Keeping Romanticism English: Thomas De Quincey Meets Allan Cunningham

This article closely examines Thomas De Quincey's account of his meeting with poet and essayist Allan Cunningham. Read in light of recent critical attention to De Quincey's role as popularizer and disseminator of canonical Romantic literature and aesthetics, his treatment of meeting with Cunningham and of other experiences in Scotland engages his larger project of constructing and transmitting specifically Romantic canon around figure of Wordsworth. However, careful attention to rhetoric in this brief text reveals both fragility of such construction of Romanticism and hybridity of De Quincey's literary identity. ********** Recent studies of De Quincey' s work have highlighted his role in roduction of an Romantic canon with figure of Wordsworth at center. Josephine McDonagh's view of De Quincey as a popularizer and disseminator of other people's ideas (4) and Margaret Russet's assessment of his career as a primal scene of criticism (7) encourage us to read his works of literary biography as, in Russet's terms, vehicle[s] of transmission (6) through which Romantic canon is brought into being. Russet attends closely to complexities and contradictions involved in such project of canon formation, arguing that very trajectory of canonization paradoxically entails challenge to literary property and even effects death and disfigurement of author (12). Her De Quincey sets about precisely this task, in which ostensibly stabilizing process of canon formation is fraught with instability. Her reading of De Quincey's role as Wordsworth's London agent in Convention of Cintra disaster--in which De Quincey comes to personify contingencies of rime, problem of distance, and the hazards of print as alienation and deferral (80)--suggests that projects of dissemination, like that of transmitting Wordsworthian canon, do not follow predictable path. Like Mail-Coach, dynamic material processes of spreading knowledge can take on chaotic life and velocity of their own, running off prescribed course and meeting resistance not anticipated. This essay reads one of De Quincey's shorter and less often examined literary reminiscences, that of his introduction to writer Allan Cunningham, as disorienting bump in road toward Wordsworthian Romantic canon. Both Cunningham and De Quincey wrote collective literary biographies, which, Annette Cafarelli argues, functioned as forums discussing theories of creativity, canon, and place of poet in society (5). Both writers perform cultural work of building critical apparatus according to which British literature of their age would be assessed. In what follows I argue that De Quincey frames their meeting as something of standoff between his own English tastes and threat of competing canon potentially transmitted by Cunningham. Yet even as he attempts to record his divergence from Cunningham's allegedly too Scottish opinions, he reveals instability or hybridity of his own literary and cultural identity his sense of exile from literary greatness that he sees as embodied in Wordsworth and that he hopes to transmit to futurity. As result, his very attempt to secure Wordsworth-centered Romanticism we have only fairly recently come to question opens possibilities for reading other competing literary and cultural histories of period, and for re-mapping of territory of traditional British Romanticism as dynamic, diverse, and contested. De Quincey's own identity indeed becomes itself site of such contestation. In both 1839 and 1854 versions of his recollections of Wordsworth, De Quincey justifies his interest in lives of authors as crucial to dissemination of language and literature. (1) Authorial identity and image even become standards in taming of colonial lands, as De Quincey demonstrates in his fantasy of young girl confronting terrors of North American wilderness under aegis of Shakespeare: Even in farthest depths of Canada, many young innocent girl, perhaps at this very moment--looking now with fear to dark recesses of infinite forest, and now with love to pages of infinite poet, until fear is absorbed and forgotten in love--cherishes in her heart . …

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