ROMANTICISM

The word "Romantic" was adopted in the last decades of the 18th century and it is a period in
which ideas and attitudes arose in reaction to the Enlightenment.
English Romanticism covers the period between the French Revolution and the Victorian Age, it
was never a unified movement. It emphasised the subjective and irrational parts of human
nature: emotion, imagination, introspection and a relationship with nature. It led to a new way
of considering the role of man in the universe; there was a growing interest in everyday life and
attention to the countryside as a place where there could still be a relationship with nature, as
opposed to the industrialized town. The nature was no longer something that man could control,
but became a manifestation of a divine power on earth.
In English literature there were two generations of poets: William Wordsworth and Samuel
Taylor Coleridge in the firts; Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and John Keats in the second.
The Romantics were fond of introspection. They exalted the outcast, the rebel and this led to the
cult of the hero, for example the "rebel" in Coleridge" and the "Byronic hero" in Byron, and to
the view that the habits, the values and the rules imposed by a society grounded in reason had
to be abandoned.
Wordsworth was interested in the relationship between the natural world and human
consciousness, he considered nature as a source of joy, inspiration and knowledge, a mother and
a moral guide. He thought that man and nature are inseparable.
Coleridge emphasized the role of the imagination as a creative power. He distinguished between
primary imagination, as a fusion of percepition and the human individual power to produce
images, and secondary imagination, as a poetic faculty which built new word.
He considered nature as a representation of God's will and love, so man had to respect it,
otherwise he could offend God. He believed that natural images carried abstract meanings and
he used them in his most visionary poems.
(The rime of the ancient mariner)
GEORGE GORDON BYRON believed in individual liberty and hated any sort of constraint; he
wished to be himself without compromises and he wanted all men free and so went to fight
against tyrans. He denounced the evils of society by using satirical style, but his themes were
Romantic. In the foregound there is always an isolated man whose feelings are reflected in the
wildest and most exotic natural landscapes, so nature is not a source of consolation and does not
convey any message.
The Byronic hero is a moody, restless and mysterious Romantic rebel who hides some horrible
secret in his past. He is characterised by proud individualism and rejects the conventional moral
rules fo society. He is an outsider and attractive at the same time, of noble birth but wild in his
manners. He has a great sensibility to nature and beauty, but has grown bored with the excesses
of the world.
PERCY SHELLEY believed in the principles of freedom and love as remedies for the faults and evil
of society. He had a passionate devotion to nature, which was a source of enjoyment and
inspiration. It represents his favourite refuge from the disappointment and injustice of the
ordinary world. He tought that poetry was expression of imagination and it could change the
reality of an increasingly material world.
ODE TO THE WEST WIND:
This ode, published with Prometeus Unbound, identifies Shelley with his heroic Titan. By stealing
fire from heaven, Prometheus enabled humanity to found civilisation. In punishment, Zeus
chained Prometeus to a mountain and gave him unending torment: an eagle fed from his
constantly restored liver. Like Prometheus, Shelley hopes that fire, a liberal philosophy, will
enlighten humanity and liberate it from intellectual and moral imprisonment. He writes about
his hopes for the future.

THE VICTORIAN AGE

Queen Victoria's reign was the longest in the history of England: from 1837 to 1901.
It was a period of unprecedent material progress, imperial expansion and one of political
developments and social reform (like the Ten Hours Act in 1847). During the reign, the two main
political parties were the Liberals (ex Wings) and the Conservatives.
LIFE IN THE VICTORIAN TOWN: the victorian city was famous for overcrowding and squalor,
disease and crime, particularly in the slum districts; the mortality rate was high and working
conditions were terrible. In 1851 were passed two laws to prevent the worst squalor and to
clean up the towns. Professional organisations were founded to regulate and control medical
education and research, modern hospital were built, water, gas and lighting were introduced.
Law and order were among the major problem s of the urban environment and modern police
forces were needed to keep cities under control.
THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE: This age was a contradictory era: on the one hand, it was an age
of progress, stability and great social reforms; on the other, it was characterised by poverty,
injustice and social unrest. The Victorians were great moralists and promoted a code of values
that reflected the world as they wanted it to be, based on duty hard work, respectability and
charity. There values were refined by the upper and middle classes but they were of equal
application to all strata of society.
THE VICTORIAN NOVEL: during the victorian age, for the first time there was a communion of
interests and opinions between writers and their readers. One reason for this was the enormous
growth in the middle class, who were avid consumers of literature. The novel became the most
popular form of literature and the main form of entertainment. A great number of novels
published during the middle period of Victorianism were written by women, some of them used
a male pseudonym; in addition, the majority of novel-buyers and readers were women.
In the victorian novel: the voice of omniscent narrator erecte a rigid barrier between "right" and
"wrong"; the city was the most popular setting chosen by Victorian novelist, because
represented the industrial civilisation; the plot was long and often complicated by subplots;
writers concentrated on the creation of characters and thus achieved deeper analysis of the
characters'life; retribution and punishment were to be found in the final, where adventures and
incidents had to be explained.
CHARLES DICKENS
He was born in Portsmouth in 1812 and he died in London in 1870. The protagonists of his
autobiographical novels, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and Little Dorrit, became symbols of an
exploited childhood confronted with the sad realities of slums and factories. Other works deal
with social issues such as the conditions of the poor and the working class in general.
Dickens was obsessed with children, whom he presented innocent or corrupted by adults. A the
beginning, they live trought a negative situation but later rise to happy endings. A lot of children
from poor and working-class backgrounds in the Victorian age were obliged to work in factories
and mines, or as domestic servants and chimneysweeps. Victorian literature played an
importante role in the sentimental portrayal of childhood.
The most important setting of Dickens's novels is London, which is depicted at three different
social levels:
-The parochial world of the workhouses, where the officials, instead of alleviating the suffering
of poor, abused their rights and caused them further misery.
-The criminal world
-The world of the Victorian middle class where live respectable people who believe in the
principle of human dignity.
COKETOWN: Coketown is the classic city that reflects the period of the Industrial Revolution: its
an imaginery town but its possible to locate Preston-city, near Manchester. The city appears
monotonous not only in the colours but also in the sounds, in the noises, in the buildings ,in the
streets; the inhabitants expression communicate only the monotony and sadness of life in this
industrialized town.
People have lost their personality, their individuality: they are equally like one another and look
like robots. By the use of metephors, we can clearly deduce the presence of two types of risk
that coexist and cause not only serious physical dangers (pollution) but even psychological
problems.
The alienation due to the repetitive life in Coketown is a significative and worrying message of
the existence of a psycological risk that workers may suffer. Dickens wrote this novel as a protest
against industrialisation and how it was in danger of turning humans into machines and denying
their creativity and imagination.
CHARLOTTE BRONTE (1816-55) she is the daughter of an Anglican clergyman of Irish origin who
exerted an important influence on her artistic inclinations, she spent most of her life in isolation
in a remote part of Yorkshire. Like many female writers of the period, she used a pen-name to
publish her novel Jane Eyre in 1847. It is a perfect example of an education novels. The reader
follows the main character's "coming of age", as Jane passes from the innocence of childhood to
adulthood. During this journey, Jane undergoes the trial of education according to Victorian
standards. She must constantly struggle for self-control as she moves through different places of
resident, including Ferndean Manor where she is fully educated.
THOMAS HARDY
He was born near Dorchester in June 1840. His work express a deterministic view, deprived of
the consolation of divine power. After reading Darwins' On the Origin of Species, he denied the
existence of God and thought that human life was a tragic process upon which man had no
power, man's struggle with the impersonal forces both inside and outside himself that control
his life.
In addition, he adopted the idea of an "Immanent will": a universal power indifferent to the fate
of man.
Most of Hardy's stories are set in Wessex (a land of the West Saxons), his native county of
Dorset, an unspoiled countryside where people are still superstitious and practiced ritual
ceremonies. An important theme in his work is nature as a co-protagonist with the characters.
Indifferent to man's destiny, nature sets the pattern of growth and decay which characterises
human life.
Hardy employ the Victorian oniscent narrator, who is always present and sometimes comments
or introduces his opinions and his view of life.
His most important works are Tess of the D'Urbevilles and his last, Jude the Obscure. This books
scandalised Victorian public with its pessimism and immorality and it was burnt publicy.

Jude the Obscure: talks about a boy from a poor village, Jude, who works as a stonemason and
studies in his free time. After his marriage to Arabella ends disastrously, he mpves to
Christminster where falls in love with his cousin Sue. They decide to live togheter, though
refusing the institution of marriage. Sue takes in his son, called Little Father Time, whi was born
from Jude's first marriage, and bears him a second son and a daughter. After Jude loses his work,
Sue and the children live ina room while he stays at a tavern. The climax is reached with the
death of their children.
While Dickens' children will survive and want to improve their conditions, Hardy's children are
pessimistics and have not hope. This is visible in the character of Little Father Time, who kills
their brother and their sister and then kills himself.