GE2133

The Life and Times of the English

Language

Becoming Modern: from the Restoration to the Victorian Age

 ”[. . .] one great pitfall:
periodization, or
compartmentalization
of literary history.”
(Susan Bassnett, Translation Studies)

https://study.com/academy/lesson/chronology-periodization-in-history.html
 1660-1900
What are the initial and terminal demarcations of this period? Where do they come from? Why
might they be useful?
https://londontopia.net/history/london-history-london-
restoration-charles-ii/
 At home the hateful names of parties cease,
And factious souls are wearied into peace.
The discontented now are only they
Whose crimes before did your just cause betray:
John Dryden – Of those, your edicts some reclaim from sin,

Astrea Redux But most your life and blest example win.
Oh, happy prince! whom Heaven hath taught the way,
(1660) By paying vows to have more vows to pay!
Oh, happy age! oh times like those alone,
By fate reserved for great Augustus’ throne!
When the joint growth of arms and arts foreshow
The world a monarch, and that monarch you.
The Tête-à-Tête, from Marriage à-la-mode, William Hogarth
Royalist – Republican
Divide
Much wine had passed, with grave
discourse
Of who fucks who, and who does worse
(Such as you usually do hear
From those that diet at the Bear),
When I, who still take care to see
Drunkenness relieved by lechery,
Went out into St. James's Park
To cool my head and fire my heart.

[. . .]
Each imitative branch does twine
In some loved fold of Aretine,
And nightly now beneath their shade
Are buggeries, rapes, and incests made.
Unto this all-sin-sheltering grove
Whores of the bulk and the alcove,
Great ladies, chambermaids, and
drudges,
The ragpicker, and heiress trudges.
Carmen, divines, great lords, and tailors,
Prentices, poets, pimps, and jailers,
Footmen, fine fops do here arrive,
And here promiscuously they swive.
As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a
certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to
sleep: and, as I slept, I dreamed a dream. I dreamed, and behold, I
saw a man clothed with rags, standing in a certain place, with his
face from his own house, a book in his hand, and a great burden
upon his back. [Isa. 64:6; Luke 14:33; Ps. 38:4; Hab. 2:2; Acts
16:30,31] I looked, and saw him open the book, and read therein;
and, as he read, he wept, and trembled; and, not being able
longer to contain, he brake out with a lamentable cry, saying,
"What shall I do?" [Acts 2:37]
In this plight, therefore, he went home and refrained himself as
long as he could, that his wife and children should not perceive his
distress; but he could not be silent long, because that his trouble
increased. Wherefore at length he brake his mind to his wife and
children; and thus he began to talk to them: O my dear wife, said
he, and you the children of my bowels, I, your dear friend, am in
myself undone by reason of a burden that lieth hard upon me;
moreover, I am for certain informed that this our city will be
burned with fire from heaven; in which fearful overthrow, both
myself, with thee my wife, and you my sweet babes, shall
miserably come to ruin, except (the which yet I see not) some way
of escape can be found, whereby we may be delivered.
Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit (1)
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing heavenly muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed,
In the beginning how the heavens and earth
Rose out of chaos: Or if Sion hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa's brook that flowed
Fast by the oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme. (16)
The Rise of the Novel

https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/first-edition-of-daniel-defoes-robinson-crusoe-1719
 • Time
• Scale
Issues in • Complexity
• Form (or lack thereof)
reading and
• Voraciousness
interpreting
• Obviousness
novels • Prosaicness
November 1.—I set up my tent under a rock, and lay there for the first night; making it as large as I could, with stakes driven in to
swing my hammock upon.
Nov. 2.—I set up all my chests and boards, and the pieces of timber which made my rafts, and with them formed a fence round me,
a little within the place I had marked out for my fortification.
Nov. 3.—I went out with my gun, and killed two fowls like ducks, which were very good food. In the afternoon went to work to
make me a table.
Nov. 4.—This morning I began to order my times of work, of going out with my gun, time of sleep, and time of diversion—viz. every
morning I walked out with my gun for two or three hours, if it did not rain; then employed myself to work till about eleven o’clock;
then eat what I had to live on; and from twelve to two I lay down to sleep, the weather being excessively hot; and then, in the
evening, to work again. The working part of this day and of the next were wholly employed in making my table, for I was yet but a
very sorry workman, though time and necessity made me a complete natural mechanic soon after, as I believe they would do any
one else.
Nov. 5.—This day went abroad with my gun and my dog, and killed a wild cat; her skin pretty soft, but her flesh good for nothing;
every creature that I killed I took of the skins and preserved them. Coming back by the sea-shore, I saw many sorts of sea-fowls,
which I did not understand; but was surprised, and almost frightened, with two or three seals, which, while I was gazing at, not well
knowing what they were, got into the sea, and escaped me for that time.
Nov. 6.—After my morning walk I went to work with my table again, and finished it, though not to my liking; nor was it long before I
learned to mend it.
Nov. 7.—Now it began to be settled fair weather. The 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, and part of the 12th (for the 11th was Sunday) I took
wholly up to make me a chair, and with much ado brought it to a tolerable shape, but never to please me; and even in the making I
pulled it in pieces several times.
• https://www.abebooks.com/first-edition/NOVELS-LETTERS-JANE-AUSTEN-Volumes-Emma/22824775557/bd
Neoclassical and Romantic painting
 Definitions of Romantic literature
M.H.Abrams in The Mirror and the Lamp:
"The title of the book identifies two common and antithetic metaphors of mind, one comparing the
mind to a reflector of external objects, the other to a radiant projector which makes a contribution
to the object it perceives. The first of these was characteristic of much of the thinking from Plato to
the eighteenth century, the second typifies the prevailing romantic conception of the poetic mind."

René Wellek in "The Concept of Romanticism" in Literary History II:

"If we examine the characteristics of the actual literature which called itself or was called
‘romantic’ all over the continent, we find throughout Europe the same conceptions of
poetry and of the workings and nature of poetic imagination, the same conception of
nature and its relation to man, and basically the same poetic style, with a use of imagery,
symbolism, and myth which is clearly distinct from eighteenth-century neoclassicism."
I wander'd lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils,
Beside the lake, beneath the trees
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretch'd in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: -
A poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company!
I gazed - and gazed - but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought.

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils.
Victorian
London
https://twitter.com/cityoflondon/status/1022801816659079169
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.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down
the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and
dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of
collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the
gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners,
wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the
wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little
'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of
fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.
http://www.theguardian.com/cultur
e/graphic/2012/nov/27/oscar-wilde-
epigrams-quotes-infographic
 The Picture of Dorian Grey (1890-1891)
THE PREFACE
The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can
translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.
The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful
things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to
whom beautiful things mean only beauty.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.
The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of
man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect
medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies.
An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express
everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for
an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of
feeling, the actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at
their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist
is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only
excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

OSCAR WILDE