Philip Pullman’s children’s fantasy His Dark Materials is a work influenced by Romanticism, particularly British Romanticism. The thematic concern of the work, with building not a kingdom but a secular humanist republic of heaven where all people are free and equal citizens, and its philosophical concern, with the dialectic between childhood innocence and adult experience, owe much to values and norms held and developed by Romantic writers and thinkers. His Dark Materials makes a case for the revolutionary potential of literature, but children’s fantasy specifically, to challenge established customs and effect social change. Its republican validation of personal liberty, egalitarianism and partnership questions the centrality of Christian mythology, theology and ecclesiasticism in Western culture, as well as oppressive nostalgias for childhood innocence that refuse to say anything positive about adult experience. While John Milton and Paradise Lost - the Romantics’ foremost precursor poet and poem - the works of William Blake, particularly Songs o f Innocence and o f Experience, and Heinrich von Kleist’s ‘On the Marionette Theatre’ are acknowledged influences on His Dark Materials, there are also similarities between the text and the political tracts of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine and William Godwin, as well as the imaginative writings of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. Despite the continued growth in the number of critical essays published on Pullman’s oeuvre, relatively few scholarly monographs have been published on His Dark Materials', furthermore, while the influence of Romanticism on His Dark Materials is generally accepted, the extent of this influence has not been examined in detail. Danijela Petkovic suggests that while ‘it is possible to draw numerous parallels’ between His Dark Materials and ‘the key Romantic texts of the nineteenth century’ to do so would necessitate going ‘far beyond the scope’ of scholarship to date (2008: 97) - this dissertation illuminates some of these parallels. This dissertation begins with an introductory chapter that states the thesis and expounds the relationship between His Dark Materials and a revolutionary and republican strain in Romantic writing; contextualizes the dissertation, both theoretically and critically; and, outlines the structure of the argument in the succeeding chapters. Chapter One, entitled ‘His Dark Materials as Children’s Fantasy’, argues that Pullman employs the language and generic conventions of children’s literature and fantasy to develop a story that promotes the need for personal and social change to as wide a readership as possible. In light of his acknowledged indebtedness to Milton, Chapter Two, entitled ‘His Dark Materials, Paradise Lost and Romantic Iconoclasm’, considers both the influence o f Paradise Lost on the thematic concern of His Dark Materials with building a republic of 4 heaven and the similarities the text shares with iconoclastic theology and theocracy in Romantic writing. Chapter Three, entitled 'His Dark Materials and Romantic Constructions of Childhood’, examines the dialectic between childhood innocence and adult experience in His Dark Materials, as well as the text’s challenge to oppressive nostalgias for childhood that malign maturation and subordinate children to adults. The dissertation concludes with a chapter that offers a summation of the arguments made to substantiate the claim that the thematic and philosophical concerns of Pullman’s text are expressed through well-established Romantic paradigms - that His Dark Materials is written in a tradition of republican revolution.