The Early and Romantic Age

The early romantic age (1760 – 1789)

Debate on independence and equality

4th July 1776 America’s Declaration of Independence.

Britain continued to struggle against France. Britain was superior in world trade, leading to the Navigation Acts.

Physical and industrial changes

There was a physical change in the country: population was rising with the first textile factories, coal mines, new roads, and canals marking the industrial and agricultural revolutions.

New machines and rational division of work emerged.

New cultural and literary trends

There was a new taste for wild and exotic travels. Literature began to focus on the use of the senses and emotion rather than reason.

The new vision of nature was not anymore a set of divine principles set by God, but something real and living. Emotion vs. reason became a central theme.

There was a new sensibility, with no supremacy of reason as the only way to knowledge and progress, which was contrary to the Enlightenment. Instead, there was a focus on the impression of the senses.

There was a growing interest in humble and everyday life, in melancholy and sadness, and a rediscovery of the art, architecture, and legends of the Middle Ages, known as the Gothic.

The sublime and Gothic novels

The sublime: Burke’s idea of the sublime was opposed to the idea of beauty. It is a feeling of horror and fear created by what is infinite and terrible. The taste for obscurity, terror, and introspection became fundamental in Gothic novels.

Gothic novels expressed a taste for the strange and mysterious, an impulse for freedom, and an escape from the world. They were a sort of reaction against industrialization and a denunciation of social problems.

Thomas Gray (1716 – 1771)

Gray was a transitional poet with Romantic subjects but neoclassical style, without the use of everyday language.

He used the first person singular to express emotions, foreshadowing Romantic writers.

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

This work is in the traditional form of the elegy, lamenting someone’s death, written after his best friend's death.

It is a meditation on universal themes such as man’s destiny, equality, and ambition.

The content includes the contemplation of a country churchyard at twilight, a description of rural people, and meditation on the value of the tomb as a link between the living and the dead.

It was written in quatrains of ten-syllable lines.

William Blake (1757 – 1827)

Blake came from humble origins and a poor family. He was an engraver and a supporter of the French Revolution and the abolition of slavery.

He created a new kind of art focused on the power of the imagination, with a new role for the artist as a prophet of the imagination who can see deeply into reality.

Blake had a strong sense of religion, with the Bible as his main literary influence. He was a lover of the Gothic style, with an idea of living art in contrast with the mechanical art of Classicism. He rejected neoclassical literary style and themes.

He had a vision of ‘complementary opposites’: good and evil, male and female, reason and imagination. The existence of opposites is fundamental for progression and knowledge.

He wrote two collections of short lyrical verses: Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience.

Songs of Innocence (1789)

This collection uses a pastoral mode where the narrator is a shepherd who receives inspiration from a child. There is a large use of symbolic imagery (lambs, flowers, children). Childhood is seen as a symbol of innocence, a state of happiness, freedom, and inspiration.

Songs of Experience (1794)

Here, the narrator is a bard who questions the themes of the previous collection. There is a pessimistic view of life, with adulthood seen as the opposite of innocence, experience.

Mary Shelley (1797 – 1851)

Her house was visited by some of the most famous writers of that time. She was the daughter of a philosopher and a writer and married Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, a novel.

Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (1818)

The plot revolves around Frankenstein, a scientist who creates a human being that soon becomes a monster and a murderer, ultimately killing his creator.

There is tension between an interest in revolutionary ideas and fear of them, characteristic of English intellectuals of the time.

The novel shows interest in science, chemistry, evolutionism, and electricity. The monster can be seen as Rousseau’s noble savage, and the influence of the philosopher Locke is evident in the monster’s self-awareness and education by experience. The influence of Romantic poets is seen in their discussions of crimes against nature.

It draws on the myth of Prometheus, who challenged the gods.

The form of the novel is epistolary, and the main theme is the double. Other themes include forbidden knowledge, penetration of nature’s secrets, the usurpation of the female role (the monster was created without the participation of a woman), social prejudices (the monster is an outcast), education, and experience.