INTRODUCTION
Problems now and then
Raymond Williams begins his foreword to Languages of Nature with
William Hazlitt’s report, in 1825, of a conversation about the dead.
‘I suppose the two first persons you would choose to see’, writes
Hazlitt, ‘would be the two greatest names in English literature, Sir
Isaac Newton and Mr Locke.’ Williams’s point is that if ‘the use of
‘‘literature’’ there is now surprising, where ‘‘science’’ or ‘‘natural
philosophy’’ might be expected, the problem is as much ours as
theirs’.
1
This book is rooted squarely within that problem. Its focus
lies along the disputed border between ‘the literary’ and the merely
‘textual’, and in the gap between definitions of literature in our own
age and in what is now known as the Romantic period, a time of
social and technological transformation during which literature
became a site of ideological contestation, generating a series of
questions with far-reaching implications: what constituted ‘litera-
ture’? What sort of truth claims or authority did it possess? What
kind of community should it address?
If an important part of the recent rise of interdisciplinary
approaches has been the exploration of the historical evolution of
the academic disciplines themselves, then it may be of some help
to our own debates to understand more about the theoretical ten-
sions of this earlier age, not least because those struggles found
their partial resolution in the development of the academic disci-
pline of English Literature, which is today the subject of various
theoretical challenges that aim at redrawing the boundaries
between the disciplines.
2
The ‘enlightened philosophers’ of the

the cultural critic or historian must multiply the mediators, not elimin-
ate them. He or she must excavate the cultural institutions, the competi-
tive readings, the social and political constraints, and above all, the
intense mutualities and struggles in social space that guide and block
the passage of signs among historical writers, readers and audiences.
5
Offering a similar argument for a more socially grounded explo-
ration of literary culture, Robert Darnton rejects ‘the great-man,
great-book view of literary history’ as a ‘mystification’ of literary
production which occults the important role of ‘literary middle-
men’ such as publishers, printers, booksellers, editors, reviewers
and literary agents
6
. He suggests that widening our focus to
include the many texts which a ‘canon of classics’ approach has
encouraged us to ignore will ‘open up the possibility of rereading
literary history. And if studied in connection with the system for
producing and diffusing the printed word, they could force us to
rethink our notion of literature itself .’
7
My own critical project is driven by a similar interest in the
shifting cultural geography within which literary texts are
inscribed, and out of which their meanings are inevitably pro-
Problems now and then 3
duced. Darnton pursues this aim by shifting his attention from
the great men and books of canonical literature to the middlemen
and supposedly lesser authors of the publishing industry, and by
concentrating his focus on original editions, ‘seizing them in all
their physicality’ in order to ‘grasp something of the experience
of literature two centuries ago’.

boast Newton, Locke, and Johnson. – Science, taste, and correction, are
indeed the characteristics of the present day (MM 7 (1799): 112).
The Monthly Review reflected this assessment in its celebration of
the Dissenting theologian, political theorist, chemist, and edu-
cational pioneer Joseph Priestley (in July 1791, the same month
that Priestley’s house and library were destroyed by a Church-and-
The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s4
King mob in Birmingham) as ‘the literary wonder of the present
times’ (MR 5 (1791): 303).
This approach to literature was reflected not only in the wide
range of subject matter that was attributed to it, but in assump-
tions about its social function. However differently they might
interpret the claim, critics on both sides of the political divide
could find some measure of common ground in the Analytical
Review’s conviction, in its discussion of the Birmingham riots, ‘that
the diffusion of knowledge tends to the promotion of virtue; and
that morals can form the only stable basis for civil liberty’ (AR 11
(1791): 175). The Times would affirm this role in its response to
the planned increase in stamp duties two decades later: ‘such a
measure would tend to the suppression of general information,
and would thereby incalculably injure the great cause of order and
liberty which has been maintained no less by British literature than by
British valour, and to which the Press of this country may honestly
boast that it has contributed no weak or inefficient support’.
10
Lit-
erature, or the republic of letters as it was often referred to, was
celebrated by the advocates of this vision as the basis of a com-
municative process in which all rational individuals could have
their say, and in which an increasingly enlightened reading public

emphasizes that some people embraced writing’s emancipatory
promise – an enthusiasm which only heightened the discomfort of
others. Focusing on the enthusiasts, Darnton suggests that the
French ‘revolutionaries knew what they were doing when they car-
ried printing presses in their civic processions and when they set
aside one day in the revolutionary calendar for the celebration of
public opinion’.
13
The parallels between these epochs reverberate
throughout this study. So too, I hope, do the many differences.
Rather than insisting on a precise correlation, I am suggesting this
analogical relationship in order to displace the loftier equation of
literature with ‘imaginative expression’.
In The Function of Criticism, Terry Eagleton describes the domi-
nant eighteenth-century concept of literature in terms similar to
my own emphasis on a communicative process between rational
individuals:
Only in this ideal discursive sphere is exchange without domination poss-
ible; for to persuade is not to dominate, and to carry one’s opinion is
more an act of collaboration than of competition . . . What is at stake in
the public sphere, according to its own ideological self-image, is not
power but reason. Truth, not authority, is its ground, and rationality, not
domination, its daily currency. (17)
There are few better descriptions of the appeal of this version of
literature in the period. My quarrel with it, however, is precisely
over the question of period. Eagleton’s differentiation between
this discourse and the dominant approach to literature in the age
that followed conforms to a crude strategy of periodization which
distinguishes between the Enlightenment and Romanticism.
14

nal, The Reflector: ‘Pursue the course of poetry in England, and you
will find it accompanied with literature . . . [England’s poets] by
their literature enriched their poetry; and what they borrowed
from the public stock of art and science, they repaid with interest,
by the pleasure and instruction which they afford mankind’ (1
(1812): 358–9). Far from equating literature – ‘the public stock
of art and science’ – with poetry, the passage reverses modern
assumptions by suggesting that poetry is better when its author is
well-acquainted with literature.
The ideal of the bourgeois public sphere was a dominant but
highly contested position that was most closely associated with the
reformist middle class. Conservative thinkers worried that literary
freedom led to political unrest, that the universalist rhetoric of the
public sphere reflected the particular interests of the professional
classes, and that the legal distinction between speculative and
seditious works could no longer be relied upon to regulate the free
play of intellectual debate. Equally disconcerting was what seemed
to be the overproduction and the increasingly fashionable status
of literature, which unsettled its equation with the diffusion of
Problems now and then 7
knowledge and social progress. Reviews were hailed as a possible
means of halting this sense of cultural decline, but critics were
frequently denounced for acting as demagogues rather than ‘sov-
ereigns of reason’.
16
What was ultimately at stake in these debates
was the proximity of the literary and political public spheres. The
more reformist the critic, the more he or she tended to insist on
their close connection, whereas conservative critics tended to
think of them as distinct cultural domains.

atmosphere, it was easier for critics to denounce those who
asserted their rightful place in the expanded reading public as
part of the problem rather than to welcome them as potentially
serious writers and readers. Or, if these new readerships were
allowed to be serious in their attitudes towards literature, this
commitment was denounced as evidence of a politically radical
spirit determined to subvert the established social order.
The political changes triggered by the French Revolution, which
The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s8
I examine in chapter one, unfolded far more rapidly than did the
history which I focus on in chapter two, which treats the dream of
the republic of letters as an expression of the aspirations of the
professional classes. But as debates arose about the relationship
between literature and political authority, these apparently dis-
tinct histories became part of the same story of the fragmentation
of the ideal of literature as a public sphere. The excesses gener-
ated by the French Revolution, on the one hand, and by the infor-
mation revolution, on the other, converged in an antagonism
towards those new readerships who, critics argued, could not be
trusted to resist either the inflammatory effects of seditious writ-
ings or the vagaries of literary fashion. Ironically, however, if these
emergent groups were denounced for their irrationality, it was
partly because their appropriation of the Enlightenment emphasis
on literature as a guarantee of rational liberty coincided with
broader concerns about the sustained viability of precisely this
equation.
The movement from chapter 1 to chapter 2 presupposes two
critical transitions: a shift in focus from literature to authors, and
a redefinition of politics as a struggle for professional distinction
(the status of the author) rather than for national agency