Conclusion

I then wrote to Croker saying that as for writing odes, like exercises, the time was past when I could do such things either with readiness or propriety; that unless I could do credit to the office, the office could do none to me; but that if it were understood this idle form was to be dropt & I were left on great public events to commemorate them in verse, or not, as the spirit moved, in that case I should willingly accept the situation as a mark of honourable distinction, which it would then become.1

In 1813, Robert Southey was appointed to the office of poet laureate. He accepted on the understanding that the laureate would no longer be tasked with writing biannual odes, but that he would instead be allowed to write ‘on great public events … or not, as the spirit moved’. The king’s final descent into illness had already caused the odes to fall into partial abeyance, yet Southey was initially disappointed. Barely had he been installed as poet laureate when a letter reached him from the master of the king’s music, William Parsons, requesting that he send the text for 1814’s New Year’s ode.2 On this occasion, the spirit was moving anyway, and Southey wrote a ‘Carmen Triumphale’ for the new year, longer than almost any previous laureate ode, leaving Parsons to decide how much of it to set to music. Over the next thirty years, Southey would write several more ambitiously ex cathedra poems, but he continued to resent his paymasters’ efforts to have him write odes at stated intervals. Just as Rowe’s appointment had confirmed the identification between laureate and biannual odes that Tate had partially effected, so too did the process reverse itself over a hundred years later. Following Southey’s resistance, Wordsworth accepted the office in 1843 with the firmer stipulation that he would never be required to write any official poetry. From that point on, the office was a sinecure.

Southey’s tenure therefore heralded a new era for the laureateship; the office as it had been created between 1668 and 1715 was finished. It is fitting that this book should end here. Yet it is not the end that might be expected from the tenor of Southey’s words, or from the manner in which he struggled against the eighteenth-century traditions of the office: it is neither a whimpering nor an acrimonious end. Southey disliked being required to write odes to order, and looked disdainfully on several of the eighteenth-century laureates; many of his contemporaries shared these feelings. Yet his willingness to accept the office, and his belief that it could become an ‘honourable distinction’ if the biannual odes were dispensed with – not all laureate writing, or even all laureate odes, but merely the biannual stipulation – indicates not the failure, but the success of the eighteenth-century laureateship. As well as being a prominent, significant feature of British cultural life, it was something that had the potential for adaptability, and something that many people believed ought to be continued in a new form. The fact that it was adapted, rather than abolished, shows that it had served its function well up to that point, and had proven itself capable of continuing to function well if only certain adjustments were made to it.

Thus the biannual odes were discontinued. The idea of the court as a distinct location in which cultural products were created and consumed, and in which cultural meaning and value were determined, had become increasingly metaphorical and abstract, and would eventually diffuse entirely. While the court as a concept became an essentially symbolic part of British society, the laureateship evolved into a primarily honorific position. Tennyson and Wordsworth, and even Ted Hughes, Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage, were happy to accept the office.3 In retrospect, it was convenient to believe that the eighteenth-century version of the office had received nothing but mockery; this belief was what lubricated the changes that the office underwent after Southey’s appointment, and it gelled perfectly with the ideas that developed thereafter concerning literature, national identity, the monarchy and the character of the eighteenth century. Even Broadus, the office’s foremost historian, believed ‘that Warton’s appointment had turned a good poet into a bad laureate’, ‘crystalliz[ing]’ contemporary opinion against the office.4 But whatever aesthetic judgements may be made of Warton’s verse now, his tenure encouraged contemporary opinion in favour of the office, and was probably a contributory factor in Southey’s and Wordsworth’s acceptance of it.5 Nor was Warton alone among eighteenth-century laureates in enjoying a widespread favourable opinion; far from it.

As this book has argued throughout, the eighteenth-century laureateship was a highly prominent, respectable and significant office. It was perfectly in line with the sorts of practice and belief that were widespread at the time concerning culture and the court, and it served as a key instrument of those sorts of practice and belief. It was the defining element of the court’s evolving place in the conceptual geography of culture: the later Stuart court nestled together with ‘the town’, at the centre of a metropolis to which readers throughout ‘the world’ looked and in which they sought to vicariously place themselves by means of print culture; the early Hanoverian court and town serving as a forum for ‘the public’, and as the central location for patronage, social networks and fashion; the later Hanoverian court being viewed by some as a closed-off space, alien to ‘the nation’, but by others, and by increasing numbers from the 1780s onwards, as an abstract space coterminous with the nation as a whole, housing royals and public in harmony.

Chapter One showed that the office was initially brought about due to the efforts of persons based both within and without the institutional court, who sought to define, and take advantage of, the conceptual court’s role in culture. Such definition had become newly (and repeatedly) necessary, due to the ruptures between regimes, and due to developments in print culture, non-court institutions and the economic heft of audiences that contemporaries primarily conceptualized as the town, the world and the public. The laureateship was then fixed into a certain place within the institutional court and tasked with a specific function, again due to various persons’ efforts to exploit the court’s putative cultural centrality for their own gain.

These conclusions were developed in Chapter Two. By a close reading of the works of George I’s poets laureate (primarily Nicholas Rowe), it was shown that literature of the time was not merely produced commercially, situated in the town, or pitched to a middle-class public, but that the court remained an important forum in terms of determining the meaning of literary works, and that writers sought to produce works that would succeed by the criteria of judgement appropriate to this courtly forum. Yet in the conceptual geography of this time, the court did not stand in opposition to the town or the public; writers like Rowe succeeded by pitching their work to court, town and public, and by appealing to each by means of the other. The laureate was a prime element of this conceptual geography, being positioned at the interface of court and town, and writing for the public while being explicitly based in court and town. The writers appointed laureate under George I – Rowe, Cibber and to some extent Eusden – were receiving their due reward for having succeeded so well according to the values connected with this conceptual geography.

Chapter Three adopted a longer timeframe, exploring all laureate appointments from Rowe to Southey. It revealed that those writers chosen for the laureateship tended to be among the few most successful and highly esteemed writers of their day, and that their appointments correlated closely to the ebbs and flows of literary taste, political power and individual royal personality. It demonstrated how the laureateship could bring various different networks into play, each attempting to access and employ it for different ends, and how, following on from this, there were different ways by which the merit that determined the bestowal of the laureateship might itself be determined. Ultimately, it offered two major conclusions: that the appointment of a laureate confirmed the court’s centrality to society, in that it placed a courtly validation on those networks, cultural products and cultural practices that had the greatest valence at the time; and that the superficial randomness in the sorts of writers who were appointed laureate is a reflection of how literature was valued in the eighteenth century, when there were many different possible agents trying to make their claim for the understanding and dictation of cultural affairs.

In Chapter Four, the emphasis was on the public character of the laureate, and on the office’s standing in the eyes of the reading public, during the reign of George III. Here was perhaps the most conclusive evidence as to the importance of the eighteenth-century laureateship. In exactly the period that might have been expected to see the triumph of commercial culture, the public, British identity and middle-class assertiveness, the laureateship was found to have held a massive presence in the very medium that might have been expected to reveal that triumph best: newspapers. Moreover, although mockery and hostility were certainly apportioned to the office in good supply, so too were approval, respect, consideration, esteem, enjoyment and even a sort of reverence. Although it is impossible to establish the mass of readers’ genuine opinions, it would seem that much of the reading public was interested in the laureate odes, judging them by the highest standards and often finding them worthy. For Whitehead and especially Warton, it seems to have been a widespread opinion that the office had been honourably bestowed, while Pye, taking the office at the start of the French Revolutionary Wars, became a central figure in loyalist culture, his odes guiding the nation in its celebration of a patriot king. Thus the newspapers reveal the court’s place in the conceptual geography of culture, and its importance in society more generally, to have endured, while also continuing to adapt; and they reveal, again, the importance of the laureateship in forming the interface between court and public.

Finally, Chapter Five surveyed the laureates’ odes. Here, the laureates were found to be continually negotiating the relationship between (in the phraseology appropriate for the panegyric tradition) prince and people, and mediating that relationship to the people themselves. It was shown that, over the course of the long eighteenth century, the odes continued to affirm the centrality of the court to society and its place in the production and consumption of culture, but that the ways in which it did so communicated an understanding that the relationship between court and society was evolving. At the start of the period, the court’s importance was a more traditional, hierarchical sort of importance, in which the court was a discrete location to which the rest of society actively looked for a lead; there was no greater privilege than going to court, no greater cultural product than court ceremony, and the laureate odes offered these two things to their readers. By the end of the period, however, the court had diffused across the land. Courtliness and Britishness were one and the same. A human, sympathetic, patriot king stood at one with his people, sponsoring a literature that was produced according to the highest, most ambitious and most modern understanding of literary value. The court was still perceived as being of central importance to society, and the laureateship to literature. But while the one had become an abstract part of an increasingly abstract conceptual geography of culture and its importance to society was on the way to becoming exclusively symbolic, the other was on the verge of being occupied by Southey, and thus translated into a purely honorific position.

Throughout the chapters, the main analytical framework was that of the conceptual geography of culture. However, it is now time to question what an analysis carried out within such a framework actually means, and what wider conclusions can be drawn from it. As set out in the Introduction, this conceptual geography was never a dogmatic system. Eighteenth-century Britons often used spatial concepts to frame the production and consumption of culture, and to determine the meaning and value of cultural products. There are identifiable consistencies and patterns in their manner of doing so. But such usage often tended to be casual, vague, idiosyncratic and inconsistent, even within a single document. It also coexisted with a significant trend, present throughout the long eighteenth century, of insisting upon a standard of literary quality that transcended time and space. This standard was sometimes even placed in opposition to the forms of cultural production and consumption that took place in specific spaces: the town, the court and playhouses were all sometimes described as housing corrupt taste and bad art, due to their physical and social characteristics.

Moreover, this monograph’s dual intentions of using the laureateship to shed light on the subject of this conceptual geography, and of using this conceptual geography as a (putatively more authentic) framework for analysing the laureateship’s meaning and function, have sometimes pulled in different directions. For example, except in Chapter Four, the conceptual geography has generally been discussed as if there was only one map of it at any given time, with all contemporaries subscribing to the same notions. In fact, there was no such accordance. Similarly, it has been argued that criteria of judgement and the value attributed to cultural products were linked to concepts of space, a rationale that has allowed arguments about contemporary understandings of spatial concepts to have been based upon quotations that sometimes do not even mention spatial concepts, simply because they mention values and criteria of judgement that other people sometimes linked to those spatial concepts. It may even be argued that by claiming to use a more authentically eighteenth-century taxonomy than Habermas’s public sphere, this monograph has mixed up subject matter with methodology, and blurred the lines between the ideas of contemporaries and those of the historian.

The conclusions being made here must therefore be defined more clearly. First, the views of the laureateship and court detailed here were not universally held. It is not even possible to estimate how many people would have held them, or, insofar as an ideal model has appeared in these pages, with what differing degrees of concordance Britons would have acknowledged that model. The evidence suggests that it would be fair to call the views presented here ‘mainstream’, at least for the social elite resident in the town, and probably for literate English people in general. As Chapter Four indicated, there was a contrary mainstream view too; but rival mainstream views always tend to validate each other as mainstream views. For example, newspapers that denigrated the court and laureate did so in the acknowledgement that many literate people in Britain, and perhaps most, had a positive opinion of the court’s and laureate’s role in British society and culture; by opposing such views, they helped to reinforce them, and to give them greater coherence, as part of the endless dialectic of partisanship. Of course, this dialectic is not one that this monograph has engaged with much. Issues of political partisanship, social class and (other than in the emphasis on London) regional identity have been touched on somewhat incidentally, or not at all; this monograph can therefore offer no conclusions as to how these issues may have cut across the conceptual geography delineated here.

Second, spatial concepts were a widespread, useful way of understanding cultural production and consumption for eighteenth-century Britons, and they did tend towards a certain conceptual coherence, rather than being merely rhetorical. In certain ways, they would have been accepted by everyone who had any interest in culture. For example, the frequent and often casual references to the town and the court in later Stuart publications clearly assumed some common basis of understanding among readers; and no one could have been unaware that plays were performed in playhouses, and laureate odes at court. Indeed, spatial concepts would have been particularly relevant to views of the laureateship, both due to the odes and because it was certainly commonplace to use the term ‘court’ in discussions of the king and of the laureate.

Moreover, while it may be tempting to posit a distinction between forms of culture that were related to a certain space, such as drama and laureate odes, and forms of culture that were unrelated to particular spaces and were judged by a true standard of cultural value, this monograph’s evidence has shown that no such distinction can be easily made. Print culture was intimately bound up with spatial concepts, whether that be in terms of published books being primarily intended for a town-based audience, dedicatory epistles asserting the primacy of the court, newspapers selling London and its cultural and political geography to readers throughout Britain, plays and odes transporting their readers to the space of performance or mass-produced texts constituting such abstract spatial forums as the nation. Even the transcendental standard of value was often articulated by way of spaces: the world, the country, the closet. And while some writers placed the true standard in opposition to corrupt, specific locations, others argued that the true standard was only to be found in specific locations, or reached its highest validation in them. As seen with Cibber in Chapter Two, they argued that the truest form of judgement for plays existed not in the reading experience, but in the playhouse; or, as seen with Dryden and Shadwell in Chapter One, that the best taste and judgement were to be found at court, especially in the person of the king.

Again, there were other ways of understanding culture. A thoroughgoing attempt to draw the landscape of contemporary concepts would have to depart from the landscape analogy itself, exploring (for example) the function of dedicatory epistles to aristocrats, and invocations of their powers of judgement, in determining the meaning and value of cultural products. Dedicatory epistles would sometimes make reference to the aristocrat’s country seat, portraying it as a haven for writers, and as a place in which the literary work had taken shape; and, as discussed in Chapters One and Two, they would often reference the court. But they would also employ entirely non-spatial concepts and criteria of judgement. Likewise, as mentioned above, works could be judged by certain values that were sometimes explicitly linked to certain locations, but sometimes not. And, as is still the case today, though such terms as ‘the nation’ and ‘Britain’ could denote a place, they could equally or alternatively denote a body of people; that is, they could be synonymous with ‘the public’.

The prevalence of different ways of making sense of culture, and the fact that they overlapped and were sometimes used interchangeably, are of significance for this monograph’s main conclusions. When eighteenth-century Britons viewed the court and the laureateship in terms of a conceptual geography of culture, it was partly because it made sense to do so. There was indeed an institutional court, and several physical palaces, housing the monarch and their family members, that were resorted to by the nation’s elite. St James’s, Kensington, the Queen’s House and Whitehall were physically intimate with the town and with Westminster, and were based in the nation’s capital city. The laureate – usually one of the most successful and prominent writers in the nation – received his salary and laureate identity from the court, and wrote two odes a year that would be performed at court and widely published and read. Culture was produced and consumed in ways that were dependent upon literal geographical facts. To view culture spatially was, at least in part, to acknowledge those facts and their effects. In such an understanding, the court and laureate were clearly important; and the nature of that importance is what has been elaborated in the foregoing chapters.

However, the conceptual geography of culture was also a way – one way among many – for contemporaries to articulate broader notions about culture and their society: notions of power, authority, politics, value, identity, gender, class, nationality, the past and the future. By the same token, the casual usage of spatial concepts is highly revealing of the nature of, and developments in, eighteenth-century British society. This monograph can therefore offer conclusions about that society that could have been arrived at by means of other evidence, or another focus, but that have here been arrived at by an analysis of the poet laureateship and the conceptual geography of culture. What that analysis shows is that British society retained a hierarchical character throughout the period, focused on a traditional and metropolitan-based body of authority; the monarch and his court continued to provide the British people with the unifying ideology that allowed them to see themselves as Britons, to structure their behaviour and to evaluate the behaviour of others. Likewise, the monarch and his court served as a practical nexus of social distinction and political power. However, British society did undergo drastic changes between 1668 and 1813, due in no small part to the increasing profusion of print, which offered new bases for such a unifying ideology and partially obviated the need for physical proximity to any particular nexus. The fact that king and court retained their importance, and that print served to constitute and convey that importance in new ways, is testament to four factors: the continuing importance of physical location (including the need for print to have a base of operations, and the advantages attendant on having that base of operations in the metropole); how deeply entrenched the court was as a unifying ideology; the stability of the period; and the existence of people like the poets laureate, standing at the interface between court and reading public, responsive to developments in society as a whole (albeit such people were symptoms of the first three factors).

Indeed, the history of the eighteenth-century laureateship is of laureates (and certain other people) courting the public: both in the actual sense of the word ‘courting’, and in the more punning sense of bringing the public to court. By exploring this process, this monograph has made three major contributions to eighteenth-century scholarship, and particularly to eighteenth-century British cultural historiography, as set out in the Introduction. In each area, it has hopefully encouraged new agendas of research. First, it has used an interdisciplinary methodology to demonstrate the importance of the laureateship in eighteenth-century Britain. It has shown that many different agents and audiences were concerned with the office, that it was responsive to the different interest groups among which it was positioned and that it adapted as part of the eternal dialectic of old and new. Further work can be carried out in these respects not just on the laureateship, but on cultural institutions in general and on the laureate-style model of cultural producer.

Second, this monograph has placed the court and its relationship with the public in a more central place in our understanding of eighteenth-century Britain. Here, the idea of ‘courting’ is key. The laureates were not the only people courting the public; for example, many more odes and poems were published in affirmation of the court than came from the laureates’ pens alone, and most of these came from writers who were not part of cultural institutions and do not fit the laureate-style model of cultural producer. The laureates were, so to speak, the monarchs of a public courtly culture, but they were far from absolute. Attention must now turn to the expansive, anarchic realms of that culture.

Lastly, this monograph has advanced a new paradigm for eighteenth-century cultural history: the conceptual geography of culture. This is a subject deserving of study in its own right, but is also a framework that can be used to make sense of British cultural production and consumption in the period. While there are potential risks to using this paradigm, the preceding chapters have shown that it can be highly illuminating, allowing us to ask new questions and to see eighteenth-century Britain and its cultural history in new ways. The Habermasian public sphere paradigm has been enormously, deservedly influential in the field, and also in research on other periods and countries, but its dominance necessarily involves a predetermining of the scope of our research. The conceptual geography of culture paradigm offers a new way forward, not just for scholarship on British culture of the long eighteenth century, but for earlier periods and for other European and Atlantic countries. By turning our attention to the spatial concepts that contemporaries used to map their cultural worlds and to evaluate cultural production and consumption, we will better understand what culture meant to them, why they behaved in the ways that they did and how they navigated change over time. It is by taking such a perspective that the importance of the laureateship in Britain in the long eighteenth century has been revealed, contrary to a long-standing belief that the office had been marginal and contemptible. Many more such discoveries remain to be made.