INTRODUCTION TO THE
ROMANTIC PERIOD (1785-1830)
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Revolutionary and Napoleonic Period in France (1789-1815)
England changed from a primarily agricultural society to a modern
industrial nation;
The society was threatened by the imported revolutionary ideologies;
The early period of the French Revolution, marked by the Declaration of
the Right of Man and the storming of the Bastille to release imprisoned
political offenders, was generally supported by England;
Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790)
Tom Paine’s Rights of Man (1791-92)
William Godwin’s Inquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793);
In its later stage of the Revolution the English sympathizers gradually
dropped off as it followed an increasingly grim and violent course: the
accession to power by Jacobin extremists, the “September Massacres” of
the helpless imprisoned nobility in 1792, the execution of the king and
queen, the invasion of the French Republic of the Rhineland and
Netherlands, and its offer of armed assistance to all countries desiring to
overthrow their governments, which brought England into the war against
France, the decapitation of thousands in the Reign of Terror under
Robespierre, and then of the men who had directed the terror, the
emergence of Napoleon first as dictator and then as emperor of France;
- Napoleon, the child and champion of the French Revolution, had become an
archaggressor, a despot and the founder of a new dynasty;
-Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815 was a triumph of reactionary despotism
throughout continental Europe (no reforms in England for nearly three decades;
- The manufacturing were replacing the agricultural classes and they demanded a
voice in government proportionate to their wealth;
- The Industrial Revolution was the shift in manufacturing that resulted from the
invention of the power-driven machinery which gradually replaced hand labour
(James Watt had perfected the steam engine in 1765 and steam replaced wind
and water);
- In the second half of the eighteenth century there began the ever-accelerating
alteration in economic and social conditions which shows no signs of slowing
down;
- The new labouring population massed in the sprawling mill towns of central and
northern England;
- Enclosure – the process of enclosing open field and communally worked farms
into privately owned agricultural holdings; this created a new landless class that
either migrated to the industrial towns or remained as farm labourers, subsisting
on starving wages;
- process of industrialization: the pall of smoke cast over vast areas of slum
tenements by the factories of the industrial and trading cities;
- Two Nations – the two classes of capital and labour;
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the theory of “let alone’ – free operation of economic laws;
Labouring class: inadequate wages, long hours of work under harsh
discipline in sordid conditions, large-scale employment of women and
children;
The conclusion of the French war in 1815 brought the first modern
industrial depression;
In 1819 meetings of workers were organized to demand parliamentary
reform(in August Peterloo Massacre at St. Peter’s Field, Manchester);
The British Empire became the most powerful colonial presence in the
world (East India Company and the black slave labour in the West Indies)
The Regency era in the United Kingdom is the period between 1811 and
1820, when King George III was deemed unfit to rule and his son, the
Prince of Wales, ruled as his proxy as Prince Regent. In 1820 the Prince
Regent became George IV on the death of his father. For the leisure class
this was a time of lavish display and moral laxity (Jane Austen);
Women were an underprivileged class but women writers began to rival
men in their numbers (Mary Wollstonecraft A Vindication of the Rights
of Women);
The first Reform Bill was passed in 1832 (it eliminated the rotten
boroughs, redistributed the parliamentary representation to include the
industrial cities and extended the vote.
The Romantic Period
• Wordsworth defines poetry as "the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it
takes its origin from emotion recollected in
tranquility“ (Lyrical Ballads, 1798)