МІНІСТЕРСТВО ОСВІТИ І НАУКИ УКРАЇНИ

Національний університет
«Полтавська політехніка імені Юрія Кондратюка»
Гуманітарний факультет

Кафедра германської філології та перекладу

МЕТОДИЧНІ ВКАЗІВКИ ДО ПРАКТИЧНИХ ЗАНЯТЬ

З ДИСЦИПЛІНИ
«ІСТОРІЯ ЛІТЕРАТУРИ АНГЛОМОВНИХ КРАЇН»

Для студентів III курсу спеціальності 035 «Філологія» 035.04

«Германські мови та літератури (переклад включно)»
освітнього рівня бакалавр

Частина ІI

Полтава 2021
 Методичні вказівки до практичних занять із дисципліни «Історія
літератури англомовних країн» для студентів III курсу спеціальності
035 Філологія спеціалізації 035.041 Германські мови та літератури (переклад
включно), перша – англійська освітнього рівня бакалавр. Змістові модулі І та
ІІ. Практичні заняття VI–X. Частина ІІ. – Полтава: Національний університет
«Полтавська політехніка імені Юрія Кондратюка», 2021 р. 52 с.

Укладач: А. К. Павельєва, кандидат філологічних наук, доцент, доцент

кафедри германської філології та перекладу Національного університету
«Полтавська політехніка імені Юрія Кондратюка».

Відповідальний за випуск: О. С. Воробйова, кандидат філологічних

наук, доцент, завідувач кафедри германської філології та перекладу
Національного університету «Полтавська політехніка імені Юрія
Кондратюка».

Рецензент: Т. В. Кушнірова, доктор філологічних наук, професор

кафедри германської філології та перекладу Національного університету
«Полтавська політехніка імені Юрія Кондратюка».

Затверджено навчально-методичною
радою гуманітарного факультету.
Протокол № 19 від 20.05.2021 р.

В авторській редакції.

21.12.04.01

Павельєва А. К., 2021 рік

Національний університет
«Полтавская політехніка імені Юрія Кондратюка», 2021 рік
2
 ЗМІСТ
ПЕРЕДМОВА .......................................................................................................... 4
Змістовий модуль 2. Тема 4. The Romantic Age. .................................................. 6
Змістовий модуль 2. Тема 4. Walter Scott. .......................................................... 28
Змістовий модуль 2. Тема 5. The Victorian Period. The Bronte Sisters.............. 31
Змістовий модуль 3. Тема 6. William Somerset Maugham. ................................ 46
Змістовий модуль 3. Тема 7. Dystopia. Aldous Huxley. George Orwell ............ 47
REFERENCES ........................................................................................................ 52

3
 ПЕРЕДМОВА

Методичні вказівки з дисципліни «Історія літератури англомовних

країн» призначені для аудиторної та самостійної роботи студентів III курсу
денного відділення гуманітарного факультету спеціальності «035 Філологія»,
спеціалізації 035.04 Германські мови та літератури (переклад включно) в
умовах кредитно-модульної системи організації навчального процесу. Вони
містять матеріали для підготовки до практичних занять.
Методичні вказівки спрямовані на засвоєння матеріалу за змістовими
модулями IІ та ІІІ, практичні заняття 6-10:
1) Змістовий модуль 2. Тема 4. The Romantic Age. The poets of Lake School.
Byron, Shelly.
2) Змістовий модуль 2. Тема 4. Walter Scott.
3) Змістовий модуль 2. Тема 5. The Victorian Period. The Bronte Sisters
4) Змістовий модуль 3. Тема 6. William Somerset Maugham.
5) Змістовий модуль 3. Тема 7. Dystopia. Aldous Huxley. George Orwell

4
 Теми практичних занять

№ Назва теми Кількість

з/п годин
Змістовий модуль 1. Тема 1. Old English Literature.
1. 2
“Beowulf”.
Змістовий модуль 1. Тема 1. Middle English
2. 2
Literature.
3. Змістовий модуль 1. Тема 1. Geoffrey Chaucer. 2
Змістовий модуль 1. Тема 2. The Renaissance.
4. 2
William Shakespeare.
Змістовий модуль 2. Тема 3. Daniel Defoe, Jonathan
5. 2
Swift.
Змістовий модуль 2. Тема 4. The Romantic Age. The poets of
6. 2
Lake School. Byron, Shelly
7. Змістовий модуль 2. Тема 4. Walter Scott. 2
Змістовий модуль 2. Тема 5. The Victorian Period. The Bronte
8. 2
Sisters
9. Змістовий модуль 3. Тема 6. William Somerset Maugham. 2
Змістовий модуль 3. Тема 7. Dystopia. Aldous Huxley. George
10. 2
Orwell
Разом: 20

5
 Змістовий модуль 2. Тема 4. The Romantic Age.
The Romantic period
The nature of Romanticism
As a term to cover the most distinctive writers who flourished in the last years
of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th, “Romantic” is indispensable
but also a little misleading: there was no self-styled “Romantic movement” at the
time, and the great writers of the period did not call themselves Romantics. Not until
August Wilhelm von Schlegel’s Vienna lectures of 1808–09 was a clear distinction
established between the “organic,” “plastic” qualities of Romantic art and the
“mechanical” character of Classicism.
Many of the age’s foremost writers thought that something new was
happening in the world’s affairs, nevertheless. William Blake’s affirmation in 1793
that “a new heaven is begun” was matched a generation later by Percy Bysshe
Shelley’s “The world’s great age begins anew.” “These, these will give the world
another heart, / And other pulses,” wrote John Keats, referring to Leigh Hunt and
William Wordsworth. Fresh ideals came to the fore; in particular, the ideal of
freedom, long cherished in England, was being extended to every range of human
endeavour. As that ideal swept through Europe, it became natural to believe that the
age of tyrants might soon end.
The most notable feature of the poetry of the time is the new role of individual
thought and personal feeling. Where the main trend of 18th-century poetics had been
to praise the general, to see the poet as a spokesman of society addressing a
cultivated and homogeneous audience and having as his end the conveyance of
“truth,” the Romantics found the source of poetry in the particular, unique
experience. Blake’s marginal comment on Sir Joshua Reynolds’s “Discourses”
expresses the position with characteristic vehemence: “To Generalize is to be an
Idiot. To Particularize is the alone Distinction of Merit.” The poet was seen as an
individual distinguished from his fellows by the intensity of his perceptions, taking
as his basic subject matter the workings of his own mind. Poetry was regarded as
conveying its own truth; sincerity was the criterion by which it was to be judged.
The emphasis on feeling – seen perhaps at its finest in the poems of Robert
Burns – was in some ways a continuation of the earlier “cult of sensibility”; and it is
worth remembering that Alexander Pope praised his father as having known no
language but the language of the heart. But feeling had begun to receive particular
emphasis and is found in most of the Romantic definitions of poetry. Wordsworth
called poetry “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,” and in 1833 John
Stuart Mill defined poetry as “feeling itself, employing thought only as the medium
of its utterance.” It followed that the best poetry was that in which the greatest
intensity of feeling was expressed, and hence a new importance was attached to the
lyric. Another key quality of Romantic writing was its shift from the mimetic, or
imitative, assumptions of the Neoclassical era to a new stress on imagination.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw the imagination as the supreme poetic quality, a quasi-
divine creative force that made the poet a godlike being. Samuel Johnson had seen
6
the components of poetry as “invention, imagination and judgement,” but Blake
wrote: “One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination, the Divine Vision.” The poets
of this period accordingly placed great emphasis on the workings of the unconscious
mind, on dreams and reveries, on the supernatural, and on the childlike or primitive
view of the world, this last being regarded as valuable because its clarity and
intensity had not been overlaid by the restrictions of civilized “reason.” Rousseau’s
sentimental conception of the “noble savage” was often invoked, and often by those
who were ignorant that the phrase is Dryden’s or that the type was adumbrated in
the “poor Indian” of Pope’s “An Essay on Man”. A further sign of the diminished
stress placed on judgment is the Romantic attitude to form: if poetry must be
spontaneous, sincere, intense, it should be fashioned primarily according to the
dictates of the creative imagination. Wordsworth advised a young poet, “You feel
strongly; trust to those feelings, and your poem will take its shape and proportions
as a tree does from the vital principle that actuates it.” This organic view of poetry
is opposed to the classical theory of “genres,” each with its own linguistic decorum;
and it led to the feeling that poetic sublimity was unattainable except in short
passages.
Hand in hand with the new conception of poetry and the insistence on a new
subject matter went a demand for new ways of writing. Wordsworth and his
followers, particularly Keats, found the prevailing poetic diction of the late 18th
century stale and stilted, or “gaudy and inane,” and totally unsuited to the expression
of their perceptions. It could not be, for them, the language of feeling, and
Wordsworth accordingly sought to bring the language of poetry back to that of
common speech. Wordsworth’s own diction, however, often differs from his theory.
Nevertheless, when he published his preface to “Lyrical Ballads” in 1800, the time
was ripe for a change: the flexible diction of earlier 18th-century poetry had
hardened into a merely conventional language.
Poetry
Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge
Useful as it is to trace the common elements in Romantic poetry, there was
little conformity among the poets themselves. It is misleading to read the poetry of
the first Romantics as if it had been written primarily to express their feelings. Their
concern was rather to change the intellectual climate of the age. William Blake had
been dissatisfied since boyhood with the current state of poetry and what he
considered the irreligious drabness of contemporary thought. His early development
of a protective shield of mocking humour with which to face a world in which
science had become trifling and art inconsequential is visible in the satirical “An
Island in the Moon” (written c. 1784–85); he then took the bolder step of setting
aside sophistication in the visionary “Songs of Innocence” (1789). His desire for
renewal encouraged him to view the outbreak of the French Revolution as a
momentous event. In works such as “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” (1790–93)
and “Songs of Experience” (1794), he attacked the hypocrisies of the age and the
impersonal cruelties resulting from the dominance of analytic reason in
contemporary thought. As it became clear that the ideals of the Revolution were not
7
likely to be realized in his time, he renewed his efforts to revise his contemporaries’
view of the universe and to construct a new mythology centred not in the God of the
Bible but in Urizen, a repressive figure of reason and law whom he believed to be
the deity actually worshipped by his contemporaries. The story of Urizen’s rise was
set out in “The First Book of Urizen” (1794) and then, more ambitiously, in the
unfinished manuscript “Vala” (later redrafted as “The Four Zoas”), written from
about 1796 to about 1807.
Blake developed these ideas in the visionary narratives of “Milton” (1804–
08) and “Jerusalem” (1804–20). Here, still using his own mythological characters,
he portrayed the imaginative artist as the hero of society and suggested the
possibility of redemption from the fallen (or Urizenic) condition.
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, meanwhile, were also
exploring the implications of the French Revolution. Wordsworth, who lived in
France in 1791–92 and fathered an illegitimate child there, was distressed when,
soon after his return, Britain declared war on the republic, dividing his allegiance.
For the rest of his career, he was to brood on those events, trying to develop a view
of humanity that would be faithful to his twin sense of the pathos of individual
human fates and the unrealized potentialities in humanity as a whole. The first factor
emerges in his early manuscript poems “The Ruined Cottage” and “The Pedlar”
(both to form part of the later “Excursion”); the second was developed from 1797,
when he and his sister, Dorothy, with whom he was living in the west of England,
were in close contact with Coleridge. Stirred simultaneously by Dorothy’s
immediacy of feeling, manifested everywhere in her “Journals” (written 1798–
1803, published 1897), and by Coleridge’s imaginative and speculative genius, he
produced the poems collected in “Lyrical Ballads” (1798). The volume began with
Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” continued with poems displaying
delight in the powers of nature and the humane instincts of ordinary people and
concluded with the meditative “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”,
Wordsworth’s attempt to set out his mature faith in nature and humanity.
His investigation of the relationship between nature and the human mind
continued in the long autobiographical poem addressed to Coleridge and later titled
“The Prelude” (1798–99 in two books; 1804 in five books; 1805 in 13 books;
revised continuously and published posthumously, 1850). Here he traced the value
for a poet of having been a child “fostered alike by beauty and by fear” by an
upbringing in sublime surroundings. “The Prelude” constitutes the most significant
English expression of the Romantic discovery of the self as a topic for art and
literature. The poem also makes much of the work of memory, a theme explored as
well in the “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early
Childhood”. In poems such as “Michael” and “The Brothers”, by contrast, written
for the second volume of “Lyrical Ballads” (1800), Wordsworth dwelt on the pathos
and potentialities of ordinary lives.
Coleridge’s poetic development during these years paralleled Wordsworth’s.
Having briefly brought together images of nature and the mind in “The Eolian
Harp” (1796), he devoted himself to more-public concerns in poems of political and
8
social prophecy, such as “Religious Musings” and “The Destiny of Nations”.
Becoming disillusioned in 1798 with his earlier politics, however, and encouraged
by Wordsworth, he turned back to the relationship between nature and the human
mind. Poems such as “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”, “The Nightingale”, and
“Frost at Midnight” (now sometimes called the “conversation poems” but collected
by Coleridge himself as “Meditative Poems in Blank Verse”) combine sensitive
descriptions of nature with subtlety of psychological comment. “Kubla Khan” (1797
or 1798, published 1816), a poem that Coleridge said came to him in “a kind of
Reverie,” represented a new kind of exotic writing, which he also exploited in the
supernaturalism of “The Ancient Mariner” and the unfinished “Christabel”. After
his visit to Germany in 1798–99, he renewed attention to the links between the
subtler forces in nature and the human psyche; this attention bore fruit in letters,
notebooks, literary criticism, theology, and philosophy. Simultaneously, his poetic
output became sporadic. “Dejection: An Ode” (1802), another meditative poem,
which first took shape as a verse letter to Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth’s sister-in-
law, memorably describes the suspension of his “shaping spirit of Imagination.”
The work of both poets was directed back to national affairs during these years
by the rise of Napoleon. In 1802 Wordsworth dedicated a number of sonnets to the
patriotic cause. The death in 1805 of his brother John, who was a captain in the
merchant navy, was a grim reminder that, while he had been living in retirement as
a poet, others had been willing to sacrifice themselves. From this time the theme of
duty was to be prominent in his poetry. His political essay “Concerning the
Relations of Great Britain, Spain and Portugal…as Affected by the Convention of
Cintra” (1809) agreed with Coleridge’s periodical “The Friend” (1809–10) in
deploring the decline of principle among statesmen. When “The Excursion”
appeared in 1814 (the time of Napoleon’s first exile), Wordsworth announced the
poem as the central section of a longer projected work, “The Recluse”, “a
philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society.” The plan was
not fulfilled, however, and “The Excursion” was left to stand in its own right as a
poem of moral and religious consolation for those who had been disappointed by the
failure of French revolutionary ideals.
Both Wordsworth and Coleridge benefited from the advent in 1811 of the
Regency, which brought a renewed interest in the arts. Coleridge’s lectures on
Shakespeare became fashionable, his play “Remorse” was briefly produced, and his
volume of poems “Christabel; Kubla Khan: A Vision; The Pains of Sleep” was
published in 1816. “Biographia Literaria” (1817), an account of his own
development, combined philosophy and literary criticism in a new way and made an
enduring and important contribution to literary theory. Coleridge settled at Highgate
in 1816, and he was sought there as “the most impressive talker of his age” (in the
words of the essayist William Hazlitt). His later religious writings made a
considerable impact on Victorian readers.
Other poets of the early Romantic period
In his own lifetime, Blake’s poetry was scarcely known. Sir Walter Scott, by
contrast, was thought of as a major poet for his vigorous and evocative verse
9
narratives “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” (1805) and “Marmion” (1808). Other
verse writers were also highly esteemed. The “Elegiac Sonnets” (1784) of Charlotte
Smith and the “Fourteen Sonnets” (1789) of William Lisle Bowles were received
with enthusiasm by Coleridge. Thomas Campbell is now chiefly remembered for his
patriotic lyrics such as “Ye Mariners of England” and “The Battle of Hohenlinden”
(1807) and for the critical preface to his “Specimens of the British Poets” (1819);
Samuel Rogers was known for his brilliant table talk (published 1856, after his death,
as “Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers”), as well as for his exquisite
but exiguous poetry. Another admired poet of the day was Thomas Moore, whose
“Irish Melodies” began to appear in 1808. His highly coloured narrative “Lalla
Rookh: An Oriental Romance” (1817) and his satirical poetry were also immensely
popular. Charlotte Smith was not the only significant woman poet in this period.
Helen Maria Williams’s “Poems” (1786), Ann Batten Cristall’s “Poetical
Sketches” (1795), Mary Robinson’s “Sappho and Phaon” (1796), and Mary Tighe’s
“Psyche” (1805) all contain notable work.
Robert Southey was closely associated with Wordsworth and Coleridge and
was looked upon as a prominent member, with them, of the “Lake school” of poetry.
His originality is best seen in his ballads and his nine “English Eclogues,” three of
which were first published in the 1799 volume of his “Poems” with a prologue
explaining that these verse sketches of contemporary life bore “no resemblance to
any poems in our language.” His “Oriental” narrative poems “Thalaba the
Destroyer” (1801) and “The Curse of Kehama” (1810) were successful in their own
time, but his fame is based on his prose work – the “Life of Nelson” (1813), the
“History of the Peninsular War” (1823–32), and his classic formulation of the
children’s tale “The Three Bears”.
George Crabbe wrote poetry of another kind: his sensibility, his values, much
of his diction, and his heroic couplet verse form belong to the 18th century. He
differs from the earlier Augustans, however, in his subject matter, concentrating on
realistic, unsentimental accounts of the life of the poor and the middle classes. He
shows considerable narrative gifts in his collections of verse tales (in which he
anticipates many short-story techniques) and great powers of description. His
antipastoral “The Village” appeared in 1783. After a long silence, he returned to
poetry with “The Parish Register” (1807), “The Borough” (1810), “Tales in Verse”
(1812), and “Tales of the Hall” (1819), which gained him great popularity in the
early 19th century.
The later Romantics: Shelley, Keats, and Byron
The poets of the next generation shared their predecessors’ passion for liberty
(now set in a new perspective by the Napoleonic Wars) and were in a position to
learn from their experiments. Percy Bysshe Shelley in particular was deeply
interested in politics, coming early under the spell of the anarchist views of William
Godwin, whose “Enquiry Concerning Political Justice” had appeared in 1793.
Shelley’s revolutionary ardour caused him to claim in his critical essay “A Defence
of Poetry” (1821, published 1840) that “the most unfailing herald, companion, and
follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion
10
or institution, is poetry,” and that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the
world.” This fervor burns throughout the early “Queen Mab” (1813), the long
“Laon and Cythna” (retitled “The Revolt of Islam”, 1818), and the lyrical drama
“Prometheus Unbound” (1820). Shelley saw himself at once as poet and prophet,
as the fine “Ode to the West Wind” (1819) makes clear. Despite his grasp of practical
politics, however, it is a mistake to look for concreteness in his poetry, where his
concern is with subtleties of perception and with the underlying forces of nature: his
most characteristic images are of sky and weather, of lights and fires. His poetic
stance invites the reader to respond with similar outgoing aspiration. It adheres to
the Rousseauistic belief in an underlying spirit in individuals, one truer to human
nature itself than the behaviour evinced and approved by society. In that sense his
material is transcendental and cosmic and his expression thoroughly appropriate.
Possessed of great technical brilliance, he is, at his best, a poet of excitement and
power.
John Keats, by contrast, was a poet so sensuous and physically specific that
his early work, such as “Endymion” (1818), could produce an over-luxuriant,
cloying effect. As the program set out in his early poem “Sleep and Poetry” shows,
however, Keats was determined to discipline himself: even before February 1820,
when he first began to cough blood, he may have known that he had not long to live,
and he devoted himself to the expression of his vision with feverish intensity. He
experimented with many kinds of poems: “Isabella” (published 1820), an
adaptation of a tale by Giovanni Boccaccio, is a tour de force of craftsmanship in its
attempt to reproduce a medieval atmosphere and at the same time a poem involved
in contemporary politics. His epic fragment “Hyperion” (begun in 1818 and
abandoned, published 1820; later begun again and published posthumously as “The
Fall of Hyperion” in 1856) has a new spareness of imagery, but Keats soon found
the style too Miltonic and decided to give himself up to what he called “other
sensations.” Some of these “other sensations” are found in the poems of 1819,
Keats’s annus mirabilis: “The Eve of St. Agnes” and the great odes “To a
Nightingale”, “On a Grecian Urn”, and “To Autumn”. These, with the “Hyperion”
poems, represent the summit of Keats’s achievement, showing what has been called
“the disciplining of sensation into symbolic meaning,” the complex themes being
handled with a concrete richness of detail. His superb letters show the full range of
the intelligence at work in his poetry.
George Gordon, Lord Byron, who differed from Shelley and Keats in themes
and manner, was at one with them in reflecting their shift toward “Mediterranean”
topics. Having thrown down the gauntlet in his early poem “English Bards and
Scotch Reviewers” (1809), in which he directed particular scorn at poets of
sensibility and declared his own allegiance to Milton, Dryden, and Pope, he
developed a poetry of dash and flair, in many cases with a striking hero. His two
longest poems, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” (1812–18) and “Don Juan” (1819–
24), his masterpiece, provided alternative personae for himself, the one a bitter and
melancholy exile among the historic sites of Europe, the other a picaresque
adventurer enjoying a series of amorous adventures. The gloomy and misanthropic
11
vein was further mined in dramatic poems such as “Manfred” (1817) and “Cain”
(1821), which helped to secure his reputation in Europe, but he is now remembered
best for witty, ironic, and less portentous writings, such as “Beppo” (1818), in which
he first used the ottava rima form. The easy, nonchalant, biting style developed there
became a formidable device in “Don Juan” and in his satire on Southey, “The Vision
of Judgment” (1822).
Other poets of the later period
John Clare, a Northamptonshire man of humble background, achieved early
success with “Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery” (1820), “The Village
Minstrel” (1821), and “The Shepherd’s Calendar” (1827). Both his reputation and
his mental health collapsed in the late 1830-s. He spent the later years of his life in
an asylum in Northampton; the poetry he wrote there was rediscovered in the 20-th
century. His natural simplicity and lucidity of diction, his intent observation, his
almost Classical poise, and the unassuming dignity of his attitude to life make him
one of the most quietly moving of English poets. Thomas Lovell Beddoes, whose
violent imagery and obsession with death and the macabre recall the Jacobean
dramatists, represents an imagination at the opposite pole; metrical virtuosity is
displayed in the songs and lyrical passages from his over-sensational tragedy
“Death’s Jest-Book” (begun 1825; published posthumously, 1850). Another minor
writer who found inspiration in the 17-th century was George Darley, some of whose
songs from “Nepenthe” (1835) keep their place in anthologies. The comic writer
Thomas Hood also wrote poems of social protest, such as “The Song of the Shirt”
(1843) and “The Bridge of Sighs”, as well as the graceful “Plea of the Midsummer
Fairies” (1827). Felicia Hemans’s best-remembered poem, “Casabianca”,
appeared in her volume “The Forest Sanctuary” (1825). This was followed in 1828
by the more substantial “Records of Woman”.
The novel: from the Gothic novel to Austen and Scott
Flourishing as a form of entertainment during the Romantic period, the novel
underwent several important developments in this period. One was the invention of
the Gothic novel. Another was the appearance of a politically engaged fiction in the
years immediately before the French Revolution. A third was the rise of women
writers to prominence in prose fiction.
The sentimental tradition of Richardson and Sterne persisted until the 1790-s
with Henry Brooke’s “The Fool of Quality” (1765–70), Henry Mackenzie’s “The
Man of Feeling” (1771), and Charles Lamb’s “A Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old
Blind Margaret” (1798). Novels of this kind were, however, increasingly mocked
by critics in the later years of the 18-th century.
The comic realism of Fielding and Smollett continued in a more sporadic way.
John Moore gave a cosmopolitan flavour to the worldly wisdom of his predecessors
in “Zeluco” (1786) and “Mordaunt” (1800). Fanny Burney carried the comic realist
manner into the field of female experience with the novels “Evelina” (1778),
“Cecilia” (1782), and “Camilla” (1796). Her discovery of the comic and didactic
potential of a plot charting a woman’s progress from the nursery to the altar would
be important for several generations of female novelists.
12
 More striking than these continuations of previous modes, however, was
Horace Walpole’s invention, in “The Castle of Otranto” (1764), of what became
known as the Gothic novel. Walpole’s intention was to “blend” the fantastic plot of
“ancient romance” with the realistic characterization of “modern” (or novel)
romance. Characters would respond with terror to extraordinary events, and readers
would vicariously participate. Walpole’s innovation was not significantly imitated
until the 1790s, when – perhaps because the violence of the French Revolution
created a taste for a correspondingly extreme mode of fiction – a torrent of such
works appeared.
The most important writer of these stories was Ann Radcliffe, who
distinguished between “terror” and “horror”. Terror “expands the soul” by its use of
“uncertainty and obscurity.” Horror, on the other hand, is actual and specific.
Radcliffe’s own novels, especially “The Mysteries of Udolpho” (1794) and “The
Italian” (1797), were examples of the fiction of terror. Vulnerable heroines, trapped
in ruined castles, are terrified by supernatural perils that prove to be illusions.
Matthew Lewis, by contrast, wrote the fiction of horror. In “The Monk”
(1796) the hero commits both murder and incest, and the repugnant details include
a woman’s imprisonment in a vault full of rotting human corpses. Some later
examples of Gothic fiction have more-sophisticated agendas. Mary Shelley’s
“Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus” (1818) is a novel of ideas that
anticipates science fiction. James Hogg’s “The Private Memoirs and Confessions of
a Justified Sinner” (1824) is a subtle study of religious mania and split personality.
Even in its more-vulgar examples, however, Gothic fiction can symbolically address
serious political and psychological issues.
By the 1790s, realistic fiction had acquired a polemical role, reflecting the
ideas of the French Revolution, though sacrificing much of its comic power in the
process. One practitioner of this type of fiction, Robert Bage, is best remembered
for “Hermsprong; or, Man as He Is Not” (1796), in which a “natural” hero rejects
the conventions of contemporary society. The radical Thomas Holcroft published
two novels, “Anna St. Ives” (1792) and “The Adventures of Hugh Trevor” (1794),
influenced by the ideas of William Godwin. Godwin himself produced the best
example of this political fiction in “Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb
Williams” (1794), borrowing techniques from the Gothic novel to enliven a narrative
of social oppression.
Women novelists contributed extensively to this ideological debate. Radicals
such as Mary Wollstonecraft (“Mary”, 1788; “Maria”; or, “The Wrongs of
Woman”, 1798), Elizabeth Inchbald (“Nature and Art”, 1796), and Mary Hays
(“Memoirs of Emma Courtney”, 1796) celebrated the rights of the individual. Anti-
Jacobin novelists such as Jane West (“A Gossip’s Story”, 1796; “A Tale of the
Times”, 1799), Amelia Opie (“Adeline Mowbray”, 1804), and Mary Brunton (“Self-
Control”, 1811) stressed the dangers of social change. Some writers were more
bipartisan, notably Elizabeth Hamilton (“Memoirs of Modern Philosophers”, 1800)
and Maria Edgeworth, whose long, varied, and distinguished career extended from
“Letters for Literary Ladies” (1795) to “Helen” (1834). Her pioneering regional
13
novel “Castle Rackrent” (1800), an affectionately comic portrait of life in 18th-
century Ireland, influenced the subsequent work of Scott.
Jane Austen stands on the conservative side of this battle of ideas, though in
novels that incorporate their anti-Jacobin and anti-Romantic views so subtly into
love stories that many readers are unaware of them. Three of her novels – “Sense
and Sensibility” (first published in 1811; originally titled “Elinor and Marianne”),
“Pride and Prejudice” (1813; originally “First Impressions”), and “Northanger
Abbey” (published posthumously in 1817) – were drafted in the late 1790-s. Three
more novels – “Mansfield Park” (1814), “Emma” (1815), and “Persuasion” (1817,
together with “Northanger Abbey”) – were written between 1811 and 1817. Austen
uses, essentially, two standard plots. In one of these a right-minded but neglected
heroine is gradually acknowledged to be correct by characters who have previously
looked down on her (such as Fanny Price in “Mansfield Park” and Anne Elliot in
“Persuasion”). In the other an attractive but self-deceived heroine (such as Emma
Woodhouse in “Emma” or Elizabeth Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice”) belatedly
recovers from her condition of error and is rewarded with the partner she had
previously despised or overlooked. On this slight framework, Austen constructs a
powerful case for the superiority of the Augustan virtues of common sense,
empiricism, and rationality to the new “Romantic” values of imagination, egotism,
and subjectivity. With Austen the comic brilliance and exquisite narrative
construction of Fielding return to the English novel, in conjunction with a distinctive
and deadly irony.
Thomas Love Peacock is another witty novelist who combined an intimate
knowledge of Romantic ideas with a satirical attitude toward them, though in comic
debates rather than conventional narratives. “Headlong Hall” (1816), “Melincourt”
(1817), and “Nightmare Abbey” (1818) are sharp accounts of contemporary
intellectual and cultural fashions, as are the two much later fictions in which Peacock
reused this successful formula, “Crotchet Castle” (1831) and “Gryll Grange”
(1860–61).
Sir Walter Scott is the English writer who can in the fullest sense be called a
Romantic novelist. After a successful career as a poet, Scott switched to prose fiction
in 1814 with the first of the “Waverley novels”. In the first phase of his work as a
novelist, Scott wrote about the Scotland of the 17th and 18th centuries, charting its
gradual transition from the feudal era into the modern world in a series of vivid
human dramas. “Waverley” (1814), “Guy Mannering” (1815), “The Antiquary”
(1816), “Old Mortality” (1816), “Rob Roy” (1817), and “The Heart of Midlothian”
(1818) are the masterpieces of this period. In a second phase, beginning with
“Ivanhoe” in 1819, Scott turned to stories set in medieval England. Finally, with
“Quentin Durward” in 1823, he added European settings to his historical repertoire.
Scott combines a capacity for comic social observation with a Romantic sense of
landscape and an epic grandeur, enlarging the scope of the novel in ways that equip
it to become the dominant literary form of the later 19th century.
Discursive prose

14
 The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political
principles, a debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose.
Richard Price’s “Discourse on the Love of Our Country” (1789) was answered by
Edmund Burke’s conservative “Reflections on the Revolution in France” (1790) and
by Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Men” (1790) and “A Vindication
of the Rights of Woman” (1792), the latter of which is an important early statement
of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of
the period, particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous
writing is that of William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most
characteristic work is seen in his collections of lectures “On the English Poets”
(1818) and “On the English Comic Writers” (1819) and in “The Spirit of the Age”
(1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In “The Essays of Elia”
(1823) and “The Last Essays of Elia” (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself –
charming, whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine “Letters” show,
however, he could on occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s
“Our Village” (1832) is another example of the charm and humour of the familiar
essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the new interest in writing
about the self, producing a colourful account of his early experiences in
“Confessions of an English Opium Eater” (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His
unusual gift of evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as
“The English Mail Coach” and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his
essay “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839
and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian Aesthetic movement. Walter
Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some brief lyrics and
in a series of erudite “Imaginary Conversations”, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly “The
Edinburgh Review” (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals “The
Quarterly Review” (begun 1809) and the monthly “Blackwood’s Magazine” (begun
1817). Though their attacks on contemporary writers could be savagely partisan,
they set a notable standard of fearless and independent journalism. Similar
independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken journalism, particularly
in his “Examiner” (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William Cobbett,
whose “Rural Rides” (collected in 1830 from his “Political Register”) gives a
telling picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theatre, notable for the acting of John Philip
Kemble, Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not
a great period of playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the
“Royal” (or “legitimate”) theatres created a damaging split between high and low
art forms. The classic repertoire continued to be played but in buildings that had
grown too large for subtle staging, and, when commissioning new texts, legitimate
theatres were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-verse manner of the great
15
tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular modes of
performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver
Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770-s, revived the tradition
of “laughing comedy”. But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained
the dominant mode, persisting in the work of Richard Cumberland (“The West
Indian”, 1771), Hannah Cowley (“The Belle’s Stratagem”, 1780), Elizabeth
Inchbald (“I’ll Tell You What”, 1785), John O’Keeffe (“Wild Oats”, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (“The Dramatist”, 1789), George Colman the Younger (“John Bull”,
1803), and Thomas Morton (“Speed the Plough”, 1800). Sentimental drama
received a fresh impetus in the 1790-s from the work of the German dramatist
August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial “Das Kind Der Liebe”
(1790) as “Lovers’ Vow” in 1798.
By the 1780-s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would
become the most important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama.
Thomas Holcroft’s “Seduction” (1787) and “The Road to Ruin“ (1792) have
something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot, and sensationalism of the
“mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the latter’s “Coelina”
(1800) as “A Tale of Mystery” in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class
audiences of the “illegitimate” theatres. Many early examples, such as Matthew
Lewis’s “The Castle Spectre” (first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s “The
Vampire” (1820), were theatrical equivalents of the Gothic novel. But there were
also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, “The Miller and His Men”, 1813),
patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, “Black-Eyed Susan”, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, “Clari”, 1823), and even industrial melodramas
(John Walker, “The Factory Lad”, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form
would gradually help to revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic
concerns would persist in the films and television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theatres, is best represented by the
work of James Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays,
both tragic and comic (“Virginius”, 1820; “The Hunchback”, 1832). The great lyric
poets of the era all attempted to write tragedies of this kind, with little success.
Coleridge’s “Osorio” (1797) was produced (as “Remorse”) at Drury Lane in 1813,
and Byron’s “Marino Faliero” in 1821. Wordsworth’s “The Borderers” (1797),
Keats’s “Otho the Great” (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “The Cenci” (1819)
remained unperformed, though “The Cenci” has a sustained narrative tension that
distinguishes it from the general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to
character and produce “closet dramas” (for reading) rather than theatrical texts. The
Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of his early career writing verse
plays for the legitimate theatre (“Strafford”, 1837; “A Blot in the ’Scutcheon”,
produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of
play rapidly disappeared.
16
 Lake poets

Lake poet, any of the English poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, and Robert Southey, who lived in the English Lake District of
Cumberland and Westmorland (now Cumbria) at the beginning of the 19th century.
They were first described derogatorily as the “Lake school” by Francis (afterward
Lord) Jeffrey in “The Edinburgh Review” in August 1817, and the description
“Lakers” was also used in a similar spirit by the poet Lord Byron. These names
confusingly group Wordsworth and Coleridge together with Southey, who did not
subscribe in his views or work to their theories of poetry.
Robert Southey, (born Aug. 12, 1774, Bristol, Gloucestershire, Eng. – died
March 21, 1843, Keswick, Cumberland), English poet and writer of miscellaneous
prose who is chiefly remembered for his association with Samuel Taylor Coleridge
and William Wordsworth, both of whom were leaders of the early Romantic
movement.
The son of a linen draper, Southey spent much of his childhood at Bath in the
care of his aunt, Elizabeth Tyler. Educated at Westminster School and Balliol
College, Oxford, Southey expressed his ardent sympathy for the French Revolution
in the long poem “Joan of Arc” (published 1796). He first met Coleridge, who
shared his views, in 1794, and together they wrote a verse drama, “The Fall of
Robespierre” (1794). After leaving Oxford without a degree, Southey planned to
carry out Coleridge’s project for a pantisocracy, or utopian agricultural community,
to be located on the banks of the Susquehanna River, in the United States. But his
interest in pantisocracy faded, causing a temporary breach with Coleridge.
In 1795 he secretly married Edith Fricker, whose sister, Sara, Coleridge was
soon to marry. That same year he went to Portugal with his uncle, who was the
British chaplain in Lisbon. While in Portugal he wrote the letters published as
“Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal” (1797), studied
the literature of those two countries, and learned to “thank God [he was] an
Englishman.” So began the change from revolutionary to Tory.
In 1797 he began to receive an annuity of £160 that was paid to him for nine
years by an old Westminster school friend, Charles Wynn, and in 1797–99 he
published a second volume of his “Poems”. In these years he composed many of his
best short poems and ballads and became a regular contributor to newspapers and
reviews. Southey also did translations, edited the works of Thomas Chatterton,
completed the epic “Thalaba the Destroyer” (1801), and worked on the epic poem
“Madoc” (1805).
In 1803 the Southeys visited the Coleridges, then living at Greta Hall,
Keswick. The Southeys remained at Greta Hall for life, partly so that Sara and Edith
could be together. Southey’s friendship with Wordsworth, then at nearby Grasmere,
dates from this time. The Southeys had seven children of their own, and, after
Coleridge left his family for Malta, the whole household was economically
dependent on Southey. He was forced to produce unremittingly – poetry, criticism,
history, biography, journalism, translations, and editions of earlier writers. During
17
1809–38 he wrote, for the Tory “Quarterly Review”, 95 political articles, for each
of which he received £100. Of most interest today are those articles urging the state
provision of “social services.” He also worked on a projected history of Portugal that
he was destined never to finish; only his “History of Brazil”, 3 vol. (1810–19), was
published. His edition (1817) of Sir Thomas Malory’s 15th-century “Le Morte
Darthur” played an important part in generating renewed interest in the Middle Ages
during the 19th century.
In 1813 Southey was appointed poet laureate through the influence of Sir
Walter Scott. But the unauthorized publication (1817) of “Wat Tyler”, an early verse
drama reflecting his youthful political opinions, enabled his enemies to remind the
public of his youthful republicanism. About this time he became involved in a
literary imbroglio with Lord Byron. Byron had already attacked Southey in “English
Bards and Scotch Reviewers” (1809) and had dedicated to him (1819) the first
cantos of “Don Juan”, a satire on hypocrisy. In his introduction to “A Vision of
Judgement” (1821), Southey continued the quarrel by denouncing Byron as
belonging to a “Satanic school” of poetry, and Byron replied by producing a
masterful parody of Southey’s own poem under the title “The Vision of Judgment”
(1822). The historian Thomas Macaulay unleashed a similarly devastating riposte to
Southey’s “Sir Thomas More; or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of
Society” (1829), a major statement of 19th-century political medievalism. Southey’s
last years were clouded by his wife’s insanity, by family quarrels resulting from his
second marriage after her death (1837), and by his own failing mental and physical
health.
Except for a few lyrics, ballads, and comic-grotesque poems – such as “My
days among the Dead are past”, “After Blenheim”, and “The Inchcape Rock” –
Southey’s poetry is little read today, though his “English Eclogues” (1799)
anticipate Alfred Tennyson’s “English Idyls” as lucid, relaxed, and observant verse
accounts of contemporary life. His prose style, however, has been long regarded as
masterly in its ease and clarity. These qualities are best seen in his “Life of Nelson”
(1813), still a classic; in the “Life of Wesley; and the Rise and Progress of
Methodism” (1820); in the lively “Letters from England: By Don Manuel Alvarez
Espriella”, the observations of a fictitious Spaniard (1807); and in the anonymously
published “The Doctor”, 7 vol. (1834–47), a rambling miscellany packed with
comment, quotations, and anecdotes (including the well-known children’s classic
“The Story of the Three Bears”). His less successful epic poems are verse romances
having a mythological or legendary subject matter set in the past and in distant
places. In his prose works and in his voluminous correspondence, which gives a
detailed picture of his literary surroundings and friends, Southey’s effortless mastery
of prose is clearly evident, a fact attested to by such eminent contemporaries as
William Hazlitt and Scott and even by such an enemy as Byron.
Lord Byron
Lord Byron, in full George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, (born
January 22, 1788, London, England – died April 19, 1824, Missolonghi, Greece),
British Romantic poet and satirist whose poetry and personality captured the
18
imagination of Europe. Renowned as the “gloomy egoist” of his autobiographical
poem “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” (1812–18) in the 19th century, he is now more
generally esteemed for the satiric realism of “Don Juan” (1819–24).
Life and career
Byron was the son of the handsome and profligate Captain John (“Mad Jack”)
Byron and his second wife, Catherine Gordon, a Scots heiress. After her husband
had squandered most of her fortune, Mrs. Byron took her infant son to Aberdeen,
Scotland, where they lived in lodgings on a meagre income; the captain died in
France in 1791. George Gordon Byron had been born with a clubfoot and early
developed an extreme sensitivity to his lameness. In 1798, at age 10, he unexpectedly
inherited the title and estates of his great-uncle William, the 5th Baron Byron. His
mother proudly took him to England, where the boy fell in love with the ghostly
halls and spacious ruins of Newstead Abbey, which had been presented to the Byrons
by Henry VIII. After living at Newstead for a while, Byron was sent to school in
London, and in 1801 he went to Harrow, one of England’s most prestigious schools.
In 1803 he fell in love with his distant cousin, Mary Chaworth, who was older and
already engaged, and when she rejected him she became the symbol for Byron of
idealized and unattainable love. He probably met Augusta Byron, his half sister from
his father’s first marriage, that same year.
In 1805 Byron entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he piled up debts
at an alarming rate and indulged in the conventional vices of undergraduates there.
The signs of his incipient sexual ambivalence became more pronounced in what he
later described as “a violent, though pure, love and passion” for a young chorister,
John Edleston. Alongside Byron’s strong attachment to boys, often idealized as in
the case of Edleston, his attachment to women throughout his life is an indication of
the strength of his heterosexual drive. In 1806 Byron had his early poems privately
printed in a volume entitled “Fugitive Pieces”, and that same year he formed at
Trinity what was to be a close, lifelong friendship with John Cam Hobhouse, who
stirred his interest in liberal Whiggism.
Byron’s first published volume of poetry, “Hours of Idleness”, appeared in
1807. A sarcastic critique of the book in “The Edinburgh Review” provoked his
retaliation in 1809 with a couplet satire, “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers”, in
which he attacked the contemporary literary scene. This work gained him his first
recognition.
On reaching his majority in 1809, Byron took his seat in the House of Lords,
and then embarked with Hobhouse on a grand tour. They sailed to Lisbon, crossed
Spain, and proceeded by Gibraltar and Malta to Greece, where they ventured inland
to Ioánnina and to Tepelene in Albania. In Greece Byron began “Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage”, which he continued in Athens. In March 1810 he sailed with Hobhouse
for Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey), visited the site of Troy, and swam the
Hellespont (present-day Dardanelles) in imitation of Leander. Byron’s sojourn in
Greece made a lasting impression on him. The Greeks’ free and open frankness
contrasted strongly with English reserve and hypocrisy and served to broaden his

19
views of men and manners. He delighted in the sunshine and the moral tolerance of
the people.
Byron arrived back in London in July 1811, and his mother died before he
could reach her at Newstead. In February 1812 he made his first speech in the House
of Lords, a humanitarian plea opposing harsh Tory measures against riotous
Nottingham weavers. At the beginning of March, the first two cantos of “Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage” were published by John Murray, and Byron “woke to find
himself famous.” The poem describes the travels and reflections of a young man
who, disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry, looks for distraction in foreign
lands. Besides furnishing a travelogue of Byron’s own wanderings through the
Mediterranean, the first two cantos express the melancholy and disillusionment felt
by a generation weary of the wars of the post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras.
In the poem Byron reflects upon the vanity of ambition, the transitory nature of
pleasure, and the futility of the search for perfection in the course of a “pilgrimage”
through Portugal, Spain, Albania, and Greece. In the wake of “Childe Harold”’s
enormous popularity, Byron was lionized in Whig society. The handsome poet was
swept into a liaison with the passionate and eccentric Lady Caroline Lamb, and the
scandal of an elopement was barely prevented by his friend Hobhouse. She was
succeeded as his lover by Lady Oxford, who encouraged Byron’s radicalism.
During the summer of 1813, Byron apparently entered into intimate relations
with his half sister Augusta, now married to Colonel George Leigh. He then carried
on a flirtation with Lady Frances Webster as a diversion from this dangerous liaison.
The agitations of these two love affairs and the sense of mingled guilt and exultation
they aroused in Byron are reflected in the series of gloomy and remorseful Oriental
verse tales he wrote at this time: “The Giaour” (1813); “The Bride of Abydos”
(1813); “The Corsair” (1814), which sold 10,000 copies on the day of publication;
and “Lara” (1814).
Seeking to escape his love affairs in marriage, Byron proposed in September
1814 to Anne Isabella (Annabella) Milbanke. The marriage took place in January
1815, and Lady Byron gave birth to a daughter, Augusta Ada, in December 1815.
From the start the marriage was doomed by the gulf between Byron and his
unimaginative and humorless wife; and in January 1816 Annabella left Byron to live
with her parents, amid swirling rumours centring on his relations with Augusta Leigh
and his bisexuality. The couple obtained a legal separation. Wounded by the general
moral indignation directed at him, Byron went abroad in April 1816, never to return
to England.
Byron sailed up the Rhine River into Switzerland and settled at Geneva, near
Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin (soon to be Mary Shelley), who had eloped
and were living with Claire Clairmont, Godwin’s half sister. (Byron had begun an
affair with Clairmont in England.) In Geneva he wrote the third canto of “Childe
Harold” (1816), which follows Harold from Belgium up the Rhine River to
Switzerland. It memorably evokes the historical associations of each place Harold
visits, giving pictures of the Battle of Waterloo (whose site Byron visited), of
Napoleon and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and of the Swiss mountains and lakes, in
20
verse that expresses both the most aspiring and most melancholy moods. A visit to
the Bernese Oberland provided the scenery for the Faustian poetic drama “Manfred”
(1817), whose protagonist reflects Byron’s own brooding sense of guilt and the
wider frustrations of the Romantic spirit doomed by the reflection that man is “half
dust, half deity, alike unfit to sink or soar.”
At the end of the summer the Shelley party left for England, where Clairmont
gave birth to Byron’s daughter Allegra in January 1817. In October Byron and
Hobhouse departed for Italy. They stopped in Venice, where Byron enjoyed the
relaxed customs and morals of the Italians and carried on a love affair with Marianna
Segati, his landlord’s wife. In May he joined Hobhouse in Rome, gathering
impressions that he recorded in a fourth canto of “Childe Harold” (1818). He also
wrote “Beppo”, a poem in ottava rima that satirically contrasts Italian with English
manners in the story of a Venetian menage-à-trois. Back in Venice, Margarita Cogni,
a baker’s wife, replaced Segati as his mistress, and his descriptions of the vagaries
of this “gentle tigress” are among the most entertaining passages in his letters
describing life in Italy. The sale of Newstead Abbey in the autumn of 1818 for
£94,500 cleared Byron of his debts, which had risen to £34,000, and left him with a
generous income.
In the light, mock-heroic style of “Beppo” Byron found the form in which he
would write his greatest poem, “Don Juan”, a satire in the form of a picaresque
verse tale. The first two cantos of “Don Juan” were begun in 1818 and published in
July 1819. Byron transformed the legendary libertine Don Juan into an
unsophisticated, innocent young man who, though he delightedly succumbs to the
beautiful women who pursue him, remains a rational norm against which to view
the absurdities and irrationalities of the world. Upon being sent abroad by his mother
from his native Sevilla (Seville), Juan survives a shipwreck en route and is cast up
on a Greek island, whence he is sold into slavery in Constantinople. He escapes to
the Russian army, participates gallantly in the Russians’ siege of Ismail, and is sent
to St. Petersburg, where he wins the favour of the empress Catherine the Great and
is sent by her on a diplomatic mission to England. The poem’s story, however,
remains merely a peg on which Byron could hang a witty and satirical social
commentary. His most consistent targets are, first, the hypocrisy and cant underlying
various social and sexual conventions, and, second, the vain ambitions and pretenses
of poets, lovers, generals, rulers, and humanity in general. Don Juan remains
unfinished; Byron completed 16 cantos and had begun the 17th before his own
illness and death. In “Don Juan” he was able to free himself from the excessive
melancholy of “Childe Harold” and reveal other sides of his character and
personality – his satiric wit and his unique view of the comic rather than the tragic
discrepancy between reality and appearance.
Shelley and other visitors in 1818 found Byron grown fat, with hair long and
turning gray, looking older than his years, and sunk in sexual promiscuity. But a
chance meeting with Countess Teresa Gamba Guiccioli, who was only 19 years old
and married to a man nearly three times her age, reenergized Byron and changed the
course of his life. Byron followed her to Ravenna, and she later accompanied him
21
back to Venice. Byron returned to Ravenna in January 1820 as her cavalier servente
(gentleman-in-waiting) and won the friendship of her father and brother, Counts
Ruggero and Pietro Gamba, who initiated him into the secret society of the Carbonari
and its revolutionary aims to free Italy from Austrian rule. In Ravenna Byron wrote
“The Prophecy of Dante”; cantos III, IV, and V of “Don Juan”; the poetic dramas
“Marino Faliero”, “Sardanapalus”, “The Two Foscari”, and “Cain” (all published
in 1821); and a satire on the poet Robert Southey, “The Vision of Judgment”, which
contains a devastating parody of that poet laureate’s fulsome eulogy of King George
III.
Byron arrived in Pisa in November 1821, having followed Teresa and the
Counts Gamba there after the latter had been expelled from Ravenna for taking part
in an abortive uprising. He left his daughter Allegra, who had been sent to him by
her mother, to be educated in a convent near Ravenna, where she died the following
April. In Pisa Byron again became associated with Shelley, and in early summer of
1822 Byron went to Leghorn (Livorno), where he rented a villa not far from the sea.
There in July the poet and essayist Leigh Hunt arrived from England to help Shelley
and Byron edit a radical journal, “The Liberal”. Byron returned to Pisa and housed
Hunt and his family in his villa. Despite the drowning of Shelley on July 8, the
periodical went forward, and its first number contained “The Vision of Judgment”.
At the end of September Byron moved to Genoa, where Teresa’s family had found
asylum.
Byron’s interest in the periodical gradually waned, but he continued to support
Hunt and to give manuscripts to “The Liberal”. After a quarrel with his publisher,
John Murray, Byron gave all his later work, including cantos VI to XVI of “Don
Juan” (1823–24), to Leigh Hunt’s brother John, publisher of “The Liberal”.
By this time Byron was in search of new adventure. In April 1823 he agreed
to act as agent of the London Committee, which had been formed to aid the Greeks
in their struggle for independence from Turkish rule. In July 1823 Byron left Genoa
for Cephalonia. He sent £4,000 of his own money to prepare the Greek fleet for sea
service and then sailed for Missolonghi on December 29 to join Prince Aléxandros
Mavrokordátos, leader of the forces in western Greece.
Byron made efforts to unite the various Greek factions and took personal
command of a brigade of Souliot soldiers, reputedly the bravest of the Greeks. But
a serious illness in February 1824 weakened him, and in April he contracted the
fever from which he died at Missolonghi on April 19. Deeply mourned, he became
a symbol of disinterested patriotism and a Greek national hero. His body was brought
back to England and, refused burial in Westminster Abbey, was placed in the family
vault near Newstead. Ironically, 145 years after his death, a memorial to Byron was
finally placed on the floor of the Abbey.
Legacy of Lord Byron
Byron’s writings are more patently autobiographic than even those of his
fellow self-revealing Romantics. Upon close examination, however, the paradox of
his complex character can be resolved into understandable elements. Byron early
became aware of reality’s imperfections, but the skepticism and cynicism bred of his
22
disillusionment coexisted with a lifelong propensity to seek ideal perfection in all of
life’s experiences. Consequently, he alternated between deep-seated melancholy and
humorous mockery in his reaction to the disparity between real life and his
unattainable ideals. The melancholy of “Childe Harold” and the satiric realism of
“Don Juan” are thus two sides of the same coin: the former runs the gamut of the
moods of Romantic despair in reaction to life’s imperfections, while the latter
exhibits the humorous irony attending the unmasking of the hypocritical facade of
reality.
Byron was initially diverted from his satiric-realistic bent by the success of
“Childe Harold”. He followed this up with the Oriental tales, which reflected the
gloomy moods of self-analysis and disenchantment of his years of fame. In
“Manfred” and the third and fourth cantos of “Childe Harold” he projected the
brooding remorse and despair that followed the debacle of his ambitions and love
affairs in England. But gradually the relaxed and freer life in Italy opened up again
the satiric vein, and he found his forte in the mock-heroic style of Italian verse satire.
The ottava rima form, which Byron used in “Beppo” and “Don Juan”, was easily
adaptable to the digressive commentary, and its final couplet was ideally suited to
the deflation of sentimental pretensions:
Alas! for Juan and Haidée! they were
So loving and so lovely – till then never,
Excepting our first parents, such a pair
Had run the risk of being damn’d for ever;
And Haidée, being devout as well as fair
Had, doubtless, heard about the Stygian river,
And hell and purgatory – but forgot
Just in the very crisis she should not.
Byron’s plays are not as highly regarded as his poetry. He provided
“Manfred”, “Cain”, and the historical dramas with characters whose exalted
rhetoric is replete with Byronic philosophy and self-confession, but these plays are
truly successful only insofar as their protagonists reflect aspects of Byron’s own
personality.
Byron was a superb letter writer, conversational, witty, and relaxed, and the
20th-century publication of many previously unknown letters has further enhanced
his literary reputation. Whether dealing with love or poetry, he cuts through to the
heart of the matter with admirable incisiveness, and his apt and amusing turns of
phrase make even his business letters fascinating.
Byron showed only that facet of his many-sided nature that was most
congenial to each of his friends. To Hobhouse he was the facetious companion,
humorous, cynical, and realistic, while to Edleston, and to most women, he could be
tender, melancholy, and idealistic. But this weakness was also Byron’s strength. His
chameleon-like character was engendered not by hypocrisy but by sympathy and
adaptability, for the side he showed was a real if only partial revelation of his true
self. And this mobility of character permitted him to savour and to record the mood

23
and thought of the moment with a sensitivity denied to those tied to the conventions
of consistency.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley, (born Aug. 4, 1792, Field Place, near Horsham,
Sussex, Eng. – died July 8, 1822, at sea off Livorno, Tuscany [Italy]), English
Romantic poet whose passionate search for personal love and social justice was
gradually channeled from overt actions into poems that rank with the greatest in the
English language.
Shelley was the heir to rich estates acquired by his grandfather, Bysshe
(pronounced “Bish”) Shelley. Timothy Shelley, the poet’s father, was a weak,
conventional man who was caught between an overbearing father and a rebellious
son. The young Shelley was educated at Syon House Academy (1802–04) and then
at Eton (1804–10), where he resisted physical and mental bullying by indulging in
imaginative escapism and literary pranks. Between the spring of 1810 and that of
1811, he published two Gothic novels and two volumes of juvenile verse. In the fall
of 1810 Shelley entered University College, Oxford, where he enlisted his fellow
student Thomas Jefferson Hogg as a disciple. But in March 1811, University College
expelled both Shelley and Hogg for refusing to admit Shelley’s authorship of “The
Necessity of Atheism”. Hogg submitted to his family, but Shelley refused to
apologize to his.
Late in August 1811, Shelley eloped with Harriet Westbrook, the younger
daughter of a London tavern owner; by marrying her, he betrayed the acquisitive
plans of his grandfather and father, who tried to starve him into submission but only
drove the strong-willed youth to rebel against the established order. Early in 1812,
Shelley, Harriet, and her older sister Eliza Westbrook went to Dublin, where Shelley
circulated pamphlets advocating political rights for Roman Catholics, autonomy for
Ireland, and freethinking ideals. The couple traveled to Lynmouth, Devon, where
Shelley issued more political pamphlets, and then to North Wales, where they spent
almost six months in 1812–13.
Lack of money finally drove Shelley to moneylenders in London, where in
1813 he issued “Queen Mab”, his first major poem – a nine-canto mixture of blank
verse and lyric measures that attacks the evils of the past and present (commerce,
war, the eating of meat, the church, monarchy, and marriage) but ends with
resplendent hopes for humanity when freed from these vices. In June 1813 Harriet
Shelley gave birth to their daughter Ianthe, but a year later Shelley fell in love with
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, daughter of William Godwin and his first wife, née
Mary Wollstonecraft. Against Godwin’s objections, Shelley and Mary Godwin
eloped to France on July 27, 1814, taking with them Mary’s stepsister Jane (later
“Claire”) Clairmont. Following travels through France, Switzerland, and Germany,
they returned to London, where they were shunned by the Godwins and most other
friends. Shelley dodged creditors until the birth of his son Charles (born to Harriet,
November 30, 1814), his grandfather’s death (January 1815), and provisions of Sir
Bysshe’s will forced Sir Timothy to pay Shelley’s debts and grant him an annual
income.
24
 Settling near Windsor Great Park in 1815, Shelley read the classics with Hogg
and another friend, Thomas Love Peacock. He also wrote “Alastor”; or “The Spirit
of Solitude”, a blank-verse poem, published with shorter poems in 1816, that warns
idealists (like Shelley himself) not to abandon “sweet human love” and social
improvement for the vain pursuit of evanescent dreams. By mid-May 1816, Shelley,
Mary, and Claire Clairmont hurried to Geneva to intercept Lord Byron, with whom
Claire had begun an affair. During this memorable summer, Shelley composed the
poems “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and “Mont Blanc”, and Mary began her novel
“Frankenstein”. Shelley’s party returned to England in September, settling in Bath.
Late in the year, Harriet Shelley drowned herself in London, and on December 30,
1816, Shelley and Mary were married with the Godwins’ blessing. But a Chancery
Court decision declared Shelley unfit to raise Ianthe and Charles (his children by
Harriet), who were placed in foster care at his expense.
In March 1817 the Shelleys settled near Peacock at Marlow, where Shelley
wrote his twelve-canto romance-epic “Laon and Cythna”; or, “The Revolution of
the Golden City” and Mary Shelley finished “Frankenstein”. They compiled
“History of a Six Weeks’ Tour” jointly from the letters and journals of their trips to
Switzerland, concluding with “Mont Blanc”. In November, “Laon and Cythna” was
suppressed by its printer and publisher, who feared that Shelley’s idealized tale of a
peaceful national revolution, bloodily suppressed by a league of king and priests,
violated the laws against blasphemous libel. After revisions, it was reissued in 1818
as “The Revolt of Islam”.
Because Shelley’s health suffered from the climate and his financial
obligations outran his resources, the Shelleys and Claire Clairmont went to Italy,
where Byron was residing. They reached Milan in April 1818 and proceeded to Pisa
and Leghorn (Livorno). That summer, at Bagni di Lucca, Shelley translated Plato’s
“Symposium” and wrote his own essay “On Love”. He also completed a modest
poem entitled “Rosalind and Helen”, in which he imagines his destiny in the poet-
reformer “Lionel”, who – imprisoned for radical activity – dies young after his
release.
Thus far, Shelley’s literary career had been politically oriented. “Queen
Mab”, the early poems first published in 1964 as “The Esdaile Notebook”, “Laon
and Cythna”, and most of his prose works were devoted to reforming society; and
even “Alastor”, “Rosalind and Helen”, and the personal lyrics voiced the concerns
of an idealistic reformer who is disappointed or persecuted by an unreceptive
society. But in Italy, far from the daily irritations of British politics, Shelley
deepened his understanding of art and literature and, unable to reshape the world to
conform to his vision, he concentrated on embodying his ideals within his poems.
His aim became, as he wrote in “Ode to the West Wind”, to make his words “Ashes
and sparks” as from “an unextinguished hearth,” thereby transforming subsequent
generations and, through them, the world. Later, as he became estranged from Mary
Shelley, he portrayed even love in terms of aspiration, rather than fulfillment: “The
desire of the moth for the star,/ Of the night for the morrow,/ The devotion to
something afar/ From the sphere of our sorrow.”
25
 In August 1818, Shelley and Byron again met in Venice; the Shelleys
remained there or at Este through October 1818. During their stay, little Clara
Shelley (b. 1817) became ill and died. In “Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills”
(published with “Rosalind and Helen”), Shelley writes how visions arising from the
beautiful landscape seen from a hill near Este had revived him from despair to hopes
for the political regeneration of Italy, thus transforming the scene into “a green isle.
/ In the deep wide sea of Misery”. He also began “Julian and Maddalo” – in which
Byron (“Maddalo”) and Shelley debate human nature and destiny – and drafted Act
I of “Prometheus Unbound”. In November 1818 the Shelleys traveled through
Rome to Naples, where they remained until the end of February 1819.
Settling next at Rome, Shelley continued “Prometheus Unbound” and
outlined “The Cenci”, a tragedy on the Elizabethan model based on a case of
incestuous rape and patricide in sixteenth-century Rome. He completed this drama
during the summer of 1819 near Leghorn, where the Shelleys fled in June after their
other child, William Shelley (b. 1816), died from malaria. Shelley himself terms
“The Cenci” “a sad reality,” contrasting it with earlier “visions of the beautiful and
just.” Memorable characters, classic five-act structure, powerful and evocative
language, and moral ambiguities still make “The Cenci” theatrically effective. Even
so, it is a less notable achievement than “Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama”,
which Shelley completed at Florence in the autumn of 1819, near the birth of Percy
Florence Shelley, Mary Shelley’s only surviving child. Both plays appeared about
1820.
In “Prometheus” Shelley inverts the plot of a lost play by Aeschylus in a
poetic masterpiece that combines supple blank verse with a variety of complex lyric
measures. In Act I, Prometheus, tortured on Jupiter’s orders for having given
mankind the gift of moral freedom, recalls his earlier curse of Jupiter and forgives
him (“I wish no living thing to suffer pain”). By eschewing revenge, Prometheus,
who embodies the moral will, can be reunited with his beloved Asia, a spiritual ideal
transcending humanity; her love prevents him from becoming another tyrant when
Jupiter is overthrown by the mysterious power known as Demogorgon. Act II traces
Asia’s awakening and journey toward Prometheus, beginning with her descent into
the depths of nature to confront and question Demogorgon. Act III depicts the
overthrow of Jupiter and the union of Asia and Prometheus, who – leaving Jupiter’s
throne vacant – retreat to a cave from which they influence the world through ideals
embodied in the creative arts. The end of the act describes the renovation of both
human society and the natural world. Act IV opens with joyful lyrics by spirits who
describe the benevolent transformation of the human consciousness that has
occurred. Next, other spirits hymn the beatitude of humanity and nature in this new
millennial age; and finally, Demogorgon returns to tell all creatures that, should the
fragile state of grace be lost, they can restore their moral freedom through these
“spells”:
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than Death or Night;
To defy Power which seems Omnipotent;
26
 To love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.
“Prometheus Unbound”, which was the keystone of Shelley’s poetic
achievement, was written after he had been chastened by “sad reality” but before he
began to fear that he had failed to reach an audience. Published with it were some of
the poet’s finest and most hopeful shorter poems, including “Ode to Liberty,” “Ode
to the West Wind,” “The Cloud,” and “To a Sky-Lark.”
While completing “Prometheus Unbound” and “The Cenci”, Shelley reacted
to news of the Peterloo Massacre (August 1819) in England by writing “The Masque
of Anarchy” and several radical songs that he hoped would rouse the British people
to active but nonviolent political protest. Later in 1819 he sent to England “Peter
Bell the Third”, which joins literary satire of William Wordsworth’s “Peter Bell”
to attacks on corruptions in British society, and he drafted “A Philosophical View of
Reform”, his longest (though incomplete) prose work, urging moderate reform to
prevent a bloody revolution that might lead to new tyranny. Too radical to be
published during Shelley’s lifetime, “The Masque of Anarchy” appeared after the
reformist elections of 1832, “Peter Bell the Third” and the political ballads in 1839–
40, and “A Philosophical View of Reform” not until 1920.
After moving to Pisa in 1820, Shelley was stung by hostile reviews into
expressing his hopes more guardedly. His “Letter to Maria Gisborne” in heroic
couplets and “The Witch of Atlas” in ottava rima (both 1820; published 1824)
combine the mythopoeic mode of “Prometheus Unbound” with the urbane self-
irony that had emerged in “Peter Bell the Third”, showing Shelley’s awareness that
his ideals might seem naive to others. Late that year, “Oedipus Tyrannus”; or,
“Swellfoot the Tyrant”, his satirical drama on the trial for adultery of Caroline
(estranged wife of King George IV), appeared anonymously but was quickly
suppressed. In 1821, however, Shelley reasserted his uncompromising idealism.
“Epipsychidion” (in couplets) mythologizes his infatuation with Teresa (“Emilia”)
Viviani, a convent-bound young admirer, into a Dantesque fable of how human
desire can be fulfilled through art. His essay “A Defence of Poetry” (published 1840)
eloquently declares that the poet creates humane values and imagines the forms that
shape the social order: thus each mind recreates its own private universe, and “Poets
are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.” “Adonais”, a pastoral elegy in
Spenserian stanzas, commemorates the death of John Keats by declaring that, while
we “decay/ Like corpses in a charnel,” the creative spirit of Adonais, despite his
physical death, “has outsoared the shadow of our night.”
The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.
The verse drama “Hellas” (published 1822) celebrates the Greek revolution
against Turkish rule and reiterates the political message of “Laon and Cythna” –

27
that the struggle for human liberty can be neither totally defeated nor fully realized,
since the ideal is greater than its earthly embodiments.
After Byron’s arrival in Pisa late in 1821, Shelley, inhibited by his presence,
completed only a series of urbane, yet longing lyrics – most addressed to Jane
Williams – during the early months of 1822. He began the drama “Charles the
First”, but soon abandoned it. After the Shelleys and Edward and Jane Williams
moved to Lerici, Shelley began “The Triumph of Life”, a dark fragment on which
he was at work until he sailed to Leghorn to welcome his friend Leigh Hunt, who
had arrived to edit a periodical called “The Liberal”. Shelley and Edward Williams
drowned on July 8, 1822, when their boat sank during the stormy return voyage to
Lerici.
Mary Shelley faithfully collected her late husband’s unpublished writings, and
by 1840, aided by Hunt and others, she had disseminated his fame and most of his
writings. The careful study of Shelley’s publications and manuscripts has since
elucidated his deep learning, clear thought, and subtle artistry. Shelley was a
passionate idealist and consummate artist who, while developing rational themes
within traditional poetic forms, stretched language to its limits in articulating both
personal desire and social altruism

Змістовий модуль 2. Тема 4. Walter Scott.

Sir Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott, in full Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet, (born on August 15,
1771, Edinburgh, Scotland – died September 21, 1832, Abbotsford, Roxburgh,
Scotland), Scottish novelist, poet, historian, and biographer who is often considered
both the inventor and the greatest practitioner of the historical novel.
Scott’s father was a lawyer, and his mother was the daughter of a physician.
From his earliest years, Scott was fond of listening to his elderly relatives’ accounts
and stories of the Scottish Border, and he soon became a voracious reader of poetry,
history, drama, and fairy tales and romances. He had a remarkably retentive memory
and astonished visitors by his eager reciting of poetry. His explorations of the
neighbouring countryside developed in him both a love of natural beauty and a deep
appreciation of the historic struggles of his Scottish forebears.
Scott was educated at the high school at Edinburgh and also for a time at the
grammar school at Kelso. In 1786 he was apprenticed to his father as writer to the
signet, a Scots equivalent of the English solicitor (attorney). His study and practice
of law were somewhat desultory, for his immense youthful energy was diverted into
social activities and into miscellaneous readings in Italian, Spanish, French, German,
and Latin. After a very deeply felt early disappointment in love, he married, in
December 1797, Charlotte Carpenter, of a French royalist family, with whom he
lived happily until her death in 1826.
In the mid-1790s Scott became interested in German Romanticism, Gothic
novels, and Scottish border ballads. His first published work, “The Chase, and
William and Helen” (1796), was a translation of two ballads by the German
Romantic balladeer G.A. Bürger. A poor translation of Goethe’s “Götz von
28
Berlichingen” followed in 1799. Scott’s interest in border ballads finally bore fruit
in his collection of them entitled “Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border”, 3 vol. (1802–
03). His attempts to “restore” the orally corrupted versions back to their original
compositions sometimes resulted in powerful poems that show a sophisticated
Romantic flavour. The work made Scott’s name known to a wide public, and he
followed up his first success with a full-length narrative poem, “The Lay of the Last
Minstrel” (1805), which ran into many editions. The poem’s clear and vigorous
storytelling, Scottish regionalist elements, honest pathos, and vivid evocations of
landscape were repeated in further poetic romances, including “Marmion” (1808),
“The Lady of the Lake” (1810), which was the most successful of these pieces,
“Rokeby” (1813), and “The Lord of the Isles” (1815).
Scott led a highly active literary and social life during these years. In 1808 his
18-volume edition of the works of John Dryden appeared, followed by his 19-
volume edition of Jonathan Swift (1814) and other works. But his finances now took
the first of several disastrous turns that were to partly determine the course of his
future career. His appointment as sheriff depute of the county of Selkirk in 1799 (a
position he was to keep all his life) was a welcome supplement to his income, as was
his appointment in 1806 as clerk to the Court of Session in Edinburgh. But he had
also become a partner in a printing (and later publishing) firm owned by James
Ballantyne and his irresponsible brother John. By 1813 this firm was hovering on
the brink of financial disaster, and although Scott saved the company from
bankruptcy, from that time onward everything he wrote was done partly in order to
make money and pay off the lasting debts he had incurred. Another ruinous
expenditure was the country house he was having built at Abbotsford, which he
stocked with enormous quantities of antiquarian objects.
By 1813 Scott had begun to tire of narrative poetry, and the greater depth and
verve of Lord Byron’s narrative poems threatened to oust him from his position as
supreme purveyor of this kind of literary entertainment. In 1813 Scott rediscovered
the unfinished manuscript of a novel he had started in 1805, and in the early summer
of 1814 he wrote with extraordinary speed almost the whole of his novel, which he
titled “Waverley”. It was one of the rare and happy cases in literary history when
something original and powerful was immediately recognized and enjoyed by a large
public. A story of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, it reinterpreted and presented with
living force the manners and loyalties of a vanished Scottish Highland society. The
book was published anonymously, as were all of the many novels he wrote down to
1827.
In “Waverley” and succeeding novels Scott’s particular literary gifts could be
utilized to their fullest extent. First and foremost, he was a born storyteller who could
place a large cast of vivid and varied characters in an exciting and turbulent historical
setting. He was also a master of dialogue who felt equally at home with expressive
Scottish regional speech and the polished courtesies of knights and aristocrats. His
deep knowledge of Scottish history and society and his acute observation of its
mores and attitudes enabled him to play the part of a social historian in insightful
depictions of the whole range of Scottish society, from beggars and rustics to the
29
middle classes and the professions and on up to the landowning nobility. The
attention Scott gave to ordinary people was indeed a marked departure from previous
historical novels’ concentration on royalty. His flair for picturesque incidents
enabled him to describe with equal vigour both eccentric Highland personalities and
the fierce political and religious conflicts that agitated Scotland during the 17th and
18th centuries. Finally, Scott was the master of a rich, ornate, seemingly effortless
literary style that blended energy with decorum, lyric beauty with clarity of
description.
Scott followed up “Waverley” with a whole series of historical novels set in
Scotland that are now known as the “Waverley” novels. “Guy Mannering” (1815)
and “The Antiquary” (1816) completed a sort of trilogy covering the period from
the 1740s to just after 1800. The first of four series of novels published under the
title “Tales of My Landlord” was composed of “The Black Dwarf” and the
masterpiece “Old Mortality” (1816). These were followed by the masterpieces “Rob
Roy” (1817) and “The Heart of Midlothian” (1818), and then by “The Bride of
Lammermoor” and “A Legend of Montrose” (both 1819). It was only after writing
these novels of Scottish history that Scott, driven by the state of his finances and the
need to satisfy the public appetite for historical fiction that he himself had created,
turned to themes from English history and elsewhere. He thus wrote “Ivanhoe”
(1819), a novel set in 12th-century England and one that remains his most popular
book. “The Monastery” and “The Abbot” followed in 1820, and “The Pirate” and
“The Fortunes of Nigel” appeared in 1822. Two more masterpieces were
“Kenilworth” (1821), set in Elizabethan England, and the highly successful
“Quentin Durward” (1823), set in 15th-century France. The best of his later novels
are “Redgauntlet” (1824) and “The Talisman” (1825), the latter being set in
Palestine during the Crusades.
In dealing with the recent past of his native country, Scott was able to find a
fictional form in which to express the deep ambiguities of his own feeling for
Scotland. On the one hand he welcomed Scotland’s union with England and the
commercial progress and modernization that it promised to bring, but on the other
he bitterly regretted the loss of Scotland’s independence and the steady decline of
its national consciousness and traditions. Novel after novel in the “Waverley” series
makes clear that the older, heroic tradition of the Scottish Jacobite clans (supporters
of the exiled Stuart king James II and his descendants) had no place in the modern
world; the true heroes of Scott’s novels are thus not fighting knights-at-arms but the
lawyers, farmers, merchants, and simple people who go about their business
oblivious to the claims and emotional ties of a heroic past. Scott became a novelist
by bringing his antiquarian and romantic feeling for Scotland’s past into relation
with his sense that Scotland’s interests lay with a prudently commercial British
future. He welcomed civilization, but he also longed for individual heroic action. It
is this ambivalence that gives vigour, tension, and complexity of viewpoint to his
best novels.
Scott’s immense earnings in those years contributed to his financial downfall.
Eager to own an estate and to act the part of a bountiful laird, he anticipated his
30
income and involved himself in exceedingly complicated and ultimately disastrous
financial agreements with his publisher, Archibald Constable, and his agents, the
Ballantynes. He and they met almost every new expense with bills discounted on
work still to be done; these bills were basically just written promises to pay at a
future date. This form of payment was an accepted practice, but the great financial
collapse of 1825 caused the four men’s creditors to demand actual and immediate
payment in cash. Constable was unable to meet his liabilities and went bankrupt, and
he in turn dragged down the Ballantynes and Scott in his wake because their financial
interests were inextricably intermingled. Scott assumed personal responsibility for
both his and the Ballantynes’ liabilities and thus courageously dedicated himself for
the rest of his life to paying off debts amounting to about £120,000.
Everyone paid tribute to the selfless honesty with which he set himself to work
to pay all his huge debts. Unfortunately, though, the corollary was reckless haste in
the production of all his later books and compulsive work whose strain shortened
his life. After the notable re-creation of the end of the Jacobite era in “Redgauntlet”,
he produced nothing equal to his best early work, though his rapidity and ease of
writing remained largely unimpaired, as did his popularity. Scott’s creditors were
not hard with him during this period, however, and he was generally revered as the
grand old man of English letters. In 1827 Scott’s authorship of the “Waverley”
novels was finally made public. In 1831 his health deteriorated sharply, and he tried
a continental tour with a long stay at Naples to aid recovery. He was taken home and
died in 1832.
Scott gathered the disparate strands of contemporary novel-writing techniques
into his own hands and harnessed them to his deep interest in Scottish history and
his knowledge of antiquarian lore. The technique of the omniscient narrator and the
use of regional speech, localized settings, sophisticated character delineation, and
romantic themes treated in a realistic manner were all combined by him into virtually
a new literary form, the historical novel. His influence on other European and
American novelists was immediate and profound, and though interest in some of his
books declined somewhat in the 20th century, his reputation remains secure. Scott
wrote articles on “Chivalry”, “Romance”, and “Drama” for Encyclopædia
Britannica’s fourth edition (1801–09).

Змістовий модуль 2. Тема 5. The Victorian Period. The Bronte Sisters

The post-Romantic and Victorian eras
Self-consciousness was the quality that John Stuart Mill identified, in 1838,
as “the daemon of the men of genius of our time.” Introspection was inevitable in
the literature of an immediately Post-Romantic period, and the age itself was as
prone to self-analysis as were its individual authors. Hazlitt’s essays in “The Spirit
of the Age” (1825) were echoed by Mill’s articles of the same title in 1831, by
Thomas Carlyle’s essays “Signs of the Times” (1829) and “Characteristics” (1831),
and by Richard Henry Horne’s “New Spirit of the Age” in 1844.
This persistent scrutiny was the product of an acute sense of change. Britain
had emerged from the long war with France (1793–1815) as a great power and as
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the world’s predominant economy. Visiting England in 1847, the American writer
Ralph Waldo Emerson observed of the English that “the modern world is theirs.
They have made and make it day by day”.
This new status as the world’s first urban and industrialized society was
responsible for the extraordinary wealth, vitality, and self-confidence of the period.
Abroad these energies expressed themselves in the growth of the British Empire. At
home they were accompanied by rapid social change and fierce intellectual
controversy.
The juxtaposition of this new industrial wealth with a new kind of urban
poverty is only one of the paradoxes that characterize this long and diverse period.
In religion the climax of the Evangelical revival coincided with an unprecedentedly
severe set of challenges to faith. The idealism and transcendentalism of Romantic
thought were challenged by the growing prestige of empirical science and utilitarian
moral philosophy, a process that encouraged more-objective modes in literature.
Realism would be one of the great artistic movements of the era. In politics a
widespread commitment to economic and personal freedom was, nonetheless,
accompanied by a steady growth in the power of the state. The prudery for which
the Victorian Age is notorious in fact went hand in hand with an equally violent
immoralism, seen, for example, in Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poetry or the
writings of the Decadents. Most fundamentally of all, the rapid change that many
writers interpreted as progress inspired in others a fierce nostalgia. Enthusiastic
rediscoveries of ancient Greece, Elizabethan England, and, especially, the Middle
Ages by writers, artists, architects, and designers made this age of change
simultaneously an age of active and determined historicism.
John Stuart Mill caught this contradictory quality, with characteristic
acuteness, in his essays on Jeremy Bentham (1838) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(1840). Every contemporary thinker, he argued, was indebted to these two “seminal
minds”. Yet Bentham, as the enduring voice of the Enlightenment, and Coleridge,
as the chief English example of the Romantic reaction against it, held diametrically
opposed views.
A similar sense of sharp controversy is given by Carlyle in “Sartor Resartus”
(1833–34). An eccentric philosophical fiction in the tradition of Swift and Sterne,
the book argues for a new mode of spirituality in an age that Carlyle himself suggests
to be one of mechanism. Carlyle’s choice of the novel form and the book’s humour,
generic flexibility, and political engagement point forward to distinctive
characteristics of Victorian literature.
Early Victorian literature: the age of the novel
Several major figures of English Romanticism lived on into this period.
Coleridge died in 1834, De Quincey in 1859. Wordsworth succeeded Southey as
poet laureate in 1843 and held the post until his own death seven years later.
Posthumous publication caused some striking chronological anomalies. Percy
Bysshe Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry” was not published until 1840. Keats’s
letters appeared in 1848 and Wordsworth’s “Prelude” in 1850.

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 Despite this persistence, critics of the 1830-s felt that there had been a break
in the English literary tradition, which they identified with the death of Byron in
1824. The deaths of Austen in 1817 and Scott in 1832 should perhaps have been
seen as even more significant, for the new literary era has, with justification, been
seen as the age of the novel. More than 60,000 works of prose fiction were published
in Victorian Britain by as many as 7,000 novelists. The three-volume format (or
“three-decker”) was the standard mode of first publication; it was a form created for
sale to and circulation by lending libraries. It was challenged in the 1830s by the
advent of serialization in magazines and by the publication of novels in 32-page
monthly parts. But only in the 1890s did the three-decker finally yield to the modern
single-volume format.
Dickens
Charles Dickens first attracted attention with the descriptive essays and tales
originally written for newspapers, beginning in 1833, and collected as “Sketches by
“Boz” (1836). On the strength of this volume, Dickens contracted to write a
historical novel in the tradition of Scott (eventually published as “Barnaby Rudge”
in 1841). By chance his gifts were turned into a more distinctive channel. In February
1836 he agreed to write the text for a series of comic engravings. The unexpected
result was “The Pickwick Paper” (1836–37), one of the funniest novels in English
literature. By July 1837, sales of the monthly installments exceeded 40,000 copies.
Dickens’s extraordinary popular appeal and the enormous imaginative potential of
the Victorian novel were simultaneously established.
The chief technical features of Dickens’s fiction were also formed by this
success. Serial publication encouraged the use of multiple plot and required that each
episode be individually shaped. At the same time it produced an unprecedentedly
close relationship between author and reader. Part dramatist, part journalist, part
mythmaker, and part wit, Dickens took the picaresque tradition of Smollett and
Fielding and gave it a Shakespearean vigour and variety.
His early novels have been attacked at times for sentimentality, melodrama,
or shapelessness. They are now increasingly appreciated for their comic or macabre
zest and their poetic fertility. “Dombey and Son” (1846–48) marks the beginning of
Dickens’s later period. He thenceforth combined his gift for vivid caricature with a
stronger sense of personality, designed his plots more carefully, and used symbolism
to give his books greater thematic coherence. Of the masterpieces of the next decade,
“David Copperfield” (1849–50) uses the form of a fictional autobiography to
explore the great Romantic theme of the growth and comprehension of the self.
“Bleak House” (1852–53) addresses itself to law and litigiousness; “Hard Times”
(1854) is a Carlylean defense of art in an age of mechanism; and “Little Dorrit”
(1855–57) dramatizes the idea of imprisonment, both literal and spiritual. Two great
novels, both involved with issues of social class and human worth, appeared in the
1860s: “Great Expectations” (1860–61) and “Our Mutual Friend” (1864–65). His
final book, “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” (published posthumously, 1870), was
left tantalizingly uncompleted at the time of his death.
Thackeray, Gaskell, and others
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 Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and
educated background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too
learned his trade in the field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early
fictions were published as serials in “Fraser’s Magazine” or as contributions to the
great Victorian comic magazine “Punch” (founded 1841). For his masterpiece,
“Vanity Fair” (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of publication
in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction,
and an ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years
between the Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match
this sharpness. “Vanity Fair” was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero”.
Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more sentimental Thackeray wrote novels
without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England”
novelists of the 1840-s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and
Charles Kingsley to the economic crisis of that troubled decade. “Mary Barton”
(1848) and “Ruth” (1853) are both novels about social problems, as is “North and
South” (1854–55), although, like her later work – “Sylvia’s Lovers” (1863), “Wives
and Daughters” (1864–66), and the remarkable novella “Cousin Phyllis” (1864) –
this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels
of provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish
novels, crime novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–
48, indeed, represent a pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In
addition to “Vanity Fair”, “Dombey and Son”, and “Mary Barton”, they saw the
completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels – “Coningsby” (1844), “Sybil”
(1845), and “Tancred” (1847) – and the publication of first novels by Kingsley,
Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose
fiction, rather than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would
concede that “the modern novel is preferred to the modern poem”.
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed,
rather than simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by
the work of the Brontë sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in
Yorkshire, they, as children, invented the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and
Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many of the poems in their first,
and pseudonymous, publication, “Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell” (1846).
Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although
both her novels have cheerful romantic endings. “Agnes Grey” (1847) is a stark
account of the working life of a governess, and “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall” (1848)
paints a grim picture of the heroine’s marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte
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Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have been writing a literal fiction of
provincial life. In her first novel, “Jane Eyre” (1847), for example, the heroine’s
choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her
employer and the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different
tradition of the Gothic novel. In “Shirley” (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in
her own words, “as unromantic as Monday morning.” In “Villette” (1853) the
distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of the limits of stoicism an
unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only
novel, “Wuthering Heights” (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely
handled plot, and a sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined
with vivid imagery and an extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly
achieved study of elemental passions and the strongest possible refutation of the
assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel
was in fact also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early
with “Poems, Chiefly Lyrical” (1830) and “Poems” (1832; dated 1833),
publications that led some critics to hail him as the natural successor to Keats and
Shelley. A decade later, in “Poems” (1842), Tennyson combined in two volumes
the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic
subject matter. The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the
French Symbolists of the 1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam
in 1833, however, left him vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics
that this highly subjective verse was insufficiently engaged with the public issues of
the day. The second volume of the “Poems” of 1842 contains two remarkable
responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a form of poetry in
which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers since
the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently
by both Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it
became the mode by which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry
were expressed. The other is the form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl”, in
which he combined brilliant vignettes of contemporary landscape with relaxed
debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale
required by his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building
long poems out of short ones. “In Memoriam” (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed
by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent, vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute
pathological study of individual grief and the central Victorian statement of the
problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. “Maud” (1855) assembles 27 lyric
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poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the psychology
of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable
poems on patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was “Idylls
of the King” (1859–85). An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little
pictures”, it offers a sombre vision of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly
articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil”. The elegant
Virgilian note was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work
was Germanic rather than Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial
rather than refined. The differences between Browning and Tennyson underline the
creative diversity of the period.
Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One
was as a playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet
of the confessional meditation “Pauline” (1833) and the difficult though innovatory
narrative poem “Sordello” (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with
the volume “Dramatic Lyrics”. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic
monologues, among them “Porphyria’s Lover”, “Johannes Agricola in
Meditation”, and “My Last Duchess”. The monologues make clear the radical
originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the reader in sympathetic
identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional minds,
requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking
lyrics make up “Men and Women” (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered
chiefly for her love poems “Sonnets from the Portuguese” (1850) and her
experiment with the verse novel “Aurora Leigh” (1856; dated 1857), she was in her
own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her “Poems”(1844) established her
as a leading poet of the age. “Casa Guidi Windows” (1851) is a subtle reflection on
her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one of the
century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with
the publication of “Dramatis Personae” (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the
sort of fame that Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume
contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra”, the most extreme statement of Browning’s
celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring creed, however, go the
skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such poems as
“Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium’”.
His “The Ring and the Book” (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue
format unprecedented scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid
murder story in a way that both explores moral issues and suggests the problematic
nature of human knowledge. Browning’s work after this date, though voluminous,
is uneven.
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 Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, “The Strayed Reveller, and Other
Poems” (1849), combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical
landscape of the period. The title poem of his next collection, “Empedocles on Etna”
(1852), is a sustained statement of the modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic
embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the dialogue of the mind with itself”.
Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a more impersonal
manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland”, “Dover Beach”, “The Scholar-Gipsy”)
is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with “Essays in Criticism” (1865), “Culture and Anarchy” (1869), and
“Literature and Dogma” (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and
religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to
produce three highly original poems. “The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich” (1848) is a
narrative poem of modern life, written in hexameters. “Amours de Voyage” (1858)
goes beyond this to the full-scale verse novel, using multiple internal narrators and
vivid contemporary detail. “Dipsychus” (published posthumously in 1865 but not
available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable closet drama that
debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with “Sartor
Resartus”. He continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development.
“The French Revolution” (1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very
directly to this consciously postrevolutionary age. “On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and
the Heroic in History” (1841) combined the Romantic idea of the genius with a
further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle opposed to
the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in “Chartism” (1839; dated 1840), “Past and Present” (1843), and the splenetic
“Latter-Day Pamphlets” (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic”
denunciations of laissez-faire economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance
of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in “Modern Painters” (5 vol., 1843–60),
brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged an appropriate prose
for its expression. But in “The Stones of Venice” (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin took the
political medievalism of Carlyle’s “Past and Present” and gave it a poetic fullness
and force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems
continued into “Unto This Last” (1860), “The Crown of Wild Olive” (1866), and
“Fors Clavigera” (1871–84). John Henry Newman was a poet, novelist, and
theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as “Tracts for the Times” (1833–
41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the Roman
Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development
is memorably described in his “Apologia pro Vita Sua” (1864), one of the many
great autobiographies of this introspective century.
Late Victorian literature
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 “The modern spirit”, Matthew Arnold observed in 1865, “is now awake.” In
1859 Charles Darwin had published “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural
Selection”. Historians, philosophers, and scientists were all beginning to apply the
idea of evolution to new areas of study of the human experience. Traditional
conceptions of man’s nature and place in the world were, as a consequence, under
threat. Walter Pater summed up the process, in 1866, by stating that “Modern
thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the ‘relative’ spirit in place
of the ‘absolute’”.
The economic crisis of the 1840s was long past. But the fierce political debates
that led first to the Second Reform Act of 1867 and then to the battles for the
enfranchisement of women were accompanied by a deepening crisis of belief.
The novel
Late Victorian fiction may express doubts and uncertainties, but in aesthetic
terms it displays a new sophistication and self-confidence. The expatriate American
novelist Henry James wrote in 1884 that until recently the English novel had “had
no air of having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it.” Its
acquisition of these things was due in no small part to Mary Ann Evans, better known
as George Eliot. Initially a critic and translator, she was influenced, after the loss of
her Christian faith, by the ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach and Auguste Comte. Her
advanced intellectual interests combined with her sophisticated sense of the novel
form to shape her remarkable fiction. Her early novels – “Adam Bede” (1859), “The
Mill on the Floss” (1860), and “Silas Marner” (1861) – are closely observed studies
of English rural life that offer, at the same time, complex contemporary ideas and a
subtle tracing of moral issues. Her masterpiece, “Middlemarch” (1871–72), is an
unprecedentedly full study of the life of a provincial town, focused on the thwarted
idealism of her two principal characters. George Eliot is a realist, but
her realism involves a scientific analysis of the interior processes of social and
personal existence.
Her fellow realist Anthony Trollope published his first novel in 1847 but only
established his distinctive manner with “The Warden” (1855), the first of a series of
six novels set in the fictional county of Barsetshire and completed in 1867. This
sequence was followed by a further series, the six-volume Palliser group (1864–80),
set in the world of British parliamentary politics. Trollope published an astonishing
total of 47 novels, and his “Autobiography” (1883) is a uniquely candid account of
the working life of a Victorian writer.
The third major novelist of the 1870s was George Meredith, who also worked
as a poet, a journalist, and a publisher’s reader. His prose style is eccentric and his
achievement uneven. His greatest work of fiction, “The Egoist” (1879), however, is
an incisive comic novel that embodies the distinctive theory of the corrective and
therapeutic powers of laughter expressed in his lecture “The Idea of Comedy”
(1877).
In the 1880s the three-volume novel, with its panoramic vistas and
proliferating subplots, began to give way to more narrowly focused one-volume
novels. At the same time, a gap started to open between popular fiction and the
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“literary” or “art” novel. The flowering of realist fiction was also accompanied,
perhaps inevitably, by a revival of its opposite, the romance. The 1860s had
produced a new subgenre, the sensation novel, seen at its best in the work of Wilkie
Collins. Gothic novels and romances by Sheridan Le Fanu, Robert Louis Stevenson,
William Morris, and Oscar Wilde; utopian fiction by Morris and Samuel Butler; and
the early science fiction of H.G. Wells make it possible to speak of a full-scale
romance revival.
Realism continued to flourish, however, sometimes encouraged by the
example of European realist and naturalist novelists. Both George Moore and
George Gissing were influenced by Émile Zola, though both also reacted against
him. The 1890s saw intense concern with the social role of women, reflected in the
New Woman fiction of Grant Allen (“The Woman Who Did”, 1895), Sarah Grand
(“The Heavenly Twins”, 1893), and George Egerton (“Keynotes”, 1893). The
heroines of such texts breach conventional assumptions by supporting woman
suffrage, smoking, adopting “rational” dress, and rejecting traditional double
standards in sexual behaviour.
The greatest novelist of this generation, however, was Thomas Hardy. His
first published novel, “Desperate Remedies”, appeared in 1871 and was followed
by 13 more before he abandoned prose to publish (in the 20th century) only poetry.
His major fiction consists of the tragic novels of rural life, “The Mayor of
Casterbridge” (1886), “Tess of the D’Urberville” (1891), and “Jude the Obscure”
(1895). In these novels his brilliant evocation of the landscape and people of his
fictional Wessex is combined with a sophisticated sense of the “ache of modernism”.
Verse
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, formed in 1848 and unofficially reinforced
a decade later, was founded as a group of painters but also functioned as a school of
writers who linked the incipient Aestheticism of Keats and De Quincey to the
Decadent movement of the fin de siècle. Dante Gabriel Rossetti collected his early
writing in “Poems” (1870), a volume that led the critic Robert Buchanan to attack
him as the leader of “The Fleshly School of Poetry.” Rossetti combined some subtle
treatments of contemporary life with a new kind of medievalism, seen also in “The
Defence of Guenevere” (1858) by William Morris. The earnest political use of the
Middle Ages found in Carlyle and Ruskin did not die out – Morris himself continued
it and linked it, in the 1880s, with Marxism. But these writers also used medieval
settings as a context that made possible an uninhibited treatment of sex and violence.
The shocking subject matter and vivid imagery of Morris’s first volume were further
developed by Algernon Charles Swinburne, who, in “Atalanta in Calydon” (1865)
and “Poems and Ballads” (1866), combined them with an intoxicating metrical
power. His second series of “Poems and Ballads” (1878), with its moving elegies
for Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier, displays a sophisticated command of
recent developments in avant-garde French verse.
The carefully wrought religious poetry of Christina Rossetti is perhaps truer
to the original, pious purposes of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Her first
collection, “Goblin Market and Other Poems” (1862), with its vivid but richly
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ambiguous title poem, established her status as one of the outstanding lyric poets of
the century. The other outstanding religious poet of this period is Gerard Manley
Hopkins, a Jesuit priest whose work was first collected as “Poems” in 1918, nearly
30 years after his death. Overpraised by Modernist critics, who saw him as the sole
great poet of the era, he was in fact an important minor talent and an ingenious
technical innovator.
Robert Browning’s experiments with the dramatic monologue were further
developed in the 1860s by Augusta Webster, who used the form in “Dramatic
Studies” (1866), “A Woman Sold and Other Poems” (1867), and “Portraits” (1870)
to produce penetrating accounts of female experience. Her posthumously published
sonnet sequence “Mother & Daughter” (1895) is a lucid and unsentimental account
of that relationship.
The 1890s witnessed a flowering of lyric verse, influenced intellectually by
the critic and novelist Walter Pater and formally by contemporary French practice.
Such writing was widely attacked as “decadent” for its improper subject matter and
its consciously amoral doctrine of “art for art’s sake.” This stress upon artifice and
the freedom of art from conventional moral constraints went hand in hand, however,
with an exquisite craftsmanship and a devotion to intense emotional and sensory
effects. Outstanding among the numerous poets publishing in the final decade of the
century were John Davidson, Arthur Symons, Francis Thompson, Ernest Dowson,
Lionel Johnson, and A.E. Housman. In “The Symbolist Movement in Literature”
(1899), Symons suggested the links between this writing and European Symbolism
and Impressionism. Thompson provides a vivid example of the way in which a
decadent manner could, paradoxically, be combined with fierce religious
enthusiasm. A rather different note was struck by Rudyard Kipling, who combined
polemical force and sharp observation (particularly of colonial experience) with a
remarkable metrical vigour.
The Victorian theatre
Early Victorian drama was a popular art form, appealing to an uneducated
audience that demanded emotional excitement rather than intellectual subtlety.
Vivacious melodramas did not, however, hold exclusive possession of the stage. The
mid-century saw lively comedies by Dion Boucicault and Tom Taylor. In the 1860s
T.W. Robertson pioneered a new realist drama, an achievement later celebrated by
Arthur Wing Pinero in his charming sentimental comedy “Trelawny of the “Wells”
(1898). The 1890s were, however, the outstanding decade of dramatic innovation.
Oscar Wilde crowned his brief career as a playwright with one of the few great high
comedies in English, “The Importance of Being Earnest” (1895). At the same time,
the influence of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen was helping to produce a new
genre of serious “problem plays”, such as Pinero’s “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray”
(1893). J.T. Grein founded the Independent Theatre in 1891 to foster such work and
staged there the first plays of George Bernard Shaw and translations of Ibsen.
Victorian literary comedy
Victorian literature began with such humorous books as “Sartor Resartus”
and “The Pickwick Papers”. Despite the crisis of faith, the “Condition of England”
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question, and the “ache of modernism”, this note was sustained throughout the
century. The comic novels of Dickens and Thackeray, the squibs, sketches, and light
verse of Thomas Hood and Douglas Jerrold, the nonsense of Edward Lear and Lewis
Carroll, and the humorous light fiction of Jerome K. Jerome and George Grossmith
and his brother Weedon Grossmith are proof that this age, so often remembered for
its gloomy rectitude, may in fact have been the greatest era of comic writing in
English literature.
The Bronte Sisters
Emily Brontë
Emily Brontë, in full Emily Jane Brontë, pseudonym Ellis Bell, (born July
30, 1818, Thornton, Yorkshire, England – died December 19, 1848, Haworth,
Yorkshire), English novelist and poet who produced but one novel, “Wuthering
Heights” (1847), a highly imaginative work of passion and hate set on the Yorkshire
moors. Emily was perhaps the greatest of the three Brontë sisters, but the record of
her life is extremely meagre, for she was silent and reserved and left no
correspondence of interest, and her single novel darkens rather than solves the
mystery of her spiritual existence.
Her father, Patrick Brontë (1777–1861), an Irishman, held a number of
curacies: Hartshead-cum-Clifton, Yorkshire, was the birthplace of his elder
daughters, Maria and Elizabeth (who died young), and nearby Thornton that of
Emily and her siblings Charlotte, Patrick Branwell, and Anne. In 1820 their father
became rector of Haworth, remaining there for the rest of his life.
After the death of their mother in 1821, the children were left very much to
themselves in the bleak moorland rectory. The children were educated, during their
early life, at home, except for a single year that Charlotte and Emily spent at the
Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge in Lancashire. In 1835, when Charlotte
secured a teaching position at Miss Wooler’s school at Roe Head, Emily
accompanied her as a pupil but suffered from homesickness and remained only three
months. In 1838 Emily spent six exhausting months as a teacher in Miss Patchett’s
school at Law Hill, near Halifax, and then resigned.
To keep the family together at home, Charlotte planned to keep a school for
girls at Haworth. In February 1842 she and Emily went to Brussels to learn foreign
languages and school management at the Pension Héger. Although Emily pined for
home and for the wild moorlands, it seems that in Brussels she was better appreciated
than Charlotte. Her passionate nature was more easily understood than Charlotte’s
decorous temperament. In October, however, when her aunt died, Emily returned
permanently to Haworth.
In 1845 Charlotte came across some poems by Emily, and this led to the
discovery that all three sisters – Charlotte, Emily, and Anne – had written verse. A
year later they published jointly a volume of verse, “Poems by Currer, Ellis and
Acton Bell”, the initials of these pseudonyms being those of the sisters; it contained
21 of Emily’s poems, and a consensus of later criticism has accepted the fact that
Emily’s verse alone reveals true poetic genius. The venture cost the sisters about £50
in all, and only two copies were sold.
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 By midsummer of 1847 Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes
Grey had been accepted for joint publication by J. Cautley Newby of London, but
publication of the three volumes was delayed until the appearance of their sister
Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, which was immediately and hugely successful. Wuthering
Heights, when published in December 1847, did not fare well; critics were hostile,
calling it too savage, too animal-like, and clumsy in construction. Only later did it
come to be considered one of the finest novels in the English language.
Soon after the publication of her novel, Emily’s health began to fail rapidly.
She had been ill for some time, but now her breathing became difficult, and she
suffered great pain. She died of tuberculosis in December 1848.
“Wuthering Heights”
Emily Brontë’s work on “Wuthering Heights” cannot be dated, and she may
well have spent a long time on this intense, solidly imagined novel. It is distinguished
from other novels of the period by its dramatic and poetic presentation, its abstention
from all comment by the author, and its unusual structure. It recounts in the
retrospective narrative of an onlooker, which in turn includes shorter narratives, the
impact of the waif Heathcliff on the two families of Earnshaw and Linton in a remote
Yorkshire district at the end of the 18th century. Embittered by abuse and by the
marriage of Cathy Earnshaw – who shares his stormy nature and whom he loves –
to the gentle and prosperous Edgar Linton, Heathcliff plans a revenge on both
families, extending into the second generation. Cathy’s death in childbirth fails to
set him free from his love-hate relationship with her, and the obsessive haunting
persists until his death; the marriage of the surviving heirs of Earnshaw and Linton
restores peace.
Sharing her sisters’ dry humour and Charlotte’s violent imagination, Emily
diverges from them in making no use of the events of her own life and showing no
preoccupation with a spinster’s state or a governess’s position. Working, like them,
within a confined scene and with a small group of characters, she constructs an
action, based on profound and primitive energies of love and hate, which proceeds
logically and economically, making no use of such coincidences as Charlotte relies
on, requiring no rich romantic similes or rhetorical patterns, and confining the
superb dialogue to what is immediately relevant to the subject. The sombre power
of the book and the elements of brutality in the characters affronted some 19th-
century opinion. Its supposed masculine quality was adduced to support the claim,
based on the memories of her brother Branwell’s friends long after his death, that he
was author or part author of it. While it is not possible to clear up all the minor
puzzles, neither the external nor the internal evidence offered is substantial enough
to weigh against Charlotte’s plain statement that Emily was the author.
Anne Brontë
Anne Brontë, pseudonym Acton Bell, (born Jan. 17, 1820, Thornton,
Yorkshire, Eng. – died May 28, 1849, Scarborough, Yorkshire), English poet and
novelist, sister of Charlotte and Emily Brontë and author of “Agnes Grey” (1847)
and “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall” (1848).

42
 The youngest of six children of Patrick and Marie Brontë, Anne was taught in
the family’s Haworth home and at Roe Head School. With her sister Emily, she
invented the imaginary kingdom of Gondal, about which they wrote verse and prose
(the latter now lost) from the early 1830s until 1845. She took a position as governess
briefly in 1839 and then again for four years, 1841–45, with the Robinsons, the
family of a clergyman, at Thorpe Green, near York. There her irresponsible brother,
Branwell, joined her in 1843, intending to serve as a tutor. Anne returned home in
1845 and was followed shortly by her brother, who had been dismissed, charged
with making love to his employer’s wife.
In 1846 Anne contributed 21 poems to “Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton
Bell”, a joint work with her sisters Charlotte and Emily. Her first novel, “Agnes
Grey”, was published together with Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” in three volumes
(of which “Agnes Grey” was the third) in December 1847. The reception to these
volumes, associated in the public mind with the immense popularity of Charlotte’s
“Jane Eyre” (October 1847), led to quick publication of Anne’s second novel (again
as Acton Bell), “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall”, published in three volumes in June
1848; it sold well. She fell ill with tuberculosis toward the end of the year and died
the following May.
Her novel “Agnes Grey”, probably begun at Thorpe Green, records with
limpidity and some humour the life of a governess. George Moore called it “simple
and beautiful as a muslin dress. ”The Tenant of Wildfell Hall” presents an
unsoftened picture of the debauchery and degradation of the heroine’s first husband
and sets against it the Arminian belief, opposed to Calvinist predestination, that no
soul shall be ultimately lost. Her outspokenness raised some scandal, and Charlotte
deplored the subject as morbid and out of keeping with her sister’s nature, but the
vigorous writing indicates that Anne found in it not only a moral obligation but also
an opportunity of artistic development.
Charlotte Brontë
Charlotte Brontë, married name Mrs. Arthur Bell Nicholls, pseudonym
Currer Bell, (born April 21, 1816, Thornton, Yorkshire, England – died March 31,
1855, Haworth, Yorkshire), English novelist noted for “Jane Eyre” (1847), a strong
narrative of a woman in conflict with her natural desires and social condition. The
novel gave new truthfulness to Victorian fiction. She later wrote “Shirley” (1849)
and “Villette” (1853).
Her father was Patrick Brontë (1777–1861), an Anglican clergyman. Irish-
born, he had changed his name from the more commonplace Brunty. After serving
in several parishes, he moved with his wife, Maria Branwell Brontë, and their six
small children to Haworth amid the Yorkshire moors in 1820, having been awarded
a rectorship there. Soon after, Mrs. Brontë and the two eldest children (Maria and
Elizabeth) died, leaving the father to care for the remaining three girls—Charlotte,
Emily, and Anne – and a boy, Branwell. Their upbringing was aided by an aunt,
Elizabeth Branwell, who left her native Cornwall and took up residence with the
family at Haworth.

43
 In 1824 Charlotte and Emily, together with their elder sisters before their
deaths, attended Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, near Kirkby Lonsdale,
Lancashire. The fees were low, the food unattractive, and the discipline harsh.
Charlotte condemned the school (perhaps exaggeratedly) long years afterward in
“Jane Eyre”, under the thin disguise of Lowood Institution, and its principal, the
Reverend William Carus Wilson, has been accepted as the counterpart of Mister
Brocklehurst in the novel.
Charlotte and Emily returned home in June 1825, and for more than five years
the Brontë children learned and played there, writing and telling romantic tales for
one another and inventing imaginative games played out at home or on the desolate
moors.
In 1831 Charlotte was sent to Miss Wooler’s school at Roe Head, near
Huddersfield, where she stayed a year and made some lasting friendships; her
correspondence with one of her friends, Ellen Nussey, continued until her death and
has provided much of the current knowledge of her life. In 1832 she went home to
teach her sisters but in 1835 returned to Roe Head as a teacher. She wished to
improve her family’s position, and that was the only outlet that was offered to her
unsatisfied energies. Branwell, moreover, was to start on his career as an artist, and
it became necessary to supplement the family resources. The work, with its
inevitable restrictions, was uncongenial to Charlotte. She fell into ill health and
melancholia and in the summer of 1838 terminated her engagement.
In 1839 Charlotte declined a proposal from the Reverend Henry Nussey, her
friend’s brother, and some months later one from another young clergyman. At the
same time Charlotte’s ambition to make the practical best of her talents and the need
to pay Branwell’s debts urged her to spend some months as governess with the
Whites at Upperwood House, Rawdon. Branwell’s talents for writing and painting,
his good classical scholarship, and his social charm had engendered high hopes for
him, but he was fundamentally unstable, weak-willed, and intemperate. He went
from job to job and took refuge in alcohol and opium.
Meanwhile, his sisters had planned to open a school together, which their aunt
agreed to finance, and in February 1842 Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels as
pupils to improve their qualifications in French and acquire some German. The talent
displayed by both brought them to the notice of Constantin Héger, a fine teacher and
a man of unusual perception. After a brief trip home upon the death of her aunt,
Charlotte returned to Brussels as a pupil-teacher. She stayed there during 1843 but
was lonely and depressed. Her friends had left Brussels, and Madame Héger appears
to have become jealous of her. The nature of Charlotte’s attachment to Héger and
the degree to which she understood herself have been much discussed. His was the
most-interesting mind she had yet met, and he had perceived and evoked her latent
talents. His strong and eccentric personality appealed both to her sense of humour
and to her affections. She offered him an innocent but ardent devotion, but he tried
to repress her emotions. The letters she wrote to him after her return may well be
called love letters. When, however, he suggested that they were open to
misapprehension, she stopped writing and applied herself, in silence, to disciplining
44
her feelings. However Charlotte’s experiences in Brussels are interpreted, they were
crucial for her development. She received a strict literary training, became aware of
the resources of her own nature, and gathered material that served her, in various
shapes, for all her novels.
In 1844 Charlotte attempted to start a school that she had long envisaged in
the parsonage itself, as her father’s failing sight precluded his being left alone.
Prospectuses were issued, but no pupils were attracted to distant Haworth.
In the autumn of 1845 Charlotte came across some poems by Emily, and that
discovery led to the publication of a joint volume of “Poems by Currer, Ellis and
Acton Bell” (1846), or Charlotte, Emily, and Anne; the pseudonyms were assumed
to preserve secrecy and avoid the special treatment that they believed reviewers
accorded to women. The book was issued at their own expense. It received few
reviews and only two copies were sold. Nevertheless, a way had opened to them,
and they were already trying to place the three novels they had written. Charlotte
failed to place “The Professor: A Tale” but had, however, nearly finished “Jane
Eyre: An Autobiography”, begun in August 1846 in Manchester, where she was
staying with her father, who had gone there for an eye operation. When Smith, Elder
and Company, declining “The Professor”, declared themselves willing to consider
a three-volume novel with more action and excitement in it, she completed and
submitted it at once. “Jane Eyre” was accepted, published less than eight weeks
later (on October 16, 1847), and had an immediate success, far greater than that of
the books that her sisters published the same year.
The months that followed were tragic ones. Branwell died in September 1848,
Emily in December, and Anne in May 1849. Charlotte completed “Shirley: A Tale”
in the empty parsonage, and it appeared in October. In the following years Charlotte
went three times to London as the guest of her publisher; there she met the novelist
William Makepeace Thackeray and sat for her portrait by George Richmond. She
stayed in 1851 with the writer Harriet Martineau and also visited her future
biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell, in Manchester and entertained her at Haworth.
“Villette” was published in January 1853. Meanwhile, in 1851, she had declined a
third offer of marriage, that time from James Taylor, a member of Smith, Elder and
Company.
Her father’s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls (1817–1906), an Irishman, was her
fourth suitor. It took some months to win her father’s consent, but they were married
on June 29, 1854, in Haworth church. They spent their honeymoon in Ireland and
then returned to Haworth, where her husband had pledged himself to continue as
curate to her father. He did not share his wife’s intellectual life, but she was happy
to be loved for herself and to take up her duties as his wife. She began another book,
“Emma”, of which some pages remain. Her pregnancy, however, was accompanied
by exhausting sickness, and she died in 1855.
A three-volume edition of her letters, “The Letters of Charlotte Brontë”,
edited by Margaret Smith, was published in 1995–2004.
Jane Eyre and other novels of Charlotte Brontë

45
 Charlotte’s first novel, “The Professor” (published posthumously, 1857),
shows her sober reaction from the indulgences of her girlhood. Told in the first
person by an English tutor in Brussels, it is based on Charlotte’s experiences there,
with a reversal of sexes and roles. The necessity of her genius, reinforced by reading
her sister Emily’s “Wuthering Heights”, modified this restrictive self-discipline,
and, though there is plenty of satire and dry, direct phrasing in “Jane Eyre”, its
success was the fiery conviction with which it presented a thinking, feeling woman,
craving love but able to renounce it at the call of impassioned self-respect and moral
conviction.
The book’s narrator and main character, Jane Eyre, is an orphan and is
governess to the ward of Mr. Rochester, the Byronic and enigmatic employer with
whom she falls in love. Her love is reciprocated, but on the wedding morning it
comes out that Rochester is already married and keeps his mad and depraved wife
in the attics of his mansion. Jane leaves him, suffers hardship, and finds work as a
village schoolmistress. When Jane learns, however, that Rochester has been maimed
and blinded while trying vainly to rescue his wife from the burning house that she
herself had set afire, Jane seeks him out and marries him. There are melodramatic
naïvetés in the story, and Charlotte’s elevated rhetorical passages do not much
appeal to modern taste, but she maintains her hold on the reader. The novel,
purporting to be an autobiography, is written in the first person, but, except in Jane
Eyre’s impressions of Lowood, the autobiography is not Charlotte’s. Personal
experience is fused with suggestions from widely different sources, and the
Cinderella theme may well come from Samuel Richardson’s novel “Pamela”. The
action is carefully motivated, and apparently episodic sections, like the return to
Gateshead Hall, are seen to be necessary to the full expression of Jane’s character
and the working out of the threefold moral theme of love, independence, and
forgiveness.
In her novel “Shirley”, Charlotte avoided melodrama and coincidences and
widened her scope. Setting aside Maria Edgeworth and Sir Walter Scott as national
novelists, “Shirley” is the first regional novel in English, full of shrewdly depicted
local material– Yorkshire characters, church and chapel, the cloth workers and
machine breakers of her father’s early manhood, and a sturdy but rather embittered
feminism.
In “Villette” Charlotte recurred to the Brussels setting and the first-person
narrative, disused in “Shirley”; the characters and incidents are largely variants of
the people and life at the Pension Héger. Against that background she set the ardent
heart, deprived of its object, contrasted with the woman happily fulfilled in love.
The influence of Charlotte’s novels was much more immediate than that of
“Wuthering Heights”. Charlotte’s combination of romance and satiric realism had
been the mode of nearly all the women novelists for a century. Her fruitful
innovations were the presentation of a tale through the sensibility of a child or young
woman, her lyricism, and the picture of love from a woman’s standpoint.

Змістовий модуль 3. Тема 6. William Somerset Maugham.

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 W. Somerset Maugham
W. Somerset Maugham, in full William Somerset Maugham, (born Jan.
25, 1874, Paris, France – died Dec. 16, 1965, Nice), English novelist, playwright,
and short-story writer whose work is characterized by a clear unadorned style,
cosmopolitan settings, and a shrewd understanding of human nature.
Maugham was orphaned at the age of 10; he was brought up by an uncle and
educated at King’s School, Canterbury. After a year at Heidelberg, he entered
St. Thomas’ medical school, London, and qualified as a doctor in 1897. He drew
upon his experiences as an obstetrician in his first novel, “Liza of Lambeth” (1897),
and its success, though small, encouraged him to abandon medicine. He traveled in
Spain and Italy and in 1908 achieved a theatrical triumph – four plays running in
London at once – that brought him financial security. During World War I he worked
as a secret agent. After the war he resumed his interrupted travels and, in 1928,
bought a villa on Cape Ferrat in the south of France, which became his permanent
home.
His reputation as a novelist rests primarily on four books: “Of Human
Bondage” (1915), a semi-autobiographical account of a young medical student’s
painful progress toward maturity; ‘The Moon and Sixpence” (1919), an account of
an unconventional artist, suggested by the life of Paul Gauguin; “Cakes and Ale”
(1930), the story of a famous novelist, which is thought to contain caricatures of
Thomas Hardy and Hugh Walpole; and “The Razor’s Edge” (1944), the story of a
young American war veteran’s quest for a satisfying way of life. Maugham’s plays,
mainly Edwardian social comedies, soon became dated, but his short stories have
increased in popularity. Many portray the conflict of Europeans in alien
surroundings that provoke strong emotions, and Maugham’s skill in handling plot,
in the manner of Guy de Maupassant, is distinguished by economy and suspense. In
“The Summing Up” (1938) and “A Writer’s Notebook” (1949) Maugham explains
his philosophy of life as a resigned atheism and a certain skepticism about the extent
of man’s innate goodness and intelligence; it is this that gives his work its astringent
cynicism.

Змістовий модуль 3. Тема 7. Dystopia. Aldous Huxley. George Orwell

Aldous Huxley, in full Aldous Leonard Huxley, (born July 26, 1894,
Godalming, Surrey, England – died November 22, 1963, Los Angeles, California,
U.S.), English novelist and critic gifted with an acute and far-ranging intelligence
whose works are notable for their wit and pessimistic satire. He remains best known
for one novel, “Brave New World” (1932), a model for much dystopian science
fiction that followed.
Aldous Huxley was a grandson of the prominent biologist Thomas Henry
Huxley and was the third child of the biographer and man of letters Leonard Huxley;
his brothers included physiologist Andrew Fielding Huxley and biologist Julian
Huxley. He was educated at Eton, during which time he became partially blind
because of keratitis. He retained enough eyesight to read with difficulty, and he
graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1916. He published his first book in 1916
47
and worked on the periodical “Athenaeum” from 1919 to 1921. Thereafter he
devoted himself largely to his own writing and spent much of his time in Italy until
the late 1930s, when he settled in California.
Huxley established himself as a major author with his first two published
novels, “Crome Yellow” (1921) and “Antic Hay” (1923); these are witty and
malicious satires on the pretensions of the English literary and intellectual coteries
of his day. “Those Barren Leaves” (1925) and “Point Counter Point” (1928) are
works in a similar vein.
“Brave New World” (1932) marked a turning point in Huxley’s career: like
his earlier work, it is a fundamentally satiric novel, but it also vividly expresses
Huxley’s distrust of 20th-century trends in both politics and technology. The novel
presents a nightmarish vision of a future society in which psychological conditioning
forms the basis for a scientifically determined and immutable caste system that, in
turn, obliterates the individual and grants all control to the World State. The novel
“Eyeless in Gaza” (1936) continues to shoot barbs at the emptiness and aimlessness
experienced in contemporary society, but it also shows Huxley’s growing interest in
Hindu philosophy and mysticism as a viable alternative. (Many of his subsequent
works reflect this preoccupation, notably “The Perennial Philosophy” [1946].) In
the novel “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan” (1939), published soon after he
moved to California, Huxley turned his attention to American culture.
Huxley’s most important later works are “The Devils of Loudun” (1952), a
detailed psychological study of a historical incident in which a group of 17th-century
French nuns were allegedly the victims of demonic possession, and “The Doors of
Perception” (1954), a book about Huxley’s experiences with the hallucinogenic
drug mescaline. His last novel, “Island” (1962), is a utopian vision of a Pacific
Ocean society.
The author’s lifelong preoccupation with the negative and positive impacts of
science and technology on 20th-century life, expressed most forcefully in “Brave
New World” but also in one of his last essays, written for Encyclopædia Britannica’s
1963 volume of “The Great Ideas Today”, about the conquest of space, make him
one of the representative writers and intellectuals of that century.
George Orwell
George Orwell, pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair, (born June 25,
1903, Motihari, Bengal, India – died January 21, 1950, London, England), English
novelist, essayist, and critic famous for his novels “Animal Farm” (1945) and
“Nineteen Eighty-four” (1949), the latter a profound anti-utopian novel that
examines the dangers of totalitarian rule.
Born Eric Arthur Blair, Orwell never entirely abandoned his original name,
but his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, appeared in 1933 as the work
of George Orwell (the surname he derived from the beautiful River Orwell in East
Anglia). In time his nom de plume became so closely attached to him that few people
but relatives knew his real name was Blair. The change in name corresponded to a
profound shift in Orwell’s lifestyle, in which he changed from a pillar of the British
imperial establishment into a literary and political rebel.
48
 He was born in Bengal, into the class of sahibs. His father was a minor British
official in the Indian civil service; his mother, of French extraction, was the daughter
of an unsuccessful teak merchant in Burma (Myanmar). Their attitudes were those
of the “landless gentry”, as Orwell later called lower-middle-class people whose
pretensions to social status had little relation to their income. Orwell was thus
brought up in an atmosphere of impoverished snobbery. After returning with his
parents to England, he was sent in 1911 to a preparatory boarding school on the
Sussex coast, where he was distinguished among the other boys by his poverty and
his intellectual brilliance. He grew up a morose, withdrawn, eccentric boy, and he
was later to tell of the miseries of those years in his posthumously published
autobiographical essay, “Such, Such Were the Joy” (1953).
Orwell won scholarships to two of England’s leading schools, Wellington and
Eton, and briefly attended the former before continuing his studies at the latter,
where he stayed from 1917 to 1921. Aldous Huxley was one of his masters, and it
was at Eton that he published his first writing in college periodicals. Instead of
matriculating at a university, Orwell decided to follow family tradition and, in 1922,
went to Burma as assistant district superintendent in the Indian Imperial Police. He
served in a number of country stations and at first appeared to be a model imperial
servant. Yet from boyhood he had wanted to become a writer, and when he realized
how much against their will the Burmese were ruled by the British, he felt
increasingly ashamed of his role as a colonial police officer. Later he was to recount
his experiences and his reactions to imperial rule in his novel “Burmese Day” and
in two brilliant autobiographical sketches, “Shooting an Elephant” and “A
Hanging”, classics of expository prose.
Against imperialism
In 1927 Orwell, on leave to England, decided not to return to Burma, and on
January 1, 1928, he took the decisive step of resigning from the imperial police.
Already in the autumn of 1927 he had started on a course of action that was to shape
his character as a writer. Having felt guilty that the barriers of race and caste had
prevented his mingling with the Burmese, he thought he could expiate some of his
guilt by immersing himself in the life of the poor and outcast people of Europe.
Donning ragged clothes, he went into the East End of London to live in cheap
lodging houses among labourers and beggars; he spent a period in the slums of Paris
and worked as a dishwasher in French hotels and restaurants; he tramped the roads
of England with professional vagrants and joined the people of the London slums in
their annual exodus to work in the Kentish hopfields.
Those experiences gave Orwell the material for “Down and Out in Paris and
London”, in which actual incidents are rearranged into something like fiction. The
book’s publication in 1933 earned him some initial literary recognition. Orwell’s
first novel, “Burmese Days” (1934), established the pattern of his subsequent fiction
in its portrayal of a sensitive, conscientious, and emotionally isolated individual who
is at odds with an oppressive or dishonest social environment. The main character
of “Burmese Days” is a minor administrator who seeks to escape from the dreary
and narrow-minded chauvinism of his fellow British colonialists in Burma. His
49
sympathies for the Burmese, however, end in an unforeseen personal tragedy. The
protagonist of Orwell’s next novel, “A Clergyman’s Daughter” (1935), is an
unhappy spinster who achieves a brief and accidental liberation in her experiences
among some agricultural labourers. “Keep the Aspidistra Flying” (1936) is about a
literarily inclined bookseller’s assistant who despises the empty commercialism and
materialism of middle-class life but who in the end is reconciled to bourgeois
prosperity by his forced marriage to the girl he loves.
Orwell’s revulsion against imperialism led not only to his personal rejection
of the bourgeois lifestyle but to a political reorientation as well. Immediately after
returning from Burma he called himself an anarchist and continued to do so for
several years; during the 1930s, however, he began to consider himself a socialist,
though he was too libertarian in his thinking ever to take the further step – so
common in the period – of declaring himself a communist.
From “The Road to Wigan Pier” to World War II
Orwell’s first socialist book was an original and unorthodox political treatise
entitled “The Road to Wigan Pier” (1937). It begins by describing his experiences
when he went to live among the destitute and unemployed miners of northern
England, sharing and observing their lives; it ends in a series of sharp criticisms of
existing socialist movements. It combines mordant reporting with a tone of generous
anger that was to characterize Orwell’s subsequent writing.
By the time “The Road to Wigan Pier” was in print, Orwell was in Spain; he
went to report on the Civil War there and stayed to join the Republican militia,
serving on the Aragon and Teruel fronts and rising to the rank of second lieutenant.
He was seriously wounded at Teruel, with damage to his throat permanently
affecting his voice and endowing his speech with a strange, compelling quietness.
Later, in May 1937, after having fought in Barcelona against communists who were
trying to suppress their political opponents, he was forced to flee Spain in fear of his
life. The experience left him with a lifelong dread of communism, first expressed in
the vivid account of his Spanish experiences, “Homage to Catalonia” (1938), which
many consider one of his best books.
Returning to England, Orwell showed a paradoxically conservative strain in
writing “Coming Up for Air” (1939), in which he uses the nostalgic recollections of
a middle-aged man to examine the decency of a past England and express his fears
about a future threatened by war and fascism. When World War II did come, Orwell
was rejected for military service, and instead he headed the Indian service of the
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). He left the BBC in 1943 and became
literary editor of the “Tribune”, a left-wing socialist paper associated with the
British Labour leader Aneurin Bevan. At this period Orwell was a prolific journalist,
writing many newspaper articles and reviews, together with serious criticism, like
his classic essays on Charles Dickens and on boys’ weeklies and a number of books
about England (notably “The Lion and the Unicorn”, 1941) that combined patriotic
sentiment with the advocacy of a libertarian, decentralist socialism very much unlike
that practiced by the British Labour Party.
“Animal Farm” and “Nineteen Eighty-four”
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 In 1944 Orwell finished “Animal Farm”, a political fable based on the story
of the Russian Revolution and its betrayal by Joseph Stalin. In the book a group of
barnyard animals overthrow and chase off their exploitative human masters and set
up an egalitarian society of their own. Eventually the animals’ intelligent and power-
loving leaders, the pigs, subvert the revolution and form a dictatorship whose
bondage is even more oppressive and heartless than that of their former human
masters. (“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”) At
first Orwell had difficulty finding a publisher for the small masterpiece, but when it
appeared in 1945, “Animal Farm” made him famous and, for the first time,
prosperous.
“Animal Farm” was one of Orwell’s finest works, full of wit and fantasy and
admirably written. It has, however, been overshadowed by his last book, “Nineteen
Eighty-four” (1949), a novel he wrote as a warning after years of brooding on the
twin menaces of Nazism and Stalinism. The novel is set in an imaginary future in
which the world is dominated by three perpetually warring totalitarian police states.
The book’s hero, the Englishman Winston Smith, is a minor party functionary in one
of those states. His longing for truth and decency leads him to secretly rebel against
the government, which perpetuates its rule by systematically distorting the truth and
continuously rewriting history to suit its own purposes. Smith has a love affair with
a like-minded woman, but then they are both arrested by the Thought Police. The
ensuing imprisonment, torture, and reeducation of Smith are intended not merely to
break him physically or make him submit but to root out his independent mental
existence and his spiritual dignity until he can love only the figure he previously
most hated: the apparent leader of the party, Big Brother. Smith’s surrender to the
monstrous brainwashing techniques of his jailers is tragic enough, but the novel
gains much of its power from the comprehensive rigour with which it extends the
premises of totalitarianism to their logical end: the love of power and domination
over others has acquired its perfected expression in the perpetual surveillance and
omnipresent dishonesty of an unassailable and irresistible police state under whose
rule every human virtue is slowly being suborned and extinguished. Orwell’s
warning of the potential dangers of totalitarianism made a deep impression on his
contemporaries and upon subsequent readers, and the book’s title and many of its
coined words and phrases (“Big Brother is watching you,” “newspeak,”
“doublethink”) became bywords for modern political abuses.
Orwell wrote the last pages of “Nineteen Eighty-four” in a remote house on the
Hebridean island of Jura, which he had bought from the proceeds of “Animal Farm”.
He worked between bouts of hospitalization for tuberculosis, of which he died in a
London hospital in January 1950.

51
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