| Comment | The critical realism of the 19th century flourished in the forties and in the beginning of fifties. The realists and foremost set themselves the task of criticizing capitalist society from a democratic reality |
| Typical writers | Charles Dickens | The greatest English realist of the time | With a striking force and truthfulness, he creates pictures of bourgeois civilization, describing the misery and suffers of common people. |
| William Makepeace Thackeray | critical realist | Thackeray ‘s novels mainly contain a satirical portray of the upper strata of society |
| Elizabeth Gaskell | Mary Barton | described the inhuman conditions of the life of English workers and birth of Chartist movement as the inevitable result of the monstrous exploitation |
| Charlotte Bronte | Further adherents of the method of critical realism |
| Humanism | Profound humanism which is revealed in their sympathy for the laboring people. These writers create positive character who are quite alien to the vices of the rich and who are chiefly common people |
| Humor & satire | The world of greed and cruelty is contrasted to a world where the unwritten laws of humanism rule in defiance of all sorrow and inflictions that befall the heroes. This juxtaposition determines the character and function of humor and satire in the realistic novel of the 19th century. |
| Humorous scenes may attend the actions of the positive characters, but this humor is tinged with lyricism and serves to stress the human quality, the sincerity and kindness of such character. At the same time, bitter satire and ever grotesque is used to expose and criticize the seamy side of reality. |
| Position | The three greatest Victorian novelists are Dickens, Thackeray and George Eliot. The first of these to achieve fame was Dickens, |
| who became a great portrayer of child life. |
| Comments | After success of A Tale of Two Cites, his reputation was great. His concern for the oppressed poor, his sentiment (which sometime slipped into sentimentality), his flair for narrative, often melodramatic, and above all, his invention of comic character, combined to make him more popular than any other English novelist has ever been. |
| All Dickens’ major novels were published either in numbers, like Nicholas Nickleby, or in installments in magazine, which frequently accounts for the episodic quality of his work. |
| Pickwick | At the time of his marriage he was writing series of humorous stories to accompany illustrations of Cockney sporting life, the richly comic adventures of the Pickwick Club in the English countryside. The sales of the Pickwick papers jumped with the introduction into the story of the engaging Cockney servant, Sam Weller, and by 1837, when its publication in numbers was completed |
| Dickens at twenty five had risen in a year from obscurity to a poison of popularity unequaled in England before or since. |
| Oliver Twist | Oliver Twist, his first true novel, had a carefully worked out plot, in contrast to the picaresque of incidents in Pickwick. |
| Its picture of the workhouses created under the New Poor Law and the description of the criminal slum of London in which young Oliver lived brought Dickens a new class of serious reader interested in social reform. |
| Master Humphrey’s Clock | In 1840 Dickens began a weekly paper, Master Humphrey’s Clock, patterned on Spectator and Tatler. The reader’s interests were less in the familiar essays than in the stories which Dickens was providing; gradually the paper became only the framework for the publication of two novels: the Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge. Barnaby Rudge is his first historical novel. |
| America trips | His first trip to America began with an enthusiastic and uncritical reception which slowly soured as Dickens began to speak out against slavery and the American publishers’ piracy of English books. He, in turn, was disgusted by the crudeness of life and manners in America, and in particular by his own lack of privacy there. |
| His American Notes, published on his return to England provoked great resentment in the United State. |
| In his next novel Martin Chuzzlewit, he once more used his observation on the trip to draw the ludicrous characters of the American episodes of the book, and again there was trans-Atlantic protest. This novel is concerned with the evils of the love of money, but Dickens embroidered the tale with the humor of some of his most comic character, such as the old nurse Sara Gamp and the hypocritical Pecksniff. |
| A Christmas Carol | His first and best Christmas book, A Christmas Carol, failed to sell as well as he expected |
| David Copperfield | David Copperfield, please everyone. Many of the events of its hero’s childhood and his romance with Dora are clearly reminiscences of Dickens’ youth. The mellow vein of memory provided a range of characterization he never surpassed, and such creations as the marvelous Micawber and the cringing Uriah Heep have made it the most perennially popular of his novels. |
| Bleak House | Bleak House, a satire on the abuses of the Court of Chancery, show Dickens at his best in handling complex narratives and interlocking plots, but the prevailing mood of somberness was new to his readers. |
| Hard Times | Hard Times is an earnest attack on the vulgarity and materialism of the rising middle class industrialists. |
| A Tale of Two Cities | The story of redemption through devotion shows his ability at handling pure narrative, and it has always been on of his most popular novels, although it lacks his characteristic humor. |
| Great Expectation | Great Expectation is told in the first person by Pip, a young man who learns through adversity to discard his won superficial snobbishness. Because of the unity of interest centered on the chief character, and the credible quality of its romantic story, many critics have called it the best of his novels. |
| Comments | By this time his popularity rivaled that of Dickens, with whom he was friendly if not intimate; their only quarrel was healed just before Thackeray’s death. |
| The sentimentality which he shared with Dickens over scenes of suffering, and the occasionally maudlin quality of his “good” women are tempered in his work with a satirical some times cynical, view of society which perhaps has more appeal today than in his won time. |
| Thackeray was always, gregarious, and he loved the easy life of the upper class, with whom he was friendly but who were frequently the butts of his satire. |
| Yellowplush Correspondence | To the new Fraser’s Magazine he contributed his first important success, the Yellowplush Correspondence, the fictional memoirs of pushing and self-important footman, of which the theme as one he later used frequently: the ridiculousness of pretension. Reviews, sketches, and novels follow in Fraser’s, notably Catherine, written to satirize such “Newgate Calendar” novels of crime Oliver Twist and Harrison Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard, The Great Hoggarty Diamond, and Barry Lyndon. |
| The Book of Snobs | The Book of Snobs made his reputation as a social satirist. |
| Vanity Fair | His first masterpiece of long novels, Vanity Fair appeared in monthly installments. |
| Its setting is England during and after the Napoleonic Wars, but its panoramic view of folly and vanity is universal. |
| Becky Sharp, the unscrupulous governess of whose adventures dominate the book, is generally recognized as one of the most vividly draws characters in the English novel. |
| Henry Esmond | Henry Esmond, a historical novel for which his studies of the humorists had provided the background. |
| It is set in the period in history he loved best, the reign of Queen Anne, but the love story of Esmond and Lady Castlewood is in part a reflection of his won feeling for Mrs. Brookfield. |
| Perhaps it was the only one of his novels not publishes serially, Esmond has a finish and structural organization greater than any of his other works. |
| The Newcomes | His delightful fairy-tale,The central character of The Newcomes is another view of Thackeray himself as a young man of good instincts which are thwarted by his own shortcomings; |
| Clive’s struggles to establish himself as an artist and the trials of his first marriage are reminiscent of Thackeray’s curly manhood. |
| The real interest of the book, however, is in the characterization of Clive’s capriciously charming sweetheart, Ethel, and of the honorable and guileless old Colonel Newcomes. |
| The Virginians | The last of his great novel, The Virginians, continues the fortune of Esmond family in the persons of the American twin grandsons of Henry Esmond, in a setting divided between the fast and fashionable society of England and America of the Revolution. |
| Cornbill Magazine | As the first editor of Cornbill Magazine, Thackeray once rejected a poem by Mrs. Browning because in contained “an account of unlawful passion felt by a man for a women”. |
George Eliot’s real name is Mary Ann Evans.
| Comments | Her reputation was always with the serious consideration of the moral position of the individual in the universe, but her psychological insight into the development in the universe, her flair for country scenes and speech, her fine sense of fun, and the narrative interest of her novels gain her a general popularity not common to didactic novelists. |
| After Daniel Deronda, a study of Jewish racial consciousness, she had archived a position of respect never approached by any other English woman writer. Even today, among all the Victorian woman novelists, only the Bronte sisters seem her equals; in the study of aspiration and nobility in the mind of woman she has no rival. |
| Early stories | Her early stories Amos Barton, Mr.Gilfil’s Love Story and Janet’s Repentance were collected in Scenes of Clerical Life. It was published under the masculine pseudonym of “George Eliot”. |
| The first two works of fiction had brought her a critical reputation as one of the most powerful of contemporary writers. |
| The Mill on the Floss | The Mill on the Floss tells of the love, estrangement, and eventual reconciliation of the daughter and son of a country miller. The early sections of the book are the most clearly autobiographical of all her writing. |
| Silas Marner | Silas Marner, last and shortest of the rustic novels, is set in the period before the Industrial revolution, and has for its theme the influence of his fellow men in first crushing a poor hand-loom weaver and them restoring him to happiness. |
| Study of Provincial Life, Middlemarch | Study of Provincial Life, Middlemarch sets in one of the new towns of the Industrial North. This is the book on which her reputation rests with modern readers, and some critics have called it the greatest of Victorian novels. |
| Common | The sisters of the Brontes were independent children, devoted to each other and suspicious of outsiders. |
| All the Brontes scribbled poetry secretly. |
| All works were published under the sisters’ pseudonyms. |
| Both Jane Eyre and the still greater Wuthering Heights brought to the novel introspection and an intense concentration on the inner life of emotion which before them had been the province of poetry alone. |
| Charlotte | Jane Eyre | the poetic and imaginative story of the love of a young governess for her married employer, has undoubted connections with Charlotte’s experiences in Brussels. |
| All charlotte’s novels were success, and she occasionally broke her Yorkshire seclusion for a wisic to London, here she was something of a celebrity, one her real identity was known. |
| Emily | Wuthering Heights | As inspiration in her master piece, one of the great workers of genius in English fiction, Emily drew equally on her own emotional, introverted nature and on the wild and mysterious moorland around her for the story of the passionate Cathy and her savage lover Heatchcliff, whose love lasts through their lives and beyond their death and burial in the quite churchyard on the moor. |
| Locksley Hall | He uttered the protest which young men like himself, of good though not noble birth, were felling in the presence of class distinctions which subordinated love to rank, and of an industrial civilization which made gold the supreme test of success. |
| The princes | It was Tennyson’s contribution to the question, then beginning to be widely discussed, of the higher education of women, |
| In Memoriam | The poetry interpenetrates the theme, on which was just then engaging the minds of men more passionately than ever before in the world’s history---the question of immortality of the soul. The poem was written in memory of the Arthur Hallam, a beloved friend and college mate of Tennyson’s, who dies in 1833. |
| The Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington | He ministered to national pride, stroked the fires of imperialism, and brought poetry nearer to the national life than it had been since Shakespeare. |
| Idylls of the King | He painted the character of the first English national hero, King Arthur, and gives a new meaning to the legends which had ground up in the Middle Ages about the knights of the Round Table. |
| In no way does he illustrate more conspicuously his tendency to forsake pure romance for romantic treatment of present realities: than in these poems, which are full of suggestions of: modern moral and social problems. King Arthur’s attempt to bring civilization o his realm through the devotions of his knights fails because of ins which Tennyson felt to be the peculiar danger of this age. |
| Comparison | Browning | Tennyson |
| interest lay in individual passion | interest lay in universal law |
| Style was highly individual, an often more intent on meaning than on form | Style is eclectic and carefully elaborated |
| Robert Browning, who disputes with Tennyson the first place among Victorian poets, is Tennyson’s opposite in almost every respect but fame and length of years. Both shared almost equally in the Victorian tendency toward reflection, and toward a didactic aim; but their reflection was exercised upon very different phenomena, and their teaching was widely opposed. |
| Shelly | His first stimulus to poetic creation was given by a volume of Shelly which he picked up by a chance on a London book-stall in his fourteenth year. |
| Pauline | His first long poem, Pauline, is a half-dramatic study of the type of spiritual life which Shelly’s own career embodied; and Shelly’s influence is clearly traceable both in its thought and in sit style. |
| Paracelsus | Like Pauline, Paracelsus is the “history of a soul.” In it Browning’s wonderful endowments are already suggested: his knowledge of the causes of spiritual growth and decay, his subtle analyses of motive and counter motive, his eloquence in pleading a cause, the enkindled power and beauty of his language when blown upon by noble passion. |
| The Ring and the Book | This is the crowning efforts of his genus for he vastness of its scope and its grasp of human nature, though it lacks the spontaneous grace and charm which the best of his shorter pieces share with Pippa Passes, that perfect fruit of his youthful imagination. |
| Comments | He wrote much, with a steady gain in intellectual subtlety, but with a corresponding loss of poetic beauty. |
| He made a more and more deliberate sacrifice of form to matter, wrenching and straining the verse –fabric in order to pack into it all the secondary meanings of the theme. |
| To the last, his genius continues to throw out burst and jets of exquisite music, color and feeling. |
| early poetry | One Word More | One of Browning’s most perfect short poems, One Word More, is addressed to his wife, and is kind of counter-tribute to her most perfect work |
| the Sonnets from the Portuguese | which contain the record of her courtship and marriage. |
| Comments | Her early life was shadowed by illness and affliction, and her early poetry shows in many places the defects of unreality and of over wrought emotion natural to work produced in the loneliness of a sick-chamber,. |
| The best known of these early poems are perhaps Lady Geraldine’s Courtship, where she works under the influences of Tennyson’s idylls, and The Cry of the Children, where she voices the humanitarian protest against the practice of employing child labor in mind and factories. |
| Aurora Leigh | Her most ambitious work, Aurora Leigh, a kind a versified novel of modern English life, with a social reformer and humanitarian, of aristocratic lineage, for hero and a young poetess, in large part of a refection of Mrs. Browning’s own personality, for heroine. It shows the influence of a great novel-writing age, when the novel was becoming more and more imbued with social purpose. |
| Comments | Mr. Browning’s technique is uncertain, and she never freed herself from her characteristic faults of vagueness and unrestraint. But her sympathy with noble causes, the elevation and ardor of her moods of personal emotion, and the distinction of her utterance at its best, tempts us to over look her technical limitations. She shares her husband’s strenuousness and optimism, but she speaks always from the feminine vantage-ground. |
| Comments | Imperialism | Kipling, who with drum and trumpet called upon England to “take up the White Man’s burden” by dominating all “lesser breeds without the law.” |
| Dogmatic, cocksure |
| Drama | One unexpected literary feature of the age was enthusiasm for stage plays that rolled like a tide over the whole English-speaking world. |
| Provincial Theatre, “drama study group” ,“drama workshop” |
| Nearly all successful; novelists wrote plays also, and most of them used the stage as an instruments of social reform. |
| contrast between Victorian and post-Victorian literature | Poets of the Victorian age, as reflected in Stedman’s Victorian Anthology, leave a general impression of beauty, of faith, and therefore of cheerfulness. |
| Poetry | Tennyson | Kipling |
| world-wide idealism | his intolerance of everything outside the British pale |
| Novel | Dickens | Hardy |
| a man of colossal optimism | most “finished: novelist of the age following was sunk on the deeps of pessimism |
| The end of 19th | Comments | The growth of anti-realistic art and literature reflected the crises of bourgeois culture at the period of imperialism. |
| The end of the 19th century is a period of struggle between realistic and anti-realistic trends in art and literature. |
| Contrast | George Meredith, Samuel Butler, and T. Hardy and later on G. B. Shaw, Herbert George Wells and J. Galsworthy | created a truthful picture of contemporary England |
| Robert Louis Stevenson and Oscar Wilde | led the readers away from the burning issues of social reality |
| R. L. Stevenson | The chief aim of R. L. Stevenson was to entertain his readers. His mastery written stories and novels abound in interesting adventures, fantastic situations and vivid descriptions. But even in his best books he avoided touching upon the social contradictions of his times. |
| Oscar Wilde | Oscar Wilde is the most conspicuous writer and poet of the English decadence. In his critical essays O. Wilde expounded the theory of “art for art’s sake”. Though in many of his brilliant plays and fairy tales he criticize the cynicism and bigotry of the bourgeois-aristocratic world of his days, he, for all that, remained a septic and pessimist. |
| R. Kipling | In his short stories, poems and novels R. Kipling, the bard of imperialism, glorified the colonial expansion of Great Britain. |
| Describing the everyday life of ordinary British official and military men in India and other colonial and semi-colonial countries, he never raised his voice in protest against the oppression of the natives. His picture of India, though exceedingly vivid and fascinating, presenting a perverted view of the country and its glorious people. |
| End of 19th and beginning of 20th | Comments | The English realists of the end of 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries continued and developed the traditions of their predecessors, i.e. Dickens, Thackeray, Bronte, and Gaskell. |
| They sought for new ways and means of revealing the truths of life. |
| S. Butler, G. B. Shaw | In their works criticism of the bourgeois world reached considerable depth and poignancy. The narrow-mindedness, hierocracy and avidly of the propertied classes are mercilessly scourged in the works of S. Butler and his followers G. B. Shaw. |
| G. Meredith, T. Hardy and J. Galsworthy | The later realists exceeded in revealing the characters from a psychological point of view. The novels of G. Meredith, T. Hardy and J. Galsworthy are masterpiece of satirical portrayal and psychological analysis. |
| H.G. Wells | Of great interest are the works of H.G. Wells. His social and fantastic novels also bring out the crying contradictions of bourgeois civilization. In an attempt at solving social problems, Wells devised number of projects, but none of them has anything in common with scientific socialism. |
| Summary | With all their merits and achievements, however, the later realists are inferior to their great predecessors in the scope and breadth of their portrayal of social phenomena. The work of S. Butler, T. Hardy and H.G. Wells is imbued with pessimism often bordering in despair. |
| Condemning the existing order of things, the later English realist failed to see the force at work in society which was bound to change it. |
| The greatest books of the period were cries of suffering and protest. |
| Comments | Thomas Hardy is the last and one of the greatest of Victorian novelists. |
| The chief love of his life is poetry. |
| Early works | Far from the Madding Crowd | Hardy’s first masterpiece, a story of fortitude and of sufferings brought about by the capriciousness of a country girl. |
| Victorian novel | Both novels were badly bowdlerized for serial publications, but even so, they shocked British prudery and Hardy was terribly abused for being “filthy”. |
| Tess of the D’Urbervilles | The second part of the title of Tess is A Pure Woman, to show what Hardy thought of his heroine, who is seduced, abandoned, and finally driven to murder for which she is hanged. Through it all she remains his most lovable woman character, cruelly tormented by fate and innocent of any intention to sin. |
| Jude the Obscure | Jude shows the horrible decline of a man and woman drawn together by sexual desire and torn apart by the disaster it entails. |
| Post-Victorian poetry | After Jude Hardy turned with relief to the writing of vigorously intellectual and experiment lyrical poetry which many cites think is at least as great s his novels. |
| Comment | One of the most prominent of 20th century realistic English writers |
| The Man pf Property and The Forsyte Saga | In 1905 he married the devoiced wife of his cousin, their association having begun some years earlier when her first marriage proved unhappy. |
| The Man of Property, the first novel of the Forsyte Sage, was the highest point of social criticism ever attained by Galsworthy |
| Forsytism | The specifically English type of bourgeois morality and social attitude. |
| Theme | He saw human existence in terms of the hunters and the hunted: with varying emphasis and in a variety of guise his is the theme of the majority of his novels and plays. |
| He was moved throughout life by an acute sense of social justice, and though he aimed to hold the balance fairly between rich and poor, between the powerful and the helpless, his emotions were always engaged on the side of the underdog. |
| Early age | Wilde was quickly established himself both as a writer and as a spokesman for the school of “Art for Art’s Sake” when he was in college with George Bernard Shaw and William Butler Yeats. |
| Later he became spokesman for Aestheticism. |
| The Portrait of Dorian Gray | The Portrait of Dorian Gray is a striking ingenious story of a handsome young man and his pursuit of sensual please. |
| Until the end of the book he himself remains fresh and healthy in appearance while his portrait mysteriously changes into a horrible image of his corrupted soul. |
| Although the Preface to the novel emphasize that art and morality are totally separate, in the novel itself, at least in its later chapters, Wilde seems to be expounding a moral lesion on the evils of self-regarding hedonism. |
| Poetry | As a poet Wilde felt overshadowed by the Victorian predecessors whom he admired: Browning, Rosette, and Swinburne, |
| And had trouble finding his own voice. |
| Mrs. Warren’s Profession | Born in Dublin, a treatment of commercialized vice which was refused performance by the censor. |
| Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant | He reached dramatic maturity |
| Preface | In the elaborate prefaces to these volumes he commented on the technical and social qualities of the plays, and further to guide his readers, expanded the stage directions into full description, character sketches, and analysis, thus adopting the play to a public accustomed to the reading of novels. |
| By this campaign in behalf of the printed play he helped to raise prose drama again to the status of literature. |
| Arms and the Man | a brilliant satire on military glory |
| Candida | a resolution of a triangular situation by Shaw’s ideal woman |
| the Man of Destiny | a mock-heroic skit on Napoleon |
| You Never Can Tell | a farcical treatment of the new woman |
| John Bull’s Other Island | In he invented the usual conceptions of Englishman and Irishman, depicting the former as a soft-headed sentimentalist, the later as a type of practical sense |
| Man and Superman | In he represented courtship as a war of the sexes and man as the victims of woman, who is the incarnation of natures purpose and the will to live |
| Comment | During his lifetime and even afterward Lawrence was a controversial figure because of his frank treatment of sex and his outspoken insistence upon a need for a readjustment in the relationship between the sexes. |
| Lawrence is often criticized for the didactic elements in his novels and the looseness in structure. |
| The short stories are generally considered be superior in unity of mood and artistic form. |
| Lady Chatterley’s Lovers and The Rainbow | His most controversial novel is Lady Chatterley’s Lovers, the best probably The Rainbow, is often taken to be largely biographical, its subject matter paralleling much of his early life. |
| Sons and Lovers | Sons and Lovers, against a background of paternal coarseness and vitality conflicting with maternal refinement and gentility, he set the theme of the demanding mother who has given up the prospect of achieving a true emotional life with her husband and turns to her sons with a stultifying and possessive love. |
| The theme of Sons and Lovers is usually said to concern the effect of mother-love upon the development of a son. |
| Bloomsbury group | Lynton Starchy | The biographer |
| J.M. Keynes | The eminent economist |
| Roger Fry | An art critic |
| E.M. Forster | |
| Her suicide | Her suicide in March,1941, resulting from her fear that she was about to lost her mind and become a burden on her husband |
| First revealed to the public that she had been subject to periods of nervous depression, particularly after finished a book and that underneath the liveness and wit so well known among the Bloomsbury group lay disturbing psychological tensions. |
| Stream of consciousness | Rebellion | She rebelled against what she called the “materialism” of such novelists as Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy, and sought a more delicate rendering of those aspects of consciousness in which she felt that the truth of human experience really lay. |
| Monday or Thursday | The sketches in which she explored the possibilities of moving between action and contemplation, between specific external events in time and delicate tracing of the flow of conspicuousness where the mind moved between retrospect and anticipation, were collected in Monday or Thursday. |
| Mrs. Dalloway | The first completely successful novels in her new style. |
| Skill | After two novels cast rather cumbersomely in traditional form, she developed her own style, which handled the “stream of consciousness” with a carefully modulated poetic flow and brought into prose fiction something of the rhythms and the imagery of lyric poetry. |
| Theme | Woolf was a skilled exponent of the “stream of consciousness” technique in her novels, exploring with great subtly problems of personal identity and personal relationship as well as the significance of time change, and memory of human personality. |
| Women | Woolf was much concerned with the position of women, especially professional women, and the constrictions they suffered under. |
| Comment | From a comparably early age Joyce regards himself as a rebel against the shabbiness and Philistinism of Dublin. |
| He wrote only and always about Dublin. He devised ways of expanding his accounts of Dublin, however, so that they become microcosm, small-scale models, of all human life, of all history and all geography. |
| Indeed that was his life’s work: to write about Dublin in such a way that he was writing about all of human experience. |
| Dubliners | Dubliners are more than sharp realistic sketches, a book about man’s fate as well as series of sketches of Dublin. |
| A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man shows how carefully Joyce reworked and compressed his material for maximum effect. |
| The Portrait is not literally true as autobiography, though it has many autobiographical elements; but it is representatively true not only of Joyce but of the relation between the artist and society in modern world. |
| His masterpiece is Ulysses. |
