The turbulent world and whirl of real events shaped the years of the “Romantic” period. It was marked on the one end by the revolutions in America and France, and on the other by the reform of Parliament to extend the vote and reconfigure representation, by the emergence of the modern industrial state, and by the abolition of slavery in British colonies.

In the early 1820s, Lord Byron protested. As the nod toward monarchs indicates, the French Revolution of the 1790s cast a long shadow across British consciousness. Its events had announced a radical break in historical continuity—a sudden, cataclysmic overthrow of a monarchy surrounded by high culture, and the eruption of new social order that no one knew how to “read.” New, challenging, and often contradictory energies reverberated across Britain and Europe. Enthusiasts heralded the fall of an oppressive aristocracy and the birth of democratic and egalitarian ideals, a new era, shaped by “the rights of man” rather than the entailments of wealth and privilege, while skeptics and reactionaries rued the end of chivalry, lamented the erosion of order, and foresaw the decline of civilization.

Yet whatever side one took, the upheaval bore a stark realization: politically, socially, economically, and philosophically, an irrevocable tide of new ideas had risen against seemingly entrenched structures. “It was now known,” as historian E. J. Hobsbawm puts it, “that revolution in a single country could be a European phenomenon, that its doctrines could spread across the frontiers...It was now known that social revolution was possible, that nations existed as something independent of states, peoples as something independent of their rulers, and even that the poor existed as something independent of the ruling classes.”

Other challenges appeared, framed in the rhetoric of the Revolution debate and animated by appeals to moral law and natural principle. There were arguments for and against the rights of women (not for the vote, but for better principles of education and improved social attitudes); debates over the abolition of Britain’s slave trade and of slavery in its colonies (a moral blight but also a source of enormous and widespread commercial profit); movements for social and political remedies for the poor (versus the traditional spiritual consolations); and a newly emergent class consciousness among discontented workers in Britain’s fields, mines, factories, and mills. Polemical essays and pamphlets helped shape the controversies, and so did various forms of literary writing: sonnets and songs, ballads and poetic epistles, tales and plays, the sensationally turned narrative and the didactic novel. Even literature not forged in the social and political turbulence was caught by a sense of revolution.

The first generation of writers (those who made their marks in the 1790s and the first decade of the new century) included William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Walter Scott, as well as several remarkable women: Anna Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, Joanna Baillie, and Mary Robinson. The second generation (emerging before 1820) adds the younger voices and visions of Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Keats, Lord Byron, John Clare. It also witnesses the emergence of international literary celebrity, first and foremost in the charismatic figure of Lord Byron, then extending in the 1820s to the adored Felicia Hemans and at last to venerable Wordsworth, who would become a beloved Poet Laureate in 1843. All these writers were invigorated by a sense of participating in the modern world, of defining its values, and of claiming a place for writers as its instructors, prophets, critics, and inspirers.

This enthusiasm inspired innovations in content and literary form. Lyric, epic, and autobiography became radically subjective, spiraling inward to psychological dramas of mind and memory, or projecting outward into prophecies and visions of new worlds formed by new values. Other hybrid forms, such as political ballads and polemical narrative, emerged to address pressing issues of the day, while novelists were producing new kinds of female heroines and new narrative structures to represent family and social life. Still other writers developed forms such as the personal essay, the travelogue, or the journal, to join the personal and the political, the social and the domestic, the world of feeling to the world of thought, and both to the world of action.

ROMANCE, ROMANTICISM, AND THE POWERS OF THE IMAGINATION
In this vibrant culture of new imaginative possibilities, “Imagination” itself became a subject of reflection, and often debate. Eighteenth-century philosophy and science had argued for objective, verifiable truth and the common basis of our experience in a world of concrete, measurable physical realities. Over the century, however, there emerged a competing interest in individual variations, subjective filterings, and the mind’s independence of physical realities, or even creative transformation of them: not just a recorder or mirror, the mind was an active, synthetic, dynamic, even visionary power—of particular importance to poets. Poets tended to define “Imagination” against what it was not, even categorically the opposite of: thus, imagination vs. reality; vs. reason; vs. science; vs. the understanding (especially its “fixities” and “certainties”); vs. mere “fancy”; even vs. religious truth.

Poetry is written by the “secondary Imagination,” an “echo” of the Primary “coexisting with conscious will”. Percy Shelley, who also liked binaries, contrasted “Imagination” to “Reason”. Keats proposed the imagination as a link to the ideal world in the dawn of creation, but he was ultimately more interested in the way imagination operates on real perception. And like his contemporaries, he was drawn by the involvement of on with disease, deviance, delusion, egotism, escapism. How did women writers address the imagination? They were prone to a skeptical bias, accenting dangers, a corruption of rationality and moral judgment, an alliance with destructive (rather than creative) passion. This view was not just resistance to male schemes of gender; it was also fueled by a discourse of rational education and intellectual dissent that included both men and women.