1. The Romantic Period
Whitechapel High Street, ca. 1894

2. “Romantic”
1. Fascination with youth, innocence, and the “growing up” experience
2. Questioning of authority and tradition
3. The ability to adapt to change

3. Key Ideas of the Period Imagination
Industrial Revolution (Laissez-Faire)
Innocence & Experience
Ideas & Inspiration
Introduction into Gothic

4. The Romantic Period
Began in 1789, the year Wordsworth and Coleridge published the Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems.
Ended in 1832, by which time the major writers of the preceding century were either dead or no longer productive.
It was a turbulent time period, when England changed from a primarily agricultural society to a modern industrial nation.
Wealth and power shifted from the landholding aristo cracy to large-scale employers, who found themselves against a large, restless working class.

5. Reaction to Revolution
In response to the French Revolution, the English government prohibited public meetings, suspended habeas corpus (the release from unlawful restraint), and advocates of even moderate political change were charged with high treason.
Yet economic and social changes created a desperate need for corresponding political changes, and new social classes were demanding a voice in government.
Viaduct across the Great Northern Railway, 1851

6. Reaction to Revolution
American Revolution had left England without its 13 colonies.
The French Revolution was being led by Napoleon – who claimed to want democracy. (Got it by using the guillotine!)
Democracy scared the upper classes in England because they were afraid that the lower classes would: (Like France!)
Take away their wealth
Overthrow the government
Threaten their lives

7. The Industrial Revolution
Resulted from the invention of power-driven machinery replacing hand labor.
Open fields and farms were enclosed into privately owned agricultural holdings.
A new labor population massed in the sprawling mill towns that burgeoned in central and northern England.
The new landless class migrated to the industrial towns or remained as farm laborers, subsisting on starvation wages.
Megg's almshouses, 1800s

8. Results of the Industrial Revolution
The landscape began to take on its modern appearance, with rural areas divided into a checkerboard of fields enclosed by hedges and stone walls.
Factories of the industrial and trading cities cast a pall of smoke over vast areas of jerry-built houses and slum tenements.
The population polarized into two classes of capital labor, the large owner or trader and the possession-less wage-worker, the rich and the poor.

9. Governmental response to the Industrial Revolution
A laissez-faire, “let people do as they please”, attitude encouraged government not to interfere in commerce
The results 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.

10. Colonization
While the poor were suffering, the landed classes, the industrialists, and many merchants prospered as the British Empire expanded aggressively both westward and eastward.
During this time period, the British Empire became the most powerful colonial presence in the world.
The British East India Co ruled the entire Indian sub continent, and black slave labor in the West Indies generated great wealth for British plantation owners.

11. The “Spirit of the Age”
Writers during this time period did not think of themselves as “romantic.”
Many writers, however, felt that there was something distinctive about their time – a pervasive intellectual and imaginative climate which they called “the spirit of the age.”
They described it as a release of energy, experimental boldness, and creative power that marked a literary renaissance, an age of new beginnings when, by discarding traditional procedures and outworn customs, everything was possible.

12. Poetry
Wordsworth described all good poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”
He believed that the source of all poetry was not in external things, but in the individual poet (Imagination!).
The lyric poem, expressing the poet’s own feelings and temperament, became a major Romantic form.
The natural scene became a primary poetic subject, and poets described natural phenomena with an accuracy of observation that had no earlier match.
Poets bestowed attitudes and sentiments on the landscape that earlier writers had felt only for God, parents or a beloved.
Humble, rustic life and plain style were elevated and the wonder of ordinary things was exalted.

13. England’s Lake District
Themes in Literature
Nature
Isolationism
Exile – especially of a mind that cannot find a spiritual home in its native land
Fascination with the outlaws of myth, legend, or history
Mysticism
Results of the industrial revolution
England’s Lake District

14. “I will not Reason & Compare; my business is to Create.” -Blake
- What does this MEAN?

15. Authors from the Romantic Period
William Blake
Poetical Sketches
Songs of Innocence and Experience
A Poison Tree
The Chimney Sweeper

16. Various songs and poems
Robert Burns
To a Mouse
Various songs and poems
William Wordsworth
Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems
The Prelude
Tintern Abbey
What is a poet?
“He is a man speaking to men”

17. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Dejection: An Ode
Kubla Khan
Christabel
George Gordon, Lord Byron
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
Don Juan
Various poems

18. Percy Bysshe Shelley
Alastor
Prometheus Unbound
Adonais
Various poems
John Keats
Endymion
The Eve of St. Agnes