Taking the notion of the ‘mechanic’ as its starting point, this chapter outlines how an interest in the mechanic and scientific aspects of speech production is a pervasive feature of Romantic-era treatments of spoken utterance. The chapter investigates the numerous contemporary senses of the term ‘mechanic’, to highlight these senses’ common concern with physical movement, whether of the human hands, a constructed machine, or the material world. It examines how Romantic innovations in the theory of speech production which present utterance as a form of motion – of bodies, of machines, and of matter itself – combine, engage with, and react to traditions of materialist philosophy and elocution teaching and explores how such studies of speech rely on blending knowledge-based fields of study with traditionally non-theoretical practices including medicine and elocution.

This chapter investigates how Percy Shelley’s poetry of speech draws on a Darwinian materialist understanding of the body and can be read alongside John Thelwall’s theory of rhythmus in its figuring of speech as unstoppable action. Focussing on Shelley’s later works, including A Defence of Poetry, Julian and Maddalo, Prometheus Unbound, and The Mask of Anarchy, this chapter draws out the ways that materialist and embodied models of speech production underpin Shelley’s figuring of poetry as a force of change, and allow him to blur the boundaries between art and science, aesthetics and politics, the internal and the external. It examines how such understandings of the communicative power of voice as a physical and material force that can be felt as action or movement challenge the notion that Shelley’s later poems are indicative of the failure of both poetry as a means of communication and utterance as a means of effecting change.

Prior to shaping literary depictions of a nature classed both wondrous and terrible, sublime discourse addressed uplifting, transporting encounters with the written word. Nicolas Boileau’s influential French translation of Longinus’ ancient treatise On the Sublime (ca. first century CE) restyled the branch of sublime discourse dedicated to discourse itself, suggesting that sublime literature is not elevated simply because it is complex or because it is marked by a high or lofty style. Rather sublime works of verbal art carry a peculiar charge, a charge or spark relayed to audiences taking in sublime textual encounters. This emphasis on a charged sublime encounter would underwrite prominent philosophical and aesthetic accounts of sublime nature penned by Kant, Wordsworth, Burke, and Keats. Such literary representations of sublime nature are famously ambivalent, with aesthetic renderings of earthquakes, fires, or floods bearing out fraught questions of agency. Kantian and Wordsworthian models of sublime nature suggest human agencies of mind transcend vast powers of nature. Burkean and Keatsian accounts of dread nature or astounding material sublimities ultimately humble humankind.

Chapter 2 explores the 1814 collaboration between Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley and extends scholarly attention to their travel journals, before discussing Frankenstein. Using the couple’s shared journal as a way of marking their convergence and redefinition of themselves from a singular identity to a shared pluralism, the journal’s entries witness a shared understanding – a sympathetic concord – between the couple. This close examination of the collaborative process indicates a willingness to assimilate and accommodate the other’s sentiments and formal constructs. While the narratives of these entries show the completion of each other’s thoughts and a reliance upon readerly circulation, the entries’ form also gestures to their defined plural identity through a vocal blending. With its sustained focus on the sympathetic communities developed by the couple and increased literary production as a result of this lived communal experience, I suggest that the Shelley collaboration ultimately shapes the narrative form of Frankenstein. The novel’s layered narrative of sympathetic texts makes possible a view of the collaborative compilation of the novel as a means of social reform: a view of society that relies upon the affective bonds of sympathy with a community of people, whether imaginative or genuine.

This chapter investigates the ‘cosmopolitan Gothic’ collection of German ghost stories brought together in Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès’s French translation Fantasmagoriana (1812) and Mary Shelley’s English Gothic masterpiece Frankenstein (1818; 1831). The first section of the chapter explores the German provenance of Fantasmagoriana as these ghost stories travelled between European cultures in the early nineteenth century. The second section examines the historical context of popular magic-lantern shows and storytelling, in particular the phenomenon of the phantasmagoria, musing on its possible influence on the famous ghost storytelling contest at the Villa Diodati in June 1816. The final section considers the influence of particular ghost stories in Fantasmagoriana on the composition of Mary Shelley’s novel.

This chapter surveys the literary achievements of the group of writers who gathered together on the banks of Lake Geneva in the Summer of 1816: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley; Percy Bysshe Shelley; John Polidori; and Lord Byron. Beginning with the famous ghost storytelling competition proposed by Byron, it considers the extent to which Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, while located in the earlier tradition of Radcliffean romance, forged new directions for the Gothic mode through its graphic realisation of corporeal and textual monstrosity. While it forces us to reconsider notions of origin and influence among the group, Polidori’s The Vampyre, the chapter argues, bequeathed to the Gothic its own ‘monstrous progeny’. Engaging with, and thoroughly revising, the earlier poetry of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley and Byron, for their part, set in place some of the distinctive features of second-generation Romanticism, even if the works that they produced during this period force us to interrogate the critical distinction between the ‘Romantic’ and the ‘Gothic’ itself.

In 1889, the end of the decade in which all the major literary societies dedicated to poets were formed, Andrew Lang bemoaned their impact: ‘They all demonstrate that people have not the courage to study verse in solitude and for their proper pleasure, men and women need confederates in this adventure.’ This shift in reading practices took place during an important decade for poetry. It was the decade during which some of the era’s most renowned poets died, including Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It was the decade in which the relevance of poetry was increasingly questioned, as vernacular English literature was being claimed as having the capacity to be studied ‘scientifically’ like its sibling rival philology. It was also the decade that witnessed extended debate over the establishment of university Chairs of English Literature. In this context, this chapter examines the establishment and overwhelming popularity of literary societies in the 1880s, tracing their movement away from the ethos of a scholarly gentleman’s club towards more democratic, inclusive and experimental literary associations that tangibly impacted the reading of poetry in the 1880s.