Difference Between Romanticism And The Victorian Era

Register to read the introduction… Romantic writers were optimists, they believed in the possibility of progress, social and human reform. They saw mankind as generally good, but were corrupted by society. Romantic writers broke with the eighteenth century belief in the power of reason, instead they believed in imagination and emotion (Fuller, 280). The preromantics were a group of poets who represented a bridge between classicism and romanticism. They signaled the awareness of social problems and the love of nature that became typical of English romanticism. William Blake was the leading preromantic poet.(Merritt, 319). Romantic poets believed that nature was the principle source of inspiration, spiritual truth, and enlightenment. “Poets of the Romantic Age focused on the ordinary person and common life in order to affirm the worth and dignity of all human beings, and to repudiate to evils of a class system that artificially designated a few select people as more important than others because of wealth, position, or name,” said Pfordresher. From 1786 to 1830 a few major poets emerged who permanently affects the nature of English language and literature. Robert Burns was a Scottish writer who wrote about characters, sometimes with a Scottish dialect another writer of the Romantic Age was Percy Bysshe Shelley, and idealist and social reformer. John Keats wrote intense and vivid …show more content…
During the Romantic Age, towns became cities and more and more villagers, forced by economic necessity to seek work in the growing factories, huddled together in filthy slums. Men, women and children worked from sunrise to sunset. For children of the poor, religious training, medical care, and education were practically nonexistent. Through the efforts of reformers, the church and government assumed responsibilities. Sunday schools were organized; hospitals were built; movements were begun to reform the prisons and regulate the conditions of child labor. Gradually English society began to awake to its obligations to the helpless. In the Victorian Period the Industrial Revolution had started in the 18th century with the invention of the steam engine and machines for spinning and weaving. In northern England the “newly mechanized” textile industry expanded Almeida 5 rapidly. Industrialization destroyed old jobs as it provided new ones. During the population shifting there was bad water, no sanitation and little food. Men, women and children worked up to 16 hours a day, 6 days a week, in factories without safety regulations. Industry became a major influence on English life. In Europe it produced revolutionary unrest (Fuller, 284). Industry and trade expanded rapidly, and railroads and canals crisscrossed the country (Merritt, 320). The Romantic Age and the Victorian Period had many similarities in the effect