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2 Richardson, 893.
3 It is, perhaps, no longer necessary to explain that the designation "sentimental" is by no means derogatory. Regarding Uncle Tom's Cabin, Jane Tompkins is not alone in treating Stowe's 1850 bestseller as "the most important book of the [19th] century" (83). The case for the centrality of the sentimental tradition to the rise of the novel is made assertively in Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
4Three times in Uncle Tom's Cabin Stowe makes explicit reference to Byron. I won't have time to discuss how the epigraphs to chapters 14 and 35 function, taken from the description of Aurora Raby in Book XV of Don Juan and from Canto IV of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; however it is worth relating the third. For more on Byron's influence on Harriet Beecher Stowe see Alice Crozier, The Novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). In addition to the epigraphs and the comparison of Byron and St. Clare, many of Stowe's plot devices and representations of plantation life seem derived from Byron's Turkish Tales and from Don Juan. For example, Legree and his harem of black mistresses along with Cassy's inclination to murder him echo elements of the "The Corsair."
5 In 1870, Stowe took her castigation of Byron to another level. Having befriended Byron's wife, Stowe was moved to write a defense of her character, entitled Lady Byron Vindicated .
6 The Golden Treasury remains a popular anthology. To Palgrave's four books, John Press added a fifth covering poets of Palgrave's era in 1964.
7 Palgrave refrained from including living poets in his anthology, writing that it would have been "invidious to apply the standard aimed at in this Collection to [them]." One can than infer that since Wordsworth's work constitutes the greatest part of the volume's last book, Palgrave considered his work the height of poetic achievement.
8 Palgrave, 580-1.
9 For a discussion of editorial attempts to decide the matter of authorship, see Murray, E. B., ed. The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 429-435.
10 Stephen C. Behrendt, Shelley and His Audiences (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 108.
11 Murray, 202.
12 Earl Wasserman, The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neoclassical and Romantic Poems (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959), 208.
13 Discussion of print culture and its transformative effect upon the public sphere is now well-traversed ground. Applications of Jurgen Habermas' Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere have found important articulations in Michael Warner, Letters of the Republic and Peter Stallybrass and Alon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, among others.
14 Behrendt, 2-6.
15 I find it useful to turn to Defense of Poetry to illustrate Shelley's faith in the power of imagination: "The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void for ever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens that faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb" (488).