The Romantic Period
1798—1832 Introduction
• the publication of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth & Coleridge in 1798 ------
the death of Sir Walter Scott in 1832
• The essence of this new movement is
--- the glorification of instinct & emotion, --- a deep veneration of nature,
--- a flaming zeal to remake the world.
Historical background
• The political & social factors that gave rise to the Romantic Movement were the three
revolutions.
(1) the American Revolutions (2) the French Revolutions
------ political reforms & mass demonstrations violently shook the very foundation of aristocratic rule in England. (3) the Industrial Revolution
--- It brought great wealth to the rich & worsened the working & living conditions of the poor.
• With the invention of new machines, many skilled workers were replaced by women & children, and working hours for young children lasted fourteen to sixteen hours a day.
• Ignorant of the real causes that brought them such disaster, workers in various places
attributed their miseries & growing poverty to the introduction of the new machines.
• Hence there broke out a machine-breaking movement, called the Luddite movement, named after Ned Ludd, who in a fit of temper, destroyed some stocking frames in 1779. • Workers organized themselves & gave voice to their distress by breaking machines. The riots
lasted from 1811 to 1818. The government took repressive measures against it. Intellectual background
• The shift in literature from emphasis on reason to instinct & emotion was intellectually
prepared for by a number of thinkers in the later half of the 18th century.
•
Rousseau(1712—1778), the French philosopher, is generally regarded as the father of
Romanticism.
--- He rejects the worship of reason. Reason, he maintains, has its use, but it is not the
whole answer.
• In the really vital problems of life it is much safer to rely on feelings, to follow our instincts and emotions. He contrasts the freedom & innocence of the primitive men with the tyranny & wickedness of civilized society, and even insists that the progress of learning is destructive to human happiness.
• He preaches that civilized man should ―return to nature‖, to a primitive state of life. He
praises the natural man as ―the noble savage‖ & attacks the civilized man as ―the depraved animal‖. The New Heloise (1761) & Emile (1762) sowed the seeds of Romanticism. (2) Edmund Burke (1729—1797) --- another thinker who contributed to this shift of
