“Personality” as Personal Attack

It is impossible to introduce “personality” without beginning with Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Founded in 1817 and run by a group of brilliant young Tories, the periodical has long epitomized the nastiness of Romantic periodical culture. Its writers were the masters of the “personality”, constructing searing depictions of the personal lives of contemporary authors as a means of discrediting their works. These attacks were incredibly successful. Attacks on William Hazlitt provoked him to sue for £2000 in damages due to

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plummeting book sales and attendance at his public lectures (Wu, 255-6), while those on the London Magazine resulted in the famous duel in which the London’s editor John Scott died at the hands of a Blackwood’s representative (Cronin, 1-5). Much critical ink has already been spilled over the magazine’s famous attacks on the “Cockney School of Poetry and Prose”— its reviews of John Keats, Leigh Hunt, and William Hazlitt have become shorthand for nasty rhetoric of Romantic periodicals.13 _{Penned primarily by John Gibson Lockhart and published under the}

signature “Z”, these cutting reviews employ “personality” consistently, revealing or inventing something personal about these authors in order to attack them. Yet this is more than simple slander; in each of these cases the “personality” functions as a means of evaluating a writer’s work. By evaluating the books through synecdoche, however, Blackwood’s writers do more than abridge reviewing labor, they also compete with Hunt, Hazlitt, and Keats in displaying their own literary virtuosity.

Thus, in October 1817, Blackwood’s fired its first volley at the Cockney School with this characterization of poet, essayist, and periodical editor Leigh Hunt:

The poetry of Mr. Hunt is such as might be expected from the personal character and habits of its author. As a vulgar man is perpetually labouring to be genteel—in like manner, the poetry of this man is always on the stretch to be grand. He has been allowed to look for a moment from the antechamber to the saloon, and mistaken the waving feathers and the painted floor for the sine qua non’s of elegant society. He would fain be always tripping and waltzing, and is sorry that he cannot be allowed to walk about in the morning with yellow breeches, and flesh-coloured stockings. He sticks an artificial rosebud into his button hole in the midst of winter. (BEM 2:7 [October 1817]: 39)

Hunt’s poetry is depicted not through a close analysis of its stylistic faults, but through an analogy with his clumsy social climbing. Picking out articles of dandified apparel (the yellow

13 _{Peter Murphy’s “Impersonation and Authorship in Romantic Britain” has remained a touchstone}

analysis, but Richard Cronin’s Paper Pellets, Jeffrey Cox’s Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School, and David Stewart’s Romantic Magazine’s and Metropolitan Literary Culture feature sustained engagements with the attacks.

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breeches and flesh-coloured stockings) and outlining how Hunt uses them inappropriately, “Z” portrays Hunt as a man who cannot grasp the social codes of the class to which he aspires. Hunt’s failure to wear the right clothes on the right occasions stands in for his failure to understand the rules of poetry: he is overdressed, and this is the surest proof that his verse is, too. In depicting Hunt’s attire, meanwhile, “Z” shows off his own ease of literary description. The vividness with which the arriviste dandy is described, down to the false luxury of his artificial rosebud, damns Hunt by comparison. Readers are invited to read and admire the reviewer’s satirical description, rather than Hunt’s poetry.

Almost a year later, a similar relationship between author and work appears in the fourth Cockney School attack, targeting John Keats:

It is a far better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr. John [Keats], back to “plaster, pills, and ointment boxes,” &c. But, for Heaven’s sake, young Sangrado, be a little more sparing of extenuatives and soporifics in your practice than you have been in your poetry. (BEM 3:17 [August 1818] 524)

Here, again, the author’s non-literary behavior (the “personality”) serves to represent his poetry. Hurrying Keats back to his apothecary’s shop, “Z” rereads the poems not as poetry, but as sedatives. He counsels Keats to be wary of duplicating his performance in poetry in his professional capacity—overdosing his clients may have more dangerous consequences that overdosing his readers. The personal information of Keats’ employment is invoked not only as class-based exclusion; it also provides the governing image by which to represent and dismiss his poetry. But unlike the allegedly stultifying effects of reading Keats, the attack itself sparkles with life. Alluding to young Sangrado, an inept physician in Le Sage’s novel Gil Blas, translated into English by Tobias Smollett, “Z” not only suggests that Keats is a quack, as James Allard has noted (96), but demonstrates his own mastery of the satirical literary canon represented by

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Smollett. “Z” shares a common, English literary culture with his readers in the form of the Sangrado joke—one that shuts out Keats and his unreadable, illiterate, pseudo-Greek Endymion.

Finally, the most economical and perhaps most perfect “personality” of the Cockney School appears in the versified table of contents for the March 1818 number of the magazine:

Of pimpled Hazlitt’s coxcomb lectures writing,

Our friend with moderate pleasure we peruse. (BEM 2:12 [March 1818] 613)

In “pimpled Hazlitt” the periodical offers a new, Homeric epithet to epitomize the poet’s character. Hazlitt’s pimpled skin itself upstages and represents his lectures. The mottled texture of the pimpled skin invokes the accusation of paradox had become the standard response to Hazlitt’s work, while its conjunction with the word “coxcomb” implies a syphilitic rash and thereby impugns the overall moral tendencies of his work.14 _{In each of these three instances, then, the}

synecdochic mode allows elements outside the text to be substituted for it: Hunt’s clothes for his poetic style, Keats’ drugs for his poem’s effects, Hazlitt’s pimples for his moral and political opinions. The “personality”, as an attack, depends on this basic contention: that it is more important and meaningful to attend to the person behind a text than to attend to the text itself. It insists, through its violence, vividness, and effectiveness, that what is personal about a text’s author constitutes its meaning. This may be, by many metrics, irresponsible criticism, but it partakes of the new representational logic of book reviewing and serves to advance the reviewer’s literary prowess over that of the targeted author. Ethical or not, such a mode of dealing with authors is important to the Romantic period and deserves deeper, and more systematic analysis.

One of the barriers to such analysis has been the terminological confusion that the term “personality” has caused. As Tom Mole has pointed out, usage of the term “personality” to mean

14 _{For Hazlitt’s love of paradox see reviews of his Lectures on English Drama (ER 34:67 [August 1820]}

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a disparaging remark—rather than a characteristic of self or identity—dates to the mid-eighteenth century (2013, 89). It is in this sense that Coleridge deemed the Romantic period “this age of personality, this age of literary and political gossiping” in the Biographia Literaria (23). However, current critical discussions tend to muddy this meaning, allowing “personality” to pick up, and become overshadowed by, more modern valences of meaning. Peter Murphy astutely recognizes personality as a “genre” in his influential analysis of Blackwood’s Cockney School attacks, but he is also quick to point out a tempting slippage into other meanings (626). In describing the unique coloring of Blackwood’s and the London Magazine, Murphy notes that “The word “personal”, along with its linguistic relatives, is constantly applied to the practice of the [Blackwood’s] magazine” (631). In picking out an extract where “personality” is used to signify an inappropriate personal attack, Murphy makes a jump that will become characteristic of discussions of personality-as-attack15_:

Much of the spirit of this extract concentrates in the word “personalities,” here used as a term for personal satire. “Personality,” as we know it, is another word for the self, the group of characteristics that identifies individuality, and so it is a delightful linguistic compression that also makes it a name for the unfeeling handling people receive from personal satire of the Blackwood’s type. (631)

Murphy’s delight in this parallel should not be allowed to engender confusion between personality-as-attack and our modern understanding of “personality” as individuality—whether we mean the sense of identity that affirms our sense of self or the set of behaviors for which reality-TV producers cast. To do so produces a hierarchy between the two, and threatens to render personality-as-attack invisible.

15 _{Here is the extract in question (in full) in which John Scott of the London describes the features of}

Blackwood’s that his own, newly-launched magazine will not be emulating: “Nor shall we seek to impart to our sheets that redolency of Leith-Ale, and tobacco smoke, which floats about all the pleasantry of the magazine in question,—giving one the idea of its facetious articles having been written on the slopped table of a tavern parlour in the back-wynd, after the convives have retired, and left the author to solitude, silence, pipe-ashes, and the dregs of black-strap. The indecency of personalities, and the unmanliness of retractions, we mean to respect as belonging to our Scotch friends:—also the pleasures of caning and being caned,—or cudgelling, and being cudgelled.” (quoted by Murphy, 631)

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In Richard Cronin’s recent intervention on the subject, the slippage between these two meanings gains momentum. When describing the post-Waterloo literary climate as one in which both personal attacks occurred and developed essayist personae emerged, he summarizes: “Personality was at once the most widely deprecated resource of those engaged in political and literary controversy and the most valued characteristic of [anonymous and pseudonymous] modern writing” (53). Such a framing feels very satisfying, but has obfuscating effects. It offers the positively-viewed, literary work of essayists like Lamb or Hazlitt as an offset to the debased practice of personal attack. In so doing, it both obscures the literary content of such attacks and refuses to interrogate their function in periodical culture. When Murphy invokes our modern ideas of personality as self, or Cronin our framing of personality as style, they produce a dialectical reading of the term: the modern meaning provides a means of redeeming the debased Romantic one. “Personality” as attack is reduced to the antithesis through which the redemptive modern sense of self or style can be produced. It is only worth mentioning as the hostile environment despite which the excellence of Romantic conceptions of selfhood must triumph. This doubled, dialectical presentation of the term produces characteristic confusion like that found in David Stewart’s otherwise cogent chapter on “Urban, Hunt, North: Personality and the Principle of Miscellaneity”, which, after one mention of Blackwood’s “personalities” as “cutting”, wields the term to signify inclusion of different personae and knitting them together in one magazine, even while drawing on contemporary sources that use the term in its sense of attack (2011, 39).16 _{The overall tendency to forsake the uncomfortable uses and meanings of}

16 _{At the risk of nitpicking, I do want to drive home the extent to which being personal or “personality”}

means a particular kind of attack and repurposing it to mean something else introduces confusion. For example, a quotation from Lamb that describes why the London is a less successful magazine than

Blackwood’s should be read as indicating personality in its attacking sense: “[Wainewright] is much wanted. He was a genius of the Lond. Mag. The rest of us are single Essayists. …He talked about it & about it. The Lond. Mag. wants the personal note too much. Blackwd. owes everything to it.” (quoted by Stewart 2011, 30. my italics) By reading Lamb’s comment as a critique of the magazine’s failure to tie articles together through a set of different personas, Stewart ends up understating the importance of the

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“personality” in order to celebrate its more literary applications leads at the limit to the framing of Kim Wheatley’s most recent book, Romantic Feuds: Transcending the “Age of Personality”, in which “personality” becomes something to “transcend” rather than a technique worthy of study in its own right.

Yet periodicals themselves, as well as indignant responses such Coleridge’s, overwhelmingly define “personality” as the kind of attacks found in magazines, pamphlets and newspapers. Even as Blackwood’s plays with the term, it does not seek to redeem it—instead, extending the variety of attacks that “personality” might comprise. According to Blackwood’s “personality” can appear in acts of self-promotion as well as hostile reviews. Leigh Hunt, they explain, is guilty of writing personalities not only of others, but of himself:

he never yet published a single Number of the Examiner paper—a single sonnet or song—of which one half at least was not, in some shape or other, dedicated to himself. […] We are sick of the personalities of this man—of his vituperative personalities concerning others, and his commendatory personalities concerning himself. (BEM 5:25 [April 1819] 98)

Such “commendatory personalities” are acts of self-revelation that shame the author as much as an attack would; in particular, Hunt’s revelations of his domestic habits in the Examiner and The Round Table are read, both here and elsewhere, and instances of personal attack. Hunt abandons decorum by publishing “the account of his getting the night-mare by eating veal-pye, […] tak[ing] the trouble to inform us that he dislikes cats; to describe ‘the skilful spat of the finger nails which he gives his newspaper,’ and the mode in which he stirs his fire” (QR 17:33 [April 1817] 159). Hunt’s drive for self-exposure provides the reviewer all the ammunition required for future personalities; in a sense, he attacks himself.

hostile tone of Blackwood’s to its success. Wainewright’s persona “Janus Weathercock” was fond of personalities, even wielding them against other writers at the London (see Chapter 4 for further discussion).

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But as violations of decorum, such self-personalities are also attacks on the reader: they reveal something personal about their object that should have been kept out of public knowledge. The accusation of vanity goes beyond a simple problem of self-obsession—this is an aggressive vanity, which prompts Hunt to put his person into print where it does not belong. “Personalities” in their usual form, always claim to respond to such a transgression. There is, in a sense, no outside of personality, as the attacker will always claim that the process had been initiated by its victim. Thus, Hunt’s publication is construed as an act of force against his readers. As a corrective to the impulse to collapse the Romantic sense of personality with more modern understandings, I will focus on personality as just such an act of force—an attack, or an imposition. It is in this sense that I will use the term in the coming pages. For the periodical writers of the Romantic period, personality is not an attribute of self but a technique through which one attacks or promotes a writing persona. As an utterance, it is like an obscenity: “it is scarcely possible to document [it]… without repeating the offense” (Cronin, 45). Personalities were composed of a similarly sticky substance: they are always reactivated by any attempt at rebuttal. In their interest and effectiveness, they proved the perfect technique for book reviewers struggling to respond to a market filled with more books that one can possibly buy or read. By reprinting, revealing, or inventing the private detail, periodical writers solve a perceived problem in their world—represented here by Hunt—the problem of the surplus author.