~ The Ladies of Reenacting ~ Welcome to the Romantic Era ~

Welcome to our Romantic Era page. This era of history in America covers the years of 1825 to 1845. But this has been debated in history as to when it actually started since Europe's Romantic era began at the time of the French and Industrial Revolutions. We will bring to you a general history, which you can read below and we will bring your information on the clothing and literature of the time. We hope you enjoy.

Romanticism as a broad term is associated with the empowerment of the individual over and above form of law and restriction. The Romantic spirit had been used to embrace conflicting ideological ideals, on the one hand justifying the acquisitiveness of Jacksonian democracy, and on the other imspiring the transcendentalists' enthusiasm for the utopian ideals of Brook Farm.

Originally, Romanticism referred to the characteristics of romances, whose extravagance carried somewhat pejorative connotations. But in the 18th century the term came to designate a new kind of exotic landscape which evoked feelings of pleasant melancholy. The term Romantic as a designation for a school of literature opposed to the Classic was first used by the German critic Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel (1772-1829) at the beginning of the 19th century. From Germany, this meaning was carried to England and France.

Since no single figure or literary school displays all the characteristics considered to be "Romantic," any general definitions tend to be imprecise. In addition, these characteristics are often discerned in artists and cultural movements not usually so designated. They are not, in fact, the exclusive property of the Romantic period, but it is here that they are dominant and give identity to an era.

Because the expression Romanticism is a phenomenon of immense scope, embracing as it does, literature, politics, history, philosophy and the arts in general, there has never been much agreement and much confusion as to what the word means. It has, in fact, been used in so many different ways that some scholars have argued that the best thing we could do with the expression is to abandon it once and for all. However, the phenomenon of Romanticism would not become less complex by simply throwing away its label of convenience.

For English literature the most significant expression of a Romantic commitment to emotion occurs in Wordsworth's preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads (1800), where he maintains that "all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." Although Wordsworth qualifies this assertion by suggesting that the poet is a reflective man who recollects his emotion "in tranquility," the emphasis on spontaneity, on feeling, and the use of the term overflow mark sharp diversions from the ealier ideals of judgment and restraint.

Searching for a fresh source of this spontaneous feeling, Wordsworth rejects the Neoclassic idea of the appropriate subject for serious verse and turns to the simplicities of rustic life "because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature." That interaction with nature has for many of the Romantic poets mystical overtones. Nature is apprehended by them not only as an exemplar and source of vivid physical beauty but as a manifestation of spirit in the universe as well. In Tintern Abbey Wordsworth suggests that nature has gratified his physical being, excited his emotions, and ultimately allowed him "a sense sublime/Of something far more deeply interfused," of a spiritual force immanent not only in the forms of nature but "in the mind of man." Though not necessarily in the same terms, a similar connection between the world of nature and the world of the spirit is also made by Blake, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley.

In his desire to identify with a spiritual force, the Romantics often expressed the Faustian aspiration after the sublime and the wonderful. Committed to change, flux rather than stasis, he longs to believe that man is perfectible, that moral as well as mechanical progress is possible. Although the burst of hope and enthusiasm that marked the early stages of the French Revolution was soon muted, its echoes lingered through much of the 19th century and even survive in the 20th century. If the Romantic often sees his enemy in the successful bourgeois, the Philistine with a vested interest in social stability, political revolution is not always his goal. His admiration for the natural, the organic, which in art leads to the overthrow of the Classical rules and the development of a unique form for each work, in politics may lead him to subordinate the individual to the state and insist that the needs of the whole govern the activities of the parts.

Although these characteristics of Romanticism suggest something of its nature, they are far from exhaustive. The phenomenon is too diverse and too contradictory to admit of an easy definition. As Lovejoy suggested, "typical manifestations of the spiritual essence of Romanticism have been variously conceived to be a passion for moonlight, for red waistcoats, for Gothic churches . . . for talking exclusively about oneself, for hero-worship, for losing oneself in an ecstatic contemplation of nature."

At the same time in European history, between 1760-1850, was dominated by two broad series of events, The French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, both of which oversaw the emergence and growth of Romanticism. The two phenomena contributed decisvely to the most profound structural change of this era: the transformation of Europe from a feudal to a bourgeois society. This transformation is best considered in terms of the political, social, and economic causes and effects of the French and Industrial Revolutions, the growth of nationalism, the kinds of idealogical and intellectual struggles emerging from these phenomena, and the response of Romantic thought, much of which forged in the heat of those struggles. Accounts of this era given by Eric Hobsbawm, Georges Lefebvre, Herbert Marcuse, and others prove especially enlightening, as does some of the general histories documented.

References:
Brewer, John and Eckhart Hellmuth. _Rethinking Leviathan: The Eighteenth-Century State in Britain and Germany_. London: German Historical Insitute Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Briggs, Asa. _The age of Improvement, 1783-1867._ Longman, 2000. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983.

Briggs, Asa. _A Social History of England._Longman, 2000. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983.

Chase, Richard. _The American Nivel and Its Tradition._ NY: Doubleday, 1957.

Darnton, Robert. _What Was Revolutionaary about the French Revolution?_ Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 1990.

Levin, Jonathan. _The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism and American Literary Modernism._ Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.

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"Carolan's Concerto"
by Turlough O'Carolan

Updated: December 10, 2006