4.32 Europe: a.d. 1801 to 1900  (Page 22/27)

Early 19th century philosophy was little influenced by science but spawned some famous doubters such as Tom Paine, who wrote on the fallacies of the Christian legend; William Godwin, who felt that morality is nothing but a calculation of consequences and Malthus, who foretold the starvation of man resulting from his fertility. Britain led the world in literature. It was the time of the prolific novelist, Sir Walter Scott of Scotland, born in the preceding century, who wrote such favorites as The Lady of the Lake and Waverly. In England proper, women led among the novelists, with Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, unhappy Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth, but the men dominated poetry. In the Lake District of northwest England, early in the century, there lived three of England's great poets - William Wadsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the worst poet but the greatest gentlemen. Robert Southey. And then there were the "rebel poets" - Byron and Shelley - friends, philanderers, travelers and geniuses. Lord George Gordon Byron of noble heritage was born with a right club-foot, but this did not prevent him from living and loving extravagantly, in and out of marriage and in and out of many European countries. He died in Greece in 1824 as the leader of a squad of 600 Suliotes (part Greek, part Albanian barbarians) in the Greek Revolution. His partner in much of his sin and fun, Percy Bysshe Shelley, also of lesser nobility parents, was expelled from Oxford for favoring atheism and then became a renegade poet and lover, joining Byron in Switzerland and later in Italy. Not yet 30 years of age, he suffered a nervous breakdown, contemplated suicide and then was drowned off the coast of Italy in a storm and shipwreck in 1822. He had just written his last poem, entitled "The Triumph of Life". Last but not least of the poets was John Keats, who died of acute tuberculosis at the early age of 26 years.

Charles Darwin's Origin of Species in mid-century precipitated a whole series of profound re-evaluations in philosophy and social thought as well as another crisis in religious circles. His work, however, was only the end result of many previous studies. For example, Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, published in 1830, had emphasized the theory of uniformitarianism, that geological history was one of slow, uniform orderly development brought about by accumulation of constant, small changes. This was at odds with the Biblical creation. Darwin, himself, refrained from attacking the Bible, but others, like his friend and publicist, Thomas Huxley, were not so reticent. Darwinism was even used as an endorsement of industrial capitalism and laissez-f aire and conversely on the continent, particularly, as a racist-militarist endorsement that "the strong must rule". (Ref. [for all of ENGLAND] 55 , 139 , 68 , 211 , 45 , 125 , 175 )

Ireland deserves an additional paragraph or two in the tale of this century. After the Act of Union of 1800, which joined Ireland to England, Daniel O'Connell had won the right for Catholics to sit in Parliament and hold office, by 1829. Then he immediately began to agitate for repeal of the Union, to free Ireland again. By the 1840s Ireland's population had reached 8,500,000 (almost 3 times its 1973 level) and 4,000,000 of those people lived almost entirely on potatoes. The American potato had been introduced in the 1580s and the Irish had become very dependent on that food. When a parasitic fungus initiated the great potato blight in 1845, there were soon not only no potatoes to eat but none for seed for the next season and livestock had to be slaughtered, because they were also without food. Hunger was soon accompanied by scurvy (because no vitamin C) and then failing eyesight, acute nervous debilities and sometimes even dementia, apparently from the lack of vitamins A and B7, which had previously been obtained from milk. There was a tremendous emigration of the Irish, some to England, but most to the United States, so that by 1851 some 250,000 were arriving at Ellis Island each year. The famine only increased Irish bitterness with England and in the 1860s and 70s there was new agitation for independence, fanned by the Fenians, who acted secretly and violently. In opposition to that extremism, Charles Stewart Parnell- fought in Parliament for simple autonomy in internal matters. Some land reforms were obtained through the help of Gladstone, but to the English the idea of real separation was unthinkable.