The
th
19
Century
Romanticism to Realism
Imperialism
The Romantic Period
1785-1830
Monarchies and Empires
France: The House of Bourbon
France: The House of Bourbon
Bourbon Dynasty
1643 - 1715 Louis XIV (the Sun King)
1715 - 1774 Louis XV (the Beloved)
1774 - 1792 Louis XVI
First Republic 1792-1804 [Louis XVII]
Bonaparte Dynasty First Empire
1804-1815 Napoleon
Bourbon Dynasty Restored
1815-1824 Louis XVIII
Spain: The House of Bourbon
Russia: The Romanovs
England: The House of Hanover
ROMANTIC
REVOLUTIONS
Political
Philosophical
Artistic
American Revolution
1775-1783
• Broad intellectual and social shifts
– republican ideals: liberty and rights as central values,
makes the people as a whole sovereign, rejects aristocracy
and inherited political power, expects citizens to be
independent and calls on them to perform civic duties,
and is strongly opposed to corruption.
– liberal democracy: representative democracy (with free
and fair elections) along with the protection of
minorities, the rule of law, a separation of powers, and
protection of liberties (thus the name liberal) of speech,
assembly, religion, and property.
• 1776: Declaration of Independence
• 1787: Constitution and Bill of Rights
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Quaker
Met Ben Franklin in London –
who advised him to move to
America
1776: Common Sense: attacked
British monarchy and argued
for American independence
1787: Returned to Britain
1791: The Rights of Man:
proposed universal male
suffrage, progressive taxes,
family allowances, old age
pensions, maternity grants and
abolition of House of Lords
1792: Became a French citizen
and elected to National
Convention – opposed
execution of Louis XVI
1794: Age of Reason: questioned
truth of Old Testament and
Christianity
1802: returned to America
Tom Paine
1737-1809
Auguste Milliere, Thomas Paine
National Portrait Gallery, London
French Revolution and Napoleon
1789-1815
• 1789: Fall of Bastille and Declaration of the Rights of
Man
• 1792: September Massacres of imprisoned nobility
• 1793: The Reign of Terror
– Execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette
– France declared war against Britain
• 1794: Fall of Robespierre
• 1804: Napoleon crowned Emperor of France
• 1815: Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo
Jean-Pierre Louis Laurent Houel (1735-1813),
Prise de la Bastille ("The storm of the
Bastille").
Eugene Delacroix
Liberty Leading the People
1797:The
Young
General
1800: Napoleon at St. Bernard
1812: Napoleon in his study
Images of
Napoleon
By
Jacques
Louis
David
1804: The coronation
Jacques Louis David, 1805-07
The coronation of the Emperor Napoleon I
Edmund Burke
1729-97
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Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke
Scottish National Portrait Gallery
Anglo-Irish statesman and
philosopher
1756: A Vindication of Natural
Society: A View of the Miseries
and Evils Arising to Mankind:
treatise on anarchy
1757: A Philosophical Enquiry
into the Origin of Our Ideas of
the Sublime and Beautiful:
treatise on aesthetics
1765-94: Whig member of
House of Commons
Opposed absolute monarchy
and supported American
colonies against the king
1790: Reflections on the
Revolution in France: saw
French Revolution as a
violent rebellion against
tradition which would end in
disaster.
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Professional writer,
philosopher and feminist Mary
1790: Vindication of the
Rights of Men: response to
Burke in defense of the
ideals of the French
Revolution
1792: A Vindication of the
Rights of Women
1794: An Historical and
Moral View of the French
Revolution
1796: Letters Written During
a Short Residence in Sweden,
Norway, and Denmark
1797: married William
Godwin
Died of childbirth fever
1798: William Godwin
published Memoirs of the
Author of a Vindication of
the Rights of Woman
Wollstonecraft
1759-97
Official British Reaction to the French Revolution
• Curtailment of civil liberties and harsh
repression
– suspension of the writ of habeus corpus
– advocates of political change charged with
treason
• 1791: Rejection of a bill to abolish the slave
trade
• 1793: Declaration of war against France
Napoleonic Wars
1805-1815
William Sadler, The Battle of Waterloo
Industrial Revolution
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Power-driven machinery replaced hand
labor
– 1765: James Watt – the steam engine
Industry moved from homes and workshops
to factories
Population moved from agricultural
countryside to industrial cities
Enclosure of “commons” into privately
owned estates
Laissez faire economic policy – free
operation of economic laws –governmental
non-interference
– 1776: Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
Romantic
Artist
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Loner
Unconventional
Amoral
Genius
Prophet
George Gordon Lord Byron
Autobiography
• The term was first used by the poet Robert Southey in
1809 in the English periodical Quarterly Review
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions
(1781-88)
• Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of
Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789)
• Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journals (1799+)
• Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an Opium Eater,
(1822)
• Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass, An American Slave, (1845)
Lyric Poetry
• Search for an authentic language of feeling rather than
artifice
• Wordsworth: “the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings recollected in tranquility”
• 1st person voice of the poem – during this period
usually associated with the poet – sometimes
biographical and confessional
• Revived older poetic forms:
– blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter
– the sonnet
– the ballad
– the ode
Keats
Coleridge
The Poet as
Rock Star
Shelley
Wordsworth
Byron
Leopardi
Heine
The Poet as
Rock Star
Pushkin
Novalis
Jane Austen and
the Novel of Manners
• Novels dominated by the customs,
manners, conventional behavior and
habits of a particular social class
• Often concerned with courtship and
marriage
• Realistic and sometimes satiric
• Focus on domestic society rather
than the larger world
• Other novelists of manners:
Anthony Trollope, Edith Wharton, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, Margaret Drabble
• Novels characterized by
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magic, mystery and horror
Exotic settings – medieval,
Oriental, etc.
Originated with Horace
Walpole’s Castle of Otranto
(1764)
William Beckford: Vathek, An
Arabian Tale (1786)
Anne Radcliffe: 5 novels
(1789-97) including The
Mysteries of Udolpho
Widely popular genre
throughout Europe and
America: Charles Brockden
Brown’s Wieland (1798)
Gothic Novels
Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley
1797-1851
• Inspired by a dream in reaction to a
challenge to write a ghost
story
• Published in
1817
(rev. ed. 1831)
• A Gothic novel
influenced by
Promethean myth
• The first science
fiction novel
Novels of Sentiment
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Novels in which the characters, and thus the readers, have a
heightened emotional response to events
Connected to emerging Romantic movement
Laurence Sterne (1713-1768):
Tristam Shandy (1760-67)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832):
The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)
Francois Rene de Chateaubriand (1768-1848): Atala (1801)
and Rene (1802)
The Brontës: Anne Brontë Agnes Grey (1847) Emily Brontë,
Wuthering Heights (1847), Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)
The Brontës
Charlotte (1816-55), Emily (1818-48), Anne (1820-49)
• Wuthering Heights and Jane
Eyre transcend sentiment into
myth-making
• Wuthering Heights plumbs the
psychic unconscious in a search
for wholeness, while Jane Eyre
narrates the female quest for
individuation
• Brontë.info: website of Brontë
Society and Haworth Parsonage
• The Victorian Web
portrait by Branwell Brontë of his
sisters,
Anne, Emily, and Charlotte (c. 1834)
Historical Novels
• Novels that reconstruct a
past age, often when two
cultures are in conflict
• Fictional characters
interact with with
historical figures in actual
events
• Sir Walter Scott (17711832) is considered the
father of the historical
novel: The Waverly Novels
(1814-1819) and Ivanhoe
(1819)
18th –19th c. German
Romantic Theater
• “Stürm und Drang”
• Looked to Shakespeare for
models
• Sweeping historical and
tragic dramas
• Began to emphasize
historical accuracy in
costumes and settings
• Improved theatrical effects
-- footlights, revolving
stages, theatrical
machinery
Schiller and Goethe
Light
• 1817: first gas lit theatre
– Smelled bad
– Very hazardous – many theatres burnt
down as the gas lighting set the wood
and canvas scenery on fire
• 1826: limelight was invented
– A block of quicklime heated by oxygen
and hydrogen produced a bright sharp
light.
– Used in hand-operated spotlights
• 1881: London’s Savoy Theatre opened
with electric lights
•
The auditorium was still lit for most of this
period, which also had an effect on the
lighting effects on-stage.
Lighting control desk at the Paris Opera, 1893
Melodrama: 19th C.
 Comes from "music drama" – music was
used to increase emotions or to signify
characters (signature music).
 Theatre of sentimentality -- emotional
appeal
 Simplified moral universe: good and evil
embodied in stock characters
Heroes and villains -- and lily-pure
heroines
 Sensationalistic: fires, explosions,
drownings, etc.
 Episodic form: the villain poses a threat,
the hero or heroine escapes, etc.—with a
happy ending
 Wide popular appeal
Uncle Tom’s
Cabin
dramatizations based on novel
by
Harriet Beecher Stowe
 George L. Aiken’s was the most popular--1853. Six acts,
done without an afterpiece – established the single-play
format. 325 performances in New York.
 In the 1870’s, at least 50 companies doing it in the U.S.
 In 1899: 500 companies.
 In 1927: 12 still doing it.
 12 movie versions since 1900.
 The most popular melodrama in the world until the First
World War.
“British history is two thousand years
old, and yet in a good many ways the
world has moved farther ahead since
the Queen was born than it moved
in all the rest of the two thousand
years put together.”
Mark Twain, 1897
at Queen Victoria’s
Jubilee
Technology
• 1830: Liverpool and Manchester RR – first
public steam railway in the world
• steam ships
• telegraph -- intercontinental cables
• photography
• high speed printing
• cast iron for building
• anesthetics -- ether
• Technology on the
Victorian Web
Gustav Doré, London Underground
The Crystal Palace in Hyde Park
site of the 1851 Great Exhibition
J. M. W. Turner, Rain, Steam, Speed. 1844.
Science: Geology and Astronomy
•
Geology
– “the hottest science going”
– all accredited geologists agreed that the earth was millions
of years old, that strata were layers from different times and
that Genesis was incompatible with the findings of modern
geology or irrelevant
– many discoveries about dinosaurs throughout the 19th c.
http://rainbow.ldeo.columbia.edu/courses/v1001/dinodis3.html
• Astronomy: new planetary and cosmic discoveries
• Geology “gives one the same sort of bewildering view of the
abysmal extent of Time that Astronomy does of Space.” – John
Sterling, 1837
The Great
Exhibition
1851
included first
exhibition of
dinosaurs
Science: Biology
•
Charles Darwin (1809-82)
– 1859: On the Origin of the Species
– 1871: The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation
to Sex
– 1872: The Expression of the Emotions in Man and
Animals
•
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95)
– Populizer and advocate of Darwin’s theories
– On a Piece of Chalk influenced thinking about
education
– Huxley advocated broad primary school
instruction: reading, writing, arithmetic, art,
science, and music.
– The basic form of nearly every American college
curriculum is what Huxley advocated more than
100 years ago: two years of more liberal basic
studies followed by two years of specialization
– Huxley emphasized doing and observing in
science classes
The voyage of the HMS Beagle
Biblical Studies
• Linguistic and Historic: “Higher Criticism”
• Study of original Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic
texts – history of composition
• Historical contexts
• David Friedrich Struass’s Das Leben Jesu –
translated by George Eliot as The Life of Jesus
• Biblical Archaeology vs. Mesopotamian
Archaeology – Sumerian texts
Philosophy: Marxism
Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels
in London, 1867
•
Based on materialist
interpretation of history
– Social change occurs
because of class
struggle
– Capitalism leads to the
oppression of the
proletariat
– Inevitability of a
proletarian revolution
• 1845: Engels, The Condition
of the Working Class
• 1848: Marx and Engels, The
Communist Manifesto
• 1867-94: Marx, Das
Kapital
Social Realism
• Social or Sociological novels deal with the
nature, function and effect of the society
which the characters inhabit – often for the
purpose of effecting reform
• Social issues came to the forefront with the
condition of laborers in the Industrial
Revolution : Dickens’ Hard Times, Gaskell’s
Mary Barton; Eliot’s Middlemarch, Zola’s
Germinal
• Slavery and race issues arose in American
social novels: Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Mark Twain
George
Eliot
Nikolai Gogol
Emile Zola
Honore Balzac
• By including varieties of poor people
in all his novels, Dickens brought
the problems of poverty to the
attention of his readers:
• “It is scarcely conceivable that
anyone should…exert a stronger
social influence than Mr. Dickens
has…. His sympathies are on the side
of the suffering and the frail; and
this makes him the idol of those
who suffer, from whatever cause.”
Harriet Martineau
• Dickens aimed at arousing the
conscience of his age. "There have
been at work among us three great
social agencies: the London City
Mission; the novels of Mr. Dickens;
the cholera."
Charles Dickens
1812-1870
 The Dickens Project,
The Dickens Page
 "Dickens' Social
Background" by E. D. H.
Johnson
The Russian Novel
•
Russia from 1850-1920 was a period of social, political,
and existential struggle.
• Writers and thinkers remained divided: some tried to
incite revolution, while others romanticized the past as a
time of harmonious order.
• The novel in Russia embodied these struggles and
conflicts in some of the greatest books ever written.
• The characters in the works search for meaning in an
uncertain world, while the novelists who created them
experiment with modes of artistic expression to
represent the troubled spirit of their age.
The Russian Novel
Leo Tolstoy
1828-1910
The Cossacks
Anna Karenina
War and Peace
Resurrection
Even beyond their deaths, the two novelists
stand in contrariety… Tolstoy, the mind
intoxicated with reason and fact;
Dostoevsky, the contemner of rationalism,
the great lover of paradox; …Tolstoy,
thirsting for the truth, destroying himself
and those about him in excessive pursuit of
it; Dostoevsky, rather against the truth
than against Christ, suspicious of total
understanding and on the side of mystery;
Fyodor Dostoevsky
…Tolstoy, like a colossus bestriding the
palpable earth, evoking the realness, the
1821-1881
tangibility, the sensible entirety of concrete The Gambler
experience; Dostoevsky, always on the
Crime and
verge of the hallucinatory, of the spectral,
Punishment
always vulnerable to daemonic intrusions
Notes from
into what might prove, in the end, to have
been merely a tissue of dreams; ~ George
Underground
Steiner in Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay
The Brothers
in the Old Criticism (1959)
Karamazov
Realism and Naturalism
 Intellectual reaction
against popular theatre
 Theatre of social problems
 Influenced by emerging
disciplines of psychology
and sociology
 Emerging importance of
director
Realistic stage conventions
 Proscenium stage
 Audience as “fourth
wall”
 Change in acting
conventions
 Continued
improvement in
stagecraft: electric
lighting, set design,
costumes, etc.
Realism
vs.
 Middle class
 Pragmatic
 Psychological
 Mimetic art
 Objective, but ethical
 Sometimes comic or satiric
 How can the individual live
within and influence
society?
 “Well-made play”
 Henrik Ibsen, George
Bernard Shaw
Naturalism
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Middle/Lower class
Scientific
Sociological
Investigative art
Objective and amoral
Often pessimistic, sometimes
comic
 How does society/the
environment impact
individuals?
 “Slice of life”
 August Strindberg, Anton
Chekhov, John Millington Synge
 Realistic Social Dramas
Henrik Ibsen
Norwegian,
1828-1906
 Romantic Dramas
Brand
Peer Gynt
The Pillars of Society
A Doll's House
Ghosts
An Enemy of the People
The Wild Duck
Rosmersholm
The Lady from the Sea
Hedda Gabler
Symbolic Dramas
The Master Builder
Little Eyolf
John Gabriel Borkman
 When We Dead Awaken
August Strindberg
 Naturalistic Plays : 1880s
The Father
Miss Julie
Creditors
 Dreamplays : turn of the century
To Damascus
 A Dream Play
The Ghost Sonata
 Historical Dramas: turn of the century
Gustavus Vasa
Erik XIV
Charles XII
Swedish, 1849-1912
Anton Chekhov
Russian
1860-1904
 Physician, storyteller, dramatist
 Plays:
 That Worthless Fellow
 Platonov
 On the Harmful Effects of
Tobacco
 Ivanov
 The Bear
 A Marriage Proposal
 The Wood Demon
 For the Moscow Art Theatre:
 The Seagull
 Uncle Vanya
 The Three Sisters
 The Cherry Orchard
The World in 1775
Red: British Empire
Yellow: Spanish Empire
Green: Qing Dynasty
Fuchsia: Ottoman Empire
Dark Grey: Russian Empire
How Did Europe Conquer Africa?
• The wealth generated by the buying and selling of
enslaved Africans went to create the extensive
technological innovations that led to the Industrial
Revolution.
• The coastal trade with Africans strengthened
European commercial capitalism and transformed
it into all-powerful industrial capitalism.
How Did Europe Conquer Africa?
• Europe started to take a
more direct hand in African
affairs.
• While African states were
weakened by their conflicts,
the Europeans grew in
strength.
• The same scenario took
place in Asia and the
Americas.
• Soon a full-fledged system
of colonialism began to
overspread the world.
• Thus did Europe not only
conquer Africa, but America
and Asia too....
Imperialism: The British Empire
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1853-1880: Over 2 million Britons emigrated to settle in British
colonies – especially Canada and Australia
1839-42; 1856-60: Opium Wars with China
1857: Parliament took over rule of India from East India Co. and
set up a civil service government
1867: Canadian provinces united into Dominion of Canada
1876: Victoria declared Empress of India
1880s – the Irish question – Home Rule
1899-1902: Boer War in South Africa
By 1890, the British Empire contained ¼ of the earth’s territory,
and ¼ of the earth’s population.
Richard Redgrave, The Emigrants’ Last Sight of Home, 1858
Ford Madox
Brown
The Last of
England, 1855
The British Empire
The pattern of East-West relations-- from
the first discovery of a sea route from
Europe to Asia-- was largely one of
Western action and Eastern reaction
Voyage of
Vasco da
Gama
The West
went to
the East,
but the
East saw
no need to
come to
the West
Vasco da Gama’s discovery of a sea route to India in 1498 opened
important commercial traffic,
led to the expansion and consolidation of the Portuguese Empire,
and the spread of European culture and Christianity in the Orient.
The Portuguese were quickly followed by the
Spanish and Dutch, and later the French and
British sent their ships into Eastern oceans
The British, with their superior naval
strength, finally became the dominant
colonial power in southern Asia
The Armorial Bearings of the Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies
Granted by Garter and Clarenceux Kings of Arms in 1600 and as Borne and Used until 1709
In India, the
British found a
country
governed by the
Mogul emperors
As the
emperors grew
decadent,
the British
penetrated
their
governments,
first as
advisors -later as
direct
rulers with
military
and
political
control
The English were content to live apart,
safe in their compounds
and strongholds
Government House in Calcutta
1799-1803
As closely as possible, they duplicated life in
England -- with certain luxurious additions
According to
Lord Kitchener:
“It is the
consciousness
of the inherent
superiority of
the European
which has won
for us India”
British Empire in India 1800 - 1947
• The political
dominance of
the British
introduced
Western culture,
language,
methods of
government and
technology into
urban centers
Paddle-steamer on the Hooghly, watercolour over a lithographed
outline, Kalighat painting by Becaram Das Datta, 1857
But in the establishment of English schools, they
introduced the revolutionary ideas of equality,
social reform and self-government which India
would adapt to its own cultural pattern
First meeting of Indian National Congress, 1916
Independence came to India
in 1947 after decades of
campaigning and nonviolent protest led by
Mahatma Gandhi
Satyagrahi
Dandi March
1930
China, convinced of its superiority, had
restricted trade and other contacts with
the West
Desperate to open up the
rich ports of China, the
Europeans finally found a
product they could sell in
China
opium…
”Opium is an imperious master and treats
its subjects like slaves. It first comes with a
gentle touch...
...and then in a few weeks when it has got its grip
upon the man, it shows itself to be the cruelest
taskmaster that ever drove man to a lingering
death.”
When the Chinese
government tried to
curb the opium traffic,
the British gunboats
triumphed in the
Opium Wars
(1839-42,
1856-60)
China was forced to open her ports and the interior to a flood of
foreign merchants, soldiers and missionaries and to legalize the
opium trade.
The Open Door
Policy imposed by
the Western Powers
created havoc in
China: depredation
by foreigners and
internal rebellion
A secret society in northern China began
a campaign of terror against Christian
missionaries and Chinese converts.
Foreigners called them “Boxers” because
they practiced martial arts.
The
Boxer
Rebellion
1900
1912: Overthrow
of last Imperial
Dynasty and
establishment
of a republic
under the
leadership of
Sun Yat Sen
Japan, reacted to the Western challenge in a rather
different fashion
Throughout the 14th19th centuries, Japan
had isolated itself
from foreign trade
and contacts under
the rule of the
Shoguns
Imposing order
after a series of
civil wars,
Hideyoshi, in
1587, issued an
edict expelling
Christian
missionaries.
By the 19th c., the
rigid class distinctions
were crumbling in the
wake of a failing
economic system
Disaffected
samurai
warriors
roamed the
country as
bandits
Merchants and tradesmen, had gained power and
wealth in the growing cities
Such was the situation
when, in 1853, US
Commodore Matthew
Perry steamed into
Yokohama
Demonstrating the firepower of what the Japanese
called his “black ships,” Perry demanded that Japan
open trade with the West
Realizing they could not match the military power of
America, Japan agreed to establish diplomatic and
trade relations
The military
humiliation of the
Shogunate, combined
with the social and
economic problems
brought about the
restoration of the
Emperor in 1868
Imperial
administrators
quickly embraced
reform and
completely
remodeled the
government and
economy to
resemble those of
19th c. Europe and
the US
The abrupt break with the past left many Japanese with
feelings of cultural loss and a sense of dislocation and
regret
But it also led to a
rise of nationalism
and the emergence of
Japan as a major
world power at the
turn of the century
Sino-Japanese War, 1894
Russo-Japanese
War
1904-05
This print criticizes a Russian
General and his troops by
representing the General as a
Daruma -- a limbless Buddhist
figure normally portrayed
wrapped in robes -- implying that
the Russians have no arms and
legs and so cannot fight.
The countries of the East and West
have reacted to each other in different ways,
but each has adopted something of the other
In the 18th c. a craze for anything Chinese swept Europe -- Chinese
furniture, wallpaper, porcelain and oriental gardens
Chinese Garden in Zurich
Similarly in the
19th c.,
Japonisme
infiltrated
Western visual
and
performance
arts
Monet, La Japonaise, 1876
India, as seen
through its
great
religious
literature,
was admired
by Western
Romantics.
Ralph Waldo
Emerson
wrote a
poem, “To
Brahma”
The Eastern philosophies
of spiritual enlightenment
influenced the
development of American
Transcendentalism and
European Existentialism
The great
conflicts of the
20th c. drew in
both Eastern and
Western powers
as allies and
enemies
Memorial to the children who died
at Hiroshima