The 19th Century

Romanticism to RealismImperialism

The Romantic Period

1785-1830

Monarchies and Empires

France: The House of Bourbon

France: The House of BourbonBourbon Dynasty

1643 - 1715   Louis XIV (the Sun King) 1715 - 1774   Louis XV (the Beloved)

1774 - 1792   Louis XVI

First Republic 1792-1804 [Louis XVII]Bonaparte Dynasty First Empire

1804-1815 Napoleon

Bourbon Dynasty Restored1815-1824 Louis XVIII

Spain: The House of Bourbon

http://www.answers.com/topic/spain-familytree-png-1

Russia: The Romanovs

England: The House of Hanover

ROMANTIC REVOLUTIONS

PoliticalPhilosophical

Artistic

American Revolution1775-1783

• Broad intellectual and social shifts– republican ideals: liberty and rights as central

values, makes the people as a whole sovereign, rejects aristocracy and inherited political power, expects citizens to be independent and calls on them to perform civic duties, and is strongly opposed to corruption.

– liberal democracy: representative democracy (with free and fair elections) along with the protection of minorities, the rule of law, a separation of powers, and protection of liberties (thus the name liberal) of speech, assembly, religion, and property.

• 1776: Declaration of Independence• 1787: Constitution and Bill of Rights

Tom Paine1737-1809

• Quaker• Met Ben Franklin in London –

who advised him to move to America

• 1776: Common Sense: attacked British monarchy and argued for American independence

• 1787: Returned to Britain• 1791: The Rights of Man:

proposed universal male suffrage, progressive taxes, family allowances, old age pensions, maternity grants and abolition of House of Lords

• 1792: Became a French citizen and elected to National Convention – opposed execution of Louis XVI

• 1794: Age of Reason: questioned truth of Old Testament and Christianity

• 1802: returned to America

Auguste Milliere, Thomas PaineNational Portrait Gallery,

London

French Revolution and Napoleon1789-1815

• 1789: Fall of Bastille and Declaration of the Rights of Man

• 1792: September Massacres of imprisoned nobility• 1793: The Reign of Terror

– Execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette– France declared war against Britain

• 1794: Fall of Robespierre• 1804: Napoleon crowned Emperor of France• 1815: Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo

Jean-Pierre Louis Laurent Houel (1735-1813), Prise de la Bastille ("The storm of the Bastille").

Eugene DelacroixLiberty Leading the People

1812: Napoleon in his study

1800: Napoleon at St. Bernard 1804: The coronation

Images of NapoleonByJacques LouisDavid

1797:The Young General

Jacques Louis David, 1805-07 The coronation of the Emperor Napoleon I

Edmund Burke1729-97

• Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher

• 1756: A Vindication of Natural Society: A View of the Miseries and Evils Arising to Mankind: treatise on anarchy

• 1757: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful: treatise on aesthetics

• 1765-94: Whig member of House of Commons

• Opposed absolute monarchy and supported American colonies against the king

• 1790: Reflections on the Revolution in France: saw French Revolution as a violent rebellion against tradition which would end in disaster.

Joshua Reynolds, Edmund BurkeScottish National Portrait Gallery

Mary Wollstonecraft1759-97

• Professional writer, philosopher and feminist

• 1790: Vindication of the Rights of Men: response to Burke in defense of the ideals of the French Revolution

• 1792: A Vindication of the Rights of Women

• 1794: An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution

• 1796: Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

• 1797: married William Godwin

• Died of childbirth fever• 1798: William Godwin

published Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Official British Reaction to the French Revolution

• Curtailment of civil liberties and harsh repression– suspension of the writ of habeus corpus– advocates of political change charged

with treason

• 1791: Rejection of a bill to abolish the slave trade

• 1793: Declaration of war against France

Napoleonic Wars1805-1815

William Sadler, The Battle of Waterloo

Industrial Revolution

• Power-driven machinery replaced hand labor– 1765: James Watt – the steam

engine• Industry moved from homes and

workshops to factories• Population moved from agricultural

countryside to industrial cities• Enclosure of “commons” into

privately owned estates• Laissez faire economic policy – free

operation of economic laws –governmental non-interference– 1776: Adam Smith, The Wealth of

Nations

Romantic Artist

• Loner• Unconventional• Amoral• Genius• Prophet

George Gordon Lord Byron

Autobiography• The term was first used by the poet Robert Southey in

1809 in the English periodical Quarterly Review • Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions

(1781-88) • Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the

Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789)

• Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journals (1799+)• Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an Opium Eater,

(1822)• Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick

Douglass, An American Slave, (1845)

Lyric Poetry• Search for an authentic language of feeling

rather than artifice• Wordsworth: “the spontaneous overflow of

powerful feelings recollected in tranquility”• 1st person voice of the poem – during this

period usually associated with the poet – sometimes biographical and confessional

• Revived older poetic forms:– blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter– the sonnet– the ballad– the ode

The Poet as Rock Star

Keats Coleridge

WordsworthByron

Shelley

The Poet as Rock Star

Leopardi Heine

PushkinNovalis

Jane Austen and the Novel of Manners

• Novels dominated by the customs, manners, conventional behavior and habits of a particular social class

• Often concerned with courtship and marriage

• Realistic and sometimes satiric• Focus on domestic society

rather than the larger world• Other novelists of manners:

Anthony Trollope, Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Margaret Drabble

Gothic Novels

• Novels characterized by magic, mystery and horror

• Exotic settings – medieval, Oriental, etc.

• Originated with Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764)

• William Beckford: Vathek, An Arabian Tale (1786)

• Anne Radcliffe: 5 novels (1789-97) including The Mysteries of Udolpho

• Widely popular genre throughout Europe and America: Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798)

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

1797-1851

• Inspired by a dream in reaction to a challenge to write a ghost story

• Published in 1817 (rev. ed. 1831)

• A Gothic novel influenced by Promethean myth

• The first science fiction novel

Novels of Sentiment• Novels in which the characters, and thus the readers,

have a heightened emotional response to events• Connected to emerging Romantic movement• Laurence Sterne (1713-1768):

Tristam Shandy (1760-67)• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832):

The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)• Francois Rene de Chateaubriand (1768-1848): Atala

(1801) and Rene (1802)• The Brontës: Anne Brontë Agnes Grey (1847) Emily

Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847), Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)

The BrontësCharlotte (1816-55), Emily (1818-48), Anne (1820-49)

• Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre transcend sentiment into myth-making

• Wuthering Heights plumbs the psychic unconscious in a search for wholeness, while Jane Eyre narrates the female quest for individuation

• Brontë.info: website of Brontë Society and Haworth Parsonage

• The Victorian Webportrait by Branwell Brontë of his sisters, Anne, Emily, and Charlotte (c. 1834)

Historical Novels

• Novels that reconstruct a past age, often when two cultures are in conflict

• Fictional characters interact with with historical figures in actual events

• Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) is considered the father of the historical novel: The Waverly Novels (1814-1819) and Ivanhoe (1819)

18th –19th c. German Romantic Theater

• “Stürm und Drang”• Looked to

Shakespeare for models

• Sweeping historical and tragic dramas

• Began to emphasize historical accuracy in costumes and settings

• Improved theatrical effects -- footlights, revolving stages, theatrical machinery

Schiller and Goethe

Light• 1817: first gas lit theatre

– Smelled bad– Very hazardous – many theatres

burnt down as the gas lighting set the wood and canvas scenery on fire

• 1826: limelight was invented – A block of quicklime heated by

oxygen and hydrogen produced a bright sharp light.

– Used in hand-operated spotlights• 1881: London’s Savoy Theatre

opened with electric lights • The auditorium was still lit for most of

this period, which also had an effect on the lighting effects on-stage.

Lighting control desk at the Paris Opera, 1893

Melodrama: 19th C. Comes from "music drama" – music

was used to increase emotions or to signify characters (signature music).

Theatre of sentimentality -- emotional appeal

Simplified moral universe: good and evil embodied in stock characters Heroes and villains -- and lily-pure

heroines Sensationalistic: fires, explosions,

drownings, etc. Episodic form: the villain poses a threat, the hero or heroine escapes,

etc.—with a happy ending Wide popular appeal

George L. Aiken’s was the most popular--1853. Six acts, done without an afterpiece – established the single-play format. 325 performances in New York.

In the 1870’s, at least 50 companies doing it in the U.S.

In 1899: 500 companies. In 1927: 12 still doing it. 12 movie versions since 1900. The most popular melodrama in the world until the

First World War.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

dramatizations based on novel by

Harriet Beecher Stowe

“British history is two thousand years old, and yet in a good many ways the world has moved farther ahead since the Queen was born than it moved in all the rest of the two thousand years put together.”

Mark Twain, 1897

at Queen Victoria’s

Jubilee

Technology

• 1830: Liverpool and Manchester RR – first public steam railway in the world

• steam ships• telegraph -- intercontinental cables• photography• high speed printing• cast iron for building • anesthetics -- ether• Technology on the

Victorian Web

Gustav Doré, London Underground

The Crystal Palace in Hyde Park

site of the 1851 Great Exhibition

J. M. W. Turner, Rain, Steam, Speed.

1844.

Science: Geology and Astronomy

• Geology– “the hottest science going”– all accredited geologists agreed that the earth was

millions of years old, that strata were layers from different times and that Genesis was incompatible with the findings of modern geology or irrelevant

– many discoveries about dinosaurs throughout the 19th c. http://rainbow.ldeo.columbia.edu/courses/v1001/dinodis3.html

• Astronomy: new planetary and cosmic discoveries• Geology “gives one the same sort of bewildering

view of the abysmal extent of Time that Astronomy does of Space.” – John Sterling, 1837

included first exhibition of

dinosaurs

The Great

Exhibition

1851

Science: Biology• Charles Darwin (1809-82)

– 1859: On the Origin of the Species– 1871: The Descent of Man, and Selection

in Relation to Sex – 1872: The Expression of the Emotions in

Man and Animals • Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95)

– Populizer and advocate of Darwin’s theories

– On a Piece of Chalk influenced thinking about education

– Huxley advocated broad primary school instruction: reading, writing, arithmetic, art, science, and music.

– The basic form of nearly every American college curriculum is what Huxley advocated more than 100 years ago: two years of more liberal basic studies followed by two years of specialization

– Huxley emphasized doing and observing in science classes

The voyage of the HMS Beagle

Biblical Studies

• Linguistic and Historic: “Higher Criticism”

• Study of original Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic texts – history of composition

• Historical contexts• David Friedrich Struass’s Das Leben

Jesu – translated by George Eliot as The Life of Jesus

• Biblical Archaeology vs. Mesopotamian Archaeology – Sumerian texts

Philosophy: Marxism

• Based on materialist interpretation of history– Social change

occurs because of class struggle

– Capitalism leads to the oppression of the proletariat

– Inevitability of a proletarian revolution

• 1845: Engels, The Condition of the Working Class

• 1848: Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto

• 1867-94: Marx, Das Kapital

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in London, 1867

Social Realism• Social or Sociological novels deal with

the nature, function and effect of the society which the characters inhabit – often for the purpose of effecting reform

• Social issues came to the forefront with the condition of laborers in the Industrial Revolution : Dickens’ Hard Times, Gaskell’s Mary Barton; Eliot’s Middlemarch, Zola’s Germinal

• Slavery and race issues arose in American social novels: Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Nikolai Gogol

Honore Balzac

George Eliot

Emile Zola

Mark Twain

Charles Dickens1812-1870

• By including varieties of poor people in all his novels, Dickens brought the problems of poverty to the attention of his readers:

• “It is scarcely conceivable that anyone should…exert a stronger social influence than Mr. Dickens has…. His sympathies are on the side of the suffering and the frail; and this makes him the idol of those who suffer, from whatever cause.” Harriet Martineau

• Dickens aimed at arousing the conscience of his age. "There have been at work among us three great social agencies: the London City Mission; the novels of Mr. Dickens; the cholera."

The Dickens Project, The Dickens Page "Dickens' Social Background" by E. D. H. Johnson

The Russian Novel• Russia from 1850-1920 was a period of social, political, and

existential struggle. • Writers and thinkers remained divided: some tried to incite

revolution, while others romanticized the past as a time of harmonious order.

• The novel in Russia embodied these struggles and conflicts in some of the greatest books ever written.

• The characters in the works search for meaning in an uncertain world, while the novelists who created them experiment with modes of artistic expression to represent the troubled spirit of their age.

The Russian NovelEven beyond their deaths, the two

novelists stand in contrariety… Tolstoy, the mind intoxicated with reason and fact; Dostoevsky, the contemner of rationalism, the great lover of paradox; …Tolstoy, thirsting for the truth, destroying himself and those about him in excessive pursuit of it; Dostoevsky, rather against the truth than against Christ, suspicious of total understanding and on the side of mystery; …Tolstoy, like a colossus bestriding the palpable earth, evoking the realness, the tangibility, the sensible entirety of concrete experience; Dostoevsky, always on the verge of the hallucinatory, of the spectral, always vulnerable to daemonic intrusions into what might prove, in the end, to have been merely a tissue of dreams; ~ George Steiner in Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism (1959)

Fyodor Dostoevsky1821-1881

The GamblerCrime and PunishmentNotes from

UndergroundThe Brothers Karamazov

Leo Tolstoy1828-1910

The CossacksAnna KareninaWar and PeaceResurrection

Realism and Naturalism

Intellectual reaction against popular theatre

Theatre of social problems

Influenced by emerging disciplines of psychology and sociology

Emerging importance of director

Realistic stage conventions

Proscenium stageAudience as

“fourth wall”Change in acting

conventionsContinued

improvement in stagecraft: electric lighting, set design, costumes, etc.

Realism vs. Naturalism

Middle class Pragmatic Psychological Mimetic art Objective, but ethical Sometimes comic or

satiric How can the individual

live within and influence society?

“Well-made play” Henrik Ibsen, George

Bernard Shaw

Middle/Lower class Scientific Sociological Investigative art Objective and amoral Often pessimistic, sometimes

comic How does society/the

environment impact individuals?

“Slice of life” August Strindberg, Anton

Chekhov, John Millington Synge

Henrik IbsenNorwegian, 1828-1906

Romantic DramasBrandPeer Gynt

Realistic Social DramasThe Pillars of

SocietyA Doll's HouseGhostsAn Enemy of the

PeopleThe Wild DuckRosmersholmThe Lady from the

SeaHedda Gabler

Symbolic DramasThe Master BuilderLittle Eyolf John Gabriel

Borkman When We Dead

Awaken

August Strindberg Swedish, 1849-1912

Naturalistic Plays : 1880sThe Father Miss Julie Creditors

Dreamplays : turn of the centuryTo Damascus A Dream Play The Ghost Sonata

Historical Dramas: turn of the centuryGustavus Vasa Erik XIV Charles XII

Anton ChekhovRussian

1860-1904

Physician, storyteller, dramatist

Plays: That Worthless FellowPlatonov On the Harmful Effects of

Tobacco IvanovThe BearA Marriage Proposal The Wood Demon

For the Moscow Art Theatre:The SeagullUncle Vanya The Three SistersThe Cherry Orchard

The World in 1775

Red: British Empire Yellow: Spanish EmpireGreen: Qing Dynasty Fuchsia: Ottoman EmpireDark Grey: Russian Empire

How Did Europe Conquer Africa?• The wealth generated by the buying and

selling of enslaved Africans went to create the extensive technological innovations that led to the Industrial Revolution.

• The coastal trade with Africans strengthened European commercial capitalism and transformed it into all-powerful industrial capitalism. 

How Did Europe Conquer Africa?• Europe started to take

a more direct hand in African affairs.

• While African states were weakened by their conflicts, the Europeans grew in strength.

• The same scenario took place in Asia and the Americas.

• Soon a full-fledged system of colonialism began to overspread the world.

• Thus did Europe not only conquer Africa, but America and Asia too....

Imperialism: The British Empire• 1853-1880: Over 2 million Britons emigrated to settle

in British colonies – especially Canada and Australia • 1839-42; 1856-60: Opium Wars with China• 1857: Parliament took over rule of India from East

India Co. and set up a civil service government• 1867: Canadian provinces united into Dominion of

Canada• 1876: Victoria declared Empress of India• 1880s – the Irish question – Home Rule• 1899-1902: Boer War in South Africa• By 1890, the British Empire contained ¼ of the earth’s

territory, and ¼ of the earth’s population.

Richard Redgrave, The Emigrants’ Last Sight of Home, 1858

Ford Madox BrownThe Last of

England, 1855

The British Empire

The pattern of East-West relations-- from the first discovery of a sea route

from Europe to Asia-- was largely one of Western

action and Eastern reaction

The West

went to the East, but the

East saw no need to come to the West

Voyage of Vasco da

Gama

Vasco da Gama’s discovery of a sea route to India in 1498 opened important commercial traffic,

led to the expansion and consolidation of the Portuguese Empire, and the spread of European

culture and Christianity in the Orient.

The Portuguese were quickly followed by the Spanish and Dutch, and later the French and British sent their

ships into Eastern oceans

The British, with their superior naval strength, finally became the dominant colonial power in

southern Asia

The Armorial Bearings of the Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies Granted by Garter and Clarenceux Kings of Arms in 1600 and as Borne and Used until 1709

In India, the British found a country governed by the

Mogul emperors

As the emperors grew decadent, the British penetrated their

governments, first as advisors -- later as direct

rulers with military and

political control

The English were content to live apart, safe in their compounds

and strongholds

Government House in Calcutta1799-1803

As closely as possible, they duplicated life in England -- with certain

luxurious additions

According to Lord

Kitchener: “It is the

consciousness of the inherent

superiority of the European

which has won for us

India”

British Empire in India 1800 - 1947

• The political dominance of the British introduced Western culture, language, methods of government and technology into urban centers

Paddle-steamer on the Hooghly, watercolour over a lithographed outline, Kalighat painting by Becaram Das Datta, 1857

But in the establishment of English schools, they introduced the revolutionary ideas of equality, social reform and self-

government which India would adapt to its own cultural pattern

First meeting of Indian National Congress, 1916

Independence came to India in 1947 after

decades of campaigning and non-violent protest led by Mahatma Gandhi

SatyagrahiDandi March

1930

China, convinced of its superiority, had restricted trade and other contacts with the West

Desperate to open up the rich ports of China, the Europeans finally found

a product they could sell in China

opium…”Opium is an imperious master and treats its subjects

like slaves. It first comes with a gentle touch...

...and then in a few weeks when it has got its grip upon the man, it shows itself to be the cruelest taskmaster that ever drove man to a lingering

death.”

When the Chinese government tried to curb the opium traffic, the British

gunboats triumphed in the Opium Wars (1839-42, 1856-60)

China was forced to open her ports and the interior to a flood of foreign merchants, soldiers and missionaries and to legalize the opium trade.

The Open Door Policy imposed by the Western Powers created havoc in China: depredation by

foreigners and internal rebellion

A secret society in northern China began a campaign of terror

against Christian missionaries and Chinese converts.

Foreigners called them “Boxers” because they practiced martial

arts.

The Boxer Rebellion1900

1912: Overthrow of last Imperial Dynasty and establishmen

t of a republic

under the leadership of Sun Yat Sen

Japan, reacted to the Western challenge in a rather different fashion

Throughout the 14th-19th

centuries, Japan had isolated itself from foreign trade

and contacts under the rule of

the Shoguns

Imposing order after a series of civil wars, Hideyoshi, in 1587,

issued an edict expelling Christian missionaries.

By the 19th c., the rigid class

distinctions were crumbling in the wake of a failing

economic system

Disaffected samurai warriors

roamed the country as

bandits

Merchants and tradesmen, had gained power and wealth in the growing cities

Such was the situation when, in 1853, US Commodore Matthew Perry steamed into Yokohama

Demonstrating the firepower of what the Japanese called his “black ships,” Perry demanded that Japan

open trade with the West

Realizing they could not match the military power of America, Japan agreed to establish diplomatic and trade

relations

The military humiliation of the Shogunate, combined with the social

and economic problems brought about the restoration of the Emperor in 1868

Imperial administrators

quickly embraced reform and completely

remodeled the government and

economy to resemble those of

19th c. Europe and the US

The abrupt break with the past left many Japanese with

feelings of cultural loss and a sense of dislocation and regret

But it also led to a rise of

nationalism and the emergence of Japan as a major world power at the turn of the

century

Sino-Japanese War, 1894

Russo-Japanese War1904-05

This print criticizes a Russian General and his troops by representing the General as a Daruma -- a limbless Buddhist figure normally portrayed wrapped in robes -- implying that the Russians have no arms and legs and so cannot fight.

The countries of the East and West have reacted to each other in different

ways,

but each has adopted something of the other

In the 18th c. a craze for anything Chinese swept Europe -- Chinese furniture, wallpaper, porcelain and oriental gardens

Chinese Garden in Zurich

Similarly in the 19th c., Japonisme infiltrated Western visual and performance arts

Monet, La Japonaise, 1876

India, as seen

through its great religious

literature, was

admired by Western Romantics

. Ralph Waldo

Emerson wrote a

poem, “To Brahma”

The Eastern philosophies of spiritual enlightenment influenced the development

of American Transcendentalism and European Existentialism

The great conflicts of the 20th c. drew in both Eastern and Western powers as allies

and enemies

Memorial to the children who died at Hiroshima