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The Enlightenment
"The Age of Reason" with emphasis on individualism, scepticism, religious tolerance, natural right: life, liberty and property. European politics, science, philosophy, and communications were radically re-oriented. -
Divine Songs, Isaac Watts
Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children is a collection of didactic, moralistic poetry for children. One of the first books to address children in their own language and suggest that learning should be enjotyble. -
An ad runs for A Little Pretty Pocket Book by John Newbery
"A LITTLE PRETTY POCKET-BOOK, intended for the
Instruction and Amusement of little Master Tommy
and pretty Miss Polly; with an agreeable Letter to
each from Jack the Giant-Killer; as also a Ball and
Pincushion, the Use of which will infallibly make
Tommy a good Boy and Polly a good Girl." -
Edmund Burke - A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of the Idea of the Sublime and the Beautiful
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful is a 1757 treatise on aesthetics written by Edmund Burke. It was the first complete philosophical exposition for separating the beautiful and the sublime into their own respective rational categories. -
A Course of Lectures on Elocution, Thomas Sheridan
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Death of Thomas Chatterton
Chatterton was only 17 years old when he committed suicide. He became a tragic figure to encapsulate the struggle and romantic despair of the romantic poet. -
Fall of the Bastille / Start of The French Revolution
The traditional autocratic monarchy in France was overthrown by the people, ending a 300-year reign and paving the way for a democratic French government and the rise of the middle-class. -
Uvedale Price - An Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful
“Observe the process by which time, the great author of such changes, converts a beautiful object into a picturesque one. First, by means of weather stains, partial incrustations, mosses, &c. it at the same time takes off from the uniformity of the surface, and of the colour; that is, gives a degree of roughness, a variety of tint.” -
Songs of Innocence & Experience, William Blake
Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794) juxtapose the innocent, pastoral world of childhood against an adult world of corruption and repression -
Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems - William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The “Preface” to the second edition (1800) contains Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” and his theory that poetry should be written in “the language really used by men.” -
Earliest recorded use of the term "Industrial Revolution"
French envoy Louis-Guillaume Otto, announced that France had entered the race to industrialise. The term Industrial Revolution applied to technological change that was becoming more common by the late 1830s. It took place from the 18th to 19th centuries, and marked a shift from predominantly agrarian, rural societies in Europe and America becoming industrial and urban. Inventions and innovations during this time permanently changed society. -
Resolution and Independence, William Wordsworth
A Lyric by Wordsworth. The poet describes his own elation as he walks over the moors on a fine spring morning after a storm, and his sudden descent into apprehension and dejection, as he ponders the fate of earlier poets, such as Chatterton. At this stage he comes upon the aged leech gatherer, whom he questions about his way of life; the old man responds with cheerful dignity, and the poet resolves to remember him as an admonishment. -
Sense & Sensibility - Jane Austen
Austen revises and critiques the conventions of the traditional sentimental novel and complicates the binary of "sense" and "sensibility" through the characters of Marianne and Elinor. She makes creative use of the free indirect style. -
Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich
The quintessential Romantic artwork. A lone figure looks ahead at a scene of natural, unknowable vastness, acting, perhaps, as a surrogate for the viewer of the painting. -
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
(The Modern Prometheus). Undergraduate Victor Frankenstein for some reason decides he wants to create a being & give it life. Widely seen as a warning on the transformations of man under the Industrial Revolution. -
Sensibility - Letter from Lady Louisa Stuart to Walter Scott
“I remember so well its first publication, my mother and sisters crying
over it, dwelling upon it with rapture! And when I read it, as I was a girl of fourteen not yet versed in sentiment, I had a secret dread I should not cry enough to gain the credit of proper sensibility.”
