The Other East and Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Imagining Poland and the Russian Empire by Thomas Mclean (review)

Abstract

advances the work of Michael Scrivener and William Keach, among others. His concluding reading of Shelley’s Swellfoot the Tyrant, which builds on the work of Steven Jones and Olivia Smith, among others, explores the shared figures of literary and graphic satire of the period. Similarly, Gardner provides a compelling reading of two of Charles Lamb’s neglected poems, revealing the liberal (though not radical) politics of this author who, since Hazlitt, has been deemed largely apolitical (p. 128). The strength of these readings of Bamford, Shelley, and Lamb are not in the novelty of methodological approach but in their attention to political allusions, tropes conventional in radical culture, and satirical humor. More original in approach are Gardner’s readings of William Hone and Lord Byron. Picking up on Ian Haywood’s thesis that radical print culture was characterized by “a process of continual appropriation and reappropriation, of rapid response, innovation, imitation, assimilation and subversion,” Gardner argues that Hone “utilized whatever narratives and means he had at his disposal,” including “pirating and parodying some of the best-known and ablest poets of the day” so as “to bring their weight to the side of radicalism” (pp. 36–37, 64). To this end, he discusses Hone’s “full length Byronic counterfeit,” Don Juan Canto the Third, a work entirely sympathetic to the radical agenda and geared to a broader reading public than any poem Byron himself authored. In a compelling contrast, Gardner moves to a reading of Byron’s failed play, Marino Faliero, a thinly-veiled but equivocating response to Cato Street in which Byron “examine[d] his own relationship with a British politics that had come into being only after he had left the country” (p. 131). Where Hone was fully engaged in reform efforts, Byron remained distant from and ambivalent about events that would “test his aristocratic loyalty” (p. 194). This is where Gardner’s study is strongest and most lively: in demonstrating how the commitment to radical politics variously played out in late Romantic literature. Poetry and Popular Protest is a very welcome addition to scholarship on radical Romanticism. Sam Houston State University Michael Demson