Chapter Sixteen argues that late-Romantic literature also reflects Europe’s new global consciousness, a product of the modern nation-state rather than of cosmopolitanism. What Goethe referred to as Weltliteratur is updated here as global literature. The chapter first defends the historical and theoretical application of globalisation to the Romantic context, linking it with the development of nationalism and imperialism, and in particular the increasingly transnational book trade. It then analyses this ‘global imaginary’ from a British perspective in Scott’s The Field of Waterloo, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and Felicia Hemans’ Records of Woman. These texts show among other things how Britons reacted to their nation’s new global power and interconnectedness, which made them feel more dependent and vulnerable, but also contributed to a sense of ‘global sociality’. The last section briefly looks at how other European literatures likewise reflected their national as well as imperial anxieties in the wake of Napoleon, examining Scott’s influence abroad in a novel by de la Motte Fouqué.

This chapter investigates the formal and generic experimentation of four late poems that rework the concerns of the Lyrical Ballads for the new contexts – public and private – of the late 1820s, 1830s and 1840s. Several intertwined themes run through my discussion: Wordsworth’s efforts to set his new poems in a circle of writers and readers, substituting for the old Grasmere circle but more socially conventional; his critical response to the tales and romances of Scott and Hemans; his renewed interest in people, especially women, who, by virtue of dwelling at or beyond society’s borders, communicate with or embody the world of death, and the feminism of this interest and the limitations of this feminism.

The poet’s conservative revisioning of the Swiss myth is developed in Chapter Six, which looks at Restoration-period representations of Switzerland, unearthing what Paul Hamilton calls the ‘political imaginary’ of the Restoration. After discussing the country’s socio-political situation as well as changes between the Grand Tour and modern tourism, I explore how Whig and Tory travelers alike, including Byron, the Wordsworths, the Shelleys, Mackintosh, Southey, Samuel Rogers, and Francis Jeffrey tried to revive their liberal hopes in Switzerland after 1814 by revisiting Whiggish topoi, but also by meditating over the ruins of revolution. I then look at Hemans’s and Scott’s late Romantic representations of the Swiss myth as a model of Christian patriotism and domestic attachment, yet one which never completely sheds its residual significance as a democratic trope. Drawing on Switzerland’s medieval past, and notably on the story of William Tell and on the wars of liberation, their texts offer a paradoxical mix of conservative and progressive values, or what I call Restoration republicanism.

She was 68, he was 24. Both hit the winter of 1812 with poetic heat that radiated into a future bereft of British self-recognition, importance and supremacy.