Romanticism

Aidan Day

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136512766
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Romanticism was a revolutionary intellectual and artistic movement which generated some of the most popular and influential texts in British and American literary history. This clear and engaging guide introduces the history, major writers and critical issues of this crucial era. This fully updated second edition includes:

• Discussion of a broad range of writers including William Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, John Keats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, H.D. Thoreau, Frederick Douglas
• A new chapter on American Romanticism
• Discussion of the romantic sublime or romantic imagination
• An engagement with critical debates such as postcolonialism, gender studies and ecocriticism.

1

Enlightenment or Romantic?

In 1954 Robert Mayo published an important article in which he compared the poems published by Wordsworth and Coleridge as Lyrical Ballads with poems published in contemporary magazines and miscellanies. What Mayo discovered was that far from marking ‘the beginning of a new age’ the poems of Lyrical Ballads were in many respects the flowering of an already established age. By ‘age’, here, I do not mean to define the entirety of a culture. The taste and values that inform the Lyrical Ballads were not the sole, or even the prevailing, taste and values of later eighteenth-century British culture. But they were the taste and values of a significant part of that culture. And this part, as Mayo observes, expressed itself in periodical publications that were themselves a part of the cultural mainstream:

We have been asked to consider too exclusively the revolutionary aspects of the Lyrical Ballads…. there is a conventional side to the Lyrical Ballads, although it is usually overlooked…. they … conformed in numerous ways to the modes of 1798, and reflected popular tastes and attitudes…. There is in much of the magazine verse of the 1790s a literary lag of at least half a century. In his attacks on Pope, Gray, Prior, and Dr Johnson in the 1802 Appendix [to the third edition of Lyrical Ballads] Wordsworth was not exactly beating dead horses…. The insipidity of magazine poetry, however, is deceptive. It is not uniformly antique, and it is far from being homogeneous. A persistent minority … are occupied with new subjects of poetry and written in the new modes of the late eighteenth century…. With the poems of this minority the Lyrical Ballads have a great deal in common…. In general, the drift is in several directions only – towards ‘nature’ and ‘simplicity’, and towards humanitarianism and sentimental morality … the reader of that day would tend to construe most of the contents of the Lyrical Ballads in terms of these modes of popular poetry, with which he was already familiar.

(Mayo 1954: 486, 488–90)

In the pages that follow I am going to look in more detail at the two tendencies in which Mayo sees the Lyrical Ballads immersed: first, humanitarian sentiment and second, an emphasis on nature.

Humanitarianism

The drift towards humanitarianism noted by Mayo in 1790s poetry is evident in several poems from Lyrical Ballads. There is, for instance, Wordsworth’s ‘The Female Vagrant’. A version of this poem had formed part of a longer work, ‘Salisbury Plain’, which was initially composed, though not published, in 1793–94. The speaker of ‘The Female Vagrant’, the vagrant herself, recounts how her father, a poor cottager, was driven out of his property at the hands of a wealthy and acquisitive neighbour:

Then rose a mansion proud our woods among,

And cottage after cottage owned its sway,

No joy to see a neighbouring house, or stray

Through pastures not his own, the master took;

My Father dared his greedy wish gainsay;

He loved his old hereditary nook,

And ill could I the thought of such sad parting brook.

But, when he had refused the proffered gold,

To cruel injuries he became a prey,

Sore traversed in whate’er he bought and sold.

His troubles grew upon him day by day,

Till all his substance fell into decay.

His little range of water was denied;

All but the bed where his old body lay,

All, all was seized, and weeping, side by side,

We sought a home where we uninjured might abide.

(39–54; Brett and Jones 1976: 45–46)

The woman and her father found such a home through the man that the woman married. But this was no more than a temporary respite. After the death of her father a few years later an ‘evil time’ (91; Brett and Jones 1976: 47) returned and the woman and her three new children followed her husband who, of necessity, had to go to fight for the British during the American War of Independence (1775–81). Wordsworth’s disgust at such war emerges in the woman’s statements in the fourteenth stanza:

Oh! dreadful price of being to resign

All that is dear in being! better far

In Want’s most lonely cave till death to pine,

Unseen, unheard, unwatched by any star;

Or in the streets and walks where proud men are,

Better our dying bodies to obtrude,

Than dog-like, wading at the heels of war,

Protract a curst existence, with the brood

That lap (their very nourishment!) their brother’s blood.

(118–26; Brett and Jones 1976: 48–49)

The woman lost her husband and children ‘by sword/And ravenous plague’ (132–33; Brett and Jones 1976:49). She managed to return to England and was cast upon the life of destitute wandering that we find her living at the opening of ‘The Female Vagrant’. As she says in the penultimate stanza of the poem:

I lived upon the mercy of the fields,

And oft of cruelty the sky accused;

On hazard, or what general bounty yields,

Now coldly given, now utterly refused.

The fields I for my bed have often used.

(253–57; Brett and Jones 1976: 53–54)

R.L. Brett and A.R. Jones comment that as ‘The Female Vagrant’ stands in 1798 ‘it is clearly a product of the revolutionary Wordsworth, whose passionate humanitarianism leads him to write about the injustices of a social system which oppresses the poor and turns them into outcasts’ (Brett and Jones 1976: 280–81).

Alongside Wordsworth’s anger at social injustice in ‘The Female Vagrant’ may be placed Coleridge’s complaint, in ‘The Dungeon’, at the social forces – poverty and lack of education – that generate criminal behaviour and at the dehumanising prison conditions that convicted criminals are made to suffer:

And this place our forefathers made for man!

This is the process of our love and wisdom,

To each poor brother who offends against us –

Most innocent, perhaps – and what if guilty?

Is this the only cure? Merciful God?

Each pore and natural outlet shrivell’d up

By ignorance and parching poverty,

His energies roll back upon his heart,

And stagnate and corrupt; till changed to poison,

They break out on him, like a loathsome plague-spot;

Then we call in our pamper’d mountebanks –

And this is their best cure! Uncomforted

And friendless solitude, groaning and tears,

And savage faces, at the clanking hour,

Seen through the steams and vapour of his dungeon,

By the lamp’s dismal twilight! So he lies

Circled with evil, till his very soul

Unmoulds its essence, hopelessly deformed

By sights of ever more deformity!

(1–19; Brett and Jones 1976: 82)

Wordsworth and Coleridge’s humanitarian protests were poetically highly refined and often specially subtle. But there was nothing particularly original in the humanitarian topics themselves. Robert Mayo points out that

However much they may be rendered fresh and new by poetic treatment, it must be recognized that most of the objects of sympathy in [Lyrical Ballads] belong to an order of beings familiar to every reader of magazine poetry – namely, bereaved mothers and deserted females, mad women and distracted creatures, beggars, convicts and prisoners, and old people of the depressed classes, particularly peasants. For nearly every character, portrait, or figure, there is some seasoned counterpart in contemporary poetry…. Wordsworth’s Female Vagrant … is one of a familiar class of outcasts, the female beggar; and through that class she is associated with the long procession of mendicants who infested the poetry departments of the Lady’s Magazine, the Edinburgh Magazine, and other popular miscellanies in the last years of the eighteenth century. Some of the mendicant poems are merely portraits, which make blunt appeals to sympathy for the poor, the aged, and the unhappy (as does Wordsworth’s Old Man Travelling – more subtly); but others are narrative poems, sometimes, like The Female Vagrant, told in the first person and emphasizing the contrast between past joy and present sorrow, the horrors of war and its consequences, man’s treatment of man, and the indifference of society.

(Mayo 1954: 495, 500–501)

The fashionableness of humanitarian sympathy was part of the groundswell of radical political feeling in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the period which saw first the American War of Independence and then the French Revolution.

The success of the American colonies in achieving independence was seen by many as a vindication of basic human rights and it was celebrated by groups in Britain who were campaigning for reform in the system of Parliamentary representation, a system which had a restrictive base in the aristocracy and land-owning class. The reform movement drew heavily on the Nonconformist and Dissenting population of the country that suffered under legally inscribed civil and religious disabilities: the Corporation Act of 1661 and the Test Act of 1673 together proscribed dissenters from holding government office and from entering the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The reformist groups, stirred by the American example, gained further stimulation from the French Revolution and the first half of the 1790s was a momentous period for the radical cause in Britain. But while it was certainly encouraged by events in France, that cause was also to a large extent home-grown. Its shape in the 1790s was directed by the writings of a native Englishman who had spent the mid-1770s to the later 1780s in America. In 1776 Thomas Paine (1737–1809) published, in America, a pamphlet entitled Common Sense, which argued for equality of rights amongst American citizens, for American independence and for the establishment of a republican government on American soil. Paine’s most influential work in Britain, Rights of Man, was published in two parts, the first in 1791 and the second in 1792. Paine’s dissenting background (his father was a Quaker staymaker from Norfolk) and his reformist zeal bear witness to the way in which a native tradition of radical thought flowered in the light of the French Revolution. As E.P. Thompson has written in The Making of the English Working Class:

Too often events in England in the 1790s are seen only as a reflected glow from the storming of the Bastille. But the elements precipitated by the French example – the Dissenting and libertarian traditions – reach far back into English history. And the agitation of the 1790s, although it lasted only five years (1792–96) was extraordinarily intensive and far-reaching…. It was an English agitation, of impressive dimensions, for an English democracy.

Constitutionalism was the flood-gate which the French example broke down. But the year was 1792, not 1789, and the waters which flowed through were those of Tom Paine.

(Thompson 1991: 11...