The flourishing of the essay as a protean literary form in an age marked by growing interest in essaying systematic knowledge reflects a tension within eighteenth-century empiricism. Two divergent subgenres emerged from this tension. The conversational essay, first, drew upon a Montaignian tradition rooted in scepticism, dialogue, and performative rationality; these essays were associated with a form of pragmatic empiricism at ease with the idea of human knowledge as intersubjectively constituted in the public domain. On the other hand, the systematic essays of the Enlightenment, spurred on by John Locke’s attempt to establish ‘order’ in intellectual inquiry, deployed the essay as an instrument for establishing Universal Truth and what Leibniz termed ‘demonstrative knowledge’. In considering the epistemology of the eighteenth-century essay in Britain, this chapter explores not only how this bifurcated empiricism influenced the development of the essay, but also the ways in which the essay reconstituted empiricism itself.

Coleridge's plea comes in the midst of an 1804 notebook entry that characteristically combines self-mortification with self-justification. The poet confesses to ‘Drunkenness’ and ‘sensuality’, but begs his future reader to consider, in mitigation, that he ‘never loved Evil for its own sake’. ‘Charity’, he suggests, is the prerequisite for interpreting the ‘Truth’ of his life's work. The passage presents Coleridge at his most strategically disarming, yet it would be wrong to dismiss his appeal as wishful thinking or crafty manipulation. The request for trust, the assumption of generosity on the part of his reader, is no mere sleight of hand. By refusing to subordinate friendship and charity to an abstract idea of truth, Coleridge trades on a network of romantic ideas concerning the nature of the relationships between truth, charity, and friendship. This network, which forms the central interest of this study, can be characterised broadly as an interest in the interdependence of truth and intersubjectivity. More concisely, and contentiously, it can be described as a kind of pragmatism.

In choosing the last descriptor, I am not claiming that the writers discussed here are essentially pragmatists: as I argue below, the growth of naturalism in the nineteenth-century forms a formidable barrier between the romantics and pragmatists such as William James and John Dewey. When, for example, Coleridge defines the ‘Ideal’ as the ‘union of the Universal and the Individual’, he subjects the possibility of redescription to a transcendental ideal in a way that is quite alien to pragmatism.

Framing the background to this book is a question that has dogged modern thought since the Enlightenment: can the critique of reason be carried out within reason? Hume's answer to this question is no, but the cost of this refusal is the severance of his reasoning, reflective self from his everyday self whenever the former proves troublesome. More ambitiously, Kant and Hegel attempt systematically to redefine the basis of thought in light of Hume's ‘no’. Though broadly in line with this project, the romantic endeavour to consecrate the other of reason in the domain of an aesthetic and imaginative conception of ‘truth’ is overruled by the Hegelian radicalisation of otherness as negativity. As a consequence, Hegel's damning verdict upon idealised, subject-centred reason, handed down, via Marx and Nietzsche, to modern theory, criticism, and historicism, is revisited today upon the romantic topos of self and community.

The present study is, in part, an attempt to redraw the image of reason upon which this judgement is made. At its heart is the claim that the subject-centred model gives an incomplete picture of the full range of Enlightenment rationality and romantic expressiveness. As Habermas argues, early nineteenth-century culture develops a language of decentred, communicative rationality that forms a counterdiscourse to the hypostasised conceptions of idealism. In Britain, this counterdiscourse emerges from within the linguistic and anthropological currents in late eighteenth-century empiricism.

Keats remains, for many readers, the epistolary poet par excellence. Few today would countenance Paul de Man's claim that the importance of Keats's letters is easily ‘exaggerated’; indeed, it is more common to find critics insisting on their centrality to interpreting his poems. In particular, the letter Keats writes from Hampstead in late December 1817 to his brothers George and Tom, contains what must be one of the most critically overdetermined passages of prose in English literature: the rumination on ‘Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’. Like Keats's later denigration of the literal as antithetical to the ‘life of allegory’, this abdication from ‘fact and reason’ can be depicted as contesting a second, important sense of ‘correspondence’: that of agreement or accord. By questioning the literal foundation of meaning and the factual status of belief, Keats undermines an empirical topos whereby correspondence is held to be the key relation underpinning meaning and truth – respectively, between the referring sign and its referent, and between the idea and its object. Through the ‘correspondence’ of letters, then, Keats subverts the ‘correspondence’ of epistemological harmony.

This anti-epistemic turn in Keats's writing has been interpreted in a number of ways: as evidence of a nascent Neo-Platonism imbibed from Benjamin Bailey's bookshelves; as the revival of eighteenth-century theories of sympathetic imagination modelled on Shakespeare; and as evidence of a developing engagement with Hazlitt's theories of art, knowledge and power.

Writing ‘On Life’ in Florence in late 1819, Shelley disavows the dogmatic materialism of his youth and, encouraged by the diverse lessons of Hume, Drummond, and Tooke, together with over a year's intensive reading of Plato, outlines an approach to experience and reality altogether less grounded and logocentric:

On one hand, this passage appears strikingly performative. Shelley's own writing, the self-consciously rhetorical use (rather than ‘misuse’) of words and signs, might itself be seen as an ‘education of error’. Remarkably tenacious in this centrifugal action, however, is the centripetal function of philosophy, which has ‘much work yet remaining’ in monitoring the relationship between the ‘centre’ and ‘circumference’ of human life.

In his celebrated letter of March 1801 to Thomas Poole, Coleridge portrays himself as a man who, on the threshold of a new century, is undergoing a radical (if not quite sudden) transformation in philosophical outlook. Interleaving the language of violent revolution with the rhetoric of revelation, he writes:

The familiarity of this performance attests to its success: since Coleridge wrote his letter, the picture of his thought as a flight from a dogmatic materialist associationism to an equally dogmatic, ‘organic’ idealism has weathered well. Underpinned by the early work of Shawcross, Muirhead, Wellek, and Snyder, the scholarly consensus on Coleridge's changing views on the relationship between truth, thought, and language remained remarkably stable throughout the twentieth century. Its persistence has ensured that even today at the shoulder of the image of the Young Coleridge – Pantisocrat, Hartleian, and linguistic radical – there continues to hover the presence of Coleridge the metaphysician: Trinitarian, Kantian, and apostle of the Logos. The sense of inevitability that clings to this conversion narrative, further heightened by an air of political apostasy, is such that even those who argue that Coleridge never quite manages to disentangle himself from the unsettling implications of Hartley's thought continue to chart his career as one that slips beguilingly from uneasy materialism into disingenuous transcendentalism.

Rorty's call for ‘a rhetoric that romanticizes the pursuit of intersubjective, unforced agreement’ (my emphasis) reflects his view that pragmatism extends some of the key ideas of romanticism. This in turn raises the question: which ideas? Kathleen Wheeler characterises the antirationalistic strain of thought linking romanticism, pragmatism, and deconstruction as a thoroughgoing rejection of dualism in all its guises. Rorty himself is more cautious, picking his way between the possibilities of redescription implicit in what he identifies as ‘the romantic notion of man as self-creative’, and the equally romantic but (for him) less laudable aspiration that the vocabulary for that redescription be final, grounded in the noncontingent foundations of a ‘transcendental constitution’. Consequently, Rorty argues, although Coleridge, Shelley, and Wordsworth may have taught William James and John Dewey that truth is a human creation, the pragmatists had to find out for themselves that creation is not the act of an individual (or universal) consciousness, but is embedded within social interaction and communication. Habermas's argument, in turn, cuts between Wheeler's inclusiveness and Rorty's caution. His articulation of a romantic counterdiscourse of communicative rationality unsettles the assumption that romantic writers have no way of expressing the idea of self-creation without hypostasising it as an ideal. In subsequent chapters, I trace a distinctly British and empirical form of this counterdiscourse through the work of Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge.

In Chapter 1, I argued that the metacritical ‘cramps’ of modern romantic commentary are allayed by incorporating the ‘romanticised’ pragmatisms of Rorty, Habermas, and Taylor, and registered some helpful ideas concerning the relationship between truth and interpretation provided by Quine, Putnam, and Davidson. Pursuing this line of inquiry has meant delaying until now any further exploration of the connections between pragmatism and romanticism. In particular, it has meant deferring any assessment of the extent to which pragmatic or holistic attitudes to questions of truth and meaning already figure within romantic literature. While, at first glance, the latter might appear to be an unpromising enterprise, the very suspicions held by critics and historians regarding the hidden agendas of modern pragmatism would suggest otherwise. If, as Lentricchia and others have claimed, there is an underlying complicity between ‘romantic’ and ‘pragmatic’ worldviews, then it is not unreasonable to suppose that a strain of pragmatic thinking is already active within romantic culture. Given this, what is required at this stage is an explanation of why the attempt to ‘pragmatise’ the romantics should appear counterintuitive.

Accordingly, in this chapter I argue that such an account involves making a clear distinction between two empirical traditions within (and against) which British romantic writers work. The first of these is a doctrine of representational or epistemological empiricism that dates back to Locke and reaches its nadir in Hume's Treatise of Human Nature (1739–41).