english 6175 - victorian literature @ east carolina u.

Vanity Fair, Part II, Scene 2, "Dearest George"

The continued courtship of Amelia Sedley and George Osbourne.

Vanity Fair, Part II, Scene 1, "Arcadian Simplicity"

Vanity Fair, Part II, Scene 1, "Arcadian Simplicity"

Mini-lecture 23: "Victorian Britain and the American Civil War"

Mini-lecture 23: "Victorian Britain and the American Civil War"

Scope: British attitudes toward America varied in the Victorian era depending on the class, interests, and beliefs of the observer. British supporters of democracy were generally pro-American, whereas defenders of hierarchy tended to be anti-American. The Anierican Civil War created difficulties for British politicians. Economic and diplomatic interests both suggested the benefits of an alliance with the Confederacy, but religious and humanitarian sentiment supported the Union. Britain’s equivocal policy toward America caused a diplomatic crisis. but the rift healed soon after the war, while cultural links continued to strengthen. At the same time, a steady stream of Britons emigrated to the United States, as farmers, industrial workers. entrepreneurs. and even utopian colonizers.

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

Outline

I. British attitudes toward America depended on the individual’s beliefs.

A. America represented an inspiring future to believers in democracy.

B. It represented a dismaying future to supporters of hierarchy, Mrs. Trollope, for example, was appalled by Cincinnati egalitarianism.

C. America and Britain shared literary tastes.

1. First Walter Scott, then Charles Dickens, reigned supreme in both countries.

2. American writers, including Longfellow, Emerson. and Washington Irving, became famous in Britain first.

3. The Smithsonian Institution was funded by, and named after, a British scientist, James Smithson (1765—1829).

II. The American Civil War posed a dilemma to British politicians.

A. Cotton from the slave south fed the industrial factories of Lancashire and Yorkshire. The trade had boomed ever since the invention of the cotton gin.

B. Political reasons existed to justify supporting the Confederacy.

1. From a geopolitical view, two small Americas were better than one big one.

2. Victorians sympathized with “independence” movements in Italy, Hungary, Poland, and potentially the Confederacy, too.

C. Political, religious, and humane reasons existed to justify supporting the Union.

1. Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beeclier-Stowe were popular in Britain.

2. Britain had abolished slavery in its own plantation colonies in 1833.

3. John Bright helped persuade northern mill workers to support the Union.

4. Karl Marx praised British workers’ pro-Union sentiment.

D. A series of diplomatic incidents during the American Civil War affected Anglo—American relations, including the “Trent” incident.

1. Confederate diplomats James Mason and John Slidell were sailing to Britain under the protection of the British flag to argue the case for official British recognition of the Confederate States of America.

2. They were captured by the U.S. Navy, but Abraham Lincoln ordered their release to Britain after Lord Palmerston sent him a letter threatening war.

E. The Union sent talented diplomats of its own to prevent an Anglo-Confederate alliance.

1. Charles Francis Adams was ambassador.

2. His son and private secretary Henry was also a secret journalist.

3. Their skillful negotiations in Whitehall helped prevent British recognition of the Confederacy.

F. Lincoln’s leadership was widely admired in Britaim Queen Victoria mourned his death.

G. The Alabama and other gunboats built in Britain aided the Confederacy and continued to cause ill feelings after the war.

1. As a neutral country in the American Civil War, Britain had no right to supply warships to either side.

2. The Alabama, built in Britain and armed in the Azores, was used by the Confederates to sink many Union ships.

3. This violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the neutrality rules.

4. The postwar “Alabama claims” (1872) settled the issue.

III. Emigration from Britain to Anierica accelerated after the Civil War,

A. A steady stream of British emigrants moved to America.

1. British farniers were subsidized by American railroad companies, which gave them land and supplies to establish farms on the Great Plains.

2. Industrial workers and miners brought expertise to America.

B. A few of them played an important role in American history.

1. Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), steel manufacturer, became one of the richest men in the world.

2. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and played a central role in the education of the deaf.

IV. In the later nineteenth century, the idea of Anglo-Saxon supremacy and the common missionary impulse drew the two nations together.

A. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson both admired British institutions and the British Empire.

B. Winston Churchill was the most famous child of an Anglo-American dynastic marriage.

Essential Reading:
David Frost and Michael Shea, The Rich Tide: Men, Women, Ideas, and Their Transatlantic Impact.
H.C. Allen. The Anglo-American Relationship Since 1763.

Supplementary Reading:
Kevin Phillips. The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph 0f Anglo-America.
F. Leventhal and R. Quinault, Anglo-American Attitudes: From Revolution to Partnership.

Questions to Consider:
1. How did American and British histories interact in the Victorian era?
2. Would Britain have benefited from supporting the Confederate States of America?

09 Illuminated Context Report Assignment - "Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Abolition in Britain " (35 pts)

Due Wed. 16 Nov.

Please read the following from Mellor and Matlak's British Literature 1780-1830 (1996):

• "Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Abolition in Britain" (53-56);
• [from] The Mansfield Judgment (56-58);
• Cugoano - "[from] Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species" (58-62);
• Cowper - "The Negro's Complaint" and "Pity for Poor Africans" (62-63);
• Bellamy "[from] The Benevolent Planters (64-68);
• Southey - "[from] Poems Concerning the Slave Trade and "The Sailor, Who Had Served in the Slave Trade" (64-68);
• Wilberforce - "[from] A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade (71-75)";
• Clarkson - "[from] The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliment" (75-82);
• and Opie - "The Black Man's Lament" (82-85).

Please also review our mini-lecture:

• Mini-lecture 22: "Victorian Britain and the American Civil War"

Instructions for Report to the Class:

Your group is responsible for assembling the readings and critical interpretations into a coherent and cogent summary of the relationship between slavery, the slave trade, and abolition and the nineteenth century. For the presentation to the class, your group MUST develop an engaging and illuminating performance. These performance-reports should be 'Illuminated' exercises; that is, creativity and invention are primary. Show us why your subject matters! You are welcome and invited to bring in any relevant material from the novels we are reading. Instruct, entertain, and delight!

Click Here for Illuminated Context Reports - Overview

This Week in English 6175, Week 13 (14 - 18 Nov.)

Week 13
(14 - 18 Nov.)

Mon. 14 • Thackeray, Vanity Fair (Chapter 35-39, pp 406-469)

In-class Game Assignment (35 pts)

Wed. 16 • Thackeray, Vanity Fair (Chapter 40-44, pp 470-523)

In-class Game Assignment (35 pts), Presentations

Fri. 18 • Thackeray, Vanity Fair (Chapter 45-49, pp 524-574)

• Mini-lecture 23: "Victorian Britain and the American Civil War"

Due: 09 Illuminated Context Report - "Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Abolition in Britain" (35 pts)

"Illuminated" Game Assignment (35 pts), DUE WED. Nov. 15

Instructions:

Victorian Novels are full of games, from the Charades of Thornfield Hall to the private theatricals performed at Lord Steyne's in Vanity Fair.  These multi-plot novels resemble nothing so much as complex games mirroring the social, political, financial and romantic games that make up the sum of Victorian life.

This "Illuminated" game assignment requires you to collaborate with other students to "adapt" a popular board game to one of our works this semester: Barchester Towers, Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, or Vanity Fair.

1. Divide yourselves according to the novel you plan to concentrate on for your Documented Research Paper.  If you are still unsure, choose the group that is focusing on the novel you like best:

Group 1: Barchester Towers
Group 2: Jane Eyre
Group 3: David Copperfield
Group 4: Vanity Fair

2. Now you must negotiate as a class which board game you will use as a source for your adaptation.  Each group must choose one of these board games, or a board game the group itself provides.  The board games are:

1. "Mary-Kate & Ashley Friendship Game"
2. "Life"
3. "Operation"
4. "Battleship"
5. "Chutes and Ladders"
6. "Sorry"
7. "Monopoly"
8. "Battle of the Sexes"

3. Using the board game your group has chosen, adapt the game (refigure the cards, rules, accessories etc.) to "play" the themes you detect in your novel of choice.  In other words, adapt the board game you have chosen to dramatize the themes and characters of your chosen novel.

You will have all class Friday and Monday to prepare your game.  In class, on Wednesday November 15, we will play these games as a final review of our major works in the course.  Your group will be graded according to the "playability" and inventiveness of your adaptation.  We will play these games again at our end-of-the semester party (TBA).

Suggestion: As a group, consider preparing a list of representative characters from your novel and a list of major themes in your work.  Now consider the various plots involved.  Sketch these out as a way to begin plotting your adaptation.

Mini-lecture 21: "Later Victorian Literature"

Mini-lecture 21: "Later Victorian Literature"

Scope: The late Victorian years witnessed an immense concentration of literary talent and a series of controversies and about the nature and morality of literature. Authors and critics debated bitterly whether sexuality and the inner workings of unhappy marriages should be depicted in literature and on the stage. Hendrik Ibsen and Thomas Hardy each found savage detractors and eager champions. The aesthetic movement of the 1890s sidestepped the dispute by denying that art had anything to do with morality at all. However, its most well known British exponent. Oscar Wilde, found that lack of discretion about his own homosexuality could bring severe punishment. The British Empire found a brilliant literary champion in Rudyard Kipling in the 1880s and 1890s, but the nation as a whole got a second-rate mediocrity, Alfred Austin, as poet-laureate. Ironically. the most durable literary figure of the late Victorian era, Sherlock Holmes, was created simply for passing entertainment and to raise some ready money for a struggling doctor, Arthur Conan Doyle.

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

Outline

I. Influential writers believed that more elements of human life should be portrayed in fiction and drama.

A. Hendrik Ibsen’s plays stirred controversy.

1. Conventional critics condemned these works, for example, A Doll's House (1879) and Ghosts (1891).

2. Early feminists and such critics as George Bernard Shaw defended Ibsen’s plays.

B. Thomas Hardy sympathized with “fallen” women.

1. His novels evoked a rural England in the midst of radical social change.

2. Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1896) endured savage criticism on the grounds that they were immoral and excessively frank about sex.

3. In spite of their critics, the novels enjoyed enormous popularity.

4. In later life. Hardy turned exclusively to writing poetry.

II. The aesthetic niovement denied that art and literature had a moral purpose at all—it spoke on behalf of “art for art’s sake.”

A. Walter Pater in England and Theophile Gautier in France influenced the movement.

B.Oscar Wilde defied or contradicted all the conventions.

1. Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854 and studied classics at Oxford University.

2. His exotic dress, quick wit, and dandyism made him a celebrity.

3. He appears in Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta Patience (1881) as the character Bunthorne.

4. His novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and his essay “The Decay of Lying” contradicted familiar verities.

5. His plays. above all The Importance o~Being Earnest, demonstrated his mastery of the stage.

6. He brought disaster on himself by suing the Marquis of Queensberry, with whose son he was having a homosexual affair.

7. Wilde sued the marquis for libeling him as a “posing sodomite," but lost.

8. Wilde refused to go voluntarily into exile to avoid prosecution for “Acts of Gross indecency between Males.”

9. He was convicted and sent to prison for two years.

10. After prison, he spent the rest of his life in exile in France and died prematurely in 1900.

III. Literary and political interests often overlapped.

A. Rudyard Kipling championed the imperial mission.

1. Kipling, born in India in 1865, was sent to England for his schooling, which lie hated.

2. At the age of sixteen, he returned to India, where he went to work for an English-language newspaper.

3. He urged British and American Anglo-Saxons to take up the “white man’s burden” of colonialism: he believed that Britain had a Godgiven duty to bring civilization and Christianity to colonial subjects.

4. Recessional (1897) warned that only trust in God could preserve the British Empire from ultimate failure.

5. Kipling was the first British writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he did in 1907, when he was only forty-one.

B. The poet-laureate controversy of 1892—1895 came to a farcical conclusion.

1. Tennyson’s death in 1892 led to a prolonged debate over possible candidates.

2. Most of the best poets were unsuitable because of their sexual or political orientation.

3. Alginon Swinburne and Oscar Wilde were homosexuals.

4. Kipling was too young.

5. William Morris was an outspoken socialist.

6. Coventry Patmore, Francis Thompson, and Gerard Manley Hopkins were Roman Catholics.

7. Lord Salisbury appointed Alfred Austin.

8. Austin churned out patriotic verses by the yard.

IV. Growth in the ranks of the reading public created more niches for authors.

A. Arthur Conan Doyle, a Scottish doctor living in London, created the Sherlock Holmes phenomenon.

B. The character of Holmes was inspired by Dr. Joseph Bell, one of Doyle’s professors at medical school.

C. Holmes represented the triumph of scientific method and close observation over ad hoc police methods.

D. For example, Holmes is a great advocate of fingerprinting, which was being introduced at the time.

E. Conan Doyle tired of Holmes, but the character’s popularity and financial incentives —- an American magazine offered Doyle £5,000 per story — brought him back from the dead.

F. Doyle himself was consulted in criminal controversies, and he championed prisoners he felt had been wrongly convicted.

Essential Reading:
Karl Beckson. London in the 1890s: A Cultural History.
Julian Symons. Conan Done: Portrait of an Artist.

Supplementary Reading:
G.K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature.
Margaret Drabble, ed., The Genius of Thomas Hardy.

Questions to Consider:
1. What were the arguments for censorship of sexual and marriage-related issues in literature?
2. How, and with what consequences. do politics and literature interact?

Mini-lecture 22: "Victoria After Albert-1861-1901"

Mini-lecture 22: "Victoria After Albert: 1861—1901"

Scope: Queen Victoria never fully recovered from the shock of Prince Albert’s death, after which she always wore mourning. Throughout the 1860s. she refused to do her public duties, always complaining of illness and depression. until the popularity of the monarchy itself began to decline. Recovering some composure in the 1870s. Victoria found solace in the help of a loyal Scottish servant. John Brown, and in the flattering attentions of her favorite prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli. After Brown’s death in 1883. another devastating blow, she was served by “the Munshi.” a young Indian Moslem who was widely disliked and resented by other members of her court but retained her devotion. By then. Victoria’s nine children and their families were connected to every royal court in Europe. Her Golden and Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 1887 and 1897 occasioned great public celebrations and a festive, imperial mood in London. Victoria herself survived the worst shocks of the Boer War, dying in 1901 at the age of eighty-one.

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

Outline

I. After the death of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria became reclusive.

A. She refused to attend official functions and dressed in black mourning for the rest of her life.

B. She complained of being too miserable or too ill to appear in public.

1. She fully expected to die very soon, though she was only forty-two.

2. She bullied her doctor, William Jenner, to confirm her belief that she was failing.

C. Her popularity declined as she became reclusive: Charles Dilke criticized her in Parliament and was cheered.

II. In later life. Victoria relied heavily on a small group of friends and helpers.

A. Among her prime ministers, she loved Disraeli but disliked Gladstone. 1, Disraeli flattered her, was obsequious. and enjoyed her company.

1. He appointed her empress of India in 1876 (her European relatives were emperors of Austria, Germany. and Russia).

2. He trusted her instinct for public opinion.

3. Gladstone was respectful but did not pretend to take her advice in policy issues.

B. John Brown, Victoria’s Scottish servant, became her favorite companion.

1. He was her riding companion at Balmoral and saved her from a riding accident.

2. Victoria’s doctor brought Brown to Windsor after Prince Albert’s deatll in the hope of persuading her to resume riding, which she did.

3. Brown became high-handed among servants and even members of the royal family, confident of the queen’s unswerving loyalty.

4. He was rumored (then and since) to be her lover or even her secret husband.

5. He seized a young man who fired a pistol at the queen in 1872, further winning tier favor.

6. Brown’s death in 1883 horrified the queen.

C. Abdul Karim, “the Munshi,” replaced John Brown in Victoria’s affections. He became her servant in her old age.

1. The Munshi was a widely hated figure at court, where he was suspected of passing on state secrets to an Islamic fundamentalist group in India.

2. Courtiers also suspected him of biasing the queen in favor of the Muslim side in Indian affairs.

3. Victoria flew into a great rage when her household rebelled against them, largely because of their racial prejudice.

4. After Victoria’s death, the Munshi was pensioned off and retired to India.

D. Victoria disliked any member of the household leaving it -- many of her servants continued into old age in her service.

E. Her private secretary, Henry Ponsonby, recounted her imperiousness and her dislike of contradiction.

III. Victoria’s family connections linked up the monarchies of all Europe.

A. Her nine children all married and all had children of their own.

1. Her thirty-eight grandchildren included the monarchs of much of Europe.

2. Her eighth child, Prince Leopold, suffered from hemophilia and died prematurely.

3. She now has hundreds of living descendants.

B. Relations with her eldest son and heir, Edward (nicknamed Bertie), remained strained.

1. Victoria blamed Edward for Albert’s death.

2. Edward never lived up to Victoria’s moral expectations; he was a philanderer and gambler.

3. Victoria accused him of setting a bad example for the lower classes.

C. Victoria had ambivalent feelings about Germany.

1. She was half-German and had married a German; her favorite daughter had married the kaiser.

2. She hated Bismark, who was chiefly responsible for achieving German unity in 1870, because she saw the resulting growth in German power as a threat to Britain’s supremacy in the world.

IV. Victoria’s visibility and popularity revived late in life.

A. The Golden Jubilee of 1887 marked her fiftieth year as queen: she attended a service at Westminster Abbey but refused to wear robes of state.

B. The Diamond Jubilee of 1897 is seen by many historians as the high watermark of the British Empire.

V. Victoria never grasped the extent or severity of British poverty.

A. E. F. Benson, a popular writer and son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, said that Victoria was unaware of the sufferings of the poverty stricken and viewed protesters and social activists as mere troublemakers.

B. As Benson put it, Victoria knew of only three social classes: the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the middle class, “which she could see was becoming the governing power.”

C. She visited Scottish crofters when she was staying at Balmoral, but those crofters were relatively privileged and ill no way representative of the working class as a whole.

D. She never visited industrial cities or urban “rookeries.”

VI. Victoria died in January 1901, aged eighty-one, at Osborne, her residence on the isle of Wight, in the arms of her grandson, the kaiser of Germany.

A. Only subjects over age sixty-five could remember anyone else being monarch.

B. She was buried beside Prince Albert, after forty years as a widow, at their mausoleum in Frogmore.

C. Her son (Bertie) became King Edward VII at the age of sixty.

VII. Victoria had always feared that she might go mad, as her grandfather George III had, but in fact, despite periodic rages, she had remained psychologically very stable.

Essential Reading:
Christopher Hibbert, Queen Victoria: A Personal History.
Lytton Strachey. Queen Victoria.

Supplementary Reading:
Christopher Hibbert, ed., Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals: A Selection.

Questions to Consider:
1. Did Britain get any real benefit from the preservation of its monarchy?
2. How did personal and political issues overlap in Victoria’s later reign?

This Week in English 6175, Week 12 (07 - 11 Nov.)

Week 12
(07 - 11 Nov.)

Mon. 07 • Examination (120 pts)

Wed. 09 • Thackeray, Vanity Fair (Chapter 20-24, pp 220-272 and Chapter 25-29, pp 273-333)

• Mini-lecture 21: "Later Victorian Literature"
• Mini-lecture 22: "Victoria After Albert-1861-1901"

In-class Game Assignment

Fri. 11 • Thackeray, Vanity Fair (Chapter 30-34, pp 334-405)

In-class Game Assignment

Complete Prep and Guide to the English 6175 Examination

Here it is!  The complete prep and guide to our English 6175 examination.  Happy prepping!

Download engl_6175_exam_prep_guide_05.pdf