Medicine, the "Manufacturing System," and Southey's Romantic Conservatism

• Published in: The Wordsworth circle 2011, Vol.42 (1), p.57-63
• Main Author: Budge, Gavin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Beddoes, Thomas (1760-1808); British & Irish literature; Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (1806-1861); Business; Catholicism; Conservatism; English literature; Factory labor; Medicine; Mental illness; Methodism; Morality; Nervous system diseases; Poetics; Radicalism; Robert Southey in Context; Sexual self stimulation; Southey, Robert (1774-1843); Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)
• ISSN: 0043-8006; 2640-7310
• DOI: 10.1086/TWC24044005

In the context of the anti-Maldiusian argument presented in the essay, this invocation of a dualistic relationship in which the development of the mind uses up the constitutional resources required to nourish "animal passion" (152 fn) constitutes a providentialist modification of Malthus's famous claim that "vice and misery" are the only effective controls on population growth; coupled with Southey's advocacy of a national education system at the end of the essay, it suggests that better education would naturally lead to a decline in population growth because it would constitute a diversion of the bodily vitality which sexual activity requires. Southey's analysis of confession echoes anxieties about the effects of masturbation, whose evils, as Thomas Laqueur has shown, were thought to consist not in physical acts but in the employment of the imagination to reinforce sexual ideas. Since masturbation made sexual ideas independent of any particular bodily situation, the sexuality of the masturbator was in danger of running rampant in a self-reinforcing spiral of addiction which drained the body of vitality. By the vicious indulgence of a prurient appetite, the mind, like the body, may be reduced to a state of atrophy; in which, knowledge, like food, may pass through it, without adding either to its strength, its bulk, or its beauty. . Besides this atrophy, arising from the habit of reading without attention, there is likewise a sort of sickly sensibility of mind, nourished, if not engendered, by compositions of this kind; which is equally adverse to the acquisition of all useful knowledge and sound morality. . Southey is very consistent in applying the notion of a "moral pestilence" to the manufacturing system in his later work Sir Thomas More: or Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, where the reference to John Hunter featured in the Quarterly Review article appears again (1: 50) Thomas More, whose ghost is one of the participants in these dialogues, develops the medical comparison in an elaborate description of manufacturing as "a wen, a fungous excrescence from the body politic: the growth might have been checked if the consequences had been apprehended in time; but now it has acquired such bulk, its nerves have branched so widely, and the vessels of die tumour are inosculated into some of die principal veins and arteries of the natural system, that to remove it by absorption is impossible, and excision would be fatal" (1: 171).