Essay: Explore How Historical Events Changed Society: Renaissance, Romanticism and Victorian Age

Many historical events changed the course of history and inevitably they affected society. Some of them brought problems and some brought salvation. Some of them had a short span of life and some had a long span of life. What they have in common is they affected the period’s structure. This text will be about some of the events. The events that this text will analyse are the Romantic Period, the Victorian Age and the Renaissance. In this text I will analyse the events in three aspects and these are defining events, giving historical information and literary examples for each event.
The first event is the Renaissance. The word Renaissance means “rebirth” in French. Crisis in the middle ages was the first step for Renaissance to occur. The Middle Ages was also known as the Dark Ages and, The Renaissance was the light that ended dark times for science, art, literature, education, and social life. One of the biggest influencers of the Renaissance was Henry the VIII.. He closed the obscurantist Catholic Church, and Catholic Church lost its dominance over people with this people started to think more freely, authors started to write about different topics. Scientists and philosophers continued their works safely. Meantime, Europe was living under the influence of the Renaissance, England was dealing with civil wars. Such as the War of Roses and the Hundred Years War. Due to these circumstances, there was no ideal ambiance for Renaissance. England was the last one to be affected by the Renaissance. Most of the authors and playwrights started to write against Cotholic Church and politics. Some of the most important literary works of the Renaissance are Utopia by Thomas More, Prince by Nicolas Machiavelli, and some of Shakespeare’s works such as Hamlet, Richard III and Romeo and Juliet.
Next, I will be analysing the Romantic Period. The Romantic Period is also known as Romanticism. Romanticism is a musical, literary, artistic and intellectual
movement that originated in Europe in the 18th century. The first signs of Romanticism can be seen in around 1770 but it took place mostly in between 1800 and 1850 and affected literature, art, philosophy, music and even science in Europe. It increased the interest in nature and helped people with their imagination and expressing their emotions. The Industrial Revolution is the main cause for this movement. Because of the Industrial Revolution and politics people started to leave big cities and they found the beauty and importance of nature and themselves. William Wordsworth is the biggest name of British Romanticism. Nature and emotions first find voice in his poetry and Lyrical Ballads is the kick-starter of the Romanticism movement in England. Lyrical Ballads is a compilation of William Wordsworth and his fellow writer Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poems.
Lastly, I will write about the Victorian Age. The Victorian Age was named after Queen Victoria’s 63 years of reign. Queen Victoria was a powerful and intellectual person. She ruled a quarter of the world’s population. With her reign, there were great changes and developments within Britain in science, technology, cultural, and social life. Due to these developments and other factors, this period is also named as Age of Invention. In the Victorian Age, British Empire was doing great in economics, and they were investing in technology. They were improving quickly in technology so the Industrial Revolution was accepted by people in a short time. With industrialization, the need for manual labor was getting less and less every day and people were finishing their work in less time than before. This helped people to spare time for reading and, more people were starting to read newspapers, novels, and poets. Publishing Houses became so popular that everybody invested in them. Aside from playwrights, novelists started to make money. Harrison Ainsworth was the best-selling author of the period but Charles Dickens was the most famous novelist of the Victorian Age. He heavily worked for the entertainment public. He wrote about social problems a lot. William Thackeray, Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Bronte, Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Hardy, and Charles Reede are some of the most famous novelists of the Victorian Age. Charles Reede was doing something never been done before and writing about prison life and treatments of criminals and mad people in asylums such as his work Hard Cash.
To sum up, there are many important breaking points, periods, movements in history. In this text, we analyzed three of them. All three of them affected and changed the era they occurred and caused other events to happen. While changing the course of history, they gave us new artists, new topics, new lives, new ideas, and new experiences. Without those breaking points we could never be the same as we are now in many aspects of life.