The Poetry of Ernest Jones

Myth, Song, and the 'Mighty Mind'

Simon Rennie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780367598778
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317198574
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

As the last leader of the Chartist movement, Ernest Charles Jones (1819-69) is a significant historical figure, but he is just as well-known for his political verse. His prison-composed epic The New World lays claim to being the first poetic exploration of Marxist historical materialism, and his caustic short lyric 'The Song of the Low' appears in most modern anthologies of Victorian poetry. Despite the prominence of Jones's verse in Labour history circles, and several major inclusions in critical discussions of working-class Victorian literature, this volume represents the first full-length study of his poetry. Through close analysis and careful contextualization, this work traces Jones's poetic development from his early German and British Romantic influences through his radicalization, imprisonment, and years of leadership. The poetry of this complex and controversial figure is here fully mapped for the first time.

CHAPTER 1

Influences and Early Poetry 1840–45

Establishing influences on a writer’s work is almost always a matter of balanced probabilities. Literary tropes are disseminated so widely and rapidly in modern societies that even pointing out apparent intertextual references between writers can be subject to the complications of the literary middleman, a secondary order of influence. A writer’s declaration of influence should not be accepted at face value but must be cross-checked by a careful study of texts; a writer may merely wish that a literary idol were their main influence. Poetry would seem to have the advantage of various formal elements to trace back to a possible original text or writer, but such forms quickly become ubiquitous, and the partially unconscious and synthetic nature of the poetic creative process provides myriad paths down which the critic can travel. It is almost a literary commonplace that writers are often the least qualified people to analyze their own work; inescapable subjectivity leads to unconscious dissembling, and the tendency to place emphasis where it should not necessarily be. Prudence, therefore, encourages the critic at least to attempt to quantify the probability of a possible influence being discussed, and to present such discussion within the frame of a cautious qualification.

Ernest Jones shared with most poets of his period the influences in varying degrees of the major figures of the British Romantic period, and it is these inheritances which are first explored in the following chapter. But it is also possible to trace influences of German Romanticism in Jones’s writing absorbed during a childhood and adolescence spent in the Duchy of Holstein, and these influences form the basis of the second section of the chapter. The fact that Jones translated the works of several German poets strengthens the argument that his work was influenced by these writers. Jones’s tendency to re-work early material for publication in Chartist periodicals provides some hitherto unexplored links between German Romantic poetry and mid-nineteenth-century British radical poetics. In order to fully examine evidence of poetic influence, the focus of this chapter will shift between Jones’s Chartist and pre-Chartist periods of production. Due to Jones’s habit of republishing his early work, this will also be the case with the last section of the chapter which deals with the original poetry that Jones published before his direct involvement with radical politics in 1846. One of the contentions of this study is that, contrary to previous biographical accounts, Jones’s poetic development provides examples of a growing political consciousness in the period immediately preceding his Chartist ‘conversion’.

British Romantic Influences

While it has been recognized that such historical demarcations can be problematic, the complex response of canonical Victorian literature to its Romantic precursor has been widely documented. For Leon Gottfried, the Romantic movement ‘stood like the Chinese Wall separating the nineteenth century from the dominant literary tradition of the eighteenth century represented by such key figures as Dryden, Pope, and Johnson’.¹ Whether one accepts the degree of historical dislocation that Gottfried’s simile suggests, it can seem that early Victorian literature is interpreted by modern critics in relation to the preceding literary period. It should be noted that two Poet Laureates of the early Victorian period were the aging Robert Southey and William Wordsworth, and that the mid-nineteenth century saw posthumous cults of celebrity emerge around the figures of Keats and Shelley. The perceived sexual, political, and indeed literary radicalism of the Romantics proved troublesome issues for many Victorian commentators and writers. In Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era, Andrew Radford and Mark Sandy note ‘a neurotic fear that the potentially subversive, ungovernable essence of Romanticism will begin to work independently and possess the Victorian possessor’.² But for mid-nineteenth-century radicals, the politically subversive elements of British Romanticism provided both inspiration and important literary precedence. In Byron and Shelley, the late Romantic period produced widely-respected poets who were consistently critical of the political establishment; the early radicalism of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and even Southey served to make Romanticism appear a generation of dissent. Jones was not alone among Chartist poets in drawing on British Romanticism for inspiration and influence. The early poetry of William James Linton (1812–97) — in particular The Dirge of the Nations (1848) — was imitative of the work of Shelley, while the influence of Byron can be seen in the work of Jones’s predecessor as unofficial Laureate of Chartism, Thomas Cooper (1805–92). At the same time as much canonical mid-nineteenth-century poetry (led by Browning and Tennyson) was becoming more insular and self-absorbed, adapting an emphasis on the consciousness of the self inherited from Romanticism, Jones and other Chartist poets were inheriting an adapted form of Romanticism’s political consciousness.

Jones’s rise to prominence within the pages of the Northern Star’s poetry column in 1846 coincided with an increase in the number of Byron poems printed in the paper. In July 1845 the newspaper had begun a series called ‘The Beauties of Byron’. Mike Sanders has observed that ‘in 1846, Byron’s poetry provided more than a tenth of the poetry column’s output and only Ernest Jones — who contributed eighteen poems — came close to matching Byron’s total of twenty poems’.³ While Byron was idolized by Chartists, his influence on the majority of Chartist poets was often limited to tonal and thematic aspects of poetry. The length of much of his work, and its characteristic geographical and historical sweep, made it literally inimitable for most Chartist writers. Another element of Byron’s writing that led to him being more inspirational than directly influential was what the Chartist activist Thomas Frost, in an article entitled ‘Scott, Byron, and Shelley’ published on 2 January 1847 in the Northern Star, described as ‘the misanthropy which occasionally gleams forth in the writings of Byron, “the stinging of a heart the world had stung’”.⁴ Byron’s occasional retreats into an injured individualism, coupled with the extra-literary image of his sartorial dandyism, did not align themselves easily with Chartism’s altruistic and morally upright nature, or with its essentially working-class aesthetic. Byron, as the nineteenth century’s first, and arguably greatest, literary celebrity, bolstered Chartism’s cause with his essential radicalism, but his manner, behaviour, and scabrous humour belonged back beyond that Chinese wall, in the pre-industrial decadence of the eighteenth century.⁵

In spite of the complications that Byron’s legacy left, his name remained a touchstone for literary excellence and, for radicals, the bold expression of political truths. Jones’s versatility as a writer saw him occasionally emulate Byron’s poetic style. In ‘The Painter of Florence: A Domestic Poem’, a long poem published in 1851 in its author’s newspaper Notes to the People, Jones references Byron in a concluding section that makes an argument for the public accessibility of art:

As well might Byron’s Harold,

In one dark folio kept,

In one man’s sordid chamber

Thro’ endless years have slept. (ll. 689–93)⁶

The reference to Childe Harold is apt not just because of Byron’s fame, but because of his method of addressing directly his readership, insisting on an interdependent relationship between art and the public. In the same poem, Jones’s description of a character called ‘Lady Devilson’ echoes Byron’s description of Don Juan’s mother, Donna Inez, notoriously based on his ex-wife, Annabella Millbanke:

But oh! beware how you approach her!

No thorn so mangles an encroacher!

She’ll lure you on, with easy seeming,

To drop some hint of doubtful meaning,

Then turn, as hot as fire, to shew

Her virtue’s white and cold as snow;

And, dragging you forth in a storm of laughter,

Hurl the full weight of her chastity after.

Such, no line is overdone,

Is Lady Malice Devilson.

(‘The Painter of Florence’, ll. 99–108)

Morality’s grim personification,

In which not Envy’s self a flaw discovers;

To others’ share let ‘female errors fall,’

For she had not even one — the worst of all.

Oh! she was perfect past all parallel —

Of any modern female saint’s comparison:

So far above the cunning powers of hell,

Her guardian angel had given up his garrison.

(Don Juan, I, 125–33)⁷

Although Lady Devilson’s morality is a mechanism for hypocritical teasing, and Donna Inez (at least in this section) appears a paragon of virtue, both descriptions satirize the cultural pretensions of female chastity. Jones’s rhyming of ‘approach her’ with ‘encroacher’ is eminently Byronic in its silliness, and the line ‘Such, no line is overdone’, with its air of a theatrical aside, is an example of the influence of the self-reflexive nature of Byron’s later poetry. Given the detailed description of her personality, it is possible that Lady Devilson, like Donna Inez, was based on a real person.

There are also thematic examples o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Influences and Early Poetry (1840–45)
• 2 Jones and Myth (1846–48)
• 3 The ‘Mighty Mind’ (1846–48)
• 4 Lyrical Prison Poetry (1848–50)
• 5 ‘The New World, a Democratic Poem’ (1851)
• 6 Pseudonymity, Revision, Songs of the Low and High (1851–60)
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index