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218 The Romantic period 1789–1832
the increased animal farming necessary to feed a rapidly expanding
population; but fewer labourers were required to work the land, and
that led to an exodus to the cities of large numbers of people seeking
employment. Increasing mechanisation both on the land and in the
industrial factories meant continuing high levels of unemployment.
Workers in the rural areas could no longer graze the animals on which
they partly depended for food and income. Acute poverty followed.
These developments literally altered the landscape of the country. Open
fields were enclosed by hedges and walls; in the cities, smoking factory
chimneys polluted the atmosphere; poor-quality houses were built in large
numbers and quickly became slums. The mental landscape also changed.
The country was divided into those who owned property or land – who
were rich – and those who did not – who were poor. A new world was
born, which Benjamin Disraeli, who was both a novelist and Prime Minister
of Britain under Queen Victoria, was later to identify as ‘Two Nations’.
The Industrial Revolution paralleled revolutions in the political order.
In fact, Britain was at war during most of the Romantic period, with a
resultant political instability. Political movements in Britain were
gradual, but in countries such as France and the United States political
change was both more rapid and more radical. The American
Declaration of Independence (from Britain) in 1776 struck an early
blow for the principle of democratic freedom and self-government,
but it was the early years of the French Revolution, with its slogan of
‘Equality, liberty and fraternity’, which most influenced the intellectual
climate in Britain. In this respect the storming of the Bastille in 1789,
to release political prisoners, acted as a symbol which attracted the
strong support of liberal opinion.
Debate in Britain was, however, polarised between support for radical
documents such as Tom Paine’s Rights of Man (1791), in which he
called for greater democracy in Britain, and Edmund Burke’s more
conservative Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Later in the
1790s, more measured ideas are contained in the writings of William
Godwin, an important influence on the poets Wordsworth and Shelley,
who advocated a gradual evolution towards the removal of poverty
and the equal distribution of all wealth. Such a social philosophy caused
much enthusiasm and intellectual excitement among many radical writers