Revision and Romantic Authorship
What is the nature of the self? Is it continuous over time or a composite of many diverse selves? For Zachary Leader, how Romantic writers answer this question is fundamental to understanding the revisions they make to their texts both before and after publication. Some authors consider the self "single and continuous, something indivisible with which we are born," while others see it as "a creation, the sum of a series of discrete 'selves'" (4-5). For those who see the self as continuous, "revision is often seen as a simple matter of refinement or clarification, 'bringing out'" whereas for those who see the self as a creation, "revision is as much an attempt to establish personal identity as to reveal it" (5). This latter group may find that "imperfections won't matter, won't be worth revising, being the product of a past self," or that "not revising is an obligation: it would be wrong to misrepresent the self one once was by revising past work" (5).
Leader divides his study into two sections: the first considers individual authors' conception of the self and of the integrity of the self over time. Is an older William Wordsworth revising an earlier poem the same self or a different self? If the same, then the revisions that Wordsworth makes are not violations of the original work, but rather 'clarifications' and 'amplifications.' In the same way, Leader defends S. T. Coleridge's almost compulsive revisions against charges of 'neurosis' and 'insecurity.' Coleridge's revisions, rather, "serve wholeness, coherence, perfection of form, in short, unity" (120).
The second section addresses the issue of authorial autonomy. What role do family, friends, and publishers play in the revision process? Is it 'imposition,' as feminist critics have argued in the case of Percy Shelley's emendations to Frankenstein? 'Slashings' as John Clare's editors have argued in face of the sometimes dramatic revisions of John Taylor, Clare's publisher? 'Parenting' as Leader claims for Mary Shelley's inclusion of Percy in the birth of her novel? Or a happy collaboration that ensures a collection will receive the approbation of a critical and reading audience-as Leader believes is the case with both John Keats and Clare?
In proposing that critics re-examine the role of the self in revision, Leader hopes to counter a common tendency among critics and editors of Romantic literature: to prefer moments of inspiration and composition over 'secondary' processes of revision and criticism. This tendency is rooted in Romanticism itself, in a fascination with 'primitivism' so pervasive that such critics prefer their Clare unpunctuated and sometimes unreadable rather than 'corrected' as Clare wanted his poems to be. In valuing 'secondary' processes, Leader is concerned with 'nomination'-the process by which these writers chose which version of their texts to present to the public. For Leader, the author's concept of self-and ultimately the author's intentions toward his or her published work-should play a significant role in what version of a text editors produce and critics analyze.
Since Leader's arguments are carefully researched, offering useful surveys of the various debates over editions for those unfamiliar with more than the general outlines, I summarize major points of each chapter below.
Leader's exploration of the nature of identity orders Part One of his book, where he examines Wordsworth as a representative of the 'continuous self'; Lord Byron as a 'series of distinct selves'; and Coleridge as a series of selves 'unified' through revision. Leader's argument sets these poets in a spectrum, with Wordsworth holding a stable self-conception, Byron acting on a conception of the self as multiple and variable, and Coleridge espousing the former, but in some senses practicing the latter view.
Wordsworth, Leader asserts, refuses "to recognize earlier work as the work of an earlier self, insisting instead on 'affinities preserved / between all stages of the life of men', and constantly returning to the past to test and confirm personal identity" (38). Leader objects to the "conception of Wordsworth's revisionary practice as imposition, importation, betrayal, rather than refinement, recuperation, restoration" (57). Instead, Wordsworth's revisions were "amplifications or clarification" of his original intentions and as a result Wordsworth's revisions are consistent with his "treatment of the theme of return or re-vision in the poetry" (64, 46).
Leader's discussion of Byron is somewhat less straightforward than one might hope, although many of the individual stages in the argument are compelling in their own right. Byron's sense of the self as unstable, 'fluid or multiple' opposes Wordsworth's conception of the self as a continuum, Leader argues, because Byron acknowledged his own changeability and was reluctant to revise works after publication (102). When Byron did revise his works, those revisions ironically destabilize the text. But Leader draws back from asserting that Byron's sense of self was actually fragmentary: Byron "thought the fixed or stable self an illusion-yet could only, in the end, present himself as unified and autonomous" (117). Thus particularly in Don Juan, Byron's destabilizing revisions create a "stable self," a narrator of "cool smooth control" (111). In a sense, Leader argues, the stability of Byron's poetic voice lies in its consistent instability.
Coleridge's sense of identity falls somewhere between Wordsworth's and Byron's: explicitly seeking to present "unity and unified selfhood," while doubtfully "question[ing] the autonomy of the self" and its ability to "posses[s] one's writing" (16, 37). Coleridge's multiple revisions, rather than indicating a loss of control, reveal his belief that to complete his work, to fully realize his meaning, the poet must also function as 'critic-reader.' Coleridge seems only to value as 'his,' poems which go through this process of revision; thus he would likely not acknowledge as part of his canon the large body of poems he produced for sale on the periodicals market. For Coleridge, the 'creation of a coherent self is part of the role of publication; thus the only authorized versions of his poems are those Coleridge explicitly allowed to be published in a book under his name.
In part two of his book, Leader examines the role of friends, family, and editors in shaping a text for the public. His goal in doing so is to counter a simplistic acceptance of Romantic "notions of solitary genius or authorial autonomy" with a fuller sense of Romantic writers having worked in a collaborative context, with others upon whom they depended for positive revisions to their work (15).
Given Leader's focus with Wordsworth and Coleridge on the value of early versus late published versions, one expects that the discussion of Frankenstein will consider the same issues. Instead, Leader focuses on "that moment when Mary Shelley turns to Percy Shelley in the course of the novel's composition and allows him to revise it" (168). In seeking out and valuing Percy's comments, Mary Shelley "consciously [. . . ] resists the conventional image of the authorial self as single and autonomous" (171). Her belief in a collaborative model appears elsewhere as well, in her editorial work for other writers and in her fair-copy revisions of Byron's poems. Likewise, after Percy's death, Mary Shelley follows his example in the kinds of revisions she makes to Frankenstein. Leader focuses on revisions in manuscript before publication rather than the problems of editing that text for a modern edition, except to say that "Mary Shelley would be offended - it would violate her principles - if the text were to be returned to its pre-Percy form" (171).
Moving from Percy Shelley's 'impositions' in Frankenstein, Leader examines the editorial 'slashings' of John Clare's publisher, John Taylor. Leader argues that "it is not the case [. . . ] that unrevised or manuscript versions are the versions Clare would have wanted printed" (213). Certainly, Clare's poems were cut for length and 'sameness' as well as for sexual or political material, and "in obvious instances of censorship the lines ought to be restored" (239). But Lord Radstock, Clare's patron, was responsible for the 'most notorious' censorings, not Taylor. Instead, Clare clearly expected Taylor to revise, frequently sending him far more material than Taylor could profitably publish. As Taylor's and Clare's correspondence reveals, "Clare not only needed Taylor, but actively solicited Taylor's help, thought of him as tolerant or restrained in revision" (234). Leader strongly defends Taylor's editing as the 'responsible' actions of a publisher "mediat[ing] between poet and audience" (261).
Just as Taylor revised Clare's poetry, he also helped Keats mend the 'defects' and 'faults' reviewers had criticized in Poems (1817) and Endymion (1818). Keats, like Clare and Mary Shelley, saw revision as 'collaborative,' an "enterprise involving not only friends and publishers ... but the public itself, in opinions partly formed and reflected by critics" (263). When Keats determined to write with 'more judgement' following his first negative reviews, revision became tied to "questions of commercial and critical reception" (311). As Keats' conception of his relation to his audience changed, so to did his idea of himself as an author. Leader's considerations of such questions of authorial identity return the reader to the issues of self that opened the volume.
This overview does little justice to the rich texture and ample detailing of Leader's chapters. Leader's work is enjoyable, engaging, and thought-provoking. In making his arguments, Leader draws on an impressive array of materials, including book history, composition and reception, responses of friends and publishers in contemporary correspondence, and authorial comments in letters and journals. His clear analyses of the effects of specific revisions on individual texts and on whole oeuvres are particularly compelling.
Some readers might object to some of Leader's organizational choices: for example, he places the chapter on Clare before that on Keats, even though he admits that Taylor learned the lessons he enacted with Clare from his experiences with Keats' reception. However, Leader seems to place Keats last since Keats' response to his audience shares much with the issues examined in part one. And, as I mentioned above, the argument about Byron's 'stable' self is not entirely convincing. But such criticisms are minor in a book as compelling and interesting as this one.
