Conclusion

Abstract

At last I turn, somewhat reluctantly, to the task that the wise and generous reader of my first manuscript noticed that I had shirked. I had set out no ‘period-defining theory’: all I had done was to write a series of essays on some of the writing produced between 1824 and 1840 that most interested me. I had not even attempted as much as Virgil Nemoianu in 1984, who, although he accepts that the label he attaches to the writing of these years, the ‘Age of Biedermeier’, does not name a literary movement, still claims for it a loose coherence, a ‘Grundgefühl’.1 I decided to place my last chapter, ‘Domesticating Romanticism’, at the very end of my book in part as an acknowledgement of Nemoianu, for what can be a clearer instance of the ‘taming of romanticism’ than the replacement of an erotic love between brother and sister, an incestuous love that can never be socially accommodated, by a love between first cousins that, as Henry Alford found, can enjoy the blessing of the church, the approval of his family, and be happily acknowledged by all his parishioners.