ABSTRACT
The forty-three years from the Fall of the Bastille (1789) to the passage of the first Reform Bill (1832) precisely cover the period in English literary history from the appearance of Blake's Songs of Innocence to the death of Sir Walter Scott. Commonly called the Romantic Period, it might be called the pre-Victorian, in a double sense, both chronologically as preceding the Queen's long reign and also because it saw England moving through the ordeal of the Industrial Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars to her period of dominance during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. 1
