Abstract
On 22 July 1795, William Cowper wrote these lines on a window shutter at his home in Weston Underwood (Figure 1.1). Stricken by mental and physical ailments, the poet was about to move to Norfolk where he and his long-term companion Mary Unwin could be properly cared for by his cousin John Johnson. Given the grim melancholy that afflicted him during his final years, and Mary’s failing health, he may have felt that in moving away he was leaving behind the last source of pleasure available to him. The intensity of his attachment to his local environment is suggested by the fact that he writes directly onto the fabric of the house, as if that would allow a small part of his self to stay there forever. With customary wit, he chooses the most appropriate object on which to inscribe the lines: by moving away, he will be permanently shutting out the ‘dear Scenes’ of his past. It is apparent from the poet’s letters that these feelings of attachment were long-standing: thus he writes to John Newton in July 1783 that ‘the very Stones in the garden walls are my intimate acquaintances; I should miss almost the minutest object and be disagreeably affected by its removal […] [were I to] leave this incommodious and obscure nook for a twelvemonth, I should return to it again with rapture’.2
Farewell dear Scenes — for ever clos’d to me,
Oh for what sorrows must I now exchange you.1
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Notes
William Cowper, ‘Lines Written on a Window-Shutter at Weston’, in The Poems of William Cowper, ed. by John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–95), III, 208. The lines were retraced in 1834 and possibly again at a later date, so the version visible in the present day differs slightly from the copy text used by Cowper’s editors: see Poems, III, 352–4.
William Cowper, The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, ed. by James King and Charles Ryskamp, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979–86), II, 151. Further references to Cowper’s letters and prose writings are in the text.
Vincent Newey, Cowper’s Poetry: A Critical Study and Reassessment (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1982).
W. B. Hutchings, ‘William Cowper and 1789’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 19 (1989), 71–93 (p. 73).
Vincent Newey, ‘Cowper and the Condition of England’, Literature and Nationalism, ed. by Vincent Newey and Ann Thompson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1991), p. 120–39 (p. 134).
Martin Priestman’s Cowper’s Task: Structure and Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) includes a chapter on ‘Mental Topography’. It makes some valuable suggestions about links between individual and imperial crises in Cowper’s writings, and the importance of the image of the ‘circle’, but offers a general overview of the subject, rather than my more focused account of Cowper’s relationship to England and empire.
Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 166.
Vincent Newey, ‘“The Loop-holes of Retreat”: Exploring Cowper’s Letters’, Cowper and Newton Journal, 1 (2011), 16–45 (p. 7).
Karen O’Brien, ‘“Still at Home”: Cowper’s Domestic Empires’, in Early Romantics: Perspectives in British Poetry from Pope to Wordsworth, ed. by Thomas Woodman (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), p. 134–47 (p. 135).
Karen O’Brien, ‘“These Nations Newton Made his Own”: Poetry, Knowledge, and British Imperial Globalization’, in The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory, ed. by Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 281–303 (p. 299). For an original way of thinking about the global context of The Task, see Tobias Menely’s analysis of its connection to the Laki Eruption of 1793: ‘“The Present Obfuscation”: Cowper’s Task and the Time of Climate Change’, PMLA, 127 (2012), 477–92.
Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), Chapter 3;
Mary Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010).
See also Julie Ellison, ‘News, Blues, and Cowper’s Busy World’, Modern Language Quarterly, 62 (2001), 219–37.
Jon Mee, Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community: 1762 to 1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 180, 177.
Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. by John Butt (London: Butler & Tanner, 1970), p. 209.
For a useful general study (which focuses on fiction and therefore omits Cowper), see George Boulukos, The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
See also Marcus Wood, ‘Emancipation, Fanon, and “the Butchery of Freedom”’, in Slavery and Cultures of Abolition, ed. by Brycchan Carey and Peter Kitson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007), p. 11–41.
James King, William Cowper: A Biography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986), p. 281.
Scott Hess, Authoring the Self: Self-Representation, Authorship, and the Print Market in British Poetry from Pope through Wordsworth (New York & London: Routledge, 2005), p. 177.
Valuable discussions of Mai in relation to interactions between the metropolitan centre and exotic periphery can be found in Fulford, Lee, and Kitson, pp. 46–70, and Harriet Guest, Empire, Barbarism, and Civilisation: Captain Cook, William Hodges, and the Return to the Pacific (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), Chapter 6.
See David Fairer, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century 1700–1789 (Harlow: Pearson, 2003), p. 233–5.
John Milton, The Portable Milton, ed. by Douglas Bush (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 64; The Poems of Alexander Pope, p. 195.
See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), Chapter 9.
For a discussion of Cowper, domesticity, and gender, see Andrew Elfenbein, Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), Chapter 3.
For a lively account of the ballooning craze in the late eighteenth century, see Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder (London: HarperCollins, 2008), Chapter 3.
See Paul Keen, Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), Chapter 2.
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© 2014 David Higgins
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Higgins, D. (2014). ‘These circuits, that have been made around the globe’: William Cowper’s Glocal Vision. In: Romantic Englishness. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137411631_2
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