THE ROMANTIC AGE

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The period from the Declaration of American Independence  to about 1830  was marked  by great revolutions: the Industrial Revolution reshaped the social and political background of Britain;  the British colonies on the other side of the Atlantic became a new and free nation; the French Revolution brought  its ideas  of freedom and equality  all over Europe.  All this was  to influence  also the cultural and literary aspects  of life.

1760- 1850	The term Industrial Revolution  generally refers  to Britain’s economic development  which rapidly  transformed  it from an agricultural to an industrial country. The Industrial Revolution involved the use of new  sources  of power (like coal and the steam engine), important technological inventions  (like the mechanisation of the textile industries, the improvement of  iron-making techniques) and the development of the factory system (division of labour and specialization of function).  Trade expansion was enabled by the improvement of transports: new waterways were  built and road conditions were bettered. There were also great changes in agriculture. The Agrarian Revolution was connected to the Industrial Revolution because they both used technological inventions.  The Agrarian Revolution took two  principal forms: massive enclosure of “open fields” and common land, and improvements in the breeding of cattle  and in farming techniques. During the Industrial Revolution,  power and wealth began to move from the land-owning aristocracy  to factory owners and other employers based in the cities. In this period cities expanded rapidly thanks to the arrival of rural  farm workers who became industrial labourers. Women and children were especially employed because they could be paid less and were easier to control. The new urban masses  lived in conditions  of terrible poverty and overcrowding and the atmosphere was  polluted  by smoke from  factories. Small towns, the so-called “mushroom towns”, were constructed  to house the workers; they lacked the most elementary sanitation. The old feudal order of agrarian society was going to be replaced by a nation divided between rich landowners and industrialists on the one hand and the restless urban poor on the other. The policy of “laissez-faire”, based on the doctrine that an economic system functions best when there is no interference by government, proposed by Adam Smith  in The Wealth of Nations (1776),  served  to increase the gap between the rich and the poor. The fear that the French revolutionary ideas would spread among the working class led the  government of William Pitt the Younger to pass the Combination Acts (1799-1800) which made Trade Unionism illegal. The employers took advantage of the situation and dictated their terms, workers’ frustration  led to protests  such as Luddism - between 1811 and 1816 workmen   attacked factories and destroyed laborsaving textile machinery in the belief that such machinery would diminish employment. A protest in 1819, the Peterloo  Massacre, where  soldiers fired on and killed workers at a meeting,  led the government to pass new acts to make   meetings illegal (Six Acts, 1819). Gradually,  a new political awareness began to be felt and an age of important reforms started. In 1824  the Combinations Acts  were repealed and  the first Trade Unions were founded. In about 1830 Socialism arose as a reaction to the economic and social changes associated with the Industrial Revolution; it advocated the abolition of class differences and the redistribution of wealth. In 1833 the Factory Acts were passed to limit the exploitation of child and female labour in industry.
1775– 1783	The American War of Independence broke out in 1775.  The conflict arose from growing tensions between residents of Great Britain's thirteen North American colonies and the colonial government, which represented the British crown. The colonists argued that the British parliament was not entitled to tax American colonists who were not represented in that parliament (the "no taxation without representation" theory).  On 4 July 1776, Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence which was drawn up by Thomas Jefferson and in which the natural rights of all people were proclaimed. Since then, it has come to be considered a major statement on human rights: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. France entered the American Revolution on the side of the colonists, turning what had essentially been a civil war into an international conflict.  In 1781, the war ended. In 1783, with the Treaty of Versailles, the British  recognized the independence of the United States.
1789 -1791	The same thirst for freedom and equality, claimed in the American Declaration of Independence, marked the event which most influenced the European political and intellectual thought at the end of the 18th century: the French Revolution. In Britain it gave rise to different reactions: on the one hand, the ruling classes were terrified of “Jacobinism”, as sympathy with the cause  of French Revolution was called; on the other side, the majority of intellectuals and Romantic poets enthusiastically supported the Revolution. Disillusion soon followed with the Reign of Terror and the imperialistic tendencies of Napoleon, and some Romantic poets turned from radical to conservative in the early 19th century. Even so, the hope of regeneration and change was  reflected in Romantic poetry.

1760- 1820	George II was succeeded by his grandson George III. He was the third British monarch of the House of Hanover, but  unlike his two Hanoverian predecessors he was born in Britain, spoke English as his first language, and never visited Hanover. His life and reign were marked by a series of military conflicts involving his kingdom, much of the rest of Europe, and places  in Africa, the Americas and Asia. Early in his reign, Great Britain defeated France in the Seven Years' War, becoming the dominant European power in North America and India. However, many of its American colonies were soon lost in the American War of Independence. Further wars against revolutionary and Napoleonic France from 1793 concluded in the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. In the later part of his life, George III suffered from recurrent, and eventually permanent, mental illness. Medical practitioners were baffled by this at the time, although it has since been suggested that he suffered from the blood disease porphyria. After a final decline in 1810, a regency was established, and George III's eldest son, George, Prince of Wales, ruled as Prince Regent. On George III's death, the Prince Regent succeeded his father as George IV.
1820- 1837	George III  was succeeded by two of his sons George IV and William IV, who both died without surviving legitimate children, leaving the throne to the only legitimate child of the Duke of Kent, the fourth son of George III,  Victoria, the last monarch of the House of Hanover.
1832	The First Reform Bill  was passed. It extended the right to vote to middle-class men, who acquired more political power as a consequence; it excluded the lower middle class, the working class and women.

MAIN TRENDS IN LITERATURE

The Romantic Movement, which influenced all forms of art, developed as a reaction against the Enlightenment with its emphasis on rationality, decorum, rules and conventions.

The  infinite  confidence  of the previous age in the power of  reason   was  supplanted  by a deep belief in the faculties of imagination  and intuition  as  means  to  see beyond physical  reality and attain  the  ultimate truth.  This led to the identification of pure poetry with truth itself,  and of the mission of the poet with that of the prophet and seer. The Romantic revival was, in other words, the  revolt of the heart against  the  brain,  of  feeling  against  reason.

The characteristics of the literary production of this period  can  be  listed as  follows:

1. the importance of  emotional experience,  individual feelings and intuition
2. an emphasis on imagination both as the supreme faculty of the mind which possesses cognitive power  and  as  the primary faculty for creating all art  -  the Romantic poet  possesses imagination in the highest degree and is therefore able to see clearly and deeply into the real essence of things
3. a love of  Nature seen as an organically unified whole,  a healing power, a source of subject and image for poetry, a refuge from the artificial constructs of civilization,  a source of understanding and a means of communion with God
4. the  cult  of  sensibility  and  melancholy,  characterized  by  certain  typical  manifestations:  a  love  of  ruins  and  graveyards,  the  idealization  of  solitude,  meditations  on  man’s  unhappy  destiny 
5. the  cult  of  the  primitive,  which  involves  diffidence  as  regards  civilization  and  a  desire  for  a  lost  earthly  paradise  in  which  man  lived  in  communion  with  nature  (the  “noble  savage”  is  a  typical  example  of  this)
6. the cult of  the child, uncorrupted and  unspoilt by civilised life, considered  holier and closer to God than the other men
7. an emphasis on the sublime  associated with the   feelings  of  fear and horror created by what is infinite and terrible
8. an interest  in  the past, particularly in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as  a manifestation of spontaneity and creative freedom
9. the rediscovery of  the art and popular traditions of the Middle Ages, known as  the   "Gothic vogue",  that is to say  an interest in what  was wild, irrational, supernatural and horrific
10. the cult of the exotic,  of what was far away both in space and in time, as a way  of escape from contemporary society
11. an emphasis on moral and  political  freedom, freedom  from authority and rules
12. an admiration for all figures of rebels and outcasts (e.g. Prometheus, Faust)
13. an interest in the  life of  the poor and the  humble
14. an interest in the supernatural, the mysterious and the mystical   -  Coleridge’s Christabel is a medieval romance ballad, full of nightmarish and grotesque events and images
15. myths and symbols used to create visual imagery and further illustrate new concepts and ideas
    
16. a deliberate use of  a simple  and direct  poetic language  - Wordsworth asserted that there should be  no difference between the language of poetry and the language of prose.

The great English Romantic poets are usually grouped into two generations: the first generation included  William Blake, William Wordsworth and  Samuel Taylor Coleridge; the poets of the second generation were John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley and George Gordon, Lord Byron. 

William Blake is perhaps the best known of the early Romantic poets; he was a prophetic and mystical poet who rebelled against rationalism, materialism and the tyranny of laws and rules (social, political and religious) which, in his opinion, killed man’s innocence  and prevented his creative  energy from being released.

He was particularly concerned with the plight of  all those who had become the victims of the industrial society and its "satanic mills".

In Lyrical Ballads (1798 and 1800), a turning point in literary history, William Wordsworth and S.T. Coleridge presented and illustrated a liberating aesthetic: poetry should express, in genuine language, experience as filtered through personal emotion and imagination; the truest experience was to be found in nature. 
The concept of the Sublime strengthened this turn to nature, because in wild countryside the power of the sublime could be felt most immediately. In search of sublime moments, romantic poets wrote about the marvellous and supernatural, the exotic, and the medieval. But they also found beauty in the lives of simple rural people and aspects of the everyday world.

The poets of the second generation were tragically destined to a short life and came to represent the Romantic idea of the poet suffering through the injustices of society and of life itself.  

Individualism and escapism, that is to  say  the desire of "escaping" from present reality  as well as the alienation of the artist from society, found expression in the different attitudes of the three poets: the nonconformist, rebellious attitude of the "Byronic hero", the revolutionary spirit of Shelley and Keats's escape in the world of beauty.

                 

Lord Byron was the prototypical romantic hero, the envy and scandal of the age. He has been continually identified with his own characters, particularly the rebellious, irreverent, erotically inclined Don Juan. Byron invested the romantic lyric with a rationalistic irony: "Fools are my theme, let satire be my song".

In Keats's great odes, intellectual and emotional sensibility combine in language of great power and beauty.  His  poetry  contains  no  direct  moral  or  social  message;  he conceives  poetry  as  “something Absolute”,  the only  way  to  defeat  death.  The  central  theme  of  all  his  poems  is  beauty,  the  only  consolation in  a  life  of  sadness and sorrow:  “A  thing of  beauty is a  joy  forever” .  

Percy Bysshe Shelley, who combined elevated lyricism with an apocalyptic political vision, sought more extreme effects and occasionally achieved them, as in his great drama Prometheus Unbound (1820). 

His wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, wrote the greatest of the Gothic novels, Frankenstein (1818). Click here to learn about it.

Although the great novelist Jane Austen wrote during the Romantic era, her work defies classification. With insight, grace, and irony she delineated human relationships within the context of English country life. Click here for more details.
Her "novels of manners" are based on the assumption that there is a vital connection between manners, social behaviour and character.

Sir Walter Scott, Scottish nationalist and Romantic, made the genre of the historical novel widely popular.  In his novels Scott arranged the plots and characters so the reader enters into the lives of both great and ordinary people caught up in violent, dramatic changes in history. His influence on other European and American novelists was immediate and profound. Alessandro Manzoni  took  Scott's novels as examples  of the possibilities offered by the historical novel. He exchanged many letters  with Scott  while writing  his Promessi Sposi.

Click here for an insight into the historical and cultural background of the Romantic Age.
Here you can read an interesting blog post about the Industrial Revolution.