Apuntes Literatura 1800-1900

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Literatura inglesa de 1800 a 1900 Dr. Francisco José Cortés

Vieco Curso 2013-2014
Literatura Inglesa de 1800 a 1900 (Universidad Complutense Madrid)
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Dr. Francisco José Cortés Vieco
Introduction to 19th century

1.1. The historical, socio-political and cultural context (1780-1830 and
1830-1900 periods)
ROMANTIC PERIOD
- It corresponds to the Georgian Era (1740-1837)
- In the United Kingdom the rulers were from the house of Hannover (from
Germany): George I, George II, George III, George IV and William IV
- Short period of 10 years (1811-1820) when the Regency of George IV (Prince of
Wales) took place because of his father’s (George III) illness
- Events which impacted in the ideology and literature
• American Revolution and Independence
The 13 British colonies became independent in 1776
The British Empire and the independent colonies signed the Treaty of
Paris to finish the war of Independence of the United States in 1783
• French Revolution (1789)
Political event (also the events occurred after it) that changed the
world
There were two defenders of Britain against Napoleon: Admiral
Nelson, who helped the kingdom of Spain during Napoleon’s
invasion, and the duke of Wellington
• Catholic Emancipation Act: rich Catholic people can enjoy some restrictions
which were imposed by reducing or eliminating them in Great Britain and
Ireland
• Slavery Abolition Act (1833) throughout the British Empire
• Act of Union (1801) between Great Britain and Ireland → one single country
ROMANTICISM
- A literary, intellectual and artistic movement throughout Europe
- In Britain lasted from 1780 to 1830 and in other countries it started before or lasted
longer
- Against the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment
- In favour of the American Independence and the French Revolution.
- Its rule: `Sturm und Drang´ (from German: storm and urge/desire)
- Romantic artist could create from nothing, i.e. by their imagination, nor rational
neither realistic ideas, to express their own ideas and emotions
- Romantic poets
1. William Wordsworth*
2. Samuel Coleridge* *Founders of Romanticism in Britain
3. John Keats
4. William Blake
5. Percy Shelley
6. Lord Byron

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- The Storming of the Bastille in France (1789)

• Political prisoners: the king and queen of France went to prison and then they
were executed in the guillotine
• British politicians and thinkers thought that changes of this kind would affect the
British political situation
- French Revolution
• Approved for some French politicians and thinkers as William Goodwin and
Mary Wollstonecraft
• Against: Edmund Burke (although he supported the cause of the American
Revolutionaries)
• Napoleon was seen as a despot and not as a revolutionary
• There was not real progress after the French Revolution
• It did not care about women although they needed the same → Mary
Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Man to ask for men’s rights for
women
• Ideals: freedom, equality and fraternity (libertè egalitè fraternitè)
- In this period men of all the social classes asked for choose their own governor (not
hereditary powers)
- At the end of the Romanticism slavery was abolish in West India
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

- Agricultural society → industrial society
- Replace human labours by machines
- The majority of population migrated to cities to get a better job (more jobs in cities)
- Many poets against it
• Negative changes for population
• Agricultural world is better than the industrial world: people care for the others
and they are not exploited by Capitalism
- Two ideologies about it
1. Two nations
High and low class (not mid)
Rich people (owners) had the power vs. poor people (workers)
Women and little children were exploited in work because they had not
rights
2. Laissez-Faire: rules should not interfere in market (free market).
- Time of strikes but also prospered of economic growth.
- Great Britain lost territories → new territories as Africa and especially India, where
invasion and domination were purely economical
- Women
• Still considered inferior but they received education to read and write, as high
and mid class men
• They did not have the writer right but their husbands had until the 20th century
- People had literacy: more people could read and write
- Middle class men could vote and little by little they had parliamentary
representation

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APOCALYPTIC EXPECTATIONS
- Apocalypse: a series of events (catastrophes, wars…) which are signs of Heaven to
show the arrival of a Messiah
- French Revolution (Romantic poets)
• A necessary devastation to create a better world: time of cleansing by destroying
all the corruption
• If we cannot change the world at least we can change our perception of it
NEOCLASSICAL
Epic, tragedy and lyrics are important → poetry is not important at all (legitimate form
of social expression)
ROMANTIC POETRY (NATURE POETRY)

- 3rd person narrator → 1st person (intimate relation with the audience)
- Relationship between nature and the feelings of the poet (primitive nature)
- Protagonists: the poet himself and nature
- What matters is your personal emotions as a poet (spontaneous self-expression):
egoistical sublime
- Emotional states, intimate sensations (meditation) and moral consciousness
- True devotion: deconstruction of the old world to create a new world full of
promises
- Poetry should reflect the common life events, also of poor people
- Same language as a vehicle of expression
- Political and social issues (novels did not)
• Byron: not at the beginning compared with the other Romantic poets
• Blake: a lot of symbolism. He is more individual
- Revolution in theory and practice to classical poetry (metrical forms, blank verse)
- Freedom in the topics and the form
- Prosaic and poetic language emerge together
`The Spirit of the Age´

- Spiritual journey (personal evolution)→ The Prelude by Wordsworth
- Romantic poets are the chosen ones, as they were prophets, to tell messages
Main tenets
1. Spontaneity and freedom
• Emotion felt in the past (remembered in calmness)
• A message is not needed because it shows an emotion
• Independence from canonical words
• Instinct with imagination: feelings are superior than religion/ believes
2. Nature poetry
• Interrelation/ conversation between external nature (landscape, mountains,
tree…) and internal nature (us)
• External nature: stimulus for the thought
• Topics: pleasure, to get older, death
• Metaphysical poets were their predecessors
• Transfusion: devotion to God → devotion to nature (manifestation of God’s
powers in nature). Also the beloved person (women, parents, siblings, sons…)

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3. Glorification of the ordinary and the outcast

• Matters of everyday life
• Outcast: characters who are marginalized in society (women, children,
prostitutes…)
• Simple language in order to make everybody understand it
• Looking for wonder, transcendence
• Non-traditional topics: observing a beggar, divinity vs. ignorance
4. Supernatural and strangeness in beauty
• Related to Gothic novels
• Violation of natural rules (domains of magic mystery)
• Oral tradition (legends, superstitions)
• Visionary states of unconsciousness: dreams and nightmares, sexual messages
(hidden in a way), pain, pleasure and satanic forces/ dark sides
• Death as a key topic
WILLIAM BLAKE (1757-1827)

- Very difficult to classify
- He admired Dante and Milton
- Poetry as an experiment
- Visual impact in his poetry (he was a painter): interrelation between the text and his
pictures
- Complex way of interrelation of symbols (opposite places): Heaven vs. Hell,
experience vs. ignorance, pleasure vs. pain
- Highly relation between his poetry and Christianity (Bible, Christian sources)
- Traditions and influences from the past
- His poetry books tended to be prophetic
- Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794)
• Contrary sources of Newton’s example in Paradise Lost
• Simple form and rhyme but extremely symbolic
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850)

- He looked back to the past and remembered the feelings of that moment
- He lived with Coleridge and they were called Lake poets
- He spent all his life living with his sister Dorothy → Influenced his literature
- Influence of the French Revolution in his arts
- Poet of remembrance: how beautiful the world was before, remembering his
childhood/youth
- Lyrical Ballads (1798)
• Anecdotes of humble and rustic people (Perception of rural communities):
Happy and tragic events
• Written in ballads
• Laments the French Revolution
• Duty to reform poetry and literature

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• “Tintern Abbey”
Written in blank verse
Interrelation between external and internal nature
Meditative poem (inspiration outside in nature: mental stimulation)
3rd edition: preface: “Poetry is a genre as tragedy” (claim made by
Wordsworth and Coleridge)
• The Prelude or Growth of a Poet's Mind (1798 and revised in 1839)
Example of autobiographical poems
Confessional mood: duty/love towards poetry, hero of his own life,
news to be shared
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834)

Visionary poems: dark side of human beings
- “Kubla Khan”
• Composed one night after he experienced an opium-influenced dream
• Considered one of the most famous examples of Romanticism in English poetry
• Exotic imaginary (religion, history)
- “Christabel”
• It was not published in Lyrical Ballads thanks to the advice of William
Wordsworth
• Demons
• States of mind that can be altered
- “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
• Published in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads
• Mariner = Cain because he is a murderer
• Spiritual journey: journey of self-discovery and expiation of his crime
• Only through suffering we can find a balance
JOHN KEATS (1795-1821)

- Prototype of tragic writer (badly criticised by other writers)
- Master in the use of sonnets
- Opposition: pain vs. pleasure, life vs. death
- He considered himself to be a chameleon poet: creative impulse to absorb his
external influence
- Poems
• “Ode to a Nightingale”: life is temporary
• “Ode to a Grecian Urn”: art lasts/persists while people die
• “To Autumn”: summer as a season of prosperity and autumn as a pass to
death/decadence

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VICTORIAN AGE (1830/1837-1900)

- Era in which England had higher development, progress, prosperity, wealth
- During mostly queen Victoria I kingdom → adjective Victorian
- Queen Victorian I kingdom (1837-1901)
• The largest kingdom ever seen in the British monarchy (she wanted to be
remembered for it)
• Ideology of Queen Victoria: honesty, moral responsibility and domestic
propriety (values of family/domesticity)
• Considered the mother of English empire
- The world changed rapidly during this particular time
- Time of ideal exchanges
• Positive: alternative points of view
• Some thinkers attacked the Victorian system
Against progress and have a developed society with modern changes and
prosperity
Progress is not necessarily good because maybe we are losing many
things because of this rapid change
Time of questioning systems, institutions and universal truths known
from a long time
• Others followed the Victorian system (theories)
- Time of conflicts: conflictive theories, scientific and economic debates, social and
spiritual pessimism.
- Religious crisis and new religious concepts
• Changed the life of Victorian people
• New scientific theories which revolutionized Victorian society: Charles
Darwin’s theories of natural selection and other scientific theories
• Utilitarianism (all social classes)
• Religion = driving force for society → religion appears in Victorian literature
• Highly religious society (Eastern England and some areas in Ireland) vs. less
religious (industrial north cities: Liverpool, Manchester, Yorkshire…)
• Other type of things (sports, theatre) instead of going to church
• Christian moral teaching (strict puritan period) → Virtues: family life
(especially for women), abstention (e.g. sex), monogamy, fidelity in love
• Rules that cannot be avoided → first feminist movement (mid of the period) vs.
oppression of women (domesticity, dependence of men)
• Queen Victoria was very traditional (family values) → No feminist revolution
- Social and economic growth from the Industrial Revolution in England
• Industry was not regulated at that time
• Injustice: exploitation of the working class → homeless, beggars in the big cities
(they had not rights)
• Exploitation of goods to export manufactured products (American colonies)
- London was the centre/metropolis and banker of the world → tremendous influence
around the world
- England was the first industrialized country in the world
- Social improvements
• Agriculture (land property), trade, manufactures, railway, printing cheaply
(readings, newspapers and periodicals), photography, compulsory education
• → changes in the life and habits of the English people

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- Situation of progress, the colonial empire, the economic wealth… → critics because
these changes did not benefit everybody
• Marginalization: not equal social situation (goods and rights): education (lower
classes could not go to university)
• New trend for Humanism: the replacement of men by machines should not be
aloud
• Lost of traditional values (familiar and community values): people did not know
each other, so they are anonymous in the industrial cities ≠ rural communities
- Romantics idealized in a way the past life because it was better than the one they
lived
- English double moral: Thackeray’s Vanity Fair
- British confidence and isolation from events occurred in Europe
• Domestic poetics principles of liberty and individual freedom that really
benefited the middle class
• No women: they could not vote, they had neither property rights (fathers,
husbands do) nor university education
- Revolutions all over Europe
- Catholic Emancipation Act (1778-1793): stability in Great Britain and Ireland
- Reform Bill/Reform Act (1832): rotten boroughs (populated areas which were over
represented in the British Parliament by a patron) were intended to eliminate
- Industrial areas had not Parliament representation at all
- Moral purpose
Early Period (1830-1848)

- Growth for the British Empire
- Construction of the first railway lines in England (transferred by the British
landscape)
• Facilitated trade
• Shorted distances between countries → economic travels
- Reformation of the British Parliament (electoral system)
• Have cities represented in the British Parliament
• Avoid the rotten boroughs
- Middle classes were fed up → politicians were obliged to make reforms
- Bad working conditions (especially for women and children), strikes, bad sanitary
conditions (manufactures, houses, water)
- Laissez-Faire doctrine because there were not regulations of working conditions
- Problems related to the Industrial Revolution detected by Thomas Carlyle in his
essay “Condition of England Question”
- Chartists
• Organization of workers who wanted the parliamentary reform
• Thanks to them there was an atmosphere for political reform in the spirit of the
age
• Importation of cheaper grain vs. starvations of that time
• Abolition of taxes

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Mid Period (1848-1870)

- Prosperity: wealth, world power and great influence throughout the world
- Climax of queen Victoria’s popularity: domestic devotion to duty, specially to
women
- Free trade: advantages joined by high and middle classes
- Reforms on the living conditions of working classes
- Technological progress in communications (telegraph)
- Expansion of the power in different territories by the great English people
emigration (Canada, Australia, New Zealand)
- Queen Victoria → Empress of India
- Educational rules were improved
- Religious controversy
• Queen Victoria extended Christianity throughout the British empire
• Division of the Anglican Church
High church (king or queen)
◊ Religion important in Victorian society → Its traditional values
should have to be protected
◊ Not so many differences between Catholics and them → Oxford
Movement
Evangelical movement: revival of religious feelings (spiritual
transformation), against slavery
• Utilitarism (new philosophy in life)
John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham
Rationalist challenge to religion
“What is useful is good for us”: Minimize pain and maximize pleasure
and utility in this world
Late Period (1870-1900)

- Decadence of Victorian values
- The British Empire was still wealthy
- Many abuses against the colonies (massacres of population)
- Time for festivities (jubilees)
- Strong economic crisis → Emigration to the colonies of the Empire
- Birth of Marxism (Karl Marx)
• Equality of social classes, not personal property, not social classes = equal lives
• Trade unions attacked the system (also predicting decadence) by writing prose
(e.g. John Ruskin)
- Universal compulsory male education (not female) → Increase of literacy
- Printing (books, magazines, newspapers) became cheaply → Reading became more
popular
- Creation of libraries
• Great propagation of writing
• Families getting together to read aloud

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- Literature
• Because of realism → Delightment, instruction
• “Art for the art´s sake” (1870): movement against instruction (read just for
pleasure, not morality behind)
• Prose
Instruct and intellectual life
Propagate ideas and persuasive motivation
Secular priest behind → Replaced by workers of mind and thought
Essay writers: Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, John
Ruskin, Charles Darwin, John Henry Newman
Literature should be also another science (Matthew Arnold and John
Ruskin´s claim)
1.2. Romanticism: antecedents, ideology, Lord Bryon and evolution

until 1830
LORD BYRON (1788-1824)
- Life
• From aristocratic family
• His father was a noble who was able to inherit
• Educated by his mother in the most severe Puritanism
• Homoerotic energies
• Very good athlete during his time in Cambridge
• 2 years to visit some European countries (Mediterranean Europe)
• Some of his years to politics (Whig: liberals, supported classes VS Tory:
conservative and royalists)
• Good friend of Mary Shelley: they told scary tales to each other → Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein
• He got married and had a daughter. They separated and he had an affair (Mary
Shelley’s step sister)
• In 1816 he abandoned Britain for ever
• He died and became a hero in Greece
- Very prolific writer
- He was irritated but also occupied by the society of his time
- He used a critical voice
- Very temperamental and faithful to his ideas (patriarchal individualism)
- He wanted to demolish established ideas and perceptions (glory of war, heroic to be
faithful in love, journeys are instructive, innate human goodness)
- Pessimistic: description of a shipwreck → Cannibalistic instinct of men
- Influence of Alexander Pope (Romantic) and chivalry romance (cavalier/knight
from Italy → Orlando-Ariosto)
- He was a good commentator of his time
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818)

- Long narrative travelogue adventures around Europe based on Lord Byron’s
experience
- Lord Byron became famous because of this novel
- Childe Harold: young nobleman who learns how to become in the future a knight
(Europe at that time)

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- 3rd person narrator → 1st person narrator

- High-pitched style
- Men can show their feelings
- His mode changes from Canto III (written in Switzerland) to Canto IV (adventures
in Italy) because it is most passionate
Don Juan (1819-1824)

- Romantic hero (Byronic hero)
• Good and bad qualities vs. classics (only good values)
• Arises the sympathy of the reader
• Flawed because of natural and supernatural forces
• Readers think that Lord Byron is behind the characters
• Lord Byron wanted that what happened to the characters would happen to him
- 1st person narrator
- Unfinished poem: we do not know what Don Juan’s end is
- It consists on 16 cantos
- Based on Tirso de Molina’s myth Don Juan in El burlador de Sevilla but in Byron’s
version Don Juan is not a womanizer
- Other influences from Spain
• Picaresque novel: genre which appeared thanks to Lazarillo de Tormes. Social
classes clashed because Lazarillo is poor and Don Juan is rich.
• Spanish Romantic poets: they approached the lost of the territories in Spain
during the 19th century. Spain was exotic for Romantic poets
• Ottava rima: stanzas which consist on 8 lines (abababcc): comic effect
- Mixed both serious and comic matters
• Don Juan experiences came from Byron’s
• Don Juan experiences things that nobleman are not supposed to experience
• Epistolary (from the past to the present)
• Heroic circumstances but in a mocking mood. E.g. Battle Don Juan vs. Don
Alfonso
- It is the longest English satirical novel
- Homme fatal (prototype): courtesy, good manners, he is seduced by a woman
- Above all, it is a satire of modern civilization
- Themes: public issues in general (nationalistic feelings from Portugal to Russia,
libertine, self-exploratory)
- Canto I
• Epic carnival (idea of carnavalesque): shows a wide range of people which
compose human nature
• Don Juan is important for the plot but he is not the most important character in
this canto
• Lord Byron wanted to kill his Don Juan during the French Revolution
• Main topics
Unhappy marriage: marriage of convenience leaves to disaster (Don
Juan’s parents, Don Alfonso and Donna Julia)
Deficient education: Don Juan has a formal education but he does not
learn anything about life (he does not know about self-control/impulse,
that is why he is seduced by women)
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1.3. 19th century’s thought and ideology: Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart
Mill, John Ruskin, De Quincey, Mathew Arnold, Charles Darwin and
Cardinal Newman.
ROMANTIC ESSAY
- Familiar essay
• A little bit different from the 19th century essay: written in a more
relaxed/subjective matter
• Issue related to outcast
• Mediators between the poets and the readers
- 18th century: time for journalism (great influence thanks to newspapers):
• Tatler and The Spectator (journals): people instructed and educated by knowing
what was happening
• Also by reviews and magazines (about liberal politics and published in chapters
monthly) → 19th century (e.g. London Magazine in 1820)
- 3 famous writers
1. William Hazlitt
Thanks to his critics to Shakespeare’s plays, Shakespeare is studied at
the university
Reported the parliamentary activities
2. Charles Lamb
3. Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859)
THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881)

- Contemporary of Romantic poets, translator of Goethe and historian of the French
Revolution
- Public discourse about the condition of English society in the time of the Industrial
Revolution
- Political essays, historiography (like The French Revolution: A History),
philosophical satires and fiction
- Pessimistic vision of the contemporary society
- Modern technical civilisation = gradual loss of individual freedom
- He criticised both the feudal and capitalist systems in his works: Sartor Resartus,
Chartism, Past and Present and Latter-Day Pamphlets
- “Condition of England Question”
• Phrase first used in his novel Chartism (1839)
• It significantly contributed to the emergence of a series of debates about the
spiritual and material foundations of England
• Great effect on a number of writers of fiction in Victorian era and after
• “The two nations theme”: the gap between the rich and the poor
• Industrial Revolution (“mechanical age”) was destroying human individuality
• Likewise other Victorian Condition of England novelists (Elizabeth Gaskell,
Charlotte Brontë or Charles Dickens), he attempted to persuade readers to look
for ways of reducing such antagonism between the “two nations”
- Past and Present
• As a response to the economic crisis which began in the early 1840´s
• Analysis of the Condition of England Question: question of Capitalism,
inequality between manufacturers and the working class
• Critical opinion about the present Condition of England in an elevated, prophetic
language
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• Depressing picture of the daily life of the workers

• Solution: spiritual rebirth of both the individual and society
• Contrasting visions of the past and the present
• Idealized vision of the past: chronicle of the monk Jocelyn of Brakelond, who
described the life of St. Edmund’s monastery → Organization of life and work
of the medieval monks as an authentic idyll and contemporary life increasingly
unbearable due to the lack of true leadership
JOHN STUART MILL (1806-1873)

- One of the greatest of Victorian liberal thinkers
- Works: texts in logic, epistemology, economics, social and political philosophy,
ethics, metaphysics, religion, and current affairs
- His most well-known essays: A System of Logic, Principles of Political Economy,
On Liberty, Utilitarianism, The Subjection of Women, Three Essays on Religion, and
his Autobiography
- In his twenties, he felt the influence of historicism, French social thought and
Romanticism
• Search for a new philosophic radicalism that would be more sensitive to the
limits on reform imposed by culture and history
• Emphasize the cultivation of our humanity, including the feelings and the
imagination
- Utilitarianism (1861/63)
• Based on Jeremy Bentham’s theories
• Differences between theories of intuition and those of experience
• Associated with the Greatest Happiness Principle
• How the term has been misunderstood and contaminated by opposed people
• Ultimate goal: achieve such happiness for the majority of people
• The principle of utility was the centerpiece of his ethical philosophy
• Utilitarian philosophy
The measure of right and wrong through happiness
Mill’s philosophy
◊ The goal of an action is not just to maximize happiness for
oneself, but for others
◊ Much happiness could be deduced from hard work and
intellectual pursuits
◊ People could attain happiness regardless of their education or
intellectual skill
◊ External sanctions (environment, other people), internal sanctions
(yourself)
To achieve happiness: freedom, individuality and no oppression of racial
minorities and women limited
- He became sympathetic to socialism
- Great advocate of the equality in human rights, whatever the conditions were
- He was a strong advocate of women’s rights and of political and social reforms:
proportional representation, labour unions and farm co-operatives
- He became a defender of individual liberty against the interference of both society
and state
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- While he advanced the cause of democracy to a considerable degree, he eloquently

argued for the right of women to vote (not successful)
- The Subjection of Women (1869)
• Co-written with his wife
• It caused controversy but today is a classic statement of liberal feminism
• In favour of equality of the sexes employing utilitarian arguments → inequality
of women would impede human progress in general
• The only way to find out whether there are actually differences between men
and women is by experiment
• Comparison of the legal status of women to the status of slaves
• Equality in marriage and under the law
JOHN RUSKIN (1819-1900)

- He was a social theorist
- He became important thanks to his book The Stones of Venice
• Tradition of the travels to Italy to improve people´s knowledge to the world
• Venice as glamour, wealth, art and culture
• Metaphor for the possible decline for Victorian values
• Redefine values
• Advice: to look back to the past to avoid mistakes in the future
THOMAS DE QUINCEY (1785-1859)

- He was born in Manchester and was the son of a successful merchant
- He read widely and acquired a reputation as a brilliant classicist
- Manchester Grammar School
• He ran away when he was 17
• Five months penniless and hungry on the streets of London (recorded in
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater)
- University of Oxford (1804), but left it four years later without taking his degree
- English Lake District
• He moved to be near his two literary idols (William Wordsworth and Samuel
Taylor Coleridge)
• After an initial period of intimacy, he was separated from both men
- Opium
• In 1813 he became dependent on it, a drug he began experimenting with during
his student days at Oxford
• He slid deeper into debt and addiction before penury forced him to join
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1819
- Over two hundred magazine articles on topics ranging from philosophy and history
to aesthetics, economics, literary criticism, and contemporary politics.
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821)

- Published in London Magazine Study
- Imprecise emotions in a hallucinatory suspension of reason
- Exploration of inner conscience and dreams as the road to unconsciousness (it is
more revealing than conscious intelligence)
- Study of addictions and of the impossibility to forget the past
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- Recollections of human kindness but also of childhood traumas to justify drug-

taking
- One of the most influential works of all autobiographies
- De Quincey may be said to scrutinise his life, somewhat feverishly, in an effort to
fix his own identity
- The opium is sold for money and this is not fair in respect of the poor: poor suffer
- The title seems to promise a graphic exposure of horrors
- Majestic neoclassical style (dense imagery and recondite vocabulary) applied to a
very romantic confessional writing (self-reflexive but contacting with the reader)
- Yet from the time of its publication, it was criticized
• Picture of the opium experience too positive and too enticing to readers (Opium
both relieves all pains and allows oneself to think clearly)
• He thought it was a gift from heaven
- Religious influence
• Comparison between the drug taking with the religious experience
• Drugs help us to forget problems and to be happy
• Pray: we hope that God will solve or at least minimize our problems and pain
- It influenced psychology and abnormal psychology (Freudian theories), and
attitudes towards dreams and imaginative literature
MATTHEW ARNOLD (1822-1888)

- Social critic (thinker) and an inspector of schools
- Poet: he gave it up because it did not give him the way to express himself
- Liberal education (training and formation): science, humanities, languages, classic
literatures ≠ vocational education (specialized)
- Criticism of the middle class → philistine people
• Care about wealth but not for intellectual matters
• Materialistic and ignorant, on aware of the suffering of the poors
- Essays in Criticism
• How to read properly the novels
• Attached Victorian values (contribution of the Bible as literature)
CHARLES DARWIN (1809-1882)

- English naturalist
- Restricted by the level of scientific development and technology: only individual
traits to explore the rules of biological evolution
- Thanks to his wife’s participation (believer of God), he focused more on facts and
logic instead of his personal feelings and insists
- Theory of evolution: he introduced natural selection
- Theory of evolution by natural selection
• Where all kinds of living things came from and how they became adapted to
their particular environments
• Evidences: the progressive nature of fossil forms in the geological record, the
geographical distribution of species…
• Evolutionism ≠ Creationism: the existence of the Creator is actually not
necessary at all
- Influenced by Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798)
• Malthus observed that in nature, plants and animals produce a greater number of
offspring than can survive
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• Human species could also do the same (growth of English population)

• Conclusion: unless family size was regulated, poverty and famine would be
global epidemics that could destroy the species
- Voyage of the Beagle (1839)
• Darwin was offered to travel on a survey ship (5 years)
• Most of these years investigating the geology and zoology of the lands he visited
• Specimens and observations immediately recorded in field notebooks
• Experiences recorded in a diary → basis of this book
- Origin of Species
• Organisms are malleable and not fixed natural kinds
• Domesticated plants and animals were known to be highly variable and to have
changed so much as to be classified as different species
• The existence and abundance of organisms was dependent on many factors, such
as climate, food, predation, available space
• Natural selection: effects of differential death and survival on reproduction and
the persistence and diversification of forms
• Evolution (three main elements): variation, selection and heredity
• Differences in an organism which could be are inherited by offspring:
subsequent generations would be descended from those which were lucky
enough to survive
• “Survival of the fittest”
Nature chooses the best individuals of each generation and they transmit
their favourable characteristics to their descendants
It gradually challenged and dislocated Victorian modes of thought,
accentuating the existing scepticism and pessimisms in the 1880s
- The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex
• Victorian mentality: Adam was created in God’s image
• Darwin
Humans were closer to animals than they were to God
Nature was not static but evolving
• His theories were rejected by religious and scientific circles
• Huge anxiety caused by the difference of classes
• Human evolution and the races were caused by politic reasons
- Darwin's writings produced profound reactions and influences in scientific studies,
psychology, literature and theology, many of which are still ongoing
JOHN HENRY NEWMAN/ CARDENAL NEWMAN (1801-1890)

- Preacher (but not a priest) and a thinker
- Leader of the Oxford Movement
• Revival of Catholic values (traditions of faith) in the Anglican Church (coming
back to the dogmas of the Bible)
• Liturgical celebration (first communion, confirmation...)
• Controversial: the opponents were those against the revival of Catholicism and
Utilitarianism
• He converted to Catholicism in order to preserve the values
• Agnosticism came from utilitarianism and scientific discoveries
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The novel of the early 19th century

2.1. Novel of Manners: Jane Austen. Study of Pride and Prejudice.
MIDDLE CLASS READERS → FEMALE READERS
- Different ways and themes than men (as domestic family)
- Critic towards the society of the family
- Respected the patriarchal order (controlled women in education)
- Regency period (1811-1820)
• George III (porphyria)
• Aristocracy
• Napoleonic threads
- Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, Ann Radcliffe, Frances Burney and
Charlotte Smith
JANE AUSTEN (1775-1817)

- She was born in Steventon Rectory, Hampshire, England
- From an upper middle class family and the daughter of the pastor George Austen
- Her sister Cassandra and she had difficulties to find an accommodation (they died
unmarried)
- Novels published secretly and by her brother Henry (she did not want to be
identified)
- Vocational and spontaneous writer
- Domestic duties and flirting (although she did not get married) → Get married +
have children = not possibility to write
- Master of the Novel of Manners: behaviour, languages, customs, values in an
specific social class and an specific historic setting
- Ironic tone following the 18th c., which surface of conformity of the patriarchal
order making fun of social conventions
- She died in Winchester, where she was buried
Characteristics of her novels

- Not necessarily autobiographical: their settings and situations dare to her life but not
the plots
- Not political values in her novels
- Power of observation: She reflected human
- Under sentimental/ romantic novels to call readers´ emotions (not to provoke strong
feelings in her readers)
- She cared about the destiny of women and their clash in society
- Particular setting
- Narrator voice is herself
- Not tragedies: under sentimental/romantic novels because they call readers´
emotions (do not provoke strong feeling in her readers)
- Test about the moral integrity of her characters´ feeling: their knowledge of the
world and the knowledge of themselves
- Philosophical contents: reason vs. feeling
- Conservative era in terms of religion
- Grace
- Agricultural depression: land, money (relationship between them) and class
- Very good observations of nature (very aware of geographical space)
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- No more rights for women, rather their duties: YOU HAVE TO RESPECT THE
RULES (merits of good manners, reason and marriage → institutions)
- Love: self-knowledge practicality (head and then with your heart)
- Restraint: you cannot show your feelings in public
Sense and Sensibility (1811)

- Written to make fun criticising literary forms
- The less important of her works
- Epistolary novel
- Clash between sense (Elinor) and sensibility (Marianne)
- Sisters Dashwood: their parents had passed away
- Topic: female financial dependence
- Plot: Henry Dashwood, their father, on his deathbed makes John (their half-brother)
promise to take care of his half-sisters. Immediately after Henry's burial, the
insensitive Fanny Ferrars cleverly persuades John not to make any provision for his
stepmother and half-sisters. Edward Ferrars, Fanny's brother, comes to stay and is
attracted to Elinor. Mrs. Dashwood and Marianne expect an engagement, but Elinor
is not so sure; she knows that Mrs. Ferrars and Fanny will object to Edward's
interest in her. The Dashwoods move and are met by Sir John, who does all in his
power to make them comfortable. They soon meet his wife and their four children.
One day, when Marianne and Margaret are walking on the downs, Marianne sprains
her ankle. She is carried home by a stranger, John Willoughby. Marianne and
Willoughby fall in love and are inseparable. But after a short time, he leaves
unexpectedly for London without explaining or declaring himself. Edward Ferrars
soon pays a visit to Barton Cottage. Lady Middleton's younger sister, Charlotte
Palmer, and her husband visit Barton Park. When they leave, Sir John invites the
Misses Steele, two young ladies whom he has met in Exeter and has found to be
connections of Mrs. Jennings. Lucy confides to Elinor that she has been secretly
engaged to Edward Ferrars for four years. He was tutored by her uncle and became
well acquainted with Lucy and Anne at that time. In London, Marianne waits for a
visit from Willoughby. She writes him several times but receives no reply. One day
he leaves his card but never calls personally. Finally, Elinor and Marianne see
Willoughby at a dance with a fashionable heiress, Miss Grey. She writes him for an
explanation, and he returns her letters with a cruel note, denying that he had ever
been especially interested in her and announcing his engagement to Miss Grey.
Colonel Brandon, who is also in London, is distressed by Willoughby's conduct to
Marianne and tells Elinor his own story. John Dashwood and his wife come to
London for the season. He meets his sisters and is introduced to the Middletons,
whom he finds very friendly. Marianne falls ill there and seems near death. Colonel
Brandon is also staying at Cleveland and offers to go to get Mrs. Dashwood. While
Elinor awaits her mother's arrival, she is amazed by a visit from Willoughby. He has
heard of Marianne's illness and has come to get news of her. He tells Elinor how
bitterly he repents of his conduct and how wretched his wife has made him. Elinor is
sorry for him. Marianne recovers and the family returns to Barton Cottage.
Eventually, Elinor tells Marianne about Willoughby's repentant visit. Marianne is
now sorry that the family has suffered on her behalf. Everything ends happily.
Edward Ferrars is reconciled to his mother and marries Elinor. Eventually Marianne
agrees to marry Colonel Brandon, and the two couples live happily, close in distance
and in friendship
- Elinor and Colonel Brandon and Marianne and John Willoughby
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- Not show feelings in public

- Social satire
- Romance vs. hash reality
Northanger Abbey (post. 1818)

- Written to make fun criticising literary forms
- Published after Jane Austen’s death
- Plot: Catherine Morland is a seventeen girl who lives in a small village with her
parents and siblings. The Allens, a wealthy couple, invite her to visit Bath (a resort
town in England) with them. She is thrilled to get out: her views of life outside are
highly coloured by the Gothic novels she reads. While in Bath, she meets Henry
Tilney at a ball and quickly feels in love with him. She also meets Isabella Thorpe,
who is in love with Catherine’s older brother James. James is a good friend of
Isabella’s older brother, so the Thorpes decide that Catherine is perfect for John, but
John is rude. The Thorpe siblings manipulate both James and Catherine to ensure
advantageous marriages for themselves. Catherine is still falling in love with Henry
Tilney. She also meets his sister Eleanor. Henry, Eleanor and General Tilney decide
to leave Bath and invite Catherine to visit them at Northanger Abbey. While
Catherine is there, her love of Gothic novels and her tendency to confuse fiction
with reality come back to haunt her. General Tilney throws her out of his house. She
returns home but Henry follows her. He explains her that his father knew that she
was not as rich as he thought, so they could not longer socialize. Against his father’s
wishes, Henry proposes Catherine and they get married.
- Catherine: very naïf, she cannot distinguish between reality and fantasy because she
had read a lot of gothic novels
- Eleanor-Henry (he loves Catherine). Their father was General Tilney and their mother
passed away
- Criticism against Gothic Novel: imagination can be dangerous because it avoids
reality (it cannot shape reality)
Pride and Prejudice (1813)

- First Impressions → first title for the manuscript
- Basic features → basic form of Austen’s novels
- Philosophical detachment
- Not typical Victorian heroine (Elizabeth Bennet): models of human nature, not
idealized figures
- Issue of getting married in country gentry communities (difficulties: getting married
only for economical purposes)
- Social boundaries can fluid
- About love and social rank: there are not revolutionary contents but conservative plots
- IMPORTANT: Issue of the narrator and how the story is told (intrusive narrator)
- Realist novel ≠ Realism
• Portrays characters experiences and events (although it is fiction)
• Under the Romantic frame and opposed to the Gothic novel
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- Narrative technique: different kinds of narrator (Jane Austen’s voice)

• Omniscient/unmediated narrator: 1st person narrator, direct speech (dialogues)
• Intrusive/mediated narrator: 3rd person narrator, indirect speech (her point of
view)
• Plus of both → Free indirect discourse: sometimes we do not know who exactly
is talking. We need to know the personality of the characters in order not to get
lost
- Letters help to understand situations (anticipate future events, explain situations, and
marriage proposals)
- Plot: Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and their five daughters live in Hertfordshire and they are
not rich. The main wish of Mrs. Bennet is to see all her daughters married,
preferably to men with large fortunes. She sees an opportunity for her eldest
daughter Jane when Mr. Charles Bingley, a wealthy gentleman from the city,
occupies the nearby estate of Netherfield Park. Mr. Bingley brings along his two
sisters, Caroline Bingley and Louisa Hurst, and his closest friend, Mr. Fitzwilliam
Darcy. Bingley is immediately attracted to Jane Bennet. When Bingley suggests
Darcy to dance with Elizabeth Bennet, he refuses and negatively comments on her
looks. Elizabeth overhears the comment and develops a strong prejudice against
him.
Jane and Bingley continue to be attracted to one another. Caroline Bingley invites
Jane to Netherfield for a visit. While at Netherfield, Jane falls ill and Elizabeth
comes to look after her sister. During her short stay at Netherfield, Elizabeth
concludes that Caroline’s friendship and cordiality towards Jane is only a pretense.
Mr. Collins, a clergy man who is a relative of the Bennets, pays a visit to Longbourn
with the intention of proposing marriage to one of the Bennet daughters. He is
attracted to Jane, but Mrs. Bennet informs him that she is about to be engaged. He
then turns his attention to Elizabeth and makes a ridiculous proposal of marriage to
her. When Elizabeth rejects him, he proposes to her friend Charlotte Lucas, who
accepts him.
Bingley and his companions soon depart for London. Both Bingley and Caroline
write to Jane to say that they have left Netherfield and have no plans of returning to
it in the near future. Jane is very disappointed. Elizabeth meets Mr. Wickham and is
magnetically attracted to him. They have a friendly conversation in which she
reveals her dislike of Darcy. Taking advantage of this information, Wickham tells
Elizabeth that he has been cheated by Darcy. Elizabeth takes pity on him and almost
falls in love.
At the invitation of the Gardiners, Jane goes to London. She hopes that she sees
Bingley, even accidentally. Jane makes many attempts to get in touch with him, but
Caroline does not even inform her brother about Jane’s presence in London. Jane is
heart broken, but grows to accept her rejection.
Elizabeth goes to Hunsford to visit Mr. Collins and his new wife Charlotte. During
her stay, Darcy happens to visit his aunt, who also lives there, and attempts to build
a relationship with Elizabeth. To her surprise, Darcy proposes marriage to her in a
language so arrogant that Elizabeth turns him down indignantly. The next morning
Darcy meets Elizabeth when she goes out for a walk and hands her a long letter that
answers all her accusations.
There is also another shock awaiting her. Her youngest sister Lydia has been invited
to Brighton by a young officer’s wife. Lydia is very excited about the trip; but
Elizabeth knows how stupid and flirtatious Lydia is. She tries to persuade her father
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not to allow Lydia to go to Brighton. Her father, however, dismisses Elizabeth’s

fears.
Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner plan a tour of the Lake District and take Elizabeth with them.
At the last minute, however, they decide to restrict their trip to Derbyshire, where
Darcy has his vast estate. Elizabeth makes sure that Darcy is away on business and
then agrees to visit that estate, out of sheer curiosity. The housekeeper speaks very
highly of Darcy, saying he is just and fair. Elizabeth cannot believe that she has
made such a mistake in judging his character. As Elizabeth is looking over those
lovely grounds, Darcy himself appears, returning a day before he is expected. He
looks surprised to see Elizabeth, and she is intensely embarrassed. He is polite to her
and the Gardiners, and Elizabeth notices that there is no trace of pride in him.
The following day, Bingley calls on Elizabeth, and his anxious inquiries about Jane
indicate that he is still in love with her. Darcy and his beautiful sister, Georgiana,
also call on Elizabeth at the inn to invite her and the Gardiners to dinner. Elizabeth
accepts the dinner invitation. During the dinner, Caroline tries her best to destroy the
friendly relationship between Darcy and Elizabeth by running down Elizabeth’s
family, but she does not succeed. Darcy is fond of Elizabeth.
News comes that Lydia has eloped with Wickham, so Elizabeth and the Gardiners
return home. Darcy convinces Wickham to marry Lydia, pays up his debts, and
persuades him to settle in the North of London. Darcy then requests that the
Gardiners not reveal his help to the Bennet family. Elizabeth, however, finds out the
truth about Darcy’s assistance. She is impressed with his kindness.
Bingley reappears at Netherfield Park, and they are soon engaged. Lady Catherine
also arrives unannounced. She threatens Elizabeth with dire consequences if she
marries Darcy, but Elizabeth refuses to promise that she will not accept a proposal
from Darcy. A few days later, Darcy makes a second proposal of marriage to
Elizabeth and she accepts. The two couples, Jane and Bingley and Elizabeth and
Darcy, are married on the same morning. Mrs. Bennet is overjoyed at having three
of her daughters married, two of them to very rich young men.
- Characters
• They are not static: self-scrutiny to get self-knowledge

• Evolution of Elizabeth and Darcy
• They do not embody only one characteristic/quality
• Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy
• Mr Charles Bingley- Miss Caroline Bingley
• George Wickham: soldier of the army, his father worked for the Darcy family
• Mr William Collins looks for an angelical/ideal woman to marry
• Personality of characters by the writer but also by themselves (their behaviour
and the language they use)
• Mr Bennet: sarcastic man
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• Mrs Bennet: psychologically is very unstable (she wants to get all her daughter
married for economic security) and also a practical woman (if her husband dies
they would not have neither property nor security)
• Sir William Lucas → self-inflated character: “I have to be respected”. A lot of
vanity in this character
- Chapter 1
• The essential one
• Main issues that are going to happen in the novel
• Mrs Bennett’s thoughts (not only in this chapter) → “I want one of my
daughters to marry Mr Bingley”
• Characters´ qualities, interactions, social environment
- Topics
• Mr Darcy (pride, antihero) vs. Elizabeth (prejudice) → Process of evaluating to
change her mind
• First impressions can make us do mistakes
• Women problem: if they do not get married they would not have property
(house)
• Sisterly affection: strong sensibility between Jane and Elizabeth because they
love each other
• Criticism of the army: they must be fighting against Napoleon instead of flirting
with girls
• Parental negligence: not patriarchal figure in Bennets´ family
• Restrain
• 2nd marriage proposal: more about perceptions, sensations, more romantic
• Save the honour of Lydia: Bennets´ honour is saved because Darcy pays Lydia’s
wedding with Wickham
• When Lizzy goes to Darcy’s house she realizes that he would be a good man to
marry
• Elizabeth is criticised because of her family connections and also by her
personality (independence of thoughts, she is athletic, that was not considered to
be too feminine at that time)
• Women have to be married but they have their own mind
• Society and class
Representation of Jane Austen’s immediate social experience
“Two inches of ivory”: snobbery, she worked as miniaturist in her novels
↓
Perfect sketch of this little world
Some people think that she did not care about the rest of the world
Important social issues: mobilisation of the middle class (e.g. Sir
William Lucas, as he became a knight he gets social mobility)
Mansfield Park (1814)

- Warning: children may be controlled by their parents in order not to corrupt them
- Plot: Fanny Price (10 years old) lives with her family. As it is too big and too poor,
her mother decides to send her to Mansfield Park to live with her wealthy relatives,
the Bertrams. Fanny grows up very shy and is often ignored and treated unkindly by
her relatives. Many years after, financial problems force her uncle to go check on his
plantation in the Caribbean. Meanwhile, two wealthy siblings (Henry and Mary
Crawford) move to a nearby house. Two Fanny’s cousins (Maria and Julia Bertram)
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are both in love with Henry, Mary Crawford ends up interested in Edmund Bertram,
and Fanny herself is in love with Edmund too. The young people all get into lots of
trouble while Sir Thomas is out of town. When he returns home unexpectedly,
Henry departs, which breaks the hearts of Maria and Julia. Maria decides to marry
Mr. Rushworth and leaves for her honeymoon with Julia in town. Meanwhile, Mary
starts up a friendship with Fanny, but Fanny is thrilled when her brother (William
Price) pays a visit. Mary and Edmund fall further in love. Henry falls in love with
Fanny, but when he proposes, Fanny refuses him. Sir Thomas decides to send Fanny
to visit her family. While there, she discovers that Mansfield Park has become her
real home. Finally, Tom falls ill, Julia elopes and Edmund and Mary end their
relationship. Eventually, Edmund falls in love with Fanny and they get married
- Topic: ORDER
• Disrupted by Thomas (George III)
• New order by Edmund (Prince of Wales, in the future George IV) and Fanny:
moral integrity
Emma (1816)
- It is like a comedy of errors at Shakespeare’s time
- 3rd person narrator
- Appearances vs. reality
- Chaperon: adult person who controls that between a man and a woman there is not
sexual relations
- Plot: Emma Woodhouse is a young, pretty and smart woman who lives with her old
father. Mr. Woodhouse loves her, but he is unable to offer her any guidance, which
is perhaps why Emma does not see her own limitations. Even though her friend
Harriet is determined never to marry herself, she immediately decides to find her a
husband. Determined to make her into a gentlewoman, Emma convinces Harriet to
abandon Robert Martin (the young farmer who likes her) and set her sights on the
town’s clergyman, Mr. Elton. Unfortunately, he is love with Emma, or at least with
her money. When Frank Churchill comes to town, Emma tries very hard to fall in
love with him herself. She flirts with him in front of Jane Fairfax, a young woman
who recently returned to Highbury to live with her aunts. Meanwhile, Emma
decides that Frank might be the perfect new man for Harriet. Emma´s feats are
watched- and commented upon. By her good friend, Mr. Knightley. Although
Emma frequently ignores his advice, she appreciates his good opinion.
Unfortunately, Harriet confesses that she loves Mr. Knightley, not Frank. All of a
sudden, Emma realizes that she loves him too. Convinced that Mr. Knightley might
be interested in Harriet, Emma crushes Mr. Knightley´s attempts to propose to her.
Finally, Emma marries Mr. Knightley, and Harriet marries the farmer
- Characters
• Emma Woodhouse
Witty and intelligent woman
She would inherit everything before getting married because she is an
only child
She does not want to get married but she is matchmaker
She would have to change (narrow-minded)
• Mr Knightley
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Persuasion (post 1818)

- It starts in medias res
- Plot: The Elliots, a family of minor nobility, are in financial trouble. Their sense of
how important they are has long been larger than their bank account allows. So they
move out of the ancestral mansion and rent out the place to someone else to increase
their income. And so the Elliots move out, and the newly rich Admiral Croft and his
wife move in. While the Crofts are total strangers to the Elliots, Mrs. Croft's brother,
Captain Wentworth, is not. In fact, years ago he and the middle Elliot daughter,
Anne, were already taking marriage after dating for a few months. Wentworth's
service in the navy, however, did not give him enough social status to please Anne's
family and her mentor, Lady Russell. Eventually Lady Russell persuaded Anne to
break it off with Wentworth. Meanwhile, Wentworth has struck it rich, but has
never gotten back in touch. Back in the present, Anne's dad Sir Walter, her older
sister Elizabeth, and Mrs. Clay go to Bath, where they can show off more cheaply
than at home. Anne stays first with Lady Russell, and then with Mary Elliot, who is
married with children to Charles Musgrove. Captain Wentworth comes to visit his
sister. Not only is he still angry at Anne for abandoning him, but he is flirting with
her cousin-in-law, Louisa Musgrove. Anne and the Musgroves go with Wentworth
to visit his old friend Captain Harville. As a bonus, they get to meet Harville's
family and his friend, Captain Benwick, who reads the saddest poetry he can find
through the death of his fiancée. A fun time is had by all, until Louisa tries to show
off by leaping off a staircase into Wentworth's arms, but instead takes a headfirst
dive into the pavement. While everyone else is staggering about, only Anne gets
Louisa medical attention. Louisa stays in bed at Lyme with the Harvilles, while
Anne goes with Lady Russell to see what her dad and sister have been doing in
Bath. They have been making friends with one William Elliot. Elizabeth has her eye
on Mr. Elliot, but he is interested in Anne. Anne gets a letter from her sister Mary,
where Mary tells her that Louisa is getting married, but with Captain Benwick. And
that elsewhere he decides to look turns out to be the town of Bath, as Anne meets
Wentworth one rainy morning when she is out shopping with Elizabeth, Mrs. Clay,
and the attentive Mr. Elliot (who the local gossips are convinced is going to marry
Anne). Wentworth and Anne cross paths again at a concert, where Anne realizes
that Wentworth is still madly in love with her. Anne visits her old friend Mrs.
Smith, whose life was ruined by Mr. Elliot. Anne is relieved to have some
information of that kind if her family hassles her about wanting to marry Wentworth
instead of Mr. Elliot. The next time Anne and Wentworth meet, Anne tries to say
him that he should propose (again). Finally, they get married
- Characters
• Anne Elliot: 27, spinster, out of bloom, she feels depressed and is considered to
be old. Daughter of a member of aristocracy: Sir Elliot (Elizabeth, Mary =
Charles Musgrove). She has not mother but Lady Russell
• Captain Wentworth
- External influence: two opposed worlds
• Aristocracy: corruption
• Navy: honesty
• Clash between them
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2.2. Regional Novel: Maria Edgeworth and Sir Walter Scott

MARIA EDGEWORTH (1767-1849)
- Born and educated in England
- Protestant family
- Mother of the historical novel
- Creator of the regional novel
- There is an understanding of Ireland in her novels
- Sympathetic towards Catholics although she was Protestant
- She had hope for the future
- History:
• A lot of suppression to Irish people
• Potato famine (around 1845): a significant of the population died due to bad
crops. They could not provide food for their families nor pay their rent → some
emigrated to London, England
- Comic and serious in portrayal of the history of England
- Thought: English manners were superior
- Literature for children and books about women’s education
- She did not encourage Irish dependence and was in favour of the Act of Union
- Castle Rackrent (1800)
• Glossary which explains terms for the readers to interpret
• English people to understand Irish people (their history, costumes, culture…)
- The Absentee (1812)
• Story about the Clonbronys, a family who is asked to return to Ireland to take
care of an state
• Maria is requesting the aristocracy to return English people to Ireland
• English manners are superior → English aristocracy can solve many problems in
Irish society
- Ormond (1817)
• Story of an Irish hero
• Journey from poverty to wealth and also travels in France
• The protagonist (Harry Ormond) finds out in the end that he has to be loyal to
England
• Ireland and England have to work together (mutual utility) → “We have more in
common than we think”
• English aristocracy to come back to Ireland and teach the Irish population
SIR WALTER SCOTT (1771-1822)

- Scottish and raised by his parents in a farm
- Sick of polio when he was growing up
- He liked to read → found in oral traditions Jacobite rebellions (political movement
from the 17th-19th c.)
• James should came back to the throne
• Support to the Stuarts because they were Roman Catholics
- His father was a lawyer and he became it too
- Supporter2 of Scotland
- England and Scotland → 1 country, but he was tolerant with minorities
- Political writer
- Very well-know and respected writer ( ≠ Jane Austen)
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- First, long narrative poems: “Marmion” (1808) and “The Lady of the Lake” (1810)
- Later, narrative prose
- Landowner but he lost a lot of money because of the economic crash (1826)
- Master of language
- Good knowledge of Scottish history
- Main features to understand his literature:
• Only by looking to the past we can understand the current moment/ present
• Continuity
- Blending of romance and history in his novels (romance → fiction, new characters;
history → ingredient to create fiction/ fantasy)
- He claimed to respect Scottish history, tradition and society (they should be modern)
- He became an international writer
- Plots: loose, disconnected
- Described the spirit of the past rather than being chronological
- Strength: narrating the way of speaking (he was an expert on language and customs)
- Uncommon events occur in his novels, strong passionate love
- Technical flaws but he was a best-selling author. Nowadays he is not widely read
- Nor supporter of the middle class as Edgeworth
- Conservative in his political novels
- Colourful world with outcast characters as tradesmen, servants, crazy people
- Claim: Scottish society has evolved from the last Jacobite rebellion
- Historical novels
• Waverley (1814)
His most important novel
Not only Jacobite rebellions to get the Stuarts back to the throne but also
against the Houses of the Parliament
• The Heart of the Midlothian (1818)
Firstly published anonymously
We can learn from the past and we must not reject it
• Others: Ivanhoe, Kenilworth
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Gothic novel in the 19th century

3.1. Antecedents and evolution until the end of the century (Bram
Stoker, R. L. Stevenson)
THE GOTHIC NOVEL
- Setting many times, medieval, but generally not in the Gothic times
- Post-medieval
- Considered to be a low class movement
- Addressed to middle class women
- Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) → first Gothic novel; story of sex
and power
- Emotional response
• Writers wanted physical response (fear: related to fantasy; strong, supernatural,
unknown and extraordinary events) vs. Austen (reality, everyday life)
• Ingredients: fantasy, mystery, terror
- Setting: gloomy castles, monasteries, convents, churches…
- The Sublime (Edmund Burke)
• Title: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and
the Beautiful (1756)
• To witness extreme/excessive beauty that causes a climax between pain and
rationality
• Horror can cause the sublime
- Delightful horror
• Fascination felt with pain, danger and terror when reading a Gothic novel
• When reading a Gothic novel danger is controlled because readers know it is
fiction
- Gothic novel vs. Enlightment
- Themes
• Subversion, transgression
• Dark sexual desires (young women persecuted, sexual tension, satisfaction of
sexual desires)
• Sense of mystery and terror (secret passages, old mansions, inexplicable events,
deaths, ghosts, dreams…)
• Human’s unconscious/ dark side, perverse instincts
• Fantasy of liberation (women → dominated by men in family; the state and the
church)
• Chaos, the unknown
- “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”: poem written by Thomas Gray and a
great inspiration for the Gothic novel
- Main Gothic writers (women)
• Mary Shelley and Ann Radcliffe
• The heroines of her novels show how they feel (oppressed, against the
patriarchal order)
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- Theoretical concepts of the Gothic novel

• Literary criticism of Gothic novel: recapture and recover the values of the
Gothic novels
• Feminism
• Psychoanalysis
• New historicism: trend to revise all the text
• Cultural studies
- The Uncanny/ Das Unhemlich (1919)- Freud
• Psychoanalysis is, in a way, uncanny → Gothic test: primitive desires
• Definition: “[…] nothing else than a hidden, familiar thing that has undergone
repression and then emerged from it, and that everything that is uncanny fulfils
this condition”
• Brake the animate and the inanimate
• A ghost might be someone belonged to your family
• World of experience, death, castration, superstitions
• E.T.A. Hoffmann: The Sandman and The Devil’s Elixir
- The Shadow (1930)- Freud and Jung
• Psychoanalytic point of view
• What reminds of human consciousness
• Personality trades and behaviour that when we are conscious are not compatible
with ourselves: we reject culturally but they do not disappear because we are
attracted to them
• Gothic novel explain all these trades of unconscious
- The Doppelgänger - Otto Rank
• The self-love which appears in childhood and makes children self-confident but
when they grow up it disappears and causes a feeling of uncanny in the person
• Our evil twin (Good twin, bad twin): imitation of someone else
• Very recurrent in Gothic novel
• It represents the materialization of our dark side (separation of a being) or what
we want to do.
Frankenstein is the name of the creator but we identify the creation with
this name
Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hide
Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales
Hoffmann’s The Devil’s Elixir: mental breakdown of psychiatric patients
- The Fantastic (1975)
• ≠ The Marvellous (world of non-real characters)
• Literary genre where the events in the novels are caused by the uncertainty (real
or supernatural event)
• At the beginning, normal and believable events and characters. Later on there
are events that we cannot understand in our consciousness
• Supernatural explanation: insanity (mental breakdown)
• Criteria
The novel makes us believe that the situation and the characters can be
true, but there is a hesitation
Hesitation is shared between the main character and the reader
The reader discards allegoric history
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• Different kind of topics

The look: we would find in Gothic novels windows to see the world
(Alice in Wonderland → holes), mirrors to see a ghost, our own fears,
predeterminism (superstitions, déjà vu, hesitations)
The discourse: relationship with the others
- The Grotesque
• It is primarily concerned about the distortion and transgression of boundaries, be
they physical boundaries between two objects, or psychological boundaries, or
anything in-between.
• Exaggeration also plays a role
• Animals that become humans: sometimes both comic and disgusting, but also
sympathy for this kind of characters in the novel
- The Abject- Julia Kristeva
• Human reaction
• “Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection” by Julia Kristeva
• Love of distinction between the subject and the object: corpse (we do not want
to be a corpse ourselves)
• Scatological materials cause vomit or adrenaline. Explanation: when we become
adults we reject what caused us pleasure
ANN RADCLIFFE (1764-1823)

- Inspiration in Italy (Catholic country) although she never went to Italy (settings
through the paints of Salvator Rosa)
- They are superior to the villains
- Novels (intellect emotions)
• The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)- Emily
• The Italian (1797)- Ellena
CHARLES ROBERT MATURIN (1782-1824)

- He represents the figure of tormented hero
- Goethe’s Faust → Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) goes to the past (story within a
story)
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MAIN GOTHIC NOVELS AT THE END OF THE CENTURY

1. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)- Robert Louis Stevenson
• Main narrator: Gabriel John Utterson. He investigated about his friend (2nd hand
account with the events)
• 1st hand account by the letters (it might be reliable or not)
• Correlation: East and West London with the two sides of the brain
• Duality of human nature (2 faces in 1 person): reflection of double sexuality
(possible homosexuality)
• Importance of reputation
• Crime related with sexuality: homosexuality, rapes, prostitution
• Dr. Jekyll and his dark side
• Dr. Jekyll is a scientific with a good reputation and he is very ambitious as Dr.
Frankenstein. Also he is selfish and wants to have the best of the two worlds
(fame, reputation, experiment with perversion)
• Bad side takes over: Mr. Hyde ends with Dr. Jekyll
2. Dracula (1897)- Bram Stoker
• Introduced the myth of Dracula to Western Europe and America
• Dracula existed in the 15th c.: Vlad Dracula- The Impale Prof. van Helsing
• Territory of the undead: Black Death → corpses rise from death, night-living
• Transylvania → modern England (modern London)
• Consequences of abandoning old traditions and good values: female sexuality,
female promiscuity
• Epistolary novel → credibility (diary entries, letters)
• It tries to show modernity
• Gothic mood of terror
• Christian propaganda to salvation
• Plot: Jonathan Harker, a young London solicitor travels to Transylvania to help a
rich nobleman: Count Dracula. Dracula is planning to immigrate to England, and
wants Harker to help him with all the legal details. Harker is at first impressed
by Dracula's politeness, but he is soon terrified by the Count's weird ability to
communicate with wolves and by the lack of servants in the Count's huge castle.
Soon after, Harker realizes that he's a prisoner in the castle.
One evening, he is discovered and almost seduced by three sexy vampire ladies
(the brides of Dracula). Dracula rescues him at the last minute, and Harker
realizes that he is only kept alive to finish the real estate transaction. Harker
escapes from the castle alive, though he's not able to come back to England
directly. He comes down with a severe case of brain fever because of the shock
and spends many weeks recuperating in a convent in Hungary.
Meanwhile, back in England, Harker's fiancée, Mina, is with her best friend
Lucy in a seaside town. Mina wonders why she has not heard from Harker in so
long, but Lucy can only think about her own suitors. She gets three marriage
proposals in the same day and she accepts Arthur Holmwood (the son of an
English gentleman). Even though Quincey Morris and Dr. Seward (the other
suitors) are disappointed, they still stay friends with Arthur.
Meanwhile Dracula has arrived in England, a patient in Dr. Seward's hospital,
continually captures and eats insects and birds and says that the "Master" is
coming soon. Lucy seems to be losing blood, but no one knows where the blood
is going. Her fiancé gets worried, and Dr. Seward sends for his friend and
mentor, Van Helsing, to check her out.
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Van Helsing realizes that there's a vampire involved. He's a scientist and doctor,
but he also knows what to do to kill vampires. Even after giving her multiple
blood transfusions, Lucy dies. But Van Helsing knows she is not really dead.
The four men break into her tomb and catch vampire Lucy coming back from an
attack in the neighboring village. They stab her in the heart and cut off her head
to make sure she is really dead.
Mina finally hears from Harker and goes to Budapest. They get married and
come back to England. Harker, Van Helsing, Seward, Morris, and Holmwood all
go to kill Dracula. Meanwhile Mina has to hide in Dr. Seward's office at the
hospital. Unfortunately, Renfield (the crazy men) knows about Dracula and
invites him into the building, and he starts drinking Mina's blood. The men come
back in time to find her being attacked by Dracula's blood thirst. The case is now
extremely urgent – if they don't catch and kill Dracula quickly, Mina will turn
into a vampire, like Lucy. Dracula comes back to Transylvania, where they
finally catch up to him and kill him: Mina is saved.
• Characters
Jonathan Harker
Mina: Harker´s fiancée
Prof. van Helsing discovers that Lucy has been attacked by a vampire
and tries to save her life
• Shipwreck of a Russian ship with belongings of Count Dracula
• Topics
Life vs. death
Natural vs. supernatural
East vs. West: English superiority comparing to others, foreign and
oppressed people
Technology and modernity vs. superstitions
Vampirism: metaphor of sexual desires (Dracula attacks virgin women)
• Metaphors related to sexuality:
Blood: transgression of Christian right of blood (the blood of Christ)
Bite throat = penetration
3.2. Mary Shelley. Study of Frankenstein.

PERCY SHELLEY
- From an aristocratic family and educated in Oxford
- How oppressive the world can be: He was mocked because he was not so athletic
because of his health
- Treat “The Necessity of Atheism”: rejections of religious dogmas and myths
- London: he met Goodwill and become one of his disciples
- Very radical and political institutions
- Eloped with Mary Shelley to Europe because he was not considered a writer in the
UK
- Appreciated in the 20th c
- Poetry: regeneration, it can kill the tyranny of our world, can overstep laws
- Precursor of modern poetry
- Sceptical idealism: change the world being sceptical of what was established in
politics and religion. Radical optimism
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- “Ode to the West Wind” (1820)

• Mythical and biblical imagery (tradition)
• Classical form but revolutionary contents
• Metaphors (literal figurative → description) but also the other way round
(figurative → literal description) → MANY PROBLEMS TO THE READERS
• Topics: spiritual and emotional regeneration (seasons, rebirth, passing of the
time metaphorically)
• Too complex, irrational
- “Prometheus Unbound” (1820)
• Prose
• Myth of Prometheus Aesclylus
• Mythical drama combining his political ideas (revolutionary purposes)→ Issue
of liberty because Prometheus is released from his punishment
• Battle: drama vs. lyrics
• Prometheus with the shape of Satan → “Paradise Lost” (John Milton)
• Lyrical celebration from the internal enemies (fears, limits of human beings) and
the external ones (at least in literary circles)
• Regeneration and progress of human kind
MARY SHELLEY (1797-1851)

- Daughter of William Goodwill and Mary Wondercraft (she died when she was giving
birth to her)
- Adored her father and hated her step-mother
- Eloped to Europe with Percy Shelley. Both were good friends of Lord Byron
- Their forth baby was the only one who survived: Percy Florence → Influence in
Frankenstein
- Bad health depression
- Widow when she was 30
Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818, 1831)

- She wrote it anonymously
- It became from the decision of write a terror tale to tell to everyone
- 1818: first publication; 1831: adaptation (new version with changes)
- Title: the Modern Prometheus → “Prometheus Unbound”
- Tremendous success and an immediate classic
- Not only a Gothic novel, but also a work of proto-science fiction (as science was
going on)
- Epistolary novel: Robert Walton’s letters to his sisters
- Important narrator: Unreliable narrators and shift perspectives
• Robert Walton: he wants to provide credibility
• Dr. Frankenstein: 1st hand version- 2nd hand version. It is not himself who tells
the story
• Monster (unnamed creation, known as Frankenstein): he is between Robert and
his creator
- Hesitation: we do not know if the monster exists or it is Victor himself
- Characters
• Robert Walton: explore the North Pole
• Victor Frankenstein: South Germany (investigates about life). He is frighten
because he realizes what he has done (the transgression) and its consequences
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• Monster: he wants not to be alone. When he murder Elizabeth its persecution

starts. As Satan, he is jealous and becomes angry because he feels miserable
• Roles are interchangeable: Frankenstein → “Paradise Lost”
- Plot: The story begins when Captain Robert Walton arrives to St. Petersburg,
probably near the end of the 18th century. He is going to hire some Russians to go
sailing off to the North Pole. Unfortunately, the boat gets stuck in impassable ice
hundreds of miles from land. He writes letters to his sister, who is in England. In
them, he complains that he wants a worthy companion. Soon, Walton's despair is
interrupted by the sight of a man on the ice. It seems as if Walton's wish for a friend
has come true. Except this new guy, Victor. Victor started out like any normal kid in
Geneva, with his parents adopting a girl named Elizabeth for him to marry when he
was older. At college, he decides to study natural philosophy and chemistry. In
about two years, he figures out how to bring a body made of human corpse pieces to
life. Afterwards, he is horrified by his own creation and is sick for months while his
friend Henry Clerval nurses him back to health.
Back in Geneva, Victor's younger brother, William, is murdered. The Frankenstein
family servant, Justine, is accused of killing him. Victor magically intuits that his
monster is the real killer, but he is afraid to even propose his theory.
Victor, in pain, goes to the Swiss Alps. All too conveniently, he runs into the
monster, who confesses the crime and tells him that, when Frankenstein run away,
he found himself alone and hideous. No one accepted him, except for one old blind
man. He hoped that the blind man's family of cottagers would give him compassion,
but even they drove him away. When he ran across William, he killed the boy out of
revenge.
After much persuading, Victor agrees. But, just before he finishes, he destroys the
second monster because he is afraid that the two will bring destruction to humanity
rather than love each other harmlessly. The monster sees him do this and swears
revenge. When Victor lands on a shore among Irish people, they accuse him of
murdering Henry, who has been found dead. He's acquitted, but not before another
long illness.
Victor returns to Geneva and prepares to marry Elizabeth, but he is a little worried:
the monster has sworn to be with him on his wedding night. Victor thinks the
monster is threatening him, but the night he and Elizabeth are married, the monster
kills the bride instead. This causes Victor's father to pass away from sorrow. Alone
and bent on revenge, Victor chases the monster over all imaginable terrain until he
is ragged and near death. Walton discovers the monster crying over Victor's dead
body.
- Main features
• Criticism of the family Frankenstein
• Criticism of the female character in patriarchal socialization (Justine and
Elizabeth). The monster also represents it
• Allegory of the anxiety of motherhood (Mary had lost 2 babies before write it)
• Responsibility of become a good mother (Dr. Frankenstein is not a good mother)
• Domestic affections: moral corruption because Dr. Frankenstein does not give
affection to his creation, he is abandoned
- Purpose
• Speak about the mysterious fears in nature (also the human nature) → Body
response of the reader reading a Gothic novel
• Explore the responsibility of knowledge and human rights → Consequences
when limits are transgressed
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- Topics
1. Dangerous knowledge
Dr. Frankenstein: success but he expends the rest of his life persecuting
the monster
Robert Walton: he does not succeed but he gets more success because of
the experience
To know when to stop → SUCCESS
Humans create life from dead bodies and mock about the power of God
because traditionally He was the only one to give life
Overreach: imitate God (Faust, Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll)
2. Sublime nature
Beneficial impact
Refuge against all that Dr. Frankenstein has done
Protects the monster
Natural forces vs. supernatural powers
3. Monstrosity of the creature: mixture of science and supernatural forces
4. Process of self-education of the monster (Rousseau and Locke)
Good savage
Innate goodness: we all were born to be good but the experience of
civilization can corrupt us/ makes us to become a monster
Tabula rasa: learn by experience (adapt oneself to the world)
5. Parallelism
Dr. Frankenstein (God) and the monster (at least, Adam): Human
loneliness → sympathy for these creatures
Monster as Satan
11th c. heroes (as Heathcliff) and the monster: lack of affection, not rules,
abandoned
6. Motherless book
Inexistent, passive or irrelevant female
Uncanny: she “killed” her mother when she was born
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Victorian novel
4.1. The Brontë sisters. Study of Jane Eyre.
- “The Woman Question”
• Reforms, more rights for citizens (only men, not women)
• Domesticity: not politics, not properties, not educational opportunities
• Conditions at work were very bad and very hard for women (low class women
had to work in the factories)
• Parliament: more rights for women (little by little), women access to education
(university because they were allowed only to finishing school)
• 1848: first college for women. They could not go to Oxford and Cambridge
• Middle-class women could get married or become governess (between a servant
and a family member)
• Education for middle and high class women: basic education to be a good and
virtuous mother or governess (social manners, languages, drawing, house
activities)
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• Surplus of women
Spinsters (Brontës, Christina Rossetti)
Emigration: George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss → unemployment,
prostitution, governess (middle class woman, servant-member of the
family)
• Born to domestic life
• Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House (1854)
Self-sacrifice beings, role to create the paradise in the house
Women are the angel and men the master (oppressive ideology)
Myth of the angel in the house
The Brönte sisters were against it
• Intellectually inferior → Against the figure of women as an ideal: they should
not be included in the myth
- Successful business: because of literacy, economic changes (cheaper to print)
- “Pickwick papers”
- Realistic novels (resembles the truth): represent the social world, different plots,
settings and characters
- What does worry us as readers?: material conditions (money → social class
opportunities)
- Clash between oppression and aspirations
- Didactic (inclusive narrators), punishment
THE BRÖNTE SISTERS

- Life
• Father (Ireland): influence of Celtics (legends), parish of Haworth (Yorkshire)
• 6 motherless children: 4 older girls when to school with a very hard religious
education (Charlotte, Emily, Maria and Elizabeth)
• The two eldest sisters (Maria and Elizabeth) died of tuberculosis
• Their father’s money was expended on the only male (Branwell), who wanted to
become an artist but was not talented. He was alcoholic and addicted to opium
• Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels (1842) to study French and they expended
only one year abroad
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• In 1848 Branwell died of tuberculosis and also Emily, because she expended a
lot of time with him
• Charlotte and Emily became governesses when they got older and Anne, as she
was the youngest, took care of their father
• Charlotte married Arthur Bell Nicholls (1854). She get pregnant and in her
fourth month of pregnancy she died of pulmonary disease
• Although they used male pet names, they had to write novels with female
sensitivity if they wanted to write
- Topics
• Overcome difficulties and go beyond: life is a journey with advantages and
disadvantages
• Analysis of human nature and the individual’s identity, especially women’s
• Analysis of women’s pain because of the idea of domesticity (middle class girls
who had not the possibility of get married)
• Immerse political debate of Victorian times (enjoyment of reading all the family
together) and the debate of London’s events of the time
• Passionate heroines that have to face cruel circumstances but they have to be
successful (spiritual experiences)
- Differences between them but all of them received a very strict religious education
- Allowed to read Victorian novels and the classics as Shakespeare
- Similar life and sisterly affection → important for their novels
- Not typical Victorian novel, poetic grammar
- Similar literary sources and same reading
- Juvenilia works
• Sagas of Gondal (by Emily and Anne) and Agria (by Charlotte and Branwell):
Napoleon, critic of political power
• The Poems of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell: series of poems, their male pet
names in the title. It was not very sold
EMILY BRÖNTE
Wuthering Heights (1847)
- Gothic elements
• Catherine’s ghost and corpse (necrophilia)
• Wild nature, terror, ruins, violent feelings
- Ambiguous happy ending: legitimate power/property is restored
- Novel of death
- Complex book: many different narrators (Mr. Lockwood, Nelly Dean)→ different
perspectives; many times (past, present)
- Characters
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Heathcliff is the protagonist of the family. As he has dark skin he is considered to be

gipsy or Spaniard
- Story: Heathcliff beggar → rich, hero but also villain
- Plot: It is the life of Heathcliff, a mysterious gypsy-like person, from childhood
(about seven years old) to his death in his late thirties. Heathcliff rises in his adopted
family and then is reduced to the status of a servant, running away when the young
woman he loves decides to marry another. He returns later, rich and educated, and
sets about gaining his revenge on the two families that he believed ruined his life
- Topics
• Social conventions, religion, regulations
• Destructiveness of love
• Metaphysical and erotic union (passionate love without sex)
• Love beyond marriage (Catherine loves Heathcliff although she is married)
• Love beyond death (2 souls become identical = Catherine loves Heathcliff)
• Nostalgic memory of childhood
• Love vs. pain, freedom vs. captivity, nature vs. culture (ideological violence,
repression) and also house life and wife feelings
• Dysfunctional families (not harmony, but jealousy)
ANNE BRÖNTE
Agnes Grey (1847)
- Topics
• Fictions of the social restrictions imposed to women
• Criticism of the child education by their parents
• Status
- Plot: Helen abandons her husband (Arthur Huntingdon) because he had a lover and
also he was an alcoholic. They had a son and she decided to abandon her husband
when she notices that her son is contaminated with his father’s behaviour. It is when
he thought she had to accept being the angel of the house. She pretends to be a nun
but she comes back when her husband is dying (Christian duty)
She also wrote The Tenant of Wildfell (1848)
CHARLOTTE BRÖNTE
Shirley (1849)
- Shirley: male name
- Topics
• Condition of the northern area of England (masters vs. working classes →
strikes, destroy machines)
• Anorexia: as Caroline has not possibilities of being loved, she kills herself with
starvation
- Plot: It follows two women born into very different circumstances. Caroline lives
with her uncle. He refuses to let her work and does not approve of her affection for
Robert, a local mill owner. On the other hand, Shirley was born into wealth. As the
only child, she inherited her family's fortune after her parents died. Now she lives
with a governess, Mrs. Pryor, but her independent wealth allows her to make
business decisions that women at the time typically were not involved in. Caroline
likes Robert a lot, and Robert likes her too, but he distances himself from her
because of his bad financial circumstances. Robert and Shirley become friends and
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everyone thinks they will marry, which makes Caroline depressed. To save Caroline
from her depression, Mrs. Pryor reveals to Caroline that she is Caroline's mother,
but gave her up as a child because Caroline looked too much like her husband.
Caroline, thinking she has lost Robert, clings to her rediscovered mother as a reason
to live. Meanwhile, Shirley's uncle comes to visit her. He brings with him the rest of
his family, including his son's tutor, Louis. He was Shirley's tutor when she was
younger. Sometimes she is very formal with him, but she also confides her intimate
fears in him. When Robert eventually proposes to Shirley, she rejects him because
he only wants her money. Robert goes away to London to clear his head. When he
returns, angry millworkers shoot him. As he is nursed back to health, Caroline visits
him. Robert asks her to come visit him again and tries to explain why he proposed to
Shirley, but Caroline has forgiven him.Shirley's uncle is upset when Shirley rejects
yet another marriage proposal, this time from a rich baronet. He makes plans to
leave town with his family and Louis. Louis proposes to Shirley because he loves
her and does not want to leave without letting her know how he feels. Shirley loves
Louis too and accepts his proposal, Robert proposes to Caroline and both couples
get married
Villette (1853)
- Her mature novel
- Villete: fictional name for a Belgium woman
- Charlotte’s pain when her sister dies
- Psychological novel: we get to the mind of the female character (Lucy Snowe, the
most similar character to Charlotte)
- Topics
• Isolation, sense of mental and physical claustrophobia
• Amnesia and memory (all I want to remember I tell you as a writer)
- Plot
• Lucy expends a summer with her stepmother Mrs. Bretton
• Lucy considers herself to be a looser
• Gothic plot (death nun): she loves Dr. John but he loves another woman, so
Lucy has to bury her feeling for him
• Lucy discovers love with Emmanuel Paul: they become friends, he helps her to
enjoy life and also creates a school for her
• Emmanuel is 3 years outside. During that period, she discovers that she can be a
successful headmaster
• They get married after that period
• Madame Beck
Jane Eyre (1847)

- Tremendous success, realistic fiction, attractive reading
- Post colonialism (against Jane Eyre): Wide Sargasso Sea (1960) by Jean Rhys
- Melodrama → happy ending
- Partly autobiographical
- Revolutionary in the sense that it was so unfeminine
- Romantic (gothic) and realistic ingredients
- Pattern: enclosure and escape
- Story told from the narrator’s point of view (Jane herself when she is old). She shares
her feelings to the reader
- Blue bird: Fairytale
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- 19th century: the “it” woman

- Literary influence in Jane Eyre: The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) by John Bunyan
• Do what is good or what is bad
• Looking for salvation
- Charlotte Brönte respects patriarchal imperialism
- Dialogues are so important
• Curiosity
• Progression of the relation between Jane and Rochester
• Simple language, symbolism and imagery
- Topics
• Independent of get married or become a governess she is a spinster
• Life as a journey with fortunes and misfortunes
• Radical departure from domestic femininity: Jane has not to be related to
domesticity
• Characters are rewarded/punished with death or other conclusions
• Political and sexual radicalism: criticises the roles of women
• You can love but it can happen in the appropriate moment (workings of the
mind of what we are supposed to do)
• Discipline: job as a governess (patriarchal ideology)
• Evangelism (by Charlotte’s father): one to one relationship without an
intermediary, not predestination, upper-class clergy on the Anglican church
• Exploitation of religion
• Sacrifice from girls was necessary for Victorian society → physical and
psychological punishment for girls
• Ethics more than morality: do always what is right
• Jane looks for happiness in real life: strong individualism ≠ religious dogmas)
• Anger → passion and love
- Characters
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• Jane (as Charlotte) is very religious, Christian heroine, although Charlotte is not
completely agree with the Church (institution)
• St. John Rivers: good
Good clergyman (widespread of Christianity and take care of the poor
people)
He does not show emotions (he is cold)
He is not in love with Jane but he thinks she is the perfect wife
• Bertha: first wife of Rochester, rich Creole her, behaves as an animal, she is
crazy/mad
- Fairytale conventions
• Shake Jane’s understanding of the world
• She embodies Cinderella when she is in Gateshead → she wants to escape
because she considers herself to be bad treated
- Settings
• Continues misfortunes for the evolution of the character’s evolution
• Nature → freedom
• Gateshead: loneliness, bitten by her cousin John
• Lowood: very strict religious education, she finds friends (Ms. Temple and
Helen Burns)
• Thornfield Hall: passion, romanticism → betrayal → maturity (women = men,
their own identity ≠ The Angel in the House, not difference between social
classes)
- Plot: Jane Eyre is a young, orphaned girl who lives with her aunt and cousins, the
Reeds. Her aunt hates her and allows her cousin John to torment her. At the age of
ten, Jane tells them all exactly what she thinks of them. She is punished by being
locked in "the red-room," where her uncle died. There, she thinks his ghost is
appearing. After this, she is sent to a religious boarding school for orphans, where
she is run by Mr. Brocklehurst and students never have enough to eat or warm
clothes. However, Jane finds a friend, Helen Burns, and a sympathetic teacher, Miss
Temple. Under their influence, she becomes an excellent student. Unfortunately, an
epidemic of typhus breaks out at the school and Helen dies. Jane remains at Lowood
as a student until she’s sixteen, and then as a teacher until she’s eighteen. When
Miss Temple leaves the school to get married, Jane becomes a governess. She
accepts to tutor a little French girl, at a country house called Thornfield. One
evening when Jane is out for a walk, she meets Mr. Rochester. Both are immediately
interested in each other. They have fascinating conversations but Rochester invites a
bunch of his rich friends to stay at Thornfield, including the beautiful Blanche
Ingram. Rochester lets Blanche flirt with him constantly in front of Jane to make her
jealous and encourages rumours that he is engaged to Blanche. A man named
Richard Mason shows up and, at night, he sneaks up to the third floor and he gets
stabbed. Rochester asks Jane to tend Mason's wounds secretly while he fetches the
doctor. The next morning before the guests find out what happened, Mason goes out
of the house. When Jane knows that Aunt Reed is very sick, she forgives her and
goes back to take care of her. When Jane returns to Thornfield, Blanche and her
friends are gone. Mr. Rochester proposes to Jane and she accepts. During the church
ceremony two men claim that Rochester is already married. He admits it, but
justifies himself telling all that his wife (Bertha Mason) tried to burn Rochester to
death in his bed, stabbed her own brother (Richard Mason), and does other creepy
things at night. After explaining all this, Rochester claims that he wants Jane to go
and live with him in France, where they can act like husband and wife. Jane runs
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away before she is tempted to agree. Having no money, she almost starves to death
before being taken in by the Rivers family. The Rivers siblings – Diana, Mary, and
St. John – are about Jane’s age and well-educated, but somewhat poor. Jane wants to
earn her keep, so St. John arranges for her to become the teacher in a village girls’
school. When Jane’s uncle Mr. Eyre dies and leaves his fortune to his niece, it turns
out that the Rivers siblings are actually Jane’s cousins, and she shares her
inheritance with the other three. St. John admires Jane’s work ethic and asks her to
marry him. She refuses because she does not love him. Jane offers to go to India
with him, but just as his cousin and co-worker. St. John keeps pressuring Jane to
marry him. Jane goes back to Thornfield, where she finds out that Mr. Rochester
searched for her everywhere. After this, Bertha set the house on fire one night.
Rochester rescued all the servants and tried to save Bertha, too, but she committed
suicide. Now Rochester has lost an eye and a hand and is blind in the remaining eye.
Jane offers to take care of Mr. Rochester as his nurse or housekeeper. He purposes
her again, she accepts and they get married
- Symbolism and imagery
• Nature
Present on the important moment of Jane’s life: proposal in a spring
afternoon (powerful sexual environment) in a garden (as Adam and Eve)
Temptation
Chesnutt tree: place where the proposal occurs. It is broken by a thunder
(natural accident) → the union will be broken
Romantic correspondence between nature and
Place where Jane can find herself
(Feminine) moon: represent Jane’s mother. It guides and protects her
Wind: devastated wind when Jane discovers Bertha and thinks that she is
a ghost
• Colour red: danger, adult life (menstruation, changing)
• Gothic elements
Gothic places and gothic apparitions: Bertha Mason Rochester’s image,
Jane has nightmares
Mirrors: Jane sees Bertha in a mirror → distortion of reality
Fire: ambiguous image because it can mean good fire when it is at home
but it can also mean revenge, dangers of passion, purification of the sins
• Colonial prejudices: colonial women have to be subjugated
• Jane: purity, virgin ≠ Bertha: sexuality. She asks Jane to forgive Mr. Rochester
She also wrote The Professor (post. 1857)
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4.2. “Condition of England” Novel: Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles

Dickens. Study of Great Expectations.
THE CONDITION OF ENGLAND NOVEL

- Novels about the Industrial Revolution (Does it give us evolution or misery? Is the
machine a bless?)
- Social and economic changes, people move to cities and the work and sanitary
conditions were horrible
- Novels are written to wake up people and show what was happening
- Marxism
• Marx and Engels (The Condition of the Working Class in England)
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning (poem: “The Cry of the Children”)
ELIZABETH GASKELL (1810-1865)

- From a London family (Unitarians)
- Her husband was a minister and they moved to Manchester
- She lost a child and started writing
- Good friend of Charlotte Brönte → her biography: The Life of Charlotte Brönte
(1857)
- Realist writer
- Portrayed a wide margin of situations that humans can live
- “The two nations”, a controversial issue related to high classes and people starving
- Change consciousness → Not novels of freedom but about necessity
Mary Barton (1848)

- About the situation of the cities → understand why there was violence in the
working class
- Conditions explained in a realistic way because in the South people did not know
what was happening
- Controversial novel
Cranford (1851-1853)
- Countryside life
- The arrival of railway was threatening the life in those areas
- Nostalgic visions
North and South (1854-1855)

- New vision of the social conflict, she adopts a political approach being positive and
believing that problems could be solved
- Dickens encouraged her to write this novel and to change the name
- Main character: Margaret Hale
- Plot: Margaret lives in the South but moves to the North with her father. She is
unhappy but starts to make friends of the working class. Her father makes friend of
Mr. Thornton, a business man capitalist and materialist. Margaret and he like each
other but Margaret does not like the way he is with his employees. There is a strike
→ Margaret saves Thornton. Her mother is about to die and wants to be with her
son Frederick, who is a fugitive. When he goes to see his mother, Thornton thinks
he is Margaret’s lover. Almost everybody dies, she receives money (becomes rich)
and moves to the south again. Thornton is ruined and then he becomes a good man.
Margaret gives him money and after that they get married
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- Topics
• Romantic and about social problem
• South: calm life and working class people are considered vulgar
• North: strikes, hard living conditions, violence… → they want change
• Margaret (South) and Thornton (North): virtues and flaws
• Mutual understanding is needed to avoid violence
• Deaths make Thornton cruel and Margaret a strong woman
- Other women in Gaskell’s novels are victims of society
• Margaret at the end is the one choosing husband
• Margaret (strong and intelligent woman) can understand workers and masters
(Elizabeth Gaskell too)
Wives and Daughters (1864-1865)

- Family relationships, inside the family and between different families
- Stories are connected because of families
CHARLES DICKENS (1812-1870)

- Portsmouth
- Financial difficulties from the very beginning in his family when he was a child
- When he was 12, his father went to prison
• The whole family with his father except him → sustain the family
• Emotionally hurt: being a victim, oppressed by those who had power
- Charles could go to school after his father went outside prison
- When he was 24, he became a reporter (periodical/monthly magazines)
- He published a book of his illustrated literary sketches (short stories with pictures):
The Pickwick Papers (1836-1837) → he was the first one to write a serialized novel
(instalment)
- He married Catherine Hogarth: 23 years of marriage, 10 children
- He enjoyed acting
- He spent his last 10 years in a lucrative way
- Models of 18th c. (masters of autobiography) using trades of the picaresque novel:
Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Jonathan Swift
CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS NOVELS

- Èngland question´: social priorities and the inequality in society
• Social consciousness and criticism → He tended to create caricatures
• Observed in his novels
• Action: correct problems of Victorian society
- Ignorant readers
• Reflection of what was going to happen
• Persuasive and witty language: influent voice to convince his readers
- No darkness → comedy and humour
- Polyphonic: provide the whole panoramic view
- Sentimentality: happy ending and evoke humanitarian feelings
- Settings: prisons as a metaphor of psychological captivity to reflect how society
enforce Victorian society
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- Prototypes of the modals of society to create a panorama of his society

- Evil characters: gothic villains, beggars, prostitutes…
- Although Dickens was American, he could picture very well London in the settings
of his novels
EARLY NOVELS
Baggy plots: do not show the full talent Dickens showed in his other novels
The Pickwick Papers (1836-1837)

- Comedy (funny characters)
• Mr. Pickwick: business man and philosopher
• Mr. Tracy Tupman: ladies´ man who never makes a conquest
• Mr. August Snodgrass: poet who has not ever written a poem
• Nathaniel: inept sportsman with no medals or awards
- Quest for survival
- Mr Pickwick and his friends travel around England (spiritual narrative 18th c.)
- Plot: The Pickwick Club of London loves to travel. The journey begins with an
angry cabman knocking down the Pickwickers. Mr.Jingle, an adventurer with deep
interest in wealthy women, rescues them. Pickwickians meet Mr. Wardle, a country
squire who invites them to his estate at Dingey Dell. There, Mr. Tupman falls in
love with Mr. Wardle’s spinster sister Rachael. However, Mr. Jingle outsmarts
Tupman and elopes with Rachael. Rachael is saved from her unhappy marriage with
Jingle by Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Wardle. Mr. Pickwick meets Sam Waller in London
and takes him as a valet. Mrs. Bardell thinks that Mr. Pickwick wants her to marry
but it is not true. Mrs. Bardell starts a breach of promise suit against him. During
their visit to Eatans, they are invited to a costume party, where Mr. Pickwick finds
Mr. Jingle trying to make a young lady fall in his trap, and tries to prevent
elopement. While in London seeking legal help for the lawsuit by Mrs. Bardell
against him, he knows that Mr. Jingle is in Ipswich. There, Mr. Pickwick proves that
Mr. Nupkins´ daughter is Jingle’s interest. Mr. Pickwick’s trial leads him to jail as
he refuses to pay the damages. Finally, he decides to pay the cost to release himself
Oliver Twist (1837)

- Dark comedy: many abuses of the system attacked by Dickens
- Against Newgate novels (fluttery biographies about criminals´ lifes written in the
18th c.)
- Topics
• Journey: childhood → maturity although the novel covers Oliver’s childhood
• Opposition: orphan houses, prisons ≠ middle and upper classes
• Criticises church, state and charity institutions (hard conditions, greedy class) →
Individualism caused by the Industrial Revolution
• Confrontation: city vs. country life
• Mistaken identities: origins of people, hidden family relations
• Oliver does not find comfort
- Context
• Poor Laws (1834), which allowed public system to poors only if they worked in
workhouses
New slavery
Not public assistance for poors
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• Middle class relied on hard work

Poors were poors because they were lazy, so it was their fault.
Poors were considered evil and immoral
Dickens was a defender of the poors (also poor children), prostitutes and
beggars in the city of London
- Plot: Oliver Twist was born and lives in a workhouse. Mr Bumble wanted Oliver to
work to an undertaker: Mr Sowerberry. He runs away because he attacks another
boy who works with this man because tells him that his mother was a prostitute.
Outside London, Oliver, starved and exhausted, meets Jack Dawkins, a boy his own
age. Jack offers him shelter in the London house of his benefactor, Fagin. It turns
out that Fagin is a career criminal who trains orphan boys to pick pockets for him.
After a few days of training, Oliver is sent on a pickpocketing mission with two
other boys. Oliver is caught by the police but Mr. Brownlow pardoned him because
he considered Oliver to be a poor child and also Oliver was very sick. Mr.
Brownlow takes Oliver to his home and nurses him back to health. Mr. Brownlow is
struck by Oliver’s resemblance to a portrait of a young woman that hangs in his
house. Oliver thrives in Mr. Brownlow’s home, but two young adults in Fagin’s
gang, Bill Sikes and his lover Nancy, capture Oliver and return him to Fagin.
Fagin sends Oliver to assist Sikes in a burglary. Oliver is shot by a servant of the
house and, after Sikes escapes, is taken in by the women who live there, Mrs.
Maylie and her beautiful adopted niece Rose. But Fagin and a mysterious man
named Monks are set on recapturing Oliver.
David Copperfield (1849-1850)

- Fictional or semi-autobiographical novel
- 1st person narrator
- Set in Victorian Times
- Dickens´ own experience being a child
- Topics
• Childhood and possibility of romantic love and marriage
• Idea of society making a mistake (pain, hardship)
• Good parents are separated from their children
• Equality in marriage: women should not be subjugated to men
• Inequality of power and authority: Mr. Murdstone and David’s mother
- Plot: As an adult, David tells his childhood. His father dies and his mother marries
Mr. Murdstone, who does not treat very well his mother. He lives with them and
with his nurse Peggotty. He is soon sent to a miserable school where he becomes
friend of James Steerforth, a fellow student. When David's mother dies, he is taken
from school and put to work by Mr. Murdstone in a London warehouse. David uses
his spare time doing clerical and literary work to help Aunt Betsey, who now finds
herself without financial resources. David decides to become a lawyer. Mr.
Spenslaw´s daughter (Dora) and David fell in love with each other and get married.
When Dora dies, David marries again.
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A Christmas Carol (1843)

- Christmas is also a time of coldness, sadness and death, not only of happiness
- Mr. Scrooge (the protagonist) is the winter but there is also a possibility of spring
- Mr. Scrooge experiences a journey of salvation
- Plot: Mr. Scrooge is an old man who hates Christmas. His nephew invites him to his
annual Christmas party and he refuses. Two portly gentlemen ask Scrooge for a
contribution to their charity. He reacts to all them with bitterness and angry.
Scrooge receives a chilling visitation from the ghost of his dead partner, who tells
him his punishment for his greedy and self-serving life to save Scrooge from sharing
the same fate. He also informs Scrooge that three spirits will visit him during each
of the next three nights. The first one is the ghost of the Christmas past, who helps
him to remember his past and tries to restore his connections with people. Then, the
ghost of the Christmas present shows him the bad living conditions of the poors to
make him understand him and have charity and empathy with the others. The last
one, the ghost of the Christmas yet to come, shows him his future and he feels fear
to death and notice that nobody will care about his death. At Christmas Day,
Scrooge rushes out onto the street hoping to share his newfound Christmas spirit.
SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS (Novels)

Bleak House
- Narrator in the past and the present tense
- Topics
• Legal system and laws make bureaucracy ineffective and corrupted → metaphor
of the symptoms of the society
• Mysteries, crimes
- Plot: In the Court of Chancery, there is an inheritance case called Jarndyce and
Jarndyce that has been going on for several generations. Ada Clare and Richard
Carstone are orphans connected with the case. Esther Summerson is a girl raised in
isolation by an angry aunt. The three are united one day by a man named John
Jarndyce. Meanwhile, the rich and important Dedlock family has a loyal lawyer
named Tulkinghorn. Lady Dedlock is also connected with the Jarndyce case, and
one day she pays an unusual amount of attention to the handwriting on one of
Tulkinghorn's legal documents. That makes Tulkinghorn start investigating. The guy
whose handwriting it is calls himself Nemo. Just as Tulkinghorn finds him, Nemo
kills himself by an overdose of opium. At the inquest, the only person who knew
Nemo is a poor boy named Jo. Tulkinghorn tells the Dedlocks the story of Nemo.
Esther becomes Ada's governess, and both and Richard live with Mr. Jarndyce, who
tries to find a profession for Richard. Sadly, Richard is fixated on the court case, so
he tries being a doctor, then a lawyer, then an army officer, but nothing sticks. One
day a veiled woman makes Jo take her to all the places associated with Nemo. Jo is
later found by Tulkinghorn and his detective, Bucket. When they show him another,
similarly veiled woman, Jo recognizes the clothes but it's not the same woman. She
turns out to be Hortense, Lady Dedlock's ex-maid, who is furious at having been
fired. Bucket sends away Jo, who has been running his mouth a little bit about his
adventures with the veiled woman. Jo falls ill, and is taken in by Jenny and Liz, who
passes him on to Esther. He freaks out because Esther looks so much like the veiled
woman. Jarndyce takes Jo in, but the next morning he is gone and cannot be found.
However, one night with Jo in the house was long enough to get Esther sick.
Although she recovers, her face is left disfigured by scars. Jarndyce asks her to
marry him and she accepts. Richard and Ada secretly get married. Ada becomes
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pregnant. Lady Dedlock figures out that Nemo was Captain Hawdon, and that the
baby that she had with him was raised by her crazy sister. She finds Esther,
confesses to being her mom, then tells her they can never see each other again.
Tulkinghorn has discovered a lot of things too. He tells Lady Dedlock that he is
going to tell her husband the truth any day now. But that night, he is killed. Bucket
arrests Mr. George for murder. Meanwhile, thinking that she is about to be exposed
and maybe even accused of murder, Lady Dedlock runs away. Bucket sets off to
find her, bringing Esther with him. They find Lady Dedlock dead in the cemetery
where Captain Hawdon had been buried. Woodcourt tells Esther, but she gets ready
to marry Jarndyce but is none too psyched about it. All the inheritance money has
been spent on court fees, and since there is no more money, there is no more case.
Mr. George is reunited with his mother, the Dedlock housekeeper. Sir Dedlock is
heartbroken over the fate of his wife, Ada has a baby and lives at Jarndyce's house.
Esther and Woodcourt are happily married with two children
Little Dorrit (1855-1857)

- Topics
• Debtor prisons
• Very young and nice girl manipulated by members of her family
• Importance of being/ not being vulnerable people
- Plot:A couple of prisoners, Cavalletto and Rigaud, are in a Marseilles jail.
Cavalletto is a minor smuggler serving out his sentence. Rigaud is a murderer who
is about to go on trial. Meanwhile a group of people are released from quarantine in
England. Arthur Clennam has just returned from 20 years in China. His dad is dead,
so he goes to visit his mom, Mrs. Clennam. His parents ran some kind of semi-
shady business, and Arthur is visiting in part to tell his mom he does not want to
work for Clennam & Co anymore. In quarantine, Arthur befriended the Meagleses.
Mr. Meagles is a retired businessman who now travels with his family. They have a
beautiful but immature and spoiled daughter named Pet, and abother girl they
rescued from an orphanage and named Tattycoram. When Arthur goes to visit the
Meagles family at their house, he falls in love with Pet. He also meets a rival, the
negative and unpleasant Henry Gowan. Obviously, Pet is totally into Gowan and
just likes Arthur as a friend. At Mrs. Clennam's house, Arthur meets Little Amy
Dorrit, the youngest daughter of a man who is in prison for debts. She takes care of
her whole Dorrit family. The other Dorrits are sister Fanny, Mr. Merdle, brother
Tip, and uncle Frederick. Amy is super self-sacrificing and looks older despite
actually being 22. Arthur befriends her. Arthur tries to deal with Mr. Dorrit's debts.
This involves many useless trips to the Circumlocution Office. All his efforts are
totally fruitless, but Arthur meets Daniel Doyce, an inventor and factory owner in
London. They befriend one another, and Arthur becomes a partner in the Doyce's
factory. One day Arthur runs into Cavalletto, who himself has just been run into by
a carriage. He takes Cavalletto to the hospital, then gets him a job at the factory and
an apartment nearby. Also nearby is Flora Finching, Arthur's ex-girlfriend from
about 20 years ago. Her dad, Mr. Casby, is the landlord at the place where
Cavalletto is renting a room. Though sadly, Amy likes Arthur, he just wants to be
friends. At the same time, Pet and Gowan get married. Back to Rigaud, his trial ends
because of lack of evidence and he can go out. Now his name is Blandois and comes
to London with a letter of introduction and credit from some bank in Paris. He visits
Mrs. Clennam to do some mysterious business. Arthur tries to figure out what kind
of business is that but does not discover anything. Arthur starts doing some research
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into the Dorrit family. And his research shows that Mr. Dorrit is heir to a massive
fortune. He immediately starts pretending that everyone he knew when he was in
prison does not exist and his family goes abroad. Amy cannot get used to the their
new lifestyle. Back in London everyone is sad. The Meagleses miss their daughter.
Arthur misses Little Dorrit and dedicates his life to his work. In Italy Fanny again
runs into the Merdles and Edmund Sparkler. Fanny eventually decides to marry
Sparkler anyway in order to make her mother-in-law's life miserable. Pet and
Gowan continue living in unhappiness. Pet has a baby. Dorrit invests all his money
with Merdle, Fanny's new stepfather-in-law. Then he goes back to Italy, all prepared
to ask Mrs. General to marry him. But he has a mental collapse of some kind, freaks
out. A few days later he dies. Doyce comes back, forgives Arthur for his misdeeds,
and sets him back up at the factory in his old job. Amy proposes to Arthur and they
get married
Hard Times (1854)

- Plot: Mr Gradgrind, a man who runs a school, has an educational philosophy, based
on Utilitarianism. One day, Gradgrind tries to find his own two eldest children
peering under the flap of the circus tent to experience a world that has been
forbidden from them until now. Sissy, a girl who works in the circus, is forced to
choose between the life of the circus or gaining an education, and she chooses the
latter.
Louisa Gradgrind, his daughter, agrees to marry Josiah Bounderby, the man who
owns the factory and the bank, to cement an alliance between the Bounderbys and
Gradgrinds.
Stephen Blackpool, a factory man, is the victim of a loveless marriage but he is in
love with Rachel, a factory girl. When the factory workers go on strike, Stephen
refuses to join the strike and is spurned by his fellow workers. He is also fired and
falsely accused of the bank robbery that has just occurred. He dies when he falls
down a mine shaft just as he is about to clear his name.
Louisa's marriage is unhappy. She goes to her father's house where she accuses him
of having deprived her of a normal childhood that would have allowed her to
develop emotionally. Bounderby has been told that Louisa is about to elope with
Harthouse. He goes to Gradgrind's house, where he gives Louisa the opportunity of
either returning to him or to say their marriage goodbye. Not surprisingly, she
welcomes the latter.
Louisa suspects that Tom was behind the bank robbery. Sissy had also suspected
Tom, and sends him off to hide at the circus. The circus audience, unaware of Tom's
guilt, arrange for Tom to escape to Liverpool and take a ship to America.
Bounderby loses his money and dies in the street. Gradgrind abandons his
Utilitarianism, and Louisa continues to live a loveless life. The only happy ending is
for Sissy, who has children of her own who are not deprived of love or enjoyment as
they grow up.
- Transfer the interests from Manchester to London
- Dealing with the Industrial North vs. utilitarian education and industrialism
- Coketown
- What it is wrong with the age → inability of human people to share emotions
- Workers = factory machines
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- Topics
• Mechanization of human beings: neither emotions nor imaginations
Mr. Gradgrind (school master) educates his children in utilitarianism and
turns his own children respecting the law. His daughter is against this
way of education
Bounderby (owner of a factory) exploits his workers by his own interest
• Vs. utilitarianism
Grates to benefit for the greatest part of society: capitalism
Antagonism workers vs. masters
• Facts vs. imagination
Emphasis of reality because of the conditions of workers
Having not imagination is a cost of money
There has to be a balance between reality and imagination
• Male society → emphasis in femininity: Dickens said that woman had to be
important in society
• Criticism against arranged marriage (marriages for money) because they end in
disaster
LATE NOVELS
A Tale of the Two Cities (1859)
- Dimension
• Love triangle: Charles Darnay → Lucie Manette ← Sydney Carton
• Society of the French Revolution
- Setting: French Revolution
- Thomas Carlyle was influenced by this novel
- Violence after and during the revolution
- Characters
• Charles: former aristocrat. Attacked during the French Revolution
• Sydney: barrister. He chooses to die
- Ideas
• It is necessary a sacrifice (Sydney sacrifices his love with Lucy)
• Human beings can change
• Death of the old order: rebirth can be possible
• Not fight against cruelty with cruelty: not use the same methods as the
oppressors
Great Expectations (1860)

- His best novel
- Avoidance of happy ending → open ending
- Serialized novel
- Confessional narrative (first person narrator)
- Bildungsroman
• Prototype of Victorian novels: David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, Great
Expectations
• Precursors: Lazarillo de Tormes, Voltaire’s Candide, Fielding’s History of Tom
Jones, a Foundling
• Künstlerroman (20th c.): James Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man
- “All the Year Round”: his own periodical to publish his own novels
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- Plot: As a young child, the orphan Pip lives with his sister and brother-in-law. On
Christmas Eve, Pip visits his parents´ tombs and suddenly an escaped convict
appears and threatens him into bringing back food and a file to break the leg-irons.
On Christmas Day, the convict is captured and returned to the prison. Much later,
young Pip is sent to entertain Miss Havisham, a wealthy old lady who was jilted on
her wedding day. She still wears her wedding dress. Her adopted daughter, Estella,
is beautiful, and Pip instantly falls in love with her. But Estella is cold and distant.
She tells him she can never love anyone.
Pip is dismissed from Miss Havisham’s service and becomes an apprentice to Joe.
But he wants to be a gentleman, not a blacksmith. One day he knows that an
anonymous benefactor has left him an enormous sum of money. He moves to
London, where he will be trained to act as a gentleman. A lawyer, Jaggers, will
oversee his inheritance. Pip is certain his benefactor is Miss Havisham, and believes
he is being trained as Estella’s future husband. He is educated by Mr. Mathew
Pocket and strikes a great friendship with his son, Herbert.
His wealth and position changes him: he is ashamed of Joe and Biddy, and wants
little to do with them. He thinks association with them will lower him in Estella’s
eyes. Estella has been trained by Miss Havisham to break men’s hearts. Even though
she warns him she cannot love him, Pip persists in loving her.
On his twenty-fourth birthday, Pip knows that his benefactor is the convict from
long ago. He realizes with shame that he has mistreated his good friend Joe, who
was always faithful to him. Though Pip is ashamed of the convict, Magwitch, he is
grateful and loyal, so he commits himself to protecting Magwitch from the police,
who are looking for him. His friend, Herbert Pocket, helps him.
Pip's decides he can no longer accept the convict’s money. He tries to help
Magwitch escape, but in the chaos, he is injured and caught. Before Magwitch dies,
Pip discovers that adopted Estella is Magwitch’s daughter and tells him how lovely
she is. Estella marries Pip’s enemy, Drummle. Miss Havisham dies, but not before
leaving a good deal of money to Herbert Pocket, at Pip’s request. Pip goes to Joe
and Biddy, who have married one another since the death of Pip’s sister. The novel
ends when he meets Estella after many years. She has left Drummle and she is
remarried. She and Pip part as friends and Pip realizes she will always be a part of
his life.
- Characters
• Pit: manipulated during the whole novel
• Orlick: jealous, irascible
• Lawyer Jaggers: Pip has a benefactor to become a gentleman, so he can go to
London
- Topics
• Being poor→ become wealthy, respected
• Revenge
Ms. Havisham wants to break men’s hearts with her niece Stella
Pip is manipulated by them
• Novel of education, coming-of-age story: excuse to show the moral and
psychological growth (we learn from mistakes)
• Journey reading for answers to questions to be happy in this world
• To become a gentleman is not only a good economic position
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• Paradoxical beginning
Death → Gothic effects
When Pip contemplates his parents´ tombs and the convict appears, Pip
does not know if he is a ghost, a monster… → Achieved thanks to the
child’s eyes
• Connections between the good and the evil: What seems to be good can be evil
and vice versa. Examples:
Mr. Jaggers is supposed to be a good man but he does not behave well
with his servant Molly
Bentley Drummle does not behave well with his wife Stella
• Money and capitalism
Can corrupt people
Properties become identity in that society (ownership → identity): NOT
NECESSARY
Family can share your identity
• Typical pattern of success in life: capitalism and Protestantism →
ALTERNATIVE (moral plot): Pip changes his life and realizes that wealth is
not important but emotional connections are
• Reversal of the social status: social classes are not fixed, your future can change
• Social class is not related to a character
• Post-industrial Revolution face: rich characters do not have to belong to the
aristocracy
• Clash: ambition and self-improvement (I can change/improve myself)
• Self-improvement
Moral (the most important one): when he acts immorally he realizes and
tries to change/ act better in the future
Social: fantasy to become a gentleman and marry Stella. He is not
happier than he was poor
Educational: linked to the social one. Social advancement thanks to the
teaching of good manners and also how to read and write by his tutor
• Childhood traumas, criticism to professions as lawyers, innocents
• Go beyond to discover love and truth in life
• Carnival of voices: create polyphony (Mijail Baklitin)
4.3. William M. Thackeray and Anthony Trollope.

WILLIAM M. THACKERAY (1811-1863)
- Satire, essays
- Very well known in literary circles
- Comic journalist
- Influenced by Henry Fielding and William Hogarth (irony to denounce, Marriage à
la Mode = a series of pictures)
- Victorian man, who was quite liberal but he did not like the Newgate Novels of the
18th c. (Moll Flanders)
- Satirical moralist → his novels teach and amuse people
- Novels: snobs (people with financial problems)
- Pessimist about human mature: people cannot redeem themselves
- Vices portrayed in his novels are timeless and can be found everywhere. Also
humans can be ambivalent
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- Strong omniscient narrator → voice to teach readers and judge his characters
- Weakness
• Hypocrisy, vanity, snobbery…
• Only interested in status
- One narrative voice but multiple characters (sometimes virtuous sometimes not →
show the world as it is)
- Novels: Vanity Fair (1847-1848), The History of Henry Esmond (1852), The
Newcomes (1854-1855)
Vanity Fair (1847-1848)

- His most important novel
- Regency Period
- Biblical theme (title): vanity is a topic of the Bible but now is discussed too in
secular circles
- Plot: academy for girls, Ms. Pinkerton teach women to be good wives and
governesses
- No hero (no courage, no generosity…)
- Main characters
• Becky Sharp
Intelligent, from a poor family
Governess for Crawleys, a family waiting for Matilda´s death to heritage
her fortune
Marries Rawdon Crawley
A lot of affairs as the ambitious woman she is (she wants money)
• Amelia Sedley
Fells in love with a playboy (George) who dies in the battle of Waterloo
As a widow she has financial problems and a George’s friend (Dobbin)
helps her
Marries Dobbin because she finds out that George had an affair with
Becky
- Main topics
• Vanity: narcissism. Thackeray criticised how mankind is attached to material
possessions → You always want more money
• Dark comedy: being comical but pessimistic at the same time
- Serialized: every chapter ends very excitingly
- Not evolution in the characters
- Crash between truth and lies
• Thackeray must tell the truth even if it is not flattering
• Becky is a liar, Amelia lives in an ideal world, Dobbin does not want to see that
Amelia does not love him
- Thackeray is the manager of the performance and as such he is a showman and a
preacher he manipulates the characters
ANTHONY TROLLOPE (1815-1882)

- Interaction individual and society
- Moralist view of the world
- High and middle classes
- Idea of sagas: first characters in different novels to see how they changed or to see
the continuity
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- Free traditional Victorian values: modesty, hard work and to be honest

- Sequence of novels
• Develop fiction from one novel to the next: interconnections of time and space
• Types
Manchester novels
◊ Small rural communities (share history and experiences)
◊ Internal relationships between the population of this community
◊ The Warden (1855)
◊ Barchester Towens (1857): more comic, observes how political
decisions are not taken when they had to be
Palliser novels
◊ Social and family relations
◊ Public and private life of upper classes and metropolitan upper
classes
◊ The Eustache Diamonds (1871-1873): parliamentary concern, social
incidents
◊ Phineas Finn (1867-69): Irish member of the Parliament who finds
difficulties and who is the subject of men jealous and ambition and
also the object of woman flirty
◊ The Way We Live Now (1874-1875): satirical view of the world with
moral purposes. He provides a large map of the English society
(criticism against them): corruption, speculation, dishonesty and
adultery
4.4. George Eliot. Study of Middlemarch.

GEORGE ELIOT (1819-1880)
- Writer: male profession → male pick name
- Real name: Mary Anne Evans
- Excluded from literary circles because she was a woman
- Most distinctive, intelligent (Victorian novelist), realist (prototype)
- Life
• Born in Stratford
• Wealthy middle-class family
• School but not to university
• Deeply evangelic religious (evangelic family)
• Her first novel: Adam Bede (14 years old)
• Education by her own through extended readings: politics, philosophy, religion,
history of religion, classics and science in general
Srong impact in the chapters of her novels
Wonder: Do I have to believe in what it talks?
German Higher Criticism of the Bible (school)
◊ Free thinkers, rational writers
◊ Faith of Institutional Church (in her 20´s) → Rationalist: criticised
the Bible an other religious texts
• Extensive readers, hard life experiences and strong personality = mature writer
• Translator (German → English): Life of Jesus, by David Strauss
• Moved to London in her own, after her educational journey through Europe
• Many love affairs (Radicalism ≠ conservative writer)
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• Philosopher and dramatist George Henry Lewis (a married man): they lived
together during 20 years
• Critical with women although she was a woman
Women were uneducated → “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”: romance,
love, courtship (women would not be aloud to write)
In a way, sympathetic to women
• More personal view of religion
• Historian (she cares about the past) and also a scientist (she observes the
behaviour of her characters and the circumstances surrounding them because
they condition their lives)
• Realism (for her): truth + sympathy and real life
• 2 years before she died she married a man 21 years younger
- Characteristics of her novels
• Still significant nowadays
• Novels of ideas (to convey messages) or consciousness of seriousness
• Not much light compared with Charles Dickens
• Serious matters
• Intellectual novels
• Provincial life (countryside): small towns/communities
• Psychological analysis of the characters: their good and bad sides
• Retrospective look to the past (nostalgia), evocation to preindustrial rural life
• Evolution in her novels: early novels (Adam Bede and Silas Marner) → rural
areas (complex characters, psychological analysis: Middlemarch and Daniel
Deronda)
• Moral message (family and moral values):sympathy, understanding, compassion
• Ordinary people/life (as Wordsworth): not selfishness → collectiveness (help
each other, affection)
• Sorry for her characters or she criticises them (moral dimension): individual
responsibility on them
• Religion is linked with sympathy: care/help others
• Fiction but also history because of the real setting
• Interrelation history-contemporary society: historical retrospective view
(looking back to the past)
• Not characters who follow her life philosophy
• Philosophical meditation (herself as a writer) and deep psychological motive of
the characters (aspirations)
Adam Bede (1859)

- Interest for common life (rural England, preindustrial countryside), realistic
- Setting: recent past (beginning of the 19th c.): kind of nostalgia, time having a lot of
limitations
- Inspiration: true story about a woman who killed her baby
• She read it in the newspaper
• She knew it very well because her aunt was a preacher (Methodism- redemption
to everybody) and visited the guilty woman to the jail several times before she
was executed
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- Basic plot: Adam Bede (carpenter) is an honest man who is in love with Hetty
Sorrel (dairymaid) who was very beautiful but very selfish. She lives with her uncle
and aunt (Mr. and Mrs. Poyser), who have a lot of children who she hates. She is
looking for a man. She has an affair with Captain Donnithorne, a rich man. Adam
proposes the captain to leave Hetty. He does it and Adam proposes Hetty marriage.
She discovers she is pregnant (the captain is the father) and she gives birth in the
forest. She abandons her baby and when she is going to keep her baby, the police
discover that the baby is dead and she is executed.
- Characters
• Hetty is only in love with herself either with Adam nor with the captain
• Dinah Morris: quaker appearance, she cares for the others (she spends time with
Hetty although Hetty is going to be executed)
- Moral tone and didactic message: we do not have to be blinded with external beauty
- Topics
• Value of hard work
Adam Bede (carpenter)
Dinah Morris (miller and preacher)
Mr. and Mrs. Poyser (milkmen)
• Love as a transformative face
Love can change people and those who love are portrayed as gentle and
kind
Dinah´s love make Hettel to repent at the end, she realizes that she was
bad with people
• Consequences of bad behaviour: collateral effects→ Strong impact in the
chapters of her novels
The Mill on the Floss (1860)

- Ends in a very tragic way
- Her most beloved novel written
- Topics
• Psychological realism
• Provincial life
• Importance of family values
• Frustration of the aspirations of the girl
• Sympathetic portray of childhood
• Past has an impact on present and childhood on adulthood
• Angel in the house (Lucy, blonde girl) ≠ dangerous, sexual (Maggie, dark hair
girl)
• Individual ≠ society
• Intellectual knowledge: Maggie
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- Characters
• Maggie ≠ George Eliot because she chooses her family first (family ties/bounds)
- Plot: Story of the love between Tom and Maggie Tulliver (siblings). Maggie is an
impetuous girl who is looking for affection and education. She is more loved by her
father (miller). She is considered to be unfemenin (she runs away, she cuts her hair,
she has dark hair), but she is a clever girl. Tom goes to school with the son of his
father´s enemy (Philip Wakem), who is a strong boy and does not like to study.
When Maggie is 13 years old there is a trial in which Mr. Wakem asks for Mr.
Tulliver´s water to be his. Philip loves Maggie but she does not love him back.
Maggie rejects sexual attraction with Philip, she chooses Tom and rejects
intellectual stimulus with Stephen.
Silas Marner (1860)

- Story of loosing faith in religion (autobiographical novel)
- Countries setting (rural communities)
Felix Holt (1866)

- Another way of religion (faith will be different)
- Relate to others, building human relations with others
Romola (1863)
- Past (Renaissance Italy)
“The Spanish Gypsy” (1868)

- Dramatic poet
Daniel Deronda (1876)

- Last work
- Contemporary England (1870s)
- Immanuel Oscar Deutsch´s ideology → Mordecai Cohen
- Topics
• Psychological realism
• Interrelated (society within society)
Upper-middle classes corruption (materialistic) e.g. Gwendolen
(unhappy marriage)
Judaism (Jewish culture): marginalized all over Europe → controversial,
criticised topic → CHANGE ENGLISH PEOPLE´S IGNORANT MIND
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- Plot: story of a woman called Gwendolen Harleth, who is going to marry

Grandcourt. She discovers he is has illegitimate children and lovers, so she rejects to
marry him
- Characters
• Daniel Deronda: he discovers that his mother is an actress. Finally, he finds
homeland for Jewish people
• Mirah
• Mordecai Cohen: prototype of a Jewish, he defends Jewish culture
• Jewish characters can have a good side and also a bad side
Middlemarch (1871-71, 1874)

- Psychological realism
- Volume of 8 books with a short prelude
- Postscript: faiths of the characters (start)
- Title: Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life
- Certain finding/conclusions because it is a novel of manners
- Moral and didactic tone
- Authorial voice: she controls the narrative making comments to add information and
to criticise her characters
- Fictional country of Middlemarch (1830-1832): Reform Bill (1832)
- Novel to convey ideas
- Realistic human life: complex characters and situations
- Topics
• Woman question
• Issue of marriage: marriage can be unhappy for both men and women
• Idealism vs. harsh reality (Dorothea Brooke)
• Issues related to religion, education
• To feel out of place vs. to find themselves to be the head of their time
(revolutionary ideas)
- Reform the idea of epic narrative: events of important people’s life → representation
of common and ordinary life (they do not have to be historical remarkable)
- Religious controversy of the 19th c. because many religions coexisted
- Different plots and characters that create a web/tissue (interrelations between
people) → each one influence the others and is influenced by the others
- Criticises the medical practices of that time
- Not a remote past
• To still be familiar for the readers
• She thought she was not able to analyze Victorian society in her time
- Particular (micro level) → universal experiences (macro level)
- Waste of talents and ideas to change the world (critics to Dorothea)
- Very strong 3rd person narrator who knows everything about all the characters and
who criticises arts (music, poetry), science and history
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- Characters
• Not protagonist: each one has a certain behaviour and world perspective (your
views and your context: not succeed in a world view)
• Dorothea ≃ Sta. Teresa de Ávila
• Dorothea: head strong woman, wealthy, intellectual skills, she helps other
people, reformer (change things), she needs to subordinate herself to a man
(MISTAKE), world of ideas, not reality
• Mr. Casawbon: project (discover relationship amount religion)
• Mary Garth: faithful
• Rosamond Vincy: very pretty girl from a simple middle-class family
• Couples
Dorothea and Mr. Casawbon
Dorothea and Will Ladislaw: good friends at the beginning but finally
they get married
Mary Garth and Fred Vincy: they get married at the end. The had known
each other since childhood
Rosamond Vincy and Tertius Lydgate: they get married for love (they
are interested in each other). Chaos and unhappy marriage because they
get married too quickly and they have different projects in life.
• 1 murder, infidelities, family problems, political and social issues, past secrets
- Unconventional novel: everybody knew she was a woman (a lot of references)
- Face a lot of controversies
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- Choices in the life of these characters

• Vocation/Profession:
Place in life, rule in society. Consequences of wrong choices
If you want to fulfil your dreams, they have to be realistic to complete
them
Novel of dissatisfaction
Marriage
◊ Short romantic courtships leaves to problems (unrealistic ideas of
each other and expectations) as Dorothea and Mr. Casawbon (he
wants to control Dorothea) and Rosamond and Lydgate
◊ Marry for love does not mean that it will be happy
◊ None of them marry for money
◊ It is a tramp for women
• Society and social class of the whole community
Expectations of the society can be very clash. Opposes society and to be
happy (Fred Vincy)
Gossips (talk behind someone’s back and direct communication) →
Misunderstanding
• Money: related to character’s personality, its past and its secrets
• Dichotomy chance and self-determination
• Science literature and writing
Scientific and technological discoveries → some people are for and
other against the changes caused because of them
Controversy 1830 (Dr. Lydgate): medicals firstly have to be scientists
and they do not only prescribe drugs and medicines, but also
4.5. Thomas Hardy. Study of Jude the Obscure.

THOMAS HARDY (1840-1928)
- Very good example in the novels of the 20th century
- Victorian writer and protomodernist (anticipates the Modernism in the 20th century):
transit from tradition and innovation
- POET as well (true vocation in life): philosophical pessimism and autobiographical
- Same setting in all her novels (fictional rural areas of Wessex, England; created by
himself), based on his childhood in Dorset
- Influences
• Charles Dickens: criticism of Victorian society
• George Eliot
• Romantic poetry, not only in his poetry but also in his novels, especially
William Wordsworth
- Very ambitious: he wanted to go to university and to become an Anglican priest
• Any of them because he had not enough money and became agnostic
• Autobiographical
- Trained as an architect instead of go to university. At the same time, he started
writing (novels and poetry)
- Very successful writer of novels
- No more novels after writing Jude the Obscure
- Extensive reading (familiarized with Darwin’s theories)
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- Main writer of the literary movement + Naturalism (France, 19th c., created by
Émile Zola)
• Scientific discoveries
• External forces (physical and metaphysical forces as life around you, nature):
We are not responsible of our lives because there are forces that controls them
• Influenced by Darwin’s theories
• Criticised superficial pessimism: it is an extension
• Reality
- Scientific methods to literature
• Not (happy) endings in his novels because life continues and has changes
• Scientific method: introduction, explanation, results and explanation of results
• Territorial unit to his novels
• Primary topic: transformation of rural communities under the pressure of
industrialization (rural past vs. industrial present)
• Landscapes
• Romanticism in his novels as a true follower of the school of Wordsworth:
ordinary people can be heroes (in his novels)
• Nature
Not join, not consolation
Maybe indifferent of our suffering
Also a place of hostility, not only a place of feelings and passion
• Love can be destroyed by marriage, institutions and fade
• Pessimistic view of life, agnosticism (rejection of theology and the idea that
humans are puppets in the hands of a force)
• Failure in life, love and vocation: suffering, characters fail in life trying to
improve themselves (stoicism) → limitations in life
• Communities: similar to Greek chorus
• Conflicts among social classes, not education (characters are rather primitive:
not evolution, instinct, Darwin’s ideas
Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)

- His first success. Then, a professional writer
- Rural life vs. industrial cities
- Problem of a society
- Avoid life in the city: cities can endanger life, rural landscape (preserve life for
future generations)
- Link between past and present life
- Plot: land owner Bathsheba (girl) loves flirting with men and she is surrounded for
some men. Gabriel Oak (poor shepherd) is chosen by her when he becomes a farm
manager
The Return to the Nature (1878)

- Clym Yeobright: cosmopolitan life in the city (France), returns to rural life →
confrontation with rural world
- Fate: can also be wrote by chance
- Nature reflects our behaviours and our characters
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The Major of Casterbridge (1886)

- External world changing to industrial society
- Characters
• Not many characters
• Michael Trenchard (main character): has not a great sense of honour and
morality (not remarkable as a human being). At the end, he dies.
- Capacity to endure pain in our life. Our worth life is to confront life and to accept
limitations in our life
Tess of the DÚrbervilles (1891)

- Both a success and a controversy
- Subversive novel (fatalism)
• Carnal side, rural experience
• Sexual connexion
- A lot of social changes
- Plot: Tess is a very beautiful and sexy girl whose parents are farmers. One day, her
father discovers that he belongs to a rich family (aristocratic family). He thinks that
old money comes to his life claiming. Tess goes to get the money. Family
DÚrbervilles is very. Best money to catch money is sending it. Tess is seduced by
Alek but she tries to contain her virginity. When she comes back she has no money,
no virginity and pregnant. She gives birth and her baby dies. She goes away to
another village. Angel loves her and they get married. At her wedding night, she
tells him about her past. Angel runs away to America to become a farmer. Alek
finds Tess and they live together. Angel repents of having abandoned her.
- Topics
• Old money (aristocracy) and new money (new businesses in Victorian world)
• Violence, sexuality
• Injustice (no justice by men, no justice by God either): injustice because Angel
abandons Tess, injustice because women are always the victims
• Social class: new money can bring you success in life, origins are defined by
class/blood
• Men exploiting women
Alek vs. Tess
Angel towards three women: he rejects two friends of Tess when he is
married (one commits suicide and the other becomes alcoholic)
• Changing of roles: Tess murders Alek
Jude the Obscure (1895)

- Subversive novel (fatalism)
• Carnal side, rural experience
• Sexual connexion
- Controversy (immorality), scandal because there is sexual hypocrisy of English
society: frustration of our ambitions (theological fatalism) → destroy social
positivism
- Bad reception that made Hardy get the decision to give novel writing
- Plot: Jude Fawley is an eleven-year-old orphan who is raised by his aunt in Wessex.
When he is young, he sees as his schoolmaster, Richard Phillotson, leaves
Marygreen and goes to Christminster. There, he plans to go to university to become
a great scholar. Jude decides to become a scholar just like him. As Jude grows up,
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he starts to teach himself Ancient Greek and Latin. He also knows that someday he
will go to Christminster to learn properly. Unfortunately, when Jude is in his late
teens, he runs into Arabella Donn. Arabella convinces Jude to sleep with her and
then that she is pregnant. Jude gives up on his dreams and agrees to marry Arabella.
Arabella reveals that she was mistaken about her condition, and Jude feels tricked.
The marriage is pretty rough from the beginning and soon Arabella decides to leave
for Australia with her family. So Jude can move on to Christminster as he always
dreamed. Of course, it is not easy for him because he is poor, so he takes on work as
a tradesman while continuing to study on his own. He follows Sue Bridehead, a
cousin of Jude's who he has never actually met in person. The two meet face to face
at last, and the attraction is pretty instant. The problem is that Jude is still legally
married to Arabella. Sue marries Phillotson but she lives with Jude. Arabella returns
and tells Jude that she has married another man in Australia. That lets Jude and Sue
start to live openly as a couple, but they do not get married. Arabella returns again
to tell Jude that she had a son years ago, and that he is Jude's. Arabella leaves her
son with Jude. Little Father Time is a strange boy who calls Sue mother and seems
not to get interested in or happy about anything. As the years go by, Sue and Jude
have two children of their own, but they are still not married. Their family is forced
to move around to places where no one knows them. After an illness and a tough
financial run, Jude decides it is time to return to Christminster. They struggle to find
lodging. Jude is forced to find separate lodging from his family. Sue talks to LFT
about how it is hard to find lodging with children and to make enough money to
support the entire family. Then, she tells LFT that she is going to have another baby.
He does not take this well. In the morning, when Sue goes out to meet Jude, Little
Father Time kills the two babies and himself. The horror of all of this causes Sue to
have a miscarriage. To make things right, Sue returns to Phillotson and remarries
him. Arabella tricks Jude into remarrying her. In the end, Jude travels to see Sue one
last time. They express their love for each other, but they do not run away. Jude
returns home and dies soon after.
- Links this world of books that Jude cannot get
- Topics
• Criticism to social classes (system)
• Adultery, divorce
• Determinism: blood, environment, God → limit the agency of the individual
• Criticism to education
High education (Oxford and Cambridge universities)
Jude works very hard to go to university
University: ideal of light and enlightenment (new Jerusalem, new
Heaven on Earth)
He had not access to university (Hardy’s own experience), no education
Education experience in life: must know about the social life, know
women before marry them (Jude marries Arabella without knowing her)
• Rejection of marriage
Institutions of marriage: divorce if you find out that there is a person that
you truthfully love and it is not your husband or your wife
Arabella abandons Jude, Sue is a free spirit
Marriage and love are not necessarily related to each other
Marriage can poison relationships (Sue’s thought)
Against marriage when it is not created by a man and a woman with free
love, when there is a legislation by men and Church
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• Women’s rights
In Victorian society, neither a professional nor an intellectual life
Sue is always portrayed, very temperamental
Not stable
Anxiety with the idea of New Woman (feminist movement), sexual
freedom (not only to have sex but also to choose a husband and to
divorce)
Arabella is a survival when she abandons Jude. Jude is rather a dreamer
• Criticism against church
Bishop: only accessible to those people who have money
Controversial debates: Jude (religion) vs. Sue (agnostic): she thinks that
agnostic people can be moral (cares for others)
Jude looses his faith and burns his books (he breaks with Christianity)
• Isolation and disappointment: life is a disappointment for Little Father Time
(why did I born? To be miserable?: I should not have been born) → depression,
sadness, pessimism, idea of having not future, meaningless life
• Society and social life can limit people prospects: poor people cannot join
university and church
• Protection of tradition whereas modern architecture can destroy the old one
- Structure
• Lives can be tragic because of the reversal of the believers
• Reversal of marriage
- Itinerancy: story of a worker that goes from a place to another. It means that we are
rudeness, we are alone in this world
- Characters
• Jude Fawley: pursue of vocation or becoming a scholar. He loves his cousin. He
needs love in marriage and university to fulfil his dreams
• Sue Brideshead: truly feminist intellectual in a Victorian novel
• Little Father Time: fate (predeterminism, fatalistic view of life)
• Prime Minister: dreams can come true
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Victorian poetry
5.1. The pre-Raphaelites and Christina Rossetti
INTRODUCTION
- Poetry: secondary role compared to novel → impact on the development of poetry
- Simplicity: ordinary language and ordinary plots
- Not support towards the improvement of poetry in Victorian society
- Own styles and own topics: new stories and how to tell them (each poet tries to find
his/her own voice (they had not someone to follow)
- Time for female poets: Christina Rossetti (religion) and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(social problems)
- Poets who escape from poetry
• Escapism (looking back to a remote past)
• Not direct criticism of society
- Material from the past: King Arthur’s time and the Round Table → English
materials (identity, models, myths and history which can affect the Victorian world
to the English people)
- Rescue romantic poets
- Functionality (social function/mission) → evasion from the Victorian society
- Religious but also secular poetry: love, solidarity, empathy, alienation of isolation
- William Wordsworth´s ideas: rural society
- Not a school of poetry in this period as in Romanticism
- Not time gap between Romantic poets and Victorian poets → Victorian poets were
highly influenced by Romantic poets (heterogeneous groups of poets)
- Lack of confidence in Victorian poets because they had the sense of
- Rewriting of Romantic poetry → attenuated overabundant Romantic poetry
1. 1st person in Romantic poetry
Not in Victorian poetry
Dramatic monologue (subjective expression of himself/herself) in 3rd
person: point of view of the character (psychology of the character and
consequences, psychological depth)
2. Long narrative poems (tell a story): poetry is not meant to tell you a story
3. Interrelated the pictorial and the picaresque
Scenic form that combines poetry and painting
Pictorial: use of detail to construct a visual image that represents an
emotion or a situation in the poetry
Picaresque: combination of visual images/impressions that carry a
predominant emotion in the poem
- Loneliness, depression, isolation: mood and personality of the characters
- Novel: England (18th c.) → women had a lot of difficulties to enter in this world,
and even more in the poetry world
- Sentimentality avoided by women: erase prejudices and explore a male subjectivity
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PRE-RAPHAELITE PAINTING AND POETRY

- Pre Raphaelite brotherhood
• Funded in London (September 1848)
• 7 original members
Main ones: William Holman hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John
Everett Millais
Others: F.C. Stephens, Thomas Woolner, James Collinson, William
Michael Rossetti
• Important personalities linked: Fox Madox Brown, Edward Burne Jones,
William Morris, Christina Rossetti, John William Waterhouse
• Poets, painters and literary critics
• Great influence in Arts until the 20th century (Modernism)
- Aesthetic principles
1. To express authentic and true ideas
2. To study carefully nature
3. To select the direct, serious and sincere in the art of the past
4. To look for the perfection in the creation of paintings and sculptures
- Painting-Literature
• Close relationship with literature. Horace’s idea: “Ut pictura poesis”
• Preference for the epic poetry: King Arthur, Dante, Shakespeare, romantics…
• Its example and ideal were the masters of the Quattrocento
• Literary-symbolic themes and the detailed thoroughly painting are not
incompatible: poetry and painting are twins, they have the same principles
• Magazine “The Genre”: published January-April 1850, its editor was William
Michael Rossetti, it had poor success and a brief existence
- English pre-Raphaelitism and Modernism
• Common links with Romanticism
• Radical rejection of the dominant academic art
• Enhancement of detail, colour and brightness: capture a moment
• Importance of Nature
• Recovery of the ancient artistic manifestations
• Search of the formal perfection (Poetry and Art)
• Connections with symbolism (meaning behind)
• Presence of eroticism and hedonist setting (lavish environment)
- Pre-Raphaelites and women
• Real women for their works
• Women were simply the art’s object, not its creators
• Three feminine pre-Raphaelite generations
- Pre-Raphaelite theme
• The Victorian woman
The Angel in the House vs. The Falling Woman
Fascination for the feminine chastity, virginity and sexuality
Idolism: woman as an artistic object of veneration
Feminine madness vs. masculine tyrant
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• Woman from the past: Mythology, legend and literature

Romanticism and connexion between ART and LITERATURE
Pictorial inspiration in narrative and poetic sources
Painting as illustration
◊ Helen of Troy: her beauty causes a war
◊ Proserpina: the femme fatale → beauty + death
◊ Blessed-Beatrix: the beloved’s death
• Hamlet’s Ophelia- William Shakespeare
Life and death of Ophelia
BEAUTY- WOMAN-WATER- DEATH: suicide in the water
Nature: flowers → Ophelia emotions
“The Female Malady”
◊ Ophelia = archetype of feminine madness. Neurosis + incoherence,
fluency and silence
◊ Connexion: feminine madness and sexuality
◊ Nowadays woman = model of the past heroine
◊ Inspiration: Victorian psychiatrics + pre-Raphaelites’ lovers and
wives
• From hedonism to suicide
“The Beloved”
◊ Aesthetic orientalism-luxury, vegetation highlight feminine beauty
◊ Theme from the Bible: Solomon’s Song
“Chatterton”
◊ Social critic-bohemian artist commits suicide in his attic =
misunderstood martyr of the society
◊ Beauty and femininity of the dead poet
• Social problems and landscape painting: Realism and Symbolism, beauty and
ugliness
1. Beauty English countryside but impossible delight: blindness and poverty
(“The Blind girl”)
2. Satire and ambiguity: simple pastoral landscape, defenceless coasts in the
presence of an enemy or danger following a politic/spiritual leader?
3. Empathy with human pain: anguish and misery of the emigration
• Arthurian world theme and The Englishness
History, legends and reinvention: King Arthur, the knights of the Round
Table and Camelot (kingdom)
Fantasy, magic world of legendary knights and fairy-tales
Imperialist England: rescue of the epic glory and search of the English
identity (“Englishness”)
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI (1830-1894)

- Famous Victorian poetess associated with the pre-Raphaelites
- Spinster
- Hidden message
- Anglo-Italian heritage
• Mediterranean world vs. Anglo-Saxon world
• Influenced by Dante Alighieri and Petrarch
- Christian modesty and patriarchal submission vs. woman as artist
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- Aesthetics of renunciation
• Escape, differ and deny through art
• Poetry as secret garden of lyrical purity and emotional intensity
• Sensual beauty and pre-Raphaelite daydream vs. resignation of temptation and
sexuality to get the eternal salvation
• Religious theme: sin and temptation
- “The Goblin Market” (1862)- Christina Rossetti
• Fairy-tale: poetry as narrative fable
Text: pre-Raphaelite primitivism and childish simplicity
Sub-text: feminine sexuality. Religion-sin and redemption
• Conflict between erotic passion and repression under Christian devotion
• A woman can be the saviour
• Sisterly affection: sisters who love each other
• Sisters Lizzie and Laura (= Maria and Eve)
• Goblins fruit sellers (= masculine animalism)
• Fruit = forbidden feminine sexuality
• Pre-Raphaelism : Fantasy + feminine psychology
• Temptation, sacrifice and salvation
• Mass and eroticism: lesbianism and sexual climax?
- Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872)
- A Pageant and Other Poems (1881)
- “Monna Innominata”: after life instead of fulfilment (emotional needs after her
death: she chooses God instead of men)
WILLIAM MORRIS (1834-1896)

- Poet, painter and also a designer and a producer of decorative art (considered to be a
minor art)
- Friend of the pre-Raphaelites
- Revolutionary voice: politics (especially in his last productions) and arts
- One of the leaders of the literary movement
- From a wealthy countryside family
- Clergyman → he gave it up
- Adulterous wife
- Inspiration from his own life
- Main achievement: The Defence of Guenevere (1858)
• Recreation of the Arthurian world
• Thomas Mortis: Morte DÁrtur
• Destruction of the kingdom
• 2 compromise situations
King Arthur’s wife is accused of adultery and sir Lancelot restore her
honour
Sir Lancelot kills a knight who accused King Arthur’s wife
• Women as the cause of a war
• Tentatives, not real facts → guess what happened, critical interpretations
• Combination of Art and visual arts
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- The Earthy Paradise (1868-1870)

• Medieval and classical
• A way to tell myths in prose
• Recreation of the Arthurian world
• Reinventing, fantasising the past
- News from Nowhere (1890)
• Utopian view of life (England)
• Real life and real growth of the individual → not socialism
• World should be free of mechanical thinking → not creativity
• Combination of arts and politics (agriculture and craft)
5.2. Alfred Tennyson, Swinburne, the Brownings and Manley Hopkins

LORD ALFRED TENNYSON (1809-1892)
- The greatest and most popular of the Victorian poets
- Life
• Isolated
• Grew up in a parsonage
• Many siblings (most of them were insane)
• Poor because his father became alcoholic and his family had economic problems
• Great education before enter to university thanks to his father
• In Cambridge he discovered that he wanted to devote his life writing poetry
• Gave up his university studies before end them because of economic problems
• Techniques improved (metrics, rhyme) → great master of poetry technique
- Poetry
• Interrelation between landscape (external) and the interior of characters
• Differences between his early and last poetry
• An accomplish verse technician: he spent 20 years writing, revising and
improving In Memoriam
• Mood and character
Melancholy and isolation of the characters
Himself reflected in his characters
• Topic: religion
Influence of the advances in science
He started having doubts in his religious feelings because he also
believed in those advances
• Not spontaneous feelings and emotions
Perfect world/image
His mannerism contradicted the countryside
• Main source of inspiration: fantastic world from the past (King Arthur)
• Not contemporary world: conservative but with not opposition of Victorian
times
• True hero: man who is proud of himself and is courageous
• Death as a destiny (characters look for death) and a state (do not live fully,
between alive and death)
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- “Marianna” (1830)
• Topics
Own feelings = melancholy, depression, isolation (deep anxiety)
Fear about love, religion and death through the withdrawal of her lover
Unfavourable environment → suffering
• Enters in the mind of an isolated woman’s (Marianna) mood
• Female voice
• Plot: she understands that her lover is not going back to her. At the end, she
looks for death, she cannot wait for something better in her life
• Sounds from the nature (animals)
• Pictorial and the picturesque: interior landscape of female characters
• Archaic words, repeated sounds, regular metrical system
- “The Lady of Shalott” (1842)
• Characters from King Arthur’s myth (Sir Lancelot, knight) and mythological
setting (Camelot)
• Magical allegory to death
• Psychological female landscape
• Plot: In the Island of Shalott there is a little castle, which is the home of the
mysterious Lady of Shalott. People pass by the island all the time, on boats and
barges and on foot, but they never see the Lady. She spends her days weaving a
magic web, and that she has been cursed, forbidden to look outside. So she
watches the world go by in a magic mirror. One day Sir Lancelot rides by the
island. When his image appears in the mirror, the Lady is so completely
captivated that she looks out her window on the real world. When this happen,
the magic mirror cracks. The Lady finds a boat by the side of the river and
writes her name on it. She lies down in the boat and lets it slip downstream,
singing her final song. She dies before she gets to Camelot.
• Invisible woman: people do not know if she is true or a legend
• Dark setting anticipates death
• Seasons: spring (birth), summer (climax/development), autumn (landscapes),
winter (death)
• 9 lines (stanzas)
• Parallel structures, repetition of sounds
- In Memoriam (1850)
• He became famous with this volume of poetry
• Elegy written during 17 years
It helped him to accept that life must conclude with death but with the
hope of an after death life
He also accepted the loss of his friend
• Relationship between nature, character and God
• Painful, purgative process
• Individual unities: although they are self-contained, they make sense as a whole
• Topics
Death because his friend Arthur Hallam died very young
Meaning of the universe
Meditation, speculation, isolation
• Spiritual autobiography inverse in faith: fluctuation between faith and doubt
(opposite moods)
- “The Princess: a Medley” (1847): related to social claim: education for women
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- “Maud, the Madness” (1855): the narrator loves a woman who dies. He chooses to
go to war in order not to became mad of that lost
- The Idylls of the King (1872)
• 12 narrative poems
• Myth created around King Arthur. He truly existed but all the figures around
him have a literary source
• Morte DÁrtur (1470)- he translated the French poems
• Topics: love, heroism
• Plot: main adventures between King Arthur and his wife and other women
• Idylls: movements of the seasons
• Death of King Arthur → loss of hope
• Ideals fail
ALGERNON C. SWINBURNE (1837-1909)

- Life
• Rebel
• Against institutions (liberal republican) and Victorian moral behaviour
• Baundelaire/ Marquis de Sade: descriptions of sex (sexual passion and sexual
pain)
• From a distinguish family
• Influenced by the pre-Raphaelites → not borders between the painters and the
artist
• Defended atheism, sexual emancipation, sexual freedom, to talk about sexuality
- Songs before Sunrise (1871)
• Collection of poems relating to Italy
• Political lyrics supporting Italian republicans (Italian “Risorgimento”/ revival)
- Poems and Ballads (1866)
• First collection of poetry
• Topics: myths, legends and real past (Classic Greece) to recreate a mythical and
historical past (not only art but also Greek democracy as an example of men’s
freedom)
• “Sapphics”: glorifies Sappho. She is considered by him to be the tenth muse,
immortal
• “The Garden of Proserpine”
Myth
Not care about life to death, but to represent Proserpine as the goddess of
death
To refer to death it has to be accepted, it has not to be avoided
Proserpine as a femme fatale (“belle dame sans mera”)
• Disturbs the form and the contents of his poems
ELIZABETH BARRET BROWNING (1834-1896)

- Emily Dickinson was the most famous poetess in her life
- Poetry as a tool to show contemporary world: social protest and social reform
- Sappho
- Life
• Orphan of mother, overprotective father
• From a very wealthy family
• Usual reader
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• Christina Rossetti claims that Elizabeth found what she could not find in life:
love
• Fulfilled her sexual needs in life ≠ Christina’s thought
• Involved in the Italian politics (Risorgimento)
• She and her husband (Robert Browning) contemporary world, highly narrative
contents, made literal experiments with poetry
• Mixture of literary produced by them → new kind of epic (epic drama and
lyrical strategies)
• Claim: women can also be poets (equality)
• Topics: empathy, sympathy, understanding, compassion
- Books of poetry
• Sonnets from the Portuguese (1845-1846)
44 love poems (sonnets)
Successor of Shakespeare in sonnets with female perspective
Emotional fulfilment in Earth
Plot: someone who suffers physical and psychological punishment
Change in her live: love (love has the power to revive life)
Robert encouraged her to publish them and she did it
Her poetry influenced Camões and maybe other Portuguese poets
Lilies: symbol of virginity
• “Aurora Leigh” (1853-1856)
Long narrative poem
Autobiography with fictional details (she is not a heroine)
Social and contemporary public issues
Künstlerroman: true vocation (development of the artist)
Social point of view: woman question
Identify aspects of her behaviour (as Romantic poets)
Personal experience: straggle to find her vocation as a poet
Aurora: England, with her father (a very possessive father), her mother
was Italian
Kind of short novel
Narrative poem
◊ Mixture of narrative and poetry
◊ She reject to get married with her cousin
◊ She rescues a prostitute of committing suicide
◊ Mixture of places, dialogues and descriptions
◊ Present (adult: lack of confidence, she only does not doubt about her
poetry vocation) and past (retrospective look to her childhood)
◊ Mixture of subjectivity and objectivity
Splendid characterization of Aurora
Melodramatic plot but also sarcastic
True spoken feminist ideology
Encyclopaedia references
Independence as a woman and as an artist
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ROBERT BROWNING (1812-1899)

- Greatest example of the dramatic monologues
- Drama
- Involved in the Italian politics (Risorgimento)
- History: to go back to history
- Very unknown poet until the death of her wife (Elizabeth Barrett Browning)
- Experimented with poetry and also with language and syntax: COMPLEIXITY
- Main achievement: dramatic monologues
• Poet and other side: speaker (not the same person)
• Readers can understand only entering in the voice of the speaker of the poem
- Fascination for human nature (psychological insight)
• Failures of men: hate and love
• Ill behaviour: manipulators, criminals, murders → EXPLORE DEVIL, BAD
BEHAVIOUR
- Considered as a proto-modernist poet
- Influenced by Chaucer, Donne and Shakespeare’s soliloquies
- Sacrifices harmony and rhyme
- Historical characters: Renascent Italy, Ancient Rome → EXPLORE UNIVERSAL
ISSUES
- Not “I” as a poet: I am the writer but not the one who is speaking
- Function of artist in the modern life
- Heaven is perfect but this world is imperfect → investigate villainy (manipulators,
criminals)
- Life: Strafford, when Elizabeth died, he came back to England with his son
- Very influenced by Shelby and also by Romantic poets
- Men and Women (1855)
• Book of poetry
• Picturesque landscapes
• Poet experiencing (not happy being abroad)
• Not single experience of life
• Science and sexuality
• Motifs and topics: typical of his own creation (multiple perspectives/voices of a
single event to provide a sensation of truth)
• Motifs
1. Italy: events that happened in the medieval and renaissance Italy = mirror of
Victorian times (men having the power, women: sex, punished)
2. Psychological view of the characters
3. Very grotesque images: brothels, magnets, murder (not very poetic)
• Topics
1. “Fra Lippo Lippi”
◊ Medicis
◊ Historical character that really existed in the renaissance Italy
◊ Purpose of art: art is not only creating beauty but also a way to make
money to live
◊ Relationship between art and morality (responsibility)
2. “My Last Duchess”: the duke of Ferrara murders his wife and gets away
without being punished
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- The Ring and the Book (1868-1869)

• Historical events → multiple points of view
• Inspiration: discover in Italy a book of (trial for murder)
• Plot: Guido kills his wife because she was discovered to be unfaithful to him
with a young handsome man
• 12 books
• Very unpoetic material
• Analysis of different issues
Contrastive perspectives of different characters
Ironic analysis between the individual and society
• Speaker who is not the speaker himself
• More about the murder trial
• Not final conclusion for the reader: the reader has to get his/her own conclusions
• Criticism vs. justice above public opinion
Impossible to distinguish good from evil
The system can destroy the individual
GERALD MENLEY HOPKINS (1844-1889)

- Priest, not known in the 19th century
- Poetic production → poet celebrates God’s creations
- Link between him and Victorians: nature is God’s magnificent
- London, belonged to a very cultivated family
- Oxford
• Exposed to secular thinking (Matthew Arnold)
• Roman Catholicism
- Priest converted into Catholicism → broken links with his family, disrupted by
protestants
- Destroyed his early poetry
• Not compatible internally to be at the same time a priest and a poet
• Encouraged to his superiors to continue writing but he did not
- Master of a new rhythm created in his poetry
- Mystical insight
- Struggle between himself (artist) and his duty as a priest
- Formal aspects
• Experiments with rhythm: sprung rhythm (any number of syllables in a foot,
imitation of ordinary speech, reminds us ancient poetry in English)
• Experiments with structure
• Coined new words
- “The Wreck of Deutschland” (1876)
• Rhapsodic
• Shipwreck in which 5 sisters are extremely persecuted for religion and they
escape to England
• Inscrutable plan of God
• Natural elements to test your faith
• God: benevolent but also out of love because He test us when we are
independent
• Inversion of words, colloquial speech → emphasis
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• Idea: God is the centre of the world (He is the one who created nature →
pleasures; God is in everything)
• Sprung rhythm
- “The Windhover” (discovered during 20th century)
• Not single interpretation
• Plot: Windhover is a bird who is flying and is looking what happens to Earth
• Images and sounds of the bird’s movements
• Metaphor for God, for Christ
• Bird that controls and protect us, free will (bird → God)
• Our life is a product of his real
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Literatura inglesa de 1800 a 1900 Dr. Francisco José Cortés

Literatura Inglesa de 1800 a 1900 (Universidad Complutense Madrid)

StuDocu no está patrocinado ni avalado por ningún colegio o universidad.

Dr. Francisco José Cortés Vieco

Introduction to 19th century

Descargado por Carmen Cenalmor (carmencenalmor13@gmail.com)

- The Storming of the Bastille in France (1789)

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

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ROMANTIC POETRY (NATURE POETRY)

`The Spirit of the Age´

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3. Glorification of the ordinary and the outcast

WILLIAM BLAKE (1757-1827)

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850)

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SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834)

JOHN KEATS (1795-1821)

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VICTORIAN AGE (1830/1837-1900)

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Early Period (1830-1848)

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Mid Period (1848-1870)

Late Period (1870-1900)

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1.2. Romanticism: antecedents, ideology, Lord Bryon and evolution

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818)

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- 3rd person narrator → 1st person narrator

Don Juan (1819-1824)

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THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881)

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• Depressing picture of the daily life of the workers

JOHN STUART MILL (1806-1873)

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- While he advanced the cause of democracy to a considerable degree, he eloquently

JOHN RUSKIN (1819-1900)

THOMAS DE QUINCEY (1785-1859)

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821)

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- Recollections of human kindness but also of childhood traumas to justify drug-

MATTHEW ARNOLD (1822-1888)

CHARLES DARWIN (1809-1882)

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• Human species could also do the same (growth of English population)

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN/ CARDENAL NEWMAN (1801-1890)

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The novel of the early 19th century

JANE AUSTEN (1775-1817)

Characteristics of her novels

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Sense and Sensibility (1811)

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- Not show feelings in public

Northanger Abbey (post. 1818)

Pride and Prejudice (1813)

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- Narrative technique: different kinds of narrator (Jane Austen’s voice)

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not to allow Lydia to go to Brighton. Her father, however, dismisses Elizabeth’s

• They are not static: self-scrutiny to get self-knowledge