When Did Romanticism Begin? The Date and Origin of a Movement
“There is no such thing as a Romantic movement; there is only a Romantic temper of mind.” — A.O. Lovejoy, 1916
The question of when Romanticism began is one of the most debated in the cultural history of the modern West. There is no single, agreed-upon date; the movement emerged gradually over several decades, and its beginnings can be traced to different events, publications, and intellectual developments in different countries. What follows is a survey of the major candidates and an explanation of why the question is so contested.
The Common Dating
Most scholars date the beginning of English Romanticism to the publication of the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798, or to the appearance of the preface to the second edition in 1800. For German Romanticism, the equivalent dates are the founding of the Jena circle in the 1790s, the publication of the Athenäum journal in 1798, or the appearance of Schlegel’s On the Study of Greek Poetry in 1797. For French Romanticism, the beginnings are usually placed in the 1820s, with the early works of Lamartine (Méditations poétiques, 1820) and the later manifestos of Stendhal, Hugo, and the others.
If a single date has to be given, 1798 is often chosen — the year of the Lyrical Ballads and the Athenäum, and a year that also saw the composition of some of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s most important early poems.
The Pre-Romantic Background
But the seeds of Romanticism had been planted long before 1798. The German Sturm und Drang movement of the 1770s — with its emotional intensity, its medievalism, its reverence for nature, and its break with Neoclassicism — is often cited as a pre-Romantic phenomenon. The English graveyard poets of the 1740s and 1750s, the early Gothic novel of Walpole, the poetry of James Macpherson’s Ossian, the political philosophy of Rousseau — all of these can be seen as part of the longer pre-history of Romanticism.
The French Revolution of 1789 is sometimes given as a beginning, both for the political events that shaped the Romantic generation and for the new conception of politics, nation, and freedom that the Romantics developed.
The Conventional End
The conventional end of the Romantic period is usually given as 1850, the year of Wordsworth’s death and the publication of his long autobiographical poem The Prelude. The mid-century revolutions of 1848, the early Victorian consolidation, the rise of Realism in literature and art, and the publication of major works by Dickens, Tennyson, and others, all mark a turning away from the great Romantic themes.
But the Romantic tradition did not end in 1850. The late Romantics — Tennyson, Browning, the Pre-Raphaelites, the early Wagner, the late Verdi — continued the Romantic project well into the later nineteenth century. The Symbolists and Decadents of the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s, treated in our page on Symbolism and Decadence, extended the Romantic project into new territory. And the great persistence of the Romantic tradition into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, treated in our pages on Twentieth-Century Echoes and Modern Romanticism, shows that the Romantic period, however it is dated, is in many ways still our own.
Why the Dating Is Contested
The question of when Romanticism began is contested for several reasons. Romanticism was not a single event but a gradual emergence; it was not confined to a single country or a single language; it took different forms in literature, art, music, and philosophy; and the retrospective identification of a “Romantic period” is itself a construction of later historians.
The great cultural historian Isaiah Berlin, in his influential lectures on the Romantics, suggested that Romanticism was, in essence, a movement that began in the late eighteenth century and that has never really ended. To study Romanticism, on this view, is to study a permanent possibility in the modern cultural imagination.
Further Reading
- A.O. Lovejoy, “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms” (1924) — the founding statement of the case that there is no single Romanticism but a family of related movements. Required reading for anyone interested in the dating question.
- Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (1965) — Berlin’s “never really ended” view, in lecture form.
- David Womersley, ed., The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism (Oxford, 2018) — for the current state of the academic debate, with chapters on the periodisation question.
- “Long Romanticism” — a recent movement in literary history, associated with the work of Jerome Christensen, Michael Washington, and others, that pushes the conventional end of Romanticism well into the later nineteenth century.