Category: Research

Comprises research and research methodologies. “Research methodologies” is its own tag but not a category.

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“Maximizing (and Enjoying) Research Time in the Archives” by Andrew Burkett

Andrew Burkett
Assistant Professor of English, Union College
Roundtable Talk:  “Researching in the Archives”
NASSR 2013, Boston University
August 9, 2013
11:30-1:00 PM; Conference Auditorium

 

“Maximizing (and Enjoying) Research Time in the Archives”

 

I wanted to begin my brief remarks today first by thanking Kirstyn and her co-organizers for putting together this exciting roundtable and for inviting me to share some of the story of my own experiences in archival research as well as some ideas about how we might all approach future archival work a bit more efficiently and with, perhaps, a bit more enjoyment.  In doing so, I’m going to limit these remarks to thinking about how to maximize—and to appreciate more fully—one’s time once at the archival research site.  And I wanted to note too from the start here that I’m basing these insights largely on my own experiences while working with the Charles Darwin Papers while a Visiting Scholar in the Manuscripts Room at the University of Cambridge’s University Library (or the UL, as it’s affectionately abbreviated).  So, these notes are made in relation mainly to my work at a single-author archive, and some of these ideas thus might not translate seamlessly into other forms of archival research.  That said, I’ve worked to keep my remarks broad enough so as to speak—as best as possible—about “Researching in the Archives.”
A few very brief notes about my archival research project:  I spent roughly two years—on and off—completing the research for the final chapter of my dissertation (which focuses on the role of the idea of “chance” in nineteenth-century cultural and scientific production) at the UL, where I was looking at Darwin’s unpublished manuscripts concerned with the concept of species variation and evolution.  Before leaving Duke and even up until my first days of arrival at Cambridge, I envisioned my archival research as an unearthing of what I—at the time—speculated to be Darwin’s investments in Romantic poetic forms and philosophies, and I hoped to substantiate that thesis by uncovering in the unpublished papers evidence (textual, conceptual, etc.) of an indebtedness to Romantic notions and representations of the aleatory.  Unfortunately, though, I found very little evidence of this sort, and while some of these research endeavors were indeed fruitful to some extent, I found myself moving into something like a state of panic, as my assumptions about what I would find among the papers were rather quickly overturned.  And this leads me to my first major point about working in the archive—be more than willing to adjust your research program as and when you are in the act of investigation.  The more rigid I became in my initial weeks to seek out such evidence, the more I realized that I wasn’t paying the archival materials the respect that they deserved—indeed, that they demanded.  So, I feel that while we certainly need to bring with us expectations of what would be successful outcomes of research, we also need to be able to adjust to the contingencies of the archive.  Once I began to let go of that desire to find what I believed I was seeking, I actually started to stumble upon so many new forms of evidence that took my work in radically novel and exciting directions.
Fortunately, these initial interests led me to uncover—by chance—a largely unpublished sector of the archive dealing with what is referred to by the curators of the Darwin Papers as Darwin’s “Botanical Arithmetic” drafts.  Of course, I won’t go into the details of this find, but I’ll note briefly here that, while Darwin made these numerous and extensive statistical calculations involving the bio-geographical distribution of continental plant species just before the 1859 publication of the Origin of Species, only a few scholars had investigated, at the time of my research, Darwin’s botanical studies that played such a crucial role in his discussion of the key evolutionary concept of ‘variation under nature’ in Chapter II of the Origin.  So my point here, which builds off of my last, is that we must be prepared to evolve as archival researchers if we are going to make new discoveries in unpublished materials.  And this leads to my next piece of advice as well:  this sector of the archive opened wide before me—which was obviously exciting and promising—but as it did so, I was quite overwhelmed with the number of volumes and boxes of documents dedicated to these complex mathematical calculations.  I was also extremely surprised to find that even with an author as famous and celebrated as Darwin that some of these materials were impossible to seek out via electronic research methods and that I had to do the leg work of catalogue searches and even sometimes had to stumble around blindly through volumes and boxes in this sector—page by page, or leaf by leaf—as a number of the boxes were (surprisingly) not fully marked or catalogued, given the relative obscurity of these drafts.  So, part of my second major point here is to expect at some point—and even perhaps for several days at a time—to be overwhelmed completely by the avalanche of information that you will likely trigger in your work, regardless of your project.  The question then becomes:  how does one move through such mountains of information to seek out those five or ten documents that will be most important for your argument and that you might wish to transcribe or even pay large sums to have imaged?  My answer here is a quite simple one:  befriend the archivists and curators and even other researches working among the papers in which you are interested.  Upon finding these materials, I quickly sought out and turned to Adam Perkins, the Curator of Scientific Manuscripts at the UL, and he proved to be an invaluable source of information about the micro-sectors of the “Botanical Arithmetic” drafts that made the most sense for me to look into first (and even provided me with an order through which to move among the papers) based upon the more global concerns of my chapter focusing on the concept of chance—and more specifically to Darwin—the development of his theory of organic variation.  Adam let me know that (by chance) David Kohn, one of the few scholars who had studied and written about these papers, had been seated only a few tables away from me for several weeks during my work in the Manuscripts Room.
This serendipity leads me to my third and final set of remarks—personal observations really—about working in the archives:  really do allow yourself to enjoy your time while searching through the materials.  David was more than excited to talk with me about my project and to give me advice about things such as where I should look next in the archive and ways to proceed efficiently with the work (many of which I’m borrowing from in my own remarks today), and I soon realized after befriending Adam and David that archival research sites are just as—or perhaps even more “alive,” so to speak—as any of our other work sites (e.g., our departments, our classrooms, our offices, etc.).  Archival centers are extremely dynamic, unpredictable, and—as such—exciting places:  they can certainly be intimidating and overwhelming but, more often than not, if we are willing to accept their contingencies and surprises, they are almost always prepared to greet us with hospitality and—most certainly—with vitality.
[Editor’s note: published with permission of the author]

 

 

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"Researching in Archives" – The NGSC Roundtable at NASSR 2013

Want to go on a funded research trip to study a collection that is crucial for your project? Want to know how senior scholars find funding, manage their time, and use a new collection to fortify their work-in-progress? Attend this year’s NGSC professionalization roundtable and learn how.
Conducting research in an archive away from your home institution can lend truly original ideas and evidence to your writing projects. It can also add important lines to your CV and prove that you have research skills that are important for the job market.
When: Friday, August 9, 11:30am – 1pm (Note: this is a brown-bag lunch session. Bring your lunch with you!)
Where: Conference Auditorium
We invited five distinguished speakers to give us advice on how to select an archive to travel to, get paid to do research there, and make the most of what we discover. Following short presentations we will open the floor for a lengthy Q&A session and conversation. Bring your lunches and your questions — we hope to have a lively discussion.
Speakers:

  • Andrew Burkett (Union College)
  • Jill Heydt-Stevenson (CU-Boulder, NGSC faculty advisor)
  • Michelle Levy (Simon Fraser U)
  • Devoney Looser (Arizona State U)
  • Dan White (U of Toronto)

Specifically, our panelists will help us learn:

  • how to write a winning application for funding for the trip,
  • where major collections for our field are held,
  • what you need to prepare before you arrive,
  • how to use the archive as a place of discovery, and
  • what to do with all the notes and photos we gather.

See you all there!

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Sharing Process, Sources, Product: Around My Talk on Grad Student Group Blogging

Just a couple weeks ago, I gave a talk at MLA13 on graduate student blogging in which I call for graduate students, like us and in our example, to blog more about what we do over the course of the years we spend training for our jobs and for publishing. Rather than just reblogging my talk, this post is an effort to share my process of writing this talk, since it was highly dialogic and a new process for me. Feedback from other bloggers was critical to my learning how different users read, write, and connect through communities of graduate students studying Romanticism and other topics in the Humanities and to thinking through two very different kinds of group blogging forums: our nassrgrads blog and HASTAC.
Here’s a link to the talk: “‘A Large Amount of Good Second-Class Work’: The Value of Graduate Students’ Contributions to Scholarly Group Blogs”
Twitter and Storify: While writing my talk, and especially during MLA, I Tweeted a bunch and was on the lookout for Tweets on topic that pointed to relevant scholarly discussions. I made a Storify of these tweets, which you can find here.
To get to the final version of this talk I needed a lot of feedback from nassrgrads.com bloggers — thank you very much for your email replies! I also sought feedback from HASTAC (another group blog forum I wrote about and that I participate in). To think things through, I blogged on HASTAC and through those blogs generated two sets of very useful conversations.
Blog 1: “Graduate Student Research Blogging” and its conversation (on HASTAC) led me to …
Blog 2: “How Do You Use HASTAC” and its conversation (again, on HASTAC’s platform). All I can say is: wow! It is incredibly satisfying and exciting to have real-time discussions with scholars, like Cathy Davidson, and to have those conversations inflect my work so directly and meaningfully. More, please!
Here is a loose compendium of the sources I consulted while writing this talk, pub’d in Google Docs. One source I just thought of that is not on the list, and that includes blogs as scholarship, is Debates in the Digital Humanities (ed. Matthew K. Gold, U of Minnesota P, 2012).
On the “shoulder” of the MLA talk project, I was simultaneously thinking a lot about how we can make our nassrgrads.com blog a better, more fruitful, rewarding, rich, fun, and useful collection of posts and conversations. I’m looking forward to working on these improvements as a group!
All of this is to share a process that was extremely nontraditional for me in terms of scholarship production. It was true for this paper that thinking editorially about our blog and group on nassrgrads, blogging questions and comments in multiple fora, Tweeting and making a Storify, researching in The Chronicle and other pubs that focus on the relationship between scholars, modes of scholarship, and the profession helped me recognized the lack of serial scholarship produced by graduate students (on the whole) and ways in which we can increase our value as working Humanists who produce great quantities of useful work over the course of our training. It was a highly dialogic writing process in which comments from people I only know through HASTAC or nassrgrads — by professional connection in an online research community — contributed to critically thinking through the issues and identifying what I wanted most to say. After all, Mark Sample was adamant that each speaker only had 6 minutes and 40 seconds at the podium. I sweated this one and a lot of discussing and reading went into those few minutes.
Now that most of it is collected here, in this blog post, I am turning to my first spring semester projects: dissertation fellowship applications, revisions for my entries in the Johns Hopkins Guide to New Media and Textuality, and revising a diss chapter into an essay-length piece.
What are you working on right now? Looking forward to hearing from you — tally-ho, Spring semester projects!
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Image of raw cookie dough: By Nick Ares (originally posted to Flickr as Cookie Dough) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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Getting to the Good Parts: Chapbooks and Blue Books

One of my favorite things about Broadview Press’s 2006 edition of Zofloya (1806), by Charlotte Dacre, is the inclusion of a chapbook version of the original text in the appendix.[i] Dacre’s novel, which occupies 216 pages in this edition, has been condensed into a 19-page document that speeds through the tale, sidestepping scenes of excessive emotion, dialogue, and prolonged action and cutting right to the barebones plot. A scene early on in the novel, in which the main character’s father is mortally wounded by his wife’s lover, the count, reads:
“Draw, monster, devil, and incendiary!” exclaimed the frantic husband, at the same time snatching his stiletto from his bosom.
“I have no sword,” cooly returned the count; “but I have, like yourself, a stiletto, that shall be at your service.”
The Marchese heard no more: he struck and struck again with desperate fury at the body of his antagonist; but his aim was rendered unsure by his thirst for vengeance, by the raging and uncontrouled passions of his soul. The count, calm, and self-collected, parried with hellish dexterity his indiscriminate attempts; but receiving, at length, the point of his adversary’s stiletto in his shoulder, he suffered an impulse of rage to nerve his hand; and, retreating for an instant, then furiously advanced, and plunged his dagger to the hilt in the breast of the unfortunate Loredani. (50)
In the chapbook, this same scene simply reads:
“Draw monster and defend yourself!” exclaimed the husband, snatching his stiletto from his bosom.
“I have no sword,” said the Count; “but I have a stiletto.” The Marchese struck at him with great fury. The indignant Count plunged his dagger into the breast of the unfortunate Leonardo. (280)
It sounds almost like an outline or as if recorded from memory. The chapbook, called The Demon of Venice: An Original Romance, By a Lady (1810), like most chapbooks, has been blatantly plagiarized from Dacre’s original, though Adriana Craciun speculates in her footnote to the Broadview introduction that there is a slim chance that Dacre could actually be the author (31). Regardless, the “borrowing” of plot details as the norm does not seem to bother either reader or author, and Alison Milbank claims that changing the names avoids any direct legal ramification for the often-anonymous authors.[ii] Milbank explains the difference between chapbooks and blue books (named, of course, for their blue covers): chapbooks are prominent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and had begun to die out in the early nineteenth century, whereas blue books—Gothic in nature and featuring a more sophisticated illustration style—were prevalent in the early nineteenth century and dealt closely with booksellers (perhaps even those carrying the original novels upon which they were based). Though I have only seen reference to The Demon of Venice as a chapbook, I suspect that it qualifies more as a blue book for these reasons. While books and even library membership were expensive, blue books “provided racy, entertaining and cheap reading for the literate poor,” and like many other more accessible forms of entertainment, such as theater, helped to perpetuate and continue the Gothic legacy among both the well-educated upper classes and the lower classes hoping occupy their minds for relatively cheap (Milbank). Milbank describes two lengths of these small books or pamphlets: “sixpence for 36 pages, and a shilling for 72 pages,” though some were even shorter.
I am just beginning to enter the world of chapbooks and blue books, hoping that this may offer insight into many Gothic novels that have not survived through to modern publishing and digitalization. Even Ann Radcliffe’s monstrous tome The Mysteries of Udolpho has been squeezed into under a hundred pages and re-titled as The Veiled Picture. I’m also interested in these types of abbreviations and how they change the stories themselves as well as the reading experience. I like to think of them as similar to today’s comic books or the series of Great Illustrated Classics with which many of us grew up (the ones with a picture on every other page. You know the ones!). They provide a different type of access to great stories. As Milbank points out, even our most revered literary figures, such as Percy Shelley, had a fondness for blue books, particularly in his youth.
Finding these texts today, however, is not easy. One of my goals for this post is to share with you a recent discovery that’s trying to make such texts as they were intended: accessible again. Literary Mushrooms, a spinoff project of Zittaw Press, is in the process of reprinting and re-illustrating fifteen Gothic chapbooks. They have just set up a great project page here, in order to gather funding for this project, which supports the 50’s-style comic illustrations, printing, and hand-stitching costs. Both Zittaw and Literary Mushrooms are dedicated in revitalizing an interest in these forgotten texts and to combine both nineteenth and twentieth-century elements to create a new (truly Gothic?) reading experience. I’ve just ordered a slew of copies of The Bloody Hand for the Gothic Reading Group that I run, distributing cheap thrills to the (poor) grad student masses, and we are anxious, amidst our regular studies of lengthy volumes, to discuss the difference in shifting from plot-driven novels to plot-only chapbooks, full (I might add) of exclamation points!

[i] Dacre, Charlotte. Zofloya. Ed. Adriana Craciun. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2006.
[ii] Milbank, Alison. “Gothic Satires, Histories, and Chap-Books.” Gothic Fiction: Rare Printed Works from the Sadleir-Black Collection of Gothic Fiction at the Alderman Library, University of Virginia. Marlborough, Wiltshire, UK: Adam Mathew Publications, 2003. http://www.ampltd.co.uk/digital_guides/gothic_fiction/AlisonMilbank3.aspx.
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All Songs [(Post)Romantically] Considered

This summer’s been a contemplative one for me. Packing up and moving to a new city to start my second program in two years has been cause for self-reflection. Such is the nature of moving right on from the M.A. to the Ph.D. (now ‘repping Northwestern, exchanging the #B1GCats for the Oregon #GoDucks). Recently, a thought provoking listen to NPR’s All Songs Considered–in line with some work I’m doing on music for my ICR paper–catalyzed a key moment of self-realization. I began to think back to how my trajectory into Romantic studies was, in fact, launched through music. It’s a great episode, so I highly recommend checking it out (http://www.npr.org/2012/09/04/160431581/the-most-important-band-of-your-college-years).
Broadly, in this post, I look to sort through some issues of scholarly development in dialogue with a close reading of the alternative artist Brand New’s song “The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows.” Importantly, though, I hope to generate some comments that look to different points of departure into the field. It was music for me. Was it music for you? Or was it something visual, literary, or a different medium or some other circumstance entirely?
As already mentioned, the discussion on this episode of All Songs Considered reminded me of how my own intellectual interests were formed. It also alerted me to a function of contemporary music in line with Romantic poetics. Notably, the last person featured in the program discusses the way the group Fun. speaks to her in a language that she simultaneously knows while opening her up to new experiences in fresh ways. The music, for her, is a means to think through and habitually fall “blissfully in love with her life”–as she I think so profoundly puts it. At the core of it, for this person, listening to Fun. generates a headspace that forges a comforting emotional connection between band and listener that parallels what Coleridge famously describes as the defamiliarizing functionality of poetry in Chapter 14 of the Biographia. Poetry shatters what he describes as “the film of familiarity” whereby “we have eyes yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.” Music, like poetry and art, can manifest a medium through which to clarify a sense of self-identity and  perception of one’s relation to the world. Granted, this is always historically situated, but nevertheless potentially purposeful.

Brand New performing at the Academy, Academy 1, Manchester, United Kingdom. (Photograph by Natalia Balcerska. 23 June 2009. © Natalia Balcerska Photography

I can’t help but think. Isn’t this precisely what is operative in Romantic art, both literary and visual? For me, in this respect, it was coming of age in the early- to mid-2000s that engendered a sense of the satisfaction of exploring emotionality in an intellectually charged way. The group Brand New, who’ve been charged by various critics and listeners as “the American Radiohead,” did this for me. Music in the period, generally, but Brand New, specifically, captured a deeply felt affective intensity. To my mind, Brand New’s sophomore effort Deja Entendu (2003) expanded artistic vocabularies of musical expression in especially important ways. It brought new influences into play that went beyond mere musical predecessors. I recall being particularly struck by the allusion to Picasso’s painting Guernica in the title of one of the songs–thereby connecting the psychological tumult of the track to the chaotic aesthetic underpinning the famous Picasso canvas. Deja was a record that directed the listener beyond itself in extraordinary ways.
Centrally, to explore a concrete example, the artistic self-consciousness of singer/songwriter Jesse Lacey’s lyricism is what catapults Brand New’s art into a rich interspace between music and textuality (See: “The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows” from Brand New’s VEVO page on YouTube). Now, as when I heard the song for the very first time, the opening verse strikes me: “We saw the western coast / I saw the hospital / Nurse the shoreline like a wound / Reports of lovers tryst / Were neither clear nor descript / We kept it safe and slow / The quiet things that no one ever knows.” Initially, I was immediately drawn to my sense of Lacey’s unusual diction. The rhyme between “tryst” and “descript” elevated lyrical content beyond what I knew to be everyday language. The “western coast” signifies melancholy emotions, intersecting the direction in which the sun sets. The speaker’s woundedness is underscored both by seeing “the hospital” and the metaphorical turn towards “nurs[ing] the shoreline like a wound.” What I found to be Lacey’s brilliant poetry sparked an ember of interest in me for the literary.
Now, “deconstructionist me” can quite clearly see the intersections between all of this and the forms of Romantic literary and visual culture we’ve all come to know and love. In Lacey’s song, the “reports” the speaker alludes to are positioned in an impossible breach, being “neither clear nor descript.” The song therefore confronts the impossibility of resolution in the face of an intense set of emotions: specifically, an emotional knot between loss and a projected wedding day wrought with boredom. In doing so, it generates a polarity between description and clarity that’s impossible to resolve. Such an aporiaic play in Lacey’s lyrics accords well with tropes in Romantic art and literature, as I’ve realized in my graduate studies in both Art History and English at Oregon.
In any event, in looking at the present, I may have seen too much in the past. There may even be some over-intellectualizing going on. I’m not sure. Also, and perhaps mercifully, my tastes have certainly since evolved. However, it’s been interesting to see how past engagements inform present interests. In closing, I’d definitely love to hear from you all what experiences from the past connect to the work you’re doing in the present.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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Vital Viscera

Though I have temporarily shifted my research from early nineteenth-century depictions of the body to contemporary zombie studies, I’m finding my previous research and the ideas of Romantic-era physicians to be astoundingly enlightening for this project in terms of the vitalism controversy: does materialism or vitalism—“the theory that life is generated and sustained through some form of non-mechanical force or power specific to and located in living bodies”—dominate the motions of the body? (Packham 1).[i] One of the things I find interesting about this controversy, however, is that both still locates the source of life and animation within the body itself (rather than an outside force, such as a higher power or cosmic force, or sometimes even a physician). I’m just beginning my research on vitalism, but, in my mind, the difference between materialism and vitalism seems to be this “unknown” factor. A mechanism can be explained, but the words used to describe the core principle of vitalism—force, spark, power—speak to its vague and elusive nature in such a way that reveals the physican’s awe for the body while materialists seem to claim more authority, even over the individual whose body is in question. The concept of vitalism also disrupts the mind/body dichotomy, as Catherine Packham points out in her excellent study of Eighteenth-Century Vitalism. “‘Life’ itself began to look rather different:” she says, “no longer a physical entity passively carrying out the orders of reason, but a fluid, constant, dynamic, changeable and ultimately elusive force, existing and communicating throughout a vitally animated body” (19). My goal in this post is to describe and discuss the infatuation with interiority of the body shared with some of the prominent vitalists and their interest in movement within even a body that does not appear to be moving.
In 1785, a Mr. James Whytt wrote to accomplished Edinburgh physician William Cullen of the dissection of a Mr. James Cochman’s abdomen twelve hours after his death: “The swelling of [it] increased gradually to a very great extent after you saw him; previous to opening the abdomen, when filliped, it gave the sound of a drum; when open’d…” and goes on to describe the shape and color of various organs.[ii] Cullen himself was one of the leading vitalists at the Edinburgh Medical School, along with his associate Robert Whytt (any relation to the letter-writer, I have yet to surmise) (Packham 6). There are a few things in this brief example to note. Firstly, there is a distinction between the exterior and interior of the body, but also a correlation: swelling indicates an internal change. An action against the exterior, a “fillip,” can indicate even more about the quality and condition of that interior, but Whytt does not seem concerned about such an action disturbing it. The description that follows (which is not something to read right before lunch) compartmentalizes the body to a great extent, describing where in the body things have settled, as if they were settled in an unusual way and had found their way there themselves. Things have clearly been happening within this (leaky) body in the twelve hours since life had animated it, things that remain animated for a time beyond its larger entity.
Physician Robert Whytt describes this kind of body-agency in terms of three categories of animal motions in his 1751 text on vitalism: voluntary, involuntary, and “mixed”. These last two classifications “are performed by the several organs as it were of their own accord, without any attention of the mind, or consciousness of an exertion of its active power: such are the motions of the heart, organs of respiration, stomach, guts, &c; which have been also distinguished by the name Automatic…” (1-2).[iii] Though these ideas precede the Romantic era, they nonetheless inform the kinds of observations made by James Whytt later in his dissection.  They also speak to the claim made by Alan Richardson in his article “Romanticism and the Body,” about the prominence of the body in Romantic poetry. He suggests that Jerome McGann’s theory that Romantic poets strove to transcend the physical and political upheaval of their world through their poetry “failed to account for the diversity of available ideological positions” (2).[iv] Instead, criticism has been seeing more emphasis on the Romantic body within literature (something Aaron brought up in his post on feet at the beginning of the month). Whytt’s sentient principle, which he uses to explain the reanimation (re-sensitizing) of the body after a period of inaction or even momentary death, claims that, since these body parts do not have the ability of stimulation themselves, there must be an “active sentient PRINCIPLE animating these fibres” (Whytt 242). In other words, there must be some kind of energy or substance that sparks this movement and contributes to the overall animation of the body, particularly its involuntary and “mixed” actions. This begs the question, what are our bodies doing when we’re thinking of other things, when we’re not commanding its every move? The poet’s body, then, proves itself a mystery more expansive and active than even the poet’s mind, able to move and act almost of its own accord… even for a short time beyond death.

[i] Packham, Catherine. Eighteenth-Century Vitalism: Bodies, Culture, Politics. New York: Palgrave, 2012.
[ii] Letter from James Whytt. March 1785. Sibbald Library.
[iii] Whytt, Robert. MD. An Essay on the Vital and other Involuntary Motions of Animals. Edinburgh: Printed by Hamilton, Balfour, and Neill. 1751.
[iv] Richardson, Alan. “Romanticism and the Body.” Literature Compass 1 (2004): 1-14.
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"Composition" and "Execution'": The Dramatic Efforts of William Godwin

The Romantic era witnessed the reemergence of closet drama, the rise of what scholars have come to call mental theatre, and Charles Lamb’s famous declaration that Shakespeare has always belonged in print and has always been meant to be read. Examining these attempts to remediate the theatre – to have print supplant the stage as the correct medium for theatrical exhibitions – under the larger categories of poetry, imagination, or mental theatre does not consider the shifting material situation of the period. While valuable work has been done examining theatre’s relationship to these categories as well as the social space offered by the theatre and changes in theatrical laws and practices, this post will show that one of the principal objections regarding writing for the stage during the Romantic era was more pragmatic. William Godwin, an early and neglected participant in this conversation, claims that the lag time between the composition and performance of a play prevents the theatre and playwrights from staying current.
As many critics have shown, Godwin and his circle – including Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, John Thelwall, and others –share a “profound mistrust of the theater and theatricality in general.” [1] Summarizing the chief goals of Godwin’s landmark 1793 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness, Mark Philip echoes these sentiments when he claims that, according to Godwin, “as people become more fully autonomous, rational and benevolent, the institutions of property and government will fall by the wayside, but so too will such invidious practices as concerts and theatrical performances.” [2] A reexamination of his famous dismissal of the “invidious practices” of concerts and theatrical performances, however, reveals the effects print had on the theatre. It is when he is writing about cooperation that Godwin turns his attention to the arts, specifically music and the theater. Before asking “shall we have theatrical exhibitions,” the political thinker asks “shall we have concerts of music?” Godwin dismisses both music and the theater because he believes that it is detrimental for men to “come forward in any mode, formally to repeat words and ideas not their own.” [3] The, in Godwin’s terms, “mode” of music and theatrical exhibition simply facilitate repetition.
The distinction between “executing” and “composing” music and dramas reveals Godwin’s main concern regarding these two “modes” of artistic representation.[4] G. Thomas Tanselle’s discussion of literary texts and musical scores in A Rationale of Textual Criticism is useful in understanding Godwin’s objections. For Tanselle, both types of art serve as sets of instruction for the reader and performer: “As artifacts, literary texts are analogous to musical scores in providing the basis for the reconstitution of works, even though the medium of those works is different.” [5] According to Tanselle, both are sets of instructions for their reproduction. It is this idea of reproduction that Godwin believes to be problematic. The “execution” of earlier compositions is a type of submission to the authority of the past. To privilege the work of earlier generations is, according to Godwin, to “yield supinely to the superior merit of our  predecessors.” This anxiety regarding the “merit of our predecessors” connects Godwin’s concerns regarding music and the theater with the larger issues of Political Justice. For example, discussing the legislative decisions of the new national assembly in France, Godwin writes, “‘Man and forever!’ was the motto of the labours of this assembly. Just broken loose from the thick darkness of an absolute monarchy, they assumed to prescribe lessons of wisdom to all future ages.” As Angela Esterhammer points out, Godwin claims the French Constitution “fell into exactly the same trap of attempting to legislate for all time.”[6]  Likewise, the musical and theatrical compositions of his predecessors have come to dominate the art of the age.
It would seem, then, that the rehabilitation of the artistic modes of music and theatrical production is possible. When he concludes his discussion of the arts of his time, Godwin gestures towards a solution. He claims that the current moment’s submission to past compositions “borders perhaps, in this respect, upon a breach of sincerity, which requires that we should give immediate utterance to every useful and valuable idea that occurs.”[7]  “Every useful and valuable idea” must be expressed immediately. Godwin’s longing for “immediate utterance” reveals his “Romantic proclivity for the oral.” [8] It also begins to show why the theater, which “tended to relegate the written word to secondary significance, behind the spoken”[9] would appeal to him. Furthermore, as George Woodcock recognizes, “Godwin’s view of social change,” especially in 1793 when he was first gaining notoriety, required “a certain immediacy, for he believed men’s minds would be open to the persuasion of reason” if “the truth were shown to them.” [10] Therefore, showing “the truth” to men immediately through a medium that privileges the spoken word would be quite persuasive. Those capable of reviving the artistic modes of the music and theatrical production are not the performers or actors – that is, those who are responsible for the execution of a given work – but the composers. In other words, the execution of compositions written during his own moment would, for Godwin, put an end to the practice of “supinely” submitting to the superiority of his predecessors.
The extent of Godwin’s investment in the stage is most evident when after the performance of his play Antonio in 1800, he claims, “I regard the 13th of December last as a great era in my life, & I am not without hope that it may ultimately prove an auspicious one.” [11]   Despite the fact that the play was performed only once, this quotation shows that he clearly hoped that the first production of one his plays would not be his last. The fact that he labels the staged performance of his play as an “era” is also important. As Julie Carlson notes, writing for the stage is “precisely a writing for – for a future representation and reception that may or may not occur.”[12]  The “great era” Godwin identifies further highlights the distinction between the writing of a play and its staged performance.
Godwin wrote four plays over the course of his career, two of which made it to the Drury Lane stage. What happens to our understanding of Romantic drama when Godwin is put into the conversation? What happens when we consider Godwin’s distinction between “composition” and “execution” in relation to attempts to locate the theatre and theatrical performances in print as opposed to the stage?

[1] Karr, “Thoughts That Flash Like Lightning,” 327.
[2] Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice, 1.
[3] Godwin, Political Justice, 272.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Tanselle, A Rationale of Textual Criticism, 23.
[6] Esterhammer, “Godwin’s Suspicion of Speech Acts,” 560.
[7] Godwin, Political Justice, 572.
[8] Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt Against Theory, 135.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Woodcock, William Godwin, 125.
[11] Maniquis and Myers, Godwinian Moments, 227.
[12] Carlson, In the Theatre of Romanticism, 5.
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The Painful Pleasures of Romantic Feet

In early July 1797, Sara Coleridge spilled hot milk on her husband’s foot, prompting one of the finest romantic poems, “This Lime-tree Bower My Prison.”  The preface to the poem reads: “some long-expected Friends paid a visit to the Author’s cottage; and on the morning of their arrival, he met with an accident, which disabled him from walking during the whole time of their stay.”[i]  As Coleridge’s preface and the rest of the poem demonstrate, feet and walking were an important aspect of the romantic experience given the exceptional tendency to stroll, pace, and hike.  Thomas De Quincey calculated that Wordsworth had walked an estimated 180,000 English miles.  Coleridge’s great decade of walking culminated with him being the first to scale Scafell Peak in 1804.  And despite—or in spite of—a clubfoot, Byron swam four miles to cross the Hellespont on 3 May 1810.  It is difficult to imagine British romanticism without feet.
But it is precisely the romantic imagination that displaces the foot.  Following Coleridge’s accident, he laments not joining his party of friends.  He finds relief in imagining their journey, substituting the mental representation for the actual, physical experience of walking.  Was it merely a coincidence then that romantic poets frequently walked and on occasion mentioned their feet?  For Robin Jarvis, the wounded foot provides an opportunity for the poet to “[trace] the path of his friends” with his imagination, providing a view of an “uneven progress through a landscape which…offers locomotive as well as visual obstructions.”[ii]  These obstructions are then imitated in the poem’s uneven rhythms.  So the imagination might elide the physical, but the mind relies on the information the feet have gathered about the rhythm of walking in order to construct its elision.
For romantics, walking supplemented writing, but also they required supplementation for their walking.  In the tradition of Romans adding shoes to the Olympics (called “krepis”),[iii] the romantics had special clothes made to accommodate walks, and De Quincey was “first to go on a walking tour with a tent.”  According to Solnit, the introduction of these tools marks the beginnings of the “outdoor equipment industry.”[iv]  Some of us might not think of them as equipment, but animals also mediate the walking experience.  Wordsworth walked compulsively in order to compose, and sure enough, he brought along his dog.  The boyhood companion would warn Wordsworth of oncoming pedestrians so that the poet might cease his compositional “murmuring” before being mistaken for a madman.[v]
If romantic poets were such innovators and advocates in the world of walking, why would they ever pass over these things in favor of a different focus?  From a phenomenological perspective, passing up the foot for another issue (actual or imagined) might be inevitable.  It is typical to identify a thing when it breaks, or in Coleridge’s case, when it is scalded.  The foot suddenly becomes conspicuously present because it ceases to be what it normally is—a functional foot.  Only when noticed does a foot become the starting point of a poem.  But the poem quickly moves past the foot and onto the image of the poet’s friends.  In this example, Coleridge’s recognition of the thing (his foot) is negative: the foot’s conspicuousness never allows the observer to know the foot itself, only a deferral of the foot.
But it makes good sense that if a thing can attract attention when it breaks, it will attract attention when it works, as well.  The phenomenological response a la Heidegger would say that because the thing works we take it for granted and so the thing goes unnoticed.[vi]  For instance, I don’t think about my feet so long as they get me to work in the morning, just as the cabinetmaker doesn’t think about his hammer so long as it still drives nails.  However, if something suddenly works differently it might also attract attention.  This difference may signal that the thing was, in fact, not working beforehand.  We may have only grown accustomed to what has been broken for as long as we can remember.  So in the case that the thing is repaired, would I actually be experiencing a deferral of the thing, or would I finally gain access to the thing itself?  Probably not the latter, but the fact that the closest thing to one’s person could suddenly attract attention while working without flaw is exactly the realization I had one morning while running barefoot.
Rather than adding more equipment to my running, recently I decided I would try it with less.  It was about five thirty in the morning when I made the somewhat uncharacteristic decision (romantic mornings tend to follow romantic evenings, I find).  My usual place to run is the Olympic Sculpture Park.  The park faces Puget Sound, a large body of water punctuated with sailboats and ferries, framed by the Olympic Mountains.  I would like to say the scene was sublime or awe inspiring.  But my attention was on the ground.  I attempted to jog lightly at first, but beginning on a gravel path, there was much more pain than pleasure.  Approaching the grass I thought the softness would mitigate the discomfort but the grass was wet and cold.  At one point in my youth, it was common to run through the yard or the nearby woods without shoes.  Half my life has passed since my feet braved the earth.  It was shocking to have limbs so near and so unacquainted with exposure suddenly stung by what otherwise felt like a perfectly temperate morning.  The grass and my feet had become alien.
Our feet have become restricted to a heavily mediated form of touching.  If I could ask my feet what the world feels like they would describe a hot and itchy place: moist, confining, argyle.  The fact is, due to socks, rubber, and plastic I hardly ever touch the ground beneath me, to say nothing of unconstructed ground.  But that first morning I ran unshod, my dainty jog eventually became a full run, my feet enjoying the various textures of the ground.  Skin rubbed against concrete and woodchips, mud and grass, gravel and puddles.  At one point I stepped into mixture of grainy rocks and water covering the footpath.  I felt tiny air-filled cells densely packed together burst.  The sensation was not unfamiliar.  It reminded me of roe I had recently tasted at a sushi restaurant.  Finally, my mouth and feet had something to talk about.
Having abandoned the daily prosthetics designed for feet, I felt elated.  The experience was painful, but also it changed the way I relate to the park I routinely visit.  The landscape did not suddenly become sublime but more various and diverse, characteristics Wordsworth constantly praises in his Guide to the Lakes.  But where he praises visual diversity, my feet explored a tactile dimension of textures and temperatures.  Where the eye looks for contrasting colors, my feet were contrasting the hardness and softness of things.  These differences cancelled out most of the pain in the end; instead, it felt good to be feeling.  Running unshod reminded me of how little I actually know about this familiar place, and equally important, about my own body.
While Coleridge might not remove his shoes in order sharpen his focus on feet, the scalded foot still manages to open new points of access to the body and its surroundings.  Recall, Coleridge sits in a lime-tree bower.  He could have depicted himself lying in bed or sitting by a fire, but he chooses to situate himself on the ground in the garden.  Such a position is important because, although Coleridge seems to displace the physical for the imaginary, consider the fact that he immerses himself in the ground by eschewing a chair.  Tim Ingold has recently pointed out the modern belief that stationary rest was a prerequisite for thinking.[vii]  One must cease to move or walk in order to think and enhancing such thinking requires its own prosthetic: the armchair.  In this particular case, Coleridge does not celebrate the relationship between walking, the feeling of walking, and its correlation with thinking; rather, with other regions of the body spread across a plane of dirt, grass, roots, and rocks, the poet espouses a less regulated form of sitting which might provide the conditions for a different way of thinking altogether.  Given the variety of furniture, shoes, and constructed ground surfaces, it seems as though the body has access to unlimited experience.  However, if the body is forever wrapped, comforted, and secured, then how little of the world we actually know.
[i] Coleridge, Samuel Taylor.  Poetical Works. Vol 1. Ed. J.C.C. Mays. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001.  Print.

[ii] Jarvis, Robin.  Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel.  New York: St. Martin’s, 1997.  Print.  149.
[iii] Tenner, Edward.  Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity.  New York: Knopf, 2003.  Print.  78-79.
[iv] Solnit, Rebecca.  Wanderlust: A History of Walking.  New York: Viking, 2000.  Print.  115-116.
[v] Wordsworth, William.  The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850.  Eds. Jonathan Wordsworth and M.H. Abrams.  New York: Norton, 1979.  Print.  130-1.
[vi] Heidegger, Martin.  Being and Time.  Trans. Joan Stambaugh.  Albany: SUNY P, 1996.  Print.  67-71.
[vii] Ingold, Tim.  “Culture on the Ground: The World Perceived Through the Feet.”  Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge, and Description.  New York: Routledge, 2011.  Print.  33-50.
 
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Love Letter to Mr. Lewis

As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, the original Gothic tradition met with some pretty extreme ambivalence from other writers and pretty staunch criticism from reviewers in the late eighteenth century. Matthew G. Lewis—the writer of The Monk, who also happened to be an MP—got the brunt of abuse from those critical of his stories of terror and gore.  He mentions in one of his many undated letters to his mother, “You will observe that the Morning Herald continues to call [me] Monk Lewis, and to abuse me as much as formerly.” Though The Monk and much of Lewis’s poetry push the boundaries of the genre he helped create, I have found much of Lewis’s drama, including his best-known play, The Castle Spectre, to be surprisingly cautious and even conservative in terms of the supernatural. [i] In the same letter, however, he describes the failure of his play The Captive, which “proved much too terrible for representation, and two people went into hysterics during the performance and two more after the curtain dropped. It was given out again with a mixture of applause and disapprobation….”[ii]  Lewis, persisting in his penchant for creating tales of wonder and terror, was, nonetheless, not writing from an ivory tower but seemed keenly aware of the reception of his works. His letters reveal him to be especially sensitive of the impact his scandalizing works would have on the reputation and sensibility of his family, and he apologized profusely to his father for the outcome of The Monk, blaming his misjudgment of its reception on his youth (he was only 19 when it was published). After that, he sent some of his literary endeavors to his mother or his sister to edit for objectionable passages and eventually released a censored version of his novel.
Attracting severely negative attention from critics, Lewis also attracted his fair share of parody and satire.  The anonymous collection of poems, Tales of Terror followed the publication of his own collection, Tales of Wonder, an accumulation of original poems by himself and others such as Sir Walter Scott and Robert Southey as well as translations of German pieces. There is no evidence to suggest that Lewis is in any way associated with Tales of Terror beyond being the model for its creation: it is unlikely that he contributed to it in any way, and it is a mistaken attribution in an early biography and a later combined version of Tales of Terror and Wonder that instilled this misguided authorship through to the present time (Thomson 239).[iii] One poem in particular found in Tales of Terror, “Grim, King of the Ghosts; or the Dance of Death” is dedicated to Lewis, making it especially improbable that he was involved in its authorship. On the other hand, it is thought that Tales of Terror ridicules and reproaches Tales of Wonder by its exaggerated mimicry of it. This also seems unlikely or overly simplistic, at best. Douglass Thomson says, in his article on the relationship between the two texts, that Tales of Terror is “less an attack on Lewis than an homage to him, a carrying-on of the good fun that Lewis had with his own production. ‘Grim’ underscores the fact that that parody is, if not the sincerest form of flattery, at least a form of imitation and tribute” (17).[iv]
In a very roundabout way, this fine line between condemnation and appreciation is the point I want to make in this post, and it extends beyond these two published volumes. Lewis was a source of criticism and disdain, as well as humor and real adoration in many contexts. I recently discovered a fantastic little “tribute” to him in the National Library of Scotland, a fourteen-page poem entitled “The Old Hag in a Red Cloak: A Romance,” attributed to George Watson-Taylor.  On the surface, the moral of the story and last stanza of the poem seems to make it very clear that the writer disapproves of Lewis’s antics:
If you wish me the moral, dear Mat, to rehearse,
‘Tis, that nonsense is nonsense, in prose or in verse,
That all, who to talents claim any pretense,
Should write not at all, or should write COMMON SENSE.
However, if the writer disagrees with Lewis’s style or subject matter, it certainly does not stop him from reading more or less everything that Lewis has ever written.  Only half of those fourteen pages contain the short poem. The bottom half of each page boasts two or three extensive footnotes detailing each and every reference to a line or a character in one of Lewis’s works.  For example, the first page reads:
Matthæus was little, Matthæus was young,
Of wonders he chanted, and quaintly he sung; i
Thro’ fire, and water, and clouds could he see, ii
For this bard, a profound necromancer was he. iii
i. “Lord Ronald was handsome, Lord Ronald was young,  / The Greenwood he travers’d, and gaily he sung, &c.” “The Grim White Woman”
ii. The Cloud King, the Water King
iii. This spectre, the Grim White Woman she was.
Matthæus is, of course, Matthew Lewis, referred to for most of the poem as simply “Mat.” The plot follows the consequences of Mat refusing to give a poor old woman a sixpence to buy some bread. The old woman turns out to be Mother Goose, a witch-like figure who torments him for both denying her the money and getting her kicked out of bookshops. She calls on all of the creatures of her literature to accost him. He tries to call on his own creations, but they fail him, and he is forced to admit that she rules the “realms of romance” and to vow to write more appropriate literature. Most of the footnotes just relate the lines from the particular poem the writer is mocking, but others give more detailed information. One provides a laundry list of “ghosts and hobgoblins, and horrible shapes” found in popular romances of the day, with which the reader should be familiar. This guy has done his homework! As Thomson says, “as imitation of a pre-existing style comprises an essential feature of parody, this satiric mode especially depends upon a degree of identification with its satiric object” (2). It’s clear from the detailed lists of Lewis’s creatures throughout the poem that a real enjoyment went into describing them, even though it is hidden behind the guise of criticism. I might suggest that it feels like a guilty love-letter to a writer and type of writing that had become fashionable to criticize but also fashionable (among a different sort, perhaps) to read. Crafting a poem with such subject matter, despite the didactic symbolism and moral, also speaks to a writer who has learned a thing or two from what he has read. It speaks to the complicated love/hate relationship endured by the Gothic as well as the Gothic tradition’s invitation to parody and a little bit of fun.

[i] At least part of the reason for this caution is due to the censorship restrictions on drama and the uneasiness with showing the supernatural on stage. Jeffrey Cox has a fantastic explanation of this in his introduction to Seven Gothic Dramas, Ohio University Press, 1993.
[ii] “The Captive” closed in 1803, so this letter was sent sometime after March of that year. The letter is simply dated “Wednesday___”. Papers Concerning Matthew Gregory Lewis, 1792- circa 1834.
[iii] Douglass Thomson gives a thorough overview of this in an appendix about Tales of Terror in his 2009 Broadview edition of Tales of Wonder.
[iv] Thomson, Douglass H. “Mingled Measures: Gothic Parody in Tales of Wonder and Tales of Terror.” Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. (May 2008) 50: 22 paragraphs. http://www.erudit.org/revue/ravon/2008/v/n50/018143ar.html
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Editing Lyrical Ballads: Wordsworth's Decision to Remove "The Convict"

Only one poem from the original 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads does not appear in the two volume 1800 edition: Wordsworth’s “The Convict.” The specific political goals of the poem do indeed make it difficult to situate among the other works in the collection (with the exception of Coleridge’s “The Dungeon”). For most critics, “The Convict” is out of keeping with the rest of the poems in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. When scholars such as Celeste Langan and Quentin Bailey do engage the poem, they usually do so under the larger category of vagrants or vagrancy. In other words, the convict, like Martha Ray of “The Thorn,” the mad mother, and the idiot boy, is one of the marginal figures that Wordsworth’s poetry pulls to forefront. Yet the convict receives his title not from a loquacious speaker or a gossipy group of townspeople but from a formal political institution. Furthermore, while crime, even violent crime, is implied in several poems in Lyrical Ballads, in “The Convict” clear action is taken. For example, while the speaker of “The Thorn” claims that “some had sworn an oath that she [Martha Ray] / Should be to public justice brought,” no punishment ever occurs (323-3). “The Convict,” in contrast, depends upon the presence of “public justice”  for its very title.
Yet, for all of its differences, I want to suggest that the “The Convict” does share one crucial feature with the other poems in Lyrical Ballads: the centrality of the speaker. By examining the physical and imaginative movement of Wordsworth’s sympathetic speaker, I will show how “The Convict,” to a certain extent, “fits” with the larger project of the collection. When we turn to the poem, we see encounter the speaker standing on a mountain slope in the “glory of evening” (1). Reluctantly, he leaves his idyllic surroundings to visit the convict within the “thick ribbed walls” and “the glimmering gate” of his prison (9,11). As Kenneth Johnston notes, the poem “turns very abruptly from its opening scene of natural beauty to a highly articulated scene of human suffering” (419). The subject of the poem, an individual convicted of committing a crime, has already faced public judgment. There is also, as Quentin Bailey and others have noted, no suggestion that the convict is innocent. As judgment has been made and the guilty convict imprisoned, the public’s engagement with him, it would seem, is at a close.
In the fictional scenes of “The Convict,” Wordsworth’s speaker is able not only to represent the convict’s sad state but also use his “fancy” to see what lies in the man’s heart. Gazing at the convict as he sits staring dejectedly at his fetters, the speaker claims “’Tis sorrow enough on that visage to gaze, / That body dismiss’d from his care; / Yet my fancy has pierced to his heart, and pourtrays / More terrible images there” (17-20). Although the mere sight of the convict’s “visage” is “sorrow enough,” the speaker is able to push further, to offer more insight. Through his “fancy,” Wordsworth’s speaker can look not only on the convict’s “matted head,” neglected body, and the crippling effects imprisonment has on his body, but also gaze into the convict’s “heart” and find “the more terrible images there.” It is telling that rather than revealing details of the convict’s crime, these “terrible images” show the degree to which the convict “wishes the past to undo” (22). According to the speaker, the convict’s “crime, through the pains that o’erwhelm him, descried, / Still blackens and grows on his view” (23-4). The speaker suggests that it is remorse for his crime that “blackens” the convict’s appearance. Such insight, or perhaps more accurately, imaginative speculation, is possible in the fictional scenes of Wordsworth’s poem.
According to the speaker, the monarch has the potential to alleviate the convict’s sufferings. He imagines how different the convict’s situation might be if the king were standing in his place: “When from the dark synod, or blood-reeking field, / To his chamber the monarch is led, / All soothers of sense their soft virtue shall yield, / And quietness pillow his head” (25-8). Like his own movement from the mountain slope to the prison, the speaker imagines the king leaving a dark church or a bloody battlefield to come to the convict’s chamber. The speaker locates the monarch in three value-laden spaces: the church, the battlefield, and the prison are all places in which the public is constituted and acts (thinking here of Locke, Kames’s “publick” from Historical Law-Tracts, and Bentham). In others words,  Wordsworth’s speaker refers to places that became metonymic for the common interest, places where the public is constituted. The monarch entering the convict’s cell is endowed with the necessary agency to assist him.
At the close of the poem, the speaker rewrites this earlier episode by imagining what he would do if he commanded the power of the monarch. The convict, so weighed down by his condition, lets out a tear which the speaker proceeds to read: “The motion unsettles a tear; / The silence of sorrow it seems to supply, / And asks me why I am here” (42-4). In the speech act that follows, the speaker offers his answer:
“Poor victim! no idle intruder has stood
With o’erweening complacence our state to compare,
But one, whose first wish is the wish to be good,
Is come as a brother thy sorrows to share.
“At thy name though compassion her nature resign,
Though in virtue’s proud mouth thy report be a stain,
My care, if the arm of the mighty were mine,
Would plant thee where yet thou might’st blossom again.” (45-52)
In these lines, the speaker identifies himself as a special type of observer. Unlike the “idle
intruder” who visit the convict’s cell to compare his state to that of the imprisoned criminal, Wordsworth’s speaker expresses a desire “to share” the convict’s “sorrows.” As Bailey points out, the speaker distinguishes himself from more sentimental visitors and the moralizing of writers like Robert Southey because in late eighteenth century Britain “visits to a prison could too easily be assimilated by the literature of sentimentality and suffering” (7). “The Convict,” then, strives to avoid falling into these generic pitfalls and puts forward a suggestion for penal reform. It is also important to note that in the closing stanza, the speaker states that the personified abstractions of “compassion” and “virtue” have named and judged the convict. The phrase “thy name” could refer to the title of the poem itself. The title of “convict” is a name that has been assigned to this man by “public justice,” which in turn has led to him being abandoned and condemned by “quietness,” “compassion,” and “virtue.”
Many critics have recognized the influence of Godwin in the poem’s crucial
final two lines and their call for reform. Emile Legouis points out that, like Godwin’s Political Justice, Wordsworth’s poem calls for “transportation as a substitute for capital punishment” and “kindness and compassion” for the convicted (309). The speaker’s desire to relocate the convict is indeed clear, but many critical studies do not consider the manner in which the speaker expresses this desire. The final eight lines of the poem can be read as the speaker’s attempt at a performative speech act. If “the arm of the mighty” were the speaker’s to command, his words would perform an action: they would transport the convict, “plant” him somewhere where he “might’st blossom again.” Such a closing further connects Wordsworth to Godwin. As Angela Esterhammer points out, Jeremy Bentham “interpreted laws as verbal utterances exchanged between sovereigns and subjects” (554). While Bentham describes laws as speech acts, Godwin believes, as is clear in Political Justice, that language’s “only legitimate purpose is the communication of truth” and that words should never do anything (Esterhammer 555). According to Esterhammer, for Godwin, “all speech acts that attempt to exert control over future behavior ultimately work against the improvement of society because they institutionalize error, protect existing abuses, and prevent reform” (557). In other words, temporality troubles
contracts, oaths, pledges, promises, and all other performative speech acts.
Bentham’s classification of laws and Godwin’s, to borrow the title of Esterhammer’s
essay, “suspicion of speech acts” provide an useful context for examining the close of “The
Convict.” The speaker imagines himself in a position to make a verbal utterance that would carry with it the weight of the law. “If” he commanded the power of the monarch,  the speaker’s words would enact the very political reform that critics have identified in Godwin and Wordsworth.
While Godwin’s main anxiety about performative speech acts centers around time, the anxiety of Wordsworth’s speaker appears to have more to do with who has the capacity to make a performative utterance. “The Convict,” then, documents two types of representative failure. First, the “fancy” of the speaker shows the reader what lies in the convict’s heart after his judgment and imprisonment. Secondly, as is evident throughout the poem and forcefully so at its close, the monarch and “public justice” do not represent the will of the sympathetic speaker.
Perhaps the poem’s attempt to represent more “accurately” a marginalized figure and its meditation on the failure of political representation more generally connects it to the larger democratic purpose of Lyrical Ballads that will be announced in 1800.