english 6175 - victorian literature @ east carolina u.

This Week in English 6175, Week 11

Week 11
(31 - 04 Nov.)

Mon. 31 • Thackeray, Vanity Fair (Chapter 10-14, pp 100-164)

Wed. 02 • Thackeray, Vanity Fair (Chapter 15-19, pp 165-219); Class will meet in the Great Room, Mendenhall for the Teaching with Technology Think-In

Due: Assignment 09: Reading Quiz Vanity Fair (30 pts)

Fri. 04 • Examination

Due: Assignment 10: Exam (120 pts)

Vanity Fair, Episode 02, Scene 01

Becky Sharp becomes indespensable to Sir Pitt Crawley and ensnares the affections of both Captain Rawdon Crawley and his rich aunt, Miss Crawley. The scene opens with Becky doing impersonations of family members at Queen's Crawley for the amusement of Miss Crawley




Download Vanity Fair, Episode 2, Scene 1.m4v

DSIR 03 - David Copperfield

Mini-lecture 17: "The Crimean War"

Mini-lecture 17: "The Crimean War: 1854-1856"

Scope: In 1854. Britain went to war against a European power for the first time since Waterloo(1815). In alliance with France and Turkey, it fought against Russia on the coast of Black Sea, afraid that Russia might profit from the declining strength of the Turks and threaten Britain’s Indian empire. The British campaign was mishandled by an army riddled with inefficiency, nepotism, and corruption, but ultimately prevailed. because the enemy was even more poorly organized. The Charge of the Light Brigade, one of the most famous incidents of this war and the one that occasioned Lord Tennyson’s poem. demonstrated many of the faults of the British army in concentrated form. Two new developments made the war memorable: the nursing achievements of Florence Nightingale, whose hospital work at Scutari showed that recovery rates aniong wounded soldiers could be much higher than they had been traditionally, and the investigative reporting of the Times correspondent William Howard Russell. His stories, arriving in Britain almost instantly because of the new telegraph, aroused public opinion, led to political investigations, and contributed to the resignation of Prime Minister Lord Aberdeen.

Click here for a printable, PDF version of the following outline.

Outline

I. Fear of Russian power was a steady undercurrent of nineteenth-century British politics.

A. Liberals thought of the Czars as the epitome of cruel. arbitrary. and backward rule.

B. Conservatives feared Russian designs on the Eastern Mediterranean aiid the British Empire in India.

C. Both anticipated that the declining Turkish Empire would be displaced by Russia.

D. Russia occupied the area west of the Black Sea that is today Rumania. triggering war with Turkey, which also claimed the area.

E. After a long period of diplomatic maneuvering. Britain and France declared war against Russia ill alliance with Turkey in March 1854.

II. The British army was mismanaged.

A. Officers gained their positions through social and political influence, not military skill.

1. Commissions could be bought and sold, and regimental commanders were entitled to dress their soldiers in uniforms of their own design.

2. High—level commands usually canie through Seniority, and all the British commanders in the Crimean War were over age sixty-live.

B. Rankers were drawn from the poor and unemployed and were forced to submit to severe discipline.

C. The army was not suitably equipped for the climatic extremes of the Crimea.

1. The first campaign, at Varna on the western shore of the Black Sea, took place in blistering heat. Outbreaks of cholera and dysentery soon weakened the army.

2. Later, in the Crimea. after the Russians had retreated, the army suffered from the same deadly winter that had defeated Napoleon in 1812.

3. Supplies arrived too slowly and were often inappropriate to conditions.

D. The Anglo-French forces (about 25,000 from each country) won a series of victories at Alma, Balaclava, and lnkerman in the fall of 1854, then besieged the fortress of Sevastapol.

1. They could have seized Sevastapol at once, but because of a lack of information, they delayed.

2. This delay afforded the Russians the opportunity to fortify Sebastapol. resulting in a year-long siege.

E. The Charge of the Light Brigade was launched in error during the Battle of Balaclava.

1. From a hilltop. Lord Raglan watched captured British guns being removed and sent a message to Lord Cardigan to retake them.

2. From his position in the valley, Lord Cardigan could not see these guns.

3. Rather than question orders, he attacked the entrenched batteries lie could see, which fired on his men throughout their charge.

4. They overran the battery but were unable to hold it.

5. The event occasioned the work of poet-laureate Tennyson.

F. Queen Victoria followed the course of the war closely.

1. She created a decoration, the Victoria Cross, for officers and ranks alike.

2. She followed the news of the campaigns closely.

3. She resented the fact that the war was acconipanied by an outbreak of anti-foreign feeling that was turned against Prince Albert.

4. She invited Lord Cardigan to describe the Charge of the Light Brigade to her in person.

III. William Howard Russell’s journalism criticized the British army’s conduct.

A. Telegraph lines to London meant that news arrived in Britain the same day rather than weeks later, as it had in previous wars: press dispatches regularly arrived more quickly than commanders’ reports got to the cabinet.

B. William Howard Russell, a journalist for the London Times, wrote in a style that stripped the romance from war, describing the suffering of the soldiers.

C. Russell established the press as a potentially powerful political force.

1. The stories prompted a radical MP, John Roebuck, to demand a committee of inquiry into the government’s conduct of the war.

2. The vote in favor of this committee was so strong that the prime minister, Lord Aberdeen, resigned.

3. Lord Palmerston replaced him and began to rectify the chaos.

4. The commission’s report concluded that the antiquated system, rather than individual mendacity, had caused the early disasters.

D. Roger Fenton, a pioneering photographer, made 360 photographs in the Crimea; the Crimean War was the first war in history of which we have photographs.

E. It substantiated a small anti-war movement in Parliament; Cobden and Bright, former leaders of the Anti-Corn-Law League, led it.

IV. Florence Nightingale (nicknamed by soldiers “the Lady with the Lamp”) improved medical care for the wounded soldiers.

A. She had sought a nursing career at a time when such work was considered inappropriate for genteel women.

1. She rejected suitors.

2. She studied nursing in Germany.

B. News of the war led her to lobby Sidney Herbert, a politically wellplaced friend, to let her lead a nurses’ expedition.

C. She took thirty-eight volunteer nurses and a shipload of equipment to Scutari (near Istanibul, several hundred miles from the actual battles).

D. Nightingale dramatically improved conditions at Scutari.

1. Nightingale feuded with Sir John Hall.

2. She cleaned filthy wards and provided beds, linen, and regular laundry. (Five times as many soldiers died of disease as of battle wounds.)

3. Publicity for her work brought voluntary and official help and money from England.

4. Queen Victoria publicly honored her when she returned at war’s end.

E. Nightingale became an effective behind-the-scenes lobbyist for hospital building and sanitation.

1. Her pose as an invalid was belied by her prolific writings.

2. At a tinie when women had no public political role, Nightingale was not allowed to give testimony to parliamentary commissions.
Instead, Sidney Herbert and other male political friends worked at her bidding.

3. She established St. Thomas’s Hospital, London, opposite Parliament. Britain’s first school of nursing.

4. Her work dignified nursing as a job for ladies.

V. The Crimean War ended in 1856 with the Peace of Paris.

A. The treaty compelled the new Russian czar, Alexander II, to relinquish Russia’s territorial claims in the eastern Danube area and to demolish its Black Sea naval bases.

B. In Britain, the war led to a round of rationalization, civil service reform, and the abolition of purchase for army commissions (1871).

Essential Reading:
Winifred Baunigart, The Crimean War, 1853— 1856.
Cecil Woodharn-Smith, The Reason Why.

Supplementary Reading:
Trevor Royle, Crimea: The Great Crimean War.
Hugh Small. Florence Nightingale: Avenging Angel.

Questions to Consider:
1. Why did Britain fight on behalf of the Turkish Empire?
2. What role did British public opinion play in the Crimean War?

Mini-lecture 18: "The British in Africa-1840-1880"

Mini-lecture 18: "The British in Africa: 1840—1880"

Scope: The African coastline had been explored by the time of Victoria’s reign.
but much of the interior was unknown to Europeans. British explorers crisscrossed Africa and traced the course of the major rivers in the midVictorian period. Among their motives were a desire for scientific and geographical knowledge and eagerness to spread the Christian gospel. suppress the Arab slave trade, and develop economic opportunities. Among the most famous explorers were Richard Burton, James Speke. David Livingstone. and Henry Stanley. In their conflicts with the Arabs and Africans. the British were usually successful because of their technological superiority. but many paid with their lives in the unhealthy climate. The British pLiblic followed their exploits enthusiastically and supported colonization schenies. Disraeli’s Conservatives in the 1870s expanded the British Empire in Africa; Gladstone’s Liberals were less enthusiastic.

Click here for a printable, PDF version of the following outline.

Outline

I. The British search for the source of the Nile was funded by the Royal Geographical Society (founded in 1830).

A. The expedition of Richard Burton and John Henning Speke located Lake Victoria in 1858.

1. Burton was among the most intellectually adventurous men of the age. a brilliant linguist (he reputedly mastered twenty-six languages), and a prolific writer. He was the first Englishman to visit Mecca (in disguise). He was a great collector of pornography, the first translator of the Arabian Nights. and a good amateur antliropo log ist.

2. Speke was a big game hunter, poor at languages. and less naturally curious about different cultures than Burton. He was a teetotaler. who resented Burton’s predilection for alcohol, experimentation with local drugs. and womanizing. (Burton resented Speke’s desire to stop to hunt big game along the way.)

3. Burton and Speke were very heavily laden and found their native bearers unreliable. They lost supplies and many of their bearers on the journey.

4. When Burton was too sick with malaria to travel. Speke discovered a lake, which he named Victoria, that he claimed was the. source of the Nile.

5. Speke was not able to prove his claim at the time. although it was later found to be true: sickness prevented him from seeking the river’s outlet from the lake.

B. The differences in Burton’s and Speke’s personalities caused severe tensions in their relationship.

1. Speke returned to Britain, leaving Burton behind in Africa after their expedition in 1858.

2. Burton asked Speke not to publicize his discovery of Lake Victoria until all doubts could be dispelled.

3. Speke, however, went to the Royal Geographical Society with their findings.

4. Burton felt betrayed. and the two men became enemies.

5. Burton disputed the significance of Speke’s discovery of Lake Victoria.

6. Burton wrote that Speke was not a qualified scientist and that although Speke had received all the glory, it was he. Burton, who had done the expedition’s important work.

7. In 1864. the Royal Geographical Society arranged for the two men to debate the issue.

8. Speke died in a shooting accident the day before he and Burton were scheduled to confront each other in the debate.

C. Speke and James Grant. on a second expedition (1859) that involved even more colorful adventures, confirmed that the river Nile originated in Lake Victoria.

II. David Livingstone blended idealistic mission work with exploration and became a national hero.

A. He trained as a doctor and intended to be a medical missionary in China, but warfare prevented him from entering the country.

B. His lack of success in converting Africans drew him, instead, to exploration.

1. He was the first European to cross the Kalahari Desert (1849).

2. He explored and charted the Zambesi River (1853—1855) and discovered what he named the Victoria Falls.

3. He took pride in traveling light and withstanding fearsome hardships.

4. Africans and Europeans alike were impressed by his charisma.

C. He carried on the search for the Nile’s source after Burton, Speke. and Grant.

1. The Royal Geographical Society funded his 1866 expedition.

2. Livingstone detested Burton for his “bestial immorality.”

3. He was also contemptuous of Grant, Speke, and other explorers.

4. He lost contact with the outside world on his 1866 expedition and it was rumored that he had died.

5. After four years of no news from Livingstone, James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald asked one of his journalists, Henry Stanley, to go and search for Livingstone.

D. Henry Stanley was a Welsh immigrant to the United States, who had fought on both sides in the American Civil War.

1. With the backing of the New York Herald, he undertook one of the most imperious of all expeditions into “darkest Africa,”

2. In 1871, Stanley “found” Livingstone at Ujiji and gave the immortal greeting “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”

3. With Stanley’s help, Livingstone pursued an alternative theory -— that the Lualaba River was the Nile -— but Livingstone died in 1873.

4. Livingstone’s faithful African servant, Susi, brought his body back to the coast.

E. Henry Stanley resolved any remaining uncertainties between 1874 and 1877 -- he proved that the Lualaba was the Congo.

F. African adventurers’ tales continued to delight the British public.

1. Mary Kingsley showed the same daring as her male counterparts.

2. African adventure fiction, such as Rider-Haggard’s King Solomon's Mines, was popular.

III. British empire-builders wanted to dominate not merely the African coast, as in earlier generations, but all potentially useful interior parts of the continent.

A. The completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 created a new route to India, of great strategic significance.

B. The Ashanti War of 1874 demonstrated Britain’s determination to annihilate indigenous rivals.

1. Rival empires confronted each other, but Britain enjoyed overwhelming technological superiority.

2. The natives’ numerical superiority, greater immunity to disease, and knowledge of the terrain were still no match for British firepower.

IV. Britain extended its reach into the interior of southeni Africa.

A. Boer dissatisfaction at British governance (the Boers resented the British authorities’ request to free their slaves) had provoked the “Great Trek” of the 1830s and the foundation of the Boer Republics, Orange Free State, and Transvaal.

B. The discovery of diamonds led the British to annex Transvaal in 1877.

C. The Boers at first tolerated this, because they benefited from British efforts to neutralize Zulu power.

1. A British army suffered an unexpected defeat (at Isandhlwana) at the hands of the Zulu in 1879.

2. British military pride was salvaged at Rorke’s Drift (the subject of the classic British movie Zulu) and Ulundi.

D. With the Zulus defeated, the Boers became eager to throw off the British, whose protection they no longer needed.

1. The Boers had been led to expect that Gladstone would revoke DisraelFs annexation ofTransvaal. He did not.

2. Paul Kruger's coup against Britain succeeded at Majuba Hill (l88l).

3. Prime Minister Gladstone then reversed himself, rather than launch a big campaign, and Transvaal regained its independence.

4. The British claimed sovereignty over Transvaal, which would become politically volatile in the next twenty years with the discovery of massive gold reserves iii the Johannesburg area.

5. These tensions prefigured the Boer War (1899-1902).

Essential Reading:
Roy Lewis and Yvonne Foy, The British in Africa.
Roger Beck, The History of South Africa.

Supplementary Reading:
James Morris, Heaven's Command: An imperial Progress.
Donald Morris. The Washing 0f the Spears: A History of the Rise of the Zulu Nation.

Questions to Consider:
1. What motives led to British exploitation of Africa?
2. Why did the explorers’ and soldiers’ activities generate enthusiasm in Britain itself?

Mini-lecture 19: "Medicine and Public Health"

Mini-lecture 19: "Medicine and Public Health"

Scope: Medicine became a profession in the Victorian era, an era in which death at any age was common. In the 1830s. a three-tier medical system existed, divided among classically trained physicians at the top and. beneath them, surgeons and apothecaries, who took care of practical aspects of medical care and learned through apprenticeships. To learn their trade, doctors needed to dissect corpses. Their official source was the gallows, but grave robbers provided the necessary additional bodies. despite bitter popular opposition to the practice. Medical advances in the Victorian era included the application of anesthetics and antiseptics by Lister and others and the unification of the medical profession by legislation of 1858. More important in reducing the death rate, however, were the elementary steps taken in public health and sanitation. John Snow performed the classic public health experiment in 1854 by removing the handle of a pump that he had identified as the focus of a cholera outbreaks cities began to keep health statistics and find ways to provide fresh water supplies. Meanwhile, women struggled for admission to the profession, though niale doctors discouraged them for fear that practicing as doctors would upset their delicate reproductive systems.

Click here for a printable, PDF version of the following outline.

Outline

I. Sickness and death were constant companions in Victorian Britain.

A. Death came at any age, often suddenly.

B. Dying was a public event, and deathbed scenes were solemn social occasions.

II. In the early nineteenth century. medical men were divided into three categories, each with its own role and social rank.

A. Physicians were the most eminent.

1. They were graduates of Oxford or Cambridge.

2. They studied largely in the classics and mathematics.

3. They were licensed by the Royal College of Physicians.

B. Surgeons were of intermediate rank.

1. They had the status of skilled technicians.

2. They needed to be physically robust and not squeamish.

3. They were licensed by the Royal College of Surgeons.

C. Apothecaries were the lowliest medical men.

1. Provincial surgeons were often apothecaries, also.

2. Many medicines were poisons, including mercury.

3. It was widely believed that all ailments were related to bad blood. thus many medicines claimed to cure all ailments.

D. Numerous unlicensed healers also plied their trade.

III. Parliament reformed Britain’s medical system and created a situation of greater legal uniformity.

A. By act of Parliament in 1858, all doctors were included on a centralized list of practitioners. the Medical Register.

1. The Colleges, which had lobbied against the act, were retained but lost most of their earlier power

2. Inclusion on, or exclusion from, the Medical Register now marked a sharp professional divide.

B. The Anatomy Act of 1832 helped curb the problem of body snatching.

1. "Resurrection men” had earlier provided anatomy schools with the necessary bodies, because the gallows alone were insufficient.

2. Fear of postmortem dissection compounded poor people’s dread of the workhouse.

3. The fear of dissection was partly attributable to the fact that many people believed in resurrection of the earthly body -— an intact earthly body —- at the "Second Coming.”

C. The economic and social status of doctors continued to vary.

1. A minority became rich—the Harley Street consultants.

2. For most, practicing medicine remained a marginal business.

3. Doctors began to appear as heroic figures in literature —- a phenomenon previously unknown.

IV. Medicine and science combined to create genuine improvements in the midand late nineteenth century, though they disagreed over the best methods.

A. One group of doctors emphasized surgical improvements.

1. Joseph Lister helped spread the use of antiseptics to prevent infection of wounds.

2. Anesthetics, along with antiseptics, made surgery far more endurable and reduced shock. (James Simpson pioneered the use of chloroform.)

B. A second group believed that sanitation was more important than surgery in saving lives. The great London sanitary reformers, including Edwin Chadwick, John Simon. Edwin Lankester, and Florence Nightingale, led them.

C. Cholera epidemics after 1831 added urgency to the sanitationists’ work.

1. Doctors John Snow and William Budd had identified living organisms in water as the cause of the outbreaks.

2. Snow identified a pump as a cholera source in an 1854 epideniic and removed the pump handle —- an emblematic moment in the history of public health.

D. The logic of preventive public health spread gradually and always in the face of popular opposition. Small pox vaccinations were made compulsory in 1853.

V. Victorian doctors theorized about the nature of sex.

A. They warned young men that masturbation would lead to blindness and dementia.

B. They helped popularize the view that women were naturally frail and at the mercy of their reproductive systems.

1. They treated menstruation and pregnancy as forms of sickness.

2. Many male doctors campaigned passionately against women being permitted to become doctors.

3. Nevertheless, hardy pioneering women doctors did appear, beginning in the late 1870s.

Essential Reading:
Roy Porter, Bodies Politic: Disease, Death, and Doctors in Britain, 1650—1900.
H.J. Morris, Cholera: 1832.

Supplementary Reading:
Anne Hardy. Health and Medicine in Britain Since 1860.
Mary P. English, Victorian Values: The Life and Times of Dr. Edwin Lankesier.

Questions to Consider:
1. What was the connection between medicine and social status in Victorian Britain?
2. Why was health so precarious in nineteenth-century Britain?

Mini-lecture 20: "Education"

Mini-lecture 20: "Education"

Scope: At the beginning of the Victorian era, more than half the British population could not read or write. By the end of it, nearly everyone had sonic elementary literacy. The spread of the vote (in the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884) underlined the need for an educated electorate. Parliament legislated to promote elementary schooling for all in 1871 and made it compulsory in 1880. Until then, a wide variety of educational practices had prevailed in a highly decentralized environment, from the simple rural danie school at one extreme, to the famous”public” (i.e.. private) schools, Eton and Harrow, at the other. Corporal punishment was integral to education at all levels and some of the public schools followed what now look like sadomasochistic practices. The high-minded reform of the public schools was led by Dr. Thomas Arnold at Rugby and fondly commemorated by his pupil Thomas Hughes in Torn Brown ‘s Schooldaj’s (1857). By the late Victorian era, sports, especially cricket, were emphasized more highly than the academic curriculum was. By 1900, most of the elite schools regarded their principal role not as an intellectual one but as the producers of Christian gentlemen. University education broadened in the Victorian era from the training of clergymen to a cautious embrace of the new sciences and humanities. The first colleges for women appeared at Oxford and Cambridge, but the students were subjected to strict chaperonage.

Click here for a printable, PDF version of the following outline.

Outline

I. Education was highly localized and varied in quality depending on location.

A. Dame schools gave rural children the elements ofan education.

1. Learning was almost entirely by memorization and recitation.

2. Masters and mistresses enforced discipline with a cane.

B. The Education Act of 1870 introduced universal education for children up to the age of thirteen.

1. Recent wars in America and Germany appeared to give the advantage to the more educated population.

2. Extension of the franchise (1867) made the need for wider education urgent.

3. The government hoped to economize and maintain local initiatives but found religious obstacles difficult to circumvent.

4. Further legislation of 1880 made attendance compulsory and cost-free.

C. The Secondary Education Act of 1902 created universal secondary schooling.

II. The famous British public schools were transformed in the Victorian era.

A. They were not public in the American sense, but private boarding schools.

1. Eton and Harrow were the most distinguished.

2. Keate and other headmasters practiced brutal flogging, but punishment was theatrical and ritualized.

3. Other public schools were scandalously brutal and negligent.

B. These schools experienced an era of reform following Thomas Arnold’s transformation of Rugby from 1827.

1. Arnold wanted to help boys conquer the evil in their nature and become Christian gentlemen.

2. Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857) is a thinly fictionalized account of Arnold’s Rugby.

C. The cult of sports, especially rugby and cricket, was emphasized more strongly than the academic curriculum.

III. Britain gradually recognized the need for an improved higher educational system.

A. The Anglican monopoly of Oxford and Cambridge students ended in the 1850s.

B. Non-Anglican fellows (teachers) were also permitted after 1871.

C. Outstanding teachers, such as Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol College. Oxford, began to seek out brilliant but poor students.

D. New universities began to teach science, which Oxford and Cambridge had neglected.

IV. A few Victorian women also began to seek educational opportunities.

A. London University admitted women in 1848.

B. The first women’s colleges at Oxford and Cambridge were founded in 1868 (Oxford) and 1869 (Cambridge). Women were excluded from degrees until 1920.

V. Education at home remained a popular alternative to schooling.

A. John Stuart Mill (1806—1873) was educated at home by his father, James Mill, beginning at the age of three.

1. Mill’s father was incredibly attentive to his son’s progress and held him to the highest standards.

2. Mill undertook very difficult work from the earliest age and claimed anyone else could do it, too.

3. As an eight-year-old, lie was also required to tutor his younger brothers and sisters in Latin.

4. He believed that the education lie had experienced could have been enjoyed, with profit, by any child.

B. Bertrand Russell (1872—1970) was educated first by his brother, then by tutors, and finally, at Cambridge University.

Essential Reading:
John Chandos. Boys Together: English Public Schools, 1800—1864.
G.F. Lamb. The English at School.

Supplementary Reading:
John Stuart Mill. Autobiography.
Bertrand Russell, Autobiography, Volume I.

Questions to Consider:
1. Why did the Victorians acquiesce to so much physical punishment of children?
2. What was the motive behind Victorian educational reforms and improvements?

08 Illuminated Context Report Assignment - "Education and Literacy, Groups 1 and 2" (35 pts)

Due: Wed. 26 Oct.

Please review week 03 reading assignment: "Chaper 2: The Victorians - Actor and Audience" (vpi 17-72), paying particular attention to Chapter 2 (section 8), "The Power of the Press" (64-72).

Please also read Sally Mitchell's overview in Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia (1988): "Literacy and the Reading Public" (456-57) and the Introduction to Richard Altick's study The English Common Reader 2nd Edition (1957, 1998): "Introduction" (1-12).

Both groups should also review this week's mini-lecture:

• Mini-lecture 19: "Education"

Group # 1 (elementary education, secondary education, and literacy) will concentrate on elementary education, secondary education, and literacy. Please read: Chapter 7: "Elementary Education and Literacy" (141-72) and Chapter 8: "Secondary Education" (173-87) in Altick's The English Common Reader. Also read Chapter 3: "Education" (53-94) in David Vincent's Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750-1914 (1993).

Group # 2 (mechanics institutes, book trade, and circulating libraries) will concentrate on the mechanics institutes, the book trade, and circulating libraries. Please read Chapter 9: "The Mechanics Institutes and After" (188-212) and Chapter 12: "The Book Trade: 1851-1900" (294-317) in Altick's The English Common Reader. Finally browse through Altick's Chapter 5, Section 5 "Literature and Circulating Library Morality" (190-202) in Victorian People and Ideas.

Instructions for Report to the Class:

You are responsible for assembling these historical readings and critical interpretations into a coherent and cogent summary of the relationship between the education, literacy, and the nineteenth century. For the presentation to the class, students should perform their subject. Costumes, play-acting, food, games, and other 'Illuminating' devices are expected. The group presentation should be designed to give classmates useful information on a subject that they might otherwise have had to research themselves -- and to do so in an entertaining and engaging fashion. Finally, the presentation should also reflect the continued influence of the debates surrounding "Victorian education and literacy" and contemporary approaches to education and literacy. Be clear, brief, and inventive!

Click Here for Illuminated Context Reports - Overview

This Week in English 6175, Week 09

Week 09
(17 - 21 Oct.)

Mon. 17 • NO CLASS MEETING, SEE ACADEMIC CALENDAR

Wed. 19 • Dickens, David Copperfield (Chapter 45-50, pp 656-727)

Fri. 21 • Dickens, David Copperfield (Chapter 51-56, pp 728-807)

David Copperfield’s “Written Memory"

David Copperfield’s “Written Memory"

David Copperfield calls his project of recalling and structuring his life “my written memory” (ch 48), and he devotes much of his attention to how imagination weaves strands of experience and memory into a memorable whole.

1.       Surrounded by negative models

1. characters rely on writing or declaiming as a retreat from active participation in the world

2. many of the writers content to repeat words to no effect

1.       Mr. Dick flies pages of the Memorial on kites

2.       Micawber writes endless letters to uncaring recipients

3. Dr. Strong’s work preparing a sourcebook for language, the Dictionary

1.        Presented as an endless task that blinds its creator to serious obscurities in human

Meanings and motives

2.        To be fully useful, he must awaken from his dream of language, learn to read his words with

“new meaning,” and attempt to save his wife—not just his words—from “misconstruction”

3.        Mr. Dick poses the ultimate problem of the writer: he can never get his subject

“quite right” or make it “perfectly clear” (ch. 14)

4.        His obsession, which traps him in frustrating repetition, limits his effectiveness to

to  the world and shows David the necessity of confronting, not just entertaining, the ghosts of the mind.

2.       David attempts to give his version of the past validity and force by describing his memories as almost physical sensation that left a real rather than an imagined mark on his sensitive mind

a.        Describes his memory of his old nurse Peggoty’s roughened finger, almost as if the finger had touched his memory as well as his child’s hand or face:

I have an impression on my mind which I cannot distinguish from actual remembrance, of the touch of Peggotty’s roughened forefinger (ch. 2)

b.        David the adult narrator tries to recapture his childhood “objectivity” by making associations between present and past images

c.        He focuses on physical objects that he claims trigger scenes buried in his memory, like the ring “associated in my remembrance with Dora’s hand” that causes a “momentary stirring in my heart, like pain!” (ch. 33)

d.        Or the storm that kills Ham and Steerforth, which is so “indelibly” etched in his memory that he can get it back “at the lightest mention of a sea-shore” (ch. 55).

3.       One can emphasize the success of David’s strategies by contrasting them with the vacuous generalities, predetermined questions (“Must not D.C. confine himself to the broad pinions of Time?”), and conventional images (“Are tears the dewdrops of the heart?”) that fill Julia Mills’s diary (ch. 38).

a.       Julia’s comic failure suggests the limitations of cliched emblems of memory

b.       Objects—like the first toy, the Christmas tree, the class ring, or the family snapshot album—objects that mark out public or generic development rather than individual pasts

c.       Scenes instead rely on common experiences for their impact and yet are vivid and particular, like David’s childhood pleasure with his crocodile book or the catalog of smells that recall his schoolroom (“mildewed corduroys, sweet apples wanting air, and rotten books”) [ch. 9]

4.       Memory as a way of editing one’s past

a.         David recognizes he may be suspected of using his narrative powers to obscure his past.

b.         “I write the exact truth,” he claims.  “It would avail me nothing to extenuate it now” (ch. 44) But the issue clearly extends beyond any deliberate attempt to falsify the past; the difficulty is how an autobiographer knows or writes “the exact truth” and how fully the written life can approach the lived experience.

c.         David makes a compact to “reflect [his] mind on the paper, [to] examine it, closely, and bring its secrets to light” (ch. 48).

5.       David’s development as a writer and the experience of “retracing” his steps (ch. 31) lead him to greater self –consciousness about his process of shaping his material.

a.           David does not fully welcome this maturity, because he sees it also as a loss of childhood’s innocent delight in words as objects.  He must work harder to recapture the time when words recalled “no feeling of disgust or reluctance,” when he delighted simply in the “fat black letters in the primer, the puzzling novelty of their shapes, and the easy good-nature of O and Q and S” (ch. 4)

b.           And he dreads the pain that writing can bring, the memories of betrayal and loss that may emerge with the delight.

c.           He suggests that the writing of such sorrows makes the “indelible” (ch. 55) and that, like the past itself, the “remembrance” of the past “is fraught with so much pain” (ch. 14).

d.           Yet he also recognizes that such times are lost forever without the meditative effect of language.  Only through a verbal command—“Let me remember how it used to be” (ch. 4)—can he approach the past.

e.           David’s desire to recapture some measure of his past begins to overcome his need to partition off or repress sorrow.

6.       David’s various strategies for writing the past, contrasting scenes in which he calls attention to his art with those in which he asks permission to “stand aside” as narrator (ch. 43)

a.       These “Retrospective” chapters—such as chapter 14, in which he describes himself as a ghostly director or magician “calling up” players from the past and raising and lowering the curtain on the scene that passes before him—suggests a distanced and passive narrator. . . .

b.       A writer who appears as audience or reader of a scene.

c.       He regularly portrays himself as an observer of his own life—a strange little boy off to one side watching the adults argue over his fate or a strange adult hiding behind doors while other adults take central roles in crisis scenes

d.       The novel invites us to consider not only “what happens” but “how we are told of it.”

7.       In chapter 63, David describes his structuring of the material as weaving, a metaphor that suggests the power of the adult’s imagination to make strong connections, find a meaningful “thread,” and link parts into a whole

a.        But the metaphor also counters David’s earlier insistence on a truly objective narrative (ch. 2) and suggests the motive of catching or trapping.

8.       If writing is to have a therapeutic value for David Copperfield and his society, he must learn the functions and malfunctions of writing.

a.        His imaginative power to bring forth memories with the vividness of present experience must be tempered by an adult awareness of the art involved.

b.        Words are not things but signs by which people struggle to communicate, and that struggle must aim for something more than a nostalgic retreat into a fictional world.

c.        If the child is to be father to the man rather than a perpetual child like Micawber or Mr. Dick, he must direct his most serious personal issues out to the world and must tolerate a critical response from his adult self.

d.        David’s writing can thus become a way to free him from obsessive repetition of his past and move him beyond egocentric concerns.

e.        His story encourages sophisticated self-consciousness about language and writing, in both their literary and their social uses

The education of David’s “undisciplined heart”—provides the novel its focus.