A History of English Literature

Overview

English Romantic literature is overwhelmingly a poetic one, with six major poets

writing in the first quarter of the 19th century, transforming the literary climate.

Blake was unknown; Wordsworth and Coleridge won partial acceptance in the

first decade; Scott and Byron became popular. The flowering of the younger

Romantics, Byron, Shelley and Keats, came after 1817, but by 1824 all were

dead. The other great literary artist of the period is Jane Austen, whose six

novels appeared anonymously between 1811 and 1818. Other books appear-

ing without an author’s name were Lyrical Ballads(Bristol, 1798) and Waverley

(Edinburgh, 1814). The novels of ‘the author of Waverley’, Sir Walter Scott,

were wildly popular. There was original fiction from Maria Edgeworth and Mary

Shelley, and non-fiction from Thomas De Quincey, Charles Lamb and William

Hazlitt.

nThe Romantic poets

Early Romantics

William Blake

William Blake (1757–1827) was Burns’s contemporary but had none of his success.
He grew up poor in London, went to art school, was apprenticed to an engraver at
14,and lived by engraving. His fine teenage Poetical Sketches were printed but not
published. He engraved his later poems by his own laborious method, hand-colour-
ing each copy of the little books in which he published them. Eventually, his art
gained him a few admirers, notably the painter Samuel Palmer (1805–1881).
Blake had begun his Songs of Experience with ‘Hark to the voice of the Bard!’ – but
the age did not hearken to this truly ‘heaven-taught’ genius. Self-educated and mis-
understood, he opposed the ruling intellectual orthodoxies, political, social, sexual and
ecclesiastical, with a marked contempt for Deist materialists, censorious priests and the
President of the Royal Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds. A revolutionary who briefly

Contents

The Romantic poets 227

Early Romantics 227

William Blake 227

Subjectivity 228

Romanticism and

Revolution 229

William Wordsworth

Samuel Taylor Coleridge 234

Sir Walter Scott 236

Younger Romantics 237

Lord Byron 237

Percy Bysshe Shelley 239

John Keats

Romantic prose 245

Belles lettres 245

Charles Lamb 245

William Hazlitt 246

Thomas De Quincey 246

Fiction 247

Thomas Love Peacock 247

Mary Shelley 247

Maria Edgeworth 247

Sir Walter Scott 249

Jane Austen

Towards Victoria 254

Further reading 255

227

The Romantics:

1790–1837

7

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