This talk takes fresh look at the impact of the industrial revolution on British Romanticism by taking a primary visual approach. Eco-critics have argued that the ‘birth’ of the Anthropocene era in the late eighteenth century led to the simultaneous genesis of an oppositional ‘green’ Romanticism, yet surprisingly little work has been done on the visual dimension of this confrontation, even though paintings, reproductive prints and illustrations provided some of the most spectacular evidence for what we now regard as carbon catastrophe. I will show how the Romantic construction of the idyllic Lake District is a deeply unreliable ‘guide’ (pun intended) to the historical reality of rural industrialization that connected the English countryside to global networks of commerce, imperialism and enslaved labour. The ‘industrial gaze’ enables a fuller and richer understanding of the place of Romantic culture within this planetary upheaval, and begs the counterfactual question: was there another way?

Ian Haywood is Professor of English at Roehampton University, London. He has written extensively on eighteenth-and nineteenth-century British radicalism and its impact on literary and visual culture. His publications include The Revolution in Popular Literature (2004), Bloody Romanticism (2006), Romanticism and Caricature (2013), Spain in British Romanticism (2018, co-edited with Diego Daglia), Romanticism and Illustration (2019, co-edited with Mary Shannon and Susan Matthews), The Rise of Victorian Caricature (2020) and Queen Caroline and the Power of Caricature in Georgian England (2023). His next monograph project is Frankenstein and Romantic Visual Culture (contracted with Bloomsbury). He was the President of the British Association for Romantic Studies 2015-19, and co-ordinates the Romantic Illustration Network (https://romanticillustrationnetwork.com).