Studies in Romanticism

The essays published here make the case that romantic literary studies has much to learn from recent scholarship in economic history. The economic historiography of the late eighteenth and early ninteenth centuries offers new ways to understand the connections between Romantic literary and cultural formations on the one hand, and on the other, fundamental changes in Britain's social and demographic conditions, its technological development, and its colonial, mercantile, and ecological relations. Most of all, these essays propose that a Romantic studies made newly responsive to economic concerns might have at its heart a new kind of ecocriticism.

The collection's title is from the eighth book of The Excursion (1814), a book dominated by reflections on the rise of the manufacturing system:

                                            An inventive AgeHas wrought, if not with speed of magic, yetTo most strange issues. I have lived to markA new and unforeseen Creation riseFrom out the labours of a peaceful Land,Wielding her potent Enginery to frameAnd to produce, with appetite as keenAs that of War, which rests not night or day,Industrious to destroy!¹

The epithet that the Wanderer (who speaks these lines) chooses for the age might at first recall the heroic myth of Romantic-period Britain's industrial [End Page 187] development as the accomplishment of a few great inventors.² His second sentence describes something different: an emergent "Creation" generated without conscious purpose out of interactions between "labours" with smaller ends in view. The appetites that urge on those labors are handled with ambivalence. Are they the contrary or only the obverse of warlike impulses? Notwithstanding the long decades of war with France, the Wanderer's invocation of "a peaceful Land" is evidently a sincere account of the nation's supposed inward character. The assertion that Britain has redirected violent energies and technologies toward peaceful flourishing is not lightly made, as his extended meditation on the manufacturing system goes on to show. But that meditation's pessimistic side is at least equally forceful. Above all, the Wanderer denounces night-labor and child labor in the mills: a compulsion that itself "rests not night or day / Industrious," and thereby hauntingly resembles the acts of war to which it had promised an alternative.

Wordsworth's "inventive Age" implies something more than an epoch of mechanical ingenuity. His poetry typically uses "inventive" and its cognates in senses of creative or playful contrivance, as with the "old inventive Poets" of the twentieth River Duddon sonnet or when, in the previous book of The Excursion, a merry clergyman deflects personal questions with "inventive humour" (Book 7, line 101). In "Stanzas written in my Pocket copy of the Castle of Indolence," Coleridge has the gift of "inventions rare" to amuse and entertain.³ Coleridge himself employed the word in Religious Musings almost as a technical term for the fine arts as such when they arise in the course of society's progress:

     all th' inventive arts, that nurs'd the soulTo forms of beauty, and by sensual wantsUnsensualiz'd the mind.⁴

In this usage, the "inventive arts" are the groundwork of the spirit's highest aspirations. The Excursion's reference to an "inventive Age" might thus suggest both a preponderance of barren calculation and a means of redemption from mere instrumentalism. It designates an age in which various kinds of creativity and imaginative possibility could be either liberated or confounded by others. Wordsworth explained in a note that when describing the characteristics of the age he had felt "compelled" to "dwell upon the baneful [End Page 188] effects arising out of an ill-regulated and excessive application of powers . . . admirable in themselves" (314). His treatment of "manufacturing industry," while certainly conservative in orientation, was by no means simply rejectionist. Perhaps most notable of all, in this context, was simply the intensity with which he perceived the manufacturing "Creation" as novel, strange, and hardly less than magical.

Responses to economic transformation in British Romantic writing often involved complexities of the kind signaled by Wordsworth's phrase, and a comparable sense of wonder or sublimity. "Nothing seems too bold...