Natural Rights and the Rise of Romanticism in the 1790s by R. S. White

Abstract

MLR, 103.3, 2oo8 83I In this reading theborder poet becomes a 'deceitful scavenger, feeding on the after math of others' actions' (p. 2 I). It isone of several essays inwhich Romantic writing ismade to seem disconcertingly modern. Another isDiego Saglia's study of three dramas inwhich Christians are pitted against Moors: Joanna Baillie's Constantine Paleologus, Richard Sheil's Bellamira, and Felicia Hemans's The Siege of Valencia. These are dramas inwhich Christianity and Islam come intoviolent neighbourhood one with another, and yet each ends by reinstating thedifferencebetween the twocul tures.As late as theearlynineteenth century,Saglia shows, Europe defined itscultural identity inopposition to Islam: it isa habit thathas proved surprisingly hard tobreak. The debatable lands investigated in this volume are delightfully various. Nigel Leask explores the debate over thebody of Scotland's national bard. Burns's corpse was offered by one group of commentators as a warning of the consequences of a failure to curb the appetites, by another as evidence of the failure of the nation to nurture itsartists.Alex Benchimol traces Wordsworth's and Cobbett's rival readings of theEnglish landscape. Janet Sorensen excavates the debate between English and Scottish collectors as towhether therewas a living tradition of ballad production, or whether ballads might comfortably be consigned to a lost past. Carol Bolton shows how the contrast between the narrative and the notes inSouthey's The Curse ofKe hama exposes theprocess bywhich the 'Romantic' India of Warren Hastings and Sir William Joneswas ousted by theutilitarian view of India of JamesMill andMacaulay. This is a richlyvarious collection of essays. UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW RICHARD CRONIN NaturalRights and the Rise ofRomanticismin theI79os. By R. S.WHITE. Basingstoke: PalgraveMacmillan. 2005. 277 pp. C52. ISBN 978-I-4039-9478-3. The 'natural rights' in the titleof this interestingnew book byR. S.White refersto the set ofinalienablehuman rights (primarily life andliberty) theorized by Enlightenment philosophers and concretized in theAmerican and French Revolutionary constitu tions. White asks thequestion: how did thisdiscourse about natural rights impact on British literature in the turbulent I790s? By way of response, thebook not only traces thepresence of 'natural rights' language innovels and poems of thatdecade, but also constructs a category intowhich these literaryworks can be said to fit. White calls this 'the literatureof natural rights'. Examples, picked fromdifferentchapters in the book, include Goldsmith's The Deserted Village, Godwin's Caleb Williams, Elizabeth Inchbald's Nature andArt, Henry Mackenzie's TheMan ofFeeling, Hazlitt's Essay on thePrinciples ofHuman Action, Thelwall's The Peripatetic, Helen Maria Williams's Poems, Robert Bage's Hermsprong, Erasmus Darwin's The Temple ofNature, Blake's Songs of Innocence and Songs ofExperience, andWordsworth's 'We are Seven'. There are fewobvious historical reasons togroup suchworks together,so White's claim that they form a loosely connected but none the less cohesive 'literature' isbold. What is attractive about this claim isnot itshistorical validity,which would be hard toprove (people in the 1790s wrote and readGothic novels, sentimental novels, lyricpoetry, and so on, but no one knowingly wrote or read a 'novel of natural rights'), but rather itsusefulness as a heuristic device for the critical reader today. In retrospect,we can see that such texts as those I justmentioned not only display an awareness of 'natural rights',but also, indifferent ways tobe sure,ground theirclaims forsocial and political change on such rights.These texts, White claims,manipulate forliterarypurposes and for literaryreaders a hugely important, and historically highly influential,contempo rarysocio-political discourse. The book does not connect this to the 'riseofRomanti cism' except in a cursory way, so thisphrase in the title must have been thepublisher's 832 Reviews contribution. Most of the book focuses on the specific texts already mentioned, of feringdelicate close readings thatwill enliven our appreciation of their radical political subtext.White, in this respect, nicely extends a tradition initiated by E. P.Thompson. The readings are sometimes prefaced bywell-known biographical and literaryhistori cal descriptions that really have little relevance toeither the textual interpretation or theoverall argument, though undergraduate readerswill find this information useful. The one aspect of thebook that I found disconcerting was itsuncritical embracing of an Enlightenment narrative about the rise of 'natural rights' theory out of the discredited remains of ancient...