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This text surveys the romantic age across all aspects of British culture, rather than in literary or artistic terms alone. The Companion's two-part structure presents 42 essays on major topics, by leading international experts, cross-referenced to an extensive alphabetical section covering all the principal figures, events and movements in the broad culture of the period. Aimed at students and general readers as well as scholars, the essays constitute an accessible, pluralistic, and modern social history of the epoch. The alphabetical entries can either be used alongside them, for deeper information on specific subjects, or as a free-standing reference tool. The volume as a whole embraces both high and low culture, and explores its subject across the whole breadth of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. The book's multi-disciplinary approach treats romanticism both in aesthetic terms - its meaning for painting, music, design, architecture, and above all literature - and as a historical epoch of "revolutionary" transformations which ushered in modern democratic and industrialized society. In this period Wedgwood turned taste into a commercial enterprise, Pierce Egan took Britain by storm with his accounts of low-life in the capital, and Mary Shelley created, in Frankenstein , one of the enduring myths of scientific advance. The Companion revitalizes canonical romantic figures in the context of the historical events, political and linguistic debates, commercial pressures, and plebeian subcultures of their day, as well as bringing back into historical focus individuals and events whose impact has often been muffled or forgotten. The text is accompanied by over 100 integrated illustrations and bibliographies accompany all the major essays.