historia de la literatura inglesa

1. History of The English Literature

2. Timeline
• Old English
*Historical or non-English / American item
• B.C. — A. D. 428: Celtic and Roman Britain
• 428 — 1100: Old English (Anglo-Saxon) Period
• c. 700 — Beowulf composed in present form
• *1066 — Battle of Hastings (Norman Conquest)
• *1215 — Signing of Magna Carta
• *c. 1307 — 1321 — Dante's Divina Commedia

3. • 1350 — 1500: Middle English Period
• c. 1387 — Chaucer, "Prologue" to Canterbury Tales
*1492 — Columbus lands in America
• 1500 — 1660: The Renaissance (in England; 1607 - 1780 is considered the
"Colonial" period in America)
*1517 —Martin Luther posts his theses in Wittenberg, leading to Protestant
Reformation
*1532 — Machiavelli, The Prince
• 1539 — English Bible (the "Great Bible") published
*1558 — 1603 — Reign of Queen Elizabeth I
• 1564 — 1616 — Life of William Shakespeare
• 1601 — Shakespeare's Hamlet
*1605 — Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part I
*1607 — Settlement at Jamestown, Virginia
• 1611 — King James translation of the Bible
*1620 — Pilgrims land at Plymouth
*1640 — Bay Psalm Book: first book printed in America
*1649 — Execution of Charles I
*1649 — 1660 — Commonwealth Period–England ruled by Parliament

4. • 1660 — 1798: Neoclassical Period (also known as "The Long 18th Century")
*1660 — Charles II restored to the throne ("The Restoration")
• 1667 — John Milton, Paradise Lost
*1687 — Sir Isaac Newton, Principia Mathematica
*1692 — Salem witchcraft executions
• 1719 — Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
• 1726 — Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
• 1740 — Samuel Richardson, Pamela
• 1740-5 — The Great Awakening (religious revival)
• 1749 — Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
*1751 — Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"
• 1755 - Ben Johnson, Dictionary
• 1760-67 — Lawrence Stern, Tristram Shandy
• 1765-1830 — Revolutionary and Early National Period
*1770 — Oliver Goldsmith, "The Deserted Village"
• 1771 — Ben Franklin, Autobiography
• 1775-1783 — Revolutionary War
• 1776 —Declaration of Independence
• 1783-85 — Noah Webster, Grammatical Institute of the English Language (speller, grammar, reader)
*1789 — French Revolution begins

5. • 1798-1832: Romantic Period
• 1798 — William Wordsworth and Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads
• 1811 — Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
• 1817 — Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
• 1819 — Lord Byron, Don Juan I and II
*1820 — The Missouri Compromise
• 1820 — Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe
• 1830 — Edgar Allan Poe, Poems

6. • 1832-1870: Early Victorian Age (English Literature)
• 1836 — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
• 1836 — Charles Dickens, Pickwick Papers
• 1837 — Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales
• 1842 — Robert Browning, Dramatic Lyrics; Lord Tennyson, Poems
• 1845 — Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven
• 1847 — Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights; Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
• 1847-8 — Thackeray, Vanity Fair
• 1849 — Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
• 1850 — Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese
• 1850 — Nathaniel Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter
• 1851 — Herman Melville, Moby Dick
• 1852 — Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
• 1854 — Henry David Thoreau, Walden
• 1855 — Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
• 1859 — Charles Darwin, Origin of the Species
• 1860 — George Eliot, Mill on the Floss
*1860-5 — American Civil War

7. • 1865-1914: Realistic Period (American Literature)
• 1867 — Karl Marx, Das Kapital
• 1868 — Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
• 1872 — George Eliot, Middlemarch
• 1874 — Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd
• 1876 — Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer
• 1879 — Henry James, Daisy Miller; * Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House
• 1883 — Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
• 1884 — Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
• 1891 — Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
• 1893 — George Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren’s Profession
• 1895 — Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest; Stephen
Crane, The Red Badge of Courage

8. • 1900-1930: Naturalistic and Symbolistic Period
(American Only)
• 1900 — Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
• 1901-1910: Edwardian Period
• 1903 — Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Jack
London, The Call of the Wild
• 1905 — Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
• 1907 — John Millington Synge, Playboy of the Western
World
• 1913 — D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers; Willa Cather,
O Pioneers!

9. • 1914-1918: First World War
• 1917 — T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
• 1921- Aldous Huxley, Chrome Yellow
• 1922 - James Joyce, Ulysses; T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
• 1924 - E.M. Forster, A Passage to India
• 1925 — Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
• 1926 — T.E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom;
Earnest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
• 1929 — William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
• 1933 — W.B. Yeats, Collected Poems
• 1937 — John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men; The Red
Pony

10. • 1939-1945: The Second World War
• 1939 — James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake
• 1940 — Richard Wright, Native Son
• 1946 — George Orwell, Animal Farm
• 1949 — Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
• 1951 — J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
• 1952 — Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
• 1955 — Vladmir Nabokov, Lolita
• 1957 — Jack Kerouac, On the Road
• 1958 — Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
• 1961 — Iris Murdock, A Severed Head
• 1964 — Theodore Roethke, The Far Field

11. • 1965 - ? Postmodernist Period
• 1966 — Sylvia Plath, Ariel
• 1969 — Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird
Sings
• 1973 — Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
• 1981 — Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
• 1983 — Alice Walker, The Color Purple
• 1985 — Raymond Carver, Cathedral
• 1987 — Toni Morrison, Beloved
• 1988- Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
• 1989 — Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club; Thoman
Pynchon, Vineland

12. The term ‘Old English’ was invented as a patriotic and philological convenience. The
more familiar term ‘Anglo- Saxon’ has a far older pedigree. ‘Old English’ implied that
there was a cultural continuity between the England of the sixth century and the
England of the nineteenth century (when German, and later British, philologists
determined that there had been phases in the development of the English language
which they described as ‘Old’, ‘Middle’, and ‘Modern’). ‘Anglo-Saxon’ had, on the other
hand, come to suggest a culture distinct from that of modern England, one which
might be pejoratively linked to the overtones of ‘Sassenach’ (Saxon), a word long
thrown back by angry Celts at English invaders and English cultural imperialists. In
1871 Henry Sweet, the pioneer Oxford phonetician and Anglicist, insisted in his edition
of one of King Alfred’s translations that he was going to use ‘Old English’ to denote
‘the unmixed, inflectional state of the English language, commonly known by the
barbarous and unmeaning title of “Anglo-Saxon”’. A thousand years earlier, King Alfred
himself had referred to the tongue which he spoke and in which he wrote as ‘englisc’.
It was the language of the people he ruled, the inhabitants of Wessex who formed
part of a larger English nation. That nation, which occupied most of the ferale arable
land in the southern part of the island of Britain, was united by its Christian religion,
by its traditions, and by a form of speech which, despite wide regional varieties of
dialect, was already distinct from the ‘Saxon’ of the continental Germans.

13. • In 604 Ethelbert promulgated a law code
known as the "Dooms of Ethelbert"; this is not
only the first of several "Dooms" of Anglo-
Saxon kings, it is the first known written law
code in English. Ethelbert's Dooms fixed the
legal standing of the Catholic clergy in England
as well as setting in place a good number of
secular laws and regulations.

14. • From the thirteenth century onwards, however, Alfred’s ‘English’
gradually became incomprehensible to the vast majority of the
English speaking descendants of those same Anglo-Saxons. Scholars
and divines of the Renaissance period may have revived interest in
the study of Old English texts in the hope of proving that England
had traditions in Church and State which distinguished it from the
rest of Europe. Nineteenth-century philologists, like Sweet, may
have helped to lay the foundations of all modern textual and
linguistic research, and most British students of English literature
may have been obliged, until relatively recently, to acquire some
kind of mastery of the earliest written form of their language,
butthere remains a general and almost ineradicable prejudice that
the culture of early England was severed from all that came after it
by the Norman Conquest of 1066. 1066 is still the most familiar
date in the history of the island of Britain, and, despite Henry
Sweet’s Victorian protest, many latter-day ‘barbarians’ have
persisted in seeing pre Conquest England, and its wide and complex
civilization, as somehow that of a lost tribe of ‘Anglo-Saxons’.

15. • The Germanic peoples known as the Angles, the Saxons, and the
Jutes, who had successfully invaded the former Roman colony of
Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries, brought with them their
language, their paganism, and their distinctive warrior traditions.
They had also driven the Christianized Celtic inhabitants of Britain
westwards to the confines of Wales and Cornwall and northwards
into the Highlands of Scotland. The radical success of their
colonization is evident in the new place-names that they imposed
on their areas of settlement, emphatically English place-names
which proclaim their ownership of homesteads and cultivated land
(the main exceptions to this nomenclature generally pertain to the
residually Celtic names of rivers, hills, and forests or to the remains
of fortified Roman towns which were delineated by the Latin-
derived suffixes -chester and -cester).

16. • The fate of the old Celtic inhabitants who were
not able to remove themselves is announced in
the English word Wealh (from which the term
‘Welsh’ is derived), a word once applied both to a
native Briton and to slave. The old Roman order
had utterly disintegrated under pressure from the
new invaders, though stories of determined Celtic
resistance to the Saxons in the sixth century, a
resistance directed by a prince claiming imperial
authority, were later associated with the largely
mythological exploits of the fabled King Arthur.

17. • With his inherited alertness to the Anglo-Saxon concept of wyrd, LaZamon
seems to recognize that Britain, first colonized by refugees from a
devastated Troy, continues to derive a certain moral authority from its
acceptance of the processes of change and decay. Its future, like its past,
will reflect the uncertainties, reversals, and restorations which mark all
human experience, but a providentially inspired continuity will determine
its survival. Stories of Arthur are central to the text both physically and
morally. Despite the fact that his greatest battles are fought against
invading, pagan Saxons, LaZamon’s Arthur is the kind of generous,
splendidly nonchalant and unswervingly mighty warrior familiar to the
audiences of Old English poetry. The poem’s imagery, unlike that of
LaZamon’s more circumspect sources, equally hearkens back to a wilder
heroic world. In the most famous of LaZamon’s similes, Arthur comes
down on his foes like a swift wolf of the woods, his fur hung with snow
(‘bihonged mid snawe’), intent on devouring whatever animals he chooses
(‘swule deor swa him likeD’).

18. • Chaucer symbolizes, as no other writer does, the Middle Ages. He stands in much
the same relation to the life of his time as Alexander Pope does to the 18th
century, and Tennyson to the Victorian era. And Chaucer’s place in English
literature is even more important than theirs, for he is the first great English
writer—the first man to use "naked words" in English, the first to make our
composite language a thing compact and vital.
• According to John Dryden, Chaucer is the father of English poetry. Dryden
venerates Chaucer as highly as the Greeks venerated Homer and the Romans
venerated Virgil. "Chaucer", says Dryden, "is a perpetual foundation of good sense.
He is learned in all sciences and therefore speaks properly on all subjects. As he
knew what to say, so he knew also when to leave off."
•
Chaucer’s art of characterization is another contribution to English poetry. He is
the first great painter of character in English literature. In fact, next to Shakespeare
he is the greatest master in this field. But he is also the grand father of the English
Novel. In his Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales, we have the seeds of
the novel which have been cultivated by others later.

19. • For some two hundred years after their respective deaths, Chaucer’s
contemporary and friend, John Gower (1330- 1408), was considered to be
his rival in English eloquence, richness of style, and narrative artistry. The
honour originally accorded to Gower’s English poem, the Confessio
Amantis (c. 1386), is witnessed by the survival of over fifty manuscript
copies (three times as many as Troilus and Criseyde, though some eighty
manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales are extant) and by the elegant
illuminations provided for certain copies by the prestigious court painter,
Herman Scheerre (a mark of status rarely accorded to Chaucer). The
poems of both were amongst the earliest vernacular works to be issued by
the prodigiously busy printer, publisher, and translator, William Caxton, in
the late fifteenth century (Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in 1478, Gower’s
Confessio Amantis in 1483). Caxton was both the first to print a book in
English, and the first English printer. He realised the commercial potential
of the new technology while working as a merchant in the Low Countries
and Germany, birthplace of printing in Europe. Late in 1475 or early in
1476 Caxton set up his own printing press in London.

20. • Patriotic pride dictated that editions of both
poets were to be formally dedicated to King
Henry VIII in 1532 and it was to Gower that
Shakespeare respectfully turned for a source
for Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1608) (though it
must be admitted that his tribute to ‘the
worthy and ancient’ poet begins to look
condescending once a superannuated Gower
is pressed into service to act as his dusty
choric narrator).

21. • The English language had almost no prestige abroad at
the beginning of the sixteenth century. One of the
earliest sixteenth-century works of English literature,
Thomas More's Utopia, was written in Latin for an
international intellectual community. It was only
translated into English during the 1550s, nearly a half-
century after its original publication in Britain. By
1600, though English remained somewhat peripheral
on the continent, it had been transformed into an
immensely powerful expressive medium, as
employedby Shakespeare, Marlowe, and the
translators of the Bible.

22. • The development of the English language is linked to the consolidation
and strengthening of the English state. The Wars of the Roses ended with
Henry VII’s establishment of the Tudor dynasty that would rule England
from 1485 to 1603. The Tudors imposed a much stronger central authority
on the nation. The royal court was a center of culture as well as power,
finding expression in theater, masques, fashion, and taste in painting,
music, and poetry. The court fostered paranoia, and in this anxious
atmosphere courtiers became highly practiced at crafting and deciphering
graceful words with double or triple meanings. For advice on the
cultivation and display of the self, they turned to Castiglione's Il
Cortigiano (The Courtier). Beyond the court, London was the largest and
fastest-growing city in Europe, and literacy increased throughout the
century, in part due to the influence of Protestantism as well as the rise of
the printing press. Freedom of the press did not exist, and much
literature, especially poetry, still circulated in manuscript.

23. • The movement now known as the Renaissance unleashed new
ideas and new social, political and economic forces that gradually
displaced the spiritual and communal values of the Middle
Ages. The Renaissance came to England through the spiritual and
intellectual orientation known as humanism. Humanism, whose
adherents included Sir Thomas More, John Colet, Roger Ascham,
and Sir Thomas Elyot, was bound up with struggles over the
purposes of education and curriculum reform. Education was still
ordered according to the medieval trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric)
andquadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astrology, and music), and it
emphasized Latin, the language of diplomacy, professions, and
higher learning. But the focus of education shifted from training for
the Church to the general acquisition of “literature,” in the sense
both of literacy and of cultural knowledge.

24. • Another well know writing is Machiavelli’s The Prince that has been
incredibly influential since it was published 5 years after his death in
1532. It was written during the European Renaissance when
intellect and the discussion of new ideas was a widespread them of
the era. Machiavelli did not write The Prince to become famous but
instead wrote his book to achieve a position in the new Italian
government formed by the Medici family. The Prince was written as
a political handbook for rulers and has been used this way for many
centuries. The book has caused passionate debates and controversy
since the day it was published and it appears that it will continue to
do so. When The Prince was published, Italy was not a unified
country but a compilation of city states that were all fighting to gain
power over one another. Machiavelli was greatly influenced and
interested in the complicated nature of European politics.

25. • Officially at least, England in the early sixteenth century had a single
religion, Catholicism. The Protestant Reformation, with its
emphasis on the authority of scripture (sola scriptura) and salvation
by faith alone (sola fide), came to England as a result of Henry VIII’s
insistence on divorcing his wife, Catherine of Aragon, against the
wishes of the Pope. Henry declared himself supreme head of the
Church of England (through the Act of Supremacy). Those like
Thomas More who refused the oath acknowledging the king’s
supremacy were held guilty of treason and executed. Henry was an
equal-opportunity persecutor, hostile to Catholics and zealous
reformers alike. His son Edward VI was more firmly Protestant,
whilst Mary I was a Catholic. Elizabeth I, though a Protestant, was
cautiously conservative, determined to hold religious zealotry in
check.

26. • A female monarch in a male world, Elizabeth ruled through a combination
of adroit political maneuvering and imperious command, enhancing her
authority by means of an extraordinary cult of love. The court moved in
an atmosphere of romance, with music, dancing, plays, and
masques. Leading artists like the poet Edmund Spenser and the
miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard celebrated Elizabeth’s mystery and likened her
to various classical goddesses. A source of intense anxiety was Mary
Queen of Scots, a Catholic with a plausible claim to the English throne,
whom Elizabeth eventually had executed. When England faced an
invasion from Catholic Spain in 1588, Elizabeth appeared in person before
her troops wearing a white gown and a silver breastplate; the incident
testifies to her self-consciously theatrical command of the grand public
occasion as well as her strategic appropriation of masculine qualities. By
the 1590s, virtually everyone was aware that Elizabeth’s life was nearing
an end, and there was great anxiety surrounding the succession to the
throne.

27. • Renaissance literature is the product of a rhetorical
culture, a culture steeped in the arts of persuasion and
trained to process complex verbal signals. Aesthetically,
Elizabethan literature reveals a delight in order and
pattern conjoined with a profound interest in the mind
and heart. In his Defense of Poesy, Sir Philip Sidney
argued that poetry’s magical power to create perfect
worlds was also a moral power, encouraging readers to
virtue. The major literary modes of the Elizabethan
period included pastoral, as exemplified in
Marlowe’s The Passionate Shepherd to his Love,
andheroic/epic, as in Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

28. • A permanent, freestanding public theater in England
dates only from 1567. There was, however, a rich and
vital theatrical tradition, including interludes and
mystery and morality plays. Around 1590, an
extraordinary change came over English drama,
pioneered by Marlowe’s mastery of unrhymed iambic
pentameter, or blank verse. The theaters had many
enemies; moralists warned that they were nests of
sedition, and Puritans charged that theatrical
transvestism excited illicit sexual desires, both
heterosexual and homosexual. Nonetheless, the
playing companies had powerful allies, including
Queen Elizabeth, and continuing popular support.

29. • Whereas the creative revolutions of the Italian Renaissance took
place mainly within the visual and architectural arts, in England
(from Henry VII’s reign onward) they mainly took place in a new
spiritual and intellectual orientation known as humanism. In
England and elsewhere, humanism was bound up with the struggles
over the purposes of education and curriculum reform, and many
humanists, such as Thomas More and Erasmus, were critical of
what they regarded as a hopelessly narrow and outmoded
intellectual culture based on scholastic hair-splitting and a dogmatic
adherence to the philosophy of Aristotle, and educational programs
in England began to shift their focus from training men for the
church to the general acquisition of "literature," in the sense both
of literacy and of cultural knowledge.

30. • The two impulses illustrated by Mulcaster above—humanist reverence for
classical literature and English pride in the vernacular language—gave rise
to many distinguished translations throughout the century:
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey by George Chapman, Ovid’s Metamorphosesby
Arthur Golding, Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano by Sir Thomas Hoby, and
Montaigne’s Essais by John Florio, just to name a few. Let us remind
ourselves, too, that this was not the first time in England that such
impulses led to the English translation of both classical literature as well as
native literature that had been originally written in Latin—in the
9th century, King Alfred initiated a program whereby many works seen as
important to the Anglo-Saxons (i.e., the Vulgate Bible,
Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History,
Aelfric’sLives of the Saints, among others) were translated into Old English.
Therefore, even in the so-called "Dark Ages," the importance of a
"national culture" and education in the classics was perceived and acted
upon.

31. • As a prose polemicist, John Milton (1608-74) was a masterly and at times vituperative defender of
the various public causes he chose to espouse. In the early 1640s he produced five pamphlets
attacking both the idea and the supposed enormities of English episcopacy; between 1643 and
1645 he published four tracts in favour of divorce, stemming from the unhappiness of his own
marriage; in 1644 he offered his great defence of ‘free’ speech, Areopagitica, as a means of
countering the licensing ordinance of a predominantly Presbyterian Parliament; following the
execution of Charles I in 1649 he argued in both English and Latin for the propriety of bringing a
tyrant to account and he attempted to undermine the success of Eikon Basilike by scathingly
attacking its pretensions; in 1660, shortly before the restoration of the monarchy, he proposed in
The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonmealth the establishment of a ‘Grand
Councel of ablest men chosen by the people’ as a means of safeguarding the unsteady republic. Of
the anti-episcopal tracts, two, The Reason of Church Government and An Apology for Smectymnuus
(both 1642), contain pertinent digressions on Milton’s own life, education, and development. In the
earlier tract he writes of his serene determination ‘to lay up as the best treasure, and solace of a
good old age ... the honest liberty of free speech from my youth’, and, with a self assertive attempt
to disarm protest, he adds, ‘if I be either by disposition, or what other cause too inquisitive, or
supositious of my self and my own doings, who can help it?’ His intellectual credentials, he insists,
had been proved by his ready acceptance into the high-minded salons of Italy during his travels of
1638-9, but despite his early success as a Latin stylist, he had subsequently resolved ‘to be an
interpreter & relater of the best and sagest things among mine own Citizens throughout this Iland
in the mother dialect’. In Of Reformation Touching Church Discipline (1641), however, he briskly lays
out a general argument against the Anglican compromise based on a severely anti-episcopalian
reading of English Reformation history.

32. • John Dryden (1631-1700) was perhaps Restoration England's most
learned writer. Appointed Poet Laureate in 1688, Dryden was an
accomplished poet, dramatist, literary critic and social
commentator who recognized that the English language and
literature of his day was becoming something new as it evolved
away from earlier models of literary production. At the heart of
much of Dryden's writing was his reliance on the Bible and how its
stories could be used to reflect and understand contemporary
political conditions. His political satire Absalom and Achitophel, for
instance, draws upon 2 Samuel 13-19 and allegorizes the Exclusion
Crisis of the late-1670s by casting King Charles II as King David, the
Duke of Monmouth as David’s son, Absalom, and the Duke of
Buckingham as Absalom's mentor, Achitophel. The original owner
of OSU's copy of this poem has astutely equated each character to
his real-world equivalent by writing the names of the King and the
Duke alongside their printed spoken parts.

33. • In 1697 Swift wrote The Battle of the Books to buttress
his beleaguered patron Sir William Temple in a
controversy over the relative merits of ancient learning
and modern learning. Gentlemen with old Tory money
or new Whig pretensions affected a haughty disdain for
the new philosophy of Descartes and the new social
science of Hobbes, and their disdain affected Swift.
They saw in modernism a childish self-absorption,
disregard for the classics, disrespect for traditional
authorities, and bad manners. Swift ridiculed the new
trends by contrasting them with the sound wisdom and
graceful art of the old masters.

34. • Today the word ‘romantic’ evokes images of love and
sentimentality, but the term ‘Romanticism’ has a much wider
meaning. It covers a range of developments in art, literature, music
and philosophy, spanning the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
The ‘Romantics’ would not have used the term themselves: the
label was applied retrospectively, from around the middle of the
19th century.
• When reference is made to Romantic verse, the poets who
generally spring to mind are William Blake (1757-1827), William
Wordsworth (1770-1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834),
George Gordon, 6th Lord Byron (1788-1824), Percy Bysshe Shelley
(1792-1822) and John Keats (1795-1821). These writers had an
intuitive feeling that they were ‘chosen’ to guide others through the
tempestuous period of change.

35. • This was a time of physical confrontation; of violent rebellion in parts of Europe
and the New World. Conscious of anarchy across the English Channel, the British
government feared similar outbreaks. The early Romantic poets tended to be
supporters of the French Revolution, hoping that it would bring about political
change; however, the bloody Reign of Terror shocked them profoundly and
affected their views. In his youth William Wordsworth was drawn to the
Republican cause in France, until he gradually became disenchanted with the
Revolutionaries.
• This was a time of physical confrontation; of violent rebellion in parts of Europe
and the New World. Conscious of anarchy across the English Channel, the British
government feared similar outbreaks. The early Romantic poets tended to be
supporters of the French Revolution, hoping that it would bring about political
change; however, the bloody Reign of Terror shocked them profoundly and
affected their views. In his youth William Wordsworth was drawn to the
Republican cause in France, until he gradually became disenchanted with the
Revolutionaries.
• Shelley’s companion poems, “Song to the Men of England” and “The Mask of
Anarchy,” are full of the particulars of the contemporary working-class experience
during this period.

36. • No poet of the period so effectively extended this grasp of rural communal
relationships as did William Wordsworth (1770-1850). Wordsworth’s admiration
for Burns’s achievement is evident both in the pilgrimage he made to Ayrshire in
1803 in search of sites associated with the poet and in a poem of his own
addressed ‘To the Sons of Burns after visiting their Father’s Grave’ (‘Be
independent, generous, brave! Your Father such example gave’). His real tribute to
Burns’s example lies, however, in his own poetry of place, of character, and of
relationships. Although Wordsworth’s contribution to Lyrical Ballads (1798)
consisted chiefly of his use of ballad form and in remoulding its traditional
subjects, he also strove, as he later argued in the celebrated Preface, to find an
appropriate language. He had chosen to describe ‘humble and rustic life’, he
claimed, because in that condition ‘the essential passions of the heart find a better
soil in which they can attain their maturity’ and because they ‘speak a plainer and
more emphatic language’. Burns’s vernacular poems drew their strength from the
very vigour of a living dialect. For Wordsworth, no such alternative to ‘standard’
English seemed appropriate to poetry, however radical his desire to break with the
artificialities of the tradition he had inherited from the poets of the eighteenth
century.

37. • Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) was one of the most famous and prolific
poets of the Victorian period, with a career spanning four decades. Elizabeth
Barrett Browning inherited her ideas about what poetry could do principally from
the poets of the Romantic period – in particular William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe
Shelley, and her great love, George Gordon, Lord Byron. It was from these figures
that she gained a strong belief that poetry had the power to influence social and
political thinking.
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning's influential poem 'The Cry of the Children' was written
in response to the dire state of child labour in Britain. A year earlier, in 1842,
Barrett Browning had read the official parliamentary reports of the terrible
conditions and expolitation faced by working children in mines and factories.
Although sentimental, the poem is a powerful and moving protest against the
cruelty and injustice of such a system.
• The poem was first published, as shown here, in the August 1843 issue
of Blackwood's Edinburgh, a magazine which enjoyed a large readership. It has
been credited as rousing greater public support for reforms surrounding child
labour.

38. • In 1858 The Royal Commission on the state of popular education in
England, under the chairmanship of the Duke of Newcastle, was appointed
'To inquire into the state of public education in England and to consider
and report what measures, if any, are required for the extension of sound
and cheap elementary instruction to all classes of the people.
• The Commissioners commented that infant schools for children up to the
age of seven were 'of great utility': they were places of security as well as
of education, since they were the only means of keeping children of poor
families off the streets in town, or out of the roads and fields in the
country. They distinguished two types of infant schools: the public infant
schools, which often formed a department of the ordinary day school; and
the private or 'dame' schools, which were very common in both town and
country but were frequently little more than nurseries in which 'the nurse
collected the children of many families into her own house instead of
attending upon the children of some one family'

39. • It is important to recognize the achievements that resulted from the 1870 Act. The
figures for the final decades of the century show the almost complete elimination
of illiteracy as measured from parish registers. The gains were greater for women
than men. Had it not been for the 1870 Act progress in literacy would have slowed
down simply because illiteracy was concentrated in those classes and regions that
were hardest to provide for under the voluntary system. The 1870 Act was
responsible for the mopping-up operation by providing more school places and
improvements in attendance and length of school life. There were certainly
improvements in attendance but by 1897 it was still only just over 80%. Legislation
helped but machinery of enforcement was necessary.
• The main pressure was that of the attendance officer (commonly called the ‘board
man’) and ultimately a summons. This did not always prove effective and
authorities were often unwilling to prosecute or convict parents especially in rural
areas where cheap child labor was essential for farmers and parents. The
Agricultural Children Act 1873 was intended to improve attendance, but fines were
so low if imposed at all. The quality of literacy was governed by things other than
directly educational ones. The factory legislation of the late 1860s and 1870s
encompassed children in industries not covered before. From the 1870s, future
patterns of leisure and holidays began to take rudimentary form. New skilled and
semi-skilled occupations were being created and white-collar occupations were
expanding. Literacy was essential in all of these areas. The impact on literature of
the Education Act of 1870, which made elementary schooling compulsory the
emergence of a mass literate population at whom a new mass-produced literature
could be directed.

40. • The disconcertions and anomalies of early Victorian Britain are
nowhere more trenchantly examined than in the pamphlets, essays,
lectures, and books of its most noisy and effective critic, Thomas
Carlyle (1795-1881). Carlyle was a late product of the Scottish
Enlightenment, and of the culture which had made the Edinburgh
Review (founded in 1802) an intellectual force to be reckoned with
beyond the borders of Scotland. The power and effect of his own
writings do not, however, derive exclusively from the classical
rationality of late eighteenth-century Edinburgh philosophy.
Carlyle’s fundamental debt to the rhythms and the confident,
prophetic utterance of the Bible is profound, as is his sense of
himself as a latter-day Jeremiah, endowed with the urgent accents
of a Presbyterian pulpit. He was also exceptionally well read in
modern German thought which was already exerting a powerful
cerebral influence over the literatures of other European nations.
His own Life of Schiller was published in the London Magazine in
1823-4 and his translation of Goethe’s seminal novel Wilhelm
Meister’s Apprenticeship appeared in 1824.

41. • Elizabeth Barrett Browning's influential poem 'The Cry of
the Children' was written in response to the dire state of
child labour in Britain. A year earlier, in 1842, Barrett
Browning had read the official parliamentary reports of the
terrible conditions and expolitation faced by working
children in mines and factories. Although sentimental, the
poem is a powerful and moving protest against the cruelty
and injustice of such a system.
• The poem was first published, as shown here, in the August
1843 issue of Blackwood's Edinburgh, a magazine which
enjoyed a large readership. It has been credited as rousing
greater public support for reforms surrounding child labour.

42. • John Donne's standing as a great English poet,
and one of the greatest writers of English prose,
is now assured. However, it has been confirmed
only in the early 20th century. The history of
Donne's reputation is the most remarkable of any
major writer in English; no other body of great
poetry has fallen so far from favor for so long and
been generally condemned as inept and crude. In
Donne's own day his poetry was highly prized
among the small circle of his admirers, who read
it as it was circulated in manuscript, and in his
later years he gained wide fame as a preacher.

43. • For some 30 years after his death successive editions of his verse
stamped his powerful influence upon English poets. During the
Restoration his writing went out of fashion and remained so for
several centuries. Throughout the 18th century, and for much of the
19th century, he was little read and scarcely appreciated.
Commentators followed Samuel Johnson in dismissing his work as
no more than frigidly ingenious and metrically uncouth. Some
scribbled notes by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Charles Lamb's copy
of Donne's poems make a testimony of admiration rare in the early
19th century. Robert Browning became a known (and wondered-at)
enthusiast of Donne, but it was not until the end of the 1800s that
Donne's poetry was eagerly taken up by a growing band of avant-
garde readers and writers. His prose remained largely unnoticed
until 1919.

44. • In the first two decades of the 20th century Donne's poetry was
decisively rehabilitated. Its extraordinary appeal to modern readers
throws light on the Modernist movement, as well as on our intuitive
response to our own times. Donne may no longer be the cult figure
he became in the 1920s and 1930s, when T. S. Eliot and William
Butler Yeats, among others, discovered in his poetry the peculiar
fusion of intellect and passion and the alert contemporariness
which they aspired to in their own art. He is not a poet for all tastes
and times; yet for many readers Donne remains what Ben
Jonson judged him: "the first poet in the world in some things." His
poems continue to engage the attention and challenge the
experience of readers who come to him afresh. His high place in the
pantheon of the English poets now seems secure.