Romantic Prose

Introduction:

In the eighteenth century a change had taken place in the prose style. Many eighteenth century prose-writers dependent on the assumptions about the suitability of various prose styles for various purposes for which they shared with the relatively small but the sophisticated public. Writers in the Romantic Period were rather more concerned with subject matter and emotional expression than with appropriate style. They wrote for an ever-increasing audience which was less homogenous in its interest and education than that of their predecessors. The autobiographical exploitation of personality manifests itself in a great variety of ways among writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; it is symptomatic of a significant change in the relation between the writer and the society. There was an indication of a growing distrust of the sharp distinction between matter and manner which was made in the eighteenth century. In the Romantic Period the tendency was for the writer to draw on his own personality either as illuminating case history or as a gesture of defiance of showmanship or ‘alienation’ rather than to objectify it in terms of a cause or a system. The growth of the familiar essay, with its highly personal, often whimsical, flaunting of the writer’s tastes, prejudices, and idiosyncrasies, represents another aspect of the Romantic exploitation of personality.

Non-fictional

Charles Lamb (1775-1834):

Charles Lamb was an English prose writer. Charles is a subtler and more interesting writer than his influence might lead one to suspect. He is not the cultivated gentleman of leisure relaxing in easy chat due to the circumstances of his personal life were harsh and even tragic. He never married and devoted himself to care of his sister, Mary Lamb, who was a subject to mental fits. Charles Lamb was in large measure self-educated and his views on life and letters were worked out with an almost desperate geniality in order to preserve and develop a relish for the color and individuality of experience which for him was the only alternative to despair.

Important Works:

• His sentimentality can be seen at its strongest in his early work “A Tale of Rosamund Gray” (1798). It was a melodramatic story of a girl ruined by a villain. Charles Lamb rejected the rational and Utopian systems so popular in his youth and cultivated a mixture of restrained hedonism and humane feeling which appears in his essays in his appreciation of certain physical pleasures.
• Lamb was essentially a Londoner. His Essays of Elia (1820-23) and Last Essays of Elia (1833), artfully artless in their personal, conversational tone, show his interest in curious persons and places, his relish of the color and variety of London life and characters. In these Essays he talks intimately to the reader about himself, his own personality, his quaint whims and experiences, and cheerful and heroic struggle which he made against misfortunes.
• The work for children which he produced together with his sister Mary in an effort to provide something less crudely moralizing than the children’s literature of the period include the Tales from Shakespeare (1807) and The Adventures of Ulysses (1808). Lamb shared with many writers of his generation a feeling for childhood, but this was not enough to make him a great children’s writer.

William Hazlitt (1778-1830):

William Hazlitt, the son of an Irish Unitarian clergyman, was born in Maidstone, Kent, on 10th April, 1778. His father was a friend of Joseph Priestley and Richard Price. As a result of supporting the American Revolution, Rev. Hazlitt and his family were forced to leave Kent and live in Ireland. The family returned to England in 1787 and settled at Wem in Shropshire. At the age of fifteen William was sent to be trained for the ministry at New Unitarian College at Hackney in London. In 1797 Hazlitt lost his desire to become a Unitarian minister and left the college. At first Hazlitt attempted to become a portrait painter but after a lack of success he turned to writing. William Hazlitt is a more vigorous and less mannered essayist than Lamb. He was an independent spirit who maintained his radicalism throughout his life. In his judgment of others he was always downright and frank, and never cared for its effect on them. During the time when England was engaged in a bitter struggle against Napoleon, Hazlitt worshipped him as a hero, and he came in conflict with the government. His friend left him one by one on account of his aggressive nature, and at the time of his death only Lamb stood by him.

Important works:

·        Hazlitt wrote many volumes of essays, of which the most effective is The Spirit of the age (1825) in which he gives critical portraits of a number of his famous contemporaries. This was the work which only Hazlitt could undertake because he was outspoken and fearless in the expression of his opinion.

·        Representative of his critical style is Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1817), which contains subjective, often panegyrical commentary on such individual characters as Macbeth, Othello, and Hamlet. This work introduces Hazlitt's concept of "gusto," a term he used to refer to qualities of passion and energy that he considered necessary to great art. Hazlitt felt that Shakespeare's sonnets lacked gusto and judged them as passionless and unengaging despite the "desperate cant of modern criticism."

·        In addition to literature, Hazlitt also focused on drama and art in his critical essays, many of which are collected in A View of the English Stage (1818) and Sketches of the Principal Picture-Galleries in England (1824).

·        The many and varied familiar essays that Hazlitt wrote for magazine publication and collected in the volumes of The Round Table, Table-Talk (1821-22), and The Plain Speaker (1826) are usually considered his finest works.

·        His characteristics energy and enthusiasm are exhibited in his three collections of lectures, On the English Poets (1818), On the English Comic Writers (1819), and On the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth (1820).

Thomas De Qunicey (1785-1859):

Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) is one of the greatest English prose writers. He shared the reaction of his day against the severer classicism of the eighteenth century, preferring rather the ornate manner of Jeremy Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne and their contemporaries. The specialty of his life consists in describing incidents of purely personal interest in language suited to their magnitude as they appear in the eyes of the writer. The reader is irresistibly attracted by the splendour of his style which combines the best elements of prose and poetry. The defects of his style are that he digresses too much and often stops in the midst of a fine paragraph to talk about some trivial thing by way of jest. But in spite of these defects his prose is still among the few supreme examples of style in the English Language. He was a highly intellectual writer and his interests were very wide. Mostly he wrote in the form of articles for journals and he dealt with all sorts of subjects; about himself and his friends, life in general, art, literature, philosophy and religion.

Important works:

·        His autobiographical Confessions of An English Opium-Eater (1821) tells the story of his early life, which was unusual enough, and goes on to recount the dreams, some magnificent and some terrifying, which were stimulated in him by his taking of opium, a habit he first indulged in when quite younger in order to alleviate neuralgia and in which he persisted intermittently throughout his life.

·        Suspiria de Profundis (1845) was his other autobiographical work which reveals his interest in his own psychology and show an attitude to the significance of dreams and an awareness of the different levels of consciousness that are surprisingly modern.

·        De Quincey published his expanded version of the Confessions in 1856, but this version is considered obscure and stylized.

·        His numerous essays, which initially appeared in periodicals in the Lake District, London, and Edinburgh, treat a large variety of issues, both parochial and international: Britain's imperial conflicts in Asia and northern Africa, criminal violence, theological history, Enlightenment philosophy, as well as numerous more explicitly literary reviews. Among these literary essays, De Quincey's essay on William Shakespeare, “On the Knocking on the Door in Macbeth,” has received acclaim as an outstanding piece of psychological criticism, and his critique of Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads is considered a brilliant analysis of the poet's creative process.

·        In addition, De Quincey published essays that sketched personal portraits of other Romantic authors; his reminiscences of his interactions with Coleridge and Wordsworth offer largely sympathetic insights into their literary circle.

Fictional:

Jane Austen (1775-1817):

Jane Fitzwilliam Austen was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction set among the gentry, has earned her a place as one of the most widely read and most beloved writers in English literature. Amongst scholars and critics, Austen's realism and biting social commentary have cemented her historical importance as a writer. Austen lived her entire life as part of a close-knit family located on the lower fringes of the English gentry. She was educated primarily by her father and older brothers as well as through her own reading. The steadfast support of her family was critical to Austen's development as a professional writer. Austen's artistic apprenticeship lasted from her teenage years until she was about thirty-five years old. She first gave the novel its modern character through the treatment of everyday life. During Austen's lifetime her works brought her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews. Through the mid-nineteenth century, her novels were admired mainly by members of the literary elite. However, the publication of her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1869 introduced her to a far wider public as an appealing personality and kindled popular interest in her works. By the 1940s, Austen had become widely accepted in academia as a "great English writer". The second half of the twentieth century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship, which explored many aspects of her novels: artistic, ideological, and historical.

Important works:

·        From 1811 until 1816, with the release of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1815), she achieved success as a published writer.

·        She wrote two additional novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818, and began a third, which was eventually titled Sanditon, but died before completing it.

·        Austen's works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the eighteenth century and are part of the transition to nineteenth-century realism. Austen's plots, though fundamentally comic, highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security. Like those of Samuel Johnson, one of the strongest influences on her writing, her works are concerned with moral issues.

Mary Shelley (1797-1851):

Mary Shelley was daughter of writer and pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and philosopher/novelist William Godwin, wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley and friend of Lord Byron. Mary Shelley was educated at home, where she met her father’s literary friends, including the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who admired her father for his philosophical beliefs. Mary eloped to France with Percy when she was only 16. Their first child, a daughter died in Venice, Italy, few years later. They returned to England, where their son William was born. They only married in 1816 after Percy’s first wife committed suicide.            

            She also edited and promoted the works of her husband. Mary Shelley was known mainly for her efforts to publish Percy Shelley's works and for Frankenstein. Mary Shelley remained a political radical throughout her life. Mary Shelley's works often argue that cooperation and sympathy, particularly as practiced by women in the family, were the ways to reform civil society. This view was a direct challenge to the individualistic Romantic ethos promoted by Percy Shelley and Enlightenment political theories.

Important works:

·        Mary Shelley’s first novel, Frankenstein (1817) was published when she was 21. In the style of a sinister gothic novel which was popular at that time, the story deals with the ambitious young scientist who wanted to be the creator of life, the horrors that follow his experiment and his destruction by the monster he creates. Frankenstein was immediately successful.

• After Percy’s death in 1822, Mary Shelley returned to England. Her second novel, Valperga (1823) was published when she was 26.
• Scholars have shown increasing interest in her literary output, particularly in her novels, which include the historical novels Valperga (1823) and Perkin Warbeck (1830), the apocalyptic novel The Last Man (1826), and her final two novels, Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837).
• She also edited and promoted the works of her husband was known mainly for her efforts to publish Percy Shelley's works.