AQA ENGLISH LITERATURE AS

SPECIFICATION A
VICTORIAN LITERATURE OVERVIEW

Today you will receive two important bits of paper

1. This pack, which contains an overview of the course, a reading
list and your holiday homework
2. Letter to your parents explaining the texts you will need.

All the information you have been given today can be found on the
blog, www.victorianliteraturealevel.blogspot.com

There are TWO modules, one tested
coursework.
COURSEWORK = 40%
TWO ESSAYS
- first essay compares two plays,
A Woman of No Importance by
Oscar Wilde and A Doll’s
House by Henrik Ibsen. This is
due in Jan 2011 and is approx
1500 words.
- Second essay analyses one
novel, Hard Times by Charles
Dickens. This is due in Easter
2011 and is approx 1000
words.
by exam and one tested by
EXAM = 60%
ONE TWO-HOUR EXAM.
TWO QUESTIONS
- first question is a response to
an unseen non-fiction extract.
This question tests your wider
understanding of Victorian
literature and culture.
- Second question is an
analytical essay on the poetry
of Thomas Hardy. This
questions tests your detailed
understanding of the set
author, Hardy. You will be
given a copy of the Thomas
Hardy poetry anthology, and
we have asked you to buy and
read a biography of Thomas
Hardy (A Time Torn Man by
Claire Tomalin) in order to
increase your understanding of
his poetry.
TEXTS FOR WIDER READING IN UNIT ONE
The following list has been given to us by the exam board as a
suggestion of what your wider reading could include. You will not be
expected to read all of these! We will also read plenty of extracts from
these texts in class. It would be a good idea if you familiarized yourself
with the names of these authors and selected one text to read in
advance of the course. Most of these texts are written by Victorians,
but those with asterisks (*) are modern works that deal with the
Victorians. As well as this, many of the plays have been made into
films and are available on DVD.

PROSE FICTION
Peter Ackroyd The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde* (1983)
Beryl Bainbridge Master Georgie * (1998)
Arnold Bennett Anna of the Five Towns (1902)
Andrew Drummond An Abridged History * (2004)
Elizabeth Gaskell Mary Barton (1848)
G. & W. Grossmith The Diary of a Nobody (1892)
Andrew Martin The Necropolis Railway * (2002)
Herman Melville Redburn (1849)
William Morris News from Nowhere (1891)
Robert Louis Stevenson The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(1886)

PROSE NON-FICTION
Victorian non-fiction
Matthew Arnold Culture and Anarchy (1869)
Thomas Carlyle Selected Writings (Penguin)
John Clare Selected Letters (OUP)
Elizabeth Gaskell The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857)
Edmund Gosse Father and Son (1907)
Marx and Engels The Communist Manifesto (1848)
John Ruskin Selected Writings (Penguin)
The Brontës A Life in Letters (ed. Barker)
Henry Thoreau Walden (1854)
Oscar Wilde De Profundis (1905)
Modern non-fiction
Peter Ackroyd Dickens * (1990)
Juliet Barker The Brontës * (1994)
Jonathan Bate John Clare * (2003)
Quentin Bell A Life in Letters (ed. Barker)
Barbara Dennis The Victorian Novel * (2000)
Terry Eagleton Heathcliff and the Great Hunger * (1996)
Richard Ellman Oscar Wilde (1988)
Lytton Strachey Eminent Victorians (1918)
Jenkins and John Re-reading Victorian Fiction * (2002)
Claire Tomalin Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man * (2006)

DRAMA
Anonymous Maria Marten, or Murder in the Red Barn (1840)
J.M. Barrie The Admirable Crichton (1902)
Dion Boucicault The Streets of London (1864)
Terry Eagleton Saint Oscar (1989)
Brian Friel The Home Place * (2005)
Patrick Hamilton Gaslight (1939)
David Hare The Judas Kiss * (1998)
Arthur Wing Pinero The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893)
Harold Pinter The French Lieutenant’s Woman (screenplay) (1981)
George Bernard Shaw Mrs Warren’s Profession (1894
George Bernard Shaw Arms and the Man (1898)
Tom Stoppard The Invention of Love * (1997)
Tom Taylor The Ticket-of-Leave Man (1863)
Oscar Wilde Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892)
Oscar Wilde An Ideal Husband (1895)
Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)

POETRY
Matthew Arnold
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Robert Browning
Arthur Clough
Emily Dickinson
Gerald Manley Hopkins
A.E. Housman
George Meredith
Christina Rossetti
Algernon Swinburne
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Walt Whitman

TEXTS IN TRANSLATION
Anton Chekhov Crime and Punishment (1866)
Feodor Dostoevsky Uncle Vanya (1897)
Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary (1857)
Gustave Flaubert Sentimental Education (1869)
Nikolai Gogol The Government Inspector (1836)
Henrik Ibsen An Enemy of the People (1882)
August Strindberg Miss Julie (1888)
Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina (1875)
Emile Zola Germinal (1885)
Emile Zola La Bête Humaine (1890)
June 2010
Year 11 into 12 holiday work

You have THREE tasks to do over the holidays.

1. Buy and read A Doll’s House and A Woman of No
Importance. It is VERY important you read these by
the start of next term because we will start the piece of
coursework on them straight away
2. Complete the writing task on this sheet.
3. Complete the writing task overleaf.

You should also buy A Time Torn Man and Hard Times, (see
the letter to your parents for the details of these) but you
don’t have to start reading those yet.

TASK TWO

BLEAK HOUSE
CHARLES DICKENS
Read this extract carefully. This is the first paragraph of Bleak House, a
novel by Charles Dickens. In it, he describes London on a cold and wet
November day.

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting
in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in
the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the
earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty
feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.
Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle,
with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into
mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs,
undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their
very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a
general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-
corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been
slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding
new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points
tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Write a 500 word analysis of this extract’s presentation of London in

Victorian times.
Consider:
• The writer’s presentation of London and the weather
• The writer’s choice of words and phrases, in particular the use of
extended metaphors
• Any other texts you feel this can be compared to.
TASK THREE
Read the following extract carefully. It is by Ada Nield Chew, a young woman who
taken from worked as a tailoress in a factory in Crewe. She wrote a series of
anonymous letters to the Crewe Chronicle about working conditions in the factory.
When her identity was discovered, an uproar ensued and she was fired. This extract
is from the second letter.

Sir, — In your issue of 5 May you were good enough to publish a letter
of mine on the above subject, and also to invite me to write you further
on our wages, hours of work, and conditions of employment.
To take an average of a year's wage of the 'average ordinary
hand', which was the class I mentioned in my first letter, and being
that which is in a majority may be taken as fairly representative. The
wages of such a 'hand', sir, will barely average — but by exercise of
the imagination — 8 shillings a week. I ought to say, too, that there is a
minority, which is also considerable, whose wages will not average
above 5 shillings a week. What do you think of it, Mr. Editor, for a
'living' wage?
I wish some of those, whoever they may be who mete it out to
us, would try to 'live' on it for a few weeks, as the factory girl has to do
52 weeks in a year. To pay board and lodging, to provide herself
decent boots and clothes to stand all weathers, to pay an occasional
doctor's bill, literature, and a holiday away from the scope of her daily
drudging, for which even the factory girl has the audacity to long
sometimes — but has quite as often to do without. Not to speak of
provision for old age, when eyes have grown too dim to thread the
everlasting needle, and to guide the worn fingers over the accustomed
task. Yet this is a question which some of us, at least, ought to face,
ignore it as we may, and are compelled to do.
I have myself, repeatedly, five nights a week, besides Saturday
afternoons, for weeks at a time, regularly taken four hours, at least,
work home with me, and have done it. It will be unnecessary to point
out how fearfully exhausting and tedious it is to sit boring at the same
thing for 14 or 15 hours at a stretch.
But we are not asking for pity, sir, we ask for justice. Surely it
would not be more than just to pay us at such a rate, that we could
realise a living wage — in the true sense of the words — in a
reasonable time, say one present working day of from 9 to 10 hours —
till the eight hour day becomes general, and reaches even factory girls.
Our work is necessary (presumably) to our employers. Were we not
employed others would have to be, and if of the opposite sex, I venture
to say, sir, would have to be paid on a very different scale. Why,
because we are weak women, without pluck and grit enough to stand
up for our rights, should we be ground down to this miserable wage ?
Write a 500 word analysis of this letter’s presentation of life in
Victorian times.
Consider:
• The writer’s presentation of factory work
• The writer’s choice of words and phrases
• Any other texts you feel this can be compared to.