Labyrinths of Deceit

Front matter

LABYRINTHS OF DECEIT Culture, Modernity and Identity in the Nineteenth Century

LIVERPOOL ENGLISH TEXTS AND STUDIES 44

Culture, Modernity and Identity in the Nineteenth Century

Contents

Acknowledgements vii Introduction: Tracing the fragments of modernity I Part I

(De)Generating doubles: duality and the split personality in the prose writing of James Hogg, Robert Louis Stevenson and Oscar Wilde

Introduction 29 1 Speaking and answering in the character of another:

Part II

The stripping of the halo: religion and identity in the poetry of Alfred Tennyson, James ‘B. V. Thomson and

Gerard Manley Hopkins Introduction 119 4 A life of death: Alfred Tennyson’s ‘St Simeon Stylites’ 124 5 But what am I? Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam 137 6 Allis vanity and nothingness: James ‘B. V. Thomson’s haunted city 155

7 Dead letters: Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Terrible Sonnets’ 175 vi LABYRINTHS OF DECEIT

Part III Infected ecstasy: addiction and modernity in the work of Thomas De Quincey, Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti and Bram Stoker

8 A change in physical economy: Thomas De Quincey’s confession

9 Coming like ghosts to trouble joy: Alfred Tennyson’s ‘The Lotos Eaters’

to Like honey to the throat but poison to the blood: Christina Rossetti’s addictive market

11 The blood is the life: Bram Stoker’s infected capital

Conclusion: Ghost-script Notes

Bibliography Index

193 203

243 256

284 293

323 331

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Tony Lopez, Dr Robert Gee and Professor Geoff Ward, who supported this project in its early stages. Thanks also to all my friends at the University of Plymouth where it had its origins. I must also acknowledge the support and friendship of colleagues at the University of Central Lancashire, particularly the office staff in the Department of Cultural Studies, and Dr Daniel Lamont, Karen Adams, Dr Alizon Brunning and Dr Jason Lee. The English Literary Studies cohort of 1999-2002 had to put up with me using some of the ideas in this book in their seminars. The R. L. Stevenson conferences at Stirling and Gargnano made appreciative noises when I presented some of the work as papers. The chapter on Thomas De Quincey first appeared in an abbreviated form in S. Brewster et al. (eds.), Inhuman Reflections: Thinking the Limits of the Human (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Thanks to Robin Bloxsidge at Liverpool University Press for his patience. This book is dedicated to Tony and Celia Walker whose help, support and encouragement have been incomparable.

Tracing the fragments of modernity

All Truth is change.!

All that is solid melts into air.?

this strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims.’

What is it like to be in a state of crisis? To be more specific what is it like to be ina state of crisis in the nineteenth century? The aim of this book is to explore such a condition and to ask, as a significant subclause: what is it like to be modern in the nineteenth century? This interaction between crisis and modernity is not a randomly chosen connection. Isobel Armstrong, in her radical rethinking of the political and subversive elements of Victorian poetry, states that ‘Victorian modernism, as it emerges in its poetics, describes itself as belonging to a condition of crisis which has emerged directly from economic and cultural change.”

Armstrong’s positioning of Victorian culture, in particular its poetics, in direct correlation with a cultural and socio-economic topography effectively conflates the two questions posited above; nineteenth-century modernity as it appears in cultural representation is intrinsically equated with crisis. In Armstrong’s definition modernism in terms of poetics doesn’t get engendered by crisis or act as a response to it, it is explicitly affiliated with it; the definition therefore identifies a significant act of belonging — to engage with the strategies and devices of Victorian modernism is to be in crisis. In his study of the Gothic, The Literature of Terror, David Punter argues that the genre arises from a period that is affiliated with Armstrong’s sense of the ‘economic and cultural’ changes which instigate crisis; in his investigation of the effect of these changes on culture Punter suggests that

The period which saw the birth of the Gothic novel was that in which the early forces of industrialization were producing vast changes in the ways people lived and worked. Rural patterns of life were being broken up by enclosure of land and by the labour demands of urban-centred industry. The stability of an, at least theoretically, long-accepted social structure was being dissolved amid the pressure of new types of work and new social roles ... In the most general terms, it was of course changes of this kind that occasioned so much romantic writing.’

Punter refers of course to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the decades conventionally associated with the main impact of the Industrial Revolution upon the British landscape and on British social structures, and also the period most closely associated with British Romanticism; indeed Armstrong defines the Victorians as ‘post-Romantic’ and ‘post-industrial’, suggesting that the changes assessed by Punter are already in operation by the time of Victorian modernism.® Nonetheless, certain connections can be established between the two analyses in that both identify a state of crisis emerging out of a radically reconfigured social and economic climate. At the heart of this change is urbanization. Indeed the metropolis becomes a central motif within, if not the explicit location for, the condition of crisis alluded to by Armstrong.

William Wordsworth, in a passage from The Prelude of 1805, also cited by Punter, compares an urban fair to the early nineteenth-century city experience:

Oh, blank confusion! and a type not false Of what the mighty city is itself

To all except a Straggler here and there — To the whole swarm of its inhabitants —

An undistinguishable world to men,

The slaves unrespited of low pursuits Living amid the same perpetual flow

Of trivial objects, melted and reduced

To one identity, by differences

That have no law, no meaning, and no end.”

Punter describes the passage as “Wordsworth’s lament ... for stability, for a social system in which people knew their place’; in effect what starts out as a description rapidly turns into a critique of the urban condition and the city experience itself.’ The poem posits the fair as a microcosmic and metonymic representation of the macrocosmic city. The experience as depicted by Wordsworth is more complex than a mere lament for past stability and social structures, however, anticipating, even literally providing a prelude, for many of the issues that will be significant in this book. The predominant feature of the urban condition is its chaotic nature, what Wordsworth refers to as its ‘confusion’; this feature is intensified in the state of flux implicit in the ‘perpetual flow of trivial objects’ which branches out into the anarchy of ‘no law, no meaning, and no end’ where the city-dweller cannot read the plethora of signs in an ‘undistinguishable world’. Within this topography strange things start to happen to identity and the individual: the inhabitants of the city become a ‘swarm’, further dehumanizing the mass, and ultimately they are ‘melted and reduced / To one identity’. Again flux and change are evoked as the city induces a state of disidentity for its dwellers with Wordsworth using a vocabulary that anticipates many of the discussions of modernity in the nineteenth century.’ At its core the experience is contradictory for the city generates a consciousness of the strange and the alien, yet also, through the creation of a dehumanized mass, induces uniformity; as Stallybrass and White put it, ‘[i]n the city ... differences proliferate and at the same time melt into one identity’.'° In his reading of modernity Marshall Berman suggests that the notions of crisis and the representations of uncontrollable flux rise from a fundamental sense of division in nineteenth-century life; he argues that the public shares the feeling of living in a revolutionary age, an age that generates explosive upheavals in every dimension of personal, social and political life. At the same time, the nineteenth-century modern public can remember what it is like to live, materially and spiritually, in worlds that are not modern at all. From this inner dichotomy, this sense of living in two worlds simultaneously, the ideas of modernization and modernism emerge and unfold."

For Berman at the root of nineteenth-century modernity there exists a basic sense of inner conflict, one that takes place between an oscillating consciousness of the old and the new. Out of these inherent conflicts and contradictions — between an apprehension of a premodern world and a modern and apparently chaotic world — emerges

‘modernization and modernism’; without claiming that Wordsworth is the starting point for literary modernism, in many ways the passage cited above dramatizes the tensions and conflicts argued for by Berman.

As I have stated, many of the features in the passage from The Prelude prefigure the concerns of this book; and as David Punter points out, the extract is indicative of Wordsworth’s anxiety regarding the chaos and confusion inherent in the industrialized city of the early nineteenth century. By the late nineteenth century, and in particular its conception of a fin de siécle, the urban crisis for identity as Wordsworth envisages it has transmuted into a malady. In his study of fin de siécle degeneration theory William Greenslade discusses this correlation between the city and sickness: “Urban living, its diseases and pathologies, were leaving metropolitan men and women vulnerable to fatigue and debility from prolonged exposure to the pressures of the very environment which had formed them.’!? What Greenslade argues for is a situation where urban living perpetuates its own debilitation: exposure to the territory that one lives in perversely involves exposure to ‘fatigue and debility’; in short, to live in the city is to live ina climate conducive to maladies, psychosomatic or otherwise. Citing the degeneration theorist Max Nordau, Greenslade expands upon this paradoxical juxtaposition of urban life and sickness by suggesting, in a phrase that echoes Sigmund Freud’s essay of the same name, that there is ‘an early psychopathology of everyday life’ and that ‘living in a modern city was like living on the edge of nervous collapse’. The extraordinary condition of ‘psychopathology’ is effectively translated into the ordinary environment of ‘everyday life’ — the life of the late nineteenth-century urban dweller. The experience of modernity is therefore one of being on the ‘edge of nervous collapse’; Armstrong’s invocation of a ‘condition of crisis’ for Victorian modernism becomes a literal mental condition, a breakdown, in Greenslade’s perception of fin de siécle modernity. Greenslade concludes that the late nineteenth-century city was a territory of immanent breakdown, where the contours of that territory and the map which described it were conflated. Symptoms of the city ‘condition’, such as neurasthenia and hysteria, have been inherited, and so have become the determinants of the ‘condition’ from which they have been bred. Both symptoms are observable states of disorder and generalized symptoms of the prevailing condition."

The situation is crystallized in this statement, the map of the city is the map of ‘a territory of immanent breakdown’ where perpetuation is the key to the malady: the city ‘condition’ breeds symptoms such as ‘neurasthenia and hysteria’ which in turn define and determine the ‘condition’ itself. Where Wordsworth’s city is marked by ‘confusion’ and ‘perpetual flow’ and Armstrong’s definition of Victorian modernism stems from the economic changes that create the nineteenth-century metropolis, Greenslade’s late nineteenth-century urban environment is defined as infected, hypochondriacal and in ‘observable states of disorder’. For Wordsworth, in the early decades of the century, the identity of the individual is levelled out, ‘melted and reduced’ to a faceless uniformity. By the close of the nineteenth-century identity in the city has become quite literally a ‘condition’ — to be modern in the fin de siécle metropolis is to be sick.

I stated above that I would be asking questions with a degree of historical specificity; in response to this it is possible to argue that the tracing of the nineteenth-century city that takes place above is too loose in terms of a sense of chronology and genre, running as it does between Victorian poetics, the Gothic novel, British Romanticism and fin de siécle degeneracy theory. Of course it is clearly necessary to testify that as much as there are similarities between these areas there are also significant differences, ones which I will address in due course. That said, there are traces that run through culture in the nineteenth century which can be identified and equated with the sense of crisis which has already been discussed. Isobel Armstrong establishes such traces when she refers to anxieties which belong to fundamental changes wrought at the end of the eighteenth century. It is the habit of marking off Victorian from Romantic which disguises the anxieties common to early and later nineteenth-century writers. But there is a difference, a difference in perception, for [the Victorians] lived with these problems in an acute and morbid form because they intensified with continued economic and political change in the nineteenth century.”

Armstrong provides an implicit criticism of twentieth-century literary classifications and chronologies that habitually isolate Romantic and Victorian writers. In suggesting that the anxieties inherited from changes that took place at the end of the eighteenth century are features that link writers working at the beginning and end of the nineteenth century, Armstrong effectively supports the establishment of connections between Punter’s Romanticism and Greenslade’s fin de siécle study. Nonetheless she certainly privileges the Victorians, suggesting that their experience of these problems is intensified by accelerated ‘economic and political change’; as a result her argument that they manifest themselves in ‘an acute and morbid form’ correlates with Greenslade’s definition of the psychopathology of late nineteenth-century life. If Victorian cultural life is defined by acute morbidity, everyday life eventually becomes defined by the hysteria and neurasthenia referred to by Greenslade.

The similarities yet also marked differences that exist in and create a tension between early and later nineteenth-century writing can be assessed most appropriately through the use of example. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ (1817) and Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ (probably written in 1851 and published in 1867) are two of the most familiar poems of the nineteenth century; one is a central poem in the canon of British Romantic writing, the other probably Arnold’s most famous lyric." What links the two poems is a series of themes which revolve around fragmentation, disintegration and dislocation; ultimately it is the manner of approach to these motifs that constitutes the fundamental departure between the two writers and reveals the extent to which Armstrong’s sense of the ‘morbid’ emerges in Victorian poetics. The location of Shelley’s sonnet is the desert sands of Egypt, while Arnold’s lyric opens on the shingled beach of Dover, the environment for each could hardly seem more different; nonetheless as a basic starting point both create a fragmentary and ever-shifting milieu. It is worth quoting ‘Ozymandias’ in full:

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said — “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desart. ... Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”!”

The presence of fragmentation is obvious here, manifest in the ‘trunkless legs of stone’ and the ‘shattered visage’ of the ‘colossal wreck’ that constitute the decaying remains of the statue of Ozymandias. What we pay witness to is a symbol of collapse and disintegration in a poem that mocks the grandiose affirmation inscribed on the pedestal of the statue — ‘Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ The sense of fragmentation is compounded by the environment, a desertscape symbolizing the sands of time that slowly but inexorably conceal all trace of Ozymandias. Identity is effectively translated into disidentity in the sonnet; Ozymandias’ claim to history and legacy, contained in the affirmation of self — ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings’ —is rendered meaningless through the ruin of the statue and its presence in the apocalyptic ‘terminal beach’ of the desert sands that ‘boundless and bare ... stretch far away’.'* Ultimately what intensifies the fragmentation represented in the poem is the way in which Shelley utilizes a distanced voice; the words of Ozymandias are conveyed to us by the poetic voice via ‘a traveller from an antique land’, resulting in a complex concatenation of poetic travelogue, history lesson and allegory. The result is a poem that subtly dislocates its own representation of dislocation through a systematic displacement of inscription and utterance. Shelley’s achievement is to bind up all these aspects of fragmentation and dislocation in a polished sonnet and to give the conception of distance in the poem, whether historical or one of location, an unerringly contemporary message about power, history and civilization. Indeed, David Punter sees Shelley’s project as an ‘objectlesson in the transience of empire’ with the poem arguably becoming a palimpsest inscribed ‘over the decaying manuscript of the West’.!” Shelley’s vignette of the ruined statue of an Egyptian king is therefore opened out into an ironic political and cultural allegory; Punter’s suggestion that the poem is a comment on the ‘transience of empire’ is particularly convincing when the claims represented on the pedestal of the statue, along with their alleged permanence, are juxtaposed with the ruins and their location. Imperial claims effectively become an exercise in archaeology recounted by travellers from ‘antique’ lands. By contrast, Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’, written at the middle of the nineteenth century, initially seems unconcerned with notions of fragmentation or collapse. Indeed, what makes Arnold’s lyric so unsettling is that the opening lines seem to affirm the stability and permanence of English national identity and imperial aspiration:

The sea is calm to-night.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; — on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. (lines 1-5)”°

The emphasis in these first five lines is upon durability, tranquility and security. The sea is ‘calm’, the tide is ‘full’, and the ‘cliffs of England’ — here the White Cliffs of Dover, that symbol of Englishness itself — shine in the moonlight ‘vast’ in the ‘tranquil bay’. By this point the poem seems to be an exercise in patriotism and national cohesion, a suggestion emphasized by the juxtaposition of England with a France whose ‘light / Gleams and is gone’. However, the motif of fragmentation that so marks Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ immediately intrudes upon this seemingly placid scene, and the poem begins to undermine its initial sense of unity:

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanch’d land, Listen! You hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in. (lines 7-14)

The presence of the ‘eternal note of sadness’ in these lines, along with the insistent repetition of the motion of the tide in ‘Begin, and cease, and then again begin’, suggests a reiteration of permanence within the poem, and the ‘eternal note of sadness’ is certainly a concern of Arnold’s at this point. However, as we move from the representation of an apparently real sea scene to a metaphoric one that ushers this theme of sadness in, Arnold’s use of a landscape dominated by the ‘grating roar’ and the ‘tremulous cadence’ of pebbles flung by the tide onto Dover beach evokes a fragmented environment that can be juxtaposed with Shelley’s desert sands. As the sands of time have effectively brought about the collapse of the statue of Ozymandias for Shelley, in

Arnold’s lyric the fragmentary pebbles of Dover beach are gradually eroding the symbol of English national identity and permanence, the White Cliffs of Dover, and the ‘tremulous cadence’ of the noise that they make heralds Arnold’s meditation upon and lament for cultural stability.

The dissonant noise made by the pebbles and the effect that they implicitly have upon the cliffs of Dover shifts the poem from its contemplative mode to one of dislocation; effectively Arnold’s poem, in spite of the plea for permanence in ‘eternal’ sadness, cannot decide where to settle from line 15 onwards. As the White Cliffs of Dover seem to become decaying monuments to English national identity, broadly equatable with the statue in Shelley’s poem, Arnold shifts his perspective and initially provides the reader with a history lesson in the permanence of Classical culture:

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Aegaean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea. (lines 15-20)

Again the poem enters ambivalent territory; what Arnold seems to be suggesting is a link between the culture of ancient civilization, represented here by the reference to Sophocles, and that of the modern. He suggests that the note of sadness heard on Dover Beach was also heard by Sophocles on the shores of the Aegean, and that the insistent motion of the tide detected on the former shore is echoed in the ‘turbid ebb and flow / Of human misery’ traced in Sophocles’ work. Arnold is certainly engaged in a poetic process of establishing connections — here between his own ruminations and Sophocles — but there is a crucial difference that problematizes these links. In the final line of this section Arnold describes the sound of ‘human misery’ being heard ‘by this distant northern shore’; his own location is crucially ‘distant’, suggesting a dislocation from the permanence of Classical culture which undermines the connections that he strives to establish. In Arnold’s poem the contemporary effectively becomes distant, a notion that catalyses the sense of alienation that marks the later stages of the poem. Where Shelley’s use of distance and dislocation subtly undermines the claims inscribed upon the statue of Ozymandias,

IO LABYRINTHS OF DECEIT covering up the symbols of monarchic power and pointing to, in Punter’s words, the ‘transience of empire’, Arnold’s use of distance in relation to the contemporary indicates the transience of modern culture for the poet.

From a contemplation of the fragility of nation and culture, Arnold moves to religion:

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world. (lines 21-28)

The ambivalence of the earlier sections of the poem is lost; what remains is unequivocal as Arnold depicts the decline of religion. The presence of the sea is again evident, here in the figurative ‘Sea of Faith’. However, where the rhythms of the tide seemed to imbue the poem with a semblance of stability that linked past and present in its earlier stages, now the tide has lost even that element of permanence, becoming just a ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’. What we are left with is another apocalyptic ‘terminal’ beach, with the world becoming ‘vast edges drear / And naked shingles’; the result is an environment that is as ‘boundless and bare’ as the desert in Shelley’s poem. Both poets utilize similar terms. Shelley’s desert is ‘bare’ and Arnold’s beach is ‘naked’; however, where the sands of time in ‘Ozymandias’ are ultimately covering up the ‘Half sunk’ statue, ‘Dover Beach’ lays bare the vulnerable culture of the modern world. It is in the final lines of the poem that the state of crisis hinted at in its earlier stages emerges fully:

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain

INTRODUCTION II

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. (lines 29-37)

Having found nation, culture and religion all lacking, Arnold seemingly tries to find respite from despair by converting the poem into a conventional paean to the security of love, and perplexingly the lyric seems to become a love poem in its final stages thereby dispelling the pessimism of its earlier sections. That said, the incongruous and desperate appeal for stability contained in ‘Ah, love, let us be true / To one another’ proves to be illusory, for Arnold brutally undercuts this affirmation in his apocalyptic depiction of a world that, amongst all its failings and shortcomings, does not and cannot ‘really’ have love. It is in this final section that the unsituated nature of Arnold’s perspective is established; even the apparent certitude of the ‘long, withdrawing roar’ of the Sea of Faith is rejected in favour of emphatic contradictions. What Arnold stresses is the insubstantial nature of the modern world which ‘seems / To lie before us like a land of dreams’ (my emphasis), its very modernity stressed by the inclusion of the adjective ‘new’. What the poetic voice finds is that this world contradicts all the promises that it offers and ultimately will not allow even an appeal for love. Where Shelley’s desert is barren and empty, save for the traveller and the ruined statue, Arnold’s is crammed and chaotic, ‘Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night’; the dignified ‘ebb and flow’ of ‘human misery’ found in Classical tragedy is parodied in the ‘struggle and flight’ of the shadowy armies. The lasting impression is of a vision of the world in a state of crisis, where the touchstones of nation, culture, religion and even love fail the speaker, and of a poem where the poetic voice cannot settle because the contemporary world is so dislocated from the institutions that it values. What we witness is a lucid evocation of alienation and fragmentation in a poem that systematically overthrows and undermines all the values that the poetic voice identifies with. What links Arnold and Shelley’s individual poems is their use of images of fragmentation and dislocation; however, Shelley’s maintains an ironic note in the undermining of the claims of Ozymandias and the location of his petrified statue in the uninhabited and desolate desert whereas Arnold’s is a pessimistic lament for the contemporary which cannot maintain its connections with past culture with any credibility. Where Shelley’s poem establishes a distance from the Classical past with a celebratory composure which simultaneously criticizes the aspirations of empire, Arnold’s becomes an anguished, dislocated and unsettled representation of cultural alienation in the modern world which demonstrates the morbidity of Victorian poetry detected by Armstrong.

In 1856, approximately five years after the probable composition of ‘Dover Beach’, Karl Marx was invited to speak at the anniversary of the People’s Paper. Referring to the European revolutions of 1848, Marx stated: “The so-called revolutions of 1848 were but poor incidents, small fractures and fissures in the dry crust of European society. But they denounced the abyss. Beneath the apparently solid surface, they betrayed oceans of liquid matter, only needing expansion to rend into fragments continents of hard rock.” As with the start of Arnold’s lyric Marx’s reference points are geological, and their use of this motif is deceptively gentle, encapsulated in the ‘tremulous cadence’ of the tide for Arnold and Marx’s ‘small fractures and fissures’. The result of these processes is the production of the fragments also traced in Shelley’s sonnet, and the notion of the earth as a “dry crust’ which evokes the wastelands represented in both poems discussed earlier. The significant difference between Marx and Arnold’s perspectives is that where these metaphoric geological processes produce the representation of cultural crisis for the latter, for Marx the process instigates a cautious tone of celebration. Like the passage from Wordsworth’s The Prelude cited earlier, Arnold’s poem is effectively a lament for stability and security; by contrast Marx identifies and, through his dynamic language, seems to revel in the illusory nature of the ‘apparently solid surface’ that conceals change, fragmentation and contradiction — a feature that can also be detected in the Communist Manifesto. It is from this climate of change, dislocation and insubstantiality that the broken, unsettled and unsettling ‘Dover Beach’ emerges.

Marshall Berman, in tracing the experience of modernity through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, taking into account such seemingly disparate figures as Goethe, Marx, Baudelaire and the New York architect Robert Moses, suggests that the difference between modernity in the two centuries lies in the fact that in the twentieth century ‘the modern public expands, it shatters into a multitude of fragments, speaking incommensurable private languages; the idea of modernity, conceived in numerous fragmentary ways, loses much of its vividness, resonance and depth, and loses its capacity to organize and give meaning to people’s lives.’ Berman’s argument might prove controversial with scholars of twentieth-century high modernism and modernity; however, for the purposes of the present discussion what Berman identifies is again the notion of fragmentation implicit in the discourse of modernity. Berman’s understanding of modernity as ‘conceived in numerous fragmentary ways’ is based on his reading of the nineteenth century, hence the variety of figures that he chooses to represent the phenomenon; what he states is that in the twentieth century the culture of modernity and modernism shifts into a variety of different and cryptic modes of discourse that lose the ‘resonance and depth’ of the previous century. That said, elements of the poems discussed above anticipate and prefigure features and images in early twentieth-century writing in uncanny ways. Without entering into too detailed a discussion of points of comparison, two exemplary poems — W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming’ composed in 1919 and first published in 1920 and T. S. Eliots The Waste Land composed in 1921 and published in 1922 — contain cadences and echoes of Shelley and Arnold, conscious or otherwise. Yeats’s poem, which deliberately alludes to Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, also represents a strange figure in the midst of a sandscape similar to that in Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’: