British literature - Johnsonian and Romantic Period

The Age of Johnson and Early Romanticism Introduction The mid-eighteenth century represents a crucial turning point in English literature. On one hand, it saw the rise of scholars and critics who helped systematize and define English literature itself. On the other hand, it witnessed the emergence of new literary forms and styles—experimental novels, emotionally intense poetry, and Gothic fiction—that would directly pave the way for the Romantic movement of the late 1700s and early 1800s. Understanding this period requires knowing both the stabilizing influence of figures like Samuel Johnson and the disruptive, innovative voices that challenged literary conventions. Samuel Johnson: Defining English Literature Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) stands as one of the most influential literary figures of the eighteenth century. He was an author, poet, essayist, literary critic, biographer, editor, and lexicographer—essentially, he did nearly everything in literature, and he did it brilliantly. Johnson's most famous achievement was A Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755 after nine years of exhaustive labor. This wasn't the first English dictionary, but it was revolutionary in scope and ambition. Johnson examined over 100,000 quotations from respected literary and scholarly works, illustrating how words were actually used. The Dictionary served not only as a practical reference but as a statement about what constituted legitimate English and English literature. By choosing which authors to quote and which words to include, Johnson was essentially defining the boundaries of the English literary tradition itself. Beyond the Dictionary, Johnson edited Shakespeare's complete works and wrote Lives of the Poets, a biographical and critical study of English poets. These works were foundational in establishing English literature as a formal field of study. Before Johnson, literature was valued, certainly, but it wasn't systematically studied or canonized the way Johnson helped make possible. He created the critical framework that would dominate literary study for generations. Irish Authors and the Expansion of English Letters In the mid-eighteenth century, three Irish writers achieved significant prominence in England, expanding the range of literary forms and voices in English letters. Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774) produced two major works that remain widely read: the novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), a sentimental but genuinely moving story of a rural clergyman's family, and the poem The Deserted Village (1770), which mourns the passing of English rural life under the pressure of agricultural change and enclosure. Goldsmith's work is characterized by warmth and a certain melancholy observation of human nature. Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816) was a master of comedic drama. His plays The Rivals and The School for Scandal sparkle with witty dialogue and satirical observations of upper-class society. They represent the height of eighteenth-century comic theater and show the enduring influence of earlier comic traditions adapted to contemporary settings. Laurence Sterne (1713–1768) took the novel in a radically experimental direction. His Tristram Shandy, published in installments from 1759 to 1767, completely disrupts conventional narrative. The "hero," Tristram Shandy, does not even appear until midway through the novel. Instead, Sterne digresses constantly, breaks the fourth wall by addressing the reader directly, plays with typography and blank pages, and creates a work that seems to mock the very conventions of the novel form. Tristram Shandy is bewildering to readers expecting a traditional story, but it was genuinely innovative and influenced experimental fiction for centuries to come. New Forms: Novels of Sensibility and Manners The second half of the eighteenth century saw the rise of the sentimental novel or novel of sensibility—a form that privileged emotional response, sentiment, and feeling over reason and restraint. These novels often featured protagonists who were acutely sensitive, morally virtuous, and prone to tears. The form reflected broader cultural values of the period that celebrated refined emotional awareness as a marker of education and moral worth. Frances Burney (1752–1840) wrote Evelina (1778), one of the earliest examples of the novel of manners—a form that focuses on the details of social behavior, class distinctions, and the rules governing polite society. Evelina follows a young woman of uncertain social status navigating the marriage market and London society. Burney's novel combines the emotional intensity of sensibility with sharp social observation and comedy. The novel of manners would become a major form in the Romantic and post-Romantic periods, most famously developed by Jane Austen. Precursors to Romanticism: The Graveyard Poets and Gothic Fiction Two literary movements emerged in the mid-eighteenth century that directly anticipated Romanticism: Graveyard Poetry and the early Gothic novel. The Graveyard Poets wrote meditative, melancholic verse focused on mortality, ruins, and the transience of human life. The most famous example is Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751), one of the most beloved poems in English literature. In it, Gray wanders through a rural churchyard at dusk, observing the graves of humble villagers and reflecting on death, obscurity, and the erasure of individual lives by time. The poem is characterized by elegant language, a solemn tone, and the valorization of feeling and contemplation. It represents a conscious turn away from the rational, social focus of earlier eighteenth-century verse toward inwardness and melancholy. <extrainfo> The Graveyard Poets—including figures like Edward Young and Robert Blair—wrote works like Night Thoughts and The Grave, which shared similar preoccupations. These poems often featured nighttime settings, churchyards, tombs, and meditations on death. While this might sound depressing, these works were actually celebrated in their time as models of elevated sentiment and serious feeling. </extrainfo> The Gothic novel emerged almost simultaneously. Horace Walpole (1764–1823) wrote The Castle of Otranto (1764), which is widely considered the first Gothic novel. Set in a medieval Italian castle filled with supernatural occurrences, mysterious secrets, and ancestral curses, The Castle of Otranto combines horror, romance, and melodrama. The Gothic novel became a hugely popular form—readers craved tales of haunted castles, virtuous heroines in danger, tyrannical villains, and supernatural mystery. What both Graveyard Poetry and early Gothic fiction share is a reaction against Enlightenment rationalism. Rather than celebrating reason, logic, and social order, they valued mystery, emotion, and the darker aspects of human experience and nature. They created space for the irrational, the supernatural, and the intensely personal—all values that would become central to Romanticism. The Romantic Period: Context and Key Figures What Is Romanticism? The Romantic period in English literature conventionally begins with the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, a collaborative collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This date marks a deliberate break from earlier eighteenth-century literary values. Romanticism arose as a reaction to historical upheaval: the Industrial Revolution, which was transforming Britain from a rural, agricultural economy to an urban, manufacturing one; the Agricultural Revolution, which was consolidating farmland and displacing rural populations; and the French Revolution, which challenged traditional hierarchies of power and raised questions about individual liberty, social change, and the role of the nation-state. These massive social transformations created both anxiety and exhilaration, and Romantic literature channeled both. Core Values of Romanticism Romantic poets and novelists typically valued: Nature: Not as a mere backdrop or resource, but as a source of spiritual truth, beauty, and emotional power. Nature was where authentic feeling and meaning could be found, in contrast to artificial urban or courtly society. Emotion and Imagination: Rather than reason alone, Romantic artists celebrated feeling, intuition, imagination, and individual consciousness. Personal experience and emotional truth mattered more than universal rules or social conventions. The Individual: Romantic literature centered the unique perspective, feelings, and experiences of individuals, especially their internal emotional and spiritual journeys. The Romantic hero or heroine often struggles against society or fate. The Sublime: A category of experience in which the viewer is overwhelmed by vast, powerful, or terrible natural phenomena (mountains, storms, infinite spaces). The sublime combined pleasure with a sense of danger or awe—it was emotionally intense and spiritually elevating. The Past: Romantic writers were fascinated by medieval history, ancient cultures, folklore, and the legends of earlier peoples. This nostalgia often reflected anxiety about modernity and industrialization. The First Generation: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Scott William Blake (1757–1827) was a visionary poet, painter, and engraver who worked somewhat outside mainstream literary circles. His Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) are complementary collections presenting two contrasting states of human consciousness. The "innocence" poems feature children and pastoral scenes with a sense of wonder; the "experience" poems explore the same themes but with awareness of evil, exploitation, and suffering. Blake also produced prophetic, visionary works like Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), which blended mystical symbolism, social critique, and complex personal mythology. Blake's work is often difficult and symbolic, but his innovations in combining visual art and poetry, and his fierce individuality, made him a crucial Romantic figure. The Lake Poets—named for their association with the Lake District in northern England—formed the core of early Romanticism. William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) were the most important; Robert Southey (1774–1843) was the third major member of the group. Wordsworth and Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads together and co-authored a theoretical preface explaining their poetic aims. They wanted to write poetry about "ordinary life" in "everyday language," rejecting the elaborate diction and artificial conventions of earlier eighteenth-century verse. Wordsworth famously focused on how the mind responds to natural scenes and memory, while Coleridge was drawn to the mysterious, the supernatural, and the dreamlike (as in his famous poem "Kubla Khan"). Walter Scott (1771–1832) achieved fame initially as a poet with narrative works like The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and Marmion (1808), which told dramatic stories set in medieval Scottish history. Scott's poetry is exciting, accessible, and deeply connected to Scottish history and legend. As we'll see, he later became even more famous as a novelist. The Second Generation: Byron, Shelley, and Keats The second wave of Romantic poets included three figures who are among the most celebrated in English literature, though they took quite different approaches. Lord Byron (1788–1824) was a brilliant, controversial figure—a poet, nobleman, and libertine who became famous as much for his scandals as his verse. His poetry is marked by wit, intelligence, and a skeptical tone that set him apart from more earnest Romantic poets. While younger poets like Wordsworth grew increasingly conservative, Byron remained a fiery radical, defending liberty and attacking established power. He was influenced more by the sophisticated satirist Alexander Pope than by contemporary Romantic fashion. His major works include Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (a long poem chronicling a world-weary hero's travels) and Don Juan (a witty, satirical narrative poem). Byron's influence was enormous—he became a legend, and the term "Byronic hero" describes a Romantic protagonist who is darkly handsome, cynical, intellectually brilliant, and somewhat dangerous. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) was a radical intellectual who wrote visionary, politically engaged poetry celebrating liberty, love, and imagination. His major poems include Ode to the West Wind (a meditation on destructive and creative power), To a Skylark (celebrating the bird as a symbol of unfettered poetic inspiration), and Adonaïs (an elegy for the dead poet John Keats). Shelley also wrote longer philosophical poems and dramatic works. Despite dying young at sea, he left a powerful legacy of poetry that combines intellectual sophistication with lyrical beauty. John Keats (1795–1821) is celebrated for some of the most beautiful and technically accomplished poems in the English language. His major works include The Eve of St Agnes (a romantic narrative poem), La Belle Dame sans Merci (a mysterious ballad about a supernatural woman), and his great odes—Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, and To Autumn. Keats's poetry is characterized by extraordinary sensory richness (he appeals to all five senses), complex emotional depth, and formal beauty. Like Shelley, Keats died young from tuberculosis, but his relatively small body of work has had an incalculable influence on English poetry. His concept of "negative capability"—the ability to accept uncertainty and mystery without irritation—became influential in twentieth-century literature. Romantic Fiction: From Sensibility to History to Gothic Just as the Romantic period transformed poetry, it transformed the novel. Several important developments occurred: Jane Austen (1775–1817) is one of the greatest novelists in English literature. Her major works—Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion—all feature the marriage plot and focus on young women navigating society, manners, and courtship. However, Austen's approach was satirical and critical. In Sense and Sensibility, for example, she contrasts two sisters—one excessively emotional and sensitive (representing the novel of sensibility), the other rational and restrained—suggesting that both extremes are problematic. In Northanger Abbey, she explicitly mocks Gothic novels and their readers. Austen's novels are witty, sharply observant of social behavior, and sophisticated in form, but they also contain real emotional depth. She critiqued Romanticism even as she participated in its era, and her combination of irony, social observation, and feeling helped establish a distinctly English novelistic tradition. Walter Scott (1771–1832), whom we met as a narrative poet, became even more influential as a novelist. With Waverley (1814), he pioneered the historical novel—a new form that dramatized historical events and periods while inventing characters and plots. Waverley is set during the 1745 Scottish Rebellion and follows a young Englishman drawn into the conflict. Scott's later historical novels, like Ivanhoe (set during the Crusades), became wildly popular and established the historical novel as a major form. Scott's innovation was to show that fiction could imaginatively explore the past in ways that revealed historical forces and human complexity. He also drew heavily on Scottish history and legend, helping to establish Scotland's cultural significance in literature. <extrainfo> The Gothic novel flourished in the Romantic period. Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823) wrote The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), an enormously popular Gothic novel featuring a virtuous heroine trapped in a mysterious Italian castle, with supernatural occurrences that are ultimately explained as natural phenomena. Radcliffe pioneered the technique of providing rational explanations for apparent supernatural events, which became known as the "explained supernatural." Matthew Lewis (1775–1818) took a more extreme approach with The Monk (1796), a Gothic horror novel featuring actual supernatural events, demonic possession, and explicit sexual content (for the time). The Monk is darker and more transgressive than Radcliffe's work, and it scandalized readers with its combination of sexuality, violence, and blasphemy. Both types of Gothic fiction—the psychologically mysterious and the overtly supernatural—flourished during the Romantic period and influenced literature well beyond it. </extrainfo>