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History of Literature

A BRIEF HISTORY OF
WESTERN LITERATURE
Romanticism

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Romanticism
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Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe
"Faust" PART
I,
PART II,
PART
III
Illustrations by Eugene Delacroix
and Harry Clarke
Johann
Gottfried von Herder
Friedrich von Schiller
"Love and
Intrigue"
Ralph Waldo
Emerson
"Nature"
Thomas Carlyle
Henry David Thoreau
William Blake
I. "Songs of
Innocence",
II.
"Songs of
Experience",
III. "The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell",
IV-V.
"The Book of Job"
William Godwin
Tom
Paine
William Wordsworth
"The Prelude"
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner"
PART I,
PART
II-IV,
PART
V-VI,
PART
VII
Illustrations by Gustave
Dore
Robert Southey
George Gordon, Lord Byron
"Don Juan"
CANTO THE FIRST-CANTO THE
FIFTH,
CANTO THE SIXTH-CANTO THE
SEVENTEENTH
Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Prometheus Unbound"
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
"Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus"
John Keats
"The Eve of St. Agnes"
William Hazlitt
Charles
Lamb
Thomas De Quincey
"Confessions
of an English Opium-Eater"
Horace Walpole
"The Castle
of Otranto"
William Beckfor
"The History of
Caliph Vathek"
Ann Radcliffe
"The Mysteries of Udolpho"
VOLUME 1-2,
VOLUME 3,
VOLUME
4
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
"Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus"
Thomas Love
Peacock
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet
"Ivanhoe"
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Lord Byron on his deathbed as depicted by Joseph-Denis Odevaere
c.1826
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ROMANTICISM
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The preoccupations of any age tend to produce contrary
reactions in a succeeding one, and the Romantic movement was
an especially fierce reaction to the Enlightenment. As a
literary movement, it embodied a dramatic change in
prevailing habits of thinking and feeling. The Romantic
poets looked inward, placing unprecedented importance on
their own personal emotions, while at the same time finding
exaltation in the beauties of Nature, especially in
spectacular scenery. Broadly speaking, they were against the
classical, the conservative and the moderate, and in favour
of liberty, both political and individual, the imagination
and the exotic.

Caspar David Friedrich
The Wanderer above the Sea of
Fog
1818
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT
Like all literary movements, the Romantic
movement encompassed many different tendencies and cannot easily
be tied down by time or by place. It extended roughly from the
last third of the 18th century to the middle of the 19th, and
aspects of it are evident in every region of Western
civilization. However,
Rousseau, such an important influence on
Romanticism, belongs to the previous generation; earlier poets
such as Gray and
Cowper show some Romantic elements, as do some
who were active after 1850. Many writers who were at work within
the Romantic period -
Jane Austen for example - cannot be called
Romantics, and some who do fall into that category acquired
their 'Romantic' image as much from their lives and personal
circumstances as from their published writings.
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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An early example of the Romantic revival was the
Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) movement of the 1770s,
a time of great literary excitement in Germany. It was inspired
by the idealism of
Rousseau and its leading influence was
Johann
Gottfried von Herder (1744—1803), philosopher and critic, whose
followers included the young
Goethe and
Schiller. They rebelled
against literary conventions, demanded poetry of strong
passions, and exalted the original genius, notably
Shakespeare.
The most famous work of this movement was The Sorrows of
Young Werther, by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(1749-1832), the greatest figure in German literature and a
"universal man", whose work ranged over philosophy, science,
music and art. This early work, in the form of an epistolary
novel, and partly autobiographical, tells of a sensitive young
artist, hopelessly in love with an unattainable girl, who
ultimately commits suicide. It had an electric effect on Europe,
becoming, something of a cult (Wertherism).
Goethe was later
much embarrassed by this work.
Goethe, who spent most of his life at the court of Weimar,
Germain's leading centre of culture, soon outgrew the Sturm
und Drang movement and, after visits to Italy, turned
towards Classicism. He collaborated closely with
Friedrich von
Schiller (1759-1854), the great dramatist and lyric poet, in a
'golden age' of German literature (roughly 179O-1830), which
integrated German Romanticism with the ancient classical
tradition. Through the advocacy of Carlyle, who portrayed him as
'the Wisest of Our Time', Goethe had an important influence on
many Victorian writers. He is probably best known for his
novels, and especially for his two-part drama
Faust,
which he began about 1770 and did not finish until shortly
before his death. In the meantime, he had made great
contributions to practically every field of human experience.
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Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein
Goethe in the Roman Campagna
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Ralph Waldo
Emerson
"Nature"
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THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS
Both German philosophy and the English Romantics
had a powerful effect on a group of American intellectuals who,
in the late 1830s, gathered at the house of
Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803—82) in Concord, Massachusetts.
Emerson's essay
Nature
(1836) explained the basis of Transcendentalism, a mystical,
semi-religious concept that encompassed social and economic
ideas, as well as religion and philosophy. Along with
self-reliance and self-knowledge, reverence for Nature was
fundamental: "Nature is the incarnation of thought", said
Emerson, who became a national sage in America like
Goethe or
Emerson's friend,
Thomas Carlyle.
Some of the Transcendentalists attempted to put their ideas into
practice at the Brook Farm Institute, where philosophical
discussion alternated with manual labour. European influences
notwithstanding,
Emerson advocated the independence of American
culture: "We have listened too long to the courtly muses of
Europe", he proclaimed in a lecture at Harvard. His essays and
poems were published in The Dial, the organ of the
Transcendental Club, which he edited.
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THOREAU

Henry David Thoreau
Besides Emerson himself, the most interesting and popular of
the Transcendentalists was
Henry David Thoreau (1817-62).
Though some of his poems appeared in The Dial, he
published only two books during his lifetime and depended
for income on various jobs, ranging from teacher to
pencil-maker. It took him, he said, six weeks to earn enough
for a year's existence. His first book was A Week on the
Concord and Merrimack River (1849). His masterpiece,
though little noticed at the time, was Walden, or Life in
the Woods (1854), the result of two years spent living
in a hut he built himself on Walden Pond. Describing his
experiments in self-sufficient living, the local wild life
and his visitors, it also expresses his sensitivity to the
pre-colonial past and, with forceful clarity, his antagonism
to the materialism of the modern age.
In his, often neglected, essay "Civil Disobedience" (1849),
Thoreau claims the right of individuals to refuse to pay
taxes on grounds of conscience. This belief, like his
enactment of an Emersonian life-style at Walden, was also
put into practice — his objections to the Mexican-American
War and to slavery having earned him a spell in prison.
Thoreau was not recognized as a literary genius, philosopher
and expert naturalist until British admirers publicized his
ideas towards the end of the century. His views on civil
disobedience were later adopted by Gandhi, and he is now
seen as a forerunner of the Green movement.
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"I wanted to live deep and suck out
all the marrow
of life ... to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to
its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, win
then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it,
and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were
sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to
give a true account of it in my next excursion."
Thoreau, "Where I lived, and what I lived for".
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William Blake
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Romantic English poets, who were not of
course so called in their own time, fall largely into two
distinct generations. Although there was no 'school' of
poets in either generation, there was often close
co-operation and friendship, for instance between
Wordsworth
and Coleridge in the first generation and, in a rather
different way,
Byron and
Shelley in the second. But one
image of the typical Romantic, as posterity saw him, was the
solitary dreamer, the eccentric - and egocentric - artist,
vitally concerned with his own mind and his own soul,
sturdily resistant to authority and social convention, and
oblivious to tradition, who stands apart from his fellows
and from the world. Someone,
in short, like
William Blake.
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THE VISIONARY
As a poet, a painter and an engraver,
William Blake
(1757-1827), was a highly individual genius, so strange and
so uncompromising that some people thought him insane,
though
Wordsworth is said to have remarked that
Blake's
madness was more interesting than the sanity of other poets.
Later generations have-seen him as a prophet, inspired by a
hatred of the materialism of the 18th century; as a
liberator who, for all his loathing of social injustice and
oppression, saw farther, something even beyond Good and
Evil; as a mystic at odds with contemporary religion, who
aspired to build a new Jerusalem 'in England's green and
pleasant land'.
Son of a well-to-do London tradesman,
Blake had no formal
education but was taught by his mother and himself, learning
Greek and Hebrew among other languages, and acquiring a
special fascination with legend and the Middle Ages.
He
became an engraver and, as a student at the Royal Academy,
he met painters and intellectuals, some of whom financed the
publication of his Poetical Sketches in 1783. His radical
sympathies later brought him into friendly contact with
revolutionary sympathisers such as
William Godwin and
Tom
Paine, who influenced his antipathy to conventional
Christianity and authority. He was poor all his life, though
not quite as isolated from the world, nor as deliberately
perverse, as legend suggests. When he died he was buried in
a pauper's grave — but he left no debts.
SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE
The collection Songs of Innocence was published, together
with the poet's own illustrations, in 1789. Here
Blake is at
his simplest and gentlest, and, for most readers, probably
his most approachable. The poems are largely about
childhood, some written in a deliberately child-like manner,
although the declamations of the prophet can already be
heard.
Blake's early mysticism and love of emblems are
apparent in The Book of Tirel of the same year, again with
his illustrations. The Songs of Innocence were reissued in
1794, together with the grimmer Songs of Experience which
balance the adult world of corruption and oppression against
that of the innocent child, expressing with extraordinary
economy
Blake's highly original ideas about the connection
between good and evil and his doctrine of 'contraries' -
angels as devils, energy against reason.
These ideas are also active in
Blake's chief work in prose,
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which consists of a series
of aphorisms that overturned conventional ideas of morality.
In The Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), America: A
Prophecy (1793), and several subsequent works,
Blake
introduced his own mythology: Urizen, the repressive moral
authority, and Ore, the archetypal rebel (like the poet
himself), and other personifications, of 'body', 'passion',
'spirit', etc. These 'prophetic books' arc extremely obscure
and inaccessible to ordinary readers without scholarly
commentary.
Blake employs what amounts to a secret language,
the symbolism of which has only recently been fully worked
out by devoted scholars.
IMAGINATION AND REALISM
Blake was born within two years of
Robert Burns and three
years of the Suffolk poet George Crabbe (1754-1832). In
spite of some common themes, a more disparate trio would be
hard to imagine. Crabbe,
Jane Austen's favourite poet, was a
realist. He used the heroic couplet of
Pope and he wrote of
the ordinary experiences of rural life, without romance. His
strong points in The Village (1783) and The Parish Register
(1807) are his sincerity and his grimly observant eye. In
spite of a very 'Romantic' addiction to opium (acquired
through unwise medical advice), he knew little or nothing of
the forces that manipulated the imagination of Blake, yet he
is a rewarding poet who in his own day was considerably the
more popular. One of his tales in The Borough (1810)
concerns the tormented fisherman Peter Grimes, the subject
of Benjamin Britten's well-known opera (1945 .
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THE
LYRICAL BALLADS
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The most important event in English Romantic
literature was the publication of Lyrical Ballads,
With a Few Other Poems in 1798. It marked the
beginning of a new age. It was the result of the
co-operation of two poets,
Wordsworth and
Coleridge, briefly neighbours in Somerset where
most of the poems were written. They felt stifled
by the rigid conventions of 18th-century poetry
and wished to release feeling from the rule of
intellect, or as
Coleridge put it, to concentrate on
'the two cardinal points of poetry: the power of
exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful
adherence to the truth of nature, and the power
of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying
colours of the imagination . . .'
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THE POEMS
Wordsworth, whose combative preface attacked the 'gaudy and
mane phraseology of many modern writers', concentrated on
the 'truth of nature' and
Coleridge on the 'colours of the
imagination'.
Wordsworth's poems were the most personal,
including 'Lines composed . . . above Tintern Abbey'.
Coleridge contributed only four poems to the original
edition, among them 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', one
of the best-known poems in the English language. It was
singled out for attack by the critics, who gave the Lyrical
Ballads a mostly hostile reception. Nevertheless, a second
edition, with more poems and a new preface by Wordsworth
which amounted to a Romantic manifesto, appeared at the
beginning of 1801, and a third edition in 1802.
WORDSWORTH

William Wordsworth
"The Prelude"
A lawyer's son born in Cumbria,
William Wordsworth
(1770-1850) is one of England's greatest lyric poets.
Despite his fairly prosaic descriptions of nature,
Wordsworth had an almost mystical outlook - 'we are part of
all that we behold' - and the history of his mental
development is to be found in The Prelude, probably his
greatest work, which he began in 1798. It was published in
1805, but he revised it continually for the rest of his
life. As well as a spell at St John's College, Cambridge, he
spent a year (1791—92) in France — like most English
Romantics, he enthusiastically supported the French
Revolution, but became disillusioned later - where he had a
love affair resulting in the birth of a daughter. Otherwise,
Wordsworth spent most of his life in the Lake District, his
presence attracting others, notably
Coleridge and
Southey
(the 'Lake Poets'). He lived with his sister Dorothy, to
whom he was devoted from childhood and on whom he was
emotionally dependent. From 1799, they lived at Dove
Cottage, Grasmere, now a place of literary pilgrimage,
notwithstanding the poet's marriage in 1802 to a childhood
friend.
Although he lived a long and productive life, Wordsworth
wrote most of his great poetry in a single decade,
1797—1807, after he had recovered from a period of severe
mental and professional doubts, the latter ameliorated by a
friend's substantial legacy. It included 'Michael',
'Resolution and Independence', his 'Ode [on] Immortality',
and the 'Lucy' poems, written mostly during travel in
Germany with his sister (who may have been the original
Lucy), and included in the second edition of Lyrical
Ballads. In his later years Wordsworth, who was Poet
Laureate from 1843, politically moved steadily Right, and
although he continued to write fine poetry, it lacked the
fire of inspiration.
COLERIDGE

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner"
PART I,
PART
II-IV,
PART
V-VI,
PART
VII
Illustrations by Gustave
Dore
It has been remarked that no one can write a satisfactory
study of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) because no one
has a brain large enough to encompass the vast range of his
intellectual and artistic interests.
Coleridge was
Wordsworth's chief intellectual stimulus, as Dorothy was his
emotional prop. Son of a Devon vicar, like
Wordsworth he did
not stay long enough at Cambridge to take a degree. His
first poems appeared in a newspaper in P94, when he settled
in Bristol, lodging with his friend, the poet
Robert
Southey, lecturing on politics, religion and education, and
marrying the sister of
Southey's fiancee. He produced a
radical weekly publication, started a family and began his
study of German literature, also acquiring the habit of
taking opium against depression.
Moving to Somerset, he met the Wordsworths in 1797, the
start of a literary partnership that produced the foundation
of English Romanticism, the Lyrical Ballads. An annuity from
a rich pottery family, the Wedgwoods, alleviated his
financial problems, and he produced a succession of poems,
including the strange, magical, fragmentary, opium-induced 'Kubla
Khan'. In 1798 he visited Germany with the Wordsworths,
confirming
Coleridge as the spokesman on German Romanticism.
He moved to the Lake District in P99 to be near the
Wordsworths, and fell in love with Mrs Wordsworth's sister,
a cause of profound personal anguish, manifested in a series
of poems m 1800—02 and in virtual addiction to opium. In
1808 he began lecturing .it the Royal Institute, notably on
Shakespeare.
Crisis came in 1810, caused by a breach with
Wordsworth
(later healed, though never completely), and feelings of
desperation induced chiefly by his relationship with
Wordsworth's sister-in-law. As a poet, his career was
closing, but as a philosopher and critic he still had
fruitful vears ahead.
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'For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days.
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
Tо me was all in all. — I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood.
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.'
Wordsworth, 'Lines composed a few miles above
Tintern Abbey'.
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YOUNG HEROES
The idea of the Romantic hero as a beautiful young man of
turbulent emotions, passionate, devoted to liberty, widely
travelled, and destined for a premature death was
personified in the leading members of the second generation
of English Romantic poets,
Byron,
Keats and
Shelley. All of
them, but
Byron especially, have become almost as famous for
their lives, loves and letters as for their poetry.
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BYRON
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George Gordon, 6th Lord Byron (1788-1824) inherited
Newstead Abbey, but little money, and gained a reputation as
a wild young man at Cambridge. His earliest poems were
highly sensual, and he destroyed most copies. He responded
to early criticism with sharp satire, attacking
Scott and
the Lake poets, though he later recanted. After a long tour
of the Mediterranean, vividly described in letters, he wrote
the first two cantos of Cbilde Harold's Pilgrimage (1812),
the wanderings of a young man in various settings, partly
autobiographical, which made him famous. As a handsome young
aristocrat, he was also fashionable, until the break-up of
his unsuitable marriage (1815) turned public opinion against
him.
He left England for ever in 1816, stayed in Switzerland with
the
Shelleys while writing the third canto of Cbilde Harold
and had a daughter by
Mary Shelley's sister. In the next two
years he produced some of his best work, including Manfred
and the first cantos of
Don Juan. He was now a famous figure
throughout Europe: a character in
Goethe's
Faust is based on
him. He was closely involved with the Italian nationalist
movement until 1821, when he threw himself into the cause of
Greek independence. He died in Greece, his heart being
buried in Athens.
In his public quarrel with Southey,
Byron gave Romanticism a
new and more combative image. Literary critics now rank him
just below the great poets, and regard
Don Juan, an 'epic
satire' (16 cantos, but unfinished, in ottava rima) as his
masterpiece.
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SHELLEY
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More radical than Byron,
Percy Bysshe Shelley
(1792—1822) regarded poetry and politics as one. Called 'Mad
Shelley' at Eton, he was expelled from Oxford for his public
espousal of atheism. Eloping with 16-year-old Harriet
Westbrook lost him his family inheritance, and his
ultra-democratic views attracted the attention of the secret
service.
William Godwin, the anarchistic philosopher, was
for a time his mentor and in 1814 he eloped with
Mary,
Godwin's daughter by the feminist pioneer
Mary
Wollstonecraft. He married her after Harriet's suicide in
1816.
Always a wanderer, Shelley spent the summer of 1816 at Lake
Geneva with
Byron and from 1818 lived in Italy. There he
entered his poetically most creative period: the dramas
"Prometheus Unbound" and The Cenci; the great political poem
'The Mask of Anarchy', inspired by the Peterloo Massacre;
and some of his most famous short poems, such as the 'Ode to
the West Wind' (written in a few hours), 'To a Skylark',
'The Cloud' and Adonais an elegy for
Keats (1821). In 1822
Shelley was drowned in a boating accident at La Spezia.
Shelley
is regarded as one of the finest lyric poets in the
language, though for a time he was comparatively little
read. His high reputation among critics today arises largely
from his revolutionary thoughts and ideas, which studies
have shown to be wider-ranging, more profound, also more
ambiguous, than Shelley's contemporaries realized.

Shelley's funeral.
Byron wrote of the "extraordinary effect such a funeral pile has,
on a desolate shore, with mountains in the background and the sea
before...
All of Shelley was consumed, except his heart, which...
is now preserved in spirits of wine".
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KEATS

John Keats
"The Eve of St. Agnes"
The popular image of
John Keats (1795-1821) as the
ultra-sensitive, tormented, young Romantic artist 'half in
love with easeful Death', applies, if at all, to his last,
death-threatened years. At school he was remembered for his
love of sports before his appetite for reading.
Keats is,
with
Wordsworth, the most popular of the English Romantics,
and one or two of his odes ('To Autumn', 'On a Grecian Urn',
'To Psyche', 'To a Nightingale') are as famous as any
English poetry outside
Shakespeare. He came from a poor,
devoted family that was riven by tuberculosis, and trained,
but never practised, as a surgeon.
His early work, including the sonnet 'On First Looking into
Chapman's Homer' (1816), received little attention, while
his letters, now a major reason for his fame, were not
published until after his death. At Hampstead in 1817 he
wrote his most ambitious work so far, Endymion, in friendly
rivalry with
Shelley, currently working on a comparable work
(The Revolt of Islam). Despite mutual admiration, Keats kept
his distance from
Shelley's more powerful personality.
Hyperion (begun in 1818) reflected
Keats's travels in the
north and west, although mainly written in Hampstead, where
he had fallen in love with Fanny Brawne. There followed
'The
Eve of St Agnes', a wonderful montage of Romantic
medievalism; his finest odes; the sonnet on 'Fame'; and the
ballad 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'. By early 1820 he was
seriously ill with tuberculosis. He went to Italy, avoiding
Shelley's circle at Pisa, in a bid for recovery, but died in
Rome. His reputation rose steadily after his death and has
never declined.
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CRITICS AND
COMMENTATORS
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As a literary movement, Romanticism was essentially
poetic, but it was also a period in which a new kind of
prose developed. One aspect of the movement was an intense
interest in the inner or private life of the individual,
which found expression in the popularity of letters, memoirs
and biographies. Autobiography, partly through the
inspiration of the Romantic poets, became a literary genre
for the first time. Criticism gained psychological depth;
essayists discussed the fantastic, the process of creativity
and the inadequacy of Reason and Classicism. They embraced
new subject matter, including science and technology, or
treated familiar subjects in a novel way.
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COLERIDGE
Perhaps the most original and capacious mind of the Romantic
era,
Coleridge brought a subtler, more philosophical
interpretation to literary criticism, both in his lectures
and in works such as Biographia Litemria (1817), a massive
if ill-organized work on 'literary life and opinions'. It
contained practical advice to potential writers, but was
fundamentally concerned with the meaning of 'imagination',
and included studies of then little-known German writers,
memorable reconsiderations of
Shakespeare, and essays on the
psychology of the creative process.
THE ESSAYISTS
Though a precocious youth,
William Hazlitt (1778-1830) was
nearly 30 before he concluded that he was intended for a
life of letters, having spent much of his early years
painting. The freshness of his style owed something to the
early Romantics, though he later quarrelled with them on
political and literary grounds. His vigour sprang from the
intensity of his radical but idiosyncratic opinions, whether on great
events such as the French Revolution, or on humbler matters such as
mail-coach travel.
Hazlitt's early works
dealt with philosophical questions, but his true metier was
as a critic and essayist, and he is almost unique in English
literature m establishing so high a reputation entirely on
such writings. Of his many volumes of essays, perhaps the
best are Characters in Shakespeare, dedicated to
Charles
Lamb and much admired by
Keats, Lectures on the English
Comic Writers, and especially The Spirit of the Age (1825),
containing critical portraits of many contemporaries.

Thomas De Quincey
"Confessions
of an English Opium-Eater"
Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) is chiefly remembered for
"Confessions
of an English Opium-Eater"
(1821), which first
appeared in the London Magazine. He was devoted to the Wordsworths and took over Dove Cottage his opium addiction and his
Recollections of the . . .
Lake Poets (18.34-39). From 1826, with a family to support,
lie wrote extensively for Blackwood's, including 'On Murder
Considered as One of the Fine Arts' (1827, 1839), a minor
masterpiece of black humour. As a stylist, he lacked
Hazlitt's sparkle, adopting an original, if rather laboured,
'poetical' style to describe his opium-induced dreams.
COBBETT
A breezy contrast with the Romantics is presented by Thomas
Cobbett (1763-1835), a democrat, patriot and powerful
advocate of parliamentary reform. The kind of 'sublime'
scenery that inspired the Romantics would have been roundly
condemned by Cobbett for its barrenness - he liked to see a
good field of turnips. A voluminous writer, with the knack
of engaging the reader's sympathy with his strongly
expressed views, he is remembered chiefly for his classic
Rural Rides (1830, 1853;, a collection of accounts of his
exploration of the English counties on horseback.
THE WITS
The Essays of Elia (1823, 1833) are responsible for the
affection in which
Charles
Lamb (1775— 1834) has been held.
They are largely 'blithe trivialities' (e.g. 'A Dissertation
upon Roast Pig'), and the smiling, sentimental face that Elia
presents reflects the kindly character of
Lamb, who had a
large circle of literary friends, maintaining lifelong
friendships with
Coleridge and
Hazlitt.
There is more to
Lamb than that, however. He was a fine critic, even of
writers who dealt with subjects that he was temperamentally
unable to approach, such as
Shakespeare (Lamb's Tales from
Shakespeare
for children was hugely popular for generations). An edge
to
Lamb's poetry and essays is lent by knowledge of his
private life: he devoted himself to caring for his insane
sister, who had murdered their mother, and as a young man he
himself suffered brief insanity. He also stuttered, a
disability he sometimes exploited. (A lady at a dinner
party: 'And how do you like babies, Mr Lamb?" 'B-b-b-boiled,
Madam.')
A sharper, though genial, wit was the Revd Sydney Smith
(1771 —1845), a born satirist whose articles published in
The Edinburgh Review, one of the first and weightiest of the
political-literary journals founded in the early 19th
century, were often denoted to mocking the Romantics.
Lamb's circle did not include the notoriously short-tempered
Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864), who spent most of his
adult life abroad. A man of great learning and fine critical
perceptions, Landor's prose is distinctive, sometimes
beautiful, and outside the mainstream, though his poetry is
largely forgotten. He was much admired in the 19th century,
not least by
Browning, who looked after the angry old man in
his last years in Florence.
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THE
GOTHIC NOVEL
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An offshoot of Romanticism was the Gothic novel,
inhabiting a literary underworld that has remained
significant ever since and is currently manifest in
innumerable science-fiction fantasies and tales of horror
set in American suburbs. In fact it precedes the Romantic
movement, dating from the mid-18th century. The word Gothic
in the later 18th century came to mean wild and
undisciplined, even crude - the antithesis of Classicism.
Gothic novels were frequently set in the Middle Ages (a
taste not confined to literature), in castles, monasteries
and dungeons, and the plot depended on suspense and fantasy,
frequently with a supernatural element.
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WALPOLE
Horace Walpole (1717—97), son of the so-called 'First
Prime Minister', was in many respects a quintessential
18th-century man of letters. He had a brilliant mind, no
need to earn a living, no strong convictions, and much of
his time was taken up with social matters: he had a large
acquaintance and was a prolific correspondent. He also had
a distaste, ahead of the Romantics, for commercialism and
the rule of Reason and, prior to the Pre-Raphaelites, a love
of medieval culture, or at least his notion of that culture.
The tangible memorial of this predilection is his jewel-like
'medieval' villa, Strawberry Hill, near Twickenham, where
the bookcases were modelled on the altar screen at Chartres.
Walpole's
The Castle of Otratito (1765) is generally cited
as the first 'Gothic' novel. It is a medieval daydream, set
in Italy, full of mysterious terrors and supernatural
menace. It was a great popular success, which perhaps misled
the cultured
Walpole into supposing he had composed a work
of art.
William Beckford (1759-1844), a millionaire, wrote
Vathek (1786), set in the mysterious and fantastic
Orient, full of strange and cruel passions, the sort of book
whose author would now be suspected of harbouring deviant
and anti-social desires, as indeed
Beckford seems to have
done.
TERROR TAEES

Ann Radcliffe
"The Mysteries of Udolpho"
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
"Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus"
The best-known later exponents of the fin-de-siecle 'terror
tale' were
Mrs Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) and Matthew Gregory
Lewis (1775—1818), generally known as 'Monk' Lewis after his
most famous book The Monk, a debased version of Faust. The
most popular of
Mrs Radcliffe's five novels is
The Mysteries
of Udolpho (1794), a fairly typical example of the genre:
the innocent young heroine falls into the hands of Montoni,
the cruel and allpowerful proprietor of a grim, remote and
haunted castle. Eventually the supernatural elements turn
out to have a rational explanation.
Novels such as these
were extremely popular among readers at the circulating
libraries, where books could be borrowed for a small fee, a
major stimulus to fiction writing in the late 18th and 19th
centuries.
The Gothic novel had some effect on better writers,
including
Byron and
Shelley. In Northanger Abbey, probably
written about 1798-1800,
Jane Austen mocked the genre by
contrasting it with real life.
Shelley's friend
Thomas Love
Peacock (1785-1866) exploited aspects of the genre in his
satires of Romantic excesses. The Brontes, on their
Yorkshire moor, certainly read Gothic novels:
Charlotte Bronte's
Rochester (in
Jane Eyre) has been called a
middle-class Montoni, and
Emily's
Wuthering Heights provides
further evidence.
FRANKENSTEIN
The supernatural and macabre tales of the Romantic era are
today almost completely unread, with one most notable
exception:
Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818) by
Mary Shelley (1797-1851). It certainly transcends the
genre, though whether it can bear all the critical weight
that has been loaded on it is another question.
Mary
Shelley said that the idea came to her in a half-dreaming
state, arising from a light-hearted agreement with
Shelley
and
Byron in Switzerland in 1816 that each should write a
story of the supernatural. The others never completed
theirs. She adopted the epistolary form, technically perhaps
something of an advantage with this type of subject matter.
Frankenstein, a well-meaning philosopher-scientist,
discovers how to create life artificially in a creature he
assembles from spare parts of corpses. The result is a
monster, hideous in appearance and superhuman in strength,
who horrifies all normal human beings, and having acquired
human emotions through its reading of
Milton,
Goethe and so
on, turns murderous when
Frankenstein breaks his promise to
provide him with a mate.
Frankenstein pursues it to the
Arctic, meeting the British explorer whose letters tell the
story, and dies. The monster disappears into the frozen
wastes, seeking its own death.
Besides being a pioneer work of science fiction,
Frankenstein is also a variation on the theme of the Rousseauesque 'Noble Savage', a good creature ruined by
'civilized' society. It has inspired a legion of films, most
of them failing, or not attempting, to capture the
resonances of the story.
After
Shelley's death,
Mary settled in England and later
wrote a number of other novels, one [The Last Man, 1826) set
in the future, but none has the power and vision of
Frankenstein.
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SIR WALTER SCOTT
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The historical novel, meaning one dealing with a time
before the author's birth, was not invented by
Sir Walter
Scott. An early example was the
Comtesse de La Fayette's
La Princesse de Cleves and many 18th century Gothic
novels were set in earlier times. Castle Rackrent
(1800) by the Irish writer
Maria Edgeworth, a pioneer of
both the historical and the regional novel, was acknowledged
as an influence by
Scott, always a man to pay his debts.
Still, Waverley (1814) first made the historical
novel widely popular and established it permanently, not
only in Britain, but throughout Europe.
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Walter Scott
LAIRD OF ABBOTSFORD
So far, the revisionists have hardly dented
Scott's
reputation as one of the most attractive and honourable
people ever to publish a work of fiction. In his day he was
hugely popular, but now he is little read. He trained at
Edinburgh University as a lawyer, and acquired a profound
knowledge of country folk and legends, travelling on
horseback around Scotland on legal business. He was a poet
first, and became famous after The Lay of the Last
Minstrel (1805), the first of several verse romances.
The most notable are The Lady of the Lake and
Marmion (1808), about the Battle of Flodden.
Scott's
industry and output amazed even his contemporaries, for he
was also involved with a vast range of other literary work
and public duties.
One of his idiosyncrasies, only puritans
would call it a fault, was a tendency to spend magnificent
Borders estate of Abbotsford. Later, the failure of
publishing companies with which he was involved brought him
to the edge of bankruptcy. His journal, covering this
fraught period, makes moving reading. (One result,
benefitting all writers, was that
Scott's need for cash,
backed by his ability to command huge sales, induced larger
payments from publishers.)
Yet visitors to Abbotsford gained
an impression of a lairdly if not leisurely existence, as if
novel writing was a pastime undertaken on idle evenings.
Such was
Scott's output that it was suggested he must have
written many of his novels much earlier, and merely produced
them from a drawer on demand. Except for Waverley,
started and abandoned several years before it was published,
this was true only in the sense that much of
Scott's
material had long been stored away m his mind. Overwork was
responsible for serious physical ailments in 1817-19,
and the frenetic activity of his last years, when he might
have taken refuge in bankruptcy, but honourably insisted on
working to pay his debts, led to his final illness and
death. All creditors were paid in full.

Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet
"Ivanhoe"
THE NOVELIST
The success of Waverley, which sold out four editions
in its first year, turned
Scott permanently from poetry to
fiction. It was published anonymously: all
Scott's later
novels bore the phrase, 'by the author of Waverley',
and he did not publicly admit authorship until 1827. It
concerns a young, romantic army officer at the time of the
rebellion of 1745 who is attracted to the Jacobite cause.
The novels thereafter came thick (literally, for they are
immensely long) and fast. The majority, and on the whole the
best (Old Mortality, The Heart of Midlothian, Rob Roy,
Red Gauntlet), were also set in the Scotland of the
recent past. Those set in the Middle Ages (Ivanhoe,
The Talisman) lack some of the vigour and conviction of the
Scottish novels, although Kenilworth, set in
16th—17th century England, and Quentin Durward,
set in 15th-century France, albeit with many Scottish
characters, have been especially popular.
Scott's most obvious contribution to the development of the
novel was the addition of background.
Fielding and
Jane
Austen created characters within a restricted environment,
but
Scott presents a great social panorama, with picturesque
details drawn from his unrivalled knowledge and fertile
imagination as well as fine descriptions of landscape and
nature (ironically, a factor that probably alienates the
impatient modern reader). In his rich array of characters,
Scott surpasses
Dickens, though, like
Dickens, it may be
said against him that psychologically, his characters are
relatively superficial, their feelings and motives simple.
Scott was by nature perhaps too easy-going to deal with real
tragedy, or with spiritual agony, and religion meant little
to him. It has often been pointed out that his picture of
the Middle Ages virtually omits the period's most powerful
social institution, the Church. Modern historians can also
criticize
Scott on facts, but for good or ill, the popular -
not to say romantic and superficial - image of Scottish
history, perhaps even in Scotland, derives more from
Scott
than from the output of the historians. That mantle has, it
seems, been inherited by Hollywood, which in turn colours
our idea of
Scott. He was certainly a great story teller,
but he was also a serious writer with a deep concern for
history and society.
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O Caldeonia! stern and wild,
Meet nurse for a poetic child!
Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,
Land of the mountain and the flood,
Land of my sires! what mortal hand
Can e'er untie the filial band
That knits me to thy rugged strand!
Scott, The Lady of the Lake (1810), Canto VI.
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