I am very much a nineteenth-century specialist, and although I have read and studied fairly widely in other periods, it is with the Victorians that I feel most comfortable. However, my research interests have been gradually creeping backwards with my work on Gothic, and I am now beginning a new project which places me firmly in the latter part of the eighteenth century. As I am currently staying at the marvellous Gladstone’s Library, I decided to begin my work by reading through the enormous New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse. I must admit I didn’t read every single poem, but revisiting the eighteenth century – in many cases, for the first time since my undergraduate days – was a delight.
Eighteenth-century writing seems to defy categorisation in many ways, and humans like to pigeon-hole. There is the ‘age of reason’ that we think of in works by Johnson, Swift and Addison, often in prose. The novel saw its rise during that time; think of Defoe and Fielding, for example. There is the elegant, witty neo-classicism of Pope, the regretful, nostalgic rural idylls of Goldsmith, the sublime melancholy of Gray, not to mention the political satire, the landscape poetry, the epitaphs, and the humour. Oh, the humour – some of these poems are really funny. And some made me cry.
I think, perhaps, while I remembered the satire and the classicism of the period, I had forgotten the humanity. Poems on children (read Joanna Baillie’s ‘A Mother to her Waking Infant’, for example), on the dead, on the nostalgia for your home, on the moving beauty of the landscape – I had forgotten how touching these can be. I think perhaps this is particularly so because I felt a little adrift in the eighteenth century. With the Victorians, I am comfortable: I know them and their ways; I know their history, their politics and religion, their homes and their cultural touchstones, as well as their art and literature. I also know how critical views have changed over time, and what the current thought is on many aspects of the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth, I know some of this, but less so, and it occurs to me that this defamiliarization, this sense of being in a place that I know but which is not quite how I remember it, is actually a gift to the literary critic, because never again will I read these poems with such a fresh eye or receptive mind. Having devoted much of my life to building up knowledge which allows me to contextualise work, it’s rather liberating to start again in a place where I don’t yet know much. And I am looking forward to finding out more.