Romantic Englishness: Periodical Writing and National Identity After the Napoleonic Wars

Abstract

Recent scholarship has paid too little attention to English national identity in Romantic literature and culture. A key reason is no doubt the continuing influence of Linda Colley’s Britons (1992), which focuses on the period between the Acts of Union of 1707 and Queen Victoria’s Coronation in 1837. Although Colley acknowledges that ‘the Welsh, Scottish and the English remain[ed] in many ways distinct peoples in cultural terms”, she emphasises how Britishness was ‘superimposed over an array of internal differences’ (Colley 1994: 6). Similar claims are made by Krishan Kumar in The Making of English National Identity (2003), which (citing Colley) identifies ‘the rise of an overarching British identity’ during the long eighteenth century (Kumar 2003: xi). Kumar believes that it is anachronistic to refer to English nationalism during the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century (178–84), and finds only a cultural (rather than political) ‘moment of Englishness’ around 1900, which was linked to decreased confidence in British imperial and industrial supremacy (176). Although he conclusively refutes Gerald Newman’s claims in The Rise of English Nationalism (1987) that a fully-fledged English nationalism had formed by the end of eighteenth century, the historical range of Kumar’s argument means that some nuance is inevitably lost.KeywordsEighteenth CenturyEnglish LiteratureRomantic PeriodLiterary CultureEnglish WriterThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.