There are moments in every life when the importance of wellbeing becomes unavoidable: moments of acute illness or extreme anxiety; moments when we must confront death. As we revise this introduction in 2021, we are collectively experiencing one such moment. In the current global COVID-19 pandemic, our lives have been profoundly affected by issues of contagion, health, mortality, and the deep systemic inequalities that shape embodied experience. Those of us in teaching professions have additionally had to confront the pandemic’s complex effects on the relationship between wellbeing and pedagogy. We may find ourselves struggling to balance our own wellbeing against our institution’s, advocating for our students’ wellbeing, and thinking in new ways about the relationship between labor (our own and our students’) and mental and physical health.
As we’re reminded of our vulnerability, we also may feel more acutely the value of the humanities and the arts. We look to writing, film, and music for meaning and solace. We may look to the past for insight into the present: how did we get here, and how do we move forward? As scholars of Romantic literature and culture, we know that the years between 1750 and 1850 were pivotal for shaping contemporary ideas about wellbeing, health, illness, and disability. In this introductory essay, we hope to show that the Romantic era can also offer resources for thinking about the particular intersection between wellbeing and pedagogy. Romantic thinkers mapped out territory we would do well to revisit, scouting out the pitfalls they dug for us and using their insights to help us identify and avoid new ones.
To say that the Romantics believed wellbeing informed pedagogy is in some ways to state the obvious. In the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802),” Wordsworth explains that poets can enlighten a reader’s understanding, provided the reader “is in a healthful state of association,” and in “The Tables Turned,” Wordsworth posits that “spontaneous wisdom” is “breathed by health”—as if health were wisdom’s prerequisite.
Contrarily, in Keats’s well-known “Vale of Soul-Making” letter, he suggests that good poetry, like life itself, is a pedagogical “hornbook” that depends on a person’s suffering through a “World of Pains and troubles.”
Consider, too, texts like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” which posit a complex, generative relationship between pain, experience, and knowledge.
Though they might have disagreed on the precise relationship between learning and wellbeing, Romantic writers took it for granted that there was one, and that it mattered.
The period’s scholars have recently started to follow suit, asking how wellbeing and education might be related.
In doing so, they have moved beyond questions about art’s therapeutic and pedagogical power that have interested Romanticists since New Criticism.
In the past two decades, critics have expanded their approach to wellbeing, often by exploring embodiment, a topic previously deemed “unromantic.”
For example, interdisciplinary fields like disability studies, literature and medicine, and narrative medicine have used new lenses to focus our attention on the disabled, ill, and injured bodyminds that were there all along in Romantic writing.
Scholars have also reassessed the ways in which concepts like the imagination and the sublime may be understood as embodied for Romantic-era authors.
Further, Bigger 6 and the V21 Collective have called us to remember that the question of whose bodymind always matters. The canon as it emerged in the Victorian era occluded the voices of marginalized people that we must foreground to understand the stakes of Romanticism’s conceptual preoccupations. In focusing on British Romanticism, this volume considers the decades during which a rising medical profession helped consolidate bodily norms as well as what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls the “normate”: “the corporeal incarnation of culture's collective, unmarked, normative characteristics.”
While oppressive structures of race, disability, and gender predate the nineteenth century, the rise of professional medicine during the Romantic era gave them a destructive scientific legitimacy. During the era, physicians worked to justify the ideas that disabled bodies should be cured and that non-white and non-male bodies were designed to be, in different ways, subjugated.
Yet in the decades leading to the consolidation of these violent norms, authors also explored a variety of approaches to wellbeing that we can now recognize as distinct alternatives—from Thomas Beddoes’s conception of “health” as a functional and aesthetic category, to Charles Lamb’s embrace of non-normative embodiment, to Dorothy Wordsworth’s negotiation of chronic illness.
These authors wrote alongside systems that sought to construct and reinforce norms of embodiment. Recovering their voices shows us how the structures that shape our lives were not inevitable. They help us to understand how the past informs the present, and to imagine different futures.
How do these lines of research help us better understand wellbeing in the classroom? Addressing that question is the main task of this volume. By drawing links between wellbeing and pedagogy, we pick up on the lively, robust, and generous conversations about this topic that already exist on social media and have begun to take place at our conferences.
By engaging some of those conversations, we invite our field to take them further. As we will show, Romantic thinkers saw wellbeing as relative, embodied, and inextricable from social and political circumstances. Teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic has urgently clarified how dependent good pedagogy is upon such multidimensional wellbeing—our students’ and our own.