victorian literature module

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Module One – Lecture One Introduction to the Victorian Middle Class Society, Politics,Mentality and Culture.

a) enduring historical, sociological and political labels and competing insider views

the Victorian age – the age of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), who became Empress of India in 1876 after

previously changing the name of the Hanoverian British dynasty to that of the House of Saxe-Coburg and

Gotha, when she married Prince Albert of the latter house) – in Romanian, epoca victoriană (small case)

the age of the British Empire (a geopolitical label) - the British monarch controlled one third of the

world in the British colonies which extended in Asia to Afghanistan and Tibet, covering the whole of

India ( thirty-four times the size of England), extending to New Zealand and Australia (where Magwitch

in ”Great Expectations” or Hetty Sorrell in ”Adam Bede” by George Eliot and many a real Victorian villain

got transported in a kind of surrogate of a criminal’s execution). The British Empire also extended to

Canada, 40 times the size of England. In Africa, the British Empire occupied Nigeria and Egypt to the

North, after the Purchase in 1875 of the Suez Canal, and went as far down as the tip of the continent

where it conquered South Africa after the Boer War, in the 1890s. (see G. M. Trevelyan. ”Illustrated

History of England”, 1962, translated into Romanian in 1975 ; Book 6, 3rd Chapter).The union of Ireland

with Great Britain ( to create The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801) sanctioned and

brought to its climax the centuries-old domination of Ireland by the rich, powerful neighbour.

the country of the industrial revolution (an economic, social label). It is interesting to see what caused

the industrial revolution and what its historical consequence were. In the span of a single century the

history of science unites in Britain the names of James Watt, Michael Faraday, William Thomson, Lord

Kelvin, George Boole, James Clerk Maxwell. The technological advances include the invention of the

telegraph, the intercontinental cable, the generalisation of steam power (with the large scale

implementation of the steam hammer, the steam turbine, the steam loom and the steam plough) or the

universal milling machine; the communication industry was revolutionized by the invention and the

world-wide spreading of the telegraph, the intercontinental cable or photography and by the rotary

printing press; land transportation developed tremendously with the building in Britain of the first

successful railroad system in the world – followed by the construction of the first underground railway

system, the Metropolitan, in 1860; the electric lamp increased the urbanization standards, too; the

commodity industry was changed by the introduction of the vacuum cleaners, and the war industry

”thrived” after the invention of the automatic guns, the shell gun and the Winchester gun (cf. 1991

Information Please Almanac, Houghton Mifflin, Boston).

an age of material progress (this label is the consequence of the former one) which constantly sought to

accommodate the demographic and environmental changes so as to allow other areas of life to keep

pace with material progress. Education, for example, was torn between the old and the new liberal

models as a tool for controlling, in a disciplined and benevolent/progressive way, the minds of people


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and make them fit members of the new society. (See the lectures on the models in education in the

nineteenth century)

an age of considerable environmental change: the change of the countryside and the city alike. Quite

often, a plain would be spectacularly transformed into a canyon by the sprouting railways which cut

through meadows in depth or cut tunnels through the mountains: all these site changes amounted to aspecial kind of environmental events thought worthy of being celebrated in work songs about the navies

(or railway workers) and their prowess in taming nature (as the theme park folklore demonstrates

today, in the most recent and fashionable kind of museographical exhibition in Britain, aimed at

recreating the commoners’ everyday life in the regional British near past). Urbanization became

overriding, with the displacement of the rural population in the mass. In literature, this was reflected by

the nostalgic rememberance of the rural past in quite a number of success, or simply representative,

Victorian novels, such as the majority of George Eliot’s novels or the rural gentry and family chronicles

that spawned into a picturesque Victorian genre.

the first mass age in history, the precursor, of the 20th

century mass society (a sociological label)

an age of liberal reforms meant to strengthen the economically liberal state (a label that demonstrates

the connection between economy and politics) Liberal politics is middle class politics with little regard

for the lower classes (from a populist or social-democratic viewpoint this could be seen as a

”cruel” state: it did not bother to manage the interests of other than the capitalistic

entrepreneurs and did not interfere with the market. The label for the Victorian or liberal state

was a non-interventionist state, dominated by mercantile – free market – a regulations. It was

based on the political doctrine of ”laissez- faire” that gave free reign to the private capitalistic

enterprise without regard to the public welfare. Thus, the liberal legislation was double-edged:

protectionist, for the capitalistic, entrepreneurial class and impoverishing when not simply

indifferent or even oppressive towards the working class

- laws which enfranchised the man of property, called ”Reform Bills”, since they completely changed

the voting qualifications at the beginning from nominal to real property qualifications by eliminating the

old ”rotten” boroughs and the appointment of constituencies by royal charter. The Reform Bill of 1832

enfranchised all the male owners of property worth at least 10 pounds in annual rent; the Reform Bill of

1867 doubled the number of voters; and the 1884 Bill brought about the universal male

enfranchisement. The parliamentary battle was fought throughout the 19th

century between the

representatives of the two political parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, with William Ewart

Gladstone, nicknamed ”The Old Man”, at the head of the Liberal Party and four times at the head of the

executive as the British Prime Minister, between 1868-74, 1880-85, 1885-6 and 1892-3; the other

mandates were held for the Conservatives by Sir Robert Peel, first, then by Benjamin Disraeli, Queen

Victoria’s friend and British Prime Minister between 1874-1880. The two parties are also distinguished

by their foreign policy, in so far as the Tories advocated a ”big England”, imperial policy, while the

Liberals were the ”little England” party.

- property-strenghthening and free-trade measures required by a successful political machine meant to

sustain the kind of progress associated with the British power in control of a newly industrial economy

and a modern empire. Thus, in 1846, the old Corn laws were repealed, which had offered protectionist

tariffs for British agriculture. This was the pre-requisite for effectively securing free trade, by 1860.


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- the 1830 Catholic Emancipation meant the modernization of the British polity now capable of making

allowance for other than its own Reformed, Anglican political formations . A similar modernization

embraced the British polity services and institutions, thanks to the measures passed by Gladstone’s

administration during the 1868-1874 mandate. (See the relevant chapter in G. M. Trevelyan’s

”Illustrated History of England” for a pertinent discussion of the Liberal modernization of the British

institutions, including the religious and military ones).

- reforms in education, reformism meant that essential education was generalised, so that the

1870 Education Act opened the way to generalised literacy in Britain. By 1871, the abolition of the

university tests virtually transformed the leading universities of Oxford and Cambridge into lay,

metropolitan, ”universalist” universities.

- public administration and municipal management reforms, which created town councils instead of

rotten boroughs and heightened the quality of urban life As a result, what we know today as roughly

modern city life became a reality translated into higher living standards and the increased number of

commodities. The Victorian periodical, serialised pamphlets, the formal discourses, not to mention the

fiction and satirical documents of the age retain numerous traces of the eventful addition to cities of

public baths and laundries, museums, libraries (public reading rooms), parks, public gardens and latertrams, gas and electricity facilities or water networks.

an age of social unrest in the mass section of the society the poverty problem which represented the

reverse of the great imperial and colonial coin, included in the Victorian age the passing of a

number of poor laws, such as the 1834 Poor Law Amendment which created the workhouses or

prisons in disguise for containing what was considered to be, at the time, the social scum of the

street villains. The poor street population literally haunted the Dickensian imaginary in so many

of his youthful novels. The Chartist Movement of 1836 –1854 proved that beyond the middle-

class modern paradise there reigned supreme social chaos. For almost the entire first half of the

age, the Victorian masses demonstrated in the streets and sent petitions of rights (charts)

signed by ever-increasing numbers of people to the leaders of the nation but they were never

listened to (the 1840 Chart, for example, was signed by over three million three hundred

people who requested for the lower classes precisely what came to be granted to the middle

classes in the course of the century). This prolonged street demonstration reminds one of the

long demonstration for democracy in Bucharest, in the Piata Universitatii Square at the

beginning of the 1990s); under Chartist inspiration, there were organised strikes, such as the

first general strike of 1842 but all these got practically nowhere and had to continue their

”fight” by the better organised trade-unionist movement of the 1860s and 1870s (after the

repeal of the Combination Acts, which had forbidden gatherings of riotous people, in the wakeof the French Revolution – between 1799, i.e., and 1824). This proved that there exisited

virtually ”two nations” in Britain, as Benjamin Disraeli put it, the rich and the poor. The rich

passed and enacted quite a big number of consistent laws for the poor, but it appears that the

former were too busily engrossed in their business to devote enough attention or resources to

rescuing the poor. The Factory Acts of the period 1833 –1878, however, eliminated child labour

and gross overworking in factories. Some support was granted also by the government’s Public


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Health Acts of 1871 – 1875 which granted some measure of medical assistance to the poor as

well. Still, for all the echoes of the social unrest and unhealthy living conditions of the poor in

the printed Victorian media, including the literature of the age, the 1880s saw the rise of more

radical social movements, such as the wide-spread socialism of the Fabian brand or the utopian

socialism of the intellectuals (cf. Martin Day: ”A History of English Literature. 1837 to the

Present”, Doubleday, New York, 1964, the chapter on Victorian prose) and of Marxiancommunism, some time after the publication of the Communist Party Manifesto by Karl Marx,

in 1859. By 1903, the Socialist Labour Party had also been formed as a potential opposition

force on the political stage.

***

Narrative introduction to the HISTORY OF IDEAS lecturing module (an informal, free or table talk essay,

which would have been delivered were your course instructor present for a first encounter)

Studying the strengths and weaknesses of the British Empire, the last great and visible modern empire,

means measuring the distance between the doctrine (the faith) in modern progress turned into an

ideology of the triumphant modern British nation – the ruler of one third of the world – and the more

concrete underpinnings of the imperial advance. The grandeur of the British Empire was achieved in

reality with wars caused by human greed, rather than being prompted by the ambition, or the noble

cause, of advancing Western civilization, as the imperial ideology declared.1

A century without wars on British soil, the nineteenth is a progressive, nationalistic, democratic and

imperial modern age: it is called the Victorian age, from the reign of Queen Victoria (1937-1901);

Victoria was invested Empress of India in 1877 (this was not because she was a genuine colonial leaderherself, but because the leadership of the West India Company had become corrupt – as proved by the

Indian Mutiny in the 1840s – and its power had to be crushed, which is why the Crown became the

direct ruler of the Indian Sub-Continent.2

The British Empire increased in the wake of the pervasive modern ideology of progress, it was prompted

by imperial nationalism (NB: the termination of this word!), it was liberal in the three senses of the word

(cf. Zirra – Contributions I, pp. 87 - 88), it was democratic. The polemic surrounding the democratic

1

An ideology is a useful doctrine/philosophy – which furthers the interest of a particular class eager for power,according to Marxism (NB – the termination – ism is for ideologies) and Neo-Marxism. Marxism was the radical

critique of nineteenth century capitalism just as Neo-Marxism is the critique of twentieth century Western

democracies. They also went under the name of Left wing Hegelianism, both being inspired by the Kantian critiques

of reason and the Hegelian idealistic doctrine of progress in history. It stands to reason that when compared to any

perfectly rational and ideal model, no actual human society will stand the test!2 NB: For the British, ―the Continent‖ designates Europe, just as, when used attributively, for example in the phrase

―overseas students‖, the adverbial noun ―overseas‖ (Rom. de peste mări) refers to everything that is not within the

perimeter of the British Isles (this is a proof of the insular mentality and the nationalist self-centeredness, or the

arrogance perhaps?, of the Brits.


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society in the Victorian age shall be addressed in the next lecture, titled “Victorian Democracy: Pros and

Cons”.

The specifically English form of economic liberalism is the laissez faire doctrine, which reduces to a

minimum the role of the state in respect to the free market, giving free reign to the “invisible hand of

the market”(namely, competition); this makes the Victorian state be typically non-interventionist; thecapitalistic non-interventionist Victorian polity proved its limitations when popular unrest broke out and

continued in the early Victorian age (see the seminar topic: the Chartist movement), the rise of Trade

Unionism and the organization of the First General Strike (in 1854), and finally the appearance of

utopian and Fabian Socialism.

The English name for the modern practical (and liberal) philosophy of progress is utilitarianism

(translated into Romanian as UTILITARISM). Its connection with the new liberal paradigm in mid-

Victorian learning and the differences between the old liberal and the new liberal paradigms are

important history of ideas issues.

SECOND LECTURE

Competing Insider Views on the Victorian Age: Upper Middle-Class Leisure and Pleasure (in

The Prologue to Alfred Tennyson’s ―The Princess‖ versus Their Puritanical Challenge (in

Thomas Carlyle’s ―The Everlasting Yea‖, from Sartor Resartus Contributions I, 58-59; the

consequent doctrine of activism in Past and Present (1843) ―Labour‖); Carlyle’s further

challenges: his accusation to the laissez-faire society in Chartism (1841) and Past and

Present (1843): Gospel of Mammonism, Captains of Industry, the chapters on

LaissezFaire and Not Laissez Faire "Labour" Past and Present , chapter XI

(Contributions I, 2011, 60-62) (b)

I. Upper Middle-Class Leisure and Pleasure (in The Prologue to Alfred Tennyson’s ―The

Princess‖

The Prologue

Sir Walter Vivian all a summer’s day

Gave his broad lawns until the set of sun

Up to the people: thither flocked at noon

His tenants, wife and child, and thither half


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The neighbouring borough with their Institute

Of which he was the patron. I was there

From college, visiting the son, - the son

A Walter too,- with others of our set,

Five others: we were seven at Vivian-place.

And me that morning Walter show’d the house,

Greek, set with busts: from vases in the hall

Flowers of all heavens, and lovelier than their names,

Grew side by side; and on the pavement lay

Carved stones of the Abbey-ruin in the park,

Huge Ammonites, and the first bones of Time;

And on the tables every clime and age

Jumbled together; celts and calumets,

Claymore and snowshoe, toys in lava, fans

Of sandal, amber, ancient rosaries,

Laborious orient ivory shphere in sphere,

The cursed Malayan crease, and battle-clubs

From the isles of palm: and higher on the walls,

Betwixt the monstruous horns of elk and deer,

His own forefathers’ arms and armour hung .

And ’this’ he said ’was Hugh’s at Agincourt;

And that was old Sir Ralph’s at Ascalon:

A good knight he! We keep a chronicle

With all about him’ – which he brought, and I

Dived in a hoard of tales that dealt with knights,


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Half-legend, half-historic, counts and kings

Who laid about them at their wills and died.

………………………………………………………………………….

….round the lake

A little clock-work steamer paddling plied

And shook the lilies: perch’d about the knolls

A dozen angry models jetted steam:

A petty railway ran ; a fire balloon

Rose gem-like up before the dusky groves

And dropt a fairy parachute and past:

And there thro’ twenty posts of telegraph

They flash’d a saucy message to and fro

Between the mimic stations; so that sport

Went hand in hand with Science;

II.Thomas Carlyle’s Puritanical Challenge of the Genteel Mentality and the Romantic Roots ofHis Contestation

1.excerpts from Sartor Resartus (1833)

‖The Everlasting Yea‖ (a handbook of metaphysical belief and vitalism)

See the internet pdf for the passage with Ophiuchus

So true it is, what I then said, that the Fraction of Life can be increased in value not so much by

increasing your Numerator as by lessening your Denominator. Nay, unless my algebra deceive

me, Unity itself divided by Zero will giveInfinity‖ and, he continues, ‖Make thy claim of wages a

zero, then; thou hast the world under thy feet. Well did the Wisest of our time write: ‖It is only

with Renunciation (Entsagen) that Life, properly speaking, can be said to begin‖ [ He is quoting

from Goethe who will also be invoked by Matthew Arnold, later as his inspirer] And, Carlyle

declares, on the same page 88: ‖What Act of Leg islature was there that thou shouldst be

Happy? A little while ago thou hadst no right to be at all. What if thout wert born and predestined

not to be Happy, but to be Unhappy! Art thou nothing other than a Vulture, then, that fliest


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through the Universe seeking after somewhat to eat : and shrieking dolefully because carrion

enough is not given thee? Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe.‖

2. Labour and the Doctrine of Activism

there is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in Work (…)the real desire to

get Work done will itself lead one more and more to truth, to Nature's appointments

and regulations, which are truth. The latest Gospel in this world is, Know thy work

and do it. (…)Think it not thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an

unknowable individual: know what thou canst work at; and work at it, like a

Hercules! That will be thy better plan.(… …) the whole soul of a man is composed

into a kind of real harmony, the instant he sets himself to work! Doubt, Desire,

Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, Despair itself, all these like helldogs lie beleagueringthe soul of the poor dayworker, as of every man: but he bends himself with free

valour against his task, and all these are stilled, all these shrink murmuring far off

into their caves. The man is now a man. The blessed glow of Labour in him, is it not

as purifying fire, wherein all poison is burnt up, and of sour smoke itself there is

made bright blessed flame!

3. Carlyle’s accusations to the liberal, laissez-faire state (Chapter VI: ‘Laissez-faire,’ ‘Supply-and-

demand,’ ‘Cash-payment for the sole nexus,’ and so forth, were not, are not, and will never be, a

practicable Law of Union for a Society of Men. That Poor and Rich, that Governed and Governing, cannot

long live together on any such Law of Union.”) (Captains of Industry: Chapter IV, the 6th occurrence)

(Mammonism: The Modern Worker, Chapter II”True, it must be owned, we for the present with our

Mammon Gospel….)

LECTURE TWO Democracy: Pros and Cons

I.Thomas Carlyle’s Denunciation of Democracy

Part Three of Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present (1840) treats democracy as an annoying object of

derision (compare this passage with Sartor Resartus, “The Everlasting Yea”) and preaches instead the

authoritarian rule by the meritocracy

'You cannot walk the streets without beholding Democracy announce


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itself: the very Tailor has become, if not properly Sansculottic,which to him would be ruinous, yet a Tailor unconsciously symbolising,and prophesying with his scissors, the reign of Equality. What now isour fashionable coat?

Carlyle dismantles the notion of democracy with a critical eye, because he considers the revolutionary

desideratum of social liberty too narrow. Democracy is defined by utilitarians as 'the liberty of

not being oppressed by your fellow man’.Carlyle considers it ―an indispensable, yet

one of the most insignificant fractional parts of Human Liberty”. Carlyle regards

man as a creature enthralled by ―his own brutal appetites‖3:Thou art the thrall not of Cedric the Saxon, but of thy own brutal appetitesand this scoured dish of liquor4. And thou pratest of thy 'liberty'? Thouentire blockhead!//Heavy-wet and gin: alas, these are not the only kinds ofthraldom.[…] thou art_ as an 'enchanted Ape' under God's sky, where thoumightest have been a man, had proper Schoolmasters and Conquerors, andConstables with cat-o'-nine tails,been vouchsafed thee;

Liberty? The true liberty of a man, you would say, consisted in his

finding out, or being forced to find out the right path, and to walkthereon. To learn, or to be taught, what work he actually was ablefor; and then by permission, persuasion, and even compulsion, to setabout doing of the same! That is his true blessedness, honour,'liberty' and maximum of wellbeing: if liberty be not that, I for onehave small care about liberty. You do not allow a palpable madman toleap over precipices; you violate his liberty, you that are wise; andkeep him, were it in strait-waistcoats, away from the precipices!Every stupid, every cowardly and foolish man is but a less palpablemadman: his true liberty were that a wiser man, that any and everywiser man, could, by brass collars, or in whatever milder or sharperway, lay hold of him when he was going wrong, and order and compel himto go a little righter. O, if thou really art my _Senior_, Seigneur,my _Elder_, Presbyter or Priest,--if thou art in very deed my _Wiser_,

may a beneficent instinct lead and impel thee to 'conquer' me, tocommand me! If thou do know better than I what is good and right, Iconjure thee in the name of God, force me to do it; were it by neversuch brass collars, whips and handcuffs, leave me not to walk overprecipices! That I have been called, by all the Newspapers, a 'freeman' will avail me little, if my pilgrimage have ended in death andwreck. O that the Newspapers had called me slave, coward, fool, orwhat it pleased their sweet voices to name me, and I had attained notdeath, but life!--Liberty requires new definitions.

II. John Stuart Mill’s Guide for the Achievement of Civic Liberty in a Modern Democracy

The opening paragraph of Mill’s treaty On Liberty (1859), Part II defines civic liberty in principle as

follows: there is no (legislative or executive) power in a modern state which may be justified in imposing

an official opinion on its people.

3 Carlyle regards man in a Biblical light, as a fallen/beastly creature who has to recover spiritual dignity. To be free,

means for Carlyle, to be free from beastly appetites which are the cause of human vices.4 The lower classes drank cheap strong liquor (alcohol, gin) – as could be seen in Hogar th‘s caricatural engravings in

the eighteenth century.


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-No argument, we may suppose, can now be needed, against permitting a

legislature or an executive, not identified in interest with the people, to prescribe

opinions to them, and determine what doctrines or what arguments they shall be

allowed to hear.

- Let us suppose, therefore, that the government is entirely at one with the people,and never thinks of exerting any power of coercion unless in agreement with what

it conceives to be their voice. But I deny the right of the people to exercise such

coercion, either by themselves or by their government. The power itself is

illegitimate. The best government has no more title to it than the worst.

Later, Mill demonstrates why it is wrong to suppress opinions:

If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the

contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person,

than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

Mill proceeded to explain what happened in two cases when a man‘s opinion was silenced:

the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the

human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from

the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are

deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what

is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth,

produced by its collision with error.

…………………………………………………………………….

First: the opinion which it is attempted to suppress by authority may possibly be

true. Those who desire to suppress it, of course deny its truth; but they are not

infallible. They have no authority to decide the question for all mankind, and

exclude every other person from the means of judging. To refuse a hearing to an

opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is

the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of

infallibility.

In the same chapter II of On Liberty, Mill gives the examples of the Athenian state which wrongly

assumed infallibility in judging, condemning and executing Socrates and the example of the Roman

Emperor Marcus Aurelius who wrongly assumed infallibility and persecuted the early Christians,

although the Stoic spirit resembled the Christian spirit in austerity.

The longer demonstration about the degrees of certainty available in accordance with the rules of reason

was made by Mill in his earlier essays dedicated to Bentham and Coleridge :


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1. Truth is a socially defined function of several truths, pragmatic and synthetic. It is obtained as a combination

that results after harmonising several partial truths, as can be possessed by real people in concrete circumstances. In

his essay – Coleridge – , Mill shows that:

– All students of man and society (…) are aware that the besetting danger is not somuch of embracing falsehood for truth, as of mistaking part of the truth for the

whole. It might be plausibly maintained that in almost every one of the leadingcontroversies, past or present, in social philosophy, both sides were in the right inwhat they affirmed, though in the wrong in what they denied; and that if eithercould have been made to take the other’s views in addition to its own, little morewould have been needed to make its doctrine correct. – (Proza eseistica Victoriana, in threevolumes, edited by Ana Cartianu and Stefan Stonescu -PEV I p. 458)

And the nuances Mill is capable of detaching in matters of partial turths have practically no end – Thus, it is inregard to every important partial truth; there are always two conflicting modes ofthought, one tending to give to that truth too large, the other to give it too small aplace; and the history of opinion is generally an oscillation between these

extremes. – (Ditto, p. 460) It is possible to harmonize the conflicting modes, but only in the long run, and very gradually:

– Thus, every excess in either direction determines a corresponding reaction;improvement consisting only in this, that the oscillation, each time, departs ratherless widely from the centre, and an ever-increasing tendency is manifested to settlefinally in. – (Ditto, p. 461)

There is a kind of physical, mathematical necesity shown to be at work in this extremely rational model of human

society, which proves the point made before, about the model of science underlying the clear, persuasive liberal

discourse.

2. Truth prevails over error (or as Mill calls error –human fallibility–), because it ispossible to correct past errors and to learn from them, so that all times –there is

just enough truth for correct action – ( – On Liberty – , in PEV, p. 510). Here, Mill‘s theory veers intothe moral and ethical realm, and it seems inspired by one of Jesus Christ‘s own reassuring teachings to the disciples.

– There is no such thing as absolute certainty, but there is assurance sufficient forthe purposes of human life. (…) Complete liberty of contradicting and disprovingour opinion is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth forpurposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties haveany rational assurance of being right. – (Ditto)

3. Public opinion, discussion, is the complement of thought and experience, which are of necessity limited, justas the individual person is. Exchange of ideas and experience, however, if conducted according to the laws of justice

and rationality, or if conducted fairly enough can correct errors and make humanity asymptotically approach in

actionwhat it cannot hope to attain in principle.


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He (man in general, our note) is capable of rectifying his mistakes, by discussionand experience. Not by experience alone. There must be discussion to show howexperience is to be interpreted. Wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to factand argument: but facts and arguments, to produce any effect on the mind, mustbe brought before it. Very few facts are able to tell their own story, withoutcomments to bring out their meaning. The whole strength and value, then, ofhuman judgment, depending on the one property, that it can be set right when it iswrong. – (PEV I, p. 511)

Mill points to the connection between legitimately held opinions and free discussion as the basisfor approaching truth (rather than holding opinions dogmatically):

However unwillingly a person who has a strong opinion may admit the possibility

that his opinion may be false, he ought to be moved by the consideration that

however true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will

be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.

In On Liberty , Part III ―Of Individuality as One of the Elements of Well-Being‖ Mill presents the

conditions for developing personal experience and attaining maturity – which represented a duty for every

member of a modern, democratic society

Nobody denies that people should be so taught and trained in youth as to know

and benefit by the ascertained results of human experience. But it is the

privilege and proper condition of a human being, arrived at the maturity of his

faculties, to use and interpret experience in his own way. It is for him to find out

what part of recorded experience is properly applicable to his own circumstances

and character.– And –(…)The human faculties of perception, judgment,

discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference are exercisedonly in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom makes

no choice. He gains no practice either in discerning or in desiring what is best.

The mental and moral, like the muscular, powers are improved only by being

used. The faculties are called into no exercise by doing a thing merely because

others believe it. If the grounds of an opinion are not conclusive to the person’ s

own reason, his reason cannot be strengthened, but is likely to be weakened by

adopting it.– This is the pledge of Mill’s humanism in his views on general

education: to strengthen man rather than weaken him by the misuse of reason,

either because it is used in isolation or because it is not used at all. John Stuart

Mill’s argument continues –He who lets the world, or his own portion of it,choose his plan of life for him has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like

one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself employs all his faculties.

He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to

gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has

decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision. (…) It is

possible that he might be guided in some good path, and kept out of harm’s


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way, without any of these things. But what will be his comparative worth as a

human being? It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what

manner of men they are that do it. Among the works of man which human life is

rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying, the first importance surely is

man himself. Supposing it were possible to get houses built, corn grown, battles

fought, causes tried, and even churches erected and prayers said by machinery

– by automatons in human form- it would be a considerable loss to exchange

for these automatons even the men and women who at present inhabit the more

civilized parts of the world, and who assuredly are but starved specimens built

after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which

requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the

inward forces which make it a living thing. –

Module Two: The Victorian Novel (I): Early Victorian novelists - Dickens and Thackeray and

the fashionable kinds of fiction in the nineteenth century; Vanity Fair as the swan song of the

dominant genteel mentality and the literary force of Dickens's imagination; his sentimental andsatirical genteel mentality emblems presented through character definitions from Our Mutual

Friend (1854) and Bleak House (1852) [the Veneerings, Podsnappery, Boffin‘s Bower] Bleak

House (1852) [Telescopic philanthropy; deportment] (Contributions I, Appendix, 137-140)

The list of titles/species published by the two authors is available in Contributions I, the bio-bibliography

Appendix, 137-140 and the discussion about Thackeray’s fateful hesitation between satire and

sentimentalism in the construction of stock characters5 make his realistic books readable today as

simple instances of genteel conversation.

The comparison of the fictional titles shows the development of the novel from the earlier picaresque

and romance6 species to increasingly mature species of panoramic, critical, analytic, historical and

artistic species.

After presenting the titles of Thackeray’s and Dickens’s books and the Prologue toVanity Fair only

(which is to be explained by this reader’s / your Reader’s dissatisfaction with the latter novel qua novel,

5 See the pairs of stock characters: the vixen, Rebecca Sharp (Becky, the protagonist of Thackeray‘s ―novel without

a hero‖) VERSUS Amelia Sedley, the Victorian angel in the house – in keeping with Coventry Patmore‘s poem of

the same title, published in 1854, then revised in 1862; George Osborne, the object of Amelia‘s unrequited love

VERSUS Captain Dobbin, in love with Amelia and devoted to her as two types of men, the dishonest/honest types;

rich, vicious, decadent upper middle-class barbarians, by Matthew Arnold‘s standards (the Crawleys and Osbornes)

VERSUS virtuous, decaying, empoverished middle-classes (the Sedleys).6


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though it is fair to confess its conversation is appealing as a sample of Victorian wit and cultivation and

though confessing that Vanity Fair can serve perfectly for understanding the blocks of middle class

characters in the structure of British society in the nineteenth century), this lecture will present the

complexity of Dickens’s fiction by analyses deriving from the first year’s lectures in twentieth century

criticism and theory)

BEFORE THE CURTAIN

As the manager of the Performance sits before the curtain on the boards and looks

into the Fair, a feeling of profound melancholy comes over him in his survey of the

bustling place. There is a great quantity of eating and drinking, making love and

jilting, laughing and the contrary, smoking, cheating, fighting, dancing and fiddling;

there are bullies pushing about, bucks ogling the women, knaves picking pockets,

policemen on the look-out, quacks (OTHER quacks, plague take them!) bawling in

front of their booths, and yokels looking up at the tinselled dancers and poor old

rouged tumblers, while the light-fingered folk are operating upon their pockets behind. Yes, this is VANITY FAIR; not a moral place certainly; nor a merry one,

though very noisy. Look at the faces of the actors and buffoons when they come off

from their business; and Tom Fool washing the paint off his cheeks before he sits

down to dinner with his wife and the little Jack Puddings behind the canvas. The

curtain will be up presently, and he will be turning over head and heels, and crying,

"How are you?"

A man with a reflective turn of mind, walking through an exhibition of this sort,

will not be oppressed, I take it, by his own or other people's hilarity. An episode of

humour or kindness touches and amuses him here and there — a pretty child looking ata gingerbread stall; a pretty girl blushing whilst her lover talks to her and chooses her

fairing; poor Tom Fool, yonder behind the waggon, mumbling his bone with the

honest family which lives by his tumbling; but the general impression is one more

melancholy than mirthful. When you come home you sit down in a sober,

contemplative, not uncharitable frame of mind, and apply yourself to your books or

your business.

I have no other moral than this to tag to the present story of "Vanity Fair." Some

people consider Fairs immoral altogether, and eschew such, with their servants and

families: very likely they are right. But persons who think otherwise, and are of a lazy,

or a benevolent, or a sarcastic mood, may perhaps like to step in for half an hour, and

look at the performances. There are scenes of all sorts; some dreadful combats, some

grand and lofty horse-riding, some scenes of high life, and some of very middling

indeed; some love-making for the sentimental, and some light comic business; the

whole accompanied by appropriate scenery and brilliantly illuminated with the

Author's own candles.


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What more has the Manager of the Performance to say? — To acknowledge the

kindness with which it has been received in all the principal towns of England through

which the Show has passed, and where it has been most favourably noticed by the

respected conductors of the public Press, and by the Nobility and Gentry. He is proud

to think that his Puppets have given satisfaction to the very best company in this

empire. The famous little Becky Puppet has been pronounced to be uncommonlyflexible in the joints, and lively on the wire; the Amelia Doll, though it has had a

smaller circle of admirers, has yet been carved and dressed with the greatest care by

the artist; the Dobbin Figure, though apparently clumsy, yet dances in a very amusing

and natural manner; the Little Boys' Dance has been liked by some; and please to

remark the richly dressed figure of the Wicked Nobleman, on which no expense has

been spared, and which Old Nick will fetch away at the end of this singular

performance.

And with this, and a profound bow to his patrons, the Manager retires, and the

curtain rises.

LONDON, June 28, 1848

The Complexity of Dickens’s Fiction

It is possible to demonstrate the complexity of Dickens‘s imagination, as a source for sophisticated

psychoanalytical, archetypal and discourse studies [rhetoric of fiction texts] to date. It is amazing to see

the kind and number of Dickensian and other Victorian fiction analyses published late in the twentieth

century in America, which is a leader in critical and theory of criticism nowadays. David Shaw‘s volume

Victorians and Mystery: Crises of Representation, published in Ithaca and London, by the Cornell

University Press in 1990, for example, explains, in its Part One, subtitled Mystery and the Unconscious:

Can Free Will Exist? – and in the chapter ―We Know More Than We Know We Know: Repetition in

Dickens and Hardy‖ – how Great Expectations catches our subliminal attention by the density of

discourse details: when Jaggers, the lawyer, seeks out Pip, the legatee, in a pub of the village on the

marshes, to announce him that ―he has great expectations‖, Jaggers is handling a file, like the one which

Pip had procured for the convict; the file tells the whole story of who Pip‘s benefactor is but this close

reading detail only becomes apparent on re-reading the book, so as to sense the repetitions on which the

poetics/politics of the text rests. To argue about the complexity of Dickens‘s discourse by invoking the

construction of characters and plots in psychoanalytical and archetypal terms means to praise the realistic

vein of his novels; and it also means to argue that Dickens did not only write novels which may easily

qualify as romances, by Northrop Frye‘s standard in the first Anatomy of Criticism essay. There is more

than suspense and sentimentality blooming in the typically Victorian world of Dickens‘s novels. Since


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important writers‘ texts will be complete literary documents, anyway, it is possible to analyze Dickens‘s

novels and illustrate practically all the schools of literary criticism and concepts of theory introduced in

the first academic year, the second semester.

The most complete studies of Dickens‘s imagination in the twentieth century were proposed, for

example, by Joseph Hillis Miller, in America. He began to write as a phenomenological critic, eager and

capable to characterize the structure of identity of writers who configure a literary universe (understood asa literary phenomenon whose identity is unique and it can be rationally understood). The Form of

Victorian Fiction, published in Notre Dame and London in 1968, drew attention, in the chapter dedicated

to Dickens, to the powerful means employed by the author to comprise a whole society in the pages of

Our Mutual Friend ; he focused upon the book‘s second chapter titled ―The Man from Somewhere‖ and

its skilful gathering of practically all the characters of the book (and there is an amazing number of

characters in this novel): they are reflected in a mirror at the Veneerings‘ dinner table that shows their

appearances and keeps them very near each other, without revealing the subtext of their co-existence from

behind the lustre of the occasion. This is, Hillis Miller says, a masterful way of concentrating what will be

understood at length, while the plot progresses, in terms of the social, moral and fictional deeper realities

underlying the deceitful/shiny appearances which keep people together in the world. Hillis Miller also

dedicated an entire book to Dickens‘s own cogito, as an author, or to the structure of his literary identity,

Charles Dickens: the World of His Novels, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 1958.7

In earlier twentieth century decades – and to the east of the Iron Curtain – realistic nineteenth

century literature in Britain and Dickens‘s novels in particular were praised owing to their value as

empirical documents that gave substance to Marxist critiques of capitalism. There were numerous

ideological books of criticism produced in communist Moskow, translated into English by numerous

excellent translators (mostly Soviet Jews), and published with cultural propaganda money in Moskow and

Leningrade (the communist name of Sankt Petersburg) about the Victorian slums, vicious industrial town

life and towns. For example, A. Anixt‘s History of English Literature (1956), focused on Dickens‘s

sombre sentimentalism in describing life in the workhouses of a poor parish boy (Oliver Twist ) or the

kind of life to which an industrial, polluted city such as Coketown condemned its inmates to live (see Hard Times, chapter V – available on the internet). Slightly later, to the West of the Iron Curtain, Great

Expectations was praised from a Neo-Marxist perspective for its implicit exposure and convincing

critique of capitalist relations of production. Mammonism, as Thomas Carlyle would term it and

consumerism as we would deem it in the twentieth century, after being first instructed by Thorstein

Veblen about the conspicuous consumption of the leisure class, whose Theory he wrote in 1899, in

America, are the cause for many a Dickensian glutton‘s degradation (Pip‘s, after he goes to live in

London, or the Jarndyce villains in Bleak House).

Since any and all literary texts will yield the rewarding secrets of their coherence when analysed

closely, by formalist means, and the structuralist demonstrations of literariness with narratology are more

likely to reveal the flaws in plausibility of the Dickensian plots – the history of twentieth century literary

conceptualizations applicable to this great Victorian‘s fiction had better be pursued from a

psychoanalytical and archetypal perspective. Esther Summerson‘s case, in Bleak House, is one that

explains the complexity of personal identity formations under the pressure of external reality impositions.

The first thing to notice, in a Freudian perspective, is the complexity of this narrator‘s identity, which

grows under the pressure of reality principle threats – she is raised by her aunt who keeps mentioning the

7 Both Cornell and Johns Hopkins are Ivy League universities, i.e., top American universities, and the fact that

Victorian studies abounded in them shows the interest of Victoriana in the contemporary world.


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curse of life, and shame, accompanying Esther‘s birth which fills the void left in the protagonist’s self by

the complete absence of family-romance figures; consequently, she fetishizes her doll. Dickens‘s great

achievement is that he is an apt narrator who doubles the readers‘ participation in the Freudian

complexities of the characters with mystery (and often just sensational, ie too little credible) plots. The

doll as a feminine figure substitute prefigures Esther‘s encounter with her mother at the end of the novel.

In addition, what recommends the series of masterpieces of Dickens‘s later period of creation isthe symbolic depth of his novels: the symbolism of water and of the Thames as the hub of London life in

Our Mutual Friend (see all the scenes set on the waters of the Thames in the novel). The symbolism of

fire, slime and decay dominates Great Expectations (if you think of the tragic fire in Miss Havisham‘s

decaying house) and that of fog/mist/haziness and pouring rain dominates Bleak House

It is worth analysing the apocalyptic imagery at the beginning of Bleak House, emblematic for the

entanglement of the national, English institutions of justice – in the description of the High Court of

Chancery. But whereas the archetypal and symbolic element of Great Expectations was dictated by the

natural and moral entanglement of the marshes, and by the personal and social infection introduced into

the fictional world by Miss Havisham and the low light in her haunted and haunting bridal room, the

element of Bleak House is the wind. From the chilling London fog and the bleak November weather in

the opening scene, the book progresses towards the symbolically named country-house of the Lord and

Lady Deadlock and towards the Ghost‘s Walk promenade drenched in the sequel of the London fog:

damp rain. The characters themselves are threatened by windiness – first the self-declared unreliable

narrator Esther Summerson, who imagines that she can never interpret correctly the things she describes,

and which she fears might lose their substance, as it were, gone with the wind; secondly, Mr Jarndyce,

the architect of the book‘s encounters and the last in a line of people whom the system of the law turns

into inconsistent ghosts in nineteenth century Britain – not very differently from the Romanian system of

the twenty-first century law. Mr Jarndyce explicitly complains of the wind in his head.

Progressing from one of his declared masterpieces to the next, Dick ens‘s last finished novel, Our

Mutual Friend, reduces or enriches realism itself to such an extent as to put absence itself at its centre and

to become a very profound metatext. The text is more artistically conceived. This can be proved byexamining the complex significance of the syntagm ―our mutual friend‖ itself. It becomes, from an empty

label of sociality – in which everybody is everybody else‘s ―mutual friend‖ (as in the beginning scene

already discussed in the Veneerings‘ household) more and more involved in separating hypocritical or

maleficient ―mutual friends‖ (such as the emblematically named Lammles, who are morally lame plotters

incapable of becoming genuine friends with anybody) from true the gallery of true friends spread in the

novel. At one extreme, the shallowest of ―mutual friends‖ become plotters, such as the Lammles and the

couple of tramps, Mr Wegg and Mr Venus, at the other extreme, though they wear masks on their faces,

the good pairs of friends increase their virtuous powers in the course of the plot. As a realistic metatext,

the novel reflects – though not on its own construction, as twentieth-century modernist and post-

modernist literary works do – on the whole range of mutual relations that society consists of: mutual

betrayal and mutual friendship alike. The wager of the book is to attract towards the positive pole of

genuine human love and friendship the casual ―mutual friends‖. The characters in the middle – some of

them main characters of the book – are attracted in patient ways, by intrinsic cause-effect movements of

the plot, by the morally whole characters. A statistic calculation can indicate that the number of villains

versus angels in this book is balanced and that the role of the low mimetic and very serious qui pro quos

is not sentimental but constructive. Dickens is more interested here in the coexistence of good and evil

side by side in society than in find solutions for defeating evil.


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In his last finished book, there are more explicit indications about the book‘s comp lex ironic

statements – and, perhaps, less mystery. The sophistication of the titles, parts, subtitles and images is

greater in this book which wishes to indicate the ironies and complexities to be noticed in order to yield

its meaning. As a metatext, the book communicates with the readers over the heads of the characters and

their social masks. Dickens‘s art is more concentrated and systematic in this novel, for all its garrulous,

conversational spirit. The Cup and the Lip – the book‘s first part already indicates that the book is morecomplex than it appears: ―there‘s many a slip between the cup and the lip‖ (socoteala din ta^rg nu se

potriveste cu cea de acasa).

A twenty-first century reader, also, will go away from this book with a very great number of unforgettable

number of English identity emblems than are to be found in other novels by him. In the lecture put

together in more haste for the English Minor students, I made more of Dickens‘s memorable imagination

which fashioned the British nation. The comic types in Our Mutual Friend recall Dickens‘s humouristic

earlier fiction and they are the counterpart of the Bleak House national counterparts, which are, of course

primarily bleak. It is easy to remember the Veneerings as the types of Victorian upstarts – brand new,

glossy, sticky and unfaithful, as in their relationship with Twemlow, remotely connected to a Lord (Lord

Snigsworth) who is always invited to their dinners but who does not manage to see if he is their older or

newest friend.

Chapter 2

THE MAN FROM SOMEWHERE

Mr and Mrs Veneering were bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new

quarter of London. Everything about the Veneerings was spick and span new. All

their furniture was new, all their friends were new, all their servants were new, their

plate was new, their carriage was new, their harness was new, their horses were new,

their pictures were new, they themselves were new, they were as newly married as

was lawfully compatible with their having a bran-new baby, and if they had set up a

great-grandfather, he would have come home in matting from the Pantechnicon,

without a scratch upon him, French polished to the crown of his head.

For, in the Veneering establishment, from the hall-chairs with the new coat of arms,

to the grand pianoforte with the new action, and upstairs again to the new fire-escape,

all things were in a state of high varnish and polish. And what was observable in the

furniture, was observable in the Veneerings — the surface smelt a little too much of the

workshop and was a trifle sticky.

There was an innocent piece of dinner-furniture that went upon easy castors and

was kept over a livery stable-yard in Duke Street, Saint James's, when not in use, to

whom the Veneerings were a source of blind confusion. The name of this article was

Twemlow. Being first cousin to Lord Snigsworth, he was in frequent requisition, and

at many houses might be said to represent the dining-table in its normal state. Mr and

Mrs Veneering, for example, arranging a dinner, habitually started with Twemlow,


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and then put leaves in him, or added guests to him. Sometimes, the table consisted of

Twemlow and half a dozen leaves; sometimes, of Twemlow and a dozen leaves;

sometimes, Twemlow was pulled out to his utmost extent of twenty leaves. Mr and

Mrs Veneering on occasions of ceremony faced each other in the centre of the board,

and thus the parallel still held; for, it always happened that the more Twemlow was

pulled out, the further he found himself from the center, and nearer to the sideboard atone end of the room, or the window-curtains at the other.

But, it was not this which steeped the feeble soul of Twemlow in confusion. This he

was used to,and could take soundings of.The abyss to which he could find no bottom,

and from which st arted forth the engrossing and ever-swelling difficulty of his life,

was the insoluble question whether he was Veneering's oldest friend, or newest friend.

That the social is primarily a pragmatic relationship with the world of mutual friends, can also be seen in

the figure of Mr Podsnap, an embodiment of self-satisfied but vapid middle-class pater familias.

PODSNAPPERY (Chapter 11)

Mr Podsnap was well to do, and stood very high in Mr Podsnap's opinion.

Beginning with a good inheritance, he had married a good inheritance, and had

thriven exceedingly in the Marine Insurance way, and was quite satisfied. He never

could make out why everybody was not quite satisfied, and he felt conscious that he

set a brilliant social example in being particularly well satisfied with most things, and,above all other things, with himself.

Thus happily acquainted with his own merit and importance, Mr Podsnap settled

that whatever he put behind him he put out of existence. There was a dignified

conclusiveness — not to add a grand convenience — in this way of getting rid of

disagreeables which had done much towards establishing Mr Podsnap in his lofty

place in Mr Podsnap's satisfaction. 'I don't want to know about it; I don't choose to

discuss it; I don't admit it!' Mr Podsnap had even acquired a peculiar flourish of his

right arm in often clearing the world of its most difficult problems, by sweeping them

behind him (and consequently sheer away) with those words and a flushed face. Forthey affronted him.

Such mutual friends are perfect counterparts of Caragiale‘s ―Amicul‖, though they are higher middle

class fops, by comparison with Caragiale‘s petty middle class Mitica. Incidentally, however, Mr

Podsnap‘s habit of silencing everybody with his ponderous pod‘s snapping presence, ruined his

daughter‘s life in the book and made her be a prey of the Lammles‘ scheming.


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Our Mutual Friend also has a geuine pair of friends in the persons of the Boffin spouses, whose

environment testifies to their mutual tolerance and real affinities, as will be seen in the following

quotation.

'You don't understand it, Wegg, and I'll explain it. These arrangements is made by

mutual consent between Mrs Boffin and me. Mrs Boffin, as I've mentioned, is a

highflyer at Fashion; at present I'm not. I don't go higher than comfort, and comfort ofthe sort that I'm equal to the enjoyment of. Well then. Where would be the good of

Mrs Boffin and me quarrelling over it? We never did quarrel, before we come into

Boffin's Bower as a property; why quarrel when we have come into Boffin's Bower as

a property? So Mrs Boffin, she keeps up her part of the room, in her way; I keep up

my part of the room in mine. In consequence of which we have at once, Sociability (I

should go melancholy mad without Mrs Boffin), Fashion, and Comfort. If I get by

degrees to be a higher-flyer at Fashion, then Mrs Boffin will by degrees come

for'arder. If Mrs Boffin should ever be less of a dab at Fashion than she is at the

present time, then Mrs Boffin's carpet would go back'arder. If we should both

continny as we are, why then here we are, and give us a kiss, old lady.'

Mrs Boffin who, perpetually smiling, had approached and drawn her plump arm

through her lord's, most willingly complied. Fashion, in the form of her black velvet

hat and feathers, tried to prevent it; but got deservedly crushed in the endeavour.

This whole passage follows after a strange question and a typically dishonest answer to it and it

represents what corrects the conventional exchanges between people in society at large. Mr Boffin puts

things right by going to the essence of things and overturning appearances in addition to contradicting

them. After presenting the following precinct to his visitor, Wegg, a man with a wooden leg and who can

read books, but otherwise a tramp off the streets, Mr Boffin asks:

'Do you like it, Wegg?' asked Mr Boffin, in his pouncing manner.

'I admire it greatly, sir,' said Wegg. 'Peculiar comfort at this fireside, sir.'

'Do you understand it, Wegg?'

'Why, in a general way, sir,' Mr Wegg was beginning slowly and knowingly, with

his head stuck on one side, as evasive people do begin, when the other cut him short.

Mr Boffin‘s frankness is a sign of his trustworthiness in this book – and the frankness and

fairness are mirrored by the interior of the house shared fairly with his wife who is also his

friend. Domestic bliss made of love, mutual respect and communication is the cause for calling

the Boffins‘ home ―Boffin‘s bower‖(of bliss):

Chapter 5

BOFFIN'S BOWER

It was the queerest of rooms, fitted and furnished more like a luxurious amateur tap-

room than anything else within the ken of Silas Wegg. There were two wooden settles


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Alber t, Victoria‘s husband, after his death in 1869 and because by this time Tennyson had been lorded

and made Poet Laureate – in 1850 – and the Royal Pair‘s friend); Tennyson also revives classical Greek

heroes, motifs, examples to write dramatic monologues or fables: ―Ulysses‖ (a dramatic monologue),

―The Lotos Eaters‖ (a fable which expresses, by an analogy, the modern self -indulging state of

prostration) ―Tithonus‖ (a fable of human finitude).

Arnold laments or explains the predicament of the present by turning to the past, and writes elegies

meant to create deliverance (―the comprehension of the present and the past‖, consequently the possession

of general ideas). 8 Arnold writes elegies, lyrical poems that convey the predicament of the present and

seek some consolation by the confrontation with the past (for example, in ―Dover Beach‖, he seeks

consolation in the lasting art and lessons of history produced in the age of Sophocles and Xenophon; in

―The Scholar Gipsy‖, he seeks consolation in the exemplary escape from constraints that a man who loves

his soul more than his situation, as in the story included in the 1661 tract by Joseph Glanvil The Vanity of

Dogmatizing ). Each of Arnold‘s poems moves towards some generic statement/lesson, which can be

irritating nowadays, after the twentieth century surrealistic collages and in general experimental poems –

but it is the process and lyrical way in which his poems advance that matters in Arnold‘s poetry9.

Both writers search, in the past, for models to encourage the Bildung (spiritual and cultural edification)

of a heroic, enduring modern self - in an age of doubt and skepticism.10

Sceptical post-romantic poetry,

however, has absence, a sense of prostration and insufficiency at its heart; it tries to compensate for

absence by adopting a preacher‘s voice ready to explain and extend consolations for the predicament of

the modern soul. This holds true for Tennyson‘s In Memoriam (1850),, the elegy for the loss of a friend

and mentor, Arthur Henry Hallam, and for Arnold‘s ―The Buried Life‖, from the 1852 volume

Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems. Both Tennyson‘s and Arnold‘s poems abound in instances of

translation/adaptation and (sentimental in the sense of ―later‖) assimilation of past models ( Empedocles,

of monuments, ages, texts and themes belonging to past classical ages (the Golden Age of ancient Greece,

the Elizabethan age.

II.Tennyson and Arnold compared as Paramount Poets

The oppressive landscape of Victorian poetry

The illustration of the elegiac vein in Tennyson‘s and Arnold‘s poetry (a) AND (b) the lyrical rhythm

and devices of Tennyson‘s meditation on death– In Memoriam (1850):, whose curt meditative tableaux

are contrasted to Arnold‘s longer epics – The Scholar Gipsy (1853) – from the volume Poems: a New

Edition

(a)

8 Cf . ―On the Modern Element in Literature‖, 1857 (Arnold‘s inaugural lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry) 9 If one refers only to the lesson/general idea, the poems by Arnold are ruined for twentieth and twenty-first century

readers; if, on the contrary, the images and their progress are focused upon, the reading experience can be fully

rewarding.10 Thomas Carlyle declared the modern age an age of skepticism in On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in

History (1840 lectures, published in 1841) where he also singled out some modern saviours of humanity from

skepticism, acting as the heroes of old, the priests, kings and prophets: the poet and the man of letters. See lecture

five in Carlyle‘s On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History:―The Hero as Man of Letters: Johnson,

Rousseau, Burns‖.


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the elegiac vein in quotations from Tennyson and Arnold

* The early Tennyson: before In Memoriam

Compare ‖Song‖, with the background of a poem about a dying swan in his first volume ―The dyin Swan‖,

Juvenilia (1830); notice the same elegiac vein in Tennyson’s later volumes whose titles contains the

phrase ‖other poems‖ in the later collections The Lady of Shalott and Other Poems (1832)ii and English

Idylls and Other Poems (1840). It is worth noting that even in the twentieth century, you will get no lesser

a poet that T.S. Eliot titling his 1917 volume, by playing upon the Victorians’ manner in a manneristic and

also modernistic vein, ―Prufrock and Other Observations‖


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Song

I

Heavily hangs the broad sunflower

Over its grave i’the earth so chilly:

Heavily hangs the hollyhock,

Heavily hangs the tiger-lily.

II

The air is damp, and hush’d and close,

As a sick man’s room when he taketh repose

An hour before death;

My very heart faints and my whole soul grieves

At the moist rich smell of the rotting leaves,

And the breath

Of the fading edges of box beneath,

And the year’s last rose.

Heavily hangs the broad sunflower

Over its grave i’the earth so chilly:

Heavily hangs the hollyhock,

Heavily hangs the tiger-lily.

(‖Song‖)

The wild swan’s death-hymn took the soul

Of that waste place with joy

Hidden in sorrow : at first to the ear

The warble was low, and full and clear;

………………………………………..


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And the creeping mosses and clambering weeds,

And the willow-branches hoar and dank,

And the wavy swell of the soughing reeds,

And the wave-worn horns of the echoing bank,

And the silvery marsh – flowers that throng

The desolate creeks and pools among,

Were flooded over with eddying song.

(‖The Dying Swan‖)

or, at the beginning of ‖The Lotos-Eaters‖

In the afternoon they came unto a land

In which it seemed always afternoon.

All round the coast the languid air did swoon,

Breathing like one that hath a weary dream.

Full-faced above the valley stood the moon;

And like a downward smoke, the slender stream

Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem.

A land of streams! some, like a downward smoke,

Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go;

And some thro’ wavering lights and shadows broke,

Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below

From this atmosphere, Tennyson awakens into existence equally melancholy shadows of characters,

incarnations of sad, slothful dreams themselves:

The charmed sunset linger’d low adown

In the red West: thro’ mountain clefts the dale

Was seen far inland, and the yellow down

Border’d with palm, and many a winding vale


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A much earlier poem is explicit about what ailed Arnold‘s contemporary humanity longing for DELIVERANCE from ―the shadow of itself‖

11:

MATTHEW ARNOLD, FROM THE 1852 VOLUME EMPEDOCLES ON ETNA ANDOTHER POEMS

To Marguerite: Continued Yes! in the sea of life enisled,

With echoing straits between us thrown,

Dotting the shoreless watery wild,

We mortal millions live alone.

The islands feel the enclasping flow,

And then their endless bounds they know.

But when the moon their hollows lights,

And they are swept by balms of spring,

And in their glens, on starry nights,

The nightingales divinely sing;

And lovely notes, from shore to shore,

Across the sounds and channels pour—

Oh! then a longing like despair

Is to their farthest caverns sent;

For surely once, they feel, we were

Parts of a single continent!Now round us spreads the watery plain—

Oh might our marges meet again!

Who order'd, that their longing's fire

Should be, as soon as kindled, cool'd?

Who renders vain their deep desire?—

A God, a God their severance ruled!

And bade betwixt their shores to be

The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea.

The Buried LifeBY MATTHEW ARNOLD

Light flows our war of mocking words, and yet,

Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet!

11 See Thomas Carlyle‘s Sartor Resartus ―The Everlasting Yea‖, after the passage with the Infinite Shoeblack:

Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: it is even, as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/matthew-arnoldhttp://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/matthew-arnoldhttp://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/matthew-arnoldhttp://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/matthew-arnoldhttp://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/matthew-arnoldhttp://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/matthew-arnoldhttp://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/matthew-arnold


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I feel a nameless sadness o'er me roll.

Yes, yes, we know that we can jest,

We know, we know that we can smile!

But there's a something in this breast,

To which thy light words bring no rest,

And thy gay smiles no anodyne.

Give me thy hand, and hush awhile,

And turn those limpid eyes on mine,

And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul.

Alas! is even love too weak

To unlock the heart, and let it speak?

Are even lovers powerless to revealTo one another what indeed they feel?

I knew the mass of men conceal'd

Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd

They would by other men be met

With blank indifference, or with blame reproved;

I knew they lived and moved

Trick'd in disguises, alien to the rest

Of men, and alien to themselves—and yet

The same heart beats in every human breast!

But we, my love!—doth a like spell benumb

Our hearts, our voices?—must we too be dumb?

Ah! well for us, if even we,

Even for a moment, can get free

Our heart, and have our lips unchain'd;

For that which seals them hath been deep-ordain'd!

Fate, which foresaw

How frivolous a baby man would be—

By what distractions he would be possess'd,

How he would pour himself in every strife,

And well-nigh change his own identity —


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That it might keep from his capricious play

His genuine self, and force him to obey

Even in his own despite his being's law,

Bade through the deep recesses of our breast

The unregarded river of our life

Pursue with indiscernible flow its way;

And that we should not see

The buried stream, and seem to be

Eddying at large in blind uncertainty,

Though driving on with it eternally.

But often, in the world's most crowded streets,

But often, in the din of strife,There rises an unspeakable desire

After the knowledge of our buried life;

A thirst to spend our fire and restless force

In tracking out our true, original course;

A longing to inquire

Into the mystery of this heart which beats

So wild, so deep in us—to know

Whence our lives come and where they go.

And many a man in his own breast then delves,

But deep enough, alas! none ever mines.

And we have been on many thousand lines,

And we have shown, on each, spirit and power;

But hardly have we, for one little hour,

Been on our own line, have we been ourselves—

Hardly had skill to utter one of all

The nameless feelings that course through our breast,

But they course on for ever unexpress'd. And long we try in vain to speak and act

Our hidden self, and what we say and do

Is eloquent, is well— but 't is not true!

And then we will no more be rack'd

With inward striving, and demand

Of all the thousand nothings of the hour


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Their stupefying power;

Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call!

Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn,

From the soul's subterranean depth upborne

As from an infinitely distant land,

Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey

A melancholy into all our day.

Only — but this is rare—

When a belovèd hand is laid in ours,

When, jaded with the rush and glare

Of the interminable hours,

Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear,

When our world-deafen'd earIs by the tones of a loved voice caress'd—

A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,

And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.

The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,

And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.

A man becomes aware of his life's flow,

And hears its winding murmur; and he sees

The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.

And there arrives a lull in the hot race

Wherein he doth for ever chase

That flying and elusive shadow, rest.

An air of coolness plays upon his face,

And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.

And then he thinks he knows

The hills where his life rose,

And the sea where it goes.

(b)

*The lyrical rhythm and devices of Tennyson‘s meditation on death– In Memoriam (1850)

*The lyrical rhythm and devices of Tennyson‘s meditation on death– In Memoriam (1850)


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What whispers from thy lying lip?

’The stars,’ she whispers, ’blindly run;

A web is wov’n across the sky;

From out waste places comes a cry,

And murmurs from the dying sun:

’And all the phantom, Nature, stands-

With all the music in her tone,

A hollow echo of my own,-

A hollow form with empty hands.‖

And shall I take a thing so blind,

Embrace her as my natural good;

Or crush her, like a vice of blod,

Upon the threshold of the mind?

...................................................

XI

Calm is the morn without a sound,

Calm as to suit a calmer grief,

And only thro’ the faded leaf

The chestnut pattering to the ground:

Calm and deep peace on this high wold,


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And on these dews that drench the furze,

And all the silvery gossamers

That twinkle into green and gold:

Calm and still light on yon great plain

That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,

And crowded farms and lessening towers,

To mingle with the bounding main:

Calm and deep peace in this wide air,

These leaves that redden to the fall;

And in my heart, if calm at all,

If any calm, a calm despair:

Calm on the seas, and silver sleep,

And waves that sway themselves in rest,

And dead calm in that noble breast

Which heaves but with the heaving deep.

…..............................................................

L

Be near me when my light is low

When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick

And tingle; and the heart is sick

And all the wheels of Being slow.

Be near me when the sensuous frame


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Is rack’d with pangs that conquer trust;

And Time, a maniac scattering dust,

And Life, a Fury slinging flame.

Be near me when my faith is dry,

And men the flies of latter spring,

That lay their eggs, and sting and sing,

And weave their petty cells and die.

Be near me when I fade away,

To point the term of human strife,

And on the low dark verge of life

The twilight of eternal day.

B.

III. Conclusions

The taste: elegiac. The paramount Victorian poetic voices were voices of epigones: they considered themselves

epigones of the grandiose, classical past – but in fact they were post-romantic epigones, for which see quotations

from the Contributions I, p. 42, below

‖Post-romantic‖- from the point of view of Northrop Frye‘s ‖Anatomy of Criticism‖, the First Essay, it is possibleto detach a number of features that the Romantics had added to poetry, features that were not lost in Victorian

verse12.

– Regarding the poet, the Victorian poet, just like the Romantic, moves back in time and space, higher too and

beyond the conventional experience, into a more imaginative order of experience. But whereas the Romantic

remains lyrically elevated in/by that imaginative transport, the Victorian poet returns wiser and embittered, as a rule,

to his present-day audience for whose sole benefit, it appears, he has soared into the provisional infinite; hence the

shared elegiac tone associated to Victorian lyricism -the romantic love of (organic) metaphor and the Victorian

alternative love of allegory, simile and dramatic representation in general. It is not by accident that the Victorian

poets selected the form of the dramatic monologue as their favourite form of self-expression.

-Regarding the formal features shared by the Victorian with the Romantic poets, Frye mentions the tendency of the

Romantics to develop encyclopaedic, grand, long poems in the form of epics, which is retained in Victorian poetry.The structures and motivations of these long epics can only be elucidated when relating the poetry to the poet‘s own

design. The range of encyclopaedic epics includes:

12 This overall view of Victorian poetry is a synthesis from the Fryean text mentioned, the second part of the First

Essay, dedicated to thematic (non-fiction).


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Long fields of barley and of rye,

That clothe the wold and meet the sky;

And thro' the field the road runs by

To many-tower'd Camelot;

The yellow-leaved waterlily

The green-sheathed daffodilly

Tremble in the water chilly

Round about Shalott.

Willows whiten, aspens shiver.

The sunbeam showers break and quiver

In the stream that runneth ever

By the island in the riverFlowing down to Camelot.

Four gray walls, and four gray towers

Overlook a space of flowers,

And the silent isle imbowers

The Lady of Shalott.

Underneath the bearded barley,

The reaper, reaping late and early,

Hears her ever chanting cheerly,

Like an angel, singing clearly,

O'er the stream of Camelot.

Piling the sheaves in furrows airy,

Beneath the moon, the reaper weary

Listening whispers, ' 'Tis the fairy,

Lady of Shalott.'

Lecture 6 Module Three: Oblique Victorian Poetry (II): the Dramatic Monologue Species:

Robert Browning the Scandal Monger - Irony and Idealism in his Inciting Verse ( Contributions I,

81-87). The Comparison withTennyson’s ―Ulysses‖ 1


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The contrast between the indirect narrative and indirect dramatic discourse (of the dramatic

monologue): Browning’s voice in “By the Fire Side” (1833) and in poems from the volumes

Romances (1845), Men and Women (1855) and Dramatis Personnae (1864) (Contributions I,

75 et seq.)

While in “By the Fire Side” the reader traverses several discourses embedded in one another as a

Chinese boxes game (in a frame narrative about a studious, meditative and poetic man seen from

outside by youngsters giggling at his activities, followed closely by another narrative that makes the man

advance into his past “*to slope+ to Italy at last/And youth, by green degrees” , only to get, finally, to the

core of the poem, which is love: domestic, mature, settled love longing to understand with the soul “The

Great Word which makes all things new/When earth breaks up and Heaven expands” and what change

will come “when earth breaks up and Heaven expands” for people who feel their one soul together.

II III

I shall be found by the fire, suppose, Till the young ones whisper, finger onlip

O’er a great wise book as beseemeth

age ’There he is at it, deep in Greek:

While the shutters flap as the crosswindblows

Now, then, or never, out we slip

And I turn the page, and I turn the page, To cut from the hazels by the creek Not verse now, only prose ! A mainmast for our ship!’

IV V I shall be at it indeed, my friends! The outside frame, like your hazel-trees-

Greek puts already on either side But the inside-archway narrows fast, Such a branch-work forth as soonextends

And a rarer sort succeeds to these,

To a vista opening far and wide, And we slope to Italy at last And I pass out where it ends. And youth, by green degrees.

Next, for most of its middle part, the poem remains in the region of what Mill called “the state or states

of human sensibility” observing itself and “human emotion… painted with scrupulous truth”


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XXXIX

Oh, the little more, and how much it is!

And the little less, and what worlds away

How a sound shall quicken content to bliss,

Or a breath suspend the blood’s best play,

And life be a proof of this!

The poem connects its meditations (that resemble Tennyson‘s In Memoriam stanzas) alonggeneral lines because it amplifies its thoughts to embrace with the soul all the levels of nature

and hold them together in a complete picture of existence

XXVII

Think, when our one soul understands

The Great Word which makes all things new

When earth breaks up and Heaven expands

How will the change strike me and you

In the House not made with hands?

Notice in the final soliloquy (as a meditative discourse addressed to an audience, as we remember from

Mill’s “What Is Poetry?”) – the shift of persons to the first person plural, to the plurality of togetherness,

to “me and you” from the predominant “I” ,at the beginning of the poem. The subject of t

victorian literature module

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