Educational Media Reviews Online

Noted British biographer, novelist, and poet Peter Ackroyd places his highly personal stamp on this three part BBC2 television series, The Romantics. He promises to take his viewers “on a journey into the human imagination—back to a time when the values and ideas and dreams of the modern world were born.” This journey takes place in France and England and is set during the time of the Romantic poets (1760-1830) and today. Ackroyd argues that the promise of the French Revolution was undercut by the violence of the Terror; it was then transformed into the creativity of the British Romantic poets (Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron and Keats—with a nod to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), who preached the need for liberty and the power of imagination, nature, and humanity in an increasingly mechanized, industrial world.

The production values and aesthetics of this series are exceptional. The three one-hour episodes are entitled: “From Revolution to Nature,” “From Nature to Transcendence,” and “From Transcendence to Oblivion.” These segments, in turn, emphasize the ideas of liberty (birth of the individual), nature (under attack by industry) and eternity (a search for meaning in a world without God). Ackroyd is more than just a narrator—the camera often focuses on his eyes, then on what his eyes appear to be seeing—past and present, the real and imagined. Different actors portraying the Romantic poets appear beside him, or in their imagined landscapes, wearing a mixture of contemporary and modern dress, speaking words both prescient and haunting; the French Revolution happens under stormy skies in the shadow of the guillotine, over blood wet cobblestones; the fall of the Bastille morphs into the fall of the Berlin Wall; and Blake’s working class heroes become 21st century assembly-line seamstresses. “The Romantics” features a subtly sophisticated use of special effects: William Blake sees angels, Shelley has visions, and Coleridge transforms our understanding of the imagination through opium.

Although historians could argue with Ackroyd’s tendencies to simplify the historical process (particularly the French Revolution), this is a minor flaw when compared with the strengths of The Romantics. The images complement the ideas, the writing stimulates thought, and the acting captures the passion and intensity of the language of the Romantic poets. These three episodes should appeal to anyone with an interest in ideas in history and the role of the artist in understanding the world. Highly recommended.