Set 7: 19th Century Novelists: The Romantic Movement

Towards the end of the 18th Century, there came into circulation new notions of individuality,
of freedom and liberty and the power of the imagination. The main influence on this was the
French-Swiss thinker Jean Jacques Rousseau who sustained essential goodness of nature and
natural impulses. He also protested against corruption of society. His ideas helped to lead the
American War of Independence and the French Revolution.

Literature was influenced by these ideas. For the first time English literature was colored by a
deep and sincere spirit of democracy. In this context the Romantic Movement or Romanticism
emerged in Europe and it was not restricted only to literature but also to art and music. It was
marked by a preference of feeling and free expression over intellect and strict forms. Its ideals
included imagination, liberty and love of nature.

The period called Romantic Age started in 1770 and ended in 1847. In essence, the word
“Romantic” was used to highlight the contrast between the freedom of imagination of the
medieval “romances” and the restraint and discipline of the ‘classical’ literature of ancient
Greece and Rome. It was a reaction against classicism in literature which put the emphasis on
form and the mastery of the rules of writing and it did not consider content and feelings.

The Romantic Age was also characterized by a love of the strange and fantastic of far
countries and medieval times, of heroic adventures and exalted amours.

The Age was pre-eminently poetic. Among the big names of Romantic Poets we can mention
William Blake, William Wordsworth, Robert Burns, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron and
Percy Bysshe Shelley.

However important prose writers also emerged in this period. The most important novelists
belonging to the Romantic Age are Mary Shelley, Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott.

Mary Shelley (1797-1851)

Her real name as a single woman was Mary Wollstonecraft. She was the daughter of the
philosopher and novelist William Godwin. Her mother Mary was also a feminist writer. She
used the name Mary Shelley after her marriage to the romantic poet Percy B. Shelley.

Her most important novel was Frankenstein. It is a gothic tale of terror which is thought to be
the origin of modern science-fiction. Through the letters of Captain Walton, an English
explorer in the Arctic, it tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, an idealistic student of Natural
Philosophy, who has discovered the secrets of giving back life to dead tissue. He collects
bones and builds something resembling a human being, which has a supernatural strength
and size and is terrible in appearance. The idea of a man-made monster, living and without
conscience, is somewhat morbid; the inevitable consequences are skillfully developed with
unshrinking realism.

Sir Walter Scott (1778-1832)

He was born in Edinburgh (Scotland). His father was also a writer and his mother was the
daughter of a famous physician. At high school he was a popular story-teller. His family had a
great library and he devoted his free time to read the greatest works of English literature. He
became a lawyer and married a French woman. He also studied German and his literary
career started with his publication of Translations from Burger and then he also started to
write poetry. He published The Border Minstrelsy, which contained some original poems and
other anonymous ones compiled in Southern Scotland.

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His first great poem was The Lay of the Minstrel. This was followed by other enchanting
poems Marmion and The Lady of the Lake.

In 1814, at the age of forty-three he published a collection of novels which tell fantastic
stories of Southern Scotland. It was called Waverly and it was a great success. It was
published anonymously and everybody wondered who the genial author was. He kept his
secret until the Theatrical Fund dinner in 1827 when he publicly confessed his authorship.
This was the starting point of his astonishing career as a novelist becoming the greatest one
of the Romantic Period. He found the material for most of his books in the pages of History. In
his love of the past, Scott is a true Romanticist. His novels are full of adventure, mystery and
the supernatural. He has succeeded in revivifying the past for his readers.

In a period of 20 years he wrote more than 30 novels. He devoted to write so much at an

His most important novels are lvanhoe, The Talisman, Rob Roy and Kenilworth. They are all
historical novels. Ivanhoe takes place during the reign of King Richard Ill or Richard Lion
Hearted with Knights, Castles ladies in distress and medieval tournaments. The Talisman is
about the crusades and Kenilworth is about the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

The chief of Scott's faults is a tendency to over description and a certain lack of care in
construction. This was probably due to the speed with which his works were written.

Jane Austen (1775-1817)

At first her novels were written anonymously and she was not recognized as a great novelist
during her lifetime but just some years after her death.

She was the daughter of a clergyman. She grew up in somewhat conventional but pleasant
family circle. Her elder brothers were all sailors and she was very fond of her elder sister
Cassandra. They both went to a good boarding school and were rather well educated for their
position.

She started writing since very young and wrote six novels. Pride and Prejudice, Sense and
Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion.

All her novels are about the quiet, prosperous, middle-class world of the provinces. Although
her novels lacked of adventure, passion and historical pictures, she pointed her narrative with
wit and humor. Her characterization was perfectly natural because she described characters
drawn directly from her own experience and confined to limited class of society.

She did not care about technical theories of construction or style. However her style was
very of wit and humor. But when she referred to the object of her moral indignation, she was
cynical, merciless and caustic. She also ridiculed masculine vanity towards women with
unsparing vigor.

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Set 7b: Transcendentalism

This movement originated in New England in the nineteenth Century, in the eighteen thirties,
to be precise. It represents neither a religion nor a philosophy. It was a movement of feelings
and beliefs rather than a philosophical system. They rejected both the conservative
Puritanism of their ancestors and the newer liberal faith of that time, Unitarianism. This was a
branch of Christianity which did not believe in the Trinity (The union of the Father, Son and
Holy Spirit in one God).

The origins of this movement can be found in the German philosopher Kant, the greatest
German writer Goethe and also in the English Romantic poets Wordsworth, Coleridge and
Carlyle.

Transcendentalists were interested in the individual and his goodness. It was a protest
against the doctrines of damnation (a condemn from God to suffer in Hell), doubt and
pessimism of the Puritans who were very strict and severe regarding moral and considered
man as naturally evil. On the contrary the Transcendentalist doctrine put total faith in the
individual, his worth and goodness. They recognized in man the capacity of knowing truth
intuitively, or attaining knowledge transcending the reach of the senses.

They also believed that Nature reflected the absolute order of things established by God. So
Nature is the revelation of the Spirit of God. According to this conception by studying nature
man could get knowledge of God through his intuition or transcendental reason and could
redeem himself without any intermediates such as ministers, priests, churches, etc. The main
representatives of this movement constituted The Transcendental Club of Boston which
published a magazine called "The Dial". Through this they spread their ideas which had
tremendous influence upon American thought and upon literature.

The greatest transcendentalists and leaders of this movement in New England were Ralph
Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Apart from them there were other
transcendentalist poets and writers. One of them was Amos Bronson Alcott, an important
pioneer in American Education and the author of “Conversations with children on the
Gospels". His method was to trust the intelligence of children in educating them. His greatest
success was with his own the daughter, Louisa May Alcott who later wrote "Little women”.

A brief idea of transcendentalism

This unwieldy name represents neither a religion nor a philosophy. The group of intellectuals
in early New England, who called themselves “transcendentalists" were interested in the
individual and his goodness. They developed their high ideals somewhat from the liberal
philosophy of the German philosopher Kant and the writer Goethe, somewhat from the
ideals of the natural man of Rousseau and from the ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity of
the French Revolution, somewhat from the idealized concepts of man and his place in nature
the English romantics, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle, somewhat from the Oriental
teachings of the Hindus, and a great deal from their own interpretations of these ideals for
the living of the good life.

All one needs to know of the very complicated network of ideas that can be built up around
the term transcendentalism in order to appreciate the body of literature it gave rise to in New
England, is that the doctrine was the lay intellectual counterpart of the Unitarian doctrine
that was being preached in the pulpits. It was the doctrine that put total faith in the
individual and his worth and goodness, that was a supreme romantic protest against the

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doctrines of damnation, doubt, and pessimism of the Puritans. The belief endowed the
individual man with a sense of ennobling divinity within himself.

They rejected both the conservative Puritanism of their ancestors and the newer, liberal faith
of Unitarianism. They saw both religions as “negative, cold, and lifeless". Although they
respected Christ for the wisdom of his teachings: they thought of the works Shakespeare and
the great philosophers as equally important.

The Transcendentalists tried to find the truth through feeling and intuition rather than
through logic. Orestes Brownson, an early Transcendentalist, defined the movement as "the
recognition in man of the capacity of knowing truth intuitively... an order of knowledge
transcending the senses”. Henry David Thoreau put it more simply “Wisdom does not
inspects, it beholds.''

The Transcendentalists found God everywhere, in man and in nature.

In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) founded the "Transcendental Club”. Its magazine,
The Dial, was often criticized for its vague or silly ideas. Still, it was the true voice of their
thoughts and feelings. For a time, the movement had an experimental community, the Brook
Farm Institute. But this came to an end when the Transcendentalists divided into two groups:
those interested in social reform, and those (like Emerson and Thoreau) who were more
interested in the individual.

In 1836, Emerson published Nature, the clearest statement of Transcendentalist ideas. In it

When the eye of Reason opens... outlines and surfaces become transparent and are no
longer seen; causes and spirits are seen through them. The best moments of life are
these delicious awakenings.

The slow sale of the book showed how small in numbers the Transcendentalists really were.
In 1837 Emerson gave a speech at Harvard University: The American Scholar. He attacked the
influence of tradition and the past, and called for a new burst of American creativity. To him,
the word scholar did not refer to the man of "book learning'', but to the original thinker. Such
a man knows himself through intuition and the study of nature, not of books.

A tall, handsome man, Emerson began his career as a Unitarian minister. Even after he left the
ministry and turned away from Christianity, he remained a kind of "preacher”: he was an
enormously popular lecturer. First he would "deposit'' ideas in his journal (which he called
"my bank account") and then he developed his lectures from the notes in his journal. Next, he
rewrote them into essays. Self-Reliance (1841) is one of the most famous of these
lecture/essays, and is widely read in American high schools today. The essay is filled with
memorable lines, familiar to most Americans:

To believe in your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart
is true for all men, that is genius.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

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 Equally important is Emerson's essay The Over-Soul (1841). The "Over-Soul" is "that unity…
within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all things". Flowing
out of that unity, "Man is a stream whose source is hidden." From the Over-Soul come all
ideas and intelligence: "We do not determine what we think. We only open our senses... and
suffer the intellect to sec.”

In his essay The Poet (1844), Emerson describes the poet as the “complete man". The poet ..
us from old thoughts. A good poem helps us to "mount to paradise/ by the stairway of
surprise." Emerson felt that the form of a of a poem should grow out of his thought. This is
because each poem "has an architecture of its own”.

As much as Walt Whitman, Emerson helped open American poetry to new possibilities. His
poetry is often criticized as being awkward and unmusical. But for him poetry did not always
have to produce pleasant sounds. Harsh sounds could be used to surprise the ear. He also
introduced the nation to entirely new poetic material, such as the Hindu idea that we are
always reborn into this world each time we die. This is the theme of his Brahma:

If the red slayer thinks he slays,

Or if the slain think he is slain,

They know not well the subtle ways

I keep, and pass, and turn again.

But perhaps he is best known as the author of the Concord Hymn, which celebrates the
Battle of Concord during the American Revolution. The last line of the first stanza is familiar to
most Americans:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,

Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,

Here once the embattled farmers stood

And fired the shot heard round the world.

Another literary giant who lived in Emerson's hometown of Concord (thirty miles west of
Boston) was Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). As a young man at Harvard, Thoreau had
been deeply influenced by reading Nature and he remained a pure Transcendentalist all his
life. He and Emerson held many similar opinions; they even looked alike and for two years,
Thoreau lived in Emerson's home. Emerson often remarked that the younger man's ideas
seemed like continuations of his own. Over the years, however, the relationship became
increasingly difficult. In 1853, Thoreau wrote of a meeting between the two in which Emerson
"told me what I already knew”. Thoreau felt that he had wasted his time.

Like Emerson, Thoreau created his lectures and books from notes in his carefully kept journal:
"My journal is that for me which would else spill over and run to waste.” But what he wrote
there- and in his books- was written in a far more lively style than Emerson's. Emerson wrote
about nature in the abstract. Thoreau, however, was an experienced woodsman and his
works are filled with details about plants, rivers and wildlife.

In 1846, Thoreau was arrested and put in jail for one night because he had refused to pay his
taxes. It was a protest against the U.S government’s acceptance of slavery in the South and its
war with Mexico. He wrote about his experience in jail in his essay Civil Disobedience (1849):
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 As I stood considering the walls of solid stone... and the iron grating which strained
the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of the institution which
treated me as if were flesh and bones, to be locked up... As they could not reach me,
they had resolved to punish my body.”

The theme of this work- “that we should be men first and subjects afterward"- made it a
great influence on Tolstoy, Gandhi and Martin Luther King. It is probably the best-known
American essay outside the United States.

From 1845 to 1847, Thoreau lived alone in a hut he built for himself on the north shore of
Walden Pond, a few miles from Concord. While there, he wrote A Week on the Concord and
Merrimack Rivers. The book is loosely organized around the story of a river trip which he had
once taken with his brother. Most of the material was actually from his journal. One critic has
called it "a heap of good things rather than a book". Its various discussions include a catalog
of fish on the Concord River, the poetry of Homer, fights with Indians and the
Transcendentalist meaning of sounds.

Later, in 1854, Thoreau wrote his world-famous Walden, about his stay in the pondside hut. In
its own strange way, it is one of the greatest works of American literature. On the surface, it
speaks only of the practical side of living alone in the woods, of the plants, animals and
insects one finds there, and of the changing seasons. But in fact it is a completely
Transcendentalist work. The author tries to “live through the visible to the invisible, through
the temporal to the eternal.” He rejects the things ordinary people desire in life, such as
money and possessions. Instead, he emphasizes the search for true wisdom: “While
civilization has been improving our homes, it has not equally improved those who live in
them." True enjoyment comes only when one throws off all unnecessary things. Describing
his little home, he says, "My best room... always ready for company... was the pine woods
behind my house.” Walden is a hopeful book, encouraging people to lead sincere, joyous
lives. The author sees the world as “more wonderful as it is convenient; more beautiful than
it is useful.”

Thoreau's poetry is far less important than Emerson's. He seems to apologize for this fact
when he write "My life has been the poem I would have writ/ But I could not both live and
utter it." Many of Thoreau's prose sentences, however, sound like poetry. Some are now
famous sayings in our literature:

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

Throughout the 1850s, his interest in science increased. But he always felt a basic difference
between himself and the scientific naturalist. In 1853, he wrote, "Man cannot afford to be a
naturalist, to look at nature directly… It turns the man of science to stone". Also, around this
time, Thoreau became deeply interested in the abolitionist movement. His home became a
meeting place for anti-slavery groups. He was an active member of a group which helped
slaves escape to freedom.

Amos Bronson Alcott (1799-1888)

He was the third major figure in the transcendentalist movement whose significant
contributions to philosophy, Education, literature and even religion were well recognized in
the 19th Century and almost forgotten later.

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He was the son of a farmer who never sent him to school but just taught him to read and
write at home. However through his strong willpower and dedication to the ideal he
educated himself. He became a progressive educator and a leader of the transcendentalists.

Alcott was unique in the way he embodied and lived out his transcendentalist ideas. As an
educator he believed that all knowledge and moral guidance springs from inner sources and it
is the teacher's role to help these unfold in a beneficial way. His pedagogical philosophy
stressed the emotional and physical as well as the intellectual development of children. These
ideas nowadays seem common and normal but in his time they were completely innovative.
He introduced Art, Music, Nature Study, and Physical Education to his classes at a time when
these subjects were not taught.

He sustained that all children were created equal in terms of moral and intellectual
potentiality, and that circumstantial contingencies (which education might overcome) were
the responsible of inequalities in achievement. Consequent to his thought he admitted a
black girl in his class. This made many parents react against him and they withdraw their
children from his school. At that time they were not prepared to consider a black child as an
equal. Besides they did not understand his innovative methods. He rejected physical
punishment to pupils which was a common practice those days. He was accused of not
keeping discipline in the classroom. But this was not so. He required attention and discipline
in pupils through dialogue. He developed a “common conscience” in which all children had to
participate in the selection of a common punishment to individuals. He was the first to open a
school for boys and girls altogether in Boston. He also believed that learning was the result of
dialogue between teacher and pupils. All these radical educational theories and practices
were misunderstood by parents and caused the failure of most of the schools he established
and he became bankrupt. Parents expected their children to be educated in the same way
they had been educated and rejected all kinds of innovations. This failure caused the Alcott
family to live with many restrictions and his elder daughters had to work in their teens to
contribute with the family income. Mr. Alcott taught in Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Boston.
Because of this situation the Alcott family moved over 20 times in 30 years.

Alcott believed that the key to social reform and spiritual growth was in the home, in family
life. He promoted essential values in his own children and in his pupils such as self-reliance,
sense of duty, self sacrifice and charity. Self expression was cultivated through the keeping of
journals. His greatest success in education was his own daughter Louisa.

As a writer he was constantly publishing articles and essays in “The Dial”, the
transcendentalist magazine. His most famous book was “Conversations with children on the
Gospels” (1838).

Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888)

She was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1832. Then her family moved to Concord,
Massachusetts where Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne lived. She and her three sisters,
Anna, Elizabeth, and May were educated at home by their father and raised on the practical
Christianity of their mother Abigail “Abba” May.

Louisa enjoyed the pleasant atmosphere of Concord and divided her time between acting out
plays with her sisters which she had written; nature walks with Henry David Thoreau and
visits to Ralph Waldo Emerson's library. As a child she counted as friends children of Emerson
and Hawthorne. She was a tomboy. She liked climbing trees and leaping fences. However
writing was her greatest passion.

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Since very young she had to work to help her family. She did different jobs. She read for an
elderly man and his sister, she and her sister Anna started to teach young children, she also
washed and mended clothes. She also became a school teacher in Boston.

At the age of 20 she published her first poem, “Sunlight”, in a magazine under the
pseudonym of Flora Fairfield. From then onwards she devoted entirely to writing.

In 1855 her first book “Flower Fables” was published in the same year her sister Elizabeth
died of scarlet fever.

During the Civil War she became a voluntary nurse in Washington DC. There she wrote
"Hospital Sketches” (1863). In 1864 she published an adult novel "Moods", based on her love
for Henry Thoreau. All her stories and early books were very successful. Her publisher
recommended her to write for young readers and in 1868 she published “Little Women"
based on her own family experience. This was an unusual success. It was first published as a
magazine serial and although it was intended to be read by children and adolescents, adults
were trapped with it and were eagerly waiting for the next installment.

A few months later it was published in a book form and more than 2000 copies were sold
immediately. Due to this success her publisher begged her for a second which was released
the following year 1869 “Good wives" or "Little women wedded". Both 1st and 2nd parts
were soon translated into more than 30 languages. "Little Women" was the first American
children novel to become a classic. She also wrote "Little Men” (1871) and “Jo’s boys" (1886).
These four novels are sequels. Other successes are "An old fashioned girl", "Eight cousins"
and its sequel "Rose in Bloom", "Under the lilies", "A Garland for girls" (a collection of short
stories), "Work". These are the best known works but she published over 30 books and
collections of short stories. All her works are full of humanity humorous freshness and
sympathy. Though earnestly religious and consciously moral she never becomes tiresome or
didactic.

She became active in the women's suffrage movement writing for "The Woman's Journal"
encouraging women to register to vote.

She got married but she devoted her life to look after and bring up her niece Louisa May. She
was the daughter of her youngest sister May who died a month after giving birth.