A Study of Romantic Age
Abstract
A time of dubiousness and turmoil was experienced in England when the nation was witnessing adrastic changein the society from 1776 to 1837. Major upheavals till 1800 include; social, political and economic conversions -transformation of an agricultural country to an industrial one, the laws of a free marketdeveloped by the economist Adam Smith in his book Wealth of Nations(1776) dominated people’s lives, emergence of a new class – the Labour class. Also, the American Declaration of Independence (from Britain) in 1776 striking an early blow for the principle of democratic freedom and self-government, the French Revolution with its slogan of ‘Equality, Liberty and Fraternity’ influencing the intellectual climate in the Britain, Tom Paine’s Rights of Man (1791) in which he called for greater democracy, Edmund Burke’s more conservative Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), in the 1790s ideas on Utilitarianism in the measured writings of William Godwin were observed with some dismay. In The Prelude, a long autobiographical poem, Wordsworth wrote that in the early years of the French Revolution ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive’, but he later recorded his feeling that the leaders of the French Republic had: ‘Become Oppressors in their turn. / Frenchmen had changed a war of self-defence / For one of Conquest, losing sight of all / Which they had struggled for.’
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