Bacchus in Romantic England describes real drunkenness among writers and ordinary people in the Romantic age. It grounds this ‘reality’ in writings by doctors and philanthropists from 1780 onwards, who describe an epidemic of drunkenness. These commentators provide a context for the different ways that poets and novelists of the age represent drunkards. Wordsworth writes poems and essays evaluating the drunken career of his model Robert Burns. Charles Lamb’s essays and letters reveal a real and metaphorical preoccupation with his own drinking as a way of disguising his personal suffering; his companion Coleridge writes drinking songs, essays about drunkenness, and meditations about his own weakness of will that show both festive inebriety and consciousness of an inward abyss; Coleridge’s son Hartley, whose fate his father had prophesied, experiences drunkenness as the life-long humiliation described in his poems and letters. Keats’s complex dionysianism runs through ‘Endymion’ and the late odes, setting him at odds with his temperate hero Milton. Men in the Romantic age, such as Sheridan, Byron, Moor, and Clare, celebrate rowdy friendship with tales and songs of drinking; Romantic women novelists such as Smith, Edgeworth and Wollstonecraft depict these men stumbling home to abuse their wives. Although excessive drinking is real in the period, observers and participants can still maintain ambivalence about its power to release or to debase the human being.

alcohol
Coleridge
England
John Keats
John Milton
poem
Romanticism
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
William Wordsworth
Wordsworth
British and Irish Literature

• Introduction
• Historical Context of Romantic England
• Mythology and Symbolism of Bacchus
• Bacchus in Romantic Literature
• Bacchus in Romantic Art
• Cultural Significance and Interpretations
• Influence on Romantic Music and Theatre
• Comparative Analysis with Classical Depictions
• Legacy and Modern Reception
• Conclusion

John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, USA
Anya Taylor

Book Title
Bacchus in Romantic England

Book Subtitle
Writers and Drink 1780-1830

Authors
Anya Taylor

Series Title
Romanticism in Perspective:Texts, Cultures, Histories

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230377202

Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan London

eBook Packages
Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts Collection, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

Copyright Information
Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 1999

Hardcover ISBN
978-0-333-72521-4
Published: 11 November 1998

eBook ISBN
978-0-230-37720-2
Published: 11 November 1998

Edition Number
1

Number of Pages
XI, 264

Topics
Poetry and Poetics, Early Modern/Renaissance Literature, Sociology, general, British and Irish Literature