LECTURE 1

ccording to many literary historians, the Romantic movement started in 1798 (the year of the first publication of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge) and was over in 1832, with the death of the last Romantic writer Sir Walter Scott.

However, as an intellectual movement affecting all the arts, Romanticism begins roughly in the 1770-s and continues into the second half of the nineteenth century. This extended chronological spectrum permits recognition of Robert Burns and William Blake as Romantic poets.

George III was the king of Great Britain from 1760 to 1820. During this extremely long reign Britain continued to develop economically and politically.

The rapid rise of population is one indication of how dynamic Britain was as it entered the 19^th century. In 1770 there were 8.3 million people in the country. By 1821 there were 14.2 million. The population was divided basically into three classes:

1) the landowners and aristocracy: this class had ruled the country for centuries and held most of the wealth

2) the businessmen and industrialists: they were becoming increasingly rich, but they still had no voting rights

3) the masses: the vast majority of population. Many of them were forced to leave the countryside and look for work in the factories.

ritish economy was thriving and by 1800 Britain was the most industrialized country in the world. England gradually became an integrated industrial unit. Mechanization meant that goods could be produced cheaply and more efficiently.

Despite these improvements, most people lived in dire poverty. The cities were overcrowded and unsanitary. Workers in factories slaved in inhuman conditions on miserable pay.

Those who were horrified at the exploitation of workers found inspiration in the ideas of the French Revolution. The high point in the protest movement in Britain was a rally of 60,000 people near Manchester to protest against the rise in the price of bread.

At first the government’s policy was to stifle all forms of protest by force, and all public meetings were banned. However, faced with increasingly difficult situation, and realizing that the society had to change to keep pace with economic progress the government introduced a package of reforms.

The following is a list of some important reforms:

· Trade Unions were recognized in 1825;

· a police force was established in 1829. Before that, their functions were performed by the army;

· a local government was established in every town;

· in 1832 businessmen and industrialists were given right to vote (the First Reform Bill)

These reforms did not change Britain overnight, but they were a starting point in a creation of a more democratic society and helped to avoid a revolution.

he Spirit of the Age

Romanticism is a complex and self-contradictory movement. Romantic aesthetics is not a coherent theoretical system or a literary doctrine. In fact, there were almost as many Romantic theories as there were individual authors.

In Britain Romanticism was limited to a few writers (mostly poets), but those few changed the face of literature for ever. The new movement found its greatest expression in the poetry of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, George Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. Romantic prose is exemplified in the work of Sir Walter Scott. Other Romantic prose writers include Mary Shelley (the author of Frankenstein), Charles Maturin, and others

All these poets and prose writers were highly individual and never considered themselves as part of a movement. However, their work had a common quality and shared characteristics which were later defined as ‘romantic’.

All major writers felt, that there was something distinctive about their age, not a shared doctrine or literary quality, but a pervasive intellectual and imaginative climate, which was less their spirit than “the spirit of the age”. (William Hazlitt)

The early Romantic period coincides with what is often called “the age of revolutions”, including the American (1776) and the French (1789) revolutions. It was an age of upheavals in political, economic and social traditions, of transformation and change.

The Revolution generated a pervasive feeling that this was a great age of new beginnings; that everything was possible by discarding old procedures and outworn customs, and not only in the political or social realm, but also in intellectual and literary enterprises. In the early period of the revolution almost all English writers were in sympathy with it, and most were its ardent supporters.

A revolutionary energy was also at the core of Romanticism, which quite consciously transformed not only the theory and practice of poetry, but the very way we perceive the world.

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