In a recent Guardian opinion piece, Ross Barkan announced that “the new romanticism has arrived” (2023). Likening “today’s romantics” to those of a distinctly English Romantic tradition: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron (albeit tied to Scotland), and William Blake, he imagines that their supposed fascination with the “magic” and “spiritual realms” as the vehicles for “transcendence” parallels a resurgence of “magic” in the twenty-first century (2023).

Now, Barkan’s theory of what constitutes Romanticism is highly idealistic and echoes certain Victorian theories of Romanticism that were produced through spiritual and mystical lenses rather than current work on British Romanticism. I should open by stressing that Barkan’s theory is only one way in which the Romantics were received by the Victorians, dividing opinion much like how Amazon’s The Rings of Power continues to divide and direct conversations in Tolkien fandom.

In the first few blog posts directly related to my PhD, then, I want to spend time demystifying how exactly the Victorians came to (re)create specifically British Romanticism and the British Romantics. Besides giving context to Barkan’s article, I aim to chart and illuminate the many fascinating, whacky, and controversial ways the Victorians (re)made the Romantics.

The Age of Transition, the Age of Change

The terms ‘Romantic’ and ‘Romanticism’ that we use to describe British texts, styles, and aesthetics from the period 1789-1832 are a mid-Victorian creation. As the nineteenth century progressed, what they specifically meant continuously fluctuated and adapted according to individual reactions and responses to Romantic work. As early as the 1830s, authors referred to the period as the “age of change” and “visible transition” (Mill 1831: 20; Lytton 1833: 166). The decades surrounding the turn of the nineteenth century in Britain were certainly rife with change: revolutions, a stepping away from (but not outright rejection of) Enlightenment philosophy that dominated the first half of the eighteenth century, a reorientation of the author’s role in society, the rapid growth of industry, scientific developments that excited and worried all at once, the Reform Act of 1832 and its implications for social hierarchies. But how far would this change and transition go? How could early Victorians harness the radicalism and ideas of their predecessors for their own times?

Recently, Michael Bradshaw has usefully classified authors of the 1820s-1830s such as Thomas Lovell Beddoes, George Darley, Thomas Hood, and Letitia Landon as a “third generation” of Romantics who “extended” “Romantic themes of imaginative creativity”, “Romantic achievement and Romantic idioms […] into the commodity culture of the mid-nineteenth century” (2018: 160-1). Such a distinction is useful in considering how the philosophies, styles, and aesthetics of the ‘age of change and transition’ snowballed into the early Victorian period. The decade wasn’t liminal, stuck between Romantic and Victorian, it was ripe with Romanticism’s continuity.

Thinking of the 1830s in this way helps us distinguish how the first, second, and third generations of Romantic authors (if we still wish to engage with this generational framing) didn’t think of themselves as Romantic, nor were they a homogenous group who collectively fetishised Nature or actively sought transcendence through magic and communion with Nature. These are Victorian readings that germinated from a specific cluster of works (poems, lectures, essays, journals, letters) that were carefully chosen, edited, anthologised/included in condemning or idealistic biographies, and subsequently canonised as the century progressed. Consequentially, later Victorians ended up reading earlier Victorian cut/edit-and-paste jobs of Romantic work, taking audiences further away from the original text. The age of “change” and “transition” may have described the decades surrounding the turn of the nineteenth century, but Romanticism and the Romantics were continuously ‘changed’ by their Victorian readers, compiling a toolkit of Romantic themes and tropes that school children in England still repetitively use to find, highlight, and annotate today.

The Web of Reception

Now, this does not mean that every Victorian had the same reaction to the Romantics. Reception theory is nuanced and has a tendency of shrugging off generalisations. When considering Victorian receptions of the Romantics, Tom Mole’s “web of receptions” is a useful model (2017: 14). Although there was “no such thing as a homogenous Romantic impulse” or Romantic “center” for the Victorians, Mole’s metaphor can be resituated so each Victorian becomes the centre of their own web, spinning their own threads and thoughts about the early, middle, and late parts of a Romantic’s life, moral views and practices, and literary work (Radford and Sandy 2008: 5; Mole 2017: 3). Although these webs would interweave at times, prompting discussion on authors’ lives, works, and influences on contemporary work, culture, and lifestyles, they could still be spun in isolation, complicating the tapestry of Romantic Victorianism.

So what is the tapestry or picture we get of Romanticism and the Romantics? Well, it’s anything but singular. Instead, it’s a patchwork collection of “fragmented and modified” forms of Romanticism knitted to varying degrees into the very fabric of Victorian literary, artistic, and intellectual cultures (Mole 2017: 2). Some Victorians were antagonistic towards their predecessors; figures such as Henry Taylor, William Makepeace Thackeray, Aubrey Thomas de Vere, and W.J. Courthope called for the rejection of Romanticism as a dangerous, insidious force that no longer supported Victorian Britain – Coleridge’s opium addiction, Byron’s immorality and sexual exploits, Shelley’s atheism being just a few of the key damning reasons. On the other hand, Victorians such as the Brontë sisters, Alfred Tennyson, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot sought to find a middle ground, negotiating between Romantic and Victorian theories of morality and aesthetics to create something innovative and new – one need only look to Poems Chiefly Lyrical (1830), Wuthering Heights (1847), Bleak House (1852-1853), and Middlemarch (1871-1872) for examples of the marriage between Romanticism and Realism (Casaliggi and Fermanis 2016: 201). Additionally, Steven Gill’s Wordsworth and the Victorians (1998) and Sarah Wootton’s Consuming Keats (2006) has illuminated how the Victorians also ignored Romantic styles, ideals, and aesthetics, preferring to adapt, commodify, and market their work for profit (Gill 1998: 1; Wootton 2006: 70).

For the Victorians, Romantic lives, works, ideas, philosophies, aesthetics (etc.) were palimpsests as they were repetitively reused and altered according to the needs, views, and beliefs of the Victorian doing the remodelling – leading to remakings of remakings of remakings in the spiralling web of reception. It would be impossible to document in a few blog posts the extensive Victorian receptions and adaptations of the Romantics and Romanticism, but by highlighting a few points, one begins to notice how Barkan’s theory of Romanticism remains under the shadow of Victorian ideology and bias.

However, responding to Barkan is not my main or sole aim – nor do I completely disagree with everything in the article; there are one or two points that I think he comes to the brink of but doesn’t follow through. In this first post of my ‘How the Victorians (Re)made the British Romantics’ blog series, I’ve addressed various generalisations about both Romanticism and the Victorians. The picture is never as simple as we are led to believe and my decade of experience observing and teaching in English secondary schools and colleges confirms that such nuances aren’t always achievable in the classroom – the reasons for this are legion; sit me down and buy me a tea to know more about my thoughts on the multitude of issues plaguing English departments in secondary schools!

To wrap up this first post, I want to address a word that repetitively came up while I was discussing Barkan’s article on Facebook and Twitter: revival. I hope that I’ve clearly illustrated how the word revival isn’t the most accurate word when describing nineteenth century forms of Romanticism. Romanticism was unmistakably a central pillar from which the Victorians formulated their theories of art, life, faith, community, life styles etc. etc.. Yes it transformed, changed, transitioned, adapted (insert the other thousand synonyms here), but it was never really revived. After all, how can you revive that which is still alive?

Bibliography

Barkan, Ross. 2023. ‘The zeitgeist is changing. A strange, romantic backlash to the tech era looms’, The Guardian, 28th December 2023. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/28/new-romanticism-technology-backlash

Bradshaw, Michael. 2018. ‘Romantic Generations’ in The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism, ed. by David Duff (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 157-172.

Casaliggi, Carman and Fermanis, Porscha. 2016. Romanticism: A Literary and Cultural History (New York and Abingdon: Routledge).

Gill, Stephen. 1998. Wordsworth and the Victorians. (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

Lytton, Edward Bulwer. 1833. England and the English: In Two Volumes. Vol. II (London: Richard Bentley, 1833).

Mill, John Stuart. 1831. ‘The Spirit of the Age, No. 1’, The Examiner, 1197 (9 January 1831), pp. 20–1.

Mole, Thomas. 2017. What the Victorians Made of Romanticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

Radford, Andrew and Sandy, Mark. 2008. ‘Introduction’ in Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Period, ed. by Andrew Radford and Mark Sandy (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited), pp. 1-14.

Wootton, Sarah. 2005. Consuming Keats: Nineteenth-Century Representations in Art and Literature (London: Palgrave).