Romantic Period Literature – English UGC NET – Notes

Romantic Period (1798–1832): Important Social, Political & Literary Events

Beginning of the Romantic Movement:

• 1798 — Publication of Lyrical Ballads (Beginning of the Romantic Movement); Battle of the Nile; Irish Rebellion; growth of the Industrial Revolution.

Early 19th Century: War & Political Change

• 1800 — Act of Union with Ireland.

• 1802 — Peace of Amiens; foundation of the Edinburgh Review.

• 1803 — War with France renewed; Napoleon Bonaparte becomes Emperor (1804).

• 1805 — Nelson’s Victory at Trafalgar.

• 1806 — End of the Holy Roman Empire.

• 1807 — Abolition of the Slave Trade.

• 1808 — Beginning of the Peninsular War.

• 1809 — Foundation of the Quarterly Review.

• 1811 — Luddite Riots.

• 1812 — French Retreat from Moscow.

Napoleonic Era & Aftermath:

• 1814 — Napoleon Abdicates; restoration of Louis XVIII.

• 1815 — Battle of Waterloo; defeat of Napoleon; Corn Law passed.

• 1817 — Habeas Corpus Act Suspended; foundation of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine.

• 1818 — Habeas Corpus Act Restored.

• 1819 — Peterloo Massacre.

Late Romantic Period: Reform & Social Change:

• 1820 — Death of George III; accession of George IV.

• 1821 — Death of Napoleon Bonaparte.

• 1824 — Opening of the National Gallery; foundation of the Westminster Review.

• 1825 — Financial Crisis; Trade Unions Legalized.

• 1827 — Battle of Navarino; Sir Walter Scott acknowledges authorship of the Waverley Novels.

• 1829 — Catholic Emancipation Act.

• 1830 — Death of George IV; accession of William IV; agitation for Parliamentary Reform.

• 1831 — Reform Bills introduced (failed).

• 1832 — Reform Act (Great Reform Act) passed (End of the Romantic Period).

Major Literary Figures and their Works

William Wordsworth (1770–1850):

Major Long Poems:

• The Prelude (1805)

• The Excursion (1814)

• The White Doe of Rylstone (1815)

• Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822)

Lyrical & Narrative Poems:

• Tintern Abbey

• Ode on Intimations of Immortality

• The Daffodils

• The Solitary Reaper

• Resolution and Independence

• Michael

• Lucy Gray

• We Are Seven

• The World Is Too Much with Us

• To Milton

• Upon Westminster Bridge

• She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways

Early Works:

• An Evening Walk (1793)

• Descriptive Sketches (1793)

James Hogg (1770–1835):

• The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)

• Kilmeny

• The Queen’s Wake

Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) – Father of the Historical Novel

Poetry:

• The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805)

• Marmion (1808)

• The Lady of the Lake (1810)

Major Novels:

• Waverley (1814)

• Guy Mannering (1815)

• Old Mortality (1816)

• Rob Roy (1818)

• The Heart of Midlothian (1818)

• Ivanhoe (1820)

• Kenilworth (1821)

• The Talisman (1825)

• Woodstock (1826)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) – Poet & Critic of Romanticism

Poetry:

• The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

• Kubla Khan (1816)

• Christabel (1816)

• Dejection: An Ode

• Frost at Midnight

Prose & Criticism:

• Biographia Literaria (1817)

• Aids to Reflection

• Table Talk

Co-author of Lyrical Ballads (1798).

Robert Southey (1774–1843) – Poet Laureate

• Thalaba the Destroyer (1801)

• The Curse of Kehama (1810)

• Roderick, the Last of the Goths (1814)

• Life of Nelson

Jane Austen (1775–1817) – Novelist of Manners

• Sense and Sensibility (1811)

• Pride and Prejudice (1813)

• Mansfield Park (1814)

• Emma (1816)

• Northanger Abbey (1818)

• Persuasion (1818)

Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864):

• Imaginary Conversations (1824–46)

• Rose Aylmer

Charles Lamb (1775–1834) – Essayist

• Tales from Shakespeare (1807)

• The Essays of Elia (1823)

• The Last Essays of Elia (1833)

• Specimens of English Dramatic Poets (1808)

Thomas Campbell (1777–1844)

• The Pleasures of Hope

• Lord Ullin’s Daughter

• Ye Mariners of England

• Hohenlinden

Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775–1818)

• The Monk (1797)

• Tales of Terror (1800)

• Tales of Wonder (1801)

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) – Romantic Essayist & Critic

• Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1817)

• The Round Table (1817)

• The English Poets (1818)

• The English Comic Writers (1819)

• The Spirit of the Age (1825)

• Table Talk (1822)

Thomas Moore (1779–1852):

• Irish Melodies (1807–35)

• Lalla Rookh (1817)

• The Fudge Family in Paris (1818)

• Life of Byron (1830)

Leigh Hunt (1784–1859):

• The Examiner (1808)

• The Story of Rimini

• Autobiography

Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) – Satirical Novelist

• Nightmare Abbey (1818)

• Headlong Hall (1816)

• Crotchet Castle (1831)

• The Four Ages of Poetry

Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859):

• Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821)

• On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts

• The English Mail-Coach

Lord Byron (1788–1824) – Revolutionary Romantic Poet

• Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812)

• Don Juan (1819)

• Manfred (1817)

• The Giaour (1813)

• The Corsair (1814)

• Cain (1821)

• The Prisoner of Chillon

Henry Hart Milman (1791–1868):

• The History of the Jews (1829)

• The History of Latin Christianity

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) – Idealist Romantic Poet

• Prometheus Unbound (1818–19)

• The Mask of Anarchy (1819)

• Adonais (1821)

• Ode to the West Wind

• To a Skylark

• Ozymandias

• Hymn to Intellectual Beauty

• The Cloud

• The Cenci (1819)

• A Defence of Poetry (1821)

• Queen Mab (1813)

John Clare (1793–1864):

• Poems Descriptive of Rural Life (1820)

• The Shepherd’s Calendar (1827)

John Gibson Lockhart (1794–1854):

• Life of Scott

• Life of Burns

John Keats (1795–1821) – Poet of Beauty & Sensuousness

• Endymion (1818)

• Hyperion (1819)

• The Eve of St. Agnes (1819)

• La Belle Dame sans Merci

• Ode to a Nightingale

• Ode on a Grecian Urn

• Ode to Autumn

• To Psyche

• When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be

• On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer

Mary Shelley (1797–1851):

• Frankenstein (1818)

Thomas Hood (1799–1845):

• The Song of the Shirt

• The Bridge of Sighs

Other Minor Writers of the Age:

• William Cobbett — Political Register, Rural Rides

• Maria Edgeworth — Castle Rackrent (1800), Belinda (1801)

• James Montgomery — The West Indies

• Reginald Heber — Palestine

• John Keble — The Christian Year (1827)

• Mrs. Hemans — The Siege of Valencia (1823)

• Robert Bloomfield — The Farmer’s Boy (1798)

• Thomas Lovell Beddoes — Death’s Jest Book

Important Continental & Related Works

• Goethe — Faust (1808)

• Hannah More — Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1809)

• Charles Maturin — Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)

• Galt — The Entail (1822)

This phase of the Romantic Age highlights:

• Rise of Subjectivity & Imagination

• Growth of Lyric Poetry

• Development of the Historical & Gothic Novel

• Strong Political Idealism (Shelley, Byron)

• Emphasis on Nature, Beauty & Individual Emotion (Wordsworth, Keats)

Romantic Period

• Many scholars say that the Romantic Period began with the publication of Lyrical Ballads (1798) by William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge. The volume contained some of the best-known works from these two poets, including Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Wordsworth’s Lines Written a Few Miles from Tintern Abbey.
• Of course, other literary scholars place the start of the Romantic Period much earlier (around 1785), since Robert Burns’s Poems (1786), William Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789), Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and other works already demonstrate that a change had taken place — in political thought and literary expression. Other first generation Romantic writers include Charles Lamb, Jane Austen, and Sir Walter Scott.
• A discussion of the period is also somewhat more complicated, since there was a second generation of Romantics (made up of poets Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats). The main members of this second generation, though geniuses, died young and were outlived by the first generation of Romantics. Mary Shelley, still famous for Frankenstein (1818), was also a member of this second generation of Romantics.
• While there is some disagreement about when the period began, the general consensus is that the Romantic Period ended in 1837 with the coronation of Queen Victoria and the beginning of the Victorian Period. The Romantic era followed the Neoclassical era, which was known for its wit and satire, especially in the works of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. However, the Romantic Period introduced a different poetic spirit.
• In the backdrop of these new Romantic writers, who were writing their way into literary history, the world stood on the edge of the Industrial Revolution, and writers were deeply influenced by the French Revolution. William Hazlitt, in his book The Spirit of the Age, stated that the Wordsworth school of poetry “had its origin in the French Revolution… it was a time of promise, a renewal of the world — and of letters.”
• Instead of embracing politics as writers of some other eras might have (and indeed some writers of the Romantic era did), the Romantics turned to Nature for self-fulfillment. They moved away from the values and ideas of the previous era, embracing new ways of expressing their imagination and feelings. Instead of concentrating on the head — the intellectual focus of reason — they relied on the self, advancing the radical idea of individual freedom. Rather than striving for perfection, the Romantics celebrated “the glory of the imperfect.”
• The term Romanticism has been defined in many different ways. Walter Pater calls it the “addition of strangeness to beauty.” Theodore Watts-Dunton describes it as the “renaissance of wonder.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe contrasts Romanticism with Classicism, stating, “Romanticism is disease, Classicism is health,” thus emphasizing the imperfection and incompleteness of romantic art.
• Lascelles Abercrombie stresses the subjective element of Romanticism, describing it as a withdrawal from outer experience to inner experience. He highlights vagueness, indefiniteness, and a tendency to disregard reality as essential characteristics of the Romantic spirit.
• Heinrich Heine, Henry A. Beers, and William Lyon Phelps define Romanticism as the “re-awakening of the Middle Ages.” Victor Hugo sees the democratic spirit as the most significant aspect of Romantic art, calling it “Liberalism in Literature.” C. H. Herford refers to it as an extraordinary development of imaginative sensibility. Émile Legouis and Louis Cazamian emphasize both the emotional and imaginative elements, describing Romanticism as an “accentuated predominance of emotional life, provoked and directed by the exercise of imaginative vision.”
• However, all these definitions are partial and unsatisfactory, since each highlights only one element of this complex literary movement rather than presenting a composite view. Therefore, it is more useful to consider the salient features of English Romanticism instead of attempting to define it in rigid or concrete terms.