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Birth of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Philospher and novelist who believed in valuing the individual and his or her capacity for good. Some of his works marked the beginnings of the Romantic Movement. He proposed radically unsettling ideas about human nature, justice, and progress that disrupted the dominant Enlightenment thinking of the moment and helped to spark the Romantic Movement. -
Birth of Anna Laetitia Barbauld
A sophisticated woman poet whose work was widely known and respected in England and the United States. She was a fierce opponent of war and slavery and an early defender of animal rights. She urged her readers to live up to the highest principles of morality and citizenship. Her political poetry protested against the wasteful miseries of war. -
Birth of William Blake
Poet of the Romantic Movement. Blake condemned authority of all kinds. He used his poetry to decry the corruption of church and government, as well as the poverty and enslavement of people. Excited by the radical energies unleashed the French Revolution, Blake threw himself into his creative endeavors and produced many of his greatest works. -
Beginning of the Industrial Revolution
Industrial RevolutionShift from rural economy to urban one, dominated by machinery, factories, and mass production. Considered a significant influence on the artists and writers of Romanticism. Nature plays a crucial role in Romantic literature. As the industrial revolution forced huge masses of people out of agricultural life and into crowded cities, nature became exotic, interesting, and valuable. As black factory smoke billowed into the sky, nature's beauty began to seem rare, precious, and under threat. -
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Industrial Revolution
Shift from rural economy to urban one, dominated by machinery, factories, and mass production. Considered a significant influence on the artists and writers of Romanticism. Nature plays a crucial role in Romantic literature. As the industrial revolution forced huge masses of people out of agricultural life and into crowded cities, nature became exotic, interesting, and valuable. As black factory smoke billowed into the sky, nature's beauty began to seem rare, precious, and under threat. -
Birth of William Wordsworth
Poet and leading figure of the Romantic Movement. The sense that poets should convey intensely personal, individual expression can be traced to Wordsworth's deliberate rejection of his precursors. He turned readers' attention away from classical models to everyday emotion and imagination, championing the spontaneity of authentic feeling. He also often chose to focus on common people. Wordsworth's poetry insistently asks complex questions of faith, nature, selfhood, community, and knowledge. -
Birth of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poet of the Romantic Movement. Coleridge spoke passionately in support of liberty. He was critical of the government and the slave trade. His most famous works involve more mysterious, supernatural, even demonic themes. Coleridge also explores the inner frontier, probing the power and limits of the mind. And in all of his work, he offers a dense and thoughtful contemplation of human capacities: our knowledge, our inner vision, and our powers of creation and destruction. -
American Declaration of Independence
In North America, colonial subjects declared independence not only from English rule but from the whole structure of the old regime, rejecting the hereditary monarchy. This democratic revolution argued that governments should derive their power only from the consent of the governed. It had global effects, transforming expectations about basic rights and freedoms worldwide. Themes of the political revolution made their way into literature, seen in works that depict ideas of political resistance. -
Death of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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First Phase of Romanticism
The first phase of Romanticism included Barbauld, Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. This phase was caught in the initial excitement of the French Revolution and its promise of a wholly new kind of society based on equal rights and freedom. -
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Romanticism
Artistic, literary, and intellectual movement originating in Europe toward the end of the 18th century. Partly a reaction to the industrial revolution, a period of democratic revolutions, and the age of enlightenment. Evokes imagination, freedom, and revolution. Often dwells in wild, ghostly, and exotic settings. Embraces a turn inward to the individual, emotions, dreams, and fantasies. Greatly associated with nature. Revolutionary resistance is mirrored by resistance in Romantic literature. -
Rousseau's Confessions
Jean Jacques Rousseau's work Confessions is published posthumously. With Confessions, Rousseau invents a major new genre: the modern autobiography. For the first time, an author's intimate emotional life became the subject of his work. This text took formative childhood experiences and the uniqueness of individual feeling more seriously than any text had done before, prizing honest self-knowledge as a new moral value. It also explores ideas about the individual and society. -
Blake's Songs of Innocence
William Blake's poetry book entitled Songs of Innocence is published. Blake explores what it would be like to perceive the world through the eyes of a child.Many of the poems draw attention to the positive aspects of natural human understanding prior to the corruption and distortion of experience. Others take a more critical stance toward innocent purity. -
Beginning of the French Revolution
The French monarchy had become ever more absolutist, and peasants were growing resentful. On July 14, 1789, a loosely organized armed mob stormed the Bastille prison - a symbol of royal power - and called for the liberation of the French people. This political revolution argued that ordinary people should take political decision making into their own hands. The tremendous changes going on in France influenced the artists and writers of the Romantic Movement. -
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
Issued by the French National Assembly. Asserted the equality and freedom of all men and abolished all privileges based on birth. An era of a self governing and autonomous people. -
Birth of Percy Bysshe Shelley
English poet of the Romantic Movement. Shelley is a deeply skeptical poet. He is famous for his resistance and rebellion. He often experiments with endings that resist resolution. Some of his works celebrate an ideal freedom that triumphs over oppression. -
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Reign of Terror
A small group of radicals, called the Jacobins, seized control and united the nation under a strong centralized dictatorship, mobilizing the nation for war and sending all traitors - and potential traitors - to the guillotine. Their short period of leadership has come to be known as the "Reign of Terror." The blood they shed sickened many observers who had once sympathized with the aims of the revolution. It has become a symbol of revolutionary violence taken too far. -
Guillotine
The French stunned Europe by sending Louis the XVI to his death, executing him with a sleek new machine - the guillotine. Suddenly it seemed possible that people might rise up against their oppressors, violently opposing traditional authority in the name of individual human rights. -
Blake's Songs of Experience
William Blake's book of poems, Songs of Experience, is published. Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience juxtapose the innocent, pastoral world of childhood against an adult world of corruption and repression. Thus the collection as a whole explores the value and limitations of two different perspectives on the world. Many of the poems fall into pairs, so that the same situation or problem is seen through the lens of innocence first and then experience. -
Birth of John Keats
Poet of the Romantic Movement. Uses poetic forms to dwell on death, love, pain, art, and nature. -
Birth of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
English novelist, short story writer, poet, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer. Best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein. Studies of her lesser-known works suggest that she remained a political radical throughout her life. -
Lyrical Ballads
A work entitled Lyrical Ballads written by Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth is published. Radically democratic, it focused on subject matter conventionally ignored by poets - the lives of lowly people, such as the very poor, the insane, children, shepherds, and tinkers. It prized not only humble and simple subjects but also the poet's own internal state of mind. This collection reflects many of the themes valued by the writers of the Romantic Movement. -
Napoleon Bonaparte Installs Dictatorship
Through a vast military campaign, Bonaparte redrew the map of Europe, bringing large parts of Spain, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Poland under French control. -
Napoleon Bonaparte Crowns Himself Emperor
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Second Phase Romanticism
The second phase of Romanticism included Mary and Percy Shelley and John Keats. This phase is marked by a quickening of cultural nationalism and a new attention to national origins, as attested by the collection and imitation of native folklore, folk ballads, and poetry. -
Birth of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Most famous woman poet writing in English in the 19th century. In her view, poetry was capable of acting as a powerful vehicle for social protest. When she wrote about slavery, women's rights, prostitution, and child labor, her audiences were often inspired to vocal debate and political action. -
Birth of Robert Browning
English poet. Notorious in the poetic genre of the dramatic monologue. Like monologues spoken on stage, these first-person poems are spoken by characters in a setting. His works contain characters with vividly realized personalities - often extreme and eccentric. His dramatic monologues depart from the expresive lyrics so popular among the Romantic poets, which dwell on the thoughts and feelings of the individual self. -
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Marries Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Napoleon Bonaparte is Defeated
Defeated by the British at the Battle of Waterloo. However, he left a powerful myth behind: the brilliant individual who could conquer whole nations. He left a political legacy behind as well. Though he ruled by dictatorship, he also consolidated many principles of the French Revolution. His legal system was known as the Napoleonic Code. It abolished hereditary privileges, opened government careers to individuals on the basis of ability rather than birth, and established freedom of religion. -
Frankenstein
The novel Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is published. The novel is an example of a Gothic work that was created out of the elements of Romanticism.The Gothic movement evolved from Romanticism, delving deeper into profound philosophical questions like the quest of man to achieve perfection, -
Birth of Walt Whitman
One of the greatest American poets, perhaps the greatest. He rejected traditional conventions of poetry and made free verse seem like the most appropriate form for modern poetry. His work was an art form that left European values and traditions behind to celebrate modern pluralistic democracy. He also appealed to the common reader and gave voice to a vast range of ordinary people who had gone largely unnoticed by poets before him. -
Death of John Keats
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Birth of Emily Dickinson
One of the best known American poets. While she draws on familiar poetic themes - nature, death, love, and faith - she pushes her exploration of feeling to their most extreme intensity, and her images persistently unsettle expectation. Her works have an unlikely combination of innocence and sophistication. Her poems are philosophically demanding and are radically innovative experiments in lyric form. -
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Queen Victoria Takes the Throne
Queen Victoria takes the throne of the United Kingdom. The beginning of Queen Victoria's reign sees the decline of the Romantic Movement and the beginning of the Victorian era. -
Elizabeth Barrett Marries Robert Browning
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Springtime of the Peoples
Both the industrial revolution and the political revolutions haunted the generations that followed. Absolute monarchies kept crumbling, as outraged people rose up to demand new rights. Each insurgency inspired other outbreaks, producing a kind of revolutionary contagion across Europe and the Americas that reached its peak in the year of 1848, called the "Springtime of the Peoples", when revolutions broke out in France, Austria, Hungary, Switzerland, Spain, Germany, Italy, Denmark, and Romania. -
Death of William Wordsworth
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Death of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley
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Death of Emily Dickinson
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