Romantic Period

Dual English

Historical Notes
The Romantic Period

the shortest period scholars singled out 6 poets- Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Percy, Shelley, Keats, and Blake- and constructed notions of a unified Romanticism on the basis of their works.
They didn’t all get along though
In 1798, the year of Lyrical Ballads, neither of the authors had much reputation
Some of the best regarded poets of the time were women- Anna Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson- of which Wordsworth and Coleridge looked up to.

Revolution and reaction

we use “romantic period” to refer to the spun between the year 1785 and 1830. this was a turbulent period, during which England experienced the ordeal of change from a primarily agricultural society, where wealth and power had been concentrated in the landholding aristocracy, to a modern industrial nations.
The early period of the French Revolution, marked by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the storming of the Bastille, evoked enthusiastic support from English liberals and radicals alike.
A Vindication of the Rights of Men- justified French Revolution attack
Reflections on the Revolution in France
Rights of Man- Tom Paine
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice- William Godwin’s
The Prelude
Napoleon had become an arch-aggressor and would be founder of a new imperial dynasty.
Nap defeat at Waterloom in 1815 proved to be the triumph, not of progress and reform, but of reactionary depotisms throughout continental Europe.
The frusteration of the abolitionist cause is an emblematic chapter in the larger story of how a reactionary government sacrificed hopes of reform while it mobilized the nation’s resources for war.
New classes inside England were beginning to demand a voice in government proportionate to their wealth.
The industrial revolution had begun in the mid- 18 century with improvements in machines for progressing textiles, and was given immense impetus when James Watt perfected the steam engine in 1765.
A new laboring population masses in sprawling mill towns such as Manchester.
The landscape of England began to take on its modern appearance- the hitherto open rural areas subdivided into a checkerboard of enclosed fields with their factories and cheaply built housing.
No attempt was made to regulate this shift from old economic worlds to the new.
The Wealth of Nations – Adam Smith
Laisses- faire
In 1833 Parliament finally ended slavery
Inferno- Dante
By the end of the war in 1815, the nations workforce was enlarged by demobilized troops at the very moment when the demand for manufacturing goods fell dramatically.
In 1819, 100s of 1000s of workers organized meetings to demand parliamentary reform.
Alliteration both put new pressures on women and granted them new opportunities.
Women in the Romantic period were provided only limited schooling, were subjected to a rigid code of sexual behavior, and were bereft of legal rights especially with marriage.
Women began to be deluged by books, sermons, and magazine articles theat insisted vehemently on the physical and mental differences between the sexes and instructed women that, because of these differences, they should accept that their roles in life involved child rearing, housekeeping, and nothing more.
The new idea that a woman’s place was not simply in the home but also in the nation could also justify or at least extenuate the affront to proper feminine modesty represented by publication by a woman’s entry into the public sphere of authorship.
Romantic poetry by women
Vindication of the Rights of Women

The Concept of the Poet and the Poem

philosophers began emphasizing individual variations in perception and the capacity the receptive consciousness has to filter and to re-create reality.
Other Romantic theories concurred by referring to the mind, emotions, and imagination of the poet for the origin, content, and defining attributes of a poem.
The lyrical poem written in the first person became a major Romantic form and was often described as the most essentially poetic of all the genres.
This reinvention of the lyric complicated established understandings of the gender of authorship.
The Prelude is an instance of a central literary form of English, as of European, Romanticism- a long work about the crisis and renewal of the self, recounted as the story of an interior journey taken in quest of one’s true identity and destines spiritual home and vocation.

Spontaneity and the Impulses of Feeling

Poetry had been regarded as supremely an art- an art that in modern times is practiced by poets who have assimilated classical precedents, are aware of the “rules” governing the kind of poem they are writing, and deliberately employ tested means to achieve premeditated effects on an audience.
The emphasis in this period on the spontaneous activity of the imagination is linked to a belief in the essential role of passion, philosophy or morality.

Writing in the marketplace and the courts

Many romantic poets never spoke their poems in front of a crowd.
The most revolutionary aspect of the age was the spread of literacy and the dramatic expansion of the potential audience for literature.
Beginning in 1780, more members of the working classes had learned to read as a result of lessons provided in Sunday schools.
By the end of the period, printing presses were driven by steam engines, and the manufacture of paper had been mechanized; publishers had mastered publicity, the art of “the puff”.
Distributed by clubs of workers who pooled money for this purpose, read aloud in alehouses or as listeners worked in the fields, those copies reached a total audience that was much more numerous still.
Licensing Act had lapsed
Another government strategy was to use taxes to inflate the prices of printed matter and so keep political information out of the hands out of the poor without exactly violating the freedom of the press.
The Family of Shakespeare
Commentators who condemned the publishing industry as a scene of criminality also cited the frequency with which, during this chaotic times, best-selling books ended up republished in unauthorized editions.
Queen Mab
Watt Tyler

Other literary Forms (Prose)

Although the romantic period was an age of poetry, centered on works of imagination, nonfiction prose forms- essays, reviews, political pamphlets-flourished during the epoch, as writers seized the opportunity to speak to and for the era’s new audiences.
The Watchmen
The Friend
The issue of how the writer should relate to audience- as watchmen or friend- was especially tricky, because this period saw the emergence of a new species of specialist reader.
1802- Edinburgh
1809- Quarterly Review
Monthly Review
Critical Review
The continuing tension between criticism and literature and doubt about whether critical prose can be literature- whether it can have artistic value as well as social unity- are legacies from the Romantic period.
London Magazine
De Quincy developed a style that harkened black writers who flourished before the republic of letters and who had more idiosyncratic eccentricities then 18th century decorum would have allowed.

(drama)

The theatrical culture’s demotions of words might explain why the poets of the era found drama uncongenial.

(the novel)

novels were immensely popular but- as far as critics and some of the form’s half-ashamed practitioners were concerned- not quite respectable.
Lose in structure
Seemed to require fewer skills than other literary genres.
It attracted an undue proportion of readers who were women.
The last decade of the era saw bold experiments with novels’ form and subject matter- new ways of linking fiction and philosophy and history.
Caleb Williams
Things as They Are