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History of English Literature

Notes genius has caused their age to be known as the second creative period of English Literature. Thus in
the early days, when old institutions seemed crumbling with the Bastille, Coleridge and Southey
formed their youthful scheme of a “Tantisocracy on the banks of the Susquehanna.”—an ideal
commonwealth, in which the principles of More’s Utopia should be put in practice. Even Wordsworth,
fired with political enthusiasm, could write,
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive
But to be young was very heaven.
The essence of Romanticism was, it must be remembered, that literature must reflect all that is
spontaneous and unaffected in nature and in man and be free to follow its own fancy in its own
way. In Coleridge we see this independence expressed in Kubla Khan and The Ancient Mariner,
two dream pictures, one of the populous Orient, the other of the lonely sea. In Wordsworth this
literary independence led him inward to the heart of common things. Following his own instinct,
as Shakespeare does he too find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks. Sermons in stones,
and good in everything.
And so more than any other writer of the age, he in vests the common life of nature, and the souls
of common men and women, with glorious significance.

Notes Coleridge and Wordsworth, best represent the romantic genius of the age in which
they lived, though Scott had a greater literary reputation, and Byron and Shelley had
larger audiences.

The second characteristic of this age is that it is emphatically an age of poetry. The previous
century, with its practical outlook on life, was largely one of prose; but now as in the Elizabethan
Age, the young enthusiasts turned as naturally to poetry as a happy man to singing. The glory of
the age is in the poetry of Scott, Wordsworth. Coleridge. Byron, Shelley, Keats and others. Of its
prose works those of Jane Austen, Scott and Charles Lamb had attained a wide reading. It was
characteristic of the spirit of the age, so different from our own that Southey could say that, in
order to earn money, he wrote in verse “what would otherwise have been better written in
prose.”

Literary Criticism

In this age literary criticism became firmly established by the appearance of such magazines as the
Edinburgh Review (1802), The Quarterly Review (1808), and Blackwood’s Magazine (1817). The
Westminster Review (1824), the Spectator (1828). The Athenaeum (1828), and Eraser’s Magazine
(1830). These magazines, edited by such men as Francis Jeffrey. John Wilson (who is known to us
as Christoper North), and John Gibson Lockhart, who gave us the Life of Scott, exercised an
immense influence on all subsequent literature. At first their criticisms were largely destructive,
as when Jeffrey hammered Scott, Wordsworth and Byron most unmercifully and Lockhart could
find no good in Keats: but with added wisdom, criticism assumed its true function of construction.
And when magazines began to seek and to publish the works of unknown writers, like Hazlitt,
Lamb and Leigh Hunt, they discovered the chief mission of the modern magazines which is to give
every writer of ability the opportunity to make his work known to the world.

15.3 Summary

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.
The 1890 Housing Act made it the responsibility of local councils to provide decent accom-
modation for local people.
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