NINETEENTH CENTURY

LITERATURE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 FROM THE ROMANTIC TO THE VICTORIAN FRAME OF MIND

Romanticism (until 1840s):
• Emotion, individualism (hero has to be alone), glorified past, importance of nature,
constant allusion to mediaevalism and isolation
• Early Gothic genre

Industrial Revolution (until 1840s):

• Emergence of middle class, urban sprawl (representation = democracy grows)
• Class difference (rich/poor) / Genre difference (man, woman)
• Victorianism (1837 – 1901): Realism, Gothic gender revised (feminized)

1.2. THE WOMAN QUESTION

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What is a woman? Notions of womanhood in 19 century England
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• Over the 19 century there were many developments in the widespread questioning of
the place and value of women in English society. The woman question in Victorian
England witnessed various debates over women's place in society with opposing voices
emphasizing either the need for women to have educational, political and economic
opportunities or else the contention that women properly belonged in the home as
caretaker to the family.
• Queen Victoria epitomized these two opposite versions since she was often depicted, and
represented, as an ideal wife and mother whilst reigning appearing often times to heavy-
handed a ruler as monarch of the nation.

Coventry Patmoner's “The Angel in the House” and the separate spheres as an ideology
• Ideology from Industrial Revolution
• Men (will of God an biologic determinism)→ Public sphere
• Women (religious doctrines)→ Private sphere (not domestic)→ domestic is not private
• The separate spheres ideology: Women and men are unapologetically different and
therefore distinctive gender roles are natural

Why did women take central stage?

• The main reason why women came to become so central to political, social and literary
debates is to be found in the changes that industrialization and capitalism brought about
• Industrialization brought new types of work but also urban poverty. These works could be
made by both, but women continue to not be equally paid
• The development of women's labour in industries, challenged traditional notions of the
woman as economically inferior and limited to the private sphere
• Even the most educated women has difficulty to practise a profession due to the belief
that they were supposed to have physical and mental limitations

The notion of coverture

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• At the beginning of the 19 century, married women had no standing due to the notion of
coverture
• Coverture refers to the legal conception that a woman's rights were engulfed under her
husband's which implied that women had no right to own any property
William Blackstone
• He thought that when married, woman is suspended, incorporated or consolidated into that
of the husband, who is her baron or lord. And the condition of the woman during her
marriage is called her coverture. A man cannot grant any thing to his wife, or enter into
covenant with her, because legally, they're not at the same level→ This was one of the
principal reasons why women started to vindicate their nights.

1.3. THE RISE OF THE PRESS

The Penny Daily Paper wrote an article that was very revolutionary:
• Addressed to people in power
• Without information, people cannot feel part of the nation
∟This needs to be change, stop hiding = ∟This is what the article reclaims
free papers for the people
• No distinction between public and private

Fanny Mayne “The Literature of the Working Classes”, The Englishwoman's Magazine and
Christian Mother's Miscellany
• The concept of social mass was created and for that reason, articles like this appeared.
• In that moment reading was possible for everyone, but only accessible if the books were
related to the spiritual aspect, teaching a moral lesson.
• Novels had to be written not only for entertainment but also to instruct. Reading = moral
lesson + education of people.
• Falling costs of production led to the emergence of a working class market for print that led
Mary to worry about the “penny fiction” magazines that were being sold at a fraction of the
price of authors who are now considered to be part of the nineteenth century literary canon.
• With mass-produced popular fiction came the notion of the popular mass that consumed it -a
mass of indiscriminate and addicted readers who cared little about the content of what they
read as long as it gratified the sensual needs, violent or romantic, of the moment.
• Education became a matter of reading selection of texts that were deemed to rise above the
popular -an activity that both individualized their readers and rescued them from the mass of
popular texts and popular readers.

THE EMERGENCE OF THE NOVEL

• The “novel” itself had little of the formal definition it has today. It was seem simply as a
narrative form opposed to “romance”, a work of fiction dealing with the affairs of everyday
life.
• The “classic” Victorian novel read and studied today was largely written by and for a
specific large but restricted middle-class readership, and consolidated middle-class cultural
values. It is a myth that even Dickens was read by everyone.
• The middle-class Victorian novel was nevertheless related to the revolution in printing and
reading that affected everyone in early nineteenth century Britain. Print has played an
important role in previous social and religious developments in earlier periods of change.
But what happened in early nineteenth century England was different. The Industrial
Revolution created cheap printing and papermaking, and rapid book distribution by rail, at a
time when the reading population was rapidly expanding . As old social structures crumbed,
new identities were forged through print.
• Reading was a creative act. For the emerging lower middle classes it was political.
• Where novels were allowed , they gave instruction for “real-life” situations., like those of
Fanny Burney or Jane Austen. That the middle-class readership came to accept a broader
range of fiction was due above all to Sir Walter Scott, whose historical novels stood poised
between fiction and chronicled fact.
 • The novel was especially well adapted to explore and even to define central aspects of
Victorian experience and belief. Formally, it developed as an interplay of romance and
realism of fantasy both shaped and obstructed by the imperatives of social and material life.
• The railways, carrying their first passengers from 1830 onwards transformed the English
landscape, and altered the consciousness of space and time. In the world of publishing, over
time they centralized the book market, rapidly distributing books and periodical across the
nation and extending the circulating libraries of Edward Mudie and W. H. Smith, which used
rail to send boxes to the provinces and overseas.
• The excessed of the Reign of Terror, and patriotic imposition to the threat of invasion, cooled
much public support for the French Revolution, although Napoleon remained a surprisingly
popular hero with the working classes. Britain was moving toward a new social consensus.
In the later eighteenth century popular religious movements, in particular that of Methodism,
had created an upwardly mobile working and lower middle-class, energized by self-
discipline and the work ethic.
• Looking back to the native European impulse of late mediaevalism, A.W.N. Pugin's
Contrasts (1836) opposed the industrial ethos of the age with an aesthetic based on social
and moral function, an organic form combining beauty, religion and the honesty of the
builder's craft.
• In the romantic ear the prose became an unusually supple vehicle for varieties of
introspection as well as social and literary comment. The dislocations of the early Victorian
decades created an audience eager for writing that addressed new social prospects and
perplexities. These worries were focused most pointedly in religious doubt, but in a world f
greatly expanding literacy, where, to adapt Marx's phrase, all that is solid seemed to be
melting into air, the craving for new sources of value was unusually pervasive. This hunger
is registered in the expanding popularity of lectures and public reading, along with the
remarkable tolerance among Victorian audiences for sometimes excoriating attacks on their
character and values.
• In effect, Walter Scott rescued romance from its feminine associations, and pointed towards
the subsequent development of the novel as the dominant literary form of the century.

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Gothic Sceneries – from 18 up until 19 century
• One cannot move far in the Victorian period without encountering the Gothic. It focused the
social debate.
• The aesthetic and moral qualities of the Gothic influenced building design from railway
stations to the acres of suburban villas spilling out from the city centres, over the
countryside, housing the new urban middle classes. Gothic images pervaded literature
and Pre-Raphaelite art.
• Gothic fiction began as a sophisticated aesthetic tenet. Horace Walpole first applied the
word “Gothic” to a novel in the subtitle -”A Gothic story”- of The Castle of Otranto,
published in 1764. When he used the word it meant something like “barbarous”, as well as
“deriving from the Middle Ages”.

UNIT 2: THE NOVEL

The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) – Anne Radcliffe

• Gothic novel full of mysteries and uncomfortable aspects.
• Darkness vs. Light (feminist, the protagonist and hero use to be a woman)
• Horrible feelings like fear and uncertainly.
• The idea of women reading in the candle light. Women possibility to succeed in the story.
Women authors were creating something to the society. A defence of women who could read
freely.
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• Gothic tropes in the 18 century included psychological and physical terror; mystery and
the supernatural; madness, doubling, dark landscapes, and heredity curses.
• The Victorian Gothic moves away from the familiar themes of Gothic fiction -ruined castles,
helpless heroines, and evil villains -to situate the tropes of the supernatural and the uncanny
within a recognisable environment. This brings a sense of verisimilitude to the narrative, and
thereby renders the Gothic features of the text all the more disturbing.
• Why was that so? The Victorian era saw the abandonment of conventional religion. In the
search for meaning, people were prepared to suspend reason.
• Critics have identified Radcliffe’s writing as part of the “female Gothic”, or a “tradition of
romance writing produced by women for women. One characteristic of this body of writing is
the explained supernatural which “evokes a spiritual world through unexplained ghostly
visions and sounds, yet finally provides a natural origin for all the effects”. Radcliffe often
includes references to the divine supernatural through her characters’ religious experiences
However, Radcliffe’s novels expose the “false supernatural,” and reveal the “true
supernatural” through characters’ relationship to “non-human nature”
• A key distinction from Radcliffe’s Gothic to the Gothic fiction of other authors is her use of
terror as opposed to horror. Although her works “featured castles, tyrants, abductions and
imagined ghosts,… Radcliffe [avoids] scenes of positive horror”. In other words, she
privileged imagined evils over actual, physical threats, in accordance with theories of the
sublime (terror expands our mind through imagination, while horror contracts it through
earthly fears).
• Portrayals of the Supernatural: For example, in the Mysteries of Udolpho, the reader is
haunted by the possibility of what is behind the black veil, and we are terrified not by a
description of what Emily saw, but by her reaction to it. All we know is that what lies behind
the veil is “no picture” (Radcliffe, 249), and that it causes Emily to faint.
• The Mysteries of Udolpho can be read as “an attack on the cult of sensibility”. Radcliffe’s
narrative consistently favours reason over superstition, as when she explains away the
heroine’s (and reader’s) terror by revealing the mysteries to have natural causes. Because
Gothic novels are the playground of the irrational, they allow characters to encounter the
“extreme effects of sensibility”, and eventually learn an appropriate lesson about the dangers
of sensibility. Ironically, it is Emily’s own imagination rather than any external Gothic
occurrences that cause terror in the novel. Emily’s “sensitive imagination [makes her]
susceptible to superstition, and increases her sense of self-delusion”
• Gender: Many critics have analysed The Mysteries of Udolpho in terms of gender. Old and
new ideas of masculinity were colliding in this period, as seen in The Mysteries of Udolpho.
For example, Montoni’s “warlike virility” is contrasted with the sensibility of Valancourt or
St.Aubert. While the sentimental hero assimilates feminine virtues of sensitivity and
emotionality, Montoni sees anything feminine as weak. He is “distinct from [and] hostile to
women, whom he regards only as a means to or form of disposable property” and he sees
chivalric love as “emasculating”. Basically, Montoni is a misogynist, asserting complete
dominance over women: “in his terms, self-control means complete abdication of female
control and will to male sublime power”. Through Montoni, Radcliffe critiques the old style
of masculinity. She reveals the effect of Montoni’s unrestrained violence on the community,
upholding instead the positive benevolence of St. Aubert.

Northanger Abbey (1818) – Jane Austen

• VOL I, Chapter 5 → Speaks about the fact that due to the paper of women in society, when
they decide to read a novel, they do it like it was something bad or inappropriate for them.
And also that if a woman would be the author of the novel, probably show more enthusiasm
and a feeling of proud.
• VOL I, Chapter 6 → Makes a reference of a real book, “The Mysteries of Udolpho” and also
that women started to read more, but it was like they only feel comfortable speaking about
their literary passion with other women. Also deals with human strength.
• VOL I, Chapter 7 → Men continue depreciating books that women think are good. And also
only recognising the talent of a little group of women writers. This makes reference to the
 supposed superiority of intelligence between man and women in that moment. In this
chapter she is like following clues and discovering new things.
• VOL II, Chapter 7 → Tired of being all the time acting good with people she doesn't like,
she started to show her real feelings. Also starts to hate a man who only treated his wife as
an object and she thinks that was not even sad when she died. She's charming and he is
cruel. Mixture between romantic literature and Gothic.
• VOL II, Chapter 9 → The main character receives a moral lesson, you can't judge one
situation without having all the details. Also that reading books is never enough to know
everything about a situation. LIGHT → If dark meaning dark reality, women can be seen as
a way of shine the dark. Light can be seen in moments in which women are strong.
• VOL II, Chapter 10 → She learns that is better to not know something than imagine what
you don't know only because you have read it in a book. You can be only sure about these
things you're sure you know. England considered a vice less place, and all outside is bad and
corrupted.
• VOL II, Chapter 14 → Failure of herself like a heroine because of her previous
precipitations and inventions. On the opposite, a heroine who has discover a lot of things
through investigation and travelling, come back home full of happiness.
• VOL II, Chapter 15 → It can be dangerous to magnified someone's actions or behaviours,
because this can make that you don't realise about the real danger. Austen address the reader
directly because of the importance of the spiritually. Also is a novel that is thought to be
read for someone educated.
• VOL II, Chapter 16 → Happy ending, even the main character have committed a lot of
mistakes and prejudices, the end of the story is a good one, in which what she has learned,
makes her happiness possible. Choose between love and money. She chooses love and
marriage. Even can be seen as something conservative for us, in that moment, the behaviour
of the woman in the novel, was something new.
• This novel is a parody about everything: the novel, women reading, etc. (which is use
specially about port colonial literature). Parody not always implies humorous elements.
• Some of feminism strategies hidden in the text (p. 35 - 39):
1) “They called each other by their Christian name” → RELIGION: She speaks about
Christianity to vindicate the spiritually of woman. IMPORTANT: Jane Austen was not
Christian.
 2) The woman quotes some male poets to the English renaissance. This is a way to show
that she know a lot about literature.
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3) Second awakening (first half of 19 century) → Huge importance in writing.
4) Jane Austen is defends the novel as a literary genre.
5) She makes one of the most important definition of what literature is (P. 36 – lines 3 to 5)
Austen draws her portrait of Bath society from her own experience. Northanger Abbey, however, is
probably as much a product of the Gothic novels that Austen read as it is a product of her own
experience. A crumbling old building is often found in Gothic works, some of which feature an abbey,
once used to house nuns or monks, then sold or abandoned and later purchased by some lord or baron
who is generally a villain. The holy nature of the abbey becomes ironic in these Gothic novels, since
terrible things go on there once the lord or baron takes possession. For Catherine, Northanger Abbey
symbolizes an imagined ideal. As soon as she enters the abbey, she begins to think of herself as the
heroine of a Gothic novel. Unlike Bath, which is simply a pleasant tourist town, the Abbey is a place
of mystery and perhaps even adventure, at least in Catherine's mind. When the Abbey turns out to be
disappointingly normal, Catherine uses her memory of the abbeys from her novel-reading to make it
more frightening.

WOMEN WRITERS
Preliminaries
1 Strategies for gender studies to challenge C19 literary canon:
- Bring to our attention writers hitherto forgotten or marginalized
- Literary history written taking into account their stories
- Expansion of the canon (eg. New Woman writings)
- Proposing new frames of reference for reveling/ re-reading canonical works.
Eg.: differences between male and female Gothic fiction
-> Female representing patriarchal oppression
-> Male representing femme and fentasy
2 Literary history
- Throughout the C19
2.1 Reasons for high visibility of women:
- Large-scale changes in literary culture
- Development of a mas literary market (women as readers)
- Growth of periodical literature
- Emergence of a new class of professional writers
-> This offered some women economic independent
-> Caroline Norton
3 Prejudices against women`s writing=exclesion from the literary canon in first half of C20
4 Reasons for prejudices:
- Women only fit for a short range of topics
-> Thomas Gisborne ( 1758-1846), Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797)
-> Men efforts of mind, comprehensive reasoning
-> Women: modesty, delicacy, sympathizing sensibility
5 Some women writing under male pseudonyms to gain responsibility:
- George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880)
6 Amy Levy (1816-1889)
- First Jewish woman at Cambridge University in Newnham
6.1 Attempted to make the gendered notion of 'feeling' a standard by which all literature
should be judged
6.2 A work's literary value is defined in terms of its ability to foster a mode of reading
engaged feelings and not intellect alone
6.3 Influence of choice of print media
-> Periodical press vs Single-authored book
-> Anonynithy
-> Subject matter (eg.: women's and children's magazines)
 Example: Proserpine Arranged as a Tableau for drawing-room performance (1880),
Julia Goddard. WOMEN WRITERS

Preliminaries
1 Strategies for gender studies to challenge C19 literary canon:
- Bring to our attention writers hitherto forgotten or marginalized
- Literary history written taking into account their stories
- Expansion of the canon (eg. New Woman writings)
- Proposing new frames of reference for reveling/ re-reading canonical works.
Eg.: differences between male and female Gothic fiction
-> Female representing patriarchal oppression
-> Male representing femme and fentasy
2 Literary history
- Throughout the C19
2.1 Reasons for high visibility of women:
- Large-scale changes in literary culture
- Development of a mas literary market (women as readers)
- Growth of periodical literature
- Emergence of a new class of professional writers
-> This offered some women economic independent
-> Caroline Norton
3 Prejudices against women`s writing=exclesion from the literary canon in first half of C20
4 Reasons for prejudices:
- Women only fit for a short range of topics
-> Thomas Gisborne ( 1758-1846), Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797)
-> Men efforts of mind, comprehensive reasoning
-> Women: modesty, delicacy, sympathizing sensibility
5 Some women writing under male pseudonyms to gain responsibility:
- George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880)
6 Amy Levy (1816-1889)
- First Jewish woman at Cambridge University in Newnham
6.1 Attempted to make the gendered notion of 'feeling' a standard by which all literature
should be judged
6.2 A work's literary value is defined in terms of its ability to foster a mode of reading
engaged feelings and not intellect alone
6.3 Influence of choice of print media
-> Periodical press vs Single-authored book
-> Anonynithy
-> Subject matter (eg.: women's and children's magazines)
Example: Proserpine Arranged as a Tableau for drawing-room performance (1880),
Julia Goddard.

Frankenstein (1818) – Mary Shelley

• Precursor of Naturalism (reverse of French influence)
• Shelley sat by whilst her father, Byron and Polidori discussed the new sciences of
mesmerism electricity... which promised to unlock the riddle of life, and planned to write
ghost stories.
• Lifting of the Victorian taboo against writing about physical sexuality (including pregnancy
and labour)
• Brought birth to literature not as realism but as Gothic fantasy, and thus contributing to
Romanticism a myth of genuine originality.
TEXTS: Chapter 4: Victor attacks his studies with enthusiasm and, ignoring his social life and his
family far away in Geneva, makes rapid progress. Fascinated by the mystery of the creation of life,
he begins to study how the human body is built (anatomy) and how it falls apart (death and decay).
After several years of tireless work, he masters all that his professors have to teach him, and he goes
one step further: discovering the secret of life.
Privately, hidden away in his apartment where no one can see him work, he decides to begin the
construction of an animate creature, envisioning the creation of a new race of wonderful beings.
Zealously devoting himself to this labor, he neglects everything else—family, friends, studies, and
social life—and grows increasingly pale, lonely, and obsessed.

Chapter 13: As winter thaws into spring, the monster notices that the cottagers, particularly Felix,
seem unhappy. A beautiful woman in a dark dress and veil arrives at the cottage on horseback and asks
to see Felix. Felix becomes ecstatic the moment he sees her. The woman, who does not speak the
language of the cottagers, is named Safie. She moves into the cottage, and the mood of the household
immediately brightens. As Safie learns the language of the cottagers, so does the monster. He also
learns to read, and, since Felix uses Constantin-François de Volney’s Ruins of Empires to instruct
Safie, he learns a bit of world history in the process. Now able to speak and understand the language
perfectly, the monster learns about human society by listening to the cottagers’ conversations.
Reflecting on his own situation, he realizes that he is deformed and alone. “Was I then a monster,” he
asks, “a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned?” He also learns
about the pleasures and obligations of the family and of human relations in general, which deepens the
agony of his own isolation.

Chapter 15: While foraging for food in the woods around the cottage one night, the monster finds an
abandoned leather satchel containing some clothes and books. Eager to learn more about the world
than he can discover through the chink in the cottage wall, he brings the books back to his hovel and
begins to read. The books include Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Sorrows of Werter, a volume of
Plutarch’s Lives, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the last of which has the most profound effect on
the monster. Unaware that Paradise Lost is a work of imagination, he reads it as a factual history and
finds much similarity between the story and his own situation. Rifling through the pockets of his own
clothes, stolen long ago from Victor’s apartment, he finds some papers from Victor’s journal. With his
newfound ability to read, he soon understands the horrific manner of his own creation and the disgust
with which his creator regarded him. Dismayed by these discoveries, the monster wishes to reveal
himself to the cottagers in the hope that they will see past his hideous exterior and befriend him. He
decides to approach the blind De Lacey first, hoping to win him over while Felix, Agatha, and Safie
are away. He believes that De Lacey, unprejudiced against his hideous exterior, may be able to
convince the others of his gentle nature. The perfect opportunity soon presents itself, as Felix, Agatha,
and Safie depart one day for a long walk. The monster nervously enters the cottage and begins to
speak to the old man. Just as he begins to explain his situation, however, the other three return
unexpectedly. Felix drives the monster away, horrified by his appearance.

Chapter 24: His whole family destroyed, Victor decides to leave Geneva and the painful memories it
holds behind him forever. He tracks the monster for months, guided by slight clues, messages, and
hints that the monster leaves for him. Angered by these taunts, Victor continues his pursuit into the ice
and snow of the North. There he meets Walton and tells his story. He entreats Walton to continue his
search for vengeance after he is dead.

Gothic feminism
• The novel is most feminine in the motif of revulsion against newborn life, and the drama of
guilt, and flight surrounding birth and its consequences.
• Frankenstein -distinctly a woman's myth making on the subject of birth precisely because its
emphasis is not upon what precedes birth, not upon birth itself, but upon what follows birth:
the trauma of the afterbirth.
• Victor; feminized man who breaks through normal human limitations to defy the rules of
society and infringe upon the realm of God.
• Frankenstein defies morality not by living forever but by giving birth.
 • Shelley faces the monster's sexual needs, for the denouement of the story hangs on his
demand that Frankenstein create a female monster partner.
• “Strange perversity”; is a mother's hatred (when an innocent girl is wrongly executed for the
murder of Frankenstein's brother)
• Frankenstein transforms the standard Romantic matter of human relationships into a
phantasmagoria of nursery and the rethinking of human/gender relations through the first
openly Victorian and Gothic (through also Romantic) novel.

The Newgate novel and sensation fiction (1830 – 1868) (Only written by men)
• The Newgate novel and the sensation novel were sub-genres of the literature of crime,
which enjoyed a relatively brief but quite extraordinary popular success in the 1830s, 1840s
and 1860s
• The Newgate novel was associated exclusively
• These novels and the controversies they engendered tell us a great deal about cultural
anxieties and social and literary change at two key points in the Victorian period.
• Newgate novels looked back to the eighteenth century literature of crime and also to the
radical indictments of oppressive legal and penal systems at the turn of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries.
• They held a considerable influence over the sensation and the detective novel.
• Newgate novels took their name from various versions of the Newgate Calendar (1773)
which satisfied the popular fascination with the crime and criminals by gathering accounts
of the lives, trials, confessions, punishments and/or escaped from the law of celebrated
criminals.
• Offered to the public as works of moral improvement whose purpose was to provide a
necessary example of punishment to offenders and to record examples of morally corrupted
people.
• They made a spectacle of “deviant” or socially transgressive behaviour.
• Newgate phenomenon: taking up in the rapidly growing penny press (debate over the nature
and future of the novel as a literary form).
• Who were Newgate novelists and which of their work were Newgate novels? To a large
extent journalistic constructs.
• Edward Bukwer's “Eugene Aram” (1832)
• William Harrison Ainworth's “Rockwood” (1834)
• Ainsworth's “Jack Sheppard” (1840)
• The Newgate controversy as it developed in the 1840s was in part a debate about what could
and could not (and should not) be represented in the novel, and about what forms pr models
of representation were appropriate to the novel.
• It was a debate about the changing nature and status of the novel, and its relationship woth
what Thackeray called the “middling classes” and to other cultural forms, and it was also a
contest about fictional realism.
• The Newgate debate was also a debate about the influence if fiction alongside the effects on
the middle-class readers: of becoming sympathetically involved with the doings of noble
highwaymen, sentimental burglars, and whores with hearts of gold.
• The Newgate debate was also a debate about hierarchies, both social and literary. It was
about keeping the different classes of society separate both in fiction ans as readers of
fiction.
• One of the objections to the Newgate novel was that it imported the literature of the streets
to the drawing room.
• Like the sensation debate twenty years later, the Newgate controversy was a contest over the
nature of the novel and its position in the hierarchy of cultural production in an age of
increasing literacy and proliferation of print forms.
• In the 1860s, the sensation novel debate was also closely intertwined with development in
the newspaper press. The growth of cheap newspapers following the abolition of the Stamp
Tax on newspapers in 1855, and the tendency of both the expanding penny press and the
 middle-class newspapers to include more crime reporting was one factor in the creation of
the market for sensation novels.
• In the late 1850s, the newspapers were also full of sensational stories of the great social evil
of prostitution, and scandals of wrongful imprisionment on lunatic asylums. All (…)

TEXTS:
1C

The Sensation Novel

• Like the Newgate novel, the Sensation Novel was a journalistic construct, a label attached
by reviewers to novels whose plots centred on criminal dees, or social transgressions and
illicit passions, and which preached to the nerves.
• Sensation Novel were tales of modern life that dealt in nervous, psychological, sexual, ad
social shocks , and had complicated plots involving bigamy, adultery, seduction, fraud,
forgery, blackmail, kidnapping and, sometimes, murder. It will be evident in the description
of many of the novels of the 1840s and 1850s (including Jane Eyre)

Differences:
• One of the main differences between Newgate and Sensation Novel was that the latter
upper-middle class crime and transgression in modern (rather than historical) settings.
• In the Sensation Novel the scene of the crime was more likely to be the home that the
road. The Sensation Novel did not depict the criminal underworld, but rather it explored
the dark underside of respectable society.
• One of the most important differences between Sensation Novel and Newgate Novel is
the shift of focus from crime to detection.
• One important difference between Sensation Novel and its Newgate predecessors was
the greater prominence given to female criminals, another was the Sensation Novel's
development of the female detective.
• In truth, the Sensation Novel was also a part of a contest about literary and social
hierarchies, about cultural status of the novel, the influence of fiction and about realism.
• Opponents to Sensation Novel objected to this mixed characters, moral ambiguity, and
mixed feelings -in short, to the ways in which the plots and narrative methods of
Sensation Novel repeatedly put their readers in the position of having to suspend or
revise moral judgements.
• Like Newgate novel, Sensation Novels were seen as both a symptom and cause of social
corruption. The product of a deprived moral taste, they corrupted the public appetite by
feeding it.
• Newgate and Sensation Novels, and the furor they provoked, provide interesting
examples of cultural appropriation and the blurring of the boundaries between high and
low culture during the extended process of the birth of a modern mass media.
• Both Newgate and Sensation Novels were preoccupied with the changing legal and
social structures and often pointed to the need for further change.

Example of a Sensation Novel: Lady Audelley's Secret

• As the tittle shows, the woman in the centre of this story.
• It was situated during the period of the Roman Catholic Act, that open the gate between
protestants and Catholics.
• Secret and mystery is one of the most important characteristics in Sensation Novel.
• Light as something feminist, that women could use to overcome the dark and show
themselves to the literary world.
• Biblical reference: A women dressed in red is a sinner (As in “The Scarlet Letter) > It is
shown a bid difference between they way in which men and women describe sinners (sinner
women, of course).
• Labelling women as crazy was their way to oppress them.
• Open questions to the readers in order to make a reflection with this kind of novels.
 The Historical Novel
• As the literary glory of the Victorian age, no form of novel-writing in the period has more
prestige, and of none were hopes higher-hopes of dignity, seriousness, and moral insight.
th
• Literature of the 19 century had a complex and fruitful relationship to the writing of
history which grew in the course of the century into a professionalized discipline.
• Historical novels were by no means a matter for the elite. Together with the Gothic and the
tale of terror, the historical novels of Walter Scott and Ainsworth were major influences on
working-class and popular literature in the early decades of the century.
• The greatest difficulty of writing historical fiction was that of creating a flexible yet
authentic historical idiom for periods (…)
• Two names dominate the story of the historical novel: Walter Scott and George Lukács.
• At the beginning of the Victorian period, the novel was dominated, overawed almost, by the
achievements of Scott, the most successful of all novelists writing in English and had raised
the novel to a new seriousness and dignity.
• Although Maria Edgewirth's Castle Rackrent (1800) has claimed to be the first historical
novel in English, it was Scott's Waverley: Or 'Tis Sixty Years Since (1815) ans its many
successors that formed the model for his Victorian rivals.
• Historical fiction is a problematic genre without clear boundaries or identity.
• For Lukács, the historical novel is an essentially secular form, in which the masses play a
significant role; its task to reveal the essential causal links between the historical setting of
the novel and the events and characters depicted in it.
TEXTS:
1 . A Tale of Two Cities:
Chapter 1: THE PERIOD: As its title promises, this brief chapter establishes the era in which the
novel takes place: England and France in 1775. The age is marked by competing and contradictory
attitudes—“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”—but resembles the “present period”
in which Dickens writes. In England, the public worries over religious prophecies, popular
paranormal phenomena in the form of “the Cock-lane ghost,” and the messages that a colony of
British subjects in America has sent to King George III. France, on the other hand, witnesses
excessive spending and extreme violence, a trend that anticipates the erection of the guillotine. Yet in
terms of peace and order, English society cannot “justify much national boasting” either—crime and
capital punishment abound.
The “season of Light,” coexisting with the “season of Darkness,” invokes another irony of the period.
Though the “Enlightenment” (usually associated with the move from the superstitious world view of
the Middle Ages to the rationalism of 18th-century philosophy and science) may be applied to aspects
of various historical periods, the word itself became part of European lexicons in the 18th century (in
French, the word is “Lumières”) (Roberts 268). If, however, the “Enlightenment” was a period of
reason, rationality, science, etc., it was likewise a period of pseudo-science and new kinds of
superstition. As one history of the period puts it, “The eighteenth century was the century of
mesmerism as well as of inoculation; the cautious rationalism and theism of the early freemasons
ramified in a few decades into the luxuriant dottiness of mystical and occult masonry” (Roberts 270).
Thus the period in which the novel opens is a period both of Light and Darkness – a period of
contrasts.

2 Jude the Obscure: Part Second

Three years after his marriage, Jude decides to go to Christminster at last. He is motivated partly by a
portrait of his cousin Sue Bridehead, who lives there. He finds lodging in a suburb called Beersheba
and walks into town. He observes the colleges and quadrangles and finds himself conversing aloud
with the great dead philosophers memorialized around him. The next morning he remembers that he
has come to find his old schoolmaster and his cousin. His aunt sent the picture of Sue with the
stipulation that Jude should not try to find her, and he decides that he must wait until he is settled to
find Phillotson. He tries to find work in the colleges. He finally receives a letter from a stonemason's
yard and promptly accepts employment there. He thinks of going to see Sue, despite his aunt's
continuing entreaties not to see her. He walks to the shop his aunt described and sees Sue illuminating
the word "Alleluja" on a scroll. He decides that he should not fall in love with her because marriage
between cousins is never good, and his family in particular is cursed with tragic sadness in marriage.
Analisis: Sue serves to attract Jude to Christminster, and he seeks her out with a strange devotion, as
though he is following an inevitable path carved out by destiny. Taken together with his aunt's warning
that marriages in their family never end well, Jude's haste to find and fall in love with his cousin
creates a sense of foreboding about the young man's fate. His marriage to Arabella prevents him from
pursuing Sue fully, but she clearly captivates him. Jude is disappointed to find that Phillotson does not
remember him and has not fulfilled his ambitions. Phillotson is a foil to Jude, his complacency set
against Jude's fervor. Phillotson represents a path more accessible to Jude than his aspirations toward
an academic career, but Jude is loath to give up his Christminster ambitions. He also clings to Sue,
arranging for her to teach with Phillotson as a way of keeping her near him. Jude finds that the
Christminster colleges are not welcoming toward self-educated men, and he accepts that he may not
be able to study at the university after all. His propensity for drinking emerges. The episode in the
pub, in which he recites Latin to a group of workmen and undergraduates, shows the juxtaposition of
Jude's intellect with his outer appearance. Christminster will not accept him because he belongs to the
working class, yet he is intelligent and well-read through independent study. The realization that his
learning will help him only to perform in pubs sits heavily with Jude, and he is comforted only by the
possibility of becoming a clergyman through apprenticeship.

3 Jude the Obscure: Part Fifth: Jude and Sue are both able to obtain divorces from their first
marriages, so legally they can marry each other. Jude decides that he can be happy without being
legally married to Sue as long as he is with her, and the two do not tell their neighbors whether they
are married or not. However, they live as though they are married and are therefore considered sinful
by people around them. The idea of raising Jude's son prompts Sue to think about formalizing their
marriage, but ultimately they do not marry. The uncertainty surrounding their status foreshadows
difficulties to come, as there is a sense of illegitimacy lingering in their relationship. When Arabella
sees Jude and Sue with her son she immediately points out to her new husband that the child is too old
to be Sue's son, as though claiming motherhood from a distance. Sue immediately develops a
relationship with the boy, although she dislikes the fact that he was born of Jude's first marriage. The
child's old, world-weary face points to both his premature wisdom and his ability to see beyond
childish things. In his eyes there is a danger that Sue senses but cannot, at this stage, define.

What's a historical novel?

• It is a hybrid and dynamic form of writing changes substantially over the course of the
century. It borders on, is touched by, and infiltrated many other forms: romance, Gothic but
also melodrama and farce, satire, and tragedy.
• William Thackeray was in many ways the most profoundly engaged of all Victorian writers
of historical fiction:
➔ The Virginians (1857)
➔ Henry Esmund (1852)
➔ Vanity Fair (1848)
➔ Elizabeth Glaskell's Sylvia Lovers (1863)
• J. Hillis Miller asserts that writers should “make historical narrative seem fictional” (Miller
1982:108)
• National identity in Britain, as Linda Colley has argued, is profoundly linked religious
identity (Colley 1996). The re-establishment of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England in
1850 occasioned a spate of public controversy which was part played out in historical
fiction.
• These novels helped to promote the concern with spiritual life at the time of transition
between epochs of faith.
• Following the lead of Glaskell, the 1880s also saw the rise of the provincial historical novel,
of which the most important example is Thomas Hardy's “The Trumpet Major and Robert
his Brother” (1880): little interest in grand narratives of political history.
 • It is Robert Louis Stevenson who is the most important writer of historical fiction of 1880s
and 1890s. His works features a reprise of many of the central concerns and tropes of his
forerunners in its interest in the force of transcendent and spiritual within the material world,
in Scottish history and its relationship to the dispersed and unstable national identity that is
“Britishness”, in historical conflict as familial rivalry, in the eruption of Gothic material
within the essentially realist claims of history, in empire and the creation of adventure stories
for boys and young men.
• The 1890s also saw the growth of future-oriented fiction, such as William Morri's News
from Nowhere (1891) and H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895), which exploded in a
different temporal dimension many of the same questions of historical change and
development that were at the heart of the historical fiction.

The Bildgunsroman
• Refers to a novel (Roman) about human development and formation (Bildung) that has
experienced mainly positive growth.
• First applied to Goëthe's early work Willhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795)
• Narrative of growing up, novel of growth.
• A Bildungsroman is a story of education. It is similar to coming-of-age stories; however, the
characters of the Bildungsroman are more specific. In order for a novel to be considerd as a
true Bildungsroman, the main character has to experience some form of moral
development. In essence, they have to grow up. The focus of the character's growth is the
main thrust of the narrative.
• Since 1796, the forces of change, commercialism, and capitalism the growth of a world
politics and a world incredibly -with the growing person forced to live out in her or his life
the gaps that endlessly emerge between old and new.
• In this great variety the Bildgunsroman gives us access to most of the important ways people
have represented, conceptualized, and created discourses about growing up in such a
dynamic, disturbing period.
• The popularity of the genre first spread across the European continent and then the entire
world.
• The existence of the female Bildgunsroman genre -sometimes called the frauenroman- has
been debated amongst scholars and feminist alike with blurred resolution. Does the genre
stray from the patterns of the male Bildgunsroman? What are its definitive characteristics?

Attributes:
• There is a search for meaning by the protagonist, who is usually inexperienced at the
beginning of the narrative. The story typically centres on the maturation process of a
single person.
• There is some kind of inciting incident that pushes the protagonist into their journey. It's
usually something akin to a great emotional loss.
• The journey will not be easy. In fact, there will be many failures along the way. The hero
will be tested, and he will fight tooth and nail to survive the unwavering rules and limits of
society.
• There is usually an epiphany, or a flashing moment where the hero finally gets it: This
lucidity changes them as a person. They learn what it takes to be a grown up in the real
world.
• The hero will eventually find his place in society by accepting its values and rules. The
ending isn't necessarily about closure. We often do not know exactly what's going to happen
to the hero. We do know that he has grown as a person from page one, and at the very least
he is equipped with the maturity and knowledge to have a chance in life.
• Whether concerned with religious self-understanding, education or the self-realization of an
artist, the genre follows the same pattern of the quest for self-identity, which has to be
attained through a dramatic and painful process of maturation. The telos of the narrative has
a cathartic function -the hero gives himself a new birth; he realizes his fate and role in
society. If gender is defined by its cultural representation, it is obvious that social
signifying practices participate in its definition. In this, the role of the Bildgunsroman
 should not be neglected, since its narrative persuasively defines the notion of manliness. Its
narrative of travel and action, of self-assertion ans discipline, of filling one's life diary with
the account of glorious and victorious deeds, of creating in the smithy of one's soul the as-
yet uncreated conscience of one's race has only one tenor: how to be a man in the world.

Female Bildgunsroman
• The female Bildgunsroman of these times depicted the suppression and defeat of female
autonomy, creativity, and maturity by patriarchal gender norms.
• Writing the development of a female protagonist as parallel to a male lead character during
this time period would have meant describing a girl undergoing personal development
through education, growth and citizenry.
• Gender must always be kept in mind because “the sex of the protagonist modifies every
aspect of a particular Bildgunsroman: its narrative structure, its implied psychology, its
representations of social pressures” (Abel 5)
• This type of plot disjunction is shadowed by the hidden agendas of Victorian norms and
mores -where boys are encouraged to be independent while the girl-children are schooled in
dependency- and can lead to plot dichotomies wherein the surface plot may be challenged
by the subversive encoding of feminine or female or female anger through the girl or young
woman's intense inwardness, isolation, withdrawal from the social or even death. In some
cases, the entire net of the literary texts is disrupted by the encouragement of young women
to remain passive and selfless rather than to become active agents of their own subjective
maturation.

Marriage as social endeavour

• To marry threatens to end any other development on favour of a peculiar famel destiny; not
to marry seems a failure in itself
• The female Bildgunsroman does exist; perhaps it is not the antithesis, but rather an
expansion of the traditional Bildgunsroman first located in Goëthe's text. In particular, Jane
Eyre and The Mill of the Floss provide the possibility to explore the conflict and tensions
inherent in the nineteenth-century incarnation of the genre once the question of gender is
introduced.
• Furthermore, the social realism which manifests in these texts allows for an investigation of
the young woman's need to negotiate her place in society and how such realistic contexts
impact upon her self-creative impulses given she has only a limited degree of autonomy.
• As a result, it becomes clear that female self-definition via a single identity is impossible
when considered experienced and witnessed by the female authors, then produces their
complex heroines of fiction; woman's “place” is, by definition, multiple -daughter, sister,
teacher, liver, wife, surrogate mother figure -in both fact ans fiction.
• The complexity of the female Bildgunsroman is so because the plots of women's literature
are not solely about life and solutions in a therapeutic sense, nor should they be. They are
about the constraints the maxim places on rendering a female life in fiction.

Industrial and “Condition of England” novels

• Questions about the lives and labours of the populace were of great interest to British public.
It was under the broad rubric of the “condition of England” that these questions came to be
addressed.
• Debates leading to passage of the New Poor Law of 1834 revealed the extent of pauperism
and hunger.
• Industrialization and explosive urbanization gave public prominence to pauperism and to the
proletariat and its discontents.
• Hundreds of thousands of people in Britain, including men, women and children laboured
like slaves.
• As the appetite for knowledge about the condition of England was whetted, novelists found
an audience interested in learning more about the plight of the working classes and the novel
became a method of teaching the middle and upper classes about the “real” condition of
England.
 • Reform was on the minds of all England, and the novel served to represent such concerns to
the public in a manner and language not suited for lawyers and politicians, but for the
common man and woman as well.
• Paramount among the types of condition of England novels was the industrial novel.

Child Labour
• Renaissance – Elizabethan poor law (1601)
• “Inflectious fever” in cotton works in Radcliffe (1784)
• “Factory question”
• W. Godwing Fleetwood; or the New Man of Feeling (1805)
• John Brown's A Memoir of Robert Blincoe (1828)

Victorian Industrial Novels

• John Walker's The Factory Lad (1832)
• Frederic Montagu's Mary Ashley (1839)
• From working-class child to working-class adult
• Elizabeth Glaskell's Mary Barton (1848)
• Charlotte Brontë's Shirley (1849)
• Glaskell's North and South (1855)
• 1860s: the drama of the industrial novels becomes out of fashion
• Employment: more normalized
• Legislation enacted reforms and the working-class enjoyed improving conditions and
therefore other issues such as socialism and feminism (“the new woman”) will be brought to
the front

Children's Fiction: Enlightenment children through fantasy

• The mind of a child is like the acorn; its powers are folded up, they do not yet appear, but
they are all there – Anna Laetitia Barbould
• Definitions of childhood as child have varied throughout different periods of history and are
dependent on cultures, ethnicities, religions, gender and have been subject of much
discussion.
• Such notions are not essentialist or objective but fluid constructions that serve and obey
social and political needs
• A Isaac Krammick contends, “children's literature has always been highly ideological” and
“from its very beginning in the late eighteenth century, children's literature in English has
been designed to serve ideological objectives”
• The turning point for the emergence of the child in Western culture can be back to
Reformation.
• Protestantism became firmly established in England with the Glorious Revolution (1688 –
1689). The cultural changes that accompanied the religious shift from Catholicism to
Protestantism had a relevant impact on the concept of a child.
• In the new Protestant faith the child was considered to be “an important ideological vessel”
and the principal subject to be indoctrinated in order to reinforce and expand the religious
and social networks
• The origins of children's literature during the eighteenth century must be unavoidably
related to the evolution of industrial capitalism.
• Introduction of bourgeois ideology embraced by the English Protestant creed.
• These Protestant dissenters played a leading role in destroying the aristocratic values not
only in politics but also in writing.
th
• 18 century children's fiction became significant to display the Protestant ethic that
permeated capitalism.
• Central to this emerging liberal middle-class ideology were the conceptions of childhood
espoused by John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau.
 • Locke conceived children as no longer fouled by the original sin but beings born as tabula
rasa, empty vessels, or whatever, images that illustrate their malleability; Children as
rational creatures in need of education.
• Prents, family and society were in charge of inculcating the right ideas in their little ones.
• A great care is to be had in the forming of children's minds, and in giving that seasoning
aerly since it shall influence their lives always after.
• As rational creatures children imbibed learning through the example set before them and the
experiences they lived. Among these experiences reading was a priority.
• Locke's approach towards education, mainly his innovations highlighting the classical
educational doctrines of deluctando monemus, had significant consequences on pedagogical
theories both in England and the transatlantic colonies, and triggered the emergence of
children's books, volumes which were instrumental in transmitting his principles to young
readers and in conforming new generations of enlightened children
• Together with Locke, Rousseau was the prevailing philosophical author of the latter part of
th
the 18 century on educational theories: Émile, ou De l'éducation (1762).
• The Enlightenment theorists had provided ample pedagogical background to spurn the
desires of parents, publishers and writers to put them into practice both in the private and the
public spheres.
• Children's fiction in Victorian era follows these trains of thought.
• Children as the stronghold beings through whom to protect a sense of national character out
of the corruptions of adulthood.
• Evangelical revival: childhood was centrally important as a site for redeeming individual
souls and reforming society.
• 1802: Sarah Trimmer founded the periodical The Guardian of Education -aimed at
reforming parents and educators.
• The necessity to protect children from corruption can be seen in the developing subgenres of
children's fiction.

Fantasy/ Fairytales
• Fairytales: Transgression – Bildgunsroman
• Ability to self-realization
• Comes from Romanticism: divine innocence and the power of imagination
• Fantasy: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Through the Looking-Glass (1871)

Moral Fiction
• John Nunyan's Pilgrim's Progress: moral guide
• Virtues versus vice
• Literacy to engender the soul of children
• Readers: essentially lacking both spiritual and material well-being

School Stories and Adventure Tales

• Openly boy's fiction
• Separation from home. Civilizing values
• Problematizing childhood in transition to a specific type of masculinity

Home and Family Life

• Girl's fiction
• Significance of religion in the home
• Maturation from girls to women
• While school stories involved the separation of their child heroes from home life, these
fictions placed their young heroines wholly within the context of home and family-girls to
get married and to become mothers.
• Elizabethan Sewell's Experience of Life (1853), and above all Louis May Alcott's Little
Women (1868)
 • Culture of empire -to justify British political power

th
The Double and late 19 century Gothic
th
• Late 19 century: new variety of Gothic fiction linked to fantasy and the supernatural
• This new variety of Gothic became one of the literary forms of modernity, the vehicle of
fragmented modern subjectivity, and detached, often politically and/or psychological
alienated individuals.
• New Gothic: fascinated by forms of psychic splitting, trance states and telepathic intimacies
and, contrary to its predecessors, if focused on spheres of the English scenery.
• Darker side of human nature
• Main concern: to create a reaction from the reader, mainly one of terror and horror
• Oscar Wilde's The picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
• Best example: Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

• Categorized as example of moral hypocrisy and repression
• Middle-class doctor: dualism and monstrosity, considers the two sides of the doctor as
flipping sides of the same coin in a psychological approach that sees Mr. Hyde as a
representation of Dr. Jekyll's subconscious.
• Reflection of the divided present at the time in British society
• LONDON (as a hub embodying England): figures prominently as an immense world-city,
culturally and economically important, yet socially and geographically divided and
politically incoherent. A site of economic divisions ans economic tensions.
• Great Depression of 1873-96 contributed to highlight the decline of the nation and its power
• Divisions: engraved in the citizens a sense of immorality and hypocrisy, a double moral
along the same lines of the double façade of the city
• Everything that did not match Victorian values, was unpleasant or threatened the standards
of conduct was disregarded and enclosed in fear of being judged or excluded from the
higher circles of society.
• Victorian individuals ended up nourishing hypocrisy even more and feeling self-divided
• In the novella: subculture hidden behind the respectability and social status of Jekyll
• Through Hyde we are able to see a side of London that even though it was hidden under
false decorum, was very present in the society of the time
• Main theme: the division between natural instincts and social respectability

JANE EYRE – CHARLOTTE BRONTË

1) Womanhood: No other novel creates a most important heroine
2) The importance of reading
3) Love and religion
4) Colonialism:
• Jane Eyre does fit into the grand array of heroines of the Protestant will that commences
with Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe and goes through Austen's Emma Woodhouse to
triumph in George Eliot's Dorothea Brooke and Henry James's Isabel Archer. They are
simply too wild and Byronic, too High Romantic, to keep such company.
• For a Victorian woman the question was peculiarly fraught since women were biologically
defined as creatures of excess, throbbing with reproductive energy which had to be sluiced
away each month, and yet could not be dammed up or controlled without real threat to the
balance of the psyche. In constructing the parallel histories of Jane and Bertha, Brontë
constantly negotiates between these different models of womanhood, trying to find an image
of female empowerment and control which would not also be a a negation of femininity
• Jane's problematic status in the social and economic sphere is replicated in the psychological
domain where she is aligned with the two figures from the discourse of Victorian psychiatry
who demarcated the sphere of excess: the passionate child and madwoman
 • Brontë's novel as a “myth” that work toward balancing individualistic bourgeois values and
conservative aristocratic values. He argues that her novels, including Jane Eyre, do this in
part through conservative endings in which the protagonists “negotiate passionate self-
fulfilment
• For Victorian women: it was a matter of learning new disciplines and habits of feeling, new
rhythms of time and organisations of space, new forms of repression, defence and self-
fashioning.
• Jane: an extraordinary contradictory amalgam of smouldering rebelliousness and prim
conventionalism, gushing Romantic fantasy and canny heard-headedness, quivering
sensitivity and blunt rationality

Reading:
• Jane and Bewick's History of British Birds; children's fiction to reinforce human feelings.
Tess Cosslett explains that these feelings are reinforced by two arguments that would later
become traditional in fiction about animals, “the religious appeal to the idea of 'fellow
creatures`, and the rhetorical device of reversing the roles, translating animal pain into
the equivalent human pain”
• Hence, non-human creatures, together with black slaves and omen, were, in a way,
categorized under the same label and came to be the target of a rising rhetoric of sensibility
th
throughout the first half of the 19 century to transform social understandings about the
inferiority of these subjects. Promoting sympathy towards animals mirrored the politics
of liberal enlightenment
• CHAPTER 12 (Paragraph that starts: It is in vain to say human beings...)
-Ostensibly the passage articulates support for the reformist position adopted by Combe, that
women, as well as men, should be allowed to exercise their faculties to the full. The demand
is not for radical change, but rather that women should be allowed to participate in the given
social order in more decisive fashion. But against this reformist reading, we must place the
explosive energy of the passage, and the explicit linking of the position of women and
workers. The vision is that of a silent but seething revolt, merely waiting to erupt.
• Writing in the era of Chartism, and at a time when political revolution was about to explode
throughout Europe, Brontë was nor employing her terms loosely. Her letters of 1847 and
1848 show a recurrent preoccupation with the phenomenon of political rebellion, though her
shifting responses reveal a significant ambivalence. In April 1848 she speaks of Chartism as
an “ill-advised movement... judiciously repressed”: collective political action should be
replaced by “mutual kindliness” and the “just estimate of individual character”

Love and Religion:

• It is Jane's stoical Quakerish stillness which captivated Rochester. Her refusal to act
prematurely for her own ends both satisfies restrictive convention and leads ultimately to a
fulfilling transcendence of it
• Loveless conventionalism and illicit passion both threaten the kind of fulfilment the novel
seeks for her
• Evangelical protestant creed: 1) Mr. Blocklehurst vs. Helen Burns and Jane Eyre
• St. John: conflicting character
• In light of Evangelical tracts and sermons counselling women to think more of religion than
love as a foundation for marriage, St. John would have been viewed in many circles as a
most eligible bachelor
• Instead, the natural world (divinity of humanity and its relationships) reinforces for Jane
her conviction of a God far greater than -and hence separate from- mankind

Feminine models of spirituality

• Unlike men who attempt to impose their wills upon Jane, women in the novel
communicative their theological convictions by example rather than exhortation ALWAYS
in inner spaces.
 • Helen Burns: models for Jane an independence of thought on matters of theology and
doctrine. Universal salvation (CHAPTER 6. Almost at the end. Paragraph that started: She
has been unkind to you...)
• Diana and Mary: models of divinely-inspired womanhood for Jane. No trace of Calvinist
morbidity or grim earnestness that consume their brother
• Jane as highly spiritual: throwing waters of baptism (spiritual rebirth) upon Rochester,
ostensibly quenching the fires which threaten to devour him

Colonialism:
• The figurative use of race relations in Jane Eyre reveals a conflict between sympathy for the
oppressed and a hostile sense of racial supremacy, one that becomes most apparent in Jane
Eyre
• Brontë makes class and gender oppression the overt significance of these other races,
displacing the historical reasons why non-white people might suggest the idea of oppression,
at some level of consciousness, to nineteenth-century British readers. What begins then as
an implicit critique of British domination and an identification with the oppressed collapses
into merely an appropriation of the imagery of slavery, as the West Indian slave becomes the
novel's archetypal image of the oppressed “dark races”. Nonetheless, the novel's closure
fails to screen out entirely the history of British imperialist oppression. [We don't know if
Bertha is black]

How to create a colonial subject

• In 1840, the fist World Anti-Slavery Convention was held in London, an event at which
British abolitionists dedicated themselves to the eradication of American slavery.
• Also traversing the country on lecture tour was the fugitive slave, Moses Roper, who fled to
England in 1835. Aided by several British abolitionists, Roper attended boarding schools
and University College in London
• In the 1839 edition of his narrative, Moses Roper appends a list of the churches and halls he
visited in his lecture tour. Included on the list are the “Independent”, or Congregationalist,
churches in Gomersal and Skipton, two small towns near Haworth, where Brontë grew up.
Mary Taylor was from Gomersal, and we know Brontë visited her several times between
1836 and 1840. We also know the two women attended services at Gomersal Church almost
every day

Proof:
• Bertha, a “Jamaican Creole”, is a “native subject” indeterminately excluded from the
individualistic humanity that the novel's feminism claims for Jane
• Jane Eyre gives the white Jane individuality at the expense of the native Bertha
2 Jane Eyre was written in an ideological context in which white women were
frequently compared to people of non-white races, especially blacks, in order to
emphasize the inferiority of both to white men. But as Brontë constructs the trope in
Jane Eyre, the yoking between the two terms of the metaphor turns not on shared
inferiority but on shared oppression
• An interpretation of the significance of the British empire on Jane Eyre must begin by
making sense of Bertha Mason Rochester, the mad, drunken West Indian wife whom
Rochester keeps locked up on the third floor of his ancestral mansion. Bertha functions in
the novels as the central locus of Brontë's anxieties about the presence of oppression in
England, anxieties that motivate the plot and drive it to its conclusion (CHAPTER 26.
Paragraph that starts (not start, is in the middle) with: In the deep shade, at the further...)
• The novel's anti-imperialist politics, such examples suggest, are more self-interested that
benevolent. The opposition to imperialism arises not primarily out of concern foe the well-
being of the people directly damaged by British imperialism -the African slaves in the West
Indian colonies, the Indians whose economy was being destroyed under British rule- but out
of concern for the British who were being contaminated by their contact with the unjust
social systems indigenous to the people with dark skin
 • In opposition to the danger of the contagious inequality characteristic of other races -Brontë
poses an alternative directly out of middle-class domestic ideology: keeping a clean house at
home in England. Part of what the novel solves in its conclusion is the problem of the
contamination from abroad. Clean and unclean, healthy and unhealthy environments from a
central symbolic structure in the novel, and what is clean is represented as intrinsically
English
• Bertha institutes the great act of cleaning in the novel, which burns away Rochester's
oppressive colonial wealth and diminishes the power of his gender, but then she herself is
cleaned away, burned and as it were purified from the novel. Brontë creates a character of
the non-white races to use as the vividly embodies signifier of oppression in the novel, and
then has this sign, by the explosive instability of the situation it embodies, destroyed itself

Double?
• Bertha seems to act out for Jane where she cannot act out for herself. There are several
examples of this throughout the novel: In chapter 20, Mr. Mason is stabbed by his lunatic
sister. Jane had in the previous chapter voiced to the audience her distaste for the man. She
dislike him, though she did not wish him harm. Bertha attacks him the night of his arrival,
nearly killing him, it process. While she literally does not do this because Jane does not like
him, it is easy to look as it in a metaphorical manner
• Similarity, she destroys the wedding veil Jane to wear after Jane begins to have second
thoughts about marrying Rochester. Again, while it is not literal, it is easy to see how it is
interpreted that it is Bertha acting on behalf of Jane by destroying the veil, symbolizing her
sudden ill feelings towards the marriage. It also serves as foreshadowing for the pending
nuptials that cannot occur because of Bertha. Bertha is, in a way, the woman Jane could
never be, as she is bound by the rules of prosper society. This relationship is crucial to the
novel as it dictates a great part of Jane's future

Ending... punishment?
• Superiority of the blind: command of language
• Jane and Rocherter's love will be founded on the words that they exchange. In turn,
according to the article, Rochester is able to greater appreciate the language he shares with
Jane, as his blindness enables him to concentrate more fully on words without being
distracted by his vision
• Consequently, Rochester's blindness served a dual purpose: to sharpen his language
capabilities and to allow him to become closer to Jane than any two people, independent of
one another, could become.
• NOTES:
-Jane's purpose during all the book is to get married
-She succeed because along the whole novel, she manages and control all her impulses
-Individualism is one of the most notable characteristics in the novel
-Bertha always appears when Jane is having a crisis
-The book is like a GPS that women need to follow in order to become women
-Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys was a novel that settled the bases of what Jane Eyre will be
Even that that novels published in that moment didn't succeed, Jane Eyre did it because created a
model of femininity that should be follow

NINETEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL
Genres:
• Gothic (supernatural elements) and Gothic Romance
• Bildgunsroman (novel about the evolution of the characters, as Jane Eyre) / Condition of
England (realism, social novel)
• Children's Fiction
• Science Fiction
• Sensation (sensations or emotions that are provoked to the readers)
• Historical Novel
 • Newgate (about crimes) and Detective Novel
th
• Feminist Utopias (develop at the late 19 century and refer to a set of novels which
describe the future utopian works ruled by women)

The Rise of the Press (1855 Abolishment of Stamp Duty)

• Social effects
-Increase of number of readers (For example, women readers education...)
-Increase of access to knowledge (Reading spaces→libraries, coffee houses, circulating libraries...)
• Literary effects:
-New characters (making a differentiation between social classes)
-New genres

➔ 1830s-1860s: pornographic papers and guides to London low life

UNIT 3: THEATRE

Theatres can be:

-PATENT NON-PATENT
-LEGITIMATE ILLEGITIMATE
-ROIN THEATRES MINOR

Licensing Act (p.107)

1737:
• In force until 1843
• Exclusive rights to perform spoken drama (comedy, tragedy, drama: the big genres, without
th
music in the 19 century)
• Drury Lane and Covent Garden (legitimate theatres)
• Haymarket (License for the summer season). It was an attempt to control theatre in relation
with the society.
• Burletta (only plays allowed in minor theatre) = Comic genre

Theatres / Venues
• Population increase= increase of potential audiences
-1851 Census: 79% of population in London was working class
• Location of new population= new venues
-Located in the East End, across the Thames and on the northern fringes of the West End
-They mainly aimed at their local population (working class)
• After 1843 (end of 1737 Licersing Act) NOT increase of theatre building
• 1843-1866: decrease in building theatres due to economic reasons
• From 1866= new national prosperity= building boom in the West End.

Audiences page 99
th
• 18 century:
-divided into boxes, pit and galleries with different entries
th
• Early 19 century:
-West End: high classes; middle-classes; occasionally working classes
-East End: mostly local audiences
BUT
• Depending on the particular neighbourhood and the particular dramatic action (but if a kind
of play attracted people from other social classes, people had any problem in going to the
place in which the play was represented)
 th
• Early 19 century theatre considered mostly popular BUT increase in respectability as
the century unfolded

Management:
• Manager: at the top of the Victorian theatrical hierarchy
-Both men and women
• Financed everything out of his/her own pocket
-No subsidy
• Managers rarely owned the theatre; they leased it from the owner of the building
• The terms of the lease usually obliged them to:
-Maintain the building, pay taxes and insurance, and leave all fixtures and a stock of
scenery, costumes and properties when the lease finished

Managers preferred to no innovate because they didn't want to lost money because of
experimentation, choosing to be sure about the result of the plays they financed.
th
19 century theatre was so spectacular, a lot of sceneries and furniture. But the fact that they have
to change from one theatre to another, has the consequence of having to start to construct
everything again, and this was so expensive.

• Other duties of managers:

-Run his/her company
-Put on plays
-Choose actors and cast them in each play
-Select key administrative, backstage and front-of-house staff
-Responsible for all the weekly salary hill of all the staff
-Decided which plays to stage; scheduled them and sometimes rearranged texts to suit the
company
-Superintended rehearsals
-Performed the leading roles of actor-manager
• Repertory system vs. long run

Actor-manager (p.96-98)
• Madame Vestris (Lucia) (1797-1856)
-The first notable female manager of the West End
-Management of the Olympic (1831-1839)
-Resolved to make illegitimate repertory as fashionable as possible
-Redecorated the theatre richly
-Rehearsed with care
-Increase of respectability
-James Robinson Plaché and burlesque
• Management of the Covent Garden (1839-1842)
-With her husband Charles Matthews (even it was not usual in that time that the woman was
the one who manages the theatre and the husband was only helping her)
• Management of the Lyceum (1847-1855)
-With her husband Charles Matthews

Breeches Roles: Male roles performed by women, what allowed the masculine audience to see
their legs, when women performed mostly male characters). This increased the idea of voyeurism in
theatre, because it was an excuse to make nudity respectable on stage).
Transvestite Roles: Used in genre discourse (male actors performing a determined type of woman:
1) minor characters; 2) comic characters; 3) like women that act in a masculine way, to show that
they don't complained society roles imposed for them. Strong-minded, determined women.

Playbills:
 th th
• Definition: A poster which advertised the play. A lot of evolution between the 18 and 19
century. Addition of images, colours in order to highlight the tittle of the play or the name of
the theatre. Much more details along the years.
• Nineteenth century:
-Town-criers, actors playing instruments
-Pictorial advertising lead by circuses and menageries
-Influence of industrial revolution with manufacture of paper in continuous sheets
and iron presses.
After 1851 (with lithographic printing) coloured illustrations (nautical play)
-Managers realized that detailed cast-lists were superfluous on posters and some managers
began producing separate programmes to give that info when patrons reached the theatre.
th
• Late 19 century: influence of French poster design (Henri de Toulouse Lautrec)

Text and Manuscripts

• Larpent Collection
• Lord Chamberlain's Plays Collection of Manuscripts (at the British Library)> You had to
send your manuscript to Lord Chamberlain's office in order to have the license to be able to
perform it. So Chamberlain had a collection of all the existent plays.
-British Library Add. Ms 52962 Y
• Acting Collections:
-Lacy's Acting Edition of Plays> All the plays need to be printed and were collected.
-Samuel French (partners as agents and then sold of business in 1873)
• Acting editions:
-Readership: 1) Performers in the provinces and amateurs; 2) Minor theatre companies; 3)
Enthusiasts.
-Poor quality paper; small type; cheaply priced (sixpence to a penny)

MELODRAMA (drama with music) (P. 107)

-Emotional and theatrical response
-Legitimate Drama: tragedies, dramas and comedies
• Historical background:
-1827 Treaty of London (signed by European forces supporting the independence of Greece)

Surrey Theatre:
• -Directed to popular audiences
• 1782: Royal Circus (south of the Thames)
-Originally built to emulate Astley's
-Rebuilt and remodelled on several occasions due to fire
-Renamed Royal Surrey Theatre in 1811 and remodelled as a theatre
• Focus for a small commercial district
-Increase in respectability under Robert Elliston's two periods of management
st
-1 1809-1814
nd
-2 1827-1830
-Attempted to broaden the range of its audience
-Tickets could also be purchased in the West End (from 1836 an omnibus calling at
the theatre for Fleet Street, Holborn...)
-By 1842 it was one of the leading minor theatres in London
-Fashionable audiences continued to attend well until the 1860s
• Audience: Census data> mostly tradesman, shopkeepers, skilled artisans ans small
merchants BUT very few related to nautical or marine trades
• Audience also from outside the neighbourhood: Importance of transport> Omnibuses for the
middle-classes; steamboats an hackney coaches or cabs
 BURLESQUE (P. 108)
• Definition: A satirical play, usually based on some well known contemporary drama or
dramatic fashion that offered possibilities for parody.
th
• Hypotext: 18 century burlesque. (LOOK FOR DEFINITION). Deeper satire of
the hypotext.
th
• In the 19 century a new type of burlesque flourished. The hypotext is not important but
presenting well-known stories making fun of them through famous passages or moments.
Allusions to the topics (E.g. To be or not to be). Massive production of this kind of theatre
and for that reason, lost the originality.
• T.W. Robertson changed the genre.
• The 1737 Theatre Regulation Act bestowed on Drury Lane and Covent Garden exclusive
rights to perform “serious drama” (in force till 1843).
• 1832: debates in the Houses of Parliament on the question of burletta (only plays that can be
represented during the Drury Lane). Definition: Originally a farce with interpolated music or
a short comic opera. (P.108).
• Written in prose, never in verse.
• Transportation of high into low characters. They preferred to play cards instead of going to
fight in a battle.
• Contemporalization and anachronism of the characters and events. (E.g. putting a messenger
into a train instead of running along the scenery).
• Special effects, sight gags and pieces rewritten as lyrics to contemporary songs.
• Allusions to everyday things.

Victorian Shakespeare Burlesques

th
• Late 18 century already a burlesque disposition toward Shakespeare.
th
• 19 century menacing Shakespeare as a national icon.
-Actor-manager system
• Rhyme couplets
• Transgressive theatrical practice=burlesque
-1840s-1870s: as twice as much Shakespeare burlesques as in preceding years.
-Parodies of a specific actors, productions, methods of mise en scene but also the
pomposities of the “official” Shakespearean culture.
-Familiarity (time of production)
-Low treatment of high subjects
-Rhymed couplets in parody or paraphrase of Shakespeare's text
-Soliloquies and set pieces as lyrics of famous songs...
• Example: Richard Gurney: Romeo and Juliet Travesty (1812)
• Shakespeare parodied not only in theatre but also in other formas of popular culture:
-1850: comic singer Sam Cowell, one-man parodies of Hamlet, Macbeth, The Merchant of
Venice, Richard III in Evan's Supper Rooms.
-George Cruikshank's 1846 caricature of John Philip Kemble as Hamlet and gravediggers.
• Case Study: Macbeth
-Tragedy by William Shakespeare
-Written between 1599 and 1606
-First performed probably in 1611 at the Globe
-Folio publication: 1623
• Macbeth Travestie, Francis Talfourd (1847). He came from a high class family and attended
to Eton (high class college). Also studied at Oxford and founded a society called Oxford
Dramatic Amateurs. His father was Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd, who created the Infant
Custody Act.
-Fisrt performed at the Henley Regatta (17 June 1847)
th
-Then moved to Strand Theatre (January 10 1848)
-Built in 1832 on the site of a panorama:
 • With various names
• One of its managements was Douglas William Jerrold (1830s)> Author of Black-
Ey'd Susan
• Levelled to other minors such as the Olympic.
• Successful as the home of burlesque.

Victorian Classical Burlesques

• Mostly random mythological references from the Greek and Roman tradition.
• But also: Tragedies, Comedies and Epic
• Example:-Alcestis, the Original Strong-minded Woman: A Classical Burlesque in One Ad
(1850), Francis Talfourd.> Discussion about the Marriage and Divorced Act
(1857)
-Medea; or the Best of Mothers, with a Brute of a Husband. A Burlesque, in One
Act (1856), Robert Brough
-Agamemnon and Cassandra; or the Prophet and Loss of Troy (1868), Robert
Reece.
• Classical Burlesques – Case Study: Medea. Who is Medea? Granddaughter of Helios and
daughter of Aetes, king of Alia. She helps Jason to get the Golden Fleece and leaves Aia
with him to live in Iolcus. Medea protected the Argonauts from the pursuing Colchiand by
killing her brother Aspyrtus and scattering his limbs. Medea and Jason fled to Corinth where
Jason abandons her for Creusa. In revenge, Medea kills their two sons and Creusa. Then she
flies from Corinth to Athens in a chariot of the Sun.
• Medea of Ernest Legouvé is the hypotext of the original Medea.
• Lyceum:
-Vestris: 1844-1855 (with Planché)
-1856-1858: used by Covent Garden actors while theatre rebuilt > This is why big theatrical
adaptations were represented in operatic spaces.
• Olympic:
-1830: sold to Madam Vestris in order to give more importance to the burlesque =
innovations with Planché
• Context:
-Infant Custody Act (1839) (Caroline Northon)
-Mother could have the custody of the children until 7; and only access for older
children
-Matrimonial Causes Act (1857)
-Marriage = a civil contract and not a sacramnet
-Divorce:
-For men (easier): One the sole grounds of adultery (wife)
-For a woman: Adultery + incest, cruelty, bigamy, etc.
-Women slavery (John Stuart Mill, 1861)
-Hard Times (Charles Dickens, 1854; Stephen Blackpool and Boundeby)

COMEDY page 111

th
• Early 19 century failed to produced good comedies
• Characteristics:
-Poetic romantic comedy / Sentimental comedies (contemporary manners with moral
precepts)
-Many set abroad: adapted from the French and fear of bringing scenes too close to actual
English life
-Humour obscured by sentimental affection
-Influential author: Dion Boucicault; London Assurance (1841)
Development of the comedy
• 1800 – 1860: drama dominated by characters types
• Old School: focused on drama of the 1830s – 1860s
-Henry James Byron = representative of the popular tastes
-Stock roles
-Lack of creation of characters and inventive power in “serious plays” (artificial
characters, self-repetition...)
-Paucity of plot material
➔ Humour in burlesque
• Attempts of Reform by Thomas William Robertson = revolutionary figure of theatre in the
th
19 century.
• Reform of Thomas William Robertson (1829 – 1871):
-Realism: “The comedy of a time must be faithful to be character of the time itself”
• Prince of Wales's Theatre (1865-) / Marie Wilton (Bancroft)
-Elaborate description of:
-setting and costume
 -stage directions with gestures and positions on the stage (No chance when three
plays ran per night)
• Plot: surveying real problems objectivity? (Society, School, War...)
• Drawing-room comedy / comedy of manners
• 1870 – 1880:
-Robertson helped to improve British Drama
-1882. English Dramatics of Today, William Archer
-Periodical writings of 1880s
-Robertson coexisted with melodrama: he was still influenced by the previous minor genres
-Robertson contested by W.S Gilbert
• William Schwenk Gilbert (1836 – 1911)
-Rebellion against Robertson's naturalism
-Sources Planché / William and Robert Brough / H.J. Byron
-Comedy, imagination, satire, magic
-E.g. :
-Pygmalion and Galatea (1871)
-The Pirates of Penzanze (1880)
-The Mikado; or, The Town of Titipu (1885, Savoy)
-Ruddigore; or, the Witch's Curse (1887, Savoy)
• Henry Arthur Jones (1851 – 1929)
-Influence of Robertson and contemporary melodrama
-Introduction into the theatre of larger problems of mankind (relation to man and God... ) but
not only social drama like Arthur Wing Pinero
-Desire for something that should stimulate thought
-E.g. Saints and Sinners (1884)
• Sir Arthur Wing Pinero (1855 – 1934)
-Influenced by Robertson without his restrictions (e.g. melodrama, sentimentalism, social
tastes...)
-The Social Mrs. Tanqueray (1893)
-The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith (1895):
-The “woman with a past” plot
-Social problems: criticism of the institution of marriage
-Increase in psychological declination
-Tendency towards naturalism

Development of the comedy: Oscar Wilde

• Oscar Wild and the new comedy of wit with re-establishes a true comedy of manners:
-The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
-An Ideal Husband (1895)
• “I took the drama, the most objective form know to art, and made of it as personal a mode of
expression as the lyric or the sonnet; at the same time I widened its range and enriched it
characterization”

Development of the comedy: Bernard Shaw

• Shaw's plays are a tissue of reminiscences of earlier work
• His genius consisted in his fusing of different elements and in looking towards the future
instead of towards the immediate present
• Pygmalion (1912): “Galatea never does quite like Pygmalion: his relation to her is too
godlike to be altogether agree-able”
-First performed at the Hofburg Theatre, Vienna (16 October 1913)
-First performed in England at His Majesty's (11 April 1914
 -Sir Herbert Beerbohm Three; actor-manager (since 1899 at His Majesty)
-”What Eliza did” (1916) (Mr and Mrs Eynsford-Hill)

Caste, by T. W. Robertson
• Founded on a short story written by Robertson in 1866:
-”The poor Rate Unfolds a Tale” for Rates and Taxes (Christmas volume edited by Tom
Hood)
• First performed at the Prince of Wales' Theatre. London, 6 April 1867 (by Tottenham Court
Road)
• Prince of Wales' Theatre:
-Mary Wilton (1840-1921) manager of Prince of Wales since 1865
-First together with H. J. Byron; when together (...)
• Bancrofts' innovations as actor-managers:
-Mounting only one play per night (instead of a mixed bill)
-More naturalistic acting style
-Realistic, three-dimensional sets rather than only painted backdrops
-Realism and naturalism = closer to audiences
-Raised ticket prices (more respectability)
-Influence on the kind of audiences attending the shows
-Developed the “drawing-room comedy” with T. W. Robertson
-Preceding Oscar Wilde's comedies: The idea of the reflection of the comedy of
manners in a realistic way, but Oscar Wilde not only reflecting society but also with
criticism.

- The main characters are performed by two actors that are the actor and actress-manager of the
theatre: Hawtree played by Mr. Bancroft and Esther played by Marie Wilton.
- Unity of time: Realistic use of time between the acts
- Stage directions = Realistic tendency of Robertson on stage. Realistic through highly
detailed descriptions of what is present on stage.
- Description of the characters = It's not only descriptions of space but actions of the characters.
Portrayed through their actions, way of being, their dialogues or the description other characters
make of them. This descriptions were influenced by melodrama (good characters are very good,
bad characters are very bad)
- Not realistic story for us in the actual moment, but maybe was more realistic for people in the
time in which the play was written. This is because this kind of drama was that of the moment.
- Social problems. Social criticism about the drunk father, everything he does is bad.
- Topics: Differences between social classes (marriage between a rich man and a poor
woman)
- The captain is the most pragmatic character of the play. This is because he makes the idealistic
th
discourse of the play: not believe in marriage. He represents the realistic voice of that time (19
century) because was the reality that people coming from different social classes could not got
married. Caste = social law: no mixture between social classes = no marriage
- Happy realistic ending: Reconciliation of the classes. Between the Marquess and Esther. But is it
not a complete one, because the Marquess idea of wanting to change Esther, not accepting her
completely. But Hawtree interposed himself in his mother's speech, saying that honour and class are
th
already in her nature. We're not gonna find this in the comedies of the end of the 19 century.
 UNIT 4: POETRY

English Verse Forms:

- Is there rhyme in the poem?
- What other sound effects can you hear in the poem?
- Is there repetition in the poem (of words, structures, etc.)
- Is there a chorus or refrain (repetition of lines)
- What effect does it have?
- Can you hear the line or stanza breaks?
- Who is speaking? Who is this voice (end of the verse) addressed to?

Metrical foot:
- Division of the line depending on the pattern
- Smallest unit of the line / verse
- It consisted of a strong (accented syllable) and one a more weak (unaccented)
- Types of foot:
-The iambic (8 syllables)
-The trochaic
-The anapaestic
-The dactylic

Scansion:
- A regular line of verse, is expected to choose one type of unmetrical foot and repeat it, this
producing the simplest kind of verse - pattern

Romantic Poetry I: William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

ROMANTICISM
- Autobiographical tendency: narcissist self
- Faith in the self identity
- The writer does not objectify nature of within a system or ideal but as a reflection of the self in
order to make it an example of the self, a challenge, a theatrical gesture or alienation

ROMANTIC POETRY
-Period 1780ss – 1830s
-Related to:
1) Poetry of consciousness, reflective subjectivity
2) Cultural impurity
3) Socio-political critique
4) National identity
5) Poetry of the self native
- The Romantics (BBCC) by Peter Ackroyd (on nature, liberty and eternity)

Generations:
- Early Romantic poets:
-Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge
- Late Romantic poets:
-Byron, Shelley, Reats
- BIG SIX + Thomas Love Readock, Leigh, Hunt, Anna Laetitia Borbould, Joanna Baillie,
Felicia Hermans
 William Blake (1757 – 1827):
- 1793: Visions of the Daughters of Albion (19 poems)
- 1789 – 1794: Songs of Innocence and of Experience (26 poems)
- 1970 – 1973: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Song Of Liberty (his only play in prose)
- His father was a hosier (work on a mercery). He went to the Royal Academy of Arts, where he
exhibited his works. Putting together the ideas of word and vision, the sense of experience. Very
much influenced by bible and Milton.
- In order to understand his works, we have to take into account his idea of the union of the
contrary (e.g. heaven/hell), that was in which he centred his poetical vision
- Corruption coming from society as one of the main themes in his poetry
- He reintroduced the structure of the Ballard in English poetry

POEMS:
1 Introduction p.143
The poet sees a child in the sky, upon a cloud. This child is both an embodiment of innocence, as he is
young, and the inspiration behind poetry, as he charges the shepherd to play, sing, and write. That the
child charges the shepherd to play the song specifically about “a Lamb” indicates one of the major
foci of Blake’s work, the portrayal of Jesus as the innocent, spotless Lamb of Christianity. Ostensibly,
the intended audience for this collection is also innocent, as the poet writes, “Every child may joy to
hear.” It is not only children, however, but also the childlike at heart who will appreciate his works.
Using the reed for a pen and stained water for the ink connects even the act of creation to nature. The
easily acceptable tools provided by the natural world serve to emphasize both the spontaneity of the
works that follow and their place as responses to the bounty and beauty of nature. His subject matter
will (allegedly) be “happy cheer” throughout, although several poems of the Songs of Innocence belie
this suggestion. The shepherd's progression from piping, to singing, and finally to writing parallels the
poet's own progression from inspiration, the music, to the initial composition of the poem, the lyrics,
and finally the creative act of putting the words on paper. The poem wishes “that all may read,” a
phrasing which suggests the superiority of the written word over the recited word in the former's
ability to reach a wider audience and to exist apart from the author. Blake's own vocations as printer
and engraver are therefore vindicated over that of the performer.

2 The Chimney Sweeper p.144

The wretched figure of the child sweep is a key emblem in Blake’s poems of social protest. Not only
are the sweeps innocent victims of the cruellest exploitation but they are associated with the smoke of
industrialisation, thus uniting two central Romantic preoccupations: childhood; and the impact of the
Industrial Revolution on the natural world. A report to a parliamentary committee on the employment
of child sweeps in 1817 noted that ‘the climbing boys’ as young as four were sold by their parents to
master-sweeps, or recruited from workhouses. As the average size of a London chimney was only
seven inches square, to encourage the sweeps to climb more quickly, pins were ‘forced into their feet’
by the boy climbing behind; lighted straw was applied for the same purpose. ‘Easy prey to those
whose occupation is to delude the ignorant and entrap the unwary’, a sweep might be shut up in a flue
for six hours and expected to carry bags of soot weighing up to 30lbs. Many suffered ‘deformity of the
spine, legs and arms’ or contracted testicular cancer.[1] The practice was not abolished until 1875,
nearly 50 years after Blake’s death.

Where, in reality, their lives are restricted, death-infected (the image of the black coffins), in the
dream, they are free, leaping, running, sporting in the wind. The dream takes place in a pastoral idyll –
‘a green plain’ – where there is colour, light, pleasure and laughter; the real world is monochrome,
dark, subject to the pressures of city life, and a capitalist economy where the boys can only weep over
their degradation.

This liberation, though, comes at a price. The angel who releases the sweeps with ‘a bright key’ tells
little Tom ‘if he’d be a good boy / He’d have God for his father and never want joy’. This stipulation
is repeated in the poem’s last line: the boys ‘need not fear harm’ if ‘all do their duty’. Such a
submission seems an unlikely prescription from a social critic like Blake. While it is true that the
dream helps Tom endure his misery (he feels ‘happy and warm’ when he wakes up), it becomes clear
that Blake is not advocating passive acceptance of earthly misery in order to gain the joys of the
kingdom of heaven after death.

Through the ironic use of the child-like anapaestic rhythm (two unaccented syllables followed by an
accented one) which exposes such overly-simplistic, inane sermonising, Blake attacks the established
church for perpetuating these insidious myths which maintain the dispossessed in a state of what Marx
would later call false consciousness. Marx argued: ‘To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the
people is to demand their real happiness. The demand to give up illusions about theexisting state of
affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions.[2] Although starting from a
very different philosophical position (Blake was hardly a materialist), Blake had come to an identical
position half a century earlier

3 LONDON pag. 144

The opening image of wandering, the focus on sound, and the images of stains in this poem’s first
lines recall the Introduction to Songs of Innocence, but with a twist; we are now quite far from the
piping, pastoral bard of the earlier poem: we are in the city. The poem’s title denotes a specific
geographic space, not the archetypal locales in which many of the other Songs are set. Everything in
this urban space—even the natural River Thames—submits to being “charter’d,” a term which
combines mapping and legalism. Blake’s repetition of this word (which he then tops with two
repetitions of “mark” in the next two lines) reinforces the sense of stricture the speaker feels upon
entering the city. It is as if language itself, the poet’s medium, experiences a hemming-in, a restriction
of resources. Blake’s repetition, thudding and oppressive, reflects the suffocating atmosphere of the
city. But words also undergo transformation within this repetition: thus “mark,” between the third and
fourth lines, changes from a verb to a pair of nouns—from an act of observation which leaves some
room for imaginative elaboration, to an indelible imprint, branding the people’s bodies regardless of
the speaker’s actions. Ironically, the speaker’s “meeting” with these marks represents the experience
closest to a human encounter that the poem will offer the speaker. All the speaker’s subjects—men,
infants, chimney-sweeper, soldier, harlot—are known only through the traces they leave behind: the
ubiquitous cries, the blood on the palace walls. Signs of human suffering abound, but a complete
human form—the human form that Blake has used repeatedly in the Songs to personify and render
natural phenomena—is lacking. In the third stanza the cry of the chimney-sweep and the sigh of the
soldier metamorphose (almost mystically) into soot on church walls and blood on palace walls—but
we never see the chimney-sweep or the soldier themselves. Likewise, institutions of power—the
clergy, the government—are rendered by synecdoche, by mention of the places in which they reside.
Indeed, it is crucial to Blake’s commentary that neither the city’s victims nor their oppressors ever
appear in body: Blake does not simply blame a set of institutions or a system of enslavement for the
city’s woes; rather, the victims help to make their own “mind-forg’d manacles,” more powerful than
material chains could ever be. The poem climaxes at the moment when the cycle of misery
recommences, in the form of a new human being starting life: a baby is born into poverty, to a cursing,
prostitute mother. Sexual and marital union—the place of possible regeneration and rebirth—are
tainted by the blight of venereal disease. Thus Blake’s final image is the “Marriage hearse,” a vehicle
in which love and desire combine with death and destruction.

5 THE THYGER pag. 145

The opening question enacts what will be the single dramatic gesture of the poem, and each
subsequent stanza elaborates on this conception. Blake is building on the conventional idea that
nature, like a work of art, must in some way contain a reflection of its creator. The tiger is strikingly
beautiful yet also horrific in its capacity for violence. What kind of a God, then, could or would design
such a terrifying beast as the tiger? In more general terms, what does the undeniable existence of evil
and violence in the world tell us about the nature of God, and what does it mean to live in a world
where a being can at once contain both beauty and horror? The tiger initially appears as a strikingly
sensuous image. However, as the poem progresses, it takes on a symbolic character, and comes to
embody the spiritual and moral problem the poem explores: perfectly beautiful and yet perfectly
destructive, Blake’s tiger becomes the symbolic center for an investigation into the presence of evil in
the world. Since the tiger’s remarkable nature exists both in physical and moral terms, the speaker’s
questions about its origin must also encompass both physical and moral dimensions. The poem’s
series of questions repeatedly ask what sort of physical creative capacity the “fearful symmetry” of the
tiger bespeaks; assumedly only a very strong and powerful being could be capable of such a creation.
The smithy represents a traditional image of artistic creation; here Blake applies it to the divine
creation of the natural world. The “forging” of the tiger suggests a very physical, laborious, and
deliberate kind of making; it emphasizes the awesome physical presence of the tiger and precludes the
idea that such a creation could have been in any way accidentally or haphazardly produced. It also
continues from the first description of the tiger the imagery of fire with its simultaneous connotations
of creation, purification, and destruction. The speaker stands in awe of the tiger as a sheer physical
and aesthetic achievement, even as he recoils in horror from the moral implications of such a creation;
for the poem addresses not only the question of who could make such a creature as the tiger, but who
would perform this act. This is a question of creative responsibility and of will, and the poet carefully
includes this moral question with the consideration of physical power. Note, in the third stanza, the
parallelism of “shoulder” and “art,” as well as the fact that it is not just the body but also the “heart” of
the tiger that is being forged. The repeated use of word the “dare” to replace the “could” of the first
stanza introduces a dimension of aspiration and willfulness into the sheer might of the creative act.
The reference to the lamb in the penultimate stanza reminds the reader that a tiger and a lamb have
been created by the same God, and raises questions about the implications of this. It also invites a
contrast between the perspectives of “experience” and “innocence” represented here and in the poem
“The Lamb.” “The Tyger” consists entirely of unanswered questions, and the poet leaves us to awe at
the complexity of creation, the sheer magnitude of God’s power, and the inscrutability of divine will.
The perspective of experience in this poem involves a sophisticated acknowledgment of what is
unexplainable in the universe, presenting evil as the prime example of something that cannot be
denied, but will not withstand facile explanation, either. The open awe of “The Tyger” contrasts with
the easy confidence, in “The Lamb,” of a child’s innocent faith in a benevolent universe.

William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850):

-1787 – Cambridge // 1791 – France, time of the France Revolution // 1794 – His sister
Dorothy is one of the main receptors of his poetry // 1795 – He met Coleridge
- 1798: Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (in collaboration with Coleridge, who only wrote
4 of the poems) (one of the most important masterpieces of English poetry)
-1800: Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems (2 vols.)
-1802: Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other Poems (2 vols.)
-1799: The Prelude
-1805, 1850 Revised
-1805: “the moon looked down upon this show”
-1850: “the full-orbed moon,
Who, from her sovereign elevation, gazed
Upon the billowy ocean”
- Introduction of adjectives in order to explain the emotions of the beginning
- 1814: The Excursion
- His poetry was about coming and revising the past again and again. He believes that poetry is a
kind of loss. He believes in first impressions. When poetry tries to grasp all the moments, is
impossible because always will be something missing.
- Core idea: reproducing the sensations or first impression, idealises the landscape.
Idealisation of nature: perfect state
- Poetry is also sounds, related with vision but also with listening. He composed his poetry while
walking
- Every memory will always include a lose. Every time you try to remember something, you will
be loosing something never able to attend the first original impressions
- Spots of time:
-Surfacing into present consciousness of memories of significant events in his life
-Retrospective habits of the mind are the best form of conveying emotions recollected in
tranquillity
-Psychological excursion into past time and return
-Structure of the poem (19 Sections: 1798-1799 2 books in the volume // 1805 13 books //
1850 14 books /// No separation in stanzas, long epic poem, setting of the time and place,
then the poet leaving the crowd, after the isolation the minds goes to the past. Psychological
trip to the past: romantic idea.

POEMS:

1 LINES WRITTEN A FEW MILES ABOVE TINTERN ABBEY pag. 145

The subject of “Tintern Abbey” is memory—specifically, childhood memories of communion with
natural beauty. Both generally and specifically, this subject is hugely important in Wordsworth’s
work, reappearing in poems as late as the “Intimations of Immortality” ode. “Tintern Abbey” is the
young Wordsworth’s first great statement of his principle (great) theme: that the memory of pure
communion with nature in childhood works upon the mind even in adulthood, when access to that
pure communion has been lost, and that the maturity of mind present in adulthood offers
compensation for the loss of that communion—specifically, the ability to “look on nature” and hear
“human music”; that is, to see nature with an eye toward its relationship to human life. In his youth,
the poet says, he was thoughtless in his unity with the woods and the river; now, five years since his
last viewing of the scene, he is no longer thoughtless, but acutely aware of everything the scene has
to offer him. Additionally, the presence of his sister gives him a view of himself as he imagines
himself to have been as a youth. Happily, he knows that this current experience will provide both of
them with future memories, just as his past experience has provided him with the memories that
flicker across his present sight as he travels in the woods. “Tintern Abbey” is a monologue,
imaginatively spoken by a single speaker to himself, referencing the specific objects of its imaginary
scene, and occasionally addressing others—once the spirit of nature, occasionally the speaker’s
sister. The language of the poem is striking for its simplicity and forthrightness; the young poet is in
no way concerned with ostentation. He is instead concerned with speaking from the heart in a
plainspoken manner. The poem’s imagery is largely confined to the natural world in which he
moves, though there are some castings-out for metaphors ranging from the nautical (the memory is
“the anchor” of the poet’s “purest thought”) to the architectural (the mind is a “mansion” of
memory). The poem also has a subtle strain of religious sentiment; though the actual form of the
Abbey does not appear in the poem, the idea of the abbey—of a place consecrated to the spirit—
suffuses the scene, as though the forest and the fields were themselves the speaker’s abbey. This idea
is reinforced by the speaker’s description of the power he feels in the setting sun and in the mind of
man, which consciously links the ideas of God, nature, and the human mind—as they will be linked
in Wordsworth’s poetry for the rest of his life, from “It is a beauteous evening, calm and free” to the
great summation of the Immortality Ode.

2 THE PERLUDE, 1805, pag. 148

Wordsworth’s monumental poetic legacy rests on a large number of important poems, varying in
length and weight from the short, simple lyrics of the 1790s to the vast expanses of The Prelude,
thirteen books long in its 1808 edition. But the themes that run through Wordsworth’s poetry, and the
language and imagery he uses to embody those themes, remain remarkably consistent throughout the
Wordsworth canon, adhering largely to the tenets Wordsworth set out for himself in the 1802 preface
to Lyrical Ballads. Here, Wordsworth argues that poetry should be written in the natural language of
common speech, rather than in the lofty and elaborate dictions that were then considered “poetic.”
He argues that poetry should offer access to the emotions contained in memory. And he argues that
the first principle of poetry should be pleasure, that the chief duty of poetry is to provide pleasure
through a rhythmic and beautiful expression of feeling—for all human sympathy, he claims, is based
on a subtle pleasure principle that is “the naked and native dignity of man.”
Recovering “the naked and native dignity of man” makes up a significant part of Wordsworth’s poetic
project, and he follows his own advice from the 1802 preface. Wordsworth’s style remains plain-
spoken and easy to understand even today, though the rhythms and idioms of common English have
changed from those of the early nineteenth century. Many of Wordsworth’s poems (including
masterpieces such as “Tintern Abbey” and the “Intimations of Immortality” ode) deal with the
subjects of childhood and the memory of childhood in the mind of the adult in particular, childhood’s
lost connection with nature, which can be preserved only in memory. Wordsworth’s images and
metaphors mix natural scenery, religious symbolism (as in the sonnet “It is a beauteous evening, calm
and free,” in which the evening is described as being “quiet as a nun”), and the relics of the poet’s
rustic childhood—cottages, hedgerows, orchards, and other places where humanity intersects gently
and easily with nature. Wordsworth’s poems initiated the Romantic era by emphasizing feeling,
instinct, and pleasure above formality and mannerism. More than any poet before him, Wordsworth
gave expression to inchoate human emotion; his lyric “Strange fits of passion have I known,” in which
the speaker describes an inexplicable fantasy he once had that his lover was dead, could not have been
written by any previous poet. Curiously for a poet whose work points so directly toward the future,
many of Wordsworth’s important works are preoccupied with the lost glory of the past—not only of
the lost dreams of childhood but also of the historical past, as in the powerful sonnet “London, 1802,”
in which the speaker exhorts the spirit of the centuries-dead poet John Milton to teach the modern
world a better way to live.

The Beneficial Influence of Nature: Throughout Wordsworth’s work, nature provides the ultimate
good influence on the human mind. All manifestations of the natural world—from the highest
mountain to the simplest flower—elicit noble, elevated thoughts and passionate emotions in the
people who observe these manifestations. Wordsworth repeatedly emphasizes the importance of nature
to an individual’s intellectual and spiritual development. A good relationship with nature helps
individuals connect to both the spiritual and the social worlds. As Wordsworth explains in The
Prelude, a love of nature can lead to a love of humankind. In such poems as “The World Is Too Much
with Us” (1807) and “London, 1802” (1807) people become selfish and immoral when they distance
themselves from nature by living in cities. Humanity’s innate empathy and nobility of spirit becomes
corrupted by artificial social conventions as well as by the squalor of city life. In contrast, people who
spend a lot of time in nature, such as laborers and farmers, retain the purity and nobility of their souls.

Wordsworth praised the power of the human mind. Using memory and imagination, individuals could
overcome difficulty and pain. For instance, the speaker in “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above
Tintern Abbey” (1798) relieves his loneliness with memories of nature, while the leech gatherer in
“Resolution and Independence” (1807) perseveres cheerfully in the face of poverty by the exertion of
his own will. The transformative powers of the mind are available to all, regardless of an individual’s
class or background. This democratic view emphasizes individuality and uniqueness. Throughout his
work, Wordsworth showed strong support for the political, religious, and artistic rights of the
individual, including the power of his or her mind. In the 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth
explained the relationship between the mind and poetry. Poetry is “emotion recollected in
tranquility”—that is, the mind transforms the raw emotion of experience into poetry capable of giving
pleasure. Later poems, such as “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (1807), imagine nature as the source
of the inspiring material that nourishes the active, creative mind.The Splendor of Childhood: In
Wordsworth’s poetry, childhood is a magical, magnificent time of innocence. Children form an intense
bond with nature, so much so that they appear to be a part of the natural world, rather than a part of
the human, social world. Their relationship to nature is passionate and extreme: children feel joy at
seeing a rainbow but great terror at seeing desolation or decay. In 1799, Wordsworth wrote several
poems about a girl named Lucy who died at a young age. These poems, including “She dwelt among
the untrodden ways” (1800) and “Strange fits of passion have I known” (1800), praise her beauty and
lament her untimely death. In death, Lucy retains the innocence and splendor of childhood, unlike the
children who grow up, lose their connection to nature, and lead unfulfilling lives. The speaker in
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality” believes that children delight in nature because they have access to
a divine, immortal world. As children age and reach maturity, they lose this connection but gain an
ability to feel emotions, both good and bad. Through the power of the human mind, particularly
memory, adults can recollect the devoted connection to nature of their youth.
Motifs

Wandering and Wanderers: The speakers of Wordsworth’s poems are inveterate wanderers: they
roam solitarily, they travel over the moors, they take private walks through the highlands of Scotland.
Active wandering allows the characters to experience and participate in the vastness and beauty of the
natural world. Moving from place to place also allows the wanderer to make discoveries about
himself. In “I travelled among unknown men” (1807), the speaker discovers his patriotism only after
he has traveled far from England. While wandering, speakers uncover the visionary powers of the
mind and understand the influence of nature, as in “I wandered lonely as a cloud” (1807). The speaker
of this poem takes comfort in a walk he once took after he has returned to the grit and desolation of
city life. Recollecting his wanderings allows him to transcend his present circumstances.
Wordsworth’s poetry itself often wanders, roaming from one subject or experience to another, as in
The Prelude. In this long poem, the speaker moves from idea to idea through digressions and
distractions that mimic the natural progression of thought within the mind.

Memory: Memory allows Wordsworth’s speakers to overcome the harshness of the contemporary
world. Recollecting their childhoods gives adults a chance to reconnect with the visionary power and
intense relationship they had with nature as children. In turn, these memories encourage adults to re-
cultivate as close a relationship with nature as possible as an antidote to sadness, loneliness, and
despair. The act of remembering also allows the poet to write: Wordsworth argued in the 1802 preface
to Lyrical Ballads that poetry sprang from the calm remembrance of passionate emotional
experiences. Poems cannot be composed at the moment when emotion is first experienced. Instead,
the initial emotion must be combined with other thoughts and feelings from the poet’s past
experiences using memory and imagination. The poem produced by this time-consuming process will
allow the poet to convey the essence of his emotional memory to his readers and will permit the
readers to remember similar emotional experiences of their own.

Vision and Sight: Throughout his poems, Wordsworth fixates on vision and sight as the vehicles
through which individuals are transformed. As speakers move through the world, they see visions of
great natural loveliness, which they capture in their memories. Later, in moments of darkness, the
speakers recollect these visions, as in “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” Here, the speaker daydreams of
former jaunts through nature, which “flash upon that inward eye / which is the bliss of solitude” (21–
22). The power of sight captured by our mind’s eye enables us to find comfort even in our darkest,
loneliest moments. Elsewhere, Wordsworth describes the connection between seeing and experiencing
emotion, as in “My heart leaps up” (1807), in which the speaker feels joy as a result of spying a
rainbow across the sky. Detailed images of natural beauty abound in Wordsworth’s poems, including
descriptions of daffodils and clouds, which focus on what can be seen, rather than touched, heard, or
felt. In Book Fourteenth of The Prelude, climbing to the top of a mountain in Wales allows the speaker
to have a prophetic vision of the workings of the mind as it thinks, reasons, and feels.
Symbols

Light: Light often symbolizes truth and knowledge. In “The Tables Turned” (1798), Wordsworth
contrasts the barren light of reason available in books with the “sweet” (11) and “freshening” (6) light
of the knowledge nature brings. Sunlight literally helps people see, and sunlight also helps speakers
and characters begin to glimpse the wonders of the world. In “Expostulation and Reply” (1798), the
presence of light, or knowledge, within an individual prevents dullness and helps the individual to see,
or experience. Generally, the light in Wordsworth’s poems represents immortal truths that can’t be
entirely grasped by human reason. In “Ode: Imitations of Immortality,” the speaker remembers
looking at a meadow as a child and imagining it gleaming in “celestial light” (4). As the speaker
grows and matures, the light of his youth fades into the “light of common day” (78) of adulthood. But
the speaker also imagines his remembrances of the past as a kind of light, which illuminate his soul
and give him the strength to live.
The Leech Gatherer. In “Resolution and Independence,” the ancient leech gatherer who spends his
days wandering the moors looking for leeches represents the strong-minded poet who perseveres in
the face of poverty, obscurity, and solitude. As the poem begins, a wanderer travels along a moor,
feeling elated and taking great pleasure in the sights of nature around him but also remembering that
despair is the twin of happiness. Eventually he comes upon an old man looking for leeches, even
though the work is dangerous and the leeches have become increasingly hard to find. As the speaker
chats with the old man, he realizes the similarities between leech gathering and writing poetry. Like a
leech gather, a poet continues to search his or her mind and the landscape of the natural world for
poems, even though such intense emotions can damage one’s psyche, the work pays poorly and
poverty is dangerous to one’s health, and inspiration sometimes seems increasingly hard to find. The
speaker resolves to think of the leech gatherer whenever his enthusiasm for poetry or belief in himself
begins to wane.

ROMANTIC POETS
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834)
He writes together with William Wordsworth ‘Lyrical Ballads’. One of the most important
poems in ‘Lyrical Ballads’, published in 1798 is ‘The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’. Samuel
Taylor Coleridge is also well-known by his other poem ‘Kubla Khan’: he claims he wrote it under
the influence of drugs [opium] (an image of romantic poets being influenced by drugs).
He was not only well-known for his poetry but also for his criticism: ‘Biographia Literaria’
on of his most important prose works in which he goes through a series of lectures of his own life
and on other major English writers like William Shakespeare (most influential piece of criticism in
th
the 19 century). Great approach to literature in terms of theory.
He was very much influenced by the Gothic: it is noticeable its great influence upon ‘The
Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’ regarding its descriptions.
In terms of his life, we had Wordsworth coming from a wealthy family; in the case of
Coleridge his father was a parish speaker and he died when Coleridge was very young so he was
sent to a boarding school in which he received higher education (he went to Cambridge University:
Jesus College) and he was a very good student but he attempted to leave university on various
occasions (1793, 1794). In comparison with Wordsworth, while Coleridge was trying to leave
university, he went and came back from Europe.
In 1795 – 1796 he met Wordsworth so they worked and lived together for a time in the Lake
District. Around the 1800s in Coleridge’s first attempt to take opium, he had also some problems
and tried to solve them with medicine (opium) that turned out to make him addict (it was also a
poetical pose). During this period he also had a close relationship with Robert Southey, another
important figure in the Lake Poets movement (Coleridge and Southey had this advanced radical
ideas as opposed to Wordsworth, much more instrument).
Related to this drug addiction, we have to mention the reflection on his writings, particularly
in ‘Kubla Khan’ where part of the structure is much more irregular than in the rest of his works
because the poem is inherited from this idea of having writing it after a dream.

The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner

It is the poem that opens ‘Lyrical Ballads’ and it is going to be one of the most important
poems in the collection. The poem it is divided into 7 sections, it is much longer than Coleridge
used to write. We have common stanza (quatrains), but this is combined with sextets and other
forms (normally following a common rhythm: ABCB – ABCCB – ABCBDB). When these
irregularities appear in the poem it is to brought the attention of the readers (audience).
It follows the form of the ballad, mainly characterised by syntactic symmetry (anaphora,
alliteration) and repetitions. This provokes a kind of hypnotical response in the readers when it is
read out loud.
Archaisms (lexical items and ending of some verbs) are also found in the poem in contrast to
Wordsworth’s everyday language, this is going to be part of the struggle in terms of poetic style, too
much rhetorical. It will be no natural language as there is in Wordsworth’s poetry, but much more
stylized.
 Symbolism and allegory are also quite important. Glosses (notes in the margins) are also
present in the poem: they were included by himself on its third edition. However, in this glosses
there is a deeper Christian meaning to the poem, we also have satirical poems: if the poems was
difficult this made it even more difficult because it made critics be more influenced by this glosses
than by the poem itself and also because it is claimed that glosses are a parallel literary piece in
which Coleridge is mocking the readers.
The plot is focus on figures on their way to attend to a wedding and they are stopped by an
old man that wants to tell them his story. So we have a first beginning in which we think we are
going to be told the story of this attendants to the wedding (false start), and then we have the real
beginning in which the ancient mariner stops the guests. This feature is meant to attract the attention
of the reader.
So the mariner explains how he was in a trip with non-benevolent nature against the ship. So
it appears an albatross and, for some reasons, he decides to kill the albatross. However, the ancient
reveals that by killing the albatross other calamities happen and the boat is blamed for killing the
albatross. Finally it is revealed that the ancient mariner is the only survivor of the catastrophe, but
his curse is that he will continue alive as long as he tells the story once and again, and as long as he
venerates the figures of the sea.
In the first stanza we have an irregularity in the third line because the poet it grasping our
attention towards the appearance of the mariner (ghostly figure). This first stanza, along with the
second one, also corresponds with the first beginning.
In the third and fourth stanzas there is a repetition that coincides the description of the figure
of the first stanza.
Fourth stanza – third line: Willing Suspension of Disbelief. A term that reflects the innocence of the
audience that it is going to belief everything they are being told. Related with verism
[verisimilitude], something seems to be real even though it is not but the audience, as is aware of
the fictional element in the poem, is much more able to believe it.
Personification of natural elements: the sun, the wind, the ice… Nature persecuting the ship
(inherited from Gothic, nature against men), along with the rhythm of the poem which goes faster.
The beginning of the mystery starts with the apparition of the albatross: Bad weather related
to the albatross. However, the death of the albatross meant the catastrophe of the crew. Direct
mentioning of Christianity even though there are also pagan explanations. The Christian explanation
of the albatross is the allegory of the sacrifice of the albatross as Christ (imagery). The pagan
explanation relates with the consideration that it is not Christ but his own inspiration (symbol of
poets’ inspiration, hope).

Lord Byron (1788 – 1824)

Considered the best poet of the Second Generation of Romantic Poets. He belonged to a
wealthy family and he also received higher education. If we consider the First Generation of
Romantics related with the Lake Poets and the poets of the nature, Lord Byron is going to be just
the opposite: individualism. Extreme expression of the self in most of his works (life experiences).
The main characters of this works are going to be travellers, womanizer, and also exotic characters
(extension of his own poetic persona).
When he was very young he started travelling around Europe 1909 – 1910 in order to be
inspired by the continent and to learn by his experiences (he included them in his poetry). Byron
enrolled Cambridge University only for a semester so he received higher education but he did not
finished it, he preferred to travel to Spain, Greece (Troy), Russia, Constantinople… all this journeys
influenced his poetry. He had some affairs which are also reflected on his poetry. He was married at
some point of his life but it did not last so much.
Villa Diodati (1818): Highest event of Romanticism. Lord Byron, Polidori, Mary Shelley…
going together to this villa in Genova and having this gathering. After this gathering, some of the
most important works were written such as The Vampire (1819), Frankenstein. Love affairs and
experiences between writers.
Lord Byron’s death was not so much heroic: he went to war but before fighting he died from
a disease. All his heroic life was not corresponded with his death.
POEMS:
1 Don Juan: One of his most well-known pieces: image of a womanizer, self-secure figure. Byron is
self-promoting trough his poetry. The form of the poem is ottava rima (eight lines stanzas in iambic
pentameters, the last two lines are called ‘bathos’). Sixteen cantos finished and one unfinished. On
the whole around 17000 lines. It was not written in a particular period of time, but rewritten and
rewritten because some points were just too satiric and sexualised. The 16 cantos are also divided
into the region they expose:
I –VI: Spain, Greek Islands, Constantinople
VII – X: Russian Cantos
X – XVII: English
Don Juan is going to be a hero representing an anti-hero. Constant satiric mockery of the poets of his
time, of the poetry course of this time, of social heroes and philosophers of the period. Changing first
living person.
In the first stanza is directly attacking the Lake Poets because they think they are the only
poets to be venerated and because poetry has room for more people.
From Don Juan there would be long history of the tradition of Don Juan in the West World
such as Tirso de Molina.

Percy Shelley (1792 – 1822)

- 1820: Prometheus Unbound, a lyrical drama in 4 acts → very romantic figure (Prometheus)
promoters of the individual against society
- He was an educated son of a country squire in a wealthy family. He went to the university college in
Oxford but he was expelled (the necessity of atheism with Thomas Jefferson Hogg → radical ideas
→ 1816 Villa Diodati, Byron, Mary Shelley (Dec., 1816). Jane Claire Claremont, Polidori →
liberalist group.
- He run away with Harriet Wesrbrook (not high class) and had a daughter with her.
- William Golding, married to Mary Wollsronecraft, and their daughter, met him in 1814, and the
daughter (Mary Shelley) will become the author of Frankenstein. In 1816, Mary and Percy Shelley
get married. Later, he get drowned on a trip and Mary edited his works.
- Jane Clair, the stepsister of Mary, had an affair with Byorn. Percy Shelley is much more idealistic
than Byron. Poetry can actually change and serve as a mirror of the world, change the disorder of the
world into something beautiful.

POEMS:
1 OZYMANDIAS pag. 159
This sonnet from 1817 is probably Shelley’s most famous and most anthologized poem—which is
somewhat strange, considering that it is in many ways an atypical poem for Shelley, and that it
touches little upon the most important themes in his oeuvre at large (beauty, expression, love,
imagination). Still, “Ozymandias” is a masterful sonnet. Essentially it is devoted to a single
metaphor: the shattered, ruined statue in the desert wasteland, with its arrogant, passionate face and
monomaniacal inscription (“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”). The once-great king’s
proud boast has been ironically disproved; Ozymandias’s works have crumbled and disappeared, his
civilization is gone, all has been turned to dust by the impersonal, indiscriminate, destructive power
of history. The ruined statue is now merely a monument to one man’s hubris, and a powerful
statement about the insignificance of human beings to the passage of time. Ozymandias is first and
foremost a metaphor for the ephemeral nature of political power, and in that sense the poem is
Shelley’s most outstanding political sonnet, trading the specific rage of a poem like “England in
1819” for the crushing impersonal metaphor of the statue. But Ozymandias symbolizes not only
political power—the statue can be a metaphor for the pride and hubris of all of humanity, in any of
its manifestations. It is significant that all that remains of Ozymandias is a work of art and a group of
words; as Shakespeare does in the sonnets, Shelley demonstrates that art and language long outlast
the other legacies of power. Of course, it is Shelley’s brilliant poetic rendering of the story, and not
the subject of the story itself, which makes the poem so memorable. Framing the sonnet as a story
told to the speaker by “a traveller from an antique land” enables Shelley to add another level of
obscurity to Ozymandias’s position with regard to the reader—rather than seeing the statue with our
own eyes, so to speak, we hear about it from someone who heard about it from someone who has
seen it. Thus the ancient king is rendered even less commanding; the distancing of the narrative
serves to undermine his power over us just as completely as has the passage of time. Shelley’s
description of the statue works to reconstruct, gradually, the figure of the “king of kings”: first we see
merely the “shattered visage,” then the face itself, with its “frown / And wrinkled lip and sneer of
cold command”; then we are introduced to the figure of the sculptor, and are able to imagine the
living man sculpting the living king, whose face wore the expression of the passions now inferable;
then we are introduced to the king’s people in the line, “the hand that mocked them and the heart that
fed.” The kingdom is now imaginatively complete, and we are introduced to the extraordinary,
prideful boast of the king: “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” With that, the poet
demolishes our imaginary picture of the king, and interposes centuries of ruin between it and us:
“ ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ / Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that
colossal wreck, boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

2 ODE TO THE WEST WIND pag. 161

The wispy, fluid terza rima of “Ode to the West Wind” finds Shelley taking a long thematic leap
beyond the scope of “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” and incorporating his own art into his meditation
on beauty and the natural world. Shelley invokes the wind magically, describing its power and its
role as both “destroyer and preserver,” and asks the wind to sweep him out of his torpor “as a wave, a
leaf, a cloud!” In the fifth section, the poet then takes a remarkable turn, transforming the wind into a
metaphor for his own art, the expressive capacity that drives “dead thoughts” like “withered leaves”
over the universe, to “quicken a new birth”—that is, to quicken the coming of the spring. Here the
spring season is a metaphor for a “spring” of human consciousness, imagination, liberty, or morality
—all the things Shelley hoped his art could help to bring about in the human mind. Shelley asks the
wind to be his spirit, and in the same movement he makes it his metaphorical spirit, his poetic
faculty, which will play him like a musical instrument, the way the wind strums the leaves of the
trees. The thematic implication is significant: whereas the older generation of Romantic poets viewed
nature as a source of truth and authentic experience, the younger generation largely viewed nature as
a source of beauty and aesthetic experience. In this poem, Shelley explicitly links nature with art by
finding powerful natural metaphors with which to express his ideas about the power, import, quality,
and ultimate effect of aesthetic expression.

3 PROMETHEUS UNBOUND
Shelley compares his Romantic hero Prometheus to Milton's Satan from Paradise Lost.
The only imaginary being, resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan; and Prometheus is, in
my judgment, a more poetical character than Satan, because, in addition to courage, and majesty,
and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susceptible of being described as
exempt from the taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandizement,
which, in the hero of Paradise Lost, interfere with the interest. The character of Satan engenders
in the mind a pernicious casuistry which leads us to weigh his faults with his wrongs, and to
excuse the former because the latter exceed all measure. In the minds of those who consider that
magnificent fiction with a religious feeling it engenders something worse. But Prometheus is, as
it were, the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest
and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends.

If the reader sympathises with Prometheus or Satan, he views Jupiter and God as omnipotent
and unchallengeable beings that rely on their might to stay in power. Furthermore, Æschylus's
Jupiter is a representation of Destiny, and it is a force that is constantly at odds with the
individual's free will.[60] In Milton, God is able to easily overthrow Satan. Although both divine
beings represent something that is opposed to the human will, both represent something inside
of the human mind that seeks to limit uncontrolled free will: reason and conscience. However,
Shelley's version of Jupiter is unable to overwhelm the will of Prometheus, and Shelley gives
the power of reason and conscience to his God: the Unseen Power of Hymn to Intellectual
Beauty
 John Keats (1795 – 1821)
- Introduction to the romantic ode famous // Ode on a Grecian Urn / Ode to a Nightingale / Ode on
Melancholy
- His life was very prolific in the way of poetry, even if he died very young of tuberculosis. His father
worked in stables, being a part of the working class. Even though, he went to a local school by John
Clarke. He got an education on the classics (Latin and Greek, elitist at that time). He received this
kind of education. With 8 years old, he lost his mother and with 14, his father too. He was never able
to marry his love life and this resulted in a very sad personal life.
- In the professional way, he was apprentice of a surgeon, trained in a hospital. But he wanted to
write. Leigh Hunt published his works and introduced him in the romantic circle. Massive production
in poetry. Not engaged with society but inner self of the poet. He was not an exotic traveller like
Byron or Shelley.
- The concept of NEGATIVE CAPABILITY (La belle dame sans mercy) is defined as the ability of
the poet to disappear from the poem, not being present: the lyrical first person. Emotional engaging
poet, but distancing and detached. But the meaning was very related with the life of the poet.

POEM:
1 I STOOD TIP-TOE UPON A LITTLE HILL, pag. 164
"I stood tip-toe" derives from the eighteenth-century "rhapsody," itself descended from Milton's
L'Allegro and Il Penseroso — one might compare this ode with Thomas Warton's very popular
descriptive odes in blank verse or octosyllabic couplets. Keats drops the usual formalities, though
something like an address to the goddess does appear at the center of the poem: "O Maker of sweet
poets, dear delight | Of this fair world, and all its gentle livers; | Spangler of clouds, halo of crystal
rivers, | Mingler with leaves, and dew and tumbling streams, | Closer of lovely eyes to lovely dream, |
Lover of loneliness, and wandering, | Of upcast eye, and tender pondering! | Thee must I praise above
all other glories | That smile us on to tell delightful stories" p. 7.
The catalogue of mythological figures in the second half of the poem points to the seventeenth-
century writers of Ovidian tales — Michael Drayton, Browne of Tavistock, Shakerley Marmion —
whose metrical art Keats and Hunt had been studying. This passage corresponds to the tributes in
L'Allegro and Il Penseroso where John Milton likewise salutes the English poets who had been the
cynosure of his attention. "The first poem consists of a piece of luxury in a rural spot, ending with an
allusion to the story of Endymion and to the origin of other lovely tales of mythology, on the ground
suggested by Mr. Wordsworth in a beautiful passage of his Excursion. Here, and in the other largest
poem, which closes the book, Mr. Keats is seen to his best advantage, and displays all that fertile
power of association and imagery which constitutes the abstract poetical faculty as distinguished from
every other. He wants age for a greater knowledge of humanity, but evidences of this also bud forth
here and there" The Examiner (1 June 1817) 429. "In Calidore and its induction, in 'I stood on tiptoe'
and 'Sleep and Poetry' and others, we come to the most famous and important of his followings, the
experiments in the enjambed decasyllabic couplet. That he took this directly from Leigh Hunt is
always told, and is probably in great part true.... At the same time, the more I read the Jacobean and
Caroline originals, the more convinced do I feel that Browne, Marmion, and probably Chamberlayne
himself, had — whether at first or only later, but certainly before Endymion was finished — a great
direct influence on Keats" History of English Prosody (1906-10)

VICTORIAN POETS
Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809 – 1892)
-First Victorian poet we're gonna see
-”Poems by Two Brothers” with Charles and Edward (his brothers) (1827)
-In 1829 he created an association of students at university called “The Apostles” where he met his
best friend for life, Arthur Henry Hallam, who died at a very early age, what provoked him a big
shock. Its shock was very important because inspirited him to write “In Memoriam A. H. H.” (page
172 of the class book)
-In 1832 he published collection of books that was latterly revised and in 1842 was published again
 -In 1850 he obtained a distinction: “The Poet Laureate”, giving by the government as a way of
recognise someone as the “poet of the country”, because they wrote stories about things that happen
in the country.
-He had long life fear for epilepsy, because there was some antecedents in his family. This affected
his character and also his poetry. The composed his poems not writing but in his head. In term of
style, he is a poet who looks to the past of England (Victorian poetry). Use of references to the well-
known past. In his early poetry we find reminiscences of Romantic poetry.
-”The Lady of Shalott” (page 168) IMPORTANT!!

Illustrating “The Lady of Shalott”

- Pre-Raphaelitism
-Inspired by the poem because of:
- Eroticized medieval seeting
- Tragic subject (tragic love)
-Spiritual state of suffering for love
- The imprisoned woman figure
- Conflicted role of the artist
-Destruction of the artist by the necessity of interacting with the world
- Used subject of literary narration to portray individualized emotional conflicts
- THEREFORE
- Scenes mostly represented:
-The imprisoned woman
-The Lady looking out her window at Lancelot
-The Lady leaving the island
-The Lady dying in her boat
-The dead Lady in her boat

 Pre-Raphaelitism
An important factor is the one regarding the relationship between the verbal and the visual
th th
(very important in the 19 c). ‘The Lady of Shalott’ had great influence on the art of the 19
century not only in poetry but also in paintings [PRERAPHAELITISM].
th
The Pre-Raphaelites appear mostly in the middle 19 century (1850s). It was not only a
movement related to paintings but also put together painting and poetry. As features it has the lots of
details coming from nature (symbolism through nature);
 John William Waterhouse is going to be much influenced by Pre-Raphaelitism: his painting
on ‘The Lady of Shalott’ is one of the most visual. It has several pieces representing
different scenes of the poem such as when she leaves the tower or when she first sees Sir
Lancelot. Sexualised images of the lady (red ropes and manners).
 William Holman Hunt, one of the members of the Pre-Raphaelites brotherhood. Natural
symbols (vegetal motives) related with some references to innocence and sin.

Pre-Raphaelitism was inspired by ‘The Lady of Shalott’ because of the Medieval setting, the
sensuality (erotism), the tragic subject (tragic love), the spiritual state of suffering for love and the
images surrounding this suffering. The imprisoned woman figure as the passion and sensuality is
going to be another important topic for them. The conflicted role of the artist (destruction of the
artist by his necessity of interacting with the world) is also necessary for Pre-Raphaelite painters.
It used subjects of literary narration to portray individualized emotional conflicts. Therefore,
the scenes mostly represented: The imprisoned Lady, The Lady looking oy her windows at
Lancelot, The lady leaving the island, The Lady dying in her boat, and The dead Lady in her boat.
 The Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood started in 1848 and it was a gathering between William
Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rosetti and John Everett Millais. Other members of the brotherhood
were Thomas Woolner, James Collinson and F. G. Stephens.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 – 1882)

- Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
-Reunion in 1848 between William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (the most
important figure of the group), John Everett Millais, Thomas Woolner, James Collinson and
E.G. Stephens.
- Gabriel Rosseti was the son of Gabriel Rossetti (a scholar specialized in Dante) and Frances
Polisori (sister of John Polidori, author of “The Vampire”, first short story about vampirism
literature). The went to the Sass's Drawing School in 1841 and to the Antique School of the
Royal Academy in 1845, whose head was Sir Joshua Reynolds. In 1848 he founded the Pre-
Raphaelite brotherhood.
- They were against the classicism of the Royal Academy of Arts (Raphael) They wanted to go
to the people before Raphael, for that they were called Pre-Raphaelites.
- They were inspired by:
-John Ruskin: “Modern Painters” (1843 – 1846): “go to nature”
th
- “Pitture a fresco del Campo Santo di Pisa” by Carlo Lasinio (1828): engravings from 15
century paintings attributed to Giotto and others
- PRB was the way in which they signed their paintings in the exhibitions as that of the Royal
Academy and Hyde Park. This was a big revolution, they were supported by Ruskin because the
similarity of their model and ideas.
- Pre-Raphaelites created a magazine called “The Germ” in 1850, that had only four numbers.
They published not only pictures but also poems and their ideas of art. The subtitle of “The
Germ” was: “thoughts towards nature in poetry, literature and art”
- Some characteristics of pre-raphaelitism:
-Objectionable and morally shocking
-Topics (poverty, double standards in society...)
-Approach to religion (realism)
-Vivid sensuality
-Symbolism:
-Simplicity of nature provides symbols
-Archaic atmosphere
-Female models (Elizabeth Siddal)
- Ekphrasis: an important term in pre-raphaelite movement. Is the written description of a visual
work of art

Elizabeth Barret Browning (1806 – 1861)

- An Essay on Mind and Other Poems (1826)
- Prometheus Unbound (1833)
- Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850): It is said that the word Portuguese was the word her
husband used to refer to her
- Aurora Leigh (1857) (Page 176)
In 1844 wrote a collection of poems which attracted the attention of Robert Browning, her
future husband. They escaped through Florida in 1846, but before that they exchanged 574
letters. In 1899 the son of the marriage published the letters and these revealed details of
their lives that were opposite from the reality she showed in “Sonnets from the Portuguese”.

POEMS:
1 TO GEORGE SAND, A DESIRE pag. 174
The 1853 poem “To George Sand: A Desire” was a tribute by poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning to
French author Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin, better known by her pen name, George Sand. When
this poem was published, Sand was nearly 50 years old (born in 1804), just two years older than
Barrett Browning. But the poet considered Sand a model for boldness in writing and living.
Starting with the famous line, “Thou large-brained woman and large hearted man,” the poem
acknowledges Sand’s dual nature, and how she managed to wed intellect and emotion in her writings.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning purposefully attributed brains to the feminine in Sand, and heart to the
masculine, upending gender stereotypes.

The next line calls attention to the nom de plume — “Self-called George Sand!” After all, George
Sand was the foremother of other authors who assayed to break gender barriers in publishing with
masculine names. Notable among them: Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, better known now as the
Brontë sisters, who in the 1840s were endeavoring to find London publishers for their first works.
“To George Sand: A Desire” highlights, even in its brevity, the courage it took for Sand to achieve
what she did. Sand not only was almost unreasonably prolific in literature, but in life and love as well.
She carried on numerous love affairs, had children and grandchildren, traveled, and gardened. There
was much drama and difficulty, but one thing is sure — nothing ever stopped her from writing. And
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, prolific and productive in her own right, appreciated that immensely.

“A RECOGNITION”

Is a poem about George Sand serves as a call to liberation from things that are considered womanly or
feminine. Browning admires Sand’s courage to be different: “And break away the gauds and armlets
worn” (Line 3). Sand has refused to take on the traditional role of a wife and mother in domestic
captivity, and Browning respects and appreciates her bravery for stepping out and being a good
example of a bold and fearless woman. George Sand was fixated on destroying the old-fashioned
roles, and she further proved this point by assuming a masculine name. Browning identifies the true
wish that Sand has: “Till God unsex thee on the heavenly shore” (Line 13). Both women believe that
if gender did not exist and everyone was the same sex, then the judgment passed on Sand’s lifestyle
and writings would have been far less severe. A Desire shows that Sand had the will power to be
different in a traditional society, and A Recognition shows the strength Sand had in order rise from the
ashes after the world tried to burn and disappear who she was as a writer. Both works displayed the
resilient nature of George Sand, and they also revealed the beautiful gift that Browning has for
interesting comparisons and contrasts.

Robert Browning (1812 – 1889)

- He was born in a healthy family, so he studied at home
- He went to the University of London
- He was not successful when he tried to write for stage, but his interest in theatre influenced his
writing
- 1942: Dramatic Lyrics (Published as Bells and Pomegranates III) – My Last Duchess (Page
177)
- 1845: Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (Published as Bells and Pomegranates VII)
- 1855: Men and Women

Dramatic monologue had some synonyms as: “Dramatic Lyrics Romances”, “Lyrical Monologues”
and “Monodramas”. Dramatic monologue. Elements:
1. Speaker
2. Implied auditor
3. Reader - Gap between what the speaker is saying and what he or she really wants to say.

POEMS:
1 MY LAST DUCHESS, pag. 177
But Browning has more in mind than simply creating a colorful character and placing him in a
picturesque historical scene. Rather, the specific historical setting of the poem harbors much
significance: the Italian Renaissance held a particular fascination for Browning and his
contemporaries, for it represented the flowering of the aesthetic and the human alongside, or in some
cases in the place of, the religious and the moral. Thus the temporal setting allows Browning to again
explore sex, violence, and aesthetics as all entangled, complicating and confusing each other: the
lushness of the language belies the fact that the Duchess was punished for her natural sexuality. The
Duke’s ravings suggest that most of the supposed transgressions took place only in his mind. Like
some of Browning’s fellow Victorians, the Duke sees sin lurking in every corner. The reason the
speaker here gives for killing the Duchess ostensibly differs from that given by the speaker of
“Porphyria’s Lover” for murder Porphyria; however, both women are nevertheless victims of a male
desire to inscribe and fix female sexuality. The desperate need to do this mirrors the efforts of
Victorian society to mold the behavior—gsexual and otherwise—gof individuals. For people
confronted with an increasingly complex and anonymous modern world, this impulse comes naturally:
to control would seem to be to conserve and stabilize. The Renaissance was a time when morally
dissolute men like the Duke exercised absolute power, and as such it is a fascinating study for the
Victorians: works like this imply that, surely, a time that produced magnificent art like the Duchess’s
portrait couldn’t have been entirely evil in its allocation of societal control—geven though it put men
like the Duke in power.
A poem like “My Last Duchess” calculatedly engages its readers on a psychological level. Because we
hear only the Duke’s musings, we must piece the story together ourselves. Browning forces his reader
to become involved in the poem in order to understand it, and this adds to the fun of reading his work.
It also forces the reader to question his or her own response to the subject portrayed and the method of
its portrayal. We are forced to consider, Which aspect of the poem dominates: the horror of the
Duchess’s fate, or the beauty of the language and the powerful dramatic development? Thus by posing
this question the poem firstly tests the Victorian reader’s response to the modern world—git asks, Has
everyday life made you numb yet?—gand secondly asks a question that must be asked of all art—git
queries, Does art have a moral component, or is it merely an aesthetic exercise? In these latter
considerations Browning prefigures writers like Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde.