“One Hot Electric Breath”: EBB’s Technology Debate with Tennyson, Systemic Digital Lags in Nineteenth-Century Literary Scholarship, and the EBB Archive

"One Hot Electric Breath": EBB's Technology Debate with Tennyson, Systemic Digital Lags in Nineteenth-Century Literary Scholarship, and the EBB Archive Marjorie Stone (bio) and Keith Lawson (bio) If we trod the deeps of ocean, if we struck the stars in rising, If we wrapped the globe intensely with one hot electric breath … (EBB, "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" 209–12) 1 Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Lady Geraldine's Courtship. Illustrated by W.J. Hennessy. Engraved by W.J. Linton. New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1870. Courtesy of the Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University, Waco, Texas. In 1844, imagining the possibility of "the globe" wrapped "intensely with one hot electric breath," the poet who first established her transatlantic reputation under the name "Elizabeth Barrett Barrett" provided an uncannily proleptic metaphor for the World Wide Web. The image comes from "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," a work that EBB completed with phenomenal speed to round out volume 1 of her 1844 Poems, which in America was titled [End Page 101] A Drama of Exile: And Other Poems. Although "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" was among the most critically successful as well as popular works in the two-volume collection that made her a celebrity poet, it remains little discussed today. It is most often noted in biographical accounts as the work in which she praised "modern" authors (1: 161), Robert Browning among them, thus encouraging him to write his bold first letter in January 1845, in which he addressed her as "dear Miss Barrett" (Browning and Browning) and returned the praise, saying of her 1844 Poems: "I do, as I say, love these Books with all my heart—and I love you too" (10: 17).2 In criticism of her poetry, "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" is discussed chiefly as the "long modern ballad" (9: 58) she described as the prototype of Aurora Leigh.3 As early as 1844, EBB conceived of writing a hybrid "novel-poem … as completely modern as 'Lady Geraldine's Courtship,'" comprehending "the aspect & manners of modern life … and flinching at nothing of the conventional" (9: 177). Subtitled "A Romance of the Age," much as the "intensely modern" Aurora Leigh was "crammed from the times" (19: 46), "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" also anticipates its mixing of genres. A ballad-romance in the form of a dramatic epistle, it was described variously by critics as a "beautiful sui generis drama" and a "capital magazine story" (qtd. in webb 1: 385). Edgar Allan Poe, who dedicated The Raven and Other Poems (1845) "To the Noblest of Her Sex … Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, of England," is among the many who registered the poem's impact. While the story that "The Raven" was prompted by "a single line" in "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" is now regarded as apocryphal (webb 1: 390n10), in his review of EBB's 1844 collection, Poe observed of "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" that "with the exception of Tennyson's 'Locksley Hall,' we have never perused a poem combining so much of the fiercest passion with so much of the most ethereal fancy." In fact, Poe termed EBB's poem "a very palpable imitation" of "Locksley Hall," surpassing the earlier work "in plot or rather in thesis" but falling below it in "artistical management," given the experimental rhymes that he saw as "inadmissible" (qtd. in Browning and Browning 10: 352, 355). Poe was far from alone in connecting "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" to "Locksley Hall." The two works were repeatedly linked by nineteenth-century critics (webb 1: 385). Like critics today, however, they passed over EBB's debate with Tennyson on technological progress, the catalyst for her vision of a globe "wrapped" in "one hot electric breath."4 We begin with the differing visions of technological progress in "Locksley Hall" and "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" because they point to nineteenth-century analogues for debates and divides in digital scholarship today. EBB's electrically charged metaphor not only appears in a poem explicitly concerned with class and gender divisions but also emerges from dialogue with another poem that reflects, more directly than hers does, the racial, geographic, and technological divides institutionalized by Victorian imperialism...

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