Cosmopolitanism – Uncollected Works of Mathilde Blind

The “Unified Volume Theory” & Mathilde Blind’s Late Poetry

While annotating Mathilde Blind’s last three volumes of poetry for the Jewelled Tortoise series of fin-de-siècle texts, I was struck by the ways in which Blind structured each book so that the whole is greater than (or extends the implications of) the sum of its separate parts. Below are slightly revised passages from my introduction to Mathilde Blind: Selected Fin-de-Siecle Poetry and Prose that describe her arrangement of the poems in volume (for a more detailed discussion, complete with full citations, see the entire “Introduction” on pages 1-46).

The Ascent of Man (1889)

The Ascent of Man consists of three sections–the title poem, “Poems of the Open Air,” and “Love in Exile.” The poems in the latter two sections exist in an implicitly dialogical relationship to the title poem. Most of the verses in “Poems of the Open Air” hearken back to (and elicit nostalgia for) a pre-Darwinian conception of nature (as the epigraph from Coleridge that heads the section suggests). In so doing they invite the reader to confront the epistemic shifts that occurred in the long nineteenth century when pantheistic visions of nature gave way to scientific perspectives. As Blind put it in Shelley’s View of Nature Contrasted with Darwin’s, she and her late-century contemporaries were forced to acknowledge “the oppression, strife, and cruelty, which seem to pervade all organic beings according to that dread law formulated by Darwin: ‘Let the strongest live and the weakest die”’ (p. 243). The sequence of poems in the ‘Love in Exile’ section, which includes twenty numbered poems subtitled ‘Songs’ followed by four individually titled lyrics, registers this seismic cultural shift through intimate expressions of personal loss. This section begins with an epigraph from Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850), whose famous phrase “Nature, red in tooth and claw” anticipated the troubling implications of Darwin’s theory. Tennyson’s poem grieves both the loss of a loved one and of faith in a benign universe, and thus Blind’s allusion to Tennyson in the final section of The Ascent of Man is doubly appropriate. The lyrics in “Love in Exile” give voice to feelings of isolation, exile, and unrequited love that echo those of Tennyson’s lyric speaker. They also implicitly link these personal griefs to broader cultural dislocations engendered by an increasingly naturalistic world view.

Dramas in Miniature (1891)

This volume is divided into two sections, the first labelled “Dramas in Miniature” and the second “Lyrics.” By subsuming both her “dramatic” and “lyric” poems in a volume titled Dramas in Miniature, Blind is intentionally blurring the distinction between these two poetic genres. In effect, she is inviting her readers to think of all these poems as what Monique Morgan calls “‘lyric narrative hybrids.” Isobel Armstrong’s concept of the ‘double poem’ is also relevant here — a poem in which the speaker’s utterance is always also “the object of analysis and critique. It is, as it were, reclassified as drama in the act of being literal lyric expression.” In this regard it is worth noting that its position as the last “drama” of the first section allows “Scherzo” to function as a kind of bridge to the “lyrics” that make up the second. A monodrama of female erotic desire, ‘Scherzo’ in one sense fully embraces the Romantic tradition of direct subjective expression. It begins with a direct expression of the speaker’s desire for the presence of a lover: “Oh, beloved, come and bring | All the flowery wealth of spring!” (p. 172). But in the second half of the poem, this speaker relates the story of Diana’s love for Endymion as a way of validating this desire. Blind thus makes use of narrative and dramatic elements that serve to “objectify” the speaker’s lyric effusion.

As Carol Christ notes, Victorian (and Modernist) poets reacted against the subjectivity they associated with Romanticism “by attempting to objectify the materials of poetry,” often turning to “structures of myth and history which provide a narrative that contains and gives significance to personalities.” Of the fifteen “lyrics” in the volume three are narratives or include narrative elements; one (“A Child’s Fancy”) contains dialogue; and many rely on metaphorical indirection to express the speaker’s feelings, from the use of vividly detailed landscape tableaux, to comparisons of the speakers to sleepwalkers, Tantalus, even a viola d’amore. Furthermore, the lyrics in this section employ a wide array of metrical patterns and verse forms, including iambic and trochaic dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, and pentameter; quatrains, quintets, sexains, octets, and Spenserian stanzas, which foreground the formal qualities of each poem. Indeed, one of these lyrics, a sonnet, is titled “Sonnet,” verbally objectifying its form.

This “Sonnet” alludes to Shakespeare’s sonnet 18, whose speaker assures his beloved that “thy eternal summer shall not fade” thanks to his immortalizing verse, which will live “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see.” The speaker in Blind’s sonnet, seeking to “shield” the beloved “from time’s fraying wear and tear,” asks “How save you, fairest, but to set you where | Mortality kills death in deathless art?” (p. 176). Like many of the “lyrics” in the section, this poem registers Blind’s acute awareness of the tradition of English lyric poetry in which she is writing. Some ten months before she published Dramas in Miniature, Blind’s friend and fellow poet Edmund Gosse published the essay “Is Verse in Danger?” Gosse writes that contemporary poets are so haunted by the poets of the past that the “activity of the dead is paramount and threatens to paralyse original writing altogether,” adding that many “suggest that poetry has had its reign, its fascinating and imperial tyranny, and that it must now make way for the democracy of prose.” But Gosse goes on to assert the vitality of verse, and speculates that the “poetry of the future” will represent more successfully than fiction the nature of human consciousness, those “ephemeral shades of emotion which prose scarcely ventures to describe,” those “divisions and revulsions of sensation, ill-defined desires, gleams of intuition and the whole gamut of spiritual notes descending from exultation to despair.” Because “untroubled by the necessity of formulating a creed, a theory, or a story,” this poetry “will describe with delicate accuracy, and under a veil of artistic beauty, the amazing, the unfamiliar, and even the portentous phenomena which it encounters.” Gosse could here be describing the poems in Dramas in Miniature.

Birds of Passage: Songs of the Orient and Occident (1895)

Birds of Passage is divided into five sections: “Prelude,” “Songs of the Orient,” “Songs of the Occident,” “Shakespeare Sonnets,” and “Miscellaneous Pieces.” Because of its musical connotations, “Prelude” may seem to apply only to the second and third sections. In fact, it frames the entire volume, both in its imagery and themes. Most importantly, the literal avian migration that is the controlling imagery in the poem — the “passage” from one region to another, followed by a return — becomes a metaphor for a cosmopolitan vision and a transnational impulse the entire volume embraces. So too does the poem’s celebration of the “undaunted wing” of the birds’ journeys as they “face the fluctuant storm‐winds and the elemental night” express the volume’s embrace of both imaginative risk-taking and acceptance of fate. The final stanza of the “Prelude,” with its reminder of personal mortality, anticipates the final two poems in the volume’s final section. The “Prelude,” along with the poems “Rest” and “Mystery of Mysteries,” are fittingly valedictory expressions of Blind’s antitheism and aestheticism (she died a year after this volume appeared), and a reminder that, like her friend Helen Zimmern, she was a close reader of Nietzsche. Nietzsche expressed his conception of amor fati (love of fate) in terms that describe the sensibility everywhere apparent in Birds of Passage: “I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer” (from The Gay Science, originally published in 1887 as Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, and sometimes translated as The Joyful Wisdom or The Joyous Science).

Mathilde Blind: Selected Fin-de-Siècle Poetry and Prose now available

I am delighted to announce the publication of Mathilde Blind: Selected Fin-de-Siècle Poetry and Prose — an annotated edition of the three major volumes of poetry Mathilde Blind published between 1889 and 1895 (The Ascent of Man, Dramas in Miniature and Birds of Passage: Songs of the Orient and Occident). This new edition also contains several of Blind’s reviews; her essay “Shelley’s View of Nature Contrasted with Darwin’s”; and reviews of Blind’s writing by Arthur Symons, Arnold Bennett, and Edith Nesbit, among others. It is available in both hardback and paperback.

My sincere thanks to series editors Catherine Maxwell and Stefano Evangelista for their support, expert guidance, and close readings; Simon Davies for his superb copy editing; and Gerard Lowe, Senior Publishing Manager for the Modern Humanities Research Association for guiding this project through all stages of writing, revision and production.

Mathilde Blind Selected Poetry and Prose

“A profound contribution to Victorian Studies”

Diana Maltz, whose important book British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, 1870-1900: Beauty for the People informed my own research, has just reviewed Mathilde Blind: Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters for Victorian Studies. She begins her review by emphasizing the importance of Blind’s career to current scholarship in the field:

One would be hard-pressed to find a sharper embodiment of late-Victorian cosmopolitanism than editor, fiction writer, critic, biographer, translator, and poet Mathilde Blind. The expatriate German-Jewish Blind was at the matrix of aesthetic, socialist, free-thinking, and New Woman circles throughout her literary career. James Diedrick’s biography, Mathilde Blind: Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters, offers a chronological study of Blind’s growing intellectual interests and social networks as well as analyses of her key works in their contexts. As such, this is a boon to scholars researching Blind, and a profound contribution to Victorian studies. (145)

Maltz also emphasizes the importance of intellectual and literary networks in encouraging and supporting Blind’s development as a writer, thinker and non-comformist:

The aesthetic coterie around the Dark Blue was just one early manifestation of Blind’s sustained interdependent literary community. Authors recommended one another to publishers, read each other’s work in draft and aloud to fellow writers, and reviewed each other’s volumes. Just as Blind helped coax James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night (1874) toward publication, she in turn sought Thomson’s aid in finding a publisher for her antitheistic poem “The Prophecy of St. Oran” (1881). Arthur Symons also benefited from Blind’s contacts and promoted her work in kind, though he could be condescending about it. Into the fin de siècle, Blind forged alliances with New Women. Friendships with sexual nonconformists such as Vernon Lee encouraged a new ambiguity in her poems, where speakers’ genders are unclear and their affections potentially queer. Diedrick locates a similarly subtle same-sex eroticism in a journal entry about Mona Caird during their holiday together in 1893. (146-47)

I also appreciate Maltz’s emphasis on the ways in which Blind’s radicalism informed all of her writing, from her essays and translations to her poetry:

Blind’s desire to focus critical attention on important women in history fueled several literary endeavors, including biographies of Madame Roland and George Eliot for the Eminent Women Series that she co-founded with poet A. Mary F. Robinson. She brought her liberatory politics to her biographical and critical work. Writing on Mary Wollstonecraft, she emphasized the radical potential of women’s education by imagining an expansion of women’s professions. Translating the diary of the late Marie Bashkirtseff, Blind strategically described Bashkirtseff’s suffocation in the skin, or “envelope,” of her gender (208). Diedrick similarly underscores the feminist purport of Blind’s creative writings, such as her revisionist invention of Mona in “The Prophecy of St. Oran,” her enthroning of a primeval mythical mother figure in Birds of Passage’s “Nuit” (1895), her psychological explorations of sexual exploitation and infidelity in Dramas in Miniature (1891), and her critiques of marriage in Tarantella (1885) and The Ascent of Man (1889). (147)

Because I set out to write a biography that makes an argument about Blind’s contributions to late-Victorian intellectual and social culture, I am especially grateful that Maltz highlights my interpretive arguments in the book:

Her letters reveal her diligence and ambition, and Diedrick also surveys periodical reviews of her work. He performs nuanced close readings of primary texts and situates them in wider cultural conversations, as when he shows The Ascent of Man as a reflection of evolutionary writings by Blind’s friend William Kingdon Clifford and as a response to heated debates on the Woman Question. This methodology impelled Diedrick to go beyond archival research on Blind to read the political, theological, and philosophical texts that inspired her. The result is a comprehensive, layered study of interest to scholars of Victorian poetry, periodical studies, gender and women’s studies, and aestheticism and decadence. (147)

Victorian Studies is published by Indiana University Press. For more on the journal and the press, visit the journal’s website.

Mathilde Blind: Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters reviewed in The Review of English Studies (10 August 2017)

On August 2, senior White House aide and notorious alt-right propagandist Stephen Miller came to the White House Press Room to discuss the RAISE Act, which would halve legal immigration into the U.S. In a heated exchange with Jim Acosta, a CNN anchor who quoted Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “The New Colussus” (“Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”), Miller attacked Acosta for his “cosmopolitan bias” and for asking about what the bill would do to the racial composition of immigrants to the US by claiming “that is one of the most outrageous, insulting, ignorant and foolish things said you’ve ever said.”

The use of the adjective “cosmopolitan” by right-wing polemicists has a long history, and this is why English writer Mathilde Blind’s life and career continues to speak to contemporary political realities. Gregory Tate emphasizes this in his 10 August 2017 review of Mathilde Blind: Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters for The Review of English Studies:

James Diedrick’s biography of the Victorian writer Mathilde Blind opens with a critique of Benjamin Disraeli’s 1872 speech on ‘Conservative and Liberal Principles’, in which Disraeli set out a stark opposition between the popular nationalism of his Conservative party and the elitist cosmopolitanism (or un-British radicalism) of Gladstone’s Liberals. For Diedrick, ‘this speech illuminates the reasons Blind’s career and writing mattered to her contemporaries, and why her story still speaks to contemporary cultural debates’ (p. 2). He argues persuasively that her life and career subvert Disraeli’s simplistic distinction between the national and the cosmopolitan. Born in Germany in 1841, Blind’s family settled in London in 1852 after her mother and stepfather’s involvement in the failed 1848 revolutions; she thought of herself as British, and she campaigned and wrote on a range of national issues, from women’s education to the cultural ramifications of Darwinism to the history of the Highland Clearances. Diedrick also makes a valuable case for the importance to Victorian culture of the multinational and politically radical circles in which Blind moved: she knew Karl Marx and Giuseppe Mazzini as a child, and her writings consistently champion active and progressive responses to the social inequities of Victorian Britain. For those of us reading the book in Brexit Britain, these are compelling arguments for Blind’s current relevance. Diedrick’s narrative of Blind’s life is comprehensive and illuminating, but the most important contribution of his biography is its evocation of Blind’s cosmopolitan intellectual environment, and of the literary and political culture of late-Victorian London more generally.

Tate continues:

The book offers an insightful analysis, for instance, of the ways in which Blind’s ‘gift for friendship’ helped her career. Through a range of different kinds of social exchange—letters, conversations (in, for example, the British Museum), literary salons, public readings, and lectures—Blind positioned herself as part of a group of writers and artists with shared interests, who supported each other practically (through introductions to publishers and editors of periodicals, for instance) and intellectually; this ‘community of like-minded friends and fellow artists is what enabled her career and inspired her writing’ (p. 260). Over the course of her life Blind developed more or less close friendships with (in no particular order, and among others) Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Michael Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, Eleanor Marx, Mona Caird, Richard Garnett (superintendent of the reading room at the British Museum), William Kingdon Clifford, Arthur Symons, and Vernon Lee. Diedrick’s focus on Blind’s friendships enables him to develop a detailed picture of the cultural dynamics of late-Victorian London, of the interactions and exchanges between particular individuals, and of the shared concerns that underpinned those exchanges. For Diedrick, Blind’s diverse interests—in socialism, Romanticism, aestheticism, science, and debates about the New Woman—exemplify the inseparable connection between aesthetics and politics that was a guiding conviction of her wider intellectual community.

Tate’s final paragraph emphasizes both Blind’s underestimated significance as a writer and the ways in which her career illuminates cultural concerns that inform our present:

On the . . . topic of Blind’s writing, the book is thorough and authoritative, and it does a particularly important service in demonstrating and examining the range of her talent. After Blind’s death in 1896, her friend Arthur Symons used his 1897 Selection from the Poems of Mathilde Blind and his 1900 edition of her complete Poetical Works to construct a surprisingly conventional (and conventionally gendered) view of Blind as a sentimental and lyric poet, and, while not so narrow in its interpretation of her writing, recent scholarship has also focused nearly exclusively on her poetry. However, as Diedrick makes clear, ‘presenting Blind exclusively as a poet, and an exclusively lyrical poet, was doubly reductive’ (p. 255). As well as publishing seven volumes of poetry that made room for dramatic monologues and narrative verse as well as lyrics and sonnets, Blind was also a novelist, a translator of writers as diverse as David Friedrich Strauss and Marie Bashkirtseff, a biographer of George Eliot and Madame Roland, a champion and editor of Shelley and Byron, and a frequent contributor to the Victorian periodical press. Diedrick makes a persuasive case for a fuller consideration of Blind’s versatility as a writer, and of her popularity and influence in late-Victorian literary culture; he notes that an 1890 profile in the journal Woman commented that ‘“everyone familiar with the current thought and literature of the day knows the name of Mathilde Blind”’ (p. 223). Diedrick’s book is a meticulous and comprehensive biography of this now underestimated writer, and it deserves to make Blind’s name better known today. It is also a valuable addition to recent scholarship on Victorian cosmopolitanism, and a timely reminder of the importance to British culture of cosmopolitan and transnational perspectives.

I appreciate the careful and thorough reading Gregory Tate gave to Mathilde Blind: Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters.

Mathilde Blind: Cosmopolitan, Transnationalist

[NOTE: I presented this short paper at a Roundtable on “Women’s Transnationality” at the 25^th annual British Women Writers Conference, held June 21-24 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Roundtable was organized and moderated by Linda K. Hughes, Texas Christian University; the other four panelists were Beverly Taylor (UNC Chapel Hill); Marjorie Stone (Dalhousie University); Deirdre d’Albertis (Bard College); and Heidi Hakimi-Hood, Ph.D. candidate, Texas Christian University. Some of the material for this presentation comes from my biography Mathilde Blind: Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters, University of Virginia Press, 2017]

“A dangerous curiosity for an undiscovered world”: Mathilde Blind’s Radical Cosmopolitanism

If transnationalism is in part a means and method of thinking beyond the nation as a literary category and interrogating the formation and deployment of the concept of the nation-state across both time and space, then the work of the Anglo-German, Anglo-Jewish poet, political refugee, radical feminist and socialist Mathilde Blind provides an excellent example of how certain Victorian writers pioneered this project. In my brief remarks today, I want to show how her political affiliations inform her literary practice, and how her writing embodies this transnational perspective. I will be using three terms during my discussion, and I hope to suggest both how they overlap and how they diverge: internationalism, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism.

To begin with the first of these terms: both liberal and socialist versions of internationalism were circulating in the 1870s, when Blind began publishing under her own name, and she was firmly aligned with the socialist camp. The liberal version derived from Kant’s essay on “Perpetual Peace,” in which he first advocated a “league of nations”—the inspiration for the organization established after World War I (which Blind’s stepsister half-sister Ottilie would campaign for). The socialist version envisions the eventual disappearance of nation-states, and this is where internationalism shades into transnationalism. While Blind supported the formation of independent national states (the goal of the European Revolutions of 1848, which her mother and stepfather participated in) and later Irish Home Rule, she was also one of those who looked toward an altogether different future. In the words she used to translate David Strauss’s unsympathetic definition of cosmopolitanism in The Old Faith and the New (1873), she would “have the large consolidated states resolve themselves into groups of small confederated republics, organized on the socialistic principle, between which, thenceforth, differences of language and nationality could no longer act as barriers, or prove the cause of strife” (301). Since I won’t have time to discuss her poetry in any depth today, it is worth noting that Blind’s poetry consistently gestures toward this imaginary Europe, what Christopher Keirstead in Victorian Poetry, Europe, and the Challenge of Cosmopolitanism calls an “ever-impending Europe of the future” (3). And now that I’ve introduced this third term, I want to spend a few minutes discussing Blind’s distinctive cosmopolitanism.

In 1872, the same year she began reviewing for The Athenaeum and published her edition of selected poems by Shelley, another Anglo-Jewish writer, Benjamin Disraeli, delivered his Crystal Palace speech, in which he castigated those who, like Blind, professed cosmopolitan views—in terms that remind us of the politically charged nature of late-Victorian cosmopolitanism. Delivered two years before Disraeli would return as Prime Minister to lead the Tory government for the next four years, this speech illuminates the reasons Blind’s career and writing mattered to her contemporaries, and why her story still speaks to contemporary cultural debates. Disraeli aligns the Conservatives with “nationalism” and the Liberals (and their leader William Gladstone) with “cosmopolitanism,” which he equates with radicalism on the Continent. He also attempts to enlist the British working classes in the Conservative cause, claiming they “repudiate cosmopolitan principles. They adhere to national principles. They are for maintaining the greatness of the kingdom and the empire, and they are proud of being subjects of our sovereign and members of such an empire” (10). Blind’s anti-monarchical, antitheist, anti-imperialist ideas, not to mention her socialism, made her an unnamed target of Disraeli’s speech.

Disraeli’s dichotomies obscure what are in fact a range of complex political positions. His opposition of “nationalism” and “cosmopolitanism,” for example, leaves no room for Blind and her friend William Morris, socialists who also “adhered” to “national principles” in the sense that they were English citizens who organized to support national movements in Germany and Italy. Moreover, Blind and Morris were simultaneously cosmopolitans, socialists and aesthetes, and their careers challenge those who have cast the aesthetic movement as the apolitical precursor to the avant-garde. Borrowing a phrase from Friedrich Nietzsche, Regenia Gagnier describes late-Victorian cosmopolitans like Morris as “citizens of the world” who “perceived no conflict between individualism and the social state, who never fell “into the depoliticized idealism that that phrase evokes today” (137). This is especially relevant to Blind, whose career coincided with the revival of socialist internationalism in Britain, Europe, the Americas, and Australasia (the Second International was formed in Paris in 1889, the year Blind published The Ascent of Man, many of whose poems express a kind of apocalyptic socialism). Like her countryman Nietzsche, —whose books Beyond Good and Evil and Human, All Too Human her friend Helen Zimmern would translate into English — Blind writes from the perspective of those “free spirits” or “good Europeans” who in Nietzsche’s words are characterized by “a dangerous curiosity for an undiscovered world,” one that “flames and flickers up in all the senses” (4).

Blind’s cosmopolitan identity is distinct from that of Morris, however, and not only because of her gender. In William Michael Rossetti’s loaded words, “she was of Jewish race” (2: 388). Though she was thoroughly secular in her outlook, and unlike her friend Amy Levy did not self-identify as Jewish, she was often identified as such in ways that also cast her as an outsider. This is important because one of the late-century debates concerning cosmopolitanism is directly bound up in questions of Jewish identity and citizenship. Were Jews considered “rooted” citizens of their nations, or “rootless cosmopolitans”? Anti-Semites cited Svengali (in fiction) and the Rothschild banking family (in fact) as proof of the latter. In this debate, “cosmopolitan” is a pejorative term meaning stateless and not deserving of a state, as in the myth of the Wandering Jew. Though Blind was herself a self-confessed wanderer, and frequently traveled on the Continent, she also thought of herself and described herself as English. At the same time, she identified and sympathized with those struggling for self-determination on the Continent as well as in Scotland and Ireland—a sympathy linked in part to her awareness of the Jews’ history of being treated as aliens. For this reason Nathan Sznaider’s Jewish Memory and the Cosmopolitan Order provides a valuable framework for discussing Blind’s subject position, especially his appropriation of Anthony Appiah’s concept of “rooted cosmopolitanism” (618)

Sznaider’s observation that throughout much of their history, Jews were both a nation and cosmopolitan, living in a constant tension between particularism and universalism, also relates to two other late-Victorian debates. The first concerns nationalism and internationalism, which I outlined above. The second, related late-century debate concerns particularism and universalism. Sznaider writes that the Jewish experience “straddles the interstices of universal identifications and particular attachments,” and that cosmopolitanism “combines appreciation of difference and diversity with efforts to conceive of new democratic forms of political rule beyond the nation-state” (5) Blind was a child of the German Enlightenment who imbibed the totalizing ideas of Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Strauss, and Marx—and later Comte, Wollstonecraft, and J. S. Mill. And her own universalist ideals—concerning universal suffrage, equality of the sexes, the religion of humanity, and socialism—were shaped by them. Yet they were also productively complicated by her particular experiences of alienation—as a Jewish female, a sexual nonconformist, a political radical, and an expatriate. She understood that those who formulated universalist ideals often ignored the realities of race, class, and (in particular) gender. Her writing does not. Like “cosmopolitanism” as defined by Sznaider, it is “sensitive to historic cultural particularities, respecting the specific dignity and burden of a group, a people, a culture . . .” (6).

To link this overview of Blind’s political allegiances to our contemporary literary discourse, I argue that for Blind cosmopolitanism is not figured, to use Tanya Agathocleous and Jason Rudy’s terms, as “the false idealism of globalization and the cultural logic of neoimperialism,” but as “globalization’s critical edge, an ethos that attempts to encompass all humanity while remaining attentive to the pitfalls of humanism” (390). In Amanda Anderson’s usage, cosmopolitanism is an ethical and characterological stance intrinsic to the detached outlook of Victorian narrators and cultural critics. Blind, as Anderson argues about other Victorian writers, was “self-consciously pluralistic” (30) and politically “enabling” (4). Blind’s work is especially critical of the hierarchies of nationality, race, class and gender” that Lauren Goodlad and Julia Wright claim much Victorian literature mounts “comparatively inert” challenges to, or even embraces. Blind’s cosmopolitanism is always already in dialogue with issues of nationalism and imperialism. In this sense, her cosmopolitanism exists, again in Agathocleous and Rudy’s words, as “nationalism’s dialectical other” (392), contesting the imperialist forces underwriting its existence.

One example from Blind’s poetry will need to suffice here. Tricia Lootens argues that Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” helps identify the transatlantic poetess tradition as one that strives to convert women’s powerlessness to a form of extranational power. The Heather on Fire: A Tale of the Highland Clearances, published in the midst of the Crofters’ War of the 1880s, expresses this power. Crofters were the Scottish peasant farmers and fisherman who had earned a subsistence living from the land for generations; the war was fought with such bitter ferocity that the British government sent gunboats to the west coast of Scotland and stationed policemen and troops on the Hebridean islands. The conflict was rooted in the Highland Land Clearances that began in the eighteenth century and accelerated in the 1830s, the decade which is the setting of Blind’s poem. One of the most infamous mass evictions of a class of people in British history, the clearances were part of the transformation of the west of Britain from a paternalistic society based on ties of kinship to a capitalist one based on commercial and exploitative landlordism. Crofters were brutally evicted from their homes and property, first to make way for sheep grazing, then for hunting grounds for wealthy British and American sportsmen. In the preface to her poem, Blind emphasizes that the atrocities rendered in her narrative are historical, not imaginative, and that “the uprooting and transplantation of whole communities of Crofters from the straths and glens which they had tilled for so many generations must be regarded in the light of a national crime” (2). The Heather on Fire gives the clearances a local habitation and a name. Its 181 octave stanzas, all composed of heroic couplets and each ending with an Alexandrine line, tells the story of a family destroyed by actions of English landlords, one of whose agents boasts:, “of all these dirty huts the glen we’ll sweep, / And clear it for the fatted lowland sheep” (61).

I won’t discuss the poem at length here, or the ways in which it engaged contemporary Parliamentary debates about land reform (beyond noting that the poem appeared the same year that Gladstone introduced the contentious Irish Home Rule Bill in Parliament, marking the beginning of the end of British domination of Ireland). Instead I want to note the ways in which it was perceived by one of Blind’s closest friends, the pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown. He was particularly attuned to the ways in which Blind’s perspective as a rooted cosmopolitan—critical of the imperial designs and practices of empires, whether British, German or Russian—gave her a critical perspective on the clearances that native-born writers lacked or simply declined to exercise.

Brown’s comments on The Heather on Fire reflect his advocacy of her poetry, including his interventions on her behalf, as well as the ways in which her perspective as an expatriate engendered insights beyond those of her native-born contemporaries. On 13 April 1886, writing to his friend Marion Harry Alexander Spielmann (the art critic for the Pall Mall Gazette and editor of the Magazine of Art), Brown says that Blind’s poem on “the crofters . . . produced almost entirely in our house here in Manchester,” is about to be published. Then he praises the poem for going “deeply into the matter” before calling it “strange” that Scots writers and reformers like Carlyle and Henry Brougham (who helped pass the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 when he was Lord Chancellor) should “have been holding forth to spellbound listeners in Edinburgh and London and neither of them to have uttered (or shown that they knew) a word on the subject.” Brown suggests why: “so clearly do the English nation screen their peccadillos from too ardent glare of publicity” (English MS., Rylands Library University of Manchester). Brown wrote to Spielmann again on 22 April, thanking him for inserting a notice about Blind’s biography of Madame Roland in the Pall Mall Gazette and observing with bitter humor that “there is fear of such a small book being overlooked among the many other half-crown affairs which are devoted to impure actresses and mistresses of Royal Princes and others scarcely worthy to be written about” (English MS., Rylands Library University of Manchester). For Blind, the Highland Clearances represented the depradations inflicted by the English state on its one-time quasi-colony, and exemplified the abuses of imperial power. Indicting past imperial practices, she also created a narrative poem that constitutes an important instance of post-colonialism avant la letter.

Works Cited

Agathocleous, Tanya Agathocleous and Jason R. Rudy. “Victorian Cosmopolitans: Introduction.” Victorian Literature and Culture 38(2):389-397.

Anderson, Amanda. “Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity.” In Cheah, Pheng, and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998.Cheah and Robbins. 265-89.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Cosmopolitan Patriots.” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 3 (1997): 617-39.

Disraeli, Benjamin. “Conservative and Liberal Principles.” National Union 16 (1872): 9-11.

Blind, Mathilde. The Heather on Fire: A Tale of the Highland Clearances. London: Walter Scott, 1886.

Gagnier, Regenia Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to Whole, 1859–1920 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

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