Page 124 - DENG402_HISTORY_OF_ENGLISH_LITERATURE

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

Notes

Task Write a short note on the peried history of romanticism.

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
1. The .................... had lost for England her thirteen colonies.
2. In 1803, England began a long war against .................... .
3. Democratic idealists and liberals like wordsworth felt exhilarated by the events in .................... .
4. Even wordsworth became disillusioned, however, when in 1792 the .................... took place
in France.
5. The Novelist charles Dickens visited .................... in 1857.
6. Canning Town is the child of the .................... .

The French Revolution
The half century between these two events is one of great turmoil, yet of steady advance in every
department of English life. The storm centre of the political unrest was the French Revolution, that
frightful uprising which proclaimed the natural rights of man and the abolition of class distinctions.
Its effect on the whole civilized world is beyond computation. Patriotic clubs and societies multiplied
in England, all asserting the doctrine of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, the watchwords of the
Revolution. Young England, led by Pitt the younger, hailed the new French Republic and offered
it friendship; old England, which pardons no revolutions but her own looked with horror on the
turmoil in France and misled by Burke and the nobels of the realm, forced the two nations into
war. Even Pitt saw a blessing in this at first; because the sudden zeal for fighting a foreign nation—
which by some horrible perversion is generally called patriotism might turn men’s thoughts from
their own to their neighbour’s affairs, and so prevent a threatened revolution at home.

Economic Conditions
The causes of this threatened revolution were not political but economic. By her inventions in steel
and machinery, and by her monopoly of the carrying trade, England had become “the workshop
of the world.” Her wealth had increased beyond her wildest dreams: but the unequal distribution
of that wealth was a spectacle to make angels weep. The invention of machinery at first threw
thousands of skilled hand-workers out of employment; in order to protect a few agriculturists,
heavy duties were imposed on corn and wheat, and bread rose to famine prices just when labouring
men had the least money to pay for it. There followed a curious spectacle. When England increased
in wealth and spent vast sums to support her army and sub-sidize her allies in Europe, and while
nobles, landowners, manufacturers, and merchants lived in increasing luxury, a multitude of
skilled labourers were clamouring for work. Fathers sent their wives and little children into the
mines and factories, where sixteen hours’ labour would hardly pay for the daily bread; and in
every large city were riotous mobs made up chiefly of hungry men and women. It was this
unbearable economic condition, and not any political theory, as Burke supposed, which occasioned
the danger of another English revolution.
Literary Characteristics of the Age

It is intensely interesting to note how literature at first reflected the political turmoil of the age; and
then. When the turmoil was over and England began her mighty world of reform, how literature
suddenly developed a new creative spirit, which shows itself in the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge.
Byron. Shelley, Keats, and in the prose of Scott, Jane Austen. Lamb. Hazlitt and De Quincey.—a
wonderful group of writers, whose patriotic enthusiasm suggests the Elizabethan days, and whose

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