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Old Stragers

Pat Rogers, 7 May 1981

The Garrick Stage: Theatres and Audience in the 18th Century 
by Allardyce Nicoll.
Manchester, 192 pp., £14.50, April 1980, 0 7190 0768 2
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The Kemble Era: John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons and the London Stage 
by Linda Kelly.
Bodley Head, 221 pp., £8.50, April 1980, 0 370 10466 8
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Early English Stages 1300 to 1660: Vol. 3: Plays and their Makers to 1576 
by Glynne Wickham.
Routledge, 357 pp., £14.50, April 1981, 0 7100 0218 1
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... our gaze. The thing we contemplate is not Edmund Kean, his very self and voice, but the Kean of William Hazlitt. The radiance of the report obscures that which is reported. Ms Kelly writes clearly for the most part, seldom with elegance. She gets into some frightful muddles of syntax: ‘Family commitments, among them to her stepson George, an unsuccessful ...

Wielded by a Wizard

Seamus Perry: Shelley’s Kind of Glee, 3 January 2019

Selected Poems and Prose 
by Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Jack Donovan and Cian Duffy.
Penguin, 893 pp., £12.99, January 2017, 978 0 241 25306 9
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... as well as admirers, dividing opinion over the next two hundred years with comical extremity. William Hazlitt, although notionally on the same side in the big political questions of the day, was pugnaciously uncharmed by the cast of mind that he discerned in Shelley’s dashing about, and anticipated a whole school of criticism: ‘There is no caput ...

Deleecious

Matthew Bevis: William Hazlitt, 6 November 2008

New Writings of William Hazlitt: Volume I 
edited by Duncan Wu.
Oxford, 507 pp., £120, September 2007, 978 0 19 923573 5
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New Writings of William Hazlitt: Volume II 
edited by Duncan Wu.
Oxford, 553 pp., £120, September 2007, 978 0 19 923574 2
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William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man 
by Duncan Wu.
Oxford, 557 pp., £25, October 2008, 978 0 19 954958 0
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... The gradings, for instance, are not always consistent: the first of three articles on the trial of William Hone is graded A but the third gets a C, and we aren’t given a reason for the difference. On another occasion Wu feels that an article is ‘beyond doubt’ written by Hazlitt, yet awards it a B. Sometimes the arguments for attribution involve a special ...

Never mind the neighbours

Margaret Anne Doody, 4 April 1996

Delphine 
by Germaine de Staël, translated by Avriel Goldberger.
Northern Illinois, 468 pp., $50, September 1995, 0 87580 200 1
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... literature. The novel has strong connections with the ‘Jacobin’ novels of Charlotte Smith, William Godwin, Amelia Opie and Thomas Holcroft. The use of engagements and marriages as symptoms of the state of society belongs peculiarly to Charlotte Smith as a Revolutionary subject. To Smith, too, must be given the credit for the genre to which ...

Mother-Haters and Other Rebels

Barbara Taylor: Heroine Chic, 3 January 2002

Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage 
by Elaine Showalter.
Picador, 384 pp., £16.99, June 2001, 0 330 34669 5
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... applauded five years earlier were fast falling from favour. In 1798 Wollstonecraft’s husband, William Godwin, published a memoir of his wife in which he revealed her unorthodox sexual history. Conservatives crowed in triumph, and she was publicly vilified as a whore; even former friends denounced her. So savage was the outcry that when Mary Hays came ...

Walking in high places

Michael Neve, 21 October 1982

The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of 18th-Century Science 
edited by G.S. Rousseau and R.S. Porter.
Cambridge, 500 pp., £25, November 1980, 9780521225991
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Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin 
by Thomas McFarland.
Princeton, 432 pp., £24.60, February 1981, 0 691 06437 7
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Poetry realised in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early 19th-Century Science 
by Trevor Levere.
Cambridge, 271 pp., £22.50, October 1981, 0 521 23920 6
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Coleridge 
by Richard Holmes.
Oxford, 102 pp., £1.25, March 1982, 0 19 287591 4
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Young Charles Lamb 1775-1802 
by Winifred Courtney.
Macmillan, 411 pp., £25, July 1982, 0 333 31534 0
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... lonely schoolboy from Christ’s Hospital. Through his study of the scientific work, Levere joins William Empson among others in defending the coherence of Coleridge and his metaphysics. Coleridge’s vision of a ‘dynamic’ German philosophy, pitted against Anglo-Gallic reductionism; his flirtation with chemistry ‘to improve his stock of ...

Wordsworth’s Crisis

E.P. Thompson, 8 December 1988

Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years 
by Nicholas Roe.
Oxford, 306 pp., £27.50, March 1988, 0 19 812868 1
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... I am of that odious class of men called democrats,’ Wordsworth wrote to his friend William Mathews in 1794. Much the same can be said of Coleridge, on the evidence of his letters and publications of the mid-1790s. By the early decades of this century, British, French and American scholarship concurred in finding both poets to be, in the 1790s, republicans and advanced reformers, who then suffered disappointment in the course of the French Revolution and, in different ways and at different times, changed their minds ...

Men Who Keep Wolves

Tom Shippey: Edward the Confessor, 3 December 2020

Edward the Confessor: Last of the Royal Blood 
by Tom Licence.
Yale, 332 pp., £25, August 2020, 978 0 300 21154 2
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... on the charge sheet: Edward was a roi fainéant, who handed everything over to Earl Godwin and his squabbling sons – if Harold had not had to go and fight his brother Tostig at Stamford Bridge on 25 September 1066, he might not have lost at Hastings three weeks later. Edward also failed in his duty to provide an heir, possibly out of pious ...

Libel on the Human Race

Steven Shapin: Malthus, 5 June 2014

Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet 
by Robert Mayhew.
Harvard, 284 pp., £20, April 2014, 978 0 674 72871 4
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... population, and in which death would be, if not eliminated, at least indefinitely postponed. William Godwin pointed to the enormous agricultural capacity of the world’s yet unexploited land: mind would triumph over matter, and ‘there will be neither disease, anguish, melancholy, nor resentment.’ It was better that there should be more people ...

Praeludium of a Grunt

Tom Crewe: Charles Lamb’s Lives, 19 October 2023

Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb 
by Eric G. Wilson.
Yale, 521 pp., £25, January 2022, 978 0 300 23080 2
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... Landor), but cites instead David Lynch, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Marcel Duchamp, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, Hugo Ball, Geoff Dyer, Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis.Lamb deserves​ much better than this. He deserves, most of all, an account that makes you want to read him. His prose only ...

No Theatricks

Ferdinand Mount: Burke, 21 August 2014

The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: from the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence 
by David Bromwich.
Harvard, 500 pp., £25, May 2014, 978 0 674 72970 4
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Moral Imagination: Essays 
by David Bromwich.
Princeton, 350 pp., £19.95, March 2014, 978 0 691 16141 9
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... with the Vindication is that Burke carries it off with such gusto that innocent readers such as William Godwin took it literally and were convinced by the myth that it was intended to demolish; some even believed that it might be the work of Bolingbroke, who was actually Burke’s target. The Enquiry, by contrast, is an excursion of daring and ...

Puellilia

Pat Rogers, 7 August 1986

Mothers of the Novel: One Hundred Good Women Writers before Jane Austen 
by Dale Spender.
Pandora, 357 pp., £12.95, May 1986, 0 86358 081 5
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Scribbling Sisters 
by Dale Spender and Lynne Spender.
Camden Press, 188 pp., £4.95, May 1986, 0 948491 00 0
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A Woman of No Character: An Autobiography of Mrs Manley 
by Fidelis Morgan.
Faber, 176 pp., £9.95, June 1986, 0 571 13934 5
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Cecilia 
by Fanny Burney.
Virago, 919 pp., £6.95, May 1986, 0 86068 775 9
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Millenium Hall 
by Sarah Scott.
Virago, 207 pp., £4.95, May 1986, 0 86068 780 5
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Marriage 
by Susan Ferrier.
Virago, 513 pp., £4.50, February 1986, 0 86068 765 1
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Belinda 
by Maria Edgeworth.
Pandora, 434 pp., £4.95, May 1986, 0 86358 074 2
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Self-Control 
by Mary Brunton.
Pandora, 437 pp., £4.95, May 1986, 9780863580840
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The Female Quixote: The Adventures of Arabella 
by Charlotte Lennox.
Pandora, 423 pp., £4.95, May 1986, 0 86358 080 7
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... Robert Bage, Henry Brooke, John Bunyan, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, Charles Johnstone, Charles Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], Thomas Malory, Charles Maturin, Walter Scott, Philip Sidney, Horace Walpole ... twenty, plus the recognised ...

Museums of Melancholy

Iain Sinclair: Silence on the Euston Road, 18 August 2005

... on a strange, random trawl across London, a version of the dictated geography of Aidan Dun or William Blake. St Pancras Old Church to Old Street Roundabout to Farringdon Road to Wapping Old Stairs, where Lennon lay on the ground and played dead. St Pancras was a child martyr who gave his name to numerous churches, a hospital, a railway station. He is ...

Gray’s Elegy

Jonathan Coe, 8 October 1992

Poor Things 
by Alasdair Gray.
Bloomsbury, 317 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 0 7475 1246 9
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... the operating table of a doctor’s surgery in late 19th-century Glasgow. The doctor in question, Godwin Baxter, is himself an overgrown monster, with deformed hands and a voice that can perforate eardrums, but his grotesque appearance hides the soul of ‘an astonishingly good, stout, intelligent, eccentric man’: and in making Bella, whose body is her own ...

The Reptile Oculist

John Barrell, 1 April 2004

... by political disagreements, Taylor, a known and convinced Tory and devotee of the prime minister, William Pitt, managed to remain on friendly terms with men such as William Godwin and the great satirical poet John Wolcot, ‘Peter Pindar’, whom Pitt’s government regarded as dangerously disloyal.Friendship was his ...

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