English literature Archives - Page 6 of 44

Brooksmith

November 24, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Brooksmith first appeared in Harper’s Weekly and Black and White in May 1891 – a sure sign that Henry James was attentive to the commercial opportunities of simultaneous publication – getting paid for the same story twice over.

James has always been known as a writer of refined sensibility, with a prose style renowned for its demanding complexities and subtelties of meaning; but it is often forgotten that he was a full-time writer who made a considerable part of his income from professional contracts with publishers. Despite the aesthetic demands he sometimes made of his readers, he had one eye closely on the literary marketplace.

Brooksmith – critical commentary

Brooksmith is not much more than a light character sketch, but it is composed in a delicately constructed arc – of the narrator’s appreciation of Brooksmith’s position in society. It starts from the narrator’s realization that Offord’s salon owes its success to Brooksmith’s sensitive ministrations. Brooksmith has become sufficiently attuned to Offord’s sophisticated culture that he is able to anticipate his needs.

Then as Offord himself declines the narrator becomes even more appreciative of Brooksmith as they form a complicit understanding of their relative positions. The narrator also begins to worry about Brooksmith’s future prospects. He realises it will be almost impossible to locate employment offering such a cultivated milieu.

The arc reaches its peak on the death of Offord, and from that point onwards Brooksmith begins his slow decline. He goes from one lower status position to another, at each step sliding down the social scale, until he disappears from society altogether. The narrator’s conclusion (which seems somewhat callous) is that ‘he had indeed been spoiled’.

Brooksmith – study resources

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

Complete Stories 1884—1891 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1884—1891 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Complete Tales of Henry James – Volume 8 – Digireads reprint – UK

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Brooksmith – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

Brooksmith – plot summary

An anonymous narrator reflects on the successful salon maintained by his friend Oliver Offord, a retired diplomat. He wonders how the success is created and concludes that it is the subtle and tactful influence of Offord’s butler, Brooksmith.

When Offord falls ill and receives fewer visitors, the narrator begins to worry what will become of Brooksmith, who is so much a part of the establishment. When Offord dies, Brooksmith is left eighty pounds, but his employment and role disappear.

The narrator encounters Brooksmith amongst the staff at various other houses, and always feels a sympathetic sadness thatBrooksmith is working at a level which demeans his true value. Brooksmith eventually falls ill, but the narrator is still unable to help him.

Brooksmith gradually falls down the social order of the servant class and is last encountered as a casual waiter-on at a society dinner. No more is heard of him until a poor relative visits the narrator to report that Brooksmith has simply disappeared, and is presumed dead.

Principal characters

I	the anonymous narrator
Oliver Offord	a bachelor and retired diplomat
Brooksmith	his butler and intimate friend (35)

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Other works by Henry James

The Aspern Papers (1888) is a psychological drama set in Venice which centres on the tussle for control of a great writer’s correspondence. An elderly lady, ex-lover of the writer, seeks a husband for her daughter. But the potential purchaser of the papers is a dedicated bachelor. Money is also at stake – but of course not discussed overtly. There is a refined battle of wills between them. Who will win in the end? As usual, James keeps the reader guessing. The novella is a masterpiece of subtle narration, with an ironic twist in its outcome. This collection of stories also includes three of his accomplished long short stories – The Private Life, The Middle Years, and The Death of the Lion.
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The Spoils of Poynton (1896) is a short novel which centres on the contents of a country house, and the question of who is the most desirable person to inherit it via marriage. The owner Mrs Gereth is being forced to leave her home to make way for her son and his greedy and uncultured fiancee. Mrs Gereth develops a subtle plan to take as many of the house’s priceless furnishings with her as possible. But things do not go quite according to plan. There are some very witty social ironies, and a contest of wills which matches nouveau-riche greed against high principles. There’s also a spectacular finale in which nobody wins out.
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Daisy Miller (1879) is a key story from James’s early phase in which a spirited young American woman travels to Europe with her wealthy but commonplace mother. Daisy’s innocence and her audacity challenge social conventions, and she seems to be compromising her reputation by her independent behaviour. But when she later dies in Rome the reader is invited to see the outcome as a powerful sense of a great lost potential. This novella is a great study in understatement and symbolic power, and it has rightly gained a reputation as an oustanding example of the literary genre.
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Henry James – web links

Henry James at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides, tutorials on the Complete Tales, book reviews. bibliographies, and web links.

The Complete Works
Sixty books in one 13.5 MB Kindle eBook download for £1.92 at Amazon.co.uk. The complete novels, stories, travel writing, and prefaces. Also includes his autobiographies, plays, and literary criticism – with illustrations.

The Ladder – a Henry James website
A collection of eTexts of the tales, novels, plays, and prefaces – with links to available free eTexts at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.

A Hyper-Concordance to the Works
Japanese-based online research tool that locates the use of any word or phrase in context. Find that illusive quotable phrase.

The Henry James Resource Center
A web site with biography, bibliographies, adaptations, archival resources, suggested reading, and recent scholarship.

Online Books Page
A collection of online texts, including novels, stories, travel writing, literary criticism, and letters.

Henry James at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of eTexts, available in a variety of eBook formats.

The Complete Letters
Archive of the complete correspondence (1855-1878) work in progress – published by the University of Nebraska Press.

The Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites
An old-fashioned but major jumpstation – a website of websites and resouces.

Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.

Henry James on the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations of James’s novels and stories for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production features, film reviews, box office, and even quizzes.

More tales by James
More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

Bunner Sisters

February 4, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

Bunner Sisters was written in 1891, but wasn’t published until 1916 in Edith Wharton’s collection of short fiction Xingu and Other Stories. Technically, it has very strong claims to be classified as a novella, rather than a short story, but it is usually listed with her shorter works to keep it separate from the novels.

Old New York

Bunner Sisters – critical commentary

Literary naturalism

There was a literary vogue towards the end of the nineteenth century for naturalism – which is characterised by a concentration on everyday, unheroic subjects, often seeking to expose the poverty and misery of existence in contrast to the romantic and heroic treatment of life in traditional fiction. Naturalism as a literary mode was underpinned by a belief in determinism – that social conditions and heredity were the primary forces shaping human character. It was also strongly influenced by two other important philosophic features of late nineteenth century society – the decline of religious belief and the powerful influence of Darwinism and its popular manifestation in the idea of ‘the survival of the fittest’.

Both of these ideas led the adherents of naturalism to emphasise a pessimistic view of life, and they also took the opportunity to expose the harsher and degenerate sides of society, including poverty, crime, prostitution, and corruption in general. There was also a marked tendency amongst naturalistic works to focus on the life of big cities. Writers who epitomised this literary trend included Emile Zola (France), Theodore Dreiser (USA), Stephen Crane (USA) and George Gissing (UK) – all of whom were at the height of their fame when Edith Wharton started writing.

Bunner Sisters certainly includes many of these ideas. Although it seems to begin in a mildly satirical manner, its trajectory is grimly pessimistic as things go from bad to worse in the two sisters’ lives. Their business slowly dries up; they are preyed upon by a man who turns out to be an opium addict; and he eventually ruins Evelina’s life, which in turn leaves Ann Eliza destitute.

These naturalistic tendencies are worth noting, because they were still present in Edith Wharton’s work when she came to write her first major novel, The House of Mirth in 1905. Lily Bart falls from a much greater social height than Ann Eliza and Evelina Bunner, but she ends in a similar fashion – destitute, ill, and exhausted with self-sacrifice.

Bunner Sisters – study resources

Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

Bunner Sisters – eBook format at Project Gutenberg

Bunner Sisters – AudioBook format at librivox

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Bunner Sisters – plot summary

Part I. Ageing sisters Ann Eliza and Evelina Bunner maintain a millinery shop in a seedy and run down area of New York. They live in straightened circumstances, and on the occasion of Evelina’s birthday, her sister buys her a cheap clock.

Part II. She has bought the clock from an equally run down shop in the neighbourhood run by bachelor Herman Ramay, who she decides to pursue when the clock stops working. She goes to the local market, hoping to meet him there, but doesn’t. A lifetime of co-operative self-sacrifice and renunciation begins to crumble as the two women secretly become competetive regarding Mr Ramay.

Part III. Mr Ramay calls to check the clock they have bought, but nothing transpires from the visit.

Part IV. They then entertain Miss Mellins, a dressmaker from upstairs, whereupon Mr Ramay visits again. Ann Eliza is jealously concerned that he is visiting to see her younger sister.

Part V. Mr Ramay visits more frequently, but divides his time there between long silences and lengthy autobiographical anecdotes. He takes Evelina to a stereopticon; spring arrives; and he invites them both to Central Park, along with Miss Mellins. Ann Eliza is forbearing on her sister’s behalf.

Part VI. The sisters wish to transfer their meagre earnings into another bank. Ann Eliza calls for advice on Mr Ramay, who seems to have been ill.

Part VII. Mr Ramay takes them on an excursion to his friend Mrs Hochmuller in Hoboken. Over dinner they discuss Mr Ramay’s illness – which he denies. Then Evelina and Mr Ramay go for a walk in the countryside. Shortly afterwards Mr Ramay calls to the shop and proposes marriage to Ann Eliza, but she tells him she cannot think of marrying. She is secretly ecstatic at this major event in her life, and disappointed that she cannot reveal it to her sister.

Part VIII. Mr Ramay then goes on an excursion with Evelina, who returns to announce that she is engaged to Mr Ramay. Ann Eliza prepares herself for being left alone when her sister moves to live at Mr Ramay’s shop. However, Mr Ramay gets the offer of a job in St Louis, though he does not have enough money to risk transferring there. Ann Eliza gives her sister her half of their joint savings.

Part IX. Left on her own, Ann Eliza feels very lonely, and Evelina writes from St Louis to say that she is lonely because Mr Ramay is out at work all day. Then the letters cease, and Ann Eliza learns that Mr Ramay has been dismissed by his employers. She cannot afford to visit St Louis and look for her sister, and meanwhile the business goes downhill.

Part X. Anna goes to seek help from Mrs Hochmuller in Hoboken, but when she gets there she discovers that Mrs Hochmuller left some time before. She contracts fever as a result of the journey and is in bed for over a week. When she recovers she visits Mr Ramay’s old employers, only to be told that he was dismissed for taking drugs.

Part XI. Months pass by, then one day Evelina suddenly appear at the shop. She is in a very bad way, and recounts her tale of Mr Ramay’s opium addiction, the birth and death of her child, and Ramay’s running away with young Linda Hochmuller. Evelina was reduced to begging in the streets.

Part XII. Evelina continues to be very ill, and Anna has to borrow money from Miss Mellins to pay the doctor’s bill. Anna loses her faith in Providence and feels that self-sacrifice does not automatically transfer good or benefit to its intended recipient. The doctor recommends hospital for Evelina, but Anna prefers to keep her at home. Evelina reveals that during her troubles she has converted to Catholicism.

Part XIII. Evelina gets steadily worse (with consumption) and believes her Catholic faith will permit her to be reunited with her baby in heaven. When Evelina dies, Anna gives up the shop, sells the last of her effects, and faces a bleak and unknown future.

Bunner Sisters – principal characters

Ann Eliza Bunner	elder sister in a millinery shop
Evelina Bunner	her younger sister
Miss Mellins	their upstairs neighbour, a dressmaker
Herman Ramay	a German immigrant clock-maker
Mrs Hochmuller	washerwoman friend of Ramay
Linda Hochmuller	her young daughter

Video documentary

Other works by Edith Wharton

The Custom of the Country (1913) is Edith Wharton’s satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father’s money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. This is a study of modern ambition and materialism written a hundred years before its time.
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The House of Mirth (1905) is the story of Lily Bart, who is beautiful, poor, and still unmarried at twenty-nine. In her search for a husband with money and position she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of the tragedy that finally overwhelms her. The book is a disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of Wharton’s generation. In telling the story of Lily Bart, who must marry to survive, Wharton recasts the age-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways that transform the traditional novel of manners into an arresting modern document of cultural anthropology.
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Edith Wharton – web links

Edith Wharton at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, tutorials on the shorter fiction, bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

The Short Stories of Edith Wharton
This is an old-fashioned but excellently detailed site listing the publication details of all Edith Wharton’s eighty-six short stories – with links to digital versions available free on line.

Edith Wharton at Gutenberg
Free eTexts of the major novels and collections of stories in a variety of digital formats – also includes travel writing and interior design.

Edith Wharton at Wikipedia
Full details of novels, stories, and travel writing, adaptations for television and the cinema, plus web links to related sites.

The Edith Wharton Society
Old but comprehensive collection of free eTexts of the major novels, stories, and travel writing, linking archives at University of Virginia and Washington State University.

The Mount: Edith Wharton’s Home
Aggressively commercial site devoted to exploiting The Mount – the house and estate designed by Edith Wharton. Plan your wedding reception here.

Edith Wharton at Fantastic Fiction
A compilation which purports to be a complete bibliography, arranged as novels, collections, non-fiction, anthologies, short stories, letters, and commentaries – but is largely links to book-selling sites, which however contain some hidden gems.

Wharton’s manuscripts
Archive of Wharton holdings at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Edith Wharton – short stories
More on Edith Wharton
More on short stories

Canonising Hypertext

June 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

putting literary hypertext into the curriculum?

I remember first coming across hypertext in the early 1990s, and feeling that it was like a glimpse of a newly discovered world. Ted Nelson, Jay Bolter, and George Landow all became my heroes overnight. There wasn’t much you could do with it in those days, outside struggling with a few bits of proprietary software such as Hypercard. But as soon as we got the Web, HTML and the first browser (Mosaic: still got my copy) – we were away!

Some hyperfictions had been written at that time – and more have since: stories which exploit the possibilities of non-sequential narratives, hyperlinks between pages (or lexia), multiple navigation systems, and reader-generated choices. Astrid Ensslin thinks these creations deserve more attention. Indeed, she wants to argue that they should be included in the ‘canon’ of literary studies – and this is a book-length explanation of why that should be.

But along the way she takes in lots of other issues. the current state of hypertext writing; educational theories and policies; debates regarding the ‘canon’ of English literature; and IT skills in the classroom. It is something of an uphill struggle, because she is surrounded wherever she looks by a lack of evidence to support her claim or any enthusiasm for its implementation.

As a postmodern critic, she is sceptical about the very notion of a canon, yet she is eager to see examples of hypertexts included within it – seemingly oblivious to the fact that it takes a long time for any writer to be canonized. Even modern classics such as D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce were censored and banned before they became a part of Eng. Lit.

So in the absence of any hypertext in the canon of English Literature, she is forced to propose her own. These turn out to be the fairly well-known Michael Joyce (afternoon), Stuart Moulthorpe (Victory Garden) and Jayne Yellowlees Douglas (I Have Said Nothing). These are the ‘first generation’ of hypertext writers. There are ‘plot summaries’ so far as this is possible with non-sequential writing, yet even whilst making great claims for their work, she is curiously reluctant to quote from them to prove that these qualities exist. [I have checked out the work where it’s accessible, and I can tell you that there is nothing to get excited about.]

[As an aside, I simply cannot understand why so many of these writers imprison themselves within the confines of proprietary software (Eastman’s Storyspace) when the vast, free, and ubiquitous resources of HTML-based multimedia is open to them. Maybe it’s because Eastman also acts as a publishing house, and sells their products on its site?]

She then makes something of a swerve – into the realms of the philosophy of education – before getting back to hypertext in the classroom. There, to what should be nobody’s surprise, there is little evidence of its being used to its full potential, let alone being ‘canonized’. Ensslin huffs and puffs at length considering what could be done, what might be done, and what should be done about it. She even spells out the curriculum for a project she ran – and shows the results, which were ‘encouraging’.

Does any of this alter the potential of literary hypertext? I’m afraid not – because she ignores two very important factors. Number one – every day, millions of people are reading and writing hypertexts on blogs and Wikis (two terms which only crop up once in the whole book). Of course she would argue that the sort of hypertexts she has in mind are creative, literary, and fictional – whereas the majority of bloggers are writing non-fictional prose.

Number two – It doesn’t seem to occur to her that hypertext simply isn’t an appropriate medium for imaginative literature. This is because it lacks the features which readers value very highly in imaginative literary genres – a highly organised and very subtle sense of structure in the work. We like tightly organised plots, themes, symbols, and carefully articulated stories. These are what separate ‘literature’ from plain prose. Moreover, we have prized equally highly, since the middle of the nineteenth century, a subtly controlled point of view. This is not possible if the reader is genuinely free to take any route through a collection of documents or pages.

I have to warn you that she writes in a style which is designed to impress academic promotion committees – turgid, abstract, clotted with qualifiers, over-signposted, and dripping with ‘scholarly references’. At one point I began to suspect that the book might be an undeclared research project – perhaps a postgraduate dissertation or thesis.

Nevertheless, for anyone interested in the subject of electronic writing, hypertext, or experimental narratives, I think it’s worth grappling with the difficulties to get an up-to-date view on the issues.

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Astrid Ensslin, Canonizing Hypertext, London: Continuum, 2007, pp.197, ISBN: 0826495583

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

Chance – a study guide

June 13, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Chance (1914) is unusual in the work of Joseph Conrad in that it was his first big commercial success as a novelist; and it was the first (and last) to have a female protagonist. He actually called it his ‘girl novel’. Conrad is now well ensconced in the Pantheon of great modernists, and his novels Lord Jim, Under Western Eyes, and The Secret Agent are popular classics, along with impressive novellas such as The Secret Sharer and Heart of Darkness which are even more celebrated in terms of the number of critical words written about them. And yet he did not have a popular success in his own lifetime until the publication of Chance in 1914.

Joseph Conrad – portrait

Chance – critical commentary

The narrative

Chance sees the return of Marlow as a narrator after an absence of a decade or more. Marlow’s task is to assemble the facts of the narrative from a number of different sources, at different temporal levels, of events covering a time span of seventeen years. Some of these sources are people he has never met, and the information that comes from them is so indirect and convoluted, that one often wonders how reliable it can be.

This obliqueness, complexity, and self-referentiality was even more marked in the serial version of the story, which appeared before the novel. The serial included an outer narrator who is a novelist, reflecting on Marlow’s account of events. Conrad cut this out for publication as a novel, and left behind instead an un-named outer narrator who ‘presents’ what Marlow tells him.

In his later novels Conrad pushed the complexities of his narrative strategies more or less to the breaking point of credibility. In Nostromo for instance we are asked at one point to believe that a minute by minute, detailed description of violent events in a revolution is provided by a character writing a letter with a pencil stub in a darkened room.

Similarly in Chance, Marlow is constructing the drama of Flora de Barrall from events which cover a span of seventeen years, related to him largely by other people, some of whom were not even present at the occasions Marlow describes – often in great detail, including what the participants thought and felt. It’s as if Conrad forgets that he has invented some of the characters included in the chain of the narrative.

This weakness also has the effect of blurring the distinction between Marlow and Conrad as the true carrier of the narrative – despite the fact that there is an almost vestigial outer-narrator who is supposed to relaying Marlow’s account to us, and who could have been used to put a critical distance between Conrad and his narrator.

Since Marlow carries almost the entire weight of the narrative, this lack of critical distance has significant ramifications. For instance he repeatedly punctuates his account of events with quasi-philosophic reflections on the nature of women. These are what we would now call patronising at best and downright misogynist at worst. Very occasionally the outer-narrator interrupts him to express surprise – but Marlow’s opinions are never seriously challenged or questioned. Readers are given every reason to believe that Marlow is acting as a mouthpiece for Conrad.

The drama

There is an argument that Conrad reached the highest point of his achievement as a novelist in the period which includes Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911).

Yet even the ending of Nostromo shows signs of being rushed. After 350 pages of dramatic conflict and revolution, the protagonist suddenly changes his customary behaviour and is shot, mistaken for somebody else, and that brings the narrative to an end.

Similarly in Chance the major characters are brought together for one final dramatic encounter on board the Ferndale. First the skulduggery which precipitates the climax is terribly melodramatic – a lethal potion slipped into a drink.

This event is seen by one character, who is watching a second, who is spying on a third – a sequence of improbabilities which might be straight out of a Thomas Hardy novel. And then the villain of the piece suddenly acts quite out of character and swallows his own poison.

And once all the problems have been dealt with, the hero of the novel is removed from the picture by a sudden accident – leaving the stage clear for a very unconvincing happy ending in which the two youngest people in the novel (Flora and Powell) are romantically linked.

The main problem with Chance is that unlike Heart of Darkness, The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes, it is not about anything very important. A financial dealer goes bankrupt, and his young daughter is ill-treated by the people who are supposed to be looking after her. She enters a curiously ‘chivalric’ marriage, of which her father disapproves. There is tension between her father and her husband; but when both of them die, she is free to face the prospect of life with a man her own age.

The central drama of the novel is supposed to revolve around the character of Flora – yet she never really comes to life. She is the passive victim throughout – adored by her husband and possessively regarded by her father who shows no signs of paternal affection for her. She marries Anthony in a daydream and appears to be entering into a similar relationship with Powell at the end of the novel. We do not see events from her point of view, and she expresses few emotions other than a feeling worthlessness in her low moments, and a saint-like patience with her father as he rants about her choice of husband.

Chance – study resources

Chance – Oxford World’s Classics – Amazon UK

Chance – Oxford World’s Classics – Amazon US

Chance – annotated Kindle eBook edition

Chance – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

Chance – Online Literature

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

The Complete Critical Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Joseph Conrad at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources

Chance – plot summary

The celebrated financier de Barrall is a widow with a young daughter called Flora. She is looked after by a governess in Brighton whilst her father concentrates on expanding his business empire. He makes a large fortune by persuading people to invest, but is then disgraced and sent to jail when his business collapses. When the prospect of getting hold of some of de Barrall’s money disappears, the governess (and her shady accomplice) abandon Flora, and she is taken in by lower-class relatives who neglect her. She escapes from them and is then looked after by Mr and Mrs Fynes, where she is rescued by a momentary temptation to commit suicide by Marlow, the narrator of the the story.

She also meets Captain Anthony, Mrs Fynes’ brother who falls in love with her and persuades her to marry him. Because of her life experiences, she feels unloved and worthless, but agrees to the marriage, which Anthony proposes will be ‘chivalric’ on his part. That is, recognising that she is not in love with him, he will make no demands on her (including sexual) but will defend her for the rest of her life.

When her father is eventually released from prison, a broken man, Anthony makes provision for them both on board his ship, the Ferndale. Relations on board however become very strained. Franklin, the chief mate, is passionately attached to Captain Anthony and is jealous of his relationship with Flora. In addition, de Barrall cannot stand the sight of Anthony and regards the fact that Flora has married him as an act of betrayal on her part.

The climax of the story occurs when de Barrall tries to poison Anthony, but is overseen by Powell, the second mate. When de Barrall is exposed and realises that the game is up, he takes the poison himself and dies.

Anthony and Flora are free to continue their mariage blanc for six years until the Ferndale is involved in a collision at sea and Anthony goes down with the ship as the last man on board. Flora retires to the countryside and as the novel ends she is being encouraged by Marlow to entertain the attentions of Powell, with whose ‘chance’ employment on the Ferndale the novel began.

Biography

Principal characters

Narrator	The un-named outer narrator who presents Marlow’s account of events
Marlow	An experienced sea captain, the principal narrator of events
Mr Powell	A shipping office employer, who gives Charles Powell his first chance of employment
Charles Powell	A young, recently qualified naval officer
Roderick Anthony	The captain of the Ferndale
Carleon Anthony	Captain Anthony’s father, a romantic poet
John Fyne	A civil servant, Anthony’s brother-in-law
Zoe Fyne	Captain Anthony’s sister, a radical feminist
Eliza	Governess to Flora in Brighton
Charley	The governess’s young ‘nephew’ and accomplice
Mr de Barrall	A famous financier who becomes bankrupt and goes to jail
Flora Barrall	Barrall’s young daughter
No name	de Barrall’s lower-class relatives who ‘abduct’ Flora
Franklin	First mate on the Ferndale who is passionately attached to Captain Anthony
Mr Brown	Steward on the Ferndale
Jane Brown	The steward’s wife who is companion to Flora

Manuscript page from Heart of Darkness

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad offers a series of essays by leading Conrad scholars aimed at both students and the general reader. There’s a chronology and overview of Conrad’s life, then chapters that explore significant issues in his major writings, and deal in depth with individual works. These are followed by discussions of the special nature of Conrad’s narrative techniques, his complex relationships with late-Victorian imperialism and with literary Modernism, and his influence on other writers and artists. Each essay provides guidance to further reading, and a concluding chapter surveys the body of Conrad criticism.

Joseph Conrad’s writing table

Other novels by Joseph Conrad

The Secret Agent (1907) is a short novel and a masterpiece of sustained irony. It is based on the real incident of a bomb attack on the Greenwich Observatory in 1888 and features a cast of wonderfully grotesque characters: Verloc the lazy double agent, Inspector Heat of Scotland Yard, and the Professor – an anarchist who wanders through the novel with bombs strapped round his waist and the detonator in his hand. The English government and police are subject to sustained criticism, and the novel bristles with some wonderfully orchestrated effects of dramatic irony – all set in the murky atmosphere of Victorian London. Here Conrad prefigures all the ambiguities which surround two-faced international relations, duplicitous State realpolitik, and terrorist outrage which still beset us more than a hundred years later.
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Under Western Eyes (1911) is the story of Razumov, a reluctant ‘revolutionary’. He is in fact a coward who is mistaken for a radical hero and cannot escape from the existential trap into which this puts him. This is Conrad’s searing critique of Russian ‘revolutionaries’ who put his own Polish family into exile and jeopardy. The ‘Western Eyes’ are those of an Englishman who reads and comments on Razumov’s journal – thereby creating another chance for Conrad to recount the events from a very complex perspective. Razumov achieves partial redemption as a result of his relationship with a good woman, but the ending, with faint echoes of Dostoyevski, is tragic for all concerned.
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Joseph Conrad web links

Joseph Conrad at Mantex
Biography, tutorials, book reviews, study guides, videos, web links.

Joseph Conrad – his greatest novels and novellas
Brief notes introducing his major works in recommended editions.

Joseph Conrad at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats.

Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, literary career, style, politics, and further reading.

Joseph Conrad at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production notes, box office, trivia, and quizzes.

Works by Joseph Conrad
Large online database of free HTML texts, digital scans, and eText versions of novels, stories, and occasional writings.

The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
Conradian journal, reviews. and scholarly resources.

The Joseph Conrad Society of America
American-based – recent publications, journal, awards, conferences.

Hyper-Concordance of Conrad’s works
Locate a word or phrase – in the context of the novel or story.

More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
More on Joseph Conrad tales

Charles Dickens critical guide

June 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

introductory study, background, and resources

This is an introductory survey of Dickens and the major parts of his work written for students and general readers who perhaps want to know more about this perennially popular novelist. Donald Hawes begins Charles Dickens – A Critical Guide with a sketch of Dickens’s life – the hardships he suffered as a child, his early success as a writer with Sketches by Boz, and then his rapid rise to be the most successful writer in both England and America.

It’s easy to forget Dickens’s astonishing productivity: he regularly composed more than one novel at once, wrote and published his own weekly newspaper, and contributed to other people’s journals as well. This is to say nothing of his prodigious physical energy: walks of up to forty miles a day taken at high speed.

And for all the close association with Englishness and London in particular, he also travelled widely in Europe, living in France and Italy on a regular basis.

What follows is chapters which offer accounts of his major works, alternating with studies of themes and issues important to his work as a whole.

The first give potted plot summaries as well as critical insights which will be particularly useful for beginners. The latter explore recurrent symbols and those topics which Dickens made his own – for example nineteenth century London and its relation to the labyrinthine system of jurisprudence which permeates Bleak House, or the prisons, most notably in Little Dorrit.

Donald Hawes clearly knows Dickens’s work inside out, and all his arguments are illustrated by well-chosen details from the best known works. In most cases he gives some notion of their contemporary reception, plus an account of how these reputations have lasted into the twentieth century.

There’s a very good chapter on Dickens’s unforgettable rogues, villains, and comic masterpieces, analysing why they so brilliantly conceived and executed. Another on the theatre places Dickens’s enthusiasm for the genre firmly in the realm of what we would now call ‘popular culture’ – since at that time, in mid nineteenth century there was little else the lower orders could enjoy. The same was also true of Dickens’s public readings from his own works – which both made him rich and probably shortened his life.

I hadn’t previously realised just how much Dickens’s friend John Forster had played in the composition, revision, and editing of his writing, but there’s a good chapter on Dickens’s relationship with his friends and contemporaries.

Other topics considered include prisons, education, doctors and hospitals, social class, Christmas, and even a section on animals – especially dogs and ravens (both of which Dickens possessed).

So, Hawes covers all the major novels, the stories, and some of the occasional writing. With this and the thematic chapters, plus an extensive bibliography of further reading, there’s everything here for someone who wants a comprehensive departure point for further Dickens studies.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Donald Hawes, Charles Dickens, London: Continuum, 2007, pp.167, ISBN 0826489648

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Charles Dickens criticism

May 6, 2015 by Roy Johnson

annotated bibliography of criticism and comment

Charles Dickens criticism is a bibliography of critical comment on Dickens and his works, with details of each publication and a brief description of its contents. The details include active web links to Amazon where you can buy the books, often in a variety of formats – new, used, and as Kindle eBooks and print-on-demand reissues. The listings are arranged in alphabetical order of author.

The list includes new books and older publications which may now be considered rare. It also includes versions of older texts which are much cheaper than the original. Others (including some new books) are often sold off at rock bottom prices. Whilst compiling these listings a hardback copy of Fred Kaplan’s Charles Dickens: A Biography was available at Amazon for one penny.

Dickens – Peter Ackroyd, London: Mandarin, 1991. Presents an illustrated introduction to the public and private life of the popular Victorian novelist.

Dickens at Work – John Butt and Jane Tillotson, London: Methuen, 1957. Illustrates what modes of planning Dickens evolved as best suited to his genius and to the demands of serial publication, monthly or weekly; how he responded to the events of the day; and how he yet managed to combine the freshness of this ‘periodical’, almost journalistic approach with the art of the novel.

The Violent Effigy: A Study in Dickens’ Imagination – John Carey, London: Faber and Faber, 2008. This study sees Dickens as not a moralist or social commentator but as an anarchic comic genius, who was drawn irresistibly to the sinister and grotesque – murderers, frauds and public executions, bottled babies, wooden legs, walking coffins, corpses, umbrellas, waxworks, and living furniture.

Dickens: The Critical Heritage – Philip Collins (ed), London: Routledge, 1982. A collection of reviews and critical essays which trace the development of Dickens’ reputation as a novelist from his original publications up to the late twentieth century.

Dickens and Crime – P.A.W. Collins, London: Macmillan, 1965.

Dickens and His Readers – G.H. Ford, Norton, 1965. Attempts to explain the fluctuations in Dickens’ critical and popular reputation.

The Dickens Critics – George Ford and Lauriat Lane (eds). New York: Cornell University Press, 1961.

The Life of Charles Dickens – John Forster, Benediction Classics, 2011. The first comprehensive biography, written by his contemporary and friend.

Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women – Jenny Hartley, London: Methuen, 2009. An account of the refuge Dickens created with the financial backing of the heiress Angela Burdett Courts, Chronicles cast-off women, pickpockets, prostitutes, abandoned children, and others from the darkest streets of London.

Who’s Who in Dickens – Donald Hawes, London: Routledge, 2001. Contains a physical and psychological profile of each character, a critical look at his characters by past and present influential commentators and over forty illustrations of major characters drawn by Dickens’ contemporaries.

The Dickens World – Humphrey House, Oxford University Press, 1960. Minor works and journals as well as the novels are used to provide critical analysis of Dickens’ prowess as a reporter of Victorian life.

Dickens’s Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture – Juliet John, Oxford University Press, 2003. This interdisciplinary study locates the rationale for Dickens’s melodramatic characters in his political commitment to the principle of cultural inclusivity and his related resistance to ‘psychology’.

Dickens and Mass Culture – Juliet John, Oxford University Press, 2013. Examines Dickens’s cultural vision and practice – his model of authorship, journalism, public readings, relations with America, and the commercial, cultural, and political aspects of Dickens’s populist vision and legacy.

Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph – Edgar Johnson, Viking Press, 1977. This is universally regarded as the definitive biography and a highpoint in critical scholarship.

The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens – John O. Jordan, Cambridge University Press, 2001. Contains fourteen specially-commissioned chapters by leading international scholars, who provide diverse but complementary approaches to the full span of Dickens’s work, with particular focus on his major fiction.

Dickens: A Biography – Fred Kaplan, William Morrow & Co, 1988. Well regarded critical biography by a Dickens specialist.

Dickens and his Illustrators – Frederick G. Kitton, Emerson Publishing, 2013. Detailed studies of the illustrators who worked with Dickens, examining the relationships between author and artists, drawing on correspondence between them and reproducing preparatory sketches.

Dickens the Novelist – F.R. Leavis and Q.D. Leavis, London: Chatto and Windus, 1970. In seven typically robust and uncompromising chapters, the Leavises grapple with the evaluation of a writer who was still open to dismissal as a mere entertainer, a caricaturist not worthy of discussion in the same breath as Henry James.

Charles Dickens: The Major Novels – John Lucas, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992. This study of five major novels by Dickens looks at the tensions between the private and public aspect of his work.

A Companion to Dickens – David Paroissien, Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. Includes original essays by leading Dickensian scholars on each of Dickens’s fifteen novels, and puts his work into its literary, historical, and social contexts.

Charles Dickens: Critical Issues – Lyne Pykett, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Looks at the author as a Victorian ‘man of letters’, and explores his cultural and critical impact both on the definition of the novel in the nineteenth century and the subsequent development of the form in the twentieth.

Authors in Context: Charles Dickens – Andrew Sanders, Oxford University Press, 2009. Explores Dickens’s interest in the urban phenomenon which so marks nineteenth-century culture, and looks at the vital interconnection between his life and his art.

The Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens – Paul Schlicke (ed), Oxford University Press, 2011. Features more than 500 articles, throwing new and often unexpected light on the most familiar of Dickens’s works, and exploring the experiences, events, and literature on which he drew. There is also a chronology of Dickens’ life, a list of characters in his works, a list of entries by theme, a family tree, three maps, and an invaluable bibliography.

Dickens and the City – F.S. Schwarzbach, Athlone Press, 1979. Traces the fascinating and often dramatic relationship of the novels to the ever changing Victorian urban scene. The novels emerge not only as valuable historical documents, astonishing in their accuracy of detail, but as a unique contribution to the growth of modern urban culture.

Charles Dickens – Michael Slater, Yale University Press, 2011. The core focus is Dickens’ career as a writer and professional author, covering not only his big novels but also his phenomenal output of other writing–letters, journalism, shorter fiction, plays, verses, essays, writings for children, travel books, speeches, and scripts for his public readings,

The Narrative Art of Charles Dickens – Harvey Peter Sucksmith, Oxford University Press, 1970.

Going Astray: Dickens and London – Jeremy Tambling, London: Routledge, 2008. Drawing on all Dickens’ published writings (including the journalism but concentrating on the novels), this study considers the author’s kaleidoscopic characterisations of London: as prison and as legal centre; as the heart of empire and of traumatic memory; as the place of the uncanny; as an old curiosity shop.

Charles Dickens: A Life – Claire Tomalin, London: Penguin, 2012. Highly regarded critical biography by award-winning writer.

Dickens and Religion – Dennis Walder, London: Routledge, 2007. Dickens’s religion is shown to be that of a great popular writer, who created a unique kind of fiction, and a unique relationship with his readers, by the absorption and transformation of less respectable contemporary forms, from fairy-tale and German romance to tract and print.

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Charles Dickens web links

December 11, 2010 by Roy Johnson

a selection of web-based archives and resources

This short selection of Charles Dickens web links offers quick connections to resources for further study. It’s not comprehensive, and if you have any ideas for additional resources, please use the ‘Comments’ box below to make suggestions.

Charles Dickens – web links

Charles Dickens at Mantex
Biographical notes, book reviews, tutorials and study guides, free eTexts, videos, adaptations for cinema and television, further web links.

Charles Dickens at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, literary techniques, his influence and legacy, extensive bibliography, and further web links.

Charles Dickens at Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts of the major works in a variety of formats.

Dickens on the Web
Major jumpstation including plots and characters from the novels, illustrations, Dickens on film and in the theatre, maps, bibliographies, and links to other Dickens sites.

The Dickens Page
Chronology, eTexts available, maps, filmography, letters, speeches, biographies, criticism, and a hyper-concordance.

Charles Dickens at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations of the major novels and stories for the cinema and television – in various languages

A Charles Dickens Journal
An old HTML website with detailed year-by-year (and sometimes day-by-day) chronology of events, plus pictures.

Hyper-Concordance to Dickens
Locate any word or phrase in the major works – find that quotation or saying, in its original context.

Dickens at the Victorian Web
Biography, political and social history, themes, settings, book reviews, articles, essays, bibliographies, and related study resources.

Charles Dickens – Gad’s Hill Place
Something of an amateur fan site with ‘fun’ items such as quotes, greetings cards, quizzes, and even a crossword puzzle.

The Oxford Companion to Dickens offers in one volume a lively and authoritative compendium of information about Dickens: his life, his works, his reputation and his cultural context. In addition to entries on his works, his characters, his friends and places mentioned in his works, it includes extensive information about the age in which he lived and worked: the people, events and institutions which provided the context for his work; the houses in which he lived; the countries he visited; the ideas he satirized; the circumstances he responded to; and the culture he participated in. The companion thus provides a synthesis of Dickens studies and an accessible range of information.

Mont Blanc pen – Charles Dickens special edition

The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens contains fourteen essays which cover the whole range of Dickens’s writing, from Sketches by Boz through to The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Some address important thematic topics: childhood, the city, and domestic ideology. Others consider the serial publication and Dickens’s distinctive use of language. Three final chapters examine Dickens in relation to work in other media: illustration, theatre, and film. The volume as a whole offers a valuable introduction to Dickens for students and general readers, as well as fresh insights, informed by recent critical theory.

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Close reading tutorials

March 21, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorials in literary criticism and close critical analysis

What is close reading?

Close reading means not only reading and understanding the meanings of the individual printed words of a text: it also involves making yourself sensitive to all the nuances and connotations of a language as it is used by skilled writers.

This can mean anything from a work’s particular vocabulary, sentence construction, and imagery, to the themes that are being dealt with, the way in which the story is being told, and the view of the world that it offers. It involves almost everything from the smallest linguistic items to the largest issues of literary understanding and judgement.

language
meaning
structure
philosophy

Close reading can be seen as four separate levels of attention which we can bring to the text. Most normal people read without being aware of them, and employ all four simultaneously. The four levels or types of reading become progressively more complex. The most advanced forms of close reading combine all these features in an effort to reveal the full and even hidden meanings in a work.

A close reading exercise is not a guessing game or a treasure hunt: it is an attempt to understand the mechanisms by which a narrative is constructed and its meanings generated. However, a really successful close reading can only be made when you know the work as a whole.

The tutorials listed here offer a variety of approaches to close reading. Some focus attention on details of literary style; others concentrate on how the meaning(s) of a text are constructed. All of them pay close attention to the language being used.

Charles Dickens – Bleak House

This tutorial looks at the famous opening passage of Bleak House and examines Dickens’s use of language, simile, and metaphor. It argues that whilst Dickens is often celebrated for the vividness of his descriptions, the true genius of his literary power is in imaginative invention.

Close reading – Bleak House.

If you wish to read the complete novel in conjunction with these tutorial notes, it is available free at Project Gutenberg.

Bleak House (full text)

Joseph Conrad – An Outpost of Progress – I

This is the first of two close reading tutorials on Conrad’s early tale An Outpost of Progress. This one looks at the opening of the story and examines the semantic values transmitted in Conrad’s presentation of the narrative. That is, how the meaning(s) of the story are embedded in even the smallest details of of the prose.