Repossessing the Romantic Past (review)

Reviewed by: Repossessing the Romantic Past Ruth Abbott (bio) Heather Glen and Paul Hamilton, eds. Repossessing the Romantic Past. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. ix+254pp. US$90. ISBN 978-0-521-85866-3. At first glance, “repossessing” seems an odd verb to use in relation to the past. The past, if it can be repossessed, sounds more like a kind of place, thing, or even person, than like a stretch of time. We repossess houses; we do not repossess our first day at school. Indeed, we only repossess things we have lost, things which are not simply own-able but which we have owned before. What is “the Romantic Past,” if it can be repossessed? When did we own it, and who were the owners when it was lost to us? Well, someone else, at least, and it is from a variety of someone elses that Repossessing the Romantic Past, a new collection of essays celebrating the legacy of Marilyn Butler, tries to retrieve it. As Paul Hamilton’s comprehensive introduction notes, “new work on British Romanticism is often characterized as much by its conscious difference from preceding positions as it is by its take on or choice of material” (1), and the eleven essays that follow are no exception. Each engages in the scholarly business of delicately dispossessing whoever is perceived to be the current owner of their chosen corner of Romantic literary history and interpretation, before restructuring and re-inhabiting it with its own argument. To repossess therefore often means to remodel, and the balanced care with which this is performed cannot be overstated. Take Jon Mee, who, while acknowledging Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s debt to Bluestocking “polite discourse” (25), suggests that she found Dissent’s more combative “collision of mind with mind” (22) increasingly profitable, but manages to combine both conversational politeness and fruitful contention in his own elegant argument. Or Susan Manly, who, against claims that Maria Edgeworth’s educational experiments were [End Page 456] “fundamentally coercive and restrictive” (140), realigns Edgeworth’s endorsement of “independent discovery and experiment” (142) in Practical Education with anti-authoritarian tendencies, managing to make at least the theoretical education of an Edgeworth child sound as generous as her own prose while acknowledging the likelihood of their practical unhappiness. Butler’s legacy, at the very least, seems from this volume to be one of consummate, admirably cautious scholarship. But it is not to Butler’s methods alone that the volume is indebted. Often defined by minute reinterpretation of a “Romantic Past” that seems less a period to be mastered than a discourse within which to position oneself, the essays gratefully admit that the very existence of that discourse is owing to Butler’s own scholarship of recuperation. For what “Repossessing the Past” meant in the late 1980s climate of Thatcher government, house repossessions, and educational cuts in which Butler first used the phrase was politically less metaphorical and academically more contentious. In her 1989 essay of that name, she argued for the radical necessity of repossessing—which, practically speaking, meant reprinting, rereading, and re-editing—a literary past of so-called minor writers who had fallen out of mind and print under governmental and academic insistence on what was then a narrow canon. That a Cambridge University Press publication can even be devoted to subtle reconsiderations of equally subtle critical positions on writers such as Barbauld and Edgeworth is due in no small part to decades of critical and editorial endeavours by Butler and her colleagues, endeavours helpfully documented in Heather Glen’s bibliography (244–49). These endeavours continue here: Pamela Clemit, for example, documents insights from current work on the first scholarly edition of William Godwin’s letters. And in Anne Janowitz’s recuperative essay on the similarly recuperative writings of Barbauld’s niece Lucy Aikin, or Nigel Leask’s cautious journey between the Indo-Persian poet Abu Taleb’s non-fictional and Elizabeth Hamilton’s fictional travel writings, the potential interest of writers who remain out of print is undeniable. But the shift, from Butler’s call to repossess an almost-forgotten past through its lost textual territory, to scholarly repositioning within a territory now predominantly...

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