Romantic Spectacle – An Introduction

The articles in this special issue of Romanticism on the Net are derived from papers delivered at the ‘Romantic Spectacle’ conference, held at Roehampton University London in association with the University of Bristol in July 2006. The focus upon ‘Romantic Spectacle’ aims to promote and stimulate new modes of thinking about the aesthetic and ideological impact of visual cultural production in the Romantic period. The word ‘spectacle’ is intentionally tendentious: unlike a more neutral word such as ‘image’, the idea of ‘spectacle’ implies the emergence of conspicuous new types of visual effects in British culture of the late eighteenth century. It is clear from the variety of topics covered by the articles in this volume that this new cultural practice had numerous causes and manifestations. A crucial development was the cultural authority of theories of sensibility and the sublime, both of which placed an intensified emphasis on the visual representation of suffering. The idea that sensational violent imagery could have a redemptive moral effect on the suitably refined reader or spectator had a profound impact on eighteenth-century literary and artistic culture. In response to the cataclysmic events which became the historical bedrock of Romanticism – revolution, global warfare, imperial expansion, the slave trade – an expanding Romantic print culture invested heavily in set-piece dramas of hyperbolic distress. The Gothic imagination is the best-known and most enduring legacy of this cultural shift, but one aim of ‘Romantic spectacle’ is to recover a much wider field of cultural production and consumption. The quest for sublime and awe-inspiring visual effects was not restricted to depicting (in verbal or visual form) scenes of violent or hyperbolic suffering. Burke’s influential writings on the sublime identified a range of proto-Romantic spectacles which would guarantee the (assumed masculine) frisson of elevated terror and awe: colossal natural scenery (mountains, caves), notions of infinity or vastness, and ‘obscure’ or hyperbolic images of power. The notion of spectacle as a cultural tool of dictatorship was a particularly influential feature of the Burkean sublime: as Burke notes, ‘Those despotic governments, which are founded on the passions of men, and principally upon the passion of fear, keep their chief as much as may be from the public eye’ (231). Thomas Paine was in little doubt about the degrading effects of displays of terror such as public executions: ‘The effect of those cruel spectacles exhibited to the populace, is to destroy tenderness, or excite revenge; and by the base and false idea of governing men by terror, instead of reason, they become precedents’ (57-8). Following Burke’s approval of ‘judicious obscurity’ rather than Paine’s critique of repressive spectacle, revisionist historians have argued that popular spectacles of political, religious and military power played a crucial role in shaping British national identity in the late eighteenth century. But the political use of spectacle was not the sole prerogative of the state. From the 1760s onwards (the era of ‘Wilkes and Liberty’) popular politics became increasingly theatricalized and popular culture became increasingly politicized. Though the unreformed electoral system, as seen in Hogarth’s prints, could often resemble a carnival or urban riot, the disciplined mass political rally became the radical ‘answer’ to the loyalist military parade or royal procession. To mention Hogarth also reminds us that the spectacular vignettes of caricature prints became hugely popular modes of imagining and disseminating political ideas and social themes. Though they are poles apart in many ways, Gillray and Blake were both concerned to visualize sublime power and hyperbolic experience. However their work must also be placed in a much broader and diverse economy of visual spectacle and display which embraced both …