Of Bearish Persons, Lions, and Puppy-Dogs: Biographic Historicism in Hazlitt, De Quincey and Trelawny

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article reads selected biographical work by Hazlitt, De Quincey and Trelawny on a range of key figures—chiefly, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley. In line with extant scholarship, its aim is to trace how these auto/biographic texts endeavor to disentangle auto from bios; that is, how they construct the authors whose lives they recount to carve out a space for the biographer, rather than for his subject. The article makes a distinct contribution in specifically reading this competitive dialectic of major and minor authorship in historiographic terms. The writers analyzed will be shown to activate a historical construction of Romanticism, at once insisting on the representative termination of the writers whose lives are recounted, as well as on their own capacity to succeed where the former failed. Such biographic historicism finally effects the construction of a late-Romantic subperiod, which in turn redounds on what was beginning to be periodized as Romanticism. Notes1 Similar assessments of Parry’s character were so often publicly expressed by contemporary men and women of letters that Parry eventually sued his most aggressive detractors, winning damages from The Examiner for libeling him in May 1825 as “exceedingly ignorant, boasting, bullying, and drunken” (329). Much to the delight of his enemies, the trial also revealed that Parry used a ghostwriter. Undeterred by the verdict against it, The Examiner published another screed against Parry in June 1827, describing him as an “illiterate pretender” who “came forward in the mask of an author” (375.) It should be noted that, in addition to class-related prejudices, another reason for this enmity may be Leigh Hunt’s uneasiness with facing a competitor for his own Lord Byron and His Contemporaries. Such tugs of war between potential biographers were a frequent occurrence; see, for example, Sheridan’s discussion of Percy Bysshe Shelley.2 Carlyle conjectures this conversation may have occurred on 26 February 1835 (283–84n1). Southey would himself become a focus of De Quincey’s recollections in 1839. For further context regarding De Quincey’s Recollections and their reception, see de Groote (29–30, 41–43) and Jordan.3 For an example of this prescriptive perspective, see Edel.4 On this latter point, see Linder and James & North, as well as Sheridan.5 See Thomas Moore 4: 191–92. On Byron’s celebrity, see Mole.6 See Leask’s “The Shadow Line” 64.7 See Addison in The Spectator: “I remember, upon Mr. Baxter's Death, there was Published a Sheet of very good Sayings, inscribed, The last Words of Mr. Baxter. The Title sold so great a Number of these Papers, that about a Week after there came out a second Sheet, inscrib’d, More last Words of Mr. Baxter” (qtd. in Addison and Steele 9: 104–08).8 On biography and its (re)creation of a sociability that involves subjects, writers, and readers, see North’s “Intertextual Sociability.”9 The tension between the living author and a mode premised on the writer’s death is examined in greater detail by Woody. It should also be noted that the confusion of past and present is an occasional feature of Hazlitt’s writing.10 The phrase “High Romanticism” has been deployed to capture this distinction (most notably, in Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism, especially 217–25).11 Hazlitt first publishes five portraits in The New Monthly; to the three editions published in 1825 (two in London, one in Paris), he adds about a dozen new chapters, one of which takes inspiration from an 1821 contribution to The London. The order and number vary between editions, but each does list the Coleridge bio as its third entry. While the Paris volume has the Byron essay as its first chapter, followed by an essay on Scott, the two London editions have the Byron chapter a few chapters in, in both instances preceded by the Scott essay. The position of the chapters matters in that the Coleridge essay sets up the Scott piece, which, in turn, prepares the Byron piece.12 This article is itself based on Hazlitt’s 1817 review of Coleridge’s Statesman’s Manual.13 Given the (auto)biographical nature of so much of De Quincey’s work, this strategy extends well beyond the lake essays. See Leask’s “Murdering One’s Double.”14 For further comment on De Quincey’s deployment of footnotes in another biographical essay, on the Scottish philosopher William Hamilton, see Tyson.