Victorian Criticism 69

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Victorian Criticism
Arnold
• Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), the Victorian poet and critic, was 'the first modern critic'
[1], and could be called 'the critic's critic', being a champion not only of great poetry, but
of literary criticism itself. The purpose of literary criticism, in his view, was 'to know the
best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to
create a current of true and fresh ideas', and he has influenced a whole school of critics
including new critics such as T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, and Allen Tate. He was the
founder of the sociological school of criticism, and through his touchstone method
introduced scientific objectivity to critical evaluation by providing comparison and
analysis as the two primary tools of criticism.
• T. S. Eliot praised Arnold's objective approach to critical evaluation, particularly his tools
of comparison and analysis, and Allen Tate in his essay Tension in Poetry imitates
Arnold's touchstone method to discover 'tension', or the proper balance between
connotation and denotation, in poetry. These new critics have come a long way from the
Romantic approach to poetry, and this change in attitude could be attributed to Arnold,
who comes midway between the two schools.
Recommends consistent methods of criticism:
• Matthew Arnold is an important critic of English Literature. Before him, English
criticism was in fog, and whatever criticism we find, is more based on personal notions
than on any consistent methods.
• Dryden is regarded as the first critic of English, but his criticism is based on personal
notion- sympathy and knowledge rather than on any formula. It is the reason that even in
his age, the authority of Aristotle remained unquestioned.
Arnold laid down PRINCIPLES for criticism:
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• The romantic critics besides their rich criticism were more lost in their theory of
imagination and love for metaphysis. It is in Arnold that English literature could have a
critic of real nature, who laid down certain principles following which poetry could
be criticized.
He taught others how to criticize, laid the foundations of setting principles for criticism
• Herbert Paul very pertinently remarks, “Mr. Arnold did not merely criticize books
himself. He taught others how to criticize. He laid down principles; if he did not always
keep the principles he laid down. Nobody, after reading “Essays in Criticism” has any
excuse for not being a critic.”
• The originality and importance of Mathew Arnold lies in the fact he laid down principles
and brought criticism to stand on a solid ground. He did not claim or wish to probe to the
“metaphysical depths” as Coleridge did because this could have obscured the lines of his
criticism. He took the help of an empirical test, one which could be applied after long
experience with beautiful poems and ideas. He advises critics to “give themselves great
labor to draw out what in the abstract constitutes the characteristics of a high quality of
poetry.
The social role of poetry and criticism
• To Arnold a critic is a social benefactor. In his view the creative artist, no matter how
much of a genius, would cut a sorry figure without the critic to come to his aid. Before
Arnold a literary critic cared only for the beauties and defects of works of art, but Arnold
the critic chose to be the educator and guardian of public opinion and propagator of the
best ideas.
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• Cultural and critical values seem to be synonymous for Arnold. Scott James, comparing
him to Aristotle, says that where Aristotle analyses the work of art, Arnold analyses the
role of the critic. The one gives us the principles which govern the making of a poem, the
other the principles by which the best poems should be selected and made known.
Aristotle's critic owes allegiance to the artist, but Arnold's critic has a duty to society.
• To Arnold poetry itself was the criticism of life: 'The criticism of life under the
conditions fixed for such criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty', and in
his seminal essay The Study of Poetry' 1888) he says that poetry alone can be our
sustenance and stay in an era where religious beliefs are fast losing their hold. He claims
that poetry is superior to philosophy, science, and religion. Religion attaches its emotion
to supposed facts, and the supposed facts are failing it, but poetry attaches its emotion to
ideas and ideas are infallible. And science, in his view is incomplete without poetry. He
endorses Wordsworth's view that 'poetry is the impassioned expression which is in the
countenance of all Science', adding 'What is a countenance without its expression?' and
calls poetry 'the breath and finer spirit of knowledge'.
A moralist
• As a critic Arnold is essentially a moralist, and has very definite ideas about what poetry
should and should not be. A poetry of revolt against moral ideas, he says, is a poetry of
revolt against life, and a poetry of indifference to moral ideas is a poetry of indifference
to life.
• Arnold even censored his own collection on moral grounds. He omitted the poem
Empedocles on Etna from his volume of 1853, whereas he had included it in his
collection of 1852. The reason he advances, in the Preface to his Poems of 1853 is not
that the poem is too subjective, with its Hamlet-like introspection, or that it was a
deviation from his classical ideals, but that the poem is too depressing in its subject
matter, and would leave the reader hopeless and crushed. There is nothing in it in the way
of hope or optimism, and such a poem could prove to be neither instructive nor of any
delight to the reader.
• Aristotle says that poetry is superior to History since it bears the stamp of high
seriousness and truth. If truth and seriousness are wanting in the subject matter of a
poem, so will the true poetic stamp of diction and movement be found wanting in its style
and manner. Hence the two, the nobility of subject matter, and the superiority of style and
manner, are proportional and cannot occur independently.
• Arnold took up Aristotle's view, asserting that true greatness in poetry is given by the
truth and seriousness of its subject matter, and by the high diction and movement in its
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style and manner, and although indebted to Joshua Reynolds for the expression 'grand
style', Arnold gave it a new meaning when he used it in his lecture On Translating Homer
(1861): I think it will be found that that the grand style arises in poetry when a noble
nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with a severity a serious subject.
• According to Arnold, Homer is the best model of a simple grand style, while Milton is
the best model of severe grand style. Dante, however, is an example of both.
• Even Chaucer, in Arnold's view, in spite of his virtues such as benignity, largeness, and
spontaneity, lacks seriousness. Burns too lacks sufficient seriousness, because he was
hypocritical in that while he adopted a moral stance in some of his poems, in his private
life he flouted morality.
Return to Classical values
• Arnold believed that a modern writer should be aware that contemporary literature is
built on the foundations of the past, and should contribute to the future by continuing a
firm tradition. Quoting Goethe and Niebuhr in support of his view, he asserts that his age
suffers from spiritual weakness because it thrives on self-interest and scientific
materialism, and therefore cannot provide noble characters such as those found in
Classical literature.
• He urged modern poets to look to the ancients and their great characters and themes for
guidance and inspiration. Classical literature, in his view, possess pathos, moral
profundity and noble simplicity, while modern themes, arising from an age of spiritual
weakness, are suitable for only comic and lighter kinds of poetry, and don't possess the
loftiness to support epic or heroic poetry.
• Arnold turns his back on the prevailing Romantic view of poetry and seeks to revive the
Classical values of objectivity, urbanity, and architectonics. He denounces the Romantics
for ignoring the Classical writers for the sake of novelty, and for their allusive (Arnold
uses the word 'suggestive') writing which defies easy comprehension.
Preface to Poems of 1853
• In the preface to his Poems (1853) Arnold asserts the importance of architectonics; ('that
power of execution, which creates, forms, and constitutes') in poetry - the necessity of
achieving unity by subordinating the parts to the whole, and the expression of ideas to the
depiction of human action, and condemns poems which exist for the sake of single lines
or passages, stray metaphors, images, and fancy expressions. Scattered images and happy
turns of phrase, in his view, can only provide partial effects, and not contribute to unity.
He also, continuing his anti-Romantic theme, urges, modern poets to shun allusiveness
and not fall into the temptation of subjectivity.
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• He says that even the imitation of Shakespeare is risky for a young writer, who should
imitate only his excellences, and avoid his attractive accessories, tricks of style, such as
quibble, conceit, circumlocution and allusiveness, which will lead him astray.
• Arnold commends Shakespeare's use of great plots from the past. He had what Goethe
called the architectonic quality, that is his expression was matched to the action (or the
subject). But at the same time Arnold quotes Hallam to show that Shakespeare's style was
complex even where the press of action demanded simplicity and directness, and hence
his style could not be taken as a model by young writers. Elsewhere he says that
Shakespeare's 'expression tends to become a little sensuous and simple, too much
intellectualised'.
• As an example of the danger of imitating Shakespeare he gives Keats's imitation of

Shakespeare in his Isabella or the Pot of Basil. Keats uses felicitous phrases and single
happy turns of phrase, yet the action is handled vaguely and so the poem does not have
unity. By way of contrast, he says the Italian writer Boccaccio handled the same theme
successfully in his Decameron, because he rightly subordinated expression to action.
Hence Boccaccio's poem is a poetic success where Keats's is a failure.
• Arnold also wants the modern writer to take models from the past because they depict
human actions which touch on 'the great primary human affections: to those elementary
feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which are independent of time'.
Characters such as Agamemnon, Dido, Aeneas, Orestes, Merope, Alcmeon, and
Clytemnestra, leave a permanent impression on our minds. Compare 'The Iliad' or 'The
Aeneid' with 'The Childe Harold' or 'The Excursion' and you see the difference.
• A modern writer might complain that ancient subjects pose problems with regard to
ancient culture, customs, manners, dress and so on which are not familiar to
contemporary readers. But Arnold is of the view that a writer should not concern himself
with the externals, but with the 'inward man'. The inward man is the same irrespective of
clime or time.
The Function of Criticism
• It is in his The Function of Criticism at the Present Time (1864) that Arnold says that
criticism should be a 'dissemination of ideas, a disinterested endeavour to learn and
propagate the best that is known and thought in the world'. He says that when evaluating
a work the aim is 'to see the object as in itself it really is'. Psychological, historical and
sociological background are irrelevant, and to dwell on such aspects is mere dilettantism.
This stance was very influential with later critics.
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• Arnold also believed that in his quest for the best a critic should not confine himself to
the literature of his own country, but should draw substantially on foreign literature and
ideas, because the propagation of ideas should be an objective endeavour.
The Study of Poetry
• In The Study of Poetry, (1888) which opens his Essays in Criticism: Second series, in
support of his plea for nobility in poetry, Arnold recalls Sainte-Beuve's reply to
Napoleon, when latter said that charlatanism is found in everything. Sainte-Beuve replied
that charlatanism might be found everywhere else, but not in the field of poetry, because
in poetry the distinction between sound and unsound, or only half-sound, truth and
untruth, or only half-truth, between the excellent and the inferior, is of paramount
importance.
• For Arnold there is no place for charlatanism in poetry. To him poetry is the criticism of
life, governed by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty. It is in the criticism of life
that the spirit of our race will find its stay and consolation. The extent to which the spirit
of mankind finds its stay and consolation is proportional to the power of a poem's
criticism of life, and the power of the criticism of life is in direct proportion to the extent
to which the poem is genuine and free from charlatanism.
• In The Study of Poetry he also cautions the critic that in forming a genuine and
disinterested estimate of the poet under consideration he should not be influenced by
historical or personal judgements, historical judgements being fallacious because we
regard ancient poets with excessive veneration, and personal judgements being fallacious
when we are biased towards a contemporary poet. If a poet is a 'dubious classic, let us sift
him; if he is a false classic, let us explode him. But if he is a real classic, if his work
belongs to the class of the very best . . . enjoy his work'.
• As examples of erroneous judgements he says that the 17th century court tragedies of the
French were spoken of with exaggerated praise, until Pellisson reproached them for want
of the true poetic stamp, and another critic, Charles d' Héricault, said that 17th century
French poetry had received undue and undeserving veneration. Arnold says the critics
seem to substitute 'a halo for physiognomy and a statue in the place where there was once
a man. They give us a human personage no larger than God seated amidst his perfect
work, like Jupiter on Olympus.'
• He also condemns the French critic Vitet, who had eloquent words of praise for the epic
poem Chanson de Roland by Turoldus, (which was sung by a jester, Taillefer, in William
the Conqueror's army), saying that it was superior to Homer's Iliad. Arnold's view is that
this poem can never be compared to Homer's work, and that we only have to compare the
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description of dying Roland to Helen's words about her wounded brothers Pollux and
Castor and its inferiority will be clearly revealed.
The Study of Poetry: a shift in position - the touchstone method
• Arnold's criticism of Vitet above illustrates his 'touchstone method'; his theory that in
order to judge a poet's work properly, a critic should compare it to passages taken from
works of great masters of poetry, and that these passages should be applied as
touchstones to other poetry. Even a single line or selected quotation will serve the
purpose.
• From this we see that he has shifted his position from that expressed in the preface to his
Poems of 1853. In The Study of Poetry he no longer uses the acid test of action and
architectonics. He became an advocate of 'touchstones'. 'Short passages even single lines,'
he said, 'will serve our turn quite sufficiently'.
• Some of Arnold's touchstone passages are: Helen's words about her wounded brother,
Zeus addressing the horses of Peleus, suppliant Achilles' words to Priam, and from
Dante; Ugolino's brave words, and Beatrice's loving words to Virgil.
• From non-Classical writers he selects from Henry IV Part II (III, i), Henry's expostulation
with sleep - 'Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast . . . '. From Hamlet (V, ii) 'Absent
thee from felicity awhile . . . '. From Milton's Paradise Lost Book 1, 'Care sat on his
faded cheek . . .', and 'What is else not to be overcome . . . '
The Study of Poetry: on Chaucer
• The French Romance poetry of the 13th century langue d'oc and langue d'oil was
extremely popular in Europe and Italy, but soon lost its popularity and now it is important
only in terms of historical study. But Chaucer, who was nourished by the romance poetry
of the French, and influenced by the Italian Royal rhyme stanza, still holds enduring
fascination. There is an excellence of style and subject in his poetry, which is the quality
the French poetry lacks. Dryden says of Chaucer's Prologue 'Here is God's plenty!' and
that 'he is a perpetual fountain of good sense'. There is largeness, benignity, freedom and
spontaneity in Chaucer's writings. 'He is the well of English undefiled'. He has divine
fluidity of movement, divine liquidness of diction. He has created an epoch and founded
a tradition.
• Some say that the fluidity of Chaucer's verse is due to licence in the use of the language,
a liberty which Burns enjoyed much later. But Arnold says that the excellence of
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Chaucer's poetry is due to his sheer poetic talent. This liberty in the use of language was
enjoyed by many poets, but we do not find the same kind of fluidity in others. Only in
Shakespeare and Keats do we find the same kind of fluidity, though they wrote without
the same liberty in the use of language.
• Arnold praises Chaucer's excellent style and manner, but says that Chaucer cannot be
called a classic since, unlike Homer, Virgil and Shakespeare, his poetry does not have the
high poetic seriousness which Aristotle regards as a mark of its superiority over the other
arts.
The Study of Poetry: on the age of Dryden and Pope
• The age of Dryden is regarded as superior to that of the others for 'sweetness of poetry'.
Arnold asks whether Dryden and Pope, poets of great merit, are truly the poetical classics
of the 18th century. He says Dryden's post-script to the readers in his translation of The
Aeneid reveals the fact that in prose writing he is even better than Milton and Chapman.
• Just as the laxity in religious matters during the Restoration period was a direct outcome
of the strict discipline of the Puritans, in the same way in order to control the dangerous
sway of imagination found in the poetry of the Metaphysicals, to counteract 'the
dangerous prevalence of imagination', the poets of the 18th century introduced certain
regulations. The restrictions that were imposed on the poets were uniformity, regularity,
precision, and balance. These restrictions curbed the growth of poetry, and encouraged
the growth of prose.
• Hence we can regard Dryden as the glorious founder, and Pope as the splendid high
priest, of the age of prose and reason, our indispensable 18th century. Their poetry was
that of the builders of an age of prose and reason. Arnold says that Pope and Dryden are
not poet classics, but the 'prose classics' of the 18th century.
• As for poetry, he considers Gray to be the only classic of the 18th century. Gray
constantly studied and enjoyed Greek poetry and thus inherited their poetic point of view
and their application of poetry to life. But he is the 'scantiest, frailest classic' since his
output was small.
Arnold on Shakespeare
• Praising Shakespeare, Arnold says 'In England there needs a miracle of genius like
Shakespeare's to produce a balance of mind'. This is not bardolatory, but praise tempered
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by a critical sense. In a letter he writes. 'I keep saying Shakespeare, you are as obscure as
life is'.
• In his sonnet On Shakespeare he says; 'Others abide our question. Thou are free./ We ask
and ask - Thou smilest and art still,/ Out-topping knowledge'.
• Arnold's position as an eminent critic is secure. Douglas Bush says that the breadth and
depth of Arnold's influence cannot be measured or even guessed at because, from his own
time onward, so much of his thought and outlook became part of the general educated
consciousness. He was one of those critics who, as Eliot said, arrive from time to time to
set the literary house in order. Eliot named Dryden, Johnson and Arnold as some of the
greatest critics of the English language.
• Arnold united active independent insight with the authority of the humanistic tradition.
He carried on, in his more sophisticated way, the Renaissance humanistic faith in good
letters as the teachers of wisdom, and in the virtue of great literature, and above all, great
poetry. He saw poetry as a supremely illuminating, animating, and fortifying aid in the
difficult endeavour to become or remain fully human.
• Arnold's method of criticism is comparative. Steeped in classical poetry, and thoroughly

acquainted with continental literature, he compares English literature to French and
German literature, adopting the disinterested approach he had learned from Sainte-Beuve.
• Arnold's objective approach to criticism and his view that historical and biographical
study are unnecessary was very influential on the new criticism. His emphasis on the
importance of tradition also influenced F. R. Leavis, and T. S. Eliot.
• Eliot is also indebted to Arnold for his classicism, and for his objective approach which
paved the way for Eliot to say that poetry is not an expression of personality but an
escape from personality, because it is not an expression of emotions but an escape from
emotions.
• Although Arnold disapproved of the Romantics' approach to poetry, their propensity for
allusiveness and symbolism, he also shows his appreciation the Romantics in his Essays
in Criticism. He praises Wordsworth thus: 'Nature herself took the pen out of his hand
and wrote with a bare, sheer penetrating power'. Arnold also valued poetry for its strong
ideas, which he found to be the chief merit of Wordsworth's poetry. About Shelley he
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says that Shelley is 'A beautiful but ineffectual angel beating in a void his luminous
wings in vain'.
• In an age when cheap literature caters to the taste of the common man, one might fear
that the classics will fade into insignificance. But Arnold is sure that the currency and the
supremacy of the classics will be preserved in the modern age, not because of conscious
effort on the part of the readers, but because of the human instinct of self-preservation.
• In the present day with the literary tradition over-burdened with imagery, myth, symbol
and abstract jargon, it is refreshing to come back to Arnold and his like to encounter
central questions about literature and life as they are perceived by a mature and civilised
mind.
Sources/ Bibliography:
1. Preface to the First Edition of Poems: 1853 (Edited by Miriam Allot, 1979)
2. Matthew Arnold: Selected Poems and Prose Edited by Denys Thompson , 1971
A Quick Revision of Victorian Age:
Victorian Age
In his preface to The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James compares fiction to a house of vast
proportions:
“The house of fiction has in short not one window,
but a million”
The Victorian Genres
• The novel was the predominant genre of the Victorian period

• Other genres of the period:
• Autobiography
• Melodrama
• Satire, Comic operas
• The Essay
• Art and Literary Criticism
The Victorian Novel
• Idealized portraits of difficult lives; hard work, love and luck win in the end; poetic
justice
• Scepticism, pessimism vis-à-vis prosperity, optimism
• Realism and Naturalism
• Serialization and popular nature
• Sensation novels, detective fiction
• Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle. Bram Stoker
• Concern with history, society, economics, philosophy
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• Writing for children

• Lewis Carroll, RM Ballantyne, Anna Sewell, RL Stevenson, Thomas Hughes,
Rudyard Kipling
Some Major Trends / Movements
• The Social Novel (The Condition of England Novel)

• The Woman Question (New Woman)
• Utilitarianism
• Oxford Movement
• Darwinism
• Positivism
• Aestheticism
The Social Novel
• Realistic portrayal of social life

• Arose in the 1830s-40s as a reaction to the socio-economic upheavals following the
Reform Act of 1832.
• Against rapid industrialization
• Against the abuses of the government and factory owners
• Depicted the sufferings of the poor
• Referred to as “industrial novel” or “Condition of England” novel
“Condition of England”
• The phrase, the “Condition of England Question”, was used by Thomas Carlyle in
“Chartism” (1839)
• Chartism was a working-class political reformist movement that sought universal
male suffrage and other parliamentary reforms.
• “Condition of England” novels considered the question of how to resolve the tension
between the new working classes and the owners
“Condition of England” in Writing
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem “The Cry of the Children” portrays the suffering of
children in mines and factories.
• Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class (1845) was written after he spent
twenty months observing industrial conditions in Manchester, and led to the writing of
The Communist Manifesto (1848)
More Condition of England Novels
• Frances Trollope’s Michael Armstrong, The Factory Boy (1839-40)

• Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845)
• Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848)
• Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849)
• Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850)
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• Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1854) depicts the harshness of existence in the industrial
towns through the fictional city of Coketown
The Woman Question
• The Woman Question, raised by Mary Wollstonecraft in her pamphlet, A Vindication of

the Rights of Woman (1792), influenced the mid- and late-Victorian feminists.
• These early feminists urged upper-class women to obtain a proper education and
profession in order to make themselves financially independent.
The Woman Question in Literature
• The novelists Frances Trollope and Elizabeth Gaskell urged upper-class women to
become active in the public sphere.
• Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot criticized social marginalization of women
The “New Woman”
• The term was coined by Sarah Grand in 1894

• A cultural icon of the of the fin de siècle
• A departure from the stereotypical Victorian woman
• Intelligent, educated, emancipated, independent and self-supporting
• Not only middle-class, but also factory and office workers
• Expressed dissatisfaction with the contemporary position of women in marriage and in
society
“New Woman” Novels: Features
• Heroines who fight against the perception of woman as ‘angel in the house’ and
challenge the old codes of conduct and morality
• Deal frankly with sex and marriage as well as women’s desires for independence and
fulfilment.
• The New Woman writers indicated three major areas in which women felt oppressed:
marriage, labour market and suffrage.
• Conventional marriage is viewed as a degrading and oppressive institution because
women suffered inferior status and were often victims of domestic violence
“New Woman” Novelists: Women
• Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm, 1883

• Feminist bildungsroman
• An assertive heroine who can shape her life
• Also deals with sexual initiation, premarital sex, freethinking, gender identity,
rejection of marriage, etc
• Sarah Grand, and George Egerton
• Criticized the representations of Ideal Womanhood
• Amelia Sedley in Vanity Fair (1847)
• Esther Summerson in The Bleak House
• Bold, independent female characters modelled on New Woman
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• C. Brontë’s Shirley; Elizabeth Gaskell’s Margaret Hale
“New Woman” Novelists: Men
• George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways (1885)

• A passionate and intelligent upper-class young woman who is trapped into an
abusive and degrading marriage
• George Gissing’s Odd Women (1893)
• Focuses on the fates of single women and shows that the patriarchal society is
unable to accept the increasing presence of new independent women in the public
sphere.
• Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did (1895, popular)
• Combines the free-love theme with an anti-marriage message
• The Cambridge-educated heroine of the novel refuses to marry her lover, but
gives birth to her illegitimate daughter
“New Woman” and Thomas Hardy
• Thomas Hardy praised the New Woman writers

• Created a memorable and tragic female character in his last novel, Jude the Obscure
(1896)
• Sue Bridehead, an enlightened liberal New Woman, is a victim of oppressive Victorian
double moral standard
• Like the New Woman female authors, Hardy objects to the Victorian view of the
sacredness of the institution of marriage
• In Jude, he proposes the abolition of conventional marriage because it is not in harmony
with human nature
Utilitarianism
• Utilitarianism is the idea that the moral worth of an action is determined solely by its
contribution to overall utility: that is, its contribution to happiness or pleasure as summed
among all people.
• It is thus a form of Consequentialism, meaning that the moral worth of an action is
determined by its outcome.
Utilitarianism: Origins
• The origins of utilitarianism are often traced as far back as the Greek philosopher
Epicurus, but, as a specific school of thought, it is generally credited to Jeremy Bentham
• Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)
• Proposed many legal and social reforms; expounded an underlying moral
principle on which they should be based
• Attempted to create a “Pannomion”, a utilitarian code of law
• “Greatest happiness principle”
• “All poetry is misrepresentation” (Poetry exaggerates.)
Mill and Utilitarianism
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• Bentham’s foremost proponent was James Mill, a significant philosopher in his day and
the father of John Stuart Mill.
• The younger Mill was educated according to Bentham’s principles, including transcribing
and summarizing much of his father’s work while still in his teens.
• John Stuart Mill formed the Utilitarian Society in 1823, which was a highly controversial
movement
The Greatest Good Principle
• Utilitarianism is described by the phrase “the greatest happiness of the greatest number is
the only right and proper end of government”
• Bentham understood “happiness” to be “pleasure” as against “pain”
• It has been characterized as a quantitative and reductionist approach to ethics
• JS Mill defended Bentham with his qualitative categorization of “pleasures”;
distinguished between happiness and contentment
Mill’s Definition of Pleasure
• In his famous short work, Utilitarianism, JS Mill argues that cultural, intellectual and
spiritual pleasures are of greater value than mere physical pleasure.
• “It is better to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates
dissatisfied than a fool satisfied”
• This quote demonstrates Mill’s distinction between higher and lower pleasures, and
defends Bentham and his father in their focus on “happiness”
Attitude to Social Reform
• The utilitarians supported reforms to improve conditions for the lower classes because
they thought the more workers are happy, the more successful an industry will be.
• However, they also supported Adam Smith’s concept of free trade.
Critics of Utilitarianism
• Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens were among the most vocal in opposing utilitarian
thinking.
• In The Signs of the Times, Carlyle criticized the utilitarian belief that happiness
depends on external circumstances
• In Hard Times, which is dedicated to Carlyle, Dickens attacks the utilitarian
theories of society and education, and shows the abuse of utilitarianism
Oxford Movement
• An affiliation of High Church Anglicans

• Most of them members of the University of Oxford
• Sought to
• Reform Anglican Church
• Demonstrate that the Church of England was a direct descendant of the Church
established by the Apostles
• Establish that Anglican Church is a branch of Catholic Church
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• Also known as the Tractarian Movement (Tractarianism) after its series of publications
Tracts for the Times (1833-1841)
Cardinal Newman
• The Tractarians were also called Newmanites and, Puseyites (disparagingly) after the two
prominent Tractarians, Edward Bouverie Pusey and Cardinal John Henry Newman
• Cardinal Newman
• Apologia Pro Vita Sua (autobiography)
• Grammar of Assent (prose work that defends faith and argues that logic is not
practically applicable in real life)
• The Dream of Gerontius (poem)
• The popular hymn, “Lead, Kindly Light”
Darwinism
• Even before Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species by Means of Natural
Selection (1859) and Descent of Man (1871), the debate over evolution had been
developing throughout the 19th century
• In Origin of Species, Darwin explained evolution as the natural selection of species with
specialized traits, or “survival of the fittest”
• In Descent of Man, Darwin proposed that man descended from primates
Darwinism and Writers
• Darwin’s theories provoked in Victorian literature a wave of pessimism and scepticism

about the human condition
• Till then, all theories of the world had put mankind in a superior position
• Darwinism appealed to scientists like Thomas Henry Huxley as well as to novelists and
poets
Darwinism in Literature
• Two pre-1859 poems reflecting evolutionary theory and the crisis of faith
• Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Arnold’s “Dover Beach”
• In Elizabeth Gaskell’s last novel Wives and Daughters (1866), the naturalist hero Roger
Hamley is modelled on Charles Darwin (Gaskell’s cousin)
• George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1874) is regarded a demonstration of social Darwinism
• Hardy’s Tess and Jude the Obscure present a Darwinian world where the characters are at
the mercy of their environment,
Positivism
• Developed by French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857)

• A form of empiricism
• Every rational assertion can be scientifically verified
• Regards metaphysical speculations as meaningless
• Sense perceptions are the only source of knowledge
• Reflected the general tone of Victorian social optimism
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• Advocated by Victorians like JS Mill, Herbert Spencer, George Henry Lewes, etc
Aestheticism
• Rejected John Ruskin’s and Matthew Arnold’s utilitarian view of art as something moral
and useful
• Related to Decadence, Symbolism and Fin-de-siècle writers
• Upheld the motto “Art for art’s sake”
• Developed a cult of beauty
• Major proponents: Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, AC Swinburne
• For a detailed overview, please see the chapter entitled “End of the 19 Century”
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Matthew Arnold (1822-88)
• Poet, critic & educational administrator

• Son of Thomas Arnold, famous headmaster of Rugby School
• Educated at Oxford, Arnold travelled abroad in the late 1840s
• Met the Swiss girl Marguerite who haunts much of his early lyric poetry
• By 1851, became an inspector of schools
• Financial security
• Married Frances Lucy Wightman
Career
• Poetic career started in 1849 with The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems
• In 1858, Arnold became professor of poetry at Oxford, but, except the 1867 volume,
wrote prose for the rest of his life!
• Like other Victorian polymaths*, he was
• Sensitive to the stresses of the age
• Sought to deal with social problems in literary, political, religious & educational
writings
• [* A polymath is a man of wide-ranging knowledge]
As an educationist
• In his reports on educational problems

• Possessed a European rather than insular vision
• Advocated humane discipline
• Emphasized the Bible as a moral and literary strength
• Advocated state instruction at home and abroad
• Envisaged a national instruction rising above local & political interests
Essays in Criticism
• First series appeared in 1865

• The second appeared posthumously in 1888
• Contains famous essays
• “The Study of Poetry”
• “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”
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“The Study of Poetry”
• “Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with
us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry”
• Great poetry should have “high truth” and “high seriousness”
• As in Shakespeare and Milton
• But not in Chaucer
• Criticism should be
• “a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and
thought in the world” and should confine itself to the “pure intellectual sphere”
“The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”
• Develops his view of criticism as a disinterested & flexible mode of thought whose
application extends far beyond literature
• Criticism must lead men to perfection
• Advocates a broad, cosmopolitan view of European literature as a basis for comparative
judgements
• Attacks provincialism & lack of real knowledge
Culture and Anarchy (1869)
• A series of periodical essays published in Cornhill Magazine in 1867-68

• Discusses the dilemmas of English society (typical of “Sage writers”)
• Culture is
• “the great help out of our present difficulties”
• “the pursuit of total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters
which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world”
Concepts in Culture and Anarchy
• Culture is “the study of perfection”

• Chap I: Sweetness and light (symbols for beauty and intelligence, the two main
components of an excellent culture)
• Chap III: English society has three classes: Barbarians (aristocracy); Philistines (middle-
class); and Populace (unskilled working class)
• America is the same society, with no Barbarians, and very little Populace
• Culture is “the study of perfection”
• Chap I: Sweetness and light (symbols for beauty and intelligence, the two main
components of an excellent culture)
• Chap III: English society has three classes: Barbarians (aristocracy); Philistines (middle-
class); and Populace (unskilled working class)
• America is the same society, with no Barbarians, and very little Populace
• Chap IV: Hebraism and Hellenism
• The two influences of our world
• Hellenism is
• “spontaneity of conscience”
• “to see things as they are”
• Understanding beauty, reality
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• Belief that the body gets in the way of “right thinking”

• Hebraism is
• “strictness of conscience”
• “conduct and obedience”
• Differentiating between good and evil, self-conquest
• Belief that body gets in the way of “right doing”
Religious Writings
• By the 1870s Arnold had joined the long list of Victorian thinkers who turned their
attention to the theological controversies of the age
• Saint Paul and Protestantism (1870)
• Literature and Dogma (1873)
• God and the Bible (1875)
• Last Essays on Church and Religion (1877)
Charles Dickens (1812-70)
• Born at Portsmouth
• Son of John Dickens, an irresponsible clerk
• Charles had an unsettled childhood at Chatham and London
• At Chatham, the boy came under the beneficent eye of a schoolmaster who recognized
his talent
• Voracious reader of Smollett, Fielding, Cervantes
• His restless imagination responded to exotic tales like The Arabian Nights, play-acting,
pageantry and magic-lantern displays
Unforgettable traumas
• With his father’s transfer to London, he was for several years neglected
• His parents slid into financial difficulties that resulted in John Dickens’ imprisonment for
debt at Marshalsea
• Two days after his 12 birthday, Dickens was put to work in Warren’s Blacking factory
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• His father’s imprisonment and his miserable months at Warren’s left a profound a mark
on him
• His family never knew about these experiences until, after Dickens’ death, the biography
by John Forster was published
Start of a journalistic career
• When he was released from the Marshalsea, John Dickens sent his son to Willington
House Academy
• A slight improvement on his blacking factory life
• Remained there until 1827
• He then became office boy in a firm of attorneys
• Rose swiftly to work as reporter in the Doctors’ commons, which he called “confusion of
different courts”
The Young Journalist
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• In 1829 he fell in love with Maria Beadnell, but their association ended due to her
family’s disapproval
• Dickens was soon working for his uncle’s publication The Mirror of Parliament
• Soon he was reporting for The True Son, and the Liberal paper, The Morning Chronicle
• Also wrote sketches for many journals, among them The Monthly Magazine edited by his
friend George Hogarth
• From these reportorial experiences and writings came his first book Sketches By Boz
(1836-37), in which he for the first time adopted the pseudonym derived from his own
infant pronunciation of ‘Moses’ as ‘Boses
Knowledge of London
• Dickens by this time developed a wide knowledge of the squares, highways, courts,
alleys, markets and gardens of London
• His endless wanderings, literally from one end of the city to the other gave rise to
numerous situations and descriptions in his later writing
• Much of Dickens’ early experience provided for his later fiction
New Beginnings
• Welcomed into George Hogarth’s family, Dickens courted the eldest daughter of the
household, the pretty Catherine, and the couple were married in 1836
• At the same time began the serial publication of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick
Club, better known as The Pickwick Papers
• Its fourth number, introducing Sam Weller, elevated Dickens to a literary and financial
position from which he never descended
The Pickwick Papers
• Subtitled “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club”

• Episodic, high-spirited style
• Journeys and observations of the Pickwick Club:
• Samuel Pickwick (Chairman; a retired businessman and philosopher whose
thoughts never rise above the commonplace), Sam Weller is his servant
• Tracy Tupman (a ladies’ man who never makes a conquest)
• Augustus Snodgrass (a poet who never writes a poem)
• Nathaniel Winkle (an unskilled sportsman)
• Novel ends with the marriage of Augustus Snodgrass and Emily Wardle and the
retirement of Pickwick
Boz and Phiz
• With success assured, Dickens worked and lived with even greater intensity and purpose
than before
• First, Dickens worked with the illustrator Seymour (who killed himself), then Hablot K.
Browne, who took the pseudonym Phiz
• The Boz-Phiz tie up was highly prolific; it explains Dickens’s caricatures
• Overlapping with the serialization of Pickwick Papers came first Oliver Twist (1837-39)
and then Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39)
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Master Humphrey’s Clock
• In the autumn of 1839, as Nicholas Nickleby came to its conclusion, Dickens conceived
the Master Humphrey’s Clock, a weekly miscellany
• The framework of this magazine was that of an antiquarian extracting tales,
sketches and stories from his ‘old quaint queer-cased clock’
• Sales very soon fell off and Dickens had to expand a short story originally designed for
the miscellany into a full-length serial, The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41), quickly
followed with Barnaby Rudge (1841)
A Busy Life
• Dickens’ business & personal life were equally busy

• Ever prickly with publishers, he quarreled with Richard Bentley, which caused him to
resign the editorship of Bentley’s Miscellany
• He was elected to the Athenaeum Club
• Met his future biographer John Forster
• Rescued his parents many times from financial ruin
• Widened his circle of friends beyond the humbler spheres of journalism
Travels
• In January 1842 Dickens arrived to an enthusiastic welcome in Boston for his first
American visit
• He travelled to New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, and Richmond,
Virginia, as well as various smaller cities and towns; he went down the Ohio river to
Cincinnati and briefly up to Canada
• But his American Notes (1842) and the American episodes in his next novel, Martin
Chuzzlewit (1843-4), caused lasting resentment among his American audience
• After this, he travelled extensively in Italy and wrote Pictures from Italy (1844)
More Novels
• In 1843, prompted by the sight of the “ragged schools” (schools set up in London to
teach poor children), he produced his first and most famous Christmas story, A Christmas
Carol
• In the mid 1840s, Dickens also produced Christmas Books
• The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life and The Hunted Man
• Republished together with A Christmas Carol in 1852
• Founded his own magazine, Household Words, succeeded by All the Year Round in 1859
Mature Period: 1850s
• Dombey and Son (1846-44) was followed in the next decade by David Copperfield
(1849-50), Bleak House (1852-53), Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit (1855-7) and A Tale
of Two Cities (1859)
• His early work overflowed with improvisatory energy
• The novels of the 1850s and beyond are more tightly controlled
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• Equally wide-ranging in their subjects

• Unified by theme, images and symbols
• Complex and ramifying plots
Other Interests
• Love for the theatre

• assembled companies
• Organized productions
• Acted in The Frozen Deep (a play he wrote in collaboration with his friend Wilkie
Collins) etc
• Interest in social problems
• Capital punishment
• Reform of prostitutes
• Building model flats in Bethnal Green to replace slums
A Restless Spirit
• Moved to a house in Kent, later called “Bleak House”

• He toured Switzerland and Italy with Wilkie Collins and the painter Augustus Egg, and
visited France several times
• By the late 1850s, he was captivated by the young actress Ellen Ternan, whose shadow
hovers over his later fiction
• His marriage came to an end with the notorious revelation in Household Words (June
1858) of “some domestic troubles of mine, of long-standing” and a permanent separation
from Catherine
• Aware of his inability to rest or settle, Dickens planned a series of public readings from
his work, the first of them given in 1858
The 1860s
• Highly successful, his readings were repeated throughout England and in the United
States
• Further readings took place on his return to England, but by then the strain had grown too
great, he suffered a stroke, and they were stopped
• The 1860s also produced some of his best work:
• Great Expectations (1860-61)
• Our Mutual Friend (1864-65) and
• The incomplete Mystery of Edwin Drood, halted in its serialization by his death in
June 1870
Oliver Twist (1837)
• Subtitled “The Parish Boy’s Progress”

• Serialized in Bentley’s Magazine
• A “social novel” that shows the underside (bad side) of society
• Hostility to Bentham’s utilitarianism
• Criticism of the New Poor Law of 1834
• Unromantic portrayal of criminals
22
Oliver joins Fagin’s School
• Oliver Twist, an orphan, has a miserable life in an orphanage and then a workhouse
• When he asks Mr Bumble for “more”, Mr. Sowerberry, an undertaker, is given 5 pounds
to take him away.
• Oliver runs away to London where he meets the Artful Dodger (Jack Dawkins), leader of
the young pickpockets of Fagin’s School.
• Oliver naively joins their company
Brownlow and the Maylies
• Fagin’s boys steal from Mr Brownlow; Oliver runs away horrified; and is taken in by
Brownlow
• The burglar Bill Sikes and his prostitute-lover Nancy capture Oliver and return him to
Fagin
• Oliver assists Sikes in a burglary
• He is shot at
• The women who live in that house, Mrs Maylie and her beautiful adopted niece
Rose, take him in
• Fagin and a sickly man named Monks are bent on recapturing Oliver and covering up the
secret of his birth
The True Story
• Nancy secretly informs Rose about Fagin’s designs

• She is brutally murdered by Sikes for this disclosure
• Unable to escape from his conscience and the mob, Sikes hangs himself
• Oliver is reunited with Brownlow who finds the truth of Oliver’s parentage from Monks
• Monks is Oliver’s half-brother who wants to ensure that Oliver wouldn’t get his
share of family inheritance
• Oliver’s mother Agnes was Rose’s sister
• Oliver gets his inheritance and is adopted by Brownlow
• Fagin is hanged
Nicholas Nickleby (1838)
• Nicholas, a penniless boy, is hated by his uncle Ralph

• Works at Dotheboys Hall, where Wackford Squeers starves and ill-treats 20 urchins,
especially Smike.
• Nicholas thrashes Squeers and escapes with Smike
• Becomes actor in the company of Vincent Crummles; then works under the benevolent
Cheeryble brothers.
• Nicholas breaks the head of Sir Mulberry’s head for abusing his sister Kate, falls in love
with Madeline Bray
• Ralph Nickleby plots against Nicholas and Smike, but all his plans are foiled.
• Smike dies of tuberculosis, and Ralph hangs himself when he comes to know that Smike
was his own son.
Barnaby Rudge
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• Dickens’ first attempt at a historical novel

• Set during the Gordon riots of 1780
• Subtitled “A Tale of the Riots of Eighty”
• Barnaby Rudge and The Old Curiosity Shop were the two novels published in Master
Humphrey’s Clock
The Plot in Brief
• Barnaby Rudge is a local idiot with a pet raven, Grip

• Grip inspired Edgar Allan Poe to write “The Raven”
• His father, Barnaby Rudge Sr, is revealed to have been the steward and murderer of
Rueben Haredale (killed over 22 years ago)
• Lord George Gordon is a fictional character based on the historical personality who led
the Gordon riots
A Christmas Carol
• Ebenezer Scrooge
• Embittered, miserly man
• Experiences supernatural visits from
• his recently deceased business partner Jacob Marley
• the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come
• Undergoes an ideological, ethical, and emotional transformation
• Five chapters labelled “staves”, i.e., song stanzas or verses (since the title is “carol”)
Dombey and Son
• Full-title: Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son: Wholesale, Retail and for
Exportation
• Written during the age of the railways in the mid-1840s
• Theme: destruction and degradation, of both people and places, caused by
industrialisation
The Plot
• Paul Dombey, the wealthy owner of the shipping company, dreams to have a son to
continue his business
• The child, also named Paul, dies when he only six
• Dombey ignores his daughter Florence who later marries the poor employee Walter
• Dombey himself marries wealthy Edith Granger who despises him for his pride
• Finally, when all his financial and personal hopes are lost, Dombey realizes his follies
and is reunited with his daughter and his grandchildren
David Copperfield
• Considered by some to be his last novel

• Called “the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery”
• Dickens called “David Copperfield” his “favourite child.”
• A pseudo-autobiography
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• Most autobiographical of Dickens’ novels

• Begins with the chapter “I am born”
• First line “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station
will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”
Growing Up
• Adult David Copperfield narrates the story of his childhood

• Born in Blunderstone, six months after his father died
• Lives with his mother and housekeeper, Clara Peggotty
• Mother remarries the violent Mr. Murdstone and his cruel sister Miss Murdstone
also moves in
• Bit Mr. Murdstone’s hand during one beating
• Sent to boarding school Salem House with the ruthless headmaster Mr.
Creakle
• Befriends James Steerforth (an egotistic boy) & Tommy Traddles (a fat
boy always beaten)
Reaches London
• Peggotty takes David to visit her family at Yarmouth

• Meets her brother’s two adopted children, Ham and Little Em’ly
• David’s mother and her baby boy die, and he returns home
• Peggotty marries Barkis (Barkis had sent a message through David to Clara that he is
willing)
• Sent to work at Mr. Murdstone’s wine business in London
Meets Agnes
• His landlord Mr. Micawber mismanages his finances, goes to debtors’ prison, and when
released, leaves London
• David runs away to Dover; finds his eccentric aunt, Miss Betsey Trotwood, who adopts
him
• Miss Betsey calls him “Trotwood Copperfield” or “Trot”; sends him to a school in
Canterbury run by Doctor Strong.
• He moves in with Mr. Wickfield and his gentle daughter, Agnes.
• Agnes and David become best friends. She harbors a secret love for him.
Uriah Heep
• A boarder at Wickfields’
• A “snakelike”, vengeful man with red hair and red eyes, dressed entirely in black and
skeleton-like in appearance
• Later works as clerk for Wickfield and takes over his business fraudulently
• Wishes to marry Agnes simply to spite David
• His misdeeds are finally exposed by Micawber and Tommy Traddles
• Uriah Heep’s corruption makes him a foil to David (innocence and compassion)
Meets Dora
25
• David graduates and visits Peggotty at Yarmouth; wondering which profession to choose
• James Steerforth is with David, and Steerforth and the Peggottys become fond of one
another
• Miss Betsey persuades David to become a lawyer and he joins the London firm of
Spenlow and Jorkins as apprentice.
• He falls in love with Spenlow’s daughter, Dora.
• In London, he is reunited with Tommy Traddles and Mr. Micawber
More of Em’ly, Dora
• Barkis is terminally ill.

• Unwilling to marry Ham, Em’ly runs off with Steerforth, after Barkis’ death
• Steerworth cheats on her and leaves her, and Em’ly is brought back to the family
• Mr. Spenlow dies in a carriage accident; later Dora and David marry, but Dora proves a
terrible housewife. David loves her anyway.
• Em’ly, Mr. Peggotty and the Micawbers move to Australia
• Ham tries to save a shipwrecked Steerforth; both die
• Dora also falls ill and dies
David is settled
• Miss Betsey’s husband

• He was an awful man
• She had courageously left him and kept his existence a secret
• He dies at this time
• David leaves the country to travel abroad and settles in Switzerland.
• His love for Agnes grows.
• David returns, marries Agnes and they have several children.
• He pursues his career in writing successfully
Bleak House
• Central concern is a long-running litigation “Jarndyce vs Jarndyce” in the Court of

Chancery (court of common law) in London that affects all characters
• Dickens attacks British judicial system
• Partly narrated by Esther Summerson
• Only female narrator in Dickens
• Raised as an orphan by her aunt Miss Barbery and later John Jarndyce becomes
her guardian
• Richard Carstone and Ada Clare become her friends
• The discovery of her true identity is a major issue: she is the illegitimate daughter
of Lady Dedlock and Captain Hawdon who lived as the pauper Nemo
Hard Times
• Shortest novel; only novel not set in London

• Attack on utilitarianism and rationalization of society
• Thomas Gradgrind
• wealthy, retired merchant in Coketown
26
• devoted to rationalism, self-interest, and fact

• He raises his children, Louisa and Tom, according to this philosophy and never allows
them imaginative pursuits.
Section 1: Sowing
• McChoakumchild is a teacher at Gradgrind’s school

• The imaginative Sissy Jupe
• An abandoned child of a clown in Sleary’s circus
• A student at Gradgrind’s school taken in on charity
• Tom Gradgrind becomes a selfish pleasure seeker
• Louisa is a confused young woman who feels disconnected from her emotions and other
people.
• Louisa marries wealthy Josiah Bounderby
• More than twice her age; Gradgrind’s friend
• Boasts of being a self-made man, abandoned by his mother in infancy
• Tom apprenticed at the Bounderby bank
• Sissy is at the Gradgrind home to care for the younger children.
• Stephen Blackpool, a poor labourer (“Hand”) loves Rachael.
• Unable to marry because he is already married to a horrible woman
• Only the wealthy can obtain a divorce!
Section 2: Reaping
• James Harthouse
• Wealthy young man from London
• Comes to Coketown to enter politics with Gradgrind
• Tries to seduce Louisa with the aid of Mrs. Sparsit, Bounderby’s housekeeper
• The Hands form a union. Only Stephen doesn’t join
• He is cast out by the other Hands
• Fired by Bounderby for refusing to spy on them
• Louisa helps Stephen with some money.
• Tom advises Stephen to wait outside the bank for several nights when “help” will arrive.
No help arrives, and Stephen leaves Coketown.
• Soon after, the bank is robbed, and the lone suspect is Stephen.
• Harthouse asks Louisa to elope with him.
• Louisa flees to her father’s house instead
• For the first time, she confronts Gradgrind about the unnaturalness of her
upbringing; then faints.
• Gradgrind, shocked, realizes his folly.
Section 3: Garnering
• Sissy convinces Harthouse to leave Coketown forever.

• When Stephen tries to return to clear his good name, he falls into a mining pit and later
dies like a martyr
• Gradgrind and Louisa realize that Tom is the real thief and try to sneak him out of
England with the help of the circus performers. They are stopped by Bitzer, Gradgrind’s
old student. But helped by Sleary, the lisping circus proprietor, Tom escapes.
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• It is revealed that Mrs. Pegler is Bounderby’s mother, and he is not a self-made man
after all. Later he dies on the streets.
The End
• Gradgrind gives up his philosophy of fact and devotes his political power to helping the
poor.
• Tom realizes his mistakes, but dies without ever seeing his family again.
• Sissy marries and has a large and loving family, while Louisa remains unmarried and
learns how to feel sympathy for others
Little Dorrit
• Satire on government and society

• Debtors’ prison
• Social safety nets (programs that prevent poor people from falling below poverty
line)
• Safety of workers
• Bureaucracy
• British Treasury ridiculed as the Circumlocution Office
A Tale of Two Cities
• Set in London & Paris before & during French Revolution

• In 1775, Mr. Jarvis Lorry, an official of Tellson's Bank in London, accompanies Lucie
Manette to Paris.
• Her father, Dr. Alexandre Manette, who had disappeared 18 years ago, is alive. He had
been wrongly imprisoned in the Bastille and left there to die.
• On reaching Paris, they meet Monsieur Defarge
• A wine-seller who had taken care of Dr Manette
• Hates oppression of the aristocracy
• Dr Manette has lost both his memory and his sense, and spends time cobbling
shoes
Darnay and Carton
• Dr Manette is taken to London and nursed back to health

• Five years later, a young Frenchman, Charles Darnay, is accused of being a traitor and a
spy.
• Lucie and her father are witnesses for the prosecution, as they had met him before
• Lucie stresses his good qualities while the prosecution produces witnesses who swear that
he is a spy
• Sydney Carton, an advocate, points out the resemblance between the prisoner and
himself
• The jury realizes that it could be a case of mistaken identity, and Darnay is acquitted.
Darnay and His Uncle
28
• Years pass; both Darnay and Carton fall in love with Lucie
• Carton wastes his life in drinking and idling
• Lucie marries Darnay, who is an aristocrat who has renounced his inheritance and now
lives in London under an assumed name
• His profligate uncle, the Marquis St. Evremonde, is notorious for his cruelty and
callousness
• He kills a child on the streets and refuses to help a poor widow in need of a
tombstone to mark her husband's grave.
• That very night he is murdered in bed
Darnay in Paris
• The French Revolution breaks

• Darnay has been happily married to Lucie for eleven years, and they have a beautiful
daughter. On hearing that his steward in France, has been arrested, Darnay secretly
returns to Paris; is caught and imprisoned
• Lucie, her daughter, Dr. Manette, and Mr. Lorry rush to Paris to save him, and Darnay is
discharged
• Madame Defarge, however, seeks personal revenge against the Evremonde family, for
the cruel Marquis had molested her sister and killed her brother. Largely because of her,
Darnay is re-arrested, tried, and sentenced to death.
Carton’s Sacrifice
• There is no hope of saving him.

• Defarges wish to eliminate anyone who has a connection with aristocracy
• Sydney Carton decides to save Darnay's life by taking his place
• He gains entry into the prison, drugs Darnay, and with the help of Mr. Lorry gets
him out of danger.
• The Darnay family flees back to England while Carton sacrifices his life for
Darnay, his look-alike.
• The sacrifice is made to fulfill a promise to Lucie whom he loves.
Great Expectations
• Like David Copperfield, fully narrated in the first person

• Concise and dense narration
• Both novels are bildungsromane
• Autobiographical elements
• Set in early Victorian England, a time when great social changes were sweeping the
nation
An escaped convict
• Pip (Philip Pirrip)

• A young orphan living with his sister and her husband Joe Gargery in the marshes
of Kent
• One evening in the cemetery
• Pip was looking at his parents’ tombstones
29
• Suddenly, an escaped convict (Abel Magwitch) springs up from behind a

tombstone
• Orders Pip to bring him food and a file for his leg irons.
• Pip obeys, but the convict is soon captured.
• The convict protects Pip by claiming to have stolen the items himself.
Estella
• Uncle Pumblechook takes Pip to play at Satis House

• Gothic mansion of wealthy, eccentric Miss Havisham
• Always wears an old wedding dress
• Keeps all the clocks in her house stopped at the same time
• Here, Pip meets a beautiful young girl named Estella
• Meets her regularly at Satis House
• Treats him coldly and contemptuously
• But he falls in love with her
• Dreams of becoming a wealthy gentleman and marrying her
• Hopes that Miss Havisham would make him a gentleman
• But she decides to help him become a common labourer
Troubles
• Miss Havisham gets adolescent Pip apprenticed to his brother-in-law Joe, a blacksmith
• Unhappy Pip attempts to read and expand his knowledge
• Pip is dejected even more to learn that Estella has been sent abroad
• Dolge Orlick
• Joe’s worker and a vicious man who ill-treats Pip
• One night, after a quarrel with Orlick, Pip’s sister, Mrs. Joe, is cruelly attacked
and becomes a mute invalid.
• She draws a “T” like a hammer and Pip suspects that Orlick was responsible for
the attack
In London
• A lawyer named Jaggers appears

• Brings the news of Pip getting a large fortune
• Pip must go to London immediately to begin his education as a gentleman
• Pip assumes that Miss Havisham is his secret benefactor
• In London
• Pip befriends a young gentleman Herbert Pocket
• Jaggers’s law clerk, Wemmick
• Feels disdain for his former friends, especially Joe
• Continues to pine after Estella
• Studies with Matthew Pocket, Herbert’s father
• Meets Orlick again as Miss Havisham’s porter, who is fired when Pip tells Jaggers about
his past
Magwitch again
30
• Pip turns 21 and begins to get an income from his fortune

• 2 years later, one night, the convict Magwitch appears and announces that he is the
source of Pip’s fortune
• He was moved by Pip’s kindness in the cemetery
• He dedicated his life to making Pip a gentleman
• Made a fortune in Australia for that very purpose
• Magwitch is pursued
• by the police, and by Compeyson, his former partner in crime
• Pip comes to know that
• Compeyson had abandoned Miss Havisham at the altar
• Estella is Magwitch’s daughter
• Miss Havisham has raised her to break men’s hearts and was delighted when she
toyed with Pip’s affections
A changed Miss Havisham
• Pip begins to care for Magwitch deeply

• Estella marries an upper-class oafish man named Bentley Drummle whom Pip knew at
the Pockets’
• Pip visits Miss Havisham
• She begs his forgiveness for the way she has treated him
• Later that day, Miss Havisham’s clothing catches fire. She survives but becomes
an invalid.
• In her final days, she will continue to repent for her misdeeds
Losses
• Pip and friends attempt to help Magwitch escape down the river
• Just before the attempt, the vengeful Orlick attempts to kill Pip
• They are discovered by the police, who Compeyson tipped off
• Compeyson is drowned when he fights Magwitch
• Magwitch is sentenced to death; Pip loses his fortune
• Pip is ill; Joe comes to London to care for him
• Joe tells him news from home
• Orlick, after robbing Pumblechook, is now in jail
• Miss Havisham has died and left her fortune to the Pockets
• Biddy has taught Joe how to read and write
• After Joe leaves, Pip decides to rush home and marry Biddy
• He arrives to discover that she and Joe have already married
• Pip goes abroad with Herbert to work in the mercantile trade
Two Endings
• Pip returned many years later

• First ending
• After Drummle’s death, Estella married a country doctor in Shropshire
• Walking through London with Joe and Biddy’s son, Pip meets Estella
• She thinks it is Pip’s son
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• Pip saw that “suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham’s teaching and had
given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be”
• Second ending
• Met Estella in the ruined garden at Satis House
• Drummle, her husband, treated her badly
• Drummle is now dead
• Estella’s coldness and cruelty have been replaced by a sad kindness
• Pip took her hand in his and walked out of the ruined place
• “I saw no shadow of another parting from her.”
Why Two Endings?
• Dickens showed his friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton the manuscript of the novel.
• The latter urged him to change the ending.
• On 23 June 1861, Dickens wrote to his friend Wilkie Collins:
• “Bulwer was so very anxious that I should alter the end of Great Expectations –
the extreme end I mean, after Bidd and Joe are done with – and stated his reasons
so well, that I have resumed the wheel, and taken another turn at it. Upon the
whole I think it is for the better. You shall see the change when we meet.”
Our Mutual Friend
• Central concern money

• John Harmon’s dead body is found.
• Were he alive, his father’s will would require him to marry Bella Wilfer, a beautiful,
mercenary girl whom he had never met.
• Instead, the money passes to the working-class Boffins, and the effects spread into
various corners of London society.
Features of Novels
• Popularity
• large number of novels, hasty & ill-considered work
• staginess of plot, unreality of characters, loose style
• yet rich & enduring tales
Features of Novels
• Concern with Social Reform

• no systematic social or political theory
• aroused public interest in contemporary evils
• Boarding schools—Nicholas Nickleby; Workhouses—Oliver Twist
• New manufacturing system—Hard Times
• Court of Chancery—Bleak House
• Spread of benevolence rather than political upheaval
• Contrived poetic justice
• Exaggerated characters like the Gradgrinds
Features of Novels
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• Humour & pathos

• Broad, humane, creative humour
• Not subtle humour; Sometimes boisterous
• Satire sometimes develops into burlesque
• Pathos often cheap & third-rate
• Depended on devices such as elaborate descriptions of the death of
children
• Described the horrible as in the death of Bill Sykes
• Painfully melodramatic as in Madame Defarge
Features of Novels
• Imagination
• Multiplicity of characters & situations
• Lower & middle classes esp. in & around London
• Mannerisms
• Flat characters representing one mood or one phrase
• Uriah Heep (’umble)
• Barkis (willing)
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63)
• Born in Calcutta of Anglo-Indian parents

• Came to England in 1817; educated at private schools
• Later, went to Charterhouse boarding school
• The ‘Slaughterhouse’ and ‘Grey Friars’ of his fiction
• Never too keen on academic education
• Did not complete his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, or Middle Temple
(Law) or in Paris (art)
• He squandered much of his wealth by gambling and lost some of it in some unsuccessful
ventures
• Visited Paris in 1829
• Gave him a lifelong love of the city
• Travelled to Germany in 1830; met Goethe
Early Career
• In 1836 he published his first book, lithograph caricatures of the ballad “La Sylphide”
entitled Flore et Zephyr
• The same year he married the mentally unstable Isabella Shawe, who went completely
insane later
• Thackeray returned to London in 1837, where his daughter Anne was born in June
• Later she attained some literary fame as the novelist Anne Thackeray Ritchie
• In 1840 Harriet Marian was born
• The future wife of Leslie Stephen
• That makes Virginia Woolf his granddaughter
Contributions to Magazines (1840s)
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• For a living, wrote reviews, comic sketches, parodies, satires

• Notably in Fraser’s Magazine and Punch
• For Fraser’s he wrote
• The Yellowplush Papers, the comic memoirs of a footman
• Catherine, a pastiche of the popular Newgate Fiction, etc
• Took pseudonyms
• ‘Charles James Yellowplush’, a footman
• ‘Michael Angelo Titmarsh’ (after Thackeray’s sketching talent and broken nose)
• ‘George Savage Fitz-Boodle’, a heavy, tobacco-addicted clubman
• The autobiographical subject of The Fitz-Boodle Papers (1842-3)
• Presented as the editor of Thackeray’s first real novel, Barry Lyndon,
serialised in Fraser’s in 1844
Fame
• At this period he also wrote 3 travel books

• The Paris Sketch Book, The Irish Sketch Book and Notes of a Journey from
Cornhill to Grand Cairo
• Growing reputation in the 1840s
• Two major works
• His writings for Punch were collected in the Book of Snobs
• His first major novel, Vanity Fair (1847-48), was serialized monthly, like
Dickens’ novels
• Satirical, anti-heroic vision
• Satirized the class consciousness of early Victorian age
• Discontent with contemporary fictional stereotypes
Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero (1847–48)
• Title taken from Pilgrim’s Progress where a never-ending fair is held in the town Vanity,
representing man’s sinful attachment to worldly things
• Becky (Rebecca) Sharp and Amelia Sedley complete their studies at Miss Pinkerton's
Academy for Young Ladies and depart for Amelia's house in Russell Square
• Amelia
• Good-natured and lovable; passive and naïve
• Betrothed to the dashing, self-obsessed Captain George Osborne
• Becky Sharp
• The anti-heroine, and Amelia's opposite
• Intelligent and talented; strong-willed and cunning
Becky reaches the Crawleys
• Becky is introduced to
• Captain George Osborne
• Joseph Sedley (Amelia's brother; a boastful, rich civil servant from the East India
Company)
• Becky wants Sedley to marry her, but Osborne foils the plan
• Becky leaves Russell Square to work as a governess to Sir Pitt Crawley’s daughters
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• Sir Crawley proposes to Becky, but she has secretly married his son, Captain Rawdon
Crawley.
• Sir Pitt's affluent half sister, Miss Crawley disinherits Rawdon and bequeathes the
Crawley estate to Rawdon’s elder brother, also called Pitt Crawley
Amelia’s Marriage and After
• Amelia's father, John Sedley, is bankrupt

• George Osborne’s father forbids George’s marriage with Amelia
• George marries Amelia against his father's will, pressured by his friend William Dobbin,
and George is disinherited
• George encounters Becky and Captain Crawley at Brighton, where George and Becky
flirt (George even asks her to run away with him)
• Amelia is hurt and a rift develops between the two women
• Meanwhile the Napoleonic Wars are taking place. Osborne, Crawley and Dobbin are sent
to Waterloo
• Captain Crawley survives, but George dies in the battle. Joseph Sedley had fled from the
battle, but boasts about his valour.
• Amelia and Becky give birth to sons.
Becky’s Rise and Fall
• While Amelia is devastated by her husband’s death and dotes on her son, Becky enters
the vain high society life in London
• Her flirtations extort money from admirers while Captain Crawley drinks and gambles
heavily
• The couple obtain credit by tricking everyone into believing they are receiving money
from others
• At the summit of her success, Becky's relationship with the rich and powerful Marquis of
Steyne is discovered after Rawdon is arrested for debt.
• Pitt Rawdon's brother's wife, Lady Jane, bails him out.
• Rawdon leaves Becky, and later dies of yellow fever
• Becky leaves the country and wanders the continent.
• Wherever Becky goes, her disreputable history follows her
The End
• Dobbin professes his unchanged love to Amelia, but she cannot forget her dead husband.
• Amelia’s father in law, Osborne finally bequeaths young George half his large fortune
and Amelia a generous annuity
• Amelia, Joseph, George and Dobbin go on a trip to Germany, where they meet the
destitute Becky.
• Becky resumes her seduction of Joseph Sedley. Joseph later dies after signing a portion
of his money to Becky.
• Amelia reconciles with Becky when she hears that Becky's ties with her son have been
severed.
• Becky shows Amelia a note from George Osborne. Amelia stops idealizing him, and
marries Dobbin
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• Becky’s son, young Rawdon, becomes the baronet and supports Becky financially, but
declines any further relationship with her
Two More Novels
• Vanity Fair was an immediate popular and critical success

• It was followed by The History of Pendennis (1848-50)
• A semi-autobiographical bildungsroman
• Portrays one of ‘the gentlemen of our age’
• In 1848 Thackeray had an unfulfilled affair with Jane Brookfield, the wife of a college
friend
• The melancholy of love unfulfilled enters The History of Henry Esmond (1852)
• The most carefully planned of his novels
• The only one to be published originally in the three-volume format
• A historical novel, set during the reign of Queen Anne
More Novels
• After a lecture tour of the United States, produced more novels

• The Newcomes (1853-55)
• A panoramic novel of English social life during the first half of the 19 century
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• The Rose and the Ring (1855)

• The last and best of his six Christmas books
• A second visit to the United States, during which he lectured on The Four Georges
(1860)
• The Virginians (published in monthly parts in 1857-59 )
• Historical novel that is sequel to The Newcomes
• Continues the Esmond family saga in 18 century England and America
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Last Years
• In 1859 Thackeray became the founding editor of The Cornhill Magazine, a monthly
literary journal
• His last works were published in the Cornhill
• The short novel Lovel the Widower (1860)
• The essays gathered in The Roundabout Papers (1860-63)
• His last completed novel, The Adventures of Philip (1861-62)
• A repetition of the themes and situations from Pendennis and The Newcomes
• Died on Christmas Eve 1863, leaving Denis Duval unfinished
• A central figure in Victorian realism
• Sceptical, ironic but compassionate vision of human conduct in a society
dominated by the power of money and class
Thackeray’s Works
• Debt to Fielding
• Early neglect; genius blossomed slowly, as Fielding
• Reacting against popular novel of the day, especially against romanticizing of rogues
• Adopted Fielding’s method
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•
To view his characters steadily & fearlessly
•
To record their failures as well as merits
•
Characters rounded but no flattery (clever people are rogues; virtuous are fools)
• Humour & Pathos
• Sneering cynicism; satire potent method of revealing truth
• Quiet & effective pathos, seldom sentimental
Charlotte (1816-55), Emily (1818-48) Anne (1820-49)
• Charlotte, Emily and Anne were three of the five daughters of an Irish Anglican
clergyman
• They had a brother named Branwell
• The Brontës lived in Yorkshire, in the village of Haworth
• The Haworth parsonage & its surrounding moorland was the centre of his children’s
lives
Education
• All the girls save Anne attended the Clergy Daughters’ School,
• The original of Lowood’s School in Jane Eyre
• Harsh regime and poor conditions contributed to the early deaths of their two
elder sisters
• Charlotte becomes the oldest child in the motherless family
• Later, Charlotte was sent to Miss Wooler’s School at Roe Head
• Here she met her lifelong friends and correspondents Mary Taylor & Ellen
Nussey
• Emily and Anne also later studied here
Other Influences
• The girls’ real education was from their father’s books at the Haworth parsonage, which
included the Bible, Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Scott etc
• They enthusiastically read articles from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Fraser’s
Magazine, Edinburgh Review, etc
• The girls were brought up by their aunt, Elizabeth Branwell and servant Tabitha, who
taught them
• About a relentless Calvinistic world – with its threats of a vengeful God
• Folk-tales & superstitions
As Governesses
• All three worked unhappily as governesses to families in Yorkshire

• A governess was a young woman employed to teach and train children in a
private household
• Jane Eyre and Agnes Grey work as governesses
• One of Charlotte’s wards once threw a Bible at her
• At the beginning of Jane Eyre, young Jane’s cousin John Reed also throws a book
at her
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At Brussels
• In 1842, Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels to join a boarding school run by
Constantin Heger, and in return for boarding and tuition, taught English and music
• The sisters returned home upon the death of their aunt, but Charlotte went back
• She got attached to Heger but he did not encourage her affections
• For much of her stay she was anxious, melancholy & hostile to the atmosphere
around her
Early Writings
• A box of soldiers Mr Brontë brought home formed the basis for imaginary worlds that the
children created
• Glass Town
• Angria
• Gondol (Emily wrote “Gondol poems”)
• This juvenilia
• Was replete with melodrama & violence, the wondrous & the fantastic
• Showed a strong moral strain suggestive of parsonage life & of their aunt’s stern
Methodism
Early Poems and Novels
• From Roe Head Charlotte sent her poems to Southey, who responded with advice
• In 1845 Charlotte discovered the poems written by Emily and proposed a joint volume by
all three sisters
• Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton (1846)
• Emily was reluctant to publish
• Passed unnoticed by the reading public
• It was Charlotte who again urged publication of novels which each of them had by then
finished
• Her own work, The Professor, which drew heavily on her experiences in Brussels, was
rejected & did not appear until its posthumous publication in 1857
Southey to Charlotte
• “…Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be. The more
she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it, even as an
accomplishment and a recreation. To those duties you have not yet been called, and when
you are you will be less eager for celebrity….”
More Novels
• Charlotte got encouragement from the publishing house of Smith, Elder & Co
• Submitted Jane Eyre which appeared in Oct 1847
• It was immediately followed by
• Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights
• Anne Bronte’s Agnes Grey, which concerned a governess unhappy in a family she
disliked
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• Anne’s second novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, appeared in July 1848
• These works
• attracted the public interest
• were published under male pseudonyms, Currer, Ellis & Acton Bell
• In July 1848, Charlotte & Anne visited George Smith to reveal their identity
Jane Eyre (1847)
• Originally published as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography

• Form of pseudo-autobiography
• Three volumes
• Both are common publishing formats during the 19 century
th
• Published under the pen name “Currer Bell”

• Love story of the plain, vital heroine told with frankness
• Main characters conceived deeply
• Poetic intensity
• Proto-feministic elements
• Bildungsroman, first-person narrative
• Second edition dedicated to William Makepeace Thackeray
• Five distinct stages in the life of the Jane Eyre
Jane’s childhood at Gateshead
• Jane is a 10-year-old orphan living with her maternal uncle’s family, the Reeds, as a
result of her uncle’s dying wish
• Mrs Reed and her three children (John, Eliza, Georgiana) are abusive to Jane, both
physically and emotionally.
• The servant Bessie is kind, but she sometimes scolds Jane
• Finds solace in a doll and books
• One day, as a punishment, Jane is locked in the red room where her uncle died. She sees
his ghost and faints
• Dr. Lloyd convinces Mrs. Reed to send Jane away to Lowood School for Girls
• Before leaving, she tells Mrs. Reed that she will never call her "aunt" again and that she
will tell everyone at Lowood of their cruel mistreatment
At Lowood School
• Mr Brocklehurst, a self-righteous clergyman, is the headmaster

• Brocklehurst has been told that Jane is deceitful
• Helen Burns
• Jane’s best friend
• Teaches Jane to trust Christianity
• Dies of consumption in Jane’s arms
• Probably represents Charlottes elder sister Maria who died similarly
• During an inspection, Jane accidentally breaks her slate, and Brocklehurst, brands her a
liar and shames her before the entire assembly. Helen Burns comforts her
• Miss Temple, a caring superintendent, writes to Mr. Lloyd in order to help Jane.
• Finally, Jane is publicly cleared of Brocklehurst’s accusations
39
At Lowood School
• Brocklehurst preaches the values of poverty to the students and swindles the school
funds
• The eighty pupils at Lowood are subjected to cold rooms, poor meals, and thin clothing.
Many students fall ill when a typhus epidemic strikes.
• Mr. Brocklehurst’s maltreatment of the students is eventually exposed
• Several benefactors erect a new building and conditions at the school improve
dramatically
As governess of Thornfield Hall
• After six years as a student and two as a teacher, Jane leaves Lowood
• Becomes governess at Thornfield Hall, where Alice Fairfax is housekeeper
• She teaches Adele Varens, a young French girl, left in Mr. Rochester’s care when her
mother abandoned her.
• One night, Jane unknowingly helps Edward Rochester when he falls from the horse.
• She falls in love with Rochester
• Edward Fairfax Rochester
• A Byronic hero
• Conceals from Jane that he is tricked into making an unfortunate marriage to
Bertha Mason
The Madwoman in the Attic
• Odd things start to happen at the house

• A strange laugh, a mysterious fire in Mr. Rochester’s room, on which Jane throws
water, and an attack on Mr. Richard Mason
• Mrs. Reed gives Jane a letter from Jane’s paternal uncle, Mr John Eyre, asking for her to
live with him.
• Mrs. Reed admits to telling her uncle that Jane had died of fever at Lowood and dies.
• Jane returns to Thornfield and begins to communicate to her uncle John Eyre.
• Jane broods over Mr. Rochester’s impending marriage to the beautiful Blanche Ingram.
But on a midsummer evening, he proposes to her.
• On the eve of the wedding, a savage-looking woman sneaks into her room at night and
rips her wedding veil in two.
The Wedding is Called Off
• During the wedding ceremony, Mr. Mason and a lawyer declare that Mr. Rochester
cannot marry because he is still married to Mr. Mason’s sister Bertha.
• Mr. Rochester admits and explains that his father had tricked him into the marriage for
Bertha’s money. After marriage, she descended into madness and was locked away in
Thornfield. When Grace Poole her maid gets drunk, she causes the strange happenings at
Thornfield.
• Despite her love for Rochester, Jane disagrees with Rochester’s idea to go to France and
live together.
• Jane leaves Thornfield in the middle of the night.
40
With the Rivers family
• Penniless and hungry, Jane is forced to sleep outdoors and beg for food.
• At last, three siblings Mary, Diana, and St. John Rivers, who live in Marsh End and Moor
House, take her in.
• St. John, a clergyman, finds Jane a job teaching at a charity school in Morton.
• He tells her that her uncle, John Eyre, has died and left her a large fortune (20,000
pounds) and that Jane and the Riverses are cousins.
• Jane shares her inheritance equally with the Rivers
Reunion with Rochester
• Out of a sense of duty, St. John asks Jane to marry him and to go with him to India.
• Jane initially accepts going to India, but rejects the marriage proposal, suggesting they
travel as brother and sister.
• She mysteriously hears Rochester’s voice calling her and returns to Thornfield Hall. She
learns that Mrs. Rochester set the house on fire and killed herself by jumping from the
roof.
• In his rescue attempts, Mr. Rochester lost a hand and his eyesight. Jane reunites with him,
but he fears that she will be repulsed by his condition.
• When Jane assures him of her love and tells him that she will never leave him, they are
married.
• He eventually recovers enough sight to see their first-born son
Wuthering Heights
• Russian-doll or Chinese-box Structure

• story-within-story-within-story
• The Frame Narrative
• Winter of 1801. Lockwood rents Thrushcross Grange. His wealthy landlord
Heathcliff lives at Wuthering Heights, 4 miles away. Wild stormy countryside.
• Housekeeper Nelly Dean tells Lockwood the story.
• Lockwood writes down her recollections, which form this novel.
The Earnshaws
• As a young girl, Nelly worked as a servant at Wuthering Heights, for Mr. Earnshaw
• Earnshaw brings orphan Heathcliff from Liverpool, to raise with his own children
• Earnshaw children Hindley and Catherine at first detest dark-skinned Heathcliff
• Catherine soon comes to love him
• Earnshaw attached to Heathcliff; pampers him
• In three years Earnshaw dies and Hindley inherits Heights
• Hindley marries Frances; seeks revenge on Heathcliff; makes him a labourer in the fields
Catherine’s Love and Marriage
• Heathcliff and Catherine still close

• They go to Thrushcross Grange to tease cowardly, snobbish Edgar and Isabella Linton
• Catherine bitten by a dog, stays at Grange for 5 weeks to recuperate
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• Mrs. Linton works to make her a proper lady

• By the time she returns, Catherine infatuated with Edgar
• Frances dies giving birth to Hareton
• Hindley alcoholic, more abusive to Heathcliff
• Catherine engaged with Edgar, for social advancement despite her overpowering love
Heathcliff
• Heathcliff stays away from Heights for 3 years; returns after Catherine’s and Edgar’s
marriage
• Heathcliff’s revenge; mysterious wealth
• Lends Hindley money; he sinks to despondency and dies.
• Heathcliff inherits the manor. Marries Isabella Linton to inherit Thrushcross Grange.
Treats her cruelly.
• Catherine gives birth to daughter (Catherine) and dies.
• Heathcliff begs her spirit to stay on earth, in whatever form, and not to leave him alone.
• Isabella flees to London and gives birth to Linton.
Young Catherine
• Thirteen years pass. Nelly Dean is nursemaid to young Catherine at Thrushcross Grange
• Catherine is beautiful & headstrong like her mother
• She does not know Heights, one day she wanders and discovers the manor & Hareton
• When Isabella dies, unhealthy, frail Linton comes to live with Heathcliff
• Catherine & Linton begin a secret romance through letters, later at night
Heathcliff’s Revenge
• Soon it is clear that Heathcliff is forcing Linton into this romance to get full claim over
Thrushcross Grange & complete his revenge upon Edgar Linton
• Edgar is ill and dying at Grange
• Heathcliff holds Nelly & Catherine prisoners at Heights and forces her into marriage
• Edgar dies, followed by Linton.
• Catherine is forced to live at Heights & be a servant
The Present
• Nelly’s story ends in the present.

• Lockwood returns to London
• Six months later, visits Nelly
• Though Catherine at first mocked Hareton, they begin to love each other.
• Heathcliff obsessed with the memories of his lover.
• Speaks to her ghost and sees her everywhere.
• One night, walks in the moors and dies
• Hareton & Catherine inherit both manors & decide to get married
Deaths in the Brontë Family
• By this time the family was involved in private sorrow
42
• Branwell’s alcoholism, clearly represented in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,

contributed to his early death in Sept 1848
• He was followed by Emily, who died of tuberculosis in December, stubbornly
resisting the encroachments of the illness until virtually her last hours, and by
Anne who died calmly & resignedly at Scarborough in July 1849
• Charlotte survived to cope with a father now sorely tired & going blind
Later Years
• She published Shirley in Oct 1849

• Villette in 1853
• A novel which, like The Professor, drew upon her life in Brussels
• Despite her nervous self-consciousness she began to move in literary society
• Met Thackeray (to whom she had dedicated Jane Eyre) & G.H. Lewes, and
Elizabeth Gaskell, her future biographer
• In June 1854 she overcame her father’s opposition & married his curate; the couple lived
together with Mr. Bronte at the parsonage
• She died the following March, apparently from the complications of early pregnancy
• Her father survived until 1861 & her husband until 1906
Wuthering Heights (1847)
• The very spirit of the wild, desolate moors

• Chief characters conceived in gigantic proportions
• Passions have an elemental, poetic force
• Series of climaxes, sustained intensity of the novel carried to unbelievable peaks of
passion
• Stark, unflinching realism
Brontës: Their Importance
• Plots largely restricted to author’s own experiences

• High seriousness, no humour
• The wonder & beauty of the romantic world
• The romantic movement in poetry felt in the novel
• As against the detached observation of Jane Austen, the Brontës painted sufferings of the
individual
• New conception of the heroine as a woman of vital strength & passionate feelings
• Emotion, imagination, intellect
• Poetic language, lyrical tone
• Concern with human soul (later in George Eliot & Meredith)
George Eliot (1819-80)
• Pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans

• Born at Warwickshire
• After attending several schools, she lived with her father at Foleshil near Coventry
• There Mary Ann Evans was drawn to an intellectual circle
• Included Charles Bray
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• Directed her towards free thinking in religious opinion

• In Jan 1842, refused to attend church with her father
• Later she completed the translation of The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined by Dr David
Strauss, published by John Chapman in 1846
Adult Years
• There followed a continental travel with the Brays

• Went to London
• Closely associated with the amorous Chapman
• Chapman was publisher of the radical Westminster Review
• She was assistant editor of Westminster Review from 1852 to 1854
• For her services she received no salary but board & lodging at 142 strand, where
Chapman conducted a curious boarding-house frequented by middle-class intellectuals
• Another important work of this time was a translation of Feuerbach’s Essence of
Christianity (1854)
• By this time she had met George Henry Lewes, with whom she lived from 1853 until his
death in 1878
Early Works of Fiction
• George Eliot’s interest in writing fiction goes back to her schooldays when she wrote a
story
• in 1857 three stories were serially published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
• “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton”
• “Mr Gilfil’s Love Story”
• “Janet’s Repentance”
• The next year these were collectively published as Scenes of Clerical Life, which was
well-received
• This was followed by
• Adam Bede (1859)
• The Mill on the Floss (1860)
• Silas Marner (1861)
Adam Bede
• Set in Hayslope
• Adam
• A local carpenter much admired for his integrity and intelligence
• In love with Hetty Sorrel
• Hetty is attracted to Arthur Donnithorne, the charming local squire's grandson and heir,
and falls in love with him.
• After a fight with Adam, Arthur agrees to give up Hetty and leaves Hayslope to return to
his militia
• Hetty agrees to marry Adam but discovers she is pregnant.
• In desperation, she leaves in search of Arthur.
Adam Bede
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• Hetty cannot find Arthur; but does not return to the village for fear of shame and
ostracism
• She delivers her baby and, the child is killed when she abandons it in a field.
• Hetty is caught and sentenced to hang for child murder.
• Dinah Morris
• Her cousin and a Methodist preacher
• Pledges to stay with Hetty until the end
• Dinah’s compassion brings about Hetty's confession
• Arthur comes on leave for his grandfather’s funeral
• Races to the court and has the sentence commuted to transportation.
• Adam and Dinah, who gradually become aware of their mutual love, marry and live
peacefully.
Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe
• Silas Marner is seen as an outsider in Raveloe

• Due to his special skills
• He came to the village from elsewhere
• He suffers from fits
• He had come to Raveloe when falsely accused of theft by his religious community in
Lantern Yard
• In Raveloe, he leads a miserly life and hoards money
• Squire Cass is the wealthiest man in Raveloe; Godfrey and Dunsey are his sons
• Godfrey is good-natured; secretly married to the opium addict Molly Farren; in love with
Nancy Lammeter.
• Dunsey is greedy and cruel; repeatedly blackmails Godfrey with threats to reveal the
marriage to their father
Silas Marner
• Godfrey gives Dunsey 100 pounds of their father’s money, and Dunsey refuses to repay it
• Instead, Dunsey offers to sell Godfrey’s prize-horse but gets it killed in a race
• Dunsey plans to extort money from Silas, and finding his cottage empty, steals it
• Silas is utterly disconsolate to find the money gone
• Townsfolk are sympathetic
• Especially Dolly Winthrop who urges Silas to go to church which he had not done
after being falsely accused
• When Dunsey does not return, Godfrey tells his father about the dead horse, but not about
his marriage
• New Year’s dance at Squire Cass’s
• Godfrey’s wife Molly is on the way there with her toddler daughter to reveal the
secret; takes more opium; dies on the way
• The girl falls asleep in Silas’s hearth; Godfrey does not claim his daughter; Silas
adopts her; names her Eppie; gets newfound happiness
• Sixteen years later
• Godfrey has married Nancy but they have no children
• Squire Cass has died
• Eppie is a beautiful woman
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• In the stone-pit near Silas’s house, Dunsey’s skeleton is found along with Silas’
gold
• Godfrey confides his story to Nancy who wishes to adopt Eppie
• But Eppie prefers to stay with Silas
• She marries Aaron Winthrop, Dolly’s son
Later Novels
• After a brief visit to Florence, she wrote Romola

• Historical novel set in 15 century Florence
th
• Published serially in The Cornhill Magazine (1862-63)

• Here she deserted her native literary landscapes
• Next came Felix Holt, the Radical (1866)
• Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, published in independent parts in 1871-72
• Daniel Deronda (1874-76)
• The Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879)
• Her last work
• A series of essays linked by a narrator
Two Later Novels
• Felix Holt
• A social novel about political disputes in a small English town at the time of the
First Reform Act of 1832
• Middlemarch
• Set in the fictitious Midlands town of Middlemarch
• Interlocking narratives
• Underlying themes, including the status of women, the nature of marriage,
idealism and self-interest, religion and hypocrisy, political reform, and education
• Reflects on contemporary issues like the Great Reform Bill, the beginnings of the
railways, the death of King George IV and succession of William IV
• The protagonist Dorothea Brooke is an idealistic and well-to-do young woman,
engaged in schemes to help the lot of the local poor
Last Years
• Also wrote some novellas and a surprising amount of poetry

• including The Spanish Gypsy (1868,the product of a trip to Spain in 1867)
• The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems (1874)
• She was one of the finest letter-writers in the language
• After the death of Lewes, she married in 1880 John Walter Cross, a man many years her
junior
• She died in December of the same year
• Cross’s biography of George Eliot was published in 1885
Features of George Eliot’s Novels
• Serious moralist
• duty is the supreme law of life
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• humble life is interesting and exalted

• daily choices have moral significance
• there is no escape from reward / punishment due to one’s action
• Association with Herbert Spencer, J. S. Mill and other liberals
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
• Born in Dorset and trained as an architect

• Problematic religiosity (agnostic)
• Novels set in “partly real, partly dream” county of Wessex
• Depicted he epoch just before the railways and industrial revolution
• Pessimistic and bitterly ironic tone
• Eye for poignant detail; real newspaper events used as detail
• Himself called his finest novels, “Novels of Character and Environment”
• Emphasis on impersonal & negative power of Fate over working class people
Hardy’s Writing Career
• Began his writing career as a novelist

• The Poor Man and a Lady failed to find a publisher
• First published novel Desperate Remedies in 1871
• Wrote realist novels in the tradition of George Eliot
• Highly critical of much in Victorian society
• Focused more on a declining rural society
• Under the Greenwood Tree (1872)
• Published anonymously
• Subtitled “A Rural Painting of the Dutch School”
• Concerns the activities of the Mellstock parish choir
• A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873)
• Drawing on Hardy’s courtship of his wife
The Wessex Novels
• Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)

• Hardy said he first introduced “Wessex” in this novel
• Title taken from Gray’s “Elegy”
• Bathsheba Everdene, William Boldwood, Frank Troy, Gabriel Oak
• The Return of the Native (1878)
• A year and a day in Egdon Heath; begins on Guy Fawkes night
• Clym Yeobright who is a diamond merchant, Eustacia Wye
• The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)
• Subtitled “The Life and Death of a Man of Character”
• Michael Henchard, Donald Farfrae, Elizabeth-Jane
• The Woodlanders (1887)
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891)
• Controversially subtitled “A Pure Woman: Faithfully Presented”
Far from the Madding Crowd
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• Hardy’s first major literary success

• Gabriel Oak, the novel's hero, is a farmer and shepherd
• Humble and honest ways, his exceptional skill with animals and farming, and an
unparalleled loyalty.
• Bathsheba Everdene, the protagonist, is a proud beauty who lives with her aunt Mrs.
Hurst
• Gabriel watches Bathsheba quietly for several days and proposes to her, but she refuses
to marry him
• Upon inheriting her uncle's prosperous farm, she moves away to the town of
Weatherbury
Boldwood
• A disaster befalls Gabriel's farm and he loses his sheep and is forced to give up farming.
• He travels first to Casterbridge and to Shottsford, near Weatherbury, in search of work.
• On the way he unknowingly rescues Bathsheba’s farm from fire. She hires him as
shepherd.
• She gets acquainted with her rich neighbor, Mr. Boldwood, and on a whim sends him a
valentine with the words "Marry me."
• Boldwood becomes obsessed with her and proposes to her
• Bathsheba refuses him because she does not love him, but she then agrees to reconsider
her decision.
Frank Troy
• Bathsheba meets handsome Sergeant Frank Troy who excites her with a private display
of swordsmanship.
• Troy falls in love with Bathsheba and both get married.
• Gabriel has remained Bathsheba’s friend throughout.
• Bathsheba soon discovers that Troy is a gambler with little interest in farming.
• Troy loves a servant girl, Fanny Robin whom he had promised to marry; but the wedding
was called off as Fanny couldn’t appear in church in time for the marriage.
• One day Troy sees Fanny, poor and sick; she later dies giving birth to Troy’s child.
Bathsheba discovers that Troy is the father.
• Grief-stricken and ashamed, Troy runs away
Gabriel Oak
• With Troy supposedly dead, Boldwood insists that Bathsheba marry him.
• But Troy is not dead. He sees Bathsheba at a fair and decides to return to her.
• Boldwood holds a Christmas party, and again proposes marriage to Bathsheba . Just then,
Troy arrives to claim her. Bathsheba screams, and Boldwood shoots Troy dead. He is
sentenced to life in prison.
• When Gabriel, now a prosperous bailiff, decides to leave for California, Bathsheba
realizes how important he is to her.
• That night, she visits him in his cottage and he again asks for her hand in marriage. She
accepts, and the two are quietly wed.
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
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• Teresa ‘Tess” Durbeyfield, daughter of uneducated peasants

• Tess's father learns that he is descended from a medieval noble family, the d'Urbervilles
• The elder Durbeyfields wish to take advantage of their illustrious ancestry
• Send a very reluctant Tess to “claim kin” with the local newly rich d'Urberville
family (who in fact have no connection to the original d'Urbervilles)
• Tess begins working at the d'Urberville house, and attracts the unwanted attentions of the
playboy son of the household, Alec
• In a rape or seduction, Tess becomes pregnant.
• She returns home against Alec's wishes; bears a son whom she names “Sorrow” who
soon dies
Fresh Beginnings:
• Leaving her disgrace behind, she takes a job at Talbothay’s dairy forty miles away.
• At the local May Dance, Tess meets Angel Clare, the virtuous younger son of a minister
• Although the two are from different social classes, they fall in love, and Angel repeatedly
urges Tess to marry him.
• He perceives her as an innocent country maiden and Tess finds it difficult to tell him her
secret.
• On the wedding night, after Angel asks forgiveness for a past sexual indiscretion of his
own, she finally finds the courage to make her confession.
• To her horror, Angel is deeply mortified and his attitude toward her changes completely.
Trials
• The two separate a few days later; Angel tells Tess he will come to her if he decides he
can endure living with her.
• Tess goes to work again as a day laborer on other farms.
• During these months, Alec d'Urberville re-enters her life, claiming to be a reformed
sinner and begging her to marry him.
• Tess rebuffs him with loathing and continues her difficult, lonely existence, performing
backbreaking field work all winter and waiting for Angel to relent.
• Tess’s father John Durbeyfield dies and the family is forced to travel the countryside with
all their possessions searching for lodgings and employment.
The Murder
• Alec d'Urberville re-appears and a desperate Tess agrees to become his mistress in order
to support her family.
• Angel Clare has been in Brazil, where a disease nearly kills him
• He returns to England to find Tess and renew their love
• Angel discovers her living in a seaside hotel with Alec d'Urberville, beautifully dressed
but miserable.
• Tess, in despair, sends Angel away, and goes back to her room, weeping. When Alec
scoffs at her misery and insults her husband, she stabs him to death
• Tess wildly hopes that the murder will somehow purify her in Angel's eyes
The End
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• Tess goes after Angel and they flee together, finally consummating their marriage while
hiding in a guest house.
• They eventually reach the Stonehenge, where Tess asks Angel to take care of her younger
sister, Liza-Lu
• The police arrive to make their arrest. In the last scene, as Angel and Liza-Lu watch
outside the walls of a prison, a black flag ascends a flagpole, signalling the completion of
Tess’s execution.
• Hardy writes: “Justice” was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean
phrase) had ended his sport with Tess.
Criticism against his novels
• Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895) received negative reviews
upon publication for being too pessimistic and preoccupied with sex
• He left fiction writing for poetry, and published eight collections, including Wessex
Poems (1898) and Satires of Circumstance (1912)
Hardy’s Poetry
• Traditionalist in technique
• Modernist in themes
• Explores a fatalist outlook against the dark, rugged landscape of his native Dorset
• Rejects the Victorian belief in a benevolent God
• His poetry reads as a sardonic lament on the bleakness of the human condition
Hardy: Modernism]
• Class-inflected, skeptical, self-implicating tendencies

• Highly ambiguous language
• Resistance to conventional attitudes
• Insistence on the possibility of achieving a defiant freedom to choose and refuse
• Doubt, pessimism, intellectual crisis
• Denial of resolution, closure
• Unusual distortion and simplification characteristic of expressionism
• Tendency to mix sharply contrsting artistic modes in a single work
Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59)
• Writing for recreation

• Balladic poems
• French and English history
• History of England
• No accuracy of fact
• Immensely pleasurable style
• Essays on Bunyan, Addison, Bacon, Johnson, Goldsmith, Byron
• One-sided criticism
• Brilliant style and wealth of allusion
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
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• Scottish writer from a Calvinist family, who abandoned the clerical profession
• German influence
• Translated Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
• Wrote The Life of Schiller
• Connections in the US; friendship with Emerson
• Time of industrial revolution; but transcendental, not materialistic view of the world
Major Works
• On Heroes and Hero Worship

• Leaders in religion, poetry, war and politics—Divinity (Odin), Prophet
(Mahomet), Poet (Dante, Shakespeare), Priest (Luther, Knox), Man of Letters
(Johnson, Rousseau, Burns), King (Cromwell, Napoleon)
• development of human intellect
• History as the biography of a few heroes; heroism as a matter of power, not of
physical or moral courage
• The French Revolution in 3 volumes
• Not historical in the modern sense; pictorial and dramatic
• Completed draft accidentally burnt by JS Mill’s maid; then rewritten
• Signs of the Times
• Collection of essays
Sartor Resartus
• Means “tailor repatched”

• Commentary on the thought and life of a German philosopher Teufelsdröckh, author of
‘Clothes: their Origin and Influence.’
• Simultaneously factual and fictional, serious and satirical, speculative and historical.
Ironically metafictional.
• Central question: Where can one find truth?
• The imaginary “Philosophy of Clothes” is described
• The Everlasting Yea is Carlyle's name in the book for the spirit of faith in God, in
opposition to Everlasting No
• In Sartor Resartus, the narrator moves from the "Everlasting No" to the
"Everlasting Yea," but only through "The Center of Indifference," a position
agnosticism and detachment
John Ruskin (1819-1900)
• Spirit of a social reformer

• Sensitiveness and sincerity
• Art criticisms
• Seven Lamps of Architecture
• Modern Painters (Ruskin’s admiration of JMW Turner)
• Stones of Venice
• Political economy
• Unto This Last (political economy is merely commercial; detailed plan to make a
nation wealthy by increasing the health and happiness of human beings)
• Sesame and Lilies (on books & womanly character)
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• “Shakespeare has no heroes, only heroines”
The Victorian Age
• Queen Victoria, the last Hanoverian monarch

• Long reign from 1837 to 1901
• Heyday of colonial trade and commerce
• Exploding population
• Society is considered to have been priggish (formal and pretentious), moralistic, and
narrow-minded
• Early Victorian literature witnessed the continuing spirit of Romanticism
• Later Victorian literature saw the rise of modernism
Major events during Victoria’s reign
• Rise of Technology and Innovation

• Industrial Revolution
• The Great Exhibition of London
• The Indian Rebellion (1857)
• The Great Irish Famine (1846-52)
• Irish Home Rule
• The Chartist Movement (1838-48)
• The Great Reform Acts (1832, 1867, 1884)
• The Boer Wars
• The Crimean War
Technology and Innovation
• The blast furnace was the trailblazer in the Industrial Revolution

• The spinning mill revolutionized textiles
• Powerful steam engines became popular
• The introduction of the railways
• Made travel faster
• Made it possible for large quantities of goods to be transported quickly and
efficiently over land
Industrial Revolution
• Inaugurated the modern era of mass production and consumption

• Began in England before it reached the other parts of Europe
• Methods of production changed.
• An age of materialism started
• The main aim was to produce large quantities of goods as quickly as possible
• Companies were highly profit-oriented
• Working classes suffered from over-exploitation
• The workers united and formed trade unions
The Great Exhibition of London
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• Great Britain was the leader of the industrial revolution and feeling very secure in that
ideal.
• To symbolize this industrial, military and economic superiority, the Great Exhibition of
London (1851) was held in Hyde Park in London in the specially constructed Crystal
Palace.
• Along with the feats of Britain, the technological achievements pioneered by the British
in its colonies and protectorates, and exhibits from “less civilized” countries were
included
The Great Exhibition of London
• The Exhibition was a nationalistic parading the accomplishments of Britain and gave
expression to the smug satisfaction or “Victorianism”
• Millions of visitors who came from European cities
• Among the 13,000 exhibits were the Jacquard loom, an envelope machine, steel-making
displays and a reaping machine from the United States
• The profits from the event allowed for the foundation of public works such as the Albert
Hall, the Science Museum, the National History Museum and the Victoria and Albert
Museum.
Indian Rebellion of 1857
• For the British, it is a mutiny of sepoys of the army of the East India Company
• For the Indians, it is the First War of Independence
• Many British were killed
• Literature based on the Indian rebellion:
• John Masters’ Nightrunners of Bengal (1951), a fictionalised account of the
Rebellion by a British Captain based in Bhowani, a fictionalised version of Jhansi
• JG Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), the siege of a fictional Indian town,
Krishnapur, during the Rebellion
• Tennyson’s ballad “The Defence of Lucknow” (1879), an account of the heroic
resistance by the English soldiers
Ireland in the Victorian Period
• While the population of England doubled, that of Ireland halved

• Ireland did not partake in the Industrial Revolution
• Ireland also endured a devastating famine from 1845-1847, as the result of a failed potato
crop
• Large numbers of the Irish emigrated to Britain, the Americas and Australia
• Irish Catholics blamed the British government
• 'The Irish Question' became a burning issue and home rule campaigns abounded in
Ireland, though it did not materialize
The Chartist Movement (1838-48)
• In 1837, six Members of the Parliament and six working men formed a committee and
published the People's Charter in 1838, which demanded Parliamentary reforms and
voting rights.
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• This was followed by many working class movements for political reform between 1838
and 1848, which are together called the Chartist Movements
• Chartism was a continuation of fight in the 18 century against corruption and for
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democracy in the industrial society
The Great Reform Acts (1832, 1867, 1884)
• The three Reform Acts, of 1832, 1867, and 1884, all extended voting rights to previously
disfranchised citizens, leading to controversies
• Women were not allowed to vote until 18 years after Victoria's death
• In works such as Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, authors debated whether this shift of
power would create democracy that would, in turn, destroy high culture
• From the 1840s onwards, several Factory Acts were also passed to provide better
working conditions in factories
Two Wars
• The Boer Wars (1880–1881 and 1899–1902)

• The Dutch had established a colony in South Africa, and came to be called Boers.
• The British drove the Dutch settlers out in the Boer Wars, and South Africa was
made a British dominion.
• The Crimean War (1853-56)
• Russia lost to France, Britain and the Ottoman Empire
• Fight was over the rights of Christians in the Holy Land, (controlled by the
Ottoman Empire), and due to Britain’s and France’s unwillingness to let Russia
gain more power
• The Crimean War, the setting for Tennyson’s 'Charge of the Light Brigade',
altered the balance of power in Europe and set the stage for I World War
Socio-Cultural Background
• England became
• the leading industrial power in Europe
• an empire that occupied more than a quarter of the earth's surface
• A mood of nationalist pride and optimism about future progress
• Expanding, wealthy middle class
• Unregulated industrialization leading to the deterioration of rural England, shoddy
urbanization, and massive poverty concentrated in slums
Socio-Cultural Background
• Impatience with new ideas on the one hand; numerous intellectual activities on the other
• Victorian Dilemma: In religion, literature and philosophy the Victorian period was an age
of doubt.
• Conflict between science & religion following the publication of Darwin (1809-
82)'s Origin of Species (1859)
• Conflict between the industrial (urban) and the agrarian (rural) ways of life
• Conflict between oligarchy and monarchy
• New socio-political theories
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• Herbert Spencer (1820-1903, Social Darwinism)

• JS Mill (1806-73, Utilitarianism)
• Positivism (August Comte)
• The view that all valid knowledge must be based on the methods of
empirical investigation established by the natural sciences
• “The woman question”
• The early feminist agitation for equal status and rights
• Victorian dress reform or rational dress movement urged women to adopt
simplified garments for athletic activities such as bicycling or swimming
• New Woman fiction
Literary Features
• Two trends
• (1) Insistence on morality, propriety; revolt against the grossness of the earlier
age; respect for convention (Tennyson and Dickens)
• (2) Revolt against convention; conservatism (Carlyle, Arnold, Thackeray,
Browning)
• The revolt strengthened with the age: In the Pre-Raphaelites, there is no morality
except the author’s regard for his art
Literary Features
• New ideas propagated in science, religion and politics reflected in literature

• The spirit of scepticism is found in Tennyson's In Memoriam and Idylls of the King, in
Arnold’s meditative poetry & Carlyle
• New religious and ethical thought emerged in Oxford Movement (Cardinal Newman)
which reflected widespread discontent with Church of England
Literary Features
• After the Education Act of 1870, elementary education became compulsory

• This gave rise to an enormous reading public
• At this time, printing and paper became cheap
• These developments led to a greater demand for the novel
• Many writers came under international influences
• American-British writers’ interaction (Carlyle and Transcendentalists, Henry
James)
• German influence (Carlyle, Arnold)
• Italian influence (Browning, Swinburne, Morris, Meredith)
Alfred Tennyson (1809-92)
• Born as one of eight children in the gloomy and neurotic household of the local vicar
• Most of Tennyson's early education was under the direction of his father
• Due to family background, certain themes recurred:
• madness, murder, avarice, miserliness
• social climbing, marriages arranged for profit instead of love
• estrangements between families and friends
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At Cambridge
• Entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1827

• First volume of poetry, Poems by Two Brothers (1827)
• Became member of the club called “Apostles”, which gave him much needed
friends and confidence
• Won the Chancellor’s Gold medal for “Timbuctoo”
• Formed a close friendship with Arthur Henry Hallam
• Poems, Chiefly Lyrical appeared in 1830
• The next year his father, a past victim of severe physical and mental breakdown, died,
and the young Tennyson left the university without degree
“Timbuctoo” (1829)
• Written when Tennyson was 19

• Won the Chancellor’s Gold Medal at Cambridge
• Reworking of his earlier poem “Armageddon” (a poem written when he was 15, which
offers a vision of the distant human future, in outer space)
• About a legendary city in Africa
• At that time, European colonization of the interior of Africa was beginning
• Optimistic poem showing the “modern” expectation that the human race, guided by
reason and science, would come together and build a better world for everyone
• Tennyson didn’t think this poem was good.
Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830)
• “The Kraken”
• Irregular sonnet
• About a massive legendary creature from Icelandic saga that dwells at the bottom
of the sea
• “Ode to Memory”
• Picturesque description of landscape, as in later poetry
• “Mariana”
• Based on the character Mariana in Measure for Measure
• Theme of a woman waiting for her lover's return
• Typical style: brilliant use of objects and landscapes to convey a state of strong
emotion
The Young Poet
• Poems (1832-1833) received a savage criticism from John Wilson Croker of The
Quarterly Review
• There followed the ‘Ten Years’ Silence’, a period of neurotic refusal to publish, when
Tennyson’s life lacked direction and his emotional instability seemed unusually apparent
• Arthur Hallam fell in love with Tennyson’s sister, Emily
• In 1830, Tennyson and Hallam went to Pyrenees in France-Spain border with a plan to
make money.
Poems inspired by life at Pyrenees
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• “Oenone”
• Dramatic monologue
• Describes the Greek mythological character Oenone and her witnessing of the
events in the life of her lover, Paris, as he is involved in the events of the Trojan
War
• “The Lotos-Eaters”
• Dramatic monologue on Ulysses’ adventures
• Describes Ulysses’ mariners who, upon eating the lotos fruit, are put into a
lethargic state and isolated from the outside world; argue that death is a
completion of life
• Biblical overtones; but the message is a reversal: here, the fruit offers a release
from the life of labour
Adversities
• Tennyson’s poetry was meeting with very adverse criticism

• John Wilson Croker of the Quarterly Review, who had devastated Keats, accused
Tennyson and his poetry of lack of masculinity and considered him a member of the
Cockney School, for imitating Keats.
• Meanwhile, Arthur Hallam died in Vienna of a congenital brain disease in 1833, at the
age of 22.
• Poverty, madness, epilepsy in the family
• Family moved to Epping
• Tennyson began his long and interrupted engagement to Emily Sellwood and made a
disastrous investment in the woodcarving scheme of his friend Dr Allen
Greatest Short Poems
• The adversities inspired Tennyson’s greatest poems:

• “Ulysses,” “Morte d’Arthur,” “Tithonus,” “Tiresias,” “Break, break, break” and the many
elegies later collected into In Memoriam (1850)
• Tennyson felt compelled to publish because of pressures over copyright and prodding of
friends like Edward Fitzgerald
• Poems (1842)
• First volume comprised earlier revised poems: The Lady of Shalott, The Lotos-
Eaters
• The second contained new poems: Locksley Hall, Ulysses
“The Lady of Shalott”
• An Arthurian story in ballad form, depicting tragic love.

• The story of the Lady of Shalott, separated from the outside world because she is cursed
to remain in her tower in an island beside a river flowing to Camelot, and should not even
look out of the window.
• A large mirror within her chamber reflects the outside world, and she weaves a tapestry
illustrating its wonders by means of the mirror's reflection.
• Seeing Sir Lancelot riding down to Camelot, the Lady leaves her loom to look down on
him directly from her window, which immediately fulfills the curse. Her tapestry begins
to unravel and the mirror cracks.
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• She tries to escape in a boat, and she must die as a result.
“Ulysses”
• Dramatic monologue; companion-piece of “The Lotos-Eaters”

• Ulysses declares that there is little point in his staying home “by this still hearth” with his
old wife, doling out rewards and punishments for the unnamed masses in his kingdom.
• His spirit yearns constantly for new experiences that will broaden his horizons; he wishes
“to follow knowledge like a sinking star” and forever grow in wisdom and in learning.
• This poem also concerns the poet’s own personal journey, and is an elegy for his deeply
cherished friend
• “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,” became a motto for the Victorians. For them
Ulysses was a model of individual self-assertion and the Romantic rebellion against
bourgeois conformity.
“Morte d’Arthur”
• In 1833, Tennyson proposed to write an epic about King Arthur

• By 1838, he had completed one of the twelve books, entitled “Morte d’Arthur,” which
chronicled the king’s death.
• He published this single book in 1842 within the framework of the poem, “The Epic,”
which consists of 51 lines that precede “Morte d’Arthur” and thirty lines that follow it.
• “The Epic” provides a modern context for the Arthurian story by casting it as a
manuscript read aloud by a poet to three of his friends following their Christmas-Eve
revelry.
• After Tennyson completed all twelve books of Idylls of the King in 1869, he discarded
this framing poem and retitled “Morte d’Arthur” as “The Passing of Arthur.”
“Tithonus”
• Dramatic monologue based on Greek mythology.

• Initially conceived as a companion-poem to “Ulysses”
• Tithonus was once a beautiful man who was chosen by Aurora, the goddess of dawn, as
her lover.
• She granted him immortality but not youth.
• Tithonus appeals to Aurora to take back the gift of immortality.
• He now realizes the danger in not belonging to the rest of humanity.
• This poem was one of a set of 4 works (including “Morte d’Arthur,” “Ulysses,” and
“Tiresias”) that Tennyson wrote shortly after Arthur Henry Hallam’s death in 1833.
Locksley Hall
• Dramatic Monologue with autobiographical overtones

• The emotions of a weary soldier who comes to his childhood home, the fictional
Locksley Hall
• Theme of disappointed love; evils of worldly marriage
• Scorn of industrialized world, but accepts change at the end
The Princess, A Medley (1847)
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• Tennyson's first attempt at a long narrative poem

• Serio-comic poem in blank verse
• Theme: education of women and the establishment of female colleges
• Presents a ladies’ academy & a mutinously intellectual princess at the head
• The ‘new’ woman
• Tennyson seems to assert that men and women do not have identical roles in the society
Annus Mirabilis
• 1850 was a great year fro Tennyson

• Published his most enduring work, In Memoriam
• Succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate
• Finally married Emily Sellwood
In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850)
• A group of 132 elegies written over a period of 17 years

• In memory of Arthur Henry Hallam
• Original title: “The Way of the Soul”
• Search for hope after great loss—Victorian theme
• Long series of meditations on life & death
• The poet’s anxieties about change, evolution, immortality
• Epilogue is a marriage song on the occasion of the wedding of Tennyson’s youngest
sister, Cecilia
• Iambic tetrameter quatrains rhyming abba called "In Memoriam stanza"
• A famous expression “Nature red in tooth and claw”
More Poems
• In 1853 Tennyson and Emily moved to Farringford on the Isle of Wight, where his
privacy was constantly invaded
• Because of his obsessive shyness Tennyson invariably resigned or withdrew from public
engagements
• The poetry continued to pour forth
• Maud and Other Poems (1855) included “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and “Ode on
the Death of the Duke of Wellington”
“The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854)
• Describes a disastrous historical military engagement during the initial phase of the
Crimean War fought between Turkey and Russia (1854-56)
• The story of a brigade consisting of 600 soldiers who rode on horseback into the “valley
of death”
Maud (1855)
• Narrator falls in love with Maud

• Brother forbids alliance
• Meets her secretly in the garden (“Come into the garden, Maud”)
59
• Kills brother, flees to France

• Maud also dies
• Poet becomes mad and imagines himself dead
• Regains sanity and leaves to fight in Crimean War
Imperialist verse
• “The Defence of Lucknow”

• Describes the British defence of the Residency that was attacked during the Siege
of Lucknow by Indian “mutineers” in 1857 (during the First War of
Independence)
• “Havelock—November 25th, 1857”
• Another response to the 1857 “Mutiny” in India
• Response to the death of Henry Havelock, one of the British heroes of the defence
of Lucknow
Arthurian Poems and Popularity
• In 1859 began The Idylls of the King

• In 1864 he published Enoch Arden in a volume which also included Tithonus
• Tennyson was extraordinarily popular by this time
• He refused a baronetcy four times, though he did eventually agree to a title and took his
seat in the Lords in 1833
• Received honorary doctorates from various universities
• Also in the 1860s the Tennysons built another home, in Aldworth near Haslemere, and he
developed an interest in the Metaphysical Society
• At the end of the decade he published The Holy Grail and Other Poems (1869, dated
1870)
Idylls of the King (1859)
• The 1859 edition contained only four ("Enid," "Vivien," "Elaine," and "Guinevere") of
the eventual twelve idylls
• Cycle of twelve narrative poems in blank verse
• Last of these "Morte d'Arthur"
• Tales of King Arthur and the Round Table
• From Arthur’s coming to power to his death at the hands of Mordred, the traitor
• Arthur’s attempt and failure to lift up mankind and create a perfect kingdom
• Allegory of the societal conflicts in Britain
• Dedication to recently deceased Prince Albert
Poetic Drama and Last Poems
• Wrote poetic drama in later years

• In 1875 Tennyson published his first play, Queen Mary
• A group of dramatic works followed, including Harold (1876), Becket (1884) and The
Cup (1881), which were not great successes
60
• Prose play The Promise of May (only prose work; shows Tennyson’s growing
despondency and resentment at the religious, moral, and political tendencies of the age)
• Later poems—muse occasionally nodding; sharper tone; discontent with the artifices of
his time
• Perhaps no poet’s reputation has received – and withstood – so severe a criticism since
his death
Tennyson’s Image and Influence
• Embodiment of his age

• Poet Laureate and official poetic spokesman for the reign of Victoria
• Victoria considered him the perfect poet of “love and loss”
• Inspired the Pre-Raphaelites
• TS Eliot called him the “poet of metric and melancholia”
Tennyson’s Style
• Subject of Tennyson's Poetry

• Earlier poems lyric and legendary narrative
• Later poems are of ethical interest
• Tennyson was no deep thinker; was content to mirror the feelings / aspirations of
the time
• Tennyson's Craft
• Took great care and skill in perfecting the form & technique
• Mixed sound and sense (great musical quality)
• Keatsian descriptive power. Ornate description, pictorial effect, sumptuous imagery
(created a lovely image by carefully amassing detail)
Robert Browning (1812-89)
• The son of a scholarly father, Browning was largely educated at home, and read widely
• At 16 he began to study at the newly established London University, but returned home
after a brief period
• He wrote verse from an early age, taking as his literary hero Shelley, who influenced
much of his work and prompted him to adopt vegetarian & atheist principles for a time
• In 1833 he published Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession
Early Works
• Browning then turned to the dramatic monologue, which characterizes his best work
• His next poem, Paracelsus (1835), deals with the life of a Swiss alchemist, a subject
suggested by the poet’s friend Amédée de Ripert-Monclar
• In 1837 Browning wrote a play, Strafford, for the actor William Macready
• In spite of the efforts of Macready & John Forster, who assisted in revising the work for
the stage, it was not a popular success
61
• After a visit to Italy (1838) he published Sordello (1840),which concentrated on “the

incidents in the development of a soul” as evinced in the life of a poet who was Dante’s
contemporary
Pauline (1833)
• Subtitled “A Fragment of a Confession”

• Published anonymously
• Introspective long poem
• Influence of (and homage to) Shelley
• It was briefly noticed in a few journals
• John Stuart Mill famously remarked that he found in Pauline “a more intense & morbid
self-consciousness than I ever knew in any sane human being”
Paracelsus (1835)
• Story of a 16th century alchemist

• Monodrama* without action (*a theatrical or operatic piece played by a single actor or
singer, usually portraying one character)
• Hero’s unquenchable thirst for that breadth of knowledge which is beyond the grasp of
one man
• Browning’s predominant ideas: life without love a failure; God’s will, more than human
conjecture, is behind everything
Sordello
• Long poem in heroic couplets

• The imaginary biography of the Mantuan bard introduced in Dante’s Divine Comedy
• Relationship between art and life
• Obscure style which led to hostile reception
Dramatic Poetry
• From 1841 to 1846 Browning’s work was published in a series bearing the general title of
Bells and Pomegranates
• These included Pippa Passes (1841), Dramatic Lyrics (1842), Dramatic Romances and
Lyrics (1845), and some plays
• Browning’s best known poems date from this early period:
• “Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola”
• “My Last Duchess,” “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister”
• “The Pied Piper of the Hamelin”
• “How They Brought The Good News From Ghent to Aix”
• “Home Thoughts from Abroad”
• “The Bishop Orders His Tomb in St Praxed’s Church”
• “The Flight of the Duchess”
62
Pippa Passes
• Verse drama
• The first in a series of dramatic pieces
• About a woman who works as a silkwinder
• Concluding lines: “God’s in his heaven—All’s right with the world!”
• Controversial for its frank portrayal of disreputable characters, and for sexual frankness
Marriage
• Browning paid a visit to Italy in 1844, returning to take part in the admiration of
Elizabeth Barrett’s poems that year
• Elizabeth was six years his elder, a semi-invalid in her domineering father’s house in
Wimpole Street
• He corresponded with her; met her; admired her poems
• Secretly married her and eloped to Italy
• The Brownings settled in Florence where their son was born
• They lived there until Elizabeth’s death in 1861.
Browning’s Characters
• “Fra Lippo Lippi” (15th century Florentine painter and monk being interrogated by some
Medici watchmen, who have caught him out at night)
• “Andrea del Sarto” (Renaissance painter in Florence talking to his nagging wife
Lucrezia)
• “Caliban Upon Setebos” (Shakespeare's Caliban talks about the world and his god
Setebos)
• “Rabbi Ben Ezra” (Jewish mathematician and scholar; theme of old age)
• Begins: “Grow old along with me! / The best is yet to be...”
Browning’s Characters
• “Abt Vogler” (18 -19 century German music composer)

th th
• “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church” (a Renaissance bishop in his
deathbed)
• “My Last Duchess” (recently widowed Duke of Ferrara)
• “The Grammarian’s Funeral” (The speaker is a disciple of an accomplished grammarian
who has recently died)
• “Home Thoughts, From Abroad” (A homesick traveller longs for every detail of his
beloved home)
• “Porphyria’s Lover” (speaker strangles his beautiful lover to preserve the moment of
love)
The Ring and the Book
63
• In Florence Browning had discovered in a stall an ‘old yellow book’ of documents

relating to a 17 century murder trial & he now began to contemplate his ‘Roman
th
Murder-Story’
• The ‘murder story’, The Ring and the Book, was published in monthly instalments in
1868-1869
• The poem received complimentary reviews & Browning, ‘king of the mystics’, was at
last popular with the reading public
• The discursive story of the murder of a young wife Pompilia by her worthless husband,
told by nine different people
Last Works
• His vitality continued undiminished as he produced a remarkable series of later works,

too frequently undervalued, ending with Asolando: Fancies and Facts (1889)
One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.
• Browning’s prolific output during these years nevertheless left him time to produce a
translation of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (1877), to watch anxiously over the career of his
painter son, and to led a demanding social life.
Death
• The foundation of the Browning Society (1881) is an indication of the status he had
achieved as sage and celebrity in old age
• He died while visiting his son in Venice and, his wish to be buried in Florence providing
impossible to fulfill, his body was returned to England & buried in Westminster Abbey
Browning’s Style
• Obscurity; sometimes rugged, angular style

• At its best, noble dignity & verbal music
• Variety of metrical forms
• Cleverly manipulated rhythmic effects
• Didn’t care for beauty of description for its own sake; beauty of expression often
captured in a single image
64
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61)
• The eldest of the 12 children of Edward Moulton Barrett & his wife Mary
• Spent most of her childhood & youth at the estate of Hope End, near Malvern
• A precocious & ardent student, Elizabeth Barrett studied with a governess & shared her
brothers’ lessons in Latin & Greek
• At the age of 15 she suffered a serious illness
• She began to write verse at an early age
Marriage
• Nevertheless, she embarked on a productive period, writing poems and essays for The
Athenaeum
• Poems (1844), which included “A Drama of Exile” & “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship”
received considerable acclaim
• One of her admirers was Robert Browning, whose verse she had complimented in “Lady
Geraldine”
• A correspondence soon developed, growing rapidly into love
• In order to avoid her father’s expected prohibition, the poets were married secretly in
September 1846 and left for Italy a week later
• They settled at Casa Guidi in Florence, where their son Robert was born
• In 1850 she published a further volume of Poems among them the Sonnets from the
Portuguese, written during her courtship
• This was followed by Casa Guidi Windows (1851)
• On the death of Wordsworth in 1850, The Athenaeum had proposed Elizabeth Barrett
Browning as an appropriate successor to the post of Poet Laureate, but it was not until the
publication of Aurora Leigh (1856) that her recognition as the foremost woman poet in
English was secure
• Poems before Congress (1860), which supported the cause of Italian unification, was
branded as hysterical & unwomanly
• Saddened by the death of her sister Henrietta & the Italian leader, Cavour, she fell ill and
died at Casa Guidi
• Robert Browning prepared her Last Poems (1861)for posthumous publication
Sonnets from the Portuguese (pub 1850)
• Collection of 44 love sonnets

• Written during the period leading to marriage with Robert Browning in 1846
• Elizabeth did not want to publish them for being too personal
• Urged by Robert Browning to publish
• Appeared as translations of foreign sonnets
• Elizabeth admired Portuguese poet Luís de Camões
• Browning called her by the pet-name "my little Portuguese"
• One famous sonnet: "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways."
Aurora Leigh
65
• Longest and most innovative work

• Epic verse novel in blank verse
• Depicts a woman-poet-hero whose country’s destiny depends on the balance of her deeds
Matthew Arnold (1822-88)
• For a detailed biography of Matthew Arnold, please see the chapter "Victorian Fiction
and Prose"
• Son of the famous headmaster of Rugby School, Thomas Arnold for whom he wrote the
poem “Rugby Chapel”
• Legitimate fame is as a prose writer and critic
• Arnold's poems are not numerous, and not of high quality
• Classical themes in meditative & melancholy mood (this is a modernist strain)
• Themes of alienation, stoicism, despair, spiritual emptiness
• Apostle of sanity & culture
Poetic Career
• Arnold’s poetic career began in 1849 with the publication of The Strayed Reveller and
Other Poems, by A (1849)
• Poetic career was over but by New Poems (1867)
• Major works:
• Empedocles On Etna and Other Poems (1852)
• Poems (1853)
• Poems Second Series (1855) and
• Merope (1858, a classical tragedy)
Arnold: Poetry
• Lyrics
• “Marguerite poems”, “The Forsaken Merman”, “Dover Beach”, “Scholar Gipsy”,
“Philomela”
• Poetic dramas
• Empedocles on Etna, Merope
• Narrative poems
• “Tristram & Iseult”, “Sohrab & Rustum”
• Elegies
• “Thyrsis”, “Scholar Gipsy”, Memorial Verses
“Dover Beach”
• The speaker is on the beach, watching the calm sea and the full tide
• The moon's bright light shines 0n the French Coast across the English Channel and
disappears, while the cliffs of England glimmer.
66
• The speaker calls his companion to the window to enjoy the sweet night air. He invites
her to listen to the grating of the pebbles as they are flung back and forth by the waves,
bringing "the eternal note of sadness in"
• The poet remarks that Sophocles had heard this ebb and flow of human misery, which
they are hearing now.
“Dover Beach”
• The Sea of Faith was was full, and lay around the earth like a girdle
• Yet now, the speaker hears only the melancholy roar of the sea of faith
• The poet tells his beloved that they should be honest with each other, for the world that
they live in, which looks so beautiful and new, and lay before them like a land of dreams,
does not have joy, love or spiritual light, or certainty or peace or help in times of trouble.
• And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
“Thyrsis”
• Pastoral elegy to commemorate the death of Arnold's friend and poet Arthur Hugh
Clough in 1861
• Clough is presented as Thyrsis, and Arnold as Corydon
• Thyrsis is a character from Virgil Eclogues who lost a singing match with Corydon
• Famous are the lines in which Arnold recalls the Oxford countryside the two of them
explored as students in the 1840s
“The Scholar Gipsy”
• A pastoral elegy based on a 17 century story found in Joseph Glanvill's The Vanity of
th
Dogmatizing
• Companion-poem of "Thyrsis"
• An impoverished Oxford student was dejected by the fret and fever of modernity, and left
his studies to join a band of gipsies, who had traditional learning and original imagination
• Rumours are that the scholar gipsy is not subject to ageing and death, and was again seen
from time to time around Oxford
• Arnold ends with an epic simile of a Tyrian merchant seaman who flees from Greek
competitors to seek a new lifein Iberia.
“Empedocles on Etna”
• Dramatic poem by Matthew Arnold, published anonymously in 1852 in the collection

Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems.
• In Poems 1853, he excluded this long poem, and explained in the Preface that the mood
of elegiac gloom and helpless suffering which "finds no vent in action" in the poem were
too depressing
67
Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-61)
• Poems charged with the deep-seated despair & despondency of Arnold’s works
• Typical example of the Victorian intellectual seeking in vain for moral and metaphysical
certainties
• Most original work: The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848), a "Long Vacation Pastoral"
on Oxford set in the Scottish Highands
American Contemporaries
• Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

• Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-82)
• Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
• Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
• Walt Whitman (1819-92)
• Herman Melville (1819-1891)
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
• Formed in 1848 by painter poets D. G. Rossetti (1828-82), W. H. Hunt (1827-1910) &

John Millais (1829-96)
• Influence of John Ruskin
• Revolt against 18 century academism and the canons of the Royal Academy; against
th
realism
• Dedicated to recovering the purity of medieval art which Raphael and the Renaissance
had destroyed
• Attempt to return to the truthfulness, simplicity, accuracy & spirit of devotion of Italian
painting before Raphael & Italian Renaissance
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
• In painting it is distinguished by its love of bright colour, vividly naturalistic detail and
subjects drawn from religion or literature (Dante, Shakespeare, Keats & Arthurian
Literature)
• In poetry, Pre-Raphaelitism found congenial precedents in Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans
Merci and the work of Tennyson
• The movement was as short-lived as its periodical The Germ
The Fleshly School of Poetry
• In a review-essay titled "The Fleshly School of Poetry", Scottish author Robert Buchanan
castigated the PRB (Rossetti, Morris and Swinburne) for its detailed description of scenes
and frank treatment of sexuality
• Rossetti replied with “The Stealthy School of Criticism” in The Athenaeum, December
1871
68
• Swinburne replied with a pamphlet, Under the Microscope, in 1872.
DG Rossetti
• Poet, painter and translator

• Father was an Italian patriot exiled from Naples and mother was daughter of Byron’s
physician, Dr John Polidori
• Thus Rossetti’s background and heritage were essentially Italian
• Studied painting
The PRB
• Met William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and these friendships led in the
autumn of 1848 to the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB)
• Rossetti worked with unusual consistency in the late 1840s and throughout the 1850s
both as painter and poet and attempted to revolutionized Victorian art
• His paintings were highly symbolic, spiritually charged and suggestive of other, remote,
worlds
• Rossetti’s poetry, like his painting, was detailed, symbolic, concerned with the remote
and sometimes erotic; it was often pseudo-medieval cast in ballad form and sometimes
archaic in language
Major Works
• His major poems included Jenny, a dramatic monologue about a London prostitute, his
best-known poem The Blessed Damozel, as well as early studies of “Dante at Verona”,
“The Bride’s Prelude” and “Sister Helen”
• In the 1850s Rossetti made drawings for Poems by Alfred Tennyson (1857) in which
Millais and Holman Hunt also participated
• He also undertook some mural decorations at Oxford
The Blessed Damozel
• Written when DGR was 18 years old

• The poem describes the damozel observing her lover from heaven, and her unfulfilled
yearning for their reunion in heaven.
• Partly inspired by Poe's "The Raven"
• Medievalism
• Pictorial realism and symbolic overtones
• Union of flesh and spirit
• Sensuousness and religiousness
The Blessed Damozel: Summary
69
• The Damozel in heaven overlooks earth and thinks of her lover.

• To the Damozel Time seemed to last forever because she was without her love.
• Then the lover on earth talks about his beloved.
• The next few stanzas describe heaven, and other lovers reunite around her as she sits and
watches alone.
• In stanzas ten and eleven, her lover can hear her and feel her, and describes the sound of
her voice like a bird's song
• As she waits at the gates of heaven, she dreams of the day that they ("we two") will be
together and present themselves in the beauty and glory of God.
The Blessed Damozel: Summary
• The Damozel wants her love to be ideal and perfect, but it is not possible, now. The two
worlds separating them doesn't keep them apart in thought, but it is not possible to be
together. However, she wishes that their love be as it was on earth with the approval of
Christ the Lord.
• The Damozel finally realizes that she can have nothing until the time comes. The
Damozel suddenly becomes peaceful and lets the light take her. She will enter heaven
without her love. Her lover on earth also knows this.
• Physically apart, but together at heart, there is nothing that can be done but hope and
pray. Therefore the Damozel "laid her face between her hands, And wept."
The Oxford Murals
• Commissioned by John Ruskin

• Arthurian themes
• Done for the Oxford Union with several of his PRB friends
• As the walls were unprepared with plastering or underpainting, the murals soon
deteriorated and later restoration did little to evoke the originals
Two Stunners
• In Oxford he met Jane Burden for whom he developed an obsessive love, and who was
later unhappily married to William Morris but continued to play an important role in
Rossetti’s private life
• She was one of the many ‘stunners’, to use the PRB term, whom the poets and painters
made their subject: beautiful women with red-gold hair, attenuated fingers, faintly, sulky
mouths and swan-like necks
• Another stunner was Elizabeth Siddal, whom Rossetti had met and fallen in love with in
1850
• They were unable to marry until 1860, and Lizzie died from an overdose of laudanum in
1862
Morbid Years
70
• Although Rossetti had not been a faithful husband or lover, Lizzie's loss affected him
deeply and an increasing morbidity became apparent in his work
• However, he published The Early Italian Poets (1861; revised as Dante and His Circle,
1874), translations from some 60 writers which demonstrate another side of his gifts
• In the 1860s, too, Rossetti’s painting yielded to decorative art – he produced designs in
stained glass, furniture, and tiles for William Morris’s firm and then, as eye strain
developed, he turned increasingly to poetry
• Poems (1870) drew on the manuscripts he had first, in a fit of remorse, interred with
Lizzie Siddal but later exhumed
Last Years
• Shortly thereafter he was attacked by Robert Buchanan in a scurrilous pamphlet, “The

Fleshly School of Poetry” (1872),to which he replied with “The Stealthy School of
Criticism”
• By now increasing illness, morbidity and paranoia beset him, and in 1872 he attempted
suicide
• Yet he published Ballads and Sonnets (1881), which included a sonnet sequence, The
House of Life
• Chloral, imagined treacheries and groundless suspicions took their toll and, a near
recluse, he died shortly before his 54 birthday
th
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909)
• Alcoholic and highly excitable character

• Cared for by his friend Theodore Watts-Dunton
• Swinburne followed the poetic style of Rossetti but was not as successful
• When his work Poems and Ballads appeared in 1866, he was much blamed for moral
reasons.
• Because of theelements of homosexuality and bestiality in his works, he is classified as a
decadent poet
• Tristram of Lyonesse is usually considered to be his best work. It tells the undying story
of Tristram and Iseult.
• Atalanta in Calydon is a closet drama.
William Morris (1834-1896)
• Textile designer, architectural designer, poet, novelist, essayist and painter, translator
from Icelandic
• Major Poetry
• The Defence of Guenevere
• The Life and Death of Jason
• The Earthly Paradise
• Major Fiction ("prose romances" set in a fantasy world)
• News from Nowhere (1890, utopian socialism and science fiction)
• The Wood Beyond the World
71
• The Well at the World’s End
Other members
• Christina Rossetti (1830-94)

• William Michael Rossetti (1829-1919, brother of DG Rossetti and Christina Rossetti)
• FG Stephens
• James Collinson
• Thomas Woolner
• Coventry Patmore
Edward FitzGerald (1809-1883)
• One of the greatest translators of the time

• He translated six of Calderon’s plays, Agamemnon of Aeschylus, and the Rubaiyat of the
Persian poet Omar Khayyam.
• At first the Rubaiyat attracted no attention.
• When Rossetti discovered the Rubaiyat in 1861, it slowly became famous
• In 1868, a new revised edition appeared
• The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on; nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it. (famous lines)
The Rubaiyats
• Romantic melancholy (anticipating Arnold)

• Epicurean elements (anticipating fin-de-siecle poets)
• Rebelled against certain Victorian values
• Frank sexuality
• Pessimism about the human condition (at the time the translation appeared, the
Victorians were wallowing in a sense of superiority and optimism following the
Great Exhibition)
• Browning's "Rabbi Ben Ezra" seems to be a reply
• Rabbi sees life as “perfect” and thanks God that he is a “man”
72

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Recommends consistent methods of criticism:

• Matthew Arnold is an important critic of English Literature. Before him, English

than on any consistent methods.

his age, the authority of Aristotle remained unquestioned.

Arnold laid down PRINCIPLES for criticism:

excuse for not being a critic.”

The social role of poetry and criticism

Return to Classical values

Preface to Poems of 1853

• As an example of the danger of imitating Shakespeare he gives Keats's imitation of

The Function of Criticism

The Study of Poetry

The Study of Poetry: a shift in position - the touchstone method

The Study of Poetry: on Chaucer

The Study of Poetry: on the age of Dryden and Pope

• Arnold's method of criticism is comparative. Steeped in classical poetry, and thoroughly

A Quick Revision of Victorian Age:

• The novel was the predominant genre of the Victorian period

The Victorian Novel

• Writing for children

Some Major Trends / Movements

• The Social Novel (The Condition of England Novel)

The Social Novel

• Realistic portrayal of social life

“Condition of England” in Writing

More Condition of England Novels

• Frances Trollope’s Michael Armstrong, The Factory Boy (1839-40)

The Woman Question

• The Woman Question, raised by Mary Wollstonecraft in her pamphlet, A Vindication of

The Woman Question in Literature

The “New Woman”

• The term was coined by Sarah Grand in 1894

“New Woman” Novels: Features

“New Woman” Novelists: Women

• Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm, 1883

• C. Brontë’s Shirley; Elizabeth Gaskell’s Margaret Hale

“New Woman” Novelists: Men

• George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways (1885)

“New Woman” and Thomas Hardy

• Thomas Hardy praised the New Woman writers

Mill and Utilitarianism

The Greatest Good Principle

Mill’s Definition of Pleasure

Attitude to Social Reform

• An affiliation of High Church Anglicans

Darwinism and Writers

• Darwin’s theories provoked in Victorian literature a wave of pessimism and scepticism

• Developed by French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857)

Matthew Arnold (1822-88)

• Poet, critic & educational administrator

• In his reports on educational problems

• First series appeared in 1865

“The Study of Poetry”

“The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”

Culture and Anarchy (1869)

• A series of periodical essays published in Cornhill Magazine in 1867-68

Concepts in Culture and Anarchy

• Culture is “the study of perfection”

• Belief that the body gets in the way of “right thinking”

Charles Dickens (1812-70)

Start of a journalistic career