For some time now we have recognized that the \u00abeastern\u00bb or \u00aboriental\u00bb verse narratives of the early nineteenth century were more than just popular, fashionable entertainment.Writing broadly about the phenomenon of Romantic orientalism in 1994, Marilyn Butler observed that as \u00abBritain transformed itself into an Empire
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Stick to the East; \u2013 the oracle, Sta\u00ebl [Madame De Sta\u00ebl] told me it was the only poetical policy.The North, South, and West, have all been exhausted; but from the East, we have nothing but [Robert Southey\u2019s] unsaleables \u2013 and these he has contrived to spoil, by adopting only their most outrageous fictions. . . . The little I have done in that way is merely a \u2018voice in the wilderness\u2019 for you; and, if it has had any success, that also will prove that the public are orientalizing, and pave the path for you.[BYRON 1974, vol. 3, p. 101]\n
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Leask begin his chapter on Byron by commenting astutely on this letter.\u00abByron speaks like a Levantine or East India merchant who has tapped a lucrative course of raw materials in a newly opened up Orient, which he feels will makes a splash on the home market\u00bb.\u00abByron\u2019s advice\u00bb, Leask continues, \u00abthat the two entrepreneurs could only benefit from the negative example of Robert Southey [in Thalaba the Destroyer<\/em>of 1801 and The Curse of Kehama<\/em> of 1810], would continue to pay off\u00bb [LEASK 1992, pp. 13-14].Of course Byron himself was only indirectly and paradoxically a literary entrepreneur:he refused to accept money from the unprecedented sales of Childe Harold<\/em> and the \u00abEastern Tales\u00bb, although these sales generated huge profits for his publisher, John Murray.But he does write as a fellow entrepreneur to Moore, who entertained no such aristocratic detachment from making money out of poetry and who labored during a substantial part of his career under the burden of a distinctive kind of debt.Moore had been appointed Admirality Registrar at Bermuda in 1803. Soon bored with this colonial appointment, he turned his duties over to a deputy and returned to London.When the deputy was later discovered to have embezzled a substantial amount of money and left his post in 1818, Moore was held responsible.This all took place the year following the initial publication of Lalla Rookh<\/em>, but it nonetheless throws into relief the conditions and circumstances under which Moore made his most ambitious incursion into the literary market. Whatever Lalla Rookh<\/em> meant to him in terms of its relation to contemporary politics, its significance as a commercial enterprise could hardly have been \u2013 or have become \u2013 more exciting.If the cause of Irish independence speaks through his version of \u00abOriental Romance\u00bb, so does the cause of Moore\u2019s own professional independence and cultural credibility. \u00a0<\/p>\n […]the state of distress to which England was reduced, in that dismal year, by the exhausting effects of the series of wars she had just then concluded, and the general embarrassment of all classes, both agricultural and commercial, rendered it a juncture the least favourable that could be conceived for the first launch into print of so light and costly a venture as Lalla Rookh.[MOORE 1862, p. 4]\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Moore\u2019s gesture raises a range of questions.Given the political thematics of \u00abThe Veiled Prophet\u00bb and \u00abThe Fire-worshippers\u00bb, why would Moore apologize for \u00abso light and costly a venture\u00bb? Are we to assume that the Messrs. Longman were oblivious to the \u00abdouble application\u00bb of these narratives?And how does the earnest English patriotism enacted here square with the Irish nationalism allegorized, most evidently, in \u00abThe Fire-worshippers\u00bb? Is Moore reconstructing a version not only of the Lalla Rookh<\/em> venture but of his entire career that idealizes the basic tension in his literary identity \u2013 that offers an Irish nationalist poet more determined to seduce than to challenge the British establishment? [1]<\/a>\u00a0Moore\u2019s Preface originally appeared in the 1819 6-volume collected edition of his Works<\/em>. It was reprinted with slight modifications in the 10-volume Complete<\/em> Poetical Works<\/em> of 1841.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Bibliography<\/strong><\/p>\n For some time now we have recognized that the \u00abeastern\u00bb or \u00aboriental\u00bb verse narratives of the early nineteenth century were more than just popular, fashionable entertainment.Writing broadly about the phenomenon of Romantic orientalism in 1994, Marilyn Butler observed that as \u00abBritain transformed itself into an Empire<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\nIt is hardly surprising, therefore, that the Preface Moore eventually constructs for Lalla Rookh<\/em> places far more emphasis on the cultural and economic dimension of literary capital than on the commercial, military, and political terms of British colonialism, either in India or in Ireland.Moore represents his negotiations with Longman & Co., through which he was offered the remarkable advance of 3,000 guineas on the sales of a poem he was only beginning to imagine, as a drama of personal and professional risk, labor, and triumph.I want to look in detail at how this drama unfolds \u2013 first in Moore\u2019s Preface, then in the frame fiction of Lalla Rookh<\/em> itself.
\nMoore opens the Preface with the claim that he \u00abwas induced to attempt a Poem upon some Oriental subject\u00bb and \u00abopened\u00bb a \u00abnegotiation [\u2026] with the Messrs. Longman\u00bb for its publication \u00ababout the years 1812\u00bb [Moore 1862, p. 3].So Moore begins his prefatory drama in the year in which the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold\u2019s Pilgrimage<\/em> gave orientalist poetry a new kind of claim on the attention and book-buying inclinations of Regency readers. There was, Moore continues, \u00abno decisive result\u00bb from his negotiations with Longman until \u00aba year or two after\u00bb when \u00aban old friend of mine, Mr Perry, kindly offered to lend me the aid of his advice and presence in the interview which I was about to hold with the Messrs. Longman, for the arrangement of mutual terms\u00bb [Moore , p. 3].\u00abMr Perry\u00bb is James Perry, editor of The Morning Chronicle<\/em>, who seems to have known that John Murray had already offered Moore a two thousand pound advance and believed that a poem like Lalla Rookh<\/em> might attract an even higher initial investment from competitive London publishers.With \u00abMr Perry\u00bb now onstage, Moore proceeds with his reenactment of the interview with Longman, complete with quoted dialogue \u2013 and with flamboyant emphasis on what Perry is made to characterize as \u00ab\u2019the largest price that has been given, in our day, for such a work\u2019\u00bb:\u00ab \u2019That was,\u2019 answered the Messrs. Longman [who speak as a chorus at this moment, literally with one voice], \u00ab\u2019three thousand guineas\u2019\u00bb [MOORE, p. 3].
\nMoore further elaborates this \u00abtransaction\u00bb between \u00abTrade and Poesy\u00bb by having his friend Perry take \u00abthe romantic view\u00bb that, although Longman \u00abhad never yet seen a single line of the Poem\u00bb, three thousand guineas was a fair price \u00abas a tribute to reputation already acquired\u00bb [MOORE, p. 3]. The term \u00abromantic\u00bb is interesting here.Moore embraces it more directly as he concludes the scene of negotiation:\u00abto the honour and glory of Romance, \u2013 as well on the publisher\u2019s side as the poet\u2019s, \u2013 this very generous view of the transaction was, without any difficulty, acceded to, and the firm agreed, before we separated, that I was to receive three thousand guineas for my Poem\u00bb. I know of no other instance in early nineteenth-century writing where commercial and aesthetic interests are made to converge so interdependently, all under the sign of \u00abRomance.\u00bb
\nAnd Moore is by no means done with his prefatory fable of mutual advantage.As he began the actual writing of Lalla Rookh<\/em>, we are told, \u00aba strong desire not wholly to disappoint this \u2018auguring hope,\u2019 became almost a substitute for inspiration\u00bb [MOORE, p. 3].Moore\u2019s allusion here to Pompey\u2019s vaunt in Act 2, scene 1 of Antony and Cleopatra<\/em> may be an anxious, or ironic, comment on his own imperious ambitions.So, after making some progress in composition, \u00abI wrote to report the state of the work to the Messrs. Longman, adding, that I was now most willing and ready, should they desire it, to submit the manuscript for their consideration\u00bb.Longman\u2019s reply to Moore\u2019s offer is framed as a testimony to his combined literary and moral integrity:\u00ab We are certainly impatient for the perusal of the Poem; but solely for our gratification.Your sentiments are always honourable\u00bb. This affirmation enables Moore to extend the self-justifying logic of the Preface to include aspects of his poetic identity regarded in some circles as less than \u00abhonourable\u00bb:\u00ab I continued to pursue my task for another year, being likewise occasionally occupied with the Irish Melodies\u00bb.
\nLongman\u2019s generous response to Moore\u2019s anxieties also enables Moore to link Lalla Rookh<\/em> to a broader context of imperialist war in terms that have to be read as provocatively ironic.In the year after Waterloo, having written enough of Lalla Rookh<\/em> to put himself in position to claim his opulent advance, Moore again gives Longman an opportunity \u00abto reconsider the terms of their engagement with me\u00bb because:<\/p>\n
\nThere is more to Moore\u2019s Preface: he goes on to display the charms of discarded strands of narrative, to justify and document the \u00abindustry\u00bb of his \u00abreading\u00bb in Orientalist sources, to survey the tributes to Lalla Rookh<\/em>\u2019s success that have come in the form of critical appreciations, translations into other languages (including Persian!), adaptations for the stage.The focus of this brief essay, however, remains Moore\u2019s dramatizing of the original venture, and now the relation of this self-dramatization to the frame narrative.
\nThe prose narrative that frames the four verse tales of Lalla Rookh<\/em> is fundamentally about poetic seduction \u2013 a poetic seduction that triumphs over the ridiculous prejudices of a reactionary critical establishment (parodied in the absurd fiddle-faddle of Fadladeen, \u00abGreat Nazier or Chamberlain of the Haram\u00bb) and finally reveals its inherent nobility (in more than one sense of the word).Lalla Rookh and her retinue are captivated by Feramorz, whose name may well prompt us to ask just how fair a figure of Moore he is.The entire frame might be taken as a playful and often satirical joke, except that at the level of autobiographical allegory the story of Feramorz and Lalla Rookh raises all the difficult questions we needed to ask about Moore and Lalla Rookh<\/em> in the Preface.In the frame as in the Preface Moore triumphs, but the status of the darker, more violent political elements in Feramorz\u2019s four narratives remains uncertain.
\nThere are, it would seem, two registers of socio-political allegory in Lalla Rookh<\/em>, and while they are both importantly determined by Moore\u2019s identity as colonized poet addressing his colonial readers, they stand in conflicting relation to each other.He wants to produce a version of \u00abOriental Romance\u00bb that sustains his identity as the \u00abnational poet\u00bb of Ireland but that also, at the same time, gives playful fictive expression to a desire to become a conqueror if not a colonizer in the Regency literary market. The contradictions in Moore\u2019s achievement appear even more striking when we consider that his setting Lalla Rookh<\/em> \u00abin the eleventh year of the reign of Aurungzebe\u00bb (this would be 1669) establishes a series of potentially critical links to the history of Britain\u2019s domination of Ireland: Cromwell\u2019s brutal invasion and campaign against the Catholics of 1649-1658, followed after the Restoration by the period in which the Duke of Ormond ruled as Viceroy. Lalla Rookh<\/em> mystifies the oppressive dimension of Aurungzebe\u2019s regime and of the regimes of his British contemporaries, even as it allegorizes the Irish cause as noble, heroic, tragic. That Feramorz\u2019s \u00abromantic\u00bb winning of Aurungzebe\u2019s daughter takes place within a context of actual imperial rule may be present as an unarticulated potential, but it no more becomes the subject of Lalla Rookh<\/em> than does Moore\u2019s success with London publishers and readers in relation to Britain\u2019s exploitation of Ireland.The brilliance of a \u00abtransaction in which Trade and Poesy [\u2026] shone out so advantageously in each other\u2019s eyes\u00bb turns out to be blinding when it comes to this particular allegory of empire<\/p>\n
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