Poetry as News—On The Morning Post’s Publication of Wordsworth’s “To Toussaint L’Ouverture”
By Kiel Shaub, University of Southern California
Page 2 of London’s Morning Post for February 2, 1803. Wordsworth’s poem, “To Toussaint L’Ouverture,” is printed in the top right-hand corner. Newspaper image © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).
Prompted by the 2018 publication of Julius Scott’s 1986 dissertation, The Common Wind, which examines the dissemination of news among African diasporic communities at the time of the Haitian Revolution, this visual exhibition, consisting of page 2 of London’s Morning Post for February 2, 1803, underscores the importance of the newspaper as the original medium of publication for William Wordsworth’s sonnet “To Toussaint L’Ouverture.” Seeing Wordsworth’s poem as it was originally published allows us to reframe it as a response to, and indeed even a part of, the very dissemination of news (understood as emanating from a Haitian center rather than a British) that Scott’s work describes.
Indeed, the poem’s content, occasioned by Napoleon’s betrayal, capture, and imprisonment of Toussaint Louverture, the leading General of the Saint-Domingue slave rebellion, is among the most “newsworthy” that Wordsworth would ever publish. At the same time, the conjunction of the poem with the quotidian matters of daily news provides a rare counterpoint to our typical understanding of and critical approach to Romantic Authorship vis-à-vis Wordsworth.
Printed in the top-right corner of the page, the only marks of authorship are the initials “W.L.D.” From these initials alone the name of Wordsworth would not even have crossed the reader’s mind. So the poem as originally printed is essentially anonymous. Beyond the lack of ascertainable authorship, its decentered placement forces the poem to compete with the bustling world of international, commercial, and entertainment news of the day.
Classifieds fill the left-hand columns. Among them, most of the advertisements relate to fashion: “New, Elegant, and Fashionable Dresses”; the latest style in hair dressing, boasting of “ingenious ornaments with hair only”; a Master Tailor’s “Scientific Plan for Measuring and Cutting Clothes.” Natural remedies are also on offer, most strikingly Dr. Edwards’s “Globular Herbal Nipple Cases, for the cure of SORE, and recovery of LOST NIPPLES.” One young man seeks extra work in a counting house, while a financially distressed (though genteel) couple has placed an ad beseeching the “Charity and Humanity” of those in better circumstances. Entertainment news and notices of social events about town also take up a large portion of the page. That very evening a “Ventriloquist” would be performing at Mr. Dulau’s Library. Thursday, readers are invited to attend an exhibition featuring “an Epitome of the Atrocities committed in a neighboring State, during the Revolution,” on display at the “late” Star and Garter Tavern, Pall Mall. Notices of the plays on at Drury Lane and Covent Garden, sports betting, a report on the queen’s “card party,” and an identification of “the names of the persons who sunk into the Serpentine river, on Sunday,” all vie for the reader’s attention.
Yet none of this information is placed so centrally as the latest installment of an ongoing essay series on the topic of the conflict in “St. Domingo.” The “two opinions” represented in that essay, contrasting the proprietary and imperial interests, display with striking clarity not only the breadth of mainstream opinion on this central (literally) issue in British life, but also how marginalized (literally) the revolutionary perspective expressed by Wordsworth’s tribute must have been at that time. What we find here as a spatial arrangement on the newspaper page, may also serve as an indication of contemporaneous values in British society. The “common wind,” it seems, only blew in one direction.
About the Author
Kiel Shaub, Ph.D. is the Academic Curator for the EXL Lab at the University of Southern California. Kiel’s literary research, focusing on Caribbean studies, transatlantic Romanticism, aesthetics, critical theory, and the history of science, has appeared or is forthcoming in Romanticism, The Journal of Aesthetic Education, the Keats-Shelley Journal, William Blake’s Gothic Imagination, and Female Voices—1770-1830.