Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction to The Age of Romanticism
Political Parties and Royal Allegiances
Imperial Expansion
The Romantic Mind and Its Literary Productions
The Business of Literature
“Romantic”
A Changing Language

History of the Language and of Print Culture

ANNA LAETITIA BARBAULD
Washing Day
Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, A Poem
On the Death of the Princess Charlotte
To a Little Invisible Being Who is Expected Soon to Become Visible
Life
The Rights of Woman

SIR WILLIAM JONES
A Hymn to Narayena

CHARLOTTE SMITH
from Elegiac Sonnets
1 (“The partial Muse, has from my earliest hours”)
2 Written at the Close of Spring
11 To Sleep
39 To Night
44 Written in the Church-yard at Middleton in Sussex
59 Written September 1791
70 On being cautioned against walking on an headland overlooking the sea
74 The Winter Night
84 To the Muse
Beachy Head

CONTEXTS: THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE NAPOLEONIC ERA (Web)
from Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
from Thomas Paine, Rights of Man
from Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Letter to Charles Heath, 29 August 1794
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Pantisocracy”
Robert Southey, “On the Prospect of Establishing a Pantisocracy in America”
from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Once a Jacobin Always a Jacobin”
Thomas Spence, “The Rights of Man for Me: A Song”
from George Walker, The Vagabond
from The Preface
from Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne, Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte
from Chapter 18: 1799
from Chapter 22: 1799
from Chapter 28: 1800
from Barry Edmund O’Meara, Letter to Sir Hudson Lowe, 28 January 1817
from Madame (Germaine) de Staël, Considerations of the Principal Events of the French Revolution
from Chapter 4: The Advance of Bonaparte’s Absolute Power
from Chapter 8: On Exile
from Chapter 19: Intoxication of Power; Bonaparte’s Reverses and Abdication
from Chapter 13: Bonaparte’s Return
from The Corsican: A Diary of Napoleon’s Life in his Own Words
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte”
from Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Hallam’s Constitutional History”

GEORGE CRABBE (Web)
from The Borough
The Poor of the Borough: Peter Grimes
Arabella

WILLIAM BLAKE
from Songs of Innocence and of Experience
from Songs of Innocence
Introduction
The Ecchoing Green
The Lamb
The Little Black Boy
The Chimney Sweeper
The Divine Image
Holy Thursday
Infant Joy
Nurse’s Song
In Context: Charles Lamb, the Praise of Chimney-Sweepers (Web)
from Songs of Experience
Introduction
The Clod & the Pebble
Holy Thursday
The Chimney Sweeper
The Sick Rose
The Fly
The Tyger
Ah! Sun-Flower
The Garden of Love
London
The Human Abstract
Infant Sorrow
A Poison Tree
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
America (Web)
In Context: “A Most Extraordinary Man”
from Charles Lamb, Letter to Bernard Barton, 15 May 1824
from John Thomas Smith, Nollekens and His Times

MARY ROBINSON
January, 1795
from Sappho and Phaon
Sonnet 4 (“Why, when I gaze on Phaon’s beauteous eyes”)
Sonnet 12 (“Now, o’er the tessellated pavement strew”)
Sonnet 18 (“Why art thou chang’d? O Phaon! Tell me why?”)
Sonnet 30 (“O’er the tall cliff that bounds the billowy main”)
Sonnet 37 (“When, in the gloomy mansion of the dead”)
The Haunted Beach
All Alone
London’s Summer Morning
from A Letter to the Women of England

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Introduction
Chapter 2: The Prevailing Opinion of a Sexual Character Discussed
from Chapter 3: The Same Subject Continued
In Context: Contemporary Reviews of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
from Analytical Review 12
from Critical Review 4
from Maria; or The Wrongs of Woman
Chapter 5

CONTEXTS: WOMEN AND SOCIETY
from William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book 1, Chapter 15, “Of Husband and Wife”
from Catharine Macaulay, Letters on Education
from Letter 21, “Morals Must be Taught on Immutable Principles”
from Letter 22, “No Characteristic Difference in Sex”
from Olympe de Gouges, The Rights of Woman
from Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Practical Education, Prudence and Economy
from Priscilla Wakefield, Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex; With Suggestions for Its Improvement
from Chapter 3
from Chapter 6
from Richard Polwhele, “The Unsexed Females: a Poem, Addressed to the Author of The Pursuits of Literature”
from Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education
from Volume 1, Chapter 4: “Comparison of the Mode of Female Education in the Last Age with the Present Age”
from Volume 1, Chapter 6: “On the Early Forming of Habits. On the Necessity of Forming the Judgment to Direct those Habits”
from William Thompson and Anna Wheeler, Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, To Retain Them in Political, and Thence in Civil And Domestic Slavery
from Introductory Letter to Mrs. Wheeler
from Part 2

ROBERT BURNS
To a Mouse, On Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough
The Fornicator
Halloween
Address to the De’il
Flow gently, sweet Afton
Ae Fond Kiss
Robert Bruce’s March to Bannockburn
A Man’s A Man For A’ That
Comin’ thro’ the Rye
A Red, Red Rose
Auld Lang Syne
Love and Liberty. A Cantata

JOANNA BAILLIE
A Mother to Her Waking Infant
A Child to His Sick Grandfather
Thunder
A Winter Day
Song, Woo’d and Married and A’
from Plays on the Passions
Introductory Discourse
De Monfort (Web)

WILLIAM TAYLOR
Ellenore

MARIA EDGEWORTH
Angelina; Or, L’amie Inconnue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
In Context: Edgeworth’s Moral Tales

ANNE BATTEN CRISTALL (Web)
Morning. Rosamonde
Evening. Gertrude

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
from Lyrical Ballads, 1798
Advertisement
We Are Seven
Lines Written in Early Spring
The Thorn
Expostulation and Reply
The Tables Turned
Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey
from Lyrical Ballads, 1800, 1802
Preface
[There was a Boy]
[Strange fits of passion I have known]
Song [She dwelt among th’ untrodden ways]
[A slumber did my spirit seal]
Lucy Gray
Nutting
Michael, A Pastoral Poem
[I Griev’d for Buonaparté]
Ode to Duty
Resolution and Independence
Composed upon Westminster Bridge
[The world is too much with us]
[It is a beauteous Evening]
London, 1802
The Solitary Reaper
[My heart leaps up]
In Context: “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”: Stages in the Life of a Poem
from Dorothy Wordsworth, Grasmere Journal (Thursday, 15 April 1802)
[I wandered lonely as a Cloud] 1807
[I wandered lonely as a Cloud] facsimile
[I wandered lonely as a Cloud] transcription
[I wandered lonely as a Cloud] 1815
Elegiac Stanzas
Ode [Intimations of Immortality]
from The Excursion
[The Ruined Cottage]
Surprised by Joy
Mutability
Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways
In Context: Visual Depictions of “Man’s Art”
The Prelude
The Two-Part Prelude of 1799
First Part
Second Part
from The Fourteen-Book Prelude of 1850
from Book First, Introduction, Childhood, and School-time
from Book Fifth, Books
from Book Sixth, Cambridge, and the Alps
from Book Thirteenth, Subject concluded
from Book Fourteenth, Conclusion

CONTEXTS: READING, WRITING, PUBLISHING
from Daniel Isaac Eaton, The Pernicious Effects of the Art of Printing Upon Society, Exposed
Thomas Spence, “Examples of Safe Printing,” from Pig’s Meat, Volume 2
Joshua, “Sonnet: The Lion,” from Moral and Political Magazine, Volume 1
from Anonymous, “On the Characteristics of Poetry” No. 2, from Monthly Magazine
from Anonymous, Letter to the Monthly Magazine
from Samuel Pratt, Gleanings in England: Descriptive of the Countenance, Mind, and Character of the Country
from Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, from Chapter 8, “On Female Study”
from Charles and Mary Lamb, “Preface,” Tales from Shakespeare
Anna Laetitia Barbauld, “On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing”
from Isaac D’Israeli, The Case of Authors Stated, Including the History of Literary Property
William Hazlitt, “A Review of The St. James Chronicle, The Morning Chronicle, The Times, The New York Times, The Courier, &c., Cobbett’s Weekly Journal, The Examiner, The Observer, The Gentleman’s Magazine, The New Monthly Magazine, The London, &c. &c.,” from The Edinburgh Review
from John Stuart Mill, “The Present State of Literature”
Copyright and the Growth of “a Reading Age”
from Copyright Act of 1709 (the Statute of Anne)
from Millar v. Taylor (1769)
Hinton v. Donaldson (Scotland, 1773); Donaldson v. Beckett (England 1774)
from Catharine Macaulay, A Modest Plea for the Property of Copyright
from Robert Southey, “Inquiries Concerning the Proposed Alteration of the Laws of Copyright, as It Affects Authors and the Universities,” Quarterley Review (January 1819)
from Thomas Babington Macaulay, Speech to House of Commons, 5 February 1841

DOROTHY WORDSWORTH
from The Grasmere Journal
Grasmere—A Fragment
Thoughts on My Sick-bed

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
The Eolian Harp
Fears In Solitude
Frost at Midnight
from The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, in Seven Parts
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In Seven Parts
In Context: The Origin of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Chapter 14
from A letter from the Rev. Alexander Dyce to Hartley Coleridge, 1852
The Lime-Tree Bower My Prison
Christabel
Dejection: An Ode
Work Without Hope
Kubla Khan, Or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment
Epitaph
On Donne’s Poetry
from Lectures and Notes On Literature
[Definition of Poetry]
from Notes on Lear
from [On the English Language]
[Mechanic Vs. Organic Form]
from Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions
from Chapter 1
Reception of the Author’s First Publication
The Effect of Contemporary Writers on Youthful Minds
Bowles’s Sonnets
from Chapter 4
Mr. Wordsworth’s Earlier Poems
from Chapter 11
An affectionate exortation to those who in early life feel themselves disposed to become authors
from Chapter 13
On the Imagination, or Esemplastic Power
Chapter 14
Occasion of the Lyrical Ballads
from Chapter 17
Examination of the Tenets Peculiar to Mr. Wordsworth
from Table Talk
[On Various Shakespearean Characters]
[The Ancient Mariner]
[On Borrowing]
[On Metre]
[On Women]
[On Corrupt Language]
[On Milton]
[The Three Most Perfect Plots]

CONTEXTS: INDIA AND THE ORIENT
from Sir William Jones, “A Discourse on the Institution of a Society for Inquiring into the History, Civil and Natural, the Antiquities, Arts, Sciences and Literature of Asia”
Edmund Burke and the Impeachment of Warren Hastings
from Edmund Burke, Speech on the Impeachment of Warren Hastings
from Warren Hastings, Address in His Defence
from Elizabeth Hamilton, Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah
from Anonymous, “Review of Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah,” from The Analytical Review
Tipu Sultan and the British
from Letter from Tipu Sultan to the Governor General
from Declaration of the Right Honourable the Governor-General-in-Council
from Mary Robinson, “The Lascar”
from Thomas Macaulay, Minute on Indian Education
Roger Fenton, Orientalist Studies
from Col. Henry Yule and A.C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical, and Discursive

MARY TIGHE
from Psyche; or The Legend of Love
Sonnet Addressed to My Mother
Psyche
Canto 1
from Canto 2

JANE AUSTEN
Lady Susan
from Pride and Prejudice
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
In Context: Austen’s Letters

CHARLES LAMB (Web)
Old China
from On The Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for the Stage
Representation

WILLIAM HAZLITT
from The Spirit of the Age; or Contemporary Portraits
Mr. Coleridge
Mr. Wordsworth

THOMAS DE QUINCEY
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
from Suspiria de Profundis (Web)
Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow
The Apparition of the Brocken

MARY PRINCE
The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself
In Context: Mary Prince and Slavery
Mary Prince’s Petition Presented to Parliament on June 24, 1829
from Thomas Pringle, Supplement to The History of Mary Prince
from The Narrative of Ashton Warner

CONTEXTS: THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY
from John Newton, A Slave Trader’s Journal
from Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species
from Alexander Falconbridge, Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa
William Cowper, Sweet Meat has Sour Sauce or, The Slave-Trader in the Dumps
from William Wilberforce, “Speech to the House of Commons,” 13 May 1789
Proponents of Slavery
from Rev. Robert Boncher Nicholls, Observations, Occasioned by the Attempts Made in England to Effect the Abolition of the Slave Trade
from Anonymous, Thoughts on the Slavery of Negroes, as it Affects the British Colonies in the West Indies: Humbly Submitted to the Consideration of Both Houses of Parliament
from Gordon Turnbull, An Apology of Negro Slavery; or, the West Indian Planters Vindicated from the Charge of Inhumanity
from Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men
Anna Laetitia Barbauld, “Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq. on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade”
William Blake, Images of Slavery
from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, On the Slave Trade
from William Earle, Obi; or, the History of Three-Fingered Jack
Mary Robinson, Poems on Slavery
“The African”
“The Negro Girl”
from Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journal
from Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade
from Matthew Gregory Lewis, Journal of A West India Slave Proprietor

GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON
Sun of the Sleepless
She walks in beauty
When we two parted
Stanzas for Music
from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Web)
Canto the Third
from Canto the Fourth
Darkness
Prometheus
So, we’ll go no more a roving
When a man hath no freedom to fight for at home
January 22nd 1842. Missolonghi
Epistle to Augusta
from Don Juan
Dedication
Canto 1
Canto 2
from Canto 3
from Canto 7
from Canto 11
In Context: Don Juan
“Remarks on Don Juan,” from Blackwood’s Magazine
Selected Letters
from a letter To Francis Hodgson
To Lady Byron
To Augusta Leigh
To Douglas Kinnaird
from a letter To John Murray
In Context: The Byronic Hero (Web)
from Eastern Tales

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
To Wordsworth
Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude
Mutability
Mont Blanc, Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
Ozymandias
Ode to the West Wind
The Cloud
To a Skylark
Adonais, An Elegy on the Death of John Keats
from Hellas
Chorus (“Worlds on worlds are rolling ever”)
Chorus (“The world’s great age begins anew”)
Mutability (“The flower that smiles to-day”)
Stanzas, Written in Dejection—December 1818, near Naples
Sonnet [Lift Not the Painted Veil]
To Night
To ——
The Mask of Anarchy
Song To The Men Of England
England in 1819
from A Defence of Poetry
In Context: The Peterloo Massacre
Robert Shorter, The Bloody Field of Peterloo! A New Song
Anonymous, A New Song
Hibernicus, Stanzas Occasioned by the Manchester Massacre!
Anonymous, The Peterloo Man
from Samuel Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical
Chapter 28
Chapter 35
from Chapter 36
from Chapter 39
from John Tyas, An account of the events leading up to the massacre
In Context: Youth and Love
Letter to T.J. Hogg, Field Place, 3 January 1811
Letter to T.J. Hogg, 1811
Letter to William Godwin, Keswick, 10 January 1812
In Context: Shelley and Keats
from Letter to the Editor of the Quarterly Review
Leigh Hunt on “Mr. Shelley’s New Poem Entitled Adonais”

FELICIA HEMANS
The Homes of England
The Land of Dreams
Evening Prayer at a Girls’ School
Casabianca
Corinne at the Capitol
The Effigies
The Image in Lava
Properzia Rossi
Woman and Fame

JOHN CLARE
Written In November
Remembrances
from The Flitting
The Badger
Written in a Thunder storm July 15th 1841
Don Juan A Poem
Sonnet [I am]
“I Am”
Clock A Clay
To Mary
An Invite to Eternity

JOHN KEATS
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
On the Grasshopper and Cricket
Sleep And Poetry
On Seeing the Elgin Marbles
On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again
When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be
Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds
To Homer
The Eve of St. Agnes
Bright Star
La Belle Dame Sans Merci
La Belle Dame Sans Mercy
Incipit Altera Sonneta
Ode To Psyche
Ode To A Nightingale
Ode On A Grecian Urn
Ode On Melancholy
Ode On Indolence
To Autumn
Lamia
The Fall of Hyperion, A Dream
Canto 1
Canto 2
This Living Hand
Selected Letters
To Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817
To George and Thomas Keats, December 1817
To John Hamilton Reynolds, 3 February 1818
To John Taylor, 27 February 1818
To Benjamin Bailey, 13 March 1818
To Benjamin Bailey, 18 July 1818
To Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818
To George and Georgina Keats, 14 February-3 May 1819
To Fanny Brawne, 25 July 1819
To Percy Bysshe Shelley, 16 August 1820
To Charles Brown, 30 November 1820
In Context: Politics, Poetry, and the “Cockney School Debate”
from Leigh Hunt, “Young Poets”
from John Gibson Lockhart (“Z.”), “On the Cockney School of Poetry, No. 1”
from John Lockhart (“Z.”), “On the Cockney School of Poetry, No. 4”
In Context: The Elgin Marbles (Web)
Selected Photographs
from William Hazlitt, “Sir Joshua Reynold’s Discourses”
from William Hazlitt, “Report on the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the Elgin Marbles”
from B.R. Haydon, “On the Judgement of Connoisseurs Being Preferred to that of Professional Men—Elgin Marbles etc.”
In Context: The Death of Keats
Joseph Severn to Charles Brown, 27 February 1821

MARY SHELLEY
from The Last Man
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
In Context: The “Last Man” Theme in the Nineteenth Century
Thomas Campbell, “The Last Man,” New Monthly Magazine 8
from Thomas Campbell’s letter to the editor of the Edinburgh Review, 28 February 1825
John Martin’s painting of The Last Man
In Context: Shelley’s Life and The Last Man
Selected Letters
To Thomas Jefferson Hogg, 6 March 1815
To Thomas Jefferson Hogg, 25 April 1815
To Maria Gisborne, 2 Nov. 1818
To Maria Gisborne, c. 3 Dec. 1818
To Maria Gisborne, 9 April 1819
To Marianne Hunt, 29 June 1819
To Maria Gisborne, 2 June 1822
To Maria Gisborne, 15 August 1822

LETITIA ELIZABETH LANDON
Lines Written Under a Picture of a Girl Burning a Love Letter
A Child Screening a Dove From a Hawk
Love’s Last Lesson
Lines of Life
Revenge
The Little Shroud
The Fairy of the Fountains (Web)

THOMAS BEDDOES (Web)
Old Adam the Carrion Crow
Isbrand’s Song

APPENDICES

Reading Poetry

Maps

Monarchs and Prime Ministers of Great Britain

Glossary of Terms

Texts and Contexts: A Chronological Chart (Web)

Bibliography (Web)

Permissions Acknowledgments

Index of First Lines

Index of Authors and Titles

Posted on October 29, 2015