Pramod K. Nayar - A Short History of English Literature-Great Books Foundation (2009)

JR
JR
Preface
This is a conventional history of English Literature. The overall aim in this work
is to survey English Literature from the medieval times to the present. Categories,
genres and timelines most frequently used in such studies have been retained
with boxed items focusing on particular ‘moments’ in this history.
I have retained the original spellings of works so that the flavour remains
unchanged. The term ‘prose’ is used in order to describe extended non-verse
writings before further classification into fiction and non-fiction. The individual
ages are organized around authors not in order of a strict chronology (though
by and large it is adhered to) but in terms of significance, contribution and
influence (and conscious of the fact that, in the age of Theory, these are very
debatable, even disreputable categories or criteria to invoke). In most cases, the
women writers have been grouped together. This is not intended to ghettoize
them, but rather to draw attention to the large numbers of women writers in
every age.
The Timeline at the beginning of each section is to be used as a contextual aid,
to locate texts and writers in their age. The ‘Further Reading’ list at the end of
every section is a set of basic texts for the student to read for that particular age,
and consists of works I deem indispensable for detailed exploration.
However, every section indicates, very schematically, points of departure should
students want to explore further. Each section concludes with a brief account
of new and revisionist readings of the age and select genres. This chapter suggests
new ways of conceptualizing, analyzing and critiquing particular cultural, textual
and pedagogic formations like the canon, a genre or the literature of that particular
age. The footnotes are, in most cases, about books that will be useful for further,
more specialized readings of the age under discussion. The bibliography at the
end of the book also has a large section devoted to texts and critical material
that would serve a student’s needs in this revisionist reading.
Pramod K. Nayar
University of Hyderabad and Cornell University
1. English Literature
A Prologue
The opening moments of ‘English’ literature can be found in the

writings of the Old and Middle English ages, 600–1485. Literature
from these early times survives mainly in fragmented form. ‘Old
English’ is the term associated with 5th century Britain – constituted
by seven kingdoms – and with dialects as varied as West Saxon and
Mercian. Numerous invasions between the 9 th and 10 th centuries
defined and altered the linguistic and cultural structure of the islands.
A rough chronology of the islands in this period would be as follows:
410 Roman legions leave Britain
450 Anglo-Saxon invasions from Germanic regions
590s Canterbury Christian mission established
793–95 Viking invasion
802 England united under King Egbert
885 Alfred the Great, partition of England
917–26 England regains Danish-held territories
1066 Edward the Confessor dies, Harold succeeds. William of
Normandy defeats Harold (Battle of Hastings).
The oldest literary text from the region is known today as Caedmon’s
Hymn and has been dated at around 680 AD. A song sung by a farmer
in praise of God, it is the first Christian poem in English. Later hymns
such as Deor’s Lament and The Seafarer are, like Caedmon’s Hymn,
narratives of everyday life sung by common folk rather than specialist
poets. These two texts, along with some other songs, are present in
one manuscript called The Exeter Book and collectively date back to
the 10th century. Another prominent Christian text in Old English
2 A Short History of English Literature
is The Dream of the Rood, dated at the 7th century. These constitute
the first literary texts in English. They are important precisely because
they are in English and not in Latin. The use of the local language
marks the creation of a distinct local cultural atmosphere. Latin, it
must be remembered, was the dominant language of literature and
scholarship. Hence the attempts to preserve these ‘English’ texts
appear to be a conscious effort at constructing an ‘English’ identity
(as Carter and McRae point out in their The Routledge History of
Literature in English: Britain and Ireland, 1998).
The first major, or popular, text from the Old English period is Beowulf.
This epic poem presents the first ‘hero’ in English literature, even
though the work is almost entirely Germanic and hence does not
quite become a ‘national tale’. Beowulf sets out to defeat the monster,
Grendel. Grendel is himself roughly human in shape and is descended
from Cain, the first murderer in human history according to Christian
doctrine. A Germanic tale thus becomes a Christian allegory in which
Grendel, like all monsters in religious and theological tales, represents
evil. Beowulf presents a vision of human civilization, the challenge of
evil, brotherhood and an ethics of duty and responsibility. It also
focuses on the fate of communities and races (the Danes and the
Geats). Beowulf uses figurative language and thus inaugurates literary
expression in English.
A text traceable to a particular author first occurs in the case of Brut.

The author is identified simply as ‘Layamon’. It is a saga of the Dark
Ages, starting with the Romans (5th century) and bringing it up to
the time of the Britons and the Arthurian legends. Layamon adapted
tales from earlier texts in the Celtic and French languages and the
Homeric works. Brut is also the first sustained attempt to provide a
‘national’ history of Britain. Wars, Christianity, love, romance and
Arthurian tales appear in Brut and the work sets the tone for much
of what follows in Early Middle English literature (Middle English is
generally taken to mean the period from the 12th century to the end
of the 15th). Brut may be called the first ‘national epic’ in English. It
departs from the then dominant languages, Latin and French, to
create a work in the local language. Brut and Beowulf together
introduce the themes that start the romance tradition (see the box
English Literature: A Prologue 3
The Romance) in English: themes of courage, personal valour, fidelity,

goodness, morality, personal pride, faith, the quest and evil.
The Romance
A romance is a tale of chivalry, courage, love and danger where the hero
passes through various trials and obstacles before attaining the heroine,
his beloved. Traditionally, the hero is virtuous and the obstacles involve a
testing of his virtue. His faith enables him to win the battle against evil and
resist temptation. The romance involves the hero’s descent into physical
danger and mental despair before he raises himself to success. Most of the
European romances can be traced back to the Arthurian legends.
It is important to note the cultural contexts of the time. Religion,

specifically Roman Catholic Christianity, played the most important
role in European medieval life. The Bible and the work of St
Augustine (The City of God and Confessions) were significant texts in
the dissemination of Christian thought. Augustine’s work proposed
two cities: the City of Man, temporary and subject to decay, and the
City of God, permanent and perfect. Man is a sojourner in the City
of Man and must understand that the goal is to reach the City of
God. Augustine found the symbol for the City of God in places like
the New Jerusalem. The Church also represents the City of God. The
medieval Christian also had to deal with the knowledge of humanity’s
innate sinfulness. She or he had to aspire to great virtue, in the face
of several human frailties. Asceticism was one of the consequences
of this train of thought, as some people gave up the material pleasures
of the world in favour of spirituality and faith.
The medieval age believed that there was the Bible and the ‘Book of
Nature’. The Bible revealed the Truth to humans. The Book of Nature
is a symbolic system. The value of symbols come from the associations
in Christian doctrine: snakes, trees, water are all given values
depending upon their role in Christian stories, mythology and history.
The phenomena of Nature reflected another world behind it – an
ideal world. This is the kind of belief system that informed medieval
and Early English writings.
A significant context for the development of both theology studies

and literature was the establishment of education systems in England.
The Cambridge and Oxford universities were set up around this time
to facilitate the study of Christian literature. But the institutions also
had another consequence: it facilitated discussions of interpretations
and the evolution of critical thinking among like-minded people. The
14 th century is a landmark period for English scholarship and
literature. Contemporary re-readings of the medieval ages and its
literature, therefore, focus on the construction of local and national
identity through language, imagery and poetry (a good example
would be Thorlac Turville-Petre’s 1996 work England the Nation:
Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290–1340).
Epics and long narrative poems began to appear in European regional
languages during the Middle Ages. The influence of most of these
texts has been immeasurable, since literatures across the European
continent and elsewhere have borrowed and adapted from them. In
Europe, Chrétien de Troyes’ five great romances were Arthurian
(except the second one, Cligés). The last three of these concerned the
more famous of Arthur’s knights: Yvain, or the Knight with the Lion
(the story of Gawain), Lancelot, or the Knight of the Cart and Perceval.
But the most famous of the early romances was The Romance of the
Rose, written by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. In the early
part of the 13th century, Guillaume wrote about 4100 lines and 40
years later Jean added almost 18000 lines. Cast in the dream-vision
form, the Romance of the Rose uses allegory (see the box Allegory),
personification and types. Characters represent qualities or features
like Old Age, Idleness and Pleasure. The poem presents a version of
courtly love (as in love among noblemen and ladies of the court).
The dreamer, an aristocratic young man, enters a garden, which
turns out to be the garden of love. He falls in love with a rose, which
stands for, or symbolizes, a lady. His ‘romance’ is aided by some and
obstructed by others, in a classic formulation of the romantic love
story. Later additions to the tale had advice sections from ‘the Old
Woman’, some of which influenced Geoffrey Chaucer while
composing the Wife of Bath’s Prologue in The Canterbury Tales. The
later additions also expanded the themes to include religion, politics,
marriage and women.
Allegory
Allegories are used to reveal a truth about the world, something about
human nature, or to comment on a political situation and so on.
An allegory is a literary form where the poem/image has one surface level
of meaning, but, on being read closely, reveals something more. It is used to
deliver a message to the attentive reader. There are political allegories where
the characters and events described in the literary text represent actual
historical figures and events. Allegories of ideas are used to represent
abstract concepts (such as ‘good’ or ‘evil’). John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s
Progress (1678) is a well-known example of the allegory of ideas. An allegory
of ideas personifies virtues and concepts. Personification is a literary device
where an abstract concept is treated as a human being or thing. Thus there
is ‘Good Man’, a personification of the virtue of goodness. ‘Lazy bones’
becomes a human being who stands for the concept of laziness.
There are various forms of allegory: fable, exemplum and the parable.
The high point of the literature from the Middle Ages belongs to a
poet whose influence on literature across the world has been so vast
that all subsequent work must be seen as derivative: Dante Alighieri
(1265–1321), the Florentine statesman, public figure and poet. Dante
influenced people like Petrarch and Boccaccio, who in turn inspired
the European Renaissance, an era that created the most inspiring
works of literature in the Western world. His first major work Vita
Nuova (1292–94?), meaning the ‘new life’, launches Dante’s famous
love story – his love for Beatrice. Indeed, Beatrice provides the
inspiration for much of Dante’s work, even though she died early
and Dante had clearly very little actual contact with her. He had
promised that he would write of Beatrice ‘what has never before
been written of any woman’ and his work is a fulfilment of this
promise. It’s a mixture of prose and poetry, most of it extraordinarily
lyrical. Loaded with number symbolism – the Catholic Dante’s
favourite numbers are three (representing the Trinity) and nine (three
times three) – the work is a beautiful praise-song and Beatrice,
associated with the number nine, becomes a symbol of perfection.
And yet, this extraordinary poem is only a preface, for the book was
still to come.
The Divine Comedy, which Dante composed during exile (it was
available, except the sections on Paradise, by 1319 and the last thirteen
cantos of the ‘Paradiso’ were discovered later by his son), is an allegory
of human life itself, and is indisputably one of the most influential
literary works in human history. It is a huge work: the section ‘Inferno’
consists of 39 cantos, ‘Purgatory’ and ‘Paradise’ of 33 cantos each!
Dante, seeking to correct his mistakes – it is assumed Dante was
speaking of some mistake he had made about Beatrice – journeys
through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. He is lost in the woods on
Good Friday and is now seeking to find his path once more:
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Dante’s descriptions of Hell, in its nine ‘circles’, and Purgatory (easily
the best section of the poem) are superb. Inscribed over the gates of
the Inferno are the prophetic words: “All hope abandon, ye who
enter here.” Dante discovers that the gates are crowded, for so many
humans are designated to go into Hell:
Were lamentations none, but only sighs,
That tremble made the everlasting air.
And this arose from sorrow without torment,
Which the crowds had, that many were and great,
Of infants and of women and of men.
The violence of suffering is incredible and Dante’s language and
power is superb:
We crossed the circle to the other bank,
Near to a fount that boils, and pours itself
Along a gully that runs out of it.
The water was more sombre far than perse;
And we, in company with the dusky waves,
Made entrance downward by a path uncouth.
A marsh it makes, which has the name of Styx,
This tristful brooklet, when it has descended
Down to the foot of the malign gray shores.
And I, who stood intent upon beholding,
Saw people mud-besprent in that lagoon,
All of them naked and with angry look.
They smote each other not alone with hands,
But with the head and with the breast and feet,
Tearing each other piecemeal with their teeth.
Dante’s Purgatory, with the sins of wrath, gluttony, envy and others,
is a nine-level mountain, meant for sinners who will be purged of
their sins before they attain Paradise. His imagery – with an
extraordinary use of light and dark – is unparalleled except perhaps
in Milton’s Paradise Lost. The motifs of journeying, distanciation from
God (Dante sees distance from God as a greater pain than physical
torture) and suffering are recurrent.
The entire poem, incorporating the then current systems of thought
and beliefs in astronomy, philosophy, biology, politics and theology,
serves to explicate the medieval theological and physical structure
of the universe. It is meant to serve as a warning for humankind,
which has been led astray into corruption and moral depravity, to
return to righteous ways of life. In this sense, the poem is a visionary
statement. The narrator converses with the souls in the three realms
– Hell, Purgatory and Paradise – and returns to tell the world of
what he has seen and heard. It is important that Dante envisions
love as the redeeming feature of humanity – that theology, faith and
morality all proceed from human love. Virtues and vices are both
the effect of love.
The first great English romances appeared around this time: Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight, Piers Plowman, Patience, Pearl and Cleanness.
Patience and Pearl form part of the ‘Alliterative Revival’ and date
back to the 1350–1450 period. The introduction of alliterative
language also marks an important moment in the formation of the
English language. Nature poetry first appears in the form of The Owl
and the Nightingale, dating back to the 12th century. Among the major
names from 14th century English, we have the Pearl-poet (no author
name is available), William Langland (though even this identity is
suspect and the name we now use is derived from ‘Will’ and
‘Langland’ used in Piers Plowman), John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer.
William Langland’s Piers Plowman is also, importantly, the first

provincial work in English, drawing upon the local countryside and
legends. It is a dream-vision, where the narrator falls asleep and
has prophetic visions that reveal truths about the present. A sense of
community is emphasized throughout the narrative, as people from

all walks of life meet in the field, what Langland describes as ‘a fair
field full of folk’. The field is bordered by a high tower (heaven) and
a deep pit (hell). Will, the narrator, converses with the resident of
the tower, ‘Truth’. The conversation is about saving his soul, and
represents a larger allegory about human redemption. The poem is
actually a criticism of the society of the times.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – at one point edited and modernized
by JRR Tolkien, and by Jessie L Weston (whose work From Ritual to
Romance influenced TS Eliot’s The Wasteland) – recounts a story in
the life of one of Arthur’s famous Knights of the Round Table. This
is the first of the great Romances in English. It actually consists of
two stories, one within the other. In the first tale, there is a testing at
Bertilak’s Castle and the second tale deals with the beheading of the
Green Knight. The plot is fairly simple. During a feast at King
Arthur’s court, the Green Knight appears and challenges Arthur’s
Knights to a game. He will allow anybody to behead him, provided
the beheader will journey to receive the return blow (from the Green
Knight) exactly one year later. Sir Gawain accepts the challenge and
beheads the Knight. The Green Knight, now headless, picks up his
fallen head and leaves, reminding Sir Gawain that he is to appear
before him to accept the return blow. A year later, Sir Gawain
journeys to find the Green Knight. He faces much hardship on the
way before reaching Bertilak’s Castle. In the Castle, Bertilak’s wife
tries to seduce him. Gawain has entered into a pact with Bertilak by
which Bertilak will go out and hunt every day and in the evening,
he will exchange his day’s earnings with whatever Sir Gawain has
won by staying back. One day, Bertilak’s wife gives Sir Gawain a
magic girdle, which will protect him, which he does not give Bertilak
(even though he is supposed to, as part of the deal). He eventually
meets the Green Knight. At the third blow the Green Knight manages
to cut Sir Gawain’s neck a little. Sir Gawain argues that the pact
was a blow, which the Green Knight has already delivered. It is
then revealed that the Green Knight is actually Bertilak, who knows
that Sir Gawain is protected by the magic girdle. The Romance
provides a set of themes that have continued in English literature for
centuries: brotherly love, chivalry, Christian morality, honesty,
fidelity, the duties of host and guest, truth and courage. It introduces
symbols like the pentangle (the five-pointed star) as a code for the
five senses and the five joys of Christ (Annunciation, Nativity,
Resurrection, Ascension and Assumption).
Pearl introduced the narrative form of the utopia and the dream-
vision, a form that was to be extremely popular right down to the
age of Philip Sidney. Pearl contrasts the human world with another,
more perfect one. Pearl is available in one manuscript with Sir Gawain
(and two other poems, Cleanness and Patience), now with the British
Library, London. They have all been attributed to the same poet.
They were composed at the same time that Chaucer was writing,
though these poems were written in a dialect from the North-West
Midlands (and are therefore quite incomprehensible unless
‘translated’ into modern English). Here is an example from Pearl:
The dubbement dere of doun and dale3,
Of wod and water and wlonk playne3,
Bylde in me blys, abated my bale3,
Fordidden my stresse, dystryed my payne3.
Translated, this would read:
The adornment precious of hills and dales,
Of wood and water and splendid plains,
Aroused in me bliss, abolished my woes,
Dispelled my distress, put an end to my pains.
The poem is a jeweller’s lament for a pearl he has lost. Saddened at
the loss he falls asleep in a garden and dreams that the pearl comes
to him in the form of a young woman who stands on the opposite
bank of a river. They debate theological issues and the speaker has a
vision of the New Jerusalem. He wakes up when he tries to cross the
river. It is possible that the pearl represents a person – for the speaker
describes the pearl as ‘nearer to me than aunt or niece’ and that she
lived ‘not two years in our land’. It might quite possibly be a daughter
who died, and whom the speaker mourns. The whiteness of the pearl
is a symbol of purity and might refer to the death of an innocent,
very young sister or daughter.
Old and Middle English is also the period when the first women’s
literary texts appear in Europe. Hrotsvitha (930?–1002), is widely
accepted as the first woman writer in Europe. An abbess by
profession, she wrote plays on Christian themes, the lives of the saints
and chronicled legends and history. She wrote in Latin, however.
Marie de France wrote twelve Lais (‘lai’ is a short narrative poem), a
series of short romances based on local English songs. Ancrene Wisse
(‘Anchoresses’ Guide’), an advice book, dates back to the 13th century
and its manuscript is still available in Cambridge University’s Corpus
Christi College Library. This work is in vernacular prose. Christian
de Pisan from France wrote Book of the City of Ladies and Moral
Proverbs of Christine. The latter has the distinction of being the first
woman’s text to be printed in English (by William Caxton in 1478).
The most famous woman’s writer from the period is, of course,
Margery Kempe (1373?–1438). Kempe, whose personal life was
traumatic with multiple childbirths, domestic suffering, madness and
visions, created in The Book of Margery Kempe the first
autobiographical narrative of trauma, guilt, sexuality and desire. The
tone of guilt and self-approbation in this work is unique and becomes
the earliest literary expression of a woman’s psychological state. Here
is an example of Kempe’s powerful tone:
And anon for dread she had of damnation on that one side and his
sharp reproving on that other side, this creature went out of her
mind and was wonderly vexed and labored with spirits half year
eight weeks and odd days. And in this time she saw, as her thought,
devils open their mouths all inflamed with burning lows of fire as
they should 'a swallowed her in, sometime ramping at her, sometime
threatening her, sometime pulling her and hauling her both night
and day the foresaid time. And also the devils cried upon her with
great threatenings and bade her she should forsake her Christendom,
her faith, and deny her God, his Mother, and all the saints in Heaven,
her good works and all good virtues, her father, her mother, and all
her friends. And so she did. She slandered her husband, her friends,
her own self; she spoke many a reprevous word and many a shrewd
word; she knew no virtue nor goodness; she desired all wickedness;
like as the spirits tempted her to say and do so she said and did. She
would 'a fordone herself many a time at their steering and 'a been
damned with them in Hell, and into witness thereof she bit her own
hand so violently that it was seen all her life after. And also she
rived her skin on her body again her heart with her nails spiteously,
for she had none other instruments, and worse she would 'a done
save she was bound and kept with strength both day and night that
she might not have her will.
The contexts for Geoffrey Chaucer (1343?–1400), the first major poet
of the ‘modern English’ language, include the great plague of 1348–
50 (described by Boccaccio in The Decameron) and the widely
unsettling peasant rebellions during 1381. He had finished most of
The Canterbury Tales by about 1395, having begun it many years
earlier. But he died before he could finalize it and what we have
now are essentially fragments of the work. The problem is
complicated by the fact that Chaucer’s own manuscript has not
survived and what we rely on are 15 th century manuscripts.
Chaucer’s work, written in Middle English, now comes with a
pronunciation guide and glossary! (The best and most reliable edition
remains The Riverside Chaucer, edited by Larry D Benson, 3rd edition,
1987.)
The Canterbury Tales is set during the time of a pilgrimage made to

the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, Kent, England. The
pilgrims, who travel together, stay at the Tabard Inn where the host
suggests that each of them, one of whom is Chaucer, tell four stories
to entertain the weary group – two on the way out to the shrine and
two on the way back. What follows is a set of tales, all narrated on
the way to the shrine (there are no stories from the return journey,
presumably Chaucer had indeed intended to write them but died
before he could), reported to us, the readers, by Chaucer, who claims
that he is repeating them exactly as he heard them. The entire
collection of tales, like Dante’s Divine Comedy, is meant to survey
humanity as a whole. The general prologue to the Tales sets out the
scene, in the form of a dream-vision:
Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes

To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The general prologue echoes Chaucer’s translation of The Romaunt
of the Rose:
That it was May thus dremed me
In time of love and jollite
That al thyng gynneth waxen gay
For there is neither busk nor hay
In May that it nyl shrouded ben,
And it with new leves wryen.
These greves eke recoveren grene,
That dry in wynter ben to sen,
And the erthe waxeth proude withal
For swete dewes that on it falle . . .
Chaucer describes the pilgrims in great detail, and we get a good
picture of the various professions of the period. He uses myths and
legends as part of the tales. Palamon and Arcite in The Knight’s Tale,
for example, is based on Boccaccio's Teseide. Chaucer’s genius is to
vary the style and tone to suit the storyteller. The knight’s style is
lofty and full of references. The Miller’s Tale is witty. The Wife of Bath’s
Tale is in the form of what is called an ‘apologia’ – a justification of
one’s life. The Wife of Bath describes her five husbands, and her
own behaviour (including faking unfaithfulness and knocking one
husband into the fireplace). The often bawdy language and the
bluster suit the woman very well. The Wife of Bath’s Tale is one of the
best sections of the Canterbury Tales. In The Prioress’s Tale, the Prioress,
who seeks to be lady-like, is full of elaborate conventions and dainty
manners in her speech, riding style and her dining habits. There are
some vivid descriptions in the Tales. For example, the elaborate detail
of the marriage feast in The Merchant’s Tale. The sensitivity of
language in Chaucer is also, quite often, related to the issue he is
dealing with. Thus in The Prioress’s Tale he discusses the martyrdom
of an innocent child, who sings because he has been visited by Virgin
Mary. The whole episode is narrated in a particularly touching tone,
to suit the events being described.
Of Chaucer’s works, including The Parliament of Fowls (a genre rooted

in the medieval bestiary) and House of Fame, The Canterbury Tales
has remained the best known. His contribution to the English
language and literature has been enormous and numerous later
writers have acknowledged their debt to him. Chaucer is really the
‘prologue’ to English literature as we know it.
Further Reading
Coss, Peter. The Knight in Medieval England 1000–1400. Stroud, Gloucestershire:

Alan Sutton, 1993.
Greenfield, Stanley B. and Daniel G. Calder. A New Critical History of Old English
Literature. New York: New York University Press, 1986.
Philips, Helen. An Introduction to the Canterbury Tales: Reading, Fiction, Context. New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.
Steinberg, Theodore L. Reading the Middle Ages. Jefferson, North Carolina:

McFarland, 2003.
SECTION ONE
From the Renaissance to
the Restoration
Timeline
Historical and Social Events Literary Events
EARLY TUDOR PERIOD (1485–1550) 1485
Ascension of Henry VII and

founding of Tudor dynasty (1485)
Skelton’s Philip Sparrow (1508)
Ascension of Henry VIII (1509) 1509

Heywood’s Four Ps and John
John (1519)
Tyndale’s New Testament in
English (1526)
Henry VIII is excommunicated by
the Pope (1533)
Act of Supremacy passed (1534)
Coverdale’s Bible (1535)
Dissolution of Monasteries (1539)
Ascension of Edward VI (1547) 1547

Book of Common Prayer
published (1549)
Ascension of Mary I (1553) 1553 Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister
Wyatt’s rebellion (1554) (1553)
Tottel’s Miscellany (1557)

ELIZABETHAN PERIOD (1558–1603) 1558
Ascension of Elizabeth I (1558)

Scottish rebellion (1559)
Gammer Gurton’s Needle;
Gorboduc; Geneva Bible (1560)
London Plague (1563)
James B urbage builds ‘The

Theatre’ (1576) Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577)
Sidney’s Arcadia and Defence of
Poesy (1579)
Hakluyt’s Voyages and Navigations

End of Irish rebellion (1583) (1582)
Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (1586)
The defeat of the Spanish 1588 Marprelate Controversy

Armada
Spenser’s Faerie Queene Books
I–III (1590)
Shakespeare’s Henry VI (1591)
Theatres shut down due to Plague
(1593) Spenser’s Amoretti and
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet
(1595)
Spenser’s Faerie Queene Books
IV–VI and Shakespeare’s The
Merchant of Venice (1596)
Bacon’s Essays (1597)
Jonson’s Every Man in His
Humour (1598)
Globe Theatre opens (1599)
East India Company formed
(1600) Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1601)
JACOBEAN PERIOD (1603–25) 1603
Ascension of James I (1603)

The Gunpowder Plot (1605)
Charter to Virginia Company
(1606)
Authorised Version of the Bible
(1611)
Globe Theatre burned down
(1613)
Thirty Years War begins (1618)

Pilgrim Fathers leave for America
(1620)
Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623)
CAROLINE PERIOD (1625–49) 1625
Ascension of Charles I (1625)
Dissolution of the Parliament

(1629)
Donne’s Poems and Herbert’s
Temple (1633)
Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ (1637)

Long Parliament summoned
(1640)
Closing of theatres (1642)
Parliament imposes
Presbyterianism in England
(1643)
Milton’s Areopagitica (1644)
INTERREGNUM (1649–60) 1649
Charles I executed (1649)

Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode upon
Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’
(1650)
Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651)
Cromwell becomes the Lord
Protector (1653)
Cromwell dies and succeeded by

his son Richard Cromwell (1658)
Restoration of Charles II, Pepys begins his Diary (1660)
Reopening of theatres (1660) 1660
2. Backgrounds
The term ‘Renaissance’ means ‘a new birth’ or ‘rebirth’. The

Renaissance is associated with a variety of areas – architecture,
painting and the visual arts, and, of course, literature. However, the
intellectual and cultural aspects of the 1485–1660 period, commonly
considered the Renaissance period in English literature, has several
social, economic and political contexts that are important to the study
of Shakespeare, Milton, Donne and others.
In 1485, a new dynasty, the Tudors, came to power in England with
Henry VII. The reign of Henry VIII, between 1509 and 1547, had a
significant impact on the religious and social history of England.
Worried that he may not have a son, Henry VIII married six times.
Henry VIII had three children: Edward VI, Mary I and the most
famous monarch of all, Elizabeth I. When the Pope refused him
permission to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Henry
VIII decided that the church could not be allowed such powers over
the monarch of England. He ended the role of the Catholic church
and declared that the King would be the supreme political ruler of
England as well as its spiritual leader. Henry VIII brought the church
of England closer to Protestantism, which began with Martin Luther
in 1517 in Germany. During the reign of his son Edward VI,
Protestantism became the official religion of England.
Reformation in England
Drawing upon the Reformation Movement in Europe, monasteries were
dissolved and traditional religious communities were destroyed. With this,
England moved away from Rome and the Roman Catholic church. This
meant that all the tenets of the Catholic church were rejected. Reformation
also meant that the King of England was all-powerful. Dissent was often
brutally suppressed. As a result, the literature of the time, from early
Tudor to Jacobean, often reflected the elite opinions of the members of
the court.
Backgrounds 19
In an age when religion and politics were very closely linked, such a
change in religious policy also meant a very radical shift in England’s
political relationships with other European nations. England was
isolated from the rest of Europe even as it set about creating an
individual identity for itself, especially under Elizabeth I. This took
the form of elaborate ideas of ‘Englishness’, the creation of a whole
new iconography, mapping, civic rituals and the beginnings of
overseas exploration.1
Other European events during this period altered the shape of the
world for ever. In 1492, Christopher Columbus set out to find a sea
route to the ‘East Indies’ (the then prevalent name for India).
Navigating through what we now know as the Atlantic Ocean, he
reached the shores of what he thought was India, but which actually
was a huge continent. This space was called the ‘New World’.
Columbus had done a great service to the European political powers,
for this new space offered vast riches. The Spaniard Hernando Cortez
discovered an abundance of gold among the Aztecs tribes of what is
now Mexico. Stories of such discoveries led other European explorers
to conquer most of Mexico and Latin America. And it was not just
such valuable minerals/metals – the Europeans also discovered corn,
chocolate and tobacco in these new lands.
Reigning for about 45 years, Elizabeth I gave stability to England.
After the 1588 victory over the Spanish fleet (known in history as
the Spanish Armada), England became the most powerful force on
the seas and her navy began travelling and conquering huge areas
of the globe. With the extensive use of improved magnetic compasses,
the astrolabe and maps, sailors could travel further into the unknown
and eventually made the Renaissance the great age of exploration
and travel.
The Renaissance
The Renaissance began in Italy around the mid-14th century, slowly moving
outward over all of Europe and reaching England around the 16th century.
The Renaissance had its most important effect on painting, sculpture,
architecture and literature, though it derived inspiration from the sciences,
20 From the Renaissance to the Restoration
medicine, philosophy and geography. Some of the central features of the

Renaissance are:
Quest for Knowledge: Reading ancient Greek and Latin texts, scholars of
this period began to think extensively about human nature. In fact, the
definition and features of what it means to be human emerges during this
period. What we now know as ‘humanities’ (arts, languages) originated in
the Renaissance quest for more knowledge about the human mind and
body. Thinkers developed theories in philosophy, psychology and medicine
in order to define the human. It also included a great love for the artistic,
and the arts (music, painting and literature) were seen as the highest
expression of culture and civilization. This search for knowledge was aided
by the invention of printing. Books became cheaper and more people began
to read.
The Rise of Civility: ‘Civility’, ‘courtesy’ and ‘manners’ were key words
in Renaissance culture. All over Europe, people were writing courtesy books,
which told people how to behave (etiquette). Civility was supposed to be
the mark of the cultured man, who begins to be called a ‘gentleman’. The
gentleman was brave, interested in the arts, always courteous and graceful,
knew Latin, and was a brilliant conversationalist. Castiglione’s Courtier
(1528) was a popular book of instructions for such gentlemen. It was
translated into English in 1561 from the original. In England, this ‘gentleman’
was always a man who owned land and was, therefore, inevitably from the
aristocracy.
The New Religion: In Europe, Martin Luther (1483–1546) and later

John Calvin (1509–64) led a Reformation of Christianity. The individual’s
experience of faith and God became more important than the church’s
rituals or priests’ role. However, even this highly individualistic – it gave
more importance to the individual rather than to any institution – system
of faith developed into an institution by the 16th century.
The New World: Christopher Columbus’ discovery of America marked

an important change in European life. More commercial transactions across
the seas began. Travellers sent back reports of the new sights they saw and
the new people they met. Europe’s idea of the world changed drastically
because it came in contact with other cultures and new ways of thinking.
The New Science: In 1543, Copernicus argued that the sun is at the
centre of the universe (as opposed to the Ptolemaic theory which argued
that the earth is at the centre of the universe: a theory endorsed by the
Backgrounds 21
church). This meant that the earth was not the most important unit of the
universe. Discoveries of planets and heavenly bodies by Kepler and Galileo
changed European visions of creation. Astronomical images fill John Donne’s
poetry, for instance. Francis Bacon encouraged experiments in science. Rene
Descartes explored the forms and processes of human thinking. The discovery
of the circulation of blood and more detailed dissections on human body
revealed new truths about human anatomy. The Renaissance slowly rejected
religious and superstitious beliefs in favour of actual scientific experiments
and logical/rational thinking. The origin of the 17th and 18th century
Enlightenment can be traced back to this.
Elizabeth I imposed the Church of England on her subjects, and

modified the religious rules to balance both Catholic and Protestant
ideas. One of her significant contributions was ‘The Thirty-Nine
Articles’ (1562), a set of formulas for practicing religion, which
advocated vernacular worship using the language of the people.
Meanwhile, Protestants who wished to practise their form of religion
in peace felt that England was not a ‘free’ country. Seeking a more
liberal atmosphere, they embarked on a historic journey – to the
New World. These were the Puritans, and voyaging to the ‘New
World’, they set up colonies in Virginia and Pennsylvania, thus
founding the United States of America.
In 1600, a ‘charter’ was granted to a company of merchants wishing
to go on a voyage to foreign lands for trade. Thus was formed the
East India Company and the charter marked the start of what was
to become the greatest empire in modern world history: the British
Empire. London emerged as a centre for commerce, drama and
politics. Its population grew by nearly 400% in the hundred years
between 1500 and 1600. The language spoken on stage (the first
public theatre was built in 1576) and in the city, the writings of
Shakespeare and others, shaped the English language as we know it
today. Slowly, the literature began to define what England was. It
identified the essential features of ‘Englishness’. Shakespeare, the
cornerstone of English literature, lived and wrote during this critical
phase when England was trying to define itself and carve out its
own cultural and national identity.
This period was also the age of the plague. The plague arrived in
Europe in the 1340s, and, by the 1350s, most of Europe had been
affected. London and suburban England were hit especially badly
with nearly half of London’s population wiped out. In 1563, London
experienced another outbreak of plague. It took almost 80,000 lives
– 1000 people died every week in mid-August, 1600 per week in
September and 1800 per week in October. Queen Elizabeth had to
prohibit the import of goods as a measure to prevent the spread of
plague to her court. The famous diarist Samuel Pepys records the
stench of the plague in London lanes in 1665:
This day, much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or
three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and 'Lord
have mercy upon us' writ there; which was a sad sight to me, being
the first of the kind that, to my remembrance, I ever saw. It put me
into an ill conception of myself and my smell, so that I was forced to
buy some roll-tobacco to smell to and chaw, which took away the
apprehension.
James I (1603–25), Elizabeth’s successor, was actually James VI, the

ruler of Scotland and the son of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. James
was invited to ascend the throne of England after Elizabeth’s death.
James I also made his mark as a writer: he wrote pamphlets on
demonology, tobacco and other subjects. As a monarch he united
the kingdoms of England and Scotland when he became King of
England. Politically, James I did not have a stable time. Parliament
challenged royal authority during his rule and claimed the right to
advise the King on foreign affairs and the church. The leaders of the
Church of England and the Puritans objected to the Prayer Book
and the church rituals, and demanded reforms. Many officers and
ministers, one of them being Francis Bacon, were impeached for
corruption. During all this strife, James I also became the first English
monarch to speak of ‘Great Britain’, thereby inaugurating an idea
that was to endure well into the 20th century.
This was also a period of great social mobility. Merchants and lawyers
acquired property. They began to mimic and compete with the upper
classes and thus began to pose a threat to the uniqueness of the ruling
classes. In order to suppress this phenomenon, the nobility began to
suggest that only certain kinds of educated people could form the
Backgrounds 23
ruling class. These kinds of social tensions often defined the literature
of the period, and many writings capture the debates around
aristocratic ‘privilege’, notions of ‘commonness’ and social hierarchy.
Sir Thomas Elyot in his The Book Named the Governor (1531) argued
that wealth was not enough to make a man a ruler or statesman.
The merchant may be rich, but he did not have the necessary
education, attitudes or manners to be a ruler. Classical education
(by which Elyot meant Latin and Greek), and liberal training (a
training in the arts and philosophy) was essential to the growth of a
true ‘gentleman’.2 The context for this argument in favour of classical
education was the European Renaissance. The European Renaissance
which opened up new forms of knowledge in the sciences and
philosophy came into England through translations of works from
Italian and other European languages.
Two great intellects stand out from this period of turbulent
Christianity, figures whose influence on European thinking has been
profound. The Dutch scholar Erasmus rejected Catholic monasticism
and condemned the corruption of the Catholic church. He argued
that the only hope was a return to the values and habits of the early
Christian church. The second outstanding figure is Martin Luther.
Luther also condemned the corruption of the Catholic church and
refused to accept the Pope’s authority. His 95 Theses Against the Sale
of Papal Indulgences (1517) eventually resulted in the Reformation
(and Luther’s excommunication in 1521). John Calvin extended
Luther’s work and functioned as a great proponent of Protestantism.
Protestantism returned to the Bible as the word of God and preached
a very rigid moral code – simplicity of dress, unchallenged patriarchy,
strict punishments for adultery (women to be drowned, men
beheaded) and censorship of the stage, among others. Protestantism
eventually became a crucial political movement in England with the
Puritan Commonwealth under Cromwell.
With the reduction in the power of religion, ‘Reason’ or ‘Rationality’

became the crucial driving force in the Renaissance’s efforts to find
explanations for human behaviour, physiology and appearance.
Scepticism was an acceptable, even fashionable, approach during
the time. Investigating causes and effects was a mark of class.
Science began to emerge from religion’s shadow, and soon occupied
centre-stage in terms of intellectual enquiry and culture. Dissections,

the discovery of the circulation of blood, the invention of the
microscope, the laboratories of Robert Boyle and others established
science as the dominant component of intellectual culture. Discoveries
in astronomy, medicine, physics and the other sciences enabled
scientists to attain enormous social power – a power that has
remained with the sciences to this day.
In terms of the social contexts to Renaissance literature, therefore,

two things are crucial: (1) the ruling aristocracy of Protestant faith
seeking absolute power over state and religion, and (2) the emphasis
on classical education. Education and learning were the marks of
the ruling class. The arrival of printing in England with William
Caxton (1422–91) transformed this context considerably. The printing
press changed the ways in which ideas circulated in English society.
Literacy was beginning to grow, though with a difference in literacy
between men and women. Book reading had already been increasing
among the educated European middle classes after Gutenberg
invented the printing press in 1445. It now began to affect the English
middle classes too.
Printing and the Renaissance

During the Middle Ages, few people owned or read ‘books’. Learning was
restricted to the clergy, and books were written in Latin, considered the only
language of wisdom and scholarship. Book-making before Gutenberg was a
laborious process. It entailed copying all the words and illustrations by
hand. Parchment or animal skin would be used for the purpose. Because of
the procedure involved, books were very expensive. In 1445, Gutenberg’s
printing methods made book-making easier, faster and much less expensive.
Almanacs, travel books, chivalry romances and poetry were already in print
during the Middle Ages and their production increased during the
Renaissance. Books played a central role in the rise and spread of humanistic
thought during the Renaissance, especially with the reprinting of Greek and
Latin texts on politics, philosophy and ethics and rhetoric. Printing thus
helped disperse a wide variety of ideas and was a crucial factor in the
‘evolution’ of the Renaissance.
Backgrounds 25
For the upper classes to retain their authority, literature and the arts
needed to convey particular ideas and images about England and
its rulers in the language of the common man. There was no point in
talking about the absolute power of the English monarch in Latin to
an audience which would not have understood it. The people had
to understand and then ‘accept’ the rule of the king. Therefore,
playwrights (since plays were the most common form of
entertainment) had to adapt their ideas and convey them in the
language of the audience. In terms of social entertainment, ‘popular’
speech forms and language, and not Latin, were required to appeal
to the masses. Elizabethan drama, therefore, uses everyday speech,
sensational dialogues (dramatic, melodramatic and excessive) and
community events (recall here Ben Jonson’s carnivals in Bartholomew
Fair). These appealed and made sense to people. Ideas about
monarchy, religion and absolute Kingship began to be conveyed
through common speech and images.
Condemning Homosexuality in Early Modern England

Friendship between men was deemed dangerous in the early modern
England. Alan Bray (1982) has demonstrated how same-sex relations
between men were commonplace in 16th and 17th century families and
educational institutions. However, sodomy was considered a breakdown of
sexual and social order. Homosexuality was viewed not as deviance but as
a sin. On the continuum of male sexuality, homosexuality was seen as
unrestrained lust and was equated with effeminate loss of control over
appetite and an indulgence in excessive and destructive lechery. Young
men, especially, were under tremendous pressure to prove they were
heterosexually active. In fact, heterosexual sex was one of the three signs of
‘manhood’, alongwith drinking and fighting. However, fraternal bonding
was considered a ‘safe’ form of male intimacy. Interestingly, young men’s
disorderly assertions of masculinity were considered less threatening to the
patriarchal order than women’s transgressions.
In 1642, the Parliament decided that plays were dangerous because

they corrupted the common man. This resulted in the closure of all
public playhouses. The Act of 1642 stated:
Whereas ... the distracted estate of England, threatened with a cloud

of blood by a civil war call[s] for all possible means to appease and
avert the wrath of God … it is therefore thought fit and ordained by
the Lords and Commons in this Parliament assembled that, while
these said causes and set times of humiliation do continue, public
stage-plays shall cease and be forborne.
This is a crucial moment in England’s cultural and social history
and is a context in which we read the comedies of the Jonson school
(which were staged just before the ban) and the later drama.
Liberal education and an interest in ‘humanism’ marked the

Renaissance in Europe, and had its effect on English literature of
the 16th century. Several other ideas were influential in this period
(see the box Renaissance). A thinker such as Francis Bacon –
undoubtedly one of the most influential thinkers of the 16th century
– and a scientist such as Isaac Newton called for new ways of
thinking. Political turmoil and religious conflicts which were
common to the age made people uncertain about what ideas to
follow and turn to ancient Greece and Rome (called ‘antiquity’) for
ideas.
The 16 th and early 17 th century marked the origins of several
approaches and interpretations of the human mind and body. In
fact, the term ‘humanism’ should be used to include all aspects of
the study of the human: medicine (surgical dissection was a
Renaissance discovery), philosophy and psychology. A particularly
influential idea of the time was that of the ‘great chain of being’.
This suggested that creation consists of many ‘degrees’ of existence,
each linked to the other in a certain order. There was a ‘natural’
sequence and unity to all forms of life. God ordained one’s ‘place’ in
society. The state was headed by a monarch, assisted by aristocrats,
and served by the people. In families, the man was the head of the
household, to be assisted by his wife, and in control over the children
and servants. This order, or hierarchy, was not to be disturbed because
it was given by God. That is, it was a natural law that husbands
controlled their wives, and kings ruled over the people. One needs
to preserve this ‘natural’ order, obey it and use it as the basis of
social relationships and knowledge. Bishop Richard Hooker’s Laws
of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593–97) stated: ‘the obedience of creatures
Backgrounds 27
unto the law of nature is the stay of the whole world’. The Church
Homily of 1571 warned the people: “Such subjects as are disobedient
or rebellious against their princes, disobey God and procure their
own damnation.” In order to preserve this natural order, one needed
to follow certain rules of behaviour. Many of these concerns may be
found in the literature of the period.
Gender in Elizabethan England

Elizabethan England was a completely patriarchal society, where the
husband or father was at the top of the hierarchy, and everybody else at
various positions, an order supposedly ordained by nature and Providence.
Women were instructed that everything rested in their practice of chastity.
Virgins and wives were to maintain silence in the public sphere. Interestingly,
widows had some scope for making their own decisions and managing
their affairs.
Gender roles were defined in texts such as The Book of Common Prayer
(1559) and The Law's Resolutions of Women's Rights (1632). Gervase
Markham's book, The English Hus-Wife (1615), outlines the woman's
responsibility: understanding and administering medicines to her family,
perfect skill in cookery, etc. John Dod’s Exposition of the Ten Commandments
(1604), asserts that the woman's duty is to nurse her children. Dorothy
Leigh's advice book The Mother's Blessing (1616) underlined the need to
bring up children with gentleness and advises her sons to make their wives
companions. During the Civil War period, some women voiced opinions
publicly. Leveller women submitted a petition to Parliament in 1649 in
which they sought political rights. Margaret Fell published a rationale in
1664 for allowing women to testify and preach in church.
Renaissance England also saw an increase in the number of women writers.

Over 100 works were composed or translated by Englishwomen between
1500 and 1640. These included prose narratives, poetry, prayers, essays,
confessions, diaries, letters and prefaces. Titled and middle-class women
wrote on subjects ranging from religion to motherhood to social
commentary. Most of the published works by English women in the
Renaissance were religious. However, there were also interesting variations
to the theme. Anne Askew (1521–46), who was examined for heresy in
1545 – she was eventually incarcerated in the London Tower – produced
two fascinating documents that provide some of the most significant
commentaries on the gendered nature of the social, religious and political
contexts of Elizabethan England: The First Examinacion of the Worthy

Seruaunt of God Maistres Anne Askewe (1546) and The Lattre Examinacion
of the Worthye Seruaunt of God Maistres Anne Askewe (1547) are part
diary, part spiritual autobiography and part social criticism. Elizabeth Cary,
Jane Lumley, Anne Finch, Amelia Lanyer and Margaret Cavendish were
some of the more important women dramatists.
Notes
1. Identities are not ‘natural’ – they are constructed through certain

processes. In the case of nations, identities are constructed through the
mass circulation of certain ‘national’ myths, symbols and legends.
Histories are written and stories of an ancient past and a ‘great’ culture
told. The construction of national identities relies heavily on commonly
accepted images and cultural artefacts, the appeal to a common history
and a sense of belonging. The people must be convinced that they all
belong to the same nation. The rise of print in early modern Europe
enabled this process because histories, stories and legends circulated in
the public domain as never before. People could imagine, through a
consumption of such images and stories, that they were part of a
community. For a study of this process see Benedict Anderson’s
Imagined Communities (1983). For a study of the Elizabethan
‘construction’ of English identity, see Richard Helgerson’s Forms of
Nationhood (1992) and Jeffrey Knapp’s Shakespeare’s Tribe (2002).
2. The Renaissance marks the period when the concept of the gentleman
begins to appear in Europe. Numerous writings sought to define and
identify the characteristics of a gentleman and a lady. The Elizabethan
age was excessively concerned with appearances, behavior, civic
consciousness and duties (of the upper classes). See Stephen Greenblatt’s
Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980).
3. Literature of the Renaissance
The period between 1485 and 1660 – from the end of the War of the
Roses to the Restoration of the monarchy – may be termed the English
Renaissance. Though the European Renaissance dates from a much
earlier period (roughly the late 14th to the 16th centuries), its full effect
on England becomes visible only in the 16th century, reaching a peak
with the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. John Milton (1608–1674)
is often described as the last Renaissance poet of England.
The English language grew during the 16th century. While Latin and
Greek words had always influenced words in English (especially in
terms of etymology), the French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian
languages had contributed to it too. But, with the geographical
expansion of the world, words from the languages of Africa, Asia
and North America also entered the lexicon (language historians
have suggested that 12,000 new words entered the English language
between 1500 and 1650). The period also invented new ways of using
words. Prefixes such as ‘nonsense’, ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘disrobe’,
suffixes such as ‘laughable’ and ‘immaturity’, and compound words
such as ‘Frenchwoman’ and ‘heaven-sent’ began to appear during
this period. Shakespeare’s contribution to this re-invention and
expansion of the English language was, as can be imagined (and as
Frank Kermode has demonstrated in his Shakespeare’s Language,
2000), spectacular.1
Early Tudor Period (1485–1550)
The most important writings of the early Tudor period were prose
histories (commonly called Chronicles), biographies, religious and
polemical (i.e., argumentative) tracts, and poetry. Ralph Holinshed
was given the charge of preparing the histories of England, Scotland
and Ireland. The result, published in 1577, is now commonly known
as Holinshed’s Chronicles. It became a rich resource for writers like

Shakespeare to fashion their tales around the history of the nation.
PROSE
Non-fiction
William Caxton, the man who brought printing to England,
published his first book, The Dicts or Sayings of the Philosophers, in
1477. Caxton is a significant figure in the English Renaissance because
he was one of the first to acquire and print ancient and medieval
texts. He reprinted Boethius in 1478 and The Golden Legend in 1483.
He also printed the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower and
Robert Fabyan’s The Concordance of Histories (1516). Numerous
histories and legends of England were published, which helped
instil a sense of ‘Englishness’ among the readers by tracing their
lineage and cultural inheritance. Biographies of kings, like Cardinal
Morton’s account of the life of Richard III, were also published for
this same reason.
Tudor Protest Writing

The prose of protest during the early Tudor period was essentially in the
form of ‘supplications’. Simon Fish’s Supplication for the Beggars (1529)
was a severe criticism of the corruption and greed among the clergy. A
collection of supplications is to be found in Furnivall and Cowper’s Four
Supplications 1529–1553 (1871). Henry Brinkelow, a protestant exile,
published The Complaint Book of Roderick Mors (1542) castigating
Parliament for its inaction regarding social abuses and The Lamentation
of a Christian against the City of London (1542) attacking the London
public for being irreligious.
Polydore Vergil did a history of England. Local histories such as

Edward Hall’s Union of the Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and
York (1542) were a popular genre. Most of these local histories
conveyed images about the power – economic, political, cultural and
territorial – of ruling families in England while also showing how
these families were virtuous and learned.
Literature of the Renaissance 31
One of the most important prose writers of the Tudor period was
Thomas Elyot (1490–1548), the ancestor of the famous 20th century
poet, TS Eliot. Elyot’s The Book Named the Governor (1531) was meant
to show how rulers and governors were to be trained in their
vocation. One of the first authors to write almost entirely in English,
Elyot sought to define the purpose of education itself. He suggested
that poetry and dance should not be omitted from education, though
they must certainly be less emphasized than history or politics. The
gentleman must be learned in classical literature, and develop a
sensitivity to poetry and music. Elyot attacked gentlemen who spent
more time on food and hunting rather than in educating themselves.
He defines a gentleman thus:
[One who] speaking Latin elegantly, can expound good authors,
expressing the invention and disposition of the matter, their style
or form of eloquence, explicating the figures as well as of sentences
as words, leaving no thing, person, or place named by the author
undeclared or hidden from his scholars.
Elyot’s work was also a courtesy book, instructing young men on
manners and etiquette. Elyot’s comments on dancing are fascinating:
In every dance of a most ancient custom there danceth together a
man and a woman holding each other by the hand or the arm;
which betokeneth concord. Now it behoveth the dancers and also
the beholders of them to know all qualities incident to a man and
also all qualities to a woman appertaining … These qualities …
being knit together, and signified in the personages of then man
and women dancing, do express or set out the figure of very
nobility …
Elyot returned to the philosophy of Plato and prepared one of the
most significant Latin-English dictionaries (1538). He believed that
nature is ‘hierarchic’, where everything has its place (‘The Great
Chain of Being’). In the order of nature, some are higher and some,
lower. The monarch must be at the top of the order, aided by good
assistants, for a society to function efficiently. The themes of The
Book Named the Governor are extended (and repeated) in The Image
of Governance (1541). A different kind of work by Elyot is The Castle
of Health (1539), an explanation of the humoral theory of disease
with detailed instructions on diet, personal hygiene and medical
practices. It was so popular that, by 1610, there were at least 15

editions of the work.
Roger Ascham (1515–68) wrote prolifically on various subjects (he
even wrote a tract, Toxophilus, on the use of the long bow). Secretary
to the ambassador to the court of the German King Charles V,
Ascham wrote an analysis of Germany in Report of the Affairs and
State of Germany. In 1579, he published his best known work, The
Schoolmaster. A tract on education, this work is a classic of
Renaissance prose. Ascham argued that teachers should look at future
potential rather than the present interests of the students. He writes:
“Those which be commonly the wisest, the best learned, and best
men also when they be old, were never commonly the quickest of
wit when they were young.”
In uncertain times – times of political and social instability and change

– nations tend to turn to their past for comfort. The past seems to be
not only stable, but also unchanging. During the 1550–1650 period,
English society was going through massive changes in every realm.
In search of something enduring, the scholars turned to ancient
Britain. One result of this obsession with the past was the rise of the
‘discipline’ of antiquarianism. Antiquarianism was the quest for relics
(manuscripts, artefacts and objects) from ancient times. One of the
more famous antiquarians was John Stow (1525–1605), the author
of Survey of London (1598). John Leland’s collection of antiquaries –
mainly documents – from England and Wales was published in
several volumes (1536–42) and are now part of the great collections
at the British Museum (London) and the Bodleian Library (Oxford
University).
The Bible plays a central role in the literature of the age. William
Tyndale (1494–1536) translated the Greek New Testament into
English, arguing that people should be able to read the Bible in their
own language, and two editions were smuggled into England in
1526 (the Bishop of London had banned the work). Tyndale was
hunted, and fled to the Netherlands and later to Germany, but
continued his work. He translated parts of the Old Testament before
he was caught in 1535 and executed near Brussels in 1536. Tyndale
did much for the expansion of English language through his use of
colloquialisms. Phrases such as ‘the signs of the times’, ‘powers that

be’, ‘eat, drink and be merry’ have been traced to Tyndale.
The Oxford Reformers

The late 15th century thinkers, William Grocyn, Thomas Linacre, John Colet
and William Lyly have been called the Oxford Reformers. They were
administrators, schoolmasters and philosophers who were interested in
classical (meaning ancient Greek and Latin) learning and theology. Linacre
translated the writings of the Greek physician Galen and thereby started a
whole ‘Galenic’ tradition in English medical science, a tradition that extended
into the 18th century. Lyly was the first headmaster of St. Paul’s School, from
where John Milton received his education. Henry VIII decreed that Lyly’s
book of Latin grammar should be used in schools. Colet was the Dean of St.
Paul’s Church in London. The Oxford Reformers influenced several
generations of scholars, grammarians, mathematicians and educationists
and thus played an important role in the English Renaissance.
Miles Coverdale published the first complete English Bible, having

incorporated Tyndale’s revised version of the New Testament and
other works, in 1535, and is now known as the Coverdale Bible.
John Rogers published another edition of the Coverdale-Tyndale
translation in 1537. The 1540 edition carried a preface by Archbishop
Cranmer.
Thomas Cranmer (1498–1556) is famous for having supported the
divorce of Henry VIII from Catherine of Aragon. Appointed as the
Archbishop of Canterbury in 1533, he was instrumental in producing
the first prayer book of Edward VI (in 1549), revising it in 1552. He
also produced the 42 articles of religion, and edited Book of Homilies
in 1547. The Book of Common Prayer was produced by Thomas
Cranmer in 1549 and 1552 to enable the widespread knowledge of
the ‘word of God’. The idea was that worshippers should be able to
chant the psalms. Cranmer’s name is thus associated almost always
with English liturgy. However, it was not exactly a popular move,
because the English nation was furious with him for substituting the
Latin version of the liturgy with the English one. English prose,
especially in Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer and other texts
continued to use classical material, but combined it with the idiom
of 15 th and 16 th century England. Cranmer maintained that the

monarch was the supreme head of the Church of England. During
Queen Mary’s reign he was condemned for heresy and eventually
burnt at the stake.2
There were many reprints and editions of the Bible during the 1530s.
The Geneva Bible, one of the most famous, was prepared by Protestant
exiles during the reign of Queen Mary. King James appointed fifty-
four scholars to look into the production of a definitive version of
the Bible. The result is the Bible of 1611, now known as the
‘Authorized Version’ or the King James Version. The Authorized
Version of the Bible marked Protestant England’s final break with
Rome, and started the decline of Latin. It is important to note that
the Bible – people who went to church heard the Bible – contributed
to spoken and written English in a massive way.
Fiction
Thomas Malory (?–1471) recreated the Arthurian legends in prose
form in his Le Morte D’Arthur (published in 1485 by William Caxton).
It has the unique reputation of being the first imaginative work to
achieve widespread public distribution – a phenomenon entirely
traceable to the cheaper printing that Caxton made possible.
The best known prose writer from this period is Sir Thomas More
(1478–1535). The first English translation of his major work, Utopia,
appeared in 1551 (it was originally written in Latin). Set in an
imaginary island in the New World, Utopia gave the English-speaking
world a term for the creation of such imaginary, fantastical spaces
where everything is perfect.3 Even today we refer to people’s dreams
and ambitions as ‘utopian’. Book I, set in a period about twelve years
before Henry VIII’s rule, is about the old world and its many faults:
unjust rulers, war, poverty, cruel laws and greed. More attacks
England’s unjust practices such as enclosing of common lands
(whereby common lands, open to all villagers, were fenced in)
and the extremely high punitive measures (for instance, death
penalty for stealing). Book II provides, as a contrast to the old world,
a new world where there is no private wealth, unemployment or
poverty. There is no exploitation of the poor. Houses are reallocated
every ten years. Marriage is actively encouraged but not extramarital

relations. Divorce and remarriage are also allowed. There is complete
religious freedom and a great love for knowledge. Perhaps the most
attractive feature about this island is that the working day is only 6
hours long! More’s vision is radical because he was writing at a time
when such things were unthinkable. For example, he suggests that
in Utopia women can become priests (this is not possible even in the
21st century in many countries, so one can understand how radical
More was). He approves of euthanasia (mercy killing, for people
with severe, painful illness) – an issue being debated furiously even
today. Finally, he approves of divorce and remarriage. What is
important is that More is not seeking to present a fantasy of the
perfect world, but rather to show how humans ‘can’ build such a
world. It is what is called a ‘visionary’ work, for More is describing a
vision for the future of mankind. This is what makes More a good
example of Renaissance humanism.
POETRY
Features of Renaissance Poetry (The Silver Poets)
• Idealization of women
• Classical allusions and European Renaissance references
• Individualist, but with some contemporary themes
• Upper–class, elite and aristocratic in tone and style
• Very formal and courtly, in keeping with their practitioners and audience
• Love and loss are the central themes
• The focus is almost entirely on the emotional state of the speaker in the
poem
• In the love lyric, the melancholic lover pleads for his mistress’ attention
and the poem takes the form of a complaint about his lady’s indifference or
cruelty
• The lady is often portrayed as fickle and this fickleness is the cause of the
gentleman’s pain
• Constant merging of the poet and lover and the invocation of a close
link between the poet’s mood and the seasons
• Many of the poems refer to the act of writing poetry itself and suggest a
close link between love and poetry.
Some distinctive poetic forms, traditions and voices emerged during

this period. Many of the poems of this period use what is called the
‘dream allegory’. The poet dozes off and has a dream that reveals
certain truths about life.
Perhaps the most famous of the early poets (excluding Chaucer) is

William Dunbar (1460–1520). Using Chaucer’s structure (the nine-
line stanza), Dunbar published his The Golden Barge in 1503. The
poem is a dream about a ship full of beautiful women and the court
of King Cupid (the God of love in Roman mythology). Among his
later works are The Thistle and the Rose (written for the wedding of
Henry VII’s daughter, Margaret to James IV of Scotland) and The
Two Married Women and the Widow. Sir David Lyndsay (1490?–1555)
is better known as the author of the first ‘dog poem’ in English
literature – Ane Publict Confessioun of the Kingis auld Hound callit
Bagsche. His The Dreme of Schir D. Lyndesay is a dream allegory about
the abuse of power by kings, rulers and popes and the suffering of
the common man (in the poem, this character is called John Commoun
Weill, a reference to the ‘commonwealth’). Lyndsay’s The Testament
and Complaynt of our Soverane Lordis Papyngo is a ‘bird poem’, where
James V’s injured parrot sends a message to the king asking him to
be just and kind. Lyndsay’s longest poem is Dialog betuix Experience
and ane Courteour Off the Miserabyll Estait of the Warld (1553).
Purporting to be a history of the world, this poem also reflects on the
conditions of Lyndsay’s age – war and the church, moral corruption
and ungodly clerics. William Camden (1551–1623) was interested
in antiquaries and wrote a long poem, Britannia (1586), cast in the
mode of a detailed survey of England’s history, politics and its
landscape.
After Dunbar and before the great Elizabethan lyricists, we have

two well-known poets: Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, the Earl
of Surrey (who are together known as the ‘Silver Poets’). Wyatt (1503–
42) wrote some exceptionally famous love poetry, all centred on the
figure of the abandoned lover yearning for his beloved. The pain of
being in love was almost always the central concern in the melancholic
poems of Wyatt:
Lament my loss, my labour, and my pain,
All ye that hear my woeful plaint and cry;
If ever man might once your heart constrain
To pity words of right, it should be I.
The lover pleads with the beloved not to go away in many poems:
And wilt thou leave me thus?
Say nay, say nay, for shame!
Say nay, say nay!
Disdain me not without desert,
Nor leave me not so suddenly
Disdain me not!
Strongly individualist, the poetry of Wyatt became the first really
‘English’ verse. The individualism may also have had something to
do with the fact that only members of the upper classes, who could
spare the time, wrote poetry, and the ability to write poetry became
a marker of class. The courtly, formal and highly stylized form
imported from the European continent was a feature of the poetry
of the period.
Wyatt was versatile and tried his hand at a number of forms: lute
songs, satires, epigrams, sonnets and a version of the seven Penitential
Psalms. The sonnet form he used was adapted from the Latin poet
Petrarch, and came to be known as the ‘Petrarchan sonnet’. He also
translated some Petrarchan poems. He set a tradition for writers of
love poetry down the ages. However, there have been constant
debates about whether he really wrote all the poems attributed to
him.
Wyatt’s contemporary and the other famous poet of the age was
Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey (1517?–47). Like Wyatt, Surrey
(as he is popularly known) used the sonnet form extensively. And,
like Wyatt, he used Italian poetic styles and popularized a form of
the sonnet that was eventually used by Shakespeare. He used blank
verse (see the box Blank Verse) in his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid
(1540?). The mood is invariably solemn, the style meditative and
almost always concerned with the mental states of the speaker of

the poem, and the central theme is the anguish of the lover:
Alas, so all things now do hold their peace,
Heaven and earth disturbed in nothing;
The beasts, the air, the birds their song do cease;
The night’s chair the stars about doth bring.
Calm is the sea, the waves work less and less;
So am not I, whom love alas doth wring,
Bringing before my face the great increase
Of my desires, whereat I weep and sing
In joy and woe, as in a doubtful ease.
Such poetry invariably had the figure of the ideal woman (inspired
by Petrarch, who wrote poetry to his ideal woman, Laura).
Blank Verse
This poetic style consists of five-stress iambic verses which are unrhymed
(the ‘blank’ refers to the absence of rhyme). It is similar to everyday speech.
Blank verse was introduced by Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey and was
popular during the Elizabethan age. John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667)
uses blank verse. Many long poems – both descriptive and narrative poems
(which seek to tell a story) – such as James Thomson’s The Seasons (1726–
30), Wordsworth’s Prelude (1805), Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1891)
and TS Eliot’s The Wasteland (1922) used blank verse.
Tottel’s Miscellany (1557), compiled by Richard Tottel, was one of

the most important collections of poetry published in this period. It
had nine editions in thirty years, and had ninety poems by Wyatt
and forty by Surrey.
Poet Laureate at both Oxford and Cambridge and tutor to the future
Henry VIII, John Skelton (1460?–1529) was a brilliant practitioner
of the satire form. His A ryght delectable traytise upon a goodly Garlande,
or Chapelet of Laurell (Right Delectable Treatise upon a Goodly Garland
or Chaplet of Laurel) is a dream allegory, where Skelton’s own poetic
production becomes the subject of debate between Pallas, Athene
and the Queen of Fame, which sees him crowned among the great
poets of the world. In The Bowge of the Courte (meaning ‘court rations’)
– also a dream allegory – the young man, Dread, believes he is

surrounded by ruffians and villains in the court (the reference is to
the court of Henry VII). Philip Sparrow is a lamentation by a young
lady, Jane Scroupe, whose sparrow has been killed by a cat. One of
his more famous works is The Tunnynge of Elynoure Rummyng, the
tale of a woman who brews ale for travellers. Inspired by Chaucer’s
The Wife of Bath’s Tale, the poem is full of naughty humour and is a
good study of contemporary common life. Skelton developed his own
form of verse, with a unique rhyme scheme, now known as ‘Skeltonic
verse’. Here is an example of Skelton’s style:
Droopy and drowsy
Scurvy and lousy
Her face all bowsy [swollen]
Comely crinkled,
Wondrously wrinkled,
Like a roast pig’s ear,
Bristled with hair.
Skelton used colloquial English speech patterns extensively, despite
being a very eminent Latin scholar. He justified the use of everyday
English speech and rejected the use of heavy classical language in a
passage in Philip Sparrow:
Our natural tongue is rude,
And hard to be ennewed
With polished terms lusty:
Our language is so rusty,
So cankered and so full
Of frowards and so dull,
That if I were to apply
To write ordinately [ordinary]
I wot not where to find
Terms to serve my mind.
Skelton is saying here that one cannot express one’s thoughts in
classical Latin and that the Englishman wants everyday language
rather than heavy classical material.
The other satirist of note from this period is John Heywood. Heywood
belonged to a distinguished literary family: his wife was the niece of
Thomas More and John Donne was his grandson. Heywood was a
professional entertainer to three courts: Henry VIII, Edward VI and

Queen Mary. His poems were often criticisms of idlers and slanderers.
The Spider and the Fly (1556), a very long poem about the imprisonment
of a fly in a spider web and concluding with a battle between armies
of flies and spiders, is intended as a comment on his times. The flies
represent the people of England and the spider Archbishop Cranmer.
Heywood also wrote epigrams (see the box Epigrams). Derived from
the proverbs of the day, they proved to be popular.
Epigrams
An epigram is a very short poem, focused in its subject matter and tightly
structured. It usually ends with a ‘turn’ at the end. The Roman poet Martial
was the originator of this form. In the 16th and 17th centuries, epigrams
were used as casual verse (called ‘light verse’) by Donne, Jonson (who
published a volume called The Epigrams in 1616) and Herrick. Epigrams
were witty statements, which also served to highlight a folly in mankind.
Here is an epigram from Coleridge:
Swans sing before they die – ‘twere no bad thing

Should certain people die before they sing!
In the 18th century, the great age of satire, it found practitioners such as
Matthew Prior and Alexander Pope. Later poets such as Walter Savage
Landor, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound and Ogden Nash used this form.
DRAMA
Mystery plays were popular play cycles of the 15th century. These
plays had been popular because the common folk found them
appealing. They were traditionally performed between May and
June, during the Corpus Christi festival. Religious in theme, these
plays often dealt with the Christian version of the history of the
world. Christ’s life was also a common theme. Fairs and celebrations
were often the setting for such plays, which were staged outside the
city. Four manuscripts of the cycles survive. They belong to York,
Chester, Wakefield and one unknown place. They date back to the
last decades of the 14th century.
The 16th century saw a new form of drama, called the interlude
(derived from the Latin, ‘inter-ludum’, meaning ‘between plays’),
whose origins have been traced back to the Tudor period. It generally
took place in the banquet hall before or during a meal in a nobleman’s
house. This is an important shift in the tradition of theatre (earlier
plays received their public performance on fixed festival days). The
interlude, especially in John Heywood, used morality themes, but
was broader in scope. It often included farces with no moral lesson.
The interlude often had comic subplots and parodies of the main
theme (for instance, shifting the main theme of chivalry into the lower
classes and the servants’ quarters). Shakespeare's A Midsummer
Night's Dream provides an example with villagers performing
Pyramus and Thisbe, an interlude. This developed into a play with
debates over various issues because the noblemen’s houses often had
such debates wherein women and men both participated.
John Heywood (1497–1580) was the most popular author in this
genre. He produced interludes with a distinctive moral tone. The
Four PPs (early 1540s), a debate between a pedlar, apothecary,
palmer and pardoner set the tone for the realist comedy that
flourished later in the 16th century. Many works, such as The Pardoner
and the Frere and John Johan the Husband, Tyb his Wife and Syr John
the Priest, have been attributed to Heywood.
Henry Medwall, a chaplain in the house of John Morton, wrote Nature
(discovered only in 1919), an interlude staged in 1497. It also has the
distinction of being the first secular play in English. John Skelton’s
Magnificence (1515) was a satire attacking Cardinal Wolsey. King
John (1538) and Three Laws (1538, reprinted in 1562) by John Bale
(1495–1563) were notoriously satirical interludes and dealt with issues
that were controversial. In Three Laws, for instance, Sodomy was
dressed as a monk, Ambition as a bishop and Hypocrisy as a
Greyfriar.
The Elizabethan Period (1558–1603)
The Elizabethan period was noted for several translations of the

classics – from Homer to Plutarch to Montaigne. Thus, foreign
languages entered England in a big way. In the age of a revitalized
nationalism, attempts were made to correct the so-called ‘barbarism’
of the English language. Educational tracts and works on rhetoric,
language and logic were common. This is also the age when English
literary criticism and 'defences' of poetry begin to flourish.
PROSE
The prose of the Elizabethan age includes a variety of forms:
translations, polemical, religious and educational tracts, satires,
literary debates, criticism, grammar, logic and rhetoric, and others.
Recent studies have uncovered many news pamphlets, which
constitute an important moment in the rise of English journalism
(see Voss 2001).
Non-fiction
Features of Elizabethan Non-fiction
• Used the pamphlet form
• Polemical and political in theme
• Instructional pamphlets and courtesy books on etiquette and morals were

a common form.
• Also discussed social issues such as the suitability of the forms of

entertainment and morality on the stage
• Several of the pamphlets were satiric in tone
• Religious writing, works of criticism and rhetoric appeared in large numbers.
Works in rhetoric and criticism flourished during the Elizabethan

age. Thomas Wilson (1525?–81) wrote Rule of Reason, a manual of
logic, and Art of Rhetoric in which he warned against faults in
language. These were followed and imitated by Leonard Cox (The

Art or Craft of Rhetoric, 1524, 1525), Richard Sherry (A Treatise of the
Figures of Grammar and Rhetoric, 1555) and Richard Mulcaster (The
First Part of the Elementary, which Entreateth Chiefly of the Right Writing
of our English Tongue, 1582). Poets and critics fiercely debated the
proper style and theme for English poetry. Richard Carew in his The
Excellency of the English Tongue (1595) argued that the English
language, with its borrowings from classical languages and the very
local adaptations for English purposes, had become very rich and
fertile: “The long words that we borrow, being intermingled with
the short of our own store, make up a perfect harmony… .”
The famous Edmund Spenser–Gabriel Harvey debate was one of
the early arguments over what constitutes English poetry.
Instructions and advice for authors, criticism and programmes were
available in the form of George Gascoigne’s brief Certain Notes of
Instruction concerning the Making of Verse or Rime in English (1575),
William Webbe’s Discourse of English Poetry (1586) and Thomas
Campion's Observations in the Art of English Poesy (1602). Perhaps
the most famous, and enduring, tract on the subject was George
Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy (1589). Scientific and organized in
his study of prosody, Puttenham (who was a nephew of Thomas
Elyot) studied patterns of spoken English while also making observant
cultural criticism (he has a chapter on decent behaviour). The three
books of this work – ‘Of Poets and Poesie’, ‘Of Proportion’ and ‘Of
Ornament’ – also constitute a sustained attempt to define what good
literary taste is. The third book analysed various figures of speech
and is a magnificent study of literary terms. Philip Sidney’s Defense
of Poesy (1595; another edition of the book was titled An Apology for
Poetry) sought to assert the supremacy of imagination and poetry
and is one of the first major works of literary criticism in English.
Sidney argued that the poet is a greater influence than the
philosopher or historian because he ‘creates’. The poet is not
interested in analysing nature, but in transcending it. Sidney writes
in an often-quoted phrase: “Nature never set forth the earth in so
rich tapestry as diverse poets have done … Her world is brazen, the
poets only deliver a golden.” In a very significant move for the
development of an ‘English’ literature, Sidney asserts that major
poetry in any genre can be written in the English language.
Such debates about ‘English’ poetry, language and literary taste are
linked to the careful descriptive accounts of the English countryside,
English traditions, the mapping of England, the narratives about
English people, plants and animals (the histories and natural
histories) – all of which contributed to the construction of an ‘English’
identity. That is, the writings of this period defined and described
English landscape, culture and behaviour.
A significant genre of the Elizabethan age was religious prose

writings. A figure of crucial importance here is Hugh Latimer (1485?–
1555). Using a mixture of homely anecdotes, events from everyday
life, nicknames and fervent passion, Latimer’s sermons were part
satire and part homily. Here is an example of his plain, conversational
style, even when dealing with a serious subject matter:
Who is the most diligent bishop and prelate in all England, that
passeth all the rest in doing his office? I can tell, for I know him,
who it is; I know him well. But now I think I see you listing and
harkening that I should name him. There is one that passeth all the
other, and is the most diligent prelate and preacher in all England.
And will ye know who it is? I will tell you. It is the Devil ... He is
never out of his diocese, he is never from his cure; ye shall never
find him unoccupied, he is ever in his parish… Ye shall never find
him out of the way; call for him when you will, he is ever at home,
the diligentest preacher in all the realm.
An important prose form of this period was the famous admonition
tracts. The ‘admonitions’ to Parliament (Admonition to Parliament,
1572; A Second Admonition to Parliament, 1574) were printed
undercover. The immediate cause was Archbishop Whitgift’s
attempts to standardize all liturgical practices, while promoting royal
supremacy. John Bridges’ A Defence of the Government Established in
the Church of England for Ecclesiastical Matters (1587) immediately
drew responses. The Puritans published Dudley Fenner’s A Defence
of the Godly Ministers against the Slanders of Dr. Bridges (1587) and
Walter Travers’ A Defence of the Ecclesiastical Discipline (1588). The
controversy raged and a series of pamphlets under the name of Martin
Marprelate began to appear. Published from a secret press, these
pamphlets attacked the bishops and defended the Presbyterian faith.
Known as the Marprelate controversy, this issue produced extremely
satiric prose pieces in a contemporary idiom: The Epistle, The Epitome,

Minerall and Metaphisicall Schoolpoints, Martin Junior, Martin Senior
and The Protestation of Martin Marprelate. Those instrumental in
producing and distributing the tracts were sometimes caught and
executed.
Among the religious scholars and writers of the period who
responded to the Marprelate tracts, we have Richard Hooker (1554?–
1600), the author of the famous Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity
(1593, 1597). Hooker was at the centre of the Puritan issues of the
last decades of the 16th century. Defending the authorized prayer
book, he used ingenious arguments against his dissenters, especially
the Marprelates, in defence of Anglicanism and the Church of
England. Hooker was also one of the first to defend intellectual liberty.
Robert Greene (1560–92) wrote a set of what is called ‘cony-catching

pamphlets’: A Notable Discovery of Coosnage Now daily practised by
sundry lewd persons, called Connie-catchers and Crosse-biters (first part
in 1591, followed by the second and third parts in 1592). Deceit is
the main theme in all these pamphlets and adequate examples are
given as illustrations to the way tricksters operated. The figures
include conmen, dishonest card-players, tricksters and petty thieves,
and are brilliant literary explorations of ‘low’ or ‘slum’ life of the
time. Greene also wrote some autobiographical pamphlets with titles
such as Greene’s Farewell to Folly (1591), Greene’s Never too Late and
its sequel Francesco’s Fortunes (1590).
Thomas Dekker (1572?–1632), better known as a playwright,
adapted the theme of cony-catching from Greene and wrote prose
works that dealt mainly with London’s subcultures such as News
from Hell (1606), Bellman of London (1608) and Lanthorn and Candle-
Light (1608). His chronicle, The Wonderful Year (1603), dealing with
the London plague of that year, provided the model for Daniel Defoe’s
more famous Journal of the Plague Year (1722). The Gull’s Handbook
deals with a young man’s (a gallant, as they were called) day in
London.
There were also tracts that sought to define culture and good
entertainment. Writers took such work seriously, and conducted
debates on the suitability of watching plays or dancing. John

Northbrooke’s Treatise wherein Dicing, Dancing, Vain Plays or
Interludes, with other Idle Pastimes … are Reproved (1577) is a typical
example of the argumentative Elizabethan tract. Northbrooke drew
up criteria for ‘acceptable’ plays: they should be educational plays,
the language should be Latin and they must be free of themes of
love. Stephen Gosson’s The School of Abuse (1579), Anthony Munday’s
A Second and Third Blast of Retreat from Plays and Theatres (1580) and
Philip Stubbes’ Anatomy of Abuses (1583) rejected amusements such
as plays, May-games, dancing, cards and football as evil. Thomas
Heywood (1570?–1641) wrote his tract Apology for Actors (1612) as
a response to the objections against public theatre and play-going,
arguing that plays were admired by foreign visitors, spread education
and helped improve the English character. He writes:
What English blood, seeing the person of any bold Englishman
presented and does not hug his fame and feel delight at his valour,
pursuing him in his enterprise with his best wishes, and as being
rapt in contemplation, offers to him in his heart all prosperous
performance, as if the personator were the man personated? So
bewitching a thing is lively and well-spirited action that it has
power to new-mould the hearts of the spectators, and fashion them
to the shape of any noble and notable attempt.
Edmund Spenser wrote his Veue of the Present State of Ireland in 1596.
This prose work is in the form of a dialogue between Irenius and
Eudoxus. Its topics range from Ireland’s customs and laws to its bards
and poetry. What is significant is that Spenser, who at the time was
secretary to Lord Grey, Governor of Ireland, defends the brutal
oppression of the Irish by the English monarchy. Ireland was the
first real British colony and Spenser even accuses the Queen of
England of being too soft-hearted towards the Irish. Spenser suggests
systematic starvation and exile for those Irish who do not submit to
the monarch of England. These aspects of Spenser’s document are
important because, since they were made at the time of the English
(and European) slaving voyages to Africa, they represent the
beginnings of colonialism and colonial writing. It is somewhat difficult
to associate the poet of The Faerie Queen with such angry and cruel
ideas.
Fiction
Features of Elizabethan Fiction
• Love, marriage and courtship remained the main themes in fiction as well
• There were many satires on London life, its corruption, moral depravity and
lack of faith
• There was a variety of romances: pastoral, courtly, middle-class, etc
• In some cases, the fiction dealt with lower and working class life. Everyday,
working-class language and speech were used in several novels
• The trickster or the cheat was a central figure
• Themes of honour and chivalry, courage and fidelity were important
• Genres included love and romance tales, adventure, courtly fiction and
what may be called ‘intrigues’.
Elizabethan prose fiction, which provides the first moments in the

rise of the English novel, is mainly the creation of a handful of figures.
George Gascoigne’s The Adventures of Master F.J. (1573) deals with
F.J.’s love-affair with the daughter-in-law (Elinor) of his benefactor.
The games, dancing, the park and society life are all dealt with in
crisp detail.
A short digression about influences is in order here. We have already
posited Dante as the source of European literature. There is, in fact,
another precursor for European prose fiction. Miguel de Cervantes
(1547–1616), who died the same year as William Shakespeare
(Shakespeare read Don Quixote in 1611), can perhaps be identified
as the founder of the fiction genre itself. But, in addition to inventing
the novel, Cervantes’ Don Quixote (whose first volume appeared in
Spanish in 1605 and the second in 1615), also generated enough
material and offered enough themes to be one of the most influential
and enduring works in world literature. Cervantes’ novel was,
ironically, itself about literary influence, about the fallacy of believing
stories. In a sense, the tale mocks the very foundation of literature
and the readers’ belief (or gullibility), and therefore looks forward to
writers like James Joyce whose works were parodies of literature
itself: how can you read a book about how reading books can damage
you? Indeed the book is about imagination, about role-playing and
about creation itself. This is the reason why Don Quixote is so
significant – it refuses to be a novel because Cervantes is suggesting
that there cannot be any belief in novels. What 20th century theorists
agonized over as postmodernism, Cervantes transformed into a
literary theme in the 17th century.
Quixote and Sancho Panza are acting out roles, in which they believe
even as they know these are mere roles. In the second volume, where
there is heightened awareness of his actions, Don Quixote recognizes
he has become an international figure, a hero: fiction has merged
with reality in a tale where both are under interrogation. This is the
reason why William Blake, one of the first great critics of the tale,
announced in very simple terms: “[The Don Quixote of Volume 2 is]
the Real Man, the Imagination”. When, towards the end of the
epic – this is precisely what Don Quixote is, an epic, unlimited in
scope, endless in its potential – Don Quixote defends his actions, he
provides the themes for literature, for all times to come: “I have set
injuries and insults straight, righted wrongs, punished arrogance,
conquered giants, and trampled on monsters.” Did he? Quixote may
have done all this in his imagination, but it is in the very act of
believing and enacting his imagined monsters, insults and wrongs
that he clears a space for the ultimate democracy: it is in literature
that one can say anything, where anyone can be a hero, where
everyone can be free. Literature, Don Quixote discovers, frees him
to be heroic, to fight the demons and monsters. It is not the battle
itself that Cervantes underscores: it is the decision that the battles
must be fought, wrongs righted, injustice remedied and that
conscious assertion that the world will not be like this within the
reach of one’s arm (if one may adapt a line from, of all texts, Thomas
Harris’ Hannibal). Cervantes inaugurates postmodern skepticism, self-
reflexivity and parody, humanist notions of the role of humans, the
question of justice, the epic imagination that anyone can share, the
romance, the adventure tale … the list is too long.
The distinguished critic Harold Bloom once asked: “At whose altar
shall we worship?” Bloom’s answer was very simple: Shakespeare.
For, as he put it, “Who else is there?” Bloom was aware, despite his
claims for Shakespeare, that that altar was shared by two others:
Dante and Cervantes. These three created models for all European
literature. Their works have suffered onslaughts by theorists and
critics, and survived (the critics often did not). Their works have
remained inexplicably popular and dozens of writers have turned
to them to know how it is all done. So the European pantheon, the
fount of literary wisdom, style, form and philosophy in Western
literature is ready: Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare and Miguel
de Cervantes. They taught people what to write. Most importantly,
as Don Quixote himself discovers in his ‘negotiations’ with windmills
and things, they taught readers how to read. Literature, these three
proved, was a way of reading the world. And there is no one way
to read.
John Lyly’s Euphues (1578) deals with the life of Euphues, who goes
off to Naples and falls in love with his friend Philautus’ fiancée,
Lucilla. In addition to this love story, there are passages on education,
faith and love. The sequel, Euphues and his England (1580) deals with
Euphues and Philautus’ life in England. Lyly’s indirect, over-
elaborate style in these works marked the origin of what is now called
‘euphuism’. Lyly used alliteration (the repetition of the first syllable
in consecutive words), repetitions and numerous similes. The
sentences and themes use the ‘thesis/anti-thesis’ form – where an
idea and its opposite (superior/inferior, love/hate and so on) are
used together. Here is an example of the Euphuistic style:
This young gallant, of more wit than wealth, and yet of more wealth
than wisdom, seeing himself inferior to none in pleasant conceits,
thought himself superior in all honest conditions, insomuch that
he deemed himself so apt to all things that he gave himself almost
to nothing but practicing of those things commonly which are
incident to these sharp wits, fine phrases, smooth quipping, merry
taunting, using jesting without mean and abusing mirth without
measure.
As the uninterrupted sentence, races along, note the alliterations:
‘wit’ and ‘wealth’, ‘wealth’ and ‘wisdom’ and ‘mirth’ and ‘measure’.
Also note the thesis/antithesis pattern: ‘inferior/superior’, “so apt
to all things that he gave himself almost to nothing”. This marked a
whole new turn in English language.
One of the most prolific and talented writers of prose of the

Elizabethan age was Robert Greene. Greene imitated the successful
Euphues in a series of short novels, including The Mirror of Modesty
(1584), Euphues his Censure to Philautus (1587), Pandosto (1588) and
Menaphon (1589). Love stories being the reading public’s favourite
form, Greene’s works invariably deal with courtship, failed love
affairs, gentlemanly behaviour towards ladies, etc. Greene also wrote
fiction about cony-catchers (The Blacke Bookes Messenger, 1592).
Pandosto was the source of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1588).
Pirates, disguises, riots, prisons and debtors, issues of honour and
virtue, disguised royalty, shepherds and gentlemen – the
extraordinary spectrum of characters and themes (and, of course,
the spectrum of extraordinary characters) in Greene’s fiction provides
great insights into the life of Elizabethan England. Greene is also
well-known as the writer who first mentions Shakespeare, though
in very derogatory terms (“upstart Crowe, beautified with our
feathers”, as Greene put it in A Groat’s-Worth of Wit, 1592).
The Elizabethan caricature is exemplified in the work of Thomas
Nashe (1567–1601). Nashe in his satires used a less polite style,
lampooning everyone and engaging in the religious controversies of
his time in The Anatomy of Absurdity (1589), Pierce Penniless (1592)
and The Unfortunate Traveller (1594). The Unfortunate Traveller is
perhaps the best known of his works. It is a mixture of the picaresque
narrative, parody (see the box Parody) and historical fantasy. Set in
the period of Henry VIII, a page-boy, Jack Wilton, is the narrator of
the story. Written in the form of melodramatic episodes, with several
cruel and farcical incidents in the English court, France, Venice,
Florence and Rome, the work is witty and brilliant. Nashe’s works
targeted Richard and Gabriel Harvey and eventually was banned
by the authorities, forcing its author to flee London. His The Terrors
of the Night (1594), part study of dreams and nightmares and part
Gothic fantasy which anticipates the 18th century Gothic narratives,
is an unusual work.
Thomas Deloney (1560?–1600) sketched portraits of middle and low-
class England in Jack of Newbury (1597), Thomas of Reading (1597)
and The Gentle Craft (1597). Popular as a balladeer, Deloney’s fiction
is notable for its unrelenting criticism of bourgeois society. Cheating,
Parody
Parody is an adaptation of a literary genre, often to make fun of it. What
parody does is to use the style, theme or language of a respected literary
genre or a particular text, but to apply it to a subject or theme that is trivial
or at least less significant. A good example occurs in the 18th century novel.
The subject of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740–41) and other novels is
feminine virtue and good behaviour. Henry Fielding parodies the moral
tone and theme of Richardson in his own works like Shamela (1741) and
Joseph Andrews (1742), often mocking Richardson’s pedantic seriousness.
The 20th century comic book MAD parodies serious films and literature by
transforming the themes into trivia.
dishonesty and the virtues of hard work are portrayed in Deloney’s

sketches of weavers, tradesmen and shoemakers. He dealt with the
‘low life’ of England and situated his events in drinking houses and
streets rather than in manors.
Philip Sidney, a significant cultural figure of the age, wrote his epic
prose romance Arcadia (Arcadia was originally a series of verse
eclogues published around 1504 by the Italian Sannazaro and dealt
with the life of shepherds in Arcadia). Arcadia exists in two versions.
The Old Arcadia, the first version written around 1581 and published
in sections around 1593, is divided into five books or ‘acts’, separated
by ‘eclogues’ (eclogues are short pastoral poems, sometimes in the
form of dialogues). Duke Basilius seeks to prevent the fulfilment of a
prophecy by withdrawing to two rustic lodges with his family. His
daughters Pamela and Philoclea fall in love with two princes, Pyrocles
and Musidorus, who are disguised as shepherds. The attempts of
the two pairs of lovers (Pyrocles–Pamela and Musidorus–Philoclea)
to be united, runs into difficulties with Basilius’ apparent death.
Arcadia is a pastoral, but the rustic theme is interwoven with mystery,
clowning, crime, love, disguise and a detective story. Philosophical
comments, high chivalry and a courtroom drama mark Arcadia. It is
also notable for some very popular love poems (especially the well-
known, ‘What tongue can her perfections tell’, a poem in praise of
Philoclea’s beauty). The New Arcadia (1583–84, incomplete) is an
attempt to revise the earlier version and is considerably longer. New
characters, such as Basilius’ sister-in-law Cecropia and her son

Amphialus who is in love with Philoclea, are introduced here. The
plot of Arcadia was used by various dramatists, including
Shakespeare (King Lear).
POETRY
Features of Late Tudor and Elizabethan Poetry
• Elizabethan poets, while continuing to be under the influence of Homer,

Virgil and other classical poets, attempted to make the idiom more English
• ‘Time’, both past and present, is a constant theme
• Mutability, transience and change become central concerns
• Poems of the period embody certain anxieties regarding contemporary

politics, the monarch and society
• Many poets made use of religious allegory
• The use of myth to express contemporary political concerns was common

(the most famous poem of this category being Spenser’s The Faerie
Queene).
The Elizabethan literary scene is perhaps equally divided, in terms

of fame, between the sonnet and the play. The Elizabethan sonnet
was the handiwork of three principal figures: Sidney, Spenser and
Shakespeare.
The aristocrat poet and literary critic Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86)
was an initiator of what can be called ‘literary clubs’ and was thus
influential in setting the literary tone of his age. Sidney was associated
with Edward Dyer, Edmund Spenser and other such major figures
of the time. Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella (written around 1582, with
two editions published in 1591) is a collection of 108 sonnets and 11
songs. It deals with the unfulfilled love of Astrophel for Stella.
Interestingly, like Astrophel’s love which remains incomplete, the
poetic sequence ends in mid-sentence: “That therewith my song is
broken.” It is significant that Sidney links the seasons and the weather
to the poet/lover’s mood. Here is an example from Sonnet 31:
With how sad steps, O moon, thou climb’st the skies!

How silently, and with how wan a face!
What, may it be that even in heavenly place
That busy archer his sharp arrows tries?
Sure, if that long-with-love-acquainted eyes
Can judge of love, thou, feel’st a lover’s case;
I read it in thy looks; thy languished grace
To me, that feels the like, thy state descries.
Sidney’s sequence popularized the 14-line sonnet, which was later
taken up by Samuel Daniel in Delia (1592), Henry Constable in Diana
(1592), Thomas Watson in The Tears of Fancie (1593), Giles Fletcher
in Licia, or Poems of Love (1593), William Percy in Cœlia (1594), Michael
Drayton in Ideas Mirrour (1594) and George Chapman in A Coronet
for his Mistresse Philosophie, and his amorous Zodiacke (1595). The most
famous among the sonnet collections of the time is Edmund Spenser’s
Amoretti (1595). Shakespeare is believed to have written his sonnets
around the same time, though they were not printed until 1609.
Edmund Spenser (1552–99) published The Shepherd’s Calendar in 1579,

when he was only 27 years old. This work is one of the most
important poems in the pastoral tradition (poetry that seeks to present
an idyllic rural life). The Shepherd’s Calendar anticipates both the
Romantics and AE Housman (A Shropshire Lad, 1896). Illustrated
with woodcuts, it had twelve eclogues, one for each month of the
year. They are in the form of dialogues between shepherds, except
for the first and last. Of the twelve, four of them deal with matters of
religion and conduct; four of them deal with love; one is in praise of
Queen Elizabeth (who is called ‘Elisa’); one is a lament; one describes
a singing match; and one laments the state of poetry. Spenser’s
wooing of Elizabeth Boyle produced some extraordinary love poetry
in the form of Amoretti and Epithalamion (both published in 1595).
Amoretti is a three-part sequence: Sonnets 1–62 deal with unrequited
love, Sonnets 63–84 with the lovers’ happiness, and Sonnets 85–88
with the lovers’ brief separation before their marriage. The second
part is really extraordinary in terms of its imagery, emotional power
and style. Spenser celebrates his marriage to Boyle in Epithalamion.
The 24 stanzas represent the 24 hours of Midsummer Day.
Prothalamion (1596) is a ‘spousal verse’, celebrating the double
marriage of Lady Elizabeth and Lady Katherine Somerset, daughters
of the Earl of Worcester. It has some surprising imagery (like brides

being compared to white swans). Marriage, in these poems, is
celebrated as the natural fulfilment of life’s cycle itself.
The most famous and enduring of Spenser’s poetry is The Faerie
Queene. The first three books appeared in 1590, and the second group
in 1596. Though Spenser planned to write twelve books, he managed
only six. It was meant to be an allegory (what was called the poem’s
‘dark conceit’) and sought, as Spenser himself declared, to restore
the ‘moral function’ of poetry. The Faerie Queene (Elizabeth) sends
out her knights to overcome monsters and temptations – which stand
for the twelve moral vices.
Upon a great adventure he was bond,
That greatest Gloriana to him gave,
That greatest Glorious Queene of Faerie lond,
To win him worship, and her grace to have,
Which of all earthly things he most did crave;
And ever as he rode, his hart did earne
To prove his puissance in battle brave
Upon his foe, and his new force to learne;
Upon his foe, a Dragon terrible and stearne.
The triumph of the knights stands for the triumph of a virtuous
English monarchy itself. The Faerie Queen, said Spenser, was the
symbol of glory, and “that most excellent and glorious person of our
sovereign Queen”.
The allegory in the poem works at various levels. Spenser used real
people from the Queen’s court to symbolize qualities such as chivalry
and loyalty. The battle of good and evil and the the triumph of courage
and will-power over temptation actually belong to the tradition of
Romances, especially the legends of King Arthur as seen in the work
of Thomas Malory and other chivalric romances of the medieval
period. Spenser uses this format to speak of larger issues such as
nationalism, loyalty, the glory of the monarch and morality. Various
moral weapons are available to the knights: generosity (Book I), truth
and chastity (Book IV), a sense of justice (Book V), self-control (Book
II) and courtesy (Book VI). These qualities – truth, temperance,
chastity, friendship, generosity, a sense of justice and courtesy –
become the ideals that Englishmen and women should aspire to. It
is therefore a ‘moral allegory’. By using the traditional distinction

between good and evil as well as holiness and wickedness, Spenser
makes the poem a ‘religious allegory’ too. Thus, the Red Cross Knight
is St. George and symbolizes holiness.The role of the knight, writes
Spenser, is to “defend the feeble in their right/and wrong, redress in
such as went awry” (Book V). The relationship of the knights with
the Faerie Queen becomes a ‘political allegory’ about the relationship
between the Queen and her courtiers and well-wishers. Further, since
the Queen is symbolic of English monarchy and English character, it
becomes a ‘national allegory’. Spenser’s position in English literature
has been that of a pioneer. Contemporary readings of his work pay
attention to his colonial prejudices (especially in Veue of the Present
State of Ireland) and his patriarchal ideology (Faerie Queene is clearly
a male-centric poem). He is also seen as a poet who was trying to
forge an English poetic identity through the use of myth, religion
and contemporary politics.
Michael Drayton (1563–1631) tried his hands at a variety of genres

and styles. One of the major influences in his poetic career was
Spenser. His To the Virginian Voyage, Poly-Olbion, Ballad of Agincourt
and the mythological Nymphidia, The Quest of Cynthia, The Shepherd’s
Sirena and The Muses’s Elysium are all indebted to Spenser. These
are narrative poems which seek to detail a whole way of life of a
community/place or chronicle an era. Drayton sought to nostalgically
recall a pastoral England of earlier eras. He thus used local
monuments, legends and detailed landscape descriptions to show
how England had changed and to instil a sense of longing in his
readers. His Poly-Olbion is subtitled ‘A Chorographicall Description
of Tracts, Rivers, Mountaines, Forests, etc.’ Patriotism, legends and
history all combine with geographical surveys and fairy tales in his
works. His Poems (1619) is also important because it used the ode
form, one of the earliest attempts to do so in English.
One of the most colourful figures of Elizabethan England was Sir

Walter Ralegh (also spelt Raleigh; 1552?–1618). Ralegh led an
extraordinarily full political life. He colonized Virginia in the New
World (America), was Elizabeth’s favourite for a long time (until he
fell in love with the Queen’s lady-in-waiting, Elizabeth
Throckmorton) and had a position of eminence in the court of King
James until he was convicted of treason and, finally, publicly

executed. He was a friend of Sidney, Marlowe and Spenser, and
was actually instrumental in persuading Spenser to publish the first
instalment of The Faerie Queen. There is debate about the authorship
of some of Ralegh’s poetry. Like the love poems of the time, his poetry
moves between extensive praise of the lady and melancholy:
[…] Let’s, then, meet
Often with amorous lips, and greet
each other till our wanton kisses
in number pass the days Ulysses
consumed in travel […].
His dissatisfaction with the English monarchy caused him to write
some of his political poems. In one of these, he described the court
thus:
Say to the court it glows
And shines like rotten wood;
Say to the church, it shows
What’s good, and doth no good.
Ralegh is also known for his huge work, The History of the World
(1614), in which he declared that any paradise on earth could be
found only in the tropics.
In 1593, Shakespeare published his Venus and Adonis, a non-dramatic,

erotic poem, followed by The Rape of Lucrece in the next year. Venus
and Adonis dealt with the love of the goddess Venus for a shy boy and
contains some vivid descriptions of the countryside. The Rape of Lucrece
is a dramatic poem full of soliloquies and declamations about the
ravishing of Lucrece by Sextus Tarquinius. It is notable for Lucrece’s
dignified assertion of her integrity in the face of Sextus’ aggression.
DRAMA
Features of Elizabethan Drama
• The comedies used Italian or Latin comedies as source
• Comedies were often romances or congratulatory works in praise of a patron

or monarch
• Love and its tribulations were the main theme, as seen in Shakespeare’s
comedies
• History plays and chronicles were common
• Tragedy used Seneca as a model
• Tragedies were melodramatic, full of emotional speeches and scenes, and

used a great deal of stage spectacles
• Tragedies were concerned with the darker side of human characters:

immorality, greed and cruelty. They also touched upon the melancholic
aspect of human life (a theme shared with Jacobean drama)
• Politics and history interested almost all the playwrights.
In Elizabethan England, travelling companies staged performances

in barns and yards. Further, the actors themselves lived in very
uncertain conditions. They were not recognized as wage-earners and
were at the mercy of guilds. By the end of the 16th century, two
public playhouses had come up outside London. These were the
Theatre and the Curtain (set up in 1576–77). They were followed by
Fortune Rose (1587), Swan (1595), Globe (1599), Red Bull (1605)
and Hope (1614) – all built outside city limits to avoid problems with
the city government. Some theatres were built inside city limits and
were the private playhouses, catering to a smaller and wealthier
audience. Paul’s Boys (1576–84) and the two Blackfriars (1600),
however, faced major problems when in existence. With the Lord
Chamberlain’s Men (subsequently called the King’s Men) –
Shakespeare’s company – acting and theatre became professionalized.
The mystery plays of the 15th century began to wane in popularity.
With the Reformation, Catholic themes in these plays became
unpopular. John Bale produced a set of plays with Protestant themes.
Bale’s work was also an attempt at humanism and spoke of man’s
dignity and self-reliance. The mystery plays were slowly replaced
by ‘morality plays’. Plays such as Everyman (1485) had been popular
because they spread the message of the church. Characters were
not from scripture any more and ‘starred’ the common man (hence
the term ‘everyman’). The morality play invariably had one theme:
psychomachia or ‘the battle of the soul’ (sometimes also interpreted
as ‘battle for the soul’), where good and evil struggle for man’s soul.
Such plays suggested that wealth and worldly goods, pride and other
human states were ultimately irrelevant. In Everyman, Death informs
the Human:
Everyman, it may not be, by no way.
I set nought by gold, silver, nor riches,
Nor by pope, emperor, king, duke, nor princes.
By the mid-16th century, the New Testament was no more the source
of dramatic plots, though playwrights continued to use the Old
Testament and Apocrypha as sources. Lady Elizabeth Carey’s
Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry (1613) was one of the last to use a
Biblical subject for its plot. Hereafter, secular drama will begin to
reign on the English stage.
Comedy
The Latin comedies of Terence and Plautus made a considerable
impact on the English stage during this period. Nicholas Udall’s
Floures for Latine speakyng selected and gathered oute of Terence, and
the same translated into englyshe (Flowers for Latin-Speaking, Selected
and Gathered out of Terence and the Same Translated into English, 1533)
was an effort at bringing in Latin comedy into English. Latin comedy
becomes a popular genre mainly with Udall’s play about middle
class London, Ralph Roister Doister and William Stevenson’s village
comedy Gammer Gurton’s Needle (the authorship of this work is a
matter of debate), both from Queen Mary’s reign. In Udall’s play,
Merrygreek urges Ralph to pursue his love, Custance. The lady, who
is engaged to another gentleman, scorns Ralph. Ralph is beaten and
mocked through the play, until at last he realizes that he will never
win the lady. Comic scenes included Ralph wearing a kitchen utensil
as a helmet for battle and Merrygreek’s accidental blows to Ralph.
This kind of farcical comedy was very popular.
Adaptations from Italian and other sources were also available to
the public in the form of George Gascoigne’s translation of Ariosto’s
I Suppositi (staged in 1566) and AF Grazini’s La Spiritata (or The Girl
Possessed by the Devil, 1561). Anthony Munday’s adaptation of Luigi
Pasqualigo’s Il Fedele (1575) with the title Fedele and Fortunio was
enacted before Queen Elizabeth and was subsequently printed (unlike

several plays of the time, for which no print versions are available –
they may have existed only in manuscript form). The play, with its
love intrigues, bawdy comedy and enchantment theme, provides
models for Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer
Night’s Dream and Much Ado about Nothing. The tale of two couples
caught in a plot and the larger theme of the ‘course of true love’ (as
Shakespeare put it) was a common pattern in many of these comedies.
John Lyly was one of the most talented of Elizabethan writers. His
success with the novel Euphues encouraged him to try his hand at
comic drama. Lyly wrote seven comedies beginning with A most
excellent comedie of Alexander, Campaspe and Diogenes in 1581. His
plays, Sapho and Phao, Endimion, Gallathea, Midas and The Woman in
the Moon were performed before the Queen herself. His plays dealt
with themes of culture and upbringing, manners and class, often
treating them as linked – something that is central to our
understanding of the Elizabethan age itself, where class and
upbringing was reflected in one’s manners and behaviour. Lyly’s
plays show ‘gentlefolk’ (the aristocrats and upper classes) in various
roles: the brave, the tender, the generous and chivalrous. Thus, in
Endimion, Geron asks Eumenides to rescue his friend rather than
pursue his love. Likewise in Alexander and Campaspe, Alexander the
Great falls in love with a captive girl. He orders his artist Apelles to
paint her portrait. Eventually, the girl and Apelles fall in love. When
Alexander discovers this, he nobly renounces his love for her. It is
this kind of theme – generosity, sacrifice and friendship over love –
that made Lyly popular.
George Peele (1556–96) explored London life and society – its villainy,
its swindles, its heroics, its nationalist sentiments (especially against
France and Spain) – in his works. In The Arraignment of Paris, Peele
flatters the Queen of England. Using the myth of the golden ball and
the quarrel between the three goddesses, Peele suggests that no
goddess or angel deserves it and it finally goes to the Queen of
England! Peele’s David and Bethsabe and Old Wives’ Tale are partly
satires.
Some of Robert Greene’s comedies are significant examples of
Elizabethan drama. Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and James IV are
two of his better works. Greene’s importance lies in the fact that he
uses historical events and figures in imaginary situations. Greene’s
plays are almost always about the neighbouring town or county,
often presenting the other place as one of great charm and pleasure.
The plays mix various themes: love stories, fairy tales, history, magic
and jokes. Collaborating with Thomas Lodge, Greene produced
A Looking-Glass for London and England, an extremely popular social
satire.
Tragedy
The early Elizabethan dramatists, especially in the period between
1550 and 1580, used the Greek writer Seneca as a model. All of
Seneca’s ten tragedies were translated and they appeared in a single-
volume edition in 1581. Many of these tragedies were horrific in
theme. All Elizabethan tragedians used stage tricks and magic. It
was spectacle that thrilled the audience more than the actual story
(which was frequently adapted from European mythology). Most of
the plays were also complex, with plots and subplots. There were
other devices used to thrill the audience. The plays usually had some
strange characters with psychological problems and a clever
wickedness. In fact, the villains in Elizabethan drama are more
interesting than the heroes and heroines. A good example would be
the characters of Lorenzo and Hieronimo in Thomas Kyd’s The
Spanish Tragedy.
An early example of English tragic drama is Tragedy of Gorboduc
(1565), which appears under the title Tragedy of Ferrex and Porrex in
the 1570 edition. There is some dispute about the authorship here.
Thomas Norton (1532–84) is supposed to have written the first three
acts, and Thomas Sackville (1536–1608) the last two.
The two central figures in the genre are Thomas Kyd (1558–94) and
Christopher Marlowe (1564–93). Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy was a
melodrama with numerous twists and turns of plot. There are eight
deaths – of both homicidal and suicidal types – in the play. The
verse used in the play is racy, adding to the emotional effect. The
spectacles included a public hanging, a lunatic, the biting out of a
man’s tongue and a play-within-the-play. All this was excellent
stagecraft calculated to keep the audience glued to their seats – if

you blinked, you missed a murder. The Spanish Tragedy had some
particularly fine speeches on grief. Hieronimo’s on the death of his
son is well known:
See here my show, look on this spectacle:
Here lay my hope, and here my hope hath end:
Here lay my heart, and here my heart was slain:
Here lay my treasure, here my treasure lost:
Here lay my bliss, and here my bliss bereft:
But hope, heart, treasure, joy and bliss,
All fled, fail’d, died, yea, all decay’d with this.
The Spanish Tragedy had at least ten editions before 1634 and was
one of the most popular plays of the age. Though he wrote other
plays (some of them are lost and the authorship of others has been
debated) such as Soliman and Perseda and a translation of Robert
Garnier’s French work Cornelia (1594), nothing has matched the
power or popularity of The Spanish Tragedy. Kyd is also supposed to
have written a ‘Danish tragedy’ which was the immediate ancestor
of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Samuel Daniel’s Cleopatra (1594) was also influenced by Garnier
(often called the French Seneca). Daniel’s later plays like Philotas
(1605) are ‘classical’. They were influenced by Greek and Latin
dramatists and by classical mythology and themes. Garnier’s
influence extended into the Jacobean literary scene and playwrights
such as Fulke Greville and William Alexander worked with Garnier’s
style (rhyming verse, the chorus, etc.). Other tragedies also dealt with
themes of love and conquest, war and kingship, and court politics.
Among the better known plays of this type are Thomas Lodge’s
Wounds of Civil War (1594), Peele’s Edward I (1593) and works such
as True Tragedy of Richard III (1594), Troublesome Reign of John, King
of England (1591), Sir John Oldcastle (1600) and Captain Thomas
Stukeley (1605). It is important to understand the role of such plays
in English history. These plays presented aspects of English history
for the audience to assimilate. They played an important role in
developing a sense of ‘national history’ and ‘culture’ among members
of the public (one must remember that these plays were public, staged
in theatres). It is therefore also important to see how other countries
and cultures were presented in these plays. Plays like Selimus (1594)
and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (1587, 1590) dealt with Turkish and
Islamic nations and cultures. By presenting a certain view of other
cultures, these plays influenced public opinion about them. These
plays therefore served as ‘propaganda’ about English and other
cultures. They mapped the world in terms of West and East,
civilization and barbarity, and are fine examples of the beginnings
of colonial themes in English literature. An excellent example would
be one of Tamburlaine’s more famous speeches:
Zenocrate, were Egypt Jove’s own land,
Yet would I with my sword make Jove to stoop.
I will confute those blind geographers
That make a triple region in the world,
Excluding regions which I mean to trace,
And with this pen reduce them to a map,
Calling the provinces, cities, and towns,
After my name and thine, Zenocrate…
As can be seen, most of these tragic plays dealt with kings and queens
and the aristocrat class. John Phillips’s Patient and Meek Grissill (1565)
and Thomas Garter’s Virtuous and Godly Susanna (1578) mark a
change in this type because they deal with the upper middle-class
gentry (called ‘bourgeois’) of England. The first major tragedy that
dealt with ordinary middle-class English life was Arden of Feversham
(1592), dealing with the murder of a leading citizen of Feversham.
Often dealing with crime and lust and brutal killings, plays such as
Arden of Feversham, The Late Murder in Whitechapel, Page of Plymouth
and A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608, whose title page said ‘written by W.
Shakespeare’) were uniformly melodramatic and spectacular, with
grave speeches, dramatic situations, killings, emotional scenes and
the revenge theme. Shakespeare’s Hamlet was part of a larger series
of revenge plays such as Henry Chettle’s Tragedy of Hoffman and The
Tragedy of Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany.
After Kyd, the most popular Elizabethan dramatist was Christopher
Marlowe (1564–93), born the same year as Shakespeare. His
contribution to English drama was undoubtedly the dramatic effect
and the first sustained analysis of the effects of power: imperial power
in Tamburlaine, acquisitive and commercial power in Jew of Malta,
monarchical power in Edward II and demonic/satanic power in

Doctor Faustus. Marlowe executed dramatic situations to perfection
and when combined with some powerful poetry (best exemplified
in the speeches of Doctor Faustus), provided thrilling theatre.
Marlowe was an erudite scholar with a thorough grounding in
classical learning, in addition to a degree of competence and interest
in geography, astronomy and philosophy. The order of his plays is
rather uncertain and has been the subject of great scholarly research.
His first play may have been Dido, Queen of Carthage (perhaps co-
authored with Thomas Nashe). The two-part Tamburlaine the Great
(1587) inaugurated a new kind of tragedy. Marlowe’s play describes
the rise of a shepherd to generalship and eventually, the command
of the Mongol empire (the play is based loosely on the story of Timur
the Lame). One of the first great characters in English drama,
Marlowe’s Tamburlaine is confident, powerful, obsessed and
gloriously arrogant. In order to understand Marlowe’s powerful
poetry, we need to just look at Tamburlaine’s boastful speech after a
victory:
The god of war resigns his room to me,
Meaning to make me general of the world:
Jove, viewing me in arms, looks pale and wan
Fearing my power should pull him from his throne …
Highly dramatic situations, characters and speeches are characteristic
of Marlowe’s work as a whole. Barabas in The Jew of Malta is pure
evil and is one of the most unforgettable characters in world literature.
In fact, Barabas’ cruelty (in deliberately driving men into bankruptcy
and suicide) and greed provoke a certain horrified fascination.
Edward II is about the problems that ensue when a king is weak-
willed. Here, Marlowe was dealing with a very difficult and politically
sensitive subject: homosexuality. Edward II is one of the first plays to
explore the dramatic tension between duty and desire, between
individual needs and the community’s demands. Doctor Faustus
focused on a man’s quest for knowledge:
All things that move between the quiet poles
Shall be at my command. Emperors and kings
Are but obeyed in their several provinces,
Nor can they raise the wind or rend the clouds;
But his dominion that exceeds in this

Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man.
Doctor Faustus, however, is critical of the classical learning of Aristotle
and others. Instead, it suggests magic, necromancy and other less
‘respectable’ forms to be superior to classical learning and, hence,
more desirable. One of the most dramatic of Elizabethan plays, Doctor
Faustus is pure entertainment. The final plea for mercy that Faustus
sends up is perhaps one of the finest pieces of poetry in English:
O God!
If thou wilt not have mercy on my soul,
Yet for Christ’s sake whose blood hath ransomed me
Impose some end to my incessant pain:
Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years,
A hundred thousand, and at last be saved!
O, no end is limited to damned souls!
Shakespeare
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) has the distinction of being one of
the most quoted authors in the world. His career is spread across the
Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. His first published play was Titus
Andronicus (printed anonymously in 1594). From 1598, his name
appears on title pages, suggesting the increasing popularity of his
plays. First editions of Henry V, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Pericles
and the third part of Henry VI appeared in what are now known as
the ‘bad quartos’. The comedies – The Comedy of Errors, The Two
Gentlemen of Verona, Love’s Labour’s Lost and Henry VI – drew from
a range of styles and contemporaries (Greene, Plautus, Lyly, Peele
and Marlowe).
Shakespeare’s drama, exploring the various shades of human
character (and not simply ‘good’ and ‘bad’), was a whole new way
of talking about the human. Shakespeare provided Elizabethan and
Jacobean England a language – philosophical, medical, commercial/
economic, military and political – in which to talk about humans as
a whole. This means that Shakespeare’s work presents human beings
in their various roles and businesses. Each of these roles shows
particular aspects of what it means to be human: a greedy merchant,
a gallant prince or a jealous lover. By using the language of a
profession or class or community, Shakespeare delivered ‘typical’

humans, who served as models for that profession or class. He
explored the weaknesses of humans, creating more ‘complete’
characters than ever seen before on the English stage. His history
plays and the great tragedies, for example, show the human side of
monarchs. Shakespeare’s exploration of human ambition, greed, lust
and madness is unparalleled in English literature. He humanizes
the human. His audiences can identify with his characters because
they seem just like one of them. His women characters (played by
boys on stage during Shakespeare’s time), the subject of much feminist
criticism, are often strong and unconventional. Issues of patriarchy,
the woman’s role in marriage, her desires and her rights, her intellect
and abilities are the subjects of works like As You Like It, The Merchant
of Venice and Twelfth Night. Shakespeare questions the traditional
male/female stereotyping and social norms that ‘establish’ particular
frames of existence and behaviour for women. Characters like
Volumnia (Coriolanus), Ophelia, Countess (All’s Well That Ends Well)
and Lady Macbeth represent unconventional women in that they
are not the dependent, weak women of Elizabethan drama. In most
cases, they push men into decisions or work out their own agenda.
It is this ability to show mankind in all its aspects that makes Harold
Bloom suggest that Shakespeare actually ‘invents’ the human (see
Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 1998).
Shakespeare’s Plays in Chronological Order

1589–93
King Henry VI, Part I
King Henry VI, Part II
King Henry VI, Part III
Titus Andronicus
The Comedy of Errors
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Taming of the Shrew
King Richard III
1593–98
King John
Love’s Labour's Lost
Romeo and Juliet
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The Merchant of Venice
King Richard II
King Henry IV, Part I
King Henry IV, Part II
The Merry Wives of Windsor
1598–1613
Much Ado About Nothing

King Henry V
Julius Caesar
As You Like It
Hamlet
Twelfth Night
Troilus and Cressida
All’s Well that Ends Well
Measure for Measure
Othello
King Lear
Macbeth
Antony and Cleopatra
Timon of Athens
Coriolanus
Pericles
Cymbeline
The Winter’s Tale
The Tempest
King Henry VIII
Note: Of these, the plays from Pericles to King Henry VIII are often
termed the ‘late plays’. The sequence also shows interesting patterns.
The comedies belong to the early phase. The great tragedies,
undoubtedly Shakespeare’s greatest work, belong to the later phase.
Shakespeare’s comedies rely on the theme of love, friendship4, dual

or false identities in addition to some extremely rude (even bawdy)
language and comic situations. Love’s Labour’s Lost is a satire on the
pretentiousness of scholars who believe that they can forego the
charms of women in favour of reading and writing poetry. The
heroines in this play are full of wit and wisdom and often outclass
the men in their courtship. A later play, Much Ado About Nothing,
was an unusual play because it showed lovers, Beatrice and Benedick,
who mocked each other in public. The play suggests that each of
them found the other to be the only worthy opponent. Shakespeare
begins with this kind of admiring antagonism, which he then shows
transforming into admiring love.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream was a new kind of play – with magic
and fairyland – showing a world parallel to that of human beings.
The Theseus–Hippolyta marriage revels run parallel to the plot of
Lysander–Hermia–Demetrius. Adding to the comedy is the team of
fairies – with their own love intrigues and magic – and the craftsmen
(headed by Bottom, who, during the course of the play, acquires the
head of an ass). It is a brilliant effort in language for a very simple
reason. Unlike cinema, all humans on stage are of the same size and
dimension – there can be no special effects here. So Shakespeare,
who had dwarves and elves in this play, had to rely on language to
suggest physical smallness. That is, the dialogue, poetry and such
linguistic devices had to convey the impression of smallness. For
instance, the fairies ‘talking’ of the tiny spiders, beetles and snails in
their world or the ‘narration’ of actions such as hanging a pearl of
dew in a cowslip’s ear, created and amplified their physical attributes.

Here is another example from Act II of this play to show how
Shakespeare’s language helps give an impression of darting
movement and weightless flight:
Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough brier,
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire,
I do wander everywhere,
Swifter than the moon’s sphere …
The Comedy of Errors reworks two highly popular comedies of Plautus
(Amphitruo and Menaechmi) using two sets of identical twins to create
amusing situations. Twelfth Night, done at a time when Shakespeare
had established himself as England’s leading playwright, also dealt
with love, but spent a lot of time exploring the eccentricity of each
person. One of the few plays where everybody is in love (the Duke
Orsino and Olivia, Viola and Duke Orsino, Olivia and Viola/
Sebastian, Sir Toby and Maria) and which uses the theme of twins
(Viola and Sebastian) again, it is a celebration of festivities and cheer,
and is one of Shakespeare’s finest comedies.
Henry VI is a chronicle play (a chronicle play uses a theme from

history and consists of episodes linked together) that deals with
England’s war with France. In Richard III, Shakespeare extends his
study of monarchy, showing how a man becomes king by murdering
his contenders. Shakespeare makes us aware of the irony here: though
Richard III becomes king by rightful succession (since all contenders
are dead), his crimes make him politically, morally and ethically unfit
to be king. This is also one of the first plays where Shakespeare shows
his ability to present villains. And yet, the audience feels some sort
of sympathy for him, since Richard III is a hunchback:
I, that am rudely stamp’d and want love’s majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deform’d, unfinish’d, sent before my time
into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable

That dogs bark at me as I halt by them…
Shakespeare continued his exploration of the themes of monarchy
and history in Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV and the concluding
Henry V. Richard II was about the responsibility of a monarch. It
marks Shakespeare’s first real comment on English monarchy and
shows how he dealt with contemporary problems (the issue of the
successor to Queen Elizabeth). This play about a king deposed by
his people had actually been quoted at the treason trial of Robert
Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex. Richard II is an ancestor of Hamlet
because he constantly broods on his conditions. Henry IV introduced
one of Shakespeare’s most unforgettable characters, Falstaff, a man
who symbolizes all the sins of gluttony, lust and sloth. It is also
significant for the debates on honour that Falstaff has with Prince
Hal (Henry IV, Part I, Act V).
The Merchant of Venice has sometimes been called a ‘romance’. A
play about morality, Shakespeare was commenting upon the tenets
of the Old Testament (an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth) that
Shylock insists upon. Humility, wit and dignity are all explored here,
though the play’s anti-Jewish theme made it controversial after the
Second World War. What is clear is that Shakespeare was becoming
increasingly interested in the darker (villainous) side of human
nature.
Romeo and Juliet marks the first great tragedy. Shakespeare attacks
society’s hypocrisy and bigotry in this play about two ‘star-crossed
lovers’. Family feuds, social injustice and the community’s
indifference to people are the causes for the tragedy of the young
couple here. Julius Caesar (1599) is about the slow erosion of a republic,
caused at least partly by the selfishness of politicians. Caesar,
victorious over Pompey, ignores the prophetic warnings about the
‘ides of March’. Statesmen like Cassius and Brutus are worried that
Caesar is assuming the stature of a king. The plot to kill Caesar takes
place under the pretext that the country is greater than the man and
that personal ambition can never be allowed to overwhelm public
interest.
Hamlet (1601), one of literature’s greatest plays, is a Senecan tragedy.

Brooding heroes, vengeance, murder and madness, duels and hate
– the play has it all. One of the great figures in literature, Hamlet,
with his speeches and ‘problems’ of melancholia, desire for revenge
and political justice, became a prototype for the hero in search of his
own self and meaning. The death of his father, his mother’s betrayal,
the worrying politics of the court of Denmark, all prey on Hamlet’s
mind. The turmoil emerges in the form of some of the best known
soliloquies in the language. Hamlet summarizes the human themes
of doubt, despair, ambition and moral dilemmas:
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. – Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd.
In his Jacobean phase, Shakespeare’s darker period, such gloomy
themes and characters multiplied. Othello (1603), dealing with human
jealousy, distrust and vulnerability combines the heroic figure with
that of a braggart. The theme of revenge continues to haunt
Shakespeare here and Iago, the master-plotter, becomes one of his
best creations. He is the finest and most perfect villain, who never
commits a crime himself, but uses the uncertainties and emotional
states of the people around him to his own purposes. King Lear (1605)
is about the failure of an egotistical man who is unable to recognize
evil or virtue. With high drama, Shakespeare plots the downfall of
Lear. It is one of his most grotesque and violent plays with blindings,
murders and battles. Macbeth (1606) is about succession, kingship
and the social order. The play details the moral corruption of a man
driven by personal ambition into betraying his benefactor. Governed
by what he defines as “vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself /
And falls on the other”, Macbeth ruins his kingdom, his family, but
more importantly his self. Shakespeare links the fate of the social
order, subjects and kingdoms to the greed and short-sightedness of
aristocrats and kings. The theme is extended in Antony and Cleopatra
(1607), which deals with dissolving empires and history.5 Coriolanus
(1609) is also about the individual versus history theme. Timon of
Athens (1608) is a caricature of politics in a society where social and
personal relations are done on the basis of cash (there are almost no
women figures, other than prostitutes, in the play).
Among the later plays, The Tempest has endured in popularity. The
play has, in recent decades, often been seen as working out a theme of
colonial domination. One of Caliban’s speeches invites this reading:
This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother,
Which thou takest from me. When thou camest first,
Thou strokedst me and madest much of me, wouldst give me
Water with berries in't, and teach me how
To name the bigger light, and how the less,
That burn by day and night: and then I loved thee

And show'd thee all the qualities o' the isle,
The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile:
Cursed be I that did so! All the charms
Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you!
For I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own king: and here you sty me
In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me
The rest o' the island.
Possession, territory, slavery and love are the central elements in
this unusual play.
Shakespeare’s work provides excellent material for the study of
Elizabethan England as a whole. He explores his age’s concerns with
and interest in, commerce, sexuality, marriage, morals, monarchy,
the family, disease, violence, myth, magic, national identity and
language.6 His plays are unique in the sense they are a strange mixture
of conventional themes and subversive politics.
William Shakespeare’s plays were popular because he dealt with
human imperfections. A master of human follies and eccentricities,
egos and problematic personalities, Shakespeare embodied, for the
first time, human beings in their entire range of features. Rather than
restrict himself to one or two features, Shakespeare developed the
‘complete’ human. His central concern is also with kingship and
power relations between classes as well as genders.7 Authority –
within the family, society and country – is Shakespeare’s great theme.
Most of his great history plays deal with the problems of dynastic
succession. His analyses of the monarchs and aristocratic classes of
England often revealed the human dimensions of the great ‘powers’
– their jealousies, loves and hates. Shakespeare is interesting because
gods and demons have very little to do in his work, since he is mainly
concerned with the workings of mortals. He explores the rights and
duties of human beings, from the worker to the monarch. Justice,
truth, morality and identity are central to Shakespeare’s work.
Villainy and courage, virtue and egotism, all facets of human nature
come under intensive scrutiny as never before in English literature.
He is also exploring what it means to be ‘English’ – the issue of
cultural and national identity. It is also important to note the fact
that since Shakespeare’s time, part of English identity has been

centred around the ‘institution’ of Shakespeare itself. That is, England
has consistently projected itself as ‘the land of Shakespeare’ and his
work has contributed to the making of England’s identity.8
The Jacobean Period (1603–24)
Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, after nearly fifty years on the throne.
James I, who succeeded her, granted Shakespeare’s company an
appointment as the King’s Servants and Grooms of the Chamber,
hereafter to be known as The King’s Men. It is thus interesting that
Shakespeare’s dark plays belong to this period of royal recognition
and public success.
Jacobean literature, in its poetry and prose, shows a great deal of
overlap with late Elizabethan literature (1580s–1600). Satire as a
genre straddles these eras. Poets such as Marston and Hall attacked
vice, moral corruption and lust through their satires, which therefore
functioned as social commentary. Another common form, also
utilizing social situations and concerns like morality, was the morality
play (which often dovetailed into the revenge play). Both these forms
dwelt extensively upon the psychology of the individual and were
primarily the drama of ‘character’. The works of Marlowe and
Shakespeare, for example, with their interest in the psychological,
were explorations of the darker sides of human nature. Part of the
dramatic effect of these plays, especially when dealing with themes
of revenge, lust or betrayal, was due to the language used: both
Marlowe and Shakespeare preferred the colloquial speech patterns
for their works. In sharp contrast, a playwright like Ben Jonson
demonstrates the classical influence, with plays imbued with Latin
learning and classical literature from Petrarch, Ovid and Horace and
the rhetoric and oratory of Cicero. Similar erudite works emerged a
little later in John Donne and the metaphysical poets and manifest
as a preference for unusual images and new metaphors (called
conceits). This learning and classicism did not, however, preclude
the highly personal or the sentimental and the combination is best
exemplified in the religious poetry of Herbert, Vaughan and Donne.
In fact, histories of English literature are rather uncertain as to where

to locate specific authors like Francis Bacon or playwrights like
Thomas Dekker, whose work and professional careers have affinities
with both eras.
PROSE
Features of Jacobean Prose
• Translations became very popular during the late Elizabethan and Jacobean
periods
• Some of the writers were interested in science and learning
• There was a great deal of interest in human psychology and behaviour
• Virtue, evil, faith and human corruption were the subjects of many prose
works, especially sermons and religious writings by priests such as John
Donne and Lancelot Andrewes
• Human character and society was the subject of many prose works.
Character books classified humans into various types
• Traveller’s tales, such as the Richard Hakluyt (edited) anthology,

documented their experience of other cultures and geographical regions
• There was an interest in geography. Histories of the world and maps were
increasingly printed and sold
• There were pamphlets, lengthy prose works and essays on education,

knowledge (both true and false), wisdom, culture and other social conditions
from major writers such as Bacon and Milton.
Learning and theology were central concerns of the prose writers of

the 17 th century. The seventeenth century also witnessed the
emergence of genres like the travelogue, biography/autobiography,
character books, etc. This meant a widening of prose styles, from the
informal and informative (in the travel narratives) to the pedantic
and ponderous (in Burton and More).
King James I wrote pamphlets and theological treatises. His

Demonology (1597), Basilikon Doron (King’s Gift, 1599) and A
Counterblaste to Tobacco (1604) vary in language from Scots to

Southern English. His style is pedantic and heavy and he is conscious
of being a learned monarch. However, as his pamphlet on tobacco
reveals, he was not without a sense of humour.
Francis Bacon (1561–1626), whose career spans the Elizabethan and

the Jacobean eras, was one of the most prolific writers of his time.
Bacon had diverse interests. He wrote on history, travel, government,
politics, ethics, religion, law, gardening, the family, health and
science. The first edition of his Essays, in 1597, contained ten pieces
and the final edition of 1625, fifty-nine! Bacon borrowed the term
‘essay’ from Montaigne, the French writer who popularized this
form. The emphasis in all of Bacon’s work is on ambition, opportunity
and efficiency. Public duty and responsibility towards fellow-citizens
and native culture are equally central ideas. Bacon is also famous
for his constant assertion of the role of knowledge in human
development. His writings inaugurated a whole new era in English
culture – the era of discovery, scientific spirit and rational temper.
The Advancement of Learning (1605), Bacon’s essay on education, was
intended as a gift to James I. It praises education (in book I) and
surveys learning as a basis for a national culture (book II). In Novum
Organum (The New Instrument, 1620) Bacon identifies four ‘idols’ that
lure man away from the truth: the tribe, the cave, the market-place
and the theatre. The New Atlantis (1627) was meant as an extension
of Advancement of Learning. This work is about a land, Solomon’s
House, where new forms of agriculture and mechanics are being
adopted. The Wisdom of the Ancients (1619) reinterpreted classic myths
and figures to suit modern tastes and needs. The Historie of the Raigne
of King Henry the Seuenth (The History of the Reign of King Henry the
Seventh, 1622) is a curious work. Seeking to explore the mind of the
monarch, Bacon undertakes no less than a psycho-biography. Bacon
often used wit, aphorisms and polemical statements to provoke
responses and is known as a master of prose for his extremely pithy,
economical and accessible style. If there is a figure who captures the
English Renaissance’s questioning spirit, humanism and religious
dilemmas, it is Francis Bacon and he is often referred to as the
‘Renaissance Man’.
The other significant prose writer, also interested in the 17th century
English mind, was Robert Burton (1577–1640). His The Anatomy of
Melancholy (1621) was one of the most popular works of the age.
With a wide ranging set of themes – on the need for classical
education, the nature of spirits and marriage – Anatomy is an intricate
prose work in which Burton proposes that ‘love melancholy’ and
‘religious melancholy’ are central constituents of the human
condition. The Anatomy also catalogues human follies. It is an
extraordinary work, full of scientific rhetoric, sensational and
dramatic stories and mock-seriousness, but also with a certain
medical slant (and is therefore comparable to Browne’s Religio Medici,
1642). 9 Burton is full of irony and self-conscious mockery. For
example, in one paragraph, he mocks the entire range of human
professions, and suggests how they ought to be:
If it were possible, I would have such priests as should imitate
Christ, charitable lawyers should love their neighbours as
themselves, temperate and modest physicians, politicians condemn
the world, philosophers should know themselves, noblemen live
honestly, tradesmen leave lying and cozening, magistrates
corruption, etc, but this is impossible, I must get such as I may.
The 17th century is marked by the appearance of a remarkable genre

– character books. Joseph Hall’s Characters of Virtues and Vices (1608)
was one of the earliest examples of this kind of work. The work is
full of types – the wise man, the true friend, the flatterer, the greedy
– to be perceived as examples of the entire human spectrum. He
praises virtue and cruelly satirizes evil. A collection of poems, titled
A Wife, was published in 1613, with the authorship attributed to
Thomas Overbury. A second edition appeared in 1614, with another
22 prose ‘characters’. By August of the same year there were 24
editions, and a total of 83 characters. John Earle’s Micro-cosmographie
(1628) was an entire sequence of such characters. These ‘characters’
became extremely popular, and writers such as John Donne and
others are believed to have written some of these.
Thomas Fuller (1608–61) began with the chronicle form in The Historie
of the Holy Warre (1639), a detailed history of the Crusades. It paid
attention to places, events and people, seeking to provide a kind of
fact-file on the era. In The Holy State and the Profane State (1642)
Fuller tries several genres. There are several characters who stand
for social ‘types’: the good husband and the good wife, the good
child, the virtuous virgin, the kind schoolmaster and so on. What
Fuller does is to add a brief biography of certain personalities as an
illustration of a social type. Thus, a description of the ‘good chaplain’
is followed by a biography of one Mr Perkins, who was Fuller’s
favourite theologian. In the latter parts of the book, Fuller adopts
Bacon’s style of classification, with short pieces on various subjects:
‘Of Plantations’, ‘Of Marriage’, ‘Of Travelling’, etc. In book V, Fuller
contrasts the ‘good characters’ with ‘profane’ ones: for instance, the
witch and the atheist. Fuller returned to his favourite form, history,
with The Church History of Britain (1655), The History of the University
of Cambridge since the Conquest (1655) and The History of the Worthies
of England (1662), a chorographic work which details everything
about the counties of England – from natural commodities to its
eminent men and women.
The 17th century also witnessed the emergence of biographies and

autobiographies as a genre. One of the earliest was Life of Sidney
(1652) by Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke. The autobiographical mode
informed even sermons as seen in the work of the most important
preacher of the age, John Donne (1572?–1631). One hundred and
sixty of Donne’s sermons have survived in print form. They often
reveal the conflicts in Donne himself. For example, in his Devotions
upon Emergent Occasions (1624) he writes: “If I accuse myself of
original sin, wilt thou ask me if I know what original sin is? I know
not enough of it to satisfy others, but I know enough to condemn
myself, and to solicit thee.” This kind of introspection and
autobiographical self-questioning made Donne very popular. The
above tract is also the source of one of Donne’s most quoted lines:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the
continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a
manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death
diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; And therefore
never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Donne is also significant for another reason: after Shakespeare, he
has created the largest number of nautical images in his work.
An interesting volume of prose is Richard Hakluyt’s (1552?–1616)

collection, The Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the
English Nation (1589, 1599–1600). This is a volume of travelogues
that presented the reader with the first complete set of documents
on the exploration of other nations and cultures – from the New
World to the East Indies. Walter Ralegh had produced a similar
document, Discoverie of the large, rich and bewtiful Empyre of Guiana
(1596) in which he described a tropical paradise and this is one of
the major texts in the genre of ‘new world’ writings.
Hakluyt’s successor, Samuel Purchas, produced a sequel, Hakluytus
Posthumous, or Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625) and introduced
documents such as Thomas Roe’s travelogue detailing his experience
in the court of the Mughal emperor, Jahangir, and documents
describing journeys to the New World. These volumes constitute a
body of writing that embody English ideas about other nations and
England itself. They were instrumental in creating a vision of the
world that influenced later travellers to, say, India, and continued
to do so into the age of empire (the 18 th century). Hakluyt and
Purchas’ works are the first documents on English colonialism. They
highlight the English role in the expansion of the world, exploration,
trade and interaction with other races. Writings of this type also
provided the geographical imagery in Renaissance and 17th century
English literature.10
POETRY
Jacobean poetry really comes into its own with the ‘metaphysicals’
and John Donne. The Spenserians, who were indebted to the pastoral
tradition of Edmund Spenser, made considerable impact. However,
this was also the period of Ben Jonson, whom one cannot classify
into either of these traditions.
Jonson, known mainly as a satirist, wrote some fairly accessible poems

which appeared in his Works (1616). He also included songs and
poems in his plays Volpone, Cynthia’s Revells and The Divell is an
Asse. Jonson wrote odes, songs and epigrammatic verse. His poems
seem to be definitions rather than anything else. An example would
be:
Truth is the trial of itself

And needs no other touch
And purer than the purest gold,
Refine it ne’er so much.
It is the life and light of love,
That sun that ever shineth
And spirit of that special grace,
That faith and love defineth.
Jonson’s style of tightly controlled rhythm and diction anticipates
18th century poetry – especially that of Alexander Pope and the other
Augustans.
A poet whose work falls between the Elizabethan and the Jacobean
is George Chapman. His first major achievement was the volume
The Shadow of Night (1594), which included two hymns on Night
and the Moon. Ben Jonson was an admirer of Chapman’s verse and
John Donne is known to have borrowed from his work.
The Spenserians
Features of Spenserian Poetry
• Preferred pastoral themes and subjects
• Wrote narrative poetry
• Idealized the ‘golden age’ of old England
• Also wrote political, moral and religious allegories like Spenser’s The Faerie
Queene.
Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene was published in 1609 and was
followed by his Works in 1611. Spenser influenced several of his
contemporaries. Spenserian pastoral poetry may also have been
influenced by Joshua Sylvester (1563–1618), who translated the
French Divine Weeks, and Works into English in 1605. Sylvester’s
translation is basically a commentary on the early books of the Old
Testament and talks about the creation and early history of the world.
It is very ornamental in style and uses Latin idioms and sentence
structures. Later poets like John Dryden also admitted to his
fascination with this work. William Browne published his Britannia’s
Pastorals (1613, 1616) and Shepherd’s Pipe (1613). George Wither’s

Shepherd’s Hunting (1615) was also in the Spenserian pastoral
tradition. William Basse authored Three Pastoral Elegies (1602) and
Pastorals (1616) in Spenser’s mould.
The brothers Phineas (1582–1650) and Giles Fletcher (1585–1623)

were influenced by Spenser. Sorrow’s Joy (1603) was their earliest
attempt at Spenserian poetry. Their work is characterized by a strong
Renaissance ‘high culture’, the use of narrative and allegory, and
rich imagery. For his Purple Island (1633) Phineas Fletcher used
Spenser’s allegorical mode and John Donne’s analogy mode. The
parts of the human body are described in terms of an island’s
geography, where the island has three ‘metropolies’: belly, breast
and head. From the sixth canto, the theme shifts to Biblical history.
In a later work, Piscatory Eclogues (1633), Phineas substitutes
fishermen for shepherds. Giles Fletcher’s Christs Victorie, and Triumph
in Heaven, and Earth (1610) is also allegorical in tone and form, with
the themes of temptation in the wilderness, the debate between Mercy
and Justice, and the final Resurrection.
The Metaphysical Poets

Features of Metaphysical Poetry
• Uses everyday speech
• Unusual logic and images which were exaggerated and not always easy to
understand
• The metaphors were strange and artificial, and were called ‘conceits’.
• A mixture of wit and seriousness
• A poetry of both great religious fervour and human love/sensuality, often

combining the two in the same poem (Donne’s poems are examples)
• The use of irony and paradox, which makes it difficult to decide whether
the poet is being serious or casual.
The term ‘metaphysical’ came from John Dryden who described the
poetry of John Donne (1572?–1631) as affecting the ‘metaphysics’,
while Dr Samuel Johnson used it as a pejorative in the 18th century.

The term refers to a traditional method of arguing, popularized by a
group of philosophers called the Scholastics.
One of the most popular poets from this period is John Donne.
Only one volume of his poetry was printed during his lifetime and
this was the Anniversaries (1611, 1612). Donne’s satires are a mix
of grand lines and simple truths. He brought colloquial language
into poetry and popularized the conceit, an extended metaphor in
which unrelated things are brought together to express ideas and
emotions. His religious poems, especially his Holy Sonnets are
essentially Petrarchan. Curiously, they show very little ‘devotional’
dilemmas and are mainly concerned with the terrors of Judgement
Day and the speaker’s sense of inadequacy. There is an attempt to
be rational about human moral corruption, death and separation.
Donne’s chief concern is with faith, the psychology of love and
sentiment. Images from zoology, geography, astronomy and the
seasons are used to convey the emotions of lovers (‘Air and Angels’,
‘The Good Morrow’, ‘Love’s Alchemy’). In the great songs (‘The
Canonization’, ‘The Expiration’, ‘A Valediction: Forbidding
Mourning’), Donne used some unusual imagery. For instance, he
described doctors as ‘cosmographers’ and the body as ‘their map’
(‘Hymn to God, in my Sickness’). Donne’s poetry also contains a
good deal of wit and sexual frankness, as exemplified in ‘To His
Mistress Going to Bed’. There is an entire range of emotions: from
frustration and exasperation to ecstasy and often, some deft satiric
touches. The religious poems are mainly sonnets that seek to
contrast the poet’s sense of unworthiness with divine mercy. There
is an extensive use of memory and sense of wonder here. The
language is idiomatic, exclamatory and very dramatic. Examples
would include ‘Goodfriday, 1613, Riding Westward’, ‘A Hymn to
God the Father’ and ‘The Sun Rising’:
Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
(‘The Sun Rising’)
DRAMA
Features of Jacobean Drama
• A new conversational tone emerges in Jacobean drama. The Elizabethans

used rhetoric that was highly stylized while the Jacobeans used everyday
speech
• The main themes are money, property and class. In addition, there is a
new frankness about sexuality and sexual relations
• While there is quite a lot of moralizing, there is also a secret fascination

with the wicked and the corrupt. It is vice that creates the drama in the
play
• Moral and sexual corruption is a constant theme in Jacobean drama,

especially in the tragedies
• There was a great deal of sensationalism and excessive emotional moments

in many of the plays of this period. Hence the term ‘melodrama’ can be
used to describe the Jacobeans
• Jacobean drama is characterized by its realism and taste for satire
• There is nostalgia for the old world’s decencies and decorous behaviour
• The most common themes include lust, adultery, corruption, death, sickness
(both physical and mental), exploitation of the weak, the cruelty of the
aristocrats and upper classes, the eccentricities of human beings, the
hypocrisy of people, dishonesty and family crisis
• The playwright used to include comments and addresses to the audience

explaining the motives of characters or the psychology that causes them
to behave in certain ways.
Most of the dramatists of the Jacobean period wrote under the

influence of either Marlowe or Shakespeare. Thomas Dekker (1572?–
1632) can be considered an example of this trend. Most of Dekker’s
work used fairy tales and romances. He also collaborated with other
writers. With Chettle and Haughton, he did Patient Grissell (1600),
with Middleton he wrote The Roaring Girl (1611) and he wrote The
Virgin Martir (1620) with Philip Massinger. Dekker, who was
extremely good at portraits of London’s streets and the life of the
working class, has a curious mix of romance and realism in his plays.
Dekker’s The Shomaker’s Holiday was first enacted at Queen
Elizabeth’s court in 1599. This play about two princes disguised as
shoemakers, corrupt courtiers and London tradesmen was one of
the first of what came to be called ‘city comedies’. City comedies
used themes of adultery, unhappy marriages, debts and cuckoldry.
Some of the better-known city comedies are Middleton’s A Mad World,
My Masters and A Chast Mayd in Cheape-side (A Chaste Maid in
Cheapside), Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607–
08) and Philip Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1625–26).
Another major dramatist of the period was Thomas Heywood

(1570?–1641), who claimed to have written over 200 plays. Four
major types of Heywood’s plays have been identified: classical plays,
English history plays, realist plays and domestic drama. The ‘classical
plays’ include Rape of Lucrece (1608), Appius and Virginia (1654) and
The Captives (1624). These used early Roman history or adapted the
work of Plautus. Five plays, The Golden Age, The Silver Age, The Brazen
Age and the two parts of The Iron Age, constitute Heywood’s Greek
plays. The ‘English history plays’ include King Edward the Fourth
(1599), initially published without Heywood’s name, and two plays
(Parts I and II) on Elizabeth – If you know not me, You know nobodie:
Or The troubles of Queene Elizabeth (1605). The Fair Maid of the West
(1631) and Fortune by Land and Sea (1655) have now been attributed
to Heywood (they were both staged long before they were printed).
A Challenge for Beautie (1636), The Royall King and Loyall Subject (1637)
and A Mayden-Head well lost (1634) were later plays that worked
with the theme of the Englishman’s honour and generosity. These
are his romances. Heywood’s ‘realist plays’ deal with local issues
and problems. The Wise-Woman of Hogsdon (1638) is set in London
and deals with the life of young men. An earlier play A Woman Kilde
with Kindnesse (1607) also belongs to this category and deals with
the theme of loyalty in various human relationships. The English
Traveller (1633) also dealt with marital relationships, friendship and
the issue of loyalty. ‘Domestic drama’ like A Woman Kilde with
Kindnesse, Arden of Feversham and A Yorkshire Tragedy are mainly
tragedies, set within the confines of the family and concerned with
its financial, moral and physical collapse.
John Webster (1580–1638) is believed to have done one chronicle

play, Lady Jane, which does not survive in print form. He collaborated
with Dekker to produce two city comedies, Westward Ho! and
Northward Ho! His more famous plays are The White Divel (The White
Devil; printed in 1612, though enacted before that) and The Tragedy
of the Dutchesse of Malfy (acted by Shakespeare’s company in 1613).
The White Devil is set in Italy, and depicts Italian society as corrupt
and evil. It is melodramatic and has a variety of bizarre characters
and situations: a brother who seeks to sell his sister, a poisoned
painting, adultery, lust, treachery and murder. It has some great
speeches such as Vittoria’s last:
[…] I shall welcome death
As princes do some great ambassadors;
I’ll meet thy weapon half way.
Dutchesse of Malfy was equally melodramatic, with its poisoned book
(a theme used in a 20th century novel, Umberto Eco’s The Name of
the Rose), masked murderers, a mistaken murder, madness and
revenge. Blood, lust, corruption, greed and intrigue become the subject
of some extraordinary poetry in Webster. The language is extremely
colourful and vivid. It also offers one of the best comments on politics
and politicians:
A politician is the devil’s quilted anvil;
He fashions all sins on him, and the blows
Are never heard […]
George Chapman (1559–1634) is known mainly as the first major
translator of Homer into English. His first surviving comedy, The
Blind Beggar of Alexandria (1596) marks the beginning of the Jacobean
satiric tradition. The main character, Irus, is someone who can
assume different roles in a short time. Disguise is his speciality, and
he acquires women, money and power because of this ability.
Chapman’s Comedy of Humors (1597) and All Fools (1599) were also
quite popular and anticipate the work of Ben Jonson. May-Day
(1602), The Gentleman-Usher (1603) and The Widow’s Tears (1605)
are Chapman’s other plays. Chapman’s plays reveal a certain
cynicism about the world and humanity in particular.
The most significant satirist of the Jacobean period is undoubtedly

Ben Jonson (1572-1637). Jonson is believed to have been associated
with Thomas Nashe’s The Isle of Dogs (1597). This play was so vicious
that the government ordered the closure of all theatres and
imprisoned Jonson (he was also an actor) along with two other actors.
These plays explored the conditions and sicknesses that arise when
the ‘humours’ in the body are in imbalance. The theory of humours,
drawn from the medical science of the time, proposed that blood,
phlegm, choler and melancholy corresponded to the four elements –
earth, air, fire and water. Their proper balance ensured a healthy
mind and body, and any change in the balance led to ill-health and
mental disturbances. Jonson’s plays explored the influence of
excessive emotional states like jealousy, greed, anger or lust, in people.
Thus, in Every Man in His Humour (performed in 1598) – in which
Shakespeare was supposedly one of the actors – we have an overly
suspicious father (Knowell), a wayward son (Edward), a cunning
and treacherous servant (Brainworm) and a braggart soldier
(Bobadill). This play actually inaugurates Jonson’s fame. Jonson’s
concern is with human follies, eccentricities and pretensions.
Stephen, from rural England, thinks he can acquire ‘gentlemanliness’
by studying a book. Bobadill boasts about his abilities with the sword,
while Mathew pretends to be a poet. What Jonson does is to create
particular types in this play – types one could identify with because
they were ‘everyman’ and ‘everywoman’, i.e., humanity in general.
Thus, the gullible countryman, the pretentious poet, the stern justice
are all types. Jonson demonstrates how every person’s deceit stands
revealed in due course when Justice Clement arrives and delivers
his judgement. In this, Jonson is using satire to comment on his age.
Jonson’s satires about the pretentiousness of English society proved
very popular. Every Man Out of His Humour was enacted in 1599.
Cynthia’s Revels (1600) is a masque that glorifies Queen Elizabeth.
Jonson also did some Roman plays, Sejanus (1603) and Catiline’s
Conspiracy (1611), a play about the ultimate uselessness of ambition.
However, they have not acquired the kind of popularity that his
satires have. Poetaster (1601) is also set in Rome and the chief
character is the poet Horace. Jonson had satirized John Marston, a
fellow dramatist, in Poetaster and this is part of what is known as
the ‘War of the Theatres’. In fact, dramatists such as Marston, Dekker
and Jonson often used caricatures of their rival dramatists to mock

them. Volpone, the Fox (1606), The Alchemist (1610) and Bartholomew
Fair (1614), from Jonson's later period, are enduring satires and
continue to be taught and read all over the world as fine examples
of Jacobean satire. Volpone, with its unforgettable characters, Volpone
and Mosca, shows how the clever outwit the foolish by using the
latter’s vanity and greed. The Alchemist is full of tricksters (especially
such memorable ones as Subtle and Face), each trying to deceive the
other. Both deceivers and their victim (Sir Epicure Mammon) are
finally disappointed. Bartholomew Fair is also about a similar theme.
Swindlers at the fair reveal the falseness of people’s respectability.
Hypocrisy and so-called morality about marriage, ego and pride,
are all satirized in this play.
John Marston (1576–1634), the ‘victim’ of Jonson’s satire Poetaster,

wrote plays exclusively for the entertainment of the fashionable English
class. Jack Drum’s Entertainment (1600), Antonio and Mellida and
Antonio’s Revenge (both in 1602), What You Will (1607), The Malcontent
(1604), Parasitaster (1606) all used Italian settings. Marston’s work is
well known for its extremely violent language and for being full of
ghosts and dead bodies (especially Antonio and Mellida). Marston’s
work is almost definitely classifiable as melodrama.
Cyril Tourneur (1580–1626) is known for two plays: The Revenger’s
Tragedy (1607) and The Atheist’s Tragedy (1611). The Revenger’s
Tragedy has all the classic Jacobean elements: intrigue, morality,
melodrama, tragic-satire and comedy. The characters are rather
bizarre and the scenes morbid (such as the Duke kissing a poisoned
skull and dying). The Revenger’s Tragedy depicts characters who take
pleasure in causing the deaths of or cruelty to others and is another
example of the Jacobean exploration of the darker aspects of the
human mind.
Thomas Middleton (1580–1627) collaborated with Dekker for The
Roaring Girl (1611). One of his early comedies was A Trick to Catch
the Old One (1608), in which he satirizes university dons, doctors,
wives and country gentlemen. There are no real ‘heroes’ in this play.
It has an interest in the common man and the less-important citizens
of the kingdom. Middleton’s famous tragedies are Women, Beware
Women and The Changeling. Women, Beware Women portrays a society

full of corruption and moral depravity. The Changeling is about lust
and hypocrisy. In the play, Beatrice is worried about guarding her
honour, even though she has been responsible for two murders. The
play deals with the moral degradation of individuals and explores
the dark, ugly side of human nature. Middleton mixes both tragedy
and comedy in his satires. The plots are compressed and the stories
move very rapidly. The verses in his plays are very stylized and hence,
manage to convey a sense of the absurd.
Among the forms of Jacobean drama is the masque (see the box
Masques). These were semi-dramatic pieces, sometimes used as part
of certain festivities.
Masques
Masques came into prominence during the reign of James I. They were
usually performed in the royal court on special occasions. They involved
the use of expensive costumes, stage settings and special effects. The masque
usually served a moral purpose – to demonstrate the victory of good over
evil. Inigo Jones was undoubtedly one of the most important stage designers
of the age. He introduced the proscenium arch (a picture frame behind
which the stage action appears) to the stage. They were also used to celebrate
the arrival of important people in London and were called ‘royal entries’.
Such ‘entries’ or masques were either staged or part of a procession (also
known as pageants) and had music, dialogue and pantomime. In court
entertainments, dances were held in which the ‘maskers’ – gentlemen and
noblemen – chose partners from the spectators (Henry VIII is known to
have participated in such dances, having forgotten that he was a monarch).
Actors and guests therefore mingled in the performance.
Peele’s Arraignment of Paris introduced short masques into the play. Samuel
Daniel’s Vision of the Twelve Goddesses (1604) celebrates the new monarch
(James I). George Chapman, Francis Beaumont, Thomas Campion, James
Shirley and Ben Jonson were some of the more important writers of masques.
Milton’s Comus (1637) was a masque that celebrated a woman’s faith and
virtue and is a good example of the political and social uses of plays. In his
masque, Milton shows how a woman’s virtue is guarded by the gods, because
she is a woman of strong faith. Indeed, Milton’s argument is that her belief
in her virtue is itself a weapon against temptation and evil (represented in

the masque by the evil magician Comus). In his tract on divorce (1643),
Milton argues: “that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary”.
Jacobean drama is known for its elaborate satires and its realist
drama. However, there were also some romantic playwrights, among
whom John Day (1574–1640) is perhaps the best known. Day wrote
more than twenty plays, often in collaboration with other writers.
The Travels of the Three English Brothers (1607; with William Rowley
and George Wilkins) is a travel drama that explores the thrill of exotic
foreign spaces. Isle of Gulls (1606) was an adaptation of Sidney’s
Arcadia. Humor Out of Breath (1608) is the story of two dukes – one
banished and the other seizing power – and their six children who
pair off in marriage. The Parliament of Bees (1641) is a set of twelve
scenes in couplet verse, dealing with a variety of human types
symbolized in bees.
Francis Beaumont (1584–1616) was arguably the wittiest playwright
of this generation. The Woman-Hater (1607), dealing with a single
day in an Italian city, revolves around the woman-hater Gondarino
and the glutton Lazarillo. His The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607)
may have been influenced by Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Here Rafe, an
apprentice, pretends to be a ‘Knight’ with a pestle rather than a
sword. The ‘audience’ provides asides and comments in an interesting
experiment in multi-level (i.e., stage and audience) theatre. Beaumont
collaborated with John Fletcher (1579–1625) to produce the
sentimental play dealing with love and honour, The Maid’s Tragedy,
the tragicomedy Philaster and A King and No King. Together they
produced some fifty plays. Lustful tyrants, virtuous women and
themes of honour and virtue populate The Maid’s Tragedy, one of
the more popular works of Beaumont and Fletcher. Fletcher later
collaborated with Philip Massinger to produce Thierry and Theodoret,
The False One, The Prophetess, The Lover’s Progress, The Custom of the
Country, The Elder Brother and other plays.
The Caroline Period (1625–49)
The Caroline Age is taken to be between 1625 and 1649 and is named
after Charles I, England’s king at the time. An age known mainly
for its political tensions between King Charles I and the Puritans
(and, not the least, for Charles’ attempts to exhibit his power to his
subjects, often through massively expensive tableaux, triumphal
arches and masques), this age is also historically significant as
marking the expansion of colonization in the ‘New World’.
PROSE
Non-fiction
Features of Caroline Non-fiction
• Highly personal
• A degree of scepticism about religious and philosophical truths, best seen

in the work of Thomas Browne
• Influenced by the intellectual movements and figures of the age: Pascal,

Montaigne, Descartes, etc
• An interesting mix of science and philosophy as well as science and religion

in almost all the writings of this period
• The writings were usually on controversial issues such as Faith and the
‘right’ religion
• The debate between Reason and Faith gathers fresh intensity and actually
marks the early moments of European Enlightenment thought
• Also influenced by the discoveries being made about other cultures and
worlds through European travels in Asia and Africa.
Thomas Browne (1605–82), a physician by training, published his

private journal, Religio Medici (‘A Doctor’s Religion’), in 1642. It is
an interesting attempt to combine Christian theology and ethics with
scientific precepts. Browne solves the dilemma of choosing between
science and religion by declaring that we should inquire into God’s

works, ‘inquiry’ being an acceptable term to describe scientific work
during the 17th century. He, therefore, reads a holy book (Bible) with
the ‘book of Nature’. The latter he calls “that universal and public
manuscript, that lies expans’d unto the eyes of all”. In Religio Medici,
Browne attempts to provide scientific explanations for Biblical
miracles. In the second part of the book, Browne discusses charity as
the most sought-after virtue of all. The work was extremely popular,
going into 9 editions before 1660 and 5 editions in Latin translation.
Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646) is a huge work discussing
the various errors in our ideas about minerals, vegetables, diseases,
animals, etc. He refutes superstitions and several established opinions
about various topics and seeks to provide a warning against such
dangerous acceptance of uninformed opinions. Browne’s
Hydrotaphia, or Urn Burial (1658) is often used as an example of the
greatness of 17th century prose style. It is, at least partly, a detailed
scientific report on the various Roman funeral urns discovered near
Norwich (where Browne had his medical practice), but concludes
with a magnificent essay on death itself.
Other prose writers of the period include: William Chillingworth

(1602–44), Owen Feltham (1604–68) and James Howell (1593–1666).
Significant prose writers such as Burton and Fuller (discussed above)
continued publishing well into mid-seventeenth century.
Fiction
The fiction of the Caroline period is a rather insignificant body of
work, when compared to the major prose essays and pamphlets.
Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moon (1638) was a fantasy about
an imaginary voyage. Robert Anton’s Moriomachia (1613) was a
romance with chivalric and pastoral themes, but adopting Cervantes’
style. John Reynolds published a collection of violent, erotic stories,
The Triumphs of Gods Revenge Against … Murder (1621, 1635). Kenelm
Digby published his Loose Fantasies (1628), an autobiographical
narrative with fictional elements about his courtship and marriage.
POETRY
Cavalier poetry is perhaps the best known of Caroline poetry. The
religious poets of the period – Herbert, Crashaw and others – also
figure under the ‘metaphysicals’ in some literary histories. Here they
are discussed under Caroline poetry.
The Religious Poets

Features of Caroline Religious Poetry
• Faith, repentence, spiritual progress, perseverance and grace are the central
themes of Caroline religious poetry
• It explores the tension between worldly human desires and the will of God
as well as the needs of the body and the call to spiritual duties
• All poets declare their inner turmoil in unconditionally accepting the word
of God
• Introspective and very personal, the poets are rarely interested in the larger
issues of religion and culture. Their poetry is about a very personal
experience of faith and religion.
The poetry of George Herbert (1593–1633) is often a portrait of his

emotional responses to divine subjects and God. Adoration and
anxiety, happiness and uncertainty about his relationship with God,
haunt Herbert’s verse. What is important is that Herbert’s poetry is
intensely personal, and deals almost exclusively with ‘his’ God. That
is, the poems deal with a man’s ‘individual’ experience of God and
faith. Well-known poems such as ‘The Collar’ and ‘The Pulley’ capture
the not-very-easy relationship of God and the poet. The tone is often
defiant at the beginning, but concludes with a humble acceptance
of God. In ‘The Collar’, the speaker says:
I struck the board, and cry’d, No more.
I will abroad.
What? Shall I ever sigh and pine?
The poem then concludes with a totally different tone:
But as I rav'd and grew more fierce and wilde

At every word,
Methought I heard one calling, Child!
And I reply’d, My lord.
The conceits that Herbert uses convey great moral truths and religious
beliefs. Here is an example of such a conceit:
Christ left his grave-clothes, that we might, when grief
Draws tears, or blood, not want an handkerchief.
The primary theme in his poetry is the tension between worldly
desires and the need to surrender oneself to God. Herbert often draws
a connection between the external church and the inner temple of
the spirit and soul.
Richard Crashaw (1612–49), a poet who uses the conceit mode to
excess, divides his major book, Steps to the Temple (1646), into religious
and secular parts. The finest poems in this collection are addressed
to Saint Teresa, a source of inspiration to Crashaw. He exhibits a
significant interest in the human body and its functions.
John Davies (1565–1618) wrote some severely religious-metaphysical
poetry in intricate patterns of rhymes and structure. Francis Quarles
(1592–1644) began with a series of poems that were Biblical in theme,
A Feast for Worms (1620), and followed it with Sion’s Elegies (1624)
and Divine Fancies (1625). However, his most popular work appeared
much later. Quarles published his Emblems in 1635, a volume that
has gone through more than 50 editions since then. The volume
consists of five books. Each of the books contains 15 emblems or
symbolic pictures, which are then interpreted in the poems that follow.
Henry Vaughan (1622–95) was not discovered as a poet until 1847.
His Poems, with the Tenth Satire of Juvenal Englished (1646) and Olor
Iscanus (The Swan of Usk, 1651) were mainly love poems, verses to
friends and translations of Latin verse and prose. Influenced by
Herbert’s volume, The Temple, Vaughan started writing religious
poetry. Silex Scintillans (Fire from the Flint) appeared in 1650.
Vaughan’s famous poem, ‘The Retreat’, is a good example of the
religious mysticism that influenced his work. Vaughan does not have
the anxieties of Herbert, preferring to deal with a world of innocence.

Images of fruitful and fertile nature, childhood and enchantment
are characteristic of Vaughan’s verse. ‘The Retreat’ represents a series
of typical Vaughan images:
O how I long to travel back,
And tread again that ancient track!
That I might once more reach that plain
Where first I left my glorious train;
From whence the enlightened spirit sees
That shady City of Palm-trees.
Self-conscious and exuberant, Thomas Traherne (1636–74) has often

been compared to the American poet Walt Whitman. There is a sense
of wonder in Traherne’s vision of the world. He makes little attempt
to either rationalize or philosophize about what he sees. Instead,
there occurs a sense of joy and extravagance in his images. There is
also a very intense relationship with nature in his work. His Centuries
of Meditations (discovered in a notebook and published in 1908) is
mystical with a sense of wonder. He writes of rural England in
Centuries of Meditations as “new and strange at first, inexpressibly
rare, and delightful, and beautiful”. These two qualities connect him
to the metaphysicals and the other religious poets. It moves between
personal and Biblical history. The sense of union with Creation – a
common theme in Traherne – is presented as a vision from Heaven
itself. Human life needs to regain this vision which was once available
in childhood, a theme also noticeable in Vaughan’s ‘The Retreat’.
The Cavalier Poets

Features of Cavalier Poetry
• Gallantry and chivalry are central to the Cavaliers
• The poetry was full of wit, smart responses to situations and clever
complimentary remarks to the lover
• Flattery and high praise of the lover’s beauty and wisdom become integral
to this kind of poetry
• The poets often complain about their lover’s indifference. There is also the
agony of separation in many of the poems
• A lot of eroticism is visible here
• Unlike the metaphysicals, the cavaliers did not engage in serious debates
and their poetry is much more simple than the metaphysical poetry of
Donne and others
• The lines in these poems are almost always short and precise, though the
images may seem exaggerated today.
Thomas Carew (1594?–1640, pronounced ‘Carey’) is associated with

the Cavalier school of poetry along with John Suckling, John Cleveland
and Richard Lovelace. Carew wrote courtly poetry, love verses and
poems with advice for young girls. There are also detailed poems on
country hospitality such as ‘To Saxham’, which mark the rise of a
whole genre of country-house poems. They describe the warmth and
welcome of the aristocrat’s country-house. In fact, in Elizabethan
England, one of the features of nobility was their ability to host Queen
Elizabeth – this usually meant the noble’s house footed the entire bill
for the Queen’s visit.11 Other examples of poems in this genre are
Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’ and Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’.
John Suckling (1609–42) was one of the court poets during the reign
of Charles I. His poetry is full of wit and sharp social comments.
There is a refreshing frivolity about his work, even when he is dealing
with more ‘serious’ subjects such as love. Here is an example of
Suckling’s casual tone:
Out upon it, I have loved
Three whole days together,
And am like to love three more,
If it prove fair weather;
Sections of Robert Herrick also carry a certain cavalier tone:
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.
(‘To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time’)
John Cleveland (1613–58) was quite popular in his time as a wit and
poet. The Rebel Scot (1644) was his best known piece. Richard Lovelace
(1618–57) is best known for his poems to Lucasta and Althea (‘To
Althea, From Prison’). His poems and songs were set to music by
eminent musicians during his day. One of his most quoted lines is
his plea for freedom in ‘To Althea, From Prison’, a poem that is directly
influenced by the harsh Puritan government under Oliver Cromwell:
“Stone walls do not a prison make/Nor iron walls a cage.”
The Tribe of Ben

The ‘tribe of Ben’ is a term used to describe poets who were influenced by
the great satirist Ben Jonson. Thomas Randolph and William Cartwright are
two important members of this ‘tribe’. Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace and
John Suckling were also included in this group. They wrote satires and
pastoral poetry that used a lot of naughty wit, elaborate conceits and
descriptions, to make social comments. In this they were influenced, like
Jonson, by the Classical poets and adopted a polished style. In fact, this
poetry is noted for being highly stylized (perhaps in order to indicate the
author's learning and sophistication) and had parallels with a tradition in
the Mannerist paintings of the period, where the emphasis was on style
and artifice rather than naturalism. The Cavalier poets' artifice and conceits
are, therefore, Mannerist.
George Wither (1588–1667) wrote some courtly poetry in his Prince

Henry’s Obsequies (1612), Epithalamia (1613), a marriage poem
celebrating Princess Elizabeth’s wedding, and the deeply moralist
Abuses Stript and Whipt (1613). This volume details the various
passions that damage man. The purpose is clearly to deliver a moral
message as seen in:
I will teach my rough satiric rimes
To be as mad and idle as the times.
Wither also wrote some pastoral poetry in his Fidelia (1615), Fair-
Virtue, the Mistress of Philarete (1622) before returning to satire in
Wither’s Motto.
Of the minor poets, William Drummond (1585–1649) is perhaps the
best. He is famous as a Scotsman who used London dialect in his
work. Drummond preferred the sonnet form, and was influenced

by Philip Sidney. There are some love poems and a large number of
what can be called ‘complimentary poems’, written in praise of
important people and friends. An example of the latter would be his
Forth Feastings, where the personified Scottish river, Firth of the Forth,
praises James I’s virtues and wisdom. It was written to celebrate
James I’s visit to Edinburgh.
DRAMA
Of the major dramatists in this period, Philip Massinger (1583–1640)
was one whose loyalty remained firmly with the English aristocracy.
The Bondman (1623), The Great Duke of Florence (1627), Believe as You
List (1631) and The Maid of Honor (1632) all deal with the monarchy,
palace intrigue and politics and the aristocrats. Massinger also had
plays on religious themes such as Renegado (1624) and his co-authored
play with Dekker, The Virgin-Martyr (1624). Massinger’s best plays
are his comedies. A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1626) and The City
Madam (1632) are both set in contemporary England. Sir Giles
Overreach in the former is the prototype of a corporate boss, with
his henchmen and constant scheming.
John Ford (1586–1655) collaborated with Dekker to produce The Sun’s
Darling (1624). Ford was fascinated by psychological theories and
Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) was a significant
influence in his career. This influence is visible in his The Lover’s
Melancholy (1629), ‘Tis a Pity She’s a Whore (with romantic incest as
its theme), The Broken Heart (a play about sexuality) and Love’s Sacrifice
(about moral/mental adultery). Perkin Warbeck (1634), about
impostors and monarchy, was one of the popular history plays of
the time.
A group of dramatists influenced by Ben Jonson, sometimes referred
to as the ‘School of Jonson’, produced a substantial body of work
during this time. Nathan Field (1587–1620), who had acted in
Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels and Poetaster, produced two rather naughty
comedies set in London, A Woman is a Weathercock and Amends for
Ladies (both around 1612). He also collaborated with Massinger to
produce The Fatal Dowry (1618). Richard Brome (1590–1652) also

benefited from Jonson’s patronage. He collaborated with Dekker to
produce Late Lancashire Witches (1634). He is supposed to have written
fifteen plays, of which The Antipodes (1638), a play about travel and
travel-literature, and A Jovial Crew (1641) are the better known.
The most prolific playwright of this generation is James Shirley (1596–
1666). Shirley’s The Doubtful Heir (1640), The Gamester (1633), The
Young Admiral (1633) and The Cardinal (1641) were performed before
the royal court and the elite (King Charles had expressed an interest
in Shirley’s work). His comedies seem to anticipate the great comedies
of Restoration playwrights and mark the transition moment from
the Jacobean-Caroline to the Restoration. Among his comedies are
The Witty Fair One (1628), The Lady of Pleasure (1635) and The Triumph
of Peace. He also wrote a masque, The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses
(printed in 1659).
With these playwrights, the period of Caroline drama comes to an
end. It also marks the beginning of a drought in English drama, for
in 1642, public playhouses were closed by an Act of Parliament.
The Interregnum (1649–59)
The Interregnum is the period between the civil war and the
Restoration of monarchy with Charles II. The literature of the
Interregnum marks the transition between the Caroline and
Restoration periods. In a period of social and political uncertainty,
the literature was heavily influenced by new political ideas.
PROSE
The prose, in this Puritan period, dwelt exclusively on moral issues
and themes of virtue, duties and ethics. Jeremy Taylor (1613–67), a
very distinguished Anglican theologian of the period, was a prolific
writer. Almost his entire work is about religion and devotional
subjects (as a result he was called ‘the Shakespeare of the Divines’).
The Liberty of Prophesying (1647) was a tract on religious toleration.

The Ductor Dubinatium (1660) was about what Taylor called ‘cases
of conscience’. His most famous works are The Rule and Exercises of
Holy Living (1650) and The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (1651).
Taylor is significant for his emphasis on religious tolerance and ethics.
Izaak Walton (1593–1683) is one of the most fascinating figures of
the age. A self-educated shopkeeper from London, Walton was
friendly with several writers of his time. His Life of John Donne is one
of the most enduring works of the age and is a standard component
of every subsequent edition of Donne’s prose and poetry. He later
wrote a life of George Herbert. His The Complete Angler (1653), though
apparently about fishing, is actually a philosophical meditation full
of echoes of poetry from Drayton, Phineas Fletcher, Marlowe, Ralegh
and other Elizabethan poets.
John Milton’s prose in Areopagitica (1644) and the tracts on education
(1644) and divorce (1643) are masterpieces of argumentative prose.
His first major polemical text was Of Reformation in England and the
Causes that Hitherto Have Hindered It (1641). In Areopagitica (the name
comes from Areopagus, the site of the meetings of the Council of State
of ancient Athens), Milton does not plead for unlimited freedom.
What he suggests is that censorship before publication prevents a
free and open debate about the issues. Once a work is published and
is deemed politically, morally or socially dangerous, it may be tried
by law. Milton writes: “He who kills a good book kills reason itself,
kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.” Milton argues that the
suppression of an entire book is a massacre of the human spirit, for
it “slays an immortality rather than a life”. He also suggested that
the parliament of a country such as England would not deny freedom.
He wrote:
Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so
necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of
error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with
less danger scout into the regions of sin and falsity than by reading
all manner of tracts, and hearing all manner of reason? And this is
the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read.
Richard Baxter (1615–91) wrote an enormously popular book of
devotion, The Saints’ Everlasting Rest (1650), with an emphasis on
goodness, virtue and the promise of ‘everlasting rest’. A more

moderate Puritan, Baxter underlines the joys of innocence, while
attacking those inclined to either religious disputes or those who
complain about their religious duties. Baxter writes:
And oh! The sinful folly of many of the saints, who drench their
spirits in continual sadness, and waste their days in complaints
and groans, and so make themselves , both in body and mind, unfit
for this sweet and heavenly work.
This is also the kind of non-pedantic style – of plain speaking,
everyday speech, but conveying deeper moral and religious meanings
– that was adopted by a group of philosophers and thinkers from
around mid-17th century. This group, known as the Cambridge
Platonists, included Benjamin Whichcote (1609–83), Henry More
(1614–87), John Smith (1616–52), Ralph Cudworth (1617–88) and
Nathaneal Culverwel (1618–51). This group sought to combine
Christian faith with scientific reason. Smith’s Select Discourses (1660)
spoke of the divinity of human reason. Henry More was well read in
ancient philosophy and occult/mystical writings. He was also
influenced by Spenser and the notion of ‘mutability’ (change with
time). He argued that even Plato was teaching the same philosophy
as Christianity. He also wrote some pedantic poetry, published under
the title Philosophical Poems (1647). The writing of the Cambridge
Platonists is full of mystical references and images. They tolerated a
variety of opinions and appealed to reason and freedom of thought.
Cromwell was fond of them and saw them as a moderate influence
in those turbulent times.
One of the most important prose writers of the time, and one whose
ideas influenced many generations of political and social thinkers
was Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). Influenced by the mechanistic
philosophy of Descartes, which saw everything in nature – including
human bodies – as machines, Hobbes tried to combine the new ideas
from science and political theory. Thus, in Leviathan (1651) he writes:
For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in
some principal part within; why may we not say that all automata
(engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as does a
watch) have an artificial life? For what is the heart, but a spring;
and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many
wheels, giving motion to the whole body […].
Hobbes argued that since no man is completely safe, men enter into
a contract and form a government. There has to be an absolute power
which can ensure the safety of the state and individuals. All laws
and morals are derived from this absolute authority. If one challenges
this authority, then man may have to return to the state of nature,
which Hobbes famously described as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish
and short”. This is the origin of the idea of ‘absolutism’. Hobbes also
wrote extensively on philosophy, social theory, rhetoric and art.
Robert Filmer (1588–1653) in his Patriarchia: A Defence of the Natural
Power of Kings (1680, but written between 1635 and 1642) tried to
explain the origins of government. Gerrard Winstanley (1609–76) in
his pamphlets pleaded for universal suffrage, regular elections and
religious tolerance.
Margaret Cavendish (1623–73), the first woman to be allowed into
the Royal Society of London (a scientific society which included major
scientists such as Robert Boyle and the philosopher Rene Descartes),
wrote treatises on mathematical philosophy, poetry and tracts on a
variety of themes. Her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy was
a critique of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia and was followed by
another such exposition, The Blazing World. Her letters are detailed
chronicles of her age. The range of her interests – from Shakespeare
to food, natural philosophy to theatre – reveals Cavendish as a brilliant
woman, whose works, like the work of many women writers, have
been neglected until recently.
POETRY
One of the major poets of the interregnum period is Abraham Cowley
(1618–67). Cowley produced his first volume of poetry when he was
15 years old. His collection, The Mistress (1647), has nearly 100 poems,
dealing mostly with Cowley’s supposed suffering because of his lady
love’s indifference. His poem in praise of the Royal Society, attached
to Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society, is a good example of
the scientific temper of the age.
Andrew Marvell (1621–78) is, after Milton and Donne, arguably the
most widely read 17 th century poet in English curricula today.
Intellectual and sentimental with just the right measure of wit and
irony, Marvell’s famous poems extend the conceit of the metaphysical
poets like Donne into more understandable images. For instance,
the sheer power and beauty of Marvell’s memorable lines in ‘To His
Coy Mistress’ (surely one of the most anthologized poems in the
English language) has remained unmatched:
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime
[…]
But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
The theme of ‘carpe diem’, meaning ‘seize the day’ or ‘capture the
moment’, already present in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen, is
central to the poetry of Marvell, Herrick and Waller. The emphasis
here is on the shortness of life, and the poet urges his lady love to
make the most of available time.
Robert Herrick (1591–1674) was influenced by the classical (Latin)
poets and Ben Jonson (whom he called ‘Saint Ben’). Some of Herrick’s
work appeared in the 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s Poems. His
subjects included English rural life and fairy tales, and often took
recourse to feminized and floral images. Pastoral beauty is perhaps
Herrick’s most common theme. He utilized folk and village festivals
such as May Day and Harvest Home as subjects for his poetry. Noble
Numbers (1648) is a volume of Herrick’s religious poems. In his
secular poetry, collected in the volume Hesperides (1648), he deals
with the themes of death, love and temporality.
Edmund Waller (1606–87) is best known as the author of ‘Go, Lovely

Rose’. Waller also produced complimentary poems on Charles I,
Charles II, Oliver Cromwell and the Prince of Orange. William
Davenant (1606–68) and John Denham (1615–69) are poets who
are at the transition point between the earlier era and the Restoration.
Denham’s most famous poem Cooper’s Hill (1642) inaugurates a form
of poetry imitated by no less than Alexander Pope: the topographical

poem. Here the speaker looks down from a height and describes the
scene below. It includes some classic hunting scenes. Local scenery,
nationalist sentiment and circulating myths all merge in the
descriptions.
However, the pride of place among the poets of this generation goes
to a man whose work has fascinated critics and readers for centuries.
John Milton (1608–74), known as the author of the greatest epic
poem in English literature, Paradise Lost, wrote both prose and poetry.
Milton’s first collection appeared in 1645 though he had already
achieved success and popularity with ‘On the Morning of Christ’s
Nativity’ (1629), published at the age of 21. He tried his hand at
several forms: sonnets, Latin poems, the pastoral (of which ‘Lycidas’
is the most famous) and the epic. ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’ dealt
with opposite states of the human mind. In the first poem, he deals
with the removal of melancholia, celebrating “jest and youthful jollity,
/ quips and cranks, / and wanton wiles”. In the second poem, about
pensive melancholy, Milton seeks the company of a “pensive nun,
devout and pure / sober, steadfast, and demure”.
Paradise Lost (the first edition appeared in 1667; the ‘Arguments’

were added in subsequent imprints of this edition. In 1674, a ‘revised
and augmented’ edition with more preliminary matter was
published, with its now-standard 12-book structure) dealt with the
creation of the world, the fall of man and the power of God. It deals
with man’s inability to live according to divine order. The larger
philosophical debate here is between free human will and chance as
well as the moral consequences of disobedience. But what Milton
does is to show the ‘fall’ of man from a divine to a human condition.
Adam is truly human: mortal, suffering and seeking liberty.
Temptation is the key theme here as in Comus. Paradise Lost uses, in
addition to Christian theology, pagan mythology, recent scientific
theories and classical literature (in terms of the form, his epic is closely
modelled on Homer and Virgil). It is filled with sounds and colours,
and is often dramatic. Here is a famous description of heavenly light
from Book III:
Hail holy Light, offspring of Heav’n first-born,
Or of the Eternal Coeternal beam
May I express thee unblam’d? Since God is Light

And never but in unapproached Light
Dwelt from Eternity, dwelt then in thee,
Bright effluence of bright essence increate
Or hear’st thou rather pure Ethereal stream,
Whose fountain who shall tell? […]
If Paradise Lost is about the temptation of man, Paradise Regained
(1671) is about the devil’s attempted temptation of Christ in the
wilderness. Jesus Christ in this unusual poem (far less dramatic and
also far less read than Paradise Lost) is more human than anything
else. In addition, the transformation of Satan into something near-
heroic was an unusual move for the Puritanical age.
The play Samson Agonistes, published along with Paradise Regained

in 1671, emphasizes, according to some critics, the element of divine
revenge in the Old Testament rather than the atonement of the New
Testament. The entire drama takes place in Samson’s soul. The
blinded Samson, the failed hero of Israel, is taunted by his wife Dalila
(who was the cause of his downfall) and Harapha, the representative
of the victorious Philistines. Eventually Samson reconciles himself to
the purposes of God. His death is a triumph and a redemption. It
ends with the famous lines, “And calm of mind, all passion spent”.
Samson and Christ become examples of what humanity ought to be
rather than what it is.
Notes
1. For a history of the English language that takes into account its social
and political contexts, see Gerry Knowles’ A Cultural History of the
English Language (1997).
2. It must be noted here that the growth of English literature through
the Renaissance is rooted in the martyrdom of many important writers,
editors and publishers who wrote and created what they thought was
right even in the face of social and monarchical objections, often at the
cost of their lives. The growth of literary thinking is intimately
connected to the history of the quest for democratic expression, and

the history of censorship.
3. Clearly the ‘New World’ was central to the Elizabethan imagination.
Travel and exploration produced an enormous amount of writing about
new places. These narratives helped the construction of European/
English identity because they showcased differences between races,
cultures and geographical regions. Europe defined itself in opposition
to and in its difference from the ‘new’ cultures that were being
discovered. Many studies of the European ‘discovery’ of and encounter
with the ‘New World’ and other non-European cultures exist today.
See Greenblatt’s Marvelous Possessions (1991) and Tzvetan Todorov’s
The Conquest of America (1984), among others.
4. Friendship, especially among virtuous people, is an enduring theme in
Elizabethan England. Shakespeare’s use of the theme is rooted in related
themes of loyalty, virtue, betrayal and cuckoldry (among friends) circulating
during the time. For a recent study of the theme of friendship in
Shakespeare’s time, see Laurie Shannon’s Sovereign Amity (2001).
5. For a recent study of the empire theme in Shakespeare, see Heather James’
Shakespeare’s Troy (1997).
6. Here is a brief reading list of specialized studies of these themes in
Shakespeare and the Elizabethan age: on Shakespeare and disease, see
Jonathan Gil Harris’ Sick Economies (2004); for violence in Shakespeare, see
Derek Cohen’s Shakespeare’s Culture of Violence (1993) and RA Foakes’
Shakespeare and Violence (2003); for market and commerce, see Douglas
Bruster’s Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (1992); for sexuality,
see Valerie Traub’s Desire and Anxiety (1992) and Catherine Alexander
and Stanley Wells (ed.) Shakespeare and Sexuality (2001); for law, see
BJ Sokol and Mary Sokol’s Shakespeare, Law, and Marriage (2003); on
audiences for Shakespeare, see David Richman’s Laughter, Pain, and
Wonder (1990) and Kent Cartwright’s Shakespearean Tragedy and its
Double (1991).
7. Among more recent studies of Shakespeare’s theme of monarchies and
subjects, see Constance Jordan’s Shakespeare’s Monarchies: Ruler and Subject in
the Romances (1997).
8. There are plenty of contemporary studies of the institutionalization

of Shakespeare and his role in the construction of an English national
identity. See, for example, Jonathan Hall’s Anxious Pleasures:
Shakespearean Comedy and the Nation-State (1995), John J Joughin’s
edited collection, Shakespeare and National Culture (1997) and Andrew
Hadfield’s Shakespeare, Spenser and the Matter of Britain (2004).
9. ‘Anatomy’ is a central term, metaphor and image in Renaissance and
early modern writing as evidenced in several titles of prose and poetry.
Dissection and medical science grew rapidly during this period and
influenced several thinkers. For a brilliant account, see Jonathan
Sawday’s The Body Emblazoned (1995).
10. Travel, geography and the discovery of new lands informs Renaissance
writings. The sea route to India and the English experience of Indian culture,
the New World and other regions of the earth enter Renaissance and early
modern writing in a crucial way. For a study of the travel, landscape and
geography theme, see John Gillies’ Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference
(1994) and WGL Randles’ Geography, Cartography and Nautical Science in the
Renaissance (2000).
11. Festivities, food and social occasions are central to almost the entire
Renaissance literary tradition, from Skelton and Shakespeare to the Cavaliers.
In fact, the religious and social significance of feasting and fasting have
been the subject of some of the most fascinating cultural histories of the
period. See Caroline Bynum’s now classic work Holy Feast and Holy Fast
(1987). For a recent study of Shakespeare’s festivities, see David Ruiter’s
Shakespeare’s Festive History (2003).
4. Re-reading the Renaissance
Postcolonial Shakespeare
Traditional literary history treats Shakespeare as the best thing that

happened to the English language, English culture and the literature
of the entire world. From the 1980s, there has been an opposition to
this reading of Shakespeare’s greatness. Critics adopting many
different theoretical and ideological positions have found problems
with Shakespeare’s characters, plots and politics. Contemporary
critical readings prefer a highly political reading of Shakespeare’s
literary texts, paying attention to various ideological biases and
political issues in his work. This includes the (1) colonial,
(2) patriarchal, (3) racial, (4) heterosexist and (5) bourgeois themes
embodied in the plays.
The Renaissance presented itself in certain ways – humanist, rational-

scientific, universal, liberal – by masking very serious oppressive
structures. Homosexuals, women, other races, the working classes,
and vagrants and the homeless were exploited, controlled and often
became victims of social power structures. Social structures, claiming
to be universal and humanitarian, served the interests of the ruling
classes. Dissent was put down in the name of social harmony and
order. England began to fashion itself as a country favouring justice,
fair play and equality by comparing itself with other races (which
were being discovered through the voyages). In fact, England’s image
of itself was constructed precisely through this racial ‘other’, the
theoretical opposite of what England was. Terms like ‘fair’ became
associated with the colour of the skin when Europe met the dark-
skinned races (as shown by Kim Hall in Things of Darkness, 1995.
Also, see Richmond Barbour's Before Orientalism, 2003).
The upper classes imposed their coat of arms on the land through
maps and local histories that erased the working classes from the
Re-reading the Renaissance 107
landscape. While homosexuality, transvestitism and alternate

sexualities were common within Renaissance and Shakespearean
England, they were not talked about and were often the subject of
strong condemnation from the law and the church. ‘Masculinity’
and ‘femininity’ were constructed as concepts during this period.
That is, concepts and norms of what masculinity/femininity meant,
how men and women were supposed to behave and the relations
between them, were framed during this period.
Postcolonial theory seeks to re-read English literary texts in the context
of European colonialism of Asian and African nations. Colonialism
was a feature of the period between 1600 and the mid-20th century.
It meant that white men and women governed the lives – social,
economic, political and, often, cultural – of Asian and African
populations. It was a white versus black situation, where one side
(the white) had power over the other (the black).
Colonialism, in addition to being a military and political condition,
was also a very powerful cultural event in the history of Africa, Asia
and South America. Through literature, the arts, media and
education, colonial rulers often presented certain images of the
Asians – as poor, helpless, traitorous, primitive, feminine and such.
All such images were used to justify white colonial rule as a saviour
of the Asian race. Thus cultural forms such as museums and literary
texts popularized specific ideas and images of the two races. Culture
becomes a site of politics and power-play. Postcolonial readings of
literary texts show how race and power are disguised in the texts’
themes. They seek to expose the political, racial, masculinist
(patriarchal) politics that are encoded into literary themes.
In the case of Shakespeare in particular, there has been considerable
postcolonial interest. Since Shakespeare remains the most popular
(canonical) literary figure in the world, it is natural that he and his
works must be seen less as individual than as institutions. How does
Shakespeare come to occupy such a high position? What are the
politics that make Shakespeare a popular staged, studied, researched
and critiqued text? These are some of the questions that postcolonial
studies ask.
Postcolonial readings of Shakespeare address the following themes

and issues in his works:
• Shakespeare’s work often gives a fictional account of actual

political conditions of slavery, colonial conquest and native
suffering. A play like The Tempest, with its pair of Prospero and
Caliban, is actually about the colonial rule of the white man over
a native inhabitant.
• It looks at how English language itself expands its vocabulary in
the new context of colonialism. Encountering new races and
cultures, English required a new vocabulary to describe what
the Englishmen and women saw. Thus, the term ‘fair’ began to
describe not only a sense of justice, but also a complexion. ‘Black’
becomes associated with evil and, by extension, the ‘black race’
itself becomes the symbol for evil (Kim Hall, 1995).
• It explores how race and gender are crucial elements of the

Shakespearean context. As noted above, The Tempest is about
racial conquest. Othello and The Merchant of Venice also look at
the power relations between white and non-white races. These
plays are about the ‘differences’ between races and cultures. They
deal with the cultural encounter of races (African or Jewish versus
English or European) and cultures (native or non-white versus
English or European).
• It looks at how Shakespeare’s plays comment on (or quietly erase)
the English politics of acquisition and colonization. For instance,
Terence Hawkes has argued that Henry IV is about the English
attempts to bring Wales under English power. King Lear is also
about land ownership.
• Ania Loomba, Michael Neill and others are interested in
unravelling the politics of Shakespeare’s global popularity. They
note that he is extremely popular even in the non-English
speaking world. In a way, there are ‘Shakespeares’ appropriated
by writers and performers worldwide. Reviews of Shakespeare’s
performances, film adaptation, translation, curriculum and such
efforts radically appropriate his work for all people. David
Re-reading the Renaissance 109
Johnson, for instance, looks at how education policy-makers in

colonial Africa sought to spread the study of Shakespeare there.
• Such readings argue that while Shakespeare may have been using
European history as his immediate source, the themes often
involve a history of other nations. That is, the history of Europe
in Shakespeare’s period ‘cannot’ be separated from its political
context of colonial travel, colonial power and racial politics.
Further Reading
Braunmuller, A.R. and Michael Hattaway. Ed. The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance
Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Brooke, Tucker and Matthias A. Shaaber. The Renaissance (1500-1660). A Literary

History of England, Vol. II, Ed. Albert C. Baugh. Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1975.
Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1980.
Jardine, Lisa. Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of the
Shakespeare. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
Loomba, Ania and Martin Orkin. Ed. Post-Colonial Shakespeares. London and
New York: Routledge, 1998.
Orgel, Stephen and Sean Keilen. Ed. Shakespeare and Gender. New York: Garland
Publishing, 1999.
Sharpe, J.A. Early Modern England: A Social History 1550-1760. London: Edwin
Arnold, 1987.
Summers, Claude J. Ed. Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England:

Literary Representations in Historical Context. New York: Haworth Press, 1992.
SECTION TWO
From the Restoration to
the Enlightenment
Timeline
RESTORATION PERIOD (1660–1700) 1660
Restoration of the Stuart dynasty Pepys begins his diary (1660)

with the ascension of Charles II;
Royal Society of London founded
(1660)
1667 Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667)
Dryden’s Of Dramatick Poesie, An

Essay (1668)
Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)
Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel

(1681)
Ascension of James I (1685)
Newton’s Principia Mathematica
(1687)
Glorious Revolution and the
Ascension of William of Orange 1688 Behn’s Oroonoko (1688)
(1688) and James II replaced
Locke’s Human Understanding
(1690)
ENLIGHTENMENT PERIOD (1700–70) 1700 Congreve’s Way of the World
(1700)
Ascension of Anne (1702)
Newton’s Opticks (1704)
Act of Union, Scotland joins
England and Wales to form the
1707
United Kingdom (1707)
Tatler launched (1709)
Spectator launched (1711)
Pope’s Rape of the Lock (1712)
Ascension of George I (1714)
1719 Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
Ascension of George II (1727)
1740 Richardson’s Pamela (1740)
Smollett’s Roderick Random
(1748)
Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749)
Johnson’s Dictionary (1755)

East India Company wins the Burke’s Sublime and Beautiful
1757
Battle of Plassey (1757) (1757)
The first two volumes of Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy (1759)
Ascension of George III (1760)
East India Company wins the Walpole’s Castle of Otranto
Battle of Buxar (1764) (1764)
Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield
(1766)
First edition of Encyclopaedia
Britannica (1768)
Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker
(1771)
American War of Independence 1776 Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of

(1776) Roman Empire, Smith’s Wealth
of Nations and Paine’s Common
Sense (1776)
Sheridan’s School for Scandal
(1777)
Johnson’s Lives of English Poets
begins (1779)
French Revolution (1789) Blake’s Songs of Innocence

1789 (1789)
5. Backgrounds
The period between 1660 and 1780 is known variously as the Age of
Enlightenment, the Age of Sensibility, the Neoclassical Age, the
Augustan Age or the ‘long eighteenth century’.1
After the Civil War and the Restoration of Charles II to the throne of
England, an event commonly known as the ‘Restoration’, England
sought stability in society, politics and religion. Early victories in the
Anglo-Dutch wars (1665–67) were later negated by heavy losses.
Peace was restored after King Charles signed the Treaty of Breda
(1667). The Parliamentary system was now in place and two parties,
the Tories and the Whigs, emerged. Charles II proved to be an
indifferent king and the intellectuals – who were undoubtedly
encouraged and patronized by him – were soon disillusioned.
Protestantism established itself more firmly, interrupted by a Catholic
reign, that of James II (1685–88). In 1688, James II was replaced by
William of Orange in a coup that was almost entirely peaceful and
is known in history as ‘the Glorious Revolution’ or ‘Bloodless
Revolution’. Commerce became even more important during the
period and it was greatly facilitated by the founding of the Bank of
England in 1694.
In terms of intellectual contexts, ‘reason’ and ‘rationality’ replaced

speculation and abstract reasoning. The age rejected a mere passive
acceptance of handed-down truths, preferring empirically verifiable
and studied ideas. There was a distrust of established authority in
the sciences and the leading intellectuals of the age refused to accept
anything other than the evidence of their eyes. The founding of the
Royal Society of London in 1662–63 marked the start of a scientific
enterprise that facilitated the rise of an Enlightenment sensibility in
England. The Society was a step in the institutionalization of scientific
enquiry and was frequented by scientists and natural philosophers.
The increasing use of the telescope and microscope revealed worlds
114 From the Restoration to the Enlightenment
too distant and/or too small to be seen by the naked eye. Further,
travellers’ accounts from their journeys to various parts of the world
proved that there were other people, cultures and civilizations
(Jonathan Swift’s 1726 novel Gulliver’s Travels is a mocking account
of such journeys to different parts of the earth). A new theory of the
cosmos and a new vision of the world had to be created. The ‘Plurality
of Worlds’ theory, propagated by Giordano Bruno (for which he
was eventually burnt at the stake as a heretic), proposed that there
are several worlds other than the earth. Fontenelle’s Conversations
on the Plurality of Worlds (1686), originally in French, was translated
and became very popular.2
The Enlightenment
The Enlightenment refers to the rise and growth of modern rational and
scientific thought in Europe from the last years of the 17th century through
the 18 th century. The Enlightenment was marked by a rigorous
mathematical and scientific approach. Experimentation and logic were
revered. The discovery of other worlds and races enabled Europe to
rationalize and classify human beings along a scale. This form of
intellectualism marked the rise of ethnography in its studies of the earth
and its people. Classification and tables were central to the process of
organizing knowledge about people, nature and the world.
Alongside the idea of multiple worlds was the increasing recognition

of the variety of humankind itself. With the discoveries of other
cultures and countries from the Renaissance period, the boundaries
of humanity itself had to be pushed further. However, such an
expansion was not always pleasant or welcome. This was the time
that Europe’s slaving voyages increased. England entered the slave
trade in 1660, though Portugal and Spain had indulged in it for a
long time. Other people and races began to be seen as primitives
and, therefore, suitable to be slaves to the superior European races.
The 18th century is actually the period of the founding of European
colonialism in Asian and South American countries. In India, with
the Battle of Plassey (1757) and Buxar (1764), the English East India
Company would establish itself as a ‘political’ power.
Backgrounds 115
The political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) argued in The

Leviathan (1651) that society is a complete, organic whole
(‘Leviathan’) and the individual must be the subject of state control
in order to live peacefully. In one of his most famous passages, Hobbes
wrote:
Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of War, where every
man is enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time
wherein men live without other security, than what their own
strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In
such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit
thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth, no
Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by
Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and
removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the
face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society;
and which is worse of all, continual fear, and danger of violent
death; And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Men form a contract with each other in order to end this state of
primitive and brutal existence. Hobbes rejected miracles as the mere
effect of human ignorance rather than an act of God, an argument
that annoyed the English Church. He was later banned from writing
any more religious or political works and his books were publicly
burnt. Hobbesian empiricism and rational thinking was significant
as this age demonstrated a shift (a shift noted from the mid-17th
century, in fact) from speculative philosophy to natural philosophy
– relying on experimentation, observation and mathematical
reasoning.
Religion returned to traditional notions of God’s supremacy
(exemplified in Milton’s Paradise Lost, completed in 1667). After the
revolution of 1688 and the firming up of Protestant ideology, there
was little questioning of prevalent religious beliefs. The England of
the 17th century was restless due to the acrimonious relations between
the Catholics and Protestants. The Quakers (or the Religious Society
of Friends, founded by George Fox) also pleaded for religious
tolerance.
Perhaps the single most influential thinker of this period was Isaac
Newton (1642–1727), President of the Royal Society and Lucasian
Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge (a Chair

now occupied by a man many people consider to be in the same
category as Newton and Albert Einstein – Stephen Hawking). He
produced treatises that significantly altered established views of the
world. In his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) and
Opticks (1704), Newton proposed that Nature functioned according
to specific and intelligible laws. However, for Newton, these laws
were themselves the result of an intelligent creator. Newtonian
mechanics paved the way for the late 18th-century Enlightenment,
and was to remain the dominant mode of thinking until the
Einsteinean revolution of the 20 th century. What is however not
known is that Newton also dabbled in alchemy, the popular pseudo-
science of his age, and even wrote books on the subject! An
extraordinarily innovative thinker and experimenter (he is said to
have poked a long needle into the corner of his eye to test colour
perception), Newton set the agenda for theoretical physics for
centuries.
The Act of Union in 1707 joined Scotland to England and Wales.
Minor resistance to the Hanoverian dynasty came in the form of
James II’s grandson: Bonnie Prince Charlie. Called the ‘Young
Pretender’, Bonnie Prince Charlie led the rebellion against the
Hanoverians in 1745. In the Battle of Culloden (1746), he was
defeated, thus marking the end of Stuart attempts to regain the throne
of England. However, ‘revolution’ continued to trouble the British
imagination in the form of the American Revolution of 1776 and the
French one of 1789. Other disturbances that shook the country’s
peace during the period included the two Jacobite Rebellions of 1715
and 1745, the ‘Porteous Riots’ of 1736 in Edinburgh and the Gordon
Riots of 1780 in London. These disturbances indicated public anger
at London’s governance and authoritarianism. It also gestured at
the Scottish dissatisfaction with England’s regime (England feared
that the Scots would take French help to rebel against England).
Thus the 18th century, in the aftermath of the Restoration and the
Bloodless Revolution, was not really a peaceful period. The mass of
the people remained unmoved by London’s attempts to impose social
order. Rapid changes in urban life upset established rhythms and
caused anxiety.
Backgrounds 117
London became the centre of England, as commercial enterprises,

banking and the arts began to be concentrated in the city. The result
was a large-scale migration of job-seekers and workers from country
to city. William Hogarth (1697–1764) captured some of the frightening
and ugly aspects of London’s city life – especially its suffering, poverty,
cruelty and hypocrisy – in paintings like ‘Beer Street’ and ‘Gin Lane’.
Hogarth’s work best illustrates the disrupted social order of the age.
The coffee house culture, for which the period is famous, took culture
out of drawing rooms and into the streets. Men – they were invariably
men – sipped coffee and discussed current events, politics and literature.
These meetings eventually resulted in long-lasting and influential
relationships and friendships in English literature.
There was a pronounced enthusiasm for Greek and Latin literature

as evidenced by the numerous translations, and this interest gives
the age its name ‘Neoclassical’. It is significant that many 17th century
authors like Isaac Newton wrote in Latin – the language of
respectability and erudition. Literary figures like Alexander Pope
turned to Greek and Latin texts, translating and adapting them into
English. The neoclassical turn was perhaps heralded by William
Davenant (1606–68) as early as 1650 in his epic Gondibert.
The emphasis was on the prosperity and health of the entire society.
Class consciousness was very strong. This is the age when sensibility
and taste become key words. Taste, the age believed, could not be
acquired and was something obtained by virtue of birth in the correct
family or class. Men were ‘gentlemen’ and women, ‘ladies’ because
of their class and taste. The very idea of a ‘gentleman’ gets further
established during the Augustan age and the long 18th century. Hence,
manners and mannerisms and the appropriate taste in the arts were
central to social status in 18th century English society.
Notes
1. ‘Augustan’ was a term derived from the name of the Roman Emperor
Augustus (27 BC–14 AD). In the Roman age, it marked the flourishing
of literature and poetry, with three of the greatest Roman writers all
living around this time: Virgil, Horace and Ovid. The term was used
to describe the early to mid-18th century in English literature, when
writers like Addison, Pope, Swift and Steele imitated the works of the
Roman writers. In fact, these English writers admitted to admiring the
Romans, and of imitating them (proved by Pope’s adaptations of the
Horatian ode, for example). The term ‘Age of Enlightenment’ indicates
the intellectual changes that mark this period. The rise of rationalism
is the key feature of the Enlightenment. Rationalism also led to a process
of organization, where everything from plants to words was tabulated,
organized and classified through the 1700–1800 period, often called
the ‘long eighteenth century’. This is the period of the dictionary, the
encyclopaedia and other such classificatory systems which sought to
provide models and paradigms for knowledge. The term ‘Age of
Sensibility’ gestures at the renewed interest in the senses, and the tensions
that characterize debates about the supremacy of reason versus the
primacy of ‘feeling’. ‘Neoclassical’ is used to describe this period because
many of the writers and artists had an interest in the classical Greek,
Roman and Latin literatures and arts. The revival of ‘classical’ forms
of art is termed ‘neoclassical’.
2. For an account of this extremely influential theory, see Karl Guthke’s
pioneering work The Last Frontier (1990) and Mary Baine Campbell’s Wonder
and Science (1999).
6. Literature of the Restoration
The period immediately after the restoration of the monarchy in

England is characterized by an emphasis on scientific thinking –
which generated the first attempts at popular science writing. The
‘restoration’ of the monarchy also renewed the debates about the
king’s power, the rights of the people and the nature of society. The
English public sphere and civil society became the subject of debate,
even as the literary imaginations turned to scandals, domestic troubles
and human relationships as the subject of plays and fiction.
PROSE
Non-fiction
Features of Restoration Non-fiction
• Essays ranged from philosophical to personal, covering gardening,

environment, family, love affairs and politics
• Diaries that ranged in content and form from the personal to the
philosophical/reflective were also quite common
• Genres included prose epistles, dialogues, pamphlets and periodicals
• Advice essays and biographies were popular
• Literary criticism and history writing, especially religious and political history,
were also common
• Scientific investigations were reported as news items in learned periodicals
• The plain, direct style was preferred to rhetoric
• The emphasis was on information delivered in an unadorned style.
An interesting development in the Restoration period was the rise of

an English prose that sought to popularize science. The Royal Society
appointed a committee for the improvement of the English language

in 1664. The committee included Dryden, John Evelyn, Edmund
Waller and Bishop Thomas Sprat. Literature and science came
together here, for many of these figures had interest in both areas.
English prose in earlier ages tended to be pretentious and loosely
structured. In sharp contrast, Enlightenment prose sought clarity of
style and directness of manner. Logical argument and sound common
sense was preferred over florid and erudite prose. Francis Bacon,
with his voluminous works in the last decades of the 16th century,
was already seeking the style that was to become popular with the
essayists and polemicists of the Age of Enlightenment.
Thomas Sprat (1635–1713) prescribed methods of writing and speech,
recommending ‘positive expressions’, ‘clear senses’, ‘native senses’
and a ‘mathematical plainness’. Sprat’s under-recognized The History
of the Royal Society of London, for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge
(1667) was an account of the rise and flourishing activities of the
Royal Society. This influential tract, over 450 pages long, was also a
detailed and erudite account of the history of European philosophy.
Today, he is famous mainly for this eulogy of England’s premier
science organization – though, interestingly, he argues that all
European ‘learning and civility’ came to them from the ‘eastern’
nations. In addition, Sprat’s reworking of Baconian ideas of
knowledge, empiricism and natural philosophy was a remarkable
study of the intellectual climate of the age.
Jeremy Taylor (1613–67), chaplain to Charles I during the Civil War,
was a prolific writer. His prose style was extravagant though elegant.
A supreme example of his prose is The Rule and Exercises of Holy
Dying (1651):
Take away but the pomps of death, the disguises and solemn bug-
bears, the tinsel, and the actings by candle light, and proper and
fantastic ceremonies, the minstrels and the noise-makers, the women
and the weepers, the swoonings and the shriekings, the nurses and
the physicians, the dark room and the ministers, the kindred and
the watchers, and then to die is easy, ready and quitted from its
troublesome circumstances. It is the same harmless thing that a
poor shepherd suffered yesterday, or a maid servant today; and at
the same time in which you die, in that very night, a thousand
Literature of the Restoration 121
creatures die with you, some wise men, and many fools; and the
wisdom of the first will not quit him, and the folly of the latter does
not make him unable to die.
The richness of tone, the irony and the sheer exuberance of prose
that marks this passage is vintage Taylor. His sermons combined
imagery from everyday life with Christian themes and poetic
metaphors.
Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) is famous for his Diary. The Diary covers
the 1660–69 period (the first entry is for 1 January 1660, when Pepys
turned 27) and is a social document of considerable importance
because it discusses the events of the Restoration, the coronation of
Charles II, the 1665 plague, the Fire of London (1666) and the Dutch
Wars. Exacting in detail and comprehensive in scope, Pepys’ diary
is also a great humanist document informed by the intellectual
currents of his age (Pepys was the President of the Royal Society in
1684). It is also frank in its details, often providing information about
his amorous activities. The Diary is interesting because Pepys is never
apologetic about his behaviour or attitudes, and does not seek to
invent a role for himself – he was an epicurean, a man who loved
life, and the Diary is a public assertion of this. It, therefore, becomes
a public document of private behaviour. Written in a very readable
style, filled with gossip and rumours, the Diary reveals the everyday
life of a 17th century intellectual: the details of expenses, the love
affairs, the colleagues, the tea-drinking, the administrative hassles
and London city’s entertainments.
John Evelyn (1620–1706), the other famous diarist of the period,
stands in sharp contrast to Pepys. A man of many interests, ranging
from gardening to numismatics and experimental science, Evelyn
wrote a good deal of prose. His Fumifugium (1661) was an
environmental tract railing against the smokiness of London. In
Sculptura (1662), Evelyn discussed engraving. Sylva (1664) is one of
the most significant environmental documents of the 17th century
and one of the first to suggest active reforestation. Evelyn’s diary is
very unlike that of Pepys and Evelyn has no confessions to make. It
deals with Evelyn’s travels on the continent, life in London and finally,
retired life in rural England.
The heavily documented historical work of Gilbert Burnet (1643–

1715) dealt with the political events and religious dilemmas of the
time and was a new form of history writing. Burnet’s Memoirs of the
Lives and Actions of James and William, Dukes of Hamilton (1677) was
an unusual history because it reprinted the documents on which the
historical interpretation was based. Later, Burnet published History
of the Reformation of the Church in England (1679), which was also
cast in similar fashion with extensive documentation and evidence
for arguments. He inaugurated the trend of accumulated factual
research.
Abraham Cowley (1618–67) wrote about a dozen personal essays.

Written in plain style, with little rhetorical flourish or bombast, the
topics ranged from the autobiographical ‘Of Myself’ to ‘The Danger
of Procrastination’. Some of the more political essays include
Discourse by way of Vision concerning the government of Oliver Cromwell
(1661) – an essay quoted by David Hume in the next century. Joseph
Glanvill (1636–80) wrote a series of ‘skeptical’ essays in philosophy,
religion and science. In an important piece, ‘Essay Concerning
Preaching’ (1678), he pleaded for a simple and accessible style of
preaching. Using a plain, informal style, Glanvill recommended an
open if inquisitive mind as essential to knowledge-acquisition in
works such as Scepsis Scientifica (1665; originally published as Vanity
of Dogmatizing in 1661).
Sir William Temple (1628–99), diplomat and statesman, produced
two kinds of essays: reflective and socio-political. ‘Observations upon
the United Provinces of the Netherlands’ (1673) and ‘Memoirs of
what Past in Christendom from 1672 to 1679’ (1692) are the more
popular of the political type. In Of Ancient and Modern Learning (1690),
Temple contrasted the two approaches to knowledge and learning –
of the old world and the modern. Personal essays like ‘Of Health and
Long Life’ revealed scepticism towards science and religion. He also
wrote some essays on landscape and gardening, of which the most
famous is ‘Upon the Gardens of Epicurus’. Dr Johnson admitted that
he had followed Temple in matters of style and argued that Temple
was the “first writer who gave cadence to English prose”. Jonathan
Swift, who would eventually become famous for his fiction, was
Temple’s secretary for a period of time. Thomas Burnet (1635–1715)
wrote a heavily pedantic work in natural philosophy, A Sacred Theory

of the Earth (1684), in which he discussed the various topographical
features of the earth – from hills to plains – in terms of their divine
significance.
John Locke (1632–1704), active in the politics of the 1670s and ‘80s,
is one of the most influential philosophers in the European tradition.
He, along with Hobbes, constitutes the centrepiece of English
philosophical thought in this age. His Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690) explored the limits of human reason, before
concluding that the mind has no knowledge other than the one it
attains through the senses. The mind is born a tabula rasa, a blank
slate, on which experience inscribes real knowledge. Experience is
of two kinds – sensation and reflection. Sensation tells us about the
world while reflection tells us about the workings of our own mind.
Ideas are of two kinds. Simple ideas are those that come from
experience, which are then combined by the mind into more complex
structures. The mind undertakes three main actions here. It combines
simple ideas into complex ones. Then it places these ideas alongside
each other without necessarily combining or uniting them so that it
can view the ideas simultaneously. Finally, it draws general
abstractions from these ideas and particulars. Objects possess two
qualities: primary and secondary. Primary qualities are those that
do not depend on us – the object’s texture, being in rest or motion
and occupying space. Secondary qualities are the powers of the object
that produce in us ideas of smell, colour or taste. These ideas are
produced, argued Locke, by the interaction of our perceptual
apparatus with the powers of the primary qualities of the object.
Arguing against mere speculation, Locke proposed that only a
thought that adds to practical progress and the ‘conveniences of
life’ is important. It is not necessary to understand the working of
the human mind or the intricacies of nature for everyday life. Locke
also rejected the passive acceptance of received opinion, arguing that
humans need to use their own reason and logical thinking to arrive
at the truth.
Locke was also opposed to all forms of authoritarianism and was a

strong proponent of the rights of citizens. In his Two Treatises on
Government (1690), Locke opposed the divine right theory of
monarchy. He argued that men are born with some ‘natural rights’.
They enter into a ‘social contract’ – thereby forming the government
– by giving up some rights in order to survive. He defined political
power this way:
Political power, then, I take to be a right of making laws with penalties
of death, and consequently all less penalties, for the regulating and
preserving of property, and of employing the force of the community,
in the execution of such laws, and in the defence of the common-
wealth from foreign injury; and all this only for the public good.
The role of a legitimate civil government, arrived at through the social
contract, is to safeguard the rights to life, liberty, health and property
of the citizens (he defined a citizen as a man of ‘large, sound, round-
about sense’). If a state encroaches upon natural rights, Locke argued
in a controversial but influential thesis, popular rebellion against the
king/government is justified.
The Quakers produced numerous pamphlets, journals and histories
in order to promote religious tolerance and their view of religion as
a psychological state and an ‘inner’ experience, both cast ‘in the light
of reason’. George Fox, William Penn and Robert Barclay wrote
extensive tracts on these Quaker themes and their body of work is
an important constituent of the Restoration essay.
Another group of writers who contributed to the religious debates
of the age were the Deists. The Deists believed that the works of
nature proved the existence of God, an argument that influenced
philosophers like Lord Shaftesbury (1671–1713; This is the Third Earl
of Shaftesbury, who is also named, like the First Earl of Shaftesbury,
Anthony Ashley Cooper. The First Earl of Shaftesbury is the Absalom
in Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel). Shaftesbury, under the
influence of Deism, declared: “all nature’s wonders serve to excite
and perfect this idea of their author.” Emphasizing the ‘Book of
Nature’ as a manifestation of God itself, authors like John Ray (The
Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation, 1691) appealed
to reason and opposed ‘historical’ accounts of Biblical revelation.
Instead, Deists argued, one should trust only ‘natural religion’, the
universal religious perceptions and beliefs of men.
George Temple, the Marquis of Halifax (1633–95), wrote an

enormously popular work called Character of a Trimmer in 1688 in
which he tried to capture the spirit of the 1688 revolution. After the
death of Charles II, Halifax published Character of King Charles II, in
which he provided a sketch of the king’s personality. In the same
year, he also published The New-Year’s Gift: or, Advice to a Daughter
(1688), a famous tract offering advice on diverse topics such as
religion, vanity and pride, housekeeping, family and, in general, the
social system. These are basically informal essays on character.
Journals and periodicals increased in number especially after the
lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695. The newspapers were political
tools and the major parties had their own voice in papers like Flying-
Post (Whig, 1695–1731) and Post-Boy (Tory, 1695–1736). Sir Roger
L’Estrange’s Observator (1681–87) aimed to explain and explicate
the complex political issues of the day through a staged dialogue
between the ‘observator’ and a party ideologue or functionary. Ned
Ward’s London Spy (1698–1700) was an interesting periodical that
sought to expose England’s tourist spots, lowlife and prisons. Ward
used contemporary slang, songs, and vulgar dialogues to sustain
the interest in ‘lowlife’ – a forerunner of modern-day yellow
journalism and the tabloid. Ward’s pamphlets of voyages and travels
are less well-known, though they carry the same intense wit and
nastiness. In his Trip to New England (1699), he declared: “Bishops,
Bailiffs, and Bastards, were the three terrible persecutions which
chiefly drove our brethren to seek their fortunes in our foreign
colonies.”
The journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society published
essays, informative articles and scientific data from 1666. Robert
Boyle, John Locke and other eminent figures contributed to this
journal. The topics ranged across botany and zoology, geology,
history, weather and scientific experiments. The Transactions also
carried news reports of monstrous births, deformed babies and what
we today call the ‘paranormal’. It carried reviews and extracts from
travelogues and helped popularize conditions and features of the
newly discovered parts of the world. In fact, a particularly fascinating
feature of the Transactions was an item called ‘Inquiries’. These
‘Inquiries’ were a series of questions sent out with travellers to foreign
lands and covered almost every conceivable topic – from poisonous

snakes and rainfall to history and sartorial fashions. John Locke sent
out such ‘Inquiries’ for Surat and Robert Boyle prepared a list of
items to be inquired into and observed by travellers. These ‘Inquiries’
thus enabled the construction of a knowledge-base about places like
India and Arabia. They also contributed in a huge way to Western
(European and English) images of Asian nations.1
The epithet of ‘first major English literary critic’ could easily be applied
to John Dryden. His insights have influenced the course of criticism
ever since. Much of his criticism occurred as prefaces. In 1668, he
published Essay of Dramatic Poesy, an essay in the form of a
conversation. Neander, among the four conversationalists, is perhaps
Dryden’s voice. While Dryden’s essay clearly admires the ancients,
it also pleads for modernization and advancement in the arts. He
thus rejects Roman comedies and French drama. Dryden pleaded
for naturalness, sophisticated wit and structural tightness. He praises
Shakespeare famously as “he needed not the spectacles of books to
read Nature”. While he finds irregularity of structure attractive –
Shakespeare is his example – he admits that this is also a difficult
form to achieve. He admires variety and has this to say about
Shakespeare:
Shakespeare … who many times has written better than any other
poet, in any language … is the very Janus of poets; he wears almost
everywhere two faces; and you have scarcely begun to admire the
one, ere you despise the other.
In his later prefaces, Dryden argued that tragicomedy was the purest
and finest form of drama.
Fiction
Features of Restoration Fiction
• Used the epistolary form
• Allegories were common
• Gossip, scandal, sexual and marital intrigues with slightly salacious content
became popular
• Romances and love stories used stock characters and situations
• The rogue or rake became a popular type.
A very popular genre in fiction of the Restoration period was the

French romance, more samples of which were being translated into
English. La Calprenède’s Cassandra (1652, 1667, 1703) and Cleopatra
(1652–59) were translated and abridged. Works by Gomberville and
D’Urfé were also made available. These romances provided material
for heroic plays. John Reynolds’ Flower of Fidelitie (1650), John
Crowne’s Pandion and Amphigenia (1665) and Roger Boyle’s
Parthenissa (1654–69, 1676) are examples of English adaptations of
such romances. Epistolary narratives were a common genre. Works
such as Charles Gildon’s Post Boy Rob’d of his Mail (1692–93) and
Tom Brown’s Adventures of Lindamira (1702) were essentially gossip-
tales. Travel letters were widely popular. John Reynolds also
published a range of crime stories in 1621 and his The Triumphs of
Gods Revenege against the crying, and execrable Sinne of Murther went
into multiple editions, and was expanded into God’s revenge against
the crying and execrable sin of adultery (1679). Richard Head and Francis
Kirkman produced some fictitious biographies of so-called rogues.
John Bunyan (1628–88), whose work was startlingly different from
such dramatic and rakish tales, towers above all other fiction writers
of this time. Bunyan’s first work, Grace Abounding (1666), was an
autobiographical narrative about his conversion and life as a
preacher. The work was written while he was in prison (he was
imprisoned for preaching and was in prison for almost 12 years). It
was during this time that he composed one of the most famous
openings in English literature:
As I walk’d through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a
certain place, where was a Den; and I laid me down in that place to
sleep: and as I slept, I dreamed a dream. I dreamed, and behold I
saw a man cloathed with Rags, standing in a certain place, with
his face from his own House, a Book in his hand, and a great burden
upon his back. I looked, and saw him open the Book and read
therein; and as he read, he wept, and trembled; and not being able
longer to contain, he brake out with a lamentable cry; saying, “what
shall I do?”
From here begins the journey of the man, Christian, in the greatest
fictional work of the Restoration, Pilgrim’s Progress. Presented in
the form of dramatic episodes, Faithful, Despair, Hopeful, Diffidence
are characters we meet on the way. Bunyan’s work is clearly an
allegory (see the box Allegories) about faith and salvation, forcing
us to stop and think about the implications of what is being narrated.
There is, in addition to theology, some social satire (in the ‘Vanity
Fair’ section, for example). Bunyan also published The Life and Death
of Mr Badman (1680), an allegory warning readers against
wickedness. In 1682, he published The Holy War, an allegory about
an entire town that is taken over and retrieved by the faithful. In
1684, he published the second part of Pilgrim’s Progress, dealing with
the journey of Christiana and her children. Pilgrim’s Progress, along
with Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, is perhaps one of the most
significant works in Christian literature.
Aphra Behn (1640–89) wrote plays, short stories and longer fiction.
Her Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave was part of a collection of Behn’s
stories published in 1688 and became her most popular work. The
love story of Oroonoko and Imoinda reverses the colonial, European
stereotype of the ‘brutal’ and ‘primitive’ native (i.e., African) and
makes her hero noble and intelligent. A mix of travel writing, romance
and historical fiction, Oroonoko, set in Surinam, is the story of a black
prince who ends life as a slave. By reversing the stereotype, Behn
also provides one of the earliest critiques of colonization and the
British presence in Surinam. An indication of her criticism can be
gleaned from her description of the white colonial masters:
…such notorious villains as Newgate [the English prison in
London] never transported … possibly originally were such, who
understood neither the laws of God or man, and had no sort of
principles to make them worthy the name of men.
POETRY
Features of Restoration Poetry
• Expresses mostly private sentiments and emotional states
• Poetry was full of compliments and polite manners

• Often used a conversational style
• Some moral poetry in Jonson, Waller and others.
Restoration poetry is marked by a careful attention to craftsmanship,

meticulous syntax and tight form. There is not much intellectualizing
and the tone is often light-hearted.
John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester (1647–80), is better known for
his bohemian lifestyle – drinking, love affairs and a dramatic
deathbed conversion – than his poetry. Rochester combined the poetic
styles and themes of three generations – the metaphysicals, the
Cavaliers and the Augustans. Thus, an elaborate (baroque) style of
expression and imagery, satire, wit and sentimentality mark his
poetry, which was written mostly in the mock heroic mode. A deep
sense of mockery is clearly visible in his work. Often, the satire is
self-directed as in ‘The Maimed Debauchee’. Rochester’s ‘A Satire
Against Reason’ anticipates Alexander Pope in its satiric criticism of
mankind itself:
Were I, who to my cost already am
One of those strange, prodigious Creatures Man,
A spirit free to choose for my own share
What case of Flesh and Blood I’d please to wear,
I’d be a Dog, a Monkey or a Bear,
Or any thing but that vain Animal
Who is proud of being Rational.
In fact, this is the kind of satire that John Dryden (1631–1700), one
of the first great practitioners of the satiric mode and Poet Laureate
of England (1668–88), also developed with such finesse in works
like MacFlecknoe (1682–84), Absalom and Achitophel (1681) and The
Medal (1682). Dryden’s early verse was devoted to the praise of
monarchy and the Restoration. In ‘Astræa Redux’ (1660) he wrote:
Oh Happy Age! Oh times like those alone,
By Fate reserv’d for great Augustus’ Throne!
When the joint growth of Arms and Arts forshew
The World a Monarch, and that Monarch You.
Later for Charles II’s coronation (1661), Dryden composed ‘To His
Sacred Majesty’, in which he praised the peace that the monarchy
had restored:
The mistrustful fowl no harm suspects

So safe are all things our King protects.
‘Annus Mirabilis’ (1666) – famous for the preface in which Dryden
defined wit as the “delightful imaging of poems, persons, actions,
passions, or things” – marks the end of Dryden’s first major poetical
period. He combined a lofty style with mundane journalistic prose
passages. During this time, he had also produced a large number of
plays and translations.
His second poetical period was between 1681 and 1687. This is the
time of Dryden’s great satires, which often targeted specific people
and events. MacFlecknoe, originally published anonymously, was a
satire that targeted Thomas Shadwell, the playwright. Here, a dying
poet Flecknoe (the reference is to a minor poet Richard Flecknoe,
who died around 1678) is choosing his successor. He decides on
Shadwell, for reasons that Dryden outlines in a savage satire:
Shadwell alone my perfect image bears,
Mature in dullness from his tender years.
Shadwell alone, of all my Sons, is he
Who stands confirm’d in full stupidity.
The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense.
This is the tone that Dryden (and later, Pope) will perfect in poetry
and Jonathan Swift will raise to a fine art in his fiction and prose. In
Absalom and Achitophel, Dryden used the form of an allegory to
satirize Catholic monarchy and political and religious issues.
Achitophel is the First Earl of Shaftesbury, who is tempting Absalom
(the Duke of Monmouth) into rebelling. Dryden satirizes the devious
plots and crafty intrigues that marked the religious and political
events of the times. In the allegorical poem The Hind and the Panther
(1687), Dryden sought to alter the sarcasm of his political satire while
discussing the faction-ridden political and religious affairs (Catholics
versus Protestants) of his times. This poem was a mix of the animal
fable and the religious polemic. The Hind symbolizes the Roman
Church, the Panther the Anglican Church, and the entire poem is a
defence of the former. The minor dissenting groups are also present
in the form of animals.
He wrote some religious poetry (Religio Laici, 1682) and odes (the
more famous ones being To the Pious Memory of Mrs Anne Killigrew,
On the Death of Mr Henry Purcell and Song for St Cecilia’s Day). His
odes are masterful lyrical pieces. On the Death of Mr Henry Purcell
(Purcell was a famous composer), Song for St Cecilia’s Day and
Alexander’s Feast were set to music. With the 1688 revolution,
Dryden’s Poet Laureateship ended and he turned to theatre, even as
he generated a decent income from his translation of Horace,
Lucretius, Virgil, Plutarch and others. Dryden’s contribution to
English poetry lies in his emphasis on control and rhythm. Dryden’s
poetry made the rhymed pentametric couplet famous and he
popularized many classical writers through his translations.
Samuel Butler (1613–80) created the very long, satiric Hudibras (1663–
80) in complex eight-syllable couplets. The poem starts off as a mock
romance before becoming a critique of the times. The age is described
thus: “[when] civil dudgeon first grew high/and men fell out they
knew not why”. The knight Hudibras and Ralph go through a series
of adventures – trying to stop bear-baiting, courtship (Hudibras falls
in love with a widow) – all of which are meant to be allegorical. The
poem is full of grotesque characters and polemics and is a devastating
satire on Puritanism. Sir Hudibras and Squire Ralph became figures
of ridicule with their farcical involvement in extremely unheroic
adventures that remind one of Cervantes’ Don Quixote and the
characters in Jonathan Swift and Henry Fielding. Hudibras also
contributed several phrases and usages to the English language like
‘to look a gift horse in the mouth’, ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’
and ‘devil take the hindmost’.
Matthew Prior (1644–1721) is known today mainly as a writer of
light, casual verse. Prior was a spy during the events leading up to
the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), which ended the War of Spanish
Succession. One of his early verses was a parodic burlesque of
Dryden’s Hind and the Panther titled Story of the Country-Mouse and
the City-Mouse (1687), which Prior produced in collaboration with
Charles Montagu. He published his Poems in 1718. The volume
contained some personal poems, verse narratives (The Ladle, Paulo
Purganti and Hans Carvel) and philosophical poems (Solomon on the
Vanity of the World). His love poems, ‘The Secretary’ (1696), ‘The
Lady who offers her Looking-Glass to Venus’ and other ‘Cloe poems’
were written in a tone of mock seriousness.
DRAMA
The audience for drama in the post-Restoration period was essentially
upper class. The Theatre Royal (Drury Lane) and Duke’s House
(Lincoln’s Inn, but moved to Covent Garden Theatre in 1732) were
the two major licensed theatres. With the ban on drama and theatre
being lifted, many dramatists started producing plays. Earlier plays,
of Shakespeare and Marlowe in particular, were adapted during
this period, many of them with music. What is significant is that the
rewriting and adaptation altered the original to suit contemporary
tastes and political needs. In a self-conscious age, both audiences
and dramatists were concerned about what was put up and viewed.
And hence we have a heightened attention to taste, manners and
socially acceptable plots and themes in much of Restoration drama.
In fact, the ‘comedy of manners’ evolved precisely because of this
emphasis on social acceptability. Thus, King Lear was reworked by
Nahum Tate with a happy ending and minus the scene of Gloucester’s
blinding, so that audiences were neither shocked nor fascinated by
the violence of Shakespeare’s original.
Women artists on stage in this period got lesser pay than their male
counterparts. An index of the conditions can be gauged from the
fact that many male actors became playwrights, while very few
women did so (Charlotte Clarke, an actress who tried her hand at
writing plays, wrote a total of three plays).
Tragedy
Features of Restoration Tragedy
• Often had rhymed dialogues and poetry
• Heroic drama was the most common type
• Tragedy here is caused by failure and not by overarching ambition (the

latter being the case in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays)
• Use of melodrama and histrionics
• In some cases, there is a concern with social stability.
Heroic drama was the most common type of theatre during this
period. It was often rhymed and no less a commentator-critic than
John Dryden, in his 1672 essay ‘Of Heroic Plays’, identified rhyme
as providing an exalting tone.
Unlike Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Restoration tragedy was a

tragedy of failure and not one of overvaulting ambition (which is
exemplified by Macbeth). Thomas Otway (1652–85) with The Orphan
(1680) and Venice Preserv’d (1682) was one of the great tragic
dramatists of this age. In Venice Preserv’d, Jaffeir, who has married
Belvidera against the wishes of her father, Priuli, a senator, gets
involved in a rebellious plot. He is torn between his duty to his friend,
Pierre, and his wife. Jaffeir ultimately kills Pierre to save him from
torture and then kills himself to preserve the social order and
harmony. Belvidera goes mad and dies. In these plays, the characters
rarely question the social order: rather, they strive to reaffirm it. In
a speech later in the play, Jaffeir captures this tragic sense of failure:
How cursed is my position, toss’d and jostled
From every corner, fortune’s common fool,
The jest of rogues, and instrumental ass
For villains to lay loads of shame upon,
And drive about just for their ease and scorn.
In The Orphan, Otway depicts twin brothers, Castalio and Polydore,

who vie for Monimia’s affections. Castalio marries Monimia, although
this remains a secret. Polydore, who overhears a conversation between
the newly married couple insinuates himself in the marital bed,
pretending to be Castalio. The play concludes with a series of suicides.
Nicholas Rowe (1674–1718) produced seven tragedies. In The

Ambitious Stepmother (1700), he dealt with palace intrigues.
Tamerlane (1701), perhaps his most famous play, was a praise-play
for King William III. In The Fair Penitent (1703), Rowe created character
types such as the ‘gay Lothario’ and ‘fair Calista’ which provided
models for Samuel Richardson’s Lovelace in Clarissa and Henry
Fielding’s Miss Mathews in Amelia. Jane Shore (1714) and Lady Jane
Grey (1715) formed part of the genre of ‘she-tragedies’, as they were

called, and relied on vivid depictions of feminine distress. Even his
historical plays like Ulysses (1705) and Royal Convert (1707) had relied
considerably on this theme.
The most famous dramatist in Restoration tragedy is John Dryden

whose Tyrannic Love, or, The Royal Martyr (1669/70), The Conquest
of Granada (in two parts, 1670) and All for Love (1677/78) retained a
measure of popularity well into the 19th century. His Tyrannic Love,
or, The Royal Martyr deals with the tyrant Maximin and the ‘captive
queen’, St Catharine of Alexandria. There are passages, especially
those that deal with the proposed tortures of St. Catharine, which
are particularly gruesome and remind one of Jacobean tragedy. The
melodrama is made available through some fiery speeches and
Maximin’s rhetoric:
And after thee I go
Revenging still, and following […]
And shoving back this earth on which I sit,
I’ll mount, and scatter all the Gods I hit.
The Conquest of Granada was about national strife. Almanzor, the
hero of the play, wages war against the weak ruler of Granada,
Boabdelin. Woven into the theme of national politics is the love story
of Almahide and Boabdelin. Almanzor, described as “vast [in]
courage and boundless in mind”, provides some great speeches and
is particularly remembered for his retort to the king’s execution order:
“stand off; I have not leisure yet to die”. Dryden’s Aureng-zebe (1675)
was a rhymed heroic play full of the usual villainy, love intrigues
and carnage. A sense of melancholia pervades the play. His All for
Love was adapted from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. In
Dryden’s version, Egypt symbolizes love and Rome, honour. One of
the most successful of Restoration tragedies, All for Love, privileged
passion over reason in a startling departure from the ‘temper’ of the
age. The Indian Queen (1664) was a heroic play about love and valour
(by now established as the standard themes for heroic plays). Set in
Mexico, the play is full of ‘types’ rather than characters: the idealist
Acacis, the lustful villain, Traxalla, and the ‘true’ lovers Montezuma
and Orazia. Love’s many tribulations remain his central theme, and
villainy combines lust with cruelty and treason.
Nathaniel Lee (1649–92) collaborated with Dryden to produce two

tragedies, Oedipus (1678) and The Duke of Guise (1682). Lee used
Greek and Roman stories and wrote nine plays. Nero, his first tragedy,
dealt with the infamous Emperor’s crimes. Lee became unpopular
because of his political plays – his Lucius Junius Brutus (1680) was
banned after three performances. Violent imagery, poetry and some
sentimentality and melodrama mark his work.
Comedy
Features of Restoration Comedy
• Class-bound, especially concerned with the upper classes
• Mostly a metropolitan genre, where the setting is London

• Work with stereotypes (innocence versus all-knowing, the predatory widow,
the gullible young man) and stock situations (cuckoldry, amorous pursuits)
• Emphasis on male and female rivalries (facilitated by the introduction of

actresses on stage during this period)
• Portrayal of marriage as a boring and restrictive system

• Focus on carnality (from sexual attraction to sexual conquest), follies and
vices. Adultery is a crucial theme
• Set scenes (especially in Dryden), called ‘proviso scenes’, of couples

bargaining over conditions of marriage
• Wit and quick repartee, especially among gentlemen and rakes

• Intrigue, especially in love and marriage, was a common theme
• Gossip is a central feature of all plays
• Parallel plots were common.
Restoration comedy is, of course, the best-known form of drama from

this age. The genre included a wide variety such as the farce, the comedy
of manners, satire (which were invariably set in London) and comedies
of provincial humour (a minor form, exemplified by the work of George
Farquhar in The Recruiting Officer, 1706, and The Beaux’ Stratagem,
1707). Some critics identify three main forms – comedy of manners, of
humour and of intrigue, though most plays exhibit elements of all

three. It was called ‘comedy of manners’ because it mostly portrayed
the manners and morals of the upper classes (it must be remembered
that the audience was mostly upper class).
The London-based plays invariably portrayed humanity in terms of

stereotypes: the boorish country man, the witty gentleman, the
hypocritical Puritan, the cuckolded or easily tempted husband and
so on. The plays are full of trickster figures: women seeking to capture
good husbands and men seeking to grab estates. The comedies invite
the audience to participate in the exposure of social hypocrisy. Such
plays reveal the influence of Ben Jonson and the works of Beaumont
and Fletcher (who popularized ‘witty obscenity’ on the English
stage). Restoration comedy is often class-based comedy, with the
vision, characters and mannerisms restricted to the class it portrayed.
The comedy was also rooted in particular social situations such as
friendship, courtship and marriage, and rarely extended beyond this
specific context. The setting was quite often restricted to the upper
classes, consisting of ‘gentlemen’ and ‘ladies’. In fact, like the fiction,
the comedy of the time introduced and popularized the idea and
ideal of the gentleman and the fop – a recurrent theme in English
literature, right down to the 20 th century. The gentleman was
primarily identified by his affectations, a patronizing attitude,
cynicism, sophistication, quick wit and pleasing dialogue (with a
tendency to flattery).2 Most plays had parallel plots involving couples.
The plays, especially of William Congreve, reveal the absurdity of
ideals such as honour and fidelity through their themes of hypocrisy,
temptation and excessive carnality. Such plays often presented late
17th century society as frivolous and amoral. Thus in Wycherley’s
The Country Wife, Mrs Pinchwife describes London’s sexual
immorality thus: “Don’t I see every day in London here, women
leave their first husbands and go and live with other men as their
wives?”
Thomas Shadwell (1640–92) wrote plays with characters that were
essentially caricatures. Inspired by the French playwright Molière,
Shadwell’s plays ranged from farces to bawdy comedies. The Sullen
Lover (1668), Epsom Wells (1673) and Bury Fair (1689) were energetic
explorations of city manners. Shadwell wrote a total of 18 plays.
Shadwell disapproved of wit and the popular theme of love-and-

honour. Instead, he opted for the comedy of humours, in the manner
of Ben Jonson. Brutal and bawdy, he was enormously popular for
his depiction of ‘low’ manners and crudity. A neglected but
reasonably interesting play is The Virtuoso (1676) in which he
satirized the empiricism, excessive rationalism and science of
the age.
Aphra Behn, known mainly for her fiction and her career as a spy,
was also a successful playwright in the 1677–90 period. Her The
Dutch Lover (1673) and The Rover (1677, 1681) were social comedies
bordering on the farcical. Often criticized for her ‘unfeminine’
themes and portraits, Behn’s plays of intrigue, manners and
sentiment were quite popular with theatre-goers. She has the
reputation of being the first woman to earn her living by writing
for the theatre.
Behn’s plays, especially in their extraordinary prefaces, often provide
a sharp critique of masculinity and power, while pointing to the
unequal education provided to women. The Widow Ranter (1689),
Behn’s last play, once more returned to the theme of colonization
(as in her novel, Oroonoko), dealing with Virginia in the New World.
The Rover had a plot that Behn borrowed from Thomas Killigrew
and, like much Restoration comedy, dealt with marriage and love.
Set in Naples, the plot revolves around Florinda, Belville, Hellena
and the rake, Willmore. Florinda’s brother opposes her marrying
Belville for love. How Florinda and Hellena circumvent the oppressive
patriarchal injunctions restraining women forms the play’s social
criticism.3
The ‘Big Five’ of Restoration comedy include George Etherege, William
Congreve, William Wycherley, George Farquhar and Sir John
Vanburgh. Farquhar was the only professional playwright of the
group. Etherege and Wycherley were among the court wits.
The favourite themes of George Etherege (1634–91) were love and

intrigue. Etherege introduced the character of Lady Cockwood, the
excessively amorous lady who pursues the hero, in She Would if She
Could (1688). About this play, Samuel Pepys records that at least
one thousand people were turned away for lack of adequate seats
on the opening night. More of a ‘genteel comedy’ than was common

during the time, Etherege’s plots revolved around amorous
adventures. Etherege often worked with binaries. His The Man of
Mode (1676), for instance, had youth and age, country and town,
male and female. Vanity is Etherege’s pet theme in most of the plays
and Sir Fopling Flutter (the set type of the fop and the prototype of
the dandy who was to become so popular on European stage later)
in The Man of Mode declares that studying oneself is “the best diversion
in our retirements” in a prescient description of narcissistic vanity.
William Congreve (1670–1729) is the most famous dramatist of this
age. The Old Bachelor (1693), The Double Dealer (1694) and Love for
Love (1695) with their brilliant dialogues are, despite Congreve’s
reliance on set characters and themes, particularly good examples
of his craft. Millamant and Mirabell from The Way of the World (1700)
have remained popular as late as the 20 th century. The famous
dialogue between Millamant and Mirabell is a good example of the
‘proviso scene’ – the theme of bargaining between the sexes prior to
marriage. Here is an extract from the famous scene:
Millamant: I’ll never marry, unless I am first made sure of my
will and pleasure.
Mirabell: Would you have ‘em both before marriage? Or will
you be contended with the first now and stay for the
other till after grace? […]
Millamant: And d’ye hear, I won’t be called names after I’m
married; positively, I won’t be call’d names.
Mirabell: Names!
Millamant: Ay, as wife, spouse, my dear, joy, jewel, sweetheart,
and the rest of that nauseous cant, in which men and
their wives are so fulsomely familiar, – I shall never
bear that. Good Mirabell, don’t let us be familiar or
fond, nor kiss before folks … not go to Hyde Park
together the first Sunday in a new chariot, to provoke
eyes and whispers; and then never be seen there
together again, as if we were proud of one another the
first week, and ashamed of one another ever after. Let
us never visit together, nor go to a play together, but
let us be very strange and well-bred: let us be as strange
as if we had been married a great while; and as well-

bred as if we were not married at all.
Mirabell: Have you any more conditions to offer? Hitherto your
demands are pretty reasonable.
Millamant: Trifles, – as liberty to pay and receive visits to and
from whom I please; to write and receive letters,
without interrogatories or wry faces on your part; to
wear what I please; and choose conversations with
regard only to my own taste; to have no obligation
upon me to converse with wits that I don’t like, because
they are your acquaintance; or to be intimate with
fools, because they may be your relations. Come to
dinner when I please, dine in my dressing-gown when
I’m out of humour, without giving a reason. To have
my closet inviolate, to be sole empress of my tea-table,
which you must never presume to approach without
first asking leave. And lastly wherever I am, you shall
always knock at the door before you come in. These
articles subscribed, if I continue to endure you a little
longer, I may by degrees dwindle into a wife.
Congreve’s works show a deep concern with form and dramatic
structure rather than with theme. The characterization, though it
may seem overdone and uni-dimensional now, was far subtler than
that of his compatriots. His low characters and villains are, perhaps,
the best portraits in Restoration drama. The conversations are sharply
witty in most of his works, at times even overshadowing the
movement of the plot.
The satires of William Wycherley (1641–1715) focus mainly on
women’s hypocrisy and verge on the farcical. Characterized by
innuendo, double entendres and lengthy asides, Wycherley’s work
in The Country Wife (1672/1673) and The Plain Dealer (1674) tends
to be bitter and caustic in its appraisal of high society. In The Country
Wife, often treated as a typical Restoration comedy for its supposed
amoral nature, Wycherley dealt with seduction and hypocrisy.
Horner, who pretends to be impotent so that he can seduce women,
and Mrs Pinchwife, who claims to be ‘innocent’, are well-known
archetypes of Restoration comedy. It was Wycherley’s depiction of
moral and sexual hypocrisies with such unflattering frankness that
caused an uproar during the debates about the morality of theatre

during this period. Jeremy Collier’s Short View of the Immorality and
Profanity of the English Stage (1698) condemned the mockery of the
clergy, the upper classes and the sexual innuendoes and profanity
of such plays. Collier was instrumental in rousing public opinion
against such theatre. Eventually, the outcry resulted in a royal order
that prohibited ‘the acting of anything contrary to religion and good
manners’, though censorship did not become an official policy for
another forty years.
John Vanbrugh (1664–1726) wrote plays with complex plots, usually
a series of intrigues and impersonations by every character, in The
Relapse (1696) and The Provok’d Wife (1697). He reworked plays from
the Spanish and French. The characters are richly drawn, dialogues
are in the form of quick repartees and the wit is bawdy and often
crude (Vanbrugh was singled out by Collier in his tract on the
immorality of the English stage). He is concerned with social evils
and marital troubles, though the cynicism is far too overwhelming.
In The Relapse, Vanbrugh gave a particularly charming portrait of
the dandy. Lord Foppington is describing his day:
I rise, madam, about ten a-clack. I don’t rise sooner, because ‘tis the
worst thing in the world for the complexion; nat that I pretend to be
a beau; but a man must endeavour to look wholesome, lest he make
so nauseous a figure in the side-bax, the ladies should be compelled
to turn their eyes upon the play. So at ten a-clack, I say, I rise. Naw
if I find ‘tis a good day, I resalve to take a turn in the park, and see
the fine women; so huddle on my clothes, and get dressed by one. If
it be nasty weather, I take a turn in the chocolate-hause: where, as
you walk, madam, you may have the prettiest prospect in the world:
you have looking glasses all raund you … from thence I go to dinner
at Lacket’s, where you are so nicely and delicately serv’d, that, stap
my vitas! they shall compose you a dish, no bigger than a saucer,
shall come to fifty shillings. Between eating my dinner (and washing
my mauth, ladies) I spend my time, till I go to the play; where, till
nine a-clack, I entertain myself with looking upon the company;
and usually dispose of one hour more in leading ‘em aut. So there’s
twelve of the four and twenty pretty well over. The other twelve,
madam, are disposed of in two articles: in the first four I toast myself
drunk, and in t’other eight I sleep myself sober again. Thus, ladies,
you see my life as an eternal raund of delights.
George Farquhar (1677–1707) dealt less with cynical and brilliant

gentlemen than with good-natured and lively heroes. He produced
seven comedies and a farce. He believed that a play without a
cuckold, beau or coquette was poor entertainment and his plays are
peopled with several of these. The Recruiting Officer is a satirical play
that explores the abuses of enlisting officers. It deals with Serjeant
Kite, masquerading as a fortune teller but all the while pimping for
his master, Captain Plume. There are two courting couples – Plume
and Silvia and Worthy and Melinda – and Farquhar satirizes the
ways in which class dominates affections and relationships in the
tale of these pairs. In The Twin Rivals, we have a classic Restoration
theme: a younger, deformed brother seeks to steal his elder brother’s
title and estate. In The Beaux’ Stratagem, fortune-hunters Archer and
Aimwell and the drunkard Squire Sullen are fine character-sketches.
Farquhar bridges Restoration drama and the later 17th century drama
of sentiment.
John Dryden’s early comedies, modelled on the Spanish comedies,

were full of intrigue and melodrama. Dryden’s Marriage a la Mode
(1672) satirized the age’s attitudes towards sex and marriage. Drama
declined in the first decades of the 18th century as people turned to
fictional prose and the attacks on the ‘immorality’ of the stage
increased. With such events came censorship in the form of the
Theatre Licensing Act of 1737. The Lord Chamberlain, the official
government censor, was given powers to grant or refuse licence to
any play on religious, moral or political grounds.
Notes
1. The travel narrative is integral to the growth of not only European

knowledge about the East but the genre of English literature.
Travelogues provided themes and images that fed back into the literary
imagination of England. Travellers reporting non-European and non-
Christian social and cultural practices from various parts of the world
created a store-house of images to be used by novelists and poets. For
example, it is well-known that Daniel Defoe modelled the story of
Robinson Crusoe on the true-life narrative of a traveler, Alexander

Selkirk, who had, after shipwreck, lived on an island for years before
rescue. For travel in the Augustan age, see Chloe Chard’s Pleasure and
Guilt on the Grand Tour (1999) and Jean Viviès’ English Travel
Narratives in the Eighteenth Century (2002).
2. For a study of the idea of the English gentleman, see David Castronovo’s
The English Gentleman (1987).
3. The 18th century linked masculinity with social concerns and even national
identity, as Michèle Cohen’s work Fashioning Masculinity (1996) has
demonstrated.
7. Literature of the Enlightenment
The literature of the post-1700 period – to mark a distinction from

the Restoration period of 1660–1700 – embodies many of the
intellectual concerns of the Enlightenment. Reason, rationality,
empiricism and scientism informed the thinking of many of the
literary figures of the time.
PROSE
Non-fiction
Features of 18th Century Non-fiction
• Influenced by Montaigne and Francis Bacon
• Dealt mostly with morals and manners
• Often served the purpose of social commentary
• Used everyday life as theme
• Aim was to amuse while also providing information and advice.
Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), was

tutored by John Locke. In 1711, he published his earlier writings
under the title Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times.
Shaftesbury argued that humans possess an innate moral sense that
enables us to recognize virtue. He argued further that the ability to
recognize virtue was linked to our ability to appreciate something
beautiful. That is, moral sense and aesthetic appreciation, virtue and
good taste were linked in Shaftesbury’s opinion: “Thus are the arts
and virtues mutually friends and thus the science of virtuosos and
that of virtue itself become, in a manner, one and the same.” Vice
thus becomes a matter of bad taste. “To love the public, to study
universal good, and to promote the interest of the whole world, as
far as lies within our power, is surely the height of goodness,” writes
Shaftesbury in Characteristics. Beauty is equated with the harmony

of the universe and truth. It was Shaftesbury who declared “all beauty
is truth” in his Characteristics and inspired Keats’ more famous lines
on the same theme.
George Berkeley (1685–1753), who wrote on mathematics, economics,

metaphysics and the psychology of vision, was one of the first
European philosophers to propound an ‘immaterial hypothesis’,
arguing that there cannot be any matter that existed outside
intelligence. Reality is the product of the human mind. Berkeley
writes in his most important work, Treatise concerning the Principles
of Human Knowledge (1710):
It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing amongst men, that
houses, mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects have
an existence natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by
the understanding. But with how great an assurance and
acquiescence soever this principle may be entertained in the world;
yet whoever shall find in his heart to call it in question, may, if I
mistake not, perceive it to involve a manifest contradiction. For what
are the forementioned objects but the things we perceive by sense,
and what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations; and
is it not plainly repugnant that any one of these or any combination
of them should exist unperceived?
Berkeley’s idealism and rejection of the existence of matter outside
human perception of it was famously disputed by Dr Johnson by
striking his foot against a stone!
A formidable rationalist thinker, Bishop Joseph Butler (1692–1752)

attempted to prove the existence of God in his famous tract, Analogy
of Religion, Natural and Revealed (1736). Adam Smith (1723–90), now
known mainly as the economist who propounded the theory of
laissez-faire (free trade), was also a philosopher. His Theory of Moral
Sentiments (1759) explored the nature and motives of moral
sentiments. Smith argued that when we see others’ suffering, we
suffer with them because we are fundamentally imbued with a moral
sense. We imaginatively place ourselves in the sufferer’s position
because of this sympathy. With his Wealth of Nations (1776), Smith
established modern economic theory.
Literature of the Enlightenment 145
Joseph Addison (1672–1719) and Richard Steele (1672–1729) did

much to popularize the periodical essay. The essay was meant to be
both entertaining and educational. Addison and Steele used the genre
to educate people on morals and manners in periodicals like The
Spectator and The Tatler. Steele wrote while launching The Tatler:
The general purpose of this paper, is to expose the false arts of life,
to pull off the disguises of cunning, vanity, and affectation, and to
recommend a general simplicity in our dress, our discourse, and
our behaviour.
Steele wrote most of the Tatler essays, focusing mainly on the news
and theatre. The stated intention of The Spectator was to “enliven
morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality”. It ran from 1
March 1711 to 6 December 1712 (555 numbers). The Sentry, the
Clergyman and the Templar (the ‘Club’) provided a diversity of
views. Sir Roger de Coverley, originally intended as a rake, became
the loved squire. The figures enabled Addison and Steele to moralize
to the general public. Social commentary was the main purpose and
Addison and Steele satirized the follies of upper-class men and
women, the obsession with wealth and status and the absence of
benevolence. The Spectator was essentially a document of common
life in London, from fashion and the theatre to trade and morality.
John Dennis (1657–1734) was a leading critic of the period.
Influenced by his own contemporary, Dryden, and a diversity of
European sources from Aristotle to Horace, Dennis rejected the role
of the chorus in tragedy (in ‘Impartial Critick’, 1693) for a very
commonsensical reason: what suited the religious temper of the
Greeks did not suit the English circumstance or age. In works such
as ‘Grounds of Criticism in Poetry’ (1704) and ‘Three Letters on the
Genius and Writings of Shakespeare’ (1711), Dennis pleaded for a
strict adherence to the rules of plays and even criticized Shakespeare
for not being faithful to the ‘poetical art’. Dennis was also
instrumental in popularizing, well before Edmund Burke, the
aesthetic of the sublime. He spoke of nature as possessing order, but
also as inspiring awe and terror.
Travel in the Age of Enlightenment

Travel and tourism emerged as a big business and as pastime during the
18th century. Domestic tourism – visiting manor houses and palaces, as
Carole Fabricant has shown (1987), grew. The travelogue became one of
the most popular genres of the time. Travelling for the sake of health became
very popular and one of the earliest travelogues by an English woman, The
Journeys of Celia Fiennes (1697), records her trips to take the water cure.
Others travelled abroad and explored exotic foreign cultures. One of the
most famous was Lady Montagu, who travelled to Turkey and described the
Turkish baths and Turkish women in her Embassy Letters (1717). Joseph
Addison travelled to Italy and produced a memoir of his experiences. Dr
Johnson went to Wales and wrote about it. The Grand Tour – travels on the
European continent – was considered essential for education among the
upper classes in England.
The journals of such expeditions were usually lavishly illustrated with sketches
of other races, landscapes, fauna and flora made by the travellers themselves.
They revealed details of other cultures. Indirectly, this led to an increased
interest in other cultures and fuelled research (translation, interpretation,
codification and historiographies) into India and other nations – a
phenomenon that Edward Said would famously term ‘Orientalism’ in his
epochal work of that title (1978). An index of this interest in other nations
can be gauged from the fact that by the end of the seventeenth century,
sixteen separate accounts appeared on the Mughal empire, while ten more
reported extensively on it and other parts of Asia.
There is, thus, a close link between travel, exploration, trade and colonialism
during this period.
Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator was intended as a response to

Addison and Steele’s periodical. It catered exclusively to an
increasingly literate female audience that constantly demanded more
reading matter. Focusing on issues of female domesticity, society and
female bonding, the essays in the periodical were a mixture of
entertaining information and advice. An example of her advice:
But, say they, Learning puts the Sexes too much on an Equality, it
would destroy the implicit obedience which it is necessary Women
should pay to our Commands. If once they have the Capacity of
arguing with us, where would be our authority!
Now will I appeal to any impartial Reader, even among the Men, if
this very Reason for keeping us in Subjection does not betray an
Arrogance and Pride in themselves, yet less excusable than that
which they seem so fearful of our assuming.
The tone is clearly feminist, and looks forward to the 20th century
writings on the theme.1
Daniel Defoe’s essays and other prose are brilliant social
commentaries on 18 th century England. His ‘Enquiry into the
Occasional Conformity of Dissenters’ (1698) and ‘Shortest Way with
Dissenters’ (1702) were major attacks on the parliament, written in
scathing prose. For the latter, he was brought to trial, fined and placed
in the pillory (as a response, this indefatigable writer produced,
‘Hymn to the Pillory’!). Travelling through England, he produced A
Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–27), an important
social document that maps population, trade, rural life, agriculture
and industry.
Jonathan Swift published pamphlets on a variety of topics. In 1712,

he published A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining
the English Tongue in which he pleaded for the establishment of an
English Academy. His Journal to Stella (1766–68) was a collection of
letters to Esther Johnson and Rebecca Dingley. The letters are a realist
depiction of London city, with a special focus on politics. His later
work, especially in the pamphlets, was often a criticism of England’s
treatment of Ireland. A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of
Poor People from Being a Burthen to their Parents or Country (1729) is
undoubtedly one of the most savage pieces of English satirical prose
ever. Here Swift suggests that the starving Irish should sell their
infants as food and this can become a good source of livelihood for
them. This, he proposed, would ease the burden on England, which
was anyway not doing much for Ireland. In The Drapier’s Letters,
Swift attacked the English policy of using a debased copper coin
that benefited the English but severely damaged Irish trading profits.
Swift’s friendship with Pope and the ‘Scriblerus Club’ (Addison and
Steele) was a significant literary development for they formulated,
at least for their own generation, principles of literary style and
composition.
Edward Gibbon (1737–94) authored the non-fictional epic of the 18th

century with his The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–83).
A true classicist who revered ancient Roman culture, Gibbon had
initially planned a book on the decline of the city of Rome. The
complete work is a smooth narrative full of detail, even though he
chose to ignore the exploitative economic or social conditions. The
sheer panoramic view of the work is staggering. Finally, after
detailing the ‘fall’, he isolates four major causes in the last chapter:
the injuries of time and nature, the hostile attacks of the barbarians
and Christians, and the domestic quarrels of the Romans. Also prone
to rhetorical flourishes, especially when speaking of Roman heroes
and statesmen, Gibbon managed to write the history without
dwelling too much on everyday life and the common man.
Edmund Burke (1729–97) was a statesman and philosopher, known

today for his systematization of the aesthetic of the sublime, his
famous 1786 impeachment speech against Warren Hastings (the first
Governor General of British India) and the reflections on the French
Revolution. Burke also wrote a great deal on domestic issues, English
and European politics and America. Burke hoped for a conciliation
with the American colonists (expressed in works such as ‘American
Taxation’, 1774; and ‘Conciliation with America’, 1775) and found
the events of the French Revolution abhorrent. In his several writings
on India, Burke argued that the Indians had always had a great
civilization, though it had now degenerated and stagnated. He was
also one of the first to propound the theory of native (that is, Indian)
effeminacy – a theme that is echoed throughout the colonial writing.
Burke attacked Hastings for being unscrupulous and dishonest and
for exploiting India and the Indians. A particularly fine piece of
rhetoric and invective, the impeachment speech is a classic in English
prose today. Here is the conclusion to Burke’s immortal speech:
Therefore, it is with confidence that, ordered by the Commons, I
impeach Warren Hastings, Esquire, of high crimes and
misdemeanours.
I impeach him in the name of the Commons of Great Britain in
Parliament assembled, whose parliamentary trust he has betrayed.
I impeach him in the name of all the Commons of Great Britain,

whose national character he has dishonoured.
I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose laws,
rights and liberties, he has subverted, whose properties he has
destroyed, whose country he has laid waste and desolate.
I impeach him in the name and by virtue of those eternal laws of
justice which he has violated.
I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has
cruelly outraged, injured and oppressed, in both sexes, in every
age, rank, situation and condition of life.
Dr Samuel Johnson (1709–84), known as the maker of the great
dictionary (1755), was one of the extraordinary figures of the
Augustan age. In 1749, he published The Vanity of Human Wishes,
made famous by a description of the artist and writer:
There mark what ills the scholar’s life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.
The reference was to Richard Savage, the man who had befriended
Johnson in London (whose Life Johnson had written in 1744) and
died in a debtor’s prison. He also captured the poignant story of
human vanity:
His fall was destined to a barren strand,
A petty fortress and a dubious hand.
He left a name, at which the world grew pale
To point a moral or adorn a tale.
A brilliant conversationalist and acute observer of the English
language, Dr Johnson (he became a Doctor of Laws at the age of
fifty five and was thereafter known as ‘Doctor’), wrote prefaces to
English poets and writers and created a body of criticism that has
endured for centuries. His comment on Shakespeare as a ‘moral’
teacher did not blind him to the several defects of the Bard. Johnson’s
Rasselas (1759), a novel with deep moral attitudes and serious
reflections, is a curious tale of human vanity. The series, Lives of the
English Poets (1779–83) is, of course, a classic work. Though called
‘lives’, they were, in essence, detailed works of criticism. Dr Johnson’s
comments on Milton, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Addison and others are
perspicacious and based on a close reading of the works (though he

neglected all other Elizabethans, except Shakespeare!). He also
formulated critical theories of poetry. Poetry, he declared, was the
work of genius, whose function was to ‘‘instruct by pleasing’’. Dr
Johnson also published essays in The Rambler and The Idler. Johnson
was the subject of one of the greatest biographies in the English
language: James Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791). Boswell established
Dr Johnson’s reputation for posterity when he described the latter’s
mind as a ‘‘vast amphitheatre’’.
Philip Stanhope, Fourth Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773) wrote some
of the most famous letters in literary history, full of wit, fine turns of
phrase and aphorisms. His letters to his illegitimate son seek to instil
social graces, good taste and a sense of responsibility, as the following
sample reveals:
When you come into the House of Commons, if you imagine that
speaking plain and unadorned sense and reason will do your
business, you will find yourself most grossly mistaken. As a speaker,
you will be ranked only according to your eloquence and by no
means according to your matter; everybody knows the matter almost
alike, but few can adorn it ... Your sole business is to shine, not to
weigh. Weight without lustre is lead. You better talk trifles elegantly
to the most trifling woman than coarse inelegant sense to the most
solid man … Manner is all, in everything; it is by manner only that
you can please and consequently rise.
Gilbert White (1720–93) wrote a classic work of natural history, The
Natural History of Selborne (1789), which documents weather, fauna
and flora and geology. White’s work, which was the prose equivalent
of long Elizabethan poems such as Michael Drayton’s, can be termed
‘chorographic’ since its concerns are chiefly local and particular
histories. Horace Walpole was an extremely erudite scholar, with a
range of interests from architecture to painting. His fascination with
landscaping produced Strawberry Hill, a Gothic-style structure that
received mixed comments. His Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors
of England (1758) was less a critical compilation than a collection of
gossip.
David Hume (1711–76), known primarily as a philosopher, also
wrote in genres such as history. His Enquiry Concerning Human
Understanding (1748), Four Dissertations (1757), Enquiry Concerning

the Principles of Morals (1751) and the posthumously published
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religions (1779) embody the finest sceptic
philosophy of 18th century England. Brilliantly logical, opposed to
all a priori thinking and using psychology and empiricism with equal
felicity, Hume is the precursor of the positivist strand in English
philosophy. Hume’s scepticism enabled him to argue that human
understanding is limited and can only deal with questions and
problems that arise from our own perceptual experiences. Hume
argued that the human mind links ideas together through three main
modes: cause and effect, resemblance and contiguity. This theory,
which Hume named, ‘association of ideas’, went on to become an
extremely important contribution to literary thought and philosophy.
Oliver Goldsmith (1730–74) was a prolific essayist. His first serial

miscellany, The Bee (1759), ran for eight weekly numbers. He wrote
an eight-volume An History of the Earth and Animated Nature (1774)
and undertook translations to alleviate his financial distress. In his
Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759),
Goldsmith mourned the demise of the arts and culture in general. In
The Citizen of the World (1760–61), Goldsmith portrayed the essayist
as a traveller, comparing cultures and civilizations, while also
reflecting on the intellectual and political climate of his time.
Fiction
Features of 18th Century Fiction
• Emphasis on sentiments and manners
• Satiric exploration of human follies and vices
• Rise of the picaresque tradition
• The ‘growing up’ or bildungsroman narrative
• Some experimentation in structure by Sterne
• Comic effects normally produced by the idiosyncratic character
• The origins of a Gothic sensibility derived from medievalism

• Social commentaries were popular, especially those that discussed virtues

and moral failings.
The 18th century is widely accepted as the age of the novel. In the
middle years of the 18th century the readership of novels increased
and the professional novelist appeared on the scene to cater to this
large market. The result was a large variety of novels, meant to suit
a variety of literary tastes.
Essayist, social commentator, journalist, dissenter and novelist, the

multi-talented Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) was the first great fiction
writer of the 18th century and, arguably, of English literature. In 1719
he published Robinson Crusoe, a novel that has come to be treated as
a classic at several levels – in terms of readership, continuing
popularity, influence and inaugurating a whole new way of writing.
Defoe had been influenced by the travel narrative of Alexander
Selkirk, an Englishman who had been marooned on the island of
Juan Fernando for five years (1704–09). Defoe’s novel was a
fictionalized account of such a survivor. The novel, at one level, is a
glorious adventure tale. But at another level, it is also a novel about
colonialism – with its themes of the white man’s conquest and
occupation of another land and his control of the native (Crusoe
instructs Man Friday in English and converts him to Christianity,
while keeping him as a servant throughout). As Ian Watt has
convincingly argued in The Rise of the English Novel (1957), the tale
represents the rise of economic individualism. Eventually, Crusoe
begins to believe himself to be a ‘King’, “absolute Lord and Law-
giver” to his people, with an ‘undoubted Right of Dominion’ over
the property. In the 20th century, JM Coetzee’s Foe (1987) satirized
Defoe’s novel. Later, Defoe wrote a sequel, The Farther Adventures of
Robinson Crusoe (1719), about Crusoe’s wanderings in Asia, China
and Siberia. He turned to historical romance in Memoirs of a Cavalier
(1720). Realising that voyage and survivor genres were popular, he
wrote Captain Singleton (1720), a novel about travelling through seas
and the deserts of Africa. In a marked departure from the celebratory
survival account of Robinson Crusoe, this novel’s hero is guilt-ridden
at his life of wickedness. Defoe shows Singleton’s amoral nature as
rooted in his heritage (kidnapped as a child), a theme that looks
forward to Moll Flanders. The second half of the book deals with
Singleton’s life as a pirate and his eventual redemption at the hands

of William the Quaker.
Moll Flanders was a novel that showcased the dilemma of morality:

how to be moral when caught in a trap of need and poverty. Narrated
as a ‘flashback’ by a repentant Moll, it revolves around a woman
whose principal aim in life is to survive the terrible conditions in
which she finds herself. Defoe asks some extremely probing questions
about issues of justice, exploitation, gender and class in this dramatic
tale. Defoe elaborated on the theme of women and sexuality in an
unjust world in Roxana (1724). When her husband goes bankrupt,
Roxana is forced to give in to the advances of her landlord. She
declares: “I think honesty is out of the question, when starving is the
case.” The novel is also interesting because of Roxana’s views on
marriage, which she describes as a state of inferiority and bondage.
She is scared of being reduced to the status of a mere woman by and
through marriage. The novel deals with her efforts at self-
emancipation in an unjust society. A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)
was a fictionalized account of the plague. Its realism and attention
to detail makes it a kind of docu-fiction (documentary fiction). Defoe’s
style, mixing fiction and truth, social document and autobiography,
is now considered a classic.
Laurence Sterne (1713–68) created one of the greatest novels of all

time, in any language, with The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
(1759–67). This novel has influenced numerous 20th century writers,
including Salman Rushdie, John Fowles, Gunter Grass and James
Joyce. It was intended by Sterne as a comedy that reveals the
ridiculousness of human vanity and life itself. Everything he found
‘laugh-at-able’, he put in, wrote Sterne in his letter to the publisher.
The sheer irreverence for society’s manners – the novel was
condemned as too indelicate – is astoundingly modern and reminds
one of the works of Philip Roth or Joseph Heller. Using the association-
of-ideas theme from John Locke and other philosophers of his time,
Sterne emphasized the essential irrationality of thought processes.
The fragmented narrative is supposed to capture the incoherence
and illogical nature of human thinking. There are several references
to the intellectual and philosophical dilemmas of the time, the most
famous one being Tristram’s response to the question posed by the
commissary of the post in Lyons. To the query “And who are you?”
Tristram answers: “Don’t puzzle me.” International war meets bodily
functions, manners meet love, and passion meets science in Tristram
Shandy, one of the most sophisticated of English novels. The grotesque
and the farce are central to Sterne’s work. They enable him to convey
the ultimate emptiness of human desires and intellect. Sterne reduced
human beings to fumbling, irrational creatures whose vanity has
created fictional image of a rational, ‘thinking’ humanity. In addition
to his theme of humanity’s ‘true’ whimsicality, Sterne also attempted
some extraordinary structural experimentation. Changes in tone, plot
narration and even in typography meant that the novel is not exactly
easy to read. There are blank pages, figures, a preface that occurs in
the middle of the book and other such experiments. In this sense,
Tristram Shandy with its self-reflexive attention to the ‘craft’ of its
own composition, calls attention to the ‘fictionality’ of the work. The
style and multi-voiced narration make it a very postmodern novel
and anticipates the fiction of Thomas Pynchon and Donald
Barthelme in the 20th century. Though Tristram Shandy is Sterne’s
claim to immortality, his other works, especially A Sentimental Journey
through France and Italy (1768) are fine exercises in prose and extend
the theme of human follies.
Influenced by Sterne’s irreverent wit and ‘indecency’, Henry
Mackenzie (1745–1831) published Man of Feeling (1771). Harley,
Mackenzie’s hero, is the sentimental man, affected by melancholia,
loneliness and unhappy love. An excess of benevolence and suffering
permeates the tale. A sequel to this unrealistic tale written in a very
self-conscious, formal style was Man of the World (1773). This lapsed
from sentimentality into melodrama.
Aligned with the novel of sentiment (see the box The Novel of
Sentiment and Sensibility) is the novel of manners, exemplified in
the works of Samuel Richardson (1689–1761). Dr Johnson famously
warned against reading Richardson for plot or story. Instead,
suggested Johnson, we ought to read him for the sentiment.
Richardson’s work exemplified the Augustan age’s concern with
class and social standing. Decorum, manners, the power and failings
of emotions – these were Richardson’s basic themes. Pamela (1740),
his first novel, dealt with the theme of a young girl’s continually
besieged virtue. How the girl – she is fifteen years old – retains her
virtue despite the most difficult of situations constitutes Richardson’s
moral tale. Her master pretends to be her benefactor and undertakes
some horrific subterfuges to touch Pamela (disguised as a woman,
pretending to search her person for letters). However, he is also
thwarted by her moral stance and this is what finally redeems him
as he marries Pamela. In Clarissa (1747–48), the heroine is violated
by an earl’s nephew. The question Richardson posed was whether
she would ever be given justice for her virtue. The tale ends in tragedy
and both Clarissa and her tormenter, Lovelace, die at the climax of
the novel. Clarissa becomes a symbol of purity with her death and
Richardson avoids the social implications of her rape through this
mechanism. Clarissa’s refusal of marriage (to Solmes), the rape and
the constant attention to the spiritual dimensions made this a more
complex (though not more readable) novel than Pamela. In Sir Charles
Grandison (1753–54), the hero has to choose an appropriate wife
from two women. Richardson’s portrayal of psychological dilemmas
of men and women often worked to underline emotional distress
born out of a divided mind. The issue of moral choice haunts his
characters.
The Novel of Sentiment and Sensibility

True virtue, suggested the fiction of Oliver Goldsmith and others in the 18th
century, was associated with a heightened sensibility. Sympathy, philanthropy,
rigid codes of morality and honour were the hallmarks of characters such as Dr
Primrose in Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield. The focus in the sentimental
novel was on the psyche of characters and their emotional responses to events
that befall them. It is thus more inward looking. Novelists like Sarah Fielding
(David Simple, 1744), Henry Mackenzie (Man of Feeling, 1771) and Frances
Sheridan often elevated (as Janet Todd demonstrates in her path-breaking
Sensibility: An Introduction, 1986) feminine values. The promise of domestic
bliss and a good life in heaven were rewards for a virtuous woman. The
sentimental novel was often domestic in theme, once again underscoring the
family as the centre and source of emotional stability and support. The novel of
sensibility marks the peak of (and is a version of) the novel of sentiment in
works like Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker and Fanny Burney’s Evelina. Here the
characters are sentimental, but are equally concerned about others – responding
with compassion and heightened sentimentality to the suffering and trauma of
others.
Disgusted by what he saw as an over-emphasis on sweet sentiment

and unbelievable goodness of human beings, Horace Walpole (1717–
97) set out to create a completely different kind of novel in Castle of
Otranto (1764). Walpole sought to explore the darker side of human
nature. His work returned to medieval romance and incorporated
supernatural elements. Murders, taboos and nightmares combine
with mysterious passages and secret rooms, moving statues and
danger, to provide the tale with a strange new kind of excitement.
The Gothic (see the box The Gothic in the next Section), as this came
to be called, was sensationalist literature. Walpole inaugurated a
method of writing that proved to be enormously influential and
writers like Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliff, William Beckford and others
imitated the Gothic novel, which can be seen not only as a revolt
against sentimental literature and the novel of manners of the 18th
century, but also as another version of Romanticism.
The Oriental tale was a form that attracted numerous writers. The
Arabian Nights arrived in England in 1704, with an anonymously
authored English translation of Antoine Galland’s French version.
Addison and Steele’s Spectator also provided news items, stories and
essays that created a context for the Oriental tale. This also sparked
an interest in the genre. Dr Johnson (Rasselas, 1759), Frances Sheridan
(Nourjahad, 1767), John Hawkesworth (Almoran and Hamet, 1761)
and other writers provided fantasies set in non-European, specifically
Asian regions. These created a market and readership for the kind
of work to be produced on a massive scale by writers, translators
and administrators in the latter decades of the 18th century. Oriental
tales are forerunners of what Edward Said has termed ‘Orientalism’
(see the box Orientalism in Section Five: Modern Age), which was a
mode of depicting non-European spaces and people. Societies
founded in the latter half of the 18th century, such as the Asiatic
Society of Bengal, took up translations as well as commentating upon
Asian literature, culture and people. These, in turn, fed back into
the European sensibility and imagination, providing particular views
of the Orient.
The most popular form of fiction was, of course, the satirical novel
which flourished through most of the 18 th century. Among its
practitioners are Henry Fielding (1707–54), Jonathan Swift (1667–

1745), Tobias Smollett (1721–71) and Fanny Burney (1752–1840).
Jonathan Swift, like Defoe, was also known as a political writer,
and, unlike ‘dissenter’ Defoe, was a respected member of the
community because of his church affiliation. His first important work
was The Battle of the Books (1696–98). Written as a mock-heroic epic,
the tale deals with a contemporary controversy between Richard
Bentley (the royal librarian at St James’ Palace) and William Wotton
(a Cambridge don). A Tale of a Tub is a satire on church history,
where the three brothers, Peter, Martin and Jack stand for the Roman
Church, the Lutheran or Anglican Church and the Protestants
respectively. It is also a satire on the period’s obsession with
knowledge. Unfortunately for Swift, it prejudiced Queen Anne
against him so much that he lost any chances he had had for
obtaining a bishop’s job (instead, after the Queen died in 1713, he
was given charge of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin and he went,
he said famously, “to die like a poisoned rat in a hole”). It is as the
author of Gulliver’s Travels that Swift is best known. Travels into
several Remote Nations of the World. In four parts. By Lemuel Gulliver,
first a surgeon, and then a captain of several ships was anonymously
published in 1726. Written with an obvious misanthropic sensibility,
Swift criticizes learning, politics, religion and human society in
general. Lilliput has a noble past but is now corrupt. Brobdingnagians
are large-hearted and large-sized. The Yahoos are animal-men, while
Houyhnhnmland is a perfect world where horses weave and thread
with a great degree of sophistication. Reason and sentiment are both
suspect in Swift’s tale. What emerges as a key theme is the sheer
corruption of humanity itself.
Rejecting the morality and value systems of high society – something

which Samuel Richardson revered – Henry Fielding saw England’s
virtue and innocence as a sham. His tales are best described in his
own words (from the Preface to Joseph Andrews): “comic epic poems
in prose”. In Shamela (1741), Fielding portrayed the hollowness of
the kind of virtue Richardson had praised in Pamela. In Joseph Andrews
(1742), Pamela’s brother, Joseph, loses his job because he rejects the
advances of the aristocrat, Lady Booby (this is Fielding’s satiric
comment on “Virtue Rewarded”, the subtitle to Pamela). Half of the

novel deals with Joseph’s adventures with Parson Adams, the
quintessential good man, portrayed as a naïve, bumbling but sweet
gentleman by Fielding. In 1743, Fielding published Miscellanies,
which included Life of Mr Jonathan Wild the Great – a tale that once
again portrayed how the good man, Heartfree, is victimized by the
world. It is in this novel, based on the life of the highway robber
Jonathan Wild (who was executed in 1725) that Fielding made his
greatest comment on society: “Mankind are first properly to be
considered under two grand divisions, those that use their own hands
and those who employ the hands of others.”
The History of Tom Jones (1749), perhaps Fielding’s best-known work,

is in the biographical mode, charting the history of a ‘foundling’,
Tom Jones. Tom Jones’ adventures are meant to prove his true
identity, so that he can marry his beloved Sophia Western. Episodic
and full of incidents, in sharp contrast to Richardson’s fiction which
focused on a character’s mental states, Tom Jones proposes that
human characters are never uni-dimensional, every one is both good
and bad. Here, Fielding is again targeting what he perceived as
Richardson’s naïve portraits of completely virtuous or completely
evil men and women. Virtue is deceived and not rewarded, malice
and immoral behaviour flourish and the world is reluctant or far too
stupid to recognize true virtue.
The Picaresque
The picaresque emerges in 16th century Spain. ‘Picaro’ means ‘rogue’ in
Spanish. The picaresque narrative deals with the adventures of a rogue who
survives on his wit and presence-of-mind even when trapped in unfavourable
circumstances. The narrative is usually a collection of episodes. Thomas
Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) was one of the first models for this
form. Henry Fielding in Tom Jones and Tobias Smollett in Roderick Random
used this form to show the growth of a boy into a man. The boy, traveling
through many regions, meets all sorts of people and learns from his
experiences. At the end of the tale, he has matured in his mind and become
a man.
Tobias Smollett wrote some briskly-paced, action-filled fiction. While

he is not the greatest stylist in English prose, Smollet is certainly one
of the more entertaining ones. A significant practitioner of the
picaresque form, Smollett explored the follies of classes and races
(such as the Welsh and the Scots). Smollett’s fiction is usually cast as
a travel narrative. The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) dealt
with the life of a young surgeon, who endures poverty and suffering
in London and on a ship to the West Indies. Later, he battles on the
continent before eventually discovering that he is the son of a wealthy
father. The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751), The Adventures of
Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves
(1760–61) and The History and Adventures of an Atom (1769) were
more experimental. The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771)
explored numerous English towns and had three intricate plots
woven together. Each of the novels dealt with a young man’s growing
up, his suffering as a result of a cruel and effective social system, his
love and the eventual discovery of his true lineage. Smollett, like
Fielding and unlike Richardson, had little faith in society’s ability to
recognize and reward virtue. His social scenes are, as a result, sharply
critical of moral and ethical hypocrisy.
Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) was his attempt at
portraying simplicity and the rural English idyll. A good example of
the sentimental novel, the tale turned on the distressed state of the
virtuous and the simple. Dr Primrose loses all his money and is forced
to live with his family on a small piece of land. The love affairs of his
daughters Olivia and Sophia, the social pretensions of his wife, the
various ups and downs (especially poverty) of their lives and the
evil designs of Squire Thornhill constitute the plot. The novel includes
the famous poem, ‘When lovely woman stoops to folly’:
WHEN lovely woman stoops to folly,
And finds too late that men betray,
What charm can soothe her melancholy?
What art can wash her tears away?
The only art her guilt to cover,
To hide her shame from ev’ry eye,
To give repentance to her lover,
And wring his bosom is – to die.
Women authors also appeared on the literary scene in large numbers.

Sarah Fielding, Fanny Burney and Eliza Haywood are relatively better
known in our times. Authors like Frances Sheridan, Clara Reeve,
Charlotte Smith and Elizabeth Griffith also made their mark during
this period.
Eliza Haywood (1693–1756) published her most famous novel The
History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless in 1751. The novel’s central theme
was quite radical for the age – and also for literary history – for it
focused on female education. Adapting the conventions of conduct
books and advice books, Haywood’s novel warned female readers
against being sexually ignorant (Miss Betsy risks getting raped and/
or seduced because she is unaware of sexual overtures). In fact, there
is also a subtle criticism of the sexual hypocrisy of the age when
Haywood portrays licentious and promiscuous men escaping the
repercussions for their behaviour while women are supposed to keep
their virtue. Haywood shows Betsy trying to retain some amount of
power in her relationships, an interesting portrait for the age. Her
novel Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (1753) is little known today. Anti-
Pamela (1741), republished often in the 20th century, was a response
to Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (it was one of the two responses, the
other being Fielding’s Shamela). Here, Syrena Tricksy is a servant girl
who, in sharp contrast to Richardson’s unbelievably virtuous heroine,
is a sly, worldly-wise woman. While Syrena often runs into trouble
because of her attitude, Haywood also shows her obtaining some
advantage from her cunning and adversarial positions. Haywood’s
Love in Excess (1719) was a novel that, for the first time, dared explore
female sexuality.
Fanny Burney’s first novel, Evelina (1778), published anonymously,
was a huge success. Writing what was considered moral prose to
advise young women on life and society – Evelina was subtitled ‘A
Young Woman’s Entrance into the World’ – Burney’s Cecilia (1782)
and Camilla (1796) provided social criticism cast in a realist mode.
As a friend of Dr Johnson, Burney became a prominent figure in
London literary circles. Her fiction can be treated as guidebooks to
young women, with an emphasis on manners, breeding and
behaviour (especially in public). While class is, expectedly, central to
Burney’s world, she is also concerned with the unequal gender

relations of her time and this makes her an interesting figure.
Sarah Fielding (1710–68), often obscured by the reputation of her
brother Henry Fielding, was also interested in social pretensions as a
theme. Morality, virtue, manners, class and honesty were her chief
concerns in novels like David Simple (1744). David Simple deals with
an honest man’s search for true friendship. It emphasizes the
characters’ sentiment and emotional states – features that became
the hallmark of the sentimental novel. She also wrote what might be
the first English novel written for children, The Governess (1749).
It is important to note that women novelists were only beginning to
find their voice during this period. Constantly asked to prove their
abilities in the face of harsh criticism by male writers, authors like
Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood have been marginalized in canon
formation.
POETRY
Features of Augustan Poetry
• Satire was a predominant form, often using specific public and literary
figures as the subjects of criticism and mockery, especially in Pope
• The ‘graveyard school’ was obsessed with decay and death
• Highly self-conscious, crafted and metrical, but used simple, unassuming

language
• Poets who were less satiric used wit and gentle irony rather than caustic
mockery
• A deep sense of humanism in the writings of Goldsmith, Gray and Pope
• Pastoral influence in the works of the Wartons, Goldsmith and Gray
• Classical authors and learning figured prominently in the works and hence
the term ‘neoclassicism’.
Wit and form dominate poetry during the Augustan age. Poetry,
especially in the post-1700 period, often accepted the intellectual
premises of the Enlightenment.
Alexander Pope (1688–1744) is perhaps the most important poet of

the Augustan age. A rather unhappy personal life and professional
bitterness troubled him constantly. He was constantly criticized and
attacked in the media due to his Catholic background. His Poems
appeared in 1717, though his reputation as a formidable intellect
and wit had been established with an earlier work, Essay on Criticism
(1711). Poems contained two narrative poems ‘Elegy to the Memory
of an Unfortunate Lady’ and ‘Eloisa to Abelard’. The latter, a tragic
love story, was a dramatic poem cast in Ovid’s style. The scene of
Eloisa taking her vows as a nun constitutes some of the best
melodramatic poetry in English:
As with cold lips I kiss’d the sacred veil
The shrines all trembled, and the lamps grew pale:
Heav’n scarce believ’d the conquest it survey’d,
And Saints with wonder heard the vows I made.
Yet then, to those dread altars as I drew,
Not on the Cross my eyes were fix’d, but you
The Rape of the Lock, cast in the mock-heroic format that parodied
epic poetry, appeared in Lintot’s Miscellanies in 1712, with an
enlarged and revised edition in 1714. With these works, Pope’s
reputation as a poet was ensured for posterity.
Pope also did a number of translations and edited the works of Homer
and Shakespeare. In 1734, Pope published Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, a
poem in which he satirized Joseph Addison in the character of Atticus.
The major works that Pope is known for from this period include
what might be called The Dunciad series, the ‘Moral Essays’ (which
includes the classic, Essay on Man) and his imitations of Horace in
the form of satires and epistles. The Dunciad (1728; the first Dunciad)
was a satire on pedantry, where Pope engaged in personal and often
spiteful attacks on people like Lewis Theobald. An enlarged edition
was published in 1729. Later, Pope made William Warburton the
subject of the New Dunciad of 1742. Finally, Colly Cibber becomes
the ‘hero’ of the complete Dunciad – by now in four books – of 1743.
In his verse epistles, Pope savaged the rise of the nouveau riche (the
new rich) for their pomposity and lack of good taste. Pope’s satires,
like that of Jonathan Swift and Henry Fielding in fiction, sought to
expose society and humanity’s foibles and vices. Political corruption,

the lack of taste in art, pomposity and bombast among the ignorant
and incompetent – these were the subjects of Pope’s epistles. Epistle
to Dr Arbuthnot is a brilliant satire on the aspirations to art by the
ignorant, the pretentiousness of the incompetent and the patronage
system that worked to raise the incompetent to heights of literary
glory. Pope’s Essay on Man appeared in the form of four epistles
during 1733–34. The first epistle discusses the relation of man to
God and forwards the thesis of the ‘great chain of being’. An
important theme in the history of ideas and in the intellectual history
of the 18th century, this thesis proposed that there was a rising scale
of being on earth, moving towards unity, completeness and order.
The second epistle explored man’s psychology and attempted to
reconcile the twin poles of 18th century thinking – reason and passion.
The third epistle was a social study – the evolution of humanity from
a primitive state to its present decadence. The fourth epistle was
called ‘Of Happiness’. Pope’s poetry has provided some of the most
quoted lines in English language:
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
or
Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in the night
God said ‘Let Newton Be!’ and all was light.
or
The proper study of mankind is man.
Pope’s Windsor Forest popularized the genre of topographical poetry,
where the landscape is described from a vantage point.
Classicism and Neoclassicism

Classicism is a tendency to look to the ancient world, specifically the Greek
and Roman civilizations, for aesthetic values and styles. Classicism sees
Greek and Roman art as the highpoint in European culture and antiquity as
the greatest source of inspiration and model for the new generations to
imitate. Classical art stood for clarity of expression and symmetry. During
the European Renaissance (1400–1600), poets and artists turned to poets
of antiquity such as Homer and Virgil to find models. During the 16th century,
John Milton, Ben Jonson and Francis Bacon in England and Jean Racine in
France were admirers of classical art. An interest in the classical ages and
ancient civilizations was revived with the archaeological re-discovery of the
Pompeii ruins. During the post-Restoration period, figures such as Dryden
and Pope also sought models in Homer and adapted ideas about art from
Plato, Aristotle, Horace and Cicero. Pope’s famous Essay on Criticism revived
neo-classical principles of clarity, order and logic, harmony, control and
decorum (which often meant a proper choice of subject matter). The
emphasis was more on pragmatism and reason than on the emotions and
was clearly a reaction against the exuberance of the Renaissance humanist
view of man. The Augustan age, with its emphasis on form (a feature of
ancient art), is thus known as the Neoclassical Age. In the 20th century,
there was a revival of interest in classical authors with Ezra Pound and TS
Eliot. Neoclassicism is thus a term that describes several generations of
poets and artists.
Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) wrote several satires on the political and

economic conditions of his times. His satire is best seen in True-Born
Englishman (1701), a poem defending William III. It is an attack on
those who questioned the foreign origins of William III (William was
Dutch), arguing that it is personal virtue and not family lines or
place of origin that matters. The poem begins with a well-known
satirical comment:
Where-ever God erects a House of Prayer,
The Devil always builds a Chapel there:
And ‘twill be found upon Examination,
The latter has the largest Congregation.
Thomas Gray (1716–71), who refused the offer of Poet Laureateship,
authored one of the most anthologized poems in the English language,
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Lines from this poem have
become part of the English idiom.
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
His subject was the common man and Gray’s rather moralizing tone
showcases rustic settings and ordinary life within a deep humanism.
Gray’s work also included a medieval fable, The Bard, with

descriptions of sublime landscape and invested with a great deal of
passion and piety. He also composed poems on the Celtic myths and
translated some Norse poems.
The elegy has often been associated with a school of poetry that
flourished in the first half of the 18th century. This school of poetry
was concerned with death, decay and mourning (see the box
Graveyard School of Poetry). Poets such as Edward Young (1683–
1765), Thomas Parnell (1679–1718) and Robert Blair (1699–1746)
created a dark brooding atmosphere in their poetry. In a sense, this
school of poetry explored the darker side of the human psyche and
anticipated the Gothic novel.
Graveyard School of Poetry

English culture has always been obsessed with melancholy. In fact,
melancholy or despair has been described as an English malady. In 1621
Robert Burton wrote The Anatomy of Melancholy. The 17th century was
concerned with human mortality, decay, aging and death. The mutability
theme in earlier poets such as Spenser can be linked to this concern. The
passing of time, which is the basis of this concern, became visible with the
invention of mechanical clocks in this period and increased the anxiety
about it. But it was in the 18th century that the obsession with mortality
really becomes a major literary theme. Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a
Country Churchyard (1751) is the most famous of the graveyard poems.
Others include Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1721), Edward Young’s
epic, Night Thoughts (1742) and Robert Blair’s The Grave (1743). Gloom,
despair and pessimistic thoughts on human decay, death and the grave fill
these poems. Young characterized Night Thoughts as dealing with “life,
death and immortality”. There is a great deal of attention to macabre and
gory details:
The knell, the shroud, the mattock and the grave;
The deep damp vault, the darkness and the worm.
The elegy – a meditative poem that focuses on death as well as related
themes such as memory, yearning and mourning – is a common form of
this kind of poetry.
James Thomson (1700–48) created an epic poem in The Seasons (1726–

30). One of the first great nature poems of the 18th century, The Seasons
offered a vision of nature as harsh but bountiful. It celebrated rural
life and looked forward to the writings of George Crabbe in the late
18th century. A poem devoted to description, Thomson revised and
expanded it several times. The poem is organized into four sections,
each titled after the four seasons. Thomson’s evocative descriptions
capture the changing season in terms of sounds, colours and even
signs of human labour. In ‘Autumn’, therefore, we have:
… the saddened grove, where scarce is heard
One dying strain to cheer the woodman’s toil.
Haply some widowed songster pours his plaint
Far in faint warblings through the tawny copse.
‘Winter’ opens with sadness:
See, winter comes to rule the varied year,
Sullen and sad, with all his rising train –
Vapours, and clouds, and storms.…
But it ends, like Shelley’s ‘West Wind’, with hope:
The storms of wintry time will quickly pass,
And one unbounded Spring encircle all.
‘Summer’ focuses on a typical day and moves from dawn to night.
‘Spring’ describes the effect of the season on various forms of being –
from inorganic matter to vegetables, animals and, finally, Man. It is
the season when "truth, goodness, honour, harmony, and love,/the
richest bounty of indulgent Heaven" reign.
Thomson has a sentimental approach to domestic animals.

Throughout the poem, the focus is invariably on movement and
change. Nature is a book and a teacher and the truths taught are
equivalent to divine lessons, suggests Thomson, in works like A Hymn
on the Seasons. Thomson also envisioned an uncompromising work
ethic in the face of a harsh landscape:
All is the gift of industry – whate’er
Exalts, embellishes, and renders life
Delightful.
In Castle of Indolence (1748), Thomson’s other famous work, the Knight

of Art and Industry is the true hero, liberating pilgrims from the
wizard Indolence. Thomson’s vision and method influenced
Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village.
Another nature poem that appeared around this time was Grongar
Hill (1726) by John Dyer (1699–1757). Using a setting that remains
unchanging, Dyer prefers to focus on picturesque scenes and nature’s
beauty rather than on moral truths. Thus, there are ruined towers,
meadows, hills and valleys – scenes that look forward to the nature
poetry of the Romantics and the landscape paintings of the period.
Dyer was concerned with a celebration of georgic2 landscapes, in
which labourers toiling in the field were the poetic subjects. In a
later poem, The Fleece (1757), Dyer praised the wool manufacturing
areas. Dyer’s work influenced the poetry of John Clare, while
Wordsworth admired him greatly.
Some didactic poems also made their appearance in the Augustan
age. Mark Akenside’s The Pleasures of the Imagination (1744; revised
edition in 1757) is an important contribution to aesthetic theory,
though the poetic quality of this work is open to debate. Influenced
by the writings of Shaftesbury, Akenside, along with Edmund Burke
and William Gilpin (writing later in the century), developed an
aesthetics of landscape appreciation while constantly moralizing
about the poetic craft.
Publisher-poet Robert Dodsley (1703–64) published Collection of Poems
by Several Hands in 1748. Thomson’s ‘Hymn on Solitude’ appears in
this collection. Most of the poems in this collection deal with rural
subjects and are elegiac in tone. William Collins (1721–59), Thomas
Gray, Christopher Smart (1722–71), Joseph Warton (1722–1800),
Thomas Warton (1728–90) and William Shenstone (1714–63) are
among the poets included in this important collection. Christopher
Smart had bouts of religious mania which eventually took him to
the asylum in 1757. He first achieved a degree of fame by winning
the Seatonian Prize for poetry while in college. His best-known work,
A Song to David (1763), appears to have been influenced by Paradise
Lost. Extraordinarily lyrical in places, experimental (one phrase, ‘for
adoration’, shifts positions regularly in the course of the poem),
intense, awe-inspiring and deeply mystical, A Song to David is a

magnificent bit of versification. Joseph Warton, like his brother
Thomas, preferred to focus on rural idylls. His Enthusiast (1744)
combines a rural theme with primitivism. Thomas Warton’s Five
Pastoral Eclogues (1745) and Pleasures of Melancholy (1747) suggest a
romanticism that looks forward to the Wordsworth generation.
William Shenstone, known more for his treatises on gardening and
architecture, also used nature, landscape and the pastoral contexts
for his The Schoolmistress and Pastoral Ballad. Shenstone’s focus was
on picturesque descriptions.
Thomas Percy (1729–1811) had an interest in antiquarianism. He began

his career with a translation of a Chinese novel and set in motion the
taste for the exotic. In 1765, Percy published Reliques of Ancient English
Poetry, a collection of ballads. The volume was instrumental in reviving
an interest in English ballads. The collection itself was not restricted to
merely early English works as he also included political songs from
the 17th century and ballads from the 18th century. It is on this volume
that Percy’s reputation primarily rests.
One of the most colourful poets of the period was Thomas Chatterton
(1752–70). Influenced by medieval myths and legends, Chatterton
claimed to have discovered a medieval (15 th century) poet from
Bristol, Thomas Rowley. Horace Walpole condemned these as
forgeries and so did Thomas Warton in his History of English Poetry
(1778). By the 19th century, it was decided that there was no poet
Rowley and that the work was all Chatterton’s. Today, he is known
for his early death (he committed suicide at the age of 18) and one
major poem, An Excelent Balade of Charitie. William Wordsworth
created the myth of a boy-genius around the life of Chatterton. He
described Chatterton as “the marvellous boy/The sleepless soul, that
perished in his pride”. Coleridge immortalized him in his poem,
‘Monody on the Death of Chatterton’.
Two poets who mark the transition to the Romantic age from that of
the Augustans are William Cowper (1731–1800) and Robert Burns
(1759–96). Cowper’s first independent volume of poetry was Poems
(1782). After this, he wrote continuously for the next few years,
including the patriotic ‘On the Loss of the Royal George’ and the
humourous ‘John Gilpin’s Ride’. He turned to blank verse with his

long poem The Task. The style of the poem is of reportage. It is full of
news from around the world, with issues and events from India
(there are passages referring to Brahminical rites) and America,
prison reform, slavery and the French revolution figuring in it. There
are comments that are clearly critical of war. Given to melancholia
and a deep religiosity, Cowper’s themes were often of mercy, fate,
faith and divine grace. He also wrote some powerful hymns and
some particularly fine descriptions of nature.
Robert Burns located humanity within the countryside and nature.
He was concerned about the labourer’s lot and class inequality. He
often rebelled against social injustice. From the very beginning, Burns
sought to situate his poems in rural subjects: “… manners-painting
strains/The loves, the ways of simple swains… .” Domestic animals,
farms and the farmer’s labour were described with tender care and
sympathy in ‘The Holy Fair’ and ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’. He
also wrote satires and love songs such as ‘Mary Morison’ and
‘Duncan Gray’.
DRAMA
Features of Augustan drama
• Satires, especially political ones, continued to be common
• Some sentimental comedy
• More emphasis on plot
• Wit continued to be the key element.
Due to the Theatre Licencing Act of 1737, playwrights in the post-

Restoration period became more cautious in their choice of topics.
The result was the sentimental comedy. Dr Johnson’s Irene (1749)
was a popular tragedy.
With David Garrick, theatre manager of Drury Lane, and other able
managers like JP Kemble and George Colman, theatre prospered.
Samuel Foote, who specialized in mimic and satirical plays,
controlled the Little Theatre. Such theatres usually offered, in one
evening, a major piece (either tragedy or comedy) and an afterpiece,

usually a piece that was in sharp contrast in tone to the main one. In
the interval between the two pieces, there would be singers, acrobats
or strong men to entertain the audience. Colley Cibber (1671–1757)
was a prolific writer of plays, operas and verse. In his sentimental
comedies such as Love’s Last Shift (1696) and The Careless Husband
(1704), Cibber popularized the fop. What is interesting is that he
often played this part himself since he was an established actor in
his own right. The unfaithful and slightly dull husband was Cibber’s
favourite character. Most of the plots dealt with the redemption of
such a husband.
A prominent tragic dramatist of the time was George Lillo (1693–
1739). In his plays like The London Merchant (1731) and The Fatal
Curiosity (1736), Lillo reworked earlier plays. In The London Merchant
we have an apprentice, George Barnwell, who murders his
benefactor at the behest of his mistress, Millwood. The Fatal Curiosity
is a similar domestic tragedy that repeats Macbeth’s plot of greed
and ambition. Other plays of this type include Joseph Addison’s
classical Cato (1713), Johnson’s Irene (1749) and Edward Moore’s
The Gamester (1753). Many of these relied on melodrama and
histrionics for effect.
Essayist Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713) was a response to
contemporary English politics and reveals a concern with social
stability. The play deals with Cato’s attempts to defend the Roman
Republic against Caesar’s advancing forces. It sets up the tragic hero
Cato as a defender of democratic principles, bravely battling Caesar’s
attempts to impose a dictatorship. Both the Whigs and the Tories
identified Cato with contemporary figures. The play was full of
patriotic sentiments adapted from Roman times, the most famous
one being Cato’s:
What a pity is it
That we can die but once to serve our country!
Other memorable quotes include:
A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty
Is worth a whole eternity in bondage.
Lucius’ oration on Cato’s death is also well-known:

From hence, let fierce contending nations know
What dire effects from civil discord flow.
‘Tis this that shakes our country with alarms,
And gives up Rome a prey to Roman arms,
Produces fraud, and cruelty, and strife,
And robs the guilty world of Cato’s life.
George Washington is said to have been deeply influenced by the
figure of Cato, and the play has always been popular in the United
States.
Richard Steele (1672–1729) is also known primarily as an essayist.
However, his plays such as The Funeral (1701), The Lying Lover (1703)
and The Tender Husband (1705) were quite successful. These comedies
often moralized on virtue and behaviour. In The Funeral, Lord
Brumpton fakes death in order to test the affection of his wife and
son. Steele sought to expose the evils of duelling in The Lying Lover.
The Tender Husband dealt with affections within a family. Steele’s
plays were often heavy on morals and light on comedy because his
intention, as he once stated, was to ensure that there was no
“improper entertainment in a Christian Commonwealth”. Didactic
in tone, though sharply plotted in terms of characters, Steele’s plays
stressed serious matters such as filial duty, marital fidelity and love.
Susannah Centlivre (1669–1723) was a prolific playwright,
producing fourteen comedies, two tragedies and three farces. One
of the most staged playwrights after her death, Centlivre’s brilliant
comment on her society appears in the dedication to The Platonick
Lady (1706):
And why this Wrath against the Womens Work?
Perhaps you’ll answer, because they meddle
with things out of their Sphere:
But I say, no; for since the Poet is born,
why not a Woman as well as a Man?
Her plays such as The Gamester (1705), The Wonder (1714) and A
Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718) deal with confident, self-possessed
heiresses who refuse to choose between love and property and fight
to keep both. One of the few playwrights who believed in women’s

right to property, Centlivre’s plays deal with economic independence,
social status and marriage laws.
Henry Fielding, famous for his satiric fiction, also indulged in the
comedy of manners. He attacked London high society in The Modern
Husband (1732) and The Universal Gallant (1735). His Mock Doctor
(1732) and The Historical Register for 1736 (1737) are known as
political satires. However, it is with The Tragedy of Tragedies; or, the
Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great (1730) that Fielding achieved
his canonical status. A satire on the theme of the court, the play
dealt with contemporary issues and themes.
Samuel Foote (1720–77) specialized in scandal tales. Numerous
statesmen and public figures were ridiculed. George Whitfield was
savaged in The Minor (1760) and Mrs Richard Sheridan (then
Elizabeth Linley) in The Maid of Bath (1771). Arthur Murphy (1727–
1805) produced over a dozen farces. The Apprentice (1756) dealt with
journalism as a profession. In Three Weeks after Marriage (1776), he
satirized the bankers. Both drew from his own experiences, since he
had worked in both professions. In Know Your Own Mind (1777)
and other works, Murphy continued the tradition of the comedy of
manners.
Sentimental comedy was practiced by playwrights like Richard
Cumberland (The West Indian, The Fashionable Lover, The Jew and
others) and Hugh Kelly (A Word to the Wise and The Romance of an
Hour). Oliver Goldsmith and RB Sheridan wrote moral but less
lachrymose and often melodramatic works.
Oliver Goldsmith, who had criticized Garrick, the manager of Drury
Lane, had his first plays rejected by the latter. In an essay, ‘A
Comparison between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy’,
Goldsmith pondered on the function of human distress as a source
of entertainment and concluded that the success of sentimental
comedies was because of their depiction of the distresses (rather than
the faults) of mankind. However, in Good Natur’d Man, Goldsmith
himself worked within the sentimental play convention, even though
Young Honeywood was meant to be a combination of sentimentality
and wry cynicism. Goldsmith’s best play is surely She Stoops to

Conquer (1773). With more individualized characters and its comedy
of manners style, it has remained one of the most popular plays on
the English stage. She Stoops to Conquer also showcases class tensions.
Its hero, Marlow, is uncomfortable with women of his own class but
quite at ease with servants and barmaids. Miss Hardcastle therefore
‘stoops’ to a lower level in order to woo him.
RB Sheridan’s (1751–1816) works represent what has been called a

‘comedy of character’. His evergreen comedy The School for Scandal
(1777) borrows from the earlier genre of city comedy. It presents
London as a site of gossip and intrigue. The Critic (1779) is a comedy
based on an earlier farce. The Duenna (1775) was a comic opera that
broke theatre records in its first season. Sheridan used caricature to
satirize the events and figures of his day. In The Rivals (1775), his
most enduring play along with The School for Scandal, Sheridan
worked with both sentimental comedy and the farce. Mrs Malaprop’s
hilarious linguistic gaffes and word play – her “nice derangement of
epitaphs” – has perhaps done more for the English language than
anybody else since Shakespeare. Intrigue was part of The School for
Scandal. Here, Sheridan portrayed the true man of feeling (Charles
Surface) in sharp contrast to the social hypocrite (Joseph). Sheridan
satirized the scandal-ridden and scandal-obsessed London society
in the play.
Farces and musicals continued to be popular. One such play to receive
massive popular success was John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728).
A play that captures – in sharp contrast to the regular Restoration
comedy’s emphasis on upper-class society – the lower rungs of
London’s population, The Beggar’s Opera was an entertaining mix
of songs, popular ballads, sentiment, melodrama and political satire.
Oriental and New World themes figured in the plays of the time.
Samuel Foote’s The Nabob dealt with the Englishmen who acquired
wealth in India and returned home to a new lifestyle and attitude.3
In Richard Cumberland’s The West Indian, there is a “child of nature”
in Belcour, the West Indian. Arthur Murphy used China (Orphan of
China) and Peruvian elements (Alzuma) in his plays.
Notes
1. For a study of domesticity as a theme in the 18th century novel and its
attendant politics, see Nancy Armstrong’s brilliant work Desire and Domestic
Fiction (1987). Armstrong demonstrates how such novels about domesticity
constructed particular kinds of women subjects to be controlled and defined
by a patriarchal society.
2. The georgic was a form of the pastoral where the landscape is transformed
into one of great beauty and prosperity through labour.
3. The Nabob, a version of the Indian ‘nawab’, was an Englishman who lived
and worked in India with the East India Company during the 17th and 18th
centuries. Often indulging, unofficially, in private trade and corrupt practices,
these men acquired vast amounts of wealth. They led extremely luxurious
(and unhealthy) lives in India, with a retinue of servants, large bungalows,
feasts and drinking, while lording it over the natives. For a study, see Percival
Spear’s The Nabobs (1932).
8. Re-reading the Augustan Age
Gender and Genre: The Rise of the
English Novel
As pointed out earlier, women writers from the Restoration and

Enlightenment have been consistently marginalized from the English
literary canon. Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957) firmly located
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe as the precursor of the English novel. The
woman writer’s contribution to the genre’s rise and evolution has
only recently been acknowledged. Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and her
epistolary tale Love Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister (1683),
for instance, were pioneers in form and were composed well before
Richardson’s sentimental novels in the same mode appeared on the
scene. The erotic fiction of Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess (1719)
had four editions in the first four years. Haywood was a prolific
author and had a publication every year in the 1720–30 decade except
in 1720 and 1721. In fact, she produced 35% of the total output by
women in this period. She produced ten novels in 1725 alone.
Psychological realism, often attributed to Defoe, makes its appearance
in women writers like Jane Barker. Barker’s Loves Intrigues: Or, The
History of the Amours of Bosvil and Galesia (1713) is a first-person
narrative about Galesia and her love life.
Recent studies have demonstrated how the 18th century English novel
was firmly located in the sexual and gender politics of the age. The
main question asked by feminist historians and thinkers is this: why
is the contribution of women writers to the development of the novel
– to mention only one genre – consistently neglected in literary
history? The indifference to and ignorance of women’s writing,
especially during the flowering of the genre in 18th century England,
has meant that several of the works have been lost. Comprehensive
bibliographies of early modern and 18th century writing by women

are hard to come by. Since the 1960s, feminist archivists and literary
historians have identified and compiled extensive lists of such works.
Cheryl Turner (Living by the Pen, 1992) lists 176 authors and 446
works between 1696 and 1796. Re-reading the rise of the novel and
the novelists has often meant a study not just of the actual texts but
of the circumstances of their circulation, i.e., of their readership.
The English novel constituted the bulk of literary production during

the period between 1740 and 1771. Samuel Richardson, Tobias
Smollet, Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne are considered to have
set the agenda for this boom in the production and popularity of the
genre. Traditional literary histories suggest that after the era of these
four male writers, commerce rather than art became a central social
concern. According to these accounts, the rise of the woman writer
during this time, catering to women readers through circulating
libraries, contributed to the decline of the novel from the status of a
respected genre to cheap entertainment – a mere source of women’s
recreation/pleasure. What is significant is that this period shows a
remarkable increase in the number of women writers. Thus, the social
context to the rise of the woman writer is a crucial element in
understanding the rise and progress of the genre. But what exactly
is the link between the rise of the woman writer and the social contexts
of the time?
Some critics have argued that Samuel Richardson’s fiction
contributed to the ‘feminization’ of the novel. Janet Todd (Sensibility:
An Introduction, 1986), the distinguished literary critic, has suggested
that the eponymous heroines in Richardson were actually fictional
models of ‘the cult of sensibility’, stressing those qualities considered
truly feminine such as emotionalism, passivity, sympathy, etc.
Women writers adopted this strategy and increased their readership.
Thus, the novel captured the social and psychological meanings of
gender differences. Ideals of masculinity and femininity embodied
in the fiction of Richardson and Haywood established norms and
contested them. The realist novel, especially, was shaped (as Helene
Moglen demonstrates in The Trauma of Gender: A Feminist Theory of
the Novel, 2001) by the consciousness of the self in its moral, ethical
and psychological relationships with others. The novel was thus a
Re-reading the Augustan Age 177
social form which was often used to erase social differences of both
class and gender by naturalizing them. Sons and daughters struggled
with the social order. In the bildungsroman, the son has to find his
true lineage and acquire his rightful property. For the daughter, her
location in the family and her maternity were important. Both
naturalized gender inequality: the son was linked to ownership and
property while the daughter was only aligned with maternity,
domesticity and familial responsibilities. That is, the son and daughter
had to choose between these different gendered realms. The issue of
correct choices that almost every realist novel of the period discusses
had a social function – of asking its youngsters to choose correctly
and well. In short, much of 18 th century fiction subsumed the
individual under the social when it asked the youthful characters to
adapt to social norms rather than go their individualist (and therefore
disruptive) ways. This is a parallel history of the genre in the 18th
century.
During the 18 th century, copyright laws changed. Aristocratic
patronage was in decline. There was also a substantial increase in
the number of large publishers. All this meant that the relation
between author and publisher became far more commercial. The
book trade catered to a burgeoning leisure industry, with a growing
demand for entertaining reading. Literary professionalism was on
the rise, along with a massive expansion of readership through
various means, especially through extensive circulation of newspapers
and magazines and local libraries. Print culture flourished. Among
the readers were middle- and upper-class women who, by employing
domestic servants, were freed from day-to-day chores, directly leading
to increased leisure time and the quest for entertainment.
Improvement in education produced literate women who sought
both guidance and escape in the didactic moral fiction and the
romances of the age. The presence of circulating libraries meant that
even servants of middle- and upper-class women had access to fiction.
Romantic fiction circulated in large quantities as a result of all these
circumstances.
The first women writers incorporated autobiography into the novel
and both genres catered to roughly the same market. Mary Carleton’s
criminal autobiography Historicall Narrative (1663), Francis
Kirkman’s semi-fictionalized account of Carleton’s life, The Counterfeit

Lady Unveiled (1673), and Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) are all basically
romanticized accounts of women’s lives. ‘Lives’ and ‘memoirs’ were
common genres during the time. The pioneer writers in the genre, of
course, were not very welcome to the male society. Female
professionalism – embodied in Hannah Wolley in the 17th century
and later by Aphra Behn and Susanna Centlivre – was not
encouraged. This was so because these writers catered to mixed rather
than exclusively female audiences by incorporating humorous and
often critical representations of social mores and the follies of
fashionable society such as marital discord, extramarital relations
and intrigues. Women authors were not supposed to deal with such
issues. Behn and Centlivre even had to defend their choice of themes.
Such a debate over the appropriate subject for a woman novelist

produced two main kinds of fiction and writers. Delarivière Manley
and Eliza Haywood wrote scandal-ridden novels about love and
the passions. Satire, sexual desire and scandal were the staple fare
here. Critics such as Alexander Pope launched savage attacks on
such ‘unfeminine’ fiction. Indeed, Pope may very well have destroyed
Haywood’s career since she wrote very little after his attack in The
Dunciad (1728). A significant result of such attacks on women
novelists was the rise of the virtuous professional woman writer after
1740. Katherine Philips, Penelope Aubin and Elizabeth Rowe embody
this strand in the rise of the English novel. Elizabeth Rowe was praised
for her decorum of theme and presentation by Dr Johnson. A new
market for fiction which stayed off ‘taboo’ topics such as amatory
intrigues and was moral in tone was thus born (most of Aubin’s
novels went into a second edition within a year of publication). These
three writers were the forerunners of the new trend that was to be
followed by Sarah Fielding, Elizabeth Griffith, Charlotte Lennox and
others later in the 18th century.
While such a limitation imposed on the woman writer’s choice of

subject matter may have affected their literary style and theme, it
also enabled them to have greater influence precisely because, unlike
Haywood, they were socially acceptable. The woman writer was no
more castigated or ignored as unfeminine or immoral. This meant
that the woman writer could expect an audience and a market.
Re-reading the Augustan Age 179
Hannah More and other writers capitalized on this context of an

accepting readership by commenting on social and political issues
of the day. Thus, respectability created a market for the professional
woman author. The legitimizing of the woman’s voice because of
her didactic and ‘clean’ fiction was instrumental in creating a space
for the authors in the genre of the novel itself. This process of
feminization must be considered while reading accounts of the
history of the English novel.
Further Reading
Allen, Walter. The English Novel: A Short Critical History. London: Penguin, 1958.
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Bevis, Richard W. English Drama: Restoration and the Eighteenth Century, 1660–
1789. New York: Longman, 1988.
Porter, Roy. Enlightenment. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Sambrook, James. The Eighteenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of
English Literature, 1700–1789. New York: Longman, 1993.
SECTION THREE
The Romantic Age
Timeline
French Revolution 1789 Blake’s Songs of Innocence
Restrictions on Freedom of Press Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of

(Libel Act), Paine flees to France 1792 the Rights of Woman
Godwin’s Political Justice (1793)
Robespierre executed (1794) Blake’s Songs of Experience and

Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho
(1794)
Blake’s Songs of Innocence and

Experience (1795)
Lewis’ The Monk (1796)
First major Indian resistance to Wordsworth and Coleridge’s

1798
East India Company; Tipu Sultan Lyrical Ballads
killed (1799)
Napoleon crowned Emperor of Blake’s Milton and Edgeworth’s

France (1804) Popular Tales (1804)
Battle of Trafalgar 1805 Wordsworth’s Prelude and

Scott’s Last Minstrel
Lewis’ Romantic Tales (1808)
Austen’s Sense and Sensibility

(1811)
Byron’s Childe Harold Cantos 1
and 2 (1812)
Austen’s Pride and Prejudice
(1813)
Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814)
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria

founded (1817) and Keats’ Poems (1817)
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

(1818)
Peterloo Massacre Byron’s Don Juan Cantos 1 and

1819 2, Scott’s Ivanhoe and Shelley’s
Ascension of George IV (1820) Cenci
Irish Famine 1821 Shelley’s Adonais

de Quincey’s Confessions of an
English Opium Eater (1822)
National Gallery, London,
founded (1824)
Stockton-Darlington Railway line Scott’s Talisman (1825)
(1825)
Ascension of William IV (1830) Cobbett’s Rural Rides and

Tennyson’s Poems (1830)
Ascension of Queen Victoria 1837

9. Backgrounds
The period between 1780 and 1830 is popularly known as the Romantic
Age. The Romantic poets are perhaps the most anthologized and
studied poets in English literature. Poets such as Wordsworth and
Coleridge have been considered the founding figures of Romanticism
and of a whole new way of thinking. However, a closer examination
of the contexts reveals that the poets were not ‘inventing’ concepts or
ideas, but responding to events and situations around them.
Furthermore, elements of Romanticism are visible well before
Wordsworth and his visionary company. William Blake, for instance,
was already working with ideas and images that looked forward to
the Wordsworth–Coleridge collection, Lyrical Ballads.
Reform was underway in the England of the 1780s. Social movements

for causes such as the abolition of the slave trade, poor relief,
education of the poor, amelioration of prison conditions and
numerous other efforts were on to ‘improve’ England. There was
also rising social discontent. People wanted greater representation
in Parliament. Meanwhile, things were rapidly spiralling towards a
crisis in France. In the summer of 1789, the fall of the Bastille prison
heralded the French Revolution, an event that was to have a
profound impact on English society, ideas and politics. PA Brown’s
The French Revolution in English History (1918; reprinted in 1923)
extensively documents this influence. It also energized new forms of
thinking in the realm of literature, as we shall see.
Edmund Burke responded with horror at what he thought was an

unacceptable event in France in his Reflections on the Revolution in
France (1790). Others, however, saw the events as a source of hope
for the English, since the Revolution symbolized, at least in the early
stages, freedom, democracy and equality. Thomas Paine’s The Rights
of Man (1791–92) became a cult text, secretly distributed among
radicals, even as he was indicted for treason and was forced to flee
to France. Joseph Priestley, the noted chemist, wrote a detailed
184 The Romantic Age
argument, in the form of letters to Edmund Burke, in favour of

reform. In 1793, William Godwin published Political Justice, a tract
that renounced sentiment and passion in favour of reason and
education. The notion of an ‘enlightened self-interest’ became a
commonly accepted view of many of the radicals. Such an
enlightened self-interest, argued the English radicals, made for moral
decisions that enabled a man to subsume his interests to the greater
needs of social order and well-being – a theme expostulated in great
detail by Jeremy Bentham in his Fragment on Government (1776).
Education, Godwin argued, could bring about this moral stance in
human beings. Welfare and civic humanism, philanthropy and care
of the poor became central tenets for politicians making laws and
debating social issues.1
However, as the Revolution’s violence increased in quantum leaps

over the next few years, reactions against it hardened in England.
Supporters of the Revolution were targeted and Priestley’s laboratory
was set on fire by a mob pleading for ‘Church and King’. England
slowly drifted into a war with France and an ‘Anti-Jacobin’ movement
began in England (see the box Jacobin/Jacobite). Radicals like Horne
Tooke, Daniel Easton and John Thelwall were put on trial for treason.
Actions against radical newspapers were common. In 1803, William
Blake was put on trial for sedition, and, in 1811, John and Leigh Hunt
were prosecuted for exposing the cruel practice of flogging in the army.
In 1812, Daniel Easton was prosecuted for reprinting Paine’s Age of
Reason (1795). The Luddite riots of 1811 further alarmed the
conservatives who responded with harsher laws such as the Frame-
Breaking Bill (1812) that made it illegal to damage productive
machinery. The movement for reform became associated in the minds
of people with pro-revolution radicalism and social anarchy.
Meanwhile, social conditions were becoming appalling in various
parts of England. Increased mechanization (such as power looms)
made large numbers of workers redundant. A decline in infant
mortality and increased Irish immigration added to the population
in England’s counties, especially London (and the Irish populace
was of course treated as a ‘problem’). Slums increased, and returning
soldiers added exponentially to the unemployment rate. In such
a situation, the repeal of income tax in 1816 combined with
Backgrounds 185
Jacobin/Jacobite
Jacobin was the name taken by a group of French monks of the Dominican
order when they built a convent at the church of Saint Jacques in Paris.
Later, it was used to refer to a political club (formed in the crucial year of
1789) which supported democracy. Later, it began to be used as a term to
describe any radical social or political reformer.
Jacobite is an English term and refers to supporters of James II (1633–1701)

and his sons James (1688–1766; known as the ‘old pretender’) and Charles
Edward Stuart (1720–88; known as Bonnie Prince Charlie or the ‘young
pretender’). They tried to regain power through a series of uprisings,
commonly known as the Jacobite uprisings, through 1720–45. They were
defeated at the battle of Culloden by the Duke of Cumberland in 1746. The
Jacobite rebellion of Bonnie Prince Charlie is the context of Walter Scott’s
Waverley (1814).
decreased trade and indirect taxes adversely affected the national

economy. The acute economic depression of 1819 was to be the
climactic moment in the misery of the common Englishman.
Discontent was therefore dangerously high. In August 1819, over
50,000 people gathered in St Peter’s Field, Manchester, to hear Henry
Hunt, a supporter of radicals such as Horne Tooke and William
Cobbett. The police action against the gathered people resulted in
11 deaths and left hundreds injured. The event went down in history
as the ‘Peterloo massacre’. As a result of this event, public anger
against an oppressive government and monarchy increased. The
leader of the House of Commons, Viscount Castlereagh, was seen as
the symbol of evil and was portrayed as a murdering demon in Percy
Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy (1819).
The writings of William Cobbett, Robert Owen and others, appearing
in the midst of such events, slowly forced social and parliamentary
reform. Working class education opened up. The writings of Jeremy
Bentham and the Utilitarians (James Mill and, later, John Stuart Mill)
pleading for the ‘greatest good of the greatest number’ became an
influential ideology in the first decades of the 19th century. Reforms
came in the form of emancipation of the Roman Catholics (1829)
and the Reform Bill of 1832 which shifted political power to the
boroughs – with many centres given franchise – and the middle class.2
The intellectual contexts of the Wordsworth generation of writers

included political liberalism, radicalism, socialism and notions of
equality that spread with and during the French Revolution. An
important strand of thinking that influenced many writers was
Evangelicalism. This was essentially a social reform movement that
drew on theology for its purposes. It sought to revitalize English
society through a reiteration of moral values and codes. However,
other diverse ideas circulated across Europe during this period and
were equally influential in England. A central theme in the
intellectual climate of the time was the role of instinct and emotion.
This resurgence of interest in the unconscious workings of the human
mind, its many sentiments and emotions and the role of instinct was
a rebellion against the previous age’s insistence on order, reason,
intellectualism and logic. Romanticism, as this anti-intellectualist
strand came to be known, revived an interest in and enthusiasm for
the abnormal, the quaint, the disorderly and the mystic. Experiences
that could not be rationalized were central to the work of poets like
Blake. Irrational and instinctive responses to scenes and events figure
prominently in Wordsworth. The workings of the mind – visions,
fears, superstitions and strong passions – became the keystone of
the Romantic poetry of the last decades of the 18th century. This turn
to the life and work of the mind often took on expositions and critical
debates about one particular term in the writings of Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Shelley and Keats: Imagination. Imagination, re-
discovered as it were by the Romantic writers, stressed the world of
dreams and visions over that of reality and the phenomenal world.
They saw these visions as uncontaminated by the world of the senses
and as providing a greater pleasure than anything in reality. The
impulse, born out of the inner workings of the human mind and
untouched by the real world, could be relied on for pleasure and
creativity. It is also possible to argue that the Romantics preferred to
dwell on the imagination and the mind as an escape from the realities
in the ‘real’ world.
While Wordsworth and others stressed the positive side of this
unconscious, others became interested in the darker side of the
human personality. Lord Byron and Shelley both explored the deeper
and less likeable passions. The Gothic novel explored the forbidden
Backgrounds 187
desires and violence that haunt the human soul. If Wordsworth saw
instinct and the unconscious as contributing to happiness and
pleasure, the ‘Dark Romantics’ (a term that also describes the Gothic
novelists like Mathew Lewis, Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliff) were
obsessed with the evil, destructive and sinful aspects of the same
unconscious.
Poetic dream-visions were considered standard components of the
poet’s mental make-up. What used to be termed madness in the earlier
age was revered as poetic genius now. Madness and poetry,
melancholia and art went together in the Romantic conception of
the poet. Blake’s fearsome visions translated into some of the most
powerful poems in the English language. The drug-induced images
of De Quincey and Coleridge became art. Keats praised the powers
of intoxication. However, it was not enough to demonstrate poetic
madness. The poets also had another role to perform – that of the
prophet. The two central images of the Romantic poet are thus of
the poet and the prophet. When Percy Shelley called poets the
“unacknowledged legislators of mankind”, he was gesturing at this
grand function of the poet.
The return to instinct and the everyday was also accompanied by a

search for the primitive and the natural. The concept of the ‘noble
savage’, uncontaminated by education, social mores and intellectual
rationalizations, was heroic for the Romantics. The peasant and the
child became symbols of such a state of purity as personalities that
took joy in simple things without rationalizing about them and as
minds that still possessed a sense of wonder. Likewise, other cultures
– specifically, non-European and Oriental (Asiatic) – became symbols
for a pure, wonderful primitivism. Rustic and local imagery abounds
in the writings of the period. Children and nature (free of industrial
houses and machinery) are icons of Wordsworthean ‘naturalness’.
Simple pleasures like walking through the countryside, listening to
farmers’ or yeomen’s songs and looking at the local ruin excite the
emotions in the poetry of the Romantic age. Romanticism thus marks
a critical revolt against the rationalizing, industrializing scientism of
the Enlightenment.
Notes
1. On the politics of civic humanism and philanthropy and their impact

on cultural forms like painting and the arts, see John Barrell’s
inspirational work in The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge
(1992). For an earlier account, see Pocock’s Virtue, Commerce, and
History (1985).
2. It must be noted and emphasized that suffrage was limited to

householders, leaseholders and freeholders, while the labouring classes
were still denied the right to vote.
10. Literature of the Romantic Age
PROSE
Non-fiction
Features of Romantic Non-fiction
• The essay, especially the personal essay, was the dominant form
• Essays often explored the psychological state of the author
• Longer polemical works were also common
• Notions of freedom and justice inspired by the French Revolution informed

many of the works
• Diaries, memoirs and travelogues were also important genres
• Much of the literary criticism of the period appeared in the form of review
essays and in letters.
The Romantic essay was influenced by the writings and style of

Rousseau and Montesquieu. The essays of Charles Lamb, William
Hazlitt and others were very personal in style and autobiographical
in nature. Since many of these writers were interested in the psychology
and personality of human beings, the essays were often explorations
of their own mental states and emotional conditions. Thus, a subjective
tone informs many of these essays and non-fictional prose, even when
the author is writing a so-called ‘objective’ critical essay.
An important context for the essay form during the Romantic period
was the launch of numerous literary periodicals and magazines.
Periodicals like Gentleman’s Magazine introduced the writings of many
newcomers, who then went on to become famous: Walter Scott,
Coleridge, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb and William Beckford,
to name a few. The periodicals also played an important role in the
dissemination of political and literary culture across England.
Two main kinds of periodicals flourished during the age. The ‘review’
carried essays on politics, science, the arts and contemporary social
concerns. The ‘magazine’, on the other hand, restricted itself to
literary essays and carried critical pieces and reviews of poets and
their works. In 1802, three friends, Henry Brougham, Sydney Smith
and Francis Jeffrey, decided to launch a periodical. The first issue of
The Edinburgh Review and Critical Journal appeared in October 1802.
It was politically slanted towards the Whig party. One of the early
contributors was Walter Scott. William Blackwood launched
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1817. It proved successful, with
writers like James Hogg as contributing editors, after an initial slow
start. The London Magazine was short-lived, even though its editor
John Scott had been friends with influential literary figures like
Hazlitt, Lamb and de Quincey.1
Perhaps the most popular essayist of this period is Charles Lamb
(1775–1834). A friend of Coleridge and Wordsworth, Lamb is most
famous for his Essays of Elia (serialized between 1820 and 1825 in
London Magazine) and Tales from Shakespeare (1807), co-authored with
his sister Mary. Of the Shakespeare work, Lamb wrote the six
tragedies while Mary did the fourteen comedies (histories and Roman
plays were omitted). In 1808, Lamb published an anthology,
Specimens of English Dramatic Poets. In 1813, Confessions of a Drunkard
appeared, though it did not prove to be very popular. The Last Essays
of Elia appeared in 1833. Elia was the name of an Italian clerk, a
colleague of Lamb’s when he worked in South Sea House. The Elia
essays, written in the expectedly personal style of the Romantics,
were funny, ironic and casual. In ‘The Superannuated Man’
(published in his Last Essays of Elia, 1833), Lamb celebrated retirement
with his characteristic irony.
William Hazlitt (1778–1830) had almost no formal education but
cultivated an avid interest in literature and painting (he copied Titians
at the Louvre). His first publication was the philosophical-
psychological tract, An Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805)
in which his pluralist and democratic views were forcefully
expressed. Lecturing on Shakespeare – which appeared as Characters
of Shakespeare’s Plays in 1817 – Hazlitt demonstrated his fine critical
acumen and his penchant for provocative views. For instance, he
Literature of the Romantic Age 191
argued that staging Shakespeare meant converting some delightful

tales into mere pantomime. Hazlitt however admitted that
Shakespeare’s politics were of crucial importance and detected in
plays such as Coriolanus, themes and concerns which people like
Burke and Paine were writing about in his (Hazlitt’s) age. Later works
such as Lectures on the English Poets (1818), Lectures on the English
Comic Writers (1819) and Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the
Age of Elizabeth (1820) established his reputation as a leading literary
critic. Miscellaneous essays appeared in two major volumes, The
Round Table (1817) and Table-Talk (1821–22). The Spirit of the Age
(1825) was one of his last works.
Thomas de Quincey (1785–1859), well-known today for his classic
The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822), was born into a
wealthy family, but soon squandered his wealth. Initially published
anonymously, de Quincey’s work became popular enough to
demand a second expanded version in 1856. De Quincey’s writings
are few in number, though, if his literary criticism had survived, the
situation would surely have been different. Confessions, which maps
the fears, anxieties and delirious states of a drugged mind is perhaps
one of the finest explorations of the inner self in Romantic literature.
What is fascinating is that he does not admit to guilt for the abuse of
his body. Instead, he writes in his prefatory note:
If opium eating be a sensual pleasure, and if I am bound to confess
that I have indulged in it to an excess, not yet recorded of any other
man, it is no less true, that I have struggled against this fascinating
enthralment with a religious zeal and have at length accomplished
what I never yet heard attributed to any other man – have untwisted,
almost to its final links, the accursed chain which fettered me. Such
a self-conquest may reasonably be set off in counterbalance to any
kind or degree of self-indulgence ... Guilt, therefore, I do not
acknowledge.
The text has presented itself several times to psychoanalytic critics
with its series of monsters, claustrophobia, irrational fears and crowds.
Part vision, part dream and part drug-induced hallucination,
Confessions is a cult text that looks forward to 20th century works
such as those by William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Irvine Welsh.
Here is a section from de Quincey’s description of his nightmares:
… dreams of oriental imagery and mythological tortures, impressed

upon me. Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical
sunlights, I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all
trees and plants, usages and appearances that are found in all
tropical regions and assembled them together in China or Indostan.
From kindred feelings, I soon brought Egypt and all her gods under
the same law. I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by
monkeys, by paroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas and was
fixed, for centuries, at the summit, or in secret rooms: I was the idol;
I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the
wrath of Brama through all the forests of Asia: Vishnu hated me;
Seva laid wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had
done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled
at… .
The cursed crocodile became to me the object of more horror than
almost all the rest. I was compelled to live with him; and (as was
always the case, almost, in my dreams) for centuries. I escaped
sometimes, and found myself in Chinese houses with cane tables,
etc. All the feet of the tables, sofas, etc., soon became instinct with
life: the abominable head of the crocodile, and his leering eyes,
looked out at me, multiplied into a thousand repetitions; and I stood
loathing and fascinated
It is also significant that de Quincey is supplied opium by an ‘Oriental’
(a ‘Malay’) and has ‘dreams of Oriental imagery’, as the above
passage demonstrates. De Quincey’s brilliant essay, ‘On Murder
Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ (1827) is an extraordinary
exercise in black humour.2
William Cobbett (1763–1835), the editor of Political Register, was a

staunch critic of metropolitan culture (though he himself lived in
London!), with its social hypocrisies and falsehoods. Cobbett’s fiery
writings savaged the advent of industrialization. Cobbett’s Rural Rides
(1830) argued that rural England presented a more healthy
relationship of land and labour. The machine, he suggested,
interfered and radically altered this relationship. He accuses
England’s monarchs of having destroyed the country and goes so
far as to say that Henry VIII reduced England to a ‘great human
slaughter-house’.
William Godwin (1756–1836) treated education as the key to human

happiness. He believed that government would eventually disappear
as humans became more perfect. Laws, marriage and property would
all become irrelevant. His Political Justice (1793), an important example
of polemical prose, is a severe critique of all forms of exploitation
and injustice. Along with Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97), Godwin
constituted the most important radical thinker of the age, influencing
younger poets and writers like Percy Shelley.
Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) remains
even today an inspirational feminist tract. Like Godwin and JS Mill,
Wollstonecraft sees reason and education as the greatest hopes for
women’s emancipation. She therefore lists an entire range of possible
professions and areas of expertise that the woman can acquire:
healing, midwifery, business and politics. Reading a variety of texts,
including those by Milton and Bacon, she declares:
Children, I grant, should be innocent; but when the epithet is applied
to men or women, it is but a civil term for weakness. For if it be
allowed that women were destined by Providence to acquire human
virtues and by the exercise of their understandings, that stability of
character which is the firmest ground to rest our future hopes upon,
they must be permitted to turn to the fountain of light and not forced
to shape their course by the twinkling of a mere satellite.
However, her concern is not merely with gender discrimination. Her
critique argues that class oppression has been equally instrumental
in generating injustice. She writes, in a later chapter, with a
particularly trenchant tone:
One class presses on another; for all are aiming to procure respect
on account of their property: and property, once gained, will procure
the respect due only to talents and virtue. Men neglect the duties
incumbent on man, yet are treated like demi-gods; religion is also
separated from morality by a ceremonial veil, yet men wonder that
the world is almost, literally speaking, a den of sharpers or
oppressors.
Written with often superbly acerbic wit, Vindication is a classic text
from the age.
Biographia Literaria (1817), the chief critical contribution from the

poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), is a series of prose pieces
on criticism, poetry and art. It is deeply philosophical in parts and
makes an attempt to develop a theory of the imagination. It is known
primarily for Coleridge’s definition of ‘Fancy’ and ‘Imagination’. This
is how Coleridge distinguishes between the two.
The primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime
Agent of all human Perception and as a repetition in the finite mind
of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am. The secondary I
consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious
will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency,
and differing only in degree and in the mode of its operation. It
dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this
process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to
idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as
objects) are essentially fixed and dead.
Fancy, on the other hand,
has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The
Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from
the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified
by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the
word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy
must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.
Coleridge’s arguments about these two forms of creative thinking
were extremely influential, though later critics have found several
flaws in his admittedly vague formulations. The theme of harmony
and organic unity that Coleridge proposes in his work was to be a
sustained one right down to the modern poet WB Yeats.
Percy Shelley (1792–1822), the angry poet of the second generation

of Romantics, also wrote an extended study of the poetic art. A
Defence of Poetry appeared posthumously in 1840 (though it had been
written much earlier, in 1821). He distinguishes here between poets,
philosophers and philosophic historians. He classifies Shakespeare,
Milton and Dante as philosophers and Plato, Bacon, Herodotus and
Plutarch as poets. Poetry for Shelley contains all other forms of
thought. Shelley writes:
Every original language near to its source is in itself the chaos of a

cyclic poem: the copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions
of grammar are the works of a later age and are merely the catalogue
and the form of the creations of Poetry
Poetry is the source of not only beauty but also morality. Imagination,
which finds its best expression in poetry, synthesizes and unifies.
Poetry is “the expression of imagination”. The task of the poet is
that of a prophet and priest.
Poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order,
are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance and
architecture and statuary and painting; they are the institutors of
laws and the founders of civil society and the inventors of the arts
of life and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with
the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies
of the invisible world which is called religion … .
Thus Shelley, in typical Romantic fashion, sees the poet as above the
rest of society, as a heroic figure. It is not surprising that one of his
best poems is about Prometheus, the hero who stole fire from the
Gods for humans. The poet’s vision will save the world and enable
the rest of humanity to lead better, moral lives.
Keats’ famous theory of ‘negative capability’ was expressed not in
an essay but in a letter. He defined ‘negative capability’ as the ability
to suspend judgment while being in sympathy with the other. It
was to be a mix of the subjective sympathetic mode and the objective
critical one. Of the letter and journal writers, we have Dorothy
Wordsworth. The Journals are brilliant accounts of her life with
Wordsworth, all interspersed with her view, of nature and
neighbourhood. She is herself a sharp observer of nature and her
journals reveal a romantic sensibility that has only now begun to be
recognized as being on par with the more famous Wordsworthean
one. Some poetry is also available with the journals, though their
quality is well below that of her prose. Wordsworth’s own Guide to
the Lakes (1810) was part travelogue and part guide full of poetic
meditations on the sights.
Among the other significant writers we have William Gilpin, whose
treatise Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel;
and On Sketching Landscape (1792) helped launch a whole new
aesthetic. The picturesque, according to Gilpin, was a landscape that

had been improved by human intervention. In one of his more famous
examples, he proposed that an ancient building would become more
picturesque if one took a hammer to a small section of it! The
picturesque was an important component of Romantic writing,
especially in the genre of travelogues and travel diaries. Nature was
treated as a ‘scene’, rendered beautiful as a picture (hence the term
‘picturesque’). Landscape appreciation was a crucial part of the
gentleman’s education, and people who learnt to understand the
aesthetics of a beautiful landscape were supposedly ‘civilized’.
Fiction
Features of Romantic Fiction
• There were several forms, many of them overlapping: epistolary, romance,

didactic, gothic, historical, etc.
• Continued the earlier age’s fiction of sensibility
• Philosophical novels or ‘novels of ideas’ were popular
• Some evangelical and moral tales were also published
• The Gothic tradition explored the darker aspects of human nature
• Later strands included historical fiction and historical romances
• Local fiction (what has been termed the ‘regional novel’) from Ireland and
Scotland provided glimpses into their particular culture and history.
Though the 1790–1830 period is seen mainly in terms of its poetry,

the fiction produced during this time has been not only popular, but
also extremely influential in terms of techniques and themes. Novels
of the 1790s mostly extended the themes from the ‘age of sensibility’.
Philosophical novels such as those by John Moore and Robert Bage
were deeply influenced by Enlightenment thought. Even the radical
William Godwin drew on Enlightenment ideas of rationality and
human reason in his fiction.
Influenced by Jacobin ideology, numerous writers used the genre to

provide social criticism and promote liberal social views. Thomas
Holcroft (1745–1809), William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft

were essentially writing novels with a social purpose. In John Moore’s
Zeluco (1789), the eponymous hero finds himself first trapped and
then corrupted by the rigid social codes and hypocrisies around him.
Thomas Holcroft in Anna St Ives (1792), a revision of Richardson’s
Clarissa, pleaded for social reform in his tale of the corruption of a
young woman by a courtly ‘gallant’, Coke Clifton. His subsequent
work, The Adventures of Hugh Trevor (1797), dealt with the middle
classes. Later, Hannah More and her sister Sarah produced novels
that were anti-Jacobin. These texts were produced in what they called
the Cheap Repository. Hannah More researched and purchased street
literature so that she could paint an authentic portrait of local life.
Her fiction – The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain (1795), Hints to All Ranks
of People (1795), Tawny Rachel (1797) and others – were about working
class people. A strong evangelical strain is visible in More’s work
and her aim was to target and critique prevalent habits of the lower
classes such as thieving, superstitions and sex outside marriage with
a view to reform them. Among the didactic writers of the time, she
was one of the most prolific and widely read (two million of her
tracts were sold in the first year).
William Godwin wrote Caleb Williams (1794), a social-historical novel
that adapted certain conventions and elements from the sentimental
novel of the earlier age. It is a savage criticism of English society
where decent gentry-folk (represented by Ferdinando Falkland) are
destroyed while boorish, uncultured fellows like Barnabas Tyrrel
flourish. The novel sets up a clash between Falkland’s liberal politics
and Tyrrel’s bigoted one. Falkland’s murder of Tyrrel is explained
away as the result of the former’s public humiliation at Tyrrel’s hands.
Caleb unravels the deadly secret in his master’s life, and understands
Falkland’s descent into paranoia and madness. When Caleb seeks to
reveal the secret, the tribunal prefers to believe the word of the master
rather than that of the servant. The novel, while commenting on the
social contexts of rural England, also delved into the psychology of a
murderer, one of the first explorations of its kind in English fiction.
It was also a critique of class oppression. In an impassioned outcry,
Caleb declares: “Is that [England] a country of liberty where
thousands languish in dungeons and fetters?” Godwin’s exploration
of the slow decay of Falkland’s morals and psychology suggests that
“the spirit and the character of the government intrudes itself into
every rank of society”, thus arguing that the state of England itself is
to blame for the decadence of once-decent gentry such as Falkland.
Even though Godwin wrote five more novels, it is as the author of
Caleb Williams and Political Justice that he is known today.
Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman (1798) was a feminist
response to Paine’s epochal tract, The Rights of Man. Maria, who is
forced into an asylum by her husband George Venables, is
Wollstonecraft’s symbol of a middle-class woman who is wronged.
In the asylum, Maria befriends Darnford, only to be abandoned by
him too. Towards the end she is left with her faithful servant Jemima,
a prostitute and a symbol of the oppressed lower class woman, and
her child by Darnford. Wollstonecraft was attempting to show how
women of all classes are oppressed by the English patriarchal system.
She describes Maria’s emotions at being hounded by social structures
like the law:
A strong sense of injustice had silenced every motion, which a
mixture of true and false delicacy might otherwise have excited in
Maria's bosom. She only felt in earnest to insist on the privilege of
her nature. The sarcasms of society, and the condemnations of a
mistaken world, were nothing to her, compared with acting contrary
to those feelings which were the foundation of her principles.
There are extended debates about women and property, marriage
and morals in the didactic tale.
Fanny Burney (1752–1840) was a prominent writer of sentimental
fiction. Her heroine-centric, and unfailingly moral tales detailed, in
the mode of Samuel Richardson, the tribulations of a young, virtuous
girl in society, described generically in Evelina as a girl with “a virtuous
mind, a cultivated understanding, and a feeling heart”. Her virtue is
under attack and she is constantly in danger of being corrupted by
both the gentry class and the middle classes. The plot revolves around
her entry into society, her mistakes and eventual ‘learning’. They
dealt with the process of courtship, the manners and the tensions in
prospective and actual marriages. Eventually, she acquires a husband
and home and settles down. Respectability is attained with marital
status alone. Her most famous work is the epistolary novel Evelina
(1778), subtitled, “A Young Woman’s Entrance into the World”.

Cecilia (1782), Camilla (1796) and The Wanderer (1814) provide
explorations of the woman’s psychological states. They all pointed
to the absolute necessity of good conduct in girls, suggesting that
later marital bliss depended on their perfect behaviour in society
during courtship. In Camilla, there is an entire sermon on the right
conduct of women by Mr Tyrold (Camilla’s father). As pointed out
in the case of Elizabeth Rowe and Penelope Aubin in the previous
era, such moral tales were welcome and the female novelist found
ready acceptance with them. Burney’s fiction looks forward to the
domestic novels of the Victorian period.
One version of the sentimental novel which preferred to go to the
other extreme in explorations of the human psyche was the Gothic
tale (see the box, the Gothic). The genre was heralded by Horace
Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765). In the 1780–1820 period, the
genre flourished. One of the leading practitioners of the genre was
Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823). Radcliffe also portrays the heroine as
the victim of a male-dominated society. In addition, there is madness,
wickedness and the brooding presence of inhuman evil in these tales.
Dangers and demonic threats loom large in Radcliffe’s The Mysteries
of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797). Her characters are all
governed by extreme passions – an extrapolation of the passions in
the sentimental novel – and the villain seems to be the incarnation of
pure evil (for instance, Montoni in Udolpho). Radcliffe was also
particularly good at evoking a gloomy atmosphere and setting in
her fiction. While her plots are not always well-crafted, it is the power
of the atmosphere – brooding, menacing and frightening – that
makes Udolpho and The Italian such great reads. Here is an extended
sample of Radcliffe’s powers of description from Udolpho:
Towards the close of day, the road wound into a deep valley.
Mountains, whose shaggy steeps appeared to be inaccessible,
almost surrounded it. To the east, a vista opened, that exhibited the
Apennines in their darkest horrors; and the long perspective of
retiring summits, rising over each other, their ridges clothed with
pines, exhibited a stronger image of grandeur, than any that Emily
had yet seen. The sun had just sunk below the top of the mountains
she was descending, whose long shadow stretched athwart the
valley, but his sloping rays, shooting through an opening of the
cliffs, touched with a yellow gleam the summits of the forest, that
hung upon the opposite steeps, and streamed in full splendour
upon the towers and battlements of a castle, that spread its extensive
ramparts along the brow of a precipice above. The splendour of
these illumined objects was heightened by the contrasted shade,
which involved the valley below…
Emily gazed with melancholy awe upon the castle, which she
understood to be Montoni's; for, though it was now lighted up by the
setting sun, the gothic greatness of its features, and its mouldering
walls of dark grey stone, rendered it a gloomy and sublime object. As
she gazed, the light died away on its walls, leaving a melancholy
purple tint, which spread deeper and deeper, as the thin vapour
crept up the mountain, while the battlements above were still tipped
with splendour. From those too, the rays soon faded, and the whole
edifice was invested with the solemn duskiness of evening. Silent,
lonely and sublime, it seemed to stand the sovereign of the scene,
and to frown defiance on all who dared to invade its solitary reign.
As the twilight deepened, its features became more awful in obscurity,
and Emily continued to gaze, till its clustering towers were alone
seen, rising over the tops of the woods, beneath whose thick shade
the carriages soon after began to ascend.
The extent and darkness of these tall woods awakened terrific
images in her mind, and she almost expected to see banditti start
up from under the trees … .
Notice how the physical setting seems to readily evoke certain kinds
of mental states. The frightening scene causes disturbing sensations
in Emily’s mind in a classic example of Gothic description where
landscape/atmosphere and the mindscape seem to affect each other.
Emily, affected by what she sees, imagines horrors. And her mind,
already stirred, imposes greater menace on the surroundings.
One of the most controversial examples of the Gothic novel came
from Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775–1818). The Monk (1796) deals
with corruption of the monastery, perverted religion, villainy, murder,
incest and excessive desire. It is a typical Gothic novel (indeed one
can safely say that Lewis did not leave out any of the Gothic elements),
so much so that Lewis is now referred to as ‘Monk’ Lewis. Ambrosio,
the monk of the tale, is a respectable priest by day. But behind the
The Gothic
Gothicism was a form of architecture that flourished between the 12th and
16th centuries in parts of Europe. Castles with turrets, vast dungeons, winding
passages set in facades with intricate detail and topped by steep spires were
typical of Gothic architecture.
In terms of literature, Gothic writing dwelt upon the darker sides of human
sensibility – uncontrollable passions, paranoia and evil. The fiction of Ann
Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Mary Shelley, Horace Walpole (who is credited
with creating the first Gothic novel in The Castle of Otranto) and Maria
Edgeworth was usually set in large rolling grounds, castles with mysterious
rooms and dungeons, moving statues and lurking evil. There was an
atmosphere of brooding menace and unseen dangers. Characters are often
governed by some strange obsession and are often unpredictable. The
supernatural and the irrational figure prominently in these works. Taboo
subjects like incest, blasphemy and black magic become routine elements
in them. They often also take recourse to the detective or adventure story
convention. Sexuality – its multiple anxieties, desires and prohibitions – is
central to the Gothic tale. Later authors like Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker and
even Charles Dickens used Gothic elements. In the American context, Edgar
Allan Poe proved to be the most popular of Gothic writers.
façade of faith and decorum lurk deep desires and a villainous mind.
The rape and murder of his sister hurtles the novel – and the monk
– to an expected conclusion. Written with heavy doses of melodrama
and dollops of severely pathological states of mind, The Monk
combines, in the true tradition of the Gothic, passion and reason,
respectability and base villainy, eroticism with religion, in a mix that
was to set the agenda for many decades of the genre.
A genre that draws from each of the above traditions is the ‘Local
Novel’ of Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849). Her concern is with English
provincial life and the gentry, increasingly a class whose way of life
was under threat. The gentry sought to hold on to the vestiges of its
former glory and ways of life. With the burgeoning sense of
Englishness, local and provincial life seemed to be under threat of
erasure. The gentry moved to towns and the feudal country squire
was transforming himself into a capitalist and seeking a presence on
the national scene. The dissolute and depraved lifestyles of the

extravagant gentry – symbolized in Edgeworth’s Sir Patrick Rackrent,
Sir Murtagh and Sir Kit – contributed greatly to their downfall. Castle
Rackrent (1800), her most famous novel, captures this changing aspect
of provincial life. Like most of her later tales, it is set in Ireland and
discusses through the voice of Thady Quirk, a loyal servant, the
decline in the Rackrent family’s fortunes. Edgeworth’s fiction is a
good index of the social criticism of the time, since the sense of
nostalgia for a declining way of life combines with a quiet
apportioning of guilt between industrialized urbanization,
incompetence and a complete absence of social responsibility among
the squires. Her later novels, Belinda (1801), Patronage (1814) and
Helen (1834) were, in her own words, ‘moral tales’.
One of the great practitioners of the Gothic tradition was Mary Shelley
(1797–1851), who also expanded its literary scope to include science
fiction and fantasy. Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) has been filmed and
adapted so many times that the original novel is lost in these versions.
Shelley was influenced by the circulating discourses of science –
galvanism and natural philosophy – and the theological debates
about theories of life and motion. Feminist critics of romanticism
have discerned several layers of meaning in this complex tale about
a scientist (Victor Frankenstein – it is usually forgotten that
‘Frankenstein’ is the name of the scientist and not the monster) and
his quest for the secret of life. He invents what he thinks is a human,
but discovers to his horror that he has created a gigantic monster.
The monster now expects Frankenstein to do his creator’s duty (the
monster wants Frankenstein to make him, the monster, a mate) and
when Frankenstein refuses, the monster torments him and his family.
Slowly, the monster kills all those people Frankenstein loves. Finally,
chasing the monster in order to kill him, Frankenstein himself dies.
The novel combines several themes: the theology of Genesis and the
role of the Creator, the use and abuse of science, education and
morality (the monster reads Milton and Plutarch), the romance of
discovery, the role of community and the problematic theme of
motherhood (all mothers, real and potential, die early in the tale). It
generates a whole new mythology that has remained a powerful
force in literary writings since its publication (contemporary debates
about cloning in science and Margaret Atwood’s 2002 novel, Oryx
and Crake, are two recent examples that seem to extend Mary Shelley’s
anxieties about science and creation).5
Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan; 1776?–1859) explored Irish history
and culture in her The Wild Irish Girl (1806). The novel provides
invaluable information about local customs, geography and culture.
Themes of social reform inform the tale, which was, interestingly,
subtitled, ‘a national tale’. The theme of Irish independence in the
novel made the British government suspicious of her and the
Owensons even came under police surveillance. Owenson’s
nationalistic fiction was so popular that the British government gave
her a pension for her services to literature and nationalism in 1837.
She was the first woman writer to receive the honour. She also wrote
an ‘Indian tale’, The Missionary (1811).
The Scottish equivalent of Owenson was Jane Porter. In The Scottish

Chiefs, Porter mapped Scotland’s history and culture in extensive
detail. Based loosely on the lives of Sir William Wallace and Robert
Bruce, two of Scotland’s prominent heroes, the novel is an
examination of the gentry, religious values and Scottish nationalism
(it discusses Scotland’s rebellion against English rule, a rebellion led
first by Wallace, and, after his execution, by Bruce).
Tales for children were produced in large numbers by Hannah and
Sarah More’s Cheap Repository. One writer, Mary Sherwood (1775–
1851), alone produced over 300 works. These were often in the nature
of evangelical tales, emphasizing moral values. Sherwood’s Little
Henry and his Bearer (1814) is the story of an English orphan in India
and his slow conversion to Christian faith. The History of the Fairchild
Family (1818) was also cast in a similar mould of the instructional
children’s book.
The evangelical novel was the preferred form for Barbara Hofland
(1770–1844). Her ‘tales for youth’ such as The Good Grandmother
(1817), The Blind Farmer and the ‘widow cycle’ of three novels (The
Officer’s Widow, 1809; The Clergyman’s Widow, 1812; The Merchant’s
Widow, 1814) glorified virtues of thrift, stoicism, Christian faith and
self-discipline. Her didactic fiction rejected ambition, fashion and
greed. The tales usually revolved around the poverty of a family,
whose efforts and discipline enables it to survive and eventually attain
happiness. Other themes of destiny, providence and social injustice

also figure prominently in these ‘feel-good’ tales meant to provide
moral instruction to slightly older children.
The most significant writer of romances during the period and one
of the greatest novelists in English is Jane Austen (1775–1817). Austen
began writing by adapting earlier writers’ works, before going on to
publish six novels between 1811 and 1818. One of the finest
chroniclers of English country life and the social mores of the country
squire and his family, Austen’s fiction has remained extremely
popular all over the global literary market. She explored themes of
property, marriage, the status of women, the dysfunctional nature
of the English village and the decline of the gentry. The descriptions
of festivities, marriage alliances, the countryside and clergy are
unsurpassed examinations of English social life. Though she was
not a feminist in the contemporary sense of the term, her exposure
of the ‘wrongs’ of woman reveal a knowledge of the exploitative
nature of gender relations in English society. Austen downplays
emotion while providing intelligent and sharply perceptive
observations delivered with great irony. The reader does not obtain
direct comments; rather one is forced to go beneath the gentle satire
to discover Austen’s social commentary and critique.
Sense and Sensibility (1811) contrasts the two states of reason and
emotion in two sisters, the highly self-controlled Elinor and the
impulsive Marianne. While Elinor chooses to be restrained in her
demonstration of affection for Edward Ferrars, Marianne makes
visible her love for Willoughby. The vicissitudes of the sisters’ love
life and the debate between sense and sensibility constitutes the plot
of the novel. Pride and Prejudice (1813) combines a love story with
the theme of property and family fortunes. Once again a story of
sisters and their marriages, the novel explores, chiefly, Elizabeth
Bennett’s recognition and admission of her true feelings and faults.
The Elizabeth–Darcy love story is delivered with characteristic wit
and fine observations on what marriage entails for a woman (a
recurrent theme in Austen’s fiction). Mansfield Park (1814), one of
Austen’s more ambitious tales, is about the revival of society. The
moral revival of a family and culture is the central theme in Austen’s
tale about the Crawfords. The Crawfords represent, in Austen’s
vision, all that is wrong with the English gentry – the rivalry,
dysfunctional marriages, hypocrisies, petty jealousies, boorishness,
extravagances and immorality. Austen’s Fanny Price, one of the more
popular of the virtuous heroines in English literature (and miles ahead
of Samuel Richardson’s vacuous women characters), is morally,
ethically and intellectually superior to everybody else. As the novel
reaches its denouement, we find her attaining the centre of the Park’s
culture, a symbolic victory for her moral courage. She proves herself
the rightful heir to the Park. Mansfield Park is also Austen’s most
sustained examination of property and landscape (the estate) in
English gentry society. What she achieves is a smooth elision of the
physical and moral landscapes, by showing how the former is
worthless without the latter.
Emma (1816) is one of Austen’s most popular works, studied in

literature classes across India and the world. It offers a remarkable
sketch of the heroine’s status – a wealthy heiress conscious of her
social role, privileges and obligations – and her character. Emma’s
abuse of her social power, especially at the cost of her social inferiors,
is the subject of Austen’s attack. Her interference in the alliances
between various couples (Harriet and Martin, Harriet and Elton,
Jane and Frank) and finally her discovery that she is in love with
Knightley (with whom Harriet has fallen in love) is the subject of
some brilliant irony and characterization. Austen’s insight into the
workings of people’s minds is surely one of the finest in English
literature. Austen’s ability to combine several comments and insights
into a single image/sentence often results in the reader’s ignoring
the depth of the writing. For instance, take the opening lines of Emma:
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable
home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best
blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the
world with very little to distress or vex her.
Here Austen conveys the image of a happy and pleasantly-behaved
young woman. But she also suggests that Emma’s behaviour and
manners have something to do with the fact that she is economically
very secure and rich. The descriptive “with a comfortable home and
happy disposition” combines class/economy with states of mind.
Another example would be the opening of Mansfield Park where
Austen emphasizes the link between economic status and a person’s

character:
About thirty years ago Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only
seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas
Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to
be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet’s lady, with all the comforts
and consequences of an handsome house and large income.
The suggestion that Maria Ward had ‘captivated’ the English
aristocrat and escaped penury is clearly indicated here. Austen’s
ironic tone is unmatched in literary language and much of her social
criticism is made through such diction. A brilliant example would
be Austen’s self-conscious ironic comment in Pride and Prejudice:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in
possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be
on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in
the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the
rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.
Walter Scott (1771–1832) wrote the largest selling historical romances
of his time and has remained one of the most popular authors for
the reading public well into the 20th century. Scott wrote about the
transformations in Scottish society from the feudal-agrarian to the
urban-rural. His tales revolved around the themes of Scottish
nationalism, the civil war (which transformed English and Scottish
history as nothing else did), class and feudal issues in society as well
as the Jacobite Rebellions. Later works discussed medieval England.
His novels combined realistic descriptions with poetic
representations. The extensive documentation provided a great
degree of realism, while the symbolism contributed to the romance
of history. The result is what has come to be called the ‘historical
romance’. Scott’s own definition of the genre was as follows: “a
poetical imagination and a strict attention to the character and
manners [of the age]”. The combination of historical detail with
imaginative plots and evolved symbolism made for complex
narratives layered with fact and fiction. Scott adopted the medieval
romance tradition of heroic narratives: the hero’s quest, his
adventures, themes of social status, courage, chivalry and virtue. In
many cases, Scott substituted gentry or middle-class heroes for the

knights of medieval romances. His work exhibits a clear admiration
for such old world values that, he believes, are increasingly lost or
ignored in a period of change and modernization. His use of folk
language, courtly mannerisms and details of social life in his fiction
lend a degree of verisimilitude unmatched by any writer of the time.
His novels, despite the very evident fictionality of plot, provide a
good introduction to the English and Scottish society of the period.6
Scott’s first great success was Waverley (1814), set in the turbulent
years of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Jacobite Rebellion. Guy Mannering
(1815) is a social novel, exploring the eroding life of the Scottish
gentry. Scott’s nostalgia for an old way of life, under threat from
modernizing methods in the ‘age of improvement’, comes through
very clearly in this novel. In The Antiquary (1816), he returned to the
same theme, though he now situated it within the Jacobin versus
Anti-Jacobin tensions of the 1790s. His next major work was Old
Mortality (1816), a novel set in the 17th century and exploring the
religious tensions of the 1650s. Rob Roy (1817–18) was set in the
Scottish rebellion of 1715 and dealt with the life of the Scottish hero
of the title. The famous Scottish Highlanders are the main study here.
They symbolize, in Scott’s vision, the best of traditional values. The
Heart of Midlothian has a larger sweep, taking in the period from the
1680s when Presbyterian Covenanters were massacred (giving the
dubious epithet ‘killing time’ to the age) to the Porteous riots of 1736
and thereby situating the tale of Davie Jeans, Jeanie Deans and Effie
Deans on either side of the 1707 Act of Union between England and
Scotland. A novel set in the immediate aftermath of the crucial Act
of Union was The Bride of Lammermoor (1819). One of Scott’s gloomiest
works – he dictated the entire work, being in great physical pain at
the time – the novel is a revenge story. Edgar Ravenswood falls in
love with Lucy, daughter of his arch enemy Sir William Ashton.
William Ashton encourages the romance because he sees Edgar as
his winning card in his own battle with his political rival, the Duke
of Atholl. Lady Ashton seeks to prevent the marriage. The novel
then turns into a version of the melodramatic Gothic. Finally, Lucy
stabs her other suitor, Bucklaw. Bucklaw survives even as Lucy dies
of shock. Soon after, Edgar perishes in quicksand.
Scott returned to English history with his best-known tale Ivanhoe

(1819–20). This tale of Robin Hood, Richard the Lionheart, the
Crusades and the Knights of the Templars, with its ‘dark’ and ‘fair’
heroines, has been extremely popular for its themes of revenge
(Ulrica’s), chivalry (Robin Hood’s), courage (Ivanhoe’s) and love
(Rebecca and Rowena’s). Scott’s nostalgia for the romance and
chivalry of the medieval and early modern world also resulted in
Tales of the Crusaders (1825), The Talisman (1825) and The Betrothed
(1825). Woodstock (1826) was set in the traumatic years of England’s
regicide and civil war. It was also one of Scott’s most sustained
analyses of the corruption of court culture – the plotting, dishonesty
and seduction. Scott wrote other historical romances, but failed to
achieve the narrative density of his early and middle work. The Abbot,
Kenilworth, The Monastery and The Pirate were reasonably popular
during his time. Scott, however, was always known as the ‘author
of Waverley’; in fact, Ivanhoe did not carry his name (it had only the
phrase “from the author of Waverley” on the cover).
The main themes in the fiction of Charlotte Smith (1749–1806) revolve
around inheritance and the family. There is a definite touch of the
Gothic in novels such as Emmeline (1788), with heroines pursued
through old houses, obsessive suitors, uncertain ancestry and other
themes. The Old Manor House (1793) is another novel that deals with
the dilemmas of England’s gentry. It has a colonial sub-theme,
specifically about colonial America, where a scion of the family is
fighting with the British army. In The Young Philosopher (1798), the
hero abandons an oppressive English society and leaves for America
and freedom. She was also inspired by the events of the Revolution
to write a revolutionary novel, Desmond (1792). Drawing from her
own failed marriage, Smith’s fiction also documents the sufferings
of and social ostracism and exploitation of a separated woman.
Charlotte Lennox (1729?–1804) spent a few years in America and
used it as the setting of her first novel, The Life of Harriot Stuart (1750).
The major part of her literary output is in poetry, publishing her
works from about 1747. But her best known work is The Female
Quixote (1752), a work endorsed by Samuel Johnson and Henry
Fielding. As in Cervantes’ classic, the heroine (Arabella) is influenced
by her reading of romance novels. This results in a skewed vision of
the world. Arabella rushes to rescue a prostitute from her companions,

suspects her uncle of incestuous designs on her and mistakes a
gardener for a nobleman. After a serious illness – as a result of her
jumping into a river to escape from what she believes are ravishers
chasing her – a clergyman dispels her illusions about romances and
she returns to her faithful suitor.
Rural England received one of its best chroniclers in Mary Mitford
(1787–1855?). A great believer in the notion that true Englishness
lay in its villages, Mitford presented detailed and romanticized
accounts of rural life and character in tales such as Our Village.
Mitford is a novelist who questions the Enclosure acts and the so-
called measures of improvement and is the fictional equivalent of
poets such as John Clare and George Crabbe. Mitford peopled her
tales with leisurely ladies, hard-working yeomanry, the mercantile
middle class and the tensions (so central to Romantic writing) of
country versus the city. She discusses the life of families in villages,
where gossip, intrigues and tensions abound, but virtue and the old-
fashioned ethics of labour and sincerity finally triumph.7
This is also the age of the ‘Oriental tale’. The Orient – from the middle-
east to India – was central to the Romantic writer. Scott’s The Talisman
had a Palestinian connection. James Morier’s The Adventures of Hajji
Baba (1824), Caroline Lamb’s Ada Reis (1823) and William Beckford’s
Vathek (1786), all drew from prevalent myths and images about the
Orient. The empire and colonialism contributed greatly to the
storehouse of images for the use of the Romantic writers.8
A talented commentator on Romantic writing and culture was

Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866). A practitioner of what is often
called the ‘opinion novel’, Peacock satirized many famous
contemporaries and genres in his satiric novels. Nightmare Abbey
(1818) was a satire on the Gothic tale. Headlong Hall (1816) mocked
the main intellectual concerns of the Romantic age: the aesthetic of
the picturesque, the rise of psychology and physiognomy and the
factory system. The Utilitarians (James Mill and JS Mill and Jeremy
Bentham) were the subject of Crotchet Castle (1831). Peacock’s work
is full of strongly-opinionated eccentrics, who constantly squabble
with each other.
POETRY
Features of Romantic Poetry
• The principle concern was nature, landscape and beauty
• The poems often represented the working-out of poetic theory itself
• Dreams, childhood and innocence were common themes
• The influence of the French Revolution and other political events was visible
• Concern with the inner self: the poems are mainly explorations of the
poet’s mind
• Heavy symbolism
• Influenced by theories of association and drugs
• Adapted myths and images from several non-European cultures
• A revelatory or prophetic tone is seen in many poets
• Obsession with death and unconscious states.
The Romantic age is best known for its poetry, a genre which
produced some of the most studied and anthologized poems in the
English language. Wordsworth and Coleridge constituted the first
generation of poets, followed by Keats, Shelley and Byron. Then,
there were other poets such as Robert Southey, George Crabbe, John
Clare and Thomas Moore. There was a pervasive influence of the
German Romantic poets and philosophers (Schelling, the Schillers
and Goethe). However, the Romantic strain begins to be visible in
English poetry well before Wordsworth and Coleridge’s poetical
works. William Blake, William Cowper and Robert Burns exhibit
several themes and concerns that anticipate the so-called ‘Lake
School’ poets.
Until roughly 1960, five male writers constituted the ‘Romantics’

canon and women poets from this period have not been as well
studied or anthologized. It was only in the 1980s that even Mary
Shelley was studied within this paradigm. We need to keep in mind
the severely patriarchal culture in and against which women authors
of this period wrote. Isobel Armstrong in her prescient essay ‘The

Gush of the Feminine: How Can We Read Women’s Poetry of the
Romantic Period?’ (1995) suggests that reading these writers as
embodying the feminine would be highly reductive. She argues that
women Romantic writers used two strategies for writing: using a
traditional ‘feminine’ discourse which they then used to analyse and
think, and challenging male forms of thought that devalued woman’s
knowledge and experience.
Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743–1825) published her Works in 1825.
Her poems are full of personal ‘signs’ – names of people, places and
events – even though (and unlike Wordsworth) she does not invite
attention to herself. Ironically, we only get a glimpse of the ‘I’ within
the wealth of personal detail. She wrote some truly funny burlesque
poems, though a sense of dissent is visible in most of them. ‘The
Groans of the Tankard’ is a poem about the abuse of a drinking
tankard, spoken by the tankard itself. Here is Barbauld’s description
of hunger, with the right mix of seriousness and the burlesque:
‘Twas at the solemn, silent, noon-tide hour,
When hunger rages with despotic power,
When the lean student quits his Hebrew roots
For the gross nourishment of English fruits,
And throws unfinis’d airy systems by
For solid pudding and substantial pye,
When hungry poets the glad summons own,
And leave spare fast to dine with Gods alone…
The satire is beautifully phrased and conveys a nice mix of theology
and social criticism. In other poems such as ‘Corsica’ and ‘The Times’,
she supports rebellion (even revolution):
It is not in the force of the mortal arm,
Scarcely in fate, to bind the struggling soul
That gall’d by wanton power, indignant swells
Against oppression; breathing great revenge,
Careless of life, determin’d to be free.
It is also important to note the powerful woman Barbauld creates in
‘Corsica’, who is personified as both Virtue and Liberty and described
as possessing a “tow’ring form …with an ampler port/and bolder
tone”, anticipates the ‘virago’ figure of later feminism. Other poems

that showcase Barbauld’s support for rebellion and her anger against
establishment authoritarianism include ‘The Invitation’ and ‘To Dr
Aikin…’. Thus, contrary to established views of women’s writing,
Barbauld’s work does not emphasize merely the personal or domestic.
She comes across as a keen observer of contemporary life and as a
thinker on the crucial issues of her day. However, this is not to suggest
that she only wrote political poems. Poems such as ‘Verses Written
in an Alcove’ – in the form of an invitation to another woman
(Elizabeth Rigby or ‘Lissy’ in the poem) for a romantic tryst in the
alcove at night, a theme echoed in ‘A Summer Evening’s Meditation’
– and the six ‘Songs’ are deeply sensual and come close to being
erotic.
Felicia Hemans (1793–1835) published her Records of Woman in 1828.

Her poems document women’s lives with a mixture of dramatic and
sentimental verse. In ‘Madeline’, a young Frenchwoman leaves her
mother to go to America with her new husband. In America, her
husband dies and the woman is on her deathbed. She has visions of
her mother coming to care for her. In a queer mix of reality and
fantasy, the mother is indeed at her bedside. A poem that captures
the thus-far ignored mother-daughter bond, ‘Madeline’ is a powerful
counterpoint to male relationships. The surreal, even utopian, informs
Hemans’ poetry, as in ‘The Better Land’, which once again locates a
strong mother-child bond:
‘I hear thee speak of the better land,
Thou call'st its children a happy band;
Mother! oh, where is that radiant shore?
Shall we not seek it, and weep no more?
Is it where the flower of the orange blows,
And the fire-flies glance through the myrtle boughs?’
– ‘Not there, not there, my child!’
‘Is it where the feathery palm-trees rise,

And the date grows ripe under sunny skies?
Or 'midst the green islands of glittering seas,
Where fragrant forests perfume the breeze,
And strange bright birds on their starry wings,
Bear the rich hues of all glorious things?’
– ‘Not there, not there, my child!’
‘Is it far away, in some region old,

Where the rivers wander o'er sands of gold?–
Where the burning rays of the ruby shine,
And the diamond lights up the secret mine,
And the pearl gleams forth from the coral strand?–
Is it there, sweet mother, that better land?’
– ‘Not there, not there, my child!'
‘Eye hath not seen it, my gentle boy!

Ear hath not heard its deep songs of joy;
Dreams cannot picture a world so fair–
Sorrow and death may not enter there;
Time doth not breathe on its fadeless bloom,
For beyond the clouds, and beyond the tomb,
– It is there, it is there, my child!’
Florence Nightingale is said to have copied out this poem for a cousin.
Love stories are central to Hemans’ poems like ‘The Vaudois’ Wife’,
‘Thekla at her Lover’s Grave’ and ‘The Image in the Heart’.
Heterosexual love, domestic affections and motherhood are the subjects
Hemans deals with best. She has very few references to contemporary
political issues. However, Hemans does engage in another kind of
politics – that of gender. In ‘The Forest Sanctuary’, for instance, two
sisters, Theresa and Inez, are to be burned at the stake as heretics.
Interestingly, Hemans describes the sisters in terms that have often
been used to define male heroism. In a reversal of gender roles, Hemans
describes the sisters as possessing ‘fire’, ‘energy’ and abilities to raise a
‘storm’ – images that Blake uses to describe Urizen and Shelley deploys
to mark Prometheus. This reversal is a crucial element in Hemans’
proto-feminist poetry, whereby she posits a ‘heroism of the woman’.
It is therefore important to realize that a Wordsworth or a Shelley
was writing in a context where women also wrote and received a
certain measure of critical and public attention, but eventually failed
to be included in the canon. Many of the themes we see in the
canonical Romantic poets are visible in Hemans and Barbauld, who,
as noted above, give them a gender twist as it were.
William Blake (1757–1827) is arguably the greatest English poet after
Milton. He had visions even as a child and was deeply interested in
philosophy and the contemporary theological debates. An extremely

well-read man especially in mysticism and occult philosophies,
Blake’s poetry heralds a whole new era. His poetry also appropriates
and reworks myths, traditions and symbols from various sources –
Swedenborgian mysticism, Christianity, Renaissance art (Blake was
a printer and did his own etchings), European and English poets
(especially Milton and Dante) and religious poetry. Blake’s poetry
must be read with his visuals to get a more complete sense of his
vision. He also wrote heavily symbolic poetry which is often difficult
to comprehend, especially in his prophetic books. Blake also held
some very radical views for his age. He believed that the Devil was
the real hero of Milton’s Paradise Lost. He also argued that God was
both good and evil and that Heaven and Hell will eventually merge
to generate redemptive forces (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is the
title of one of his masterpieces, published between 1790 and 1793).
His poetry often combines both these ‘contrary’ (Blake’s term, in lieu
of opposites) states of the human soul: innocence and experience as
well as evil and virtue. Blake is also a poet who anticipates the
Romantic emphasis on poetic imagination. His ‘Auguries of
Innocence’ opens with the famous lines:
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
The Songs of Innocence (1789) portrays images of children, sheep and
lambs – symbols of the pure state of innocence. His Songs of Experience
(1794) portrays the challenges to innocence and its corruption (the
poems are paired; one set in Songs of Innocence and another set
showing contrary states in Songs of Experience). The poems in the
latter volume also embody Blake’s hatred of authority: parents,
teachers and priests are all portrayed as cruel dictators. A child is
punished for speaking quite truthfully that he cannot love God (or
anyone else) more than he loves himself. The child symbolizes nature,
which is free and pure. Blake suggests in poems such as ‘Chimney
Sweeper’ and ‘Holy Thursday’ that the whole idea of education and
religion (commonly called ‘culture’) is to impose control over
innocence.
'Twas on a Holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean,

The children walking two and two, in red and blue and green
The children are walking in a very orderly, i.e., regimented fashion
here – hardly the way children should walk. In its pair version, Blake
asks:
Is this a holy thing to see
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduc'd to misery
Fed with cold, usurous hand?
Blake sees the world in terms of a conflict between nature and culture,
innocence and corruption, imagination and rationality. His dislike
of organization and systematization is revealed in his dark images
of control (the beadles in ‘Holy Thursday’) and discipline. They can
be read as his criticism of industrial England’s increasing modes of
social control. London, in Blake’s famous poem of the same title, is
described as ‘chartered’ (meaning mapped and controlled). As a
result, the speaker in the poem hears only anguish among its citizens:
In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear
‘The Sick Rose’, a well-known Blake poem, describes the corruption
of beauty and innocence. His poems contained critiques of social
systems (‘London’), praise and awe at the power of God (‘Tiger’)
and controversial views (for instance, that we keep people poor so
that we can show them mercy and charity, thereby ensuring our
place in heaven). His prophetic books, especially America (1793)
Europe (1794) and Jerusalem (1804–20) were about liberty, the
primacy of passion and the separation of holiness, symbolized by
Jerusalem, from England (Albion in the poem). Blake worries that
imagination is at an end and Los, the spirit of the imagination in
Jerusalem, has no work to do any more in materialist England and
he sits jobless at his anvil. In The Song of Los (1795), imagination has
been replaced by rational laws and religion.
All of Blake’s themes were expressed in difficult symbolic modes.
For instance, Enitharmon in The First Book of Urizen represents pity.
But in Europe, she symbolizes tyrannical power. Blake’s visuals,

enormously thought-provoking, add to the glorious power of his
thought. 9
William Cowper (1731–1800) is today known mainly for The Task
(1784). A deeply contemplative poet, Cowper structures his poem
around the seasons. Cowper also provides some extremely fine
portraits of nature, and argues that nature is evidence of God’s
existence. Here is a particularly fine piece of description of winter
morning:
'Tis morning; and the sun, with ruddy orb in a blaze,
Ascending, fires th' horizon: while the clouds,
That crowd away before the driving wind,
More ardent as the disk emerges more,
Resemble most some city in a blaze,
Seen through the leafless wood. His slanting ray
Slides ineffectual down the snowy vale,
And, tinging all with his own rosy hue,
From ev'ry herb and ev'ry spiry blade
Robert Burns (1759–96) was a passionate believer in the idea of
community. Making the Scottish farmer his hero, Burns sought to
portray a generous picture of rural life. While he recognized the
benefits of Scotland’s union with England, he was also a supporter
of Scottish nationalism. He therefore wrote in the Scot vernacular
rather than in English. His first volume of verse is significantly titled
Poems, chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786). Adapting the folk and
oral traditions of Scotland, Burns described farming life, while being
keenly aware of the exploitative class mechanisms that prevailed in
the countryside. A sense of piety is also clearly visible in his works.
The best known of the Romantic poets is surely William Wordsworth
(1770–1850). In a long poetic career, Wordsworth tried many genres
and styles. Wordsworth’s main theme can be summarized in a phrase:
man and nature. He wrote poems with a message (which are called
didactic poems). His Prelude (1805), an autobiographical poem, is
subtitled ‘growth of a poet’s mind’. His friendship with Samuel Taylor
Coleridge resulted in the classic volume of the age: Lyrical Ballads
(first version in 1798). Wordsworth also took the role of poet-as-
prophet very seriously. In the Prelude, he wrote:
Prophets of Nature, we to them will speak

A lasting inspiration …
Disappointed with the French Revolution and angered at the
industrialization of London, Wordsworth returned to Grasmere and
the Lake District. Many of his poems reflect his critique of
modernization and city life. The Excursion, an ambitious poem that
combines many of his lasting preoccupations, declares the poetic
vocation in no uncertain terms:
Of truth, of Grandeur, Beauty, Love and Hope,
And melancholy subdued by Faith;
Of blessed consolations in distress;
Of moral strength, and intellectual Power;
Of joy in widest commonality spread;
Of the individual mind that keeps her own
Inviolate Retirement, subject there
To Conscience only, and the law supreme
Of that Intelligence which governs all.
Wordsworth believes, like Blake, that imagination is being sidelined
in contemporary London.
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away … .
Or in his description of London when he says the ‘mighty heart [of
London] is lying still’, playing on the word ‘lying’, he suggests that
the centre of English commerce lies and cheats even when asleep
(‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802’). In his
famous ‘Immortality Ode’, he mourned the death of imagination
and innocence and of the child’s sense of wonder:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
This happens as the child grows into an adult, a process that ends
innocence:
Shades of the prison house begin to close
Upon the growing boy.
He spoke nostalgically of the rural way of life in famous poems like
‘The Leech Gatherer’, ‘The Solitary Reaper’, ‘Simon Lee’ and
‘Michael’. Social themes of vagrancy, poverty and unemployment

figure in ‘The Ruined Cottage’, ‘The Pedlar’ and the Salisbury Plain
poems (including ‘The Female Vagrant’). He shows how nature is a
teacher in poems like Prelude (especially in the bird’s egg and boat-
stealing incidents) and pleads for respect for nature. Contemporary
politics is the theme in Book XIV of Wordsworth's Prelude (a reworking
of his earlier poem, ‘The French Revolution’) in which he declared,
full of enthusiasm for the events in Paris:
Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive
But to be young was the very heaven.
In the Lyrical Ballads, which produced a ‘manifesto’ for the new
poetry, Wordsworth declared that rural themes were to be his central
concern because that was where ‘true’ human nature existed.
Authenticity of expression can be attained only when the poet uses
the language of everyday speech of the farmer and the rural
community. Poetic themes must be rooted in the life of the community
(as the famous ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads emphasizes). While a degree
of idealization of rural England is clearly visible in Wordsworth, it
does not exclude the theme of suffering. Wordsworth is honest
enough to admit that suffering, poverty and malice were integral to
rural England (in poems like ‘The Thorn’ and ‘The Idiot Boy’). Old
age is a preoccupation in poems such as ‘Old Cumberland Beggar’,
‘Simon Lee’, ‘Michael’ and numerous others. Wordsworth believed
that old people have a better chance of a decent life in rural England
than in ‘Poor Houses’ (set up with the Poor Laws). Ruins and cottages
populate the landscape of Wordsworth’s poetry, from the well-
known ‘Tintern Abbey’ to ‘The Ruined Cottage’. While ruins were
central to the aesthetic of the picturesque in 18th century England,
they became reasons for Wordsworth to reflect on the human
condition. A central feature of Wordsworth’s poetry is its intense
self-absorption. People, nature, ruins and events are not important
in and of themselves. They are important in terms of their effect
upon the observing poet. What emotions do they induce? What
thoughts arise when seeing them? Wordsworth uses the sights to
reflect on his own mind and emotional state (and this is why he is
almost a solipsist poet), while later expanding it to reflect on the
general nature of human life. The ‘I’ is thus central to most of his
poems, and, arguably, he uses it more than any other poet in English.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) initially wrote under the
influence of earlier religious poets and William Cowper. Nature is
central to Coleridge too as the extraordinary beauty of images in
‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’, ‘Frost at Midnight’ (a poem that
captures silence as no other poem in English does) and other poems
reveal. But nature is also a cruel teacher, as the Ancient Mariner
finds out in the Gothic poem of the same name. Here the Mariner’s
guilt (‘instead of the cross, the Albatross/about my neck was hung’)
is the heart of the poem. The afflictions visited on him are at least
partly externalizations of his own guilt at killing the bird. Yet, the
poem is also about unpredictability. It also has some particularly
fine descriptions of travel, the sea and nature.
The stars were dim, and thick the night,
The steersman’s face by his lamp gleamed white;
From the sails the dew did drip –
Till clomb above the eastern bar
The horned Moon, with one bright star
Within the nether tip.
The poem effectively captures loneliness and despair, perhaps better
than any other Coleridge work.
Coleridge took the East as his theme in ‘Kubla Khan’, another
‘fragment poem’ (a particularly ‘Romantic’ genre, as Marjorie
Levinson’s 1986 study The Romantic Fragment Poem has argued).
Inspired by descriptions of India in contemporary travelogues, stories
of a lost paradise and by images that appeared to him in a drug-
induced stupor, the poem is a stunning prophetic vision of the Orient
(though one cannot ignore the colonial stereotyping of the East).
‘Kubla Khan’ combines utopianism with despair, morality with
eroticism, demonic energy with stately calm in a brilliant juxtaposition
of images. The prophet-poet’s description in the poem recalls Thomas
Gray’s ‘The Bard’. Coleridge writes:
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
Coleridge is at his best with images and themes that both frighten
and fascinate. His ‘Christabel’, ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘Ancient Mariner’
have this disturbing quality about them, almost as though Coleridge
is writing the poetic equivalent of the Gothic novel. Such poems are
also dramatic while his other poems are quietly reflective.
Coleridge, like Wordsworth, saw the human heart and nature as
constituting an ‘organic whole’, (“in our life alone does nature live,”
he writes in ‘Dejection: An Ode’). In many of his poems, especially
in ‘The Eolian Harp’ and ‘Dejection: An Ode’, Coleridge portrayed
a mind and heart that was ‘open’ to the influences, sights and sounds
of the world. His poems are journeys into the self and simultaneously
into the external world:
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.
Here he is also reiterating the power of human imagination to re-
mould nature.
George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824) has become associated with
a particular kind of male personality: the brooding, handsome hero.
It was an unusual kind of mass cultural iconization of a literary
personality. He was the largest selling poet in the first decades of
the 19th century. He produced some energetic, if uneven poetry. His
first major achievement was his savage critique on the literary culture
of his time, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809). The biting satire
lampooned even Wordsworth (who was described as ‘simple’) and
Coleridge (whose poetry was termed ‘turgid’) – dismissing them all
in the phrase ‘the scribbling crew’. Byron’s role as an iconoclast was
decided with this volume:
I shall publish, right or wrong.
Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.
His contempt for poets like Robert Southey resulted in some

exceptionally brilliant satires such as ‘The Vision of Judgement’.
Manfred, Cain and other dramatic poetry created the image of the
guilt-ridden hero, thus launching the ‘Byronic’ as an icon. With Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron declared his poetic talents. A poem with
a huge canvas – from Greek civilization to the Ottoman empire and
the decay of aristocracy and feuds – the poem (which Byron
expanded in 1816 and 1818) attracted instant attention. It also
expresses, in several places, Byron’s views on civilization, art and
nature. For instance, here is his description of Venice:
In Venice Tasso's echoes are no more,
And silent rows the songless gondolier;
Her palaces are crumbling to the shore,
And music meets not always now the ear:
Those days are gone – but Beauty still is here.
States fall, arts fade – but Nature does not die
Don Juan (1819–24) firmed up his reputation. The hero of the long
poem is a young man who wanders across Europe and has a series
of erotic (the descriptions of Juan’s love affairs, for example, in Canto
IV) and other adventures. Byron puts in a heavy dose of the dramatic,
with ship-wrecks, cannibalism and Juan’s own ‘mishaps’. The poem
has an emotional range from the comic to the pathetic. Some of his
more popular works are ‘She Walks in Beauty’ and ‘When We Two
Parted’, frequently anthologized worldwide. He was, however, also
astute enough to see the problems of being described as a poet of the
passions. In a famous 1821 letter to Thomas Moore (another poet),
he writes:
I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of
excited passion and that there is no such thing as a life of passion
any more than a continuous earthquake or an eternal fever. Besides,
who would ever shave themselves in such a state?
His Turkish tales (The Corsair, The Bride of Abydos, Lara and The Giaour)
are clearly influenced by the age’s interest in non-European cultures
and histories.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) started as a rebel – dismissed from

Oxford for publishing a pamphlet titled, The Necessity of Atheism
(1811) – and sought to keep up this reputation throughout his life.

He rejected religious and moral sanctions of the society of his time.
He was also enthused by radical ideologies (under the influence of
William Godwin, whose daughter Shelley eventually married) and
the idea of political revolution. His poem on the Peterloo Massacre,
The Mask of Anarchy (1819), is a good example of his view of the
monarchy and authoritarian rule in England. Queen Mab (1813) and
The Revolt of Islam (1818) also spoke of the possibility of social change
from despotism to democracy. His most famous dramatic verse occurs
in Prometheus Unbound (1820). The Cenci (1819) had strong Gothic
overtones with its theme of incest and evil (it was based on the history
of an ancient Roman family).
Shelley is better known for his great odes and shorter poems. His
‘Adonais’ (1821), a praise of John Keats, written in the form of an
elegy upon Keats’ death and perhaps matched in sense of mourning
and poetic praise only by WH Auden’s ‘In Memory of William Butler
Yeats’. Describing Keats as “the Sire of an immortal strain”, Shelley
writes:
He has outsoar'd the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again;
‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, ‘Mont Blanc’, ‘Ode to the West Wind’,
‘To the Skylark’ and ‘Ozymandias’ are some of his best known works.
They combine a deep appreciation of nature while reflecting on the
social order (for example, the pestilence that ‘West Wind’ speaks
about is also social and moral corruption). Epipsychidion was Shelley’s
infamous praise of bigamy:
True love in this differs from gold and clay
That to divide is not to take away.
Shelley, despite his gloomy views of contemporary human civilization
is also a poet of hope, as ‘West Wind’ demonstrates: “if winter comes,
can spring be far behind?” In poems like ‘Skylark’ and ‘West Wind’,
he suggests that art can be a palliative for the ills of society. He prays
that he be given the power of poetic prophecy in ‘West Wind’:
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:

What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
John Keats (1795–1821) was the last of the really great Romantic
poets, until WB Yeats appears on the scene. Extremely well-read
(though essentially self-taught), Keats combined a fervour for the
role of poetry with erudition in European mythology, intense self-
reflection and a love for nature. His finest Odes are a combination of
all these elements, as a glance at ‘To Autumn’ reveals. His narrative
poems like Endymion (1818) and Hyperion (1820) have been far less
popular. Endymion maps the four stages of experience – of nature, of
art, of friendship and of love. Hyperion took stories from the
Renaissance, and Greek and Roman history in his narrative about
the Titans. A certain Miltonic tone is clearly visible in the poem. Lamia
and Isabella are narrative poems that have Gothic elements and an
obsession with death. Sickness and death fill Isabella. Lamia has a
snake-woman at the centre of the narrative. It is a poem about dreams
and reality – a continuing obsession with Keats. There are some
superlative sensual images in The Eve of St Agnes (1820), a poem
about love and family feuds, especially when Keats describes
Madeline.
Keats’ own disease-ridden life resulted in some fine meditations on

death and art, especially in ever-popular poems such as ‘Ode to a
Nightingale’ and ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. Human mortality and the
permanence of art are the twin poles of Keats’ work. In ‘Ode on
Melancholy’, Keats contemplates the twin states of joy and sorrow
and the impermanence of beauty (another persistent theme):
She dwells with Beauty – Beauty that must die;

And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu, and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips
Keats is a poet of sensuality, fully aware of the sights, sounds and
smells of the world and this is best captured in ‘To Autumn’:
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
He is also aware of the limitations of the body and the pervasive
decay that haunts all humans even as they lead full lives. His solution
to decay was to appreciate beauty as long as it was available and
possible. His great dictum, from the ‘Grecian Urn’ poem, was:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Keats’ poetry also images the poet as prophet and as an intensely
aware, if doomed, figure, especially in his famous ‘Nightingale’ ode,
where the bird’s clear song is contrasted with the poet’s ‘numbness’
and inability to sing effectually.
Among the minor poets – though by no means were they minor
during their own time – are Thomas Moore, Walter Savage Landor
and Robert Southey. Southey (1774–1843) is best known as the victim
of Byron’s satire in the latter’s The Vision of Judgment. His Gothic
poems The Curse of Kehama (1810) and Thalaba the Destroyer (1801)
are perhaps better known for their ‘orientalizing’ than for stylistic
finesse. The elaborate footnotes where he provides explanations and
references reveal deep reading, though the poetic content of these
works is open to question.
Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) wrote a fairly popular Oriental

work in his Egyptian narrative poem, Gebir (1798). An unusual poem,
Gebir is Romantic (in Northrop Frye’s terms) for its ascent/descent
motif, magic and sensuality. It is also an extremely violent poem.
‘Rose Aylmer’ is his most quoted poem, mourning the death of a
beloved while also painting a particular picture of the British race:
What avails the sceptred race,
Ah what the form divine!
What every virtue, every grace!
Rose Aylmer, all were thine.
Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes
May weep, but never see,
A night of memories and of sighs
I consecrate to thee.
George Crabbe (1754–1832) was a poet of rural England. Like John
Clare, he was much affected by the changes in the countryside. The
Village (1783), his best known work, echoes Goldsmith and Clare.
Later poems like The Borough (1810) extended his themes. Crabbe
portrayed the lower working classes without rendering them into
beautiful objects (something Wordsworth was fond of doing –
evacuating the dirt and the pain and glorifying the farm and farmer).
A ‘dark’ poet of the age, Crabbe saw society entirely in terms of its
exploitative mechanisms. Nature, described as serving with a
‘niggard hand’, seems to be the setting for suffering in Crabbe and
not something to admire and appreciate as it is for Wordsworth. He
is, therefore, a poet who must be seen as a voice against the prevalent
Romantic idealization of the peasant. As he puts it in Book I of The
Village: “the real picture of the poor/demand[s] a song”. He went
on to add:
Fled are those times, when, in harmonious strains,
The rustic poet praised his native plains:
No shepherds now…
He then instructs his contemporaries “who dream of rural ease,
/whom the smooth stream and smoother sonnet please” to:
Go look within and ask if peace be there;
If peace be his – that drooping weary sire,
Or theirs, that offspring round their feeble fire;

Or hers, that matron pale, whose trembling hand
Turns on the wretched hearth th' expiring brand.
John Clare (1793–1864) was a poet who combined the theme of rural
poverty with psychological studies. There are extraordinary
descriptions of the rural countryside, the seasons and the labour on
farms. Like Crabbe, he disliked the romanticization of nature – in
fact he complained that Keats described nature as “she appeared to
his fancies” rather than as she was in actuality – and preferred to
point to the suffering and pains of rural life. For instance, in The
Shepherd’s Calender (1827), he described the weary thresher rather
than the joyful one. In ‘The Parish’, he describes the cruelties inflicted
upon nature and animals by unthinking humans. Clare’s poetry
suggests a freshness and honesty that is absent in Wordsworth’s more
adored work. Clare’s poems do not possess either the artistic finish
of Wordsworth or the complex symbolism. He prefers to record what
may appear to be his naïve delight in flowers and farms, but these
have a greater sense of authenticity and immediacy (not to mention
socialist sympathies) than Wordsworth’s carefully crafted and
obviously ‘stylized’ visions of rural England.
Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) wrote poems in praise of England in
The Battle of the Baltic and used America as a setting for his Gertrude
of Wyoming (1809). Lochiel’s Warning was a poem about the Jacobite
Rebellions (see the box Jacobin/Jacobite) and Ye Mariners of England
was an effort at the patriotic lyric. Thomas Moore (1779–1852)
combined sentiment with frivolity in works such as The Fudge Family
in Paris (1818), though his Lalla Rookh (1817) was a Romantic poem
in the complete sense – with its extravagance of description and its
Orientalist setting. Leigh Hunt (1784–1859) celebrated the downfall
of Napoleon in The Descent of Liberty: A Mask (1815). The Story of
Rimini (1816) was a tragic poem and Hunt experimented with
narrative poetry again in Hero and Leander, and Bacchus and Ariadne
(1819) and in ‘Abou ben Adhem’, an Oriental poem.
Thomas Hood’s (1799–1845) work involved the extensive use of the

grotesque and the macabre in poems like The Dream of Eugene Aram
(based on a real-life story of a murderer-philologist Eugene Aram),
The Haunted House and The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies. These works
are the poetic equivalent of the Gothic novel and were presumably
intended to instil horror. In his Odes and Addresses to Great People
(1825), he tried his hand at satire. Social reform was Hood’s agenda
in The Lay of the Labourer, The Workhouse Clock and The Song of the
Shirt. Ebenezer Elliott (1781–1849), whose themes and political
sympathies are in alignment with Thomas Hood and John Clare,
wrote The Ranter (1827) and Corn-Law Rhymes (1828) where he
thematized the conditions in factories and the state of the urban
poor. Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803–49) wrote poetry influenced by
both his contemporaries (especially Shelley) and the Elizabethan
dramatists. Full of spectres and visions of death, works such as Death’s
Jest-Book are poems about madness and aberrant personalities and
are overpopulated with mummies, skeletons and ghosts. They are
allied more with the ‘dark romanticism’ of Byron than with
Wordsworth.
DRAMA
Today, Romantic drama is not the period’s best known genre, even
though there was plenty of it as recent criticism has discovered and
demonstrated. While it is not the best drama or theatre in English
literary history, there is material of considerable interest.
During the revolution, plays that had political implications drew

crowds and worried authorities. It must be remembered that the
English monarchy and government (led by people like Burke) were
anxious that the French events must not be enacted in England. This
anxiety was concomitant with public interest in the events and
literary figures’ desire to develop political themes in their works. The
result was a genre of ‘revolutionary drama’.
In 1789, John St John’s The Island of St Marguerite – with its central
ideological statement, “vindicate the rights of man” – was censored
because it included one scene where a mob bursts into revolutionary
song. Plays from European authors were translated into English:
notably Schiller’s The Robbers by Alexander Tytler in 1792 and CM
Wieland’s Dialogues of the Gods published by Joseph Johnson in 1795
(This play may have inspired Percy Shelley’s Hellas and Prometheus
Unbound with its ideas of ‘federation’). Coleridge adapted elements
of Schiller’s pre-revolutionary play into his Osorio. Coleridge and

Southey’s The Fall of Robespierre (1794; The poet Robert Lovell also
contributed to it, but his contribution was rejected and Southey wrote
a replacement) was clearly inspired by the events across the Channel.
In order to escape censorship, some playwrights situated their themes
of revolution and social change in different time spans and even
different countries. William Godwin’s Faulkener (1807) and Shelley’s
Charles the First were both set in the 17th century rather than in their
own times. Shelley’s The Cenci was set in 16 th century Rome and
Coleridge’s Osorio in 16th century Spain.
Charles Lamb’s John Woodvil was staged in 1800 and published in

1802. It is set in the immediate years of the Restoration. It dealt with
a highly opportunistic kind of courtier, John Woodvil. Woodvil makes
jokes about persecuting the Puritans, mixes with the new power
coterie (the Cavaliers), praises Charles II, and, in general, seeks
political advancement. His father, in sharp contrast, stands by his
parliamentarian principles. John, under the influence of wine, betrays
his father and this awakens him to his true state of affairs. He repents
and returns to his beloved Margaret (who has retained her Puritan
ideology and world view).
Godwin’s Faulkener is set in Florence of the 17 th century. An
Englishman Captain Faulkener seeks his mother who had
disappeared when he was a child. He discovers that his mother had
been involved with Charles II. Godwin portrays the corruption of
Charles II’s court. Shelley’s Charles the First was written under
Godwin’s influence. It is a tragedy of the monarchy’s downfall, set
in the civil war period. Shelley focuses on the issue of taxation without
the consent (or meeting) of the Parliament. There are continual
references to other Kings who had sought absolute power by ignoring
the parliament – the audience could easily see the parallels with
Louis XIV. The Citizens conduct the debate about the functioning of
the English king. Mary Russell Mitford’s play of the same title, Charles
the First, was banned in 1825 and was staged in an unlicensed theatre
in 1834. Mitford portrays Cromwell as a potential democrat though
a failed one. Mitford suggests sympathy for the Puritan and
Parliamentary cause, though she tries very hard to deliver a more
positive image of Charles (especially by showing the poignancy of
his separation from his wife and children). In Shelley’s The Cenci,
Beatrice finally kills her tyrannical father, a symbolic end of
monarchic oppression.
Direct political satires were also presented in dramatic form, most
notably in works such as The Bugaboo (by RS, 1817), which had several
attacks on the government in comical verse. Robert Southey’s Wat
Tyler, a drama praising republican ideals and revolution, was
republished in 1817 (by then, to his embarrassment, he had changed
his opinions and political stance to suit the moment). The Bugaboo
was also mistakenly (and perhaps deliberately) attributed to Southey.
Joanna Baillie’s Constantine Paleologus (1804) was about a besieged
monarch in ancient times, where Muslims launch a revolution against
the monarch. The September massacres of 1792 were the theme of
Elizabeth Inchbald’s The Massacre, an extremely violent play with
murdering mobs and streets strewn with the bodies of dead children
(the play was suppressed as a result). George Watson’s England
Preserved (1795) was set in the 15th century, once again displacing
the traumatic events of revolution into another historical context.
Here Watson shows a conniving French leader who fools the English
people – a direct reference to Charles James Fox who opposed William
Pitt’s war against France and was therefore seen as supporting the
French who were threatening to invade England. Samuel Birch’s
The Adopted Child (1795) was a play about the attempt to kill the
heir to a castle. Wordsworth’s Borderers and Baillie’s De Monfort were
also about political themes of revolution. Stirring rhetoric captures
English and Scottish patriotism. England is described thus:
Here, where “Rome’s eagles found unvanquish’d foes”
The Gallic vulture fearlessly oppose,
Chase from this favour’d isle, with baffled wing
Bless’d in its good old laws, old manners and old King.
The call to thwart any French move to invade England as a result of
the Revolution is clearly visible. In a very different kind of play, The
Tryal (1798), Baillie turned to the theme of courtship and marriage
and women’s sovereignty. A gentle comedy, the plot involves two
sisters, Agnes and Mariane, and their attempts to test the suitability
of Agnes’ prospective husbands.
Melodrama retained a hold on the theatre-audiences during this

period. A new genre, the gothic melodrama, emerges during this
period. Mathew ‘Monk’ Lewis wrote two of these plays, both
featuring supernaturalism, dungeons and demonic passions (The
Castle Spectre, 1797, and The Wood Daemon, 1807). Adaptations such
as Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake, adapted for the stage in 1810,
were also popular. Such plays used a lot of special effects through
the employment of mechanical devices – people disappearing, storms,
the wild sea and so on. The gothic melodrama also had demonic
villains and a slightly deranged eroticism (what could be termed a
‘maniacal sensuality’). Through the 1820s and 1830s, plays that
dealt with the sea were also popular with Edward Fitzball being the
most prolific creator of these works (for instance, The Pilot, The
Inchcape Bell, The Red Rover and The Wreck and the Reef). Plays that
dealt with historic battles were also staged, including Sadler Wells’
recreation of The Battle of Trafalgar (1806) and The Battle of the Nile
(1815).
Notes
1. The contribution of the periodical to Romantic literature, sensibility

and genre has been most recently studied by David Higgins in Romantic
Genius and the Literary Magazine (2005).
2. On the link between opium, imperialism and discourses of contagion

and infection, see John Barrell’s The Infection of Thomas de Quincey
(1991).
3. The romantic concern with landscape, beauty and visual description

has been the subject of extensive study, especially for its politics of
gender and class. See, among others, Tim Fulford’s Landscape, Liberty,
and Authority (1996) and Jacqueline Labbe’s Romantic Visualities (1998)
4. It must be noted that by 1800 England was on its way to being an
Empire, for India, the wealthiest nation in Asia, had been under the
political and economic control of the English East India Company
since 1757.
5. For studies of the link between gender, science and romanticism, see
Mary Mellor’s Romanticism and Gender (1993). On the adoption and
adaptation of the Gothic by women writers of the period, see Donna
Heiland’s Gothic and Gender (2004).
6. On the romance as a narrative genre, the standard work remains

Northrop Frye’s The Secular Scripture (1976). On the historical novel
and the historical romance, see Herbert Butterfield’s The Historical
Novel (1971).
7. The representation of the rural poor, yeomanry and agrarian economy
is central to both imaginative literature and the visual arts during the
Romantic period. For a study of the theme in painting, see John Barrell’s
The Dark Side of the Landscape (1980) and Ann Bermingham’s Landscape
and Ideology (1986).
8. For the link between Romanticism and empire, see John Drew’s India
and the Romantic Imagination (1987), Nigel Leask’s British Romantic
Writers and the East (1992), Katie Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism
(1997), Tim Fulford and Peter Kitson’s Romanticism and Colonialism
(1998) and others.
9. The ‘illuminated Blake’ also constitutes some of the best electronic
archives in literature today. See www.blakearchive.org.
11. Re-reading the Romantics
Colonialism, Romanticism and
Disease
Alan Bewell’s Romanticism and Colonial Disease (1999) is a fascinating

re-reading of the contextual and textual discourses of Wordsworth
and his fellow poets. Bewell notes that a significant context for the
Romantic age was colonial expansion. English ships were travelling
all over the world. In India, soon to be Britain’s greatest possession,
the East India Company had transformed itself from a trading body
into a political power after Plassey (1757) and Baksar (1764). The
money from these colonies was helping a financially drained British
exchequer. Colonies in West Indies and Africa also flourished.
This was only one side of the picture. Many Englishmen died in the
colonies. Tropical diseases – to which they had no immunity and to
which they were being exposed for the first time – claimed their
lives in huge numbers in India, West Indies and Africa. Many died
during the lengthy voyages too. This meant that many families in
England had lost their family members in the colonies. In terms of
writing, this was the period when the first treatises on tropical diseases
began to get published and circulated in England. Other countries
were also mapped in terms of their medical geography (the incidence
of specific diseases in certain geographical areas). In fact, Bewell
shows how every single Romantic writer, from Wordsworth to
Austen, had at least one family member in the colonies, had a colonial
connection, and were often familiar with tropical diseases. The
Romantic poets were actually reacting to the ‘epidemiological costs
of colonization’.
Under the influence of these real and discursive contexts, Shelley
developed a theory of climatology and Coleridge wrote Ancient
Mariner and a tract about cholera (a tropical disease). Mary Shelley’s
Re-reading the Romantics 233
The Last Man is about a pandemic in which she thematizes the decline
and fall of the British Empire in terms of disease. The vulnerability of
European constitutions to strange climates and food and the dangers
of a rich diet constitute central themes in this period (De Quincey's
Confessions of an English Opium Eater is an example). Bewell suggests
that several Romantic poems, for example, are ‘depopulation’
narratives. Wordsworth’s landscapes in ‘The Brothers’, ‘The Female
Vagrant’ and large parts of the Salisbury Plain poems are populated
by direct or indirect victims of colonialism and disease: a dead family
member, a discharged soldier or a man infected with a tropical disease.
Wordsworth and Coleridge, argues Bewell, were aware of this effect
of colonialism and Coleridge had, in fact, documented the decreasing
number of houses in particular regions of Britain. Wordsworth’s brother
John had been a victim too – his ship sank on a return voyage from
India. Keats’ poetry is full of images of disease and his critics even
used images of pestilence to disparage him!
Thus, Bewell argues, Romantic literary culture was shaped by the

medical and pathological consequences of colonial expansion.
Further Reading
Abrams, M.H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic

Literature. New York: Norton, 1973.
Copley, Stephen, and John Whale. Ed. Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to
Texts and Contexts 1780–1830. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
Kelly, Gary. English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789–1830. London:

Longman, 1989.
Watson, J.R. English Poetry of the Romantic Period, 1789–1830. London:

Longman, 1985.
Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society 1780–1950. Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1961.
Wu, Duncan. Ed. Romantic Women Poets: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell,

1998.
SECTION FOUR
The Victorian Age
Timeline
First Reform Bill 1832 Tennyson’s Poems

Slavery abolished in British
Empire (1833)
Ascension of Queen Victoria 1837 Dickens’ Oliver Twist begins

publication
Anti-Corn Law League (1838)
Penny Post introduced (1840)

Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero-
Worship (1841)
Dickens’ Christmas Carol and

Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1843)
Irish Famine (1845)
Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights
and Disraeli’s Tancred; Thackeray’s
Vanity Fair begins publication
(1847)
Marx and Engels publish 1848
Communist Manifesto
Dickens’ David Copperfield
begins publication (1849)
Browning’s Poems and
Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850)
Arnold’s Poems and Gaskell’s
Cranford (1851)
Start of the Crimean War Dickens’ Hard Times begins

1854 publication
Browning’s Men and Women
(1855)
First Indian War of Elizabeth Browning’s Aurora Leigh

Independence (1857) (1857)
Darwin’s On the Origin of the JS Mill’s ‘On Liberty’, Tennyson’s

Species
1859
Idylls of the King and George
Eliot’s Adam Bede
Collins’ The Woman in White and
George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss;
Dickens’ Great Expectations
begins publication (1860)
American Civil War begins George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861)

(1861)
Arnold’s Essays in Criticism and
Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland
(1865)
Browning’s Ring and the Book

(1868)
Suez Canal opened (1869) Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy
(1869)
Geroge Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871)
Hardy’s Far from the Madding

Crowd (1874)
Queen Victoria declared the
‘Empress of India’ (1877)
Hardy’s Return of the Native (1878)
Anglo-Boer War 1880
DG Rossetti’s Ballads and Sonnets
(1881)
Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines

(1885)
Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge,
Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde and
Doyle’s Study in Scarlet (1886)
1890 Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray

12. Backgrounds
The Victorian age in literature is roughly taken to be between 1830

and 1890, approximately coinciding with the long reign of Queen
Victoria.
This was the age of industrialization, empire and reform. Mass
movement of people from the country to London changed its
demographics drastically. Poverty and exploitation increased. Family
life was significantly altered. Slums sprang up in and around London
and pollution made its appearance. The Chartist uprisings (see the
box Chartism) and increasing social unrest raised fears of a revolution
similar to the recent one in France. The middle class tried to retain
an old-world morality in times when moral codes were too lax (as
they believed). Part of the moral debate surrounded sexual codes,
marriage, religious beliefs and family life. Debates about faith were
invariably driven by developments in science that questioned and
broke down established ideas. The Church of England faced a crisis
as people were divided along the ‘high’ and ‘low’ lines – a crisis
driven in part by the conversion of Cardinal John Henry Newman
to Catholicism. Darwinism altered the prevailing views of life,
divinity, humanity and creation in the latter decades of the century.
Many writers of the mid-Victorian age were involved in what
eventually came to be known as the ‘condition of England’ debates.
These debates over morality, poverty, education, industrialization and
reform are clearly the contexts of the ‘social problem’ novel in Victorian
literature. The individual and the family were at the centre of most
novels. The exploitation of the poor, the rise of the middle class and
the state of the factory were the concerns of the industrial novel (see
the box The Industrial Novel). The main debate here concerned the
meaning of ‘progress’: was progress scientific achievement and
material gain, compensated by the loss of faith and certitude that
resulted from the same scientism? Further, were the material benefits
from industrialization and trade evenly distributed?
238 The Victorian Age
Chartism
A movement that accompanied the expansion of English industrialization,
Chartism was led by the working classes and was concentrated in factory
towns like Manchester. It peaked during 1838–48, a period of economic
depression and large-scale poverty. The working classes demanded
parliamentary and social reform, believing that England’s bad government
was responsible for their poverty and suffering. Fiction about the movement
includes Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli, who went on to become the Prime
Minister of England.
The major political parties of the Whigs and the Tories became the
Liberals and the Conservatives. Numerous acts and the debates
around them heralded an age of reform. After much parliamentary
debate, the act to abolish slavery was passed in 1833. 1 An act
prohibiting child labour was also passed in 1833. The Factory Act of
the same year took account of workers’ demands and factory working
conditions. Workhouses for the poor and the unemployed were
regulated after the Poor Law of 1834. All through the century, there
were debates about the condition of both the urban and the rural
poor. Dickens’ and Gissing’s fiction, for instance, provide a detailed
portrait of Victorian England’s poor. The rise and expansion of slums
in London was a source of great concern. Disease, dirt and
deprivation marked these slums and family life was heavily disrupted
due to the 24-hour factory working systems. Adults, especially fathers,
worked night-shifts and rarely saw their children. The increasing
number of women in factories changed the structure of the family.
This period was also marked by a great sanitation drive to eradicate
dirt and disease from urban London. Categorized as welfare or
reform, the sanitation and hygiene drive was combined with a
discourse of infection and contagion – including racial contamination
– about the non-European races2. This discourse emerged because
of the increased contact with other races during the expansion of
the empire.
Trade-unionism became more powerful as workers banded together
against the powers of the capitalist industry owner. Writers like
Richard Cobden and Richard Jefferies wrote extensively about the
Backgrounds 239
degradation of the workers and the land due to over-exploitation

under capitalism. There were major debates about the wisdom of
the free trade system, especially after the Irish famine of 1845. The
Corn Laws were repealed in 1846 due to mounting pressure.
In 1838, Lord Durham’s Report suggested a massive revamping of

British colonial administration. Halfway across the world, England
was establishing the greatest empire humanity had ever seen.
However, the empire was not always at peace. Numerous wars –
for instance, the disastrous Afghan campaigns (1838–42) – caused
the deaths of thousands of English soldiers. The 1857 mutiny in India
shook the very basis of English rule in its largest possession. The East
India Company lost its powers and the governance of India shifted
to the British crown. Queen Victoria was declared ‘Empress of India’
in 1877. During this period, evangelical missions spread their activity
across Asia.
There was a larger reading public created during this period, with
circulation libraries, newspapers and cheap novels. Circulating
libraries created a demand for three-decker (multi-volume) novels
and many writers produced serialized fiction. The theatres remained
popular and places like Covent Gardens and Drury Lane saw a
change in their audiences as more members of the middle class began
to acquire high cultural tastes. Darwinism altered the basic thinking
of the age and was to affect human intellectual history as never before.
The Victorian Temper

A term that is often used to describe Victorian attitudes, ‘Victorian temper’
refers to the multiple strands of ideology and thinking that prevailed during
the period. Political and social thought was divided between the
Conservatives (exemplified by Disraeli, William and John Ruskin) and the
Liberals (exemplified by James Mill and JS Mill). The Conservatives favoured
social hierarchy and had a taste for older (classical) art and thinking while
the Liberals believed in a utilitarian philosophy of individual and collective
action.
The Victorian temper is also marked by a great divide between the believers
and the agnostics. Among the believers are Cardinal Newman and the early
John Ruskin. The agnostics included figures like George Eliot, Charles Darwin,
Thomas Hardy and the Pre-Raphaelites. Others like GM Hopkins swerved

between faith and non-belief. There were also liberal Christians like Charles
Dickens and the great evangelicals working in the colonies.
The Victorian temper was marked by social hypocrisy about sexuality (it is
commonly referred to as ‘Victorian prudishness’ even today). The clash
between faith and science was prominent in the intellectual debates of the
age. The Victorian temper was marked by a fascination for technology and
scientific developments (it is the age of the first computer, or computing
machine, designed by Charles Babbage. Ada Lovelace, Byron’s daughter, is
credited to be the first computer programmer). In terms of the arts, the
‘Victorian temper’ was caught between ideas of the moral function of art
and the drive towards a pure aestheticism.
Notes
1. Slavery and anti-slavery debates were central to the Victorian

intellectual climate. Abolitionist politics spilled over from its American
context into England and priests, politicians and writers all lectured/
wrote on the subject. For a study of the mass cultural responses to the
slavery debates, see Audrey A Fisch’s American Slaves in Victorian
England (2000).
2. On the politics of sanitation and the discourses of contagion and hygiene
in the 19th century, see Allan Conrad Christensen’s Nineteenth-Century
Narratives of Contagion (2005)
13. Literature of the Victorian Age
PROSE
Non-fiction
Features of Victorian Non-fiction
• Didactic essays and social commentaries on environment, politics and

society
• Historical tracts were common
• Polemical writings on issues like problems of the working class
• A great deal of critical thinking and writing on art and architecture, which
influenced subsequent generations.
The Romantic period marked the rise of the personal essay. During
the Victorian period, the essay turned towards social criticism. Some
of the most trenchant commentaries and analyses of Victorian society
and culture came from figures like Thomas Carlyle. Education,
women’s conditions, religion and science, the rise and spread of
industrial capitalism and the empire were all subjects of essays.
John Henry Newman (1801–90), popularly known as Cardinal

Newman, was one of the most influential figures of the age. As a
preacher and writer, Newman attracted controversy for his views.
He played an important role in the Oxford Movement (see the box
Oxford Movement) and published his opinions in Tracts for the Times.
In 1845, Newman became a Roman Catholic. His 1852 publication
The Idea of a University continues to be read to this day. Newman is
also the author of one of the most widely-read spiritual
autobiographies, the Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864). He was ordained
as a Cardinal in 1879. In The Idea of a University Newman defined

the purpose of the institution thus:
It [the university] does not promise a generation of Aristotles or
Newtons, of Napoleons or Washingtons, of Raphaels or
Shakespeares … A university training is the great ordinary means
to a great but ordinary end; it aims at raising the intellectual tone of
society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national
taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed
aims to popular aspiration, at giving enlargement and sobriety to
the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political power,
and refining the intercourse of private life.
The Oxford Movement

The Oxford Movement is also known as Tractarianism. The chief spokesman
of the movement was John Henry Newman. The movement originated in
Rev. John Keble's sermon ‘National Apostasy’ (14 July 1833) in which he
attacked the government’s plans to derecognize the Anglican Church of
Ireland. Ninety tracts were published, most of them written by Newman.
The tracts argued that the Church of England derived its authority from
being direct descendants of the Apostles. Newman concluded with the
controversial Tract 90, which argued that the Thirty-Nine Articles, which
distinguished the Anglicans from the Roman Church, did not conflict with
Roman Catholic ideas. In short, Newman was arguing that the Thirty-Nine
Articles could be seen as Catholic. Newman was ostracized for this idea.
Of the essayists from this period, Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) is

perhaps the most influential. A prolific writer (his collected works
run into 30 volumes), Carlyle set the agenda for rethinking issues
ranging from the French Revolution to science and education. His
Signs of the Times went on to influence whole generations of thinkers
and writers. He lectured and eventually published on a diverse range
of subjects including the negro question (in a notorious essay, he
supported slavery, arguing that it kept order in society), Chartism
and the French Revolution. Sartor Resartus (1833–34) was part
autobiography, part philosophical meditation. Written in an
extremely circular and complicated fashion, full of allusions and
colloquialisms, this text set Carlyle on the road to fame. He revived
Literature of the Victorian Age 243
the concept of a charismatic leader in Heroes and Hero Worship (1841),

and used Mohammed the Prophet, Dr Johnson, Shakespeare,
Cromwell and others as examples (he later went on to write works
on Frederick the Great and Cromwell to show how they qualified as
heroes). Heroes had a sense of the Divine Idea and this set them
apart from ordinary human beings. Carlyle sees the hero as a mix of
the warrior and the poet as well as the king and the prophet. His
tract on the French Revolution also underscored the necessity of
heroism and the heroic in the making of history. In effect, he was
questioning the efficacy and need for mass movement, while
supporting individual endeavour and heroism. This led him to attack
democracy as an ideal in Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850). Carlyle’s
feelings towards science were ambivalent. While he appreciated logic,
he deplored the reduction of everything to mechanistic thinking,
pleading for a return to intuitive thinking.
The single most influential text from the Victorian age and a book
that revolutionized human thought was Charles Darwin’s On the
Origin of Species (1859). Darwin (1809–82) argued that life evolved
through a process of natural selection. Rejecting creationism as
unscientific, Darwin provided a model for evolution: life evolved
from simple to complex. With this, Darwin had radically undercut
the basis of faith itself. The effects on society were enormous. The
theory rejected the need for an intelligent god. By arguing that
humanity had evolved from lesser and smaller creatures through a
process of natural selection, Darwin was able to reject the idea of
intelligent design. Such a theory was unacceptable to even scientists
and Darwinian science became popular only in the early decades of
the 20th century.1 Another science-writer of the same period was
TH Huxley (1825–95). A much more accessible writer than Darwin,
Huxley inaugurates the genre of science writing, a genre known today
for Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Jayant Narlikar and others.
John Stuart Mill (1806–73) worked for several years at the India Office
in London. The association with his father James Mill and Jeremy
Bentham led him to philosophy and history. His works on
utilitarianism (see the box Utilitarianism), political economy and
ethics made him an extremely influential Victorian. Mill was one of
the first men to speak on and advocate women’s rights (in 1869, he
published ‘On the Subjection of Women’). In his famous ‘On Liberty’

he argued in favour of individual freedoms, and rejected the
monopolistic powers of the state. He wrote famously: ‘Over himself,
over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign’. In ‘On
Representative Government’ (1861) and elsewhere, Mill argued that
governments and holders of power are to be limited. Mill also argued
in favour of cooperative movements, democratic principles and
liberalism. Representative government which encouraged liberty
was, for Mill, the best form of government.
Utilitarianism
A philosophical theory that emerges with the two Mills and Jeremy Bentham,
utilitarianism can be summarized in a phrase: ‘the greatest good of the
greatest number’. Human beings are (or ought to be) concerned about the
general happiness of all humanity. The general happiness principle also
suggests a principle of justice: everyone is entitled to happiness. Human
beings are unhappy when their actions are not commiserate with the general
humanity’s happiness.
William Morris (1834–96) introduced a medieval revival – an interest

in medieval and Renaissance ideas and arts – in Victorian thinking.
His work with architecture included designing wallpapers, murals
and textiles. Influenced by Marx (who was already available in
French) and tempering socialism with Christian beliefs, Morris wrote
Art and Socialism and co-authored A Summary of the Principles of
Socialism. He was also the author of pieces of fantasy fiction. In
recognition of his talents as a poet, he was offered the Poet Laureate’s
post (succeeding none less than Tennyson), but Morris refused.
Among his prose works, News from Nowhere (first serialized in 1890)
is the most famous. Here Morris sketches the problems with present-
day civilization – from the underground railway system to the
parliament (for which he discovers a fine use: as a storehouse for
manure) – and anticipates a working-class revolution. Morris writes:
… the history of the terrible period of transition from commercial
slavery to freedom may thus be summarised. When the hope of
realising a communal condition of life for all men arose, quite late
in the nineteenth century, the power of the middle classes, the then
tyrants of society, was so enormous and crushing, that to almost all

men, even those who had, you may say despite themselves, despite
their reason and judgement, conceived such hopes, it seemed a dream.
So much was this the case that some of those more enlightened men
who were then called Socialists, although they well knew, and even
stated in public, that the only reasonable condition of Society was
that of pure Communism (such as you now see around you), yet
shrunk from what seemed to them the barren task of preaching the
realism of a happy dream. Looking back now, we can see that the
great motive-power of the change was a longing for freedom and
equality, akin if you please to the unreasonable passion of a lover; a
sickness of heart that rejected with loathing the aimless solitary life
of the well-educated men of that time: phrases, my dear friend, which
have lost their meaning to us of the present day; so far removed we
are from the dreadful facts which they represent.
Matthew Arnold (1822–88) began his career as a poet but turned to
prose in his later years. Arnold’s criticism probably inaugurated what
is now called ‘cultural criticism’. His Culture and Anarchy (1869) was a
masterly defence of literature. Arnold saw literature, especially classical
or what we would now call ‘elite’ literature, as the basis for a sound
and healthy civilization. His rejection of the ‘philistines’ (those who were
only interested in wealth and who equated wealth with culture, in
Arnold’s contemptuous opinion) and ‘barbarians’ in this work was a
humanist attempt to highlight the absolute necessity of good literature
as the only weapon against anarchy. Culture, Arnold defined famously,
was “the best which has been thought and said” in the world. It would
“make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light” and generate
“an increased spiritual activity, having for its characters increased
sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased sympathy”. He also
proposed that provincialism and regionalism were equally barbaric and
that Britain needed to return to European traditions as a whole. He
attacked the Philistines who did not appreciate the creative mind and
who actually prevented the artist from working. A cultureless society,
he believed, despised poets and the poets had to increasingly turn
inwards, into themselves, as a refuge against the Philistines. As an
example, Arnold used Thomas Gray, of whom he said: “He was a man
born out of date, a man whose full spiritual flowering was impossible.”
In other famous works like Essays in Criticism (1865, 1888) and The
Study of Poetry (1880), Arnold argued that certain poets provided
the standards by which all subsequent literature could be judged.

Among these he numbered Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth.
He suggested that one needed to look to Pericles’ Greece and
Elizabethan England to understand what true culture is. Milton, he
argued, had a “sure and flawless perfection of rhythm and diction”
and Wordsworth, wrote Arnold, was a standard “because of the
extraordinary power with which … he shows us this joy [offered to
us in nature]”. In his famous ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present
Time’, Arnold proposed that an objective criticism was indeed
possible, arguing for “disinterestedness, detachment and a perpetual
dissatisfaction with anything that falls short of an ideal”. In the 20th
century, Arnold came in for criticism for his elite view of culture.
John Ruskin (1819–1900) wrote on subjects as diverse as geology
and art. In art, he wrote and theorized about various forms from
realism to symbolism, with Modern Painters (first volume in 1843)
being his most famous tract. Ruskin was influenced both by classical
and Romantic ideas of art, seeing beauty in living things (what he
termed ‘vital beauty’) and in the unity rather than diversity of things.
Rejecting the heavily subjective first-person accounts of the
Romantics (what he famously called the ‘pathetic fallacy’), Ruskin
argued that great literature must present a more balanced view of
the world. In The Stones of Venice (1851–53), Ruskin discusses the
fall of a great culture. He was also influenced by Christian notions
of art, as can be seen from his work on architecture The Seven Lamps
of Architecture (1849), where he argued that great architecture, like
any great art, produced moral feelings. Ruskin understood the
contribution of social and economic factors to forms and themes in
art and therefore accounted for the linkage between art, workers,
the government and markets. He also looked at the influence of art
on its audiences. Unto this Last (1862), an exercise in social economy,
was first published as essays in Cornhill Magazine, but violent public
protest halted publication. Ruskin’s aim was to provide a humanistic
account of economics. Rejecting the mechanistic account of economy
that reduced workers to numbers and machines, Ruskin argued that
there was an urgent need to curtail competition. Employers and
factory-owners must be generous in their treatment of workers if
they wished to secure the affections of the latter. Ruskin’s writings

influenced figures like Gandhi, while his art criticism and theory
influenced the founding of the National Trust, the National Art
Foundation and other such institutions.
Walter Pater (1839–94), like Ruskin and Morris, saw his age as
decadent. However, unlike the other two, he turned to the
Renaissance for inspiration. His The Studies in the History of the
Renaissance (1873) and Appreciations (1889) were attempts to recast
aesthetics and were instrumental in the forging of the Pre-Raphaelites
and the Aesthetic Movement (see the box Aestheticism and
Decadence). Pater saw art as a kind of ‘imaginative reason’ (as
Matthew Arnold called it). Pleading for the pleasure of art as pure
and harmonious, Pater proposed that the end or aim of art was art
itself, nothing more. The emphasis on the sensuous element in art
was Pater’s major contribution to aesthetics. Art was something that
unified matter and mind as well as sensation and intellect:
constituent elements of the composition [in art or music] are so
welded together, that the material or subject no longer strikes the
intellect only … but form and matter, in their union or identity,
present one single effect to the “imaginative reason” …
Aestheticism and Decadence

A movement in 19th century England and France, Aestheticism was
characterized by the slogan ‘art for art’s sake’. Among its significant
supporters were Victor Cousin, Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater and the Rossettis.
They believed that the primary function of art was aesthetic and sensual,
not intellectual or moral. It aims to please the senses rather than convey an
argument. It encouraged the excessive use of symbols and imagery, which,
they argued, contributed to pleasure. Beauty was to be primary (the Aesthetic
slogan, as coined by Wilde, was ‘life imitates art’). ‘Decadence’ was the
pejorative term used by critics to disparage the aestheticism of France, the
symbolists and the Pre-Raphaelites.
Fiction
Features of Victorian Fiction
• Realism was the preferred form
• Predominantly concerned with social issues
• The three-decker (multi-volume) novel was popular
• Many genres evolved – the mystery thriller became extremely popular with
Wilkie Collins
• The industrial novel was a genre that emerged in this age
• Many novelists used the novel of manners and the novel of sentiment as
models
• Morals and social codes were major concerns
• Social problem novels (Disraeli, Dickens and Gaskell) were propagandist

and they mixed socialism with Unitarianism and Christian ethics
• The characters were inevitably strongly individualistic.
The 18 th century saw the rise and growth of the English novel.
Fielding, Sterne, Haywood, Burney and others laid the foundation
for a variety of genres and forms even as they created an audience
for longer prose narratives in an age of increasing literacy. The
Victorian age was marked by a massive expansion of the novel in
terms of the kinds of writing as well as readership. Many kinds of
genres were being published and consumed: utopian fiction, school
tales, mystery and sensation novels, historical novels, industrial
novels, social problem novels, adventure tales, oriental tales and
moral stories, among others. Readership boomed, especially with
an increasing demand for fiction from the middle classes. The style
ranged from realism to fantasy. Facilitated by cheaper formats such
as the penny novel and serial publication (best known in the form
of Dickens’ Household Words, which published Elizabeth Gaskell
and Wilkie Collins) and availability through circulating libraries,
the English novel established itself as a key genre. Publishing fiction
turned out to be quite a lucrative business and the role of audience/

readership is increasingly acknowledged as having played a major
role in the evolution of the Victorian novel.2
The Industrial Novel

The industrial novel is often linked to the social problem novel in the
Victorian Age. It was exemplified best by Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1854).
Other practitioners include Benjamin Disraeli (Sybil, 1845) and Elizabeth
Gaskell (Mary Barton, 1848; North and South, 1855).
The concerns of the industrial novel may be traced to the Victorian ‘condition
of England’ question. Most of them showed working-class sympathies. Class
was, expectedly, the central theme in many of them, usually connecting it
with unionism and class unrest. The factory system had altered lifestyles,
social structures and economic conditions. The shift system, unionism,
exploitative factory owners, women working in factories, urban poverty
and rural migration were the themes in these novels.
The first popular writers of the period were GPR James and William
Harrison Ainsworth. James specialized in historical romances, and
his fiction is full of meticulous, often overdone detail. Ainsworth’s
fiction inaugurated the intrigue novel and was extremely lurid and
violent (Rookwood, 1834; Old St Paul’s, 1841). Also practising historical
fiction was Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–73), famous mainly for
his classic chronicle of early Christianity, The Last Days of Pompeii
(1834). Bulwer-Lytton was also known for his romances – mainly
situated around crime and social evils. Eugene Aram (1832), based
on the life of an actual murderer, attracted controversy, with Bulwer-
Lytton being attacked for romanticizing crime. His historical fiction,
elaborate with a wealth of detail and a rather ponderous style,
included tales of the Roman conquest (Harold, 1848), the Wars of
the Roses (The Last of the Barons, 1843) and the conquest of Granada
(Leila, 1838). A weak attempt at supernatural horror was Zanoni
(1842), about a man who is granted immortality, but sacrifices himself
for love during the French Revolution.
The Silver-Fork Novel

Inaugurated by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, this genre dealt with high society
manners and styles. Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham (1828) and Disraeli’s Vivien
Grey (1826–27) are examples of the genre. During an age when the middle
classes were acquiring greater riches and aspiring to nobility, the upper
classes sought to reaffirm their position by suggesting that one had to be
born to wealth and that manners could not be acquired through new money.
Breeding, class, birth and sophistication, such novels argued, could not be
bought.
Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81), Prime Minister of Britain during the

1874–80 period, was also a prolific writer. Disraeli dealt with
romance, often weaving it into political issues and historical events.
Coningsby (1844) was his first major political novel, dealing with the
life of the English elite. Sybil (1845) built on the earlier work by
dramatizing the conflict and chasm between the rich and poor classes
of England. Disraeli’s sympathy for the Chartists is clearly indicated
in the later novel. Tancred (1847) shifted focus to religious issues.
Disraeli was fascinated by Oriental religions – which frequently
became the source of the occult for his fiction – and situated themes
from these in novels like Tancred and Lothair (1870). Along with
Elizabeth Gaskell, Disraeli is one of the most significant practitioners
of the industrial novel. However, he detracts from his social reform
agenda with his tendency to use melodrama and caricature. The
working class and poor are caricatured in Sybil and trade unions
are treated as though they may be the cause rather than the effect of
social unrest.
The reputation of Charles Kingsley (1819–75) rests on three main

works: Chartist Alton Locke (1850) which dealt with textile workers
and agricultural workers; Water Babies (1863), a fantasy tale about a
chimney-sweeper boy who runs away from his cruel employer and
becomes a water baby; and Westward Ho! (1855). Westward Ho! is a
Christian allegory, with flashes of imperial sentiment (the battle
against the Spaniards is seen as the war against evil itself). Kingsley’s
works combined the agenda of social reform with moralizing. His
concern for the poor and the exploited often resulted in fiction that
reads like propaganda.
Lewis Carroll (1832–98) was the pen name of the mathematician

Charles Lutwidge Dodson. Carroll’s real-life attempts to entertain
children took the form of story-telling. Alice in Wonderland (1865),
Through the Looking Glass (1872) and other equally brilliant but lesser
known works like ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ have remained popular
among both children and adults for long. These part fairy-tale, part
adventure narratives empower the child (Alice), while demonstrating
how insignificant humans can be in comparison with the rest of the
world. Memorable characters from the tales include the Cheshire
cat, Humpty Dumpty, the queen with a single commandment (“Off
with their heads”) and the mock turtle. Carroll’s play with language
(for instance, the Jabberwocky song or Alice’s debates with Humpty
Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass), the blurring of lines between
reality and illusion, philosophic insights into reality and language
are the outstanding features of the tales. ‘Jabberwocky’ and other
such Carrollisms have received unremitting attention from literary
critics for their experiments with language and meaning.
‘Jabberwocky’, in particular, reads and sounds English, but the
meaning is hard to find:
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought –
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head

He went galumphing back.
“And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’
He chortled in his joy.
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–65) was an activist who worked with factory
labour and the Chartists. Her experiences inspired her first major
novel: Mary Barton (1848), a tale about “care-worn men” (as she put
it in her preface to the work). Cast in the realist mould, the novel
gave working-class men and women a degree of individuality. This
in itself was a criticism of a system which saw them only as an
undifferentiated, threatening mass. Taking recourse to stereotypes,
Gaskell showed capitalist industry-owners (in this case, the Carsons)
in very poor light. She is, however, cautious in supporting working-
class revolutions and the conclusion – Mary Barton finally goes away
to Canada – smacks of escapism. She focused on provincial problems
in Cranford (1853). With North and South (1855), she returned to her
major interest, factories and workers, though it was mixed with the
love story of Margaret Hale and John Thornton. Gaskell was one of
the first writers to explore the dubious advantages of development,
locating in industrial capitalism the problems of contemporary
England. She also wrote the first major biography of Charlotte
Brontë. Among the social problem novels of the 19th century, Gaskell’s
novels remain the most popular.
The three Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, growing up in

relative isolation in Yorkshire, produced a body of work that forms
the heart of mid-Victorian fiction. Their fiction invariably focuses on
the wrongs perpetrated by a class-conscious society, especially on
women (who are described, memorably, in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley
as “half doll, half angel”). Governesses, wives and daughters are
trapped in claustrophobic families and relationships. Inheritance and
independence go alongside love and stable relationships. The choices
are not always clear: should the woman marry a wealthy man or
strive for independence? Their novels are also complex explorations
of Victorian women’s psychology, with some supernatural and
spiritual elements thrown in.
Charlotte Brontë (1816–55) arrived on the literary scene with a hugely

successful novel, Jane Eyre (1847). This melodramatic, yet powerful,
story of Edward Rochester, Jane Eyre and Bertha linked marriage
with property and morals. After a series of bad experiences, Jane,
an orphan, arrives at Thornfield Hall, whose owner is the brooding
Rochester. Jane’s wedding ceremony to Rochester is interrupted by
her discovery that Rochester is already married to a woman who is
incarcerated in the attic of Thornfield Hall, Bertha Mason, a Creole
from Jamaica. This discovery of the ‘mad woman in the attic’ causes
Jane to flee. Later, Jane is torn between her love for Rochester and
the steady love of the upright St John Rivers. She returns to Thornfield
Hall to discover that the place has burnt down and that Rochester is
maimed in the accident. She marries Rochester and the disappointed
Rivers eventually dies in India. Gothic elements, powerful scenes of
madness, obsessions and dramatic encounters (between Jane and
Bertha, for instance) construct a haunting tale. The novel’s themes
also include women and madness, class conflict and the gendered
nature of imperialism (in the portrait of Bertha Mason). Villette (1853),
situated in France, is the story of a young woman, Lucy Snowe,
who teaches in a girls’ school. Her romance with John (actually
Graham Bretton, whom she knows from childhood) and Paul
Emmanuel constitutes the emotional core of the tale. John finally
falls in love with Paulina and Emmanuel sails for the West Indies.
Lucy is left alone in a rather ambiguous ending. Villette also carries
the usual Gothic elements in the form of Lucy’s visions, the ghost of
the nun in the school attic and strong emotional undercurrents. The
novel also, as in the fiction of all the three Brontës, is about women’s
sexuality and repression.
Emily Brontë (1818–48) wrote some poetry and one novel, the classic
Wuthering Heights (1847). This tale of strong passions – both love
(Heathcliff and Catherine) and hate (Heathcliff and the Lintons) –
with its Gothic touches has remained a favourite Victorian novel all
over the world. The story of Heathcliff’s love for Catherine is tied up
with issues of succession, property and is a strong critique of the class-

consciousness of English society. Heathcliff’s status as an interloper
in the Earnshaw household and his attempts to acquire the standing
of a gentleman through ownership of both land and women constitute
its multiple themes of class, women and patriarchy.3
Agnes Grey (1847), by the youngest of the sisters, Anne Brontë (1820–
49), dealt with a class of women who were common in many upper-
class households during the 19th century: the governess (Anne herself
had been a governess for some time). Agnes Grey’s experiences as a
governess to the Bloomfields and Murrays constitute the plot of the
novel. She eventually opens a school and marries the curate. The
novel had two main foci: the work of the governess class and the
exploitation of young women. Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
(1848) also focuses on the tribulations of a young woman, this time
of Helen Graham, a widow with a son. She moves into a village and
faces gossip and social antagonism from the country folk because of
her relationship with her landlord, Lawrence. Helen’s attempt to
extricate herself from her abusive husband – her ‘widowhood’ – may
be seen as an early attempt to map women’s independence.
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–63), born in Calcutta, where

his father was an officer of the East India Company, was the first
major experimenter with form during the Victorian age. He tried his
hand at a Newgate novel (Catherine, 1839–40) and novels of English
social hierarchy (Diary of Jeames de La Pluche, 1845–46; and The History
of Samuel Titmarsh and The Great Hoggarty Diamond, 1841). Works
like La Pluche satirized England’s obsession with hierarchy and
manners. Catherine attracted some notoriety because of its subject
matter – it was based on the life of a woman who had killed her
husband and was burned at Tyburn in 1726. Thackeray was to return
to the crime novel with Barry Lyndon (1844), based loosely on
Fielding’s cult text Jonathan Wild. The Great Hoggarty Diamond was a
comment on the system that sends innocent but gullible people to
prison because of the actions of others. Thackeray was serialized in
respected journals like Fraser’s Magazine and Punch. Vanity Fair,
serialized in twenty episodes in 1847–48, established Thackeray’s
reputation. Set in the preceding generation (the battle of Waterloo is
the immediate setting), the novel was essentially a gentle satire on
English society. More similar to the novel of manners, Vanity Fair

portrayed English society as crass, godless, immoral and given to
material pleasures. Becky Sharp’s strong individualism, her survival
instincts and her determination to be successful constitutes one of
the best and most complexly delineated characterizations in the
history of the English novel. Thackeray never created another such
work, even though the portraits of Henry Esmond and Beatrix in
The History of Henry Esmond (1852) do show Thackeray’s powers of
characterization. His The Newcomes (1853–55) also provided an
interesting portrait of English womanhood in the form of Ethel
Newcome. Thackeray’s fiction combines some biting satire with
sentimentality and is ambivalent about figures like Becky Sharp –
who can be admired for her courage and determination, but may be
criticized for her selfishness and callous indifference. Thackeray, like
most of his contemporaries, appears bitter about English society,
seeing it mainly in its worst colours.
The prolific Anthony Trollope (1815–82) was a chronicler of English

country life. His Barchester trilogy, inaugurated by Barchester Towers
(1857), has proved to be of considerable popularity well into the
20th century. Trollope’s early fiction, other than Barchester Towers,
including The Warden (1855) and Doctor Thorne (1858) were
documents of rural and semi-urban England. His fiction about
English public and political life (Phineas Finn, 1869; and The Prime
Minister, 1876) is not generally known. He also wrote fiction about
Ireland and Australia, historical romances and a large quantity of
short fiction.
One of the masters of the language and a writer who became a
celebrity during his lifetime (anecdotes circulate of people waiting
at the New York ports for the ship from London, carrying the next
instalment of his novel), was Charles Dickens (1812–70). A tireless
chronicler of the flaws of the age and a sharp-eyed critic of England’s
social systems, Dickens’ fiction has the unique reputation of never
having gone out of popularity (only Martin Chuzzlewit was a real
failure with his public). Dickens also successfully worked with the
serial format.
The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), which takes the reader on a tour of
industrial England, inaugurates Dickens’ lifelong theme: the travails
of a good man. The novel also reveals Dickens’ talent for caricature
in the characters of Mrs Leo Hunter and Mr Nupkins. Dickens’ Oliver
Twist (1837–39) is the tale of a boy’s growing up in inimical
circumstances, battling poverty, class, the indifference of society and
assorted criminals. The scene where Oliver, footsore, tired and hungry
in the bitter winter, begs from some stage-coach passengers on the
way to London, who make him run for a half-penny, is a well-known
Dickens situation. The novel is a powerful critique of the workhouse
era (the result of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834) that rendered
many children vulnerable to exploitation.4 Nicholas Nickleby (1838–
39) combined images of great benevolence with images of gullibility,
wickedness and questionable morals. Ralph Nickleby is the epitome
of villainy. It may be safely said that Dickens excelled in portraying
villains and negative characters (Fagin, Gradgrind, Uriah Heep and
Ralph Nickleby, for instance). Dickens’ Hard Times (1854), an
industrial novel, portrayed the conditions of education, exploitation
and industry. Coketown stands for the dangers of industrialization.
Like other works of Dickens, this one is also full of symbolism and
grotesque characters. In M’Choakumchild’s school, we have a
critique of the education system. Mr Gradgrind describes his system
of education thus:
‘Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but
Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root
out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning
animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.
This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and
this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to
Facts, sir!’
Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44), like much of Dickens’ work, is about
flawed moral values, in this case greed and hypocrisy, embodied in
Pecksniff. David Copperfield (1849–50), a kind of bildungsroman, builds
on this kind of moral vision, as it traces the growth of David into a
young man through various trials and tribulations. Marriage and
morals are central to the plot and the novel contains all the
recognizable Dickensean characters: the gullible, the courageous, the
crooked, with Uriah Heep being one of his more unforgettable villains.
The novel is also remarkably different from the rest of Dickens in
that it is less about social issues and the community. Great Expectations
(1860–61) provided one of Dickens’ most unforgettable characters

in Pip. Another tale of the mistreatment of children – Estella is also
as much a victim as Pip, though one does not quite remember this –
the novel is notable for Dickens’ sensitivity and characterization.
Once again, criminals and innocents constitute the main cast in this
novel. Little Dorrit (1855–57) focused on prison conditions. Dickens’
only attempt at a historical novel was A Tale of Two Cities (1859), set
in the French Revolution period and with one of the most famous
opening lines in English literary history: “It was the best of times, it
was the worst of times … .” He did not live to finish his only thriller:
The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
There is an undercurrent of violence in Dickens – even if the violence
is not actual physical brutality. Children and the poor are ruthlessly
exploited throughout his oeuvre. The melodrama is integral to
Dickens’ plots, most of which seek to drive readers to a highly
sentimental response – Little Nell’s death in The Old Curiosity Shop
(1840–41) is said to have had the populations of both England and
America in tears. The realism of his description enables Dickens to
generate a great deal of affect in the readers, even as his caricature
and social comedy facilitate sharp commentaries on the ‘condition
of England’. His characters, in order to facilitate his social
commentary, are less of individuals than types. They stand in for a
particular class or group: workers, bankers, landlords, thieves and
capitalists.
Among the later Victorians we have George Meredith, George Eliot,
Wilkie Collins, Margaret Oliphant and RM Ballantyne, while the
careers of Thackeray and Dickens extend well into this period.
George Meredith’s (1828–1909) first foray into fiction was with the
fantasy novel. He produced two in quick succession: The Shaving of
Shagpat (1856) and Farina (1857), with the usual doses of
supernaturalism and adventure. Using irony as his chief narrative
mode, Meredith criticized British society with his gentle satire in
works like The Adventures of Harry Richmond (1870–71) and Richard
Feverel (1859), with the latter attracting notoriety for its apparent
disregard for Victorian moral codes. Meredith believed in the
centrality of the comic imagination. His most sustained comments
on women and England, with suggestions of a feminist stance, appear
in the better known The Egoist (1879) and Diana of the Crossways
(1885) where women trapped in unhappy marriages turn to other
men. Unsuitable marriages and unrequited love are Meredith’s
themes in almost all his works. Meredith’s fiction contains passages
and commentaries on religion, education, politics, literature and the
arts – in short, just about everything. Along with realism, he also
used substantial amounts of melodrama – Richard Feverel is a good
example, with family dilemmas, infidelity, marital crises and
separation. Meredith’s sole attempt at the historical novel was Vittoria
(1866), set in Milan during the 1848 uprisings.
One of the most important figures in Victorian literature is Mary Anne

(Marian) Evans (1819–80), better known by her pseudonym, George
Eliot. Her first works – Janet’s Repentance, Amos Barton and some short
fiction – appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Her interest in
Renaissance Europe becomes visible in the early historical novel Romola
(1863). Her more canonized works came later: Felix Holt, the Radical
(1866), the voluminous Middlemarch (1871–72), described as a “study
of provincial life”, and Daniel Deronda (1876). Middlemarch, as in much
of her other fiction, draws a distinction between mere pedantry and a
more practical novel. This classic novel is also a satire on English
provincialism. Eliot faults English villages for being both bigoted and
insincere. The people of the village distrust Lydgate, an idealistic, young
doctor, precisely because he is not a local and because he experiments
with new ideas and developments in medical science. Will Ladislaw,
yet another idealistic but penniless young man, is also subject to this
kind of treatment for being an outsider. Eliot seems to suggest that
English provincialism is against any kind of innovation. Eliot’s powers
of description, her concern for the poor of rural England and her moral
vision are exemplified best in Adam Bede (1859), notable for its heavily
religious theme, The Mill on the Floss (1860), an exceptionally fine picture
of English childhood, and Silas Marner (1861), of rural England. One
of Eliot’s major contributions to the English novel is her attempt at
moral tales without moralizing. She restrains from the overly didactic
novel (although Adam Bede comes dangerously close), but ensures that
the moral message gets across through her strong character-portrayals.
Her tendency to use metaphors and symbols from the sciences often
produced hostile reception from male readers who believed that a
woman should not exhibit learning. Eliot, like most other Victorian
novelists, also satirized English society’s concerns and anxieties over

hierarchy.
Eliot believed that human beings are endowed with moral choices.
A person’s actions are determined by these moral choices. Being an
agnostic, Eliot believed that human beings made their own destiny,
without the aid of gods. Further, individuals are responsible,
ultimately, for their actions. This attitude is visible as early as Felix
Holt, where the eponymous hero speaks about duty and choices:
“As long as a man sees and believes in some great good, he’ll prefer
working towards that in the way he’s best fit for, come what may.”
Eliot also suggests that we have a responsibility towards the world.
Her characters thus exhibit strong signs of both empathy and
sympathy (in Silas Marner, for example). Dorothea Brooke in
Middlemarch embodies a work-ethic, informed by a feeling of goodwill
and duty towards fellow-humans.
Eliot’s fiction also has some strong criticism of the strict gender codes
of English life. Dorothea’s desire for learning – part of her ostensible
reason for marrying the scholarly, if stilted, Casaubon – was a very
unusual trait in the Victorian woman. Eliot also does straight
contrasts of character. Dorothea, with her love of learning and
concomitant rejection of feminine frivolities, does not fit the ‘woman’s
image’ and hence is not very well-thought-of by her fellow villagers.
In sharp contrast, both Celia, Dorothea’s sister, and Rosamund adopt
a more pragmatic, and therefore socially acceptable, approach.
Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss refuses to succumb to social
expectations even when her reputation is at stake (vis-á-vis Stephen).
Her women characters try to break out of the stereotypes and have
to battle social norms to do so. This is what the determined
Gwendolen in Daniel Deronda finds out when she decides to take up
acting instead of marrying and settling down.
Margaret Oliphant (1828–97) was, like most Victorians, a chronicler
of provincial life and a writer of supernatural thrillers. Her collection
of short stories Tales of the Seen and Unseen (1880), novel Salem Chapel
(1863) and the short novel A Beleaguered City (1880) were extremely
popular as sensation fiction. Chronicles of Carlingford (1863-66), Miss
Marjoribanks (1866) and other works incorporate some Scottish
characters (Oliphant was of Scottish origins) and discuss, if rather

indecisively, issues of gender, class and social codes.
The most popular of Victorian sensation writers was, of course, Wilkie
Collins (1824–89). Collins almost invented the thriller, even though
Gothic tales from the Romantic age did have elements of the
sensational (see the box Sensation Literature). In 1852, Collins
published ‘A Terribly Strange Bed’ in Dickens’ magazine Household
Worlds. He collaborated with Dickens in producing plays and short
stories for the magazine. When Dickens launched the magazine All
the Year Round in 1859, the first issue carried, along with the last
instalment of A Tale of Two Cities, the first instalment of Collins’ The
Woman in White. When published in one volume in 1860, it became
the largest selling novel of the time. Its use of multiple points of view
in narration, where the story unravels through the subjective
narration of individual characters instead of a controlling, objective,
third-person narrative, marked a daring departure from the
established narrative conventions. In this, Collins may have set the
tone for 20th century’s detective fiction plots.5 He also made another
daring move: he created in Marian Halcombe an ugly heroine. It
was something unthinkable for his time and looked forward to
feminist writers like Fay Weldon and Margaret Atwood in the 20th
century. Halcombe is witty and intelligent and Collins consciously
downplays the significance of looks by focusing on these qualities in
his heroine.
Sensation Literature
Sensation literature is a term used to describe a particular kind of writing
that became popular in the latter half of the 19th century. It is mainly the
novel form that is categorized under this head. Sensation literature drew
upon the Gothic novel. They involved extremely dramatic situations and
often had characters driven by obsession or madness. The plots were what
we would now call ‘racy’ and involved guilty secrets, chases, obsessions,
murder and other criminal acts. There would be fainting women and brave
men, all of whom concealed some secret or the other. It carried elements of
detective fiction too. The most popular practitioner of the genre was Wilkie
Collins with his The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868).
The Moonstone (1868), set in the Anglo-Sikh wars of British India,

but referring back to the time of Wellesley and Seringapatnam (Tipu
Sultan), showcases the greed, danger and unscrupulousness that
constitute the history of a diamond (inspired, critics tell us, by the
story of the Koh-i-Noor). The diamond transforms even the honest
Godfrey Ablewhite into a different person. The novel maps the
passage (and thefts) of the stone through various times, people and
spaces, before being finally restored to the forehead of the Hindu god.
The Moonstone is a tale that provides an ambivalent criticism of the
British Raj’s exploitative and greedy nature, while also exoticizing India
and the Orient. Collins’ novel suggests that we tend to ignore the blood-
stained pasts of such wealth. The novel also set the agenda for detective
novels, complete with the polished detective with a hobby (Sergeant
Cuff, who likes roses), conflicting points of view that the detective has
to untangle and the triumph of truth and law in the end.
Collins relied on characterization to pull his plot together. His
characters influence actions through their perceptions and subjective
responses. Collins’ interest in psychology resulted in portraits of
obsession and neurosis in his work. He specialized in populating his
works with the lower classes – criminals and petty thieves, the ugly,
the poor and the vagabonds. What is interesting is Collins’ belief,
portrayed clearly in his works, that respectability often conceals
shady secrets.
Richard Jefferies (1848–87), who championed environmentalism and
the countryside, wrote fiction that highlighted the consequences of
industrialization: World’s End (1877) and After London (1885).
POETRY
Features of Victorian Poetry
• Relied on classical and traditional forms and ideas
• Some use of archaic form, especially by Tennyson
• Used classical allusions
• Use of local, colloquial speech and dialect, especially in Clough

• Experimented with language, using earlier forms of versification
• Anxiety over religion, science and tradition
• Classicism, medievalism and aestheticism influenced several poets
• Melancholia and a concern with the past
• Crisis of faith in most of the major poets
• Memory and the past figure prominently.
The Victorian age produced some of the best known poets in the
English language. The influences on these poets were many: from
medievalism to the industrial revolution and from Darwinian theories
to the expanding British empire. The poetry produced was thus
diverse, with many genres, themes and styles.
The most significant poet in terms of output and influence is surely
Alfred Tennyson (1809–92). Tennyson’s career spanned most of the
Victorian age and the 19th century. Tennyson was influenced by the
English Romantics, who held sway during his college days at
Cambridge. Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) demonstrates this influence.
Sections of Recollections of Arabian Nights and Mariana also show
Romantic touches. Tennyson was also an extremely erudite poet,
with a wide breadth of classical learning. The death of his close friend
Arthur Hallam resulted in one of the most famous poems in the
English language, In Memoriam, published in the year he succeeded
Wordsworth as England’s Poet Laureate (1850). This elegy, steeped
in spirituality and emotional turmoil, is a good example of the
meditative poem, of which Tennyson is undoubtedly one of the
masters. In Memoriam is also important because it stands as a good
instance of the Victorian crisis of faith: caught between traditional
belief (religion and spirituality) and the new science (Darwinism,
geology and industrialism). Tennyson suggests that science and
poetry see Nature in different yet equally valid ways. At a time when
Nature was being systematically studied, explored and exploited,
poets such as Tennyson sought to revive a kind of Romantic awe for
Nature’s beauty. Eventually, Tennyson preferred tradition to new
belief systems. His 'Maud' (1853) was an interesting experiment in
what is known as ‘monodrama’, where the entire poem is a series of
episodes presented through soliloquies. Emotional and fragmented,

these poems came to be associated with what is derogatorily termed
the ‘spasmodic school’. The poems were used to reveal the condition
of the speaker’s mind – with all its emotional upheavals, madness
and passions. In his famous ‘Tears, Idle Tears’ (1847), he writes:
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
In 'Mariana', Tennyson captures the tormented soul with the refrain:
“My life is dreary,
He cometh not,” she said;
She said, “I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead.”
Poems like ‘The Lady of Shalott’ are good examples of Tennyson’s
power of description. The poem is famous for its death-scene:
With a glassy countenance
Did she look to Camelot.
And at the closing of the day
She loosed the chain, and down she lay;
The broad stream bore her far away,
The Lady of Shalott.
Lying, robed in snowy white
That loosely flew to left and right –
The leaves upon her falling light –
Thro’ the noises of the night
She floated down to Camelot:
And as the boat-head wound along
The willowy hills and fields among,
They heard her singing her last song,
Heard a carol, mournful, holy,
Chanted loudly, chanted lowly,
Till her blood was frozen slowly,
And her eyes were darken’d wholly,
Turn’d to tower’d Camelot.
For ere she reach’d upon the tide

The first house by the water-side,
Singing in her song she died,
Tennyson’s greatest project was the poetic equivalent of the historical
novel. In the time of uncertainty over tradition, he turned to the
medieval ages and the result was Idylls of the King (1859).
Incorporating the Arthurian legends and the Holy Grail myth, Idylls
presents the most sustained Victorian attempt at allegory. The poem
has some powerful passages, especially those dealing with the battle
scenes and the death of Arthur (in the section titled ‘The Passing of
Arthur’) as seen in the following lines:
For friend and foe were shadows in the mist
And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew;
[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ]
And shouts of heathen and the traitor knights,
Oaths, insult, filth, and monstrous blasphemies,
Sweat, writhings, anguish, labouring of the lungs
In that close mist, and cryings for the light,
Moans of the dying, and voices of the dead.
Last, as by some one deathbed after wail

Of suffering, silence follows, or thro' death
Or deathlike swoon, thus over all that shore,
Save for some whisper of the seething seas,
A dead hush fell; but when the dolorous day
Grew drearier toward twilight falling, came
A bitter wind, clear from the North, and blew
The mist aside, and with that wind the tide
Rose, and the pale King glanced across the field
Of battle: but no man was moving there;
Tennyson’s ‘Tithonus’, ‘The Lotos Eaters’ and ‘Ulysses’ returned to
Greek and Roman legends.
George Meredith wrote a substantial volume of poetry, though only
his Modern Love (1862) has stayed popular. William Morris (1834–
96) wrote romantic poetry that, like most Victorian poetry, turned
to the medieval age. His epic The Earthly Paradise (1868, 1870) returns
nostalgically to a cultural utopia: an island which retains its pure

Greek culture, untouched by contemporary civilization. His Sigurd
the Volsung (1876) was yet another heroic epic in the manner of
Homer.
Robert Browning (1812–89), whose career paralleled Tennyson’s,

was also influenced by the classical poets as well as the English
Romantics. His first major work Paracelsus appeared in 1835. This
work is full of classical allusions and obscure imagery, a tone that
solidifies with Sordello (1840). In his later works, Browning discovered
his favourite style, the dramatic monologue (as seen in poems like
‘My Last Duchess’ and ‘Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister’). His
collection Dramatis Personae (1864) showed influences of
contemporary scientific theories. Between 1868 and 1869, he
published The Ring and the Book, which established his reputation as
the greatest poet of his age after Tennyson. The monologues here
thematize questions that are characteristic of the age: knowledge,
truth, evidence and faith.
Dramatic monologues enable Browning to explore the construction
of the self. They are in the form of ironic gazes directed inwards.
Browning’s most famous poems are fine portraits as well. ‘Fra Lippo
Lippi’ has the brash, irreverent and naughty bishop, exposing the
hypocrisy of monasteries and religion. ‘Andrea del Sarto’ is a
monologue by a painter whose career is going downhill. These poems,
like most of the Browning works, also showcase Victorian concerns
like the limits of human knowledge and ambition, fate and destiny,
loveless relationships and faith. ‘Andrea del Sarto’ has Browning’s
famous query:
A man’s reach should exceed his grasp
Or what’s a heaven for?
In ‘My Last Duchess’, Browning’s conversational style explores the
Duke’s cool, ironic look at his life and love:
She had
A heart – how shall I say? – too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
The woman subject does not speak at all and is spoken for. This was
a common theme in Browning, where the male speaker speaks on
behalf of the woman, even describing her emotional states
(‘Porphyria’s Lover’ is another famous example).
Browning’s lyrics are concerned with love and faith – two themes
that figure in almost all his works. In ‘Two in the Campagna’ the
speaker asks:
Let us, O my dove,
Let us be unashamed of soul,
As earth lies bare to heaven above!
How is it under our control
To love or not to love?
His characterization – of lovers, husbands and others – is powerful
and the use of the dramatic monologue enables him to engage with
the mental and emotional states of his characters. His Childe Roland
(published in his Men and Women in 1855) returned to medieval
themes of heroism, quest and romance. Highly figurative, dramatic
and experimental, with a brooding, nightmarish landscape, this
poem about a knight’s quest and suffering is surreal in parts and
recalls the romances of an earlier era:
… grey plain all round:
Nothing but plain to the horizon's bound.
I might go on; nought else remained to do.
The image of heroism is what concludes the poem. Trapped, with
his end in sight and facing a huge power that threatens to overwhelm
him, the knight takes out his slug-horn and blows at the tower:
What in the midst lay but the Tower itself?
The round squat turret, blind as the fool's heart
Built of brown stone, without a counterpart
In the whole world.
[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ]
Names in my ears
Of all the lost adventurers my peers, –
How such a one was strong, and such was bold,
And such was fortunate, yet each of old
Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.
There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met

To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture! in a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew. "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came."
The poem is often treated as an allegory of Victorian heroism in the
face of spiritual uncertainty.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–61) overcame an early Romantic
influence, especially that of Byron, to turn to social themes of class
and women. Her Aurora Leigh (1857), though rather loosely
structured (she lacked Browning’s control over form), is full of intense
moments. Suffering and poverty as well as exploitation and courage
mark Elizabeth Browning’s most famous work:
I was just thirteen,
Still growing like the plants from unseen roots
In tongue-tied Springs, – and suddenly awoke
To full life and life's needs and agonies,
With an intense, strong, struggling heart beside
A stone-dead father.
The poem also captures the degree of social control being exerted by
the elite and the powerful over the lower classes:
The lord-lieutenant looking down sometimes
From the empyrean to assure their souls
Against chance-vulgarisms, and, in the abyss
The apothecary, looked on once a year
To prove their soundness of humility.
Unlike her husband and the other Victorians, Elizabeth Browning
saw the obsession with the past as unhealthy and argued that the
poet needs to ‘represent the age’ (as she put it in Aurora Leigh).
Matthew Arnold exhibits remarkable control over diction in his
mature poetry. Deeply philosophical and reflective, Arnold’s major
works are his shorter poems. His famous ‘Dover Beach’ is a frightening
vision of humanity and culture. The poem captures the uncertainty
of Arnold’s age:
The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
Love appears to be a veil behind which brute reality hides:
For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams
[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ]
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
In another famous poem ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’, Arnold captures the
tensions between modernity and the rapidly disappearing agrarian
(pastoral) ideal. It opens with images of the wonderful world of the
pastoral countryside. An Oxford scholar abandons his college
education to study ‘gipsy-lore’. As the poem proceeds, he is lured
back to Oxford by his former friends. He then discovers that his vision
of the pastoral ideal is simply a fantasy of a world that has
disappeared in the age of industrialization.
Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–61) suffered a spiritual crisis, which he
sought to explain and explicate in much of his poetry. Science did
not seem, to Clough, to offer much courage or stability either. ‘The
New Sinai‘ rejects science, just as ‘Easter-Day’ rejects the Resurrection.
In The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (a novelette in verse), Clough turned
towards love poetry. The poem is notable for some great visual
imagery, with natural scenes being described in substantial detail
that recall the Romantics. Clough, like Tennyson, was also deeply
enamoured of the past.
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) first appeared on the
English literary scene as a dramatist. In 1866, he published his Poems
and Ballads. Swinburne tried his hand at several themes and forms,
and, finally, opted for the elegiac mode in Ave atque Vale (1867) and
historical events and politics in A Song of Italy (1867) and Songs Before
Sunrise (1871).
Edward Fitzgerald (1809–83) is famous right up to the present day

for one major work: his translation of Omar Khaiyyam’s Persian
Rubaiyat (1859). He edited the original and created a poem that tried
to retain the metre and the rhyme. It enabled a revival of interest in
the Oriental, since the text was loaded with images of Arab excesses,
luxury and wealth. Desire, merry-making, mortality and hedonism
mark the work. There is also the exaggerated metaphor and image
that recalls the English metaphysicals:
Ah Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits – and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire.
James Thomson (1834–82) painted a searing portrait of modernity
in The City of Dreadful Night (parts of it appeared in 1867, the entire
work appeared between 1870 and 1874 in book form), which
anticipates the dystopic visions of Eliot and other modernists. In the
poem, the streets, river and the people appear to suffer a death-in-
life state, imaged as “the desert of life” by Thomson. The city itself
seems to brood under the eyes of a huge statue – that of Melancholia.
The most famous section of the poem is ‘As I came through the desert’
which captures much of Thomson’s tone, as the extract below
demonstrates:
As I came through the desert thus it was,
As I came through the desert: All was black,
In heaven no single star, on earth no track;
A brooding hush without a stir or note,
The air so thick it clotted in my throat;
And thus for hours; then some enormous things
Swooped past with savage cries and clanking wings:
But I strode on austere;
No hope could have no fear
In terms of style and form, the most innovative of the Victorian poets
is Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). Hopkins’ stylistic experiments
eventually created a new mode: the sprung rhythm. Sprung rhythm
is a form where there are a variable number of syllables (often one to
four syllables per foot) and where the stress always falls on the first
syllable in a foot. These experiments were recorded in Hopkins’ notes
which he destroyed when he became a Jesuit priest. Hopkins embodies

the central dilemma of modern times: how to have faith given the
present context. His ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, dealing with
the death of nuns in a sea disaster, is symptomatic of this dilemma
of faith. ‘God’s Grandeur’, ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord’, ‘The
Windhover’ all explore questions of faith. His poetry is full of Biblical
allusions and symbolism. His main attempt was to capture what he
termed the ‘inscape’ of things. Inscape was, in Hopkins, the inner
set of characteristics that made every object unique. To understand
the inscape of an object was to understand how it was constituted
and how, therefore, it had been ‘composed’ by God.
There is a strong sense of violence in Hopkins’ imagery. In ‘The Caged
Skylark’, he describes the human being as a prisoner: “Man's
mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells”. In other
poems, Hopkins’ imagery is just as powerful.
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod
This famous poem, ‘God’s Grandeur’, has been at the centre of literary
debates for quite some time now. Critics have suggested that the
‘ooze of oil’ image derives from the hydraulic press which was
becoming a popular device during the time. Others see the poem as
demonstrating an ambivalence towards Christianity itself, while also
laying the responsibility for faith at the doorstep of humans, since
God has already made His presence felt.6
Coventry Patmore (1823–96) was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites.
Marriage, love and faith are his themes in many poems (’Angel in
the House’, ’Faithful Forever’). There is a touch of Romanticism and
a gentle sensuality in his imagery that does not quite fit in with the
Victorian mode. Sensual and highly symbolic, Patmore also used
veiled sexual images in his works.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82) composed the first versions of the

poem that made him famous, ‘The Blessed Damozel’, in 1847–48. It
was privately circulated and established his reputation, though he
published very little poetry in his lifetime. Its famous opening lines
go as follows:
The blessed damozel lean’d out
From the gold bar of Heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters still’d at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.
The poem was intended as an expression of a lover’s grief. It concludes
thus:
But soon their path
Was vague in distant spheres:
And then she cast her arms along
The golden barriers,
And laid her face between her hands,
And wept. (I heard her tears.)
Rossetti and his friends were deeply interested in the visual arts. In
1848, he formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (see the box Pre-
Raphaelites). In 1857, this group illustrated Tennyson’s Poems.
Rossetti also translated Italian poetry into English. In 1870, he
published Poems, a volume that attracted a notorious attack from
Robert Buchanan. Buchanan’s article The Fleshly School of Poetry
eventually gave the Brotherhood their notorious epithet of ‘fleshly
school’. Rossetti published Ballads and Sonnets in 1881. Rossetti’s
poetry is full of exuberant descriptions and surreal settings. Time
scales collapse and there is a sense of the magical and mystical.
Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830–94), like most women writers
doomed to marginality through the machinations of a patriarchal
society, wrote both poetry and prose (the latter mainly of the
devotional variety). She composed some nursery-rhymes, complete
with a ditty-like rhythm, in Sing-Song. Her fame as a poet, however,
rests mainly upon Goblin Market (1862). This long narrative poem
carries several traits of the ‘fleshly school’, especially in its descriptions

of women. Here is an example:
Laura stretch'd her gleaming neck
Like a rush-imbedded swan,
Like a lily from the beck,
Like a moonlit poplar branch,
Like a vessel at the launch
When its last restraint is gone.
There is also a current of violence in the poem, especially in the
description of the goblins’ attack on Lizzie:
They began to scratch their pates,
No longer wagging, purring,
But visibly demurring,
Grunting and snarling.
One call'd her proud,
Cross-grain'd, uncivil;
Their tones wax'd loud,
Their looks were evil.
Lashing their tails
They trod and hustled her,
Elbow'd and jostled her,
Claw'd with their nails,
Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking,
Tore her gown and soil'd her stocking,
Twitch'd her hair out by the roots,
Stamp'd upon her tender feet,
Held her hands and squeez'd their fruits
Against her mouth to make her eat.
Robert Bridges (1844–1930), who gave up medical practice to write

and eventually became Poet Laureate, is a good nature poet, especially
in works like ‘London Snow’ and ‘While yet we wait for the spring,
and from the dry’. An elegiac tone informs much of Bridges’ mature
work. A Romantic, Bridges’ sonnets and other poems exhibit a
remarkable control over rhythm and diction. In fact, his precision
rather than content/theme makes him the poet that he is.
The Pre-Raphaelites
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of poets influenced by the
visual arts. It included the Rossettis, William Morris and AC Swinburne and
owed much to the paintings of their contemporary, William Holman Hunt.
Others associated, at least partially, with the group included the influential
philosopher John Ruskin and the noted painters Edward Burne-Jones and
John Everett Millias. They were all great admirers of Raphael, whom they
saw as the high point of Renaissance art. The Pre-Raphaelites deliberately
invoked medieval images and aesthetics in their work. The poetry used
symbolism (some of it obscure), especially from theology and religion. There
was also a major strand that dealt with love, especially tragic love, and
mortality.
They were criticized for being too concerned with the body. Their poetry
and paintings often portray voluptuous bodies. The Pre-Raphaelites
attempted to combine a hard realism (they are famous for their attention to
detail) with heavy symbolism, seeking to make a comment on contemporary
society while simultaneously suggesting a higher state of being.
The poet WE Henley (1849–1903) is supposed to have been the

inspiration for RL Stevenson’s Long John Silver! Henley is known
more for his influential role as arbiter of British literary and artistic
taste through his editorial and critical work in periodicals like London
and Pen. He published Conrad’s The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ in The
New Review. Today, In Hospital is what remains of his poetry. The
poems describe a hospital stay, and capture the reality of the sights
and sounds (and the anxieties) of the place. His most celebrated poem
is, of course, ‘Invictus’7:
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scrolls,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
DRAMA
Features of Victorian Drama
• Popular drama included farces and pantomimes

• The melodrama and the historical play were popular
• Covent Garden and Drury Lane were enlarged
• Some lavish spectacles and sensation plays
• Use of everyday English in the popular play.
Strangely, the Victorian era is not widely recognized for its plays,
even though some of its most famous writers – Thackeray, Dickens,
Wilkie Collins, Bulwer-Lytton and Trollope for instance – wrote
drama. In addition, plays from the Romantic writers like Coleridge,
Shelley, Byron and Wordsworth were staged during this period. Four
playwrights – Douglas Jerrold, Tom Taylor, Thomas William
Robertson and Henry Arthur Jones – produced 255 plays between
them. Tennyson, Poet Laureate of England, wrote two huge
spectacles, Queen Mary and Becket. A measure of the popularity of
the drama as a genre can be gauged from the fact that the two patent
theatres, Covent Garden and Drury Lane, had been expanded in
the 1790s to accommodate about 3500 people each, while other
theatres like the Adelphi and Sadler’s Wells were also extremely
popular. It also provided sensationally successful actors like Mrs
Siddons (who immortalized Lady Macbeth) and Edmund Kean.
Victorian popular drama used everyday language. Spectacles were

guaranteed to bring in the audiences. The increasing influx of middle-
class audience from London’s immediate suburbs may have

contributed to the rise of the popular drama of the age. Concomitant
with the interest in sensation novels was a taste for sensation drama.
Dion Boucicault, who popularized the genre, created successful plays
in The Colleen Bawn (1860), The Flying Scud (1866) and After Dark
(1868). Historical plays remained popular with Douglas Jerrold’s
Thomas à Becket (1829), Tom Taylor’s Jeanne d’Arc (1871) and Henry
Arthur Jones’ The Tempter (1893). Tragedies included Wordsworth’s
The Borderers (which, though written in 1795, was produced only in
1842), Coleridge’s Remorse (1813), Browning’s Strafford (1837) and
Shelley’s The Cenci (which appeared on stage only in 1886). Comedies
and farces, often dealing with troubled marriages and with
exaggerated characters, remained popular with Arthur Wing
Pinero’s Dandy Dick (1887), Douglas Jerrold and William Thomas
Moncrieff’s Nell Gwynne (1883), Jerrold’s Retired from Business (1851)
and Tom Taylor’s Still Waters Run Deep (1855). The farces of Stirling
Coyne and John Madison Morton were extremely successful,
especially their Did You Ever Send Your Wife to Camberwell (1846),
Box and Cox (1847) and My Wife’s Bonnet (1864). Pantomimes were
another popular genre, with the staging of Mother Goose (1880),
Aladdin (1885), Humpty-Dumpty (1891) and Dick Whittington (1894).
Arthur Wing Pinero (1855–1934) abandoned acting in favour of
scripting and proved to be far more successful. His first major success
came with The Squire (1881) and he followed this up with farces,
most of which were popular. The highpoint of his career came with
The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893), a play about marital and domestic
adjustment between husband (Aubrey Tanqueray), wife (Paula
Jarman, the ‘second Mrs Tanqueray’ and a woman with a past) and
a daughter from an earlier marriage (Ellean).
Douglas Jerrold (1803–57) was a prolific playwright and a successful
one. Starting off as a journalist and short story writer (his writings
appeared in The Athenaeum, Punch and others), Jerrold began with
melodrama: The Mutiny at the Nore, Martha Willis, The Factory Girl
and others. These were not so successful. Jerrold, unhappy with the
way theatre managers ruled the stage, founded the Dramatic
Authors’ Society in 1833 to protect the interests of the playwrights.
During his early years, he tried his hand at social problem plays
with works like Fifteen Years of a Drunkard’s Life (which showed the
degeneration into alcoholism and crime of Vernon, a wealthy young
man). Black-Eyed Susan (the title comes from John Gay’s ballad) dealt
with the uncertain lives of seamen and their families. The play was
a huge success. In The Golden Calf (1832), Jerrold looked at the
propertied classes, represented by the Mountneys, who also need
money to keep up their social status. One significant historical play
from his early period is Thomas à Becket. From the 1830s, Jerrold
turned increasingly to comedies, and attained success with Beau Nash,
The Housekeeper, The Wedding Gown and Doves in a Cage. Among his
later works, is The Prisoner of War, set in the Napoleonic wars and
dealing with English prisoners in Verdun. Patriotism and love
interests mark this play.
WE Henley collaborated with Robert Louis Stevenson on four plays:

Deacon Brodie (1880), Beau Austin (1884), Admiral Guinea (1884), and
Macaire (1885). These melodramas were not successful, despite the
collaborative work of two fine artists.
Tom Taylor (1817–80), who served as the editor of Punch and wrote
art criticism for the Times and Graphic, is another successful
playwright from this period. His first foray into drama began with
farces. A Trip to Kissingen (1844) dealt with schoolboy pranks and
escapades. Our Clerks (1852) was a comedy dealing with the lives,
loves and poverty of a lawyer named Hazard and his clerks. His
most successful play from this period is To Oblige Benson (1854). This
comedy about Mrs Benson’s innocent flirtations with young men
like John Meredith, the repercussions of mis-directed letters (involving
Meredith’s letter to Mrs Benson, which reaches Mrs Trotter
Southdown) and the intrigues to safeguard ‘reputations’ became
hugely popular. Taylor’s more successful comedies belong to his
middle period. Masks and Faces (1852) is about theatre personalities,
where the central character is Peg Woffington (the historical actress,
1714–60). The courtship and multiple love interests involving Peg
constitute the play. Our American Cousin, where Asa Trenchard, an
American rustic, inherits an English fortune, was first staged in New
York in 1858. The play was a gentle satire on English aristocracy.
New Men and Old Acres (1869) again dealt with the financial situation
of the English gentry, this time represented by the Vavasours. Taylor
also wrote some domestic plays with an overdose of sentimentality

and melodramatic situations revolving around marriage and morals.
Still Waters Run Deep (1855) is a good example of this genre. Some of
his historical and verse dramas were also successful, especially Plot
and Passion (1853) and The Fool’s Revenge (1859).
Thomas William Robertson (1829–71) had mixed success as a
playwright during the early part of his career. By the end of the
1860s, however, he was extremely popular. Among his early plays,
David Garrick (1864) was perhaps the most successful. His first major
success came with Society (1865), which dealt with a cross section of
England – from the aristocratic Ptarmigant to the middle-class Sidney
Daryl. Ours (1866) also tried a similar pattern – portraying the
landscape of English society. Wealth, love, appropriate marriages
and social status continue to be Robertson’s main themes in Ours.
Caste (1867) used a historically troubling event: the Indian ‘mutiny’
of 1857 as a context to look at English domestic life.
Henry Arthur Jones (1851–1929), in addition to his plays, also wrote

some exceptional pieces of criticism and commentary about the
English stage. Like most Victorian dramatists, he began with
melodrama. The Silver King (1882) deals with the life of Denver, a
gambler, and his supposed involvement in murder and robbery. The
plot is full of action with melodramatic situations, including an
eviction, gangsters, people believed to be dead and so on. Saints and
Sinners (1884) looked at the politics of a small English town, involving
the local preacher, the businessman and the local squire.
Notes
1. On the influence of Darwin in Victorian narrative, see Gillian Beer’s

Darwin’s Plots (1983).
2. For studies of audience, markets, authors and publishing in ‘developing’
the Victorian novel, see John Sutherland’s Victorian Fiction (1995) and
Bradley Deane’s The Making of the Victorian Novelist (2003), among
others.
3. Critics have debated, extensively, the link between property, marriage

and gender in the Victorian novel. See, for instance, Jeff Nunokawa’s
The Afterlife of Property (1994) and Tim Dolin’s Mistress of the House
(1997).
4. Children were central to the Victorian imagination and public debates.

Novels like those by Dickens were part of the larger debates on the
changing situation of the child – both male and female – in rapidly
altering family structures. See Laura C Berry’s The Child, the State,
and the Victorian Novel (1999).
5. For the Victorian novel of crime and detection, see Lisa Rodensky’s
The Crime in Mind (2003) and Heather Worthington’s The Rise of the
Detective in Early Nineteenth-century Popular Fiction (2005).
6. For a study of faith and doubt in Victorian culture, see Elisabeth Jay’s
Faith and Doubt in Victorian Britain (1986). On the scientific temper
of the age, see Patrick Brantlinger’s Energy and Entropy (1989).
7. The poem recently returned to the public imagination because Timothy
McVeigh (who bombed a federal building in Oklahoma, resulting in the
deaths of nearly 200 people in 1995) used it as his last statement before his
execution in 2001!
14. Late Victorian Literature
Several writers who are frequently studied under ‘Edwardian’,

‘Georgian’ or even ‘Modern’ literature began their writing careers in
the late Victorian period. Most novelists from this period retained
the realist mode, though the adventure/fantasy and mystery formats
also came into their own during the 1880s. Social satire continued to
be a popular genre.
PROSE
Non-fiction
Of the prose writers towards the later decades of the 19th century
and the early part of the 20 th century, Samuel Butler figures
prominently. Butler was much influenced by the writings and theories
of Charles Darwin, though he eventually turned towards Lamarck
and away from Darwin. He wrote tracts on biological theories and
a considerable body of journalism on these subjects: Evolution, Old
and New (1879) and Unconscious Memory (1880), among others.
Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872) is Butler’s most famous prose piece.
This work resembles Gulliver’s Travels. Mr Higgs goes over the
mountains in New Zealand (Butler was living in New Zealand at
the time) and comes upon a country of savages. This becomes the
excuse for Butler to satirize all aspects of this ‘undiscovered’ culture
– religion, social hierarchies and art. Butler was unwilling to let go
of the Christian doctrine, despite Darwinism, and much of his early
work (The Fair Haven, 1873) and sections of Erewhon are a defence
of faith.
Fiction
Features of Late Victorian Fiction
• Realism was the dominant mode, especially for writers working with the
social problem novel
• The genre of sensation fiction (thrillers) became widely popular
• Romances and adventure fiction were also popular
• Psychological novels with a focus on the state of the soul and mind made
their appearance
• Empire features as a theme in many works
• Shorter novels began to appear.
One of the first major writers of the late Victorian age was George
Gissing (1857–1903). Gissing, known also for his polemical essays
on censorship and the Grub Street phenomenon (of hack writers),
took his role of a novelist and social commentator seriously. Much of
his fiction is a documentation of the suffering in urban England.
Workers in the Dawn (1880) and The Nether World (1889) dealt with
working-class problems and have been called ‘slum fiction’. The
Emancipated (1890) shifted focus to the middle classes, though Gissing
clearly did not see much to cheer about even there. However, his
sympathies for the working classes did not deter him from having a
deep admiration for the classical age and its writers. Class is integral
to Gissing’s work and he renders class tensions and class despair
with a great deal of sensitivity and pessimism. His descriptions of
London and its society often take the form of extremely harsh
portraits, with extensive use of terms like ‘abomination’, ‘pest-
stricken’, ‘hell’ or ‘abyss’. Like in Dickens, the characters are basically
types and essences of their class, social level and gender. New Grub
Street (1891), undoubtedly Gissing’s most polished work, centres
around marriage, class, financial stability and social conditions,
subsuming love and affection under the weight of practical difficulties.
The overall sense of hopelessness and despair that haunts his works
makes Gissing a tedious read today (and matters are not helped by
the sheer bulk of his novels).
Late Victorian Literature 281
A contemporary of Gissing’s, and a prominent practitioner of ‘slum

fiction’, was Walter Besant (1836–1901). His fiction is set in slum
schools: All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882) and Children of Gibeon
(1886). There is a certain idealism in Besant, unlike in Gissing. Besant
hopes for an end to class conflict and a resolution of social problems.
Besant also has a wry sense of humour which makes for less tedious
reading when compared to Gissing.
George Moore (1852–1933) attracted controversy with his novels of

deep sensuality. Deeply concerned with a character’s feelings and
sentiments, Moore’s A Modern Lover (1883), A Mummer’s Wife (1885),
A Drama in Muslin (1886) and Esther Waters (1894) portrayed
married women attracted (sexually) to other men, a theme that was
immediately controversial. There is a great deal of psychological
symbolism and brutal descriptions of bodily ailments and suffering.
Moore’s concern with human passions was, in terms of context, quite
appropriate, for Sigmund Freud, William James and others were
exploring these same aspects in their work around the turn of the
19th century. His portrait of the sex drive in both men and women
was a radical departure from the prudery of the Victorian age and
looks forward to the moderns.
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94), the author of ever popular works
like Treasure Island and Kidnapped, is perhaps the most famous
Scottish writer since Walter Scott. The better works from Stevenson’s
early period is the entertaining travelogue Travels with a Donkey in
the Cevennes (1879). In 1881, the children’s magazine Young Folks
began serializing Treasure Island, one of the most popular tales for
children ever, and Stevenson immediately attracted attention as a
great entertaining writer. This was followed by two works that
ensured Stevenson’s reputation: Kidnapped (1886) and The Strange
Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). The Black Arrow (serialized in
1883), a historical novel, and The Master of Ballantrae (1889), an
adventure tale, proved far less successful. He also wrote some
polemical pieces deriding English colonialism (having seen it first
hand, since he spent the last several years of his life in Samoa).
Stevenson’s fast-paced plots, a sharp departure from the regular

multi-volume Victorian tale, proved to be his strength. Treasure Island
is a romance, complete with a mysterious map, a brave boy, treasure-

hunting and a brilliant villain (Long John Silver). This novel marked
the return of the romance novel in England. Presented as a first-
person narrative by the boy-hero, Jim Hawkins, the novel takes us
through the sea voyage, villainy, the finding of the treasure and the
return in a crisp sequence. The opening paragraph of Treasure Island
gives us a good idea of Stevenson’s narrative:
Squire Trelawney, Dr Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen
having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure
Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the
bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure
not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back
to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the
brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under
our roof.
Notice how much information and thematic content Stevenson packs
into these few lines: the date, the history, the context of narration,
several of the characters and the core mystery (treasure). Hawkins
stumbles across the scheme for a treasure-hunt, gets involved with it
and is driven by fear of Long John Silver and a sense of adventure.
The concluding scenes, of course, conform to the traditional theme
of the battle between good and evil (here represented by the doctor
and the pirate). David Balfour in Kidnapped is similarly drawn into
adventure after his father’s death and the machinations of his uncle.
Stevenson’s narratives were linear and straightforward with few
subplots. Stevenson’s boy-heroes grow up through adventure and
the tales may be easily read as works about growing up and the
‘rites of passage’. They discover the unpleasant truths about the world
and themselves, moral values and courage. Full of violent fights and
life-threatening situations, Stevenson’s plots are essentially about the
building of character in the face of adversity. His boys retain a sense
of what is good and choose the ‘correct’ path. This sense appears to
them when faced with their own selves, devoid of any contexts of
civilized society. Stevenson inserts his boy-heroes into situations
where they can revert to a primitive animal state, without any vestige
of culture or civilization. It is only in such circumstances that a man’s
true nature is revealed, suggests Stevenson.
Stevenson also made an extraordinarily psychological study in his

60-page The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a tale so popular
that it entered the English language as a metaphor for man’s dual
nature (good and bad) and hypocrisy. The theme suggests that even
the best and most respectable men have less likeable sides to them.
Initially, Jekyll transforms himself for the sake of disguise. Later, he
discovers that being Hyde enables him to do things that are otherwise
not possible. Culture is a mere veneer and even members of the so-
called upper classes would take to evil, if given the chance. When
the tale ends, Jekyll has killed himself because he is unable to cope
with his twin personae. In terms of themes, Stevenson locates a moral
ambivalence in all humans: given the right stimulus and
circumstances, even a dignified man can become a savage animal.
Other important and extremely popular writers of romance and

adventure tales include GA Henty (1832–1902) and Rider Haggard
(1856–1925). Haggard has continued to fascinate children with his
King Solomon’s Mines (1885), its sequel Allan Quatermain (1887) and
She (1886–87). These were, of course, inspired by accounts of real-life
adventures published by travellers like David Livingstone during this
time. Henty’s and Haggard’s work situated in new places provided
English schoolboys with images of a new world, a dream of adventure,
which inspired them to think of a career in the colonies.1
One of the most enduring novelists in the English language is Thomas

Hardy (1840–1928). Driven by a famously tragic vision in The Return
of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), The Woodlanders
(1886–87), Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895),
Hardy is a writer of rather gloomy, tragic novels. His central themes
include social and human callousness to the fate and sufferings of
other humans, a cruel nature, an irrelevant set of social codes,
hypocrisy, fate, flawed characters/personalities and an indifferent
god. Of Hardy’s early work, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) and A
Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) stand out as explorations of life in rural
England, with its small intrigues and social relationships. Far from
the Madding Crowd (1874) appeared anonymously (it was attributed
to George Eliot, which annoyed Hardy considerably) and was his
first major success. This was quickly followed by The Return of the
Native (1878), one of his enduring texts and one which provides the
first glimmers of his tragic vision. Hardy interspersed his novels with
several short stories, many of which were extremely popular, and
some truly wonderful poetry. He also wrote two critical pamphlets,
The Profitable Reading of Fiction (1888) and Candour in English Fiction
(1890).
Exploring the social norms and hypocrisies of rural England, Hardy’s
fiction presents some strong character portraits, an extraordinary
sense of place and a vision of humanity that is not very flattering. As
a regional novelist, Hardy perhaps has no equal in his age. Hardy’s
fiction locates humanity as a very insignificant component of the
world. One of his favourite modes is to situate human figures within
large expanses: Tess in Tess of the D’Urbervilles is, for instance, a “fly
on a billiard-table of infinite length”. Nature and landscape, Egdon
Heath and the Wessex countryside, are characters in themselves in
Hardy. His characters become victims of unforeseen circumstances
and fate, over which they have no control. Tess’s letter to Angel
Clare, for example, never reaches him and leads to tragic
consequences later. Mrs Yeobright chooses to send her son (Clym) a
gift for his wedding through Christian, who gambles away the
money, and widens the rift between mother and son. Believing that
“character is destiny,” Hardy developed a series of flawed characters
like Henchard (Mayor of Casterbridge) and the dysfunctional Sue in
Jude the Obscure. Tragedy, Hardy believed, proceeded from ordinary
human passions and prejudices and this is precisely what his
characters illustrate (Hardy was influenced by Aristotle’s theories
of tragedy). Emotion and reason appear to be in conflict in women
characters like Bathsheba and Eustacia Vye.
Social codes stifle individuals who think or live differently: Sue in
Jude the Obscure discovers this when she decides to leave her husband
Phillotson and tries to live together with Jude without being married.
Hardy’s preference is for impulse and natural law rather than social
codes and norms. Society rejects the sensitive individual, as
exemplified in Arabella’s treatment of Jude. Tess is executed for being
driven to killing her oppressor Alec in Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
Hardy’s ironic comment at the end of the novel – “Justice was done”
– suggests that human laws do not treat people fairly.
Jude the Obscure was Hardy’s most sustained interrogation of the

class issues and sexual morality of the period. Jude wishes to study
but circumstances are not conducive to him. Sue, his cousin, finds
her husband physically repulsive. Both find marriage a dangerously
limiting formula for their relationships – since they would be bound
by law to love each other as Sue reminds Jude. However, she is unable
to sustain her rebellion against the prevalent modes. Sue’s self-
destructive tendencies, her moral relativism and her formidable
intellect mark her out as a ‘new woman’.
Hardy’s concern about the fate of women in the 19th century is best
exemplified by his portrait of Henchard’s actions in Mayor of
Casterbridge: in a fit of drunkenness, he auctions his wife, Susan, at
the fair. Susan goes away with Newsom, a sailor. After he became
sober, Henchard regrets his action but fails to locate the sailor. He
abstains from alcohol and works his way up to the positon of mayor.
Years later, when Susan returns with ‘their’ daughter (Elizabeth-
Jane is actually Newsom’s daughter), things become more
complicated. The rest of the novel unravels old relationships (Lucetta-
Henchard), new ones (David Fairfrae-Lucetta, Fairfrae-Elizabeth-
Jane) even as Henchard’s business collapses. Henchard loses first
Susan (again) and then Lucetta. When he dies, he states in his will
that no man should remember him, a tacit admission of his sordid
early life and his tragic later life. The subjugation and degradation
of women, which renders even marriage a business transaction
(Hardy uses these terms himself), is linked to the expansion of
capitalism which cast women as objects.
One of Hardy’s important contemporaries was a Polish immigrant
to England, Joseph Conrad (1857–1924). Conrad learnt his English
through newspapers and the works of Carlyle, and, ironically, went
on to become one of the finest practitioners of the language. A master
of the narrative technique (as demonstrated in works like Heart of
Darkness, Nostromo and Lord Jim) with a fine sense of place/setting,
Conrad’s fiction also embodies a strong moral vision.
Heart of Darkness (1899), the most enduring of his works and one of
the primary source texts for postcolonial studies today (one strand
of which is exemplified by the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe’s
caustic dismissal of Conrad as a “bloody racist”), is set in colonial

Africa. It is the story of Kurtz, a white trader, who slowly transforms
into a savage master within the context of colonialism. Kurtz’s
savagery and madness, narrated by Marlow, embodies the cruelties
of colonial domination and the annihilation of any vestiges of
humanity in the white man. The absence of Africans in the novel –
except as slaves – suggests that the Europeanization of African space
is purchased at the cost of the dehumanization of the natives. The
journey into the Congo is also, Conrad suggests in the case of both
Kurtz and Marlow, a journey into the soul.
Lord Jim (1900) embodies Conrad’s finest moral vision. This tale of
betrayal – Jim abandons his ship and then states that it sank beneath
his feet – argues forcefully that a man’s actions are a clear index of
his character. Jim’s attempt to gain self-respect and redemption for
his earlier cowardly actions is the key to this moral vision. He spends
the rest of his life trying to deal with the memory of his actions. He
moves to Borneo (present-day Indonesia) and starts work there.
Befriending Dain Waris, Jim gets involved in the intrigues of the place.
Eventually, as the local politics burgeons into a crisis, Dain Waris is
shot dead and his father (Doramin) assumes that Jim is responsible.
Jim, having realized that the time for atonement has come, walks up
to his death at Doramin’s hands. Jim’s loyalty to Dain Waris and his
attempts to retrieve his self in Borneo form the key to the novel. Jim
establishes himself as a reliable man in sharp contrast to his past.
Conrad’s friend John Galsworthy (1867–1933) situated his fiction in
the class he knew best: the upper-class bourgeoisie. Galsworthy’s
preoccupation in works like The Forsyte Saga (1922) is with the
decadence of the upper classes. While Galsworthy’s major work is
located well into the modern period, the attitudes and themes suggest
a Victorian temperament. The life of Soames Forsyte, a typical
arrogant upper-class gentleman, is a series of ownership moves. His
wife Irene tries to escape from the stifling state of her marriage, but
with little success. The saga moves on through the attempts of Soames
and Irene to reconcile with each other (the artist who loves Irene
and who represented freedom and individuality, unfortunately dies).
This multi-generation tale has large doses of sentimentality.
Another contemporary of Conrad and Galsworthy, whose fiction

occupies a difficult spot between Victorianism and modernity, is
Arnold Bennett (1867–1931). Known mainly as the author of Anna
of the Five Towns (1902) and The Old Wives’ Tale (1908), Bennett ranks
alongside Hardy as a regionalist, but without the latter’s powerful,
if pessimistic, vision. Bennett’s focus was the everyday life in small
towns and villages. There is little tragic vision, though sadness is
commonplace. More in the nature of a gentle narrative than a series
of powerful events, Bennett’s fiction looks at the poverty, aspirations
and disappointments of the lower and middle classes.
Samuel Butler (1835–1902) established his reputation as a writer of

fiction with one novel, The Way of All Flesh (1903). This satirical
portrait of an English family drew upon Butler’s childhood
experiences of growing up in a repressively conservative household.
He painted bitter portraits of his parents in the tale, almost as a kind
of revenge upon his upbringing.
Among the more controversial writers of the time was Oscar Wilde
(1854–1900). Celebrated for his plays and his homosexuality – for
which he was imprisoned – Wilde’s claim to novelistic fame rests on
a particularly fine exploration of narcissism, The Picture of Dorian
Gray (1890). This short piece depicts the corruption at the heart of
English bourgeois society and the inability of art to capture the core
of wickedness. Dorian Gray kills the painter who paints his lovely
portrait, drives Sybil, an actress, to suicide with his cruel rejection
and progresses deeper into evil, culminating in the destruction of
the portrait. A tale reminiscent of Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,
Dorian Gray points to the evil within beauty and to the devil within
the human.
The most significant novelist of the sensation genre from this period
was Bram Stoker (1847–1912). Stoker’s Dracula (1897) was based on
a mixture of science (progeria, the rare disease of premature aging,
and vampire bats), history (it was based loosely on a medieval king,
Vlad the Impaler, who was notorious for his cruelty) and myth-
legends (the Nosferatu). The novel shocked the world with its
eroticism (which anticipates several theories of sexuality, pain and
the corporeal in the latter decades of the 20th century) and curious
notions of religion. Jonathan Harker and his friends take on the

immortal Count Dracula armed with some esoteric knowledge of
vampires and a great deal of faith in Christianity’s power to destroy
evil. Dracula’s success spurred numerous 20th century adaptations
and the novel ranks alongside Frankenstein as one of the originating
moments of the horror story.
POETRY
One particular poem of Francis Thompson (1859–1907) has endured
in popularity: ‘The Hound of Heaven’. Thompson’s poetry is marked
by both faith and self-doubt, and, in this, his thematic relation is
with Hopkins. Powerful visions and images render his poetry surreal
and discomfiting. Note, for instance, the opening of the deservedly
celebrated ‘The Hound of Heaven’:
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbéd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat—and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet—
“All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.”
The poem describes how God pursues wayward and lapsed souls.
Thompson, whose own opium addiction was causing him major
bouts of depression, captures the sense of despair and guilt of the
‘outlaw’ (his term for the lapsed believer).
AE Housman (1859–1936), a Professor of Latin at University College,

London, and later at Cambridge University, is celebrated mainly for
his collection A Shropshire Lad (1896), a volume that has almost never
been out of print (something unusual for a poetry collection). The

poems in this collection are unremittingly gloomy and combine some
exquisite nature descriptions with details of prison life, executions
and death. Here is an example of Housman’s work from this volume:
On moonlit heath and lonesome bank
The sheep beside me graze;
And yon the gallows used to clank
Fast by the four cross ways.
A careless shepherd once would keep
The flocks by moonlight there,
And high amongst the glimmering sheep
The dead man stood on air.
They hang us now in Shrewsbury jail:
The whistles blow forlorn,
And trains all night groan on the rail
To men that die at morn.
There sleeps in Shrewsbury jail to-night,
Or wakes, as may betide,
A better lad, if things went right,
Than most that sleep outside.
And naked to the hangman's noose
The morning clocks will ring
A neck God made for other use
Than strangling in a string.
As can be seen, the diction is immaculate. Shropshire, Housman’s
half-imagined country, is described as a land of ‘lost content’ for the
suffering of its people. Decay and inevitable death, the passing of
time and suffering haunt Housman’s poetry.
DRAMA
Oscar Wilde’s comedies like Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and The
Importance of Being Earnest (1895) recall the Restoration dramatists.
The Importance of Being Earnest was a scathing attack on the polished
hypocrisy of the Victorian age. Every person turns out to be other
than what he/she has claimed to be. Gwendolen, Cecily, Jack and
Algernon are all revealed as duplicitous people. Algernon and Jack
escape responsibility by creating a ‘double’. When he actually wants

to have a share of London life, Jack claims that he has a brother,
Ernest, who resides in the town and whom he has to visit, and
Algernon invents Bunbury, an invalid in the country, whom he has
to visit. In Wilde’s analysis of women characters like Lady Bracknell,
we have a critique of marriage – people marry for money and titles
and love is not a necessary factor. Class dictates and defines identity
and social relationships, as Cecily discovers when she is treated rudely
by Lady Bracknell. Several themes from the aesthetic movement are
visible in the play. Art and aesthetic taste are paramount among the
upper classes whose properties and profits gave them plenty of
leisure, even as their idleness is excused as taste and their personalities
forgiven because they are ‘aesthetes’. Eventually, Jack is revealed to
be ‘Ernest’ in official records.
Notes
1. Critics like Martin Green (Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire, 1979) have
argued that the empire and its expanding boundaries, its encounter with
other races and cultures provides a context for numerous Victorian novels.
Also see, Laurence Kitzan’s Victorian Writers and the Image of Empire (2001).
15. Re-reading the Victorians
Constructed Masculinities
Recent studies of the Victorian era have analysed the overemphasis

on masculinity during this period of Empire. Historians of
homosexuality have detected what is termed a ‘sexual panic’ in the
writings of the age. Effeminate aristocrats, their hangers-on and
working-class males were all equally worried about the public
appearance of sexual preferences. Male homosexual activities were
of course illegal (it was decriminalized only in 1967). However, the
debates were never one-sided. Jeremy Bentham, a key thinker,
believed that homosexuality should be decriminalized. Contemporary
readings have excavated the homosexual themes in many Victorian
poets and novelists. The contexts of army life, adventure and travel,
the public school system and the empire produced a cult of
masculinity.
Twentieth-century critics have suggested that Tennyson’s In Memoriam
celebrates ‘homosocial’ (rather than homosexual) bonding. Certain
passages from the poem offer the homosocial theme readily:
… manhood fused with female grace
In such a sort, the child would twine
A trustful hand, unask’d, in thine,
And find comfort in his face.
Or, his address to Arthur Hallam:
My friend, the brother of my love,
My Arthur, whom I shall not see
Till all my widow’d race be run.
Here the reference to marriage (‘widowed’) alongside the emotional
expressions of love for a ‘brother’ have been seen as veiled expressions
of homosexual desire.
Gerard Manley Hopkins sought to negotiate the constraints of his

Catholic belief with his homosexuality. His poems contain many
references to the godly beauty of men. Hopkins also images God as a
masculine principle in ‘God’s Grandeur’. Walter Pater’s essays,
especially works like ‘Notes on Leonardo da Vinci’ (1869), seem to
suggest that male-male desire may be quite acceptable, though Pater,
understandably, refuses to make any overt statement. AC Swinburne
declared that “great poets are bisexual, male and female at once.”
In ‘Anactoria’, a dramatic monologue apparently articulated by
Sappho, he describes lesbianism.
It is interesting to see how many of the ‘great’ Victorian poets, writing

in the age of Empire and its concomitant (gendered and sexualized)
theme of masculinity, managed to interrogate gender roles and social
relations. Clearly, Victorian codes of sexuality and behaviour were
questioned and subverted in literary representations such as the ones
cited above. In an age given to appearances, the subtexts of these
authors reveal how ambivalent and even self-contradictory
appearances could be.
Further Reading
Emeljanow, Victor. Victorian Popular Dramatists. Boston: Twayne,

1987.
Jenkins, Anthony. The Making of Victorian Drama. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Richards, Bernard. English Poetry of the Victorian Period 1830–1890.

London and New York: Longman, 1988.
Wheeler, Michael. English Fiction of the Victorian Period 1830–1890.

SECTION FIVE
The Modern Age
Timeline
London–Paris telephone system 1891 Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles

opened
Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and
Wilde’s The Importance of Being
Earnest (1895)
Stoker’s Dracula (1897)
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899)
Ascension of Edward VII 1901 Kipling’s Kim

Doyle’s The Hound of
the Baskervilles (1902)
Abbey Theatre founded in Dublin
(1904)
Synge’s Playboy of the Western
World (1907)
Ascension of George V 1910

Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers
(1913)
World War I begins 1914 Joyce’s Dubliners
Easter Rising in Dublin (1916) Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a

Young Man (1916)
Russian Revolution (1917) Eliot’s Prufrock (1917)
World War I ends 1918 Hopkins’ Poems and Strachey’s
Eminent Victorians
Eliot’s Poems and Sassoon’s War
Poems (1919)
Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920)
Irish Free State established

(1921)
Eliot’s Wasteland, Joyce’s Ulysses
Civil Disobedience movement in and Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga
India
1922
Forster’s Passage to India and
First Labour Government in Richards’ Principles of Literary
Britain (1924) Criticism (1924)
Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927)

Women’s suffrage extended to 1928 Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s
all women over 21 years of age Lover and Yeats’ The Tower
Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own
(1929)
Huxley’s Brave New World (1932)

Hitler becomes German
Chancellor (1933)
Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral
(1935)
Ascension and Abdication of Eliot’s Collected Poems
1936
Edward VIII; Ascension of
George VI; Penguin Books
founded; BBC Television service
begins; Spanish Civil War
World War II begins 1939 Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake

Fall of France; Battle of Britain
(1940)
Eliot’s Four Quartets (1944)
Atom bomb on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki; World War II ends
1945 Orwell’s Animal Farm
RS Thomas’ Stones of the Field
(1946)
India becomes independent
(1947)
Leavis’ Great Tradition (1948)
NATO founded (1949) Orwell’s 1984 (1949)

Lessing’s The Grass is Singing (1950)
Greene’s End of the Affair (1951)
Ascension of Elizabeth II Dylan Thomas’ Collected Poems
1952
Amis’ Lucky Jim, Dylan Thomas’

Under Milkwood and Golding’s
Lord of the Flies (1954)
Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1955)
Hungarian Uprising (1956) Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and
Ted Hughes’ Hawk in the Rain
(1956)
Pinter’s Birthday Party (1957)
Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958)
Berlin Wall built 1961 Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas

Burgess’ Clockwork Orange and
Lessing’s Golden Notebook (1962)
Plath’s Bell Jar (1963)
Mandela imprisoned (1964)
Larkin’s Whitsun Weddings and
Plath’s Ariel (1965)
Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist
(1966)
Nigerian Civil War (1967) Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern are Dead (1967)
Manned Moon Landing; the first Fowles’ French Lieutenant’s
Booker Prize 1969 Woman
Bond’s Lear (1971)

‘Bloody Sunday’ massacre in Heaney’s Wintering Out (1972)
Belfast (1972)
American troops withdraw from
Vietnam(1973)
Martin Amis’ Dead Babies and
Lodge’s Changing Places (1975)
McEwan’s Cement Garden,
Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea and
Raine’s The Onion, Memory (1978)
The Iranian Revolution Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and
1979 Raine’s A Martian Sends a
Postcard Home
Rushdie’s Midnight Children (1981)

Emecheta’s Destination Biafra
Falkland’s War (1982) (1982)
Swift’s Waterland (1983)
Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot and
Ballard’s Empire of the Sun (1984)
Winterson’s Oranges are Not the
Only Fruit (1985)
Seth’s The Golden Gate
Chernobyl disaster 1986 Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and

Lodge’s Nice Work (1988)
Fatwa against Rushdie (1988)
Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day (1989)
Collapse of the USSR; the Gulf Martin Amis’ Times Arrow and
War
1991 Phillips’ Cambridge
Winterson’s Written on the Body
(1992)
Walsh’s Trainspotting (1993)
Hill’s Canaan, Roy’s God of Small

Things and Kureishi’s My Son the
Fanatic (1997)
McEwan’s Amsterdam, Barnes’
England, England and Hughes’
Birthday Letters (1998)
Duffy’s The World’s Wife and
Waters’ Affinity (1999)
2000 Kane’s Blasted
World Trade Centre attacked
(2001) Duffy’s Feminine Gospels (2002)
The US invasion of Iraq (2003) Dabydeen’s Our Lady of Demerara
2004 and Hollinghurst’s The Line of
Beauty
16. Backgrounds
The modern age in literature was grounded in achievements that

are amazing in their potential for both emancipation and destruction:
atomic energy, space exploration, genetic and biomedical engineering
and telecommunications. Technological advances in these areas could
either save millions of human beings and the planet or destroy them
several times over. They can free people from the ‘bondage’ of disease,
poverty and oppression or mire them in worse conditions. The
literature of the 20th century has consistently addressed these extreme
situations of freedom and oppression, fear and freedom from fear,
ruins and achievements.
The increasing role of, and dependence on, electrical and
mechanical devices, from everyday life and housework to gigantic
industries, marks the 20th century. The technologization of the world
and life has also resulted in massive environmental problems, some
of which have attracted socio-political and legal attention and
activism across the world. Right from the first decades of the 20th
century, North American and European continents underwent
rapid urbanization, as rural populations fled to cities for jobs.
Science became the most significant discipline (perhaps at the cost
of the humanities and social sciences). The race to colonize space
began. Medical science crossed unbelievable distances and provided
treatments for assorted illnesses. It cracked open the secret of life –
the discovery of DNA stands on par with the discoveries of the
radio waves, the theory of relativity, the steam engine and other
such achievements of the industrialized age.
The economic depression of the 1930s proved to be a huge blow to
the already suffering poor. The lack of jobs and the decrease in the
value of money made life exceptionally tough. Interestingly, many
large business houses also suffered and numerous businessmen went
bankrupt with the stock exchange crashes. This phenomenon was
to repeat in the dot com crash of the late 1990s when the information
298 The Modern Age
technology-led software markets slowed down and large companies

had to impose lay-offs.
Wars significantly altered political, geographical, financial and social
relations. If World War I (1914–18) reiterated the issue of territorial
conquest, World War II (1939–45) underscored the ease of
destruction, the extent of human suffering and the power of mindless
technology. The wars brought home several truths to the 20th century:
that man was perfectly capable of destroying what he had built,
that cruelty is an integral feature of human psychology, that all war
is about suffering no matter what the justification of war may be,
and that war may be about heroism but it is also about the ability to
be indifferent to the consequences of heroism (something WB Yeats
captured in ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’). The literature of
the two World Wars was an attempt to negotiate the trauma of such
extensive suffering and the theme of power and cruelty. The war
also revealed the fragile nature of human existence. When TS Eliot
wrote his famous lines “these fragments I have shored against my
ruins” (The Wasteland), he was referring not only to the very limited
knowledge mankind possesses, but also to the fragmented nature of
memory, identity, desire and existence itself. The entire literature of
the 20th century can, in fact, be read as an attempt to deal with the
discovery of the hopelessness of courage and the fallibility of mankind
in the face of war. It is also possible to argue that literary techniques
like the ‘stream of consciousness’ in James Joyce and Virginia Woolf
were responses to the brutal nature of the realities of war. Poets and
artists sought to escape the harsh reality of suffering, destruction
and cruelty by retreating into the mind. Rather than exploring the
real world (as the 19th century realist novel did), they preferred to
explore the mind. The literature of the post-World Wars was often,
therefore, a literature of escape, though certain genres like
apocalyptic/disaster novels addressed the theme of human/earth
destruction directly.
Governments in North America and Europe expanded mechanisms
for the welfare of the poor. The entertainment industry – television,
radio and cinema – became a huge profit-making and popular aspect
of modern life. Towards the latter half of the 20th century, American
mass culture, specifically Hollywood and television, entered the
Backgrounds 299
‘Third World’ countries (taken to mean countries in Asia, Africa and

South America) and became a major player in their cultural scene.
The publishing industry sought to capture the market – more literacy
meant more reading publics – with lower priced editions and pocket-
sized, easy-to-carry, paperbacks (the latter being a radical move
credited to Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin).
In addition to the popularization of literature and the extensive mass
cultural forms of the 20th century, there was also a flourishing of
artistic rebellion against established forms. This resulted in radical
experimentation in artistic form, technique and themes, especially
in painting. Cubism, Vorticism and Futurism were artistic movements
directly influenced by the mechanical and technological
developments of the age.
Ideological conflicts, especially after World War II, divided the

world along capitalist/communist lines. Escalating tensions
between these two camps in Europe and America changed global
geopolitics and resulted in what came to be known as the Cold
War. A significant effect of this was the excessive militarization of
the world, with both camps looking for military bases all over the
world to deter the other.
From the last decades of the 19th century, numerous countries in
Asia, Africa and South America began to fight the domination of
their cultures and identities by the white races. These nationalist
movements resulted in political independence for many countries,
including India. The process of decolonization also saw a revival of
new non-English cultural forms and new writings by formerly
colonized people in English (a discipline now known as
Commonwealth or Postcolonial Literature). Newly independent
countries began, in the wake of the World Wars and the Cold War
later, to join the capitalist or communist camps.
Large-scale refugee movement across the world during the course
of the 20th century saw people migrating across borders, despite
stricter border controls, in search of a safer and better life. Genocidal
wars and ethnic cleansing became a part of the 20th century – starting
with the Jews in Nazi Germany, through the conflicts in Africa and
Europe in the last decades of the 20th century. No other century saw
300 The Modern Age
so many millions suffer from racism, poverty, unemployment or

disease.
The civil rights movement in the USA saw a marked change in the
conditions of blacks and the work of Martin Luther King, Jr, Malcolm
X, Rosa Parks and others generated new cultural icons. Across the
world today, the work of civil rights movements, the United Nations
and institutions like Amnesty International and Red Cross has
expanded and parallels – some might argue, exceeds – the role of
the governments. The feminist and gay rights movements have been
influential in politics and have had a marked impact on literary and
cultural studies. Environmental activism, such as that by Greenpeace,
has attained a significant degree of political presence in many
countries.
However, with the increasing role of agencies like the World Bank
and International Monetary Fund, the economic control of ‘First
World’ (a term used to describe nations in Europe and North America
as well as others like Australia and Japan) over the ‘Third World’
has increased resulting in a phenomenon called neo-colonialism.
Protests against First World economic and cultural imperialism has
increased substantially, especially in the 1980s and 1990s. Meanwhile,
religious, cultural, racial and linguistic tensions, driven by economic
crises have escalated political problems in numerous parts of the
world. Ethnic conflict, separatist movements and religious
fundamentalisms have increased in Third World nations.
17. Towards the Modern
Edwardian and Georgian Literature,
1900–22
The ‘modern’ as a literary period is heralded in much of the writings

of the last decades of the 19th century. The poetry of Gerard Manley
Hopkins and the fiction of Thomas Hardy, the varied work of HG
Wells, all embody a ‘modern’ consciousness. Experiments with form,
language and style in the works of the early 20th century – Woolf,
Joyce, Forster – and a new sensibility developed in the aftermath
and contexts of war, high imperialism and new ideas in philosophy
and human psychology (especially in the work of Sigmund Freud
and William James). Radical departures in views about god, religious
doctrine and sexuality are embodied in most of these works (both
poetry and prose).
FICTION
Features of Early 20th Century Fiction
• An interest in psychology and the human soul
• Multiple genres and forms used
• Realism combined with psychological and the supernatural.
The turn-of-the-nineteenth-century fiction threw up many celebrated

authors: Rudyard Kipling, EM Forster, HG Wells, Arthur Conan
Doyle, GK Chesterton and Thomas Hardy (for Hardy, see the chapter
on Late Victorian Literature in the preceding section). Many of these
authors looked forward to the modernist movement of the 1920s
and 30s.
302 The Modern Age
Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), known, and often hated, as an

apologist for the British Empire, wrote some of the most popular
children’s and young adults’ fiction of the 20th century. Sent to
England from India (where he was born) at the age of six, he painted
rather unflattering pictures of family life at ‘home’ in Baa-baa, Black
Sheep, life and school in Stalky and Co. He later spent many years in
India as a journalist. The short fiction and poetry of his early years
in India appeared in Departmental Ditties and the famous collection
Plain Tales from the Hills (1888). Kipling’s focus was the life of Anglo-
Indians (the term was originally used to describe Englishmen and
women living in India). His first novel was The Light that Failed (1891),
which appeared when he had already secured a reputation as a
writer with his short stories and poetry. The Jungle Book (1894), the
story of a boy brought up in the jungle, proved hugely successful
and has remained so since then. Kipling’s most celebrated novel is,
of course, Kim (1901).
Kim explored the life of a young Irish boy (readers often tend to
think of him as an English boy) who is almost Indian. Kim gets
involved in two separate yet concurrent ‘projects’: helping an old
lama find a mystic river and spying for the British Empire. Kipling
had established a reputation for being a supporter of the Empire by
this time. Kim’s theme of the Empire’s benevolence and protection,
its conquest and control over India and the portrayal of Indians
(especially Hurree Chunder Mookherjee) furthered this reputation.
Kim is a sweeping study of India. It sketches in loving (if exotic)
detail life on the Grand Trunk Road (which functions as a microcosm
of India itself). The boy’s growth into a young man, the old lama’s
spiritual quest and the ‘great game’ (basically spying and preliminary
war games of Britain with Russia) becomes a study of British India
itself. Themes of evangelical imperialism, military conquest, native
collaboration and missionary education all come together in this
classic tale. Kipling’s views on the Empire begin to show a marked
shift later. His short fiction and essays like ‘The City of Dreadful
Night’ contain a sharp critique of Britain’s continuing presence in
India.
HG Wells (1866–1946) is surely the originator of 20th century science
fiction. His first work is also his most enduring: The Time Machine
Towards the Modern 303
(1895). After this, novels appeared in quick succession: The Island of

Dr Moreau in 1896, The Invisible Man in 1897, The War of the Worlds
in 1898 and The First Men in the Moon in 1901. Wells despised
Victorian society and wrote short pamphlets criticizing it: Mankind
in the Making (1903) and A Modern Utopia (1905). Wells’ science fiction
is often a critique of contemporary London. He also satirized
university life in The Camford Visitation (1937).
In The Time Machine, the time traveller arrives in a future where

humans, now called Eloi, live simply (eating, as Wells calls it, a
‘frugivorous’ diet). Agriculture and industry have disappeared,
except for the ruins. Yet, class hierarchies have been maintained!
The time traveller also has a glimpse of a dying earth. Moreau, the
main character in The Island of Dr Moreau, turns out to be a scientific
experimenter indifferent to the ethics of science. Prendick, who is
shipwrecked on the island, discovers that he vivisects human beings
and experiments with their minds. Moreau also tries to instil a new
system of laws (including laws against drinking) and a deification
of himself as a god. Eventually, the Beast People – the modified
‘humans beings’ – overwhelm Moreau’s system and anarchy sets in.
Moreau and his assistant are killed. Griffin in The Invisible Man
acquires the technology to become invisible. The novel follows his
adventures as he wanders around the city, seeing but unseen. In The
War of the Worlds, Wells created the precursor to 20th century disaster
films like Independence Day. The earth is invaded by Martians who
carry laser guns and other advanced weapons. In the battle for the
survival of human civilization, just when it appears that earth will
lose, there is an unexpected reprieve. The Martians are destroyed,
not by human technology, but by the smallest living organisms on
earth: bacteria. Earth’s bacteria, against which Martian bodies have
no immunity, kill the invaders. Wells’ fiction is often a criticism of
humanity that has lost all sense of proportion about technology and
development. The overzealous pursuit of power, Wells shows, makes
man play god and lose all ethics. The drive to control nature has
resulted in disaster, suggests Wells.1
Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) created the immortal detective,

Sherlock Holmes. He also wrote some science and adventure fiction.
The Holmes stories, especially The Hound of the Baskervilles and The
304 The Modern Age
Sign of Four, have remained extremely popular. Part of the reason

for this popularity is the racy narrative: Doyle’s fiction is tightly woven
and the plot takes supremacy over character (in Agatha Christie’s
fiction, on the other hand, the character of the victim or the murderer
is what is extensively studied and detailed). Holmes himself is a
fascinating figure, with his eccentricity of manners, his intelligence
and his ruthlessness. Adventure, mystery, strong passions, memory
and history, all combine in these tales.
A celebrated novel from this period is the 1894 The Prisoner of Zenda
by Anthony Hope Hawkins (1863–1933). The theme of adventure
in Zenda has parallels with the fiction of Doyle, Haggard and
Stevenson.
Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923), born in New Zealand but settled
in England, is one of the most anthologized short story writers in the
20th century. Her first volume of stories, In a German Pension, appeared
in 1911. Her main concern is with gender relations, especially within
families, and she drew on her own childhood experiences in an upper-
class New Zealand family for this purpose. Her realism provides
exquisite details of the settings and a lucid narrative. There is also
the right touch of irony and satire, often delivered by the women
characters.
Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939) collaborated with Joseph Conrad on
novels like The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903). He played a
major role in English literary criticism through his own criticism (The
March of Literature, 1935) and by founding periodicals like The English
Review and the Transatlantic Review. His major literary work The Good
Soldier (1915) anticipates many postmodern novels with its unreliable
narrator (John Dowell), time shifts and ambiguities. His other works
include a trilogy Fifth Queen (1906–08) about Catherine Howard,
one of the wives of Henry VIII, and the war tetralogy Parade’s End
(1924–28).
EM Forster (1879–1970) produced a work that has set postcolonial

and other critics hard at work with its politics, mystic elements and
humanism with his A Passage to India (1922; contemporary with
Eliot’s The Wasteland). Forster’s work and his influential association
with the Bloomsbury group (see the box Bloomsbury Group) was a
significant influence in 20th century British literary culture. Forster’s
books have been made into award-winning films that have arguably
gained more popularity than his books. Where Angels Fear to Tread
(1905) dealt with class issues. The plot revolves around Lillia Herriton,
a widow, who falls in love with an Italian much younger to her. She
marries him and has a child, but she dies in childbirth. Her family
wants the child to be raised an Englishman and the rest of the novel
deals with the critical issue of heritage, class and culture. A Room
with a View (1908) also involved class tensions, where Cecil Vyse’s
contempt for country people is the key to Lucy Honeychurch’s
dilemma about her forthcoming marriage to him. This novel, which
portrays a woman’s discovery of her self with considerable sensitivity,
is more like a novel of manners. Howards End (1910) returned to
Forster’s favourite theme: class and culture. The story is about two
families with differing interests (commerce and culture): the Wilcoxes
and the Schlegels. Maurice, Forster’s autobiographical novel with
homosexual themes, was published only posthumously.
A Passage to India is perhaps Forster’s most complex work. Adela
Quested and her elderly friend Mrs Moore come out to India from
England. Adela wishes to see ‘the real India’, as she puts it. During
a tourist expedition to the nearby Marabar Caves, they befriend their
‘guide’, Dr Aziz. Later, Adela accuses Aziz of attempting to assault
her. The British population of the town immediately decides that
Aziz must be guilty and he is put on trial. The only Englishman who
is on Aziz’s side is Cyril Fielding, a school teacher who has been
Aziz’s friend for some time. During the trial, Adela withdraws her
charge, much to the consternation of everybody, especially her
compatriots. The novel revolves around the theme of cultural
understanding and friendship beyond governments and politics.
Forster attempts to show how people of different races can
understand each other despite their differences through Mrs Moore’s
relationship with Aziz and the Fielding–Aziz friendship. ‘Only
connect’, Forster’s famous motto, is an attempt to overcome racial
and political distances. Towards the end of the novel, the symbolic
swerving away of the horses on which Aziz and Fielding are riding
suggests that such a connection is ‘not yet’ here. The theme of
306 The Modern Age
sexuality, especially interracial sexual attraction and its possibilities,

is coded into the theme of Adela’s ‘molestation’ and the homoerotic
relationship between Fielding and Aziz. Forster proposes that
humanism must battle and win against racism and cultural
differences. Forster’s universal and secular humanism is embodied
in Mrs Moore and Fielding, who try to ignore their religious, cultural
and racial specificities and prejudices, even when faced with an
equally adamant Indian prejudice in Professor Godbole (who does
appear, however, like a caricature rather than a character). Forster
is not very sympathetic to the English, and criticizes them for being
callous and ignorant about India and Indians.
Bloomsbury Group
Bloomsbury was an influential group of British writers and thinkers in the
early part of the 20th century. They met regularly and often used each other’s
ideas in their work. The more significant members included Virginia and
Leonard Woolf (writers and critics), Clive Bell (art critic), Roger Fry (painter
and art critic), JM Keynes (economist) and Lytton Strachey (historian). Also
associated with the group were Vita Sackville-West and EM Forster. They
were intolerant of Victorian prudishness and were keen on exploring the
limits of thinking on philosophy, humanism, sexuality, gender issues and
politics. The Bloomsbury group represented the avant-garde in the art-
and-culture world of their time. They were often notorious for their
redefinitions of sexual morality – many of them were bisexual – and
liberalism (seen by many as libertarianism). Their writings were informed
by developments in psychoanalysis, philosophy and the arts.
POETRY
The poets associated with the Decadence movement prioritized
experience over anything else. Thus the sensual experience of
everyday life was the main theme in the writings of the Rossettis
and their circle. As the century came to a close attempts were made
to capture experience in unique moments and images. The Symbolist
Movement in literature was a crucial anterior moment to the
modernists. Major writers like TS Eliot admitted to being influenced
by Arthur Symons’ 1899 work, The Symbolist Movement in Literature.
Though the movement’s chief works appeared during the Victorian

age, their impact is more discernable in the moderns.
Poetry of the 1900–22 period is often read under two heads –
Edwardian and Georgian – though there is considerable overlap
between the two.
Features of Edwardian and Georgian Poetry
• Rooted in local and regional contexts, rural themes
• Used agrarian imagery and detailed local landscapes
• Heavily sentimental
• Aimed to speak realistically about everyday life
• Some amount of war poetry.
Edwardian Poetry
Critic Kenneth Millard in Edwardian Poetry (1991) lists seven poets
under Edwardian poetry: Housman, Henry Newbolt, John Masefield,
Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas, John Davidson and Rupert Brooke
(for Housman, see the Victorian Age Section, in the chapter on Late
Victorian Literature). Figures like John Masefield wrote across both
the Edwardian and Georgian periods, while also being influenced
by the first moderns. The poets are concerned with the fast
disappearing values of ‘old England’ in the age of modernization
and war (first, the Boer War between 1899 and 1902 and, later, World
War I). There is a sense of nostalgia in these works. The British Empire
and expansion also constitute a theme.
Thomas Hardy, known more for his fiction, wrote some war poetry,
of which ‘Drummer Hodge’, ‘Channel Firing’, ‘The Going of the
Battery’ and ‘The Man He Killed’ are the most accomplished. There
is a sense that war is an exercise in both brutality and stupidity.
Hardy meditates not only on the soldiers going out to die, but also
on the families and beloveds left behind, awaiting their return
(especially in ‘The Going of the Battery’). In ‘The Man He Killed’, as
the soldier discovers that there is no real reason for killing his ‘enemy’,
308 The Modern Age
Hardy looks forward to Yeats’ celebrated ‘An Irish Airman foresees

His Death’. In ‘Drummer Hodge’, likewise, the soldiers wonder if
the world be any saner and what they are supposedly doing out
there. Other meditative lyrics from Hardy include the ‘She to Him’
poems and the celebrated ‘Darkling Thrush’.2
Rupert Brooke (1887–1915), despite having written just five poems
on war, has been identified as a ‘war poet’. The most celebrated of
these five poems is the sentimental sonnet ‘The Soldier’.
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.
Brooke tried some interesting variations. For instance, his ‘A Channel
Passage’ is clearly a love poem. Yet its images are startlingly different
from any love poetry seen before.
The damned ship lurched and slithered. Quiet and quick
My cold gorge rose; the long sea rolled; I knew
I must think hard of something, or be sick;
And could think hard of only one thing – you!
You, you alone could hold my fancy ever!
And with you memories come, sharp pain, and dole.
Now there's a choice – heartache or tortured liver!
A sea-sick body, or a you-sick soul!
Do I forget you? Retchings twist and tie me,
Old meat, good meals, brown gobbets, up I throw.
Do I remember? Acrid return and slimy,
The sobs and slobber of a last year's woe.
And still the sick ship rolls. 'Tis hard, I tell ye,
To choose 'twixt love and nausea, heart and belly.
Love and nausea, bodily torments and the anguish of the soul –
Brooke’s themes are a bizarre combination of opposites. His poetry,
published as Georgian in the early anthologies, was quaint and tried
to detail a world that was losing out to urbanization: the English
village (in this case Grantchester, near Cambridge). Poems like ‘The
Old Vicarage, Grantchester’ are good examples of this style.
Georgian Poetry
Five volumes edited by Edward Marsh and published between 1912
and 1922 mark the core of Georgian poetry. Harold Monro’s
bookshop in London was the site of book readings and had a crucial
role to play in the popularization of this kind of poetry.
Georgian poets aimed to write poetry that was true to life and without
any ornamentation or exaggeration. Georgian poetry was also
extremely sentimental and recalled imagery from John Clare and
the English Romanticists. Here is an example from James Stephens’
‘The Fifteen Acres’:
I cling and swing
On a branch, or sing
Through the cool, clear hush of Morning, O:
Or fling my wing
On the air, and bring
To sleepier birds a warning, O:
Such poetry also recalled a certain ideological mode from the 17th
century, when English landscape and scenery, especially rural and
agrarian, was detailed and lavishly praised by poets like William
Camden and Michael Drayton in an effort at instilling a sense of
‘Englishness’. Whether modern Georgian poetry evoked similar
feelings of nationalist pride is a debatable point, but the similarity
with the early period is significant. It is possible that 20th century
Georgian poetry rose as a response to the first moments of global
migrations and cosmopolitanism. Its emphasis on the local and the
regional may have been a direct response to the slow
internationalization of the country.
Curiously, however, Georgian poetry that sets out to capture the

beauty of rural England does not sketch in the historical/economic
conditions of the peasant, the landlord or the tenant. The poetry is
restricted to nostalgia or high praise and is not located in actual
living conditions encountered in rural England. This is what
separates the Georgian poets from the first generation of ‘rural’ poets
like John Clare, whose descriptions of the countryside were informed
by a keen awareness of the social injustices and economic inequalities
that govern the farmer’s life and lands.
310 The Modern Age
Georgian poetry proved extremely popular during the first decades

of the 20th century. In terms of its themes, it has parallels with the
Scottish Kailyard School, which flourished in the last two decades
of the 19th century (see the box The Kailyard School). Among the
poets of the Georgian style were celebrated ones like John Masefield,
Walter de la Mare, WH Davies, Rupert Brooke and some now-
forgotten ones like Wilford Gibson, James Stephens and Ralph
Hodgson.
The Kailyard School

The Kailyard School of writers flourished during the late 1880s until about
the mid 1890s. It was concentrated around the work of three Edinburgh
University writers: JM Barrie (better known as the creator of Peter Pan, he
also wrote under the pseudonym Gavin Ogilvy), Reverend John Watson
and SR Crockett. The term comes from ‘Scot’s kailyard’, meaning kitchen
garden. It refers to stories that captured Scottish rural life and were composed
in the form of anecdotes and episodes. The themes included stoicism in the
face of poverty, nostalgia for the countryside and a high degree of piety.
Barrie’s Auld Licht Idylls (1888), Crockett’s The Stickit Minister and Some
Common Men (short stories, 1893) and John Watson’s Beside the Bonnie
Brier Bush (1894, written under a pseudonym Ian McLaren) are the best
examples of this school.
John Masefield (1878–1967), Poet Laureate for 37 years, and a few

others managed to go beyond the simple sentimentality of such
bucolic poetry and sought to provide a deeper insight into life rather
than just describe it. Masefield invests sentiment and larger issues of
life and death within the landscape as seen in this extract from
‘Lollingdon Downs’.
I went into the fields, but you were there
Waiting for me, so all the summer flowers
Were only glimpses of your starry powers;
Beautiful and inspired dust they were.
I went down by the waters, and a bird
Sang with your voice in all the unknown tones
Of all that self of you I have not heard,
So that my being felt you to the bones.
A more accomplished poet from this group is WH Davies (1871–

1940). Davies is a far more meditative poet than his fellow Georgians,
as illustrated by his ‘Cowslips and Larks’.
I hear it said yon land is poor,
In spite of those rich cowslips there –
And all the singing larks it shoots
To heaven from the cowslips’ roots.
But I, with eyes that beauty find,
And music ever in my mind,
Feed my thoughts well upon that grass
Which starves the horse, the ox, and ass.
So here I stand, two miles to come
To Shapwick and my ten-days-home,
Taking my summer's joy, although
The distant clouds are dark and low,
And comes a storm that, fierce and strong,
Has brought the Mendip hills along:
Those hills that when the light is there
Are many a sunny mile from here.
Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) also invoked a Romantic
sentimentality in his poetry. Childhood and its fantasies as well as
death and melancholic meditation are the chief characteristics of de
la Mare’s poetry. Haunting presences and a forbidding sense of the
supernatural inform de la Mare’s poetry, as seen in ‘The Listeners’.
Is there anybody there?' said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
[……………………...]
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
'Is there anybody there?' he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
[………………………]
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
312 The Modern Age
Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), one of the finest fiction writers of the

modern age, also wrote a considerable body of polished poetry.
Among his most famous poems is, of course, ‘Gunga Din’, a poem
that celebrates an Indian’s courage. A soldier narrates the story of
the fearless water-carrier, Gunga Din, who, in the midst of battle,
continues to move around supplying water to the soldiers. When
supplying water to the wounded narrator, he is mortally wounded.
But he manages to take the soldier to safety and dies with ‘I ‘ope you
liked your drink’ as his last line. The wounded soldier survives
because of Gunga Din’s courage. The poem concludes with: “Though
I've belted you and flayed you, / By the livin' Gawd that made you,
/ You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!” In ‘The Ballad of East
and West’, Kipling declared, controversially and famously, that ‘East
is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet’. Kipling’s
war poems (‘Soldier Soldier’, ‘Danny Deever’ and ‘The Young British
Soldier’) capture the sounds of battles and the life of the soldier. He
also wrote many nautical poems, mostly in the form of chanties.
Of the early women poets from the Edwardian–Georgian period,
one name stands out rather tragically: Charlotte Mew (1869–1928).
Mew, battling an anti-homosexual society (she had a love affair with
the popular novelist May Sinclair, who later made Mew the subject
of public ridicule by mocking her), poverty and illness (two siblings
died in their twenties, two others went insane, a sister died painfully
of liver cancer), had a late recognition. Harold Monro of the Poetry
Bookshop published her chapbook, The Farmer’s Bride in 1916 and
scattered poems appeared in periodicals. Her poetry is full of
suffering, unrequited love and a rejection of desire. When Mew
committed suicide by drinking disinfectant in 1928, she left behind a
body of work that is only now attracting attention. She often
generated a man’s persona in her poetry to avoid emphasizing her
attraction for women. Her ‘Farmer’s Bride’, whose story has echoes
of Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (in fact, Hardy was one of the early
readers of Mew’s work) is her best-known work. The heroine in
‘Farmer’s Bride’ is afraid of her husband and runs away. They chase
her across the land and bring her back. She is still scared of men,
though willing to be a slave in the house.
She does the work about the house

As well as most, but like a mouse:
Happy enough to cheat and play
With birds and rabbits and such as they,
So long as men-folk keep away
"Not near, not near!" her eyes beseech
When one of us comes within reach.
Notes
1. On the genre of science fiction in the modern age, see Edward James’
Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century (1994). For the politics of the genre, see
Patrick Parrinder’s Learning from Other Worlds (2000).
2. For the influence of war on modern writing and cultural memory, see
Paul Fussell’s classic work The Great War and Modern Memory (1975).
18. Literature of the Modern Age
The Modern period in literature may be said to extend from the 1920s
to the Cold War of the 1960s and 1970s. The period includes the
war years, which produced its own literature, and the many literary
and cultural movements in Europe. British and American writers
were influenced by these movements.
MODERNISM AS A CULTURAL MOVEMENT

A key cultural – artistic, architectural and literary – moment and
movement marking the early decades of the 20th century (‘the modern
age’), is modernism.
Features of Modernism (as a cultural movement)
• High degree of complexity in structure
• Reworks tradition
• Works are intensely self-reflexive, exploring the process of their own

composition
• Are often fragmented and non-linear, breaking up time-frames and plots (in fiction)
• Is city-based
• It is also located in the context of Empire and world wars, of advanced

military technology
• A great deal of experimentation with language and form
• An interest in subjectivity and the working of the human consciousness
• Some critics identify a sense of apocalypse and disaster in modernism
• Often rejects realism, and the idea that art has to capture reality
• Modernist fiction ‘defamiliarizes’ or makes strange what is common ‘Make

it new’ is the modernist slogan
Literature of the Modern Age 315
• Highly elitist because it was complex and used allusions and classical
references that called for great erudition – which was available only to
certain classes of people.
As an artistic and cultural movement, modernism may be said to

have begun in the last decades of the 19th century in parts of Europe.
In the early decades of the 20th century, it spread to the USA. In fact,
literary modernism cannot be studied in one continent alone since
writers and painters were influenced by and corresponded with their
fellow artists in other places.
The term derives from the Latin ‘modo’, meaning current. There have
been many controversies about the term itself (see Peter Childs’
Modernism, 2000). Here it will be taken to refer to a Euro-American
trend in literature and the arts. Its major flowering may be traced to
the 1920s, with the works of James Joyce, TS Eliot, HD (Hilda
Doolittle), Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett and American writers like
Ezra Pound. ‘Modernism’ was influenced by – or perhaps we need
to say ‘constituted’ by – various movements and artistic theories
during the 20th century. These include: expressionism, impressionism,
imagism, cubism, surrealism, futurism and vorticism (see boxes).
Expressionism
Expressionism was a movement in modern art that first came into
prominence around German artists. They were influenced by the work by
Vincent Van Gogh and Edward Munch. There were two main groups in
Germany – the Bridge (formed in 1905) and The Blue Rider (formed in
1911). Expressionism believed in using violent colours and dynamic
movement to capture moods. It was abstract in the sense that the painting
was difficult to decode and the patterns or colours did not necessarily reflect
the theme. The dramatist Bertolt Brecht was influenced by expressionism.
Wyndham Lewis adapted its methods in Britain and created a new movement
called Vorticism.
Intellectually, writers owed much to the theories of Charles Darwin,

Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein and Karl Marx.
Modernism is linked to another term, ‘modernity’. Modernity is a
period in human history, from roughly the Enlightenment (late 18th
316 The Modern Age
and early 19th centuries) marked by the division of the religious and
the secular, the increasing mechanization of the world, the rise of
industrial capitalism, the increased role of the state, the increased
regulation of time and space and the discourses of emancipation of
women, working classes, etc.
Impressionism
The term may have been derived from Claude Monet’s painting Impression.
Some critics have traced it back to the highly evocative works of the early
19th century British painters John Constable and JMW Turner. Turner’s use
of light was particularly striking and impressionists adopted it as a technique.
The emphasis was on perceptions of objects (‘impressions’ of objects) rather
than the objects themselves. For this purpose, they used light very effectively.
Later painters like Camille Pissarro and Paul Cezanne built on impressionistic
technique and focused on form. The movement had a limited influence
around the last decades of the 19th century. Impressionism may have been
an influence in the origin of cubism in the 20th century.
NON-FICTION
Features of Modern Non-Fiction
• Criticism acquired a degree of respectability as never before (especially

with the work of Eliot, Pound and the various manifestos)
• Prefaces and Forewords in anthologies were major critical statements
• Many established writers practised journalism
• Writings from philosophy, psychoanalysis and anthropology were influential

among literary circles
• Polemical writings about race, class, Empire and women also began to
appear.
A prose writer who may have well altered the course, content and
politics of 20 th century literature and the arts was the European
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), whose influence on writing and culture
is on par with those of philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844–1900). Freud’s exploration of the human mind, sexuality,

childhood and personality resulted in a series of theories that altered
the very notion of ‘human’.
Freud argued – in works like ‘Jokes and their Relation to the
Unconscious’, The Interpretation of Dreams, ‘The Psychopathology of
Everyday Life’ and later works like Civilization and its Discontents –
that the human being was influenced by a layer of consciousness
that was not immediately recognizable. The ‘unconscious’, expressed
in our dreams, contains materials that have been ‘repressed’, that is,
shut away because of social norms and moral codes imposed upon
the human beings. Repression results in neurosis, which, in artists,
is translated into art. Dreams are expressions of wishes that cannot
be fulfilled because of the norms under which human life is lived.
Religion, medicine, the law and morals are all repressive apparatuses
that cause instincts to be ‘cultivated’ in particular ways. The Oedipal
complex, for instance, is the result of the son’s attraction for/to the
mother – sexual in nature – being thwarted and forbidden by the
Father (the Father, with a capital F, signifies the repressive apparatus
in Freud and much critical theory later in the 20th century). The
repressed emerges in the form of dreams, jokes or neurosis. In art,
certain symbols represented, according to Freudian theory, sexual
feelings. Hysteria and neurosis were the result of sexuality turning
inwards.
For Freud, anatomy and sexuality were the keys to human
personality. Even the child, Freud posited, was a sexual being. Girls
live under the shadow of a lack – of the male sexual organ – and
suffer envy as a result (this is perhaps the point at which feminists
have most critiqued Freud). Psychoanalysis, the process and
approach Freud ‘invented’, involved patients ‘talking’ about their
innermost fears and darkest desires, the interpretation of their dreams
to decode the deeper meanings. Freud’s work, often the subject of
much controversy and attack by feminists, homosexuals and others,
resulted in a radical redefinition of the human. He demonstrated
that the human is not really a rational creature. The human is subject
to desires and fears over which s/he has no control. There are deeper
recesses of the mind that cannot be governed and may ‘erupt’ given
the right circumstances. There can be no ‘essences’ to identity, for
318 The Modern Age
identities are always multiple and fractured. Freud, thus, destroyed

the notion of a unified, rational and coherent human – the notion
on which much of post-Enlightenment Western views are based.
There can be no ‘one’ human when s/he may be controlled by their
unknown unconscious. This idea is perhaps Freud’s greatest insight
for literature, especially if we were to see artists as seeking to express
what cannot be expressed. It is this idea that writers in the 20th century
adopted with great enthusiasm. Writers in the 20th century suddenly
became conscious of their unconscious, as it were. The ‘stream-of-
consciousness’ novel adapted Freudian theory in its emphasis on
the unknown territories and uncontrolled associations of the mind.
Taboos and prohibitions were seen as repressive mechanisms of a
society that sought to curb natural instincts like sexual desire. The
Bloomsbury group, for instance, was Freudian in its outlook on
sexuality. The ‘subject’ (a term used to describe the human being in
contemporary philosophical and critical thought) was never to be
the same again.1
The turn of the 19th century saw important prose works like Fabian
Essays (1889), co-authored by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and George
Bernard Shaw. Fabianism, a movement that flourished briefly in this
period was a version of socialism. Shaw also wrote a tract on
vegetarianism.
The work of anthropologists like James G Fraser proved extremely
influential among the early modernists. The Golden Bough (1890),
Fraser’s epic work, introduced numerous myths and rituals to the
writers. Subsequent work on the anthropology of rituals and myths,
including Jessie L Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920) and Joseph
Campbell’s The Hero of a Thousand Faces (1968) and, later, the work
of Claude Levi-Strauss proved to be extremely influential. Sections
of the world were opened up through the travelogues of explorers
and others through the 19 th century. Arabia, for instance, was
suddenly made available through the Victorian travel writings of
Richard Burton and turn-of-the-century writers like Wilfrid Scawen
Blunt (Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates, 1879; there is a controversy
regarding the authorship of this work) and the extremely popular
TE Lawrence (Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 1926). These travelogues
contained place descriptions and (prejudiced) analyses of non-white
tribes and races. These semi-anthropological tracts were

supplemented by a resurgent interest in the ancient world, both
European and non-European. Scholars in Cambridge, Oxford and
many Euro-American universities produced detailed tomes on the
past, many of which made available images for poets and artists.
The Pound era’s interest in non-European cultures and myths, images
and poetic forms – the Japanese haiku, for instance – may be partly
attributed to the increased availability of these texts in translations,
commentaries and anthologies. In effect, ‘Orientalism’ (see the box
Edward Said and Orientalism) continued to be a mode of
approaching and appropriating the non-European ‘Other’ into
European literature and culture.2
Edward Said and Orientalism

Arguably the most influential work of literary-cultural criticism in the 20th
century, Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) inaugurated a field (postcolonial
studies), even though, arguably, the writings of Frantz Fanon anticipate
much of the postcolonial criticism of the 1990s. A feature of colonialism
from the 18th century, ‘Orientalism’ is the process by which Europe studied,
disciplined, controlled and governed non-European cultures. European
scholars studied and represented the non-European cultures in certain ways:
through stereotypes of the effeminate, weak, vulnerable and primitive native.
It posits the non-European as the backward, pagan ‘Other’, or polar
opposite, to the developed, Christian European. Europe in fact constructs
its image in contrast with and in opposition to the Orient. These
representations enabled the Europeans to justify and reinforce their rule by
convincing themselves and the natives that European governance was
necessary for the weak native to survive. Orientalism produced literature,
anthropological tracts, missionary narratives, histories and political
documents on the non-European worlds. It studied the non-European,
preparing a huge imperial archive to be used by colonial administrators.
Edward Said, through a series of readings of Western texts about Asia and
Africa, demonstrates how literary texts coded particular images of the non-
West as a preliminary to ruling it. That is, Said’s work shows how knowledge
about the Orient (Asia) leads to power over the Orient. Edward Said’s work
has facilitated a deeper understanding of Western literature and the relations
between Europe and the rest of the world by locating culture within the
power relations of colonialism.
320 The Modern Age
Contemporary history writing, biography and commentary also

proceeded apace. Winston S Churchill, Britain’s wartime Prime
Minister, wrote a huge history of World War II, The Second World
War (1948–53). GK Chesterton produced biographies of Dickens and
other Victorians. Lytton Strachey wrote Eminent Victorians (1918), a
psycho-biographical study of Cardinal Manning (the Catholic
clergyman), Florence Nightingale (the founder of modern nursing),
Dr Thomas Arnold (the father of Mathew Arnold and a well-known
educationist) and General Gordon (known for his imperial exploits
in Sudan). Hilaire Belloc combined history writing with racy and
humorous anecdotal work. HG Wells produced a history of the world.
The Greeks came in for detailed exploration in the work of Gilbert
Murray, Lowes Dickinson and others. FH Bradley’s philosophical
work influenced Eliot and other writers. The political and economic
writings of John Maynard Keynes and TH Green, though with limited
readership, proved influential among the more elite circles of
Bloomsbury. The journalistic and essayistic writings of George Orwell
on urbanism, class conflict and development (The Road to Wigan Pier,
1937; Homage to Catalonia, 1938; The Lion and the Unicorn, 1941),
written with a socialist politics and agenda, constitute an important
genre in the cultural history of 20th century Britain. Autobiographical
accounts by literary personalities were extremely popular. Rudyard
Kipling, Robert Graves, Virginia Woolf, EM Forster and many others
published their memoirs and autobiographies. Letters of authors were
also published, many of them posthumously.
Literary criticism flourished. AC Bradley (1845–1933) was the first

major critic of Shakespeare in the 20th century. Bradley, a professor
of English at Liverpool and later at Oxford, is well-known for his
emphasis on character above all else in Shakespeare. His Shakesperean
Tragedy (1904) remains one of the finest analysis of Shakespeare on
par with LC Knight’s (1906–97) famous ‘How Many Children had
Lady Macbeth?’ (1933). Edmund Gosse (1849–1928) revived an
interest in Donne. Gosse was instrumental in introducing Ibsen’s
work in England. A prolific biographer, he wrote the lives of Thomas
Gray, William Congreve, Jeremy Taylor, Ibsen, AC Swinburne and
John Donne. He also maintained a strong interest in European
literature (particularly Andre Gide). Walter Raleigh (1861–1922) was
the first chair of English literature at Oxford. Among his work are
studies on Milton (1900) and Shakespeare (1907), and a critical
account of the English novel.
IA Richards with his Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and William
Empson with Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) led the field of literary
criticism in the first half of the 20th century. The work of Ezra Pound,
the manifestos of Andre Breton and TE Hulme sought to generate
debates about and set agendas for literature and the arts. The New
Criticism, which achieved a major academic position on the
American critical scene produced works that had considerable impact
on English criticism. The New Critics – Cleanth Brooks, William
Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley – focused on the literary text alone.
Their approach was ‘formalist’, alert only to the formal properties of
the work: rhythm, metre, theme, imagery and metaphor. Brooks,
for instance, argued that the elements of a work (especially poetry)
set up ‘tensions’, which the work then resolved. Irony and paradox
are two major sources of such tension and most of the New Criticism
is an exploration of these two components of literary works. They
argued that external evidence (history, contexts and the biography
of the author) was not necessary to read a literary text. That is, the
New Criticism saw the text as a self-contained unit, which made
meaning on its own. They rejected any quest for ‘intentions’ – what
the author may have intended when s/he wrote a particular image
– as a fallacy. They also rejected any analysis that sought to explain
the emotional effects of literary texts upon their readers. These two
fallacies – ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ and ‘The Affective Fallacy’,
outlined by William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in The Verbal
Icon (1954) – became influential concepts in New Criticism.
TS Eliot’s literary and social criticism has perhaps been as influential

as his poetry. His essays revived an interest in the Metaphysicals.
The idea of a historical consciousness in ‘Tradition and the Individual
Talent’ and other essays pleaded for a knowledge of influences and
the European tradition. He wrote essays on culture (Notes Towards a
Definition of Culture, 1948) and on individual poets and works (the
most famous ones being those on Blake, Marvell, Dryden, Milton,
Dante and Shakespeare’s Hamlet). It was in his 1920 essay on Hamlet
322 The Modern Age
that he coined the concept/term ‘objective correlative’. His writings

influenced the cultural debates of the 20th century, especially in the
case of FR Leavis.
Periodicals and literary magazines often edited by major figures like
Eliot provided a space for new and younger writers. FR Leavis (1895–
1978), surely one of the most important critics of the 20th century,
edited the influential journal Scrutiny from 1932 to 1953. Leavis
proposed that criticism and literary appreciation were special talents
and that people had to be trained in it. He believed that current
developments (such as Bloomsbury) had diluted standards and that
the cultural heritage of a country depended upon its elite intellectuals.
In works like New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) and Culture and
Environment (1933; co-authored with his wife QD Leavis and Denys
Thompson) this was what Leavis tried to do – to set up a series of
authors as standards in English poetry. He famously rejected
Tennyson in the former work and presented Donne, Pope, Dr
Johnson, Hopkins, Eliot, Pound and Yeats as the great English poetic
tradition. Leavis tried to set up similar standards for fiction in his
influential (and now controversial) The Great Tradition (1948) locating
Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad as
benchmarks (he later added Dickens to the list, but rejected Hardy
and Laurence Sterne).
Frank Kermode (1919– ), who continues to write very distinguished

and scholarly essays, was a professor of English at Cambridge. His
work on the Renaissance, Shakespeare (the latter being his abiding
interest) and the Romantic writers often explored the influence of
the earlier writers on the modernists. He popularized Wallace Stevens
and wrote on the English novel’s ‘sense of an ending’ (the title of his
book). He introduced numerous European thinkers as Series Editor
for the popular Fontana Modern Masters series.
QD Leavis (1906–81) is best known for her 1932 work Fiction and the
Reading Public (originally a thesis written under the supervision of
IA Richards). In this she surveyed reading habits from the 18th
century, in what was truly a pioneering work in Cultural Studies
and Audience Studies, though from a conservative point of view.
She looked at the structures that formed reading habits – the book
clubs and lending libraries – and located reading with the rise of
mass media like film.
Marxist literary criticism in England may be said to have begun with
Christopher Caudwell (1901–37). Its best moments came with
Raymond Williams (1921–88), whose The Country and the City (1973)
and other works altered the course of critical thinking for generations.
Later, Williams’ work (along with Richard Hoggart’s) proved
instrumental in the formation of a new discipline, Cultural Studies,
of which Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School became significant
practitioners in the 1980s and 1990s.
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), whose writings on women, literature

and culture marked the early feminist movement, is perhaps the most
significant woman writer of the first half of the 20th century (she
published nearly 500 essays, a staggering number by any standard).
Often, her fiction has tended to obscure her significance as a critic.
Woolf began writing for the Times Literary Supplement as early as
1905, though her major essays date from a later period. In A Room of
One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), she analyzed the
marginalization of the woman writer, thereby setting the course for
later day feminists to start asking questions about the literary canon.
Written with brilliant irony and political acumen, Woolf declared
that financial and spatial independence were essential to the
woman’s creation of artistic work – and neither of it was available
to women. Woolf also documented the sexual abuse she suffered as
a child in her autobiographical essays (‘22 Hyde Park Gate’ and ‘A
Sketch of the Past’).
FICTION
Features of 20th century Fiction
• Massive experimentation with form and language
• Influenced by theories and philosophies of the mind, especially Freudianism
• Novelists commented on the art of the novel

324 The Modern Age
• Increased interest in the workings of the mind resulted in studies of human

subjectivity
• Politically conscious fiction (the political novel) and some political allegories
• Numerous genres ranging from satires to historical fiction
• The historical context of the various nationalist movements in parts of the

British Empire is crucial to the understanding of several authors
• Science fiction and fantasy emerged as important genres.
The 20th century could very well be the age of the English novel: the
wide variety of forms, the radical experimentation with language
and style and the political agenda of particular writers, all contributed
to the novel being, perhaps at the expense of poetry and drama, the
most dominant form of literary expression in the modern age.
George Orwell (1903–50), the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, wrote
two of the most significant political allegories in 20th century fiction.
Orwell’s socialist sympathies made him deeply suspicious of capitalist
modernity and his non-fictional work showcased this. However,
Orwell’s political preferences did not blind him to the risks of a
totalitarian socialist state either. Orwell’s political ideology was
essentially a humanism that rejected any form of domination and
coercive power structures. In 1945, he published Animal Farm, an
allegory on socialism. The actual tale begins when the animals launch
a revolution against their oppressive master, Mr Jones. The revolution
is spurred by ideas of equality and fraternity – as in the case of most
revolutions. The pigs, the most intelligent of the farm’s animals,
prepare a set of ‘commandments’ for the new order, which rejects
any human code of conduct (like sleeping in a bed) and institute an
equality doctrine: ‘all animals are equal’. Slowly, with the assumption
of total control by the pigs, the order in the farm changes. The pigs
begin to occupy the top rungs of the hierarchy and become ‘more
equal than others’. Opposition is eliminated and the pigs corner the
privileges. The old distinctions of masters and slaves return. The
criticism of socialism that Animal Farm encodes suggests that equality
is utopian. Exploitation is always the key in any social structure.
The manipulation of choices, decisions and relations by the pigs and
their rhetoric (which resembles that of political parties and politicians
in the human world), signifies social engineering where ideals can

be subverted to suit the needs of particular classes. Elitism, suggests
Orwell, is built into the agenda of any social change. When classes
or people attain power, it tends to corrupt, no matter what the
political ideology espoused. When the novel ends, a socialist revolution
has created the same hierarchic and exploitative social structure as
capitalism.
A far bleaker picture of society was Orwell’s 1984 (1949). In a

totalitarian society, the entire population is under constant
surveillance (‘Big Brother is Watching You’) and even their most
intimate activities are ‘planned’ for them by the Party, disobedience
being inexcusable. The Party alters history and changes its politics,
approaches, foreign relations and agenda periodically. The people
have to simply follow what the most recent agenda is. The Party’s
three-point slogan (‘War is Peace’, ‘Freedom is Slavery’ and
‘Ignorance is Strength’) governs much of what happens. Winston
Smith is lured into denouncing himself. What follows is a programme
of brain-washing and indoctrination through torture. When the tale
ends, Winston is forced to denounce his love, Julia, and she has been
made to do the same. He is now a mere husk of a man who has
discovered that he really does ‘love’ Big Brother. His thoughts are
now entirely conditioned by what happened to him in prison and
the torture chamber. The system breaks everyone, and there can be
no opposition. 1984 reflects on the ease with which a totalitarian
society can work. Individuality is destroyed and political ideology is
a convenience. This dystopic novel is a humanist vision of politics in
general and a denunciation of totalitarian regimes in particular.
In sharp contrast to Orwell’s biting indictment of politics and social
order are Evelyn Waugh’s (1903–66) gentle comedies, full of irony
and mild satire. Recalling the novel of manners from an earlier age,
Waugh’s fiction maps the contours of a class-conscious society, so-
called liberalism and the ‘vanity of human wishes’. Decline and Fall
(1928) starts Waugh’s chronicling of English class snobbery. Paul
Pennyfeather is expelled from Oxford for indecency (Waugh’s
brother had been expelled for homosexuality), but manages to get
back into the profession (schooling). Waugh suggests, satirically, that
being thrown out of college qualifies one for the teaching profession.
326 The Modern Age
In Vile Bodies (1930), he explored the hollow ambitions of the English

youth, who, it turns out, are as snobbish as the upper classes they
criticize and mock. Waugh’s tale moves across English class and social
mechanisms into war (it was made into a film, Bright Young Things,
in 2003). Brideshead Revisited (1945), a later novel about politics and
war, is perhaps Waugh’s most successful tale, even though it is unlike
his other works in that there seems to be a kind of admiration for the
upper classes (represented by Sebastian Flyte’s family in the tale). In
what is Waugh’s most overtly ‘religious’ novel in its exploration of
Catholicism, Charles Ryder’s quest for both love and faith forms the
key theme of the novel. John Beaver in A Handful of Dust (1934) is
the prototype of the social parasite and climber. This novel discusses
the collapse of an upper-class family, appropriately named ‘Lasts’,
within and through marriage, adultery and social snobbery. The novel
also weaves in exotic locales and a colonial imaginary, with upper-
class Englishmen and women going in search of lost cities in South
American and other (colonized) lands. The Sword of Honour trilogy
(1952–61) was a complicated tale of identity and army life. With
this work, Waugh returns to his favourite theme – the collapse of
the English aristocracy. Waugh’s interest in the upper classes, social
norms and relationships constitutes perhaps the best of the satiric
tradition in 20th century fiction.
The Irish James Joyce (1882–1941) is surely the most daring user of
the English language in the 20th century. Joyce claimed his work
would keep professors busy for centuries, and he was right. Joyce is
known for three main works: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1916), Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). He has also written
a popular collection of short fiction, Dubliners (1914). Ezra Pound, a
key mover in the literary history of the 20th century, introduced Joyce
to Harriet Shaw Weaver, the English publisher, who gave Joyce the
economic independence to concentrate on his writing.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a kind of bildungsroman of

the consciousness. It deals with the growth of Stephen Dedalus, a
bright if frivolous boy, into a serious intellect. The interior monologue
makes its first appearance here. Joyce also developed the ‘epiphany’
as a literary mode. The epiphany is a sudden awareness of the soul,
a flash of insight into reality and truth itself. The sensitive Stephen
Dedalus is bullied at school. Later, in a private school, he becomes a

kind of leader. His obsession with Emma drives him deeper into
sexual fantasies, till he finally visits a prostitute. Later, he repents
and turns to religion. Even this does not help and Stephen becomes
increasingly impatient with Catholic faith and doctrines. Stephen
wants to be a writer but is not sure if the claustrophobic and stagnant
atmosphere of Ireland inspires him to ‘forge in the smithy of my soul
the uncreated conscience of my race’ (Joyce’s memorable phrase from
the novel). He has to escape both history and the nation to do so.
‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’, declares
Stephen in Ulysses (Stephen figures in both the novels). The tale is
about identity, aesthetics and faith. Stephen’s discovery of the limits
of faith, and the need to carve out his own vision of the world through
aesthetics is the central theme. To this end, he pursues beauty,
sexuality and philosophy. Stephen discovers that religion and faith
are far less effective than art and aesthetics in terms of identity and
individuality.
Ulysses, Joyce’s most celebrated work, tracks one day in the life of
Leopold Bloom and deals with his wanderings around Dublin.
Biographically, it celebrates an event in Joyce’s life – his walk through
Dublin with Nora Barnacle. On 16 June 1904, the two went on their
first date. Ulysses is set on this same day, the greatest tribute to any
‘date’ in history! It is structured around the events of Homer’s epic,
Odyssey. Further, each of the episodes is associated with a ‘colour’,
a particular ‘art/science’, ‘organ’ of the human body and an ‘hour’
of the day – the 18-chapter tale starts around 8 AM and ends at about
2 AM the next day, about 18 hours long. Thus, the first chapter that
deals with the 8 PM–9 PM period is symbolic of Nausicaa (the princess
in the land of Phaeacians in Homer), the colour grey and the art
painting. Similarly the last chapter that ends at 2 AM is associated
with Penelope, earth (or geology) and the colour white. There is also
a huge amount of literary referencing in the tale – from Greek legends
to classics in English literature (Stephen Dedalus analyses Hamlet in
the novel). In order to understand the tale, it is almost mandatory to
have a guide to the episodes. Joyce invented new words by
telescoping words together (‘maladorous’ is one of his famous
creations). The interior monologues of Bloom and his wife Molly took
the stream-of-consciousness mode to new heights. Molly Bloom’s
328 The Modern Age
monologue, full of sexual connotations, became notorious and people

asked for Ulysses to be banned for obscenity. The novel is also a
parodic inversion of Odyssey. Leopold is Ulysses, Molly is Penelope
and Stephen is Telemachus. Dublin city is reproduced in
extraordinary detail (Joyce claimed that if Dublin were destroyed in
a fire, they could use his book to rebuild it). Thus Ulysses’ complexity
derives from its encyclopedic details of the external world and an
almost equally detailed cartography of the mind.
Finnegans Wake is almost entirely word play, with multilingual puns
and fractured sentences. The book begins in the middle of a sentence:
“riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of
bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth
Castle and Environs”. The first part of this sentence is the last line of
the novel: “A way a lone a last a loved a long the”. Based on a
cyclical view of the world and history – which is what the opening
and closing lines of the book are supposed to indicate – derived from
philosopher Giambattista Vico, Finnegans Wake is a dream sequence.
The pub-keeper HC Earwicker (‘HCE’, or ‘Here Comes Everybody’)
is married to Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP, whose initials occur
throughout the tale). The two represent a city-river pair (Dublin-
Liffey). HCE has twin sons, Shem and Shaun, and a daughter, Issy.
As the tale proceeds, HCE seems to merge into his son Shem and an
artist who will come to write a book like Ulysses. There is an
accusation of sexual misconduct against HCE. The rumour builds
and a letter that may incriminate or exonerate HCE is in circulation.
HCE’s dream sequences are storehouses of information about culture
and mythology. He represents a kind of collective consciousness of
humanity itself. Necessary guides to this work include Joseph
Campbell and HM Robinson’s exhaustive (and exhausting) A Skeleton
Key to Finnegans Wake (1939).
Virginia Woolf, one of the finest practitioners of the stream-of-
consciousness mode in the 20th century, is, like Joyce, less concerned
with the external world than with the workings of the characters’
minds. Woolf’s narratives are rarely sequential. Fragmented, moving
between reality and dreams, mixing past, present and future, her
fiction is highly experimental and is the prose equivalent of modernist
poetry. Mrs Dalloway (1925) is, like Joyce’s Ulysses, one day in the
life of Clarissa Dalloway, who is preparing to host a party later in

the day. Clarissa represents a feminist voice in the tale, just as Septimus
Smith stands for the insanity inflicted by war. There are
autobiographical overtones too – Septimus’ madness and suicidal
depression matched Woolf’s own. This is perhaps the most
philosophical of Woolf’s fiction, with extended meditations on
existence, life and death, sanity/insanity and memory. To the
Lighthouse (1927) is in the form of a series of visits to the Isle of Skye
by the Ramsay family. There they are joined by their friends including
Lily Briscoe (a painter) and Augustus Carmichael (a poet). The
interaction of the various characters, interrupted in the narrative by
Mrs Ramsay’s death, forms the novel. The third part of the novel
deals with Mr Ramsay’s meeting with his children after his wife’s
death, Lily’s portrait of Mrs Ramsay, and the children themselves.
To the Lighthouse is an exploration of human consciousness and
creativity (as Lily tries to capture Mrs Ramsay in a painting). Woolf’s
later novel Orlando (1928) is set in Elizabethan England. It is the
story of Orlando, who wishes to live for ever as a young man.
Eventually, he discovers he has become a woman. The novel was
controversial for its experiments with not just narrative but also trans-
gendering. This is Woolf’s most extensive discussion of gender and
identity and looks forward to the works of later-day feminist writers
like Jeanette Winterson. The Waves (1931) is about six friends who
recite their thoughts, with the merging and separation of their
narratives constituting the novel. The tale is a strange mix of interior
monologues that seem to move seamlessly into each other. We know
of characters through their own interior monologues and that of the
others.
Rebecca West (1892–1983) was the pseudonym of Cecily Fairfield.

One of the early writers to support the women’s suffragette
movement, West is supposed to have declared that she did not
understand what feminism meant and that she only expressed ideas
that differentiated her from “a doormat or a prostitute”. Of her fiction,
The Return of the Soldier (1915), The Thinking Reed (1936) and The
Birds Fall Down (1966) are popular. To this early generation of writers
belongs Radclyffe Hall (1883–1943), the first major homosexual
writer of the modern age. Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) which
portrayed a lesbian relationship with a great deal of sensitivity was
330 The Modern Age
banned on publication and Hall was put on trial for obscenity. The
novel was deemed to be ‘a danger to the nation’! The story of Stephen,
the lesbian protagonist, may have had close parallels with Hall’s
own life.
DH Lawrence (1885–1930) attained notoriety with Lady Chatterley’s

Lover, a novel banned on grounds of obscenity. Lawrence was
influenced by the work of Freud and believed that civilization is built
on a denial of the instinct. Culture consists in denying the drives,
particularly the sexual drive, in human beings. Lawrence’s fictional
oeuvre is concerned with this outlawed life of the senses, pleasure
and desire. His first published novel was The White Peacock (1911).
Narrated by Cyril Beardsall, it inaugurates Lawrence’s abiding theme
of marriage, intellectual and sexual compatibility and desire, and is
written in the realist mode he was to favour throughout his career.
Sons and Lovers (1913) has remained one of 20th century literature’s
continuing favourites. This novel also has the dubious distinction of
being one of the most heavily edited of mainstream English literature:
Edward Garnett the publisher is reputed to have removed over one-
tenth of the original text! Gertrude Coppard (Mrs Morel), caught in
a loveless and mismatched marriage focuses her entire affection on
her sons, William and Paul. William, dependent upon his mother,
eventually falls in love with a shallow girl. After he dies, Mrs Morel
places the burden of her love on Paul. Paul’s attempts to escape his
mother’s shadow, his return to her after his failed relationships (it is
suggested that he is unable to sustain any other relationship) with
Miriam, a farm girl who reads extensively, and Clara Dawes, a
woman who is separated from her husband, but with a reputation
for being very intelligent and his problematic relationship with his
mother constitute the heart of the tale. Clearly influenced by Freud’s
theories of the Oedipal complex, Sons and Lovers is Lawrence’s first
major foray into the dilemmas of love, sexuality and the family. The
Rainbow (1915) is the story of the Brangwen family. Its treatment of
sexuality earned it a ban and it was unavailable in Britain for over a
decade. Gudrun and Ursula, the two sisters of The Rainbow, are also
the chief protagonists of Women in Love (1920). Their love affairs
with Gerald Crich (the capitalist) and Rupert Birkin (the rather
pompous intellectual) respectively are narrated along with long
didactic passages on sensuality, thinking and the self. Lady
Chatterley’s Lover combined sexuality with the themes of class and

marital fidelity. By showing a member of the upper classes asserting
her sexual and individual identity with a working-class man
(Mellors), Lawrence aroused the ire of English society and the book
had to be published in France. It finally appeared in its unexpurgated
edition in the USA only in 1959. An epoch-making obscenity case
ensued and Penguin won the case in 1960 (key witnesses included
EM Forster and critics Raymond Williams and Helen Gardner). None
of his later novels – The Plumed Serpent, Kangaroo, Aaron’s Rod and
The Prussian Officer – acquired the degree of critical or popular
attention as his early works. Lawrence’s major contribution has been
to foreground the life of the senses in his fiction. His short fiction
(especially ‘Sun’ and ‘The Woman who Rode Away’) also dealt with
the theme of sexuality and the human instinct.
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) migrated to the US later in life. He was
denied a US citizenship because he refused to state that he would
bear arms to defend America, which resulted in him retaining his
British citizenship. He came under the influence of spiritualist
philosopher J Krishnamurti and wrote philosophical tracts of his
own. He also wrote about, and under the influence of, the effects of
the hallucinogenic drug mescaline (especially in Doors of Perception).
Huxley is known for his Brave New World (1932), a dystopic look at
the future along the lines of Orwell’s fiction. Often read under the
category of fantasy or science fiction, Brave New World, set in the
26th century, suggests that technology would evolve such that people
would be brainwashed into enjoying their own slavery and
oppression. In Huxley’s fictional universe, there is no illness or poverty.
Everything in the World State is planned and controlled, on the lines
of the Ford industrial system (mechanization, division of labour and
functions and the assembly-line). Advanced reproductive technology
ensures that only the best of the human species would be created
and allowed to live. Sex has become meaningless. Children are born
from embryos harvested in factories. They are ‘produced’ according
to the economic needs of the society at that moment. Literature,
religion and the arts do not exist because they may induce unwanted
thoughts and ideas. People are indoctrinated through constant
soundings of recorded messages into their ears when they sleep. There
332 The Modern Age
is no unit like the ‘family’. The use of hallucinogenic drugs is allowed.

Huxley shows two worlds: Malpais, the ‘savage’ reservation in New
Mexico where the primitive still exists and the World State where
everything is controlled, clean and ‘civilized’. Bernard Marx, who is
unhappy with his culture, takes Lenina, who approves of the World
State, there to show her the ‘former’ world. John and Linda, who
are taken back from Malpais to World State’s London, are used as
exotic objects and eventually die. Bernard is banished to the Falkland
Islands, where, after an orgy of drugs and sex, he commits suicide at
his degradation. Huxley’s novel rejects a totalitarian society that takes
away the individual’s right to happiness in favour of social good. Its
fear of technology and the not-so-subtle hints that hierarchies of
classes and castes will survive even in perfectly ordered worlds are
other recognizable themes. Huxley favours ‘primitivism’ and disorder
to regulation, even if the regulation is apparently for the sake of
happiness. In Island (1962), Huxley tried to suggest a different form
of social ordering. Children grow up not in families but in groups.
Drug use is acceptable not for pleasure but for knowledge. Science
and technology are at man’s service and not the other way round.
Religion – in this case a mix of Christianity, Buddhism and Eastern
mysticism – is acceptable.
If Huxley’s fiction created utopian and dystopian worlds based on a
vision of technology, the work of the Anglo-Irish CS Lewis (1898–
1963) offered a fantasy created out of a more religious vision. Lewis,
a highly regarded Milton scholar, medievalist (he was the Chair of
Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge)
and critic, after a late return to Christianity (partly under the
influence of his friend, JRR Tolkien), created The Chronicles of Narnia
(1950–56). The Narnia tales are in seven books – their order has
been a matter of some debate – and deal with the adventures of a
group of children who visit a magical island, Narnia. Though
Christian in theme and intention, there are influences from Celtic
and Greco-Roman mythologies. In The Lion, the Witch, and the
Wardrobe, the first of the epic cycle, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy
Pevensie stumble into Narnia. The evil witch, called simply the White
Witch, is thwarted as the children befriend the great lion, Aslan. In
book II (Prince Caspian) an evil king has acquired control of Narnia.
How the children help the good Prince Caspian to fight and win
against Telmar is the main story here. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
takes Edmund and Lucy Pevensie, and their cousin Eustace Scrubb,
on a voyage with Prince Caspian to find and rescue the seven lords.
In The Silver Chair, Aslan calls Eustace and his friend Jill to help him
find Prince Rilian and rescue him from the Emerald Witch. Bree (a
talking horse) and Shasta plan to escape from their country,
somewhere south of Narnia in The Horse and his Boy. The Pevensie
children and Aslan thwart the attempts of the Calormenes to conquer
Narnia. In The Magician’s Nephew Lewis maps the origins of Narnia,
even as other children enter the place. In The Last Battle there is a
false Aslan. The last volume ends Narnia itself. Just when the
Calormenes are set to take over Narnia – the result of machinations
by Swift the Ape and Puzzle the Donkey – Aslan, Eustace and Jill
enable a fight against the Satanic forces. Aslan ends Narnia and
selects all those loyal to him to another world. It is also revealed that
Narnia is in fact England and that the ‘travellers’ in Narnia are
actually dead and they have been reunited in a perfect world.
Controversies over the use of Christian doctrines and symbols (such
as the lion image) and Lewis’ problematic presentation of Susan
Pevensie (whose unflattering portrayal that highlighted her interest
in cosmetics and, by extension, her physical appearance and
sexuality, was critiqued by two of the major children’s authors today:
Philip Pullman and JK Rowling) have continued.
The most enduring fantasy work produced in 20th century literature
is surely The Lord of the Rings (1954–55), prefigured, at least in terms
of its characters, in The Hobbit (1937). JRR Tolkien (1892–1973), a
professor of poetry at Oxford, was influenced by Greek and Finnish
mythologies. The Bible (Tolkien admitted that his was a Christian
work) and old English writings (specifically Beowulf, on which Tolkien
lectured) are discernable influences on Tolkien’s own work. Tolkien’s
work is set in a fictional universe, Middle-earth, governed by different
rules and conditions. The evil power, Lord Sauron, has created a
ring to control all the other rings of power (Sauron is the servant of
Morgoth, a former Dark Lord, who appears in Tolkien’s The
Silmarillion):
Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
334 The Modern Age
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,

One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
In the first part, The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo (the main
protagonist), who has the One Ring, escapes the Ringwraiths, the
henchmen of Sauron. On the advice of the wizard Gandalf, Frodo
heads for Rivendell where he may be safe from Sauron. His journey
leads him into many adventures, in the company of characters like
Tom Bombadil, Strider and others. Attacked by five Blackriders, Frodo
uses the Ring to disappear, but is stabbed. At Rivendell they decide
to destroy the Ring at Mordor. With a few companions, including
Gandalf and the other hobbits, Frodo sets forth again. They encounter
the Orcs, and in the resulting battle, Gandalf falls into an abyss.
Frodo realises that the Ring has an evil effect on some of his
companions. Frodo and Sam leave for Mordor, and thus break up
the ‘Fellowship’. The Two Towers brings together the rest of the epic’s
cast. The Hobbits encounter giant tree shepherds, battle Orcs, reach
Edoras, and finally head for Minas Tirith for the battle with Sauron.
Frodo and Sam meanwhile negotiate Gollum who also seeks the Ring.
They are led into a trap and face Faramir and a spidery Shelob.
Frodo is bitten, and eventually captured by the Orcs, and Sam decides
that he may have to finish the quest on his own. The Return of the
King presents the defence of Minas Tirith in the Battle of the Pelennor
Fields. The attack on Mordor is launched. At the Crack of Doom,
the Ring is finally destroyed, Sauron is defeated, Aragorn is crowned,
and the Hobbits return home.
Critics have toiled for the past several decades with Tolkien’s epic.
The criticism has consisted of everything: from tracing sources for
images/characters/settings and plot to the many languages of
Middle-earth as well as to the Christian allegory of the work. The
Lord of the Rings does, of course, return to an old theme: the battle
between good and evil. The quest and trial motifs are clearly the
informing themes. Greed, power, courage, loyalty and other human
vices and virtues are symbolized in its characters. It is also seen as a
‘mirror’ to human character (a theme in Tolkien criticism first

launched by WH Auden in his 1954 New York Times review of The
Fellowship of the Ring).3
The quiet realism of Graham Greene (1904–91) in works like Brighton
Rock (1938), The Quiet American (1955) and A Burnt-Out Case (1961)
stands as a sharp contrast to both, the high fantasy of contemporaries
like Tolkien and the postmodern ‘play’ of John Fowles and Graham
Swift. Brighton Rock is an unusual Greene novel in that it is in the
format of a murder mystery. However, the deeper issues are of
growing up (in the figure of Pinkie Brown, the troubled murdering
teenager), relationships and morality. Greene’s concern with morality
and sin govern much of his fiction, and is best explored in The Heart
of the Matter (1948), a novel about adultery and suicide. In The Quiet
American Greene seems to draw parallels between the American Pyle’s
conduct and that of his government in Vietnam. A Burnt-Out Case
explores the themes of duty, selfless service, moral certainty and
death in a Congo setting. Greene’s novels are also explorations of
mental anguish, and his characters often indulge in serious
introspection. In Greene the external actions and events are excuses
for characters to analyze themselves. His characters are almost
invariably flawed, and their psychic landscapes are harsh and grimy.
A character like Harry Lime (in The Third Man) is a study of how
youth perverts itself and how easily good turns to evil. The ‘whiskey
priest’ of The Power and the Glory (1940) in contrast, is a sinner who,
working against numerous obstacles (he is being hunted by the
police), performs his duties and becomes a good man and a saint.
The 20th century satire novel achieves its peak in a slim tale set in
academic surroundings. Lucky Jim (1954) by Kingsley Amis (1922–
95) is a campus novel (see the box The Campus Novel) that looks
forward to the fiction of David Lodge. The novel’s main theme – the
culture wars of 1950s–60s England – struck a chord with people
from both the elite and mass readership. Jim Dixon, the reluctant
academic, cannot adjust to the pretensions of the professors
(embodied in Welch). His loathing erupts in an uncontrollable
mockery of Welch at a public lecture. He loses his job, but is hired by
a rich man who admires his courage. Eventually, things turn out
336 The Modern Age
well when Christine, engaged to Welch’s son, goes over to Jim. Amis’
fiction, marked by a misanthropic view of mankind seems like a milder
version of Jonathan Swift. In Jim Dixon he created a prototype anti-
hero: lovable, bumbling, unpretentious and dishonest in parts. The
novel became particularly popular because of the context of its
appearance: when more and more people from the ‘lower’ classes,
previously barred from ‘high culture’, were acquiring education in
universities and colleges. This greatly upset the traditionalists who
believed that the lower classes lacked culture and were philistines.
The messy negotiation of culture – where Jim Dixon stood against
the pretensions of a pure, traditional high culture – is what Lucky
Jim is all about.
The Campus Novel

Also known as the ‘university novel’, the genre was inaugurated by Kingsley
Amis (Lucky Jim, 1954). Later writers include Malcolm Bradbury (The History
Man, 1975), Tom Sharpe (Porterhouse Blue, 1974) and the more
contemporary David Lodge (Changing Places, 1975; Small World, 1984). It
is mainly a British genre. As the term indicates, it deals with university life.
Amis mocked the pretentiousness of the academics in his portrait of Jim
Dixon. David Lodge explored the question of research, funding and the
politics of contemporary literary theory with his portrait of feminism. Both
novelists see class as a continuing theme and context in the British university
system. The sexual revolution of the 1970s and 1980s also becomes a
theme in much campus fiction, though many of these novels have been
accused of being sexist. Other versions of the campus novel include AS
Byatt’s celebrated Possession (1990), where the quest for fame is via the
quest and discovery of a rare literary artefact. In many cases, these novels
reflect an anxiety in universities about the fate of the humanities, the ethics
of research and funding and the politics of appointments.
Anthony Burgess (1917–93) is best known for A Clockwork Orange

(1962) and his first work, the Malayan trilogy, Time For A Tiger (1956),
The Enemy in the Blanket (1958) and Beds in the East (1959). He is also
famous for his numerous editions of and prefaces/introductions to
classic authors like Wilkie Collins, popular writers like Ian Fleming
and the mainstream literature of the 20th century like Lawrence and
Joyce. A Clockwork Orange is an extension of Orwell’s 1984 (he also
extended Orwell’s vision literally in 1985). The Soviet Union has taken
over England. A street gang of thugs, led by Alex, goes on the
rampage. The novel immediately became controversial for its
description of violence (it became more controversial with Stanley
Kubrick’s 1971 film version). In the original edition, Alex reforms,
though the American edition did not include this version. Burgess
tried his hand at a great deal of narrative and linguistic
experimentation (he was influenced, briefly, by contemporary literary
theory). In A Clockwork Orange he invented a new street slang,
Nadsat, with cockney, Russian words and other Slavic languages
mixed together. He brought together Beethoven’s music and literature
with history in Napoleon Symphony (1974). He also attracted
controversy for his themes; a syphilitic Shakespeare in Nothing Like
the Sun (1964), homosexuality and cannibalism in The Wanting Seed
(1962) and Satanism in Earthly Powers (1980).
A popular, if controversial, Irish author of the mid-20th century, Edna
O’Brien (1930/1932?– ) wrote fiction that dealt with women’s
sexuality and relationships, which resulted in her work being banned
in Ireland. Her trilogy, The Country Girls (1960), The Lonely Girl (1962)
and Girls in their Married Bliss (1964), made her reputation. Kate
and Baba, brought up in a strict Roman Catholic ethos find their
relationships (marriage) unsatisfactory, as their sexuality is at odds
with what they have been taught to believe. Their relationships with
men verge between deep emotional entanglements to lust and the
explosive nature of O’Brien’s discussion of the two women’s sexuality
provided feminists with a vast amount of material. In other novels
O’ Brien combined sexuality with religion in even more dangerous
combinations. In A Pagan Place (1971) a girl is seduced by a priest. In
Johnny I Hardly Knew You (1977) a girl avenges herself by murdering
the lover who betrayed her. Her newest tale, In the Forest (2002), is
set in an asylum and deals with the machinations and (unthinking?)
cruelties of a mad boy, Michen.
William Golding (1911–93) achieved celebrity status with Lord of the
Flies (1954), a novel published after 21 rejections! Golding’s fiction is
rooted in a dark, misanthropic vision of humanity and civilization.
If the first tale showed the eventual degradation of school children –
given the right circumstances, even the civilized man will turn savage,
suggests Golding – an even more frightening vision informs The
338 The Modern Age
Inheritors (1955). Here Neanderthal man meets his descendent, Cro-

magnon man, who quickly destroys the more gentle Neanderthal.
The Spire (1964) showcased human pride, which seeks gratification
even at the cost of others’ lives.
Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884–1969), often neglected because of her

excessive dialogue and abstract plots, wrote family fiction, where all
the families seem to be maladjusted in some way or the other. Pastors
and Masters (1925), Men and Wives (1931) Parents and Children (1941)
are collections of impressions. Her novels lack a coherent and
recognizable plot, and much of the ‘action’ takes place within
dialogues.
Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973), an Anglo-Irish writer, is known
primarily for her brilliant The Death of the Heart (1938) and some
short fiction. Portia Quayne, a sixteen-year old orphan, moves to
London to live with her half-brother Thomas and his wife Anna.
Portia falls in love with Anna’s friend Eddie. The novel also has some
homoerotic relationships. The rather gloomy settings go with the
theme of morality and sin in almost all of Bowen’s fiction. Almost all
her major fiction deals with the theme of a young girl’s love affairs,
betrayals and growing up.
Lawrence Durrell (1912–90) wrote a major epic in The Alexandria
Quartet (1957–1960). The saga, with its themes of love, sexual
intrigues and espionage is also an interesting narrative experiment
where the same events are given to us through various characters.
There are also debates about creative genius and the purpose of art
(especially in the character of Pursewarden). Highly sensual in
sections – Durrell subscribed to Henry Miller’s views on sexuality as
fulfilment of the human potential, and was influenced by DH
Lawrence – and marked by a progressively darkening vision (each
of the four novels ends in death) – the Quartet’s wealth of detail
remains its strength.
Another significant quartet of the 20th century is Paul Scott’s The Raj
Quartet (1966–74. The individual volumes are The Jewel in the Crown,
The Day of the Scorpion, The Towers of Silence and A Division of the
Spoils). Mapping the last days of the British Empire in India, Paul
Scott (1920–78) situated human relationships between Britons and
Indians in terms of the racialized power equations. Ronald Merrick,

the homosexual sadist police officer in the tales, stands for the
complete decay of the Raj’s principles. Scott also looked at the
transformation of the Indian: the Hari Kumar/Harry Coomer
character, who is never truly English, but has lost much of his
Indianness. Scott’s concern was the violence of Empire – rape,
murder and arson fill the pages of the saga – and its effect on both
Englishmen and natives. Scott went on to question many of the
stereotypes of the Raj, notably that of the benevolent British officer,
the dependent native, and the ‘peace’ which the Raj supposedly
maintained. His later work, the Booker winning Staying On (1977)
dealt with the life of an old English couple who had stayed on in
India after India’s independence.
Alan Sillitoe (1928– ) writes fiction about ‘low-life’. Crooks,

prostitutes, the unemployed fill his works. Men and women alienated
from and unhappy with their social conditions and personal
relationships inform novels like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
(1958), the tale that really launched Sillitoe’s career. Arthur Seaton
in the novel stands for the English working-class man who tries to
alleviate his professional misery and inadequacy through love affairs
with Brenda and Doreen. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
(1959) explored ‘rebellion’ by an angry young man, Smith, who sees
the world in terms of ‘them’ and ‘us’. The Death of William Posters
(1965), A Start in Life (1970) and The Widower’s Son (1976) all build
on the theme of working-class deprivation. Sillitoe’s novels are
marked by the language of the streets and depiction of lust, swearing,
fights and barroom scenes. Sillitoe often portrays the working-class
man’s attempts at improving himself as ending in failure. Sillitoe’s
fiction has angry protagonists who seek vengeance against a society
that has deprived them of opportunities. However, their acquisition
of material possessions, welfare benefits from the government or even
marriage rarely render them happier. Sillitoe also suggests a different
moral code in operation for the working classes. Extra-marital love
affairs, lust rather than love, divorces and abandonment are common
in the lives of his characters. There is also a fairly high degree of
violence in Sillitoe’s fiction. John Wain and John Braine share Sillitoe’s
interests in portraying working-class lives in their fiction.4
340 The Modern Age
Jean Rhys (1894–1979), born Ella Gwendoline Williams in the West

Indies (then a British colony), wrote the best-selling and critically
acclaimed Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) as a reworking of the classic Jane
Eyre. This story of a Creole woman, Antoinette and her marriage to
an Englishman retrieves the figures of Bertha Mason and Rochester
from Jane Eyre. Themes of colonialism, racism and sexuality combine
to make it a powerful tale. Rhys rejects the Jane Eyre image of Bertha
as either a primitive or a demon. Antoinette is portrayed as the
‘victim’ of her identity – Afro-Caribbean and English. She is the
symbol of the marginalized, non-European woman. Rhys’ Antoinette
sees England and Thornfield Hall as hell and her Caribbean
childhood home as Edenic, thus reversing the stereotype of the
colony-as-hell. The West Indies also figures prominently in the
consciousness of her protagonist Anne Morgan in Voyage in the Dark
(1934).
The Anglo-Irish Iris Murdoch (1919–99) was an extremely erudite
philosopher and thinker (she was a student of Ludwig Wittgenstein
and wrote the first English study of Jean-Paul Sartre). Touches of
the Gothic are visible in her fiction, especially in its dark settings and
bizarre events that border on the surreal. A Severed Head (1961) is
an extraordinary satire on the hypocrisies of upper-class English
society. Sex becomes worthless in an endless round of incest, adultery
and marriage among a group of aristocratic middle-aged men and
women. Martin Lynch-Gibbon, Georgie, Palmer Anderson and
Honor Klein are caught up in a series of intrigues to justify their
sexual preferences and attractions. The Sea, The Sea (1978), perhaps
Murdoch’s best novel, deals with the delusions and visions of a
playwright-director who has set out to record his memories in the
form of an autobiography. The most surrealist of her novels, the
settings in the tale verge on the Gothic, even as the hallucinations
take on the shape of already circulating myths. The reality-illusion
distinction breaks down.
The Popular Novel

The 20 th century has seen a boom in the popular (mass) novel.
Intended as thrillers, airport/train reading and plain entertainment,
the popular fiction industry has generated profits, celebrities and
social criticism. Fashion, shopping and consumerism, tourism and

travel, partying and socialization, crime and horror – the popular
novel spreads across many sub-genres, themes and issues. From
Agatha Christie and PG Wodehouse to Isaac Asimov and Stephen
King, the popular novel has held sway in the 20th century. The genre
also is perhaps the best index of a globalized literary culture, especially
in the later decades of the century when best-sellers are available
across the world (the Harry Potter phenomenon is a good example).
Film and televison adaptations make popular novels famous, and
create a space for new genres, as exemplified by the newest entrant
into literary culture: ‘chick lit’ (fiction about and for young women,
of which Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’ Diary, 1996, is seen as the
inaugural moment).5
Agatha Christie (1890–1976), one of the most translated authors in

the history of the English language (her competitors include the Bible,
William Shakespeare and Enid Blyton), is available in nearly 50
languages world-wide, and is acknowledged as the ‘queen of crime’.
She eroded the image of a quiet, peaceful English village by making
it the scene of some of the most horrific evil – locating her crimes in
tiny, out-of-the-way hamlets and idyllic pastoral spaces. Her
reluctant detective, the indefatigable Miss Jane Marple (introduced
in The Murder at the Vicarage, 1930) taps into the gossip lines of the
community, and exhibits a startling awareness of the psychology of
the individual. Working from a basic notion that given time people
will reveal themselves for what they are, Miss Marple solves crimes
almost apologetically. Characters in village settings reveal their sorry
sides in conversations, small, inconsequential actions and social
interactions. Christie demonstrates an unerring understanding of
the way communities function in claustrophobic settings. She is at
her best with family murders, as she unravels the loves, hates and
petty jealousies that inform ‘closed’ sets of people. Her choice of
murder weapons and setting are of the stealthy variety – poisons,
strangling and drowning are her best known devices. Her utilization
of old people and their incredible memories constitutes a remarkable
move in detective fiction. Class also plays an important role – with
inheritors, scions of big family, working-class people – in her plots.
She works with the basic notions that members of a particular class
will behave in certain ways: the wayward upper class man, the
342 The Modern Age
arrogant society lady, the all-observant-but-unnoticed maid are staple

Christie.
With the formidable, if eccentric, Hercule Poirot (surely one of the
most famous characters in English fiction), Christie takes the detective
story a notch higher. Poirot’s cunning consists of using people against
themselves. His exaggeratedly foreign appearance (Christie gestures
throughout at the xenophobia of English society), his bumbling
manner combined with a laughable pomposity and his sharp eye
for detail enable him to solve mysteries. Christie believes that one
cannot attribute the world’s evils solely to god and that man is
accountable for most of the wickedness around. Poirot believes that
nothing can justify murder (as he stresses several times, “I do not
approve of murder”). Christie’s use of nursery rhymes, English poetry
and Shakespeare as governing motifs in her plots makes the works
all the more fascinating because the solution to mysteries are often
buried within the rhyme/poem. The truth is often hidden in an
everyday instance, as the disclosure of it relies on a commonplace
like the tilt of a head, a portrait, a missing piece of conversation or a
misunderstood sentence. There are no elaborate conspiracies (except
in Murder on the Orient Express and the espionage novels). Evil itself
is a common face, an ordinary event.
Georgette Heyer (1902–74) is best known for her satirical historical
tales of Regency England (1810–20). Dukes and aristocrats are
villainous, lustful, unscrupulous and just as prone to moral depravity
as anyone else. Impostors and debtors, gamblers and fops merge
messily with high class ladies and gentlemen. The novels often
satirize the emphasis on appearance and manners in English culture.
In Powder and Patch (1930) Philp Jettan loves Cleone but must
transform himself into a foppish gentleman before he can convince
her of this fact. Heyer’s characters, despite being scornful of the rules
of society (her most memorable characters are the satirical men who
delight in challenging the hidebound society of the time), are aware
of the limits imposed on them and are careful to stay within these.
Hence, even though the Duke of Avon loves Leonie, he cannot marry
her as he believes that she belongs to the lower classes. Once her
impeccable lineage is proved, then the marriage is sanctioned. In
Devil’s Cub, Leonie’s son mistakenly kidnaps Mary Challoner. Here

Mary takes her sister’s place, hoping to teach the arrogant young
Duke a lesson.
PG Wodehouse (1881–1975) is noted for his bunch of assorted
English aristocrats – Lord Emsworth, Sir Galahad (‘Gally’), Lady
Constance (‘Connie’) – big game hunters, beautiful heiresses,
policemen, butlers (including the imperturbable Jeeves), dissolute
young men, curates and others. Wodehouse created a fictional world
where impersonations and misunderstandings are the order of the
day. Wodehouse’s portraits of the Hollywood tycoon or the Wall
Street magnate were comedies of manners. But his best was reserved
for the English aristocracy – which he subjected to untiring scrutiny,
to find them wanting. Dukes and earls lost money gambling,
duchesses were merciless in their pursuit of eligible sons-in-laws or
husbands, class consciousness regulated all social interaction and
even the most respected families had multiple skeletons in the closet.
Blandings Castle, the scene of some of Wodehouse’s most stunning
intrigues – from kidnapping the pig, the Empress of Blandings, to
wooing the ‘daughter of a hundred earls’ – entered immortality as
Wodehouse’s popularity grew across the Atlantic (he was serialized
in an American newspaper). Wodehouse remains one of the largest
selling humourists of the 20th century.6
Among the most popular novelists from Britain, Lord Jeffrey Archer
(1940– ), also in the news for perjury and his subsequent
imprisonment, is the author of a vast corpus of short fiction and
novels. Kane and Abel (1979), a story of ambition, power and
ruthlessness involving two men, William Lowell Kane and Abel
Rosnovski, was his first major success. It also inaugurated a theme
to be found in most subsequent Archer tales: the quest for power.
This might involve acquiring corporations (as in Kane and Abel) or
art works (as in A Matter of Honour, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny
Less and First Among Equals). These are also, mostly, in the thriller
format that align them alongside detective fiction. Archer also
specializes in the last-page twist in his short stories (a device
popularized by O. Henry and Maupassant, two other great short
story writers) in collections like A Twist in the Tale (1988) and Twelve
344 The Modern Age
Red Herrings (1994). Archer’s best-seller status has remained

untouched by the scandals. After his prison experiences, he produced
A Prison Diary in two volumes (2003, 2004).
Another writer who can be located somewhere between the ‘serious
fiction’ and ‘popular writing’ category would be Joanna Trollope
(1943– ). The author of mostly family tales like A Village Affair (1989),
Other People’s Children (1998) and Marrying the Mistress (2000),
Trollope’s strengths are her control over plot and conversations that
seem real. Her fiction is also mostly explorations in the psychology
of tense family situations – marriages breaking up, sibling rivalry
and love affairs.
POETRY
War Poetry
Features of War Poetry
• Provided details of life in the trenches
• Often questioned the need for war, combining it with anti-war arguments
• The individual located within a company of fellow-sufferers
• Did not romanticize or sentimentalize war
• A universal humanism
• Injury – mental and physical – is a central theme.
Poets faced with the trauma of the First World War engaged with
the experience of the trenches, wounds and death. Siegfried Sassoon’s
famous phrase ‘rant, stench of bodies’ captures much of the theme
and tone of this poetry. Among the poets of the First World War are:
Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967), Rupert Brooke (1887–1915), Edmund
Blunden (1896–1974), Wilfred Owen (1893–1918), Edward Thomas
(1878–1917), Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918) and a few women poets
like Madeline Ida Bedford, Eva Dobell, Jessie Pope and others. More
recently a volume of soldiers’ songs has been published (R. Palmer’s
'What a Lovely War!': British Soldiers' Songs, 1990).
Siegfried Sassoon criticized the war throughout his poetry and his
memoirs. His friendship with other soldier-poets like Blunden and
Brooke was a formative influence in his writing. Dead and broken
bodies strew the landscape of his war poetry, as seen in this extract
from ‘Counter-Attack’.
The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs
High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the saps
And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud,
Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled;
And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair,
Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime.
And then the rain began, — the jolly old rain!
There is some vicious satire in Sassoon’s work. Here is a good example
of this satiric strain from ‘They’:
The Bishop tells us: 'When the boys come back
'They will not be the same; for they'll have fought
'In a just cause: they lead the last attack
'On Anti-Christ; their comrades' blood has bought
'New right to breed an honourable race,
'They have challenged Death and dared him face to face.'
'We're none of us the same!' the boys reply.
'For George lost both his legs; and Bill's stone blind;
'Poor Jim's shot through the lungs and like to die;
'And Bert's gone syphilitic: you'll not find
'A chap who's served that hasn't found some change.
' And the Bishop said: 'The ways of God are strange!'
Sassoon sees war almost entirely in terms of its injuries and injustices,
and not the politics of nations or territories. Soldiers live in ‘cowed /
subjection to the ghosts of friends who die’, as Sassoon puts it in his
celebrated poem, ‘Survivors’. In his Diaries, he described war as
inflicting ‘useless suffering’, and expressed his incredulity at women
being ‘thrilled’ to hear that these soldiers have ‘shed the blood of
Germans’. Much of Sassoon’s work is a rejection of notions of glory,
heroism and even patriotism.
Edmund Blunden, who edited Wilfred Owen’s works, provided an
honest appraisal of patriotism, jingoism and disillusionment
associated with war in his memoir Undertones of War (1928). In his
346 The Modern Age
poetry, Blunden reflects a greater control over the emotions than his
fellow poets. He depicts war as something that destroys what nature
has created. Among his best poems are those in which Blunden is
anguished with memories of his dead comrades. He mourns the fact
that they are dead and he is himself a survivor, as seen in ‘1916 Seen
from 1921’:
Dead as the men I loved, wait while life drags
Its wounded length from those sad streets of war
Into green places here, that were my own;
Blunden is also a rarity among the war poets because he is the only
one writing about the pollution and destruction of nature. Thus
withered trees, desolate fields fill his work.
The best known and most anthologized of the war poets is Wilfred
Owen. It was Owen who gave the slogan for the entire genre of war
poetry: ‘My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the
pity’. This ‘pity of war’ is the pity generated by the deaths and injuries
of its young men and women. No cause justifies the extinction of
human life on such a colossal scale. Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed
Youth’, perhaps the most celebrated of the war poems captures his
disillusionment with the idea of war as heroic:
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
– Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, -
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
In ‘Strange Meeting’, a soldier meets the ghost of an enemy soldier
he had killed in a dream-sequence. The enemy soldier remarks how
he too has similar ambitions for his life. in ‘Disabled’, another
powerful poem, a disabled soldier who has lost his legs and one arm
looks at young men and women and recalls his youth when he was
handsome and ‘whole’. He has now lost even his colour (‘Poured it
down shell-holes till the veins ran dry’). The girls touch him ‘like
some queer disease’. His real days of glory were not in the trenches
but on the football fields and in dances in pre-war days. Owen’s

speaker contrasts those triumphant days with his present, and looks
at what the future holds:
Now, he will spend a few sick years in institutes,
And do what things the rules consider wise,
And take whatever pity they may dole.
Tonight he noticed how the women's eyes
Passed from him to the strong men that were whole.
How cold and late it is! Why don't they come
And put him into bed? Why don't they come?
In Owen’s poetry there are no heroes, only derelicts and the haunted.
His figures are maimed characters, coping with physical disability and
horrific memories. Nowhere in the poetry do we see patriotism or
nationalism. Indeed, Owen questions whether there was ever an ‘enemy’.
Modernist Poetry
Features of Modernist Poetry
• Use of allusion and myth, often from non-Western traditions
• Fragmented and non-linear
• Symbolism used in some cases
• Influenced by various movements like imagism, vorticism, surrealism and

objectivism
• Used collage extensively
• Metropolitan in theme and setting
• Explores subjective consciousness
• Obsession with the ruined civilization of the 20th century
• Experiment with form and style: ‘visual poetry’ where the typeface itself
was non-linear and arranged differently (examples of such poets would be
ee cummings, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Ezra Pound and Bob Cobbing)
• Some political poetry from Auden and Spender
• Numerous movements in poetry, some with their own manifestos.

348 The Modern Age
Modernist poetry in England was influenced by French symbolism

(Rimbaud, Laforgue, Mallarme and Baudelaire), the American
imagists and the writings of Ezra Pound. TS Eliot, usually taken to
be the best representative of modernist poetry, moved from the US
to England. Gertrude Stein held her famous salons in Paris and was
visited by almost every major writer of the time. Modernism is thus
a form of writing that is Euro-American. The Irish poet WB Yeats
occupies a difficult position – between a 20th century Romanticism
and Modernism (it has been argued that Ezra Pound, who was his
secretary for some time, dragged Yeats into modernism). The 1920s
and 1930s are often described as the period of ‘high modernism’.
The poets discussed here are those active mainly in the first half of
the 20th century.
Imagism
Imagism emphasized form above everything else. It requires the poet to
remove herself or himself from the poem and to deliver it as objectively as
possible. It also believed that the poem should be sparse, with no extra
flourishes or ornamentation. Adjectives and descriptives were to be avoided.
No abstractions were to be used. Words had to be accurate and precise in
their meanings. The poetry had to be ‘hard and clear’ as the Imagist Manifesto
put it. Images were to capture emotions and events in ‘an instant of time’.
Ezra Pound, TE Hulme, EA Robinson, Ford Madox Ford, Amy Lowell, HD
(Hilda Doolittle) and FS Flint were the poets who formulated this aesthetic.
There were four published Imagist anthologies: Des Imagistes (1914); Some
Imagists (1915, 1916, 1917). There was also poetry published in magazines
like Poetry and The Egoist in the US and England.
Ezra Pound (1885–1972), who was born in the USA but moved to
Britain and Europe later in his life, has the reputation of being one of
the most difficult poets of the 20 th century, a reputation one
understands and accepts if one were to dip into, say The Cantos.
Pound’s significance to 20 th century criticism and poetry is
unimaginable. He nurtured several poets – one of them was TS Eliot,
whose The Wasteland was edited by Pound – and was at the forefront
of major literary movements and developments like Vorticism (see
the box Vorticism and Futurism) and Imagism (see the box Imagism).
He edited the first imagist anthology in 1914 and was instrumental

in promoting James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis. He was also
associated with Gertreude Stein, Ernest Hemingway and Hilda
Doolittle first in London and then in Paris. Pound’s first collection of
poems A Lume Spento appeared in 1908. His obsession with accurate
language, minimalism and sharp imagery is already visible in his
early works like Personae (1909). Here is a sample from Personae.
See, they return; ah, see the tentative
Movements, and the slow feet,
The trouble in the pace and the uncertain
Wavering!
In 1920, he published the famous Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, a collection
that dealt with the theme of art itself. It opened with the following
well-known lines.
For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry [………………..]
he had been born
In a half-savage country, out of date;
Futurism and Vorticism

The Italian poet FT Marinetti wrote the famous ‘Futurist Manifesto’ (1909/
1912?). The emphasis of this literature would be vibrant energy, he declared.
As he put it, Futurist literature would “exalt aggressive action, a feverish
insomnia, the racer's stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap … the
beauty of speed”. Influenced by technology and new theories in the sciences,
Futurism sought a more dynamic language and expression. The poetry is
characterized by extreme energy, violent and vivid imagery and descriptions
of movement and action. In Marinetti’s ‘The Futurist Aviator Speaks to his
Father, Vulcan’ (1914) he describes an aviator descending into a volcano
thus:
Watch me descend and dip toward your sulphurous breath
And dart between your columns of reddening clouds
To listen to the rumbling of that vast belly,
Your heaving, gulping, deafening landslide,
Your war at the center of the earth.
350 The Modern Age
However, this celebration of technology often resulted in a glorification of

war and violence. The automobile, speed and movement are integral to the
futurists. In England Futurism influenced the Vorticist movement.
The image, Ezra Pound wrote, was a ‘vortex’ through which ideas rush
through. The writer/painter, argued Pound, had to draw the reader into the
dynamic swirls of the work. The movement, mainly confined to Britain, used
modernism’s fascination with technology and energy. It was influential in
poetry, painting and sculpture. The magazine Blast published much of the
vorticist work. The moving spirit here was Wyndham Lewis, writer, painter
and publisher (his portrait of TS Eliot adorns the cover of many books).
Among the other artists influenced by Vorticism were William Roberts,
Edward Wadsworth, David Bomberg, Frederick Etchells, Cuthbert Hamilton
and Lawrence Atkinson and the sculptors Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-
Brzeska (killed at the age of 24 in the First World War). It used a lot of colour,
swirling patterns, images of violent movement and energy, all cast in fluid
or geometric models – what Blast’s inaugural issue described as ‘living
plastic geometry’. Influenced by Cubism and Futurism, Vorticism also had a
high degree of abstraction.
Pound turned increasingly to translation and adaptations – ranging

from Old English to the Chinese poets. Sections of his Cantos appeared
first in Poetry magazine in 1917, with latter parts appearing over the
next few decades. During the Second World War, he supported
Mussolini and broadcast for Italian radio. After arrest in 1945, he
was incarcerated in Pisa – first in a cage in an open ground due to
which he had a medical collapse – an event that produced the Pisan
Cantos. At his trial in Washington, he was declared insane. He was
released only in 1958, after which he returned to Italy where he
lived for the remainder of his life.
Pound was one of the first modernists who assimilated the ancients
and the non-European cultures in English poetry. Eliot recognized
this and described him as being both ‘objectionably modern’ and
‘objectionably antiquarian’. He adapted literary and cultural
traditions from China and Europe, which makes his poetry
inaccessible. His attention to form – he was an advocate of spare
imagery and free verse – established trends in modernism. A good
example of his inspirational role in modernism would be his famous
‘In a Station of the Metro’:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.
Pound’s Cantos, running into 120 sections, is a multicultural epic.
There are Chinese characters, quotations in European languages and
references from the history of Africa, the United States and Europe.
Pound did not bother to explicate his references, and this adds to
the poem’s difficulty. The unconnected sections of the poem and the
fragmented imagery have been interpreted by some critics as reflecting
the fragmented nature of human experience itself (a theme common
to the modernists and explored, perhaps a bit more lucidly than in
the Cantos, by TS Eliot’s The Wasteland). Others have located
autobiographical elements in the work. Interestingly, Pound’s
fascination for economics finds expression here – banking is a key
theme in the Cantos. There are also the more common themes of
love, faith, art and some extraordinary light imagery.
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) is surely Ireland’s greatest modern
poet. Yeats was particularly influenced by the French symbolists and
adapted from Celtic mythology and various mystic traditions. Yeats
was also a deeply political poet and his engagement with Ireland’s
struggles with England produced some exceptionally fine poems like
‘Easter 1916’. Yeats’ attitude towards Ireland’s struggle is ambivalent
– he was especially unhappy that his beloved Maud Gonne preferred
to take the line of the revolutionaries. In ‘Easter 1916’ he described
Ireland and Maud Gonne’s transformation thus:
That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
He wonders if the Irish sacrifice has been pointless, for England may
have ‘kept faith’. The ‘terrible beauty’ of the poem could mean
Ireland’s freedom struggle itself, and the transformation it has
wrought in its people: they have undergone so many troubles and
undertaken so many sacrifices that they have become stone-hearted.
And yet it is also supportive of this change. Later poems like
352 The Modern Age
‘Meditations in Times of Civil War’ are Yeats’ responses to the

traumatic events of his time. Many of these poems deal with Yeats’
anguish that he was not an active participant in the events of the
Irish rebellions. He thus asks to be ‘accused’ (‘Parnell’s Funeral’) and
mocks himself for his indifference to the political turmoil as seen in
‘Meditations in Times of Civil War’.
I turn away and shut the door, and on the stair
Wonder how many times I could have proved my worth
In something that all others understand or share
Maud Gonne and the Irish revolutionaries figure in many Yeats
poems like ‘Municipal Gallery’ and ‘Municipal Gallery Revisited’,
‘No Second Troy’, among others.
However, Yeats also tried to escape the dilemmas and anxieties of
his time by turning to mysticism. He developed a feminine persona
(what he called ‘masks’) in some of his plays and works like Michael
Robartes and the Dancer, ‘Solomon to Sheba’, ‘Leda and the Swan’
and others. Yeats’ experiments with automatic writing (writing in a
trance) with his wife Georgia Hyde-Lees revealed multiple sides to
his personality and he concluded that his ‘daimon’ was female. In a
sense, Yeats’ two-voiced poetry in the above-mentioned poems is an
exploration of the feminine mask and the masculine poet. Like other
modernists writing under the influence of Freudian theory – that
the mind has many layers, one of which is the unconscious – Yeats
was exploring his own fragmented personality where the mind is
not just male or female but a bit of both.
Yeats’ love poetry has been far more popular. His images of beauty,
art, youth and love have endured. In ‘Among School Children’, the
mystic vision fuses present and past and suggests a harmony and
unity that is truly organic.
O chestnut-tree! great-rooted blossomer
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
The beloved is adored as a child in this same poem. The poet and the
poem are one here. His love poems are also deeply erotic and violent.
Poems like ‘Leda and the Swan’ are about the linkage of power and
sexuality.
Yeats’ vision of civilization and destruction appears in poems like ‘The
Second Coming’, while it informs much of his better poems like ‘Lapis
Lazuli’, ‘The Tower’, the two Byzantium poems. Yeats believed that
civilization was cyclical, destroying itself every two thousand years
when it reached its pinnacle. ‘The Second Coming’ is this vision of
Christianity’s peak and destruction after 2000 years. He proposed a
universal memory – what he called spiritus mundi – which was eternal
in the Byzantium poems. Yeats’ symbols of the tower, Hanrahan or
stones were his own, even though he was influenced by a range of
mythologies from across the world. Symbolism is a means of conveying
something indirectly. The symbol intensifies the emotion and the event.
Here is an example from ‘Sailing to Byzantium’.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick,
His poems often also expressed anxiety about the body, mortality
and death. As a connoisseur of beauty, Yeats was extremely conscious
of the slow degeneration of the body and the mind, as seen in the
Byzantium poems. Like other modernists, Yeats was skeptical of
order and beauty and his poems reflect the modernist anxiety about
impermanence.
TS Eliot (1888–1965), often taken to be one of the most complex poets

of the 20th century, changed his location, political beliefs and faith.
His ‘The Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ presents many of
modernism’s features. The ‘topos’ or setting is the city. There is a
sense of ennui as the city, its people and its very character seem to be
in coma.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
354 The Modern Age
There is a breakdown of communication between people. Meanings

of words and language are being constantly questioned. The
characters in the poem are together and yet they are separate (the
modernist theme of urban alienation). They are nostalgic for a past
they do not understand and bored with a present that they do – a
state exemplified by the woman in ‘Prufrock’. The man in the poem
seeks to convey something to the woman, who does not seem to
understand. He admits he is unable to choose the right words. A
parodic element is also introduced as the women of the lower classes
talk of great artists and high culture (Michelangelo). There is a sense
of collapse and decay towards the end of the poem. Some startling
images (of a ‘patient etherized upon a table’) and numerous
intertextual allusions and juxtapositions (Shakespeare, Andrew
Marvell, John Donne, the Bible and modernity) make the poem
fascinating and modernist. Time is non-linear and space is surreal in
the poem. Characters like Prufrock also appear in many Eliot poems
like ‘Gerontion’, ‘Hollow Men’ and ‘Ash Wednesday’. These
characters are portraits of failure. The decaying, empty topoi of the
city – or Gerontion’s ‘decayed house’ – are larger symbols. These are
a commonplace in many poems. Here is an example from ‘Rhapsody
on a Windy Night’.
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum
However, Eliot’s most ambitious poem was The Wasteland (1922),
edited by Ezra Pound and perhaps made more complex by Eliot’s
‘explanatory’ notes. Borrowing from a range of sources in Christian
mythology and anthropology (sources include Jessie L Weston’s From
Ritual to Romance and JG Frazer’s The Golden Bough), incorporating
ancient symbols, history and love stories (from Ovid to the present),
The Wasteland is an unparalleled work in modernist poetry. The poem
is in the form of fragments, and is meant to indicate how human
knowledge will always be limited and incomplete:
Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images,
And hence Eliot’s famous line ‘these fragments I have shored against
my ruins’. The poem explores the collapse of contemporary
civilizations. Sexuality is meaningless, as illustrated in the incident

of the typist. Religion has failed. Technology and science are used in
wars to kill people. The collapse of civilization in Eliot is perhaps the
single most pervasive modernist theme (Ezra Pound famously
described the period marked by a ‘botched civilization’). Eliot takes
recourse to other myths and symbols from other belief systems to
offset modernity’s emptiness. Hence fertility rites, vegetation myths
and Buddhism are used to revitalize Christian hope itself.
Eliot’s landscape is full of abject figures and places: “I did not know
death had undone so many.” In a sense the poem is about an
apocalypse (the distinguished critic Hugh Kenner termed it a poem
about the ‘urban apocalypse’) – as civilizations fall, cities corrupt
and ghosts wail. Eliot mixes the highly subjective and internal with
the larger civilizational as the poem moves from characters’ feelings
to history. There is, however, a sense of hope for the future,
symbolized in the prophecy of rain in the poem. Eliot’s impatience
with modernity’s ‘commonness’ is visible in Wasteland, ‘Prufrock’,
‘Sweeney Agonistes’ and other poems where illiterate fools adapt
high culture. This is a mark of cultural degeneration for Eliot.
Imagism appears to have influenced the work of Hugh Syke Davies

(1909–94), a little-read poet today, but one whose literary friendships
(and perhaps influences) included TS Eliot, William Empson, Ludwig
Wittgenstein and Salvador Dali. Precise formulations of sentences
and sharp images mark his work. Touches of European surrealism
are also discernible in his work. ‘Music in an Empty House’ begins
innocently enough:
The house was empty and
the people of the house
gone many months
It then goes on to map both decay and ‘music’:
Footsteps slink past
damp walls
down
long
corridors
356 The Modern Age
Slow feet
warily scuff
bare boards
[………………...]
To twitch the winding-sheet
around a grand piano
thin phalanx of sound
sharp rat's teeth edge yellow
with decay
DH Lawrence’s (1885–1930) reputation rests on his fiction, even
though he wrote some highly accomplished poetry. He was
influenced briefly by the Imagists. His best verse is perhaps his nature
poetry and some of the more sensualist ones. ‘Snake’ is a frequently
anthologized poem and is notable for its imagery.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough
before me.
In contrast to the modernists, Lawrence highlighted spontaneity and
sentiment in his poetry. The sharp image from imagism and the
deeply sensualist Romantic combine in Lawrence’s ‘Aristocracy of
the Sun’.
I am that I am
from the sun,
and people are not my measure.
Like the modernists, Lawrence is extremely self-conscious. However,
rather than conceal his poetic persona behind abstractions and
allusions (a favourite ploy among modernists like Pound and Eliot),
Lawrence chooses to foreground and underscore it. Unlike other
modernists consciousness bursts open into the symbols. A brilliant
image of this process is seen in his poem ‘Grapes’: “Ours is the
universe of the unfolded rose,/The explicit,/The candid revelation.”
But, like all modernists, Lawrence was interested in the ephemeral,
the decaying and the limited.
Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978), perhaps the most important Scottish
poet of the 20 th century, is the pen-name of Christopher Murray
Grieve. He is also the founder of the Scottish National Party.

MacDiarmid was an influential figure in Scottish modernism, writing
in what is known as ‘lowland Scots’. He started a Scots language
revival with two volumes of poetry – Sangshaw (alternatively spelt
Sangschaw; 1925) and Penny Wheep (1926) – which were marked by
the use of old-fashioned expressions from Scots with more
contemporary styles.
Of the poets of the 1930s, writing in the wake of Eliot and Pound’s
high modernist mode, the work of WH Auden (1907–73) is perhaps
the most significant. Auden was a member of a group of writers at
Oxford: Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, Christopher Isherwood
and Cecil Day-Lewis. They were eventually termed ‘Macspaunday’
(an anagram from their names). The Auden generation was
influenced by socialist thought, until it was disillusioned with versions
of socialism because of the totalitarian regimes of Hitler and Stalin.
Auden wrote about war, culture, morality, workers and humanity.
A brilliant satirist and chronicler of human and civilizational follies,
Auden’s poetry is notable for its range of subject matter and precise
control over rhythm and diction. Auden wrote opera, limericks, short
poems, narratives, criticism and prose-poems.
Auden’s dystopic view of war and civilization is best recorded in
‘September 1, 1939’. Like the modernists Auden is disillusioned by
the decaying civilization: “As the clever hopes expire/Of a low
dishonest decade”. The events of his time are cause for anxiety too:
“Imperialism's face/And the international wrong”. In such a context
the poet cannot do much, since he has ‘only a voice’ to ‘undo the
folded lie’. In another famous poem, ‘In Memory of WB Yeats’ he
admitted that ‘poetry made nothing happen’. Such statements become
critiques of a culture that does not give much credence to art.
Of his political poems – these date back to his early collections in the
1930s – ‘The Unknown Citizen’, ‘The Fall of Rome’ and ‘The Shield
of Achilles’ stand out. ‘The Unknown Citizen’ is a poem that is very
much the poetic equivalent of Orwell’s vision of a totalitarian state
where, in order to survive, one must agree with the dominant
ideology or political opinion. There is no individualism any more,
and ‘the unknown citizen’ is just part of a collective:
358 The Modern Age
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be

One against whom there was no official complaint
[…………………………]
in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
He holds the correct and acceptable opinions:
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace; when there was war, he
went.
The unknown citizen fulfils all the demands made by the bureaucratic
state, and no one asks whether he has demands and expectations
other than these:
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
In ‘The Fall of Rome’ Auden locates the modern state alongside
ancient Rome and links the two in a commonality of corruption.
Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.
But perhaps his best satire on war is in his ‘Shorts’:
When Statesmen gravely say 'We must be realistic',
The chances are they're weak and, therefore, pacifistic,
But when they speak of Principles, look out: perhaps
Their generals are already poring over maps.
Auden, influenced by Freud, saw modern civilization as repressed
and unhappy. His elegy (‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’) described
the founder of psychoanalysis as the ‘climate’ under which humanity
lives. In ‘Sir, No Man’s Enemy’ (also published as ‘Petition’) he
describes humanity’s ‘intolerable neural itch’ and the ‘distortions of
ingrown virginity’ (Auden concealed his own homosexuality,
though). He believed that humanity had lost all sense of ethics and
individualism in the pursuit of what was advertised as ‘the greater
good’. In a little-known poem like ‘Their Lonely Betters’, Auden
therefore suggests we return to a certain primitivism (also the subject
of his famous ‘In Praise of Limestone’). He envies the birds and

vegetables because they do not have a language. Language – a code
for ‘culture’ or (repressive) civilization – only makes humanity sad:
Let them leave language to their lonely betters
Who count some days and long for certain letters;
We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep:
Words are for those with promises to keep
Auden’s short, four-line limericks are aphoristic and carry a distinctly
moral tone within the humour:
I am beginning to lose patience
With my personal relations
They are not deep
And they are not cheap.
Stephen Spender (1901–95), like Auden, Isherwood and others, was
influenced by socialism. As a consequence of his politics, he wrote
what is called the poetry of social protest in Poems (1933) and Vienna
(1934). The latter was a poem praising the Viennese Socialists.
Eventually, like many others of his time, he was disillusioned with
the way socialism had shaped up. Spender’s sexuality – it turns out
he was bisexual – is the subject of both furious public controversies
and his poetry. Spender’s reputation and abilities as a poet have
always been called into question especially in the 1980s and 1990s
(It does not help matters that major writers like Virginia Woolf
dismissed him outright: ‘A loose jointed mind, misty, clouded,
suffusive. Nothing has outline … we plunged and skipped and
hopped—from sodomy and women and writing and anonymity and
– I forget’.) He also wrote some slightly Romantic poetry, like ‘I Think
Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great’.
John Betjeman (1906–84), Poet Laureate from 1972 to 1984, is notable
for his casual tone and dry wit. A well-known example of his tone is
‘Slough’, in which he asks bombs to destroy the wealthier classes
and spare the poor clerks:
Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn't fit for humans now,
[……………]
360 The Modern Age
Come, bombs and blow to smithereens

Those air -conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,
Tinned minds, tinned breath.
Mess up the mess they call a town-

[……………..]
And get that man with double chin

Who'll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women's tears:
[………………..]
But spare the bald young clerks who add

The profits of the stinking cad;
It's not their fault that they are mad,
They've tasted Hell.
It's not their fault they do not know

The birdsong from the radio,
[………………]
Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough

To get it ready for the plough.
An appraisal of the present is accompanied by a nostalgia for the
past. Betjeman sees the present as empty and destructive. ‘Progress’
and ‘development’ are suspect in much of his works and he exhibits
a neo-romantic concern with the idyllic world and landscape of the
previous era. Landscape is Romantically described, with a sense of
pleasure and wonder not usually seen in modern poetry. Here is an
example from ‘Sea-side Golf’:
Ah! Seaweed smells from sandy caves
And thyme and mist in whiffs,
In-coming tide, Atlantic waves
Slapping the sunny cliffs,
Lark song and sea sounds in the air
And splendour, splendour everywhere.
However, Nature for Betjeman is significant only in terms of the

lives lived there, in that place (he took pains to point this out about
his poetry). Betjeman, like Larkin, also rebelled against the
modernist tradition of poetry that used difficult allusions and
complex structures. His rhyming poetry and clear diction made
him widely popular (at one time he was the best selling poet of
England).
Some of the poets who share the space of modernist poetry are neo-
romantics. Kathleen Raine (1908–2003), deeply influenced by Indian
mysticism, was a poet and critic, with works published on William
Blake and WB Yeats, and eleven volumes of poetry. She was briefly
married to the poet Hugh Sykes Davies. Her poetry exhibits a love of
nature and landscape, all refracted through a mystic vision, as
illustrated in ‘Amo Ergo Sum’. The poem begins with
Because I love
The sun pours out its rays of living gold
Pours out its gold and silver on the sea.
It goes on to image the speaker’s mental and emotional states in
terms of the landscape:
Because I love
The ferns grow green, and green the grass, and green
The transparent sunlit trees.
Her poetry also embodies a lot of myth and symbols. She has often
been described as ‘neo-romantic’ for the way in which landscape
and the external world are merely appendages to human thought
or emotion (rather like Wordsworth).
Of the more anthologized poets from the 1930s is the Welsh Dylan
Thomas (1914–53), whose impoverished (he often had no money
for food) and chaotic life (drunkenness, relieving himself in public
and drunken driving across Charlie Chaplin’s tennis court) often
made more news – some unverifiable, some gossipy – than his poetry.
Numerous celebrities befriended him. When he died in hospital,
probably of a cortisone or morphine overdose, the man beside him
was John Berryman (Thomas’ memorial service had Tennessee
Williams, William Faulkner and ee cummings among the audience).
362 The Modern Age
Among his notable works are ‘Poem in October’, with its

extraordinary evocation of space, mobility and nature, ‘Fern Hill’
and the visionary ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into the Good Night’. ‘Poem in
October’ has a delicacy of tone and image that is otherwise so lacking
in the grimy poetry of his generation:
My birthday began with the water –
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
Like the Romantics, Thomas’ poems are full of the ‘I’, the persona of
the poet/speaker fills the neighbouring areas and landscape. For
instance, in ‘Fern Hill’, the natural world is situated around the
speaker:
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the river of the windfall light.
This tone, sustained throughout the poem foregrounds the speaker
more than anything else. Thomas’ romanticism – detailed by John
Bayley in his classic work The Romantic Survival (1957) – moved away
from the modernist obsession with defiled and corrupted nature into
a more Wordsworthean appreciation of the same. There is also a
discernable influence of surrealism – this more so in his short fiction,
plays and other prose – which sometimes renders interpretation
difficult (Thomas said his poems have no meaning!), as in the
(in)famous line ‘turning a petrol blind face to the enemy’ in ‘I, In My
Intricate Image’ which, though startling does not immediately convey
anything.
Surrealism
An art movement best popularized by the work of Salvador Dali, Surrealism
was an attempt to capture the mind’s deepest and most unconscious
aspects in painting. In literature, automatic writing and stream-of-
consciousness came closest to being influenced by this kind of approach.
Andre Breton wrote the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, in which he praised
Sigmund Freud’s notion of the unconscious. The surrealists saw the
unconscious as a source of creative energy. Breton defined surrealism as
‘psychic automatism’. The art object had to capture the working of the
mind, as irrational or abstract as it may be, without trying to impose
reason or order on it. Weird combinations of objects – the ‘associationism’
of the human mind – were placed together (the 19th century poet
Lautremont had famously recommended an art that would record the
‘chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an
umbrella’). The dream was recorded in all its non-linear, often random
sequence. The result was an art that often appeared bizarre and un-
understandable. Dali’s image of clocks draped over various objects in his
‘Persistence of Memory’ is an example. The poetry of Louis Aragon
achieves a similar shock effect. In Euro-American literature, Dylan Thomas,
Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, David Gascoyne, George Barker, Anais Nin,
William Burroughs and, more recently, Martin Amis, show influences
of surrealism.
George Barker (1913–91) was published by TS Eliot at Faber and

Faber and gained notice in his twenties (though he is today known
mainly for his many affairs, number of children – fifteen – and as
the subject of a uniquely titled novel by his former lover, Elizabeth
Smart: By Grand Central Station I sat Down and Wept, 1945). His
early poetry was experimental, though he was to turn to the ballad
and sonnet later on. There is a touch of anarchy in his work – which
possibly explains his absence from the canon. His main themes range
from war to economics, the nature of reality to love. Poems like ‘The
True Confession of George Barker’ seek more to shock than to
enlighten (see the box The New Apocalyptic Movement). The tone
of self-mockery and satire is very strong here. Surreal atmosphere
and a futurism mark early works like ‘Calamiterror’.
364 The Modern Age
I sense the
Advent of the extraordinary event, the calamiterror,
Turn and encounter the mountain descending upon me
The moment of terror flashes like dead powder
Revealing the features of the mass as mine.
A highly individual voice, Barker’s imagery was powerful enough
to be controversial.
I see the elements of my growth were drawn
Not from the objects that encourage growth,
The mountain ornamented with morning tears,
The musical tree, the hesitating river,
But the distorted mountain of the bowels,
The hysterical tree that branches to the arms,
The lunar river from the sexual fountain.
Feeding on self, the internal cannibal
Stands like a gap over its swallowed self.
David Gascoyne (1916–2001) burst on the scene with a poetry
collection at the age of sixteen. Influenced by surrealism (a subject
on which he wrote a study) much of Gascoyne’s poetry is a mixture
of myth, harsh images from contemporary life and technology and
a certain pessimistic tone. His poem ‘Salvador Dali’ is an exercise in
surreal imagery:
The face of the precipice is black with lovers;
The sun above them is a bag of nails; the spring’s
First rivers hide among their hair.
Goliath plunges his hand into the poisoned well
And bows his head and feels my feet walk through his brain.
The children chasing butterflies turn round and see him there
With his hand in the well and my body growing from his head,
And are afraid. They drop their nets and walk into the wall like
smoke.
[…………….]
Mirrors write Goliath’s name upon my forehead,
While the children are killed in the smoke of the catacombs
And lovers float down from the cliffs like rain.
The New Apocalyptic Movement

The movement had a brief moment of popularity during the 1930–45
period and is embodied in three anthologies (1940–45). A sense of the
anarchic haunts the poetry in the anthologies. Influenced by the work of
Herbert Read, poets like George Barker, GS Fraser and Henry Treece argued
that the violent age required violent poetry. They were rebelling against
the romantic strain while also pushing modernism’s obsession with decay
and collapse into a new mode. Poets like Dylan Thomas and David
Gascoyne were also included in this category for their extensive use of
violent, vibrant images and surrealism. This was a poetry of terror and
extremity, as illustrated in the poems of Gascoyne and Barker quoted
above. The vision in much of these poets included maiming and trauma,
death and decay, and an extremely violent juxtaposition of images, some
of which were criticized as immoral.
By the time we enter the 1950s, the high modernist mode is on its
way out, as is the Auden generation of poets. We have some refreshing
new voices, the most notable among which is that of Philip Larkin
(1922–85). Larkin, one of the group known as ‘the movement poets’
(see the box The Movement Poets), is a popular poet for his choice
of subject matter (everyday life), style (plain) and tone (ironic, witty).
The interest in what is usually uninteresting makes this poetry really
different and, ironically, extends modernist poetry’s concerns with
the common life of the urban West. But, where modernism renders
it through a series of abstract, fragmented images, Larkin delivered
snapshot vignettes in fairly simple detail. Larkin’s famous ‘Aubade’
is a good example of his style:
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
The poem concludes with a particularly poignant image which refuses
to be cast in terms of metaphor or heavy symbolism.
So many things I had thought forgotten
Return to my mind with stranger pain:
– like letters that arrive addressed to someone
Who left the house so many years ago.
366 The Modern Age
Another famous poem, more polished than others, is ‘Church Going’.

The poem describes a very quiet scene, a man visiting a country
church:
Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.
The poem conceals a deeper philosophy: it wonders about the slow
disappearance of faith itself:
A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was
There is a lot of church and religious symbolism in Larkin’s poetry,
though his apparent theme of the loss of faith has often been read as
an ambivalence toward religion.
Larkin writes of human companionship, loss and loneliness in terms
that are more recognizable than that of modernism’s.
… yet when the guest
Has stepped into the windy street, and gone,
Who can confront
The instantaneous grief of being alone?
(‘Kick Up the Fire’)
Or:
Get out as early as you can,
and don’t have any kids yourself
(‘This Be the Verse’)
This kind of poetry (and other examples would be ‘Going, Going’
and ‘Nothing to be Said’) has provoked the view that Larkin had a
generally pessimistic outlook on life and was a thorough skeptic.

Larkin also used four-letter words with regularity in High Windows,
and achieved a measure of notoriety. Larkin was trying to use the
language of the time, when profanity was commonplace.
The Movement Poets

The term was coined by JD Scott to describe the work of a group of poets:
Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, DJ Enright, John Wain and Robert Conquest.
Conquest’s anthology New Lines set the agenda for the group. Donald
Davie and Thom Gunn were the other poets included under this category.
These poets rebelled against the modernist tendency, exemplified by TS
Eliot and Ezra Pound, to make poetry pedantic through the use of allusions,
mythology and intertextual references. They also blamed the critic for
deliberately preferring and popularising difficult poets. Larkin attacked the
‘cunning merger between poet, literary critic and academic critic (three
classes now notoriously indistinguishable)’ that resulted in creating such
elitist poetry. The Movement poets sought to simplify poetry by writing in
the language of everyday life – even using foul language and the slang of
the streets – so that it appealed to everyone. The subject of poetry was also
the street and common life. Direct, slightly humorous and plain in style, the
poetry was valued for its ‘commonness’. DJ Enright’s beautiful poem
‘Dreaming in the Shanghai Restaurant’ is a conversational piece on watching
an old Chinese gentleman. The simplicity of Enright’s narrative renders the
subject both immediate and strange, and is a good example of how this kind
of poetry works.
Edith Sitwell (1887–1964), influenced by Eliot and the high

modernists and marked by a feminist sensibility, is not well known
as a poet today. Her poetry, particularly her nature poetry, is often
abstract and is an effort to deliver a whole new perception of the
world. Her collection Façade (1922), published the same year as The
Wasteland, is a good example of the modernist influence. There is a
touch of the surreal in poems like ‘Heart and Mind’:
Said the Skeleton lying upon the sands of Time-
‘The great gold planet that is the mourning heat of the Sun
Is greater than all gold, more powerful
Than the tawny body of a Lion that fire consumes
Like all that grows or leaps...so is the heart
More powerful than all dust.
368 The Modern Age
Sitwell’s stated aim was to bring poetry closer to music. Façade was
thus performed: behind a curtain with a hole in the mouth of a
painted face. The poems were read through a microphone in the
mouth.
DRAMA
Modern drama owes a great deal to the efforts of the Irish playwrights
of the first decades of the 20 th century. The Independent Theatre
opened in London in 1891 and provided a valuable forum for the
dramatic circles of the city. The first major playwright was George
Bernard Shaw (1856–1950). Shaw, influenced by Ibsen and
socialism, published his Quintessence of Ibsenism in 1891 and
popularized Ibsen in England.
In 1894, Shaw had his first major theatre success with Arms and the
Man. The comedy also set the tone for most of Shaw’s work. The
satire on human follies and the portrait of social evils seen in this
play were to be the twin axes of his work throughout. Arms and the
Man focused on war as a theme. Set in the Serbo-Bulgarian war of
1885, the play shows how Raina discovers the value of soldier
Bluntschli’s agenda: he is a soldier who carries chocolates instead of
arms. Candida looked at marriage and love. Caught between a man
who loves her (the poet Marchbanks) and her socialist preacher
husband (Morell), Candida is briefly swayed by the kind of life the
former offers her. However, she finally opts for her husband. Major
Barbara (1905) is an exploration of ethics in Christianity. Major
Barbara Undershaft is troubled by the Salvation Army’s willingness
to accept contributions from arms manufacturers. Her father, who
once received the benevolence of the Salvation Army, is now an arms
manufacturer himself, and offers a major donation to the Army.
Barbara is appalled when her colleagues at the Army’s offices accept
the donation. Her decision to quit the Army and take up salvation
work with the munitions factory workers is a compromise between
the ideals of Christian work and the murky world of reality. Shaw’s
Pygmalion (first staged in 1914), the inspirational text for the massive
stage and movie success, My Fair Lady, is the story of the English
language itself (Shaw was worried about the deterioration in the
general use of the language, and wished to leave some money for
the purpose of saving it – this could not be done because he did not
leave behind that much money). Prof Higgins wishes to raise Eliza
Doolittle to the upper strata of society by improving her English. In
the process he falls in love with her. However, Eliza, who is a spirited
girl, rebels against the disciplinarian Profressor. The Apple Cart (1929)
is a play that surveys the multiple political philosophies of the time.
Noel Coward (1899–1973), playwright and actor, had his first

controversial success with The Vortex (1924), which dealt with drug
use and homosexuality. Bitter Sweet (operetta, 1929) and Cavalcade
(1931) were spectacular successes. His later comedies and musicals
were Private Lives (1930), the play-cycle, Tonight at 8.30 (1936) and
This Happy Breed (1942).
Of TS Eliot’s verse dramas, Murder in the Cathedral (1935) stands

out. This play invokes the past to comment on the present. Thomas
Becket’s martyrdom is the ostensible theme. In the 12th century, Becket,
Archbishop of Canterbury, antagonized his monarch Henry II about
the rights of the Church: Becket believed the Church must be free
from all civil jurisdiction, while Henry II, who had been Becket’s
boyhood friend, sought to control the Church. Becket was
assassinated on the orders of the king. However, Eliot uses the courage
of Becket, his internal conflicts and clash with authority to call for a
rebellion against the perversion of the Catholic church in recent times.
Historical change is inevitable and people are helpless before it.
Europe is going through a period of great political upheaval and
uncertainty now as it was in Becket's time, suggests Eliot. The
language is in parts very contemporary with expressions like ‘clap-
trap’ and ‘hard-headed’. Eliot’s play is about the slow erosion of
Christian ideas and ideals by fascism and Nazism.
The playwright Christopher Fry (1907–2005) has often been
compared with Eliot in his taste for poetic drama. His early work,
now practically unknown, included a comedy A Phoenix Too Frequent
(1946), based on the Latin writer Petronius (identified with a novelist,
Gaius Petronius who was in Emperor Nero’s court). The period piece
The Lady’s Not For Burning (1949) is perhaps his best known work. It
became a famous West End play starring John Gielgud and Richard
370 The Modern Age
Burton. Even though it was supposedly set in the Middle Ages, it

immediately caught the attention of theatre-goers with its very
contemporary characters – including a war-weary soldier, Thomas
Mendip, tired of life – and situations. Alizon is the lady sought by
Richard and Nicholas and Jennet is the ‘witch’ whose hanging is the
subject of debate (when it is Thomas who wants to be hanged for he
claims he has killed two men). Fry also adapted Jean Anouilh’s Ring
Round the Moon in 1950.
John Millington Synge (1871–1909) was a key figure in the revival of
Irish theatre. His Playboy of the Western World created a riot on its
opening night in Dublin in 1907. He adapted stories from the areas
he lived in (the Aran Islands) and created two major realist works of
modern drama: Riders to the Sea and In the Shadow of the Glen. In
Riders to the Sea (1904) Maurya is an old woman whose five sons
and a husband have drowned in the sea. She now mourns her son
Michael, who has gone missing at sea. A bundle of old clothes are
retrieved from the body of a drowned man and Maurya’s daughter
Nora brings them home for her to identify. Meanwhile, her son
Bartley has left for the mainland without her blessing. The daughters
Nora and Cathleen identify the clothes as Michael’s. They send
Maurya after Bartley to bless him. Maurya has a vision which makes
her believe that Bartley is also doomed. She concludes that the white
boards she had bought for Michael’s body will now be useful for
Bartley. She has accepted that the sea will take away everything she
has. The Playboy of the Western World is Synge’s most complex play.
Christy Mahon announces to a small fishing community that he has
murdered his father. The community accepts him, initially, as a hero,
a ‘playboy’. His growing attachment to Pegeen Flaherty, however,
alters his relationship with the village. The theme of morality,
especially Catholic morality, and its subversion, provoked strong
protests from the Irish.
Sean O’Casey (1880–1964) was interested in and influenced by Irish

nationalism. His first play, The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), showcases
the unionism and nationalism that was to be his enduring theme.
Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926) are
also built on these themes. Unfortunately the latter play was seen as
anti-national because of its criticism of war – O’Casey portrayed
members of the Irish Citizenry Army as drunkards who take to

violence not because they are patriotic but because they do not want
to be labelled cowards – and there were riots. O’Casey also wrote a
play glorifying socialism, The Star Turns Red (1940).
Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood (1953), originally a radio play,

recreates a Welsh landscape (the town of Llareggub) as a pastoral,
pre-industrial idyll. But there are deeper, troubled conditions, as
evidenced by the sexual forces circulating in the town. People’s
dreams are crucial in the plot, and Freud’s influence is clear in the
surreal ‘voices’ (dreams) of the characters. People are troubled by
their repressed desires (Polly Garter sings of Willy Wee, Gossamer
Beynon fantasizes about Sinbad).
British drama turned an entire new chapter with the advent of the
1950s with John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956). Osborne (1929–
94) specialized in heavy polemical plays, and was one of the ‘angry
young men’ of 1950s Britain (see the box Angry Young Men). Jimmy
represents a generation with no heroic causes left: “I suppose people
of our generation aren’t able to die for good causes any more. We
had all that done for us, in the thirties and forties, when we were
still kids.” He rants and raves, and directs his anger at his wife Alison.
The play also shows a certain idealization of working-class virtues
like poverty (embodied in Jimmy’s mother, as Alison is sharp to note:
“Jimmy seems to adore her principally because she’s been poor almost
all her life.”) and a contempt for those who come from the other side
of the class barrier. Jimmy’s recourse to fantasy (the ‘bear’s cave’) at
the conclusion of the play suggests an escapism from mind-numbing
modernity. Jimmy’s principal problem is that he has no role to play
in this modernity, that despite his education (acquired, as he is at
pains to point out, in ‘white-tile’ – that is new – universities and not
‘red-brick’ ones like Oxford or Cambridge), he is ignored by the
establishment. Sexual morality, education and work ethics are
Jimmy’s targets in the play and enabled Osborne to speak with a
large section of disillusioned English youth. A Patriot for Me (1965)
was a brilliant study of homosexuality. The Jewish homosexual Redl,
an intelligence officer, is blackmailed by Russian spies. A drag (cross-
dressing) scene at the conclusion of the play was its highlight.
372 The Modern Age
Arnold Wesker (1932– ) recreated East End London with Chicken

Soup with Barley, Roots and I'm Talking about Jerusalem (1958–60),
commonly known as the Wesker trilogy – a series dealing with the
life of an East End (London) Jewish family, the Kahns. His plays are
categorized as ‘kitchen-sink drama’, where the main protagonist
spends considerable time in the kitchen. In Roots, for example, Beatie
Bryant cooks, cleans, philosophizes and even bathes in the kitchen.
The plays also located family tensions and relationships within the
political ideologies and class tensions of the time. In Chicken Soup
with Barley, Sarah Kahn remains a firm believer in communism. In
Roots, Beatie hopes to introduce her cultured and metropolitan fiancé,
Ronald, to her parents. To this end, she sets the scene by explaining
high culture to them, to no avail, for Ronald breaks off the
engagement.
Angry Young Men

‘Angry young men’ is a term used to described a group of writers (mainly
dramatists and novelists) in the 1950s. These writers who came from the
working classes were unhappy at the cultural and class-bound elitism of
England, the social inequalities and what they perceived as the injustice
of the state. Among the playwrights the foremost representative of the
group is John Osborne. A later addition would be Harold Pinter. The
‘angry young men’ group also included poets Philip Larkin and John Wain
as well as novelists Kingsley Amis, John Wain, John Braine and Alan
Sillitoe. Their writings invariably described social marginalization and
alienation, with dour, unhappy protagonists with a clear inability to form
stable relationships.
Terence Rattigan (1911–77) made his debut with the comedy French
Without Tears (1936). After the Dance (1939) mocked the educated
and intellectual youth of England for their failure to prevent war.
The Winslow Boy (1946) is his most famous play. Based on a real
incident, the play dealt with a family’s attempts to clear their son’s
name – a cadet at the Royal Naval College, he has been accused of
stealing a postal order – and the resultant events alter their lives for
ever. Even though they win the case, each member of the family
loses something important. The Deep Blue Sea (1952) dealt with
homosexuality in the character of Dr Miller (who has been

derecognized for a homosexual offence). Hester, who is emotionally
distraught after her broken love affair attempts suicide and Miller
convinces her to live. The play deals with the relationship of mutual
dependency between the two unhappy and ostracized people.
Women playwrights of the period wrote realist drama. Many of these
plays dealt with the woman’s condition and thematized
contemporary debates about women’s rights. GB Stern’s The
Matriarch, produced in 1929, had Virginia Woolf in its audience.
This path-breaking play dealt with issues of matrilineality, economic
independence and power for women, femininity and women’s social
roles. Another play, Nine Till Six (1930), by Aimée Stuart anticipated
later works like Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls by looking at professional
women (in this case women in the fashion business). With legislation
about women’s issues – marriage, employment and others – these
plays were topical and hence often quite popular in London’s West
End theatres. Clemence Dane’s Bill of Divorcement, for example,
looked at the new divorce laws to question issues of moral and social
responsibility within the family, especially between generations.
Gertrude Jennings (A Woman’s Influence, The Young Person in Pink,
Family Affairs and Our Own Lives), an extremely popular playwright
through the 1930s dealt with issues of domesticity and marriage.
There was a touch of the farce in some of her work. In Husbands for
All, for example, because of a shortage of men, all men are ordered
by the government to have two wives!
When the ‘angry young men’ theatre emerged in the 1950s, a version,
or rather a feminist model of the same, emerged alongside, even
though there were only a few women playwrights who did that
kind of work. Ann Jellicoe’s The Sport of My Mad Mother (1958) drew
upon psychoanalytic theories of motherhood. Shelagh Delaney, one
of the more discussed playwrights from this period, became popular
with A Taste for Honey. It dealt with problems of single mothers,
including questions of the legitimacy of their children, abortion and
homosexuality. A highly acclaimed play for its exploration of themes,
it was considered far ahead of the times. The social realism of the
play made it more hard-hitting than expected. In 1957 Leslie Storm’s
374 The Modern Age
Roar like a Dove was a hugely successful production (it ran from
September 1957 to March 1960). Emma Dungavel, married to Lord
Dungavel, decides that, having produced six daughters in a nine-
year marriage, she needs to get a social life. The play also de-
glamorized the life of and in the aristocrat’s family. Emma says: “Do
you know it’s nine years this month since I stepped aboard the Queen
Elizabeth with Robert … married two weeks. Heading – this poor
fool thought – for a romantic life in a romantic castle.” Emma then
goes off to America and becomes a success. Another character, Muriel
(Emma’s mother), redefines her own marital situation. Storm
repeated the success with Black Chiffon (1957), whose central
character, Alicia Christie, is arrested for shop-lifting. Eventually the
context for her crime becomes clearer – her dysfunctional family. It
was a serious study of both family conflict and individual psychology.
John Arden (1930– ) made his reputation with his early play The Life
of Man (1956) and a later anti-war work Serjeant Musgrave's Dance
(1959). Set somewhere between 1860 and 1880, four deserters bring
the body of a dead soldier back to his home town. The town itself is
troubled by a coal strike and a harsh winter (they are cut off by
snow). The leader of the deserters, Serjeant Musgrave, wants to
‘educate’ the townspeople about the realities of war and they take
the town hostage. One of the most powerful plays of the 20th century,
Arden’s vision of the cruelty of war and its effects on the soldiers
and common people attracted immediate attention.
Notes
1. For the impact of Freudian thought on literature, see Frederick John

Hoffman’s Freudianism and the Literary Mind (1945). For a good
introduction to psychoanalytic thought and literary criticism, see
Elizabeth Wright’s Psychoanalytic Criticism (1984).
2. For the specific influence of China on modernism, as an example of
20 th century ‘orientalism’, see Zhaoming Qian’s Orientalism and
Modernism (1995).
3. Recent ‘guides’ to Tolkien’s epic include the fabulous Wayne Hammond

and Christina Scull (ed) The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion
(2005).
4. On the 20th century British working-class novel, see Jeremy Hawthorn’s
(ed.) The British Working-class Novel in the Twentieth Century (1984).
5. For an anthology of ‘chick lit writing’, see Cris Mazza and Jeffrey
DeShell’s Chick-Lit: On the Edge: New Women’s Fiction Anthology
(1995). For a collection of academic essays on ‘chick lit’, see Suzanne
Ferriss and Mallory Young’s Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction
(2006).
6. For studies of the genre of the popular/mass novel in 20th century, see
Ken Gelder’s Popular Fiction (2004). For popular culture studies, see John
Storey’s Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture (2003).
19. The Present
‘The Present’ refers to the literature after the 1970s. This is the age of
rapid globalization and mass migration. Industrial disasters, the
threat of war, the shift from Cold War with its nuclear threats to
collapsing communism mark the geopolitics of the age. The rapid
expansion of telecommunications technologies and the exploration
of space also shift war threats onto another level. The militarization
of space increases rapidly with surveillance satellites orbiting the
earth. The 1970s and after is characterized by literature that is
influenced by numerous liberation movements – the sexual, feminist
and Third World – as well as altered demographics and social
structures. Race debates have continued all over the world, especially
in the wake of large-scale migration (both forced and voluntary).
Previously ‘unacceptable’ writings by homosexuals, Blacks or Asians
are now a significant component of ‘English’ literature and reflects
changing attitudes to gay sexuality, sickness and racial identity.
Writers have been more explicit in describing the body, and women
writers in particular have broken the taboos on female sexuality and
desire (the work of Jeanette Winterson is an excellent example).
The present age is marked also by an increasing consciousness of the
economic inequalities in the world, and writers have also functioned
as social commentators in many cases. The rise of prestigious literary
awards has also altered the status of literature, where the influence
of mass media and advertising is increasingly visible. The present
age in literature draws heavily upon the social contexts of
multicultural societies and globalization, where First World cities
like London or New York now have populations from practically
every country and culture on earth. This is reflected in the large
number of writers whose origins are not truly English: Kazuo
Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Timothy Mo and Hanif Kureishi, to
mention a few (often termed ‘diasporic literature’, referring to their
dislocation from one country to England or the First World). In fact,
The Present 377
it could be argued that just as Third World labour and intellect has
enabled First World industries (the software industry comes to mind
as an example here) to flourish, the arrival of such diasporic and
migrant writers has added to the wealth, range and tradition of
English literature, making it more cosmopolitan.
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a critical approach and philosophy that has influenced
visual arts, architecture and literature from the 1950s. It refuses to accept
any ‘grand’ or unified theory that supposedly explains everything. It thus
rejects Freudianism, which saw everything in terms of sexuality, and
Marxism, which reduced everything to economics. Postmodernism
prioritizes the local and the native over the universal. It believes that
human knowledge is always fragmentary and limited. There can never be
‘objective’ knowledge because the structures that enable knowing are
derived from subjective conditions like human emotions. It offers fragments
and contingency, fluidity and multiples in place of fixity, completeness
and unitariness. In literature it is marked by a tendency to question the
legitimacy of the narrative itself, the refusal to offer any universal truths
and multiple points of view.
Medical science and genetic engineering break new ground and

explore the basis of human behaviour and diseases. Controversial
technologies – from organ transplantation to cloning – become
standard subjects of debate. Environmental depletion gives cause
for major concern. The increased use of psychotropic drugs (the
‘hippie’ generation) and the quest for ‘spiritual’ peace by any means
through the 1970s produced some excellent literature on either side
of the Atlantic. Ethnic strife, civil war and genocides continue in
various parts of the world. Exploitation of resources from ‘Third
World’ nations, increasing ‘aid’ from developed nations and rising
poverty and suffering in Africa, South America and other places
mark the 1980s and 1990s. Children continue to die of starvation
and poor health in many countries. International agencies control
economic policies even as transnational organizations seek to develop
alternate modes of aid and infrastructure building outside
government work.
378 The Modern Age
FICTION
Features of Contemporary Fiction
• Concern with history, both local and mythic
• Interested in the narrative modes of both history and fiction, with

representation
• Consciously multicultural, especially after the 1990s
• Experiments with form and style, sometimes producing extremely dense

works (Beckett, Fowles)
• The intricate relationship between narratives, the self and reality is a central
concern
• An anti-establishment tone in many works, resulting in the return of parodies

and satires
• Self-reflexive, calling attention to the craft of writing and representation,

often influenced by critical theory
• Adapted multiple registers and discourses – from mass media, movies,

slogans, literature, songs and street slang
• Large number of diasporic, immigrant writers emerge, lending a different

‘colour’ to ‘English’ literature.
British fiction after the 1970s has continued some of the main
concerns of the previous era, even though many of the writers started
their careers in the heyday of modernism.
An author who began writing in the high modernist era but who
continues to resist classification is Samuel Beckett (1906–89). Known
primarily as a dramatist, Beckett also produced a considerable body
of fiction. Some of the most extraordinary prose passages occur in
Beckett’s fiction. His novels are detailed and complex explorations
of human consciousness, as exemplified in this passage from Murphy
(1938):
Murphy’s mind pictured itself as a large hollow sphere, hermetically
closed to the universe without. This was not an impoverishment,
for it excluded nothing that it did not itself contain. Nothing ever
The Present 379
had been, was or would be in the universe outside it but was already
present as virtual, or actual, or virtual rising into actual, or actual
falling into virtual, in the universe inside it.
First influenced by James Joyce (Beckett worked with Joyce over
Finnegans Wake) and his narrative devices, Beckett later sought a
more spare and minimalist prose. He then shifted to writing in
French, producing a famous trilogy – Molloy (1951), Malone Dies
(1951), and The Unnameable (1953) – in that language. Seeking a
language and style that could capture the most intense experiences
of the human mind, Beckett’s work became increasingly obsessed
with the limits of language. In Murphy, the protagonist sees himself
reflected in the eyes of a catatonic patient. The search for limits,
oblivion and sanity in an increasingly un-understandable world
become obsessive concerns in Beckett. Beckett’s concern with the
limits of expression was mainly about how the self can represent
itself. Is there a language of the self? This is Beckett’s abiding concern
in his later works. Postmodernism, as critics have demonstrated (for
instance, Linda Hutcheon’s Poetics of Postmodernism, 1988), is
obsessed with representation and its limits. Beckett’s language
explores precisely this condition. In The Unnamable, the narrator seeks
the phrase that will signal the end of his story and his life. In Company,
the narrator cannot bring himself to address his self as ‘I’ and refers
to himself as ‘he’, suggesting an alienation of self from language.
Voices in Beckett are crucial elements – they stand for the self’s
dialogue (internal), external reality and the narrative itself. Beckett’s
abiding concern with silence and speech is illustrated in much of his
fiction. In Company somebody imagines somebody else who imagines
a voice in the dark. The plot is really the relation between listener,
voice and imaginer. As the ‘plot’, such as it is, progresses we lose
track of which voice belongs to whom. Slowly narratives merge,
regressing into each other. Here is an example from Company.
… words are coming to an end. With every inane word a little nearer
to the last. And how the fable too. The fable of one with you in the
dark. The fable of one fabling of one with you in the dark. And how
better in the end labour lost and silence. And you as you always
were.
Another writer who is concerned with the fictionality of history and
the historical dimensions of fiction-writing is Graham Swift (1949– ).
380 The Modern Age
Swift’s Waterland (1983) breaks new ground in postmodern narrative

modes in mixing local legend, history and fiction. Tom Crick, a teacher
of history at a school, stops ‘teaching’ history. Instead he begins to
recount the stories of the land they live in – the flat fens of
Cambridgeshire, land reclaimed from water, Waterland. Crick’s wife,
Mary, at the edge of derangement, his brother Freddie, long dead,
are all ‘revived’ through the stories Crick brings up. Waterland is about
the materiality of stories, of how they constitute our very reality: “I
wanted all along … History itself, the Grand Narrative, the filler of
vacuums, the dispeller of fears of the dark… .” History is never
straight-forward or linear, as Crick warns: “Do not fall into the
illusion that history is a well-disciplined and unflagging column
marching unswervingly into the future.” The distinction between
global and local histories collapses as Crick speaks. There appears to
be a correlation between personal-familial history (the Cricks and
the Atkinsons) and the macrocosm of the world (the fens, continents).
The reality of people lies in the representations of people. The stories
people tell about themselves make up their reality, their meaning.
We cannot hope to find complete meaning or truth: instead what
we have is a series of representations of truth. This postmodern move
in Waterland is summed up as the reality of stories and stories of
reality. Further, neither history nor stories have absolute authority
over truth. They are both temporary, fragmented, limited and
repetitive. Memory and ‘definitive’ history are both narratives,
reconstructions rather than actual experiences of reality. Reality,
Swift demonstrates, is the effect of narrative and representation.
Swift’s other work, Shuttlecock (1981) also dealt with issues of
narrative as a man seeks to reconstruct his father’s experiences during
the Second World War.
John Fowles (1966–2005), one of the most complex narrators today,
burst on the scene with The Collector (1963), whose success enabled
him to give up his job and concentrate on writing. This novel about
an obsessive and anti-social man, Clegg, who kidnaps a girl because
he loves her, dealt with madness and the problems of narration.
Clegg keeps a diary justifying his actions, and the resultant narrative
– especially the third part – is a fine exploration of the mind of a
sociopath. The theme is extended in The Magus (1965, revised 1977)
where Nicholas Urfe is unable to distinguish between reality and
The Present 381
the games he plays with Conchis. The plays the two men enact – of
Nazi occupation, for instance – assume the status of truth and reality.
Identities shift and blur in this novel, which was rapidly assumed to
be a fictional account of psychoanalysis itself. Fowles’ The French
Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) is surely his best known work (it was made
into a film, scripted by Harold Pinter, starring Meryl Streep and
Jeremy Irons and nominated for several Academy awards). The story
of Sarah Woodruff, a governess, and Charles Smithson is set in
Victorian England. It explores deceit and hypocrisy, especially sexual
(it is widely accepted that Sarah had been seduced by a French sailor,
a story that turns out to be untrue), and existential angst. The novel’s
two endings – the lovers unite in the penultimate chapter and the
story is retold in the final chapter, in which they separate – makes it
ambivalent. The narrative ploys, where the teller of the love story
claims he has no idea of what the characters will do, make it an
extremely self-reflexive novel because we are aware that the narrator
is constructing a story for us to read and believe, even as he questions
whether any of it is real.
Scottish Muriel Spark (1918–2006) shot into literary prominence with
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1962), a tale about a school teacher
with fascist sympathies. A prolific writer and critic, of her later works
The Mandelbaum Gate (1965) and Loitering with Intent (1981) stand
out. Her Memento Mori (1959), a novel about old people, is a sensitive
tale.
Margaret Drabble (1939– ) has tried her hand at criticism, realist
fiction, screenplays, biographies and experimental narrative. Her
fiction, right from A Summer Bird Cage (1963), about sibling rivalry,
explores the social and political concerns of the age. Thus debates
about women’s rights, motherhood and identity are central to her
fiction. In The Millstone (1966), Drabble examined the modern
‘intellectual’ woman in the story of Rosamund Stacey. The Ice Age
(1977) looked at the attempts of a middle-aged but beautiful woman
to negotiate between her family’s demands and her needs for
emotional sustenance from her new relationship. In The Seven Sisters
(2002), Drabble shows how seven women, each equally lonely and
dissatisfied with her life, undertake a travel during the course of
which they discover several things about themselves.
382 The Modern Age
Beryl Bainbridge (1934– ) is known mainly for her novels about real
historical events. Her The Birthday Boys (1991) was the story of
Captain Scott's Antarctic expedition. Her Every Man for Himself
(1996) was set on the Titanic. The Crimean War formed the context
for Master Georgie (1998). Her latest novel, According to Queeney
(2001) takes Dr Samuel Johnson’s affair with Hester Thrale as its
main story.
An exciting chronicler of the postmodern (and future) worlds is JG

Ballard (1930– ). His 1984 autobiographical Empire of the Sun (adapted
by Steven Spielberg) was an account of his war experiences in Japan.
In Crash (1973), Ballard explored the mechanistic and speed-driven
age, showing how contemporary culture attains a kind of psycho-
sexual thrill from crashing cars. Vaughan, described as ‘the nightmare
angel of the expressways’, heads a group that re-enacts celebrity car
crashes for thrills. David Cronenberg’s film adaptation became as
controversial as the novel. Dystopic visions mark Ballard’s work in
his The Drowned World (1962; about global warming and subsequent
flooding).
Iain M Banks achieved notoriety with his horrific psychological
thriller The Wasp Factory (1984). This novel, about maladjusted and
psychotic children, is an attack on organized religion and its
delusions. He is now known mainly for his science fiction-fantasy
tales, espeically the series set in a pan-galaxy civilization called
‘Culture’.
Jeanette Winterson (1959– ) is a writer whose novelistic experiments
and outspoken comments on her sexuality have attracted controversy
since her debut Oranges are not the Only Fruit (1985). A brilliant
juxtaposition of the Bible with 1960s England, sexuality and
education, liberalism and social hypocrisy, the novel deals with a
girl’s growing up. The quest theme – central to the old Romances
(see Section One) – is woven into Jeanette’s love affair with a girl.
Winterson’s strategy of placing herself as a character in her novel
was a daring narrative experiment and located her within the frame
of postmodernism where narrative and external reality become
indistinguishable. Sexing the Cherry (1989) and Written on the Body
(1992) both made similar narrative innovations. In the latter,
especially, Winterson treats the body as a text. This move blurs the
The Present 383
Disaster/Catastrophe/Apocalyptic Fiction
In the 20th century, the events of World War II and the increasing threat of
nuclear disaster and concomitant environmental death inspired dozens of
novels which might be grouped into this category. In many cases these
novels are set in worlds/ages after a nuclear war or biological disaster and
take the form of popular fiction. Many also take inspiration from Biblical
writings on doomsday, apocalypse and Revelation. These are usually
dystopian in theme, though a few extend hopes of a regenerated earth.
Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), where the story is set in a plague-
ravaged world, was one of the first examples of the genre. Nevil Shute’s On
the Beach (1957) was one of the most famous, and moving, examples of
post-World War II disaster novels. In Kurt Vonnegut’s nightmarish Cat’s
Cradle (1963) all water bodies on the earth freeze. JG Ballard’s The Crystal
World (1966) is the story of a virus that freezes anything it comes in contact
with. An earlier Ballard novel, The Drowned World (1962) anticipates the
problem environmentalists say will happen soon: global warming, the
melting of the polar ice-caps and the resultant flooding of the earth. Other
versions of disaster fiction include the popular The Day of the Triffids (1951)
by John Wyndham about poisonous tentacle-ridden plants . Wyndham’s
The Kraken Wakes (1953) is a novel about alien invasion (the ‘Kraken’ is
derived from Tennyson’s poem, The Kraken).
PD James’ The Children of Men (1992) was set in a post-biological disaster

era, where humans are unable to breed any more. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx
and Crake (2003) explored the effects of a plague and the possibilities of
human cloning.
reality/illusion, body/mind differences. Winterson’s thinly veiled

portraits of her lovers, such as that of Pat Kavanagh (wife of novelist
Julian Barnes) within her texts make it much more difficult to locate
where the novel ends and the publicity material begins. Novel and
autobiography merge seamlessly, if messily, here (Winterson claimed
that she herself was her favourite living author!). Like poststructuralist
theory, Winterson’s novels depict multiple selves, shifting identities,
unstable ‘centres’ (in both society and self), the simultaneity of past
and present. Playful and serious, political and anti-moralistic, satirical
and mocking – Winterson’s work defies classification because of its
parodic and self-conscious language and forms.
384 The Modern Age
Gay and Lesbian Writing

If EM Forster suppressed publication of his gay novel Maurice, the 1980s
and 1990s has seen an explosion of gay writing. Alan Hollinghurst’s gay
novel, The Line of Beauty (2004), explores the scene of aristocratic and
conservative London through the perspective of a young gay, Nick Guest.
The novel provides an insight into the way homosexuality was perceived in
1980s London, even among the so-called liberals. Mixed into this significant
gay novel are issues of class and race. Hanif Kureishi’s fiction (and plays)
explore the intersection of race and sexual preference in immigrant
populations in 1980s London. Sarah Waters (1966– ), who sets her fiction
in Victorian England, has won the Somerset Maugham award for Lesbian
and Gay Fiction for Affinity (1999).
David Lodge (1935– ) is a distinguished critic and novelist whose

campus novels have contributed greatly to the satiric tradition and
to a debunking of the aura around university academics. His first
major success was The British Museum is Falling Down (1965), the
story of a Catholic research scholar who is afraid of starting a family.
Changing Places (1975) was the first of Lodge’s campus trilogy. Philip
Swallow and Morris Zapp, two academicians from either side of the
Atlantic are part of an exchange programme, which results in a
bigger (ex)change – of politics, ideologies and wives. In Nice Work
(1988) industrialist Vic Wilcox enters into a relationship with a fire-
breathing Marxist-feminist Dr Robyn Penrose. His genuine disbelief
and puzzlement at her interpretations – she sees phallic symbols
and sexism where he can see nothing – was a satire on the over-
indulgence of ‘Theory’ by academics in the 1980s.
Son of celebrated author Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis (1949– ) has
been at the centre of controversy for his fiction and his personal life
(his battle with Julian Barnes, for example). His range has been
incredible, as also his stylistic virtuosity. In Dead Babies (1975), he
created a surreal world of hallucinogenic drug-ridden people, whose
visions and reality overlap and lead to chaos, arson and deaths. In
London Fields (1989), he created a vision of the apocalypse, even as
a murderer and his ‘murderee’ meet in London city. Nicola Six plots
her own murder and Samson Young, a writer suffering from
leukemia, hopes to document the event. In Money (1984), a crucial
The Present 385
character is one ‘Martin Amis’. John Self, a successful movie maker

ropes in people to play characters that are completely at odds with
their beliefs. The plot’s self-reflexive nature means that it is never
very clear to the reader whether Self really intends to commit suicide.
In Time’s Arrow (1991), the narrative and time run backwards. The
Information (1995) is about literary rivalry and is supposedly based
on Amis’ feud with Julian Barnes. In Night Train (1997), reality and
dreams converge as Mike Hoolihan, a police officer investigating a
death, sees the dead woman (Jennifer) in her dreams, even as a night
train thunders past her home. Amis’ language, in London Fields and
elsewhere, crackles and races along. Even if his plots are a shade too
contrived, his fiction is marked by his biting prose. Poetic passages
burst out from his writing as seen in this extract from Night Train.
Suicide is the night train, speeding your way to darkness. You won’t
get there so quick, not by natural means. You buy your ticket and
you climb on board. That ticket costs everything you have. But it’s
just one-way. This train takes you into the night, and leaves you
there. It’s the night train.
Ian McEwan (1948– ) opened his writing career with an
extraordinarily grisly novel, The Cement Garden (1978). Four children
cement the body of their mother, who has just died (the father has
also died recently). They then begin to live on their own, with the
two elder siblings starting an incestuous relationship, and the younger
one getting into transvestitism. In 1997 his Enduring Love, a novel
about obsessive love, attracted critical acclaim. A simple enough event
explodes into catastrophe. Joe Rose, a science writer, joins a bunch
of people trying to bring down a runaway hot air balloon carrying a
man and his son. During this event, a deranged man (suffering from
a strange syndrome, where the patient believes s/he is the object of
affection of somebody from a higher social class) notices Joe and
falls in love with him. He won the Booker in 1998 for Amsterdam.
Three men’s dealings with the husband of a woman – who had been
at some point the lover of the men – constitutes the basic plot. The
novel is a saga of guilt and betrayal written in McEwan’s now famous
precise prose. Paranoia and guilt are McEwan’s constant themes,
and each of his characters suffers from some form of derangement
or the other (in an interview he said most of his fans are ‘fizzing and
popping with all kinds of lonely madness’).
386 The Modern Age
Fay Weldon (1933– ) is known primarily as a feminist writer and for

some fairly controversial novels (she has 20 novels, in addition to
short fiction, TV movies and other writing) dealing with
claustrophobic patriarchy. Her very first novel The Fat Woman’s Joke
(1967) received very good reviews. Her most controversial work is
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983). Ruth discovers that her husband
(Bobbo) has betrayed her. Ruth has been slaving away to keep the
family and home going. Her husband, an extraordinarily irritating
man, is indifferent to her. Ruth then plots an elaborate plan to take
revenge on Bobbo and his lover, Mary Fisher, incidentally a writer
of romance fiction. Ruth first goes after her own desires (which
includes undergoing a series of cosmetic surgical procedures to look
like Mary), before setting out to ruin Bobbo and Mary. Having
discovered that she can do a great deal on her own, she tells Nurse
Hopkins in a feminist comment:
Out there in the world … everything is possible and exciting. We
can be different women: we can tap our own energies and the
energies of women like us – women shut away in homes performing
sometimes menial tasks, sometimes graceful women trapped by
love and duty into lives they never meant, and driven by necessity
into jobs they loathe and which slowly kill them.
World War I and Siegfried Sassoon serve as the central themes in
Regeneration (1991), part of a trilogy by Pat Barker (1943– ). It is one
of the more significant war novels of the 20th century. Barker’s interest
is in the psychological damage suffered by soldiers in war. Neuroses,
hallucinations, obsessive paranoia have scarred the soldiers. The more
sensitive among them, Sassoon being a prime example, suffer more
than others. It is based on an incident in Sassoon’s life. Having been
commended for his bravery on the battle field Sassoon suddenly
began to protest against the war in 1917. He had to be treated for
neuroses. Other characters in the novel include Wilfred Owen and
Robert Graves, also well known war poets. Billy Prior, a central
character in the trilogy, appears first in Regeneration as a soldier who
has been traumatized into silence by the war. The Eye in the Door
(1993) and The Ghost Road (1995), the other two volumes of the
trilogy, star Prior.
The Present 387
Among the satirists Julian Barnes (1946– ) stands out. Barnes’

Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), with passages of great lyrical beauty, is
another example of the postmodern British novel. Geoffrey
Brathwaite, a retired Englishman, is fascinated by accounts of the
existence of a stuffed parrot on the desk of the legendary French
writer Gustave Flaubert (creator of Madame Bovary). He seeks to
unravel the true version of this story, even as he speculates on
Flaubert’s creative processes. The entire novel is a study of creative
writing and truth-telling. The narrative is mixed up with multiple
chronologies and accounts of Flaubert’s life, and the author’s own
writings and annotations. The fact that Flaubert created multiple
accounts of Madame Bovary itself makes the entire narrative suspect.
Like much postmodern fiction, Flaubert’s Parrot also resists any direct
or ‘correct’ interpretation since every narrative element seems to
undercut another one, leaving us guessing (a parallel would be
Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49). Barnes’ other works, A
History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (1989) and England, England
(1998) are also postmodern narratives. The former, for instance, has
elements of the novel interspersed with what appear to be non-
fictional essays, all dealing with Christian history in completely
irreverent tones. Each chapter has one central character, and classical
paintings, literary and theological allusions and stories are
interwoven into the fabric of the ‘novel’.
A case of the film that makes the book a celebrated text is surely
the story of AS Byatt’s novel Possession (1990). Byatt (1936– ) wrote
several novels dealing with sibling relationships – perhaps
provoked by her own troubled relations with her half-sister, the
novelist, Margaret Drabble – family issues, love and domesticity.
In Possession, two literary scholars, Roland Michell and Maud
Bailey, uncover the love story of Victorian poet Randolph Ash and
the mysterious Christabel LaMotte. Past and present come together
as Michell and Bailey get drawn into a literary whodunit, even as
their personal lives alter shapes and configurations. Knowledge
and evolution, sexuality and literary creation all come together in
this saga, written in a singularly lyrical (if extended) style. Byatt
takes the opportunity to meditate on the literary process, the
imagination and inspiration, while also discussing Victorian
theories of cognition and knowledge.
388 The Modern Age
Malcolm Bradbury (1932–2000), professor, critic and writer, satirized

university campuses in his darkly funny Eating People is Wrong (1959)
and The History Man (1975). Manipulative professors, syllabi and
funding, campus politics and relationships are all lampooned in
Bradbury’s works, which, alongside David Lodge’s fiction, constitute
an important critique of the British education system and
contemporary academic ‘research’ and teaching. Contemporary
critical approaches like structuralism came in for scrutiny in
Bradbury’s short fiction in Who Do You Think You Are? (1976) and
the novel Rates of Exchange (1983).
Irvine Welsh (1958– ) writes fiction that disturbs more conservative

readers with its language (street slang, four-letter words, obscenities),
themes (drugs, violence, abuse) and form (surreal, hypnotic). In 1993
he published Trainspotting which made him an instant celebrity. A
tale of heroin-addiction and mindless cruelty, Trainspotting also used
multiple linguistic registers – from Scottish English to standard
English. A lot of imaginary conversations recall the stream-of-
consciousness novel. Later works like Filth, Glue, The Marabou Stork
Nightmare recall the fiction of the American drug scene (especially
William Burroughs).
Angela Carter (1940–92), like Welsh, writes fiction that may be
classified as ‘black comedy’ about sexual and drug-related issues and
personalities. Her writing is a mix of the gothic and fantasy fiction.
The Magic Toyshop (1967) marked her foray into explorations of
female sexuality and identity – an area she was to be famous in,
especially in the 1990s among feminist students of English literature.
In The Bloody Chamber and other Stories (1979) she revised classic
fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood, Beauty and the Beast and
others for their sexism and cultural prejudices. In The Passion of New
Eve (1977) she examined gender relations in great depth in the story
of a man who is surgically altered by a feminist. She portrays the
conflicts of gender and class in terms of the violence these perpetrate
on human bodies in general and women’s bodies in particular.
Doris Lessing (1919– ), winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature,
lived for a time in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) and her fiction
continues to explore the lives of Britishers in Africa. The Grass is
Singing (1950), her first novel, embodied many of the issues of
The Present 389
racialized Africa. Mary, a white woman in an unhappy marriage,

has an affair with one of the farm’s black servants. The sterile lives
of Mary and her husband Dick becomes symbolic of the collapse of
white lives in Africa as a whole. Lessing’s most complex work to
date is The Golden Notebook (1962), ostensibly a diary kept by a writer,
Anna Wulf. This maps the trauma, triumphs and politics of Wulf’s
life and career as she struggles to make sense of her past. The novel
provides political comments on communism, the ‘new woman’ and
sexuality, and has often been used by feminists as a statement
supporting feminism (though Lessing has, controversially, rejected
feminism). Among her science fiction works, Briefing for a Descent
into Hell (1971) stands out.
20 th century British writing has been greatly enriched by the
contribution of writers from different cultures. Multicultural Britain
now has a literary tradition that boasts of David Dabydeen, Salman
Rushdie, Timothy Mo, Hanif Kureishi and others. The Man Booker
Prize has often gone to people of different races and cultures and
geographical origins. Diasporic or second-generation authors have
offered many different visions of English culture, even as London
becomes (like New York) a cosmopolitan city.
David Dabydeen (1955– ), in novels such as Our Lady of Demerara
(2004) proposes that African American, British and Caribbean
diasporas constitute each other in special ways. In The Intended (1991)
a young Asian boy has to cope with being alone in unfriendly, even
deceitful London. Disappearance (1993) was a masterly exploration
of the relationship between a Guyanese man and his elderly white
landlady in a small English village.
The intricate adjustments that people of African and Caribbean
origins have to make to live in contemporary England become central
issues in the fiction of Caryl Phillips (1958– ). In Phillips’ The Final
Passage, he explores a woman’s life in 1950s London. Phillips turns
to 19th century history in Cambridge (1991) set in a plantation in the
Caribbean.
Buchi Emecheta (1944– ), of Nigerian descent, turns the focus on to
issues of women and race in contemporary London, while also
writing fiction about her home country Nigeria (her 1982 Destination
390 The Modern Age
Biafra dealt with the horrific civil war there). One of the most poignant
explorations of how black women are treated within the family –
most black writers portray their families as patriarchal and their
husbands as sexist – is Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen (1974). Here
Adah, who struggles to keep the family together, has to leave her
husband when he burns her manuscript – his attempt at silencing
the woman’s voice. A deeply disturbing account of the East-West
encounter, from the perspective of the blacks, is The Rape of Shavi
(1983) in which a group of white aircrash survivors descend on an
African village (Shavi). One of the white men rapes a local girl and
she is infected with syphilis. A young man from Shavi goes to England
and returns hoping to acquire power through the new technology
he has brought back with him. He marries the raped girl, gets syphilis
and passes it on to his other wives. The plot describes the impact of
western culture and technology on native cultures.
The literary sensation of the later decades of the 20th century, JK
Rowling’s Harry Potter series may have revived the fortunes of the
publishing industry in the age of the Internet and deteriorating
reading habits. The story of the boy wizard has all the ingredients of
a popular fantasy: adventure, quest, magic, evil and action. Set in
Hogwarts, the ‘school of magic’, the series explores an age-old theme:
the battle of good and evil. Rowling’s inventiveness with new animals,
devices and settings makes for a good read, even though its originality
is quite suspect. The Harry Potter phenomenon is also important for
another reason: it is the largest marketing event in publishing/
literature in the 20th century. Websites (the official website is from
Warner Brothers, with its interest in cinema and other media),
merchandise, even academic books on the subject have created a
cult and much of what makes Potter is this publicity machinery.
Rowling’s work has been either hated or loved by its readers. It has
occasionally been compared to Tolkien’s epic, The Lord of the Rings,
while others have dismissed it as a poor work made famous through
brilliant marketing. Yet others have expressed anxiety over the
emphasis on magic and evil. None of the themes are, of course, new.
The battle of good and evil is as old as literature. The story of an
oppressed orphan is an old theme too, as are the fable elements of
magic and monsters. While it is a racy read, without a doubt, its
vision – in comparison with The Lord of the Rings – is debatable.
The Present 391
POETRY
Features of Contemporary Poetry
• A return to primitivism and ‘primordial’ forces
• An attempt to rethink the nature/culture relation in the post-industrial age
• Some poets like Roy Fisher reject abstract expressions/images
• Political edge to poetry by women
• Postmodernism influences form and tone – self-conscious, witty and self-

reflexive.
Rejecting both the modernists’ abstract philosophizing and

experimentation with form and the deliberate commonness of the
Larkin kind, contemporary poetry, from the 1970s, has moved along
various lines. There is an anxiety that poetry has exhausted all possible
forms. Cyberculture has enabled new experimentation with
hypertexts, thus providing a new form.
A raw, violent primitivism is visible in Ted Hughes (1930–98), Poet
Laureate of England from 1984 until his death. Turning away from
the urbanism of the moderns, Hughes’ early work is rooted in nature.
However, Hughes did not have the Wordsworthean view of nature.
The nature found in The Hawk in the Rain (1957), Crow (1970) and
other early poems, is a violent, barbaric and blood-ridden one.
Dismemberment, blood and violent mutilation mark Hughes’ work.
Here is ‘Snowdrop’:
Now is the globe shrunk tight
Round the mouse’s dulled wintering heart
Weasel and crow, as if moulded in brass,
Move through an outer darkness
Not in their right minds,
With the other deaths. She, too, pursues her ends,
Brutal as the stars of this month,
Her pale head heavy as metal.
Here nature and its creatures are visualized almost entirely in terms
of their power (or lack of it), brutality and capacity for violence.
Here is one of his most famous poems, ‘Hawk Roosting’.
392 The Modern Age
I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.

Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.
[…………………….]
My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot
Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly –

I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads –
There is no attempt made to capture the beauty of the creatures in
any of Hughes. Animals assume the role of mythic creatures. Birthday
Letters (1998), Hughes’ last collection, was meant to be an explanation
of his troubled relationship with Sylvia Plath, the American poet
who eventually committed suicide.
Donald Davie (1922–95), poet and distinguished critic, is often treated
as a part of the ‘Movement’ poets. He writes a more philosophical
and abstract poetry. He chose rural landscapes more than anything
else, and perhaps wrote more semi-urban and rural poetry than most
20th century British or Irish poets. He is also more Romantic than
most poets of his generation. Nostalgia, memory and longing mark
Davie’s work. Here is an example from ‘Time Passing, Beloved’.
Time passing, and the memories of love
Coming back to me, carissima, no more mockingly
Than ever before; time passing, unslackening,
Unhastening, steadily; and no more
Bitterly, beloved, the memories of love
Coming into the shore.
How will it end? Time passing and our passages of love

As ever, beloved, blind
As ever before; time binding, unbinding
About us; and yet to remember
Never less chastening, nor the flame of love
Less like an amber.
The Present 393
What will become of us? Time

Passing, beloved, and we in a sealed
Assurance unassailed
By memory. How can it end,
This siege of a shore that no misgivings have steeled,
No doubts defend?
Roy Fisher (1930– ) wrote some of the best landscape poetry in the
20th century. His most important volume is City (1961), a prose-poetry
collection. The images are simple and direct, there is very little
abstraction (unlike the modernists) or attempt to convert every image
into a loaded metaphor or symbol (unlike Yeats). Here is an example
from City.
Outside the Grand Hotel, a long-boned carrot-haired girl with
glasses, loping along, and with strips of bright colour, rich, silky
green and blue, in her soft clothes. For a person made of such scraps
she was beautiful.
Fisher attempts, one suspects, to keep urban dirt and corruption out
of his poetry. There are very few Eliotesque descriptions of the city’s
seedy sides. On the rare occasion when Fisher does describe dirt or
decay it is with a sense of revulsion. Fisher has stated his preference
for poetry that is about sense-perceptions, and this is clearly seen in
poems like ‘Matrix’, or even in the earlier ‘Seven Attempted Moves’:
A cast concrete basin
with a hole in the bottom
Empty but for
a drift of black grit
Some feathers some hair
some grey paper,
Nothing else for the puzzled face to see
Echoes of Philip Larkin are clearly discernable here, and Fisher has
been compared to Thomas Hardy for his evocation of the landscape.
Tom Raworth (1938– ) is a prolific writer with over 40 volumes of

poetry and prose. He was first influenced by Surrealism and
American poets like Robert Creeley. Raworth has experimented with
many forms of poetry – from ‘found poems’ to long, didactic
narratives and poems that work alongside visual materials or music.
394 The Modern Age
There are some word-games and a greater degree of allusion –

especially to other poets’ work – in Raworth. There is also a tendency,
especially in his experimental work, to present short, aphoristic
poems that are drawn from everyday life. ‘Tracking (notes)’ is a good
example.
god is the space between thoughts, no, that’s simplistic. some-
times you can’t understand the words but you know the
medicine is right.
Fleur Adcock (1934– ), a poet of New Zealand origin, deals with the
relationship between men and women. A cynical tone informs her
poetry on the subject, which is usually located in domestic or family
settings. Caustic satire and a biting wit mark some of her best work.
Scatological images and an undercurrent of violence mark some of
her work. ‘Against Coupling’, a poem that supports masturbation
over sexual intercourse, is perhaps her best known work:
I write in praise of the solitary act:
[…………………..]
I advise you, then, to embrace it without
Encumbrance. No need to set the scene,
Dress up (or undress), make speeches.
Five minutes of solitude are
Enough – in the bath, or to fill
That gap between the Sunday papers and lunch.
Dry wit is an excellent weapon in Adcock’s hands, as she turns
notions of romantic love and pleasure into painful, unrewarding
moments of trouble, as in ‘Smokers for Celibacy’ where she suggests
that, in view of the dangers of AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases,
it is more advisable to give up sex rather than smoking. Adcock writes:
We can’t see much point in avoiding emphysema at sixty-five
If that is the age at which you’ve conspicuously failed to arrive.
She suggests that, for women, it is better to prefer smoking over sex
because, between ‘two objects of cylindrical shape’, the cigarette has
never been convicted of rape.
RS Thomas (1913–2000), one of the most significant Welsh voices
since Dylan Thomas, actually belongs to an earlier generation in terms
of chronology. Ordained as a priest, Thomas became a major
The Present 395
spokesperson for Welsh cultural nationalism in his later years. The

landscape of the Welsh communities form Thomas’ favourite subject
in his early work (The Stones of the Field, 1946; Song at the Year’s
Turning, 1955). A good example would be his poem ‘A Peasant’:
Iago Prytherch his name, though, be it allowed,
Just an ordinary man of the bald Welsh hills,
Who pens a few sheep in a gap of cloud.
Docking mangels, chipping the green skin
From the yellow bones with a half-witted grin
Of satisfaction, or churning the crude earth
To a stiff sea of clods that glint in the wind –
So are his days spent, his spittled mirth
Rarer than the sun that cracks the cheeks
Of the gaunt sky perhaps once in a week.
And then at night see him fixed in his chair
Motionless, except when he leans to gob in the fire.
[…………..]
Yet this is your prototype, who, season by season
Against siege of rain and the wind’s attrition,
Preserves his stock …
[………….]
Remember him, then, for he, too, is a winner of wars,
Enduring like a tree under the curious stars.
The transformation of the peasant into a heroic figure (as the
penultimate line suggests) indicates Thomas’ politics: the countryside
over the city, the farmer over the banker. His Welsh cultural
nationalism often results in poems like these:
We’ve nothing vast to offer you, no deserts
Except the waste of thought
Forming from mind erosion;
No canyons where the pterodactyl’s wing
Falls like a shadow.
the hills are fine, of course,
Bearded with water to suggest age
And pocked with cavarns,
One being Arthur’s dormitory;
He and his knights are the bright ore
396 The Modern Age
That seams our history,

But shame has kept them late in bed.
(‘A Welshman to any Tourist’)
The gentle self-mockery serves another purpose: of drawing attention
to the land’s history, and its ongoing battles to retain its identity
against assimilation under the ‘British’ label. ‘A Welsh Testament’ is
a more direct assertion of his roots and identity:
All right, I was Welsh. Does it matter?
I spoke a tongue that was passed on
To me in the place I happened to be,
A place huddled between grey walls
Of cloud for at least half the year.
My word for heaven was not yours.
The word for hell had a sharp edge
Put on it by the hand of the wind
Honing, honing with a shrill sound
Day and night. Nothing that Glyn Dwr
Knew was armour against the rain’s
Missiles. What was descent from him?
Even God had a Welsh name:

He spoke to him in the old language;
He was to have a peculiar care
For the Welsh people. History showed us
He was too big to be nailed to the wall
Of a stone chapel, yet still we crammed him
Between the boards of a black book.
The later volumes (like Mass for Hard Times 1992) have more
metaphysical ‘conceits’ and themes, even though his politics
remained central to them.
RS Thomas’ more famous contemporary, from Ireland, is Seamus

Heaney (1939– ) – both were nominated for the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1995, Heaney won. An avowed supporter of Irish
nationalism, Heaney’s work is set in Derry, the town of his childhood.
His ‘Blackberry-Picking’ captures a typical day:
The Present 397
Late August, given heavy rain and sun

For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.
His later works, which have won him wide acclaim, are often
meditations on language and meaning. The strife that haunts Irish
towns even today, as Ireland seeks an identity separate from England,
permeates many Heaney poems (‘Requiem for the Croppies’). He
eventually declared: ‘the end of art is peace’ (‘The Harvest Bow’). A
sense of the religious is also visible in much of his work. Some
extraordinary juxtaposition of images make Heaney’s poetry both
startling and refreshing. A good example would be his famous
‘Digging’, from his celebrated collection Death of a Naturalist (1966):
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests: snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
398 The Modern Age
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
[…………………………..]
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
Geoffrey Hill (1932– ), an experimenter with form and theme, is richly

allusive and elliptical in his work. The result has been that he is often
ignored – like Ezra Pound – for being difficult. He may best be
described as ‘postmodernist’ for the way in which he renders
common things strange. His fragmented syntax and poem structure
in volumes like Canaan (1996) also serve to make the reader aware of
the poem’s form – a feature of most self-reflexive and self-conscious
postmodern writing (in both fiction and poetry). Hill uses multiple
registers – traditional poetic styles, the language of advertisements,
myth, religious images (especially in works like Mercian Hymns) and
political themes. Hill is also concerned with the victims of war and
genocide (in poems like the early ‘Two Formal Elegies for the Jews in
Europe’), and has often addressed this theme in his essays and
lectures. History has been a recurring theme in his work, as can be
seen in ‘Of Commerce and Society’.
History can be scraped clean of its old price.
Engrossed in the cold blood of sacrifice,
The provident and self-healing gods

Destroy only to save. Well-stocked with foods,
Enlarged and deep-oiled, America
Detects music, apprehends the day-star
The Present 399
Where, sensitive and half-under a cloud,

Europe muddles her dreaming, is loud
And critical beneath the varied domes
Resonant with tribute and with commerce.
In another poem he described Britain as a nation with ‘so many
memorials but no memory’. An elegiac tone informs much of Hill’s
poetry, especially when he is dealing with myth or history (‘Requiem
for the Plantagenet Kings’). In ‘Drake’s Drum’ he links history with
myth-making and poetry itself:
Those varied dead. The undiscerning sea
Shelves and dissolves their flesh as it burns spray
Who do not shriek like gulls nor dolphins ride

Crouched under spume to England’s erect side
Though there a soaked sleeve lolls or shoe patrols

Tide-padded thick shallows, squats in choked pools
Neither our designed wreaths nor used words

Sink to their melted ears and melted hearts.
Carol Ann Duffy (1955– ) is indisputably one of the most exciting
new voices in English poetry. Her collection, The World’s Wife (1999)
is a reworking of myths and legends where the wife’s role and
identity is redefined by Duffy in tones of both satire and sadness.
She followed this up with Feminine Gospels (2002) which shares
concerns with her earlier work. Like most postmodern poets (one
can include here Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Thwaite,
Craig Raine) Duffy is concerned with the limits of language. And,
like postmodern writing, she appropriates myth and legend to engage
in playful subversion or to reflect on very contemporary concerns.
Thus mythological woman figures become strangely contemporary
in their agonies, anxieties and oppressions. A strong sense of play in
Duffy conceals her very strongly political and social comments on
relationships, gender inequities and social norms. Homosexuality and
sexual encounters are themes, though Duffy has been less explicit
about it than others. There is also a good deal of eroticism in poems
like ‘Anne Hathaway’ (The World’s Wife). A strong sense of the ironic
informs much of Duffy’s work, as in ‘Small Female Skull’:
400 The Modern Age
With some surprise, I balance my small female skull in my hands.

What is it like? an ocarina? Blow in its eye.
I cannot cry, hold my breath only as long as I exhale,
mildly alarmed now, into the hole where the nose was,
press my ear to its grin. A vanishing sigh.
For some time, I sit on the lavatory seat with my head

in my hands, appalled. It feels much lighter than I’d thought,
the weight of a deck of cards, a slim volume of verse,
but with something else, as though it could levitate. Disturbing.
So why do I kiss it on the brow, my warm lips to its papery bone,
and take it to the mirror to ask for a bottle of beer?

rinse it under the tap, watch dust run away, like sand
from a swimming-cap, then dry it – firstborn – gently
with a towel. I see the scar where I fell for sheer love
down treacherous stairs, and read that shattering day like braille.
Love, I murmur to my skull, then, louder, other grand words,

shouting the hollow nouns in a white tiled room.
Downstairs they will think I have lost my mind. No, I only weep
into these two holes here, or I’m grinning back at the joke, this is
a friend of mine. See, I hold her face in trembling passionate hands.
Her new volume, Rapture, is a series of love poems, cast in neo-
romantic and deeply sensual tone, but tinged with sadness and a
sense of incompleteness in relationships.
Another exciting poet writing into the 1990s is Craig Raine (1944– ).
Raine acquired the attention of the literary world with an
extraordinary poem, ‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’ (1979) and
the collection The Onion, Memory (1978), which inaugurated a
movement, labeled the ‘Martian School’ of poetry (Christopher Reid
is the other well-known practitioner of the mode). Raine’s
achievement here was to ‘de-familiarize’ everyday objects and
rename them ‘objects/in the museum of ordinary art’. Simple and
mundane events like the butcher’s work were rendered into
something surreal.
Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings –
The Present 401
they cause the eyes to melt

or the body to shriek without pain.
I have never seen one fly, but

sometimes they perch on the hand.
Mist is when the sky is tired of flight

and rests its soft machine on the ground:
then the world is dim and bookish

like engravings under tissue paper.
Rain is when the earth is television.

It has the properties of making colours darker.
Model T is a room with the lock inside –

a key is turned to free the world
for movement, so quick there is a film

to watch for anything missed.
But time is tied to the wrist

or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.
In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,

that snores when you pick it up.
If the ghost cries, they carry it

to their lips and soothe it to sleep
with sounds. And yet, they wake it up

deliberately, by tickling with a finger.
Only the young are allowed to suffer

openly. Adults go to a punishment room
with water but nothing to eat.

They lock the door and suffer the noises
alone. No one is exempt

and everyone’s pain has a different smell.
402 The Modern Age
At night, when all the colours die,

they hide in pairs
and read about themselves –

in colour, with their eyelids shut.
Raine is here examining the mechanisms of perception – an interest
that permeates much of his poetry. The watch or a television set can
also be seen differently, either through the eyes of a stranger or in the
imagination, as the above poem demonstrates. His later work has focused
on intense private emotions and moments (especially in History: The
Home Movie, 1994, an epic poem that maps the history of his family,
and that of his wife). These contain passages of great sensuality – even
graphic details of intimate acts – that have often attracted controversy.
More traditional forms in contemporary poetry are to be found in
the Irish poet Paul Muldoon (1951– ). The Movement poetic tradition
of Larkin continues in a limited fashion in Anthony Thwaite and
Andrew Motion (Larkin’s biographer, and the present Poet Laureate
of England, chosen over Carol Ann Duffy, because the British
government did not want to pick a lesbian for the post). Increasingly,
from the 1970s hybrid voices of diasporic Asians and African
immigrants in Britain have added to the richness and variety of
contemporary poetry. ‘Dub poetry’ (see the box Dub Poetry) of Kwesi
Johnson and Zephanaiah during the 1970s proved to be a major
inspiration for youngsters growing up in racist London. This poetry,
which was essentially a social poetry addressing issues of race,
nationality, sexuality, identity and suffering may be seen as the
opening moments of what is now a strong multicultural poetry scene
in England. This brings the richness of their cultural backgrounds,
poetic forms and music to the new poetry. Grace Nichols (1950– ),
one of the finest poets of the immigrant experience, captures the
hybrid identity in her poem ‘We New World Blacks’:
The timbre
in our voice
betrays us
however far
we’ve been
The Present 403
whatever tongue
we speak
the old ghost
asserts itself
in dusky echoes
And in another poem, ‘Epilogue’:
I have crossed an ocean
I have lost my tongue
From the root of the old one
A new one has sprung.
Dub Poetry
African poetry has a strong oral tradition. During the 1960s and 70s poets
such as Mutabaruka, Oku Onuora, Michael (Mikey) Smith, Linton Kwesi
Johnson and Louise Bennett were practitioners of this form. Johnson became
famous for his anti-racist poems such as ‘Inglan is a Bitch’ and ‘Five Nights
of Bleeding’. Bennett may be the forerunner of women’s oral poetry. Dub
poetry, accessible in tone, theme, rhyme and rhythm speaks of everyday
things. It is essentially performance poetry, and borrows from contemporary
socio-cultural movements such as Rastafarianism. It invokes stories of
popular cultural figures – from writers to comic-book heroes – while speaking
of people’s fears and hopes. It uses local forms of expression, idiomatic
speech patterns, and lays emphasis on the speaking voice and the immediate
context of enunciation. Oral poetry takes many forms – portraits,
monologues, satire, folk tales, calypso and political manifesto.
Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze (1957– ), also writing ‘dub poetry’, expresses an

irritation with the racial question, where everything is finally reduced
to skin colour rather than any other aspect of an individual’s identity.
Here is an example from ‘Red Rebel Song’.
Is lang time I waan
Free Iself
From de black white question.
Patience Agbabi (1965– ) is a poet and performance artist of Nigerian
origins. Her R.A.W. (1995) brought her instant acclaim and the
Excelle Literary Award. Agbabi is conscious of the fact that identity
has to be performed and performed repeatedly for it to be accepted.
404 The Modern Age
This is especially true of non-whites in Britain. She writes in ‘The

Word’:
Give me a stage and I’ll cut form on it
give me a page and I’ll perform on it.
[…………….]
Give me a word
any word
DRAMA
Features of Contemporary Drama
• Stages scenes of sex and violence
• Resists censorship and social protests through depiction of extreme

conditions
• An obsession with the non-rational
• Political themes
• Absurd drama and the theatre of cruelty became significant influences
• Some use earlier theatrical forms (Greek, Renaissance, even Restoration)
• Highly stylized and highlights its own artifice, thus redefining its theatrical
nature
• In-Yer-Face theatre relies on excessive brutality to capture contemporary

reality.
Samuel Beckett stands as the benchmark for many genres within

drama: expressionist, absurd, experimental. His Waiting for Godot
(English translation in 1955) depicts two characters, Vladimir and
Estragon, waiting for Godot. Who or what Godot might be, we never
get to know. Pozzo and his servant Lucky turn up occasionally. The
plot is repetitious with no ‘action’ (in Beckett’s famous words,
‘nobody comes, nobody goes’) except for the dialogue and brief
episodes of minor diversions. Thus Pozzo eats and delivers a lecture
on philosophy to Vladimir and Estragon. Beckett was trying to
capture the endless, tedious nature of human experience itself, where
actions do not always have a goal or meaning. Existential philosophy
The Present 405
which agonizes over the purposelessness of life has often been used
as a framework to interpret the play. It ends with the same sense of
meaninglessness. Vladimir and Estragon decide to leave, and they
do not move. After all, there is no other place to go, as the play has
demonstrated.
The Theatre of the Absurd

The Theatre of the Absurd is a term popularized by Martin Esslin to describe
the work of certain Euro-American playwrights in the 1950s and ‘60s. The
plays of Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet and the early Harold
Pinter describe situations where human life lacks meaning. Actions are
futile because there is no goal to any of them. Figures in these plays are
often in a state of hopelessness and stunned ‘stasis’ (immobility), as
demonstrated best in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Absurd drama also
emphasizes that man is the centre of the universe in which god has no role.
Influenced by European existential philosophies from Soren Kierkegaard,
Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, Absurd drama presents illogical
situations and purposeless action. Language itself seems to break down
when speech does not seem to make sense. Communication is illogical and
often, people talk at cross-purposes (as Pinter’s plays show). Such plays
often lack a linear plot or narrative, and players on stage seem to drift
through rather than possess any particular role. Traditional conflicts, dramatic
tensions are absent from these plays
Of the 20th century British dramatists, Harold Pinter (winner of the

Nobel Prize for literature in 2005) stands out as the most complex,
daring and often elusive of all. Pinter (1930–2008) has thus far 29
plays, numerous screenplays and theatre productions to his credit.
His activism, especially in favour of the freedom of expression
(articulated, more recently, in his anti-Iraq invasion speech at the
Nobel ceremony), has attracted considerable attention too. Originally
influenced by the Theatre of the Absurd, Pinter’s plays are often
taken as symbols of anti-traditional protest and emancipation. The
Birthday Party (1957) shows Stanley Webber, who lives in a rather
cheap lodging house in an unnamed English seaside resort, being
visited by two men. He is being accused of opposing tradition, even
as the two men quickly become symbols of an oppressive
establishment. In typical absurdist mode, we are never given any
complete information as to why these things happen to Stanley. We
406 The Modern Age
know that he is being interrogated and persecuted. But the actual

crimes he is supposed to have committed, and the nature of the
oppressors, remain unknown. In 1960 Pinter also had The Dumb
Waiter produced. Two professional assassins, Gus and Ben await
their next victim in the basement room of a hotel. In the background
is a dumb waiter that brings in food. Ben is a calm, collected
professional, until Gus’ nervous ramblings (he claims he is haunted
by the ghost of their last victim) irritate him to the point that he loses
his cool. Gus steps out for a drink of water and the dumb waiter
announces in the intercom that the victim is about to enter. Pinter’s
most complex play, Mountain Language (1988) is a larger comment
on the freedom of expression. Military orders prohibit the mountain
people from speaking. When the orders are lifted conversation
continues to remain impossible. Pinter’s plays are often difficult to
‘resolve’. Conversations are fragmented – the characters are not
always engaged in a dialogue; rather we have two parallel
monologues. Information is never complete, and cultural-historical
contexts are not always available. The political implications are, as a
result, often lost (for instance, Pinter has said that Mountain Language
is about the oppression of the Kurdish people by the Turkish regime).
Edward Bond (1934– ) contributed to the abolition of theatre
censorship in the UK with his play, Saved (1965). This controversial
play about working class youth who take to violence and sexual
promiscuity as a result of their extremely harsh conditions of existence
under a brutal system had some frightening naturalist scenes. One
particular scene where a baby is stoned to death attracted the
attention of the censors. Bond refused to delete any scenes. The
English Stage Society which produced the play was prosecuted. From
the naturalism of Saved, Bond shifted to a surreal mode in Early
Morning (1968), a fantastically envisioned play – Queen Victoria and
Florence Nightingale share a lesbian relationship, the Royal princes
are Siamese twins, Disraeli and Prince Albert plot against the Queen,
and everybody goes to a cannibalistic heaven. Bond continued to
attract attention with his plays on contemporary issues. His Black
Mass (1970) commemorated the Sharpeville massacres (on 21 March
1960, South African police fired upon African protestors gathered
in Sharpeville town, killing about 70 people and injuring about 200,
of which many were women and children). He later rewrote
The Present 407
Shakespeare’s classic in Lear (1971). A play that looks forward to

Sarah Kane’s work in the 1990s, Lear has graphic violence (a machine
that sucks out Lear’s eyeballs, among others). Lear here is a dictator
with paranoid visions of being invaded. His daughters rebel against
him and imprison him. Among his later, lesser known works is The
War Plays (1985), about nuclear war. Bond’s continuing anti-war
stance has resulted in At the Inland Sea (1997) and Eleven Vests (1997).
Tom Stoppard (1937– ), who had his early education in India, is best
known for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1967). Stoppard’s
play deals with the helplessness of the ordinary (wo)man to alter
destiny or social conditions. The two minor characters from Hamlet
eventually die, though their lives have been ineffectual anyway: they
spend their times in aphorisms (for instance, “life is a gamble at
terrible odds, if it was a bet you wouldn’t take it”) and word games.
The play has also been taken to be thematizing existentialism and
the issue of human free will. Arcadia (1993) is a satire on academic
research where physicists, mathematicians and biologists seek to
unravel a mystery dating back to the early 19th century.
With the feminist movement gathering strength in the 1970s, the
work of playwrights like Caryl Churchill acquired a greater social
relevance and audience. Caryl Churchill (1938– ), with socialist
leanings in terms of political ideology, achieved instant attention with
Top Girls (1982), even though her earlier work, Cloud 9 (1979) – a
play that combined themes of European imperialism with sexuality
and the ‘woman’s question’ – did receive some critical attention.
This extraordinary play underlines the efforts women make to
succeed in a world of men. Marlene has sacrificed her family in order
to be a successful businesswoman. We understand that Marlene has
foisted her daughter Angie onto her depressive sister Joyce so that
she (Marlene) would be free to work. Meeting famous women in a
kind of dream sequence, Marlene reveals her cruel individualism in
seeking success at the cost of her family and child.
Michelene Wandor wrote short duologues between 1971 and 1972,
as part of an experimental company’s work. Groups like Red Ladder,
the Women’s Company and others also produced plays with a
feminist slant. Equality between the sexes, abortion, motherhood,
family and domesticity, property and ‘public’ roles for women were
408 The Modern Age
the central issues in these plays. Socialist influences are clearly

discernable in most of these works. Later, younger writers like Louise
Page, Sarah Daniels, Timberlake Wertenbaker also began to work
on similar themes in their plays. In Nell Dunn’s 1981 work, Steaming,
a group of women bond together in a play that explores the theme
of ‘feminine’ space. National and cultural identities become central
themes in Welsh women playwrights like Lucinda Coxon (Waiting
at the Water’s Edge, 1995), Afshan Malik (Safar/Voyage, 1996) and
Marcella Evaristi (Commedia 1982, The Hat 1988). Local myth and
history is also the abiding concern of the Scottish woman playwright
Liz Lochhead (Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off, 1989),
who uses history to highlight contemporary gender issues. However,
Lochhead was not the first to use local mythology for feminist
purposes in her plays. Rona Munro’s Fugue (1983), Piper’s Cave
(1985), Ghost Story (1985) and Bold Girls (1990) used myth and
women’s issues, though Lochhead was also given to using surreal
settings and fantastic narratives to foreground the same. The Irish
troubles centred Bold Girls, which showed how women are affected
by political tensions. More recently women playwrights have
addressed contemporary social issues like AIDS (Anne Marie Di
Mambro’s Brothers of Thunder, 1994). Of the Irish women playwrights,
the best known is Anne Devlin. Winner of numerous awards,
Devlin’s work has explored women’s situations within families and
professions. In her very first play, Ourselves Alone (1985, the title is
an English translation of the Irish Sinn Fein, Ireland’s most famous
political party) Devlin combined national, social and individual
issues. Women get involved with the nationalist cause and constantly
negotiate the tensions of their personal relationships and families.
This theme was explored further in After Easter (1994). Christina
Reid adds another dimension to the women-nationalism theme by
looking at the role of religion for women in Irish family and Irish
culture in plays like Tea in a China Cup (1984), Joyriders (1986) and
My Name, Shall I Tell You My Name? (1990).
Late in the 1990s, we have a new genre emerging with the plays of
the tragically short-lived Sarah Kane (she committed suicide at the
age of 28, in 1999, and her Complete Plays appeared in 2001), Mark
Ravenhill, Anthony Neilson and others. The ‘in-yer-face’ theatre, as
The Present 409
it is called (see the box In-Yer-Face Theatre), sets out to generate a

new idiom in an ethos where the audience, inured to suffering
through excessive TV coverage of war and disaster, refuses to be
shocked any more. In Kane’s Blasted (1995), Ian and Cate are in a
hotel room. They appear to be in love, but Ian rapes Cate, and she
leaves. Later a soldier enters the room. He rapes and tortures Ian
(gouging out his eyeballs and eating them), before killing himself.
Ian is dying painfully when Cate returns. This theatre, which has
provoked strong reactions from critics and theatre-goers alike, has
been seen as projecting a world of injustice and unremitting cruelty.
In-Yer-Face Theatre
A term used to describe the drama of the 1990s, and symbolized in the
work of Sarah Kane (Blasted, 1995; Cleansed 1998; 4.48 Psychosis, 2000),
Anthony Neilsen (Normal, 1991; Penetrator, 1993; Censor, 1997) and
Mark Ravenhill (Shopping and F*****g, 1996; Mother Clap’s Molly House,
2001) and to a lesser extent in the work of Judy Upton, Naomi Wallace and
Richard Zajdlic. The plays are intended to shock the audiences with their
graphic violence, sexuality, language and emotional trauma. Often dealing
with extreme events like cannibalism, rape, beatings and murder, these
plays seek to capture the violence of contemporary life. The argument made
by the playwrights and critics who favour this mode is that we live in times
where graphic violence is telecast and printed endlessly (in the media
coverage of war, trauma and disaster) and we have lost the ability to either
empathize or sympathize. For a short introduction to this very new genre
see http://www.inyerface-theatre.com.
In terms of recent political theatre in Britain two plays stand out.

Hanif Kureishi’s My Son the Fanatic (1997) maps the slow
transformation of a British Muslim boy into a fundamentalist. The
debates between father and son, and the role of a Muslim preacher-
priest become especially relevant in the wake of 9/11. David Hare
(1947– ) has commented on the Iraq invasion with Stuff Happens
(2004), a title inspired by Donald Rumsfeld’s statement on the
invasion. Hare uses actual lines from speeches and the debates on
the invasion. It ‘stars’ George W Bush, Tony Blair, Condoleeza Rice,
Colin Powell and other prime movers of the war against Iraq.
20. Re-Reading Modernism
Technology, the Body and Literature
Modernism was clearly concerned with the city. The city, since
Victorian times, has been the centre of not only large populations
and industries, but also research laboratories and consequently
debates in science. Around the turn of the 19th century, technologies
powered by electricity transformed the industrial and urban
landscapes in both England and America. Energy and power were
scientific developments that extended into the public imagination.
Alongside this was the generation of huge amounts of waste. There
was a spate of publications on waste (Tim Armstrong, 1998).
Contemporary re-readings of modernism demonstrate how
modernism was influenced not only by philosophies of electricity,
but also by the increasing visibility of waste.
When Marcel Duchamp fixed a toilet bowl in an art gallery (labelling
it ‘Fountain’, 1917), he linked art to waste production in the period
of high modernism. A sustained meditation on waste – economic
and bodily – occurs in Eliot’s celebrated poem, The Wasteland (1922).
Bodily parts are objects of revulsion because of the accumulation of
dirt/waste (hands, feet, bones and hair). There occurs what Tim
Armstrong identifies as a ‘negative catalogue’ of debris in ‘The Fire
Sermon’: cardboard boxes, cigarette ends and handkerchiefs, among
others. In 1934, Yeats underwent a surgical procedure, called the
Steinach Operation, using hormone extracts and such, to enable
masculine ‘rejuvenation’ through alteration of glandular activity.
Yeats’ obsession with aging and his creative, generative and sexual
powers in the later poems (‘The Wild Old Wicked Man’, ‘The Three
Bushes’) have been seen as directly connected to the biological-surgical
procedure and as a literary response to a technological development
in medicine. Further, Yeats’ plays like Full Moon in March and The
King of the Great Clock Tower (with the sexual symbolism of the songs)
Re-Reading Modernism 411
encode images of incisions, decapitation and creativity which have

been read as indirect symbols of the surgical interventions that
enabled a resurgence of creativity for Yeats.
The obsession with the body went back to the discoveries of the 19th
century. At the beginning of the 19th century, the body was treated
as a machine in which the self resided. By the early 20th century, this
notion of the body had altered considerably, even radically. The body
was now investigated internally as new kinds of technology helped
‘penetrate’ the body: the stethoscope, the x-ray and the
opthalmoscope. Technology also enabled the measurement of various
body systems like blood pressure, the bacteria inside, etc.
What is also important to note is the rise of a culture of body
management: medicine and sports, gyms and drugs, cosmetic surgery
and exercising are ‘systems’ of body management, designed to
improve the efficiency of the body. And, at the same time, mankind
became more and more aware of the limits of the human body. One
result of this awareness was a dual move: to regulate the body’s
mechanisms and to understand the interior states of the body better.
Images of the ‘electric body’ – the body’s energies, the electric energy
and other forces – are attempts to work through these two moves
and are exemplified in stories like Arnold Bennett’s Riceyman Steps
(1923). Writers like HG Wells had already explored the question of
modified bodies and the ‘essence’ of human identity. The 20th century
built on these concerns. Later novels like Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s
Rainbow (1973) also explore the theme of energies (electrical, nuclear,
social and sexual) where the body is at the centre of the energy-
flows. The concern with diminishing energies (with age or sickness),
a concern in WB Yeats (note the number of Yeats poems about age
and weakness and the persistence of unfulfillable desire), can be seen
as a related theme in techno-modernism. The concern with energy,
technology and the body also resulted in a literature that dealt with
dehumanization and mechanization. The self, in works like the
American playwright Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape (1922), is seen
as brutalized and calls for a more reciprocal relationship between
man and machine. In the 1980s and 1990s, this concern would
become more pronounced with the widespread use of computers
and the Internet and resulted in the genre of cyberpunk (inaugurated
412 The Modern Age
by William Gibson’s Neuromancer, 1984) which dealt with issues of

technology, the body and the self.
Technology acquired the status of a ‘modern wonder’ and
technological advances were often described in terms that suggested
the miraculous. Thus, when the new transatlantic liner Queen Mary
was launched from Glasgow in 1934, it was described by newspapers
as a ‘miracle’. Technology altered and enhanced human sense
perceptions. Modern critics such as Sara Danius have argued that
the aesthetic of ‘high modernism’ in Thomas Mann, James Joyce and
Marcel Proust was a response to these new ‘perceptual’ technologies
– chronophotography, phonography and cinematography. Such
technologies reproduced data easily, stored images and allowed
unmediated access to larger numbers. Sight and hearing were the
most affected. The number of references to sight and hearing in Eliot’s
poetry (from The Wasteland to The Four Quartets) and the music of
Joyce’s Ulysses seem to be responses to such technologies. The concern
with memory and reproduction of images from memory in Yeats,
Eliot, Joyce and other modernists is also to do with changing
technologies of perception and image reproduction.
Further Reading
Bloom, Clive. Ed. Literature and Culture in Modern Britain. Vol. I: 1900–1929.
Bloom, Clive and Gary Day. Eds. Literature and Culture in Modern Britain. Vol. III:
1956–1999. London and New York: Longman, 1997.
Day, Gary. Ed. Literature and Culture in Modern Britain. Vol. II: 1930–1955. London
and New York: Longman, 1997.
D’haen, Theo and Hans Bertens. Eds. British Postmodern Fiction. Amsterdam,
Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1993.
Postscript
‘English Literature’ or ‘Literatures in English’
Today, ‘English Literature’ does not refer to literature produced by

England alone. It is now broader in its scope and refers to literatures
from various parts of the world and from diverse cultures, written
in English. Thus, we have a category, ‘postcolonial literature’, which
describes writing from former colonized nations in Asia, Africa and
South America. ‘Postcolonial’ here serves as a temporal marker,
referring to the period and writing after colonialism (colonialism is
the process of settlement by Europeans in non-European, that is,
Asian, African, South American and Australian spaces).
‘Postcoloniality’ captures the strategies of resistance, negotiation and
cultural assertion that countries such as India adopt to deal with
increasing neocolonial interference and control exerted by the
‘developed’, ‘First World’ nations. The ‘postcolonial’ describes a
whole new experience of political freedom, new ideologies (of
development, for instance, or economic freedom and self-reliance in
many postcolonial societies) and new agendas. This postcolonial
situation or context has produced an enduring body of writing that
has expanded the boundaries of ‘English Literature’. Other terms
used to describe these literatures include ‘new literatures in English’
or ‘international literature in English’. Thus, we need to perhaps use
the term ‘literatures in English’ rather than ‘English literature’, since
most literature is now multicultural, rooted in more than one
culture/tradition.
We do, however, need to keep in mind that ‘English Literature’ has

been used as an umbrella term to describe writings from Wales,
Scotland and Ireland too (countries and cultures that have resisted
being clubbed under ‘English’) and even translations and adaptations
from European writings. Thus there is no clear definitional boundary
to ‘English Literature’. Would Alexander Pope’s translations of the

Greek Homer be ‘English Literature’? And would the early romances
in English, adapted from Italian and French writings be ‘English
Literature’? In the same line of thinking, would writings by Salman
Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje and Chinua Achebe be ‘English
Literature’?
What exactly does ‘literatures in English’ mean? In order to

understand its significance, we need to contextualize it.
Writing in English by authors from non-English cultures is not

necessarily ‘postcolonial’ (Nayar 2008: 13–16). The first Indian author
in English, Dean Mahommed, published his works in the 1790s, when
he lived in Ireland and England. Black British writing and migrant
writings in English date back to the 18th and 19th centuries (for a
useful critical study, see CL Innes’ epochal A History of Black and
Asian Writing in Britain, 1700–2000). Likewise, writings in English
in other nations also date back to the 18th and 19th centuries. Indian
fiction in English begins in the 19th century (by Bankim Chandra), as
does the essay tradition (most notably by social reformers like Raja
Ram Mohan Roy) – all well before independence. In fact, the first
major Indian writers in English – Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao and
RK Narayan – began their careers well before 1947. The category
‘literatures in English’ included strident anti-colonial writing. The
first phase in these literatures (mostly before political independence)
focused on:
• anti-colonial resistance
• nationalism
• anti-westernization
• cultural identity.
Examples of writers who figure in this phase include statesmen and

politicians, reformers and activists: Kwame Nkrumah, Mahatma
Gandhi, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda, Amilcar Cabral and other
leaders from colonized nations right from the end of the nineteenth
century.
Postscript 415
It could be argued that the early literatures in English paved the

way for the ‘postcolonial’ writer. The first writers in English were
learning the use of English, adapting it for their purposes, investing
it with a new meaning and sentiment and appropriating it as an
anti-colonial tool. They used the language of their colonial master in
order to represent native aspirations, traditions and culture. English
became a language of resistance and self-assertion. These were key
moments in the formation of ‘literatures in English’ because
eventually they would come to re-draw the boundaries of the
‘English’ language and culture itself, making it diverse, multicultural
and plural. What we see today in the writings of Salman Rushdie,
Ishiguro or Ben Okri is a felicity with the English language that
matches any ‘true’ English writer. This is the moment at which
postcolonial literatures in English merges – not seamlessly perhaps,
but definitely grafted, to use another metaphor – with ‘English’
literature.
Most postcolonial literatures seek to address the ways in which non-

European (Asian, African and South American, but also settler
colonies) writings and cultures have been marginalized under
colonialism. It is literature that seeks to deal with a traumatic history
– of colonial violence, oppression and marginalization, but also anti-
colonial struggle and eventual independence.
Postcolonial writing, which is perhaps the largest constituent of

‘literatures in English’ may be defined as ‘the literary processes
through which formerly colonized people assert their difference from,
resistance to, and negotiation with European colonial masters and
cultures while attempting to mount similar strategies to tackle
contemporary globalizing and neocolonial processes of domination
by Euro-American powers’. The first postcolonial writers (in the 20th
century) were part of what was called ‘commonwealth literature’.
Themes of nationalism and the euphoria of decolonization (or political
independence) marked the literature of the 1950s and 1960s. In this
era, realism was the preferred mode of literary expression as writers
dealt with the immediate tasks of nation-building, cultural heritage
and development. The writings of Wole Soyinka, RK Narayan and
Chinua Achebe – the second phase of ‘literatures in English’ – were
characterized by themes of:
• bi-culturalism (involving European and native cultural traditions)
• nationalism
• local and tribal identities
• the conflict between European-model of modernization and native

traditions
• cultural assertion
• cultural nationalism.
Writers who embody these themes, in what may be seen as the

second phase of literatures in English include Raja Rao, Narayan,
George Lamming, Patrick White and Derek Walcott.
During the 1970s, there were many discussions and reevaluations
of the impact of colonialism on native cultures and about the nature
of the postcolonial development in the literatures of these recently
independent nations. The social realist works of Bhabani
Bhattacharya and Kamala Markandaya in India, VS Naipaul in the
Caribbean, and Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o in Africa
belong to this movement.
There was greater critical attention on the postcolonial condition in
the 1980s. Writers such as Salman Rushdie and Ben Okri were
confronted with their new locations: increasingly multicultural cities
and countries. The postcolonial dream had been, in many cases, lost.
There were several works that explored the postcolonial nation’s
disillusionment: Naipaul’s The Mimic Men (1967), Achebe’s A Man of
the People (1966), Ngugi’s Petals of Blood (1977) and Devil on the Cross
(1982), and Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born
(1969). With regard to form, South American magical realism, mainly
the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, was a profound influence.
Experimentation with narrative modes, mixing genres and exhibiting
a dazzling ‘play’ of form, meaning, politics and ideology, can be
observed in this era. The mixing of genres – autobiography, popular
culture, documentary history and fiction – in a kind of postmodern
writing is best illustrated by Naipaul’s In a Free State and Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children.
Postscript 417
From the 1980s, these nations also faced newer problems like
agitations for new minority and ethnic identities, secession and the
advent of massive globalization. In the face of such problems which
often threatened to tear the nation apart, writers like Ben Okri, Derek
Walcott, Meena Alexander and Salman Rushdie discussed:
• cultural identity
• the nature of identity itself
• the role of the nation-state
• the tension between separation and assimilation
• cultural roots
• migrancy
• multiculturalism
• global/transnational identities
The poetry of Agha Shahid Ali, Meena Alexander and Sujata Bhatt
explores hybrid identities, located between the ‘First’ and ‘Third
Worlds’. Problems of dual locations and dual roots thematize the
work of diasporic writers such as David Dabydeen (A Harlot’s
Progress), Hanif Kureishi (The Buddha of Suburbia), Bharati Mukherjee
(Jasmine) and Timothy Mo (The Monkey King).
Initially, ‘Commonwealth literature’ was treated as a version of
English literature. While the historical specificity of the Asian or
African novel was acknowledged, they also emphasized the
‘universal human values’. The historical specificity of the African
and Asian pasts was neglected in favour of their so-called universal
themes. Commonwealth critics considered the writing from ‘Third
World’ to be exemplifying the same principles of ‘great (English)
literature’. This is the crucial point at which ‘postcolonial’ critics in
the 1980s and 1990s break with the ‘Commonwealth’ critics.
In terms of contexts, with increasing globalization, writers of non-
European origin and those with both European and native languages
at their disposal and the resultant cross-cultural and multilingual
exchange process have internationalized literatures from all over the

globe. There are more influences, more readers and more markets
now than ever before. Writers from the formerly colonized countries
find markets and audiences in the ‘First World’. Recognition in the
form of awards, ‘reading tours’, publicity and critical responses has
increased massively in the 1980s and 1990s. The transnational novels
of Salman Rushdie, Allan Sealy, Romesh Gunesekera and Amy Tan
capture the multiple affiliations of authors and peoples today. No
more can we speak of an either/or cultural binary. In most of these
cases, we have identities that are many and widely diverse.
What is certain is that the canon of ‘English literature’ is growing,

metamorphosing into something different. Literature grows in the
world, as much as the world is shaped by the literature produced in
particular times and places. The growth of ‘literatures in English’ is
a sign of the increased globalization of cultures and the multicultural
diffusion of populations and cultures.
Select Bibliography
The Bibliography is organized mainly around the chapters in the book
FROM OLD ENGLISH TO CHAUCER

Boitani, Piero and Jill Mann. Ed. The Cambridge Chaucer Companion.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Miller, Robert P. Ed. Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1977.
Stevens, John E. Medieval Romance: Themes and Approaches. London:
Hutchinson, 1973.
Turville-Petre, Thorlac. England the Nation: Language, Literature, and
National Identity, 1290–1340. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
FROM THE RENAISSANCE TO THE RESTORATION

Alexander, Catherine M.S. and Stanley Wells. Ed. Shakespeare and
Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Allen, Don Cameron. Image and Meaning: Metaphoric Traditions in
Renaissance Poetry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1960.
Bradbrook, M.C. Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy.
Braunmuller, A.R. and Michael Hattaway. The Cambridge Companion
to English Renaissance Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990.
Cohen, Derek. Shakespeare’s Culture of Violence. New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1993.
Hadfield, Andrew. Shakespeare, Spenser and the Matter of Britain.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Hall, Jonathan. Anxious Pleasures: Shakespearean Comedy and the

Nation-State. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,
1995.
James, Heather. Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation
of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Jordan, Constance. Shakespeare’s Monarchies: Ruler and Subject in the
Romances. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997.
Joughin, John J. Ed. Shakespeare and National Culture. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1997.
Kermode, Frank. Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne: Renaissance Essays. New
York: Viking, 1971.
Knight, G. Wilson. The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian
Tragedy. London: Methuen, 1960.
Kraye, Jill. The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism.
Muir, Kenneth. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. London: G. Allen & Unwin,
1979.
Parfitt, George. English Poetry of the Seventeenth Century. London and
New York: Longman, 1992.
Patrides, C.A. and Raymond B. Waddington. Ed. The Age of Milton:
Backgrounds to Seventeenth-Century Literature. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1980.
Pooley, Roger. English Prose of the Seventeenth Century, 1590–1700.
Shannon, Laurie. Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in
Shakespearean Contexts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2002.
Spurgeon, Caroline. Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us.
Voss, Paul J. Elizabethan News Pamphlets: Shakespeare, Spenser,
Marlowe and the Birth of Journalism. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne
Select Bibliography 421
THE AUGUSTAN AGE

Bevis, Richard W. English Drama: Restoration and Eighteenth Century,
1660–1789. London and New York: Longman, 1988.
Copley, Stephen. Ed. Literature and the Social Order in Eighteenth-
Century England. London: Croom Helm, 1984.
Jones, Vivien. Women and Literature in Britain, 1700–1800. Cambridge:
Muir, Kenneth. The Comedy of Manners. London: Hutchinson, 1970.
Probyn, Clive T. English Fiction of the Eighteenth Century, 1700–1789.
Richards, Kenneth and Peter Thomson. Ed. Essays on the Eighteenth-
Century English Stage. London: Methuen, 1972.
Richetti, John. The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century
Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and
Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959 (1957).
THE ROMANTIC AGE

Bayley, John. The Romantic Survival: A Study in Poetic Evolution.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957.
Botting, Fred. Gothic. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.
Bowra, C.M. The Romantic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Butler, Marilyn. Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature
and its Background, 1760–1830. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1982.
Curran, Stuart. Ed. The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism.
Day, Aidan. Romanticism. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.
Hoagwood, Terence Allan and Daniel P. Watkins. Ed. British

Romantic Drama: Historical and Critical Essays. Madison, NJ:
Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998.
Kiely, Robert. The Romantic Novel in England. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1972.
THE VICTORIAN AGE

Bristow, Joseph. Ed. The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry.
Buckler, William E. The Victorian Imagination: Essays in Aesthetic
Exploration. New York: New York University Press, 1980.
Buckley, Jerome H. The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969.
David, Deirdre. Ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel.
Guy, Josephine M. The Victorian Social-Problem Novel: The Market,
the Individual and Communal Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1996.
Houghton, Walter E. The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1957.
Jay, Elisabeth. Faith and Doubt in Victorian Britain. Basingstoke,
Hampshire: Macmillan, 1986.
Sanders, Andrew. The Victorian Historical Novel, 1840–1880. New
THE MODERN AGE

Aston, Elaine and Janelle Reinelt. Ed. The Cambridge Companion to
Modern British Women Playwrights. Cambridge: Cambridge
Childs, Peter. Modernism. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.
Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. New York: Doubleday, 1961.
Ferris, Suzanne and Mallory Young. Ed. Chick Lit: The New Woman’s
Fiction. New York and London: Routledge, 2006.
Gillie, Christopher. Movements in English Literature, 1900–1940.
Lodge, David. The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy,
and the Typology of Modern Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1977.
Lucas, John. Modern English Poetry: From Hardy to Hughes. Totowa,
NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1986.
Millard, Kenneth. Ed. Edwardian Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms: A Literary Guide. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1995.
Williams, Raymond. Drama from Ibsen to Brecht. New York: Oxford
GENERAL STUDIES, HISTORIES, REVISIONIST

READINGS AND THEORY
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin
and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.
Armstrong, Isobel. ‘The Gush of the Feminine: How Can We Read
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Theresa M. Kelley. Hanover and London: University Press of
New England, 1995. 13–32.
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of
the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Barbour, Richmond. Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East,
1576–1626. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Barrell, John. The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge.
Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1992.
The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting,
1730–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
The Infection of Thomas de Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism.

New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.
Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George
Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1983.
Belsey, Catherine. The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in
Renaissance Drama. London: Methuen, 1985.
Bermingham, Ann. Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic
Tradition, 1740–1850. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1986.
Berry, Laura C. The Child, the State, and the Victorian Novel.
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999.
Bewell, Alan. Romanticism and Colonial Disease. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1999.
Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York:
Riverhead Books, 1998.
Brantlinger, Patrick. Ed. Energy and Entropy: Science and Culture in
Victorian Britain: Essays from Victorian Studies. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1989.
Bray, Alan. Homosexuality in Renaissance England. London: Gay Men’s
Press, 1982.
Briggs, Asa. A Social History of England. London: Viking, 1983.
The Age of Improvement 1783–1867. London: Longman, 1960.
Brown, Philip A. The French Revolution in English History. New York:
Barnes & Noble, 1965.
Bruster, Douglas. Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare.
Burroughs, Catherine. Ed. Women in British Romantic Theatre: Drama,
Performance, and Society, 1790–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge
Butterfield, Herbert. The Historical Novel: An Essay. Folcroft, PA:
Folcroft Library Editions, 1971.
Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious
Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1987.
Campbell, Joseph and Henry Morton Robinson. A Skeleton Key to
Finnegans Wake. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company,
1944.
Campbell, Mary Baine. Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early
Modern Europe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.
Caplan, Jane and John Torpey. Ed. Documenting Individual Identity:
The Development of State Practices in the Modern World. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Carter, Ronald and John McRae. The Routledge History of Literature
in English: Britain and Ireland. London and New York: Routledge,
1997.
Cartwright, Kent. Shakespearean Tragedy and its Double: The Rhythms
of Audience Response. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State
Castronovo, David. The English Gentleman: Images and Ideals in
Literature and Society. New York: Ungar, 1987.
Chard, Chloe. Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing
and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830. Manchester: Manchester
Christensen, Allan Conrad. Nineteenth-Century Narratives of
Contagion: ‘Our Feverish Contact’. London and New York:
Routledge, 2005.
Cohen, Michèle. Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language
in the Eighteenth Century. London and New York: Routledge,
1996.
Danius, Sara. The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception,
Aesthetics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002.
Deane, Bradley. The Making of the Victorian Novelist: Anxieties of
Authorship in the Mass Market. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Dellamora, Richard. Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian

Aestheticism. Chapel Hill and London: University of North
Carolina Press, 1990.
Derrida, Jacques. ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’. In Acts
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Routledge, 1992. 33–75.
Dolin, Tim. Mistress of the House: Women of Property in the Victorian
Novel. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1997.
Dollimore, Jonathan and Alan Sinfield. Eds. Political Shakespeare: New
Essays in Cultural Materialism. Manchester: Manchester
Dollimore, Jonathan. Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in
the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries. Chicago:
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Drew, John. India and the Romantic Imagination. New York: Oxford
Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe.
Fabricant, Carole. ‘The Literature of Domestic Tourism and the Public
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Ferriss, Suzanne and Mallory Young. Chick Lit: The New Woman’s
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Politics in Popular Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge
Foakes, R.A. Shakespeare and Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge
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Fulford, Tim. Landscape, Liberty, and Authority: Poetry, Criticism, and

Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth. Cambridge: Cambridge
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Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New
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Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago and
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Guthke, Karl S. The Last Frontier: Imagining Other Worlds, from the
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Hall, Kim F. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early
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Hammond, Wayne G. and Christina Scull. The Lord of the Rings: A
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Harris, Jonathan Gil. Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease
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Hawthorn, Jeremy. Ed. The British Working-Class Novel in the
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Heiland, Donna. Gothic and Gender: An Introduction. Malden, MA:
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Helgerson, Richard. Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of

England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Higgins, David. Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine: Biography,
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Hoffman, Frederick John. Freudianism and the Literary Mind. Baton
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Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction.
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Langan, Celeste. Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation
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Leask, Nigel. British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire.
Levinson, Marjorie. The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form.
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Mazza, Cris and Jeffrey DeShell. Chick-Lit: On the Edge: New Women’s
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Mellor, Anne K. Romanticism and Gender. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Moglen, Helene. The Trauma of Gender: A Feminist Theory of the Novel.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
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Parrinder, Patrick. Ed. Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement,
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Todorov, Tzvetan. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other.
New York: Harper and Row, 1984.
Traub, Valerie. Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in
Shakespearean Drama. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
Trumpener, Katie. Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the
British Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Turner, Cheryl. Living by the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth
Century. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
Vivie`s, Jean. English Travel Narratives in the Eighteenth Century. Tr.
Claire Davison. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2002.
Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society 1780–1950. Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1961.
Worthington, Heather. The Rise of the Detective in Early Nineteenth-
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Wright, Elizabeth. Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice. London:
Methuen, 1984.
Webliography
Useful websites for the study of English Literature, philosophical

backgrounds and contexts:
The Norton Anthology of English Literature: www.wwnorton.com
Voice of Shuttle: http://vos.ucsb.edu/
Philosophy: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://
plato.stanford.edu/
Internet Public Library: http://www.ipl.org/
Shakespeare. The 1914 Oxford Shakespeare (ed. W.J. Craig) at http:/
/www.bartleby.com/; Illustrated Shakespeare Collection at
http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/Arts
Free Online Literary Texts: http://etext.virginia.edu/ and
www.gutenberg.org
Women writers online: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/
eguides/womenstudies (with links to other resources)

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JR

The opening moments of ‘English’ literature can be found in the

A text traceable to a particular author first occurs in the case of Brut.

The Romance) in English: themes of courage, personal valour, fidelity,

It is important to note the cultural contexts of the time. Religion,

A significant context for the development of both theology studies

William Langland’s Piers Plowman is also, importantly, the first

community is emphasized throughout the narrative, as people from

The Canterbury Tales is set during the time of a pilgrimage made to

And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes

Of Chaucer’s works, including The Parliament of Fowls (a genre rooted

Coss, Peter. The Knight in Medieval England 1000–1400. Stroud, Gloucestershire:

Steinberg, Theodore L. Reading the Middle Ages. Jefferson, North Carolina:

Historical and Social Events Literary Events

EARLY TUDOR PERIOD (1485–1550) 1485

Ascension of Henry VII and

Ascension of Henry VIII (1509) 1509

Ascension of Edward VI (1547) 1547

Tottel’s Miscellany (1557)

Ascension of Elizabeth I (1558)

James B urbage builds ‘The

Hakluyt’s Voyages and Navigations

Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (1586)

The defeat of the Spanish 1588 Marprelate Controversy

JACOBEAN PERIOD (1603–25) 1603

Ascension of James I (1603)

Thirty Years War begins (1618)

Ascension of Charles I (1625)

Dissolution of the Parliament

Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ (1637)

INTERREGNUM (1649–60) 1649

Charles I executed (1649)

Cromwell dies and succeeded by

The term ‘Renaissance’ means ‘a new birth’ or ‘rebirth’. The

medicine, philosophy and geography. Some of the central features of the

The New Religion: In Europe, Martin Luther (1483–1546) and later

The New World: Christopher Columbus’ discovery of America marked

Elizabeth I imposed the Church of England on her subjects, and

James I (1603–25), Elizabeth’s successor, was actually James VI, the

With the reduction in the power of religion, ‘Reason’ or ‘Rationality’

centre-stage in terms of intellectual enquiry and culture. Dissections,

In terms of the social contexts to Renaissance literature, therefore,

Printing and the Renaissance

Condemning Homosexuality in Early Modern England

In 1642, the Parliament decided that plays were dangerous because

Whereas ... the distracted estate of England, threatened with a cloud

Liberal education and an interest in ‘humanism’ marked the

Gender in Elizabethan England

Renaissance England also saw an increase in the number of women writers.

contexts of Elizabethan England: The First Examinacion of the Worthy

1. Identities are not ‘natural’ – they are constructed through certain

Early Tudor Period (1485–1550)

as Holinshed’s Chronicles. It became a rich resource for writers like

Tudor Protest Writing

Polydore Vergil did a history of England. Local histories such as

practices. It was so popular that, by 1610, there were at least 15

In uncertain times – times of political and social instability and change

colloquialisms. Phrases such as ‘the signs of the times’, ‘powers that

The Oxford Reformers

Miles Coverdale published the first complete English Bible, having

of 15 th and 16 th century England. Cranmer maintained that the

every ten years. Marriage is actively encouraged but not extramarital

• Classical allusions and European Renaissance references

• Individualist, but with some contemporary themes