Early 19 th Century English Literature, part 2 Presented by Mike - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Early 19th Century English Literature, part 2

Presented by Mike Trial Technical Support by Compass Flower Press

Course Outline

• October 12

– Mary Shelley (and John Polidori) – Maria Edgeworth – Frances Burney – Jane Austen

• October 19

– The Brontës – William Thackeray – George Meredith – Wilkie Collins (and Edward Bulwer-Lytton)

Why aren’t Trollope and Dickens included among the mid-Victorian writers to be discussed today?

• Trollope – because he’s not good enough

He wrote too much, too fast (57 books and plays, plus short stories in 35 years of writing.) He achieved popularity and money, but not quality. (others will have different opinions, I’m sure)

• Dickens – because he’s too good It

would take a full session to discuss his works and influence. (our Wilkie Collins discussion will touch on Dickens.)

Timelines The Victorian Era: 1837-1901

• Anne Brontë 1820-1849

(died at age 29)

• Branwell Brontë 1817-1848 (died at age 31)
• Charlotte Brontë 1816-1855 (died at age 39)
• Emily Brontë 1818-1848

(died at age 30)

• William Thackeray 1811-1863(died at age 53)
• George Meredith 1828-1909 (died at age 81)
• Wilkie Collins 1824-1889

(died at age 65)

The Victorian Era, Rule Britannia!

The European social and political context of the mid-Victorian Era

• 1848 is a year of

revolutions across Europe

• Bismarck forms the

German nation

• Imperial Russia is

at its zenith

The Brontës (1818-1855)

This is a chalk on paper portrait of Charlotte Brontë done by George Richmond in 1850

Where did the Brontës live?

The Bronte’s lived in a small town called Haworth on the Yorkshire Moors Jane Austen’s writing years were spent at Chawton Cottage in Hampshire

Of the six Brontë children…

• Maria and Elizabeth died in childhood
• Charlotte published

– Jane Eyre (1847) – Shirley(1849) – Villette (1853) – The Professor (posthumously in 1857)

• Emily published only

– Wuthering Heights(1847)

• Anne published

– Agnes Grey (1847) – The Tenant of Wildfell Hall(1848)

• Branwell published only a few poems

Emily Brontë (1818-1848)

She was the secretive one, happiest when she was alone, roaming the Moors. She and youngest sister Anne had created their fantasy world Gondol, while Charlotte and Branwell created Angria, in their shared-universe, role- playing game Her poetry show a tough and defiant soul Her character Heathcliffe draws on her brother Branwell’s dissolute life Emily died a year after her only book was published in 1847.

Emily Brontë (1818-1848)

Emily’s poetry shows a tough and defiant soul “…no coward soul is mine, no trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere…” Emily’s poetry gave Charlotte the idea for the 3 sisters to self-publish a book of poems as by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell It was released in 1846, the sisters’ first published work. It sold 2 copies.

Anne Brontë (1820-1849)

• Tenant of Wildfell Hall –

women had no rights in marriage (the bad husband’s behavior is modeled on her brother Branwell’s behavior)

• Agnes Gray – the miserable

life of a governess (often the

• nly choice of employment a

respectable woman had)

In Agnes Grey we see Anne’s view

(though these are the words of critic F. Schwarzbach, NYU)

• Girls are trained to grow into witless
• rnaments, boys into heartless brutes.
• These moral monsters then form their own

families, brought together hardly knowing one another and doomed, at best, to loveless coexistence in unions of family convenience.

And of course, Charlotte’s best-seller, Jane Eyre

• Robert Southey had advised Charlotte "Literature cannot

be the business of a woman's life"

• No drafts survive, only the the fair copy which she finished

transcribing August 19, 1847

• She sent it immediately to publisher Smith, Elder, as an

autobiography edited by ‘Currer Bell’

• It has the trappings of melodrama: outcast orphan, Helen

Burns, Lowood school, governess at Thornfield, ghost in the attic, mysterious Rochester, leaving Thornfield, then Mr. Rivers – an offer to go to India, an unexpected inheritance, Thornfield burned, Rochester injured, and so…

• Reader, I married him.

1847 was an important year for the three Brontë sisters

• Jane Eyre an autobiography edited by Currer

Bell (Charlotte Brontë) is published by Smith, Elder, Co.

• Wuthering Heights, by Ellis Bell (Emily Brontë)

is published by Thomas Cautley Newby Co.

• Agnes Grey by Acton Bell ( Anne Brontë) is

published by Thomas Cautley Newby Co.

Charlotte Brontë published two other books in her lifetime, one was Villette

• Villette was published in January

1853

• At the time Villette was written

Charlotte was living alone with her 75 year old father a Haworth Parsonage

• Villette draws heavily upon

Charlotte’s days in Brussels, and her unrequited love for Konstantin Heger

• Mathew Arnold’s review said in

part “…contains, hunger, rebellion, and rage…a bitter complaint against the destiny of women…”

Branwell Brontë (1817-1848) a tragic, wasted, life

One legend has it that

• Mrs. Robinson in the

1963 Charles Webb novel, and 1968 movie The Graduate was based on Branwell’s liason with his employer’s wife The Black Bull pub in Haworth as it looks today

The towers of Glasstown remained in the hearts of the four children their entire lives

It was perhaps the happiest time

• f their lives, sitting at the table in

Haworth Parsonage writing the endless adventures of Angria, Gondal, Glasstown. To my mind, their experience, prefigures the experiences of many reclusive people of today who spend their time in solitude, engrossed in role playing games on-line.

A birthday gift of toy soldiers to Branwell in 1826 fired all 4 children’s imagination

• The children collectively

created an imaginary world and wrote tiny books of stories about characters in different nations in that world

• They were also influenced

by the dramatic paintings

• f John Martin
• And later by the life of

Lord Byron

Both Austen’s and the Brontës’ juvenalia survives

Comparing the juvenalia of Jane Austen and the Brontës

• Austen: “…the false glare of Fortune and the

Deluding Pomp of Title…”

– Drawing room readings, often epistolary in form, and humorous, satirical, observant

• The Brontës: “…near the heart of my own

kingdom, Angria, …found a Conqueror to whom I was no rival, but a trampled slave…”

– melodramatic, exotic…a shared dreamworld, distant from the bleak Yorkshire moors.

Other points about the Brontës

• In Jane Eyre, the saintly Helen Burns, Jane’s

friend at Lowood school, is based on Charlotte’s idolized older sister Maria

• Both Heathcliffe and Mr. Rochester were to some

extent modeled on Branwell

• All four children wrote poetry throughout their

lives

• The shared fantasy world of the Brontës juvenalia

stayed with all of them their entire lives; they each used it as the starting point for their mature writing

There are a couple of videos about the Brontës at the Columbia Public Library

This video is a good, short, documentary of the Brontë family This video is a longer, 5 part, re-enactment

• f the lives of the

Brontës

William Thackeray (1811-1863)

William Thackeray (1811-1863)

• An only child, born in Calcutta, his father is a British

civil servant who dies when William is 5 years old

• He is sent ‘home’ to England and lives with an aunt

until his mother, remarried, returns to England

• Public school education, then Cambridge – he does

not graduate

• He marries young, three children, his wife became

insane and was institutionalized

• Loses his inheritance gambling, takes up journalism

and finds he is good at it

• His novel Vanity Fair is serialized in monthly

installments in Punch magazine and is popular, when subsequently published in book form, it becomes a bestseller

• Dies at age 52

William Thackeray

• Was a master of satire, learned in his decade of

paid journalism for satirical periodicals

• He satirized the novels of people like Edward

Bulwer-Lytton, and Benjamin Disraeli

• In his novels his characters’ language identified

their social position (Dickens was better able to differentiate character through language more subtly)

• He was an Anglo-Indian but was not affected by

that experience as much as some other writers

British India during the Victorian Era

The yellow areas are independent Indian kingdoms, the reddish color is British India The Anglo-Indians were aristocrats in India, middle-class in Britain

Some other Anglo-Indians

• Writers

– Rudyard Kipling – George Orwell – Lawrence Durrell

• Actors

– Vivien Leigh – Julie Christie – Joanna Lumley

Vanity Fair, Thackeray’s most famous novel

• Serialized weekly (7000 words per

week for nearly a year with no breaks!)

• Becky Sharp is openly a social climber,

(she was once a governess but we don’t see her misery in that position like we do in Anne Bronte’s Agnes Grey)

• Final lines: “…Which of us is happy in

this world? Which of us has his desire? – or having it is satisfied? – come children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.”

British newspapers

• By 1854, all British newspapers annually

published an amazing 122,000,000 copies

• Into the late 19th century British newspapers

were controlled by 4 wealthy ‘press barons’ but surprisingly their political influence was not as great as we might expect

Edward Bulwer-Lytton 1803-1873

a strangely influential, second-rate author

• Cambridge graduate, member of parliament several times, knighted in 1866
• Best selling author of 30 books, many of which made him a great deal of money
• His son became Viceroy of British India
• Coined the phrases:

– The pen is mightier than the sword – The almighty dollar – The great unwashed – And of course It was a dark and stormy night, rain fell in torrents… – (from his book Paul Clifford, published in 1830

• His book The Last Days of Pompeii became accepted as history
• for a while, and has been made into a movie several times.
• His story titled A Strange Story influenced Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula
• His novel Rienzi, the Last Tribune of Rome became Wagner’s first opera Rienzi
• He advised Dickens to change the end of Great Expectations
• so that Pip and Estella do get together – which Dickens did
• He wrote Harold, Last of the Saxons, which became Verdi’s opera Aroldo
• Turned down the kingship of Greece in 1862 (?!)
• Was Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1858-1859
• Buried with honors in Westminster Abbey

…his wife hated him

• …his marriage to his wife Rosina, also a writer,

became strained, and they separated

• acrimoniously. Rosina publish a libelous book of

her own called Cheveley, or the Man of Honor satirizing her ex-husband.

• In 1858 when he was standing for parliament,

Rosina denounced him in public so he had her committed to an insane asylum (we’ll talk more about this later.) She wrote about the incident in another book of hers titled A Blighted Life

His influence grew after his death

George Meredith (1828-1909)

Who’s George Meredith?

• George Meredith 1828 – 1909
• His wife deserted him in 1858, leaving him to

raise their five year old son. He published his best book The Ordeal of Richard Feverel in 1859, a unique book for its time, drawing on this ordeal

• Meredith believed we cannot avoid our nature

which is both good and bad

• His book focuses on the consequences of

tragedy, not its causes

George Meredith

• Why do we want to discuss

Meredith, and his most famous novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, published in 1859?

• His book is notable because it

considers human nature to be natural, and because it discusses the results of tragedy, not the causes of tragedy

Wilkie Collins (1824-1889)

Wilkie Collins

Dickens and Collins were both in the weekly periodical All the Year Round in November 26, 1859

Tale of Two Cities

• Charles Dickens’ novel’s last

lines:

• It is a far, far better thing

that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known. The Woman in White

• Wilkie Collin’s novel’s first

lines:

• This is the story of what a

woman’s patience can endure, and what a man’s resolution can achieve.

The importance of periodicals to literature in the mid-19th century

• Dicken’s novel The Old Curiosity Shop,

serialized in 40 weekly installments, raised circulation of a periodical called Master Humphrey’s Clock from 10,000 to 100,000 copies weekly

The Woman in White

• The first ‘sensation’ novel
• A thriller with spooky, but not

supernatural, elements

• A sharp commentary on

women’s rights (or lack of them)

• A sharp commentary on the

gentry’s ability and willigness to break laws at will

• A sharp commentary on insane

asylums

• A famous, fat, Italian, villain:

‘Count Fosco’

This a a good, short, Masterpiece Theater version of The Woman in White on video

Some American writers of this period…

• James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851)

– noble savages, sea stories, romances in the style of Sir Walter Scott

• Nathaniel Hawthorne(1804–1864)

– Dark romance, New England gothic

• Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

– Detective, supernatural, and horror

• Herman Melville (1819-1891)

“Call me Ishmael.” “…the Rachel, in retracing her search after her missing children, only found another orphan.”

Some Russian writers…

• Pushkin (1799-1837) Eugene Onegin

1831

• Turgenev (1818-1883) Fathers&Sons 1861
• Dostoevsky (1821-1881) Crime&Punish 1866
• Tolstoy (1828-1910) Anna Karenina

1877

• Chekhov (1860-1904) various,

1886-1896

Some continental European writers…

• Dumas
• Stendhal
• Sand

Course Summary

• Mary Shelley – the magical summer of 1816, a unique book
• John Polidori – the Vampyre
• Maria Edgeworth – an emancipated woman
• Frances Burney – influential books foreshadowing Austen
• Jane Austen – myth, legend, and reality
• The Brontës – juvenalia, short lives, great literature
• William Thackeray – Satirist and women’s rights advocate
• Edward Bulwer-Lytton – poor writer, vast influence
• George Meredith – personal tragedy to influential novel
• Wilkie Collins – ‘sensation novel’, serialized books.

women’s rights