Romanticism

A Literary and Cultural History

Carmen Casaliggi, Porscha Fermanis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317609346
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Romantic period coincided with revolutionary transformations of traditional political and human rights discourses, as well as witnessing rapid advances in technology and a primitivist return to nature. As a broad global movement, Romanticism strongly impacted on the literature and arts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in ways that are still being debated and negotiated today.

Examining the poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama, and the arts of the period, this book considers:

• Important propositions and landmark ideas in the Romantic period;
• Key debates and critical approaches to Romantic studies;
• New and revisionary approaches to Romantic literature and art;
• The ways in which Romantic writing interacts with broader trends in history, politics, and aesthetics;
• European and Global Romanticism;
• The legacies of Romanticism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Containing useful, reader-friendly features such as explanatory case studies, chapter summaries, and suggestions for further reading, this clear and engaging book is an invaluable resource for anyone who intends to study and research the complexity and diversity of the Romantic period, as well as the historical conditions which produced it.

1 Contexts of Romanticism

DOI: 10.4324/9781315749501-2

Poets, not otherwise than philosophers, painters, sculptors and musicians, are in one sense the creators and in another the creations of their age.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Preface’ to Prometheus Unbound (1820)

Overview

This chapter outlines some of the most important events, ideas and contexts for understanding the conditions in which British Romantic writing was produced, published and read. It does so not only in order to situate the writers discussed in this book within a particular cultural milieu, or even because of the inherent historical embeddedness or locatedness of literary texts, but also because the Romantic period was one in which both writers and readers repeatedly engaged with ‘questions about the conditions within which their own literary efforts were inscribed’ (Keen 2009: 101). If, as James Chandler has argued, the Romantic period was ‘the age of the spirit of the age’ or, in other words, an age self-consciously obsessed with defining itself (Chandler 1998: 78), the events and ideas set out below become much more than just background, contextual or anecdotal material for the study of British Romanticism, and instead form a cultural matrix that Romantic writers both informed and passionately critiqued. Poets, as Percy Shelley puts it in the epigraph to this chapter, are simultaneously ‘the creators’ and the ‘creations of their age’ (Poetry and Prose 206). The first section of the chapter considers historical and political contexts such as the American and French Revolutions; the political landscape of Britain pre and post-Waterloo; and industrialisation and urbanisation. The second part of the chapter looks at circulating intellectual currents, including scientific developments from Isaac Newton (1643–1727) to Joseph Priestley (1733–1804); philosophical ideas from John Locke (1632–1704) to Adam Smith; religious discourses; and political economy. The final part of the chapter examines social and cultural contexts such as gender and sexuality; classes and conflicts; the literary market place, focusing on publishing and print cultures; and leisure and lifestyle, including tourism, the theatre, art galleries and sport.

Historical and political contexts

Wars, revolutions and revolution debates

In 1783 the Treaty of Paris ended the American Revolutionary War of 1775–83 and secured the independence of the United States of America from the British Empire. In 1789 the Constitution of the United States set out principles such as the separation-of-powers doctrine and federalism; and in 1791 the United States Bill of Rights enshrined many of the liberties and natural rights that had been used to justify the Revolution in the first place such as freedom of religion, speech and assembly. The events leading up to American independence primarily concerned issues of parliamentary sovereignty or whether the British Parliament had the right to extend its legislative authority over the colonies (Ammerman 1976: 473). At the First Continental Congress assembly of 1774, the Americans rejected the authority of the British Parliament to tax the Thirteen American Colonies, thereby validating more local protests such as the infamous Boston Tea Party of 16 December 1773.

British opinion on the American ‘crisis’ was sharply divided (see Chapter 7). Some British commentators such as the Irish MP Edmund Burke (1729–97) agreed with the Americans, arguing in his ‘Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies’ (1775) that the American devotion to liberty was founded on English principles and that any attempt to curb American disobedience was an affront to the principle of liberty itself. Like Burke, several of the most popular British newspapers expressed sympathy for the American cause and admiration for George Washington (1732–99). For those on the margins of British society – such as radicals, religious dissenters and the working classes – the American Revolution was an event to be encouraged and even celebrated. More conservative commentators, on the other hand, felt that the American colonists owed Britain a great deal for their protection and for the ongoing provision of goods and services (Weintraub 2005). Still others were concerned that Britain’s rivals (especially France and Spain) would use the Revolutionary War to expand their empires at Britain’s expense.

When the French Revolution erupted in 1789 many commentators in Britain felt that the French monarchy was receiving its just deserts for the part it had played against Britain in the American Revolutionary Wars. Materially, France had gained little by its involvement in the wars, and Louis XVI (1754–93) ascended the throne during a financial crisis largely caused by France’s participation in the American Revolution. Indeed, it was partly in response to a new and unpopular tax code, initiated to raise revenue, that the Third Estate of the French Estates-General (Etats-Généraux) on 17 June 1789 declared itself the National Assembly, or the assembly of the people. The first year of the French Revolution in 1789 saw a series of popular revolts such as the storming of the Bastille in July, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in August and the march on Versailles by working-class women in October. A Republic was proclaimed in September 1792 and Louis XVI was executed in January 1793.

British reactions to the French Revolution ranged from despairing to jubilatory. For Burke, the French Revolution – even before the onset of the Terror – was a ‘monstrous tragi-comic scene’ in which ‘everything seem[ed] out of nature’ in a ‘strange chaos of levity and ferocity’ (Burke 1986: 92). For the poet Helen Maria Williams (1761–1827), ‘[i]t was a triumph of human kind … and it required but the common feelings of humanity to become in that moment a citizen of the world’ (Williams 1790: 14). Anna Seward (1742–1809) wrote her admiring ‘Sonnet to France on Her Present Exertions’ in 1789. Although not published until 1834, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Destruction of the Bastille (written 1789) was similarly celebratory, and annual festivals commemorating the fourteenth of July were held in Britain by Whigs and radicals during the early years of the French Republic. Yet admiration for the new Republic quickly soured when it invaded Belgium and the Netherlands in 1792. Fearing the impact of such expansionary ambitions on the European balance of power, Britain declared war on France soon after.

During the French Revolutionary Wars, popular agitation and the threat of civil war radicalised the Revolution significantly, resulting in the rise of Maximilien Robespierre (1758–94) and the Jacobins at the expense of the more moderate Girondists. The so-called ‘Reign of Terror’, from 1793–4, resulted in the deaths of an estimated 40,000 people in France. By 1794 Coleridge and Robert Southey’s (1774–1843) three-act play, The Fall of Robespierre, was less admiring of the Revolution, portraying the French politician as a bloodthirsty tyrant. A similar trajectory can be traced in William Wordsworth’s views on the Revolution in the 1805 version of The Prelude. For the young Wordsworth, ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive’ (10. 692), but he later compares the Revolution to a ‘volume, whose contents he knows/ Are memorable, but from him locked up,/ Written in a tongue he cannot read’ (10. 59–61). Wordsworth’s visceral reaction in The Prelude to the remains of the blood and bodies piled on the Carousel during the French Terror stands in stark contrast to his original support for revolutionary violence in his unpublished Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff (written 1793), where he argues that liberty must often borrow the methods of tyranny in order to triumph.

Commentators on all sides of the political spectrum – Whigs, Tories, Liberals and Radicals – quickly realised the implications of the French Revolution, and the debate that ensued in Britain was about nothing less than the relationship between monarchy and people (or the principle of ‘contractual government’) and the desirability (or otherwise) of a more democratic and participatory political process (Verhoeven 2013: 1). These debates about the contractual nature of government have led some historians and philosophers to argue that the French Revolution ‘marks the birth of political modernity’ (Claeys 1995: I. xvii). The Revolution certainly initiated one of the most important ideological debates to have ever taken place in Britain, but the American Revolution also played a central role in debates concerning political reform. Not only did some of the most radical British writers flee to America to escape persecution, but many radical commentators such as Thomas Paine (1737–1809) and William Cobbett (1763–1835) believed that revolutionary forces and discourses about human rights in Europe had originally been generated in America rather than in France (Verhoeven 2013).

Case study: Richard Price, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine, ‘The Revolution Debate' (1789–92)

The dissenting minister Richard Price (1723–91) opened the debate on the French Revolution in Britain with his 1789 sermon to the London Corresponding Society celebrating the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, arguing in his Discourse on the Love of our Country (1789) that ‘a King is no more than the first servant of the public, created by it, maintained by it, and responsible to it’ (cited in Butler 1984: 28). Price’s Discourse received an infamous response from Edmund Burke in the form of his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Although Burke had supported the American Revolution, he denounced the French Revolution for its violence and excesses. Burke’s strategy was instead to celebrate the stability of the British nation, appealing to Britain’s history of bloodless, organic and gradual improvement. For Burke, the nation was ‘entailed’ or left in trust for the next generation, and many of his metaphors invoke private property and domestic ties, arguing for the ‘binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections’ (Burke 1986: 120).

Mary Wollstonecraft’s (1759–97) A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) was one of nearly 200 responses to Burke’s Reflections. Using the same form, metaphors and style as Burke, Wollstonecraft reverses his arguments in order ‘to shew you to yourself, stripped of the gorgeous drapery in which you have enwrapped your tyrannic principles’ (Wollstonecraft 1993: 37). Despite her focus on Burke’s sophistry, Wollstonecraft’s larger goal is to censure British political elites for their opulence, corruption and inhumane treatment of the poor. Unlike Burke, Wollstonecraft saw the hereditary class structure of English society as ‘unnatural, unjust and artificial’: ‘why was it a duty to repair an ancient castle, built in barbarous ages, of Gothic materials?’ (Wollstonecraft 1993: 41). Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791–2) also rejects Burke’s notions of inheritance and entailment, arguing that ‘[M]an has no authority over posterity in matters of personal right, and therefore, no man, or body of men, had, or can have, a right to set up hereditary government. … To inherit a government, is to inherit the people as if they were flocks and herds’ (cited in Butler 1984: 110).

Like the Revolution itself, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars with France initiated a number of social and political debates in Britain. Rejecting traditional views that British Romantic writers were largely unconcerned by the wars of the period, works by Simon Bainbridge (2003), Mary Favret (2010), Catriona Kennedy (2013) and Gillian Russell and Neil Ramsey (2015), as well as a digital edition of Betty Bennett’s 1976 collection of the period’s war poems, demonstrate the extent to which British writers responded to war activities, with Bennett even suggesting that ‘[w]ar was the single most important fact of British life from 1793−1815’ (Bennett 1976: 448). If, for Marilyn Butler, the Napoleonic Wars led to a more repressive cultural nationalism that increasingly politicised and stratified literature according to class allegiances (Butler 1981: 114), they nonetheless also sharpened responses to issues such as industrialisation, poverty and the balance of power in Europe. British war policy was therefore seen to have a unique moral status, which only increased after Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) overthrew the Directory during the coup of 18 Brumaire in 1799 and established the Consulate, later proclaiming himself emperor. Like Wordsworth and Coleridge, the latter of whom led a vigorous campaign in The Courier against what he saw as Whiggish defeatism about the Napoleonic Wars, Robert Southey (1774–1843) saw the Peninsular War, during which Britain supported Portugal and Spain against Napoleon, as a ‘just’ or ‘holy’ war, claiming in the opening chapter of his History of the Peninsular War (1823) that ‘this was no common war … it was as direct a contest between the principles of good and evil as the elder Persians, or the Manicheans imagined in their fables’ (Southey 1823: I. 1–2).

Napoleon’s eventual defeat at Waterloo in 1815 by an allied army under the the Duke of Wellington (1769–1852) was largely represented as the victory of good over evil in the British press, becoming in later years the ultimate symbol of national cohesion (Shaw 2002; Bainbridge 1995). But liberals, such as the essayist William Hazlitt and his friend Leigh Hunt (1784–1859), felt that the Congress of Vienna, held from September 1814 to June 1815 in order to restore long-term peace and the balance of power in Europe, was a decisive step backwards rather than forwards, as reactionary regimes were reasserted in France, Spain and elsewhere, and the liberties and natural rights associated with the American and French Revolutions disappeared on the continent. As Hunt put it in his journal The Examiner in 1815: ‘Monks with their mummeries begin to parade the streets again; the age seems fairly sliding back into old times’ (Hunt 1815: 786). For Hunt, the political landscape of post-Waterloo Europe was not a period of international peace, but rather of ideological betrayal: ‘[T]he Allies, with their violated promises, would not have it otherwise; and they will inevitably see the blessed fruit of that Divine Right which they would have re-planted’ (Hunt 1816: 534).

Politics: conservatives, radicals and reformists

Like his friend Hunt, John Keats, writing to his brothers in 1819, felt that the ‘unlucky termination’ of the French Revolution had produced the temporary effect of returning Europe to the age of autocracy and ‘horrid superstition’ (Letters, II, 193). After the Revolution, ‘social deviance’ in Britain came to include radical political views, and a series of societies were formed to prevent ‘vice’, beginning with the Proclamation Society (1787) and the Society for the Suppression of Vice (1802). These societies attempted to expose those who published and distributed obscenity, including seditious and blasphemous publications, as in the case of the 1817–19 trials of publishers and booksellers such as Thomas Wooler (1786–1853), William Hone (1780–1842) and Richard Carlile (1790–1843), and the earlier 1794 treason trials. Many liberals and radicals saw the period immediately following the French Revolution, which included the prosecution of Thomas Paine in 1792 and the 1794 treason trials of John Thelwall (1764–1834), John Horne Tooke (1736–1812) and other members of the London Corresponding Society (a group formed in 1792 by artisans who sought parliamentary reform), as ‘the institution of a system of terror, almost as hideous in its features, almost as gigantic in its stature, and infinitely more pernicious in its tendency, than France ever knew’ (Anon 1795: I. iv). This idea lies at the heart of William Godwin’s (1756–1836) novel Things as they are; or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), where the pattern of Caleb’s persecution and flight mirrors the vicissitudes...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Note on texts
• Note on translations
• Timeline
• Introduction: Romanticism and its discontents
• 1 Contexts of Romanticism
• 2 Romantic forms, genres and language
• 3 Romantic groups and associations
• 4 National, regional and local Romanticism
• 5 Romanticism in the arts
• 6 European Romanticism
• 7 Global Romanticism
• Conclusion: Legacies of Romanticism
• Guide to further reading
• Bibliography
• Index