1. Introduction to the 19th century.

1.1. Historical, sociopolitical and cultural context (period 1780/90 – 1830/40)

1.2. Romanticism as a literary movement

1.- INTRODUCTION TO THE 19TH CENTURY

1.1.- Historical context

Romanticism is a movement in response to neo-Classicism (or the Age of Reason) and in

England it lasted from 1780 to 1830. Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on
emotion and individualism as well as glorification of all the past and nature, preferring the
medieval rather than the classical. It was (mainly?) partly a reaction to the Industrial
Revolution, The American War of Independence and the French Revolution.
Romantic period (1780-1830) MOVER

The Georgian era (1714-1837) is the time where we have rulers from the area of
Hannover. The last king is William the 4th, and his successor is his niece, the Queen

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Victoria. Nevertheless, the House of Hannover changed their name to the name of the
House of Windsor. The Regency period goes from 1811 to 1820, where the future
George the 4th (Prince of Wales at that time) was the regent of his father George the 3rd.

Factors:
-American Independence (1776) The American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), also
known as the American War of Independence,[43] was an 18th-century war between Great
Britain and its Thirteen Colonies (allied with France) which declared independence as the
United States of America. The peace was signed between America and Great Britain with
the Declaration of Independency and the Treat of Paris .

-French Revolution (1789) It has a huge impact in the British Society. It is important
to analyze the acts after the French Revolution. Some people accepted the French
Revolution but, little by little, they realize that this did not change anything. There came
Napoleon, the first dictator in the modern world. Britain defeated Napoleon thanks to
the British Navy, and there are two national heroes:

 Admiral Nelson: Who also won the Spanish Navy in the Trafalgar Battle.
 Duke of Wellington: He helped the Spanish guerrilla against Napoleon’s brother.
Wellington defeated Napoleon at the Waterloo Battle.

-Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland (1800) A hundred years before,
the union between England and Scotland was signed.

-Catholic Emancipation Act (1829) Process in the kingdoms of Great

Britain and Ireland, which at the time were separate kingdoms, in the late 18th century
and early 19th century that involved reducing and removing many of the restrictions
on Roman Catholics introduced by the Act of Uniformity, the Test Acts and the penal
laws.

-Slavery Abolition Act (1833) There were slaves coming from the African countries
establishing a plantation system in America. The leasure class were the owners of these
plantations during the 19th century.

All this period coincide with the Industrial Revolution, which implies a huge change
in the economy and society in the British society. Idea of The Two Nations and the
‘Laissez-faire’ (‘Let it be’). We find the predominance of the free market to create
wealth, and the Government does not imply itself in the economical activities. The
Industrial Revolution does not only mean the change of the economical system, but also
a change ship from rural population to urban population. The whole 19th century implies
the fight of workers and trade unions for their rights. The steam engine also became
important, although there wasn’t yet a railway system. We can see in some novels the
problem of workers destroying machines, trying to convince the employees that labor
force should be used, instead of machines (as in Charles Dickens).

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In general terms, this period is prosperous; the problem is that the wealth was not
equally distributed. The British Empire is huge (India, New Zealand, Africa
countries…). British looked for other places to establish themselves. Economic
colonization. This is related to the Leisure class, with an exploitation of the colonies and
a society that enjoyed the wealth the colonies gave. During that time, the worker class
went under difficulties, and the population fought for their rights. Only rich people were
the ones that could vote, so lower-class people were considered non-human and inferior:
they were considered ‘it’ creatures. However, although they had no rights (they
couldn’t vote, they couldn’t divorce, they were uneducated), there was an era of female
writers, so there was literacy (ability to write and write) through the lower-class.
Women became the main readers and writers. So that, women start fighting for their
rights.
Events happening in France had an effect in British newspapers. The British were
readers of newspapers, so they were aware of the events happened in France. There are
different reactions to the French Revolution:

-Conservatives as Edmund Burke who reacted against it.

-Radical thinkers as Thomas Paine or William Godwin and his future wife Mary
Wollstonecraft (‘Indication of the Right of Man’). She was the first feminism writer,
claiming that women should have the same rights as women, in her ‘Indication of the
Rights of Woman’ at the beginning of the 19th century. William Godwin and Mary
Wollstonecraft are the parents of Mary Shelley.

British thought the world was going to change, but that wasn’t true as the saw with
Napoleon. Little by little, Romantic thinkers started to be disappointed by the evolution
of events in France, so they stopped supporting the French Revolution.

1.2.- Definition of Romanticism

It is a literary and artistic movement in Europe and America. The periods do not
coincide in one and other country. It comes from the Sturm und Draug movement in
Germany. We have to consider that from the British Isles the Romantic period goes. We
have to understand the Romanticism as a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment and
the Industrial Revolution. It is based on radical individualism. Romantics means that the
human being has an infinite longing, and God is not the most important idea. This idea
of infinite longing gives birth to characters such Faust, who wants to break with the
moral religious and go beyond.
Romanticism cares a lot about myths, legends and imperfect heroes. It is a looking back
to the past. The characters have a ‘dark’ side, which gives us an idea of imperfect
world.

Apocalyptic millennial expectations It is related to the French Revolution and with

the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century. It leads to a period of
cleansing, in order to get a better world in the future and a new order. In other words,

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the period of God in the Earth (the Paradise). Some writers interpreted the French
Revolution as the necessary step which would lead humanity to this Paradise.

Enlightenment Idea of originality, light, reason, science…

1.3.- Romantic poetry

Romantic poetry is not a common way to write poetry. It is a frame where every poet
picks his own tenet. So that, poets will not share any characteristic.
The ‘Spirit of the Age’. There is a change in literature, based in innovations and
experiments in poetry. Authors wanted to create new ways to express themselves and
claim freedom of form and styles. There is a fusion between poetic language and
prosaic language. There is also the idea of individual self-assertion, and an importance
of the ‘I’. Egoistical sublime. Importance of nature in the poems, and not only with
descriptions of it. Internal nature (the one with our internal nature) expresses our
feelings. We have to let our body express itself (instincts are important)

There are four tenets in the poetry of the Romanticism:

-Freedom and spontaneity in poetry Emotions recollected from the past and
accompanied by reflections. The act of component is spontaneous; you have a
perception that stimulates your creativity, so you will be able to write. If you
intellectualize your poetry, it would not be an expression of your feelings.

-Nature poetry It is based on the observation of the external world. It mixes with
meditation. There is a predominance of landscapes. Many writers firstly show you a
change in the environment, according to the different season. We can link seasons with
changing (winter means aging, springs means beauty…). God can be found everywhere
in nature, since the representation of God in poetry is nature.

-Glorification of the ordinary and the outcast It means that any incident of daily
life can be what matters in poetry. The poetry we had before was about politics, love…
but not this one. We can find, for example, the topic of a mother feeding her children, or
the topic of peasant working in the field. Nevertheless, we find other topics such love,
death… Wordsworth is the main representative of daily life topics, but Lord Byron and
Blake did not think like him. There is no rule, you can write about high or low life.

-Supernatural and strangeness in beauty Inspiration can be found in a violation of

moral conducts. Poets find inspiration in legends, myths, past stories… The past is
interesting, as well as unconsciousness (astrology, esoteric, occult, nightmares). They
also find inspiration due to drugs (opium) and alcohol. This last tenet is linked with the
gothic literature.

1.4.- Romantic poets

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W. Wordsworth
The Prelude is an autobiography poem. It is a poem important to understand romantic
poetry. He experiments a period of crisis in order to understand who he is. He talks
about his childhood, the effect that French Revolution had in him and about his mission
in life (be fully devoted to poetry). He defines himself as a hero in his time.
Lyrical Ballads (1798), together with Coleridge, is a manifesto, where they express the
spirit of the age and explain the theory of the poetry:

 They tried to democratize poetry, it should have elements of the common life.
 Romantic poetry is to use language to describe experiences.
 Transgression of the values.
 The poet is the messiah, the one who is telling the truth and talks about
individual experiences. Interrelation between social and political changes.
 Poetry should be spontaneous, it should not be planed.

Tintern Abbey is one of the most important ballads. In blank verse, he explains the myth
of nature. Thanks to nature, one can meditate about life. In the preface you can find the
language of common people and incidents of daily life. Poetry is a legitimate way to
express your emotions.
He is the most related with the spirit of the age. Poetry should be an expression of
individuality. Anything can be a source of poetry inspiration. His definition of poetry is
‘spontaneous overflow of feelings’. He used symbolism and the lyrical ‘I’. This lyrical
‘I’ means that they make themselves the heroes of the poet. Nevertheless, the heroes are
not flawless, but they are still the main characters. Looking back to the past in order to
remember your childhood, since you feel the same emotions you felt when you look a
memento of this childhood.

William Blake
He was also an illustrator and a painter. Illustrations sometimes help to understand his
poetry, and sometimes don’t. Like Keats, he is very interested in the state of feelings
and sins, good and bad… He is a very obscure poet. Blake was influenced by the ideals
and ambitions of the French and American Revolutions; also by Dante, Boehme (even
in God you can find good and evil).
His most important contribution to romantic poetry is Songs of Innocence and
Experience (1794). ‘Innocence’ and ‘Experience’ are definitions of consciousness that
rethink Milton's existential-mythic states of Paradise and the Fall.

John Keats
He is considered the most brilliant romantic poet. When we think about the life of a
romantic poet, we see that they all died very young. He died isolated, devastated by the
hard critics he received from the rest of the rest of the romantic poets.

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Keats used sonnets as a metrical form. His poetry will be based on the mixture of
pleasure and pain. We can call Keats a ‘chameleon poet’, because of his modus
operandi to write: he is able to identify himself with external object.
His three main poems are Ode to the Nightingale, Ode to a Grecian Urn and To
Autumn.

Samuel Coleridge
Wordsworth and Coleridge are sometimes called the ‘Lake Poets’. He was also a
literary critic (he wrote critics to Shakespeare). He travelled to Germany, where he was
exposed to German literary and philosophy. In fact, one of his main influences is Kant.
Coleridge was the instigator of Wordsworth, he helped him to write his poetry.
He wrote three visionary poems, in where we find the idea of mystery and demons in
our lives:
 Kubla Khan Power of the imagination. The poem celebrates creativity
and how the poet is able to experience a connection to the universe
through inspiration.
 Christabel Idea of occult
 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Idea of an outcast that has made a
mistake.

Percy Shelley
He was one of the major English Romantic poets and is regarded by critics as amongst
the finest lyric poets in the English language. A radical in his poetry as well as his
political and social views, Shelley did not achieve fame during his lifetime, but
recognition for his poetry grew after his death.
Shelley is perhaps best known for such classic poems as Ozymandias, Ode to the West
Wind, The Cloud... His other major works include long, visionary poems such as Queen
Mab, Alastor, The Revolt of Islam...

Lord Byron (1788-1824)

His real name was George Gordon. Lord Byron’s father was a rake (libertine and a
fortune-hunter), married with a woman that belonged to a Scottish aristocracy. When
his father died, his mother took care of his instruction. At the age of ten, he inherited the
title of Lord. He studied at Cambridge, where he wrote his first poems. After
graduating, he travelled around Europe, which were an influence to the first Cantos of
Childe Harold’s. As a Lord, he was invited to be a member of the Parliament. At that
time, we had two main parties in the Government, the Tories (conservatives and
royalist) and the Whigs (supporting middle-classes and more liberal). Lord Byron has a
short political career supporting the Whigs. He married unhappy because he was
accused of homo-sexual activities (which is still unproved), and because he had a
incestuous relationship with his step-sister. In 1766 he abandoned England and migrated
to Switzerland with Mary Shelley and with Polidori. There, they decided to tell scary
stories at the night, when Polidori wrote some books about horror stories and Shelley
wrote Frankenstein. After Geneva, they went to Venice, where he married an Italian
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aristocrat. Years after, he had to abandon Venice because he got involved into a plot
against the Austrian Empire. At the end, he went to Greece, where he died. He was a
very prolific waiter.
He wrote literature in order to portray himself and the outside world. Lord Byron is
often compared with Walter Scott. In a way, Lord Byron was famous in Great Britain
and outside after the publication of his first two Cantos. He is the best poet, able to
articulate and take the spirit of the age. He shows his discontent and criticism to the age
in his poems.
Walter Scott considered himself an insider; on the other side, Lord Byron is an outsider
(not in the sense of marginalization, but in the sense that he analyzed what happened
inside European society, his intention is to show the anomalism of the world). The
author’s intention was to show his unhappiness with the society, and to make fun of
contemporary society. As we will see, he creates his own myth as a barony hero
complemented by the audience’s imagination. He created his own reputation.
He got his iconic status by using idiosyncratic verse and his patriarchal individualism.
This was important to differentiate him in the romantic groups of poets of the dissenters,
who want to build a new present and to forgot the past, they don’t care about romantic
nature, and they just wanted to defend the ordinary life. There is a nationalistic
movement in the 19th century. Byron himself can be considered a libertarian and a
libertine (he would life a complex love and sexual story). He was a kind of journalist,
expressing in his poetry what was happening in Europe at the time.
He is the creator of the prototypical romantic hero, as Don Juan:

 He is an antihero, a hero who has evil and good inside him. They are
more humans that the heroes we had seen before. They tend to be
isolated, and they sometimes have self-destruction ideas. Nevertheless,
they are self-confidence. Self-assertion, they care about the ‘I’
(individualism). They become idealized and flawed at the same time.
They tend to be very talented.
 They rebel against social, political and supernatural forces (religion, for
example). They want to be more than God.
 Lord Byron gave characteristics of himself in his heroes. By reading Don
Juan, we see his own personality.
 They have a strong individualism, which fight about conventions.
 The true follower of the Byronic hero is Emily Bronte (Wuthering
Heights) with his character Hycliff.

He denounced that Britain had to be more interested in the things that were happening
in Europe.

His two main novels are:

-Childe Harold’s Pilgrimane (1812-1818): It is a long narrative travelogue (a kind of
diary with dialogues), from the perspective of an eloquent tourist. Many experts think

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that the real character is Lord Byron, described as the character of the work. This idea of
visiting Europe was, for writers and knights, was a part of the training (child training) in
order to finish their education. The first two cantos were the experience of Lord Byron’s
travels. Canto III deals with his experience in Switzerland and Canto IV with his
experiences in Italy. In Canto III and IV we find Lord Byron in a personal way.
Chivalric romance (‘novela de caballeria’). High-pitched style (aristocratic subjects,
mock-heroic which makes fun of the situation)

-Don Juan (1819-1824): The myth of Don Juan was born before Lord Byron, with Tirso
de Molina in the 17th century. He was a character in his play El burlador de Sevilla. The
character created by Tirso de Molina was a seducer, but Lord Byron’s character is
seduced by women. The innovation in Lord Byron we have not only a womenizer, but
also that he is the one seduced by women. It is written in first person, and we discover
that the one telling all the stories are Lord Byron himself, not the main character. We
see a high-pitched style combined with love and religious issues, they all told in a very
confessional story. Don Juan is classified as a carnavelesque novel or as a epic carnival
epistolary, by meaning that Lord Byron priority was to provide a huge amount of
characters, being the main characters the two main couples (Don José and Dona Innes,
and Don Alfonso and Doña Julia). In some Cantos, we find diversion that abandon the
character of Don Juan and focus on second stories. Don Juan is an unfinished poem,
since Lord Byron died when he finished after writing Canto XVI. Don Juan got a great
popularity at that time, and he is considered to be immoral to the Victorian taste. The
poem is often compared with the main picaresque novel, El Lazarillo de Tormes: both
characters are wit and have courage to face their problems. The third element of the
novel is the Interest of the British writers in the countries of Europe. They thought, for
example, that Spain was very exotic because his large world power and because of the
nationalistic movement; they also thought that Spain was archaic, while the other
nations grew economically. According to the stylistic POV, Lord Byron used the Ottava
rima, an eight-line stanza with rhyme abababcc which has a very powerful effect on the
reader. Don Juan is an improvised poem, there is no planning between one Canto and
the next one. He is the prototype of the ‘homme fatale’ hero. We feel understanding for
his problems and compassion for him when he is in problems. The last Cantos we have
sets on the Mediterranean area, Portugal, Venice Russia, London… We have the
convention of travel’s narratives (before him, we have Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s
Travels, or Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe). In these travels, we find a peripatetic
journey, where the character experiences both good and evil which are essential to
create the character’s identity and help him to grow. Lord Byron destroys the idea of
human goodness, we see in his poetry a pessimistic point of view of the society.

1.5.- Romantic essay

New journalism. We will find two main newspapers created in the 18th century: Tatler
(by Steele) and Spectator (by Addison). The main objective of these newspapers was to

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tell the population what they wanted to know. There was an important magazine called
Rewiews, where some novels were published by volumes (one chapter every month).
The term ‘Lo Familiar essay’ is a term to define this kind of writing. The essays at the
time were very subjective, and the authors wanted to create an intimate relation with the
readers. They wrote about murderers, event of the daily life in Britain, poor people…
They considered themselves as ‘mediators’.

There are three main romantic essayists:

-William Hazlitt He democratized the literary criticism on Shakespeare’s plays. He
is the reporter of the activities of the British Parliament.
-Charles Lamb He was the one who promoted romantic poetry. Idea of nostalgia of
the past. He was influenced by the tradition of the English literature.
-Thomas de Quincey Confessions of an English Opium Eater. He tells about his
traumas in his childhood. He experienced terrible fantasies and nightmares when he was
an opium consumer and, especially, after it.

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ANALYSIS OF DON JUAN (CANTO I)

Summary

The author begins by saying that since his own age cannot supply a suitable hero for his
poem, he will use an old friend, Don Juan. Don Juan was born in Seville, Spain. His
parents are Don José and Donna Inez. Donna Inez is learned and has a good memory.
Her favorite science is mathematics. She has a smattering of Greek, Latin, French,
English, and Hebrew. Don José has no love for learning or the learned and has a roving
eye. As his wife is rigidly virtuous and as he is incautious by nature, he is forever
getting into scrapes. Consequently, there are quarrels between the two. Donna Inez, with
the help of druggists and doctors, tries to prove that her husband is mad. She also keeps
a diary in which she notes all his faults and even searches through his trunks of books
and letters looking for evidence to use against him. Their friends and relatives try to no
avail to bring about a reconciliation; their lawyers recommend a divorce. But before the
situation can reach a critical point, Don Jose dies.
Donna Inez makes herself responsible for the supervision of Don Juan's education. He is
taught riding, fencing, gunnery, how to scale a fortress, languages, sciences, and arts.
His education is to a certain degree impractical, for he is taught nothing about life and
studies the classics from expurgated editions. In short, his mother sees to it that he
receives an education calculated to repress all his natural instincts and keeps the facts of
life from him.
Among Donna Inez's friends is Donna Julia, a beautiful, intelligent young woman with
Moorish blood in her veins. She is married to Don Alfonso, a jealous man more than
twice her age. Theirs is a loveless marriage. It is rumored that Donna Inez and Don
Alfonso had once been lovers and that she cultivated the friendship of Donna Julia to
maintain the association with the husband. Donna Julia has always been fond of Juan,
but when he becomes a young man of sixteen, her feelings toward him change and
become a source of embarrassment to both of them. Juan does not understand the
change that is taking place in him, but the more sophisticated Julia realizes that she is
falling in love with Juan. She resolves to fight her growing love and never to see Juan
again but the next day finds a reason for visiting his mother. She then convinces herself
that her love is only Platonic and persuades herself that it will remain that way. Juan
meantime cannot understand why he is pensive and inclined to seek solitude.
One June evening Julia and Juan happen to be in a bower together. One of Julia's hands
happens to fall on one of Juan's. When the sun sets and the moon rises, Juan's arm finds
its way around Julia's waist. Julia strives with herself a little, "And whispering 'I will
ne'er consent'-consented" (St. 117).
As Julia lies in her bed one November night, there arises a tremendous clatter. Her maid
Antonia warns her that Don Alfonso is coming up the stairs with half the city at his
back. The two women have barely enough time to throw the bedclothes in a heap when
Don Alfonso enters the room. Julia indignantly asks Alfonso if he suspects her of
wrongdoing and invites him to search the room. Alfonso and his followers do so and
find nothing. While the search is going on, Donna Julia protests her innocence with

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angry eloquence, giving numerous examples of her virtue and pouring abuse upon her
luckless husband. When no lover is found, Don Alfonso tries to excuse his behavior but
only succeeds in drawing sobs and hysterics from his wife. Alfonso, shamefaced,
withdraws with his followers and Julia and Antonia bolt the bedroom door.
No sooner has Alfonso gone than Juan emerges from beneath the pile of bedclothes
where he has been hidden. Knowing that Alfonso would soon be back, Julia and
Antonia advise Juan to go into a closet. Hardly has Juan entered his new hiding place
when Alfonso returns. Alfonso makes various excuses for his conduct and begs Julia's
pardon, which she half gives and half withholds. The matter might have ended there had
Alfonso not stumbled over a pair of men's shoes. He promptly goes to get his sword.
Julia immediately urges Juan to leave the room and make his exit by the garden gate,
the key to which she gives him. Unfortunately, on his way out he meets Alfonso and
knocks him down. In the scuffle Juan loses his only garment and flees naked into the
night.
Alfonso sues for divorce. Juan's mother decides that her son should leave Seville and
travel to various European countries for four years. Julia is put in a convent from which
she sends Juan a letter confessing her love for him and expressing no regrets.
The first episode of Don Juan ends at this point, but before concluding Canto I Byron
adds twenty-two stanzas in which he entertains himself by giving a mocking statement
of his intentions in regard to Don Juan, taunts his contemporaries Wordsworth,
Coleridge, and Southey, defends the morality of his story, confesses that at thirty his
hair is gray and his heart has lost its freshness, comments on the evanescence of fame,
and says goodbye to his readers.

Analysis

Two main topics:

-The idea of the formal education It is the one Don Juan receives. Lord Byron
criticizes the necessity of going to school. Lord Byron finally learns that the real teacher
is life. We have to be rule by our hearts and also by our head.
-The idea of the unhappy marriage He also criticized the arrange marriages. If
there is not attraction, we cannot have a happy marriage.

Byron is far more interested in the wives than in the husbands and characterizes them
rather extensively. Neither portrait is flattering. Donna Inez's is clearly malicious; in her
Byron was attacking his estranged wife. She is not a faithless wife, but she is an
intolerant and rather frigid one. Donna Julia's portrait of woman as wife is likewise
unflattering; she deceives herself — and her husband. However, Byron makes the reader
feel sympathetic toward her in spite of his using her to show up woman's wiles. Donna
Julia and Don José, had they been closer in age, might have made a compatible pair;
Donna Julia finds in Don José's son the warmth that was in the father. Donna Inez and
Don Alfonso, who had been lovers at one time, might have gotten along well in

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marriage. Human nature and society, Byron seems to say, work against a happy
marriage.
The story in Canto I is told by an "I" persona who is said to be a friend of Don Juan's
family. Byron may have foreseen the difficulties involved in making this persona a
witness who would be present with Don Juan in his various adventures and so decided
to discard him. At any rate the "I" narrator is discarded before the first canto ends, and
becomes Byron himself giving his opinions on various matters and communicating
more or less confidentially with the reader.
Canto I of Don Juan is without doubt the most interesting, entertaining, and amusing of
all the cantos. For anything of this kind comparable in quality and liveliness in English
verse, the reader has to go all the way back to Chaucer.

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2.- VICTORIAN AGE (1830/7-1900)

2.1.- Historical context

Early period (1830-1848)

Mid period (1848-1870)
Late period (1870-1900)

This is the time when England was at the top of his economical and social era. Britain
was a world power. This is a period of constant change. All of this was combined with
a feeling of pessimism, since many human values were lost.
During this time, London replaces Paris as the world capital. Industrial revolution of the
British landscape. The economy is based on manufactory and on trade. We have the
steam engine and a lot of progress in the printing industry. Photography will be created.
England became the first industrialized country in the world and, therefore, the most
powerful empire.
The problem was that industrialization was unregulated (the working conditions were
not regulated) and was a very fast progress. There is a new trade for humanism (against
machines substituting humans).
The Victorian age is a period of a crisis of values. We can see new religious concepts.
Religion was still very present in the English society, and it would be an important fact
on English social live and literature. Most of people in south and east England went to
church; people in Scotland were conservative and very religious. Nevertheless in north
England, people did not go to church (it was the most industrialized England, so they
only had one day free and they did not waste it by going to church). There was a
growing agnosticism. There is a strong Puritanism about sexuality (women sexuality,
especially). Victorian society was very critical, people could be tolerant related to men’s
adultery, but not with women’s adultery, this is double moral.
All this happened during the reign of Queen Victoria. There was a lot of expectation
about a changing in the women’s position. Some women started to see family as a
symbol of oppression. On the contrast, Queen Victoria was seen as an example of
woman (she had nine children and she was very faithful with her husband).
Little by little, middle-class people would have more relevance and ore rights, in order
to avoid an internal revolution in the country. This is the time for working class to get
some human rights and a better working condition.

-Early period Revolutionary period. At the beginning of the period, we have the
Catholicism emancipation act (which means the end of the Romanticism). There is a
reform on the electoral system of the Parliament in order to allow more people to vote.
Rotten boroughs (territory areas that are not populated) were over represented in the
Parliament and the big cities did not have enough representation. Middle classes wanted
to be represented in the Parliament. This atmosphere of claim by the middle classes
would have an effect on literature (as in Middlemarch by George Elliot). There unions

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were created to fight for worker’s rights. Railway lines were built (the first railway line
would be from Liverpool to Manchester). The London tube was started to be built. The
working classes were asking the child working to stop, and better conditions. The living
conditions were very hard (in some areas there wasn’t drinking water, people died of
tuberculosis…). Abolition of high tariffs, there were high tariffs to import grain from
other countries, so poor people starved and died.

-Mid period Economic prosperity and the growth of the Empire. There are many
religious controversies. There would be novels that denounced the problems of the
Victorian Age. In general terms, this is a time of optimism. Middle classes and
aristocratic classes would benefit themselves from the colonial empire. The working
hours were limited and there were also a limitation on the children working.
Technological progress, being the best example was the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park
in 1851 because of the Cristal Palace. It is the time when the British Empire had the
most control of the world because of its colonies. The telegraph was invented, and this
allowed the communication between the British Empire and the colonies. There are two
kinds of colonies: white colonies (Canada, Australia, New Zealand) and the rest of
colonies (India, Africa…). Religious debates between the Broad Church and the High
Church. The Oxford movement is a religious revival, the Anglican Church wanted to
get closer to the Catholicism. They felt that, in order to get back to Catholicism, they
had to get back to the past habits. Evangelical Church was about the emotional reactions
and joy; this evangelical church was very important at the age, they were progressive in
the sense that they were an important group against slavery. Charles Darwin’s theorist
about evolution were a huge shock, since people believed that human beings were
created by God. ‘Utilitarianism’ was coined by Jeremy Bentham, who said that we have
to maximize the pleasure in life and minimize the pain; the important thing is to achieve
happiness.

-Late period Time of decadence, rebellion and massacres. The public opinion started
to think that maybe colonialism is not good for the British population. It is the time of
the Jubilees to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Queen Victoria in the throne. A
crisis in 1873 involves emigration to other countries. Karl Marx theories (Marxism said
that there were no properties, everything belonged to everyone) in Germany influenced
the British ideas.
The reign of Queen Victoria is named as ‘Victorian Age’ to describe the mentality of
the society. She was a very beloved queen. We can define the Victorian age with three
different concepts:

 Earnestness (‘honestidad’)
 Domestic propriety (‘decencia’)
 Moral responsibility: Related to devotion to duty and devotion to hard work.

These concepts will be also the basis for Victorian novels. They can be defined as
realistic novels.
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After the death of Queen Victoria, many writers started to criticize the Victorian ages,
so that the adjective ‘victorian’ would be used as a pejorative concept. We now consider
the Victorian Age as a period of transition.
We have writers that oppose to the Victorian values; they would criticize the doctrines
of the system. It is the time of debate, and the age when philosophy grows up because of
the crisis of values. Many writers would be very enthusiastic about colonialism, and
some of them would be very critical about it. Some of them criticized the hard working
conditions and even the British Empire. Women writers would denounce the
discrimination to them (until the 19th century women were not allowed to vote, and they
were considered inferior to men). Education for low-class girls were developed on
charity, while high-class girls were allowed to study basic education, but not at
university.

2.2.- Victorian Literature

All men can have the right to education. There was a huge literacy at that time. Libraries
were created, so everybody could access literature and read some books. Magazines at
that time had political issues, poems, novels, short stories… and they were accessible to
everyone. Some writers became a celebrity due to these magazines (Charles Dickens,
for example)
The novels were realist, and they were based on:

-Delight We have to create fictional words that bring pleasure to us

-Instruct We need a final message.

From 1870 to 1880 we see a change on the writer’s ideas, which is called the ‘Turn of
the Century’. There is a new motto (‘Art for art’s sake’) which means that we create
beauty as the expression of a feeling or mood.

2.3.-Victorian prose

We have to distinguish Victorian prose and Victorian novel.

Victorian prose was non-fictional prose, writers tried to show the society the intellectual
life through political and economical issues, and also literature. We have a great
predominance of literary criticism. They considered themselves to be secular priests, in
a sense they replaced the Church, since they gave advice and they were very persuasive
(they wanted to convince people and tell them how to understand the world)

-Matthew Arnold He was a poet, and he was very disappointed with his poetry,
because it did not express what he felt. He was a social and literary critic. Matthew
Arnold was told by the British Government to travel and see how education worked
around Europe (Germany and France, mainly), since the British Government wanted to
improve education. He wanted to impose a liberal education, where children could study
about most every subject. He thought that this liberal education is the one which makes

15
us understand the world, and the one that told us that we shouldn’t have a vocational
education. Literature can replace religion in the sense that we can understand ourselves,
and provide us with the meaning that does not only necessary come from religion. He
thought that literature criticism was vital. He criticized the lack of culture in the society.
He was against the puritan religious morality, but he considered that humans are
civilized thanks to religion. He considered him to be the healer of a sick society. He
wrote essays in criticism and he provided guidance to readers.

-Thomas Carlyle (CV)

-John Henry Newman He became Cardinal Newman, a essayist and leader of the
Oxford movement. He was the keeper of the religious concept at the time of materialism
and individualism. He encouraged conversion to Catholicism because through these
conversion people would discover new channels of spiritualism. His writings would be
much criticized and he would defend dogmas. He wanted to change the Church of
England. He was against agnosticism, materialism and utilitarianism.

-John Ruskin He was a social theorist, and also an art critic. He explored the
interrelationship between man and nature, through the study of architecture and art. He
used a scientific method combined with personal morality. His most relevant
contribution is called Stones of Venice, which is a metaphor of Venice. Ruskin showed
that this city deteriorates and goes to decadence, the same way British society also does.

-Charles Darwin (CV)

-John Stuart Mill (CV)

2.4.- Jane Austen (1775-1817)

At the end of the 18th century, literature changes in the sense that women finally become
writers. Women writers are usually influenced by Samuel Richardson and Henry
Fielding. Some of them reflected irony and criticism about society in her novels, but
they would respect the well established patriarchal order. For example:

-Mary Wolkstonecraft She wrote about women’s rights.

-Maria Edgeworth

-Ann Radcliffe Gothic novels, she was named the ‘Queen of terror’.

-Charlotte Smith

-Frances Burney

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Jane Austen wrote her novels when she was young, but she corrected them while she
got older. She was the main representative of the Novel of Manners and the Regency
Period (George I was ill, so his successor George IV would be the ruler of England).
This is also the time of the Napoleonic threat.
We don’t have much information about her life. She was born in the region of
Hampsharie. She was the daughter of a reverent and she had many brothers and sisters.
So that, her family didn’t have many money. After some time, her family had to move
in order to get accommodation (Bath, Chawton…). In Chawton, he wrote the novels
Emma, Persuasion and Mansfield Park. She was very close to her sister Cassandra. Her
family has to be supported by her brothers, and we can see this in her novels (many of
the girls depended economically on their husbands). Henry Austin (Jane’s brother)
helped her to publish her novels. Her daily life was very simple: helping her mother,
spying the neighbors, playing the piano… At that time, dancing was an activity for
women and men, so her had time to meet men and she had some marriage proposals.
Probably she refused them to devote her time to write.
In these ages, it was common that female writers adopted a male’s name in order to
publish. Jane Austen, on the other hand, wrote in her first published novel (Sense and
Sensibility) ‘published by a woman’. When she published Pride and Prejudice she
referred to the author of Sense and Sensibility.
In 1816, she got ill and had to move to Winchester (and wrote Persuasion) where she
died. She soon became in the main figure of her period, and she is one of the main
writers of English literature.
She is the master of irony and writes about rural communities. She is not a feminist,
she’s rather conventional. She is a master of language (she knows what to say, how
much to say…). We cannot find analogies with her life. Her novels are optimistic
although there are little problems in our daily lives.
We have other writers in the Novel of Manners, but Jane Austen was the one who
achieved the perfection. The Novels of Manners are about the behavior, the values and
the language of a social class. In her same, the same class (the one she belonged to,
upper-middle class living in rural communities at the end of the 18th century). But the
problem in the Novel of Manners is the conflict between the aspiration of the human
beings and the clash of the proper social behavior, this would etiquette decorum. She is
against sentimental novels (where we have heroes and heroines driven by their
emotions). With her irony, she tries to attack the society. Her main occupation as a
writer was to reflect the faith of women, she cares about her heroines, and she wants
them to be happy. Nevertheless, she is also worried about philosophical issues (like in
Sense and Sensibility, where we can see the conflict about reasons and feelings). She
controls perfectly the economic style (using a few words to express her perfectly), she
want to reflect her power as a writer. Intellectual revolution of the romantic period. It is
unrelated to the novel of Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott. Charlotte Brontë would
attack her calmness, because she thought that novels were about energy and wildness.
She reflects the way she lived (about the rural communities where she lived in southern
England), although her novels are not autobiographic. They are full of details of this
kind of life, in order to analyze and criticize the daily life of men and women in their

17
social interaction. Her two first novels (Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey)
criticize the gothic novel. Their four other novels are about the problem of marriage,
women have to use their wit and beauty to get a husband. At the age of 28, a woman
who had not married yet was considered a spinster without any future.
Novels are a research about women under some circumstances, and she wants to test
their moral integrity (for example, Lidia in Pride and Prejudice). The situations are
always the same (a woman has to get marry), but the point is to demonstrate grace. She
is conservative in politics (she supported the Tories, although she doesn’t care about
what is happening in England), marriage and literature. We see, for example, that some
people in her novels have money because their investment in the colonies, but she does
not describe it. They care about having lands, money and social class. We see the
importance of nature in her novel (little link with the romantic poetry). Jane Austen
cares about duties, not about rights. Characters have to restrain the articulation of
feelings, love is dangerous and implies threats, so characters need to be practical. The
moral messages of her novels are the good manners and decorum. Reason is
incompatible with sensibility. She thinks that marriage is a social institution. All her
novels have a happy ending (except, maybe, Persuasion)

Sense and Sensibility (1811)

Elinor Dashmod is an introspected girl, and her sister Marianne Dashmod is the
opposite of her. It is the most criticized novel of Jane Austen. She wrote it in 1790, but
she corrected her before publishing it. Firstly, it was an epistolary novel. We have an
opposition between the characters: Marianne represents sensibility ad Elinor represents
sense. The father dies, but before he tells his son to take care of his half-sisters (Elinor
and Marianne). Nevertheless, the brother’s wife is very greedy, so that the heroines
received no money. Suddenly, romantic life comes to Marianne. She falls down and she
is rescued by Willoughby (he is alike Marianne but he is a fortune hunter), who is told
by his aunt to marry a rich girls, so he has to abandon Marianne. On the other hand,
Elinor is also in love with Edward Ferrans. In contrast, we have Colonel Brandon, a rich
old man who loves Marianne. We can see how fast Marianne falls in love with Colonel
Brandon after Willoughby abandoned her. The final message is the sisters’ affection, at
the end, they life very close to each other. Clash between glamorous romance against
reality.

Northanger Abbey (post 1818)

The main heroine Chaterine Morland. It was published together with Persuasion after
Jane Austen’s death. This is a parody of gothic novels (although she was a fan of these
kind of novels) because she thought they were dangerous (people could not differentiate
between truth and fantasy). The heroine make terrible mistakes between she can’t
distingue between fiction and reality. The key poit of the novel is that Catherine has a
friends named Eleanor, who has a brother (Herny). Catherine likes Henry, and Henry
likes Catherine. On the other hand, General Tilney is the father of both Eleanor and
Henry. Eleanor invited Catherine to Nothenger Abbey, and, when she gets there, she
considers the mansion as in a gothic novel. General Tilney was married, but his wife

18
had died. Catherine is not allowed to enter in Mrs. Tilney room, and, because of that,
Catherine thinks that Mr. Tilney has murdered his wife. She tells Henry, and he would
be very disappointed. So this is going to be the problem between Catherine and Henry,
although they finally get married. The ridicule of gothic novels is that you interpret life
according to fiction, and according to Austin it has to be the other way around.

Pride and prejudice (1813)

Mansfield Park (1814)

Funny Price, a shy girl who wants to hide. She is poor and thinks that she is inferior to
the other members of her family. Written and published of the time of the regency
perios. We have an interesting character (Funny Price) who has to abandon her family
because her mother marry a poor man and they have a lot of children. So that, she goes
with her aunt (Lady Bertram) a very rich woman married to Sir Bertram; and they have
four children: Tomas, the oldest one and the heir, Edmund, Maria and …) They would
see Funny as almost as a servant, because she is poor and inferior to them. The only one
who shows affection to Funny is Edmund, while the other members are hostile to her.
Sir Beltran represents the paternal figure, and he is a metaphor concerning the king
George III, and represents the values of the age. Sir Bertram wants Funny to marry
Henry Crawford, but she doesn’t want to. Little by little, Mr. Bertram realizes that
Funny was right about not wanting to marry Henry and, furthermore, the family starts to
accept her. Sir Beltran represent the old values, while Thomas represents the future
George IV (he enjoys gambling, having scandals, romances…) Sir Beltran has to leave
Mansfield Park for a while to preserve his colonies, so Thomas comes to Mansfield
Park with his friend Jon Yates to have fun. They want to organize a play, where all the
members of the family have to participate. The house is full of alcohol and gambling,
and Maria starts flirting with Henry Crawford. There is not chaperon (means that a man
and a woman cannot be together, in order to avoid sex) in the house. Finally, Henry and
Maria ran away, and that will be a drama for Sir Beltran because part of his value is the
value of his own daughters; and he also realizes that his heir is not the right successor.
Edmund and Funny get married and inherit Mansfield Park.

Emma (1816)
Emma Woodhouse, a rich and egocentric girl. He has a very rich and friendly father.
She is the only heir (no brothers, no cousins…). She enjoys the single and independence
life. She is a match-maker, she wants her friends to get marry to each other. She loves
intromissions and manipulations; this leads to mistakes (comedy of errors). She loves
being flattered and to be the center of attention. There is a gentleman, a friend of his
father, named Mr. Knightley, who doesn’t flirt with her. It will not be until the end
when she realizes that she was the victim of flattering, games and that she has been
manipulated. At the end, she marries Mr. Knightley. We have a third person narrator,
but we can perfectly see Emma’s thoughts and feelings. This novel is considered one of
her mature novels. For Jane Austen, the perfect marriage is the one where the husband

19
is older than his wife, and the one where the two people know themselves well before
marring.

Persuasion (post 1818)

Anne Elliot is old. The love of her life came eight years ago, and now is gone. It was
written one year before Jane Austen’s death. The novel starts in media res, so the real
action of the novel is in the past, and we remember it. Eight years ago, Anne Elliot
(daughter of Sir Elliot) is the daughter of an aristocratic. Nevertheless, her mother
passed away. She has two sisters, Elizabeth and Mary (the bas sister). Anne is like a
Cinderella. Sir Elliot is a very feminist man. Anne Elliot is depressed because she is 27
and she is not married. Lady Russell, her god mother, wants to persuade Anne not to
marry the man she loves, who is Wentworth. Men on the NAVY were heroes.

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ANALYSIS OF PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

It was written on the last decade of the 18th century, and his brother wanted to publish it
in 1797 (under the name of First Impressions) but it was rejected, so it ended up being
published in 1813. We don’t have in Jane Austen novels the idea of the idealized hero
that we have in the Romanticism and in gothic novels. Jane Austen wants to repeat
model of human behavior, not idealized characters.

Plot

The news that a wealthy young gentleman named Charles Bingley has rented the manor
of Netherfield Park causes a great stir in the nearby village of Longbourn, especially in
the Bennet household. The Bennets have five unmarried daughters—from oldest to
youngest, Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Kitty, and Lydia—and Mrs. Bennet is desperate to see
them all married. After Mr. Bennet pays a social visit to Mr. Bingley, the Bennets attend
a ball at which Mr. Bingley is present. He is taken with Jane and spends much of the
evening dancing with her. His close friend, Mr. Darcy, is less pleased with the evening
and haughtily refuses to dance with Elizabeth, which makes everyone view him as
arrogant and obnoxious.

At social functions over subsequent weeks, however, Mr. Darcy finds himself
increasingly attracted to Elizabeth’s charm and intelligence. Jane’s friendship with Mr.
Bingley also continues to burgeon, and Jane pays a visit to the Bingley mansion. On her
journey to the house she is caught in a downpour and catches ill, forcing her to stay at
Netherfield for several days. In order to tend to Jane, Elizabeth hikes through muddy
fields and arrives with a spattered dress, much to the disdain of the snobbish Miss
Bingley, Charles Bingley’s sister. Miss Bingley’s spite only increases when she notices
that Darcy, whom she is pursuing, pays quite a bit of attention to Elizabeth.

When Elizabeth and Jane return home, they find Mr. Collins visiting their household.
Mr. Collins is a young clergyman who stands to inherit Mr. Bennet’s property, which
has been “entailed,” meaning that it can only be passed down to male heirs. Mr. Collins
is a pompous fool, though he is quite enthralled by the Bennet girls. Shortly after his
arrival, he makes a proposal of marriage to Elizabeth. She turns him down, wounding
his pride. Meanwhile, the Bennet girls have become friendly with militia officers
stationed in a nearby town. Among them is Wickham, a handsome young soldier who is
friendly toward Elizabeth and tells her how Darcy cruelly cheated him out of an
inheritance.

At the beginning of winter, the Bingleys and Darcy leave Netherfield and return to
London, much to Jane’s dismay. A further shock arrives with the news that Mr. Collins
has become engaged to Charlotte Lucas, Elizabeth’s best friend and the poor daughter
of a local knight. Charlotte explains to Elizabeth that she is getting older and needs the

21
match for financial reasons. Charlotte and Mr. Collins get married and Elizabeth
promises to visit them at their new home. As winter progresses, Jane visits the city to
see friends (hoping also that she might see Mr. Bingley). However, Miss Bingley visits
her and behaves rudely, while Mr. Bingley fails to visit her at all. The marriage
prospects for the Bennet girls appear bleak.

That spring, Elizabeth visits Charlotte, who now lives near the home of Mr. Collins’s
patron, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who is also Darcy’s aunt. Darcy calls on Lady
Catherine and encounters Elizabeth, whose presence leads him to make a number of
visits to the Collins’s home, where she is staying. One day, he makes a shocking
proposal of marriage, which Elizabeth quickly refuses. She tells Darcy that she
considers him arrogant and unpleasant, then scolds him for steering Bingley away from
Jane and disinheriting Wickham. Darcy leaves her but shortly thereafter delivers a letter
to her. In this letter, he admits that he urged Bingley to distance himself from Jane, but
claims he did so only because he thought their romance was not serious. As for
Wickham, he informs Elizabeth that the young officer is a liar and that the real cause of
their disagreement was Wickham’s attempt to elope with his young sister, Georgiana
Darcy.

This letter causes Elizabeth to reevaluate her feelings about Darcy. She returns home
and acts coldly toward Wickham. The militia is leaving town, which makes the
younger, rather man-crazy Bennet girls distraught. Lydia manages to obtain permission
from her father to spend the summer with an old colonel in Brighton, where Wickham’s
regiment will be stationed. With the arrival of June, Elizabeth goes on another journey,
this time with the Gardiners, who are relatives of the Bennets. The trip takes her to the
North and eventually to the neighborhood of Pemberley, Darcy’s estate. She visits
Pemberley, after making sure that Darcy is away, and delights in the building and
grounds, while hearing from Darcy’s servants that he is a wonderful, generous master.
Suddenly, Darcy arrives and behaves cordially toward her. Making no mention of his
proposal, he entertains the Gardiners and invites Elizabeth to meet his sister.

Shortly thereafter, however, a letter arrives from home, telling Elizabeth that Lydia has
eloped with Wickham and that the couple is nowhere to be found, which suggests that
they may be living together out of wedlock. Fearful of the disgrace such a situation
would bring on her entire family, Elizabeth hastens home. Mr. Gardiner and Mr. Bennet
go off to search for Lydia, but Mr. Bennet eventually returns home empty-handed. Just
when all hope seems lost, a letter comes from Mr. Gardiner saying that the couple has
been found and that Wickham has agreed to marry Lydia in exchange for an annual
income. The Bennets are convinced that Mr. Gardiner has paid off Wickham, but
Elizabeth learns that the source of the money, and of her family’s salvation, was none
other than Darcy.

Now married, Wickham and Lydia return to Longbourn briefly, where Mr. Bennet treats
them coldly. They then depart for Wickham’s new assignment in the North of England.

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Shortly thereafter, Bingley returns to Netherfield and resumes his courtship of Jane.
Darcy goes to stay with him and pays visits to the Bennets but makes no mention of his
desire to marry Elizabeth. Bingley, on the other hand, presses his suit and proposes to
Jane, to the delight of everyone but Bingley’s haughty sister. While the family
celebrates, Lady Catherine de Bourgh pays a visit to Longbourn. She corners Elizabeth
and says that she has heard that Darcy, her nephew, is planning to marry her. Since she
considers a Bennet an unsuitable match for a Darcy, Lady Catherine demands that
Elizabeth promise to refuse him. Elizabeth spiritedly refuses, saying she is not engaged
to Darcy, but she will not promise anything against her own happiness. A little later,
Elizabeth and Darcy go out walking together and he tells her that his feelings have not
altered since the spring. She tenderly accepts his proposal, and both Jane and Elizabeth
are married.

Characters

The topic of Pride and Prejudice is marriage (getting married). This topic crosses
some social boundaries, like social mobility (Sir William Lucas). We have a third
person narrator, which moves freely in order to know character’s opinion (omniscient
narrator mixed with an intrusive narrator). The intrusive narrator makes comments of
the action and expresses his or her own opinion. We can consider this novel as realistic
(but not inside the Realistic Movement) because she presents believable characters and
believable events according with what she knows. Her source is real life.

Mr Bennet and Mrs Bennet Parents of Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Ketty and Lydia.
Sir William Lucas and his daughter Charlotte Lucas
Charles Bingley and his sister Caroline Bingley Charles Bingley is rich, handsome a
bachelor.
Georgiana Darcy Darcy’s sister
Fitzwilliam Darcy and his aunt Lady Catherine de Bourgh
George Wickham He wanted to marry Georgiana to get her fortune.
Mr. Collins

Bingley abandoned Netherfield because Darcy tells him that Jane is only interested in
money and because of the lower class Jane belongs to.
The first sentences of the book provide the main topic of the book, and are the Mrs
Bennet ideas. These sentences explain a universal truth, with an irony behind. A man as
Bingley, who has a big fortune, must to look for a wife. Mrs. Bennet try one of her
daughters to be Bingley’s wife. Due to the repetition of words such as ‘money’ and
‘marriage’, we can see what the main topic of the novel is.
We get to know Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Bennet not only because of their dialogue but also
because the narrator’s comments. Mrs. Bennet’s dream is to get her five daughters
married.

Topics in the novel

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-Pride and prejudice We get to see that is a primary opposition (pride vs prejudice).
Mr. Darcy is arrogant and proud, while Elizabeth is very clever, but she has a lot of
prejudices. Elizabeth is lead by first impressions, and all the novel will be about the
change of these impressions. Elizabeth would have to go through a painful and
embarrassing of reassessment to understand that Mr. Darcy is a good man. Jane Austen
wants the reader to make the same intellectual process of reassessment as Elizabeth do.

-Opposition between Darcy and Elizabeth She is sometimes proud and he has his
prejudices. The letter and Darcy’s servants makes Elizabeth change her mind according
to Darcy.

-Inheritance Mr. Collins is the main heir, not the oldest Bennet’s daughter (Jane).
They do not have a son to support their daughters. Total dependence of men (a father, a
brother…). Mrs. Bennet might be the funniest and more ridiculous character, but she is
also the most realistic one (she says that, as soon as Mr. Bennet dies, she and her
daughters will have to abandon their house). Women around thirty in the Victorian age
would be a problem. We can see one main topic of the 19th century, Mrs. Bennet is
desperate because she is the one that must anticipate and help their daughters in the race
to get married. Mrs. Bingley arranged that Elizabeth goes by horse to Bingley’s house,
in order she gets a cold and has to stay at Bingley’s house. Mrs. Bennet also encourages
Bingley to marry Mr. Collins, but she does not want to because in order to be married,
she has to love or, at least admire, the one she is going to marry to. We see that Mrs.
Bennet is very practical and has common sense.

-Sister’s affection As well as Cassandra and Jane love each other in real live,
Elizabeth and Jane also love each other. Elizabeth gets mad with Mr. Darcy when he
separate Jane and Bingley. At the end, they are very happy because they live near each
other, while Lydia lives far away. Lydia is a bad sister in the way that she wants to be
the first one to get married and have a better reputation that her sisters. She is also a bad
influence to Kitty. When she runs away with Wickham, they go to East London, which,
at that time, it was the zone for beggars and prostitutes (as a reference to Lydia’s future
if she wouldn’t have married Wickham thanks to Mr. Darcy). After getting married, she
feels superior.

-Male characters We note a lot of differences between Mr. Darcy, Wickham and Mr.
Collins. The main virtue of men according to Jane Austen is restraint in his feeling.
Wickham is a seducer and not a good man. Mr. Collins talks too much and he is very
superficial, and he looks for an easy manipulated woman (like Charlotte, but not
Elizabeth). Bingley is shy and not able to express himself. Mr. Darcy’s first proposal is
very dramatic, but Lizzy is angry to her and thinks he is bluffing at her. His second
proposal is silence, only with a look.

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-Lydia’s behavior The problem is her parental negligence. Mrs. Bennet has educated
her daughter to enjoy company and to be superficial.

-Army They were a new social class better than aristocracy. They were heroes. At
Jane Austen time, it was being criticized that the Army stayed at little villages flirting
with women, instead of making war.

-Age Charlotte Lucas is 27 and she had no chances. When Mr. Collis proposes her,
she accepts although she does not love him. She needs financial aid. Mr. Collins feels
superior than the Bennets because he is the only heir of their property. To define the
characters in a novel it is important to analyze the language they use in their dialogues,
and how much they say.

-Social-class movility Sir Wiliam Lucas used to be a rural man, but he becomes Sir
and a knight. He doesn’t have to work anymore. There can be fluctuations in your life.
Jane Austen criticizes that he feels superior to the rest of people when we is given the
title of knight.

Main situations

Jane Austen in the kind of writer who does not care about the international situation, she
works on small rural communities. Her main target is women belonging to the middle
class, like herself.
Mr. Darcy tries to protect himself, because he knows that women will want to flirt with
him because of his fortune. Darcy is attracted by Elizabeth because of her intellectual
(he likes to be intellectually challenged) and his wild personality. She likes reading like
him, she tells what she feels and she is able to have a discussion with him. Elizabeth is
not fully the rational femininity model, she is not an obedient wife, and she wants to
marry the man he loves and be an independent woman, and have her own opinions.
Lizzy understands that marrying for money is not enough, she has to admire and love
her husband. Harmony by oppositions.
In the issue of getting married, we can interpret that Jane Austen supported really strong
characters, or that she criticized femininity. There are a lot of opposition about the
marriage she describes and her own opinions. We always have the same patron in her
novels: order, disorder and order. Her novels always end with marriage.
If we get back to classic literature, we can see that almost all the characters remain the
same, they do not change. In contrast, in the 19th century and in Jane Austen, we can see
a development in the characters, how they change their mind and how their attributes
change as well. Lizzy learns not to be misguided by first impressions, and Darcy learns
that he has to be humble and not judge people by their social class. Jane Austen thinks
people can change.

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The narrator

Unmediated voice First person and direct speech.

Mediated voice Indirect speech when the narrator tells you a conversation or situation
between the characters

The mixture of these kinds is the free indirect speech, Jane Austen gets into the minds
of some of her characters (the first person narrator), while other times we have the three
person narrator (Jane Austen herself). This combination of voices is a complicated one,
and makes readers a bit difficult to understand who is talking.
We also have letters, made to solve misunderstandings (when Darcy explains to
Elizabeth the whole situation about Wickham). The letters always contain true facts.

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3.- THE REGIONAL NOVEL

3.1.- Maria Edgeworth

We can consider Maria Edgeworth as the mother of the Regional Novel we find in the
British Island, although it will be Sir Walter Scott as the setter of this kind of novel.
Maria novels will be about the situation of Ireland both before and after the union
between Ireland and England in 1800. Maria wanted to show the cultural division
between Protestants and Catholics and between the English who were settled there and
the Irish.
She was born and educated in England, but she returned to Ireland because her parents
have been colonizers to establish the English religion in Ireland. Maria has the
understanding that everyone should know and understand Irish history, and she was
sympathetic with the Catholics and the people oppressed.
Many of her novels are about the property of the land and the return of the English
aristocratic coming to Ireland to regenerate the country. Maria’s hope for the future of
Ireland was to see improve.
She is both comic and serious in the discourse of Irish people before and after the
Union. She has a sympathetic and critical point of view. She likes experimenting with
different voices. She likes and wants to show in her novels the vernacular folklore and
traditions of Ireland, and she is worried about the inheritage of the land (relationship of
land owners and how this property has an impact in Irish politics). She also wrote
children literature, but she is known for her regional novels.

Castle Rackent (1800)

It traces the destiny of a family in four different generations. It is about the problems of
the land. Her message is that land should be administrated property. The novel was
directed to English people, because they had to understand the situation in Ireland.

The Absentee (1812)

English aristocracy had to take possession of the land. Many people returned to England
to enjoy London’s leisure. In this novel she claims to English aristocratic families to
return to Ireland. The main characters are the Clonbrony’s family. The reason Maria’s
asked them to come back because it is their moral obligation to teach Irish people
manners and to eliminate the perversion of the Irish society.

Ormoud (1817)
It is about an Irish hero and his travel from poorness to richness. He goes to France at
the time of the French revolution. What she wants to do is that the hero is tented by
France but he finally comes back to Ireland. Loyalty to the English. The hero claims
that Egland and Ireland should help each other (mutual utility).

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Maria Edgeworth reconsidered history and fiction.

3.2.- Sir Walter Scott

He became a best-seller author, and he is considered the official founder of the

Regional Novel, even more than Maria Edgeworth.
He was born in Edinburgh, but due to his illness he lived in the Highlands, the world of
oral tradition and folklore. He was influenced the Jacobite Rebellions (1688-1745), who
were supports of the Stuart king, James II, the supposed heir of the English and Scottish
kingdom. They are not only claimers but also his successors.
Sir Walter Scott wants to repeat this world of rebellions and the Jacobite cause. What he
does is to explore history to write and inspire himself.
He is kept alive thanks to oral traditions, and this is what he captures in his novels. His
father was a lawyer, and he will become a lawyer himself. His career as a lawyer is
important to understand him, because he has the vision that law invades the changes of
social costumes. He will be an avid reader of romance and ballads. He will be also a
translator of German ballads.
Initially, he was a poet. He wrote two main narrative poets such as Marnion (1808) and
The Lady of the Lake (1810). After that, he change to write novels. Thanks to his
writing, he will become a baron and a land owner. Unfortunately, there will be an
economic crash where he loses a lot of his properties. At the end of his life, we can see
that his two last years of literary production would be relatively bad.
We can see in his novels that he though past can make us understand the present.
Transition of Scotland to a new world. He admires popular tradition, but he also claims
for modernization and development. His regional novels are a combination between
history and romance. There is a return to history, and there is also romance (situations
that are not the kind of situations we experience in daily life). He is a true master of the
language and there are many mistakes in his novels. He describes settings and costumes,
and makes you enter in the history of Scotland. He does not care for the chronological
order of events, he changes the course of history since he is not interested in the events
itself, but he cares to create an atmosphere of the past that makes you feel as you are in
the past, as we can see in two of his main works (Ivantioe and Kenilworth). In many
times he wanted to publish for money, so he improvised a lot and that is the reason
many of his novels are not perfect (his characters are flat). Politically speaking, he is a
conservative (he was a Tory) and unionist (he did not want the independence of
Scotland).
He describes people according to their situations, defined by social class, occupation,
origins… He does not beyond to explore. As a contrast to Maria, he thinks that there
would be a reconciliation between England and Scotland, but knowing that there are
contradictions between culture and society, by coming back to the past. He would
sometimes be accused of having invented Scottish traditions.
His historical novels contain a blending between politics and functional characters from
the past.

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Waverley (1814)
It was published anonymously when he was already very famous. It is about the gradual
involvement of an English man in the Jacobean raisings in 1745. As we see in other of
his novels, there is an idea of ideology, he provides an ideological message (in this case,
is the exploring of the Highland classes and old-fashioned values). He wants to prove
that Scotland is a European nation that has changed since the Jacobean revolution, and
now it is not a wild nation. History is used to suit his imagination and political views
(he supports the dominant culture, which is the English one, but still wants English to
respect the Scottish traditions).

The Hearth of the Midlothian (1818)

It is a tail settled in Edinburgh. The main character is someone who wants to mediate
between the old world and the new one. He sees the epic world and a emerging world.
Sir Walter Scott thinks that we cannot reject the past and we have to learn from it, in
order to improve our future.

To sum up, he wanted to create novels that reflect the way of thinking of people, and
that reflect different ways of thinking and acting. He included Protestants, Catholics,
Unionists…

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4.- THE GOTHIC NOVEL

4.1.- Characteristics

There would be an explosion in 1799, having primarily female readership and would
survive and continue through the 19th century. The beginning of the gothic novel is at
the end of the 17th century and continues until the 18th century. While reading a Gothic
novel, you have to be afraid, and this is the main objective of this kind of literature.
The Gothic novels are a reaction against the comfort and political and social stability
there was at the time. To show disagreement, we have a new way through imagination
to make the repress come back. In order to understand these novels, we have to
understand the theories of Edmund Burke and his essay Philosophical Enquiry in to the
Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime & the Beautiful (1756), which wanted to make us
understand two main ideas:

 Sublime: It is to witness the supreme beauty which takes you to a climax.

According to Edmund, it is to experience the strongest emotions you can
feel, and you experience this when you contemplate wild nature and
medieval architecture.
 Delightful horror: Fascination for the pain, terror, danger… These can
make you experience the sublime. You can identify yourself with the
hero of the novel, but you delight the terror because you know what,
what happens to him, is not going to happen to you.

The importance of the emotional response of the reader and the emotional response of
the character.
Main characteristics:

-Medieval setting, but not necessarily medieval times Haunted houses, graves,
dark landscapes, castles, ruins, secret passages…
-Supernatural and fantasy Truth cannot be told, we don’t care about realism. We
need fantasy to reflect the oppression in the Gothic novels.

-Darkness Related to the unconsciousness.

-Sexual persecution of a young and beautiful woman She is tempted and

persecuted by obsessed villans.

-Atmosphere of mystery and suspense.

-Main characters that see the satisfaction of the sexual desire.

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4.2.- First Gothic novel

The first gothic novel is named The Castle of the Otrauto (1764), written by Horace
Walpole. Horace was the son of the Prime Minister of the British Islands. The novel
stars with a combination of romance and gothic characteristics. The novel reflects that
individuals are prisoners of a cultural system and shows this anxiety of social and
cultural rules.
There is another influence of the 18th century: poetry. The Graveyard Poets. The most
important one is Elegy written in a Country Churchyard, by Thomas Gray. These poets
are concerned about the pass of time and death, and their poems are about the mystery
of death in dark places.
The true founder of the gothic novels is Ann Radcliffe. Gothic novels were primarily
written by women, because they were more oppressed than men. Gothic novels were the
fictional liberation of desires, and women desired to be sexual attached. Gothic novels
were fantasies of the oppressed situations. Women had no identities, so they looked for
their own identity through Gothic novels.
We can also see Gothic elements in the Romantic poetry (Gothic situations in Keats, the
Byronic hero, Gothic sceneries…)

4.3.- Gothic novels

The Gothic novels will be best sellers at the time. In the 1960s, we have the school of
psychoanalysis in literary texts, and it will be found that Gothic novels should be
studied from the psychological point of view.
We have new historicism to understand novels from the historical point of view. And
cultural studies, from the second half of the 20th century there is the cinema, and
Hitchcock recovers Gothic novels and describes them.
Theory of the Gothic novel:

-The Uncanny (Freud) It comes from the German Das Umheimliche. It is about
being frightening, but we tend to think that what is uncanny is something unfamiliar.
Freud says that what is really scary is what used to be familiar to us but has become
strange. Something that we know but hidden in ourselves. In Gothic novels, we have
unanimated objects that come to life, and that is scary. For example, we have E.T.A.
Hoffmann with Sandman, a literary character that would catch you. Women can be the
role of evil. What frights us according to Freud is the return of the repressed in our
consciousness. All that has remained hidden in your personality and behavior comes
back. When we are confronting with this ‘animate dolls’ that suddenly have life, we do
not know if it is true or false. The pillar of the Gothic novel is that the character is
hesitating between the rational and irrational interpretation of events. The topic related
to the Uncanny in Frankenstein is the whole metaphor of birth and how traumatic it can
be, and the repression of instincts and feelings.

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-The Shadow (Jung & Feud) We can see many shadows in Gothic novels, but they
are only a metaphor. Consciousness vs unconsciousness. In the unconsciousness we
have all the behavior that we do not recognize, and that are part of ourselves (feeling to
want to kill someone, feeling to want to kill yourself, incest…). They are unacceptable,
but we still feel it. Our traumas can return and they are a shadow of our
unconsciousness, and also part of our creativity through art and Gothic literature.
Violent can be a part of the inspiration.

-The Doppelgänger In the Gothic novel, is a evil figure. It is our evil twin, the dark
side of yourself. The problem with the double is that is not new, we can see it, for
example in Twelve Nights by Shakespeare, where the twins change their identities to
confuse people. The dark side represents the repress of the human nature. Freud
interpreted this Doppelgänger as the split of our personalities, between the conscious
side and the unconscious side. Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is the best example of this
characteristic.

-The Fantastic (Tzevetan Todoror) It is not the same as the marvelous (not real
facts, where the supernatural events are the law), but in the fantastic world we have the
same laws as in ours. There are supernatural events that happen but we do not know
how to interpret them (we don’t know if believe the supernatural explanation or try to
find a coherent reason for them). Believable characters with a normal life. The problem
is that there is a problem in the character, because he gets confuse and may think he is
insane. In the Gothic novels we have the so called ‘the topic of the self’ (the look, how
we see the world). There is a pandeterminism (as a déjà vu, dreams…). There are many
topics related sexual and murder instincts. All you are not able to portrait in the
Victorian novels is found in the Gothic novels. In order to be a Gothic novel, it has to
fulfill three criteria:

 The text needs real characters: We have certain events that occur.
 It is not only the character who has this doubt: You, as the reader, have
the same doubts as the character and identify with him.
 You, as reader, do not interpret the Gothic novels with an allegorical
interpretation: Gothic novels are not allegories or poems.

Freytag’s Pyramid is found both in Gothic novels and plays. It is a theory to explain the
form of these works: at the beginning, we have the explanation of the novel, and then
something happens until we find the climax. After this point, the action starts to fall in
the resolution of events.
Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), by Ann Radcliffe. The main character (Emily) is
kidnapped in an Italian castle and, there, she starts to see ghost. In the moment of
climax, we understand that the ghosts are a product of her imagination. Finally, she is
released.

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-The Grotesque It is not something related to the gothic world, we have had
grotesque elements since the Romance (Alice in Wonderland, The Hunchback of
Nôtredame…). These characters are a source of laughing, but we feel sympathy for
them. This idea of the monster is related to the abject.

-The Abject (Julia Kristera) It is our human reaction of horror to a threatening

breakdown of meaning, which occurs when there is a loss of distinction between the self
and the other. For example, when we see a corpse we are frightened because it
remembers us that we are going to die some day. The idea of the abject is related with
the in-betweenness (between the self and the other), that means, the idea of both
rejection and attraction to eschatological and disgusting topics. For example, in Dracula
we have to topic of the blood and how drinking it is considered a sexual act.

4.4.- Authors

-Anne Radcliffe Patterns of brave, courageous, beauty by contemplating

landscapes… Ideas of moral superiority to men. The really Gothic experiences we find
in her novels are the wild surroundings, as the castles, landscapes… In order to describe
them, she looked the paintings of Salvator Rosa, since she never went to Italy.

-Matthew Luis He wrote The Monk, a novel in we clearly can see the shadow. Idea
of claustrophobia and imprisonment.

-Charles Robert Maturin He wrote Melmoth The Wanderer (1820), the second part
of The Monk. This is a novel of transgression. Hommefatal. In the novel we have a
scholar with the dream of becoming immortal. He sells his soul and soon he discovers
that he has made a mistake, and tries to find substitutes to replace him. Story-within-a-
story as in Dracula (the story told in different points of views, such as letters, third
stories told by different people…)

4.5.- Mary Shelley

She was the daughter of philosopher and political writer William Godwin and famed
feminist Mary Wollstonecraft—the author of The Vindication of the Rights of
Woman (1792). She never really knew her mother who died shortly after her birth.
His father was a great philosopher at the time, and she hated her step-mother. She was
sent to Scotland to life, where she learnt about legends, stories… When she was an
adult, she comes back with his father. There she met Percy Shelley, a disciple of his
father and they fall in love. The problem is that Percy Shelley is married. She gets
pregnant and they decide to travel around Europe. They struggled financially and faced
the loss of their first child in 1815. Mary delivered a baby girl who only lived for a few
days. The following summer, the Shelleys were in Switzerland with Jane
Clairmont, Lord Byron and John Polidori. Lord Byron suggested that they all should try
their hand at writing their own horror story. It was at this time that Mary Shelley began

33
work on what would become her most famous novel, Frankenstein, or the Modern
Prometheus.
Later that year, Mary suffered the loss of her half-sister Fanny who committed suicide.
Another suicide, this time by Percy's wife, occurred a short time later. Mary and Percy
Shelly were finally able to wed in December 1816. At the age of 18, she had already
lost two babies. In 1818, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus debuted as a new
novel from an anonymous author. Many thought that Percy Bysshe Shelley had written
it since he penned its introduction. The book proved to be a huge success. That same
year, the Shelleys moved to Italy. Born in 1819, their son, Percy Florence, was the only
child to live to adulthood. Mary's life was rocked by another tragedy in 1822 when her
husband drowned. He had been out sailing with a friend in the Gulf of Spezia. At the
age of 24, Mary Shelley was a widow.

4.6.- Percy Shelley

The life of Percy Shelley is linked to Mary’s Shelley life. He was a radical thinker and
believed in an egalitarian society. He was the son of a member of the aristocracy. In his
writings, he attacked the British Parliament and the aristocracy.
He suffered bullying when he was a teenager, so from very soon he suffered tyranny.
When he entered in Oxford, he wrote a pamphlet named Necessity of Atheism where he
criticized Christianism. This made him be expelled of Oxford and break his relationship
with his father. Percy reneged from his origins. He believed marriage was a social
institution, but he was married twice. He went to Ireland and after came back to
England, when he entered as a disciple of William … and where he met Mary Shelley.
He basically wrote poetry, but also drama. There is always in his novels the sense of
injustice and freedom, specially transgressing the institutions of power. The works of
Percy Shelley are:

Ode to the West Wind (1820)

It is his most important poem. It shows the concordance between nature and the poet’s
sensibility. Shelley gives a detailed information about nature, with biblical imagines. He
uses the classical form (stanza) to be used for subversive purposes. What he does is to
invoke the West Wind to come, because this wins is the one which brings imaginative
and spiritual renewal. He thought that the only order that can be establish is poetry, so
the main purpose of this work is to do it. It is related to the passing of time. The
importance thing is the renewal of the spirit. It would not be until the 20th century when
we have poetry going from the literal to the regenerative power of poetry. It is difficult
to read his poetry if you do not know his ideology.

Prometheus Unbound (1820)

It is related to his wife’s Frankenstein. For the Greeks, the liver was an important organ
because it was thought that it kept the emotions and feeling. What Shelley cares about

34
when it wrote it is to combine his artistic and political concerns in a play. Conflict
between drama and politics. It is a celebration of the triumph of human beings over the
Gods. It shows the revolutionary process of being released of the patriarchal order,
liberation from external enemies. We are our enemies. Liberation of the spirit. Shelley
made a parallelism that we also find in Frankenstein between Prometheus and Satan
(that we find in Paradise Lost). Satan is a rejected angel rejected by God, as well as the
monster is rejected by Frankenstein.

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ANALYSIS OF FRANKENSTEIN

It was published in 1818, when Mary was barely 20 years old. This is a second edition
of the book (1831). It was published anonymously. From the very beginning, it was a
best seller and from then on it has been a influence for theater, cinema…
Frankenstein is a Gothic novel but we also can call it proto science-fiction. It was the
precursor of the first science-fiction book: The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells.
Frankenstein is science fiction because it explores the forbidden novel and the exoteric.
We have a contemporary early 18th century world, so we do not find a medieval world.
There are no castles or cathedrals, but nature plays an important role.

Plot

In a series of letters, Robert Walton, the captain of a ship bound for the North Pole,
recounts to his sister back in England the progress of his dangerous mission. Successful
early on, the mission is soon interrupted by seas full of impassable ice. Trapped, Walton
encounters Victor Frankenstein, who has been traveling by dog-drawn sledge across the
ice and is weakened by the cold. Walton takes him aboard ship, helps nurse him back to
health, and hears the fantastic tale of the monster that Frankenstein created.

Victor first describes his early life in Geneva. At the end of a blissful childhood spent in
the company of Elizabeth Lavenza (his cousin in the 1818 edition, his adopted sister in
the 1831 edition) and friend Henry Clerval, Victor enters the university of Ingolstadt to
study natural philosophy and chemistry. There, he is consumed by the desire to discover
the secret of life and, after several years of research, becomes convinced that he has
found it.

Armed with the knowledge he has long been seeking, Victor spends months feverishly
fashioning a creature out of old body parts. One climactic night, in the secrecy of his
apartment, he brings his creation to life. When he looks at the monstrosity that he has
created, however, the sight horrifies him. After a fitful night of sleep, interrupted by the
specter of the monster looming over him, he runs into the streets, eventually wandering
in remorse. Victor runs into Henry, who has come to study at the university, and he
takes his friend back to his apartment. Though the monster is gone, Victor falls into a
feverish illness.

Sickened by his horrific deed, Victor prepares to return to Geneva, to his family, and to
health. Just before departing Ingolstadt, however, he receives a letter from his father
informing him that his youngest brother, William, has been murdered. Grief-stricken,
Victor hurries home. While passing through the woods where William was strangled, he
catches sight of the monster and becomes convinced that the monster is his brother’s
murderer. Arriving in Geneva, Victor finds that Justine Moritz, a kind, gentle girl who
had been adopted by the Frankenstein household, has been accused. She is tried,
condemned, and executed, despite her assertions of innocence. Victor grows

36
despondent, guilty with the knowledge that the monster he has created bears
responsibility for the death of two innocent loved ones.

Hoping to ease his grief, Victor takes a vacation to the mountains. While he is alone one
day, crossing an enormous glacier, the monster approaches him. The monster admits to
the murder of William but begs for understanding. Lonely, shunned, and forlorn, he
says that he struck out at William in a desperate attempt to injure Victor, his cruel
creator. The monster begs Victor to create a mate for him, a monster equally grotesque
to serve as his sole companion.

Victor refuses at first, horrified by the prospect of creating a second monster. The
monster is eloquent and persuasive, however, and he eventually convinces Victor. After
returning to Geneva, Victor heads for England, accompanied by Henry, to gather
information for the creation of a female monster. Leaving Henry in Scotland, he
secludes himself on a desolate island in the Orkneys and works reluctantly at repeating
his first success. One night, struck by doubts about the morality of his actions, Victor
glances out the window to see the monster glaring in at him with a frightening grin.
Horrified by the possible consequences of his work, Victor destroys his new creation.
The monster, enraged, vows revenge, swearing that he will be with Victor on Victor’s
wedding night.

Later that night, Victor takes a boat out onto a lake and dumps the remains of the
second creature in the water. The wind picks up and prevents him from returning to the
island. In the morning, he finds himself ashore near an unknown town. Upon landing,
he is arrested and informed that he will be tried for a murder discovered the previous
night. Victor denies any knowledge of the murder, but when shown the body, he is
shocked to behold his friend Henry Clerval, with the mark of the monster’s fingers on
his neck. Victor falls ill, raving and feverish, and is kept in prison until his recovery,
after which he is acquitted of the crime.

Shortly after returning to Geneva with his father, Victor marries Elizabeth. He fears the
monster’s warning and suspects that he will be murdered on his wedding night. To be
cautious, he sends Elizabeth away to wait for him. While he awaits the monster, he
hears Elizabeth scream and realizes that the monster had been hinting at killing his new
bride, not himself. Victor returns home to his father, who dies of grief a short time later.
Victor vows to devote the rest of his life to finding the monster and exacting his
revenge, and he soon departs to begin his quest.

Victor tracks the monster ever northward into the ice. In a dogsled chase, Victor almost
catches up with the monster, but the sea beneath them swells and the ice breaks, leaving
an unbridgeable gap between them. At this point, Walton encounters Victor, and the
narrative catches up to the time of Walton’s fourth letter to his sister.

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Walton tells the remainder of the story in another series of letters to his sister. Victor,
already ill when the two men meet, worsens and dies shortly thereafter. When Walton
returns, several days later, to the room in which the body lies, he is startled to see the
monster weeping over Victor. The monster tells Walton of his immense solitude,
suffering, hatred, and remorse. He asserts that now that his creator has died, he too can
end his suffering. The monster then departs for the northernmost ice to die.

Characteristics

To create the creature, we have the convergence between the natural and
supernatural, between science and uncultured knowledge. By violating the natural the
monster is created. This is the story of the moral dispersed of an individual between he
does not conform on the moral rules of this society. The monster is rejected by Doctor
Frankenstein and is a source of fear and danger for the other. He feels rejected. The
novel shows how we can become evil and dangerous by being excluded by society and
not being loved by others. The moral message behind the novel is very important.
The novel is a critic to the bourgeois family. Maybe Frankenstein creates the monster
because his family is not so perfect. It is also a reflection of the female rejection and the
patriarchal order. We don’t have many female characters. Some critics consider the
monster to be a woman, although we know he is a man.
The novel is about motherhood and being anxious and afraid. Mary Shelley got
pregnant twice when she was 16, and she was anxious to be a mother. When her babies
dies, she thought she was a monster.
The mother of the novel is Victor, but he is not a good mother because he rejects his
creature. Moral responsibility as a mother. Radical importance of human affection for
civilization to improve. The monster has access to culture, but he does not have access
to love. The problem here is that civilization corrupts the creature, and the source for his
fury is that he has no love given by his mother or friends.

Influences

In 1816, the Shelleys went to Geneva for the summer with some friends, but it was very
rainy. So that, they spent time together talking about horror stories. Influences of Mary
Shelley:

-Encouragement of Percy Shelley.

-In a way, she wanted to show she was also worth, like her parents.

-Having spent many years in Scotland.

-She knew many German stories which influenced the work.

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-She knew about philosophy and the experiments of her father.

-She had a nightmare and she dreamt of a ghost.

-Locke and Rousseau

 Rousseau: ‘The good savage’. We are born being good, but it is society
who makes us cruel. Tabula rasa, we are born without any idea.
 Locke: Empirism, we learn through experiences.

The monster is enlightened by learning, but if we do not develop our affect, we cannot
be good and civilized people.
Certain characteristics of the monster come from the romantic hero, such as the abuse
when they were children, they are rejected by society, they are endless wanderers and
rebellious, they break the rules, they want to revenge…

Topic

Mary Shelley does not care about description (for example, she does not describe how
the creature is created) but about the social and moral consequences of these acts. This
is an exploration of liberty, human rights… and how the monster is excluded of society.
Dangerous knowledge.
As soon he gives life to the creature, he realized what he has done and rejects it. After
knowing his brother has been murdered, he comes back to Geneva. He meets the
monster some time, and the monster asks for a female creature, but Victor rejects to do
it. At first, he tries to create a female monster, but he destroys it before giving life to
her.
Her intention is between the science fiction and the Gothic fiction. She wanted to talk
about the mysterious fears of nature, because it has its attractiveness, its dark side. She
also wanted to frighten readers.
The two moments of horror are:

--The German city of Ingolstadt, when Victor creates the monster.

-At the end, when Elizabeth is killed by the monster.

The narrative a little bit complicated, because it is a mixture of different point of view.
The main narrator is Robert Walton, not Victor Frankenstein. He wrote letters addressed
to his sister in England. We have a mission and he is trapped in the ice. While he is
trapped in the ice, he met Victor, who is persecuting the monster. Robert Walton acts as
a mediator between the narrator and the readers. These letters want to give credibility
to the history. ‘Layered structure’, the metaphor of the Russian doll, because there are
different points of view in the story, told by a mediator through letters. We see also a
change of perspectives, and we can feel empathy for all of them.

39
Hesitation as the basis of the Gothic novel. The main hesitation if if what you read is
fantasy or actually the truth. At the end, you don’t know if the monster exists, or if you
have to trust the supernatural or the natural. There is a second hesitation, because Robert
Walter sees the monster. The only reliable character sees the monster, but we don’t
know if it is an illusion or a real thing.

Parallelism between the myth of Prometheus and Paradise Lost

The modern Prometheus is Doctor Frankenstein, because he is punished for having

transgressed the natural order. He thinks himself as a God. Importance of mythical
experiments. In the novel, Victor Frankenstein is God.
In Paradise Lost, Adam and Satan are both monsters. The creature is firstly Adam, but
the roles change. The monster is also the fallen angel rejected by God and can be equal
or superior to God with his powers.
As in Paradise Lost, the creature takes revenge against its maker.
In Frankenstein, Eve is not represented, because at the end the creature has not a
partner. According to some critics, the monster is a metaphor of the female perspective.

Overreachers Characters who want to go beyond knowledge. Faust, Dr. Jekyll, Victor
Frankenstein... Faust is famous thank to Goethe, but it really comes from Marlowe.
Marlowe is closer, culturally speaking, to Mary Shelley although Goethe is closer in
time. Doctor Frankenstein is an overreacher because he wants to be superior to life
according to religion, but he also wants to be the mother, since women create life. He
creates a conflict between science and the supernatural.
Shelley has a clear moral message: not to go beyond. She explains the consequences of
the experiments in order to spread this message. Revenge leads to self-destruction

Nature

The idea of sublime nature, correspond to the idea of Edmund Burke. Experience with
landscape, vastness, climax of beauty. It has different effects on the characters:

-In Victor, nature makes him forget about what had happened to him.

-It is the place when Victor and his creature meet.

-The creature feels save in nature and it is the place of self-education of the monster.

Female monster and motherhood

Feminine critics say that female characters in Frankenstein are secondary, what
represents the oppression women were subdued to in the 19th century society.
Mary Shelley was probably angry because his father has rejected him. We can see this
in the novel through the bad relation between the monster and the creator. When you

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are a maker, you have to protect your son, but Victor fails because he does not protect
his creature. So that, the creature feelings turn into hate.
Mary’s biography is vital to completely understand Frankenstein: we have a teenage
mother, but she is pregnant under abnormal circumstances. She hasn’t a female figure
next to her, and she feels embarrassed because she was not married to Percy Shelley, so
she will condemn her children to live a life of embarrassment. She has the feeling that
she will give birth to a monster. When she finally give birth to the child, he dies, so that
Mary Shelley thinks that she was a monster and feels guilty.
The uncanny experience is that because of her, her mother died, and she feels bad about
it. The repress comes back when she gives birth herself. She will feel responsible for the
death of her mother and for the death of her children. They had four children, but three
of them died (two of them before she wrote Frankenstein)
For Mary Shelley, John Milton was the master of the writing. Nevertheless, when
Milton wrote Paradise Lost he has the help of his daughters. Women in the 19th century
wanted to write, but they did not know how to express their experiences and their
feelings. They didn’t know if continue the tendency of the time or break with it.

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5.- GOTHIC NOVEL: FIN DE SIÈCLE

5.1.- Introduction

They have Gothic settings, but they are not Gothic novels themselves. The Gothic
conventions tend to be a literary resource for authors.
At the end of the 19th century, certain anxiety was created. They were entering the 20th
century, and this fact scared people. Queen Victoria was going to die soon, and people
did not know what was going to happen next. Queen Victoria was considered the
mother of the British Empire.
There was also decadence in society, we could see more scientific experiments and a
trend for agnosticism. There was also more studies about Psychiatry, women related to
madness.
Thanks to this facts, Gothic novel reappeared at the end of the century. There are three
main Gothic novels at this time:

-The Picture of Dorian Gray Topic of the fantastic at the self. It was written by Oscar
Wilde.

-The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

-Dracula

5.1.- Robert Louis Stevenson

It is a short novella written in 1886. Stevenson was a Scottish novel and travel writer.
He was also a children writer (The Treasure Island). We see at the end of the century
many examples of children literature, such as Peter Pan or Alice in Wonderland, novels
you can read both when you are a child and as an adult.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)

This is the story of a London lawyer whose name is Utterson. The narrator is the lawyer
who is investigating the different events that happen to his friend dr. Jekyll. This novel
is the example of split personality, and the case of the Doppelgänger. The main
characters have different ideas about morality. Dr. Jekyll is a very well known scientific
considered to be an exemplary figure of the scientific world. Dr. Jekyll is very
ambitious, and this is going to be the cause of his fall. The public image that you
transmit should be also how you rule your private life, but this is not the case of Dr.
Jekyll. Under the image of the example, we have someone who wants to satisfacte his
private leasures, and he is very selfish. What he wants to do is to split his figure in order
to enjoy both lifes and his perversions. Here we have the idea of someone who doesn’t
want to choose (his instincts or his morality). Finally, the bas side wins the good side.

42
The structure of the novel is very complex, because we have an omniscient narrator
until the last chapter, where we have letters that tell us the truth. The events in the novel
are not told according to when and where they happen. The order of the event may have
been change by Utterson because he does not know all the truth. The setting of the
novel is London, which is a wonderful place to create horror (dark streets, foggy
city…).
We also have the split between East London (place for prostitutes and poor people) and
West London (place for rich and recognized people). This idea of split London represent
the two hemispheres of the brain.
Topics:

-Good vs the evil Something we have seen in the Bible (Cain and Abel). The
innovation of the novel is that we see this on one person. The duality of human people.
The soul is the place of battle between the evil and the good. The dark side is the one
which rules the personality.

-Consequences of violence Senseless violence and pure evil. Mr Hyde kills for
pleasure, he finds delight the horror in other people. This show us the corruption of
society.

-The importance of reputation Utterson tries to save the reputation of Dr. Jekyll.
People have to avoid the scandals. Double moral.

-Men We do not find female characters. Homosexuality was considered to be a

crime. It is not expressed in the novel, but some of the crimes that happen in the novel
are considered as a metaphor of this.

We have the story of an overreacher, but only for his only pleasure.

5.2.- Bram Stoker

He was an Irish journalist and a drama writer.

Dracula (1897)
It is not his invention, but he brought the figure to the East continent. It is the history of
Dracula’s attend to move from Romania to England. It is the attempt of Van Helsing to
destroy Dracula.
The legend of Dracula was part of the popular folklore of many part of the world. Black
Death created lots of stories thanks to the amount of people who died. Dracula is
inspired in the image of Vlad Dracula, who was an impaler and enjoyed drinking his
enemies’ blood.
It is a Victorian novel because it reflects the Victorian anxiety (sex, religion and
promiscuity). It is a very sexual novel.

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It is a very complex novel, because we have several letters from different characters.
We have many points of view, so we don’t know which one is the correct. We get so
many letters, telegraphs and journal’s entrances. Stoker was interested about the old and
the new, and we can see this in the novel.
We have the story of Jonathan Harker, a London lawyer whose main costumer is Count
Dracula. He goes to Transilvania.
We find the topic of East vs West, and the topic of the foreign. Count Dracula emigrates
to England. People who represent the West are Van Helsing and his people, while the
East is represented by Dracula.
We also find the topic of technology and modernization. Science cannot cure Lucy, is
garlic which does (tradition), which is a critic to modern society, since Bram Stoker
thought we have to respect the old.
It is a novel about sex, blood sucking is a metaphor for sex. Blood causes attraction and
repulsion, as well as sex. This novel is also about the repression of sexual repression.
His victims are women, so women are the ones that are accessible to sex. The danger is
to protect the virginity of women, se we have two examples in the novel

 Count Dracula threats the virginity of Lucy

 Mina represents the opposite of Lucy, she keeps her chastity and she
remains a virgin until she marries.

Killing the vampire provides rest and has Lucy returning her chastity. We also have a
metaphor for rape, which is the stake through Lucy’s heart. Blood is also a metaphor for
the transgression of a Christian myth (the communion), as a way to get redemption.
Here we have a reversal, blood as a way to become immortal.
What Van Helsing does is Christian propaganda, the promise of the salvation. The trend
of the end of the century is to satisfy your pleasures, but Bram Stoker think we have to
cultivate ourselves.

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6.- THE VICTORIAN NOVEL

6.1.- Introduction

Literate is a business, a flourishing business. People knew how to write and read, more
newspaper and libraries were arising. Technological advances, printing novels was
cheap thanks to the printing press.
In the Victorian times, the predominance literature form was the novel. Poetry was also
very narrative. Novels were published on two or three volumes, and they were
serialized. The first one to do that was Charles Dickens in the Pickwick Papers. For
example, it took two years to George Eliot to publish Middlemarch.
Realism was going on in many countries such as Russia, Spain, America… Realistic
novels want to present a wide social world, a variety of social classes and social
settings. Victorian authors wanted to convince us that the characters and events
mentioned resembled to our own experience of the world. This is not autobiography, but
this is to create the illusion of truth (give an appearance of truth). The 19th century
novel is about topic that worried society, readers wanted to read about their own
problems. They represented the middle class and cared to the opportunities of human
being, the conflict of classes.
There is a clash, we see that Victorian novels describes very separated social classes,
but with the opportunity of social mobility. Victorian novels are about creating your
own identity. Women are the main characters of the novels and the writers want to
convene moral messages. The Victorian novels is didactic, it has to teach you
something. The good people are reworded, and the bad people are punished.
Nevertheless, all novels are not about women, but also about social conventions.

6.2.- The Woman Question

For the first time in history, women are the main writers of the age. Through the 19th
century, men were considered to be citizens and have rights, but this freedom achieved
by man was not for women. Women could not vote, ask for divorce or manage their
own land. Women had limited access to education, so this stimulated the feminism.
Early feminists were the followers of Mary Wollstonecraft and her manifest A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Little by little, women got improvement in
her situation. We do not only care about middle class women, but also about worker
class women, who were forced to work in factories at the time of the Industrial
Revolution, and in mines in order to extract gold.
There was a pressure in the British Parliament to reduce to less than 16 hour a day the
children and women labor, which was 20 hours a day at the time. Little by little, some
laws were accepted (the right to get a divorce, the right to manage your own property…)
but women said that the correct way to get equality was through education. They
wanted to finish their education at the Finishing School only for women (those existing
in the 19th and 20th century where they learn how to become a good wife, mother and
host, the rules of etiquette, how to behave in society…).

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There is a very important phenomenon reported in newspaper, that was half a million of
surplus female population in the Victorian era, so there was not enough female to marry
women. The prospects for them were to become burglars, prostitutes or asked for their
family charity. Many women immigrated to America. There was another option, to
become Governess.
The idea of womanhood was that only were only fit for domestic roles. The only
preoccupation for women was related to domesticity. We have a very important poem
written by Coventry Patmore (The Angel in the House) which expresses women purity
and self sacrifice. Women sacrificed themselves for the sake of their husband and
children. The centre of the Victorian age was the house, it was the place of affection and
happiness. The husband is the lord and the woman is his servant.

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7.- THE VICTORIAN NOVEL: CHARLES DICKENS

7.1.- Introduction

He is the most popular and beloved Victorian writer. Besides, he is the most popular
Victorian writer because he identified himself with the low classes. The different ideas
he had are reflected in very heterogeneous novels. The importance of Dickens is that he
consolidated Victorian values and the secularization of the religious thinking. People
had to behave as a human being according to the religious doctrine (protecting the poor,
helping people…). He was a writer who wanted to reflect the Victorian society in his
work. He wanted to criticize the Victorian world, by using humor. He also stressed
humanitarian feelings and Christianity. His novels are polyphonic (different voices in
his novels, many silence people who found their voice in Dickens’s novels). He was a
master creating characters (David Copperfield, Oliver Twist), constructed by metaphors,
clothes, they way they behave… We don’t get in the characters’ mind, because he was
worried about creating prototype characters. He wanted to teach his readers to question
their social priorities and to denounce social injustices. His novels are a way to show
people things needed to change, he wanted to create awareness calling for readers’
emotions.
Middle class society in the Victorian age believed in hard work. If you were poor, it was
not a consequence of the society, but it is because you did not work enough.
The problem with Dickens’s novels is sentimentality. Most of his novels (except Great
Expectations) have a happy ending in order to please his readers. In Oliver Twist, for
instance, he is adopted by a good mind, but the problems are still in the streets of
London.
We can see in Dickens a distinctive type of novel. The main setting in his novels is
prison. Not only physical prisons, but also psychological. Prison is a metaphor, is the
setting for criminality and the patriarchal world, to enforce punishment and discipline.
Although not all his characters go to prison, most of them do not have freedom.
He is a great creator of criminals, but in a way he investigates the relationship between
the character and nature. This is a misleading way to describe characters. Archetypes
create the panorama of the Victorian world. This is a little bit problematic of his novels,
because he relies too much in this archetypes. He thinks that if you are ugly, you are
bad; and if you are beautiful, you are good.
His novels are very different from each other. We see an evolution on his fiction.
Extravagant and baggy plots. Most of his novels are settled in London to show poverty

7.1.- Biography

He belonged to a family with financial difficulties. First of all, he was employed in a

shoe factory, but his father is sent to prison. At that time, there were debtors’ prison,
where the whole family was sent to prison. Charles Dickens was the one who was not
imprisoned.

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As a young boy, Charles Dickens was exposed to many artistic and literary works that
allowed his imagination to grow and develop considerably. He was greatly influenced
by the stories his nursemaid used to tell him and by his many visits to the theater.
Additionally, Dickens loved reading.
At 18, he started working as a freelance newspaper reporter. His luck will change when
he is 24, because he is asked to publish is illustrated literary sketches in the form of a
novel (The Pickwick Papers, his first novel). He wrote serialized novels in monthly
installments. This was very important in the Victorian age, since regular families
enjoyed laud lectures (the father read to the family the newspapers as an usual activity),
and then the whole family wanted to buy the next newspaper. Dickens did that in order t
get the readers’ attention.
He married and had ten children. He was a philanthropic and donated people to the
poor. He was an amateur actor, and when he was playing with some friends, he fell in
love with a young woman. After that, he abandoned his family and settled down with
his new wife.

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Early novels

The Pickwick Papers (1836-37)

Serial book publication about Mr. Pickwick and his friends, travelling about England.
Travel for knowledge. We can find darkness in this early novel, because Mr. Pickwick
spent some of his time in prison.

Oliver Twist (1837)

Black comedy in the sense that it tells the abuses of society. One of the main influences
to create Oliver Twist is the picaresque novel from Spain, El Lazarillo de Tormes. There
is also another literary gender that Dickens doesn’t like, the Newgate novels (criminal
narrative very successful in the 19th century). What he doesn’t like is the portrait of
criminals as heroes. The novel is about the hostile confrontation of a child against the
world. We see the adventures of Oliver Twist in the streets of London, and the
confrontation of two different worlds (comfort of the upper class and poorness in the
streets). Dickens is attacking the Poor Laws of 1834, laws approved to enforce poor
people to live and work in work houses (and almost become modern slaves). Dickens in
Oliver Twist finds that middle classes acted with hypocrisy because they treated kids
like Oliver Twist poorly, but at the same time the preached that they are charitable
people. What Dickens does is to accused these people of not being as Christians and
good as they said. For that, Dickens is a true defender and the voice of beggars,
workers, orphan children, prostitutes… At the end, Oliver Twist goes to the
countryside, where he gets an idyllic life.

David Copperfield (1949-50)

It is a semi-autobiographical novel. This novel is the expression of his trauma and
painful experiences when he was a child. Journey from childhood to adulthood.
Although the novel deals with painful experiences, is still a comic novel. This is the
typical story to tell when you are an adult, starting from childhood. When you are a
child, there are some experiences that mark you from good. David’s mother decides to
marry a gentleman (Mr. Muedstone), and decide to sent him away to different schools,
where he goes through different experiences. Nevertheless, David’s mother dies and he
goes back to work for Mr. Muedstone; but he is not happy with them and goes to live
with his only relative, Ms. Betsey. When he grows, he decides to be a lawyer and goes
to work for Mr. Spenlon, and falls in love with Mr. Spenlon’s daughter. The main topic
of the novel is the misery and the drama of the weak (women, children, orphans… are
weak, not only the poor). We cannot consider Dickens to be a feminist writer, he did not
want to change women’s situation; but he did think that there should be equality in the
marriage (balance between the wife and the husband). He also criticizes wealthy
classes; he considered that your wealthy do not tell who you are. Two main issues going
on: the importance of mother and the importance of physical beauty. If you are a good
mother, you have a good child. David’s mother is good and beautiful, therefore, David
has to be good and beautiful.

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A Christmas Carol (1843)
This novella intended to influence in all Christmas traditions. In this novel we have
images of joy and light. But Christmas is also sadness, darkness and death. This is a
Christian allegory, and we have a very hard criticism of Victorian society. The
protagonist of the story is Mr. Scrooge, the representation of winter, but spring is
possible. He is very selfish and greedy; he is a misanthrope and does not like human
company. He refuses to go to his nephew’s celebration of Christmas. He doesn’t also
enjoy Christmas to other people. So, he will be visited by three ghosts (the ghost of
Christmas past, the ghost of Christmas present and the ghost of Christmas yet to come).
These three different spirits will initiate a journey with Mr. Scrooge to witness different
Christmas scenes. The ghost of the Christian past represents memory, and they go to the
time when Mr. Scrooge was generous and happy. The ghost of Christmas present
teaches him empathy and charity; they witness the family of Mr. Chatchit (his
employee) and, by visiting them, Mr. Scrooge feels compassion and sympathizes to the
poor. The last ghost represent the fear of death, we see that after Mr. Scrooge dies,
nobody cares. We have here the story of the tradition of Christmas, this novel has a
strong religious content but it is also intended to be for children as a moral message. We
see redemption in Mr. Scrooge.

Social Consciousness
Big panorama of society. His friend Wilkie Collins (writer of novels such as The
Woman in White) will be very influence by Charles Dickens.

Bleak House (1852-53)

It is a satirical novel. We have two narrators, one in the present and one in the past. In
this novel, he criticizes the legal system in England, because he thinks that instead of
helping people, it is corrupted and inefficient due to the long burocracy. This legal
system helped itself, and this is a symptom of the illness of the Victorian system. The
fog we can see at the beginning is a metaphor of this corruption. This novel is about a
central low shut. No progress of the law. This legal problem with lead to misery in the
life of the people involved. You lives can be distrusted by these low shut. This novel is
also about charity and philanthropy. This novel is the father of detective stories, because
it is the history of the murder of Mr. Tolkinghorn. Dickens creates a complex wept of
clues and suspects. We have inspector Bucket, who has to resolve the murder of this
lawyer. The main influence for this novel is his own experience. This novel is also a
search for love, and we have the character Esther Summerson, one of the two narrators
in the novels. She is a very good woman and we know that she is in love with a man
(Mr. Woodcourt). She spends her life helping other people, but there is also a lot of
secrets going on in her life. She wants to discover who are her parents and it will be
discovered later own that she is the illegitimate daughter of Lady Dedlock. In the
Victorian age, suicide was considered very controversial, and, in this novel, Lady
Dedlock commits suicide. This is also a history of passion.

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Little Dorrit (1855-57)
In this novel we find the same repeated topic of Charles Dickens: prison. Amy, the main
character, is a child who lives in jail with her parents. Dysfunctional families. We can
see how the plot evolves and the family becomes lucky. What Dickens doesn’t life is
that many people change when they become lucky and wealthy. He focuses in the
importance of not changing your personality. This is a novel about claustrophobia and
the search for a true home (he does not consider jail as a true home). Amy doesn’t
change her personality, but her family does. This is a novel about duty, characters like
Amy must put aside their personal desires and follow her duty (devoting yourself to
other), because it is the way to achieve happiness. The middle class only thinks about
reputation.

Hard Times (1854)

It is the only true novel that defines the Victorian age and is settled outside London
(Coketown, a city in northern England which is industrialized and similar to
Manchester, in this case). This novel is the true diagnosis of the males, and the
consequence is the inability of people to share emotions (that is the problem of the
Industrial Revolution for him). There is no empathy, and business men only think in
their own privileges. The upper and middle classes want everything to work as a
machine (workers are machines they use for their interest). In this novel we truly see a
subordination of his imagination for a social purpose. Five topics in the novel:

 The mechanization of human beings: Individual becoming machines. He

thought that the industrialization of the north of England turned humans into
machines by the frustration of identity. Bounderby raised his children by
teaching them the philosophy of utilitarianism. Human beings have to be driven
by logic, common sense. Correlation between the situations in the factories and
education.

 Criticism against utilitarianism: Here utilitarianism fails with workers. Facts

against imagination. It is a bad weapon in education. Dickens defend a reform
that has to be conducted in order to improve the working conditions in factories.

 Opposition between fact and imagination: By educating children, we create a

social problem. It is necessary to have harmony in society. Balance between fact
and imagination.

 Importance of femininity: Compassion, emotions, morality. We can find this

virtuousness in women. Women can change society. Nevertheless, Dickens see
women as the angels of the house.

 Mismatched marriages: According to Dickens, marriage should be based on

love. Lisa is forced to marry Bounderby despite the difference of ages.

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Late Novels
They are more grotesque that his earlier novels, especially Great Expectations. They
try to show the bad side of human nature, with no possibility of redemption.

A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

At the time he wrote this novel, he was being an actor. Dickens felt in love with an
actress and abandoned his wife. We have in the novel political and social issues. The
main characters are Charles Darnay, Lucie Manette and Sydney Carton. The setting is
the French Revolution, meaning the peasants fighting against aristocracy. This novel
was inspired in Thomas Carlyle’s writings. During and after the FR, we can see that the
ones using weapons were the peasants, and Dickens criticized this fact. Parallelism with
the situation of England at that time. Charles is an aristocrat, a good and virtuous one
(Dickens wanted to say that not all aristocrats were mean). Sydney realized that he has
to change her life style, he tries to break the drama of the love triangle (repentance). We
have the same idea for the French Revolution context and for the love affair, the idea
that change is possible. We can change things, an in order to do this we have to make
sacrifices. Heroism by sacrificing your life as a proof of love. After the old order, Paris
changes and becomes a new city. However, sacrifice was needed.

Great Expectations (1860)

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ANALYSIS OF GREAT EXPECTATIONS

It is the most formally written novel by Dickens. Pessimism about the corruption of
human being.
We find a first person narrator (Pip), a child who comes from the lower social class. He
wants to become a gentleman, but this will have a great cost. He don’t always behave
properly, he intentionally does thing he know are not correct. He would be manipulated.
The conclusion of Great Expectations is ambiguous. Semi-self fulfillment and a open
ending.
Idea of the Bildungsroman (novel of formation and education). It focuses on the moral
and psychological development of the character, who tells his or her history from
childhood to adulthood. There is possibility to change your life, and there is also a
moral and psychological development. Change and maturity. Idea of travelling,
searching and finding answers for the question of life (how to be happy). This happiness
will not come easily; it will come after a lot of tests and proofs. This characters are often
typical characters of the Bildungsroman: Pip makes mistakes, he is looking for social
acceptance, but he will realize that this is not what he should be looking for.
The first Bidungsroman is El Lazarillo de Tormes, and in English literature the most
important one before the 19th century is History of Tom Jones, A Founding, written by
Henry Fielding. James Joyce also followed the Bildungsroman with Portrait of an Artist
As a Young Man.
Dickens was the first writer to publish a serialized novel in All The Year Round. He
created expectations as the end of the chapter, so reader wanted to buy the next
newspaper and read the next chapter. He got national and international famous thanks to
David Copperfield and Oliver Twist. Little by little, he lost his fame, and Great
Expectations is his returning to fame. He needed the money.
Idea of changing, nothing remains. We see with the figure of Magwitch (the criminal)
something typical in the English society. English prisons were overcrowded and many
prisons were sending far away. Magwitch is sent to Australia, where he made a great
fortune. Pip is used as a toy by Stella.
Plot

Pip, a young orphan living with his sister and her husband in the marshes of Kent, sits in
a cemetery one evening looking at his parents’ tombstones. Suddenly, an escaped
convict springs up from behind a tombstone, grabs Pip, and orders him to bring him
food and a file for his leg irons. Pip obeys, but the fearsome convict is soon captured
anyway. The convict protects Pip by claiming to have stolen the items himself.
One day Pip is taken by his Uncle Pumblechook to play at Satis House, the home of the
wealthy dowager Miss Havisham, who is extremely eccentric: she wears an old
wedding dress everywhere she goes and keeps all the clocks in her house stopped at the
same time. During his visit, he meets a beautiful young girl named Estella, who treats
him coldly and contemptuously. Nevertheless, he falls in love with her and dreams of
becoming a wealthy gentleman so that he might be worthy of her. He even hopes that
Miss Havisham intends to make him a gentleman and marry him to Estella, but his

53
hopes are dashed when, after months of regular visits to Satis House, Miss Havisham
decides to help him become a common laborer in his family’s business.
With Miss Havisham’s guidance, Pip is apprenticed to his brother-in-law, Joe, who is
the village blacksmith. Pip works in the forge unhappily, struggling to better his
education with the help of the plain, kind Biddy and encountering Joe’s malicious day
laborer, Orlick. One night, after an altercation with Orlick, Pip’s sister, known as Mrs.
Joe, is viciously attacked and becomes a mute invalid. From her signals, Pip suspects
that Orlick was responsible for the attack.
One day a lawyer named Jaggers appears with strange news: a secret benefactor has
given Pip a large fortune, and Pip must come to London immediately to begin his
education as a gentleman. Pip happily assumes that his previous hopes have come
true—that Miss Havisham is his secret benefactor and that the old woman intends for
him to marry Estella.
In London, Pip befriends a young gentleman named Herbert Pocket and Jaggers’s law
clerk, Wemmick. He expresses disdain for his former friends and loved ones, especially
Joe, but he continues to pine after Estella. He furthers his education by studying with
the tutor Matthew Pocket, Herbert’s father. Herbert himself helps Pip learn how to act
like a gentleman. When Pip turns twenty-one and begins to receive an income from his
fortune, he will secretly help Herbert buy his way into the business he has chosen for
himself. But for now, Herbert and Pip lead a fairly undisciplined life in London,
enjoying themselves and running up debts. Orlick reappears in Pip’s life, employed as
Miss Havisham’s porter, but is promptly fired by Jaggers after Pip reveals Orlick’s
unsavory past. Mrs. Joe dies, and Pip goes home for the funeral, feeling tremendous
grief and remorse. Several years go by, until one night a familiar figure barges into
Pip’s room—the convict, Magwitch, who stuns Pip by announcing that he, not Miss
Havisham, is the source of Pip’s fortune. He tells Pip that he was so moved by Pip’s
boyhood kindness that he dedicated his life to making Pip a gentleman, and he made a
fortune in Australia for that very purpose.
Pip is appalled, but he feels morally bound to help Magwitch escape London, as the
convict is pursued both by the police and by Compeyson, his former partner in crime. A
complicated mystery begins to fall into place when Pip discovers that Compeyson was
the man who abandoned Miss Havisham at the altar and that Estella is Magwitch’s
daughter. Miss Havisham has raised her to break men’s hearts, as revenge for the pain
her own broken heart caused her. Pip was merely a boy for the young Estella to practice
on; Miss Havisham delighted in Estella’s ability to toy with his affections.
As the weeks pass, Pip sees the good in Magwitch and begins to care for him deeply.
Before Magwitch’s escape attempt, Estella marries an upper-class lout named Bentley
Drummle. Pip makes a visit to Satis House, where Miss Havisham begs his forgiveness
for the way she has treated him in the past, and he forgives her. Later that day, when she
bends over the fireplace, her clothing catches fire and she goes up in flames. She
survives but becomes an invalid. In her final days, she will continue to repent for her
misdeeds and to plead for Pip’s forgiveness.
The time comes for Pip and his friends to spirit Magwitch away from London. Just
before the escape attempt, Pip is called to a shadowy meeting in the marshes, where he

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encounters the vengeful, evil Orlick. Orlick is on the verge of killing Pip when Herbert
arrives with a group of friends and saves Pip’s life. Pip and Herbert hurry back to effect
Magwitch’s escape. They try to sneak Magwitch down the river on a rowboat, but they
are discovered by the police, who Compeyson tipped off. Magwitch and Compeyson
fight in the river, and Compeyson is drowned. Magwitch is sentenced to death, and Pip
loses his fortune. Magwitch feels that his sentence is God’s forgiveness and dies at
peace. Pip falls ill; Joe comes to London to care for him, and they are reconciled. Joe
gives him the news from home: Orlick, after robbing Pumblechook, is now in jail; Miss
Havisham has died and left most of her fortune to the Pockets; Biddy has taught Joe
how to read and write. After Joe leaves, Pip decides to rush home after him and marry
Biddy, but when he arrives there he discovers that she and Joe have already married.
Pip decides to go abroad with Herbert to work in the mercantile trade. Returning many
years later, he encounters Estella in the ruined garden at Satis House. Drummle, her
husband, treated her badly, but he is now dead. Pip finds that Estella’s coldness and
cruelty have been replaced by a sad kindness, and the two leave the garden hand in
hand, Pip believing that they will never part again. (NOTE: Dickens’s original ending
to Great Expectations differed from the one described in this summary)

Topics

Money can ruin human nature and relations. Dickens says that you are what you are. In
life there is pain, social ills, but if we are able to connect with other people, life will be
better. Pip has had expectations and has thought that the world was another way. He
suffers a journey towards maturity and, when he reaches it, he realizes about his true
family.
The good thing about Dickens is that he shows the whole Victorian world, both rich and
poor people. Pip will suffer a kind of moral epiphany with three human feelings: love,
loyalty and affection.
We have to consider Great Expectations as a moral fable about how to become a man,
meanwhile Jane Eyre is a fable about how to become a woman. The whole story is a
kind of dichotomy between ambition and self development. At the beginning Pip is a
good boy, he thinks that he can improve his life. We see in him ambition, he is
optimistic about the future, he has great expectations about himself, he thinks he can
improve.

 Social improvement: Once he improves, he realizes that he is not happier than

when he lived with Joe and her aunt.
 Educational improvement: He needs education. When he arrives to London,
he looks for a teacher.
 Moral improvement: The most important one. Pip, although he is not a truly
hero, he realizes that when he has done something wrong, he feels guilty. He
understands that he has made a mistake. Social-self improvement is useless
without love in life.

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Criminality and innocent as topics. The idea of imprisonment coming from Dicken’s
own childhood. Idea of prisons which can be mental or physical for Pip. They are a
symbol of Pip’s struggle, he has to go beyond to find truth. If he remains in the surface,
then he condemns Magwitch. Magwitch is a good person, although he is a criminal,
while someone like Jaggers s bad although he belongs to a high social class.
Dickens is a writer of characterization, multiplicity of voices. In the novel, the main
voice is Pip. Theory of the Carnival voices, pointed by Mijail Bakhtin. Human
connections.
Idea of reality and appearances.

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8.- THE 'CONDITION OF ENGLAND'

8.1.- William M. Thackeray (1811-1863)

He was one of the main Victorian novelist, he was highly acclaimed. He started as a
journalist. He has two main influences from the 18th century:
-Henry Fielding and William Hogarth Masters of satire, to denounce the
degradation of different social classes and denounce inequality in society.
-Mariage à la Mode Series of six paintings where Hogarth tells a history: an
aristocratic man, a typical case of prestige, who has no money, so he is forced by his
parents to marry a wealthy girl from a middle class family which became rich. It is an
arranged marriage, which represent the middle classes marry for position in order to
achieve the social mobility. It is a materialistic use of marriage.

Apart from these two influences, he was against the trend of Newgate (the prison in
London) novels of the 18th century. We have a very important novel in the Newgate
narrative (Moll Flanders by Defoe). Thackeray opposed these type of novel: he was a
satirical moralist = Satirical (amuse) + moralist (teach). His novels will be of
contemporary issues in his society like:

-Social power and authority

-Social mobility (richer/having social prestige)

-Idea of society driven by money

-Character having, snob society.

He is very pessimistic (in the sense that human nature cannot be changed, will be
always with depravations, flaws,...). In order to denounce this human nature he will use
satiric, portraying. His characters can be found in other place and time.
He believes in ambivalence in human nature, virtues are not static; you behave
according to the place, the time...
He judges his own characters, criticising human weaknesses, hypocrisy, snobbery,
ambition, greed, vanity, and ambition. These are brought out in his novels, especially in
Vanity Fair.

War/peace  Many contrast. He has no heroes, all are corrupted. His idea of reflecting
the world as it is, like the truth.

Vanity Fair
Already in the title: Vanity (no religious meaning but a secular application to society),
the idea that we can find it across time and space. We have a strong first narrator
(Thakeary), we have a wide range of characters (he wants to reflect they all behave in

57
the same wayall driven by money). So, he denies heroism to all character (they are
not worth for us to feel resembled).
There is a school (Ms Pinkerton) for girls where we have to female characters: Becky
Sharp (who comes from a middle class that becomes poor) and Amelia Sedly (from a
rich family, that want so lean how to be a good woman). We have George, a playboy,
who is interested in Amelia (who loves him). Amelia marries George, he goes to war
(against the French, battle of Waterloo) where he dies. Amelia is a widow now, he has
a son, she goes through financial difficulties (family becomes poor) and she marries
Dobbin (for money) who do not realise that he is not loved. Instead, Becky, alone, needs
to make money and scale in the social classes. She goes to work to Crawley family,
where the aunt is the rich one. She manages to marry Rawdon, who goes to prison and
she is adulterous to get more possessions (greed). She finally confesses to Amelia she
had an affair with George.

-Vanity All are narcissist (Becky wants men around her to get more money and
things) They have an excessive attachment to things.

-Dark  Reflecting human nature: greed, ambition, hypocrisy, marriage for money. He
criticizes also in war.
-Chronology It is a circular plot, we find all over social mobility and greed (starting
with Becky and finishing with Amelia)
-Time It is very important because it is a serialized novel. Each time he finishes a
chapter he needs to maintain the mysterious
-Flashbacks For readers to remember what is going on( these are instalments, this
periodical publication shape the narrative)
-Thaquery He tells the truth. It contrasts with lies an ideas by characters (Becky
cheats with men, Amelia deceived by her husband, Dobbin thinks he will be loved...)

As a moralist, he is a preacher (denounce the social world) and a showman (because he

consider himself the master of the performance: his characters are like puppets,
manipulated to provide lesson to the readers). Dark and funny novels at the same time.

8.2.- The Condition of England Novel

19th century:

-Industrial Revolution.
-Great migration of people form the countryside to the city.
-Railway.

People undergoing hard conditions (long working hours, low salaries, being oppressed
by their masters). Members of Victorian society wanted social consciousness. For the
condition of England we have essays and novels (The Condition of the Working Class in
England)

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8.3.- Elizabeth Gastell (1810-65)

She was the daughter of a Unitarian (religion which did not believe in the trinity)
minister living in the outskirts of London. She also married a Unitarian minister, and
move to the north were she realised inequality. She had four daughters and a son who
died, and she wrote to overcame his dead.
Her writings reflects a critic of social injustices, by digging into the souls of characters.
She cares of emotions, source of change. She portraits a series of possible
circumstances.
Her novels keep the idea of the two nations, meaning there is a high distance between
high and low classes. She shows this antagonism, between north and south, and also in
the north between the oppressed and the rulers.

Mary Barton (1848)

It is the representation of the harsh conditions of Manchester area. She wants to show
the problems of the Industrial Revolution. It has a social purpose: antagonism between
labour classes and business men. This is very dangerous, brings violence (we see strikes
in her novels).
She wants to create social awareness, she wants her readers to feel sympathy,
compassion to understand the situation. She does not provide political solutions, she just
create social awareness.

Granford (1851-53)

North and South (1854-55)

They both represent the danger of traditional live. The railway comes to a 'perfect'
village but is rejected by the people. Happiness or unhappiness?
Idea of limited community, impositions of society like the social status. Oppressive
towards individuals wishes and aspirations.

Wives and Daughters (1864-65)

Importance of family relations, also between families. Across social classes and
generations. Psychological novel to get into the mid of female readers.

The life of Charlotte Brontë (1857)

One biography. Charlotte was a friend of Elizabeth, this novel was written two years
after her death. They will become friends because of being successful female writers. It
was one of the first biography we have in history. Elizabeth interviewed her father and
friends, she was a true master of the genre of biography.

North and South (1854-55)

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We have the history of a very strong female character (Margaret Hale). She is an older
women who experiences a mature love. It is the second Manchester novel, about
conflict of industrialization. The South vs. North.
Margaret lives a clam live, she refuses a marriage proposal. His father is a member of
the church of England. They move to the North, where people are rude, and there is
violence. She feels superior. She gets to know some workers and start to understand
them.
His father has a friend Mr Thornton, a bad master, treating his employees as slaves.
Soon Mr. Thornton loves Margaret who will be in the side of the workers, trying to
change her mind. One day, there is a strike, and the workers attack Thornton, who is
saved by Margaret and he become madly in love with her. Margaret help a fugitive (his
brother) because of the desire of her dying mother. After her dead, Margaret moves to
the South, where she becomes a rich independent woman because of a heritance. Mr
Thornton goes to the South also, but has no longer money because of the strikes, and he
has changed his mind (well-treating his solely worker). In the end she marries him and
gives him here money to save his business.
Topics of the novel:

 Contrast between North (unhappiness, drama) and the South (idyllic world
with conformist poor people): Margaret represents the south although she
changes her mind and Thornton represents the north although he changes his
mind.
 Class trouble: strikes, violence.
 Margaret: strong woman, independent. She even decides not to marry or have
children. She has debates with Thornton. She has to undergo many difficulties,
and in the end she is rewarded, chooses her husband and help her.

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9.- THE VICTORIAN NOVEL: THE BRONTËS

Different authors and different novels, but the share a deeply religious education. The
father, Patrick Parson, was the parson at Hawort, in Yorkshire. When he arrived there,
he changed his name to Brontë. The Brontë sisters were against the morality of the time,
which was very oppressive for women. Type of writers that were beyond decorum,
exaltation of feelings and emotions. They lived similar lives, with some events that were
slightly different. They loved each other, and wrote together. They helped each other
with their novels.
We have realistic prose, and it goes beyond to create intensity. Poetic dramas even in
their fiction. They share similar literary sources. All of them where very religious girls,
except for Emily. Her father vas very liberal in their education, and they were able to
read authors such as Lord Byron, Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott… We have in their
characters the strength of the human being that cannot be lead by society. Battle of
confinement and escape in the characters. These girls knew about the world, although
they were repressed.
The political issues they were interested in were Napoleon, the absence of Queen
Victoria and the turbulences between liberals and conservatives in the Parliament. They
care about women’s role in society, and also about intuition (Jane Eyre and Villette).
Domesticity inside to women, morality, decency... We have also governess novels,
where the characters care about their working conditions. Idea of heroes and heroines,
people can identify themselves with the characters. Idea that ‘I can have success in live
if I keep my strength to overcome difficulties’. Live is a journey from childhood to
adulthood.
Her mother died when they were very little. Elizabeth (Mary’s sister) came to Haworth
to take care of the family (who were six at the moment), but she does not like the
family. All the daughters were sent to a school for poor girls that were daughters of a
clergyman. There, they had a very strong religious education, and they were abuse (they
didn’t have enough food, they were bitten, their hair was cut…). Maria and Elizabeth
died, and the rest were sent back home. After that, they would be educated at home,
raised by Patrick. Branwell, the only boy, received formal education (nevertheless, he
was violent and a drug adict). In their adolescent, Patrick came back and he brought
twelve little soldiers to play, so they started to play together and create their stories
(Sagas of Angria and Gondet).
The girls had to work as governess. Charlotte and Anne became governesses, and the
only one that couldn’t work was Emily, who stayed at home taking care of the father.
Low class women had to work in factories or as maids, while higher women had to
marry. But middle-class women did not have money for their education, so they had to
become governesses or teachers. They were considered to be servants. There were so
many prejudices to governesses. They also could marry. Women were confined to
domesticity; they had to create harmony at home. In Brontë’ novels, we find
dysfunctional families. Talented female novels were not considered feminine. Women
were only entitled to write if they transmitted to their readers the patriarchal order. In
Brontë’ novels, this message does not exist (specially in Charlotte Brontë, where

61
women express clearly their opinions), so that is why they had to write with male
pennames.

9.1.- Common works

Juvenalia works Sagas of Angria and Gondat. There are two different worlds, Angria
and Gondat.
In 1842, Charlotte and Anne when to Brussels to improve their French, and they stayed
one year together. One year later, Charlotte returned to Brussels. There, she felt in love
with M. Heger, but he didn’t love her back. When she came back to England, she
discovered that Emily and Anne were writing poems without her, but she joined and
they published a book of poems, The Poems of Curror, Ellis and Acton Bell (1846),
under male’s pennames in order to be respected. Today, as critics, if we read
Charlotte’s version we find that their poems are rather conventional; Anne was too
Christian and conventional (he believed in life after death) and Emily was introvert
and independent, so their poems were highly unconventional. The book was a failure,
but the critics said that Ellis (Emily) poems were worth them.
In 1847, they send to publication one novel each, always under their male’s penname.
Charlotte sent The Professor, Emily published Wuthering Heights and Anne published
Agnes Grey.
Nevertheless, The Professor was rejected, but Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey
weren’t. At that time, Charlotte had already written Jane Eyre, and it was accepted.
Only Jane Eyre was successful, whereas Withering Heights and Agnes Grey were badly
criticized.
In 1848, the drama started: his brother tormented the family. Emily had to enter in pubs
in order to rescue Branwell. Domestic and gender violence, as we can also see in their
novels. In 1848 Branwell died, officially because of tuberculosis. Emily, who had been
taking care of her brother, also died. The next one to die was Anne, five months later,
also of tuberculosis. Charlotte was already famous and received several marriage
proposals, but she would only marry to Bell Nicholls. In her fourth month of pregnancy,
she died.

9.2.- Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855)

The Professor (post 1857)

Jane Eyre (1847)

It is a novel about intuition. It became a best seller, and it is a revolutionary novel for
that time. It is a classic love story, but it is also more than that because Charlotte
transcends to melodrama in order to portrait a woman’s search for a richer live and
richer experiences. It is a novel about independence. She trusts her conscious, she is
disciplined and takes care about the others. We know that she is a passionate woman,
but she is self-conscious and knows when to give up. It is partly an autobiographical

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novel. Jane look for happiness in this live, not in the after-life. It is a novel with gothic
novel and with the subversion of religious issues.

Shirley (1849)
It was published one year after the death of her sisters. It is the only novel that
corresponds to the condition of England novel. In this novel, we have a social plot of
the turbulent time of Northern England, were workers were violent to her bosses. The
workers did not want the machines to substitute them. We have two characters, Caroline
Helstone and Robert Moore. Robert is a rich man of business who is in love with
Caroline. He is a good friend of Shirley, who loves his brother Louis Moore. Shirley is
the portrait of her sister Anne, although the most important character is Caroline. In this
novel we don’t only see the differences between social classes, but also the differences
between the differences between male and female. We also have the problem of
anorexia (Caroline, when she finds out that she cannot marry Robert). Roberts and
Shirley had to marry because of the money, but Robert loves Caroline and Shirley loves
Louis. In the end, we get a happy ending when Robert has no longer problems with his
workers, and Shirley can marry Louis.

Villette (1853)
It is a novel of depression and psychological death. We have the main character, Lucy
Snowe. In Villette, Charlotte Bronte has given up and she does not have strength. It is a
story of a girl who has no family. Lucy spends a time in the house of her godmother,
Mrs. Reed, but she has to return with her family, and there is silence for seven years
(she did not tell her live in those years). During these seven years, she does nothing.
When she is 23, the only member in her family dies. There is a nightmare of a ship
break, where she I the only survivor. We don’t see Lucy’s strength to overcome
difficulties, she wants to die; but she is force to stand up and abandon England. She
goes to live in Villette (a metaphor for Brussels), where she becomes a teacher. In
Villette, she falls in love with Dr. John, who, of course, cannot fall in love with her. The
gothic novel in the novel is the repression of this love turns into hallucination of the
apparition of a ghost of a dead nun. Here is when M. Emmanuel Paul, who helps her to
enjoy life eating, going to museums… M. Emmanuel Paul leaves and, at the end of the
novel, he is supposed to come back to Villette, but we don’t know whether he comes
back or not, because there is a storm in the sea.

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9.3.- Emily Brontë (1818-1848)

Wuthering Heights (1847)

Gothic topics of ghosts, moors with no lights, sexuality… This is a tragedy, a novel that
has become a classic and has been studied in all schools of criticism. It is a highly
original novel, and it a mystery how an isolated girl could have written such a
passionate novel. There are two generations. The first part of Wuthering Highs ends
with the dead of Catherine, and we tend to forget the metaphysical love between
Catherine and Heathcliff, a love that survives death, a love beyond morality, religion
and social conventions. We have five minor characters and two mayor narrators (Nelly
Dean, who is the servant, and Lockwood). The story is setting in the present, and tells
both the present and the past, It is a complex novel, between it mixes present and past
and has a lot of narrators. The main idea of the novel is that love is destructive; there is
a lot of revenge. It is also a love that goes beyond death and marriage (Catherine still
loves Heathcliff after marrying). Sexless love is superior to sex love, but we still have
an erotic love. Childhood portrayed as a paradise. Wuthering Heights is a romantic
myth, and the second half is the conventional happy ending in the Victorian era. There
is instability for middle classes, life has ups and downs. There is the possibility of social
mobility (Heathcliff starts being a poor orphan, and ends being a gentleman). There is
moral and psychological violence. The idea of man as the only ruler, and the idea of a
dysfunctional family (we find greed, jealously, violence, but nor harmony). Idea of
revenge, because Heathcliff has a trauma from his childhood, and this revenge is the
consequence. The moors are a metaphor of the love between Catherine and Heathcliff
(symbolic importance of the landscape)

9.4.- Anne Brontë (1820-1849)

Agnes Grey (1847)

It is the typical story of a governess with terrible kids to take care of. It is the story of
Agnes’s degradation. At the end, she marries to a clergyman.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)

It is about a woman who decides to run away from her house because her husband has a
lover, and he is poisoned their son against her. The main character is Helen Huntingdon.
She becomes the tenant of a little village, pretending to be a widow, because she knows
that she is discovered, she would have to go back home. Finally in the novel, Arthur
(the husband) dies, and Emily marries another man (Gilbert). Anne is very influenced
by the behavior of her brother, and we can see these influences in the character of
Arthur.

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ANALYSIS OF JANE EYRE
Plot

Jane Eyre is a young orphan being raised by Mrs. Reed, her cruel, wealthy aunt. A
servant named Bessie provides Jane with some of the few kindnesses she receives,
telling her stories and singing songs to her. One day, as punishment for fighting with her
bullying cousin John Reed, Jane’s aunt imprisons Jane in the red-room, the room in
which Jane’s Uncle Reed died. While locked in, Jane, believing that she sees her uncle’s
ghost, screams and faints. She wakes to find herself in the care of Bessie and the kindly
apothecary Mr. Lloyd, who suggests to Mrs. Reed that Jane be sent away to school. To
Jane’s delight, Mrs. Reed concurs.

Once at the Lowood School, Jane finds that her life is far from idyllic. The school’s
headmaster is Mr. Brocklehurst, a cruel, hypocritical, and abusive man. Brocklehurst
preaches a doctrine of poverty and privation to his students while using the school’s
funds to provide a wealthy and opulent lifestyle for his own family. At Lowood, Jane
befriends a young girl named Helen Burns, whose strong, martyrlike attitude toward the
school’s miseries is both helpful and displeasing to Jane. A massive typhus epidemic
sweeps Lowood, and Helen dies of consumption. The epidemic also results in the
departure of Mr. Brocklehurst by attracting attention to the insalubrious conditions at
Lowood. After a group of more sympathetic gentlemen takes Brocklehurst’s place,
Jane’s life improves dramatically. She spends eight more years at Lowood, six as a
student and two as a teacher.

After teaching for two years, Jane yearns for new experiences. She accepts a governess
position at a manor called Thornfield, where she teaches a lively French girl named
Adèle. The distinguished housekeeper Mrs. Fairfax presides over the estate. Jane’s
employer at Thornfield is a dark, impassioned man named Rochester, with whom Jane
finds herself falling secretly in love. She saves Rochester from a fire one night, which
he claims was started by a drunken servant named Grace Poole. But because Grace
Poole continues to work at Thornfield, Jane concludes that she has not been told the
entire story. Jane sinks into despondency when Rochester brings home a beautiful but
vicious woman named Blanche Ingram. Jane expects Rochester to propose to Blanche.
But Rochester instead proposes to Jane, who accepts almost disbelievingly.

The wedding day arrives, and as Jane and Mr. Rochester prepare to exchange their
vows, the voice of Mr. Mason cries out that Rochester already has a wife. Mason
introduces himself as the brother of that wife—a woman named Bertha. Mr. Mason
testifies that Bertha, whom Rochester married when he was a young man in Jamaica, is
still alive. Rochester does not deny Mason’s claims, but he explains that Bertha has
gone mad. He takes the wedding party back to Thornfield, where they witness the
insane Bertha Mason scurrying around on all fours and growling like an animal.
Rochester keeps Bertha hidden on the third story of Thornfield and pays Grace Poole to
keep his wife under control. Bertha was the real cause of the mysterious fire earlier in

65
the story. Knowing that it is impossible for her to be with Rochester, Jane flees
Thornfield.

Penniless and hungry, Jane is forced to sleep outdoors and beg for food. At last, three
siblings who live in a manor alternatively called Marsh End and Moor House take her
in. Their names are Mary, Diana, and St. John Rivers, and Jane quickly becomes friends
with them. St. John is a clergyman, and he finds Jane a job teaching at a charity school
in Morton. He surprises her one day by declaring that her uncle, John Eyre, has died and
left her a large fortune: 20,000 pounds. When Jane asks how he received this news, he
shocks her further by declaring that her uncle was also his uncle: Jane and the Riverses
are cousins. Jane immediately decides to share her inheritance equally with her three
newfound relatives.

St. John decides to travel to India as a missionary, and he urges Jane to accompany
him—as his wife. Jane agrees to go to India but refuses to marry her cousin because she
does not love him. St. John pressures her to reconsider, and she nearly gives in.
However, she realizes that she cannot abandon forever the man she truly loves when
one night she hears Rochester’s voice calling her name over the moors. Jane
immediately hurries back to Thornfield and finds that it has been burned to the ground
by Bertha Mason, who lost her life in the fire. Rochester saved the servants but lost his
eyesight and one of his hands. Jane travels on to Rochester’s new residence, Ferndean,
where he lives with two servants named John and Mary.

At Ferndean, Rochester and Jane rebuild their relationship and soon marry. At the end
of her story, Jane writes that she has been married for ten blissful years and that she and
Rochester enjoy perfect equality in their life together. She says that after two years of
blindness, Rochester regained sight in one eye and was able to behold their first son at
his birth.

Characteristics

Jane Eyre embodies passion. It is a novel on passion and rebelliousness, that's why
Victorian critics consider this novel to be revolutionary. It provided a lot of subliminal
messages in terms of gender and in terms of class. It was considered to be a novel
against Victorian morality. Jane Eyre is a Christian, but she doesn't trust the Church.
This is also a novel that reflects the subversion of puritans. Jane Eyre desires are sexual
according to the 19th standards, although there is no sex in the novel. She loves with the
mind, and she later discovers that she feels with her body. She feels mentally and
physically attracted to Mr. Rochester, and this is transgressive with she abandons him
because he wants to be adulterous. There is a moral dilemma between Jane's body and
Jane's mind. This is an attack on sexual and traditional authorities. Jane does not
consider himself pure, and we will see this on manifestos in the novel. There is also
another class subversion: a middle-class woman who is an orphan and has no money
intends to marry someone like Mr. Rochester, a land owner; so here we have the issue

66
of class mobility, which was acceptable for women but not for men. According to
Female initiative like Jane were not acceptable. We don't have the idea of domesticity,
we don't have the idea of the 'Angel in the House' in this novel. Jane thinks that a
woman should be praise not according to her role of domesticity, but for her
intellectual skills and qualities. She rejects the role she is supposed to play as a
governess or as a wife, she is always looking for a richer life. In order to achieve that,
she has to pass several tests. So, definitely in the novel, she makes an attack against this
parallelism between conventionality and morality: she thinks that conventionality and
morality are agents that search patriarchal society, and this is not religion.
We can say that she opposes to this social position of women, she thinks that this
idealize versions of feminity are not true. She creates in her novels the female
empowerment, a dream at that time. Once again, we see a lot of romantic conventions:
we know that Jane values make her sacrifice her desires to finally get her rewards, and
we know that this is going to be a long journey. The novel, a Bildungsroman, is the
journey for self-improvement. Romantic conventions because it is a fairy tale typical of
the Victorian tale (this is the Victorian version of Cinderella). We also have Victorian
conventions because she likes reading (she reads a lot of fairy tales and believes
happiness is possible), she wants to escape because she does not get any attention of her
family... It is a novel of enclosure and escape, fairy tales help Jane to escape the her
hard reality.
Jane will learn to be an obedient girl, she is indoctrinate to become a governess in order
to survive. Again, the topic of enclosure and escape. She leaves Lowgood to become a
governess in Thornfield, where we have the romantic conventions. In romantic
conventions, women are passive and men are heroes, but when Jane and Mr. Rochester
is not like that, she is the hero because she helps Mr. Rochester twice (when they first
met and with the fire). So, we have a reversal of the romantic conventions. She
struggles herself for survival and liberty, still all the novel is a reconciliation between
fairy tales and reality, as when Jane and Mr. Rochester are going to happen and she
discovers her real wife (as the fairy tale of Blue Bear).
Jane Eyre is looking for happiness in life, she is not wondering after the afterlife or her
reword after dying. She is also looking for experiences, self-improvement... In a way,
she is looking for salvation in this life. This is a novel that shows the journey of a
woman for self-fulfillment, achieved by overcoming difficulties in five stages of her
life:

 Gateshead Hall: Here, she is raised by her aunt, but she feels alone.
 Lowood: It is autobiographical. Religious education and friends. Helen is
considered to be the portrait of Maria (Charlotte's sisters). Here she would learn
reality and to become an obedient girl.
 Thornfield: Her life changes when Mr. Rochester arrives. She feels enclosure
until Mr. Rochester arrives. They fall in love little by little. Mr. Rochester
betrays Jane, so when she discovers that, she becomes mature and decides to
escape. This is her sense of duty.

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  Moorhouse: She pretends to be another person, but John discovers she is her
cousin. He finds her true family and true love. This is the sense of duty.
 Abandon of Moorhouse: She discovers that Thornfield had been burnt by
Bertha and Rochester is blind.

Evolution of Jane, according to the different steps of her life. Settings are very
important in the novel to provide the idea of different steps in the novel.
A lot of dialogue in the novel, to discover the evolution in the romantic affair between
Jane and Rochester. Rochester is used to women who love him for his money, and then
he finds a woman who tells him that he is not handsome, a woman who tells him the
truth. He considers her an angel, she is an angel that protects him. But Jane does not
consider herself an angel, she is who she is. In the dialogue we could see the evolution
of the relationship.
The language used in this novel is simple. It is easy to understand and easy for
Victorians to understand, to create connection between the readers and the characters.
We have also poetic language, importance of nature, a lot of poetry in this plane way of
writing.
This is a love story, but it transcends melodrama. Helen Burns is an influence of
enduring tests of God, and tells her to forgive her enemies (when her aunt is going to
die, she forgives her because she feels that it was her duty). She tries to make the men
(Rochester and John Rivers) in her life understand that women are equal to men in the
way they think, act and feel. Equality Finally, Rochester will respect Jane. This novel is
definitely revolutionary in Victorian world.
The conclusion of the novel is when she refuses going to India with Rivers. She would
be the one who redeems Rochester. She thinks that it is a part of salvation for her. In a
way this is a journey of understanding that she has to control herself and transform
repressed anger into passion and love. We have here the subversion of social class
issues going on. Jane is an orphan girl, she is grown up by her aunt, in the house she is
almost like a servant. Mss Reed wants to indoctrinate Jane that she must be a
subordinate to her, that she depends on her, that she is her property and that she must
behave as her property and she had to behave as an angel. But Jane has a rebellious
spirit.
When Jane discovers that she is going to be sent to Lowood she is not sad, but she
discovers a hard reality when she arrives to Lowood. True happiness for Jane is
affective love, not only by a man but from a family (when she meets St. John Rivers
and her cousins)
In this novel we do not find the true image of Christian faith, Jane does not believe in
Church. Charlotte Brontë is against Deism, Calvinism and Methodism, this last one is
embodies by Brocklehurst. Charlotte Brontë and her father are against the abuses of the
upper class clergy because they neglected the real duty of evangelism. Evangelism
believes in conversion, emotional bound with God and the possibility to be redeemed.
Jane wants the freedom when she is alive, not as Helen that wants freedom in
communion with God when she dies. We have also some allusions with Paradise Lost.
The idea of making the right choice.

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The whole life of Jane is to be confronted with moral dilemmas. The key issue is the
desires and duties and expectations of society. The first moral dilemma is that she
should behave as an angel in her aunt's house. The second is that she has to be a
disciplined girl and she thinks that but she has to enjoy life and become an adult. The
third is the most important one: Do I have to become Rochester mistress once I
discovered that he is having a wife in the attic, or do I have to leave? And here is the
battle between mind and body. Moral dilemmas for the evolution of the individual.
We have in the novel this antagonism between feelings and moral dilemmas. She is
driven by her ethical code. Jane Eyre is a great novel in the sense that Charlotte Brontë
portrait how normal people live with moral dilemmas and the sense of freedom.
Gothic devices in the novel (the woman in the attic, Bertha Mason). Nature is very
important in the novel. Romantic imagery to express the struggle towards self-
fulfilment. It reflects the emotions and the feelings of Jane Eyre. We see that when
Rochester and Jane meet, they meet in the wood, a very gothic settings, with no people
around. Nature is also important when Rochester proposes Jane in one of the gardens of
Thornfiel Hall. Love scenes in this novel are linked to nature and to mood. We have a
very important tree, the chestnut tree. It is where Rochester and Jane confess each other
their love, the place where they kiss, where the marriage proposal takes place. There is a
storm and the chestnut represents organic life that would be split in two, which means
that it is unacceptable for divine and natural that the love between Jane and Rochester
can be fulfilled with a wedding, a punishment against Rochester. The witness of the
love in the chestnut. The tree has been divided but there is possibility for rebirth. Their
engage happened in spring, and the wedding in June. A time for light, flowers, hope...
Jane and Rochester are going to get marry, a good weather for England. But Jane
discovers that Rochester is bigamous, and when this happens, depression, sadness and
winter comes back. Jane feels independent in wide spaces, but these wide places are
also the places of misery. There is a feminine figure in nature that represents mother for
her, the moon. The moon guides her steps towards Moorhouse. The protection of the
moon that advises her.
Gothic elements as the red chamber. This red chamber is red the colour of danger as
well as blood and passion. We see this red chamber that she is afraid of that because her
uncle died there. The apparition of Bertha Mason is a gothic element, because Jane
though that she is a ghost. The main element of Gothic novel is the mirror, symbolizes
the anxiety, the distortion version of oneself.
We have two different types of fire. Hearth (el fuego del hogar) that's what she feels
when she feels affection in Lowood with Helen, but also fire represents danger when
Rochester is about to die because of that. Fire means affection, but also punishment
against Rochester. This fire means also redemption and purity because once Bertha has
died, and Rochester is free, he becomes blind, punishment and the possibility of
redemption of change, conversion.
Bertha Mason is the mad woman in the attic, a threat for the happiness of Jane Eyre.
But there are similarities with Jane Eyre and Bertha. Rochester's father tells his son to
marry Bertha, a Creole. Charlotte Brontë defends Rochester, and she depicts Bertha as a
bloody character. She is definitely dangerous, whereas Jane is faithful love. This is a

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very hostile representation. Jane Eyre as a novel is very revolutionary as it claims
equality between men and women, but it is not applied to Bertha Mason. The Victorian
time was a time when psychiatry born and it was though that women were supposed to
become mad or being insane in times of menstruation.

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10.- VICTORIAN NOVEL: ANTHONY TROLLOPE (1815-1882)

He was an admirer of Hecker. He was a moralist and he was worried about political
issues. He was interested in middle and upper classes.
We find the same characters in different novels. Family sagas where we find the same
characters in different novels, so we can see his or her evolution. Very conservative
writing, in the sense that he was against social mobility. These changes mean threats;
we have to respect conventions and codes of behavior.
The three Victorian values were:

 Hard work
 Modesty
 Earnestness (honesty)

He protected the Church. The prestige of the family was very important. His novels
show a distract of politics and politicians. He trusts human nature, but always with a
conservative idea.

10.1.- Novels

Barchester novels
The Warden (1855)
Local scandal that becomes a national issue. How an honest man can be the victim of
the circumstances that are out of his control. We see the interrelationship between your
private life and how politics can affect it.

The Barchester Towers (1857)

How The Warden continues. Parliamentary system does not work properly.

Palliser Novels
Non efficient political system.

The Enstade Diamonds (1871-3)

Love affairs, social incidents… Parliamentary activity and private activity.

Phineas Finn (1867-69)

This novels shows the advances. Fortunes and misfortunes of a political career of an
Irish politician. This outsider in London will be completed with a lot of intrigues in the
novel. The rest of politicians are jealous of him.

The way we live Now (1874-5)

It is the most important novel written by Anthony Trollope. He changeless the idea of
progress. It is a bitter satire of the Victorian society. He shows society’s vices,
corruption, speculation, dishonesty and adultery.
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Earnestness

Bentley Drummte

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11.- VICTORIAN NOVEL: GEORGE ELIOT (1819-1880)

Her real name was Mary Anne Evans.

She is the real Victorian writer, since she has another way of writing novels. She cares
about thoughts, not trivial things, and about real problems. She writes in a really
clever and serious way, her purpose will not be to amuse people. Her novels are very
complex. In George Eliot’s novels we go through the psychological part of the
characters.
She is the main ambassador of Realism as a literary movement. Ordinary life, things
that happen in my life. She was a mature writer, and that had a real impact in her
writing, because she had a real knowledge of the world and she had read a lot.
However, her novels do care about contemporary society (there are real problems you
could perfectly find at the time). She goes to the past, at the beginning of the 19th
century. This idea of going to the past means that she liked to describe this paradise, this
rural life, before the explosion of the industrialism, railway… Rural life before the
collapse of the industrialization. She writes according to her nostalgia. There are two
influences important to understand George Eliot:

 Humanism: Reflection of truth, a fictional truth. Realism combined with the

world’s sympathy. Her novels are very didactic, in the sense that she wants to
teach that you must help other people. We can see a similarity between Charles
Dickens’s novels and hers. Complexity of the characters, who act according to
their circumstances
 Romanticism: Ordinary people, ordinary life. Idea of collectiveness, not in the
sense of Jane Austen’s communities (own sense of values that oppress the
human being), but the idea of collectiveness as empathy, idea of being a good
community (care about others).

She has a strong authorial voice, she is not only observing and writing about what is
happening, but she also makes comments about that. She feels pity for her characters,
she criticizes them when they do wrong, and compliments them when they do well. Her
idea is that our personality is based on the moral choices we make in life. When we
make choices, they sometimes have unexpected consequences. We have duties that
change our personality.
She wants to create history with her novels by reflecting the life of ordinary people.
History for her is the combination of ordinary lives. She, as a writer, can reflect the life
of ordinary people in the past, and that is history for her.

10.1.- Biography

Her father was a prominent man in the middle class who ran a business. She was an
avid reader, she was reading all the time. She has access to a lot of books because of her
father’s job. She was educated in Attleborough and, after that, she continued her own
teaching. When she was 17, her mother died and she moved to Coventry with her father

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and her brother. She had a very religious family, and a very religious education. When
she moved to Coventry, her religious view started to change. There, she started to read
many philosophers and books coming from Germany (German High Criticism of the
Bible) and little by little Mary Anne Evans lost her faith and started to become a
rationalist. By reading, she studied medicine, the classics, politics, science… She
refused to go to Church, and this created a conflict with her father. Her relationship with
her father and brother went to worse, and she decided to go to Europe. One of her first
achievements was to translate Life of Jesus to German. After that, she moved to
London, where she found a job as the assistant editor in Westminster review. In London
she joined the literary circles, and had affairs with several men. Finally, she fell in love
with George Henry Lewes, but he was married. They lived together for twenty years,
and, when George’s wife died, they married. When George died (1880), she married
another man 21 years younger than her.
George Eliot did not want to write, she was only interested in her knowledge. It was
Lewes who encouraged her to write fiction, and her first novel (Adam Bede) was a huge
success. It was thanks to Lewes that George Eliot wrote. She decided to take a male
penname in order to be published. She thought that for entertainment novels we had
women, she wanted to detached herself from that ones she thought were inferior and
silly. She considered that these writers were propagating the Victorian ideology and
were under subversion.
She relied on her extensive readings because she wanted to be a part of the History, she
wanted her novel to be linked to the past and the time with the great philosophers and
writers. She wanted to be a part of tradition.
When she decided to spend her life with Lewes, she made the choice of ‘the man I love’
instead of the social life and her family. We have in her novels the idea of choices. We
get to see the influence of Jane Austen in the communities the characters live into; but
George Eliot goes beyond these Novels of Manners, she is more interested in
philosophical meditations. Psychological death in the motives of the characters.
We don’t see controversy in her novels, she was very conservative. For example,
Charlotte Brontë expressed her desires (Jane Eyre marries the love of her life), while
George Elliot was realistic (Jane Eyre would never had married Rochester). Very
complex view of the woman question. Maggie (The Moll on the Floss) and Dorothea
(Middlemarch) are heroes

10.3.- Novels

Adam Bede (1859)

George Eliot was 40 years old when she published this book. Reflection of reality.
Humble and rustic life with a very detailed of this rural past. This novel is a society
before the industrialization. George Eliot feels nostalgic about this world that was
disappearing. Rustic and humble people can be heroes (heroes in common life). Adam
Bede is actually a true history (there was a woman who killed her baby and George
Eliot was interested in this news because her aunt was a Methodist preacher and she was
the one who was to jail to comfort this woman who was going to be executed). Her aunt

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inspired the character of Dinah Morris, whereas the character of Hetty Sorrel was
inspired in the woman who killed her child. Adan Bede is the good guy who cares about
her family, but she is interested in another kind of boys, she is looking for something
better (she is very selfish and does not like to live with Mr. and Mrs. Poyser). Hetty is
interested in Captain Donnithorne, a lazy man and the grandson of the cathique of the
village. Hetty and he have a love affair, by Adam discovers that and forces Donnithorne
to leave her. Adam proposes to Hetty and she accepts, but still Hetty and Donnithore
have an affair. After, she discovers that she is pregnant and abandons the village. At the
end, she gives birth to her child in the woods and abandons him, but when she realized
what she has done, she returns to the woods but the baby is already death. She is caught
by the police and executed, while Adam marries Dinah Morris.
We have four main topics in the novel:

 Dichotomy between inner and external beauty: Hetty is extremely beautiful,

but she is very selfish. On the other side, Dinah is a very quaker girl, but she has
great virtuous inside. Adam Bede goes beyond surface, and she finds his true
love in his life.
 Value of hard work: If a character is hard-working, he or she is good in the
novel. Adam Bede is a carpenter, Mr. and Mrs. Poyser are dairymaids… The
lazy characters are bad.
 Love as a transformative force: Love can change people. Good people in the
novel are those who love. Dinah loves other and accepts Hetty as she is before
going to jail, she doesn’t judge her. At the end, Hetty embraces religion.
 Consequences of bad behavior: Bad behavior according to Victorian standards
have collateral effects. You can repent and be saved by God, but the wrong
cannot be undone.

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

It is the most autobiographical novel written by George Eliot. It cares about why
Maggie (the character) is acting the way she does, who she makes her choices…
Psychological novel and psychological death. George Eliot feels sympathetic for
Maggie. It is the real rue novel by George Eliot that ends in a tragedy. Maggie is very
clever, she wants to achieve complex things in their lives. We have a small community
and a family (Mr. and Mrs, Tulliver) who live there. Maggie is their daughter, and she
has a brother (Tom Tulliver). In the first chapter we have family values that can clash
against the individual inspirations and search for freedom. Maggie runs away because
she thinks her family does not love her, her main achievement is to get the affection of
her brother. Mr. and Mrs. Tulliver want Tom to go to school and to university, in order
to take care of the family business, but he doesn’t like to study. Nevertheless, he goes to
University and there he meets Philip Wakem, his enemy; but when Maggie goes to visit
her brother, she meets Philip and they become friends. Tom sometimes hates her sister
because she is much clever than him, for example, in a few hours she is able to read
Latin. The only option for Maggie to be educated is to go to a boarding school, but there
is a family tragedy: Mr. Tulliver loses his milk and it is bought by Lawyer Wakem
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(Philip’s father). Mr. Tulliver loses his money and Tom and Maggie have to abandon
their education. After that, Maggie and Philip are not friends after that, but Philip falls
in love with her, although she does not love him. Mr. Tulliver attacks Lawyer, but he
dies and Tom and Maggie have to work very hard in order to survive. However, when
Maggie is 19, she goes to visit her cousin Lucy, and there she meets Stephen Guest
(Lucy’s tutor and the man she is supposed to marry in the future). There we have a
square love (Maggie, Stephen, Philip and Tom). Lucy is the angel in the house, related
to God according to Victorian standards. One day, this four characters plan a trip, but at
the end only Stephen and Maggie can go. Stephen proposes, but Maggie is confused so
she refuses to marry him. They spend the night together because Stephen is rowing.
Lucy and Philip understand and believe her, but Tom does not, and the only important
person for Maggie was Tom. Tom is in danger because of the floods, and Maggie
knows that Tom is in danger, so she returns to save him. We can see there that Maggie
is more intelligent than Tom, but it is he who has the authority. At the end, Maggie and
Tom die together in the boat. The main topics in the novel are the depiction of
childhood, Maggie’s decisions, devotion to her family and her past… Here we have
sympathetic characters, she feels sorry for everyone but herself. However, the epic
characters are those who care for other, like Maggie. She becomes a hero when she
decides to rescue her brother when he is dying. Another topic is the conflict between the
society and an individual (when Maggie returns to her village, everyone has already
make their judgment). Dichotomy between blond and brown hair (blond hair girls are
the angel of the house, while brunette grils are more sexual). We have two models
education, formal and intellectual education and practical knowledge.
Silas Marner (1861)
It is related to George Eliot’s loss of faith. Silas Marner loses his faith in religion little
by little, and finds another religion, a more personal connection with God by connecting
with other people. He embraces this personal form of religion with his understanding.
This is how he abandons his life as a hermit and goes out in order to help other human
beings.

Felix Holt (1866)

It is a novel that we cannot consider to be a condition of England novel, although the
time is the same as Middlemarch (around 1830 and 1832). We can see the dispute
between the aristocracy and the middle classes. George Eliot criticizes the corruption
there were in the aristocracy and in the middle classes, and also the lower classes
because she taught that, without a proper education, they could be corrupted as well.
Education is the only antidote against corruption.

Middlemarch (1871-72/1874)

Daniel Deronda (1876)

Here we have two plots interrelates, one is the same kind of history we have seen in
Victorian novels (marriage of convenience, no love in marriage, money and classes…),
but the other one is very unconventional for Victorian novels, the Jewish communities.

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In the 19th century, there were considered outcast, so it was very unconventional plot. It
is the only novel that does not go to the past. It is the story of a girl whose name is
Gwendolen Harleth. Gwendolen discovers that Grandcout has many mistresses before
marrying him, and, then she meets Daniel Deronda, who is always helping other people.
Daniel and Gwendolen love each other, but Daniel does not know whose his mother is,
and, when he discovers that her mother is an actress who abandoned him, he discovers
that he has Jewish origins. Gwendolen finally marries Groundcourt, but it will be an
unhappy marriage. At the end, Groundcourt has an accident and dies; while Daniel
embraces Judaism and marries a girl named Mirah. The Jewish topic as very
controversial for Victorian society, while the topic of marriage was well accepted. This
idea of Jewish culture is particularly the victim in the character of Mordecai. When
Daniel discovers his Jewish heritage, he becomes his disciple. Daniel soon identifies
himself with Judaism, because he finds that Jewish communities are more spiritual and
have the sense of helping each other, while English society is deeply selfish for George
Eliot. A George Eliot’s friend, named Immanuel Oscar Deutsch, is embodied in the
character of Mordecai. George Eliot was very interested in Jewish traditions and
communities, and the idea of the Jews having no land, feeling a foreign within the
English society. George Eliot defended Jewish culture, but not everything Jewish people
did.

Other works: Romola (1863, Florence in the 15th century), The Spanish Gypsy (1868, a
nice poem)

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ANALYSIS MIDDLEMARCH

It was published in eight volumes. Its full name was Middlemarch: A Study of
Provincial Life. It is a study of the past, of provincial life and the people who lived
there. She studies ordinary life, but not of one single character: many people. Provincial
live in a particular place and in a specific time (1830s). Something important
happened in 1830, the Reform Bill. It was the first initiative for the improvement of the
life and working conditions in the lower classes.
We have multiple plots and many characters in the novel. She cared about marriage in
both perspectives (male and female point of view).
Two important characters: Dorothea and Lydgate, although all characters are
important. We have the topic of education, women not having access to a proper
education. We can also find social and political issues. Novel of ideas, always with a
didactic message and a strong authorial voice. We know George Eliot is behind this
ideology, making comments and critics. It is a novel of epic proportions. Epic novel
according to the 19th century, different from the past epic. It is not only the adventures
of the characters, but also the life of ordinary life of common people. Common people
can create history. People interrelate and create a web which represents the universal
and the national. Our lives can represent history, so history should not only be described
with the accomplishment of the Queen or the Empire, but also with the interrelations in
life.
The past she describes is a near one. She thought that she needed to be objective
enough to look back and have a better perspective. This novel gives a wide perspective
of history, the effect of the industrial revolution in the lives of different people. Not only
factories, but also the discoveries there were being carried out, the railway, the
development of cities… George Eliot’s intention was to show the different point of
views. If you work hard, you can have and good life. Social mobility was possible. We
also have more than one religion, and agnosticism was growing. Methodism was one of
George Eliot’s favorite religions.
George Eliot does not defend any character; all of them have a good side and a bad
side. That is way there is not character in the novel. We cannot say ‘George Eliot likes a
certain character’. By these multiples voices, George Eliot is considered a realist writer.
This idea of Realism is also given by the particular place the novel is set in, and the
multiple references of the issues that were going on. She creates an atmosphere of
changing, we don’t know what is going to happen next. We also have anxieties such as
the reform of the medical practice, the access to health services to everyone… She goes
to the particular to the general, from the local to the national, wanting to do a reflection
of the whole English nation.

At the beginning we have a prelude about Santa Teresa de Avila, a nun writer in the 16th
century. She was a simple nun who reformed the Carmelite order. As the reader of
Middlemarch, we are given the clue that Dorothea is going to become a modern Santa
Teresa, we have this relationship between this 16th century woman and Dorothea, who
want to do the same by building and hospital and reforming poor people’ houses.

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Nevertheless, Dorothea does not fulfill her enterprises because she marries. These
marriages are a mistake because she thinks that through her husband is going to get this
intellectual fulfillment. Dorothea abandons his own plans because she thinks that her
mission is to help her husband (Casaubon) in his project.
The prelude is a very important part of the novel and it has an effect at the end of the
novel. This novel is about being out of place (feeling yourself an outsider) and out of
time (Lydgate wants medicine to change, but Victorian society need time to do so; or
Casaubon, who only cares about his project and looks like a medieval monk).
There is a third person narrator. She wants to make references to politics, society,
history, art… She wants to switch from this micro-level and connects this connect this
particular with a macro-level, connect the lives of these characters with the wisdom.

Things that happen to the people in Middlemarch are more common, more trivial. It is
the story of four couples and how they learn to relate
-Dorothea and Casaubon He marries Dorothea when he is old. After dying,
Dorothea discovers that Casaubon was suspicious about her being unfaithful. Dorothea
could become herself a second Santa Teresa, since she had money to finish her social
activities
-Dorothea and Will Ladislaw Second chance of Dorothea. Instead, she is stubborn
and marries another man, abandoning her vocation.
-Mary Garth and Fred Vincy They know each other from childhood and they love
each other. The problem is that Fred does not know what to do in his life, and Mary is
there to tell him that she should decide. He spends their money and Mary says to him
that he will not marry him until he changes his behavior. Mary is a strong woman. At
first, he will be a farmer and after that he will have enough money to buy the farm,
because that is his true vocation.
-Rosamond Vincy and Tertius Lydgate Rosamond is pretty and wants a good
husband for her. Lydgate is new in the town, a doctor who comes from the city. They
marry each other, but the problem is that Lydgate is a charity man and wants to find a
hospital, and Rosamond spend all their money in material objects. Love and money is
not enough, you have to be compatible with your partner. Dorothea becomes a kind of
mediator between them. Lack of communication and sympathy between the husband
and the wife.

Topics

-Making choices There are two main choices relating to the different aspects of life

 Vocation: Rosamond and Dorothea are very clever, but they don’t have access
to a proper education. Criticism of domesticity, the angel of the house. George
Eliot also worried about men’ situations, so we also see frustration in them
(mainly Fred and Lydgate). For Fred, this search of vocation is painful. For
many characters (Lydgate, Dorothea, Casaubon), their vocations are almost
dreams. If Casaubon had had a more real project, he could have achieved it.

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 Lydgate wanted to create a hospital for poor people and discover something life-
changing in medicine, so George Eliot is criticizing all these fantasy projects
that cannot be accomplished in life. Modesty is a quality in Victorian times.
 Marriage: The problem in marriage is that love at first sight is very negative.
Rosamond and Lydgate marry almost instantaneity, but they don’t know each
other. If you don’t know your partner, you are more likely to be unhappy.
Romantic courtship leads to mistake and troubles. The same happens to
Dorothea, who marries Casaubon very soon. George Eliot claims there must be
equilibrium in marriage, woman should also have the power to decide (as in
Mary and Fred’ marriage). Love is not enough in marriage.

-Society and social class They have an impact in our lives. When we make mistakes,
we are criticized by society. We have here two characters that defy society: Fred (by
saying that he wants to become a farmer and no a clergyman) and Dorothea (she does
not marry for money but for love, although she loses her husband’s money)
-Money People needing money. Raffles is killed for gambling. Also the idea of
secrets in life, so I pay money to keep them. Idea of having money and not having it.
-Dichotomy between chance and self determination Fred, at the beginning, relays too
much on chance (when he gambles), but according to George Eliot you must work hard,
so that is why thanks to Mary Garth he abandons gambling and finds his vocation. The
opposite situation is Rosamond, who instead of wasting less money, asks for money to
some relatives of Lydgate without him knowing.
-Science and medicine Technological problems caused a lot of anxiety. When
Lydgate arrives, he wants to change the medical practice there. He thought that doctors
should be also scientists. Doctors didn’t get the appropriate formation, so George Eliot
is claiming for a change.

It is not a novel for entertainment, it tells the truth. Complexity of life, good things can
have bad side effects, and bad things happening to you can have good side effects.

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12.- VICTORIAN NOVEL: THOMAS HARDY

12.1.- Introduction

Thomas Hardy is a writer very difficult to fix in a specific category: he is a Victorian

writer because if his latest period. We do have anxiety that its predominance in the
society. Criticism against very important Victorian institutions.
He was both a poet and a novel writer. After having written Jude the Obscure, he
abandons the idea of novels, and devotes his life only to poetry until his death in 1928.
His poetry is reflexive and auto-biographical.
All his novels have the same common setting: the country of Wessex. There are four
major influences in Thomas Hardy:

 Charles Dickens and his criticism against society: Nevertheless, Thomas

Hardy’s novel do not have a happy ending.
 George Eliot and her naturalism
 Romantic poetry and Wordsworth
 Naturalism: It is basically is the determinism that our life is influenced by
external forces that limit our capability to react and change our life. Influence of
the environment and lack of freedom to control our faith. Naturalism is a kind of
modification of the Realism movement.

12.2.- Biography

When he was very young, his dream was to enter University and be ordered a priest. As
he grew up, he loses his faith and trains to be an architect. His ambitions and
frustrations are reflected in Jude the Obscure.
While he was being trained to be architect, he becomes a writer though he is not very
successful. His initial success was found with Far From the Madding Crowd, which
makes him leaving architecture and becoming a professional writer. In the 1890s he will
get a lot of success with The Return of the Native.
Jude the Obscure received a lot of harsh critics that make him quit the novels and start
writing poetry.
He attacks in his novel Victorian ideas about female sexuality and religion. Rural
women are the victims of society, morality and men. It is important to understand Jude
the Obscure's determinism in the novel: blood and the environment limit our freedom.
Thomas Hardy reflects the rural live giving emphasis to carnal experiences. Sexuality
exists, although Victorian people wanted to cover it. Fatalism view of mankind.
Social positivism in the sense than there is class mobility, and people could change
their situation. Clash against the theological fatalism that rules Hardy’s fiction.
At the beginning of his career, Thomas Hardy wrote novels about the countryside living
and the dangers of a big city; but little by little we have a writer that incorporate
philosophical, scientific ideas. That created such complex novels that Victorian readers
were not prepared for them.
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The world is in a transition between the old and the new times, and many critics
consider him to be a proto-modernist writer
He does not consider necessary to make a conclusion in his novels. They end abruptly
because, according to him, life continues. He applies the scientific method to his novels,
based on observation.
He is interested in:

 Confrontation between man vs the environment (circumstances of your life)

 Dreams vs the fulfillment
 Illusion (ideas) vs reality

Hardy wanted to create a sense of community within his novels. More important is that
this rural world provides the idea of transformation from an old world to the modern
urbanization. These novels are a link between the rural past and the present.
Romanticism and nature. He describes a natural world. Rustic life of ordinary people.
We don’t need heroes in the novels, we need common and simple people. This is all an
inspiration from his own childhood.
Also the idea that natures does not bring consolation. It is the place where we find our
emotions and feelings, but it is also what can destroy us.
Love is very important in Hardy’s novels. We can find our true love, but it tends to end
in tragedy and failure because of faith, and also because of society and marriage as
institutions that can end with our dreams.
Religion in his novels can bring no relief, and Thomas Hardy thought that we are
puppets in the hands of a superior and malicious force. We are powerless victims of
this obscure forces. Failure in life because we cannot decide by ourselves.
His characters in the novels are not heroes. They are common people who make
mistakes and have a limited knowledge of the external world. Thomas Hardy feels
compassion for them, and that is what he wants to express to the readers. However, the
main virtues are expressed in his novels with characters able to endure pain, that what
makes worth his characters. Moral dignity and stoicism. The community plays an
important role, and it is also reflected in such a way that we see small communities with
superstitious and primitive ideas, which play an important role in the novel.

12.3.- Novels

Far From the Madding Crowd (1874)

It is the story of a girl (named Bathstheba), daughter of a rich landowner. She likes
flirting with men and she chooses the poorest one, Gabriel Oak.

The Return of the Native (1878)

It means that we have a male character (Clym Yeobright) who decides to abandone
cosmopolitan Paris to come back to Wessex. He will be confronted with nature and with
the inhabitants of this rural village.

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The Major of the Casterbride (1886)
Two main plots. One the one side, we have Michael Herchard and, on the other side, we
have the change of the rural life to the modern world. This is a drama for Hardy because
it means you lose your tradition and cultural heritage. Michael dies at the end of the
novel, showing the ability to endure pain, and your heroism when you resist.

Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891)

Tess is the daughter of a poor family, but she is very beautiful. She is a high sexual
character, but very innocent. Her father discovers that he is the descendant of a very
aristocratic family, and they need money, so they decide to send Tess to borrow money
for this female. When she goes there, she is not very well treated. But the drama comes
when Alec tries to seduce Tess. One day, Tess is raped by Alec and she returns to her
village bringing no money and pregnant. She gives birth to a baby, but she is rejected by
society. Tess is a fallen woman, the baby dies and she starts to have nightmares with
this baby. She decides to move to another village, where she meets another boy with
whom she marries. When Angel and Tess marry, and Angel tells her that he has had an
affair before Tess, she tells him the truth, but Angel abandon her. Tess is found by Alec
and they start living together, but Angel comes back and Tess decides to kill Alec.
Angel and Tess are found in another village by the police, and Tess dies. We can see in
the novel the topic of blood (heritage) and money. How important is in Victorian novel
the topics of identity and origins. The most important topic is they idea of male
exploitation of women (Alec towards Tess), female characters who can’t do anything to
control their lives. When Angel discovers Tess is not a virtuous woman, he runs away.

Jude the Obscure (1895)

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ANALYSIS OF JUDE THE OBSCURE

This novel received very bad critics, so that Thomas Hardy decided writing poetry.
There is a strong criticism to higher education, religion, family…
The main character is Jude Fawley, a young and ambitious man who wants to become a
scholar. He marries a woman (Arabella). After that, he meets Sue Brideshead, the most
feminine character in the sense that she claims for sexual emancipation. She claims an
intellectual life for herself, and this character is the reflection of what was going on at
the end of the 19th century. We see the evolution of a woman who claims her right to
choose.

Plot

The novel starts in a small village. Jude Fawley dreams of studying at the university in
Christminster, but his background as an orphan raised by his working-class aunt leads
him instead into a career as a stonemason. He is inspired by the ambitions of the town
schoolmaster, Richard Phillotson, who left for Christminster when Jude was a child.
However, Jude falls in love with a young woman named Arabella, is tricked into
marrying her, and cannot leave his home village. When their marriage goes sour and
Arabella moves to Australia, Jude resolves to go to Christminster at last. However, he
finds that his attempts to enroll at the university are met with little enthusiasm.

Jude meets his cousin Sue Bridehead and tries not to fall in love with her. He arranges
for her to work with Phillotson in order to keep her in Christminster, but is disappointed
when he discovers that the two are engaged to be married. Once they marry, Jude is not
surprised to find that Sue is not happy with her situation. She can no longer tolerate the
relationship and leaves her husband to live with Jude.

Both Jude and Sue get divorced, but Sue does not want to remarry. Arabella reveals to
Jude that they have a son in Australia, and Jude asks to take him in. Sue and Jude serve
as parents to the little boy and have two children of their own. Jude falls ill, and when
he recovers, he decides to return to Christminster with his family. They have trouble
finding lodging because they are not married, and Jude stays in an inn separate from
Sue and the children. At night Sue takes Jude's son out to look for a room, and the little
boy decides that they would be better off without so many children. In the morning, Sue
goes to Jude's room and eats breakfast with him. They return to the lodging house to
find that Jude's son has hanged the other two children and himself. Feeling she has been
punished by God for her relationship with Jude, Sue goes back to live with Phillotson,
and Jude is tricked into living with Arabella again. Jude dies soon after.

This is a story of betrayal. For Jude, the world promised him a lot. Hardy reflects that
institutions such as marriage and universities, do not help you. Jude is abandoned,
nature does not console you, family does not console you… The only thing you can do

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is to accept your fate. There is a very paradoxical parallelism between Jude and Thomas
hardy, the desire of book and the failure in the book business by Hardy.

Topics

Main topics in Jude the Obscure:

 Education: Jude desire is to go to the university. He is a very autodidactic man,

but this is not enough. What matter to enter in university is money and social
status, but he has none. It is very important to understand Christminster as the
village to be, the place to go. For Jude, Christminster is the promised land.
Hardy criticized the university system. The only important education for Hardy
was the idea of being educated in life.
 Marriage: It is not rejected in the novel, Marriage implies a commitment that
not everyone can fulfill. Marriage is not necessarily linked to love. Hardy is not
against marriage, but he is against the legislation of it. Divorce should be
allowed.
 Women’s rights: Hardy criticizes that women had no access to high education.
Some critics think that Hardy is rather a woman hater because all the prejudices
there are about them in his novels. Arabella is a practical woman, similar to
Moll Flanders. She wants to survive, as we see when she kills the pig.
 Religion: Passionate debates between Jude and Sue concerning religion. Sue is a
religious woman, but Jude burns all his books when they decide to run away.
According to Sue, religion and morality is not related. She cares about other
people and wants to do good things. In terms of religion, we can see the topic of
embracing religion at the end. Jude is disappointed with his life, but the main
character who shows this disappointment is Little Father, who wonders why he
is here (a thought only adults usually have). He is driven by sadness, melancholy
and pessimism. Jude final statement is that here is not better than die. Thought
that everything in the world is against us.
 Itinerancy: There is not social mobility, but there is geographical mobility. Idea
of itinerancy through nomads like Jude. Misery in your life makes you a nomad.
Reversals in the novel

Symbolism in the novel is seen through Christminster as the heaven in Earth and the
failure in life. Little Father represents fate, predestination…

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13.- VICTORIAN POETRY

13.1.- Introduction

We know so far that novel writing was the predominant for of writing in the 19th
century. If you were a writer, you had to write novel. All this has a negative effect on
poetry, it would be no significant evolution in poetry. Victorian writers tried to find
new topics, and we have a lot of dichotomy going on. The Victorian reality was so
hard that they rather rely on the past. Their materials came from the past, and there are
a lot of poems which talk about the King Arthur and his Knights (English medieval
times). Poets tried to describe what was to be English, the literary identity.
We have a confrontation between functionality of poetry and frivolity (relying of the
imagination, activity, movement change…) An eternal conflict is also between
religion and science. Solidarity vs selfishness. We also have another dichotomy
between urbanization and rural live, many writers describe the past rural villages while
others describe this new movement. Escapism vs Realism.
Romantic poets died around the 1820s, so romantic poetry definitely influenced
Victorian poetry. There is a lack of homogeneity. Wordsworth and Coleridge created
in the Romanticism a kind of guide for the other poets to respect, but here there is not
any guide. Still, this lack on homogeneity enables personal initiative. We have to
understand that Victorian poets didn’t have the same self-confident Romantic poets
had. Romantics poets relied on the imagination and spontaneity, but not Victorian
poets. They did not rely in the human mind, but we have two main achievements:

-The Dramatic Monologue It is an expression in the poem of a 3rd person. These

dramatic poems express the view of the character through the psychological death.
This is not like the Romantic poets. There is no perspective of the ‘I’. The speaker of
the poem is not myself, as in the case of Mariana.
-Long narrative poems Aurola Leigh is a long poem, it is really a book. Victorian
poems are narrative. Painters wanted to write poetry with their painting. The borders
between poetry and painting, and between poetry and narrative are confusing.
In Victorian poetry we have to understand two concepts, because if you are a poets,
you have to create pictures with your words:

-Pictorial Use of details to construct a visual image which represents an emotion or

a situation in a poem.
-Picturesque It is the combination of visual impressions that create a picture that
carries the predominant emotions of the poet. Sounds have to combine images and
create emotions linked to visual images.

Poets wanted to experiment, and the only experiment available was the mood
(Victorian poetry is called the poetry of the mood and the poetry of the character). In
The Lady of Shallot we get to see that she is looking for love, which is more important
than being isolated. They wanted to create beauty, Victorian times for poets is ugly.

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They considered poetry as a product of the imagination, they have to create fantastic
worlds, not reality.
We have to understand that the Victorian poetry is the time when we have the first
female poets: Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. They will have to
struggle their own voice and to convey the female experience.
Poetry had existed since the Greeks, and it belonged to men. The novels were different
because it was new (before it only had existed the epic).

13.2.- Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)

He was the greatest and most popular poet at the time. He was called 'The Poet of the
People'.
He was the heir of the family, but he became a priest. His father became an alcoholic,
but he care about his children and provided Alfred a good education. He entered in
Cambridge, where he started to write his first poems. Nevertheless, his fortune
changed while he was in Cambridge: his father lost his fortune and he had to leave the
university. He started writing, but his first books were considered too obscure and
affective. Little by little, he achieved technical excellent. He wasn’t an innovator of
ideas, he was a creator of worlds, concepts… He created perfect poems with a
systematic form.
In 1850 his live changed when he published In Memoriam. He would become famous
and he got critical recognition. Then is when he became the 'Poet Laureate' (who was
Wordsworth before him), the poet of the country. After this, he got the life he wanted.

Characteristics:
-He is an accomplish technician He relies on technique, he wanted to be perfect in
his poetry
-He is the poet of melancholy and isolation He is a poet with religious concerns,
but he was exposed to Darwinist ideas and books, so he started to doubt about the
immortality of the soul.
-He is the poet of the countryside He reflects the landscapes, he creates perfect
worlds. This doesn’t follow Wordsworth ideas, it does not follow tradition. He doesn’t
talk about politics of society, but he cares about the past. We have in Tennyson a true
Victorian, he is very conservative but at the same time he is very confident about
Victorian times. He avoids the horrors of the industrialization, he escapes from the
present to go to the past.

The death of King Arthur gives the idea of renewal, of the rebirth. Madness will be a
concern in his poetry. He is a follower of the Romantic poetry and he studies it
academically. He is a scholar who wants to create his own poetry. He goes from the
description of the exterior of the landscape, linking landscapes to the mental state of
the characters (the interior) always with the idea if the scene painting. He creates
feminine landscapes. In his early poems we get to see a picturesque delineation of
objects and incarnates himself in the mind of his female characters. He is a poet of

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women, form the one side very liberal but from the other side he carries in his poetry a
lot of misunderstanding and prejudices about women (they are vulnerable and
obedient). His poems are about death, Marianna wants to die and the Lady of Shallot
wants to die), but not only about death, also about death in life. The idea of death
brings freedom and a realizing experience. This idea of death and imprisonment in life
will be later developed by Cristina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson. He creates states of
mind in his poetry. Passivity, like being among to die between this world and another
world, like being between a trance.

Mariana (1830)
Melancholy and isolation. He gets into the mind of this woman who has been
abandoned. She lives in despair, anxious because she was abandoned by the man she
loved. This poem reflects Tennyson fears of death, love and religion. We see a woman
who cannot stop crying. She says all the time that her life is miserable. We get to see
the sound of the nature that reflects the air of mystery. At the end of the poet she
wants to death, because it means release from suffer. Loneliness is the mood that
prevails in this poem. Her life is driven by isolation. This is a poem of mood, not
personality.

The Lady of Shallot (1842)

We also have psychological female landscapes. In this poem, Tennyson relies on the
Medieval England. This poem is also about Lancelot. The Lady of Shallot is the
character of Geneva. It is a magical allegory as a consequence of a man that doesn’t
love her. She has been cursed, and she cannot leave the tower where she lives. She has
no contact with the external world. People around her have heard stories about her, but
they don’t know if she is real. She has a mirror and trough that mirror she gets to see a
man (Sir Lancelot). She sees this warrior and through this reflection she falls in love
with him. He is a figure associated with rich, fire… She decides to abandon the tower,
although she knows she will die, and she dies. She knows that she doesn’t abandon the
warrior, she will die in live, so she chooses real death. Landscape of autumn, this
landscape is it the landscape that anticipates death. Finally she finds a boat and she
writes her name in the boat and sail in the river towards Camelot. Her corpse is found
by the Knights, and Lancelot is among them. The Lady of Shallot is in the dark,
described with the colors of autumn.

In Memoriam (1850)
It was writing during 17 years. It is an elegy that reflects his views of human greed and
reflects the relationship between the individual and God. It is an spiritual journey. We
can see his evolution in the poem: at the beginning we can see his doubts and the inner
struggle about religion. Something happens in Tennyson’s life: his good friend Arthur
Hallam dies, so the poem is also the reflection of the mourning. First person narrative.
This desperate need that the poet has of isolation, to live outside reality, He needs to

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escape from the crowd. This single poet makes sense as an individual poem, but also
as a whole (as a group of poems). It is an spiritual autobiography. He wonders about
the immortality of the should, what would happen when he dies. Little by little, he
comes mature and accepts his destiny. He recovers faith for consolation. The ideas of
the poem are the evolution of the human being and the seasonal events. This is a poem
led by this self-absorption.

The Princess, a Medley (1847)

It is a very strange poem because it is a combination between setting in the past and
the presentation of a problem in the 19th century. He claims formal education for
women, so it is the only criticism we can see in his poetry.

Maud, the Madness (1855)

It is a poem of love with a lot of violence going on, and which starts with an ‘I hate’.
The poem deals with changing emotions, skepticism about love, collapse when Maud
dies… It is a poem from skepticism to love, from despair to exaltation. Psychological
realism. The male narrator feels that e can become mad.

The Idylls of the King (1872)

It is a very long narrative poem. Arthur is consider a semi-legend figure, since we
know he really exists (he was a Catholic king in Britain). There was a myth that,
generation by generation, created another myth. However, Victorian writers this myth
to describe the English identity. The main font of the King Arthur’s figure is Morte
D’Arthur by Sit Thomas Malory. We find in the poem the topic of women as villains
(Geneva, who puts in danger the stability of this civilization), the topic of courtly love,
the topic of generosity, the topic of the community. We also have to topic of the
seasons: it starts in the spring time, where Arthur convinces their Knight to defeat the
Saxons. He becomes the King in summer time (beauty, courage…) but little by little
the world starts to collapse (corrupted Merlin, betrayals of Sir Crawly…) until Arthur
finally dies in winter. King Arthur may be dead, but not his spirits. His death is
connected with Tennyson’s ideas of the immortality of the soul. The poet reflects his
thoughts, that the Victorian England has reached his climax and now is in the process
of going back.

13.3.- The Pre-Raphaelites poetry and painting

Deep interrelationship between poetry and painting. If you are a poet, you create with
your words. We have narrative paintings whose inspiration comes from poetry,
myths… Ideas of romance and truth to nature define the ideas of the pre-
Raphaelites. Medieval and classic settings, inspiration comes from the past. Painters
wanted to capture the human self through painting. Primarily, women were portrayed,
representing Victorian novels (so painters had models), who became heroes in these
paintings. We get into the women’s psychology, getting to know what they think in the
painting.

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Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood

-William Holman Hunt

-Dante Gabriel Rossetti
-John Everett Millals
-F.C. Stephens
-Tomas Woolner
-James Collinson
-William Michael Rossetti.

It was found in London, in September 1848. This brotherhood consisted on poets,

painters an literary critics. Although it did not last long, it has a huge influence in art
until the 20th century. They were against the art that was being created in the last years,
and against the Royal Academy of Art, because it did reflect the truth to nature. The
Pre-Raphaelite movement is an influence on other literary movements, it is the first
revolutionary group.

Esthetic principles
-To express authentic and sincere ideas.
-To study nature.
-To select the direct, serious and sincere art of the past.
-To look for perfection in the painting and sculpture creation Parnassianism
Painting-Literature
-Relation with literature: Horacio’s idea (‘Ut picture poesis’)
-Epic poetry of King Arthur, Dante, Shakespeare…
-Their ideal and inspiration were the masters of Quattrocento.
-They demonstrate that the literary-symbolic topics and painting of nature are not
incompatible.
-Magazine published by the brotherhood between January and April 1850, whose
editor was William Michael Rossetti.

English Pre-Raphaelism and Modernism

-Common connections with Romanticism.
-Importance of color in their paintings, and importance of details.
-Importance of Nature.
-Importance of settings and motives.
-They looked for formal perfection, with a very important symbolism behind.
-Presence of hedonism settings with luxury. Jewelry, nice colors, Orientalism,
eroticism…

Victorian women represented the dichotomy between ‘The Angel in the House’ and
‘The Fallen Angel’.

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Fascination between chastity, virginity and feminine sexuality. Women were in an
artistic pedestal. The reflection of the men desire can be seen in the women. A
beautiful long hair reflects a very sexual woman.
Women form the past rely on mythology and legends. Helen of Troy reflected as a
beautiful long women. Before, blond women were good and nice, while women with
dark hair represented evil and sexuality, but with the Pre-Raphaelite painting, blond
women could also be bad.

 Elena de Troya: Beauty that causes a war.

 Proserpina: Femme fatale (beauty + death)
 Beata-Beatrix: The tragedy of the beloved’s death. We can see a religious
background, a woman who is going to heaven. Nevertheless, she kills herself,
and in the Victorian era suicide was the worst sin.
 Ofelia in Hamlet: Imagine of Ofelia’s death, not through Gertrude’s words.
The death of Ofelia has been a motive in art and literature since it was created.
We even have novels talking about her and why she committed suicide. Water
and death, drawing was women’s way of suicide. We see virginal beauty
(angelic face). We see the importance of nature; Ofelia is almost a secondary
element in her own painting, because nature is the protagonist. Idea of women
being crazy, Ofelia through the history has represented the female madness,
she is represented as silence in Hamlet and this is linked to sexuality and
madness. Pre-Raphaelites found their inspiration in mental hospitals and in
their lovers. Critics wonder if they really were misogynists or they were
criticizing Victorian society.

From Hedonism to Suicide: The Beloved (Orientalism, luxury, eroticism) and

Chatterton (social criticism)
Social problems and symbolism: Two levels (Realism and Symbolism, and Beauty and
Ugliness). The Blind Girl is about a beautiful landscape and a girl that cannot see it
because she is blind.
King Arthur’s topic and The Englishness: Fantasy and magic world of legendary
heroes and fairy tales. The English Empire, rescue of the epic glory and the search for
the English identity (Englishness).
The Lady of Shalott: Is she a victim or a sinner? There are a lot of symbols in the
picture (white purity or madness, candles how life and beauty are short, autumn
landscape decadence)

-Religion: Catholic iconography (Oxford Movement), Maria’s face represent

innocence. The scene represents a moment of almost rape (she is sleeping in her room
and suddenly a foreign man enter in her room), all of this surrounded by white colors.
According to the Bible, she was a child.
-Pre-Raphaelite poetry: Christina Rossetti was a Victorian poet associated to the Pre-
Raphaelites. She remained a spinster, and she devoted her life to protect her family.
Her poetry, at the beginning, remained very Pre-Raphaelite, but at the end she also
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wrote religious and children poetry. She also tried to convert prostitutes into virtuous
women through her poetry. According to her, she is not temped by love or sexuality.

13.4.- Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

She belongs to the Pre-Raphaelite poetry.

The Goblin Market (1862)

Poetry as a narrative fable. Goblins are animal, they represent men. A woman can save
another woman, religion is not needed. We have a lesson in the poem (‘don’t trust
strangers’). Sacrifice yourself for the others. The sisters Lizzie and Laura represents
María and Eva. There is salvation for Laura in the poem. Laura has no value, she is
going to die, but Lizzie sacrifices herself and goes to the Goblins to buy fruit for her
sister. The Goblins want no money, they want Lizzie to open her mouth (attempt of
rape). She remains pure because she fight back (she is a new kind of female hero, a
Christian heroine). At the end of the poem, Laura recovers and, in later years, she
becomes a house wife and a mother. Idea of sisterhood linked to the idea of being a
savior, of being the nurse. Lizzie saves her sister. Idea of fighting to redeem the
prostitutes. She intends to teach her women readers not to give her virginity before
marrying, because virtue has a value. Renunciation of pleasures and the world of
sexuality. Idea of solidarity between women, the idea of God saving you, he is not
only there for punishing you. There is hope for you if you are a sinner. Religion vs
eroticism.

Sing Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872)

It is a book dedicated to children, in the sense that it is literature to be enjoyed by
children. The sons are learnt by children, and some of them are poems. We have an
author that explores her own childhood, but at the same time we also have some social
issues related to childhood (like education, children mortality, orphan hood…). It also
expresses Christina’s wish to become a mother although she was a spinster.

A Pageant & Other Poems (1881)

We find a good composition called Monne Innominata. In this kind of poems, we
usually find love between a male speaker and a female object. The male speaker
expresses his love for this woman. This woman is usually an idea. Christina criticizes
that we have very unnamed woman, and she wants to be the speaker, women can also
be the subject. In this poem, we have the voice of a woman that from the very
beginning we think is a poem of a lover who runs away and abandon her. But, little by
little, we get into the woman’s mind and we understand that this man does not exist.
She is an old woman, and she is a spinster. While she is talking with her relationship
with this man, and we discover he doesn’t exist, we see what is called the ‘poetry of
renunciation’ (she gives up love and the satisfaction of her emotional desires, because
she realizes that the only man she can love is God).

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13.5.- Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

She could not find love, she was a spinster. The different between Christina Rossetti
and Elizabeth Browning is that Elizabeth was imprisoned by her father, until she met
Robert and they ran away together. Elizabeth could get emotional fulfillment, whereas
Christina Rossetti couldn’t.
Her poems wanted to adapt traditional styles to the contemporary means. She wrote
narrative poems. New poetry combining the idea of tradition and new modes.
Transgressive poems because they combine poetry with the other two other
traditionally forms (drama and epic). She was very famous, and she was a candidate to
become the poet of the nation, but Tennyson was chosen instead. She anticipates genre
equality, and she became immortal through her poems. The problem with her is that
she lost her fame when she died, so critics considered her a minor poet.
She did not have a mother, so she was raised by her father, who didn’t want any man
to get close to Elizabeth. She wasn’t very critic. She was invalid (she couldn’t walk
well) and she was already spinster, but she became famous. Robert Browning met her
and they had an affair, but her father did not allow her to marry him. Years after, they
married secretly and ran away to Italy. She gave birth to a child, and Robert and
Elizabeth had a happy marriage.
Risorgimento, where we find social and political poetry in Elizabeth’s poetry. She
also talks about the exploitation of children in factories. The regulation changes little
by little. For Elizabeth, poetry was a tool to protest and try to change the world.
Once again, she is away of the idea to write poetry in order to create beauty. Later, she
uses it to try to change the condition of women.

Sonnets from the Portuguese (1845-1846)

These poems are her greatest achievement. 44 sonnets. The first poems written in this
book are almost about death because of the psychological and physical suffer. Her
latest poems are about the exaltation of love, because it revives live. When she meets
Robert Browning, she changes (love can change things). She claims that women are
entitled to use sonnets, and she compares herself with Shakespeare. Christina Rossetti
criticized the position of woman in Monna Innominata, but Elizabeth says that she is
the speaker and the object is Robert Browning. One Elizabeth and Robert were
married, she showed her poems to him, and he said they were magnificent and that she
should publish her. When she published them, she claimed that they were translations
of poems written by Portuguese poets, and they were not hers. In sonnet 24, we find
lilies in the hills, and they represent virginity. Here, Elizabeth says that our virginity is
out of reach by civilization. We see the victory of a woman who fiends her true love,
and has complete fulfillment. Love, once again, revives things.

Aurora Leigh (1853-1856)

We find blank verse and a narrative poem. It looks like a novel using verse. Mixture of
genres between poetry and novel. It is a true example of the study of the inner life. We

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have a fictional heroine who is the representation of Elizabeth Barrett. It is about the
growth of a woman from his childhood to her adulthood. In novel this was reflected
under the literary form of Bildungsroman. Finding the vocation and voice as a poet,
and this is what we are going to find in the 20th century with James Joyce and his
Künstlerroman (the life of the artist). Physical and psychological development, her
fulfillment as a woman and as an artist. We do find realistic art because in this world
she presents not only personal struggles of herself as a woman and as a poet but also
contemporary issues (women as slaves of men, how Aurora has to marry his
cousin…). The protagonist (Aurora) is a representation of herself. She has a vocation
for being a writer, but she lacks self-confidence and she has to marry her cousin.
Aurora’s mother in the novel was Italian, and that is why she decides to discover her
heritage, so the poem has two settings (England and Italy). The poem has objectivity
(realistic emphasis in art, social and political issues) and subjectivity (she wants to
discover herself). For Elizabeth, she is the builder of the epic, where the hero can be
herself, expressing her own voice as a woman. Female experience in poetry. In a way,
there was very difficult to Elizabeth to translate female experience in her childhood.
She is also a true master of reflecting not only her female experience as Aurora Leigh,
but she is also able to express the experiences of other women. We have a
melodramatic plot and we also find the exploration of her independence as a woman
and as an artist. The poem can be a proto-manifesto of the female independence.

13.6.- Robert Browning (1812-1899)

He was very unknown during his lifetime, it was until the death of his wife when he
became famous. He can be considered as a proto-modernist poet. He is a true master
of the dramatic monologues (when the voice of the author of the poet is separated
from the voice of the speaker) are primarily from Shakespeare’s drama. Transgressive
poems which break the boundaries between the epic, the drama and the poetry. He
uses real past figures in his poetry. His experiments with syntax break rhymes and
rhymes. Robert Browning is fascinated with human nature, and what fascinates him
the most is badness, the evil side of the human nature. We can see murders, sadism…
He explores the dark side of human nature but having other characters of the past. He
is also influenced by Donne, Shelley… In a formal way, dramatic monologues disrupt
the metrical unites, he sacrifices the musical sound of his poems. Very grotesque
elements, experimentation with the formal way of writing. We do not find himself
directly in his poems. However, he does that with a very particular idea: if he goes
back to the past, it is because he wants to deal with universal and eternal issues.
The mission of the artist, what is he doing as an artist. We also find other religion
assumptions which are part of his ideology (immortality of the soul, imperfect world),
he explores imperfection and imperfect personalities (that’s why he chooses
murderers, burglars…)
Her mother was a very religious woman, and he has a very similar personality to
Elizabeth. He spent his first 25 years at home, having no interaction with the world.
He did not have a formal education, he educated himself, resulting in obscurity in his

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first poems. We was no understood by the Victorian society. He wrote plays, but they
were a failure (his most well-known play is Strafford), where we have the drama
influence which will be transmitted to his poetry.
When Elizabeth dies, Robert Browning become to Italy with his son, where he
publishes his poetry and becomes famous.
Both books are the exploration of a single event from many perspectives. He explores
the link between art and morality. He explores the evil behavior, and these dramatics
monologues he distances himself from the readers.
Motifs:
-Medieval and Renaissance Italy→ No actual events and characters. Exploration of
the Italian art.
-Psychological exploration of the characters→ As Shakespeare and even Jane
Austen. He takes into consideration what is said and how it is said.
-Grotesque imagines→ Ugly locations, violence, murder… As some late writers, he
explores the ugliness. In the 20th century, we have another writer who explores the
ugliness (Baudelaire in The Flowers of Evil).

Men & Women (1855)

He loves life in Italy. Comtemplation of the Italian monuments. Being a foreigner is
complicated, so we can also see his sadness for being far from home. We see
fragmentation, poems with different ideas and settings. In a way, it shows you there is
no way to organize your experience. Exploration of life in Italy, with no single unity to
provide the idea of fragmentation.

 My Last Duchess: This poem is loosely based on historical events involving

Alfonso, the Duke of Ferrara, who lived in the 1 6 th century. The Duke is the
speaker of the poem, and tells us he is entertaining an emissary who has come
to negotiate the Duke’s marriage (he has recently been widowed) to the
daughter of another powerful family. As he shows the visitor through his
palace, he stops before a portrait of the late Duchess, apparently a young and
lovely girl. The Duke begins reminiscing about the portrait sessions, then about
the Duchess herself. His musings give way to a diatribe on her disgraceful
behavior: he claims she flirted with everyone and did not appreciate his “gift of
a nine-hundred-years- old name.” As his monologue continues, the reader
realizes with ever-more chilling certainty that the Duke in fact caused the
Duchess’s early demise. The Duke returns to the business at hand: arranging
for another marriage, with another young girl. As the Duke and the emissary
walk leave the painting behind, the Duke points out other notable artworks in
his collection.

 Fra Lippo Lippi: Fra (Brother) Lippo Lippi was an actual Florentine monk who
lived in the fifteenth century. He was a painter of some renown, and Browning
most probably gained familiarity with his works during the time he spent in
Italy. “Fra Lippo Lippi” introduces us to the monk as he is being interrogated

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 by some Medici watchmen, who have caught him out at night. Because
Lippo’s patron is Cosimo de Medici, he has little to fear from the guards, but
he has been out partying and is clearly in a mood to talk. He shares with the
men the hardships of monastic life: he is forced to carry on his relationships
with women in secret, and his superiors are always defeating his good spirits.
But Lippo’s most important statements concern the basis of art: should art be
realistic and true-to-life, or should it be idealistic and didactic? Should Lippo’s
paintings of saints look like the Prior’s mistress and the men of the
neighborhood, or should they evoke an otherworldly surreality? Which kind of
art best serves religious purposes? Should art even serve religion at all?
Lippo’s rambling speech touches on all of these issues. Dramatic monologue of
the characters. The monk is encoured to have sex with prostitutes. Not being
himself because he is tempted, but we do see that his greatest dilemma is
himself as an artist. The problem of not being himself. In Victorian times we
had moralists, who claims decorum, and the libertines, who claimed for more
liberty. We have a mirror in Robert’s own hesitation and struggles.

The Ring and the Book (1868-1869)

Dramatic monologues of different characters. The speaker and the poet are not the
same person, and we don’t have one simple dramatic monologue, but we have
different monologues from different characters in order to have different points of
view. Robert’s inspiration is a old book which talks about a murder trial (Guide kills
her wife because she is considered adulterous). What is important in these 12 books is
that they expose the tale of this murder from different points of view, and the trial (the
importance of the court system). The author wants to explore the truth, and the way he
does that is through these dramatic monologues of different characters, by having the
perspectives of different characters. He wants to show the workings of the legal
system, and the interaction between the individual and the society. Each character
constructs reality. In the end, we don’t get any conclusion, and it is up to the reader to
make their own conclusion. What we do see is the criticism to the legal system, how
prejudices make us unable to decide what is good and what is bad.

13.7.- Alernon C. Swinburne (1837-1909)

He is a rebel in all senses. He is liberal and a republican. He is a pagan and he wants

many changes to happen in poetry. His liking for sexual deviation and sexuality
influences his poetry. He is a follower of Baudelaire and the writings of Marquis of
Sade (the creator of the erotic poetry). He revives the pre-Raphaelite theory of the art.
He got an extensive teaching at university, where he found his inspiration. He is
influenced by the pre-Raphaelites.

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Atalanta in Calydon (1865)
It is a verse drama. It is important not only to represent the influence of the classics
(Hellenism) but also the ideas of freedom and individual. We can see the democracy in
the classic societies.

Poems & Ballads (1866)

 Sapphics: It comes from Shappo (Greek poet considered to be the ten muse).
The poem glorifies the figure of Sappho, who was a true mortal and a divinity.
She achieves mortality through her poetry.
 The Garden of Proserpine: This poem does not exalt what the myth does. The
idea of rebirth is not highlighted in this poem. He represents the Garden of
Proserpine without fruit (what represents extinsion). Proserpine is the Goddess
of death, since death is the greatest extinsion. Proserpine is attractive and is
portrayed as a femme fatale (belle dame sans merci). At the same time, the
poet accepts death and even desires it.

Songs before Sunrise (1871)

Support of the Italian movement of the Risorgimento.

13.8.- William Morris (1834-1896)

He was a very polyvalent artist: he was a poet, a painter and also a decorator. At the
end of his life, he wants to change art, always with the idea of that all art are linked.
He gave up because he embraced socialism and tried to revolutionize English poetry.
He hates modern civilization.
In his early poems, he goes back to the past, a beautiful world where there is also
drama. What we also have to know is that Morris comes from a wealthy family, and he
entered Oxford. He was meant to become a clergyman, but he didn’t. At the end, he
becomes a business man who produces furniture, carpets, glass… and tries to dignify
minor arts.

The Defense of Guenevere (1858)

Here we can see a little bit of biography of William Morris. What it is wonderful about
the poet is the portrait of the medieval world (as a real and cruel world). The main
source to write it was The Morte d’Arture. In classic works, women are always guilty
of destruction. In this poem we find two compromising episodes in which the queen
has to go to two different trials. In the first trial, she is found not guilty, but in the
second, Ser Lancelot kills a knight who accuses her to be adulterous. This starts a civil
war and brings the end of King Arthur and his reign. William Morris is able to create
pictures with words, combination of art and poetry.

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The Earthly Paradise (1868-1870)
This is a re-telling of the classic medieval legends. It is also a re-telling of Norse and
Icelandic sagas. Here we see that he was a very unsuccessful narrator of legends. The
main achievement is his focus on visual details, so we are able to picture this fantastic
worlds of the past, but not so much in the narrative.

News from Nowhere (1890)

There is a change in his mood. We get to see the utopia, he imagines a communist
England in the 21st century. Morris was one of the leaders of the socialist movement in
the UK. In a way, this reflects his critizism about consumerism, capitalism… In this
work, he describes a world of anarchy, a world where people are free and the arts are
important. He represents the future the same way he represents the past in his previous
works. He didn’t want a world with machines, and tries to demonstrate that
mechanical thinking kills creativity.

13.9.- Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1899)

In Victorian times, he was an unknown poet. His poetry was discovered in the 20th
century, and now he is consider a founder of the breaking with traditions in poetry.
His poems are true experiments. If we have to define what his poetry is about, we can
say that he basically celebrates the wonders of God creations. All elements in life are
there because of God. His poetry is related to the Oxford movement (whose leader
was Cardenal Newman). The Oxford movement asked for conversion, embracing the
Roman Church: that was the hard wing of the Oxford movement. Little by little,
Protestantism grow and we have new movements like Methodism.
He went to Oxford, where he was influenced by the Oxford movement, and he decided
to convert to Christianity, and broke with his family. Later on, he became a Jesuit
priest. He burnt his poetry when he became a priest.

The Wreck of Deutschland (1876)

Lyric narrative. What it is important is that according to him, it is God who tests our
faith. The message is that we can find God in the storm, in the night, always with the
idea that if a person is not autonomous. God is the center of everything, the one that
can bring you both the good and bad in your life. Nature is the reflection of God.
Combination of the mystic world with the word of nature. We get to see the conflict as
him as an artist and him as a priest: he feels guilty for enjoying poetry. His metric
system is the sprung rhythm (a new rhythm based in that every feet in poetry can have
any number of syllables, because what he wanted to do as a poet is to reproduce oral
speech). We find colloquial speech, and the mark of the stress syllable in every verse.
There is a lot of inversion of words, compounds words, ellipsis, unconventional
rhythm… Idea of the nature as something that can express the feelings and character
of the character. Description of beauty in every element of nature.

The Windhover (discovered during the 20th century)

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A very suggestive poem, which has a lot of interpretations. The most following
interpretation is the metaphor of God. In medieval times, God was reflected as bird
which was everywhere, watching us; in the poem this bird represents God who, in a
way, has a protective eye in us. God can be in every element in the nature.

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CAMPUS VIRTUAL DISCUSSIONS

1.- Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859)

Thomas De Quincey was born in Manchester in 1785 to a prosperous linen merchant.

As a young boy he read widely and acquired a reputation as a brilliant classicist. At
seventeen, he ran away from Manchester Grammar School and spent five harrowing
months penniless and hungry on the streets of London, an episode recorded with
vividness in his best-known work, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.
Reconciled with his family, he entered Oxford in 1804, but left four years later without
taking his degree.
He moved to the English Lake District to be near his two literary idols, William
Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. After an initial period of intimacy, he was
estranged from both men, and in 1813 he became dependent on opium, a drug he
began experimenting with during his student days at Oxford. Over the next few years
he slid deeper into debt and addiction before penury forced him to join Blackwood’s
Edinburgh Magazine in 1819. Following the success of the Confessions, he produced
over two hundred magazine articles on topics ranging from philosophy and history to
aesthetics, economics, literary criticism, and contemporary politics. His well-known
essay “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” was published in Blackwood’s
Magazine in 1827. His many “Literary Reminiscences” of Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Robert Southey, and others appeared in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine beginning in 1834
(Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets). Blackwood’s published his 1845
sequel to the Confessions, “Suspiria de Profundis.” De Quincey died in Edinburgh in
1859.
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), published in London Magazine Study
of 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,
recollections of human kindness but also of childhood traumas to justify drug-taking.
Though apparently presenting the reader with a collage of poignant memories,
temporal digressions and random anecdotes, the Confessions is a work of immense
sophistication and certainly one of the most influential of all autobiographies. The
work is of great appeal to the contemporary reader, displaying a nervous
(postmodern?) self-awareness, a spiralling obsession with the enigmas of its own
composition and significance. De Quincey may be said to scrutinise his life, somewhat
feverishly, in an effort to fix his own identity.
The title seems to promise a graphic exposure of horrors; these passages do not make
up a large part of the whole. The circumstances of its hasty composition sets up the
work as a lucrative piece of sensational journalism, albeit published in a more
intellectually respectable organ – the London Magazine – than are today’s
tawdry exercises in tabloid self-exposure. What makes the book technically
remarkable is its use of a majestic neoclassical style (Latinate style, dense imagery and

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recondite vocabulary) applied to a very romantic species of confessional writing - self-
reflexive but always reaching out to the reader.
Yet from the time of its publication, De Quincey's Confessions was criticized for
presenting a picture of the opium experience that was too positive and too enticing to
readers. However, it influenced psychology and abnormal psychology (Freudian
theories), and attitudes towards dreams and imaginative literature.

2.- Charles Darwin (1809-1892)

Perhaps no one has influenced our knowledge of life on Earth as much as the English
naturalist Charles Darwin. His theory of evolution by natural selection explained
where all kinds of living things came from and how they became adapted to their
particular environments. His theory reconciled diverse evidences such as the
progressive nature of fossil forms in the geological record, the geographical
distribution of species, recapitulative appearances in embryology, among others.
He was strongly influenced by Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of
Population (1798). Malthus observed that in nature, plants and animals produce a far
greater number of offspring than can survive. Extrapolated to the growth of English
population at his time, Malthus also observed that human species could also
overproduce if left unchecked. He concluded that unless family size was regulated,
poverty and famine would be global epidemics that could destroy the species. Darwin
was offered to travel on a survey ship, HMS Beagle, as a "scientific person" or
naturalist. The round-the-world journey lasted five years. Darwin spent most of these
years investigating the geology and zoology of the lands he visited, especially South
America, the Galapagos islands, and Pacific oceanic islands. He recorded many of his
specimens and observations immediately in field notebooks. Later he recorded his
experiences in a diary which became the basis of his famous book Voyage of the
Beagle (1839).
In the Origin of Species Darwin first tried to convince his readers that organisms are
malleable and not fixed natural kinds. He demonstrated that domesticated plants and
animals were known to be highly variable and to have changed so much as to be
classified as different species if they were not already familiar. He showed that the
existence and abundance of organisms was dependent on many factors, which tended
to hold their numbers in check such as climate, food, predation, available space etc.
Only then did Darwin set about showing the effects of differential death and survival
on reproduction and the persistence and diversification of forms—natural selection.
His theory of evolution has three main elements or requirements: variation, selection
and heredity. If all individual life forms are unique, and these differences could make a
difference to which organisms lived to reproduce and which did not, then, if these
differences could be inherited by offspring, subsequent generations would be
descended from those which were lucky enough to survive. Therefore, his theory of
natural selection through the “survival of the fittest” (= nature chooses the best
individuals of each generation and they transmit their favorable traits to their
descendants) argues about the long accepted beliefs about mankind and its place in the

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order of creation, which gradually challenged and dislocated Victorian modes of
thought, accentuating the existing skepticism and pessimisms in the 1880s. In The
Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin’s hypothesis of a gradual
transformation of species was abhorrent to the Victorian mentality that sustained the
belief than Adam was created in God’s image. He argued that humans were closer to
animals than they were to God and that nature was not static but evolving. His theories
were rejected by religious and scientific circles. In geology, zoology, taxonomy,
botany, palaeontology, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, literature and theology,
Darwin's writings produced profound reactions and influences, many of which are still
ongoing.

3.- John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

John Stuart Mill was considered one of the greatest of Victorian liberal thinkers,
impacting the study of philosophy through his restatements of the principles
underlying philosophical empiricism and utilitarianism. His substantial corpus of
works includes texts in logic, epistemology, economics, social and political
philosophy, ethics, metaphysics, religion, and current affairs. Among his most well-
known essays are 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, Mill felt the influence of historicism, French social thought, and
Romanticism, in the form of thinkers like Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, Goethe, and
Wordsworth. This led him to begin searching for a new philosophic radicalism that
would be more sensitive to the limits on reform imposed by culture and history, and
would emphasize the cultivation of our humanity, including the feelings and the
imagination. He developed a utilitarian ethical theory in Utilitarianism (1861/63),
based on Jeremy Bentham’s theories. He distinguished between theories of intuition
and those of experience, whereby it is the “greatest-happiness principle” that is the
foundation of all utilitarian ethical principles. The ultimate goal of utilitarianism is to
achieve such happiness for the majority of people. The principle of utility—that
“actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend
to produce the reverse of happiness”—was the centerpiece of his ethical philosophy.
Utilitarian philosophy claims that moral actions increase happiness, and thus the ethics
of a decision are determined primarily according to the decision's outcome. Although
Mill's utilitarian ethics emphasize happiness as a moral good, Mill was not a simple
hedonist. The goal of an action is not just to maximize happiness for oneself, but for
others. Mill indicated that much happiness could be gleaned from hard work and
intellectual pursuits, and he claimed that people could attain happiness regardless of
their education or intellectual prowess. He argued that freedom and individuality were
key ingredients in the recipe for happiness, and emphasized that the oppression of
racial minorities and women limited their opportunities to achieve happiness. He
became sympathetic to socialism, and he was a strong advocate of women’s rights and
of political and social reforms: proportional representation, labour unions and farm co-

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operatives. Thus, he became a defender of individual liberty against the interference of
both society and state. While Mill advanced the cause of democracy to a considerable
degree, he eloquently argued for the right of women to vote. One of the first petitions
to Parliament (after having collected 1500 signatures) asking for votes for women in
1866 was presented to the House of Commons by John Stuart Mill, when he was a
Member of the Parliament, but it was not successful. Co-written with his wife, The
Subjection of Women (1869) was quite radical for its time. It caused a controversy but
today is a classic statement of liberal feminism. The essay argued in favor of equality
of the sexes employing utilitarian arguments. Mill was convinced that the inequality of
women would impede human progress in general. For Mill the only way to find out
whether there are actually differences between men and women, he argues, is by
experiment. In this essay, he compares the legal status of women to the status of slaves
and argues for equality in marriage and under the law. Its essential case is that if
freedom is a good for men, it is for women, and that every argument against this view
drawn from the supposedly different "nature" of men and women has been
superstitious special pleading. If women have different natures, the only way to
discover what they are is by experiment, and that requires that women should have
access to everything to which men have access.

4.- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

Thomas Carlyle, a contemporary of Romantic poets, translator of Goethe and historian

of the French Revolution, began a public discourse about the condition of English
society in the time of the Industrial Revolution. Carlyle’s Calvinistic upbringing may
have exerted influence on his pessimistic assessment of the contemporary society. He
was the most widely respected Victorian sage and social critic. He wrote political
essays, historiography (like The French Revolution: A History), philosophical satires
and fiction in which he often blurred the boundaries between literary genres. Carlyle
was an individualist, who identified the modern technical civilization with the gradual
loss of individual freedom. He criticized both the feudal and capitalist systems in his
works Sartor Resartus, Chartism, Past and Present and Latter-Day Pamphlets.
The phrase “Condition of England Question” was first used by Carlyle in Chartism
(1839), which significantly contributed to the emergence of a series of debates about
the spiritual and material foundations of England and it had a great effect on a number
of writers of fiction in the Victorian era and after. Carlyle was concerned with the
“two nations theme”: the gap between the rich and the poor. Likewise, a number of
Victorian Condition of England novelists, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë or
Charles Dickens, attempted with varying effect, to persuade the reading public to look
for ways of reducing such antagonism between the “two nations”. He criticized
vehemently the ethos of the Industrial Revolution, which, he believed, was destroying
human individuality. He expressed his distrust of the spirit of the “mechanical age”,
which was manifested not only in the technical progress of English society but also in
an overwhelming feeling of inanition. Carlyle contributed to the awakening of social
conscience among the reading public and understood well the social and political

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importance of literature. He attacked the growing materialism of Victorian society and
its laissez-faire doctrine. In his attacks on wealthy people, Carlyle anticipated some of
the ideas of the condition-of England novels. He also inspired social reformers, such
as John Ruskin and William Morris, and his essay Past and Present was reviewed by
the German social scientist Friedrich Engels, one of the fathers of Marxist theory.
Past and Present (1843), which opens with a visit to a workhouse, was written as a
response to the economic crisis which began in the early 1840’s. This book presents a
analyses the Condition of England Question. Carlyle opposed the medieval past and
the turbulent Victorian present of the 1830s and 1840s. For him, the latter was a time
of uncontrolled industrialization, worship of money, exploitation of the weak, low
wages, poverty, unemployment and riots, which would bring England to self-
destruction.
Carlyle expresses his critical opinion about the present Condition of England in an
elevated, prophetic language. Despite England’s abundant resources, the poor classes
are living in deprivation. Carlyle shows a depressing picture of the daily life of the
workers, many of whom and are unable to find meaningful work. Carlyle’s solution
was a spiritual rebirth of both the individual and society. The two sections of the book
show the contrasting visions of the past and the present. His idealized vision of the
past is based on the chronicle of the English monk, Jocelyn of Brakelond, who
described the life of the abbot Samson and his monks of St. Edmund’s monastery.
Carlyle shows the organization of life and work of the medieval monks as an authentic
idyll, whereas he finds contemporary life increasingly unbearable due to the lack of
true leadership. Carlyle argues that a new “Aristocracy of Talent” should take the lead
in the country, and the English people must themselves choose true heroes and no
quacks. In the third chapter, Carlyle makes three practical suggestions for the
improvement of social conditions in England. He calls for the introduction of legal
hygienic measures, improvement of education and promotion of emigration, mainly
Irish and Scottish people.

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