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RECENT WORK IN ROMANTIC STUDIES-INDEED, IN ENGLISH STUDIES more broadly-has called for a renewed attention to the material-culture contexts with which literary expression is always in dialogue. In the past decade, landmark studies in Romanticism have investigated everything from advertising and economics to the science of the mind and the gastronomic pleasures of the table.1 Increasingly, Romanticism is studied as a movement that is fundamentally engaged with and shaped by the circulation and production of commodities and the culture that they generate, and we are a long distance from the old myth of dreamy poets living in a world of the disembodied imagination.
Some Romantic-era commodities have received substantial scholarly attention. We know a good deal of important information, for example, about sugar and slavery, tea and opium.2 Print culture is now well integrated into the field of study, and the names of periodical reviews and their editors are, today, nearly as familiar as the names of the era's great cartoonists and satirists.3 Among the widely circulated and significant commodities of the Romantic era, however, there is one that provided late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century Britain with some of its most powerfully resonant cultural symbols: textile-based fashion. Throughout British culture, Phrygian caps and sans culottes were shorthand for 1790s radicalism, and the "buff and blue" colors of the Whig party-a visual allusion to the military uniforms of American revolutionaries-were a silent statement of transadantic and national political allegiance. The revitalization of the tartan in the early nineteenth century operated as a cipher for renewed Scottish nationalism, and, to caricature an educated literary lady, one only had to refer to her imagined bluestockings. When the young Lord Byron made his maiden speech in Parliament in 1812, he had originally intended to speak on the subject of the Catholic emancipation, a topic that was unquestionably among the most urgent and divisive controversies of the Romantic half-century. Instead, he turned his attention at the last moment to a topic that was no less urgent for many of his contemporaries: the textile riots of the Nottingham weavers.4 These impassioned artisans had been far more patient than their London counterparts, who had been rioting already for decades.
Cultural engagement, of course, was Byron's signature, and the assimilation of material-culture tropes in...