50 Fun Facts About Romanticism

Which novel did Mary Shelley begin after a ghost-story challenge among friends at a villa near Geneva in 1816?

Frankenstein grew out of a wet summer when the party stayed indoors reading German ghost stories aloud. Mary Shelley was 18 when she began it, and the book came out anonymously in 1818.

Which animal did Lord Byron keep as a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, where the rules banned pet dogs?

A bear broke no rule, because the college statutes never mentioned one. Byron even suggested that he would apply for a college fellowship for it.

Which English Romantic poet qualified as an apothecary before dying of tuberculosis in Rome at just 25?

John Keats asked for a gravestone with no name on it, only a line saying his name was written in water. His poems had been in print for less than four years.

Which French Romantic wrote The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and published Les Misérables while exiled on Guernsey?

Victor Hugo drew more than two million people to his funeral procession through Paris in 1885. His plays Cromwell and Hernani had put him at the front of the movement decades earlier.

Which composer, who wrote his Ninth Symphony while nearly deaf, led music from the Classical style into Romanticism?

Ludwig van Beethoven never went totally deaf, and could still make out low tones and sudden loud sounds in his final years. The Ninth had its premiere in 1824.

Which Bavarian castle, a showpiece of Romanticism begun in 1869, inspired Disneyland's Sleeping Beauty Castle?

Neuschwanstein was ordered by a reclusive Bavarian king as a retreat and as a tribute to an opera composer he adored. Building work ran from 1869 to 1892.

Which German scholars, swept up in the Romantic love of folklore, published a famous book of fairy tales in 1812?

The Grimm brothers started with 86 tales and kept revising until the collection passed 200. Cinderella, Rapunzel and Snow White all reached the wider world through their book.

Romanticism arose in Europe partly in reaction to which movement championed by Voltaire and Diderot?

The Enlightenment held that reason alone could explain the world, and the Romantics answered that intuition and emotion matter too. They also recoiled from the factories of the industrial age.

Which American master of dark Romanticism published The Raven in 1845 and pioneered the detective story?

Edgar Allan Poe saw the poem become a sensation as soon as it appeared in a New York evening paper. The Mystery Writers of America named their awards the Edgars after him.

Which early American Romantic author created both Rip Van Winkle and the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow?

Washington Irving also gave New York City its nickname Gotham, in a magazine piece of 1807. He wrote Rip Van Winkle overnight while staying with his sister in Birmingham, England.

Which 1847 novel by Emily Brontë sets the stormy bond of Catherine and Heathcliff on the Yorkshire moors?

Wuthering Heights was the only novel Emily Brontë wrote, and it first appeared under the pen name Ellis Bell. Its mix of love, possession and revenge draws heavily on Romanticism.

Which Herman Melville novel follows Captain Ahab's vengeful hunt for the white whale that took his leg?

Moby-Dick borrowed its ending from the real whaleship Essex, sunk by a sperm whale in 1820. Melville dedicated the book to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Which Nathaniel Hawthorne novel follows Hester Prynne, shamed in Puritan Boston for having a child outside marriage?

The Scarlet Letter carries the subtitle A Romance, the label Hawthorne preferred for his fiction. Its Custom-House preface angered his neighbours in Salem.

Which book by Henry David Thoreau records two years of simple living in a cabin he built near Concord, Massachusetts?

Walden describes a retreat only about two miles from the Thoreau family home. His mother and sisters often came by with baskets of baked goods, pies and prepared meals.

Which Indonesian volcano's 1815 eruption caused the 'Year Without a Summer' that kept Mary Shelley writing indoors?

Tambora erupted in April 1815 and brought a volcanic winter the next year. Crops failed across the Northern Hemisphere, and incessant rain kept the Shelleys and Byron inside their Swiss villa.

In which country did Lord Byron die in 1824 after joining its war of independence against the Ottoman Empire?

Greece reveres Byron as a folk hero, and he spent 4,000 pounds of his own money refitting its fleet. He died of a fever at Missolonghi, aged 36.

Which flowers, seen beside Ullswater on a walk with his sister Dorothy, inspired William Wordsworth's best-known poem?

Daffodils grew in a long belt along the shore that day, and Dorothy's journal described them tossing and dancing in the wind. Her brother left her out of the poem altogether.

Which unfinished poem did Samuel Taylor Coleridge say came from an opium dream interrupted by a visitor from Porlock?

Kubla Khan sat unpublished for almost twenty years, read only to friends, until Lord Byron urged its author to print it in 1816. It pictures Xanadu, the summer capital of a Mongol emperor.

Which seabird does the sailor shoot in Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, bringing a curse on his ship?

An albatross around the neck became an English idiom for a heavy burden of guilt because of this poem. The angry crew force the mariner to wear the dead bird.

Which collection by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge is widely seen as launching English Romanticism?

Lyrical Ballads was mostly Wordsworth's work, with Coleridge supplying only four poems. The preface added in 1800 came to be known as the manifesto of the whole movement.

Which London engraver printed his own illustrated Songs of Innocence and of Experience and claimed to see angels?

William Blake had sold fewer than 30 copies of the book by the time he died. He said that as a child he saw angels among the haystacks.

Which Edinburgh-born author of Waverley and Ivanhoe is credited with making the historical novel a Romantic genre?

Sir Walter Scott published Waverley anonymously, because he was already famous as a poet and the novel was a gamble. For nearly a century his novels were among the most widely read in Europe.

Which Scottish poet, regarded as a pioneer of Romanticism, wrote the words of Auld Lang Syne in 1788?

Robert Burns is toasted every 25 January at suppers held around the world. The night is more widely observed in Scotland than the official national day.

Which corner of England, home to William Wordsworth's Dove Cottage, lent its name to a circle of Romantic poets?

The Lake District gave the group a label that began as an insult from a hostile Edinburgh reviewer. Its three main figures were Wordsworth, Coleridge and Robert Southey.

Which university expelled Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1811 over a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism?

Oxford expelled him after he mailed the pamphlet to bishops and heads of colleges, then refused to say whether he wrote it. His co-author and closest friend, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, went too.

Which Egyptian pharaoh is the real ruler behind the shattered statue in Percy Bysshe Shelley's sonnet Ozymandias?

Ramesses II was in the news because a huge fragment of one of his statues was on its way to Britain. Shelley wrote the sonnet in a friendly contest with the poet Horace Smith.

Which German writer's 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther had young men across Europe copying its hero's clothes?

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was 24 and finished the book in five and a half weeks. Leipzig banned both the novel and the Werther outfit the following year.

Which German Romantic author wrote the tale that became Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker?

E. T. A. Hoffmann changed one of his own forenames to Amadeus in homage to Mozart. He was also a jurist and composer, and his eerie stories fed Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann.

Which Geneva-born author of The Social Contract anticipated Romanticism with his novel Julie and reverence for nature?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau gave the beauty of nature a spiritual value, an attitude the Romantics of the next century made their own. He held that uncorrupted morals prevail in the state of nature.

Which Russian poet of the Romantic era wrote Eugene Onegin and was fatally wounded in an 1837 duel?

Alexander Pushkin faced a French officer rumoured to be his wife's lover. One of his great-grandfathers was Abram Gannibal, an African-born general raised at the court of Peter the Great.

Which German painter showed a lone man with his back to the viewer in Wanderer above the Sea of Fog?

Caspar David Friedrich turned figures away from the viewer far more often than other artists, a device known by the German name Rückenfigur. Hamburg's Kunsthalle acquired the canvas in 1970.

Which French Romantic painted Liberty Leading the People to commemorate the Paris uprising of July 1830?

Eugène Delacroix painted it in the autumn of 1830, and the state bought it the next year for 3,000 francs. Its central figure is also read as Marianne, the symbol of the Republic.

Which vast Théodore Géricault canvas shows survivors adrift after a French naval frigate ran aground off Africa in 1816?

The Raft of the Medusa was researched in morgues and hospitals, and its painter brought severed limbs back to his studio to study their decay. Only 15 of the roughly 150 people set adrift lived.

Which Spanish painter showed Madrid rebels facing a French firing squad by lantern light in The Third of May 1808?

Francisco Goya proposed the picture himself once the occupiers had been driven out, and completed it in 1814. Its central victim, arms flung wide, has marks like stigmata on his right hand.

Which English painter showed a Trafalgar warship being towed to the breaker's yard in The Fighting Temeraire?

J. M. W. Turner left the picture to the nation, and a BBC radio poll in 2005 voted it Britain's favourite painting. It was put on the 20-pound note issued in 2020.

Which English landscape painter set The Hay Wain beside his father's mill at Flatford in Suffolk?

John Constable won a gold medal from the French king when the picture caused a sensation at the Paris Salon of 1824. He had first given it the plain title Landscape: Noon.

Which Swiss-born painter shocked London in 1782 with The Nightmare, in which a demon crouches on a sleeping woman?

Henry Fuseli had shown at the Royal Academy many times without success before this picture made his name. A print of it later hung in Sigmund Freud's apartment in Vienna.

Which Hungarian piano virtuoso drove 1840s audiences to such hysteria that Heinrich Heine named the craze after him?

Franz Liszt had admirers fighting over his handkerchiefs and gloves after his Berlin recitals of 1841. The poet Heine coined the word Lisztomania three years later.

Which English essayist won overnight fame in 1821 with an anonymous memoir of his addiction to laudanum?

Thomas De Quincey first ran his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in The London Magazine. An anonymous pamphlet soon appeared to warn readers against copying him.

In which century did Romanticism originate in Europe, before reaching its peak in the next one?

The 1700s were ending when the movement took shape, and it reached its peak between about 1800 and 1850. German critics were already writing of romantic poetry in the 1790s.

Which era of European history did the Romantics idealise as a time of heroism and harmony with nature?

The Middle Ages stood for a more organic way of life than the growing cities the Romantics saw around them. Critics complained that such rosy pictures left out the hardships of medieval life.

Which quality did Edmund Burke set against the beautiful in a 1757 treatise that fed the Romantic taste for awe?

The sublime and the beautiful shut each other out, Burke argued, and he was the first philosopher to say so. Preferring the first marked the turn from the Neoclassical to the Romantic era.

Which German forerunner of Romanticism took its name from a Friedrich Maximilian Klinger play first staged in 1777?

Sturm und Drang is usually translated as storm and stress, and its writers rebelled against the rules of neoclassicism. They hailed Shakespeare as a genius of the stage.

Which 1764 novel by Horace Walpole, first passed off as a translation of an old Italian book, launched Gothic fiction?

The Castle of Otranto opens with a giant helmet falling from above and crushing the heir just before his wedding. Its second edition added the subtitle A Gothic Story.

Which essayist led the Transcendentalists of New England and set out their philosophy in his 1836 essay Nature?

Ralph Waldo Emerson dropped his first name at Harvard and went by Waldo. The movement he led has been described as an American outgrowth of English Romanticism.

Which group of American landscape painters, founded by Thomas Cole, painted Romantic views of the Catskills?

The Hudson River School began when Cole took a steamboat upriver in the autumn of 1825 and hiked into the mountains to paint. Its name was first used as a put-down in the 1870s.

Which Romantic composer wrote mainly for solo piano and spent nine troubled years with the novelist George Sand?

Frédéric Chopin gave only 30 public performances after settling in Paris at 21, preferring the intimacy of the salon. An unhappy winter on Mallorca with Sand was one of his most productive spells.

Which French composer's Symphonie fantastique follows an artist who takes opium over his hopeless love for a woman?

Hector Berlioz modelled the woman on the Irish actress Harriet Smithson, whom he first saw playing Ophelia in 1827. She missed the 1830 premiere but married him three years later.

Which country's national epic, the Kalevala, did Elias Lönnrot compile from folk poetry and publish in 1835?

Finland drew from the poem a sense of nationhood that helped lead to independence from Russia in 1917. J. R. R. Tolkien drew on it for The Silmarillion.

Which German composer had his own opera house built at Bayreuth to stage his four-opera Ring cycle?

Richard Wagner opened the theatre in August 1876 with the first complete performance of the cycle. Its annual summer festival still stages his operas.