Percy Shelley, Jane Austen, and Felix Britannica

Abstract

Although we often think of how the Victorians responded to Romanticism, less often do we ask how Romanticism renegotiated itself for the Victorian period. The 1790s find Romanticism so enmeshed in its own historical moment that by contrast the early Regency (1811–15) seems restless to put both its past and present behind it. In his 1821 essay A Defence of Poetry, written at the end of the Regency, and despite its forward rush toward the future, Percy Shelley fears a certain cultural entropy may have set in: “We have more moral, political and historical wisdom, than we know how to reduce into practise … the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature.”1 Moments like this in the Defence suggest a creeping skepticism, even cynicism, that poetry’s visionary impulse may produce mere simulation. Indeed, Shelley’s odd call for poetry “to imagine that which we know” suggests radical creativity but also a ceaseless production of knowledge, a “void [that] forever craves fresh food” (530, 526). As if perpetually yearning to separate itself from the forms of its knowledge, the spirit Shelley calls upon to lift the age out of itself becomes mired all over by the very process of doing so, which is why, by the time of his last poem, history looks like a “perpetual flow” (“The Triumph of Life,” l. 298), an apocalypse without millennium, an intense hope for change coupled with the impossibility of transformation.2