Chapter 44: Romance and Romanticism
The first of two episodes devoted to the cultural changes underway in the 18th and 19th Centuries, thanks (at least in part) to the Industrial Revolution. In Part 1, we’ll be talking about how romance became a more important part of marriage and how sexual mores changed with economic growth, urbanization, and labor reform. In Part 2, we shift our focus to the art and literature of the time and how the movement known as “Romanticism” sought to fill the spiritual and emotional voids that increasing material well-being could not.
Sources for this episode include:
Allitt, Patrick N. “The Industrial Revolution.” The Great Courses. 2014.
Beers, Henry A. A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century. H.A.B. 1898.
Dash, Michael. “How Friedrich Engels’ Radical Lover Helped Him Father Socialism.” Smithsonian Magazine. Aug 1, 2013. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-friedrich-engels-radical-lover-helped-him-father-socialism-21415560/
Disraeli, Benjamin. Vivian Grey. Henry Colburn. 1826.
Emerson, Ralph W. “Nature.” James Munroe and Company. 1836.
Ferguson, Niall. The House of Rothschild: Money’s Prophets. Volume I (1798-1848). Penguin Books. 1999.
Furst, Lilian R. “Romanticism in Historical Perspective.” Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 1968, pp. 115–143.
Griffin, Emma. Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution. Yale University Press. 2013.
“The History of Romance.” National Women’s History Museum. Feb 13, 2017. https://www.womenshistory.org/articles/history-romance
Hobsbawm, Eric J. The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 1962.
Nef, John U. “The Industrial Revolution Reconsidered.” The Journal of Economic History, vol. 3, no. 1, 1943, pp. 1–31.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden; or, Life in the Woods. Ticknor and Fields. 1854.
Full Transcript
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Over the last 43 chapters of this podcast, we’ve discussed new technologies, new systems of organization, and new ways of thinking that began to transform life on Planet Earth. The brand-new phenomenon of continuous economic growth began breaking down ancient social structures, changing the map as people began moving into new cities, and transforming long-established working practices. All the while, new political ideologies and religious views began taking shape, dramatically altering society’s traditional mores. Simply put, there had not been such a significant moment of change in human society for nearly 10,000 years.
Soon we will be wrapping up this history of the First Industrial Revolution. But first, over the next few episodes, I want to explore the impact of this transformation on the culture of the time – how it influenced art, literature, entertainment, food, fashion, and more. I want us to have a better understanding of the outlook of the 19th Century. Because to truly understand the 19th Century is to understand the history of industrialization.
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This is the Industrial Revolutions
Chapter 44: Romance and Romanticism
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Throughout all the history of civilization, at different times in different places and for different people, the institution of marriage varied significantly in its form and functions.
Arranged marriages, for example, have been used throughout history as a means of preserving inherited property. Because land was comparatively much more valuable in the time before industrialization, preserving land holdings for the future generations of one’s family was more important than it is today. Arranged marriage was also a popular tool of diplomacy for the politically powerful.
In a lot of warrior societies, where so many men would die in battle, polygamy was often practiced. In some, a king having concubines was similarly seen as perfectly normal.
One of the main considerations for the form and customs of marriage was procreation. Depending on the society’s procreation needs, the society’s views of marriage might shift around.
Take, for example, this question: “What is the appropriate age for one to get married?” Well, let’s say you live in a civilization that recently experienced a pandemic. (Tough to imagine, right?) But let’s say it’s in preindustrial times, before the massive population boom ongoing since the 18th Century. In this scenario, your community might gradually begin to view the appropriate age of marriage as being younger and younger. That way, a couple would have more years ahead of them to have more children together and replenish the population. After a pandemic, there would certainly be a higher demand for labor, meaning higher wages. So, younger parents would be more likely to be able to afford the food and clothes for the extra children. A civilization that saw massive famine, meanwhile, might start to view the appropriate age for marriage as being a bit older. That way, as food prices go up, the older parents won’t have to worry as much about having too many children to feed.
Other preventative strategies were practiced to keep the population in check too, such as a chastity requirement for people who entered the church. That way, if the population is growing too fast, you can devote more resources to monasteries and convents, which can then bring in more of the excess population to help curb procreation. And for the Medieval nobility, forcing your younger sons into the church was a popular way for you to maintain your holdings for your first-born sons and their offspring.
Now, it’s not uncommon for students of history to believe that romance was a concept separate from marriage. I mean, that was often the case with the rich and powerful. The Roman general Pompey had married Julius Caesar’s daughter, Julia, as part of an alliance contract. But when people saw how affectionate he was to her, well, it raised eyebrows. Like, “um, lol, this guy loves his wife. What’s up with that?” And there are so many stories about infidelity in the royal courts of Europe that it leads us to conclude it was normal, that a marriage was nothing more than an arrangement, and that people would find romance outside their marriages.
This was, however, probably less true when it came to the vast majority of the population: the commoners. But, because such little and sporadic history about them is recorded, it’s difficult to draw any big conclusions along these lines with certainty.
What we do know is, by the turn of the 18th Century, many of the modern constructs of marriage we know today were starting to take shape in England and British North America.
In the 1600s, Europe was rocked by the so-called “Little Ice Age” – a modest cooling period in which average global temperatures kept falling, sometimes by as much as a quarter of a degree Celsius in a year. This had a sometimes-devastating impact on European agriculture. There were numerous famines over these years.
So, it should come as little surprise that, by the early 1700s, the average age of one’s first marriage was quite a bit higher than it used to be in Western Europe. (Okay, an explanatory note here: Second marriages, in the case of widows and widowers remarrying, would skew the data, so it’s important to look only at first marriages.) Anyway, in more ancient times, people (especially girls) would get married closer to the age of puberty. Now the first marriage was more likely to come in a woman’s mid-20s and a man’s mid-to-late-20s.
Helping drive this shift in the first-marriage age was the growing independence of individuals from their families. In the so-called Industrious Revolution, England experienced a gradual transition toward wage labor in both agriculture and small-scale manufacturing. As it happened, workers increasingly spent these wages on goods and services for themselves in addition to (or even as opposed to) for their family units. And wage-earning children and adult children would save some of their wages so they could move out and start their own homes.
More and more, this became a prerequisite for marriage. As the 19th Century social reformer, Joseph Livesey, put it, “no man should take a wife till he has a house furnished for her to come to.” And it wasn’t just that a couple should have their own home. They would also save up to pay for their wedding, including a fee for the minister and the dinner and party that followed.
These early 18th Century couples weren’t entirely free, of course. Many found themselves in arguments with their parents over their choice of a companion. And as couples got closer while dating, the communities around them would take note and keep an eye on them, and gossip would follow.
But compared to other societies throughout the world and throughout history, this was one in which couples were given a tremendous amount of space to choose their significant others. This was especially true among the working class, within which there was really little matchmaking and chaperoning going on.
Courting took on, what is to us, a familiar pattern. Young men and women would gradually get to know each other, keeping an eye on the field of potential romantic interests and using friends and other intermediaries to gauge the potential interests of others. Then a man would need to work up the courage to declare his intentions to a woman he had his eyes on. If she agreed to let him “keep her company” they would start “walking out together” (i.e. dating) for a period of time – sometimes several years. From there they could decide if they wished to get married.
In the small communities of the time, marriage was usually a more serious affair than walking out together. It was important to have the blessing of your parents and your fiancé’s parents so nobody would object during the church ceremony.
As the 18th Century progressed, though, these norms began to shift again. By the 1790s, substantial improvements were made in the productivity of agriculture, mining, and of course, manufacturing. Workers could find higher and higher wages in the growing industrial cities and mill towns. The British food supply became more plentiful. And as traditional guild apprenticeships declined, fewer young men were subject to indenturement contracts forbidding them from marriage.
As a result, the average age of first marriage began to fall to the mid-20s for men and early-20s for women, because, while the average age of first marriage remained higher in the countryside, it was plummeting in the mill towns.
One Joshua Dodgson had been earning wages in a West Yorkshire cotton mill as a young boy. By the time he was 17, he was working as a dyer in Halifax, earning 15 shillings a week. As a result, he felt economically secure enough to marry his sweetheart that year.
Describing the romantic inclinations of his fellow mill workers, one Thomas Whittaker explained:
“Two young people look at each other, they are sixteen or eighteen years of age, they can each earn a pound or twenty-five shillings a week. Two twenty-fives are fifty, and that is a lump of money and a temptation to people who can live on ten or twelve shillings a week. They put themselves together, and their wages too, and for a time there is abundance…”
(Now, this will change again. First marriage ages will go back up in the latter half of the 19th Century, but we’ll get to that another time.)
The cities provided young couples higher wages. But they also provided them greater anonymity in their community. With more people around and weaker social ties binding them all together, neighbors cared quite a bit less about what the kids down the block were getting up to.
Parents in these cities were less likely to care as well. With the growing economic opportunity they saw all around them, they allowed much more freedom to their children to pursue romantic endeavors as they saw fit.
Many even allowed their new children-in-law to move in with them for a few years after the wedding, knowing the couple would have plenty of time and opportunity to get on their own feet. Of course, even if one’s parents objected, it was a lot easier to find a church nearby to get married without them finding out.
Another reason for this increasing freedom was the growing value that British culture was putting on romance. However much working-class marriages might have been tied to romance throughout history, it was now becoming more and more a priority for the upper and middle classes.
Not only was the family unit declining in relevance as an economic unit, the role that women played within the family unit was changing too. As I mentioned in Chapter 41, at the same time that the middle class was expanding, middle-class wives saw a tremendous reduction in their labor responsibilities. Male clerks were doing the jobs they once did helping manage their husbands’ businesses. Servants were hired to do traditional household chores. Middle-class wives were mostly responsible for having babies and entertaining the family and guests.
As a result, the economic considerations declined in relevance for choosing a spouse. There were exceptions to this, of course. (There are plenty of stories of people using marriage to climb rank or to bring a great inheritance to a once-great family in decline.) But generally, the selection of a spouse became increasingly focused on mutual affections. This was encouraged with standardized courting rituals, like the writing of love letters.
Such courting rituals permeated English-speaking society as broader cultural norms. In fact, many working-class individuals learned to read and write during these years specifically to send and receive love letters with their sweethearts. It became more and more important for lovers to express their feelings to each other. Pamphlets were even published, teaching young romance-seekers how to capture the hearts of their crushes with letter writing.
Okay, so let’s shift gears and talk about something that the people of the time weren’t super-comfortable talking about themselves: Sexual relations. Now, sneaking away with your boyfriend or girlfriend for a make-out sesh was nothing new. There was already plenty of that going on before the Industrial Revolution. But now young couples could sneak away for a whole lot more, because with the greater social freedom of the cities came greater sexual freedom.
One John Harland was a 20-year-old a wool comber when he met a girl named Olivea and fell in love with her. Around this same time, he became a committed Methodist and tried becoming a preacher. By 1815, he was getting ready to go on mission to Nova Scotia, spreading the faith. But Harland’s superiors instead sent him back to Bradford to do the right thing. Three weeks later he had married Olivea and, one month after that, she gave birth to their first son.
(You caught on to the timeframes there, right?)
Stories like this were incredibly common during the First Industrial Revolution. Working class couples were much less likely to share the conservative sexual mores of their bourgeois employers, many of whom were descendants of Puritans. Instead, they would often engage in lower-risk sexual behaviors – or as one memoirist described it, “naughty tricks on the bed” – until they agreed to get married.
Generally, it was once a marriage agreement was made – not the marriage itself – that sexual intercourse followed. It has been estimated that, by 1800, somewhere between 30-and-40% of all British weddings featured a pregnant bride.
Add in all the births that happened outside of marriage, and no less than one-half of all first-born British children were conceived out of wedlock.
Chastity was not quite the virtue back then that we think it was. But – for a man to get a woman pregnant and then not marry her – that was considered most unvirtuous.
And yet, this was an age before anything resembling modern birth control. And it was also a time when both men and women generally believed that preventing conception was a woman’s responsibility. Still, if you were a woman and you got pregnant, and then the father abandoned you, that was seen not so much as a moral lapse but a misjudgment about the father’s character.
And yet, increasingly, not even that mattered.
Among the Radicals who organized the rally that became Peterloo was the worker-turned-poet Samuel Bamford. 10 years earlier, his sweetheart had become pregnant. But he didn’t marry her right away. In fact, more than a year passed before they formally tied the knot.
And that wasn’t even Bamford’s first child. Around the same time he was courting his wife-to-be, he met a woman in an alehouse. It turned into a drunken one-night stand. A few months later she named him as the father of her unborn child. Yet, much to Bamford’s relief, this “Yorkshire lass” (as he called her) had no interest in marrying him, and instead he sent her weekly payments to help her raise the child.
Other women, like the several daughters of Benjamin and Betty Shaw, found little use in the men they slept with. Two of them (both mothers themselves) never married, knowing full well they could earn sufficient incomes in the mills on their own, with a little occasional help from their parents.
For the most radical of the Radicals, traditional marriage was shunned for political reasons. Our old friend, Friedrich Engels, maintained a romantic partnership for about 20 years with a working-class Irish woman named Mary Burns, before she died in her early 40s. They were deeply affectionate toward one another, and it’s believed she was a major influence in his radicalization. But the couple never married. As they saw it, traditional marriage was a form of oppression, both of the working class and of women. They believed the institution of marriage treated women as mere units of production in procreation. Furthermore, because marriage was used to pass property on to offspring through inheritance, it was also responsible for the creation of the class construct, and (thus) class oppression. During their years together, Engels had numerous affairs with other women and Burns might possibly have worked as a prostitute.
As the First Industrial Revolution came to a close, though, both the Whigs and Tories passed laws making these more liberated sexual mores difficult to maintain. The 1834 Poor Law sought to disincentivize sex outside marriage by providing less poor relief to unwed mothers. And the Factory and Mine Acts – designed to protect women and children from brutal labor conditions – meant women and children would have fewer opportunities to earn good incomes. Children wouldn’t be able to save up as much for a possible early marriage. Women wouldn’t be as able to earn enough money to raise a child without the father around.
Many of the new labor unions reinforced these changes by banning women and children from joining. And in a time and place where so many husbands were alcoholics or abusive, these reforms weren’t always as positive as we might otherwise suppose.
All the practical realities of life aside, though, this was an age in which romance felt ascendant. And no doubt it was, in part, because of the artists who were driving the spirit of Romanticism.
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Toward the end of the classic novel Pride and Prejudice, the protagonist, Elizabeth Bennet, tells her sister of her intention to marry the infamous Mr. Darcy. Her sister, Jane, is incredulous. After this whole long book about Elizabeth’s distaste for the man, she’s finally coming around to him?
Jane presses Elizabeth:
“‘My dear, dear Lizzy, I would—I do congratulate you—but are you certain? forgive the question—are you quite certain that you can be happy with him?’
‘There can be no doubt of that. It is settled between us already, that we are to be the happiest couple in the world. But are you pleased, Jane? Shall you like to have such a brother?’
‘Very, very much. Nothing could give either Bingley or myself more delight. But we considered it, we talked of it as impossible. And do you really love him quite well enough? Oh, Lizzy! do anything rather than marry without affection…’”
Set in England around the turn of the 19th Century, Pride and Prejudice illustrates for us the growing importance of romance in marriage up to this point. Even among the lower aristocracy it has become an important social more.
The novel also illustrates the evolving concepts of wealth and class during the early Industrial Revolution. Mr. Darcy is very rich and quite prideful, believing himself Elizabeth’s social better. But he lacks some of the social graces that come with being a gentleman (in the old, aristocratic meaning of the word), for which Elizabeth is somewhat prejudiced against him.
Of course, these characters have their qualities in addition to their flaws. And in their own, unique ways they are classic Romantic characters – that is, they are characters who skirt social conventions, looking inward to themselves instead to evolve into better people.
This adaption of the hero (or heroine) archetype was part of a growing artistic movement that we call Romanticism.
From the mid-18th to mid-19th centuries, Romanticism spread across the whole of Europe. It took the form of paintings, sculptures, novels, poems, and music. I would even say it is the foundation for most modern artistic expression, providing the contrarian and emotionally-driven ways of thought which we expect of artists.
And yet, this movement is just about impossible to define. In fact, the average piece of scholarly literature on Romanticism will usually begin with a couple paragraphs on how peculiar it is to lump all this varying art together. And yet, Romanticism is very easy to identify. It’s one of those classic cases of “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.”
Which isn’t to say people haven’t tried to define it. Victor Hugo described the movement as having “set out to do what nature does, to blend with nature’s creations, while at the same time not mixing them all together: shadow and light, the grotesque and the sublime – in other words the body and the soul, the animal with the spiritual.”
French literary scholar Paul Van Tieghem summed it up as “a crisis of the European conscience”, while our old friend Eric Hobsbawm explained “The longing that haunted it was for the lost unity of man and nature.” The philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said it “revealed to the inner rather than the outer eye.”
Of course, Romanticism wasn’t invented in a vacuum – it evolved differently in different times and places. It stemmed from the revolutionary naturalism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant, and from the melancholic 18th Century poets of England who couldn’t figure out why everyone was suddenly so optimistic about the world’s future.
And in this literature, it seems to begin as a reaction to the Enlightenment. As I put it in Chapter 16, “This was an age when everything was on the table...everything could be discussed. Everything could be debated. Everything could be evaluated.” The thinkers of the time stressed the importance of reason, of rationalism is such evaluations. And to these ends, many thinkers had a pretty positive outlook for what was to come. After all, it seemed like the human race was capable of great advancement.
In art and architecture, this took the form that we call “neo-Classicalism” – a revival of the styles from antiquity. Enlightenment thinkers identified with the ancients who used mathematic and scientific principles to create their civilizations. The Roman arch, for example, used simple materials and principles to withstand heavy weights on it. Some even attempted to explain classical aesthetics as somehow scientifically superior to others. And the ancients’ systems of government – with their republicanism and democracy – seemed like a perfectly rational alternative to that of tyranny-prone monarchs.
In literature, some turned to even more recent scientific advancement to extol the virtues of the age. In a 1754 poem, the Reverend John Dalton writes of watching an early steam engine (built from Thomas Savery’s design) as it drained a mine.
Sagacious Savery! Taught by thee
Discordant elements agree,
Fire, water, air, heat, cold unite,
And listed in one service fight;
Pure streams to thirsty cities send,
Or deepest mines from floods defend.
Man’s richest gift, thy work will shine;
Rome’s aqueducts were poor to thine!
Or take this bit of poetry – “The Economy of Vegetation” – by our old friend, Erasmus Darwin:
Soon shall thy arm, unconquered Steam! Afar
Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car;
Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear
The flying-chariot through the fields of air.
Fair crews, triumphant, leaning from above,
Shall wave their fluttering kerchiefs as the move;
Or warrior-bands alarm the gaping crowd,
And armies shrink beneath thy shadowy cloud.
This is the kind of optimistic futurism that makes the Enlightenment so special.
But as early as the mid-18th Century, a competing approach was taken by other writers and thinkers: Gothicism. It began in Scandinavia, where writers expressed pride in their tribal Goth ancestors for defeating the Romans. And from there, Gothicism morphed into a sort of pro-Medieval worldview. Europeans began to cherish the art and traditions of the Middle Ages.
Take, for example, Horace Walpole, the noble son of Britain’s first Prime Minister, who wrote perhaps the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto. This book has everything – knights, friars, castles, a runaway princess, and a peasant hero who is eventually elevated to a prince. Though intended to be a political satire, the commercial success of it made the Gothic novel an incredibly popular form of fiction, and a harbinger of Romanticism.
It was the popularity of Gothic stories that led the German brothers Jacob Ludwig Karl and Wilhelm Carl Grimm to compile a treasure of folk tales in the early 19th Century. The Brothers Grimm published such well-known children’s stories as “Little Red Riding Hood”, “Hansel and Gretel”, “Sleeping Beauty”, “Rapunzel”, “Rumpelstiltskin”, “Snow White”, “The Pied Piper”, “Cinderella”, and more.
In an age when modern technologies were beginning to displace workers in traditional industries, and an age when violent revolutions threatened the prevailing orders people had grown up with, such Medieval settings allowed European artists to hark back to – and to, ahem, romanticize – simpler times.
The Gothic style would also be used by a slew of writers who explored the concept of individualism through emotional pain.
Among them was, of course, Lord Byron, who adapted Gothic archetypes to more modern settings, such as in his Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, tapping into the growing feeling of unrest and disillusionment in the modern era. To these ends he developed a new archetype we call the “Byronic Hero” – a champion for good, characterized by a rebellion against traditions, but who is ultimately undone by his own flaws, such as the easily-seduced Don Juan.
The Byronic Hero was also used in the works of Byron’s friend, Percy Bysshe Shelley, a poet who began his career writing Gothic novellas, but in time evolved his works to his growing political Radicalism. Such was the case with his Prometheus Unbound, in which the protagonist is a tortured superbeing fighting tyranny. Unpopular at the time, Shelley would go on to become a beloved poet among leftist thinkers across the world.
Then there was John Keats, whose poems illustrated his obsession with mortality, nature, and creation – perhaps most famously captured in his “Ode to a Nightingale”:
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Across the ocean, another Gothic Romantic poet would go on to write a similarly dark poem about a bird. “The Raven” catapulted Edgar Allen Poe to fame and acclaim. He would go on to become the American posterchild for the tortured artist.
Over in Germany, meanwhile, the Romantic with that claim to fame was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. An Enlightenment era Renaissance Man in many respects, Goethe rose to prominence after his publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther, a semi-autobiographical story of a young man’s obsessive infatuation with a young woman ending in suicide. He followed it up with his two-part masterpiece play, Faust, which touched on similar themes, as well as broader questions about one’s purpose in life. Goethe was so hugely influential in Germany that it is nearly impossible to separate him from what was to come in German art, language, and philosophy.
In France, Alexander Dumas embraced the adventurism of Gothic literature in such works as The Three Musketeers, The Corsican Brothers, The Prince of Thieves, and his magnum opus, The Count of Monte Cristo. Dumas came from a mixed-race and mixed-class background, but as liberalism gained a foothold on the Continent, the liberal Dumas rose among Europe’s intellectual and political elite. In The Count of Monte Cristo, the hero Edmond Dantès is unjustly imprisoned during the Bourbon restoration. He breaks out and establishes himself as a noble in Paris, where he takes revenge on those who personally oppressed him by manipulating capitalist institutions to their detriment.
But for other Romantic artists, their works were a reaction more to the Gothic style and individualist outlook than to the Enlightenment. Jane Austen is a great example. Far from embracing the escapism of the Gothic novel, she sets her stories in more contemporary times. Whereas the Gothic novel embraced the “damsel in distress” motif – a literary archetype which does not very accurately reflect the realities of Medieval gender relations – Austen chooses strong-minded women for her characters, women who are even rebellious by early 19th Century standards.
Her well-known stories – including Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma – are remembered as romances, but to the people at the time they were witty satires poking fun at conventional (though perhaps trivial) social values and sentimentalities, often at the untouchable intersections of class and sex.
A similar (though often darker) approach was taken by the authors from the legendary Brontë family. Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne Brontë grew up in a rapidly-changing part of northern England during the late stages of the First Industrial Revolution. They came from a small, rural village surrounded by growing industrial cities. Their village grew too big too fast. Tragedy came regularly in the form of disease (which killed 3 of the 4 sibling writers by or before their early 30s.)
The Brontë’s novels serve, in effect, as damning indictments of contemporary society. In Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, the titular character defies class conventions as she romantically pursues her aristocratic boss. But intertwined everywhere are the tragedies of the time: orphaned children, alcohol abuse, epidemics, mental illness. In Wuthering Heights, Emily uses the Gothic “damsel in distress” archetype but sets it during the early years of the Industrial Revolution. With this backdrop, she turns the archetypical Romantic male hero into the personification of extreme cruelty: the social-climbing but vindictive Heathcliff.
Among the great French novelists of this period was Victor Hugo. Beginning his literary career with poems and plays, he grew into novels with his 1831 Hunchback of Notre-Dame, which used the Gothic imagery of the famous Cathedral to romanticize Paris’ history while exploring modern themes like justice, social unrest, and revolution. And of course, he followed it up with his masterpiece, Les Misérables, which focused on many similar themes. It also explored the concept of freedom and the crippling poverty that was unaccountably running alongside industrialization.
Also exploring themes of liberty and justice was the Russian poet, playwright, and novelist Alexander Pushkin. Like Keats, he often explored the themes of art and immortality, such as in The Bronze Horseman and Mozart and Salieri. But it was his poem “Ode to Liberty” which made him such a controversial Romantic in Russia that he was exiled and censored for years.
For other writers of the Romantic period, it was the economic changes underway in society that stirred their passions and directly influenced their works.
Among the most famous was our old friend, William Blake, who decried the exploitative system of industrial labor and dirty, smoky conditions of the “dark Satanic mills.” (Shout out Chapter 23!)
Then there was Heinrich Heine, who you’ll recall wrote the poem about the Silicean Weavers – “Wir weben, wir weben!” (“We’re weaving, we’re weaving!” – Shout out Chapter 22) – Heine explored many Romantic themes in his poems and plays but was especially attracted to socio-political topics. Born into a Jewish German family in 1797, Heine was a distant relative of Karl Marx. He was drawn to liberalism, but also showed an interest in (and sympathy for) the burgeoning socialist movement. A critic of censorship in his home country, he moved to Paris, where he became an inspiration for the movement “Young Germany” toward the end of the First Industrial Revolution.
A fascinating trend in late 18th and early 19th Century Romanticism was the popularity of so-called “Robber novels” and “Robber plays” – tales that glorified highwaymen and pirates who robbed the wealthy. These stories were especially popular in England and Germany. The Medieval character of Robin Hood sprang back into literary imagination around this time. And our old friend, William Godwin, wrote a popular novel called Things as They Are; or The Adventures of Caleb Williams, in which the protagonist is taken in by the captain of a gang of forest thieves, who is able to justify the way he lives outside an unjust system of law.
One Romantic (albeit, mediocre) writer I’d like to note was Benjamin Disraeli, who no doubt would have been totally forgotten had it not been for his other, later career as one of the UK’s all-time most important prime ministers.
His most famous literary work, the 1845 novel Sybil, focuses on the plight of England’s urban working-class. Written while he was a backbench Conservative MP, it stemmed from his quiet support for Chartism. Like our old friend, Lord Shaftsbury, Disraeli believed the nation’s Radicals actually had more in common politically with the Tories than the Liberals.
Disraeli himself had been heavily shaped by the new industrial age. Born into a Jewish merchant family in London, he had lost fortunes investing in South American mines and railways. His fascination with the Industrial Revolution is found throughout his several novels. In the 1821 novel Vivian Grey, he writes about a large dinner at an aristocratic house, “Some steam process should be invented for arranging guests when they are above five hundred.”
In fact, while we regularly use steam power in a figurative sense today (e.g. “picking up steam” to describe something gaining momentum), Vivian Grey was perhaps the first book to use it in that sense, when the titular character debates with a marquess:
“...what, after all, in this country is public life? Is it not a race in which the swiftest must surely win the prize; and is not that prize power? Has not your Lordship treasure? There is your moral steam which can work the world. Has not your Lordship’s treasure most splendid consequence, pure blood and aristocratic influence? The Millionaire has in his possession the seeds of everything, but he must wait for half a century till his descendant finds himself in your Lordship’s state...”
The author who made the most lasting impact criticizing the new economic order was, of course, Charles Dickens. While associated more with the coming Realism movement than Romanticism, Dickens tapped into that same unrest about the growing inequalities of liberal, industrial capitalism. In book after book, he explores many of the same themes as Disraeli: poverty, crime, social stratification. As someone who was sent to the workhouses as a child, Dickens is especially interested in children and orphans living in these situations. And he uses these themes to develop character interactions that tell layered, even complex stories about this new age. Nothing better illustrates his feelings about industrialization as the 1854 novel, Hard Times, a short but blistering criticism of the bourgeoisie in northern mill cities.
Perhaps the most important figure in the transition from Romanticism to Realism was the French writer Honoré de Balzac. A failure at almost everything in life, Balzac was hugely influential on Dickens and others, thanks to his one, epic work, The Human Comedy. In its many stories, Balzac laments the decline of old, noble, Chivalric values, which have been replaced in post-Revolutionary France by the pursuit of money. Especially hard on bankers (including some resembling the Rothschilds), The Human Comedy warns readers against the nature of capitalism. As he writes in the story, “The Red Inn”, “At the origin of every fortune lies a crime.”
The Romantic literature of the First Industrial Revolution even included some creative, dark futurism, anticipating the birth of science fiction in the later 19th Century.
The most striking example was a Gothic novel by Mary Shelley. The daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, it’s no surprise that she too would be a notable writer. While vacationing with her husband and Lord Byron on Lake Geneva, she reflected on the advancements of electrical experiments in recent decades (in particular those of Galvani). It gave her the idea to write the story of a modern Prometheus, risen from death thanks to the flawed (though well-intentioned) efforts of a young scientist. In 1818, she published it as a novel, Frankenstein.
For some writers, the modern world wasn’t something to warn about nor to extol, but to escape from. To me, this is one of the most striking movements within Romanticism – the movement to vacate civilization for nature.
It started first in England, with poets like William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and others. Some were extremely melancholic writers, making Poe and Goethe look like pretty happy campers by comparison. They sought solace by isolating themselves in England’s picturesque Lake District. The “Lake Poets”, as they came to be known, believed it was important for artists like them to have space in the countryside reserved for them to see beauty and create their art.
Take, for example, Wordsworth’s famous poem, Daffodils, which he wrote about a walk in the Lake District:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
I suppose it wouldn’t surprise you to learn that Wordsworth was horrified when he learned a railway line would be built through the Lake District.
Decades later, several more writers would turn this subculture of Romanticism into its own ethos. They weren’t clustered in the Lake District but, rather, in Massachusetts.
Leading them was Ralph Waldo Emerson, a poet and philosopher who not only embraced naturalism, but sought it as the basis for a whole movement: Transcendentalism.
As he writes in his 1836 essay, Nature, “The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lessons of worship...It is the great organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the individual, and strives to lead back the individual to it.” Far from the rational spirit of the Enlightenment and far from the technological and economic achievements made through collective cooperation in the cities, Emerson encouraged people to discover individualism and freedom through self-reliance in nature.
One of these people was his friend, Henry David Thoreau, who in 1845 built a tiny cabin on the shore of Walden Pond, just south of Concord. There he spent the next two years, mostly alone, practicing self-sufficiency in nature. As he explained in his book about the experience, Walden, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
The stunning beauty and sometimes unforgiving forces of nature didn’t just capture the imagination of poets, but painters too.
Artists like William Turner, Caspar David Friedrich, John Constable, and Thomas Cole created vivid and inspired landscape paintings, imaging the role of human subjects to be quite small in contrast to the awesome power of the natural world.
For other Romantic painters, the role of human subjects was more substantial, but filtered through the light of a wider world. The French artist Eugène Delacroix painted dramatic scenes of individuals wrestling with the forces of nature – including “Christ on the Sea of Galilee” and “Lion Hunt” – as well as the forces of civilization. His depictions of warfare and civil strife from around the world were especially significant: “Massacre at Chios”, “Fanatics of Tangier”, and most famously, “Liberty Leading the People”.
In fact, the way violence was depicted in the paintings of Romanticism has been credited as a milestone in the development of Humanism – that universal religion we all believe in now. (Shout out, Chapter 18). As our old friend, Yuval Noah Harari describes it in his book Homo Deus:
“For thousands of years, when people looked at war, they saw gods, emperors, generals and great heroes. But over the last two centuries, the kings and generals have been increasingly pushed to the side, and the limelight has shifted onto the common soldier and his experiences… Painters too have lost interest in generals on horseback and tactical manoeuvres. Instead, they strive to depict how the common solider feels… hitherto even atrocious experiences were placed within the wider context that gave them a positive meaning. War might be hell, but it was also the gateway to heaven.”
With the onset of Romanticism, artists found new positive meanings for war. Rather than angels guiding Constantine toward imperial domination (in the typical battle scene paintings of the past), it was now Liberty (in human form, holding the French tricolor) guiding the people to take power for themselves.
And in other paintings, such positive meanings were scrapped entirely. In these works, the atrocities of war were not contextualized or spun for positive meaning. War was Hell. Period.
The Romantic painting people love to point to as an example of this is “The Third of May 1808”, which depicts Napoleonic forces holding a group of disheveled, Spanish captives at gunpoint. It was painted by the Spanish Romantic Francisco Goya.
A gifted court painter before the Napoleonic wars, Goya developed a dark trajectory in their aftermath, depicting scenes of human misery, suffering, and inexplicable cruelty. Toward the end of his life, sensing his own mortality and insanity, he began producing the so-called “Black Paintings” on the interior wall of his home. Among them was perhaps his most famous work, “Saturn Devouring His Son”.
Romanticism also touched the world of music.
In the transition from the classical style of Mozart and Bach to the modern symphony, few were as instrumental (if you’ll forgive the pun) as Ludwig van Beethoven. Take this bit of music, from his Fifth Symphony, for example. Produced during the Napoleonic Wars, it cleverly evoked the dark sentiments of Europe at the time. Or take his other enduring work, during the peace that followed, from his Ninth Symphony. Adapted from “Ode to Joy” by Romantic poet Friedrich Schiller, the music extols the sensory wonder of happiness.
Every creature drinks in joy
at nature's breast;
Good and Evil alike
follow her trail of roses.
She gives us kisses and wine,
a true friend, even in death;
In Beethoven’s wake came a slew of Romantic and revolutionary composers, including Niccolò Paganini, Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, and Giuseppe Verdi.
With the growing wealth across Europe, such great feats of music were becoming more and more accessible to a greater number of people. This would create some of the earliest examples of celebrity among the general public. The Austrian ballerina Fanny Elssler became world-famous, attracting rave reviews in newspapers printed throughout Europe and even the United States. Planographs of her dancing were published, and when she performed she could command compensation which was staggering for a woman of that time.
Another was the so-called “Swedish Nightingale” – the Opera singer Jenny Lind – who toured across Europe in the 1840s, amazing audiences everywhere. She was even brought to the United States by circus organizer P. T. Barnum to tour in the early 1850s. She was in such high demand that her constant performing damaged her voice, forcing her into semi-retirement at age 29.
Opera was an especially popular form of Romantic art, as it – more than any other – could evince the spectacular passions of human beings. Far from the rational ideals of the Enlightenment, Romantic opera tapped the emotional spirit of humanity.
Operatic composers even took swipes at capitalism and industrialization, such as this piece – a Little Train of Pleasure – by the great Gioachino Rossini. Composing it after a rather unpleasant train ride between Paris and Frankfurt, the song depicts a happy rail journey gone horribly wrong when the train derails and two passengers die. In a sardonic coda, the heirs of the wealthier victim celebrate.
You’ll remember in Chapter 41 I told you how the first historians covering the Industrial Revolution perceived it as an age of exploitation and suffering. While there were many historical examples to explain that viewpoint, it can also be explained by Romanticism. Art imitates life and life then imitates art. But then, these imitations are heavily influenced by the artists and their worldviews.
The Enlightenment and industrialization had set humankind forward on a new path to economic transformation – a transformation that would upend 10,000 years of how we organize life and society; a transformation we would call progress.
It was a transformation that could fill any of humanity’s many material needs. But, as it turned out, it did very little to address humanity’s spiritual and emotional needs. Romanticism (like Humanism and other cultural movements we’ll discuss) helped fill that new void.
Again, from Hobsbawm:
“If a single misleading sentence is to sum up the relations of artist and society in this era, we might say that the French Revolution inspired him by its example, the Industrial Revolution by its horror, and the bourgeois society, which emerged from both, transformed his very existence and modes of creation.”
He goes on to explain that (in Britain anyway), Romanticism was contrary to bourgeois values. And yet, the bourgeoisie did adopt Romanticism for themselves, including in art, fashion, and architecture. He even suggests that these modes of creation were something for bored bourgeois housewives to occupy their time and interests. But of course, we also know how certain bourgeois industrialists adopted Gothic architecture for their stately homes, to appear more upper-class; how others embraced Radical politics; and how a tiny few of them even began seeing philanthropy as an important role for them as their wealth grew.
One of the ways Romanticism was contrary to bourgeois values was in its embrace of the pre-industrial past. They were romanticizing what they saw as the uncorrupted virtues of the peasant or humble craftsman in the time before all this technological progress.
The idealization of the “folk” as they were called in English (or “volk” in German, or “la gente” in Spanish) could be seen in the fairytales of the Brothers Grimm, the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth, the entertainment of Barnum, the songs of Stephen Foster, the works of Sir William Scott, and more. The word “folklore” was coined in 1846. Folksongs and folk art followed. And as art imitated life, so life imitated art, as folk culture reinforced the burgeoning ideologies of socialism and nationalism.
Romanticism in art was not the only cultural reaction (or, perhaps I should say “counter-reaction”) to the Industrial Revolution. So too was a renewed promulgation of religious fervor, increasingly conservative styles of dress, and a very old game played in a very new way – all of it next time on the Industrial Revolutions.
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Perhaps I should actually say “next chapter” rather than “next time” because later this month I’ll be releasing a bonus episode! I’ll be reviewing four TV shows set in Britain during the First Industrial Revolution – so be sure to come back for that.
And a quick reminder that bonus episodes don’t stay on this feed forever. I take them down after about a month. BUT you can listen to all the bonus episodes you want – plus footnotes – by becoming a supporter of the podcast on Patreon! You can join at www.Patreon.com/indrevpod.
Thank you to everyone who’s already supporting the Industrial Revolutions on Patreon, including John Bartlett, Chris Bradford, Elizabeth Brooking, Tara Carlson, Molly Des Jardin, Herbyurby, Eric Hogensen, Peter Kirk, Brian Long, Kristian Sibast, Brandon Stansbury, Ross Templeton, and Walter Torres. You folks are awesome.