Romantic England, 1785-1830
George III was a respected and popular king in 1785, and his court was
a peaceful one, but that was soon to change. In 1788, he suffered the
first of a series of "attacks of madness," now known to be caused by
the hereditary disease porphyria. He would suffer further fits in 1801
and 1804. Political unrest in 1789 began with fears that the same sort
of uprisings that led to the outbreak of the French Revolution could
happen in Britain. Thomas Paine's The
Rights of Man was published in 1791, and Lyrical Ballads by Wordworth and
Coleridge was published in 1798. From 1793 to 1815, Britain warred with
France, joining with other European powers against Napoleon, but by
that time George was king in title only. In 1810, he suffered an attack
that left him blind and deranged, unfit to rule, so his son, who
would later be known as George IV, served as Regent. During this
period, so-called "regency literature" was in vogue, with Jane Austen's
Pride and Prejudice published
in 1813. In 1815, Parliament passed the Corn Laws to protect British
agriculture from cheap imports; a newly empowered working class
supported parliamentary reforms, but they were harshly dealt with in
1819's Peterloo Massacre in Manchester, which left eleven people dead
and 500 injured.
George III's death in 1820 changed George IV's status from Prince
Regent to King. In his youth, George IV had been a generous patron of
the arts and had led a life of extravagance and excess; he contracted
John Nash to direct the design or redesign of a number of royal
properties, foremost among them the Royal Pavilion in Brighton. His
ten-year reign saw a number of cultural developments. In 1823, the
Royal Academy of Music was established; the British Museum, the first
public museum in the world, was extensively rebuilt; in 1824, the
National Gallery was established; and in 1825, Buckingham Palace was
reconstructed. In 1825, the Stockton and Darlington Railway, the
world's first railway service, was opened, and in 1825, trade unions
were legalized. London's Metropolitan Police Force was formed by Robert
Peel in 1829. That same year, the Catholic Relief Act was passed,
allowing Catholics to become members of Parliament. George IV died at
Windsor in 1830.