A Red, Red Rose (Historical Context)

Historical Context

Robert Burns is often considered a writer ahead of his time, who often embraced the idea of using common language to reach the common person just slightly before this idea became popularized as the Age of Romanticism swept across the globe. When Burns published “A Red, Red Rose” in 1794, the Age of Enlightenment was dwindling to an end. As with all historical ages, there is no definitive way of measuring the beginning or the end of the Enlightenment — historians can’t point to an exact moment when people across the earth agreed to adopt a set of beliefs, or when they stopped believing — but the term is useful in measuring the prevailing mood of the time. As far back as the 1500s, scientists and philosophers began to believe that it was possible to understand how the universe works by establishing laws and principles: they turned from the religious explanations that were provided by the church to scientific explanations that were supported by reason. Today, people take for granted the idea that scientific inquiry should be conducted according to reason, but in the sixteenth century, nearly two hundred years before Burns’s time, the idea was new and bold and slightly dangerous. The theory that Earth orbits the sun, which was first put forth by Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus in 1543 and later supported by Galileo, was opposed by the powerful Catholic church, which sentenced Galileo to life imprisonment for suggesting that God did not place humans at the center of the universe. A key discovery that prodded Enlightenment thinking along was Isaac Newton’s 1684 Laws of Motion, which included the theory of Universal Gravity that could explain events and physical actions just as clearly as referring to God’s divine will could. By the 1700s, writers and philosophers were expanding out from the idea that reason could explain the way the physical universe works. Since rational theory worked so well when applied to the physical universe, they decided that there was no reason that political and social interactions could not be explained with scientific equations in the same way. During the early part of the Enlightenment, writers, based mainly in France, faced social persecution for publishing ideas that challenged the reigning authorities. One of the key figures of the time was Voltaire, who was one of the most versatile writers of his time: his essays, plays, novels and poems supported the belief that neither the church nor the monarchy had any special knowledge of the world that people of ordinary intelligence could not attain. Another key figure was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who published his philosophical work The Social Contract in 1762: it supported the will of the people over the previously-accepted “divine rights” of the monarchy. Voltaire spent eleven months in the Bastille for his writings, and Rousseau was exiled from France. However, later thinkers, who were strongly influenced by the French thinkers, ended up having enormous impact on how society imagined itself. One example was the German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s 1781 book Critique of Pure Reason, which argued that moral choices must apply to all people at all times, thereby bringing the Enlightenment worship of logic to every decision a person makes. One of the results of the Age of Enlightenment was the American Revolution: the thinkers who wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776 did so believing the untested idea that people could rule themselves at least as well as monarchs could. The United States was structured on rationalist principles that derived from the Enlightenment. Following the War of Independence came the French Revolution, from 1789 to 1799: while the American Revolution established a new state according to democratic principles, the revolution in France reorganized an old, established state, taking power out of the hands of the aristocracy and trusting the common people’s ability to follow reason.

Overlapping with the Age of Enlightenment is another era which stressed the common people over the rules of the elite: literary historians call this period the Age of Romanticism. Like the Enlightenment, the thinkers of the Romantic Age did not think that one had to come from a certain privileged class to experience the world fully or to understand it. The key difference, though, was that Romantic writers stressed emotion, not reason. Romantic writers were not interested in finding new equations to let them measure and control the world, as Enlightenment thinkers had been. Romanticism was more concerned with experiencing nature, not understanding it. As such, Romanticism allowed for the possibility of an inexplicable, supernatural world. Writers in this movement were drawn to the mysteries of the exotic, the lure of romance. Because of this emphasis on experience, the Romantic poets moved even further than the Enlightenment away from the idea of elitism: they not only rejected the idea that anyone from higher social classes was particularly knowledgeable, they also refused to believe that educated people understood the world better than uneducated people, who felt experiences more deeply. Society was corruption of humanity’s natural goodness, so social success indicated a further distance from nature. Historians generally measure the Romantic period in literature as beginning with the publication of Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1798, although, as “A Red, Red Rose” demonstrates, the Romantics’ faith in simple, common, accessible language is one of the ideas that was around before the movement in general took root.

Compare & Contrast

• 1786: Farmers in Massachusetts, burdened by the debt of the Revolutionary War, participated in Shays’ Rebellion in order to protest against having to pay the colonial government with cash. The rebellion was fairly small-scale — rebels broke up a session of the state Supreme Court and tried unsuccessfully to take the state arsenal — but symbolically it was reminiscent of the uprising against oppression that led to the foundation of the country. The rebellion was one of the most glaring proofs that the Articles of Confederation that then governed the United States were inadequate: the following year the Constitution was drafted.

  1990s: Twenty-seven amendments have been added to the Constitution, representing very little change needed in a document written over two hundred years ago.

• 1786: Inventor Ezekiel Reed developed a machine that could produce nails. Previously, all buildings were held together with wooden pegs or handmade nails.

  1990s: The world’s tallest buildings, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, stand at 1,483 feet each.

• 1786: The first public golf club in the United States was opened in Charleston, South Carolina. The game had been popular in Scotland since the 15th Century.

  1990s: There are private golf courses with high membership fees, but the game of golf has been embraced by the general public in the United States, and public courses abound.

• 1786: The population of the United States was around 3.7 million people. The largest city, New York, had 32,000, with roughly 17,000 more on the surrounding farms that would later be incorporated into the city.

  1990s: The population of the United States is estimated to be around 260 million. New York is still the most populous area, with 7.5 million inhabitants.

• 1786: Coal miners in Scotland worked under conditions that resembled slavery, under an edict from George III: they were subject to long hours in deplorable conditions and were treated as criminals if they tried to leave. An edict allowing them freedom was signed in 1788 and enacted in 1789.

  1990s: Scotland is still a part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, having members elected to the House of Commons and the House of Lords.