The eruptions of Vesuvius that took place during the later 18th century, while Sir William Hamilton was resident in Naples, provide a powerful metaphor for the many, often startling changes that took place in European culture around 1800. These changes are explored in a interdisciplinary course at The Open University, From Enlightenment to Romanticism c. 1780-1830 (A207), which was launched in 2004.

When looking for a theme that might convey something of the sense of innovation, of danger and of excitement of the period, 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.

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.

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.

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