Robin Hood by Basdeo Stephen;

Author:Basdeo, Stephen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: TRUE CRIME/General
Publisher: Pen & Sword Books
Published: 2019-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Keats has a more pessimistic view, however, and he disagrees with Reynolds because he can see that industrial capitalism has forever harmed the natural world and it is impossible to recapture even the spirit of times gone by:

No! those days are gone away,

And their hours are old and gray,

And their minutes buried all,

Under the downtrodden pall.

Of the leaves of many years.

There are two meanings of the word ‘pall’, and either of these would fit into Keats’s lamentation of the loss of the medieval period. In the first instance, it means a type of funeral cloth which is placed over a coffin, which of course would merge into Keats’s vision of the irrecoverable loss, or death, of the idyllic ‘merrie England’. Furthermore, we saw earlier that even in 1804, Blake criticised the fact that industrialisation was taking hold rapidly and spoiling the green and pleasant land that England once was. Another meaning of the word ‘pall’ is that of a dark cloud of smoke or dust. This is equally applicable given the fact this was the period in which smoke pollution became an environmental problem, as ‘dark Satanic mills’ spewed forth large quantities of thick black smoke from their towers. While complaints about pollution caused by coal smoke have been voiced since the medieval period, black smoke became a signifier of the modern industrial city. New towns and cities could often be buried under a ‘pall’ for days at a time. The use of coal in industry, as well as domestic consumption of coal, contributed to the sharp rise in coal burning in early nineteenth-century Britain, with 15 million tonnes being burned annually by the year 1800. Even at this early stage there were reactions to the effects of the pollution that the increasing burning of coal for fuel was having on the urban environment: in Manchester, for example, Thomas Percival (1740–1804) established a municipal board of health, and he and the board regarded the combatting of smoke pollution as one of the most important issues of the day. Smoke pollution affected not only people’s health but the landscape as well. Buildings were gradually blackened and this in turn affected the way that people dressed: fashion became darker and even then clothing became soiled with soot as it was hung out to dry. Thriving businesses were set up as early as 1772 to refurbish clothes that had been smoked. While numerous cities in Britain were suffering from heavy smoke pollution by 1800, it was not until the mid- to late nineteenth centuries that many of the national and regional smoke abatement societies were founded, and the government finally took steps towards cleaning Britain’s air only during the 1950s.

It was not simply with smoke pollution that Keats was concerned, however, but also with deforestation in nineteenth-century industrial Britain. Romantic poets can be counted as early conservationists. Their fondness for the beauties of the natural world made them sensitive to environmental changes within their communities. Keats, therefore, imagines what Robin Hood and Maid

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