Tuberculosis' Influence on 19th Century Literature

"The captain of all these men of death that came against him to take him away, was the consumption, for it was that that brought him down to the grave."-John Bunyan: The Life and Death of Mr. Badman

Tuberculosis, for a very brief time in history, became a symbol for a tragic beauty that marked the social structure and literature, art and theater of the day. Although the disease was the most virulent and potent killer that transcended all races, classes and nations, it came to embody an unbridled passion of a sensitive soul; amazingly, tuberculosis, that drawn-out, painfully slow killer also known as "consumption," became intrinsically linked with the passion that was the flip side of death. The British Romantics, especially, embodied this stylish disease, which shaped many of the classic works of the Romantic movement.

John Keats is the "poster boy" for the metaphors ascribed to the fatal disease. A gifted and talented poet, he died at the age of 25 from the same disease which had claimed his mother and three brothers. His association with the disease was present in many of his works, which swell heavily on the theme of life "as a tangle of inseparable but irreconcilable opposites" (Abrams). These opposites, such as love and cruelty, pervade his poetry and show an irresistible beauty found in the life cut short and the early death of a loved one. He shows a melancholy in delight, a pleasure in pain and portrays the highest intensity of love as approximation to death. It is this view that begins to explain the positive Romantic metaphors given to "consumption."

In "Ode on Melancholy, " which is probably Keats's best known statement of his recurrent them of the mingled contraries of life, he implies that it is the tragic human destiny that beauty, joy, and life itself owe not only their quality but their value to the fact that they are transitory and turn into their opposites (Norton, 853). He clearly shows these opposites of beauty mingled with pain:

Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,

Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,

Or on the wealth of globed peonies;

Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,