TRICIA LOOTENSdangerous heritage of Victorian patriotism, it may be no wonder that
patriotic writing should have been one of the last Victorian poetic genres to
be recuperated for extensive scholarly study. Such relative neglect has been
in some respects ironic. For as Eric Hobsbawm and others have pointed
out, although right-wing nationalism, militant masculinism, and "state
patriotism" assuredly dominated patriotic thinking at the end of the
nineteenth century, earlier Victorian writers who called for national unity
were likely to do so in the name of "liberal and radical movements." 6 In
1843 , for example, the poem "A Patriot's Grave" celebrated Irish rebellion
against England, 7 while "God's Englishman the bold," in radical poet
Ebenezer Jones's "A Coming Cry" (1843), was prepared to "make thrones
totter" rather than enter a government-run workhouse. 8 Indeed, the strong
currents of republican fervor within the work of Jones, Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and James Thomson ("B.V") - to
name only a few - still remain an underresearched area of inquiry. Marked
by "an internationalist pacifism, a deep-rooted suspicion of the state, and
the invocation of a tradition of English freedom," the eighteenth-century
legacy of what Hugh Cunningham terms "radical patriotism" lived on,
through the end of the nineteenth century and beyond. 9
Even if this were not the case, however, Victorian patriotic poetry would
be crucial to the study of nineteenth-century poetic culture. For as Benedict
Anderson has memorably pointed out, to call upon the name of any nation
is to evoke an "imagined community" 10 ; and Victorian poetry is inextric-
ably linked to the project of imagining such a community. Calling upon
visions of "natural" identities of blood, bone, skin, and soil, and grounding
such identities in dreams of home, Victorian patriotic poetry sought to
translate "natal" loyalties into a larger love of country. Both "love" and
"country" remained contested terms, however; and the volatile project of
imagining nationhood crystallized and fractured deep cultural longings.
Often, the counterpart of calls for unity revealed itself as fear of division;
and where Victorian celebrations of the "land of one's birth" resonated
most loudly, they often spoke to terror of bodily engulfment or of
alienation and exile.
IINo nineteenth-century British poet was more devoted to such paradoxes -
or more notorious for popular patriotic writing - than Felicia Dorothea
Browne Hemans. Author of the unforgettable opening line, "The boy stood
on the burning deck" (FHIV, 157), Hemans was born in 1793 and came of
age, like early Victorian patriotic writing itself, during the Napoleonic
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