Rattling on Exactly as They Talk: Romantic Conversations

ABSTRACT

The essay begins by identifying the conversation as a hitherto neglected Romantic genre, and by distinguishing the conversation from the dialogue. It goes on to characterise the conversation as a generic hybrid, ambiguously placed between writing and speech, between the studied and the impromptu, between the ephemeral and the permanent, and between fact and fiction. It points out how closely the conversation is connected with the rise in the second decade of the nineteenth century of the literary magazine, and with the publication in the same period of Byron’s Don Juan, and discusses why this should have been so. It argues that the conversation is a paradoxical literary genre in that it is best defined by its refusal of all conventional generic constraints.

KEYWORDS:

• Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
• Boswell
• Byron
• conversation
• Goethe
• Hazlitt
• Landor

Notes

1. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 15 (April 1824), 457–66 (hereafter BEM). Further references to the magazine are given in the text.

2. Kennedy, Conversations on Religion with Lord Byron, 208. Further references to the book are given in the text.

3. Carlyle, “Boswell’s Life of Johnson,” vol. 2, 60.

4. Macaulay, “Boswell’s Life of Johnson,” 170.

5. Hill, ed., Boswell’s Life of Johnson, vol. 1, 36.

6. Hunt, Lord Byron, 70, 65. Hunt recalls that Byron “liked to imitate Johnson, and say, ‘Why, Sir,’ in a high, mouthing way, rising, and looking about him.” It is clearly Boswell’s Johnson that he mimicked. Further references to the book are given in the text.

7. Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, 34. Further references to the book are given in the text.

8. Hazlitt, Conversations of James Northcote, vol. 11, 209. Further references to the book Hazlitt’s works are given in the text.

9. Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron, viii. Further references to the book are given in the text.

10. “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” 33.

11. Parry, Last Days of Lord Byron, xiii. Further references to the book are given in the text.

12. Noctes Ambrosianae, 1822–3 and 1824–5, ed. Mark Parker, vols. 3 and 4 of Blackwood’s Magazine, 1817–25: Selections from Maga’s Infancy, ed. Nicholas Mason, 6 vols., vol. 4, 13.

13. The review is by John Wilson.

14. Landor, Imaginary Conversations, vol. 2, 320. Further references to the book are given in the text.

15. Roberts is exceptional in valuing the “messiness” of Landor’s conversations. He prefers to read them in the volumes in which they were first published rather than in the neater arrangements, by nation and by chronology, favoured by the compilers who brought them together into collected editions. See Roberts’s Landor’s Cleanness, 165.

16. See Sisman, Boswell’s Presumptuous Task, 147–51.

17. It became a running joke in the series. In later episodes Christopher North contemplates his death and Timothy Tickler hears “Mr Gurney sobbing in his closet!” (BEM, 24 [October 1828], 510), and when Christopher North lets fall a remark that might be thought treasonous, Hogg urges, “We had better cry on Gurney no to tak doon this,” BEM, 26 (November 1829), 859.

18. Conversations of Lord Byron with the Countess of Blessington, 75–76 and 250. Further references to the book are given in the text. These conversations, too, were first published in 1832–3 in magazines, the New Monthly Magazine and the Literary Journal.

19. The offending passages were removed when the Conversations were published as a volume.

20. On this, see Duncan, “Hogg’s Body,” 1–15.

21. London Magazine, 2 (December 1820), 678.

22. The series had its precursors in Blackwood’s, most importantly two papers that appeared in 1819, “The true and authentic Account of the Twelfth of August, 1819,” 5 (August 1819), 597–613; and “The Tent,” 5 (September 1819), 627–33. These not only introduced the form of the conversation but some of the characters, including Christopher North and the Shepherd (Hogg), who later appeared in the “Noctes Ambrosianae.”

23. Eighteenth-century periodicals such as Johnson’s Rambler were often single-authored. For one of the last attempts in this manner, see James Hogg’s The Spy, ed. Gillian Hughes.

24. Cantos 6–7 were published on July 15, 1823, cantos 9–11 on August 29, and cantos 12–14 on December 17. Lockhart, who wrote this episode, may have seen advance copies.

25. Parker astutely remarks that the Noctes Ambrosianae “recall that other great, conversational experiment: Byron’s Don Juan,” BEM, 1817–1825, vol. 3, viii.

26. Byron, Don Juan, canto 1, st. 142–57. Further references to the poem, citing cantos and lines, are given in the text.

27. Murray initially published the first two cantos of Don Juan, with a title page that named neither author nor publisher, for the high price of one and a half guineas. But he was almost at once undercut by pirated editions. Later instalments of the poem were priced at 9 shillings and sixpence with a cheaper alternative edition at 7 shillings. When Byron passed the publication rights to John Hunt, Hunt kept Murray’s prices, but also added a cheap edition that he sold for one shilling. Compare this with Wordsworth’s Excursion, which Longman famously sold at 2 guineas. The most expensive of the monthly magazines, the New Monthly, cost 3 shillings. For the publication history of Don Juan, see St Clair, The Reading Nation, 682–91.

28. Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. 8, 78. The subsequent quote is from page 75.

29. Ibid., vol. 6, 207.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Richard Cronin

Richard Cronin is emeritus professor at the University of Glasgow and visiting professor at Oxford Brookes University, UK. His most recent books are Romantic Victorians: English Literature, 1824–1840 (2002); Paper Pellets: British Literary Culture after Peterloo (2010); and Reading Victorian Poetry (2011). In 2015 he co-edited, with Dorothy McMillan, Robert Browning: Selected Writings for the series 21^st-Century Oxford Authors.