The Romantic Age (1776- 1837)

1. The Romantic Age(1776- 1837)

3. George III was king of Great Britain and Ireland from 1760-1820 during this period Britain continued to develop economically and politically. • The British population was divided into three social classes: • - The landowners and aristocracy: that had ruled the country for centuries and held most of the wealth. Its members were the only citizens who could vote. • - The businessmen and industrialists: that had brought about the Industrial Revolution. They were rich but they had no voting rights. • - The masses: they were poor, and left the countryside for work in the factories. • Economy continued to grow thanks to: • The colonies, that were a source of cheap raw materials. • The bank of England started to operate around the country. • The transport system was developed. • In agriculture, mechanisation meant that food could be produced cheaply and efficiently.

4. People continued to live and work in the same dreadful condition that the first industrial workers had had to endure in the middle of the eighteenth century. The cities became ever more overcrowded and unsanitary. Factory workers continued to slave in inhuman conditions for long hours on miserable pay. • For many people Britain’s new generation of Romantic poets expressed the unease that was felt at the excesses of industrialisation. The idyllic world of nature was an antidote to the grim realities of life in the cities. • Those who were horrified at the exploitation of factory workers and the degradation of the cities found inspiration in the ideals of the French Revolution. The toppling of a despotic regime by Napoleon’s republican forces was greeted by some in Britain as a chance to channel the discontent of the masses into social revolution. A high point in the protest movement was a rally near Manchester in 1819 to protest against the rise in the price of bread caused by a ban on the import of foreign corn (The First Corn Law, 1815). Eleven people were killed by the army in what is now know as the Peterloo massacre.

5. The government introduced many reforms: • - The Factory Act of 1833 limited working hours and children under nine could not work. • - In 1825 Trade Unions were recognised and factory owners formed their own associations. • - Businessmen and industrialists were given the vote in 1832. • - A police force was established in 1829. • - A local government was established in every town. • - A system of national primary education was set up in 1834.

6. The romantic period • The Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions of the eighteenth century changed Britain radically. A largely rural society became urban and industrialised. The social price for economic progress was high: many people lived and worked in appalling conditions. • By the end of the century many poets and artists had started reacting against the dehumanisation and regimentation of the new urban industrial society. They believed in the importance of the individual and in personal experience. These artists were called Romantics. The word “romantic” comes from the French word for medieval epic sagas, “roman”. Initially it meant “exaggerated, unconvincing”, but later it took on a positive meaning and was used to describe the expression of personal feelings and emotions. • Imagination had a special role for the Romantics. They viewed the artist as a creator who used his imagination to explore the unfamiliar and the unseen. The Romantic poets considered nature to be morally uplifting. In the new world of industrial squallor the Romantics took refuge and sought consolation and inspiration in nature.

7. The first generation poets • The Romantic poets are grouped into two generations. The poets of the first generation, William Blake, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, were influenced by the French Revolution, which they considered to be almost a physical realisation of the ideals of Romanticism. The enthusiasm for the French Revolution soon dissipated and within a decade disillusionment had set in. • William Blake’s life was spent in rebellion against the rational philosophy of the eighteenth century and restrictive influences of institutions such as government and the Church. Blake was aware of the negative effects of the rapidly developing industrial and commercial society, in which individuals became dehumanised. • William Wordsworth’s poetry emphasises the value of childhood experience and the celebration of nature. He glorifies the spirit of man, living in harmony with his natural environment, far from the spiritually bankrupt city. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poetry often deals with the mysterious, the supernatural end the extraordinary. While Wordsworth looked for the spiritual in everyday subjects, Coleridge wanted to give the supernatural a colouring of every day reality. In later life Coleridge claimed that poetic inspiration had deserted him and he turned his attention to literally criticism.

8. WilliamBlake (1757-1827) • Willian Blake was born in London in 1757, where he was raised in a state of economic hardship and where he received very little formal education. At the age of fourteen he became an apprentice in an engraver’s shop. • The year 1783 marked the beginning of a period of great creativity. He published his first volume of poetry and invented a new method of printing, the illuminated printing. • In 1789 he engraved and published his first great literaly work, Songs of Innocence, followed in 1794 by The Marriageof Heaven and Hell and Songs of Experience. • From 1810 to 1817 he lived in a dirty studio, completely cut off from the rest of the world, claiming that visions of angels, spirits, prophets and devils were inspiring his work. • After 1818 he stopped writing poetry but continued to produce engravings. • He died in 1827.

10. Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience • Blake’s greatness as one of the leading poets of English Romanticism is best expressed in his illuminated books: Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. They are visual and poetic masterpieces where art and text are inextricably linked and mutually enrich each other. • Many of the poems in Songs of Innocence are about childhood and are written in such simple language that it seems they could have been written by a child. These poems depict a world of Good where virtue and purity triumph. The meek and gentle Lamb is a symbol of this idyllic world of infancy. • Childhood comes to an end, and adulthood reveals a different world. In Songs of Experience Blake highlights how corruption, greed and violence take over the human soul and how individuals are exploited by a cruel world. • To show the dichotomy between Good and Evil in human life and within the human soul, Blake wrote pairs of poems that expressed opposing views on the same topic. In the Lamb from Songs of Innocence the reader is presented with an image of a gentle, benevolent, loving God. In the Tyger from Songs of Experience, God is vindictive and terrifying.

11. William Wordsworth (1770-1850) • William Wordsworth was born in 1770 in the Lake District. • When he was eight years old his mother died, and he lost his father five years later. • In 1787 Wordsworth entered Cambridge, but he was not particularly interested in his studies. While still a university student he went on a three-month walking tour of France, the Swiss Alps and Italy. • He returned to France for a year and became a passionate supporter of the democratic ideals of the French Revolution. Financial problems forced him to return to England, where he went to live with his sister Dorothy in a small village in Dorset. • He inherited a sum of money which he could live on and, in 1795, he met Coleridge. William and Dorothy went to live close to Coleridge. They produced the Lyrical Ballads in 1798, a landmark in English Romanticism. Later that year Wordsworth, Dorothy and Coleridge travelled to Germany. William and Dorothy moved to Grasmere. • In 1802 Wordsworth married a childhood friend and together they had five children. During this period, his reputation began to grow and his work became popular. His close friend Coleridge was experiencing serious health problems and the two became estranged, never to be fully reconciled. As his fame grew, Wordsworth became more conservative politically. • In 1840 he was awarded a government pension and the title of Poet Laureate. He died in 1850, a few days after his eightieth birthday.

12. Lyrical Ballads • The Lyrical Ballads are a collection of poems, written by Wordsworth and Coleridge, that marked the birth of Romanticism in English poetry. • Wordsworth’s poetry is best understood from a reading of his “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads which is often considered to be a sort of manifesto for the Romantic movement. In it, Wordsworth theorises about poetry concluding that: • - The language of poetry should be the simple language “really used by man”; • - The subject of poetry should consist of “incidents and situations from common life”; • - The poet’s imagination can reveal the inner truth of ordinary things to which the mind is habitually blind; • - Poetry takes its origin “from emotion recollected in tranquillity”; • - The poet is “a man speaking to men”. He uses his special gift to show other men the essence of things.

13. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) • Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in 1772, the youngest of ten children. When his father died he was sent away to a London charity school. He was an avid reader and bright student. In 1791 he went to Cambridge. Met the radical poet Robert Southey, whose sympathetic views on the French Revolution he shared. The two friends collaborated on a verse drama, The fall of Robespierre. • Coleridge left Cambridge without a degree and married Southey’s fiancée’s sister. The marriage was a failure. • In 1795 he met William Wordsworth, a poet with similar political and literary views. The result of their collaboration was the Lyrical Ballads, which opened with one of the four poems that Coleridge had contributed. • He also began three other ballads and composed his celebrate opium-vision Kubla khan. In 1798 he travelled to German. He had become disillusioned with the political radicalism inspired by the French Revolution and turned his attention to German philosophy. In 1800 he went to live in the Lake District. By this time he had become addicted to opium, which was the only relief he could find from the pain caused by his bad health. • Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge became known as The Lake Poets. In 1810 the friendship with Wordsworth came to a bitter end. His addiction to opium got worse producing terrible mood swings and making him unable to work productively. He went to live with a physician in London, he regained his health, worked as a journalist and gave lectures that established his reputation as a distinguished literally critic and he wrote his major prose work Biographia Literaria a series of dissertations on subjects ranging from literary criticism and philosophy to sociology.

14. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner • The Rime is told by the Ancient Mariner to a man who is on his way to a wedding. He once worked as a sailor on a ship that was blocked in by ice near the South Pole. Suddenly on albatross appeared out of the fog and was welcomed as a sign of good luck by the crew. • The ice split-open and the bird flew alongside the ship as it continued on its voyage. One day, for no reason, the Mariner shot and killed the albatross. The ship was blown north to the Equator into a horrible sea where there wasn’t wind. • The sailors said it was the Mariner who had brought about their bad luck, and hung the albatross around his neck so that he would never forget what a terrible thing he had done. All the sailors died and he saw no way out of hopeless situation until, one night he was so struck by the beauty of the water snakes that were swimming around the ship, that he blessed them. The albatross fell from his neck and the ship sailed home. He had been saved, but as a penance he now has to travel around the world and tell his story, which serves as a warning to everyone to love all God’s creatures.

15. Kubla Khan The poem describes an earthly paradise in the Orient. The pleasure-dome represents the final realisation of poetic work; the sacred river, the poet’s creative power and the subterranean sunless sea and the sunny garden in the daylight, the subconscious and conscious worlds of the poet. The chasm symbolizes the first unshaped drive of inspiration, while the fountain the poet’s inspiration. The damsel with a dulcimer is considered as a Muse, while the poet, in the act of creation, as an enchanter.

16. The Second generation poets • The poets of the second generation, Gorge Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, all had intense but short lives. They lived through the disillusionment of the post-revolutionary period, the savage violence of the terror and the threatening rise of the Napoleonic Empire. • George Gordon Byron was the prototype of the Romantic poet. He was heavily involved with contemporary social issues and like the heares of his long narrative poems, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan, was a melancholy and solitary figure whose action often defied social conventions. Like Shelley, he left England and live on the continent. He pursued adventure in Italy and Greece. • Percy Bysshe Shelley was the most revolutionary and non-conformist of the Romantic poets. He was an individualist and idealist who rejected the institutions of family, church, marriage, and the Christian faith and rebelled against all forms of tyranny. Shelley’s ideas were anarchic and he was considered dangerous by the conservative society of his time. Many of his poems address social and political issues. • John Keats had a really brief life. The main theme of his poetry is the conflict between the real world of suffering, death and decay and the ideal world of beauty, imagination and eternal youth.

17. George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) • George Gordon Byron (22 January 1788–19 April 1824), Lord Byron, was an English poet and a leading figure in Romanticism. Among Lord Byron's best-known works are the narrative poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan..Lord Byron's fame rests not only on his writings but also on his life, which featured extravagant living, numerous love affairs, debts and separation. • Byron was born in London in 1788. On 21 May 1798, the death of his great-uncle made him the 6th Baron Byron, inheriting Newstead Abbey in England. • He received his early formal education at Aberdeen Grammar School. In 1801 he was sent to Harrow, where he remained until 1805. After school he went on to Trinity College, Cambridge. Byron published many poems. From 1809 to 1811, Byron went on the Grand Tour then customary for a young nobleman. The Napoleonic Wars forced him to avoid most of Europe, and he instead turned to the Mediterranean. He travelled from England over Spain to Albania and spent time there and in Athens. On this tour, the first two cantos of his epic poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage were written, though some of the more risqué passages, such as those touching on pederasty, were suppressed before publication. • Some early verses which he had published in 1806 were suppressed. He followed those in 1807 with Hours of Idleness, which the Edinburgh Review, a Whig periodical, savagely attacked. In reply, Byron sent forth English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809).

18. After his return from his travels, the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage were published in 1812, and were received with acclaim. • Ultimately he was to live abroad to escape the censure of British society, where men could be forgiven for sexual misbehaviour only up to a point, one which Byron far surpassed. His private life was the source of much scandal. • In 1815 Byron tried to find stability in marriage, but his wife left him just before the birth of his daughter, Ada. He went to Geneva and became friends with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Shelley's wife-to-be Mary Godwin. He was also joined by Mary's step-sister, Claire Clairmont, with whom he had a daughter, Allegra. • Byron went to Venice where he lived with nineteen-year-old Countess Teresa Guiccioli and her rich, aged husband. Through Teresa and her family he joined a branch of the Carbonari, a group of conspirators which was fighting against the Austrian oppressors. • Byron’s health was not good, but when he heard that the Greeks were preparing a revolt against the Turks he joined the insurgents at Missolonghi. In 1824 he died, he was only thirty-six years old. His remains were sent back to England, while his heart was buried at Missolonghi. Byron served as a regional leader of Italy's revolutionary organization in its struggle against Austria, and later travelled to fight against the Turks in the Greek War of Independence, for which the Greeks consider him a national hero. He died from a febrile illness in Missolonghi.

19. Don Juan • The poem, an unfinished work, is an epic satire in ottava rima, where Byron uses his wit to expose the hypocrisy of a rich society, social and sexual conventions, and sentimentalism. Byron’s hero is a sort of energetic, boyish anti-hero. Byron indulges in repeated digressions, in which he speaks both of love, fame, politics, and of poetry in a conversational tone. • One of his most frequent targets are the Romantic poets of the first generation, whom he criticises not only for their poetic inclinations, but also for having turned away from the political ideals of their youth to support conservative views. • Although Byron falls chronologically into the period most commonly associated with Romantic poetry, much of his work looks back to the satiric tradition of Pope and Dryden. In Canto III of Don Juan, he expresses his detestation for poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge.

20. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) • Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1792 into a prosperous aristocratic family. • He was educated at Oxford where his political and philosophical readings led him to co-write a dissertation, The Necessity of Atheism, for which the Oxford authorities expelled him. Shelley’s father demanded a public retraction of the pamphlet, but Shelley refused and instead eloped to Scotland with the sixteen-years-old daughter of a coffee house proprietor. • He returned to Wales, where he tried to set up a commune of “like spirits”. During this period he wrote pamphlets promoting “free love” and condemning royalty, meat-eating and religion. • In 1814 he moved to London, where he came under the influence of the philosopher William Godwin and fell in love with his daughter, Mary. The death of his grandfather solved Shelley’s financial problems and allowed him and Mary to elope abroad. • Having travelled around Europe, they settled in Geneva where, in Summer of 1816, they where joined by Lord Byron. Disillusioned with Britain, Shelley moved with his family to Italy. • In 1822 he moved his family to Lerici. In August 1822 he drowned in the bay of La Spezia. His body was cremated on the beach at Viareggio in the presence of Byron and other friends.

21. Defence of Poetry • “Poetry is something divine. It is at once the centre and the, and that to which all science must be referred circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science.” • It is “the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.” • “A poet is the author to others of the highest wisdom, virtue, pleasure and glory.” “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

22. Ozymandias • The fragment is a melancholy meditation on the inevitable fate of all human actions, doomed to oblivion. The whole poem is wrapped in a mysterious atmosphere: the land where the broken statue lies is an ancient desert, windless, as still as the lifeless wreck. Of the colossal work only two trunkless legs and a shattered visage remain. The passions of that powerful king can still be seen on the “wrinkled lip” and the “sneer of cold command”, which the ancient sculptor read and tried to stamp on the visage of the statue. Nothing else remains, and also what art meant to preserve to immortality is destined to decay, symbolized by the “lone and level sands” of the last line. It’s a sad poem, a poem of death.

24. John Keats (1795-1821) • John Keats was born in London. His early life was marked by a series of personal tragedies: his father was killed when he was eight years old, his mother died when he was fourteen and one of his younger brothers died in infancy. • He received relatively little formal education and at age sixteen he became an apprentice to an apothecary –surgeon. • In 1816 Keats obtained a licence to practise as an apothecary, but abandoned the profession for poetry. • He became friends with Shelley. He met several of the great literary figure of the day including Wordsworth, who exercised an important influence on his approach to writing poetry. • Despite frequent and persistent periods of illness, Keats dedicate himself to writing, and in the Great Year (1819) he produced some of his finest works, including his five great odes: Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to Psyche, To Autumn, Ode on Melancholy, and Ode to Nightingale. • In 1820 he settled in Rome, where he died in February.

25. Ode on a Grecian Urn • Keats became enchanted with Greek art after seeing an exposition of scultures from the Parthenon, held at the British Museum. His poem "Ode on a Greacian Urn" written in 1820, is dedicated to an urn that exsist only in his mind. The ancient work of art embodies an ideal of ablsolute, perfect and eternal beauty. This is the only truth to which man can aspire. This ideal is expressed by the silent immobility of the dancers and the musicians painted on the urn. • The poem is about a marble Grecian urn. Various pastoral scenes, that are painted on the urn are described, as the poet reflects on the transient nature of human life. The Ode is ideally divided into two parts, describing two separate scenes on the two sides of the urn. In the first stanza, the poet considers the urn as a living creature; in fact he calls it bride, child and historian. He concludes that while everything is destined to decay, the beauty of art alone lives on forever.

26. Romantic fiction • By the beginning of the nineteenth the novel had became a major literary form. Three types of novel flourished in Romantic period: the historical novel, the gothic novel and the novel of manners. • Sir Walter Scott is generally regarded as the inventor of the historical novel. He used well-known historical figures, and gave a complete panorama of the political and social context in which they lived. The two major Romantic elements in Scott’s work are the descriptions of nature and the lives of ordinary people. • The public taste for Gothic novels, which had first appeared in the second half of the eighteenth century, continued throughout the Romantic period. Gothic novels were based on tales of macabre, fantastic and supernatural settings. The greatest Gothic novel of the Romantic period is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. • The novel of manners was another popular form of fiction during the Romantic period. Although little influenced by the Romantic trends of her period, Jane Austen stands out as one of the Romantic Age’s greatest writers. Her works are basically classical in that every character must conform to social conversation. The setting are invariably rural and middle class and the concerns are property, decorum, money and marriage. Although Jane Austen was admired in her lifetime, she failed to achieve the high popularity of her contemporaries because she didn’t indulge in fashionable Romantic trends.

27. Mary Shelley (1797-1851) • Mary Shelley was born in London in 1797 to well-known parents. Her father, William Godwin, was a radical writer and philosopher, while her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was a pioneer of women’s liberation. She was surrounded by famous philosophers, writers and poets. • At the age of sixteen, she ran away with the twenty- one- years- old poet Percy Shelley. The poet was already married and their relationship shocked society, so she became a social outcast. • The idea to writing Frankenstein came to Mary when she was on holiday in Switzerland in 1816 with Lord Byron and Shelley. • They moved to Italy, but their stay there was not a happy one. Three of their four children died. When Mary was twenty-four years old her husband drowned near La Spezia. • She return to England, where she devoted herself to her son’ welfare and education and continued her career as a professional writer. She died in 1851.

28. Frankenstein • Victor Frankenstein is born and grows up in Geneva before going to university in Ingolstadt. He soon dedicates all his efforts to finding the secret of life. After many years of work, the creature ha has been working on comes to life, but Victor is horrified when he sees how grotesque it is. • The monster escapes and lives alone and isolated in a forest for many years. A family live in a cottage nearby; he watches them secretly as they go about their daily business and gradually grows fond of them. • One day he finds a book written by Victor Frankenstein and realises how he has been created. He loses any faith in humanity and sets out to get revenge on his creator. • The scientist follows the monster to the artic and vows, to destroy him, but dies in the attempt to find him while his monstrous creation wanders off into the icy wastes, never to be seen again.

29. Jane Austen (1775-1817) • Jane Austen was born on 16th Decembe 1775, in the village of Steventon, in Hampshire. • As a young woman, she enjoyed dancing at local balls, walking in the Hampshire countryside and visiting friends. She was very familiar with eighteenth-century novels. • Through her active social life, she met many men who wanted to marry her, but she remained single all her life. She started writing in her early teens. • Her earliest works including parodies of the literature of the day and were written for the amusement of her family. In the period between 1811 and 1817 she wrote her six major novels. • In 1816 her health began to fail and in 1817 she went to Winchester in search of medical attention, but she died there after two months. She was buried in Winchester cathedral.

30. Pride and Prejudice • The Bennets have five daughters and Mrs Bennet’s driving ambition is to see all of them married. Charles Bingley has come to live nearby with his friend Darcy. When Darcy realises that Charles likes Jane Bennet, he does his best to separate them on the grounds that her family are socially inferior. • He himself likes Elizabeth Bennet, but when he says so to her, she says she can have nothing to do with someone who looks down on her family. She changes her mind about him, however, when she learns that he has helped another sister, Lydia, who had eloped with a military officer, and the story ends happily with a double wedding between Charles and Jane, and Elizabeth and Darcy.

32. END BY Peluso Anastasialucia and Sciacca Giuselene