The Past Jumps Up: British Radicals and the Remaking of Literary History, 1790-1870.

Abstract

This dissertation argues that radical editors and publishers transformed nineteenth-century literary history, hauling the texts of the recent past directly into the present and undoing literary chronology in the service of political change. The radical, political periodical press of the nineteenth century was filled with excerpts of literary texts from the recent past. We might call this publication practice nostalgic, except for the fact that these editors and publishers, not content with idealizing the radical past, pulled these texts directly into the present, excerpting them, reprinting them, and making them do new political work. By re-circulating the texts of the 1790s, radicals wrote a powerful alternative history of the nineteenth century. Robert Southey and William Wordsworth might have been considered conservatives by the 1810s, but not on the pages of the radical press, where they emerge as lifelong radical poets. The first two chapters of this dissertation trace the afterlives of works by William Godwin, Robert Southey, and William Wordsworth, including CALEB WILLIAMS, WAT TYLER, and Wordsworth’s Liberty Sonnets. These chapters examine how these texts appeared in important periodicals, including Thomas Wooler’s THE BLACK DWARF and William Thomson’s CHARTIST CIRCULAR. The third chapter hones in on radical print culture by turning to a central site for practices of reading, writing, and publishing: the prison. This chapter analyzes a series of letters and poems written from prison, including the extended prison correspondence between Henry Vincent, a Chartist, and Francis Place. This chapter’s treatment of poems, written from prison and published in the radical press, has significant implications for our conception of the “solitary” lyric speaker of early nineteenth-century poetry. The dissertation’s final chapter turns to the second half of the nineteenth century, to examine George Jacob Holyoake’s repeated deployment of excerpts of texts by George Eliot, including FELIX HOLT: THE RADICAL. By carefully excerpting and reprinting Eliot’s novels, poems, and plays, Holyoake turned her into a dedicated supporter of his various political initiatives. Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates that the re-circulation of literary texts can be a surprisingly effective means of rewriting history and of advancing political movements.