Abstract
My introductory chapter profiles the literary contours of the study, and the existing body of critical work that explores the relationship between Romanticism and economies of popular magic (as distinct from wider occult cultures; occult philosophy, alchemy, hermetic societies, mesmerism or stage illusion). The chapter explains the importance of carefully attuning this study to the work of social historians in order to identify those figures and practices that Romantic Studies has (wrongly) presumed no longer existed and provide a new context for the readings of 1790s literary and political culture that follow.
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Notes
- 1.
William Covino, Magic, Rhetoric and Literacy: An Eccentric History of the Composing Imagination (New York: SUNY Press, 1994), 72.
- 2.
Anya Taylor, Magic and English Romanticism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979).
- 3.
Taylor, Magic and English Romanticism, 77–8.
- 4.
Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (London: Harper Press, 2009).
- 5.
Sharon Ruston, Shelley and Vitality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
- 6.
Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (London: Virago Press, 1989), xx. See also Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (London: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
- 7.
George Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956); Cecil Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism (London: Heath Cranton Ltd., 1933); Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Routledge, 1970); Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971).
- 8.
Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning Folk in English History (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2003), xiii.
- 9.
Davies, Popular Magic, xi.
- 10.
Owen Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture, 1736–1951 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999).
- 11.
Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
- 12.
Davies, Popular Magic, 42.
- 13.
Ibid., xiv.
- 14.
See Paul Cheshire, ‘The Hermetic Geography of William Gilbert’, Romanticism, 9.1 (2003), 82–93, and Marsha Keith Schuchard, Rediscovering William ‘Hurricane’ Gilbert : A Lost Voice of Revolution and Madness in the Worlds of Blake and the Romantics (2005), http://www.williamgilbert.com/GILBERT_Schuchard.htm [accessed 29 April 2012].
- 15.
Damian Walford Davies, ‘Pig in a Dingle: De Quincey and the Romantic Culture of the Occult’, The Times Literary Supplement, 5580 (March 2010), 13–15.
- 16.
See Tim Fulford, ‘Slavery and Superstition in the Supernatural Poems’, The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge , ed. Lucy Newlyn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 45–58, and Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture, 1756–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
- 17.
Fulford, ‘Slavery and Superstition’, 46.
- 18.
Paul Kléber Monod, Solomon’s Secret Arts: The Occult in the Age of Enlightenment (London: Yale University Press, 2013), 295.
- 19.
Kléber Monod, Solomon’s Secret Arts, 295.
- 20.
Nigel Leask, The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge ’s Critical Thought (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988); Tim Fulford, Coleridge’s Figurative Language (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), xvi.
- 21.
See Sheila Spector, Wonders Divine: The Development of Blake’s Kabbalistic Myth (London: Associated University Press, 2001) and Romanticism/Judaica: A Convergence of Cultures (Surrey: Ashgate, 2011).
- 22.
Jennifer Wunder, Keats, Hermeticism and the Secret Societies (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing, 2008).
- 23.
John Spurgin, ‘Letter to John Keats, 5 December 1815, Edward B. Hinkley, On First Looking into Swedenborg’s Philosophy: A New Keats-Circle Letter’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 9.1 (Winter 1960), 15–25.
- 24.
See Morton D. Paley, The Apocalyptic Sublime (London: Yale University Press, 1986), and Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1999); Romanticism and Millenarianism ed. Tim Fulford (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002); Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) and Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and the festschrift dedicated to Iain Macalman’s work; Unrespectable Radicals? Popular Politics in the Age of Reform, ed. Michael T. Davies and Paul A. Pickering (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2008)
- 25.
Lane Cooper, The Power of the Eye in Coleridge (1910), http://archive.org/stream/cu31924073804175#page/n7/mode/2up [accessed 9 October 2012].
- 26.
Charles J. Rzepka, ‘Recollecting Spontaneous Overflows: Romantic Passions, the Sublime and Mesmerism’, Romantic Passions (April 1998), http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/passions/rzepka/rzp.html [accessed 9 October 2012] (para. 49 of 49).
- 27.
Tim Fulford, ‘Conducting the Vital Fluid: The Politics and Poetics of Mesmerism in the 1790s’, Studies in Romanticism, 43.1 (2004), 57–78, 74.
- 28.
Roger Cooter, ‘The History of Mesmerism in Britain: Poverty and Promise’, Franz Anton Mesmer und die Geschichte des Mesmerismus, ed. Heinz Z. Schott (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1985), 152–62, 152.
- 29.
Fulford, ‘Conducting the Vital Fluid’, (my emphasis).
- 30.
A. L. Owen, The Famous Druids: A Survey of Three Centuries of English Literature on the Druids (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), Ward Rutherford, The Druids and their Heritage (London: Gordon and Cremonesi, 1978), Ronald Hutton, The Druids, (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007) and Blood and Mistletoe: A History of the Druids in Britain (London: Yale University Press, 2009).
- 31.
Jon Mee, ‘“Images of the Truth New Born”: Iolo, William Blake and the Literary Radicalism of the 1790s’, A Rattleskull Genius: The Many Faces of Iolo Morganwg, ed. Geraint H. Jenkins (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005), 173–193, 192.
- 32.
See Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe. See also A Rattleskull Genius: The Many Faces of Iolo Morganwg, ed. Geraint H. Jenkins (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005), Mary-Ann Constantine, The Truth against the World: Iolo Morganwg and Romantic Forgery (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007) and the other titles published as part of the project as listed on the research centre’s website: http://www.iolomorganwg.wales.ac.uk (2001–8), [accessed 17 August 2015].
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Churms, S.E. (2019). Introduction. In: Romanticism and Popular Magic. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04810-5_1
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