Classes 1&2: Pre-Romanticism: the forerunners (=precursors) of Romanticism

Introduction

Names to remember and to look up in an encyclopaedia: Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke, William Godwin, Mary
Wollstonecraft, William Blake, Thomas Gainsborough, John Constable, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron.

1-Pre-Romantic poetry

William Blake (1757-1827), « The Chimney Sweeper », from Songs of Experience (1794)

A little black thing among the snow:

Crying weep, weep, in notes of woe! woe: sadness
Where are thy father & mother? say?
They are both gone up to the church to pray.

Because I was happy upon the heath, heath: a large arid and
And smil’d among the winters snow: generally deserted open area
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.

And because I am happy, & dance & sing,

They think they have done me no injury:
And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King
Who make up a heaven of our misery.

See also Robert Burns (1759-1796), the Scottish national poet and especially his
interest in rustic life, and William Cowper’s (1731-1800) mainly contemplative
and religious poetry.

2-Gothic fiction

a-The Picturesque and the Sublime

Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)

Volume 1, chapter 1

“On the pleasant banks of the Garonne, in the province of Gascony, stood, in
the year 1584, the château of Monsieur St. Aubert. From its windows were
seen the pastoral landscapes of Guienne and Gascony, stretching along the
river, gay with luxuriant woods and vines, and plantations of olives. To the
south, the view was bounded by the majestic Pyrénées, whose summits, veiled
in clouds, or exhibiting awful forms, seen, and lost again, as the partial vapours
rolled along, were sometimes barren, and gleamed through the blue tinge of
air, and sometimes frowned with forests of gloomy pine, that swept downward
to their base. These tremendous precipices were contrasted by the soft green of
the pastures and woods that hung upon their skirts; among whose flocks, and
herds, and simple cottages, the eye, after having scaled the cliffs above,
delighted to repose.”

Volume 1, chapter 2

“Emily could not restrain her transport as she looked over the pine forests of
the mountains upon the vast plains, that, enriched with woods, towns, blushing
vines, and plantations of almonds, palms and olives, stretched long, till their
various colours melted in distance into one harmonious hue, that seemed to
unite earth with heaven. […]

Joseph William Mallord Turner, The Saint

Gotthard Pass (1804)
Leaving the splendour of extensive prospects, they now entered this narrow valley screened by

Rocks on rocks piled, as if by magic spell,

Here scorch’d by lightnings, there with ivy green.
The scene of barrenness was here and there interrupted by the spreading branches of the larch and cedar, which threw their
gloom over the cliff, or athwart the torrent that rolled in the vale. No
living creature appeared, except the izard, scrambling among the
rocks, and often hanging upon points so dangerous, that fancy shrunk
from the view of them. This was such a scene as Salvator would
have chosen, had he then existed, for his canvas […]”

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas

of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) Part 1, section VII:

“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger,
that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about
terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a
source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest
emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. I say the strongest
emotion, because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more
powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure.”

Salvator Rosa, Rock Landscape with a Huntsman

and warriors (c.1670)
b-Suspense, terror and horror

Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest (1791)

“[Adeline] was preparing for rest, when she recollected the MS. [=manuscript], and was unable to conclude the night without
reading it. The first words she could distinguish were the following:

‘Again I return to this poor consolation—again I have been permitted to see another day. It is now midnight! my solitary
lamps burns beside me; the time is awful, but to me the silence of noon is as the silence of midnight: a deeper gloom is all in
which they differ. The still unvarying hours are numbered only by my sufferings! Great God! whe shall I be released!

‘But whence this strange confinement? I have never injured him. If death is designed me, why this delay; and for what but
death am I brought hither? This abbey—alas,’—here the MS. was again illegible, and for several pages Adeline could only
make out disjointed sentences. […]

‘Once more night is returned to me. Another day has passed in solitude and misery. […] Last night! last night! O scene of
horror!’

Adeline shuddered. She feared to read the coming sentence, yet curiosity prompted her to proceed. Still she paused: an
unaccountable dread came over her. ‘Some horrid deed has been done here,’ said she; ‘the reports of the peasants are true.
Murder has been committed.’ The idea thrilled her with horror. She recollected the dagger which had impeded her steps in
the secret chamber, and this circumstance served to confirm her most terrible conjectures. She wished to examine it, but it lay
in one of these chambers, and she feared to go in quest of it.”

Horror and terror according to Ann Radcliffe:

See also the first gothic novel, Horace
Terror “expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life” Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764).
Horror “"freezes and nearly annihilates them” (=the faculties) Matthew Gregory Lewis (The Monk, 1796)
and Charles Robert Mathurin (Melmoth the
Wanderer, 1820) were particularly interested
Further Reading: in the supernatural. Other important works
that are closely related to gothic fiction
William Blake, Songs of Innocence (1789)
Edmund Burke Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) include William Beckford’s Vathek (1786),
Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (1791) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the
Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication in the Rights of Woman (1792) modern Prometheus (1818).
William Godwin, Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams
(1794)