1. The Romantic Period
Whitechapel High Street,

2. The Romantic Period
Began in/around 1785, the year Blake and Burns published their first poems (text notes it as 1780)
Ended in 1830, by which time the major writers of the preceding century were either dead or no longer productive.
It was a turbulent time period, when England changed from a primarily agricultural society to a modern industrial nation.
Wealth and power shifted from the landholding aristo cracy to large-scale employers, who found themselves against a large, restive working class.

3. Reaction to Revolution
In response to the French Revolution, the English government prohibited public meetings, suspended habeas corpus (the release from unlawful restraint), and advocates of even moderate political change were charged with high treason.
Yet economic and social changes created a desperate need for corresponding political changes, and new social classes were demanding a voice in government.
Viaduct across the Great Northern Railway,

4. The Industrial Revolution
Resulted from the invention of power-driven machinery replacing hand labour.
Open fields and farms were enclosed into privately owned agricultural holdings.
A new labour population massed in the sprawling mill towns that burgeoned in central and northern England.
The new landless class migrated to the industrial towns or remained as farm labourers, subsisting on starvation wages.
Megg's almshouses, 1800s

5. Results of the Industrial Revolution
The landscape began to take on its modern appearance, with rural areas divided into a checkerboard of fields enclosed by hedges and stone walls.
Factories of the industrial and trading cities cast a pall of smoke over vast areas of jerry-built houses and slum tenements.
The population polarized into two classes of capital labour, the large owner or trader and the possessionless wage-worker, the rich and the poor.

6. Governmental response to the Industrial Revolution
A laissez-faire attitude encouraged government to not interfere
The results were inadequate wages, long hours of work under harsh discipline in sordid conditions, and the large-scale employment of women and children for tasks that destroyed both the body and the spirit.

7. Colonialization
While the poor were suffering, the landed classes, the industrialists, and many merchants prospered as the British Empire expanded aggressively both westward and eastward.
During this time period, the British Empire became the most powerful colonial presence in the world.
The British East India Co ruled the entire Indian sub continent, and black slave labour in the West Indies generated great wealth for British plantation owners.

8. The “Spirit of the Age” -Ethos
Writers during this time period did not think of themselves as “romantic.”
Many writers, however, felt that there was something distinctive about their time – a pervasive intellectual and imaginative climate which they called “the spirit of the age.”
They described it as a release of energy, experimental boldness, and creative power that marked a literary renaissance, an age of new beginnings when, by discarding traditional procedures and outworn customs, everything was possible.
Attacked all forms of tyranny and evils of industrialism (urban blight, polluted environment, alienation from nature & each other)

9. Poetry
Wordsworth described all good poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”
He believed that the source of all poetry was not in external things, but in the individual poet.
The lyric poem, expressing the poet’s own feelings and temperament, became a major Romantic form.
The natural scene became a primary poetic subject, and poets described natural phenomena with an accuracy of observation that had no earlier match.
Poets bestowed attitudes and sentiments on the landscape that earlier writers had felt only for God, parents or a beloved.
Humble, rustic life and plain style were elevated and the wonder of ordinary things was exalted.

10. Characteristics Indifferent to form and structure
Direct expression of strong personal feelings and emotions
Imagination =reality/possibility
Passion
Many poems were intimate self-revelation of poet
Took themselves as heroes
Often portrayed as the “struggle of genius against all limitations”
Sometimes withdrew from society to “brood” upon themselves

11. The Romantic Period Characteristics of the Byronic Hero
A Byronic hero exhibits several characteristic traits, and in many ways he can be considered a rebel.
is a rebel (against convention, society, etc.)
has a distaste for society and social institutions
is isolated from society (a wanderer, an exile)
is not impressed by rank and privilege (though he may possess it)
is larger-than-life in his ability--and his pride
has a hidden curse or crime
suffers from titanic passions 
tends to be self-destructive
One of the key connections to understanding the Byronic Hero is that he is, in some ways, like the Romantic conception of Satan in Paradise Lost--the rebel who fights against a tyrannical establishment but is destroyed by his own overwhelming pride.  This figure is an unconventional hero--dangerous and destructive, but admirable because he is larger than life.

12. England’s Lake District
Themes in Literature
Nature
Isolationism
Exile – especially of a disinherited mind that cannot find a spiritual home in its native land
Fascination with the outlaws of myth, legend, or history
Mysticism
Results of the industrial revolution
England’s Lake District

13. Authors from the Romantic Period
William Blake
Poetical Sketches
Songs of Innocence and Experience
The Book of Thel
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Jerusalem

14. Robert Burns
Tam o’ Shanter
Various songs and poems
William Wordsworth
Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems
The Prelude

15. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Dejection: An Ode
Kubla Khan
Christabel
George Gordon, Lord Byron
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
Don Juan
Various poems

16. Percy Bysshe Shelley
Alastor
Prometheus Unbound
Adonais
Various poems
John Keats
Endymion
The Eve of St. Agnes