2. Alternative beginnings: Scholars have
argued for different dates.
• 1780 so as to include the poet William
Blake’s work (lived 1757-1821)
• 1789 beginning of the French Revolution
• 1798 first publication of the Preface to The
Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth and
Coleridge). 2nd
edition 1800; 3rd
edition
1802)
• Broadly defined, the Romantic Period ran
from 1785-1830.
3. The Romantic Period began in
1785, the year William Blake
and Robert Burns published
their first poems.
It is usually said to have ended
in 1830, by which time the major
writers of the preceding century
were either dead or no longer
productive.
It was a turbulent time period,
when England changed from
a primarily agricultural society to
a modern industrial nation.
Wealth and power shifted from
the landholding aristocracy to
new factory employers, who
found themselves up against a
large, restive working class.
4. From the 18th
century emphasis on
reason, sense, science, rationality,
civility, and political notions of
liberty and property…..
..we move to the Romantic Period–a period
of Sensibility. Writers became much more
introspective looking less at external
realities and focusing much more on
internal sensation, feeling, and emotions.
Henry Fuseli, “The Poet’s Vision,” unused
design for frontispiece to William Cowper’s
Poems (1807).
Frontispiece to Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal
Society; Wenceslaus Hollar, engraving, London,
1667.
5. Richard Samuel, Portraits in the Characters of the Muses in the
Temple of Apollo (The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain), 1778.
The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli, ca. 1783–91
Move from 18th
Century’s
dominant genre of Satire and
its accompanying ironic
distance and focus on society
vs. the self to…..
…the Romantic period’s fascination with
the lyrical, the morbid, the macabre, and
the Gothic.
6. But with the Romantic Period comes a
much more intense nostalgia for the
pastoral. This played out in a fascination
with “common” people and rural life. The
idealization of the pastoral was in part a
reaction to the rural and agricultural
destruction wreaked by the Industrial
Revolution.
Shared with the 18th
century an interest in
the “picturesque”—natural landscape,
gardens, parks.
7. REVOLUTION
Image memorializing the Peterloo Massacre. Detail
from an illustration by George Cruikshank for William
Hone’s A Slap at Slop and the Bridge-Street Gang
(1821), a stinging attack on the conservative press
that had attempted to justify the soldiers’ brutality.
The French Revolution: 1789-
1793
The American Revolution:
1774-1777
9. Reaction to Revolution
• In response to the French Revolution, the English
government prohibited public meetings,
suspended habeas corpus (the release from
unlawful restraint), and advocates of even
moderate political change were charged with high
treason.
• Yet economic and social
changes created a
desperate need for
corresponding political
changes, and
new social
classes were demanding
a voice in government.
Viaduct across the Great Northern Railway, 1851
10. The Industrial Revolution
• Resulted from the invention of power-driven machinery
replacing hand labor.
• Open fields and farms were enclosed into privately owned
agricultural holdings.
• A new labor population
massed in the sprawling mill
towns that burgeoned in
central and northern England.
• The new landless class
migrated to the industrial
towns or remained as farm
laborers, subsisting on
starvation wages.
Megg's almshouses, 1800s
11. Results of the Industrial Revolution
• The landscape began to take on its modern appearance,
with rural areas divided into a checkerboard of fields
enclosed by hedges and stone walls. (Enclosure)
• Factories of the industrial
and trading cities cast a
pall of smoke over vast
areas of jerry-built houses
and slum tenements.
• The population polarized
into two classes of capital
labor, the large owner or trader and the
impoverished wage-worker, the rich and the poor.
12. Further consequences of the Industrial
Revolution:
• Strong Governmental response
• A laissez-faire attitude
encouraged government not to
interfere.
– Adam Smith The Wealth of Nations
(1776)
• The results were inadequate
wages, long hours of work under
harsh discipline in sordid
conditions, and the large-scale
employment of women and
children for tasks that destroyed
both the body and the spirit.
13. Consequences Cont’
• Colonialization
– While the poor were suffering, the landed classes, the
industrialists, and many merchants prospered as the
British Empire expanded aggressively both westward
and eastward.
– During this time period, the British Empire became the
most powerful colonial presence in the world.
– The British East India Co.
ruled the entire Indian sub-
continent, and black slave
labor in the West Indies
generated great wealth for
British plantation
owners.
14. THE STATUS OF WOMEN
• Women of all
classes were
regarded as
inferior to men,
were
undereducated,
had limited
vocational
opportunities,
were subject to a
strict code of
sexual behavior,
and had almost
no legal rights.
• In spite of the
above, the cause
of women’s rights
was largely
ignored.Disappointed Love, Francis Danby, 1821
15. Republican Motherhood
• French Revolution provoked English conservative anxieties about disruption of traditional
gender roles.
– New emphasis on English virtues associated with “family” and “home”
– Nationalist rhetoric circulates notion that the British military is protecting the domestic
hearth.
• Conceptions of femininity altered—new idealization and nationalization of the home
16. Republican Motherhood cont’
• Women were deluged by
nationalist rhetoric disseminated
in the form of books, sermons,
and magazine articles all of
which emphasized mental &
physical differences between
the sexes.
• Policing of women into the
domestic sphere—instructing
women to remain within the
home as wives and caregivers
• Tie forged between British
domesticity and national
identity: Women’s job to raise
patriotic sons. Women’s virtues
(as culturally prescribed)
presented as having public
relevance.
17. The “Spirit of the Age”
• Writers during this time
period did not think of
themselves as “romantic.”
• Many writers, however, felt
that there was something
distinctive about their time –
a pervasive intellectual and
imaginative climate which
they called “the spirit of the
age.”
• They described it as a
release of energy,
experimental boldness, and
creative power that marked a
literary renaissance, an age
of new beginnings when, by
discarding traditional
procedures and outworn
customs, everything and
anything was possible.
A Philosopher in a Moonlit Churchyard, Phillipe de
Loutherbourg, 1790.
18. Poetic Theory and Practice
Wordsworth tried to articulate
the spirit of the “new” poetry in
his famous Preface to The
Lyrical Ballads (first published
1798; again in 1800, 1802).
19. Wordsworth’s Concept of Poetry/the
Poet
• Poetry is the “spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings”; the essence of poetry was the mind, emotions,
and the imagination of the poet (less interest in the
external world and more interest in the Self and the roles
of memory and the imagination).
20. Poetry/the Poet cont’
• FIRST-PERSON LYRIC POEM became
the major Romantic literary form, with “I”
often referring directly to the Poet. The
development of the Self became a major
topic of Romantic poetry.
21. Poetry/The Poet cont’
• THE LYRIC: a brief subjective
poem marked strongly by
imagination, melody, and
emotion, and creating for the
reader a single, unified
impression. Subjectivity is key
to the form of the lyric which is
the personal expression of a
personal emotion imaginatively
phrased.
• Poets often saw themselves as
PROPHETS in a time of crisis,
revising the promise of divine
redemption in terms of
“Heaven” here on Earth.
22. Characteristics of the Romantic
Period
• (1) Imagination, Emotions, and Intuition.
Exaltation of intense feelings.
• Descartes: I think, therefore I am.
vs
• Rousseau: I felt before I thought.
• (2) Subjectivity of approach; the cult of the
individual; the absolute uniqueness of
every individual.
23. Characteristics of Romanticism
cont
(3) Freedom of thought and expression.
A revolt against authority, tyranny, and
tradition, whether social, political, religious,
or artistic.
Thomas Paine: “The Rights of Man.”
Mary Wollstonecraft: “A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman” (1792)
Alienation and rebellion: Cult of Youth,
Energy, and Idealism
24. Characteristics of Romanticism cont
3) Freedom of thought and expression cont’
– HUMAN BEINGS were seen as inherently noble & good (though
easily corrupted by society), and as possessing great power and
potential that had formerly been ascribed only to God.
– There was GREAT FAITH PLACED IN DEMOCRATIC IDEALS,
concern for human liberty, & a great outcry against various froms
of tyranny.
– THE HUMAN MIND was seen as creating (at least in part) the
world around it, and as having access to the infinite via the
faculty of the imagination. The Romantics believed that
CONSCIOUSNESS SHAPES PERCEPTION—so by extension
this means that perception and experience are subjective. The
mind has access to the infinite via the faculty of the
IMAGINATION.
25. • 4) Idealization of Nature
England’s Lake
District
Characteristics of Romanticism cont
26. Characteristics of Romanticism cont
4) IDEALIZATION OF NATURE cont’
• Embracing the uncivilized, the wild, the pre-
civilized.
• Rousseau: “Man is born free and everywhere he
is in chains.” In other words, civilization is in part
the cause of our corruption.
• The “noble savage”—closeness to nature seen as
invoking man’s innate goodness
• Natural world as revealing the divine
• Nature as mirroring subjective states.
• Nature as revelatory/reflective of personal crisis.
27. 4) IDEALIZATION OF NATURE CONT’
Two Perspectives on
Nature
–Edmund Burke’s “The Beautiful”: The
first perspective viewed nature as
peaceful, calm, nurturing, a source for
spiritual renewal. It often showed an
innocent life of rural dwellers, a world of
peace and harmony which nurtures and
comforts the human spirit. This is very
much how Wordsworth viewed nature.
29. the Second Perspective of
Nature
• (Edmund Burke’s “the SUBLIME”)
Nature could also be terrifyingly
beautiful in its power, and cause a
vertiginous sense of awe and
wonder.
31. Edmund Burke, in A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of
our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756) defined
these two views of nature as:
• The beautiful
• The sublime—Burke’s doctrine of the sublime
was powerfully influential on 18th
and 19th
century
writers. He believed that a painful idea creates a
sublime passion and thus concentrates the mind
on that single facet of experience and produces
a momentary suspension of rational activity,
uncertainty, and self-consciousness. If the pain
producing the effect is IMAGINARY rather than
real, a great aesthetic object is achieved.
32. The sublime cont’
• Characterized by nobility and grandeur,
impressive, exalted, terror/horror, raised
above ordinary human qualities.
• Great mountains, storms at sea, ruined
abbeys, crumbling houses, charnel
houses are appropriate subjects to
produce the sublime.
• Percy Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” will be our
example of a poet contemplating the
sublime
34. THE SUPERNATURAL & STRANGE
• Many Romantic poems
explore the realm of
mystery & magic;
incorporate materials
from folklore,
superstition, etc; are
often set in distant or
faraway places
• There was also a great
interest in unusual
modes of experience
such as visionary states
of consciousness,
hypnotism, dreams,
drug-induced states,
etc.
36. POETS/POETRY from the
Romantic Period
William Blake
• Poetical Sketches
• Songs of Innocence and
Experience
• The Book of Thel
• The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell
• Jerusalem
44. Glad Day, or The Dance of Albion, William
Blake, ca. 1793. Blake kept returning to
this image of liberation. He first designed
it in 1780, shortly after finishing his
apprenticeship as an engraver, when the
vision of a rising sun and a radiant
human body may have expressed his
own youthful sense of freedom. But
later, in an age of revolution, he
identified the figure as Albion—“Albion
rose from where he labourd at the Mill
with Slaves.” For Blake the giant Albion
represents the ancient form of Britain, a
universal man who has fallen on evil,
repressive times but is destined to awake
and to unite all people in a dance of
liberty, both political and spiritual.
Eventually, in Jerusalem (ca. 1820),
Blake’s last great prophetic work, the
figure of Albion merged with Jesus, risen
from the tomb as an embodiment of “the
human form divine”—immortal and
perpetually creative
45. Robert Burns
• Tam o’ Shanter
• Auld Lang Syne
William Wordsworth
• Lyrical Ballads, with a
Few Other Poems
• The Prelude
• “Lines Composed a
Few Miles above
Tintern Abbey”
46. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner
• Dejection: An Ode
• Kubla Khan
• The Eolian Harp
George Gordon, Lord
Byron
• Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage
• Don Juan
• “Darkness”
Lord Byron, Thomas Phillips, 1835
(after an original of 1813)
47. Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Alastor
• Prometheus
Unbound
• Adonais
• Mont Blanc
John Keats
• Endymion
• The Eve of St.
Agnes
• Ode to a Nightingale
48. WERE THERE NO WOMEN POETS?
• Anna Barbauld
– “A Summer’s Evening’s
Meditation”
– “The Rights of Woman”
• Charlotte Smith
– Elegiac Sonnets
• Mary Robinson (who
Wordsworth and Coleridge
credit as their mentor in craft)
– “January, 1795”
– “The Haunted Beach”
– “To the Poet Coleridge”
49. The Essay
• Charles Lamb
• William Hazlitt
• Thomas De
Quincey
• Essays
• Reviews
• Political pamphlets
• Eclectic range of
topics from writer’s
private meditations
to politics, social
phenomenon/event
s
50. The Novel. Illustration from 1787 by James Northcote of a scene in William Hayley’s
didactic poem The Triumphs of Temper (1781): the heroine’s maiden aunt has just
caught her in possession of a novel and seized the book as “filthy trash”—while
secretly intending to keep it for herself.
1814 marked change
• Shape of the
novel changing
radically
• Novel replacing
poetry as
preferred genre
THE NOVEL
51. The Novel cont’
• Jane Austen
(1775-1817)
publishes her first novel
in 1811
– Emma (1816) “a
new style of novel”
• Focused on lives of
the landed gentry
• Particularly
interested in female
heroines
William Godwin
-Caleb Williams
political novels
• Sir Walter Scott
– Waverly series
52. The Gothic Novel
• Gloomy castles
• Devious
priests/monks
• Ghosts/nightmares
– Ann Radcliffe
– Clara Reeve
– Sophia Lee
53. The Gothic cont’
• Whereas the 18th
century writers had
disparaged the gothic
as “barbaric” the
Romanticists were
drawn to whatever
was
– Medieval; natural;
primitive; wild; free;
authentic; occult;
para-normal; the
macabre
