ACKNOWLEDGMENTS / xlv
Lethbridge), Ruth McAdams (Tarrant County College), John McCombe (University of Dayton), Kristen McDermott (Central Michigan University), Joseph McGowan (University of San Diego), Christian Michener (St. Mary's University, Minnesota), D. Keith Mikolavich (Diablo Valley College), Nicholas Moschovakis (George Washington University), Gwendolyn Morgan (Montana State University), Daniel Mosser (Virginia Polytechnic Institute), K. D. Neill (University of Victoria, British Columbia), Douglas Nordfor (James Madison University), Michael North (University of California, Los Angeles), Bernie O'Donnell (University of Florida). Michael Olmert (University of Maryland, College Park), C. R. Orchard (Indiana University of Pennsylvania), Jennifer Panek (University of Ottawa), Cynthia Patton (Emporia State University), James Persoon (Grand Valley State University), Sara Pfaffenroth (County College of Morris), John Pfordreshen (Georgetown University), Jennifer Phegley (University of Missouri, Kansas City), Trey Philpotts (Arkansas Technical University), Brenda Powell (University of St. Thomas, St. Paul), Tison Pugh (University of Central Florida), Katherine Quinsey (University of Windsor), Eric Reimer (University of Montana), Kathryn Rummel (California Polytechnic State University), Harbindar Sanghara (University of Victoria, Canada), William Scheuede (University of South Florida), Michael Schoenfeldt (University of Michigan), R. M. Schuler (University of Victoria, British Columbia), D. Schwartz (Cal Poly, Saint Louis Obispo), Michael Schwartz (California State University, Chico), Richard Sha (American University), George Shuffelton (Carleton College), Brandie Sigfried (Brigham Young University), Elizabeth Signorotti (Binghamton University), Dawn Simmons (Ohio State University), Erik Simpson (Grinnell College), Sarah Singer (Delaware County Community College), Dr. Mary-Antoinette Smith (Seattle University), Jonathan Smith (University of Michigan, Dearborn), Nigel Smith (Princeton University), Malinda Snow (Georgia State University), Jean Sorenson (Grayson County College), C. Spinks (Trinity College), Donald Stone (City University of New York, Queens), Kevin Swafford (Bradley University), Andrew Taylor (University of Ottawa), Bebecca Totaro (Florida Gulf Coast University), Bente Videbaek (State University New York, Stony Brook), Joseph Viscome (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Jennie Wakefield (Clemson University), David Ward (University of Pittsburgh), Tracy Ware (Queen's University), Alexander Weiss (Radford University), Lachlan Whalen (Marshall University), Christopher Wheatley (Catholic University of America), C. Williams (Mississippi State University), Jodi Wyett (Xavier University, Cincinnati), Jiyeon Yoo (University of California, Los Angeles), Richard Zeikowitz (University of South Alabama).
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The Norton Anthology of English Literature
EIGHTH EDITION VOLUME 2
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The Romantic Period
1785-1830
1789�1815: Revolutionary and Napoleonic period in France.�1789: The Revolution begins with the assembly of the States- General in May and the storming of the Bastille on July 14.� 1793: King Louis XVI executed; England joins the alliance against France.�1793�94: The Reign of Terror under Robespierre. 1804: Napoleon crowned emperor.�1815: Napoleon defeated at Waterloo
1807: British slave trade outlawed (slavery abolished throughout the empire, including the West Indies, twenty-six years later) 1811�20: The Regency�George, Prince of Wales, acts as regent for
George III, who has been declared incurably insane 1819: Peterloo Massacre 1820: Accession of George IV
The Romantic period, though by far the shortest, is at least as complex and diverse as any other period in British literary history. For much of the twentieth century, scholars singled out five poets�Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Percy Shelley, and Keats, adding Blake belatedly to make a sixth�and constructed notions of a unified Romanticism on the basis of their works. But there were problems all along: even the two closest collaborators of the 1790s, Words- worth and Coleridge, would fit no single definition; Byron despised both Coleridge's philosophical speculations and Wordsworth's poetry; Shelley and Keats were at opposite poles from each other stylistically and philosophically; Blake was not at all like any of the other five.
Nowadays, although the six poets remain, by most measures of canonicity, the principal canonical figures, we recognize a greater range of accomplishments. In 1798, the year of Wordsworth and Coleridge's first Lyrical Ballads, neither of the authors had much of a reputation; Wordsworth was not even included among the 1,112 entries in David Rivers's Literary Memoirs of Living Authors of Great Britain of that year, and Lyrical Ballads was published anonymously because, as Coleridge told the publisher, "Wordsworth's name is nothing-�to a large number of people mine stinks." Some of the best-regarded poets of the time were women�Anna Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson� and Wordsworth and Coleridge (junior colleagues of Robinson when she was poetry editor of the Morning Post in the late 1790s) looked up to them and learned their craft from them. The rest of the then-established figures were the later eighteenth-century poets who are printed at the end of volume 1 of this anthology�Gray, Collins, Crabbe, and Cowper in particular. Only Byron, among the now-canonical poets, was instantly famous; and Felicia
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2 / THE ROMANTIC PERIOD
Hemans and Letitia Landon ran him a close race as best-sellers. The Romantic period had a great many more participants than the six principal male poets and was shaped by a multitude of political, social, and economic changes.
REVOLUTION AND REACTION
Following a widespread practice of historians of English literature, we use "Romantic period" to refer to the span between the year 1785, the midpoint of the decade in which Samuel Johnson died and Blake, Burns, and Smith published their first poems, and 1830, by which time the major writers of the preceding century were either dead or no longer productive. This was a turbulent period, during which England experienced the ordeal of change from a primarily agricultural society, where wealth and power had been concentrated in the landholding aristocracy, to a modern industrial nation. And this change occurred in a context of revolution�first the American and then the more radical French�and of war, of economic cycles of inflation and depression, and of the constant threat to the social structure from imported revolutionary ideologies to which the ruling classes responded by the repression of traditional liberties.
The early period of the French Revolution, marked by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the storming of the Bastille, evoked enthusiastic support from English liberals and radicals alike. Three important books epitomize the radical social thinking stimulated by the Revolution. Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) justified the French Revolution against Edmund Burke's attack in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Tom Paine's Rights of Man (1791-92) also advocated for England a democratic republic that was to be achieved, if lesser pressures failed, by popular revolution. More important as an influence on Wordsworth and Percy Shelley was William Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), which foretold an inevitable but peaceful evolution of society to a final stage in which property would be equally distributed and government would wither away. But English sympathizers dropped off as the Revolution followed its increasingly grim course: the accession to power by Jacobin extremists, intent on purifying their new republic by purging it of its enemies; the "September Massacres" of the imprisoned nobility in 1792, followed by the execution of the king and queen; the new French Republic's invasion of the Rhineland and the Netherlands, which brought England into the war against France; the guillotining of thousands in the Reign of Terror under Robespierre; and, after the execution in their turn of the men who had directed the Terror, the emergence of Napoleon, first as dictator then as emperor of France. As Wordsworth wrote in The Prelude,