Biography

According to editors Madeleine Callaghan and Anthony Howe, their collection Romanticism and the Letter serves to correct a prevailing fallacy that, after an eighteenth-century zenith of fine epistolary prose, the nineteenth century "ushered in a decline in letter writing" that was soon to become "absolute" (1). In consequence, they observe, scholarship has preoccupied itself with mining Romantic letters for their biographical content, treating them as a transparent source of information that is only secondarily the business of the literary critic. In fact, Callaghan [End Page 97] and Howe argue, "it is difficult, if not impossible, to assert a meaningful distinction between an author's letters and their literary productions" (9). The fifteen essays that follow this introduction offer a variety of critical approaches to the correspondence of a range of authors to demonstrate that "the correspondence of the Romantic period constitutes a major literary achievement in its own right" (14). The chapters work together to break down generic distinctions, especially between poetry and letters. Taken as a whole, the volume's essays pose questions that seek to correct what contributor Andrew Bennett describes as the "under-developed" state of epistolary theory (220). They tease out aesthetic individuality and power, explore the creation and performance of an authorial self, describe the cultivation of intimacy and an illusion of proximity, and portray a dynamic publishing culture that was constituted and held together by correspondence.

In the volume's introduction, Callaghan and Howe survey the social and physical transformations that affected every aspect of Romantic epistolary communications, from government censorship to improvements in roads and mail vehicles to the uncertainty of international communication in the face of political instability. While this overview gestures toward the increasing number of digitized editions as a chance to consider the material qualities of letters in their manuscript form, this is an opportunity that, for the most part, the volume's contributors overlook. Instead, most work from standard print editions, with only Jane Stabler and Susan J. Wolfson addressing the physical as well as aesthetic qualities of their subjects' correspondence. Wolfson moves from reading William Wordsworth's The Prelude as a "quasi-letter" to Coleridge into noting the qualities that make Dorothy Wordsworth's journals a "proto-letter" for William (65, 67). Meanwhile, the sophisticated and lively poetics of Dorothy's actual letters portray her mountain adventures in terms of spirited agency and imaginative vigor. While Wolfson's discussion considers cancellations, scratch outs, and the transition of ideas and content from correspondence to print, Jane Stabler offers the most detailed consideration of the physical in exploring what Byron's manuscript correspondence reveals about the materiality of the letters for both composer and recipient. Characterized in general by the exuberant excess that marks his major poetry, Byron's epistolary style, like his poetics, develops over time, reworking content and shifting in style between correspondents and occasions to "create a being more intense as it writes" (181), an intensity reflected not only in his style but in his use of paper, pen, and ink as well.

The volume's opening chapters concern themselves with two opposing aspects of Romantic literary culture as they are revealed through correspondence. Mary O'Connell surveys letters between several major authors and their booksellers to expose the changing relationships between authors and their reading public, as well as the contours of the Romantic book trade at a time of increasing commercialization. Stephen C. Behrendt, meanwhile, situates the letters exchanged between the Irish quaker Mary Leadbeater and the Irish writer Melesina Trench as reciprocal gifts, circulating literary writing and critical commentary to cement a symmetrical [End Page 98] relationship that mirrors the place-centered literary salon.

From here, the volume turns to the correspondence of the first generation of major Romantics. Opening with the commonplace that Wordsworth is a disappointing letter writer, Oliver Clarkson explores how Wordsworth's letters and other prose works expose the contours of disappointment, including frustration with an unappreciative reading public and...