Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-04T18:38:53.949Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

An Image in Lava: Annotation, Sentiment, and the Traces of Nineteenth-Century Reading

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Abstract

Drawing first on an annotated copy of the poetry of Felicia Hemans that my students discovered in the stacks of the University of Virginia's library, this essay goes on to examine the marks made by female readers in three nineteenth-century copies of Hemans's poetry to reveal the dynamics of sentiment in author-reader networks of Romantic and Victorian poetry. Seeing Hemans through the eyes of individual female readers surfaces a lost world in which poetry was valued as a collaborative, intimate language of the heart. Specific historical copies allow us best to apprehend this world, but, in the wake of wide-scale digitization, nineteenth-century books are simultaneously newly visible and newly at risk. This essay makes the case for retaining them and for integrating them into our accounts of nineteenth-century literary history.

Type
Special Topic: Cultures of Reading
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Behrendt, Stephen C. Review of Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials, edited by Susan J. Wolfson. Criticism, vol. 44, no. 2, 2002, pp. 217–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Camille, Michael. Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art. Reaktion, 1992.Google Scholar
Culler, Jonathan. Theory of the Lyric. U of Chicago P, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Duffy, Eamon. Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers, 1240–1570. Yale UP, 2011.Google Scholar
Elliott, Brian P. “‘Nothing Beside Remains’: Empty Icons and Elegiac Ekphrasis in Felicia Hemans”. Studies in Romanticism, vol. 51, no. 1, Spring 2012, pp. 2540.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feldman, Paula. “Endurance and Forgetting: What the Evidence Suggests”. Romanticism and Women Poets: Opening the Doors of Reception, edited by Behrendt, Stephen C. and Linkin, Harriet Kramer, UP of Kentucky, 1999, pp. 1521.Google Scholar
Feldman, Paula. “Women, Literary Annuals, and the Evidence of Inscriptions”. Keats-Shelley Journal, no. 55, 2006, pp. 5462.Google Scholar
Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. U of Chicago P, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feldman, Paula. The Uses of Literature. Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2008.Google Scholar
Gordon, William. Diaries of William Gordon. 1845–88. Papers of the Gordon Family, University of Virginia Special Collections, accession number 9553. 10 vols.Google Scholar
Hemans, Felicia. The Poetical Works of Mrs. Felicia Hemans. Grigg and Elliot, 1836. Catherine Taylord's copy in the author's collection.Google Scholar
Hemans, Felicia. The Poetical Works of Mrs. Felicia Hemans. Grigg and Elliot, 1839. Charlotte Cocke Gordon's copy in U of Virginia Special Collections.Google Scholar
Hemans, Felicia. The Poetical Works of Mrs. Felicia Hemans. Grigg and Elliot, 1843. Ellen Pierrepont Minor's copy in the U of Virginia Alderman Library.Google Scholar
The Holy Bible. E.H. Butler, 1853. Papers of the Pierrepont and Minor Families, U of Virginia Special Collections, 7286-c, box 2.Google Scholar
he Illuminated Bible. Harper and Brothers, 1846. Papers of the Pierrepont and Minor Families, U of Virginia Special Collections, 7286-c, box 1.Google Scholar
Jackson, Heather. Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. Yale UP, 2002.Google Scholar
Kelly, Gary. Introduction. Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Prose, and Letters, edited by Kelly, , Broadview Press, 2002, pp. 1585.Google Scholar
Kete, Mary Louise. Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America. Duke UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Lamb, Charles. “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading”. London Magazine, vol. 6, July 1822, pp. 3336.Google Scholar
Latané, David E.“Who Counts? Popularity, Modern Recovery, and the Early Nineteenth-Century Woman Poet”. Teaching British Women Writers, 1750–1900, edited by Moskal, Jeanne and Wooden, Shannon R., Peter Lang, 2005, pp. 205–23.Google Scholar
Lootens, Tricia. “Hemans and Home: Victorianism, Feminine ‘Internal Enemies,‘ and the Domestication of National Identity”. PMLA, vol. 109, no. 2, Mar. 1994, pp. 238–53.Google Scholar
Lupton, Christina. Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century. Johns Hopkins UP, 2018.Google Scholar
McGann, Jerome. The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style. Oxford UP, 1998.Google Scholar
McGann, Jerome. (writing as Anne Mack et al). “Private Enigmas and Critical Functions, with Particular Reference to the Writing of Charles Bernstein.” New Literary History, vol. 22, no. 2, 1991, pp. 441–64.Google Scholar
Moffat, Abbot Low. The Pierreponts, 1802–1962: The American Forebears and the Descendants of Hezekiah Beers Pierpont and Anna Maria Constable. 1962. HathiTrust Digital Library, babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89066250671.Google Scholar
Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. Verso, 2013.Google Scholar
O'Neill, Michael. “A Deeper and Richer Music: Felicia Hemans in Dialogue with Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley”. Charles Lamb Bulletin, no. 145, 2009, pp. 312.Google Scholar
Orgel, Stephen. The Reader in the Book: A Study of Spaces and Traces. Oxford UP, 2015.Google Scholar
Osman, Sharifah. “‘Mightier than Death, Untamable by Fate’: Felicia Hemans's Byronic Heroines and the Sorority of the Domestic Affections.” Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, no. 43, Aug. 2006, www.erudit.org/en/journals/ron/2006-n43-ron1383/013590ar/.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pater, Walter. Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Macmillan, 1873.Google Scholar
Pierrepont, Henry E. Historical Sketch of the Fulton Ferry, and Its Associated Ferries. Eagle Job and Book Printing Department, 1879. Google Books, books.google.com/books/about/Historical_Sketch_of_the_ Fulton_Ferry.html?id=zDRAAAAAYAAJ.Google Scholar
Piper, Andrew. “Novel Devotions: Conversional Reading, Computational Modeling, and the Modern Novel”. New Literary History, vol. 46, no. 1, 2015, pp. 6398.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Preface. Hemans, Poetical Works [1836], pp. iii-xii.Google Scholar
Price, Leah. “Reading: The State of the Discipline”. Book History, no. 7, 2004, pp. 303–20.Google Scholar
Ross, Marlon. The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women's Poetry. Oxford UP, 1990.Google Scholar
Sanchez-Eppler, Karen. “In the Archives of Childhood”. The Children's Table: Childhood Studies and the New Humanities, edited by Duane, A.M., U of Georgia P, 2013, pp. 213–37.Google Scholar
Sanchez-Eppler, Karen. “Then When We Clutch Hardest: On the Death of a Child and the Replication of an Image”. Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture, edited by Chapman, Mary and Hendler, Glenn, U of California P, 1999, pp. 6485.Google Scholar
Shakespeare, William. Sonnet 116. The Oxford Shakespeare: Complete Sonnets and Poems, edited by Burrow, Colin, Oxford UP, 2002, p. 613.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sherman, William. Used Books: Marking Books in Renaissance England. U of Pennsylvania P, 2009.Google Scholar
Spiro, Lisa M.“Reading with a Tender Rapture: Reveries of a Bachelor and the Rhetoric of Detached Intimacy”. Book History, no. 6, 2003, pp. 5793.Google Scholar
Stauffer, Andrew M. “Hemans by the Book”. European Romantic Review, vol. 22, no. 3, June 2011, pp. 373–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stauffer, Andrew M. “The Nineteenth-Century Archive in the Digital Age”. European Romantic Review, vol. 23, no. 3, June 2012, pp. 335–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sweet, Nanora, and Melnyk, Julie. “Why Hemans Now?” Introduction. Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Sweet and Melnyk, Palgrave Macmillan, 2001, pp. 115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tennyson, Alfred. “Locksley Hall”. Tennyson: A Selected Edition, rev. ed., edited by Ricks, Christopher, Routledge, 2014, pp. 181–92.Google Scholar
Tucker, Herbert. “House Arrest: The Domestication of English Poetry in the 1820s”. New Literary History, vol. 25, no. 3, 1994, pp. 521–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Underwood, Ted, and Sellers, Jordan. “The Emergence of Literary Diction”. Journal of Digital Humanities, vol. 1, no. 2, 2012, journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1–2/the-emergence-of-literary-diction-by-ted-underwood-and-jordan-sellers/.Google Scholar
Wolfson, Susan J.“Hemans and the Romance of Byron”. Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Sweet, Nanora and Melnyk, Julie, Palgrave Macmillan, 2001, pp. 155–80.Google Scholar
Wolfson, Susan J. Introduction. Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials, edited by Wolfson, , Princeton UP, 2001, pp. xiii-xxix.Google Scholar
Wolfson, Susan J.“‘Something Must Be Done’: Shelley, Hemans, and the Flash of Revolutionary Female Violence”. Fellow Romantics: Male and Female British Writers, 1790–1835, edited by Beth, Lau, Ashgate Publishing, 2009, pp. 99122.Google Scholar
Wordsworth, William. Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth's Poetry and Prose, edited by Halmi, Nicholas, W.W. Norton, 2013, pp. 76–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar