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Digvijay Pandya,LPU Unit 15: The Triumph of Romanticism (Social, Economic, Political and Cultural Conditions)

Unit 15: The Triumph of Romanticism Notes

(Social, Economic, Political and
Cultural Conditions)

CONTENTS
Objectives
Introduction
15.1 Social, Economic, Political and Cultural Conditions of Romanticism
15.2 Social Conditions in the 19th Century
15.2.1 Poverty and Slum Housing
15.2.2 Social Investigation
15.3 Summary
15.4 Keywords
15.5 Review Questions
15.6 Further Readings

Objectives

After studying this unit, you will be able to:
Describe casual work and cheap housing.
Define a political issue and open sewers.
Describe life and labour of the London poor.
Explain the french revolution.

Introduction
It is rarely that the perceptible limits of a literary ‘period coincide so closely with crucial political
events as is the case with what we call the Romantic Movement. The name is convenient; but it
would be misleading to give it any narrow meaning or to equate it with an ‘escapist’ or a past-
ward yearning. Almost all the ‘romantic’ writers were acutely ware of their environment, and
their best work came out of their impulse to come to terms with it.

15.1 Social, Economic, Political and Cultural Conditions of Romanticism

Beginning in America in 1776, an age of revolution swept across Western Europe, releasing political,
economic, and social forces that produced, during the next century, some of the most radical
changes ever experienced in human life. Another way to date the Romantic period is to say that it
started with the French Revolution in 1789 and ended with the Parliamentary reforms of 1832 that
laid the political foundations for modern Britain. The era was dominated by six poets: Three
(William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge) were born before the period
began and lived through most or all of it, while three others (the “second generation” of Percy
Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and George Gordon, Lord Byron) began their short careers in the
second decade of the new century but died before 1825. It was a turbulent, revolutionary age, one
in which England changed from an agricultural society to an industrial nation with a large and
restless working class concentrated in the teeming mill towns.

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