The Opposite of News: Rethinking the 1800 "Lyrical Ballads" and the Mass Media

Abstract

I heartily recommend a dose of British Romantic poets to defuse constant barrage of current news reports. --Letter to Editor, New York Times, 31 March 2003 THE POSSIBILITY OF AN OVERLAP BETWEEN EARLY ROMANTIC LITERATURE and newspaper journalism might seem unlikely to scholars, since many of central tenets of a key Romantic document, William Wordsworth's Preface to 1800 Lyrical Ballads, appear to be fundamentally opposed to transitory, episodic, and heterogeneous qualities of any periodical publication, especially a daily newspaper. Romantic literature, as author of letter quoted above suggests, is generally seen as opposite of news, an antidote to dominance of newspapers and proclivities of their readers. This view has been rigorously challenged, most prominently by Marjorie Levinson, who has drawn attention to topicality and contemporary significance of Wordsworth's verse, implicitly situating poems within world of current affairs. (1) But a specific, personal and sometimes overlooked contest for readers and for authority emerges from relationship between newspapers, journalism and literature in year that Wordsworth wrote Preface. Eighteen hundred was a year in which battle between newspapers and books for readers was felt particularly keenly. Mary Robinson, writing in Monthly Magazine in late 1800, provides a valuable insight into this battle: There never were so many monthly and diurnal publications as at present period; and to perpetual novelty which issues from press may in a great measure, be attributed expansion of mind, which daily evinces itself among all classes of people.... The daily prints fall into hands of all classes: they display temper of times; intricacies of political manoeuvre; opinions of learned, enlightened, and patriotic. But for medium of a diurnal paper, letters of JUNIUS had been unknown, or perhaps never written. Political controversy and literary discussions are only rendered of utility to mankind by spirit of contention. The press is mirror where folly may see its own likeness, and vice contemplate magnitude of its deformity. It also presents a tablet of manners; a transcript of temper of mankind; a check on gigantic strides of innovation; and a bulwark which REASON has raised, and, it is to be hoped, TIME will consecrate, round altar of immortal LIBERTY! (2) Robinson's notion of emulative contention within and between press and literature is a canny summary of state of affairs in 1800. Literature and journalism, as Lennard Davis has convincingly argued, spent eighteenth century disengaging themselves from their tangled relationship while struggling to secure same pool of readers. In Factual Fictions, Davis outlines a tentative theory of relationship between news and fiction, arguing that, prior to eighteenth century, the news/novels discourse is a kind of undifferentiated matrix out of which journalism and history will be distinguished from novels--that is factual narratives will be clearly differentiated from fictional ones. (3) Davis' intriguing speculation implicitly raises a critical challenge for poets around 1800: if, by end of eighteenth century, readers turned to newspapers for facts and to novels for pleasure, what role could poetry play in literary marketplace, and how could poets engage with a public accustomed to reading in this way? This challenge evidently underpins Wordsworth's characterization of contemporary readers in 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Unlike 1798 Advertisement's warnings about feelings of strangeness and aukwardness that readers would have to confront when approaching first edition of Lyrical Ballads--warnings that juxtaposed Wordsworth's and Coleridge's poems with contemporary expectations about poetry--the 1800 Preface identified challenge to new edition as emanating from journalism and literary genres and tastes that it spawned and fostered. …