Romantic Age (1798-1837)

In 1798, a thin book of poems appeared in Bristol with no author's name on its title page. It was called Lyrical Ballads. Two young friends, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, had written it, and a bookseller named Joseph Cottle published it. The book did not sell quickly, and the first reviewers were divided. Yet later readers chose it as the starting point of a new age in English writing.

The age closes in 1837, the year Victoria became queen. Between these two dates lay almost forty years of war with France, the rise of the first great factories, and bitter quarrels about who should have a vote. The writers of these years did not stand outside that storm. Many of them had been thrilled by the French Revolution of 1789 before they wrote a line, and what became of that hope shaped much of what they wrote.

The name "Romantic" came later. The writers did not use it as the name of a group, and they often disagreed with one another. Wordsworth looked to the quiet countryside, Byron to the restless life of Europe, Shelley to a future that had not yet arrived, and Keats to beauty and the sadness that comes with it. What joined them was a changed idea of what writing was for. The Augustan writers of the century before, such as Alexander Pope, had prized order, reason and good manners. The new writers prized feeling, imagination and the view of the single person. That change grew out of a world that had been shaken nine years before the book appeared.

The world of this age

Political life

The story begins in France. In July 1789 a Paris crowd stormed the Bastille, and the old monarchy began to fall. Many young people in Britain greeted the news with joy. Wordsworth, then a student at Cambridge, later crossed the Channel and lived in France from late 1791 to the end of 1792. He saw ordinary people hoping for a fairer world, and he made that hope his own.

Not everyone shared the joy. Edmund Burke wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790 to warn that sudden change would end in disaster. Thomas Paine answered with Rights of Man in 1791 and 1792, arguing that people had a right to choose their own government. The quarrel between these two books divided British readers for years.

Then the Revolution turned violent. The French king was executed in January 1793, and Britain went to war with France a few weeks later. The government of the Prime Minister, William Pitt, feared that revolutionary ideas would spread at home. It suspended habeas corpus in 1794, so that suspects could be held without trial, and in 1795 it passed laws against meetings that it judged seditious. Writers who had cheered the Revolution now had to be careful. In 1798 Coleridge wrote an ode in which he gave up his hope in France, after French armies invaded Switzerland. Wordsworth, too, slowly changed from a friend of the Revolution into a defender of England.

The war went on, with short pauses, until 1815. Napoleon Bonaparte took power in France in 1799 and crowned himself emperor in 1804. The British fleet blocked his plans to invade, most famously when Nelson won the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Napoleon met his final defeat at Waterloo in June 1815. During these years the old king, George III, suffered fits of mental illness. In 1811 his son was made Prince Regent and ruled in his name until the king died in 1820. George IV then reigned until 1830, and William IV until 1837.

Peace brought new trouble at home. Thousands of soldiers returned to a country with few jobs, and the Corn Laws of 1815 kept the price of bread high to protect landowners. Hunger and anger grew, and working people began to demand a vote. On 16 August 1819 a crowd of about sixty thousand gathered at St Peter's Field in Manchester to hear a speaker on reform. Cavalry charged into the crowd with drawn sabres. At least fifteen people were killed and hundreds were wounded. The event was nicknamed Peterloo, a bitter joke on the name of Waterloo. Shelley was living in Italy when the news reached him, and it moved him to write The Masque of Anarchy, a poem of protest.

Slowly the pressure for change worked. Britain had ended its part in the slave trade in 1807, and slavery itself was abolished across the empire by a law of 1833. Parliament opened its doors to Catholics in 1829. The Reform Act of 1832 swept away many "rotten boroughs", which were tiny seats with almost no voters, and gave seats to growing towns such as Manchester and Leeds. By the time Victoria came to the throne in 1837, the country was calmer, though still divided.

Social life

When the century turned, Britain counted its people for the first time. The census of 1801 found about nine million people in England and Wales. Thirty years later the figure was nearly fourteen million. Growth of this kind changed daily life. Young men and women left villages that had barely changed for centuries and went to work in towns such as Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds. London was already the largest city in Europe.

Society was sharply divided by rank. At the top stood the nobles and landowners, whose wealth and power came from the land. Below them a growing middle class of merchants, lawyers, clergymen and factory owners wanted a larger say in the nation's affairs. At the bottom were farm labourers and mill workers, who had little say in how they were governed.

A bigger reading public grew up in these years. Circulating libraries lent novels for a small fee, and magazines carried essays, poems and reviews. The Edinburgh Review began in 1802, the Quarterly Review in 1809 and Blackwood's Magazine in 1817. More writers now hoped to earn their living from readers rather than from rich patrons.

Women's lives were narrow. A married woman had few property rights, because the law placed her possessions under her husband's control. Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) had asked that girls receive the same education as boys, but change came slowly. Even so, women wrote more than ever. Jane Austen published her novels without her name, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein also came out anonymously.

Economic life

Britain's wealth in these years rested on land and on machines. On the land, owners were fencing off open fields and commons to farm them more profitably. A general Act of 1801 made this "enclosure" easier. Small farmers and cottagers who had grazed their animals on common land often lost it. John Clare, the son of a farm labourer in Northamptonshire, watched the fields around his village being fenced and wrote sadly about the loss in his poems.

Machines changed work in the towns. Spinning and weaving had once been done by hand, often in workers' homes. Now mills driven by water and steam could do the work faster with fewer hands. Skilled weavers and stocking-knitters in the Midlands and the north saw their wages fall. In 1811 groups of workers in Nottinghamshire began to smash the new knitting frames at night. They called themselves Luddites, after a legendary leader named Ned Ludd. In 1812 Parliament made frame-breaking a crime punishable by death. Byron, a lord by inheritance, spoke against the bill in his first speech in the House of Lords, in February 1812. The bill became law all the same. In January 1813, after a wave of attacks on mills and masters, a special court at York hanged seventeen men.

Children worked in mills and mines, often for twelve hours or more. Earlier laws to protect them had been weak, and the Factory Act of 1833 was the first to be enforced by government inspectors. Blake, who lived in London, saw the misery of children in its streets, and he put it into poems such as "The Chimney Sweeper", which appears in both of his song books.

Travel changed too. Canals carried heavy goods across the country, and then came the railway. The Stockton and Darlington line opened in 1825, and in 1830 the Liverpool and Manchester Railway began to carry passengers by steam between two great cities. Many poets viewed these changes with unease, and Wordsworth later spoke out against a railway planned for his beloved Lake District.

Religion

The Church of England stood at the centre of national life. Its bishops sat in the House of Lords, and its clergy served in every parish. Outside it, Methodism, the movement begun by John Wesley, had spread among working people, and Dissenting groups such as the Unitarians held other beliefs. Dissenters and Catholics were shut out of many public posts. This began to change only with the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828 and Catholic emancipation in 1829.

At the same time, doubt was growing. Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason (1794) attacked the claim that the Bible was a revealed book. Percy Shelley, a student at Oxford, printed a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism in 1811 and was expelled from the university. Coleridge's path was different. In the 1790s he preached in Unitarian chapels, but in later life he returned to the Church of England and wrote a great deal about Christian thought.

The poets of the age searched for the divine in new places. Blake, a devout but unusual Christian, built a mythology of his own. Wordsworth found in nature a living presence that could calm and teach the human heart. Shelley openly rejected organised religion, yet in 1816 he wrote a "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty", praising a spirit of beauty that he could not name.

Literature in this age

The language

Poetry in 1790 still spoke in the voice of the eighteenth century. Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson had written in balanced couplets and in an elegant, raised style. Poets of that school liked roundabout phrases better than plain nouns, and this habit was later called poetic diction. A few writers had already begun to tire of it. Thomas Gray wrote about the graves of humble villagers in 1751, and Robert Burns used the speech of Scotland in his poems of 1786.

The decisive step came in Somerset in 1797. Wordsworth, with his sister Dorothy, rented Alfoxden House, a few miles from the village of Nether Stowey, where Coleridge lived. The two poets walked and talked almost every day, and out of those talks came the plan for Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge later recalled the plan in Biographia Literaria. He would write about strange and supernatural events and make them feel true, by winning from the reader what he called a willing suspension of disbelief. Wordsworth would take ordinary people and everyday scenes and show the wonder hidden in them.

The 1798 book opened with Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and closed with Wordsworth's "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey". Between them stood poems about a little girl who would not accept that two of her brothers and sisters had died, and about other humble people. When the second edition came out in 1800, Wordsworth added a long Preface to explain what the two friends were trying to do. He wrote that poetry should use the language really used by men, that good poetry is the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings", and that it takes its origin from "emotion recollected in tranquillity". In other words, a poem begins in strong feeling, but the poet shapes it afterwards in a calm mind.

Not everyone agreed with him. Coleridge himself, in Biographia Literaria (1817), argued that Wordsworth's rule about the speech of country people was too narrow, because great poetry could not simply copy the talk of villagers.

How the writing reached its readers

A writer of this age lived by publishers, magazines and reviewers. John Murray of London published Byron's poems and Jane Austen's Emma. A good review could make a name, and a bad one could wound. In 1808 the Edinburgh Review attacked Hours of Idleness, the first book of the young Byron. He answered in 1809 with a verse satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, which mocked the reviewers and many poets of the day, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey among them.

In 1814 Francis Jeffrey, the editor of the same review, began his notice of Wordsworth's long poem The Excursion by saying that it would never do. In 1818 Blackwood's Magazine mocked Keats and his friend Leigh Hunt as members of a "Cockney School" of poetry, sneering at their London, middle-class background. The Quarterly Review soon joined in with its own attack on Keats's Endymion. Shelley came to believe that these attacks had killed his friend. In truth Keats died of tuberculosis.

Some of the greatest work reached readers late. Wordsworth went on revising The Prelude for most of his life, and it was published only after his death in 1850. Shelley's A Defence of Poetry was written in 1821 and not printed until 1840. Coleridge's Kubla Khan sat in manuscript for years before the public saw it in 1816.

Poetry

Poetry had been moving towards new ground before 1798. Edmund Burke's essay of 1757 on the sublime and the beautiful had taught readers that vast and wild things, such as mountains and storms, could give a deep, almost fearful pleasure. Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) brought old ballads back to readers, and James Macpherson's "Ossian" poems of the 1760s offered misty tales of an ancient Gaelic bard. Macpherson claimed to have translated them, but they proved to be largely his own work. Robert Burns, a farmer's son from Ayrshire, died in 1796, having shown that fine poetry could come from a ploughman's pen.

William Blake stood apart from all of them. A London engraver, he printed his words and pictures together from copper plates that he etched himself and then coloured each page by hand. This method is called illuminated printing. Songs of Innocence (1789) looked at the world as a child sees it, and Songs of Experience (1794) looked at the same world after cruelty and injustice have been seen. His longer "prophetic books" told of giant figures in a mythology that he invented. Few people bought his work. A soldier once accused him of speaking against the king, and in 1804 a jury found him not guilty. He died in 1827 with little fame.

Wordsworth grew up among the hills and lakes of northern England, and the memory of that landscape never left him. In December 1799 he and his sister Dorothy settled at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, in the Lake District. Dorothy kept journals in which she noted flowers, weather and passers-by, and William often turned her notes into poems. In April 1802 the two saw a long line of daffodils beside Ullswater, and Dorothy described the sight in her journal. Two years later it became "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud". His greatest work was The Prelude, a long blank-verse poem addressed to Coleridge about the growth of his own mind. He began it in 1798 and first completed it in 1805. In it he looked back on his childhood, his years at Cambridge and his time in revolutionary France.

Coleridge was the thinker of the group. He was brilliant and restless, often unwell, and he took opium, then sold freely as a medicine, to ease his pain and came to depend on it. His best-known poems were written quickly. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) tells of a sailor who shoots an albatross and brings a curse on his ship, and who must afterwards tell his story to strangers for the rest of his life. Kubla Khan and Christabel, a tale of a lady, a stranger and magic in a castle, were published in 1816 as fragments. By Coleridge's own account, he dreamed the lines of Kubla Khan after taking opium, and forgot the rest when a visitor from Porlock interrupted his writing. In 1800 he moved to Keswick, and Robert Southey joined him there in 1803. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey came to be called the "Lake Poets", a label first given by hostile critics. Southey wrote long narrative poems and a Life of Nelson (1813), and he became Poet Laureate in 1813 after Walter Scott turned the post down.

Scott, an Edinburgh lawyer, was the best-selling poet of those years. His long verse tales set in medieval Scotland, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Marmion (1808) and The Lady of the Lake (1810), were read all over the country.

A younger group came forward after 1810. Byron was born in 1788, Shelley in 1792 and Keats in 1795. They were children when the Revolution began and grew up during the long war. Some of them felt that the older poets, now settled and respectable, had turned their backs on the causes of their youth. Byron's Don Juan opens with a mocking dedication to Southey, and in 1821 Southey hit back by calling Byron and writers like him the "Satanic School", because he thought them rebellious and immoral.

George Gordon, Lord Byron, inherited his title at the age of ten. After the reviewers mocked his first book, he travelled through Portugal, Spain, Malta, Albania, Greece and Turkey from 1809 to 1811. The first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, about a gloomy young wanderer in those lands, appeared in March 1812. The first edition sold out within days, and Byron, as he later put it, woke up one morning and found himself famous. London society adored him. The proud, moody wanderer of his poems gave the world a figure later called the Byronic hero. Then his life fell apart. He married Annabella Milbanke in January 1815, but the marriage failed within a year, and rumour and scandal followed him. In April 1816 he left England and never returned. In exile he wrote Manfred (1817), about a proud man tortured by secret guilt, and Don Juan (1819-24), a long comic poem in which a young man passes through love affairs and wars across Europe while the poet pokes fun at hypocrisy and war. Byron left it unfinished. In 1823 he sailed to Greece to help its war of independence against the Ottoman Empire, and he died of a fever at Missolonghi on 19 April 1824, aged thirty-six.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1792 into a wealthy family. After his expulsion from Oxford he lived as a radical. He admired William Godwin, the author of Political Justice (1793), and in 1814 he ran away with Godwin's daughter Mary. They married in December 1816, and in 1818 they left England for Italy for good. There he wrote with great speed. Prometheus Unbound (1820) is a poem in the form of a play in which the Titan who gave fire to humans and was punished by Zeus stands for humanity's struggle against tyranny. In "Ode to the West Wind" (1819) he asks the wind to carry his ideas across the world, and Adonais (1821) mourns the death of Keats. On 8 July 1822, when he was not yet thirty, Shelley drowned when his small sailing boat was caught in a storm in the Gulf of Spezia. His body was burned on the beach, and his ashes lie in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, close to the grave of Keats.

John Keats was born in London in 1795, the son of a man who managed a stable. He lost his father at the age of eight and his mother at fourteen. He trained as a surgeon at Guy's Hospital but gave up medicine to write poetry. His friend Leigh Hunt, the editor of the Examiner, encouraged him and printed his early poems. Poems (1817) was his first book, and Endymion (1818), a long poem on a Greek myth, brought him the attacks of the reviewers. His brother Tom, whom he nursed, died of tuberculosis in December 1818. In the months that followed, in 1819, Keats wrote the poems on which his fame rests: the romance The Eve of St Agnes, the great odes, among them "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn", and the autumn poem "To Autumn". Meanwhile he had fallen in love with Fanny Brawne and had begun to show signs of the disease that had killed his mother and brother. Early in 1820 he coughed blood. Doctors advised a winter in the warm south, and in September 1820 he sailed for Italy with his friend, the painter Joseph Severn. Keats believed that a great poet must be able to stay in doubt and mystery without hurrying towards certainty, a power he named negative capability in a letter of December 1817. He died in Rome on 23 February 1821, aged twenty-five. He asked that no name be put on his gravestone, only words saying that his name was written in water.

Other voices were heard as well. John Clare (1793-1864) wrote of village life, birds and fields. Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820) won him praise, but he later fell into poverty and mental illness. Felicia Hemans (1793-1835) became one of the most widely read poets of the day with poems on home, war and women's lives, and her Records of Woman appeared in 1828.

Prose

Prose fiction in the 1790s was already filling with mystery and terror. Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), a tale of a haunted castle, had started a fashion. Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) added wild mountain scenery and long, tense suspense, and Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796) was so dark that it shocked many readers. This kind of tale became known as the Gothic novel.

Jane Austen read these books and laughed at them. In Northanger Abbey, a young woman who has read too many Gothic tales imagines horrors in a quiet country house. Austen was born in a Hampshire village in 1775 and wrote about families, marriage and money in small country circles. Sense and Sensibility (1811) was published "By a Lady", and Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1815) followed. She died in 1817, aged forty-one, and Northanger Abbey and Persuasion appeared after her death, in December of that year.

Walter Scott had been the most popular poet in Britain until Byron's poems began to outsell his own. Around 1814 he turned to prose. Waverley (1814) follows a young English officer who is drawn into the Jacobite rising of 1745 in Scotland. It appeared without Scott's name, and for years his novels were credited to "the author of Waverley". He admitted in 1827 that he was that author. By mixing invented characters with real events, Scott created the historical novel, and writers all over Europe followed him. Ivanhoe (1819) carried the form back to medieval England.

The Gothic tradition found its most famous form in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) by Mary Shelley. Its hero, Victor Frankenstein, is a young scientist who builds a living creature from dead matter and then runs away from what he has made. The book mixes Gothic horror with real questions about the limits of science, which had become a lively subject in an age of new discoveries. It also came out without the author's name.

The magazines gave a home to the essay. Charles Lamb, a clerk at the East India Company, wrote essays for the London Magazine under the name Elia, in a warm, joking, personal voice, and they were collected as Essays of Elia in 1823. William Hazlitt wrote sharp, vivid essays and portraits, among them The Spirit of the Age (1825). Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) told, with dream and detail, the story of his own addiction. Thomas Love Peacock mocked the poets in comic novels such as Nightmare Abbey (1818).

The theatre gave the age less. Only a few London houses, chiefly Drury Lane and Covent Garden, were licensed to stage spoken drama, and their huge halls favoured spectacle and melodrama. The great poets wrote verse plays that were meant to be read rather than staged, which is why such works are called closet drama. Byron's Manfred (1817) and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound (1820) are examples. The one great star of the stage was the actor Edmund Kean, who made his name at Drury Lane in 1814 as Shylock.

Criticism and scholarship

The Romantics were also their own critics. Wordsworth's Preface of 1800 and Coleridge's Biographia Literaria of 1817 set out their ideas in plain argument. In Biographia Literaria Coleridge also separated two powers of the mind. Fancy, he said, only rearranges ready-made images, while imagination fuses them into something new. William Hazlitt judged his fellow writers in The Spirit of the Age (1825). In 1820 Thomas Love Peacock wrote a playful essay, The Four Ages of Poetry, which said that poetry had lost its use in a scientific age. Shelley answered it with A Defence of Poetry, written in 1821, in which he called poets the "unacknowledged legislators of the world".

Scholars of the twentieth century argued about what the word "Romantic" meant. In 1924 Arthur O. Lovejoy argued in "On the Discrimination of Romanticisms" that the word covered so many different ideas that it should be used in the plural. In 1949 René Wellek replied that the poets did share a common view of imagination, nature and symbol. M. H. Abrams, in The Mirror and the Lamp (1953), showed how criticism moved from the idea that art holds a mirror up to nature to the idea that art is a lamp that shines from the poet's own mind. His Natural Supernaturalism (1971) argued that the Romantics gave old religious ideas of fall, struggle and recovery a new form in the story of the human mind.

More recent scholars looked again at history and gender. Marilyn Butler's Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (1981) set the writers among the political quarrels of their day. Jerome McGann's The Romantic Ideology (1983) argued that critics had too often accepted the poets' own picture of themselves, and urged readers to ask what the poems leave out. Anne K. Mellor's Romanticism and Gender (1993) asked why women writers had been missing from the old picture of the age.

How the age ends

The age did not end in a single day. The poets who had opened it were passing away, one after another. Keats died in Rome in 1821, Shelley drowned in 1822 and Byron died in Greece in 1824. Blake died in 1827. Scott, worn out by years of writing to pay off the debts of the firms that failed in 1826, died in 1832. Coleridge and Lamb died in 1834, and Hemans in 1835. Wordsworth lived on until 1850. The poet who had once startled readers by using the speech of ordinary people became a respected old man and, in 1843, Poet Laureate.

Britain, too, was changing. The Reform Act of 1832 had given the new towns a voice. In 1833 came the Factory Act and the abolition of slavery in the empire. The railways were beginning to cross the country. In that same year, 1833, a movement began at Oxford that asked the Church of England to recover its older traditions. It came to be called the Oxford Movement.

King William IV died in June 1837, and his eighteen-year-old niece Victoria became queen on 20 June. In those same months Charles Dickens was finishing The Pickwick Papers, which had been appearing in monthly parts since 1836, and he began Oliver Twist. A new kind of reader and writer, urban and middle class, was coming forward. John Clare, whose village poems had once been praised, entered an asylum in Essex that year and spent the rest of his life in asylums.

The date 1837 is a convention. Some literary historians prefer to end the age in 1832, the year of the Reform Act and of Scott's death. In either case the ideas of the Romantics did not vanish. They passed to the next generation. Alfred Tennyson, then a boy of fourteen, was so struck by the news of Byron's death in 1824 that he carved the words "Byron is dead" on a rock. He would grow into one of the leading poets of the Victorian Age.

Writers and works

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Sources

• Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. Oxford University Press, 1953.
• Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. W. W. Norton, 1971.
• Butler, Marilyn. Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background, 1760-1830. Oxford University Press, 1981.
• Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. 1817.
• Drabble, Margaret, ed. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th ed. Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Lovejoy, Arthur O. "On the Discrimination of Romanticisms." PMLA, vol. 39, 1924.
• McGann, Jerome J. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. University of Chicago Press, 1983.
• Mellor, Anne K. Romanticism and Gender. Routledge, 1993.
• Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. 3rd ed. Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Shelley, Percy Bysshe. A Defence of Poetry. Written 1821; first published 1840.
• Wellek, René. "The Concept of 'Romanticism' in Literary History." Comparative Literature, vol. 1, 1949.
• Wordsworth, William, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads. 1798; 2nd ed. with Preface, 1800.

Afsar Khan, Ph.D. English