‘That is true fame’: A Few Words about Thomson's Romantic Period Popularity

Summary

In the period which we now label ‘Romantic’, the universality of the appeal of Thomson's The Seasons was axiomatic. Ralph Cohen has ably demonstrated ‘its development as a popular poem’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and lists some 274 editions published between 1789 and 1830. Thomson's ‘writings are everywhere, and in all hands’ declares the Penny Magazine in 1842: ‘If to be popular, in the best meaning of the word, that is, to be universally read and understood long after all temporary tastes and influences have ceased to act, be the best test of a poet's genius, then we must place the author of the “Seasons” high indeed in the intellectual scale’. In the first section of this essay, I intend drawing out the implications of critical debate about Thomson's popularity, a popularity which as Cohen states creates ‘a serious issue in the domain of literary history’. Beginning with a neglected essay by John Wilson (a piece ignored even by Cohen), I will discuss how the consideration of Thomson's popularity (defined by Thomas Campbell as the poet's appeal ‘to the universal poetry of the human breast’), plays an important role in several of the most notable critical debates of the Romantic period. In the later portion of the essay, and using the work of the now neglected but once best-selling poet Robert Bloomfield, I move on to examine how Thomson's influence is evident in the ‘popular’ (defined here in terms of the material facts of sales and editions) descriptive nature poetry of the Romantic period.