Romance is not dead

Peter Mudford finds a good companion in a guide to Romanticism.

What is a companion? Who is it for? According to The Oxford Companion to the English Language , it is a "mess-mate" (from com , together, panis , bread), "a work of reference that is presented as a friend to be consulted whenever needed".

The companion under review succeeds in being a "mess-mate" , and something more arousing. The first half contains 42 essays, written by experts on the "the exploding and fissiparous world of knowledge" that characterised British culture between the American declaration of independence in 1776 and the passage of the Great Reform Bill in 1832. The topics covered are bold and imaginative, covering the transformation of the nation; public and private worlds; culture, consumption and the arts; and emerging knowledges. They encompass - and these are among the memorable contributions - revolution (Mark Philip), law (David Lemmings), medicine (Roy Porter), architecture (Daniel Abramson), music (Cyril Ehrlich and Simon McVeigh), psychology (Robert Brown) and language (Jon Mee), as well as slavery (James Walvin), class (Eileen Janes Yeo), women (Barbara Caine), popular antiquarianism (Marilyn Butler) and poetry (Jerome J. McGann). Each essay offers a challenging and controversial view of its topic, which concludes with a brief bibliography for further reading. Whatever controversy is raised by particular contributions, the value of the first half of the volume lies in its structured and disciplined awareness of the broad and uneven front on which British culture was developing in these 50 years. The dates chosen as a starting point and a finishing line, and the very different events with which they are identified, ask the same question: "Is this an ending or a beginning?"

The second half of the volume is a work of reference, with entries alphabetically arranged under names and topics, so that it is as easy to discover the contemporary attitudes to duelling as the politics of Shelley. In both halves, entries are cross-referenced. The entries inform and, at the same time, ask the question, Is this an age of which "the centre of gravity" is to be defined as "Romantic"; and if so, what does this mean?

The general editor, Iain McCalman, makes clear in his introduction how the problems of the title have been wrestled with. But even he in his use of the term "Romantic" shifts uneasily between its association with a group of poets - Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Byron (all Romantic in different senses, and with uneven similarities) - and its usefulness as a word to characterise an age in the sense implied by William Hazlitt's The Spirit of the Age (1825).

Hazlitt's masterpiece reflects the same problem. What do Bentham, Wordsworth, Byron, Malthus and Canning have in common, except that they were contemporaries? As Hazlitt shrewdly remarks about Canning's visit to Wordsworth in the Lake District: "Really we do not know any one so little capable of appreciating the Lyrical Ballads ." Are not Hazlitt's characters the most heterogeneous figures yoked together by the brilliance of his desire to discriminate their differences, and the degree to which they rose above, or succumbed to, the element in which they lived, which he wisely refrained from defining?

Great writers, according to Shelley, as well as measuring the circumference and sounding the depths of human nature, revealed inadvertently the spirit of the age. Much in this volume succeeds in a similar aim. But it is not an equable spirit, and the revolutionary touchstones in one area of knowledge or thought do not have obvious parallels in even closely related areas. The crowds who sang the Marseillaise in France excited revolutionary fervour in England, but the loyalism aroused by the war with France made a revolution against the British government unlikely to succeed. The romantic attraction of freedom did not lead to "any truly mass movements" in this country where fierce local loyalties prevailed. Byron embodied a spirit that spoke more directly to the Greeks than to his own disenfranchised

countrymen. What was Romantic in the poetry of Wordsworth has no parallel in English music, which inspired no major talent. Even the audience at the first performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in 1825 remained uncomprehending. The Romantic poets wrote plays; but they remained, as they still are, largely unperformed.

The orientalist Sir William Jones, through his knowledge of India and Indian languages, made an unrivalled contribution to the knowledge of a history and culture entirely different from that in Europe, showing the weakness of an assumed European superiority. His discovery of the affinities between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin laid the foundation of comparative linguistics and for comparisons between cultures, which have developed into a major area of research and creativity. But the most famous scientist of the age, Humphrey Davy, concluded his life's work by expressing the belief that his scientific work would empower the "transmission of hereditary qualities" by which Europe could finally drive back the "negro race" and make "extinct" the "red men, aborigines of America". Advances in one area were not accompanied by advances in understanding or civilisation in another. This was an age that could applaud the storming of the Bastille, and the building of Buckingham Palace. When Hazlitt in his Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805) wrote "I am not the same thing, but many different things", he also characterised his age. As with the waves of the sea, flow was matched by ebb.

One theme is to be heard in these essays repeatedly: the beginning of much that is still beginning. Between 1771 and 1831 the population of England more than doubled, a rate of increase not approached in any earlier period. Industrialisation, technology, print culture and consumerism allowed the economy to expand and more of the population to be supported with the goods and services that enrich urban life. As the empire grew, so did its economic significance for the work-force at home. A consumer society dependent on the balance of trade was in the process of being born. The police force, made necessary by the growth of cities and towns, became inseparable from class interests; and the dispute over the poor laws, fired by Malthus's views on the need to control population, began a debate over welfare that remains at the centre of late 20th-century politics. At another level, the economic power and the leisure to consume provided the environment in which the Royal Academy of Arts and the National Gallery came to embody a pride and interest in the national heritage. An appetite for culture was a new form of consumption. In this period, too, the English language became the subject of a debate as to whether "the usage of only the most polite sections of society" could serve as a model. The Queen's English, according to the debate that still continues, has become a backwater of world English.

In none of these essays is it possible to see the vestige of an end. But in other areas revolutionary progress was yet to come. Medicine made few major advances until Pasteur's and Koch's discovery of bacteria in the 1870s; mental illness remained unclassified; and almost no one thought yet that women should be given the vote, or entitled to a greater freedom in education, sexuality or careers. Genius itself was part of the male domain.

Except by cross-referencing, the editors have perhaps wisely not attempted to illustrate the interwoven nature of this vast tapestry, which in many ways reveals the origins of the modern democratic state and the relationship between public and private selves on which it depends. The privacy of the self that the romantic poets explored, and the compulsive forces that their work revealed, ranging from the transcendental to the darkly anarchic, remain an incalculable element in public behaviour; still signalled by the need, often referred to, if not achieved, for governments to "keep in touch", and "listen". What happened to British culture in these 50 years formed part of a much greater shift, as the late Isaiah Berlin argued in The Roots of Romanticism (1999), which has transformed the lives and thought of the western world.

Engagingly illustrated, this companion provides a formidable starting point for scholars and students of the period. The essays reveal the origins of many of our complex conflicts and uncertainties, at the time when they were less muddied. This companion is very much more than a "mess-mate" and is also an outstanding work of reference.

Peter Mudford is reader in modern English literature, Birkbeck College, University of London.