Grasmere 2011: Selected Papers from the Wordsworth Summer Conference

Richard Gravil

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Grasme re 2011 Selected papers from the Wordsworth Summer Conference compiled by Richard Gravil HEBƁS EBOOK PLEASE SCROLL TO PAGE 2FOR ADVICE ON THE USE OF THI 6TJOH UIJT &CPPLU *This book is designed to be read in single page view, using the ‘fit page’ command. *To navigate through the contents use the hyperlinked ‘Bookmarks’ at the left of the screen. *To search, click the search symbol. *For ease of reading, use to enlarge the page to full screen, and return to normal view using . *Hyperlinks (if any) appear in Blue Underlined Text. 1FSNJTTJPOT Your purchase of this ebook licenses you to read this work on-screen. You may print a copy of the book for your own use but copy and paste functions are disabled. No part of this publication may be otherwise reproduced or transmitted or distributed without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher. Making or distributing copies of this book would constitute copyright infringement and would be liable to prosecution. Thank you for respecting the rights of the author.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• European

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• Publié par: Humanities eBooks
• Date de parution: 11 janvier 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781847601919
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

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Grasmere 2011 Selected papers from the Wordsworth Summer Conference

compiled by Richard Gravil

HEB☼ S EBOOK PLEASE SCROLL TO PAGE 2FOR ADVI CE ON THE USE OF THI

Using this Ebookt

*This book is designed to be read in single page view, using the ‘fit page’ command. *To navigate through the contents use the hyperlinked ‘Bookmarks’ at the left of the screen. *To search, click the search symbol. *For ease of reading, use <CTRL+L> to enlarge the page to full screen, and return to normal view using < Esc >. *Hyperlinks (if any) appear in Blue Underlined Text.

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Your purchase of this ebook licenses you to read this work on-screen.

You may print a copy of the book for your own use but copy and paste functions are disabled.

No part of this publication may be otherwise reproduced or transmitted or distributed without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher.

Making or distributing copies of this book would constitute copyright infringement and would be liable to prosecution. Thank you for respecting the rights of the author.

Grasmere, 2011

Selected Papers from The Wordsworth Summer Conference compiled by Richard Gravil on behalf of The Wordsworth Conference Foundation

HEB☼ Humanities-Ebooks, LLP

© heWordsworth Conference Foundation, 2011

Copyright is asserted by the Foundation on behalf of the contributing authors who retain all rights of further publication and distribution.

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Contents

Foreword Ann Wroe The Necessity of Atheism: 200 years young 7 Stephen Gill ‘Two Consciousnesses’: Wordsworth’s Sequels 25 Mark J. Bruhn An Independent Mind? Wordsworth’s Dualism 46 Madeleine Callaghan Shelley and the Ambivalence of Idealism 60 Jacob Risinger Wordsworth’s Commanding Eminence: Self-Government and Stoic Outlook inThe Excursion68 Jessica Fay Wordsworth’s Poetic Cells: Hermits, Silence, and Language 80 Matthew Rowney Where the Wheel Isn’t: the Peripatetic in ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ and ‘The Solitary Reaper’ 92 Gregory Leadbetter Wordsworth’s ‘Untrodden Ways’: Death, Absence and the Space of Writing 103 Daniel Robinson Wordsworth’s Sonnets, Newspaper Verse, and the ‘Moving Accident’ 111 Mary A. Favret The General Fast and Humiliation 128 Monika Class Coleridge and Phrenology 151 Stacey McDowell The Playwright Keats Might Have Been 162 Richard Gravil Mr Thelwall’s Ear; or, hearing The Excursion171 Felicity James Writing Female Biography: Mary Hays and the life-writing of religious Dissent 204

Foreword

This selection of lectures and papers is the fourth such to be pub- lished on behalf of the Wordsworth Conference Foundation. All four books are available in pdf form to libraries from MyiLibrary.com, EBSCO and Ebrary, and to individualsfromHumanities-Ebooks. Paperbacks are available exclusively fromLulu.com. This collection will also be available fromtheAmazonKindle store, though with end-notes rather than footnotes.

Richard Gravil,1 December 2011

Ann Wroe

1 The Necessity of Atheism: 200 years young

Shelley’sNecessity of Atheismwas the document that got him expelled from Oxford in March 2011. Its genesis was a peculiar mixture of public and private grievance, youthful bravado and a sincere search for truth. Shelley challenged his readers to prove to him that God existed. Their intemperate reaction did much to set him on his path towards becoming, half voluntarily, a social outcast. Yet his atheism is complex, and in the end very different from what the word seems to imply.

In Oxford 200 years ago, towards the end of February, a tall, long- haired, slightly stooped young man came out of University College with a package under his arm. The university authorities were already wary of this 18-year-old first-year student: expensively but untidily dressed, with a proud, wild look, and known as a troublemaker. Percy Bysshe Shelley was the son of a Sussex landowner, but was already driving his father to distraction with his uncontrollable ways; he had been a star pupil at Eton, but had already made several attempts on the place with electrical machines and gunpowder. He crossed the High, passed the Bodleian, and strode towards Munday & Slatter’s printing shop and stationer’s on the corner of the Broad. Mr Munday had already published Shelley’s violently Republican-flavouredPosthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson, at his own expense, and in fact Shelley’s father had asked him par-  ticularly to indulge his son in his ‘printing freaks’. By that, poor Timothy Shelley probably meant nothing more ruffling to morality than the eye-rolling, bosom-heaving Gothic romances his son had

1 A slightly shorter version of this paper was delivered as the first annual Shelley lecture to the British Humanist Association in March 2011 2 P. B. Shelley,The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. by Frederick. L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), I, 26n.

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already produced, such asZastrozziandSt Irvyne. But Mr Munday’s tolerance was about to be much more severely tested. Once inside the door, Shelley put down his package, took out a handful of slim book- lets, and scattered them inside the window and over the counter. Thus was publishedThe Necessity of Atheism. This clarion call was not Shelley’s unaided work. He was helped with it—at least as far as formulating his thoughts went—by his best friend at University College, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, and together they had been feverishly plotting it by letter all through the Christmas holidays. The usual festivities of the season went on downstairs while, upstairs, blaspheming pens raced swiftly across the paper. At this remove it is impossible to say for certain who was responsible for what; but Shelley seized charge of the final form of it, the print- ing and the distribution. And the title, for a start, bears his strong mark upon it. He had named his ‘little tract’, as he fondly called it 1 in the opening Advertisement, to cause maximum offence. Atheism was necessary: necessary for progress, necessary for man’s libera- tion. And it was not only necessary, but fated, inevitable, as mankind and history surged towards enlightenment, if we are to give the word ‘Necessity’ the full force it carried for Shelley in 1811. Necessity swept God out of the universe; they could not exist together. And Shelley was harnessing this force for his own purposes, dispersing his explosive material in a way that presaged his ‘Ode to the West Wind’, written eight years later:

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth 2 Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! (ll.66–67)

Indeed his words became ashes very quickly. In about 20 minutes, in fact. A fellow of New College spotted the booklets, had no need to read them, for the title was enough, had the whole lot swept up, and ordered Mr Slatter and Mr Munday to burn them, in his presence, in

 P. B. Shelley,The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. E. B. Murray,  vol. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 993), 2. 2 P. B. Shelley,Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill, Oxford World Classics Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 44.

Ann Wroe

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1 the back kitchen. The repercussions were dire. Shelley and Hogg were hauled sep- arately before the Master and Fellows of University College, were plied with questions about the pamphlet, and refused to answer. And so they were expelled. Shelley had been at Oxford for less than two terms. He despised the place for many reasons, not least its narrow- mindedness and pompous religiosity; it was ‘insipid’ and ‘uncongen- ial’, he moaned to William Godwin the next January, and, in short, ‘I could not descend to common life’ (Letters, I, 228). His very expul- sion was proof of its intellectual barrenness, since, as he indignantly told his fuming father, ‘no argument was publickly brought forward to disprove our reasoning’ (56). But all the same, he was shattered to be thrown out. It marked the beginning of his break with his father, and his life as a social outcast. You could argue that both the break and the pariah status were bound to come eventually, as a result of Shelley’s refusal to conform with contemporary values on more or less every count. But his sudden ejection from Oxford certainly did not help. Suppose you had been in Munday & Slatter’s on that day, with st your 21 century sensibilities unchanged. Suppose you had bought a copy (it cost sixpence, fairly steep for an octavo of 14 pages, some of them blank), or suppose you had had it thrust urgently into your hand by Shelley, for thiswasurgent work, to him. What would you have thought of it? The answer, I think, is that no reasonable person today would be in the least offended by it. You might say it was too rational; you might find its style achingly pompous, especially for an 18-year-old. (Shelley did tell Godwin, though, when he sent him a copy, that he had ‘compressed’ it ‘from much prolix reasoning’, and 2 we should be grateful indeed for that. ) And you might, just possibly, think it was a prank. Shelley at the time was a wicked prankster, though not many knew it, and Shelley scholars themselves did not know the extent of it until a batch of unknown letters resurfaced in an attic in 2005. He had

Letters, I, 52n;The Prose Works, 320. 2 B. C. Barker-Benfield, ‘A Spoof Letter to William Godwin’,Bodleian Library Record, vol. XXI no.  (for April 2008, publ. 2009), 2–5.

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started to make a habit of writing atheistical letters to clergy and other gentle, unsuspecting types for a while, under false names, pretend- ing to be a Christian in confusion. Ralph Wedgwood, for example, a cousin of the famous potter Josiah, had been the butt of such mis- sives all through December and January, both from Shelley and ‘my 1 learned friend Mr Hogg’ . Shelley, while thanking him effusively for his ‘well written’ and ‘elucidating’ letters, delighted to tangle him in unanswerable argument, and on the 15th he lowered the boom with typical Shelleyan scorn: ‘You will [say that] the assumption of mor- tality brought Christ nearer to the condition of Man—that is to sup- pose a mass of electrified clay possessing the power to confine, fetter & deteriorate the omnipresent intelligence of the universe. That is to suppose one of the meanest of the Creator’s works as imposing a restraint upon the free agency of the Creator himself;—but these superstitions are almost too monstrous to demand a serious refutation.’ (Darwall-Smith, 82). Poor Wedgwood, to be accused of demeaning God—and by a mocking teenager who delighted to demean Him at every opportunity. No pranksterism, however, coloursThe Necessity of Atheism. The argument is short, serious, focused and sincere. It was, perhaps, the mildest possible expression of Shelley’s disbelief; elsewhere he called it a ‘metaphysical pamphlet’, milder still (Letters, I, 88). The epigram comes from Bacon: ‘The human mind cannot in any way accept as true that which lacks a clear and obvious demonstration.’ So there is the theme laid out: a polite, but vigorous, request for proof of God’s existence, and a passionate plea for truth, for ‘love of truth’ has pushed Shelley to write this, and, as he concludes, ‘Truth has 2 always been found to promote the best interests of mankind.’ His arguments are very simple. In essence they are the arguments of Locke and Hume, his favourite philosophers of the moment. Why do we believe in anything? Shelley asks. Because we are convinced by the evidence of our senses, our own experiences, or other people’s experiences. Shelley calls these the three ‘degrees of excitement’, that

 Robin Darwall-Smith, ‘The Student Hoaxers: The New Shelley Letters’, University College Record, vol. XIV, no.  (2005), 79. 2 The text ofThe Necessity of Atheismis taken fromThe Prose Works, –5.