Nor did we have any clue that Romanticism spoke directly to debates that raged – and still rage – around our own lives, whether about the violent resurgence of nationalism, or about identities and their associated rights. But the curriculum made zero connection between the artefacts it called ‘Romanticism’ and the realpolitik and real-life battles of Napoleonic imperialism, the Italian Risorgimento, the nation-building that culminated in 1848’s Year of Revolutions across Europe and Latin America, or the gradual abolition of slavery. High school had taught us roughly when Romanticism was: from 1770, when Ludwig van Beethoven, G W F Hegel and Friedrich Hölderlin were born, to 1850, by which time Honoré de Balzac, Frédéric Chopin, Edgar Allan Poe and Mary Shelley had died. They belonged among the knitted teapot covers and potpourri sachets on the side tables of other generations’ lives. These clichés were what we believed Romanticism to be, and they represented a past whose continuity we wanted to break. I vividly remember the teenaged sense of cultural claustrophobia that can result. Elsewhere, riffing comedians and headline writers crank out pun after pun on the first line of William Wordsworth’s lyric poem, ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ (1804). Address book, china mug or wall calendar, the decoration is sure to be that overloaded harvest wagon, The Hay Wain (1821), painted by John Constable. Growing up in Britain means encountering a certain kind of early 19th-century culture as a given.
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