Download The Romantic Period

The Romantic Period
1785-1830
Whitechapel High Street, ca. 1894
The Romantic Period
• Began in 1785, the year Blake and Burns published their
first poems.
• 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 large-scale employers, who found themselves
against a large, restive working class.
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
Viaduct across the Great Northern Railway, 1851
a voice in government.
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
Megg's almshouses, 1800s
starvation wages.
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.
• 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 possessionless
wage-worker, the rich and the poor.
Governmental response to the
Industrial Revolution
• A laisses-faire attitude
encouraged government to not
interfere
• 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.
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 subcontinent, and black slave
labor in the West Indies
generated great wealth for
British plantation owners.
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 was possible.
Poetry
• Wordsworth described all good poetry as “the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”
• He believed that the source of all poetry was not in
external things, but in the individual poet.
• The lyric poem, expressing the poet’s own feelings
and temperament, became a major Romantic form.
• The natural scene became a primary poetic subject,
and poets described natural phenomena with an
accuracy of observation that had no earlier match.
• Poets bestowed attitudes and sentiments
on the landscape that earlier writers had
felt only for God, parents or a beloved.
• Humble, rustic life and plain style were
elevated and the wonder of ordinary
things was exalted.
Themes in Literature
• Nature
• Isolationism
• Exile – especially of a
disinherited mind that
cannot find a spiritual
home in its native land
England’s Lake District
• Fascination with the
outlaws of myth, legend, or history
• Mysticism
• Results of the industrial revolution
Authors from the Romantic Period
William Blake
• Poetical Sketches
• Songs of Innocence and
Experience
• The Book of Thel
• The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell
• Jerusalem
Robert Burns
• Tam o’ Shanter
• Various songs and
poems
William Wordsworth
• Lyrical Ballads, with
a Few Other Poems
• The Prelude
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner
• Dejection: An Ode
• Kubla Khan
• Christabel
George Gordon, Lord
Byron
• Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage
• Don Juan
• Various poems
Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Alastor
• Prometheus
Unbound
• Adonais
• Various poems
John Keats
• Endymion
• The Eve of St.
Agnes
• Various poems