SEMI-RESEARCH PAPER: ENGLISH LITERATURE

Theme:
The Romantics

Content:

Introduction..3
Main part:
1. Basic characteristics of The Romantics..4
2. The Romantics series............5
2.1. Liberty..5
2.2. Nature..................................................................................................................7
2.3. Eternity....9
Conclusion..11
References..13

Introduction
Today the word romantic evokes images of love and sentimentality, but the
term Romanticism has a much wider meaning. It covers a range of developments in
art, literature, music and philosophy, spanning the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
The Romantics would not have used the term themselves: the label was applied
retrospectively, from around the middle of the 19th century.1 Each of the programs
three

parts

examines

one

key

aspect

of

the

Romanticism

movement.

Liberty looks at how Rousseau and his contemporaries, including Denis

Diderot, William Blake, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
challenged the authority of Church and King to rein in a new era of selfempowerment.
Eternity explores the search for meaning in a world without God, following the
revolutions of the 18th century, which forced people to make sense of their new
reality outside the sanctions of the Church.
Nature examines how The Industrial Revolution tried to subvert and dominate
nature on the path to profit, and how Romantic artists attempted to counter this
tension by recasting nature in a context of relevance, approachability and
understanding.
In

this

BBC

documentary

Peter

Ackroyd,

writer,

historian

and

presenter, reveals how the radical ideas of liberty that inspired the French Revolution
opened up a world of possibility for great British writers such as William Blake,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, inspiring some of the greatest
works of literature in the English language. Their ideas are the foundations of our
modern notions of freedom and their words are performed by David Tennant, Dudley
Sutton and David Threlfall.

Dr Stephanie Forward. Romanticism.

1. Basic characteristics of The Romantics

The Romantics considered that free expression of the feelings of the

artist was of the first importance. This idea is summed up by the remark of
the German painter Caspar David Friedrich that "the artist's feeling is his law".
To William Wordsworth poetry should be "the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings". In order to truly express these feelings, the content of the art must come
from the

imagination of the artist, with as little interference as possible from

"artificial" rules

dictating what a work should consist of.

So,

originality

was

absolutely essential.
The concept of the genius, or artist who was able to produce his own original
work through this process of "creation from nothingness", is key to Romanticism. In
addition, romanticism placed special emphasis on the aesthetic experience and in
particular, focused on such sensations like awe, trepidation, horror, and terror. This
meant a revival of Gothic literature with its exotic settings, monsters, ghosts
and

supernatural storylines, the most famous of which are Mary Shelleys

Frankenstein and later, Bram Stokers Dracula. Also, in the Romantic Movement
folk art became something to be respected and ancient customs became noble and
desirable. It was an expression of wanting to return to a more natural time.
The Romantic Movement saw strong emotion as an authentic source of
aesthetic experience, placing emphasis on such emotions as fear, horror and
terror,

and

aweespecially

related

to

untamed

nature and its picturesque

qualities. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble and made
spontaneity a positive characteristic. Romanticism rejected the rational and
Classicist ideal models and looked further back in history to the Middle Ages
and it looked to elements of art and narrative considered to be authentically
medieval in an attempt to escape the confines of population growth,

urban

expanse and industrialism. It also included the exotic, unfamiliar, and distant,
emphasizing

the power of

the imagination

to

create visions

and to escape

common reality.
Finally, Romanticism also had a strong belief and interest in the importance
of nature, particularly in the effect of nature upon the artist when he is surrounded
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by it, preferably alone. In contrast to the

usually

very

social

art

of

the

Enlightenment, the Romantics did not trust the human world, and tended to
believe that a close connection with nature was mentally and morally healthy.

2. The Romantics series

The Romantics, explore the birth of the individual in modern society. Each of
the programs three parts examines one key aspect of the Romanticism movement.
2.1. Liberty
Peter Ackroyd reveals how the radical ideas of liberty that inspired the French
Revolution opened up a world of possibility for great British writers such as William
Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, inspiring some of the
greatest works of literature in the English language.
I'm going to take you on a journey into the human imagination. Back to a time when
the values and ideas and dreams of the modern world were born.

Two hundred

years ago monarchy was falling to the power of peoples' revolutions. Industry and
commerce were becoming the driving forces of existence. And advances in science
were changing the way life itself was understood. Artists all over the world were
inspired by these times of dramatic change. In Britain a group of poets and novelists
pioneered an alternative way of living and of looking at the world. Among them were
William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. The enduring
power of their writing haunts us to this day and inspires us still with dreams of
Liberty.
These writers had an intuitive feeling that they were chosen to guide others
through the tempestuous period of change. This was a time of physical confrontation;
of violent rebellion in parts of Europe and the New World. Conscious of anarchy
across the English Channel, the British government feared similar outbreaks. The
early Romantic poets tended to be supporters of the French Revolution, hoping that
it would bring about political change; however, the bloody Reign of Terror shocked
them profoundly and affected their views. In his youth William Wordsworth was
2

The Romantics: Liberty. (BBC documentary)

drawn to the Republican cause in France, until he gradually became disenchanted

with the Revolutionaries.
This is a story of Revolution, of bloodshed and political upheaval. It inspired a
radical change in the way we perceive the world.The story begins 40 years before
the killing of the King, in a world based upon the twin principles of authority and
hierarchy. Only nobility and clergy had personal liberties, all others had no rights,
only duties. At the heart of this old order was Paris. The Paris police force was the
largest in Europe with one member for every 545 Parisians, those undesirable to the
State would simply disappear.
In 1742, two young men met in this city and became great friends. They would
sit at the cafs of the left bank to play chess. Here they had ideas that became the
seeds of the Romantic revolution.
The names of these two men were Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. They were philosophers with very different beliefs but they were united
against the existing order. Diderot was convinced that the future would be built on
reason. The finest privilege of our reason consists in not believing in anything
by the impulsion of a blind and mechanical instinct. Man is born to think for
himself.3 But Rousseau championed feeling over thought. He was freely emotional,
plunging himself into moods of the deepest dejection at the most ween happiness.
He cried openly and often. To feel is to exist, and our feelings come most
incontestably before our thoughts.4 Both these men believed the system of
control in France to be inhuman. Both were preaching Freedom and Liberty for the
individual. They were playing a dangerous game. Rousseau had experienced the
vision that would become the single most important inspiration of the English
Romantic poets. He had seen that emotion could unlock the prison of civilized
society. For him the key to freedom lays in the individual will and feeling.
Ackroyd could have made some comment as to how the relationship between
the French Revolution and the Romanticists and their work is still valid for society
today: literary figures such as poets, novelists, essayists and journalists often end
up at the forefront of political and cultural change and question accepted but
unquestioned conventions of society; if they challenge those conventions, they find
themselves the target of persecution, imprisonment and even death; but struggle
3
4

Diderot, The Encylopedia, 1751

Rouseau, Lettres morales, 1758

they must if their challenge is a moral one. In the eyes of many, these people may
fail but in a later age they can provide inspiration to others also fighting for social
justice.5
2.2. Nature
Peter Ackroyd summons the ghosts of the Romantics to tell the story of man's
escape from the shackles of industry and commerce to the freedom of nature.
As the Industrial Revolution took hold of Britain during the late 18th Century, the
Romantics embraced nature in search of sublime experience. But this was much
more than just a walk in the country; it was a groundbreaking endeavour to
understand what it means to be human. They forged poetry of radical protest against
a dark world that was descending upon Britain.
This second instalment focusses on the importance of nature as a source of
inspiration to the leading British writers in the Romantic movement at the time:
William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, John Clare and, some
time later, Mary Shelley.
The documentary presses its point that the British Romanticists were the
social and cultural critics of their day and expressed their often forceful opinions
about the issues of their day in a literary mode aimed at rousing the social
conscience of the educated classes and ruling elites, in a period when literacy was
not widespread or well-developed even among monied and propertied people.
In style and appearance, the film revels in widescreen shots of the British
countryside and beyond where required by the subject matter, visiting mountains
with their dramatic vistas and mist-shrouded lakes from which an arm clothed in gold
fabric might emerge to catch a kings sword. Ackroyd makes frequent appearances
but his portly physique and slight speech impediment dont detract at all from the
proceedings and merely add a slightly eccentric flavour to the films proceedings: I
wouldnt have minded if he had visited all the places in the film and declaimed all the
poets works himself. A documentary such as this, marrying literature to its physical
and spiritual sources of inspiration, perhaps needs an idiosyncratic presenter who
can turn out to be as timeless as the works he champions.
The film firmly establishes the social, political and cultural context of the
5

Samuel Hobkinson, The Romantics (Episode 1: Liberty) (2005)

Romanticist movement: Britain at the beginning of the 19th century is fast becoming
industrialised with the routines of the increasing majority of the population becoming
more governed by the demands of machines, clocks especially, and by the new
values that industry and urbanisation bring: order, discipline, conformity and their
strict enforcement by new human masters not allied to religion. The lives of children
in particular were under severe control by industry child labour in those days was
common and certain occupations such as chimney-sweeping were the exclusive
preserve of child workers. The Romanticists revolt against the city and factory and
the values these brought to British life can be seen in both their poetry and the lives
they led: both Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth moved to the
country to live and William Blake himself constantly railed against the abuse of
children as workers and the consequences such work had on their health in works
like Jerusalem.
The film concludes with mention of the 1815 Mount Tambora volcanic
eruption in Indonesia which spewed so much volcanic dust into the upper
atmosphere that climates around the Earth were affected for a whole year afterwards
and temperatures dropped several degrees. The summer of 1816 was cold and often
dark (though sunrises and sunsets must have been brilliant in their reds and
oranges) and this helped to inspire the birth of Gothic literature, exemplified by Mary
Shelleys novel Frankenstein, itself a highly Romanticist work in its plea for all
humans to be treated equally, fairly and with compassion, no matter what their
origins or background may be. The novel also contains a warning within against the
misuse of science and for scientists to take responsibility for their work and the
results that ensue. Fittingly the part of the documentary that deals with
Frankenstein contain archived BBC footage of machines at work and scenes of
exploding bombs that might have come straight out of an Adam Curtis documentary.
While the film has much to commend it as a historical document, it ignores the
negative influences that the Romanticist reverence for nature might have had for
British society and culture. It disregards the possibility that the land enclosures which
angered Clare so much and helped bring on his mental collapse were carried out by
the government in part to preserve the natural environment for the benefit of the
aristocracy and its pleasures as a result of that classs nostalgia for a pre-industrial
Britain, its distaste for industry and its values, and its worry that the lower orders

might bring that industry (and with it, democracy and egalitarian values) to rural
areas and despoil them.

2.3. Eternity
Eternity explores the search for meaning in a world without God, following the
revolutions of the 18th century, which forced people to make sense of their new
reality outside the sanctions of the Church.
Byron, Keats and Shelley lived short lives, but the radical way they lived them
would change the world. At 19, Shelley wrote The Necessity of Atheism - it was
banned and burned, but it freed the Romantics from religion.
The main themes of this episode are the power of the imagination to open up
new ways of thinking and living, and defining ones identity without the support of
religion in an age electrified by the new philosophies and values of the
Enlightenment. The poets and writers under focus all sought their own ways of
forging new identities, seeking unusual experiences and gaining self-knowledge and
enlightenment: Coleridge was inspired by dreams under the influence of opium but
became addicted to it; Keats was affected by family deaths at a young age and was
plagued by ill health, dying young from tuberculosis; Shelley was an atheist and
espoused free love in his affair with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, author of
Frankenstein; and Lord Byron sought identity in being a celebrity and pursuing
adventures in foreign lands and sensual pleasures as an end in itself. Throughout
the film, narrator and writer Peter Ackroyd pops up in scenes of contemporary urban
British society and rural landscapes to trace these writers lives and relate significant
events they experienced to their surroundings where the experiences occurred.
Actors playing the writers wander the sites, reciting excerpts of their characters
important works.
The cinematography is beautiful and respects the featured landscapes where
the writers spent their lives. Interiors of houses and other buildings are given a
moody ambience. Coleridge is dispensed with quickly and the film shifts focus onto
Shelley, Keats and Byron whose destinies are often intertwined. The actors chosen
to play the poets have sensitive and expressive faces and the actor who plays Keats
portrays the poets fragility and melancholy at the knowledge that his life will be
shortened severely by disease.
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The Enlightenment project challenged the authority of religion and replaced it

with the need and desire to find ones own individuality and relationship to society
and nature generally as one form of self-enlightenment among others. Although this
had positive results individual creativity was freed to pursue independent and often
daring paths of expression the negative aspects of individuality and self-discovery
could be dangerous, even life-threatening: Shelley was expelled from Oxford
University for publicly questioning the existence of God and often faced issues of
dark self-doubt; and Lord Byron plunged into a life of excess that included racking up
huge debts, tempestuous marriages and various love affairs including a supposed
incestuous liaison with his half-sister.
Ackroyd presents Lord Byron as a mere self-indulgent libertine, no different
than, say, the Marquis de Sade who declared himself a child of the Enlightenment no
less than Byron was or for that matter, Beau Brummell, and who like them was
famous for his life-style. Omitted is the manner of Lord Byrons demise and the
circumstances in which it occurred: he died from septicaemia in an infected wound
while participating as a freedom fighter in the Battle of Missolonghi, one of the pivotal
battles in the Greek war of independence in 1824. Yes BBC, the search for selfknowledge and using your own brain to question societys conventions can also lead
a person into supporting an oppressed peoples desire for self-determination and
independence and that surely is the reason that the Enlightenment was such a
revolutionary period.

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References
1. BBC web page information about Peter Ackroyds documentary The
Romantics
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/romantics/
2. BBC Documentary: Episode 1 The Romantics Liberty, narrated by Peter
Ackroyd (1 hour long)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CAMEK3GLOQ

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3. BBC Documentary: Episode 2 The Romantics Nature, narrated by Peter

Ackroyd (1 hour long)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfGugapN0hs
4. BBC Documentary: Episode 3 The Romantics Eternity, narrated by Peter
Ackroyd (1 hour long)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UF4_WACOTw
5. Open University Worldwide Ltd, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes
http://www.ouworldwide.com/uploads/the_romantics.pdf
6. Samuel Hobkinson, The Romantics (Episode 1: Liberty) (2005)
http://undersoutherneyes.edpinsent.com/the-romantics-episode-1-liberty-howrevolution-influenced-english-romanticism/
7. http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-romantics/
8. Samuel Hobkinson, The Romantics (Episode 3: Eternity) (2005)
http://undersoutherneyes.edpinsent.com/the-romantics-episode-1-nature-visuallystriking-portrayal-of-four-english-romantic-poets/

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