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Themes
Browse by Themes to discover a wide variety of primary and critical materials on various topics, from History and Politics to Modern Critical Approaches. Click on theme below to read an introduction to the category written by our academic editors. Each introduction gives a concise overview of the theme and offers helpful reading suggestions.
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Three revolutions conditioned the politics of the Romantic period: the French Revolution, the American Revolution, which deeply influenced the French Revolution and British radical thought of the 1790s, and the emerging Industrial Revolution. When the poet William Blake was born in 1757, England was a predominantly agrarian society, albeit with several large city ports; but when he died in 1827 it had become the first industrial nation, with sizeable factory towns with their ‘dark Satanic Mills’ (The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, 2008, p. 95), as Blake put it, developing in the north and midlands of the country. Britain had also suffered the loss of the American colonies and spent nigh on twenty years at war with France.
The Romantic period was dominated politically and historically by a single event, the French Revolution of 1789 and its aftermath. The Revolution, according to Percy Bysshe Shelley, was ‘the master theme of the epoch in which we live’ (The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. F. L. Jones, vol 1, 1964, p. 504). The events at the Bastille and the turbulent period that followed – the establishment of a Republic, the Terror, the execution of Louis XVI, the fall of Robespierre, and the eventual rise to power of the Emperor Napoleon – sent Europe into cataclysmic upheaval, leading to the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars which convulsed Europe. These lasted, with the exception of a short break (the peace of Amiens 1801-3) until the final defeat of the Emperor at the Battle of Waterloo in Belgium in June 1815.
It seemed as if the British political system – unrepresentative and undemocratic – would be turned upside down as the result of the Revolution, with radical enthusiasts such as the young William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Blake entranced by the events across the channel. Arguments about the Revolution directly informed the literary scene in the United Kingdom. In 1790, the philosopher and Whig parliamentarian Edmund Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France, a strong attack on the revolution, which led to the so-called revolution debate in the 1790s, in which Burke was challenged by radical literary opponents, soon labelled ‘Jacobins’ (after the Jacobin party of Robespierre), most particularly by Thomas Paine, author of the Rights of Man (1791), Mary Wollstonecraft, author of Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), William Godwin, author of Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), and many others.
Britain was at war for twenty long years in the Romantic period, and the country remained in political turmoil even after the defeat of Napoleon. Thousands of discharged soldiers came back from the Revolutionary wars to a collapsing job market; there were crop failures, and economic turmoil and political turmoil as the 1810s wore on. Conspiratorial groups plotted revolution, principally the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1819, and there were several uprisings in provincial towns in the English midlands. Radical enthusiasm captured the imagination of many of the disenfranchised lower middle and working classes and there were a series of large radical assemblies and meetings calling for parliamentary reform, of which the most infamous was the massacre at St Peter’s Fields in Manchester in 1819, which came to be known as the Peterloo Massacre, in which unarmed protestors were cut down by the Manchester yeomanry.
As well as these seismic events in British history, this was also the period when the campaign to abolish slavery gathered momentum, leading to the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 (and the abolition of slavery in 1833). Ireland was also in turmoil throughout the period. A major armed rebellion, led by Theobald Wolfe Tone in 1798, failed, leading in part to the abolition of the Irish parliament and the establishment of the Act of Union in 1801. However, the subsequent thirty years would be notable for another uprising (Robert Emmet’s abortive 1803 rebellion), the rise of the Catholic League under the renowned orator Daniel O’ Connell and the eventual passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 (after several defeats in the House of Lords), which relaxed or removed many of the restrictions on Roman Catholics introduced by the penal laws and allowed members of the Catholic church to sit in parliament.
In the midst of this cultural upheaval were several other important social political campaigns, manifestations of a (slow) progressiveness: the rise of proto-feminism in the figures of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson, and Mary Hays; the gradual repeal of the most outlandishly severe of judicial punishments (transportation for minor theft and execution by burning alive, for example) which had operated deep into the eighteenth century (though executions for the ‘crime’ of sodomy continued until the later nineteenth century), and the emergence of the first animal welfare organizations, such as the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals which led to the Cruelty to Animals act of 1827.
This Routledge Historical Resource contains much primary and secondary material to help you as you deepen your research into the history and politics of the Romantic period and how it was reflected in the literature of the age. In terms of primary sources, it contains such important collections as Carol Bolton’s five-volume Romanticism and Politics 1789-1832, Peter Kitson’s eight-volume Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation, and Harry T. Dickinson’s Ireland in the Age of Revolution (Part I and Part II). There are also multi-volume editions of Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. The Resource also includes many journal articles which deal with political themes and their impact on Romantic writing, such as Randall Sessler’s ‘Recasting the Revolution: The Media Debate Between Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Thomas Paine’, Ann Frey’s ‘Romantic Nationalism and the British State’, and Julie Kipp’s ‘Back to the future: Walter Scott on the Politics of Radical Reform in Ireland and Scotland’.
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- Critical Concepts
- Culture
- Genre
- History and Politics
- Modern Critical Approaches