The Realms of Verse, 1830-1870: English Poetry in a Time of Nation-Building by Matthew Reynolds (review)

Abstract

190 Reviews fables, stories, and legends?arebrought by Gay to comment on "polite" opera, drama and literature' (p. 275). Well, yes, and no. There is generic variety, even confusion, but eighteenth-century genres may have been less fixed than we sometimes imagine. If so, to mix was not such a pointed and politically self-conscious act as itmight seem. The second strand of Dugaw's argument shows something ofthe same tendency to find the radical in Gay. This is both more familiar than the detailed discussions of his popular sources and less convincing. For the last ten or fifteenyears critics have been discovering a revolutionary of sorts in the surprising figure of Gay. Dugaw, who al? ready belonged to this group by virtue of her earlier book Warrior Womenand Popular Balladry, 1650-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), here reconfirms her membership. She argues that The Beggar's Opera 'identified and critiqued the profit-driven politics and systemic vice' of the Walpole administrationand its 'new order' (p. 35) and that 'Polly is a strenuous satire that exposes the heroic ideal as an ethosof slavery' (p. 186). Not only that, but she makes much of Gay's modernity. The word appears throughout her text, and one of her principal aims is to show that he re? mains 'arrestingly relevant today' (p. 50). 'More than any other early modern writer,' she suggests, 'Gay interrogated the essential dynamics of the world still in place today' (p. 31). As part of this argumentative thrust, the firstchapter is devoted to a reading of the reworkings of The Beggar's Opera by Brecht, Havel, and Ayckbourn. To be sure, it is one of the puzzles of literary history why twentieth-century radicals (and Dugaw's trio is far from a complete list) should have found such congenial materials in the ballad opera of an early eighteenth-century associate of dukes and Tories. The answer, however, may not be simply that he was the same kind of radical as his successors. But to quarrel with Dugaw's conclusions is not to deny the quality of her book. Although her arguments are often tendentious, they are also usually worth attending to. This book is a real contribution to our understanding of Gay. Students of his work and of eighteenth-century literature generally should read it. National University of Singapore John Richardson The Realms of Verse, 1830-1870: English Poetry in a Time of Nation-Building. By Matthew Reynolds. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2001. xii + 30opp. ?45. ISBN 0-19-818712-2. Reynolds's incisive study of the ways in which leading Victorian poets respond to, and at the same time help to define, Britain's imperial project?particularly in relation to the simultaneous struggles to define national boundaries and identities in other parts of Europe?is notable for a subtlety and discrimination which resist the temptation to interpret every poem as resembling 'a pamphlet or a piece of journalism' (p. 14). Rather than 'flattening' the 'enquiring and expansive textures' of Victorian poetry into 'the blankness of a message', he argues, we should recognize the extent to which Victorians saw poetry not only as resembling the nation in its continuous process of evolution, but also as capable both of informing and of embodying the 'national spirit' (pp. 16-17). If the 'realms of verse' are thus?at least in part?the 'ever-broadening England' of Tennyson's imperialist vision (p. 209), Reynolds also highlights the ways in which Tennyson and his contemporaries often suppress the more awkward potentialities ofthe nation?for example, in celebrating 'Italian unifi? cation as an assertion of British-style constitutional monarchy', while eschewing the more radical connotations of Garibaldi's campaigns (pp. 3-5). That Tennyson's view of empire, in particular, echoes a Romantic (and especially Coleridgean) vision of organic unity in which the nation ideally reflects the qualities of the work of art as well as the evolving universe is evident, for example, in his son's statement that' "one MLRy 98.1, 2003 191 of the deepest desires of his life was to help the realisation of the ideal of an Empire" in which "the most intimate union of...