Prose Writing of Romanticism

The most substantial prose of the Romantic writers is not fiction, though similar artistic principles directed both poetry and prose. Four notable writers were Charles Lamb (1775-1834), William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt and Thomas De Quincey. They concentrated on literary criticism, or on attempts to popularise the new poets. But their main contribution is the creation of the personal essay. This prose genre deals with self-contemplation and autobiographical fiction as presented in Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, factual biography in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Autobiographic Sketches. The writer Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), standing outside the above four, is best distinguished for his style influenced by his wide reading of German literature and philosophy.

At the end of the 18^th century, reviews and magazine articles were written chiefly by the supporters of political or financial interests of the publisher. However, in 1802, the Edinburgh Review initiated the periodical' publication which set up high literary standards and paid its contributors well to attract the best talents. In 1820, appeared the liberal and contemporary London Magazine. Being issued till 1829, it helped to promote a group of outstanding writers, including the three greatest essayists of the age — Lamb, Hazlitt, and De Quincey.

There were generally two new distinguishable types of fiction in the late 18^th century One was the Gothic novel, inaugurated in 1764 by Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, and carried on by Clara Reeve in The Champion of Virtue: A Gothic Story (1777). The term was motivated by the frequent setting of these tales in a dim castle of the Middle Ages, but it also covered a larger group of novels; those, set in the past, developed the possibilities of mystery and terror in gloomy, rough landscapes or crumbling mansions with damp cells. Those novels revealed the dark, irrational sides of human nature like the savage egoism, the vicious inclination and the nightmarish horrors. Such are The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797), by Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), who created the mysterious and lonely protagonist. Gothicism often surfaces in Romantic poetry, e.g. in Coleridge's medieval poem Christabel, in Byron's hero-criminal, in the descriptive passages of Keats' Eve of St. Agnes, and in Shelley's inclinations toward the fantastic.

The second fictional mode prevailing around the 1800s was the novel of purpose, written to circulate the new social and political theories. Some novels of purpose had elements of Gothic fear. Mary Shelley (1797-1851), Percy Shelley's wife, wrote such a powerful novel of terror that it not only became a literary classic but a popular legend, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1817). It belongs to a philosophical tradition going back to Rousseau and concerns the themes of isolation and social injustice.

The novels of Jane Austen (1775-1817) radiate with freshness and wit. As the first significant woman novelist, she stands alone between the classical and romantic movements, bridging the two centuries. In such novels as Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion, she depicts small communities of English society, the serene world of the quite well-off county families. Other women writers included Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849), who, apart from instructive novels for children, pioneered the Irish novel. It was Edge- worth who inspired Scott to write of Scotland the way she had written of Ireland.

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), contemporary to Jane Austen, admired her deeply, but his fiction followed another path. In 1814, he switched from story-telling verse, to narrative prose and managed to write almost thirty long fiction works in his remaining eighteen years. Scott's novelty lay in discovering fiction for the rich and lively area of history, which he sometimes alters for artistic purposes. Other novelists of the period were Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), and Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866), noted for his eccentric satirical novels directed against the romantic.

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