Handbook of British Romanticism

Ralf Haekel

• Editorial: De Gruyter
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783110393408
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literature
• Categoría: English Literary Criticism

The Handbook of British Romanticism is a state of the art investigation of Romantic literature and theory, a field that probably changed more quickly and more fundamentally than any other traditional era in literary studies. Since the early 1980s, Romantic studies has widened its scope significantly: The canon has been expanded, hitherto ignored genres have been investigated and new topics of research explored. After these profound changes, intensified by the general crisis of literary theory since the turn of the millennium, traditional concepts such as subjectivity, imagination and the creative genius have lost their status as paradigms defining Romanticism. The handbook will feature discussions of key concepts such as history, class, gender, science and the use of media as well as a thorough account of the most central literary genres around the turn of the 19th century. The focus of the book, however, will lie on a discussion of key literary texts in the light of the most recent theoretical developments. Thus, the Handbook of British Romanticism will provide students with an introduction to Romantic literature in general and literary scholars with a discussion of innovative and groundbreaking theoretical developments.

Part ISystematic Questions

Gerold Sedlmayr

1Political and Social History c. 1780–1832

Abstract: This article presents a concise overview of important political and social developments from c. 1780 to 1832. In order to offer some basic coordinates concerning the political framework, it begins by asking whether the period in question marks the beginning of a two-party system and also outlines the position of the monarch. In a next step, the effects of the French Revolution on Britain are discussed, particularly with a view to the pamphlet war it engendered and the repressive measures the government took to stifle revolutionary tendencies at home. A consideration of Britain’s long and debilitating involvement in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars follows. This is then complemented by a subchapter on pro-independence and revolutionary movements in Ireland, which ultimately culminated in the constitutional union with Britain in 1801. The next section focuses on the Empire at large, predominantly its ‘Swing to the East’ after the loss of the North-American colonies. Subsequently, the impact of the Industrial Revolution is briefly discussed, along with a consideration of class structures. The last subchapter concentrates on the issue of parliamentary reform, which ultimately was accomplished through the Reform Act of 1832.

Key Terms: British history, 1780–1832, impact of French Revolution, Ireland, British Empire, Napoleonic wars, political reform

1The Shape of Government, Political Parties, and the Position of the King

In terms of government, the period between 1780 and 1830 was dominated by two prime ministers. William Pitt ‘the Younger’ served in this capacity from 1783 to 1801, and then again from 1804 until his death in 1806; Robert Banks Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool was in office from 1812 to 1827. While the longevity of their terms in office suggests stability, and although both have been identified by posterity as ‘Tories,’ it is important to understand that party politics in the modern sense were still developing. Neither Pitt nor Liverpool, nor any of the other Prime Ministers during that time were backed by a party that was held together by a coherent ideology or what today is called party discipline. In contrast to the interpretation given in traditional historiography, recent historians have questioned the formation of a two-party system in this period, with Whigs on the one and Tories on the other side of the political divide (see Kraus 2006, 64–66). In fact, the term ‘Tory’ had largely died out in the course of the eighteenth century and began to regain its currency only from the late 1820s (see Hilton 2006, 196) onwards. During the eighteenth century, the system established by the Glorious Revolution had firmly consolidated itself, so that the old characteristics of Toryism, especially the belief in the divine right of the king and accordingly an unquestioned allegiance to the crown, had been superseded by the Whiggish trust in the parliamentary system. Although opposition politicians like Charles James Fox, Pitt’s major political antagonist, and his followers often attempted to monopolize the term ‘Whig’ for themselves, this was not in keeping with the realities of political life. In the late eighteenth century, as John W. Derry has argued,

[a]ll the major political groupings were Whig. All politicians accepted the Glorious Revolution and the Settlement which followed it; all spoke with reverence of the system which combined the virtues of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy while avoiding the vices of all three; all prided themselves on their respect for parliament, the privileges of the House of Commons, and the benefits of the church established by law. (Derry 2001, 43)

Rather than parties in the modern sense, groups formed around influential politicians, so that it is possible to speak of Pittites, Foxites, Addingtonians, and others, yet even these constellations were shifting and dynamic. Pitt for example always considered himself essentially an independent and, like his father, abhorred the notion of party (see Derry 2001, 22; 39). Nonetheless, due to Pitt’s successful exclusion of the Foxites from government and the relative continuity of his and Liverpool’s ministries, identifiable political frontlines gradually became discernible so that, particularly during Liverpool’s time, the impression was created of “a two-party system without parties to put in it” (Hilton 2006, 209). However, according to Boyd Hilton, “[t]his suggests not an emerging party system but genuine parliamentary government” (2006, 209).

These developments go hand in hand with the waning influence of the king starting from the 1780s. Whereas it is not correct to assume that the king had to accept a subordinate role to Parliament beginning immediately after the Glorious Revolution – Frank O’Gorman rather claims that “the powers of both Parliament and the monarchy strengthened during the eighteenth century” (1997, 131; emphasis in the original) – it is evident that the monarch’s executive position began to erode from the end of the century. This is not to say that his role was reduced to a merely symbolic one. Under George III, for a ministry to be viable, it was still indispensable to have the King’s confidence. For instance, when the former political enemies Fox and Lord North (who was Prime Minister from 1770–1782) entered a coalition and ousted the Earl of Shelburne from office in 1783, installing the Duke of Portland as PM instead, their rash actions alienated the king, who promptly withdrew royal patronage and manipulated the House of Lords so that it rejected Fox and Edmund Burke’s ‘India Bill’: this brought the Fox-North coalition down after a little more than eight months (see Derry 2001, 27–34). Similarly, when Pitt attempted to grant the Irish Catholics more rights in 1801 without consulting George III before debating the issue in cabinet, the King withdrew his trust and made Pitt resign after 17 years in office (see Derry 2001, 80–83). After all, Catholic relief was George’s bête noire (and Pitt was well aware of that), because for him, it seemed to undermine the unity of Church and State upon which his self-conception as a king and his constitutional understanding were based. Even so, the war with France, the increase in public business and the King’s declining health led to the eventual loss of his executive power. Already during the first longer bout of what contemporaries understood to be a form of madness, which lasted from October 1788 to February 1789, Fox and his friends had attempted to install the unpopular Prince of Wales as regent in order to regain power (for George’s madness, see Macalpine and Hunter 1995). This was unsuccessful because the King recovered just in time, and it was only more than twenty years later, in 1811, after the illness had reappeared for good, that the Prince became Regent and acted as such until George III’s death in 1820. Nonetheless, the Regency Crisis had raised the tricky constitutional question whether, in case of the King’s incapacitation, his authority self-evidently transferred to his heir or whether it “pass[ed] from the King in Parliament to Parliament without the King” (Hilton 2006, 56; emphasis mine), thereby granting Parliament a superordinate and independent role. However, while George III had been blamed for the loss of the North American colonies, his madness as well as the Foxites’ ill-advised attempt to replace him in 1788/89 mobilized a wave of sympathy from the British public. In fact, during and after Pitt’s term in office, George always had a clear sense of what the public expected and was hugely popular. Therefore, no politician in a position of power could long afford to antagonize the King or, later, the Prince Regent.

2The Revolution Controversy and ‘Pitt’s Terror’

After the American Revolution and the loss of the Thirteen Colonies, the French Revolution constituted the other hugely incisive political event of the late-eighteenth century, an event whose importance can hardly be overestimated. Contemporaries like Charles James Fox, who believed it to be “one of the greatest events in the history of mankind” (qtd. in Fell 1808, 201), were well aware of its singular status, and even Edmund Burke, in spite and because of being deeply critical of what was going on in France, maintained that “the French revolution [was] the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world” (1999, 10). Indeed, Burke aside, “[t]he initial British reaction to French developments was overwhelmingly positive” (Claeys 2001, 8). In the first years after the fall of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, the British government was not yet overly alarmed. Conflicts elsewhere – like the ‘Nootka Crisis’ with Spain over trading rights on and sovereignty claims to Nootka Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island – occupied foreign policy more than the events across the Channel. In addition, the years 1788 and 1789 marked the 100th anniversary of the Glorious Revolution and the Bill of Rights, and the celebrations gave expression to most Britons’ belief that France was merely catching up with developments Britain had pioneered much earlier. After all, in the first phase of the Revolution, the National Constituent Assembly did not envision a republican, let alone democratic, model of society, but rather a constitutional monarchy similar to Great Britain. Most Britons therefore refused to tolerate radical claims that the French had created a better or more progressive system. In the words of Gregory Claeys: “Britons had good cause to suppose they had already embraced modernity fairly comprehensively well before 1789, and thus disdained instruction in its principles from foreigners.” (2007, 4) While the government still remained detached, the public soon began to fiercely discuss the nature of the relationship between the legacy of the Glorious Revolution and the political realities in France.

One important trigger for the debate was a sermon by the dissenting minister Richard Price to the London Revolution Society, which, as its name suggests, had been formed to commemorate the centennial of the Glorious Revolution. In this sermon, given at the Old Jewry Church on 4 November 1789, Price provocatively reinterpreted the legacy of the Glorious Revolution by suggesting that it in fact had established and legitimized a quasi-democratic system which was based on the “rights of the people” (1995, 13) and which, besides granting them “the right to liberty of conscience in religious matters” and the “right to resist power when abused,” allowed them “to chuse [sic] our own governors,” i.e. kings, “to cashier them for misconduct; and to frame a government for ourselves” (1995, 14). In what can be considered an extensive reply to these suggestions, Edmund Burke, in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), sought to refute Price’s arguments, accusing him of arguing non-historically. One of his central claims was that the notion of human rights, which had been expressed both in the American Declaration of Independence (1776) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), was misguided. The “practical defect” of the so-called “natural rights,” Burke held, was precisely their “abstract perfection” (1999, 60), their ‘universality.’ By transcending the concrete, historical reality of circumstances, they could never meet and regulate the contingent practical needs of the people, their “human wants” (Burke 1999, 60; emphasis in the original), so that propagating natural rights eventually and counter-productively meant the obstruction of “the real rights of men” (Burke 1999, 58; emphasis in the original). Despite Burke’s many inaccuracies when describing the situation in France, Reflections became one of the bestsellers of the age: “Within six months it had sold nineteen thousand copies. By September 1791 it had gone through eleven editions.” (Mitchell 1999, i) As a matter of fact, Reflections was not about accuracy. It was about driving home the ideological argument that only an organically grown constitution and hence adherence to timeproven institutions like the monarchy could ensure the well-being and survival of the community. What, in Burke’s opinion, seemed the total destruction of the French historical legacy by the revolutionaries was tantamount to eradicating a community’s identity, which he considered to be closely tied to its economy of feeling:

In England we have not yet been completely embowelled of our natural entrails; we still feel within us, and we cherish and cultivate, those inbred sentiments which are the faithful guardians, the active monitors of our duty, the true supporters of all liberal and manly morals. (1999, 86)

Unsurprisingly, a host of sympathisers with the principles of the revolution felt provoked by Burke and promptly voiced their concerns in print. The very first was Mary Wollstonecraft, who, within a month after the publication of Reflections, offered her angry A Vindication of the Rights of Men to the public. The most widely read reply, though, came from Thomas Paine, whose Rights of Man (first part 1791, second part 1792) “outsold Burke three times over within two years; in ten years it probably did so thirtyfold” (Philp 1998, xxiii). Much more radical than Wollstonecraft and most others, Paine was a proponent of American-style democracy who insisted that “men are all of one degree, and consequently that all men are born equal, and with equal natural right [sic]” (1998, 117). Challenging not only Burke, but also common-sensical opinion in Britain, he claimed that “no such thing as a [British] constitution exists, or ever did exist” (Paine 1998, 123) and hence questioned the legitimacy of the entire British political and social system. All in all, then, in the years after the outbreak of the Revolution, the major question was in which way the British were to interpret the events in France, particularly with respect to the consequences the Revolution and the ideology it transported had for Britain’s self-understanding. One major effect of the controversy was the “extension […] of a popular political culture conversant with a national political agenda” (Philp 2001, 20).

The quality of the dispute decisively altered after the affairs in France had made a turn for the worse in 1792. In the first half of the year, the Revolution had assumed an international dimension after France had entered war first with Austria, then with Prussia. In August, the monarchy was overthrown, and the bloody September massacres followed (2–7 September), and later that same month (22 September) France was proclaimed a republic. Shortly after the execution of Louis XVI on 21 January 1793, Britain finally became directly involved when France declared war on its neighbour acros...

Índice

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Part I Systematic Questions
• Part II Romantic Genres
• Part III Close Readings
• Index of Subjects and Places
• Index of Names and Works
• List of Contributors