William Hazlitt's "Eloquence of the British Senate"

Abstract

William Hazlitt's Eloquence of the British Senate (1807) compiles in two volumes 250 House of Commons speeches dating from 1625 to 1802, copied by reporters, published in newspapers, and rearranged by Hazlitt. A parliamentary anthology, it a collection of remediated oratory representing the work of politicians, reporters, editors, and compilers. Acting as an author, Hazlitt, whose name appears on the title page, supplements the speeches with sketches of prominent Members of Parliament. For example, he praises the 17th century MP John Knight: confess 1 like the uncouth, bear-garden stile (1.236). Like Knight's rough rhetoric, Eloquence of the British Senate a blunt, uncouth reminder that pre-Romantic modes of authorship and textual production were survived into the 19th century. A of the romantic book, Andrew Piper has recently observerd, is by necessity a history of bibliographic heterogeneity (6). Printed books came to be equated with literature and literary authorship only through processes of remediation, experimentation, and the eventual effacement of older book forms. Hazlitt's Eloquence embodies this heterogeneous construction of the Romantic book and the Romantic author. As compilations, parliamentary anthologies bear signs of their production, and Hazlitt uses his to establish a position as an author and to criticize the remediation of political oratory in print. Because Hazlitt later used his sketches of MPs for literary projects, Eloquence helped turn him into a Romantic author. My reading of Eloquence extends work by Tom Paulin, who interprets the collection as an early, exploratory, concealed statement of his own [Hazlitt's] poetics and an early statement of his liberal politics (140, also Newlyn and Mulvihill). In addition to protesting the stagnation of British politics, Hazlitt takes what Michael Macovski called (in his paper on the panel of which thi ee above) a metacommentarial approach to the repackaging of parliamentary rhetoric in books in that Hazlitt examines the consequences of transforming political oratory into literary texts. In the Advertisement and the sketches that frame the speeches, he treats the codex as a problematic preserver of parliamentary speech and reflects on his involvement in this remediation of oratory within a print culture that encourages superficial reading habits. Through these paratexts, Hazlitt makes a bid for a form of authorship rooted in the refraining of others' words. Participating in a century-long trend of publishing parliamentary speech, Hazlitt criticizes the conventions of parliamentary anthologies and gets his say on a floor crowded by layers of remediated political speech. Eloquence sketches, in turn, were themselves recycled to reinvent Hazlitt as a Romantic author. Eloquence enters an early 19th century print culture in which political orations were transformed into texts for extra-parliamentary readers. Although publication of parliamentary speeches had been illegal since the 17th century, the expansion of the print economy and events such as the 1761 Wilkes trial altered relationships among Parliament, the press, and the people (Sparrow, Hessell, Reid). MPs like William Meredith maintained that The world at large ... had no just claim to be apprised of all the minutiae of the debates, but Parliament tolerated the print circulation of its proceedings by the late 18th century (qtd. in Reid 125). Reporters, like William Memory Wood fall, took turns listening to the debates in the galleries and transcribed speeches from memory. Newspaper editors then collated several accounts to create the image of a continuous debate. As written mediations of speech, parliamentary newspaper transcripts attest to the many hands that recorded MPs' words. transcripts featured in Hazlitt's Eloquence combine first: and third person voices, as in Mr. Pitt at beginning was rather low, and as every one was in agitation at his rising, his introduction was not heard, till he said, I came to town but to-day (2. …