Day Three:
Romantic and Victorians
PERIOD FOUR:
ROMANTIC (1798- 1832)
History/Politics
- economically turbulent, and society moved from agricultural, wealth in land to modern
industrial- Industrial Revolution
-American (1774) and French Revolutions (1789) just over
- 7 Years War with France won
- division greater between rich and poor. Working conditions, wages, etc. were
terrible. Unions illegal, so fought back with petitions, protests, riots, which made
conditions more repressive. Lost traditional rhythms of work and recompense, and
human relationships.
-Act of Union 1801 brought England together with Scotland and Ireland to be Great
Britain. Many great writers in this period were from here.
Ideas
-not "r" romantic
Youth
- belief in youth, equality for humankind, liberal sentiments
- navel gazing
- youth angst and man’s infinite longing
Revolution
Imagination of period preoccupied with the fact and idea of revolution, political, to
change the world, or personal to change the spirit (end of century, apocolypse)
Heart over Head
Imagination/heart over intellect/head
- rejection of intellectual in favour of “glory of the imperfect” i.e medieval/gothic
Nature
- start with nature. Use it to explore inner life- very interior
Glorification of the common place.
Ordinary men, “little people” as more real than court or rich.
Partly because closer to imagination/heart, and further from head.
Supernatural
- belief in spirits, ghosts, folklore, mesmirism (hypnosis), most opium users, some
addicts. Interest in Satan. Gothic interest.
Literature
Rejection of past forms- focus almost exclusively on poetry
Poetry
Wordsworth
poet laureate, poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling
Prelude
Blake
Songs of Innocence and Experience, hallucinatory,
Keats
considered the greatest poetic genius ever, died earliest
Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale
Byron
Bryonic hero in Manfred (alone against the world- rejection of/by society)
Prose Fiction
Mary Shelley
- Frankenstein, overreaching of man, corruption of nature, birth of gothic
PERIOD FIVE:
VICTORIANS (1832-1901)
History/Politics
- Queen Victoria (long reign - more than 60 years)
- London centre of world influence
- completed shift from agricultural to industrial, modern urban economic system
- fall out from Industrial Revolution
- first country to industrialize, painful but profitable. Captured world markets.
- a great deal of social work accomplished in this time (movements to improve schools,
expand vote, improve work conditions, cruelty to animals- and later, children)
Ideas
- Work, Change, Expansion
- stereotype of being prudish, but more serious & intellectual, practical
- earnest, sincere, sentimental thoughtful,
- funny in ironic way.
- Do your duty, let’s work
- less introspective than the Romantics
- Traditional Faith.
- last period to believe in God
- belief in clear and universal set of morals
- Humanism and Theory of Evolution.
- improvement of human condition and endless human potential
- The Women Question
-vote, marry and keep own property, think, contribute, put on a pedestal, but expected
to sit there- boredom
Literature
-enormous, universal popularity of authors and fame level
- widely accessible, read aloud in circles, spreading literacy.
- age of the novel (all present, but the novel richest form)
Prose Fiction
- this is the real growth of the novel, solidified form, masters
Jane Austen
- Pride and Prejudice stories marriage, themes of class, power
Bram Stoker
- Dracula (continuation of gothic)
Charles Dickens
- A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist
George Eliot
-woman Middlemarch (greatest, but scope almost too great, onion novel)
Brontes
- Emily Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Jane Eyre
Prose Non-Fiction
Carlyle
-do the dishes (do the duty that lies nearest, for the night comes...)
Plays
-melodramas (poor theatre in the long run)
Poems
Tennyson
- laureate, very popular in his time, Idylls of the King (Arthur stories)
Brownings
- Elizabeth- Sonnets from the Portugeuse
- Robert- dramatic monolgues My Last Duchess