English 315: British Romanticism: Introduction Introduction to Longman Anthology, 2-29  See on-line version of Introduction

• Importance of historical context for complete understanding of texts produced during this period.

• American Revolution timeline (1775-1783) 
• French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1789-1815)
• General History French Revolution Chronology Napoleonic Wars Chronology
• Reform Bill of 1832 
• Abolition of Slavery timeline:
• 1772:  Mansfield Case (No Slave could be forcibly removed from England)
• 1773: Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects published (England)
• 1775:  American War for Independence begins
• 1789:  French War for Independence begins
• Equiano's Narrative published (England)
• 1791:  Equiano's Narrative published (America)
• 1793:  France abolished slavery in St. Dominique
• 1802:  Slavery reestablished by French under Napolean
• 1804:  Haitian Independence
• 1807:  Britain, U.S. abolish slave trade
• 1833:  Slavery in British territories "abolished"
• (As of Aug. 1, 1834, for those under six; others become unpaid "Apprentices" for six year period)
• 1838:  July 1:  All British slaves freed
• 1863:  Emancipation Proclamation in U.S.
• 1865:  Thirteenth Amendment to U.S. Constitution ratified, ending slavery
• Madness of King George III / Regency 

• The Romantic period  “was marked on one end by the revolutions in America and France, and on the other by the reform of Parliament to extend the vote and reconfigure representation, by the emergence of the modern industrial state, and by the abolition of slavery in British colonies” (3).

• Events of French Revolution “had announced a radical break in historical continuity—a sudden, cataclysmic overthrow of a monarchy surrounded by high culture, and the eruption of a new social order that no one knew how to ‘read’” (3).
• “Enthusiasts heralded the fall of an oppressive aristocracy and the birth of democratic and egalitarian ideals, a new era, shaped by ‘the rights of man’ rather than the entailments of wealth and privilege, while skeptics and reactionaries rued the end of chivalry, lamented the erosion of order, and foresaw the decline of civilization” (3).

• Romantic period writers “were invigorated by a sense of participating in the modern world, of defining its values, and of claiming a place for writers as its instructors, prophets, critics, and inspirers” (4).
• “This enthusiasm inspired innovations in content and literary form. Lyric, epic, and autobiography became radically subjective, spiraling inward to psychological dramas of mind and memory, or projecting outward into prophecies and visions of new worlds formed by new values” (4).

• 18th C. philosophy and science “had argued for objective, verifiable truth and the common basis of our experience in a world of concrete, measurable, physical realities.  Over the century, however, there | emerged a competing interest in individual variations subjective filterings, and the mind’s independence of physical realities, or even creative transformation of them: not just a recorder or mirror, the mind was an active, synthetic, dynamic, even visionary power—of particular importance to poets” (4-5).

• Coleridge: Primary Imagination: “‘the living Power and prime Agent of all human perception, [and . . . a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” (Biographia Literaria: Longman 575)]’ analogous to but a lesser power than divine creation.  Poetry was written by the ‘secondary Imagination,’ an ‘echo’ of the Primary ‘coexisting with conscious will’: it dissolves and diffuses the materials of perception ‘in order to recreate’” (5).
• PBS, Defence: “‘Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance’” (5).
• “Keats proposed the imagination as a link to the ideal world at the dawn of creation”—compared to Adam’s dream (5).  (see Longman 900)
• “As Keats’s analogy of Adam’s dream suggests, male imagination often projects an eroticized female or feminized object” (5).
• Women writers re: imagination—“prone to a skeptical bias, accenting dangers, a corruption of rational capacity and moral judgment, an alliance with destructive (rather than creative) passion” (5).
• Women had more to lose—were already associated with passion, emotions, were not acknowledged to be capable of rational thought (see also 8, 24-26).

• Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary: Romance: “‘A military fable of the middle ages; a tale of wild adventures in war and love’” (6).
• “Radcliffe perfected the gothic romance novel” (6).
• “Scott elaborated the poetic romance and virtually defined the historical romance” (6).
• “Byron made his name and fame in exotic quest romance” (6).
• “In a variety of genres—ballad, narrative poem, novel—Romance  turned to other places and times, or shaped timeless, ahistorical tales of quest and desire, love and adventure” (6).
• PBS & Keats “turned to the landscapes and myths of ancient Greece as resources of imagination before the age of Christian "truth’” (6).

• Thus, Romantic-era writers enacted “a turn, even an escape, from the tumultuous and confusing here-and-now of England.  The appeal lay not only in exotic settings and remote ages themselves but also in the freedom these licensed to explore superstitions and customs that had been dismissed by Enlightenment thinkers who championed faith in ‘Reason,’ progress, and universal truths” (7).
• Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary: Romantick: “‘1) resembling the tales of romances; wild. 2) Improbable; false. 3) Fanciful; full of wild scenery’” (7).
• “Acutely aware of the chaos of their historical moment, writers often make the attraction to another world a critical theme” (7).
• “Romances often reflect, and reflect on, the world seemingly escaped or effaced from consciousness” (7).

• Women writers: “Especially in the popular form of the novel, they felt that it [Romance] encouraged too much ‘sensibility’—the cultivation of emotional refinement over rational intellect—and fed an appetite for fantasy over sound judgment” (8).
• Mary Wollstonecraft believed that “The genre enfeebled reason and stimulated illusions about ‘romantic love’ that held perilous social consequences” [see Maria] (8).
• Intersection of “Romance exoticism” and “the socially immediate world”: “Encounters with outcasts of all kinds—refugees, the poor, abandoned and fallen women, discharged soldiers, sailors, vagrants, peasants, north-country shepherds and smallholders, abject slaves—supplied the unusual and unexpected, and at the same time provoked social self-reflection” (8).

• Importance of literary tradition:  “Milton’s revolutionary politics provided an example of anti-monarchal courage, and Paradise Lost was indisputably the most important poem in English literature” (9).
• “Milton’s Satan, an epitome of the ‘sublime,’ is echoed and doubled everywhere, and along with Milton’s God and Adam, casts his shadow across the fable of masculine ambition and heroic alienation that Wollstonecraft’s daughter Mary Shelley creates for Frankenstein” (9).
• “The Romantic sublime is a moment of vision which, by providing an intuition of the absolute grounds of existence, claims to close the gap between subject and object” (Oxford Companion 723)  See also Longman 1031.
• “At the same time . . ., Romantic creativity also defined itself—often defiantly—against tradition, experimenting with new forms and genres” (9).

• The “I” becomes “an individual authority, for whom the mind, in all its creative powers and passionate testimony of deeply registered sensations, becomes a compelling focus” (10).
• Leads Keats to discuss the “wordsworthian or egotistical sublime” (Longman 908)
• “Poets such as Byron, Coleridge, and Shelley cultivated the ‘I’ as antihero: the exile, the damned visionary, the alienated idealist, the outcast, whose affiliates were Cain, Satan, even the paradoxical figure of Napoleon—all joined by the passion of mind and the torrents of imagination” (10).
• In his focus on common figures, “Wordsworth’s revolution was to treat them all as vehicles of worthy imagination and passion” (10).
• In “On the Living Poets” (1818), “Hazlitt had no problem linking this program to ‘the sentiments and opinions which produced the French revolution,’ as well as its ‘principles and events’” (10).

• After fall of Bastille (July 14, 1789), in England, “Conservatives were alarmed, while liberals welcomed the early phase as a rep-|etition of England’s ‘Glorious Revolution’ in 1688, an overdue end to feudal abuse and the inauguration of constitutional government” (10-11).

• August 1792: Overthrow of French Monarch, Louis XVI
• Sept: September Massacres
• Extremist Jacobins replace moderate Girondins=> Reign of Terror:
• Jan [21] 1793: Louis XVI guillotined
• (Oct [16] 1793: Marie Antoinette guillotined)
• Feb 1793: War declared on Britain, Britain reciprocates, “throwing the political ideals of WW and his generation into sharp conflict with their love of country” (11).
• Peace of Amiens: 1802-1803
• Otherwise, “ Britain was at war with France until the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815” (11).
• Terror of Robespierre (1793-1794): “thousands of aristocrats, their employees, the clergy, and ostensible opponents of the Revolution were guillotined, the violence swallowing up Robespierre himself in [July 28] 1794” (11).
• “The Revolution had evolved into a military dictatorship, its despotism confirmed when Napoleon crowned himself Emperor in 1804” (11).

• “Although war barely reached Britain, it was a constant threat, cost thousands of British lives, and sent its economy into turmoil” (12).
• “When Napoleon invaded the Iberian Peninsula in 1807, British support for the spontaneous resistance of the Portuguese and Spanish peoples enabled former radicals to return to the patriotic fold, to see their country as the champion of liberty against French imperialism” (12).
• “Unlike the English, the French rejected their monarchy; if France could thus claim to be the first modern nation in the old world, Britain could feel superior to a country defined by the Terror and then Napoleon” (12).

• “Its fears heightened by the threat of invasion, the government clamped down on any form of political expression that hinted at French ideas. Efforts to reform Parliament begun in the 1780s were stifled, as was the movement to abolish the slave trade, and even moderates were silenced by accusations of ‘Jacobinism’ (sympathy with Revolutionary extremists)” (13).
• 1794: Suspension of habeas corpus: “Now anyone suspected of a crime could be jailed indefinitely” (13). [cf. USA ca. 2001-]
• Gagging Acts of 1795: “defining any criticism of the monarchy as treason and squelching political organization by limiting the size of meetings to discuss reform” (13).
• Combination Act of 1799: Prevented unionization, discussion of collective bargaining
• Pentridge Rising of 1817: Jeremy Brandeth, instigated by agent provocateurs [one employed to associate with suspected persons and by pretending sympathy with their aims to incite them to some incriminating action (m-w.com)], led abortive, futile uprising of radicals in form of march on Nottingham.
• Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820: “scheme to murder cabinet ministers (a prime minister [Spencer Perceval] had been assassinated in 1812) and stage a coup d’etat” (13).
• “The ultimate conspirators had been the government” (13).
• “Rather than international ‘fraternity,’ it was  repression at home and wars abroad that defined the legacy of the French Revolution” (13).
• Corn Laws of 1815: “restricted imports in order to sustain the artificially high prices, a boon for landlords and a disaster for the poor, for whom bread was a chief article of diet” (13).

• “In 1800 only males, and only five percent of them, were allowed to vote; only Anglicans, members of the state Church, could serve in the House of Lords. Workers did not have a vote, or even a representative in Parliament” (14).
• “It was in Manchester that the modern vocabulary of class struggle emerged” (14).
• Peterloo Massacre: August 1819, “nearly a hundred thousand mill-workers and their families gathered at nearby St. Peter's Field for a peaceful demonstration with banners and parades, capped by an address by the radical "Orator" Hunt calling for Parliamentary reform. . .  The militia struck out at the jeering though unarmed crowd and, backed by mounted Hussars, in ten minutes left an official toll of eleven dead, including one trampled child, and more than four hundred injured, many from sabre wounds” (14).
• “Parliament did not reform, but instead consolidated the repressive measures of previous decades into | the notorious Six Acts at the end of 1819. These Acts outlawed demonstrations, empowered magistrates to enter private houses in search of arms, prohibited meetings of more than fifty unless all participants were residents of the parish in which the meeting was held, increased the prosecution of blasphemous or seditious libel (defined as language "tending to bring into hatred or contempt" the monarchy or government), and raised the newspaper tax, thus constricting the circulation of William Cobbett's radical Political Register by tripling its price” (14-15).

• “The King lived a domestic life and his successive administrations were firmly Tory—that is, socially and politically ‘conservative,’ committed to the constitutional power of the monarchy and the Church, and opposed to concessions of greater religious and political liberties” (15).
• Prince George “expected the crown in 1788, but the King unexpectedly recovered, hanging on until November 1810, when he relapsed and became permanently mad. In January 1811 the Prince was appointed ‘Regent’” (15).
• After being sent to prison in 182 for ridicule of the Regent, Leigh Hunt “continued to edit The Examiner from his prison cell, which he transformed into a gentleman's parlor, where he was visited as a hero by Byron, Moore, Keats, and Lamb” (15).

Industrial England and “Never-resting Labour”:
17:

• “By 1750, the population of England and Wales was around five-and-a-half million; at the turn of the century, when the first census was taken, it was about eight million, with most of the increase in the last two decades” (17).
• “by 1831 the population of Great Britain neared fourteen million” (17).
• “In 1800 only London—with about ten percent of the entire population of England and Wales—had more than a hundred thousand people. By 1837, when Victoria was crowned, there were five such cities, and London was growing by as much as twenty percent a decade” (17).
• “This unprecedented concentration was the result of several converging factors. The 1790s had been racked by poor harvests, and harvests were bad again in 1815. Scarcities were aggravated by the Corn Laws and an increase of "Enclosure acts"—the consolidation and privatization of the old common fields into larger and more efficient farms. The modernizing did improve agricultural yield and animal husbandry, thus offsetting in some measure Malthus's prediction of an inadequate food supply, but it also produced widespread dislocation and misery” (17).

• “The census of 1811 revealed for the first time that a majority of families were engaged in nonagricultural employment” (18).”
• There was no philosophy of government restraint and regulation of these practices; all was ‘laissez-faire,’ the doctrine associated with Adam Smith's enormously influential Wealth of Nations (1777) that national wealth would flourish if businesses were left to operate with unfettered self-interest” (18).

• “If Romantic poetry is famous for celebrating "Nature," this affection coincides with the peril to actual nature by modern industry” (19).

• “The East India Company, originally a trading organization, gradually assumed administrative control of the subcontinent, even to the point of collecting taxes to protect British interests. The Company penetrated every aspect of British life” (20).

• “The East India Company [w]as the prototype for later colonial rule” (21).
• “Cotton and tea were major goods. So was opium, and behind the dreams of Coleridge's Kubla Khan, Keats's Ode to a Nightingale (whose poet compares his state of sensation to intoxication by "some dull opiate"), and De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater were grim realities” (21).
• “The Opium Warsserved the larger purpose of opening China to Lancashire cotton, as India had been opened earlier: the Wars concluded with the annexation of Hong Kong, and the opening of five treaty ports to British commerce” (21).
• “As morals adjusted in relation to economic opportunities, the empire also fed a growing appetite for the exotic among those shut up in urban squalor, or merely in an increasingly routinized commercial life” (21).
• Josiah Wedgwood (1730–1795): “In the 1770s he discovered how quickly high art could be transformed into status commodity, and began to produce imitation Greek vases, in vogue because of recent excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii. The Wedgwood fortune enabled Josiah's sons to offer Coleridge an annuity of £150 so that he could devote himself to literature” (21).

• Gift-books: “This stimulus reached its acme with the arrival of The Forget Me Not, a Christmas and New Year's Present for 1823. More than sixty annuals emerged to capitalize on this pioneering venture, bearing such titles as The Book of Beauty. Partly because they targeted female readers, they were hospitable to female authors, including Shelley and Hemans. And because they paid so well, they also attracted male writers: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Lamb, and Scott published in them, even though literary contributions were subordinated to the engravings that were their most compelling feature” (22).
• “This revolution in manners and family structure reduced ‘family’ to its biological nucleus, replacing the economic unit that enfolded laborers, servants, and dependents” (22).

• “What Jeffrey helps us see is that naming a literary canon is a matter of selection from a wide field, motivated by personal values. Other than Hemans, for instance, he thinks of English literary tradition as defined by men—even though Jane Austen and Mary Shelley proved to have as much durability as anyone in his census (Austen's novels and Shelley's Frankenstein have never been out of print). He also prefers literature of "fine taste" and ‘elegance’ to the fiery passion and disdainful vehemence that other readers would admire in Byron and Shelley” (23).
• “The Lakers”/ Lake School (from their residence in the Lake District): Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge
• “‘Cockney School,’ a term of insult fixed on Londoners Hazlitt, Hunt, and Keats, by the Scotsman John Gibson Lockhart, writing in Blackwood's in 1817” (23).
• Poet Laureate Southey identified still a third school. His youthful radicalism well behind him, he denounced the men ‘of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations’ who formed ‘the Satanic School,...characterized by a Satanic spirit of pride and audacious impiety’” (23). (Allusion to Byron and Percy Shelley)

• “Except for Hunt and Scott, most of these men bonded across class and political lines in their contempt of ‘Blue Stockings’ (intellectual women) and female writers, even as these women were defining themselves for and against the stigmatized precedent of Wollstonecraft” (24).
• Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman (1792) was one of the first analyses to define ‘women’ as an oppressed class that cut across national distinctions and historical differences—oppressed by lack of education, by lack of legal rights and access to gainful employment, as well as by a ‘prevailing opinion’ about their character: that women were made to feel and be felt, rather than to think; their duty was to bear children and be domestic drudges, to obey their fathers and their husbands without complaint”  (24).

• Women writers faced more than a few challenges. One was the pervasive cultural attitude that a woman who presumed to authority, published her views, and even aspired to make a living as an author was grossly immodest, decidedly ‘unfeminine,’ and probably a truant from her domestic calling. Many women published anonymously, under male pseudonyms, with the proper title ‘Mrs.’ or, as in Austen's case, under an anonymous and socially modest signature, ‘by a Lady’ (not one of Austen's novels bore her name). They also maintained propriety by hewing to subjects and genres deemed ‘feminine’—not political polemic, epic poetry, science or philosophy but children's books, conduct literature, travel writing (if it was clear they had proper escorts), household hints, cookbooks, novels of manners, and poems of sentiment and home, of patriotism and religious piety. Women who transgressed provoked harsh discipline” (25).

• “Whether the topic was imaginative literature, social observation, science, or political commentary, the personality of the essayist and the literary performance—by turns meditative, autobiographical, analytical, whimsical, terse and expansive—were what commanded attention” (26).
• Godwin's political romance, Caleb Williams and Scott's successful Waverley (1814)
• “Radcliffe was remarkably popular; the genre that she perfected in the 1790s caught everyone's attention, including publishers’” (26).
• “Edgeworth's regional-historical novels, their career launched in 1800 with Castle Rackrent and extending over a quarter century, also caught the attention of Scott, who dubbed her ‘the great Maria’ both out of admiration for a genre that shaped his own ventures and in recognition of her considerable financial success” (26).

• Hannah More’s only novel, Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1808).
• Shelley’s masterpiece, Frankenstein (1818 and 1831)
• “Austen's novels caught public interest with their sharp social observation and stories of heroines coming of age in a world of finely calibrated social codes and financial pressures. With Scott, she would be deemed one of the major figures in the genre” (27).
• “The explosion of readers at once liberated authors from patronage and exposed them to the turbulent and precarious world of the literary marketplace” (27).
• More’s “Cheap Repository Tracts (1795–1799) were circulated by the millions” (27).

• “Wordsworth remained ambivalent about developing a voice and a literature that would gain popular reception, and continued to resent those, such as Scott, who were more successful in these terms” (29).
• “The volatility of the market and of public taste points to salient qualities of the period: a heightened awareness of differences and boundaries, and of the energies generated along their unstable edges, and even more, a heightened awareness of time and history, public and cultural as well as personal. ‘Romanticism’ denotes less a unified concept, or even a congeries of ideas, than an era and a literature of clashing systems, each plausibly claiming allegiance, in a world of rapid change’ (29).