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The Nineteenth Century, Romanticism

Timeline

TEXTS   CONTEXTS

1773
Thomas Hutchinson, Address to the Massachusetts Assembly

 

1781–1788
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions

1781
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

 

1787
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni is first performed

 

1789
The National Assembly in France issues its charter, Declaration of the Rights of Man

1791
Germaine de Staël, The Superiority of Moderation over Extremism

 

1792
Thomas Paine, Address to the
People of France • Jean-Paul Marat,
Address to the Convention on the
Crimes of King Louis XVI

 

1794
William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience

 

1798
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads • Dorothy Wordsworth begins her journals

 

1800
Novalis, Hymns to the Night

 
 

1801
United Kingdom of Great Britain (England and Scotland) and Ireland established

1802
Coleridge, Dejection: An Ode

1803
President Thomas Jefferson
purchases French “Louisiana”

 

1804
Napoleon has himself crowned
emperor of France

1805
Mercy Otis Warren, History of the
Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution

 

1806
First published lyrics by Anna
Petrovna Bunina

 

1808
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part I (Part II, 1832)

 

1812–1870
Charles Dickens, English
novelist

 

1812–1818 George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

1815
Battle of Waterloo, ending
Napoleon’s career

1816
Coleridge, Kubla Khan • John Keats, On First Looking into Chapman’s
Homer

 

1818
Germaine de Staël, Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution

 

1818–1820
Lyrics by Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats

 

1820
Alphonse de Lamartine, Poetic Meditations, his first collection of poems

 

1824
Giacomo Leopardi, Canzoni, his first collection of poems

 

1826
Friedrich Hölderlin, Gedichte

 

1827
Heinrich Heine, Book of Songs

 

1828
Victor Hugo, Odes and Ballads

 
 

1831
First preparation of chloroform
inaugurates a new medical era

1834
Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, The Queen of Spades

 

1837
Mikhail Yuryevitch Lermontov, The Poet’s Death

1837
Victoria crowned queen of the United Kingdom • Electric telegraph patented

1840
Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defense of Poetry; published posthumously

 

1842
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

 

1845
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

 

1847
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre • Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

 
 

1848
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
Communist Manifesto • Revolutions in France, Italy, Austria, Prague • Gold discovered in California

1850
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In
Memoriam A. H. H.

 

1842–1855
Robert Browning writes
poems, including "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"


1854
Electric lightbulb invented

1855
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself • Gérard de Nerval, Aurélia

 
 

1859
Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, presenting his theory of evolution

1860 Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Rimas

 
 

1861
Serfs emancipated in Russia •
Beginning of American Civil War

 

1863
Emancipation Proclamation frees slaves in the Confederate States of America

 

1864
Louis Pasteur, who formulated the germ theory of infection, invents
pasteurization

  1865
American Civil War ends • President
Abraham Lincoln assassinated •
Thirteenth amendment emancipates all slaves in the United States
  1867
Karl Marx, Das Kapital
  1874
First Impressionist exhibition, Paris
  1876
Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone
  1895
X rays discovered by Bavarian
physicist Wilhelm Röntgen

1884
Rosalía de Castro, Beside the River Sar

 

1890
Emily Dickinson, Poems, published posthumously

 

1891
Herman Melville leaves manuscript of Billy Budd, Sailor at his death; not published until 1924

 
 

1895
X rays discovered by Bavarian
physicist Wilhelm Röntgen