Melissa Bailes, Regenerating Romanticism: Botany, Sensibility, and Originality in British Literature, 1750-1830 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2023) 282 pp. $115.00 Hb. $32.50 Pb. ISBN: 9780813949406
Melissa Bailes’s Regenerating Romanticism: Botany, Sensibility, and Originality in British Literature, 1750-1830 makes an important intervention in Romantic studies by calling into question the truism that Romantic poets rejected science. She calls on scholars to reconsider the Romantic canon as well as the principles that seem to undergird it. She demonstrates how, at a time when literature and science were becoming increasingly separate professions, this representation worked to define the canon through exclusion. Romantic writers – many of them women – were disparaged not only for their engagement with science, but for supposedly lacking the values then emerging as central to ‘high’ literature – notably, sensibility and originality. She demonstrates how these values were promulgated in the service of misogynist and racist agendas and deployed to police the boundaries of a professional identity in the making.
Regenerating Romanticism makes a striking argument. Bailes demonstrates the workings of the misogyny and (to a lesser extent) racism driving the apparently aesthetic values promulgated by now-canonical Romantic writers (the ‘big six’ of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Shelley, Byron, and Keats). Principles of sensibility and originality were used (very inconsistently) to delineate poetry from science, to distinguish the best poetry from the rest, and to exclude those who supposedly lacked them from the top-tier of literary writers. Sensibility – meaning sensitivity to feeling even more than to physical stimuli – was said to be incompatible with scientific writing. Lasting originality was distinguished from fleeting novelty and engaging with science automatically precluded a work’s being original, especially when such works were explicitly intertextual. In this way, distinctions among writers of scientific literature were flattened and the group thus defined was relegated to a lesser school of literature. Erasmus Darwin served as the exemplar of what Bailes calls the ‘scientific literature’ of the period. His work was critiqued for its lack of both – especially The Loves of the Plants (1789), which put Linnaean taxonomy into controversially racy verse. Other writers of scientific literature were then grouped as part of the ‘Darwin school’ and accused of being similarly lacking, regardless of their individual distinctiveness as writers.
Bailes, however, shows how such characterizations were wrong and wrongheaded. In an illuminating series of close readings, Bailes (re)introduces the reader to writers who engaged with Romantic botany and who displayed considerable sensibility – including Charlotte Smith, Maria Riddell, Sydney Owenson and even Darwin – and who often deployed their knowledge of botany to do so. And many wove their interest in natural history into their literary efforts. Regenerating Romanticism considers how such writers engaged with botany as they explored conceptions of time, history, nation, life, empire, madness, and originality itself.
Chapter 1 explores James Thomson’s influential georgic The Seasons (1726-46). Thomson connects the British climate, especially its characteristic changing of seasons, to sensibility and national character. Set in opposition to the ‘torrid and frigid zones’ he understood as primitive because unchanging, Britain’s seasonal movement supposedly enabled its progress. Thomson thus contributes to Eurocentric concepts of ‘conjectural history’ that speculated about the stages through which humanity progressed to reach its modern state of civilization. Later writers –Richard West, Anna Barbauld, John Penn, John Clare – then portrayed the ‘backwardness’ or late-coming of spring as indicative of Britain’s probable decline, especially in the wake of the loss of its American colonies.
The next chapter turns from the annual cycle of seasons to that of a day. Linnaeus had proposed a floral clock, where the opening and closing of certain flowers could be used to signal the time of day. In the writings of Erasmus Darwin, Charlotte Smith and Felicia Hemans, this ‘floral clock’ was used to explore the sentience of plants and flowers. The ‘floral clock’ itself was used in contradictory ways – figuring flowers sometimes as mechanism, responding without will or feeling to external stimuli, and sometimes as beings with feelings analogous to and often metaphorical for those of humans. Although criticized as a poet for his lack of sensibility, Darwin landed on both sides of the mechanistic/vitalist divide. Responding to the mechanistic portrayal of plant life in Darwin’s floral clock, Charlotte Smith’s poem ‘The Horologe of the Fields’ stresses the distinction between mechanical and botanical clocks, portraying flowers in terms of vital, voluntary actions. Felicia Hemans, in turn, framed her interest in science in ways ‘acceptably feminine’, critiquing Linnean mechanism as an outdated concept, and using flowers to shape her explorations of human experience and emotion.
The next two chapters turn to questions of nation and empire. Maria Riddell’s travel writings record her observations of West Indian natural history. Her challenge to current naturalist theories enables her to trouble standard depictions of white women colonists, Indigenous peoples, and enslaved Africans. Whereas scientific conceptions of anomaly and monstrosity frequently bolstered social boundaries of sex, class, and race and situated the colonies as a space of degeneration, Riddell’s observations about botanical and zoological hybridity and transformation emphasize the possibility for improvement that could be gained in the West Indies. Through these, she presents alternative ways to think about sociobiological implications for traditionally denigrated groups and, deploying science and sensibility, encourages identification and sympathy in her readers.
Sydney Owenson also combines science and sensibility. Her novel The Wild Irish Girl (1806) aims to evoke sympathy for the Irish among her British readers. Her botanical engagement centers on the concept of consumption. Melding ideas of national and natural history, she depicts the British as cannibalistically consuming the Irish, whom she identifies with native edible plants. In turn, the Irish peasantry and enslaved Africans in the Caribbean colonies (associated with the potato and sugar cane, respectively), figure as the edible sufferers of British colonial consumption.
Bailes’s third section turns to what she calls the ‘in/effable’ issues of description and classification. She explores how Charlotte Smith aligns the poet naturalist with sensibility to critique both the origin of Linnaean taxonomy and the lofty attitudes of contemporary male poets including Erasmus Darwin. In her Conversations Introducing Poetry: Chiefly on Subjects of Natural History (1804), Smith explores the sea as a place that tears down boundaries – the home of species that straddle different kingdoms of the natural world. Such botanical mysteries become a source for literary originality in her larger efforts to reveal the epistemological limits of masculinist taxonomy, unpacking problematic possibilities regarding established ideas of gender, class, and nation.
A champion of poetry that promotes a sensibility focussed on sociability and connectedness, Anna Seward transforms our understanding of ‘sensibility’ in Romantic poetry. As Bailes demonstrates, at a moment when madness was broadly associated with excess of passion or feeling (such that the widespread enthusiasm for botany could be labeled botanomania), Seward argues the opposite. She insists that the lack of feeling in Darwin’s writing, the disconnections from reality she finds in Cowper’s, and, the isolating egotism evident especially in Wordsworth’s famous daffodils, not only constitute defects of poetry but also signal forms of madness in their authors.
In her conclusion, Bailes returns to some of those who shaped the canon we inherit. The marginalization of scientific literature and of the denigration and exclusion of women that accompanied it, were the result of concerted efforts by newly established professional societies like the BAAS (British Association for the Advancement of Science) as well as by critics like Thomas DeQuincey, William Hazlitt, and William Wordsworth, whose misogyny and hypocrisy Bailes depicts in no uncertain terms. Insisting that changes in botanical (or other scientific) practice should not be viewed as the reason for the dissolution of scientific literature, Bailes shakes up Romantic studies – undermining comfortable assumptions regarding canon formation and aesthetic values, as well as the relationship between literature and science.
Barri J. Gold, University of Pennsylvania