), p. 1. 159. Southey to G. C. Bedford, 14 December 1793, L&C, vol. 1, p. 196. Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 297 01/06/2007 11:54:07 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 298 01/06/2007 11:54:07 WORKS CITED Manuscripts Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University: Correspondence of Robert Southey. Berg Collection, New York Public Library: Correspondence of Robert Southey. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford: Correspondence of Robert Southey and members of the Bedford family. British Library, London: ‘Madoc’ (1794); ‘Thalaba the Destroyer’ (1799–1800); ‘The Curse of Kehama’ (1809). Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library: Correspondence of Robert Southey. 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The Contributions of Robert Southey to the ‘Morning Post’, ed. Kenneth Curry (Alabama: Alabama University Press, 1984). The Curse of Kehama (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1810). History of Brazil, 3 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1810– 19). The History of the Peninsular War, 3 vols (London: John Murray, 1823–32). Letters from England (1807), ed. Jack Simmons (London: Cresset Press, 1951). Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal (Bristol: Joseph Cottle; London: G. G. and J. Robinson and Cadell and Davies, 1797). The Letters of Robert Southey to John May 1797–1838, ed. Charles Ramos (Austin, TX: Jenkins Publishing Company, 1976). The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. C. C. Southey, 6 vols (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1849–50). The Life of Nelson, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1813). Madoc (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1805). ‘Mohammed’ (written 1799), in Oliver Newman: A New-England Tale (Unfinished): With Other Poetical Remains, ed. H. Hill (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1845), pp. 113–16. New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Kenneth Curry, 2 vols (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1965). Poems (Bristol: Joseph Cottle; London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1797). Poems (1797), ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1989). Poems, 3rd edn of vol. 1 and 1st edn of vol. 2, 2 vols (Bristol and London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1799). Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 300 01/06/2007 11:54:07 Works Cited 301 Poems (1799), ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (Poole and Washington DC: Woodstock Books, 1997). Poems of Robert Southey, ed. Maurice H. Fitzgerald (London: Oxford University Press, 1909). Poetical Works of Robert Southey, 10 vols (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1837–8). 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Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 320 01/06/2007 11:54:09 INDEX abolition 2, 11 Coleridge’s and RS’s Bristol lectures 20–6, 28–31 Coleridge’s and RS’s early radical stance on 16–19 RS’s poetry in support of 31–42 RS’s shifting attitude towards 42–52 RS’s more conservative response to 52–67 see also Emancipation Act; slave trade abortion 116, 164 Addington government 222 Africa 2, 10, 11, 15–67, 89, 96, 161, 169, 235 South Africa 244 Agnew, Vanessa 117 Akenside, Mark 75, 97, 273n42 ‘Albion’ 16, 132, 133, 134, 139, 149 ‘Alderman’s Funeral, The’ (RS) 133 Alexandria 191 America and American culture 2, 11, 16, 18, 27, 41, 114, 147, 254 American Revolution 8, 10, 208, 264n83, 270n203, 271n12, 273n47 and Madoc (RS) 12, 70, 71, 72–95, 109–11 in Mitford’s Christina 131, 134, 139 native Americans 9, 59, 95, 102, 104, 110, 140, 161, 184, 274n63, 275n88, 285n1 RS’s plans to emigrate to 19, 22, 113 and Wordsworth 70–1, 95–111 see also Pantisocracy; Penn, William; South America Anghiera, Pietro Martire d’ 276n93 Anglican Church 19, 157, 167, 188, 228 ‘Anglicists’ 13, 211, 213, 247, 250, 251–2 Annual Anthology 261n23 Annual Review 5, 12, 56, 57, 60, 208, 230, 243, 251 Anquetil-Duperron, Abraham 230, 293n73 apostasy see radicalism Arabia 147, 167–206, 231 Arabian literature 192 Arabian Nights Entertainment 12, 168, 169, 202, 212 Arabian Tales 169, 202, 204 Ardebeili, Achmed 196–7 Aristotle 23 asceticism 23, 30, 200 Asia 13, 184, 185, 207–55 Asiatic Society of Bengal 211, 230–1, 232, 234, 252 Asiatick Researches 229–36, 252 ‘aspheterism’ 164, 206, 271n13 Australia 2, 10, 161 Avon (river) 16, 135 Aztecs 228 and Madoc 80–1, 83, 85, 87–90, 92, 95, 136, 140, 275n85, 276n93, 285n1 Baghdad 190, 191 Baltic 16 Banks, Sir Joseph 115, 161 Baptist Missionary Society see reviews by RS Baptist Missions 13, 158, 225, 227, 229, 242–8 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia 42 bards and bardic tradition 87, 275n74 Barrell, John 4, 185, 212, 217 Bartram, William 70, 72, 85, 110, 278n141, 279n148 and Wordsworth 103–9 Battle of Trafalgar 223 Baum, Joan 18, 19 – 321 – Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 321 01/06/2007 11:54:09 322 Writing the Empire Beaver, Philip 64 Beckford, William 197, 202 Vathek 168, 169, 174, 226, 287n46 Beddoes, Thomas 3, 17, 25–6, 263n55 Hygeia 26 Bedford, Grosvenor Charles 8, 21, 41, 77, 113, 215 Bedouins, influence on Thalaba 181, 182–6, 187–8, 189, 192, 197, 198, 289n97 Benezet, Anthony 27, 65 Bentham, Jeremy 248–9, 250, 296n143 Bernhardt-Kabisch, Ernest 174, 205 Bernier, François 220, 233 Beshero-Bondar, Elisa 90 Bhaba, Homi 4 Blackstone, William 23 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 147, 151 Blakean ideology 204, 229 Bligh, Captain William 47, 126, 127–8, 132, 139, 148, 155 see also mutiny on HMS Bounty Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich 268n161 Bonaparte see Napoleon Bonaparte Botany Bay 73 ‘Botany Bay Eclogues’ (RS) 44 Bougainville, Louis Antoine de 10, 12, 117–19, 127, 150, 152, 153, 162 Bounty, HMS see mutiny on HMS Bounty Brahmans (‘Bramins’) 211, 226, 227, 228, 244 Brantlinger, Patrick 70 Brazil 269n168 Brissot de Warville, Jacques-Pierre 272n23 Bristol 11, 15–17, 114, 205, 260n3, 266n134, 271n18 Bristol Abolition Committee 19 Bristol Library 262n50 Bristol Library Society 22, 77 Bristol Record Society Publications 16 riots 61, 219 and the slave trade 17–21, 22, 26, 32, 45, 47, 61, 62, 261n12, 261n16 ‘Britishness’ 5, 6, 254 see also nationalism Bruce, James 198–9 Bulama 64 Burdett, Francis 55 Bürger, Gottfried 181 ‘Lenore’ 288n72 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 322 Burke, Edmund Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs 21 and Warren Hastings 209 Burney, Captain James 132 Burns, Robert 273n50 Butler, Marilyn 3, 170, 258n3, 285n1 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 3, 12, 115, 140, 143, 162, 165, 190, 192, 197, 214, 215 Southey’s attack on 147–8 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 151 Don Juan 148, 151, 152, 156, 204 Island: or Christian and His Comrades, The 147–57 Vision of Judgment, The 148 Calder, Angus 151 Calvinism 159, 244 Canada 2, 10, 100, 273n50, 277n120 Canary Islands 234, 279n11 Canning, George 221, 295n129 Carey, Brycchan 33, 36 Carey, William 229, 244, 246 Caribbean 27, 55 Carnall, Geoffrey 6, 8, 21, 41, 55 Carver, Jonathan 70, 72, 74, 77, 92, 95, 96, 101–2, 103, 109, 110, 277n123 caste system see Hinduism Catholic Emancipation 55, 89, 246 Catholicism see Southey, Robert Charles I 75 Chatterton, Thomas 20, 41 Chaucer, Geoffrey 75 Cheyne, George 25, 263n53 Chiabrera, Gabriello 276n98 Christian, Fletcher 127, 131, 133, 283n91, 284n115 see also mutiny on HMS Bounty Christianity 5, 9, 11, 89, 90, 147, 164, 271n8 conversion of natives to 51, 124, 163, 210, 227–8, 246–7 and Hinduism 210–14, 227–8, 243–6, 250–1 and Islam 168, 171–8, 180, 185, 187– 91, 200, 283n91, 285n144, 287n44, 289n106 and Montgomery’s Pelican Island 158, 159, 160, 162 01/06/2007 11:54:09 Index and slave trade 28, 31, 38, 42, 45, 50, 56, 57, 61, 65 see also Anglican Church; Baptist Missions; evangelicalism; Methodism; missionaries; Quakers Clarkson, Thomas 3, 18, 19, 30, 41–2, 53, 59–60, 268n158 Essay on the … Slave Trade 49 History of the … Abolition of the … Slave Trade (1808) 59–60, 268n168 A Portraiture of Quakerism (1806) 59 Clavigero, Francisco 93–4, 276n93 Cobbett, William 60 Colebrooke, Henry Thomas 230 Coleman, Deirdre 27, 60, 269n186, 271n12 Coleridge, Ernest Hartley 24 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 3, 6, 9, 11, 113, 124, 132, 135, 150, 157, 171, 179, 189, 206, 271n18, 273n50, 278n146, 279n148, 284n120, 289n97, 290n129 and Madoc 72, 73, 74, 76, 88, 107, 274n57 radicalism and the slave trade 16–24, 25, 26, 27, 28–30, 39, 40–1, 46, 59, 66, 262n50, 263n61, 265n112 ‘Destiny of Nations’ 40 ‘Domestic Peace’ 73 ‘Equality, Inequality, the Evils of Government’ 22–3 Fall of Robespierre, The (with RS) 22 ‘Fears in Solitude’ 52, 205 ‘France: An Ode’ 205, 222 ‘Kubla Khan’ 194, 225, 235 ‘Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement’ 32 ‘Religious Musings’ 40, 52 ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ 17, 42–5, 47, 50, 52, 242 see also Lyrical Ballads; Pantisocracy Colley, Linda 254 Common-Place Book (RS) 92, 137, 179, 182–3, 194, 204, 226 Connell, Philip 124 Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness 16 consumerism 17, 23–4, 28–9, 30, 194 Cook, Captain James 10, 12, 69, 70, 84, 96, 99, 101, 110, 119–20, 125, 137, 161, 236, 283n107, 295n107 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 323 323 ‘Cool Reflections During a Midsummer Walk’ (RS) 268n161 Cooper, Thomas 10, 72, 271n14 Cortez, Hernando 79 Cottle Joseph 25, 266n134 Cowper, William Homer, translations of 273n50 ‘The Negro’s Complaint’ 29 Creoles 59, 62 Cristall, Ann Batten 286n8 Critical Review 42, 55, 170, 190 Croker, John Wilson 3 ‘Crown Colony’ 10, 270n208 Cruikshank, Isaac 47, 48, 50 Curry, Kenneth 78 Curse of Kehama, The (RS) 6, 7, 13, 132, 139, 206, 207–55, 292n18 ‘Preface(s)’ 189, 211 Dante Alighieri 273n50 Danvers, Charles 59 Darwin, Erasmus 158 De Quincey, Thomas 217, 231 Dekker, George 82 Dening, Greg 116 Dessalines, Jean Jacques 58 ‘Destruction of Dom Daniel, The’ (RS) 168–9 ‘Devil’s Thoughts, The’ (RS) 171 Diaz, Bernal 276n93 Diderot, Denis 118–19, 128, 148, 152, 153, 157, 162 disease 25–6, 56, 63–4, 65, 124, 125, 263n53 sexually transmitted 116, 119, 124 Dissent and Dissenters 45, 73, 189 Dominica 37, 268n165 ‘Donica’ (RS) 181, 196 Drake, Nathan 273n42 Drew, John 230 Duffy, Michael 224 Dyer, George 3, 286n8 East India Company 13, 209–210, 227, 245, 246, 247 Ebbatson, J. R. 43 Eden America as 81 Jamaica as 60, 61 01/06/2007 11:54:10 324 Writing the Empire Tahiti as 118, 119, 121, 123, 124, 127, 128, 160–1, 193 in Byron’s Island 151, 153, 155, 156 in Mitford’s Christina 134, 141–2, 146, 147 see also paradise Edinburgh Annual Register 223 Edinburgh Review 6, 175, 227, 245, 246, 292n18, 295n129 see also Jeffrey, Francis Edmond, Rod 116, 284n115 Edwards, Bryan 56 Egypt and Egyptian culture 183, 202, 212, 223 252 in Landor’s Gebir 170 Eliot, George 1 Ellis, William 163 Emancipation Act (1833) 17, 61, 67 emigration 72–3 RS’s plans for 6, 16, 19, 22, 74, 77, 83, 113 see also Pantisocracy empire-building 2 Empson, William 43 ‘English Eclogues’ (RS) 44, 133, 267n140, 282n76 epic 5, 7, 63, 70, 147, 153, 158 and Kehama 206, 207, 254 and Madoc 76, 89, 273n47 and Thalaba 167, 173, 204, 287n49 Epictetus 23, 30, 36 Equiano, Olaudah 53 evangelicalism 162, 164, 189, 210, 211, 242, 246 see also Christianity; Montgomery, James exploration 1, 3, 9, 10, 12, 17, 43, 44, 83, 86 and America 69–70, 71 South Pacific 114–20, 121, 124, 136, 149, 150, 151, 157 and Wordsworth 98–9, 100–3, 109–10, 271n8, 277n120 see also individual explorers; naming, process of; travel narratives and accounts Fall of Robespierre, The (RS and Coleridge) 22 Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal 47 Fiji islands 116 Flinders, Matthew 285n143 Folger, Captain 131 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 324 ‘For a column in Smithfield where Wat Tyler was killed’ (RS) 261n23 ‘For a Monument in the New Forest’ (RS) 75, 261n23 Fothergill, Dr John 103 Fox, Charles Poems … of Ardebeili 196, 197 Fox, William Address … on Abstaining from … Sugar and Rum 29–30 France and French culture 19, 167, 208, 253 and America 92, 95 French Revolution 2, 8, 20, 40, 41–2, 78, 167, 208, 224, 264n84, 270n203 and the slave trade 58–9, 63 and Tahiti 117–18 war with Britain 73, 212, 221, 222–4, 246, 249, 254 see also Napoleon Bonaparte Franklin, Caroline 154, 155 Franklin, Michael 183, 230, 235 Fricker family 261n20 Edith (RS’s wife) 19, 73, 89 Sara 41, 89 Fulford, Tim 3, 70, 87, 212, 289n97 Galland, Antoine 169 gender politics 115, 130, 143, 157, 165, 241 see also women General Evening Post 127 Gentleman’s Magazine 103 George III 85, 148 Ghose, Indira 236, 242 Gibbon, Edward 225, 275n86 Gifford, William 295n129, 196n143 see also Quarterly Review Godwin, William 36 philosophy of 88 Political Justice 22–3 Goethe, Johann Wolgang von 181 Gomara, Francisco Lopez de 276n93 Gray, Thomas, ‘The Bard’ 87 Greece and Greek culture 76, 173, 184, 185, 222, 230 and Byron 151 Grenville, William Wyndham 52–4, 55, 267n157 Guinea 27–8, 45 01/06/2007 11:54:10 Index Haiti 39, 58 Halhed, Nathaniel Brassey 229 Haller, William 175 Hardy, Thomas 41 Hastings, Warren 2, 209, 210, 211 Hawaii 120 Hawkesworth, John 120, 132 Hearne, Samuel 70, 92, 95, 96, 100, 101, 103, 110, 276n94, 277n118 Henley, Samuel 174, 287n46 Herbelot, Barthélemy D’ 177 Heuman, Gad 65, 268n165 Hill, Herbert (RS’s uncle) 19, 41, 188 Hinduism 89, 207–55, 291n2, 292n20 caste system 211, 226–27, 244, 246 as documented by Western scholars 229–6, 252, 294n90 practice of sati 219–21, 228, 241–2, 243 RS’s view of, as fraudulent 225–8 Hoamen Indians 80–1, 83, 87–9, 92, 136, 140–1, 146, 275n80 Hobbes, Thomas 162 Hodges, William 237–8, 236, 250 Homer 1, 118, 185, 273n50 Horn, James 73 Hubbard, William 92 Hudson’s Bay Company 100–1 Hulme, Peter, and Tim Youngs 9 humanitarianism 31, 50, 208, 209, 264n83 RS and 11, 24, 42, 54, 62, 67 Hume, David 24 India 2, 10, 13, 55, 65, 147, 158, 161, 207–55 Bengal 2, 209, 230, 236, 244 Bombay 209 British in 208–13 Calcutta 209, 211 ‘domesticated’ 212, 236–42 Madras 209 strategies for social control in 248–51 India Bill (1813) 247 infanticide 116, 123, 163, 164, 211, 212, 243, 244 Innuit 95 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 325 325 ‘Inscriptions’ (RS) 20, 44, 74–6, 78 ‘For a Cavern that overlooks the River Avon’ 75, 76 ‘For a Column at Newbury’ 75 ‘For a Monument at Silbury-Hill’ 75 ‘For a Monument in the New Forest’ 75–6 ‘For a Tablet on the Banks of a Stream’ 76 Iolo Morganwg 275n74 Ireland 2, 15, 16, 289n97 Islam and Islamic culture 10, 12, 89, 167–206, 228, 289n101 Jacobinism 21, 41, 42 ‘black Jacobin’ (L’Ouverture) 58 French Jacobins 123 and Madoc 78 RS and 17, 20, 72, 78, 171, 179, 244 Jamaica 18, 27, 57, 60, 61 James, P. M. 12, 115, 164 ‘The Otaheitean Mourner’ 127–30, 131, 139, 153, 154, 155 Jarman, Paul 272n35 Jeffrey, Francis 6–7, 175, 206, 212 Jimack, Peter 118 Joan of Arc (RS) 40, 168, 210, 254 Johnson, Joseph 286n8 Johnson, Samuel, Rasselas 194 Jones, Sir William ‘Persian’ and Kehama 211, 230–6, 247–8, 250, 251, 253 and Thalaba 182–3, 185, 192, 193, 196 ‘Discourse on the Institution of a Society’ 231–2 Essay on the Poetry of Eastern Nations 182, 192 ‘On the Gods of Greece, Italy and India’ 230 ‘The Palace of Fortune’ 235–6 Sacontala 229 see also Asiatic Society of Bengal; Asiatick Researches Kant, Immanuel 268n161 Keane, Patrick 43 01/06/2007 11:54:10 326 Writing the Empire Keats, John 79 ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ 290n123 Kimber, Captain 46–7, 267n144 Kitson, Peter 31, 43, 54, 116 Koster, Henry 269n168 labouring class 2, 21, 23, 60, 123, 142 compared to slaves 20, 60–1 ‘white slavery’ 61, 62 Lake District 8, 12, 59, 71, 205 and Wordsworth 95–101, 102, 277n112 Lamb, Charles 42–3, 51, 206 Lamb family 59 Landor, Walter Savage 201, 213–14 Gebir 169, 170–1, 174, 177, 201, 287n47 landscape, significance of 69–71 and Wordsworth 96, 99–109 Indian 233–4, 236 see also naming, process of; place, significance of Lawson, Alan 81 Leask, Nigel 3, 4, 176, 236 Leclerc, George-Louis 268n161 Lecture on the Slave Trade (RS) 21–31, 34 Lee, Debbie 11, 29, 31, 43, 54 Letters from England by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (RS) 15, 132–3 Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal (RS) 216 Lewis, Matthew, The Monk 196 Life of Nelson (RS) 5, 132 Mitford on 282n71 Liverpool 15, 16, 18, 21 Liverpool, Robert Banks Jenkinson, Lord 55 Locke, John 179 London 15, 16, 21, 47, 57, 209, 219 RS and 168, 205 London Missionary Society 121, 244 Long, Edward 27, 57, 60, 269n186 Lovell, Robert 41, 261n20 Lowes, J. L. 43 luxury 63, 113, 141, 179, 184 criticism of 17, 22–30 oriental luxury 193–4, 197 ‘politics of luxury’ 24, 34 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 326 Lyrical Ballads 7, 42, 44, 55, 73, 97, 103, 110, 266n134, 267n136, 267n140 ‘Advertisement’ 95, 98, 267n136 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, Lord 247–8, 250, 253 MacGillivray, J. R. 272n23 Mackenzie, Alexander 100, 277n120 McKusick, James 73, 97, 148 Madoc (RS) 11–12, 70, 72–95, 110, 152, 157, 168–9, 188, 213 compared to Kehama 215, 221, 225, 239–40, 253, 254, 282nn70–1, 285n1 compared to Mitford’s Christina 132, 135, 136, 137, 139–40, 141, 146 magic and superstition 12, 41, 62, 122, 139, 158 in Kehama 207, 211, 213, 215, 235, 241, 242, 244 in Thalaba 168, 169, 170–1, 176, 179–82, 185, 190, 196, 198–201, 202, 204, 205, 286n1 Majeed, Javed 211, 253 Makdisi, Saree 211, 219, 291n10 malaria 65 see also disease Malory, Thomas 180 Malta 223 Manchester 15 Manco Capac 276n93 Mandeville, John 193 Manicheanism 35, 185 Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice 57, 269n186 Mariner, William 151, 152, 153, 154 Marlowe, Christopher 225 Marquesas Islands 9, 121 Marracci, Ludovico 287n29 marriage, attitude towards in Byron 150, 155 Diderot 118 in Madoc 87, 88–9, 275n85 in Mitford’s Christina 134, 137, 144, 145, 146 see also monogamy; polygamy Marshall, P. J. 209 Martin, John 151 May, John 60, 64 Mazzeo, Tilar 184 01/06/2007 11:54:10 Index Melanesian Islands 9, 116 Methodism 158 Mexico 85, 273n50 middle class 31, 73, 255, 280n27 Middle East 10, 12, 167–206, 254 ‘middle passage’ 18 Midgeley, Clare 30 ‘Midsummer Poem, A’ (RS) 268n161 Mill, James 211, 250, 252–3, 294n90 millenarianism 40, 266n118 Milton, John, and his influence 159, 180, 204 Paradise Lost 157, 204 Minchinton, W. E. 18 missionaries 55, 56, 89 in the South Pacific 116, 121–6, 138, 155, 157–9, 161–4 in India 211, 225, 227, 229, 233, 240, 242–8, 250, 268n168, 295n128 narratives 12, 123, 136, 157 see also reviews by RS Mississippi River 101, 276n89 Mitford, Mary Russell 3, 12, 115, 162, 164, 282nn70–1, 283n88, 283n107 Christina, The Maid of the South Seas 131–47 compared to Byron’s Island 147–57 Miscellaneous Poems 143 Narrative Poems on the Female Character 143 Our Village 133 ‘Mohammed’ (RS) 171–4 monarchy see Southey, Robert monogamy 128, 131, 144, 146, 155, 157, 186, 194, 196, 205 and pelicans 285n143 Montgomery, James 3, 12, 115, 184n136 Pelican Island, The 157–63, 164, 285n143 West Indies, The 268n158 Monthly Mirror 31 Moore, Thomas 176, 190, 192, 197, 214 More, Hannah 17 Cheap Repository Tracts 36 Coelebs in Search of a Wife 142, 143 ‘The Sorrows of Yamba, or the Negro Woman’s Lamentation’ 51 Morning Post 205, 261n22 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 327 327 Morton, Timothy 30, 31 Mukherjee, S. N. 233 mutiny on HMS Bounty 47, 113, 114, 245 and Byron’s Island 148, 149, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 284n115 and James’s ‘Otaheitean Mourner’ 127–8, 281n55 and Mitford’s Christina 131–2, 134, 138, 139, 140, 145, 146, 147 see also Bligh, Captain James; Christian, Fletcher mythology 5, 104, 254, 255 Hindu, and Kehama 207, 208, 212–13, 215, 227–8, 230, 233–4, 252, 292nn19–20 and Madoc 90 and Tahitian women 116, 121, 127, 152, 279n2 and Thalaba 167, 168, 169, 188, 285n1 naming, process of 69, 70–1 and Madoc 72, 74, 76, 83–5 and Wordsworth 95–103, 109, 277n112 Napoleon Bonaparte 13, 52, 53, 55, 58, 167, 170, 171, 208, 212 as model for Kehama 221–5, 246, 251 nationalism 69–70 national epic 5, 254 RS and 5, 6, 13, 110, 167–8, 206, 207–8, 253, 253–5 Nelson, Horatio 223, 282n71 see also Life of Nelson (RS) ‘New World’ 157, 159, 161, 165 Newman, John Henry 189 Niebuhr, Carsten 176, 181, 183 ‘noble savage’ 12, 80, 108, 118, 124, 136, 138, 145, 159, 183, 273n48 Obeyesekere, Gananath 120 Oicart, Bernard 169 Old Testament 40, 124, 176 orientalism 4, 7, 10, 12, 85–6 and Kehama 207–55 and Thalaba 167–206 ‘Orientalists’ 13, 211 see also ‘Anglicists’ Ossian 118 01/06/2007 11:54:10 328 Writing the Empire ‘other’ 4, 5, 9, 124, 167, 172, 185–6, 187, 204, 212, 214, 236 sexual 116 Ottoman empire 151, 184 Ouverture, Toussaint L’ 58–9 Oxford 6, 113, 261n19 Balliol College 23 Oxford University 19 Paine, Thomas 22 Rights of Man 21 Panopticon penitentiary 248, 249, 250, 296n145 see also Bentham, Jeremy Pantisocracy 6, 11–12 and Coleridge’s and RS’s early radicalism 19, 24, 25, 26, 40, 66, 72–4, 107, 113, 114, 135, 151, 164, 206, 261n20 and Madoc 71, 76, 77, 80, 81, 87–9, 92, 95, 272n23, 273n48, 275n85, 278n146 and Wordsworth 108 paradise 118, 119, 130, 254 in Byron’s Island 149–50, 154, 156 in Mitford’s Christina 134, 140, 141, 145, 146 in Montgomery’s Pelican Island 158, 160 in RS’s Thalaba 178, 192–8 see also Eden Paraguay 273n50 pastoralism 16, 23, 27, 31–2, 170, 255 in America 72, 76, 104 in Madoc 82, 83 and the Middle East 170, 183, 184–5, 192, 198 and the South Pacific 133, 135, 143, 150, 151 in Wordsworth 108 Peasant’s Revolt 261n22 ‘Pelayo’ see Roderick the Last of the Goths Penn, William 59 Pennsylvanian colony 59, 66 Perceval, Spencer 55 Persia and Persian culture 185, 186, 191, 193, 196–7, 229, 231 Peru 276n93 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 328 Pitcairn Island 131, 155, 156 in Mitford’s Christina 134–8, 140–1, 143, 145–6 Pitt, William 55, 179, 268n163 declared war on France 222 government under 73 place, significance of 69–70, 76, 83, 85, 95, 109 and Wordsworth 95–103 see also naming, process of plantocracy 30, 38, 56, 57 Plato 23, 74, 272n28 Pneumatic Institute 26 see also Beddoes, Thomas Poems (1797; RS) 75, 261n23, 283n103, 288n71 Poems (1799; RS) 42, 44 ‘Poems on the Slave Trade’ (RS) 17, 31–42, 44, 55, 56 Poetical Works (1837–8; RS) 39, 189, 200 Poland 273n50 Political Register 60 Polwhele, Richard, The Unsex’d Females 142–3 polygamy 174, 243, 246 Polynesia see South Pacific Porter, Andrew 10 Porter, Roy 263n53 Portugal and Portuguese culture 8, 12, 41 RS’s visits to 89, 167, 201, 212, 216–17, 219, 220, 221, 223, 253, 268n168, 275n85, 288n55 Pratt, Lynda 3, 4, 76, 84, 90 Pratt, Mary Louise 250, 274n57 Priestley, Joseph 72, 271n14 primitivism 24, 26, 104, 108, 114, 118, 123 prison reform see Southey, Robert ‘psycho-imperialism’ 9, 71 Pughe, William Owen 275n74 Purchas, Samuel 193, 194 Quakers 19, 50, 59, 157, 189, 289n106 Quarterly Review 5, 12, 63, 64, 65, 121, 125, 128, 131, 143, 147, 163, 243, 249, 295n129 see also Gifford, William quest 70, 254, 271n8 and Madoc 80 01/06/2007 11:54:10 Index and Thalaba 168, 174, 180, 182, 190, 193, 196, 202, 204, 205 race, issues of 27–8, 36–8, 43, 54, 57–8, 63–4, 80–2, 88, 116–17, 130, 136–7, 174, 254, 268n161 radicalism 5, 6, 11, 142 and Byron 150, 152 and Madoc 70, 74, 77, 78, 79, 84, 89, 92, 96, 139 and RS 15–39, 133, 179, 186, 189, 204, 269n187 RS’s move away from 40, 41, 44, 53, 55, 66–7, 84, 120, 164, 165, 167–8, 208, 210, 212, 249, 251, 253, 254, 284n120, 284n120, 284n136 apostasy 8, 67, 152, 222 and Thalaba 204–6 see also Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; Pantisocracy Rajan, Balachandra 214 Regis, Pamela 106, 278n141 reviews by RS Chronological History of the West Indies (T. Southey) 17, 62–3, 66 History of the … Slave Trade (Clarkson) 60 Life of Philip Beaver 64–5 Lyrical Ballads 42 New Testament in the Negro Tongue 65–6 No Slaves, No Sugar 57–9 Periodical Accounts relative to the Baptist Missionary Society 227, 233, 242–8 Report of … the African Institution 65 Transactions of the Missionary Society 56–7, 121–6, 161, 244, 245 Travels of Ali Bey 188 Richardson, Alan 35, 36, 43 Rickman, John 55, 142, 249 Robertson, Fiona 273n47 Roderick the Last of the Goths (RS) 214 Roe, Nicholas 73 Ross, Marlon 71 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 36, 104, 136, 151, 152, 157, 159, 161, 162, 164, 165, 279n3 Discourse Upon … Inequality among Mankind (1755) 12, 114, 118 ‘Rudiger’ (RS) 181 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 329 329 Saglia, Diego 194, 295n113 Said, Edward 4, 85, 172, 231 ‘Sailor who had Served in the Slave Trade, The’ (RS) 17, 42–52, 53 St Christina 9, 121 St Domingue 37, 58, 63 St Mary Redcliffe 19 Sale, George Koran 171–4, 176, 177, 179 Sancho, Ignatius 53 Sanskrit 185, 227, 229 sati, practice of see Hinduism Sayers, Frank 169 Schama, Simon 16, 69 Scott, Walter 3, 282n71 review of Kehama 215, 239 Sekora, John 23 Severn (river) 15, 16 Seward, Anna 3, 88 Seward, Edmund 23, 30 sex 47 in Bartram 104 and Byron 148–9, 150–1, 152, 153, 154–5, 156, 157 in Mitford’s Christina 134–5, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 144, 146, 147 in Montgomery’s Pelican Island 162 RS’s attitude towards 174, 186 RS’s sexuality 148 and Tahitian women 115–23, 124, 130 and Thalaba 192, 193, 194, 196, 197 and Wordsworth 108 Shakespeare, William 75, 192 Sharafuddin, Mohammed 172, 173, 179, 191 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 147, 214 Alastor 190 ‘Ozymandias’ 179 Queen Mab 235 Shenstone, William 273n42, 276n98 Shore, John (Lord Teignmouth) 207 Sierra Leone 270n203, 270n207 slave trade 11 African 15–62 West Indian 62–6 royal support for 60 RS’s shifting views on 55–62 01/06/2007 11:54:10 330 Writing the Empire slave ships and British seamen 47, 49, 264n84 see also abolition Smith, Adam 24 Wealth of Nations 22–3 Smith, Bernard 12, 124, 236, 282n81 Smith, Christopher 44–5, 273n40 Smith, Sydney 245–6 Smith, William Hawkes 195, 203 Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade 18, 47, 265n98 Socinianism 157, 189 Somerset, James 57, 269n186 ‘Songs of the American Indians’ (RS) 92 Sonnerat, Pierre 233 ‘Sonnet. The Bee’ (RS) 262n24 South America 276n93 Surinam 65 South Pacific (Polynesia) 9, 10, 12, 27, 55, 89, 96, 113–65, 174, 236, 244 Southey, Robert (RS’s father) 20 bankruptcy 21 death 72 Southey, Robert Catholicism, attitude towards 89–90, 157, 167, 188, 216–17, 228, 246, 268n163 journalism 2, 3, 4, 5, 11, 13, 77, 110, 158, 161, 208 on Hindu India 208, 242–8 on the slave trade 17, 55–62 on the South Pacific 120, 121–6, 136, 141, 147 see also reviews by RS ‘man of letters’ 1, 2, 165, 255 monarchy, attitude towards 74, 75, 167, 179, 186 neglect of 1–2, 255 plagiarism and 43–4, 267n136 Poet Laureate, as 2, 148, 165 prison reform and social control, attitude towards 248–51 religious beliefs 157–8, 187–91 Southey, Thomas (RS’s brother) 17, 47, 62 see also reviews by RS ‘Southeyopolis’ 72–4, 85, 95, 113 Spanish colonialism 63, 90, 276 Specimens of the Later English Poets (RS) 8 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 330 Speck, W. A. 3 ‘spectacle’ of public events 213–21 Spenser, Edmund Britomart 253 Faerie Queene 139, 173, 180 Spivak, Gayatri 4, 185 Staël, Madame de 215 Stansfield, Dorothy 25 Stephen, James 58 Stevenson, Robert Louis South Sea Tales 157 Stewart, Charles 57 Stewart, George 128, 131, 148, 154, 155, 156, 284n115 in Mitford’s Christina 129–30 Storey, Mark 3, 267n140 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom’s Cabin 52 sugar 18–19, 27, 31, 34 boycott on 29–30 Susquehannah (river) 72, 77, 271n14 Switzerland and Swiss culture 184, 222 Tahiti (‘Otaheitia’) 113–65 in Byron’s Island 147–57 in James’s ‘Otaheitan Mourner’ 127–30 in Mitford’s Christina 131–47 in Montgomery’s Pelican Island 157–63 Tahuata see St Christina Tale of Paraguay, A (RS) 273n48, 295n112 Tarleton, General Banastre 64 Taylor, Peter 101 Taylor, William 181, 190, 207–8, 246, 265n104, 288n72 Thalaba the Destroyer (RS) 6, 7, 12, 139, 144, 153, 167–206, 207, 208 as an amalgam of texts 169, 174–8 compared to Kehama 213, 214, 215, 217, 221, 226, 240, 253 dualism in 198–201 Thames (river) 16, 135, 207 Thelwall, John 41, 208–9 ‘Think Valentine, as speeding on thy way’ (RS) 73 Thomas, Nicholas 117 Tiffin, Chris 81 Timor 127 ‘To a Bee’ (RS) 20 ‘To Horror’ (RS) 39–40 01/06/2007 11:54:11 Index ‘To the Genius of Africa’ (RS) 38–9, 40 Tonga Islands 121, 122, 151, 152 travel narratives and accounts 3, 9, 12 and America 70, 71, 77, 80, 83–4, 86, 95, 96, 100–3, 106, 107, 109, 110, 271n8, 277n123, 278n141 and India 208, 229, 233, 251, 254 and the Middle East 169, 181, 183–5, 192, 193, 198 and the South Pacific 114, 115–20, 119, 123, 137, 158, 161 Treaty of Amiens 222–3 Tribune, The 208 Tubuai (‘Toobonai’) 151, 155 Tyler, Elizabeth (RS’s aunt) 20 tyranny and despotism 52, 75, 76, 78, 84, 89, 167, 188, 209, 261n23 and Kehama 13, 210, 211, 212, 219, 222–3, 227, 229, 241, 242, 251, 253, 273 in Montgomery’s Pelican Island 162 and the slave trade 25, 34–5 and Thalaba 168, 169, 170, 178–9, 184, 186, 190, 191, 199, 200, 201 Valle, Pietro della 220 vampirism 181, 196 ‘Verses … upon the Installation of Lord Grenville’ (RS) 52–5 Victorian period and culture 1, 2, 10, 67, 144, 206, 242, 254, 255 Vision of Judgement, A (RS) 138, 150 Volney, Constantin 176, 181, 183–5, 192, 225 Voltaire, François, Candide 220 Wadstrom, Carl Bernard 27, 32, 65 Wakefield, Gilbert 286n8 Wales 16, 113, 260n3, 278n146 Welsh colony and Madoc 12, 71, 77–80, 81, 83–5, 90, 275n85 Wallis, Samuel 117, 119, 127, 137 Wat Tyler (RS) 20, 21, 168, 179 main character 254 Watchman, The 25 Weber, Max 279n4 Wedderburn, Robert 53 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 331 331 West Indies 11, 17, 18–19, 24, 29–30, 31, 32, 34, 37, 52, 54, 56, 57, 58, 60, 62–6, 268n165, 270n208 Westminster School 19 White, Daniel E. 189 Wilberforce, William 3, 38, 47, 53, 56–7, 58, 189, 247, 268n158, 268n168 abolition bill (1791), defeat of 261n12 Wiley, Michael 70, 99, 277n112 Wilford, Francis 230, 233, 234, 252 Wilkins, Charles 229 William I 23, 75 Williams, Helen Maria 142 Williamson, Captain Thomas 236, 239, 250–1 Wilson, Captain Henry 121, 280n33 Wind, Astrid 82 Withers, George 7 Wollstonecraft, Mary 3, 142–3 and RS 283n103, 286n8 Vindication of the Rights of Woman 22 women female sexuality 12, 115–20, 122, 123, 127–8, 144, 150, 162, 163 female slaves 32–3, 46–7, 49–50, 51 idealized and virtuous 141–3, 241, 295n112 representations of 144, 162 as Aphrodite/Venus 115, 118, 119, 153, 154 in Byron’s Island 149, 150, 152–7 as Eve 119, 141, 153, 154, 155, 156, 162 in Kehama 212, 219–20, 236–42 in Mitford’s Christina 131–47 in Montgomery’s Pelican Island 162 in Thalaba 186, 192–8 RS’s attitude towards 89, 164, 165, 186, 240, 254 separate spheres 143 see also gender politics; marriage Wordsworth, Dorothy 59, 102, 265n103, 279n150 Wordsworth, Jonathan 44 Wordsworth, William 3, 7, 9, 44, 59, 69–111, 150, 206, 267n140 Descriptive Sketches 184 ‘Essay on Epitaphs’ 96–7 01/06/2007 11:54:11 332 Writing the Empire Excursion, The 110–11, 270n213 ‘The Female Vagrant’ 110 ‘Home at Grasmere’ 99 ‘Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree’ 96, 97, 98 ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’ 12, 70–1, 95–100, 102, 109, 277n123 Prelude, The 219 ‘Ruth’ 12, 71, 103–10 ‘The Thorn’ 277n108 ‘To Joanna’ 100–1 Enlightenment 3 Southey.indb 332 ‘To M. H.’ 98–9 ‘To Toussaint L’Ouverture’ 59 ‘We Are Seven’ 277n108 see also Lyrical Ballads Wu, Duncan 277n118, 277n123 Wynn, Charles W. W. 19, 41, 168 Yearsley, Ann 17 yellow fever 63 see also disease Youngs, Tim 9 01/06/2007 11:54:11