Textbook Fashioning Authorship in The Long Eighteenth Century Stylish Books of Poetic Genius 1St Edition Gerald Egan Auth Ebook All Chapter PDF

Fashioning Authorship in the Long
Eighteenth Century: Stylish Books of

Poetic Genius 1st Edition Gerald Egan
(Auth.)
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/fashioning-authorship-in-the-long-eighteenth-century-
stylish-books-of-poetic-genius-1st-edition-gerald-egan-auth/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
Stealing Books in Eighteenth-Century London 1st Edition

Richard Coulton
https://textbookfull.com/product/stealing-books-in-eighteenth-
century-london-1st-edition-richard-coulton/
Memory and Enlightenment: Cultural Afterlives of the

Long Eighteenth Century James Ward
https://textbookfull.com/product/memory-and-enlightenment-
cultural-afterlives-of-the-long-eighteenth-century-james-ward/
The long eighteenth century British political and

social history 1688 1832 Second Edition, Reprinted
Edition O'Gorman
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-long-eighteenth-century-
british-political-and-social-history-1688-1832-second-edition-
reprinted-edition-ogorman/
The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions,

Volume II: The Long Eighteenth Century C. 1689-C. 1828
Andrew Thompson
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-oxford-history-of-
protestant-dissenting-traditions-volume-ii-the-long-eighteenth-
century-c-1689-c-1828-andrew-thompson/
Fictions of Friendship in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
1st Edition Bryan Mangano (Auth.)
https://textbookfull.com/product/fictions-of-friendship-in-the-
eighteenth-century-novel-1st-edition-bryan-mangano-auth/
The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century

Literatures in English 1st Edition Sarah Eron
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-routledge-companion-to-
eighteenth-century-literatures-in-english-1st-edition-sarah-eron/
Medieval Authorship and Cultural Exchange in the Late

Fifteenth Century The Utrecht Chronicle of the Teutonic
Order 1st Edition Stapel
https://textbookfull.com/product/medieval-authorship-and-
cultural-exchange-in-the-late-fifteenth-century-the-utrecht-
chronicle-of-the-teutonic-order-1st-edition-stapel/
Sweden in the Eighteenth Century World Provincial

Cosmopolitans Göran Rydén (Editor)
https://textbookfull.com/product/sweden-in-the-eighteenth-
century-world-provincial-cosmopolitans-goran-ryden-editor/
Traveling Irishness in the Long Nineteenth Century 1st

Edition Marguérite Corporaal
https://textbookfull.com/product/traveling-irishness-in-the-long-
nineteenth-century-1st-edition-marguerite-corporaal/
FASHIONING AUTHORSHIP
IN THE LONG
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Stylish Books of Poetic Genius
Gerald Egan
PALGRAVE STUDIES IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT,

ROMANTICISM AND CULTURES OF PRINT
Series Editors: Anne K. Mellor and Clifford Siskin
Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment,
Romanticism and the Cultures of Print
Series Editors
Anne K. Mellor
Department of English
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, California, USA
Clifford Siskin
New York University
New York, USA
Palgrave Studies in The Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of
Print
Editorial Board: Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck College, University of

London; John Bender, Stanford University; Alan Bewell, University
of Toronto; Peter de Bolla, University of Cambridge; Robert Miles,
University of Victoria; Claudia Johnson, Princeton University; Saree
Makdisi, UCLA; Felicity A Nussbaum, UCLA; Mary Poovey, New
York University; Janet Todd, University of Cambridge, UK.
Palgrave Studies in The Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures

of Print features work that does not fit comfortably within established
boundaries - whether between periods or between disciplines. Uniquely, it
combines efforts to engage the power and materiality of print with explo-
rations of gender, race, and class. By attending as well to intersections of
literature with the visual arts, medicine, law, and science, the series enables
a large-scale rethinking of the origins of modernity.
More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14588
Gerald Egan
Fashioning
Authorship in the
Long Eighteenth
Century
Stylish Books of Poetic Genius
Gerald Egan
Department of English
California State University at Long Beach
Long Beach, California, USA
ISBN 978-1-137-51825-5 ISBN 978-1-137-51826-2 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51826-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016951937
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
Cover image © British Museum
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. London
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW,
United Kingdom
For Leah
PREFACE
This study was born of my fascination as a doctoral student with the pages
of old books, particularly with the copper-engraved portraits of poets in
fashionable dress that often served as frontispieces. Under productive
pressure to come up with a dissertation idea, this early fascination evolved
into a conviction about the discourse of authorship that arose in Britain in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in parallel to a rapidly expanding
print market. One view of poetic genius in this period, I surmised, held
that this transcendent faculty might—paradoxically—reside in the lady or
gentleman of fashion.
The current study attempts to develop and substantiate that early
surmise through a mix of approaches: book history, Enlightenment and
twentieth-century philosophy, visual studies, and material analyses of fash-
ions in books and in dress. While recent studies of Romantic and eigh-
teenth-century authorship focus cursorily if at all on the material history
of the book, and studies in book history say little about the author as a
public figure of fashion, the current study seeks to bring these two con-
siderations together, integrating techniques of bibliographical description
with contemporary and recent understandings of both the material and
the intellectual histories of texts in order to see the books of Alexander
Pope, Mary Robinson, and Lord Byron anew. At specific points in their
careers, each of these poets dealt ambivalently with the public percep-
tion that authorial genius might be embodied—indeed, eroticized and
marked by physical frailty—in the figure of fashionable contemporane-
ity. This study proposes that we analyze this formation by focusing on
the textual, visual, and material properties of specific editions of these
vii
viii PREFACE
poets, books that were the centerpieces of their controversial careers and
objects of fashion in their own right. In line with my early fascination,
this study focuses in particular on images of the poets, authorized frontis-
pieces within the editions and unauthorized satirical prints without, both
types of image contributing to the perception among contemporary
readers that these poets might be admired and critiqued as fashionable
contemporaries.
This study provides textual and visual examples gleaned from original
archival research into the materials of the book trade, not only bindings,
letterforms, pages, and engravings, but also newspaper advertisements,
ephemera, and correspondence. Further, it considers these materials
through the twin prisms of Enlightenment philosophy and contemporary
theory. In respect to the former, it takes up the interventions of Locke
and Kant in connection with the visual theories of Jonathan Richardson,
William Hogarth, and Joshua Reynolds, English writers on painting
whose approaches are modulated by their commercial practices as portrait-
ists of fashionable Londoners (including fashionable authors). In respect
to the latter, it draws upon the theories of recent commentators such as
Jacques Derrida, Charles Taylor, and Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-
Luc Nancy to suggest that this eighteenth-century connection between
philosophical and visual discourses points to a more profound connection
between formulations of subjectivity and creative genius and the realm of
fashion, a link that is relevant to the construction of celebrity in our own
cultural moment.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It has been my great good fortune in a brief career to have found two
ideal mentors, individuals without whose influence and support this book
would not have been written: the earlier of my debts is to Beth Lau, whose
scholarly rigor and generosity as a teacher kindled my wish to turn from a
career in high technology to one in literary scholarship, and whose friend-
ship continues to sustain me; my later debt is to Alan Liu who, from the
origins of this study as a rough dissertation idea, challenged me to advance
it temporally and intellectually even as, in matters both large and small, he
offered suggestions and critiques that seemed always to resonate with my
own deepest intentions.
I am indebted also to Julie Carlson, Laura Mandell, and William
Warner, who with patience and insight helped to oversee this study in its
earlier form as a dissertation. My learning was broadened and deepened
by conversations and encounters with an exceptional array of teachers and
fellow graduate students at the University of California, Santa Barbara,
and by inspiring colleagues and students in the Department of English at
California State University Long Beach.
Stephen Tabor and Alan Jutzi, rare book curators at the Huntington
Library, provided me with valuable assistance in the examination of eigh-
teenth-century poetic editions, some held by that wonderful library and
some carted in by me from me from my own heterogeneous collection.
Giles Bergel provided helpful information about a portrait of Alexander
Pope held by Oxford University’s Bodleian Library that is central to one
chapter in this book.
ix
x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Ben Doyle of Palgrave Macmillan expressed enthusiasm for this project

from its earliest stages and shepherded it through to completion, and Tom
Rene helped to guide me through the complexities of the publication
process. Palgrave’s initially anonymous reader, Olivia Murphy, provided
both nuanced critique of the manuscript and kind encouragement about
its potential.
The earliest of personal debts is to my late parents, Gerald Egan, II
and Elizabeth Ann Tichenor Egan, each of whom gave me a sense of the
magic of printed pages and the books in which they are bound. My chil-
dren, Yulan and Gery, have listened and observed as I have worked on this
project in various forms from their high school years into early adulthood,
and their presence has fortified me more than they could know.
My deepest debt of gratitude is to my wife, Leah Egan, who has chal-
lenged and inspired me, and provided me always with the emotional sus-
tenance to forge ahead. This book is dedicated to her.
ABBREVIATIONS
BLJ Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. L. A. Marchand

BPW Byron’s Poetical Works, ed. J. J. McGann
CAP Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. G. Sherburne
PAP Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. J. Butt et al.
WMR Works of Mary Robinson, ed. W. B. Brewer
xi
CONTENTS
1 Introduction 1
2 Freedom, Nature, and the English School

of Commercial Art 11
3 The Plural Book and the Authorial Portrait 59
4 Pope’s Fashionable Hand Book 85
5 Mary Robinson: Fashioning Freedom 123
6 Byron’s Fashionable Abstention 165
Bibliography 205
Index 213
xiii
LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 2.1 “Void of Beauty” (left) and “More Varied and Pleasing Form”
(right), from Analysis of Beauty, Plate II by William Hogarth,
1753. Author’s collection 26
Fig. 2.2 Sir J. Reynolds by D. B. Pariset after P. Falconet, 1768,
frontispiece to The Works of Jonathan Richardson, 1793.
Author’s collection 37
Fig. 2.3 From Analysis of Beauty, Plate I by William Hogarth, 1753.
Fig. 3.1 Closing couplet of Rape of the Lock followed
by imprint of lines from prior page from
The Works of Mr. Pope, 1717. Author’s collection 66
Fig. 3.2 Bleeding of ink on facing pages
from The Works of Mr. Pope, 1717. Author’s collection 67
Fig. 3.3 A pagination problem from The Works of Mr. Pope, 1717.
Fig. 3.4 Mr. Pope by George White after Godfrey Kneller, 1732.
© The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved 71
Fig. 3.5 Mrs. Mary Robinson by Joshua Reynolds, 1783–1784.
© \The Wallace Collection 71
Fig. 3.6 George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron
by John Henry Robinson after Richard Westall,
1831. © The Trustees of the British Museum.
All rights reserved 72
Fig. 3.7 “Heinrich von Veldeke” from the Codex Manesse,
ca. 1305–1340. © Heritage Image Partnership Ltd./
Alamy Stock Photo 73
xv
xvi LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 3.8 “Christine de Pizan” from Le Livre de la Cité des dames.

By permission of the Royal Library of Belgium 74
Fig. 3.9 Florizel and Perdita, anonymous, 1780.
Fig. 3.10 A noble poet – scratching up his ideas by Charles Williams, 1823.
Fig. 3.11 The Poetical Tom-Titt perch’d upon
the Mount of Love…, anonymous, 1742.
Fig. 4.1 January Calendar, page 4 from Book of Hours (Salisbury).
By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library 87
Fig. 4.2 Page Fol. 38 from The Workes of Our
Ancient and learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer,
edited by Thomas Speght, 1602. Author’s collection 96
Fig. 4.3 Page 255 from Homer, his Iliads: Translated,
Adorn’d with Sculpture, and Illustrated
with Annotations by John Ogilby, 1660. Author’s collection 97
Fig. 4.4 Page 78 from folio edition of The Works
of Mr. Alexander Pope, 1717. The Huntington
Library, San Marino, California 98
Fig. 4.5 Page 83 from quarto edition of
The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope, 1717.
The Huntington Library, San Marino, California 99
Fig. 4.6 Mr. Alexander Pope by Charles Jervas, 1714.
The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (LP 243) 112
Fig. 4.7 Mr. Alexander Pope by George Vertue
after Charles Jervas, 1715, frontispiece
to Pope’s 1717 Works. Author’s collection 113
Fig. 4.8 Mr. Steele by John Simon after
Sir Godfrey Kneller, ca. 1712–1713.
Fig. 5.1 Page 200 from Poems by Mrs. M. Robinson, printed
by J. Bell, 1791. The Huntington Library, San Marino,
California 140
Fig. 5.2 Page 42 from The Beauties of Mrs. Robinson,
printed for H. D. Symonds, 1791. Courtesy
of University of Southern California, on behalf
of the USC Libraries Special Collections 141
Fig. 5.3 Close-up of double-ruled header from Poems
by Mrs. M. Robinson, printed by J. Bell, 1791.
The Huntington Library, San Marino, California 142
LIST OF FIGURES xvii
Fig. 5.4 Miss Kitty Fisher by Richard Houston

after Sir Joshua Reynolds, ca. 1759–1765.
© The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserve 151
Fig. 5.5 Sarah (Kemble) Siddons as the Tragic Muse
by Joshua Reynolds, 1783–1784. © Courtesy
of The Huntington Art Collections, San Marino,
California 152
Fig. 5.6 Mrs. Mary Robinson by Joshua Reynolds, 1783–1784.
© The Wallace Collection 156
Fig. 5.7 Mrs. Robinson by Thomas Burke after
Joshua Reynolds, 1791, frontispiece
to Robinson’s 1791 Poems. The Huntington Library,
San Marino, California 157
Fig. 5.8 Mary Robinson by William Daniell
after George Dance, 1793. Author’s collection 162
Fig. 6.1 Byron by William Finden after George Sanders, 1830.
Fig. 6.2 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV, in boards, 1818.
Fig. 6.3 Advertisement for “Lord Byron’s Poems”
from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto the Fourth,
1818. Author’s collection 184
Fig. 6.4 Byron’s Works, custom bound, 1819. Author’s collection 186
Fig. 6.5 Portrait of a Nobleman by Samuel Agar
after Thomas Williams, 1815. Author’s collection 187
Fig. 6.6 Apollo Belvedere, by Jean Jacques Avril, 1809.
Fig. 6.7 The Honble Augustus Keppel by Edward Fisher
after Joshua Reynolds, 1759. © The Trustees
of the British Museum. All rights reserved 200
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
In August of 1715 Alexander Pope placed the following advertisement in

London’s Daily Courant:
On Tuesday next will be Published, A Print of Mr. Alexander Pope, done from
the Original Painting of Mr. Jervasi, by Mr. Vertue. Printed for Bernard
Lintott between the Temple Gates: where his Translation of Homer, and all his
other Pieces may be had.
The public offer for sale of this engraved portrait, a daring act of self-
promotion for a little-known twenty-seven-year-old, suggests that early
in his career Pope understood that poetic laurels might follow not just
from the artful arrangement of words on the pages of his books, but from
a carefully composed image of himself in full array, outfitted in periwig,
ruffled cuffs, and velvet jacket, as the early eighteenth-century “modish”
young man of fashion. The engraving would reappear two years later in
Pope’s Works of 1717, and its conspicuous size in relation to the book—
it had to be folded twice to fit into the quarto volume—indicates the
importance the image held for him. In his Preface to the book Pope
writes that “a good Poet no sooner communicates his works … but it is
imagined he is a vain young creature given up to the ambition of fame,”
the defensive assertion followed a page later by the complaint that “it is
with a fine Genius as with a fine fashion, all those are displeas’d at it who
are not able to follow it.” In portrait and prefatory text, in both instances
1
2 G. EGAN
with a characteristic mix of deference and combativeness, Pope affiliates

poetic genius with fashionable contemporaneity.
Pope’s suggestive trope provides the starting point in the present study
for an examination of the yoking of poetic genius to fashion over the
long eighteenth century, a cultural metaphor whose terms are most strik-
ingly visible in the stylish quarto and octavo editions, themselves objects
of fashion and luxury, that gain in popularity over the period as the large
folio chained to a library table gives way to the polite hand-held book
designed for a genteel urban audience. While recent studies of eighteenth-
century and romantic genius have at times touched on material histories
of the book and portraits of authors, none has considered how the poetic
edition in its materiality might itself represent the image of poetic genius
as a figure of stylish urbanity. Pope’s prefatory attempt at self-promotion
in 1717 suggests the paradox at work, the faculty of genius—tradition-
ally timeless, unconditional, seated in immaterial soul or mind—manifest
in the most particular, sensory, and conditional of cultural formations,
fashion. This study explores the possibility that it is not just in the sign
systems of single-author editions of the period, in their signifying words
and images, that the poet of genius appears as London lady or gentleman
of fashion; it is in the material properties of the books themselves that the
metaphor is fully realized as page layout, typography, illustrations, and
binding effectively package the timeless truths of high art in the fashion-
able luxury object. Daniel Leonhard Purdy has written eloquently of fash-
ion’s “struggle with itself,” the ongoing self-critical desire of fashion “to
insist that is above fashion” (10). Although Purdy associates this struggle
with twentieth-century fashion and modernism, part of my argument in
this study is that this self-critical engagement with the contemporary and
the modish is intrinsic to the formulations of the autonomous subject that
evolve in the long eighteenth century, and that this self-critical struggle
is perhaps most clearly evident in that fashionable individual, the poet of
genius. It is visible, as we shall see, in the details of the products that mark
their public images, in the letterforms, the disposition of white space, and
the punctuation that mark the pages of their books, and in the details of
the portraits that represent them. The emergence of fashionable genius is
related to the eighteenth-century emergence of aesthetics, both founded
on the empiricist notion that the senses might serve as the primary instru-
ments of knowledge; this notion, I will suggest, is vividly imaged in the
portraits of authors that appear in this period in which the primary organs
of sensory perception, the eyes and the hands, take on new prominence.
INTRODUCTION 3
Pope was among the first to grasp the promise that the book held for
those who sought to establish and maintain control over a public persona,
and the 1717 Works is thus one of the earliest in a series of authorial
attempts to represent genius through a deployment of image and text
in the printed book. In the chapters that follow, I examine this mode of
self-representation through close readings of poems and frontispiece por-
traits in editions of Pope, Mary Robinson, and Lord Byron, discovering
in these books a process of public image-making that anticipates (in the
case of Pope) and reflects (in those of Robinson and Byron) the crisis of
the self of the 1780s and 1790s that culminates politically in the chaos
of post-revolutionary France and intellectually in the critical philosophy
of Immanuel Kant. The aporia famously identified by Kant separates the
domain of nature, the sensible world of appearances in which all phenom-
ena are subject to the laws of causation, from the supersensible domain of
that which is essential to the moral and rational life: freedom, which by
definition transcends spatial and temporal conditions. Kant writes of “an
incalculable gulf fixed between the domain of the concept of nature, as the
sensible, and the domain of the concept of freedom, as the supersensible,
so that from the former to the latter … no transition is possible” (II. 176).
As beings who exist in the phenomenal world of space and time we are in
the Kantian view conditioned by and subject to the laws of nature; and yet
as free and moral beings we necessarily partake of that which transcends
that world, that which is self-caused, unconditioned, and distinct from
the sensible world of appearances. It is this “incalculable gulf” that Kant
addresses in the Critique of Judgment and that the German idealists and
early German romantics, in their responses to the corpus of Kant’s critical
philosophy, labored to close. The gulf, ultimately, is that of a noumenal
self inaccessible to the understanding and reason, a self unrepresentable
to itself. Kant’s proposed solution to this dilemma in the third Critique,
however tentative and qualified, is that through a faculty of reflective judg-
ment that discovers the beautiful and the sublime in the particularity of
nature, we might bridge this seemingly impassable gap. The product of
reflective judgment is what Kant terms the “aesthetic idea,” and the fac-
ulty that originates such ideas is genius.
This dilemma of an insuperable gulf between the material and the
immaterial had, however, been a problem for Enlightenment philoso-
phy since Descartes, and part of my argument is that Pope, Robinson,
and Byron engage with this dilemma in books that seek to clothe time-
less genius in the materials of fashionable contemporaneity. These three
4 G. EGAN
poets differ in fundamental ways: their origins and private lives, the shapes
that their public careers took and the decades in which these careers
progressed, the types of public personae that with uneven success each
attempted to present to an increasingly anonymous readership. It is in the
public personae, however, so carefully crafted and yet always just beyond
control, that Pope, Robinson, and Byron share a characteristic that sets
them largely apart from other authors of the period, for each enjoyed a
mode of contemporary fame founded as much on the visual presentation
of a distinctive physicality as on the textual presentation of truth in poetry.
This is a style of fame in which image becomes “image,” the accumula-
tion of textual and visual references made public that, in sum, exceeds
the allotment of fame usually accorded authorship in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. The processes of image-making which each of these
poets sets in motion, over which each maintains only sporadic control,
are culturally and historically significant instances of what Kant, Novalis,
and Friedrich Schlegel refer to as Darstellung, the figural representation
of the unknowable in sensible form. For Pope, Robinson, and Byron
the medium for the representation of the noumenal self of genius—for
Darstellung itself—is the book, an object of fashion in its own right, which
emerges in this process as one of the primary vehicles for the practice of
self-representation that links fashion to the mysterious faculty of genius.
It is in part as a consequence of the influential cultural productions asso-
ciated with these three poets that the nascent figure of the autonomous
subject that emerges in the long eighteenth century is in one of its most
visible incarnations the book author: the poetic genius-celebrity variously
embodied in authorized and pirated editions manufactured and dissemi-
nated by congeries of collaborators, publishers, printers, patrons, pirates,
satirists, subscribers, painters, illustrators, and engravers, to name a few
of the parties to this process and to make clear that no single agent, no
autonomous subject, is responsible for this deployment.
The advertisement that Pope placed in the Daily Courant in August
1715 is an appropriate document with which to begin this investiga-
tion, as it brings into focus a core tenet of this study: that the forma-
tion of fashionable genius in the long eighteenth century is founded on
the image, specifically on the authorial portrait designed for commercial
distribution, either separately or bound in an edition which it authorizes
as frontispiece. In the authorial engravings featured in eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century books of poetry, the conventions of a burgeoning
visual culture sanctified the body of the poet as the Homeric or Sapphic
INTRODUCTION 5
figure of the bard or prophet, as timeless and transcendent genius; and

yet the engravings, by their very nature as realistic, perspectival represen-
tations of living individuals, tended also to magnify the accidental and
particular, to represent the body in all of its contingent contemporaneity,
bewigged and powdered, modishly arrayed and made up for the fashion-
able public spaces of London. The body represented in its particularity is
inevitably sexualized, imperfect, even malformed, and the accoutrements
of fashion and urbanity in these fashionable images adumbrate what they
teasingly conceal from an increasingly avid viewing public: the body in its
disarray. In this context, the images of Pope, Robinson, and Byron current
in their years of fame and disgrace participate in Darstellung, the process
of symbolic figuration rendered by Kant’s English translators as exhibi-
tion: “fine Genius,” as Pope’s apt simile has it, on display as “fine fashion”
in the troubled figure of incipient celebrity. Fashion is here the emblem
of scandal, and the Kantian chasm that yawns between the conditioned
and the unconditioned is embodied in the paradoxical figure of noumenal
genius as the man or lady about town, an image of genius refracted in
the gazes of approval and opprobrium that arise from London’s pleasure
gardens and drawing rooms.
My exploration of the nexus of ideas that late Enlightenment philoso-
phy ultimately brings to the fore in the 1780s and 1790s—the redemp-
tive possibility that in a mechanistic universe we might rationally deduce
what is transcendent, that the aesthetic idea might bridge the gap between
nature and freedom, that such redemption is embodied in the person of
genius—focuses upon the way in which these transcendental deductions
are complicated and distressed as they materialize in the fashionable figure
of the book author as contemporary celebrity in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries. While my theoretical approach references Kant’s criti-
cal philosophy in terms of its visual and representational modalities, my
study is not oriented teleologically towards Kant as the resolution or end-
point of intractable questions of self-representation. Rather, my approach
is ultimately grounded in close readings of editions of Pope, Robinson,
and Byron, three poets whose very different careers, in succession span-
ning the period, share certain important characteristics. Each enjoyed or
endured an extensive fame or notoriety disproportionate to the reception
of his or her poetry; was publicly associated, through the publication of
numerous portraits and satirical prints, with idiosyncratic styles of personal
presentation; was the subject of reports and rumors of sexual impropri-
ety; and suffered chronic physical frailty or disability. I hope to show in
6 G. EGAN
the pages that follow that this matrix of characteristics helps to define
the public persona of each poet as flawed genius implicated in the snares
of contemporaneity—in the world, so to speak, of fashion—and that the
opposition of genius to fashion is most visible in the books, the complex
objects of fashion that are the centerpieces of these public careers. In its
focus on three singular poets, this study spans the century from Pope’s
optimistic embrace of fashion in the 1717 Works, followed by the abnega-
tion of fashion that will characterize his public image into the 1740s; to
Robinson’s ambivalence in her 1791 Poems about the fashionable image
on which her fame as actress and celebrity had in large part been based;
and finally to Byron’s rejection of fashion as an element of authorial celeb-
rity in his 1818 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV, a refusal that is
despite itself a fashionable mode of public presentation. This century-long
narrative suggests that we might approach the evolution of “genius” in
the period—the movement from the early eighteenth-century supposition
that faculties of mental representation could provide a polite engagement
with the world, towards the later contrary formulation that the exercise
of these faculties at the highest levels of creativity disengages the genius,
sequestering him or her from society—in the contexts of the material book
and fashion.
Chapter 2, “Freedom, Nature, and the English School of Commercial
Art,” lays the theoretical foundation for this study by situating the
eighteenth-century theories of visual representation of Jonathan Richardson,
William Hogarth, and Joshua Reynolds in relation to Locke’s theories of
ideas and representation, and Kant’s articulation of figural representation
or Darstellung as the characteristic mode of genius. Richardson, Hogarth,
and Reynolds were not only theorists of the visual arts, but practicing por-
traitists familiar with styles of dress and personal presentation in eighteenth-
century London. The theories of visuality that Richardson formulated in
1715 would evoke a series of responses and reformulations in eighteenth-
century Britain that, taken together, constitute the theoretical-philosoph-
ical substratum of the English school of commercial art, a commerce- and
print-centered culture in which urbane, fashionable representations of
genius feature prominently. Richardson writes within memory of the 1688
Glorious Revolution and in the context of such consequent developments
as the loosening and ultimate removal of government restrictions on the
importation of paintings and engravings into England from continental
Europe in the 1690s1; the publication of Locke’s Essay (1689); the expira-
tion of the Stationers’ Company’s monopoly on printed books (1694) and
INTRODUCTION 7
the institution of modern copyright (the “statute of Anne” in 1709); the

development of partisan, party politics of Whig versus Tory; and the Act
of Union of 1707. The responses to Richardson’s theory, which like his
written treatises follow upon this welter of historical conditions and events,
take two paths that initially diverge and ultimately join in the evolution
of British eighteenth-century visual culture: through a subversively urban
empiricism exemplified by William Hogarth in his “moral subjects” and
his Analysis of Beauty (1753); and a commercially inflected classical ideal-
ism typified by Joshua Reynolds in his celebrity portraits and his Discourses
on Art (1769–90). The commercially oriented theories of all three prove
crucial links between eighteenth- century philosophical formulations of
subjectivity, mental representation, and artistic genius, and the conditional
realms of fashion and politeness.
In Chap. 3, “The Plural Book and the Authorial Portrait,” I consider
how Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s notion of the “plural book” suggests
that we might understand the single-author edition, traditionally idealized
as a “unitary” book, in terms of the intransigently diverse particulars of
which it is constituted and which follow from collaborative work processes
in print shop and bindery. This chapter presents a summary history of
these processes in relation to the plural book’s visual and textual potential
for self-representation, focusing in particular on a historicized image of the
author present in medieval images of authors as solitary writers cloistered
in monastic cells such as those of Heinrich von Veldeke and Christine de
Pizan. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this visual motif of the
cloistered author evolves into depictions of fashionably melancholic, head-
in-hand poses, the writer here depicted as a version of Charles Taylor’s
“buffered” Enlightenment subject, sequestered from environment and
world by his or her representational powers of genius.
Chapter 4, “Pope’s Fashionable Handbook,” analyzes text and image
in Pope’s Works of 1717, considering specifically the Essay on Criticism in
relation to the outsized frontispiece portrait in which Pope puts himself
on display as timeless genius in the guise of fashionable London urbanity.
In the Essay Pope sets himself apart from his predecessors in a dazzling
performance of poetic virtuosity borne out in the material properties of his
innovative quarto book, including its page layout and the foldout frontis-
piece portrait of him as London gentleman that opens the volume. As we
shall see, a close reading of a specific page from the Essay—a reading that
focuses as much on the layout of the page as the text—suggests that the
curling brace that marks poetic triplets in the right margin of the page is
8 G. EGAN
more than just a typographical convention, that in this book in particular

it is an emblem for the assertive “licentiousness” and originality of a poet
whose “master hand” reaches out to enclose the nameless graces of poetic
inspiration. The image of himself as the fashionably urbane “master hand”
of poetic genius which Pope authorizes and publicizes in his 1717 Works
emerges in the context of the numerous unauthorized satirical representa-
tions of him already in circulation this early in his career, texts and images
which suggest a public avidity to view the poet as a diminutive monster
of inchoate and unmanly sexuality. Pope’s contention with the ambivalent
urges of his readers and viewers—the conflicting desires both to canonize
and to demonize him in image and text—provides us with a model for the
fashionable author’s relationship to his public as such relationships will
evolve in the print and visual culture of the period.
Chapter 5, “Mary Robinson: Fashioning Freedom,” examines
Robinson’s Poems of 1791 as the pivotal point in her transition from for-
mer actress and anonymous author of “Della Cruscan” verse in newspaper
dailies to the established book author, “Mrs. Robinson.” This volume,
very likely the most heavily promoted book of the year if not of the era
in which it was published, manages in its own material properties to cap-
ture the mix of fashionable elegance and radical politics that characterizes
the time and place of its inception, the Whig high society of London’s
West End circa 1789–90. Through its typographical elegance (a product
of Robinson’s collaborative exchanges with her publisher John Bell) and
its frontispiece portrait of Robinson as a lady of melancholy sensibility
(also a product of a collaborative exchange, this one with her portraitist
Joshua Reynolds), the book represents her as a writer at the forefront of
this eighteenth-century style of radical chic. This mix of characteristics
comes into play with particular emphasis in Robinson’s poem Ainsi va le
monde, her paean to freedom and the French Revolution which includes a
passage that, in its curious incongruity, is central both to the poem and the
book in which it appears: a stanza of homage to the commercially oriented
portraitist Reynolds, who in Robinson’s depiction is at once a divinely
inspired genius and the creator of her own fashionably contemporary pub-
lic image. In its entirety, the book manages to embody Robinson’s transi-
tion from seemingly washed-up celebrity to one of the most successful
poets and novelists of the 1790s.
Chapter 6, “Byron’s Fashionable Abstention,” examines the 1818 pub-
lication in octavo of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV, exploring the
evanescent presence and ultimate disappearance of the Byronic alter ego
INTRODUCTION 9
Harold in this poem (which is also, variably, a book in its own right and
a component in the many collected editions of Byron’s works published
by John Murray) in conjunction with the absence of a conventional fron-
tispiece portrait, a lacuna that has characterized all of Byron’s authorized
editions up to this point. The absence of the portrait from Byron’s edi-
tions is a teasing ellipsis that—given his astonishing fame and notoriety
in the 1810s—would have been “visible” to the contemporary reader,
and in my analysis it points to Byron’s well-known alienation from his
readers and his corresponding, but less-remarked, detachment from the
publication process. The blank page that the reader sees opposite the title
page in such editions of Byron is a bibliographic code for the image of
Byron, a marker for his teasing and phantasmal presence and absence as
genius-celebrity. We can consider this ellipsis in the context of the “modu-
lar” form of distribution of Byron’s works that had evolved by 1818, one
in which—as John Murray’s advertisements make clear—Byron’s readers
could mix and match his works to fashion their own version of the poet
who had decisively absented himself from English society.
I propose now to return to 1715, however, segueing from Pope’s offer
for sale of an image of himself in the Daily Courant, which opened this
chapter, to the publication that same year of Jonathan Richardson’s semi-
nal Essay on the Theory of Painting. Let us examine how this first serious
English treatise on painting modulates and adapts the theories of art and
the body that I have begun to sketch out to the realities of 1715—to
those commercial, technological, and philosophical currents and condi-
tions in which a burgeoning post-Restoration market for private portrai-
ture evolves over the century into a rich milieu for the development of
fashionable genius.
Note
1. See Pears, pp. 52–54.
CHAPTER 2
Freedom, Nature, and the English School

of Commercial Art
Over the course of the eighteenth century, an aggregate of theories on

painting and the visual arts appeared in Britain that I refer to here as
“the English school of commercial art.” Its main theorists were Jonathan
Richardson, William Hogarth, and Joshua Reynolds, and while their ideas
do not truly constitute a coherent “school of thought,” taken together
they suggest that the theories, practices, and reception of painting in
eighteenth-century England contributed to an emerging idea of subjectiv-
ity, a notion that creative self-consciousness might be coterminous with
fashionable self-presentation. The theories of visuality of Richardson,
Hogarth, and Reynolds share in certain important properties. All three
were profoundly influenced by and responsive to the empiricist philoso-
phies gaining currency in England at this time, most notably that of John
Locke. All three anticipated the formulations of aesthetic judgment, sub-
jectivity, and genius put forward by Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and
1790s in his critical philosophy, an attempted systematization that has
been described both as bringing the narrative of Enlightenment philoso-
phy to a grand resolution and as raising questions about subjectivity that
remain unanswered into modernity. Perhaps most significantly, all three
writers were actively engaged in the commercial practice of the art that
they theorized. Our experience of fashionable objects is primarily visual,
11
12 G. EGAN
and as practicing portrait painters, Richardson, Hogarth, and Reynolds

were alert to the material and ideational properties of drapery, hair styles,
and the ornaments that adorn the bodies of men and women. Their trea-
tises on painting, spanning the century, suggest the emergence into public
discourses—both verbal and visual—of a particular type of subject, the
creative genius who is also a figure of fashionable urbanity. In the works of
all three, the nature of this complex figure is suggested in a succession of
questions and conundrums that apply the concerns of idealist and empiri-
cist philosophy to the emerging field of aesthetics. For instance, do our
impressions of visible phenomena, which include the fashionably adorned
bodies of urban contemporaries, conduce to ideas and abstractions? Are
our fleeting and conditional impressions of such phenomena answerable
to ideal beauty? Can a faculty of genius which “improves” nature in acts of
artistic creativity flow somehow from the exertions of a “mechanic” whose
“curious hand” and perceptive eye engage with drapery, hair styles, and
other ornaments? Significantly, questions like these were made public by
the theorists of the English school in stylish octavo books, objects which,
as we shall see, themselves emerge in significant and unexpected ways as
fashionable embodiments of genius.
Richardson’s Empiricist Visuality

In 1714, aged 50 and never having previously published, the por-
trait painter Jonathan Richardson wrote what has come to be regarded as
the first serious English treatise on the visual arts, The Essay on the Theory
of Painting.1 Before Richardson, authors on the visual arts in England
produced writings that were neither systematic nor analytical, that tended
to an over-reliance on classical and continental authorities.2 Richardson’s
1715 Theory is at once a workmanlike compendium of history and practice
for the novice and a sometimes loosely woven theory of visual representa-
tion grounded in Lockean empiricism which discovers communicable ideas
in the particularities of sensory visual experience. Corollary to this theory is
an argument for the supremacy of painterly genius as it combines the hand-
craft of the mechanic who molds and reworks the materials of nature with
the creative imagination of the artist who divines and communicates such
universal properties as “grace and greatness.” John Barrell has identified
Richardson’s promotion of the painter from mechanic to liberal gentle-
man with a “bourgeois” strain of eighteenth-century civic humanism, one
that, in its privileging of the private virtues and self-interest, challenges
FREEDOM, NATURE, AND THE ENGLISH SCHOOL OF COMMERCIAL ART 13
“traditional” civic humanism (21, quotation marks in original). My own

view of Richardson’s procedure is that it does not so much address the
painter’s social rank as adduce in him a duality wherein the artificer con-
ditioned by the world of empirical experience is at one with the creative
genius who sees into and beyond that world, who discovers in nature’s
particularity an idea of nature as it “never was,” in Richardson’s phrase.
In Richardson’s Theory, which follows Locke’s influential identification in
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) of experience and
observation as the grounds of all knowledge and looks forward to Kant’s
formulation in the Critique of Judgment a century later of the aesthetic
idea as arising from reflection on the particularity of nature, the figure of
genius does indeed emerge a gentleman, but only as a consequence of
his mastery of these particulars, his ability to discern in the accidents and
contingencies of the natural world “what common eyes see not,” to invoke
another of Richardson’s formulations. Informed by Lockean empiricism
and anticipating Kantian transcendentalism, Richardson’s writings suggest
as well as any corpus of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory the inextrica-
ble closeness of the relationships that obtain between these Enlightenment
philosophies and the cultures of visuality and fashion that will help to shape
subjectivity in the period.
In what is perhaps the founding statement of British empiricism, Locke

in his 1789 Essay Concerning Human Understanding had compared the
human mind to a white sheet of paper, one
void of all Characters, without any Ideas; How comes it to be furnished?

Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless Fancy of
Man has painted on it, with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the
materials of Reason and Knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, From
Experience …. (104)3
It is experience which provides the mind with ideas, and Locke stipulates
that “whatsoever is so constituted in Nature, as to be able, by affecting
our Senses, to cause any perception in the Mind, doth thereby produce
in the Understanding a simple Idea” (132). His point is that our most
basic of ideas—our impressions of color, motion, sweetness, and so on—
“convey themselves into the Mind” by way of our physical senses. The
faculty that Locke terms “sense” or “sensation” is therefore “the great
14 G. EGAN
Source, of most of the Ideas we have” (105). Ideas also convey themselves
into the mind through reflection, which Locke describes as “the Perception
of the Operations of our own Minds within us” (105). Although sensory
perception is the source of simple ideas, reflection builds upon these simple
impressions to furnish the “Understanding with another set of Ideas, which
could not be had from things without,” such as “Perception, Thinking,
Doubting, Believing, Reasoning, Knowing, Willing, and all the different
actings of our own Minds” (105). Reflection, then, encompasses our
awareness of our own mental operations—our self-awareness, so to speak.
Locke’s notion of reflection points also, however, to the possibility of
originality and creativity. For while we cannot create simple ideas, through
reflection on the operations of our own minds we can store new ideas. Locke
writes in this connection that sensation and reflection provide man with
the Groundwork, whereon to build all those Notions which ever he shall
have naturally in this World. All those sublime Thoughts, which towre above
the Clouds, and reach as high as Heaven it self, take their Rise and Footing
here: In all that great Extent wherein the mind wanders, in those remote
Speculations, it may seem to be elevated with, it stirs not one jot beyond
those Ideas, which Sense or Reflection, have offered for its Contemplation.
(117–18)
The “Ideas of Reflection,” Locke tells us, are the “Original of all Knowledge
[and] the first Capacity of Humane Intellect,” and his language suggests
that such ideas, which make possible those “sublime Thoughts, which
towre above the Clouds,” are in fact the “groundwork” of human creativ-
ity. We shall see that the element of Locke’s formulation which will come
to exert the strongest influence over Richardson and the theorists of the
visual arts who follow him in eighteenth-century Britain is the possibil-
ity that the “sublime thoughts” and “remote Speculations” of the genius
originate in the body, in “Impressions made on our Senses by outward
Objects” (117).
Locke’s formulation of the “endless variety” of ideas “painted” on the
mind’s blank canvas invited further visual analogy, and a generation later
Richardson responded in his Theory with a characterization of the visible
world as the “innumerable colours and figures for which we have no name”
(6). While Richardson does not categorize ideas with the same techni-
cal rigor and specificity as Locke, Lockean “ideas” feature p rominently
in his theory. The manifold of visible phenomena is comprised of ideas,
FREEDOM, NATURE, AND THE ENGLISH SCHOOL OF COMMERCIAL ART 15
consisting of “an infinity of … ideas which have no certain words uni-

versally agreed upon as denoting them” (Richardson 6). The elements
of paintings are also ideas, the pictures in which the painter represents
the particularity of the visible world conveying “his ideas of these things
clearly, and without ambiguity” (6). In fact, for Richardson ideas are most
potent when they are visual, the viewer of a painting a vessel laid open to
the experiential force of visual representation which “pours ideas into our
minds …. The whole scene opens up at one view” (6). What is evident in
such formulations is that the Lockean idea is, for Richardson, primarily
an impression or perception of visible phenomena. Further, Richardson
points to an ideational capacity possessed by the painter which parallels
Locke’s formulations of sensation and reflection as the sources of creativ-
ity, for he repeatedly refers to the painter’s ability not only to transmit sim-
ple visual ideas, but to employ such internal mental operations as memory
and judgment in the process of transforming ideas into painted images. In
one of several statements that applies both the Lockean reflective faculties
and the inductive method to the art of painting, Richardson comments
that “In order to assist, and improve the invention, a painter ought to
converse with, and observe all sorts of people …. he should observe the
different and various effects of mens passions, and those of other animals,
and in short, all nature, and make sketches of what he observes to help
his memory” (38). The seemingly simple observation of visible phenom-
ena is for Richardson continuous with complex mental operations such as
the discernment, recollection, and representation of the “effects of mens
passions.” Lockean reflection, which we have seen to be the source of
consciousness or self-awareness, is in Richardson’s Theory explicitly trans-
muted into “invention” or artistic creativity.
The painter, Richardson tells us repeatedly, employs his or her reflective
faculties not only to represent the visible world but to improve it, for “the
great and chief ends of Painting are to raise, and improve nature; and to
communicate ideas” (176). Richardson argues in a number of key passages
that the painter of genius can and indeed must take license with the par-
ticulars of visible experience, his or her aim “not only to represent nature,
but to make the best choice of it; nay to raise, and improve it from what is
commonly, or even rarely seen, to what never was, or will be in fact, though
we may easily conceive it might be” (176).4 His language makes clear that,
in this raising and improving, the painter does not proceed deductively
from an abstract and idealized form to which all particulars conform, as the
classically oriented continental approaches of the seventeenth century had
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
son aspect d’irrémédiable misère, ce bungalow était le plus répugnant de
tous ceux où il m’était arrivé de m’arrêter.
Il n’y avait pas de foyer et les fenêtres refusaient de s’ouvrir. Un brasero
de charbon de bois eut donc été inutilisable. La pluie et le vent
éclaboussaient, gazouillaient, gémissaient autour de la maison.
Les palmiers arack craquaient et grondaient.
Une demi-douzaine de chacals aboyaient dans la clôture.
Une hyène, arrêtée à quelque distance, les narguait de son rire. Une
hyène pourrait convaincre un sadducéen de la résurrection des morts, de la
pire sorte de morts.
Alors arriva le ratub, mets curieux dont la composition est à la fois
indigène et anglaise, et le vieux Khansamah resta debout derrière ma
chaise, me parlant d’Anglais de jadis qui étaient défunts, pendant que les
flammes des bougies, agitées par le vent, jouaient à cache-cache sur le lit et
la moustiquaire.
C’était bien la sorte de dîner et la sorte de soirée qu’il fallait pour
disposer un homme à passer en revue, un à un, ses péchés d’autrefois, et
tous ceux qu’il comptait commettre s’il continuait à vivre.
Il était difficile de dormir pour plusieurs centaines de raisons.
La lampe de la salle de bain projetait dans les chambres les ombres les
plus grotesques et le vent commençait à dire des bêtises.
Au moment même où les motifs de mon insomnie s’assoupirent, gorgés
de sang, j’entendis la formule connue: «Nous allons le prendre et le
soulever» dont se servent les porteurs de doolies.
Cela venait de l’enceinte.
Tout d’abord, il arriva un doolie, puis un second, puis un troisième.
J’entendis le bruit des doolies posés lourdement à terre.
Le volet qui faisait face à ma porte fut secoué.
—C’est quelqu’un qui s’efforce d’entrer, dis-je.
Mais personne ne parla, et je tâchai de me persuader que c’était l’effet
d’une rafale.
Le volet de la chambre contiguë à la mienne fut attaqué, repoussé en
arrière, et la porte intérieure s’ouvrit.
—C’est quelque sous-commissaire auxiliaire, me dis-je, et il aura amené
ses amis avec lui. Maintenant, ils en ont pour une heure à causer, à cracher,
à fumer.
Mais on n’entendait ni voix, ni pas.
Personne n’apportait de bagages dans la chambre voisine.
La porte se ferma et je remerciai la Providence de ce qu’on me laissait
tranquille. Mais j’étais curieux de savoir ce qu’étaient devenus les doolies.
Je descendis du lit et allai regarder dans l’obscurité. Il n’y avait pas la
moindre trace de doolies.
Au moment même où j’allais me recoucher, j’entendis dans la chambre
voisine un bruit auquel personne ne peut se tromper, s’il jouit de l’usage de
ses sens, celui que fait une bille de billard en roulant le long de la bande,
lorsque le joueur joue son premier coup.
Il n’y a pas de son qui ressemble à celui-là.
Une minute après, autre roulement. Je me recouchai.
Je n’avais pas peur, non, je n’avais pas peur.
J’étais très curieux de savoir ce qu’étaient devenus les doolies, et c’est
pour cela que je me recouchai d’un bond.
Une minute après, j’entendis le double bruit de déclic d’un carambolage.
Mes cheveux se dressèrent. Il est inexact de dire que les cheveux se
dressent. Le cuir chevelu se contracte, et vous sentez sur toute la tête un
fourmillement léger, général. Voilà ce que c’est exactement que des
cheveux qui se dressent.
Il y eut un nouveau roulement et un bruit de déclic.
Les deux bruits n’avaient pu être produits que par une seule et même
chose, une bille de billard.
Je raisonnai en moi-même sur l’aventure, et plus je raisonnais, moins il
me semblait probable qu’un lit, une table et deux chaises—à cela se bornait
le mobilier de la chambre contiguë à la mienne—pussent imiter aussi
parfaitement le bruit qu’on fait en jouant au billard.
Après un autre carambolage, un trois-bandes, à ce qu’il me parut,
d’après la sonorité, je cessai de raisonner.
Je tenais mon fantôme, et j’aurais donné tout au monde pour m’esquiver
de ce bungalow.
Je prêtai l’oreille, et mieux j’écoutai, plus je perçus clairement les détails
de la partie.
C’était tour à tour le bruit de roulement et celui du choc.
Parfois il y avait un double choc, puis un roulement, puis un autre choc.
Il n’y avait plus de doute; on jouait au billard dans la chambre à côté. Et
la chambre à côté était trop petite pour contenir un billard.
Dans les intervalles où le vent se calmait, j’entendais la partie se
poursuivre, les coups se succéder.
Je fis un effort pour me persuader que je n’entendais pas de bruit. Cet
effort fut un échec.
Savez-vous ce que c’est que la peur? Non point la peur ordinaire
qu’inspirent une insulte, un dommage ou la mort, mais la peur abjecte,
frissonnante au sujet de quelque chose qui reste invisible pour vous, la peur
qui vous sèche l’intérieur de la bouche, et la moitié de la gorge, la crainte
qui rend moite la paume de vos mains, et vous fait faire des efforts pour
avaler, afin que la luette continue à fonctionner.
Cela est la belle peur,—une grande lâcheté, et il faut l’avoir ressentie
pour l’apprécier.
La simple invraisemblance d’une partie de billard dans un bungalow de
relais prouverait la réalité de la chose.
Nul homme,—ivre ou à jeun,—n’était capable d’imaginer une partie de
billard ni d’inventer le crachement d’un massé.
A fréquenter régulièrement les bungalows il y a un inconvénient: on
entretient éternellement sa crédulité.
Si l’on disait à un homme qui passe toute sa vie dans les bungalow: «Il y
a un cadavre dans cette chambre-ci, une jeune fille atteinte de folie dans
cette autre. La femme et l’homme qui montent ce chameau viennent de
s’échapper d’un endroit éloigné de soixante milles», l’auditeur ne se
refuserait point à le croire, parce qu’il n’est rien qui ne puisse arriver dans
un bungalow, quelle qu’en soit l’étrangeté, si grotesque, si horrible que ce
soit.
Malheureusement cette crédulité s’étend aux fantômes.
Une personne raisonnable qui serait récemment sortie de chez elle, se fût
tournée de l’autre côté et rendormie.
Moi, pas.
Aussi vrai que les centaines de créatures qui se trouvaient dans le lit
finirent par m’abandonner comme une carcasse vidée, parce que la grande
masse de mon sang refluait à mon cœur, j’entendis tous les coups joués
pendant une longue partie de billard, dans la chambre aux échos sonores qui
touchait à la mienne, de l’autre côté de la porte barrée de fer.
Ma crainte la plus forte, c’était que les joueurs eussent besoin d’un
marqueur.
C’était une crainte absurde, car les êtres qui peuvent jouer dans les
ténèbres sont au-dessus de ces superfluités-là.
Tout ce que je sais, c’est que je craignais cela. C’était une réalité.
Au bout d’un certain temps, la partie cessa et la porte claqua.
Je m’endormis parce que je tombais de fatigue. Sans cela j’aurais préféré
rester éveillé.
J’aurais donné toute l’Asie plutôt que d’enlever la barre de la porte, pour
jeter un coup d’œil dans l’obscurité de la chambre voisine.
Le matin venu, je me dis que j’avais agi sagement, prudemment, et je
m’informai des moyens à prendre pour m’en aller.
—A propos, Khansamah, dis-je, qu’est-ce que faisaient ces trois doolies,
cette nuit, dans mon enceinte?
—Il n’y avait pas de doolies, dit le Khansamah.
J’allai dans la chambre voisine où la lumière entra à flots par la porte.
J’étais plein de bravoure.
A cette heure j’aurais joué l’Enfer contre le diable en personne.
—Cet endroit a-t-il toujours été un relais de poste? demandai-je.
—Non, dit le Khansamah, il y a dix ou vingt ans, j’ai oublié l’époque,
c’était une salle de billard.
—Une quoi?
—Une salle de billard pour les Sahibs qui ont construit le chemin de fer.
Alors j’étais Khansamah dans la grande maison où logeaient les Sahibs, et
je leur servais souvent des sorbets au brandy. Ces trois chambres n’en
faisaient qu’une où il y avait une grande table où les Sahibs jouaient tous
les soirs. Mais tous les Sahibs sont morts maintenant, et le chemin de fer va,
m’avez-vous dit, jusqu’à Kaboul.
—Vous vous rappelez-vous quelque chose au sujet des Sahibs?
—Il y a longtemps de cela, mais je me rappelle un Sahib, un gros
homme, toujours en colère. Un jour, il jouait ici. Il me dit: «Mangal-Khan,
servez-moi un brandy-pani-do». Il se pencha sur la table pour jouer. Sa tête
se baissa, se baissa et finit par toucher la table. Ses lunettes tombèrent, et
quand nous—les Sahibs et moi,—nous accourûmes pour le soulever, il était
mort. J’aidai à le porter dehors. Et c’était un vigoureux Sahib, mais il est
mort, et moi, le vieux Mangal-Khan, je vis encore, par votre faveur.
C’était suffisant, et plus que suffisant.
Je tenais mon fantôme, un article de premier choix avec preuves à
l’appui.
Je comptais écrire à la société de Recherches psychiques: je jetterais
l’Empire dans la stupeur par cette nouvelle. Mais je jugeai bon de mettre
tout d’abord quatre-vingt milles de terres cultivées et cadastrées entre moi
et ce relais de poste, et cela avant la nuit.
La Société pourrait ensuite envoyer son agent officiel examiner le cas.
Je rentrai dans ma chambre et fis mes paquets après avoir mis par écrit
les détails.
Pendant que je fumais, j’entendis de nouveau le bruit du déclic. Cette
fois il y eut un raté, un queuté, car le roulement fut fort court.
La porte était ouverte, et je pus regarder dans la chambre. Clic! Clic! Un
carambolage!
J’entrai sans peur dans la chambre, car il y faisait soleil et au dehors
soufflait une fraîche brise.
Le jeu invisible marchait avec un entrain terrible.
Et cela n’avait rien d’étonnant: un petit rat infatigable courait de tous
côtés au-dessus du plafond enfumé, et un fragment du châssis de la fenêtre,
qui s’était détaché et que la brise secouait, battait contre le verrou de la
fenêtre.
Cela imitait à s’y méprendre le choc des billes de billard.
Impossible aussi de ne pas reconnaître le roulement des billes sur la table
du billard. Ah! j’étais bien excusable. Même quand je fermais mes yeux qui
s’étaient ouverts à la lumière, ce bruit ressemblait extraordinairement à
celui d’un jeu animé.
Alors entra, de fort mauvaise humeur, le fidèle compagnon de mes
peines, Kadir Baksh.
—Ce bungalow-ci est très mauvais, bon pour les basses castes. Pas
étonnant que Votre Présence ait été dérangée et soit toute mouchetée. Trois
équipes de porteurs de doolies sont venues cette nuit à une heure avancée
pendant que je dormais dehors. Ils ont dit que c’était leur habitude de
coucher dans les chambres réservées aux Européens. Le Khansamah est-il
un homme d’honneur? Ils ont essayé d’entrer, mais je leur ai dit de s’en
aller. Rien d’étonnant, si ces Porias ont passé la nuit ici, que Votre Présence
soit toute couverte de taches. C’est une honte. C’est l’œuvre d’un homme
dégoûtant.
Kadir Baksh omit de dire qu’il avait fait payer à chaque équipe deux
annas d’avance pour leur logement et qu’alors n’étant plus à portée d’être
entendu de moi, il les avait chassés en les battant avec ce grand parapluie
vert, dont jusqu’alors je n’avais pu deviner l’usage. Mais Kadir Baksh
n’avait aucune notion de morale.
Ensuite eut lieu une entrevue avec le Khansamah, mais comme il ne
tarda pas à perdre la tête, la colère fit place à la pitié, et la pitié aboutit à une
longue conversation au cours de laquelle il plaça la mort du gros ingénieur
Sahib dans trois stations différentes, dont deux étaient éloignées de
cinquante milles. La troisième déviation l’amena à Calcutta, et cette fois le
Sahib mourut en conduisant un dogcart.
Je ne partis pas aussi promptement que je l’avais décidé.
Je passai la nuit, pendant que le vent, le rat, le cadre de la fenêtre et le
verrou jouaient une bruyante partie en cent cinquante.
Puis le vent changea, et les billes s’arrêtèrent.
Je m’aperçus que j’avais réduit à néant une authentique histoire de
fantôme.
Si j’avais seulement arrêté mes investigations au bon moment, j’aurais
pu faire de cela quelque chose.
Et c’était là ma plus amère pensée.
TABLE DES MATIÈRES
Préface VII
L’Education d’Otis Yeere 1
A l’Entrée de l’Abîme 57
Une Comédie sur la Grande Route 75
La Colline de l’Illusion 107
Une Femme de deuxième catégorie 133
Rien qu’un petit Officier 181
Le Rickshaw fantôme 219
Mon Histoire vraie de fantôme 283
E. GREVIN.—IMPRIMERIE DE LAGNY
BIBLIOTHÈQUE COSMOPOLITE
OUVRAGES PARUS
I —Au delà des forces, par Bjornstjerne Bjornson,
première et deuxième parties. Traduction de MM. Auguste
Monnier et Littmanson. Un volume in-18. Prix 3 50
II —Le Roi, drame en quatre actes; Le Journaliste, drame en
quatre actes, par Bjornstjerne Bjornson. Traduction de
M. Auguste Monnier. Un volume in-18. Prix 3 50
III —Les Prétendants à la Couronne, drame en cinq actes;
Les Guerriers à Helgeland, drame en quatre actes, par
Henrik Ibsen. Traduction de M. Jacques Trigant-Geneste.
Nouvelle édition. Un volume in-18. Prix 3 50
IV —Les Soutiens de la Société, pièce en quatre actes;
L’Union des Jeunes, pièce en cinq actes, par Henrik Ibsen.
Traduction de MM. Pierre Bertrand et Edmond de Nevers.
Deuxième édition. Un volume in-18. Prix 3 50
V —Empereur et Galiléen, par Henrik Ibsen. Traduction de
M. Charles de Casanove. Quatrième édition, revue et
corrigée. Un volume in-18. Prix 3 50
VI —Nouveaux Poèmes et Ballades, de A.-C. Swinburne.
Traduction d’Albert Savine. Un volume in-18. Prix 3 50
VII —Œuvres en prose, de P.-B. Shelley, traduites par Albert
Savine. Pamphlets politiques. Réfutation du déisme.
Fragments de romans. Critique littéraire et critique d’art.
Philosophie. Un volume in-18. Prix 3 50
VIII —Souvenirs autobiographiques du Mangeur d’opium,
par Thomas de Quincey. Traduction et préface par Albert
Savine. Deuxième édition. Un volume in-18. Prix 3 50
IX —Confessions d’un Mangeur d’opium, par Thomas de
Quincey. Première traduction intégrale par V. Descreux.
Nouvelle édition. Un volume in-18. Prix 3 50
X —Aurora Leigh, par Elisabeth Barrett Browning. 3 50
Traduit de l’anglais. Troisième édition. Un volume in-18.
Prix
XI —Un Gant, comédie en trois actes; Le Nouveau Système,
pièce en cinq actes, par Bjornstjerne Bjornson. Traduit
du norvégien par Auguste Monnier. Un vol. in-18. Prix 3 50
XII —Le Portrait de Dorian Gray, par Oscar Wilde. Traduit
de l’anglais par M. Eugène Tardieu. Cinquième édition. Un
volume in-18. Prix 3 50
XIII —Un Héros de notre temps, récits; Le Démon, poème
oriental, par Lermontoff. Traduit du russe par A. de
Villamarie. Deuxième édition. Un volume in-18. Prix 3 50
XIV —Intentions, par Oscar Wilde. Traduction, préface et
notes de J. Joseph-Renaud. Un volume in-18 3 50
XV —La Dame de la mer, pièce en 5 actes; Un Ennemi du
peuple, pièce en 5 actes, par Henrik Ibsen. Traduction de
MM. Ad. Chennevière et C. Johansen. Un vol. in-18 3 50
XVI —Enlevé! roman de Robert-L. Stevenson. Traduction et
préface d’Albert Savine. Un volume in-18 3 50
XVII —Poèmes et poésies, par Elisabeth Barrett Browning.
Traduction de l’anglais et étude par Albert Savine. Un
volume in-18 3 50
XVIII —Le Crime de lord Arthur Savile, par Oscar Wilde.
Traduit de l’anglais par Albert Savine. Un vol. in-18 3 50
XIX —Derniers Contes, par Edgar Poë. Traduits par F. Rabbe.
Un vol. in-18 3 50
XX —Le Portrait de Monsieur W. H., par Oscar Wilde.
Traduit de l’anglais par Albert Savine. Un vol. in-18 3 50
XXI —Poèmes, d’Oscar Wilde, Traduction et préface par
Albert Savine. Un Volume in-18 3 50
XXII —Simples Contes des Collines, par Rudyard Kipling.
Traduits de l’anglais par Albert Savine. Un vol. in-18 3 50
XXIII —Le Prêtre et l’Acolyte, nouvelles, par Oscar Wilde.
Traduction et préface par Albert Savine. Un vol. in-18 3 50
XXIV —XXV.—XXVI.—Œuvres poétiques complètes de 3 50
Shelley, traduites par F. Rabbe. Précédées d’une étude
historique et critique sur la vie et les œuvres de Shelley.
Trois volumes in-18, se vendant séparément chacun
XXVII —Nouveaux Contes des Collines, par Rudyard Kipling.
Traduits de l’anglais par Albert Savine. Un volume in-18 3 50
XXVIII —Mystères et Aventures, par A. Conan Doyle.
Traduction d’Albert Savine. Un volume in-18 3 50
XXIX —Trois Troupiers, par Rudyard Kipling. Traduction
d’Albert Savine. Un volume in-18 3 50
XXX —Autres Troupiers, par Rudyard Kipling. Traduction
XXXI —Le Parasite, par Conan Doyle. Traduction d’Albert
Savine. Un volume in-18 3 50
XXXII —Au Blanc et Noir, par Rudyard Kipling. Traduction
XXXIII —Théâtre.—I.—Les Drames, par Oscar Wilde.
XXXIV —La Grande Ombre, roman, par A. Conan Doyle.
Traduction de M. Albert Savine. Un volume in-18 3 50
XXXV. —Poèmes et Ballades, de A. C. Swinburne. Traduction de
M. Gabriel Mourey et notes de Guy de Maupassant. Un vol.
in-18, nouvelle édition 3 50
XXXVI —Un Début en Médecine, roman, par A. Conan Doyle.
Traduction de M. Albert Savine. Un vol. in-18 3 50
XXXVII —Chants d’avant l’Aube, par A. C. Swinburne.
Traduction de M. Gabriel Mourey. Un vol. in-18 3 50
XXXVIII —Sous les Déodars, par Rudyard Kipling. Traduction de
M. Albert Savine. Un vol. in-18 3 50
XXXIX —Nouveaux Mystères et Aventures, par Conan Doyle.
Traduction de M. Albert Savine. Un vol. in-18 3 50
XXXX —Théâtre. II.—Les Comédies. I. par Oscar Wilde.
XXXXI —Idylle de Banlieue, par Conan Doyle. Traduction
Imprimerie Générale de Châtillon-sur-Seine.—A. Pichay.
NOTES:
[A] Elisabeth Barrett Browning, Poèmes et Poésies.
[B] Causeuses.
[C] Grand dîner.
[D] Improvisée.
[E] Maîtres d’hôtel.
[F] Causeuse.
[G] Petites tables.
[H] Barque hindoue.
[I] Voiture légère à deux roues.
[J] Deliriurm tremens.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOUS LES
DÉODARS ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in
these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it
in the United States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of
this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™ concept
and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and
may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the
terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of
the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as
creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research.
Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given
away—you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with
eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject
to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free

distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or
any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and

Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree
to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be
bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from
the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in
paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be

used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people
who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a
few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic
works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.
See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with
Project Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the
collection of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the
individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the
United States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in
the United States and you are located in the United States, we do
not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing,
performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the
work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of
course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg™
mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely
sharing Project Gutenberg™ works in compliance with the terms of
this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg™ name
associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of
this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its
attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when you share it without
charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also
govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most
countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the
United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms
of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying,
performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this
work or any other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes
no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in
any country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other

immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must
appear prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™
work (any work on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or
with which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is
accessed, displayed, performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is derived

from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not contain a
notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the copyright
holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in the
United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must
comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through
1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted

with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works posted
with the permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of
this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project

Gutenberg™ License terms from this work, or any files containing a
part of this work or any other work associated with Project
Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this

electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form,
including any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you
provide access to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work
in a format other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in
the official version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,

performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing

access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the
method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The
fee is owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark,
but he has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty
payments must be paid within 60 days following each date on
which you prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your
periodic tax returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked
as such and sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation at the address specified in Section 4, “Information
about donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who

notifies you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that
s/he does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and
discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of Project
Gutenberg™ works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of

any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in
the electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90
days of receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg™

electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend

considerable effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe
and proofread works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating
the Project Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works, and the medium on which they may
be stored, may contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to,
incomplete, inaccurate or corrupt data, transcription errors, a
copyright or other intellectual property infringement, a defective or
damaged disk or other medium, a computer virus, or computer
codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except

for the “Right of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph
1.F.3, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner
of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party
distributing a Project Gutenberg™ electronic work under this
agreement, disclaim all liability to you for damages, costs and
expenses, including legal fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO
REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT LIABILITY, BREACH OF
WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE
FOUNDATION, THE TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY
DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE LIABLE
TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL,
PUNITIVE OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE
NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you

discover a defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it,
you can receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by
sending a written explanation to the person you received the work
from. If you received the work on a physical medium, you must
return the medium with your written explanation. The person or entity
that provided you with the defective work may elect to provide a
replacement copy in lieu of a refund. If you received the work
electronically, the person or entity providing it to you may choose to
give you a second opportunity to receive the work electronically in
lieu of a refund. If the second copy is also defective, you may
demand a refund in writing without further opportunities to fix the
problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth in
paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied

warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted
by the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any
provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the
Foundation, the trademark owner, any agent or employee of the
Foundation, anyone providing copies of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works in accordance with this agreement, and any
volunteers associated with the production, promotion and distribution
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, harmless from all liability,
costs and expenses, including legal fees, that arise directly or
indirectly from any of the following which you do or cause to occur:
(a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b)
alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any Project
Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of

Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.
It exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and
donations from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the

assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a
secure and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help,
see Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project

Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation

Textbook Fashioning Authorship in The Long Eighteenth Century Stylish Books of Poetic Genius 1St Edition Gerald Egan Auth Ebook All Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Textbook Fashioning Authorship in The Long Eighteenth Century Stylish Books of Poetic Genius 1St Edition Gerald Egan Auth Ebook All Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Fashioning Authorship in the Long

Eighteenth Century: Stylish Books of

Stealing Books in Eighteenth-Century London 1st Edition

Memory and Enlightenment: Cultural Afterlives of the

The long eighteenth century British political and

The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions,

The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century

Medieval Authorship and Cultural Exchange in the Late

Sweden in the Eighteenth Century World Provincial

Traveling Irishness in the Long Nineteenth Century 1st

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT,

Editorial Board: Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck College, University of

Palgrave Studies in The Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures

More information about this series at

ISBN 978-1-137-51825-5 ISBN 978-1-137-51826-2 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016951937

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Cover image © British Museum

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

Ben Doyle of Palgrave Macmillan expressed enthusiasm for this project

BLJ Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. L. A. Marchand

2 Freedom, Nature, and the English School

3 The Plural Book and the Authorial Portrait 59

4 Pope’s Fashionable Hand Book 85

5 Mary Robinson: Fashioning Freedom 123

6 Byron’s Fashionable Abstention 165

Fig. 3.8 “Christine de Pizan” from Le Livre de la Cité des dames.

Fig. 5.4 Miss Kitty Fisher by Richard Houston

In August of 1715 Alexander Pope placed the following advertisement in

with a characteristic mix of deference and combativeness, Pope affiliates

figure of the bard or prophet, as timeless and transcendent genius; and

the institution of modern copyright (the “statute of Anne” in 1709); the

more than just a typographical convention, that in this book in particular

Freedom, Nature, and the English School

Over the course of the eighteenth century, an aggregate of theories on

and as practicing portrait painters, Richardson, Hogarth, and Reynolds

Richardson’s Empiricist Visuality

“traditional” civic humanism (21, quotation marks in original). My own

In what is perhaps the founding statement of British empiricism, Locke

void of all Characters, without any Ideas; How comes it to be furnished?

consisting of “an infinity of … ideas which have no certain words uni-

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

START: FULL LICENSE

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free

Section 1. General Terms of Use and

1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be

1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other

1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is derived

1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted

1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project

1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this

1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,

1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing

• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who

• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of

1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg™

1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend

1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except

1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you

1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied

Section 2. Information about the Mission of