VII THE VICTORIAN ERA

The Victorian era, from the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1837 until her death in 1901, was an

era of several unsettling social developments that forced writers more than ever before to take

positions on the immediate issues animating the rest of society. Thus, although romantic forms of

expression in poetry and prose continued to dominate English literature throughout much of the

century, the attention of many writers was directed, sometimes passionately, to such issues as the

growth of English democracy, the education of the masses, the progress of industrial enterprise and

the consequent rise of a materialistic philosophy, and the plight of the newly industrialized worker.

In addition, the unsettling of religious belief by new advances in science, particularly the theory of

evolution and the historical study of the Bible, drew other writers away from the immemorial

subjects of literature into considerations of problems of faith and truth.

A Nonfiction

The historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, in his History of England (5 volumes, 1848-1861) and even more in his Critical and Historical Essays (1843), expressed the complacency of the English middle classes over their new prosperity and growing political power. The clarity and balance of Macaulay's style, which reflects his practical familiarity with parliamentary debate, stands in contrast to the sensitivity and beauty of the prose of John Henry Newman. Newman's main effort, unlike Macaulay's, was to draw people away from the materialism and skepticism of the age back to a purified Christian faith. His most famous work, Apologia pro vita sua (Apology for His Life, 1864), describes with psychological subtlety and charm the basis of his religious opinions and the reasons for his change from the Anglican to the Roman Catholic church.

Similarly alienated by the materialism and commercialism of the period, Thomas Carlyle, another of the great Victorians, advanced a heroic philosophy of work, courage, and the cultivation of the godlike in human beings, by means of which life might recover its true worth and nobility. This view, borrowed in part from German idealist philosophy, Carlyle expressed in a vehement, idiosyncratic style in such works as Sartor resartus (The Tailor Retailored, 1833-1834) and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841).

Other answers to social problems were presented by two fine Victorian prose writers of a

different stamp. The social criticism of the art critic John Ruskin looked to the curing of the ills of

industrial society and capitalism as the only path to beauty and vitality in the national life. The

escape from social problems into aesthetic hedonism was the contribution of the Oxford scholar

Walter Pater.

B Poetry

The three notable poets of the Victorian Age became similarly absorbed in social issues. Beginning as a poet of pure romantic escapism, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, soon moved on to problems of religious faith, social change, and political power, as in “Locksley Hall,” the elegy In Memoriam (1850), and Idylls of the King (1859-1885). All the characteristic moods of his poetry, from brooding splendor to lyrical sweetness, are expressed with smooth

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technical mastery. His style, as well as his peculiarly English conservatism, stands in some contrast to the intellectuality and bracing harshness of the poetry of Robert Browning. Browning's most important short poems are collected in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1841-1846) and Men and Women (1855). Matthew Arnold, the third of these mid-Victorian poets, stands apart from them as a more subtle and balanced thinker; his literary criticism (Essays in Criticism, 1865, 1888) is the most remarkable written in Victorian times. His poetry

displays a sorrowful, disillusioned pessimism over the human plight in rapidly changing times (for

example, “Dover Beach,” 1867), a pessimism countered, however, by a strong sense of duty.

Among a number of lesser poets, Algernon Charles Swinburne showed an escapist aestheticism,

somewhat similar to Pater's, in sensuous verse rich in verbal music but somewhat diffuse and pallid

in its expression of emotion. The poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the poet, artist, and socialist

reformer William Morris were associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, the adherents of which

hoped to inaugurate a new period of honest craft and spiritual truth in property and painting.

Despite the otherworldly or archaic character of their romantic poetry, Morris, at least, found a

social purpose in his designs for household objects, which profoundly influenced contemporary

taste.

C The Victorian Novel

The novel gradually became the dominant form in literature during the Victorian Age. A fairly constant accompaniment of this development was the yielding of romanticism to literary realism, the accurate observation of individual problems and social relationships. The close observation of a restricted social milieu in the novels of Jane Austen early in the century (Pride and Prejudice, 1813; Emma, 1816) had been a harbinger of what was to come. The romantic historical novels of Sir Walter Scott, about the same time (Ivanhoe, 1819), typified, however, the spirit against which the realists later were to react. It was only in the Victorian novelists Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray that the new spirit of realism came to the fore. Dickens's novels of contemporary life (Oliver Twist, 1838; David Copperfield, 1849-1850; Great Expectations, 1861; Our Mutual Friend, 1865) exhibit an astonishing ability to create living characters; his graphic exposures of social evils and his powers of caricature and humor have won him a vast readership. Thackeray, on the other hand, indulged less in the sentimentality sometimes found in Dickens's works. He was also capable of greater subtlety of characterization, as his Vanity Fair (1847-1848) shows. Nevertheless, the restriction of concern in Thackeray's novels to middle- and upper-class life, and his lesser creative power, render him second to Dickens in many readers' minds.

Other important figures in the mainstream of the Victorian novel were notable for a variety of reasons. Anthony Trollope was distinguished for his gently ironic surveys of English ecclesiastical and political circles; Emily Brontë, for her penetrating study of passionate character; George Eliot, for her responsible idealism; George Meredith, for a sophisticated, detached, and ironical view of human nature; and Thomas Hardy, for a profoundly pessimistic sense of human subjection to fate and circumstance.

A second and younger group of novelists, many of whom continued their important work into

the 20th century, displayed two new tendencies. Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and

Joseph Conrad tried in various ways to restore the spirit of romance to the novel, in part by a choice

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of exotic locale, in part by articulating their themes through plots of adventure and action. Kipling

attained fame also for his verse and for his mastery of the single, concentrated effect in the short

story. Another tendency, in a sense an intensification of realism, was common to Arnold Bennett,

John Galsworthy, and H. G. Wells. These novelists attempted to represent the life of their time with

great accuracy and in a critical, partly propagandistic spirit. Wells's novels, for example, often seem

to be sociological investigations of the ills of modern civilization rather than self-contained stories.

D 19th-Century Drama

The same spirit of social criticism inspired the plays of the Irish-born George Bernard Shaw, who did more than anyone else to awaken the drama from its 19th-century somnolence. In a series of powerful plays that made use of the latest economic and sociological theories, he exposed with enormous satirical skill the sickness and fatuities of individuals and societies in England and the rest of the modern world. Man and Superman (1903), Androcles and the Lion (1913), Heartbreak House (1919), and Back to Methuselah (1921) are notable among his works. His final prescription for a cure, a philosophy of creative evolution by which human beings should in time surpass the biological limit of species, showed him going beyond the limits of sociological realism into visionary writing.

THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881)

Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), Scottish essayist and historian, who was an influential social critic. He was born in Ecclefechan on December 4, 1795, and educated as a divinity student at the University of Edinburgh. After five years of study he abandoned the clergy in 1814 and spent the next four years teaching mathematics. Dissatisfied with teaching, Carlyle moved to Edinburgh in 1818, where, after studying law briefly, he became a tutor and wrote articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopedia. He also made an intensive study of German literature, publishing Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1824), a translation of the novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-1796) by the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Carlyle also wrote Life of Schiller (1825), which appeared first in serial form in 1823 and 1824 in the London Magazine. After a trip to Paris and London, he returned to Scotland and wrote for the Edinburgh Review, a literary periodical.

In 1826 Carlyle married Jane Baillie Welsh, a writer, whom he had met in 1821. After 1828 the Carlyles lived on a farm in Craigenputtock, Scotland, where Carlyle wrote a philosophical satire, Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Retailored). The work, first published between 1833 and 1834 in Fraser's Magazine, is partly autobiographical. In the guise of a “philosophy of clothes,” Carlyle comments on the falseness of material wealth; and in the form of a philosophical romance, he details the crises in his life and affirms his spiritual idealism. In the satire, Carlyle emerged as a social critic deeply concerned with the living conditions of British workers. At the farm he also wrote some of his most distinguished essays, and he established a lifelong friendship with the American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1834 Carlyle moved to the Chelsea section of London, where he soon became known as the Sage of Chelsea and was a member of a literary circle that included the essayists Leigh Hunt and John Stuart Mill.

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In London Carlyle wrote The French Revolution, A History (2 volumes, 1837), a historical study concentrating on the oppression of the poor, which was immediately successful. This was followed by a series of lectures, in one of which, published as On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), he contended that world civilization had developed because of the activities of heroes. His hatred and fear of democracy and praise of feudal society were reflected in much of his subsequent writing, especially in Chartism (1839) and Past and Present (1843). His concept of history appeared in a number of his later works, notably in Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, with Elucidations (1845) and History of Frederick II of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great (10 volumes, 1858-65), his most extensive work. After the death of his wife, he edited her letters; his autobiography, Reminiscences, was published in 1881. He died in London on February 5, 1881.

ALFRED LORD TENNYSON (1809-1892)

Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), Scottish essayist and historian, who was an influential social critic. He was born in Ecclefechan on December 4, 1795, and educated as a divinity student at the University of Edinburgh. After five years of study he abandoned the clergy in 1814 and spent the next four years teaching mathematics. Dissatisfied with teaching, Carlyle moved to Edinburgh in 1818, where, after studying law briefly, he became a tutor and wrote articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopedia. He also made an intensive study of German literature, publishing Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1824), a translation of the novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-1796) by the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Carlyle also wrote Life of Schiller (1825), which appeared first in serial form in 1823 and 1824 in the London Magazine. After a trip to Paris and London, he returned to Scotland and wrote for the Edinburgh Review, a literary periodical.

In 1826 Carlyle married Jane Baillie Welsh, a writer, whom he had met in 1821. After 1828 the Carlyles lived on a farm in Craigenputtock, Scotland, where Carlyle wrote a philosophical satire, Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Retailored). The work, first published between 1833 and 1834 in Fraser's Magazine, is partly autobiographical. In the guise of a “philosophy of clothes,” Carlyle comments on the falseness of material wealth; and in the form of a philosophical romance, he details the crises in his life and affirms his spiritual idealism. In the satire, Carlyle emerged as a social critic deeply concerned with the living conditions of British workers. At the farm he also wrote some of his most distinguished essays, and he established a lifelong friendship with the American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1834 Carlyle moved to the Chelsea section of London, where he soon became known as the Sage of Chelsea and was a member of a literary circle that included the essayists Leigh Hunt and John Stuart Mill.

In London Carlyle wrote The French Revolution, A History (2 volumes, 1837), a historical study concentrating on the oppression of the poor, which was immediately successful. This was followed by a series of lectures, in one of which, published as On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), he contended that world civilization had developed because of the activities of heroes. His hatred and fear of democracy and praise of feudal society were reflected in much of his subsequent writing, especially in Chartism (1839) and Past and

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Present (1843). His concept of history appeared in a number of his later works, notably in Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, with Elucidations (1845) and History of Frederick II of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great (10 volumes, 1858-65), his most extensive work. After the death of his wife, he edited her letters; his autobiography, Reminiscences, was published in 1881. He died in London on February 5, 1881.

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY (1811-1863)

William Makepeace Thackeray

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63), English novelist and humorist, one of the foremost exponents of the 19th-century realistic novel, exemplified by his two most famous works, Vanity Fair and Henry Esmond.

Thackeray was born July 18, 1811, in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, into a wealthy English merchant family. In 1829 Thackeray entered the University of Cambridge. Leaving the university without taking his degree, he attempted to develop his literary and artistic abilities, first as the editor of a short-lived journal and subsequently as an art student in Paris. In 1840, despite a series of financial reverses and the mental illness of his wife, Thackeray produced The Paris Sketchbook, a series of reprints of his contributions to various literary journals. Comic Tales and Sketches (1841) contained the Yellowplush Papers, Major Gahagan, and the Bedford Row Conspiracy. After joining the staff of the humorous journal Punch in 1842, he published the Irish Sketchbook in 1843 and Cornhill to Cairo in 1847.

Thackeray began the serial publication of his great satirical novel Vanity Fair early in 1847, quickly establishing a reputation as one of the major literary figures of his time. In such subsequent novels as Pendennis (1848), Henry Esmond (1852), The Newcomes (1853), and The Virginians (1857), he broadened his observation of social situations to various eras and locales. These widely acclaimed works brought Thackeray new recognition. He became a principal competitor of his great contemporary, Charles Dickens, with whom he frequently disagreed on the nature of the novel as a vehicle for social commentary.

After lecturing in the U.S., Thackeray edited the Cornhill Magazine (1860-62). He contributed two of his lesser novels, Lovel the Widower and The Adventures of Philip, to the journal, and his work with the magazine suggested ideas for his humorous essays, The Roundabout Papers. In 1862 he gave up his editorship because he was unwilling to refuse manuscripts, but he continued to work for the magazine, beginning his last novel, Denis Duval, shortly before his death on December 24, 1863, in London.

Thackeray is particularly noted for his exquisitely humorous and ironic portrayals of the middle and upper classes of his time. His narrative skill and vivid characterizations are strikingly evident in his masterpiece Vanity Fair, an elaborate study of social relationships in early 19th-century England. The character of Becky Sharp, a scheming adventuress, is drawn with consummate skill, serving as a model for the heroines of many later novels. Thackeray's keen awareness of social eccentricity is seen also in his short works, especially in The Rose and the Ring (1855), in which his own clever drawings accent the text.

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Vanity FairPublished 1847-1848

I INTRODUCTIONVanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, the first major work published by William Thackeray under his own name, was published serially in London in 1847 and 1848. Previously, under various comic pseudonyms (such as Michael Angelo Titmarsh and George Savage Fitzboodle) Thackeray made clear, both in his role as the narrator of Vanity Fair and in his private correspondence about the book, that he meant it to be not just entertaining, but instructive. Like all satire, Vanity Fair has a mission and a moral. The first published installment had an illustration on its cover of a congregation listening to a preacher; both speaker and listeners were shown with donkey ears. In the pages, Thackeray explains the illustration thus: my kind reader will please to remember that these histories ... have “Vanity Fair” for a title and that Vanity Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all sorts of humbugs and falseness and pretentions. And while the moralist who is holding forth on the cover (an accurate portrait of your humble servant) professes to wear neither gown nor bands, but only the very same long-eared livery in which his congregation is arrayed: yet, look you, one is bound to speak the truth as far as one knows it.That Becky is allowed to live, and to live well, is perfectly consistent with Thackeray’s view of life and morality. ... Losing is vanity, and winning is vanity.

By the halfway point in its serial publication, Thackeray’s long, rambling tale of relentless and corrupt social climbing, told with biting humor and cynicism, was the talk of London. Readers eagerly awaited new episodes in the life of Thackeray’s deeply immoral, self-serving anti-heroine, Becky Sharp, who has since become one of the most well-known and most argued-about characters in literature. The novel secured Thackeray’s place among the literary giants of his time; and the giants of his time, among them Charles Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Thomas Hardy, and Alfred Tennyson, have endured as giants to this day. Vanity Fair is considered a classic of English literature and one of the great works of satire in all history.

II WILLIAM THACKERAYWilliam Makepeace Thackeray was born in Calcutta, India, on July 18, 1811, the only child of English parents. His father, Richmond, worked for the East India Company until he died four years after William's birth.At the age of six, William was sent to a boarding school in England while his mother, Anne Becher Thackeray, remained in India. Unsurprisingly, the young child was lonely and unhappy. In 1819, his mother remarried and returned to England where she and her new husband were able to give him the family life for which he longed.Thackeray attended Charterhouse School and went on to Cambridge University's Trinity College but did not earn a degree. He studied art in Paris and later illustrated many of his written works, including Vanity Fair. It was in Paris that Thackeray met and married Isabella Shawe, an Irish woman. They soon moved back to London where Thackeray launched his writing career. He wrote for magazines, including the famous humor magazine Punch.Isabella Thackeray suffered from mental illness after the birth of the couple's third child. After many failed attempts to cure her, Thackeray was forced, in 1842, to send his wife away to be cared for. Unable to rear his young daughters alone, he was separated from them, as well. The loneliness and separation from family that had been so difficult for Thackeray as a child were no less painful for him as a grown man. Because his wife was alive (in fact, she outlived him by many years) and divorce was not an option, Thackeray never remarried.The first work Thackeray published under his own name was Vanity Fair, a long, sprawling satire that was published in four installments in 1847 and 1848. It remains among his most well-known novels, along with The Luck of Barry Lyndon: A Romance of the Last Century

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(later published as The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon) and The Virginians: A Tale of the Last Century, inspired by Thackeray's travels in the United States in 1852–1853 and 1855–1856.Thackeray was prolific, writing short fiction and nonfiction as well as novels. By the end of his life, he had achieved both critical and financial success. In addition, he had the joy of having his mother and two of his daughters living with him and of seeing daughter Anne recognized as a successful writer. Thackeray died at his London home on Christmas Eve in 1863.

III PLOT SUMMARYA Chapters 1–7

As Vanity Fair opens, Amelia Sedley, a conventional girl from a well-to-do family, and Becky Sharp, Sedley’s orphaned, penniless, and already corrupt friend, are leaving Miss Pinkerton’s school where they have met and become friends. They go to the Sedley home where Becky will be a guest until she goes on to the governess position that Miss Pinkerton has arranged for her.Becky meets Amelia’s older brother, Joseph, called Jos, who is on leave from his government post in India. Although Jos is fat, lazy, conceited, and shy with women, he is also financially well off, and Becky schemes to marry him. Through flattery and false modesty, Becky succeeds in making all the Sedleys believe that she truly is enamored of Jos, and Jos is inclined to propose to her. George Osborne, Amelia’s fiancé, intervenes, persuading Jos that he has embarrassed himself in Becky’s presence. George does not want a governess for a sister-in-law. Defeated, Becky leaves for the Crawley estate where she is to be governess.

B Chapters 8–14The mean-spirited and stingy Sir Pitt Crawley is the patriarch of Queen’s Crawley where Becky takes up her post as governess to his two young daughters, Rosalind and Violet. Sir Pitt also has two much older sons by his first wife. The elder, also named Pitt, is pious and proper to an extreme. The younger, Rawdon, is a dandy and a gambler. The two despise each other.The irreverent and debt-ridden Reverend Bute Crawley, Sir Pitt’s brother, and his nosy, overbearing wife come on the scene. Sir Pitt and Bute also hate each other. The family members are united only in their desire to see their wealthy, old Aunt Matilda dead, and they all connive to inherit her fortune.George is disrespectful of Amelia in the presence of his army comrades, for which his longtime friend William Dobbin berates him. Physically awkward but highly virtuous, Dobbin has loved Amelia since youth but considers himself unworthy of her. George’s father, who has long encouraged George to marry Amelia, now suspects that her family has lost its money and wants George to break the engagement. The self-serving George is willing to do so.Becky has charmed Aunt Matilda and, at the old lady’s request, has moved to her home to nurse her. Rawdon is smitten with Becky and spends as much time with her as he can.Sir Pitt’s wife, Lady Crawley, dies, and immediately Sir Pitt asks Becky to marry him. Here, Becky cries the only genuine tears of her life because she must reject the wealthy Sir Pitt, having secretly married Rawdon. Sir Pitt and old Aunt Matilda are both enraged at this news.

C Chapters 15–22Becky and Rawdon go on a honeymoon, and Mrs. Bute Crawley descends on Aunt Matilda, hoping to turn her against Rawdon and secure her fortune for herself and her husband. Then the Sedleys’ possessions are sold at an estate sale; the family’s financial ruin, due to Mr. Sedley’s unwise business speculation, is complete and public. In the meantime, against the wishes of both their fathers, George and Amelia marry. Next, everyone meets in Brighton where Dobbin announces that the men have been ordered to go to Belgium where the First Duke of Wellington, the British general who is commanding a multinational army, plans to launch an attack on Napoleon's army.

D Chapters 23–35

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The peace-loving, selfless Dobbin tries to get George’s father to accept George’s marriage to Amelia, but Mr. Osborne instead disinherits George. George blames Dobbin because it was Dobbin who encouraged him to marry Amelia.Mrs. Bute Crawley is forced to leave Aunt Matilda when the reverend is injured and needs her at home. Becky and Rawdon then try to move in on the old woman, ostensibly to take over her care, but she is wise to their designs on her money.Everyone goes to Belgium. The men, except Jos, are in military service; Jos and the women accompany them. George and Becky flirt shamelessly, and Amelia is too blind to understand why she is heartsick. George finally passes Becky a mysterious note and then, remorseful, tries to make up with Amelia.General and Mrs. O’Dowd, the regiment commander and his wife, prepare for the battle. Mrs. O’Dowd, accustomed to sending her husband into battle, mothers the younger women and pursues her goal of finding a husband for the general’s sister. Rawdon is distressed at leaving Becky; George is relieved at leaving Amelia.The battle begins; the women can hear the cannons booming in the distance. Amelia is worried sick for George while Becky fantasizes about her prospects to better herself if Rawdon is killed. In fact, it is George who dies in the Battle of Waterloo.Back in England, Sir Pitt has taken up with Miss Horrocks, his butler’s daughter, scandalizing the family. Young Pitt courts Lady Jane Sheepshanks, and the sweet, kind Lady Jane in turn wins the affection of Aunt Matilda.Both Becky and Amelia give birth to sons. Dobbin tries to comfort Amelia as she grieves for George.

E Chapters 36–42Becky and Rawdon manage to live well on very little money. Becky is an expert at avoiding paying her bills. Rawdon makes a little money gambling. They lease a house from Mr. Raggles, a former servant of the Crawleys but cannot pay the rent. In turn, Raggles is unable to pay his bills and is sent to debtors’ prison.Aunt Matilda dies, young Sir Pitt inherits her wealth, and Becky and Rawdon try to ingratiate themselves with the heir. Becky ignores her son, little Rawdon, but his father loves him. Dobbin gives Amelia much-needed money, saying it was left to her by George. Jos returns to India.Sir Pitt becomes ill, lingers for a time, and then dies. Young Sir Pitt takes over Queen’s Crawley and sends for Becky and Rawdon in a gesture of family unity.

F Chapters 43–50Dobbin is in India with his regiment when he hears a false rumor that Amelia is going to get married. He requests leave to go to England.Becky and Rawdon go to Queen’s Crawley for Christmas where Becky fawns over everyone who has status or money, especially the young Sir Pitt.The Sedley family is sinking further into poverty. The Osbornes—George’s father and sisters—want George’s son Georgy to come live with them and offer Amelia money if she will give him up. After some delay, Amelia agrees to this so that Georgy is not reared in poverty.Lord Steyne, with whom Becky has a vaguely explained and profitable relationship, arranges for Becky to be presented at court—the successful culmination of all her social climbing. She appears draped in expensive jewels; unbeknownst to Rawdon, these are gifts from Lord Steyne. This begins a period of social triumph for Becky.

G Chapters 51–56Lord Steyne sends little Rawdon away to school, which pleases Becky, who cannot be bothered with him. Rawdon, long ignored by his wife, is jailed for failing to pay a debt. Becky is slow to answer his message asking her to have him released so he contacts Sir Pitt and Lady Jane. Lady Jane arrives without delay to free him. At home, Rawdon finds Becky entertaining

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Lord Steyne. He attacks Lord Steyne—he hurls a diamond pin at his forehead, leaving Lord Steyne scarred—and goes through Becky’s belongings and finds her stash of money and jewelry. Both Rawdon and Lord Steyne abandon Becky, and they plan to duel.Becky pleads with Sir Pitt to help her reconcile with Rawdon, and he agrees to try. Lord Steyne’s man, Wenham, uses diplomacy to prevent the duel. Rawdon takes a post on Coventry Island, a remote place from which he sends money for Becky and his son. Sir Pitt and Lady Jane look after little Rawdon.

H Chapters 57–67Dobbin and Jos return to England from India; Dobbin’s return has been delayed by a serious illness. Dobbin goes to see Amelia and is relieved to find that she has not married. Finally, he divulges that he has long loved her, but she continues to think only of George. Dobbin spends time with little Georgy and improves the boy’s character while Jos belatedly helps his family financially.Old Mr. Osborne dies, leaving half his money to Georgy and also leaving some money for Amelia. Jos, Amelia, Georgy, and Dobbin go to Europe. Becky, who has been wandering around Europe since losing Rawdon and Lord Steyne, meets up with them and renews her pursuit of Jos. After warning Jos that Becky is dangerous, Dobbin leaves to rejoin his regiment.Becky reveals to Amelia the contents of the mysterious note that George gave her on the eve of his death at Waterloo: George urged Becky to run away with him. Amelia finally has some understanding of George’s true character. She sends for Dobbin, he returns, and they marry immediately.Becky continues to ensnare Jos and talks him into taking out a life insurance policy with her as beneficiary. Within months, he dies of poisoning. Becky’s role in his death is left unclear. Rawdon then dies on Coventry Island of yellow fever. Sir Pitt dies, and little Rawdon inherits Queen’s Crawley. Amelia and Dobbin are happy together and have a daughter.Becky lives comfortably in Europe on the money from Jos’s insurance policy and on an allowance sent to her by her son (who nevertheless refuses to see her). She becomes a churchgoer and gives generously to charity.

IV CHARACTERSA Mrs. Blenkinsop

The Sedleys’ housekeeper, Mrs. Blenkinsop, is loyal enough to stay with the family when they lose their money. She is also Amelia’s trusted confidant.

B Miss BriggsBriggs is at first a maid for Miss Matilda Crawley and later a companion to Becky Sharp. She is good-hearted and naïve enough to loan money to Becky, which Becky, predictably, does not repay. Lord Steyne ends up providing for Miss Briggs.

C Frederick BullockFrederick, a lawyer, is Maria Osborne’s suitor and eventual husband. When Maria’s brother George is disinherited, Frederick does not hide his pleasure that Maria is now likely to receive a larger share of the family’s money.

D Mary ClappThe daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Clapp, the Sedleys’ landlords after they lose their money, Mary becomes Amelia’s friend.

E Mr. ClappMr. Clapp is the Sedleys’ longtime clerk, who takes the family in when they lose their fortune.

F Mrs. Clapp

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The Sedleys’ landlady, Mrs. Clapp, nags Amelia about the rent when the family has fallen on hard times, but she changes her attitude when Amelia comes into money.

G Bute CrawleyThe brother of Sir Pitt Crawley, Bute is a reverend who is ill-suited to his position. He likes to eat, drink, and gamble (and therefore is in debt) and is happy to let his wife run their household and write his sermons. Like all the Crawleys, he hopes to inherit a substantial amount of money from old Aunt Matilda Crawley.

H Mrs. Bute CrawleyThe reverend’s wife is overbearing, snooty, manipulative, and determined to win Aunt Matilda’s fortune. She dislikes Becky Sharp, whom she recognizes as a smart and ambitious competitor. In the end, Mrs. Crawley fails to secure Aunt Matilda’s money.

I James CrawleyThe son of Bute and Mrs. Crawley, James nearly charms Aunt Matilda into leaving him her money. When she discovers that he is a heavy drinker and catches him smoking in her house, he falls from grace and loses his chance at the inheritance.

J Miss Matilda CrawleyMiss Crawley, Sir Pitt Crawley’s half-sister, is old, unmarried, eccentric, and rich. The entire Crawley clan connives to get their hands on her fortune, and she is well aware of this. She is at first inclined to favor Rawdon, but he loses out when he marries Becky; Miss Crawley disapproves of the union because of Becky’s low social standing. Although she dislikes Pitt (mostly for his extreme piety), in the end Pitt’s wife, Lady Jane, wins the old lady’s affection through genuine kindness, and Pitt and Lady Jane end up with most of Miss Crawley’s fortune.

K Pitt CrawleyPitt is the older son of Sir Pitt Crawley. He is overly pious, proper to a fault, and stingy. It is mostly due to his marriage to the sweet and kind Lady Jane that Pitt ends up with his aunt’s fortune. His seat in Parliament is also inherited and not won by any personal merit. However, Pitt does have some redeeming qualities. He welcomes Rawdon and Becky into the family, and when they split up, Pitt offers his brother kindness and takes care of their son (also named Rawdon).

L Sir Pitt CrawleySir Pitt is a wealthy nobleman who is nevertheless uneducated, unrefined, unkempt, uncouth, and a penny pincher in the extreme. He has two sons, Pitt and Rawdon, by his deceased first wife, and two young daughters, Rosalind and Violet, by his second wife, Rose. Becky comes to his country estate, Queen’s Crawley, to be governess to his girls. When Rose dies, Sir Pitt proposes to Becky (he likes her spunk), who must refuse him because she has secretly married Rawdon. Sir Pitt then turns his affections to his butler’s daughter, Miss Horrocks, which horrifies his family. He dies and leaves his fortune, along with his noble title of baronet, to his elder son, Pitt.

M Rawdon CrawleyRawdon is the younger son of Sir Pitt Crawley and, eventually, the husband of Becky Sharp. When he is kicked out of Cambridge University, his aunt, Miss Matilda Crawley, who favors him until he marries Becky, buys him a commission in the Life Guards Green. Although somewhat dull-witted himself, Rawdon is a gambler who takes advantage of less clever men whenever he can and helps support himself and Becky in this way. He truly loves Becky and puts up with her increasing neglect and disregard for him. It is too much for him, however, when he is imprisoned for debt, and it is Lady Jane, not Becky, who comes to free him. Rawdon goes home to find Becky with Lord Steyne and finally leaves her. He takes a position

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on a faraway tropical island, Coventry Island, from which he sends money for Becky and their son. Eventually, he dies of yellow fever on the island.

N Rawdy CrawleyRawdy is the son of Becky and Rawdon. Although his father loves him, Becky shows no love or affection for him and sends him away to school under the auspices of Lord Steyne. Pitt and Lady Jane take care of him after his parents part ways, and Rawdy inherits Queen’s Crawley when Pitt dies. Although he will not see her, he provides for Becky in spite of her ill treatment of him.

O Miss Rosalind CrawleyRosalind is the daughter of Sir Pitt by his second wife and Becky’s charge when Becky comes to Queen’s Crawley.

P Miss Violet CrawleyViolet is the daughter of Sir Pitt by his second wife and Becky’s charge when Becky comes to Queen’s Crawley.

Q William DobbinDobbin is the only truly noble character in Vanity Fair. He has few outward virtues—he is awkward and unattractive—and has little money; but he is selfless, loyal, kind, truthful, and generous. He spends his life providing support and service to undeserving and ungrateful friends, among whom the closest are George Osborne and Amelia Sedley. Although Dobbin loves Amelia, he feels that he is not a good enough match for her and so goes out of his way to ensure that George marries her. His dogged devotion to Amelia is finally rewarded when Amelia marries him long after George has died. In the end, however, Dobbin realizes that Amelia was never worthy of him or of the kind of love he has shown her.

R HorrocksHorrocks is Sir Pitt’s butler.

S JohnThe Sedley’s groom, John drives Becky to Sir Pitt’s home after her visit with the Sedleys. John is rude to Becky, chiefly because Amelia has given her some clothes that John hoped to have for his girlfriend.

T Glorvina MahoneyPeggy O’Dowd’s flirtatious sister, Glorvina pursues William Dobbin, who is too fixated on Amelia to show any interest.

U Colonel Michael O’DowdThe Colonel is George Osborne and William Dobbin’s commanding officer, a brave, experienced soldier who becomes a major general. He has an amiable relationship with his wife.

V Peggy O’DowdThe Colonel’s wife is Irish, talkative, and genuinely kind. Her primary goal is to make a match for her sister, Glorvina.

W George OsborneGeorge has longstanding relationships with the Sedley family and with Dobbin. He is a good-looking, self-centered, prideful, free-spending, gambler. He has a certain amount of wealth but not nobility, and he courts the favor of all aristocrats who cross his path. It is George who ruins Becky’s hopes of marrying Joseph Sedley by convincing Joseph that it would be inappropriate for him to marry a governess. George does this not out of concern for Joseph but because he is engaged to marry Joseph’s sister, Amelia, and does not want a governess in the family.While Amelia loves George, George is incapable of loving anyone as much as he loves himself. He nearly backs out of marrying Amelia (his father is against the union and in fact

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disinherits George over it), but Dobbin persuades him to go through with it. Then, just before going off to the Battle of Waterloo, George flirts with Becky and passes her a mysterious note. George is killed in the battle, and Amelia grieves deeply. She doesn’t find out until many years later that George’s note to Becky suggested that the two of them run away together.

X Georgy OsborneGeorgy is the son of George and Amelia. His father dies before he is born. Although he is spoiled by his mother and seems destined to grow up to be even more selfish and vain than his father, Dobbin influences him for the better. His grandfather leaves Georgy half the family fortune, in spite of having disinherited his father, George, over George’s marriage to Amelia.

Y Jane OsborneOne of George’s sisters, Jane is a lonely, unmarried woman whose life is considerably uplifted when young Georgy comes to live at the Osborne family home.

Z Old John OsborneFather of George, John is a mean, calculating, unforgiving man. He has encouraged George to love and marry Amelia throughout his son’s youth, but when the Sedley family loses its fortune, John orders George to give Amelia up. When George refuses, John disowns and disinherits him and refuses to have anything to do with Amelia. After George’s death, the old man remains hard toward Amelia but wants to rear his grandson, to which Amelia finally agrees. In part because of Dobbin’s efforts, John mellows somewhat in his old age. He comes to love Georgy and not only leaves a substantial amount of money to his grandson but also provides for Amelia.

AA Maria OsborneOne of John Osborne’s three daughters, Maria is rather like her father. She welcomes her brother’s disinheritance because it means more of the family fortune for her, and she marries a lawyer who is equally cold and calculating. When her father leaves Georgy and Amelia money, Maria plots to have one of her daughters marry Georgy so that she can control more of the family money.

AB Miss Barbara PinkertonMiss Pinkerton owns the academy where Amelia Sedley and Becky Sharp meet and become friends. Miss Pinkerton dotes on Amelia because her family has money and hates Becky as much for her poverty as for her churlish attitude.

AC Charles RagglesRaggles works as a gardener for the Crawleys and saves his money until he is able to buy a greengrocer shop and house of his own. Becky and Rawdon come to be his tenants but do not pay their rent. They cheat him until finally they have ruined him, and Raggles ends up in debtors’ prison.

AD Amelia SedleyAmelia is the daughter of John Sedley, a businessman who is successful and moneyed as the novel opens. She is sweet, kind, malleable, naïve, and shallow.Amelia’s love for George Osborne is blind love. On the eve of the Battle of Waterloo, as George flirts with Becky, Amelia is deeply distraught at George’s imminent departure for the battle. George is handsome, and Amelia doesn’t see beneath the surface to the ugliness underneath, any more than she sees the nobility beneath Dobbin’s unattractive appearance. Even after George’s death, she remains as unaware of his lack of integrity and devotion as she is of William Dobbin’s love for her.Amelia is a loving mother to Georgy, the son born to her after George’s death. She finally marries Dobbin but only after Becky awakens her to his virtue.

AE John Sedley

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Father of Amelia and Joseph, John Sedley is, when the novel begins, a well-to-do merchant and a friend of John Osborne. Sedley is amenable to Becky’s plot to marry Joseph, as he fears that the alternative will be an Indian woman; Joseph is on leave from his government post in India. Sedley takes unwise business risks in an effort to increase his wealth but instead loses everything. The family is forced to rent a lowly cottage owned by one of their former servants. Sedley then spends his time concocting schemes to regain his wealth, but he dies penniless.

AF Mrs. John SedleyJohn Sedley’s wife is sweet-tempered and loyal like her daughter, Amelia, but her good nature gradually is ground down by the family’s ongoing poverty. Amelia takes care of her during her last illness.

AG Joseph SedleyJoseph is Amelia’s older brother. He loves nothing more than food, drink, and sleep. His father tells his mother, “if you and I and his sister were to die tomorrow, he would say, `Good Gad!’ and eat his dinner just as well as usual.” He is fat and cowardly, yet conceited and a dandy. At Waterloo, he goes no nearer the battlefield than the women do and still shakes with fear, and yet he later tells such tales of his courage that he is given the nickname “Waterloo Sedley.” He believes that Becky is genuinely attracted to him, when her only real interest is in his money, and plans to propose to her until George dissuades him. When his father goes bankrupt, Joseph sends only a little money and is tardy even with that.Joseph meets Becky in Europe after her husband has left her, and she charms him just as she had years earlier. Joseph and Becky travel together, but Joseph confides to Dobbin that he is frightened of Becky. Joseph soon dies of poisoning, and it is left unclear whether Becky has murdered him for his only remaining asset, an insurance policy whose proceeds are split between Becky and Amelia.

AH Becky SharpSee Rebecca Sharp

AI Rebecca SharpBecky Sharp is the central character in Vanity Fair and Amelia Sedley’s opposite. She is the orphaned daughter of destitute parents, and she learns early on to look after her own interests in all situations. Becky values money and social status above all and is thoroughly corrupt in her pursuit of them. Her most well-known (though often doubted) observation is that for five thousand pounds a year, she could be a good woman. Selfish, unscrupulous, manipulative, and ambitious, she is capable of appearing sweet, mild, and even timid when it furthers her aims to do so. She can blush and cry at will but cries genuinely only once: when she is forced to turn down the wealthy Sir Pitt’s marriage proposal because she has already secretly married his son.Becky is helped in her relentless social climbing both by her wits, which are as keenly honed as her surname implies, and by her physical attributes, which are listed thus: “Green eyes, fair skin, pretty figure, famous frontal development.” Nearly all the male characters in the novel are taken in by her, always to their detriment.As the novel opens, Becky attends Miss Pinkerton’s academy where she earns her keep by teaching French (learned from her mother). She becomes Amelia’s friend and goes to her home for a long visit when the two leave the academy. There she tries to lure Amelia’s brother Joseph into marrying her but is foiled by George Osborne. She then goes to work as a governess for Sir Pitt Crawley and marries his son Rawdon, a marriage that gives her status but not wealth. In a series of attempts to secure money, she sacrifices her marriage and ignores her child. Her vaguely defined relationship with Lord Steyne provides both money and position until Rawdon walks in on them and both men abandon her.

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In the end, Becky has attained a measure of middle-class respectability—the place in Vanity Fair that she has so long and so ardently sought. Her status is made possible partly by money inherited from Joseph Sedley, whom she meets again after many years and whose death by poisoning she may have caused.Becky’s corruption does not render her incapable of recognizing or appreciating virtue in others, even though virtue is rare in Vanity Fair. She is able to see the noble character of William Dobbin and, in an unexpected act of caring, helps Amelia to see it too, so that Amelia will marry Dobbin.

AJ Lord SteyneLord Steyne is a wealthy aristocrat and lord of the Powder Closet at Buckingham Palace. He is unattractive in every conceivable way and considerably older than Becky, but she enters into a vague arrangement with him that earns her money, jewelry, and status until her husband walks in on Becky and him and throws a brooch at Lord Steyne, scarring him for life.

AK The Marchioness of SteyneLord Steyne’s wife is a good woman, reduced to silence and superstitious religiosity by her husband’s degeneracy. She comes to Becky’s defense after Rawdon wounds Lord Steyne and both men desert her.

AL WenhamWenham is Lord Steyne’s servant. He prevents Lord Steyne from dueling with Rawdon over Becky and turns Sir Pitt against Becky.

V THEMESA Vanity

There is one clear, overarching theme in Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, and Thackeray telegraphs it in his title and subtitle. In the pages of Vanity Fair, all is vanity and all are vain. Some are more vain—more obsessed with self and with the ephemeral treasures of social position and money—than others, but none, in the author’s estimation, can be called heroic.The title is borrowed from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, in which Vanity Fair is a town that exists for the purpose of diverting men and women from the road to heaven. The town’s residents are all mean and ignorant, and they all make their living by enticing passersby to spend what they have on worldly vanities—items that offer brief sensual pleasure but have no lasting value. Thackeray transports Vanity Fair to London in the early 1800s and peoples his version with characters, primarily from the middle and upper classes, who live only to obtain higher social status and more money, and who are happy to lie, cheat, steal, manipulate, and betray in the pursuit of these goals. It is worth noting, as well, that Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, like Bunyan’s, is explicitly a godless place; both authors believe that the unrestrained vanity they portray is possible only among people who have no concept of a God who sets, upholds, and enforces moral standards. In an often-quoted letter to a personal correspondent, written in July 1847, before Vanity Fair was finished, Thackeray wrote, “What I want is to make a set of people living without God in the world . . . greedy, pompous, mean, perfectly self-satisfied for the most part and at ease about their superior virtue.”Thackeray succeeded so well in doing this that the novel has been faulted, more often than for anything else, for the unrelenting baseness of its characters. The vainest of all is Becky Sharp. Becky is proud of the physical attractiveness and clever wit that allow her to charm men. Her ultimate effect on them is similar to a spider’s effect on a fly, which finds itself trapped and consumed. As her first husband, Rawdon Crawley, goes off to the Battle of Waterloo, Becky muses that she will be free to marry a wealthier man if Rawdon is killed. When he is not killed, Becky makes the best of it, using his aristocratic pedigree to win entrance to the social circles she seeks and to help her avoid paying her bills. Meanwhile, she uses other men, especially Lord Steyne, to get what she cannot get from her husband (money), carrying on public relationships that humiliate him, and ignoring him and their son. After Rawdon has

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finally left her for a faraway island, where he dies of a tropical disease, Joseph Sedley has the bad luck to encounter Becky a second time, and the drama of the spider and the fly again unfolds. Becky seduces Joseph and soon talks him into taking out a life insurance policy with her as beneficiary. Within months, Joseph is dead of poison; whether by Becky’s hand or not is left to the reader to decide. There is scant evidence in the novel that murder would be beyond her.Most of those around Becky are not better than she is; they are simply less clever and less desperate. Joseph is lazy, gluttonous, dull, and uncaring. When his father goes bankrupt and his whole family is on the verge of starvation, he doesn’t get around to sending relief until it is nearly too late. George Osborne, Amelia’s husband, is unable to love anyone but himself. George’s father is mean, calculating, and unforgiving. Old Sir Pitt is a vulgar skinflint. Reverend Bute Crawley is not at all reverent and lets his overbearing gossip of a wife write his sermons. The list goes on and on.Among the main characters, only Amelia Sedley and William Dobbin approach virtue. Amelia’s fault is not so much that she is vain as that she is too blind and too shallow to recognize either vanity or virtue even at point-blank range. She idolizes George, the self-absorbed cad; she fails to see that Dobbin is a better man by far, even after years of his selfless attention to her. And Amelia is not completely above vanity. She is self-centered enough to accept Dobbin’s devotion and his generous gifts without thinking of his feelings and without even expressing much gratitude.Dobbin alone possesses real integrity and moral maturity, but even he is tinged with vanity. He is selfless, loyal, generous, and kind, ever content to give more than he takes. Dobbin’s failure, similar to Amelia’s, is his lack of discrimination about the characters of those around him. As a result, he gives people much more and much better than they deserve; in other words, he spends his life casting pearls before swine. And Dobbin’s vanity lies in his dogged devotion to Amelia, who is, like the wares hawked at Bunyan’s Vanity Fair, glittery but not golden. She is not a heroine, worthy of a hero; she is just a generally decent, conventional, sweet-tempered woman. Though he does finally realize that Amelia has not been worthy of the adoration he has heaped on her, as a character, Dobbin is weakened by the fact that it takes him half a lifetime to develop a realistic view of Amelia.

VI CONSTRUCTIONA Victorian Literature

It was during the Victorian period (1837–1901) that the novel became the dominant literary form. Vanity Fair is considered one of the classic novels of the era. It was common for novels to be published serially, in magazines or in stand-alone sections. Vanity Fair was first published serially, and the early parts were published before the later ones were written. This at least partly explains the novel’s many irregularities. A character may be called by different names in different sections (Mrs. Bute Crawley may be Barbara or Martha; Glorvina may be Glorvina Mahoney, the sister of Mrs. O’Dowd, or Glorvina O’Dowd, the sister of the general). One name may also be shared by multiple minor characters, and both the narrative and the passage of time may jump and start in unexpected directions. In one particularly confusing instance, Thackeray relates the details of Joseph’s visit to his family and then has Amelia receive a letter from Joseph informing her that his visit will be delayed. To put it simply, Thackeray made it up as he went along, without undue concern for consistency. The novel’s generous length and enormous cast of characters are also characteristic of the time.Thackeray and Charles Dickens were the leading lights in Victorian fiction, constantly compared and always uncomfortable around each other. Dickens was born a year after Thackeray but was well established by the time Thackeray began to attract notice. Thackeray’s focus was on the middle and upper classes, while Dickens’s was on the poor.

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Thackeray’s works, including Vanity Fair, are considered less sentimental and more subtle than Dickens’s.

B Loose StructureVanity Fair is not only long, it is meandering. Thackeray knows where he is taking his readers, but he is in no hurry to get them to their destination. Any slight forward movement of the plot may cause the author to stop, reflect, pontificate, and digress. There are many long essays on everything from how to live with no visible means to how women treat one another. Other topics include how people comport themselves at estate sales, what the relationships between servants and employers are like, and what types of wedding and funeral ceremonies are practiced. Thackeray addresses readers directly, sometimes telling them what they can expect in the coming pages, sometimes telling them what to think of a character, and sometimes sharing his own musings and desires (one of which is for a rich, old aunt like Miss Matilda Crawley).Many characters, including minor ones, also are given space to express their perspectives on other characters, story events, settings, and life in general. The story is told primarily from the point of view of a single narrator, but this narrator is often interrupted by story characters and by the author himself.Thackeray’s wanderings cover more than just philosophical terrain. Readers follow various characters all over England and to Brussels, Paris, Rome, the comically named, fictional German principality of Pumpernickel, and India, as well as to the British royal court and to an infamous debtors’ prison.

C SatireAbove all else, Vanity Fair is a satire. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory cites Thackeray among the principal satirists of the nineteenth century and Vanity Fair as a key work. It defines satire by defining its author: The satirist is . . . a kind of self-appointed guardian of standards, ideals, and truth; of moral as well as aesthetic values. He is a man (women satirists are very rare) who takes it upon himself to correct, censure, and ridicule the follies and vices of society and thus to bring contempt and derision upon aberrations from a desirable and civilized norm. Thus satire is a kind of protest, a sublimation and refinement of anger and indignation.

As much as Vanity Fair meanders in terms of content, it remains steadfastly on point when it comes to tone; it is satirical from start to finish, and all characters, even the few virtuous ones, take their share of darts. The sharpest arrows, though, are aimed at the worst of the lot. When the ignorant, vulgar tightwad Sir Pitt proposes to Becky, he makes a tall tale of a speech that makes him out as a generous gentleman whose only fault might be his advanced age. He tells Becky: “I’m an old man, but a good’n. I’m good for twenty years. I’ll make you happy, zee if I don’t. You shall do what you like; spend what you like; and ’av it all your own way. I’ll make you a zettlement. I’ll do everything reglar. Look year!” And the old man fell down on his knees and leered at her like a satyr.

The humor is compounded when Becky responds with equal corruption. Although she is distraught only because she is already married to Sir Pitt’s much less wealthy son, she does a good job of acting as if she believes Sir Pitt to be the prize of manhood and explaining that that is why she is in tears at having to turn him down.Virtually every character in the book, starting with Becky Sharp, is satirized every time his or her connotation-laden name is mentioned. But the most obvious and outrageous names are saved for minor characters: the auctioneer is Mr. Hammerdown; the surgeon, Dr. Lance; the hanging judge, Sir Thomas Coffin; the gambler, Deuceace, to give a very few examples. Also

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on Becky’s rain-drenched trip to Queen’s Crawley, she passes the towns of Leakington, Mudbury, and Squashmore.Thackeray’s satire often takes the form of irony (figurative speech in which what is meant is the opposite of what is said). People who hate each other address each other as “my love.” The degenerate Lord Steyne calls his house a “temple of virtue” and describes his long-suffering and pious wife as being as gay as Lady MacBeth. Of the war-beleaguered Belgians, the author writes, “For a long period of history they have let other people fight there.”

D Wide-Ranging AllusionsIt would take a lifetime study of world literature and history to comprehend every allusion in Vanity Fair. References to Greek and Roman classics and the Bible are not unexpected. But Thackeray adds dozens of references much more obscure to modern Western readers. To name just a few: Ahriman, a Zoroastrian evil spirit; the Arabian nights; and a French opera performed in London at the time Thackeray was writing. His several allusions appear as represented in the following passage: “Come, come,” said James, putting his hand to his nose and winking at his cousin with a pair of vinous eyes, “no jokes, old boy; no trying it on on me. You want to trot me out, but it’s no go. In vino veritas, old boy. Mars, Bacchus, Apollo virorum, hay? I wish my aunt would send down some of this to the governor; it’s a precious good tap.”

James is quoting (not accurately) the Latin Grammar he studied at school; the main gist is “truth in wine.” “Machiavel” is Thackeray’s short form of Machiavelli and the author’s nickname for Sir Pitt.

VII HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVEA Napoleon and the Battle of Waterloo

The Napoleonic Wars began in the late 1790s, with Napoleon Bonaparte leading the revolutionary government in France. For the next several years, the British suffered military defeats at sea, several attempted invasions by the French, as well as the economic inflation and disruption that often accompany war. The British formed a series of alliances to fight the French, and the Fourth Coalition, comprising Britain, Russia, Prussia, and Austria, succeeded in routing Napoleon and exiling him in 1814. In 1815, Napoleon escaped from exile on the island of Elba and retook the French throne. It is this event that brings the major characters of Vanity Fair to Brussels and leads to the famous Battle of Waterloo.At the news of Napoleon’s return, the Fourth Coalition nations quickly committed a force of 150,000 soldiers to gather in Belgium and invade France on July 1, 1815. The British general Arthur Wellesley, the First Duke of Wellington, was the chief commander of the coalition force. Napoleon responded by planning a secretive, preemptive strike against the assembling troops. He reached the Belgian border on June 14, with nearly 125,000 troops, and crossed it on June 15.With the advantage of surprise, Napoleon succeeded in splitting the two sections of the coalition force and thus held the strategic upper hand. Four days of fierce fighting and desperate strategizing on both sides followed, culminating at Waterloo on June 18. On that day alone, 40,000 French soldiers and 22,000 coalition soldiers were killed; Waterloo was one of the bloodiest battles of modern times. Here is Thackeray’s description: All day long, whilst the women were praying ten miles away, the lines of the dauntless English infantry were receiving and repelling the furious charges of French horsemen. Guns which were heard at Brussels were ploughing up their ranks, and comrades falling, and the resolute survivors closing in. Towards evening, the attack slackened in its fury. They . . . were preparing for a final onset. It came at last: the columns of the Imperial Guard marched up the hill of Saint Jean. . . . It seemed almost to crest the eminence, when it began to wave and falter. Then it

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stopped, still facing the shot. Then at last the English troops rushed from the post from which no enemy had been able to dislodge them, and the Guard turned and fled.

No more firing was heard at Brussels—the pursuit rolled miles away. The darkness came down on the field and city, and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.

In the end, strategic errors by Napoleon and his generals and savage, fearless fighting by the coalition troops led to Napoleon’s utter and final defeat. He was forced to give up the French throne a second time and was exiled to Saint Helena. King Louis XVIII was restored to the throne.Vanity Fair is not the only work of literature to feature the Battle of Waterloo. British poet Lord Byron gives it an important place in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, as does Thomas Hardy in The Dynasts. Among French writers, Victor Hugo includes the battle in Les Misérables.

B Victorian EnglandThe Victorian Age began in 1837 when eighteen-year-old Queen Victoria ascended to the British throne and ended with her death in 1901. Victoria and her husband, Albert, set the tone of English life and culture for most of a century. It was a time of social and moral conservatism; the family values of the time were similar to those touted in late twentieth-century America. Pragmatism was valued above romance, duty above pleasure.The early Victorian period was a time of social reforms. Laws were passed governing working conditions of women and children (they could not work in underground mines, for example), and attempts were made to improve conditions in prisons and insane asylums. Efforts to broaden access to education (England had no public schools at the time) stalled because of controversy over the Church of England’s role in expanded education. Writers such as Thackeray and Charles Dickens took up the cause of reform, using their writing to point out the need for prison reforms and educational programs and to expose the evils of industrialization and the class system.In the middle of the nineteenth century, England was experiencing unprecedented political, industrial, and economic power, fueled by the Industrial Revolution and by the wealth from the colonies. All forms of transportation boomed; railroad patronage increased sevenfold, and the shipbuilding industry grew. Living standards of the working class and middle class were buoyed, and trade unions were formed to promote the interests of skilled workers.In the late 1850s, after unrest in India, the British government abolished the East India Company and took over direct rule of the subcontinent. Queen Victoria was declared Empress of India in 1876, and the empire continued to expand, especially in Asia and Africa.

ROBERT BROWNING (1812-1889)

Robert Browning

Robert Browning (1812-1889), English poet, especially noted for perfecting the dramatic monologue (literary composition in which the speaker reveals his or her character). Browning was born in Camberwell (now part of London). He had almost no formal education after the age of 14 and was largely self-taught. His first volume of poetry, Pauline, appeared in 1833 without signature. It was followed by a dramatic poem, “Paracelsus” (1835), that brought him into prominence among the literary figures of the day. “Paracelsus” was the first poem in which Browning used a Renaissance setting, a familiar motif in his later work. During the next few years Browning wrote several unsuccessful plays. From 1841 to 1846, a series of

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poems under the title Bells and Pomegranates appeared, including “Pippa Passes,””My Last Duchess,” and “The Bishop Orders His Tomb.” His Dramatic Lyrics (1842) included “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” and Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845) included “How We Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix.”

In 1846 Browning married the poet Elizabeth Barrett (see Elizabeth Barrett Browning). Because of her ill health, worsened by the English climate, they made their home in Florence, Italy, in the palace later made famous by Elizabeth's poem, Casa Guidi Windows. There he wrote Christmas Eve and Easter-Day (1850) and a series of dramatic monologues, published collectively as Men and Women (1855), which included “Fra Lippo Lippi” and “Andrea del Sarto,” studies of Renaissance artists.

Following Elizabeth's death in 1861, Browning returned to London, where he wrote Dramatis Personae (1864) and what is regarded as his masterpiece, The Ring and the Book (4 volumes, 1868-1869). Concerning the events of a 17th-century Italian murder trial, the Ring is an extended dramatic monologue among a number of characters and has been praised as a perceptive psychological study. This was the first poem that brought Browning widespread fame.

In 1878 Browning returned to Italy, where his only son made his home. During this last period he wrote the prose narrative Dramatic Idylls (1879 and 1880) and Asolando, which appeared on December 12, 1889, the day he died in Venice. Although his wife's reputation as a poet was greater than his own during his lifetime, Robert Browning today is considered one of the major poets of the Victorian era. He is most famous for the development of the dramatic monologue, for his psychological insight, and for his forceful, colloquial poetic style.

CHARLES DICKENS (1812-1870)

Soon after Sketches by Boz appeared, the fledgling publishing firm of Chapman and Hall approached Dickens to write a story in monthly installments. The publisher intended the story as a backdrop for a series of woodcuts by the then-famous artist Robert Seymour, who had originated the idea for the story. With characteristic confidence, Dickens, although younger and relatively unknown, successfully insisted that Seymour’s pictures illustrate his own story instead. After the first installment, Dickens wrote to the artist and asked him to correct a drawing Dickens felt was not faithful enough to his prose. Seymour made the change, went into his backyard, and expressed his displeasure by committing suicide. Dickens and his publishers simply pressed on with a new artist. The comic novel, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, appeared serially in 1836 and 1837 and was first published in book form in 1837.

The runaway success of The Pickwick Papers, as it is generally known today, clinched Dickens’s fame. There were Pickwick coats and Pickwick cigars, and the plump, spectacled hero, Samuel Pickwick, became a national figure. Four years later, Dickens’s readers found Dolly Varden, the heroine of Barnaby Rudge (1841), so irresistible that they named a waltz, a rose, and even a trout for her. The widespread familiarity today with Ebenezer Scrooge and his proverbial hard-heartedness from A Christmas Carol (1843) demonstrate that Dickens’s characters live on in the popular imagination.

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Dickens published 15 novels, one of which was left unfinished at his death. These novels are, in order of publication with serialization dates given first: The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836-1837; 1837); The Adventures of Oliver Twist (1837-1839; 1838); The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839; 1839); The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1841; 1841); Barnaby Rudge (1841); The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1844; 1844); Dombey and Son (1846-1848; 1848); The Personal History of David Copperfield (1849-1850; 1850); Bleak House (1852-1853; 1853); Hard Times (1854); Little Dorrit (1855-1857; 1857); A Tale of Two Cities (1859); Great Expectations (1860-1861; 1861); Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865; 1865); and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (unfinished; 1870).

Through his fiction Dickens did much to highlight the worst abuses of 19th-century society and to prick the public conscience. But running through the main plot of the novels are a host of subplots concerning fascinating and sometime ludicrous minor characters. Much of the humor of the novels derives from Dickens’s descriptions of these characters and from his ability to capture their speech mannerisms and idiosyncratic traits.

Written for publication as a serial, The Pickwick Papers is a sequence of loosely-related adventures. Its main literary value and appeal is formed by its numerous memorable characters. Each character in The Pickwick Papers, as in many other Dickens novels, is drawn comically, often with exaggerated personalities.

The novel's main character, Mr. Samuel Pickwick, is a kind and wealthy old gentleman, the founder of the Pickwick Club. Following his description in the text, he is usually portrayed by illustrators as a round-faced, clean-shaven, portly gentleman wearing spectacles. Mr. Pickwick travels with his friends, Mr. Nathaniel Winkle, Mr. Augustus Snodgrass, and Mr. Tracy Tupman, and their peregrinations through the English countryside provide the chief theme of the novel.

Alfred Jingle provides the Papers with an aura of comic villainy. His misadventures repeatedly land the Pickwickians in trouble. (These include Jingle's elopement with the spinster, Aunt Rachael of Dingley Dell manor, misadventures with Col. Slammer, and others).

Other notable adventures include Mr. Pickwick's legal case against his landlady, Mrs Bardell, who (through an apparent misunderstanding on her part) is suing him for the breach of promise to marry her. Another is Mr. Pickwick's incarceration at the Fleet for his stubborn refusal to pay the compensation to her; the unscrupulous Dodson and Fogg's law firm prosecuted poor Pickwick.

Mr. Pickwick, Sam Weller, and Weller Senior also appear in Dickens's serial, Master Humphrey's Clock.

Oliver TwistPublished 1837-1839

I ABOUT THE AUTHORCharles John Huffham Dickens was born in Portsea, on England's southern coast, on February 7, 1812. The Dickens family moved several times during his youth, and the boy attended several schools, received instruction from his mother, and read voraciously. In 1824 Dickens's

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father, John, a middle-class naval pay clerk, was imprisoned for debt. Two weeks before this imprisonment, young Dickens was sent to work in a blacking warehouse pasting labels on bottles of boot polish. He lived alone in rented lodgings while the rest of his family moved into prison with his father, a common practice at that time. His father was released after three months, but Dickens always remembered and hated the degradation of this period of his life.In 1827 Dickens left school to work as an apprentice at a law firm. Although he disliked the law profession, he studied legal shorthand after work and became a very successful court and parliamentary reporter, eventually working for several newspapers. In 1836 Dickens published his first book, Sketches by Boz, a successful collection of vignettes previously published in a London newspaper. That same year he married Catherine Hogarth, with whom he would have ten children. Dickens's first novel, The Pickwick Papers, appeared as a monthly serial from 1836 to 1837. It became an immensely popular best seller, making Dickens extremely famous at age 24.Before his death in 1870 Dickens published fourteen major novels, several plays, numerous short stories, and many other books and articles. At times he was involved in writing as many as three novels simultaneously. A man of incredible energy and vitality, Dickens also acted, edited several periodicals, and worked with various charitable organizations. He twice toured America, giving readings from his works to packed houses. Dickens's novels—among them, David Copperfield, Bleak House (1852), Little Dorrit (1857), A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend (1865)—dominated the Victorian literary scene throughout his life, and he was arguably the most popular novelist ever to write in English. He left a final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished when he died of a stroke on June 9, 1870, in Rochester, England.

II OVERVIEWDickens, like Shakespeare, is one of those rare writers who has always appealed to a wide variety of readers. Many of Dickens's books were published, one part at a time, in popular magazines of the day. Whenever a new installment of a Dickens novel appeared, people of all social and economic classes rushed out to discover what had happened to their favorite characters. Scholars estimate that for every book or magazine copy sold, ten people read or heard the story. Dickens's novels are still amazingly popular among both casual readers and scholars. Academic articles and books on Dickens appear at a rate surpassed only by Shakespearean criticism.Oliver Twist offers typical Dickensian pleasures. The author creates situations and incidents that are incredibly funny, delightfully touching, and feverishly exciting. His language amazes with its aptness and honesty. Dickens's realistic descriptions of loathsome places and evil characters brought criticism from his fellow Victorians, many of whom preferred to avoid any knowledge of their society's imperfections. Despite his unforgettable portraits of the underside of Victorian England, Dickens presents a world governed by morality, in which both honest and dishonest characters receive their due. In Oliver Twist and all of his works, Dickens deals realistically and profoundly with social and moral issues that remain relevant today.

III SETTINGDickens sets Oliver Twist in early 19th-century England, a time when long-held ideas and beliefs came under serious scrutiny. Profound changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution, religious uncertainty, scientific advancement, and political and social upheaval caused many Victorians to reexamine many aspects of their society and culture.Industrialization drove many farmworkers into the cities, where poor labor conditions and inadequate housing condemned most of them to poverty. The unprecedented increase in urban population fostered new and overwhelming problems of sanitation, overcrowding, poverty, disease, and crime in the huge slums occupied by impoverished workers, the unemployed, and the unfortunate. London slums bred the sort of crime Dickens portrays in Oliver Twist.

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The novel is set against the background of the New Poor Law of 1834, which established a system of workhouses for those who, because of poverty, sickness, mental disorder, or age, could not provide for themselves. Young Oliver Twist, an orphan, spends his first nine years in a 'baby farm,' a workhouse for children in which only the hardiest survive. When Oliver goes to London, he innocently falls in with a gang of youthful thieves and pickpockets headed by a vile criminal named Fagin. Dickens renders a powerful and generally realistic portrait of this criminal underworld, with all its sordidness and sin. He later contrasts the squalor and cruelty of the workhouse and the city slums with the peace and love Oliver finds in the country at the Maylies' home.

IV THEMES AND CHARACTERSDickens's story revolves around young Oliver Twist, an orphan brought up at a 'charitable' institution 'where twenty or thirty other juvenile offenders against the poor-laws rolled about on the floor all day, without the inconvenience of too much food or too much clothing.' After nine years Oliver graduates to a workhouse for young orphans. There his starving fellow sufferers elect him to ask for more food, in punishment for which Oliver is sold to an undertaker. Eventually Oliver runs away, making his painful way to London. Penniless and hungry, Oliver is befriended by a young thief, the Artful Dodger, who introduces him to Fagin and his gang, the evil Bill Sikes, and Sikes's lover, Nancy. Steadfastly resisting the criminals' attempts to corrupt him, Oliver eventually escapes, discovers his true parentage, and receives the respect he deserves. Dickens does a creditable job of making Oliver's unshakable goodness believable. Despite the book's title, however, Oliver has less to do with the story's action than do most protagonists. Other characters act toward him or around him more than he acts on his own; his essentially passive role in the novel makes him less interesting than some of the other, more fully drawn characters.The villains of Oliver Twist are the novel's most memorable characters. Bill Sikes is stupid, strong, insensitive, and thoroughly evil. With no respect for human life, he insults, threatens, or beats every living thing that gets in his way. Fagin, the clever and devious master of the young thieves, shrewdly manipulates Sikes to his own advantage. Although he apparently retains some shreds of kindness and humanity, Fagin appears primarily as a grotesque, though at times humorous, devil figure. Fagin specializes in corrupting the young. Another evil character, Monks, works behind the scenes for most of the book but exerts an influence.The truly good characters in the novel are Dickens's least satisfying. Rose Maylie represents Dickens's early version of the ideal Victorian woman. She is sweet, unselfish, giving, loving, submissive, completely good—and unbelievable. Harry Maylie's condescending sacrifice for Rose seems unnecessary at best. Mr. Brownlow fares better; he champions Oliver's cause, leads the fight against Oliver's enemies, and has enough personal foibles to make him believable.Nancy, a prostitute, combines good and bad traits. She lives with Bill Sikes and has stolen for Fagin since her childhood, but she has many admirable qualities. She becomes Oliver's advocate and defender while Fagin holds him prisoner, and she even betrays her friends to protect him. Dickens ultimately judges Nancy's sins to be an indictment against Fagin and others who shaped her during her youth. Dickens writes in the book's preface that Nancy's character 'involves the best and worst shades of our nature; much of its ugliest hues, and something of its most beautiful; it is a contradiction, an anomaly, an apparent impossibility; but it is a truth.' By the end of the book, Nancy receives earthly punishment but heavenly reward.Dickens's thematic concern with the nature of good and evil—and the factors that make a person choose one or the other—pervades the novel. Rose Maylie has little temptation to be bad, while Nancy has little opportunity to be good. Oliver is rescued before hunger and desperation force him to compromise his values, and Charley Bates manages to overcome his

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unfortunate upbringing, although not without great struggle. Others, however, seem doomed from the beginning. Dickens writes that such men as Bill Sikes 'would not give the faintest indication of a better nature. Whether every gentler human feeling is dead within such bosoms, or the proper chord to strike has rusted and is hard to find, I do not pretend to know; but that the fact is as I state it, I am sure.'Dickens wrote Oliver Twist to identify social problems such as the workhouse system, the ineffective legal establishment, and the suffering caused by poverty. But, as always, Dickens's deepest concern is with individuals. He champions self-sacrifice, benevolence, and charity, and he suggests that personal happiness and social progress can occur only as individuals develop these traits.

V LITERARY QUALITIESOliver Twist is Dickens's second novel, written when he was still in his middle 20s, and does not display the brilliance of character, thought, form, and language that characterizes his most mature work. Nevertheless, the novel has much to recommend it. Dickens's realistic descriptions of the London criminal underworld are fascinating and effective. He creates lively characters and situations and has a knack for finding just the right word to devastate a character, drive home a point, or create effective irony or humor. His social criticism still generates animated discussions about similar problems existing today, and the moral issues Dickens raises will probably always face us.Some readers object to Dickens's use of coincidences to propel the plot of Oliver Twist. He depends on the kinds of unlikely connections that many modern writers carefully avoid; Dickens himself toned down his reliance on coincidence as a plot device in his later works. It is important to note that coincidences even more startling than those in Dickens's books occurred regularly in other novels of the time, and hence, the Victorian reading public was accustomed to suspending its disbelief to a certain extent when reading novels. Dickens and other Victorian writers sought artistic balance in their plots, and making everything fit together was a time-honored goal of the novelist. More important, Dickens hoped to show that, although those who live comfortably may try to deny any connection with—and therefore responsibility for—the poor, all people are naturally and inescapably interconnected. In later novels such as Bleak House, Dickens succeeds in expressing this theme without resorting to coincidence as often as he does in Oliver Twist.

VI SOCIAL SENSITIVITYSome of Dickens's original readers objected to Oliver Twist's comparatively frank portrayal of thieves, pickpockets, and prostitutes. But what was considered explicit then is quite mild today. Dickens carefully avoids direct quotation of offensive language and offers only the most oblique descriptions of objectionable behavior. The novel was written for a Victorian audience, after all, and as Dickens himself points out in the preface, 'a lesson of the purest good may...be drawn from the vilest evil.'Dickens's treatment of Jewish characters will be more objectionable to modern readers, although very few Victorians even noticed it. The original text clearly portrays Fagin as a Jew and may even suggest that his ethnic background has formed his character. Indeed, Dickens frequently compares Fagin to the devil, though never explicitly because Fagin is a Jew. Dickens, although remarkably clear-sighted about some forms of injustice, never completely escaped the views of his own culture, which generally viewed Jews as sneaky and dishonest.

Great Expectations

Great ExpectationsPublished 1861

I ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Charles John Huffam Dickens was born February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth, England. He was the son of John Dickens, a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, and Elizabeth (Barrow) Dickens. Young Dickens was taught at home by his mother, and attended a Dame School (a school in which the rudiments of reading and writing were taught by a woman in her own home) at Chatham for a short time, and Wellington Academy in London. Later, he further educated himself by reading widely in the British Museum. Dickens’s father was incompetent at managing money, and was eventually sent to debtor’s prison. Attempting to support herself and the younger children in more modest quarters when they had to leave the family home, Mrs. Dickens tried to set herself up as the principal of a girls’ school, but no one enrolled any children to be taught by her. Dickens was sent at age 12 to work in a run-down part of London, in a business owned by a family friend, sticking labels on bottles of boot-black; he lived in a small, humble rooming house nearby. For months his only recreation was depressing Sunday visits to his father in debtor’s prison. This life horrified him, giving him belly cramps and lasting nightmares. Even the friendship of a poor boy named Fagin who tended Dickens when he was sick at work was not enough to relieve his shame.After some months the family’s income was recovered to a small extent, but it took the intervention of another family friend before young Dickens’s parents brought him to Kent to live with the family. It simply had not occurred to them to remove their 12-year-old son from miserable employment in a slum.These few months had a profound affect on young Dickens’s life. Afterwards he strove to be a gentleman, to escape what he had learned of poverty. He considered a career in the theater, but took up writing and discovered that he had a natural talent—and what he wrote, he could sell to earn a respectable living.For the rest of his life, Dickens avoided that run-down part of London where he had lived and worked in misery for months. Even as an adult, a successful author and editor, he told no one about those experiences. His children noticed that if Dickens had to walk through that district, he would grimly hold their hands and proceed out of the area as quickly as possible, never saying a word. It was not until his literary executor asked some searching questions that Dickens broke silence, only once, in the last years of his life. The core of feelings that was the genesis of his celebrated novels David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and Great Expectations was revealed only after the author’s death.Dickens enjoyed a career as a novelist, journalist, court reporter, and editor. He was editor of London Daily News in 1846, founder and editor of Household Words from 1833-1835, and of All the Year Round from 1859-1870. He was also a talented amateur actor, and presented public readings of his works, beginning in 1858. He acquired a grand home in Kent, called Gad’s Hill, which he had aspired to own since boyhood.Dickens fell in love many times as a young man, but he married Catherine Hogarth in April, 1836, and together they raised ten children. He and his wife separated in 1858, when he was spending a great deal of time in London. Later they divorced, probably at least in part because Dickens had fallen in love with Ellen Ternan, an Irish actress.In 1865, Dickens survived a train wreck which left his first-class carriage dangling from a railway bridge. By all reports, Dickens calmed his traveling companions (his mistress Ellen Ternan and her mother), got them all safely off the train and then went to the aid of many injured and dying passengers. Eventually, Dickens retrieved his current manuscript from the railway carriage as it swayed from the bridge, before leaving the scene. Afterwards, he suffered from a great fear of train wrecks but continued to travel for lectures and readings.He died of a paralytic stroke, at Gad’s Hill, Kent, England, on June 18, 1870, and was buried in Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey, near Chaucer and Shakespeare.

II OVERVIEW

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The orphaned Philip Pirrip, who calls himself Pip, was raised by his harsh sister Mrs. Joe and her kind husband Joe Gargery, a blacksmith. Wandering through the marshes near his home one day, Pip encounters a ragged stranger who demands that Pip bring him food and a file to remove the chain that binds his leg. Pip complies with this request. Later Pip sees him struggling with another stranger before they disappear from view. The man Pip had helped is later captured by the police, but promises to repay Pip for his aid.Miss Havisham, an eccentric old lady who lives in a huge mansion, asks that Pip come to visit her. All of the clocks in her dark, dusty house are stopped on the hour that the man Miss Havisham planned to marry abandoned her. She still wears her now-yellowed wedding dress, and the moldy wedding cake still stands on a table in her room, inhabited by a colony of spiders. A frequent visitor at the mansion, Pip talks with Estella, Miss Havisham’s haughty young ward. Eventually he is paid a small sum and told it is time for him to become Joe’s apprentice.One day someone breaks into their home and Pip’s sister, Mrs. Joe, is injured with a great blow to the back of the head. A kind young woman named Biddy moves from the village into Joe’s home to help take care of Mrs. Joe and the household. Biddy believes that it was Orlick, a contemptuous employee of Joe’s, who injured Mrs. Joe. Biddy also fears that Orlick is falling in love with her. Pip continues to work for Joe. Every year on Pip’s birthday, the youth visits Miss Havisham. Pip is constantly regretting his desire for a more comfortable lifestyle, and regrets also his infatuation with Estella.Pip is surprised and pleased when a London lawyer, Mr. Jaggers, brings him to London to be educated, become a gentleman, and eventually come into an inheritance; Pip assumes that Miss Havisham is financing this plan to groom him as a proper husband for Estella. In London, Pip rooms with an agreeable young man named Herbert Pocket, a distant relative of Miss Havisham.Pip associates with a group of young dandies who call themselves the Finches of the Grove, the most prominent of which is a cad named Bentley Drummle. When the still-devoted Joe comes to visit him, Pip is embarrassed by his brother-in-law’s crude ways and treats him unkindly. Miss Havisham informs Pip that Estella will be moving to London and that she wants Pip to fall in love with her. But after her arrival in London, Estella is courted by Drummle.Pip receives an unexpected visit on his 21st birthday from the convict whom he had met so long ago in the marshes. The man, whose name is Abel Magwitch, reveals that he has been the boy’s benefactor all along, having grown rich after being banished to Australia. He has come back to witness Pip’s progress even though his own life is endangered by his illegal return to England. Pip is initially repulsed by Magwitch’s coarseness yet realizes how much he owes him; he decides to try to help Magwitch in any way he can. Magwitch is using the pseudonym Provis to avoid detection. He also reveals that the man with whom he had struggled in the marsh and who still vows to destroy him is the villainous Compeyson, who, coincidentally, is also the man responsible for the abandonment of Miss Havisham by her fiancé Arthur on their wedding day. Determined to chastise Miss Havisham for allowing him to believe that she was his benefactor, Pip visits her. He learns that Estella is engaged to Drummle and that Miss Havisham had carefully trained her young ward to break the hearts of as many men as possible, as vengeance for the desertion she herself had experienced. As a result, Estella is a cold and detached young woman, unable to love or feel compassion. On a final visit to Miss Havisham’s house after Estella’s wedding, Pip finds the mansion on fire but is unable to save Miss Havisham, who perishes.Pip and young Herbert Pocket scheme to help Magwitch escape to France, but just as they have secured him aboard a boat, Compeyson appears and the two men fight, eventually struggling in the water. Magwitch kills his enemy and is immediately apprehended by the

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police; he dies in prison, but not before Pip recognizes his pity and love for his benefactor. Pip becomes seriously ill and Joe arrives to nurse him back to health, giving Pip an occasion to realize the value of his old friend’s constancy and love. Mrs. Joe has since died, and Joe has married the Gargery’s former servant, Biddy. Still despondent over having lost Estella, Pip establishes an importing business with Herbert.Eleven years later he returns to visit Joe and also the spot where Miss Havisham’s mansion once stood. He finds the widowed Estella also wandering there; she has become a warmer, more compassionate person over the years. The two leave together, and appear destined for happiness together. In Dickens’s original version, Pip and Estella part with the understanding that they will probably never see each other again, but in the revised version, Dickens’s makes the ending more optimistic by implying that they will, indeed, have a future together someday.

III SETTINGThis novel is set in England, contemporary with the time of its writing. The action takes place in a country village built on marshy land, and in London, which is far more distant spiritually from the village than physically.Pip becomes familiar with the homes of people of varying incomes. The humble home of Joe Gargery, the blacksmith, is where Pip is raised. The Gargery house and its furnishings are simple, but decent; by contrast, the inadequate foster care given young Pip by his grown sister is unnecessarily stingy and cruel. But the comparative wealth of Miss Havisham has not made her grand house a comfortable home, nor filled it with wonders. Her refusal to move on from the moment she was jilted has resulted in a house that is a gothic horror of spiders’ webs and dust.In London, Pip finds homes that are not so much a source of comforts both physical and emotional, as a theater for play-acting. From pretend-castles to a lawyer’s absolute domain, to even his young gentleman’s digs, Pip is in place after place where the concerns of the rest of the world do not intrude. It would seem that the greatest freedom of a gentleman is the freedom in his home to do no practical work, and to entertain himself there as its absolute master.

IV THEMES AND CHARACTERSG. K. Chesterton said: “It is the real unconquerable rush and energy in a character which was the supreme and quite indescribable greatness of Dickens.” By the time the reader finishes several chapters and has met what would seem to be enough major characters for any novel, new characters are introduced, some of whom (though minor roles) are crucial to the final story, and have important relationships with Pip and other major characters.Young Phillip Pirrip, also known as Pip, is shaped by his changing circumstances. He is an orphan who never knew his dead parents or brothers, raised by his sister and Joe Gargery at Joe’s workshop on the marshes near a country village at some distance from London. For a child in constant fear of punishment, Pip learns to lie rather convincingly. A sensitive boy, he is frequently beaten or starved and verbally abused by his sister, although he keeps only one secret: that he once stole food and a file to give an escaped convict, a crime he is certain will be his doom.Pip is intimidated by the hideous Miss Havisham and by the lovely Estella. Even though Estella is his own age, Pip feels dominated by the girl and obeys Miss Havisham’s order to love her. When Pip learns that he has an anonymous benefactor who will provide for his education in London, he eagerly leaves his apprenticeship with Joe behind, certain that his patron is Miss Havisham who is preparing him to become a gentleman worthy of marrying Estella. His hunch is supported by his long-standing belief that he deserves more in life than becoming a blacksmith like Joe. Furthermore, the lawyer who pays Pip’s allowance is also Miss Havisham’s lawyer.

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However, in London, Pip’s tutor, Mr. Pocket, turns out to be ineffectual, and Pip finds himself without adequate training for any profession to fit his new social class. Pip is made conceited and mean by his good fortune; but he always remains a good fellow, with a desire to do right, and with warm feelings. He also discovers that all of his old expectations have been wrong. Even so, learning this seems to be his best education.For Pip, who spends much of his life either daydreaming or defending himself, such a change of heart seems heroic enough to set things right again. However, except for risking his own life to save Miss Havisham, Pip is not really a hero. In the end, he redeems himself by forgiving Miss Havisham, and requesting that she make her young relative Herbert Pocket her heir. He realizes who his true friends are when all of his expectations and money are gone. He is reunited with Joe and Biddy, and his kindness to Herbert Pocket is repaid.The minor characters in Great Expectations are a motley crew. Among those not to be admired is Bentley Drummle, the rich and sulky leader of the dandified Finches of the Grove (and thus the epitome of Pip’s misguided early notion of a gentleman), who marries and violently mistreats Estella. Others include Miss Havisham’s relative Sarah Pocket, a withered, sharp-tongued, snobbish woman who resents Pip’s ascent to her own elevated social class; Old Bill Barley, the father of Herbert’s fiancée Clara, a gouty and drunken old man whose habit of surveying a nearby river with a telescope is a remnant of his former career as a sailor; Mr. Pocket, Herbert’s father and Pip’s tutor, who teaches him only the mere rudiments of education since as a gentleman he will not need to know much; and Molly, Mr. Jaggers’s strange, silent housekeeper, who turns out to have been a murderess, Magwitch’s mistress, and Estella’s mother.Another of these minor characters is Mr. Wopsle. A man who accompanies Pip and Joe across the marsh the night the police first catch the escaped convicts, Mr. Wopsle has seen both Magwitch and Compeyson. This is important much later in the story: when Mr. Wopsle has left the countryside for London to act in the theater, he recognizes the second convict, Compeyson, sitting behind Pip in the audience. With that knowledge, Pip knows that Compeyson is still alive and that he must get Magwitch out of the country as soon as possible before Compeyson finds him again.Minor characters are used by the author to bring in news and important developments, and to keep the story revolving around its major character, Pip. Pip is not the best person in the novel, nor even a very admirable boy or young man. But he eventually learns to see what is good in the people around him, and through Pip’s realizations, the author is stating his opinions about the absolute worth and relative worth of people like his characters.The gentle, loving, soft-spoken, wise, and efficient Biddy is Pip’s tutor before Mrs. Joe is injured and Biddy moves into the Gargery home to take care of the house. After Mrs. Joe dies, she marries Joe Gargery. Though Pip at one point might be interested in marrying Biddy if it were not for her lowly social status, he later comes to realize that Biddy’s true worth as a person far outshines any artificial class distinctions.Far less worthy, though a gentleman, is Arthur, Miss Havisham’s suitor who once jilted her. Before the novel begins, he has fallen in with the villainous Compeyson and his schemes. However, unlike Compeyson, Arthur has a conscience; he dreams of Miss Havisham dressed in white at his bedside and dies of fright. He and Compeyson had once schemed to get Miss Havisham’s fortune, but at the last moment, with the wedding cake on the table and Miss Havisham dressed in her bridal finery, Arthur jilted her; presumably he could not carry through with the plan. He also functions as a parallel character with Bentley Drummle.Compeyson is the man who arranges Miss Havisham’s engagement with Arthur. He also testifies in court against Magwitch in an earlier scheme that failed, after which Magwitch is banished from England and exiled to Australia. Compeyson is the second escaped convict out

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on the marsh the night that Pip first meets Magwitch, and he eventually dies fighting with Magwitch during their second capture years later.Part of the fallout from the jilting of Miss Havisham is the adoption of Estella by Miss Havisham at the age of two or three. She has been taught to reject all who love her; this is Miss Havisham’s vengeance for her being jilted by Arthur. About the same age as Pip, Estella acts much older and snubs him more often than merely ignoring his attempts at friendship or love. In this, she is quite honest with Pip, for she has been raised to brush off love, and to reject it later in order to watch the man suffer. Miss Havisham’s success in raising a cold-hearted beauty is too much for her, however, for Estella can feel no love for the old woman either. Thus, Estella can only refuse Pip whenever he confesses his love. Instead, she tells him that she will ruin the man she does marry and why not, when she cares for no one? When she becomes engaged to Bentley Drummle, Pip cannot talk her out of marrying such a brutal man. In the novel’s revised ending, when Estella meets Pip years later, she has had a daughter (also named Estella) by Drummle, who has died. Estella has survived, bent and broken by the doomed marriage. She never knew who her parents were because Miss Havisham led her to assume that they were dead. More tragically, Estella has never learned to care about anyone’s happiness, not even her own.A far more caring person is Joe Gargery, Pip’s uncle and surrogate father, but also a fellow-sufferer from his wife’s nasty temper and violent behavior. He is a rough, strong working man who keeps his emotions to himself. Whenever Joe had tried to protect young Pip from his sister’s abuse, she not only hit Joe too but hurt Pip the more for it. Joe gladly takes Pip on as his apprentice at the forge and misses him terribly when Pip leaves for London, but will not stand in the way of Pip’s good fortune. After Mrs. Joe is attacked, he nurses her with the help of Biddy, whom he marries after Mrs. Joe dies. He also lovingly nurses Pip back to health in London. An uneducated man, he learns enough about writing from Biddy to leave Pip a letter to say goodbye, misspelling his own name Jo as Pip had done as a child.Of all Dickens’s many characters in the novel, Joe is one who does not change, remaining tough yet childlike in love. His weakness is a tendency to look on the bright side, which seemed foolish to Pip as a teenager. The ways in which the other characters treat Joe provide insight into their own weaknesses: Pip is ashamed of him, Estella makes fun of him, and Jaggers is stunned when Joe refuses to accept money for the loss of Pip from his shop. In spite of Joe’s hard life, he remains good-natured and devoted to Pip and Biddy.Joe’s first wife is a large, menacing woman. Mrs. Joe Gargery prides herself on raising Pip by hand, which is a sorry pun on the way she hits the child and her husband whenever she is not verbally attacking them. Her favorite instrument, The Tickler, is a stick that is worn smooth from caning Pip, regardless of his behavior. The bodice of her apron is stuck through with pins and needles, a true metaphor for her character. Only Orlick stands up to her, and she never recovers from his savage attack. She spends her last days in the tender care of Joe and Biddy, no longer vicious but in a state of childlike happiness.There is no happiness for the novel’s true eccentric. Always dressed in the wedding gown in which she had once planned to be married, Miss Havisham is colorless, from her hair to her single faded white shoe. She wants Pip and Estella to act out her love-turned-to-hatred for the man who jilted her on their wedding day. She has left the house untouched, even the items on her dressing table. The great room across from her chamber is likewise untouched; the cake, now eerily covered with spiders and dusty cobwebs, is in the middle of the long dining table. Her wish that this table be cleared only when she is dead (so that she may be laid on it for her wake) is granted when the old lady’s clothing accidentally catches on fire.She is saved by Pip who rolls her in the tablecloth from the great room. Before she dies, she honors Pip’s request to make his friend, Herbert Pocket, her heir, amazed that Pip wants

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nothing for himself. Her nightmares of dying without forgiveness are laid to rest when she dies with Pip’s kiss on her wrinkled forehead.There is little forgiveness for crime in the time the novel is set. All Londoners on the wrong side of the law know Mr. Jaggers is the lawyer with the best chance of keeping them out of Newgate Prison. Jaggers will not take a case he cannot win, or if his fee cannot be paid, and says so. He has moved many a judge and jury to tears with his courtroom drama. Outside the court, he never lets down his guard. Since he is Miss Havisham’s lawyer and is bound by Pip’s unnamed benefactor’s desire to remain unknown, Jaggers bolsters Pip’s belief that Miss Havisham is his benefactor.Jaggers can be contrasted with his clerk, Wemmick. A true friend to Pip in London, John Wemmick is a dual personality. In London, where he is a chief clerk at Jaggers’s law office, Wemmick is as coldly business-minded as his employer. However, he takes a liking to Pip and invites him to his house, a miniature castle complete with a tiny moat, drawbridge, and a cannon that Wemmick fires each evening because it delights his deaf father. In his own odd household, Wemmick becomes close friends with Pip, who grows to value their friendship deeply. Wemmick keeps one ear open at all times at the office to determine the best time to get Magwitch out of the country, and Wemmick sends word to Pip when he thinks the London underworld is unaware. Also, Wemmick thinks so much of Pip that Pip is the only wedding guest at the marriage of Wemmick and Miss Skiffins. Even so, when Pip sees him at the office, Wemmick is curt and businesslike again. Wemmick keeps both of his worlds separate from each other.Another stereotype is Wemmick’s father, who is old and deaf, and he responds to almost all conversation by smiling and yelling, “All right, John!” In his odd house and landscape, the elderly parent provides relaxation and comic relief for Pip, who enjoys visiting Wemmick’s place as a world apart from the threats of London.One of Wemmick’s and Jagger’s clients, Abel Magwitch is also known as Pip’s convict and as Provis, his benefactor. In trouble from the day he was born, Abel Magwitch is an orphan like Pip but without Joe or any loving family member to befriend him. All he can recall of his early days is his name. Banished to Australia, he tends sheep and saves his money to one day make an English gentleman of the boy named Pip who once was kind to him while he was running from the police on the marshes. When he re-enters Pip’s life in London, Magwitch holds the key to many mysteries. As Provis, he spends many happy hours with Pip, in spite of Pip’s discomfort at learning that his benefactor has not been Miss Havisham, but a criminal.Magwitch is the link between more characters in the novel than anyone but Pip himself. Magwitch dies content to have lived out his dream of creating in Pip the respectable man that he himself could never be, as well as assuring that his former crime partner and arch-enemy Compeyson drowns. In his last days, Magwitch reveals to Pip the confidence scheme that he was drawn into with Arthur and Compeyson. However, it is only after Magwitch’s death that Pip discovers that Magwitch was also Estella’s father.Jaggers’s maid Molly who serves dinner to Pip, has the scars of shackles on her wrists. As her lawyer, Jaggers once saved her from being sent to Newgate Prison, and he shames her in front of Pip to remind her of her old life, her reform, and her alternative to serving in his house. At another dinner with Mr. Jaggers, Pip is fascinated by Molly’s hands for another reason. He has seen them somewhere before. Eventually, Pip notices other resemblances between Molly and Estella and forces a stilted admission out of Jaggers that Molly was once married to a convict and that Jaggers arranged for their child to be adopted by a rich woman. Taken together with Magwitch’s story, it is obvious that Molly was Magwitch’s wife and Estella’s mother.Magwitch worked hard and achieved his goals, while Molly gave up their daughter to be raised in hopes of a better future, then worked as an honest maid. By contrast, Orlick is a

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character with no redeeming qualities. After being fired by Joe for insulting Mrs. Joe, Orlick bears a grudge against Pip. Years later, when Orlick lures Pip to the limekiln out on the marshes and ties Pip up, he tells Pip of the scene of his attack on Mrs. Joe’s skull with a convict’s (Magwitch’s) leg irons he found on the marsh. Since Pip brought a file to Magwitch to remove his shackles, Orlick’s deed may be only the delayed result of Pip’s childhood crime of aiding a convict. However, help arrives and Orlick is arrested before Pip is harmed. These convolutions of motives, actions, and consequences are pretty much standard throughout the novel; no act happens in isolation, as everything has eventual consequences and relates back to Pip and his circle of acquaintance, and his own less-than-happy life.The warmest among Pip’s circle of acquaintance is his roommate in London, Herbert Pocket, who is also his best friend. Herbert nicknames Pip “Handel” because it is the name of a famous man, as a compliment to Pip. An easygoing youth and not bright, Herbert is nonetheless loyal and persevering. While they are students together, Herbert tries to help Pip figure out where all of their money is going. Later, he invites Pip to share in his inheritance, before finding out that Pip is the reason for it. Herbert is the receiver of Pip’s only request of Miss Havisham for money. Tolerant and kind, even to the irritating alcoholic and gout-ridden Mr. Barley, Herbert falls in love with and marries the equally kind and patient daughter Clara Barley. Also, he is trusted with helping Pip try to get Magwitch out of England. Herbert’s most heroic hour is finding Orlick’s letter that Pip had dropped and rushing off to save Pip at the moment that Orlick would have surely killed him. At last, Herbert provides a job for Pip when all of his fortune is gone. In the original ending of the novel, Herbert names his son Pip.The two different endings to the novel have gathered much critical attention. In the original serial ending, which Dickens revised on advice from his friend, novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Estella marries a benevolent doctor after the death of her first husband and she and Pip have one melancholy but friendly meeting years later. In the ending that Dickens decided to use when the novel was printed as a book, the two walk off hand in hand, apparently destined for marriage. Some critics claim that the latter ending is in keeping with Dickens’s general hopeful nature, while others claim that it represents an unfortunate concession to his audience’s desire for a happy ending and is true to neither Pip’s nor Estella’s character.

V LITERARY QUALITIES“The very title of this book [Great Expectations] indicates the confidence of conscious genius,” said an unnamed critic in a review. “The most famous novelist of the day, watched by jealous rivals and critics, could hardly have selected it, had he not inwardly felt the capacity to meet all the expectations he raised.” The critic had read this novel and all of Dickens’s previous works, in installments, and was impressed by “the felicity with which expectation was excited and prolonged, and to the series of surprises which accompanied the unfolding of the plot of the story.”Dickens succeeded perfectly in stimulating and baffling the curiosity of his readers. In Great Expectations, he seemed to attain the mastery of powers which formerly more or less mastered him. He could not, like Thackeray, narrate a story as if he were merely looking on, a mere “knowing” observer of what he describes and represents; he therefore took observation simply as the basis of his plot and ran with his own particular talent for characterization. In this novel, Dickens was in the prime, and not in the decline of his great powers.Dickens always had one weakness, and this novel is strongly marked with it. He would exaggerate one particular set of facts, a comic side in a character, or a comic turn of expression, until all reality faded away, and the person became a mere frame for an elaborate, fluttering construction. Miss Havisham is an example of Dickens’s exaggeration.But what was the peg on which the entire novel, this elaborate fluttering construction, was hung? It may have been the January, 1850, issue of Household Narrative of Current Events.

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In the January, 1850, issue of Household Narrative of Current Events, there appeared an account of Martha Joachin, who always wore white after her suitor committed suicide in front of her. Also in that issue was a description of the transportation of convicts to Australia, and the story of a woman whose gown is set on fire. Peter Ackroyd suggests in his biography Dickens that the germ of the novel may have been planted by Dickens’s casual reading of some journalism 11 years before he began writing the serial. “It is possible to understand how heterogeneous themes and ideas seem to attach themselves one to another, acquiring fresh power and resonance as they do so; it is in this very act of combining, perhaps, that the story itself begins to emerge,” says Ackroyd. “As if storytelling itself were part of the process of consciousness rather than some neatly defined and independent activity.”It may be that storytelling, for Dickens and others, is a way of creating a pattern from random data fortuitously lodged in one’s consciousness. Whether Dickens overtly intended to combine these particular elements into an epic-length novel (incorporating elements of his own experience as a frustrated boy) cannot be determined; he left no notes outlining his plan. But it is fascinating to look from the viewpoint of a reader over a hundred and forty years later, at a popular novel still in print, written by a man very nearly as self-centered as Pip, and to have some understanding of where he got his ideas.This work, Dickens’s second-to-last complete novel, was first published as a weekly series in 1860 and in book form in 1861. Early critics had mixed reviews, disliking Dickens’s tendency to exaggerate both plot and characters, but readers were so enthusiastic that the 1861 edition required five printings. Victorian-era audiences appreciated the melodramatic scenes and the revised, more hopeful ending.Modern critics have little but praise for Dickens’s brilliant development of timeless themes: fear and fun, loneliness and luck, classism and social justice, humiliation and honor. Some still puzzle over Dickens’s revision that ends the novel with sudden optimism, and they suggest that the sales of Dickens’s magazine All the Year Round, in which the series first appeared, was assured by gluing on a happy ending that hints Pip and Estella will unite at last. For some, the original ending is more realistic since Pip must earn the self-knowledge that can only come from giving up his obsession with Estella. However, Victorian audiences eagerly followed the story, episode by episode, assuming that the protagonist’s love and patience would win out in the end. Modern editions contain both denouements allowing the reader a choice.In this novel, Dickens surpasses his previous works in one point. This is “a more profound study of the general nature of human character than Mr. Dickens usually [portrays],” decently distinct from David Copperfield, according to G.K. Chesterton. “Pip thinks himself better than every one else, and yet anybody can snub him; that is the everlasting male, and perhaps the everlasting gentleman. Dickens has described perfectly this quivering and defenceless dignity . . . how ill-armed it is against the coarse humor of real humanity . . . the humanity of Trabb’s boy,” Chesterton insists. In describing Pip’s weakness, Dickens is as true and as delicate as Thackeray, but Thackeray and others also possessed a quick and quiet eye for the tremors of mankind. “George Eliot or Thackeray could have described the weakness of Pip. Exactly what George Eliot and Thackeray could not have described was the vigour of Trabb’s boy.”

VI SOCIAL SENSITIVITYDickens has been praised for having created in Pip a decidedly unheroic hero, a figure who, while basically good, must learn to recognize and conquer serious weaknesses within himself. As the young Pip grows from a powerless dreamer into a useful worker and then a moderately educated young man, he reaches an important realization: grand schemes and dreams are never what they first seem to be. Pip himself is not always honest, and careful readers can catch him in several contradictions between his truth and fantasies. In chronicling the

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maturation of its likeable young hero, whose great expectations prove illusory, the novel promotes generosity, friendship, and love rather than the shallow virtues of wealth and social status.It is generally acknowledged that Dickens based Estella, who has been called his most sexually viable female character, on the Irish actress Ellen Ternan, who eventually became his mistress. Pip’s helpless attraction to Estella and the mingled hopelessness and intensity of his love for her mirror the emotions reportedly experienced by the author when he fell in love with Ternan.Charles Dickens never lost an awareness of his own experiences working as a boy, bottling boot-black, but he spoke of these days and his emotional horror, only once to his trusted friend and executor John Foster. With that knowledge, it is easier for the reader to understand the origins of the characters Pip, David Copperfield, and Oliver Twist—created by Dickens to give voice to young children like he had been.Dickens was always acutely aware of the suffering endured by the poor, and made every endeavor as an adult not to be poor. His novels were the first modern codification of the concept that children ought not to be put to tedious, repetitive work at an early age, but should be helped to grow and learn and play. Dickens was not a political activist, nor did he campaign for child welfare laws. He brought these issues to the hearts and minds of his readers through his popular fiction, rather than writing overt autobiography or political tracts. His novels were part of the process by which it became common in much of the world to believe that all children, not only those of the wealthy, should be given education and leisure to play; that children who do labor should be given work less onerous and shorter in duration than adults; and ultimately that it is as abominable to deprive children of care, comfort, and education as it is to deny them adequate food and shelter.

CHARLOTTE BRONTË (1816-1855)

Jane EyrePublished 1847

I ABOUT THE AUTHORCharlotte Brontë was born on April 21, 1816, in Thornton, Yorkshire, England. The third of six children, she spent much of her childhood at her father's parsonage in Haworth, England. Curiously, though their early life in Haworth seemed stern and somewhat deprived, Charlotte and her sisters and brother all found adventure and happiness exploring the moors near the parsonage and recounting their lives in spirited discussions and writings. Their father, Patrick Brontë, had risen from extreme poverty in Northern Ireland to become an undergraduate at St. John's College, Cambridge, and then an Anglican priest in 1897. He passed his love of learning and vigorous discussion on to his children.Charlotte briefly attended Cowan Bridge, a finishing school in Lancashire, with her sisters, Maria, Elizabeth, and Emily. A typhoid outbreak at Cowan Bridge soon claimed the lives of her older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, and provided Charlotte with the background for a similar incident in the beginning of Jane Eyre. When Charlotte and Emily returned to Haworth because of their sisters' untimely deaths, Patrick Brontë decided to educate them—as well as their brother Branwell and sister Anne—himself, with the help of his sister-in-law, Elizabeth Branwell, and the parsonage servant, Tabitha Ackroyd.The children delved into literary works by William Shakespeare, John Milton, John Dryden, Sir Walter Scott, and William Wordsworth, as well as politically affiliated Whig and Tory newspapers and popular magazines such as Blackwood's Edinburgh and Keepsake. Early in the children's lives, their eldest sister, Maria, had coached them in the writing and production of original short plays, and upon her return to the parsonage Charlotte assumed this role. This

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collaboration with her siblings was interrupted in January 1831, when tuition provided by her godparents allowed Charlotte to attend another private school, Miss Woolner's school at Roe Head. Here, as at Cowan Bridge, Charlotte gleaned background information for her future as a teacher and writer. Also while at Roe Head, Charlotte made the acquaintance of Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor, whose friendship would shape much of Jane Eyre and her later works.As a student and, later, an assistant teacher at Roe Head, Charlotte resolved the shortcomings in her formal education and concurrently developed a sense of resentment about her servitude to inferior-minded people. Both the confidence and the resentment were incorporated in Jane Eyre's personality.At the age of sixteen, Charlotte returned to Haworth to tutor her sisters and brother for three years. She then taught at Roe Head again and then at the Dewsbury School before serving as a governess to earn money for her family and offset the loss of funds squandered by Branwell in his attempt to establish himself as a painter. Although two marriage proposals—the first from Ellen Nussey's brother Henry and the second from a young Irish curate—boosted her confidence, Charlotte refused both men, believing that she would follow the dictum made at age twelve to remain single. Throughout this period, Charlotte and her sisters continued to write fiction and poetry.In preparation for opening their own school near Haworth, Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels in 1842 to complete their education, a venture funded by Aunt Branwell. While at the Pensionnat Heger, the sisters polished their understanding of European literature, manners, and customs; Charlotte drew many lessons of prose style—later to be used in Jane Eyre and other novels—from her study of the French language. As the year progressed, Charlotte found herself attracted to Constantin Heger, her teacher and the husband of the school's owner. The emotional tension created by her apparently unreciprocated affection became integral to the dramatic structure of Jane Eyre's relationship with Rochester.Upon their return from Belgium, the Brontës failed in several attempts to establish their own school. Frustrated by this failure and by their brother Branwell's degenerate life, the Brontë sisters strove, under Charlotte's direction, to compensate themselves by publishing their own books. They paid the publication costs for their first effort, Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (1846), and sold only two copies. In 1847 Emily's Wuthering Heights and Anne's Agnes Grey were published. Charlotte did not publish Jane Eyre under the pseudonym Currer Bell until a few months later. She subsequently earned 500 pounds for Jane Eyre, a sum that marked her work a financial success.She and her sisters visited their publisher, George Smith, in London a short time later to declare themselves as the true identities behind the male pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. From the time of this first meeting in 1847 to her death seven years later, Charlotte benefited from her contact with Smith. He and his mother established a network for Charlotte in London, introducing her to the sophisticated circles of society, including most of the major literary celebrities of the day.Smith also aimed to promote Charlotte's career by publishing her second novel, Shirley, an extensive three-volume work. Between 1848 and 1849, however, Charlotte was buffeted by personal tragedies that drew her attention away from her writing. With the death of Branwell in September 1848, Charlotte sunk into a depression triggered, perhaps, by guilt over having judged her brother's degeneracy so harshly. Charlotte was further shaken by the sudden decline and death of her sister Emily, who was overcome by tuberculosis in December 1848, and by Anne's death in May 1849.Darkened and hardened by these emotional traumas, Charlotte immersed herself in the writing of Shirley and published the novel in October 1849. Villette, her third novel, was published four years later.

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Charlotte traded the literary life for domestic duties upon her marriage in June 1854 to Arthur Bell Nicholls, curate of the parsonage where Charlotte's father had been pastor. Debilitated by illness, Patrick Brontë became the focus of Charlotte and Arthur's daily routine. Charlotte also helped her husband run the parsonage, but, at the turn of year in 1855, she began suffering the side effects of an ill-fated pregnancy. Because of her fragile condition, she succumbed to illness and died on March 31, 1855, at the age of thirty-eight.

II OVERVIEWWhether viewed as a richly woven tapestry of feminine imagination, as a tableau of romanticism in the Victorian era, or as an early treatise on women's rights, Jane Eyre stands as a classic work of literature in the English-speaking world. As a romance, Jane Eyre extends the tradition of sentimental concern for common folk and harsh judgment of those who exploit them within an industrialized or class-stratified social order. Condescension and mean-spiritedness on the part of landed or wealthy aristocrats causes alienation between them and the lower-middle or peasant classes. Orphaned and relegated to the foster family of her deceased uncle, Jane is badly abused by Mrs. Reed, her foster aunt. Edward Rochester retains the arrogance of his social class until his blindness causes him to turn inward and to revitalize his humble sensibilities. The love Jane maintains for Rochester results in a virtuous union between the two, a testament to perseverance and perfectibility in the romanticist view of human nature.In many ways an early feminist, Jane Eyre staunchly confronts a variety of constraints imposed on her freedom but frequently worries about the excess passion she allows in making her case. Her desire to maintain self-control conflicts with her unspoken sense of righteousness. Jane's narration lends intensity to the story; her personality serves as both catalyst and prism, and it is through her singular point of view that most of the novel's major issues are explored.

III SETTINGSet in early nineteenth-century England, Jane Eyre moves through various locations, all informed by autobiographical detail from Brontë's life. As a child living in Mrs. Reed's house, Gateshead Hall, Jane experiences overt class subordination. After her altercation with Mrs. Reed's bully son, John, Jane is forcibly removed to an isolated room where she senses a presence, 'a rushing of wings'; this ephemeral visitation recurs throughout the novel, each time signaling a major change in Jane's life.At Lowood school, more than six dozen girls ranging in age from nine to twenty years are constantly reminded that they are beholden to the charitable donors who pay partial costs for their schooling. The building is bleak, sparely furnished, and underheated, and the stern and spartan conditions severely test Jane's resolve. Jane remains at Lowood as a teacher after completing her studies, but following the urging of a disembodied voice, she soon advertises for a governess position and is solicited by Mrs. Fairfax of Thornfield. At Thornfield Manor, a gothic three-story mansion, Jane serves as governess to Adele Varens, a ward of Edward Rochester, owner of the estate.After a year at Thornfield, Jane is summoned to Gateshead to attend to the dying Mrs. Reed, and it is against this backdrop that the tempestuous scene of Rochester's marriage proposal and Jane's acceptance is played.Her wedding ceremony dramatically interrupted by a shocking revelation, Jane travels to Whitcross, located two days away from Thornfield in the moors of the north Midlands. Lacking food and money, Jane eats and sleeps in the heather until she is welcomed into Moor House, the rustic home of St. John Rivers, a sincere parson. She is offered employment by St. John as mistress of a new girls' school and moves into a simple cottage, but a premonition of Rochester's voice calling her back to Thornfield finally prompts her departure from Whitcross.

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Upon returning to Thornfield, Jane finds only a fire-blackened shell, the site of her earlier happiness and security gutted by a fire set off by Rochester's insane wife, now dead. Jane reunites with Rochester, now blind and living at Ferndean, an isolated manor house 30 miles distant. They marry, and the simple, virtuous life of Ferndean restores Rochester's sight.

IV THEMES AND CHARACTERSJane, the main character of Jane Eyre, is sensitive and passionate, intelligent and reflective. As a child, she is keenly aware of her status as an orphan and an outsider. She learns to observe others quietly and takes refuge from her loneliness in books. When pushed beyond the limits of her tolerance for pain and injustice, Jane reacts impetuously. At Gateshead, she rebukes both John Reed and his mother for their cruelty toward her; later, at Thornfield, provoked by Rochester's emotional manipulation, she hotly declares herself his equal and soulmate. Though she is often described as a small, plain 'sprite,' and though she attempts to curb her self-righteousness with an attitude of stoic acceptance, Jane shows flashes of spirit and temper that make her a compelling character.When the novel begins, Jane, a ten-year-old, lives with her imperious Aunt Reed and her cousins John, a spoiled, sadistic fourteen-year-old, Georgiana, plump, primped, and shallow, and Eliza, sour and sharp-tongued. Both her aunt and her cousins revile her as an ingrate, but years later, on her deathbed, Mrs. Reed reveals to Jane that her husband—Jane's uncle—had forced Mrs. Reed to promise that Jane would be raised as a member of the family. Only Bessie Lee, a maidservant at Gateshead, treats Jane with some degree of kindness and respect.When Jane arrives at the Lowood boarding school, she learns to contend with Mr. Brocklehurst, a hypocritical trustee of the church that runs the school and a religious zealot, and Miss Scatcherd, a history and grammar teacher who persecutes Jane's best friend, Helen Burns. Helen's stoicism, thoughtfulness, and intelligence touch Jane deeply, and the two become close friends. Maria Temple, the young and beautiful superintendent of Lowood, acts as a sort of fairy godmother to both Helen and Jane, offering them solace and encouragement.Edward Rochester, almost twenty years older than Jane (who is eighteen when she arrives at Thornfield), is first portrayed as a dark, brooding, and arrogant man. His often harsh manner belying his vulnerability, Rochester owes his moodiness to the fact that he keeps his insane wife, Bertha Mason, locked up in the attic. The master of Thornfield, he also has responsibility for his pesky French ward, eight-year-old Adele Varens. Although Adele's mother, a French opera dancer, was his mistress for an extended period of time, Rochester doubts that he is truly Adele's father. Despite his irresolute past, Rochester is portrayed as a charismatic man who becomes an acceptable mate for Jane only after he has symbolically atoned for his past transgressions.Aside from Rochester, most of the characters associated with Thornfield Hall seem one-dimensional. Mrs. Fairfax is a kind, efficient, elderly housekeeper. Adele is a flighty non-character; she lilts about chirping French phrases about flowers in her hair and pretty women. Technically she serves as a plot device, providing a reason for Jane's employment at Thornfield. Blanche Ingram, Rochester's apparent love interest, is a similarly shallow character; exceedingly beautiful, she is also haughty and manipulative. Blanche's presence in the plot intensifies Jane's consternation and confusion over her feelings for Rochester.After her abrupt departure from Thornfield, Jane finds refuge in Whitcross, at the home of St. John Rivers, a young minister, and his sisters, Diana and Mary. Though he is kind and intelligent, St. John chooses to narrowly and rigidly interpret his religious vocation, thus denying himself the love of Rosamond Oliver, yet another beautiful, angelic woman who befriends Jane.Jane Eyre stresses the virtues of self-reliance and perseverance in a world of adversity. Jane's impassioned resilience allows her to overcome the injustices heaped on her by Mrs. Reed, John Reed, Mr. Brocklehurst, Miss Scatcherd, and Blanche Ingram. A sensitive young woman

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who refuses to be calloused by her hard life, Jane pursues an independent, self-governing existence, making her in a sense a prototype of champions for women's rights.The novel also addresses the theme of children victimized by corrupt parent figures. Like Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, Jane is a pariah, stigmatized simply because she is an orphan, and denied the protection of the law. The plight of Jane and the other orphaned girls at Lowood demonstrates the warped and alienated values of Victorian social welfare schemes, which implicitly presumed a spiritual and intellectual depravity on the part of orphans equal to the children's social deprivation. In a sense, the comfortable classes shut away the offspring of the less fortunate classes as a means of avoiding emotional entanglements; they rationalized their actions with protestations of charitable intentions and moral righteousness.The Brocklehurst family and Blanche Ingram reflect still another theme, that of hypocrisy in conflict with virtue. From the New Testament parable of the Pharisee who comforts himself with the outward signs of his earthly elitism, the theme of the self-deceived bigot has recurred in Western literature. When a great chasm in the social order separates the 'haves' from the 'have-nots,' the 'haves' believe that they are better because of what they have amassed materially. A false sense of security—stemming from material acquisitions—frequently causes the former to make scathing value judgments about the latter. The Brocklehursts and Blanche Ingram are Jane's inferiors in character, but they belittle and persecute her to show the power of their status.His judgment clouded by excessive pride, Rochester is a literary descendant of the ancient Greek playwright Sophocles' Oedipus and embodies the theme of figurative versus actual blindness. While sighted, Rochester fails to comprehend the extent of Jane's commitment to him, choosing instead to hide from her the demon of his private life, his insane wife, Bertha. Only after he is blinded during an attempt to rescue Bertha from the burning Thornfield does Rochester come to see the value of what he has lost.Much has been noted about Brontë's use of romantic themes in Jane Eyre. Belief in the perfectibility of persons belonging to the lower socioeconomic classes, the mystic unity of human emotions with similar natural conditions (like the thunderstrike at Thornfield after Rochester's proposal), and above all the curative power of love, are all themes commonly associated with the romantic period that preceded this novel.

V LITERARY QUALITIESCritics agree that Jane Eyre offers a fine example of the author-as-narrator; narrative credibility follows from an intimate knowledge of the speaker. The novel is also an excellent fusion of the pious moral tone of Victorian literature and the Gothic elements of earlier romanticism. Thornfield and its bizarre third-floor inhabitant combine with Jane's telepathic messages from the beyond and with awesome happenings in nature to produce scintillating ghostly touches.Brontë uses foreshadowing and symbolic character- or place-naming to leave hints for the reader about plot development. At Lowood, Miss Scatcherd is as hard and abrasive as her name, and Maria Temple acts as the sanctified refuge for Jane that her surname signifies. Overall, the plot is rich with memorable characters acting within a predictable range of psychological and social motivations. Their actions and dialogue are well documented, and the settings are described adequately enough to provide appropriate context.

VI SOCIAL SENSITIVITYJane Eyre explores the predicaments of those bound by law, conventions, and social status to lives not of their own choosing. Like Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre resents being controlled by inferiors but uses this resentment to generate energy necessary for her survival and rise to independence. The power of religion to enlighten or to corrupt finds expression in Jane's reliance on heartfelt prayer and in the diametrically opposed vocations of Brocklehurst and St.

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John Rivers. In each case the social value of religion is depicted as part of the individual's motives.Perhaps the most socially sensitive issue in this novel is its implicit argument for women's rights. In a parallel to Charlotte Brontë's own life, Jane struggles for minimal recognition even though her artistic, social, and professional skills exceed those of most of her antagonists. It may be difficult for contemporary readers to understand the unjust predicament of women in the nineteenth century.

EMILY BRONTË (1818-1848)

Wuthering HeightsPublished 1847

I ABOUT THE AUTHOREmily Jane Brontë, born July 30, 1818, in Thornton, Yorkshire, England, moved with her family to the village of Haworth in Yorkshire when she was two years old. She spent most of her life in that small, isolated community, and died on December 19, 1848, at the age of 30. Emily's father, Patrick, a brilliant, eccentric Irishman, was the pastor at the parish church in Haworth. The Reverend Brontë, an avid reader and aspiring writer, never achieved the literary success of which he dreamed. But all six of his children inherited his love of reading, and four of them became published writers, with Emily and her older sister Charlotte each producing a critically acclaimed novel.When Emily was just three, her mother, Maria Branwell Brontë, died, leaving the six Brontë children to the care of a maternal aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, a servant, Tabitha Ackroyd, and the Reverend Brontë. Aunt Branwell, a spinster, attempted to instill her own Calvinist principles in the Brontë children. Emily's early years in Haworth were spent composing poems and stories with her imaginative sisters and brother and wandering alone on the starkly beautiful moors surrounding the family home.Emily's two oldest sisters, Elizabeth and Maria, died in a typhoid epidemic that spread through the Cowan Bridge School for Clergy Daughters. Charlotte and six-year-old Emily survived the epidemic and returned home, where Emily remained until she was seventeen. In the intervening years, besides absorbing the lessons of her natural environment, Emily educated herself primarily by listening to stories and poems recited by her father and Tabitha.The Brontë family was not wealthy, and the children duly realized that they ought to consider means of supporting themselves in the future, lest the eventuality of their father's death deprive them of both social status and financial security. In order to prepare herself for a teaching career, Emily left home at seventeen for boarding school. Four months later she returned to Haworth, seriously depressed and physically exhausted by her efforts to conform to the rigid, arbitrary rules imposed at school. Two years later Emily left home again to teach at Miss Patchett's Finishing School in Law Hill, near the industrial town of Halifax. Again, after only six months, she returned home emotionally drained, faced with both her own depression and her brother Branwell's impending breakdown.At age twenty-three, Emily attended school in Brussels, Belgium, with Charlotte. The sisters planned to open their own school eventually and had borrowed money from Aunt Branwell to get the necessary higher education. But despite her success in French, German, music, and drawing, Emily left Brussels nine months later upon the death of Aunt Branwell, and never returned. She was left to care for her brother, who was still losing his sanity, and her father, who was losing his eyesight.In 1844, after a valiant effort to open a school that attracted not even a single pupil, the Brontë sisters decided to earn their living by writing. Charlotte accidentally discovered some of Emily's poems and was so impressed that she insisted Emily contribute them to a volume she

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was compiling. Though angered by Charlotte's invasion of her privacy, Emily reluctantly agreed. Since women's poetry was rarely published in those days, Charlotte, Emily, and their younger sister Anne contributed poems under male pseudonyms. The resulting volume—Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (1846)—was partly financed by money Aunt Branwell had left the sisters. It sold only two copies but received good critical reviews.Emily's Wuthering Heights seems to have been written in a burst of energy fired by financial need, emotional conflict over Branwell, and frustration at not being able to conform to any society outside of her own eccentric family. Published in 1847, Wuthering Heights sold fairly well, but many critics were outraged by the physical brutality it depicted. Emily Brontë died at Haworth on December 19, 1848, a year after Wuthering Heights was published, and just two months after Branwell's death.

II OVERVIEWDespite the book's sometimes implausible plot and often melodramatic characters, virtually all modern critics consider Wuthering Heights a masterpiece of world literature. Indeed, the novel convincingly argues that real-life situations actually seem implausible at times, and that real people often do behave melodramatically, especially when frustrated by the relentless imposition of restrictions made in the name of social progress. Wuthering Heights demands that readers fearlessly attempt to discover those qualities of human nature that, stripped of social pretense, are truly valuable. Furthermore, although the language of the novel is rich and the themes complex, it is perhaps the most immediately readable of all Victorian novels. Young adults sympathize particularly with the early trials of Heathcliff; with Hindley's jealousy of his unwelcome foster brother; and with Cathy's dilemma in choosing between the wildly passionate Heathcliff and the somewhat meek Edgar Linton. Sophisticated readers are further intrigued by the unfolding of Heathcliff's passions as an adult, and see him not only as a spellbinding character, but also as a symbol of momentous social reformation.

III SETTINGThe setting of Wuthering Heights is a vital but contradictory force in the novel, as important as any of the characters. 'Wuthering' is a Yorkshire dialect term for the roaring of the wind, a sound both inviting and frightening. Wuthering Heights, the mansion where much of the action takes place, is a harshly beautiful building that contrasts with the other major locale of the novel, Thrushcross Grange, a more conventionally attractive mansion several miles from the Heights. Between the two houses lie the moors—high, broad stretches of wetland covered with heather and filled with marshy bogs.The events of Wuthering Heights occur during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Rural Yorkshire was then an area where sheep were raised for wool mills. As England became more industrialized, competition for power between older landowning families, such as the Lintons, and clever upstart businessmen, such as Heathcliff, increased. Thus the place and time of the novel intensify the major conflicts inherent in its themes.

IV THEMES AND CHARACTERSThe most basic theme of Wuthering Heights is that one must be true to oneself or suffer dire consequences. In marrying Edgar Linton, Catherine (Cathy) Earnshaw denies her true desires and consequently violates her love of the untamed, disinherited, uneducated Heathcliff; she later dies of a broken spirit. Furthermore, she seems to damage the lives of all the other characters in the novel. But although Cathy dies midway through the narrative, she remains a mighty presence throughout, not only reproaching those who would belie their true natures, but also driving Heathcliff's ambitions. Viewed from a broader perspective, Cathy's dilemma and its resolution (she chooses to wed the financially secure, well-bred Edgar, thereby motivating the bitter Heathcliff to seek higher social status) suggest a complex theme. Cathy's martyrdom to the dual, contradictory cause of social stability and social progress epitomizes the plight of middle-class women in Western culture. In the nineteenth century, middle-class

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women were held responsible for both the achievements of the men close to them and the well-being of their children, yet were denied the power to make decisions in response to the rapidly changing social conditions that influenced their ability to fulfill these duties.As important as Cathy's role is, many critics view Wuthering Heights as Heathcliff's story. Outliving Cathy by another generation, Heathcliff overwhelms all other characters, sometimes physically but more often by force of his indomitable personality. From the moment he arrives at Wuthering Heights, a foreign-looking, dirty little orphan whom Mr. Earnshaw brings home from the city, he throws the family into contention. But Cathy and Heathcliff soon become loyal companions and champions of one another, and the two indulge in their love of the wild landscape by spending as much time as possible alone together on the moors. Their relationship becomes so strong and reciprocal that, at a major turning point in the novel, Cathy declares, 'I am Heathcliff.' Nonetheless, she chooses Edgar for her husband.Heathcliff's mysterious origins and exaggerated passions suggest that he, like Cathy, is meant to play a role larger than that of the jilted, disenfranchised lover. The hold that Heathcliff eventually gains over the inhabitants of both the Heights and Thrushcross Grange marks him as the representative of a new social class. As such, his character, too, suggests the theme of society in transition demanding the sacrifice of individuality.Most of the other characters play minor roles. Lockwood is the somewhat spoiled city boy who opens the narrative. Having come to the country for seclusion, his naive perceptions of his hosts provide some of the scarce comic relief in the novel. Ellen (Nelly) Dean—whom Brontë probably modeled after Tabitha Ackroyd—is the housekeeper and nurse at the Heights and later at the Grange. Nelly narrates most of the story, recalling events from memory. Her mixed emotions about Cathy and Heathcliff, whom she has known since they were children, highlight the contradictions inherent in the novel.Hindley Earnshaw, Cathy's brother, serves primarily to motivate Heathcliff's lifelong desire for revenge. Hindley's spoiled and drunken character may have been influenced by Brontë's own brother, Branwell. Edgar Linton, heir of Thrushcross Grange, becomes Cathy's husband and the father of their daughter Catherine. Edgar develops from a shallow boy to a kind, loving husband and father, but his passion for Cathy cannot match Heathcliff's. Isabella Linton, Edgar's sister and later Heathcliff's wife, is little more than a stereotypical, foolish adolescent whose unrealistic notions of romantic love lead her into a disastrous relationship with Heathcliff.The three characters whose lives become enmeshed in the second half of the novel are Hareton Earnshaw (Hindley's son), Catherine Linton (Cathy and Edgar's daughter), and Linton Heathcliff (Heathcliff and Isabella's son). With Heathcliff as diabolical director, these younger characters act out a weakened, distorted version of the triangle presented in the first half of the novel. Both through her portrayals of these characters and through her less passionate writing style in the novel's second half, Brontë expresses one of the novel's themes: social stability cannot tolerate extreme passion, yet without such passion, the world is a much less exciting place.

V LITERARY QUALITIESWuthering Heights has confounded those critics who attempt to place it in any one literary genre. For its depiction of the intensely individualistic personalities of Cathy and Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights has been called the first truly romantic novel. Early in the novel, Heathcliff is an almost pure type of romantic hero; furthermore, Heathcliff's mysterious origin, the larger-than-life dimensions of Cathy's and Heathcliff's characters, and their unearthly love for each other give Wuthering Heights the status of myth. Brontë's treatment of time—the narrative moves from present to past to present again—gives the novel an epic quality. But its subject matter, the survival of romantic love and the survival of the family, place it at the crossroads between romantic poetry and the Victorian novel.

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Brontë employs numerous points of view to relate her story; much of the book is filtered through the perspective of Nelly Dean, who tells the tale of the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange to an outsider, Lockwood. By using two relatively minor characters, Nelly and Lockwood, as her primary narrators and interpreters of the action, Brontë challenges her readers to evaluate the book and its principal themes from a multitude of viewpoints. Brontë's sophisticated and groundbreaking narrative technique has been elaborated on by later writers such as Joseph Conrad in his novel Heart of Darkness and Henry James in his short story 'The Turn of the Screw.'

VI SOCIAL SENSITIVITYThe basic plot of Wuthering Heights may seem to be a timeless love story, but the characters and situations reflect many of the real social problems of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Women of the time were denied equal economic opportunity, and when Hindley disinherits Cathy Earnshaw, she feels compelled to choose Edgar over Heathcliff in order to secure her material survival. Similarly, Isabella is at Heathcliff's mercy partly because she has no economic security. Heathcliff's character, too, is better understood when one realizes that a young man with no family and no money had few options but to outwit those who did have established social status. Even Lockwood's condescending attitude toward his country hosts points up a social problem that became more acute as industrialization lured more people into the cities; during this social transition, communication and understanding between inhabitants of differing social milieus, economic classes, or educational levels became increasingly difficult. Hindley's early treatment of Heathcliff and the initial relationship between young Catherine and Hareton are variations on this theme of class conflict.

GEORGE ELIOT (1819-1880)

George EliotGeorge Eliot (1819-1880), pseudonym of Mary Ann or Marian Evans, English novelist, whose books,

with their profound feeling and accurate portrayals of simple lives, give her a place in the first rank

of 19th-century English writers. Her fame was international, and her work greatly influenced the

development of French naturalism.

George Eliot was born in Chilvers Coton, Warwickshire, the daughter of an estate agent. She was

educated at a local school in Nuneaton and later at a boarding school in Coventry. At the age of 17,

after the death of her mother and the marriage of her elder sister, she was called home to care for

her father. From that time on she was self-taught. A strict religious training, received at the

insistence of her father, dominated Eliot's youth. In 1841 she began to read rationalist works, which

influenced her to rebel against dogmatic religion, and she remained a rationalist throughout her life

(see Rationalism).

Eliot's first literary attempt, at which she worked from 1844 to 1846, was a translation of Das Leben

Jesu (The Living Jesus, 1835-1836) by the German theologian David Strauss. In 1851, after traveling

for two years in Europe, she returned to England and wrote a book review for the Westminster

Review. She subsequently became assistant editor of that publication. Through her work on the

Review she met many of the leading literary figures of the period, including Harriet Martineau, John

Stuart Mill, James Froude, Herbert Spencer, and George Lewes. Her meeting with Lewes, a

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philosopher, scientist, and critic, was one of the most significant events of her life. They fell in love

and decided to live together, although Lewes was married and a divorce was not possible.

Nevertheless, Eliot looked upon her subsequent long and happy relationship with Lewes as a

marriage.

Eliot continued to write reviews, articles for periodicals, and translations from the German. Then,

with encouragement from Lewes, she began to write fiction in 1856. Her first story, “The Sad

Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,” appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in January 1857. It was

followed by two other stories in the same year, and all three were collected in book form as Scenes

from Clerical Life (1858). The author signed herself George Eliot and kept her true identity secret

for many years.

Among Eliot's best-known works are Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Silas

Marner (1861). These novels deal with the Warwickshire countryside and are based, to a great

extent, on her own life. Travels in Italy inspired her next novel, Romola (1863), a historical romance

about the Italian preacher and reformer Girolamo Savonarola and 15th-century Florence. She began

writing the book in 1861, and it appeared in 1863, after being serialized in The Cornhill Magazine.

Following the completion of Romola, she wrote two outstanding novels, Felix Holt, the Radical

(1866), concerned with English politics, and Middlemarch (1871-1872), dealing with English middle-

class life in a provincial town. Daniel Deronda (1876) is a novel attacking anti-Semitism, and The

Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879) is a collection of essays. Her poetry, which is considered

to have much less merit than her prose, includes The Spanish Gypsy (1868), a drama in blank

verse; Agatha (1869); and The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems (1874). Eliot was admired by

contemporaries such as Emily Dickinson and later writers such as Virginia Woolf, and has generated

much favorable contemporary feminist criticism.

During the period in which she wrote her major works, Eliot was always encouraged and protected

by Lewes. He prevented her even from seeing unfavorable reviews of her books. After his death in

1878 she became a recluse and stopped writing. In May 1880 she married John Cross, an American

banker, who had long been a friend of both Lewes and herself and who became Eliot's first

biographer, but she died in London seven months later.

THOMAS HARDY (1840-1928)

Thomas Hardy

I INTRODUCTION

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), English novelist and poet of the naturalist movement, who powerfully

delineated characters, portrayed in his native Dorset, struggling helplessly against their passions

and external circumstances.

Hardy was born in Higher Bockhampton, Dorsetshire, June 2, 1840, and educated in local schools

and later privately. His father, a stonemason, apprenticed him early to a local architect engaged in

restoring old churches. From 1862 to 1867 Hardy worked for an architect in London and later

continued to practice architecture, despite ill health, in Dorset. Meanwhile, he was writing poetry

with little success. He then turned to novels as more salable, and by 1874 he was able to support

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himself by writing. This is also the year that Hardy married his first wife, Emma Gifford. Their

marriage lasted until her death in 1912, which prompted Hardy to write his collection of poems

called Veteris Vestigiae Flammae (Vestiges of an Old Flame). These poems are some of Hardy's finest and describe their meeting and his subsequent loss. In 1914 Florence Dugdale became Hardy's second wife and she wrote his biography after he died in Dorchester, on January 11, 1928.

II EARLY WORKS: NOVELS

Hardy anonymously published two early novels, Desperate Remedies (1871) and Under the

Greenwood Tree (1872). The next two, A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) and Far from the Madding Crowd

(1874), in his own name, were well received. Far from the Madding Crowd was adapted for the

screen in 1967. In the latter he portrayed Dorsetshire as the imaginary county of Wessex. The novel

is, however, not invested with the tragic gloom of his later novels. Some lesser works followed,

including The Woodlanders (1887) and two volumes of short stories, Wessex Tales (1888) and Life's

Little Ironies (1894).

Along with Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy's best novels are The Return of the Native (1878),

which is his most closely knit narrative; The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886); Tess of the D'Urbervilles

(1891), made into a movie called Tess in 1979; and Jude the Obscure (1895). All are pervaded by a

belief in a universe dominated by the determinism of the biology of Charles Darwin and the physics

of the 17th-century philosopher and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton. Occasionally the determined

fate of the individual is altered by chance, but the human will loses when it challenges necessity.

Through intense, vivid descriptions of the heath, the fields, the seasons, and the weather, Wessex

attains a physical presence in the novels and acts as a mirror of the psychological conditions and

the fortunes of the characters. These fortunes Hardy views with irony and sadness. The critic G. K.

Chesterton wrote that Hardy “became a sort of village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the

village idiot.” In Victorian England, Hardy did indeed seem a blasphemer, particularly in Jude, which

treated sexual attraction as a natural force unopposable by human will. Criticism of Jude was so harsh that Hardy announced he was “cured” of writing novels.

III LATER WORKS: POETRY AND DRAMA

At the age of 55 Hardy returned to writing poetry, a form he had previously abandoned. Wessex

Poems (1898) and Poems of the Past and Present (1901) contained poems he had written earlier. In

The Dynasts, written between 1903 and 1908, Hardy created what some consider his most

successful poetry. An unstageable epic drama in 19 acts and 130 scenes, it deals with the role of

England during the Napoleonic Wars. Hardy's vision is the same as in his novels: History and the

actors, who are racked by feeling, are nevertheless dominated by necessity. Hardy's short poems,

both lyric and visionary, were published as Time's Laughing Stocks (1909), Satires of Circumstances

(1914), Moments of Vision (1917), Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922), Human Shows, Far Fantasies

(1925), and Winter Words (1928). Hardy's techniques of rhythm and his diction are especially

noteworthy. Among his most successful shorter poems are “Channel Firing, April 1914,””Wessex

Heights,””In Tenebris, I,””God's Funeral,” and “Nature's Questioning.”

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ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1850-1894)

Treasure IslandPublished 1883

I ABOUT THE AUTHORRobert Louis Stevenson was born on November 13, 1850, in Edinburgh, Scotland, the only child of a prosperous, middle-class family. His father and grandfather were lighthouse engineers. Because his mother was of delicate health, Stevenson was raised primarily by his devoted nurse, Alison Cunningham, or 'Cummy,' to whom he later dedicated A Child's Garden of Verses (1885). His schooling was frequently interrupted by illness, but Stevenson traveled widely in Europe and was taught privately by tutors. At seventeen he enrolled as an engineering student at Edinburgh University, but changed to law after a year. Although he completed his degree, Stevenson never practiced law, and devoted himself to writing instead.On a summer holiday to France in 1875, Stevenson met Fanny Osbourne, a married American ten years his senior who was traveling abroad with her two children. Osbourne was estranged from her husband, and when she traveled back to California in the fall of 1878 to obtain a divorce, Stevenson followed. They married in San Francisco in May of 1880 and sailed back to Liverpool.Meanwhile, Stevenson was forced to ask his parents for money to supplement the meager income derived from his writing efforts. During a cold, wet summer in Scotland in 1881, Stevenson drew a treasure map for his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne—thus originating the world of Treasure Island. Stevenson set to work creating a story to accompany the map, and published the novel in 1883. The family later settled in the British health resort of Bournemouth, where Stevenson wrote Kidnapped and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, both of which were published in 1886.After the death of his father in 1887, Stevenson took his family back to America. They hired a yacht in 1888 for a cruise to the South Sea Islands, stopping in the Marquesas and Hawaii, where Stevenson wrote The Master of Ballantrae. In 1889 they continued their cruise to Samoa, where Stevenson built an estate and settled. The tropical climate improved his health, but the stress of mounting debts and enforced writing brought on a cerebral hemorrhage from which he died on December 3, 1894.Although Stevenson's reputation has declined since his death, he is still recognized as a master storyteller, and Treasure Island and Kidnapped remain among the most popular adventure stories of all time for young readers.

II OVERVIEWTreasure Island is a classic adventure story, featuring an ordinary boy, Jim Hawkins, who is transported to a treacherous world of pirates and buried treasure. Jim's adventures begin when he and his mother discover a pirate map in the chest of Billy Bones, a guest at their lodging-house. Jim's experiences on the ship Hispaniola and on Treasure Island test his resourcefulness and teach him important lessons about loyalty and physical courage. Perhaps his most important lesson grows out of his relationship with the one-legged pirate, Long John Silver—a lesson about the moral ambiguity of good and evil.

III SETTINGThe story begins sometime in the 18th century on a remote stretch of the English coast. A mysterious seaman named Billy Bones appears one day at the Admiral Benbow Inn in Black Hill Cove and asks for lodging. After the death of Billy Bones, the action shifts to Bristol, where Squire Trelawney is out-fitting the brig Hispaniola and hiring a crew to journey to Treasure Island. The bulk of the adventure takes place on board the Hispaniola or on Treasure Island itself—presumably a tiny fictional Caribbean island somewhere in the West Indies.

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After the treasure is recovered and the Hispaniola recaptured by the loyal crew members, the party sails into a West Indies port to reprovision before returning to Bristol.

IV THEMES AND CHARACTERSTreasure Island includes a wide range of vivid and memorable characters, drawn with great subtlety and psychological perception. There is a certain moral ambiguity in all of Stevenson's characters, a kind of 'Jekyll and Hyde' dual nature: the good characters are often flawed and the villains tempered with positive qualities.This note of ambiguity is evident from the beginning of the story. Mrs. Hawkins risks both her own life and Jim's when she ransacks Billy Bones's sea-chest to collect the old pirate's rent money but wastes valuable time by counting out every coin to ensure that she takes no more than is due her. Squire Trelawney is another example of flawed goodness. Even though he is strictly instructed by Doctor Livesey not to divulge the purpose of the voyage, Trelawney foolishly confides the secret of the treasure map to Long John Silver, risking a mutiny that will endanger all the crew. Trelawney is blind to the blunt honesty of Captain Smollett, while allowing himself to be taken in by Silver's flattery and deception.Perhaps the greatest moral enigma is the one-legged Long John Silver. The ship's cook on the outward voyage, Silver is a model of good cheer, showing unfailing kindness to Jim and instructing him in the particulars of seamanship. He is a striking figure as he moves about the ship with his crutch and his green parrot, 'Captain Flint,' perched on his shoulder. Yet beneath the veneer of sociability, Silver is actually the ringleader of the pirates, ruthlessly plotting to seize the ship and dispose of all but his own hands—as Jim learns in the famous scene when he hides in an apple barrel and overhears Silver's plans.A shrewd opportunist, Silver is quick to assess a situation and ally himself with the stronger party. He is glib and manipulative, capable of being vicious or ingratiating as the situation demands. Yet he shows genuine affection in his relationship with Jim, and is willing to risk his life to save him from the mutinous pirates. As the pirates' plans are thwarted by Jim's intervention, the mutineers turn on one another, and Silver appears less sinister in comparison to some of the others. Despite his wickedness, Silver is such an appealing character that he dominates the story through the force of his personality, overshadowing the other characters and offering an unforgettable example of the moral ambiguity of the adult world.The members of the loyal party offer neither the colorfulness nor the appeal of Long John Silver, but they are skillfully drawn as stock 18th-century English character types. Squire Trelawney is a robust, quick-tempered, hard-riding country squire. A poor judge of character, he abuses the honest Captain Smollett and foolishly confides the purpose of the voyage to Silver.Doctor Livesey, a physician and county magistrate, represents both the strengths and limitations of rationality. He shows bravery, integrity, and devotion to duty, even offering to treat the wounded pirates—yet he is no match for the cunning and duplicity of Silver. His are ordinary domestic virtues that prove of little value in extraordinary situations. Captain Smollett is an experienced seaman, blunt and honest almost to a fault, who undertakes a risky voyage against his better judgment. He misreads the spirit of the crew and fails to anticipate the incipient mutiny.In many respects a typical British boy of his age, Jim has led a sheltered life at the Admiral Benbow Inn. The arrival of Billy Bones triggers his desire to explore the larger world beyond his home. Although he has grown up on the seacoast, Jim knows little of the seafaring life. His adventures constitute an initiation into adulthood, by means of which he learns survival skills and moral lessons that far eclipse the typical education of a British 'gentleman.' Whereas many of his adult companions flounder in times of crisis, Jim—despite his youth and his rashness—proves himself capable of holding up under stress. It is he who first discovers and later thwarts the pirates' mutiny.

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Jim's most dangerous physical test comes when he slays the pirate Israel Hands, who has pinned him to the ship's mast with a knife. Jim passes his greatest moral test when, offered the chance to escape with Doctor Livesey, he refuses to leave and thereby break his word to Long John Silver. Jim's courage—both physical and moral—surpasses that of the adults around him, and wins him a secure place in the adult world.

V LITERARY QUALITIESStevenson is a master storyteller who knows how to construct an engrossing tale. In Treasure Island, he makes skillful use of plot, setting, atmosphere, and character development to craft an enduring story of high suspense. Every episode in the novel is carefully developed to sustain the drama of the narrative.Most of the tale is told from Jim's point of view, although Stevenson shifts the narration to Doctor Livesey for three chapters to give the reader a different perspective. What at first appears to be a conventional moral framework for the book—heroes on one side, villains on the other—soon reveals itself to be far more complex. Long John Silver is a more sympathetic character than any member of the loyal party save Jim, and Jim himself matures only by violating traditional moral norms. He frequently sneaks away from his more timid companions and takes matters into his own hands, stretching the limits of proper behavior in the pursuit of a greater good.Stevenson captures the exotic atmosphere of the age of high-seas piracy. His prose recalls an era when British privateers and cutthroats, such as Captain Kidd and Bluebeard, were encouraged by the Crown to prey upon Spanish merchant ships returning from the New World laden with gold and silver. Stevenson shows a curious ambivalence toward the pirates, condemning their cruelty and ruthlessness while admiring their pluck and bravery.

VI SOCIAL SENSITIVITYIn his emphasis on adventure as a formative influence on Jim, Stevenson shows a marked ambiguity toward the Victorian domestic virtues of his age. Domestic life is dull not only for Jim, but also for Squire Trelawney and Doctor Livesey, both of whom are quick to abandon their domestic and professional responsibilities to search for buried treasure on a remote island. Stevenson hints that adventure is the crucible of adulthood, and it seems that the adventure, not the gold, is the real purpose of the quest.Stevenson focuses on violence and suspense, two essential elements of the adventure tale. Treasure Island shows the seamy side of seafaring life, and depicts the victimization of the innocent by the strong and ruthless. Jim himself barely escapes death when Israel Hands pins him to the mast with a knife; he survives by coolly shooting the pirate with a pair of pistols. By the end of the novel Jim has been initiated into a brutal world of violence, murder, greed, and treachery. He has certainly matured during the course of his adventures, but whether Jim learns any lasting moral lessons—aside from his loathing of the treasure—is uncertain. The experience itself, it seems, has been his primary gain.

OSCAR WILDE (1854-1900)

Oscar Wilde

I INTRODUCTION

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Irish-born writer and wit, who was the chief proponent of the aesthetic movement, based on the principle of art for art’s sake. Wilde was a novelist, playwright, poet, and critic.

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II LIFE

He was born Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde on October 16, 1854, in Dublin, and educated at

Trinity College, Dublin. As a youngster he was exposed to the brilliant literary talk of the day at his

mother’s Dublin salon. Later, as a student at the University of Oxford, he excelled in classics, wrote

poetry, and incorporated the Bohemian life-style of his youth into a unique way of life. At Oxford

Wilde came under the influence of aesthetic innovators such as English writers Walter Pater and

John Ruskin. As an aesthete, the eccentric young Wilde wore long hair and velvet knee breeches.

His rooms were filled with various objets d’art such as sunflowers, peacock feathers, and blue

china; Wilde claimed to aspire to the perfection of the china. His attitudes and manners were

ridiculed in the comic periodical Punch and satirized in the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera

Patience (1881). Nonetheless, his wit, brilliance, and flair won him many devotees.

Wilde’s first book was Poems (1881). His first play, Vera, or the Nihilists (1882), was produced in

New York City, where he saw it performed while he was on a highly successful lecture tour. Upon

returning to England he settled in London and married in 1884 a wealthy Irish woman, with whom

he had two sons. Thereafter he devoted himself exclusively to writing.

In 1895, at the peak of his career, Wilde became the central figure in one of the most sensational

court trials of the century. The results scandalized the Victorian middle class; Wilde, who had been

a close friend of the young Lord Alfred Douglas, was convicted of homosexual offenses. Sentenced

in 1895 to two years of hard labor in prison, he emerged financially bankrupt and spiritually

downcast. He spent the rest of his life in Paris, using the pseudonym Sebastian Melmoth. He was

converted to Roman Catholicism before he died of meningitis in Paris on November 30, 1900.

Wilde’s early works included two collections of fairy stories, which he wrote for his sons, The Happy

Prince (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1892), and a group of short stories, Lord Arthur

Savile’s Crime (1891). His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), is a melodramatic tale of

moral decadence, distinguished for its brilliant, epigrammatic style. Although the author fully

describes the process of corruption, the shocking conclusion of the story frankly commits him to a

moral stand against self-debasement.

Wilde’s most distinctive and engaging plays are the four comedies Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892),

A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest

(1895), all characterized by adroitly contrived plots and remarkably witty dialogue. Wilde, with little

dramatic training, proved he had a natural talent for stagecraft and theatrical effects and a true gift

for farce. The plays sparkle with his clever paradoxes, among them such famous inverted proverbs

as “Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes” and “What is a cynic? A man who

knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.”

In contrast, Wilde’s Salomé is a serious drama about obsessive passion. Originally written in French,

it was produced in Paris in 1894 with the celebrated actor Sarah Bernhardt. It was subsequently

made into an opera by the German composer Richard Strauss. Salomé was also translated into

English by Lord Alfred Douglas and illustrated by English artist Aubrey Beardsley in 1894.

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While in prison Wilde composed De Profundis (From the Depths; 1905), an apology for his life. Some

critics consider it a serious revelation; others, a sentimental and insincere work. The Ballad of

Reading Gaol (1898), written at Berneval-le-Grand, France, just after his release and published

anonymously in England, is the most powerful of all his poems. The starkness of prison life and the

desperation of people interned are revealed in beautifully cadenced language. For years after his

death the name of Oscar Wilde bore the stigma attached to it by Victorian prudery. Wilde, the

artist, now is recognized as a brilliant social commentator, whose best work remains worthwhile

and relevant.

JOSEPH CONRAD (1857-1924)

Joseph Conrad

I INTRODUCTION

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), Polish-born English novelist, considered to be among the great modern

English writers, whose work explores the vulnerability and moral instability at the heart of human

lives. Conrad is best known for his classic story Heart of Darkness (1902), in which a European

sailor discovers that the heart of darkness is not Africa, but something within the human soul, and

perhaps also something linked to European imperialism. Conrad’s other acclaimed works include

Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), Under Western Eyes (1911), and “The

Secret Sharer” (1912).

Conrad is noted not only for his stories of life at sea, his insights into human psychology, and his literary style, but also for his depictions of imperialism and racial issues. Conrad writes in a rich, vivid prose style with a narrative technique that makes skillful use of breaks in linear chronology. His character development is powerful and compelling, but his outlook is generally bleak.

II LIFE

Conrad was born Teodor Józef Konrad Korzeniowski near Berdychiv, Ukraine (then under Russian

rule), the son of a Polish noble. From his father the boy acquired a love of literature, including

romantic tales of the sea. His father took part in an uprising by Poles against Russian rule in 1863,

and the family was subsequently sent into exile in Siberia. His father died when Conrad was 12

years old, and his mother died a few years later. An uncle became his guardian, and in 1874, at the

age of 16, Conrad succeeded in persuading his guardian to allow him to go to Marseille, France, and

join the French merchant marine.

During the next four years Conrad made three voyages to the West Indies, squandered money

wildly, seemingly became involved in a gunrunning venture for the Carlist pretender to the Spanish

throne, and became involved in a love affair that brought him to the brink of suicide. He apparently

attempted to shoot himself but later maintained that he had been wounded in a duel.

In 1878 Conrad joined the English freighter Mavis, and for the next 16 years he sailed chiefly in

British ships. It was at this stage of his life that he learned the English language. Although English

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was Conrad’s third language, after Polish and French, it was the language in which he did his

writing. In 1886 he earned his certificate as a master mariner and became a naturalized British

subject. A few years later he changed his name to sound more English. For the next decade he

continued to travel widely, mostly in Asian and African waters. Conrad’s experiences, especially in

the Malay Archipelago and on the Congo River in 1890, are reflected in his writing. Conrad

published his first novel and married Jessie George in 1896.

From the years he spent on ships and in foreign ports, Conrad gleaned the impressions of

atmosphere and people that provided him with material for his first two novels, Almayer’s Folly

(1895) and An Outcast of the Islands (1896), as well as for Lord Jim (1900) and a number of short

stories. However, the publication of Almayer’s Folly marked no definite break with his first vocation,

and he later wrote, “Neither in my mind nor in my heart had I then given up the sea.”

Worsening health led Conrad to give up his seafaring career and devote himself to writing. He settled in Kent, in southern England. Among Conrad’s friends and correspondents were some of the leading literary men of the day: Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, Edward Garnett, John Galsworthy, Stephen Crane, and H. G. Wells. These best years of Conrad’s writing life were a struggle, however: He was beset by lack of money, ill health, and an inability to escape from doubts about his creative ability. In addition, his wife suffered from a crippling illness. Conrad died at Bishopsbourne, Kent, near Canterbury, in 1924.

III WORKS

Conrad produced 13 novels, two volumes of memoirs, and 28 short stories, although writing was

not easy or painless for him. Perhaps only another writer can fully appreciate his comment

regarding the completion of the novel Nostromo (1904), which many critics regard as his

masterpiece: “an achievement upon which my friends may congratulate me as upon recovery from

a dangerous illness.”

Conrad’s life at sea and in ports abroad furnished the background for much of his writing, giving

rise to the impression that he was primarily committed to foreign concerns. In reality, however, his

major interest as a writer was the human condition. As in Almayer’s Folly his narrator is often a

retired master mariner and obviously Conrad’s alter ego, so that some of his novels can be seen as

at least partly autobiographical.

Conrad’s early novels suffered from literary inexperience, although they were considerable

achievements from one who had not begun to master English, the language he wrote in, until he

was 20. In The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897), a triumph of poetic realism, he portrays the

disintegrating effect on the crew of the antics of James Wait, who uses his fatal disease to blackmail

his shipmates.

One of Conrad’s best-known novels is Lord Jim (1900), a study of “the acute consciousness of lost

honor.” Eager to lead a life of adventure, Jim, the son of a rural clergyman, chooses the sea. On the

training ship for officers, he performs the routine tasks well but lives mostly in his imagination. He

sees himself a hero rescuing people from sinking ships, facing savages on distant shores, and

quelling mutinies. But when confronted with an actual emergency, he deserts an apparently

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doomed ship and thus fails to live up to the conventional code of honor. Disgraced, he spends the

remainder of his life atoning for his cowardice and redeeming his honor.

In 1902 Conrad published the novel Typhoon and a collection of three outstanding novellas (short

novels) under the title Youth. In addition to the title story Youth, they consisted of Heart of

Darkness and The End of the Tether. Youth is a paean to “the days when we were young at sea.” It

contains superb descriptions of the sea, of the doomed ship Judea and its resolute crew, of the

fascination of Asia, and of the indomitable spirit of youth. In Heart of Darkness Conrad explores the

character of the well-intentioned ivory trader Kurtz, who proves to have the capacity to be far more

savage than the supposedly “savage” Africans among whom he lives. The End of the Tether is the

pathetic story of Captain Whalley, whose long life of honorable industry, Christian faith, and loving

solicitude for his daughter ends in loneliness and blindness, “without any help, human or divine.”

Conrad’s next three novels show a strong concern with political activity. In Nostromo (1904) he

brilliantly creates an imaginary South American country. One of the main characters is Charles

Gould, owner of a silver mine who initially dreams of bringing a “better justice” to the people only

to become corrupted by “material interests” and the desire to maintain power. Nostromo, a

supposedly incorruptible man who lives for his pride and his reputation, also falls victim to the lure

of silver and becomes corrupted and dishonest. The Secret Agent (1907), set in London, is an ironic

study of the baseness and ruthless amorality of a pseudo-anarchist mentality. Under Western Eyes

(1911) reveals the senseless tyranny of the 19th-century Russian ruling class and once again works

out the theme of guilt and atonement.

Of Conrad’s short stories, “The Secret Sharer” demands particular attention. Its uses the “double”

(or alter ego) motif to portray the bond between an innocent person and someone who is

technically a criminal and to reveal how easily the fates of the two could be interchanged. Conrad

also wrote largely autobiographical pieces collected as The Mirror of the Sea (1906) and essays in

autobiography eventually titled A Personal Record (1912).

Conrad’s work received critical acclaim from the outset, but not until Chance was published in 1913

did Conrad achieve any popular success. Other later works include Victory (1915), The Shadow-Line

(1917), The Arrow of Gold (1919), The Rescue (1920), and The Rover (1923). At his death in 1924,

Conrad left a final novel unfinished. Suspense was published posthumously in 1925.

IV CONRAD’S THEMES AND POLITICS

Conrad’s favorite themes include the impact of isolation on an individual, the codes of morality that

people design for themselves, the moral ambiguities of human existence, and the attempt to be

loyal to an idea or an ideal—for example, an ideal of masculine heroism, a political philosophy, or a

belief in the righteousness of one’s work. In most of his novels Conrad portrayed European men in

situations far removed from their usual society and customs. Thus isolated, his characters are

brought into conflict with nature and with the forces of good and evil within themselves.

Since the mid-1900s critics and readers have found much of interest in Conrad’s politics. In the

1970s Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe wrote an essay entitled “An Image of Africa: Racism in

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Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” In it, Achebe claimed that Conrad was “a thoroughgoing racist”

because of the way that he portrayed Africans in the story.

A tumultuous scholarly debate broke out after the publication of Achebe’s essay. Some scholars argued that Conrad was a visionary who recognized the wrongs of imperialism at a time when most Europeans either tacitly accepted or enthusiastically endorsed efforts to colonize Africa. Others argued that Conrad believed British imperialism was far superior to the Belgian imperialism he depicts in the novella. Some praised Conrad for attempting to depict Africans sympathetically; others argued that Conrad’s depictions of Africans were shaped by racial stereotypes but noted that Conrad’s views and blind spots were typical of the time in which he lived. While the majority of Conrad critics today concur that Conrad was anti-imperialist, debates on Conrad’s presentation of imperialism and of African characters continue to enliven classrooms.

V LITERARY TECHNIQUE AND STYLE

For Conrad, advancing the plot of the story is less important than exploring the inner workings of

the minds of his characters. Rather than telling us about a character’s psychology, however, Conrad

prefers to show us the character interacting with others, describing his every gesture, inflection,

intonation, and expression. In many of his fictions, Conrad uses shifting time sequences and

multiple perspectives.

Conrad uses a narrator, the experienced shipmaster Marlow, in several of his works, namely Youth,

Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and Chance. Critics remain divided about the extent to which Marlow

represents Conrad’s point of view and the extent to which Conrad maintains a critical distance from

his narrator. Marlow’s narratives meander freely through time and space, sometimes withholding

crucial pieces of information for several chapters. For example, in the opening chapters of Lord Jim,

it is clear that Jim has done something that most characters in the book consider both terrible and

humiliating, but Marlow does not reveal precisely what it is that Jim has done until later in the

narrative. Although Marlow clearly has opinions about the events of the tales he tells, Conrad is

deliberately equivocal, leaving the reader free to make judgments.

One of the greatest descriptive writers of English fiction, Conrad stressed the natural settings of his

stories, portraying them in lengthy passages of magnificently evocative prose. His talent in

describing the natural world is matched by his skill in providing psychological insights into his

characters. The following selection from Heart of Darkness, describing Marlow’s river journey into

the African jungle in search of the Belgian trader Kurtz, illustrates both Conrad’s narrative method

and his literary style. It reveals the indirection of his technique, showing how the story of Kurtz is

told through the narrator Marlow. At the same time the passage indicates Conrad’s extraordinary

ability to evoke an atmosphere of mystery and terror. His mastery of symbolism is also evident:

Marlow’s voyage to the center of the “dark continent” represents his spiritual journey into the

recesses of his own soul.

Going up the river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation

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rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.… The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish.… The

long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On

silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side.… I turned to the

wilderness really, not to Mr. Kurtz, who, I was ready to admit, was as good as buried. And for the

moment it seemed to me as if I was buried in a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets. I felt an

intolerable weight oppressing my breast, the smell of the damp earth, the unseen presence of

victorious corruption, the darkness of an impenetrable night.

ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE (1859-1930)

The Hound of the BaskervillesPublished 1901

I ABOUT THE AUTHORArthur Conan Doyle was born on May 22, 1859, in Edinburgh, Scotland. As a young man he seemed destined for a career in medicine. In 1876 he attended the University of Edinburgh Medical School. There he met Joseph Bell, whose deductive powers and dramatic flair he would later embody in the character of Sherlock Holmes. In the early 1880s he served as a medical officer on an Arctic whaling ship and ship's surgeon on a voyage to West Africa. By the summer of 1882, he had settled in the town of Southsea in the south of England. In 1885 he received his medical degree. Even after he was a well-established writer, he continued to pursue his medical education, becoming an eye specialist. His medical practice was unsuccessful, leaving him plenty of free time to write.His first story was 'The Mystery of Sarassa Valley,' published in October 1879 in Chamber's Journal. He had trouble finding a publisher for his first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, which eventually appeared in Beeton's Christmas Annual for 1887. It and its successor, the novel The Sign of Four, published in 1890, were not popular at first. Conan Doyle himself regarded these early Holmes novels as mere entertainments to bring in some money while he concentrated on historical novels. He hoped to become a new Walter Scott, who had earned fame and respect with such novels as Ivanhoe (1820).In 1891 Conan Doyle agreed to supply the new magazine the Strand with a series of Sherlock Holmes short stories. 'A Scandal in Bohemia' appeared in the magazine's July 1891 issue and was a popular sensation. For the rest of his life Conan Doyle was pressured by publishers and the general public to write more stories about Sherlock Holmes.He tried to stop writing the stories a number of times. After his initial contract with the Strand was fulfilled, he demanded an outrageously large amount of money for new stories, hoping that the Strand would refuse. Instead, the magazine eagerly met his asking price. Then he tried killing Holmes off in 'The Final Problem,' the last of his second run of Holmes stories for the Strand. He received hate mail for killing Holmes and was besieged by publishers offering him huge sums of money to write more about Holmes. An American publisher finally offered more money than Conan Doyle could resist, and he agree to write The Hound of the Baskervilles.Writing about Holmes offered Conan Doyle a ready way to earn money for the rest of his life. But it was the character of Professor Challenger rather than Sherlock Holmes that was Conan Doyle's favorite creation. In 1912 he published a science-fiction adventure, The Lost World, featuring the professor.The death of his son during World War I (1914-1918) led Conan Doyle to seek out spiritualists and inspired in him a religious dedication to the spiritualist movement. This embarrassed friends and business associates. Spiritualism found its way into nearly all of

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Conan Doyle's writings of the 1920s, and even the hardheaded Professor Challenger is converted in The Land of Mist. Conan Doyle died on July 7, 1930, at Crowborough, Sussex.Many critics have pointed out the similarities between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson and their creator Arthur Conan Doyle. In real life, Conan Doyle sometimes employed detection techniques similar to those of Holmes to solve mysterious crimes. In the most famous such case, he proved that George Edalji, a lawyer, had been wrongfully convicted of a crime he could not have committed. Conan Doyle used such evidence as Edalji's astigmatism and the difference between the mud of roads and that of fields to demonstrate beyond doubt that Edalji was innocent and to expose the real criminal—a feat of detection worthy of Holmes. In addition, Dr. Watson shares characteristics with Conan Doyle. Both were robust men who were physically active for most of their lives. Both were physicians who served overseas. The tall and thicknecked Watson fits the description of Conan Doyle himself. Even so, readers should not take the similarities between the characters and the author beyond the superficial. Holmes and Watson are well-imagined figures with traits all their own.

II OVERVIEWFor many years, the region around the Baskerville estate was poor and backward, but when Sir Charles Baskerville returns to claim his estate, the region again begins to prosper. By devoting his vast fortune—earned in business—to better the community, Sir Charles fills the long-empty role of leadership that is the duty of the Baskervilles. But into this otherwise happy and orderly society comes disorder in the form of two utterly evil men. One is a convicted mass murderer escaped from prison, who lurks about on the moors; the other is Seldon, a clever criminal, who is insidious enough to corrupt the faithful Baskerville servants into the service of evil.Even more unsettling is the terrible Hound of the Baskervilles. When the good Sir Charles Baskerville is murdered, an ancient curse on the family is revealed that now threatens Sir Henry, the new heir. For generations, the Baskerville family has been victimized by a giant, spectral hound that prowls the moors. The hound now seems to be loose again; it has claimed Sir Charles and appears ready to strike again. Is this a supernatural creature or merely part of someone's devious plot to supplant the rightful heirs of Baskerville Hall?Sherlock Holmes is called upon to solve the mystery, and the intricate story builds to an extraordinary climax when the hound attacks: 'Fire burst from its open mouth, its eye glowed with a smoldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame.' A fiend from hell seems loosed upon Sir Henry.

III SETTINGThe late Victorian setting of The Hound of the Baskervilles is an orderly one. In it, each person has a role to fill, and when every role is suitably filled, society prospers. But the social order is endangered by those bent on its destruction, and the villains come in many disguises.The opening scenes place Sherlock Holmes in the comfortable surroundings of his home at 221B Baker Street in London. But quickly the action shifts to the dreary 'Grippen Mire,' a vast moor or bog-marsh area of England. This bleak and deserted wasteland provides a startling contrast to Holmes's refined London world. Reason seems to break down, and the atmosphere becomes eerie when it appears that a supernatural creature is responsible for the terrifying happenings on the moors. Conan Doyle carefully recreates both the Baskerville family history and the outlying areas around Baskerville Hall. The myth of the hound itself is reproduced through Dr. Mortimer's efforts and acts as necessary background.As the story progress, the Grimpen Mire comes to symbolize an ominous mire of evil, where, to his horror, Dr. Watson hears the panic-stricken cries of moor ponies, captured by the muck that lurks beneath the deceptive vegetation. One false step means death, both in the moor where what looks like solid ground may suddenly give way and in a society where a seeming friend could be a clever murderer, or even a demon with a frighteningly huge hound at his

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command. For Holmes, the setting becomes as much of a clue to the nature of the crime as other physical clues. The middle passages of The Hound of the Baskervilles are among the most suspenseful in literature in large part because of the unrelieved atmosphere of doom that surrounds the well-drawn, appealing characters of Watson, Sir Henry, and Holmes.

IV THEMES AND CHARACTERSSherlock Holmes is a private investigator who operates out of his rooms at 221B Baker Street in London, England. Well-to-do, he takes only the cases that interest him. He is high-strung and restless, and, although he finds a creative emotional outlet in playing the violin, it is often not enough to amuse his troubled mind when he is not on a case. He then injects himself with cocaine. It takes years for his associate, Dr. Watson, to wean him away from his addiction but Watson is ultimately successful.Holmes is tall and obsessively clean. His voice is 'cold, incisive, ironical.' A brilliant thinker, his education is at once broad and narrow. For example, although he is able to identify different brands of tobacco at a sniff, he knows nothing about astronomy until Dr. Watson explains to him that the earth orbits the sun.In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes displays his love of the chase; he is delighted at the opportunity to outwit the clever villain and foil his schemes. He is given to dramatic flair; he amazes listeners with his deductions from seemingly slight clues, and he enjoys disguising himself, as though he were an actor. For all his genius, however, he is fallible. In the stories, Professor Moriarty eludes him more than once, and sometimes he fails to adequately protect a client. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, he is at one point convinced that he has allowed the heir, Sir Henry Baskerville, to be killed. This element of uncertainty in Holmes's character enhances the appeal of his stories by allowing for genuine suspense because he occasionally makes mistakes.Dr. John Watson is a robust man of action. He meets Holmes when looking for lodgings after serving as a military physician in Afghanistan. His steady temperament balances Holmes's own edgy one. As a physician, Watson's skills often come in handy when people are injured. Intelligent enough to understand Holmes's genius, robust enough to provide muscle when needed, courageous enough to follow Holmes into any adventure, and unswerving in his loyalty, he is an ideal companion for Holmes. It is Watson who narrates nearly all the tales of Holmes's adventures. He asks the questions that readers want answered and often remains in the dark alongside the readers because of Holmes's infuriating habit of keeping his plans secret until he has seen whether or not they will succeed.Stapleton is a good example of Conan Doyle's archfiends who prey on the innocent. He is introduced as an eccentric naturalist and a highly respected authority on insects. Of uncertain origin and ancestry, he is described as a 'small, slim, clean-shaven, prim-faced man, flaxen-haired and lean-jawed, between thirty and forty years of age.' Physically unimpressive, he seems too frail and too naive to be a villain, but his mind is a keen one. He has plotted carefully, using the legend about a curse on the Baskervilles to further his devious designs.

V LITERARY QUALITIESThe techniques in The Hound of the Baskervilles are common to most Holmes mysteries. First, a client visits Holmes, and Holmes makes some clever deductions about him. Then the client introduces the problem that Holmes must solve. In this case, a country doctor, James Mortimer, tells Holmes of the strange death of Sir Charles Baskerville. An unusually observant man, Mortimer noted a giant paw print near the body and the cigar ash near the gate—both important clues and enough to arouse Mortimer's suspicions. In a typical case, Holmes would go to the scene of the crime, sift through clues, and decide on a course of action. These steps make for a suspenseful and fast-paced narrative.In The Hound of the Baskervilles, however, Holmes sends Dr. Watson to work on the case at Baskerville Hall, while he announces that he must stay in London to work on another case.

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This would seem to derail the novel because its main character is absent for several chapters. Nonetheless, the device works. Dr. Watson, a level-headed man, pursues his assignment and begins to uncover a sinister scheme. When Holmes reappears to solve the mystery, there is no sense of the reader being cheated for he has been working behind the scenes all along. Even after Holmes explains everything to Watson and identifies the murderer, he must still out-think the villain and catch him in the act.Conan Doyle drew on many sources for his own well-wrought detective stories. The most important precedents for the Holmes adventures were Edgar Allan Poe's tales of 'ratiocination' and the novels of Wilke Collins. Poe's tales feature the great French detective Auguste Dupin, who uses his intellect to solve bewildering crimes. As in the Holmes stories, someone brings Dupin a mystery; then Dupin sifts through the clues and devises a plan to unmask the villain. Conan Doyle's stories follow this pattern, even to the point of making Holmes analytical and arrogant like Dupin.Collins's influence may especially be seen in The Hound of the Baskervilles. In his two most famous novels, The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868), Collins tells the stories through the letters and diaries of the characters. This technique creates a tone of immediacy, as if the reader were seeing the narrative unfold moment by moment. In addition, the mystery is enhanced because the reader can know no more than his characters. Yet, all the clues needed to solve the mystery are presented; the reader may sift through them and try to be a step ahead of the characters.Three chapters of The Hound of the Baskervilles are told through Watson's diaries and letters to Holmes, creating an effect similar to that in Collins's novels. In addition, Collins added the gothic atmosphere of the supernatural to his fiction, making even everyday scenes and events seem full of looming violence or evil. The Hound of the Baskervilles also uses this technique, making after-dinner walks in the yard seem ominous and dangerous. Some critics have gone so far as to assert that Sergeant Cuff from Collins's The Moonstone is the model for Sherlock Holmes because both men look alike, are analytical, and retire to the country to raise roses. Whatever the sources of the Holmes adventures, their ingenious blend of crime and day-to-day life, and their clear narratives make them original and engrossing reading.

VI SOCIAL SENSITIVITYThe Hound of the Baskervilles depicts the kinds of individual disorientation that are created by social disorder. For instance, love is perverted by evil in the novel. Selden, the notorious Notting Hill murderer, uses his sister's love to evade the law. Stapleton uses his own wife to lure Sir Henry Baskerville to his doom. He pretends love and offers marriage to Laura Lyons in order to persuade her to entice Sir Charles into a dark walkway where he meets the Hound itself. All who encounter these evil lovers are endangered because their relationships are as confused and misleading as the narrow paths of Grimpen Mire. Sir Henry in particular is tempted by the allure of another man's wife and is left with a disordered mind at the novel's end. But the steady, clear light of reason, as embodied by Sherlock Holmes, works throughout to pierce the chaotic darkness and unmask the sources of evil.

WILLIAM SOMERSET MAUGHAM (1874-1965)

Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), English author, whose novels and short stories are characterized by great narrative facility, simplicity of style, and a disillusioned and ironic point of view. William Somerset Maugham was born in Paris and studied medicine at the University of Heidelberg and at Saint Thomas's Hospital, London. His partially autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage (1915) is generally acknowledged as his masterpiece and is one of the best realistic English novels of the early 20th century. The Moon and Sixpence (1919) is a story of the conflict between the artist and conventional society,

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based on the life of the French painter Paul Gauguin; other novels are The Painted Veil (1925), Cakes and Ale (1930), Christmas Holiday (1939), The Hour Before the Dawn (1942), The Razor's Edge (1944), and Cataline: A Romance (1948). Among the collections of his short stories are The Trembling of a Leaf (1921), which includes “Miss Thompson,” later dramatized as Rain; Ashenden: or The British Agent (1928); First Person Singular (1931); Ah King (1933); and Quartet (1948). He also wrote satiric comedies— The Circle (1921) and Our Betters (1923)—the melodrama East of Suez (1922), essays, and two autobiographies.

VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941)

Virginia Woolf

I INTRODUCTION

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), British novelist, essayist, and critic, who helped create the modern

novel. Her writing often explores the concepts of time, memory, and people’s inner consciousness,

and is remarkable for its humanity and depth of perception.

Before the early 1900s, fiction emphasized plot as well as detailed descriptions of characters and

settings. Events in the external world, such as a marriage, murder, or deception, were the most

important aspects of a story. Characters' interior, or mental, lives served mainly to prepare for or

motivate such meaningful external occurrences. Woolf's novels, however, emphasized patterns of

consciousness rather than sequences of events in the external world. Influenced by the works of

French writer Marcel Proust and Irish writer James Joyce, among others, Woolf strove to create a

literary form that would convey inner life. To this end, she elaborated a technique known as stream

of consciousness, recording, as she described it, 'the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order

in which they fall,' tracing 'the pattern, however disconnected ... in appearance, which each ...

incident scores upon consciousness.' Her novels do not limit themselves to a single consciousness,

but move from character to character, using interior monologues to present each person's differing

responses, often to the same event. Her specific contribution to the art of fiction was this

representation of multiple consciousnesses hovering around a common center.

In Woolf’s best fiction, plot is generated by the inner lives of the characters. Psychological effects

are achieved through the use of imagery, symbol, and metaphor. Character unfolds by means of

the ebb and flow of personal impressions, feelings, and thoughts. Thus, the inner lives of human

beings and the ordinary events in their lives are made to seem extraordinary. Woolf's fiction was

drawn largely from her own experience, and her characters are almost all members of her own

affluent, intellectual, upper-middle class.

Woolf had several major concerns other than her expressed desire to represent consciousness. She

was, for example, fascinated with time—both as a sequence of moments and in terms of years and

centuries—and with the differences between external and internal time. This preoccupation is often

evident in the structure of her novels; Mrs. Dalloway (1925) occurs within the consciousness of

several people during the course of one day, whereas Orlando (1928) traces the history of a single

character who reappears over several centuries.

Woolf was also interested in defining qualities specific to the female mind. She saw female

sensibility as intuitive, close to the core of things, and thus able to liberate the masculine intellect

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from what she viewed as its enslavement to abstract concepts. It is not surprising that her most

memorable characters, such as Mrs. Dalloway, and Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse (1927), are

women.

Concerned with the inner life of individuals, Woolf attempted to represent not only the social

relationships of her characters but also their solitude, when they were most themselves, forming

silent relationships with the things around them. She was, in fact, quite interested in the things of

the natural world, such as rocks and plants, because of their solitude and self-sufficiency; her books

contain many detailed descriptions of such things. Her concern with things for their own sake

influenced Alain Robbe-Grillet and other French novelists of the nouvelle vague (new wave) movement, who attempted to write purely objective fiction in which the author does not intrude with commentary.

II LIFE

Born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London, Woolf was the daughter of biographer and critic Leslie

Stephen (later Sir Leslie) and Julia Jackson Duckworth. She was educated at home by her father.

After his death in 1904, she, her sister Vanessa, and her brothers Adrian and Thoby moved to

Bloomsbury, then a bohemian section of London. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, a critic and

writer on economics and politics. Virginia Woolf, her husband, her siblings, and their friends became

known as the Bloomsbury Group. Meeting frequently until about 1930, the group included novelist

E. M. Forster, biographer and essayist Lytton Strachey, painter Duncan Grant, art critics Roger Fry

and Clive Bell (Vanessa's husband), economist John Maynard Keynes, and editor Desmond

McCarthy. Although the group shared certain values, it had no common doctrine. It was simply a

number of friends, wrote McCarthy, 'whose affection and respect for each other ... stood the test of

thirty years, and whose intellectual candor made their company agreeable to each other.'

In 1917 the Woolfs founded Hogarth Press, which became a successful publishing house, printing

the early works of authors such as Forster, Katherine Mansfield, and T. S. Eliot, and introducing the

works of Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, to English readers. Except for the first printing

of Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), Hogarth Press also published all of her works.

From the time of her mother’s death in 1895, Woolf suffered from what is now believed to have been bipolar disorder, which is characterized by alternating moods of mania and depression. In 1941, at the apparent onset of a period of depression, Woolf drowned herself in the Ouse River. She left her husband a note explaining that she feared she was going mad and this time would not recover.

III WORKS

Woolf's early novels—The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919), and Jacob's Room (1922)—

offer increasing evidence of her determination to expand the scope of the novel beyond mere

storytelling. Her fourth novel, Mrs. Dalloway, is considered by many to be her first great novel,

revealing a mastery of the form and technique for which she would become known. The novel

centers on the separate worlds and interior thought processes of two characters: Clarissa Dalloway,

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a gracious London hostess in her 50s whose husband is an uninspired politician, and Septimus

Warren Smith, a young ex-soldier suffering a mental illness triggered by a friend’s death in battle

during World War I (1914-1918). The two do not know each other and never meet, but their minds

have curious parallels. Although Septimus is considered mentally ill by society and Clarissa is

considered sane, both experience dizzying alternations in feeling: joy over the tiny leaves of spring,

dread of onrushing time, terror over impending extinction, and guilt over the what they feel is the

crime of being human. The story takes place on one June day in London after the war, and it

explores the idea of time by including past memories and future hopes of the characters. The novel

ends with a party given by Clarissa, at which Septimus’s cold but distinguished doctor tells Clarissa

of Septimus’s suicide. 'Here is death, in the middle of my party,' she thinks. Instinctively she feels

she understands her symbolic double, Septimus—his sensitivity, despair, and defiance. Some critics

maintain that Clarissa and Septimus represent two aspects of the same personality, and that both

are semiautobiographical representations of Woolf.

The power of Woolf’s fifth novel, To the Lighthouse, lies in its brilliant visual imagery, extensive use

of symbolism, and use of the characters’ stream of consciousness to evoke feeling and

demonstrate the progression of both time and emotion. Behind the backdrop of ordinary domestic

events, the novel’s real concern is with the impact of the radiant Mrs. Ramsay—representing the

female sensibility—on the lives and feelings of the other characters, even long after her death.

The story draws on Woolf’s childhood experiences at a summer home by the sea. The novel

investigates the contrasts in the behavior and thinking of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, the father and

mother of the household. The couple are often considered loose portraits of Woolf’s own parents.

To the Lighthouse is split into three distinct parts. The first section, 'The Window,' covers a

September day, before World War I, in the lives of the Ramsays, their eight children, and their four

houseguests, who include Lily Briscoe, a young painter, and Augustus Carmichael, an older poet. In

this section Woolf explores the impressions each character has throughout the day. The Ramsays'

six-year-old son, James, talks about his most cherished dream, which is to go to the nearby

lighthouse, whose beacon flashes at night. Mr. Ramsay, however, says the weather will not permit

such a trip. As the day passes the friends chat and dream; Lily starts a painting of Mrs. Ramsay and

James sitting at a window; meals are eaten; the children go to bed; and the Ramsays read.

The second part of To The Lighthouse, 'Time Passes,' starts as the night of that first day, but is then

fused with another night, ten years later. In the course of those ten years, Mrs. Ramsay has died;

the Ramsay’s eldest son, Andrew, has died in World War I; and their daughter Prue has died in

childbirth. Lily and Augustus return to visit Mr. Ramsay and James, who is now 16 years old, at the

house.

The third section, 'The Lighthouse,' covers the following day, on which James and his father finally

make their trip to the lighthouse and Lily finishes the painting she started ten years earlier.

Although Mrs. Ramsay is dead, her presence haunts the thoughts and feelings of the other

characters throughout this section. The successful trip to the lighthouse by father and son, and the

completion of the painting seem to represent some completion to the purpose of Mrs. Ramsay’s life.

Orlando, loosely based on Woolf’s friend, writer Vita Sackville-West, is a historical fantasy and an

analysis of gender, creativity, and identity. The writing is a succession of brilliant parodies of

literary styles, and the work satirically comments on society’s changing ideas and values. The story

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traces the life of Orlando, who is both a boy in 16th-century Elizabethan England and a 38-year-old

woman four centuries later.

The Waves (1931) is Woolf's most experimental and difficult work. It is organized into nine units,

each of which records a series of stream-of-consciousness monologues given entirely in the present

tense by six characters, one after another. The monologues reveal the personalities of each

character in their inner experiences of external events. Each of these nine units is introduced by an

italicized passage describing the sea, the sky, a garden, hills, and a house during some imaginary

day. As in her other novels, Woolf is primarily concerned with rendering the quality of inner life, but

here inner life is presented in a highly stylized, unrealistic way. While the voices uttering the

monologues have different names, sexes, and histories, the similar language of their monologues

often seems more like different aspects of the same consciousness, perhaps representing the

various aspects of humankind as a whole.

Besides novels, Woolf also published many works of nonfiction, including two extended essays

exploring the roles of women in history and society: A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three

Guineas (1938). Her works of literary criticism include The Common Reader (1925) and The

Common Reader: Second Series (1932). After her death, Woolf’s diaries were edited and published

in five volumes between 1977 and 1984 as The Diary of Virginia Woolf. The Letters of Virginia Woolf

appeared in six volumes from 1975 to 1980.

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