Victorian children and VIctorian eccentrics

(1836 – 1876)

11.1. Викторианство как феномен европейской культуры. Становление критического реализма. Чарльз Диккенс: жизнь и творчество. Эволюция творчества Диккенса.

11.1.1. Britain had emerged from the long war with France (1793–1815) as a great power and as the world's predominant economy. Visiting England in 1847, the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson observed of the English that “the modern world is theirs. They have made and make it day by day.”

This new status as the world's first urban and industrialized society was responsible for the extraordinary wealth, vitality, and self-confidence of the period. Abroad these energies expressed themselves in the growth of the British Empire. At home they were accompanied by rapid social change and fierce intellectual controversy.

The juxtaposition of this new industrial wealth with a new kind of urban poverty is only one of the paradoxes that characterize this long and diverse period. In religion the climax of the Evangelical revival coincided with an unprecedentedly severe set of challenges to faith.

"The modern spirit," Matthew Arnold observed in 1865, "is now awake." In 1859 Charles Darwin had published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Historians, philosophers, and scientists were all beginning to apply the idea of evolution to new areas of study of the human experience. Traditional conceptions of man's nature and place in the world were, as a consequence, under threat.

In politics a widespread commitment to economic and personal freedom was, nonetheless, accompanied by a steady growth in the power of the state. But the fierce political debates led first to the Second Reform Act and then to the battles for the enfranchisement of women and were accompanied by a deepening crisis of belief.

The prudery for which the Victorian Age is notorious in fact went hand in hand with an equally violent immorality, seen, for example, in the writings of the Decadents.

Most fundamentally of all, the rapid change that many writers interpreted as progress inspired in others a fierce nostalgia. Enthusiastic rediscoveries of ancient Greece, Elizabethan England, and, especially, the Middle Ages by writers, artists, architects, and designers made this age of change simultaneously an age of active and determined historicism.

Despite this persistence critics of the 1830s felt that there had been a break in the English literary tradition, which they identified with the death of Byron. The deaths of Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott should perhaps have been seen as even more significant, for the new literary era has, with justification, been seen as the age of the novel.

11.1.2. One of the most outstanding novelists of the day was Charles Dickens (1812-1870). In his enormous body of works, he combined masterly storytelling, humor, pathos, and irony with sharp social criticism and acute observation of people and places, both real and imagined.

Dickens spent most of his childhood in London and Kent, both of which appear frequently in his novels. He started school at the age of nine, but his education was interrupted when his father, an amiable but careless minor civil servant, was imprisoned for debt. The boy was then forced to support himself by working in a shoe-polish factory. A resulting sense of humiliation and abandonment haunted him for life, and he later described this experience, only slightly altered, in his novel David Copperfield.

Though Dickens again attended school, he was mostly self-educated. After learning shorthand, he began working as a reporter in the courts and Parliament, perhaps developing the power of precise description that was to make his creative writing so remarkable. At 21, Dickens published the first of a series of original descriptive sketches of daily life in London, using the pseudonym Boz. The success of this work, Sketches by Boz, permitted Dickens to marry and led to the proposal of a similar publishing venture in collaboration with a popular artist. Dickens transformed this particular project from a set of loosely connected vignettes into a comic narrative, The Pickwick Papers (1836-1837).

The success of this first novel made Dickens famous. At the same time it influenced the publishing industry in Great Britain, being issued in a rather unusual form, that of inexpensive monthly installments; this method of publication quickly became popular among Dickens's contemporaries. Dickens subsequently maintained his fame with a constant stream of novels. A man of enormous energy and wide talents, he also engaged in many other activities. He edited weekly periodicals, administered charitable organizations, and pressed for many social reforms. In 1842 he lectured in the United States in favor of an international copyright agreement and in opposition to slavery.

Dickens's extra-literary activities also included managing a theatrical company that played before Queen Victoria in 1851 and giving public readings of his own works in England and America. As Dickens matured artistically, his novels developed from comic tales based on the adventures of a central character, like The Pickwick Papers, to works of great social relevance, psychological insight, and narrative and symbolic complexity.

Among his fine works are Bleak House, Little Dorritt, Great Expectations (1860-1861), and Our Mutual Friend. Readers usually prized Dickens's earlier novels for their humor and pathos. While recognizing the virtues of these books, critics today tend to rank more highly the later works because of their formal coherence and acute perception of the human condition.

The novel Great Expectations is considered one of the most satisfying of all Dickens' books. Its tone varies a great deal – it is comic, cheerful, satirical, wry, critical, sentimental, dark, dramatic, foreboding, Gothic, and often sympathetic. As far as themes go, the novel contains one which is ambition and the desire for self-improvement – social, economic, educational, and moral. It is also a book telling the story of maturation and the growth from childhood to adulthood. The writer emphasizes the importance of affection, loyalty, and sympathy over social advancement and class superiority. Above all, the novel speaks directly about the difficulty of maintaining superficial moral and social categories in a constantly changing world.

11.1.3. One of Dickens' projects was the magazine Household Words. It was to this magazine that he requested a contribution from a female writer whose name was Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865). Dickens came to know her after the success of her first published novel. It was Mary Barton, a Tale of Manchester Life (1848), an attack on the behavior of factory employers during the 1840s, which was the time of depression and hardship for the British working class.

Gaskell contributed the papers to Dickens' magazine which were later published under the title of Cranford. This book, concerning elegant gentility among women in a country town, has become an English classic.

Gaskell is the novelist known for her compassion toward her subjects, and skillful narrative style. Her other works include a biography of her friend, the novelist Charlotte Bronte, published two years after Bronte had died.

11.2. Творчество Уильяма Теккерея. «Ярмарка тщеславия». Ироническое обыгрывание условностей викторианского романа. Рефлексивность и интеллектуализм, ироничность прозы.

Another great realist is William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63). He was a novelist and humorist, one of the foremost exponents of the 19th-century realistic novel. His most famous work is Vanity Fair.

Thackeray was born in India. He entered the University of Cambridge. Leaving the university without taking his degree, he attempted to develop his literary and artistic abilities, first as the editor of a short-lived journal and subsequently as an art student in Paris. Thackeray began the serial publication of his great satirical novel Vanity Fair early in 1847, quickly establishing a reputation as one of the major literary figures of his time.

Thackeray is particularly noted for his exquisitely humorous and ironic portrayals of the middle and upper classes of his time. His narrative skill and vivid characterizations are strikingly evident in his masterpiece Vanity Fair, an elaborate study of social relationships in early 19th-century England. The character of Becky Sharp, a scheming adventuress, is drawn with consummate skill, serving as a model for the heroines of many later novels. Thackeray's keen awareness of social eccentricity is seen also in his short works, especially in The Rose and the Ring, in which his own clever drawings accent the text.

In other novels he broadened his observation of social situations to various eras and locales. These widely acclaimed works brought Thackeray new recognition. He became a principal competitor of his great contemporary, Charles Dickens, with whom he frequently disagreed on the nature of the novel as a vehicle for social commentary.

11.3. “Женская литература” викторианской эпохи. Феномен семьи Бронте. «Джен Эйр»: роман-автобиография. «Грозовой перевал»: контраст реалистической и романтической манер письма. Элизабет Браунинг и Кристина Росетти.

 

11.3.1. The Victorian age saw a great number of female authors whose works are still widely read and admired. The talents of the Bronte sisters produced the works that have become beloved classics.

Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855), Emily (Jane) Bronte (1818-1848), and Anne Bronte (1820-1849), and their brother (Patrick) Branwell Bronte (1817-1848), were born in Yorkshire. Their father, Patrick Bronte, who had been born in Ireland, was appointed rector of a village on the Yorkshire moors. When their mother died, Charlotte and Emily were sent to join their older sisters Maria and Elizabeth at the Clergy Daughters' School; this was the original on which was modeled the infamous Lowood School of Jane Eyre.

The children's imaginations transmuted a set of wooden soldiers into characters in a series of stories they wrote about the imaginary kingdom of Angria and the kingdom of Gondal.

Charlotte went away to school again, returning home a year later to continue her education and teach her sisters. She returned to school as a teacher, taking Emily with her. At 24, conceiving the idea of opening a small private school of their own, and to improve their French, Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels, to a private boarding school. The death of their aunt, who had kept house for the family, compelled their return, however. In 1845 the family was together again.

Charlotte's discovery of Emily's poems led to the decision to have the sisters' verses published; these appeared, at their own expense, as Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (1846), each sister using her own initials in these pseudonyms. Two copies were sold. Each sister then embarked on a novel.

Charlotte's Jane Eyre was published first, in 1847; Anne's Agnes Grey and Emily's Wuthering Heights appeared a little later that year. Speculation about the authors' identities was rife until they visited London and met their publishers.

On their return they found Branwell near death. Emily caught cold at his funeral, and died December 19, 1848. Anne too died, on May 28, 1849. Alone now with her father, Charlotte resumed work on the novel Shirley ( 1849). This was the least successful of her novels.

Charlotte married her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls. Pregnant in 1855, she became ill and died that year of tuberculosis.

Since their deaths, new generations of readers have been fascinated by the circumstances of the sisters' lives, their untimely deaths, and their astonishing achievements. Jane Eyre 's popularity has never waned; it is a passionate expression of female issues and concerns. The transcendent masterpiece, however, is almost certainly Emily's novel Wuthering Heights, a story of passionate love, in which irreconcilable principles of energy and calm are ultimately harmonized. Emily Bronte was a mystic, as her poetry shows, and Wuthering Heights dramatizes her intuitive apprehension of the nature of life.

11.3.2. Perhaps, the best known Victorian female poet was Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861). She was alsopolitical thinker and feminist. Browning was privately educated. She started publishing poetry at the age of 20. She was incapacitated for nearly a decade after 1838 as a result of a childhood spinal injury and lung ailment. She continued writing, however, and produced a volume of poems. These verses were so highly regarded that when William Wordsworth died, Browning was suggested as his successor as poet laureate of England.

She was 39 when the poet Robert Browning began to write to Elizabeth to praise her poetry. Their romance was bitterly opposed by her father. However, the couple eloped and settled in Florence, Italy, where Elizabeth regained her health and bore a son at age 43. Her Sonnets from the Portuguese, dedicated to her husband and written in secret before her marriage, was published in 1850. Critics generally consider the Sonnets, one of the most widely known collections of love lyrics in English, to be her best work.

 

SONNET XXXVIII

First time he kissed me, he but only kissed

The fingers of this hand wherewith I write;

And, ever since, it grew more clean and white,..

Slow to world-greeting, quick with its 'Oh, list',

When the angels speak. A ring of amethyst

I could not wear here, plainer to my sight,

Than that first kiss. The second passed in height

The first, and sought the forehead, and half missed

Half falling on the hair. O beyond meed!

That was the chrism of love, which love's own crown,

With sanctifying sweetness, did precede.

The third upon my lips was folded down

In perfect, purple state; since when, indeed,

I have been proud and said, 'My love, my own'.

 

She expressed her intense sympathy with the struggle for the unification of Italy in her poems. Her longest and most ambitious work is the didactic, romantic poem in blank verse Aurora Leigh, in which she defends a woman's right to intellectual freedom and addresses the concerns of the female artist.

 

11.3.3. English lyric poet Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) wrote different kinds of verses. Much of Rossetti's work was religious in nature; the themes of renunciation of earthly love and concern with death shadow such favorite poems as “When I am dead, my dearest” and “Up-Hill.” Other poems are earthy, romantic, and sensuous. Rossetti's work encompasses a wide range of styles and forms. Her ballads, sonnets, love lyrics, and nonsense rhymes are all clearly products of an accomplished mind. A devout Anglican, Rossetti spent the last 15 years of her life as a recluse. At the same time, she wrote delightful verse for children.

11.4. Возникновение детской литературы. Фольклорные традиции в произведениях для детей. Эдвард Лир и Льюис Кэрролл. Проблема перевода детских произведений на другие языки.

Children's literature did not come out of the blue during the Victorian age. There had been a long way of its development in the preceding centuries. But there is no doubt that Victorian authors did contribute a lot to the treasure house of children's books. The authors to remember are Edward Lear, Charles Kingsley, and Lewis Carroll.

11.4.1. Edward Lear (1812-1888) was E nglish painter and humorist, born in London. The excellence of his early drawings of birds brought him to the attention of the London Zoological Society, for which he illustrated scientific books. These illustrations are considered among the most precise and vivid of all ornithological drawings. He traveled throughout Europe and the Near East. Yet Lear's observant travel books have been overshadowed by the popularity of his light verse, such as the famous poem “The Owl and the Pussycat.”

 

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea

In a beautiful pea-green boat,

They took some honey, and plenty of money,

Wrapped up in a five-pound note.

The Owl looked up to the stars above,

And sang to a small guitar,

"O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,

What a beautiful Pussy you are,

You are,

You are!

What a beautiful Pussy you are!"

Pussy said to the Owl, "You elegant fowl!

How charmingly sweet you sing!

O let us be married! too long we have tarried:

But what shall we do for a ring?"

They sailed away, for a year and a day,

To the land where the Bong-tree grows

And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood

With a ring at the end of his nose,

His nose,

His nose,

With a ring at the end of his nose.

"Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling

Your ring?" Said the Piggy, "I will."

So they took it away, and were married next day

By the Turkey who lives on the hill.

They dined on mince, and slices of quince,

Which they ate with a runcible spoon;

And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,

They danced by the light of the moon,

The moon,

The moon,

They danced by the light of the moon.

Considered among the masters of the limerick, to which he gave the modern formula and metrical cadence, he wrote A Book of Nonsense, and a couple of other books.

 

11.4.2. English novelist and clergyman Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) was also an important novelist who wrote for the young. In his forties, he taught modern history at Cambridge. Liberal in his views, Kingsley was a leader in Christian socialism and Chartism. Kingsley's novels display his sympathy with the economically and politically oppressed classes of the England of his day. He was sympathetic to the idea of evolution, which was a hot issue of the day, and was one of the first to praise Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

Kingsley's concern for social reform is illustrated in his great classic, The Water-Babies (1863). The protagonist is Tom, a young chimney sweep, who falls into a river after encountering an upper-class girl named Ellie and being chased out of her house. There he dies and is transformed into a "water baby", and begins his moral education. Kingsley also uses the book to argue that England treats its poor badly, and to question child labor, among other themes. Grimes, his old – and bad – master drowns as well, and in his final adventure, Tom travels to the end of the world to attempt to help the man where he is being punished for his misdeeds. By proving his willingness to do things he does not like, if they are the right things to do, Tom earns himself a return to human form, and becomes "a great man of science" who "can plan railways, and steam-engines, and electric telegraphs, and rifled guns, and so forth".

11.4.3. The best known of all Victorian books for children is, of course the immortal fantasy Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll ( 1832-98).

C arroll was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and was educated at Rugby and at Christ Church College, University of Oxford. For 25 years, he was a member of the faculty of mathematics at Oxford. He was the author of several mathematical treatises. In 1865 he published under his pseudonym Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, appeared six years later. These were followed by The Hunting of the Snark, and a novel, Sylvie and Bruno.

Always a friend of children, particularly little girls, Carroll wrote thousands of letters to them, delightful flights of fantasy, many illustrated with little sketches. Carroll gained an additional measure of fame as an amateur photographer. Most of his camera portraits were of children in various costumes and poses, including nude studies; he also did portraits of adults, including the actress Ellen Terry and the poets Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Christina Rossetti.

 

"Some people", said Humpty Dumpty, looking away from her as usual, "have no more sense than a baby!"

Alice didn't know what to say to this: it wasn't at all like conversation, she thought, as he never said anything to her; in fact, his last remark was evidently addressed to a tree – so she stood and softly repeated to herself:

 

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall:

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All the King's horses and all the King's men

Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty in his place again.

"That last line is much too long for the poetry," she added, almost out loud, forgetting that Humpty Dumpty would hear her.

"Don't stand chattering to yourself like that," Humpty Dumpty said, looking at her for the first time, "but tell me your name and your business".

"My name is Alice, but – "

"It's a stupid name enough!" Humpty Dumpty interrupted impatiently. "What does it mean?"

"Must a name mean something?" Alice asked doubtfully.

"Of course it must," Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh: "my name means the shape I am – and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost."

The Alice stories, which have made the invented name – Lewis Carroll – famous throughout the world, and have been translated into many languages, were originally written for Alice Liddell, a daughter of Dean of Christ Church College. On publication, the works became immediately popular as books for children.

Their subsequent appeal to adults is based upon the ingenious mixture of fantasy and realism, gentle satire, absurdity, and logic. The names and sayings of the characters, such as the March Hare, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat, and the White Knight, have become part of everyday speech.

Контрольные задания

1. Read the lecture and make up the test (20 points).

2. Write an essay on the following topic “Prolific Victorian writers”