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This chapter shows that the Romantic period was very much a preview – similar and yet different – of our own “connected condition.” Romantic poets witnessed the rise of transcription technologies (shorthand), large-scale data collection and processing through standardized forms, social networks and communications and transportation infrastructure, and instantaneous contact at a distance via telegraphy. The chapter goes on to discuss the concept of the “dream of communication,” ideals of good writing style (like clarity and brevity) treated by the New Rhetoric of the eighteenth century, the book’s own method (the “normal method”), poetic difficulty, and finally the chapters to come.

The effects of Pitt’s government’s domestic policy of alarmism, directed at proponents of parliamentary reform, on the development of English Romantic literature, may be viewed as inconsequential collateral damage, or as highly significant distortions of otherwise promising literary works and careers. The effects of Alarmism are as far-reaching and difficult to document as those of McCarthyism in 1950s America. William Pitt himself participated directly in these culture wars through his creation and protection of The Anti-Jacobin of 1797–8. Alan Liu found Unusual Suspects to be an important ‘census of the disappeared’ when reviewing an earlier version of it in Romanticism, History, Historicism (2009). The impact of Alarm on literary works and careers is undeniable, but hard to quantify conclusively. Some works and careers are being recuperated, two centuries later, but Pitt’s defeat of the parliamentary reform movement in the 1790s also spelled defeat for many promising literary careers.

This chapter presents Irving Howe's 1971 essay “The City in Literature,” in which he talks about how the city is portrayed as a major locale in literature. Howe first looks at pastoral poetry as a genre before turning to Western tradition that views the city as both an inimical and a threatening place. He traces our modern disgust with the city to the eighteenth-century novels and looks at Romantic literature's assault upon the city. He also examines what literature may tell about the city and vice versa, together with the so-called the myth of the modern city. Howe concludes by describing two significant visions of urban life in modern literature: the first is benign, while the second proceeds in a cultural line from Charles Baudelaire through T. S. Eliot and then through Eliot's many followers.

This chapter begins by presenting a chilling scene in Romantic literature, where Goethe lies abed with his Roman mistress, enraptured by her body and overcome by pleasure, yet composed enough to discern the outline of metrical patterns along the contours of her back. In an equally signatory Italian coming-of-age moment some hundred years later, Lucy Honeychurch and George Emerson, from E. M. Forster's A Room with a View, stand together above the Arno, after witnessing a murder over a few liras. Something about the horror they observed has brought them closer and, in a sense, sealed their love. Into their dull world of English manners, an alien and unsettling “Italic” emotional economy has entered, and, George realizes, it will rend asunder the traditional, respectable bonds that their English identity was to have provided them.

This chapter examines seduction by hostesses in Romantic literature. In his autobiography, Confessions, Rosseau became a long-term guest in Madame de Waren's house in the town of Annecy. She remained his surrogate mother and hostess, and shared his bed as well. In Stendhal's Red and Black, the hostess Madame de Rênal treats Julien Sorel, a household servant, as her surrogate son, lover, and guest. The chapter also examines Coleridge's Christabel, a Gothic ballad in which the hostess is both eroticized and repressed.