The article surveys the life, career, reception and works of James Woodhouse, ‘The Poetical Shoemaker’, making use of a wide variety of sources. The article outlines his posthumous reputation, arguing that many accounts until recently seem to have perpetuated the same (sometimes misleading) impressions of Woodhouse and his work. It is suggested, however, that more nuanced critical approaches to Woodhouse's oeuvre, emphasising his significance to the labouring‐class poetic tradition, have emerged in recent years. The article surveys new directions for future scholarship, concentrating on the construction of identities in Woodhouse's posthumously‐published verse autobiography, The Life and Lucubrations of Crispinus Scriblerus. The poem charts the growth of Woodhouse/Crispin(us)'s radical evangelical Methodist identity in his later years, as he retreats from an early quiescence with patrons that saw all but one poem in his first published collection dedicated to them. The article argues that contemporary critical approaches can account for why and how the autobiographical act of Crispinus Scriblerus embodies the complexities of Woodhouse's multiple and contradictory simultaneous identities. Crispinus Scriblerus uses the philosophy of Heraclitus to reproduce the same strategy that Woodhouse accuses the educated classes of adopting towards him during his early years of poetic celebrity: that of claiming superiority on the grounds of absolute difference between his own identity and that of his antagonists. It is argued that paying critical attention to the fluidity of the seeming autobiographical oppositions that the critic Stuart Sherman terms ‘compound rubrics’ can demonstrate how the poem (sometimes unwittingly) realises some of its aims, while failing in others.
This introduction provides a rationalisation for a special issue of Romanticism on edges, boundaries, and borders. The Romantic period and Romantic studies have both been fascinated by the marginal, the exile, and the outsider. ‘Edgy Romanticism’, inspired by a conference held in April 2016 at Edge Hill University, looks again at these figures, but we are also interested in new work that is being done at the edges of the discipline, thinking about new methodologies and themes as constituting the borders and boundaries of Romanticism as such. So, our collection of articles begins and ends with new ways to conceptualise Romantic understandings of history, continuing with novel approaches to place, canonical Romantic poetry, and women's writing. The introduction concludes with a consideration of the effect the digital turn in the humanities will have on Romantic studies.
This article argues that insufficient attention has been paid within existing accounts of the career of the 'Poetical Shoemaker', James Woodhouse (1735-1820), to items in the newspaper and periodical press about and by him, with specific reference to the years of his greatest fame, c.1763-7. To remedy this, the article focuses most, within a wider account, on the publication of 'The Advertisement' to Woodhouse's first volume in 1764, on an anonymous letter two days later, probably by Woodhouse himself, and on two poems addressed to Woodhouse by labouring-class admirers which provide insight into his reception by the labouring classes.
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