The Romanticism Handbook

Sue Chaplin, Joel Faflak, Sue Chaplin, Joel Faflak

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441176196
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A one-stop resource containing introductory material through to practical case studies in reading primary and secondary texts to introducing criticism and new directions in research.

1 Historical Context

Joel Faflak

Chapter Overview

The Romantic Period 2

Pre-Romanticism 3

The 1790s and the King’s Madness 4

Post-1800: The Napoleonic Wars 6

Post-Napoleon: The Regency 8

Coda: Empire 11

This chapter traces the historical context of social, political and economic factors from which literature of the British Romantic period emerges. Although Romantic literature can be and has been read separately from its historical context, our understanding of Romantic literature is ultimately enriched by looking at the various circumstances that shape its writing and production, or to see how Romantic literature shapes history in turn. This statement is true of any literary period, of course, but is especially true of the Romantic period, when our current ideas of literature and literary criticism emerge as distinct objects of study. This is not to say they emerged as homogeneous fields, and the Romantics debated fiercely the aesthetic and social significance of fictional vs non-fictional writing, all in the name of defining the category ‘Literature’. Indeed, with this Handbook in front of you, we can say that the battles have not ended. In our current time of political, economic, technological and climatic change, when the necessity of thinking about the material conditions of our lived existence has become especially crucial, we frequently wonder if literature matters. What concrete solutions can it provide for urgent problems? For the on-going struggle to answer this question we can thank the Romantics, who used literature to respond to tumultuous historical change, but also wondered if such responses were making a difference. For it is this shifting ground between texts and contexts that articulates the ground of Romantic history itself. At the end of each section in this chapter you will find cross-references to subsequent chapters in which relevant authors, works and issues related to the history outlined in this chapter are discussed in further detail. You can also refer to the historical timeline in the Introduction.

The Romantic Period

The period from 1789 to 1837 was a time of great economic, social, political and cultural ferment. For one thing, from 1793 to 1815, with the exception of 1801 to 1803, Britain was at war with France. Even after the 1815 Congress of Vienna realigned the balance of power in Europe upset by Napoleon, things did not go smoothly. The social climate in Britain post-1789 veered between idealism and paranoia. The war only partly distracted the nation from internal pressures created by a burgeoning industrial economy. By the time the 1832 Reform Bill began redistributing political power away from the ruling elites, the expanding middle and industrial classes had created a more stratified public sphere. Britain was establishing itself as the world’s manufacturing powerhouse and its population went from just under 10 million at the time of the first census in 1801 to nearly 25 million by the time Victoria took the throne. The largest growth was in industrial centres like Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester, as well as London, nerve centre for the growing Empire. Add to this the colonies Britain ruled over for most of the nineteenth century and this number nearly triples.

The progress from an agrarian to an urban industrial society did not always yield benefits. Many of England’s working class had been displaced from the countryside, where manufacturing had created widespread unemployment in the farming community. Social conditions in increasingly overcrowded cities, as the social critic Friedrich Engels describes in the mid-nineteenth century, were dire. Besides being the world’s factory, Britain was also the world’s dominant colonial power, which tied industry at home to wars and markets abroad, exerting an often volatile influence on Britain’s domestic economy. A cultural revolution of shifting and divergent tastes and ideas was ushering in the modern age. The intellectual and political enlightenment begun in the seventeenth century, advocating the rights and imagination of the individual in a civil society, was materialized in the French Revolution, which exerted an enormous influence on British thought and literature thereafter. The impact of scientific and technological advances, coupled with social, political and cultural revolution, marked the period as what Richard Holmes calls The Age of Wonder.

One fact about the less than smooth progress from 1789 to 1837 is undeniable: the time did not stand still, and indeed seemed to its inhabitants to be moving forward with increasing speed and uncertainty. As the poet Percy Shelley noted in 1820, information was expanding at such a fast pace that the world was losing its capacity to make sense of this exploding body of knowledge. Humanity having supposedly liberated itself above its natural surroundings, it was re-enslaved by its own power of enlightenment. We can thus read the history of the Romantic period less as a forward trajectory than as a movement of starts and stops, advances and retreats, revolution and reaction, progress and decline. Of the passing nature of its own time Romanticism seemed distinctly self-aware in a way that previous periods had not been. It seemed, that is, especially sensitive to the fact that it was not always sure where it was going, a period of what Tilottama Rajan calls restless self-examination.

Pre-Romanticism

Great Britain was forged by the 1707 Act of Union joining England and Scotland. Henry VIII’s creation of the Church of England in the sixteenth century had pitted Protestants against Catholics in subsequent battles over royal succession. These bitter struggles came to a head in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which deposed James II (James VII of Scotland) in favour of the Protestant William I. Subsequent Jacobite uprisings threatened Britain for the first half of the eighteenth century after James exiled himself to France, one of Britain’s main enemies during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). The war realigned both the European and colonial balances of power, effectively ending French domination in North America. The year 1707 was thus also key to the consolidation of what is called the First British Empire. Elizabeth I had begun the push for exploration and trade in competition with Spain, France and the Netherlands for control of North America, Africa and central and far Asia. This expansion was not without its hazards. The 1711 founding of the South Sea Company to oversee trade with Spain’s South American colonies resulted in the 1720 South Sea Bubble, which nearly bankrupted the British economy. On the far side of the world, rampant mismanagement by the East India Company, a private mercantile conglomerate given exclusive control over trade with Asia via a 1600 royal charter, resulted in the 1784 impeachment of Warren Hastings, the first Governor General of India. Hastings’ 1795 acquittal came only after his trial made a public spectacle of Britain’s imperial ambition, necessitating the 1784 East India Act, which brought the Company’s laissez faire administration under government control.

If the end of the First Empire comes with the United States winning the War of Independence in 1783, however, Britain triumphed in other ways. In the second half of the eighteenth century the joint Pacific expeditions of explorer, cartographer and navigator James Cook and naturalist and botanist Joseph Banks epitomized Enlightenment expansion: the expression of man’s capacity, in the name of scientific advancement, to know, classify and understand the world with unprecedented comprehension. In print culture this comprehensiveness was symbolized by the first publication of the Encyclopaedia Britannica between 1768 and 1771 (this paralleled the French publication of the Encyclopédie between 1751 and 1772). The Encyclopaedia originated in Edinburgh, which in the mid-eighteenth century emerged as a centre of learning that profoundly influenced British thought thereafter. Indeed, many of our modern notions of medicine, political economy and psychology can be said to emerge during what is known as the Scottish Enlightenment.

Compendiums like the Encyclopaedia reflected dramatically improving literacy rates, expanding a previously small class of learned readers among the ruling elites to include the professional, middle and working classes. This diversification created an ever-growing demand for information, a curiosity fed by a variety of print forms, from the rise of the novel to the growth of journals, newspapers and other serial publications in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These networks of communication helped to make sense of the increasingly complex world of Britain’s domestic and foreign affairs, the politics of which were often ugly. England’s and later Britain’s colonial expansion was fuelled by slave trade in West Africa and the Caribbean, resulting in the 1787 establishment of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Human trafficking of British citizens was also a matter of some concern. The 1779 Penitentiary Act created state prisons at home, and abroad Australia’s Botany Bay, where Cook’s HMS Endeavour first landed in 1770, became the site of a penal colony in 1786, which solved the problem of where to ship Britain’s convicts after it lost the American colonies.

The 1790s and the King’s Madness

Despite the above upheavals, Britain entered a period of relative peace, prosperity, and reform in the second half of the eighteenth century. Changes in favour of parliamentary governance since the Glorious Revolution had made the balance of power between the British state and people, if not equal, at least more equitable than in France, which is why the events of 1789 in Paris galvanized British politics and culture. The French ancien regime was epitomized by the extravagant monarchy of Louis XIV, ‘The Sun King’, and held power in conjunction with the Catholic church. These two Estates exerted autocratic influence over the third Estate – the rest of French society. Economic crisis due to a number of factors brought this oppression to account in 1789 with the formation of the First National Assembly in June, followed by the storming of the Bastille prison, symbol of royal authority, on July 14, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in August. Writers like Thomas Paine, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft saw the Declaration as the fulfilment of Enlightenment ideals of liberty and progress. Others, like Edmund Burke, saw the Revolution as an unleashed political force that, by turning its back on history and tradition, would wreak havoc on social order. Still others, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, despite an early flirtation with libertarian principles in the 1790s, ended up more Burkean in their later writings, as time (and the subsequent pillorying of Paine, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft in British cultural life) came to temper their initial enthusiasm for the French republican cause.

It did not help that Burke’s prediction came true. By 1793, the French government had executed Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and instituted a Reign of Terror against perceived dissidents within the new republic. Of more immediate consequence to British life was the fact that in the same year France declared war on Britain, fomenting a period of patriotism and paranoia that labelled anyone in favour of reform as French or Jacobin sympathizers and thus traitors. Government fears of dissidence resulted in a series of legislations (known collectively as The Gagging Acts) and various suspensions of habeas corpus from the 1790s well into the 1810s. These were meant to curtail threats, whether real or perceived, against the British body politic, particularly against the body of the King. The 1795 treason trials of John Thelwall, Horne Tooke and others, or the stoning of George III en route to the opening of parliament, were flashpoints for this reactionary fervour, which also attempted to curb the enthusiasm of calls for political reform at home. This reformism was mirrored in an evangelical movement that emerged in the 1780s as a reaction to the British religious establishment. This movement began in rural areas but spread to towns and cities. Evangelical groups were often divided amongst themselves but advocated similar aims: freedom of private and personal religious belief and practice. Evangelicism thus also called for ‘proper’ moral conduct as a reproach to a moral laxity and social corruption associated with ‘High Church’ Anglicanism and its conservative, reactionary nature. The broad appeal for stricter modes of social behaviour, corresponding with the rise of the modern temperance movement, was thus meant to counteract a perceived corrupt climate of gambling, drinking, and sexual permissiveness in late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century public life.

One potent symbol of a nation ‘out of control’ was the King’s madness. George III was on the throne for most of the Romantic period, from 1760 to 1820, nearly as long as Victoria. But he suffered from what is now thought to be porphyria, a neurological disorder resulting in often severe physiological and mental disturbances. He was momentarily declared insane in 1788–89, and recovered again after a second bout in 1798, during which time his son George, Prince of Wales, served as Regent. Finally, in 1811 George III was deemed unfit to rule, and the younger George became Prince Regent until his father’s death in 1820, when he took the throne as George IV. These Regency Crises reflect the political turbulence of George III’s reign, beginning with losing his grip on North America in 1783, a definitive challenge to the Old World’s governance of the New World that foreshadows the decline of the British Empire in the later nineteenth century. If Victoria sometimes lost touch with her time – after Prince Albert’s death, she entered a prolonged period of mourning – she nonetheless came to symbolize a singular dedication to her age, whereas her grandfather’s mental illness suggests a different ‘commitment’. George III’s sixty-year reign seems long more by dint of sheer endurance, and his madness is a fit reminder of the Romantic period’s often tempestuous history, which fuelled its hugely creative, at times apocalyptic temperament, and of reformist and reactionary attempts to come to terms with this volatility.

Post-1800: The Napoleonic Wars

The constitution of Great Britain changed again in 1800. In 1798 the Society of United Irishmen, uniting dissenting Presbyterians and Catholics in common cause against British rule, and soliciting French help, attempted to form an independent Irish republic. This rebellion was squashed by both the Irish and British governments and resulted in the 1800 Act of Union, joining Britain and Ireland to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. If the marriage between Scotland and England had been uneasy, coming at a time of increasingly perceived threats to British autonomy, this second Union signified a rather more ruthless ‘home rule’, resulting in a divisive relationship between the two countries throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Britain had partly secured the cooperation of the Irish government over the Act of Union through bribes and the guarantee of peerages to various Irish supporters from the ruling elite. This situation was not helped by the fact that Britain promoted its own economic concerns at the expense of Irish social development, which was troubled by a series of famines that threatened the country’s agricultural self-sufficiency, the most devastating of these being the 1840s famine that decimated the Irish population.

Treatment of the Irish was partly fomented by the fact that by 1800 British patriotism was needed more than ever, so that the ability (and necessity) of London to subjugate a population so close to home came to symbolize an imposed sense of British unity against a foreign threat equally close to home. The previous year Napoleon was named First Consul of France, and by 1804, after a brief peace between Britain and France, he had crowned himself emperor and proceeded with a program of imperial conquest that embroiled Europe in war for the next decade. Having lost North America to the British, the French seemed driven to gain global supremacy. Napoleon’s dreams of domination by sea ended with the British 1805 defeat of the battle of Trafalgar, though Napoleon continued his land campaigns. The 1808 Convention of Cintra allowed the defeated French army to evacuate from Portugal, precipitating the Peninsular War between France and the allied powers of Britain, Portugal and Spain (1808–14). Only with Napoleon’s catastrophic retreat from Moscow in 1812, followed by his 1814 exile to Elba, and subsequent return and final defeat at the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, were the Napoleonic wars brought to an end.

That Napoleon’s ambition re-ignited 1790s’ fears of a French invasion also redounded on Britain’s responses to its domestic troubles. The first British census in 1801 made real the nation’s productivity, but also resulted in increased anxiety about how to care for and control its rapidly expanding population both at home and abroad. The 1807 Slave Trade Act abolished one of Britain’s more egregious colonial practices, though it did not outlaw slavery itself. Closer to home, the 1802 Health and Morals of Apprentices Act, addressing the treatment of child labourers, was among the first of several reforms of working conditions among the industrial class. But such reforms were an indication of the compounding effects of industrialization and urbanization. The 1801 General Enclosure Act, consolidating previous acts, further restricted public access to arable common lands. Depending on one’s perspective, this process either made agriculture more efficient and productive to support a growing economy, or privatized farming and hastened the transformation of the rural class into waged labour. Either way, the Enclosure Act came to symbolize the time’s growing utilitarianism which, while its intent was to ensure social well-being for the largest number of people, also signified the managerial spirit of an intent to impose effective social controls over a growing and increasingly diverse population.

The evangelical movement noted above was a moral response and corrective to the often degrading social effects of such economic transformations. The often apocalyptic nature of evangelicism turned pragmatically dour in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Thomas Trotter’s An Essay, Medical, Philosophical, and Chemical, on Drunkenness (1803), an earlier treatise expounding temperance, or his A View of the Nervous Temperament (1807), a nervous malady that resulted from too much luxury and refinement, warned against the enervating effects of an increasingly industrialized society. Such prognostications came in the light of Napoleon’s rise to power, which at once fed the Romantic myth of the individual’s capacity to overcome all adversity and posed a cautionary tale about man’s reach exceeding his grasp. Napoleon flew in the face of nature and divine law, an excessive Promethean ambition that demanded to be reined in. Indeed, Napoleon’s example was a self-admonishment to Britain for its own dreams of expansion and for Romantic ideals of self-fulfilment, a self-restraining corrective to individual desire that became the model for Victorian notions of moral hygiene.

Even more dire was Thomas Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population, which went through six successive editions from 1798 to 1826. Malthus’ theory that famine, disease and mortality were nature’s curb against unbridled population growth ran in the face of an earlier Romantic idealism, like that of Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), which advocated the rational expression of each individual’s will as the means to improving and perfecting society, thus ending all institutional oppression. Malthus, an Anglican cleric, saw nature’s check on endless human empowerment as God’s object lesson in the necessity of hard work and virtuous action. But his views also implied an incipient notion of evolutionary development that was already creeping into Romantic natural history, as reflected in the work of Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin. Obsessed with finding the animating principle of life itself, Romantic science in the first decades of the nineteenth century was torn between respecting earlier preformationist models of the planet’s life as working by divine plan and advocating proto-evolutionary ideas that saw nature as self-propagating and thus capable of its own mutations. Such emergent notions flew sufficiently in the face of religious notions of divine ordination to fuel debates between religion and science that raged well into the nineteenth century.

Post-Napoleon: The Regency

Napoleon’s 1815 d...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Detailed Table of Contents
• General Editor’s Introduction
• Introduction: Defining Romanticism
• 1 Historical Context
• 2 Literary and Cultural Contexts: Key Figures, Contexts, Genres and Movements
• 3 Case Studies in Reading 1: Literary Texts
• 4 Case Studies in Reading 2: Critical Texts
• 5 Key Critical Concepts and Topics
• 6 Changes in Critical Responses and Approaches
• 7 Canonicity
• 8 Sexuality and Gender
• 9 Race and Ethnicity
• 10 Mapping the Current Critical Landscape
• Glossary
• Annotated Bibliography
• Appendix: A Survey of Romantic Literature Curricula
• Notes on Contributors
• Appendix: A Survey of Romantic Literature Curricula