Nirali vaghela's blog
Nirali vaghela's blog
Romantic age assayist
Romantic age
The Romantic Period began roughly around 1798 and lasted until 1837. The political and economic atmosphere at the time heavily influenced this period, with many writers finding inspiration from the French Revolution. There was a lot of social change during this period. Calls for the abolition of slavery became louder during this time, with more writing openly about their objections. After the Agricultural Revolution people moved away from the countryside and farmland and into the cities, where the Industrial Revolution provided jobs and technological innovations, something that would spread to the United States in the 19th century. Romanticism was a reaction against this spread of industrialism, as well as a criticism of the aristocratic social and political norms and a call for more attention to nature. Although writers of this time did not think of themselves as Romantics, Victorian writers later classified them in this way because of their ability to capture the emotion and tenderness of man.
1 Charles lamb
Charles Lamb (born Feb. 10, 1775, London, Eng.—died Dec. 27, 1834, Edmonton, Middlesex) was an English essayist and critic, best known for his Essays of Elia (1823–33).
Lamb went to school at Christ’s Hospital, where he studied until 1789. He was a near contemporary there of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and of Leigh Hunt. In 1792 Lamb found employment as a clerk at East India House (the headquarters of the East India Company), remaining there until retirement in 1825. In 1796 Lamb’s sister, Mary, in a fit of madness (which was to prove recurrent) killed their mother. Lamb reacted with courage and loyalty, taking on himself the burden of looking after Mary
Lamb’s first appearances in print were as a poet, with contributions to collections by Coleridge (1796) and by Charles Lloyd (1798). A Tale of Rosamund Gray, a prose romance, appeared in 1798, and in 1802 he published John Woodvil, a poetic tragedy. “The Old Familiar Faces” (1789) remains his best-known poem, although “On an Infant Dying As Soon As It Was Born” (1828) is his finest poetic achievement.
In 1807 Lamb and his sister published Tales from Shakespear, a retelling of the plays for children, and in 1809 they published Mrs. Leicester’s School, a collection of stories supposedly told by pupils of a school in Hertfordshire. In 1808 Charles published a children’s version of the Odyssey, called The Adventures of Ulysses.
In 1808 Lamb also published Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived About the Time of Shakespear, a selection of scenes from Elizabethan dramas; it had a considerable influence on the style of 19th-century English verse. Lamb also contributed critical papers on Shakespeare and on William Hogarth to Hunt’s Reflector. Lamb’s criticism often appears in the form of marginalia, reactions, and responses: brief comments, delicately phrased, but hardly ever argued through.
Lamb’s greatest achievements were his remarkable letters and the essays that he wrote under the pseudonym Elia for London Magazine, which was founded in 1820. His style is highly personal and mannered, its function being to “create” and delineate the persona of Elia, and the writing, though sometimes simple, is never plain. The essays conjure up, with humour and sometimes with pathos, old acquaintances; they also recall scenes from childhood and from later life, and they indulge the author’s sense of playfulness and fancy. Beneath their whimsical surface, Lamb’s essays are as much an expression of the Romantic movement as the verse of Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Elia’s love of urban and suburban subject matter, however, points ahead, toward the work of Charles Dickens. The essay “On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century” (1822) both helped to revive interest in Restoration comedy and anticipated the assumptions of the Aesthetic movement of the late 19th century. Lamb’s first Elia essays were published separately in 1823; a second series appeared, as The Last Essays of Elia, in 1833.
2 Thomas de Quincy
As a child De Quincey was alienated from his solid, prosperous mercantile family by his sensitivity and precocity. At the age of 17 he ran away to Wales and then lived incognito in London (1802–03). There he formed a friendship with a young prostitute named Ann, who made a lasting impression on him. Reconciled to his family in 1803, he entered Worcester College, Oxford, where he conceived the ambition of becoming “the intellectual benefactor of mankind.” He became widely read in many subjects and eventually would write essays on such subjects as history, biography, economics, psychology, and German metaphysics. While still at college in 1804, he took his first opium to relieve the pain of facial neuralgia. By 1813 he had become “a regular and confirmed opium-eater” (i.e., an opium addict), keeping a decanter of laudanum (tincture of opium) by his elbow and steadily increasing the dose; he remained an addict for the rest of his life.
De Quincey was an early admirer of Lyrical Ballads, and in 1807 he became a close associate of its authors, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He rented Wordsworth’s former home, Dove Cottage at Grasmere, on and off from 1809 to 1833. In 1817 De Quincey married Margaret Simpson, who had already borne him a son. Though he wrote voluminously, he published almost nothing. His financial position as head of a large family went from bad to worse until the appearance of Confessions (1821) in London Magazine made him famous. It was reprinted as a book in 1822.
The avowed purpose of the first version of the Confessions is to warn the reader of the dangers of opium, and it combines the interest of a journalistic exposé of a social evil, told from an insider’s point of view, with a somewhat contradictory picture of the subjective pleasures of drug addiction. The book begins with an autobiographical account of the author’s addiction, describes in detail the euphoric and highly symbolic reveries that he experienced under the drug’s influence, and recounts the horrible nightmares that continued use of the drug eventually produced. The highly poetic and imaginative prose of the Confessions makes it one of the enduring stylistic masterpieces of English literature.
In 1856 he seized the opportunity provided by the publication of his collected works to rewrite the book that had made him famous. He added some descriptions of opium-inspired dreams that had appeared about 1845 in Blackwood’s Magazine under the title Suspiria de Profundis (“Sighs from the Depths”). But by this time he had lost most of the accounts he had kept of his early opium visions, so he expanded the rather short original version of the Confessions in other ways, adding much autobiographical material on his childhood and his experiences as a youth in London. His literary style in the revised version of the Confessions, however, tends to be difficult, involved, and even verbose.
Among De Quincey’s other autobiographical writings, the so-called Lake Reminiscences (first printed in Tait’s Magazine, 1834–40), which deeply offended Wordsworth and the other Lake poets, remains of great interest, although it is highly subjective, not without malice, and unreliable in matters of detail. As a literary critic De Quincey is best known for his essay “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” (first printed in the London Magazine, October 1823), a brilliant piece of psychological insight and a classic of Shakespearean criticism.
