Unruly Times

by A.S. Byatt

Book by A. S. Byatt

Genres: Biography, History, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Poetry, Biography Memoir, British Literature

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

A.S. Byatt (Antonia Susan Byatt) is internationally known for her novels and short stories. Her novels include the Booker Prize winner Possession, The Biographer’s Tale and the quartet, The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman, and her highly acclaimed collections of short stories include Sugar and Other Stories, The Matisse Stories, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, Elementals and her most recent book Little Black Book of Stories. A distinguished critic as well as a writer of fiction, A S Byatt was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999.

BYATT, Dame Antonia (Susan), (Dame Antonia Duffy), DBE 1999 (CBE 1990); FRSL 1983; Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France), 2003 , writer; born 24 Aug. 1936;

Daughter of His Honour John Frederick Drabble, QC and late Kathleen Marie Bloor

Byatt has famously been engaged in a long-running feud with her novelist sister, Margaret Drabble, over the alleged appropriation of a family tea-set in one of her novels. The pair seldom see each other and each does not read the books of the other.

Married
1st, 1959, Ian Charles Rayner Byatt (Sir I. C. R. Byatt) marriage dissolved. 1969; one daughter (one son deceased)
2nd, 1969, Peter John Duffy; two daughters.

Education
Sheffield High School; The Mount School, York; Newnham College, Cambridge (BA Hons; Hon. Fellow 1999); Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia, USA; Somerville College, Oxford.

Academic Honours:
Hon. Fellow, London Inst., 2000; Fellow UCL, 2004
Hon. DLitt: Bradford, 1987; DUniv York, 1991; Durham, 1991; Nottingham, 1992; Liverpool, 1993; Portsmouth, 1994; London, 1995; Sheffield, 2000; Kent 2004; Hon. LittD Cambridge, 1999

Prizes
The PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Of Fiction prize, 1986 for STILL LIFE
The Booker Prize, 1990, for POSSESSION
Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize, 1990 for POSSESSION
The Eurasian section of Best Book in Commonwealth Prize, 1991 for POSSESSION
Premio Malaparte, Capri, 1995;
Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature, California, 1998 for THE DJINN IN THE NIGHTINGALE''S EYE
Shakespeare Prize, Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg, 2002;

Publications:
The Shadow of the Sun, 1964;
Degrees of Freedom, 1965 (reprinted as Degrees of Freedom: the early novels of Iris Murdoch, 1994);
The Game, 1967;
Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time, 1970 (reprinted as Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time, 1989);
Iris Murdoch 1976
The Virgin in the Garden, 1978;
GEORGE ELIOT Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings , 1979 (editor);
Still Life, 1985
Sugar and Other Stories, 1987;
George Eliot: selected essays, 1989 (editor)
Possession: a romance, 1990
Robert Browning''s Dramatic Monologues, 1990 (editor);
Passions of the Mind, (essays), 1991;
Angels and Insects (novellas),1992
The Matisse Stories (short stories),1993;
The Djinn in the Nightingale''s Eye: five fairy stories, 1994
Imagining Characters, 1995 (joint editor);
New Writing 4, 1995 (joint editor);
Babel Tower, 1996;
New Writing 6, 1997 (joint editor);
The Oxford Book of English Short Stories, 1998 (editor);
Elementals: Stories of fire and ice (short stories), 1998;
The Biographer''s Tale, 2000;
On Histories and Stories (essays), 2000;
Portraits in Fiction, 2001;
The Bird Hand Book, 2001 (Photographs by Victor Schrager Text By AS Byatt);
A Whistling Woman, 2002
Little

Reviews

[F · Rating 5 out of 5]

Byatt's mastery with words is here only equaled by her knowledge of Wordsworth, Coleridge, their minds, and the ideals that infused the Romantic period. This book is both general and thorough, making it an informative and enjoyable reading for anyone.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting account of the friendship between Coleridge and Wordsworth, and their friends, enemies, influences, political leanings, and cultural context. At times it did feel a little unfocused; each chapter charted the chronological progression of, say, their growing conservatism, before swinging back to the start to document the evolution of their opinion on landscape gardening. (If only Wordsworth, who was cross about people committing the dastardly act of … painting their houses white, could see the despicable Lego boxes that now masquerade as architecture.)

I’m not a fan of either man’s poetry, but I am a fan of AS Byatt, which probably accounts for why I bought this book a year ago and only finished it now. There’s no doubting that Byatt is in the admirable position of being so knowledgeable about her subjects that she can afford to have wry and even jaundiced opinions about them:

‘Like many people who demand from those they meet the total response they failed to achieve in childhood, [Coleridge] always demanded too much, and at the same time expected, even provoked, the rejection which was in fact the response he could recognize.’

Fun fact corner:

‘Coleridge was interested in the ‘cures’ produced by men with such theories, and in the true relationship between mind and matter. He is said to have been the first to use the term ‘psychosomatic’.’

‘In 1795 the Speenhamland magistrates made their famous decision not to fix the wages of agricultural workers (they feared that more would become unemployed) but to supplement their wages with poor- law allowances tied to the price of bread and the size of the family. This was intended to help, and to preserve the workers’ independence, but it had the opposite effect, and resulted in the pauperization of whole rural communities. The landowners paid lower wages, knowing they would be supplemented, and arguing that it was from their pockets that the poor rates came anyway.’

‘Coleridge was active in the agitation in 1818 for the Cotton- Children Bill. He wrote two tracts on the subject arguing against the principle that it was illegitimate to interfere with free labour and property: ‘In what sense, not utterly sophistical, can the labour of children, extorted from the wants of their parents, ‘their poverty but not their will consenting’, be called free?’’

‘Coleridge, too, felt that commerce was becoming an end in itself, and not the means to national health, or justice, or happiness. In 1800 he was writing in The Morning Post that ‘ministerial loans and job work’ created vicious speculation: schemes for internal navigation and rendering waste lands useful had not proceeded with their earlier energy. And the numerous soup establishments, the Committees for the labouring poor were in themselves suspicious phenomena. They were highly honourable to the rich— but to the nation? ‘Is that a genuine prosperity in which healthy labourers are commonly styled “the labouring poor”?’’

‘At the time he was writing in a generally idealistic and iconoclastic mode to his friends, that despite Mary’s plea ‘where Justice leads I will follow— though her path be through thorns and roughness— The Scotts desire their compliments. Compliments: cold aristocratic Inanities—! I abjure their nothingness. If there be any whom I deem worthy of remembrance— I am their Brother. I call even my Cat Sister in the Fraternity of universal Nature. Owls I respect and Jack Asses I love: for Aldermen and Hogs, Bishops and Royston Crows I have not particular partiality—; they are my Cousins, however, at least by Courtesy. But Kings, Wolves, Tygers, Generals, Ministers and Hyaenas, I renounce them all— or if they must be my Kinsmen, it shall be in the 50th Remove— May the Almighty Pantisocratizer of Souls pantisocratize the Earth and bless you and S. T. Coleridge.’’

‘It was very important, [Coleridge] believed, that newspapers should not become ‘Ministerial organs’ but should remain independent. Ministers ‘do not love Newspapers in their hearts, not even those that support them. Indeed it seems epidemic among Parliament men in general to affect to look down upon and despise Newspapers, to which they owe of their influence and character, and at least 3/ 5ths of their knowledge and phraseology.’’

‘The two poets met once only— when Coleridge recited Kubla Khan and said of Byron that ‘He has the sweetest Countenance that I ever beheld— his eyes are really Portals of the Sun, things for Light to go in and out of.’’

Lest you think this is just a list of Coleridge stan quotes, Byatt is careful to point out his multiple failings – as an artist and a person.

I still don’t really know why I read this, but I’m not mad about it.

[Ada · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Unruly Times" is not a book intended for an academic audience: there are no footnotes, and the author rarely mentions any secondary reading. Yet it is not quite a biography intended for a general audience either. The book is divided into sections which describe different aspects of Coleridge's and Wordsworth's historical contexts: from politics to daily life. It is a collection of thoughts and anecdotes about the poets' lives: I found the section on education and childhood particularly interesting, and after glancing through the section on landscape I have grown convinced that I should at least have a look at Dorothy Wordsworth's diaries.
A.S. Byatt's study is not a particularly great source on the intricacies of the relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge (which I had hoped it would be), but her work does serve as an inspiration to reach for the original poems and letters.

[Sheila · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really somewhere below a 3. A very hard slog, but packed with lots of information.

[Ruth Brumby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very throughly researched and well written with some interesting ideas, but the separate chapters on various themes were not well co-ordinated. The book needed a conclusion. The chapters on Landscape and Childhood were better than others, which were almost too dense with references, to the detriment of a clear argument. The illustrations were very useful.

[Charles Edward C Gardner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent study of Coleridge & Wordsworth

I found many of my favourite passages of these two poets set in an informative, illuminating way against the political, social, environmental and literary backgrounds of their lifetimes.

[Sharon Saxton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reads like a term paper in a grad class on literature. Not up to Byatt's usual brilliance.

[Joanne Shaw · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first chapter - overview of the relationship between Wordsworth & Coleridge - was plenty for me.

[Robbie Clipper Sethi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Inspired to read Wordsworth, Coleridge & DeQuincy in the Wordsworth museum at Dove Cottage in Grasmere in the Lake District, UK, I picked up Unruly Times, Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time by A. S. Byatt. The narrative doesn't relate times nearly as unruly as I would have hoped, considering Coleridge’s addiction and the story of his love life, not to mention Wordsworth's. Wordsworth’s close relationship with his sister is also more intriguing than the little Byatt makes of it, though she does a good job speculating in one of her chapters. Dove Cottage was a sight to see, however, while my fellow travelers on a short bus had their lunch and shopped in the winding town just up the road from Wordsworth’s residence from 1799-1809. Now, my back against a book about the men and women and their times, I’m onto the poetry, rereading what I had only a taste of in British Literary History at Indiana.

The lakes themselves and the landscape in which they stretch reminds me of the finger-lake region of New York, though on the bigger island of North America the lakes seem appropriately more spread out and distant from each other. (Incidentally it was nice to fly over our lakes on the way back from theirs!) Throw in the Great Lakes, and you’ve got a much wider area than this compact, picturesque landscape which inspired so much great poetry and painting. Damp it is, or at least was on the days I visited (July 29-30, 2008).

[Suzanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is an informative and sensitive placing of Wordsworth and Coleridge in their times. In the process it illuminates certain tendencies and trends of the period such as the consideration of the picturesque and sheds light on linkages between painting and literature. The different sections provide a rich background which helps to situate the two poets and many of their friends and acquaintances and deepen understanding of their work.

[Paula Soper]

Getting ready for the tour!

[Angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

An informative examination of various subjects and their impact on Coleridge and Wordsworth's lives. At times the book wanders and the dedicated focus on specific topics means that the reader's interest is likely to vary from chapter to chapter. While the book ends rather abruptly and sometimes seems to wander from a focus on the poets themselves, it offers an intriguing and helpful portrait of the world the poets lived in. The emphasis in the final chapter on Dorothy Wordsworth's influence on both poets would likely have been fairly cutting edge when this book was first published and was nice to see. I particularly enjoyed the chapters on education and literature, but that is more a matter of taste than a reflection of the writing in those particular chapters.