30 Great Myths about the Romantics

Duncan Wu

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781118843192, 9781118843260
• eBook ISBN: 9781118843185
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Brimming with the fascinating eccentricities of a complex and confusing movement whose influences continue to resonate deeply, 30 Great Myths About the Romantics adds great clarity to what we know – or think we know – about one of the most important periods in literary history.

• Explores the various misconceptions commonly associated with Romanticism, offering provocative insights that correct and clarify several of the commonly-held myths about the key figures of this era

• Corrects some of the biases and beliefs about the Romantics that have crept into the 21st-century zeitgeist – for example that they were a bunch of drug-addled atheists who believed in free love; that Blake was a madman; and that Wordsworth slept with his sister

• Celebrates several of the mythic objects, characters, and ideas that have passed down from the Romantics into contemporary culture – from Blake's Jerusalem and Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn to the literary genre of the vampire

• Engagingly written to provide readers with a fun yet scholarly introduction to Romanticism and key writers of the period, applying the most up-to-date scholarship to the series of myths that continue to shape our appreciation of their work

Myth 1

Romanticism began in 1798

Once upon a time, as Karl Kroeber has observed, ‘Romanticism was five poets, a Scottish novelist nobody read, and the years 1798–1832’.¹

Even today, there are numerous authorities that proudly declare, with the Routledge History of Literature in English (2nd ed., 2001), that ‘the period begins in 1798’;² with the more recent Britannica Guide to World Literature (2011), that ‘Lyrical Ballads (1798) [began] the Romantic movement’;³ or with the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, that ‘British Romanticism … [has a] commonly accepted founding date of 1798 (the publication of Lyrical ballads)’.⁴

This is not unreasonable. Even to those alive at the time, the year was an important one – though not because it had anything to do with the ‘R’ word. The numbers that composed it, Hazlitt wrote in 1823, ‘are to me like the “dreaded name of Demogorgon”’.⁵ He may have been thinking of the uprising of the United Irishmen⁶ or his first meetings with Wordsworth and Coleridge;⁷ it is less likely he had in mind the year in which the Schlegel brothers began to publish in The Athenaeum writings that would activate the term ‘Romantic’.⁸

The obvious objection is that 1798 consigns to the limbo of what used to be called ‘pre-romanticism’ most of Blake, Burns, Cowper, Mary Robinson, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, and Ann Yearsley, not to mention early works of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Samuel Rogers, Crabbe, William Lisle Bowles, Ann Radcliffe, Hannah More, Elizabeth Inchbald, and the entire Revolution debate (Burke, Paine, Price, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and Mackintosh, among others). One response is to backdate it to 1785, in line with the position taken by the Norton Anthology of English Literature from its sixth edition (1993) onwards. The Norton's editors leave us to deduce for ourselves whether Romanticism began on 1 January 1785 – as opposed to 7 January, when a Frenchman and an American made the first crossing of the English Channel by hot-air balloon; 1 June, when John Adams, the American ambassador to Great Britain, had his first meeting with George III; or 6 July, when America adopted the dollar as its currency. Whatever their view, they include a number of works published prior to 1785: Barbauld's ‘The Mouse's Petition’ (1773), Charlotte Smith's ‘Written at the Close of Spring’ (1784), and John Newton's ‘Amazing Grace!’ (1779).

The Norton is guilty of inconsistency rather than confusion, and not without cause: theories about Romanticism have a tendency to fracture when crystallized as rules that have to be policed. That is because the concept has no exact correlative in historical time, unlike the Elizabethan age and the Restoration period (Sunday, 15 January 1559 being the date of Elizabeth's coronation, 29 May 1660 that of Charles II's triumphant entry to London). Instead, it is dependent on a post-mortem rationalization of the people and events with which it is associated, such rationalizations being seldom other than circular. That is to say, having determined Blake was not Romantic, we construct a definition excluding him; if we decide Hannah More and the Bluestockings were, we conceive it accordingly. And so on.

Which raises the matter of who we consider the Romantics to have been. No one today would question the eligibility of Keats, Shelley, and Blake, but in their own time they were either obscure or subject to ridicule. Then as now, successful writers were those whose books sold – such as James Montgomery (whose net sales amounted to 38,000 copies), Robert Bloomfield (100,000), George Crabbe (35,000), Henry Kirke White (21,000), and Robert Pollok, whose The Course of Time (1827) sold 17,750 copies in less than three years.⁹ The most frequently read and discussed were Byron, Thomas Campbell, Coleridge, Thomas Moore, Samuel Rogers, Walter Scott, Southey, and Wordsworth.¹⁰ If taxonomized at all, they were ‘The Living Poets’, a term Hazlitt used in his Lectures on the English Poets (1818), with the caveat, ‘I cannot be absolutely certain that any body, twenty years hence, will think any thing about any of them’.¹¹ It was well advised: who, at the time of reading this essay, would confidently declare which poets of the present will be read decades from now? All the same, ‘The Living Poets’ stuck, perhaps because it was a label with no pretension other than to classify a diverse group by the one thing they had in common, and it persisted until around 1830, by which time one of them was dead.

During the Romantic period, ‘romance’ was meaningful only as a term by which certain kinds of novels or poems were taxonomized. In 1785, Clara Reeve used it to describe a ‘wild, extravagant, fabulous Story’ associated with epic and a likeable hero,¹² and contemporaries applied it similarly: Byron called Childe Harold's Pilgrimage a ‘Romaunt’; Southey called Thalaba a ‘rhythmical romance’; Scott's Marmion was ‘a romance in six cantos’, while Moore's Lalla Rookh was ‘an oriental romance’. None of which would have caused anyone to brand them Romantic.¹³ ‘We are troubled with no controversies on Romanticism and Classicism’, declared Carlyle as late as 1831, a little smugly.¹⁴ The debate did not begin until long after the Romantics were capable of saying what they thought about it, and only in 1875 were Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge identified as comprising a Romantic school.¹⁵ Even then, the term was slow to catch on. Mrs Oliphant's Literary History of England (1886) does not use it, referring instead to ‘The New Brotherhood’, while subsequent commentators mention ‘The New Poetry’.

One wonders why anyone would posit a starting-point of 4 October 1798, even if that was the publication date of Lyrical Ballads. A precise date argues for specificity where the more politic option is that of vagueness, while placing emphasis on what, to most contemporaries, was a non-event. In March 1799, according to Sara Coleridge, ‘The Lyrical Ballads are laughed at and disliked by all with very few excepted.’¹⁶ Reviews were ‘on the whole favorable, some of them laudatory’, despite charges of ‘babyism and social withdrawal’.¹⁷ No one called it Romantic. And no one suggested, against the evidence, that Scott, Byron, Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth had anything in common until April 1820, when John Wilson wrote,

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This age has unquestionably produced a noble band of British Poets – each separated from all the rest by abundant peculiarities of style and manner – some far above others in skill to embrace and improve the appliances of popularity – but all of them successful in the best and noblest sense of that t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• A Note on Monetary Values
• Myth 1: Romanticism began in 1798
• Myth 2: English Romanticism was a reaction against the Enlightenment
• Myth 3: The Romantics hated the sciences
• Myth 4: The Romantics repudiated the Augustans, especially Pope and Dryden
• Myth 5: The Romantic poets were misunderstood, solitary geniuses
• Myth 6: Romantic poems were produced by spontaneous inspiration
• Myth 7: Blake was mad
• Myth 8: Blake wrote ‘Jerusalem’ as an anthem to Englishness
• Myth 9: Lyrical Ballads (1798) was designed to illustrate ‘the two cardinal points of poetry’, using poems about everyday life and the supernatural
• Myth 10: Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads was a manifesto for the Romantic revolution
• Myth 11: Wordsworth had an incestuous relationship with his sister
• Myth 12: Tory Wordsworth
• Myth 13: The person from Porlock
• Myth 14: Jane Austen had an incestuous relationship with her sister
• Myth 15: The Keswick rapist
• Myth 16: Byron had an affair with his sister
• Myth 17: Byron was a great lover of women
• Myth 18: Byron was a champion of democracy
• Myth 19: Byron was a ‘noble warrior’ who died fighting for Greek freedom
• Myth 20: Shelley committed suicide by sailboat
• Myth 21: Shelley's heart
• Myth 22: Keats's ‘humble origins’
• Myth 23: Keats was gay
• Myth 24: Keats was killed by a review
• Myth 25: Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote Frankenstein
• Myth 26: Women writers were an exploited underclass – unknown, unloved, and unpaid
• Myth 27: The Romantics were atheists
• Myth 28: The Romantics were counter-cultural drug users
• Myth 29: The Romantics practised free love on principle
• Myth 30: The Romantics were the rock stars of their day
• Coda
• Further Reading
• Index
• End User License Agreement