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• The Age of Reasoning, also known as the Age of Enlightenment, was a period characterized by radical ideas set forth in social and political areas of life.
• During the Age of Reasoning, people began to ask themselves, "What does it mean to be a human being?" and "What rights do human beings have?"
• Slavery is depicted as evil not for political or philosophical reasons but mainly because it divides families, destroys normal parental love, and is inherently un-Christian.
• Uncle Tom, the slave and central character, is a true Christian martyr who labors to convert his kind master, St Clare, prays for St Clare's soul as he dies, and is killed defending slave women.
• Most of the writing of the Age of Reasoning attempts to answer these questions in all aspects of human life.
• In religious life, people sought to understand the question of authority: does the established church control spiritual thinking or must people determine spiritual matters themselves?
• The Age of Reasoning birthed a new reverence for reason and scientific knowledge as a means of understanding the world and our place in it.
• The era produced mostly nonfiction, including poetry that dealt with reason.
• Rational Poetry is any poets of the Enlightenment celebrated reason in their work, such as in Alexander Pope's "An Essay on Man," which denies divine intervention and declares the inherent goodness of nature, rather than some transcendent deity.
• Philosophers and writers became increasingly interested in Greek and Roman literature on rhetoric, logic and government, and authors became concerned more with clarity of speech and standardized language, as opposed to their predecessors during the Renaissance, who explored language more creatively.
• Writers during the Age of Reasoning frequently employed satire to critique excessive power or other social injustices.
• The concept of social justice and helping those less fortunate was developed strongly during the Age of Reasoning when people lost confidence in divine intervention and providence.
• The Age of Reasoning also gave birth to the modern-day novel.
• Francis Bacon was an English lawyer, statesman, essayist, historian, intellectual reformer, philosopher, and champion of modern science.
• Francis Bacon is hailed as the Father of Inductive Reasoning and the Father of the English Essay.
• The Essays was Francis Bacon's greatest literary contribution of the 17th century.
• Maud deal with conflicting scientific and social ideas, and In Memoriam A.H.H. was written to commemorate the death of Tennyson's close friend Arthur Henry Hallam.
• Mary Ann Evans, known as George Eliot, was one of England's greatest women novelists and is famous for Silas Marner and Middlemarche.
• Charles Dickens became a master of local color in The Pickwick Papers and is considered as England's best-loved novelist, with works including Great Expectations, Hard Times, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities.
• Lewis Carroll combined fantasy and satire in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through a Looking Glass.
• William Bradford wrote Of Plymouth Plantation and the first document of colonial self-governance in the English New World, the Mayflower Compact.
• Anne Bradstreet wrote the first published book of poems by an American which was also the first American book to be published by a woman.
• Rudyard Kipling satirized the English military and administrative classes in India and stirred the emotions of the empire lovers through his delightful children's tales.
• Edward Taylor was an intense, brilliant poet, teacher and minister who sailed to New England in 1668 rather than take an oath of loyalty to the Church of England.
• Tennyson's poem "Tis better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all" is widely quoted in the Victorian period.
• Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, and Anne Bronte wrote novels with powerful and intensely personal stories of the private lives of characters isolated from the rest of the world.
• Stevenson also wrote David Balfour and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde which endear him to adult readers as well.
• Robert Louis Stevenson wrote stories in a light mood and his novels of adventure are exciting and delightful: Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Master of Ballantrae.
• Fra Lippo Lippi and Andrea del Sarto are examples of excellent painters during the Renaissance.
• William Makepeace Thackeray disliked shame, hypocrisy, stupidity, false optimism, and self-seeking, resulting in satire on manners like Vanity Fair with its heroine, Becky Sharp.
• Alfred Tennyson wrote seriously with a high moral purpose and his work Idylls of the King is a disguised study of ethical and social conditions.
• Of Studies, Of Marriage and Single Life, Of Parents and Children, Of Revenge are chapters from Francis Bacon's work.
• Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability, according to Francis Bacon.
• To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humor of a scholar, according to Francis Bacon.
• Jane Austen was a writer of realistic novels about English middle-class people, with Pride and Prejudice being her best-known work.
• John Keats believed that true happiness was to be found in art and natural beauty, and his Ode to a Nightingale spoke of what Keats called “negative capability,” describing it as the moment of artistic inspiration when the poet achieved a kind of self-annihilation.
• Gothic Literature is a literary style popular during the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th.
• Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and Matthew Gregory Lewis are Gothic writers who crafted stories of terror and imagination.
• Shelley travelled through Europe and visited Germany and Frankenstein Castle which can be suggested as an inspiration for her.
• Percy Bysshe Shelley, together with John Keats, established the romantic verse as a poetic tradition, with many of his works being meditative like Prometheus Unbound and others being exquisitely beautiful like The Cloud, To a Skylark, and Ode to the West Wind.