19C Literature

cultural history, critical studies, and background study notes

cultural history, critical studies, and background study notes

Nineteenth Century – literary timeline – part 2

September 29, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a chronicle of events, literature, and politics

1830. Death of George IV; William IV becomes King. Petitions to both Houses of Parliament on the abolition of slavery. William Huskisson, a former cabinet minister, is killed at the opening of the Liverpool – Manchester railway. Tennyson, Poems Chiefly Lyrical.

1831. Unsuccessful introduction of the Reform Bills. Darwin’s voyage on The Beagle.

1832. The First Reform Act extends the franchise to those owning property rated at 10 a year or more.

1833. Shaftesbury’s Factory Act limits hours of children’s employment. Slavery abolished in the British Empire. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus.

1834. First colony established in South Australia. Tolpuddle martyrs exiled there. Emancipation of British West Indian slaves declared – though it takes four years for this declaration to be fulfilled. New Poor Law Commission establishes workhouses. Fire breaks out in the Palace of Westminster – much of the Houses of Parliament destroyed.

1835. Municipal Corporation Act gives votes for local government to men only.

1836. Balzac begins La Comedie Humaine novel cycle. Pickwick Papers launches Dickens’s career. London University is formed. Newspaper tax reduced.

1837. Fox Talbot experiments with photographic prints. Queen Victoria ascends the throne. Dickens, Oliver Twist. Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution.

1838. Chartist petitions published. Full emancipation of British West Indian slaves. The London to Birmingham railway is opened.

1839. Custody of Infants Act. (For the first time a woman living apart from her husband was able to apply for custody of children under seven.) Chartist riots. Daguerre patents photographic technique. Shelley, Poetical Works (posthumous)

1840. Beginning of a decade of considerable social and economic turbulence in England. Marriage of Victoria and Albert. Penny post established in UK. Start of a decade which saw a rise in so-called ‘condition of England novels’. Opium War – Chinese ports are besieged to force free passage of English narcotics. Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby.

1841. Governesses’ Benevolent Institute founded (see also 1829). Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero-Worship.

1842. Mines Act forbids use of children and women in mines. New Chartist riots. Copyright Act extends the life of copyright to 42 years from publication or 7 years after the author’s death. Mudie establishes the circulating library. Browning, Dramatic Lyrics; Tennyson, Poems.

1843. Colonization of Africa includes Gambia, Natal, Basutoland. Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit. Sara Ellis, The Wives of England: Their relative duties, domestic influence and social obligations. Ruskin, Modern Painters; Dickens, A Christmas Carol. Wordsworth appointed Poet
Laureate.

1844. Factory Act restricts working hours for women and children. First telegraph line, between Paddington and Slough. Engels, Condition of the Working Class in England. Royal Commission of Health in Towns. Co-Operative movement begun in Rochdale.

1845. Potato famine in Ireland. Boom in railway building speculation. Bronte sisters invest. Disraeli, Sybil, E.A. Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Franklin’s expedition to the Arctic to find ‘north west passage’.

1846. Repeal of the Corn Laws (legislation designed to protect the price of domestic grain from foreign imports). Famine in Ireland. Introduction of the ‘Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill’ (this is finally passed in 1907). C. Bronte, The Professor; George Eliot translates Strauss’s Life of Jesus; Ruskin, Modern Painters II.

1847. The first use of chloroform as an anaesthetic. Ten Hours Factory Act. Bronte sisters publish Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey in same year. Tennyson, The Princess. Thackery, Vanity Fair.

1848. Revolutions throughout Europe. Queen’s College for Women founded in London. Discovery of nuggets in California starts ‘The Gold Rush’. Introduction of a Public Health Act to try to tackle cholera. A. Bronte, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton; Dickens, Dombey and Son; Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto; Kingsley, Yeast. Dante Gabrielle Rosetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais form the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

1849. Bedford College for Women founded. Dickens, David Copperfield; C. Bronte, Shirley

1850. Pope Pius IX restores the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the UK – for the first time since the 16th century Catholics have a full hierarchy consistent with Catholic countries. The Public Libraries Act – first of a series of acts enabling local councils to provide free public libraries. Parliament imposes a sixty hour week. Death of Wordsworth. Tennyson becomes Poet Laureate; In Memoriam. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese, Wordsworth, The Prelude, Dickens begins publishing Household Words. Thackeray, Pendennis.

1851. Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. Religious Census. Mrs Gaskell, Cranford, Harriet Taylor Mill, The Enfranchisement of Women. Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach. Ruskin, The Stones of Venice. Mayhew London Labour and the London Poor

1852. Dickens, Bleak House. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Florence Nightingale, Cassandra. New Houses of Parliament open. First free public library opens in Manchester.

1853. Trollope, The Warden. C. Bronte, Villette

1854. Britain and France declare war against Russia to begin Crimean war. Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava. The British Medical Association is founded. Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception promulgated. Dickens, Hard Times, Gaskell, North and South. Coventry Patmore begins The Angel in the House (sequence of poems about female domestic responsibility).

1855. Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit. Repeal of stamp duty on newspapers; death of Charlotte Bronte. Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South; Robert Browning, Men and Women; Tennyson, Maud and Other Poems. Livingstone ‘discovers’ the Victoria Falls.

1856. Ruskin, On the Pathetic Fallacy; William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine.

1857. Indian ‘Mutiny’. Matrimonial Causes Act facilitates divorce for those who can afford it. The Obscene Publications Act is passed. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh. Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Bronte; Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays; Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers; Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary.

1858. ‘Big Ben’ is installed in the Houses of Parliament clock tower. India ‘transferred’ to the British Crown. Abolition of property qualification for MPs, enabling working-class men to stand.

1859. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species; Eliot, Adam Bede; Samuel Smiles, Self-Help; J. S. Mill, On Liberty; George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel; Tennyson, Idylls of the King. Samuel Smiles Self-Help. Mrs Beeton Book of Household Management

1860. Lenoir invents the first practical internal combustion engine.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations; George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss; Wilkie Collins, The Woman In White; Ruskin, Unto this Last

1861. American civil war begins with eleven states breaking away to form southern confederacy. Emancipation of serfs in Russia. Italy united under King Victor Emmanuel. In England, daily weather forecasts begin. First horse-drawn trams are used in London. George Eliot, Silas Marner; Mrs Beeton, The Book of Household Management; Hans Christian Andersen, Fairytales

1862. George Eliot, Romola; George Meredith, Modern Love; Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

1863. Polish rising against Russian occupation. American Civil War – to 1865. Opening of the first underground railway in London. George Elder Hicks’ triptych of paintings entitled Women’s Mission are exhibited at the Royal Academy. Charles Kingsley The Water Babies

1864. Contagious Diseases Act. Formation in London of the International Working Men’s Movement (influenced by Marx); Matthew Arnold, ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’

1865. Slavery abolished in United States. Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Lister develops antiseptic surgery. Cholera epidemic kills over 14,000. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace; Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies. Lewis Carrol Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

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Nineteenth Century – literary timeline – part 3

September 29, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a chronicle of events, literature, and politics

1866. George Eliot, Felix Holt the Radical; Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters; Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Fyodor Dostoyeski, Crime and Punishment; A.C. Swinburne, Poems and Ballads

1867. Russia sells Alaska to America for $7 million. The Second Reform Bill – votes extended to most middle-class men. Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach.

1868. Benjamin Disraeli becomes Prime Minister. Trades Union Congress formed. Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book. Wilkie Collins The Moonstone.

1869. Suez canal opened. J.S. Mill, The Subjection of Women (written in 1860). Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy. Margarine is developed. Hungarian Emanuel Herman invents the picture postcard. Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn. Girton College (for women) opened in Cambridge

1870. Papal infallibility announced. French declare war against Prussia – and are heavily defeated. Paris occupied. Married Women’s Property Act. Forster’s Education Act (compulsory full-time schooling for under tens).

1871. Paris commune declared – then crushed (by the French). Limited voting introduced in Britain. Emile Zola begins Le Rougon Maquart cycle of novels. George Eliot Middlemarch. Religious entry tests abolished at Oxford and Cambridge.

1872. Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree. Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market.

1873. Walter Pater, The Renaissance, John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (posthumous)

1874. Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd ; Parliament reduces the working week to 56.5 hours. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina. First Impressionist exhibition in Paris.

1875. Disraeli buys Suez Canal shares, gaining a controlling interest for Britain. Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now

1876. Queen Victoria declared Empress of India. Bell invents the telephone. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda ; Thomas Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta; Henry James, Roderick Hudson.

1877. Henry James, The American; Zola, L’Assommoir. Phonograph invented by Edison.

1878. Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, Henry James, The Europeans. University of London admits women to degrees. Electric street lighting in London.

1879. Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House, George Meredith, The Egoist; Henry James, Daisy Miller.

1880. First Anglo-Boer war in South Africa. Education Act makes schooling compulsory up to the age of ten.

1881. The Natural History Museum is opened. President Garfield of the USA and Tsar Alexander II of Russia are assassinated. Henry James, Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady. D.G. Rossetti, Ballads and Sonnets; Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts. Gilbert and Sullivan write Patience, a comic opera that pokes fun at the aesthetic movement.

1883. Robert Louis Stephenson, Treasure Island. Olive Schreiner The Story of an African Farm

1884. The franchise is extended by the Third Reform Bill. Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn; F. Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State; Walter Besant gives a lecture entitled ‘The Art of Fiction’ and Henry James responds with an essay of the same title. First Oxford English Dictionary

1885. Radio waves discovered. Internal combustion engine invented. Death of General Gordon at Khartoum. Zola, Germinal. Rider Haggard King Solomon’s Mines

1886. Daimler produces first motor car. Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Henry James, The Bostonians.

1887. Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders. Conan Doyle A Study in Scarlet (first Sherlock Holmes story)

1888. English Football League founded. George Eastman develops the Kodak camera. English vet John Dunlop patents the pneumatic tyre. Rudyard Kipling, Plain Tales from the Hills; Henry James, The Aspern Papers. Jack the Ripper murders in Whitechapel, London

1889. Eiffel Tower built for the Paris Centennial Exposition. Coca-Cola developed in Atlanta. 10,000 dockers strike in London. Rudyard Kipling, Barrack-Room Ballads; Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler

1891. Work starts on the Trans-Siberian railway. The Prince of Wales appears in a libel case about cheating at cards. Anglo-American copyright agreement. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Gissing, New Grub Street, Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray ; Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

1892. James Dewar invents the vacuum flask. First edition of Vogue appears in New York. Tchaikovsky, The Nutcracker. Thomas Hardy, The Well Beloved. Keir Hardy first Labour MP.

1893. First motor cars built by Karl Benz in Germany and Henry Ford in the USA. Alexander Graham Bell makes the first long-distance telephone call. Whitcome Judson patents the zip fastener. Independent Labour Party founded.

1894. Manchester ship canal opens. Dreyfus affair fanned by anti-Semitism in France. Rudyard Kipling, Jungle Books.

1895. X-rays discovered. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest. First radio broadcast by Marconi. First moving images displayed by French cinematographer.

1896. Wireless telegraphy invented. Abyssinians defeat occupying Italian forces – first defeat of colonising power by natives. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure; Anton Chekhov, The Seagull. Daily Mail founded.

1897. Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton, What Masie Knew; Bram Stoker, Dracula.

1898. Second Anglo-Boer War begins. Henry James, The Turn of the Screw ; Thomas Hardy, Wessex Poems; George Bernard Shaw, Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant

1899. British military disasters in South-Africa. Henry James, The Awkward Age; Kate Chopin, The Awakening; Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya

1900. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

1901. Queen Victoria dies — Edwardian period begins. Rudyard Kipling, Kim

1902. Henry James, The Wings of the Dove; Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

1903. First flight in heavier-than-air machine by Wright brothers in USA. James, The Ambassadors

1904. Henry James, The Golden Bowl; Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard

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Nineteenth Century Russian Novels

October 2, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Nineteenth-century Britain: introduction

July 13, 2009 by Roy Johnson

History, politics, and society in 19th century Britain

This introductory guide comes from a new series by Oxford University Press. They are written by specialists, aimed at the common reader, and offer an introduction to the main cultural and philosophical ideas which have shaped the western world. Christopher Harvie and Colin Matthew take head on the issue that the interpretation of historical events (even when we know the ‘facts’) is a political, an ideological issue. It was refreshing to see this form of Marxism still alive and well in their new Nineteenth-century Britain.

The early part of the century is dominated by the French revolution and Britain’s ambiguous role in the following Napoleonic wars. Thereafter, the emphasis, as one might expect, is on a steadily growing population, on urbanisation, industrialisation, and above all on trade. Theirs strikes me as a solidly traditional form of history – dominated by politics, government, law, and social reforms – though they do find space to mention writers, artists, and social philosophers whose ideas might have had an effect on the development of the nation.

This volume, like many of the others in this series, is like listening to a lecture delivered by a distinguished academic – but to an audience of peers. There are no concessions; details are not explained; and the reader is left to supply the context.

At the centre of the account and the century is the Great Exhibition of 1851 – just as the Festival of Britain was to be a century later. There’s a very strong sense of optimism and confidence. It’s a rich social tapestry: educational reforms; public health initiatives; the development of the railways; free trade; and the steady decline of religious belief.

I was rather pleased in a parochial sense to note the repeated prominence of my own home city of Manchester in the development of political radicalism.

They cite as illustrative evidence the work of the great Victorian writers – Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and Thomas Hardy.

The latter part of the book is devoted to a survey of the lower, middle, and upper classes, their habits, beliefs and their political affiliations.

The sense of a historical narrative picks up with greater and greater momentum towards the end, and the closing pages made me eager to pick up all the threads in its sister publication Twentieth-century Britain. This is a very interesting and attractive format – a small, pocket-sized book, stylishly designed, with illustrations, endnotes, suggestions for further reading, and an index.

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Christopher Harvie and Colin Matthew, Nineteenth Century Britain: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp.1171, ISBN: 0192853988

Novelists and the Theatre

May 10, 2016 by Roy Johnson

a tutorial essay with study resources

Novelists and the theatre have often formed an ambiguous relationship. Some of the earliest novelists such as Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett produced both novels and dramas (as well as non-fiction works) though they are currently regarded primarily as novelists and their writing for the theatre is more or less forgotten.

The same is true for Walter Scott, and even Jane Austen has a play (Sir Charles Grandison) amongst her lesser, that is almost completely unknown works. Charles Dickens was also a great lover of amateur theatricals, participating in them as an actor and a stage manager. He wrote a play The Frozen Deep (1856) in conjunction with his friend Wilkie Collins, based on Sir John Franklin’s search for the Northwest Passage. But despite rave reviews this work is now a museum piece, whilst his novels are as popular as ever.

It is difficult to pinpoint a cause for this phenomenon of failed theatrical works, except to say that as the novel rose as a medium of both popular and highbrow cultural values, the theatre was in a period of relative decline. From the eighteenth into the nineteenth centuries more and more people were literate. Newspapers and magazines (in which many novels first appeared) grew in popularity, whereas the number of theatres remained relatively static. Circulating libraries grew in popularity, as did the sales of novels in both serial and volume form.

In the twentieth century works of a theatrical nature came to be transmitted first via cinema, then radio, and finally by television, which is now established as the most popular medium for the expression of imaginative drama. The crossover from the dominance of one medium over another is nowhere more neatly illustrated than in the case of James Joyce – one of the most experimental of modern novelists – who was the first person to open a cinema in Dublin, Ireland in 1909.

Here are a few examples of novelists and their attempts to diversify in terms of their medium. Perhaps their lack of theatrical success can also be attributed to the enormous shift in artistic practice that the switch from page to stage inherently demands.

Henry James is a very famous case of the ambivalent results of a novelist’s dalliance with the theatre. His novels are packed with dramatic incident, sparkling dialogue, and well-orchestrated plots – so he had every reason to believe that he would succeed in writing staged dramas. From 1890 onwards he wrote half a dozen plays, but only one of them – a dramatization of his novel The American (1876) – was produced with any degree of success.

Then in 1895 he put all his energy into the long drama Guy Domville which he wrote especially for the opening of the St James’s Theatre in the West End of London. This proved to be a disaster, and James the playwright was booed off stage on the first night. He was seriously depressed by this response, and was forced to return to the novel genre as the principal outlet for his creative imagination.

However, the story does have a positive ending, because he recycled the content of these dramas into the plots of some of his later novels such as The Other House (1896) and The Outcry (1911). Interestingly enough, James converted The Other House back into play form in 1909, but once again it failed to reach production.

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Thomas Hardy gave up writing novels because of the public outcries of indecency over Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1894). Afterwards he turned his attention to the ‘theatre’ and spent six years writing his epic verse drama The Dynasts. This huge panorama of the Napoleonic War was published in three parts, nineteen acts, and one hundred and thirty scenes in 1904, 1906, and 1908. It is written in verse, and is more or less impossible to present on stage because of its complex battle scenes and its sheer length.

It is worth noting that many other nineteenth century poets and writers had written verse dramas which are now confined to the of literary history – from Shelley’s The Cenci (1819), to Browning’s series more than half a dozen verse dramas published under the collective title of Bells and Pomegranates which were published but hardly ever produced on stage

Hardy’s The Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall is a one act play published in 1923 and first performed by the Hardy Players, an amateur theatrical group for whom Hardy wrote the drama. The full title reflects his desire to have the play performed: The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall at Tintagel in Lyonnesse. A New Version of an Old Story Arranged as a Play for Mummers, in One Act Requiring No Theatre or Scenery.

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Joseph Conrad had established his reputation as the author of technically challenging and morally complex novels when he first felt drawn to the world of theatre. He might have known that the result would be problematic, because he immediately ran into the issue of censorship. At that time all works written for the stage had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s office for approval by the Censor of Plays. This is a power which was not repealed until the Theatres Act of 1968.

In 1905 he wrote One Day More a one-act play which was an adaptation of his story To-Morrow (1902). The play was actually a modest success, but Conrad felt the experiment was a disappointment. However, he was outraged by the arbitrary legal requirement and he railed against the public censorship of dramatic productions by the Lord Chamberlain in his very scathing essay The Censor of Plays – An Appreciation (1907), speaking of

th[is] monstrous and outlandish figure, the magot chinois whom I believed to be but a memorial of our forefathers’ mental aberration, that grotesque potiche

However, despite this unsatisfactory experience, he embarked on further theatrical ventures, none of which were particularly successful. In 1920 he was persuaded to adapt his story Gaspar Ruiz for the cinema and produced a film script with the title Gaspar the Strong Man, but the cinematic version was never produced.

He adapted his novel The Secret Agent (1904) for the theatre – a play staged with reasonable success at the Ambassadors Theatre in 1922, but which he felt to be a failure:

The disagreeable part of this business is to see wasted the hard work of people who depend upon it for their livelihood [the actors], and for whom success would mean assured employment and ease of mind. One feels guilty somehow.

Then in 1922 he wrote a play Laughing Anne which was criticised by his friend John Galsworthy as being technically naive and ‘threatening to present an unbearable spectacle’. This was because the original story, Because of the Dollars (1914) features a man with no hands who bludgeons a woman to death. It proved to be his last attempt at writing for the theatre.

A comparison of the play script and the story reveals the weaknesses of the theatrical version. The play reaches its dramatic climax with a fight sequence in which Laughing Anne is killed by the man without hands (MWH). All the action takes place in semi-darkness.

DAVIDSON (To SERANG on board) : Send four men ashore. There is a dead body there which we are going to take out to sea, (He moves, carrying the lantern low, followed by four Malays in blue dungaree suits, dark faces. Stands the lantern on the ground by the body and looking down at it apostrophizes the corpse.) Poor Anne! You are on my conscience, but your boy shall have his chance.
(As the kalashes stoop to lift up the body CURTAIN falls.)

Quite apart from all the superfluous scene description, this version omits some of the key events and the ironic aftermath to the story. In the prose narrative Because of the Dollars Davidson buries Anne at sea and gives the child to his wife to look after. However, his wife suspects that the child is actually his by Anne, and she turns against both of them. Eventually she leaves him and goes back to her parents. The boy is sent to a church school in Malacca, where he eventually does well and plans to become a missionary. Davidson is left alone with nobody.

In 1924, as a fellow novelist and author of plays, Galsworthy accurately summed up Conrad’s relationship to the theatre:

his nature recoiled too definitely from the limitations which the stage imposes on word painting and the subtler efforts of a psychologist. The novel suited his nature better than the play, and he instinctively kept to it.

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D.H. Lawrence is well known as a novelist, a writer of short stories, and even as a poet; but the amazing thing is that he wrote eight plays, only a couple of which were staged during his own lifetime. The full list is as follows: The Daughter-in-Law (1912); The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd (1914); Touch and Go (1920); David (1926); The Fight for Barbara (1933); A Collier’s Friday Night (1934); The Married Man (1940); The Merry-Go-Round (1941).

Many of these works anticipate the ‘kitchen sink’ phase of British drama which emerged later in the 1950s and 1960s. They dealt in a fully realistic manner with powerful conflicts of class, gender, and individual liberty set in working class milieux. A number of these works have been successfully staged and turned into television dramas in the twentieth century – but they have had little impact on his critical reputation, which remains firmly based on his work as a novelist and writer of short stories.

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James Joyce had only published a short selection of poems (Chamber Music 1907) a collection of short stories (Dubliners 1914) and his first novel (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 1916) when he produced his only play Exiles in 1918. He had been heavily influenced by the work of the Norwegian dramatist Ibsen whose powerful dramas had challenged many of the suppositions that lay behind public and private morality in the late nineteenth century.

Exiles was rejected by W.B. Yeats for production at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, and it had to wait until 1970 for a major London performance when it was directed by Harold Pinter at the Mermaid Theatre.

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Virginia Woolf had no serious intention to be considered a playwright, but she did take part in amateur theatrical productions mounted by members of the Bloomsbury Group for their own amusement, and she did eventually write the play Freshwater. This is a satire of the bohemian world of her aunt, the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. But Woolf took the play seriously enough to produce two versions – a one act version in 1923, and then a longer three act version in 1935.

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Parallel Lives

July 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

studies of five unusual Victorian marriages

Parallel Lives made a big impact when it first appeared, and continues to be a source of inspiration to many biographers. I noticed an appreciative reference to it in Katie Roiphe’s recent study of unconventional literary relationships, Uncommon Arrangements, which deals with similar issues. Phyllis Rose has chosen to write about a series of fairly famous Victorian literary marriages in which the personal relationships were unusual by contemporary standards, and which she believes offer modern readers something to think about in our age of apparent sexual free-for-all.

And I couldn’t help feeling from hints she drops at regular intervals throughout the book that she was working out some of her own personal issues at the same time. The subjects are Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle, Effie Gray and John Ruskin, Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill, Catherine Hogarth and Charles Dickens, and George Elliot and George Henry Lewes.

What she is trying to show is that in an age when marriages were often made as financial and social contracts, the arrangements made to cater for personal satisfaction were often more subtle and successful than we might imagine today, when sexual or romantic reasons are given precedence.

The story of Ruskin’s wedding night fiasco is reasonably well known: the authority on classical beauty took fright when he saw a real woman in the flesh. What is not so well known is that he never consummated the marriage, and after several years of misery, being presented with his failure to deliver as the grounds for divorce, he offered to ‘prove his virility’ in court. How exactly he would have gone about doing this is the source of some amused speculation.

John Stuart Mill’s case is slightly different, although it shared one important feature. He fell in love with Harriet Taylor, whose husband thoughtfully allowed them to carry on their relationship because it was sexually chaste. Even when the tolerant Mr Taylor died and the couple were able to marry, the habit stuck, reinforced by Mill’s belief that men should subjugate themselves to women’s will – in order to compensate for the historical injustices they had suffered.

It’s hard to see why Phyllis Rose included the similarly well-known case of Charles Dickens and his wife Catherine Hogarth, except as she concludes “he provides a fine example of how not to end a marriage”. Their early life together is a portrait of his energy and bonhomie; then comes his disenchantment and the separation. But of the twelve remaining years secretly engaged with Ellen Ternan – nothing is made. Dickens took such rigorous pains to conceal his tracks, there’s still no hard evidence on the degree of their intimacy – though it’s almost impossible to escape the conclusion that it was complete.

Rose makes the case that George Eliot, a woman blessed with high intelligence but not good looks, was forthright and enterprising enough to seek out what she says every normal woman wants – a man to love and be loved by. The man in question was George Henry Lewes, married though separated from his wife. But because his wife had three children by his friend Thornton Hunt, all of them were regarded as scandalous libertines by society at the time. Eliot lived with Lewes happily ‘outside the law’ for twenty-four years, then when he died she married her financial adviser, who was twenty years younger than her.

The strangest case of all is the Carlyles – of whom it was said that the best thing about their being married to each other was that only two people were miserable, not four. In another apparently sexless union, Mrs Carlyle, Jane Welsh, devoted herself to promoting his ‘greatness’ and was treated dreadfully in return. Confiding her unhappiness to a diary which he edited after she died, Thomas Carlyle spent the rest of his life afterwards eaten up by remorse because of the unhappiness he had engendered.

There are plenty of unusual arrangements here, but no easy solutions. Fortunately for us, separation and divorce are much easier in the twenty-first century. But Phyllis Rose wants us to reconsider these examples of Victorian challenges to orthodoxy and view them sympathetically – even when the cost in some cases seemed to be personal happiness and sexual fulfilment.

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Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives, London: Vintage, 1994, pp.320, ISBN: 0099308711

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Print Culture bibliography

October 1, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Abdurgham, Alison. Women in Print: Writing and Women’s Magazines from the Restoration to the Accession of Victoria. London: Allen & Unwin, 1972.

Altick, Richard Daniel. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900. 2nd ed. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1998.

Armbruster, Carol, ed. Publishing and Readership in Revolutionary France and America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993.

Anderson, Benedict R. O’Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 1991.

Anderson, Patricia. The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture 1790-1860. Oxford: Clarendon P of Oxford UP, 1991.

Armstrong, Adrian. Technique and Technology: Script, Print, and Poetics in France 1470-1550. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

Barker, Hannah and David Vincent. Language, Print, and Electoral Politics, 1790-1832: Newcastle-under-Lyme Broadsides. Rochester, NY: Boydell P/Parliamentary History Yearbook Trust, 2001.

Baron, Naomi S. Alphabet to Email: How Written English Evolved and Where It’s Heading. London: Routledge, 2000.

Barton, David and Nigel Hall, eds. Letter Writing as a Social Practice. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2000.

Bazerman. Charles. The Languages of Edison’s Light. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology P, 1999.

—. Shaping Written Knowledge. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1988.

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Reproduced with the permission of the author –

Thomas J. Farrell, Associate Professor, Department of Composition, University of Minnesota at Duluth; Duluth, MN 55812

Research Methods for English Studies

April 10, 2010 by Roy Johnson

new approaches to literary studies for post-graduates

Research Methods for English Studies is a collection of essays on the subject of research skills, methods, and methodology in the field of literary studies. The essays betray a profound unease which has (quite rightly) begun to infect this branch of academic activity. For they are in a sense answers to questions which are rarely if ever asked in this section of the humanities. Questions such as ‘What exactly is research in literary studies? What methods are used? What validity do the results have? Indeed, compared to other subjects such as biology, history, physics, astronomy, and sociology, what is literary studies about?

Some practitioners can answer these questions by taking fast hold of a vaguely related discipline and writing about the biography of an author, the genesis and publication history of a text, or the nature of its reception by the reading public. But the vast majority of what is called literary studies (and not just ‘English’) is nothing more than one person’s opinions about a text or a body opf work. Even worse, it may be opinions about opinions, or opinions about theories. There will be no declaration of critical method attached to works submitted for assessment or publication, no theory to be tested or conditions which can be reproduced – only a long bibliography of works consulted, packed out with the names and works of currently fashionable critics.

This is the state off affairs that has obtained for a long time in institutions of higher education, and in the prevailing climate it is likely to be coming to an end. These essays, whilst betraying unease, are also in a sense offering a lifeline to those who wish to find a niche for themselves in departments of literature or humanities. They are saying ‘Look! Here’s a new angle, so that you can retain tenure’.

Carolyn Steedman (a historian) for instance offers a chapter on the romance of working in archives, though she has no specific advice on what you might do when you get to it. Mary Evans promotes ‘auto/biography’ as a new approach – but this misses the fact that writing accounts of authors’ personal lives is a form of history, not literary studies. The activity of considering a number of biographies of Sylvia Plath amounts to not much more than a higher form of weekend supplement celebrity gossip, which says nothing about her poetry.

Next comes oral reminiscence. The argument here is that this enables a recovery of lost or forgotten history. All well and good, but there is no explanation of how this applies to literary studies. The example discussed merely compares the memories of a Home Guard volunteer with the accuracy or otherwise of Dad’s Army.

A chapter on visual methodologies carries with it similar problems. It is quite true that pictures can be analysed and interpreted, but since the vast majority of literary texts have no illustrations at all, it is difficult to to imagine how such an approach would help us to understand An Essay on Criticism or King Lear.

Discourse analysis looks more promising, because it focusses its attention on language, but an analysis of the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice stretches for a whole page without mentioning the term irony, though it does have space to complain about the text’s ‘focus on heteronormativity’. But at least Gabrielle Griffin goes on to explain how computer programs can be used to analyse texts – an activity which might keep somebody in post via a research grant whilst legitimately claiming to be literary studies.

Ethnographic studies at first seems a possibility, but studies of how readers consume texts, why they choose one book rather than another, and what the significance of their activity might be – all are ultimately sociological questions or matters of private biography. They do not contribute to literary understanding or interpretation.

Catherine Belsey appears to be on much firmer ground with ‘textual analysis’. Indeed, she even offers a practical exercise to demonstrate its efficacy. But her exercise has problems right from the outset. First of all she analyses a painting (Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia) and then she does nothing but raise questions about its meaning, based on nothing more than you could gain from a few minutes in front of the object, with an encyclopedia or Google search open by your side.

With much invoking of Roland Barthes, she argues that meanings in a text are ‘ultimately undecidable’, which she sees as good news for researchers, because it will keep them in business for ever. This is an admission of intellectual bankruptcy that today’s crop of post-graduates would do well to treat with extreme caution when applying for grants funded by tax-payers’ money.

There’s a whole chapter on interviewing authors (more celebrity gossip) and even creative writing as ‘research’ before the collection ends with the most sensible chapter of all – the use of computational technology as an aid to research. This includes the digitisation of primary sources, computer-aided textual analysis, the creation of electronic texts, and the establishment of multi-featured hypertext editions. All of these approaches are of use to other scholars, and they tend to be free of the ‘Look at me’ attitudes which infest much of what passes for contemporary criticism. It’s significant that this chapter has by far the largest and most useful supplement of suggested further reading and follow-up web sites.

So – this rabbit is finally pulled out of the hat at the very end – but anyone following the general advice in this book should be warned. In the current economic climate many of these self-indulgent approaches to ‘research’ are likely to be doomed. Some of the contributors to this volume are likely to be listed for early retirement by the time you come to read what they have written.

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Gabrielle Griffin (ed), Research Methods for English Studies Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009, pp.248, ISBN: 0748621555

More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

Russian Literature: a short introduction

August 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Russian poetry and prose 1800-2000

Catriona Kelly takes a rather unusual approach to the task of presenting two centuries of Russian literature without going for a chronological list or a ‘great writers’ structure. What she does instead is take Pushkin as a central starting point, then follows themes that arise from a consideration of his work and looks at other Russian writers en passant.

Starting from the importance of Pushkin to Russian society and culture, she puts nineteenth and twentieth-century Russian literature into a context which includes the political, social, and cultural history of a country which has gone from absolute monarchy, through totalitarian dictatorship, to a rough-hewn and precarious democracy in less than a hundred years. This book is not simply about literature: you’ll learn a lot about history from it too.

Her early chapters discuss Pushkin’s language and his thematic connections with other Russian writers as diverse as the poets Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak, and novelists Gogol, Chekhov, and Mikhail Bulgakov.

There’s a thoughtful chapter on novels and poetry during the Soviet period, and she makes a brave attempt to re-examine literature from this dark era and defend it against accusations of crude propaganda.

She also looks at the role and significance of women in Russian literature – both as subjects and authors. Her observations seem to be based on a close acquaintance with ‘gender-aware criticism’ in the last years of the twentieth century, and there are cascades of new names in addition to those already well known, such as Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva.

There are also chapters on religious belief and the nature of good and evil (plenty on Dostoyevsky there); Russia’s imperialistic relations with its neighbours and the cult of the exotic; and the writer as a guide to public morals.

This book could easily have as its alternative sub-title ‘An Introduction to Alexander Pushkin’, but taking him as her inspiration she considers just about every other major Russian writer of the last two hundred years – plus plenty more besides.

These very short introductions from OUP are an interesting and attractive format – a small, pocket-sized book, stylishly designed, with illustrations, maps, endnotes, suggestions for further reading.

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Catriona Kelly, Russian Literature: a very short introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp.164. ISBN: 0192801449

Studying Fiction

June 30, 2009 by Roy Johnson

guide to the basics of literary analysis – plus short stories

Many adult students have spent most of their lives reading fiction in the form of stories and novels. However, when it comes to making a formal academic study of literature – especially at undergraduate level – it’s hard to find the right words in which to express your understanding of a text. That’s why this book was written. Studying Fiction is an introduction to the basic concepts and the technical terms you will need when making a study of prose fiction.

It shows you how to apply the elements of literary analysis by explaining them one at a time, and then showing them at work in a series of short stories which are reproduced as part of the book. The materials are carefully graded, so that you start from simpler literary concepts, then work gradually towards more complex issues. The guide contains stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Katherine Mansfield, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, and Charles Dickens. All of them are excellent and very entertaining tales in their own right. The guidance notes help you to understand the literary techniques being used in each case.

Eight chapters deal separately with issues such as the basics of character and story; point of view, symbolism, irony, and theme; literary language and ‘appreciation’; the techniques of close reading; the social context of literature; narrators and interpretation; and an explanation of literary terms.

The book works as a form of self-instruction programme. You first of all read the story; then a particular literary concept is explained in relation to the story; a series of questions are posed [with answers] which allow you to test your understanding; and the chapter ends with suggestions for further reading.

OK – this is what’s called an ‘author’s own review’, so I’ve tried to be as unbiased as possible. If anybody else wishes to produce a review, I’ll be happy to add it. Alternatively, you can read somebody else’s review at Amazon here

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Roy Johnson, Studying Fiction, Manchester University Press, 1994, pp.226, ISBN 0719033977

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