THE ROMANTIC AGE
Historical background
From 1760 to the middle of the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution marked the shift from
manual labour to new manufacturing methods, which were made possible by the invention of
power-driven machines.!
It was in England that the Industrial Revolution had its earliest and most substantial foundation,
and it was the immediate consequence of a technological revolution. A Scottish engineer and
inventor, James Watt, perfected the steam engine in 1765. The American Robert Fulton invented
the steamship and in 1811 steam trains were patented by George Stephenson.
Soon many industries were converted to mills and factories, where machines did the work, and
where workers came to serve the machines. But this wave of industrialization meant that numerous
towns and cities became dirty, polluted, and insanitary, as smoke from the factories, bad housing,
poor sanitation and long hours for little pay made life for the newly formed urban working class
intolerable.
During the 18th century, there was a shifting of population from the agricultural and commercial
areas of the south to the north and the midlands, where new factories were built near the coal fields.
“Mushroom towns” were built to house the workers.!
Women and children were employed because they could be paid less and were easier to control.
Industrial cities lacked elementary public services; the air and water were polluted by smoke and
filth; the houses were overcrowded. The workers' lives were revolutionized because of the
mechanization and the rational division of labour.!
The life expectancy was well below twenty years because of the toil, disease and heavy drinking to
bear the fatigue and alienation. At the beginning of the 19th century the level of unemployment
rose in consequence of the new technologies and the Napoleonic wars. The first three decades of
the century were a period of political stagnation and repression.
The Romantic movement
Romanticism was a literary and artistic movement that emerged during the second half of the 18th
century as a reaction against the extreme rationality prevailing during the period of Enlightenment.
The term "Romanticism" was first coined by the German Romantic poet Friedrich Schlegel, who
stated "that which is 'Romantic' conveys emotional matter in an imaginative form."
Romanticism had its origins in Germany in the 1770s. The Sturm und Srang (Storm and Stress)
movement was a revolutionary literary movement that reflected anti-Enlightenment and anti-
Classicism attitudes, and its adherents stressed the importance of inspiration rather than reason.
Expression was everything to the Romantics – expression in art, music, poetry, drama, literature and
philosophy. These ideas were created by a sense of dissatisfaction with the dominant ideals of the
Enlightenment and the society that had produced them.
In the last thirty years of the 18th century a new sensibility became dominant which came to be
known in literature as Romanticism. It included elements of introspection, nostalgia, emotion and
individualism.!
The new appeal to the heart and to the relationship between reason and emotions expressed itself in
various ways. There was a grown interest in everyday life and great attention was paid to the
countryside as a place where there could still be a relationship with nature, as opposed to the
industrial town.!
A new taste for the desolate was part of a revival of a past perceived as contrasting with present
reality. There was also a revolution in the concept of nature. Nature began to be perceived as a
manifestation of a divine power on earth. Imagination assumed a key role as a means of giving
