Populating Solitude

This chapter presents modern biopolitics taking its first recognizable shape in the late eighteenth century, coming to the fore in a prolonged clash between Thomas Malthus and two generations of Romantic writers. It examines how the responses of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Godwin, Percy Shelley, and William Hazlitt in the principle of population helped consolidate literature's ethical as well as aesthetic importance. The chapter also looks at Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, which introduced what Wordsworth called a “new species of poetry” and charted a bold course for its future. It then shifts to discuss Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, which advanced a troubling hypothesis about the future of the human species. Ultimately, the chapter explicates Shelley's Gothic romance of life-production as a timely experiment in Romantic political theory. The heterogeneous mass of flesh assembled by her protagonist grants ambiguously human form to the nineteenth century's revised conception of the populace.