Historical+Background

=HISTORICAL BACKGROUND:=

The Romantic Period in British literature stretched from roughly the year 1785 to the year 1830. (Source 1)

(Source 4)

media type="youtube" key="z2ISRMSIyX8" height="283" width="378" (Source 4)

= **In America:** =

The 1776 revolution seemed far away and relatively unimportant to most of the British, more an economic concern than a matter of significant social upheaval. Edmund Burke, the late-18th-century English conservative even argued in favor of the American cause: besides the inherent unfairness of taxation without representation, he thought the British were violating the property rights of the American colonists, who were, after all, often relatives of the British upper classes. The ideals of the American Revolution did have more significant impact in France (see Thomas Paine's 1791-1792 //Rights of Man// in particular).

= **In France:** =

Rousseau's 1762 //Social Contract//opens with the words: "Man is born free, and is everywhere in chains." The writings of Rousseau, Diderot, and Voltaire suggested that all men are by nature free and equal. These egalitarian, democratic ideals gave rise to the battle cry "liberty, equality, fraternity" in the revolution of the French masses against an oppressive nobility. (Source 2) Napoleon rises to power and opposes England militarily and economically. (Source 3)

**"Joyous Revolution"**
The July 14, 1789 storming of the Bastille by the Parisian mob began the French Revolution. In France, England, and all over Europe, there were ecstatic hopes among common people for freedom and equality in a new age of dissolved social barriers. At the beginning, the French Revolution was seen not just as the overthrow of an unjust ruling class but of traditional society altogether: this would be the dawn of the age of the common man, the privileges of birth and heredity would be no more. The revolutionary spirit inspired individual energies and lifted the limits on personal ambition. The idea of a commoner becoming leader of a country ruled for centuries by absolute monarchs was not out of the question—Napoleon, for instance, could happen.


 * //William Wordsworth//: "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very Heaven!" (//The Prelude//, Book XI, 108-9).

"Europe at that time was thrilled with joy, / France, standing on the top of golden hours, / And human nature seeming born again" (//The Prelude//, Book VI, 340-42).


 * //William Hazlitt//: "It was the dawn of a new era, a new impulse had been given to men's minds, and the sun of Liberty rose upon the sun of life in the same day, and both were proud to run their race together."

**Revolution grows bloody**
In September, 1792, after the moderate Girondin party had been replaced in power by the radical Jacobins, more than a thousand royalist prisoners were massacred by the Parisian mob.

In the Reign of Terror under Maximilien Robespierre (May, 1793-July, 1794), thousands of supposed counterrevolutionaries were guillotined, including nobility, royalist sympathizers, and Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

After five years of growing disillusionment with political activism and a decline in popular sympathy for the "glorious cause," the Revolution culminated in Napoleon establishing himself as absolute ruler. Napoleon, as you recall, led French armies in wars of aggression all over Europe.

= **In England:** =

The British aristocracy and government responded to the excitement generated by the French Revolution among the English lower and middle classes with strong reactionary measures; those in power feared the revolutionary contagion would spread to England. The channel coast was watched for possible invasion; the rights of free speech and //habeas corpus//(no imprisonment without trial) were curtailed; mass public meetings were forbidden without governmental permission; known liberals, radicals and revolutionary sympathizers were spied upon and berated as "Jacobins," and many, including William Blake, were arrested. (source 2) Tory party philosophy was popular at the time, suggesting that the government should not interfere with private enterprise. (source 3)

After the Revolution turned bloody, most British sympathizers were disappointed and abandoned the French cause. With only one brief pause, from 1793-1815 England was at war with France, who promised aid to any countries who overthrew their rulers and attempted under Napoleon to dominate all of Europe, and English patriotism ran high. English liberals and radicals, though, were still inspired by the ideals behind the French Revolution, "liberty, equality, fraternity"; to an extent, they held the attitude that the French were barbarians with a few good ideas. The seeds of revolutionary change were sown in England in the 1790s, and the cries for reform and a radical new vision in society, politics, and in art gave rise to the English "Romantic Era." (Source 2)

**Meanwhile**
A more insidious and profound revolution was born within England herself, the Industrial Revolution. The turn of the 19th century saw the rise of modern technology in the dawning age of machines, factories, and mass production. As Britain moved from a rural, agrarian economy with home-production of textiles and other goods to urban industrialization, there was great material progress for the wealthy manufacturers, which included not just aristocratic landowners but also the more enterprising among the middle class.

But the lower classes paid a heavy price for industrial "progress": manufacturing towns quickly became slums, housing was inadequate, working conditions were terrible, with long hours, tiny wages, and children and women laborers suffering worst of all. Poverty, vice, sickness, early death—these new "city" problems went largely unchecked by intervention of the "authorities"; laissez-faire policies held that free-market economics would sort out all problems—social Darwinism before its time. The result: the poor got poorer, the rich richer (Source 2).