Abstract
Exploring eighteenth-century poetry about unborn children, Buckley examines the cultural restraints placed upon expectant mothers to voice only positive emotions about their pregnancies and the subversive techniques employed by women writers to express their frustrations. While man-midwives such as Thomas Denman propagated the notion that most forms of maternal imagination were nonsense, they also insisted that the passions of a pregnant woman were intimately connected to the foetus. Elizabeth Boyd, Jane Cave, Isabella Kelly, Anna Laetitia Barbauld and William Wordsworth’s use of maternal passion in their poetry therefore probes the tensions of late eighteenth-century maternity. Buckley suggests that maternal imagination not only survived in poetry, but evolved, perhaps because its central aspects – maternity, emotion and imagination – were also crucial to the Romantic aesthetic.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
- 1.
Claude Quillet’s Callipædia: Or The Art of Getting Pretty Children (1710, see my Chapter 1) is occasionally mentioned, yet the Callipædia was originally written during the seventeenth century and contains anachronistic views that were deemed vulgar and unfashionable after James Blondel’s The Strength of Imagination In Pregnant Women (1727, see my Chapter 2).
- 2.
Although I do not have space to discuss the poem in any detail, Elizabeth Hands’ “On the Author’s Lying in” (1789) is an example of a poem written expressly about the fear of childbirth.
- 3.
- 4.
Perry argues that this attitude was employed to bind women into the maternal role and produce the nation’s workforce.
- 5.
This is a separate poem to the previously mentioned “On the Death of an Infant Five Years Old” (1733), also by Boyd.
- 6.
See my Chapter 1. Mark S Lussier (2000) describes the emergence of “physical criticism” in the past twenty years that is occupied with the exchange between literature and science. In a statement key to this chapter, Gavin Budge observes that “late eighteenth-century medicine was fully prepared to accept that mental states could have real, physical effects on the functioning of the body” (2013, 50–51). With specific reference to Wordsworth, Cynthia Chase (1990, 50–77) discusses the materiality of language and Peter De Bolla (2010, 49) says we must also be aware, as Wordsworth was, of the “thingliness” of words, the bodily process of writing and physicality of poetics. Alan Richardson (2011, xiii) also points out that Wordsworth came of age during a time when the materiality of the mind was being asserted by avant-garde thinkers such as Erasmus Darwin and Joseph Priestley, while Michael R Page (2012) traces the rich interchange between science and the literary imagination and argues that Wordsworth advocated the merging of poetry and scientific endeavour in his Chapter 2.
- 7.
This chapter is indebted to Sha’s insightful and detailed research on the Romantic imagination.
- 8.
Denman is discussing menstruation, but his words also apply to the broader mystery of women’s bodies.
- 9.
For example the physiognomist Johann Lavatar (1794, 115) advocated the possibility of maternal longing, and man-midwife William Perfect (1784) was unwilling to dismiss the idea, citing a selection of possible maternal imagination cases. As I will discuss in more detail below, most man-midwives gave credence to the theory of maternal passion.
- 10.
Denman was the first physician whose authority made inducing premature labour in cases of narrow pelvis and other conditions (in which the mother’s life is imperilled by the attempt to deliver at the full time) general practice in England. This practice is still observed today.
- 11.
The writer Ernest Gray based his fictional character “John Knyveton” on Denman; see Man midwife: The further experiences of John Knyveton M. D. late surgeon in the British fleet during the years 1763–1809 (1946).
- 12.
In a further illustration of the close-knit London sphere of medicine, William Hunter had been the pupil and lodger of James Douglas, the physician who had uncovered Mary Toft’s fraud in 1727.
- 13.
Thomas Denman Jr. later acquired eminence when he became Lord Chief Justice of England.
- 14.
“Con” meaning “together”; “sentir” meaning “to feel”.
- 15.
Richardson’s Pamela in Her Exalted Condition is the exception rather than the rule, see my Chapter 3.
- 16.
Although these two characters could be described as secondary to the main plots, Laura is at the centre of the narrative for a large portion of Smith’s novel and I read Lewis’ Agnes as one of the six main protagonists of The Monk, along with Ambrosio, Raymond, Lorenzo, Antonia and Matilda.
- 17.
A prominent example includes Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), which portrays the maternal passion of the secondary character Miss Emily Watkins.
- 18.
- 19.
Susan Greenfield explores this trope more fully (2002, Chapter 1). She cites other novels that have plots which rely explicitly upon the mother-daughter resemblance such as Elizabeth Helme’s Louisa or the Cottage on the Moor (1807), Agnes Maria Bennett, The Beggar Girl and her Benefactors (1797) and Clara Reeve, Fatherless Fanny (1811).
- 20.
- 21.
Mary Jacobus (1992) makes a similar point about the semiotics of the maternal breast in French imagery and literature of the post-revolutionary period, emphasising the discrepancy between maternal iconography and the role that actual mothers played in the organisation of the revolution.
- 22.
Mortimore is imbued with maternal associations as she is named after her godmother Joscelina Mortimore, who also happens to be the heroine’s mother.
- 23.
Jordanova (1999, 217) also says that late eighteenth-century women’s poetry contains a striking amount of pregnancy and birth, and conveys a passionate identification with the babies.
- 24.
In a discussion of Samuel Taylor and Sara Coleridge, Ruderman explains the “distortions and conflations that tend to arise in these moments [of poetry] because encountering an infant, especially one’s own, means encountering in the present a material image of one’s past and one’s futurity” (2008, 20).
- 25.
Although this line of argument suggests an essentialist approach, I am not claiming that women who personally experienced pregnancy wrote about it differently than women who were childless because of their bodily experience. However I do suggest that the eighteenth-century reading public were alert to such biographical information and that this would have affected the style and content of maternal poetry.
- 26.
Barbauld’s childless neighbour and fellow Unitarian, Joanna Baillie, also presented a case for more maternal autonomy in “A Mother to Her Waking Infant” (1790). However this poem is not included in my discussion as Baillie’s poem is addressed to a new-born child, rather than a foetus, and is thus occupied with concerns other than maternal imagination. Similarly Mary Robinson’s “Sonnet. To My Beloved Daughter” (1791) also addresses an adult daughter, rather than a foetus.
- 27.
Henderson does not fully explain what kind of power this is, although she suggests that the poems “represent the baby as having rights to an inheritance that it nevertheless has to roughly demand from a hostile world” (37).
- 28.
As Barbauld originally composed the poem for her friend Frances Carr, it seems unlikely that she would wish to imply that Carr was seeking to wrest power from her unborn child.
- 29.
Mee observes that Barbauld overcompensated, employing restraint so well that “Eighteenth Hundred and Eleven” was criticised not for being too enthusiastic, but for being too distant (2003, 210–211). Daniel E White (2006) agrees that as a Dissenting woman, Barbauld was particularly vulnerable to accusations of overly feminine sensibility, see especially his chapter 2.
- 30.
- 31.
Although Barbauld did not have any biological children, she adopted her nephew Charles and acted as a surrogate mother to the boys at her husband’s school for many years (McCarthy 2008).
- 32.
For details of Barbauld’s attitude to reading see McCarthy (2008, 39) and also for direct reference to her knowledge of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey (565 n.2).
- 33.
Obviously Priestley was not the only, or even most prominent, advocate of Associationism, however it is likely that his perspective influenced Barbauld due to their early paternalistic relationship. Influential figures who argued for the theory of associationism include Richard Payne Knight, Abraham Tucker, Archibald Alison, Thomas Belsham and Erasmus Darwin. Coleridge and Wordsworth were initially attracted to the theory, but later largely abandoned associationist ideas.
- 34.
Educational theorists of the period span a wide range of conservative, liberal and radical perspectives. Notable figures include, but by no means are restricted to: William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Day, Catherine Macaulay, Sarah Trimmer, Maria and Richard Edgeworth, Hannah More, and of course, Anna Barbauld.
- 35.
- 36.
I would like to point out that even a strident educationalist such as William Godwin experienced conflict regarding the debate of nature versus nurture. He admitted that, although easily erased, “at the moment of birth man has really a certain character, and each man a character different from his fellows. The accidents which pass during the months of percipiency in the womb of the mother, produce a real effect.” See Godwin (1798, 42).
- 37.
Anne Mellor and many of the contributors to her collection (1988) claim that Romanticism is about fluid boundaries and the blurring of male and female. In contrast Philip Cox says that adoption of feminine traits could “be read as possessing a positively deconstructive force and a potentially powerful political subtext” (1996, 14–15).
- 38.
For selected research on major male Romantic figures and the maternal see: Barbara Gelpi’s research (1992), which draws upon psychoanalytic theories to focus on the themes and imagery of maternity running throughout Shelley’s writing, Mellor’s discussion (2001) of the significance of the mother and lure of the feminine creative imagination for John; and Jennifer Davis Michael’s comments (2007) on William Blake’s use of womb-like spaces and cannibalisation of the feminine. Examinations of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s deeply suggestive poem “Frost at Midnight” in relation to a usurpation of the maternal are of particular relevance to my study as Coleridge was Wordsworth’s collaborator, see U C Knoepflmacher’s brief but valuable summary (1998, 21) and more recently, Julie Carlson (2002).
- 39.
See also Susan Wolfson (1994).
- 40.
- 41.
This section was deleted in the 1836 Preface, as were any references to poems with mothers as protagonists.
- 42.
Martha Ray was a real person and the mistress of John Montagu, the debauched Earl of Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, but had nothing in common with Wordsworth’s Martha. She died in 1779, shot by a disappointed lover. Wordsworth’s use of her name for a figure of maternal passion is particularly interesting, as she was the mother of his friend Basil Montagu. Coincidentally Ray was attended by the obstetrician William Hunter, whom I discuss in this chapter and in my Chapter 4; see Roy Porter (1985).
- 43.
Later in “The 1805 Prelude” Wordsworth returns to this idea, although he does not make it clear whether he is discussing pre- or postnatal influence:
-
From early days,
-
Beginning not long after that first time
-
In which, a Babe, by intercourse of touch
-
I held mute dialogues with my mother’s heart,
-
I have endeavoured to display the means
-
Whereby the infant sensibility,
-
Great birthright of our being, was in me
-
Augmented and sustained…(“The Prelude”, 281–287)
-
- 44.
Although in earlier periods pregnancy had been considered a cure for greensickness or oversensitive nerves, by the early nineteenth century, medical texts increasingly viewed pregnancy as a potential source of insanity. See John Connolly, An Inquiry Concerning the Indications of Insanity (1830), Thomas Arnold, Observations of the Nature of Insanity (1806) and Sir William Ellis, A Treatise on The Nature, Symptoms, Causes and Treatment of Insanity (1838).
- 45.
Frances Ferguson (2010) takes issue with Parrish’s reading.
- 46.
- 47.
I concur with Wolfson, who notes that Wordsworth is “busy gendering ‘the spot’” in lines 41–42 (1994, 43).
- 48.
Similarly Alexander Regier has convincingly suggested that “for Martha Ray the words [“O Misery”] are tied to the spot to which she needs to return in order to repeat her dirge…As readers we are in a comparable position. We return to the poem as to a mysterious spot” (2010, 78).
- 49.
This claim has been shown to be quite far from the truth, as the actual compilation of Lyrical Ballads was much more haphazard, see Michael Gamer (1999, 93).
- 50.
Some major works on this subject are: Thomas McFarland’s The Symbiosis of Coleridge and Wordsworth (1972); Lucy Newlyn’s Coleridge, Wordsworth and the Language of Allusion (1986); Paul Magnusson’s Coleridge and Wordsworth: A Lyrical Dialogue (1988); Gene W Ruoff’s Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Making of Major Lyrics (1989); Richard E Matlak, The Poetry of Relationship (1997). (Nicholas Roe) (1988, 232), also particularly points out the crossover in Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s theories of imagination during 1795–1797.
- 51.
James H Averill (1976) argues that Wordsworth used Zoonomia for many poems in Lyrical Ballads. Similarly Richard Matlak (1990) has shown Lyrical Ballads owes its inner-body imagery to Darwin’s bio-medical understanding of a “physiologically-based mental system in Zoonomia”. In a related perspective, Gavin Budge (2013, 53) argues that Wordsworth’s poetry and poetic theory c.1798–1805 engages with Darwin’s medical philosophy and adopts some ideas, but chiefly rejects Darwin’s overall intellectual position.
- 52.
This refers specifically to “Goody Blake”, but it is part of a larger justification for the poems of Lyrical Ballads, which includes “The Thorn”.
- 53.
The prophetess Deborah promises Barak that she will deliver his enemy, Sisera, through a woman. This prophecy is fulfilled when the woman Jael murders Sisera with a hammer and tent peg.
- 54.
My thanks to Judith Hawley for pointing out this possibility.
- 55.
Adela Pinch (1996) also describes this technique in her analysis of Goody Blake.
- 56.
Mitzi Myers (1987) has argued that the refashioning of motherhood redefined female roles (at least in middle and upper classes) in terms of pedagogical and maternal power and helped women writers to establish a more authoritative public voice. Alan Richardson has contested Myers’ view and states that women writers who cast themselves as maternal figures were pursued by the idea that they were “potentially dangerous strongholds of the irrational” (1994, 169). This dichotomy is a continuation of the tension between stereotypes of the mother who wielded a powerful imagination and the fragile pregnant female assailed by her uncontrollable passions.
References
Arnold, Thomas. 1806. Observations of the Nature of Insanity. Second edition. 2 vols. London: T Cadell.
Austen, Jane. 1798. 1995. Letter to Cassandra, Saturday 27th – Sunday 28th October. In Jane Austen’s Letters, third edition. edited by Deirdre Le Faye. Oxford: OUP.
Averill, James H. 1976. Wordsworth and “Natural Science”: The Poetry of 1798. Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 77.2: 232–246. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27708331.
Backscheider, Paula. 2005. Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press.
Barbauld, Anna Laetitia. c.1795. 1994. The Poems of Anna Laetitia Barbauld. edited by William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft. London: The University of Georgia Press.
Barbauld, Anna Letitia. 1778. [1835]. Lessons for Children in Four Parts. London: Baldwin and Cradock; Longman and Co.; J. Booker; Hamilton, Adams, and Co.; Darton and Harvey; Dulau and Co.; and Simpkin and Marshall.
Barrell, John. 2006. The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s. Oxford: OUP.
Baillie, Joanna. 1790. [1999]. A Mother to Her Waking Infant. In The Selected Poems of Joanna Baillie 1762–1851, edited by Jennifer Breen. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Bennett, Andrew. 1999. Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity. Cambridge: CUP.
Bennett, Anna Maria. 1797. The Beggar Girl and Her Benefactors. 7 vols. London: William Lane.
Blondel, James. 1727. The Strength of Imagination In Pregnant Women Examin’d And the Opinion that Marks and Deformities in Children arise from Thence Demonstrated to be a Vulgar Error. Pater-Noster Row, London: J Peele.
Boyd, Elizabeth. 1733. The Humorous Miscellany; or, Riddles for the Beaux. London: S. Slow.
Buchan, William. 1803. Advice to Mothers, on the Subject of Their Own Health; and on the Means of Promoting the Health, Strength and Beauty of Their Offspring. London: T Cadell and W Davies.
Budge, Gavin. 2013. Romanticism, Medicine and the Natural Supernatural: Transcendent Vision and Bodily Spectres 1789–1852. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Burney, Frances. 1778. [2008]. Evelina. London: Penguin.
Bygrave, Stephen. 2009. Uses of Education: Readings in Enlightenment in England. Cranbury: Associated University Presses.
Campbell, Jill. 2008. Women Writers and the Woman’s Novel: The Trope of Maternal Transmission. In The Cambridge Companion to Fiction In the Romantic Period, edited by Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener, 159–175. Cambridge: CUP.
Cannon, Mercy. 2008. Hygienic Motherhood: Domestic Medicine and Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy. Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 20.4: 535–561. doi: 10.1353/ecf.0.0017.
Carlson, Julie. 2002. Gender. In The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, edited by Lucy Newlyn, 203–216. Cambridge: CUP.
Cave, Jane. 1782. [1795]. Written a Few Hours before the Birth of a Child. In Poems on Various Subjects Entertaining, Elegiac, and Religious edited by Jane Cave., Bristol: N Biggs.
Chaber, Lois A. 1996. “This Affecting Subject”: An “Interested” Reading of Childbearing in Two Novels by Samuel Richardson. Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 8.2: 193–250. doi: 10.1353/ecf.1996.0034.
Chase, Cynthia. 1990. Monument and Inscription: Wordsworth’s “Rude Embryo” and the Remaining of History. In Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory, edited by Kenneth R Johnston, Gilbert Chaitin, Karen Hanson, and Herbert Marks, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1817. 1983. Biographia Literaria. edited by James Engell and W Jackson Bate, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Connolly, John. 1830. An Inquiry Concerning the Indications of Insanity. London: John Taylor.
Costello, Julie. 1998. Aesthetic Discourses and Maternal Subjects: Enlightenment Roots, Schlegelian Revisions. In Comparative Romanticisms: Power, Gender, Subjectivity, edited by Diane Long Hoeveler and Larry H Peer, 171–188. Woodbridge: Camden House.
Cox, Philip. 1996. Gender, Genre and the Romantic Poets. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Crawford, Crawford. 2004. Blood, Bodies and Families in Early Modern England. Harlow: Pearson Longman.
Curran, Stuart. 2002. Mothers and Daughters: Poetic Generation(s) in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. In Forging Connections: Women’s Poetry from the Renaissance to Romanticism, edited by Anne K Mellor, Felicity Nussbaum, and Jonathan F S Post, 147–165. San Marino: Henry E Huntington Library and Art Gallery.
Dacre, Charlotte. 1806. [1997]. Zofloya, or the Moor. Ontario: Broadview.
Darwin, Erasmus. 1794. Zoonomia; or, the Laws of Organic Life. Vol. 2. London: J Johnson.
Davis Michael, Jennifer 2007. Blake and the City. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses.
De Bolla, Peter. 2010. What is a Lyrical Ballad? Wordsworth’s Experimental Epistemologies. In Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory: Knowledge, Language, Experience, edited by Alexander Regier and Stefan H Uhlig. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Denman, Thomas. 1788. An Introduction to the Practice of Midwifery. London: T. Bensley; for J. Johnson.
Eighteenth-Century Obstetrician An. 1933. The British Medical Journal, 2.3786: 206–207.
Ellis, Sir William. 1838. A Treatise on the Nature, Symptoms, Causes and Treatment of Insanity. London: Samuel Holdsworth.
Fay, Elizabeth A. 1998. A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
Fenwick, Eliza. 1795. [1998]. Secresy: Or The Ruin on The Rock, edited by Isobel Grundy. Second edition. Ontario: Broadview.
Ferguson, Frances. 2010. Writing and Orality around 1800: “Speakers”, “Readers” and Wordsworth’s “The Thorn”. In Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory: Knowledge, Language, Experience, edited by Alexander Regier and Stefan H Uhlig, 119–138. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fulford, Tim. 1999. Romanticism and Masculinity: Gender, Politics and Poetics in the Writings of Burke, Coleridge, Cobbet, Wordsworth De Quincey and Hazlitt. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press ltd.
Gamer, Michael. 1999. Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception and Canon Formation. Cambridge: CUP.
Gelpi, Barbara. 1992. Shelley’s Goddess: Maternity, Language Subjectivity. Oxford: OUP.
Gérard, Albert S. 1979. Of Trees and Men: The Unity of Wordsworth’s The Thorn. In Wordsworth Lyrical Ballads: A Selection of Critical Essays, edited by Alun R Jones and William Tydeman, reprint, 215–233. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press. [originally published in Essays In Criticism, XIV (1964), 237–255].
Gill, Stephen. 2003. Introduction. In The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth, edited by Stephen Gill, 1–4. Cambridge: CUP.
Godwin, William. 1798. Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. third edition. Vol. 2.London: G G and J Robinson.
Goldstein, Jan. 2005. The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France 1750–1850. London: Harvard UP.
Gonsalves, Joshua. 2007. Reading Idiocy: Wordsworth’s “The Idiot Boy”. Wordsworth Circle 38.3: 121–130. https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1–168354715/reading-idiocy-wordsworth-s-the-idiot-boy.
Gray, Ernest. 1946. Man Midwife: The Further Experiences of John Knyveton M. D. late surgeon in the British fleet during the years 1763–1809. London: Robert Hale.
Greenfield, Susan C. 2002. Mothering Daughters: Novels and the Politics of Family Romance Frances Burney to Jane Austen. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Hamilton, Alexander 1792. A Treatise on the Management of Female Complaints, and of Children in Early Infancy. London: Samuel Campbell.
Hammons, Pamela. 1999. Despised Creatures: The Illusion of Maternal Self-effacement in Seventeenth-Century Child Loss Poetry. ELH, 66.1: 25–49. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30032060.
Hanson, Clare. 2004. A Cultural History of Pregnancy: Pregnancy, Medicine and Culture, 1750–2000. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Hands, Elizabeth. 1789. On the Author's Lying in. In The Death of Amnon: A Poem. With an Appendix: Containing Pastorals, and Other Poetical Pieces. Coventry: N Rollason.
Hartley, David. 1749. [1801]. Observations on Man. Fourth edition. London: J Johnson.
Hartman, Geoffrey. 1987. Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.
Haygarth, John. 1800. The Imagination, as a Cause and as a Cure of Disorders of the Body. London: Cadell and Davies.
Hays, Mary. 1799. [1998]. The Victim of Prejudice. Ontario: Broadview.
Helme, Elizabeth. 1807. Louisa, or the Cottage on the Moor. Paris: Theophilus Barrois.
Henderson, Andrea K. 1996. Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity 1774–1830. Cambridge: CUP.
Homans, Margaret. 1986. Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing. London: University of Chicago Press.
Hunter, William. 1774. Anatomia uteri humani gravidi tabulis illustrata … The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uteris Exhibited in Figures. London: Imprint Birmingham: J. Baskerville, & S. Baker & G. Leigh.
Inchbald, Elizabeth. 1791. [1967]. A Simple Story. Oxford: OUP.
Jacobus, Mary. 1976. Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
———. 1992. Incorruptible Milk: Breastfeeding and the French Revolution. InRebel Daughters, Women and the French Revolution, edited by Sara E Melzer and Leslie W Rabine, 54–75. Oxford: OUP.
Jordanova, Ludmilla. 1999. Nature Displayed: Gender, Science and Medicine 1760–1820. Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman.
Keane, Angela. 2000. Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s, Romantic Belongings. Cambridge: CUP.
Kelly, Isabella. 1794. To An Unborn Infant. In A Collection of Poems and Fables, edited by Isabella Kelly. Edinburgh: W. Richardson; J. Debrett; and J. Balfour.
———. 1798. Joscelina, or the Rewards of Benevolence. Vol. 2.London: W Lane.
Kipp, Julie. 2003. Romanticism, Maternity and the Body Politic. Cambridge: CUP.
Knoepflmacher, U C. 1998. Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales and Femininity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth. 1991. Their Father’s Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity. Oxford: OUP.
Lavatar, Johann. 1794. Essays on Physiognomy. London: William Spotswood and David West.
Lewis, Matthew. 1796. [2008]. The Monk. Oxford: OUP.
Lussier, Mark. 2000. Romantic Dynamics: The Poets of Physicality. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press.
Matlak, Richard. 1990. Wordsworth’s reading of Zoonomia in Early Spring. The Wordsworth Circle 21: 76–81. http://search.proquest.com/openview/94a47ee1f15de8ce142ed17a1239dd1e/1?pq-origsite=gscholar.
Matlak, Richard E. 1997. The Poetry of Relationship: The Wordsworths and Coleridge, 1797–1800. New York: St Martin's Press.
McCarthy, William. 2008. Anna Laetitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.
Mackenzie, Henry. 1771. The Man of Feeling. Second edition. London: T Caddell.
McDonagh, Josephine. 2003. Child Murder and British Culture 1720–1900. Cambridge: CUP.
McFarland, Thomas. 1972. The Symbiosis of Coleridge and Wordsworth. Studies in Romanticism 11: 263–303.
McGann, Jerome. 1996. The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style. Oxford: OUP.
McLane, Maureen 2000. Romanticism and the Human Sciences. Cambridge: CUP.
Mears, Martha. 1797. The Pupil of Nature or Candid Advice to the Fair Sex. London.
Mee, Jon. 2003. Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period. Oxford: OUP.
Mellor, Ann. 1988. Introduction. In Romanticism and Feminism, edited by Ann Mellor, 3–12. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
———. 2001. Keats and the Complexities of Gender. In The Cambridge Companion to Keats, edited by Susan Wolfson, 214–229. Cambridge: CUP.
Morgan, Thaïs E. 1994. Literature, Theory and the Question of Genders. In Men Writing the Feminine: Literature, Theory and the Question of Genders, edited by Thaïs Morgan, 1–11. New York: University of New York Press.
Myers, Mitzi. 1987. Impeccable Governesses, Rational Dames and Moral Mothers: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Female Tradition in Georgian Children’s Books. Children’s Literature, 14: 31–59. doi: 10.1353/chl.0.0638.
Newlyn, Lucy. 1986. Coleridge, Wordsworth and the Language of Allusion. Oxford: Clarendon.
Oldisworth, William Others. 1710. [1768]. Callipædia: Or the Art of Getting Pretty Children in Four Books. Edinburgh: Alexander McCaslan.
Opie, Amelia. 1805. Adeline Mowbray: Or the Mother and Daughter. London: Pandora.
Page, Judith W. 1994. Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women. London: University of California Press.
Page, Michael R. 2012. The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H G Wells: Science, Evolution and Ecology. Farnham: Ashgate.
Parrish, Stephen Maxfield. 1957. “The Thorn”: Wordsworth’s Dramatic Monologue. Elh, 24.2: 153–163. doi: 10.2307/2871827.
Paul Magnusson. 1998. Coleridge and Wordsworth: A Lyrical Dialogue. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Perfect, William. 1784. Cases in Midwifery. London: T Fisher.
Perry, Ruth. 1990. Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth-Century England. In Forbidden History: The State, Society, and the Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe, edited by John Fout, 107–138. London: University of Chicago Press.
———. 2004. Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture 1748–1818. Cambridge: CUP.
Phillips, Katherine. 1667. [1669]. Poems. By the Most Deservedly Admired Mrs. Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda. London: Reprints, n.p.
Pinch, Adela. 1996. Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Pollock, Linda A. 1990. Embarking on a Rough passage: The Experience of Pregnancy in Early-modern Society. In Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England: Essays in Memory of Dorothy McLaren, edited by Valerie Fildes, 39–67. London: Routledge.
Porter, Roy. 1985. William Hunter: A Surgeon and a Gentleman. In William Hunter and The Eighteenth Century Medical World, edited by W F Bynum and Roy Porter, 7–34. Cambridge: CUP.
———. 2001. Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain 1650–1900. London: Reaktion Books.
Radcliffe, Ann. 1794. [1980]. The Mysteries of Udolpho. Oxford: OUP.
Regier, Alexander. 2010. Words Worth Repeating: Language and Repetition in Wordsworth’s Poetic theory. In Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory: Knowledge, Language, Experience, edited by Alexander Regier and Stefan H Uhlig, 61–80. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Retford, Kate. 2006. The Art of Domestic Life: Family Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century England. London: Yale University Press.
Reeve, Clara. 1811. [1821]. Fatherless Fanny, or, a Young Lady's First Entrance into Life. London: G Virtue.
Richardson, Alan. 1988. Romanticism and the Colonization of the Feminine. In Romanticism and Feminism, edited by Anne Mellor, 13–25. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
———. 1994. Literature, Education and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice 1780 – 1832. Cambridge: CUP.
———. 2011. British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind. Cambridge: CUP.
Richardson, Samuel. 1740–1741. 1902. vols 3–4. Pamela in Her Exalted Condition] Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. Vol. 4. London: Chapman.
Robinson, Mary. 1791. [2000]. Sonnet. To My Beloved Daughter. In Selected Poems, edited by Judith Pascoe. Ontario: Broadview.
Roe, Nicholas. 1988. Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Ross, Marlon B. 1989. The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry. Oxford: OUP.
Ruderman, David B. 2008. Breathing Space: Infancy and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry and Poetics. PhD Thesis, University of Michigan.
Ruoff, Gene W. 1989. Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Making of the Major Lyrics, 1802–1804. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Schlegel, Friedrich. c.1799. 1971. Ideas 127. In Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, edited and translated by Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: University of Michigan Press.
Schürer, Norbert. 2013. Jane Cave Winscom: Provincial Poetry and the Metropolitan Connection. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 36.3: 415–431. doi: 10.1111/1754–0208.12010.
Sha, Richard. 2009. Towards a Physiology of the Romantic Imagination. Configurations, 17.3: 197–226. URL: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/49851889_Toward_a_Physiology_of_the_Romantic_Imagination.
———. 2012. Imagination. In A Handbook of Romanticism Studies, edited by Joel Faflak and Julia M Wright, 19–33. London: Blackwell Publishing ltd.
Simpson, David. 1982. Wordsworth and the Figurings of the Real. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press.
Smellie, William. 1790. The Philosophy of Natural History. London: T Cadell and GG & J Robinsons.
Smith, Charlotte. 1791. [2004]. Celestina. Toronto: Broadview.
Smith, Charlotte. 1798. [2007]. The Young Philosopher. London: Pickering and Chatto.
Stabler, Jane. 2001. Space for Speculation: Coleridge, Barbauld and the Poetics of Priestley. In Coleridge and the Sciences of Life, edited by Nicholas Roe, 175–204. Oxford: OUP.
Stafford, William. 2002. English Feminists and Their Opponents in the 1790s: Unsex’d and Proper Females. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Tomalin, Claire. 1974. The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
Tomaselli, Slyvana. 1995. The Death and Rebirth of Character in the Eighteenth Century. In Rewriting the Self: Histories from Renaissance to the Present, edited by Roy Porter, 84–96. London: Routledge.
Ty, Eleanor. 1993. Unsex’d Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Vickery, Amanda. 1998. The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England. London: Yale Nota Bene.
Watts, Ruth. 1998. Gender, Power and the Unitarians in England 1760–1860. London: Addison Wesley Longman.
White, Daniel E. 2006. Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent. Cambridge: CUP.
Wolfson, Susan. 1994. Lyrical Ballads and the Language of (Men) Feeling: Wordsworth Writing Women’s Voices. In Men Writing the Feminine: Literature, Theory and the Question of Genders, edited by Thaïs E Morgan, 29–58. New York: University of New York Press.
———. 2003. Wordsworth’s Craft. In The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth, edited by Stephen Gill, 108–124. Cambridge: CUP.
———. 2010. Social Being and Turns of Literary Action. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Wordsworth, William. 1800. [2008]. Lines: Written with a Slate-Pencil. In The Major Works, Oxford: OUP.
Wordsworth, William, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 1798. 2003. Lyrical Ballads & Other Poems. edited by Martin Schofield, Ware: Wordsworth Editions Limited.
———. 1800. 2008. Note to The Thorn. In The Major Works, edited by Stephen Gill. Oxford: OUP.
———. 1802. 2008. Preface to Lyrical Ballads. In The Major Works, edited by Stephen Gill. Oxford: OUP.
Wright, Mehetabel. 1733. To an Infant Expiring the Second Day of Its Birth. In The Gentleman's Magazine. 3, October 1733.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Buckley, J. (2017). “I’ll Repress the Rising Anguish/Till Thine Eyes Behold the Light”: Passionate Responsibility in Maternal Poetry. In: Gender, Pregnancy and Power in Eighteenth-Century Literature. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53835-8_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53835-8_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-53834-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-53835-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)