NOVELISTS IN EARLY VICTORIAN PERIOD

Lecture 18History of English literatureCOMSATS Virtual Campus

Islamabad

Outline

• Charles Dickens• WILLIAM THACKERAY

• Works• Themes

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Charles Dickens’ Biography (1812-1870)

• Born in Portsmouth, 7 February 1812

• 1824, Dickens worked at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse

• 1824, Mr. Dickens (Charles’ father) taken to debtors’ prison; family goes with him

• Imprisoned from February – May 1824

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More Bio

• 1827 - Dickens family evicted from home for not paying rent

• Charles is pulled out of private school• Charles, now 15, becomes law clerk and free-

lance writer• 1834 - Charles takes Boz as pen name• 1834 - Charles’ Dad re-arrested for debts

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Dickens starts Publishing!

• 1836 - Sketches by Boz

• 1837 - The Pickwick Papers

• and on a personal note...

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“Here Comes the Bride…”

• 1836 (Dickens is 24) he and Catherine Hogarth get married

• and… one year later, the first “little Dickens” is born

• and one year after that, new baby is born...

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But, back to business!

• 1837 - Oliver Twist is serially published (appears in periodical magazines)

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Some other Dickens’ novels…• 1838 -- Nicholas Nickleby• 1840 -- The Old Curiosity Shop• 1841 -- Barnaby Rudge• 1842 -- American Notes• 1843 -- A Christmas Carol• 1844 -- Martin Chuzzlewit• 1844 -- The Chimes• 1845 -- The Cricket on the Hearth• 1846 -- The Battle of Life• 1846 -- Dombey and Son

And so writing goes on...• 1850 -- David Copperfield• 1853 -- Bleak House• 1853 -- A Child’s History of England and... a

near nervous breakdown• 1854 -- Hard Times• 1857 -- Little Dorrit• 1859 -- A Tale of Two Cities• 1861 -- Great Expectations• 1865 -- Our Mutual Friends• 1869 -- The Mystery of Edwin Drood (unfinished)

What was happening in 1837?• King William IV of

England dies

• Victoria becomes queen of England

• Benjamin Disraeli delivers his first speech in the House of Commons

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And in the arts?

• Nathaniel Hawthorne publishes Twice Told Tales – it becomes a best seller

• William H. Prescott publishes The History of the Reign of Isabella and Ferdinand

• John Constable died (English landscape painter)

• Berlioz completes “Grande Messe des Morts,” Opus 5

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In the sciences

• Industrialist August Borsig opens iron foundry and engine-building factory in Berlin

• Wheatstone and Cooke patent electric telegraph

• Samuel Morse exhibits his electric telegraph• Dutchman Johannes Diderik born (Nobel Prize

in physics in 1910)

Themes in Dickens’ novels• The powerlessness of children• Good’s ability to triumph over evil• Man’s humanity to man• Man’s inhumanity to man• The outcast’s search for status and

identity• The heinous (= hateful) nature of

crime and criminals

03/12/2007 Cosimo Cannata 14

Hard life for English teenagers in this century

03/12/2007 Cosimo Cannata 15

Cruelty and inhumanity in daily life

Dickens' style of writing• 1. Dickens’ descriptions show a wonderful eye for

DETAIL.• 2. Dickens’ style of writing is filled spaces, and

included lots of REPETITION and long LISTS.• 3. Dickens loved words. He included lots of powerful

ADJECTIVES, and is famous for his use of METAPHORS and SIMILES.

• 4. From the early 1850s, Dickens gave public readings of his novels. His writing is RHYTHMIC and designed to be read out loud.

• 5. The effect is COMIC or heart-breakingly• 6. The tone becomes SENTIMENTAL.• 7. D. used DIALECT and brilliant sections of

DIALOGUE and EXAGGERATION.

Physical description — telling us what the character looks like dialogue — what the character says• Physical actions — what the character does (particularly in relation to what he or she says or thinks.)• Thoughts, or mental actions — the character's inner life, what the character thinks

Techniques for characterization - 1

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Techniques for characterization – 2

• Judgment by others — what other characters say and think about this fictional person

• The narrator's judgement — what narrator tells us about the character

• The author's judgement — what the author thinks of the character (sometines difficult to determine until late in the narrative)

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Children and city (very hard) life

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Children from low class suffered abuses, long working hours and were the weakest members of London society

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Not children from upper class…:easy life, dance, food and

facilities…

Exercise of moral conscience…

• He exercised his social conscience

• He crusaded for children’s rights.

• He was an advocate of child labour laws to protect children.

• He opposed cruelty, deprivation, and corporal punishment of children.

• He believed in and lobbied for just treatment of criminals.

What to watch (out) for...

• Use of irony

• Use of coincidence

• Use of humour

WILLIAM THACKERAY (1811-1863)

INTRODUCTION-Who was William Thackeray-The short biography-Some expressive moments of his

life(Marriage,Troubled Times , Responsibilities,The Brookfields, Controversy With Charles Dickens)

-The best books he wrote-History of his books-Later Years -Conclusion

Who was William Thackeray• William Makepeace Thackeray was

the second representative of critical realism in English Literature of the 19th century.Dickens and Thackeray were such near contemporaries that their work was often compared,but Thackeray`s life was different from that of Charles Dickens.

The short biography• William Makepeace Thackeray was born in Calcutta,

India, as the only son of Richmond Thackeray, a Collector in the East Indian Company's service. After his father died he was sent to home to England. He was educated at Charterhouse and at Trinity College, Cambridge. Thackeray abandoned his studies without taking a degree, having lost some of his inheritance of twenty thousand pounds through gambling. In the beginning of the 1830s he visited Germany, where he met Goethe.

• During 1831-33 Thackeray studied law at the Middle Temple, London, but had little enthusiasm to continue his studies. In 1833 he brought with a large heritage the National Standard, but lost his fortune a year later in the Indian bank failures and other bad investments. According to an anecdote, Thackeray offered to undertake the task of illustrating Dickens's Pickwick Papers in 1836, but the author himself found Thackeray's drawings unsuitable.

Some expressive moments of his life

• Thackeray began to contribute regularly to Fraser's Magazine, Morning Chronicle, New Monthly Magazine and The Times. His writings attracted first attention in Punch, where he satirized English snobbery. These sketches reappeared in 1848 as THE BOOK OF SNOBS, in which he stated that "he who meanly admires mean things is a Snob."

• In 1840 Isabella Thackeray suffered a mental breakdown, from which she never recovered, through she survived Thackeray by thirty years. The author was forced to send his children to France to his mother. The children returned to England in 1846 to live with him.

Marriage• He met Isabella Shawe, a timid, simple and artless girl. He fell outrightly in love

with Isabella. She was just 17 and was totally under control of her mother. He was immediately ready for marriage, but Mrs Shawe did not permit. Isabella herself could not make any decision. Similarly, his parents were also much reluctant for the union. His stepfather wanted him to establish himself first, for that Thackeray was made the Paris correspondent for a newspaper The Constitutional and Public Register at Ј400 per year. Backed by the income and through his steady persistence, the marriage did take place finally on August 20, 1836. After trying out briefly the bohemian life of an artist in Paris, and failure of his newspaper, he returned to London in 1837 and started his career as a journalist. He worked for periodicals like Fraser's Magazine and The Morning Chronicle, but his most successful association was with Punch. Thackeray worked as a freelance journalist for about 10 years, publishing literary criticism, art criticism, articles, and fiction, either anonymously or under a number of comic pseudonyms. Often he used absurd pen names such as George Savage Fitzboodle, Michael Angelo Tit Marsh, Theophile Wagstaff and C J Yellowplush, Esq. William and Isabella Thackeray's first child, Anne Isabella, was born on June 9, 1837. Her birth was followed by the collapse of The Constitution of which William was the Paris correspondent. Thackeray began writing as many articles as humanly possible and sent them to any newspaper that would print them.

PARIS FASHIONS FOR JANUARY, 1864.

Troubled Times• Thackeray and Isabella Shawe had a happy life during their first

years of marriage. But as financial demands forced Thackeray into more and more work, Isabella became isolated and lonely. The happy years of marriage was eclipsed by the tragic death of their second daughter Jane, born in July 1838. She died of respiratory illness in March the following year. Harriet Marian, their third daughter was born in 1840. It was at this time that Isabella fell victim to mental illness . After a few months she started displaying suicidal tendencies and as it was difficult to control her, she was placed in a private institution. Doctors told Thackeray that all she needed was a change of air. She was taken to her mother in Ireland, where she attempted to drown herself in the ocean. Thackeray began a series of futile searches for her cure. He took Isabella to various spas and sanatoriums, at one point himself undergoing a 'water cure' with her, since she wouldn't go at it alone. He continued to hope for some time that she would make a full recovery. He was forced to send his children to France to his mother

Responsibilities• Thackeray's children returned to England in 1846. He gradually

began paying more and more attention to his daughters, for whom he established a home in London. Eventually, he resigned himself to Isabella's condition and was seemingly indifferent to the circumstances around her and the children. He raised his daughters with the help of his mother, who was never satisfied with the governess's Thackeray hired. The touching reminiscences of Anne Thackeray's biographical introductions to his works portray him as a loving, if busy, father. He started the serial publication of his novel Vanity Fair in 1847. It brought Thackeray both fame and prosperity. From then on he was an established author on the English literary scene. Dickens was then at the height of his fame, and, though the two men appreciated each other's work, their admirers were fond of debating their comparative merits.

The Brookfields• During these years of success, Thackeray lived the life of a bachelor in

London. He spent much time with his friends, attending the social functions of a fashionable society. He became the constant attendant upon Jane Brookfield, the wife of an old friend from Cambridge. Thackeray and the Brookfields were involved in an increasingly tense emotional triangle. His first trip to America in 1852 provided the time and distance for Thackeray to try and extricate himself from the tangle. Henry Brookfield's coldness and desire to dominate his wife, her resistance and the need for someone to turn to, and Thackeray's loneliness combined to create a complicated affair. Brookfield alternately ignored or forbade his wife's warm communications with the successful novelist. Jane Brookfield returned Thackeray's ardent expressions of friendship and lamented her husband's inability to understand her. Thackeray, for his part, professed for Jane a devotion that was pure and he also remained a companion of her husband. He nonetheless felt betrayed by Jane's tendency to cool down the correspondence when Brookfield complained

Controversy With Charles Dickens

• Of the several literary quarrels in which Thackeray got involved during his life, the 'Garrick Club affair' is best remembered. Charles Dickens had always been one of Thackeray's earliest and best friends. But a quarrel had arisen and for several years the two men were not on talking terms. Thackeray had taken offense at some personal remarks in a column by Edmund Yates and demanded an apology, eventually taking the affair to the Garrick Club committee. Dickens was already upset with Thackeray for an indiscreet remark about his affair with Ellen Ternan and so he championed Yates. Dickens helped Yates to draft letters both to Thackeray, and in his defense, to the club's committee. Despite Dickens' intervention,

The best books he wrote• THE YELLOWPLUSH PAPERS, 1838 • CATHERINE, 1839 • THE PARIS SKETCH BOOK, 1840 • THE HISTORY OF SAMUEL TITMARSH AND THE GREAT HOGGARTY DIAMOND, 1841 - Samuel Titmarsh eli tarina

isosta Hoggartyn timantista • THE BOOK OF SNOBS, 1848 • VANITY FAIR, 1847-48 - REBECCA AND ROWENA, 1850 • THE ENGLISH HUMOURISTS OF THE 18TH CENTURY, 1851 • THE HISTORY OF HENRY ESMOND, ESQ., 1852, 3 vol. - Henry Esmondin tarina hänen itsensä kertomana (trans.

by Martta Räsänen) • THE ENGLISH HUMORISTS OF THE 18TH CENTURY, 1853 • THE NEWCOMES, 1853-55 • THE ROSE AND THE RING, 1855 • MISCELLANIES, 4 vol., 1855-57 • THE VIRGINIANS, 1857-59 • THE FOUR GEORGES, 1860 • LOVEL THE WIDOWER, 1860 • POEMS AND ESSAYS, 1860 • THE ADVENTURES OF PHILIP ON HIS WAY THROUGH THE WORLD, 1862 • ROUNDABOUT PAPERS, 1860-63 • DENIS DUVAL, 1864 • COLLECTED ED., 1867-69 • LETTERS AND PRIVATE PAPERS, 1945-46

Vanity Fair(1848)It’s the book of social realism, which brought great fame to the novelist, and

remains his most-read work up to the present day. It appeared 1st in 24 monthly installments which Thackeray illustrated himself, and then in 1848,as a complete

book

The history of Pendennis(1850)

• One of the earliest and greatest of the Victorian Bildungsroman, this introspective novel treats London's bohemian and literary underworld and the romantic entanglements of its hero, Arthur Pendennis, with comic and uninhibited style. Son of a selfless widow, Pendennis moves from one disastrous romantic involvement to another on the fringes of the corrupt upper classes. Thackeray had slaved for ten years in this literary bohemia; the introduction considers the parallels between Thackeray's life and the novel, and examines the changes taking place in Victorian England throughout the years of the story

Rebecca and Rowena (1850)

• A satire on the Victorian admiration for all things medieval, this early work by the author of Vanity Fair is decidedly contrary—a self-confessed "middle-aged novel" that begins where most novels end: with marriage. Rebecca and Rowena calls into question the ending of Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, exploring the miserable marriage of Sir Wilfrid to the "icy, faultless, prim" Rowena. In an irreverent and theatrical plot, in which the dead come back to life, marriage is exposed as really quite dull, and imperialism is mocked mercilessly, Thackeray ridiculously reunites Ivanhoe with his first love

The English Humourists(1852)• William Thackeray (1811-63) began as a journalist and produced his

first critique in 1837, and his first novel in 1841. His association with Punch began in 1842 and articles continued until 1854. In 1851 he gave a series of lectures on 'The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century' in cities around England and later the USA. This collection of potted biographies comprises Jonathan Swift; Congreve and Addison; Richard Steele; Prior, Gay and Pope; Hogarth, Smollet and Fielding; Sterne and Goldsmith. These seven lectures were delivered on Thackeray's American tour of 1852, but only the six lectures pertaining to English authors were published in England; the seventh - "Charity and Humour" - appeared here for the first time. These lectures were a great success with the Victorian public, and remain a witty, enjoyable and affectionate comment on the period by one of England's greatest writers.

The Newcomes(1855)• The Newcomes (1853-5) concerns a self-made man, Sir

Brian Newcome, whose marriage into the aristocratic Kew family brings titled respectability to his family's "new" money. Now the marriage of his daughter Ethel is of crucial importance to both families' quest for further advancement. A revelatory and hugely witty excursion among the hypocritical upperclass, The Newcomes memorializes the evolution of an age.

The Rose and the Ring• Between the kingdoms of Paflagonia and Crim Tartary,

there lived a mysterious personage, who was known in those countries as the Fairy Blackstick, from the ebony wand or crutch which she carried; on which she rode to the moon sometimes, or upon other excursions of business or pleasure, and with which she performed her wonders. When she was young, and had been first taught the art of conjuring by the necromancer, her father, she was always practicing her skill, whizzing about from one kingdom to another upon her black stick, and conferring her fairy favors upon this Prince or that.

Later Years• It was as if Thackeray had an intuition that he must make haste to

hail and farewell to his old friend. It was only a few nights later - December 23, 1863 - that he went to sleep for the last time. He was found dead on the morning of Christmas Eve. The master had called the roll; and Thackeray, like the beloved Colonel Newcome in one of his novels, responded gently, "Adsum - I am here." Towards the end of his life, Thackeray was proud that through his writings, he had regained the patrimony lost to bank failures and gambling. He passed on to his daughters an inheritance sufficient for their support and also a grand house in Kensington. He was buried in the Kensal Green Cemetery on December 30. An estimated 2000 mourners came to pay tribute, among them was Charles Dickens. After his death, a commemorative bust was placed in Westminster Abbey.

Conclusion

• The picture of the ruling classes of England created by Thackeray remains a classic example of social satire to this very day.

Bibliography

• A Critical History of English Literature by David Daiches• A Critical History of English Literature by Dr. Mullik