Depending on your perspective, this volume’s title might appear either oxymoronic or simply redundant. If your Romanticism tends to be disdainful, even phobic, of popularity; if it is self-reflexive and critical, full of obstinate questioning of sense and outward things; if it is dedicated to reforming as well as experimenting on the public’s taste, then fandom might look to you like Romanticism’s very opposite: fandom after all marks the faddish and the popular; we often characterize it as embracing its objects with reckless abandon or unthinking absorption. If on the other hand your Romanticism involves primarily the overflow of powerful feeling, an exuberance recollected perhaps somewhat ashamedly in moments of tranquility, a going out of our own nature in search of an ideal other, you might ask what kind of fandom worth the name wouldn’t be deemed Romantic.

Celebrity has become something of a hot topic within Romantic studies, with a wave of studies building on groundbreaking articles and books by Peter Manning, Susan Wolfson, Judith Pascoe, and Karen Swann, and including recent work by Tom Mole, Ghislaine McDayter,David Higgins, Clara Tuite, myself and many others. There have been, too, in recent years several excellent collections of essays examining the fan cultures built up around individual writers: Frances Wilson’s Byromania and Deidre Lynch’s Janeites, for example. This volume aims to continue the conversation this scholarship has begun, but asks what different questions or insights arise if we shift the emphasis from the celebrity to the fan. The essays in this volume use this shift in emphasis to open up alternative views of the history of reading, and they take up the problem of fandom as a methodological challenge that requires new thinking about how to recover and analyze varieties of audience response. That is, the focus here is not on the topics of traditional reception history: the development of reputation, the strategies by which texts are marketed or distributed, a legacy of changing judgments or expectations or interpretations. Nor is the focus on cults of a particular author as reflections or betrayals of the reception that author might imagine. Rather, these are essays about the sometimes very ordinary, often very quirky activities of fans, though they show, unavoidably, the complex interrelation and interaction—mutually influential but not mutually determining—between forms of response and the forms that inspire such response in the first place. These essays reveal Romanticism’s publics as highly complicated, heterogeneous, inventive and unpredictable.

Nicola Watson’s essay makes clear both the diversity of modes of fandom in the period and how little these fan practices actually conform to some of our frequent assumptions about the period. Watson’s topic is the practice of reading writers in situ—touring locations associated with writers or their characters and experiencing those scenes through the lens of one’s literary experience, often with book in hand. Her essay takes as a case study the cultural tourism of the socialite Lady Frances Shelley—a distant relative of the poet, “well-read yet unintellectual, and a crashing snob”—whose encounters with writers and the places they made famous are richly detailed in nearly half a century’s worth of letters and diaries. While we now typically see such tourism as a middle-brow if not mass-cultural phenomenon, Watson explains by contrast how Lady Shelley’s fandom is in fact dogged by an “anxiety of readership” tied to her elite class position. Though it anticipates later throngs of tourists in the Lake District in the nineteenth century or to places like Stratford or Haworth today, Lady Shelley’s reading of landscapes and locales reflects an effort to “distinguish the elite tourist-reader from an otherwise worryingly large and undifferentiated mass readership” (Watson).

The social distinctions Watson turns up in her analysis of this particular reader’s fan practices have suggestive implications for our understanding of the relationships between readers and books more generally in the Romantic period and, indeed, in the present. Watson uncovers a contest between two modes of literary fandom driving the cultural tourism she investigates: on the one hand, an “author-centered” mode “organized towards visiting, being, or envisioning the author;” on the other hand, a “fiction-centered” mode through which the tourist-reader uses a particular landscape to project himself or herself imaginatively into a narrative, or imaginatively to project the reality of fictional scenes. If the author-centered mode of fandom suggests the writer and reader are on equal footing, Watson argues, the fiction-centered mode of fandom “connoted a propensity to confuse the real and the fictional, a dangerous and risible lack of sophistication which contemporary discourse typically associated with the new mass readership” (Watson). As Watson observes, this is a distinction still active in the gap between visiting someplace like Austen’s Chawton or the Keats House and a theme park like Dickens’ World. Yet I might add that these two modes of fandom, of course, draw on and feed back into types of fantasy and identification possibly present, and overlapping, in any given experience of losing oneself in a book. Watson’s discussion ultimately, then, points us to the spillover—in both directions—between the way we experience imaginative worlds in reading and the cultural practices through which we seek to extend those experiences into reality.

While all of the essays in this volume bring out fandom’s richly social and even communal dimensions, it’s also a paradox of fandom that the typicality of any given fan’s pleasures must lie in their idiosyncrasy. Clara Tuite’s case history of Stendhal’s momentous meeting with Byron in 1816 builds a strong argument both for the individuality of Stendhal’s response to Byron (it’s a quintessentially Stendhalian response) and for its representative status with regard to Byronic fandom in particular and modern mass-cultural fandom, perhaps modern masculinity, more generally. Floored when he realizes he’s sharing an opera box with the poet he idolizes, Stendhal is at once thrilled and deeply embarrassed, but in Tuite’s account this is not just another story of enthrallment to Byron’s seductive figure. Indeed, part of what’s so intriguing about this exchange is the uneasy, competitive, and erotically charged triangular relationship that governs it— Stendhal/Napoleon/Byron—with both Stendhal and Byron engaged in an on-going and unstable process of identity-formation through the public performance of ambivalent identification with figures also engaged in such an on-going and unstable process of self-invention. As Watson does also, Tuite emphasizes that the fan acts in ways not always scripted or anticipated by the author, but here the fan’s independence takes on a more Barthesian quality. In Tuite’s provocative argument, fandom “spectacularizes the transformative agency of the reader, producing new circuits of exchange that empower reading and reception, and endow them with new pleasures and sensations. Far from entailing an exclusively passive position—in docile thrall to the sovereignty of author and text—fandom can be seen to transform a traditional textual economy of active and passive, thereby enabling reception as a mode of delirious productivity—proliferating often disobedient and indiscreet disclosures” (Tuite). But Tuite painstakingly shows as well how Stendhal’s emotion and its display are conditioned by and as the social ritual of a very specific time and place, the immediately post-Napoleonic moment of the encounter between these two recent exiles, one British and one French, at the opera in Italy.

Crucial to Tuite’s analysis of the affective dimension of Stendhal’s fandom is the category of the “impulse,” on the edge point between “the desire to act and the act itself,” and ambiguously located between body and mind (Tuite). Stendhal’s experience of fandom as unwilled feeling chimes not only with accounts of present-day fandom but also with the language of other nineteenth-century accounts of fan feeling: Elizabeth Barrett Browning would write in the 1840s of her own “impulses to lionizing,” for example (1:145). As Tuite suggests in linking Stendhal’s “impulse” to the older literary-historical and philosophical category of the “sensation”—important in Stendhal’s thinking about love, memory and emotion— Stendhal’s fascination with his feeling on this occasion might be assimilated to the entire complex project through which Romantic writers work to refashion and revalue eighteenth-century understandings of the relation of emotion and knowledge, producing a new “history or science of feelings” (Wordsworth, Note to “The Thorn,” Lyrical Ballads 289). (We might, for example, read Tuite’s discussion of impulse and sensation in Stendhal’s fan feeling against Noel Jackson’s recent work on sensation in British Romantic poetry: Tuite sees Stendhal pushing sensation away from scientific knowledge while Jackson sees the two as more closely allied in British Romantic thought [ Jackson 1-2]). Tracing Stendhal’s shifting recollections and rewritings of the encounter with Byron over the years, Tuite zeros in on what these rewritings tell us about “that most Stendhalian concern with the fraught interrelation between desire and memory”—a concern so central to Romantic writing generally. As I have suggested elsewhere, Romantic fandom turns out in this way to be surprisingly close to the dynamics of the Romantic lyric, with its focus on memory and memorialization and its attempted coordination between deeply personal and transpersonal feeling. Just as the Romantic lyric is supposed to provide a passage between an almost incommunicable meaning and public meaning, the fan’s response is felt at once as uniquely individual experience and as shared or social experience. Is it possible really to imagine oneself the lone fan of anything? Fandom is perhaps always something we think of as shared, or at least as something we want to share, even as our embarrassment about our fandom speaks not just to its excesses of feeling but to the way we take it as revealing deeply personal truth. It’s too much sharing.

Mark Schoenfield’s engaging contribution to this volume, “Byron in the Satirist,” analyzes a much less adulatory—if perhaps no less obsessed—response to Byron. Schoenfield teases out the complex political and cultural rhetorics through which the journal refracts the figure of Byron in its reviews, its social satire, and its verbal and visual parodies, starting with its 1807 review of Byron’s Hours of Idleness. Animating this interaction in large part is the personal animus between Byron and the Satirist writer Hewson Clarke, who was at Cambridge with Byron and for whom Byron represented not only a rival but the (frustrating) epitome of aristocratic privilege, a privilege Clarke and The Satirist will target in attacks on what they brand Whiggish indolence. Schoenfield demonstrates how even at this early stage in Byron’s career, the Satirist’s attacks function to deflate, by redeploying, Byron’s figuration of his own fame, reflecting back to the poet and his audience “the fragility of his public self.” In other words, despite being captivated by Byron’s figure, Clarke is hardly a fan of the poet, but both Clarke and Clarke’s Byron write with an anxious eye on the poet’s real or potential audience of devoted admirers, the “real” Byron’s claims to nonchalance or indifference notwithstanding. In Schoenfield’s nice summary, the journal thus influentially produces “a competing version of Byronic celebrity to that produced by Byron.”

Schoenfield’s essay is perhaps most exciting in the way it shows us the vexed interdependence of periodical writing and poetic production in the first decades of the nineteenth century, a mutually bound relationship whose antagonistic dynamic is captured by the reversibility of these hostilities: as Schoenfield explains, “who binds whom is determined by an economy of cultural production.” The antagonism of satire in this way proves suggestively parallel to the mutually bound and sometimes very antagonistic relationship between fans and the objects of their interest. The close connection Schoenfield examines between poetic production and periodical culture reflects, of course, the position of each within a rapidly developing literary marketplace, but also, especially in Byron’s case, the way a kind of seriality was emerging in the publication of poetry (even before the Oriental Tales) that lent itself to sustained engagement with and by the seriality of magazine publication. If periodicals like The Satirist require a Byron as an organizing figure for their own reading of culture, we’re also coming more and more to see how powerful a role the periodicals played not just in the reception of Byron but in shaping the poet’s self-representation.

While Schoenfield, Tuite and Watson each describe how particular individuals responded to famous writers and their works, Brewer’s essay on the craze for Pierce Egan’s Life in London asks a somewhat different question about fandom: how to account for the “phenomenon” of a book like Life in London? As Brewer recounts, it’s not just that the book itself sparked a craze, but that it gave rise to so many also wildly popular imitations, theatrical adaptations and spin-offs, and even cross-merchandising (clothiers pushed Tom and Jerry fashions, for example). Histories of reading and reception have a tough time making convincing sense of such reader response: the mania inspired by Life in London may stand as a particularly inexplicable instance, but, as Brewer points out, we still need to develop critical languages or frameworks through which we might approach this kind of fandom productively. Brewer’s brilliant solution is radically to shift the scale of analysis: rather than situate the response to Life in London within ideological or cultural patterns mapped through broad swaths of literary or social history, or even the more limited “Regency culture,” Brewer’s analysis goes micro. Building on Franco Morretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees, Brewer’s essay literally maps the publication, adaptation and reception of Life in London down to the month-by-month level of the book’s serial appearance and down to the street-by-street level of the particular London neighborhoods where the characters go on their larks, where theaters stage adaptations, or where we have evidence of particular reader response (including police reports of overexcited readers acting out Tom and Jerry’s sprees). The results are astonishing: not only do we, in reading this essay and looking at these maps, experience the temporality of reception in an entirely new way, but we see in new terms how and why this craze played out as it did across forms and media. As in all the essays in this volume, we get a powerful sense of the peculiarly mediated space fandom occupies. We also, excitingly, get a new sense of how we might understand the history of reading and theatergoing through the problematic of form.

Indeed, each of these essays describes scenes of fandom that come very quickly to belong emphatically to the past. Travelling down the Rhine in the 1850s, Lady Shelley, Watson tells us, finds herself unable to re-experience her own earlier feelings of romance amid these scenes, even though she keeps her copy of Childe Harold open beside her. Stendhal’s encounter with Byron may set the stage for later developments in his life and his writing, but almost on the scene, in Tuite’s account, it is already subject to the revising and corroding action of memory. The Satirist’s exchanges with Byron set in motion recurring tropes in the poet’s reception, but as Schoenfield explains, these exchanges belong to an early moment in Byron’s career, before the full appearance of “Byronism” and its transformative effects on the poet’s public persona and on the literary market itself. Brewer explains that the craze for Life in London faded as quickly as it came on; by the middle of the century, even those who’d been swept up in it in their youth professed themselves mystified by the book’s popularity. This pattern isn’t just about aging or the passage of time: what it reveals is the way fandom is always historically situated, always tied to specific and shifting cultural as well as individual situations. In the Romantic period in particular, the fading of forms of fandom indexes the rapid and uneven development and transformation of institutions of writing, reading, and publication across the period. The essays in this volume show how an analysis of fandom can limn these changes in provocative and revelatory fashion. They point the way to more work on Romantic-era readers and reading practices that needs to be done, and they suggest some of the innovative and varied methodologies scholars might put to use in charting this underexplored but very rich terrain.