british literature romantic period

2 2 I T H E R O M A N T I C P E R I O D

How such popular acclaim was to be understood and how the new reading public that bestowed it (and took it away) could possibly be reformed or monitored when, as Coleridget term "misgrowth" suggests, its limits and composition seemed unknowable: these were pressing questions for the age. Opponents of the French Revolutipn and political reform at home pondered a frightening possibility: if "eventS . . . [had] made us a world of readers" .(as Coleridge put it, thinking of how newspapers had proliferf,ted in response to the political upheavals), it might also be true that readers could mahe events in turn, that the new members of the audience for print would demand a part in the drama of national politics. Conservatives were well aware of arguments conjecturing that the Revolution had been the result of the invention of the printing press three centuries before. They certainly could not forget that Paine's Rights of Man-not the reading matter for the poor the Sunday-school movement had envisioned-had sold an astonish- ing two hundred thousand copies in a year.

However, the British state had lacked legal provisions for the prepublica- tion censorship of books since 1695, which was when the last Licensing Act had lapsed. Throughout the Romantic period therefore the Crown tried out other methods for policing reading and criminalizing certain practices of authoring and publishing. Paine was in absentia found guilty of sedition, for instance, and in l8l7 the radical publisher William Hone narrowly escaped conviction for blasphemy. Another government strategy was to use taxes to inflate the prices of printed matter and so keep political information out of the hands of the poor without exactly violating the freedom of the press. In the meantime worries about how the nation would fare now that "the people" read were matched by worries about how to regulate the reading done by women. In 1807 the bowdlerized edition was born, as the Reverend Thomas Bowdler and his sister Henrietta produced The Family Shahespeare, concoct- ing a Bard who, his indelicacies expurgated, could be sanctioned family fare.

Commentators who condemned the publishing industry as a scene of criminality also cited the frequency with which, during this chaotic time, best-selling books ended up republished in unauthorized, "pirated" edi- tions. Novels were the pirates'favorite targets. But the radical underground of London's printing industry also appropriated one of the most politically daring works of Percy Shelley, Queen Mab, and by keeping it in print, and accessible in cheap editions, thwarted attempts to posthumously sanitize the poet's reputation. And in l8l7 Southey, by then a Tory and the King- dom's Poet Laureate, was embarrassed to find his insurrectionary drama of 1794, Wat Tyler, published without his permission. There was no chance, Southey learned, that the publishers who had filched his play and put this souvenir of his youthful radicalism into circulation would be punished. The court refused to grant an injunction, citing the precedent that there could be no protection for publications deemed injurious to the public.

OTHER LITERARY FORTViS

Prose

Although we now know the Romantic period as an age of poetry, centered on works of imagination, nonfiction prose forms-essays, reviews, political pamphlets-flourished during the epoch, as writers seized the opportunity

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