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History of English Literature

Notes The American Revolution had lost for England her thirteen colonies. This was a great economic loss,
but it was also a loss of prestige and of confidence. The more radical revolution in France, which
started with the storming of the prison called the Bastille on July 14, 1789, had far more serious
repercussions. For the ruling classes in England, the French Revolution came to represent their
worst fears: the overthrow of an anointed king by a democratic “rabble.” To English conservatives,
the French Revolution meant the triumph of radical principles, and they feared that the revolutionary
fever would spread across the Channel.
But democratic idealists and liberals like Wordsworth felt exhilarated by the events in France.
During the revolution’s early years, they even made trips to France to view the “new regime” at
first hand, as if it were a tourist attraction like the Acropolis in Greece. Wordsworth later wrote,
“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!”
Even Wordsworth became disillusioned, however, when in 1792 the “September massacre” took
place in France. Hundreds of French aristocrats—some with only the slightest ties to the regime of
King Louis XVI—had their heads severed from their bodies by a grisly new invention, the guillotine.
And that wasn’t the end of it. In the midst of the blood and turmoil and calls from France for
worldwide revolution, control of the French government changed hands again. Napoleon
Bonaparte, an officer in the French army, emerged first as dictator and then, in 1804, as emperor of
France.

Notes In the end, Napoleon— whose very name today suggests a tyrant—became as ruthless
as the executed king himself.

All of these bewildering changes in Western Europe made conservatives in England more rigid
than ever. England instituted severe repressive measures: They outlawed collective bargaining
and kept suspected spies or agitators in prison without a trial. In 1803, England began a long war
against Napoleon. English guns first defeated Napoleon’s navy at the Battle of Trafalgar and,
finally, in 1815, with the help of allies, sent his army packing at Waterloo, Belgium.
The conservatives in England felt they had saved their country from a tyrant and from chaos; the
early supporters of the revolution, like Wordsworth, felt betrayed. For them, Waterloo was simply
the defeat of one tyrant by another.
The historical upper limit of this period is unmistakably the outbreak of the Colonists’ rebellion
in North America, their successful defence and their achievement of independence. The American
victory was a stimulus to those who for one reason or another felt confined by the existing
institutions the Dissenters, kept down by civil disabilities; the manufacturers, harassed by the
archaic excise system; the farmers by tithe and game laws; the lower middle class and working
classes by indirect taxes which weighed on every article of common use as well as on luxuries. All
this was imposed by a Parliament in which there was no representation of the ordinary people, the
productive classes, neither of masters nor men. Not a penny of the money collected was returned
as social services.
The chief subject of romantic literature was the essential nobleness of common men and the value
of the individual and the history which lies between the Declaration of Independence (1776) and
the English Reform Bill of 1832. We are in the presence of such mightly political upheavals that
“the age of revolution” is the only name by which we can adequately characterize it. Its great
historic movements become intelligible only when we read what was written in this period; for
the French Revolution and the American Commonwealth, as well as the establishment of a true
democracy in England by the Reform Bill were the inevitable results of ideas which literature had
spread rapidly through the civilized world. Liberty is fundamently an ideal; and that ideal—
beautiful, inspiring, compelling, as a loved banner in the wind was kept steadily before men’s
minds by a multitude of books and pamphlets as far apart as Burns’s Poems and Thomas Paine’s
Rights of Man,—all read eagerly by the common people, all proclaiming the dignity of common
life, and all uttering the same passionate cry against every form of class or caste oppression.

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