Dr. Karen A. Droisen
Department of English
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
KDroisen@hotmail.com

Introduction: England in the 1790's

During the French Revolution and its aftermath, the anxiety produced in England by British radical sympathizers and the events across the Channel had a profound effect on both governmental policies towards political groups and on the forms that political discourse could take. In Britain during this time period, the Government's anxiety about British Radicals who sympathized with the French Revolution took the form of a brutal crackdown on personal liberties. Parliament suspended the writ of habeas corpus, developed a vast surveillance and espionage system, heavily censored the press, outlawed unions, and imprisoned liberal and radical political figures with reckless abandon. In the face of stringent governmental censorship and the increasing regulation of political groups, the authors of the 1790’s resorted to narratives that seemed to disclaim political intent. The exploration of political rights became a physiological and psychological investigation of the individual: the human body and its constituent parts became an arena for political theorizing. The interest demonstrated by the authors of this period in the internal life of the individual should thus be read in part as an indication of the real danger faced by authors interested in human rights and as a wishful escape from the troubles of the day.

It's important to remember that in Britain at this time, only the aristocracy and landed gentry had any voice in the running of the country. Middle class men did not get the vote until 1832 and nearly universal male suffrage was not granted until 1867. Women, of course, did not get even a limited franchise until 1917. The events in France, thus, held real resonance for the British upper classes because their country, too, was still structured along the same feudal lines. The British Government responded to the French and the American Revolutions by attempting to shore up their power and solidify their control over the country. In the 1790’s, in the wake of the French Revolution, the English Jacobin movement (a radical political movement that aligned itself with French Revolutionary thinkers), and the political organization in England of an increasingly dissatisfied working class, the exploration of the “natural” state of social relationships became highly charged with political and moral significance. Sensibility becomes an object of intense interest in the late eighteenth century as the issues on which it focuses -- the social relationships among individuals -- become more fluid: the discourse of sensibility begins to take center stage in English literature as the stability of the class structure it theorizes could no longer be taken for granted. During the French Revolution and its aftermath, the struggle to define the modern individual thus raged on battlefields both discursive and literal.

We talk about a “discourse of sensibility” because it is constituted by a set of symbolic structures. These structures reflect, in part, political necessity. In the face of stringent governmental censorship, the authors of the 1790’s explored social relations and class structure in narratives that seemed to disclaim political intent.

The debates of the 1790’s were characterized by a politicizing of issues raised within the school of sensibility to the extent that one’s stand on matters such as the conduct of the private affections, charity, education, sympathy, genius, honour, and even the use of the reason, became political statements, aligned with conservative or radical ideologies. Under the suppression of direct political expression, these issues became a code in which conservative and progressive thinkers proclaimed their allegiances and worked out terms of accommodation. (Chris Jones 13)

Readers who dismiss sentimentality as self-indulgent or devoid of intellectual complexity, thus, wrongly overlook its function: it developed as a means of political commentary, not as an escape from it.

The early 1790’s witnessed a massive mobilization, both in London and all over England, of London Corresponding Society (LCS) members calling for Parliamentary and economic reform.

Their opponents were quite horrified to see the people enter politics in such numbers . . . There was clearly a wide range of men and of occupations affected by the sharp rise in prices and decline in real wages in the second half of 1792 and who turned to the LCS for redress and organisation. In the process, the LCS began to speak with a collective voice for London’s distressed artisans and, more generally, for the dispossessed throughout the nation. (Royle and Walvin 51)

The English Romantic poets traditionally studied are the “Big Six”: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, and Keats. These authors claim repeatedly that they are doing something radically new to save poetry from the outworn traditions of the eighteenth century. In reality, they owe a great deal to the age of sensibility. We should understand the degree to which they make claims of originality to reflect the anxiety with which they viewed their positions as poets. The premium placed by these poets on “originality” suggests how worried they are about it. We'll be reading the Big Six alongside many other poets who were also very popular and fairly famous during this era. Felicia Hemans, for example, outsold every English Romantic poet except Byron, yet not even one of her poems was included in standard anthologies of Romantic literature until about 1990. They've been written out of the canon in part because critics have accepted the definition of Romanticism generated by the Big Six. We will begin to counter this misreading of history by reading a wide spectrum of poetry from this period.

Central Issues in Romantic Poetry

These poets focus on the human imagination and particularly, on the transformative power they claim it possesses. In all these poems, we will see a continuing interest in the relationship between the individual mind and the natural world. Do we create meaning? or is it there to be perceived? is the relationship symbiotic? or parasitic? Can we see things as they are? Or does every observer distort the world simply by looking at it? These are the questions the Romantic poets will explore.

These poets -- particularly the Big Six -- tend to define the human psyche by opposition to the contingencies of time and politics. They claim that the imagination and the world of feeling offer access to -- or even create -- a realm of meaning that transcends history. We will explore the means by which this transcendence is depicted and defended and we will ask why the desire to "transcend" the passage of time held such a powerful appeal to these poets and to their audience. The movement inward that tends to characterize this poetry thus can be understood in part as a desire to displace political issues into the analysis of the individual. Political lessons about class structure and gender relations are thus encoded in this, as in all, literature.

These poets typically demonstrate a strong interest in Nature and the natural world. This derives in part from a desire to arrest a way of life that is rapidly vanishing: unspoiled nature becomes an appealing myth when it begins to be threatened by industrialism. The pastoral is fundamentally an elegiac mode: it attempts to memorialize and thereby preserve something in danger of being lost.

The typical structure of a Romantic poem the poet or the poetic imagination raises an issue, interrogates it, and offers some sort of answer: most of these poems consist of crisis and resolution. The crisis may take the form of staged intellectual confusion, emotional difficulty like grief, personal tragedy like loss, writer's block, or a failure of the imagination to respond to challenges of some sort. The resolution typically takes the form of a renewed faith in the power of the imagination and/or poetry to counter the crisis at hand.

During the 1950's, M. H. Abrams defined this structure as "Natural Supernaturalism." He  emphasized the similarities between Romantic poems and the King James Version of the Bible. Both stories are organized around three events or states of mind: innocence, a fall from grace, and eventual redemption. Translated into the world of Romanticism, this story becomes one of poetic plenitude threatened by a crisis of imaginative power and redeemed through imaginative vision. For the Big Six, this correspondence is fairly easy to trace. We will be examining the its form and content in part by placing it in historical context and also by examining the issues that get swept under the table by the resolutions at which the poems arrive.

Jones, Chris. Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790’s. London and NY:  Routledge, 1991.

Royle, Edward and James Walvin.  English Radicals and Reformers, 1760-1848.  Lexington:  UP of Kentucky, 1982.

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