British State Romanticism: Authorship, Agency, and Bureaucratic Nationalism/Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

• Published in: The Wordsworth circle 2011-10, Vol.42 (4), p.271
• Main Author: Goldberg, Brian
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Authorship
• ISSN: 0043-8006

[...]the "mental bombast" Coleridge objected to in the poem is, according to Garrett, an invocation of the sublime in order to "contain" the gypsies within "larger unities" (41). The national census posed the problem of how to group people into appropriate professional and national categories, an exercise that generates its own categorical slippage as census-takers refine their mediods and encounter facts, such as the surprising number of female breadwinners, that lead them to "supplementation in the form of changing categories, changing values, and outright obfuscation" (62). The issue for Frey, however, is less whether a given author supports a particular ministry or initiative than it is how he or she conceives of a world in which government agency has a central role in the formation of the individual but does not exercise power at the expense of individual will. Religious affiliation, however, remains an unsolvable problem, since Coleridge assumes diat Cadiolicism divides the loyalty of the British/Irish citizen. Because Irish Catholics reject the Anglican Church, they can never be incorporated into the British whole (41).