The arid decades

Just 'cause I had way too much time on my hands, I made a bar graph of the classics I've read, by decade of publiction. I discovered there were some decades from which I had read no classics. 1800-1810, for example. But when I searched for major works from that decade I found... Nothing. As far as I can tell, although the 1830s had many great works, and the 1790s had a few, the first two decades of the 19th Century were really unproductive, at least in English literature.

I'm wondering why that is? And more generally, why does literature go through occasional dry spells? Another example is English drama: after Shakespeare and the Jacobean playwrights, there are hardly any noteworthy plays until Shaw, Wilde and the Irish playwrights of the late 19th/early 20th Century. That's a period of over 250 years.

The first decade I can give you (I can not think of much beyond Walter Scotts poetry), but 1810-1820? You have all of Jane Austen, much of Walter Scott and Lord Byron, and Frankenstein. It's certainly not on par with what came later, when reading became a possibility for larger masses of people, but it's certainly a fair result, especially if one compares with earlier centuries.

Yes, I guess the 1810s were more productive. The 1800-1810s were a gap decade, I suppose, between the early Romantics (Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, etc.) and the later ones, and between the gothic novels of the late 18th Century and the more sophisticated novels of Scott and Austen.

I've not done the research, but perhaps you would find that popular fiction (rather than really good fiction) ruled the intervening years, when most authors/publishers wrote/published to spec of what had already done well. Those titles would then subsequently be viewed only as more of what came before and not similarly rise to longevity. Still wouldn't explain a derth of originality though.

Well, I suppose there was a war on. And maybe English novelists were all too overawed by what the Germans could do (Faust I, Wilhelm Tell, Kleist's Marquise Von O, etc...)

Goethe's Elective Affinities, presuming that you are not interested in Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind.

Ugo Foscolo's Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis

The decade was when Chateaubriand was at the height of his powers - his novels Rene and Atala, as well as his sometimes ponderous Genius of Christianity.