Assignment

History of English Literature 2

Redwan Siddik | 1441 | 46B

The Age of Sensibility

The period between 1750 and 1798 is known as the Age of Sensibility, but it is also
sometimes described as the "Age of Johnson". This age is called the Age of Sensibility
because reason, sensible views and “original genius” controlled the literature of the time.
This age started after Pope’s death and ended with the first edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1798.

Important facts which influenced the literature of this

period

• James Watt invented steam engine in 1769. In 1733 John Kay invented the flying
shuttle. In 1764 Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny. All these contributed to the
Industrial Revolution.
• Industrial towns appeared.
• There was revolution in agricultural production,
• The British founded its empire in India in 1757 and lost its American colony in 1776.
• French Revolution started in 1789 and continued till 1799. Voltaire (1694-1778) and
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) taught individualism and inspired revolution for more
freedom and equality. The existing social injustices prompted the great revolution
known as the French Revolution in 1789. The slogan of the revolution was “Liberty,
Equality and “Fraternity”. The King along with his Queen was overthrown by the
common people. This revolution had tremendous effect on the life and literature of the
people of England.
• In 1764 Dr Johnson founded his famous literary club known as Johnson’s Literary
Club; its members were Burke, Pitt, Fox, Gibbon, Goldsmith and a few other great
persons of the time.
• The development of industry and commerce, the rise of political parties and
democracy created problems and a change in the social infrastructure ensued.
• A literate middle class grew and the range of reading public widened.

Literature in the Age of Sensibility and its effects

The Romantic movement in English literature of the early 19th century has its roots in 18th-
century poetry, the Gothic novel and the novel of sensibility. This includes the graveyard poets,
from the 1740s and later, whose works are characterised by gloomy meditations on mortality.
To this was added, by later practitioners, a feeling for the 'sublime' and uncanny, and an
interest in ancient English poetic forms and folk poetry. The poets include Thomas Gray (1716–
1771), Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751) in and Edward Young (1683–1765), The
Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (1742–45). Other precursors
are James Thomson (1700–1748) and James Macpherson (1736–1796). James Macpherson was
the first Scottish poet to gain an international reputation, with his claim to have found poetry
written by the ancient bard Ossian.

The sentimental novel or "novel of sensibility" is a genre which developed during the second
half of the 18th century. It celebrates the emotional and intellectual concepts of
sentiment, sentimentalism, and sensibility. Sentimentalism, which is to be distinguished from
sensibility, was a fashion in both poetry and prose fiction which began in the 18th century in
reaction to the rationalism of the Augustan Age. Among the most famous sentimental novels in
English are Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), Oliver Goldsmith's Vicar of
Wakefield (1766), Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759–67), and Henry Mackenzie's The
Man of Feeling (1771).

Significant foreign influences were the Germans Goethe, Schiller and August Wilhelm
Schlegel and French philosopher and writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). Edmund
Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)
is another important influence. The changing landscape, brought about by
the industrial and agricultural revolutions, was another influence on the growth of the
Romantic movement in Britain.

In the late 18th century, Horace Walpole's 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto created the Gothic
fiction genre, that combines elements of horror and romance. Ann Radcliffe introduced the
brooding figure of the gothic villain which developed into the Byronic hero. Her The Mysteries
of Udolpho (1795) is frequently cited as the archetypal Gothic novel.