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Review of Bacchus in Romantic England
Review Author: Megan O'Neill
Affiliation: Stetson University
Although we know much about various chemical addictions in the twentieth century, we know comparatively little about such addictions in previous ages aside from the well-documented and publicized opium and laudanum abuses of several Romantic writers, chief among them Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas de Quincey. Coleridge, however, as well as several of his cronies and contemporaries, used alcohol extensively, and Anya Taylor's study explores the effects of drink on several discrete groups in the fifty-year period of the subtitle. After an initial chapter in which Taylor sets up the Dionysian metaphor she tracks throughout, individual chapters explore Romantic reactions to Robert Burns, particularly Wordsworth's parsimony; the peculiar ameliorating effect of alcohol on Charles Lamb's insanity; Coleridge's alcohol addiction, which overshadows his laudanum addiction, and the addiction of his son Hartley (who was scripted, Taylor suggests, for failure by his own father); Keats and wine; and finally, the literary realization of the effects of alcoholism on wives and mothers. Although the text of Taylor's study is dry at times, the research she has done is sound, and the controlling metaphor and ideology of Bacchus/Dionysus are undeniably effective at capturing the Romantic bent toward the celebratory and dangerous delights of grape and grain.
As so often with studies in Romanticism, we see polar oppositions in the Romantic writers' conception of drinking and excess. The Dionysian (Bacchan, in Roman mythology) duality of the effect of alcohol on humans -- rendering each a "beast, savage or thing, or, on the other edge ... a free, inspired spirit" (132) -- is the perfect vehicle through which to deeply understand the way the writers used alcohol, and, in some cases, the way it used them. Burns, for instance, may have used alcohol partially to control his rheumatoid endocarditis, Taylor suggests; to onlookers, of course, alcohol used Burns. Wordsworth, in particular, was not amused by Burns's excesses, despite their assistance in creating Burns as the very type of the Romantic artist. The figure of the drinker, Taylor writes, "tests the boundaries of the human person at a time when scepticism, secularism and psychology were calling into doubt assumptions about personal integrity; the drinker becomes either a less than human figure or a more than human one" (5). Alcohol, a "transformative substance," can bring out the best in a creative mind, decimate a dull mind, destroy a vulnerable mind -- or be a tool to soothe a savage mind, as in the case of Charles Lamb, who, Taylor suggests, used drink to rein in his insanity. Taylor presents examples and discussion of each of these effects as she moves through two chapters on the doomed Coleridges; one of them transcended his addictions to write unearthly poetry, while the other became a beast, falling victim to both his father's greatness and his own lack of self and will. Both these tendencies, Taylor notes, are patterns modern research has found in alcoholism. Coleridge's famous description of his son Hartley as the "limber elf" in Christabel mingles with Hartley's own "ominous" lines, "But ten-fold woe betide the elf / Who knows not how to trust himself" (140). Taylor therefore uses the communion of the two references to entwine a further element of the Dionysus dynamic: Hartley's chapter is titled "In the Cave of the Gnome."
The chapter on Keats is less interesting, perhaps because of its near-exclusive focus on wine; while other chapters survey the use of alcohol from spirits to wine to ale, offering a broad perspective, Keats's own preference for wine narrows the chapter's focus. The examination of alcoholic husbands and their wives is fascinating, not because of the real people discussed but because of its focus on the fiction of the time and its representations of alcohol from the female perspective. This chapter is heavily laden with feminist Romantic theory, Mary Poovey's and Anne Mellor's in particular, which sheds light on the masculine linguistic codes about drinking and its beasts. Taylor's writing in this chapter, as it is throughout the entire work, is enlightened by her years at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice (NY), where she teaches in the Alcohol and Substance Abuse Program. She uses twentieth-century medical research into alcoholism to comment primarily on the changing social attitudes and beliefs about alcohol and drunkards. On one or two occasions her use of modern research into alcoholism appears anachronistic, as when a reference to Jim Morrison helps to illuminate a point about the creative genius infused with alcohol; on the whole, however, Taylor's modern understanding of the workings of alcoholism adds a thick layer of credibility to her writing.
Bacchus in Romantic England is a welcome and illuminating study of drinking in the period. The levels of euphemism used by the male writers, which Taylor disinters and closely examines in the light of women's straightforward writing about drunkards and drinking, reveal themselves to be a code of masculinity by which social classes of men reify themselves; the chapter describing Hartley Coleridge's foreordained descent into shiftless beasthood is beautifully entwined with his famous father's psychology. Lastly, the Dionysian metaphors and controlling ideology are exceptionally well chosen to convey Taylor's central idea. A sound and valuable addition to a Romantic scholar's bookshelf -- perhaps best placed next to de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater.
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