State Patronage and the Romantic Writer: Henry Taylor's Modest Proposal

So John Maynard Keynes, broadcasting to the nation in 1945 as chairman of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, the government body founded during the Second World War to help boost morale which even as he spoke was being developed into the Arts Council of Great Britain, incorporated in 1946.1 Until then, state subsidy with any pretensions to either system or comprehensiveness had been ignored in a ‘very English’ way, in spite of — or was it because of? — numerous Continental precedents. I want to look at one abortive attempt at state patronage from the 1830s, if only to suggest, when Keynes said that ‘State patronage of the arts has crept in’, just how long a creeping that involved. So abortive was Henry Taylor’s Proposal of 1835 for a British Institute as ‘the means through which the Government might be enabled to promote the interests of science and literature’, however, that it is arguably only a curiosity, comparable with moves in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to introduce decimal currency.2 The interest of the episode for us lies in what it might have meant and what it can be made to mean. And the fact that few will be familiar with the name of Henry Taylor, let alone with Taylor’s very successful closet drama of 1834 Philip Van Artevelde, is in part the point — certainly the point Taylor was himself trying to make in his Proposal.