Objects of Suspicion: Keats, ‘To Autumn’ and the Psychology of

Romantic Surveillance

RICHARD MARGGRAF TURLEY

Spies and informers are abroad, and sent among you.

Henry Hunt, address to ‘The Reformers of the United Kingdom’, October 1819

We have been taken for Spectacle venders, Razor sellers, Jewellers, travelling

linnen drapers, Spies ….

John Keats, letter dated 6 August 1818.1

Keats makes few explicit allusions to surveillance, but they are memorable, queasily

attuned to asymmetries of power. Think of Porphyro’s unsuspected eye in the closet as

Madeline disrobes in her bedchamber, or the ‘sly’ conspiring vision of Isabella’s

brothers, or Lamia reconnoitering the nymph’s ‘secret bed’ before turning informant to

Hermes. An extended reflection on the surveillant gaze, Lamia is as distinctly the

product of an atmosphere of compulsive watchfulness in the build-up to the Six Acts

of December 1819, as Keats’s Hyperion fragments are of what Daniel P. Watkins calls

1This chapter began as a lecture on Romanticism and technoethics given with Anne

Marggraf-Turley at the 30th Chaos Communication Congress (30C3), Hamburg,

Germany. I wish to thank Hannah Dee for her help with computer vision. I am also

grateful to Damian Walford Davies, and to Nicholas Roe, John Barnard and Ken Page

for their co-sleuthing of Keats’s when-and-whereabouts during Hunt’s procession, and

for their advice about the missing letters sent from Lombard Street.

Hunt’s letter was reprinted in T. J. Wooler’s political magazine, Black Dwarf, 27

October 1819. LJK, i. 360.

1

the ‘post-Waterloo moment’.2 The stifling climate of suspicion that hangs over Corinth

gives back the dense superintendance that made London the most surveilled of modern

cities, just as the ‘most curious’ agents who track Lamia and Lycius through the

‘populous streets’ and ‘watch’d to trace them to their house’ at the end of Part 1 find

their non-fictional counterparts in the spies and informers stationed in London’s

theatre lobbies, debating clubs, coffee-houses and even, as Peterloo hero Henry

‘Orator’ Hunt lamented, in the metropolis’s pot-houses.3

But – and less obviously, perhaps – it is the ode ‘To Autumn’, composed two weeks

after final revisions to Lamia, where we find Keats’s most probing, untranquil

meditations on the insidious emotional and psychological effects of watching (with

patient look) and informing. The poem, I propose, doesn’t just represent an encounter

with surveillance culture, but internalizes that culture. The ode itself becomes an all-

seeing optic, looking out and down over Winchester from the panoptic platform of St

Giles’s Hill to the east; becomes, that is, a reporting mechanism, a field of

information, a spy transcript, whose ominous governing question, lensed unsettlingly

through an uncolloquial negative, taunts reapers and readers alike: ‘Who hath not seen

thee?’.

My investigation of the ode’s surveillant energies proceeds by way of a tracking

exercise of my own, a tracing (as far as this is possible) of Keats’s movements through

London’s own populous streets on an afternoon of political pageantry on Monday, 13

September 1819, six days before he wrote ‘To Autumn’. Hille Koskela warns us that

2 Daniel P. Watkins, Keats’s Poetry and the Politics of the Imagination (London,

1989), 91.3 Black Dwarf, 3 (1819), 702; LJK, i. 360.

2

surveillance is experienced as an ‘emotional event’ in which surveilled terrain is

always ‘emotional space’.4 Drawing on surveillance studies’ insights into the corrosive

psychological impacts of pervasive invigilation (insights, we’ll see, already developed

in the emerging field of Romantic psychiatry), I wish to advance the argument that the

pathological watching and reporting that governs the ode is brought to issue for Keats

by two radically entangled, highly suspicious events in which he was involved in the

week leading up to the ode’s composition. The first of these events is the return of

Henry Hunt to the capital to answer charges of treason for addressing the massed

protesters at Peterloo. Hunt’s huge procession, cheered by crowds of 300,000 people,

which Keats witnessed from the thronged streets, was billed as ‘Hunt’s Triumphant

Entry into London’ – the moniker applied in conscious echo of an earlier triumphal

entry, that of Christ into Jerusalem, an historical convoy that ended with betrayal. The

second entangled event is the biblical procession itself, which Keats also, in a sense,

witnesses, framed among the bystanders and spectators in the tightly packed crowd

scene in artist Benjamin Robert Haydon’s enormous painting ‘Christ’s Triumphant

Entry into Jerusalem’ (1814-1820). The image took shape over the course of Keats’s

formative but strained creative friendship with Haydon, which by Autumn 1819 had

descended into mutual suspicion – a psychodrama that not only informs Haydon’s

allegorically loaded portrayal of Christ’s procession, but whose unsettling emotional

energies were also felt by Keats as he moved around London during Hunt’s parade.

4 Hille Koskela, ‘“Cam Era”: The Contemporary Urban Panopticon’, Surveillance &

Society, 1 (2003), 292-313, at 300:

http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/articles1(3)/camera.pdf [date of access:

23.3.17].

3

These private and national dramas of suspicion, I contend, feed the ode’s own

suspicions, its own invigilating anxieties, to produce a text radically attuned to the fear

of being profiled, infiltrated and finally of its author being cast in the role of informer

himself.

1. The beautiful fabric of love

In the wake of Edward Snowden’s exposure in 2013 of supranational electronic

spying programmes, surveillance was ranked by Global Language Monitor as the

year’s sixth most ubiquitous term in print and electronic communications, ahead of

the cloud and twerking.5 Google’s Ngram viewer shows an equally dramatic spike in

usage in English corpora much earlier in the word’s history, during another hot spot

of mass intelligence gathering in 1819. (Fig. 1) This rise in incidence, along with a

corresponding peak for informer, took place three years after surveillance made its

parliamentary debut during a debate on the Alien Bill,6 and after the expanded fourth

edition of Charles James’s Military Dictionary (1816) added a sub-entry for

surveillance that glossed a disturbing new ontology, the condition of existing ‘under

the eye of the police’.7 We perhaps forget, but surveillance – first introduced to

English reading audiences by the Monthly Review in 1799 – is a Romantic word, and

5 Global Language Monitor’s lists of ‘top trending’ words by year may be found at

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Language_Monitor [date of access:

23.3.17].6 ‘It was certainly most curious to hear new words borrowed from the French quoted,

and particularly that of surveillance, as an inducement for the House to pass the bill’,

The Parliamentary Debates for the Year 1803 to the Present Time, 34 (London,

1816), 907.7 Charles James, A New and Enlarged Military Dictionary (4th edition; London, 1816),

880.

4

in its premature mass manifestation, a Romantic concept.8

Koskela observes that the debilitating mental impacts of modern bulk surveillance

range from feeling ‘guilty without a reason, embarrassed or uneasy’ to ‘shameful,

irritated [and] fearful.’ What ‘ensures discipline’, she adds with neo-Foucauldian

modality, ‘simultaneously erodes confidence’ (300). Coleridge noticed similar effects

in the mid-1790s, a period that serves as an introduction both to post-Waterloo

suspicion and to our own age of routinely intercepted data. His 1795 lecture ‘On the

Present War’ argued that the government’s expanding ‘system of spies and informers’

had created conditions in which ‘every man begins to suspect his neighbour’,

undermining ‘social confidence’ – in Coleridge’s terms, the ‘beautiful fabric of love’.9

Vicesimus Knox argued along similar lines in his pamphlet The Spirit of Despotism

(1795), identifying ‘want of confidence’ as the inevitable consequence of the

proliferation of modern-day ‘Judas Iscariots’ in ‘coffee-houses, taverns and places of

public amusements’.10 In a burst of inflammatory rhetoric that inspired radical

bookseller William Hone to reprint the pamphlet seven times in 1821, Knox added that

widespread ‘employment of spies and informers’ amounted to no less than a ‘virtual

declaration of hostilities against the people’ (40).

These hostilities have continued. As the Snowden disclosures confirmed, entire

populations now live under computer vision’s patient look. Combining information

from Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras, networked CCTV and 8 Monthly Review, 30 (1799), 538.9 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Conciones ad Populum; or, Addresses to the People

(1795), 49.10 Vicesimus Knox, The Spirit of Despotism, ed. William Hone (7th edn, 1795;

London, 1821), 40.

5

face recognition records, a converged surveillance infrastructure enables near-

seamless tracking of subjects through public space. Modern urban (and, increasingly,

rural) environments bristle with surveillance tech, either concealed in plain sight or

mimicking as it mocks familiar shapes. Fig. 2 shows a dome camera disguised as a

heritage-style streetlamp, which it hangs beneath, a bizarre, uncanny doubling whose

absurdity is obscured by what geographer Trevor Paglen calls the ‘line that separates

vision from knowledge’.11 In addition, ‘private’ emails, photographs, video chats and

texts are routinely intercepted and archived in storage centres for retrospective data-

mining.12 In an algorithmic age, the ‘surveillant assemblages’ (Haggerty’s and

Ericson’s phrase) that gather and connect this information do not merely passively

observe, but are capable of making political decisions about those they select and

sort.13

The editors of Surveillance in Europe (2014) note that such ‘uncontrolled expansion’

of the surveillant gaze has resulted in a ‘widespread sense of suspicion’ that is eroding

democratic societies.14 The insight is acute, echoing Coleridge’s and Knox’s own

observations about the insidious impacts of surveillance on social confidence. Indeed,

modern surveillance studies is – seemingly unknowingly – rehabilitating prior

understandings of the insidious impacts of government eavesdropping already deeply

processed in the art, literature and politics, as well as in the medical culture, of those

11 Interview with Trevor Paglen, Center for the Study of the Drone,

http://dronecenter.bard.edu/interview-trevor-paglen/ [Date of access: 28.7.16]12 The NSA’s Mission Data Repository in Utah has attracted most controversy: see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center [date of access: 23.3.17].13 Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson, ‘The Surveillant Assemblage’, British

Journal of Sociology, 51 (2000), 605-22.14 Surveillance in Europe, ed. David Wright and Reinhard Kreissl (London, 2014), 1,

3, 338.

6

who lived through the first age of mass inspection and who were closely adjusted to its

emotional shocks. If, as I will argue, contemporary surveillance theory offers new

ways into familiar Romantic texts, Romanticism has much to contribute to ongoing

debates about privacy, suspicion and the psychological effects of persistent

supervision.

2. Every event suspicious

In March 1818, Wordsworth’s friend George Philips demanded a ‘Inquiry into the

Conduct of Spies and Informers’. Lamenting the widespread deployment of such

agents, the parliamentarian argued that in the instant anyone accepted the role of

informer, he or she themselves became ‘an object of suspicion’ whose evidence was to

be ‘received with distrust’.15 If spies and informers could become objects of interest,

an inverse recursion was also possible. John Haslam, apothecary at Bethlem Hospital,

noted that disproportionately interiorized suspicion frequently manifested in the

compulsion to surveil others. Sketches in Bedlam (1823) documents the case of the

‘very suspicious’ Andrew McKennot, a forty-year-old forger admitted to Haslam’s

care in 1816, whose ‘addiction to prying’ rendered the inmate a ‘sort of secret

inspector-general’:16

No transaction, whether trivial or important, passes his observation without a

written note … He seems to consider himself a sort of secret inspector-general:

nothing eludes his prying observation. (58-59)

15 Parliamentary Debates from the Year 1803 to the Present Time, 37 (London, 1818),

821.16 John Haslam, Sketches in Bedlam; or, Characteristics Traits of Insanity (London,

1823), 58.

7

Surveillance, the new discipline of Romantic psychiatry began to understand, was not

merely a phenomenon patients feared they had been placed under and must endure

passively, but always threatened to become an active undertaking.

Mad-doctors and asylum-keepers treated suspicion with urgency as both vector and –

in excessive cases – indicium of insanity. A Leicester physician, Thomas Arnold,

included ‘suspicious insanity’ among the most significant manifestations of mental

disorder.17 Similarly, on the first page of his influential treatise, Practical Observations

on Insanity (1804), Joseph Mason Cox, pioneer of the ‘moral cure’, identified ‘unusual

suspicion’ among those telling states of mind that presaged fully-fledged bouts of

madness.18 Likewise for Haslam, ‘suspicion [that] creeps in upon the mind’, often

accompanied by heightened awareness of ‘plots, which had never been contrived’, was

a precursory ‘symptom of approaching mania’.19 (Observations on Madness, 42).

With post-9/11 inspection in mind, pivotal surveillance theorist David Lyon argues

that a ‘culture of suspicion’ both ‘produces and is produced by surveillance’. The

intuition would not have surprised apothecary Haslam. From the beginnings of what

we would recognize as the pervasive superintendence of large populations, Romantic

psychiatrists were engaged in aligning and lineating the relationship between suspicion

17 Thomas Arnold, Observations on the Nature, Kinds, Causes and Prevention of

Insanity (2 vols, Leicester, 1782), i. 238, 255.18 Joseph Mason Cox, Practical Observations on Insanity (2nd edn; London, 1806),

42.19 John Haslam, Observations on Madness and Melancholy (2nd edn; London, 1809),

42.

8

and surveillance. New categories of mental disorder were identified, including

persecutory fantasies of remotely directed panoptic inspection. One of the most

‘curious cases’ of this kind to fall under Haslam’s own observation was that of a well-

educated, middle-aged patient who in addition to stopping his ears with wool ‘usually

slept with his head in a tin saucepan’.20 According to Haslam’s record in Observations

of Madness and Melancholy (1809), the inmate’s aim in protecting his head in this

manner was to ‘prevent the intrusion of the sprites’ sent by philosophers and princes to

‘a person, who is an object of suspicion to any of these potentates’ (73). The

anonymous patient’s fear was that his persecutors’ seminal fluid (‘conserved in rum or

brandy’), would be infused into his ears, and sprites – pinhead-sized beings – formed

in this way would ‘traverse the interior of the brain, and become acquainted with [his]

hidden secrets’ (74).21

Sprite Man’s fantasies of fluids, impregnation and surveillance-at-a-distance – what

today would be called remote sensing – exhibit striking parallels with Haslam’s much

more famous case of Welsh tea-broker, James Tilly Mathews, who believed he was

subject to both thought withdrawal and insertion, kinds of interference that he called

‘kiteing’ and ‘thought making’.22 Mathews’ belief in magnetic Air Loom surveillance

machines, installed at various locations around London, produced complex symptoms

that Haslam would go on to document at length in Illustrations of Madness (1810).

Haslam’s case notes annotate Romantic psychiatry’s intuition that fear of surveillance,

and perhaps surveillance itself, generated its own psychopathological states.20 John Haslam, Observations on Madness and Melancholy, 71.21 The DSM-5 terms this fear thought withdrawal, as opposed to thought insertion.

See Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th edn; Arlington, VA,

2013). 22 See John Haslam, Illustrations of Madness (London, 1810), 31, 34.

9

Keats was ideally placed to absorb the period’s refined nosology of mental disorder

associated with attacks of suspicion. Guy’s Hospital Physical Society library owned

copies of Haslam’s Observations and Illustrations, as well as Arnold’s Observations

and Cox’s Practical Observations.23 Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Keats was adept at self-

diagnosing his own propensity to the malady of suspicion, describing himself in a

letter of 15 July 1819 as ‘a little given to bode ill like the raven’, a trait that ‘has

proceeded from the general tenor of the circumstances of my life, and rendered every

event suspicious’.24 Despite the capacity Keats exhibits for rationalising his own

tendency to distrust, in August 1820, invalided at Leigh Hunt’s cottage in Hampstead,

an episode of immersive suspicion culminated in an emotional collapse and a stormy

exit from his lodgings. The trigger was a mislaid letter from Fanny Brawne which,

when it eventually arrived in Keats’s hands, having already been opened. Keats

suspected someone in the Hunt household of prying:

Wentworth Place [14 August 1820].

My dear Fanny,

’Tis a long time since I received your last. An accident of an unpleasant nature

occurred at Mr Hunt’s and prevented me from answering you, that is to say

made me nervous. That you may not suppose it worse I will mention that some

one of Mr Hunt’s household opened a Letter of mine – upon which I

23 See A Catalogue of Books in the Library of the Physical Society, Guy's Hospital

[manuscript] (1850), 19. Available online at: https://archive.org/details/b21300574

[date of access 4.2.17].24 LJK, ii. 129.

10

immediately left Mortimer Terrace, with the intention of taking to Mrs

Bentley’s again.25

Keats’s explanation registers both the emotional/psychological effects of suspicion

(nervousness), as well as their impacts on confidence (being deterred from further

private correspondence with Fanny for fear of interception).

Notwithstanding Keats’s medical insights into suspicion’s numerous rubrics, as well as

his finely limned observations on his own propensity to suspect others, we do not tend

to veer to him when we evaluate the responsiveness of Romantic art and literature to

the mist of suspicion that descended on the country between Pitt’s ‘Reign of Alarm’

and the post-Peterloo months. Nevertheless, Keats’s writing not only reflects his age’s

sophisticated understanding of the effects of endemic suspicion on individual

wellbeing; but it is also attuned to the communal consequences of wider surveillance

culture in ways that both anticipate and enrich the efforts of current surveillance

studies to annotate the post-Snowden society.

3. Stopped from curiosity

At around two o’clock on the afternoon of Monday, 13 September 1819, the short-

stage coach from Walthamstow – one of Wragg’s seven daily runs to London – turned

into Islington High Street, before juddering to a halt. The way ahead was blocked by

an enormous crowd stretching north to the Holloway turnpike.26 In the estimation of

25 LJK, ii. 313, emphasis added. 26 This is the same ‘Walthamstow stage’ Keats refers to in his letter to Fanny Keats on

31 March 1819 (LJK, ii. 49). The 10 o’clock morning stagecoach from the Flower Pot

coaching inn on the corner of Bishopsgate Street and Leadenhall Street – a couple of

minutes’ walk from Lombard Street, where Keats posted a letter to Fanny Brawne

11

Wednesday’s The Black Dwarf, ‘never before did London disgorge in one day so

many thousands of its population’.27 Like the Corinth of Lamia, the city was emptied

of its folk. The crowds had presented themselves to welcome Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt

back into the capital to stand trial for treason. Wragg’s fares, finding their route

impassable, clambered out. Among those who emerged from the rear of the coach was

Keats.28 He doesn’t allude to the tremendous scenes until five days later on Saturday,

18 September, by which time he was back in his Winchester writing retreat. Sketching

‘Hunt’s triumphal entry into London’ in a journal letter to his émigré brother and

sister-in-law, George and Georgiana, Keats limits himself to noting that Hunt’s entire

four-mile route from the Angel at Islington to The Crown and Anchor tavern on The

Strand was lined by cheering supporters.

From our own historical junction, it is possible to relate to Keats’s nervousness in a

letter on the topic of ‘Orator’ Hunt. It is a commonplace in surveillance studies to talk

about the ‘chilling effects’ of mass electronic monitoring on aspects of our online

behaviour around privacy-sensitive or politically contentious topics (a major 2016

study conducted by Jonathan Penney concludes that significant self-censoring has

occurred since the Snowden revelations, with consequences for the ‘broader health of

society’).29 Henry Hunt was certainly contentious. Events in Manchester the previous

earlier that morning (JKNL, 343-4) – would have taken Keats the seven miles out to

Walthamstow. For the stage itinerary, see Johnstone’s London Commercial Guide,

and Street Directory (London, 1818), 41. 27 The Black Dwarf, 3 (1819), 599.28 Keats was returning from a visit to his sister, Fanny, whose boarding school, like

Wragg’s coach house, stood in Marsh Street, Walthamstow.29 Jonathon W. Penney, ‘Chilling Effects: Online Surveillance and Wikipedia Use’,

Berkeley Technology Law Journal, 31 (2016).

12

month had put the country in a state of high alarm, and the lead speaker’s defiant

procession could easily have led to a recapitulation of the violence on St Peter’s Field.

As the Royal Cornwall Gazette, Falmouth Packet & Plymouth Journal  reported,

alarmed by Hunt’s ‘motley assemblage’ the ‘civil and military authorities deemed it

necessary to be on the alert to repress any outrages’.30 The whole of the City Light

Horse, as well as the Artillery, were at the ready as the procession rounded Mr.

Champion’s Vinegar Manufactory and made their way down past the Artillery

Ground;31 shops along the route were closed along with all but one entrance to the

Bank of England, the approach to Mansion House was packed with constables, and –

as ever – spies and informers mingled with the crowds.32

Keats was also aware that mail was liable to be intercepted. In fact, he suspected

precisely this fate had befallen a letter he posted that day. He alludes to the episode on

22 September, three days after composing ‘To Autumn’. Writing to Charles Dilke,

author of a political tract on Corn Law economics, Keats thanks his friend for sending

on the latest Examiner to Winchester, declares himself (alliteratively) ‘pleased with

the present public proceedings’, before noting that two recent letters, ‘one from

London … the other from this place [Winchester]’, seemed to have miscarried.33 He

attempts to pass off (but also marks) his suspicions by making a joke about suspicion: 30 ‘Hunt’s Arrival in London’, Royal Cornwall Gazette, Falmouth Packet & Plymouth

Journal, 847 (18 September 1819), 2.31 Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post; or, Plymouth and Cornish Advertizer (16 September

1819), 4.32 York Herald, and General Advertiser, 1516 (18 September 1819).33 For a discussion of Dilke’s 1821 pamphlet, The Source and Remedy of the National

Difficulties, Deduced from Principles of National Economy, see Richard Marggraf

Turley, Jayne Elisabeth Archer and Howard Thomas, ‘Keats, “To Autumn”, and the

New Men of Winchester’, Review of English Studies, 64 (2012), 797-817, at 807-8.

13

‘I will not open your Letters. If they are as David says “suspicious looking letters” I

won’t open them’.34

Keats had posted two letters during Hunt’s parade. One was probably that addressed to

Fanny Brawne dated 13 September 1819, postmarked Lombard Street (formerly the

site of the ‘General Post Office’) at 8 o’clock the following morning, which found its

Hampstead destination without mishap.35 The second Lombard Street letter, still

missing on 22 September, was addressed to Charles Brown.36 The matter was soon

‘cleared up’: on 24 September, Keats’s intermitted journal letter to George and

Georgiana reports that four delayed letters had turned up together at Brown’s ‘all in a

lump’:

Brown, who was at Bedhampton, went thence to Chichester, and I am still

directing my Letters Bedhampton. There arose a misunderstanding about them. I

began to suspect my Letters had been stopped from curiosity. However,

yesterday Brown had four Letters from me all in a Lump, and the matter is

cleared up.37

Accounted for by the poet, the letter ‘from London’ has since been lost and we can

only speculate about its contents. If, however, Keats had written or added to it on the

afternoon of Hunt’s parade, the letter may well have alluded to the ‘present public

34 LJK, ii. 180.35 See LJK, ii. 160. The letter is postmarked ‘TP Lombard Street; 8 o’Clock SP 14

1819’. Presumably ‘TP’ stands for two-penny post.36 See LJK, i. 11, ‘To Charles Brown. c. 12 September’, and LJK, ii. 173, 180 for

references to this letter (‘two letters to Brown … one from London’).37 LJK, ii. 213.

14

proceedings’. Importantly, though, over the weekend that ‘To Autumn’ was

composed, the letter to Brown had been missing for several days, and Keats was

specifically worried it had been detained by government spies: stopped from

‘curiosity’, as he puts it, a phrase recalling his description of the ‘most curious’ spies

in Lamia. As we shall see, the ode seems to absorb this modality of suspicion, which

inflects its wider registration of the impacts of surveillance culture on social

confidence.

4. Passing by

Most of what Keats tells us about Hunt’s parade is contained in the following remarks,

made in passing to George and Georgiana, mostly about passing:

You will hear by the papers of the proceedings at Manchester and Hunt’s

triumphal entry into London – I[t] would take me a whole day and a quire of

paper to give you any thing like detail – I will merely mention that it is

calculated that 30.000 people were in the streets waiting for him – The whole

distance from the Angel Islington to the Crown and anchor was lined with

Multitudes. As I pass’d Colnaghi’s window I saw a profil[e] Portrait of Sands

the destroyer of Kotzebue. His very look must interest every one in his favour – I

suppose they have represented him in his college dress – He seems to me like a

young Abelard – A fine Mouth, cheek bones (and this is no joke) full of

sentiment; a fine unvulgar nose and plump temples.38

We tend to assume that Paul Colnaghi’s stucco-fronted print shop was passed by Keats

as he followed Hunt’s circuit from Islington down to The Strand. As James Chandler 38 LJK, ii. 194.

15

comments: ‘The words “As I passed” seem to indicate that this whole account is the

description of someone moving among the “Multitudes” he is describing’.39 In fact

(see Fig. 6), Colnaghi’s shop window at 23 Cockspur Street looks out on the far end of

The Strand, west of Charing Cross (now Trafalgar Square). Hunt’s radical terminus

lies to the east at the opposite end of The Strand, off the junction to Arundel Street,

half a mile back. The second portion of what we usually think of as Keats’s account of

Hunt’s parade, then, actually refers to an event that took place after the procession had

ended. But while Colnaghi’s shop was not on Hunt’s route, what Keats saw in the

print-seller to the Prince Regent’s window on Monday 13 September unlocked the

afternoon’s deeper dramaturgy of suspicion, whose internalization over the next few

days would work itself out in the composition of ‘To Autumn’ at the end of the week.

1819’s largest mass event, Hunt’s triumphal entry also ranked among the year’s most

suspicious. Where Keats demurred to give ‘any thing like detail’, newspaper and

radical pamphlets provide accounts of the afternoon’s visual rhetoric. Of the ‘vast

concourse of people’ (Edinburgh Magazine), ‘ribbons, banners and hatbands’, the ‘red

cockades’ (Examiner), Hunt’s famous white hat – reinforced against cudgel assaults –

and the route ‘thronged by eager expectants’ (The Cap of Liberty).40 An orderly riot,

then, not of radicals arisen, but of colour and political stagecraft. By mid-afternoon in

Thomas Dolby’s judgment, the crowds – one of the ‘mass manifestations of popular

39 James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of

Romantic Historicism (Chicago, 1998), 427-28. Today, Colnaghi’s print-shop window

looks into a restaurant.40 Edinburgh Magazine, 5 (1819), 370; Examiner, 612 (19 September 1819), 605;

The Cap of Liberty, 1 (1819), 19. With some variations of detail and colour, all three

accounts, like that printed in The Black Dwarf, are based on one description of the

event.

16

radicalism’, Gregory Dart points out – were ‘so immense as to … defy computation’.41

The authorities were right to be nervous: as another Hunt – Leigh Hunt, Keats’s

political mentor – noted in the Examiner, ‘thousands and thousands of Englishmen’

across the country that summer seemed about to rise up with ‘irresistible might’.42

Keats hints at the popular unrest, intoning ominously to George and Georgiana that by

the time his epistle arrived in America ‘things in England may have taken a different

turn’.

The idea of the crowd as an unpredictable, drunken, seditious, potentially state-

toppling beast was always powerful after 1789. Keats puns on this image in The Cap

and Bells, the poem he began and abandoned a couple of months after Henry Hunt’s

procession, and which he apparently intended to publish under the alias of ‘Lucy

Vaughan Lloyd’43:

‘Behold, your Majesty, upon the brow

Of yonder hill, what crowds of people!’ ‘Whew!

The monster’s always after something new,’

Return’d his Highness … (Stanza 61)

In the legal aftermath of Peterloo, the question of culpability turned on the issue of

whether crowd members retained individual agency in a compressed mass of people or

were transformed into a monstrous ‘single-headed collectivity’, as those in positions of

41 Thomas Dolby, The Triumphal Entry of Henry Hunt Esq. Into London (London,

1819), 7. 42 Examiner, 608 (22 August 1819), 529.43 LJK, ii. 238.

17

authority insisted.44 In broad terms, the age wrestled with competing bimodal models

of crowd dynamics that today would be characterized as flow-based versus agent-

based (Fig. 3). Mr Holt, counsel for Manchester journalist John Saxton, was following

radical protocol when he asserted that mere presence at a riot could not by itself prove

riotous behaviour:

The third and last charge was seditious riot. What was riot? [Holt] apprehended

there was no such thing as riot in the abstract: the individual must be found

actually doing that which tends to riot. If a multitude be even riotous, a man

could not be made a rioter, even if present, should he be found holding no

participation in the tumult that prevailed.45

Brief allusions to Keats’s route around London made elsewhere in the letter to George

and Georgiana resonate intriguingly in the context of Holt’s defence. Choosing his

words carefully, Keats records that he ‘walked about the streets’ that afternoon ‘as if in

a strange land’, and that it had taken ‘a whole day before [he] could feel among

Men’.46 His claim to have existed apart from Hunt’s radical assemblage as it ‘moved

slowly and regularly along, in one solid mass’ (The Cap of Liberty, 3) – of having

observed rather than participated, ‘pass’d’ rather than stopped – frames an agent-based

narrative of his movements and allegiances. Eyewitnesses to the mass event seem to

44 Mark Harrison, Crowds and History: Mass Phenomena in English Towns, 1790-

1835 (Cambridge, 2002), 4. Mary Fairclough’s recent study of Romantic crowds

argues that ‘sympathy’ was understood as both the catalyst of ‘collective behaviour’

and the ‘medium for the transmission of social and political unrest’; see The Romantic

Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture (Cambridge, 2013), 21.45 The Trial of Henry Hunt (London, 1820), 135.46 LJK, ii. 187.

18

have understood Hunt’s crowds rather in terms of flow-based dynamics. To The Cap

of Liberty, the spectacle conjured ‘the idea of an immense deluge of People, which in

its passage had spread, and filled up every spot where it could find admittance, and

covering what it did not sweep along’ (21).

Modern visual analysis quantifies the ways we occupy and move through public space.

As shown in Fig. 4, agent-based modelling techniques such as the Social Force Model

(SFM) are capable of tracking and analysing individuals and small groups in real time

as they move in and through crowds. The key to determining affiliation, it turns out, is

not sympathy but velocity (Fig. 5 shows a decelerating male subject producing

measurable attractive force as he approaches a stationary group.) As we transit urban

space with variable velocity, we leak information that modern surveillant technology

uses to parse normative passers-by (as Keats is at pains to depict himself) from active,

enrolled agents. The SFM algorithm would have settled the issue of John Saxton’s

guilt or innocence, just as it would have been able to make judgments about Keats’s

relation to the radical orator’s ‘fantastic procession’.47

Today’s panoptic technologies linked to pedestrian detectors, face recognition

software and multi-object data association algorithms are capable of ‘extract[ing]

long-term trajectories of people passing through [a] scene’, not only parsing

behaviour for contextual normativity and flagging that which is statistically abnormal

and therefore suspicious but also reconstructing and predicting behaviour.48 Machine

47 Edinburgh Magazine, 5 (1819), 370.48 Weina Ge, Robert T. Collins and R. Barry Ruback, ‘Vision-based Analysis of Small

Groups in Pedestrian Crowds’, Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 34.5

(2012), 1003-16, at 1006.

19

intelligence, that is, has the capacity to hypothesize our routes around city space along

both temporal axes, estimating previous trajectories just as it plots prospective

destinations against statistical probability curves: ‘[a]s soon as [the hypothesis

selection procedure] is selected, it explains the whole past, as if it had always existed.

We can thus follow a trajectory back in time to determine where a pedestrian came

from when he first stepped into view’.49 The technique leads to the proliferation of

digital doppelgängers, or ‘data doubles’ in Haggerty’s and Ericson’s phrase.50 The

conjuring from information of these statistically plausible twins places the subject in

two narratives at once – one that is veridical and directly experienced, the other

constructed from ‘plausible spacetime trajectories’ capable of ‘explain[ing] the whole

past, as if it had always existed’.

In his scrambled account of his movements around London on 13 September, Keats

resists hypothesization, placing himself at an oblique angle to the itinerary of his own

movements, carefully eliding ‘detail’. He had employed a similar technique in the

‘chameleon poet’ letter, where he went as far as to distance himself from his own

opinions, telling Woodhouse (in the language of the interrogation chamber, no less):

‘[i]t is a wretched thing to confess; but is a very fact that not one word I ever utter can

be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature’.51 The

question remains: how and when did Keats arrive at Colnaghi’s window? Did he

follow the ‘progress of the multitudes’, or keep to his own itinerary? Did the two

men’s progresses coincide? The Morning Chronicle records that Hunt’s mammoth 49 B. Leibe, K. Schindler, N. Cornelis and L. Van Gool, ‘Coupled Object Detection

and Tracking from Static Cameras and Moving Vehicles’, IEEE Transactions on

Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 30 (2008), 1683-98.50 Haggerty and Ericson, 163.51 LJK, i. 386.

20

procession may have reached the Crown and Anchor as early as 6pm, while the

Morning Post suggests it arrived at 8pm due to ‘impediments’ along the way. The

Black Dwarf gives the time of his arrival as 7.20pm (see Fig. 6). At 7pm, according to

the letter to George and Georgiana, Keats met his guardian Mr Abbey at 4 Pancras

Lane, Cheapside, which lay more-or-less on Hunt’s route. After meeting Abbey, Keats

set off west, but remembering letters for Fanny Brawne and Charles Brown he wished

to ‘put … in the Post’, he doubled back through the Poultry to Lombard Street.52 After

posting his letters there, he headed west again, walking round Mansion House, whose

barred iron gates were guarded by constables (perhaps hearing the ‘hisses and groans

for the Lord Mayor’),53 before cutting up through Bucklersbury, where he met Abbey

for a second time.54 The two men walked together as far as a hatter’s at 74 Cheapside.55

‘When I left Mr. Abbey on Monday evening’, Keats wrote, ‘I walked up Cheapside,

but returned to put some letters in the post, and met him again in Bucklersbury. We

walked together through the Poultry as far as the hatter’s shop he has some concern

in’.56

Further on in his journal letter, Keats mentions that he had called in at 93 Fleet Street,

a few hundred yards west, to speak to his publisher John Taylor, who was out. His

letter also records that at some point, presumably subsequent to his attempt to meet

Taylor, he called on Charles Dilke, who lived in Great Smith Street in Westminster,

some two miles south-west. Discovering Dilke was out, Keats proceeded north to call

52 LJK, ii. 192. 53 Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post (16 September 1819), 4.54 When Keats left Mr Abbey earlier, his guardian had set off on business of his own.

The two coincided along Bucklersbury.55 See JKNL, 344.56 LJK, ii. 192.

21

on John Hamilton Reynolds at 19 Conduit Street. On finding that Reynolds wasn’t in,

he headed further north to 50 Poland Street to try James Rice, who was at home.

Keats’s glimpse into Colnaghi’s window must therefore have taken place on the way

between Dilke’s and Reynolds’s. The timings of Hunt’s parade, and Keats’s position

along its itinerary at 7pm, allow for the possibility – indeed, make it likely – that Keats

witnessed the hallooing end of it, just as he’d caught its beginning, before heading

south-west to Dilke, his head no doubt full of scenes he wished to discuss with the

man he described to George and Georgiana as obsessed with ‘political justice’.57

Keats’s afternoon, then, is characterized by meetings, near meetings, second meetings

in the case of Abbey, doublings, doubling backs and suggestive lacunae. Apart from a

whorl of anti-clockwise activity around Lombard Street, his ten mile dérive were

mostly clockwise-circular, like Hunt’s. As the isolated yellow pockets on the map in

Fig. 6 indicate, however, there’s a limit to what can be reconstructed with relative

certainty. Keats’s periphrasis, his roundaboutness (both in journal letter and physical

drift across London) recalls Lamia’s and Lycius’s own foiling route through the

‘populous streets’ of Corinth. It seems likely, though, that – with some private

excursions along the way – Keats broadly followed Hunt’s route, and at various points

was probably part of the ‘solid mass’ of supporters moving ‘slowly and regularly

along’. Keats’s own sense of the political energies of his circuit are suggested by a

revealing slip that occurs when he tells his brother and sister-in-law that he intends to

give them a little politics in the ‘next street’. He means ‘sheet’, and indeed the next

sheet of his letter expounds his well-known theory of three political epochs in England

since the destruction of feudal monarchy. But for Keats in the charged, partisan

atmosphere of that September afternoon, sheets of political philosophy and packed city 57 LJK, ii. 213.

22

streets occupy the same suspicious space.

So, Colnaghi’s window has nothing at all to do with Hunt’s procession – and it also

releases the meaning of that day’s momentous events for Keats, makes sense of his

letter’s impossible cartography, and – as we’ll see – points to a private drama of

suspicion that as much as the watchful mood in the capital that Monday afternoon

conditions his great ode’s own crisis around spying and informing.

The face that arrests Keats’s attention in Colnaghi’s show window was a ‘profile

portrait of Sandt, the destroyer of Kotzebue’ (Fig. 7). On 23 March 1819, veteran

solider and student Karl Ludwig Sand had stabbed the German dramatist to death,

after accusing him of betraying Germany. In April, the Examiner devoted several

pages to the insane destroyer Sand and Kotzebue, denounced by Leigh Hunt as ‘most

suspicious’ and a ‘renegade and spy’, accounts and updates Keats is likely to have

read.58 Suspicion, denunciation, betrayal … the dyad of Kotzebue and Sand, conjured

for Keats in Colnaghi’s display, on this of all days, would have sounded these sombre

pedal notes very close to home.

Because when Keats stood among the crowds at Islington at 2 o’clock on 13

September, two processions, two triumphant entries, were about to start. One of them

was celebratory and optimistic, the other shadowed and suspicious.

5. Shadowy things

In the foreground of Benjamin Robert Haydon’s gigantic painting ‘Christ’s

Triumphant Entry into Jerusalem’ (1814-20), the object of suspicion, soon to be 58 The Examiner, 589 (11 April 1819), 225.

23

betrayed by Judas, rides a donkey through a crowd of supporters as key scenes from

the biblical narrative unfold around him (Fig. 8). Lazarus is prostrate, the Canaanite

woman spreads her garment, spies mingle with the multitudes. Members of Haydon’s

circle of friends, including Wordsworth and Hazlitt, are among the ‘ocean of heads’.59

The painting also captures the moment when the good centurion throws his spear

down at Christ’s feet, an act that resonated with ultra-radical fantasies of the army

joining forces with the people as they rose up against a corrupt government. If

Haydon’s ‘Triumphant Entry’ wasn’t itself hinting at this allegory, by the time it was

finally exhibited in Bullock’s Egyptian Hall in March 1820, overtaken by ‘Orator’

Hunt’s own triumphal entry and the execution of Arthur Thistlewood and other Cato

Street conspirators – a plot foiled by spies and informers – viewers and sitters alike

could hardly have been ignorant of these political dimensions. The scene may well

have seemed like a Peterloo allegory avant le lettre, a parable of the reform

movement, of political friendships and bonds of trust straining under the pressure of

surveillance.

Yet for all the spectacle of these set pieces, the psychological drama is off to the side.

Between two dark, pillar-like palm tree trunks, a man leans into his neighbour.60

59 Literary Gazette (1 April 1820), 221.60 Keats’s neighbour is Haydon’s first student William Bewick. Bewick identifies

himself – mixing up speaker and listener – in an 1864 letter to T. H. Cromek as the

person ‘speaking loud to … John Keats’. See Life and Letters of William Bewick, ed.

Thomas Landseer (2 vols, London, 1871), ii. 227. In a letter to ‘Col Wild’ of the

Pennsylvania Academy, Haydon comments that ‘between the stems of the Palm trees’

Keats is ‘calling’, and that the other (Bewick) is ‘turning back to catch the Sound’

(54); see Marcia Allentuck, ‘Haydon’s “Christ’s Triumphant Entry into Jerusalem”:

An Unpublished Letter’, The Art Bulletin, 44 (1962), 53-54, at 54. The Literary

Gazette’s description of the painting begins the mistaken tradition of referring to ‘two

24

Keats’s lips – for Keats’s they are – are the only pair in the painting parted in speech.

A portrait of conspiracy.

When Keats sat for his preparatory profile at Leigh Hunt’s cottage in the Vale of

Health in December 1816, his lips were sealed (Fig. 9). The placeholder for his

inclined head, framed by the palms, appears in Haydon’s earliest designs for the

canvas from 1814, two years before the painter made Keats’s acquaintance. There the

mouth is simply a flat stroke, rather than opened in conversation. At some point

between the first flush of Keats’s and Haydon’s mutual appreciation and the painting’s

public exhibition, the poet’s mouth has opened. What’s more, his cheeks are flushed to

an ‘angry tea rose’ (Stanley Plumly’s strikingly camp phrase), as if the act of

communication in which he is engaged were somehow shameful.61 As well it might be,

since Keats appears to be passing on information. In the painting’s own construction of

a ‘plausible spacetime trajectory’ capable of explaining the past ‘as if it had always

existed’, Keats has been cast in the role of the betrayer, the infiltrator, the agent

provocateur. As the archetypal informer, Judas.62 To complicate and complete the

allegory, it is Haydon himself who looks inscrutably out from atop the donkey. (Over

the course of the painting’s long composition, Christ’s face, repainted seven times, had

pillars’ on the right of the composition. As Haydon’s early sketches, his letter to ‘Col

Wild’ and the biblical narrative confirm, they are in fact palm trees (Literary Gazette,

(1 April 1820), 221).61 Stanley Plumly, The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner with Keats,

Wordsworth, and Lamb (New York, 2014). 62 The figure of Judas seems to have haunted Haydon. When Keats died in Rome in

February 1821, Haydon was a few days from finishing his painting ‘Christ’s Agony in

the Garden’, depicting Christ kneeling in prayer with Judas behind him, followed by

Roman soldiers.

25

come to resemble the artist’s own phiz. As an amused Charles Lamb put it, Christ

looked ‘remarkably like Haydon’).63

Keats and Haydon had been introduced to each other at Hunt’s on 19 October 1816,

and Haydon recalls that the pair quickly became ‘extremely intimate’.64 In a slightly

odder formulation, his diary records that the two ‘saw through each other at once’.

Meant as an approbatory remark on their mutual transparency, something of the sense

of ‘found out’ or ‘rumbled’ ghosts the phrase.65 Envisaging a protective role towards

the newcomer, Haydon vowed that if ‘Christ’s Triumphant Entry into Jerusalem’ made

any money Keats would ‘never want all his life as I live’. In the event, it was Keats

who was called on to advance Haydon a sum of £30 (which the painter thought

meagre). The loan was to become a source of resentment and suspicion on both sides.

As it turned out, the preparatory sketches in Leigh Hunt’s cottage marked the

highpoint of the pair’s relationship, for the Examiner’s editor and Haydon ‘would vie

jealously’ to mentor the young poet. First Haydon’s protégé, Keats became Hunt’s.66

Haydon – his view of the world ‘warped by … suspicion’, in the words of his first

biographer – never forgave Keats for that early shifting of allegiances.67 Nor did he

forgive Hunt, whom, after Keats’s death, he branded ‘the great unhinger of [Keats’s]

63 Walter Jackson Bate also notes the ‘remarkable similarity’; WJB, 112.64 Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon, Historical Painter, from his Autobiography and

Journals, ed. Tom Taylor (2 vols, New York, 1853), i. 318.65 Neglected Genius: The Diaries of Benjamin Robert Haydon, 1808-1846, ed. John

Jolliffe (London, 1990), 48.66 JKNL, 105.67 Neglected Genius: The Diaries of Benjamin Robert Haydon, 1808-1846, 70.

26

best dispositions’.68 Haydon was also suspicious of Keats’s rapid rise in the

Hampstead literary circle, and of the fact that Keats soon distanced himself creatively

from Hunt. If Keats could give up medicine for poetry and Hunt’s patronage so easily,

what else could he give up?

Haydon’s misgivings weren’t helped by the poet’s naively grandiloquent and

overconfident statements of support. On 8 April 1818, Keats declared: ‘believe me

Haydon your picture is a part of myself’ ; and in December he told the literal-minded

painter that he’d been thinking ‘not only now but for this year and a half’ about ways

to secure its completion.69 In February 1819, however, Keats’s hopes of financial

upturn through a share of his brother Tom’s estate were dashed when Abbey refused to

distribute the money. Unable to advance Haydon more funds, a situation both men

found awkward, Keats sought to blunt Haydon’s suspicions of bad faith by blaming

the situation on Abbey’s own suspicions of Keats’s poetic aspirations: ‘[w]hen I

offered you assistance I thought I had it in my hand; I thought I had nothing to do, but

to do. The difficulties I met with arose from the alertness and suspicion of Abbey’.70

Straitened financially himself, Keats attempted to recover his original £30, thereby

only sharpening Haydon’s sense of betrayal.

All this time, Haydon’s unfinished and still in important respects (as it concerned

Keats) indeterminate canvas played on the poet’s mind. Haydon kept the picture

propped up in his Great Marlborough Street and later Lisson Grove painting room,

which doubled as his dining room, and the gigantic crowd scene formed a familiar

68 Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon, i. 396.69 LJK, i. 264, 414-15.70 LJK, ii. 54.

27

backdrop to the circle’s social gatherings, including the famous ‘Immortal Dinner’ of

28 December 1817.71 Amid these strained relations, ‘Christ’s Triumphant Entry into

Jerusalem’ took slow shape, silently absorbing the various psychodramas in which

Haydon was involved, along with the momentous political events of the age.

What did Haydon imagine that Keats was saying in the epic painting? In an 1831

letter to ‘Col Wild’ of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Haydon claimed to

have depicted Keats ‘bawling loudly’ to his neighbour (modelled by William Bewick)

to give an impression of the immense noise in the crowd.72 None of this volume comes

across, however. Rather, Christ’s triumphant entry appears to be taking place amid

stunned silence, and Keats appears to be whispering.

Going back (or is that forward?) to Keats in Islington High Street – as the poet

watched the defiant procession of another radical, this time Henry Hunt, and not into

Jerusalem but London, he could hardly have avoided thinking about his double

presence, his double agency, in that enormous canvas leaned up in Haydon’s painting

room. Because in the dust of Islington High Street, Keats is a double exposure, a

quantum Keats, who disturbs our sense, and his own, of historical narratives.

Unlike the colourful descriptions of political pageantry in the Black Dwarf and other

radical mouthpieces, Keats’s letter to George and Georgiana redacts any detailed

description of the Orator’s crowds, skipping ahead to the assassination of a literary 71 Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon, i. 318.72 See Allentuck, ‘Haydon’s ‘Christ’s Triumphant Entry into Jerusalem’: An

Unpublished Letter’, 54. In his letter to T. H. Cromek, Bewick records that his

conversation with Keats was intended to appear loud ‘to give an idea of the noise and

crowd’ (see Life and Letters of William Bewick, ii. 227).

28

man, Kotzebue, for perfidy. Did Keats, in some sort of nightmarish heterotopy, see his

own painted face over Sand’s in Colnaghi’s window? Did he feel he’d deserved

Haydon’s dagger? At any rate, in Haydon’s hands (and with Keats’s help), the

optimism of the reformers’ triumphant procession – into Jerusalem, into London –

becomes a reflection on the dyadic nature of friendship, of confidence, and its betrayal

along all too familiar fault lines.

6. Who hath not seen thee?

Readers in Keats’s own day responded warmly to the visual clarity of ‘To Autumn’.

The Monthly Review observed that the poem brought the ‘reality’ of the season ‘more

before our eyes’ than any other description.73 But Keats’s ode brings more than harvest

home before the eyes. Brendan McQuade, drawing on Bourdieu, posits the field as ‘a

social space defined by the struggle to control a specific form of social power’.74

McQuade’s provocation is directed at current policing and post-9/11 monitory

practices, but also captures something urgent about the dramas of superintendence and

control played out in a Winchester field in 1819. Just as John Haslam’s patient

Andrew McKennot performed the role of Bedlam’s ‘secret inspector-general’,

allowing nothing to ‘pass his observation’ without jotting it down, Keats’s ode logs

everything that appears in its field of vision. It brings before our eyes not only images

of worked land, but also the labourers who work it – and those who do not. The poem

is structured around directed acts of invigilation: looking (patiently); watching (hours

by hours); seeking (abroad; Keats’s first draft was more ominous: ‘whoever seeks for

73 Monthly Magazine, 92 (1820), 305-10, at 309.74 Brendan I. McQuade, ‘Police and the Post-9/11 Surveillance Surge: “Technological

Dramas” in “the Bureaucratic Field”’, Surveillance & Society, 14 (2016), pp. 1-19, at

p. 3.

29

thee’); and seeing (‘who hath not seen thee’). The ode’s own prying observation, I

wish to suggest, makes a field of information out of its stanzas, and threatens to make

a tattling informer of Keats.

‘To Autumn’ was composed during a circuit of Winchester six days after the London

pedestrian dramas of 13 September. For some twenty years, now, it has been a critical

orthodoxy to include the defiant energies of Henry Hunt’s political pageant in the

ode’s own fugitive narratives of resistance. I would add that while ‘To Autumn’ hints

at radical allegory, positioning itself as a work that conspires with opponents of

Peterloo policing, rigged corn legislation, high bread prices and labour exploitation,

the poem also internalizes anxieties around spying and informing, suspicion and self-

suspicion – a crisis brought to the fore for Keats in the capital earlier that week, and

whose mental impacts discipline the ode and suggest its surprising affinity with the

plight of some of John Haslam’s patients in Bedlam.

In Stanza 2, the reapers are depicted ‘sound asleep’ in what might appear to be a scene

of bucolic ease and well-earned respite from labour. In fact, as Jayne Archer, Howard

Thomas and I have argued elsewhere, farmers across the country were especially

vigilant during harvest time against the idleness of casual labourers.75 In his General

View of the Agriculture of Hampshire (1813), of which Winchester is the county town,

Charles Vancouver complained that the local labour force was known to be

particularly given to ‘idleness’.76 The Farmer’s Calendar (1804) advised landowners

75 See Richard Marggraf Turley, Jayne Elisabeth Archer and Howard Thomas, ‘Keats,

‘To Autumn’, and the New Men of Winchester’, 813-16.76 See Charles Vancouver, General View of the Agriculture of Hampshire (London,

1813), 387.

30

to keep ‘a very strict eye’ on their ‘harvest-men’, adding that: ‘[i]t requires constant

attention, early and late, to see that the men work their hours; and that … they work as

long as they can see’.77 The idleness of labourers, Keats would have been well aware,

also had political implications, in that idle workers were regarded by those in

authority as potential recruits for mobs. On Sunday 26 September 1819, charting the

aftershocks of Henry Hunt’s parade, the Examiner’s front page denounced

Castlereagh’s assumption of the ‘wilful idleness’ of those who turned out to support

the radical orator.78 Whether the ode’s reapers are wilfully engaged in a calculated act

of withdrawing labour, or simply taking an illicit nap between the furrows (evading

oversight), their intransigence is logged and transcribed by Keats’s poem.

The ode, then, gives away the reapers at their ‘secret bed’, to recall Lamia’s betrayal

of the sleeping nymph to Hermes.79 It turns them into objects of suspicion – and turns

them in. And it does so as unthinkingly as we may share, or let slip, our own peers’

views, affiliations and orientations on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, or as

casually as a Google car might capture a moonlighting worker on a ladder outside

someone’s house (Fig. 10). As my co-authors and I have argued, the ode describes a

scene of real rural work in a real location, the St Giles’s Hill cornfield, and such

information could easily have landed someone in it. At the very least, it would have

done nothing to challenge Vancouver’s prejudices against Hampshire labourers. ‘To

Autumn’, indeed, begins to appear, to adapt Kaima Negishi’s terms, as a ‘surveillant

77 The Farmer’s Calendar (1804), 425.78 Examiner, 613 (26 September 1819), 609.79 See Gordon Hull, Heather Richter Lipford and Celine Latulipe, ‘Contextual Gaps:

Privacy Issues on Facebook’, Ethics and Information Technology, 13 (2011), 289-

302.

31

text’.80 Autumn herself is logged in the ode’s spy transcript, tracked from place to

place as if she were a radical in disguise, swapping identities (as chameleon as Keats),

now a thresher, now a gleaner, now a cider maker, never committing to a single

identity, to an identical nature.

In Surveillance After September 11 (2003), David Lyon concludes that a culture of

suspicion ‘makes surveillors of us all’.81 In such a culture, ‘not only do all become

suspects, but all are enlisted as informers’ (59). Keats’s ode both meditates on and –

itself an optic – mediates a surveillant gaze that exposes labourers dozing between

furrows when they should be ‘work[ing] their hours’. It offers itself as a document of

what happens to communities, to friendships, to sociability under surveillance, where

watching, informing, being informed on – and the corrosive, eroding guilt and doubt

that result – become the psychopathic norms of human interaction. The poem is

divided against itself, receives its own insights with distrust, becomes in the act of

turning informer an object of its own suspicion. Finally, the ode alerts us to the

consequences of our own internalized acts of suspicion and self-inspection, our own

acts of mutual scrutiny and betrayal as we declare our affinity with John Haslam’s

celebrated patients Andrew McKennot and James Tilly Mathews.

80 See Kaima Negishi, ‘From Surveillant Text to Surveilling Device: The Face in

Urban Transit Spaces’, Surveillance & Society, 11.3 (2013):

http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/face/

face[date of access: 9.2.17].81 Surveillance After September 11 (Polity Press: Cambridge, 2003), p. 10.

32