Mathelinda Nabugodi traces the shifts in Coleridge’s thoughts on race from his early abolitionist writings to his later reflections on beauty and aesthetics. Focusing on his comments about Africans, Nabugodi demonstrates a crucial tension between the Romantic poet’s youthful commitment to abolition and the embrace of scientific racism in his later writings. This tension also informs the revisions that Coleridge made to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) when he prepared it for republication in Sibylline Leaves (1817). Nabugodi’s careful comparative reading of the 1798 and the 1817 versions highlights the way a representative poet’s work embodies the contradictions of a Romanticism in which freedom could be imagined as universal even as European superiority was taken for granted.

DJ Lee and Aaron Oforlea’s chapter approaches Coleridge from a different angle, counterposing his vision of freedom with that of the Black Loyalists who supported the English during the American Revolution. Lee and Oforlea’s titular phrase “(not)Freedom” refers to “the fragmentation, resistance, and transgression with which Black Loyalists lived,” which is exemplified in the Loyalists’ linguistic practices. Whether by mimicking the language of white Europeans or by developing a distinctive lingo that infused poetry into the language of transactions, the Loyalists demonstrated a model of freedom – (not)freedom – that was local and transitory, contextually dependent, and always precarious.

This chapter explores the relationship of the adult essay with the ‘theme’, which was the name for school-essays until the mid-nineteenth century. Themes were, mostly, short prose pieces, focused on a moral subject which was also called a theme, written almost exclusively in Latin until English themes began to emerge in the late eighteenth century. The chapter argues that in the nineteenth century, the modern pedagogical essay emerged out of the Erasmian theme, combining many of its structures with the Baconian essay’s priority on individual experience and ideas. Meanwhile, the Romantic essayists, Charles Lamb and Thomas De Quincey, chief among them, created the modern literary essay by carrying forward the priority the theme assigned to rhetoric over experience, while on the other hand imitating Montaigne’s play with the oratorical structures of the theme, and with its subject (also called a ‘theme’).

This chapter identifies a subgenre of the essay form – the dream-essay – and charts its trajectory from early modern philosophy, through the Romantic interest in vision and reverie. Arguing that that the dream-essay both arises from and extends the sceptical ethos of Cartesian philosophy, it discusses Montaigne’s position on dreams, René Descartes’s vocational dream, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s dream reveries. With this background established, it turns to the Romantic dreamers Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and Thomas De Quincey, emphasising how, for these writers, dreaming – and writing about dreaming – elaborates a paradoxical form of consciousness which is also a form of expression. The chapter concludes with brief discussions of the contemporary writers Adam Phillips and W.G. Sebald.

This chapter addresses the question: How did the term become familiar in society? Even the earliest uses demonstrate the integration of knowledge classification and engagement with large audiences. Derived from German usage, the term ‘applied sciences’ was coined early in the nineteenth century by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It was key to underpinning a major new encyclopaedia project intended to structure knowledge and thinking. A succession of loyal editors realised his vision as the massive Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, advertised using Coleridge’s coinage. It would also be taken up by King’s College London seeking to describe its course teaching knowledge underlying engineering without claiming to be technical training. Meanwhile, the chemist J. F. W. Johnston used the term to promote the services he offered farmers. During and after debates over Corn Law Repeal, the press discussed Johnston’s applied science as a potential saviour of agriculture. The term’s use then snowballed.

Frederick Denison Maurice’s writings on the history of philosophy, from his 1839 Encyclopaedia Metropolitana article on ‘Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy’ to the various iterations of the multi-volume book that grew out of this text, are a vital and underappreciated aspect of his life’s work. Maurice ran together an idiosyncratic reading of the Old Testament with his marginally less wilful view of ancient Greek philosophy to provide a unique answer to the question of how biblical and classical heritages might be reconciled by Christians. But his history did more than this, building on the ideas of Coleridge to trace essential connections between philosophy, morality, and politics and telling a story about the development of the family, the nation, and the church, in a way that provides distinctive insight into Maurice’s core commitments. The resulting narrative was also capacious enough to change emphasis over different editions, most obviously as Maurice’s interest in various other global religious and intellectual traditions grew, and he began to seek a history that was more about the place of Anglicanism in the world, and not simply about its place in the polity.

In 1814, Denmark created a public primary school system, but Britain only developed private church schools. This chapter recounts the struggles over education in the decades surrounding 1800 and the role of authors in these battles. Writers’ literary tropes fostered distinctive perceptions of education in the two countries: Danish enlightenment writers portrayed education for workers as necessary for building a strong society, vibrant economy, and secure state. Many British authors worried that mass schooling would foster instability and overpopulation. But in both countries, some writers participated as activists in the campaigns for education. In Britain, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1808 lecture on education was credited with launching the mass education movement. Coleridge, William Wordsworth Sarah Trimmer, Hannah More, and others resisted a national education system and promoted the Bell monitorial model (espoused by the Anglican National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor. In Denmark, Ludvig Holberg bequeathed his fortune to the Sorø Academy (which educated future political statesmen) and encouraged the school to adopt his enlightened ideas about education. Later Danish Romantic writers helped a progressive coalition supporting the crown prince to advance mass schooling and to resist challenges from reactionary estate owners.

This chapter introduces the wide range of music bound up with the sublime in the Romantic period. This is a time often associated with the triumph of music – and especially ‘autonomous’ instrumental music – as the most sublime of the arts, and with a canon of overwhelming, ground-breaking, transgressive works by great (mostly German) composers. These associations are important, not least as a way of understanding the unease and sometimes controversy that has surrounded the musical sublime since the later twentieth century. Yet equally important to understanding the sublime in the Romantic period is to look beyond monumental instrumental compositions to see how smaller-scale genres and vocal music, alongside performers, listeners and other agents, shaped and contested the sublimity of music, sound and hearing, and left an indelible mark on the broader aesthetic category of the sublime itself.

This chapter examines the influence of William Bartram´s Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida on the writing of Wordsworth and Coleridge in the 1790s and highlights the uniqueness of Bartram´s eco-centric approach to sublimity in early American thinking about the natural world. A practiced botanist and natural illustrator, Bartram delights in cataloguing plant and animal lives, but the Travels also offers a significant intervention into trans-Atlantic discourses of sublimity. Bartram´s sublime overwhelms the perceiver with plentitude rather than terror, and he narrates experiences of sublimity from amidst the rich life he delights to describe rather than at a distance. He emphasizes continuity between human and more-than-human lives. Bartram also resists the nationalistic orientation of his American contemporaries, attending to native and local epistemologies. The chapter concludes with comparisons between passages of the Travels, Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” and Wordsworth’s “Ruth.”

New resources have led to new insights into the history of English vocabulary. The appearance of machine-readable corpora has made it possible to contextualise particular idiolectal usages much more comprehensively than was possible until recently. Such developments have allowed, through the harnessing of the large bodies of data to be found in the Oxford English Dictionary and other resources, a much better understanding of intertextual engagement: what might be called authorial invention, the focus of this chapter. The chapter focuses on authorial invention during the Romantic period, with reference to three writers whose imaginative outputs drew profoundly on their understanding of medicine: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), Mary Shelley (1797–1851), and John Keats (1795–1821). As Richard Holmes has argued, Romanticism drew profoundly on its scientific inheritance, in the cases analysed here derived from direct or indirect encounters with thinkers such as Thomas Beddoes (1760–1808), Astley Cooper (1768–1841), William Cullen (1710–1790), and Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802). However, they transformed this inheritance through what Holmes terms ‘imaginative intensity’.

Chapter three explores how Coleridge and the Wordsworth siblings responded to and engaged with larger questions surrounding birdsong, speech and poetry. While Coleridge throughout his life brooded over metaphysical arguments regarding ‘the one life within us and abroad’ (‘The Eolian Harp’, 1795), Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals are filled with close, detailed descriptions of birds and their songs that are neither assimilated to nor inhibited by any overarching theory regarding the sentience of other creatures and our human relation to them. As he responded to his sister’s lively observations and the philosophical arguments in which he found his friend so deeply embroiled, William Wordsworth was led into larger discussions about what may be going on inside the heads of various human and non-human others. Drawing on his own experiences of composing and ‘muttering’ over his poems in daily walks with his sister, Wordsworth hints at a subvocal language of thought that is patterned and shaped, though not always or exactly worded. Out of a deep personal recognition of a grave disjuncture between thinking and saying, Wordsworth throughout his writing explores the inner lives of others in ways that would prove crucial to Clare, Hardy and other poets writing in the following centuries.

In “Toward a Transatlantic Philosophy of Nature,” Samantha C. Harvey demonstrates how British Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge articulated a philosophy of nature in poetic form that would be reinterpreted in two central prose works of American Transcendentalism: Emerson’s Nature (1836) and Thoreau’s Walden (1854). Through detailed analysis of the works of Wordsworth and Emerson, Harvey suggests that nature’s vital role in the nineteenth century becomes particularly pronounced when Romanticism is considered as a transnational movement that flowed beyond national boundaries. Harvey shows how a transcendentalist philosophy of nature crossed, recrossed, and crisscrossed the Atlantic in various directions, undergoing continual transformations along the way.

Stressing that fully declared atheism was illegal throughout the Romantic period and beyond, the chapter gives a brief survey of some philosophical Enlightenment ‘isms’ which could sometimes be seen as connected to it, such as materialism, pantheism, necessitarianism, idealism, scepticism, and deism. It then moves from such abstractions into the world of active, sometimes dangerous debates about atheism itself, focusing on specific clashes between such figures as Joseph Priestley, Edward Gibbon, Thomas Paine, Richard Carlile, C. F. Volney, Erasmus Darwin, and their critics. The final section looks more closely at ways in which the atheism debate impinged on some of the period’s canonical poets, particularly the anxiously Christian Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the firmly atheist Percy Bysshe Shelley.

This essay explores the intersection of religion and literature in sermons and lectures during the British Romantic period. The essay traces the advance of elocutionary advice in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and demonstrates how interest in orality proliferated the printing of both sermons and lectures on religious themes. In addition to noted figures such as S. T. Coleridge, William Hazlitt, and Edward Irving, women’s voices emerged during the time, as women in dissenting religious circles set the stage for the first public lectures by women in Britain.

This chapter explores politics in the British Romantic period through a close examination of the highly politicized religion of Dissent in the 1790s, tracing in particular its arguments in political tracts and sermons against slavery, the war with France, and the growing inequality between rich and poor. The centrality of religion to an understanding of revolution, rights of man discourse, public worship, and civil liberty is found in the writings of Richard Price, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with reference to Joseph Priestley, Joshua Toulmin, John Edwards, and John Prior Estlin. There is discussion of the chain of influence descending from Price to Barbauld to the young Coleridge, and a conclusion that looks at some of the continuities in Coleridge’s thinking between his earlier radicalism and his later prose works.

J. S. Mill’s protest at ‘vulgar’ uses of the past gave way in the 1830s to an eclectic science of history which drew on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Saint-Simonians, and Auguste Comte. Book VI of A System of Logic (1843) sketched a theoretical outline of progress whose scientific conversion came about when it was connected, indirectly, to the ultimate laws of psychology. The triumph of sociology reflected Mill’s settled view that society was increasingly a historical phenomenon, shaped less and less by the psychological laws from which Thomas Hobbes, Bentham, and the ‘geometric’ reasoners had deduced their political ideas. This realisation, Barrell argues, pulled in two directions. While it provided a logic and vocabulary of historical relativism, its theoretical sketch of progress was neither relative nor concretely historical because it encompassed the ‘whole previous history of humanity’ as a progressive chain of causes and effects. This double consciousness, I have argued, can be profitably situated within German historicism, French science sociale, and English utilitarianism, all of which acknowledged the logical dissonance between historical facts and their theoretical reconstruction.

This chapter outlines the work of music for Romantic literature. The Romantic era was a pivotal period in the formation of literature as we now tend to understand it, as a category of imaginative and expressive prose and poetry, and writers deployed music in a number of ways to explore the power, limits, and nature of the literary. While lofty claims were made for literature as an ideal art form, one of the strongest uses of music for literature was to suggest its failures – to indicate kinds of freedom, fulfilment, and plenitude only pointed to by verbal language. The paradoxical uses of failure are discussed in this chapter through texts by writers including Blake, Kleist, Hoffmann, Coleridge, and Mérimée.

Chapter 5 examines the importance of the playbill in general in Romantic-period culture. Playbills represent by far the largest body of ephemeral texts that have survived and this chapter explores the history of their interest to collectors and how the theatre, as part of the category of ‘public amusements’, was integrated into ephemera collecting as a whole. The history of the playbill also focuses a discussion of changes in printing technology around 1800 – mainly the introduction of larger typefaces that could be read from a distance – which led to the emergence of the poster and the increasing colonisation of urban space by print. I argue for the importance of ephemera and ephemerality to Romantic-period media history and also to the genealogy of theatre history as a discipline. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the earliest printed document in Australian history to be discovered to date, a playbill for a performance of the tragedy Jane Shore at the ‘Theatre, Sydney’ in 1796.

This chapter offers a contemplation on the symbiotic nature and interdependencies of the later works of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, and their consequent reputations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Beginning with an account of how the critical tradition has tended to conceptualise the Radcliffe/ Lewis relation, the chapter focuses in upon a range of contemporary readerships that chose to read, compare and mention in the same breath the works of both authors, often without drawing any aesthetic differences between them.

This chapter surveys the literary achievements of the group of writers who gathered together on the banks of Lake Geneva in the Summer of 1816: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley; Percy Bysshe Shelley; John Polidori; and Lord Byron. Beginning with the famous ghost storytelling competition proposed by Byron, it considers the extent to which Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, while located in the earlier tradition of Radcliffean romance, forged new directions for the Gothic mode through its graphic realisation of corporeal and textual monstrosity. While it forces us to reconsider notions of origin and influence among the group, Polidori’s The Vampyre, the chapter argues, bequeathed to the Gothic its own ‘monstrous progeny’. Engaging with, and thoroughly revising, the earlier poetry of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley and Byron, for their part, set in place some of the distinctive features of second-generation Romanticism, even if the works that they produced during this period force us to interrogate the critical distinction between the ‘Romantic’ and the ‘Gothic’ itself.