William Makepeace Thackeray (1811 – 1863)

 

“The Paris Sketch Book” (1840)

“Fitz-Bood’s confessions & professions” “Irish Sketch Book” (1843)

“Memoirs of Barry Lyndon” (1844)

“Snob papers’ (1846)

“Vanity Fair” (1848)

“Pendennis” (1850)

“The History of Henry Esmond” (1852)

“The Newcomers” (1854)

“The Virginians” (1857)

Thackeray’s success as a novelist was inseparable from his explorations of certain effect of England’s expanding economy. He is not the first novelist of his age to fix the way in which the middle class translated superior animal cunning & luck speculation into success confirmed by religion.

Thackeray’s legacy is divided into 2 parts – before “Vanity Fair” & after it. It was a fashion to compare Dickens & Thackeray. These two authors belong not only to the English literature, but to the literature of the world, because they both added a lot to the development of human comedy that is the world literature. It’s natural to consider Thackeray as rash & wild, but in fact he was neither – he was very vulnerable & it was impossible for him to realize how to deal with evil. In fact he could not think away evil; he could not even grapple with it; but he was hurt by evil & started his creative life by reporting evil to people. The words of the preacher characterize his attitude to world & people & he repeated them as “vanity of vanities”. It was this rare case when the comedy got different name & it was addressed to not. He called it “Vanity Fair” trying to show the essence of it.

Thackeray portrays the world he knows best. The evil of self-interest, of parasitism, of snobbery released in him a detached ferocity. In the world as portrayed by Thackeray there is no place for intelligent will & performance. Individuals appear to be swept up & carried along. The cunning & the unprincipled winning of the weak are helpless & they get no sympathy from Thackeray because they are always affectual.

Thackeray’s preparation for “Vanity Fair”, his undoubted success was “Book of snobs” (1846). A snob – is a person who greatly respects social status & wealth & who looks down on people of a lower class. “I have (and for this gift I congratulate myself with a Deep and Abiding Thankfulness) an eye for a Snob. If the Truthful is the Beautiful, it is Beautiful to study even the Snobbish; to track Snobs through history, as certain little dogs in Hampshire hunt out truffles; to sink shafts in society and come upon rich veins of Snob-ore. Snobbishness is like Death in a quotation from Horace, which I hope you never have heard,»beating with equal foot at poor men's doors, and kicking at the gates of Emperors.«It is a great mistake to judge of Snobs lightly, and think they exist among the lower classes merely.”

“Vanity Fair” is the best creation of Thackeray. Its subtitle is “A novel without a hero”. There Thackeray gives us a panorama of English life & he shows us the world as it really is evolving around all sorts of hunting – money, husband, fame etc. the novel has a multitude of characters & these characters are haunted by a strong desire to prosper & all these characters try very hard to find a place where it would be easier to use the others. It’s like a puppet-shoe & Thackeray himself seems to be a puppet-master. Thackeray is above; his hands are full of strings & all sorts of people go round & round & he manipulates them. The pole is Becky Sharp – an embodiment of Thackeray’s major strategy for total organization of “Vanity Fair”. He uses Becky as a pivotal figure & for his minor strategy too. This is the opposition of 2 fates – the fate of Becky Sharp & Amelia Sedley

Becky is very credible. About matter how critics try to praise or run down Thackeray, these people always accept this fact. Becky enables Thackeray to show the whole society in motion, because his whole society gravitates around her. Characters gain their vitality from Becky. Thackeray creates Becky cumulatively. She begins with her departure with Amelia from Pinkerton’s school & Thackeray shows in dramatic particularity from the very beginning that Becky goes on challenging people.

Thackeray takes us step by step through the graded challenges of Jos Sedley, sir Pitt Rawdon & Styne, through the challenges of George Osborne. The challenges of Crawley family promote Becky’s social extension.

Thackeray gives us balance in Becky. Thackeray uses all sorts of technical recourses to show that Becky does what she wants to because she likes it. He gives her an elbow room in surveying & planning the energy in the social game that is played. She is not an exaggerated figure. All the others seem to be exaggerated as they deal with Becky. Becky begins with nothing & this gives her an opportunity to try her hand on practically everything. She has good humor in defeat. She possesses practically no ill-humor; she does not expose any savage intensity, meanness in her self-interest. Becky is at her best when she miscalculates, but she is able to laugh at disastrous miscalculation.

Thackeray has almost affection for his Becky puppet. He shows no hatred for Becky. Her sins are terrible: she is incapable of affection & love, loyalty is alien to her; but Thackeray does not make Becky suffer deeply. On the other hand his characters suffer for the most part: he visits Mr. Osborne with the death of his own son; he pursues all Sedley in his wife through the ruined, broken & merciless beggary; in the end he reduces sir Pitt to a hopeless maniacal infant. Every character but Becky is given his or her due.

Thackeray achieves in good measure the very intention of “Vanity Fair”. He makes Amelia & Dobbin ineffectual creatures. For him Amelia is a silly thing who would cry over a dead canary or a mouse & all of a sudden we come to realize that Thackeray gave Amelia certain selfishness. She possesses selfishness of a deeply-rooted parasite vine. She uses Dobbin, who is absolutely helpless & ineffectual. All of a sudden we come to realize that she uses his passive helplessness as a weapon. But she is coward; she is stupid to organize anything more affectual.

Thackeray “combines a wide band of comic vision of the social scene with a few moments of drama; he lights up half a hundred characters for us & keeps them all in motion; he bathes everything in this atmosphere & never sacrifices the effect of ordinary reality; he can always keep time ticking, flowing on, unlike most novelists, who must either get inside altogether or can only move it forward, in big jerks…” (J. B. Priestley)

Thackeray owes a lot to Fielding. It’s the same strategy to make the novel move around one character, the same strategy to address the reader directly, coming to the proscenium & talking to the reader, giving us a human comedy in a chaotic movement, making the characters create situations that are as versatile as life itself. But what is good humor. Fielding is bitter satire in Thackeray. Bothe writers are absolutely realistic & make the reader believe & more over participate in every episode & situation.

 

 

Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936)

 

“Departmental Ditties” (1886)

“Plain Tales from the Hills” (1888)

“Soldiers Three” (1888)

“Barrack-Room Ballade” (1893)

“Seven Seas” (1896)

“The Light that Failed” (1891)

“Many Inventions” (1896)

“Jungle Books” (1894; 1896)

“Just so Stories” (1902)

“Debits & Credits” (1926)

“The Five Nations” (1903)

“Actions & Reactions” (1909)

“Captains Courageous” (1897)

 

Romanticism as such finds its ways in the minds of people & in the trends that somehow come into being in literature. We can speak here of periodic reoccurrences in literary history. Reoccurrences of Romanticism: the most important one occurred about 1800 in continental Europe (Blake, Burns, Byron etc.). A revival of this movement began at the turn of the 20th century. It formed a part of a literary reaction against realism & naturalism in particular. The authors that participated in this movement shared an interest in the exotic & unusual as opposed to prosaic & ordinary (J. Galsworthy, S. Maugham vs. near Romantic Movement R. Kipling).

Kipling was attracted by the unusual & exotic, heroic & superhuman. At the same time he was down to earth. He was an advocate of an ordinary soldier.

On the one hand Kipling was a man whose relationship with the Bible is rather visible & he was a man of stoic anticlerical views. He was considered an English nationalist and at the same time he wrote about England as being petty & even lamentable. He expressed rather prominent dislike for non-white people & at the same time he wrote that they are more honest. Courageous as far as USA is concerned, he expressed rather vivid contempt & showed deep admiration for the country. He showed his respect for the working class & was all against the labor movement. He wrote about the Empire with great exaltation & showed that the works of the Empire were vain (vague).

Kipling was a poet, a writer of fiction, a journalist. At the same time he was a literary critic; he was a social writer who was very much concerned with current events & at the same time he wrote about the eternal. He was sure that it was an Englishman stately & imposing, who could change the world & bring civilization to the regions that were never civilized & cultivated. He wrote scenes, in which he described the best qualities of the man as such, as a human being.

On the one hand Kipling advertises war & shows war as atrocities, moral & physical. He shows war as atrocities that ruin the lives of people because they are inhuman.

“The Hyenas”

After the burial parties leave

And the baffled kites have fled;

The wise Hyenas come out at ever

To take account of our dead

How he died & why he died

Troubles them not a whit

The snoul, the bushes & stones aside

A dig till they come to it.

They are only resolute they shall eat

That they & their mates may thrive

And they know that the dead are safer

Than the weakest thing alive

Kipling does not speak directly about the process of war. Here is an indirect description that is more vivid than any account of what’s going on the battle field.

Kipling is an author of many facets: folklorist, dialect poet, adventure novelist, writer of juvenile literature, champion of nationalism & at the same time one of the most humanistic writers. Some critics say that much of his work is dated today. Many of his short stories have lasting merit. As time goes on it appears that Kipling’s children’s starts are better (and even the best in the genre), than most of his adult prose. This is a good sample to prove that Kipling is sincere (recognized by children is the best mark of sincerity). Sometimes his best works lie on the line between the juvenile & adult prose. “Kim” is the best example of such novel. If you read Kipling you don’t but feel an adolescent charm of his work. Mostly appealing to the youth & adult he’ll remain the standard author for the time to come. His works may also seem a source of information about the end of the 19th century, colonial wars, the British Empire & India, which Kipling loves so much.

Kipling’s short stories will give us all necessary information about British soldiers. They are full of humor, quite sincere & full of pride. They are in no way brass laughing with soldier’s snobbery.

Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865. His father was a highly creative artist & a university professor. Rudyard was educated in England in the school he later describes as “St. & Company”. He returns to India at about 17. First he tried journalism & then he turned to fiction writing. As his literary fame began to grow he settles in London. “Barrack-Room Ballade” was the first book to achieve world recognition.

During the World War I he turned to anti-German propaganda. At that time he was a fervent British patriot. His only son was killed in the war. Many honors came to him in the old age. He was awarded Nobel Prize in Literature on1907. He was endowed with many university degrees & he died in London in1936.

Chief Works

“Barrack-Room Ballade”

This collection of poetry contains the most famous Kipling’s dialect poems. There are 2 sections in the book: the first containing serious ballads in Standard English & the second consisting of semi-humorous songs in Cockney & soldier slang.

Kipling is often opposed to Oscar Wilde. Kipling showed his resentment of this intellectual life & he wanted to be close to common people, but common people do not understand his works. The poems are ingenious & the language is “salty”.

“Kim”

It’s considered to be Kipling’s best novel. The hero of the novel is an Irish orphan. He’s raised as an Indian and as a young boy he encounters a mysterious Tibetan Lama & follows the Lama through India in a pilgrimage in search of the legendary river Earo. One comes to know a lot about India, its cultural peculiarities, East &Asia as such. One comes to look for some secrets & secret forces every human being possesses. Later Kim is claimed by the British & sent to a school. After his education he joins the British service. He helps to capture a Russian spy. The chief merits of the book are absorbing interest of the plot & the first picture of Indian life at the time of the Crimean war.

“Junglebooks”

They show Mawgley and his animal associates. It’s about law of the jungle – mostly just law, because it depends not only upon our national considerations, but upon the instinct. If animal is dangerous (like a Tiger), it is despised by the whole animal community. Kipling tried to catch much many a didactic idea of the book, but it’s not one of these ideas children come to like about “Junglebook”. It’s a book about friendship, about genuine leadership. In many ways it’s an idealistic book, which proves that human society & the set of values of human beings are not a pattern to be imitated.

 

Oscar Wilde (1856 – 1900)

 

“The Happy Prince” (1888)

“The House of Pomegranates” (1891)

“Lord Arthur Savile's Crime” (1891)

“The picture of Dorian Gray” (1891)

“Lady Windermere’s Fan” (1893)

“A Woman of No Importance” (1894)

“An Ideal Husband” (1895)

“The Importance of Being Earnest” (1898)

“The Ballad of Reading Gaol” (1898)

 

“Books are well-written or badly-written, and that’s all”

“All art is quite useless”

(“The Picture of Dorian Gray”)

Oscar Wilde was a literary aesthete who found the doctrine of art for art’s sake. It’s paradoxical. He has a desire to change the minds of men. He took the drama (most objective form known to art) and made it as personal mode of expression as he could. For him drama was as personal as lyric & sonnets. Drama, novel, poem, and prose – whatever he touched, he made beautiful in a new form of Beauty. Unfortunately he believed that art should only be beautiful, but being a genius he could not but fulfilled another task first.

He was born in Dublin in a family of a distinguished surgeon. He was educated at Dublin – Oxford universities. His mother was a writer of poetry & prose. When he was a student he joined an aesthetic movement & soon became its leader. He made himself an apostle of doctrine of art for art’s sake & all of the culture & Beauty. In 1882 he made a triumphant tour to the USA, reading lectures on the aesthetic movement. The next ten years saw the appearance of all his major works. He became famous as a literary critic. He wrote several literary essays, various occasionally pieces of history. He really believed that his influence is great, soon he became an ambitious writer.

“I altered the minds of men and the colours of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder: I took the drama, the most objective form known to art, and made it as personal a mode of expression as the lyric or the sonnet, at the same time that I widened its range and enriched its characterisation: drama, novel, poem in rhyme, poem in prose, subtle or fantastic dialogue, whatever I touched I made beautiful in a new mode of beauty: to truth itself I gave what is false no less than what is true as its rightful province, and showed that the false and the true are merely forms of intellectual existence. I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.” (Oscar Wilde “De Profundis”).

The art is a great attempt to teach nature where its place was. We can see certain contradictions that are numerous in his works, because the art of writing is different from that of criticism.

Irony is very much a characteristic of Wilde, of his manner of writing, not of his ideal. Beauty becomes callous & selfish; it presupposes some qualities that do not depend upon finery. No matter how sophisticated his “Picture of Dorian Gray” is, no matter how hard Wilde tried to make the novel an example of his theory of pleasure hunting, of art for art’s sake, real life introduces its own changes & shifts the accent. The boarder line between beautiful & ugly becomes very thin & then disappears in a series of daily transformations. Suddenly he felt what he really did not want to show. All of a sudden he became a poet of compassion, tolerance & forgiveness. Being absolutely forlorn Wilde came to the best of his woks “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”.

“The Ballad of Reading Gaol”

It wasn’t meant to tell the story only as many ballads do. Ballads tell a story sometimes at great length. The genre of a ballad became very popular since ancient times. The fact that Wilde wrote a ballad makes us believe that at last he compelled the work to be enjoyed & understood by all classes of people. His ballad was not meant to be enjoyed only. It was meant to perplex, to disturb. It’s addressed to human kind at large. It’s not about a particular case or religion, though Christianity is the main background for it. It’s about abstract things & notions – justice & brotherhood, real love & compassion. Sometimes it’s considered to be a cry in wilderness, because not so many people are sensitive to the grief of others. Not so many people know & want to know for whom the bell tolls. It’s a tragedy not of a character only, but of certain notions by which the people live. It’s a story of death & disaster. It’s told with great economy. Here Wilde is clever enough to avoid terrible descriptions, unpleasant scenes. It’s different from other ballads, because the emphasis is not on the action; it’s on the attitude.

It begins with the introduction that presupposes the appearance of several melodies that are simultaneous according to the medieval theory of the counterpoint.

He did not wear his scarlet coat,

For blood and wine are red,

And blood and wine were on his hands

When they found him with the dead,

The poor dead woman whom he loved,

And murdered in her bed. The melody of blood & crime

 

He walked amongst the Trial Men

In a suit of shabby grey;

A cricket cap was on his head,

And his step seemed light and gay;

But I never saw a man who looked

So wistfully at the day.

 

I never saw a man who looked

With such a wistful eye

Upon that little tent of blue

Which prisoners call the sky,

And at every drifting cloud that went

With sails of silver by. Th melody of justice & brotherhood

 

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,

By each let this be heard,

Some do it with a bitter look,

Some with a flattering word.

The coward does it with a kiss,

The brave man with a sword!

 

Some kill their love when they are young,

And some when they are old;

Some strangle with the hands of Lust,

Some with the hands of Gold:

The kindest use a knife, because

The dead so soon grow cold.

 

Some love too little, some too long,

Some sell, and others buy;

Some do the deed with many tears,

And some without a sigh:

For each man kills the thing he loves,

Yet each man does not die.

All people commit crimes every day. Here is the melody of penitentiary institution. Every episode shows that the period before the execution is much worse than execution itself.

The Governor was strong upon

The Regulations Act:

The Doctor said that Death was but

A scientific fact:

And twice a day the Chaplain called,

And left a little tract.

The execution is wrong both morally & physically. This is a very strange & terrible stanza.

The warders strutted up and down,

And watched their herd of brutes,

Their uniforms were spick and span,

And they wore their Sunday suits,

But we knew the work they had been at,

By the quicklime on their boots.

Christ was kinder than the men. The Wilde speaks to a bush that grew there. It’s practically the end of the ballad & Wilde’s life of his doctrines.

As in every ballad some parts are repeated being slightly transformed. To make it sound like a tragedy Wilde expanded some stanzas (form 4 to 6 lines) & it had a different rhyming system, which is more effective. There is a final conclusion, but this conclusion presupposes reaction of the reader or listener, which is really predetermined. Wilde is clever enough not to represent himself as an ordinary convict. In fact he does not give us any slang or dialect that will show us the status of the prisoners. They are all ennobled by the recognition of their common & individual guilt. It’s a ballad of feeling of a two-year torment, which broke the spirit of Wilde & his health. It has also broken his protective shell. And still in the repetitions that every ballad abandons we see the poignant attitude of an author who managed to comprise the feelings of humanity.