The romantic period

The Romantic Period (cap. 4)

The Romantic Period witnessed enormous political and social upheaval with such political events and social processes as the American and French revolutions, the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, the prosecution and criticism of the transatlantic slave trade, the Great Reform Act of 1832, the Industrial Revolution and much more.

Also Britain transformed itself into a global superpower thanks to American colonies that became a new empire and this led to the creation of a new national identity.

Historical overview

At the beginning of the Romantic Period, Britain was still an agrarian economy with much of the population employed as rural workers or in domestic service.

In the 18th century there was no real class consciousness and Britain had a limited aristocracy, but with the rapid process of industrialization a new social class was created: professional people such as merchants, rural and urban workers.

This process led, in the last decades of the century, to a dramatic growth of the population, which rose to 2.4 million people.

The increasing size of the population expanded the labour force as well as the demand for goods and services.

The economical benefits reduced the cost of labour and of the goods and services produced but accelerated the industrial process.

Also urbanisation increased the concentration of the population in large cities and towns which grew bigger and bigger. However, the unhealthy living conditions in towns were uncontrollable by the absence of building codes and the lack of machinery for public sanitation.

In addition to a new factory-owning bourgeoisie, the industrial revolution created a new working class that included men, women and children, labouring in the textile mills, pottery works and mines, working in unpleasant and dangerous conditions.

Also the transportation field evolved thanks to the invention of railway trains and there were substantial changes in agriculture as the countryside was transformed. Agrarian capitalism reached a period of development in crisis with the growth of a class of agricultural workers who possessed only their labour to sell to tenant farmers.

Also 18th-century Britain became a society with a marked difference between two spheres of activity:

• The public, in which development expanded the growth of political, civil and intellectual life, thanks also to the birth of the coffee house as a venue for reading and debating.
• The private sphere, on the contrary, involved family lives and education of children.

These two spheres were gendered as masculine and feminine. In fact, women were considered guardians of morality but not of political action; they devoted themselves to domestic life and did not have to interfere in the public sphere.

This is also generally known as the authoritarian and patriarchal family that gave way to a more closely entwined unit to be held together by the values of affective individualism based on respect, loyalty and filial obedience.

Belief and thought

The canonical romantic poets were building a fun and reacting against the thought of their predecessors, in opposition to the Enlightenment.

The writers and the thinkers of the Enlightenment imagined themselves as emerging from centuries of darkness and ignorance into a new age enlightened by reason, science and the respect for humanity.

The romantic period, on the other hand, witnessed the transformation in ideas about science.

In the 18th century this body of thoughts and practices was known as natural philosophy, an inquiry into the powers of the natural world demonstrating the splendours of God’s creation.

The 19th century saw the divergence of knowledge into separate disciplines supported by discrete associations and bodies with distinct and specialised agendas and instruments. This witnessed many key developments in scientific discovery; there were major advances in the fields of mathematics, physics, chemistry, optics, electromagnetism and biology.

The origins of human life and the place of humanity in the natural order also vexed the natural philosophers. The science of co