Documentary
History
The Romantics
From Revolution to Oblivion
Between 1760 and 1830, the imagination of a few individuals
re-ordered human perception. This is the Romantics’ storey.
Programme running: 3 x 60 mins
Production: BBC
Executive Producer: Kim Thomas
Documentary
History
The Romantics
Programme running: 3 x 60 mins
Production: BBC
Executive Producer: Kim Thomas
From Revolution to Nature
From Transcendence to Oblivion
This film traces the ‘birth’ of the individual in modern society.
It begins with Jean Jacques Rousseau who understood that
civilisation had corrupted people’s morals and that government
systems had suppressed the liberty of individuals.
As the Romantic period blossomed, there was great progress in
medical science, with a new understanding of the central nervous
system, and of digestion and respiration.
His words were seen as a threat to the long-established
monarchies of Europe. His books were burned in France and he fled
to London, where he was ridiculed. But Rousseau’s single thought
had set a powerful idea in motion. It inspired the writer Thomas
Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense roused the people of the
New World.
The idea spread and went on to inspire writers like William Blake,
Williams Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to champion
individual liberty, protest and democracy in Europe.
From Nature to Transcendence
This film looks at how the modern notion of Nature developed.
After the chaos of the French Revolution, the concept of liberty
became associated with the natural world rather than political
events. And Jean Jacques Rousseau’s theories about Nature
dismissed earlier ‘civilised’ trends of picturesque vistas and
landscaped parks.
The Romantics were fascinated by the power of wild nature. The
work of German painter Caspar David Friedrich portrayed a world
of lonely figures, wandering over mountains shrouded in mists. And
Wordsworth and the painter Turner conveyed the sublime power of
the natural world in their studies of the Lake District.
But as industry and science sought to harness that same power,
the ideas of the child, nature and scientific progress would collide
in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. A Romantic manifesto, the novel
declares that children are sacred and need unconditional love. It
also warns that nature is not to be trifled with or corrupted by
science.
But the scientists treated the human body as a mechanism while
the Romantics were interested in the spirit; the ghost in the
machine. In seeking to transcend the ordinary world, poets and
painters explored the landscape of the human mind – with results
that were decades ahead of the scientific researchers.
Taking ever more daring journeys to the limits of the human
imagination, some of the Romantics succumbed to addiction
– Coleridge’s dream of Kubla Khan, for instance, was induced by
Opium. Other artists were the first to explore the relationship
between genius and madness. Goya and Gericault painted the
inmates of lunatic asylums, and the poet John Clare wrote some of
his greatest works while he was an inmate at an asylum.
For a whole new generation, the Romantic idea of transcendence
became a religion in itself. Lord Byron’s celebrity gave him a
mythological status in his own lifetime, which continues to some
extent to this day. Percy Shelley was expelled from Oxford
University for writing a paper on Atheism, and the desire to shed
matter and form and to reach a state of pure sprit. After the
tragic death of his young friend John Keats, he wrote Adonais: An
Elegy on the Death of John Keats in which he describes the poet’s
sensitive spirit, too fragile for earthly existence.
Shelley himself died in a sailing accident three years later. His
friend Lord Byron burnt his body on an Italian beach but his heart
wouldn’t burn – the poet had finally taken on true Romantic form.
His wife Mary kept the heart and at her death, it was discovered in
a box, wrapped in a manuscript of Adonais.
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