HARD TIMES/ CHARLES DICKENS

SYNOPSIS

Thomas Gradgrind, a wealthy, retired merchant in the industrial city of Coketown,

England, devotes his life to a philosophy of rationalism, self-interest, and fact. He raises
his oldest children, Louisa and Tom, according to this philosophy and never allows them
to engage in fanciful or imaginative pursuits. He founds a school and charitably takes in
one of the students, the kindly and imaginative Sissy Jupe, after the disappearance of her
father, a circus entertainer.
As the Gradgrind children grow older, Tom becomes a dissipated, self-interested
hedonist, and Louisa struggles with deep inner confusion, feeling as though she is missing
something important in her life. Eventually Louisa marries Gradgrind’s friend Josiah
Bounderby, a wealthy factory owner and banker more than twice her age. Bounderby
continually trumpets his role as a self-made man who was abandoned in the gutter by his
mother as an infant. Tom is apprenticed at the Bounderby bank, and Sissy remains at the
Gradgrind home to care for the younger children.
In the meantime, an impoverished “Hand”—Dickens’s term for the lowest
laborers in Coketown’s factories—named Stephen Blackpool struggles with his love for
Rachael, another poor factory worker. He is unable to marry her because he is already
married to a horrible, drunken woman who disappears for months and even years at a
time. Stephen visits Bounderby to ask about a divorce but learns that only the wealthy
can obtain them. Outside Bounderby’s home, he meets Mrs. Pegler, a strange old woman
with an inexplicable devotion to Bounderby.
James Harthouse, a wealthy young sophisticate from London, arrives in Coketown
to begin a political career as a disciple of Gradgrind, who is now a Member of Parliament.
He immediately takes an interest in Louisa and decides to try to seduce her. With the
unspoken aid of Mrs. Sparsit, a former aristocrat who has fallen on hard times and now
works for Bounderby, he sets about trying to corrupt Louisa.
The Hands, exhorted by a crooked union spokesman named Slackbridge, try to
form a union. Only Stephen refuses to join because he feels that a union strike would only
increase tensions between employers and employees. He is cast out by the other Hands
and fired by Bounderby when he refuses to spy on them. Louisa, impressed with
Stephen’s integrity, visits him before he leaves Coketown and helps him with some
money. Tom accompanies her and tells Stephen that if he waits outside the bank for
several consecutive nights, help will come to him. Stephen does so, but no help arrives.
Eventually he packs up and leaves Coketown, hoping to find agricultural work in the
country. Not long after that, the bank is robbed, and the lone suspect is Stephen, the
vanished Hand who was seen loitering outside the bank for several nights just before
disappearing from the city.
Mrs. Sparsit witnesses Harthouse declaring his love for Louisa, and Louisa agrees
to meet him in Coketown later that night. However, Louisa instead flees to her father’s
house, where she miserably confides to Gradgrind that her upbringing has left her married
to a man she does not love, disconnected from her feelings, deeply unhappy, and possibly
in love with Harthouse. She collapses to the floor, and Gradgrind, struck dumb with self-
reproach, begins to realize the imperfections in his philosophy of rational self-interest.
Sissy, who loves Louisa deeply, visits Harthouse and convinces him to leave Coketown
forever. Bounderby, furious that his wife has left him, redoubles his efforts to capture
Stephen. When Stephen tries to return to clear his good name, he falls into a mining pit
called Old Hell Shaft. Rachael and Louisa discover him, but he dies soon after an
emotional farewell to Rachael. Gradgrind and Louisa realize that Tom is really
responsible for robbing the bank, and they arrange to sneak him out of England with the
help of the circus performers with whom Sissy spent her early childhood. They are nearly
successful, but are stopped by Bitzer, a young man who went to Gradgrind’s school and
who embodies all the qualities of the detached rationalism that Gradgrind once espoused,
but who now sees its limits. Sleary, the lisping circus proprietor, arranges for Tom to slip
out of Bitzer’s grasp, and the young robber escapes from England after all.
Mrs. Sparsit, anxious to help Bounderby find the robbers, drags Mrs. Pegler—a
known associate of Stephen Blackpool—in to see Bounderby, thinking Mrs. Pegler is a
potential witness. Bounderby recoils, and it is revealed that Mrs. Pegler is really his loving
mother, whom he has forbidden to visit him: Bounderby is not a self-made man after all.
Angrily, Bounderby fires Mrs. Sparsit and sends her away to her hostile relatives. Five
years later, he will die alone in the streets of Coketown. Gradgrind gives up his philosophy
of fact and devotes his political power to helping the poor. Tom realizes the error of his
ways but dies without ever seeing his family again. While Sissy marries and has a large
and loving family, Louisa never again marries and never has children. Nevertheless,
Louisa is loved by Sissy’s family and learns at last how to feel sympathy for her fellow
human beings.

SOURCE: SPARKNOTES
 HARD TIMES AND REPRINTED PIECES
(Project Gutenberg)
With illustrations by Marcus Stone, Maurice
Greiffenhagen, and F. Walker
LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, LD.
NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1905

TEXT 1
CHAPTER I
THE ONE THING NEEDFUL

‘NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone
are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form
the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to
them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle
on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!’
The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a school-room, and the speaker’s square
forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the
schoolmaster’s sleeve. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s square wall of a
forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious
cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis was helped by the
speaker’s mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set. The emphasis was helped by the
speaker’s voice, which was inflexible, dry, and dictatorial. The emphasis was helped by
the speaker’s hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep
the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as
if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside. The speaker’s
obstinate carriage, square coat, square legs, square shoulders,—nay, his very neckcloth,
trained to take him by the throat with an unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn fact, as
it was,—all helped the emphasis.
‘In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!’
The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present, all backed a little,
and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in
order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the
brim.
 TEXT 2
CHAPTER V
THE KEYNOTE

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes
had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the
painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which
interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got
uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and
vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day
long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like
the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large
streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another,
inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours,
with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every
day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last
and the next.
These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the work by which it
was sustained; against them were to be set off, comforts of life which found their way all
over the world, and elegancies of life which made, we will not ask how much of the fine
lady, who could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned. The rest of its features were
voluntary, and they were these.
You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. If the members of a
religious persuasion built a chapel there—as the members of eighteen religious
persuasions had done—they made it a pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (but
this is only in highly ornamental examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of it. The
solitary exception was the New Church; a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple over the
door, terminating in four short pinnacles like florid wooden legs. All the public
inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The
jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall
might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the
contrary in the graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material
aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial. The M’Choakumchild
school was all fact, and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master
and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the
cemetery, and what you couldn’t state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in the
cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without
end, Amen.
 TEXT 3
CHAPTER VI
SLEARY’S HORSEMANSHIP

Meanwhile, the various members of Sleary’s company gradually gathered together from
the upper regions, where they were quartered, and, from standing about, talking in low
voices to one another and to Mr. Childers, gradually insinuated themselves and him into
the room. There were two or three handsome young women among them, with their two
or three husbands, and their two or three mothers, and their eight or nine little children,
who did the fairy business when required. The father of one of the families was in the
habit of balancing the father of another of the families on the top of a great pole; the father
of a third family often made a pyramid of both those fathers, with Master Kidderminster
for the apex, and himself for the base; all the fathers could dance upon rolling casks, stand
upon bottles, catch knives and balls, twirl hand-basins, ride upon anything, jump over
everything, and stick at nothing. All the mothers could (and did) dance, upon the slack
wire and the tight-rope, and perform rapid acts on bare-backed steeds; none of them were
at all particular in respect of showing their legs; and one of them, alone in a Greek chariot,
drove six in hand into every town they came to. They all assumed to be mighty rakish
and knowing, they were not very tidy in their private dresses, they were not at all orderly
in their domestic arrangements, and the combined literature of the whole company would
have produced but a poor letter on any subject. Yet there was a remarkable gentleness
and childishness about these people, a special inaptitude for any kind of sharp practice,
and an untiring readiness to help and pity one another, deserving often of as much respect,
and always of as much generous construction, as the every-day virtues of any class of
people in the world.
 HEART OF DARKNESS/ JOSEPH CONRAD
SYNOPSIS

In the Thames estuary five men sit on board the Nellie, a cruising boat. One is the
nameless first narrator of the novel, who introduces his four companions: there is the
Director of the Companies (their captain and host); a lawyer; an accountant; and finally
Marlow, a seaman who, in several works by Joseph Conrad, relates his experiences or, as
in Lord Jim, comments on the adventurous life of another man. While they are waiting
for the tide to turn, Marlow tells the others of an experience he once had in Africa.
As a child Marlow was fascinated by the River Congo (unnamed in the story). His
childhood dream materialized when he obtained the command of a steamboat to travel up
the river. He first went to Brussels (also unnamed) to visit the headquarters of the
company that sponsored his journey. The death-like atmosphere of the city and of the
company headquarters, together with weird behavior of the people he met there, seemed
to him ominous signs. He was, moreover, made uncomfortable by the realisation that he
was looked upon as an emissary of light. His uneasiness grew during the journey to
Africa, which gave him a first glimpse into the colonialist enterprise. Marlow’s suspicions
were confirmed on reaching the first or Outer Station on the river. His first view was of
black men made to work for an apparently useless purpose, or being too weak to work
and simply left to die. Marlow’s horror was matched only by his surprise when he saw a
white man, the company’s chief accountant, elegantly and meticulously attired, clearly
unaware of, or indifferent to, the surroundings in which he kept the company’s books ‘in
apple-pie order’. The accountant was the first to tell Marlow about Kurtz, the first-class
agent he would meet in the interior.
On reaching the Central Station, the next stage in his journey, Marlow was met
with the disappointing news that the steamer he was to command had sunk, her bottom
torn off as the manager had suddenly attempted to make for the Inner Station without
waiting for him. Here Marlow also heard about Kurtz, though no longer with admiration
but with but with resentment and fear. He set to work immediately to repair his boat but
couldn’t do much without rivets, which took two months to arrive from the Outer Station.
Meanwhile a band of explorers, calling themselves ‘the Eldorado Exploring Expedition’
and headed by the manager’s uncle, arrived at the Central Station. These did not even
pretend to have come on a philanthropic mission; they talked unashamedly of the riches
they could extract from the country. One night Marlow overheard a conversation between
the manager and his uncle which gave him to understand that the manager was doing his
best to delay relieving Kurtz, lying very ill at the Inner Station, in the hope that nature
would remove this undesirable rival.
Three months after his arrival at the Central Station, Marlow at last left with the
manager and a few ‘pilgrims’ for the Inner Station, which it took them another two
months to reach. In all those months Marlow’s curiosity about Kurtz had turned into a
sense of growing expectation at the prospect of meeting this man who, in his rival’s own
words, was an ‘emissary of pity, and science, and progress’. On the way up-river Marlow
keenly felt the power of attraction of the wilderness but was prevented from going ashore
by the need to be attentive to his work.
With difficulty they reached the Inner Station, where they were welcomed by a
young Russian dressed like a harlequin. While the manager and a few pilgrims went on
shore, the harlequin came on board and confessed to Marlow his unbounded admiration
for Kurtz’s eloquence and ideas. He told Marlow in confidence that Kurtz had ordered an
attack on the steamboat. Directing his field-glass towards Kurtz’s house, Marlow realized
that the knobs on the poles of the fence were actually dried human heads. It so horrified
him that he refused to hear more from the harlequin about the rites and ceremonies staged
by the natives in honour of Kurtz.
Meanwhile Kurtz was being carried on board, a very ill and emaciated man, a
mere voice, as Marlow now insists, but still a deep, vibrating and eloquent one. He was
followed to the shore by a crowd of natives. A magnificent woman, Kurtz’s black
mistress, appeared and raised her arms in a dramatic gesture that seemed to release swift
shadows before she disappeared again. Shortly afterwards, the manager’s unfavourable
comments on Kurtz drove Marlow to side with the latter, glad to have at least ‘a choice
of nightmares’. After midnight, when all were asleep on board, Marlow looked into the
cabin where Kurtz had been lying and saw that he was not there. He did not betray him,
but went on shore alone after him and managed to bring him back by outwitting him and
breaking the spell that drew him to the wilderness. As they journeyed away from ‘the
heart of darkness’, Kurtz discoursed eloquently about his ideas and his plans almost until
the moment of his death, unaware of the discrepancy between his words and his actions.
He gave Marlow a report he had written on the ‘The Suppression of Savage Customs’,
having forgotten all about his own postscript, ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’. Only at the
very last instant did he seem to pass judgement on his life when he cried out ‘The horror!
The horror!’.
Marlow himself nearly died of fever but came back to Brussels, the wiser for his
experience and irritated by the ignorance and complacency of the people he met in the
street. He was visited by several acquaintances and relatives of Kurtz, who each gave him
a different picture of the ‘great’ man. He fulfilled what he saw as a last duty to Kurtz by
visiting his Intended (his fiancée), about whom he had heard so much from Kurtz himself.
As he entered the house towards evening his vision of Kurtz as a voracious shadow
seemed to enter with him. The impressions of darkness and light that Marlow gathered
from the drawing-room converged on the girl, for she was dressed in black and had a lofty
forehead on which the light took refuge as the room grew darker. In the ensuing
conversation Marlow was made uneasy once more, the desperate and even angry by the
girl’s unquestioned admiration for Kurtz’s greatness and eloquence and her deep
conviction that ‘he died as he lived’. He did not undeceived her, however, nor take away
the ‘great and saving illusion’ that sustained her. When asked what Kurtz’s last words
were, he actually lied and said that his last words had been her name.
Marlow’s tale over, the first narrator concludes the narrative. The Thames which,
at the beginning of the novel, he saw flowing in ‘tranquil dignity’ crowded with memories
of the feats of British conquerors, he now sees flowing ‘sombre under an overcast sky…
into the heart of an immense darkness’.

SOURCE: YORK NOTES

 Source of the passages: Project Gutenberg

TEXT 1
We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and
departs for ever, but in the august light of abiding memories. And indeed nothing is easier
for a man who has, as the phrase goes, "followed the sea" with reverence and affection,
than to evoke the great spirit of the past upon the lower reaches of the Thames. The tidal
current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories of men and ships
it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea. It had known and served all
the men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights
all, titled and untitled—the great knights-errant of the sea. It had borne all the ships whose
names are like jewels flashing in the night of time, from the Golden Hind returning with
her round flanks full of treasure, to be visited by the Queen's Highness and thus pass out
of the gigantic tale, to the Erebus and Terror, bound on other conquests—and that never
returned. It had known the ships and the men. They had sailed from Deptford, from
Greenwich, from Erith—the adventurers and the settlers; kings' ships and the ships of
men on 'Change; captains, admirals, the dark "interlopers" of the Eastern trade, and the
commissioned "generals" of East India fleets. Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they
all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the
might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not
floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of
men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.
 TEXT 2

The Director of Companies was our captain and our host. We four affectionately watched
his back as he stood in the bows looking to seaward. On the whole river there was nothing
that looked half so nautical. He resembled a pilot, which to a seaman is trustworthiness
personified. It was difficult to realize his work was not out there in the luminous estuary,
but behind him, within the brooding gloom.

Between us there was, as I have already said somewhere, the bond of the sea. Besides
holding our hearts together through long periods of separation, it had the effect of making
us tolerant of each other's yarns—and even convictions. The Lawyer—the best of old
fellows—had, because of his many years and many virtues, the only cushion on deck, and
was lying on the only rug. The Accountant had brought out already a box of dominoes,
and was toying architecturally with the bones. Marlow sat cross-legged right aft, leaning
against the mizzen-mast. He had sunken cheeks, a yellow complexion, a straight back, an
ascetic aspect, and, with his arms dropped, the palms of hands outwards, resembled an
idol.

(…)

"And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth."

He was the only man of us who still "followed the sea." The worst that could be said of
him was that he did not represent his class. He was a seaman, but he was a wanderer, too,
while most seamen lead, if one may so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the
stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them—the ship; and so is their
country—the sea. One ship is very much like another, and the sea is always the same. In
the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing
immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful
ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is
the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny. For the rest, after his hours of
work, a casual stroll or a casual spree on shore suffices to unfold for him the secret of a
whole continent, and generally he finds the secret not worth knowing. The yarns of
seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a
cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and
to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the
tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these
misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.
 TEXT 3
Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn't even
a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars
going on thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long eight-
inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and
let her down, swaying her thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water,
there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the eight-
inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a
tiny projectile would give a feeble screech—and nothing happened. Nothing could
happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery
in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there
was a camp of natives—he called them enemies!—hidden out of sight somewhere.

TEXT 4
Yes; I looked at them as you would on any human being, with a curiosity of their
impulses, motives, capacities, weaknesses, when brought to the test of an inexorable
physical necessity. Restraint! What possible restraint? Was it superstition, disgust,
patience, fear—or some kind of primitive honor? No fear can stand up to hunger, no
patience can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to
superstition, beliefs, and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze.
Don't you know the devilry of lingering starvation, its exasperating torment, its black
thoughts, its somber and brooding ferocity? Well, I do. It takes a man all his inborn
strength to fight hunger properly. It's really easier to face bereavement, dishonor, and the
perdition of one's soul—than this kind of prolonged hunger. Sad, but true. And these
chaps too had no earthly reason for any kind of scruple. Restraint! I would just as soon
have expected restraint from a hyena prowling amongst the corpses of a battlefield. But
there was the fact facing me—the fact dazzling, to be seen, like the foam on the depths of
the sea, like a ripple on an unfathomable enigma, a mystery greater—when I thought of
it—than the curious, inexplicable note of desperate grief in this savage clamor that had
swept by us on the river-bank, behind the blind whiteness of the fog.
 TEXT 5
"She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth
proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. She carried her head high;
her hair was done in the shape of a helmet; she had brass leggings to the knee, brass wire
gauntlets to the elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass
beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of witch-men, that hung about her,
glittered and trembled at every step. She must have had the value of several elephant tusks
upon her. She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something
ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly
upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund
and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the
image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul.

(…)

Suddenly she opened her bared arms and threw them up rigid above her head, as though
in an uncontrollable desire to touch the sky, and at the same time the swift shadows darted
out on the earth, swept around on the river, gathering the steamer into a shadowy embrace.
A formidable silence hung over the scene.

TEXT 6
"She came forward, all in black, with a pale head, floating towards me in the dusk. She
was in mourning. It was more than a year since his death, more than a year since the news
came; she seemed as though she would remember and mourn for ever. She took both my
hands in hers and murmured, 'I had heard you were coming.' I noticed she was not very
young—I mean not girlish. She had a mature capacity for fidelity, for belief, for suffering.
The room seemed to have grown darker, as if all the sad light of the cloudy evening had
taken refuge on her forehead. This fair hair, this pale visage, this pure brow, seemed
surrounded by an ashy halo from which the dark eyes looked out at me. Their glance was
guileless, profound, confident, and trustful. She carried her sorrowful head as though she
were proud of that sorrow, as though she would say, 'I—I alone know how to mourn for
him as he deserves.' But while we were still shaking hands, such a look of awful
desolation came upon her face that I perceived she was one of those creatures that are not
the playthings of Time. For her he had died only yesterday.
 MRS. DALLOWAY/ VIRGINIA WOOLF
SYNOPSIS
The events narrated in Mrs. Dalloway all take place on a single day in mid-June 1923.
The novel opens with Clarissa Dalloway going out, at about ten o’clock in the morning,
to buy flowers for a party she is to have at her house that evening. The novel closes as the
party begins to fade at around midnight. Throughout the novel the reader is kept informed
of the passing of time through the day, by the chiming of the clocks, most often of Big
Ben, the clock at the Houses of Parliament in Westminster, the district of London where
the Dalloways live. Since the novel is not divided into chapters, this marking of the
passage of time at intervals provides a regular and objective framework. The second
objective framework within which everything takes place is that of London itself. The
characters move around London. The city provides a space for interesting encounters and
constantly changing perspectives. As the characters move around the city, all going about
their private business, their paths cross or the witness the same events (such as the plane
flying above them). The narration shifts from one character to another so that the events
of the day are told from many points of view.
Contrasting with these predictable and objective frameworks of space and time
are subjective lives of each of the characters. Throughout the day, characters remember
the pas, fantasise about the future, speculate about each other and attend with greater of
lesser degrees of success to the present. For much of the novel we follow the
consciousness of Clarissa Dalloway. She prepares for her party, stops to mend a dress,
and is then interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Peter Walsh, who loved her an wanted
to marry her when she was young. Clarissa also attends to her seventeen-year-old
daughter, Elizabeth, who goes out with her tutor, a woman whom Clarissa hates intensely.
She sees her husband briefly in the afternoon. Lateer we find her at the beginning of her
party, nervous in case it is a failure, and then again later as the evening goes by when she
is more confident. Her party is interrupted when she happens to hear from Lady Bradshaw
the news of the suicide of a young man called Septimus Warren Smith.
We have followed Septimus, a veteran of the war who is suffering from delayed
shell-shock and is mentally unbalanced, and his Italian wife Lucrezia (or Rezia), in the
course of their day. The have walked round London, sat in a park (where they happened
to see Peter Walsh) waiting for a consultation with the distinguished doctor Sir William
Bradshaw. Septimus if often delirious and his wife is deeply miserable, embarrassed when
Septimus talks to himself in public, and terrified when he threatens to kill himself.
Bradshaw immediately sees that he is severely ill and insists that hemus go away to
nursing home. Later, at their home, the Warren Smiths find a few moments of happiness
and normality but then their own doctor, Holmes, arrives and Septimus, refusing to submit
to the power of the doctors, throws himself from his window and dies almost at once.
Weaving in and out of the account of the day as it is experienced by these
characters, there is also recounted from time to time the consciousness of Peter Walsh, of
Clarissa’s husband Richard, a Conservative Member of Parliament, of Elizabeth and of
her tutor, Miss Doris Kilman. Throughout the day characters remember a particularly
significant time of their lives, a summer spent at Clarissa’s family home, Bourton, when
she was eighteen. The events of that summer had decisively influenced the entire course
of her life, for she had then rejected Peter Walsh and decided to marry Richard Dalloway.
She had also experienced a youthful infatuation with Sally Seton, a rebellious young girl
who also reappears unexpectedly, turning at Clarissa’s party transformed into Lady
Rosseter.
Clarissa Dalloway’s attention during the day comes back again and again to
thoughts about death. She has been ill and feels aware of age and the rapid passing of her
live. She thinks about the war and those who died in it. She thinks of her sister who died
when she was young in a particularly horrible accident which Clarissa herself witnessed.
She recites a quotation form Shakespeare: ‘Fear no more the heat of the sun, nor the
furious winter’s rages’, and this calms her and takes away the terror of death. (Septimus
recites the same lines at a moment of repose during the afternoon.) When she hears of
Septimus’s death she strangely gains strength and reassurance from it.
At the close of the novel we find that we have not followed a story in the normal
sense of the word. Very little has happened. We have circled around Mrs. Dalloway so
that she has been seen from many points of view, both internal external, and now we have
a sense that we are familiar with her, that we have come to know who she is. The novel
ends with Clarissa simply appearing on the stairs at her party. ‘For there she was’.

SOURCE: YORK NOTES

 Source of the passages:
eBooks@Adelaide
The University of Adelaide Library
University of Adelaide
South Australia 5005

TEXT 1

How much she wanted it — that people should look pleased as she came in, Clarissa
thought and turned and walked back towards Bond Street, annoyed, because it was silly
to have other reasons for doing things. Much rather would she have been one of those
people like Richard who did things for themselves, whereas, she thought, waiting to cross,
half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this
or that; perfect idiocy she knew (and now the policeman held up his hand) for no one was
ever for a second taken in. Oh if she could have had her life over again! she thought,
stepping on to the pavement, could have looked even differently!
She would have been, in the first place, dark like Lady Bexborough, with a skin of
crumpled leather and beautiful eyes. She would have been, like Lady Bexborough, slow
and stately; rather large; interested in politics like a man; with a country house; very
dignified, very sincere. Instead of which she had a narrow pea-stick figure; a ridiculous
little face, beaked like a bird’s. That she held herself well was true; and had nice hands
and feet; and dressed well, considering that she spent little. But often now this body she
wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its capacities, seemed
nothing — nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen;
unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this
astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being
Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.

TEXT 2
Quiet descended on her, calm, content, as her needle, drawing the silk smoothly to its
gentle pause, collected the green folds together and attached them, very lightly, to the
belt. So on a summer’s day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the
whole world seems to be saying “that is all” more and more ponderously, until even the
heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all. Fear no more,
says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which
sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. And the body
alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away barking and
barking.
 TEXT 3

A patter like the patter of leaves in a wood came from behind, and with it a
rustling, regular thudding sound, which as it overtook him drummed his thoughts, strict
in step, up Whitehall, without his doing. Boys in uniform, carrying guns, marched with
their eyes ahead of them, marched, their arms stiff, and on their faces an expression like
the letters of a legend written round the base of a statue praising duty, gratitude, fidelity,
love of England.
It is, thought Peter Walsh, beginning to keep step with them, a very fine training.
But they did not look robust. They were weedy for the most part, boys of sixteen, who
might, to-morrow, stand behind bowls of rice, cakes of soap on counters. Now they wore
on them unmixed with sensual pleasure or daily preoccupations the solemnity of the
wreath which they had fetched from Finsbury Pavement to the empty tomb. They had
taken their vow. The traffic respected it; vans were stopped.
I can’t keep up with them, Peter Walsh thought, as they marched up Whitehall,
and sure enough, on they marched, past him, past every one, in their steady way, as if one
will worked legs and arms uniformly, and life, with its varieties, its irreticences, had been
laid under a pavement of monuments and wreaths and drugged into a stiff yet staring
corpse by discipline. One had to respect it; one might laugh; but one had to respect it, he
thought. There they go, thought Peter Walsh, pausing at the edge of the pavement; and
all the exalted statues, Nelson, Gordon, Havelock, the black, the spectacular images of
great soldiers stood looking ahead of them, as if they too had made the same renunciation
(Peter Walsh felt he too had made it, the great renunciation), trampled under the same
temptations, and achieved at length a marble stare. But the stare Peter Walsh did not want
for himself in the least; though he could respect it in others. He could respect it in boys.
They don’t know the troubles of the flesh yet, he thought, as the marching boys
disappeared in the direction of the Strand — all that I’ve been through, he thought,
crossing the road, and standing under Gordon’s statue, Gordon whom as a boy he had
worshipped; Gordon standing lonely with one leg raised and his arms crossed — poor
Gordon, he thought.
 TEXT 4

Heaven was divinely merciful, infinitely benignant. It spared him, pardoned his
weakness. But what was the scientific explanation (for one must be scientific above all
things)? Why could he see through bodies, see into the future, when dogs will become
men? It was the heat wave presumably, operating upon a brain made sensitive by eons of
evolution. Scientifically speaking, the flesh was melted off the world. His body was
macerated until only the nerve fibres were left. It was spread like a veil upon a rock.
He lay back in his chair, exhausted but upheld. He lay resting, waiting, before he
again interpreted, with effort, with agony, to mankind. He lay very high, on the back of
the world. The earth thrilled beneath him. Red flowers grew through his flesh; their stiff
leaves rustled by his head. Music began clanging against the rocks up here. It is a motor
horn down in the street, he muttered; but up here it cannoned from rock to rock, divided,
met in shocks of sound which rose in smooth columns (that music should be visible was
a discovery) and became an anthem, an anthem twined round now by a shepherd boy’s
piping (That’s an old man playing a penny whistle by the public-house, he muttered)
which, as the boy stood still came bubbling from his pipe, and then, as he climbed higher,
made its exquisite plaint while the traffic passed beneath. This boy’s elegy is played
among the traffic, thought Septimus. Now he withdraws up into the snows, and roses hang
about him — the thick red roses which grow on my bedroom wall, he reminded himself.
The music stopped. He has his penny, he reasoned it out, and has gone on to the next
public-house.
But he himself remained high on his rock, like a drowned sailor on a rock. I leant
over the edge of the boat and fell down, he thought. I went under the sea. I have been
dead, and yet am now alive, but let me rest still; he begged (he was talking to himself
again — it was awful, awful!); and as, before waking, the voices of birds and the sound
of wheels chime and chatter in a queer harmony, grow louder and louder and the sleeper
feels himself drawing to the shores of life, so he felt himself drawing towards life, the sun
growing hotter, cries sounding louder, something tremendous about to happen.
 TEXT 5
To his patients he gave three-quarters of an hour; and if in this exacting science
which has to do with what, after all, we know nothing about — the nervous system, the
human brain — a doctor loses his sense of proportion, as a doctor he fails. Health we must
have; and health is proportion; so that when a man comes into your room and says he is
Christ (a common delusion), and has a message, as they mostly have, and threatens, as
they often do, to kill himself, you invoke proportion; order rest in bed; rest in solitude;
silence and rest; rest without friends, without books, without messages; six months’ rest;
until a man who went in weighing seven stone six comes out weighing twelve.
Proportion, divine proportion, Sir William’s goddess, was acquired by Sir William
walking hospitals, catching salmon, begetting one son in Harley Street by Lady
Bradshaw, who caught salmon herself and took photographs scarcely to be distinguished
from the work of professionals. Worshipping proportion, Sir William not only prospered
himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalised
despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared
his sense of proportion — his, if they were men, Lady Bradshaw’s if they were women…
 THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN
JOHN FOWLES

SYNOPSIS
This novel is a love story which leaves us troubled and bewildered. It takes place in Hardy
country on the south coast at Lyme Bay. Although it is a Victorian novel, it is seen from
a twentieth-century perspective; the characters are simultaneously part of the nineteenth-
century world and the creatures of their author’s inventions. The action takes place in
1867, but its conception belongs to 1967.
The French Lieutenant’s ‘woman’ is the heroine, Sarah Woodruff. Her male
counterpart is not the French Lieutenant but the dilettante geologist, paleontologist and
follower of Darwin, Charles Smithson, who is engaged to Ernestina (Tina) Freeman.
Other significant characters are Charles’s uncle Sir Robert, who, by marrying late in life
and producing an heir, disinherits his nephew; Sam Farrow, Charles’s manservant;
Ernestina’s father, and her Aunt Tranter; an Irish doctor called Grogan; Mrs. Poulteney
who, in the hope of earning herself some credit in heaven, takes Sarah Woodruff as her
companion; Mrs. Fairley, Mrs. Poulteney’s odious housekeeper; and finally, the
enigmatic figure of the author himself.
Today we might well think that Charles Smithson and Ernestina Freeman were
ill-suited to each other, but theirs would have been a perfectly acceptable Victorian
marriage: a handsome, intelligent man, well-behaved, with prospects of a modest fortune
and a title, and a vainly pretty young lady, the only child of her father and heiress to a
massive fortune acquired through trade; moreover, they thought themselves to be in love,
which would have been an added bonus.
Charles, however, almost by accident finds himself involved with Sarah
Woodruff, an ex-governess, the ‘wicked woman’ of Lyme Regis, whose putative affair
with the French Lieutenant has become the talk and the scandal of the neighbourhood.
Through curiosity, and sympathy with her plight, Charles allows himself to be gradually
ensnared by Sarah until at last he sleeps with her, only to discover that the stories that
have circulated in the village are without foundation –she was a virgin!
After a terrible scene with Ernestina, in which she threatens him with legal action,
he breaks his engagement to her; he now determines to find Sarah again and put matters
right between them by offering her marriage. At this point, Sarah disappears; Charles
searches for her assiduously, even employing a detective agency to trace her, to no avail.
To help him forget, he travels abroad, first on the Continent and then to America. At last,
nearly two years later, news comes of Sarah; Charles returns to England and goes to visit
her.
At this point the author, who had already attempted to end the story prematurely
in Chapters 43 and 44 by proposing that Charles should not visit Sarah at her hotel but
should instead return to Ernestina and marry her, intervenes again. He offers us two
possible endings: first that Charles finds Sarah again, meets the child he had fathered and
–of course, because it is a Victorian romance!- marries Sarah to live happily ever after;
alternatively, Charles finds Sarah again, does not recognise the child he had fathered and
–of course, because it is a story seen in the light of twentieth-century cynicism- the two
quarrel and Charles leaves in anger, never to see Sarah again.
 Source of the passages:

Copyright © 1969 by John Fowles Signet Edition Library of

Congress Catalog Card Number: 77-86616 First Printing, august,
1970 eBook scanned/proofed by Binwiped 12/02 [v1.0]
TEXT 1

Though Charles liked to think of himself as a scientific young man and would probably
not have been too surprised had news reached him out of the future of the airplane, the
jet engine, television, radar: what would have astounded him was the changed attitude to
time itself. The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time; our sense of that,
not a disinterested love of science, and certainly not wisdom, is why we devote such a
huge proportion of the ingenuity and income of our societies to finding faster ways of
doing things—as if the final aim of mankind was to grow closer not to a perfect humanity,
but to a perfect lightning flash. But for Charles, and for almost all his contemporaries and
social peers, the time signature over existence was firmly adagio. The problem was not
fitting in all that one wanted to do, but spinning out what one did to occupy the vast
colonnades of leisure available.

TEXT 2

The first simple fact was that Mrs. Poulteney had never set eyes on Ware Commons, even
from a distance, since it was out of sight of any carriage road. The second simple fact is
that she was an opium-addict—but before you think I am wildly sacrificing plausibility
to sensation, let me quickly add that she did not know it. What we call opium she called
laudanum. A shrewd, if blasphemous, doctor of the time called it Our-Lordanum, since
many a nineteenth-century lady—and less, for the medicine was cheap enough (in the
form of Godfrey’s Cordial) to help all classes get through that black night of
womankind—sipped it a good deal more frequently than Communion wine. It was, in
short, a very near equivalent of our own age’s sedative pills. Why Mrs. Poulteney should
have been an inhabitant of the Victorian valley of the dolls we need not inquire, but it is
to the point that laudanum, as Coleridge once discovered, gives vivid dreams. I cannot
imagine what Bosch-like picture of Ware Commons Mrs. Poulteney had built up over the
years; what satanic orgies she divined behind every tree, what French abominations under
every leaf. But I think we may safely say that it had become the objective correlative of
all that went on in her own subconscious.
 TEXT 3

I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never
existed outside my own mind. If I have pretended until now to know my characters’ minds
and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as I have assumed some of the
vocabulary and “voice” of) a convention universally accepted at the time of my story: that
the novelist stands next to God. He may not know all, yet he tries to pretend that he does.
But I live in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes; if this is a novel, it cannot
be a novel in the modern sense of the word.

(…)

But I am a novelist, not a man in a garden—I can follow her where I like? But
possibility is not permissibility. Husbands could often murder their wives—and the
reverse—and get away with it. But they don’t. You may think novelists always have fixed
plans to which they work, so that the future predicted by Chapter One is always
inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen. But novelists write for countless different
reasons: for money, for fame, for reviewers, for parents, for friends, for loved ones; for
vanity, for pride, for curiosity, for amusement: as skilled furniture makers enjoy making
furniture, as drunkards like drinking, as judges like judging, as Sicilians like emptying a
shotgun into an enemy’s back. I could fill a book with reasons, and they would all be true,
though not true of all. Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create
worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan.
We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created
world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its
planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us
that they begin to live. When Charles left Sarah on her cliff edge, I ordered him to walk
straight back to Lyme Regis. But he did not; he gratuitously turned and went down to the
Dairy.

(…)

The novelist is still a god, since he creates (and not even the most aleatory avant-
garde modern novel has managed to extirpate its author completely); what has changed
is that we are no longer the gods of the Victorian image, omniscient and decreeing; but
in the new theological image, with freedom our first principle, not authority.
I have disgracefully broken the illusion? No. My characters still exist, and in a
reality no less, or no more, real than the one I have just broken. Fiction is woven into all,
as a Greek observed some two and a half thousand years ago. I find this new reality (or
unreality) more valid; and I would have you share my own sense that I do not fully control
these creatures of my mind, any more than you control—however hard you try, however
much of a latterday Mrs. Poulteney you may be—your children, colleagues, friends, or
even yourself.
But this is preposterous? A character is either “real” or “imaginary”? If you think
that, hypocrite lecteur, I can only smile. You do not even think of your own past as quite
real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it ... fictionalize it, in
a word, and put it away on a shelf—your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all
in flight from the real reality. That is a basic definition of Homo sapiens.
 TEXT 4

A whistle sounded, and Charles thought he had won the solitude he craved. But
then, at the very last moment, a massively bearded face appeared at his window. The cold
stare was met by the even colder stare of a man in a hurry to get aboard. The latecomer
muttered a “Pardon me, sir” and made his way to the far end of the compartment. He sat,
a man of forty or so, his top hat firmly square, his hands on his knees, regaining his breath.
There was something rather aggressively secure about him; he was perhaps not quite a
gentleman ... an ambitious butler (but butlers did not travel first class) or a successful lay
preacher—one of the bullying tabernacle kind, a would-be Spurgeon, converting souls by
scorching them with the cheap rhetoric of eternal damnation. A decidedly unpleasant
man, thought Charles, and so typical of the age—and therefore emphatically to be
snubbed if he tried to enter into conversation.
(…)
For a while his traveling companion took no notice of the sleeping Charles. But
as the chin sank deeper and deeper— Charles had taken the precaution of removing his
hat—the prophet-bearded man began to stare at him, safe in the knowledge that his
curiosity would not be surprised. His look was peculiar: sizing, ruminative, more than a
shade disapproving, as if he knew very well what sort of man this was…
(…)
It is precisely, it has always seemed to me, the look an omnipotent god—if there
were such an absurd thing—should be shown to have. Not at all what we think of as a
divine look; but one of a distinctly mean and dubious (as the theoreticians of the nouveau
roman have pointed out) moral quality. I see this with particular clarity on the face, only
too familiar to me, of the bearded man who stares at Charles. And I will keep up the
pretense no longer. Now the question I am asking, as I stare at Charles, is not quite the
same as the two above. But rather, what the devil am I going to do with you? I have
already thought of ending Charles’s career here and now; of leaving him for eternity on
his way to London. But the conventions of Victorian fiction allow, allowed no place for
the open, the inconclusive ending; and I preached earlier of the freedom characters must
be given. My problem is simple—what Charles wants is clear? It is indeed. But what the
protagonist wants is not so clear; and I am not at all sure where she is at the moment.
(…)
But the chief argument for fight-fixing is to show one’s readers what one thinks
of the world around one—whether one is a pessimist, an optimist, what you will. I have
pretended to slip back into 1867; but of course that year is in reality a century past. It is
futile to show optimism or pessimism, or anything else about it, because we know what
has happened since.
So I continue to stare at Charles and see no reason this time for fixing the fight
upon which he is about to engage. That leaves me with two alternatives. I let the fight
proceed and take no more than a recording part in it; or I take both sides in it. I stare at
that vaguely effete but not completely futile face. And as we near London, I think I see a
solution; that is, I see the dilemma is false. The only way I can take no part in the fight is
to show two versions of it. That leaves me with only one problem: I cannot give both
versions at once, yet whichever is the second will seem, so strong is the tyranny of the
last chapter, the final, the “real” version.
I take my purse from the pocket of my frock coat, I extract a florin, I rest it on my
right thumbnail, I flick it, spinning, two feet into the air and catch it in my left hand.