OU on the BBC: In the Shadow of the Vesuvius - Volatile Times

Production team

When looking for a theme that might convey something of the sense of innovation, of danger and of excitement of the period around 1800, Vesuvius seemed an obvious choice. A volcano in eruption is by its nature excessive, indeed transgressive – it bursts its own boundaries and threatens to overwhelm everything that stands in its way. As such it can be used to stand for any force that challenges the established order of things.

So, when the French Revolution took place at the end of the 18th century, people inevitably saw it as the equivalent in political terms of a volcanic eruption in the natural world. This connection is made apparent by the print that was shown on the programme, where the word ‘liberty’ can be seen emerging out of the crater of a volcano.

Eruptions of Vesuvius took place during the later 18th century, while Sir William Hamilton was resident in Naples. These eruptions provide a powerful metaphor for the many, often startling changes that took place in European culture around this time.

Napoleon, who rose from obscurity to become ruler of much of Europe in the years after the revolution, applied the volcanic metaphor to his own career, describing himself as ‘a piece of granite thrown skywards’.

But the volcano could also serve as a symbol of more private and personal transgressions and the dangers that they involve, as in the novel Corinne (1807) by Mme de Staël, a theorist of Romanticism, where the poetess-heroine and her lover climb Vesuvius together just as it is becoming clear that their affair will destroy her.

Creative Commons Image mafalda.foto via Flickr
Naples [Image: malfalda.foto under CC-BY-NC licence]

For 18th century visitors to Naples, Vesuvius was not simply a thrilling, awe inspiring and potentially dangerous spectacle but, in the terminology of the time, ‘sublime’.

This was a key concept in what was then the brand new discipline of aesthetics; it was used above all to characterise large and terrifying natural phenomena, like volcanoes, which were said to evoke strong emotions in the mind of the viewer.

According to Edmund Burke, who published a highly influential analysis of the sublime in 1757, its appeal lay in ‘a sort of delightful horror’ far removed from the more gentle pleasures offered by the beautiful.

The emotional, irrational character of the sublime hardly fits in with conventional notions of the 18th century as the ‘age of reason’ and seems rather to look forward to the concerns that came to the fore in the Romantic era after 1800.

For one thing, Burke’s emphasis on darkness as a major cause of the terror that he saw as central to the experience of the sublime is not at all what you would expect of the Enlightenment. But his analysis of the sublime is also typical of the 18th century in the way that it seeks to extend human knowledge to phenomena that had previously seemed immune to rational understanding and explanation.

The choice of Vesuvius as a theme thus serves to reveal that the shift from Enlightenment to Romanticism was complex and nuanced, with aspects of both often co-existing side by side - as with the marriage of William Hamilton, the quintessential man of the Enlightenment in his commitment to empirical observation and his sense of public obligation, and Emma Hart, whose famous ‘attitudes’ represent a shift towards a Romantic concern with emotional intensity and subjective response.

A similar overlap between reason and emotion, empirical observation and subjective response can be discerned in Goethe’s comment on his ascent of Vesuvius: ‘Even in my transports, I did not forget to take notes’.

Goethe, who was working on his great poetic drama Faust throughout the entire period, resists neat categorisation as belonging to either of its two great cultural movements. Whilst he had a thoroughly Romantic belief in the priority of the creative imagination, he shared with Hamilton not only an interest in science but also a reverence for classical antiquity.

These typically enlightened interests persisted into the new century; the Royal Institution of Great Britain (founded in 1799), for example, fostered public interest in science and the architect John Soane continued to build in the classical style (whilst at the same time introducing into it his own highly individual innovations).

Focussing on Vesuvius also helps to introduce one of the central themes of the course: travel, tourism and a fascination with the foreign. For visitors to Naples, the poor inhabitants of the city seemed to belong to a completely different culture; according to Mme de Staël, the city belonged as much to Africa as to Europe.

Other travellers of the period went to Africa itself, notably Mungo Park whose 1799 account of his journey was a great bestseller.

By this time, the French Revolutionary wars had put an end to British travellers going on the ‘Grand Tour’ to Italy. This helps to account for the growing popularity of domestic tourism, notably to the Lake District, which provided the inspiration for poetry and painting by Wordsworth, Turner and Constable.

When peace returned to Europe after the fall of Napoleon in 1815, Vesuvius was no longer active and Naples had lost its attraction – at any rate, for Byron who scornfully wrote that it might as well be Ramsgate it was so full of tourists, and opted instead for travel further afield.

His poetry, which made him famous as the epitome of the brooding Romantic hero, can be aligned with the contemporary vogue for the exotic that also found expression in the Orientalist paintings of Delacroix and in the Royal Pavilion, Brighton. But it was not just a case of Europeans taking an interest in other cultures: a number of former slaves, such as Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, produced their own narratives of their experiences.

I have mentioned here only some of the historical figures and works of art and literature that are covered in The Open University's course From Enlightenment to Romanticism.

Among the others is Mozart’s opera, Don Giovanni (1787) which opens the course with a bang – if you’ll forgive the pun. Together, they evoke the great diversity and richness of this extraordinary moment in the history of European culture.

In the Shadow of the Vesuvius in more depth: