Timeline of the Romantic Period
On this page you will find an enhanced timeline which chronicles current affairs and significant events in the arts and sciences during the Romantic period. Spanning the period from 1770 to 1850, the timeline includes extensive lists of useful web links and further reading. In addition, a number of images are included to illustrate important events and figures of the period. Please click any of the events below for more information.
Science and the Arts
1770s
- 1770 - Wordsworth born, Cockermouth, Cumbria
- 1770 - Chatterton poisons himself in London, aged 17
- 1771 - Dorothy Wordsworth born, Cockermouth, Cumbria
- 1772 - Blake apprenticed to the antiquarian engraver James Basire
- 1772 - Coleridge born
- 1772 - Anna Letitia Aikin [later Barbauld] publishes her Poems (dates 1773 on the title-page), including ‘A Summer Evening’s Meditation’
- 1773 - Hannah More publishes The Search after Happiness
- 1773 - Anna Lætitia Aikin and John Aikin publish Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose
- 1774 - Southey born, Bristol
- 1775 - Lamb born, London
- 1775 - Jane Austen born, Steventon, Hampshire
- 1776 - Gibbon publishes first volume of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
- 1776 - Mary Robinson makes her debut as Juliet at Drury Lane Theatre
- 1777 - Sheridan’s School for Scandal opens at Drury Lane Theatre
- 1777 - Hannah More’s Percy opens at Drury Lane Theatre
- 1778 - Fanny Burney publishes Evelina
- 1778 - Hazlitt born, Maidstone, Kent
- 1778 - Sheridan’s The Critic opens at Drury Lane
- 1779 - Goethe’s The Sorrows of Werther first published in London
- 1779 - Blake admitted to study at the Royal Academy Schools
1780s
- 1781 - Fuseli paints The Nightmare
- 1782 - Hannah More publishes Sacred Dramas (including ‘Sensibility’)
- 1782 - Coleridge goes to school at Christ’s Hospital in London, where he meets Charles Lamb
- 1783 - Wordsworth’s father dies
- 1784 - Charlotte Smith publishes first edition of Elegiac Sonnets
- 1784 - Leigh Hunt born, Southgate
- 1785 - Ann Yearsley publishes Poems, on Several Occasions
- 1785 - Cowper publishes The Task
- 1785 - De Quincey born
- 1785 - Thomas Love Peacock born, Weymouth, Dorset
- 1786 - Benjamin Robert Haydon born
- 1786 - Beckford’s Vathek published, unauthorized
- 1787 - Wordsworth’s first published poem, a sonnet addressed to Helen Maria Williams, appears in the European Magazine (for March)
- 1788 - Byron born
- 1788 - Hannah More published Slavery: A Poem
- 1788 - Ann Yearsley publishes Poems on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade
- 1789 - Blake completes Songs of Innocence and begins The Book of Thel (1789-90)
1790s
- 1790 - Blake publishes The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
- 1790 - Helen Maria Williams publishes Letters Written in France in the Summer of 1790
- 1790 - Burke publishes Reflections on the Revolution in France
- 1790 - Wollstonecraft publishes A Vindication of the Rights on Men, in response to Burke
- 1790 - Kant publishes The Critique of Pure Reason
- 1791 - Paine publishes The Rights of Man Part I
- 1791 - Ann Radcliffe publishes The Romance of the Forest
- 1791 - Burns publishes ‘Tam O’Shanter’
- 1792 - Mary Wollstonecraft publishes A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
- 1792 - Paine publishes The Rights of Man Part II
- 1792 - Thomas Holcroft’s The Road to Ruin successfully performed at Covent Garden Theatre
- 1792 - Shelley born, Field Place, Sussex
- 1792 - Hannah More publishes Village Politics
- 1793 - Godwin publishes Political Justice
- 1793 - Publication of William Frend’s Peace and Union Recommended
- 1793 - Charlotte Smith publishes The Emigrants
- 1793 - John Clare born Helpstone, Northamptonshire
- 1793 - Hazlitt begins his studies at New College, Hackney
- 1793 - Felicia Dorothea Browne born, Liverpool
- 1793 - Blake advertises Songs of Experience
- 1793 - Blake begins to produce copies of Visions of the Daughters of Albion
- 1794 - Joseph Priestley emigrates to America
- 1794 - Ann Radcliffe publishes The Mysteries of Udolpho
- 1794 - Godwin publishes Caleb Williams
- 1794 - Godwin publishes ‘Cursory Strictures’ in the Morning Chronicle, leading to the acquittal of some defendants in the treason trials
- 1795 - Hannah More launches the Cheap Repository Tracts (2 million distributed by the end of the year)
- 1795 - Keats born
- 1795 - Southey publishes Joan of Arc (which includes passages by Coleridge)
- 1795 - Helen Maria Williams publishes Letters containing a Sketch of the Politics of France
- 1796 - Matthew Lewis publishes The Monk
- 1796 - Hartley Coleridge born
- 1796 - Mary Lamb stabs her mother to death and badly injures her father
- 1796 - Anna Seward publishes Llangollen Vale with Other Poems
- 1796 - Ann Yearsley publishes The Rural Lyre
- 1797 - Mary Godwin born
- 1797 - Mary Wollstonecraft dies; funeral 15 September
- 1797 - Coleridge sends a copy of the recently published Osorio to Sheridan at Drury Lane theatre, but it is rejected
- 1797 - Wordsworth’s play The Borderers sent to Covent Garden theatre, but rejected as unperformable the following month
- 1797 - Ann Radcliffe publishes The Italian
- 1798 - Coleridge preaches at the Unitarian chapel in Shrewsbury and is heard by Hazlitt, aged 17
- 1798 - Malthus publishes Essay on Population
- 1798 - Wordsworth and his sister depart from Bristol on a walking tour of the Wye Valley in the course of which he will compose ‘Tintern Abbey’ (returning to Bristol 13 July)
- 1798 - Lyrical Ballads published anonymously
- 1798 - Wordsworth in Germany, begins The Two-Part Prelude
- 1798 - Joanna Baillie publishes the first volume of her Series of Plays
- 1799 - Berkeley Coleridge dies (b. 14 May 1798)
- 1799 - Coleridge hears of Berkeley Coleridge’s death (in a letter from Poole, posted 15 March)
- 1799 - Thomas Hood born
- 1799 - Godwin’s St Leon published
- 1799 - Wordsworth and his sister move into Dove Cottage Grasmere
- 1799 - Wordsworth completes The Two-Part Prelude
1800s
- 1800 - Maria Edgeworth publishes Castle Rackrent anonymously
- 1800 - Joanna Baillie’s De Montfort produced at Drury Lane theatre by John Philip Kemble
- 1800 - Mary Robinson publishes Lyrical Tales
- 1801 - Lyrical Ballads (1800) published
- 1802 - Scott publishes Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border
- 1802 - Letitia Landon born
- 1802 - Foundation of the Edinburgh Review
- 1803 - Emerson born, Boston
- 1803 - Thomas Lovell Beddoes born
- 1803 - Mary Tighe publishes Psyche
- 1804 - Hawthorne born, Salem, Mass.
- 1805 - Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel published (sells 44,000 copies)
- 1805 - Samuel Palmer born, London.
- 1805 - Wordsworth completes The Prelude in thirteen books
- 1805 - Hazlitt publishes his first book, An Essay on the Principles of Human Action
- 1806 - Elizabeth Barrett Browning born, Durham
- 1806 - Charlotte Dacre publishes Zofloya
- 1806 - John Stuart Mill born, Pentonville
- 1807 - Charles and Mary Lamb, Tales from Shakespeare first published
- 1807 - Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head published
- 1807 - Wordsworth publishes Poems in Two Volumes
- 1808 - Leigh Hunt founds The Examiner
- 1808 - Scott publishes Marmion (2000 copies sell in two months)
- 1808 - Felicia Dorothea Browne (later Hemans) publishes her first book of Poems
- 1808 - Coleridge begins to publish The Friend
- 1808 - Blake completes Milton
- 1808 - Hannah More publishes Coelebs in Search of a Wife (which becomes a best-seller)
- 1808 - Goethe publishes Faust Part I
- 1809 - Poe born, Boston
- 1809 - Darwin born, Shrewsbury
- 1809 - Byron publishes English Bards and Scotch Reviewers
- 1809 - Joseph Johnson, bookseller and publisher, dies in London
1810s
- 1810 - Scott’s The Lady of the Lake published (sells 20,300 copies)
- 1810 - Goya etching The Disasters of War
- 1811 - Shelley expelled from Oxford for having co-written the Necessity of Atheism
- 1811 - Thackeray born
- 1811 - Austen’s Sense and Sensibility published
- 1812 - Anna Letitia Barbauld publishes Eighteen Hundred and Eleven
- 1812 - Dickens born
- 1812 - Byron publishes Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Cantos I and II (500 copies sell in three days)
- 1812 - Browning born, Camberwell
- 1812 - Shelley and Godwin meet in London
- 1812 - Coleridge lectures on Shakespeare, Surrey Institution (till 26 January 1813)
- 1813 - Coleridge’s Remorse opens at Drury Lane theatre in London to widespread acclaim
- 1813 - Austen’s Pride and Prejudice published
- 1813 - Shelley publishes Queen Mab privately (250 copies only); it was pirated in 1821
- 1813 - Henry James Pye, Poet Laureate, dies
- 1813 - Madame de Staël, De l’Allemagne published in French and English
- 1814 - Byron publishes The Corsair (10,000 copies sell in a day)
- 1814 - Burney, The Wanderer published
- 1814 - Austen’s Mansfield Park published
- 1814 - Scott’s Waverley published anonymously
- 1814 - Wordsworth publishes The Excursion
- 1814 - J.C. Spurzheim, phrenologist, visits Britain
- 1815 - Scott publishes Guy Mannering (entire edition sells out the day after publication)
- 1815 - Wordsworth publishes The White Doe of Rylstone, late May
- 1815 - James Gillray dies, London (aged 58)
- 1815 - Austen publishes Emma (dedicated to the Prince Regent)
- 1815 - Peacock published Headlong Hall
- 1815 - Indian jugglers perform at Olympic New Theatre, Strand, London, precipitating Hazlitt’s essay ‘The Indian Jugglers’
- 1816 - Shelley’s Alastor published in London
- 1816 - Leigh Hunt publishes Rimini
- 1816 - Charlotte Bronte born
- 1816 - Scott’s The Antiquary published (sells 6,000 copies in six days)
- 1816 - Keats’s ‘To Solitude’ (his first published poem) appears in the Examiner
- 1816 - Maturin’s Bertram opens at Drury Lane theatre to wild acclaim
- 1816 - Coleridge publishes Kubla Khan, Christabel and The Pains of Sleep
- 1816 - Mary Godwin begins writing the story that will turn into Frankenstein
- 1816 - Austen completes Persuasion
- 1816 - Byron publishes Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto III
- 1817 - Shelley’s Hymn to Intellectual Beauty published in the Examiner
- 1817 - Southey’s Wat Tyler published
- 1817 - Hazlitt and Hunt publish The Round Table
- 1817 - Keats’s Poems published
- 1817 - Byron published Manfred
- 1817 - Hazlitt publishes Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays
- 1817 - Coleridge publishes Biographia Literaria and Sibylline Leaves
- 1817 - Thoreau born
- 1817 - Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion published posthumously
- 1817 - Haydon hosts ‘the immortal dinner’
- 1817 - Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine founded
- 1818 - Mary Shelley publishes Frankenstein anonymously
- 1818 - Shelley publishes The Revolt of Islam
- 1818 - Scott publishes Rob Roy
- 1818 - Byron publishes Beppo
- 1818 - Byron publishes Childe Harolde Canto IV
- 1818 -Hazlitt publishes A View of the English Stage
- 1818 - Emily Brontë born, Thornton
- 1818 - Karl Marx born, Trier, Rhine Province, Prussia
- 1818 - Lamb publishes his Works (2 vols) with C. and J. Ollier
- 1818 - Keats publishes Endymion
- 1818 - Croker publishes a hostile review of Keats’s Endymion in the April number of the Quarterly Review
- 1818 - Thomas Love Peacock publishes Nightmare Abbey
- 1819 - Ruskin born, London
- 1819 - Polidori publishes The Vampyre: A Tale by Lord Byron in the New Monthly Magazine
- 1819 - John Hamilton Reynolds publishes Peter Bell. A Lyrical Ballad
- 1819 - Wordsworth’s Peter Bell published
- 1819 - Whitman born
- 1819 - Byron’s Don Juan Cantos I and II published anonymously by Murray
- 1819 - Melville born, New York
- 1819 - Hazlitt publishes Political Essays
- 1819 - Shelley prints The Cenci in Livorno
- 1819 - Shelley composes ‘The Mask of Anarchy’
- 1819 - Shelley composes ‘Ode to the West Wind’
- 1819 - William Hone and George Cruikshank publish The Political House that Jack Built
- 1819 - Shelley composes 'England in 1819'
- 1820 - London Magazine begins publishing
- 1820 - Clare, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery published; it runs to four editions and sells over 3,500 copies
- 1820 - Haydon’s Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem
- 1820 - Peacock publishes ‘The Four Ages of Poetry’ in Ollier’s Literary Miscellany, No.1
- 1820 - Keats publishes Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St Agnes, and other Poems
- 1820 - Wordsworth publishes The River Duddon
- 1820 - Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound … with other Poems published in London
- 1820 - Blake finishes work on the first illuminated copy of Jerusalem
- 1820 - Lamb publishes the first of his Elia essays, ‘Recollections of the South Sea House’, in the London Magazine
1820s
- 1821 - Shelley writing ‘A Defence of Poetry’ (not published till 1840)
- 1821 - Keats dies, Rome
- 1821 - John Scott, editor of the London Magazine, killed in a duel
- 1821 - Hazlitt, Table-Talk, volume 1 published
- 1821 - Shelley publishes Adonais in Pisa
- 1821 - Clare, The Village Minstrel published (sells 800 copies in three months)
- 1821 - Cobbett sets out on rural rides
- 1821 - De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater Part I appears in the London Magazine, followed by Part II in November
- 1821 - Fight between Tom Hickman (the Gasman) and Bill Neat at Hungerford, Berkshire, attended by Hazlitt
- 1821 - Byron publishes Sardanapalus, The Two Foscari, and Cain
- 1822 - Hazlitt’s ‘The Fight’ published in the New Monthly Magazine
- 1822 - Hazlitt Table Talk volume II published
- 1822 - Shelley drowned off Livorno
- 1822 - De Quincey publishes Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in book form
- 1822 - The Liberal No. 1 published
- 1822 - Lamb’s Elia published – the first collected volume of Elia essays
- 1822 - Matthew Arnold born.
- 1822 - Mary Shelley publishes Valperga
- 1822 - Hazlitt’s ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’ published in The Liberal
- 1822 - Hazlitt publishes Liber Amoris
- 1822 - Hemans publishes The Siege of Valencia
- 1822 - Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein opens at the Lyceum, London, for a run of 37 performances – the first of many adaptations
- 1822 - Hemans The Vespers of Palermo performed at Covent Garden theatre
- 1824 - Byron composes ‘On this day I completed my thirty-sixth year’
- 1824 - Shelley’s Posthumous Poems published, edited by Mary Shelley
- 1824 - James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner published in London
- 1825 - Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age, published anonymously
- 1825 - Hemans publishes The Forest Sanctuary and Other Poems
- 1825 - Barbauld’s Works posthumously published by her niece, Lucy Aikin
- 1826 - Mary Shelley publishes The Last Man
- 1826 - Blake publishes Job
- 1826 - Hazlitt publishes The Plain Speaker
- 1827 - Clare, The Shepherd’s Calendar, with Village Stories and Other Poems, published (sells only 425 copies over two and a half years
- 1828 - First two volumes of Hazlitt’s Life of Napoleon Buonaparte published
- 1828 - Hemans publishes Records of Woman; goes into a second edition in October
- 1828 - D.G. Rossetti born
- 1829 - Coleridge publishes On the Constitution of Church and State
- 1830 - Hazlitt’s Life of Napoleon Buonaparte volumes 3 and 4 published
- 1830 - Christina Rossetti born
- 1830 - Emily Dickinson born, Amherst, Mass.
1830s
- 1831 - Mary Shelley publishes revised edition of Frankenstein
- 1832 - Hunt publishes Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy
- 1832 - Posthumous publication of Goethe’s Faust Part 2
- 1835 - Mary Shelley publishes Lodore
- 1835 - Clare’s The Rural Muse published
- 1839 - Shelley’s collected Poetical Works (4 vols) edited by Mary Shelley begins publishing (until May)
- 1839 - De Quincey begins his ‘Lake Reminiscences’ in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine (for January) with the first part of his essay on Wordsworth
1840s
- 1840 - Thomas Hardy born
- 1844 - Gerard Manley Hopkins born
- 1845 - De Quincey begins Suspiria de Profundis in Blackwood’s (for March), which continues in issues for April, June, and July
- 1846 - Brontë sisters publish Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell
- 1846 - Benjamin Robert Haydon commits suicide
- 1847 - Charlotte Brontë publishes Jane Eyre
- 1847 - Emily Brontë publishes Wuthering Heights
- 1848 - Marx and Engels publish Communist Manifesto
- 1849 - Wordsworth’s Poetical Works (6 vols), last edition in his lifetime, begins publishing
- 1849 - De Quincey publishes ‘The English Mail-Coach’, anonymously, in Blackwood’s (for October)
1850s
Current Affairs
1770s
- 1770 - Boston Massacre
- 1772 - Emmanuel Swedenborg dies
- 1772 - Lord Mansfield delivers judgement in the case of James Somersett, a runaway slave
- 1773 - Boston Tea Party
- 1776 - American Declaration of Independence
1780s
- 1780 - Gordon Riots in London
- 1781 - Cornwallis surrenders to Washington at Yorktown
- 1783 - Pitt becomes Prime Minister at the age of 24 (until 1801
- 1787 - Warren Hastings impeached by Burke in House of Commons
- 1787 - The Society for the Purpose of Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade established in London
- 1787 - American Constitution drafted and signed
- 1788 - George III suffers mental collapse
- 1789 - Storming of the Bastille
- 1789 - Price addresses the London Revolution Society
1790s
- 1790 - President Washington delivers the first ‘State of the Union’ address
- 1790 - The Ogé rebellion in San Domingo
- 1791 - Anti-Dissenter riots in Birmingham during which Joseph Priestley’s house is burned down by Church-and-King mobs
- 1791 - Slave Riots in San Domingo
- 1791 - United Irishmen founded by Wolfe Tone in Belfast to fight for Irish nationalism
- 1792 - Paine charged with sedition
- 1792 - September Massacres of royalists and other prisoners in Paris
- 1792 - Robespierre elected to the National Assembly
- 1793 - Louis XVI executed
- 1793 - Committee of Public Safety formed, led by Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just and Couthon
- 1793 - Marat murdered in his bath by Charlotte Corday, heralding the Terror
- 1793 - Marie Antoinette Executed
- 1794 - Robespierre executed; end of the Terror
- 1794 - Treason trials begin in London with the trial of Thomas Hardy
- 1796 - Napoleon commands Italian campaign, defeating Austrians in a sequence of battles leading to the Peace of Leoben
- 1798 - Uprising of the United Irishmen, led by Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Wolfe Tone
- 1798 - Battle of the Nile; Nelson victorious over the French
1800s
- 1801 - Toussaint L’Ouverture takes command of Haiti, liberates black slaves
- 1801 - Battle of Copenhagen
- 1802 - Peace of Amiens, bringing a temporary respite to the war between France and Britain (until May 1803)
- 1803 - Toussaint L’Ouverture dies in prison
- 1805 - Emmet leads an uprising in Ireland which fails due to lack of French support
- 1805 - Battle of Trafalgar, Nelson mortally wounded
- 1805 - Napoleon defeats Russian and Austrian armies at Austerlitz
- 1806 - Pitt dies; Baron Grenville becomes head of the Coalition of the Ministry of All the Talents (until 26 March 1807)
- 1807 - Abolition Act receives royal assent, abolishing the slave trade
- 1807 - Peninsular War begins
- 1809 - Lincoln born, Kentucky
- 1809 - Madison inaugurated as fourth US President
1810s
- 1811 - Prince of Wales declared Regent, his father having been recognized as insane
- 1811 - First Luddite riots in Nottingham
- 1812 - Assassination of the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, precipitating Liverpool’s administration
- 1812 - America declares war on Britain
- 1812 - Napoleon enters Moscow
- 1813 - Leigh Hunt sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for libelling the Prince Regent
- 1814 - Allies take Paris (news reaches London 5 April)
- 1814 - Napoleon defeated at Toulouse; exiled to Elba
- 1815 - Leigh Hunt released from prison
- 1815 - Napoleon escapes from Elba (news of which reaches London on 10 March)
- 1815 - Napoleon defeated at Waterloo; exiled to Saint Helena in August
- 1816 - Spa Fields riots in London
- 1817 - Monroe becomes fifth President of US
- 1817 - William Hone (radical publisher) tried for publishing ‘blasphemous parodies’
- 1817 - Princess Charlotte dies in childbirth
- 1819 - University of Virginia founded by Jefferson
- 1819 - Peterloo Massacre takes place, St Peter’s Fields, Manchester
- 1819 - Trial of Richard Carlile, radical publisher
- 1819 - Bolivar becomes President and military dictator of Colombia
1820s
- 1820 - Military insurrection at Cadiz precipitates revolution in Spain, leading to the restoration of the 1812 constitution in March
- 1820 - Cato Street Conspiracy foiled
- 1820 - Start of the trial of Queen Caroline
- 1823 - Monroe Doctrine enunciated in America
- 1825 - John Quincy Adams elected sixth US President
- 1828 - Wellington becomes Prime Minister
- 1828 - Repeal of Test and Corporation Acts that kept non-Anglicans from holding office
- 1829 - Catholic Relief Act
- 1829 - Metropolitan Police Act puts ‘Peelers’ on the streets of London
1830s
- 1831 - Lord John Russell introduces Reform Bill
- 1832 - Reform Bill receives royal assent
- 1833 - Emancipation Act receives its final reading, abolishing slavery in British colonies
- 1834 - Poor Law Reform Act
- 1836 - Siege of the Alamo; Davy Crocket killed
- 1838 - Charter presented to Parliament by National Convention of Chartists
1840s
- 1838 - Outbreak of Opium War with China
- 1848 - Gold discovered in California; beginning of the gold rush
- 1848 - Second Republic proclaimed in France
- 1848 - Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte elected President of France