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The Diverse Landscape of English
Romanticism and Victorian
Literature
The Literature of the Romantic Period
Romanticism as a Reaction against the Enlightenment
Romanticism was a movement that emerged as a rebellion against the Enlightenment (Age of Reason). It was a reaction against the rationalism of the 18th century. English Romanticism extended from 1780 (American Rebellion) to 1830 (First Reform Bill - 1832). This period also coincided with the French Revolution, which was seen as a political enactment of the ideas of Romanticism, involving a break from the models of the past. Romanticism developed a different aesthetic of freedom from the formal rules of Neoclassicism.
Enlightenment Perspectives: Gibbon and Burke
In his "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," the Enlightenment follower Gibbon (1737-1794) gave a nostalgic picture of ancient Rome, looking back to a lost era of civic duty, which he attributed to the influence of Christianity and its idea of an afterlife. In contrast, the parliamentary figure Burke (1729-1797), although a Whig member representing liberals, was not a radical supporter of the French Revolution. In his "Reflections on the Revolution in France" (1790), he advocated for a "regulated liberty," believing that only the government could balance civil society and human passion. As a staunch supporter of the British Constitution, he could not accept the idea of revolutionary reform, as it would, in his opinion, lead to political disorder.
Radical Perspectives: Paine, Godwin, and the "Jacobin"
Novelists
In contrast to Burke and other opponents of the Revolution, the radical Paine (1737-1809) was sympathetic to the French Revolution and criticized Burke in his book "The Rights of Man" (1791), which proposed that all of humanity has the same rights, regardless of wealth. In his pamphlet "The Age of Reason" (1794), he promoted reason and freethinking, rejecting institutionalized religion and proclaiming his faith in an egalitarian morality.
Godwin (1756-1836), an English journalist and novelist, is considered one of the first proponents of anarchism. In his "Enquiry concerning Political Justice" (1793), he viewed human happiness as the sole purpose of existence, which could be achieved through the abolition of all government
and the adoption of radical anarchy. In his novel "Things as They Are, or the Adventures of Caleb Williams" (1794), he attacked aristocratic privilege, telling the story of a servant who discovers a secret about his aristocratic master and is imprisoned as a result. Godwin believed that in an anarchic society, reason would lead man to happiness.
Gothic Fiction
Gothic Fiction, a genre that combined elements of horror and romance, emerged in England in the second half of the 18th century. It was related to Burke's concept of the Sublime, which suggested that pain and terror could produce a more intense delight than positive pleasure, due to the awareness that the subject is safe from danger. Gothic writers set their novels in the Medieval era and in medieval buildings, associating these places with a dark and terrifying period characterized by torture and superstitious rituals.
Prominent features of Gothic fiction include terror, mystery, the supernatural, ghosts, and hereditary curses. The characters are often tyrants, bandits, maniacs, vampires, and monsters, or girls in peril. Themes often include "lost love," death, and the like.
Horace Walpole (1717-1794) is considered the precursor of Gothic Fiction with his novel "The Castle of Otranto," which was inspired by Clara Reeve's "The Old English Baron" (1777). Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) distinguished between terror and horror, arguing that terror is characterized by "obscurity" in its treatment of potentially horrible events, leading the reader toward the Sublime, while horror annihilates the reader's responsive capacity with its atrocity.
Gregory Lewis (1775-1818) wrote "The Monk" (1796), which tells the story of a monk, Ambrosio, who falls from his saintly reputation. Mary Shelley (1797-1851), the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, wrote the famous "Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus," which is considered one of the earliest examples of Science Fiction, although it also has elements of the Gothic Novel and Romantic movement.
Romantic Poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Others
The first generation of Romantic poets included William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworth, who was initially a supporter of the French Revolution, wrote "The Prelude" to "The Excursion" (1814), a long poem in which he attempted to record the growth of a poet's mind, although this work was not published until after his death.
Other notable Romantic poets include Robert Burns, a Scottish farmer who wrote in the Scottish dialect, and William Blake, whose symbolic and prophetic works, such as "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience," explored the themes of innocence and experience, good and evil, and the possibility of a "New Age" to come.
Ethical, because it educates men; 3) Aesthetic, because it is beautiful, so man can elevate his spirit.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) is the first poet-critic of modern English tradition, and he inspired a brilliant generation of writers. Like Wordsworth, at the beginning he shared the ideas of the Revolution, but had turned conservative with the period of the Terror. At the end of 1798, the two poets went for a tour of Germany, where they entered in contact with German romantic culture, which influenced their poems. In 1800, they both settled in the Lake District, but after an argument with Wordsworth, Coleridge moved to London, where he remained for the rest of his life.
"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is a long poem composed by Coleridge between 1797 and 1798, and it is divided into seven parts, each introduced by a short summary of the story. The person that tells the story is the sailor himself, who, after having killed an albatross, had a punishment, a kind of curse, that consists in telling his story to everyone he meets. Also, the people that he meets are under a spell, because they are obliged to listen to him.
The poem starts with the sailor telling his story: he went on board and left from England to the South Pole, but when his ship was surrounded by icebergs, it could move no more. At a certain point, an albatross flew to the ship, and as a kind of miracle, the ice broke, and the ship succeeded in moving on. All the crew thought that the albatross brought good luck to them, but for no reason, the sailor killed the albatross. The crew, angry with the sailor, punished him and tied the albatross around his neck, but the ship could not move another time. At this point, a phantom ship arrives, and on board there are Life and Life-in-Death, who are playing dice to decide if the mariner and his crew can keep living or not. In the end, all the members of the crew died, and only the sailor survives, but as he's alone, he becomes nearly crazy and starts to see many monsters in the sea. When he blesses them, the albatross falls from his neck, and he is saved. However, his punishment doesn't finish because he must tell his story to the people he meets, hoping to teach them to respect and love all nature's creatures.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is written in the form of a medieval ballad, and it creates a universe where realistic and supernatural events coexist. The landscape is mysterious, and the language is characterized by the use of sound effects (similes, alliteration, repetitions, and personifications). Coleridge's language is often archaic and takes inspiration from old ballads. The poem is real for travel, marriage, storm, and fantastic for the albatross, ghost ship, life, and the life of death. The alternation of real and unreal elements confers a degree of credibility on the narrative without weakening the sense of horror and supernatural mystery it conveys to the reader.
Other Coleridge's Poems
"Kubla Khan" (1797) is a poem that is born from a vision in a dream interrupted by a caller, which is the reason why the poem remains a fragment. Another fragment is the poem "Christabel", excluded for this reason from Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth. It is similar to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner because it appears to link the Christabel's experience to that of the Mariner.
In 1802, Coleridge admits in "Dejection, an Ode" to have lost the poetic inspiration, because his "spirit of Imagination" no longer responds to external stimuli. It will be in the essay "Biographia Literaria" (1817) that he will present his distinction between Fancy and Imagination: Fancy is the faculty by which we perceived the world around us, and it is common to all human beings. Imagination, instead, can unify and mould images that fancy only perceives. It is the faculty that a poet has to "unify" images, enriching them with the supernatural.
Wordsworth vs Coleridge
Wordsworth and Coleridge are the two most important poets of the first English romantic period. They worked together to create the collection "Lyrical Ballads", and they have some different points of view about poetry, nature, and imagination.
Regarding Imagination, Wordsworth believes that imagination is used to enrich simple ideas in tranquility, and men have these faculties before birth and lose them as they grow up. Coleridge, instead, divides imagination into primary and secondary (fancy and imagination), and it is the capacity to perceive the world around us (common to all people) and then the capacity to order those memories and enrich them with the supernatural.
Regarding Nature, Wordsworth feels nature as full of life, as it would be a part of us, in order to a Pantheistic vision. Nature is opposed to town, and it is a source of feelings and pervaded by an active force. Coleridge, instead, sees nature as the One Life (a divine power), and all his descriptions of landscapes or natural elements are endowed with a strong symbolic meaning.
Regarding Poetry, Wordsworth says that poetry is a spontaneous expression of feelings; it is "emotion recollected in tranquility". The poet takes inspiration from rustic life, and then, he combines the memory of those emotions with the use of imagination. Coleridge, instead, believes that poetry is a product of the unconscious and it creates a kind of ecstasy, reproduced with the use of memory and the adding of supernatural elements.
Other Romantic Poets
Robert Southey (1774-1843) is known – with Coleridge and Wordsworth – as a Lake Poet (pejorative). His works lack Coleridge's originality, and his
move the British novel towards a new seriousness, as authors began leaving the Romantic elements behind.
Early Career and Poetic Works
Scott began his career writing poems, which gave him the reputation as the best-selling new poet of his age. This period includes the collection of ballads "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Boarder" (1802-3) and "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805), which recount the story of a family feud in the 16th century, replete with sorcery and metaphysical intervention. These poems achieved immediate celebrity, but were soon replaced by the works of Lord Byron.
Transition to Novels
At this point, Scott decided to dedicate himself to novels, which were less appreciated than poetry at the time, and published them anonymously. His first novels are linked by Scottish affairs and the involvement of an outsider observer, often an English gentleman exposed to an alien culture, as seen in "Waverley" (1814) and "Rob Roy". In these novels, Scott represents a Scotland divided by factions, such as Jacobites and Unionists, exposing his protagonists to conflicting ways of thinking and acting.
Style and Characters
The success of Scott's novels is due to the deep psychological analysis of his characters, made possible by the use of dialogue. Scott did not choose a hero as an extraordinary personality, but rather a protagonist who represents common people.
Themes
Scott's novels explore the explanation of the evolution of the past into the present. Works such as "Ivanhoe" (1820), "The Talisman" and "The Betrothed" (both 1825) form a continuous discourse that questions the usefulness of the medieval code of chivalry and military honor in the age of the French Revolution. His finest later work is "Redgauntlet" (1824), which tells about Scottish Jacobitism seen from the different perspectives of the phlegmatic Alan Fairford and the romantic Darsie Latimer.
Lord Byron
Satirical Outsider
Lord Byron (1788-1824) was a satirical outsider who looked amused by the anomalies of his own time and culture. Unsatisfied with his contemporary writers, such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, he published the first two cantos of "Childe Harold" in 1812, which immediately gave him celebrity.
Style and Poetic Works
"Childe Harold" is a sort of diary in verse that tells about Byron-Harold's trip through Mediterranean lands and nations. Byron added two further cantos in 1816 and 1818. He easily moves between different modes of telling, such as polemic, melancholic, and comic, and he rearranges the eight-line, eleven-syllable Ottava rima of Tasso and Ariosto to English purposes by shortening the verse line to ten syllables.
Characters
Byron's hero is sullen, as if all society had conspired to complicate his destiny. However, "Don Juan" (1819-24) introduces a new kind of central character, who is more vivacious. It tells the adventures and misadventures of the young Spanish Don Juan, and the last cantos represent a critique of the amorously frivolous world of aristocratic London society from which Byron had attempted to distance himself.
Poetic Impulse
Byron's poetry emerges not from a determining philosophy or a desire to improve society, but only from the impulse of his mind.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Radical and Philosophical Scepticism
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) had Byron's equally distaste for literary and political British establishments, but unlike Byron, his work derives from an ideology determined by a philosophical scepticism that rejects Christian morality and every kind of Deity. His first work against Christianity was the pamphlet "The Necessity Of Atheism".
Critical Notes
Shelley was a radical who believed in the revolution that could change the world. His three keywords were: liberty, love, and beauty. He dreamt of a pervading love that would bring peace and friendship into the world.
Themes
Shelley's writing explores several themes: - A passionate devotion to nature, where natural objects acquire symbolic relevance. - A constant rebellion against all forms of tyranny that represent a limit to freedom. Shelley was capable of very practical proposals for reform, such as gradual reform of Parliament and the emancipation of women. - His Platonism, which is linked to his pantheism: natural objects and human life are bad copies of a remote ideal, and the artist must strip off the worldly clothing and expose the ideal prototype.
Keats' poetical ideal was objectivity: the ability to represent objects and characters, enriching them with imagination, but without interfering with his personal judgements. He appreciated in Shakespeare his impartial and impersonal way of writing.
Works
Keats' production can be roughly divided into: - Early minor poems (1816-17) - Narrative poems (1818-19) - Lyrical poems (1819-20) - Prose (including his letters)
Notable works include: - Endymion: an allegorical poem on the love of the shepherd Endymion to the goddess Diana. - Isabella, or the Pot of Basil: a poetic version of a tragic tale from Boccaccio's Decameron. - The Eve of St. Agnes: a romantic love story. - La Belle Dame sans Merci - Ode on a Grecian Urn - Ode to Melancholy - Ode to a Nightingale
Keats' letters also gave an insight into his artistic development.
The "Romantic" Essayists
Henry Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) was a poet and a florid translator, but he is remembered for his work as a journalist. Between 1808 and 1825, he acted as editor of the anti-Establishment periodical "The Examiner", which he had founded with his brother. In 1822, with Byron and Shelley, he established "The Liberal".
William Hazlitt (1778-1830) is, with Coleridge, the principal literary critic of the age. He was aware of the political problems of the post-revolutionary era and wrote essays about English Drama, particularly critiquing Shakespeare's Tragedies over his Comedies. In the essay "The Spirit of The Age" (1825), he criticized his literary and political contemporaries.
Charles Lamb (1775-1834) can be considered the founder of the autobiographic essay. He appreciated the classic English Drama (Elizabethan drama) in the anthology "Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about the time of Shakespeare". With the pseudonym of "Elia", he was the author of a series of essays that contributed to the London Magazine.
Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) is known for his most celebrated work, "The Confessions of an English Opium Eater", a study of the induction of dreams as well as the impossibility of forgetting a personal past, which preconfigured Freudian theories. De Quincey's journalism is often marked by humour, derived from the study in black comedy.
Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866) is the creator of the Novel of the Talk (Romanzo-Conversazione). His novels, often satiric, are modelled on parodies of Socratic dialogues (e.g. Maid Marian).
Victorian Preoccupations
The Victorian era (the 1830's) saw a shift in concerns from the 1820s. The argument over parliamentary and social reform replaced the involvement or the distaste for revolutionary politics, though the fact of the French Revolution continued to haunt all Victorian political thinking.
Constitutional stability served to enhance the reputation of a monarchy against the foreign principles of republicanism. Critics defined the 19th century as a period of readjustment, also marked by technological growth due to industrialization.
John Clare (1793-1864) was a rural writer precursor of this period of reassessment. He wrote about the countryside in vernacular, as he believed "putting the correct language of the gentlemen into the mouth of a simple shepherd is far from natural". His works, such as "The Parish" and "The Shepherd's Calendar", examined village society and stirred the memory of a real community in a lost world.
William Cobbett (1763-1835) criticized the "unnatural" advance of the machine, due to his faith in the collaborative relationship between those who owned the land and those who worked it. He propagated his way of thinking through the newspaper "Political Register" and revealed himself as an arrogant and intolerant, but also intelligent and observant, critic of society in his "Rural Rides".
Society and Morality
Victorian society followed Christian moral teaching, emphasizing monogamy and family values. However, there were numerous moral anomalies throughout the social system. Queen Victoria provided a model for the modern women's movement, but the stereotype of virtuous womanhood propagated by many poets was still prevalent. Thackeray, for instance, complained about this in the preface to his novel "Pendennis" (1849).
Technology and Comforts
This was an age in which technology was applied to various forms of production, providing the wealthy class with new domestic comforts.
Political Situation
The years 1830-80 were marked by British semi-isolationism in terms of European affairs. The illusion of peace in the 1850s was shattered by the Crimean War. In the domestic context, the political philosophy pursued was liberalism, which defended the freedom of the individual, although only the upper and middle classes could enjoy these benefits, while the poor were starving.
Dickens was the dominant novelist of his time, with an intimate relationship with his readers, who considered his characters as friends. His early works, such as "Sketches by Boz" (1833-36) and "The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club," reveal his acute ear for speech and observation of the habits and misery of London interiors.
Dickens's novels often attack the effects of the workhouse system and other social injustices, while also highlighting the opposition between the insecurities of criminal life and the comforts of the middle class. His works include "Nicholas Nickleby," "The Old Curiosity Shop," "Barnaby Rudge," "David Copperfield," "Bleak House," "Hard Times," "A Tale of Two Cities," "Great Expectations," and "Our Mutual Friend."
Despite the detailed traits of his characters, Dickens cannot be properly defined as a realist. He exploited the relationship between character and environment, molding them into a fictional world, with London as the center of his work and a major source of inspiration.
"Condition of England" Fiction
Harriet Martineau
Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) was a highly educated and independent woman with a refined social conscience and a Utilitarian philosophy. She wrote "Illustrations of Political Economy," a series of 23 didactic stories, and her "Autobiography" is considered one of the classics of Victorian women's writing.
Elizabeth Gaskell
Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) is generally associated with "industrial Manchester," although only two of her novels are set in this city. Manchester was the urban phenomenon of the age, having pioneered the factory system and promoted industrialization. Gaskell used this city to observe its division of class, quality of life, and the bad living conditions of industrial workers.
Influenced by Carlyle, Gaskell wrote her first "Tale of Manchester Life," titled "Mary Barton" (1848), which dramatizes the urban ills of the late 1840s, marked by industrial conflict, enforced employment, and growing class-consciousness. Her second Manchester novel, "North and South," views class-conflict from a new politically optimistic viewpoint, contrasting the snobberies and artificiality of the country gentry of the South of England with the anti-gentlemanly world of manufacturers in the North.
Gaskell's other works include "Cranford," which features a heroine with a social status based on decency and respect within a limited community, and "Ruth," which treats the problems of an unmarried mother who must endure a redemptive self-sacrifice to win respect from society. Gaskell's heroines are victims of a cruel world, but they do not renounce their redemption.
Charles Kingsley
Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) was a priest of the Church of England who tended to use fiction as an extension of his religious missions. In the 1840s, he became involved in the Christian Socialist Movement to wean Chartists away from the anti-clerical Socialism. His novels "Yeast: A Problem" and "Alton Locke: Tailor and Poet" describe rural degradation and the autobiography of a working man who joined the Chartist protest but was then persuaded by the Christian Socialist cause.
Benjamin Disraeli
Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) was a British Prime Minister who maintained an active literary career. His early novels were fantasies of high society, but with the development of a serious interest in politics, his fiction took a new turn. Disraeli was determined to involve himself in extra-parliamentary debate.
Macaulay, Thackeray, and Trollope
Thomas Babbington Macaulay (1800-1859)
Macaulay first wrote essays on literature, history, and politics. His masterpiece is the "History of England," which became a best- seller. The title is a misnomer, as it only briefly covers medieval and Tudor history as a prelude to its real subject: the revolutions of the 17th century, particularly the origins and effects of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The narrative is compelling, with defined heroes and villains, and the larger life of the nation is adumbrated. The style is clear, with long sentences balanced by short ones. The argument insists that the history of England was a history of progress and constant change in the institutions.
William Thackeray (1811-1863)
Thackeray began as an essayist and comic journalist, writing under different pseudonyms, before approaching the novel, the main genre of the Victorian Age. His earliest fictional experiments were influenced by Fielding and were against the excesses of criminal literature (e.g., "Catherine," "The Luck of Barry Lyndon"). He thought the intellectual had a social role and defined himself as a Satirical-Moralist with many readers whom the writer not only amuses but also teaches. He uses the omniscient narrator, which he calls the "Manager of the Performance," as it gives the narrator a double role: to manipulate puppets and also give lessons from their behavior.
In contrast, the romance may feature astonishing events with symbolic or ideological, rather than realistic, plausibility, and is less committed to the immediate rendition of reality than the novel.
The Brontë Sisters' Approach
The Brontë sisters' genre is not easily defined, as their works take some features from the novel (e.g., the biographical style, the figure of the heroine attempting to establish her independence) and other features from the romance (e.g., the opposition of the social background, as in "Jane Eyre," where the heroine does not have the conduct of a classic Victorian woman). Their fictions contain elements of Gothicism, Romanticism, and social issues.
Charlotte Brontë (1816-55)
"The Professor," Charlotte Brontë's first mature novel, was written after her return from Brussels, where she had worked as a teacher. The novel insists on independence, the importance of sexual and marital interdependence, and the virtues of self-discipline, dealing with submission, Christian resolution, wrath, misery, and despair. The "mission" of the protagonist, Jane, is to find a partner who respects her integrity, determination, and ideals, and who is worthy of her intelligence. She always follows her conscience, even if it could be improper for a classic woman of her period, a feature of the romance genre. "Shirley" is a "condition of England" novel that offers a perspective on the Luddite agitation that had characterized the politics of the industrial North in the 1810s. "Villette" presents a protagonist who is the opposite of Jane Eyre, a victim of social rules who may renounce her happiness.
Anne Brontë (1820-49)
"Agnes Grey" presents an impressive picture of the restrictions on contemporary middle-class women seeking paid employment, with the narrator enduring loss of status, humiliation, snobbery, and insult. "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" describes the events surrounding a drastically unhappy marriage and the escape from that marriage by its heroine, told through a double narrator.
Emily Brontë (1818-48)
"Wuthering Heights" has an extraordinary complex narrative, with two major and three minor narrators, and the reader must work to interpret the information the tellers provide. The novel opposes the gentility of the Lintons and the classless energy of Heathcliff, freedom and restraint, love and pain, all within a specific geographical area and tight community.
Nature and phenomena remain "wuthering" throughout the narrative, and the novel is the most unconventional and complex of all English novels, using elements of the Gothic and a multi-layered narrative that gives a sense of the seeming randomness of events and associations.
Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelite Poets
Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
Tennyson's earlier poetry was derived from the emotional norms evolved by the second generation of Romantics, especially Shelley and Keats, which were not universally accepted by early Victorian readers. His friend Arthur Hallam criticized him for writing "poetry of sensation rather than reflection," leading Tennyson to change his approach. After Hallam's death in 1833, Tennyson had a period of personal and professional reflection, and his later lyrics became an evocation of a desperate sense of exclusion from a working, rejoicing human community due to his pain over the loss of his friend. Tennyson's revised "Poems" (1842) and the seminal work "In Memoriam" (1850) reflect this change in his writing.
