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English literature
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The Post-Romantic and Victorian eras
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Thomas Carlyle
Algernon
Charles Swinburne
Charles Dickens
"Great
Expectations"
CHAPTER I,
CHAPTER II-XII,
CHAPTER XIII-XXXII,
CHAPTER XXXIII-LIX
Illustrations by John McLenan
William Makepeace Thackeray
Elizabeth Gaskell
Frances Trollope
Benjamin Disraeli
Charles Kingsley
Anne Brontë
Charlotte Bronte
"Jane
Eyre" CHAPTER
I-XXIV,
CHAPTER XXV-XXXVIII
Illustrations by F. H. Townsend
Emily Brontë
Alfred Tennyson
"Idylls of the King"
PART I,
PART II
Illustrations by G. Dore
"Lady of Shalott", "Sir Galahad"
Pre-Raphaelite illustrations for
Moxon's Tennyson
Arthur Hallam
Robert
Browning
"Dramatic Romances"
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
"Sonnets from the Portuguese"
Matthew Arnold
Arthur Hugh Clough
John Ruskin
"The King of the Golden River"
Illustrations by Maria L. Kirk
John Henry Newman
Bernard Bosanquet
F. H. Bradley
T. H. Green
Herbert Spencer
Alfred North Whitehead
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Self-consciousness was the quality that
John Stuart Mill
identified, in 1838, as “the daemon of the men of genius
of our time.” Introspection was inevitable in the
literature of an immediately Post-Romantic period, and
the age itself was as prone to self-analysis as were its
individual authors.
Hazlitt’s essays in
The Spirit of
the Age (1825) were echoed by
Mill’s articles of the
same title in 1831, by Thomas Carlyle’s essays
Signs of
the Times (1829) and Characteristics (1831), and by
Richard Henry Horne’s New Spirit of the Age in 1844.
This persistent scrutiny was the product of an acute
sense of change. Britain had emerged from the long war
with France (1793–1815) as a great power and as the
world’s predominant economy. Visiting England in 1847,
the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson observed of the
English that “the modern world is theirs. They have made
and make it day by day.”
This new status as the world’s first urban and
industrialized society was responsible for the
extraordinary wealth, vitality, and self-confidence of
the period. Abroad these energies expressed themselves
in the growth of the British Empire. At home they were
accompanied by rapid social change and fierce
intellectual controversy.
The juxtaposition of this new industrial wealth with
a new kind of urban poverty is only one of the paradoxes
that characterize this long and diverse period. In
religion the climax of the Evangelical revival coincided
with an unprecedentedly severe set of challenges to
faith. The idealism and transcendentalism of Romantic
thought were challenged by the growing prestige of
empirical science and utilitarian moral philosophy, a
process that encouraged more-objective modes in
literature. Realism would be one of the great artistic
movements of the era. In politics a widespread
commitment to economic and personal freedom was,
nonetheless, accompanied by a steady growth in the power
of the state. The prudery for which the Victorian Age is
notorious in fact went hand in hand with an equally
violent immoralism, seen, for example, in Algernon
Charles Swinburne’s poetry or the writings of the
Decadents. Most fundamentally of all, the rapid change
that many writers interpreted as progress inspired in
others a fierce nostalgia. Enthusiastic rediscoveries of
ancient Greece, Elizabethan England, and, especially,
the Middle Ages by writers, artists, architects, and
designers made this age of change simultaneously an age
of active and determined historicism.
John Stuart Mill caught this contradictory quality,
with characteristic acuteness, in his essays on
Jeremy
Bentham (1838) and
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1840). Every
contemporary thinker, he argued, was indebted to these
two “seminal minds.” Yet Bentham, as the enduring voice
of the Enlightenment, and Coleridge, as the chief
English example of the Romantic reaction against it,
held diametrically opposed views.
A similar sense of sharp controversy is given by
Carlyle in Sartor Resartus (1833–34). An eccentric
philosophical fiction in the tradition of
Swift and
Sterne, the book argues for a new mode of spirituality
in an age that Carlyle himself suggests to be one of
mechanism. Carlyle’s choice of the novel form and the
book’s humour, generic flexibility, and political
engagement point forward to distinctive characteristics
of Victorian literature.
Thomas Carlyle
born Dec. 4, 1795, Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire,
Scot.
died Feb. 5, 1881, London, Eng.
British historian and essayist, whose
major works include The French Revolution, 3
vol. (1837), On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and
the Heroic in History (1841), and The
History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called
Frederick the Great, 6 vol. (1858–65).
Early life.
Carlyle was the second son of James
Carlyle, the eldest child of his second
marriage. James Carlyle was a mason by trade
and, later, a small farmer, a man of
profound Calvinist convictions whose
character and way of life had a profound and
lasting influence on his son. Carlyle was
equally devoted to his mother as well as to
his eight brothers and sisters, and his
strong affection for his family never
diminished.
After attending the village school at
Ecclefechan, Thomas was sent in 1805 to
Annan Academy, where he apparently suffered
from bullying, and later to the University
of Edinburgh (1809), where he read widely
but followed no precise line of study. His
father had intended him to enter the
ministry, but Thomas became increasingly
doubtful of his vocation. He had an aptitude
for mathematics, and in 1814 he obtained a
mathematical teaching post at Annan. In 1816
he went to another school, at Kirkcaldy,
where the Scottish preacher and mystic
Edward Irving was teaching. He became one of
the few men to whom Carlyle gave complete
admiration and affection. “But for Irving,”
Carlyle commented sometime later, “I had
never known what communion of man with man
means.” Their friendship continued even
after Irving moved in 1822 to London, where
he became famous as a preacher.
The next years were hard for Carlyle.
Teaching did not suit him and he abandoned
it. In December 1819 he returned to
Edinburgh University to study law, and there
he spent three miserable years, lonely,
unable to feel certain of any meaning in
life, and eventually abandoning the idea of
entering the ministry. He did a little
coaching (tutoring) and journalism, was poor
and isolated, and was conscious of intense
spiritual struggles. About 1821 he
experienced a kind of conversion, which he
described some years later in fictionalized
account in Sartor Resartus, whose salient
feature was that it was negative—hatred of
the devil, not love of God, being the
dominating idea. Though it may be doubted
whether everything was really experienced as
he described it, this violence is certainly
characteristic of Carlyle’s tortured and
defiant spirit. In those lean years he began
his serious study of German, which always
remained the literature he most admired and
enjoyed. For Goethe, especially, he had the
greatest reverence, and he published a
translation, Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship, in 1824. Meanwhile, he led a
nomadic life, holding several brief
tutorships at Edinburgh, Dunkeld, and
elsewhere.
Marriage.
On Oct. 17, 1826, Carlyle married Jane
Welsh, an intelligent, attractive, and
somewhat temperamental daughter of a
well-to-do doctor in Haddington. Welsh had
been one of Irving’s pupils, and she and
Carlyle had known one another for five
years. The hesitations and financial worries
that beset them are recorded in their
letters. It is interesting that Carlyle,
usually so imperious, often adopted a weak,
pleading tone to his future wife during the
time of courtship, though this did not
prevent him from being a masterful,
difficult, and irritable husband; and, in
spite of their strong mutual affection,
their marriage was full of quarrels and
misunderstandings. Those who knew him best
believed Carlyle to be impotent.
In the early years of their marriage the
Carlyles lived mostly at Craigenputtock,
Dumfriesshire, and Carlyle contributed to
the Edinburgh Review and worked on Sartor
Resartus. Though this book eventually
achieved great popular success, he had at
first much difficulty in finding a publisher
for it. Written with mingled bitterness and
humour, it is a fantastic hodgepodge of
autobiography and German philosophy. Its
main theme is that the intellectual forms in
which men’s deepest convictions have been
cast are dead and that new ones must be
found to fit the time but that the
intellectual content of this new religious
system is elusive. Its author speaks of
“embodying the Divine Spirit of religion in
a new Mythus, in a new vehicle and vesture,”
but he never says very clearly what the new
vesture is to be.
London.
In 1834, after failing to obtain several
posts he had desired, Carlyle moved to
London with his wife and settled in Cheyne
Row. Though he had not earned anything by
his writings for more than a year and was
fearful of the day when his savings would be
exhausted, he refused to compromise but
began an ambitious historical work, The
French Revolution. The story of how the
partially completed manuscript was lent to
J.S. Mill and accidentally burned is well
known. After the accident Carlyle wrote to
Mill in a generous, almost gay, tone, which
is truly remarkable when Carlyle’s ambition,
his complete dependence upon a successful
literary career, his poverty, the months of
wasted work, and his habitual melancholy and
irritability are considered. The truth seems
to be that he could bear grand and terrible
trials more easily than petty annoyances.
His habitual, frustrated melancholy arose,
in part, from the fact that his misfortunes
were not serious enough to match his tragic
view of life; and he sought relief in
intensive historical research, choosing
subjects in which divine drama, lacking in
his own life, seemed most evident. His book
on the French Revolution is perhaps his
greatest achievement. After the loss of the
manuscript he worked furiously at rewriting
it. It was finished early in 1837 and soon
won both serious acclaim and popular
success, besides bringing him many
invitations to lecture, thus solving his
financial difficulties.
True to his idea of history as a “Divine
Scripture,” Carlyle saw the French
Revolution as an inevitable judgment upon
the folly and selfishness of the monarchy
and nobility. This simple idea was backed
with an immense mass of well-documented
detail and, at times, a memorable skill in
sketching character. The following extract
is characteristic of the contorted, fiery,
and doom-laden prose, which is alternately
colloquial, humorous, and grim:
. . . an august Assembly spread its
pavilion; curtained by the dark infinite of
discords; founded on the wavering bottomless
of the Abyss; and keeps continual hubbub.
Time is around it, and Eternity, and the
Inane; and it does what it can, what is
given it to do (part 2, book 3, ch. 3).
Though many readers were thrilled by the
drama of the narrative, it is not surprising
that they were puzzled by Carlyle’s
prophetic harangues and their relevance to
the contemporary situation.
In Chartism (1840) he appeared as a
bitter opponent of conventional economic
theory, but the radical-progressive and the
reactionary elements were curiously blurred
and mingled. With the publication of On
Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in
History (1841) his reverence for strength,
particularly when combined with the
conviction of a God-given mission, began to
emerge. He discussed the hero as divinity
(pagan myths), as prophet (Muḥammad), as
poet (Dante and Shakespeare), as priest
(Luther and Knox), as man of letters
(Johnson and Burns), and as king (Cromwell
and Napoleon). It is perhaps in his
treatment of poets that Carlyle shows to the
best advantage. Perverse though he could be,
he was never at the mercy of fashion; and he
saw much more, particularly in Dante, than
others did. Two years later this idea of the
hero was elaborated in Past and Present,
which strove “to penetrate . . . into a
somewhat remote century . . . in hope of
perhaps illustrating our own poor century
thereby.” He contrasts the wise and strong
rule of a medieval abbot with the muddled
softness and chaos of the 19th century,
pronouncing in favour of the former, in
spite of the fact that he had rejected
dogmatic Christianity and had a special
aversion to the Roman Catholic Church.
It was natural that Carlyle should turn
to Cromwell as the greatest English example
of his ideal man and should produce the
bulky Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and
Speeches. With Elucidations in 1845. His
next important work was Latter-Day Pamphlets
(1850), in which the savage side of his
nature was particularly prominent. In the
essay on model prisons, for instance, he
tried to persuade the public that the most
brutal and useless sections of the
population were being coddled in the new
prisons of the 19th century. Though
incapable of lying, Carlyle was completely
unreliable as an observer, since he
invariably saw what he had decided in
advance that he ought to see.
In 1857 he embarked on a massive study of
another of his heroes, Frederick the Great,
and The History of Friedrich II of Prussia,
Called Frederick the Great appeared between
1858 and 1865. Something of his political
attitude at this time can be gathered from a
letter written in April 1855 to the exiled
Russian revolutionary A.I. Herzen, in which
he says “I never had, and have now (if it
were possible) less than ever, the least
hope in ‘Universal Suffrage’ under any of
its modifications” and refers to “the sheer
Anarchy (as I reckon it sadly to be) which
is got by ‘Parliamentary eloquence,’ Free
Press, and counting of heads” (quoted from
E.H. Carr, The Romantic Exiles).
Unfortunately, Carlyle was never able to
respect ordinary men. Here, perhaps, rather
than in any historical doubts about the
veracity of the gospels, was the core of his
quarrel with Christianity—it set too much
value on the weak and sinful. His fierceness
of spirit was composed of two elements, a
serious Calvinistic desire to denounce evil
and a habitual nervous ill temper, for which
he often reproached himself but which he
never managed to defeat.
Last years.
In 1865 he was offered the rectorship of
Edinburgh University. The speech that he
delivered at his installation in April 1866
was not very remarkable in itself but its
tone of high moral exhortation made it an
immediate success. It was published in 1866
under the title On the Choice of Books. Soon
after his triumph in Edinburgh, Jane Carlyle
died suddenly in London. She was buried in
Haddington, and an epitaph by her husband
was placed in the church. Carlyle never
completely recovered from her death. He
lived another 15 years, weary, bored, and a
partial recluse. A few public causes gained
his support: he was active in the defense of
Gov. E.J. Eyre of Jamaica, who was dismissed
for his severity in putting down a black
uprising in 1865. Carlyle commended him for
“saving the West Indies and hanging one
incendiary mulatto, well worth gallows, if I
can judge.” He was excited by the
Franco-German War (1870–71), saying “Germany
ought to be President of Europe,” but such
enthusiastic moments soon faded. In these
last years he wrote little. His history The
Early Kings of Norway: Also an Essay on the
Portraits of John Knox came out in 1875, and
Reminiscences was published in 1881. Later
he edited his wife’s letters, which appeared
in 1883 under the title Letters and
Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, Prepared
for Publication by Thomas Carlyle. Although
Westminster Abbey was offered for his
burial, he was buried, according to his
wish, beside his parents at Ecclefechan.
A.O.J. Cockshut
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Algernon
Charles Swinburne
born April 5, 1837, London
died April 10, 1909, Putney, London
English poet and critic, outstanding for
prosodic innovations and noteworthy as the
symbol of mid-Victorian poetic revolt. The
characteristic qualities of his verse are
insistent alliteration, unflagging rhythmic
energy, sheer melodiousness, great variation
of pace and stress, effortless expansion of
a given theme, and evocative if rather
imprecise use of imagery. His poetic style
is highly individual and his command of
word-colour and word-music striking.
Swinburne’s technical gifts and capacity for
prosodic invention were extraordinary, but
too often his poems’ remorseless rhythms
have a narcotic effect, and he has been
accused of paying more attention to the
melody of words than to their meaning.
Swinburne was pagan in his sympathies and
passionately antitheist. Swinburne’s
biography of John Keats appeared in the
ninth edition of the Encyclopędia Britannica
(see the Britannica Classic: John Keats).
Swinburne’s father was an admiral, and
his mother was a daughter of the 3rd Earl of
Ashburnham. He attended Eton and Balliol
College, Oxford, which he left in 1860
without taking a degree. There he met
William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, and
Dante Gabriel Rossetti and was attracted to
their Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. An
allowance from his father enabled him to
follow a literary career.
In 1861 he met Richard Monckton Milnes
(later Lord Houghton), who encouraged his
writing and fostered his reputation. In the
early 1860s Swinburne apparently suffered
from an unhappy love affair about which
little is known. Literary success came with
the verse drama Atalanta in Calydon (1865),
in which he attempted to re-create in
English the spirit and form of Greek
tragedy; his lyric powers are at their
finest in this work. Atalanta was followed
by the first series of Poems and Ballads in
1866, which clearly display Swinburne’s
preoccupation with masochism, flagellation,
and paganism. This volume contains some of
his finest poems, among them “Dolores” and
“The Garden of Proserpine.” The book was
vigorously attacked for its “feverish
carnality”—Punch referred to the poet as
“Mr. Swineborn”—though it was
enthusiastically welcomed by the younger
generation. In 1867 Swinburne met his idol,
Giuseppe Mazzini, and the poetry collection
Songs Before Sunrise (1871), which is
principally concerned with the theme of
political liberty, shows the influence of
that Italian patriot. The second series of
Poems and Ballads, less hectic and sensual
than the first, appeared in 1878.
During this time Swinburne’s health was
being undermined by alcoholism and by the
excesses resulting from his abnormal
temperament and masochistic tendencies; he
experienced periodic fits of intense nervous
excitement, from which, however, his
remarkable powers of recuperation long
enabled him to recover quickly. In 1879 he
collapsed completely and was rescued and
restored to health by his friend Theodore
Watts-Dunton. The last 30 years of his life
were spent at The Pines, Putney, under the
guardianship of Watts-Dunton, who maintained
a strict regimen and encouraged Swinburne to
devote himself to writing. Swinburne
eventually became a figure of respectability
and adopted reactionary views. He published
23 volumes of poetry, prose, and drama
during these years, but, apart from the long
poem Tristram of Lyonesse (1882) and the
verse tragedy Marino Faliero (1885), his
most important poetry belongs to the first
half of his life.
Swinburne was also an important and
prolific English literary critic of the
later 19th century. Among his best critical
writings are Essays and Studies (1875) and
his monographs on William Shakespeare
(1880), Victor Hugo (1886), and Ben Jonson
(1889). His devotion to Shakespeare and his
unrivaled knowledge of Elizabethan and
Jacobean drama are reflected in his early
play Chastelard (1865). The latter work was
the first of a trilogy on Mary, queen of
Scots, who held a peculiar fascination for
him; Bothwell (1874) and Mary Stuart (1881)
followed. He also wrote on William Blake,
Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Charles
Baudelaire, and his elegy on the latter, Ave
Atque Vale (1867–68), is among his finest
works.
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Early Victorian literature: the age of the novel
Several
major figures of English Romanticism lived on into this
period.
Coleridge died in 1834,
De Quincey in 1859.
Wordsworth succeeded Southey as poet laureate in 1843
and held the post until his own death seven years later.
Posthumous publication caused some striking
chronological anomalies.
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s
A
Defence of Poetry was not published until 1840.
Keats’s
letters appeared in 1848 and
Wordsworth’s
Prelude in
1850.
Despite this persistence, critics of the 1830s felt
that there had been a break in the English literary
tradition, which they identified with the death of
Byron
in 1824. The deaths of
Austen in 1817 and
Scott in 1832
should perhaps have been seen as even more significant,
for the new literary era has, with justification, been
seen as the age of the novel. More than 60,000 works of
prose fiction were published in Victorian Britain by as
many as 7,000 novelists. The three-volume format (or
“three-decker”) was the standard mode of first
publication; it was a form created for sale to and
circulation by lending libraries. It was challenged in
the 1830s by the advent of serialization in magazines
and by the publication of novels in 32-page monthly
parts. But only in the 1890s did the three-decker
finally yield to the modern single-volume format.
Dickens
Charles Dickens first attracted attention with the
descriptive essays and tales originally written for
newspapers, beginning in 1833, and collected as Sketches
by “Boz” (1836). On the strength of this volume, Dickens
contracted to write a historical novel in the tradition
of
Scott (eventually published as Barnaby Rudge in
1841). By chance his gifts were turned into a more
distinctive channel. In February 1836 he agreed to write
the text for a series of comic engravings. The
unexpected result was The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), one
of the funniest novels in English literature. By July
1837, sales of the monthly installments exceeded 40,000
copies. Dickens’s extraordinary popular appeal and the
enormous imaginative potential of the Victorian novel
were simultaneously established.
The chief technical features of Dickens’s fiction
were also formed by this success. Serial publication
encouraged the use of multiple plot and required that
each episode be individually shaped. At the same time it
produced an unprecedentedly close relationship between
author and reader. Part dramatist, part journalist, part
mythmaker, and part wit,
Dickens took the picaresque
tradition of
Smollett and
Fielding and gave it a
Shakespearean vigour and variety.
His early novels have been attacked at times for
sentimentality, melodrama, or shapelessness. They are
now increasingly appreciated for their comic or macabre
zest and their poetic fertility. Dombey and Son
(1846–48) marks the beginning of Dickens’s later period.
He thenceforth combined his gift for vivid caricature
with a stronger sense of personality, designed his plots
more carefully, and used symbolism to give his books
greater thematic coherence. Of the masterpieces of the
next decade, David Copperfield (1849–50) uses the form
of a fictional autobiography to explore the great
Romantic theme of the growth and comprehension of the
self. Bleak House (1852–53) addresses itself to law and
litigiousness; Hard Times (1854) is a Carlylean defense
of art in an age of mechanism; and Little Dorrit
(1855–57) dramatizes the idea of imprisonment, both
literal and spiritual. Two great novels, both involved
with issues of social class and human worth, appeared in
the 1860s: Great Expectations (1860–61) and Our Mutual
Friend (1864–65). His final book, The Mystery of Edwin
Drood (published posthumously, 1870), was left
tantalizingly uncompleted at the time of his death.
"Dickens' Dream" by R.W. Buss
Charles Dickens
"Great
Expectations"
CHAPTER I,
CHAPTER II-XII,
CHAPTER XIII-XXXII,
CHAPTER XXXIII-LIX
Illustrations by John McLenan
British novelist
in full Charles John Huffam Dickens
born Feb. 7, 1812, Portsmouth, Hampshire, Eng.
died June 9, 1870, Gad’s Hill, near Chatham, Kent
Overview
British novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian
period.
The defining moment of Dickens’s life occurred when he was 12 years
old. With his father in debtors’ prison, he was withdrawn from school
and forced to work in a factory. This deeply affected the sensitive boy.
Though he returned to school at 13, his formal education ended at 15. As
a young man, he worked as a reporter. His fiction career began with
short pieces reprinted as Sketches by “Boz” (1836). He exhibited a great
ability to spin a story in an entertaining manner and this quality,
combined with the serialization of his comic novel The Pickwick Papers
(1837), made him the most popular English author of his time. The
serialization of such works as Oliver Twist (1838) and The Old Curiosity
Shop (1841) followed. After a trip to America, he wrote A Christmas
Carol (1843) in a few weeks. With Dombey and Son (1848), his novels
began to express a heightened uneasiness about the evils of Victorian
industrial society, which intensified in the semiautobiographical David
Copperfield (1850), as well as in Bleak House (1853), Little Dorrit
(1857), Great Expectations (1861), and others. A Tale of Two Cities
(1859) appeared in the period when he achieved great popularity for his
public readings. Dickens’s works are characterized by an encyclopaedic
knowledge of London, pathos, a vein of the macabre, a pervasive spirit
of benevolence and geniality, inexhaustible powers of character
creation, an acute ear for characteristic speech, and a highly
individual and inventive prose style.
Main
English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian
era. His many volumes include such works as A Christmas Carol, David
Copperfield, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and
Our Mutual Friend.
Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity than had any previous author
during his lifetime. Much in his work could appeal to simple and
sophisticated, to the poor and to the Queen, and technological
developments as well as the qualities of his work enabled his fame to
spread worldwide very quickly. His long career saw fluctuations in the
reception and sales of individual novels, but none of them was
negligible or uncharacteristic or disregarded, and, though he is now
admired for aspects and phases of his work that were given less weight
by his contemporaries, his popularity has never ceased and his present
critical standing is higher than ever before. The most abundantly comic
of English authors, he was much more than a great entertainer. The
range, compassion, and intelligence of his apprehension of his society
and its shortcomings enriched his novels and made him both one of the
great forces in 19th-century literature and an influential spokesman of
the conscience of his age.
Early years
Dickens left Portsmouth in infancy. His happiest childhood years were
spent in Chatham (1817–22), an area to which he often reverts in his
fiction. From 1822 he lived in London, until, in 1860, he moved
permanently to a country house, Gad’s Hill, near Chatham. His origins
were middle class, if of a newfound and precarious respectability; one
grandfather had been a domestic servant, and the other an embezzler. His
father, a clerk in the navy pay office, was well paid, but his
extravagance and ineptitude often brought the family to financial
embarrassment or disaster. (Some of his failings and his ebullience are
dramatized in Mr. Micawber in the partly autobiographical David
Copperfield.) In 1824 the family reached bottom. Charles, the eldest
son, had been withdrawn from school and was now set to manual work in a
factory, and his father went to prison for debt. These shocks deeply
affected Charles. Though abhorring this brief descent into the working
class, he began to gain that sympathetic knowledge of their life and
privations that informed his writings. Also, the images of the prison
and of the lost, oppressed, or bewildered child recur in many novels.
Much else in his character and art stems from this period, including, as
the 20th-century novelist Angus Wilson has argued, his later difficulty,
as man and author, in understanding women: this may be traced to his
bitter resentment against his mother, who had, he felt, failed
disastrously at this time to appreciate his sufferings. She had wanted
him to stay at work when his father’s release from prison and an
improvement in the family’s fortunes made the boy’s return to school
possible. Happily the father’s view prevailed.
His schooling, interrupted and unimpressive, ended at 15. He became a
clerk in a solicitor’s office, then a shorthand reporter in the
lawcourts (thus gaining a knowledge of the legal world often used in the
novels), and finally, like other members of his family, a parliamentary
and newspaper reporter. These years left him with a lasting affection
for journalism and contempt both for the law and for Parliament. His
coming to manhood in the reformist 1830s, and particularly his working
on the Liberal Benthamite Morning Chronicle (1834–36), greatly affected
his political outlook. Another influential event now was his rejection
as suitor to Maria Beadnell because his family and prospects were
unsatisfactory; his hopes of gaining and chagrin at losing her sharpened
his determination to succeed. His feelings about Maria then and at her
later brief and disillusioning reentry into his life are reflected in
David Copperfield’s adoration of Dora Spenlow and in the middle-aged
Arthur Clennam’s discovery (in Little Dorrit) that Flora Finching, who
had seemed enchanting years ago, was “diffuse and silly,” that Flora
“whom he had left a lily, had become a peony.”
Early years » Beginning of literary career
Much drawn to the theatre, Dickens nearly became a professional actor in
1832. In 1833 he began contributing stories and descriptive essays to
magazines and newspapers; these attracted attention and were reprinted
as Sketches by “Boz” (February 1836). The same month, he was invited to
provide a comic serial narrative to accompany engravings by a well-known
artist; seven weeks later the first installment of Pickwick Papers
appeared. Within a few months Pickwick was the rage and Dickens the most
popular author of the day. During 1836 he also wrote two plays and a
pamphlet on a topical issue (how the poor should be allowed to enjoy the
Sabbath) and, resigning from his newspaper job, undertook to edit a
monthly magazine, Bentley’s Miscellany, in which he serialized Oliver
Twist (1837–39). Thus, he had two serial installments to write every
month. Already the first of his nine surviving children had been born;
he had married (in April 1836) Catherine, eldest daughter of a respected
Scottish journalist and man of letters, George Hogarth.
For several years his life continued at this intensity. Finding
serialization congenial and profitable, he repeated the Pickwick pattern
of 20 monthly parts in Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39); then he experimented
with shorter weekly installments for The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41)
and Barnaby Rudge (1841). Exhausted at last, he then took a five-month
vacation in America, touring strenuously and receiving quasi-royal
honours as a literary celebrity but offending national sensibilities by
protesting against the absence of copyright protection. A radical critic
of British institutions, he had expected more from “the republic of my
imagination,” but he found more vulgarity and sharp practice to detest
than social arrangements to admire. Some of these feelings appear in
American Notes (1842) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44).
Early years » First novels
His writing during these prolific years was remarkably various and,
except for his plays, resourceful. Pickwick began as high-spirited farce
and contained many conventional comic butts and traditional jokes; like
other early works, it was manifestly indebted to the contemporary
theatre, the 18th-century English novelists, and a few foreign classics,
notably Don Quixote. But, besides giving new life to old stereotypes,
Pickwick displayed, if sometimes in embryo, many of the features that
were to be blended in varying proportions throughout his fiction:
attacks, satirical or denunciatory, on social evils and inadequate
institutions; topical references; an encyclopaedic knowledge of London
(always his predominant fictional locale); pathos; a vein of the
macabre; a delight in the demotic joys of Christmas; a pervasive spirit
of benevolence and geniality; inexhaustible powers of character
creation; a wonderful ear for characteristic speech, often imaginatively
heightened; a strong narrative impulse; and a prose style that, if here
overdependent on a few comic mannerisms, was highly individual and
inventive. Rapidly improvised and written only weeks or days ahead of
its serial publication, Pickwick contains weak and jejune passages and
is an unsatisfactory whole—partly because Dickens was rapidly developing
his craft as a novelist while writing and publishing it. What is
remarkable is that a first novel, written in such circumstances, not
only established him overnight and created a new tradition of popular
literature but also survived, despite its crudities, as one of the best
known novels in the world.
Early years » First novels » Oliver Twist and others
His self-assurance and artistic ambitiousness had appeared in Oliver
Twist, where he rejected the temptation to repeat the successful
Pickwick formula. Though containing much comedy still, Oliver Twist is
more centrally concerned with social and moral evil (the workhouse and
the criminal world); it culminates in Bill Sikes’s murdering Nancy and
Fagin’s last night in the condemned cell at Newgate. The latter episode
was memorably depicted in George Cruikshank’s engraving; the imaginative
potency of Dickens’ characters and settings owes much, indeed, to his
original illustrators (Cruikshank for Sketches by “Boz” and Oliver
Twist, “Phiz” [Hablot K. Browne] for most of the other novels until the
1860s). The currency of his fiction owed much, too, to its being so easy
to adapt into effective stage versions. Sometimes 20 London theatres
simultaneously were producing adaptations of his latest story; so even
nonreaders became acquainted with simplified versions of his works. The
theatre was often a subject of his fiction, too, as in the Crummles
troupe in Nicholas Nickleby. This novel reverted to the Pickwick shape
and atmosphere, though the indictment of the brutal Yorkshire schools
(Dotheboys Hall) continued the important innovation in English fiction
seen in Oliver Twist—the spectacle of the lost or oppressed child as an
occasion for pathos and social criticism. This was amplified in The Old
Curiosity Shop, where the death of Little Nell was found overwhelmingly
powerful at the time, though a few decades later it became a byword for
“Victorian sentimentality.” In Barnaby Rudge he attempted another genre,
the historical novel. Like his later attempt in this kind, A Tale of Two
Cities, it was set in the late 18th century and presented with great
vigour and understanding (and some ambivalence of attitude) the
spectacle of large-scale mob violence.
To create an artistic unity out of the wide range of moods and
materials included in every novel, with often several complicated plots
involving scores of characters, was made even more difficult by Dickens’
writing and publishing them serially. In Martin Chuzzlewit he tried “to
resist the temptation of the current Monthly Number, and to keep a
steadier eye upon the general purpose and design” (1844 Preface). Its
American episodes had, however, been unpremeditated (he suddenly decided
to boost the disappointing sales by some America-baiting and to revenge
himself against insults and injuries from the American press). A
concentration on “the general purpose and design” was more effective in
the next novel, Dombey and Son (1846–48), though the experience of
writing the shorter, and unserialized, Christmas books had helped him
obtain greater coherence.
Early years » First novels » Christmas books
A Christmas Carol, suddenly conceived and written in a few weeks, was
the first of these Christmas books (a new literary genre thus created
incidentally). Tossed off while he was amply engaged in writing
Chuzzlewit, it was an extraordinary achievement—the one great Christmas
myth of modern literature. His view of life was later to be described or
dismissed as “Christmas philosophy,” and he himself spoke of “Carol
philosophy” as the basis of a projected work. His “philosophy,” never
very elaborated, involved more than wanting the Christmas spirit to
prevail throughout the year, but his great attachment to Christmas (in
his family life as well as his writings) is indeed significant and has
contributed to his popularity. “Dickens dead?” exclaimed a London
costermonger’s girl in 1870. “Then will Father Christmas die too?”—a
tribute both to his association with Christmas and to the mythological
status of the man as well as of his work. The Carol immediately entered
the general consciousness; Thackeray, in a review, called it “a national
benefit, and to every man and woman who reads it a personal kindness.”
Further Christmas books, essays, and stories followed annually (except
in 1847) through 1867. None equalled the Carol in potency, though some
achieved great immediate popularity. Cumulatively they represent a
celebration of Christmas attempted by no other great author.
Early years » First novels » Renown
How he struck his contemporaries in these early years appears in R.H.
Horne’s New Spirit of the Age (1844). Dickens occupied the first and
longest chapter, as
. . . manifestly the product of his age . . . a genuine emanation
from its aggregate and entire spirit. . . . He mixes extensively in
society, and continually. Few public meetings in a benevolent cause are
without him. He speaks effectively. . . . His influence upon his age is
extensive—pleasurable, instructive, healthy, reformatory. . . .
Mr. Dickens is, in private, very much what might be expected from his
works. . . . His conversation is genial . . . [He] has singular personal
activity, and is fond of games of practical skill. He is also a great
walker, and very much given to dancing Sir Roger de Coverley. In
private, the general impression of him is that of a first-rate practical
intellect, with “no nonsense” about him.
He was indeed very much a public figure, actively and centrally
involved in his world, and a man of confident presence. He was reckoned
the best after-dinner speaker of the age; other superlatives he
attracted included his having been the best shorthand reporter on the
London press and his being the best amateur actor on the stage. Later he
became one of the most successful periodical editors and the finest
dramatic recitalist of the day. He was splendidly endowed with many
skills. “Even irrespective of his literary genius,” wrote an obituarist,
“he was an able and strong-minded man, who would have succeeded in
almost any profession to which he devoted himself ” (Times, June 10,
1870). Few of his extraliterary skills and interests were irrelevant to
the range and mode of his fiction.
Privately in these early years, he was both domestic and social. He
loved home and family life and was a proud and efficient householder; he
once contemplated writing a cookbook. To his many children, he was a
devoted and delightful father, at least while they were young; relations
with them proved less happy during their adolescence. Apart from periods
in Italy (1844–45) and Switzerland and France (1846–47), he still lived
in London, moving from an apartment in Furnival’s Inn to larger houses
as his income and family grew. Here he entertained his many friends,
most of them popular authors, journalists, actors, or artists, though
some came from the law and other professions or from commerce and a few
from the aristocracy. Some friendships dating from his youth endured to
the end, and, though often exasperated by the financial demands of his
parents and other relatives, he was very fond of some of his family and
loyal to most of the rest. Some literary squabbles came later, but he
was on friendly terms with most of his fellow authors, of the older
generation as well as his own. Necessarily solitary while writing and
during the long walks (especially through the streets at night) that
became essential to his creative processes, he was generally social at
other times. He enjoyed society that was unpretentious and conversation
that was genial and sensible but not too intellectualized or exclusively
literary. High society he generally avoided, after a few early
incursions into the great houses; he hated to be lionized or patronized.
He had about him “a sort of swell and overflow as of a prodigality of
life,” an American journalist said. Everyone was struck by the
brilliance of his eyes and his smart, even dandyish, appearance (“I have
the fondness of a savage for finery,” he confessed). John Forster, his
intimate friend and future biographer, recalled him at the Pickwick
period:
the quickness, keenness, and practical power, the eager, restless,
energetic outlook on each several feature [of his face] seemed to tell
so little of a student or writer of books, and so much of a man of
action and business in the world. Light and motion flashed from every
part of it.
He was proud of his art and devoted to improving it and using it to
good ends (his works would show, he wrote, that “Cheap Literature is not
behind-hand with the Age, but holds its place, and strives to do its
duty”), but his art never engaged all his formidable energies. He had no
desire to be narrowly literary.
A notable, though unsuccessful, demonstration of this was his being
founder-editor in 1846 of the Daily News (soon to become the leading
Liberal newspaper). His journalistic origins, his political convictions
and readiness to act as a leader of opinion, and his wish to secure a
steady income independent of his literary creativity and of any shifts
in novel readers’ tastes made him attempt or plan several periodical
ventures in the 1840s. The return to daily journalism soon proved a
mistake—the biggest fiasco in a career that included few such
misdirections or failures. A more limited but happier exercise of his
practical talents began soon afterward: for more than a decade he
directed, energetically and with great insight and compassion, a
reformatory home for young female delinquents, financed by his wealthy
friend Angela Burdett-Coutts. The benevolent spirit apparent in his
writings often found practical expression in his public speeches,
fund-raising activities, and private acts of charity.
Dombey and Son (1846–48) was a crucial novel in his development, a
product of more thorough planning and maturer thought and the first in
which “a pervasive uneasiness about contemporary society takes the place
of an intermittent concern with specific social wrongs” (Kathleen
Tillotson). Using railways prominently and effectively, it was very
up-to-date, though the questions posed included such perennial moral and
religious challenges as are suggested by the child Paul’s first words in
the story: “Papa, what’s money?” Some of the corruptions of money and
pride of place and the limitations of “respectable” values are explored,
virtue and human decency being discovered most often (as elsewhere in
Dickens) among the poor, humble, and simple. In Paul’s early death
Dickens offered another famous pathetic episode; in Mr. Dombey he made a
more ambitious attempt than before at serious and internal
characterization. David Copperfield (1849–50) has been described as a
“holiday” from these larger social concerns and most notable for its
childhood chapters, “an enchanting vein which he had never quite found
before and which he was never to find again” (Edmund Wilson). Largely
for this reason and for its autobiographical interest, it has always
been among his most popular novels and was Dickens’ own “favourite
child.” It incorporates material from the autobiography he had recently
begun but soon abandoned and is written in the first person, a new
technique for him. David differs from his creator in many ways, however,
though Dickens uses many early experiences that had meant much to
him—his period of work in the factory while his father was jailed, his
schooling and reading, his passion for Maria Beadnell, and (more
cursorily) his emergence from parliamentary reporting into successful
novel writing. In Micawber the novel presents one of the “Dickens
characters” whose imaginative potency extends far beyond the narratives
in which they figure; Pickwick and Sam Weller, Mrs. Gamp and Mr.
Pecksniff, and Scrooge are some others.
Middle years » Journalism
Dickens’ journalistic ambitions at last found a permanent form in
Household Words (1850–59) and its successor, All the Year Round
(1859–88). Popular weekly miscellanies of fiction, poetry, and essays on
a wide range of topics, these had substantial and increasing
circulations, reaching 300,000 for some of the Christmas numbers.
Dickens contributed some serials—the lamentable Child’s History of
England (1851–53), Hard Times (1854), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and
Great Expectations (1860–61)—and essays, some of which were collected in
Reprinted Pieces (1858) and The Uncommercial Traveller (1861, later
amplified). Particularly in 1850–52 and during the Crimean War, he
contributed many items on current political and social affairs; in later
years he wrote less—much less on politics—and the magazine was less
political, too. Other distinguished novelists contributed serials,
including Mrs. Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade, and Bulwer
Lytton. The poetry was uniformly feeble; Dickens was imperceptive here.
The reportage, often solidly based, was bright (sometimes painfully so)
in manner. His conduct of these weeklies shows his many skills as editor
and journalist but also some limitations in his tastes and intellectual
ambitions. The contents are revealing in relation to his novels: he took
responsibility for all the opinions expressed (for articles were
anonymous) and selected and amended contributions accordingly; thus
comments on topical events and so on may generally be taken as
representing his opinions, whether or not he wrote them. No English
author of comparable status has devoted 20 years of his maturity to such
unremitting editorial work, and the weeklies’ success was due not only
to his illustrious name but also to his practical sagacity and sustained
industry. Even in his creative work, as his eldest son said,
No city clerk was ever more methodical or orderly than he; no
humdrum, monotonous, conventional task could ever have been discharged
with more punctuality, or with more businesslike regularity.
Middle years » Novels
The novels of these years, Bleak House (1852–53), Hard Times (1854), and
Little Dorrit (1855–57), were much “darker” than their predecessors.
Presenting a remarkably inclusive and increasingly sombre picture of
contemporary society, they were inevitably often seen at the time as
fictionalized propaganda about ephemeral issues. They are much more than
this, though it is never easy to state how Dickens’ imagination
transforms their many topicalities into an artistically coherent vision
that transcends their immediate historical context. Similar questions
are raised by his often basing fictional characters, places, and
institutions on actual originals. He once spoke of his mind’s taking “a
fanciful photograph” of a scene, and there is a continual interplay
between photographic realism and “fancy” (or imagination). “He describes
London like a special correspondent for posterity” (Walter Bagehot,
1858), and posterity has certainly found in his fiction the response of
an acute, knowledgeable, and concerned observer to the social and
political developments of “the moving age.” In the novels of the 1850s,
he is politically more despondent, emotionally more tragic. The satire
is harsher, the humour less genial and abundant, the “happy endings”
more subdued than in the early fiction. Technically, the later novels
are more coherent, plots being more fully related to themes, and themes
being often expressed through a more insistent use of imagery and
symbols (grim symbols, too, such as the fog in Bleak House or the prison
in Little Dorrit). His art here is more akin to poetry than to what is
suggested by the photographic or journalistic comparisons. “Dickensian”
characterization continues in the sharply defined and simplified
grotesque or comic figures, such as Chadband in Bleak House or Mrs.
Sparsit in Hard Times, but large-scale figures of this type are less
frequent (the Gamps and Micawbers belong to the first half of his
career). Characterization also has become more subordinate to “the
general purpose and design”; moreover, Dickens is presenting characters
of greater complexity, who provoke more complex responses in the reader
(William Dorrit, for instance). Even the juvenile leads, who had usually
been thinly conceived conventional figures, are now often more
complicated in their make-up and less easily rewarded by good fortune.
With his secular hopes diminishing, Dickens becomes more concerned with
“the great final secret of all life”—a phrase from Little Dorrit, where
the spiritual dimension of his work is most overt. Critics disagree as
to how far so worldly a novelist succeeds artistically in enlarging his
view to include the religious. These novels, too, being manifestly an
ambitious attempt to explore the prospects of humanity at this time,
raise questions, still much debated, about the intelligence and
profundity of his understanding of society.
Middle years » Personal unhappiness
Dickens’ spirits and confidence in the future had indeed declined: 1855
was “a year of much unsettled discontent for him,” his friend Forster
recalled, partly for political reasons (or, as Forster hints, his
political indignation was exacerbated by a “discontent” that had
personal origins). The Crimean War, besides exposing governmental
inefficiency, was distracting attention from the “poverty, hunger, and
ignorant desperation” at home. In Little Dorrit, “I have been blowing
off a little of indignant steam which would otherwise blow me up . . .
,” he wrote, “but I have no present political faith or hope—not a
grain.” Not only were the present government and Parliament contemptible
but “representative government is become altogether a failure with us, .
. . the whole thing has broken down . . . and has no hope in it.” Nor
had he a coherent alternative to suggest. This desperation coincided
with an acute state of personal unhappiness. The brief tragicomedy of
Maria Beadnell’s reentry into his life, in 1855, finally destroyed one
nostalgic illusion and also betrayed a perilous emotional immaturity and
hunger. He now openly identified himself with some of the sorrows
dramatized in the adult David Copperfield:
Why is it, that as with poor David, a sense comes always crushing on
me, now, when I fall into low spirits, as of one happiness I have missed
in life, and one friend and companion I have never made?
This comes from the correspondence with Forster in 1854–55, which
contains the first admissions of his marital unhappiness; by 1856 he is
writing, “I find the skeleton in my domestic closet is becoming a pretty
big one”; by 1857–58, as Forster remarks, an “unsettled feeling” had
become almost habitual with him, “and the satisfactions which home
should have supplied, and which indeed were essential requirements of
his nature, he had failed to find in his home.” From May 1858, Catherine
Dickens lived apart from him. A painful scandal arose, and Dickens did
not act at this time with tact, patience, or consideration. The affair
disrupted some of his friendships and narrowed his social circle, but
surprisingly it seems not to have damaged his popularity with the
public.
Catherine Dickens maintained a dignified silence, and most of
Dickens’ family and friends, including his official biographer, Forster,
were discreetly reticent about the separation. Not until 1939 did one of
his children (Katey), speaking posthumously through conversations
recorded by a friend, offer a candid inside account. It was
discreditable to him, and his self-justifying letters must be viewed
with caution. He there dated the unhappiness of his marriage back to
1838, attributed to his wife various “peculiarities” of temperament
(including her sometimes labouring under “a mental disorder”),
emphatically agreed with her (alleged) statement that “she felt herself
unfit for the life she had to lead as my wife,” and maintained that she
never cared for the children nor they for her. In more temperate
letters, where he acknowledged her “amiable and complying” qualities, he
simply and more acceptably asserted that their temperaments were utterly
incompatible. She was, apparently, pleasant but rather limited; such
faults as she had were rather negative than positive, though family
tradition from a household that knew the Dickenses well speaks of her as
“a whiney woman” and as having little understanding of, or patience
with, the artistic temperament.
Dickens’ self-justifying letters lack candour in omitting to mention
Ellen Ternan, an actress 27 years his junior, his passion for whom had
precipitated the separation. Two months earlier he had written more
frankly to an intimate friend:
The domestic unhappiness remains so strong upon me that I can’t
write, and (waking) can’t rest, one minute. I have never known a
moment’s peace or content, since the last night of The Frozen Deep.
The Frozen Deep was a play in which he and Nelly (as Ellen was
called) had performed together in August 1857. She was an intelligent
girl, of an old theatrical family; reports speak of her as having “a
pretty face and well-developed figure”—or “passably pretty and not much
of an actress.” She left the stage in 1860; after Dickens’ death she
married a clergyman and helped him run a school. The affair was hushed
up until the 1930s, and evidence about it remains scanty, but every
addition confirms that Dickens was deeply attached to her and that their
relationship lasted until his death. It seems likely that she became his
mistress, though probably not until the 1860s; assertions that a child,
or children, resulted remain unproved. Similarly, suggestions that the
anguish experienced by some of the lovers in the later novels may
reflect Dickens’ own feelings remain speculative. It is tempting,
indeed, to associate Nelly with some of their heroines (who are more
spirited and complex, less of the “legless angel,” than most of their
predecessors), especially as her given names, Ellen Lawless, seem to be
echoed by those of heroines in the three final novels—Estella, Bella,
and Helena Landless—but nothing definite is known about how she
responded to Dickens, what she felt for him at the time, or how close
any of these later love stories were to aspects or phases of their
relationship.
“There is nothing very remarkable in the story,” commented one early
transmitter of it, and this seems just. Many middle-aged men feel an
itch to renew their emotional lives with a pretty young girl, even if,
unlike Dickens, they cannot plead indulgence for “the wayward and
unsettled feeling which is part (I suppose) of the tenure on which one
holds an imaginative life.” But the eventual disclosure of this episode
caused surprise, shock, or piquant satisfaction, being related of a man
whose rebelliousness against his society had seemed to take only
impeccably reformist shapes. A critic in 1851, listing the reasons for
his unique popularity, had cited “above all, his deep reverence for the
household sanctities, his enthusiastic worship of the household gods.”
After these disclosures he was, disconcertingly or intriguingly, a more
complex man; and, partly as a consequence, Dickens the novelist also
began to be seen as more complex, less conventional, than had been
realized. The stimulus was important, though Nelly’s significance,
biographically and critically, has proved far from inexhaustible.
Middle years » Public readings
In the longer term, Kathleen Tillotson’s remark is more suggestive: “his
lifelong love-affair with his reading public, when all is said, is by
far the most interesting love-affair of his life.” This took a new form,
about the time of Dickens’ separation from his wife, in his giving
public readings from his works, and it is significant that, when trying
to justify this enterprise as certain to succeed, he referred to “that
particular relation (personally affectionate and like no other man’s)
which subsists between me and the public.” The remark suggests how much
Dickens valued his public’s affection, not only as a stimulus to his
creativity and a condition for his commercial success but also as a
substitute for the love he could not find at home. He had been toying
with the idea of turning paid reader since 1853, when he began giving
occasional readings in aid of charity. The paid series began in April
1858, the immediate impulse being to find some energetic distraction
from his marital unhappiness. But the readings drew on more permanent
elements in him and his art: his remarkable histrionic talents, his love
of theatricals and of seeing and delighting an audience, and the
eminently performable nature of his fiction. Moreover, he could earn
more by reading than by writing, and more certainly; it was easier to
force himself to repeat a performance than create a book.
His initial repertoire consisted entirely of Christmas books but was
soon amplified by episodes from the novels and magazine Christmas
stories. A performance usually consisted of two items; of the 16
eventually performed, the most popular were “The Trial from Pickwick”
and the Carol. Comedy predominated, though pathos was important in the
repertoire, and horrifics were startlingly introduced in the last
reading he devised, “Sikes and Nancy,” with which he petrified his
audiences and half killed himself. Intermittently, until shortly before
his death, he gave seasons of readings in London and embarked upon
hardworking tours through the provinces and (in 1867–68) the United
States. Altogether he performed about 471 times. He was a magnificent
performer, and important elements in his art—the oral and dramatic
qualities—were demonstrated in these renderings. His insight and skill
revealed nuances in the narration and characterization that few readers
had noticed. Necessarily, such extracts or short stories, suitable for a
two-hour entertainment, excluded some of his larger and deeper
effects—notably, his social criticism and analysis—and his later novels
were underrepresented. Dickens never mentions these inadequacies. He
manifestly enjoyed the experience until, near the end, he was becoming
ill and exhausted. He was writing much less in the 1860s. It is
debatable how far this was because the readings exhausted his energies,
while providing the income, creative satisfaction, and continuous
contact with an audience that he had formerly obtained through the
novels. He gloried in his audiences’ admiration and love. Some friends
thought this too crude a gratification, too easy a triumph, and a sad
declension into a lesser and ephemeral art. In whatever way the episode
is judged, it was characteristic of him—of his relationship with his
public, his business sense, his stamina, his ostentatious display of
supplementary skills, and also of his originality. No important author
(at least, according to reviewers, since Homer) and no English author
since who has had anything like his stature has devoted so much time and
energy to this activity. The only comparable figure is his contemporary,
Mark Twain, who acknowledged Dickens as the pioneer.
Last years » Final novels
Tired and ailing though he was, he remained inventive and adventurous in
his final novels. A Tale of Two Cities (1859) was an experiment, relying
less than before on characterization, dialogue, and humour. An exciting
and compact narrative, it lacks too many of his strengths to count among
his major works. Sydney Carton’s self-sacrifice was found deeply moving
by Dickens and by many readers; Dr. Manette now seems a more impressive
achievement in serious characterization. The French Revolution scenes
are vivid, if superficial in historical understanding. Great
Expectations (1860–61) resembles Copperfield in being a first-person
narration and in drawing on parts of Dickens’ personality and
experience. Compact like its predecessor, it lacks the panoramic
inclusiveness of Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend, but,
though not his most ambitious, it is his most finely achieved novel. The
hero Pip’s mind is explored with great subtlety, and his development
through a childhood and youth beset with hard tests of character is
traced critically but sympathetically. Various “great expectations” in
the book proved ill founded—a comment as much on the values of the age
as on the characters’ weaknesses and misfortunes. Our Mutual Friend
(1864–65), a large inclusive novel, continues this critique of monetary
and class values. London is now grimmer than ever before, and the
corruption, complacency, and superficiality of “respectable” society are
fiercely attacked. Many new elements are introduced into Dickens’
fictional world, but his handling of the old comic-eccentrics (such as
Boffin, Wegg, and Venus) is sometimes tiresomely mechanical. How the
unfinished Edwin Drood (1870) would have developed is uncertain. Here
again Dickens left panoramic fiction to concentrate on a limited private
action. The central figure was evidently to be John Jasper, whose
eminent respectability as a cathedral organist was in extreme contrast
to his haunting low opium dens and, out of violent sexual jealousy,
murdering his nephew. It would have been his most elaborate treatment of
the themes of crime, evil, and psychological abnormality that had
recurred throughout his novels; a great celebrator of life, he was also
obsessed with death.
How greatly Dickens personally had changed appears in remarks by
friends who met him again, after many years, during the American reading
tour in 1867–68. “I sometimes think . . . ,” wrote one, “I must have
known two individuals bearing the same name, at various periods of my
own life.” But just as the fiction, despite many developments, still
contained many stylistic and narrative features continuous with the
earlier work, so, too, the man remained a “human hurricane,” though he
had aged considerably, his health had deteriorated, and his nerves had
been jangled by travelling ever since his being in a railway accident in
1865. Other Americans noted that, though grizzled, he was “as quick and
elastic in his movements as ever.” His photographs, wrote a journalist
after one of the readings, “give no idea of his genial expression. To us
he appears like a hearty, companionable man, with a deal of fun in him.”
But that very day Dickens was writing, “I am nearly used up,” and
listing the afflictions now “telling heavily upon me.” His pride and the
old-trouper tradition made him conceal his sufferings. And, if sometimes
by an effort of will, his old high spirits were often on display. “The
cheerfullest man of his age,” he was called by his American publisher,
J.T. Fields; Fields’s wife more perceptively noted, “Wonderful, the flow
of spirits C.D. has for a sad man.”
His fame remained undiminished, though critical opinion was
increasingly hostile to him. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, noting the
immense enthusiasm for him during the American tour, remarked: “One can
hardly take in the whole truth about it, and feel the universality of
his fame.” But in many respects he was “a sad man” in these later years.
He never was tranquil or relaxed. Various old friends were now estranged
or dead or for other reasons less available; he was now leading a less
social life and spending more time with young friends of a calibre
inferior to his former circle. His sons were causing much worry and
disappointment; “all his fame goes for nothing,” said a friend, “since
he has not the one thing. He is very unhappy in his children.” His life
was not all dreary, however. He loved his country house, Gad’s Hill, and
he could still “warm the social atmosphere wherever he appeared with
that summer glow which seemed to attend him.” T.A. Trollope (contributor
to Dickens’ All the Year Round and brother of the novelist Anthony
Trollope), who wrote that, despaired of giving people who had not met
him any idea of
the general charm of his manner. . . . His laugh was brimful of
enjoyment. . . . His enthusiasm was boundless. . . . He was a hearty
man, a large-hearted man, . . . a strikingly manly man.
Last years » Farewell readings
His health remained precarious after the punishing American tour and was
further impaired by his addiction to giving the strenuous “Sikes and
Nancy” reading. His farewell reading tour was abandoned when, in April
1869, he collapsed. He began writing another novel and gave a short
farewell season of readings in London, ending with the famous speech,
“From these garish lights I vanish now for evermore . . .”—words
repeated, less than three months later, on his funeral card. He died
suddenly in June 1870 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Assessment » Contemporary opinion
Ralph Waldo Emerson, attending one of Dickens’ readings in Boston,
“laughed as if he must crumble to pieces,” but, discussing Dickens
afterward, he said:
I am afraid he has too much talent for his genius; it is a fearful
locomotive to which he is bound and can never be free from it nor set to
rest. . . . He daunts me! I have not the key.
There is no simple key to so prolific and multifarious an artist nor
to the complexities of the man, and interpretation of both is made
harder by his possessing and feeling the need to exercise so many
talents besides his imagination. How his fiction is related to these
talents—practical, journalistic, oratorical, histrionic—remains
controversial. Also the geniality and unequalled comedy of the novels
must be related to the sufferings, errors, and self-pity of their author
and to his concern both for social evils and for the perennial griefs
and limitations of humanity. The novels cover a wide range, social,
moral, emotional, and psychological. Thus, he is much concerned with
very ordinary people but also with abnormality (e.g., eccentricity,
depravity, madness, hallucinations, dream states). He is both the most
imaginative and fantastic and the most topical and documentary of great
novelists. He is unequal, too; a wonderfully inventive and poetic
writer, he can also, even in his mature novels, write with a painfully
slack conventionality.
Biographers have only since the mid-20th century known enough to
explore the complexity of Dickens’ nature. Critics have always been
challenged by his art, though from the start it contained enough easily
acceptable ingredients, evident skill and gusto, to ensure popularity.
The earlier novels were and by and large have continued to be Dickens’
most popular works: The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Martin Chuzzlewit,
A Christmas Carol, and David Copperfield. Critics began to demur against
the later novels, deploring the loss of the freer comic spirit, baffled
by the more symbolic mode of his art, and uneasy when the simpler
reformism over isolated issues became a more radical questioning of
social assumptions and institutions. Dickens was never neglected or
forgotten and never lost his popularity, but for 70 years after his
death he received remarkably little serious attention (George Gissing,
G.K. Chesterton, and George Bernard Shaw being notable exceptions). F.R.
Leavis, later to revise his opinion, was speaking for many, in 1948,
when he asserted that “the adult mind doesn’t as a rule find in Dickens
a challenge to an unusual and sustained seriousness”; Dickens was indeed
a great genius, “but the genius was that of a great entertainer.”
Assessment » Modern criticism
Modern Dickens criticism dates from 1940–41, with the very different
impulses given by George Orwell, Edmund Wilson, and Humphry House. In
the 1950s, a substantial reassessment and re-editing of the works began,
his finest artistry and greatest depth now being discovered in the later
novels—Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Great Expectations—and (less
unanimously) in Hard Times and Our Mutual Friend. Scholars have explored
his working methods, his relations with his public, and the ways in
which he was simultaneously an eminently Victorian figure and an author
“not of an age but for all time.” Biographically, little had been added
to Forster’s massive and intelligent Life (1872–74), except the Ellen
Ternan story, until Edgar Johnson’s in 1952. Since then, no radically
new view has emerged, though several works—including those by Joseph
Gold (1972) and Fred Kaplan (1975)—have given particular phases or
aspects fuller attention. The centenary in 1970 demonstrated a critical
consensus about his standing second only to William Shakespeare in
English literature, which would have seemed incredible 40 or even 20
years earlier.
G.K. Chesterton’s biography of Charles Dickens appeared in the 14th
edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (see the Britannica Classic:
Charles Dickens).
Philip Collins
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Thackeray, Gaskell, and others
Unlike
Dickens,
William Makepeace Thackeray came from a
wealthy and educated background. The loss of his fortune
at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade
in the field of sketch writing and occasional
journalism. His early fictions were published as serials
in Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great
Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded 1841). For his
masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted
Dickens’s procedure of publication in monthly parts.
Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a
broad narrative sweep, a sophisticated
self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and
an ambitious historical survey of the transformation of
English life in the years between the Regency and the
mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this
sharpness. Vanity Fair was subtitled “A Novel Without a
Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental
Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
William Makepeace Thackeray
British author
born July 18, 1811, Calcutta, India
died Dec. 24, 1863, London, Eng.
Main
English novelist whose reputation rests chiefly on Vanity Fair
(1847–48), a novel of the Napoleonic period in England, and The History
of Henry Esmond, Esq. (1852), set in the early 18th century.
Life.
Thackeray was the only son of Richmond Thackeray, an administrator in
the East India Company. His father died in 1815, and in 1816 Thackeray
was sent home to England. His mother joined him in 1820, having married
(1817) an engineering officer with whom she had been in love before she
met Richmond Thackeray. After attending several grammar schools
Thackeray went in 1822 to Charterhouse, the London public (private)
school, where he led a rather lonely and miserable existence.
He was happier while studying at Trinity College, Cambridge
(1828–30). In 1830 he left Cambridge without taking a degree, and during
1831–33 he studied law at the Middle Temple, London. He then considered
painting as a profession; his artistic gifts are seen in his letters and
many of his early writings, which are amusingly and energetically
illustrated. All his efforts at this time have a dilettante air,
understandable in a young man who, on coming of age in 1832, had
inherited £20,000 from his father. He soon lost his fortune, however,
through gambling and unlucky speculations and investments. In 1836,
while studying art in Paris, he married a penniless Irish girl, and his
stepfather bought a newspaper so that he could remain there as its
correspondent. After the paper’s failure (1837) he took his wife back to
Bloomsbury, London, and became a hardworking and prolific professional
journalist.
Of Thackeray’s three daughters, one died in infancy (1839); and in
1840, after her last confinement, Mrs. Thackeray became insane. She
never recovered and long survived her husband, living with friends in
the country. Thackeray was, in effect, a widower, relying much on club
life and gradually giving more and more attention to his daughters, for
whom he established a home in London in 1846. The serial publication in
1847–48 of his novel Vanity Fair brought Thackeray both fame and
prosperity, and from then on he was an established author on the English
scene.
Thackeray’s one serious romantic attachment in his later life, to
Jane Brookfield, can be traced in his letters. She was the wife of a
friend of his Cambridge days, and during Thackeray’s “widowerhood,” when
his life lacked an emotional centre, he found one in the Brookfield
home. Henry Brookfield’s insistence in 1851 that his wife’s passionate
but platonic friendship with Thackeray should end was a grief greater
than any the author had known since his wife’s descent into insanity.
Thackeray tried to find consolation in travel, lecturing in the
United States on The English Humorists of the 18th Century (1852–53;
published 1853) and on The Four Georges (1855–56; published 1860). But
after 1856 he settled in London. He stood unsuccessfully for Parliament
in 1857, quarreled with Dickens, formerly a friendly rival, in the
so-called “Garrick Club Affair” (1858), and in 1860 founded The Cornhill
Magazine, becoming its editor. After he died in 1863, a commemorative
bust of him was placed in Westminster Abbey.
Early writings.
The 19th century was the age of the magazine, which had been developed
to meet the demand for family reading among the growing middle class. In
the late 1830s Thackeray became a notable contributor of articles on
varied topics to Fraser’s Magazine, The New Monthly Magazine, and,
later, to Punch. His work was unsigned or written under such pen names
as Mr. Michael Angelo Titmarsh, Fitz-Boodle, The Fat Contributor, or
Ikey Solomons. He collected the best of these early writings in
Miscellanies, 4 vol. (1855–57). These include The Yellowplush
Correspondence, the memoirs and diary of a young cockney footman written
in his own vocabulary and style; Major Gahagan (1838–39), a fantasy of
soldiering in India; Catherine (1839–40), a burlesque of the popular
“Newgate novels” of romanticized crime and low life, and itself a good
realistic crime story; The History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great
Hoggarty Diamond (1841), which was an earlier version of the young
married life described in Philip; and The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844;
revised as The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, 1856), which is a historical
novel and his first full-length work. Barry Lyndon is an excellent,
speedy, satirical narrative until the final sadistic scenes and was a
trial run for the great historical novels, especially Vanity Fair. The
Book of Snobs (1848) is a collection of articles that had appeared
successfully in Punch (as “The Snobs of England, by One of Themselves,”
1846–47). It consists of sketches of London characters and displays
Thackeray’s virtuosity in quick character-drawing. The Rose and the
Ring, Thackeray’s Christmas book for 1855, remains excellent
entertainment, as do some of his verses; like many good prose writers,
he had a facility in writing light verse and ballads.
Mature writings.
With Vanity Fair (1847–48), the first work published under his own name,
Thackeray adopted the system of publishing a novel serially in monthly
parts that had been so successfully used by Dickens. Set in the second
decade of the 19th century, the period of the Regency, the novel deals
mainly with the interwoven fortunes of two contrasting women, Amelia
Sedley and Becky Sharp. The latter, an unprincipled adventuress, is the
leading personage and is perhaps the most memorable character Thackeray
created. Subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero,” the novel is deliberately
antiheroic: Thackeray states that in this novel his object is to
“indicate . . . that we are for the most part . . . foolish and selfish
people . . . all eager after vanities.”
The wealthy, wellborn, passive Amelia Sedley and the ambitious,
energetic, scheming, provocative, and essentially amoral Becky Sharp,
daughter of a poor drawing master, are contrasted in their fortunes and
reactions to life, but the contrast of their characters is not the
simple one between moral good and evil—both are presented with
dispassionate sympathy. Becky is the character around whom all the men
play their parts in an upper middle-class and aristocratic background.
Amelia marries George Osborne, but George, just before he is killed at
the Battle of Waterloo, is ready to desert his young wife for Becky, who
has fought her way up through society to marriage with Rawdon Crawley, a
young officer of good family. Crawley, disillusioned, finally leaves
Becky, and in the end virtue apparently triumphs, Amelia marries her
lifelong admirer, Colonel Dobbin, and Becky settles down to genteel
living and charitable works.
The rich movement and colour of this panorama of early 19th-century
society make Vanity Fair Thackeray’s greatest achievement; the narrative
skill, subtle characterization, and descriptive power make it one of the
outstanding novels of its period. But Vanity Fair is more than a
portrayal and imaginative analysis of a particular society. Throughout
we are made subtly aware of the ambivalence of human motives, and so are
prepared for Thackeray’s conclusion: “Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us
is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire, or having it, is
satisfied?” It is its tragic irony that makes Vanity Fair a lasting and
insightful evaluation of human ambition and experience.
Successful and famous, Thackeray went on to exploit two lines of
development opened up in Vanity Fair: a gift for evoking the London
scene and for writing historical novels that demonstrate the connections
between past and present. He began with the first, writing The History
of Pendennis (1848–50), which is partly fictionalized autobiography. In
it, Thackeray traces the youthful career of Arthur Pendennis—his first
love affair, his experiences at “Oxbridge University,” his working as a
London journalist, and so on—achieving a convincing portrait of a
much-tempted young man.
Turning to the historical novel, Thackeray chose the reign of Queen
Anne for the period of The History of Henry Esmond, Esq., 3 vol. (1852).
Some critics had thought that Pendennis was a formless, rambling book.
In response, Thackeray constructed Henry Esmond with great care, giving
it a much more formal plot structure. The story, narrated by Esmond,
begins when he is 12, in 1691, and ends in 1718. Its complexity of
incident is given unity by Beatrix and Esmond, who stand out against a
background of London society and the political life of the time. Beatrix
dominates the book. Seen first as a charming child, she develops beauty
combined with a power that is fatal to the men she loves. One of
Thackeray’s great creations, she is a heroine of a new type, emotionally
complex and compelling, but not a pattern of virtue. Esmond, a
sensitive, brave, aristocratic soldier, falls in love with her but is
finally disillusioned. Befriended as an orphan by Beatrix’ parents, Lord
and Lady Castlewood, Henry initially adores Lady Castlewood as a mother
and eventually, in his maturity, marries her.
Written in a pastiche of 18th-century prose, the novel is one of the
best evocations in English of the atmosphere of a past age. It was not
well received, however—Esmond’s marriage to Lady Castlewood was
criticized. George Eliot called it “the most uncomfortable book you can
imagine.” But it has come to be accepted as a notable English historical
novel.
Thackeray returned to the contemporary scene in his novel The
Newcomes (1853–55). This work is essentially a detailed study of
prosperous middle-class society and is centred upon the family of the
title. Col. Thomas Newcome returns to London from India to be with his
son Clive. The unheroic but attractive Clive falls in love with his
cousin Ethel, but the love Clive and Ethel have for each other is fated
to be unhappily thwarted for years because of worldly considerations.
Clive marries Rose Mackenzie; the selfish, greedy, cold-hearted Barnes
Newcome, Ethel’s father and head of the family, intrigues against Clive
and the Colonel; and the Colonel invests his fortune imprudently and
ends as a pensioner in an almshouse. Rose dies in childbirth, and the
narrative ends with the Colonel’s death. This deathbed scene, described
with deep feeling that avoids sentimentality, is one of the most famous
in Victorian fiction. In a short epilogue Thackeray tells us that Clive
and Ethel eventually marry—but this, he says, is a fable.
The Virginians (1857–59), Thackeray’s next novel, is set partly in
America and partly in England in the latter half of the 18th century and
is concerned mostly with the vicissitudes in the lives of two brothers,
George and Henry Warrington, who are the grandsons of Henry Esmond, the
hero of his earlier novel. Thackeray wrote two other serial novels,
Lovel the Widower (1860) and The Adventures of Philip (1861–62). He died
after having begun writing the novel Denis Duval.
Assessment.
In his own time Thackeray was regarded as the only possible rival to
Dickens. His pictures of contemporary life were obviously real and were
accepted as such by the middle classes. A great professional, he
provided novels, stories, essays, and verses for his audience, and he
toured as a nationally known lecturer. He wrote to be read aloud in the
long Victorian family evenings, and his prose has the lucidity,
spontaneity, and pace of good reading material. Throughout his works,
Thackeray analyzed and deplored snobbery and frequently gave his
opinions on human behaviour and the shortcomings of society, though
usually prompted by his narrative to do so. He examined such subjects as
hypocrisy, secret emotions, the sorrows sometimes attendant on love,
remembrance of things past, and the vanity of much of life—such
moralizing being, in his opinion, an important function of the novelist.
He had little time for such favourite devices of Victorian novelists as
exaggerated characterization and melodramatic plots, preferring in his
own work to be more true to life, subtly depicting various moods and
plunging the reader into a stream of entertaining narrative,
description, dialogue, and comment.
Thackeray’s high reputation as a novelist continued unchallenged to
the end of the 19th century but then began to decline. Vanity Fair is
still his most interesting and readable work and has retained its place
among the great historical novels in the English language.
Laurence Brander
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Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the
“Condition of England” novelists of the 1840s,
responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and
Charles Kingsley to the economic crisis of that troubled
decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both
novels about social problems, as is North and South
(1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s Lovers
(1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the
remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis (1864)—this book also
has a psychological complexity that anticipates
George
Eliot’s novels of provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical
novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime novels, and
comic novels all flourished in this period. The years
1847–48, indeed, represent a pinnacle of simultaneous
achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity
Fair, Dombey and Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the
completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political
novels—Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred
(1847)—and the publication of first novels by Kingsley,
Anne Brontė,
Charlotte Brontė,
Emily Brontė, and
Anthony
Trollope. For the first time, literary genius appeared
to be finding its most natural expression in prose
fiction, rather than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the
poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
Elizabeth Gaskell
born Sept. 29, 1810, Chelsea,
London, Eng.
died Nov. 12, 1865, near Alton, Hampshire
English novelist, short-story writer, and
first biographer of Charlotte Brontė.
She was a daughter of a Unitarian
minister. When her mother died, she was
brought up by a maternal aunt in the
Cheshire village of Knutsford in a kindly
atmosphere of rural gentility that was
already old-fashioned at the time. In 1832
she married William Gaskell, a Unitarian
minister, and settled in the overcrowded,
problem-ridden industrial city of
Manchester, which remained her home for the
rest of her life. Domestic life—the Gaskells
had six children, of whom four daughters
lived to adulthood—and the social and
charitable obligations of a minister’s wife
claimed her time but not all her thoughts.
She did not begin her literary career until
middle life, when the death of her only son
had intensified her sense of community with
the poor and her desire to “give utterance”
to their “agony.” Her first novel, Mary
Barton, reflects the temper of Manchester in
the late 1830s. It is the story of a
working-class family in which the father,
John Barton, lapses into bitter class hatred
during a cyclic depression and carries out a
retaliatory murder at the behest of his
trade union. Its timely appearance in the
revolutionary year of 1848 brought the novel
immediate success, and it won the praise of
Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle. Dickens
invited her to contribute to his magazine,
Household Words, where her next major work,
Cranford (1853), appeared. This social
history of a gentler era, which describes,
without sentimentalizing or satirizing, her
girlhood village of Knutsford and the
efforts of its shabby-genteel inhabitants to
keep up appearances, has remained her most
popular work.
The conflict between Mrs. Gaskell’s
sympathetic understanding and the strictures
of Victorian morality resulted in a mixed
reception for her next social novel, Ruth
(1853). It offered an alternative to the
seduced girl’s traditional progress to
prostitution and an early grave.
Among the many friends attracted by Mrs.
Gaskell was Charlotte Brontė, who died in
1855 and whose biography Charlotte’s father,
Patrick Brontė, urged her to write. The Life
of Charlotte Brontė (1857), written with
warmhearted admiration, disposed of a mass
of firsthand material with unforced
narrative skill. It is at once a work of art
and a well-documented interpretation of its
subject.
Among her later works, Sylvia’s Lovers
(1863), dealing with the impact of the
Napoleonic Wars upon simple people, is
notable. Her last and longest work, Wives
and Daughters (1864–66), concerning the
interlocking fortunes of two or three
country families, is considered by many her
finest. It was left unfinished at her death.
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Frances Trollope
Frances Trollope (10 March 1780 – 6
October 1863) was an English novelist and
miscellaneous writer who published as Mrs.
Trollope or Mrs. Frances Trollope. Her
detractors diminished her reputation by
making the common name used for her the
overly familiar and slightly vulgar
diminutive Fanny Trollope. Her third son was
Anthony Trollope, the well-known novelist.
Her eldest son, Thomas Adolphus Trollope,
wrote The Girlhood of Catherine de Medici,
History of Florence, What I Remember, Life
of Pius IX, and some novels.
She was born at Stapleton, Bristol,
and in 1809 married Thomas A. Trollope, a
barrister, who fell into financial
misfortune. She then in 1827 went with her
family to Fanny Wright's utopian community,
Nashoba Commune, in America. This community
soon failed, and she ended up in Cincinnati,
Ohio, where the efforts which she made to
support herself were unsuccessful, though
she encouraged Hiram Powers to do Dante
Alighieri's Commedia in waxworks. On her
return to England, however, she brought
herself into notice by publishing Domestic
Manners of the Americans (1832), in which
she gave an unfavourable and, in the
opinions of partisans of America, somewhat
exaggerated account of the subject,
reflecting the disparaging views of American
society allegedly commonplace among English
people of the higher social classes at that
time; and a novel, The Refugee in America,
pursued it on similar lines. Next came The
Abbess and Belgium and Western Germany, and
other works of the same kind on Paris and
the Parisians, and Vienna and the Austrians
followed.
Trollope also, however, wrote several
strong novels of social protest: Michael
Armstrong: Factory Boy began publication in
1840 and was the first industrial novel to
be published in Britain. Other socially
conscious novels included Jonathan Jefferson
Whitlaw (1836, the first anti-slavery novel,
influencing Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle
Tom's Cabin) about the evils of slavery, and
The Vicar of Wrexhill, which took on church
corruption. Possibly her greatest work is
the Widow Barnaby trilogy, which set a
pattern followed by Anthony in the frequent
use of sequels in his oeuvre.
In later years she continued to write
novels and books on miscellaneous subjects,
writing in all over 100 volumes. Though
possessed of considerable powers of
observation and a sharp and caustic wit,
such an output was fatal to permanent
literary success, and few of her books are
now read. She spent the last 20 years of her
life at Florence, where she died in 1863,
being buried with four other members of the
Trollope household in the English Cemetery
of Florence.
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Benjamin Disraeli
born December 21, 1804, London,
England
died April 19, 1881, London
British statesman and novelist who was twice
prime minister (1868, 1874–80) and who
provided the Conservative Party with a
twofold policy of Tory democracy and
imperialism.
Early life.
Disraeli was of Italian-Jewish descent,
the eldest son and second child of Isaac
D’Israeli and Maria Basevi. The most
important event in Disraeli’s boyhood was
his father’s quarrel in 1813 with the
synagogue of Bevis Marks, which led to the
decision in 1817 to have his children
baptized as Christians. Until 1858 Jews by
religion were excluded from Parliament;
except for the father’s decision Disraeli’s
political career could never have taken the
form it did.
Disraeli was educated at small private
schools. At the age of 17 he was articled to
a firm of solicitors, but he longed to
become notable in a more sensational manner.
His first efforts were disastrous. In 1824
he speculated recklessly in South American
mining shares, and, when he lost all a year
later, he was left so badly in debt that he
did not recover until well past middle age.
Earlier he had persuaded the publisher John
Murray, his father’s friend, to launch a
daily newspaper, the Representative. It was
a complete failure. Disraeli, unable to pay
his promised share of the capital, quarreled
with Murray and others. Moreover, in his
novel Vivian Grey (1826–27), published
anonymously, he lampooned Murray while
telling the story of the failure. Disraeli
was unmasked as the author, and he was
widely criticized.
Disraeli suffered what would later be
called a nervous breakdown and did little
during the next four years. He wrote another
extravagant novel, The Young Duke (1831),
and in 1830 began 16 months of travel in the
Mediterranean countries and the Middle East.
These travels not only furnished him with
material for Oriental descriptions he used
in later novels but also influenced his
attitude in foreign relations with India,
Egypt, and Turkey in the 1870s.
Back in England, he was active in London
social and literary life, where his
dandified dress, conceit and affectation,
and exotic good looks made him a striking if
not always popular figure. He was invited to
fashionable parties and met most of the
celebrities of the day. His novel Contarini
Fleming (1832) has considerable
autobiographical interest, like many of his
novels, as well as echoes of his political
thought.
Political beginnings.
By 1831 Disraeli had decided to enter
politics and sought a seat in
Buckinghamshire, near Wycombe, where his
family had settled. As an independent
radical, he stood for and lost High Wycombe
twice in 1832 and once in 1835. Realizing
that he must attach himself to one of the
political parties, he made a somewhat
eccentric interpretation of Toryism, which
some features of his radicalism fitted. In
1835 he unsuccessfully stood for Taunton as
the official Conservative candidate. His
extravagant behaviour, great debts, and open
liaison with Henrietta, wife of Sir Francis
Sykes (the prototype of the heroine in his
novel Henrietta Temple [1837]), all gave him
a dubious reputation. In 1837, however, he
successfully stood for Maidstone in Kent as
the Conservative candidate. His maiden
speech in the House of Commons was a
failure. Elaborate metaphors, affected
mannerisms, and foppish dress led to his
being shouted down. But he was not silenced.
He concluded, defiantly and prophetically,
“I will sit down now, but the time will come
when you will hear me.”
Before long, Disraeli became a speaker
who commanded attention. He established his
social position by marrying in 1839 Mrs.
Wyndham Lewis, a widow with a life interest
in a London house and £4,000 a year. She was
deeply devoted to Disraeli, and when he
teased her in company that he had married
for her worldly goods, she would say: “Dizzy
married me for my money but if he had the
chance again he would marry me for love.”
Her husband agreed.
Breach with Peel.
The Conservative leader, Sir Robert
Peel, encouraged Disraeli, but when in 1841
the Conservatives won the election and Peel
became prime minister, Disraeli was not
given office in the Cabinet. He was
mortified at the rebuff, and his attitude
toward Peel and his brand of Conservatism
became increasingly critical. A group of
young Tories, nicknamed Young England, and
led by George Smythe (later Lord Stangford),
looked to Disraeli for inspiration, and he
obliged them, notably in his novel
Coningsby; or The New Generation (1844), in
which the hero is patterned on Smythe, and
the cool, pragmatic, humdrum, middle-class
Conservatism that Peel represented is
contrasted to Young England’s romantic,
aristocratic, nostalgic, and escapist
attitude.
In 1845, when the combination of the
Irish famine and the arguments of Richard
Cobden convinced Peel to repeal the
protective duties on foreign imported grain
known as the Corn Laws, Disraeli found his
issue. Young England could rally against
Peel not only their own members but the
great mass of the country squires who formed
the backbone of the Conservative Party. As
lieutenant to Lord George Bentinck, the
nominal leader of the rebels, Disraeli
consolidated the opposition to Peel in a
series of brilliant speeches. His invective
greatly embittered the battle and created
lasting resentment among Peel’s followers.
While Disraeli and his fellow protectionists
could not stop the repeal of the Corn Laws
because the Whigs also backed the bill, the
rebels put Peel in the minority on another
issue and forced him to resign in 1846.
Conservative leader.
The loyalty of most of the Conservative
former ministers to Peel and the death of
Bentinck made Disraeli indisputably the
leader of the opposition in the Commons.
Disraeli spent the next few years trying to
extricate his party from what he had come to
recognize as the “hopeless cause” of
protection. While Disraeli’s policy was
sensible, it raised mistrust among his
followers, as did his pride in and
insistence upon his Jewish ancestry. The
party could not, however, do without his
talents. His election to Parliament as
member for Buckinghamshire in 1847 and his
purchase of Hughenden Manor, near High
Wycombe, in 1848 fortified his social and
political power. His finances, however,
remained shaky.
When the Whig government fell in 1852 and
the Earl of Derby, leader of the
Conservative Party, formed a short-lived
minority government, Disraeli was chancellor
of the Exchequer despite his protest that he
knew nothing of finance. His budget in fact
brought the government down in 1852, though
Disraeli could hardly be blamed. The
free-trade majority in the House was
determined to defeat measures that relieved
agriculture, even though the method chosen
did not involve protection; yet Disraeli had
to bring forward some such proposals to
placate his followers. Again, until 1858,
the Tories were in opposition. Then Derby
again formed a minority government with
Disraeli as chancellor of the Exchequer.
Disraeli for some time had felt there was no
reason to allow parliamentary reform to be a
Whig monopoly, and so he introduced a
moderate reform bill in 1859. The bill,
however, seemed too obviously designed to
help his party, and so it was defeated; the
Tories again were out of office and remained
so for six years.
In 1865 when the Whig-Liberal leader Lord
Russell brought forward a moderate reform
bill, a combination of Tory opposition and a
revolt against Russell toppled his
government. Derby formed his third minority
government with Disraeli as chancellor of
the Exchequer. Although the initiative for a
new Conservative reform bill came from Queen
Victoria and Lord Derby, Disraeli introduced
it in the House and conducted the fight for
it with unsurpassed enthusiasm and mastery
of parliamentary tactics. He believed the
bill should be a sweeping one with certain
safeguards, and he was determined that it
should be carried by a Conservative
government. The Liberals, however, had a
majority, and he had to accept their
amendments, which removed nearly all the
safeguards. The bill that passed doubled the
existing electorate and was more democratic
than most Conservatives had foreseen. Derby
called it “a leap in the dark”; but Disraeli
could fairly claim that the bill had gone
far toward “realizing the dream of my life
and re-establishing Toryism as a national
foundation.”
The “top of the greasy pole.” In 1868
when Derby retired from politics, Disraeli
became prime minister. “Yes,” he said in
reply to a friend’s congratulations, “I have
climbed to the top of a greasy pole.” The
government was only a caretaker one, for the
general election awaited only the completion
of a new electoral register, and later in
1868 the Liberals won. Disraeli set a
precedent by resigning before Parliament
met.
In the following 12-year period, politics
changed from the chaotic collection of
ill-defined, shifting groups that had been
common from the beginning of Disraeli’s
career. Now the old politics defined by
personalities shifted to an emergence of two
parties with coherent policies. The party
leaders, Disraeli and William E. Gladstone,
were implacable enemies, and they polarized
the parties.
At first Disraeli played a comparatively
peaceful role. He tried to create a new
image for the Conservative Party that he
hoped would persuade the new electorate. His
seeming apathy disturbed his followers, and
his novel Lothair (3 vol., 1870), a
political comedy, seemed to some of them
undignified.
From 1872, however, Disraeli ran the
party with a firm hand. He sharply
differentiated Conservative from Liberal
policy on several issues: he defended the
monarchy, the House of Lords, and the church
against what he took to be the threat of
radical Liberal policy; he put forth a
policy to consolidate the empire, with
special emphasis on India; he dwelt on
social reform; he enunciated a strong
foreign policy, especially against Russia.
In 1872 Disraeli’s wife died of cancer
after many months of illness. Her death
brought material losses: her house in London
and her fortune passed to cousins. At age 68
his health was not good, but he turned
implacably to political battle. He began a
romantic friendship with two sisters, Lady
Bradford and Lady Chesterfield, with whom he
corresponded on politics and his personal
feelings until his death.
His political fortunes turned when
Gladstone’s ministry was defeated in 1873.
When Gladstone resigned, Disraeli refused to
take office, pleading there was too much
uncompleted business to dissolve Parliament,
and that a minority government could only
damage his party’s prospects. Gladstone
reluctantly returned to office, but within a
year he dissolved the Parliament himself.
Disraeli had been at work on party
organization and electoral machinery, and
the Conservatives won a resounding victory
in 1874.
Second administration.
Disraeli gained power too late. He aged
rapidly during his second ministry. But he
formed a strong Cabinet and profited from
the friendship of the Queen, a political
conservative who disliked Gladstone.
Disraeli treated her as a human being,
whereas Gladstone treated her as a political
institution.
In regard to social reform, Disraeli was
able at last to show that Tory democracy was
more than a slogan. The Artizans’ and
Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act made
effective slum clearance possible. The
Public Health Act of 1875 codified the
complicated law on that subject. Equally
important were an enlightened series of
factory acts (1874, 1878) preventing the
exploitation of labour and two trades union
acts that clarified the legal position of
those bodies.
Disraeli’s imperial and foreign policies
were even more in the public eye. His first
great success was the acquisition of Suez
Canal shares. The extravagant and
spendthrift khedive Ismāʾīl Pasha of Egypt
owned slightly less than half the Suez Canal
Company’s shares and was anxious to sell. An
English journalist discovered this fact and
told the Foreign Office. Disraeli overrode
its recommendation against the purchase and
bought the shares using funds provided by
the Rothschild family until Parliament could
confirm the bargain. The deal was seen as a
notable triumph for imperial prestige. Early
in 1876 Disraeli brought in a bill
conferring on Queen Victoria the title
empress of India. There was much opposition,
and Disraeli would have gladly postponed it,
but the Queen insisted. For some time his
poor health had made leading the Commons
onerous, so he accepted a peerage, taking
the title earl of Beaconsfield, and became
leader in the House of Lords.
Foreign policy largely occupied him until
1878. The Russian–Turkish conflict had lain
dormant since the Crimean War in the 1850s,
but Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire
revolted against intolerable misrule. Russia
declared war on Turkey in 1877 and reached
the gates of Constantinople early in 1878.
Britain feared for the safety of the route
to India, but Disraeli correctly judged that
a show of force would be enough to bring the
exhausted Russian forces to terms. The
highly Pan-Slavist Treaty of Stefano forced
on Turkey by Russia had to be submitted to a
European Congress at Berlin in 1878.
Beaconsfield attended and won all
concessions he wanted. He returned to London
in triumph, declaring that he had brought
back “peace with honour.”
At this climax of his career, the Queen
offered him a dukedom, which he refused, and
the Order of the Garter, which he accepted.
Thereafter his fortunes waned with disaster
in Afghanistan, forces slaughtered in South
Africa, agricultural distress, and an
industrial slump. The Conservatives were
heavily defeated in the general election of
1880. Beaconsfield kept his party leadership
and finished Endymion (3 vol., 1880), a
mellow, nostalgic political novel viewing
his early career. His health failed rapidly,
and a few days after his burial in the
family vault at Hughenden, Queen Victoria
came to lay a wreath upon the tomb of her
favourite prime minister.
Robert Norman William Blake, Baron
Blake
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Charles Kingsley
born June 12, 1819, Holne
Vicarage, Devon, Eng.
died Jan. 23, 1875, Eversley, Hampshire
Anglican clergyman and writer whose
successful fiction ranged from
social-problem novels to historical romances
and children’s literature.
The son of a clergyman, he grew up in
Devon, where he developed an interest in
nature study and geology. After graduating
from Magdalene College, Cambridge, he was
ordained in 1842 as curate of Eversley and
two years later became parish priest there.
Much influenced by the theologian Frederick
Denison Maurice, he became in 1848 a
founding member of the Christian Socialist
movement, which sought to correct the evils
of industrialism through measures based on
Christian ethics. His first novel, Yeast
(printed in Fraser’s Magazine, 1848; in book
form, 1851), deals with the relations of the
landed gentry to the rural poor. His second,
the much superior Alton Locke (1850), is the
story of a tailor-poet who rebels against
the ignominy of sweated labour and becomes a
leader of the Chartist movement. Kingsley
advocated adult education, improved
sanitation, and the growth of the
cooperative movement, rather than political
change, for the amelioration of social
problems. The strenuous tone of his Broad
Church Protestantism is often described as
“muscular Christianity.” His novels,
similarly, are often attributed to the
“muscular” school of fiction.
Kingsley soon turned to writing popular
historical novels. Hypatia (1853) is a
luridly erotic story set in early Christian
Egypt. Westward Ho! (1855) is an imperialist
and anti-Roman Catholic adventure set in the
Elizabethan period, and Hereward the Wake
(1866) is about Anglo-Saxon England and the
Norman Conquest, also with an anti-Catholic
slant. Kingsley’s fear of the trend within
the church toward Roman Catholicism, growing
out of the Oxford Movement, led to a
notorious controversy with John Henry (later
Cardinal) Newman. In answer to an attack by
Kingsley, Newman wrote his Apologia pro Vita
Sua (1864), the history of his religious
development.
The didactic children’s fantasy The
Water-Babies (1863) combines Kingsley’s
concern for sanitary reform with his
interest in natural history and the theory
of evolution. He was also a very competent
poet who wrote some memorable ballads
(“Airly Beacon,” “The Sands of Dee,” “Young
and Old” ). Kingsley became chaplain to
Queen Victoria (1859), professor of modern
history at Cambridge (1860–69), and canon of
Westminster (1873). His brother Henry
Kingsley was a novelist, and his niece Mary
Henrietta Kingsley was a travel writer and
adventurer.
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The Brontės
The Brontë sisters, painted by their brother, Branwell c. 1834.
From left to right, Anne, Emily and Charlotte
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse
could be absorbed, rather than simply superseded, by the
Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work
of the Brontė sisters. Growing up in a remote but
cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children,
invented the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal.
These inventions supplied the context for many of the
poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication,
Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846). Their
Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the
novels that began to be published in the following year.
Anne Brontė wrote of the painful reality of
disagreeable experience, although both her novels have
cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark
account of the working life of a governess, and The
Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of
the heroine’s marriage to an abusive husband.
Charlotte
Brontė, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In
her first novel,
Jane Eyre (1847), for example, the
heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty
belongs very firmly to the mode of moral realism. But
her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with
her employer and the death by fire of his mad first wife
derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontė strove to be,
in her own words, “as unromantic as Monday morning.” In
Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return
to lend this study of the limits of stoicism an
unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontė united these diverse traditions still
more successfully in her only novel, Wuthering Heights
(1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely
handled plot, and a sophisticated use of multiple
internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and
an extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly
achieved study of elemental passions and the strongest
possible refutation of the assumption that the age of
the novel must also be an age of realism.
Anne Brontë
British author
pseudonym Acton Bell
born Jan. 17, 1820, Thornton, Yorkshire, Eng.
died May 28, 1849, Scarborough, Yorkshire
Main
English poet and novelist, sister of Charlotte and Emily Brontë
and author of Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
(1848).
The youngest of six children of Patrick and Marie Brontë,
Anne was taught in the family’s Haworth home and at Roe Head
School. With her sister Emily, she invented the imaginary
kingdom of Gondal, about which they wrote verse and prose (the
latter now lost) from the early 1830s until 1845. She took a
position as governess briefly in 1839 and then again for four
years, 1841–45, with the Robinsons, the family of a clergyman,
at Thorpe Green, near York. There her irresponsible brother,
Branwell, joined her in 1843, intending to serve as a tutor.
Anne returned home in 1845 and was followed shortly by her
brother, who had been dismissed, charged with making love to his
employer’s wife.
In 1846 Anne contributed 21 poems to Poems by Currer, Ellis and
Acton Bell, a joint work with her sisters Charlotte and Emily.
Her first novel, Agnes Grey, was published together with Emily’s
Wuthering Heights in three volumes (of which Agnes Grey was the
third) in December 1847. The reception to these volumes,
associated in the public mind with the immense popularity of
Charlotte’s Jane Eyre (October 1847), led to quick publication
of Anne’s second novel (again as Acton Bell), The Tenant of
Wildfell Hall, published in three volumes in June 1848; it sold
well. She fell ill with tuberculosis toward the end of the year
and died the following May.
Her novel Agnes Grey, probably begun at Thorpe Green, records
with limpidity and some humour the life of a governess. George
Moore called it “simple and beautiful as a muslin dress.” The
Tenant of Wildfell Hall presents an unsoftened picture of the
debauchery and degradation of the heroine’s first husband and
sets against it the Arminian belief, opposed to Calvinist
predestination, that no soul shall be ultimately lost. Her
outspokenness raised some scandal, and Charlotte deplored the
subject as morbid and out of keeping with her sister’s nature,
but the vigorous writing indicates that Anne found in it not
only a moral obligation but also an opportunity of artistic
development.
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Charlotte Bronte
"Jane
Eyre" CHAPTER
I-XXIV,
CHAPTER XXV-XXXVIII
Illustrations by F. H. Townsend
British author
married name Mrs. Arthur Bell Nicholls, pseudonym Currer Bell
born April 21, 1816, Thornton, Yorkshire, England
died March 31, 1855, Haworth, Yorkshire
Main
English novelist, noted for Jane Eyre (1847), a strong narrative of a
woman in conflict with her natural desires and social condition. The
novel gave new truthfulness to Victorian fiction. She later wrote
Shirley (1849) and Villette (1853).
Life.
Her father was Patrick Brontë (1777–1861), an Anglican clergyman.
Irish-born, he had changed his name from the more commonplace Brunty.
After serving in several parishes, he moved with his wife, Maria
Branwell Brontë, and their six small children to Haworth amid the
Yorkshire moors in 1820, having been awarded a rectorship there. Soon
after, Mrs. Brontë and the two eldest children (Maria and Elizabeth)
died, leaving the father to care for the remaining three
girls—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—and a boy, Patrick Branwell. Their
upbringing was aided by an aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, who left her native
Cornwall and took up residence with the family at Haworth.
In 1824 Charlotte and Emily, together with their elder sisters before
their deaths, attended Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, near
Kirkby Lonsdale, Lancashire. The fees were low, the food unattractive,
and the discipline harsh. Charlotte condemned the school (perhaps
exaggeratedly) long years afterward in Jane Eyre, under the thin
disguise of Lowood; and the principal, the Rev. William Carus Wilson,
has been accepted as the counterpart of Mr. Naomi Brocklehurst in the
novel.
Charlotte and Emily returned home in June 1825, and for more than
five years the Brontë children learned and played there, writing and
telling romantic tales for one another and inventing imaginative games
played out at home or on the desolate moors.
In 1831 Charlotte was sent to Miss Wooler’s school at Roe Head, near
Huddersfield, where she stayed a year and made some lasting friendships;
her correspondence with one of her friends, Ellen Nussey, continued
until her death, and has provided much of the current knowledge of her
life. In 1832 she came home to teach her sisters but in 1835 returned to
Roe Head as a teacher. She wished to improve her family’s position, and
this was the only outlet that was offered to her unsatisfied energies.
Branwell, moreover, was to start on his career as an artist, and it
became necessary to supplement the family resources. The work, with its
inevitable restrictions, was uncongenial to Charlotte. She fell into ill
health and melancholia and in the summer of 1838 terminated her
engagement.
In 1839 Charlotte declined a proposal from the Rev. Henry Nussey, her
friend’s brother, and some months later one from another young
clergyman. At the same time Charlotte’s ambition to make the practical
best of her talents and the need to pay Branwell’s debts urged her to
spend some months as governess with the Whites at Upperwood House,
Rawdon. Branwell’s talents for writing and painting, his good classical
scholarship, and his social charm had engendered high hopes for him; but
he was fundamentally unstable, weak willed, and intemperate. He went
from job to job and took refuge in alcohol and opium.
Meanwhile his sisters had planned to open a school together, which
their aunt had agreed to finance, and in February 1842 Charlotte and
Emily went to Brussels as pupils to improve their qualifications in
French and acquire some German. The talent displayed by both brought
them to the notice of Constantin Héger, a fine teacher and a man of
unusual perception. After a brief trip home upon the death of her aunt,
Charlotte returned to Brussels as a pupil-teacher. She stayed there
during 1843 but was lonely and depressed. Her friends had left Brussels,
and Madame Héger appears to have become jealous of her. The nature of
Charlotte’s attachment to Héger and the degree to which she understood
herself have been much discussed. His was the most interesting mind she
had yet met, and he had perceived and evoked her latent talents. His
strong and eccentric personality appealed both to her sense of humour
and to her affections. She offered him an innocent but ardent devotion,
but he tried to repress her emotions. The letters she wrote to him after
her return may well be called love letters. When, however, he suggested
that they were open to misapprehension, she stopped writing and applied
herself, in silence, to disciplining her feelings. However they are
interpreted, Charlotte’s experiences at Brussels were crucial for her
development. She received a strict literary training, became aware of
the resources of her own nature, and gathered material that served her,
in various shapes, for all her novels.
In 1844 Charlotte attempted to start a school that she had long
envisaged in the parsonage itself, as her father’s failing sight
precluded his being left alone. Prospectuses were issued, but no pupils
were attracted to distant Haworth.
In the autumn of 1845 Charlotte came across some poems by Emily, and
this led to the publication of a joint volume of Poems by Currer, Ellis
and Acton Bell (1846), or Charlotte, Emily, and Anne; the pseudonyms
were assumed to preserve secrecy and avoid the special treatment that
they believed reviewers accorded to women. The book was issued at their
own expense. It received few reviews and only two copies were sold.
Nevertheless, a way had opened to them, and they were already trying to
place the three novels they had written. Charlotte failed to place The
Professor: A Tale but had, however, nearly finished Jane Eyre: An
Autobiography, begun in August 1846 in Manchester, where she was staying
with her father, who had gone there for an eye operation. When Smith,
Elder and Company, declining The Professor, declared themselves willing
to consider a three-volume novel with more action and excitement in it,
she completed and submitted it at once. Jane Eyre was accepted,
published less than eight weeks later (on Oct. 16, 1847), and had an
immediate success, far greater than that of the books that her sisters
published the same year.
The months that followed were tragic ones. Branwell died in September
1848, Emily in December, and Anne in May 1849. Charlotte completed
Shirley: A Tale in the empty parsonage, and it appeared in October. In
the following years Charlotte went three times to London as the guest of
her publisher; there she met the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray
and sat for her portrait by George Richmond. She stayed in 1851 with the
writer Harriet Martineau and also visited her future biographer, Mrs.
Elizabeth Gaskell, in Manchester and entertained her at Haworth.
Villette came out in January 1853. Meanwhile, in 1851, she had declined
a third offer of marriage, this time from James Taylor, a member of
Smith, Elder and Company. Her father’s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls
(1817–1906), an Irishman, was her fourth suitor. It took some months to
win her father’s consent, but they were married on June 29, 1854, in
Haworth church. They spent their honeymoon in Ireland and then returned
to Haworth, where her husband had pledged himself to continue as curate
to her father. He did not share his wife’s intellectual life, but she
was happy to be loved for herself and to take up her duties as his wife.
She began another book, Emma, of which some pages remain. Her pregnancy,
however, was accompanied by exhausting sickness, and she died in 1855.
Jane Eyre and other novels.
Charlotte’s first novel, The Professor (published posthumously, 1857),
shows her sober reaction from the indulgences of her girlhood. Told in
the first person by an English tutor in Brussels, it is based on
Charlotte’s experiences there, with a reversal of sexes and roles. The
necessity of her genius, reinforced by reading her sister Emily’s
Wuthering Heights, modified this restrictive self-discipline; and,
though there is plenty of satire and dry, direct phrasing in Jane Eyre,
its success was the fiery conviction with which it presented a thinking,
feeling woman, craving for love but able to renounce it at the call of
impassioned self-respect and moral conviction. The book’s narrator and
main character, Jane Eyre, is an orphan and is governess to the ward of
Mr. Rochester, the Byronic and enigmatic employer with whom she falls in
love. Her love is reciprocated, but on the wedding morning it comes out
that Rochester is already married and keeps his mad and depraved wife in
the attics of his mansion. Jane leaves him, suffers hardship, and finds
work as a village schoolmistress. When Jane learns, however, that
Rochester has been maimed and blinded while trying vainly to rescue his
wife from the burning house that she herself had set afire, Jane seeks
him out and marries him. There are melodramatic naïvetés in the story,
and Charlotte’s elevated rhetorical passages do not much appeal to
modern taste, but she maintains her hold on the reader. The novel is
subtitled An Autobiography and is written in the first person; but,
except in Jane Eyre’s impressions of Lowood, the autobiography is not
Charlotte’s. Personal experience is fused with suggestions from widely
different sources, and the Cinderella theme may well come from Samuel
Richardson’s Pamela. The action is carefully motivated, and apparently
episodic sections, like the return to Gateshead Hall, are seen to be
necessary to the full expression of Jane’s character and the working out
of the threefold moral theme of love, independence, and forgiveness.
In her novel Shirley, Charlotte avoided melodrama and coincidences
and widened her scope. Setting aside Maria Edgworth and Sir Walter Scott
as national novelists, Shirley is the first regional novel in English,
full of shrewdly depicted local material—Yorkshire characters, church
and chapel, the cloth workers and machine breakers of her father’s early
manhood, and a sturdy but rather embittered feminism.
In Villette she recurred to the Brussels setting and the first-person
narrative, disused in Shirley; the characters and incidents are largely
variants of the people and life at the Pension Héger. Against this
background she set the ardent heart, deprived of its object, contrasted
with the woman happily fulfilled in love.
The influence of Charlotte’s novels was much more immediate than that
of Wuthering Heights. Charlotte’s combination of romance and satiric
realism had been the mode of nearly all the women novelists for a
century. Her fruitful innovations were the presentation of a tale
through the sensibility of a child or young woman, her lyricism, and the
picture of love from a woman’s standpoint.
Joyce M.S. Tompkins
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Emily Brontë
British author
pseudonym Ellis Bell
born July 30, 1818, Thornton, Yorkshire, Eng.
died Dec. 19, 1848, Haworth, Yorkshire
Main
English novelist and poet who produced but one novel, Wuthering Heights
(1847), a highly imaginative novel of passion and hate set on the
Yorkshire moors. Emily was perhaps the greatest of the three Brontë
sisters, but the record of her life is extremely meagre, for she was
silent and reserved and left no correspondence of interest, and her
single novel darkens rather than solves the mystery of her spiritual
existence.
Life.
Her father, Patrick Brontë (1777–1861), an Irishman, held a number of
curacies: Hartshead-cum-Clifton, Yorkshire, was the birthplace of his
elder daughters, Maria and Elizabeth (who died young), and nearby
Thornton that of Emily and her siblings Charlotte, Patrick Branwell, and
Anne. In 1820 the father became rector of Haworth, remaining there for
the rest of his life.
After the death of their mother in 1821, the children were left very
much to themselves in the bleak moorland rectory. The children were
educated, during their early life, at home, except for a single year
that Charlotte and Emily spent at the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan
Bridge in Lancashire. In 1835, when Charlotte secured a teaching
position at Miss Wooler’s school at Roe Head, Emily accompanied her as a
pupil but suffered from homesickness and remained only three months. In
1838 Emily spent six exhausting months as a teacher in Miss Patchett’s
school at Law Hill, near Halifax, and then resigned.
To keep the family together at home, Charlotte planned to keep a
school for girls at Haworth. In February 1842 she and Emily went to
Brussels to learn foreign languages and school management at the Pension
Héger. Although Emily pined for home and for the wild moorlands, it
seems that in Brussels she was better appreciated than Charlotte. Her
passionate nature was more easily understood than Charlotte’s decorous
temperament. In October, however, when her aunt died, Emily returned
permanently to Haworth.
In 1845 Charlotte came across some poems by Emily, and this led to
the discovery that all three sisters—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—had
written verse. A year later they published jointly a volume of verse,
Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, the initials of these pseudonyms
being those of the sisters; it contained 21 of Emily’s poems, and a
consensus of later criticism has accepted the fact that Emily’s verse
alone reveals true poetic genius. The venture cost the sisters about £50
in all, and only two copies were sold.
By midsummer of 1847 Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey
had been accepted for joint publication by J. Cautley Newby of London,
but publication of the three volumes was delayed until the appearance of
their sister Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, which was immediately and hugely
successful. Wuthering Heights, when published in December 1847, did not
fare well; critics were hostile, calling it too savage, too animal-like,
and clumsy in construction. Only later did it come to be considered one
of the finest novels in the English language.
Soon after the publication of her novel, Emily’s health began to fail
rapidly. She had been ill for some time, but now her breathing became
difficult, and she suffered great pain. She died of tuberculosis in
December 1848.
Wuthering Heights.
Emily Brontë’s work on Wuthering Heights cannot be dated, and she may
well have spent a long time on this intense, solidly imagined novel. It
is distinguished from other novels of the period by its dramatic and
poetic presentation, its abstention from all comment by the author, and
its unusual structure. It recounts in the retrospective narrative of an
onlooker, which in turn includes shorter narratives, the impact of the
waif Heathcliff on the two families of Earnshaw and Linton in a remote
Yorkshire district at the end of the 18th century. Embittered by abuse
and by the marriage of Cathy Earnshaw—who shares his stormy nature and
whom he loves—to the gentle and prosperous Edgar Linton, Heathcliff
plans a revenge on both families, extending into the second generation.
Cathy’s death in childbirth fails to set him free from his love-hate
relationship with her, and the obsessive haunting persists until his
death; the marriage of the surviving heirs of Earnshaw and Linton
restores peace.
Sharing her sisters’ dry humour and Charlotte’s violent imagination,
Emily diverges from them in making no use of the events of her own life
and showing no preoccupation with a spinster’s state or a governess’s
position. Working, like them, within a confined scene and with a small
group of characters, she constructs an action, based on profound and
primitive energies of love and hate, which proceeds logically and
economically, making no use of such coincidences as Charlotte relies on,
requiring no rich romantic similes or rhetorical patterns, and confining
the superb dialogue to what is immediately relevant to the subject. The
sombre power of the book and the elements of brutality in the characters
affronted some 19th-century opinion. Its supposed masculine quality was
adduced to support the claim, based on the memories of her brother
Branwell’s friends long after his death, that he was author or part
author of it. While it is not possible to clear up all the minor
puzzles, neither the external nor the internal evidence offered is
substantial enough to weigh against Charlotte’s plain statement that
Emily was the author.
Joyce M.S. Tompkins
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Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of
fiction, this age of the novel was in fact also an age
of great poetry.
Alfred Tennyson made his mark very
early with Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) and Poems
(1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics
to hail him as the natural successor to Keats and
Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842),
Tennyson
combined in two volumes the best of his early work with
a second volume of more-recent writing. The collection
established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work
Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric
gift to late Romantic subject matter. The result is a
poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the
French Symbolists of the 1880s. The death of his friend
and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics
that this highly subjective verse was insufficiently
engaged with the public issues of the day. The second
volume of the Poems of 1842 contains two remarkable
responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic
monologue, a form of poetry in which the speaker is a
figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the
technique was developed independently by both Tennyson
and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s,
and it became the mode by which many of the greatest
achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The
other is the form that
Tennyson called the “English
Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period,
Tennyson
combined the larger scale required by his new ambitions
with his original gift for the brief lyric by building
long poems out of short ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an
elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics.
Eloquent, vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an
acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the
decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855) assembles 27
lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that
disturbingly explores the psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some
apt and memorable poems on patriotic themes. The chief
work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the
King (1859–85). An Arthurian epic constructed as a
series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a
sombre vision of an idealistic community in decay,
implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described
Tennyson as “a suburban
Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note was the last thing
aimed at by
Robert Browning. Browning’s work was
Germanic rather than Italianate, grotesque rather than
idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The
differences between Browning and Tennyson underline the
creative diversity of the period.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
"Idylls of the King"
PART I,
PART II
Illustrations by G. Dore
"Lady of Shalott", "Sir Galahad"
English poet
byname Alfred, Lord Tennyson
born Aug. 6, 1809, Somersby, Lincolnshire, Eng.
died Oct. 6, 1892, Aldworth, Surrey
Main
English poet often regarded as the chief representative of the Victorian
age in poetry. He was raised to the peerage in 1884.
Early life and work
Tennyson was the fourth of 12 children, born into an old Lincolnshire
family, his father a rector. Alfred, with two of his brothers, Frederick
and Charles, was sent in 1815 to Louth grammar school—where he was
unhappy. He left in 1820, but, though home conditions were difficult,
his father managed to give him a wide literary education. Alfred was
precocious, and before his teens he had composed in the styles of
Alexander Pope, Sir Walter Scott, and John Milton. To his youth also
belongs The Devil and the Lady (a collection of previously unpublished
poems published posthumously in 1930), which shows an astonishing
understanding of Elizabethan dramatic verse. Lord Byron was a dominant
influence on the young Tennyson.
At the lonely rectory in Somersby the children were thrown upon their
own resources. All writers on Tennyson emphasize the influence of the
Lincolnshire countryside on his poetry: the plain, the sea about his
home, “the sand-built ridge of heaped hills that mound the sea,” and
“the waste enormous marsh.”
In 1824 the health of Tennyson’s father began to break down, and he
took refuge in drink. Alfred, though depressed by unhappiness at home,
continued to write, collaborating with Frederick and Charles in Poems by
Two Brothers (1826; dated 1827). His contributions (more than half the
volume) are mostly in fashionable styles of the day.
In 1827 Alfred and Charles joined Frederick at Trinity College,
Cambridge. There Alfred made friends with Arthur Hallam, the gifted son
of the historian Henry Hallam. This was the deepest friendship of
Tennyson’s life. The friends became members of the Apostles, an
exclusive undergraduate club of earnest intellectual interests.
Tennyson’s reputation as a poet increased at Cambridge. In 1829 he won
the chancellor’s gold medal with a poem called Timbuctoo. In 1830 Poems,
Chiefly Lyrical was published; and in the same year Tennyson, Hallam,
and other Apostles went to Spain to help in the unsuccessful revolution
against Ferdinand VII. In the meantime, Hallam had become attached to
Tennyson’s sister Emily but was forbidden by her father to correspond
with her for a year.
In 1831 Tennyson’s father died. Alfred’s misery was increased by his
grandfather’s discovery of his father’s debts. He left Cambridge without
taking a degree, and his grandfather made financial arrangements for the
family. In the same year, Hallam published a eulogistic article on
Poems, Chiefly Lyrical in The Englishman’s Magazine. He went to Somersby
in 1832 as the accepted suitor of Emily.
In 1832 Tennyson published another volume of his poems (dated 1833),
including “The Lotos-Eaters,” “The Palace of Art,” and “The Lady of
Shalott.” Among them was a satirical epigram on the critic Christopher
North (pseudonym of the Scottish writer John Wilson), who had attacked
Poems, Chiefly Lyrical in Blackwood’s Magazine. Tennyson’s sally
prompted a scathing attack on his new volume in the Quarterly Review.
The attacks distressed Tennyson, but he continued to revise his old
poems and compose new ones.
In 1833 Hallam’s engagement was recognized by his family, but while
on a visit to Vienna in September he died suddenly. The shock to
Tennyson was severe. It came at a depressing time; three of his
brothers, Edward, Charles, and Septimus, were suffering from mental
illness, and the bad reception of his own work added to the gloom. Yet
it was in this period that he wrote some of his most characteristic
work: “The Two Voices” (of which the original title, significantly, was
“Thoughts of a Suicide”), “Ulysses,” “St. Simeon Stylites,” and,
probably, the first draft of “Morte d’Arthur.” To this period also
belong some of the poems that became constituent parts of In Memoriam,
celebrating Hallam’s death, and lyrics later worked into Maud.
In May 1836 his brother Charles married Louisa Sellwood of
Horncastle, and at the wedding Alfred fell in love with her sister
Emily. For some years the lovers corresponded, but Emily’s father
disapproved of Tennyson because of his bohemianism, addiction to port
and tobacco, and liberal religious views; and in 1840 he forbade the
correspondence. Meanwhile the Tennysons had left Somersby and were
living a rather wandering life nearer London. It was in this period that
Tennyson made friends with many famous men, including the politician
William Ewart Gladstone, the historian Thomas Carlyle, and the poet
Walter Savage Landor.
Major literary work
In 1842 Tennyson published Poems, in two volumes, one containing a
revised selection from the volumes of 1830 and 1832, the other, new
poems. The new poems included “Morte d’Arthur,” “The Two Voices,”
“Locksley Hall,” and “The Vision of Sin” and other poems that reveal a
strange naïveté, such as “The May Queen,” “Lady Clara Vere de Vere,” and
“The Lord of Burleigh.” The new volume was not on the whole well
received. But the grant to him at this time, by the prime minister, Sir
Robert Peel, of a pension of £200 helped to alleviate his financial
worries. In 1847 he published his first long poem, The Princess, a
singular anti-feminist fantasia.
The year 1850 marked a turning point. Tennyson resumed his
correspondence with Emily Sellwood, and their engagement was renewed and
followed by marriage. Meanwhile, Edward Moxon offered to publish the
elegies on Hallam that Tennyson had been composing over the years. They
appeared, at first anonymously, as In Memoriam (1850), which had a great
success with both reviewers and the public, won him the friendship of
Queen Victoria, and helped bring about, in the same year, his
appointment as poet laureate.
In Memoriam is a vast poem of 131 sections of varying length, with a
prologue and epilogue. Inspired by the grief Tennyson felt at the
untimely death of his friend Hallam, the poem touches on many
intellectual issues of the Victorian Age as the author searches for the
meaning of life and death and tries to come to terms with his sense of
loss. Most notably, In Memoriam reflects the struggle to reconcile
traditional religious faith and belief in immortality with the emerging
theories of evolution and modern geology. The verses show the
development over three years of the poet’s acceptance and understanding
of his friend’s death and conclude with an epilogue, a happy marriage
song on the occasion of the wedding of Tennyson’s sister Cecilia.
After his marriage, which was happy, Tennyson’s life became more
secure and outwardly uneventful. There were two sons: Hallam and Lionel.
The times of wandering and unsettlement ended in 1853, when the
Tennysons took a house, Farringford, in the Isle of Wight. Tennyson was
to spend most of the rest of his life there and at Aldworth (near
Haslemere, Surrey).
Tennyson’s position as the national poet was confirmed by his Ode on
the Death of the Duke of Wellington (1852)—though some critics at first
thought it disappointing—and the famous poem on the charge of the Light
Brigade at Balaklava, published in 1855 in Maud and Other Poems. Maud
itself, a strange and turbulent “monodrama,” provoked a storm of
protest; many of the poet’s admirers were shocked by the morbidity,
hysteria, and bellicosity of the hero. Yet Maud was Tennyson’s favourite
among his poems.
A project that Tennyson had long considered at last issued in Idylls
of the King (1859), a series of 12 connected poems broadly surveying the
legend of King Arthur from his falling in love with Guinevere to the
ultimate ruin of his kingdom. The poems concentrate on the introduction
of evil to Camelot because of the adulterous love of Lancelot and Queen
Guinevere, and on the consequent fading of the hope that had at first
infused the Round Table fellowship. Idylls of the King had an immediate
success, and Tennyson, who loathed publicity, had now acquired a
sometimes embarrassing public fame. The Enoch Arden volume of 1864
perhaps represents the peak of his popularity. New Arthurian Idylls were
published in The Holy Grail, and Other Poems in 1869 (dated 1870). These
were again well received, though some readers were beginning to show
discomfort at the “Victorian” moral atmosphere that Tennyson had
introduced into his source material from Sir Thomas Malory.
In 1874 Tennyson decided to try his hand at poetic drama. Queen Mary
appeared in 1875, and an abridged version was produced at the Lyceum in
1876 with only moderate success. It was followed by Harold (1876; dated
1877), Becket (not published in full until 1884), and the “village
tragedy” The Promise of May, which proved a failure at the Globe in
November 1882. This play—his only prose work—shows Tennyson’s growing
despondency and resentment at the religious, moral, and political
tendencies of the age. He had already caused some sensation by
publishing a poem called “Despair” in The Nineteenth Century (November
1881). A more positive indication of Tennyson’s later beliefs appears in
“The Ancient Sage,” published in Tiresias and Other Poems (1885). Here
the poet records his intimations of a life before and beyond this life.
Tennyson accepted a peerage (after some hesitation) in 1884. In 1886
he published a new volume containing “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After,”
consisting mainly of imprecations against modern decadence and
liberalism and a retraction of the earlier poem’s belief in inevitable
human progress.
In 1889 Tennyson wrote the famous short poem “Crossing the Bar,”
during the crossing to the Isle of Wight. In the same year he published
Demeter and Other Poems, which contains the charming retrospective “To
Mary Boyle,” “The Progress of Spring,” a fine lyric written much earlier
and rediscovered, and “Merlin and the Gleam,” an allegorical summing-up
of his poetic career. In 1892 his play The Foresters was successfully
produced in New York City. Despite ill health, he was able to correct
the proofs of his last volume, The Death of Oenone, Akbar’s Dream, and
Other Poems (1892).
Assessment
Alfred, Lord Tennyson was the leading poet of the Victorian Age in
England and by the mid-19th century had come to occupy a position
similar to that of Alexander Pope in the 18th. Tennyson was a consummate
poetic artist, consolidating and refining the traditions bequeathed to
him by his predecessors in the Romantic movement—especially Wordsworth,
Byron, and Keats. His poetry is remarkable for its metrical variety,
rich descriptive imagery, and exquisite verbal melodies. But Tennyson
was also regarded as the preeminent spokesman for the educated
middle-class Englishman, in moral and religious outlook and in political
and social consciousness no less than in matters of taste and sentiment.
His poetry dealt often with the doubts and difficulties of an age in
which established Christian Faith and traditional assumptions about
man’s nature and destiny were increasingly called into question by
science and modern progress. His poetry dealt with these misgivings,
moreover, as the intimate personal problems of a sensitive and troubled
individual inclined to melancholy. Yet through his poetic mastery—the
spaciousness and nobility of his best verse, its classical aptness of
phrase, its distinctive harmony—he conveyed to sympathetic readers a
feeling of implicit reassurance, even serenity. Tennyson may be seen as
the first great English poet to be fully aware of the new picture of
man’s place in the universe revealed by modern science. While the
contemplation of this unprecedented human situation sometimes evoked his
fears and forebodings, it also gave him a larger imaginative range than
most of the poets of his time and added a greater depth and resonance to
his art.
Tennyson’s ascendancy among Victorian poets began to be questioned
even during his lifetime, however, when Robert Browning and Algernon
Charles Swinburne were serious rivals. And 20th-century criticism,
influenced by the rise of a new school of poetry headed by T.S. Eliot
(though Eliot himself was an admirer of Tennyson), has proposed some
drastic devaluations of his work. Undoubtedly much in Tennyson that
appealed to his contemporaries has ceased to appeal to many readers
today. He can be mawkish and banal, pompous and orotund, offering little
more than the mellifluous versifying of shallow or confused thoughts.
The rediscovery of such earlier poets as John Donne or Gerard Manley
Hopkins (a poet of Tennyson’s own time who was then unknown to the
public), together with the widespread acceptance of Eliot and W.B. Yeats
as the leading modern poets, opened the ears of readers to a very
different, and perhaps more varied, poetic music. A more balanced
estimate of Tennyson has begun to prevail, however, with the recognition
of the enduring greatness of “Ulysses,” the unique poignancy of
Tennyson’s best lyric poems, and, above all, the stature of In Memoriam
as the great representative poem of the Victorian Age. It is now also
recognized that the realistic and comic aspects of Tennyson’s work are
more important than they were thought to be during the period of the
reaction against him. Finally, the perception of the poet’s awed sense
of the mystery of life, which lies at the heart of his greatness, as in
“Crossing the Bar” or “Flower in the Crannied Wall,” unites his admirers
in this century with those in the last. Though less of Tennyson’s work
may survive than appeared likely during his Victorian heyday, what does
remain—and it is by no means small in quantity—seems likely to be
imperishable.
William Wallace Robson
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Arthur Hallam
born Feb. 1, 1811, London, Eng.
died Sept. 15, 1833, Vienna, Austria
English essayist and poet who died before
his considerable talent developed; he is
remembered principally as the friend of
Alfred Tennyson commemorated in Tennyson’s
elegy In Memoriam.
Hallam was the son of the English
historian Henry Hallam. He met Tennyson at
Trinity College, Cambridge (1828), where
they joined other artistically and
politically progressive students in the club
called The Apostles. Hallam defended
Tennyson’s early work, Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830), in a review for the
Englishman’s Magazine and was engaged to
Tennyson’s sister Emily (1832). Hallam’s
prizewinning essays and critically acclaimed
poems were collected and printed
posthumously by his father, the historian
Henry Hallam, in Remains, in Verse and
Prose, of Arthur Henry Hallam (1834).
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Robert Browning and
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Elizabeth Barrett Browning and
Robert Browning
Deeply influenced by
Shelley,
Robert Browning made two
false starts. One was as a playwright in the 1830s and
’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the
confessional meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult
though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively
modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics.
As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic
monologues, among them Porphyria’s Lover, Johannes
Agricola in Meditation, and My Last Duchess. The
monologues make clear the radical originality of
Browning’s new manner: they involve the reader in
sympathetic identification with the interior processes
of criminal or unconventional minds, requiring active
rather than merely passive engagement in the processes
of moral judgment and self-discovery. More such
monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up Men
and Women (1855).
In 1846
Browning married
Elizabeth Barrett. Though
now remembered chiefly for her love poems
Sonnets from
the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse
novel Aurora Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her
own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the
age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a subtle reflection on
her experience of Italian politics, and A Musical
Instrument (1862) is one of the century’s most memorable
expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only
with the publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did
Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson
had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains,
in Rabbi Ben Ezra, the most extreme statement of
Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this
reassuring creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence
and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such poems
as Caliban upon Setebos and Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the
dramatic monologue format unprecedented scope. Published
in parts, like a
Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder
story in a way that both explores moral issues and
suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge.
Browning’s work after this date, though voluminous, is
uneven.
Robert
Browning
"Dramatic Romances"
British poet
born May 7, 1812, London
died Dec. 12, 1889, Venice
Major English poet of the Victorian age, noted for his mastery of
dramatic monologue and psychological portraiture. His most noted work
was The Ring and the Book (1868–69), the story of a Roman murder trial
in 12 books.
Life.
The son of a clerk in the Bank of England in London, Browning
received only a slight formal education, although his father gave him a
grounding in Greek and Latin. In 1828 he attended classes at the
University of London but left after half a session. Apart from a journey
to St. Petersburg in 1834 with George de Benkhausen, the Russian consul
general, and two short visits to Italy in 1838 and 1844, he lived with
his parents in London until 1846, first at Camberwell and after 1840 at
Hatcham. During this period (1832–46) he wrote his early long poems and
most of his plays.
Browning’s first published work, Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession
(1833, anonymous), although formally a dramatic monologue, embodied many
of his own adolescent passions and anxieties. Although it received some
favourable comment, it was attacked by John Stuart Mill, who condemned
the poet’s exposure and exploitation of his own emotions and his
“intense and morbid self-consciousness.” It was perhaps Mill’s critique
that determined Browning never to confess his own emotions again in his
poetry but to write objectively. In 1835 he published Paracelsus and in
1840 Sordello, both poems dealing with men of great ability striving to
reconcile the demands of their own personalities with those of the
world. Paracelsus was well received, but Sordello, which made exacting
demands on its reader’s knowledge, was almost universally declared
incomprehensible.
Encouraged by the actor Charles Macready, Browning devoted his main
energies for some years to verse drama, a form that he had already
adopted for Strafford (1837). Between 1841 and 1846, in a series of
pamphlets under the general title of Bells and Pomegranates, he
published seven more plays in verse, including Pippa Passes (1841), A
Blot in the ’Scutcheon (produced in 1843), and Luria (1846). These, and
all his earlier works except Strafford, were printed at his family’s
expense. Although Browning enjoyed writing for the stage, he was not
successful in the theatre, since his strength lay in depicting, as he
had himself observed of Strafford, “Action in Character, rather than
Character in Action.”
By 1845 the first phase of Browning’s life was near its end. In that
year he met Elizabeth Barrett. In her Poems (1844) Barrett had included
lines praising Browning, who wrote to thank her (January 1845). In May
they met and soon discovered their love for each other. Barrett had,
however, been for many years an invalid, confined to her room and
thought incurable. Her father, moreover, was a dominant and selfish man,
jealously fond of his daughter, who in turn had come to depend on his
love. When her doctors ordered her to Italy for her health and her
father refused to allow her to go, the lovers, who had been
corresponding and meeting regularly, were forced to act. They were
married secretly in September 1846; a week later they left for Pisa.
Throughout their married life, although they spent holidays in France
and England, their home was in Italy, mainly at Florence, where they had
a flat in Casa Guidi. Their income was small, although after the birth
of their son, Robert, in 1849 Mrs. Browning’s cousin John Kenyon made
them an allowance of £100 a year, and on his death in 1856 he left them
£11,000.
Browning produced comparatively little poetry during his married
life. Apart from a collected edition in 1849 he published only
Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850), an examination of different
attitudes toward Christianity, perhaps having its immediate origin in
the death of his mother in 1849; an introductory essay (1852) to some
spurious letters of Shelley, Browning’s only considerable work in prose
and his only piece of critical writing; and Men and Women (1855). This
was a collection of 51 poems—dramatic lyrics such as “Memorabilia,”
“Love Among the Ruins,” and “A Toccata of Galuppi’s”; the great
monologues such as “Fra Lippo Lippi,” “How It Strikes a Contemporary,”
and “Bishop Blougram’s Apology”; and a very few poems in which
implicitly (“By the Fireside”) or explicitly (“One Word More”) he broke
his rule and spoke of himself and of his love for his wife. Men and
Women, however, had no great sale, and many of the reviews were
unfavourable and unhelpful. Disappointed for the first time by the
reception of his work, Browning in the following years wrote little,
sketching and modeling in clay by day and enjoying the society of his
friends at night. At last Mrs. Browning’s health, which had been
remarkably restored by her life in Italy, began to fail. On June 29,
1861, she died in her husband’s arms. In the autumn he returned slowly
to London with his young son.
His first task on his return was to prepare his wife’s Last Poems for
the press. At first he avoided company, but gradually he accepted
invitations more freely and began to move in society. Another collected
edition of his poems was called for in 1863, but Pauline was not
included. When his next book of poems, Dramatis Personae
(1864)—including “Abt Vogler,” “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” “Caliban upon Setebos,”
and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium’ ”—reached two editions, it was clear that
Browning had at last won a measure of popular recognition.
In 1868–69 he published his greatest work, The Ring and the Book,
based on the proceedings in a murder trial in Rome in 1698. Grand alike
in plan and execution, it was at once received with enthusiasm, and
Browning was established as one of the most important literary figures
of the day. For the rest of his life he was much in demand in London
society. He spent his summers with friends in France, Scotland, or
Switzerland or, after 1878, in Italy.
The most important works of his last years, when he wrote with great
fluency, were the long narrative or dramatic poems, often dealing with
contemporary themes, such as Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (1871), Fifine
at the Fair (1872), Red Cotton Night-Cap Country (1873), The Inn Album
(1875), and the two series of Dramatic Idyls (1879 and 1880). He wrote a
number of poems on classical subjects, including Balaustion’s Adventure
(1871) and Aristophanes’ Apology (1875). In addition to many collections
of shorter poems—Pacchiarotto and How He Worked in Distemper (1876),
Jocoseria (1883), Ferishtah’s Fancies (1884), and Asolando: Fancies and
Facts (1889)—Browning published toward the end of his life two books of
unusually personal origin—La Saisiaz (1878), at once an elegy for his
friend Anne Egerton-Smith and a meditation on mortality, and Parleyings
with Certain People of Importance in Their Day (1887), in which he
discussed books and ideas that had influenced him since his youth.
While staying in Venice in 1889, Browning caught cold, became
seriously ill, and died on December 12. He was buried in Westminster
Abbey.
Assessment.
Few poets have suffered more than Browning from hostile
incomprehension or misplaced admiration, both arising very often from a
failure to recognize the predominantly dramatic nature of his work. The
bulk of his writing before 1846 was for the theatre; thereafter his
major poems showed his increasing mastery of the dramatic monologue.
This consists essentially of a narrative spoken by a single character
and amplified by his comments on his story and the circumstances in
which he is speaking. From his own knowledge of the historical or other
events described, or else by inference from the poem itself, the reader
is eventually enabled to assess the intelligence and honesty of the
narrator and the value of the views he expresses. This type of dramatic
monologue, since it depends on the unconscious provision by the speaker
of the evidence by which the reader is to judge him, is eminently
suitable for the ironist. Browning’s fondness for this form has,
however, encouraged the two most common misconceptions of the nature of
his poetry—that it is deliberately obscure and that its basic “message”
is a facile optimism. Neither of these criticisms is groundless; both
are incomplete.
Browning is not always difficult. In many poems, especially short
lyrics, he achieves effects of obvious felicity. Nevertheless, his
superficial difficulties, which prevent an easy understanding of the
sense of a passage, are evident enough: his attempts to convey the
broken and irregular rhythms of speech make it almost impossible to read
the verse quickly; his elliptical syntax sometimes disconcerts and
confuses the reader but can be mastered with little effort; certain
poems, such as Sordello or “Old Pictures in Florence,” require a
considerable acquaintance with their subjects in order to be understood;
and his fondness for putting his monologues into the mouths of
charlatans and sophists, such as Mr. Sludge or Napoleon III, obliges the
reader to follow a chain of subtle or paradoxical arguments. All these
characteristics stand in the way of easy reading.
But even when individual problems of style and technique have been
resolved, the poems’ interest is seldom exhausted. First, Browning often
chooses an unexpected point of view, especially in his monologues, thus
forcing the reader to accept an unfamiliar perspective. Second, he is
capable of startling changes of focus within a poem. For example, he
chooses subjects in themselves insignificant, as in “Fra Lippo Lippi”
and “Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha,” and treats through them the eternal
themes of poetry. This transition from particular observation to
transcendental truth presents much the same challenge to the reader as
do the metaphysical poets of the 17th century and much the same
excitement. Third, because Browning seldom presents a speaker without
irony, there is a constant demand on the reader to appreciate exactly
the direction of satiric force in the poem. Even in a melodious poem
such as “A Toccata of Galuppi’s,” the valid position must be
distinguished from the false at every turn of the argument, while in the
major casuistic monologues, such as “Bishop Blougram’s Apology,” the
shifts of sympathy are subtler still.
It has also been objected that Browning uses his poetry as a vehicle
for his philosophy, which is not of itself profound or interesting,
being limited to an easy optimism. But Browning’s dramatic monologues
must, as he himself insisted, be recognized as the utterances of
fictitious persons drawing their strength from their appropriateness in
characterizing the speaker, and not as expressions of Browning’s own
sentiments. Thus his great gallery of imagined characters is to be
regarded as an exhaustive catalog of human motives, not as a series of
self-portraits. Nevertheless, certain fundamental assumptions are made
so regularly that they may be taken to represent Browning’s personal
beliefs, such as his Christian faith. In matters of human conduct his
sympathies are with those who show loving hearts, honest natures, and
warmth of feeling; certainly these qualities are never satirized. He is
in general on the side of those who commit themselves wholeheartedly to
an ideal, even if they fail. By itself this might suggest rather a naive
system of values, yet he also, sometimes even in the same poem, shows
his understanding of those who have been forced to lower their standards
and accept a compromise. Thus, although Browning is far from taking a
cynical or pessimistic view of man’s nature or destiny, his hopes for
the world are not simple and unreasoning.
In The Ring and the Book Browning displays all his distinctive
qualities. He allows a dramatic monologue to each character he
portrays—to the man on trial for murder, to his young wife, whom he has
mortally wounded, to her protector, to various Roman citizens, to the
opposing lawyers, and to the pope, who ultimately decides the accused’s
fate. Each monologue deals with substantially the same occurrences, but
each, of course, describes and interprets them differently. By
permitting the true facts to emerge gradually by inference from these
conflicting accounts, Browning reveals with increasing subtlety the true
natures of his characters. As each great monologue illuminates the moral
being of the speaker, it becomes clear that nothing less than the whole
ethical basis of human actions is in question. For over 20,000 lines
Browning explores his theme, employing an unfaltering blank verse,
rising often to passages of moving poetry, realizing in extraordinary
detail the life of 17th-century Rome, and creating a series of
characters as diverse and fully realized as those in any novel.
During Browning’s lifetime, critical recognition came rapidly after
1864; and, although his books never sold as well as his wife’s or
Tennyson’s, he thereafter acquired a considerable and enthusiastic
public. In the 20th century his reputation, along with those of the
other great Victorians, declined, and his work did not enjoy a wide
reading public, perhaps in part because of increasing skepticism of the
values implied in his poetry. He has, however, influenced many modern
poets, such as Robert Frost and Ezra Pound, partly through his
development of the dramatic monologue, with its emphasis on the
psychology of the individual and his stream of consciousness, but even
more through his success in writing about the variety of modern life in
language that owed nothing to convention. As long as technical
accomplishment, richness of texture, sustained imaginative power, and a
warm interest in humanity are counted virtues, Browning will be numbered
among the great English poets.
Philip Drew
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning
"Sonnets from the Portuguese"
British poet
née Barrett
born March 6, 1806, near Durham, Durham, England
died June 29, 1861, Florence, Italy
English poet whose reputation rests chiefly upon her love poems, Sonnets
from the Portuguese and Aurora Leigh, now considered an early feminist
text. Her husband was Robert Browning.
Elizabeth was the eldest child of Edward Barrett Moulton (later
Edward Moulton Barrett). Most of her girlhood was spent at a country
house within sight of the Malvern Hills, in Worcestershire, where she
was extraordinarily happy. At the age of 15, however, she fell seriously
ill, probably as the result of a spinal injury, and her health was
permanently affected. In 1832 the family moved to Sidmouth, Devon, and
in 1836 they moved to London, where, in 1838, they took up residence at
50 Wimpole Street.
In London she contributed to several periodicals, and her first
collection, The Seraphim and Other Poems, appeared in 1838. For reasons
of health, she spent the next three years in Torquay, Devon, but after
the death by drowning of her brother, Edward, she developed an almost
morbid terror of meeting anyone apart from a small circle of intimates.
Her name, however, was well known in literary circles, and in 1844
her second volume of poetry, Poems, by E. Barrett Barrett, was
enthusiastically received. In January 1845 she received from the poet
Robert Browning a telegram: “I love your verses with all my heart, dear
Miss Barrett. I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart—and I
love you too.” In early summer the two met. Their courtship (whose daily
progress is recorded in their letters) was kept a close secret from
Elizabeth’s despotic father, of whom she stood in some fear. Sonnets
from the Portuguese (1850) records her reluctance to marry, but their
wedding had taken place on September 12, 1846. Her father knew nothing
of it, and Elizabeth continued to live at home for a week.
The Brownings then left for Pisa. (When Barrett died in 1856,
Elizabeth was still unforgiven.) While in Pisa she wrote The Runaway
Slave at Pilgrim’s Point (Boston, 1848; London, 1849), a protest against
slavery in the United States. The couple then settled in Florence, where
their only child, Robert Wiedemann Barrett, was born in 1849. In 1851
and in 1855 the couple visited London; during the second visit,
Elizabeth completed her most ambitious work, Aurora Leigh (1857), a long
blank-verse poem telling the complicated and melodramatic love story of
a young girl and a misguided philanthropist. This work did not impress
most critics, though it was a huge popular success.
During the last years of her life, Mrs. Browning developed an
interest in spiritualism and the occult, but her energy and attention
were chiefly taken up by an obsession, to a degree that alarmed her
closest friends, with Italian politics. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) had
been a deliberate attempt to win sympathy for the Florentines, and she
continued to believe in the integrity of Napoleon III. In Poems Before
Congress (1860), the poem A Curse for a Nation was mistaken for a
denunciation of England, whereas it was aimed at U.S. slavery.
In the summer of 1861 Mrs. Browning suffered a severe chill and died.
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Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849), combined lyric grace
with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape
of the period. The title poem of his next collection,
Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of
the modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of
the process that Arnold called “the dialogue of the mind
with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and
attempted to write in a more impersonal manner. His
greatest work (Switzerland, Dover Beach, The
Scholar-Gipsy) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In
the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and became, with
Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869),
and Literature and Dogma (1873), a lively and acute
writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend
Arthur Hugh Clough died young but
managed nonetheless to produce three highly original
poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a
narrative poem of modern life, written in hexameters.
Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the
full-scale verse novel, using multiple internal
narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus
(published posthumously in 1865 but not available in an
unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable closet
drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a
frankness, and a metrical liveliness, unequaled in
Victorian verse.
Matthew Arnold
born Dec. 24, 1822, Laleham, Middlesex,
Eng.
died April 15, 1888, Liverpool
English Victorian poet and literary and
social critic, noted especially for his
classical attacks on the contemporary tastes
and manners of the “Barbarians” (the
aristocracy), the “Philistines” (the
commercial middle class), and the
“Populace.” He became the apostle of
“culture” in such works as Culture and
Anarchy (1869).
Life.
Matthew was the eldest son of the
renowned Thomas Arnold, who was appointed
headmaster of Rugby School in 1828. Matthew
entered Rugby (1837) and then attended
Oxford as a scholar of Balliol College;
there he won the Newdigate Prize with his
poem Cromwell (1843) and was graduated with
second-class honours in 1844. For Oxford
Arnold retained an impassioned affection.
His Oxford was the Oxford of John Henry
Newman—of Newman just about to be received
into the Roman Catholic Church; and although
Arnold’s own religious thought, like his
father’s, was strongly liberal, Oxford and
Newman always remained for him joint symbols
of spiritual beauty and culture.
In 1847 Arnold became private secretary
to Lord Lansdowne, who occupied a high
Cabinet post during Lord John Russell’s
Liberal ministries. And in 1851, in order to
secure the income needed for his marriage
(June 1851) with Frances Lucy Wightman, he
accepted from Lansdowne an appointment as
inspector of schools. This was to be his
routine occupation until within two years of
his death. He engaged in incessant
travelling throughout the British provinces
and also several times was sent by the
government to inquire into the state of
education in France, Germany, Holland, and
Switzerland. Two of his reports on schools
abroad were reprinted as books, and his
annual reports on schools at home attracted
wide attention, written, as they were, in
Arnold’s own urbane and civilized prose.
Poetic achievement.
The work that gives Arnold his high
place in the history of literature and the
history of ideas was all accomplished in the
time he could spare from his official
duties. His first volume of verse was The
Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems. By A.
(1849); this was followed (in 1852) by
another under the same initial: Empedocles
on Etna, and Other Poems. In 1853 appeared
the first volume of poems published under
his own name; it consisted partly of poems
selected from the earlier volumes and also
contained the well-known preface explaining
(among other things) why Empedocles was
excluded from the selection: it was a
dramatic poem “in which the suffering finds
no vent in action,” in which there is
“everything to be endured, nothing to be
done.” This preface foreshadows his later
criticism in its insistence upon the classic
virtues of unity, impersonality,
universality, and architectonic power and
upon the value of the classical masterpieces
as models for “an age of spiritual
discomfort”—an age “wanting in moral
grandeur.” Other editions followed, and
Merope, Arnold’s classical tragedy, appeared
in 1858, and New Poems in 1867. After that
date, though there were further editions,
Arnold wrote little additional verse.
Not much of Arnold’s verse will stand the
test of his own criteria; far from being
classically poised, impersonal, serene, and
grand, it is often intimate, personal, full
of romantic regret, sentimental pessimism,
and nostalgia. As a public and social
character and as a prose writer, Arnold was
sunny, debonair, and sanguine; but beneath
ran the current of his buried life, and of
this much of his poetry is the echo:
From the soul’s subterranean depth
upborne
As from an infinitely distant land,
Come airs, and floating echoes, and
convey
A melancholy into all our day.
“I am past thirty,” he wrote a friend in
1853, “and three parts iced over.” The
impulse to write poetry came typically when
A bolt is shot back somewhere in the
breast,
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.
Though he was “never quite benumb’d by
the world’s sway,” these hours of insight
became more and more rare, and the stirrings
of buried feeling were associated with moods
of regret for lost youth, regret for the
freshness of the early world, moods of
self-pity, moods of longing for
The hills where his life rose
And the sea where it goes.
Yet, though much of Arnold’s most
characteristic verse is in this vein of
soliloquy or intimate confession, he can
sometimes rise, as in “Sohrab and Rustum,”
to epic severity and impersonality; to lofty
meditation, as in “Dover Beach”; and to
sustained magnificence and richness, as in
“The Scholar Gipsy” and “Thyrsis”—where he
wields an intricate stanza form without a
stumble.
In 1857, assisted by the vote of his
godfather (and predecessor) John Keble,
Arnold was elected to the Oxford chair of
poetry, which he held for 10 years. It was
characteristic of him that he revolutionized
this professorship. The keynote was struck
in his inaugural lecture: “On the Modern
Element in Literature,” “modern” being taken
to mean not merely “contemporary” (for
Greece was “modern”), but the spirit that,
contemplating the vast and complex spectacle
of life, craves for moral and intellectual
“deliverance.” Several of the lectures were
afterward published as critical essays, but
the most substantial fruits of his
professorship were the three lectures On
Translating Homer (1861)—in which he
recommended Homer’s plainness and nobility
as medicine for the modern world, with its
“sick hurry and divided aims” and condemned
Francis Newman’s recent translation as
ignoble and eccentric—and the lectures On
the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), in
which, without much knowledge of his subject
or of anthropology, he used the Celtic
strain as a symbol of that which rejects the
despotism of the commonplace and the
utilitarian.
Arnold as critic.
It is said that when the poet in Arnold
died, the critic was born; and it is true
that from this time onward he turned almost
entirely to prose. Some of the leading ideas
and phrases were early put into currency in
Essays in Criticism (First Series, 1865;
Second Series, 1888) and Culture and
Anarchy. The first essay in the 1865 volume,
“The Function of Criticism at the Present
Time,” is an overture announcing briefly
most of the themes he developed more fully
in later work. It is at once evident that he
ascribes to “criticism” a scope and
importance hitherto undreamed of. The
function of criticism, in his sense, is “a
disinterested endeavour to learn and
propagate the best that is known and thought
in the world, and thus to establish a
current of fresh and true ideas.” It is in
fact a spirit that he is trying to foster,
the spirit of an awakened and informed
intelligence playing upon not “literature”
merely but theology, history, art, science,
sociology, and politics, and in every sphere
seeking “to see the object as in itself it
really is.”
In this critical effort, thought Arnold,
England lagged behind France and Germany,
and the English accordingly remained in a
backwater of provinciality and complacency.
Even the great Romantic poets, with all
their creative energy, suffered from the
want of it. The English literary critic must
know literatures other than his own and be
in touch with European standards. This last
line of thought Arnold develops in the
second essay, “The Literary Influence of
Academies,” in which he dwells upon “the
note of provinciality” in English
literature, caused by remoteness from a
“centre” of correct knowledge and correct
taste. To realize how much Arnold widened
the horizons of criticism requires only a
glance at the titles of some of the other
essays in Essays in Criticism (1865):
“Maurice de Guérin,” “Eugénie de Guérin,”
“Heinrich Heine,” “Joubert,” “Spinoza,”
“Marcus Aurelius”; in all these, as
increasingly in his later books, he is
“applying modern ideas to life” as well as
to letters and “bringing all things under
the point of view of the 19th century.”
The first essay in the 1888 volume, “The
Study of Poetry,” was originally published
as the general introduction to T.H. Ward’s
anthology, The English Poets (1880). It
contains many of the ideas for which Arnold
is best remembered. In an age of crumbling
creeds, poetry will have to replace
religion. More and more, we will “turn to
poetry to interpret life for us, to console
us, to sustain us.” Therefore we must know
how to distinguish the best poetry from the
inferior, the genuine from the counterfeit;
and to do this we must steep ourselves in
the work of the acknowledged masters, using
as “touchstones” passages exemplifying their
“high seriousness,” and their superiority of
diction and movement.
The remaining essays, with the exception
of the last two (on Tolstoy and Amiel), all
deal with English poets: Milton, Gray,
Keats, Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley. All
contain memorable things, and all attempt a
serious and responsible assessment of each
poet’s “criticism of life” and his value as
food for the modern spirit. Arnold has been
taken to task for some of his judgments and
omissions: for his judgment that Dryden and
Pope were not “genuine” poets because they
composed in their wits instead of “in the
soul”; for calling Gray a “minor classic” in
an age of prose and spiritual bleakness; for
paying too much attention to the man behind
the poetry (Gray, Keats, Shelley); for
making no mention of Donne; and above all
for saying that poetry is “at bottom a
criticism of life.” On this last point it
should be remembered that he added “under
the conditions fixed. . .by the laws of
poetic truth and poetic beauty,” and that if
by “criticism” is understood (as Arnold
meant) “evaluation,” Arnold’s dictum is seen
to have wider significance than has been
sometimes supposed.
Culture and Anarchy is in some ways
Arnold’s most central work. It is an
expansion of his earlier attacks, in “The
Function of Criticism” and “Heinrich Heine,”
upon the smugness, philistinism, and mammon
worship of Victorian England. Culture, as
“the study of perfection,” is opposed to the
prevalent “anarchy” of a new democracy
without standards and without a sense of
direction. By “turning a stream of fresh
thought upon our stock notions and habits,”
culture seeks to make “reason and the will
of God prevail.”
Arnold’s classification of English
society into Barbarians (with their high
spirit, serenity, and distinguished manners
and their inaccessibility to ideas),
Philistines (the stronghold of religious
nonconformity, with plenty of energy and
morality but insufficient “sweetness and
light”), and Populace (still raw and blind)
is well known. Arnold saw in the Philistines
the key to the whole position; they were now
the most influential section of society;
their strength was the nation’s strength,
their crudeness its crudeness: Educate and
humanize the Philistines, therefore. Arnold
saw in the idea of “the State,” and not in
any one class of society, the true organ and
repository of the nation’s collective “best
self.” No summary can do justice to this
extraordinary book; it can still be read
with pure enjoyment, for it is written with
an inward poise, a serene detachment, and an
infusion of mental laughter, which make it a
masterpiece of ridicule as well as a
searching analysis of Victorian society. The
same is true of its unduly neglected sequel,
Friendship’s Garland (1871).
Religious writings.
Lastly Arnold turned to religion, the
constant preoccupation and true centre of
his whole life, and wrote St. Paul and
Protestantism (1870), Literature and Dogma
(1873), God and the Bible (1875), and Last
Essays on Church and Religion (1877). In
these books, Arnold really founded Anglican
“modernism.” Like all religious liberals, he
came under fire from two sides: from the
orthodox, who accused him of infidelity, of
turning God into a “stream of tendency” and
of substituting vague emotion for definite
belief; and from the infidels, for clinging
to the church and retaining certain
Christian beliefs of which he had undermined
the foundations. Arnold considered his
religious writings to be constructive and
conservative. Those who accused him of
destructiveness did not realize how far
historical and scientific criticism had
already riddled the old foundations; and
those who accused him of timidity failed to
see that he regarded religion as the highest
form of culture, the one indispensable
without which all secular education is in
vain. His attitude is best summed up in his
own words (from the preface to God and the
Bible): “At the present moment two things
about the Christian religion must surely be
clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One
is, that men cannot do without it; the
other, that they cannot do with it as it
is.” Convinced that much in popular religion
was “touched with the finger of death” and
convinced no less of the hopelessness of man
without religion, he sought to find for
religion a basis of “scientific fact” that
even the positive modern spirit must accept.
A reading of Arnold’s Note Books will
convince any reader of the depth of Arnold’s
spirituality and of the degree to which, in
his “buried life,” he disciplined himself in
constant devotion and self-forgetfulness.
Arnold died suddenly, of heart failure,
in the spring of 1888, at Liverpool and was
buried at Laleham, with the three sons whose
early loss had shadowed his life.
Basil Willey
Ed.
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Arthur Hugh Clough
born Jan. 1, 1819, Liverpool
died Nov. 13, 1861, Florence
poet whose work reflects the perplexity
and religious doubt of mid-19th century
England. He was a friend of Matthew Arnold
and the subject of Arnold’s commemorative
elegy “Thyrsis.”
While at Oxford, Clough had intended to
become a clergyman, but his increasing
religious skepticism caused him to leave the
university. He became head of University
Hall, London, in 1849, and in 1852, at the
invitation of Ralph Waldo Emerson, he spent
several months lecturing in Massachusetts.
He later worked as a government education
official and helped his wife’s first cousin,
Florence Nightingale, in her philanthropic
work. While on a visit to Italy he
contracted malaria and died at age 42.
Clough’s deeply critical and questioning
attitude made him as doubtful of his own
powers as he was about the spirit of his
age, and he gave his contemporaries the
impression of promise unfulfilled,
especially since he left the bulk of his
verse unpublished. Nonetheless, Clough’s
Poems (1862) proved so popular that they
were reprinted 16 times within 40 years of
his death. His best verse has a flavour that
is closer to the taste and temper of the
20th century than to the Victorian age,
however. Among his works are Bothie of
Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) and Amours de Voyage
(1858), poems written in classical
hexameters and dealing with romantic love,
doubt, and social conflict. The long,
incomplete poem Dipsychus most fully
expresses Clough’s doubts about the social
and spiritual developments of his era, while
his sharpest criticisms of Victorian moral
complacency are found in “The Latest
Decalogue”:
Thou shalt not kill, but need’st not
strive
Officiously to keep alive.
The Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough (1974),
edited by F.L. Mulhauser, is the standard
edition of Clough’s work.
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Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said
to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor
Resartus. He continued thereafter to have a powerful
effect on its development. The French Revolution (1837),
the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to
this consciously postrevolutionary age. On Heroes,
Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined
the Romantic idea of the genius with a further statement
of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and
utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing, in Chartism
(1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the
splenetic Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), inspired other
writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of
laissez-faire economics and utilitarian ethics. The
first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who,
in Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic
theory to the study of painting and forged an
appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones
of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin took the political
medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a
poetic fullness and force. This imaginative engagement
with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and
Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry Newman was a poet,
novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts,
published as Tracts for the Times (1833–41), that
promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert
the Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England.
His subsequent religious development is memorably
described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of
the many great autobiographies of this introspective
century.
John Ruskin
"The King of the
Golden River"
Illustrations by Maria
L. Kirk
John Ruskin
"The King of the
Golden River"
Illustrations by Maria
L. Kirk
born February 8, 1819, London,
England
died January 20, 1900, Coniston, Lancashire
English critic of art, architecture, and
society who was a gifted painter, a
distinctive prose stylist, and an important
example of the Victorian Sage, or Prophet: a
writer of polemical prose who seeks to cause
widespread cultural and social change.
Early life and influences
Ruskin was born into the commercial
classes of the prosperous and powerful
Britain of the years immediately following
the Napoleonic Wars. His father, John James
Ruskin, was a Scots wine merchant who had
moved to London and made a fortune in the
sherry trade. John Ruskin, an only child,
was largely educated at home, where he was
given a taste for art by his father’s
collecting of contemporary watercolours and
a minute and comprehensive knowledge of the
Bible by his piously Protestant mother.
This combination of the religious
intensity of the Evangelical Revival and the
artistic excitement of English Romantic
painting laid the foundations of Ruskin’s
later views. In his formative years,
painters such as J.M.W. Turner, John
Constable, and John Sell Cotman were at the
peak of their careers. At the same time
religious writers and preachers such as
Charles Simeon, John Keble, Thomas Arnold,
and John Henry Newman were establishing the
spiritual and ethical preoccupations that
would characterize the reign of Queen
Victoria. Ruskin’s family background in the
world of business was significant, too: it
not only provided the means for his
extensive travels to see paintings,
buildings, and landscapes in Britain and
continental Europe but also gave him an
understanding of the newly rich,
middle-class audience for which his books
would be written.
Ruskin discovered the work of Turner
through the illustrations to an edition of
Samuel Rogers’s poem Italy given him by a
business partner of his father in 1833. By
the mid-1830s he was publishing short pieces
in both prose and verse in magazines, and in
1836 he was provoked into drafting a reply
(unpublished) to an attack on Turner’s
painting by the art critic of Blackwood’s
Magazine. After five years at the University
of Oxford, during which he won the Newdigate
Prize for poetry but was prevented by ill
health from sitting for an honours degree,
Ruskin returned, in 1842, to his abandoned
project of defending and explaining the late
work of Turner.
Art criticism
In 1843 Ruskin published the first
volume of Modern Painters, a book that would
eventually consist of five volumes and
occupy him for the next 17 years. His first
purpose was to insist on the “truth” of the
depiction of Nature in Turner’s landscape
paintings. Neoclassical critics had attacked
the later work of Turner, with its
proto-Impressionist concern for effects of
light and atmosphere, for mimetic
inaccuracy, and for a failure to represent
the “general truth” that had been an
essential criterion of painting in the age
of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Drawing on his
serious amateur interests in geology,
botany, and meteorology, Ruskin made it his
business to demonstrate in detail that
Turner’s work was everywhere based on a
profound knowledge of the local and
particular truths of natural form. One after
another, Turner’s “truth of tone,” “truth of
colour,” “truth of space,” “truth of skies,”
“truth of earth,” “truth of water,” and
“truth of vegetation” were minutely
considered, in a laborious project that
would not be completed until the appearance
of the fifth and final volume of Modern
Painters in 1860.
This shift of concern from general to
particular conceptions of truth was a key
feature of Romantic thought, and Ruskin’s
first major achievement was thus to bring
the assumptions of Romanticism to the
practice of art criticism. By 1843
avant-garde painters had been working in
this new spirit for several decades, but
criticism and public understanding had
lagged behind. More decisively than any
previous writer, Ruskin brought 19th-century
English painting and 19th-century English
art criticism into sympathetic alignment. As
he did so, he alerted readers to the fact
that they had, in Turner, one of the
greatest painters in the history of Western
art alive and working among them in
contemporary London, and, in the broader
school of English landscape painting, a
major modern art movement.
Ruskin did this in a prose style
peculiarly well adapted to the discussion of
the visual arts in an era when there was
limited reproductive illustration and no
easy access to well-stocked public art
galleries. In these circumstances the critic
was obliged to create in words an effective
sensory and emotional substitute for visual
experience. Working in the tradition of the
Romantic poetic prose of Charles Lamb and
Thomas De Quincey, though more immediately
influenced by the descriptive writing of Sir
Walter Scott, the rhetoric of the Bible, and
the blank verse of William Wordsworth,
Ruskin vividly evoked the effect on the
human eye and sensibility both of Turner’s
paintings and of the actual landscapes that
Turner and other artists had sought to
represent.
In the process Ruskin introduced the
newly wealthy commercial and professional
classes of the English-speaking world to the
possibility of enjoying and collecting art.
Since most of them had been shaped by an
austerely puritanical religious tradition,
Ruskin knew that they would be suspicious of
claims for painting that stressed its
sensual or hedonic qualities. Instead, he
defined painting as “a noble and expressive
language, invaluable as the vehicle of
thought, but by itself nothing.” What that
language expressed, in Romantic landscape
painting, was a Wordsworthian sense of a
divine presence in Nature: a morally
instructive natural theology in which God
spoke through physical “types.” Conscious of
the spiritual significance of the natural
world, young painters should “go to Nature
in all singleness of heart…having no other
thoughts but how best to penetrate her
meaning, and remember her instruction;
rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and
scorning nothing.”
Three years later, in the second volume
of Modern Painters (1846), Ruskin would
specifically distinguish this strenuously
ethical or Theoretic conception of art from
the Aesthetic, undidactic, or
art-for-art’s-sake definition that would be
its great rival in the second half of the
19th century. Despite his friendships with
individual Aesthetes, Ruskin would remain
the dominant spokesman for a morally and
socially committed conception of art
throughout his lifetime.
Art, architecture, and society
After the publication of the first
volume of Modern Painters in 1843, Ruskin
became aware of another avant-garde artistic
movement: the critical rediscovery of the
painting of the Gothic Middle Ages. He wrote
about these Idealist painters (especially
Giotto, Fra Angelico, and Benozzo Gozzoli)
at the end of the second volume of Modern
Painters, and he belatedly added an account
of them to the third edition of the first
volume in 1846. These medieval religious
artists could provide, he believed, in a way
in which the Dutch, French, and Italian
painters of the 17th and 18th centuries
could not, an inspiring model for the art of
the “modern” age.
This medievalist enthusiasm was one
reason that Ruskin was so ready to lend his
support to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
(PRB), a group of young English artists
formed in 1848 to reject the Neoclassical
assumptions of contemporary art schools.
Ruskin published an enthusiastic pamphlet
about the PRB (in which he misleadingly
identified them as the natural heirs of
Turner) in 1851, wrote letters to the Times
in 1851 and 1854 to defend them from their
critics, and recommended their work in his
Edinburgh Lectures of 1853 (published 1854).
But medievalism was even more important
in the field of architecture, where the
Gothic Revival was as direct an expression
of the new Romantic spirit as the landscape
painting of Turner or Constable. Ruskin had
been involved in a major Gothic Revival
building project in 1844, when George
Gilbert Scott redesigned Ruskin’s parents’
parish church, St. Giles’s Camberwell. In
1848, newly married to Euphemia (Effie)
Gray, Ruskin went on a honeymoon tour of the
Gothic churches of northern France and began
to write his first major book on buildings,
The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849).
Conceived in the disturbing context of the
European revolutions of 1848, the book lays
down seven moral principles (or “Lamps”) to
guide architectural practice, one of which,
“The Lamp of Memory,” articulates the
scrupulous respect for the original fabric
of old buildings that would inspire William
Morris and, through him, the conservation
movement of the 20th century. In November
Ruskin went abroad again, this time to
Venice to research a more substantial book
on architecture.
The Stones of Venice was published in
three volumes, one in 1851 and two more in
1853. In part it is a laboriously researched
history of Venetian architecture, based on
long months of direct study of the original
buildings, then in a condition of serious
neglect and decay. But it is also a book of
moral and social polemic with the
imaginative structure of a Miltonic or
Wordsworthian sublime epic. Ruskin’s
narrative charts the fall of Venice from its
medieval Eden, through the impiety and
arrogance (as Ruskin saw it) of the
Renaissance, to its modern condition of
political impotence and social frivolity. As
such, the book is a distinguished late
example of the political medievalism found
in the work of William Cobbett, Robert
Southey, Thomas Carlyle, and the Young
England movement of the 1840s. Ruskin
differs from these predecessors both in the
poetic power of his prose and in his
distinctive—and widely
influential—insistence that art and
architecture are, necessarily, the direct
expression of the social conditions in which
they were produced. Here, as elsewhere, the
Aesthetic movement, with its view of art as
a rebellious alternative to the social norm
and its enthusiasm for Renaissance texts and
artifacts, stands in direct contrast to
Ruskin’s Theoretic views.
The Stones of Venice was influential in
other ways as well. Its celebration of
Italian Gothic encouraged the use of foreign
models in English Gothic Revival
architecture. By 1874 Ruskin would regret
the extent to which architects had
“dignified our banks and drapers’ shops with
Venetian tracery.” But, for good or ill, his
writing played a key part in establishing
the view that the architectural style of
Venice, the great maritime trading nation of
the medieval world, was particularly
appropriate for buildings in modern Britain.
The other enduring influence derived, more
subtly, from a single chapter in the second
volume, “The Nature of Gothic.” There Ruskin
identified “imperfection” as an essential
feature of Gothic art, contrasting it with
the mechanical regularity of Neoclassical
buildings and modern mass production. Gothic
architecture, he believed, allowed a
significant degree of creative freedom and
artistic fulfillment to the individual
workman. We could not, and should not, take
pleasure in an object that had not itself
been made with pleasure. In this proposition
lay the roots both of Ruskin’s own quarrel
with industrial capitalism and of the Arts
and Crafts movement of the later 19th
century.
Cultural criticism
Turner died in 1851. Ruskin’s marriage
was dissolved, on grounds of
nonconsummation, in 1854, leaving the former
Effie Gray free to marry the Pre-Raphaelite
painter John Everett Millais. Ruskin
withdrew somewhat from society. He traveled
extensively in Europe and, from 1856 to
1858, took on a considerable body of
administrative work as the chief artistic
executor of Turner’s estate. He contributed
both financially and physically to the
construction of a major Gothic Revival
building: Benjamin Woodward’s Oxford
University Museum. In 1856 he published the
third and fourth volumes of Modern Painters,
with their penetrating inquiry into the
reasons for the predominance of landscape
painting in 19th-century art and their
invention of the important critical term
“pathetic fallacy.” His annual Academy Notes
(a series of pamphlets issued by an English
publisher from 1855 to 1859) sustained his
reputation as a persuasive commentator on
contemporary painting. But by 1858 Ruskin
was beginning to move on from the specialist
criticism of art and architecture to a wider
concern with the cultural condition of his
age. His growing friendship with the
historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle
contributed to this process. Like Carlyle,
Ruskin began to adopt the “prophetic”
stance, familiar from the Bible, of a voice
crying from the wilderness and seeking to
call a lapsed people back into the paths of
righteousness.
This marginal role as a disenchanted
outsider both legitimized and, to an extent,
required a ferocity and oddness that would
be conspicuous features of Ruskin’s later
career. In 1858 Ruskin lectured on “The Work
of Iron in Nature, Art and Policy”
(published in The Two Paths, 1859), a text
in which both the radical-conservative
temper and the symbolic method of his later
cultural criticism are clearly established.
Beginning as an art critic, Ruskin contrasts
the exquisite sculptured iron grilles of
medieval Verona with the mass-produced metal
security railings with which modern citizens
protect their houses. The artistic contrast
is, of course, also a social contrast, and
Ruskin goes rapidly beyond this to a
symbolic assertion of the “iron” values
involved in his definition of the just
society. By wearing the fetters of a
benignly neofeudalist social order, men and
women, Ruskin believed, might lead lives of
greater aesthetic fulfillment, in an
environment less degraded by industrial
pollution.
These values are persistently restated in
Ruskin’s writings of the 1860s, sometimes in
surprising ways. Unto This Last and Munera
Pulveris (1862 and 1872 as books, though
published in magazines in 1860 and 1862–63)
are attacks on the classical economics of
Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. Neither
book makes any significant technical
contribution to the study of economics
(though Ruskin thought otherwise); both
memorably express Ruskin’s moral outrage at
the extent to which the materialist and
utilitarian ethical assumptions implicit in
this new technique for understanding human
behaviour had come to be accepted as
normative. Sesame and Lilies (1865) would
become notorious in the late 20th century as
a stock example of Victorian male
chauvinism. In fact, Ruskin was using the
conventional construction of the feminine,
as pacific, altruistic, and uncompetitive,
to articulate yet another symbolic assertion
of his anticapitalist social model. The
Crown of Wild Olive (1866, enlarged in 1873)
collects some of the best specimens of
Ruskin’s Carlylean manner, notably the
lecture “Traffic” of 1864, which memorably
draws its audience’s attention to the
hypocrisy manifested by their choice of
Gothic architecture for their churches but
Neoclassical designs for their homes.
The dogmatic Protestantism of Ruskin’s
childhood had been partially abandoned in
1858, after an “unconversion” experience in
Turin. Ten years later, in a moving lecture
on “The Mystery of Life and Its Arts,”
Ruskin reflected on his returning sense of
the spiritual and transcendent. In The Queen
of the Air (1869) he attempted to express
his old concept of a divine power in Nature
in new terms calculated for an age in which
assent to the Christian faith was no longer
automatic or universal. Through an account
of the Greek myth of Athena, Ruskin sought
to suggest an enduring human need for—and
implicit recognition of—the supernatural
authority on which the moral stresses of his
artistic, political, and cultural views
depend.
His father’s death in 1864 had left
Ruskin a wealthy man. He used his wealth, in
part, to promote idealistic social causes,
notably the Guild of St. George, a pastoral
community first planned in 1871 and formally
constituted seven years later. From 1866 to
1875 he was unhappily in love with a woman
30 years his junior, Rose La Touche, whose
physical and mental deterioration caused him
acute distress. During these years he began,
himself, to show signs of serious
psychological illness. In 1871 he bought
Brantwood, a house in the English Lake
District (now a museum of his work) and
lived there for the rest of his life.
Ruskin’s appointment as Slade Professor
of Fine Art at Oxford in 1870 was a welcome
encouragement at a troubled stage of his
career, and in the following year he
launched Fors Clavigera, a one-man monthly
magazine in which, from 1871 to 1878 and
1880 to 1884 he developed his idiosyncratic
cultural theories. Like his successive
series of Oxford lectures (1870–79 and
1883–84), Fors is an unpredictable mixture
of striking insights, powerful rhetoric,
self-indulgence, bigotry, and occasional
incoherence. As a by-product of the Fors
project, however, Ruskin wrote his last
major work: his autobiography, Praeterita
(1885–89). Unfinished, shamelessly partial
(it omits, for example, all mention of his
marriage), and chronologically
untrustworthy, it provides a subtle and
memorable history of the growth of Ruskin’s
distinctive sensibility.
Assessment
In November 1878 the painter James
McNeill Whistler’s action for libel against
Ruskin—brought after Ruskin’s attack on the
impressionist manner of a Whistler
Nocturne—came to trial. The trial made the
conflict between Ruskin’s moral view of art
and Whistler’s Aestheticism a matter of wide
public interest. Whistler, awarded only a
farthing’s damages and no costs, was driven
into bankruptcy. Ruskin suffered no
financial ill effects, but his reputation as
an art critic was seriously harmed. After
this date there was a growing tendency to
see him as an enemy of modern art:
blinkered, eccentric, and out-of-date.
Modernist artists and critics rejected
Ruskin. His stress on the moral, social, and
spiritual purposes of art and his Naturalist
theory of visual representation were
unpopular in the era of Impressionism,
Cubism, and Dada. Gothic Revival buildings
became deeply unfashionable; the
architecture critic Geoffrey Scott, in 1914,
would dismiss Ruskin’s architectural theory
as “The Ethical Fallacy.”
Since then, Ruskin has gradually been
rediscovered. His formative importance as a
thinker about ecology, about the
conservation of buildings and environments,
about Romantic painting, about art
education, and about the human cost of the
mechanization of work became steadily more
obvious. The outstanding quality of his own
drawings and watercolours (modestly treated
in his lifetime as working notes or amateur
sketches) was increasingly acknowledged, as
was his role as a stimulus to the flowering
of British painting, architecture, and
decorative art in the second half of the
19th century.
Above all, Ruskin was rediscovered as a
great writer of English prose. Frequently
self-contradictory, hectoringly moralistic,
and insufficiently informed, Ruskin was
nonetheless gifted with exceptional powers
of perception and expression. These are the
gifts that the poet Matthew Arnold
acknowledged when he spoke of “the genius,
the feeling, the temperament” of the
descriptive writing in the fourth volume of
Modern Painters. This unusual capacity to
see things and to say what he saw makes
Ruskin’s work not just an important episode
in the history of taste but also an enduring
and distinctive part of English literature.
Nicholas Shrimpton
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John Henry Newman
born Feb. 21, 1801, London, Eng.
died Aug. 11, 1890, Birmingham, Warwick
influential churchman and man of letters of
the 19th century, who led the Oxford
Movement in the Church of England and later
became a cardinal-deacon in the Roman
Catholic church. His eloquent books, notably
Parochial and Plain Sermons (1834–42),
Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the
Church (1837), and University Sermons
(1843), revived emphasis on the dogmatic
authority of the church and urged reforms of
the Church of England after the pattern of
the original “catholic,” or universal,
church of the first five centuries ad. By
1845 he came to view the Roman Catholic
church as the true modern development from
the original body.
Early life and education.
Newman was born in London in 1801. After
pursuing his education in an evangelical
home and at Trinity College, Oxford, he was
made a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, in
1822, vice principal of Alban Hall in 1825,
and vicar of St. Mary’s, Oxford, in 1828.
Under the influence of the clergyman John
Keble and Richard Hurrell Froude, Newman
became a convinced high churchman (one of
those who emphasized the Anglican church’s
continuation of the ancient Christian
tradition, particularly as regards the
episcopate, priesthood, and sacraments).
Association with the Oxford Movement.
When the Oxford Movement began Newman was
its effective organizer and intellectual
leader, supplying the most acute thought
produced by it. A High Church movement
within the Church of England, the Oxford
Movement was started at Oxford in 1833 with
the object of stressing the Catholic
elements in the English religious tradition
and of reforming the Church of England.
Newman’s editing of the Tracts for the Times
and his contributing of 24 tracts among them
were less significant for the influence of
the movement than his books, especially the
Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the
Church (1837), the classic statement of the
Tractarian doctrine of authority; the
University Sermons (1843), similarly
classical for the theory of religious
belief; and above all his Parochial and
Plain Sermons (1834–42), which in their
published form took the principles of the
movement, in their best expression, into the
country at large.
In 1838 and 1839 Newman was beginning to
exercise far-reaching influence in the
Church of England. His stress upon the
dogmatic authority of the church was felt to
be a much-needed reemphasis in a new liberal
age. He seemed decisively to know what he
stood for and where he was going, and in the
quality of his personal devotion his
followers found a man who practiced what he
preached. Moreover, he had been endowed with
the gift of writing sensitive and sometimes
magical prose.
Newman was contending that the Church of
England represented true catholicity and
that the test of this catholicity (as
against Rome upon the one side and what he
termed “the popular Protestants” upon the
other) lay in the teaching of the ancient
and undivided church of the Fathers. From
1834 onward this middle way was beginning to
be attacked on the ground that it
undervalued the Reformation; and when in
1838–39 Newman and Keble published Froude’s
Remains, in which the Reformation was
violently denounced, moderate men began to
suspect their leader. Their worst fears were
confirmed in 1841 by Newman’s Tract 90,
which, in reconciling the Thirty-nine
Articles with the teaching of the ancient
and undivided church, appeared to some to
assert that the articles were not
incompatible with the doctrines of the
Council of Trent; and Newman’s extreme
disciple, W.G. Ward, claimed that this was
indeed the consequence. Bishop Richard Bagot
of Oxford requested that the tracts be
suspended; and in the distress of the
consequent denunciations Newman increasingly
withdrew into isolation, his confidence in
himself shattered and his belief in the
catholicity of the English church weakening.
He moved out of Oxford to his chapelry of
Littlemore, where he gathered a few of his
intimate disciples and established a
quasi-monastery.
Conversion to Roman Catholicism.
Newman resigned St. Mary’s, Oxford, on Sept.
18, 1843, and preached his last Anglican
sermon (“The Parting of Friends”) in
Littlemore Church a week later. He delayed
long, because his intellectual integrity
found an obstacle in the historical contrast
between the early church and the modern
Roman Catholic church. Meditating upon the
idea of development, a word then much
discussed in connection with biological
evolution, he applied the law of historical
development to Christian society and tried
to show (to himself as much as to others)
that the early and undivided church had
developed rightly into the modern Roman
Catholic church and that the Protestant
churches represented a break in this
development, both in doctrine and in
devotion. These meditations removed the
obstacle, and on Oct. 9, 1845, he was
received at Littlemore into the Roman
Catholic church, publishing a few weeks
later his Essay on the Development of
Christian Doctrine.
Newman went to Rome to be ordained to the
priesthood and after some uncertainties
founded the Oratory at Birmingham in 1848.
He was suspect among the more rigorous Roman
Catholic clergy because of the quasi-liberal
spirit that he seemed to have brought with
him; and therefore, though in fact he was no
liberal in any normal sense of the word, his
early career as a Roman Catholic priest was
marked by a series of frustrations. In
1852–53 he was convicted of libeling the
apostate former Dominican priest Achilli. He
was summoned to Ireland to be the first
rector of the new Catholic university in
Dublin, but the task was, under the
circumstances, impossible, and the only
useful result was his lectures on the Idea
of a University (1852). His role as editor
of the Roman Catholic monthly, the Rambler,
and in the efforts of Lord Acton to
encourage critical scholarship among
Catholics, rendered him further suspect and
caused a breach with H.E. Manning, who was
soon to be the new archbishop of
Westminster. One of Newman’s articles (“On
Consulting the Faithful in Matters of
Doctrine”) was reported to Rome on suspicion
of heresy. He attempted to found a Catholic
hostel at Oxford but was thwarted by the
opposition of Manning.
Apologia pro Vita Sua.
From the sense of frustration engendered by
these experiences Newman was delivered in
1864 by an unwarranted attack from Charles
Kingsley upon his moral teaching. Kingsley
in effect challenged him to justify the
honesty of his life as an Anglican. And
though he treated Kingsley more severely
than some thought justified, the resulting
history of his religious opinions, Apologia
pro Vita Sua (1864; “A Defense of His
Life”), was read and approved far beyond the
limits of the Roman Catholic church, and by
its fairness, candour, interest, and the
beauty of some passages, it recaptured the
almost national status that he had once
held.
Though the Apologia was not liked by
Manning and those who thought as he did
because it seemed to show the quasi-liberal
spirit that they feared, it assured Newman’s
stature in the Roman Catholic church. In
1870 he expressed opposition to a definition
of papal infallibility, though himself a
believer in the doctrine. In the same year,
he published his most important book of
theology since 1845, An Essay in Aid of a
Grammar of Assent (commonly known as The
Grammar of Assent), which contained a
further consideration of the nature of faith
and an attempt to show how faith can possess
certainty when it rises out of evidence that
can never be more than probable. In 1879
Pope Leo XIII made him cardinal-deacon of
St. George in Velabro. He died at Birmingham
in 1890 and is buried (with his closest
friend, Ambrose St. John) at Rednal, the
rest house of the Oratory.
Mind and character.
Newman’s portraits show a face of
sensitivity and aesthetic delicacy. He was a
poet—most famous are his contributions in
the Lyra Apostolica of his Anglican days,
including the hymn “Lead, kindly light,”
written in 1833 when he was becalmed in the
strait between Sardinia and Corsica, and The
Dream of Gerontius (1865), based upon the
requiem offices and including such
well-known hymns as “Praise to the holiest
in the height” and “Firmly I believe and
truly.” He was always conscious of the
limitations of prose and aware of the
necessity for parable and analogy, and
logical theologians sometimes found him
elusive or thought him muddled.
But his was a mind of penetration and
power, trained upon Aristotle, David Hume,
Bishop Joseph Butler, and Richard Whately,
and his superficial contempt for logic and
dialectic blinded some readers into the
error of thinking his mind illogical. His
intellectual defect was rather that of
oversubtlety; he enjoyed the niceties of
argumentation, was inclined to be captivated
by the twists of his own ingenuity, and had
a habit of using the reductio ad absurdum in
dangerous places. Newman’s mind at its best
is probably to be found in parts of the
Parochial and Plain Sermons or the
University Sermons, at its worst in the
Essay on Ecclesiastical Miracles of 1843.
His sensitive nature, though it made him
lovable to his few intimates, made him
prickly and resentful of public criticism,
and his distresses under the suspicions of
his opponents, whether Anglicans defending
the Reformation or ultramontanes (exponents
of centralized papal power) attacking his
Roman theology, weakened his confidence and
prevented him from becoming the leader that
he was otherwise so well equipped to be.
Nevertheless, as the effective creator of
the Oxford Movement, he helped to transform
the Church of England; and as the upholder
of a theory of doctrinal development he
helped Catholic theology to become more
reconciled to the findings of the new
critical scholarship, while in England the
Apologia was important in helping to break
down the cruder prejudices of the English
against Catholic priests. In both the
Catholic church and the Church of England
his influence has been momentous.
W. Owen Chadwick
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APPENDIX
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Bernard Bosanquet
British philosopher
born June 14, 1848,
Alnwick, Northumberland, Eng.
died Feb. 8, 1923, London
Main
philosopher who helped revive in England the idealism of
G.W.F. Hegel and sought to apply its principles to social
and political problems.
Made a fellow of
University College, Oxford, in 1870, Bosanquet was a tutor
there until 1881, when he moved to London to devote himself
to philosophical writing and to work on behalf of the
Charity Organisation Society. He was professor of moral
philosophy at St. Andrews University in Scotland (1903–08).
Although Bosanquet
owed much to Hegel, his first writings were influenced by
the 19th-century German philosopher Rudolf Lotze, whose
Logik and Metaphysik he had edited in English translation in
1884. The fundamental principles of such early works as
Knowledge and Reality (1885) and Logic (1888) were further
explicated in his Essentials of Logic (1895) and Implication
and Linear Inference (1920), which stress the central role
of logical thought in systematically addressing
philosophical problems.
Bosanquet’s debt to
Hegel is more evident in his works on ethics, aesthetics,
and metaphysics. Having translated in 1886 the introduction
to Hegel’s Philosophy of Fine Art, he proceeded to his own
History of Aesthetic (1892) and Three Lectures on Aesthetic
(1915). Both reflect his belief that aesthetics can
reconcile the natural and the supernatural worlds. As
elsewhere in his work, Bosanquet revealed his distaste for
the materialism of his day and favoured the neo-Hegelian
antidote, which held that everything considered to be real
is a manifestation of a spiritual absolute.
Bosanquet’s ethical
and social philosophy, particularly the practical work Some
Suggestions in Ethics (1918), shows a similar desire to view
reality coherently, as a concrete unity in which pleasure
and duty, egoism and altruism are reconciled. He asserted
that the same passion shown by Plato for the unity of the
universe reappeared in Christianity as the doctrine of the
divine spirit manifesting itself in human society. Social
life requires a communal will that both grows out of
individual cooperation and maintains the individual in a
state of freedom and social satisfaction. This view is
expounded in Philosophical Theory of the State (1899) and in
Social and International Ideals (1917).
Basing his
metaphysics on Hegel’s concept of the dynamic quality of
human knowledge and experience, Bosanquet emphasized the
interrelated character of the content and the object of
human thought. Thought, he wrote in Three Chapters on the
Nature of Mind (1923), is “the development of connections”
and “the sense of the whole.”
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F. H. Bradley
British philosopher
born Jan. 30, 1846,
Clapham, Surrey, Eng.
died Sept. 18, 1924, Oxford
Main
influential English philosopher of the absolute Idealist
school, which based its doctrines on the thought of G.W.F.
Hegel and considered mind to be a more fundamental feature
of the universe than matter.
Elected to a
fellowship at Merton College, Oxford, in 1870, Bradley soon
became ill with a kidney disease that made him a
semi-invalid for the rest of his life. Because his
fellowship involved no teaching duties and because he never
married, he was able to devote the major part of his life to
writing. He was awarded Britain’s Order of Merit, the first
English philosopher to receive the distinction.
In his early work
Bradley participated in the growing attack upon the
Empiricist theories of English thinkers such as John Stuart
Mill and drew heavily on Hegel’s ideas. In Ethical Studies
(1876), Bradley’s first major work, he sought to expose the
confusions apparent in Mill’s doctrine of Utilitarianism,
which urged maximum human happiness as the goal of ethical
behaviour. In The Principles of Logic (1883), Bradley
denounced the deficient psychology of the Empiricists, whose
logic was limited, in his view, to the doctrine of the
association of ideas held in the human mind. He gave Hegel
due credit for borrowed ideas in both books, but he never
embraced Hegelianism thoroughly.
Bradley’s most
ambitious work, Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay
(1893), was, in his own words, a “critical discussion of
first principles,” meant “to stimulate inquiry and doubt.”
The book disappointed his followers, who expected a
vindication of the truths of religion. While reality is
indeed spiritual, he maintained, a detailed demonstration of
the notion is beyond human capacity. If for no other reason,
the demonstration is impossible because of the fatally
abstract nature of human thought. Instead of ideas, which
could not properly contain reality, he recommended feeling,
the immediacy of which could embrace the harmonious nature
of reality. His admirers were disappointed as well by his
discussion of worship and the soul. He declared that
religion is not a “final and ultimate” matter but, instead,
a matter of practice; the philosopher’s absolute idea is
incompatible with the God of religious men.
The effect of
Appearance and Reality was to encourage rather than to
dispel doubt, and the following that Bradley had gained
through his work in ethics and logic became disenchanted.
Thus, the most influential aspect of his work has been the
negative and critical one because of his skill as a
polemical writer. Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore, who led
the attack on Idealism, both benefitted from his sharp
dialectic. Modern critics value him less for his conclusions
than for the manner in which he reached them, via a ruthless
search for truth. In addition to original work in
philosophical psychology, Bradley wrote The Presuppositions
of Critical History (1874) and Essays on Truth and Reality
(1914). His psychological essays and minor writings were
combined in Collected Essays (2 vol., 1935).
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T. H. Green
British educator and philosopher
born April 7, 1836,
Birkin, Yorkshire, Eng.
died March 26, 1882, Oxford, Oxfordshire
Main
English educator, political theorist, and Idealist
philosopher of the so-called Neo-Kantian school. Through his
teaching, Green exerted great influence on philosophy in
late 19th-century England. Most of his life centred at
Oxford, where he was educated, elected a fellow in 1860,
served as a lecturer, and in 1878 was appointed professor of
moral philosophy. His lectures provided the basis for his
most significant works, Prolegomena to Ethics (1883) and
Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation,
published in the collected Works, 3 vol. (1885–88).
Green’s metaphysics
begins with the question of man’s relation to nature. Man,
he said, is self-conscious. The simplest mental act involves
consciousness of changes and of distinctions between the
self and the object observed. To know, Green asserted, is to
be aware of relations between objects. Above man—who can
know only a small portion of such relations—is God. This
“principle which renders all relations possible and is
itself determined by none of them” is an eternal
self-consciousness.
Green based his
ethics on the spiritual nature of man. He maintained that
man’s determination to act upon his reflections is an “act
of will” and is not externally determined by God or any
other factor. According to Green, freedom is not the
supposed ability to do anything desired but is the power to
identify one’s self with the good that reason reveals as
one’s own true good.
Green’s political
philosophy enlarged upon his ethical system. Ideally,
political institutions embody the community’s moral ideas
and help develop the character of individual citizens.
Although existing institutions do not fully realize the
common ideal, the analysis that exposes their deficiencies
also indicates the path of true development. His original
view of personal self-realization also contained the notion
of political obligation, for citizens intent upon realizing
themselves will act as if by duty to improve the
institutions of the state. Because the state represents the
“general will” and is not a timeless entity, citizens have
the moral right to rebel against it in the state’s own
interest when the general will becomes subverted.
Green’s influence on
English philosophy was complemented by his social
influence—in part through his efforts to bring the
universities into closer touch with practical and political
affairs and in part through his attempt to reformulate
political liberalism so that it laid more stress on the need
for positive actions by the state than on the negative
rights of the individual. His address “Liberal Legislation
and Freedom of Contract” (1881) gave early expression to
ideas central to the modern “welfare state.”
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Herbert Spencer
British philosopher
born April 27, 1820, Derby,
Derbyshire, Eng.
died Dec. 8, 1903, Brighton, Sussex
Main
English sociologist and philosopher, an early advocate of the theory of
evolution, who achieved an influential synthesis of knowledge,
advocating the preeminence of the individual over society and of science
over religion. His magnum opus was The Synthetic Philosophy, a
comprehensive work completed in 1896 and containing volumes on the
principles of biology, psychology, morality, and sociology.
Life and works.
Spencer’s father, William George Spencer, was a schoolmaster, and
his parents’ dissenting religious convictions inspired in him a
nonconformity that continued active even after he had abandoned the
Christian faith. Spencer declined an offer from his uncle, the Rev.
Thomas Spencer, to send him to Cambridge, and in consequence his higher
education was largely the result of his own reading, which was chiefly
in the natural sciences. He was, for a few months, a schoolteacher and
from 1837 to 1841 a railway civil engineer.
In 1842 he contributed some
letters (republished later as a pamphlet, The Proper Sphere of
Government, 1843) to The Nonconformist, in which he argued that it is
the business of governments to uphold natural rights and that they do
more harm than good when they go beyond this. After some association
with progressive journalism through such papers as The Zoist (devoted to
mesmerism and phrenology) and The Pilot (the organ of the Complete
Suffrage Union), Spencer became in 1848 a subeditor of The Economist. In
1851 he published Social Statics (reissued in 1955), which contained in
embryo most of his later views, including his argument in favour of an
extreme form of economic and social laissez-faire. About 1850 Spencer
became acquainted with Marian Evans (the novelist George Eliot), and his
philosophical conversations with her led some of their friends to expect
that they would marry; but in his Autobiography (1904) Spencer denies
any such desire, much as he admired Evans’ intellectual powers. Other
friends were G.H. Lewes, T.H. Huxley, and J.S. Mill. In 1853 Spencer,
having received a legacy from his uncle, resigned his position with The
Economist.
Having published the first part
of The Principles of Psychology in 1855, Spencer in 1860 issued a
prospectus and accepted subscriptions for a comprehensive work, The
Synthetic Philosophy, which was to include, besides the already
published Principles of Psychology, volumes on first principles and on
biology, sociology, and morality. First Principles was published in
1862, and between then and 1896, when the third volume of The Principles
of Sociology appeared, the task was completed. In order to prepare the
ground for The Principles of Sociology, Spencer started in 1873 a series
of works called Descriptive Sociology, in which information was provided
about the social institutions of various societies, both primitive and
civilized. The series was interrupted in 1881 because of lack of public
support. Spencer was a friend and adviser of Beatrice Potter, later
Beatrice Webb, the social reformer, who frequently visited Spencer
during his last illness and left a sympathetic and sad record of his
last years in My Apprenticeship (1926). Spencer died in 1903, at
Brighton, leaving a will by which trustees were set up to complete the
publication of the Descriptive Sociology. The series comprised 19 parts
(1873–1934).
Spencer was one of the most
argumentative and most discussed English thinkers of the Victorian
period. His strongly scientific orientation led him to urge the
importance of examining social phenomena in a scientific way. He
believed that all aspects of his thought formed a coherent and closely
ordered system. Science and philosophy, he held, gave support to and
enhanced individualism and progress. Though it is natural to cite him as
the great exponent of Victorian optimism, it is notable that he was by
no means unaffected by the pessimism that from time to time clouded the
Victorian confidence. Evolution, he taught, would be followed by
dissolution, and individualism would come into its own only after an era
of socialism and war.
The synthetic philosophy in outline.
Spencer saw philosophy as a synthesis of the fundamental principles
of the special sciences, a sort of scientific summa to replace the
theological systems of the Middle Ages. He thought of unification in
terms of development, and his whole scheme was in fact suggested to him
by the evolution of biological species. In First Principles he argued
that there is a fundamental law of matter, which he called the law of
the persistence of force, from which it follows that nothing homogeneous
can remain as such if it is acted upon, because any external force must
affect some part of it differently from other parts and cause difference
and variety to arise. From this, he continued, it would follow that any
force that continues to act on what is homogeneous must bring about an
increasing variety. This “law of the multiplication of effects,” due to
an unknown and unknowable absolute force, is in Spencer’s view the clue
to the understanding of all development, cosmic as well as biological.
It should be noted that Spencer published his idea of the evolution of
biological species before the views of Charles Darwin and the British
naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace were known, but Spencer at that time
thought that evolution was caused by the inheritance of acquired
characteristics, whereas Darwin and Wallace attributed it to natural
selection. Spencer later accepted the theory that natural selection was
one of the causes of biological evolution, and he himself coined the
phrase “survival of the fittest” (Principles of Biology [1864], vol. 1,
p. 444).
Sociology and social philosophy.
That Spencer first derived his general evolutionary scheme from
reflection on human society is seen in Social Statics, in which social
evolution is held to be a process of increasing “individuation.” He saw
human societies as evolving by means of increasing division of labour
from undifferentiated hordes into complex civilizations. Spencer
believed that the fundamental sociological classification was between
military societies, in which cooperation was secured by force, and
industrial societies, in which cooperation was voluntary and
spontaneous.
Evolution is not the only
biological conception that Spencer applied in his sociological theories.
He made a detailed comparison between animal organisms and human
societies. In both he found a regulative system (the central nervous
system in the one, government in the other), a sustaining system
(alimentation in the one case, industry in the other), and a
distribution system (veins and arteries in the first; roads, telegraphs,
etc., in the second). The great difference between an animal and a
social organism, he said, is that, whereas in the former there is one
consciousness relating to the whole, in the latter consciousness exists
in each member only; society exists for the benefit of its members and
not they for its benefit.
This individualism is the key to
all of Spencer’s work. His contrast between military and industrial
societies is drawn between despotism, which is primitive and bad, and
individualism, which is civilized and good. He believed that in
industrial society the order achieved, though planned by no one, is
delicately adjusted to the needs of all parties. In The Man Versus the
State (1884) he wrote that England’s Tories generally favour a military
and Liberals an industrial social order but that the Liberals of the
latter half of the 19th century, with their legislation on hours of
work, liquor licensing, sanitation, education, etc., were developing a
“New Toryism” and preparing the way for a “coming slavery.” “The
function of liberalism in the past was that of putting a limit to the
powers of kings. The function of true liberalism in the future will be
that of putting a limit to the powers of parliaments.”
Metaphysics.
In his emphasis on variety and differentiation, Spencer was
unwittingly repeating, in a 19th-century idiom, the metaphysics of
liberalism that Spinoza and Leibniz had adumbrated in the 17th century.
Spinoza had maintained that “God or Nature” has an infinity of
attributes in which every possibility is actualized, and Leibniz had
argued that the perfection of God is exhibited in the infinite variety
of the universe. Though neither of them believed that time is an
ultimate feature of reality, Spencer combined a belief in the reality of
time with a belief in the eventual actualization of every possible
variety of being. He thus gave metaphysical support to the liberal
principle of variety, according to which a differentiated and developing
society is preferable to a monotonous and static one.
Evaluation.
Spencer’s attempt to synthesize the sciences showed a sublime
audacity that has not been repeated because the intellectual
specialization he welcomed and predicted increased even beyond his
expectations. His sociology, although it gave an impetus to the study of
society, was superseded as a result of the development of social
anthropology since his day and was much more concerned with providing a
rationale for his social ideals than he himself appreciated. Primitive
men, for example, are not the childlike emotional creatures that he
thought them to be, nor is religion to be explained only in terms of the
souls of ancestors. When T.H. Huxley said that Spencer’s idea of a
tragedy was “a deduction killed by a fact,” he called attention to the
system-building feature of Spencer’s work that led him to look for what
confirmed his theories and to ignore or to reinterpret what conflicted
with them.
Harry Burrows Acton
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Alfred North Whitehead
British mathematician and philosopher
born Feb. 15, 1861,
Ramsgate, Isle of Thanet, Kent, Eng.
died Dec. 30, 1947, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.
Main
English mathematician and philosopher, who collaborated with
Bertrand Russell on Principia Mathematica (1910–13) and,
from the mid-1920s, taught at Harvard University and
developed a comprehensive metaphysical theory.
Background and
schooling.
Whitehead’s grandfather Thomas Whitehead was a self-made
man who started a successful boys’ school known as Chatham
House Academy. His father, Alfred Whitehead, an Anglican
clergyman, in turn headed the school and later became vicar
of St. Peter’s in Thanet. His mother, born Maria Sarah
Buckmaster, was the daughter of a prosperous military
tailor. Alfred North Whitehead was their youngest child.
Because they considered him too frail for school or active
sports, his father taught him at home until he was 14, when
he was sent to Sherborne School, Dorset, which was then one
of the best schools in England. Whitehead received a
classical education, showing a special gift for mathematics.
Despite his over-protected childhood, he showed himself a
natural leader. In his last year at school, he was head
prefect, responsible for all discipline outside the
classroom, and was a highly successful captain of games.
In 1880 Whitehead
entered Trinity College, Cambridge, on a scholarship. He
attended only mathematical lectures, and his interests in
literature, religion, philosophy, and politics were
nourished solely by conversation. It was not until May 1884,
however, that he was elected to an elite discussion society
known as the “Apostles.” Whitehead did well in the
Mathematical Tripos (honours examination) of 1883–84, won a
Trinity fellowship, and was appointed to the mathematical
staff of the college. His interest in James Clerk Maxwell’s
theory of electricity and magnetism (the subject of his
fellowship dissertation) expanded toward a scrutiny of
mathematical symbolism and ideas. Stimulated by pioneering
works in modern algebra, he envisaged a detailed comparative
study of systems of symbolic reasoning allied to ordinary
algebra. He did not begin to write his Treatise on Universal
Algebra (1898), however, until January 1891, one month after
his marriage to Evelyn Willoughby Wade. She had been born in
France, a child of impoverished Irish landed gentry, and
educated in a convent. She was a woman with a great sense of
drama and a real and unusual aesthetic sensibility, and she
enriched Whitehead’s life immensely.
Shortly before his
marriage, his long-standing interest in religion had taken a
new turn. His background had been solidly tied into the
Church of England; his father and uncles had been ordained;
so had his brother Henry, who would become bishop of Madras.
But Whitehead, under the influence of Cardinal Newman, began
to consider the tenets of the Roman Catholic Church. For
about eight years he read a great deal of theology. Then he
sold his theological library and gave up religion. This
agnosticism did not survive World War I, but Whitehead was
never again a member of any church.
Whitehead was at
work on a second volume of his Universal Algebra from 1898
to 1903, when he abandoned it because he was busy on a
related, large investigation with Bertrand Russell. He had
spotted young Russell’s brilliance when he examined him for
entrance scholarships at Trinity College. In 1890 Russell
was a freshman studying mathematics there, and Whitehead was
one of his teachers. Gradually the two men became close
friends. In July 1900 they went to the First International
Congress of Philosophy in Paris, where they were impressed
by the precision with which the mathematician Giuseppe Peano
used symbolic logic to clarify the foundations of
arithmetic. Russell at once mastered Peano’s notation and
extended his methods. By the end of 1900 he had written the
first draft of his brilliant Principles of Mathematics
(1903). Whitehead agreed with its main thesis—that all pure
mathematics follows from a reformed formal logic so that, of
the two, logic is the fundamental discipline. By 1901
Russell had secured his collaboration on volume 2 of the
Principles, in which this thesis was to be established by
strict symbolic reasoning. The task turned out to be
enormous. Their work had to be made independent of Russell’s
book; they called it Principia Mathematica. The project
occupied them until 1910, when the first of its three
volumes was published. The “official” text was written in a
notation, most of which was either taken from Peano or
invented by Whitehead. Broadly speaking, Whitehead left the
philosophical problems—notably the devising of a theory of
logical types—to Russell; and Russell, who had no teaching
duties, actually wrote out most of the book. But the
collaboration was thorough, and Russell gave Whitehead an
equal share of the credit. Whitehead’s only large published
piece employing the symbolism of the Principia is a masterly
speculative memoir, “On Mathematical Concepts of the
Material World” (1905).
Career in London.
In 1903 Trinity College had given Whitehead a 10-year
appointment as a senior lecturer, made him the head of the
mathematics staff, and permitted his teaching career to run
beyond the maximum of 25 years set by the college statutes.
Yet Whitehead’s future was uncertain: he had not made the
sort of discoveries that cause a man to be counted an
outstanding mathematician. (His interest was always
philosophical, in that it was directed more toward grasping
the nature of mathematics in its widest aspects and
organizing its ideas than toward discovering new theorems.)
There was, thus, little prospect of a Cambridge
professorship in mathematics for him at the expiration of
his Trinity lectureship. He did not wait for it to expire
but moved to London in 1910, even though he had no position
waiting for him there. His years of service at Trinity,
however, had made him a fellow for life, entitled to twice
the regular quarterly dividend paid to fellows. This was
scarcely enough to support his family, but Evelyn Whitehead
encouraged the venture.
In that first London
year, Whitehead wrote the first of his books for a wide
audience, An Introduction to Mathematics (1911), still one
of the best books of its kind. In 1911 he was appointed to
the staff of University College (London), and in 1914 he
became professor of applied mathematics at the Imperial
College of Science and Technology.
In London Whitehead
observed the education then being offered to the English
masses. His own teaching had always elicited his pupils’
latent abilities to the fullest. Perceiving that mathematics
was being taught as a disconnected set of largely unfathomed
exercises, Whitehead made occasional addresses on the
teaching of mathematics. He stressed getting a living
understanding of a few interrelated abstract ideas by using
them in a variety of ways so as to develop an intimate sense
for their power. Whitehead also perceived that literature
was so taught as to preclude its enjoyment, that curricula
were fragmented, and that teachers were handcuffed by the
system of uniform examinations set by outside examiners. In
1916, as president of the Mathematical Association, he
delivered the notable address “The Aims of Education: A Plea
for Reform.” Whitehead reminded youth’s keepers that the
purpose of education was not to pack knowledge into the
pupils but to stimulate and guide their self-development.
“Culture,” he said, “is activity of thought, and
receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of
information have nothing to do with it.” Whitehead’s address
became a classic in virtue of its unequalled clarity,
vigour, and realism and its reconciliation of general with
special education. It was followed by penetrating essays on
such topics as the rhythm of freedom and discipline. Though
Whitehead’s essays on education had little effect on British
practice, they inspired many teachers in Great Britain, the
United States, and elsewhere.
From 1919 to 1924
Whitehead was chairman of the governing body of Goldsmiths’
College, London, one of England’s major institutes for
training teachers. He also served as a governor of several
polytechnic schools in London. In the University of London
he became a member of the Senate, chairman of the Academic
Council, and dean of the Faculty of Science. His shrewdness,
common sense, and goodwill put him in great demand as a
committeeman.
Whitehead was a
pacific man but not a pacifist; he felt that the war was
hideous but that England’s part in it was necessary. His
elder son, North, fought throughout the war, and his
daughter, Jessie, worked in the Foreign Office. In 1918 his
younger son, Eric, was killed in action, and after that it
was only by immense effort that Whitehead could go on
working. To Whitehead, Russell’s pacifism was simplistic;
yet he visited him in prison, remained his friend, and, as
Russell later said, showed him greater tolerance than he
could return.
During those years,
Whitehead was also constructing philosophical foundations
for physics. He was led to this by the way in which he
wanted to present geometry—not as deduced from hypothetical
premises about assumed though imperceptible entities (e.g.,
points) but as the science of actual space, which is a
complex of relations between extended things. From
perceivable elements and relations, he logically constructed
entities that are related to each other just as points are
in geometry. That was only the beginning of his task, for
Albert Einstein had revised the ideas of space, time, and
motion. Whitehead was convinced that these three concepts
should be based upon the general character of men’s
perception of the external world. In 1919 he published his
Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge; it
was both searching and constructive but too philosophical
and too complicated to influence physicists.
Whitehead had begun
to have discussions of the perceptual basis of scientific
knowledge with philosophers in 1915, and he followed up his
Enquiry with a nonmathematical book, The Concept of Nature
(1920). Though he rejected Idealistic views of the relation
of nature to perceiving minds, neither was he a Realist of
the school led by Russell and G.E. Moore. In maintaining
that events are the basic components of nature and that
passage, or creative advance, is its most fundamental
feature—doctrines that foreshadowed his later
metaphysics—Whitehead was somewhat influenced by Henri
Bergson’s antimechanistic philosophy of change. Yet he was
something of a Platonist; he saw the definite character of
events as due to the “ingression” of timeless entities.
Career in the United States.
In the early 1920s Whitehead was clearly the most
distinguished philosopher of science writing in English.
When a friend of Harvard University, the historical scholar
Henry Osborn Taylor, pledged the money for his salary,
Harvard early in 1924 offered Whitehead a five-year
appointment as professor of philosophy. He was 63 years old,
with at most two more years to go in the Imperial College.
The idea of teaching philosophy appealed to him, and his
wife wholeheartedly concurred in the move. Harvard soon
found that it had acquired more than a philosopher of
science; it had acquired a metaphysician, one comparable in
stature to Gottfried Leibniz and Georg Hegel.
Early in 1925, he
gave a course of eight lectures in Boston, published that
same year (with additions—among them his earliest writing
about God) as Science and the Modern World. In it he
dramatically described what had long engaged his meditation;
namely, the rise, triumph, and impact of “scientific
Materialism”—i.e., the view that nature consists of nothing
else but matter in motion, or a flux of purely physical
energy. He criticized this Materialism as mistaking an
abstract system of mathematical physics for the concrete
reality of nature. Whitehead’s mind was at home with such
abstractions, and he saw them as real discoveries, not
intellectual inventions; but his sense for the fullness of
existence led him to urge upon philosophy the task of making
good their omissions by reverting to the variety of concrete
experience and then framing broader ideas. The importance of
this book was immediately recognized. What perhaps impressed
most readers was Whitehead’s appeal to his favourite poets,
William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley, against the
exclusion of values from nature.
In 1926, the compact
book Religion in the Making appeared. In it, Whitehead
interpreted religion as reaching its deepest level in
humanity’s solitude, that is, as an attitude of the
individual toward the universe rather than as a social
phenomenon.
In January 1927 the
University of Edinburgh invited him to give a set of 10
Gifford Lectures in the ensuing academic year. For this,
Whitehead drew up the complex technical structure of “the
philosophy of organism” (as he called his metaphysics) and
thought through his agreements and disagreements with some
of the great European philosophers. It was characteristic of
him to insist, against David Hume, that an adequate
philosophical theory must build on “practice” and not be
supplemented by it. The lectures reflected Whitehead’s
speculative hypothesis that the universe consists entirely
of becomings, each of them a process of appropriating and
integrating the infinity of items (“reality”) provided by
the antecedent universe and by God (the abiding source of
novel possibilities). When, in June 1928, the time for
delivering the lectures arrived and Whitehead presented this
system in its new and difficult terminology, his audience
rapidly vanished, but the publication of the lectures,
expanded to 25 chapters, gave Western metaphysics one of its
greatest books, Process and Reality (1929).
Whitehead had an
unwavering faith in the possibility of understanding
existence and a superb power to construct a scheme of
general ideas broad enough to overcome the classic dualisms.
But he knew that no system can do more than make an
approach, somewhat more adequate than its predecessors, to
understanding the infinitude of existence. He had seen the
collapse of the long-entrenched Newtonian system of physics,
and he never forgot its lesson. Henceforth dogmatic
assurance, whether in philosophy, science, or theology, was
his enemy.
Adventures of Ideas
(1933) was Whitehead’s last big philosophical book and the
most rewarding one for the general reader. It offered
penetrating, balanced reflections on the parts played by
brute forces and by general ideas about humanity, God, and
the universe in shaping the course of Western civilization.
Whitehead emphasized the impulse of life toward newness and
the absolute need for societies stable enough to nourish
adventure that is fruitful rather than anarchic. In this
book he also summarized his metaphysics and used it to
elucidate the nature of beauty, truth, art, adventure, and
peace. By “peace” he meant a religious attitude that is
“primarily a trust in the efficacy of beauty.”
Except for an
insufficient familiarity with Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud,
Whitehead was at home in both the scientific and the
literary cultures of his time. Young people flocked to
“Sunday evenings,” which his wife skillfully managed. Here
the spare, rosy-cheeked man, who might have been of average
height if he had not been so stooped, talked to them in a
high-pitched but gentle voice—talked not about his system
but about whatever was on their minds, sharply illuminating
it from a broad and historical perspective.
In his Harvard
lectures, as in his books, Whitehead liked best to explore
the scope of application of an idea and to show how
intuitions that were traditionally opposed could supplement
each other, which he did by dint of his own ideas. Most
students found attendance at his lectures a great
experience. Harvard did not retire him until 1937.
In his first years
in the United States, Whitehead visited many eastern and
midwestern campuses as a lecturer. Though he loved
Americans, he remained always very much an Englishman. A
Fellow of the Royal Society since 1903, he was elected to
the British Academy in 1931. In 1945 he received the Order
of Merit. After his death his body was cremated, and there
was no funeral. His unpublished manuscripts and
correspondence were destroyed by his widow, as he had
wanted.
Assessment.
Whitehead has not had disciples, though his admirers
have included leaders in every field of thought. His
educational and philosophical books have been translated
into many languages. His metaphysics has been keenly
studied, in the United States most of all. What is now
called Whitehead’s “process theology” is easily the most
influential part of his system; this is partly due to the
influence of the U.S. philosopher Charles Hartshorne.
Whitehead’s habit of
helpfulness made him universally beloved. Though his
courtesy was perfect, there was nothing soft about him;
never contentious, he was astute, charitable, and quietly
stubborn. He had a realistic, well-poised mind and a fine
irony free of malice. Whitehead combined singular gifts of
intuition, intellectual power, and goodness with firmness
and wisdom.
Victor Lowe
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