THE ROMANTIC PERIOD (1785-1830)

Revolution and reaction

Romantic period is the span between the year 1785 and 1830. It 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 nation, in which the balance
of economic power shifted to large-scale employers. This change occurred in a
context of revolution- first the American and then the French, and of wars.

The early period of the French Revolution, marked by the Declaration of the
Rights of Man and the storming of the Bastille to release imprisoned political
offenders, evoke enthusiastic support from English liberals and radicals alike.
The revolution followed the accession to power by Jacobin extremists; the
September Massacres of the imprisoned and helpless nobility in 1792, followed
by the execution of the king and queen; the invasion by the French Republic of
the Rhineland and Netherlands, and its offer of armed assistance to all
countries desiring to overthrow their governments, which brought England into
the war against France; the guillotining of thousands in the Reign of Terror
under Robespierre; and after the execution in their turn of the men who had
directed the Terror, the emergence of Napoleon first as dictator and then as
emperor of France.

Waterloo in 1815 proved to be the triumph of reactionary despotisms throughout

continental Europe.

In England, this was a period of harsh, repressive measures. Public meetings

were prohibited, habeas corpus was suspended and advocates of even
moderate political change were charged with high treason in time of war.

Profound economic and social changes were creating a desperate need for
corresponding changes in political arrangements, new classes were beginning
to demand a voice in government proportionate to their wealth. The Industrial
Revolution had begun in the mid-eighteenth century with improvements in
machines for processing textiles, and was given an immense impetus when
James Watt perfected the steam engine in 1765. In the succeeding decades,
steam replaced wind and water as the primary source of power. A new
labouring population massed in the towns. In rural communities, the destruction
of home industry was accompanied by a rapid growth of the process of
enclosing open fields and communally worked farms into privately owned
agricultural holdings. Enclosure was necessary for the more efficient methods of
agriculture and animal breeding required to supply a growing population. It
created a new landless class that migrated to the industrial towns or remained
as farm labourers.

The government should maintain a policy of strict non-interference and leave

people to pursue their private interests. For the great majority of the labouring
class the results of this policy 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. In 1815 the
conclusion of the French war brought on the first modern industrial depression.
Workers had no vote and were prevented by law; their only recourses were
petitions, protest meetings, agitation and hunger riots. The introduction of new
machines resulted in further loss of jobs and this provoked sporadic attempts by
dispossessed workers to destroy the machines.

The British Empire expanded westward and eastward, becoming the most
powerful colonial presence in the world. Black slave labour in the West Indies
generated great wealth for British plantation owners and their overseers. In the
provinces, the gentry in their country houses carried on their family and social
concerns- reflected in the novels of Jane Austen- almost untouched by great
national and international events.

Women constituted a deprived class that cut across social classes, for they
were widely regarded as inferior to men in intellect and in all but domestic
talents. They were provided limited schooling and no facilities for higher
education, had only lowly vocations open to them, were subjected to a rigid
code of sexual behaviour, and possessed (especially after marriage) almost no
legal rights.

Mary Wollstonecraft had written an early defence of the French Revolution, A

Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and two years later “A Vindication of the
Rights of Women”. She asserted that women possess equal intellectual
capacity and talents as men and demanded for them a greater share of social,
educational and vocational privileges.

The spirit of the Age

The Revolution generated a pervasive feeling that this was an age of new
beginnings when, by discarding traditional procedures and outworn customs,
everything was possible, and not only in the political and social realm but in
intellectual and literary enterprises as well.

The concept of Poetry and the Poet

Representative eighteenth century theorists had regarded poetry as primarily an

imitation of human life- that the poet artfully renders and puts into an order
designed to instruct and give pleasure to the reader. Wordsworth described all
good poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.

Poetic Spontaneity and Freedom

Wordsworth defined good poetry not merely as the overflow but as the
spontaneous overflow of feelings. The act of composing poetry involves the
psychological contraries of passion and of will, of spontaneous impulse and of
voluntary purpose.

The emphasis in this period on the free activity of the imagination is related to
an insistence on the essential role of instinct, intuition, and the feelings of the
heart to supplement the judgements of the purely logical faculty, the head,
whether in province of artistic beauty, philosophical and religious truth, or moral
goodness.

Romantic Nature Poetry

Romantic poems habitually endow the landscape with human life, passion and
expressiveness.

The Glorification of the Ordinary and the Outcast

The school of poetry founded by Wordsworth was the literary equivalent of the
French Revolution, translating political changes into poetical experiments.
Choose incidents and situations from common life and use a selection of
language really spoken by men, for which the source and model is humble and
rustic life.

The women poets especially assimilated to their poems the subject matter of
everyday life.

Wordsworth’s concern in his poetry was not only with common life but with
ordinary things.

The Supernatural and Strangeness in Beauty

Wordsworth dealt with the everyday things of this world. Next to Coleridge, the
greatest master of his Romantic mode, in which supernatural events have a
deep psychological import, was John Keats. He established a medieval setting
fir events that violate our sense of realism and the natural order.

Keats was extraordinarily sensitive to the ambivalences of human experience-

to the mingling, at their highest intensity, of pleasure and pain, to destructive
aspects of sexuality, and to the erotic quality of the longing for death. These
phenomena had already been explored by eighteenth century writers of terror
tales and Gothic fiction.

Through the greater part of the eighteenth century, humans had for the most
part been viewed as limited beings in a strictly ordered and essentially
unchanging world. A variety of philosophical and religious systems in that
century coincided in a distrust of radical innovation, a respect for the precedents
established through the ages by the common sense of humanity, and the
recommendation to set accessible goals and to avoid extremes, whether in
politics, intellect, morality, or art. Many of the great literary works of the period
joined in attacking what was called pride, or aspirations beyond the limits
natural to our species.

The Romantic period, the age of unfettered free enterprise, industrial

expansion, and boundless revolutionary hope, was also an age of radical
individualism in which both the philosophers and poets put an extraordinarily
high estimate on human potentialities and powers. The poets of the new period
also described the mind as creating its own experience. According to Blake, the
mind creates its proper milieu only if it totally rejects the material world.

Many Romantic writers agreed that the mind has access beyond sense to the
transcendent and the infinite, through a special faculty they called either
Reason or Imagination.

The desire beyond human limits that, to the moralists of the preceding age, had
been an essential sin, or tragic error, now becomes a glory and a triumph: the
human being refuses to submit to limitations and, though finite, persists in
setting infinite, hence, inaccessible goals.

Romantic theorists of art rejected the neoclassical ideal of a limited intention,

perfectly accomplished, in favour of the glory of the imperfect.

The great eighteenth century writers had typically dealt with men and women as
members of an organized, and usually an urban society. Literary authors
regarded themselves as integral parts of this society, addressed their works to it
and undertook to express its highest ideals and its collective traditional wisdom.

Shelley represented a solitary protagonist who is separated from society

because he has rejected it, or because it has rejected him. They have
introduced what became a persistent them in many Victorian and modern
writers- the theme of exile, of the disinherited mind that cannot find a spiritual
home in its native land and society or anywhere in the modern world. The
solitary Romantic nonconformist was sometimes represented as also a great
sinner. The Prometheus of Greek mythology shares with Satan the status of
superlative nonconformity. Unlike Satan he is the champion rather than the
enemy of the human race. Mary Shelley makes ironic use of his figure in her
subtitle of 1818: Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus- Victor Frankenstein
is decidedly not the champion of humankind.

Other forms: the Familiar Essay

Enlightenment inspired educational reform and a rapid growth in population

produced an explosion of potential readership. Technological improvements in
printing facilitated production and distribution, and commercial and public
lending libraries were established.
The Novel

Two new types of fiction were prominent in the late eighteenth century. One
was the Gothic novel. The term derives from the frequent setting of these tales
in a gloomy castle of the Middle Ages, but it had extended to a larger group of
novels, set somewhere in the past, that exploit the possibilities of mystery and
terror in sullen, craggy landscapes, decaying mansions with dank dungeons,
secret passages, and stealthy ghosts, chilling supernatural phenomena, and
often, sexual persecution of a beautiful maiden by an obsessed and haggard
villain. These novels opened up to later fiction the dark, irrational side of the
human nature- the savage egoism, the perverse impulses, and the nightmarish
terrors that lie beneath the controlled and ordered surface of the conscious
mind. Some of the most powerful and influential writings in the mode were by
women- they doubtless afforded a fictional release for the submerged desires
and compensatory fantasies of that rigidly and disadvantaged class. Gothicism
is apparent also in Romantic poetry. In Shelley’s inclination (fostered by his
early love for Gothic tales and his own youthful trials in that form) toward the
fantastic, the macabre and the exploration of the unconscious mind and of such
aberrations as incest.

The second fictional mode popular at the turn of the century was the novel of
purpose, often written to propagate the new social and political theories current
in the period of the French Revolution.

Mary Shelley wrote a thematic novel of terror that not only is a literary classic
but has become a popular myth. Her Frankenstein (1818) transforms a story
about a fabricated monster into a powerful representation of moral distortion
imposed on an individual who, because he diverges from the norm, is rejected
by society.

Jane Austen (1775-1817) is the only major author who seems to be untouched
by the political, intellectual, and artistic revolutions of her age. Austen elected to
work within the circumference of her own experience- the life of provincial
English gentlefolk- and to maintain the decorum of the novel of manners.
Austen achieved a fully particularized setting within which to examine and
criticize the values men and women live by in their everyday social lives.
Pride and Prejudice deal with the subject of getting married. This was a central
preoccupation and problem for the young leisure-class lady of that age, who
had no career open to her outside of domesticity. Austen chose the subject
because it provided her with the best realistic opportunities for testing her
heroine’s practical sense and moral integrity, their degree of knowledge of the
world and of themselves, and their capacity to demonstrate grace under social
and financial pressure.