House Arrest: The Domestication of English Poetry in the 1820s

Abstract

decade stood those anni mirabiles 1819-20, with the Peterloo massacre, the Cato Street Conspiracy, the accession of George IV, the trial of Queen Caroline, and the writing and publication of major works by Byron, Shelley, and Keats-to say nothing of Blake's Jerusalem, which is just what everyone did. Within ten years the big bang of 1820 had subsided to a steady hum: all of these poets had died, and so had the prospect of thoroughgoing political upheaval that traumatized the land for half a decade after Waterloo. The revolutionary spirit of 1820 came back in 1830 on the Continent with a vengeance that might have been expected-in some quarters certainly was expected-to sweep across the Channel. But Britannia, having embraced liberalism and reform, was setting her House in order with an aplomb that the future would prove well founded. George IV had died more or less on schedule, the first Reform Bill was rustling in the wings, and Queen Victoria's future laureate Alfred Tennyson had begun to make his way. Such evident contrasts frame a change in the political culture that was surely reflected and abetted by developments in British cultural politics, including the cultural politics of poetry. But our confidence about the difference between the 1820 and the 1830 literary prospect rests on a shaky understanding-an extraordinarily thin description, as regards poetry, well short of an explanation-of how that difference had come to pass. The decade was not the Roaring Twenties, that we know. Ask us to name it more accurately, though, and we defer to our colleagues across the way. Romanticists like to consider the 1820s precociously Victorian, while Victorianists, already uneasy about poaching so far back into the 1830s, think of the previous decade as the Romantic decadence. If both sides take more interest in marking their mutual frontiers than