1. The Romantic Period 1789 - 1815 Revolutionary and Napoleonic period 1807 British Slave Trade outlawed 1811 - 20 The Regency: George, Prince of Wales, acts as regent for George III 1819 Peterloo Massacre 1820 Accession of George IV

2. Major Authors and Diversity William Blake William Wordsworth Samuel Taylor Coleridge George Gordon, Lord Byron Percy Bysse Shelley John Keats Yet several authors, mainly women, were more popular early in the period: Anne Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson Older authors: Gray, Collins, Crabbe, and Cowper

3. Revolution and reaction American Revolution 1776 French Revolution 1789 Reign of Terror 1804 Napolean 1815 Ongoing social pressure Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Man” Edmund Burke “Reflections on the Revolution in France”

4. Industrial revolution 1765 James Watts perfects steam engine Rise of mill towns Enclosures Divisions into capital and labor Laissez-faire economics Child labor Working Conditions Fear of Revolution

5. The Spirit of the age “Great spirits now on earth are sojourning” Keats Lake Schools – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Robert Southey Cockney Schools – Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, Keats Satanic School – Percy Shelley, Byron Revolution as apocryphal Promise and Regret

6. Poetic theory and practice ‘The spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” Wordsworth First person lyric poetry and self reference Bardic ideals and innovation Romantic nature poetry Personification of nature and landscape Ordinary subjects The supernatural, the romance, psychological extremes Individualism and alienation

7. Writing in the Marketplace and Courts By 1830 about half of Britain’s population was regularly reading Working classes and Sunday school Circulating Libraries Steam engine printing presses Books as big business Fears of reading and readers Pirated novels Problematic attempts at censorship

8. Other literary forms An era of prose? Drama and disorder The novel gains respectability