SET V

THE AGE OF REASON VERSUS THE ROMANTIC AGE.

The 18th Century. Historical Background.

It was a century of great changes and conflicts:

● There was a change of dynasty.

Queen Anne, the last Stuart monarch died in 1714 without any living heir because all her 17
children had died being very young .After her death George of Hanover, the German son of James
I's granddaughter, became King George I.

● There were 2 political parties: the Whigs and the Tories. King George allowed the Whigs to
form his government. He was German and he was not of very interested in his new kingdom. So
he delegated his power into one his ministers Robert Walpole who became the greatest political
leader for a long time. He was a Prime Minister in the modern sense. He based his power in the
House of Commons. He pursued peace abroad and encouraged trade.
● It was a period of constant conflicts between the Whigs and the Tories. The Whigs
supported the Hanoverian Kings (George I, George II, and George III). They were landowners and
rich merchants. They favored a strong foreign policy and religious toleration. The Tories were
Conservative and wanted to restore the Stuart Dynasty through another branch of it. They
mutually accused of corruption which was a real fact on both sides. It was at this time that the
minister Walpole made his famous remark “Every man has his price”.
● It was a period of economical growth and colonial expansion.
This was due to the increase of trade and the incorporation of the new colonies all over the world.
Although England lost the American colonies in 1776 because of the American Declaration of
independence, its policy of colonial expansion continued and trade with the colonies became their
main source of income.

Literature in the 18th century.

From the literary viewpoint the 18th century can be divided into two parts.

The first part of the Century was dominated by a movement called Classicism. The classicist laid
great stress on literary form and considered a mastery of the rules of writing more important than
genius. They imitated the ancient Classics. The classical school insisted on regularity and elegance.
Any emotional writing was considered vulgar. As a result, the literature of this period was polished
in form but it was artificial and it lacked imagination and enthusiasm.

In this atmosphere prose flourished while poetry dropped. The Classicists' emphasis upon form
developed a polished and elegant prose style and the dislike for emotion made verse artificial and
cold. The most important type of prose writing was satire. This was because the English society of
the 18th Century was characterized by a remarkable low moral standard. Coarseness and brutality
were prevalent among the upper circles and corruption has found its way into politics. So the
writers of this period used humor and irony to ridicule society and politics.

By the second half of the 18th Century great changes began to take place. England tremendous
colonial expansion awakened the imagination of people and a new type of literary genre being
born: the Novel. The most important novelists of this period are Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift,
Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding.

Daniel Defoe (1660-1731)

English novelist, pamphleteer, and journalist is most famous as the author of Robinson Crusoe
(1719), a story of a man shipwrecked alone on an island. Along with Samuel Richardson, Defoe is
considered the founder of the English novel.

Defoe was born as the son of James Foe, a butcher of Stroke Newington. He studied at Charles
Morton's Academy, London. Although his Nonconformist father intended him for the ministry,
Defoe plunged into politics and trade, traveling extensively in Europe. In the early 1680s Defoe was
a commission merchant in Cornhill but went bankrupt in 1691. In 1684 he married Mary Tuffley;
they had two sons and five daughters.

Defoe earned fame and royal favor with his satirical poem "The True born Englishman" (1701). In
1702 Defoe wrote his famous pamphlet The Shortest Way with Dissenters. Himself a Dissenter he
mimicked the extreme attitudes of High Anglican Tories and pretended to argue for the
extermination of all Dissenters. Nobody was amused; Defoe was arrested and pilloried in May
1703, while in prison Defoe wrote a mock ode, "Hymn to the Pillory" (1703). The poem was sold in
the streets; the audience drank to his health while he stood in the pillory and read aloud his verses.

When the Tories fell from power Defoe continued to carry out intelligence work for the Whig
government. In his own days Defoe was regarded as an unscrupulous, diabolical journalist.

Defoe was one of the first to write stories about believable characters in realistic situations using
simple prose. He achieved literary immortality when in April 1719 he published Robinson Crusoe,
which was based partly on the memoirs of voyagers and castaways, such as Alexander Selkirk.
During the remaining years, Defoe concentrated on books rather than pamphlets. Among his works
are Moll Flanders (1722), A Journal of The Plague Year 1722) and Captain Jack (1722) His last great
work of fiction, Roxana, appeared in 1724. In the 1720s Defoe had ceased to be politically
controversial in his writings, and he produced several historical works, a guide book and The Great
Law of Subordination Considered (1724), an examination of the treatment of servants.

Phenomenally industrious, Defoe produced in his last years also works involving the supernatural,
The Political History of The Devil (1726) and An Essay on The History and Reality of Apparitions
(1727). He died on 26 April 1731, at his lodgings in Ropemaker's Alley, Moorfields.

Jonathan swift (1667-1745)

His life was a tragedy. His parents were English but moved to Dublin because his father wanted
practice as a lawyer. But he died a few months before Jonathan was born. Jonathan grew up and
was educated in with the help of his uncle who also died being young. Consequently he and his
mother were at lost because they did not have any income. They went back to England and sought
shelter in the household of Sir Temple with whom his mother was slightly connected. In that house
their position was an intermediate one between family members and servants. Of course Jonathan
did not feel at ease there and his bitterness grew together with his desire of taking revenge.

However Sir William Temple was a generous man and sent Jonathan to oxford where he graduated
as M.A- After his graduation he returned to Dublin. He took Holy Orders and became a priest, not
because he felt a real vocation but because he needed to find a position in life and in society.
Unfortunately he became a country parson with a very limited income and poverty was his bitter
reality.

Then he was involved in two love affairs. One with a friend of Sir William in his verses Swift called
her Stella (this was not her real name), afterwards with a younger girl whom he calls Vanessa.
Stella was his real love and he married her secretly because he was a priest. This situation made
Stella suffer a lot because they could not meet freely and they could not show themselves publicly.
They could not live under the same roof either. All this led her to sadness and depression which
ended with her death.

At the age of thirty-four he became a political writer. He started writing pamphlets on the Whig
side. Some years later he changed and became a Tory. He divided his time between London and
Ireland. He contributed to journals "The Tatler' and 'The Spectator'. Together with Alexander Pope
he founded the Sriblerus Club to ridicule “all false tastes in learning' In 1713 he became the Dean
of Saint Patrick Cathedral in Dublin.

His greatest works are “The tale of a tube”, “Gulliver's Travels” and “Letters signed by M.B.
Drapier”. He also wrote poetry .His works were so successful that he became rich and he gave away
all his wealth to charity.

In 1740 he became deaf and little by little he started losing contact with the world and with
people. From 1742 his faculties decayed and he was considered mad. He died in 1745.

Samuel Richardson (1089-1761)

He was born in Derbyshire. He went to the village school and he became a favorite among his
classmates because he had a remarkable gift of storytelling.

He was poor, so he was paid by a group of young ladies to read them some books while they were
sewing or doing needlework every evening. Three of these girls begged him to write their love
letters for them. So the preparation for his first novel, Pamela, began at the age of thirteen.

At the age of sixteen he became an apprentice to a London printer. He worked during eight years
for him. He married his master's daughter and established his own business.

When he was nearly fifty some booksellers asked him to write and publish a kind of letter-writing
guide and models to help country people who did not know how to write letters. The idea
occurred to Richardson to weave these letters into a story, and the result was Pamela in four
volumes.

Pamela is a maid servant who eventually marries her young master. The whole title is Pamela,
virtue rewarded, as subtitle. He presents his main character, Pamela, as exaggeratedly virtuous. Her
numerous virtues include endless patience, total obedience and modesty. It is clear that one of the
writer’s purposes was to moralize and encourage virtue in women.

The novel was a great success. Five editions were sold within the same year (1740) and people,
especially women, started to idolize its author and clamored more.

His next works were also in the form of letters between the characters: Clarissa Harlowe and Sir
Charles Grandison. They were interminable novels of seven volumes each. If we read these novels
today we may find them tiresome because of the exaggeration of virtues and the minute detail, his
slowness and preaching but for the 18th century reader they were very popular.

Henry Fielding (1707-1754)

He belonged to the aristocracy and was educated in Eaton and then he studied Law at Leyden, but
his family became bankrupt and he was obliged, at the age of 20, to cut his studies and to start
writing for a living. He became a playwright. He wrote light comedies and farces which were very
successful. He stopped writing after his marriage because his wife was a very rich aristocrat who
provided an enormous amount of money. So he returned to his studies and became a lawyer. He
worked as a lawyer and he started writing pamphlets and essays for the Whigs.

He had never considered writing novels until he read Pamela by S. Richardson. He laughed at it and
considered it ridiculous. So he started writing a novel which intended to ridicule Pamela. This novel
was never finished because in the course of writing, he discovered his own ability, and abandoning
his satiric aims, he began to write novels himself and to write them better than Richardson.

His first published novel was Joseph Andrews. In it he ridicules sentimentalism. Then he wrote Tom
Jones which is his greatest novel. It has humor and realism and its style is florid and detailed. This
last feature may make it appear somewhat heavy to the modern reader.

Then he wrote Jonathan Wild. It's about a thief who turns into thief catcher and Amelia in which
he commemorates the domestic virtues of his second wife who had been his maid servant before
and who became a great second mother to his children. He suffered from asthma and died being
still a young man.

The national poet of Scotland, Robert Burns (1759-1796)

He was also considered one of the pioneers of the Romantic Movement. What was it?

Robert Burns was born in Alloway, a rural town in Scotland. His parents were farmers and gave him
a very rudimentary education. In spite of this they encouraged him to read the greatest works of
English Literature. He also worked on the farm since his adolescence and devoted his free time to
reading and writing and became a Poet.

In 1786 he published “Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect”. This volume was a success and
opened the doors for him in every social circle, although he was poor and the Scottish Class System
was extremely rigid.

A personal characteristic of him was that he used to fall in love very easily. He had many love
affairs, sometimes with more than one woman at a time, and he also had a lot of illegitimate
children.

In 1787 he moved to Edinburgh where he joined a Music Publisher and worked for him. This
experience led him to publish “The Scots Musical Museum” in he included poems and folk songs.

Then he became tired of living in the city and established in a farm in Ellisland. He got married and
had 9 children. Only three of whom survived infancy.
After a few years he gave up farming and moved his family to a nearly town called Dumfries. He got
a job and went on writing poems and compiling traditional Scottish songs. He published “Tam
O’Shanter” a story in narrative poetry, autobiographical in a way and considered a masterpiece on
narrative poetry, and “A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice”.

His most famous poems included in his volumes are:

● “A Red Red Rose”

● “Auld Lang Syne”
● “The Battle of Sherramuir”
He died at the age of 37.