“Revolution” by Peter Ackroyd

From 1688 to 1815 occurred some of the most tumultuous events that shaped the modern world. James IIwas replaced on the English throne by William and Mary; France under Louis XIV became the pivot of war in Europe; The Seven Years War (aka the French and Indian War) reshaped the political map of North America; the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution; the American Revolution; the French Revolution and Reign of Terror; and the Napoleonic era, finding ending in the fields outside Brussels. 

In Revolution: The History of England from the Battle of the Boyne to the Battle of Waterloo, British author Peter Ackroyddepicts the story of monarchs, war, societal upheavals, and cultural changes. Continuing his series on the history of England (this is volume 4), he tells a riveting story.

The religious wars that started with the Reformation in the early 1500s finally played themselves out in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. James II was a bit too Catholic and finds himself replaced by William of Orange and James’s daughter Mary. Childless, they’re succeeded by Queen Anne, but she, too, dies without an heir (only one child survived infancy and he died young). Parliament turned to a distant relation in the German state of Hanover,George I (1660-1727), who was staunchly Protestant. But if there is a central figure in this period, it is George III (1738-1820), the nemesis of the American colonists, and the monarch whose bouts with madness caused no end of reactions and responses.

Ackroyd pays close attention to the significant events affecting business and industry during the period. The Bank of England was founded. Freedom of the press emerged in England less as a declared right and more because Parliament forgot to extend a law regulating printing (Ackroyd notes the almost immediate effect of an explosion of news sheets had on politics). The Industrial Revolution emerged as a significant factor in society, including the manufacture of Josiah Wedgewood’s plates, mechanized spinning of textiles, and the steam engine. 

Social justice issues, like the call for the abolition of slavery, began to be sounded by people like William Wilberforce and Hannah More. And this was the era of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s plays, Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine, the speeches of Edmund Burke, and the writings of Adam Smith. And in the 1790s, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge helped give birth to Romanticism.

Peter Ackroyd

Political and economic changes led to almost ongoing social unrest. The upper classes in England feared (and understandably so) the spread of the French Revolution, but crop failures, economic downturns, political changes, and even rumors fueled riots and protests.

Ackroyd points out that the American Revolution was the first political change that wasn’t about installing a new monarch or a new church, inspiring many revolutions and political changes that followed.

The author is one of Britain’s most prolific popular historians. In addition to his history of England series, he’s also written biographies of Charles Dickens and the artist J.M.W. Turner, among several others; a history of London (and a history of London beneath the streets); and many other works.

The period from 1688 to 1815 was exciting and momentous, and Ackroyd’s Revolution brings it fully to life.

Related:

My review of Rebellion by Peter Ackroyd.

My review of Peter Ackroyd’s Foundation.

My review of Peter Ackroyd’s Tudors.

Reading Peter Ackroyd.

A Revolt over a Prayer Book.

Top illustration: George III’s coronation portrait (1762) by Allan Ramsay.

“The Romantic Poets and Their Circle” by Richard Holmes

For most of us, when we read the Romantic poets like Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Byron and Coleridge (“the Big 5”), we read their poetry in the high school or college classroom. We might get a paragraph or two of introduction to the times in which they lived and wrote, but we don’t usually get much beyond that. Unless a gifted teacher, determined to help the class understand, goes into great detail about the Romantic era.

As Richard Holmes reminds us in The Romantic Poets and Their Circle, Romantic poetry didn’t spring from nothing; it had a context, a very broad context, involving the other creative arts, politics, culture, society, war and revolution. What was happening in poetry was important because it both influenced and reflected what was happening in society at large, especially British society.

Holmes, professor of Biographical Studies at the University of East Anglia and a Fellow of the British Academy, has a deep background in the Romantic period. His works include Shelley: The Pursuit (1974), Coleridge: Early Visions (1989), Footsteps (1996), Selected Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1996), Coleridge: Darker Reflections (1998), Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer (2001), and The Age of Wonder (2010). He’s also the author of Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage (2011) and Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air (2014).

This particular work is a comparatively small volume of some 136 pages, written and assembled for Britain’s National Portrait Gallery in London. It features in introductory essay and some 30 short entries on the Romantic poets and the painters, editors, essayists, and writers who formed the literary culture of the period that covers approximately 1770 to 1830.

Richard Holmes

Consider what was happening during that period: the American and French revolutions; the rise and ultimate defeat of Napoleon; the beginning of the Industrial Revolution; the growing demands for universal male suffrage and the first stirrings of the idea that women might have rights, too; scientific breakthroughs; the War of 1812. And Holmes notes that something which arose then that we today find completely familiar was the Romantic notion of genius, or illumination from within, including a marked emphasis on individual feelings.

It was also an age of counterrevolution – Napoleon’s defeat and the restoration of the Bourbons, the Congress of Vienna that ushered in the “Age of Metternich,” the often brutal suppression of worker unrest in Britain. It is. Perhaps, another reason why the Romantic period seems so familiar to us today – it was an age of extremes in politics, society and even personal morality.

As short a volume as it is, The Romantic Poets and Their Circle is a succinct introduction to the people and the period whose influence continues today.

This month at Tweetspeak Poetry, I have a series on the poet John Keats and the Keats Walk I took while recently in London. Last week, I introduced the series with “Keats and a Walk into His Life.” Tomorrow, I look at the religion and politics that influenced his poetry.

Painting (top): Snowstorm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps,” oil on canvas by J.M.W. Turner (1812). Tate Britain Museum, London.