Newcastle University

Writers of the Romantic Period

The Romantic Age attached new values to folk art, antiquarian and primitive poetry, the lives of ordinary people, local culture, travel, and history, as well as to the individual as a subject interesting in itself and in its relationship to Nature.
Not only was there an increased interest in collections of folk art and historical poetry, such as the border ballads, but early-nineteenth-century authors wrote works centring on these themes.

William Wordsworth's (1770-1850) strong attachments to locations which particularly resonate with events allowed him, in The Prelude (1805), to chart his poetic development via naming and precise geography. He capitalises upon different environments to engage with the reader by describing a journey in such physical and metaphysical detail that it can literally be retraced, particularly those episodes which are rooted in the geography of the Lake District. His most potent responses are to aspects of the natural landscape and the impact of perpetual changes in Nature upon his understanding of place.

He is also influenced by that regional oral tradition which celebrated and chronicled the deeds of common men and which, in dialects, memorialised the names and monuments of the Border wars.

With a focus on history, Walter Scott (1771-1832) wrote poems and novels about his native Scotland (though later also about other countries), emphasising its beauties of nature and past ways of life. Real historical figures never play major parts; instead Scott writes about ordinary members of society affected by specific historical conditions. >

His first novel, Waverley (1814), describes the Jacobite rising of 1745. Its hero is the fictitious Edward Waverley, who finds himself in the midst of Civil War before he has given the rights and wrongs of either side much thought. Bonnie Prince Charlie only appears as a peripheral, though impressive, character. The novel ends with the defeat of the Jacobite army, and the destruction of the Highlands way of life.
Typical for Scott is his sympathy and passion for the old ways while at the same time realising the necessity of their decline in favour of progress.

James Hogg (1770-1835) was born and lived for most of his life in Ettrick Forest in the Scottish Borders. Coming from a family who had been shepherds for generations, he became known as the 'Ettrick Shepherd' and is still regarded as a 'peasant poet'.

It was Walter Scott who discovered Hogg's poetic gift, and the two remained friends. Hogg wrote and collected poems and ballads, always in connection with Scotland and the borders, and often in Scots idiom.
(He also wrote prose, most notably The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner [1824]). The Forest Minstrel (1810) is one of his collections of poetry; The Queen's Wake (1813) is one of his own compositions and combines the old ballad style with flights of the imagination.

Lord Byron's (1788-1824) force of personality, life, as well as his works captured not only British but Europe's imagination and made him infamous. He was a keen traveller and his poetry was written and set in many different places.
His long and immensely popular poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-1818) describes the travels, experiences and reflections of Childe Harold, a pilgrim. His life and journey correspond in many aspects to Byron's own, although he denied any such parallels.
Harold journeys to a variety of countries such as Portugal, Spain, and Belgium, reflecting on events and people, as well as on the beauties of the Alps and the Rhine.

Byron was friends with Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) and his wife, Mary (1797-1851), and stayed near them at the Lake of Geneva in the summer of 1816.>

It was during this sojourn that they famously held the ghost story contest which generated Mary Shelley's gothic novel, Frankenstein.

Large parts of Frankenstein are set in Geneva, as well as more distant shores once Frankenstein chases his creation to the end of the world.

Jane Austen (1775-1817) set her novels in rural England and wrote about the life of early-nineteenth-century gentry, yet Romantic influences feature in her works, too. There are references to Romantic poets, as when Anne Elliot and Captain Benwick discuss Scott and Byron in >Persuasion (1817).
Kathryn Sutherland, in her introduction to Mansfield Park (1814), points out that:


Austen's novels centre on domestic themes, but they, too, can be read as products of, and as commenting on, her literary and cultural context, including the Romantic Movement.