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A self-made Man

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https://www.gutenberg.org/files/786/786-h/786-h.htm

https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/hardtimes/
Themes
Characters
Style

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North and South
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4276/4276-h/4276-h.htm

https://youtu.be/eXZrYgrwAoM
Review
Elizabeth Gaskell's rich weave of storytelling and social chronicle remains a landmark.

1854 was certainly a good year for the social novel. Charles Dickens had just completed Hard Times, his serialised account of life in a northern mill-town. The very next story published in his Household Words magazine was also set in the "smoky, dirty" north – except, this time, the injustices of working life weren't chronicled by an appalled visitor but by someone who lived in Manchester, Elizabeth Gaskell.
Whether this made for a more authentic novel is moot. Undeniably, Gaskell's sympathies were with the poor: North and South's central concept is the gradual realisation of haughty, scornful southerner Margaret Hale that there is a beauty to the "vulgarity of shop people". There's also a clever balance to North and South, a certain acknowledgment of the middle-class manufacturers who raise themselves "into the power and position of a master by [their] own exertions".
Gaskell's priorities lay with storytelling. Margaret is torn from the bucolic surroundings of Hampshire in classic fish-out-of-water style. She becomes part of a clearly signposted will-they-won't-they love story with the outwardly rough-and-ready manufacturer Mr Thornton. There's even a Shakespearean case of mistaken identity, just to make the course of true love run a little less smooth.

All of which makes North and South far too long. Dickens was apparently infuriated by its lack of focus, only for Gaskell to respond by cunningly reintroducing edited chapters later. It's not exactly original, either – there's more than a doff of the cap to Charlotte Brontë's Shirley, and suggestions that it's an industrial Pride and Prejudice certainly hold some water.

But, actually, it doesn't matter. As Dickens himself found with Hard Times, marrying social concerns with enjoyable storytelling is far from straightforward, but Gaskell succeeds. Would that contemporary novelists could also take on that challenge.

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Plot and characters: https://youtu.be/-JrjkotI6zg
FILM: https://youtu.be/BW9WVhTGT6Y
Vanity Fair
Vanity Fair jumps out of this list as a great Victorian novel, written and published deep in the middle of a great age of English fiction. Indeed, so commanding was Thackeray at the height of his powers (some say he never wrote as well, or as sharply, again) that Charlotte Brontë even dedicated Jane Eyre (no 12 in this list) to the author of Vanity Fair.

One hundred years after the publication of Clarissa (no 4 in this series), Thackeray not only revels in the possibilities of the genre, he even illustrated his own work with some decidedly inferior woodcuts. Vanity Fair was published in serial form (including some memorable cliff-hangers, for instance Becky Sharp's revelation of her marriage to Rawdon Crawley) from January 1847 to June 1848. Thackeray, on top form, cheerfully exploited an ebullient tradition, transcending all his previous efforts as a writer, novels such as The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844).
Early drafts of the book, which had the working title "a novel without a hero" lacked the all-important figure of William Dobbin, a thoroughly good and likable character who owes much to Thackeray himself. "Vanity Fair", a title that came in a eureka moment to the author in bed one night, actually derives from Pilgrim's Progress (no 1 in this series) and refers to the fair set up by the devils Beelzebub and Apollyon in the town of Vanity. Unlike Bunyan, Thackeray was hardly a die-hard Christian, but rather a man who relished a life of pleasure and luxury, and who, on the evidence of his letters, found much of the Bible either ludicrous or distasteful. As a title, however, "Vanity Fair" set the tone of the novel in its depiction of a society, rather as "The Bonfire of the Vanities" did for Tom Wolfe (who also illustrated his own work) in 1987.

Thackeray's intention was satirical and realistic. Writing mid-century, he set his masterpiece in Regency England during the Napoleonic wars, intending the lessons of his tale to be applied equally to his own times. In contemporary terms that would be like a modern literary novelist setting their scene during the second world war, or the blitz.

The climax of the novel comes with the battle of Waterloo. Unlike Tolstoy, whose War and Peace was influenced by Vanity Fair, Thackeray was squeamish about military matters, and chose to leave most of the fighting off-stage. This makes the irruptions of violence all the more shocking, as in the death of George Osborne, "lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart" on the field of Waterloo, which occurs almost exactly halfway through the narrative.

Thackeray was highly conscious of his audience and repeatedly breaks off from his story to buttonhole and tease his readers ("the present chapter (8), is very mild. Others – but we will not anticipate those"). The tale, however, will not be denied for long. Upwardly mobile Becky Sharp, and her sweet, devoted friend, Amelia Sedley, are perfectly matched by the caddish rake, George Osborne, and clumsy, decent William Dobbin. The social trajectory of each pair gives the narrative an almost perfect symmetry.

The key to the novel's magic, in addition to the delight it takes in the Regency pageant, probably lies in the contrast between scheming Becky, one of fiction's great female protagonists and awkward, dutiful William whose unwavering love for Amelia mirrors Thackeray's own passion for another man's wife.

Finally, however, for all its realism, Vanity Fair is a bravura performance by a writer who has found his theme. As the serialisation of the novel that would transform its author's reputation draws to a close, Thackeray himself concluded his tale with a nod to the gaudy theatricality of the whole business: "Come children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out."

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Charlotte Bronte
Trailer: https://youtu.be/rAwbzOWoqaY

When Charlotte Brontë set out to write the novel Jane Eyre, she was determined to create a main character who challenged the notion of the ideal Victorian woman, or as Brontë was once quoted: "a heroine as plain and as small as myself" (Gaskell, Chapter XV). Brontë's determination to portray a plain yet passionate young woman who defied the stereotype of the docile and domestic Victorian feminine ideal most likely developed from her own dissatisfaction with domestic duties and a Victorian culture that discouraged women from having literary aspirations

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George Eliot
A Bildungroman

The conventional pattern of the bildungsroman is greatly complicated when the main character is female. As Eliot was only too aware from her own experience, a girl’s journey to adulthood — especially if she aspired to anything beyond a typically domestic female role — was likely to be less a triumphant journey than a series of collisions with society’s restrictions. This is what we see, for instance, in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847): Jane’s development is marked (as one contemporary critic observed) by ‘hunger, rebellion and rage’ – as one contemporary critic said disapprovingly of Brontë herself.[1] ‘Women feel just as men do,’ Jane exclaims as she reflects on her own enforced passivity:

they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts… they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; … It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex. (ch. 12)

But condemned and laughed at such women were, and the experience was both infuriating and debilitating, as we see with Eliot’s heroine, Maggie Tulliver. Maggie’s painful maturation in a provincial milieu hostile to her passionate, imaginative nature reflects Eliot’s own struggles growing up as an intellectually ambitious girl with little encouragement and scant educational opportunities.
.......
As appropriate in a novel of development, education is a central theme of The Mill on the Floss. Thanks to the support of free-thinking friends and to her own intelligence and determination, Eliot herself triumphed over the limits usually set on women’s education in the 19th century. She become one of Victorian England’s foremost intellectuals: she read multiple languages, including German, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; she translated works of history and philosophy; she edited and contributed to a prestigious journal, the Westminster Review, where she was responsible for overseeing work by notable figures including philosopher John Stuart Mill and historian James Anthony Froude.

Eliot understood only too well, however, that her own path was not an easy one to follow, and she knew better than to tell an uplifting story that would obscure the need for radical change. Instead, in The Mill on the Floss she dramatises the tragedy of a girl chafing against sexist restrictions while her less able brother has all the opportunities she craves. The thwarting of Maggie’s intellectual potential makes it doubly ironic that Tom’s privileges are wasted on him: he has neither interest in nor capacity for the expensive gentleman’s education his father fondly believes will guarantee his upward mobility.

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Tess:
https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/tess/

FILM:
Tess https://youtu.be/WF77gX8rjV0
Jude the Obscure
https://youtu.be/R4wK8LBa7BY

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Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde
The Doppelganger
Stevenson attempts to express the theme of the duality of man by applying the classic Doppelgänger technique for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. A typical feature of this technique is that split personalities, living two “separate” lives with their alternating identities, always end in suicides.[7]

As mentioned in the introduction Stevenson´s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is not written from just one point of view but is characterized by the individual narratives of Enfield, Lanyon and Jekyll. The chosen order of the narrative voices “add[s] increasing rhetorical and psychological dimension to the events they describe”.[8] It is beyond question that the most gripping and frightening narration is that of Jekyll, in which he describes his attitude and relationship towards his alter ego. Nevertheless, the previous chapters provide us with numerous other speculations, reactions and opinions of Hyde and construct him as a mysterious character for the reader.[9] By this approach to narration the author also succeeds in creating suspense for the initial reader, who does not find out about Dr. Jekyll´s two identities until the story almost comes to an end.

Lombroso's L'Uomo Delinquente
Lombroso’s argument was that criminal behaviour was a throwback to an earlier evolutionary form of behaviour, and that this would be reflected in the shape of the subject’s head, equally displaying an earlier evolutionary form. In this case, a rapist with a trococephalous head (round, due to the premature union of the frontal and parietal bones of the skull) with long and looping ears, a flattened forehead, slanting and squinting eyes, a snub nose, and enormous jaws, is described as ‘monstrous’ and of a type ‘seldom seen in an asylum’. Hyde in Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is described as ‘monstrous’, but also ‘small’. The gentlemen in the book are unable to describe his features, but are nevertheless convinced that he is ‘deformed’.
Darwin's influence
Late-Victorian society was haunted by the implications of Darwinism. The ideas outlined in Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) had by the 1880s and 1890s been assimilated, initially by the scientific community and then by much of the general public. For many, the balance between ‘faith’ and ‘doubt’ had tipped disturbingly in favour of the latter, and questions about the origins, nature and destiny of humankind had become matters for science, rather than theology to address. The final chapter of The Descent of Mancontains a passage in which Darwin concludes that humans are ‘descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped’ which, via several intermediary stages, had itself evolved ‘from some amphibian-like creature, and this again from some fish-like animal’. Such a nightmarish lineage in which human evolution was portrayed as a disturbing variation on the theme of Frankenstein’s monster, with humanity being assembled from assorted disparate earlier versions, perhaps lies behind the descriptions of Mr Hyde as ‘ape-like’ and ‘troglodytic’ in Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde; the implication is that the brutal and uncivilised Hyde is somehow a reversion to a more primitive stage of human development; a ghastly evolutionary precursor who stands in a direct genetic line behind the eminently respectable Dr Jekyll.

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IT is arguable that the most influential English writer of the last 150 years is Charles Darwin and the most influential book ''The Origin of Species.'' Darwin gave to the West its most powerful myth of origins since the Old Testament; at the same time, he wrested biology, the study of life, from theological tradition and set it entirely within the explanatory range of a materialist science. The world, which had been understood as the material expression of a divine intention, became, in his argument, an accumulation of chance variations, subject only to the regularity of what he and his contemporaries thought of as natural law. Obviously, the moral and religious implications were enormous.
Darwin's influence on Thomas Hardy
In his autobiography, Hardy described himself as having ‘been among the earliest acclaimers of The Origin of Species’ (Life 153). Darwinian themes appear throughout his fiction, from Henry Knight’s encounter with a fossil trilobite as he falls part-way down a cliff in A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), to Jude and Sue’s forlorn attempts to slough off the artificial constraints of custom and religion in Jude the Obscure (1895). The different landscapes of rural Wessex each have their own ecology, described—like the woods around Little Hintock in The Woodlanders (1886-87)—with the rich detail of a naturalist on the Darwinian model. Different characters are more or less well adapted to these different environments. Diggory Venn, the reddleman in The Return of the Native (1878), seems a piece of Egdon Heath itself, coming and going as he pleases, and surviving at ease in the wild landscape, as neither the returning native Clym Yeobright nor the exotic import Eustacia Vye can. For his part, Michael Henchard, the eponymous Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), cannot adapt as his younger Scots rival Donald Farfrae can to new social, technological and economic conditions. In this changing environment it is the exotic who out-competes the native. The men and women who inhabit Hardy’s Darwinian universe are trapped too in a world of random events over which they have no control. Hardy can seem to be a determinist, but the tragedy for which his novels are famous follows not from the inexorable workings of fate but from a catalogue of chance events, like the random variations which determine the future of evolution within Darwinian biology.

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The Victorian Gothic moves away from the familiar themes of Gothic fiction - ruined castles, helpless heroines, and evil villains - to situate the tropes of the supernatural and the uncanny within a recognisable environment. This brings a sense of verisimilitude to the narrative, and thereby renders the Gothic features of the text all the more disturbing.

Spiritualism

'Supernatural' meant many things in the nineteenth century. The difficulty in defining what the term meant exactly is what made it so appealing, as individuals could use the idea of the supernatural in support of different hoaxes that promoted 'unexplained' phenomena. Spiritualism; the belief that the dead can communicate with the living, was one such popular fad that swept throughout Europe and America in the 1850s. Due to its indefinable nature, different interpretations of the supernatural could allow spiritualists to believe in ghostly presences and sceptics to explain the phenomena as psychological. Supernatural events such as table-rapping, automatic writing and full-body materialisation of spirits were construed as new forms of nature which had previously been overlooked.
The Victorian era saw the abandonment of conventional religion. In the search for meaning, people were prepared to suspend reason. Many Victorians, including the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, actively believed in Spiritualism.

Choose your favourite

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Written by: Drake Morgan
Gothic is a term that has been usurped by our modern world. Goths dress in black, wear a lot of makeup, and listen to Bauhaus. Gothic began as a term to describe architecture. It was a building style popular in the high medieval period. We all know it well. Towering spires that climb to the heavens. Massive, ornate doors. Flying buttresses. In the 1800s, this guy named Lord Byron wrote a few poems. People like Ann Radcliffe, Clara Reeve, Friedrich Schiller, and Mathew Gregory Lewis wrote a few novels. A new literary tradition was born. I make jest of course, as these authors and many others forged a bold new form of literature. They delved into the darkness of the human soul. They explored the sinister, hidden regions of humanity. They exposed those elements of ourselves we begged to remain hidden.

The best Gothic fiction is an arguable list indeed. Many will disagree with my selections. Debate, discuss, and explore further. There is no particular order to the list other than sheer numerical for organization. All are equally worthy.
Top Ten Gothic Novels from the 1800s In the Beginning

1) Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (1818) Shelley's novel is still one of the most powerful novels of the Gothic period. This was a time of scientific exploration swathed in the fear and awe of religion. Her protagonist becomes God when he creates life from inanimate flesh. He seizes the very core power reserved for the deities alone. Man created fire and now Man has created life. She challenges the reader to abandon all notions of morality, social convention, and structure throughout this frightening look into power, control, and a god-like existence run amok.

2) E.T.A. Hoffmann: The Devil's Elixirs (1815) Originally published in Germany, this novel was inspired by an earlier work, The Monk. It explores the concept of the doppelgänger, a German term for double. A monk is seduced into ingesting a powerful elixir and he begins experiencing intense sensual desires. He meets a mad prince who serves as his double throughout the story. It's a fascinating examination of dark desires, sin, evil, and corruption of the soul.

3) John Polidori: The Vampyre, A Tale (1819) Although technically a short story, Polidori's story has become the foundation for the modern vampire legend. Born during the famous "weekend" at Lord Byron's, Polidori created the aristocratic, sinister, brooding shadow of evil that we know so well today. His vampire was not the shuffling revenant of Eastern European legends. Ruthven was intelligent, sophisticated, and of course, deadly.

4) Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights (1847) By the mid-1800s, England was deep in the Victorian Era and Gothic literature was the rage. Brontë's protagonist is an outcast with questionable bloodlines and questionable social origins. He has infiltrates polite society, but that society is still on the fringe of Englishness in the wilds of the Yorkshire Moors. Heathcliff is monstrous, polluted, and feared. Her female characters battle social norms amidst the winds, storms, and spectral backdrop of the North.

5) Sheridan Le Fanu: In A Glass Darkly (1872) While technically a short story collection, Le Fanu set the stage for the Gothic ghost story here. He also cemented the vampire as the Gothic monster in "Carmilla" featured in this collection. This is the story that influenced Bram Stoker some decades later in his famous vampire novel.

6) Bram Stoker: Dracula (1897) Considered the godfather of vampire novels, Stoker's Dracula is actually less about the Count and more about the hunt for the Count. The vampire here serves as a metaphor for the pollution of English blood and the hunt is symbolic of the determination to stamp out the source of the corruption. Mina represents the purity and her sanctity is violated, but restored in the end. An often misconstrued story in our modern time, Dracula closes out the century as one of the last major works of the period.

7) Edgar Allan Poe: The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) A novella rather than a novel, Poe's tale embodies the essence of Gothic. A crumbling house, symbolic of the crumbling Usher family, stands on the brink of destruction. Love blackened by jealousy and sinister familial secrets set the stage for horror of the darkest kind. While the novella is a single example, all of Poe's work stands as Gothic masterpieces.

8) Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Grey (1891) Vanity, one of the seven deadly sins, becomes the central point of focus in this horrific tale of madness, murder, and vampiric style immortality. Dorian Grey makes the deal of a lifetime. Like the vampire, he stays young forever, but he enjoys this immortality as a human not the undead. His ego and madness escalate over the decades, leading to wanton decadence, unbridled hedonism, and violent ends.

9) Henry James: The Turn of the Screw (1898) In this novella, James blended psychological horror, madness, and the supernatural to create what many consider the perfect ghost story. We have sinister specters who may or may not exist. A governess who may or may not be insane. The children here rival the twins in King's The Shining for most creepy ever written. A timeless tale.

10) Ambrose Bierce While none of his Gothic tales were collected during his lifetime, there are numerous out there now. I did not list any in particular because readers can often find his stories on public domain sites too. He often wrote about his horrific experiences during war and turned those events into ghastly and disturbing supernatural tales. "An Occurrence at Owl Bridge" is one of the most famous, but "The Boarded Window" and "Chickamauga" are also excellent examples. Seek him out.

I could have added Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Robert Marsh, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Maturin, and countless others. H.P. Lovecraft is not here because this is a list from the 1800s, but he's a wonderful early 1900s example. There are novels from the late 1700s as well. There are enough short stories to fill hundreds of volumes without end. Horror began here.

But as we know, it did not end here.
To be continued...

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Written by: Drake Morgan Gothic is a term that has been usurped by our modern world. Goths dress in black, wear a lot of makeup, and listen to Bauhaus. Gothic began as a term to describe architecture. It was a building style popular in the high medieval period.

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Oscar Wilde
Themes
The Purpose of Art

When The Picture of Dorian Gray was first published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890, it was decried as immoral. In revising the text the following year, Wilde included a preface, which serves as a useful explanation of his philosophy of art. The purpose of art, according to this series of epigrams, is to have no purpose. In order to understand this claim fully, one needs to consider the moral climate of Wilde’s time and the Victorian sensibility regarding art and morality. The Victorians believed that art could be used as a tool for social education and moral enlightenment, as illustrated in works by writers such as Charles Dickens and George Gissing. The aestheticism movement, of which Wilde was a major proponent, sought to free art from this responsibility. The aestheticists were motivated as much by a contempt for bourgeois morality—a sensibility embodied in Dorian Gray by Lord Henry, whose every word seems designed to shock the ethical certainties of the burgeoning middle class—as they were by the belief that art need not possess any other purpose than being beautiful.

If this philosophy informed Wilde’s life, we must then consider whether his only novel bears it out. The two works of art that dominate the novel—Basil’s painting and the mysterious yellow book that Lord Henry gives Dorian—are presented in the vein more of Victorian sensibilities than of aesthetic ones. That is, both the portrait and the French novel serve a purpose: the first acts as a type of mysterious mirror that shows Dorian the physical dissipation his own body has been spared, while the second acts as something of a road map, leading the young man farther along the path toward infamy. While we know nothing of the circumstances of the yellow book’s composition, Basil’s state of mind while painting Dorian’s portrait is clear. Later in the novel, he advocates that all art be “unconscious, ideal, and remote.” His portrait of Dorian, however, is anything but. Thus, Basil’s initial refusal to exhibit the work results from his belief that it betrays his idolization of his subject. Of course, one might consider that these breaches of aesthetic philosophy mold The Picture of Dorian Gray into something of a cautionary tale: these are the prices that must be paid for insisting that art reveals the artist or a moral lesson. But this warning is, in itself, a moral lesson, which perhaps betrays the impossibility of Wilde’s project. If, as Dorian observes late in the novel, the imagination orders the chaos of life and invests it with meaning, then art, as the fruit of the imagination, cannot help but mean something. Wilde may have succeeded in freeing his art from the confines of Victorian morality, but he has replaced it with a doctrine that is, in its own way, just as restrictive.

The Supremacy of Youth and Beauty

The first principle of aestheticism, the philosophy of art by which Oscar Wilde lived, is that art serves no other purpose than to offer beauty. Throughout The Picture of Dorian Gray, beauty reigns. It is a means to revitalize the wearied senses, as indicated by the effect that Basil’s painting has on the cynical Lord Henry. It is also a means of escaping the brutalities of the world: Dorian distances himself, not to mention his consciousness, from the horrors of his actions by devoting himself to the study of beautiful things—music, jewels, rare tapestries. In a society that prizes beauty so highly, youth and physical attractiveness become valuable commodities. Lord Henry reminds Dorian of as much upon their first meeting, when he laments that Dorian will soon enough lose his most precious attributes. In Chapter Seventeen, the Duchess of Monmouth suggests to Lord Henry that he places too much value on these things; indeed, Dorian’s eventual demise confirms her suspicions. For although beauty and youth remain of utmost importance at the end of the novel—the portrait is, after all, returned to its original form—the novel suggests that the price one must pay for them is exceedingly high. Indeed, Dorian gives nothing less than his soul.

The Superficial Nature of Society

It is no surprise that a society that prizes beauty above all else is a society founded on a love of surfaces. What matters most to Dorian, Lord Henry, and the polite company they keep is not whether a man is good at heart but rather whether he is handsome. As Dorian evolves into the realization of a type, the perfect blend of scholar and socialite, he experiences the freedom to abandon his morals without censure. Indeed, even though, as Basil warns, society’s elite question his name and reputation, Dorian is never ostracized. On the contrary, despite his “mode of life,” he remains at the heart of the London social scene because of the “innocence” and “purity of his face.” As Lady Narborough notes to Dorian, there is little (if any) distinction between ethics and appearance: “you are made to be good—you look so good.”

Morality or A-morality?
The presence or lack of a moral in Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray is a topic of uncertainty. In reading The Picture of Dorian Gray and in hearing conflicting thoughts about morality in the novel, I couldn’t help but create a mental division between two types of morals. One would be morals with direction, consisting of ones intended to lead the receiver of the moral to a particular action or inaction, and the other would be morals without direction, that are intended to demonstrate some element of life that might affect how a person formulates their own morals. I read The Picture of Dorian Gray as a novel that does indeed provide a moral, but of the second variety, without direction.
It’s difficult to extrapolate any directed moral from the story. It seems that no set of behavior is entirely safe. As a result, though I can’t help but be struck by the demonstrations of how characters suffer for their actions in The Picture of Dorian Gray and take this demonstration to be some kind of moral, I don’t think that it is a moral that compels a reader to any specific conclusion. Rather, it leaves us to decide for ourselves where to take our actions from here.

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Sherlock Holmes
https://www.arthurconandoyle.com/sherlockholmes.html
Other Detective Stories
http://www.victorian-era.org/victorian-era-detective-stories.html
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jan/06/james-mccreet-top-10-victorian-detective-stories

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https://www.carleton.edu/departments/ENGL/Alice/CritNonsense.html

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http://www.novelguide.com/the-french-lieutenant-woman/theme-analysis
Trailer : https://youtu.be/zTO1wDxAAxc

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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/nov/01/1

Trailer: https://youtu.be/Ya__M3uOWvw

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The Victorian period is often noted for being an age of great faith and at the same time an age of great doubt. Do one of the following: A) Pick one work and explain how it exemplifies this conflict,B) Pick two works (one on faith and one on doubt) and explain how they exemplify these different views.

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The Victorian period is often noted for being an age of great faith and at the same time an age of great doubt. Do one of the following: A) Pick one work and explain how it exemplifies this conflict,B) Pick two works (one on faith and one on doubt) and explain how they exemplify these different views.

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(Giulia Maccaroni

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Difference between Early and Late Victorian Novel

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Difference between Early and Late Victorian Novel

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Francesco Carletti

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Alex Rinaldi

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Tommaso Giacani

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Tommaso Toccacieli

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CHIARA GIACCAGLINI

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ANITA BRACONI

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Filippo Musciano

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The Victorian period is divided into two parts

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francesco foggia

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Matin Aliakbarzadeh

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The Victorian age was a complex and contradictory era: it was an age of progress,stability and also it was characterised by poverty and injustice. Pessimism starts to afflict intellectual and artists. This era was characterized by faith and at the same time by doubts. The Victorians faced a large number of problems, they felt obliged to respect values that did not reflect the world as it really was.
We can see this conflict and this problems in the story of “Jude the Obscure” written by Thomas Hardy in 1895.
Where do you talk about this conflict?
In this story Hardy developed one main theme: the difficulty of being alive. Being alive involves being in a place and surrounded by circumstances wich modify the indivudual existence.In this poem the protagonist was “an Obscure”, Jude does not exist for others, Jude is destined to fail. Another important theme is nature, it is protagonist, indifferent to man’s destiny.
This poem is characterized also by the difficulty and failure of communication, infacts the boy kill himself and the two brother because of the failure of the communication with his mother.

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Simone Belegni

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ESSAY-A   Filippo Ronconi

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THE CONFLICT OF FAITH AND DOUBT IN THE VICTORIAN AGE EXPLAINED IN LITERATURE

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Victorian Age: an age of great faith and doubt

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VictorianAge_an age of great faith and doubt

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Alessandro Mosca -victorian times highs and lows

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Alessandro Mosca -victorian times highs and lows

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Queen Victoria’s reign is regarded as being one of the richest periods in britain’s history due to the industrial revolution.
This period is characterized by the invention of the steam engine but also by the developement of medicine that was able to cure some illnesses that were thought to be uncurable and elongated te lifespan of people.
This brought to a huge wave of optimism in the population because, although the vast majority of people were enslaved in the factories, they thought that in the end everithing was going to pay off, that life condition were goig to improve and that in the end even medicine was going to “cure” death.
This reflected in the littereature that characterised the first victorian novelist like Dickens and Garskell.
This all changed when Charles Darwin published his book “on the origin of species”, in this book Darwin talks about his theory of evolution characterised by the natural selection, this mechanism allows only the strongest to survive while the other species were doomed, this was applied by some philosophers to society by saying that the rich were actually stronger and the poor deserved to die.
If we add this to the fact that darwin’s theory didn’t need a God in order to work so the religiousness of people slowly faded away
these ideas influenced the whole litterature of the late victorian novelist were we see a world full of discrimination and inequality between social classes

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very well done. The essay is coherent and pertinent. Your grammar and vocabulary is accurate and wide. Excellent!

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Well done. Your essay is coherent and pertinent. Grammar ad vacabulary is good and quite accurate. The conclusion is a little hurried up.

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This essay has some inaccurate use of the tenses and a vague vocabulary, which is at times not appropriate. Your point is not very well explained especially in the second part about "The Picture of Dorian Gray". You had a good idea but you were not able to develop it

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The essay has some inaccurate use of grammar and vocabulary. The argument is not very well developed, the list of themes in Hard Times does not actually support the argument stated at the beginning.

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Well done. The essay supports and develops your point. There are some inaccuracies in your grammar (third person), but vacabulary is precise

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well done. Your essay supports your point with good grammar and use of vocabulary

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your essay does not well develop and support the points stated at the beginning. The examples given of the two novels are quite vague and do not point exactly to your argument. The use of vocabulary is rather extravagant at times.

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Chiara Giaccaglini
Your essay is well structured and well supported , there are some grammar inaccuracies. Your point is quite original and developed.

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Anita Braconi
Your essay is not well balanced: the beginning is too long and the actual  body of the text where your points should be developed, is too short and superficial. Grammar is very inaccurate and vocabulary also rather sloppy.

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your essay does not answer the question and is rather superficial. The use of vocabulary is rather imprecise and inappropriate

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I can't understand the structure of this essay. Punctuation is totally confused and ideas scattered without a logical sequence

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This essay has clearly not been made by you, sorry.

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This essay has clearly not been made by you, sorry

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Your essay states a point which is not supported by the aspects of the two novels that you have chosen. So your essay is not coherent and has little logic. Your use of grammar is rather inaccurate and vocabulary simple and imprecise, for example the use of POEM to refer to novel.

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Your essay is very well written and developed. Excellent

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In the first years of 18th century society was regulated by religion and man was the God’s privileged creature, made in his own image so he was good, right and perfect.

In these years everyone believed in men's potentialities, there was faith in progress, in capacity of humans to change the present through their actions.

In Victorian literature this trust in men is converted in a paternalistic vision that we can find mainly reading Dickens’ and Gaskell’s novels.

Paternalism is an attitude born in Victorian era and consist in judging and highlighting wrong behaviour and in believing that rich people with their good heart can help the poor one.

In this first period of literature of 18th century characters were flat, in the story we know only one side of them, one detail of their personality, the good or the evil, the generous or the stingy (as Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol” written by Dickens).

In 1859 Charles Darwin published “The origin of species” and upset everyone beliefs.

In fact, now man wasn't perfect anymore, he derives from animal and he's dominated by animal instincts.

The paternalistic narration is changed in a narration with no more judgements; the narrator tells the story without transmitting his opinion or highlighting evil actions (because of that he’s also judged by society because he didn't condemn immoral behaviours).

With the discovery of a new side of human beings also characters became more complete, they made complex thoughts, they took their own decisions, and some of them also rebelled to society like Jane Eyre or Tess d’ Urbervilles.

Your essay is well made and original. Well done!

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The voice of the omniscient narrator of the early Victorian novel made us understand that society was based on popular beliefs, on religon and on fate and man was convinced that he was a privileged creature of God so this belief led man to believe in his potential.
This trust in ourself led to an aspect of superiority of man, in literature indeed many writers like Dickens or Gaskell trasformed this matter in a paternalism: critical vision of the world. Dickens criticize economic, social and moral behaviour in the Victorian era, showed compassion and empathy towards disadvantaged people, like poor. For example, we can see this side of him in the novel “Oliver Twist”, where a poor child lived some vicissitudes but at the end he succeeds in having part of the inheritance of this father. In this paternalistic view writers believed in goodness of rich people to help the poor one like Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol” that at the end the understood the importance of helping those is in need. This period of trust in man ended when in the second half of 19 th century a pessimistic view grew due to new scientific discoveries. In 1859 C. Darwin published “origin of spieces”, where he discarded the version of creation by the Bible it seemed to show that the strongest survived and the weakest died. In the late Victorian novels, after this changes of view the world, characters became complex, strong and they were going against the society and its rules because they wanted something but the society didn’t allow it, like Tess and Jude of T. Hardy.

Your essay is also well supported and answers the question given. There are some grammar and vocabulary inaccuracies, though

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Your essay does not gives argumetns to support your initial statement. It's thus incoherent and imprecise. Besids Jude the Obscure is not a POEM!

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In case your essay answers A questons, it is ok but it lacks a clear reference to the part concerning Doubt. It's incomplete in the answering the question but the analysis of Dickens' work is sufficiently made

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The Conflict of faith and doubt In The Picture of Dorian Gray

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The Conflict of faith and doubt In The Picture of Dorian Gray

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Ronconi
Your essay explains and supports your point with good arguments. It lacks syntactic order and grammar accuracy at times.

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Your essay explains well the general point but it does not go deeply into the novels you used to support your point. There are some vocabulary and grammar inaccuracies.

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Your essay gives good arguments to your point, but your grammar is rather inaccurate and the last part of the text is hurried up to a quick and somehow loose conclusion

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Your essy is well done and gives a good explanation to your main point. Some inaccuracies in vocabulary, though

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your essay gives a good overview of the topic but it does not answer the question which asked you to use Victorian novels as an example of the onglict between faith and doubt. You actually did not do it.

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Your essy does not answer question A but question B.
There are many grammar, vocaulary and spelling mistakes, which makes the text quite inaccurate.
Nevertheless, your point is well suppprted and explained.

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IT is arguable that the most influential English writer of the last 150 years is Charles Darwin and the most influential book ''The Origin of Species.'' Darwin gave to the West its most powerful myth of origins since the Old Testament; at the same time, he wrested biology, the study of life, from theological tradition and set it entirely within the explanatory range of a materialist science. The world, which had been understood as the material expression of a divine intention, became, in his argument, an accumulation of chance variations, subject only to the regularity of what he and his contemporaries thought of as natural law. Obviously, the moral and religious implications were enormous.
Darwin's influence on Thomas Hardy
In his autobiography, Hardy described himself as having ‘been among the earliest acclaimers of The Origin of Species’ (Life 153). Darwinian themes appear throughout his fiction, from Henry Knight’s encounter with a fossil trilobite as he falls part-way down a cliff in A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), to Jude and Sue’s forlorn attempts to slough off the artificial constraints of custom and religion in Jude the Obscure (1895). The different landscapes of rural Wessex each have their own ecology, described—like the woods around Little Hintock in The Woodlanders (1886-87)—with the rich detail of a naturalist on the Darwinian model. Different characters are more or less well adapted to these different environments. Diggory Venn, the reddleman in The Return of the Native (1878), seems a piece of Egdon Heath itself, coming and going as he pleases, and surviving at ease in the wild landscape, as neither the returning native Clym Yeobright nor the exotic import Eustacia Vye can. For his part, Michael Henchard, the eponymous Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), cannot adapt as his younger Scots rival Donald Farfrae can to new social, technological and economic conditions. In this changing environment it is the exotic who out-competes the native. The men and women who inhabit Hardy’s Darwinian universe are trapped too in a world of random events over which they have no control. Hardy can seem to be a determinist, but the tragedy for which his novels are famous follows not from the inexorable workings of fate but from a catalogue of chance events, like the random variations which determine the future of evolution within Darwinian biology.

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During most of American history, women’s lives in most states were circumscribed by common law brought to North America by English colonists. These marriage and property laws, or "coverture," stipulated that a married woman did not have a separate legal existence from her husband. A married woman or feme covert was a dependent, like an underage child or a slave, and could not own property in her own name or control her own earnings, except under very specific circumstances. When a husband died, his wife could not be the guardian to their under-age children. Widows did have the right of "dower," a right to property they brought into the marriage as well as to life usage of one-third of their husbands’ estate. Though a married woman was not able to sue or sign contracts on her own, her husband often did have to obtain her consent before he sold any property his wife had inherited.