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English literature
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Late Victorian literature
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Charles Darwin
Walter Pater
George Eliot
"Silas Marner"
Anthony Trollope
"Barchester Towers"
George
Meredith
"The Egoist"
Wilkie Collins
"The Moonstone" PART
I,
PART II
"The Woman in White",
PART I,
II,
III,
IV,
V,
VI,
VI
Illustrations by John
McLenan
Robert
Louis Stevenson
"Treasure Island"
Illustrations by N.C.
Wyeth
William Morris
Oscar Wilde
I.
"The Ballad of Reading
Gaol",
"The Paradox"
II.
"The Picture of
Dorian Gray"
III.
"Salome"
Illustrations by Beardsley
George Moore
George
Gissing
Thomas Hardy
"Tess of the
d'Urbervilles"
PART I,
PART II
J. M. Barrie
"Peter Pan"
"Peter and
Wendy"
CHAPTER 1-5,
CHAPTER 6-17
Illustrations by F. D. Bedford
"Peter Pan in
Kensington Gardens" CHAPTER I,
CHAPTER II-IV,
CHAPTER V-VI
Illustrations
by Arthur Rackham
George MacDonald
"The Princess and the Goblin"
PART I,
PART II,
PART III
Bram Stoker
"Dracula"
CHAPTER 1-10,
CHAPTER 11-27
H.G. Wells
"The War of the Worlds" PART
I, PART
II
"The
Invisible Man"
"A Short History of the World" PART
I,
II,
III,
IV,
V
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
"SHERLOCK
HOLMES" (contents)
"The
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes"
PART I,
PART II
Illustrations by
Sidney Paget
"Memoirs of
Sherlock Holmes"
PART I,
PART II
Illustrations by
Sidney Paget
"The Return of
Sherlock Holmes"
PART
I,
PART II
Illustrations by
Sidney Paget
"The Hound of the Baskervilles"
PART
I,
PART II
Illustrations by
Sidney Paget
"A
Study in Scarlet",
"The Valley of Fear",
"His Last Bow",
"The Sign of
Four"
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
"The
House of Life"
Christina
Rossetti
Gerard Manley Hopkins
John Davidson
Arthur Symons
Francis Thompson
Ernest Dowson
Lionel Johnson
A.E. Housman
"A Shropshire Lad",
"Last Poems"
Rudyard Kipling
PART I
"Poems"
PART II
"Kim"
PART III
"The Jungle Book"
Dion Boucicault
T.W. Robertson
Arthur
Wing Pinero
Douglas Jerrold
Edward Lear
Lewis Carroll
Lewis
Carroll - photographer PART
2
"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"
PART 3, PART 4, PART 5
Illustrations by John Tenniel
"Through
the Looking-Glass" PART 6, PART 7,
PART 8
Illustrations by John Tenniel
Illustrations by Arthur Rackham
PART
9
Walt
Disney’s "Alice in Wonderland"
PART10,
PART
11
Jerome K.
Jerome
"Three
Men in a Boat"
George Grossmith
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“The modern spirit,” Matthew
Arnold observed in 1865, “is now awake.” In 1859
Charles
Darwin had published On the Origin of Species by Means
of Natural Selection. Historians, philosophers, and
scientists were all beginning to apply the idea of
evolution to new areas of study of the human experience.
Traditional conceptions of man’s nature and place in the
world were, as a consequence, under threat. Walter Pater
summed up the process, in 1866, by stating that “Modern
thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation
of the ‘relative’ spirit in place of the ‘absolute.’ ”
The economic crisis of the 1840s was long past. But
the fierce political debates that led first to the
Second Reform Act of 1867 and then to the battles for
the enfranchisement of women were accompanied by a
deepening crisis of belief.
Charles Darwin
British naturalist
in full Charles Robert Darwin
born February 12, 1809, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England
died April 19, 1882, Downe, Kent
Main
English naturalist whose theory of evolution by natural selection became
the foundation of modern evolutionary studies. An affable country
gentleman, Darwin at first shocked religious Victorian society by
suggesting that animals and humans shared a common ancestry. However,
his nonreligious biology appealed to the rising class of professional
scientists, and by the time of his death evolutionary imagery had spread
through all of science, literature, and politics. Darwin, himself an
agnostic, was accorded the ultimate British accolade of burial in
Westminster Abbey, London. (In February 2009, for the 200th anniversary
of Charles Darwin’s birth, the Britannica Blog asked two of Britannica’s
contributors to answer a few questions on the current influence of
Charles Darwin and his ideas. Noted evolutionary biologist Francisco
Ayala, professor biological sciences at the University of California,
Irvine, and author of Britannica’s entry on evolution and Evolving: The
Theory and Processes of Organic Evolution and others, addresses some of
the current developments in evolutionary biology, while Adam Gopnik, a
staff writer at the The New Yorker and author of the cultural life
section of Britannica’s United States entry and Angels and Ages,
explores the linkage between Darwin and Abraham Lincoln, with whom he
shares his birthday.)
Darwin formulated his bold theory in private in 1837–39, after
returning from a voyage around the world aboard HMS Beagle, but it was
not until two decades later that he finally gave it full public
expression in On the Origin of Species (1859), a book that has deeply
influenced modern Western society and thought.
Early life and education
Darwin was the second son of society doctor Robert Waring Darwin and of
Susannah Wedgwood, daughter of the Unitarian pottery industrialist
Josiah Wedgwood. Darwin’s other grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, a
freethinking physician and poet fashionable before the French
Revolution, was author of Zoonomia or the Laws of Organic Life
(1794–96). Darwin’s mother died when he was eight, and he was cared for
by his three elder sisters. The boy stood in awe of his overbearing
father, whose astute medical observations taught him much about human
psychology. But he hated the rote learning of Classics at the
traditional Anglican Shrewsbury School, where he studied between 1818
and 1825. Science was then considered dehumanizing in English public
schools, and for dabbling in chemistry Darwin was condemned by his
headmaster (and nicknamed “Gas” by his schoolmates).
His father, considering the 16-year-old a wastrel interested only in
game shooting, sent him to study medicine at Edinburgh University in
1825. Later in life, Darwin gave the impression that he had learned
little during his two years at Edinburgh. In fact, it was a formative
experience. There was no better science education in a British
university. He was taught to understand the chemistry of cooling rocks
on the primitive Earth and how to classify plants by the modern “natural
system.” In Edinburgh Museum he was taught to stuff birds by a freed
South American slave and to identify the rock strata and colonial flora
and fauna.
More crucially, the university’s radical students exposed the
teenager to the latest Continental sciences. Edinburgh attracted English
Dissenters who were barred from graduating at the Anglican universities
of Oxford and Cambridge, and at student societies Darwin heard
freethinkers deny the Divine design of human facial anatomy and argue
that animals shared all the human mental faculties. One talk, on the
mind as the product of a material brain, was officially censored, for
such materialism was considered subversive in the conservative decades
after the French Revolution. Darwin was witnessing the social penalties
of holding deviant views. As he collected sea slugs and sea pens on
nearby shores, he was accompanied by Robert Edmond Grant, a radical
evolutionist and disciple of the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.
An expert on sponges, Grant became Darwin’s mentor, teaching him about
the growth and relationships of primitive marine invertebrates, which
Grant believed held the key to unlocking the mysteries surrounding the
origin of more complex creatures. Darwin, encouraged to tackle the
larger questions of life through a study of invertebrate zoology, made
his own observations on the larval sea mat (Flustra) and announced his
findings at the student societies.
The young Darwin learned much in Edinburgh’s rich intellectual
environment, but not medicine: he loathed anatomy, and (pre-chloroform)
surgery sickened him. His freethinking father, shrewdly realizing that
the church was a better calling for an aimless naturalist, switched him
to Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1828. In a complete change of
environment, Darwin was now educated as an Anglican gentleman. He took
his horse, indulged his drinking, shooting, and beetle-collecting
passions with other squires’ sons, and managed 10th place in the
Bachelor of Arts degree in 1831. Here he was shown the conservative side
of botany by a young professor, the Reverend John Stevens Henslow, while
that doyen of Providential design in the animal world, the Reverend Adam
Sedgwick, took Darwin to Wales in 1831 on a geologic field trip.
Fired by Alexander von Humboldt’s account of the South American
jungles in his Personal Narrative of Travels, Darwin jumped at Henslow’s
suggestion of a voyage to Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South
America, aboard a rebuilt brig, HMS Beagle. Darwin would not sail as a
lowly surgeon-naturalist but as a self-financed gentleman companion to
the 26-year-old captain, Robert Fitzroy, an aristocrat who feared the
loneliness of command. Fitzroy’s was to be an imperial-evangelical
voyage: he planned to survey coastal Patagonia to facilitate British
trade and return three “savages” previously brought to England from
Tierra del Fuego and Christianized. Darwin equipped himself with
weapons, books (Fitzroy gave him the first volume of Principles of
Geology, by Charles Lyell), and advice on preserving carcasses from
London Zoo’s experts. The Beagle sailed from England on December 27,
1831.
The Beagle voyage
The circumnavigation of the globe (see the map) would be the making of
the 22-year-old Darwin. Five years of physical hardship and mental
rigour, imprisoned within a ship’s walls, offset by wide-open
opportunities in the Brazilian jungles and the Andes Mountains, were to
give Darwin a new seriousness. As a gentleman naturalist, he could leave
the ship for extended periods, pursuing his own interests. As a result,
he spent only 18 months of the voyage aboard the ship.
The hardship was immediate: a tormenting seasickness. And so was his
questioning: on calm days Darwin’s plankton-filled townet left him
wondering why beautiful creatures teemed in the ocean’s vastness, where
no human could appreciate them. On the Cape Verde Islands (January
1832), the sailor saw bands of oyster shells running through local
rocks, suggesting that Lyell was right in his geologic speculations and
that the land was rising in places, falling in others. At Bahia (now
Salvador), Brazil, the luxuriance of the rainforest (see the engraving)
left Darwin’s mind in “a chaos of delight.” But that mind, with its
Wedgwood-abolitionist characteristics, was revolted by the local
slavery. For Darwin, so often alone, the tropical forests seemed to
compensate for human evils: months were spent in Rio de Janeiro amid
this shimmering tropical splendour, full of “gaily-coloured” flatworms,
and the collector himself became “red-hot with Spiders.” But nature had
its own evils, and Darwin always remembered with a shudder the parasitic
ichneumon wasp, which stored caterpillars to be eaten alive by its
grubs. He would later consider this evidence against the beneficent
design of nature.
On the River Plate (Río de la Plata) in July 1832, he found
Montevideo, Uruguay, in a state of rebellion and joined armed sailors to
retake the rebel-held fort. At Bahía Blanca, Argentina, gauchos told him
of their extermination of the Pampas “Indians.” Beneath the veneer of
human civility, genocide seemed the rule on the frontier, a conclusion
reinforced by Darwin’s meeting with General Juan Manuel de Rosas and his
“villainous Banditti-like army,” in charge of eradicating the natives.
For a sensitive young man, fresh from Christ’s College, this was
disturbing. His contact with “untamed” humans on Tierra del Fuego in
December 1832 unsettled him more. (See the drawing of a Fuegian Indian
from Fitzroy’s book on the Beagle voyage.) How great, wrote Darwin, the
“difference between savage & civilized man is.—It is greater than
between a wild & [a] domesticated animal.” God had evidently created
humans in a vast cultural range, and yet, judging by the Christianized
savages aboard, even the “lowest” races were capable of improvement.
Darwin was tantalized, and always he niggled for explanations.
His fossil discoveries raised more questions. Darwin’s periodic trips
over two years to the cliffs at Bahía Blanca and farther south at Port
St. Julian yielded huge bones of extinct mammals. Darwin manhandled
skulls, femurs, and armour plates back to the ship—relics, he assumed,
of rhinoceroses, mastodons, cow-sized armadillos, and giant ground
sloths (see the engraving of the Megatherium skeleton). He unearthed a
horse-sized mammal with a long face like an anteater’s, and he returned
from a 340-mile (550-km) ride to Mercedes near the Uruguay River with a
skull 28 inches (71 cm) long strapped to his horse. Fossil extraction
became a romance for Darwin. It pushed him into thinking of the primeval
world and what had caused these giant beasts to die out.
The land was evidently changing, rising; Darwin’s observations in the
Andes Mountains confirmed it. After the Beagle surveyed the Falkland
Islands, and after Darwin had packed away at Port Desire (Puerto
Deseado), Argentina, the partially gnawed bones of a new species of
small rhea, the ship sailed up the west coast of South America to
Valparaíso, Chile. Here Darwin climbed 4,000 feet (1,200 metres) into
the Andean foothills and marveled at the forces that could raise such
mountains. The forces themselves became tangible when he saw volcanic
Mount Osorno erupt on January 15, 1835. Then in Valdivia, Chile, on
February 20, as he lay on a forest floor, the ground shook: the violence
of the earthquake and ensuing tidal wave was enough to destroy the great
city of Concepción, whose rubble Darwin walked through. (See the sketch
from Fitzroy’s narrative.) But what intrigued him was the seemingly
insignificant: the local mussel beds, all dead, were now lying above
high tide. The land had risen: Lyell, taking the uniformitarian
position, had argued that geologic formations were the result of steady
cumulative forces of the sort we see today. And Darwin had seen them.
The continent was thrusting itself up, a few feet at a time. He imagined
the eons it had taken to raise the fossilized trees in sandstone (once
seashore mud) to 7,000 feet (2,100 metres), where he found them. Darwin
began thinking in terms of deep time.
They left Peru on the circumnavigation home in September 1835. First
Darwin landed on the “frying hot” Galapagos Islands. These were volcanic
prison islands, crawling with marine iguanas and giant tortoises.
(Darwin and the crew brought small tortoises aboard as pets, to join
their coatis from Peru.) Contrary to legend, these islands never
provided Darwin’s “eureka” moment. Although he noted that the
mockingbirds differed on four islands and tagged his specimens
accordingly, he failed to label his other birds—what he thought were
wrens, “gross-beaks,” finches, and oriole-relatives—by island. Nor did
Darwin collect tortoise specimens, even though local prisoners believed
that each island had its distinct race.
The “home-sick heroes” returned via Tahiti, New Zealand, and
Australia. By April 1836, when the Beagle made the Cocos (Keeling)
Islands in the Indian Ocean—Fitzroy’s brief being to see if coral reefs
sat on mountain tops—Darwin already had his theory of reef formation. He
imagined (correctly) that these reefs grew on sinking mountain rims. The
delicate coral built up, compensating for the drowning land, so as to
remain within optimal heat and lighting conditions. At the Cape of Good
Hope, Darwin talked with the astronomer Sir John Herschel, possibly
about Lyell’s gradual geologic evolution and perhaps about how it
entailed a new problem, the “mystery of mysteries,” the simultaneous
change of fossil life.
On the last leg of the voyage Darwin finished his 770-page diary,
wrapped up 1,750 pages of notes, drew up 12 catalogs of his 5,436 skins,
bones, and carcasses—and still he wondered: Was each Galapagos
mockingbird a naturally produced variety? Why did ground sloths become
extinct? He sailed home with problems enough to last him a lifetime.
When he landed in October 1836, the vicarage had faded, the gun had
given way to the notebook, and the supreme theorizer—who would always
move from small causes to big outcomes—had the courage to look beyond
the conventions of his own Victorian culture for new answers.
Evolution by natural selection: the London years, 1836–42
With his voyage over and with a £400 annual allowance from his father,
Darwin now settled down among the urban gentry as a gentleman geologist.
He befriended Lyell, and he discussed the rising Chilean coastline as a
new fellow of the Geological Society in January 1837 (he was secretary
of the society by 1838). Darwin became well known through his diary’s
publication as Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural
History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle (1839). With a
£1,000 Treasury grant, obtained through the Cambridge network, he
employed the best experts and published their descriptions of his
specimens in his Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle (1838–43).
Darwin’s star had risen, and he was now lionized in London.
It was in these years of civil unrest following the First Reform Act
(1832) that Darwin devised his theory of evolution. Radical Dissenters
were denouncing the church’s monopoly on power—attacking an Anglican
status quo that rested on miraculous props: the supposed supernatural
creation of life and society. Darwin had Unitarian roots, and his
breathless notes show how his radical Dissenting understanding of
equality and antislavery framed his image of mankind’s place in nature:
“Animals—whom we have made our slaves we do not like to consider our
equals.—Do not slave holders wish to make the black man other kind?”
Some radicals questioned whether each animal was uniquely “designed” by
God when all vertebrates shared a similar structural plan. The
polymathic Charles Babbage—of calculating machine fame—made God a divine
programmer, preordaining life by means of natural law rather than ad hoc
miracle. It was the ultra-Whig way, and in 1837 Darwin, an impeccable
Whig reformer who enjoyed Babbage’s soirees, likewise accepted that “the
Creator creates by…laws.”
The experts’ findings sent Darwin to more heretical depths. At the
Royal College of Surgeons, the eminent anatomist Richard Owen found that
Darwin’s Uruguay River skull belonged to Toxodon, a hippotamus-sized
antecedent of the South American capybara. The Pampas fossils were
nothing like rhinoceroses and mastodons; they were huge extinct
armadillos, anteaters, and sloths, which suggested that South American
mammals had been replaced by their own kind according to some unknown
“law of succession.” At the Zoological Society, ornithologist John Gould
announced that the Galapagos birds were not a mixture of wrens, finches,
and “gross-beaks” but were all ground finches, differently adapted. When
Gould diagnosed the Galapagos mockingbirds as three species, unique to
different islands, in March 1837, Darwin examined Fitzroy’s collection
to discover that each island had its representative finch as well. But
how had they all diverged from mainland colonists? By this time Darwin
was living near his freethinking brother, Erasmus, in London’s West End,
and their dissident dining circle, which included the Unitarian Harriet
Martineau, provided the perfect milieu for Darwin’s ruminations. Darwin
adopted “transmutation” (evolution, as it is now called), perhaps
because of his familiarity with it through the work of his grandfather
and Robert Grant. Nonetheless, it was abominated by the Cambridge
clerics as a bestial, if not blasphemous, heresy that would corrupt
mankind and destroy the spiritual safeguards of the social order. Thus
began Darwin’s double life, which would last for two decades.
For two years he filled notebooks with jottings. There was an
intensity and doggedness to it. He searched for the causes of
extinction, accepted life as a branching tree (not a series of
escalators, the old idea), tackled island isolation, and wondered
whether variations appeared gradually or at a stroke. He dismissed a
Lamarckian force driving life inexorably upward with the cavalier joke,
“If all men were dead then monkeys make men.—Men make angels,” which
showed how little the failed ordinand shared his Cambridge mentors’
hysteria about an ape ancestry. Indeed, there was no “upward”: he became
relativistic, sensing that life was spreading outward into niches, not
standing on a ladder. There was no way of ranking humans and bees, no
yardstick of “highness”: man was no longer the crown of creation.
Heart palpitations and stomach problems were affecting him by
September 1837. Stress sent him to the Highlands of Scotland in 1838,
where he diverted himself studying the “parallel roads” of Glen Roy, so
like the raised beaches in Chile. But the sickness returned as he
continued chipping at the scientific bedrock of a cleric-dominated
society. The “whole [miraculous] fabric totters & falls,” he jotted.
Darwin had a right to be worried. Were his secret discovered, he would
stand accused of social abandon. At Edinburgh he had seen censorship;
other materialists were being publicly disgraced. His notes began
mooting disarming ploys: “Mention persecution of early astronomers.”
Behind his respectable facade at the Geological Society lay a new
contempt for the divines’ providential shortsightedness. The president,
the Reverend William Whewell, “says length of days adapted to duration
of sleep of man.!!!” he jotted. What “arrogance!!”
Mankind: there was the crux. Darwin wrote humans and society into the
evolutionary equation from the start. He saw the social instincts of
troop animals developing into morality and studied the humanlike
behaviour of orangutans at the zoo. With avant-garde society
radicalized, Darwin moved into his own ultraradical phase in 1838—even
suggesting that belief in God was an ingrained tribal survival strategy:
“love of [the] deity [is an] effect of [the brain’s] organization. Oh
you Materialist!” he mocked himself. In a day when a gentleman’s
character had to be above reproach, Darwin’s notes had a furtive ring.
None of this could become known—yet. The rich careerist—admitted to the
prestigious Athenaeum Club in 1838 and the Royal Society in 1839—had too
much to lose.
As a sporting gent from the shires, Darwin queried breeders about the
way they changed domestic dogs and fancy pigeons by spotting slight
variations and accentuating them through breeding. But he only saw the
complete congruity between the way nature operated and the way fanciers
produced new breeds upon reading the economist Thomas Malthus’s Essay on
the Principle of Population in September 1838. This was a seminal
moment—even if Malthusian ideas had long permeated his Whig circle.
Darwin was living through a workhouse revolution. Malthus had said that
there would always be too many mouths to feed—population increases
geometrically, whereas food production rises arithmetically—and that
charity was useless. So the Whigs had passed a Malthusian Poor Law in
1834 and were incarcerating sick paupers in workhouses (separating men
from women to stop them from breeding). Darwin’s dining companion
Harriet Martineau (whom many expected to marry his brother, Erasmus),
was the Whigs’ poor law propagandist. (Her novelistic Malthusian
pamphlets had been sent to Darwin while he was on the Beagle.) Darwin
realized that population explosions would lead to a struggle for
resources and that the ensuing competition would weed out the unfit. It
was an idea he now applied to nature (he had previously thought that
animal populations remained stable in the wild). Darwin called his
modified Malthusian mechanism “natural selection.” Nature was equally
uncharitable, went the argument: overpopulated, it experienced a fierce
struggle, and from all manner of chance variations, good and bad, the
best, “the surviving one of ten thousand trials,” won out, endured, and
thus passed on its improved trait. This was the way a species kept pace
with the Lyellian evolution of the Earth.
Darwin was a born list maker. In 1838 he even totted up the pros and
cons of taking a wife—and married his cousin Emma Wedgwood (1808–96) in
1839. He rashly confided his thoughts on evolution, evidently shocking
her. By now, Darwin accepted the notion that even mental traits and
instincts were randomly varying, that they were the stuff for selection.
But he saw from Emma’s reaction that he must publicly camouflage his
views. Although the randomness and destructiveness of his evolutionary
system—with thousands dying so that the “fittest” might survive—left
little room for a personally operating benign deity, Darwin still
believed that God was the ultimate lawgiver of the universe. In 1839 he
shut his last major evolution notebook, his theory largely complete.
The squire naturalist in Downe
Darwin drafted a 35-page sketch of his theory of natural selection in
1842 and expanded it in 1844, but he had no immediate intention of
publishing it. He wrote Emma a letter in 1844 requesting that, if he
died, she should pay an editor £400 to publish the work. Perhaps he
wanted to die first. In 1842, Darwin, increasingly shunning society, had
moved the family to the isolated village of Downe, in Kent, at the
“extreme edge of [the] world.” (It was in fact only 16 miles [26 km]
from central London.) Here, living in a former parsonage, Down House, he
emulated the lifestyle of his clerical friends. Fearing prying eyes, he
even lowered the road outside his house. His seclusion was complete:
from now on he ran his days like clockwork, with set periods for
walking, napping, reading, and nightly backgammon. He fulfilled his
parish responsibilities, eventually helping to run the local Coal and
Clothing Club for the labourers. His work hours were given over to bees,
flowers, and barnacles and to his books on coral reefs and South
American geology, three of which in 1842–46 secured his reputation as a
career geologist.
He rarely mentioned his secret. When he did, notably to the Kew
Gardens botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, Darwin said that believing in
evolution was “like confessing a murder.” The analogy with this capital
offense was not so strange: seditious atheists were using evolution as
part of their weaponry against Anglican oppression and were being jailed
for blasphemy. Darwin, nervous and nauseous, trying spas and quack
remedies (even tying plate batteries to his heaving stomach), understood
the conservative clerical morality. He was sensitive to the offense he
might cause. He was also immensely wealthy: by the late 1840s the
Darwins had £80,000 invested; he was an absentee landlord of two large
Lincolnshire farms; and in the 1850s he plowed tens of thousands of
pounds into railway shares. Even though his theory, with its capitalist
and meritocratic emphasis, was quite unlike anything touted by the
radicals and rioters, these turbulent years were no time to break cover.
From 1846 to 1854, Darwin added to his credibility as an expert on
species by pursuing a detailed study of all known barnacles. Intrigued
by their sexual differentiation, he discovered that some females had
tiny degenerate males clinging to them. This sparked his interest in the
evolution of diverging male and female forms from an original
hermaphrodite creature. Four monographs on such an obscure group made
him a world expert and gained him the Royal Society’s Royal Medal in
1853. No longer could he be dismissed as a speculator on biological
matters.
On the Origin of Species
England became quieter and more prosperous in the 1850s, and by
mid-decade the professionals were taking over, instituting exams and
establishing a meritocracy. The changing social composition of
science—typified by the rise of the freethinking biologist Thomas Henry
Huxley—promised a better reception for Darwin. Huxley, the philosopher
Herbert Spencer, and other outsiders were opting for a secular nature in
the rationalist Westminster Review and deriding the influence of
“parsondom.” Darwin had himself lost the last shreds of his belief in
Christianity with the tragic death of his oldest daughter, Annie, from
typhoid in 1851.
The world was becoming safer for Darwin and his theory: mid-Victorian
England was stabler than the “hungry Thirties” or turbulent 1840s. In
1854 he solved his last major problem, the forking of genera to produce
new evolutionary branches. He used an industrial analogy familiar from
the Wedgwood factories, the division of labour: competition in nature’s
overcrowded marketplace would favour variants that could exploit
different aspects of a niche. Species would diverge on the spot, like
tradesmen in the same tenement. Through 1855 Darwin experimented with
seeds in seawater, to prove that they could survive ocean crossings to
start the process of speciation on islands. Then he kept fancy pigeons,
to see if the chicks were more like the ancestral rock dove than their
own bizarre parents. Darwin perfected his analogy of natural selection
with the fancier’s “artificial selection,” as he called it. He was
preparing his rhetorical strategy, ready to present his theory.
After speaking to Huxley and Hooker at Downe in April 1856, Darwin
began writing a triple-volume book, tentatively called Natural
Selection, which was designed to crush the opposition with a welter of
facts. Darwin now had immense scientific and social authority, and his
place in the parish was assured when he was sworn in as a justice of the
peace in 1857. Encouraged by Lyell, Darwin continued writing through the
birth of his 10th and last child, the mentally retarded Charles Waring
Darwin (born in 1856, when Emma was 48). Whereas in the 1830s Darwin had
thought that species remained perfectly adapted until the environment
changed, he now believed that every new variation was imperfect, and
that perpetual struggle was the rule. He also explained the evolution of
sterile worker bees in 1857. These could not be selected because they
did not breed, so he opted for “family” selection (kin selection, as it
is known today): the whole colony benefited from their retention.
Darwin had finished a quarter of a million words by June 18, 1858.
That day he received a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace, an English
socialist and specimen collector working in the Malay Archipelago,
sketching a similar-looking theory. Darwin, fearing loss of priority,
accepted Lyell’s and Hooker’s solution: they read joint extracts from
Darwin’s and Wallace’s works at the Linnean Society on July 1, 1858.
Darwin was away, sick, grieving for his tiny son who had died from
scarlet fever, and thus he missed the first public presentation of the
theory of natural selection. It was an absenteeism that would mark his
later years.
Darwin hastily began an “abstract” of Natural Selection, which grew
into a more accessible book, On the Origin of Species by Means of
Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle
for Life. Suffering from a terrible bout of nausea, Darwin, now 50, was
secreted away at a spa on the desolate Yorkshire moors when the book was
sold to the trade on November 22, 1859. He still feared the worst and
sent copies to the experts with self-effacing letters (“how you will
long to crucify me alive”). It was like “living in Hell,” he said about
these months.
The book did distress his Cambridge patrons, but they were marginal
to science now. However, radical Dissenters were sympathetic, as were
the rising London biologists and geologists, even if few actually
adopted Darwin’s cost-benefit approach to nature. The newspapers drew
the one conclusion that Darwin had specifically avoided: that humans had
evolved from apes, and that Darwin was denying mankind’s immortality. A
sensitive Darwin, making no personal appearances, let Huxley, by now a
good friend, manage this part of the debate. The pugnacious Huxley, who
loved public argument as much as Darwin loathed it, had his own reasons
for taking up the cause, and did so with enthusiasm. He wrote three
reviews of Origin of Species, defended human evolution at the Oxford
meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in
1860 (when Bishop Samuel Wilberforce jokingly asked whether the apes
were on Huxley’s grandmother’s or grandfather’s side), and published his
own book on human evolution, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature
(1863). What Huxley championed was Darwin’s evolutionary naturalism, his
nonmiraculous assumptions, which pushed biological science into
previously taboo areas and increased the power of Huxley’s
professionals. And it was they who gained the Royal Society’s Copley
Medal for Darwin in 1864.
Huxley’s reaction, with its enthusiasm for evolution and cooler
opinion of natural selection, was typical. Natural selection—the “law of
higgledy-piggledy” in Herschel’s dismissive words—received little
support in Darwin’s day. By contrast, evolution itself (“descent,”
Darwin called it—the word evolution would only be introduced in the
last, 1872, edition of the Origin) was being acknowledged from British
Association platforms by 1866. That year, too, Darwin met his German
admirer, the zoologist Ernst Haeckel, whose proselytizing would spread
Darwinismus through the Prussian world. Two years later the King of
Prussia conferred on Darwin the order Pour le Mérite.
The patriarch in his home laboratory
Long periods of debilitating sickness in the 1860s left the craggy,
bearded Darwin thin and ravaged. He once vomited for 27 consecutive
days. Down House was an infirmary where illness was the norm and Emma
the attendant nurse. She was a shield, protecting the patriarch,
cosseting him. Darwin was a typical Victorian in his racial and sexual
stereotyping—however dependent on his redoubtable wife, he still thought
women inferior; and although a fervent abolitionist, he still considered
blacks a lower race. But few outside of the egalitarian socialists
challenged these prejudices—and Darwin, immersed in a competitive Whig
culture, and enshrining its values in his science, had no time for
socialism.
The house was also a laboratory, where Darwin continued experimenting
and revamping the Origin through six editions. Although quietly swearing
by “my deity ‘Natural Selection,’” he answered critics by reemphasizing
other causes of change—for example, the effects of continued use of an
organ—and he bolstered the Lamarckian belief that such alterations
through excessive use might be passed on. In Variation of Animals and
Plants under Domestication (1868) he marshaled the facts and explored
the causes of variation in domestic breeds. The book answered critics
such as George Douglas Campbell, the eighth duke of Argyll, who loathed
Darwin’s blind, accidental process of variation and envisaged the
appearance of “new births” as goal directed. By showing that fanciers
picked from the gamut of naturally occurring variations to produce the
tufts and topknots on their fancy pigeons, Darwin undermined this
providential explanation.
In 1867 the engineer Fleeming Jenkin argued that any single
favourable variation would be swamped and lost by back-breeding within
the general population. No mechanism was known for inheritance, and so
in the Variation Darwin devised his hypothesis of “pangenesis” to
explain the discrete inheritance of traits. He imagined that each tissue
of an organism threw out tiny “gemmules,” which passed to the sex organs
and permitted copies of themselves to be made in the next generation.
But Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton failed to find these gemmules in
rabbit blood, and the theory was dismissed.
Darwin was adept at flanking movements in order to get around his
critics. He would take seemingly intractable subjects—like orchid
flowers—and make them test cases for “natural selection.” Hence the book
that appeared after the Origin was, to everyone’s surprise, The Various
Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by
Insects (1862). He showed that the orchid’s beauty was not a piece of
floral whimsy “designed” by God to please humans but honed by selection
to attract insect cross-pollinators. The petals guided the bees to the
nectaries, and pollen sacs were deposited exactly where they could be
removed by a stigma of another flower.
But why the importance of cross-pollination? Darwin’s botanical work
was always subtly related to his evolutionary mechanism. He believed
that cross-pollinated plants would produce fitter offspring than
self-pollinators, and he used considerable ingenuity in conducting
thousands of crossings to prove the point. The results appeared in The
Effects of Cross and Self Fertilization in the Vegetable Kingdom (1876).
His next book, The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same
Species (1877), was again the result of long-standing work into the way
evolution in some species favoured different male and female forms of
flowers to facilitate outbreeding. Darwin had long been sensitive to the
effects of inbreeding because he was himself married to a Wedgwood
cousin, as was his sister Caroline. He agonized over its debilitating
consequence for his five sons. Not that he need have worried, for they
fared well: William became a banker, Leonard an army major, George the
Plumian Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge, Francis a reader in botany
at Cambridge, and Horace a scientific instrument maker. Darwin also
studied insectivorous plants, climbing plants, and the response of
plants to gravity and light (sunlight, he thought, activated something
in the shoot tip, an idea that guided future work on growth hormones in
plants).
The private man and the public debate
Through the 1860s natural selection was already being applied to the
growth of society. A.R. Wallace saw cooperation strengthening the moral
bonds within primitive tribes. Advocates of social Darwinism, in
contrast, complained that modern civilization was protecting the “unfit”
from natural selection. Francis Galton argued that particular character
traits—even drunkenness and genius—were inherited and that “eugenics,”
as it would come to be called, would stop the genetic drain. The trend
to explain the evolution of human races, morality, and civilization was
capped by Darwin in his two-volume The Descent of Man, and Selection in
Relation to Sex (1871). The book was authoritative, annotated, and
heavily anecdotal in places. The two volumes were discrete, the first
discussing the g of civilization and human origins among the Old World
monkeys. (Darwin’s depiction of a hairy human ancestor with pointed ears
led to a spate of caricatures; see the cartoon.) The second volume
responded to critics like Argyll, who doubted that the iridescent
hummingbird’s plumage had any function—or any Darwinian explanation.
Darwin argued that female birds were choosing mates for their gaudy
plumage. Darwin as usual tapped his huge correspondence network of
breeders, naturalists, and travelers worldwide to produce evidence for
this. Such “sexual selection” happened among humans too. With primitive
societies accepting diverse notions of beauty, aesthetic preferences, he
believed, could account for the origin of the human races.
Darwin’s explanation was also aimed partly at Wallace. Like so many
disillusioned socialists, Wallace had become engaged in spiritualism. He
argued that an overdeveloped human brain had been provided by the spirit
forces to move humanity toward millennial perfection. Darwin had no time
for this. Even though he eventually attended a séance with Galton and
the novelist George Eliot (Marian Evans) at his brother’s house in 1874,
he was appalled at “such rubbish,” and in 1876 he sent £10 toward the
costs of the prosecution of the medium Henry Slade.
Darwin finished another long-standing line of work. Since studying
the moody orangutans at London Zoo in 1838, through the births of his 10
children (whose facial contortions he duly noted), Darwin had been
fascinated by expression. As a student he had heard the attacks on the
idea that peoples’ facial muscles were designed by God to express their
unique thoughts. Now his photographically illustrated The Expression of
the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) expanded the subject to include
the rages and grimaces of asylum inmates, all to show the continuity of
emotions and expressions between humans and animals.
The gentle Darwin elicited tremendous devotion. A protective circle
formed around him, locked tight by Huxley and Hooker. It was they who
ostracized detractors, particularly the Roman Catholic zoologist Saint
George Jackson Mivart. Nor did Darwin forget it: he helped raise £2,100
to send a fatigued Huxley on holiday in 1873, and his pestering resulted
in the impecunious Wallace being added to the Civil List in 1881. Darwin
was held in awe by many, the more so because he was rarely seen. And
when he was seen—for example, by the Harvard philosopher John Fiske, a
privileged visitor to Down House in 1873—he was found to be “the
dearest, sweetest, loveliest old grandpa that ever was.”
Darwin wrote his autobiography between 1876 and 1881. It was composed
for his grandchildren, rather than for publication, and it was
particularly candid on his dislike of Christian myths of eternal
torment. To people who inquired about his religious beliefs, however, he
would only say that he was an agnostic (a word coined by Huxley in
1869).
The treadmill of experiment and writing gave so much meaning to his
life. But as he wrapped up his final, long-term interest, publishing The
Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms (1881), the
future looked bleak. Such an earthy subject was typical Darwin: just as
he had shown that today’s ecosystems were built by infinitesimal degrees
and the mighty Andes by tiny uplifts, so he ended on the monumental
transformation of landscapes by the Earth’s humblest denizens.
Suffering from angina, he looked forward to joining the worms,
contemplating “Down graveyard as the sweetest place on earth.” He had a
seizure in March 1882 and died of a heart attack on April 19.
Influential groups wanted a grander commemoration than a funeral in
Downe, something better for the gentleman naturalist who had delivered
the “new Nature” into the new professionals’ hands. Galton had the Royal
Society request the family’s permission for a state burial. Huxley, who
by taking over the public debate had preserved Darwin’s reputation of
“sweet and gentle nature blossomed into perfection,” as a newspaper put
it, convinced the canon of Westminster Abbey to bury the diffident
agnostic there. And so Darwin was laid to rest with full ecclesiastical
pomp on April 26, 1882, attended by the new nobility of science and the
state.
Adrian J. Desmond
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Walter Pater
born Aug. 4, 1839, Shadwell, London, Eng.
died July 30, 1894, Oxford, Oxfordshire
English critic, essayist, and humanist
whose advocacy of “art for art’s sake”
became a cardinal doctrine of the movement
known as Aestheticism.
Pater was educated at King’s School,
Canterbury, and at Queen’s College, Oxford,
where he studied Greek philosophy under
Benjamin Jowett. He then settled in Oxford
and read with private pupils. In 1864 he was
elected to a fellowship at Brasenose
College. Pater’s early intention to enter
the church gave way at this time to a
consuming interest in classical studies.
Pater then began to write for the reviews,
and his essays on Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro
Botticelli, Pico della Mirandola,
Michelangelo, and others were collected in
1873 as Studies in the History of the
Renaissance (later called simply The
Renaissance). His delicate, fastidious style
and sensitive appreciation of Renaissance
art in these essays made his reputation as a
scholar and an aesthete, and he became the
centre of a small group of admirers in
Oxford. In the concluding essay in The
Renaissance, Pater asserted that art exists
for the sake of its beauty alone, and that
it acknowledges neither moral standards nor
utilitarian functions in its reason for
being. These views brought Pater into an
association with Swinburne and with the
Pre-Raphaelites.
Marius the Epicurean (1885) is his most
substantial work. It is a philosophical
romance in which Pater’s ideal of an
aesthetic and religious life is scrupulously
and elaborately set forth. The setting is
Rome in the time of Marcus Aurelius; but
this is a thin disguise for the
characteristically late-19th-century
spiritual development of its main character.
Imaginary Portraits (1887) are shorter
pieces of philosophical fiction in the same
mode. Appreciations (1889) is a return to
the critical essay, this time largely on
English subjects. In 1893 came Plato and
Platonism, giving an extremely literary view
of Plato and neglecting the logical and
dialectical side of his philosophy. Pater’s
Greek Studies (1895), Miscellaneous Studies
(1895), and Essays from The Guardian
(privately printed, 1896; 1901) were
published posthumously; also published
posthumously was his unfinished romance,
Gaston de Latour (1896).
The primary influence on Pater’s mind was
his classical studies, coloured by a highly
individual view of Christian devotion and
pursued largely as a source of extremely
refined artistic sensations. In his later
critical writings Pater continued to focus
on the innate qualities of works of art, in
contrast to the prevailing tendency to
evaluate them on the basis of their moral
and educational value.
Pater’s early influence was confined to a
small circle in Oxford, but he came to have
a widespread effect on the next literary
generation. Oscar Wilde, George Moore, and
the aesthetes of the 1890s were among his
followers and show obvious and continual
traces both of his style and of his ideas.
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The novel
Late Victorian fiction may express doubts and
uncertainties, but in aesthetic terms it displays a new
sophistication and self-confidence. The expatriate
American novelist Henry James wrote in 1884 that until
recently the English novel had “had no air of having a
theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind
it.” Its acquisition of these things was due in no small
part to Mary Ann Evans, better known as
George Eliot.
Initially a critic and translator, she was influenced,
after the loss of her Christian faith, by the ideas of
Ludwig Feuerbach and Auguste Comte. Her advanced
intellectual interests combined with her sophisticated
sense of the novel form to shape her remarkable fiction.
Her early novels—Adam Bede (1859),
The Mill on the Floss
(1860), and
Silas Marner (1861)—are closely observed
studies of English rural life that offer, at the same
time, complex contemporary ideas and a subtle tracing of
moral issues. Her masterpiece, Middlemarch (1871–72), is
an unprecedentedly full study of the life of a
provincial town, focused on the thwarted idealism of her
two principal characters.
George Eliot is a realist, but
her realism involves a scientific analysis of the
interior processes of social and personal existence.
George Eliot
"Silas Marner"
born Nov. 22, 1819, Chilvers Coton,
Warwickshire, Eng.
died Dec. 22, 1880, London
English Victorian novelist who developed the
method of psychological analysis
characteristic of modern fiction. Her major
works include Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on
the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861),
Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda
(1876).
Early years
Evans was born on an estate of her
father’s employer. She went as a boarder to
Mrs. Wallington’s School at Nuneaton
(1828–32), where she came under the
influence of Maria Lewis, the principal
governess, who inculcated a strong
evangelical piety in the young girl. At her
last school (1832–35), conducted by the
daughters of the Baptist minister at
Coventry, her religious ardour increased.
She dressed severely and engaged earnestly
in good works. The school gave her a reading
knowledge of French and Italian, and, after
her mother’s death had compelled her to
return home to keep house for her father, he
let her have lessons in Latin and German. In
1841 she moved with her father to Coventry.
There she became acquainted with a
prosperous ribbon manufacturer, Charles
Bray, a self-taught freethinker who
campaigned for radical causes. His
brother-in-law, Charles Hennell, was the
author of An Inquiry Concerning the Origin
of Christianity (1838), a book that
precipitated Evans’s break with orthodoxy
that had been long in preparation. Various
books on the relation between the Bible and
science had instilled in her keen mind the
very doubts they were written to dispel. In
1842 she told her father that she could no
longer go to church. The ensuing storm raged
for several months before they reached a
compromise, leaving her free to think what
she pleased so long as she appeared
respectably at church, and she lived with
him until his death in 1849.
The Brays and the Hennells quickly drew
her from extreme provincialism, introducing
her to many ideas in violent disagreement
with her Tory father’s religious and
political views. When Charles Hennell
married in 1843, she took over from his wife
the translating of D.F. Strauss’s Das Leben
Jesu kritisch bearbeitet, which was
published anonymously as The Life of Jesus
Critically Examined, 3 vol. (1846), and had
a profound influence on English rationalism.
After the wedding Mrs. Hennell’s father, R.H.
Brabant, invited Evans to visit at Devizes.
A rather silly man, he had worked for years
on a book (never completed), which was to
dispose of the supernatural elements in
religion. They read German and Greek
together and discussed theology on long
walks; soon Mrs. Brabant became jealous of
their intimacy, and, before the term of her
visit, Evans was forced to leave. Mrs.
Hennell felt that her father had acted
ungenerously. Out of the humiliation of this
episode George Eliot drew the horrible
vividness of Mr. Casaubon in Middlemarch.
She spent the winter of 1849–50 at
Geneva, reading extensively while living
with the family of François d’Albert Durade,
who painted a portrait of her. Like those by
Mrs. Bray (1842) and Sir Frederic Burton
(1865), all in the National Portrait
Gallery, it shows her with light brown hair,
gray-blue eyes, and a very fair complexion.
Returning to Coventry, she spent the rest of
1850 with the Brays, pondering how to live
on the £100 a year left by her father. After
John Chapman, the publisher of The Life of
Jesus Critically Examined, got her a chance
to review R.W. Mackay’s The Progress of the
Intellect in The Westminster Review (January
1851), she decided to settle in London as a
freelance writer, and in January 1851 she
went to board with the Chapmans at 142,
Strand.
Life with George Henry Lewes
Soon after her arrival in London, Mrs.
Chapman and the children’s governess, who
was also John Chapman’s mistress, became
jealous of Marian, as she now signed her
name, and after 10 weeks she returned to
Coventry in tears. Doubtless her feelings
were strongly attracted to the magnetic
Chapman, whose diary supplies this
information, but there is no evidence that
she was ever his mistress. A few months
later he bought The Westminster Review, and
Evans, contrite at the domestic
complications she had unwittingly caused,
returned to London. For three years, until
1854, she served as subeditor of The
Westminster, which under her influence
enjoyed its most brilliant run since the
days of John Stuart Mill. At the Chapmans’
evening parties she met many notable
literary figures in an atmosphere of
political and religious radicalism. Across
the Strand lived the subeditor of The
Economist, Herbert Spencer, whose Social
Statics (1851) Chapman had just published.
Evans shared many of Spencer’s interests and
saw so much of him that it was soon rumoured
that they were engaged. Though he did not
become her husband, he introduced her to the
two men who did.
George Henry Lewes was the most versatile
of Victorian journalists. In 1841 he had
married Agnes Jervis, by whom he had four
sons. In 1850 Lewes and a friend, the
journalist Thornton Leigh Hunt, founded a
radical weekly called The Leader, for which
he wrote the literary and theatrical
sections. In April 1850, two weeks after the
first number appeared, Agnes Lewes gave
birth to a son whose father was Thornton
Hunt. Lewes, being a man of liberal views,
had the child registered as Edmund Lewes and
remained on friendly terms with his wife and
Hunt. But after she bore Hunt a second child
in October 1851, Lewes ceased to regard her
as his wife, though, having condoned the
adultery, he was precluded from suing for
divorce. At this moment of dejection, his
home hopelessly broken, he met Marian Evans.
They consulted about articles and went to
plays and operas that Lewes reviewed for The
Leader. Convinced that his break with Agnes
was irrevocable, Evans determined to live
openly with Lewes as his wife. In July 1854,
after the publication of her translation of
Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, they
went to Germany together. In all but the
legal form it was a marriage, and it
continued happily until Lewes’s death in
1878. “Women who are content with light and
easily broken ties,” she told Mrs. Bray, “do
not act as I have done. They obtain what
they desire and are still invited to
dinner.”
Major works
At Weimar and Berlin she wrote some of
her best essays for The Westminster and
translated Spinoza’s Ethics (still
unpublished), while Lewes worked on his
groundbreaking life of Goethe. By his pen
alone he had to support his three surviving
sons at school in Switzerland as well as
Agnes, whom he gave £100 a year, which was
continued until her death in 1902. She had
four children by Hunt, the last born in
1857, all registered under Lewes’s name. The
few friends who knew the facts agreed that
toward Agnes his conduct was more than
generous, but there was a good deal of
malicious gossip about the “strong-minded
woman” who had “run off with” her husband.
Evans’s deepest regret was that her act
isolated her from her family in
Warwickshire. She turned to early memories
and, encouraged by Lewes, wrote a story
about a childhood episode in Chilvers Coton
parish. Published in Blackwood’s Magazine
(1857) as The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend
Amos Barton, it was an instant success. Two
more tales, Mr. Gilfil’s Love-Story and
Janet’s Repentance, also based on local
events, appeared serially in the same year,
and Blackwood republished all three as
Scenes of Clerical Life, 2 vol. (1858),
under the pseudonym George Eliot.
Adam Bede, 3 vol. (1859), her first long
novel, she described as “a country
story—full of the breath of cows and the
scent of hay.” Its masterly realism—“the
faithful representing of commonplace
things”—brought to English fiction the same
truthful observation of minute detail that
Ruskin was commending in the
Pre-Raphaelites. The book is rich in humour.
The germ of the plot was an anecdote her
Methodist aunt told of visiting a girl
condemned for child murder. The dialect of
the Bedes she had heard in the conversations
of her Derbyshire uncles with her father,
some of whose early experiences she assigned
to Adam. But what was new in English fiction
was the combination of deep human sympathy
and rigorous moral judgment. Adam Bede went
through eight printings within a year, and
Blackwood doubled the £800 paid for it and
returned the copyright.
In The Mill on the Floss, 3 vol. (1860),
she returned again to the scenes of her
early life. The first half of the book, with
its remarkable portrayal of childhood, is
irresistibly appealing, and throughout there
are scenes that reach a new level of
psychological subtlety.
At this time historical novels were in
vogue, and during their visit to Florence in
1860 Lewes suggested Savonarola as a good
subject, George Eliot grasped it
enthusiastically and began to plan Romola
(1862–63). First, however, she wrote Silas
Marner (1861), which had thrust itself
between her and the Italian material. Its
brevity and perfection of form made this
story of the weaver whose lost gold is
replaced by a strayed child the best known
of her books, though it has suffered
unfairly from being forced on generations of
schoolchildren. Romola was planned as a
serial for Blackwood’s, until an offer of
£10,000 from The Cornhill Magazine induced
George Eliot to desert her old publisher;
but rather than divide the book into the 16
installments the editor wanted, she accepted
£3,000 less, an evidence of artistic
integrity few writers would have shown.
Details of Florentine history, setting,
costume, and dialogue were scrupulously
studied at the British Museum and during a
second trip to Italy in 1861. It was
published in 14 parts between July 1862 and
August 1863. Though the book lacks the
spontaneity of the English stories, it has
been unduly disparaged.
George Eliot’s next two novels are laid
in England at the time of agitation for
passage of the Reform Bill. In Felix Holt,
the Radical, 3 vol. (1866), she drew the
election riot from recollection of one she
saw at Nuneaton in December 1832. The
initial impulse of the book was not the
political theme but the tragic character of
Mrs. Transome, who was one of her greatest
triumphs. The intricate plot popular taste
then demanded now tells against the novel.
Middlemarch (8 parts, 1871–72) is by general
consent George Eliot’s masterpiece. Under
her hand the novel had developed from a mere
entertainment into a highly intellectual
form of art. Every class of Middlemarch
society is depicted from the landed gentry
and clergy to the manufacturers and
professional men, the shopkeepers,
publicans, farmers, and labourers. Several
strands of plot are interwoven to reinforce
each other by contrast and parallel. Yet the
story depends not on close-knit intrigue but
on showing the incalculably diffusive effect
of the unhistoric acts of those who “lived
faithfully a hidden life and rest in
unvisited tombs.”
Daniel Deronda (8 parts, 1876), in which
George Eliot comes nearest the contemporary
scene, is built on the contrast between
Mirah Cohen, a poor Jewish girl, and the
upper class Gwendolen Harleth, who marries
for money and regrets it. The less
convincingly realized hero, Daniel, after
discovering that he is Jewish, marries Mirah
and departs for Palestine to establish a
home for his nation. The picture of the
Cohen family evoked grateful praise from
Jewish readers. But the best part of Daniel
Deronda is the keen analysis of Gwendolen’s
character, which seems to many critics the
peak of George Eliot’s achievement.
Final years
In 1863 the Leweses bought the Priory,
21, North Bank, Regent’s Park, where their
Sunday afternoons became a brilliant feature
of Victorian life. There on Nov. 30, 1878,
Lewes died. For nearly 25 years he had
fostered her genius and managed all the
practical details of life, which now fell
upon her. Most of all she missed the
encouragement that alone made it possible
for her to write. For months she saw no one
but his son Charles Lee Lewes; she devoted
herself to completing the last volume of his
Problems of Life and Mind (1873–79) and
founded the George Henry Lewes Studentship
in Physiology at Cambridge. For some years
her investments had been in the hands of
John Walter Cross (1840–1924), a banker
introduced to the Leweses by Herbert
Spencer. Cross’s mother had died a week
after Lewes. Drawn by sympathy and the need
for advice, George Eliot soon began to lean
on him for affection too. On May 6, 1880,
they were married in St. George’s, Hanover
Square. Cross was 40; she was in her 61st
year. After a wedding trip in Italy they
returned to her country house at Witley
before moving to 4, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea,
where she died in December. She was buried
at Highgate Cemetery.
Gordon S. Haight
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Her fellow realist
Anthony Trollope published his
first novel in 1847 but only established his distinctive
manner with The Warden (1855), the first of a series of
six novels set in the fictional county of Barsetshire
and completed in 1867. This sequence was followed by a
further series, the six-volume Palliser group (1864–80),
set in the world of British parliamentary politics.
Trollope published an astonishing total of 47 novels,
and his Autobiography (1883) is a uniquely candid
account of the working life of a Victorian writer.
Anthony Trollope
"Barchester Towers"
born April 24, 1815, London, Eng.
died Dec. 6, 1882, London
English novelist whose popular success
concealed until long after his death the
nature and extent of his literary merit. A
series of books set in the imaginary English
county of Barsetshire remains his best loved
and most famous work, but he also wrote
convincing novels of political life as well
as studies that show great psychological
penetration. One of his greatest strengths
was a steady, consistent vision of the
social structures of Victorian England,
which he re-created in his books with
unusual solidity.
Trollope grew up as the son of a sometime
scholar, barrister, and failed gentleman
farmer. He was unhappy at the great public
schools of Winchester and Harrow. Adolescent
awkwardness continued until well into his
20s. The years 1834–41 he spent miserably as
a junior clerk in the General Post Office,
but he was then transferred as a postal
surveyor to Ireland, where he began to enjoy
a social life. In 1844 he married Rose
Heseltine, an Englishwoman, and set up house
at Clonmel, in Tipperary. He then embarked
upon a literary career that leaves a
dominant impression of immense energy and
versatility.
The Warden (1855) was his first novel of
distinction, a penetrating study of the
warden of an old people’s home who is
attacked for making too much profit from a
charitable sinecure. During the next 12
years Trollope produced five other books
set, like The Warden, in Barsetshire:
Barchester Towers (1857), Doctor Thorne
(1858), Framley Parsonage (1861), The Small
House at Allington (1864), and The Last
Chronicle of Barset (serially 1866–67;
1867). Barchester Towers is the funniest of
the series; Doctor Thorne perhaps the best
picture of a social system based on birth
and the ownership of land; and The Last
Chronicle, with its story of the sufferings
of the scholarly Mr. Crawley, an underpaid
curate of a poor parish, the most pathetic.
The Barsetshire novels excel in memorable
characters, and they exude the atmosphere of
the cathedral community and of the landed
aristocracy.
In 1859 Trollope moved back to London,
resigning from the civil service in 1867 and
unsuccessfully standing as a Liberal
parliamentary candidate in 1868. Before
then, however, he had produced some 18
novels apart from the Barsetshire group. He
wrote mainly before breakfast at a fixed
rate of 1,000 words an hour. Outstanding
among works of that period were Orley Farm
(serially, 1861–62; 1862), which made use of
the traditional plot of a disputed will, and
Can You Forgive Her? (serially, 1864–65;
1865), the first of his political novels,
which introduced Plantagenet Palliser, later
duke of Omnium, whose saga was to stretch
over many volumes down to The Duke’s
Children (serially, 1879–80; 1880), a subtle
study of the dangers and difficulties of
marriage. In the political novels Trollope
is less concerned with political ideas than
with the practical working of the
system—with the mechanics of power.
In about 1869 Trollope’s last, and in
some respects most interesting, period as a
writer began. Traces of his new style are to
be found in the slow-moving He Knew He Was
Right (serially, 1868–69; 1869), a subtle
account of a rich man’s jealous obsession
with his innocent wife. Purely psychological
studies include Sir Harry Hotspur of
Humblethwaite (serially, 1870; 1871) and
Kept in the Dark (1882). Some of the later
works, however, were sharply satirical: The
Eustace Diamonds (serially, 1871–73; 1873),
a study of the influence of money on sexual
relationships; The Way We Live Now
(serially, 1874–75; 1875), remarkable for
its villain-hero, the financier Melmotte;
and Mr. Scarborough’s Family (posthumously,
1883), which shows what can happen when the
rights of property are wielded by a man of
nihilistic temperament intent upon his legal
rights.
Trollope’s final years were spent in the
seclusion of a small Sussex village, where
he worked on in the face of gradually
diminishing popularity, failing health, and
increasing melancholy. He was in London when
he died, having been stricken there with
paralysis.
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The third major novelist of the 1870s was
George
Meredith, who also worked as a poet, a journalist, and a
publisher’s reader. His prose style is eccentric and his
achievement uneven. His greatest work of fiction,
The
Egoist (1879), however, is an incisive comic novel that
embodies the distinctive theory of the corrective and
therapeutic powers of laughter expressed in his lecture
The Idea of Comedy (1877).
George
Meredith
"The Egoist"
born Feb. 12, 1828, Portsmouth,
Hampshire, Eng.
died May 18, 1909, Box Hill, Surrey
English Victorian poet and novelist, whose
novels are noted for their wit, brilliant
dialogue, and aphoristic quality of
language. Meredith’s novels are also
distinguished by psychological studies of
character and a highly subjective view of
life that, far ahead of his time, regarded
women as truly the equals of men. His best
known works are The Ordeal of Richard
Feverel (1859) and The Egoist (1879).
Early life
George Meredith, the son and grandson of
tailors, was born above the family tailor
shop in Portsmouth. The name Meredith is
Welsh in origin, and family tradition held
that its bearers were descendants of Welsh
kings and chieftains. In keeping with this
tradition, the young Meredith was proud and
patrician in his bearing. A small
inheritance from his mother, who died when
he was five, enabled Meredith to attend a
superior local seminary and thus early to
assume the role of a young “gentleman.” Yet
the sensitive boy must gradually have become
conscious of the contrast between this role
and his actual social status. And the
reality was to become even harsher with the
bankruptcy of the tailoring shop when he was
about 11 and his father’s subsequent
marriage to the young woman who had been
their housekeeper.
In 1840 a second legacy, this time from
an aunt, enabled him to go first to a
boarding school and then, in 1842, to the
Moravian School at Neuwied on the Rhine
River, which was to leave its stamp upon the
remainder of his life. The picturesque
Rhineland, with its cliffs, its ruined
castles, and its legends, stimulated the
fancy of the already romantic youth.
Tolerant religious instruction was combined
with humanism: the boys were taught to think
for themselves, to respect truth, to admire
courage, to love nature, and to live in
peace and amity with their fellows. The
monotony of study was broken by daily
sports, storytelling, and playacting and on
vacations by week-long expeditions or
boating trips down the Rhine. All of these
influences except the religious remained
with Meredith throughout life. After “a
spasm of religion which lasted about six
weeks,” he later said, he never “swallowed
the Christian fable” and thereafter called
himself a freethinker.
Meredith’s return to England in 1844, at
the age of 16, ended his formal education.
Like all of the other great Victorian
novelists, he was to be largely
self-educated. After several false starts,
he was apprenticed at 18 to a London
solicitor named Richard Charnock and was
ostensibly launched upon a career in law.
There is no evidence, however, that he ever
pursued it. Probably, like the writer and
politician Benjamin Disraeli, the novelist
William Makepeace Thackeray, and others
before him, he found it intolerably dull and
abandoned it at the start. But if not the
law, what profession offered hope to a young
man who was brilliant but untrained,
ambitious but without means? If to be a poet
seems an unlikely choice, it nevertheless
accorded with his romantic nature.
He was steeped in The Arabian Nights and
German legends and literature; he had
already written verse, and he soon found
that Charnock’s interests were more literary
than legal and that he had gathered around
him a coterie of young friends whose
interests were also literary. Perhaps all of
these were influences. At any rate, among
the Charnock circle was Edward “Ned”
Peacock, son of Thomas Love Peacock, the
eccentric author, and through Edward he met
Edward’s sister, Mary Ellen Nicolls, a widow
with a small daughter. She was brilliant,
witty, handsome, and about eight years older
than he. In the course of editing and
writing for a manuscript literary magazine
conducted by the Charnock circle, he fell in
love with her. Shortly after he reached his
majority and came into the remainder of his
little inheritance, they were married.
Beginnings as poet and novelist.
On their return, the Merediths took
lodgings at Weybridge, Surrey, near
Peacock’s house at Lower Halliford,
Middlesex, and George busied himself writing
poems and articles and making translations.
Unfortunately, they brought in little money.
Somehow, nevertheless, he managed to pay the
publication costs of a little collection of
verse, entitled Poems, in 1851. Though the
writer and critic William Michael Rossetti
praised it, Charles Kingsley, the novelist,
found “very high promise” in it, and the
poet Alfred Tennyson said kindly that he
wished he might have written the beautiful
“Love in the Valley,” praise added nothing
to the family coffers.
Beset by creditors, the Merediths had to
take refuge in Peacock’s house, where their
only child, Arthur, was born in 1853.
Understandably, Peacock soon preferred to
rent a cottage for them across the village
green from him. As poetry did not pay,
Meredith now in desperation turned his hand
to prose, writing a fantasy entitled The
Shaving of Shagpat: An Arabian
Entertainment, published in 1855. Original
in conception but imitative of The Arabian
Nights in manner, it baffled most readers,
who did not know whether to regard it as
allegory or fairy tale. But the most
perceptive of the critics, the novelist
George Eliot, praised it as “a work of
genius, and of poetical genius.”
Poverty, disappointment, and the growing
antagonism between two highly strung,
critical natures placed an unbearable strain
upon the marriage of the Merediths. Little
more is known of this period in their lives,
except that Mrs. Meredith was in Wales, in
the company of an artist friend of the
couple, Henry Wallis, during the summer of
1857. In April 1858 she gave birth to a son,
whose father was registered as “George
Meredith, author,” but whose paternity
Meredith always denied. Subsequently, Mrs.
Meredith and Wallis went off to Capri
together. She died in 1861, leaving Meredith
with his eight-year-old son, Arthur.
Work was Meredith’s only solace, and he
was feverishly working upon a novel, The
Ordeal of Richard Feverel (published in
1859), with which he hoped to win fame and
fortune. It was characteristic of his best
work in many respects: in form it is a
romantic comedy (but with a tragic ending,
as is frequent in Meredith); it deals with
the relationship between a baronet and his
son; the son falls in love with a lower
class girl and is subjected to an ordeal—a
recurring motif in Meredith—by his father;
the novel is rich in allusion, image, and
metaphor; the dialogue is sparkling, witty,
and elliptical as in life; there are
frequent intrusions by the author; three of
the chapters are written in highly lyric
prose; and the psychology of motive and
rationalization is explored in depth. Father
and son suffer from excessive pride and
self-delusion (regarded by Meredith as forms
of egoism), which it is the purpose of
comedy, as he later said in his “Essay on
Comedy,” to purge and replace with sanity.
Though not without faults, the novel
nevertheless remains Meredith’s most moving
and most widely read novel. But delicate
readers found it prurient and had it banned
by the influential lending libraries,
scattering Meredith’s hopes of affluence. He
was forced to accept employment as a reader
of manuscripts for a publisher and as a
writer of editorials and news items for a
provincial newspaper. His own writing had to
be done in what spare time remained.
Feverel was followed by Evan Harrington
(1860), an amusing comedy in which Meredith
used the family tailoring establishment and
his own relatives for subject matter. The
hero is the son of a tailor who has been
brought up abroad as a “gentleman” and has
fallen in love with the daughter of a
baronet. His ordeal comes when he returns
home to find his father dead and himself
heir to the tailor shop and a considerable
debt. Taking up poetry again, Meredith next
published a volume of poems, Modern Love,
and Poems of the English Roadside, with
Poems and Ballads, in 1862. If Evan
Harrington had exorcised the tailor demon
that haunted him, “Modern Love” doubtless
served a similar purpose for his own
disastrous marriage. Semi-autobiographical,
it is concerned with the tragedy of marital
infidelity and its nemesis, though his own
wound was now sufficiently healed for him to
write compassionately. The poem deserves a
place among his permanent contributions to
English poetry.
After a walking tour on the Continent, he
once more turned to prose. The theme of his
next novel, Emilia in England (later renamed
Sandra Belloni), was the contrast between a
simple but passionate girl and some
sentimental English social climbers—an
excellent theme for Meredithian comedy. Its
publication in 1864 was made the occasion of
the first general consideration of all his
works up to this point in an article in the
Westminster Review by the Irish journalist
and writer Justin M’Carthy. A second event
of importance in 1864 was his remarriage.
Arthur had been placed in boarding school,
and Meredith’s own loneliness was
intensified. Luckily, he met an attractive,
well-bred young woman of Anglo-French
descent, Marie Vulliamy, fell in love with
her, and, after undergoing his own ordeal in
persuading her father of his respectability,
married her in September 1864. Thus ended a
period in his life: he was no longer unknown
and no longer lonely.
A son was born to the couple in 1865 and
a daughter in 1871. With a family to support
and popularity still elusive, Meredith had
to keep hard at work for the next 15 years,
with only occasional walking expeditions on
the Continent. In 1866, however, he was sent
out by The Morning Post to report the
Italian campaign in the Austro-Prussian War,
which lasted only seven weeks but enabled
him to spend three months in his beloved
Italy. After his return he was able to
purchase a comfortable cottage near the
bottom of Box Hill, Surrey, where he was to
live quietly until his death. It stands
today much as when he lived in it.
Mature works.
During the next 20 years, from 1865 to
1885, Meredith continued the drudgery of
reading manuscripts but substituted weekly
readings to an elderly rich widow for the
newspaper work. It was, however, a period
marked by the birth of the children, the
publication of seven novels and a volume of
poems, and, in the 1880s, by growing public
recognition. The next two novels, Rhoda
Fleming (1865) and a sequel to Emilia,
entitled Vittoria, added nothing to his
reputation. With The Adventures of Harry
Richmond (1871), however, Meredith returned
to what was his forte—romantic comedy. Once
more he wrote a close study of a father–son
relationship, only this time the father is
an impostor who out-Micawbers Dickens’ Mr.
Micawber in his belief that something will
“turn up” to make his fortune. The son’s
ordeal is that he must perceive and reject
the world of fantasy in which his father
lives and achieve maturity through painful
experience. After an interval of about four
years came Beauchamp’s Career. Its hero is a
self-deluded idealist who is converted to
radicalism and whose ordeal is both
political and personal. It is one of
Meredith’s better novels and confirmed what
was clear by now, that one of his greatest
strengths was the creation of spirited,
flesh-and-blood women who think for
themselves.
The next two novels of consequence, The
Egoist (1879) and Diana of the Crossways
(1885), marked the beginning of Meredith’s
acceptance by a wider reading public and a
more favourable reception by critics. Both
are comedies, full of Meredithian wit and
brilliant dialogue and notable for women
characters who prove their right to be
accepted as individuals, equal with men,
rather than puppets. In The Egoist the enemy
is egoism, and the egoist is tested by a
succession of ordeals before joining the
ranks of humanity. While that novel is
concerned with the dangers of wrong choice
before marriage, Diana is the first of a
series of studies of mismating in marriage.
Diana herself is a memorable character of
spirit and brains, although Meredith is less
successful in persuading readers that she
could naively be guilty of a grave breach of
confidence. In both novels, however, the men
that Meredith approves of and hands the
heroines over to are rather flat and
uninteresting.
A new period now began in Meredith’s
life. Fame, if not popularity, and financial
independence had come at last. Yet his
enjoyment of them was to be tempered by the
death of his wife in 1885 and of Arthur in
1890, by the beginning of deafness, and by
the onset of ataxia that was first to limit
his ability to walk and finally to render
him immobile. Honours and testimonials came
in plenty: an honorary LL.D. degree from the
University of St. Andrews, Fife, Scot.;
election to the prestigious office of
President of the Society of Authors; and in
1905 the Order of Merit, strictly limited to
24 members, was conferred upon him by order
of the King. Meredith had become a public
institution, his home at Box Hill almost a
literary shrine.
After 1885 his work was done except for
three novels and five volumes of poems that
were increasingly more philosophic than
poetic. One of Our Conquerors (1891) is
probably the most difficult of his novels
because of the indirect and cryptic style,
metaphor, and long passages of interior
monologue. Lord Ormont and His Aminta
(1894), unlike its predecessor, was praised
for the brilliancy and clarity of its style.
The final novel, The Amazing Marriage
(1895), repeats the theme of Lord Ormont—that
a wife is free to leave a husband who does
not recognize her as an equal.
In person Meredith was slightly built but
athletic, remarkably handsome, and
aristocratic in manner. Because of his
concern with upper class life in his novels,
he has sometimes been accused of being
ashamed of his lowly birth and of being at
heart a snob. The charge hardly bears
inspection: he chose the fashionable world
as a subject because it was fittest for his
brand of comic treatment. His own tastes and
manner of living were almost spartanly
simple, his greatest pleasures being long
walks and communion with nature. His
friends, for the most part, were not
aristocrats; they were chiefly writers and
artists, along with a few professional men.
It is true that in the years of his fame he
was taken up by various fashionable
ladies—usually young ones whom he had
fascinated—and that journalists began to
beat a path to his door. If he was not the
oracle with all the answers, he was willing
to play the role. A brilliant talker, he
delighted in expressing radical and
startling ideas to journalists—that the
Boers should have been given their freedom;
that Britain should join the United States;
that marriage should be for a 10-year trial
period, renewable by mutual consent; that
there was no future life; and that Britain
should arm itself against impending German
aggression. On his 80th birthday he was
presented with another testimonial, with 250
signatures of the great ones of the world,
and both King Edward VII and Pres. Theodore
Roosevelt sent congratulations.
Influence
On his 80th birthday the newspapers of
the world saluted Meredith as “the Dean of
English Writers,” the “last Great
Victorian,” the “Grand Old Man of Letters,”
and the “Sage of Box Hill.” Shortly after
his death, The Times Literary Supplement
said that his mind was “so rich, so full,
that one wonders where there is another mind
so rich, outside Shakespeare, in English
literature.” As not infrequently happens,
however, his great reputation went into
eclipse, and other gods—Henry James, James
Joyce, Joseph Conrad, and D.H.
Lawrence—replaced him. Ardent Meredithians
remained, but the pendulum of popular taste
has not swung back. The Ordeal of Richard
Feverel and The Egoist will continue to have
a share in college and university curricula,
The Adventures of Harry Richmond and
Beauchamp’s Career may have limited appeal,
and for the rest, Meredith will be left to
scholars and the intellectual elite.
The influence of Meredith on the novel
has been indirect rather than direct.
Although his highly personal style was
incapable of imitation, his extensive use of
interior monologue anticipated the
stream-of-consciousness technique of James
Joyce and others. Moreover, with George
Eliot he was creating the psychological
novel and thus was an important link between
his 18th-century precursors and 19th- and
20th-century followers. Among later
novelists influenced by him the Marxist
critic Jack Lindsay cites George Robert
Gissing, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and
Robert Louis Stevenson; and the writer and
critic J.B. Priestley points to Virginia
Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, and E.M. Forster.
C.L. Cline
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In the 1880s the three-volume novel, with its
panoramic vistas and proliferating subplots, began to
give way to more narrowly focused one-volume novels. At
the same time, a gap started to open between popular
fiction and the “literary” or “art” novel. The flowering
of realist fiction was also accompanied, perhaps
inevitably, by a revival of its opposite, the romance.
The 1860s had produced a new subgenre, the sensation
novel, seen at its best in the work of
Wilkie Collins.
Gothic novels and romances by Sheridan Le Fanu,
Robert
Louis Stevenson, William Morris, and
Oscar Wilde;
utopian fiction by Morris and
Samuel Butler; and the
early science fiction of
H.G. Wells make it possible to
speak of a full-scale romance revival.
Realism continued to flourish, however, sometimes
encouraged by the example of European realist and
naturalist novelists. Both George Moore and George
Gissing were influenced by Émile Zola, though both also
reacted against him. The 1890s saw intense concern with
the social role of women, reflected in the New Woman
fiction of Grant Allen (The Woman Who Did, 1895), Sarah
Grand (The Heavenly Twins, 1893), and George Egerton
(Keynotes, 1893). The heroines of such texts breach
conventional assumptions by supporting woman suffrage,
smoking, adopting “rational” dress, and rejecting
traditional double standards in sexual behaviour.
The greatest novelist of this generation, however,
was
Thomas Hardy. His first published novel, Desperate
Remedies, appeared in 1871 and was followed by 13 more
before he abandoned prose to publish (in the 20th
century) only poetry. His major fiction consists of the
tragic novels of rural life, The Mayor of Casterbridge
(1886), Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the
Obscure (1895). In these novels his brilliant evocation
of the landscape and people of his fictional Wessex is
combined with a sophisticated sense of the “ache of
modernism.”
Wilkie Collins
"The Moonstone"
PART
I,
PART II
"The Woman in White"
PART I,
PART II,
PART III,
PART IV,
PART V,
PART VI,
PART VI
Illustrations by John
McLenan
born Jan. 8, 1824, London, Eng.
died Sept. 23, 1889, London
English sensation novelist, early master of
the mystery story, and pioneer of detective
fiction.
The son of William Collins (1788–1847),
the landscape painter, he developed a gift
for inventing tales while still a schoolboy
at a private boarding school. His first
published work was a memoir to his father,
who died in 1847, Memoirs of the Life of
William Collins, Esq., R.A. (1848). His
fiction followed shortly after: Antonina;
or, the Fall of Rome (1850) and Basil
(1852), a highly coloured tale of seduction
and vengeance with a contemporary
middle-class setting and passages of
uncompromising realism. In 1851 he began an
association with Dickens that exerted a
formative influence on his career. Their
admiration was mutual. Under Dickens’
influence, Collins developed a talent for
characterization, humour, and popular
success, while the older writer’s debt to
Collins is evident in the more skillful and
suspenseful plot structures of such novels
as A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great
Expectations (1860–61). Collins began
contributing serials to Dickens’ periodical
Household Words, and his first major work,
The Woman in White (1860), appeared in
Dickens’ All the Year Round. Among his most
successful subsequent books were No Name
(1862), Armadale (1866), and The Moonstone
(1868). A master of intricate plot
construction and ingenious narrative
technique, Collins turned in his later
career from sensation fiction to fiction
with a purpose, attacking the marriage laws
in Man and Wife (1870) and vivisection in
Heart and Science (1883).
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Robert
Louis Stevenson
"Treasure Island"
Illustrations by N.C.
Wyeth
born Nov. 13, 1850, Edinburgh
died Dec. 3, 1894, Vailima, Samoa
Scottish essayist, poet, and author of
fiction and travel books, best known for his
novels Treasure Island (1881), Kidnapped
(1886), Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde (1886), and The Master of Ballantrae
(1889). Stevenson’s biography of Pierre-Jean
de Béranger appeared in the ninth edition of
the Encyclopædia Britannica (see the
Britannica Classic: Pierre-Jean de Béranger).
Early life
Stevenson was the only son of Thomas
Stevenson, a prosperous civil engineer, and
his wife, Margaret Isabella Balfour. His
poor health made regular schooling
difficult, but he attended Edinburgh Academy
and other schools before, at 17, entering
Edinburgh University, where he was expected
to prepare himself for the family profession
of lighthouse engineering. But Stevenson had
no desire to be an engineer, and he
eventually agreed with his father, as a
compromise, to prepare instead for the
Scottish bar.
He had shown a desire to write early in
life, and once in his teens he had
deliberately set out to learn the writer’s
craft by imitating a great variety of models
in prose and verse. His youthful enthusiasm
for the Covenanters (i.e., those Scotsmen
who banded together to defend their version
of Presbyterianism in the 17th century) led
to his writing The Pentland Rising, his
first printed work. During his years at the
university he rebelled against his parents’
religion and set himself up as a liberal
bohemian who abhorred the alleged cruelties
and hypocrisies of bourgeois respectability.
In 1873, in the midst of painful
differences with his father, he visited a
married cousin in Suffolk, England, where he
met Sidney Colvin, the English scholar, who
became a lifelong friend, and Fanny Sitwell
(who later married Colvin). Sitwell, an
older woman of charm and talent, drew the
young man out and won his confidence. Soon
Stevenson was deeply in love, and on his
return to Edinburgh he wrote her a series of
letters in which he played the part first of
lover, then of worshipper, then of son. One
of the several names by which Stevenson
addressed her in these letters was “Claire,”
a fact that many years after his death was
to give rise to the erroneous notion that
Stevenson had had an affair with a humbly
born Edinburgh girl of that name. Eventually
the passion turned into a lasting
friendship.
Later in 1873 Stevenson suffered severe
respiratory illness and was sent to the
French Riviera, where Colvin later joined
him. He returned home the following spring.
In July 1875 he was called to the Scottish
bar, but he never practiced. Stevenson was
frequently abroad, most often in France. Two
of his journeys produced An Inland Voyage
(1878) and Travels with a Donkey in the
Cévennes (1879). His career as a writer
developed slowly. His essay “Roads” appeared
in the Portfolio in 1873, and in 1874
“Ordered South” appeared in Macmillan’s
Magazine, a review of Lord Lytton’s Fables
in Song appeared in the Fortnightly, and his
first contribution (on Victor Hugo) appeared
in The Cornhill Magazine, then edited by
Leslie Stephen, a critic and biographer. It
was these early essays, carefully wrought,
quizzically meditative in tone, and unusual
in sensibility, that first drew attention to
Stevenson as a writer.
Stephen brought Stevenson into contact
with Edmund Gosse, the poet and critic, who
became a good friend. Later, when in
Edinburgh, Stephen introduced Stevenson to
the writer W.E. Henley. The two became warm
friends and were to remain so until 1888,
when a letter from Henley to Stevenson
containing a deliberately implied accusation
of dishonesty against the latter’s wife
precipitated a quarrel that Henley, jealous
and embittered, perpetuated after his
friend’s death in a venomous review of a
biography of Stevenson.
In 1876 Stevenson met Fanny Vandegrift
Osbourne, an American lady separated from
her husband, and the two fell in love.
Stevenson’s parents’ horror at their son’s
involvement with a married woman subsided
somewhat when she returned to California in
1878, but it revived with greater force when
Stevenson decided to join her in August
1879. Stevenson reached California ill and
penniless (the record of his arduous journey
appeared later in The Amateur Emigrant,
1895, and Across the Plains, 1892). His
adventures, which included coming very near
death and eking out a precarious living in
Monterey and San Francisco, culminated in
marriage to Fanny Osbourne (who was by then
divorced from her first husband) early in
1880. About the same time a telegram from
his relenting father offered much-needed
financial support, and after a honeymoon by
an abandoned silver mine (recorded in The
Silverado Squatters, 1883) the couple sailed
for Scotland to achieve reconciliation with
the Thomas Stevensons.
Romantic novels
Soon after his return, Stevenson,
accompanied by his wife and his stepson,
Lloyd Osbourne, went, on medical advice (he
had tuberculosis), to Davos, Switz. The
family left there in April 1881 and spent
the summer in Pitlochry and then in Braemar,
Scot. There, in spite of bouts of illness,
Stevenson embarked on Treasure Island (begun
as a game with Lloyd), which started as a
serial in Young Folks, under the title The
Sea-Cook, in October 1881. Stevenson
finished the story in Davos, to which he had
returned in the autumn, and then started on
Prince Otto (1885), a more complex but less
successful work. Treasure Island is an
adventure presented with consummate skill,
with atmosphere, character, and action
superbly geared to one another. The book is
at once a gripping adventure tale and a wry
comment on the ambiguity of human motives.
In 1881 Stevenson published Virginibus
Puerisque, his first collection of essays,
most of which had appeared in The Cornhill.
The winter of 1881 he spent at a chalet in
Davos. In April 1882 he left Davos; but a
stay in the Scottish Highlands, while it
resulted in two of his finest short stories,
“Thrawn Janet” and “The Merry Men,” produced
lung hemorrhages, and in September he went
to the south of France. There the Stevensons
finally settled at a house in Hyères, where,
in spite of intermittent illness, Stevenson
was happy and worked well. He revised Prince
Otto, worked on A Child’s Garden of Verses
(first called Penny Whistles), and began The
Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses (1888),
a historical adventure tale deliberately
written in anachronistic language.
The threat of a cholera epidemic drove
the Stevensons from Hyères back to England.
They lived at Bournemouth from September
1884 until July 1887, but his frequent bouts
of dangerous illness proved conclusively
that the British climate, even in the south
of England, was not for him. The Bournemouth
years were fruitful, however. There he got
to know and love the American novelist Henry
James. There he revised A Child’s Garden
(first published in 1885) and wrote “Markheim,”
Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde. The poems in A Child’s Garden
represent with extraordinary fidelity an
adult’s recapturing of the emotions and
sensations of childhood; there is nothing
quite like them in English literature. In
Kidnapped the fruit of his researches into
18th-century Scottish history and of his
feeling for Scottish landscape, history,
character, and local atmosphere mutually
illuminate one another. But it was Dr.
Jekyll—both moral allegory and thriller—that
established his reputation with the ordinary
reader.
In August 1887, still in search of
health, Stevenson set out for America with
his wife, mother, and stepson. On arriving
in New York, he found himself famous, with
editors and publishers offering lucrative
contracts. He stayed for a while in the
Adirondack Mountains, where he wrote essays
for Scribner’s and began The Master of
Ballantrae. This novel, another exploration
of moral ambiguities, contains some of his
most impressive writing, although marred by
its contrived conclusion.
Life in the South Seas
In June 1888 Stevenson, accompanied by
his family, sailed from San Francisco in the
schooner yacht Casco, which he had
chartered, on what was intended to be an
excursion for health and pleasure. In fact,
he was to spend the rest of his life in the
South Seas. They went first to the Marquesas
Islands, then to Fakarava Atoll, then to
Tahiti, then to Honolulu, where they stayed
nearly six months, leaving in June 1889 for
the Gilbert Islands, and then to Samoa,
where he spent six weeks.
During his months of wandering around the
South Sea islands, Stevenson made intensive
efforts to understand the local scene and
the inhabitants. As a result, his writings
on the South Seas (In the South Seas, 1896;
A Footnote to History, 1892) are admirably
pungent and perceptive. He was writing
first-rate journalism, deepened by the
awareness of landscape and atmosphere, such
as that so notably rendered in his
description of the first landfall at Nuku
Hiva in the Marquesas.
In October 1890 he returned to Samoa from
a voyage to Sydney and established himself
and his family in patriarchal status at
Vailima, his house in Samoa. The climate
suited him; he led an industrious and active
life; and, when he died suddenly, it was of
a cerebral hemorrhage, not of the
long-feared tuberculosis. His work during
those years was moving toward a new
maturity. While Catriona (U.S. title, David
Balfour, 1893) marked no advance in
technique or imaginative scope on Kidnapped,
to which it is a sequel, The Ebb-Tide
(1894), a grim and powerful tale written in
a dispassionate style (it was a complete
reworking of a first draft by Lloyd Osbourne),
showed that Stevenson had reached an
important transition in his literary career.
The next phase was demonstrated triumphantly
in Weir of Hermiston (1896), the unfinished
masterpiece on which he was working on the
day of his death. “The Beach of Falesá”
(first published 1892; included in Island
Night’s Entertainments, 1893), a story with
a finely wrought tragic texture, as well as
the first part of The Master of Ballantrae,
pointed in this direction, but neither
approaches Weir. Stevenson achieved in this
work a remarkable richness of tragic texture
in a style stripped of all superfluities.
The dialogue contains some of the best Scots
prose in modern literature. Fragment though
it is, Weir of Hermiston stands as a great
work and Stevenson’s masterpiece.
Assessment
Stevenson was an indefatigable letter
writer, and his letters (edited by Sidney
Colvin in 1899) provide a lively and
enchanting picture of the man and his life.
But Colvin omitted many of the most
interesting letters and compressed and
dovetailed others, with the result that many
important facts about Stevenson’s emotional
life remained unknown until the true text of
all the letters was available. Colvin
presented Stevenson’s letters to Fanny
Sitwell to what is now the National Library
of Scotland with the proviso that they were
not to be opened until 1949; the revealing
and often fascinating letters to Charles
Baxter, a friend, were deposited in the Yale
University Library. Stevenson’s biography
suffered from his being early canonized;
later writers built up a counterpicture of
an immoral swaggerer restrained into
reluctant respectability by a jealous wife.
Access to the crucial letters yielded a
picture of a Stevenson who was neither the
“seraph in chocolate” against whom Henley
protested nor a low-living rake nor an
optimistic escapist nor the happy invalid
but a sensitive and intelligent writer who
had no illusions about life and wryly made
the best of a world to which he did not
profess to have the key.
Stevenson’s literary reputation has also
fluctuated. The reaction against him set in
soon after his death: he was considered a
mannered and imitative essayist or only a
writer of children’s books. But eventually
the pendulum began to swing the other way,
and by the 1950s his reputation was
established among the more discerning as a
writer of originality and power; whose
essays at their best are cogent and
perceptive renderings of aspects of the
human condition; whose novels are either
brilliant adventure stories with subtle
moral overtones or original and impressive
presentations of human action in terms of
history and topography as well as
psychology; whose short stories produce some
new and effective permutations in the
relation between romance and irony or manage
to combine horror and suspense with moral
diagnosis; whose poems, though not showing
the highest poetic genius, are often
skillful, occasionally (in his use of Scots,
for example) interesting and original, and
sometimes (in A Child’s Garden) valuable for
their exhibition of a special kind of
sensibility.
David Daiches
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see also collection:
Morris William - designer
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William Morris
see also collection:
Morris William
- designer
born March 24, 1834, Walthamstow, near
London, Eng.
died Oct. 3, 1896, Hammersmith, near London
English designer, craftsman, poet, and early
socialist, whose designs for furniture,
fabrics, stained glass, wallpaper, and other
decorative arts generated the Arts and
Crafts movement in England and
revolutionized Victorian taste.
Education and early career
Morris was born in an Essex village on the
southern edge of Epping Forest, a member of
a large and well-to-do family. From his
preparatory school, he went at age 13 to
Marlborough College. A schoolfellow
described him at this time as “a thick-set,
strong-looking boy, with a high colour and
black curly hair, good-natured and kind, but
with a fearful temper.” Morris later said
that at Marlborough he learned “next to
nothing…for indeed next to nothing was
taught.” As in later life, he learned only
what he wanted to learn.
In 1853 Morris went to Exeter College at
the University of Oxford, where he met
Edward Jones (later the painter and designer
Burne-Jones), who was to become his lifelong
friend. Both Morris and Jones became deeply
affected by the Oxford movement within the
Church of England, and it was assumed that
they would become clergymen. Nevertheless,
it was the writings of art critic John
Ruskin on the social and moral basis of
architecture (particularly the chapter “On
the Nature of Gothic” in The Stones of
Venice) that came to Morris “with the force
of a revelation.” After taking a degree in
1856, he entered the Oxford office of the
Gothic Revivalist architect G.E. Street. In
the same year he financed the first 12
monthly issues of The Oxford and Cambridge
Magazine, where many of those poems appeared
that, two years later, were reprinted in his
remarkable first published work, The Defence
of Guenevere and Other Poems.
Visits with Street and Burne-Jones to
Belgium and northern France, where he first
saw the 15th-century paintings of Hans
Memling and Jan and Hubert Van Eyck and the
cathedrals of Amiens, Chartres, and Rouen,
confirmed Morris in his love of medieval
art. It was at this time that he came under
the powerful influence of the Pre-Raphaelite
painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who
persuaded him to give up architecture for
painting and enrolled him among the band of
friends who were decorating the walls of the
Oxford Union with scenes from Arthurian
legend based on Le Morte Darthur by the
15th-century English writer Sir Thomas
Malory. Only one easel painting by Morris
survives: La Belle Iseult, or Queen
Guenevere (1858). His model was Jane Burden,
the beautiful, enigmatic daughter of an
Oxford groom. He married her in 1859, but
the marriage was to prove a source of
unhappiness to both. Morris appears at this
time, in the memoirs of the painter Val
Prinsep, as “a short square man with
spectacles and a vast mop of dark hair.” It
was observed “how decisive he was: how
accurate, without any effort or formality:
what an extraordinary power of observation
lay at the base of many of his casual or
incidental remarks.” From 1856 to 1859
Morris shared a studio with Burne-Jones in
London’s Red Lion Square, for which he
designed, according to Rossetti, “some
intensely medieval furniture.”
After his marriage, Morris commissioned
his friend the architect Philip Webb, whom
he had originally met in Street’s office, to
build the Red House at Bexleyheath (so
called because it was built of red brick
when the fashion was for stucco villas). It
was during the furnishing and decorating of
this house by Morris and his friends that
the idea came to them of founding an
association of “fine art workmen,” which in
April 1861 became the firm of Morris,
Marshall, Faulkner & Company, with premises
in Red Lion Square. The other members of the
firm were Ford Madox Brown, Rossetti, Webb,
and Burne-Jones. At the International
Exhibition of 1862 at South Kensington they
exhibited stained glass, furniture, and
embroideries. This led to commissions to
decorate the new churches then being built
by G.F. Bodley, notably St.
Martin’s-on-the-Hill at Scarborough. The
apogee of the firm’s decorative work is the
magnificent series of stained-glass windows
designed during the next decade by
Burne-Jones for Jesus College Chapel,
Cambridge, the ceiling being painted by
Morris and Webb. The designs for these
windows came to Morris uncoloured, and it
was he who chose the colours and put in the
lead lines. He also designed many other
windows himself, for both domestic and
ecclesiastical use.
Two daughters, Jenny and May, were born
in 1861 and 1862, and altogether the five
years spent at Red House were the happiest
of Morris’s life. After a serious attack of
rheumatic fever, brought on by overwork, he
moved in 1865 to Bloomsbury in London. The
greater part of his new house was given over
to the firm’s workshops—an arrangement that,
combined with her husband’s boisterous
manners and Rossetti’s infatuation with her,
reduced Jane to a state of neurotic
invalidism. Morris’s first wallpaper
designs, “Trellis,” “Daisy,” and “Fruit,” or
“Pomegranate,” belong to 1862–64; he did not
arrive at his mature style until 10 years
later, with the “Jasmine” and “Marigold”
papers.
Iceland and socialism
As a poet, Morris first achieved fame and
success with the romantic narrative The Life
and Death of Jason (1867), which was soon
followed by The Earthly Paradise (1868–70),
a series of narrative poems based on
classical and medieval sources. The best
parts of The Earthly Paradise are the
introductory poems on the months, in which
Morris reveals his personal unhappiness. A
sterner spirit informs his principal poetic
achievement, the epic Story of Sigurd the
Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs (1876),
written after a prolonged study of the sagas
(medieval prose narratives) read by Morris
in the original Old Norse. The exquisitely
illuminated A Book of Verse, telling once
more of hopeless love and dedicated to
Georgina Burne-Jones, belongs to 1870.
In 1871 Morris and Rossetti took a joint
lease on the Elizabethan manor house of
Kelmscott in Oxfordshire. In the same year
Morris paid his first visit to Iceland, and
the journal he kept of his travels contains
some of his most vigorous descriptive
writing. He returned to Iceland in 1873. The
shared tenancy of Kelmscott, however, was
never a success, and, after the final
breakdown of his health in 1874, Rossetti
left the house for good, to Morris’s great
relief. The following year the firm was
reorganized under his sole proprietorship as
Morris & Company. In 1875 Morris also began
his revolutionary experiments with vegetable
dyes, which, after the removal in 1881 of
the firm to larger premises at Merton Abbey
in Surrey, resulted in its finest printed
and woven fabrics, carpets, and tapestries.
In 1877 Morris gave his first public
lecture, The Decorative Arts (later called
The Lesser Arts), and his first collection
of lectures, Hopes and Fears for Art,
appeared in 1882. In 1877 he also founded
the Society for the Protection of Ancient
Buildings in an attempt to combat the
drastic methods of restoration then being
carried out on the cathedrals and parish
churches of Great Britain.
The Morris family moved into Kelmscott
House (named after their country house in
Oxfordshire), at Hammersmith, in 1879. Five
years later Morris joined Henry Mayers
Hyndman’s Democratic (later Social
Democratic) Federation and began his
tireless tours of industrial areas to spread
the gospel of socialism. He was
considerately treated by the authorities,
even when leading a banned demonstration to
London’s Trafalgar Square on “Bloody Sunday”
(November 13, 1887), when the police,
supported by troops, cleared the square of
demonstrators. On this occasion he marched
with the playwright George Bernard Shaw at
his side. But by this time Morris had
quarreled with the autocratic Hyndman
Federation and formed the Socialist League,
with its own publication, The Commonweal, in
which his two finest romances, A Dream of
John Ball (1886–87) and News from Nowhere
(1890), an idyllic vision of a socialist
rural utopia, appeared. Subsequently, he
founded the Hammersmith Socialist Society,
which held weekly lectures in the coach
house next door to Kelmscott House, as well
as open-air meetings in different parts of
London.
The Kelmscott Press
The Kelmscott Press was started in 1891,
with the printer and type designer Emery
Walker as typographic adviser, and between
that year and 1898 the press produced 53
titles in 66 volumes. Morris designed three
type styles for his press: Golden type,
modeled on that of Nicolas Jenson, the
15th-century French printer; Troy type, a
gothic font on the model of the early German
printers of the 15th century; and Chaucer
type, a smaller variant of Troy, in which
The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer was printed
during the last years of Morris’s life. One
of the greatest examples of the art of the
printed book, Chaucer is the most ornate of
the Kelmscott publications. Most of the
other Kelmscott books were plain and simple,
for Morris observed that 15th-century books
were “always beautiful by force of the mere
typography.”
Death and assessment
A sea voyage to Norway in the summer of 1896
failed to revive Morris’s flagging energies,
and he died that autumn after returning
home, worn out by the multiplicity of his
activities. He was buried in the Kelmscott
churchyard beneath a simple gravestone
designed by Webb.
Morris is now regarded as a modern and
visionary thinker, though he turned away
from what he called “the dull squalor of
civilization” to romance, myth, and epic.
Following Ruskin, Morris defined beauty in
art as the result of man’s pleasure in his
work and asked, “Unless people care about
carrying on their business without making
the world hideous, how can they care about
Art?” To Morris, art included the whole
man-made environment.
In his own time William Morris was most
widely known as the author of The Earthly
Paradise and for his designs for wallpapers,
textiles, and carpets. Since the mid-20th
century Morris has been celebrated as a
designer and craftsman. Future generations
may esteem him more as a social and moral
critic, a pioneer of the society of
equality.
Philip Prichard Henderson
Ed.
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Oscar Wilde
I.
"The Ballad of Reading
Gaol"
"The Paradox"
II.
"The Picture of
Dorian Gray"
III.
Oscar Wilde "Salome"
Illustrations by Beardsley
born , Oct. 16, 1854, Dublin, Ire.
died Nov. 30, 1900, Paris, Fr.
Irish wit, poet, and dramatist whose reputation rests on his
comic masterpieces Lady Windermere's Fan (1892) and The
Importance of BeingEarnest (1895). He was a spokesman for
the late 19th-century Aesthetic movement in England,
whichadvocated art for art's sake; and he was the object of
celebrated civil and criminal suits involving homosexuality
and ending in his imprisonment (1895–97).
Wilde was born of professional and literary parents. His
father, Sir William Wilde, was Ireland's leading ear and eye
surgeon, who also published books on archaeology, folklore,
and the satirist Jonathan Swift; his mother was a
revolutionary poet and an authority on Celtic myth and
folklore.
After attending Portora Royal School, Enniskillen (1864–71),
Wilde went, on successive scholarships, to Trinity College,
Dublin (1871–74), and Magdalen College, Oxford (1874–78),
which awarded him a degree with honours. During these four
years, he distinguished himself not only as a classical
scholar, a poseur, and a wit but also as a poet by winning
the coveted Newdigate Prize in 1878 with a long poem,
Ravenna.He was deeply impressed by the teachings of the
English writers John Ruskin and Walter Pater on the central
importance of art in life and particularly by the latter's
stresson the aesthetic intensity by which life should be
lived. Like many in his generation, Wilde was determined to
follow Pater's urging “to burn always with [a] hard, gemlike
flame.” But Wilde also delighted in affecting an aesthetic
pose; this, combined with rooms at Oxford decorated with
objets d'art, resulted in his famous remark: “Oh, would that
I could live up to my blue china!”
In the early 1880s, when Aestheticism was the rage and
despair of literary London, Wilde established himself in
social and artistic circles by his wit and flamboyance. Soon
the periodical Punch made him the satiric object of its
antagonism to the Aesthetes for what was considered their
unmasculine devotion to art; and in their comic opera
Patience, Gilbert and Sullivan based the character Bunthorne,
a “fleshly poet,” partly on Wilde. Wishing to reinforce the
association, Wilde published, at his own expense, Poems
(1881), which echoed, too faithfully, his discipleship to
the poets Algernon Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and
John Keats. Eager for further acclaim, Wilde agreed to
lecture in the United States and Canada in 1882, announcing
on his arrival in New York City that he had “nothing to
declare but his genius.” Despite widespread hostility in the
press to his languid poses and aesthetic costume of velvet
jacket, knee breeches, and black silk stockings, Wilde for
12 months exhorted the Americans to love beauty and art;
then he returned to Great Britain to lecture on his
impressions of America.
In 1884 Wilde married Constance Lloyd, daughter of a
prominent Irish barrister; two children, Cyril and Vyvyan,
were born, in 1885 and 1886. Meanwhile, Wilde was a reviewer
for the Pall Mall Gazette and then became editor of Woman's
World (1887–89). During this period of apprenticeship as a
writer, he published The Happy Prince and Other Tales
(1888), which reveals his gift for romantic allegory in the
form of the fairy tale.
In the final decade of his life, Wilde wrote and published
nearly all of his major work. In his only novel, The Picture
of Dorian Gray (published in Lippincott's Magazine, 1890,
and inbook form, revised and expanded by six chapters,
1891), Wilde combined the supernatural elements of the
Gothic novel with the unspeakable sins of French decadent
fiction. Critics charged immorality despite Dorian's self-destruction;Wilde,
however, insisted on the amoral nature of art regardless of
an apparently moral ending. Intentions (1891), consisting of
previously published essays, restated his aesthetic attitude
toward art by borrowing ideas from the French poets
Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire and the American
painter James McNeill Whistler. In the same year, two
volumes of stories and fairy tales also appeared, testifying
to his extraordinary creative inventiveness: Lord Arthur
Savile's Crime, and Other Stories and A House of
Pomegranates.
But Wilde's greatest successes were his society comedies.
Within the conventions of the French “well-made play” (with
its social intrigues and artificial devices to resolve
conflict), he employed his paradoxical, epigrammatic wit to
create a form of comedy new to the 19th-century English
theatre. His first success, Lady Windermere's Fan,
demonstrated that thiswit could revitalize the rusty
machinery of French drama. In the same year, rehearsals of
his macabre play Salomé, written in French and designed, as
he said, to make his audience shudder by its depiction of
unnatural passion, werehalted by the censor because it
contained biblical characters. It was published in 1893, and
an English translation appeared in 1894 with Aubrey
Beardsley's celebrated illustrations.
A second society comedy, A Woman of No Importance (produced
1893), convinced the critic William Archer that Wilde's
plays “must be taken on the very highest plane of modern
English drama.” In rapid succession, Wilde's final plays, An
Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, were
produced early in 1895. In the latter, his greatest
achievement, the conventional elements of farce are
transformed into satiric epigrams—seemingly trivial but
mercilessly exposing Victorian hypocrisies.
I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be
in it ismerely a bore. But to be out of it simply a
tragedy.
I never travel without my diary. One should always have
something sensational to read in the train.
All women become like their mothers. That is their
tragedy. No man does. That's his.
I hope you have not been leading a double life,
pretending to be wicked and being really good all the
time. That would be hypocrisy.
In many of his works, exposure of a secret sin or indiscretion and consequent
disgrace is a central design. If life imitated art, as Wilde insisted in his
essay “The Decay of Lying” (1889), he was himself approximating the pattern in
his reckless pursuit of pleasure. In addition, his close friendship with Lord
Alfred Douglas, whom he had met in 1891, infuriated the Marquess of Queensberry,
Douglas' father. Accused, finally, by the marquess of being a sodomite, Wilde,
urged by Douglas, sued for criminal libel. Wilde's case collapsed, however, when
the evidence went against him, and he dropped the suit. Urged to flee to France
by his friends, Wilde refused, unable to believe that his world was at an end.
He was arrested and ordered to stand trial.
Wilde testified brilliantly, but the jury failed to reach a verdict. In the
retrial he was found guilty and sentenced, in May 1895, to two years at hard
labour. Most of his sentence was served at Reading Gaol, where he wrote a long
letter to Douglas (published in 1905 in a drastically cut version as De
Profundis) filled with recriminations against the younger man for encouraging
him in dissipation and distracting him from his work.
In May 1897 Wilde was released, a bankrupt, and immediately went to France,
hoping to regenerate himself asa writer. His only remaining work, however, was
The Ballad ofReading Gaol (1898), revealing his concern for inhumane prison
conditions. Despite constant money problems he maintained, as George Bernard
Shaw said, “an unconquerable gaiety of soul” that sustained him, and he was
visited by such loyal friends as Max Beerbohm and Robert Ross, later his
literary executor; he was also reunited with Douglas. He died suddenly of acute
meningitis brought on by an ear infection. In his semiconscious final moments,
he was received into the Roman Catholic church, which he had long admired.
Karl Beckson
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George Moore
born Feb. 24, 1852, Ballyglass, County Mayo, Ire.
died Jan. 21, 1933, London
Irish novelist and man of letters. Considered an innovator in fiction in
his day, he no longer seems as important as he once did.
Moore came from a distinguished Catholic family of Irish landholders.
When he was 21, he left Ireland for Paris to become a painter. Moore’s
Reminiscences of the Impressionist Painters (1906) vividly described the
Café Nouvelle-Athènes and the circle of Impressionist painters who
frequented it. Moore was particularly friendly with Édouard Manet, who
sketched three portraits of him. Another account of the years in Paris,
in which he introduced the younger generation in England to his version
of fin de siècle decadence, was his first autobiography, Confessions of
a Young Man (1888).
Deciding that he had no talent for painting, he returned to London in
1882 to write. His first novels, A Modern Lover (1883) and A Mummer’s
Wife (1885), introduced a new note of French Naturalism into the English
scene, and he later adopted the realistic techniques of Gustave Flaubert
and Honoré de Balzac. Esther Waters (1894), his best novel, deals with
the plight of a servant girl who has a baby out of wedlock; it is a
story of hardship and humiliation illumined by the novelist’s
compassion. It was an immediate success, and he followed it with works
in a similar vein: Evelyn Innes (1898) and Sister Teresa (1901).
In 1901 Moore moved to Dublin, partly because of his loathing for the
South African War, partly because of the Irish literary renaissance
spearheaded by his friend, the poet William Butler Yeats. In Dublin he
contributed notably to the planning of the Abbey Theatre. He also
produced The Untilled Field (1903), a volume of fine short stories
reminiscent of Ivan Turgenev that focus on the drudgery of Irish rural
life, and a short, poetic novel, The Lake (1905). The real fruits of his
life in Ireland, however, came with the trilogy Hail and Farewell (Ave,
1911; Salve, 1912; Vale, 1914). Discursive, affectionate, and satirical
by turns, it reads like a sustained monologue that is both a carefully
studied piece of self-revelation and an acute (though not always
reliable) portrait gallery of his Irish acquaintance, which included
Yeats, Æ, and Lady Gregory. Above all it is a perfectly modulated
display of the comic spirit.
The increasing narrowness of the Irish mind, politics, and
clericalism had sent Moore back to England in 1911. After Hail and
Farewell he made another literary departure: aiming at epic effect he
produced The Brook Kerith (1916), an elaborate and stylish retelling of
the Gospel story that is surprisingly effective despite some dull
patches. He continued his attempts to find a prose style worthy of epic
theme in Héloïse and Abélard (1921). His other works included A
Story-Teller’s Holiday (1918), a blend of autobiography, anecdote, Irish
legend, and satire; Conversations in Ebury Street (1924), autobiography;
The Pastoral Loves of Daphnis and Chloe (1924); and Ulick and Soracha
(1926), an Irish legendary romance.
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George
Gissing
born Nov. 22, 1857, Wakefield, Yorkshire, Eng.
died Dec. 28, 1903, Saint-Jean-de-Luz, France
English novelist, noted for the unflinching realism of his novels about
the lower middle class.
Gissing was educated at Owens College, Manchester, where his academic
career was brilliant until he was expelled (and briefly imprisoned) for
theft. His personal life remained, until the last few years, mostly
unhappy. His two marriages—the first to a prostitute and the second to a
servant girl—brought him little but misery, and the life of near poverty
and constant drudgery—writing and teaching—that he led until the
mid-1880s is described in the novels New Grub Street (1891) and The
Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903). In his last years Gissing
established a happy relationship with a Frenchwoman, Gabrielle Fleury,
with whom he lived.
Before he was 21 he conceived the ambition of writing a long series
of novels, somewhat in the manner of Balzac, whom he admired. The first
of these, Workers in the Dawn, appeared in 1880, to be followed by 21
others. Between 1886 and 1895 he published one or more novels every
year. He also wrote Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1898), a
perceptive piece of literary criticism.
His work is serious—though not without a good deal of comic
observation—interesting, scrupulously honest, and rather flat. It has a
good deal of documentary interest for its detailed and accurate accounts
of lower-middle-class London life. On the social position and psychology
of women he is particularly acute: The Odd Women (1893) is a powerful
study of female frustration. He did not lack human sympathies, but his
obvious contempt for so many of his characters reflects an artistic
limitation. Gissing was deeply critical, in an almost wholly negative
way, of contemporary society. Of his novels, New Grub Street, considered
by some critics to be his only great book, is unique in its merciless
analysis of the compromises required by the literary life. Though he
rejected Zola’s theory of naturalism, his ironic, agnostic, and
pessimistic fictions came to be respected for their similarity to
contemporary developments in French realist fiction.
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Thomas Hardy
"Tess of the
d'Urbervilles"
PART I,
PART II
British writer
born June 2, 1840, Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, Eng.
died Jan. 11, 1928, Dorchester, Dorset
Main
English novelist and poet who set much of his work in Wessex, his name
for the counties of southwestern England.
Early life and works.
Hardy was the eldest of the four children of Thomas Hardy, a stonemason
and jobbing builder, and his wife, Jemima (née Hand). He grew up in an
isolated cottage on the edge of open heathland. Though he was often ill
as a child, his early experience of rural life, with its seasonal
rhythms and oral culture, was fundamental to much of his later writing.
He spent a year at the village school at age eight and then moved on to
schools in Dorchester, the nearby county town, where he received a good
grounding in mathematics and Latin. In 1856 he was apprenticed to John
Hicks, a local architect, and in 1862, shortly before his 22nd birthday,
he moved to London and became a draftsman in the busy office of Arthur
Blomfield, a leading ecclesiastical architect. Driven back to Dorset by
ill health in 1867, he worked for Hicks again and then for the Weymouth
architect G.R. Crickmay.
Though architecture brought Hardy both social and economic
advancement, it was only in the mid-1860s that lack of funds and
declining religious faith forced him to abandon his early ambitions of a
university education and eventual ordination as an Anglican priest. His
habits of intensive private study were then redirected toward the
reading of poetry and the systematic development of his own poetic
skills. The verses he wrote in the 1860s would emerge in revised form in
later volumes (e.g., “Neutral Tones,” “Retty’s Phases”), but when none
of them achieved immediate publication, Hardy reluctantly turned to
prose.
In 1867–68 he wrote the class-conscious novel The Poor Man and the
Lady, which was sympathetically considered by three London publishers
but never published. George Meredith, as a publisher’s reader, advised
Hardy to write a more shapely and less opinionated novel. The result was
the densely plotted Desperate Remedies (1871), which was influenced by
the contemporary “sensation” fiction of Wilkie Collins. In his next
novel, however, the brief and affectionately humorous idyll Under the
Greenwood Tree (1872), Hardy found a voice much more distinctively his
own. In this book he evoked, within the simplest of marriage plots, an
episode of social change (the displacement of a group of church
musicians) that was a direct reflection of events involving his own
father shortly before Hardy’s own birth.
In March 1870 Hardy had been sent to make an architectural assessment
of the lonely and dilapidated Church of St. Juliot in Cornwall. There—in
romantic circumstances later poignantly recalled in prose and verse—he
first met the rector’s vivacious sister-in-law, Emma Lavinia Gifford,
who became his wife four years later. She actively encouraged and
assisted him in his literary endeavours, and his next novel, A Pair of
Blue Eyes (1873), drew heavily upon the circumstances of their courtship
for its wild Cornish setting and its melodramatic story of a young woman
(somewhat resembling Emma Gifford) and the two men, friends become
rivals, who successively pursue, misunderstand, and fail her.
Hardy’s break with architecture occurred in the summer of 1872, when
he undertook to supply Tinsley’s Magazine with the 11 monthly
installments of A Pair of Blue Eyes—an initially risky commitment to a
literary career that was soon validated by an invitation to contribute a
serial to the far more prestigious Cornhill Magazine. The resulting
novel, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), introduced Wessex for the
first time and made Hardy famous by its agricultural settings and its
distinctive blend of humorous, melodramatic, pastoral, and tragic
elements. The book is a vigorous portrayal of the beautiful and
impulsive Bathsheba Everdene and her marital choices among Sergeant
Troy, the dashing but irresponsible soldier; William Boldwood, the
deeply obsessive farmer; and Gabriel Oak, her loyal and resourceful
shepherd.
Middle period.
Hardy and Emma Gifford were married, against the wishes of both their
families, in September 1874. At first they moved rather restlessly
about, living sometimes in London, sometimes in Dorset. His record as a
novelist during this period was somewhat mixed. The Hand of Ethelberta
(1876), an artificial social comedy turning on versions and inversions
of the British class system, was poorly received and has never been
widely popular. The Return of the Native (1878), on the other hand, was
increasingly admired for its powerfully evoked setting of Egdon Heath,
which was based on the sombre countryside Hardy had known as a child.
The novel depicts the disastrous marriage between Eustacia Vye, who
yearns romantically for passionate experiences beyond the hated heath,
and Clym Yeobright, the returning native, who is blinded to his wife’s
needs by a naively idealistic zeal for the moral improvement of Egdon’s
impervious inhabitants. Hardy’s next works were The Trumpet-Major
(1880), set in the Napoleonic period, and two more novels generally
considered “minor”—A Laodicean (1881) and Two on a Tower (1882). The
serious illness which hampered completion of A Laodicean decided the
Hardys to move to Wimborne in 1881 and to Dorchester in 1883.
It was not easy for Hardy to establish himself as a member of the
professional middle class in a town where his humbler background was
well known. He signaled his determination to stay by accepting an
appointment as a local magistrate and by designing and building Max
Gate, the house just outside Dorchester in which he lived until his
death. Hardy’s novel The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) incorporates
recognizable details of Dorchester’s history and topography. The busy
market-town of Casterbridge becomes the setting for a tragic struggle,
at once economic and deeply personal, between the powerful but unstable
Michael Henchard, who has risen from workman to mayor by sheer natural
energy, and the more shrewdly calculating Donald Farfrae, who starts out
in Casterbridge as Henchard’s protégé but ultimately dispossesses him of
everything that he had once owned and loved. In Hardy’s next novel, The
Woodlanders (1887), socioeconomic issues again become central as the
permutations of sexual advance and retreat are played out among the very
trees from which the characters make their living, and Giles
Winterborne’s loss of livelihood is integrally bound up with his loss of
Grace Melbury and, finally, of life itself.
Wessex Tales (1888) was the first collection of the short stories
that Hardy had long been publishing in magazines. His subsequent
short-story collections are A Group of Noble Dames (1891), Life’s Little
Ironies (1894), and A Changed Man (1913). Hardy’s short novel The
Well-Beloved (serialized 1892, revised for volume publication 1897)
displays a hostility to marriage that was related to increasing
frictions within his own marriage.
Late novels.
The closing phase of Hardy’s career in fiction was marked by the
publication of Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure
(1895), which are generally considered his finest novels. Though Tess is
the most richly “poetic” of Hardy’s novels, and Jude the most bleakly
written, both books offer deeply sympathetic representations of
working-class figures: Tess Durbeyfield, the erring milkmaid, and Jude
Fawley, the studious stonemason. In powerful, implicitly moralized
narratives, Hardy traces these characters’ initially hopeful,
momentarily ecstatic, but persistently troubled journeys toward eventual
deprivation and death.
Though technically belonging to the 19th century, these novels
anticipate the 20th century in regard to the nature and treatment of
their subject matter. Tess profoundly questions society’s sexual mores
by its compassionate portrayal and even advocacy of a heroine who is
seduced, and perhaps raped, by the son of her employer. She has an
illegitimate child, suffers rejection by the man she loves and marries,
and is finally hanged for murdering her original seducer. In Jude the
Obscure the class-ridden educational system of the day is challenged by
the defeat of Jude’s earnest aspirations to knowledge, while
conventional morality is affronted by the way in which the
sympathetically presented Jude and Sue change partners, live together,
and have children with little regard for the institution of marriage.
Both books encountered some brutally hostile reviews, and Hardy’s
sensitivity to such attacks partly precipitated his long-contemplated
transition from fiction to poetry.
Poetry.
Hardy seems always to have rated poetry above fiction, and Wessex Poems
(1898), his first significant public appearance as a poet, included
verse written during his years as a novelist as well as revised versions
of poems dating from the 1860s. As a collection it was often perceived
as miscellaneous and uneven—an impression reinforced by the author’s own
idiosyncratic illustrations—and acceptance of Hardy’s verse was slowed,
then and later, by the persistence of his reputation as a novelist.
Poems of the Past and the Present (1901) contained nearly twice as many
poems as its predecessor, most of them newly written. Some of the poems
are explicitly or implicitly grouped by subject or theme. There are, for
example, 11 “War Poems” prompted by the South African War (e.g.,
“Drummer Hodge,” “The Souls of the Slain”) and a sequence of
disenchantedly “philosophical” poems (e.g., “The Mother Mourns,” “The
Subalterns,” “To an Unborn Pauper Child”). In Time’s Laughingstocks
(1909), the poems are again arranged under headings, but on principles
that often remain elusive. Indeed, there is no clear line of development
in Hardy’s poetry from immaturity to maturity; his style undergoes no
significant change over time. His best poems can be found mixed together
with inferior verse in any particular volume, and new poems are often
juxtaposed to reworkings of poems written or drafted years before. The
range of poems within any particular volume is also extremely broad—from
lyric to meditation to ballad to satirical vignette to dramatic
monologue or dialogue—and Hardy persistently experiments with different,
often invented, stanza forms and metres.
In 1903, 1905, and 1908 Hardy successively published the three
volumes of The Dynasts, a huge poetic drama that is written mostly in
blank verse and subtitled “an epic-drama of the War with
Napoleon”—though it was not intended for actual performance. The
sequence of major historical events—Trafalgar, Austerlitz, Waterloo, and
so on—is diversified by prose episodes involving ordinary soldiers and
civilians and by an ongoing cosmic commentary from such personified
“Intelligences” as the “Spirit of the Years” and the “Spirit of the
Pities.” Hardy, who once described his poems as a “series of seemings”
rather than expressions of a single consistent viewpoint, found in the
contrasted moral and philosophical positions of the various
Intelligences a means of articulating his own intellectual ambiguities.
The Dynasts as a whole served to project his central vision of a
universe governed by the purposeless movements of a blind, unconscious
force that he called the Immanent Will. Though subsequent criticism has
tended to find its structures cumbersome and its verse inert, The
Dynasts remains an impressive—and highly readable—achievement, and its
publication certainly reinforced both Hardy’s “national” image (he was
appointed to the Order of Merit in 1910) and his enormous fame
worldwide.
The sudden death of Emma Hardy in 1912 brought to an end some 20
years of domestic estrangement. It also stirred Hardy to profundities of
regret and remorse and to the composition of “After a Journey,” “The
Voice,” and the other “Poems of 1912–13,” which are by general consent
regarded as the peak of his poetic achievement. In 1914 Hardy married
Florence Emily Dugdale, who was 38 years his junior. While his second
wife sometimes found her situation difficult—as when the inclusion of
“Poems of 1912–13” in the collection Satires of Circumstance (1914)
publicly proclaimed her husband’s continuing devotion to her
predecessor—her attention to Hardy’s health, comfort, and privacy made a
crucial contribution to his remarkable productivity in old age. Late in
his eighth decade he published a fifth volume of verse, Moments of
Vision (1917), and wrote in secret an official “life” of himself for
posthumous publication under the name of his widow. In his ninth decade
Hardy published two more poetry collections, Late Lyrics and Earlier
(1922) and Human Shows (1925), and put together the posthumously
published Winter Words (1928). Following his death, on Jan. 11, 1928,
his cremated remains were interred with national pomp in Westminster
Abbey, while his separated heart was buried in the churchyard of his
native parish.
Assessment.
The continuing popularity of Hardy’s novels owes much to their richly
varied yet always accessible style and their combination of romantic
plots with convincingly presented characters. Equally
important—particularly in terms of their suitability to film and
television adaptation—is their nostalgic evocation of a vanished rural
world through the creation of highly particularized regional settings.
Hardy’s verse has been slower to win full acceptance, but his unique
status as a major 20th-century poet as well as a major 19th-century
novelist is now universally recognized.
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Increased literacy in rural and outlying areas and wider
access to publishing through, for example, local
newspapers encouraged regional literary development as
the 19th century progressed. Some writers in lesser-used
languages and dialects of the islands gained a literary
following outside their native regions, for example
William Barnes in Dorset, George Métivier (1790–1881) in
Guernsey and Robert Pipon Marett in Jersey. George
Métivier published Rimes Guernesiaises, a collection of
poems in Guernésiais and French in 1831 and Fantaisies
Guernesiaises in 1866. Métivier's poems had first
appeared in newspapers from 1813 onward, but he spent
time in Scotland in his youth where he became familiar
with the Scots literary tradition although he was also
influenced by Occitan literature. The first printed
anthology of Jèrriais poetry, Rimes Jersiaises, was
published in 1865. Philippe Le Sueur Mourant's tales of
Bram Bilo, an innocent abroad in Paris, were an
immediate success in Jersey in 1889 and went through a
number of reprintings. Denys Corbet published
collections of poems Les Feuilles de la Forêt (1871) and
Les Chànts du draïn rimeux (1884), and also brought out
an annual poetry anthology 1874–1877, similar to
Augustus Asplet Le Gros's annual in Jersey 1868–1875.
Ulster Scots was used in the narrative by Ulster
novelists such as W. G. Lyttle (1844–1896). By the
middle of the 19th century the Kailyard school of prose
had become the dominant literary genre, overtaking
poetry. This was a tradition shared with Scotland which
continued into the early 20th century. Ulster Scots also
regularly appeared in Ulster newspaper columns auch as
those of "Bab M'Keen" from the 1880s.. Scottish authors;
Robert
Louis Stevenson, William Alexander,
J. M. Barrie, and
George MacDonald, also wrote in Lowland Scots or used it
in dialogue.
Ewen MacLachlan translated the first eight books of
Homer's Iliad into Scottish Gaelic. He also composed and
published his own Gaelic Attempts in Verse (1807) and
Metrical Effusions (1816), and contributed greatly to
the 1828 Gaelic–English Dictionary.
The so-called "Cranken Rhyme" produced by John Davey of
Boswednack, one of the last people with some traditional
knowledge of the language, may be the last piece
of traditional Cornish literature. Later Cornish
revivalists produced literary works: John Hobson
Matthews wrote several poems, such as the patriotic "Can
Wlascar Agam Mamvro" ("Patriotic Song of our
Motherland"). Robert Morton Nance created a body of
verse, such as "Nyns yu Marow Myghtern Arthur" ("King
Arthur is not Dead").
The first major novelist in the Welsh language was
Daniel Owen, author of works such as Rhys Lewis (1885)
and Enoc Huws (1891).
Penny dreadful publications were an alternative to
mainstream works, and were aimed at working class
adolescents, introducing the infamous Sweeney Todd. The
premier ghost story writer of the nineteenth century was
Sheridan Le Fanu. His works include the macabre mystery
novel Uncle Silas 1865, and his Gothic novella Carmilla
1872, tells the story of a young woman's susceptibility
to the attentions of a female vampire.
Bram Stoker,
author of seminal horror work
Dracula,
featured as its primary antagonist the vampire Count
Dracula, with the vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing his
arch-enemy. Dracula has been attributed to a number of
literary genres including vampire literature, horror
fiction, gothic novel and invasion literature.
Walt Disney's Peter Pan
J. M. Barrie
"PETER PAN"
"Peter and
Wendy"
CHAPTER 1-5,
CHAPTER 6-17
Illustrations by F. D. Bedford
"Peter Pan in
Kensington Gardens"
CHAPTER I,
CHAPTER II-IV,
CHAPTER V-VI
Illustrations
by Arthur Rackham
in full Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st
Baronet
born May 9, 1860, Kirriemuir, Angus,
Scotland
died June 19, 1937, London, England
Scottish dramatist and novelist who is
best known as the creator of Peter Pan, the
boy who refused to grow up.
The son of a weaver, Barrie never
recovered from the shock he received at six
from a brother’s death and its grievous
effect on his mother, who dominated his
childhood and retained that dominance
thereafter. Throughout his life Barrie
wished to recapture the happy years before
his mother was stricken, and he retained a
strong childlike quality in his adult
personality.
Barrie studied at the University of
Edinburgh and spent two years on the
Nottingham Journal before settling in London
as a freelance writer in 1885. His first
successful book, Auld Licht Idylls (1888),
contained sketches of life in Kirriemuir,
and the stories in A Window in Thurms (1889)
continue to explore that setting. The Little
Minister (1891), a highly sentimental novel
in the same style, was a bestseller, and,
after its dramatization in 1897, Barrie
wrote mostly for the theatre. His
autobiographical novels When a Man’s Single
(1888) and Sentimental Tommy (1896) both
feature a little boy in Kirriemuir
(“Thrums”) who weaves a cloak of romantic
fiction between himself and reality and
becomes a successful writer. Most of these
early works are marked by quaint Scottish
dialect, whimsical humour and comic
clowning, pathos, and sentimentality.
Barrie’s marriage in 1894 to the actress
Mary Ansell was childless and apparently
unconsummated. In 1897 he formed an
attachment to Sylvia Llewellyn Davies, and
it was to her sons, through whom he began to
live again the experience of childhood, that
he told his first Peter Pan stories, some of
which were published in The Little White
Bird (1902). The play Peter Pan, the Boy Who
Wouldn’t Grow Up, was first produced in
1904. This play added a new character to the
mythology of the English-speaking world in
the figure of Peter Pan, and its theme of
heroic boyhood triumphant over the seedy,
middle-aged pirate Captain Hook proved to
have a lasting appeal. Barrie’s idyll of
reexperienced boyhood was followed by
tragedy. His marriage ended in divorce in
April 1910; Sylvia Davies, then a widow,
died four months later; and two of her sons,
to whom Barrie acted as guardian, were
killed.
Barrie was created a baronet in 1913 and
was awarded the Order of Merit in 1922. He
became president of the Society of Authors
in 1928 and chancellor of the University of
Edinburgh in 1930.
Most of Barrie’s stage triumphs have been
dismissed by critics as marred by ephemeral
whimsicalities, but at least six of his
plays—Quality Street (1901), The Admirable
Crichton (1902), What Every Woman Knows
(1908), The Twelve-Pound Look (1910), The
Will (1913), and Dear Brutus (1917)—are of
indisputably high quality. Barrie idealized
childhood and desexualized femininity but
took a disenchanted view of adult life, as
reflected in the gentle melancholy of these
works. Sometimes he expressed his
disenchantment humorously, as in The
Admirable Crichton, in which a butler
becomes the king of a desert island, with
his former employers as serfs; sometimes
satirically, as in The Twelve-Pound Look;
and sometimes tragically, as in Dear Brutus,
in which nine men and women whose lives have
come to grief are given a magical second
chance, only to wreck themselves again on
the reefs of their own temperaments. The
elaborate stage directions in Barrie’s plays
are sometimes more rewarding than their
dialogue itself. Barrie proved himself a
master of stage effects and of the
delineation of character, but the
sentimental and whimsical elements in his
work have discouraged frequent revivals.
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George MacDonald
"The Princess and the
Goblin"
PART I,
PART II,
PART III
born Dec. 10, 1824, Huntly, Aberdeen,
Scot.
died Sept. 18, 1905, Ashtead, Surrey, Eng.
novelist of Scottish life, poet, and writer
of Christian allegories of man’s pilgrimage
back to God, who is remembered chiefly,
however, for his allegorical fairy stories,
which have continued to delight children and
their elders. He became a Congregational
minister, then a free-lance preacher and
lecturer. In 1855 he published a poetic
tragedy, Within and Without, and after that
he made literature his profession. Of his
literature for adults, Phantastes: A Faerie
Romance for Men and Women (1858) and Lilith
(1895) are good examples. Although his best
known book for children is At the Back of
the North Wind (1871), his best and most
enduring works are The Princess and the
Goblin (1872) and its sequel, The Princess
and Curdie (1873).
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Bram Stoker
"Dracula"
CHAPTER 1-10,
CHAPTER 11-27
Irish writer
born Nov. 8, 1847, Dublin, Ire.
died April 20, 1912, London, Eng.
Author of the horror tale Dracula.
Although an invalid in early childhood—he could not stand or walk
until he was seven—Stoker outgrew his weakness to become an outstanding
athlete and football (soccer) player at the University of Dublin. After
10 years in the civil service at Dublin Castle, during which he was also
an unpaid drama critic for the Dublin Mail, he made the acquaintance of
his idol, the actor Sir Henry Irving, and from 1878 until Irving’s death
27 years later, he acted as his manager, writing as many as 50 letters a
day for him and accompanying him on his American tours. Stoker’s first
book, The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland, a handbook in
legal administration, was published in 1879.
Turning to fiction late in life, Stoker published The Snake’s Pass, a
novel with a bleak western-Ireland setting, in 1891, and in 1897 his
masterpiece, Dracula, appeared. Written chiefly in the form of diaries
and journals kept by the principal characters—Jonathan Harker, who made
the first contact with the vampire Count Dracula; Mina, Jonathan’s wife;
Dr. Seward; and Lucy Westenra, a victim who herself became a vampire—the
story is that of a Transylvanian vampire who, using supernatural powers,
makes his way to England and there victimizes innocent people to gain
the blood on which he lives. Led by Dr. Van Helsing, Harker and his
friends, after many hair-raising adventures, are at last able to
overpower and destroy Dracula. The immensely popular novel enjoyed equal
success in several versions as a play and as a film.
Stoker wrote several other novels—among them The Mystery of the Sea
(1902), The Jewel of Seven Stars (1904), and The Lady of the Shroud
(1909)—but none of them approached the popularity or, indeed, the
quality of Dracula.
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H. G. Wells,
who alongside Jules Verne, is referred to as "The Father
of Science Fiction", invented a number of themes that
are now classic in the science fiction genre.
The War of the Worlds
1898, describing an invasion of late Victorian England
by Martians using tripod fighting machines equipped with
advanced weaponry, is a seminal depiction of an alien
invasion of Earth. The Time Machine is generally
credited with the popularization of the concept of time
travel using a vehicle that allows an operator to travel
purposefully and selectively. The term "time machine"
coined by Wells, is now universally used to refer to
such a vehicle.
Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle's
Sherlock Holmes
is a brilliant London-based "consulting detective",
famous for his intellectual prowess, skillful use of
astute observation, deductive reasoning and forensic
skills to solve difficult cases. Holmes' archenemy
Professor Moriarty, is widely considered to be the first
true example of a supervillain, while Sherlock Holmes
has become a by-word for a detective. Conan Doyle wrote
four novels and fifty-six short stories featuring
Holmes, from 1880 up to 1907, with a final case in 1914.
All but four Conan Doyle stories are narrated by Holmes'
friend, assistant, and biographer, Dr. John H. Watson.
The Lost World literary genre was inspired by real
stories of archaeological discoveries by imperial
adventurers. H. Rider Haggard wrote one of the earliest
examples, King Solomon's Mines in 1885. Contemporary
European politics and diplomatic manoeuvrings informed
Anthony Hope's swashbuckling Ruritanian adventure novels
The Prisoner of Zenda 1894, and Rupert of Hentzau, 1898.
F. Anstey's comic novel Vice Versa 1882, sees a father
and son magically switch bodies. Satirist
Jerome K. Jerome's
Three Men in a Boat 1889, is a
humorous account of a boating holiday on the river
Thames. Grossmith brothers George & Weedon's Diary of a
Nobody 1892, is also considered a classic work of humour.
H.G. Wells
"The War of the Worlds"
PART
I, PART
II
"The Invisible
Man"
"A Short History of the World"
PART
I,
PART II,
PART III,
PART IV,
PART V
British author
in full Herbert George Wells
born , Sept. 21, 1866, Bromley, Kent, Eng.
died Aug. 13, 1946, London
Main
English novelist, journalist, sociologist, and historian best known for
such science fiction novels as The Time Machine and The War of the
Worlds and such comic novels as Tono-Bungay and The History of Mr.
Polly.
Early life
Wells was the son of domestic servants turned small shopkeepers. He grew
up under the continual threat of poverty, and at age 14, after a very
inadequate education supplemented by his inexhaustible love of reading,
he was apprenticed to a draper in Windsor. His employer soon dismissed
him; and he became assistant to a chemist, then to another draper, and
finally, in 1883, an usher at Midhurst Grammar School. At 18 he won a
scholarship to study biology at the Normal School (later the Royal
College) of Science, in South Kensington, London, where T.H. Huxley was
one of his teachers. He graduated from London University in 1888,
becoming a science teacher and undergoing a period of ill health and
financial worries, the latter aggravated by his marriage, in 1891, to
his cousin, Isabel Mary Wells. The marriage was not a success, and in
1894 Wells ran off with Amy Catherine Robbins (d. 1927), a former pupil,
who in 1895 became his second wife.
Early writings
Wells’s first published book was a Textbook of Biology (1893). With his
first novel, The Time Machine (1895), which was immediately successful,
he began a series of science fiction novels that revealed him as a
writer of marked originality and an immense fecundity of ideas: The
Wonderful Visit (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The
Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), The First Men in the
Moon (1901), and The Food of the Gods (1904). He also wrote many short
stories, which were collected in The Stolen Bacillus (1895), The
Plattner Story (1897), and Tales of Space and Time (1899). For a time he
acquired a reputation as a prophet of the future, and indeed, in The War
in the Air (1908), he foresaw certain developments in the military use
of aircraft. But his imagination flourished at its best not in the
manner of the comparatively mechanical anticipations of Jules Verne but
in the astronomical fantasies of The First Men in the Moon and The War
of the Worlds, from the latter of which the image of the Martian has
passed into popular mythology.
Behind his inventiveness lay a passionate concern for man and
society, which increasingly broke into the fantasy of his science
fiction, often diverting it into satire and sometimes, as in The Food of
the Gods, destroying its credibility. Eventually, Wells decided to
abandon science fiction for comic novels of lower middle-class life,
most notably in Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900), Kipps: The Story of a
Simple Soul (1905), and The History of Mr. Polly (1910). In these
novels, and in Tono-Bungay (1909), he drew on memories of his own
earlier life, and, through the thoughts of inarticulate yet often
ambitious heroes, revealed the hopes and frustrations of clerks, shop
assistants, and underpaid teachers, who had rarely before been treated
in fiction with such sympathetic understanding. In these novels, too, he
made his liveliest, most persuasive comment on the problems of Western
society that were soon to become his main preoccupation. The sombre
vision of a dying world in The Time Machine shows that, in his long-term
view of humanity’s prospects, Wells felt much of the pessimism prevalent
in the 1890s. In his short-term view, however, his study of biology led
him to hope that human society would evolve into higher forms, and with
Anticipations (1901), Mankind in the Making (1903), and A Modern Utopia
(1905), he took his place in the British public’s mind as a leading
preacher of the doctrine of social progress. About this time, too, he
became an active socialist, and in 1903 joined the Fabian Society,
though he soon began to criticize its methods. The bitter quarrel he
precipitated by his unsuccessful attempt to wrest control of the Fabian
Society from George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb in 1906–07
is retold in his novel The New Machiavelli (1911), in which the Webbs
are parodied as the Baileys.
Middle and late works
After about 1906 the pamphleteer and the novelist were in conflict in
Wells, and only The History of Mr. Polly and the lighthearted Bealby
(1915) can be considered primarily as fiction. His later novels are
mainly discussions of social or political themes that show little
concern for the novel as a literary form. Wells himself affected not to
care about the literary merit of his work, and he rejected the tutelage
of the American novelist Henry James, saying, “I would rather be called
a journalist than an artist.” Indeed, his novel Boon (1915) included a
spiteful parody of James. His next novel, Mr. Britling Sees It Through
(1916), though touched by the prejudice and shortsightedness of wartime,
gives a brilliant picture of the English people in World War I.
World War I shook Wells’s faith in even short-term human progress,
and in subsequent works he modified his conception of social evolution,
putting forward the view that man could only progress if he would adapt
himself to changing circumstances through knowledge and education. To
help bring about this process of adaptation Wells began an ambitious
work of popular education, of which the main products were The Outline
of History (1920; revised 1931), The Science of Life (1931), cowritten
with Julian Huxley and G.P. Wells (his elder son by his second wife),
and The Work, Wealth, and Happiness of Mankind (1932). At the same time
he continued to publish works of fiction, in which his gifts of
narrative and dialogue give way almost entirely to polemics. His sense
of humour reappears, however, in the reminiscences of his Experiment in
Autobiography (1934).
In 1933 Wells published a novelized version of a film script, The
Shape of Things to Come. (Produced by Alexander Korda, the film Things
to Come [1936] remains, on account of its special effects, one of the
outstanding British films of the 20th century.) Wells’s version reverts
to the utopianism of some earlier books, but as a whole his outlook grew
steadily less optimistic, and some of his later novels contain much that
is bitterly satiric. Fear of a tragic wrong turning in the development
of the human race, to which he had early given imaginative expression in
the grotesque animal mutations of The Island of Doctor Moreau, dominates
the short novels and fables he wrote in the later 1930s. Wells was now
ill and aging. With the outbreak of World War II, he lost all confidence
in the future, and in Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945) he depicts a
bleak vision of a world in which nature has rejected, and is destroying,
humankind.
Assessment
In spite of an awareness of possible world catastrophe that underlay
much of his earlier work and flared up again in old age, Wells in his
lifetime was regarded as the chief literary spokesman of the liberal
optimism that preceded World War I. No other writer has caught so
vividly the energy of this period, its adventurousness, its feeling of
release from the conventions of Victorian thought and propriety. Wells’s
influence was enormous, both on his own generation and on that which
immediately followed it. None of his contemporaries did more to
encourage revolt against Christian tenets and accepted codes of
behaviour, especially as regards sex, in which, both in his books and in
his personal life, he was a persistent advocate of an almost complete
freedom. Though in many ways hasty, ill-tempered, and contradictory,
Wells was undeviating and fearless in his efforts for social equality,
world peace, and what he considered to be the future good of humanity.
As a creative writer his reputation rests on the early science
fiction books and on the comic novels. In his science fiction, he took
the ideas and fears that haunted the mind of his age and gave them
symbolic expression as brilliantly conceived fantasy made credible by
the quiet realism of its setting. In the comic novels, though his
psychology lacks subtlety and the construction of his plots is often
awkward, he shows a fund of humour and a deep sympathy for ordinary
people. Wells’s prose style is always careless and lacks grace, yet he
has his own gift of phrase and a true ear for vernacular speech,
especially that of the lower middle class of London and southeastern
England. His best work has a vigour, vitality, and exuberance
unsurpassed, in its way, by that of any other British writer of the
early 20th century.
Norman Cornthwaite Nicholson
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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
British author
in full Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
born May 22, 1859, Edinburgh, Scotland
died July 7, 1930, Crowborough, Sussex, England
Scottish writer best known for his creation of the detective Sherlock
Holmes—one of the most vivid and enduring characters in English fiction.
Conan Doyle, the second of Charles Altamont and Mary Foley Doyle’s 10
children, began seven years of Jesuit education in Lancashire, England,
in 1868. After an additional year of schooling in Feldkirch, Austria,
Conan Doyle returned to Edinburgh. Through the influence of Dr. Bryan
Charles Waller, his mother’s lodger, he prepared for entry into the
University of Edinburgh’s Medical School. He received his Bachelor of
Medicine and Master of Surgery qualifications from Edinburgh in 1881 and
an M.D. in 1885, upon completing his thesis, “An Essay upon the
Vasomotor Changes in Tabes Dorsalis.”
While a medical student, Conan Doyle was deeply impressed by the
skill of his professor, Dr. Joseph Bell, in observing the most minute
detail regarding a patient’s condition. This master of diagnostic
deduction became the model for Conan Doyle’s literary creation, Sherlock
Holmes, who first appeared in A Study in Scarlet in Beeton’s Christmas
Annual of 1887. Other aspects of Conan Doyle’s medical education and
experiences appear in his semiautobiographical novels, The Firm of
Girdlestone (1890) and The Stark Munro Letters (1895), and in the
collection of medical short stories Round the Red Lamp (1894). His
creation of the logical, cold, calculating Holmes, the “world’s first
and only consulting detective,” sharply contrasted with the paranormal
beliefs Conan Doyle addressed in a short novel of this period, The
Mystery of Cloomber (1889). Conan Doyle’s early interest in both
scientifically supportable evidence and certain paranormal phenomena
exemplified the complex diametrically opposing beliefs he struggled with
throughout his life.
Although public clamour prompted him to continue writing Sherlock
Holmes adventures through 1926, Conan Doyle claimed the success of
Holmes overshadowed the merit he believed his other historical fiction
deserved, most notably his tale of 14th-century chivalry, The White
Company (1891), its companion piece, Sir Nigel (1906), and his
adventures of the Napoleonic war hero Brigadier Gerard and the
19th-century skeptical scientist Professor George Edward Challenger.
When his passions ran high, Conan Doyle also turned to nonfiction.
His subjects include military writings, The Great Boer War (1900) and
The British Campaign in France and Flanders, 6 vol. (1916–20), the
Belgian atrocities in the Congo in The Crime of the Congo (1909), as
well as his involvement in the actual criminal cases of George Edalji
and Oscar Slater.
Conan Doyle married Louisa Hawkins in 1885, and together they had two
children, Mary and Kingsley. A year after Louisa’s death in 1906, he
married Jean Leckie and with her had three children, Denis, Adrian, and
Jean. Conan Doyle was knighted in 1902 for his work with a field
hospital in Bloemfontein, South Africa, and other services during the
South African (Boer) War.
Conan Doyle himself viewed his most important efforts to be his
campaign in support of spiritualism, the religion and psychic research
subject based upon the belief that spirits of the departed continued to
exist in the hereafter and can be contacted by those still living on
earth. He donated the majority of his literary efforts and profits later
in his life to this campaign, beginning with The New Revelation (1918)
and The Vital Message (1919). He later chronicled his travels in
supporting the spiritualist cause in The Wanderings of a Spiritualist
(1921), Our American Adventure (1923), Our Second American Adventure
(1924), and Our African Winter (1929). He discussed other spiritualist
issues in his Case for Spirit Photography (1922), Pheneas Speaks (1927),
and a two-volume The History of Spiritualism (1926). Conan Doyle became
the world’s most renowned proponent of spiritualism, but he faced
considerable opposition for his conviction from the magician Harry
Houdini and in a 1920 debate with the humanist Joseph McCabe. Even
spiritualists joined in criticizing Conan Doyle’s article “The Evidence
for Fairies,” published in The Strand Magazine in 1921, and his
subsequent book The Coming of the Fairies (1922), in which he voiced
support for the claim that two young girls, Elsie Wright and Frances
Griffiths, had photographed actual fairies that they had seen in the
Yorkshire village of Cottingley.
Conan Doyle died in Windlesham, his home in Crowborough, Sussex, and
at his funeral, his family and members of the spiritualist community
celebrated rather than mourned the occasion of his passing beyond the
veil. On July 13, 1930, thousands of people filled London’s Royal Albert
Hall for a séance during which Estelle Roberts, the spiritualist medium,
claimed to have contacted Sir Arthur.
Conan Doyle detailed what he valued most in life in his
autobiography, Memories and Adventures (1924), and the importance that
books held for him in Through the Magic Door (1907).
Philip K. Wilson
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Verse
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, formed in 1848 and
unofficially reinforced a decade later, was founded as a
group of painters but also functioned as a school of
writers who linked the incipient Aestheticism of Keats
and De Quincey to the Decadent movement of the fin de
siècle.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti collected his early
writing in Poems (1870), a volume that led the critic
Robert Buchanan to attack him as the leader of The
Fleshly School of Poetry. Rossetti combined some subtle
treatments of contemporary life with a new kind of
medievalism, seen also in The Defence of Guenevere
(1858) by William Morris. The earnest political use of
the Middle Ages found in Carlyle and Ruskin did not die
out—Morris himself continued it and linked it, in the
1880s, with Marxism. But these writers also used
medieval settings as a context that made possible an
uninhibited treatment of sex and violence. The shocking
subject matter and vivid imagery of Morris’s first
volume were further developed by Algernon Charles
Swinburne, who, in Atalanta in Calydon (1865) and Poems
and Ballads (1866), combined them with an intoxicating
metrical power. His second series of Poems and Ballads
(1878), with its moving elegies for Charles Baudelaire
and Théophile Gautier, displays a sophisticated command
of recent developments in avant-garde French verse.
The carefully wrought religious poetry of
Christina
Rossetti is perhaps truer to the original, pious
purposes of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Her first
collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), with
its vivid but richly ambiguous title poem, established
her status as one of the outstanding lyric poets of the
century. The other outstanding religious poet of this
period is
Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest whose
work was first collected as Poems in 1918, nearly 30
years after his death. Overpraised by Modernist critics,
who saw him as the sole great poet of the era, he was in
fact an important minor talent and an ingenious
technical innovator.
Robert Browning’s experiments with the dramatic
monologue were further developed in the 1860s by Augusta
Webster, who used the form in Dramatic Studies (1866), A
Woman Sold and Other Poems (1867), and Portraits (1870)
to produce penetrating accounts of female experience.
Her posthumously published sonnet sequence Mother &
Daughter (1895) is a lucid and unsentimental account of
that relationship.
The 1890s witnessed a flowering of lyric verse,
influenced intellectually by the critic and novelist
Walter Pater and formally by contemporary French
practice. Such writing was widely attacked as “decadent”
for its improper subject matter and its consciously
amoral doctrine of “art for art’s sake.” This stress
upon artifice and the freedom of art from conventional
moral constraints went hand in hand, however, with an
exquisite craftsmanship and a devotion to intense
emotional and sensory effects. Outstanding among the
numerous poets publishing in the final decade of the
century were
John Davidson, Arthur Symons,
Francis
Thompson, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, and
A.E.
Housman. In The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899),
Symons suggested the links between this writing and
European Symbolism and Impressionism. Thompson provides
a vivid example of the way in which a decadent manner
could, paradoxically, be combined with fierce religious
enthusiasm. A rather different note was struck by
Rudyard Kipling, who combined polemical force and sharp
observation (particularly of colonial experience) with a
remarkable metrical vigour.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
"The
House of Life"
see also collection:
Rossetti Dante Gabriel
- painter
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Dante's Dream at the Time of
the Death of Beatrice
original name Gabriel Charles Dante
Rossetti
born May 12, 1828, London, Eng.
died April 9, 1882, Birchington-on-Sea, Kent
English painter and poet who helped found
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of
painters treating religious, moral, and
medieval subjects in a nonacademic manner.
Dante Gabriel was the most illustrious
member of the Rossetti family.
Early life and works.
After a general education in the junior
department of King’s College (1836–41),
Rossetti hesitated between poetry and
painting as a vocation. When about 14 he
went to “Sass’s,” an old-fashioned drawing
school in Bloomsbury (central London), and
thence, in 1845, to the Royal Academy
schools, where he became a full student.
Meanwhile, he read omnivorously—romantic
and poetic literature, William Shakespeare,
J.W. von Goethe, Lord Byron, Sir Walter
Scott, and Gothic tales of horror. He was
fascinated by the work of the American
writer Edgar Allan Poe. In 1847 he
discovered the 18th-century English
painter-poet William Blake through the
purchase of a volume of Blake’s designs and
writings in prose and verse; the volume has
since been known as the Rossetti MS. Blake’s
diatribes against the painter Sir Joshua
Reynolds encouraged Rossetti to attempt
lampoons of his own against the triviality
of early Victorian paintings of anecdotal
subjects, those of Sir Edwin Landseer being
a special target of his derision.
By the time Rossetti was 20, he had
already done a number of translations of
Italian poets and had composed some original
verse, but he was also much in and out of
artists’ studios and for a short time was,
in an informal way, a pupil of the painter
Ford Madox Brown. He acquired some of
Brown’s admiration for the German
“Pre-Raphaelites,” the nickname of the
austere Nazarenes, who had sought to bring
back into German art a pre-Renaissance
purity of style and aim. It remained to
initiate a similiar reform in England.
Largely through Rossetti’s efforts, the
English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was
formed in 1848 with seven members, all Royal
Academy students except for William Michael
Rossetti. They aimed at “truth to nature,”
which was to be achieved by minuteness of
detail and painting from nature outdoors.
This was, more especially, the purpose of
the two other principal members, William
Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais.
Rossetti expanded the Brotherhood’s aims by
linking poetry, painting, and social
idealism and by interpreting the term
Pre-Raphaelite as synonymous with a
romanticized medieval past.
While Rossetti’s first two oil
paintings—“The Girlhood of Mary” (1849; Tate
Gallery, London) and “Ecce Ancilla Domini”
(“The Annunciation”; 1850, Tate
Gallery)—were simple in style, they were
elaborate in symbolism. Some of the same
atmosphere is felt in the rich word-painting
and emotional force of his poem “The Blessed
Damozel,” published in 1850 in the first
issue of The Germ, the Pre-Raphaelite
magazine. When it was exhibited in 1850,
“Ecce Ancilla Domini” received severe
criticism, which Rossetti could never bear
with equanimity. In consequence, he ceased
to show in public and gave up oils in favour
of watercolours, which he could more easily
dispose of to personal acquaintances. He
also turned from traditional religious
themes to painting scenes from Shakespeare,
Robert Browning, and Dante, which allowed
more freedom of imaginative treatment. A
typical example of his work from this period
is “How They Met Themselves” (1851–60;
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge). After 1856
Rossetti was led by Sir Thomas Malory’s
Morte Darthur and Tennyson’s Idylls of the
King to evoke in his paintings an imaginary
Arthurian epoch, with heraldic glow and
pattern of colour and medieval accessories
of armour and dress.
The 1850s were eventful years for
Rossetti. They began with the introduction
into the Pre-Raphaelite circle of the
beautiful Elizabeth Siddal, who served at
first as model for the whole group but was
soon attached to Rossetti alone and, in
1860, married him. Many portrait drawings
testify to his affection for her.
In 1854 he gained a powerful but exacting
patron in the art critic John Ruskin. By
then the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was at
an end, splintered by the different
interests and temperaments of its members.
But Rossetti’s magnetic personality aroused
a fresh wave of enthusiasm. In 1856 he came
into contact with the then-Oxford
undergraduates Edward Burne-Jones and
William Morris. With these two young
disciples he initiated a second phase of the
Pre-Raphaelite movement. The two main
aspects of this fresh departure were a
romantic enthusiasm for a legendary past
instead of the realism of “truth to nature”
and the ambition of reforming the applied
arts of design. Rossetti’s influence not
only led to easel pictures illustrating
Arthurian legend but also into other fields
of art. A new era of book decoration was
foreshadowed by Rossetti’s illustration for
the Moxon edition of the Poems (1857) of
Alfred, Lord Tennyson. His commission in
1856 to paint a triptych (“The Seed of
David”) for Llandaff Cathedral was a prelude
to the ambitious scheme of 1857 to decorate
the Oxford Union debating chamber with mural
paintings of Arthurian themes. Though
Rossetti and his helpers (Burne-Jones,
Morris, and others) failed through want of
technical knowledge and experience, the
enterprise was fruitful in suggesting that
the scope of art could be expanded to
include the crafts.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Proserpine |
The later years.
From 1860 onward, trials were part of
Rossetti’s much-disturbed life. His marriage
to Elizabeth Siddal, clouded by her constant
ill health, ended tragically in 1862 with
her death from an overdose of laudanum.
Grief led him to bury with her the only
complete manuscript of his poems. That he
considered his love for his wife similar to
Dante’s mystical and idealized love for
Beatrice is evident from the symbolic “Beata
Beatrix,” painted in 1863 and now in the
Tate Gallery.
Rossetti’s life
and art were now greatly
changed. He moved from riverside premises in
London’s Blackfriars to Chelsea. The
influence of new friends—Algernon Charles
Swinburne and the American painter James
McNeill Whistler—led to a more aesthetic and
sensuous approach to art. Literary themes
gave way to pictures of mundane beauties,
such as his mistress, Fanny Cornforth,
gorgeously appareled and painted with a
command of oils he had not previously shown.
Among these works are “The Blessed Damozel”
(1871–79), “The Bower Meadow” (1872),
“Proserpine” (1874; Tate Gallery), and “La
Pia de’ Tolomei” (1881). The luxuriant
colours and rhythmic design of these
paintings enhance the effect of their
languid, sensuous female subjects, all of
whom bear a distinctive “Pre-Raphaelite”
facial type. The paintings proved popular
with collectors, and Rossetti grew affluent
enough to employ studio assistants to make
copies and replicas. He also collected
antiques and filled his large Chelsea garden
with a menagerie of animals and birds.
Rossetti had enjoyed a modest success in
1861 with his published translations, The
Early Italian Poets; and toward the end of
the 1860s his thoughts turned to poetry
again. He began composing new poems and
planned the recovery of the manuscript poems
buried with his wife in Highgate Cemetery.
Carried out in 1869 through the agency of
his unconventional man of business, Charles
Augustus Howell, the exhumation visibly
distressed the superstitious Rossetti. The
publication of these poems followed in 1870.
The Poems were well enough received until a
misdirected, savage onslaught by “Thomas
Maitland” (pseudonym of the
journalist-critic Robert Buchanan) on “The
Fleshly School of Poetry” singled out
Rossetti for attack. Rossetti responded
temperately in “The Stealthy School of
Criticism,” published in the Athenaeum; but
the attack, combined with remorse and the
amount of chloral and alcohol he now took
for insomnia, brought about his collapse in
1872. He recovered sufficiently to paint and
write, but his life in Chelsea was
subsequently that of a semi-invalid and
recluse. Until 1874 he spent much time at
Kelmscott Manor (near Oxford), of which he
took joint tenancy with William Morris in
1871. His lovingly idealized portraits of
Jane Morris at this time were a return to
his more poetic and mystical style.
In the early 1880s Rossetti occupied
himself with a replica of an early
watercolour, “Dante’s Dream” (1880), a
revised edition of Poems (1881), and Ballads
and Sonnets (1881), containing the completed
sonnet sequence of “The House of Life,” in
which he described the love between man and
woman with tragic intensity. The lawyer and
man of letters Theodore Watts-Dunton
meanwhile did his best to put Rossetti’s
financial affairs in order. From a visit to
Keswick (in northwestern England) in 1881,
Rossetti returned in worse health than
before, and he died the following spring.
Poetry.
Through his exploration of new themes
and his break with academic convention,
Rossetti remains an important figure in the
history of 19th-century English art. But his
enduring worth probably lies as much in his
poetry as in his painting. In contrast to
his painting, where accumulated details of
costume and greenery can become cloying, the
detail in Rossetti’s poetry is subordinated
to intensity of emotion and is employed to
evoke a mood. It is by means of tiny and
seemingly trivial touches, for example, that
time is suspended in his poem “My Sister’s
Sleep” and the very silence of the sickroom
is heard. “The Wood Spurge” and the lyric “I
have been here before” show Rossetti’s
mastery of similar effects. The timeless
moment is again caught with great skill in
his sonnet “A Venetian Pastoral by Giorgione
in the Louvre”—the most successful of his
highly original attempts to translate
well-known paintings into verse. “The
Stream’s Secret,” haunted by the ghost of
his dead wife, evokes pity and regret by the
power of its verbal music.
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Rossetti was a natural master of the
sonnet, and his finest achievement, “The
House of Life,” is a sonnet sequence unique
in the intensity of its evocation of the
mysteries of physical and spiritual love.
Here, as he claimed against his detractors,
“the passionate and just delights of the
body are declared to be as naught if not
ennobled by the concurrence of the soul at
all times.” Magnificent memorable lines are
created with simplicity of diction:
Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless
dower,
This close-companioned inarticulate hour
When twofold silence was the song of
love.
(“Silent Noon,” The House of Life, sonnet
XIX)
Rossetti’s poetic art had other, less
subjective aspects. “The Last Confession,” a
tragic episode set against a background of
the Italian Risorgimento, is a powerful
dramatic monologue that can bear comparison
with those of Robert Browning. With his
feeling for medieval subjects, Rossetti also
caught the spirit of the ballad. Few modern
supernatural ballads are less artificial
than “Sister Helen” and “Eden Bower”; and,
among re-creations of the historical ballad,
“The White Ship” and “The King’s Tragedy”
are outstanding. Early in Rossetti’s career,
the sight of the great winged bulls in the
British Museum evoked his poem “Burden of
Nineveh” (1850), a meditation on the
unpredictable course of history that is rich
in word-music and far-ranging in imaginative
vision.
William Gaunt
John Bryson
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Christina
Rossetti
in full Christina Georgina
Rossetti, pseudonym Ellen Alleyne
born Dec. 5, 1830, London, Eng.
died Dec. 29, 1894, London
one of the most important of English
women poets both in range and quality. She
excelled in works of fantasy, in poems for
children, and in religious poetry.
Christina was the youngest child of
Gabriele Rossetti and was the sister of the
painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In 1847
her grandfather, Gaetano Polidori, printed
on his private press a volume of her Verses,
in which signs of poetic talent are already
visible. In 1850, under the pseudonym Ellen
Alleyne, she contributed seven poems to the
Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ. In 1853,
when the Rossetti family was in financial
difficulties, Christina helped her mother
keep a school at Frome, Somerset, but it was
not a success, and in 1854 the pair returned
to London, where Christina’s father died. In
straitened circumstances, Christina entered
on her life work of companionship to her
mother, devotion to her religion, and the
writing of her poetry. She was a firm High
Church Anglican, and in 1850 she broke her
engagement to the artist James Collinson, an
original member of the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood, because he had become a Roman
Catholic. For similar reasons she rejected
Charles Bagot Cayley in 1864, though a warm
friendship remained between them.
In 1862 Christina published Goblin Market
and Other Poems and in 1866 The Prince’s
Progress and Other Poems, both with
frontispiece and decorations by her brother
Dante Gabriel. These two collections, which
contain most of her finest work, established
her among the poets of her day. The stories
in her first prose work, Commonplace and
Other Short Stories (1870), are of no great
merit, but Sing-Song: a Nursery Rhyme Book
(1872; enlarged 1893), with illustrations by
Arthur Hughes, takes a high place among
children’s books of the 19th century.
In 1871 Christina was stricken by Graves’
disease, a thyroid disorder that marred her
appearance and left her life in danger. She
accepted her affliction with courage and
resignation, sustained by religious faith,
and she continued to publish, issuing one
collection of poems in 1875 and A Pageant
and Other Poems in 1881. But after the onset
of her illness she mostly concentrated on
devotional prose writings. Time Flies
(1885), a reading diary of mixed verse and
prose, is the most personal of these works.
Christina was considered a possible
successor to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, as poet
laureate, but she developed a fatal cancer
in 1891. New Poems (1896), published by her
brother, contained unprinted and previously
uncollected poems.
Though she was haunted by an ideal of
spiritual purity that demanded self-denial,
Christina resembled her brother Dante
Gabriel in certain ways, for beneath her
humility, her devotion, and her quiet,
saintlike life lay a passionate and sensuous
temperament, a keen critical perception, and
a lively sense of humour. Part of her
success as a poet arises from the fact that,
while never straining the limits of her
sympathy and experience, she succeeded in
uniting these two seemingly contradictory
sides of her nature. There is a vein of the
sentimental and didactic in her weaker
verse, but at its best her poetry is strong,
personal, and unforced, with a metrical
cadence that is unmistakably her own. The
transience of material things is a theme
that recurs throughout her poetry, and the
resigned but passionate sadness of unhappy
love is often a dominant note.
John Bryson
Ed.
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Gerard Manley Hopkins
born July 28, 1844, Stratford,
Essex, Eng.
died June 8, 1889, Dublin
English poet and Jesuit priest, one of
the most individual of Victorian writers.
His work was not published in collected form
until 1918, but it influenced many leading
20th-century poets.
Hopkins was the eldest of the nine
children of Manley Hopkins, an Anglican, who
had been British consul general in Hawaii
and had himself published verse. Hopkins won
the poetry prize at the Highgate grammar
school and in 1863 was awarded a grant to
study at Balliol College, Oxford, where he
continued writing poetry while studying
classics. In 1866, in the prevailing
atmosphere of the Oxford Movement, which
renewed interest in the relationships
between Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism,
he was received into the Roman Catholic
Church by John Henry (later Cardinal)
Newman. The following year, he left Oxford
with such a distinguished academic record
that Benjamin Jowett, then a Balliol
lecturer and later master of the college,
called him “the star of Balliol.” Hopkins
decided to become a priest. He entered the
Jesuit novitiate in 1868 and burned his
youthful verses, determining “to write no
more, as not belonging to my profession.”
Until 1875, however, he kept a journal
recording his vivid responses to nature as
well as his expression of a philosophy for
which he later found support in Duns Scotus,
the medieval Franciscan thinker. Hopkins’
philosophy emphasized the individuality of
every natural thing, which he called
“inscape.” To Hopkins, each sensuous
impression had its own elusive “selfness”;
each scene was to him a “sweet especial
scene.”
In 1874 Hopkins went to St. Beuno’s
College in North Wales to study theology.
There he learned Welsh, and, under the
impact of the language itself as well as
that of the poetry and encouraged by his
superior, he began to write poetry again.
Moved by the death of five Franciscan nuns
in a shipwreck in 1875, he broke his
seven-year silence to write the long poem
“The Wreck of the Deutschland,” in which he
succeeded in realizing “the echo of a new
rhythm” that had long been haunting his ear.
It was rejected, however, by the Jesuit
magazine The Month. He also wrote a series
of sonnets strikingly original in their
richness of language and use of rhythm,
including the remarkable “The Windhover,”
one of the most frequently analyzed poems in
the language. He continued to write poetry,
but it was read only in manuscript by his
friends and fellow poets, Robert Bridges
(later poet laureate), Coventry Patmore, and
the Rev. Richard Watson Dixon. Their
appreciation of the strangeness of the poems
(for the times) was imperfect, but they
were, nevertheless, encouraging.
Ordained to the priesthood in 1877,
Hopkins served as missioner, occasional
preacher, and parish priest in various
Jesuit churches and institutions in London,
Oxford, Liverpool, and Glasgow and taught
classics at Stonyhurst College, Lancashire.
He was appointed professor of Greek
literature at University College, Dublin, in
1884. But Hopkins was not happy in Ireland;
he found the environment uncongenial, and he
was overworked and in poor health. From 1885
he wrote another series of sonnets,
beginning with “Carrion Comfort.” They show
a sense of desolation produced partly by a
sense of spiritual aridity and partly by a
feeling of artistic frustration. These
poems, known as the “terrible sonnets,”
reveal strong tensions between his delight
in the sensuous world and his urge to
express it and his equally powerful sense of
religious vocation.
While in Dublin, Hopkins developed
another of his talents, musical composition;
the little he composed shows the same daring
originality as does his poetry. His skill in
drawing, too, allowed him to illustrate his
journal with meticulously observed details
of flowers, trees, and waves.
His friends continually urged him to
publish his poems, but Hopkins resisted; all
that he saw in print in his lifetime were
some immature verses and original Latin
poems, in which he took particular pleasure.
Hopkins died of typhoid fever and was
buried in the Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.
Among his unfinished works was a commentary
on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius
of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order.
After Hopkins’ death, Robert Bridges
began to publish a few of the Jesuit’s most
mature poems in anthologies, hoping to
prepare the way for wider acceptance of his
style. By 1918, Bridges, then poet laureate,
judged the time opportune for the first
collected edition. It appeared but sold
slowly. Not until 1930 was a second edition
issued, and thereafter Hopkins’ work was
recognized as among the most original,
powerful, and influential literary
accomplishments of his century; it had a
marked influence on such leading
20th-century poets as T.S. Eliot, Dylan
Thomas, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and C.
Day Lewis.
Hopkins sought a stronger “rhetoric of
verse.” His exploitation of the verbal
subtleties and music of English, of the use
of echo, alliteration, and repetition, and a
highly compressed syntax were all in the
interest of projecting deep personal
experiences, including his sense of God’s
mystery, grandeur, and mercy, and his joy in
“all things counter, original, spare,
strange,” as he wrote in “Pied Beauty.” He
called the energizing prosodic element of
his verse “sprung rhythm,” in which each
foot may consist of one stressed syllable
and any number of unstressed syllables,
instead of the regular number of syllables
used in traditional metre. The result is a
muscular verse, flexible, intense, vibrant,
and organic, that combines accuracy of
observation, imaginative daring, deep
feeling, and intellectual depth.
Hopkins’ letters reveal a brilliant
critical faculty, scrupulous self-criticism,
generous humanity, and a strong will. His
friends paid tribute to his personal
integrity and to his rare “chastity of
mind.” Coventry Patmore wrote of him: “There
was something in all his words and manners
which were at once a rebuke and an
attraction to all who could only aspire to
be like him.”
John Cowie Reid
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John Davidson
born April 11, 1857, Barrhead,
Renfrewshire, Scot.
died March 23, 1909, Penzance, Cornwall,
Eng.
Scottish poet and playwright whose best work
shows him a master of the narrative lyrical
ballad.
After studying at the University of
Edinburgh, Davidson became a teacher,
meanwhile writing a number of blank-verse
dramas that failed to win recognition. In
1890 he went to London, practiced
journalism, and wrote novels and short
stories to earn a living, finally
establishing himself with Fleet Street
Eclogues (1893), Ballads and Songs (1894),
and a second series of eclogues (1896). A
series of “Testaments,” written toward the
end of his life, were long dramatic
monologues in blank verse incorporating
scientific language. They expressed his
idiosyncratic vision, which combined
scientific materialism and romantic will in
the belief that man has been created to
express himself to the utmost. Davidson
completed two plays (1907, 1908) of a
trilogy on this theme. Exhausted by his
efforts to support his family and
increasingly frustrated by the public
response to his work, he committed suicide
by drowning. His poems vary widely in tone
and execution, the best known being “Thirty
Bob a Week.”
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Arthur Symons
born Feb. 28, 1865, Milford Haven,
Pembrokeshire, Eng.
died Jan. 22, 1945, Wittersham, Kent
poet and critic, the first English champion
of the French Symbolist poets.
Symons’s schooling was irregular, but,
determined to be a writer, he soon found a
place in the London literary journalism of
the 1890s. He joined the Rhymers’ Club (a
group of poets including William Butler
Yeats and Ernest Dowson), contributed to The
Yellow Book, and became editor of a new
magazine, The Savoy (1896), with Aubrey
Beardsley as art editor. Symons was well
versed in European literature and knew the
French writers Paul Verlaine, Stéphane
Mallarmé, and Joris-Karl Huysmans. He
expanded his pioneering essay “The Decadent
Movement in Literature” (Harper’s, November
1893) into a book, The Symbolist Movement in
Literature (1899), which influenced both
Yeats and T.S. Eliot; in it he characterized
Symbolist literature as suggesting or
evoking the “unseen reality apprehended by
the consciousness.” Symons’s criticism
constitutes an ambitious development of
Walter Pater’s model of the “aesthetic
critic.”
Symons’s best poetry is strongly fin de
siècle in feeling. Days and Nights (1889),
Silhouettes (1892), and London Nights (1895)
contain admirable impressionist lyrics,
sensitive to the complex moods of urban
life. “Episode of a Night of May” is an
exquisitely ironic fixing of the detail of
modern social experience; “Maquillage” is
one of the best statements of the Aesthetic
cult of artifice; Yeats described “La
Mélinite: Moulin Rouge” as “one of the most
perfect lyrics of our time.” Symons suffered
a serious attack of mental illness in
1908–10. He recovered to produce, over the
next 20 years, a stream of travel writing,
criticism, and translation, though he never
quite regained the intense originality of
his early period.
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Francis Thompson
born Dec. 18, 1859, Preston, Lancashire,
Eng.
died Nov. 13, 1907, London
English poet of the 1890s, whose most
famous poem, “The Hound of Heaven,”
describes the pursuit of the human soul by
God.
Thompson was educated in the Roman Catholic
faith at Ushaw College, a seminary in the
north of England. He studied medicine at
Manchester, but not conscientiously, and
began to take opium; he then went to London,
where from 1885 to 1888 he lived in
destitution. In 1888 the publication of two
of his poems in Wilfrid Meynell’s
periodical, Merry England, aroused the
admiration of Robert Browning. Meynell and
his wife, Alice, befriended Thompson,
induced him to enter a hospital, nursed him
through convalescence, and in 1893 arranged
publication of a collection, Poems. Thompson
is chiefly associated with rhapsodic
accounts of religious experience written in
a diction much influenced by 17th-century
Catholic verse, though he could also produce
elegant, direct, and moving short poems,
such as “At Lord’s,” a remarkable lyric
about cricket.
From 1892 to 1896 Thompson lived near a
Franciscan priory in north Wales, during
which period he wrote Sister Songs (1895)
and New Poems (1897). He also wrote a number
of prose works, mostly published
posthumously, including the essay Shelley
(1909). The Works of Francis Thompson, 3
vol. (1913), was published by Meynell.
Thompson died of tuberculosis.
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Ernest Dowson
born Aug. 2, 1867, Lee, Kent, Eng.
died Feb. 23, 1900, Lewisham, London
one of the most gifted of the circle of
English poets of the 1890s known as the
Decadents.
In 1886 Dowson entered Queen’s College,
Oxford, but left in 1888 to spend six years
working at his father’s dry dock in the
Limehouse district of London. Dowson became
an active member of the Rhymers’ Club, a
group of writers that included William
Butler Yeats and Arthur Symons. In 1891 he
met the woman who would inspire some of his
best poetry, Adelaide Foltinowicz, whose
parents kept a modest restaurant in Soho,
London. In that same year he published his
best-known poem, “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae
sub Regno Cynarae,” popularly known from its
refrain as “I have been faithful to thee,
Cynara, in my fashion.” Adelaide, who was 12
years old when they met, declined his offer
of marriage, but he pursued her for the next
six years, drowning the pain of his
unrequited love with wine and women and
demanding as time went on “madder music and
stronger wine.”
He was received into the Roman Catholic
Church about 1892. In 1894 his father died,
his mother committed suicide, the family
business failed, and Dowson discovered the
symptoms of his tuberculosis. In 1897
Adelaide married one of her father’s
waiters; after that, Dowson lived mostly in
France, supporting himself by contributions
to The Savoy and translations of Émile Zola,
Honoré de Balzac, Voltaire, and other French
authors. He was discovered in Paris
wretched, penniless, and ill by a friend,
R.H. Sherard, who took him back to London,
where he died in Sherard’s house.
Dowson published two novels in
collaboration with Arthur Moore, A Comedy of
Masks (1893) and Adrian Rome (1899), and a
book of short stories, Dilemmas (1895), but
his reputation rests on his poetry: Verses
(1896), the verse play The Pierrot of the
Minute (1897), and Decorations in Verse and
Prose (1899). His lyrics, much influenced by
French poet Paul Verlaine and marked by
meticulous attention to melody and cadence,
turn the conventional world-weariness of the
1890s into a deeper sense of the sadness of
things. Yeats acknowledged that much of his
own technical development was due to Dowson.
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Lionel Johnson
born March 15, 1867, Broadstairs, Kent, Eng.
died Oct. 4, 1902, London
English poet and critic who was notable
for his fastidious and wistful lyrical poems
but is mainly remembered as a typical
representative of the “tragic generation” of
the 1890s, which suffered from fin-de-siècle
decadence and melancholy.
Johnson studied at Winchester College and
at New College, Oxford, and then went to
London to pursue a literary career and to
work as a writer and critic for a number of
periodicals. He early became an alcoholic
and a recluse and suffered from spiritual
malaise. He converted from Anglicanism to
Roman Catholicism in 1891. Johnson wrote the
first solid study of novelist and poet
Thomas Hardy, and his Poetical Works were
edited in 1915 by Ezra Pound. He died at age
35 after falling on a public street and
fracturing his skull. His friend William
Butler Yeats left a touching portrait of him
in Autobiographies.
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A.E. Housman
"A Shropshire
Lad"
"Last Poems"
born March 26, 1859, Fockbury,
Worcestershire, Eng.
died April 30, 1936, Cambridge
English scholar and celebrated poet whose
lyrics express a Romantic pessimism in a
spare, simple style.
Housman, whose father was a solicitor,
was one of seven children. He much preferred
his mother; and her death on his 12th
birthday was a cruel blow, which is surely
one source of the pessimism his poetry
expresses. While a student at Oxford, he was
further oppressed by his dawning realization
of homosexual desires. These came to focus
in an intense love for one of his fellow
students, an athletic young man who became
his friend but who could not reciprocate his
love. In turmoil emotionally, Housman failed
to pass his final examination at Oxford,
although he had been a brilliant scholar.
From 1882 to 1892 he worked as a clerk in
the Patent Office in London. In the evenings
he studied Latin texts in the British Museum
reading room and developed a consummate gift
for correcting errors in them, owing to his
mastery of the language and his feeling for
the way poets choose their words. Articles
he wrote for journals caught the attention
of scholars and led to his appointment in
1892 as professor of Latin at University
College, London.
Apparently convinced that he must live
without love, Housman became increasingly
reclusive and for solace turned to his
notebooks, in which he had begun to write
the poems that eventually made up A
Shropshire Lad (1896). For models he claimed
the poems of Heinrich Heine, the songs of
William Shakespeare, and the Scottish border
ballads. Each provided him with a way of
expressing emotion clearly and yet keeping
it at a certain distance. For the same
purpose, he assumed in his lyrics the
unlikely role of farm labourer and set them
in Shropshire, a county he had not yet
visited when he began to write the first
poems. The popularity of A Shropshire
Lad grew slowly but so surely that
Last Poems (1922) had astonishing
success for a book of verse.
Housman regarded himself principally as a
Latinist and avoided the literary world. In
1911 he became professor of Latin at
Cambridge, teaching there almost up to his
death. His major scholarly effort, to which
he devoted more than 30 years, was an
annotated edition of Manilius (1903–30),
whose poetry he did not like but who gave
him ample scope for emendation. Some of the
asperity and directness that appears in
Housman’s lyrics also is found in his
scholarship, in which he defended common
sense with a sarcastic wit that helped to
make him widely feared.
A lecture, The Name and Nature of Poetry
(1933), gives Housman’s considered views of
the art. His brother Laurence selected the
verses for the posthumous volume More Poems
(1936). Housman’s Letters appeared in 1971.
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Rudyard Kipling
PART I
"Poems"
PART II
"Kim"
PART III
"The Jungle Book"
British writer
in full Joseph Rudyard Kipling
born Dec. 30, 1865, Bombay, India
died Jan. 18, 1936, London, Eng.
Main
English short-story writer, poet, and novelist chiefly remembered for
his celebration of British imperialism, his tales and poems of British
soldiers in India, and his tales for children. He received the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1907.
Life
Kipling’s father, John Lockwood Kipling, was an artist and scholar who
had considerable influence on his son’s work, became curator of the
Lahore museum, and is described presiding over this “wonder house” in
the first chapter of Kim, Rudyard’s most famous novel. His mother was
Alice Macdonald, two of whose sisters married the highly successful
19th-century painters Sir Edward Burne-Jones and Sir Edward Poynter,
while a third married Alfred Baldwin and became the mother of Stanley
Baldwin, later prime minister. These connections were of lifelong
importance to Kipling.
Much of his childhood was unhappy. Kipling was taken to England by
his parents at the age of six and was left for five years at a foster
home at Southsea, the horrors of which he described in the story Baa
Baa, Black Sheep (1888). He then went on to the United Services College
at Westward Ho, north Devon, a new, inexpensive, and inferior boarding
school. It haunted Kipling for the rest of his life—but always as the
glorious place celebrated in Stalky & Co. (1899) and related stories: an
unruly paradise in which the highest goals of English education are met
amid a tumult of teasing, bullying, and beating. The Stalky saga is one
of Kipling’s great imaginative achievements. Readers repelled by a
strain of brutality—even of cruelty—in his writings should remember the
sensitive and shortsighted boy who was brought to terms with the ethos
of this deplorable establishment through the demands of
self-preservation.
Kipling returned to India in 1882 and worked for seven years as a
journalist. His parents, although not officially important, belonged to
the highest Anglo-Indian society, and Rudyard thus had opportunities for
exploring the whole range of that life. All the while he had remained
keenly observant of the thronging spectacle of native India, which had
engaged his interest and affection from earliest childhood. He was
quickly filling the journals he worked for with prose sketches and light
verse. He published the verse collection Departmental Ditties in 1886,
the short-story collection Plain Tales from the Hills in 1888, and
between 1887 and 1889 he brought out six paper-covered volumes of short
stories. Among the latter were Soldiers Three, The Phantom Rickshaw
(containing the story The Man Who Would Be King), and Wee Willie Winkie
(containing Baa, Baa, Black Sheep). When Kipling returned to England in
1889, his reputation had preceded him, and within a year he was
acclaimed as one of the most brilliant prose writers of his time. His
fame was redoubled upon the publication in 1892 of the verse collection
Barrack-Room Ballads, which contained such popular poems as Mandalay,
Gunga Din, and Danny Deever. Not since the English poet Lord Byron had
such a reputation been achieved so rapidly. When the poet laureate
Alfred, Lord Tennyson died in 1892, it may be said that Kipling took his
place in popular estimation.
In 1892 Kipling married Caroline Balestier, the sister of Wolcott
Balestier, an American publisher and writer with whom he had
collaborated in The Naulahka (1892), a facile and unsuccessful romance.
That year the young couple moved to the United States and settled on
Mrs. Kipling’s property in Vermont, but their manners and attitudes were
considered objectionable by their neighbours. Unable or unwilling to
adjust to life in America, the Kiplings returned to England in 1896.
Ever after Kipling remained very aware that Americans were “foreigners,”
and he extended to them, as to the French, no more than a semiexemption
from his proposition that only “lesser breeds” are born beyond the
English Channel.
Besides numerous short-story collections and poetry collections such
as The Seven Seas (1896), Kipling published his best-known novels in the
1890s and immediately thereafter. His novel The Light That Failed (1890)
is the story of a painter going blind and spurned by the woman he loves.
Captains Courageous (1897), in spite of its sense of adventure, is often
considered a poor novel because of the excessive descriptive writing.
Kim (1901), although essentially a children’s book, must be considered a
classic. The Jungle Books (1894 and 1895) is a stylistically superb
collection of stories linked by poems for children. These books give
further proof that Kipling excelled at telling a story but was
inconsistent in producing balanced, cohesive novels.
In 1902 Kipling bought a house at Burwash, Sussex, which remained his
home until his death. Sussex was the background of much of his later
writing—especially in Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies
(1910), two volumes that, although devoted to simple dramatic
presentations of English history, embodied some of his deepest
intuitions. In 1907 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, the
first Englishman to be so honoured. In South Africa, where he spent much
time, he was given a house by Cecil Rhodes, the diamond magnate and
South African statesman. This association fostered Kipling’s imperialist
persuasions, which were to grow stronger with the years. These
convictions are not to be dismissed in a word; they were bound up with a
genuine sense of a civilizing mission that required every Englishman,
or, more broadly, every white man, to bring European culture to the
heathen natives of the uncivilized world. Kipling’s ideas were not in
accord with much that was liberal in the thought of the age, and as he
became older he was an increasingly isolated figure. When he died, two
days before King George V, he must have seemed to many a far less
representative Englishman than his sovereign.
Assessment
Kipling’s poems and stories were extraordinarily popular in the late
19th and early 20th century, but after World War I his reputation as a
serious writer suffered through his being widely viewed as a jingoistic
imperialist. As a poet he scarcely ranks high, although his
rehabilitation was attempted by so distinguished a critic as T.S. Eliot.
His verse is indeed vigorous, and in dealing with the lives and
colloquial speech of common soldiers and sailors it broke new ground.
But balladry, music-hall song, and popular hymnology provide its
unassuming basis; and even at its most serious—as in Recessional (1897)
and similar pieces in which Kipling addressed himself to his fellow
countrymen in times of crisis—the effect is rhetorical rather than
imaginative.
But it is otherwise with Kipling’s prose. In the whole sweep of his
adult storytelling, he displays a steadily developing art, from the
early volumes of short stories set in India through the collections
Life’s Handicap (1891), Many Inventions (1893), The Day’s Work (1898),
Traffics and Discoveries (1904), Actions and Reactions (1909), Debits
and Credits (1926), and Limits and Renewals (1932). While his later
stories cannot exactly be called better than the earlier ones, they are
as good—and they bring a subtler if less dazzling technical proficiency
to the exploration of deeper though sometimes more perplexing themes. It
is a far cry from the broadly effective eruption of the supernatural in
The Phantom Rickshaw (1888) to its subtle exploitation in The Wish House
or A Madonna of the Trenches (1924), or from the innocent chauvinism of
the bravura The Man Who Was (1890) to the depth of implication beneath
the seemingly insensate xenophobia of Mary Postgate (1915). There is
much in Kipling’s later art to curtail its popular appeal. It is
compressed and elliptical in manner and sombre in many of its themes.
The author’s critical reputation declined steadily during his lifetime—a
decline that can scarcely be accounted for except in terms of political
prejudice. Paradoxically, postcolonial critics later rekindled an
intense interest in his work, viewing it as both symptomatic and
critical of imperialist attitudes.
Kipling, it should be noted, wrote much and successfully for
children; for the very young in Just So Stories (1902), and for others
in The Jungle Books and in Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies.
Of his miscellaneous works, the more notable are a number of early
travel sketches collected in two volumes in From Sea to Sea (1899) and
the unfinished Something of Myself, posthumously published in 1941, a
reticent essay in autobiography.
John I.M. Stewart
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The Victorian theatre
Early Victorian drama was a
popular art form, appealing to an uneducated audience
that demanded emotional excitement rather than
intellectual subtlety. Vivacious melodramas did not,
however, hold exclusive possession of the stage. The
mid-century saw lively comedies by Dion Boucicault
and
Tom Taylor. In the 1860s T.W. Robertson pioneered a new
realist drama, an achievement later celebrated by Arthur
Wing Pinero in his charming sentimental comedy Trelawny
of the “Wells” (1898). The 1890s were, however, the
outstanding decade of dramatic innovation.
Oscar Wilde
crowned his brief career as a playwright with one of the
few great high comedies in English, The Importance of
Being Earnest (1895). At the same time, the influence of
Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen was helping to produce
a new genre of serious “problem plays,” such as Pinero’s
The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893). J.T. Grein founded the
Independent Theatre in 1891 to foster such work and
staged there the first plays of
George Bernard Shaw and
translations of Ibsen.
Dion Boucicault
born Dec. 26, 1820/22, Dublin, Ire.
died Sept. 18, 1890, New York, N.Y., U.S.
Irish-American playwright and actor, a
major influence on the form and content of
American drama.
Educated in England, Boucicault began acting
in 1837 and in 1840 submitted his first play
to Mme Vestris at Covent Garden; it was
rejected. His second play, London Assurance
(1841), which foreshadowed the modern social
drama, was a huge success and was frequently
revived into the 20th century. Other notable
early plays were Old Heads and Young Hearts
(1844) and The Corsican Brothers (1852).
In 1853 Boucicault and his second wife,
Agnes Robertson, arrived in New York City,
where his plays and adaptations were long
popular. He led a movement of playwrights
that produced in 1856 the first copyright
law for drama in the United States. His play
The Poor of New York, based on the panics of
1837 and 1857, had a long run at Wallack’s
Theatre in 1857 and was presented elsewhere
as, for example, The Poor of Liverpool. The
Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana (1859)
caused a sensation with its implied attack
on slavery.
Boucicault and his actress wife joined
Laura Keene’s theatre in 1860 and began a
series of his popular Irish plays—The
Colleen Bawn (1860), Arrah-na-Pogue (1864),
The O’Dowd (1873), and The Shaughraun
(1874). Returning to London in 1862, he
provided Joseph Jefferson with a successful
adaptation of Rip Van Winkle (1865). In 1872
Boucicault returned to the United States,
where he remained, except for a trip to
Australia that resulted in his third
marriage (for which he renounced the
legitimacy of his second marriage). Among
his associates in the 1870s was the young
David Belasco. At the time of his death he
was a poorly paid teacher of acting in New
York City.
About 150 plays are credited to
Boucicault, who, as both writer and actor,
raised the stage Irishman from caricature to
character. To the American drama he brought
a careful construction and a keen
observation and recording of detail. His
concern with social themes prefigured the
future development of drama in both Europe
and America.
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T.W. Robertson
born Jan. 9, 1829,
Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire, Eng.
died Feb. 3, 1871, London
British playwright whose realistic social
comedies and pioneering work as a
producer-director helped establish the
late-19th-century revival of drama in
England.
Born into a theatrical family that played a
provincial circuit based on the city of
Lincoln, Robertson in 1848 moved to London
to become an actor. In 1854 he was engaged
as prompter at the Lyceum Theatre by Mme
Vestris, an enterprising and important
manager. It was her work in refining the
staging of comedy that he was eventually to
perfect. After his marriage in 1856,
Robertson gradually abandoned acting for
writing. Some of his adaptations and
translations had already been produced, and
in 1861 a one-act farce called The Cantab,
his first original play, was staged.
From 1865 to 1870 a number of plays
produced by Marie and Squire Bancroft made
Robertson famous: Society, Ours, Caste,
Play, School, and The M.P. The broader
themes suggested by the titles are merely
touched upon, but the plays give a
convincing picture of the social scene and
are marred only by a strain of
sentimentality. Many of his plays long
remained in the repertory, and Caste was
among those most frequently performed.
Generally speaking, Robertson’s
characters are recognizable as individuals,
his plots are skillfully manipulated, and
his characters’ dialogue is easy and
conversational. As a director, Robertson
stressed the performance as a whole,
insisting upon adequate rehearsal, attention
to detail, and ensemble playing. The
rigorous domestic realism of both his plays
and his staging methods gave rise in the
1860s to a broader style known as
“cup-and-saucer” drama that exerted
significant influence over the development
of the English theatre during the second
half of the 19th century.
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Arthur
Wing Pinero
born May 24, 1855, London
died Nov. 23, 1934, London
a leading playwright of the late
Victorian and Edwardian eras in England who
made an important contribution toward
creating a self-respecting theatre by
helping to found a “social” drama that drew
a fashionable audience. It is his
farces—literate, superbly constructed, with
a precise, clockwork inevitability of plot
and a brilliant use of coincidence—that have
proved to be of lasting value.
Born into an English family descended
from Portuguese Jews, Pinero abandoned legal
studies at age 19 to become an actor; and,
though still a young man, he played older
character parts for the leading theatre
company headed by Henry Irving. His first
play, £200 a Year, was produced in 1877. His
best farces, such as The Magistrate (1885),
The Schoolmistress (1886), and Dandy Dick
(1887), were written for the Royal Court
Theatre in London. They combine wildly
improbable events with likable characters
and a consistently amusing style. Pinero was
at the same time studying serious drama by
adapting plays from the French (including
The Iron Master, 1884, and Mayfair, 1885)
and also mining a profitable vein of
sentiment of his own, as in The Squire
(1881) and Sweet Lavender (1888).
Seriousness and sentiment fused in The
Profligate (1889) and—most sensationally—in
The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893), which
established Pinero as an important
playwright. This was the first of several
plays depicting women battling with their
situation in society. These plays not only
created good parts for actresses but also
demanded sympathy for women, who were judged
by stricter standards than men in Victorian
society. In a less serious vein, Trelawny of
the “Wells” (written for the Royal Court
Theatre and produced in 1898) portrayed
theatrical company life in the old style of
the 1860s—already then a vanishing
tradition—and The Gay Lord Quex (1899) was
about a theatrical rake of no placeable
period but having great panache. Pinero was
knighted in 1909.
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Victorian literary comedy
Victorian literature began
with such humorous books as Sartor Resartus and The
Pickwick Papers. Despite the crisis of faith, the
“Condition of England” question, and the “ache of
modernism,” this note was sustained throughout the
century. The comic novels of
Dickens and
Thackeray, the
squibs, sketches, and light verse of
Thomas Hood and
Douglas Jerrold, the nonsense of Edward Lear and
Lewis
Carroll, and the humorous light fiction of
Jerome K.
Jerome and George Grossmith and his brother Weedon
Grossmith are proof that this age, so often remembered
for its gloomy rectitude, may in fact have been the
greatest era of comic writing in English literature.
Nicholas Shrimpton
Douglas Jerrold
born Jan. 3, 1803, London
died June 8, 1857, London
English playwright, journalist, and humorist.
Jerrold was born in London. His father, Samuel Jerrold, was an actor
and lessee of the little theatre of Wilsby near Cranbrook in Kent. In
1807 Douglass moved to Sheerness, where he spent his childhood. He
occasionally took a child part on the stage, but his father's profession
held little attraction for him. In December 1813 he joined the guardship
Namur, where he had Jane Austen's brother Francis as captain, and served
as a midshipman until the peace of 1815. He saw nothing of the war save
a number of wounded soldiers from Waterloo, but he retained an affection
for the sea.
The peace of 1815 ruined Jerrold's father; on 1 January 1816 he took
his family to London, where Douglas began work as a printer's
apprentice, and in 1819 he became a compositor in the printing-office of
the Sunday Monitor. Several short papers and copies of verses by him had
already appeared in the sixpenny magazines, and a criticism of the opera
Der Freischütz was admired by the editor, who requested further
contributions. Thus Jerrold became a professional journalist.
In 1821, a comedy that Jerrold had written at the age of fourteen was
brought out at Sadler's Wells theatre under the title More Frightened
than Hurt. Other plays followed, and in 1825 he was employed for a few
pounds weekly to produce dramas and farces to order for Davidge of the
Coburg theatre. In the autumn of 1824, the "little Shakespeare in a
camlet cloak", as he was nicknamed, married Mary Swan and continued to
work as both dramatist and journalist. For a short while he was part
proprietor of a small Sunday newspaper. In 1822, through a quarrel with
the exacting Davidge, Jerrold left for Coburg.
In 1829, a three-act melodrama about corrupt personnel and press
gangs of the Navy launched his fame. Black-Eyed Susan; or, All in the
Downs, was brought out by manager Robert William Elliston at the Surrey
Theatre. Britain at the time was recovering from the fallout of the
Napoleonic Wars, and was in the midst of a class war involving the Corn
laws, and a reform movement, which resulted in the Reform Act of 1832
aimed at reducing corruption. Black-Eyed Susan consisted of various
extreme stereotypes representing the forces of good, evil, the innocent
and the corrupt, the poor and the rich, woven into a serious plot with
comic sub-plots to keep the audience entertained. Its subject was very
topical and its success was enormous. It took the town by storm, and all
London crossed the river to see it. Elliston made a fortune from the
piece; TP Cooke, who played William, made his reputation; Jerrold
received about £60 and was engaged as dramatic author at five pounds a
week, but his reputation as a dramatist was established.
It was proposed in 1830 that he should adapt something from the
French language for Drury Lane. He declined, preferring to produce
original work. The Bride of Ludgate (8 December 1832) was the first of a
number of his plays produced at Drury Lane. The other patent houses also
threw their doors open to him (the Adelphi had already done so); and in
1836 Jerrold became the manager of the Strand Theatre with WJ Hammond,
his brother-in-law. The venture was not successful, and the partnership
was dissolved. While it lasted, Jerrold wrote his only tragedy, The
Painter of Ghent, and himself appeared in the title role, without much
success.
He continued to write sparkling comedies until 1854, the date of his
last piece, The Heart of Gold. Meanwhile he was writing for numerous
periodicals, and gradually became a contributor to the Monthly Magazine,
Blackwood's, the New Monthly, and the Athenaeum. To Punch, the
publication which of all others is associated with his name, he
contributed from its second number in 1841 until within a few days of
his death. Punch was a humorous and liberal publication. Jerrold's
liberal and radical perspective was portrayed in the magazine under the
pseudonym 'Q', which used satire to attack institutions of the day.
Punch was also the forum in which he published in the 1840s his comic
series Mrs Caudle's Curtain Lectures, which was later published in book
form.
He founded and edited for some time, with indifferent success, the
Illuminated Magazine, Jerrold's Shilling Magazine, and Douglas Jerrold's
Weekly Newspaper; and under his editorship Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper rose
from almost nonentity to a circulation of 582,000. The history of his
later years is little more than a catalogue of his literary productions,
interrupted now and again by brief visits to the Continent or to the
country. Douglas Jerrold died at his house, Kilburn Priory, in London on
the 8 June 1857. Later that month Charles Dickens gave a public reading
to raise money for his widow.
Jerrold's figure was small and spare, and in later years bowed almost
to deformity. His features were strongly marked and expressive, from the
thin humorous lips to the keen blue eyes, gleaming from beneath the
shaggy eyebrows. He was brisk and active, with the careless bluffness of
a sailor. Open and sincere, he concealed neither his anger nor his
pleasure; to his sailor's frankness all polite duplicity was
distasteful. The cynical side of his nature he kept for his writings; in
private life his hand was always open. In politics Jerrold was a
Liberal, and he gave eager sympathy to Lajos Kossuth, Giuseppe Mazzini
and Louis Blanc. In social politics especially he took an eager part; he
never tired of declaiming against the horrors of war, the luxury of
bishops, or the iniquity of capital punishment.
Douglas Jerrold is now perhaps better known from his reputation as a
brilliant wit in conversation than from his writings. As a dramatist he
was very popular, though his plays have not kept the stage. He dealt
with rather humbler forms of social world than had commonly been
represented on the boards. He was one of the first and certainly one of
the most successful of the men who in defense of the native English
drama endeavoured to stem the tide of translation from the French, which
threatened early in the 19th century to drown original native talent.
His skill in construction and his mastery of epigram and brilliant
dialogue are well exemplified in his comedy, Time Works Wonders
(Haymarket, 26 April 1845). The tales and sketches which form the bulk
of Jerrold's collected works vary much in skill and interest; but,
although there are evident traces of their having been composed from
week to week, they are always marked by keen satirical observation and
pungent wit.
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Edward Lear
born May 12, 1812, Highgate, near London, England
died January 29, 1888, San Remo, Italy
English landscape painter who is more widely known as the writer of
an original kind of nonsense verse and as the popularizer of the
limerick. His true genius is apparent in his nonsense poems, which
portray a world of fantastic creatures in nonsense words, often
suggesting a deep underlying sense of melancholy. Their quality is
matched, especially in the limericks, by that of his engaging
pen-and-ink drawings.
The youngest of 21 children, Lear was brought up by his eldest
sister, Ann, and from age 15 earned his living by drawing. He
subsequently worked for the British Museum, made drawings of birds for
the ornithologist John Gould, and, during 1832–37, made illustrations of
the earl of Derby’s private menagerie at Knowsley, Lancashire. Lear had
a natural affinity for children, and it was for the earl’s grandchildren
that he produced A Book of Nonsense (1846, enlarged 1861). In 1835 he
decided to become a landscape painter.
Lear suffered all his life from epilepsy and melancholia. After 1837
he lived mainly abroad. Though naturally timid, he was a constant and
intrepid traveler, exploring Italy, Greece, Albania, Palestine, Syria,
Egypt, and, later, India and Ceylon [now Sri Lanka]. An indefatigable
worker, he produced innumerable pen and watercolour sketches of great
topographical accuracy. He worked these up into the carefully finished
watercolours and large oil paintings that were his financial mainstay.
During his nomadic life he lived, among other places, at Rome, Corfu,
and, finally, with his celebrated cat, Foss, at San Remo.
Lear published three volumes of bird and animal drawings, seven
illustrated travel books (notably Journals of a Landscape Painter in
Albania, &c., 1851), and four books of nonsense—A Book of Nonsense
mentioned earlier, Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets
(1871), More Nonsense, Pictures, Rhymes, Botany, etc. (1872), and
Laughable Lyrics (1877). A posthumous collection, Queery Leary Nonsense
(1911), was edited by Constance Braham Strachey.
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Lewis Carroll
Lewis
Carroll - photographer
PART
2
"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"
PART 3,
PART 4,
PART 5
Illustrations by John Tenniel
"Through
the Looking-Glass"
PART 6,
PART 7,
PART 8
Illustrations by John Tenniel
Illustrations by Arthur Rackham
PART
9
Walt
Disney’s "Alice in Wonderland"
PART10,
PART
11
born Jan. 27, 1832, Daresbury, Cheshire, Eng.
died Jan. 14, 1898, Guildford, Surrey
pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson English logician,
mathematician, photographer, and novelist, especially
remembered for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and
its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1871). His poem The
Hunting of the Snark (1876) is nonsense literature of the
highest order.
Dodgson was the eldest son and third child in a family of
seven girls and four boys born to Frances Jane Lutwidge, the
wife of the Rev. Charles Dodgson. He was born in the old
parsonage at Daresbury. His father was perpetual curate
there from 1827 until 1843, when he became rector of Croft
in Yorkshire—a post he held for the rest of his life (though
later he became also archdeacon of Richmond and a canon of
Ripon cathedral).
The Dodgson children, living as they did in an isolated
country village, had few friends outside the family but,
like many other families in similar circumstances, found
little difficulty in entertaining themselves. Charles from
the first showed a great aptitude for inventing games to
amuse them. With the move to Croft when he was 12 came the
beginning of the “Rectory Magazines,” manuscript
compilations to which all the family were supposed to
contribute. In fact, Charles wrote nearly all of those that
survive, beginning withUseful and Instructive Poetry (1845;
published 1954) and following with The Rectory Magazine (c.
1850, mostly unpublished), The Rectory Umbrella (1850–53),
and Mischmasch (1853–62; published with The Rectory Umbrella
in 1932).
Meanwhile, young Dodgson attended Richmond School, Yorkshire
(1844–45), and then proceeded to Rugby School (1846–50). He
disliked his four years at public school, principally
because of his innate shyness, although he was also
subjected to a certain amount of bullying; he also endured
several illnesses, one of which left him deaf in one ear.
After Rugby he spent a further year being tutored by his
father, during which time he matriculated at Christ Church,
Oxford (May 23, 1850). He went into residence as an
undergraduate there on Jan. 24, 1851.
Dodgson excelled in his mathematical and classical studies
in 1852; on the strength of his performance in examinations,
he was nominated to a studentship (called a scholarship in
other colleges). In 1854 he gained a first in mathematical
Finals—coming out at the head of the class—and proceeded to
a bachelor of arts degree in December of the same year. He
was made a “Master of the House” and a senior student
(called a fellow in other colleges) the following year and
was appointed lecturer in mathematics (the equivalent of
today'stutor), a post he resigned in 1881. He held his
studentship until the end of his life.
As was the case with all fellowships at that time, the
studentship at Christ Church was dependent upon his
remaining unmarried, and, by the terms of this particular
endowment, proceeding to holy orders. Dodgson was ordained a
deacon in the Church of England on Dec. 22, 1861.Had he gone
on to become a priest he could have married and would then
have been appointed to a parish by the college. But he felt
himself unsuited for parish work and, though he considered
the possibility of marriage, decided that he was perfectly
content to remain a bachelor.
Dodgson's association with children grew naturally enough
out of his position as an eldest son with eight younger
brothers and sisters. He also suffered from a bad stammer
(which he never wholly overcame, although he was able to
preach with considerable success in later life) and, like
manyothers who suffer from the disability, found that he was
able to speak naturally and easily to children. It is
therefore not surprising that he should begin to entertain
the children of Henry George Liddell, dean of Christ Church.
Alice Liddell and her sisters Lorina and Edith were not, of
course, the first of Dodgson's child friends. They had been
preceded or were overlapped by the children of the writer
George Macdonald, the sons of the poet Alfred, Lord
Tennyson, and various otherchance acquaintances. But the
Liddell children undoubtedly held an especially high place
in his affections—partly because they were the only children
in Christ Church, since only heads of houses were free both
to marry and to continuein residence.
Properly chaperoned by their governess, Miss Prickett
(nicknamed “Pricks”—“one of the thorny kind,” and so the
prototype of the Red Queen in Through the Looking-Glass),
the three little girls paid many visits to the young
mathematics lecturer in his college rooms. As Alice
remembered in 1932, they
used to sit on the big sofa on each side of
him, while he told us stories, illustrating them by
pencil or ink drawings as he went along . . . . He
seemed to have an endless store of these fantastical
tales, which he made up as he told them, drawing
busily on a large sheet of paper all the time. They
were not always entirely new. Sometimes they were
new versions of old stories; sometimes they started
on the old basis, but grew into new tales owing to
the frequent interruptions which opened up fresh and
undreamed-of possibilities.
On July 4, 1862, Dodgson and his friend Robinson
Duckworth, fellow of Trinity, rowed the three children up
the Thames from Oxford to Godstow, picnicked on the bank,
and returnedto Christ Church late in the evening: “On which
occasion,” wrote Dodgson in his diary, “I told them the
fairy-tale of Alice's Adventures Underground, which I
undertook to write out for Alice.” Much of the story was
based on a picnic a couple of weeks earlier when they had
all been caught in the rain; for some reason, this inspired
Dodgson to tell so much better a story than usual that both
Duckworth and Alice noticed the difference, and Alice went
so far as to cry, when they parted at the door of the
deanery, “Oh, Mr. Dodgson, I wish you would write out
Alice's adventures for me!”
Dodgson himself recollected in 1887
how, in a desperate attempt to strike out some
new lineof fairy-lore, I had sent my heroine
straight down a rabbit-hole, to begin with, without
the least idea what was to happen afterwards.
Dodgson was able to write down the story more or less as
told and added to it several extra adventures that had been
told on other occasions. He illustrated it with his own
crude but distinctive drawings and gave the finished product
to Alice Liddell, with no thought of hearing of it again.
But the novelist Henry Kingsley, while visiting the deanery,
chanced to pick it up from the drawing-room table, read it,
and urged Mrs. Liddell to persuade the author to publish it.
Dodgson, honestly surprised, consulted his friend George
Macdonald, author of some of the best children's stories of
the period. Macdonald took it home to be read to his
children, and his son Greville, aged six, declared that he
“wished there were 60,000 volumes of it.”
Accordingly, Dodgson revised it for publication. He cut out
the more particular references to the previous picnic (they
may be found in the facsimile of the original manuscript,
later published by him as Alice's Adventures Underground in
1886) and added some additional stories, told to the
Liddellsat other times, to make up a volume of the desired
length. At Duckworth's suggestion he got an introduction to
John Tenniel, the Punch magazine cartoonist, whom he
commissioned to make illustrations to his specification. The
book was published as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in
1865. (The first edition was withdrawn because of bad
printing, and only about 21 copies survive—one of the rare
books of the 19th century—and the reprint was ready for
publication by Christmas of the same year, though dated
1866.)
The book was a slow but steadily increasing success, and by
the following year Dodgson was already considering a sequel
to it, based on further stories told to the Liddells. The
result was Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found
There (dated 1872; actually published December 1871), a work
as good as, or better than, its predecessor.
By the time of Dodgson's death, Alice (taking the two
volumes as a single artistic triumph) had become the most
popular children's book in England: by the time of his
centenary in 1932 it was one of the most popular and perhaps
the most famous in the world.
There is no answer to the mystery of Alice's success. Many
explanations have been suggested, but, like the Mad Hatter's
riddle (“The riddle, as originally invented, had no answer
at all”), they are no more than afterthoughts. The book is
not an allegory; it has no hidden meaning or message, either
religious, political, or psychological, as some have tried
to prove; and its only undertones are some touches of gentle
satire—on education for the children's special benefit and
on familiar university types, whom the Liddells may or may
not have recognized. Various attempts have been made to
solve the “riddle of Lewis Carroll” himself; these include
the efforts to prove that his friendships with little girls
were some sort of subconscious substitute for a married
life, that he showed symptoms of jealousy when his
favourites came to tell him that they were engaged to be
married, that he contemplated marriage with some of
them—notably with Alice Liddell. But there is little orno
evidence to back up such theorizing. He in fact dropped the
acquaintance of Alice Liddell when she was 12, as he did
with most of his young friends. In the case of the Liddells,
hisfriendship with the younger children, Rhoda and Violet,
was cut short at the time of his skits on some of Dean
Liddell's Christ Church “reforms.” For besides children's
stories, Dodgson also produced humorous pamphlets on
university affairs, which still make good reading. The best
of these werecollected by him as Notes by an Oxford Chiel
(1874).
Besides writing for them, Dodgson is also to be remembered
as a fine photographer of children and of adults as well
(notable portraits of the actress Ellen Terry, the poet
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the poet-painter Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, and many others survive and have been often
reproduced). Dodgson had an early ambition to be an artist:
failing in this, he turned to photography. He photographed
children in every possible costume and situation, finally
making nude studies of them. But in 1880 Dodgson abandoned
his hobby altogether, feeling that it was taking up too much
time that might be better spent. Suggestions that this
sudden decision was reached because of an impurity of motive
for his nude studies have been made, but again without any
evidence.
Before he had told the original tale of Alice's Adventures,
Dodgson had, in fact, published a number of humorous items
in verse and prose and a few inferior serious poems. The
earliest of these appeared anonymously, but in March 1856
apoem called “Solitude” was published over the pseudonym
Lewis Carroll. Dodgson arrived at this pen name by taking
his own names Charles Lutwidge, translating them into Latin
as Carolus Ludovicus, then reversing and retranslating them
into English. He used the name afterward for all his
nonacademic works. As Charles L. Dodgson, he was the author
of a fair number of books on mathematics, none of enduring
importance, although Euclid and His Modern Rivals (1879) is
of some historical interest.
His humorous and other verses were collected in 1869 as
Phantasmagoria and Other Poems and later separated (with
additions) as Rhyme? and Reason? (1883) and Three Sunsets
and Other Poems (published posthumously, 1898). The 1883
volume also contained The Hunting of the Snark, a narrative
nonsense poem that is rivalled only by the best of Edward
Lear.
Later in life, Dodgson had attempted a return to the Alice
vein but only produced Sylvie and Bruno (1889) and its
second volume, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), which has
been described aptly as “one of the most interesting
failures in English literature.” This elaborate combination
of fairy-tale, social novel, and collection of ethical
discussions is unduly neglected and ridiculed. It presents
the truest available portrait of the man. Alice, the perfect
creation of the logical and mathematical mind applied to the
pure and unadulterated amusement of children, was struck out
of him as if by chance; while making full use of his
specialized knowledge, it transcends his weaknesses and
remains unique.
Roger Lancelyn Green
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Jerome K.
Jerome
"Three
Men in a Boat"
in full Jerome Klapka Jerome
born May 2, 1859, Walsall, Staffordshire,
Eng.
died June 14, 1927, Northampton,
Northamptonshire
English novelist and playwright whose
humour—warm, unsatirical, and unintellectual—won
him wide following.
Jerome left school at the age of 14,
working first as a railway clerk, then as a
schoolteacher, an actor, and a journalist.
His first book, On the Stage—and Off, was
published in 1885, but it was with the
publication of his next books, The Idle
Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886) and Three
Men in a Boat (1889), that he achieved great
success; both books were widely translated.
From 1892 to 1897 he was a coeditor (with
Robert Barr and George Brown Burgin) of The
Idler, a monthly magazine that he had helped
found, which featured contributions by
writers such as Eden Phillpotts, Mark Twain,
and Bret Harte.
Jerome’s many other works include Three
Men on the Bummel (1900) and Paul Kelver
(1902), an autobiographical novel. He also
wrote a number of plays. A book of Jerome’s
memoirs, My Life and Times, was published in
1926.
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George Grossmith
born Dec. 9, 1847, London, Eng.
died March 1, 1912, Folkestone, Kent
English comedian and singer who created many
of the chief characters in the original
productions of Gilbert and Sullivan light
operas.
After several years of journalistic work,
Grossmith began about 1870 as a public
entertainer, with songs, recitations, and
sketches. His long connection with Gilbert
and Sullivan began in 1877 at the Opera
Comique, London, in the comic opera The
Sorcerer. Thereafter, he appeared regularly
at the Opera Comique, being transferred, in
1881, with the Gilbert and Sullivan
productions to the new Savoy Theatre,
London.
In 1889 Grossmith left the Savoy and
again set up as an entertainer, visiting all
the major cities of Great Britain and the
United States. He wrote an autobiography, A
Society Clown (1888), and, with his brother
Weedon Grossmith (1852–1919), an actor and
playwright, wrote the amusing Diary of a
Nobody (1892). His humorous songs and
sketches exceeded 600. Both of his sons,
George (1874–1935) and Lawrence Grossmith
(1877–1944), were distinguished actors.
George, Jr., became a well-known figure in
musical comedies, entered the motion-picture
industry in 1932, and wrote musical plays.
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