“Performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them”, Jane Austen said about herself and her contemporaries. Ancient Mariners, mind-forged manacles and disastrous picnics create a literature that is entertaining, but with a determination to explore the “meddling intellect” which “murder[s] to dissect”.
In the late 18th century and early 19th century, Britain was altering. Jane Austen, like her contemporaries Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth, mourned all that was being lost. Between them they created one of the most vibrant of literary periods.
By the late 18th century, to many of its contemporaries, England looked entirely different from the country of a century before. Villages had been emptied and their inhabitants now lived in towns. Factories had appeared, “these dark Satanic Mills” as Blake termed them, and modern forms of urban life were beginning.
This Industrial Revolution, as historians call it, was not the only revolution to disturb the British. Earlier in the century, the Americans had fought and won a war of separation from British power, offering a beacon of republicanism to the disillusioned in Britain. But even closer to home was the French Revolution, killing the royal family and aristocrats of the ancien regime and setting up a new style of government. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive” as Wordsworth wrote. These huge events threatened the traditions of English life and writers felt compelled to respond to them.
Blake’s response to America and France was excited. He felt industrial capitalism was a cruel system and he longed for the world that existed before. This nostalgia is shared by all our writers, though not all of them embraced Blake’s political opinions. Jane Austen’s writings, though at the beginning of the 18th century, mainly avoid the changing towns and predominantly look back to the aristocratic country life of the previous century. Wordsworth and Coleridge positioned themselves in the Lake District, away from the city and Coleridge dreamed of moving to the American wilderness.
The style of writing changed too. Jane Austen was writing in a brand new form, appropriately called ‘novel’, and embraced its realism of surface. The voice she produced to tell her stories was a new one, darting in and out of the characters’ minds, positioning the readers’ opinions through irony and wit, passing off comedy and fairy stories as accurate observations of social life.
Blake and Wordsworth wrote in a radically reduced language, Coleridge and Blake wrote in a language of dreams, they all turned their back on the Augustan style of polish.
In this course we will look at all these authors in order to see what was so new about them and why they are still exciting to read.
