This book views Romantic literature’s discourses of childhood, education, and reproduction through the eyes of four early nineteenth-century British authors who were uniquely implicated in those discourses. Hartley and Sara Coleridge, children of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and William Godwin Jr, children of William Godwin, shared the predicament of being both ‘real’ and ‘literary’ children. All the children of authors who helped shape culturally-definitive Romantic-period ideas about childhood, they wrote back to their fathers in order to understand and to resist the ways in which they were produced by paternal texts which foreclose the possibility of the child’s own regeneration. This study proposes that through this predicament, and their responses to it, the literature of the period between the Romantic and the Victorian periods comes into focus, marked by an anxiety not of influence, but of reproduction. It suggests that one reason why this period has tended to disappear from view lies in the sense of historical and aesthetic difference, and productive failure, which this study uncovers.

General Henry Lockwood of Delaware: Shipmate of Melville, Co-builder of the Naval Academy, Civil War Commander depicts the fascinating and accomplished life of nineteenth-century Delaware son, Brig. Gen. Henry Lockwood. Excerpt for a leave of absence to fight as a Union general during the Civil War, Lockwood was a U.S. Navy professor of mathematics from 1841–1876, serving on the USS United States in the Pacific, at the Asylum Naval School, at the U.S. Naval Academy, and the U.S. Naval Observatory. Lockwood sailed aboard the U.S. Navy frigate United States, participating in Commodore Thomas Catesby Jones’s seizure of Monterey from Mexico and figuring importantly in shipmate Herman Melville’s novel White-Jacket. Later he was a co-builder of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. During the Civil War Lockwood pacified the slavery-bound Delmarva peninsula, and commanded a brigade at Gettysburg, the Maryland Heights at Harper’s Ferry, the Middle Department/8th Corps, and a division at Cold Harbor. All these accomplishments occurred in the face of Lockwood’s tendency to stutter which afflicted him throughout his life. This book also takes note of family members such as his son Lieut. James Lockwood, who died of starvation during the Greely polar expedition after having reached the furthest point north of any human; brother Navy Surgeon John Lockwood, whose essays in conjunction with Melville’s White-Jacket were major factors in outlawing punitive flogging in the Navy; and son-in-law Adam Charles Sigsbee, who was in command of the USS Maine when it blew up in Havana Harbor. Several pivotal events in Lockwood’s life have unjustly led to his historical neglect. Here Matthews finally gives Lockwood his due.

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