The romantic period 1780-1830

Revolution and Reaction

The Romantic period conventionally extends from 1785, a year after Samuel Johnson died and Blake and Burns published their first poems, to 1830, when the major romantic writers had either died or no longer wrote. The Industrial Revolution had started as early as the mid-18^th century, boosted by new textile machinery, and led England on the way to becoming an industrial nation. Scientific accomplishments in the areas of geology, chemistry, physics, and astronomy were also noteworthy during the Romantic Age. Towns were attracting more and more jobless rural inhabitants driven out by the destruction of home industry, and the fast growth of private agricultural holdings.

With the shift of population into the ever expanding towns, the English landscape gradually assumed its modern appearance: the countryside, checkered into fields by hedges or stone walls, and high-chimneyed cities spreading its smoke over slum houses. The population was dividing itself into "two nations", or the rich owners or traders and poor wageworkers. The government took a safe position of laissez-faire. This social philosophy states that the overall well-being could be achieved only through the laws of free economy, letting people take care of their private interests and prohibiting any state interference.

England was also involved in international conflicts. In 1789, as a protest against royal dictatorship and a declaration of the equality of people, the French Revolution broke out. In Great Britain most progressive people were inspired by its democratic ideas, but once the revolutionary government in France had attained power, it spread brutality, violence and the massacres of imprisoned nobility that shook the world.

Poetry During the Romantic Age

The 18^th-century Neoclassicists, writing mostly in heroic couplets, and thematically concentrating on London, were principally satirists, who scorned individual deviations from the norms of common sense, and valued good manners more than personal emotions. Despite the seeming order of the 18^th century, the opposite of the "classical" was underway, breaking out at the time of the French Revolution. It was connected with the individual's revolt against society and everything it stood for — firmly accepted good taste and artificial manners. The Romantic, as it later came to be called, is about a highly emotional, and generally impatient individual, rebelling against the restrictions of a stable society. Romanticists placed a high emphasis on free, unlimited imagination, on the essential role of instinct, intuition, and the feelings of the "heart" that were to act in complex with the logical judgments of the "head", both for artistic and philosophical activities. As opposed to the official Neoclassicists, who were mostly children of the city and looked down on the country, Romanticists worshipped the countryside and simple people. They abandoned the heroic couplet and began experimenting with other forms, rediscovering blank verse along with the Spenserian stanza. Finally, in 1798, Wordsworth and Coleridge with their publication of Lyrical Ballads inaugurated the Romantic movement. In the Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1800, they collected various scattered ideas into a consistent theory and initiated new poetic principles.

The Romantic movement covers about half a century and one of its principal representatives was William Blake (1757-1827). His imaginative longer works, such as the prophecy Jerusalem (1818), as well as his fervent devotion to democratic principles and to revision of Christianity, signify the distinctive qualities of that epoch, those of creative diversity and introspective self-examination. The literary representatives of this period did not, however, consider themselves as "romantic"; this word was introduced by English historians about half a century later. Contemporary literary studies view them as independent personalities, or group them into several separate schools, like the Lake School of William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), and Robert Southey (1774-1843); the Cockney School, a negative term for the Londoners Leigh Hunt (1784- 1859), William Hazlitt (1778-1830), and associated writers, ^ including John Keats (1795-1821); and the Rebellious School of George Gordon Byron (1788-1824), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), and their followers, and those who resist classification like Robert Burns (1759-1796).

The canonical 18^th century literary critics took poetry as mainly a reflection of human life directed at instruction and s artistic pleasure. However, Wordsworth constantly insisted that "all good poetry is, at the moment of composition, the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings". According to those views, poetry written by the first person narrator, earlier mostly neglected, now became a major mode of expression. Romantic writers experimented in poetic language, versification technique and forms: e.g. Blake's symbolic lyrics and far-sighted poems; Coleridge's haunting narrative ballad of sin and revenge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Wordsworth's epic-like spiritual autobiography, The Prelude; Shelley's symbolic drama, Prometheus Unbound; Keats' odes on the contradictions in fundamental human desires; Byron's ironic inspection of European civilization, Don Juan. Some Romantic writers shut themselves away from society in order to extend their individual vision. In almost all Wordsworth's poems one constantly comes across the words single, solitary, alone. Coleridge, and moreover Byron and Shelley, represented a solitary hero rejected by or rejecting society, and in search of a spiritual home. Hence, there was fascination with the mythical or historical outlaws, such as Cain, Satan, or Faust.

Romantic poems usually regard the landscape as a human being, with its life and passion. Since landscapes were so important for Romantic poetry, it is usually identified with nature poetry. Indeed, Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, Coleridge's Frost at Midnight, Shelley's Ode to the West Wind, Keats' Nightingale, and others introduce natural scenes; yet they are subordinated to the central human activity, meditation.

The poets of the second generation of Romanticists died young: Byron at the age of thirty-six, Shelley at twenty-nine, and John Keats at only twenty-five. Keats' first poetic attempts are in a traditional mode, and most of his achievements were written in 1819. The poetic heritage of this apostle of Beauty ranks him among the greatest English poets.

The Romanticists were much preoccupied with the unusual which was previously largely ignored or considered too insignificant. Coleridge was interested in mesmerism, and, like Blake and Shelley, studied occult literature. Coleridge also shared with Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) an anxiety about dreams and nightmares. Byron often relied on the appeal to the forbidden and the terrifying Satanic hero.

As in earlier English history, women were generally viewed as second-rate to men in all but domestic talents and were discouraged from schooling or higher education, possessing almost no legal rights. During this revolutionary period, women obtained their expressive defender, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (1759-1797), who defended the French Revolution in A Vindication of the Rights of Man (1790), and demanded a greater share of social, educational, and professional privileges for women in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which became a classic of the women's movement.

Prose Writing of Romanticism

The most substantial prose of the Romantic writers is not fiction, though similar artistic principles directed both poetry and prose. Four notable writers were Charles Lamb (1775-1834), William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt and Thomas De Quincey. They concentrated on literary criticism, or on attempts to popularise the new poets. But their main contribution is the creation of the personal essay. This prose genre deals with self-contemplation and autobiographical fiction as presented in Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, factual biography in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Autobiographic Sketches. The writer Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), standing outside the above four, is best distinguished for his style influenced by his wide reading of German literature and philosophy.

At the end of the 18^th century, reviews and magazine articles were written chiefly by the supporters of political or financial interests of the publisher. However, in 1802, the Edinburgh Review initiated the periodical' publication which set up high literary standards and paid its contributors well to attract the best talents. In 1820, appeared the liberal and contemporary London Magazine. Being issued till 1829, it helped to promote a group of outstanding writers, including the three greatest essayists of the age — Lamb, Hazlitt, and De Quincey.

There were generally two new distinguishable types of fiction in the late 18^th century One was the Gothic novel, inaugurated in 1764 by Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, and carried on by Clara Reeve in The Champion of Virtue: A Gothic Story (1777). The term was motivated by the frequent setting of these tales in a dim castle of the Middle Ages, but it also covered a larger group of novels; those, set in the past, developed the possibilities of mystery and terror in gloomy, rough landscapes or crumbling mansions with damp cells. Those novels revealed the dark, irrational sides of human nature like the savage egoism, the vicious inclination and the nightmarish horrors. Such are The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797), by Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), who created the mysterious and lonely protagonist. Gothicism often surfaces in Romantic poetry, e.g. in Coleridge's medieval poem Christabel, in Byron's hero-criminal, in the descriptive passages of Keats' Eve of St. Agnes, and in Shelley's inclinations toward the fantastic.

The second fictional mode prevailing around the 1800s was the novel of purpose, written to circulate the new social and political theories. Some novels of purpose had elements of Gothic fear. Mary Shelley (1797-1851), Percy Shelley's wife, wrote such a powerful novel of terror that it not only became a literary classic but a popular legend, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1817). It belongs to a philosophical tradition going back to Rousseau and concerns the themes of isolation and social injustice.

The novels of Jane Austen (1775-1817) radiate with freshness and wit. As the first significant woman novelist, she stands alone between the classical and romantic movements, bridging the two centuries. In such novels as Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion, she depicts small communities of English society, the serene world of the quite well-off county families. Other women writers included Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849), who, apart from instructive novels for children, pioneered the Irish novel. It was Edge- worth who inspired Scott to write of Scotland the way she had written of Ireland.

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), contemporary to Jane Austen, admired her deeply, but his fiction followed another path. In 1814, he switched from story-telling verse, to narrative prose and managed to write almost thirty long fiction works in his remaining eighteen years. Scott's novelty lay in discovering fiction for the rich and lively area of history, which he sometimes alters for artistic purposes. Other novelists of the period were Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), and Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866), noted for his eccentric satirical novels directed against the romantic.

Drama During the Romantic Period

Although positive for the essay, literary conditions in the early 19^th century were difficult for the stage. The Licensing Act of 1737, which severely censored theatrical performances, was not cancelled until 1843, so only the Drury Lane and Covent Garden theatres had the right to stage spoken drama. The other theatres could only produce entertainments, with dialogue set to music, much dancing and pantomime, and musical plays. Audiences at both theaters were usually boisterous and rough. The drama of that period was leaning towards either extreme farce or simplistic melodrama.

Inspired by their beloved Shakespeare, almost all Romantic poets tried their skill at poetic plays. Some were written just for reading, the so called closet drama, such as Byron's Manfred and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, and some look as if intended for the stage.

Byron was not successful as a practical dramatist. His plays were readable, but they lacked theatrical dynamism. In addition, the author himself refused to have them performed. Coleridge achieved a success with his tragedy Remorse, which ran for the whole twenty nights at the Drury Lane in 1813. But the most-successful among Romantic dramatists was Shelley's play, The Cenci (1820), based on a true Italian story of a monstrous father.