Della Cruscanism and Newspaper Poetics: Reading the Letters of Simkin and Simon in the World

Abstract

Della Cruscanism and Newspaper Poetics: Reading the Letters of Simkin and Simon in the World Claire Knowles (bio) One of the givens in recent critical work on the della cruscans is that there is a straightforward distinction between what is a Della Cruscan poem, and what is not. This approach makes sense in the case of what has become known as the “first wave” of Della Cruscanism because it was always a relatively well-delineated phenomenon. Della Cruscanism began when a group of English and Italian friends living in Florence published privately a collection of poetry (written both in English and Italian) called The Florence Miscellany (1785). There is, then, only one first wave Della Cruscan text and only two key vehicles responsible for its dissemination back home in England: the privately printed Miscellany and the respectable monthlies such as the European Magazine and the London Chronicle who took it upon themselves to reprint poems from the Miscellany in their pages. In this context, deciding what constitutes a Della Cruscan poem is fairly straightforward—a Della Cruscan poem is, quite simply, a poem that first appeared in the Florence Miscellany. Things become more complicated, however, when Della Cruscanism enters what I have described elsewhere as its “second wave.”1 Two years after the publication of The Florence Miscellany, one of its key contributors, Robert Merry, published a poem in a similar vein to those appearing in the book under the pseudonym of “Del Crusca” in Edward Topham’s fashionable paper, the World.2 His poem inspired a reply from a poet calling herself [End Page 581] “Anna Matilda” (the playwright, Hannah Cowley). Della Crusca responded in verse to his new fan, she wrote back, and the flirtatious and theatrical dialogue that became one of the hallmarks of the second wave of Della Cruscan poetry was born. The popularity of Anna Matilda and Della Crusca’s playful exchange in the pages of the World began a fad for pseudonymous poetry in the daily newspapers that continued well into the 1790s. Poetry had, of course, been a feature of the daily newspapers long before the runaway success of the Della Cruscans. But by 1789 consciously “poetical” pseudonyms similar to those of Della Crusca and Anna Matilda (“Glanville,” “Philander,” “Laura,” “Maria”) came to be favored by contributors to the World. Such was the public appetite for Della Cruscan poetry during the late 1780s and early 1790s that the paper’s printer John Bell went on to publish two collections of Della Cruscan poetry—The Poetry of the World (1788) and The British Album (1790)—as well as numerous volumes by individual Della Cruscan poets.3 The success of the World, a success grounded in the paper’s ability to attract and retain audiences through a clever engagement with London’s vibrant literary and theatrical scenes, had a significant impact on the media landscape of the latter part of the eighteenth century. Newspaper historian Stanley Morison writes, for example, “by 1800 all the daily papers in London had altered their make-up and headings into accordance with that of the World. The writing and reporting style, frivolous, up-to-date, and very personal, was also widely copied.”4 Similarly, Della Cruscan poetry, or poetry modelled in certain key respects on Della Cruscan poetry, was to become a common feature of all of the most widely read newspapers of the late eighteenth century, including the Morning Post, the Morning Star and the Oracle. What precisely might make a particular poem or poet “Della Cruscan” becomes more difficult to pinpoint in the wake of the success of the second-wave of Della Cruscan poets. The proliferation of vehicles for the publication of poetry over the course of the 1780s and 1790s, combined with the enormous popularity of the particular type of verse written by Merry and his associates, meant that second-wave Della Cruscanism expanded in the latter part of the 1780s to become a phenomenon with very loose boundaries indeed. Jerome McGann, for example, has famously suggested [End Page 582] that the Della Cruscan movement came into cultural dominance in the final decades of the eighteenth century precisely “because the writing explicitly encouraged further...