Romanticism began in 1798
Once upon a time, as Karl Kroeber has observed, âRomanticism was five poets, a Scottish novelist nobody read, and the years 1798â1832â.1
Even today, there are numerous authorities that proudly declare, with the Routledge History of Literature in English (2nd ed., 2001), that âthe period begins in 1798â;2 with the more recent Britannica Guide to World Literature (2011), that âLyrical Ballads (1798) [began] the Romantic movementâ;3 or with the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, that âBritish Romanticism ⌠[has a] commonly accepted founding date of 1798 (the publication of Lyrical ballads)â.4
This is not unreasonable. Even to those alive at the time, the year was an important one â though not because it had anything to do with the âRâ word. The numbers that composed it, Hazlitt wrote in 1823, âare to me like the âdreaded name of Demogorgonââ.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 âRomanticâ.8
The obvious objection is that 1798 consigns to the limbo of what used to be called âpre-romanticismâ 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 â 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 âThe Mouse's Petitionâ (1773), Charlotte Smith's âWritten at the Close of Springâ (1784), and John Newton's âAmazing Grace!â (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 â 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 âThe Living Poetsâ, a term Hazlitt used in his Lectures on the English Poets (1818), with the caveat, âI cannot be absolutely certain that any body, twenty years hence, will think any thing about any of themâ.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, âThe Living Poetsâ 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, âromanceâ 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 âwild, extravagant, fabulous Storyâ associated with epic and a likeable hero,12 and contemporaries applied it similarly: Byron called Childe Harold's Pilgrimage a âRomauntâ; Southey called Thalaba a ârhythmical romanceâ; Scott's Marmion was âa romance in six cantosâ, while Moore's Lalla Rookh was âan oriental romanceâ. None of which would have caused anyone to brand them Romantic.13 âWe are troubled with no controversies on Romanticism and Classicismâ, 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 âThe New Brotherhoodâ, while subsequent commentators mention âThe New Poetryâ.
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, âThe Lyrical Ballads are laughed at and disliked by all with very few excepted.â16 Reviews were âon the whole favorable, some of them laudatoryâ, despite charges of âbabyism and social withdrawalâ.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,
This age has unquestionably produced a noble band of British Poets â each separated from all the rest by abundant peculiarities of style and manner â some far above others in skill to embrace and improve the appliances of popularity â but all of them successful in the best and noblest sense of that t...
