The “Long Nineteenth Century”
Left painting: ‘Liberty leading the people’, by Eugène Delacroix in 1830
> French revolution, revolutionary ideals were realized (liberty, freedom, equality),
Right painting: ‘A Battery Shelled’, by Wyndham Lewis in 1918
➔ Age of revolution – Age of capital – Age of empire
→ explain evolutions 19th century
➔ Romanticism (Age of revolution)
- Poetry, cult of genius
- Experimentation and consolidation: the Romantic novel, the American renaissance
➔ Mid-Victorian era, the American Civil War (Age of capital)
- Realism: social panoramas, social satire, things happening in society
- Growth of British Empire; end slavery US
➔ Late Realism, early Modernism (Age of empire)
- Naturalism, psychological realism (focus on characters’ lives), decadentism (e.g. Oscar
Wilde), …
- Disillusion, questioning traditional truths (Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud)
Nineteenth-Century Britain
Romantic or Victorian period
➔ Romantic period: ended 1830s (?)
→ many Romantics had died, Queen Victoria ascended the throne
➔ Fluid distinction from temporal point of view (e.g. Keats and Carlyle born in same year)
➔ Romantic, Victorian, Realist = Porous concepts!
Age of Revolution (1789 – 1848)
➔ America, France, Haiti, Ireland, Scotland, Spanish America, Switzerland, …
➔ Enlightenment ideals
➔ From absolutist monarchies to representative governments with constitutions
➔ French Revolution in 1789: political liberals and radicals → revolution as beginning of new
society ruled by democratic and egalitarian ideals
➔ Social structures (used to be fixed or eternal) → now subject to change, open for debate
➔ Britain: emancipation movement (discussions rights of women, abolition slave trade,
solutions to poverty etc.)
Relatively stable climate in Britain compared to other European nations
1
,Literary significance
➔ British Romantic authors → enthusiasts of revolutionary zeal, “The spirit of the age”
➔ Poetic revolution
- innovate literary form and content
- “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”
- idea of poet-prophet as spokesman for society in crisis (see themselves as prophets or
‘chosen’, who can help society and push it into a different direction)
Tension between high ideals and reality
➔ French Revolution disintegrated into Reign of Terror (1793) and dictatorship Napoleon
→ France and Britain at war until 1815
➔ Period of harsh, repressive measures in Britain against defenders of political change
Queen Victoria (power 1837 – 1901)
➔ Symbol England, Empire, Duty, Family and Decorum
➔ Strived for cultural unity
➔ Era of bourgeois puritanism
- obsessed with propriety, strict rules, formalities, strict gender roles
The Victorian Era
➔ Age of frantic activity (scientific discoveries, technological developments)
➔ Political stability (improvements working and living conditions, education)
➔ Social hierarchies
➔ Era of reflection, self-consciousness
➔ British dominance
The British Empire
➔ The first “global superpower” (Canada, the West Indies, Australia, New Zealand, India)
➔ Dominant motive = trade, pursuit of wealth
➔ “Irish Question” unsolved (worsened during potato famine → Empire didn’t really do
anything → deaths, migrations)
➔ Bloody uprisings and wars elsewhere because people resisted British rule
The British Slave Trade → 3.1 million slaves transported to British colonies
Britain called ‘First Industrial nation”
➔ Increasing population, economy relied on factories instead of agriculture, economic
progress, poverty and insecurity (migrations from the country to urban centres and to US,
child and women’s labour, poor hygiene), new machinery replaced workers
Technological and scientific development
➔ Science: immunology, germ theory, anatomy, embryology, sexology, antiseptics, recreational
drug use
➔ Understanding of the mind, consciousness and mental processes
➔ Physics: atomic theory of matter, energy, electricity
Charles Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species’ (evolution theory) → challenged religious authority,
move to secular society
Karl Marx (capitalism etc.) → revolution : classless society (communism)
2
,Emancipation process
➔ Struggle for universal suffrage, socialism and labor movements, striving for equal society
→ people were questioning social structures, influenced by thinkers like Darwin etc., 19th
century saw a lot of struggles because of people asking for more rights
Women in the Victorian age
➔ Before 1870s: women = no legal rights
➔ Women’s special power = their “femininity”
➔ Laws enacted during the 1850s, in 1870 and 1882 improved conditions for married women
The Business of Literature
➔ Industrialization of print culture, burgeoning industry
- exponential rise newspapers, periodicals, books during Victorian period + they became
cheaper + libraries
- serialization (people waited every week to find out how story continues, cliff hangers)
➔ Consumer / commodity culture
➔ Readers divided along class lines
- anxiety about declining literary standards (+ dominance of female readers)
- publishing controlled by upper & middle class
- poetry = highest literary art form but novels sold better
➔ Authors
- cult of celebrity, writer as media personality
- authors are literary entrepreneurs
Literary landscape 19th century
Big variety (essays, travel writing, novels, novellas, short stories, prose poems etc.)
Romanticism and Realism
First paragraph is realism (very factual,
objective), second paragraph is romanticism
(more dreamy, the Sublime)
They are both dominant trends but not all-
encompassing, many works combine both
3
,Romanticism
= poetry, novels (Gothic novel, …)
1. Emancipation of the individual
- Artistic
- social and economic status: autonomous, outcasts, prophets
- cult of Genius: individualism, creativity and originality, genre shifts, formal and thematic
innovations)
- Political: democratic impetus, revolutionary zeal (see themselves as rebels), hero worship
(often idea of heroes portrayed in romantic literature)
2. Subjective worldview
- Insistence on personal feelings (extremes of feeling, polarity, idealization of love, desire for
union)
- Exploration of the mind and soul (obsession with inwardness, imagination, the irrational
madness, alternative perception, revelation of the soul)
- Cult of beauty (aestheticism, sensualism, also relates to the Sublime)
- Obsession with death and mortality
3. Attitudes towards time
- The past: becomes a very wide tabloid which they start to explore (the primitive, the Middle
Ages, Shakespeare, …)
- The present: very flux, transience, idealization of the child
- The future: optimistic about the future, new ways of seeing the world
4. Attitudes towards space
- Outdoors: nature (spiritual force, revelation of truth, …), nightscapes/psyche, exoticism
- Indoors: interest in confining spaces (locked rooms etc.)
4
,British Romantic Poetry
William Blake (1757-1827)
➔ “infernal method” (different process than most poets, wanted to break free from
conventions etc., did everything by hand as well)
➔ Personal mythology (had his own system of beliefs, again wanted to act against certain
beliefs and conventions etc.)
➔ Songs of Innocence (The Tyger, The Lamb): expresses the fact that God consists of two
contrary states and so do people and because of these contrasts we can move forward as
people)
London
➔ Poem inspired by J.J. Rousseau
➔ Hears things (cries of Man, fear of infants, …)
➔ Images: blood on the walls, church is black (out of shame
because weren’t helping – metaphor!), Chimney-sweeper
(dangerous job, forced to do it)
➔ Last stanza: young women forced to be prostitutes to get
out of poverty and survive
➔ Lot of his poems deal with social issues like corruption
➔ Conclusion: poem can be seen as response to industrial
revolution, strong images to convey social problems of that time
Form:
➔ Regular poem, regular meter
➔ Rhyme: ABAB
➔ 4 quatrains
➔ Meter: iambic/trochaic tetrameter
➔ Emphasis on the last words in every sentence
- Meter and rhyme scheme extra information -
5
, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
“man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains” (people shouldn’t accept authority of these
governments, power is not given from above but should be based on a contract between citizens
and government)
“our wisdom is slavish prejudice, our customs consist in control, constraint, compulsion. …”
(explains his ideas on parenting, Emile grows up with very little authority)
Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
➔ Revolution was dangerous, disrupting society according to him
Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
➔ Incited American Revolution, positive about French Revolution
➔ Common Sense: common sense that Americans liberated themselves from Great Britain
➔ Rights of Man: if authorities are not working to benefit their own people, then they shouldn’t
exist at all
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)
➔ A Vindication of the Rights of Men: argued that these rights don’t align with tradition (like
Burke tries to make us believe)
➔ A Vindication of the Rights of Women
Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743-1825)
➔ Poetry: nature, personal meditations, self-awareness, transformation
➔ Never made it into the canon (her ideas on the French Revolution went into a different
direction), but big celebrity in her own lifetime
The Rights of Woman
➔ Reply to Wollstonecraft (“yes’)
➔ First part: description about how women should stand up for their rights
➔ Second part: difficult for women to be in control
➔ Third part: women are advised to bury their ambitions, not think about those rights too much
➔ Images (words related to conquest, military action): rise, empire, panoply, golden sceptre,
artillery, cannon, magazine of war
➔ 4th line: could imply she says that you can try to stand up for your rights and conquer politics
➔ Part 2: warning it’s going to be difficult to rule
➔ You will soon realize it’s better to live in harmony with men, nature intended it this way (last
line): if we love each other and live in harmony, it’s not necessary to have separate rights
6
Left painting: ‘Liberty leading the people’, by Eugène Delacroix in 1830
> French revolution, revolutionary ideals were realized (liberty, freedom, equality),
Right painting: ‘A Battery Shelled’, by Wyndham Lewis in 1918
➔ Age of revolution – Age of capital – Age of empire
→ explain evolutions 19th century
➔ Romanticism (Age of revolution)
- Poetry, cult of genius
- Experimentation and consolidation: the Romantic novel, the American renaissance
➔ Mid-Victorian era, the American Civil War (Age of capital)
- Realism: social panoramas, social satire, things happening in society
- Growth of British Empire; end slavery US
➔ Late Realism, early Modernism (Age of empire)
- Naturalism, psychological realism (focus on characters’ lives), decadentism (e.g. Oscar
Wilde), …
- Disillusion, questioning traditional truths (Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud)
Nineteenth-Century Britain
Romantic or Victorian period
➔ Romantic period: ended 1830s (?)
→ many Romantics had died, Queen Victoria ascended the throne
➔ Fluid distinction from temporal point of view (e.g. Keats and Carlyle born in same year)
➔ Romantic, Victorian, Realist = Porous concepts!
Age of Revolution (1789 – 1848)
➔ America, France, Haiti, Ireland, Scotland, Spanish America, Switzerland, …
➔ Enlightenment ideals
➔ From absolutist monarchies to representative governments with constitutions
➔ French Revolution in 1789: political liberals and radicals → revolution as beginning of new
society ruled by democratic and egalitarian ideals
➔ Social structures (used to be fixed or eternal) → now subject to change, open for debate
➔ Britain: emancipation movement (discussions rights of women, abolition slave trade,
solutions to poverty etc.)
Relatively stable climate in Britain compared to other European nations
1
,Literary significance
➔ British Romantic authors → enthusiasts of revolutionary zeal, “The spirit of the age”
➔ Poetic revolution
- innovate literary form and content
- “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”
- idea of poet-prophet as spokesman for society in crisis (see themselves as prophets or
‘chosen’, who can help society and push it into a different direction)
Tension between high ideals and reality
➔ French Revolution disintegrated into Reign of Terror (1793) and dictatorship Napoleon
→ France and Britain at war until 1815
➔ Period of harsh, repressive measures in Britain against defenders of political change
Queen Victoria (power 1837 – 1901)
➔ Symbol England, Empire, Duty, Family and Decorum
➔ Strived for cultural unity
➔ Era of bourgeois puritanism
- obsessed with propriety, strict rules, formalities, strict gender roles
The Victorian Era
➔ Age of frantic activity (scientific discoveries, technological developments)
➔ Political stability (improvements working and living conditions, education)
➔ Social hierarchies
➔ Era of reflection, self-consciousness
➔ British dominance
The British Empire
➔ The first “global superpower” (Canada, the West Indies, Australia, New Zealand, India)
➔ Dominant motive = trade, pursuit of wealth
➔ “Irish Question” unsolved (worsened during potato famine → Empire didn’t really do
anything → deaths, migrations)
➔ Bloody uprisings and wars elsewhere because people resisted British rule
The British Slave Trade → 3.1 million slaves transported to British colonies
Britain called ‘First Industrial nation”
➔ Increasing population, economy relied on factories instead of agriculture, economic
progress, poverty and insecurity (migrations from the country to urban centres and to US,
child and women’s labour, poor hygiene), new machinery replaced workers
Technological and scientific development
➔ Science: immunology, germ theory, anatomy, embryology, sexology, antiseptics, recreational
drug use
➔ Understanding of the mind, consciousness and mental processes
➔ Physics: atomic theory of matter, energy, electricity
Charles Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species’ (evolution theory) → challenged religious authority,
move to secular society
Karl Marx (capitalism etc.) → revolution : classless society (communism)
2
,Emancipation process
➔ Struggle for universal suffrage, socialism and labor movements, striving for equal society
→ people were questioning social structures, influenced by thinkers like Darwin etc., 19th
century saw a lot of struggles because of people asking for more rights
Women in the Victorian age
➔ Before 1870s: women = no legal rights
➔ Women’s special power = their “femininity”
➔ Laws enacted during the 1850s, in 1870 and 1882 improved conditions for married women
The Business of Literature
➔ Industrialization of print culture, burgeoning industry
- exponential rise newspapers, periodicals, books during Victorian period + they became
cheaper + libraries
- serialization (people waited every week to find out how story continues, cliff hangers)
➔ Consumer / commodity culture
➔ Readers divided along class lines
- anxiety about declining literary standards (+ dominance of female readers)
- publishing controlled by upper & middle class
- poetry = highest literary art form but novels sold better
➔ Authors
- cult of celebrity, writer as media personality
- authors are literary entrepreneurs
Literary landscape 19th century
Big variety (essays, travel writing, novels, novellas, short stories, prose poems etc.)
Romanticism and Realism
First paragraph is realism (very factual,
objective), second paragraph is romanticism
(more dreamy, the Sublime)
They are both dominant trends but not all-
encompassing, many works combine both
3
,Romanticism
= poetry, novels (Gothic novel, …)
1. Emancipation of the individual
- Artistic
- social and economic status: autonomous, outcasts, prophets
- cult of Genius: individualism, creativity and originality, genre shifts, formal and thematic
innovations)
- Political: democratic impetus, revolutionary zeal (see themselves as rebels), hero worship
(often idea of heroes portrayed in romantic literature)
2. Subjective worldview
- Insistence on personal feelings (extremes of feeling, polarity, idealization of love, desire for
union)
- Exploration of the mind and soul (obsession with inwardness, imagination, the irrational
madness, alternative perception, revelation of the soul)
- Cult of beauty (aestheticism, sensualism, also relates to the Sublime)
- Obsession with death and mortality
3. Attitudes towards time
- The past: becomes a very wide tabloid which they start to explore (the primitive, the Middle
Ages, Shakespeare, …)
- The present: very flux, transience, idealization of the child
- The future: optimistic about the future, new ways of seeing the world
4. Attitudes towards space
- Outdoors: nature (spiritual force, revelation of truth, …), nightscapes/psyche, exoticism
- Indoors: interest in confining spaces (locked rooms etc.)
4
,British Romantic Poetry
William Blake (1757-1827)
➔ “infernal method” (different process than most poets, wanted to break free from
conventions etc., did everything by hand as well)
➔ Personal mythology (had his own system of beliefs, again wanted to act against certain
beliefs and conventions etc.)
➔ Songs of Innocence (The Tyger, The Lamb): expresses the fact that God consists of two
contrary states and so do people and because of these contrasts we can move forward as
people)
London
➔ Poem inspired by J.J. Rousseau
➔ Hears things (cries of Man, fear of infants, …)
➔ Images: blood on the walls, church is black (out of shame
because weren’t helping – metaphor!), Chimney-sweeper
(dangerous job, forced to do it)
➔ Last stanza: young women forced to be prostitutes to get
out of poverty and survive
➔ Lot of his poems deal with social issues like corruption
➔ Conclusion: poem can be seen as response to industrial
revolution, strong images to convey social problems of that time
Form:
➔ Regular poem, regular meter
➔ Rhyme: ABAB
➔ 4 quatrains
➔ Meter: iambic/trochaic tetrameter
➔ Emphasis on the last words in every sentence
- Meter and rhyme scheme extra information -
5
, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
“man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains” (people shouldn’t accept authority of these
governments, power is not given from above but should be based on a contract between citizens
and government)
“our wisdom is slavish prejudice, our customs consist in control, constraint, compulsion. …”
(explains his ideas on parenting, Emile grows up with very little authority)
Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
➔ Revolution was dangerous, disrupting society according to him
Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
➔ Incited American Revolution, positive about French Revolution
➔ Common Sense: common sense that Americans liberated themselves from Great Britain
➔ Rights of Man: if authorities are not working to benefit their own people, then they shouldn’t
exist at all
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)
➔ A Vindication of the Rights of Men: argued that these rights don’t align with tradition (like
Burke tries to make us believe)
➔ A Vindication of the Rights of Women
Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743-1825)
➔ Poetry: nature, personal meditations, self-awareness, transformation
➔ Never made it into the canon (her ideas on the French Revolution went into a different
direction), but big celebrity in her own lifetime
The Rights of Woman
➔ Reply to Wollstonecraft (“yes’)
➔ First part: description about how women should stand up for their rights
➔ Second part: difficult for women to be in control
➔ Third part: women are advised to bury their ambitions, not think about those rights too much
➔ Images (words related to conquest, military action): rise, empire, panoply, golden sceptre,
artillery, cannon, magazine of war
➔ 4th line: could imply she says that you can try to stand up for your rights and conquer politics
➔ Part 2: warning it’s going to be difficult to rule
➔ You will soon realize it’s better to live in harmony with men, nature intended it this way (last
line): if we love each other and live in harmony, it’s not necessary to have separate rights
6
