Irritability and the Politics of Deerbrook

Abstract

Coleridge’s Romantic acccount of perception as a process in which mental faculties organically assimilate the disconnected particularities of sense-experience to a greater perceptual whole has as its political corollary the Coleridgean notion of the ‘clerisy’, as a body of intellectuals working to incorporate specialized knowledge into the ‘common sense’ of the nation, allowing, as Coleridge puts it, ‘language itself [… to] think for us’.¹ Harriet Martineau, as a dissenting woman writer, would almost certainly not have fitted Coleridge’s mental picture of the clerisy, and yet her breakthrough success with the best-selling 1832–33 Illustrations of Political Economy had enormous influence in naturalizing the terms of economic analysis in a way which arguably corresponds to this Coleridgean model of intellectual progress. Philip Connell, in his 2001 study Romanticism, Economics and the Question of ‘Culture’, has demonstrated the inaccuracy of the assumption that the Romantics were implacably opposed to the kind of Malthusian economics represented by Martineau’s Illustrations.² The interpretative schema which Martineau included at the end of each number of the Illustrations, which in the last chapter I suggested could be seen as making local particularity spectral, could also plausibly be characterized in Coleridgean terms as subsuming the particularities of her narrative into the working out in history of governing Ideas, having affinities with the revival of typological modes of interpretation in which the Romantics participated.³