The Romantic age in England formed one of the most celebrated — and heterogeneous — moments in literary history, but it also witnessed the rise of ‘political economy’ as the pre-eminent 19th-century science of society. This book investigates this historical conjunction, and reassesses the idea that the Romantic defence of spiritual and humanistic ‘culture’ developed as a reaction to the individualistic, philistine values of the ‘dismal science’. Drawing on a wide range of source material, the book combines the methods of literary scholarship and intellectual history. It addresses the changing ... More

The Romantic age in England formed one of the most celebrated — and heterogeneous — moments in literary history, but it also witnessed the rise of ‘political economy’ as the pre-eminent 19th-century science of society. This book investigates this historical conjunction, and reassesses the idea that the Romantic defence of spiritual and humanistic ‘culture’ developed as a reaction to the individualistic, philistine values of the ‘dismal science’. Drawing on a wide range of source material, the book combines the methods of literary scholarship and intellectual history. It addresses the changing political identifications of familiar literary figures such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Shelley, but also illuminates the wider political and intellectual life of this period. The book situates canonical Romantic writers within a nuanced, and highly detailed ideological context, while challenging our inherited understanding of the Romantic tradition itself as the social conscience of 19th-century capitalism.