Mantex

Tutorials, Study Guides & More

  • HOME
  • REVIEWS
  • TUTORIALS
  • HOW-TO
  • CONTACT
>> Home / Archives for 19C Literature

Charles Dickens: an introduction

July 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

short biography and literary background

The new Very Interesting People series from Oxford University Press provides authoritative bite-sized biographies of Britain’s most fascinating historical figures. These are people whose influence and importance have stood the test of time. Each book in the series is based on the biographical entry from the world-famous Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Michael Slater sketches the main outline of Dickens’ life – the boyhood in Chatham and Rochester, his love of reading and amateur theatricals, and then the shocking, seminal event in his young life when his father was put into the Marshalsea debtor’s prison and Dickens himself was set to work in a blacking factory, sticking labels on bottles. This was an event which was to shape much of his later fiction, as well as his own psychology and his attitudes to social reform.

Charles Dickens: an introductionAfter this difficult start to life, and despite being very largely self-educated, he fought his way into literature via journalism and court reporting. By the time he was in his mid twenties he had catapulted himself to fame with Pickwick Papers. Thereafter, he became a cultural and publishing phenomenon, producing masterpieces at a rate that puts most of today’s writers to shame.

On the strength of this success he married and settled down to a life of stupendous creativity and some amazing enterprise. He was active in controlling his own commercial potential as a writer, and he campaigned vigorously on the cause for authors’ copyright.

His fame also led him to develop a parallel career as a public speaker, and he gave regular dramatised readings from his own works, travelling to America on lecture tours and taking holidays in France and Italy.

Slater’s account manages to balance aspects of Dickens’ personal life with the development of his literary work. For instance, he doesn’t shirk the fact that Dickens like many other rich middle-class Victorian men became interested in the plight of ‘fallen women’, but at the same time he was able to produce his great masterpieces in books such as Dombey and Son, Bleak House, and Little Dorrit.

Yet whilst his fame spread and both his family and his bank-balance grew, his marriage slid into the doldrums, and he made matters worse by falling in love with Ellen Ternan, an actress the same age as his own young daughter.

The later years of his life appear to have been tinged with darkness. His relationships with his (ten) children was not good; he seems to have been implacably hostile to his wronged wife; and his health was not robust. Nevertheless, he worked on – and eventually it was his work rate and his dramatic readings which cut short his life at fifty-eight.

For a publication of this size, there’s a lot of inline source referencing that takes up space which could have been much better used by offering a bibliography and suggestions for further reading. But it’s a book which you can be quite confident is based on a scholarly knowledge of its subject. Most importantly, it makes you want to read the great works – or even better read them again.

© Roy Johnson 2007

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US


Michael Slater, Charles Dickens, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp.111, ISBN: 0199213528


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


Filed Under: Charles Dickens Tagged With: 19C Literature, Charles Dickens, Charles Dickens: an introduction, Literary studies

Father and Son

April 30, 2012 by Roy Johnson

A child pulled between religion, science, and poetry

Father and Son (1907) is a profoundly sad book which details the struggle between religious belief and scientific rationalism in the middle of the nineteenth century. It has the appearance of an autobiography, but author Edmund Gosse stresses more than once that it’s a ‘study of two temperaments’, by which he means the relationship between him and his father, Philip Gosse. It’s sad because his story details the terrible struggle between two people who obviously love each other dearly, but in ways which are completely different and even antagonistic.

Father and SonThe father is a strict, authoritarian, and evangelical Christian who wishes to control and mould a son entirely in his own image. The son feels oppressed, lonely, burdened with anxiety and self-doubt, and he is denied the pleasures and innocence of a normal childhood. On almost every page the reader is invited to sympathise with the fragile and tender feelings of a young boy who is denied any form of natural enjoyment, but is exhorted to prepare himself for Judgement Day. Before even the age of ten he is being commanded to prove the fervour of his commitment to the True Way to God.

His father Philip Gosse was a successful writer, a naturalist, and a member of the fundamentalist Christian sect of Plymouth Brethren. They believed that every word of the Bible was literally true because in their terms it was the actual word of God. All other religious beliefs were deemed heretical and their adherents doomed to hell and damnation – particularly Catholics. The Lord would only save those who truly believed, and who were prepared to be baptised (often for a second time) as adults.

To accept this ideology was only the beginning. After that it was the duty of every true believer to proselytise and convert non-believers to the True Way. The young Gosse had this drummed into him relentlessly in a domestic routine which was puritanical, cheerless, and devoid of any normal social pleasures.

The narrative documents his lonely childhood in Islington with no friends, the early death of his mother, and an amazing absence of any formal education. This was followed by a move to live in Devon when he was about ten years old – which provided a slight amelioration in the grimness of life. But it’s significant that this slim pleasure was found in gathering and documenting specimens of sea creatures in rock pools on the shore – which was precisely his father’s scientific specialism.

The central point of the drama comes in 1857 when his father published a work of theory (with the unfortunate title of Omphalos) which sought to reconcile Biblical accounts of creation (Genesis) with scientific evidence of the world’s evolution over millions and millions of years. His explanation was a version of what we now call creationism. He suggested that God made the world completely in six days – and that it already contained all the aeons of materials that we now see as historical evidence. Moreover, all its animal life was in a fully developed state of being.

Expecting great things from this work, he was mortified when it was badly received, and of course two years later in 1859 Darwin delivered the hammer blow of The Origin of Species which provided the explanation that is still accepted today and that constituted a challenge to religious belief that left it reeling.

Boarding school provided a slight relief from the physical presence of parental pressure. However, the interrogations his father had subjected him to personally were immediately replaced by an almost daily demanded for written evidence detailing proof of his son’s efforts to remain uncontaminated and free from the temptations of ‘infidelity’. At that time this meant adherence to the True Way and was code for a virulent strain of anti-Catholicism.

The young Gosse discovered Shakespeare and romantic poetry as a sort of alternative and antidote to the extreme puritanism his father continued to impose on him, but in the end he never shook off the shackles of religious belief. It’s interesting to note that this semi-confessional memoir and heart-rending account of a spiritually anguished childhood originally ended with Gosse in a religious fervour, imploring the Lord to take him away:

Come now, Lord Jesus, come now and take me to for ever with Thee in Thy Paradise. I am ready to come. My heart is purged from sin, there is nothing that keeps me rooted to this wicked world … take me before I have known the temptations of life, before I have to go to London and all the dreadful things that happen there.

It was the publisher Heinemann who insisted on his writing an Epilogue which brought the account to its natural conclusion – which was the eventual (partial) triumph of the son’s sense of personal identity over the tyranny of such an oppressive father figure.

The struggle between them continued even when Gosse was a young adult, living independently. Eventually he mustered sufficient courage to express mild reservations about evangelical Christianity and its exclusive claim to the Truth. But it is his father’s devastating and uncompromising riposte, holding to the logic of his fundamentalist belief which is the artistic conclusion of the narrative.

Some readers have said that it is the oppressive, scholarly, and Ahab-like figure of Gosse senior who emerges as the more admirable of the two characters (or ‘temperaments’) and that Gosse junior reveals himself as a feeble, complaining, and self-centred figure.

That’s why the book is so sad – because it’s almost impossible not to wish that this young child then young man could break away from his emotionally tyrannical father – having the confidence to throw off the system of belief that is being welded onto him like a suit of armour. But he never really succeeds.

Gosse went on to become a successful man of letters and was instrumental in introducing figures such as Ibsen and Gide into English literary culture, but this is the book for which he will be remembered. It’s rather like one of the Cotman or Crome watercolours that are evoked in the text – offering a pastoral and sentimental vision of English childhood that nevertheless captures the powerful ideological conflicts that affected the latter part of the Victorian era. It’s perhaps significant that the memoir was published only a few years before Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, a book that helped to draw a line under the same phenomenon for once and all.

Father and Son Buy the book at Amazon UK

Father and Son Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2012


Edmund Gosse, Father and Son, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.241, ISBN: 0199539111


Filed Under: 19C Literature, 20C Literature Tagged With: 19C Literature, Biography, Cultural history, Edmund Gosse, Father and Son, Literary studies

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.

Parallel Lives 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.

© Roy Johnson 2002

Parallel Lives Buy the book at Amazon UK

Parallel Lives Buy the book at Amazon US


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


More on lifestyle
More on biography
More on the Bloomsbury Group


Filed Under: 19C Literature, Lifestyle Tagged With: 19C Literature, Biography, Cultural history, Lifestyle, Literary studies, Marriage, Parallel Lives

Pride and Prejudice

January 24, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, characters, criticism, video, resources

Pride and Prejudice (1813) has the famous opening line “It is a fact universally recognised that a man with a fortune must be in search a wife.” It’s a story of the empty-headed and garrulous Mrs Bennet, who has but one aim in life – to find a good match for each of her daughters. Her husband is a mild-mannered and indolent man, much given to making witty cynicisms, and he refuses to take this vulgar prospect seriously.

Jane Austen - portrait

Jane Austen

The pride of the title belongs to its hero Mr Darcy, and the prejudice to heroine Elizabeth Bennet, who has lessons to learn from life. This was Jane Austen’s first major success as a novelist – though not the first of her books to be written. It’s a perfect place for readers to start – witty, sophisticated writing, and some well-observed character sketches. It seems as fresh today as ever.


Pride and Prejudice – plot summary

Pride and PrejudiceMr. Bingley, a wealthy young gentleman, rents a country estate near the Bennets called Netherfield. He arrives in town accompanied by his fashionable sisters and his good friend, Mr. Darcy. While Bingley is well-received in the community, Darcy begins his acquaintance with smug condescension and proud distaste for all the ‘country’ people. Bingley and Jane Bennet begin to grow close despite Mrs. Bennet’s embarrassing interference and the opposition of Bingley’s sisters, who consider Jane socially inferior. Elizabeth is stung by Darcy’s haughty rejection of her at a local dance and decides to match his coldness with her own wit.

At the same time Elizabeth begins a friendship with Mr. Wickham, a militia officer who relates a prior acquaintance with Darcy. Wickham tells her that he has been seriously mistreated by Darcy. Elizabeth immediately seizes upon this information as another reason to hate Darcy. Ironically, but unbeknownst to her, Darcy finds himself gradually drawn to Elizabeth.

Just as Bingley appears to be on the point of proposing marriage he quits Netherfield, leaving Jane confused and upset. Elizabeth is convinced that Bingley’s sisters have conspired with Darcy to separate Jane and Bingley.

Before Bingley leaves, Mr. Collins, the male relative who is to inherit Longbourn, makes a sudden appearance and stays with the Bennets. He is a recently ordained clergyman employed by the wealthy and patronizing Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Though he was partially entreated to visit by his patroness, Collins has another reason for visiting: he wishes to find a wife from among the Bennet sisters.

Mr. Bennet and Elizabeth are amused by his self-important and pedantic behaviour. He immediately enters pursuit of Jane; however, when Mrs. Bennet mentions her preoccupation with Mr. Bingley, he turns to Elizabeth. He soon proposes marriage to Elizabeth, who refuses him, much to her mother’s distress. Collins quickly recovers and proposes to Elizabeth’s close friend, Charlotte Lucas, who immediately accepts him. Once the marriage is arranged, Charlotte asks Elizabeth to come for an extended visit.

In the spring, Elizabeth joins Charlotte and her cousin at his parish in Kent. The parish is adjacent to Rosings Park, the grand manor of Mr. Darcy’s aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, where Elizabeth is frequently invited. While calling on Lady Catherine, Mr. Darcy encounters Elizabeth. She discovers from a cousin of Darcy that it was he who separated Bingley and Jane. Soon after, Darcy admits his love of Elizabeth and proposes to her. Insulted by his high-handed and insulting manner of proposing, Elizabeth refuses him. When he asks why she should refuse him, she confronts him with his sabotage of Bingley’s relationship with Jane and Wickham’s account of their dealings.

Deeply shaken by Elizabeth’s vehemence and accusations, Darcy writes her a letter justifying his actions. The letter reveals that Wickham soon dissipated his legacy-settlment (from Darcy’s father’s estate), then came back to Darcy requesting permanent patronage; he became angry when rejected, accusing Darcy of cheating him. To exact revenge and to make off with part of the Darcy family fortune, he attempted to seduce Darcy’s young sister Georgiana – to gain her hand and fortune, almost persuading her to elope with him – before he was found out and stopped. Darcy justifies his actions from having observed that Jane did not show any reciprocal interest in his friend; thus his aim in separating them was mainly to protect Bingley from heartache.

After reading the letter, Elizabeth begins to question both her family’s behaviour and Wickham’s credibility; she concludes that Wickham is not as trustworthy as his easy manners would indicate, and that her early impressions of Darcy may not have been accurate. Soon after receiving the letter Elizabeth returns home.

Some months later, during a tour of Derbyshire with her aunt and uncle, Elizabeth visits Pemberley, Darcy’s estate. Unexpectedly, Darcy arrives at Pemberly as they tour its grounds. He makes an effort to be gracious and welcoming to them, thus strengthening Elizabeth’s newly favourable impression of him. Darcy then introduces Elizabeth to his sister Georgiana. He treats her uncle and aunt very well, and finds them of a more sound character than her other relatives, whom he previously dismissed as socially inferior.

Elizabeth and Darcy’s renewed acquaintance is cut short when news arrives that Elizabeth’s younger sister Lydia has run away with Wickham. Initially, the Bennets believes that Wickham and Lydia have eloped, but soon it is surmised that Wickham has no plans to marry Lydia. Lydia’s antics threaten the family’s reputation and the Bennet sisters with social ruin. Elizabeth and her aunt and uncle hurriedly leave Derbyshire, and Elizabeth is convinced that Darcy will avoid her from now on.

Soon, thanks to the intervention of Elizabeth’s uncle, Lydia and Wickham are found and married. After the marriage, Wickham and Lydia make a visit to Longbourne. While bragging to Elizabeth, Lydia comments that Darcy was present at the wedding. Surprised, Elizabeth sends an inquiry to her aunt, from whom she discovers that Darcy was responsible for both finding the couple and arranging their marriage at great expense to himself.

Soon after, Bingley and Darcy return to the area. Bingley proposes marriage to Jane, and this news starts rumours that Darcy will propose to Elizabeth. Lady Catherine travels to Longbourn with the sole aim of confronting Elizabeth and demanding that she never accept such a proposal. Elizabeth refuses to bow to Lady Catherine’s demands. When news of this obstinacy reaches Darcy, it convinces him that her opinion of him has changed. When he visits, he once again proposes marriage. Elizabeth accepts, and the two become engaged.

Elizabeth and Darcy settle at Pemberley where Mr. Bennet visits often. Mrs. Bennet remains frivolous and silly, and often visits the new Mrs. Bingley and talking of the new Mrs. Darcy. Later, Jane and Bingley move from Netherfield to avoid Jane’s mother and Meryton relations and to locate near the Darcys in Derbyshire. Elizabeth and Jane manage to teach Kitty greater social grace, and Mary learns to accept the difference between herself and her sisters’ beauty and mixes more with the outside world. Lydia and Wickham continue to move often, leaving their debts for Jane and Elizabeth to pay off. At Pemberley, Elizabeth and Georgiana grow close, though Georgiana is surprised by Elizabeth’s playful treatment of Darcy. Lady Catherine stays very angry with her nephew’s marriage but over time the relationship between the two is repaired and she eventually decides to visit them. Elizabeth and Darcy also remain close with her uncle and aunt.


Study resources

Pride and Prejudice Pride and Prejudice – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Pride and Prejudice Pride and Prejudice – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Pride and Prejudice Pride and Prejudice – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon UK

Pride and Prejudice Pride and Prejudice – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon US

Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen Complete Works – 6-book Boxed Set – Amazon UK

Pride and Prejudice Pride and Prejudice – Audio book – Amazon UK

Pride and Prejudice Pride and Prejudice – 1995 BBC TV drama on DVD – Amazon UK

Pride and Prejudice Pride and Prejudice – Brodie’s Notes – AMazon UK

Pride and Prejudice Pride and Prejudice – York Notes (Advanced) – AMazon UK

Pride and Prejudice Pride and Prejudice – York Notes (GCSE) – Amazon UK

Pride and Prejudice Pride and Prejudice – Cliffs Notes – Amazon UK

Red button Pride and Prejudice – eBook at Project Gutenberg – [FREE]

Red button Pride and Prejudice – audioBook at LibriVox – [FREE]

Red button Pride and Prejudice – Routledge Guide

Red button Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen – 6-book boxed set

Red button Jane Austen: Selected Letters – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen – Amazon UK

Red button The Complete Critical Guide to Jane Austen – Amazon UK

Red button Jane Austen: A Biography

Red button Jane Austen at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button Jane Austen at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials


Principal characters
Mr Bennet Head of family, with wife and daughters, much given to sardonic criticism
Mrs Bennet His frivolous and excitable wife, socially ambitious for her daughters
Jane Bennet The eldest daughter – 22 years old – who is considered a local beauty
Elizabeth Bennet Second eldest daughter – 20 years old – intelligent, attractive, and witty
Mary Bennet The plain Bennet daughter – bookish and unsociable
Catherine (Kitty) Bennet The Fourth Bennet daughter – 17 years old
Lydia Bennet The youngest Bennet daughter – 15 years old – frivolous, flirtatious, and headstrong
Charles Bingley Gentleman without an estate – 22 years old – friend of Darcy
Caroline Bingley Bingley’s proud and snobbish sister
Fitzwilliam Darcy Wealthy estate owner – 28 years old – friend of Bingley
George Wickham Officer in the militia and old acquaintance of Darcy
William Collins Clergyman cousin to Mr Bennett – and heir to his estate
Lady Catherine de Bourgh Wealthy, haughty, domineering, and condescending
Mr Gardiner Mrs Bennett’s brother, and a friend to the family

Pride and Prejudice – film version

2005 adaptation, with Donald Sutherland and Keira Knightly


Genesis of the text

The novel was originally titled First Impressions by Jane Austen, and was written between October 1796 and August 1797. It was submitted for publication to a London bookseller by her father, but rejected.

Austen revised the text between 1811 and 1812, re-naming it Pride and Prejudice, and sold the manuscript outright for 110. It was published in three volumes in January 1813, priced at 18s. Two further editions were published in the next four years.

The scholarly edition produced by R.W.Chapman in 1923 has become the standard edition on which many modern editions of the novel are based.


Jane Austen’s writing

Jane Austen - manuscript page

the manuscript of Sanditon


Selected criticism

Red button F.W. Bradbrook, Jane Austen and her Predecessors, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966.

Red button Julia Prewitt Brown, Jane Austen’s Novels: Social Change and Literary Form, Cambridge (Mass), 1979.

Red button Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975, revised 1987.

Red button W.A. Craick, Jane Austen: the Six Novels, London: Methuen, 1965.

Red button D.D. Devlin, Jane Austen and Education, London, 1975.

Red button Alistair M. Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels, Baltimore (Md) and London, 1971.

Red button Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination, New Haven and London, 1979.

Red button John Halperin (ed), Jane Austen Bicentenary Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

Red button Barbara Hardy, A Reading of Jane Austen, London, 1975.

Red button Joycelyn Harris, Jane Austen’s Art of Memory, Cambridge, 1989.

Red button Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel, Chicago and London, 1988.

Red button Margaret Kirkham, Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction, Brighton and Totawa (NJ) 1983.

Red button Mary Lascelles, Jane Austen and her Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963.

Red button A. Walton Litz, Jane Austen: a Study of her Artistic Development, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Red button Juliet McMaster (ed), Jane Austen’s Achievement, London: Macmillan, 1976.

Red button David Monaghan, Jane Austen in a Social Context, Totawa (NJ) 1981.

Red button Laura G. Mooneyham, Citical Essays on Jane Austen, Twayne Publishers, 1998.

Red button Susan Morgan, In the Meantime: Character and Perception in Jane Austen’s Fiction, Chicago, 1980.

Red button Norman Page, The Language of Jane Austen, London: Blackwell, 1972.

Red button K.C. Phillips, Jane Austen’s English, London: Andre Deutsch, 1970.

Red button Adrian Poole, The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen , London: Macmillan, 1976.

Red button Warren Roberts, Jane Austen and the French Revolution, New York, 1979.

Red button B.C. Southam, Jane Austen’s Literary Manuscripts: A Study of the Novelist’s Development through the Surviving Papers, London and New York, 1964.

Red button B.C. Southam (ed), Critical Essays on Jane Austen, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969.

Red button B.C. Southam (ed), Jane Austen: the Critical Heritage, 2 vols, London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1968-87.

Red button Alison G. Sulloway, Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood, Philadelphia, 1989.

Red button Tony Tanner, Jane Austen, London: Macmillan, 1986.

Red button Ian Watt (ed), Jane Austen: a Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs (NJ): Prentice-Hall, 1963.


Pride and Prejudice – film version

1940 version, with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier


Other novels by Jane Austen

Sense and SensibilitySense and Sensibility (1811) casts two young and marriageable sisters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood as representatives of ‘sense’ and ‘sensibility’ respectively. Elinor bears her social disappointments with dignity and restraint – and thereby gets her man. Marianne on the other hand is excitable and impetuous, following her lover to London – where she quickly becomes disillusioned with him. Recovering and gaining more ‘sense’, she then finally sees the good qualities in her old friend Colonel Brandon, who has been waiting in the wings and is now conveniently on hand to propose marriage.
Jane Austen greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
Jane Austen greatest works Buy the book at Amazon US

 

Northanger AbbeyNorthanger Abbey (1818) opens in the drawing rooms of Bath. The heroine is imaginative Catherine Morland who falls in love with Henry Tilney, a young clergyman. When he invites her to meet his family at the Abbey however, she sees nothing but Gothic melodrama at every turn – since they were very fashionable at the time. Her visions of medieval horror prove groundless of course. This is Jane Austen’s satirical critique of Romantic cliché and excess. But Catherine eventually learns to see the world in a realistic light – and gets her man in the end. This volume also contains the early short novels Lady Susan and The Watsons, as well as the unfinished Sanditon.
Jane Austen greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
Jane Austen greatest works Buy the book at Amazon US

 

Mansfield ParkMansfield Park (1814) is more serious after the comedy of the earlier novels. Heroine Fanny Price is adopted into the family of her rich relatives. She is long-suffering and passive to a point which makes her almost unappealing – but her refusal to tolerate any drop in moral standards eventually teaches lessons to all concerned. (All that is except standout character Mrs Norris who is a sponging and interfering Aunt you will never forget.) The hero Edmund is dazzled by sexually attractive Mary Crawford – but in the nick of time sees the error of his ways and marries Fanny instead. Slow moving, but full of moral subtleties.
Jane Austen greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
Jane Austen greatest works Buy the book at Amazon US

 

EmmaEmma (1816) Charming and wilful Emma Woodhouse amuses herself by dabbling in other people’s affairs, planning their lives the way she sees fit. Most of her match-making plots go badly awry, and moral confusion reigns until she abandons her self-delusion and wakes up to the fact that stern but honourable Mr Knightly is the right man for her after all. As usual, money and social class underpin everything. Some wonderful comic scenes, and a rakish character Frank Churchill who finally reveals his flaws by making the journey to London just to get his hair cut.

Jane Austen greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
Jane Austen greatest works Buy the book at Amazon US

 

PersuasionPersuasion (1818) is the most mature of her novels, if one of the least exciting. Heroine Anne Elliott has been engaged to Captain Wentworth, but has broken off the engagement in deference to family and friends. Meeting him again eight years later, she goes against conventional wisdom and accepts his second proposal of marriage. Anne is a sensitive and thoughtful character, quite unlike some of the earlier heroines. Jane Austen wrote of her “She is almost too good for me”. There is a shift of location to Lyme Regis for this novel, which reveals for the first time a heroine acting from a deep sense of personal conviction, against the grain of conventional wisdom.
Jane Austen greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
Jane Austen greatest works Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2010


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


Filed Under: Jane Austen Tagged With: 19C Literature, English literature, Jane Austen, Literary studies, study guide

The Art of Fiction – Henry James

June 27, 2010 by Roy Johnson

a famous critical essay on literary theory

[Published in Longman’s Magazine 4 (September 1884), and re-printed in Partial Portraits(1888). The Art of Fiction is the essay that Robert Louis Stevenson answers in his ‘A Humble Remonstrance’, published in the next number of Longman’s Magazine (December 1884)]

NB. The paragraphs really are that long!


I SHOULD not have affixed so comprehensive a title to these few remarks, necessarily wanting in any completeness, upon a subject the full consideration of which would carry us far, did I not seem to discover a pretext for my temerity in the interesting pamphlet lately published under this name by Mr. Walter Besant. Mr. Besant’s lecture at the Royal Institution-the original form of his pamphlet-appears to indicate that many persons are interested in the art of fiction and are not indifferent to such remarks as those who practise it may attempt to make about it. I am therefore anxious not to lose the benefit of this favourable association, and to edge in a few words under cover of the attention which Mr. Besant is sure to have excited. There is something very encouraging in his having put into form certain of his ideas on the mystery of story-telling. It is a proof of life and curiosity-curiosity on the part of the brotherhood of novelists, as well as on the part of their readers. Only a short time ago it might have been supposed that the English novel was not what the French call discutable. It had no air of having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it-of being the expression of an artistic faith, the result of choice and comparison. I do not say it was necessarily the worse for that; it would take much more courage than I possess to intimate that the form of the novel, as Dickens and Thackeray (for instance) saw it had any taint of incompleteness. It was, however, naïf (if I may help myself out with another French word); and, evidently, if it is destined to suffer in any way for having lost its naïveté it has now an idea of making sure of the corresponding advantages During the period I have alluded to there was a comfortable, good-humoured feeling abroad that a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding, and that this was the end of it. But within a year or two, for some reason or other, there have been signs of returning animation-the era of discussion would appear to have been to a certain extent opened. Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints; and there is a presumption that those times when no one has anything particular to say about it, and has no reason to give for practice or preference, though they may be times of genius, are not times of development, are times possibly even, a little, of dulness. The successful application of any art is a delightful spectacle, but the theory, too, is interesting; and though there is a great deal of the latter without the former, I suspect there has never been a genuine success that has not had a latent core of conviction. Discussion, suggestion, formulation, these things are fertilizing when they are frank and sincere. Mr. Besant has set an excellent example in saying what he thinks, for his part, about the way in which fiction should be written, as well as about the way in which it should be published; for his view of the ‘art,’ carried on into an appendix, covers that too. Other labourers in the same field will doubtless take up the argument, they will give it the light of their experience, and the effect will surely be to make our interest in the novel a little more what it had for some time threatened to fail to be a serious, active, inquiring interest, under protection of which this delightful study may, in moments of confidence, venture to say a little more what it thinks of itself. It must take itself seriously for the public to take it so. The old superstition about fiction being ‘wicked’ has doubtless died out in England; but the spirit of it lingers in a certain oblique regard directed toward any story which does not more or less admit that it is only a joke. Even the most jocular novel feels in some degree the weight of the proscription that was formerly directed against literary levity; the jocularity does not always succeed in passing for gravity. It is still expected, though perhaps people are ashamed to say it, that a production which is after all only a ‘make believe’ (for what else is a ‘story’?) shall be in some degree apologetic-shall renounce the pretension of attempting really to compete with life. This, of course, any sensible wide-awake story declines to do, for it quickly perceives that the tolerance granted to it on such a condition is only an attempt to stifle it, disguised in the form of generosity. The old Evangelical hostility to the novel, which was as explicit as it was narrow, and which regarded it as little less favourable to our immortal part than a stage-play, was in reality far less insulting. The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does compete with life. When it ceases to compete as the canvas of the painter competes, it will have arrived at a very strange pass. It is not expected of the picture that it will make itself humble in order to be forgiven; and the analogy between the art of the painter and the art of the novelist is, so far as I am able to see, complete. Their inspiration is the same, their process (allowing for the different quality of the vehicle) is the same, their success is the same. They may learn from each other, they may explain and sustain each other. Their cause is the same, and the honour of one is the honour of another. Peculiarities of manner, of execution, that correspond on either side, exist in each of them and contribute to their development. The Mahometans think a picture an unholy thing, but it is a long time since any Christian did, and it is therefore the more odd that in the Christian mind the traces (dissimulated though they may be) of a suspicion of the sister art should linger to this day. The only effectual way to lay it to rest is to emphasize the analogy to which I just alluded-to insist on the fact that as the picture is reality, so the novel is history. That is the only general description (which does it justice) that we may give the novel. But history also is allowed to compete with life, as I say; it is not, any more than painting, expected to apologize. The subject-matter of fiction is stored up likewise in documents and records, and if it will not give itself away, as they say in California, it must speak with assurance, with the tone of the historian. Certain accomplished novelists have a habit of giving themselves away which must often bring tears to the eyes of people who take their fiction seriously. I was lately struck, in reading over many pages of Anthony Trollope, with his want of discretion in this particular. In a digression, a parenthesis or an aside, he concedes to the reader that he and this trusting friend are only ‘making believe.’ He admits that the events he narrates have not really happened, and that he can give his narrative any turn the reader may like best. Such a betrayal of a sacred office seems to me, I confess, a terrible crime; it is what I mean by the attitude of apology, and it shocks me every whit as much in Trollope as it would have shocked me in Gibbon or Macaulay. It implies that the novelist is less occupied in looking for the truth than the historian, and in doing so it deprives him at a stroke of all his standing-room. To represent and illustrate the past, the actions of men, is the task of either writer, and the only difference that I can see is, in proportion as he succeeds, to the honour of the novelist, consisting as it does in his having more difficulty in collecting his evidence, which is so far from being purely literary. It seems to me to give him a great character, the fact that he has at once so much in common with the philosopher and the painter; this double analogy is a magnificent heritage. It is of all this evidently that Mr. Besant is full when he insists upon the fact that fiction is one of the fine arts, deserving in its turn of all the honours and emoluments that have hitherto been reserved for the successful profession of music, poetry, painting, architecture. It is impossible to insist too much on so important a truth, and the place that Mr. Besant demands for the work of the novelist may be represented, a trifle less abstractly, by saying that he demands not only that it shall be reputed artistic, but that it shall be reputed very artistic indeed. It is excellent that he should have struck this note, for his doing so indicates that there was need of it, that his proposition may be to many people a novelty. One rubs one’s eyes at the thought; but the rest of Mr. Besant’s essay confirms the revelation. I suspect, in truth, that it would be possible to confirm it still further, and that one would not be far wrong in saying that in addition to the people to whom it has never occurred that a novel ought to be artistic, there are a great many others who, if this principle were urged upon them, would be filled with an indefinable mistrust. They would find it difficult to explain their repugnance, but it would operate strongly to put them on their guard. ‘Art,’ in our Protestant communities, where so many things have got so strangely twisted about, is supposed, in certain circles, to have some vaguely injurious effect upon those who make it an important consideration, who let it weigh in the balance. It is assumed to be opposed in some mysterious manner to morality, to amusement, to instruction. When it is embodied in the work of the painter (the sculptor is another affair!) you know what it is; it stands there before you, in the honesty of pink and green and a gilt frame; you can see the worst of it at a glance, and you can be on your guard. But when it is introduced into literature it becomes more insidious-there is danger of its hurting you before you know it. Literature should be either instructive or amusing, and there is in many minds an impression that these artistic preoccupations, the search for form, contribute to neither end, interfere indeed with both. They are too frivolous to be edifying, and too serious to be diverting; and they are, moreover, priggish and paradoxical and superfluous. That, I think, represents the manner in which the latent thought of many people who read novels as an exercise in skipping would explain itself if it were to become articulate. They would argue, of course, that a novel ought to be ‘good,’ but they would interpret this term in a fashion of their own, which, indeed, would vary considerably from one critic to another. One would say that being good means representing virtuous and aspiring characters, placed in prominent positions; another would say that it depends for a ‘happy ending’ on a distribution at the last of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs and cheerful remarks. Another still would say that it means being full of incident and movement, so that we shall wish to jump ahead, to see who was the mysterious stranger, and if the stolen will was ever found, and shall not be distracted from this pleasure by any tiresome analysis or ‘description.’ But they would all agree that the ‘artistic’ idea would spoil some of their fun. One would hold it accountable for all the description, another would see it revealed in the absence of sympathy. Its hostility to a happy ending would be evident, and it might even, in some cases, render any ending at all impossible. The ‘ending’ of a novel is, for many persons, like that of a good dinner, a course of dessert and ices, and the artist in fiction is regarded as a sort of meddlesome doctor who forbids agreeable aftertastes. It is therefore true that this conception of Mr. Besant’s, of the novel as a superior form, encounters not only a negative but a positive indifference. It matters little that, as a work of art, it should really be as little or as much concerned to supply happy endings, sympathetic characters, and an objective tone, as if it were a work of mechanics; the association of ideas, however incongruous, might easily be too much for it if an eloquent voice were not sometimes raised to call attention to the fact that it is at once as free and as serious a branch of literature as any other. Certainly, this might sometimes be doubted in presence of the enormous number of works of fiction that appeal to the credulity of our generation, for it might easily seem that there could be no great substance in a commodity so quickly and easily produced. It must be admitted that good novels are somewhat compromised by bad ones, and that the field, at large, suffers discredit from overcrowding. I think, however, that this injury is only superficial, and that the superabundance of written fiction proves nothing against the principle itself. It has been vulgarised, like all other kinds of literature, like everything else, to-day, and it has proved more than some kinds accessible to vulgarisation. But there is as much difference as there ever was between a good novel and a bad one: the bad is swept, with all the daubed canvases and spoiled marble, into some unvisited limbo or infinite rubbish-yard, beneath the back-windows of the world, and the good subsists and emits its light and stimulates our desire for perfection. As I shall take the liberty of making but a single criticism of Mr. Besant, whose tone is so full of the love of his art, I may as well have done with it at once. He seems to me to mistake in attempting to say so definitely beforehand what sort of an affair the good novel will be. To indicate the danger of such an error as that has been the purpose of these few pages; to suggest that certain traditions on the subject, applied a priori, have already had much to answer for, and that the good health of an art which undertakes so immediately to reproduce life must demand that it be perfectly free. It lives upon exercise, and the very meaning of exercise is freedom. The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting. That general responsibility rests upon it, but it is the only one I can think of. The ways in which it is at liberty to accomplish this result (of interesting us) strike me as innumerable and such as can only suffer from being marked out, or fenced in, by prescription. They are as various as the temperament of man, and they are successful in proportion as they reveal a particular mind, different from others. A novel is in its broadest definition a personal impression of life; that, to begin with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression. But there will be no intensity at all, and therefore no value, unless there is freedom to feel and say. The tracing of a line to be followed, of a tone to be taken, of a form to be filled out, is a limitation of that freedom and a suppression of the very thing that we are most curious about. The form, it seems to me, is to be appreciated after the fact; then the author’s choice has been made, his standard has been indicated; then we can follow lines and directions and compare tones. Then, in a word, we can enjoy one of the most charming of pleasures, we can estimate quality, we can apply the test of execution. The execution belongs to the author alone; it is what is most personal to him, and we measure him by that. The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant – no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes. Here it is especially that he works, step by step, like his brother of the brush, of whom we may always say that he has painted his picture in a manner best known to himself. His manner is his secret, not necessarily a deliberate one. He cannot disclose it, as a general thing, if he would; he would be at a loss to teach it to others. I say this with a due recollection of having insisted on the community of method of the artist who paints a picture and the artist who writes a novel. The painter is able to teach the rudiments of his practice, and it is possible, from the study of good work (granted the aptitude), both to learn how to paint and to learn how to write. Yet it remains true, without injury to the rapprochement, that the literary artist would be obliged to say to his pupil much more than the other, ‘Ah, well, you must do it as you can !’ It is a question of degree, a matter of delicacy. If there are exact sciences there are also exact arts, and the grammar of painting is so much more definite that it makes the difference. I ought to add, however, that if Mr. Besant says at the beginning of his essay that the ‘laws of fiction may be laid down and taught with as much precision and exactness as the laws of harmony, perspective, and proportion,’ he mitigates what might appear to be an over-statement by applying his remark to ‘general’ laws, and by expressing most of these rules in a manner with which it would certainly be unaccommodating to disagree. That the novelist must write from his experience, that his ‘characters must be real and such as might be met with in actual life;’ that ‘a young lady brought up in a quiet country village should avoid descriptions of garrison life,’ and ‘a writer whose friends and personal experiences belong to the lower middle-class should carefully avoid introducing his characters into Society;’ that one should enter one’s notes in a common-place book; that one’s figures should be clear in outline; that making them clear by some trick of speech or of carriage is a bad method, and ‘describing them at length’ is a worse one; that English Fiction should have a ‘conscious moral purpose;’ that ‘it is almost impossible to estimate too highly the value of careful workmanship-that is, of style;’ that ‘the most important point of all is the story,’ that ‘the story is everything’-these are principles with most of which it is surely impossible not to sympathise. That remark about the lower middle-class writer and his knowing his place is perhaps rather chilling; but for the rest, I should find it difficult to dissent from any one of these recommendations. At the same time I should find it difficult positively to assent to them, with the exception, perhaps, of the injunction as to entering one’s notes in a common-place book. They scarcely seem to me to have the quality that Mr. Besant attributes to the rules of the novelist-the ‘precision and exactness’ of ‘the laws of harmony, perspective, and proportion.’ They are suggestive, they are even inspiring, but they are not exact, though they are doubtless as much so as the case admits of; which is a proof of that liberty of interpretation for which I just contended. For the value of these different injunctions-so beautiful and so vague-is wholly in the meaning one attaches to them. The characters, the situation, which strike one as real will be those that touch and interest one most, but the measure of reality is very difficult to fix. The reality of Don Quixote or of Mr. Micawber is a very delicate shade; it is a reality so coloured by the author’s vision that, vivid as it may be, one would hesitate to propose it as a model; one would expose one’s self to some very embarrassing questions on the part of a pupil. It goes without saying that you will not write a good novel unless you possess the sense of reality; but it will be difficult to give you a recipe for calling that sense into being. Humanity is immense and reality has a myriad forms; the most one can affirm is that some of the flowers of fiction have the odour of it, and others have not; as for telling you in advance how your nosegay should be composed, that is another affair. It is equally excellent and inconclusive to say that one must write from experience; to our supposititious aspirant such a declaration might savour of mockery. What kind of experience is intended, and where does it begin and end? Experience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the finest silken threads, suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius-it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations. The young lady living in a village has only to be a damsel upon whom nothing is lost to make it quite unfair (as it seems to me) to declare to her that she shall have nothing to say about the military. Greater miracles have been seen than that, imagination assisting, she should speak the truth about some of these gentlemen. I remember an English novelist, a woman of genius, telling me that she was much commended for the impression she had managed to give in one of her tales of the nature and way of life of the French Protestant youth. She had been asked where she learned so much about this recondite being, she had been congratulated on her peculiar opportunities. These opportunities consisted in her having once, in Paris, as she ascended a staircase, passed an open door where, in the household of a pasteur, some of the young Protestants were seated at table round a finished meal. The glimpse made a picture; it lasted only a moment, but that moment was experience. She had got her impression, and she evolved her type. She knew what youth was, and what Protestantism; she also had the advantage of having seen what it was to be French; so that she converted these ideas into a concrete image and produced a reality. Above all, however, she was blessed with the faculty which when you give it an inch takes an ell, and which for the artist is a much greater source of strength than any accident of residence or of place in the social scale. The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it-this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education. If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, ‘Write from experience, and experience only,’ I should feel that this was a rather tantalising monition if I were not careful immediately to add, ‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!’ I am far from intending by this to minimise the importance of exactness-of truth of detail. One can speak best from one’s own taste, and I may therefore venture to say that the air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel-the merit on which all its other merits (including that conscious moral purpose of which Mr. Besant speaks) helplessly and submissively depend. If it be not there, they are all as nothing, and if these be there, they owe their effect to the success with which the author has produced the illusion of life. The cultivation of this success, the study of this exquisite process, form, to my taste, the beginning and the end of the art of the novelist. They are his inspiration, his despair, his reward, his torment, his delight. It is here, in very truth, that he competes with life; it is here that he competes with his brother the painter, in his attempt to render the look of things, the look that conveys their meaning, to catch the colour, the relief, the expression, the surface, the substance of the human spectacle. It is in regard to this that Mr. Besant is well inspired when he bids him take notes. He cannot possibly take too many, he cannot possibly take enough. All life solicits him, and to ‘render’ the simplest surface, to produce the most momentary illusion, is a very complicated business. His case would be easier, and the rule would be more exact, if Mr. Besant had been able to tell him what notes to take. But this I fear he can never learn in any hand-book; it is the business of his life. He has to take a great many in order to select a few, he has to work them up as he can, and even the guides and philosophers who might have most to say to him must leave him alone when it comes to the application of precepts, as we leave the painter in communion with his palette. That his characters ‘must be clear in outline,’ as Mr. Besant says-he feels that down to his boots; but how he shall make them so is a secret between his good angel and himself. It would be absurdly simple if he could be taught that a great deal of ‘description’ would make them so, or that, on the contrary, the absence of description and the cultivation of dialogue, or the absence of dialogue and the multiplication of ‘incident,’ would rescue him from his difficulties. Nothing, for instance, is more possible than that he be of a turn of mind for which this odd, literal opposition of description and dialogue, incident and description, has little meaning and light. People often talk of these things as if they had a kind of internecine distinctness, instead of melting into each other at every breath and being intimately associated parts of one general effort of expression. I cannot imagine composition existing in a series of blocks, nor conceive, in any novel worth discussing at all, of a passage of description that is not in its intention narrative, a passage of dialogue that is not in its intention descriptive, a touch of truth of any sort that does not partake of the nature of incident, and an incident that derives its interest from any other source than the general and only source of the success of a work of art-that of being illustrative. A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like every other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts. The critic who over the close texture of a finished work will pretend to trace a geography of items will mark some frontiers as artificial, I fear, as any that have been known to history. There is an old-fashioned distinction between the novel of character and the novel of incident, which must have cost many a smile to the intending romancer who was keen about his work. It appears to me as little to the point as the equally celebrated distinction between the novel and the romance- to answer as little to any reality. There are bad novels and good novels, as there are bad pictures and good pictures; but that is the only distinction in which I see any meaning, and I can as little imagine speaking of a novel of character as I can imagine speaking of a picture of character. When one says picture, one says of character, when one says novel, one says of incident, and the terms may be transposed. What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? What is a picture or a novel that is not of character? What else do we seek in it and find in it? It is an incident for a woman to stand up with her hand resting on a table and look out at you in a certain way; or if it be not an incident, I think it will be hard to say what it is. At the same time it is an expression of character. If you say you don’t see it (character in that–allons donc!) this is exactly what the artist who has reasons of his own for thinking he does see it undertakes to show you. When a young man makes up his mind that he has not faith enough, after all, to enter the Church, as he intended, that is an incident, though you may not hurry to the end of the chapter to see whether perhaps he doesn’t change once more. I do not say that these are extraordinary or startling incidents. I do not pretend to estimate the degree of interest proceeding from them, for this will depend upon the skill of the painter. It sounds almost puerile to say that some incidents are intrinsically much more important than others, and I need not take this precaution after having professed my sympathy for the major ones in remarking that the only classification of the novel that I can understand is into the interesting and the uninteresting.

The novel and the romance, the novel of incident and that of character-these separations appear to me to have been made by critics and readers for their own convenience, and to help them out of some of their difficulties, but to have little reality or interest for the producer, from whose point of view it is, of course, that we are attempting to consider the art of fiction. The case is the same with another shadowy category, which Mr. Besant apparently is disposed to set up-that of the ‘modern English novel;’ unless, indeed, it be that in this matter he has fallen into an accidental confusion of standpoints. It is not quite clear whether he intends the remarks in which he alludes to it to be didactic or historical. It is as difficult to suppose a person intending to write a modern English, as to suppose him writing an ancient English, novel; that is a label which begs the question. One writes the novel, one paints the picture, of one’s language and of one’s time, and calling it modern English will not, alas ! make the difficult task any easier. No more, unfortunately, will calling this or that work of one’s fellow artist a romance-unless it be, of course, simply for the pleasantness of the thing, as, for instance, when Hawthorne gave this heading to his story of Blithedale. The French, who have brought the theory of fiction to remarkable completeness, have but one word for the novel, and have not attempted smaller things in it, that I can see, for that. I can think of no obligation to which the ‘romancer’ would not be held equally with the novelist; the standard of execution is equally high for each. Of course it is of execution that we are talking-that being the only point of a novel that is open to contention. This is perhaps too often lost sight of, only to produce interminable confusions and cross-purposes. We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, what the French call his donnée; our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it. Naturally I do not mean that we are bound to like it or find it interesting: in case we do not our course is perfectly simple-to let it alone. We may believe that of a certain idea even the most sincere novelist can make nothing at all, and the event may perfectly justify our belief; but the failure will have been a failure to execute, and it is in the execution that the fatal weakness is recorded. If we pretend to respect the artist at all we must allow him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify. Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions, and some of the most interesting experiments of which it is capable are hidden in the bosom of common things. Gustave Flaubert has written a story about the devotion of a servant-girl to a parrot, and the production, highly finished as it is, cannot on the whole be called a success. We are perfectly free to find it flat, but I think it might have been interesting; and I, for my part, am extremely glad he should have written it; it is a contribution to our knowledge of what can be done or what cannot. Ivan Turgénieff has written a tale about a deaf and dumb serf and a lap-dog, and the thing is touching, loving, a little masterpiece. He struck the note of life where Gustave Flaubert missed it-he flew in the face of a presumption and achieved a victory. Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of ‘liking’ a work of art or not liking it; the more improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test. I mention this to guard myself from the accusation of intimating that the idea, the subject, of a novel or a picture, does not matter. It matters, to my sense, in the highest degree, and if I might put up a prayer it would be that artists should select none but the richest. Some, as I have already hastened to admit, are much more substantial than others , and it would be a happily arranged world in which persons intending to treat them should be exempt from confusions and mistakes. This fortunate condition will arrive only, I fear, on the same day that critics become purged from error. Meanwhile, I repeat, we do not judge the artist with fairness unless we say to him, ‘Oh, I grant you your starting point, because if I did not I should seem to prescribe to you, and heaven forbid I should take that responsibility. If I pretend to tell you what you must not take, you will call upon me to tell you then what you must take; in which case I shall be nicely caught! Moreover, it isn’t till I have accepted your data that I can begin to measure you. I have the standard; I judge you by what you propose, and you must look out for me there. Of course I may not care for your idea at all; I may think it silly, or stale, or unclean; in which case I wash my hands of you altogether. I may content myself with believing that you will not have succeeded in being interesting, but I shall of course not attempt to demonstrate it, and you will be as indifferent to me as I am to you. I needn’t remind you that there are all sorts of tastes: who can know it better? Some people, for excellent reasons, don’t like to read about carpenters; others, for reasons even better, don’t like to read about courtesans. Many object to Americans. Others (I believe they are mainly editors and publishers) won’t look at Italians. Some readers don’t like quiet subjects; others don’t like bustling ones. Some enjoy a complete illusion; others revel in a complete deception. They choose their novels accordingly, and if they don’t care about your idea they won’t, a fortiori, care about your treatment.’

So that it comes back very quickly, as I have said, to the liking; in spite of M. Zola, who reasons less powerfully than he represents, and who will not reconcile himself to this absoluteness of taste, thinking that there are certain things that people ought to like, and that they can be made to like. I am quite at a loss to imagine anything (at any rate in this matter of fiction) that people ought to like or to dislike. Selection will be sure to take care of itself, for it has a constant motive behind it. That motive is simply experience. As people feel life, so they will feel the art that is most closely related to it. This closeness of relation is what we should never forget in talking of the effort of the novel. Many people speak of it as a factitious, artificial form, a product of ingenuity, the business of which is to alter and arrange the things that surround us, to translate them into conventional, traditional moulds. This, however, is a view of the matter which carries us but a very short way, condemns the art to an eternal repetition of a few familiar clichés, cuts short its development, and leads us straight up to a dead wall. Catching the very note and trick, the strange irregular rhythm of life, that is the attempt whose strenuous force keeps Fiction upon her feet. In proportion as in what she offers us we see life without rearrangement do we feel that we are touching the truth; in proportion as we see it with rearrangement do we feel that we are being put off with a substitute, a compromise and convention. It is not uncommon to hear an extraordinary assurance of remark in regard to this matter of rearranging, which is often spoken of as if it were the last word of art. Mr. Besant seems to me in danger of falling into this great error with his rather unguarded talk about ‘selection.’ Art is essentially selection, but it is a selection whose main care is to be typical, to be inclusive. For many people art means rose-coloured windows, and selection means picking a bouquet for Mrs. Grundy. They will tell you glibly that artistic considerations have nothing to do with the disagreeable, with the ugly; they will rattle off shallow commonplaces about the province of art and the limits of art, till you are moved to some wonder in return as to the province and the limits of ignorance. It appears to me that no one can ever have made a seriously artistic attempt without becoming conscious of an immense increase-a kind of revelation-of freedom. One perceives, in that case-by the light of a heavenly ray-that the province of art is all life, all feeling, all observation, all vision. As Mr. Besant so justly intimates, it is all experience. That is a sufficient answer to those who maintain that it must not touch the painful, who stick into its divine unconscious bosom little prohibitory inscriptions on the end of sticks, such as we see in public gardens-‘It is forbidden to walk on the grass; it is forbidden to touch the flowers; it is not allowed to introduce dogs, or to remain after dark; it is requested to keep to the right.’ The young aspirant in the line of fiction, whom we continue to imagine, will do nothing without taste, for in that case his freedom would be of little use to him; but the first advantage of his taste will be to reveal to him the absurdity of the little sticks and tickets. If he have taste, I must add, of course he will have ingenuity, and my disrespectful reference to that quality just now was not meant to imply that it is useless in fiction. But it is only a secondary aid; the first is a vivid sense of reality.

Mr. Besant has some remarks on the question of ‘the story,’ which I shall not attempt to criticise, though they seem to me to contain a singular ambiguity, because I do not think I understand them. I cannot see what is meant by talking as if there were a part of a novel which is the story and part of it which for mystical reasons is not-unless indeed the distinction be made in a sense in which it is difficult to suppose that anyone should attempt to convey anything. ‘The story,’ if it represents anything, represents the subject, the idea, the data of the novel; and there is surely no ‘school’-Mr. Besant speaks of a school- which urges that a novel should be all treatment and no subject. There must assuredly be something to treat; every school is intimately conscious of that. This sense of the story being the idea, the starting-point, of the novel is the only one that I see in which it can be spoken of as something different from its organic whole; and since, in proportion as the work is successful, the idea permeates and penetrates it, informs and animates it, so that every word and every punctuation-point contribute directly to the expression, in that proportion do we lose our sense of the story being a blade which may be drawn more or less out of its sheath. The story and the novel, the idea and the form, are the needle and thread, and I never heard of a guild of tailors who recommended the use of the thread without the needle or the needle without the thread. Mr. Besant is not the only critic who may be observed to have spoken as if there were certain things in life which constitute stories and certain others which do not. I find the same odd implication in an entertaining article in the Pall Mall Gazette, devoted, as it happens, to Mr. Besant’s lecture. ‘The story is the thing!’ says this graceful writer, as if with a tone of opposition to another idea. I should think it was, as every painter who, as the time for ‘sending in’ his picture looms in the distance, finds himself still in quest of a subject-as every belated artist, not fixed about his donnée, will heartily agree. There are some subjects which speak to us and others which do not, but he would be a clever man who should undertake to give a rule by which the story and the no-story should be known apart. It is impossible (to me at least) to imagine any such rule which shall not be altogether arbitrary. The writer in the Pall Mall opposes the delightful (as I suppose) novel of Margot la Balafrée to certain tales in which ‘Bostonian nymphs’ appear to have ‘rejected English dukes for psychological reasons.’ I am not acquainted with the romance just designated, and can scarcely forgive the Pall Mall critic for not mentioning the name of the author, but the title appears to refer to a lady who may have received a scar in some heroic adventure. I am inconsolable at not being acquainted with this episode, but am utterly at a loss to see why it is a story when the rejection (or acceptance) of a duke is not, and why a reason, psychological or other, is not a subject when a cicatrix is. They are all particles of the multitudinous life with which the novel deals, and surely no dogma which pretends to make it lawful to touch the one and unlawful to touch the other will stand for a moment on its feet. It is the special picture that must stand or fall, according as it seems to possess truth or to lack it. Mr. Besant does not, to my sense, light up the subject by intimating that a story must, under penalty of not being a story, consist of ‘adventures.’ Why of adventures more than of green spectacles? He mentions a category of impossible things, and among them he places ‘fiction without adventure.’ Why without adventure, more than without matrimony, or celibacy, or parturition, or cholera, or hydropathy, or Jansenism? This seems to me to bring the novel back to the hapless little rôle of being an artificial, ingenious thing-bring it down from its large, free character of an immense and exquisite correspondence with life. And what is adventure, when it comes to that, and by what sign is the listening pupil to recognise it? It is an adventure-an immense one-for me to write this little article; and for a Bostonian nymph to reject an English duke is an adventure only less stirring, I should say, than for an English duke to be rejected by a Bostonian nymph. I see dramas within dramas in that, and innumerable points of view. A psychological reason is, to my imagination, an object adorably pictorial; to catch the tint of its complexion-I feel as if that idea might inspire one to Titianesque efforts. There are few things more exciting to me, in short, than a psychological reason, and yet, I protest, the novel seems to me the most magnificent form of art. I have just been reading, at the same time, the delightful story of Treasure Island, by Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, and the last tale from M. Edmond de Goncourt, which is entitled Chérie. One of these works treats of murders, mysteries, islands of dreadful renown, hairbreadth escapes, miraculous coincidences and buried doubloons. The other treats of a little French girl who lived in a fine house in Paris and died of wounded sensibility because no one would marry her. I call Treasure Island delightful, because it appears to me to have succeeded wonderfully in what it attempts; and I venture to bestow no epithet upon Chérie which strikes me as having failed in what it attempts-that is, in tracing the development of the moral consciousness of a child. But one of these productions strikes me as exactly as much of a novel as the other, and as having a ‘story’ quite as much. The moral consciousness of a child is as much a part of life as the islands of the Spanish Main, and the one sort of geography seems to me to have those ‘surprises’ of which Mr. Besant speaks quite as much as the other. For myself (since it comes back in the last resort, as I say, to the preference of the individual), the picture of the child’s experience has the advantage that I can at successive steps (an immense luxury, near to the ‘sensual pleasure’ of which Mr. Besant’s critic in the Pall Mall speaks) say Yes or No, as it may be, to what the artist puts before me. I have been a child, but I have never been on a quest for a buried treasure, and it is a simple accident that with M. de Goncourt I should have for the most part to say No. With George Eliot, when she painted that country, I always said Yes.

The most interesting part of Mr. Besant’s lecture is unfortunately the briefest passage-his very cursory allusion to the ‘conscious moral purpose’ of the novel. Here again it is not very clear whether he is recording a fact or laying down a principle; it is a great pity that in the latter case he should not have developed his idea. This branch of the subject is of immense importance, and Mr. Besant’s few words point to considerations of the widest reach, not to be lightly disposed of. He will have treated the art of fiction but superficially who is not prepared to go every inch of the way that these considerations will carry him. It is for this reason that at the beginning of these remarks I was careful to notify the reader that my reflections on so large a theme have no pretension to be exhaustive. Like Mr. Besant, I have left the question of the morality of the novel till the last, and at the last I find I have used up my space. It is a question surrounded with difficulties, as witness the very first that meets us, in the form of a definite question, on the threshold. Vagueness, in such a discussion, is fatal, and what is the meaning of your morality and your conscious moral purpose? Will you not define your terms and explain how (a novel being a picture) a picture can be either moral or immoral? You wish to paint a moral picture or carve a moral statue; will you not tell us how you would set about it? We are discussing the Art of Fiction; questions of art are questions (in the widest sense) of execution; questions of morality are quite another affair, and will you not let us see how it is that you find it so easy to mix them up? These things are so clear to Mr. Besant that he has deduced from them a law which he sees embodied in English Fiction and which is ‘a truly admirable thing and a great cause for congratulation.’ It is a great cause for congratulation, indeed, when such thorny problems become as smooth as silk. I may add that, in so far as Mr. Besant perceives that in point of fact English Fiction has addressed itself preponderantly to these delicate questions, he will appear to many people to have made a vain discovery. They will have been positively struck, on the contrary, with the moral timidity of the usual English novelist; with his (or with her) aversion to face the difficulties with which, on every side, the treatment of reality bristles. He is apt to be extremely shy (whereas the picture that Mr. Besant draws is a picture of boldness), and the sign of his work, for the most part, is a cautious silence on certain subjects. In the English novel (by which I mean the American as well), more than in any other, there is a traditional difference between that which people know and that which they agree to admit that they know, that which they see and that which they speak of, that which they feel to be a part of life and that which they allow to enter into literature. There is the great difference, in short, between what they talk of in conversation and what they talk of in print. The essence of moral energy is to survey the whole field, and I should directly reverse Mr. Besant’s remark, and say not that the English novel has a purpose, but that it has a diffidence. To what degree a purpose in a work of art is a source of corruption I shall not attempt to inquire; the one that seems to me least dangerous is the purpose of making a perfect work. As for our novel, I may say, lastly, on this score, that, as we find it in England to-day, it strikes me as addressed in a large degree to ‘young people,’ and that this in itself constitutes a presumption that it will be rather shy. There are certain things which it is generally agreed not to discuss, not even to mention, before young people. That is very well, but the absence of discussion is not a symptom of the moral passion. The purpose of the English novel-‘a truly admirable thing, and a great cause for congratulation’-strikes me, therefore, as rather negative.

There is one point at which the moral sense and the artistic sense lie very near together; that is, in the light of the very obvious truth that the deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer. In proportion as that mind is rich and noble will the novel, the picture, the statue, partake of the substance of beauty and truth. To be constituted of such elements is, to my vision, to have purpose enough. No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind; that seems to me an axiom which, for the artist in fiction, will cover all needful moral ground; if the youthful aspirant take it to heart it will illuminate for him many of the mysteries of ‘purpose.’ There are many other useful things that might be said to him, but I have come to the end of my article, and can only touch them as I pass. The critic in the Pall Mall Gazette, whom I have already quoted, draws attention to the danger, in speaking of the art of fiction, of generalizing. The danger that he has in mind is rather, I imagine, that of particularizing, for there are some comprehensive remarks which, in addition to those embodied in Mr. Besant’s suggestive lecture, might, without fear of misleading him, be addressed to the ingenuous student. I should remind him first of the magnificence of the form that is open to him, which offers to sight so few restrictions and such innumerable opportunities. The other arts, in comparison, appear confined and hampered; the various conditions under which they are exercised are so rigid and definite. But the only condition that I can think of attaching to the composition of the novel is, as I have already said, that it be interesting. This freedom is a splendid privilege, and the first lesson of the young novelist is to learn to be worthy of it. ‘Enjoy it as it deserves,’ I should say to him; ‘take possession of it, explore it to its utmost extent, reveal it, rejoice in it. All life belongs to you, and don’t listen either to those who would shut you up into corners of it and tell you that it is only here and there that art inhabits, or to those who would persuade you that this heavenly messenger wings her way outside of life altogether, breathing a superfine air and turning away her head from the truth of things. There is no impression of life, no manner of seeing it and feeling it, to which the plan of the novelist may not offer a place; you have only to remember that talents so dissimilar as those of Alexandre Dumas and Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Gustave Flaubert, have worked in this field with equal glory. Don’t think too much about optimism and pessimism; try and catch the colour of life itself. In France to-day we see a prodigious effort (that of Emile Zola, to whose solid and serious work no explorer of the capacity of the novel can allude without respect), we see an extraordinary effort vitiated by a spirit of pessimism on a narrow basis. M. Zola is magnificent, but he strikes an English reader as ignorant; he has an air of working in the dark; if he had as much light as energy his results would be of the highest value. As for the aberrations of a shallow optimism, the ground (of English fiction especially) is strewn with their brittle particles as with broken glass. If you must indulge in conclusions let them have the taste of a wide knowledge. Remember that your first duty is to be as complete as possible-to make as perfect a work. Be generous and delicate, and then, in the vulgar phrase, go in!’


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


Filed Under: 19C Literature, Henry James Tagged With: 19C Literature, English literature, Henry James, The Art of Fiction, The novel, Theory

The Picture of Dorian Gray

April 1, 2011 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) Oscar Wilde’s version of the Gothic horror story, has entered popular consciousness even amongst people who have not actually read the novel. His central image of a secret ‘portrait in the attic’ is frequently used as a metaphor in cases where people seem to be rather unnaturally preserving their youthful looks.

The Painting of Dorian Gray

The novel is also packed full of witty epigrams and paradoxes (usually expressed by the character Lord Henry Wotton) which Wilde re-used in the stage plays that made him famous. Within twelve months of publishing Dorian Gray he was at the height of his fame as a writer, a wit, and a dandy. And within another three years he was in jail – convicted of having commited acts of ‘gross indecency’ with other men in private – providing a wonderful example of the claim made in his essay The Decay of Lying (1891), that “Life imitates Art more than Art imitates Life”.

The Picture of Dorian Gray was first serialised in Lipincott’s Monthly Magazine (Philadelphia) starting in the issue for July 1990. But this version was Bowdlerised by the magazine editors without Wilde’s knowledge. He subsequently revised the text for its publication as a one-volume novel by Ward, Locke and Company in 1891.


The Picture of Dorian Gray – critical commentary

The Double

The Picture of Dorian GrayThe ‘double’ theme gets an interesting twist here. Instead of two human beings we have a human and a painting – a work of art. They start out looking identical. The portrait is an accurate record of Dorian’s beauty as an eighteen year old young man. But as time passes, Dorian remains the same, whilst the portrait ages and acts as a reflector of the sins that Dorian commits.

In most instances of the double, one character acts as the alter-ego of the other or commits acts on behalf of the other. But in Dorian’s case, he actually commits the acts himself, whilst the portrait internalises their effects. (It is also interesting that so few of his debaucheries are recorded.)

Structure

The narrative was first published in thirteen chapters as a serial in Lippincott’s monthly magazine, and later as twenty chapters in one volume. The additional matter for the first book publication does not add anything substantial.

The narrative essentially falls into two parts, with a two chapter bridge between them. Part one establishes Dorian’s desire for eternal youth, his relationship with Sibyl which turns out badly, the mysterious changes to the portrait, and his decision to lock it away in the attic.

The bridging section in which almost twenty years pass is filled with an account of Dorian’s cultural tastes for decadent writers and his passion for collecting ornate embroidery and obscure musical instruments. During this period he establishes a social reputation for debauchery.

Part three deals with his downfall. First he commits murder, blackmails his friend, and then is pursued by Sibyl Vane’s brother – but appears to escape justice. But suffering both from a sense of guilt and horror at what his life has become, he decides to rid himself of the the thing that acts as a constant reminder – the portrait.

The title

It is interesting to note that whilst the title of the novel is The Picture of Dorian Gray, it is almost universally referred to amongst the general public as The Portrait of Dorian Gray – and with some justification. Because the painting is a portrait. The term picture is more ambiguous: it could mean ‘the impression created by Dorian Gray’ or ‘the picture owned by Dorian Gray’. Whereas the whole shocking effect of the story is that the portrait ages horribly in the attic whilst Dorian in person retains his youthful good looks.


The Picture of Dorian Gray – study resources

The Picture of Dorian Gray The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Picture of Dorian Gray The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Picture of Dorian Gray The Picture of Dorian Gray – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Picture of Dorian Gray The Picture of Dorian Gray – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Picture of Dorian Gray The Picture of Dorian Gray – Penguin CLassics – Amazon UK

The Picture of Dorian Gray The Picture of Dorian Gray – Penguin CLassics – Amazon US

The Picture of Dorian Gray The Picture of Dorian Gray – York Notes (study aids) – Amazon UK

The Picture of Dorian Gray The Picture of Dorian Gray – Norton Critical edition – Amazon US

The Picture of Dorian Gray The Picture of Dorian Gray – Cliffs Notes (study aids) – Amazon UK

The Picture of Dorian Gray The Picture of Dorian Gray – BBC full-cast 2CD audio – Amazon UK

The Picture of Dorian Gray The Picture of Dorian Gray – BBC unabridged audio book – Amazon UK

The Picture of Dorian Gray The Picture of Dorian Gray – eBook versions at Gutenberg

The Picture of Dorian Gray The Picture of Dorian Gray – 2009 DVD film (Colin Firth) – Amazon UK

The Picture of Dorian Gray The Picture of Dorian Gray – BBC Oscar Wilde 3 DVDs – Amazon UK

The Picture of Dorian Gray The Picture of Dorian Gray – 1945 DVD (George Sanders) – Amazon UK


The Picture of Dorian Gray – plot summary

Lord Henry Wotton meets Dorian Gray in Basil Hallward’s studio where he is having his portrait painted. He is struck by Dorian’s youthful beauty, and preaches to him a philosophy of self-realisation (and self-indulgence) before Time ages him and his appetites wane. Dorian takes up these ideas enthusiastically, and wishes to remain as youthful as he appears in the very successful portrait, which he is given as a gift.

As a result of his desire to live life more fully, Dorian meets and falls in love with Sibyl Vane, a young actress. Her mother encourages the connection, but her brother is jealous of Sibyl’s reputation and suspicious of Dorian’s motives, because he comes from the upper class. However, it is revealed that Sibyl’s father was ‘a gentleman’.

Dorian wishes to show off Sibyl to his friends, but when they visit the theatre her acting is disastrously bad. She now believes that love for Dorian is her true vocation in life. Dorian feels humiliated by the episode and brusquely rejects her. He returns home to find that his portrait has changed for the worse.

Next day Lord Henry reports that Sibyl has committed suicide, and persuades Dorian that he can not be considered responsible for her death. Dorian hides the portrait in his attic and will not let Basil see his own work, knowing that the portrait will age whilst he continues to look young.

Dorian gives himself up to a life of self-gratification and debauchery, based on his reading of the Decadent writers and Lord Henry’s philosophies. As the years go by he develops a scandalous reputation, whilst retaining his youthful looks. His friend Basil implores him to reform before it is too late – whereupon Dorian confronts him with the portrait, then kills him.

Dorian then blackmails an old college friend Alan Campbell to dispose of the evidence, which is successful. He feels free of any suspicion, until James Vane re-appears and threatens to kill him because of Sibyl’s death. Vane pursues Dorian to his country estate, but he is shot by accident during a hunting party.

It is then revealed that Campbell has committed suicide – presumably to avoid some sort of scandal. Dorian feels relieved that he has completely escaped detection, and although other people’s lives have been ruined, he is glad to look as youthful as ever.

Nevertheless he feels oppressed by feelings of guilt and wishes to reform. Feeling that the portrait has somehow cheated or deceived him, he resolves to destroy it – but destroys himself instead. In the final scene the painting has become young again, whilst Dorian is dead with a knife in his heart – a wrinkled, withered, and age-ravaged old man.


Oscar Wilde pencil

Mont Blanc – special Oscar Wilde edition


Principal characters
Lord Henry Wotton aesthete and wit
Basil Hallward painter
Dorian Gray wealthy and good-looking young man
Lady Agatha Lord Henry’s aunt
Lord George Fermor Lord Henry’s uncle
Margaret Devereux Dorian Gray’s attractive mother
Victoria Lord Henry’s wife
Sibyl Vane a young actress
Mr Isaacs Jewish impressario
James Vane Sibyl’s younger brother
Lord Radley Dorian Gray’s guardian
Lady Gwendolen Lord Henry’s sister
Victor Dorian Gray’s servant
Mrs Leaf Dorian Gray’s housekeeper
Alan Campbell chemist friend of Dorian’s
Lady Narborough society hostess

Film version

1976 TV version – Jeremy Brett and Sir John Gielgud


Further reading

Karl Beckson (ed), Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1970.

Richard Ellman, Oscar Wilde, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987.

Regina Gagnier (ed), Collected Essays on Oscar Wilde, New York: G.K.Hall, 1971.

H. Montgomery Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde, New York: Dover, 1973

Neil McKenna, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, London: Century, 2003.

Peter Raby, The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistomology of the Closet, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Los Angeles Press, 1990.

John Sloan, Oscar Wilde, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.


Film version

1945 Original movie trailer – George Sanders

© Roy Johnson 2011


More 19C Authors
More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories


Filed Under: 19C Horror Tagged With: 19C Literature, Gothic horror, Oscar Wilde, The novel

Victorian Women Writers – 00

December 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a guide to electronic texts

Contents

Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Gaskell

  • Introduction
  • Major E-Text Archives
  • Encoding and Text Formats
  • British Victorian Women Writers
  • E-Texts – Authors – A-B
  • E-Texts – Authors – C-D
  • E-Texts – Authors – D-E
  • E-Texts – Authors – F-G
  • E-Texts – Authors – K-M
  • E-Texts – Authors – N-P
  • E-Texts – Authors – Q-S
  • E-Texts – Authors – T-W
  • E-Texts – Authors – X-Z
  • Conclusion
  • Bibliography

 

© Kathryn Abram 2002

 


contents – archives – encoding – authors – bibliography


Filed Under: 19C Literature Tagged With: 19C Literature, Cultural history, eTexts, Literary studies, Victorian Women Writers

Victorian Women Writers – 01

December 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a guide to electronic texts

Introduction

In recent years, there has been an explosion in the amount of electronic primary texts that are available on the Internet. Whilst copyright restrictions prevent this form of publication for many of the latest works, a large proportion of texts written by British women in the Victorian period are now out of copyright and, thanks to the work of various institutions and enthusiasts, have been made freely available.

Whilst only the most fervent supporters of E-Texts would suggest that they will eventually replace printed books or even advocate that students and academics can rely on them to the extent that they need never visit a library, there are certain advantages that E-Texts have over their codex counterparts. Perhaps the most obvious of these is one of accessibility. Once a text is published on the Internet, it is available to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection. There are no opening hours and none of the frustration of finding that someone else got there first! Moreover, some of the texts listed in this bibliography are not widely available in any other format.

However, the main advantage that E-Texts have is that they are searchable. E-Texts are machine readable, which means that they are made up of a series of 0s and 1s that can be read by a computer and displayed on a monitor. Like word processors, all web browsers are capable of performing various kinds of searches in a matter of seconds. The advantages of being able to search a long Victorian novel for a certain phrase or perform stylistic analyses of texts are beginning to be recognised, and computers are increasingly becoming accepted as an invaluable research tool.

Despite their advantages however, using E-Texts can be problematic because of the lack of restrictions that are placed upon the material that is available on the Internet. It is conceivable that anyone could upload a text and suggest that it is authoritative when the reality could be, and often is, very different. Many of the E-Texts that are currently available on the Internet have been digitised by volunteers and it is not uncommon for them to contain errors. Moreover, even those that are error-free can be rendered not viable for academic purposes if the edition that has been used to create the electronic version is not documented. In order to raise standards and provide the highest possible quality of texts, the Text Encoding Initiative was launched in 1987. It produced a set of guidelines that stipulate how texts intended for use in the humanities should be digitised, and there are many reputable sites that adhere to the guidelines that they advocate.

A large proportion of the texts listed in this bibliography are available at one or more of four sites which offer extensive E-Text archives. These sites are evaluated below and there is an explanation of the forms of encoding which are commonly used in creating digital texts.

 

© Kate Abram 2009next

 


contents – archives – encoding – authors – bibliography


Filed Under: 19C Literature Tagged With: 19C Literature, Cultural history, eTexts, Literary studies, Victorian Women Writers

Victorian Women Writers – 02

December 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a guide to electronic texts

Major E-Text Archives

Electronic Text Centre at The University of Virginia

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/

This site is aimed at, and maintained by members of the academic community. It contains some public domain texts and some that are commercially licensed. All texts are accompanied by a TEI header, which contains approximately two pages of information about the text itself, the text used as a copy-text, the identity of the transcriber and any errors and corrections that have been made. In addition, there is an explanation of any conventions that might have been used in transcription.

Some of the texts at this site are illustrated and / or include photographs of the covers of the edition used. For some works, it is possible to choose to download the entire work or receive individual chapters or illustrations.

This site is well run. It follows the TEI guidelines and the texts that it offers are of a high standard. The following screen shot is of its “Modern English Collection”, which contains a wide selection of texts written by women writers, including many British women who published material in the Victorian period.

University of Virginia

 


Oxford Text Archive

http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/ota/public/index.shtml

The Oxford Text Archive is a British site, which in itself is unusual as much of the work being done to provide digitised texts it taking place in the USA. Like the Electronic Text centre at Virginia, it is aimed at the academic community and is part of the Arts and Humanities Data Service. It is supported by the University of Oxford, the Joint Systems Community and the Arts and Humanities Research Board all of which adds to the site’s authority and reliability.

The texts on offer here are available in a range of different formats, the majority of which are encoded. They are clearly documented and accompanied by a TEI header. The site includes the usual search facility or there is the option to look up an individual author and see which texts are held. There is also a downloadable and regularly updated catalogue in PDF form. The majority of texts are available for immediate download, although some are only released following a written request to the transcriber.

The site contains many texts written by Victorian women writers, although they are, in practise, restricted to those writers who are traditionally perceived as canonical. George Eliot and Mrs Gaskell are particularly well represented. The following screen shot shows a selection taken from the Oxford Text Archive’s catalogue of E-Texts of works written by Mrs Gaskell. At the time of writing, twenty-four texts by this author are on offer. Seventeen of these are freely available, with the further seven available only after a written request has been submitted.

Oxford Text Archive

 


Project Gutenberg

http://www.gutenberg.net/

Project Gutenberg was one of the first collections of E-Texts to be established. It is one of the largest archives and is probably the one that is most well known. Originally the brainchild of Michael Hart at the Carnegie Mellon University, it is made up entirely of either out of copyright or copyright cleared texts.

Unlike the two previous sites, it is aimed at the general public with the stated aim of maximum accessibility. The texts chosen are the ones considered to have the widest appeal and they are digitised by volunteers. The only format available is that of ASCII or plain text and typographical errors are not uncommon. The texts are of a varying standard and this is largely down to the skill and acuracy of the individual transcribers. In the majority of cases there is no way of ascertaining which edition has been used as a copy-text and indeed, the site includes a disclaimer to this effect.

Despite these drawbacks however, Project Gutenberg texts are available without charge for research and teaching purposes and the site contains a vast selection of texts written by Victorian Women Writers.

 


Victorian Women Writers Project

http://www.indiana.edu/~letrs/vwwp/

The three sites discussed so far have been examples of archives that hold a variety of texts of different genres and from different periods. This site however, as its name suggests, is a specialized one, compiled and held at the University of Virginia. It contains a wide range of texts and the focus seems to be on the works of lesser known writers. Perry Willett, the general editor, sets out the aims of the project:

The goal of the Victorian Women Writers Project is to produce highly accurate transcriptions of works by British women writers of the 19th century, encoded using the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). The works, selected with the assistance of the Advisory Board, will include anthologies, novels, political pamphlets, religious tracts, children’s books, and volumes of poetry and verse drama. Considerable attention will be given to the accuracy and completeness of the texts, and to accurate bibliographical descriptions of them.

Texts downloaded from the VWWP are accompanied by a TEI header of which the site provides a sample and an explanation.The Texts themselves are of a consistently high standard, are well documented with any corrected errors clearly marked, and the editors provide an explanation of the conventions used during transcription. This site is a extremely useful resource for anyone with an interest in the works of Victorian Women Writers and many of their texts feature in the following bibliography. Further information about the project is available in the following article:

Willett, Perry. “The Victorian Women Writers Project: The Library as a Creator and Publisher of Electronic Texts,” Public-Access Computer Systems Review 7.6 (1996): 5-16
Available at:<http://info.lib.uh.edu/pr/v7/n6/will7n6.html>

Accessed 14 May 2002.

 

© Kate Abram 2009next

 


contents – archives – encoding – authors – bibliography


Filed Under: 19C Literature Tagged With: 19C Literature, Cultural history, eTexts, Literary studies, Victorian Women Writers

Victorian Women Writers – 03

December 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a guide to electronic texts

Encoding and Text Formats

‘The purpose of encoding within a text’ writes Susan Hockey, ‘is to provide information which will assist a computer program to perform functions on that text’. [1] The E-Texts listed in the following bibliography are available in a variety of different formats – some are encoded and some are not.

Plain Text or ASCII Files

Plain Text files – or ASCII Files – are not encoded. Documents in this format will consist, as the name suggests, of plain text. This means that there will be no underlining, no boldface or italics, text will be of uniform size and without any variety of font styles. The following example shows the first stanza of The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point , by Elizabeth Barret Browning, in ASCII form:

ascii file[2]

The main advantage of ASCII text is that is widely available. It can be read by the vast majority of software and in 1972 it was adopted as international standard. It is possible to perform simple searches on documents written in plain text and many E-Texts are available in this form. A text in ASCII form however will appear less sophisticated than a word processed document and any formatting will be lost. This is in important consideration in poetry for example where the form and layout of the text can often make a significant contribution to the meaning.

 

HTML

HTML stand for hypertext markup language and this is the language that most Internet browsers currently read and the language that is used to control the appearance of many web pages. HTML consists of ‘tags’ which a browser reads and then arranges the appearance of the text on the screen accordingly. HTML tags can be used to instruct a browser to display visual features such as bold or italics. The following shows an example of HTML code and the effect that it has upon the text on the screen:

<B>George Eliot</B>’s sixth novel is entitled <I>Middlemarch</I>.

George Eliot’s sixth novel is entitled Middlemarch.

HTML files are therefore more visually appealing than ASCII files and attempts can be made to maintain a sense of the original formatting of a document. Long documents are often easier to read on screen in HTML form than are text files.

 

SGML

SGML stands for Standardized Markup Language, which is the parent language of HTML. There are, however, important distinctions between them.Whereas HTML uses tags to specify the way text appears on screen, SGML uses tags to describe the structure of the text and the separate units that make up this text – for example <title>, <poem>,<stanza> etc.

SGML is the markup language recommended by the TEI as it allows for greater control of a text and enables scholars to perform much more complex and precise searches of a text. A search on document in ASCII or HTML form could find all the examples of a certain word in the entire text but a search performed on an SGML encoded document could limit that search to lines spoken by an individual character. Institutions that adhere to the TEI guidelines will produce texts that are encoded in SGML. However, it should be noted that whereas most web browsers can read these files, to perform additional searches and sophisticated textual analyses, additional software will be required.

 

PDF

PDF stands for Portable Document Files, and there are a few E-Texts in this format listed in the following bibliography. A PDF file reader is required in order to view a PDF file. The most commonly used program is Adobe’s Acrobat Reader – which is now available free of charge at http://www.adobe.com/acrobat


[1] Hockey, Susan. Electronic Texts in the Humanities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 24.

[2] Barret Browning, Elizabeth. ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’. Available at gopher://dept.english.upenn.edu/00/Courses/Curran202/Barrett/slave.

Accessed 15 May 2002.

 

© Kate Abram 2009next

 


contents – archives – encoding – authors – bibliography


Filed Under: 19C Literature Tagged With: 19C Literature, Cultural history, eTexts, Literary studies, Victorian Women Writers

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • Next Page »

Get in touch

info@mantex.co.uk

Content © Mantex 2016
  • About Us
  • Advertising
  • Clients
  • Contact
  • FAQ
  • Links
  • Services
  • Reviews
  • Sitemap
  • T & C’s
  • Testimonials
  • Privacy

Copyright © 2025 · Mantex

Copyright © 2025 · News Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in