Steven E. Jones. The Satiric Eye: Forms of Satire in the Romantic Period. New York; Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. ISBN: 0312294964. Price: £47.00 (US$79.95).

Published three years after his important study of Satire and Romanticism (2000), Steven E. Jones’s The Satiric Eye provides the reader with an enormously wide-ranging and thought-provoking collection of essays that set out to challenge traditional long-held critical assumptions about Romantic sensibility and aesthetics as well as Romanticism’s representations of revolution, nature, sentiment, and the Gothic. Since the cultural historian E. P. Thompson re-established the significance of the satiric mode in the nineteenth century, there has been a burgeoning interest amongst literary scholars in the relationship between satire and Romanticism. Groundbreaking work by John Barrell, Jerome McGann, and Marilyn Gaull was successfully followed up by a number of critical investigations conducted by Gary Dyer’s British Satire and the Politics of Style (1997), Marcus Wood’s Radical Satire and Print Culture, 1790-1822 (1994), and Steven Jones’s own study of Shelley and Satire published that same year. These critical responses to Romantic satire were complemented by the diverse range and register of primary material collated together, under the editorship of John Strachan and Graeme Stone, for Pickering & Chatto’s seminal five volumes on Parodies of the Romantic Age (1998). The scholarly enterprise of several of these key critics and editors in the field is represented by original contributions from them in Jones’s present critical collection. Contributors’ essays, by the editor’s own admission, ‘are loosely clustered in (very) rough chronological order’ (7) with the first four contributors (Tim Fulford, Michael Gamer, Nicola Trott, and Marcus Wood) focusing on public ‘taste-making’ in the 1780s and 1790s as the subject of their discourse. Concerned with London in the 1780s, Fulford, in his ‘“Getting and Spending”: The Orientalization of Satire in Romantic London’, opens the collection by reflecting on how Britain’s rapidly commercialised and consumerist capital with its insatiable desires and sexual appetites were satirically associated with the excesses of the Orient and India. William Cowper, William Wordsworth, and George Crabbe responded to London’s moral and political vices by (after Virgil and Horace) adopting the moral high ground and creating a rustic retreat as a vantage-point from which to criticise the Oriental and Babylonian excesses of the city. This satiric fascination with the Oriental and London, Fulford persuasively explains, was in part fuelled by the practices of the street mountebank, Dr James Graham, who enticed his clients with a combination of scientific know-how and Eastern promise. But also the voyeuristic raree-shows that imitated the harems of the Far East told of by travellers and the adoption of Oriental fashions for women actresses in theatrical and other staged performances. The scandal surrounding the East India Company and the Prince Regent’s publicly lavish lifestyle reinforced this link for cartoonists, such as James Gillray, Robert Seymour and others, between London’s dizzying consumerism — replete with sexual titillation packaged as a consumerist product — and Oriental exoticism. It is, Fulford concludes, the ‘self-referential irony’ (27) of Byron’s Don Juan that regards ‘Wordsworthian spiritual and Oriental sexual solitude…[as]…similar ego-driven fantasies’ (26). Only the Byronic persona has the ability to inhabit the role of ‘both the Sultan and the salesman, the innocent and the rake of the raree-show that, the Romantics realized, was contemporary Britain.’ (27). Michael Gamer’s essay also revisits London of the late 1780s, but takes 1786 as his starting-point and the capital’s newspaper industry at the time that John Bell, having sold his interest in The Morning Post, embarked upon the collaborative publishing venture of The World. In ‘“Bell’s Poetics”: The Baviad, the Della Cruscans, and the Book of The World’, Gamer re-examines the London newspaper scene of this period and revises our sense of the …