Rebels and Dreamers: The Romantic Period (1789-1832)

French Revolution

english ruling class feels threatened

authorities try to repress worker’s efforts to organize “Liberty, equality, fraternity”

Industrial Revolution

• boosted growth of manufacturing

• lead to poverty and suffering

• “faith in science and reason no longer applied in a worlds of tyranny and factories”

• Romantic values challenging the Neoclassical beliefs of order and balance

English Victories over Napoleon

• Napoleon Bonaparte

• English heros emerge

• Napoleon exiled, but England will never be the same

  • the ideas unleashed in both the French and Industrial revolutions will change England forever

Industrialzation and Urbanization

• steamboats, railroads, and textile industry

• “Wealth no longer depended on land”

• The Reform Bill of 1832

An out-of-touch monarchy

• rise of democratic values and demands are pushing against the monarchy

• those in power vs. those who wanted reform

• The Peterlou Massarce

George III

• “An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king”

• declared insane in 1811, resulting in his son to be named Prince Regent, hence the Regency Era

George IV

“Extravagent, obese, seperated from his wife in an ugly and very public marital quarrel”

• succeeded by brother William

• William dies in 1837

• no ligitimate heirs

• the daughter of his younger brother was next in royal line Victoria

Strange and Faraway Places

• “Kubla Khan” and “Ozymandias”

• the Lake District

• “the Romantic poets all sought something beyond this world” rather than “the stain of cities”

• factories (industrial revolution)

• moving away from cities and to the country

William Wordsworth

• Lake District (for insirpation)

• worship of nature and the natural world

• “Ideal beauty”

  • inspired by landscape

• “beyond the bounds of earth”

  • inspired by fantasy

urban world

• regardeless where the poets were setting their work, the common factor was in wanting to escape the urban world

• tough the city was not as completely bleak as Wordsworth once believed

• the city inproved or brightened

  • London

• new infrastrcture after the fire

• St. Paul’s Cathedral

• Brighon Pavillion (partly inspired by India’s Taj Mahal)

Bath

• Jane Austen’s home

• though Charles Dickens had other thoughts

lit and society

• french and idustrial revolution shaped society, history, and therfore they would shape liturature

• “human nature seeming born again”

• Neopoleonic wars

  • England vs. France

  • Napeleon’s defeat; reestablished order

  • the priviledge few

ideas would not die

• post-revlution ideology: “…people were to be free in their personal lives and free to choose their government- people were equally “citizens”

William Wilberforce and the abolition of salvery in England

• the Reform Bill of 1832

• “Revolutions are about power and the Industrial Revolution was about the application of power to work; the creation of machines that work while human beings feed and tend to them”

• “economic progress exacted an enormous human price”

Mary Wollstonecraft

• inspired by French Revolution

• Vindication of the Rights of Women

• “a false system of education geared to make women marriageable rather then knowledge”

• mother of Mary Shelby

William Blake

• child labor in “The Chimney Sweeper”

Lord Byron

• “In Defense of Lower Class”

• response to Parliment debating penalty against protesting unemployed weavers

Pery Bysshe Shelley

• British labor Party in “Men of England”

William Wordsworth alternate speech

• “other ways of being”

• nature

  • different than pastoral poetry

  • “a cleaner, greener world in which human nature can be, if not reborn, at least restored”

  • Tintern Abbey

Wordsworth focus

• focus on common people and common language (not hieghtened) mirrored the political goals of the French Rev.

• “Some writers spoke out against the ills they saw; others looked inward or far away to see world that might be. Human nature was not born again, but human beings were changed profoundly.”

Writer and Tradition

• Romantic wasn’t a contemporary term, but a label later ascribed to the poets and writers of this era

• Romantic does not mean love stories

• “everything that the opposite of the drab, the ordinary, the conventional, the routine, the predictable, and the expected.”

• realistic

settings

• Robert Burn’s “To a Louse”

• or Faraway, exotic, supernatural, fantastic

• Colerridge’s “Kubla Khan” or “The Rime of the Acient Mariner”

Romantics

• “Romantics were by nature rebellious”

• rejected traditions of the ealier centuries

• anything against the satus quo or convention

• “you can imagine why they enjoyed Paradise Lost”

• literary forms and traditions were “swept away, as the French Rev. had swept away powered wigs and keen breeches”

What Romantics Wanted

• aim for authenticity and sincerity

• ordinary, everyday speech

• reaching audiences in the common, uneducated classes

• revealing their personal thoughts or feelings

Political Rebels

• Revolution- to-Napoleon- to-tyranny-to-new-order

• rebelling against the economic system “that turned men, women, and children in factory “hands”

• idolizing John Milton

Revival

• The Sonnet

  • Wordsworth and Shelley

• The Ode

  • Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats

• Byronic Hero

  • Lord Byron

  • Archetype that captures “the spirit of the age”

Characteristics of Byronic Hero

• mysterious, brooding, threathening

• modern day equivelent to the “mysterious outsider” character

Jane Austen

• commedy of manners

• middle class

• stories centured around the loves of women

• insights into human nature and sense of humor

Sir Walter Scott

• thoughts of as the inventor of the “historical novel”

• harkening back to the history myths and legends of Englands

• distant and the exotic and fantastical

Elements of Romenticism

• simplicity or directness of language

• honoring the common man

• an intense interest in the beauty or power of nature. The awe of nature as sublime

• they believe in the healing power of nature

• creating the fantastic, emphasis on the imagination

• setting that are exotic or faraway

• seeking the unknown, gaining forbidden knowledge

• a hero or heroine who rebels against the social norms of society

• an interest in dreams, superstitions, and legends

• a belief in the power of the individual, deeper awarness of self

• the expression of spontaneous, intensified feelings

• all things are connected

The Gothic

• Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

• horror genre

• Victor Frankenstein: Romantic theme of going beyond limits

• science and reason

• Frankenstein’s monster: darker side of Romanticism too cut off from orgins`

Gothic Lit

• a sub-genre of Romantic lit

• “takes the reader from the reasoned to order of the everyday world into the dark world of the supernatural”

Elements of a Gothic

• atmosphere of mystery and superme

• usually set in an old castle or large estate

• romance

• emotional distress especially in women

• omen, visions, ghosts, supernatural, or otherwise inexplicable events

• storms and bad weather

• idea that we all have a “inner-beast”