Abstract
Notwithstanding the appearance in 1778 of the rashly printed edition of modern works, the Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, attention largely turned to the Rowley papers for the next half-decade, between 1777 and 1783, as the so-called ‘Rowley controversy’ dominated large sectors of the periodical press. In addition to weekly, even daily, notes in the journals and newspapers, many lengthy books and pamphlets ostensibly arguing for or against the authenticity of the relics — by Rowleians and anti-Rowleians respectively — appeared quickly, and a greatly expanded edition of the works came with reams of superfluous scholia in late 1781. Sub-controversies about the value and methods of literary history and criticism took shape, and gentlemen renewed old disagreements. For many participants, as George Steevens informed Thomas Warton, the notional controversy proved to be a convenient vehicle for puffing other research often only tangentially related to the newly recovered works or even to neglected early English literature at large.1
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Notes
Steevens to Warton, 27 April 1782, in Thomas Warton, The Correspondence of Thomas Warton, ed. David Fairer (Athens, GA, and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1995), p. 448.
Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity in the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 51.
’s.W.’, SJC (22-4 October 1782). This was a response to the philological proofs of ‘Chattertonius’, SJC (1-3 October 1782). See’ s.W.’, SJC (23 May 1782). A similar request, again signed’ s.W.’, appeared in the GM 53.1 (1783), p. 123. ‘D.H.’ [Richard Gough] responded, GM 53.1 (1783), p. 212, as did ‘T.H.W’ [Thomas Holt White], p. 231, and ‘B’, pp. 321–2. The respondents focus on antiquarian knowledge in order to ‘explain’ the lines, which is not quite what Weston had asked. For attribution see James Marquis Kuist, The Nichols File of ‘The Gentleman’s Magazine’: Attributions of Authorship and Other Documentation in Editorial Papers at the Folger Library (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), pp. 154
Maurice James Craig, The Volunteer Earl: Being the Life and Times of James Caulfeild, First Earl of Charlemont (London: Cresset Press, 1948), pp. 213–14.
James Hams, Philological Inquiries in Three Parts, 2 vols (London: C. Nourse, 1781), vol. 2, p. 467.
Quoted in Ernest Clarke, New Lights on Chatterton (London: Blades, East & Blades, 1916), p. 10.
A. Watkin-Jones, ‘Bishop Percy, Thomas Warton, and Chatterton’ s Rowley Poems (1773–1790) (Unpublished Letters)’, PMLA 50 (1935), pp. 769–84.
Nick Groom, ‘Richard Farmer and the Rowley Controversy’, N&Q239 (1994), pp. 314–18. See The Percy Letters: The Correspondence of Thomas Percy & George Paton, ed. A. R Falconer (London: Yale University Press, 1961), pp. 153–5.
Andrew Coltée Ducarel, John Chapman and others: GM 56.1 (1786), pp. 361–2
David Fairer, ‘The Origins of Warton’s History of English Poetry’, RES 32 (1981), pp. 37–63
Hurd to Warton, 14 October 1762, Correspondence of Thomas Warton, pp. 127–8. See Lawrence Lipking, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 355–62.
See Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Hambledon and London, 2004), p. 232.
Thomas Warton, Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry, ed. David Fairer, 4 vols (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1998), vol. 1, pp. 1–70.
Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry, ed. Richard Taylor, 3 vols (London: Thomas Tegg, 1840), vol. 1, p. 9.
See Jonathan Brody Kramnick, Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 22–3.
For the affiliation between philology and Leland’s antiquarianism see Joseph M. Levine, Humanism and History: Origins of Modem English Historiography (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 79–82.
Jacob Bryant, Observations upon the Poems of Thomas Rowley (London: T Payne and Son, 1781).
See Fanny Bumey Diaries and Letters of Madame D’Arblay, 7 vols (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1854 [1842]), vol. 3, pp. 98
See Theodor Harmsen, Antiquarianism in the Augustan Age: Thomas Hearne, 1678–1735 (Oxford and New York: Peter Lang, 2000), p. 24.
K. E. Attar, ‘More than a Mythologist: Jacob Bryant as Book Collector’, The Library, 7th series, 3.4 (2002), pp. 351–66.
GM 53.1 (1783), pp. 336–8. This was a modem forgery according to Grace R. Trenery, ‘Ballad Collections of the Eighteenth Century’, MLR 10.3 (1915), pp. 283–303
Thomas Heame, A Collection of Curious Discourses, 2 vols (London: W. and J. Richardson, 1771 [1720]), vol. 1, p. lxx.
Bryant, Observations, pp. 581, 584. For the poststructuralist implications see K. K. Ruthven, ‘Preposterous Chatterton’, ELH 71.2 (2004), pp. 345–75.
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales of Chaucer, ed. Thomas Tyrwhitt, 5 vols (London: T Payne, 1775–8), vol. 5, p. v.
SJC (19-22 January 1782). See Arthur Sherbo, The Achievement of George Steevens (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), pp. 169–98.
1781, pp. 19–22. See Nick Groom, ‘Thomas Rowlie Preeste’, in Thomas Woodman (ed.), Early Romantics: Perspectives in British Poetry from Pope to Wordsworth (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 242–55.
E.g., SJC (29-31 January 1782) and (5-7 February). See Sherbo, Achievement of George Steevens, pp. 178–84. Steevens follows a ‘judicious critick in the Gentleman’s Magazine for last month’, possibly the Reverend John Kynaston (‘Q’), GM 52 (1782), pp. 14–15.
GM 51 (1781), pp. 555–9, and (Supplement), pp. 609–15. Malone to Lord Charlemont, 8 January 1782, in James, First Earl of Charlemont, The Manuscripts and Correspondence of James, First Earl of Charlemont, 2 vols (London: HMSO, 1891–4), vol. 1, pp. 393–4. Malone immediately corrected his little brat’ of an essay for publication as a pamphlet in early February 1782: Cursory Observations on the Poems attributed to Thomas Rowley (London: J. Nichols, 1782). For an overview of changes from the review to the pamphlet see Edmond Malone, Cursory Observations on the Poems attributed to Thomas Rowley, intr. James M. Kuist (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, 1966), pp. i–xiv
Quoted in James M. Osborn, ‘Horace Walpole and Edmond Malone’, in Wanen Hunting Smith (ed.), Horace Walpole, Writer, Politician, and Connoisseur (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1967), pp. 299–327
See Piene Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (New York and London: Routledge, 2004 [1979]).
Malone, p. 47. ‘Q’ insisted the mock-ancient ‘garb’ of the poems was not modern, as Malone had asserted, but that the poems were read ‘in the days of Edward, as well as in those of Elizabeth’: GM 52 (1782), pp. 14–15. Attributed to Kynaston in Arthur Sherbo, Letters to Mr. Urban of the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’, 1751–1811 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Meilen Press, 1997), p. 129.
With Ritson and Hearne in mind, Joseph Waiton observed that a ‘great deal of wit has been wasted on antiquarians’: An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 4th edn, 2 vols (London: J. Dodsley, 1782), vol. 2, p. 203.
Joseph Ritson, Observations on the Three First Volumes of the History of English Poetry (London: J. Stockdale and R. Faulder, 1782), p. 3.
GM 52 (1782), pp. 532–3. ‘Castigator’ defended Ritson against politeness: GM 52 (1782), pp. 571–2. This contributor has been identified as Ritson himself by Bertrand H. Bronson, Joseph Ritson: Scholar-at-Arms, 2 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1938), vol. 1, p. 340.
Enquiry, p. 14. Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance (London: A. Millar, 1762), p. 91.
Edward Burnaby Greene, Strictures upon a Pamphlet intitled, Cursory Observations on the Poems attributed to Rowley (London: J. Stockdale, 1782), p. 3.
[Rayner Hickford and John Fell], Observations on the Poems attributed to Rowley (London: C. Bathhurst, 1782).
Thomas James Mathias, Essay on the Evidence, External and Internal, relating to the Poems attributed to Thomas Rowley (London: T. Becket, 1783), p. 3.
George Hardinge, Rowley and Chatterton in the Shades, or Nugœ Antiquœ et Novœ, intr. Joan Pittock (Los Angeles: Augustan Reprint Society, 1979).
William Julius Mickle, The Prophecy of Queen Emma (London: J. Bew, 1782).
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© 2013 Daniel Cook
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Cook, D. (2013). The Rowley Controversy. In: Thomas Chatterton and Neglected Genius, 1760–1830. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137332493_5
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