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Moby Dick

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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Herman Melville's (1819-1891) epic novel, published in London in 1851, the story of Captain Ahab's pursuit of a great white sperm whale that had bitten off his leg. He risks his own life and that of his crew on the Pequod, single-mindedly seeking his revenge, his story narrated by Ishmael who was taking part in a whaling expedition for the first time. This is one of the c1000 ideas which listeners sent in this autumn for our fourth Listener Week, following Kafka's The Trial in 2014, Captain Cook in 2015 and Garibaldi and the Risorgimento in 2016.

With

Bridget Bennett Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Leeds

Katie McGettigan Lecturer in American Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London

And

Graham Thompson Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Herman Melville's (1819-1891) epic novel, published in London in 1851, the story of Captain Ahab's pursuit of a great white sper

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The Fighting Temeraire: Why JMW Turner’s greatest painting is so misunderstood

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As museums around the world celebrate the 250th birthday of JMW Turner, it’s time to reappraise his beloved and celebrated painting, The Fighting Temeraire.

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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas, people and events that have shaped our world.

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Hemingway Editor makes your writing bold and clear.

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Whether you are an actor, a filmmaker, or a film geek through and through, writing film reviews can help hone your ability to think critically. With experience writing reviews, cinephiles can watch movies with a more thoughtful and intentional perspective. This skill enables viewers to have a response that goes deeper than "That movie was awesome!" And for you future film reviewers out there, it's never too soon to start.

How to Write a Movie Review

While there's no perfect approach to writing a movie review, there are definitely best practices that every aspiring reviewer can consider. Here are nine tips on writing a compelling piece.

1. Watch the film at least once.

When writing a film review, once is necessary, but twice is preferable. It's impossible to capture every detail and thought only after one viewing. Throughout watching the film, taking detailed notes is also a good idea. This will help the writing process and make it easy to refer to your in-the-moment thoughts and reactions.

2. Express your opinions and support your criticism.

Professional reviewers do not shy away from telling their readers whether they thought a movie was good, bad, or indifferent. In fact, readers rely on those reviewers whose tastes reflect their own. Be sure to back up these thoughts with specifics-a disappointing performance, a ridiculous plot, beautiful cinematography, difficult material that leaves you thinking, and so on. Professional reviewers can express why and how they came to their criticism.

3. Consider your audience.

Are you writing for a fan site or a news outlet? Who will read your pieces, and what are their interests? Knowing who your readers are can help you decide what elements of the movie to highlight. You can also adjust your writing style to fit the target audience and the tone they're used to reading.

4. Talk about the acting.

Many casual filmgoers will be inspired to see a movie if a favorite actor is in it, so you should probably spend a little space talking about the performances. Does the film feature a seasoned actor in a new kind of role or a brilliant performance from a rising star? How was the acting? Feedback about how well the actors handled the script, the dynamics in an ensemble, and so much more can help describe how the actors did in any given film.

5. Call out directors, cinematographers, and special effects.

This is where your film geek can really shine. Tell your readers about the highlights or missteps of directors, cinematographers, costume designers, and CGI. What worked, what surprised you, and what fell short of expectations are all great questions to address in the body of your review. It helps to have some knowledge of filmmaking, as well. That's why film students with writing experience can actually make great reviewers. At NYFA, for instance, many film students study a range of topics relating to film that can include screenwriting, producing, and much more.

6. No spoilers!

Give your readers some idea of the plot, but be careful not to include any spoilers. Remember, the point of a good review is to get people interested in going to the movie. Don't get over-excited and ruin it for them!

7. Study the professionals.

As with all writing endeavors, the more you read, the better. And when you read film reviews that you like (or don't like), think about why. Use your critical eye to consider why one reviewer has a hundred thousand followers and another only has two. Be sure to read the publications where you'd like your writing to appear as a template for your reviews, and don't forget to read the submission guidelines. A few examples of film review professionals include Rotten Tomatoes, Roger Ebert, and Film Comment.

8. Reread, rewrite, and edit.

Edit your work. Your opinions will not be taken seriously if you misspell the director's name or can't put together a grammatically correct sentence. Take the time to check your spelling and edit your piece for organizational flow.

9. Find your voice.

The best reviewers have a distinct personality that comes across in their writing. This does not happen overnight, so take every opportunity to write as an opportunity to develop your own style and voice that will grab the reader's attention and keep them coming back for more.

Learn More About Filmmaking at NYFA

Writing film reviews is a great way to pursue your passion for film. Ready to build even more skills in filmmaking? Request more information about New York Film Academy's filmmaking programs and workshops today!

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How to Write a Movie Review: 9 Essential Tips

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Love film and want to learn how to write a movie review? Learn more about writing the best possible film review!

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Open Book - The Joy of Dickens - BBC Sounds

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Catch up on your favourite BBC radio show from your favourite DJ right here, whenever you like. Listen without limits with BBC Sounds.

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Romantic art and sensibility around the world

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Romantic art and sensibility around the world

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We're going to begin our art survey with Romanticism. Check out the following video which touches on Romantic philosophy, art, literature, and architecture as a general introduction to the artistic period and movement. Keep in mind that what you now call "romantic" only has a little bit to do with the actual Romantic Period.

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Bookclub - The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, with Elly Griffiths - The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, with Elly Griffiths - BBC Sounds

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Bookclub - The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, with Elly Griffiths - The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, with Elly Griffiths - BBC Sounds

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Catch up on your favourite BBC radio show from your favourite DJ right here, whenever you like. Listen without limits with BBC Sounds.

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How to Read Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

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How to Read Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

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In this episode Dan Snow is joined by Chris Wilson, Director of Experience Design at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Chris specialises in the Civil Rights Movement and has written about the intersection of non-violence with the self defence mentality of that time.

Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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‎Dan Snow's History Hit: The Civil Rights Movement su Apple Podcasts

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In this episode Dan Snow is joined by Chris Wilson, Director of Experience Design at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Chris specialises in the Civil Rights Movement and has written about the intersection of non-violence with the self defence mentality of that time. Subscribe...

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Fake News: Fact & Fiction - Episode 6: How to be a critical thinker

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Fake News: Fact & Fiction - Episode 6: How to be a critical thinker

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How to Read Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

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How to Read Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

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GCSE English Literature podcasts - Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre - BBC Bitesize

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Learn more about Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre in this GCSE podcast from BBC Bitesize.

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Tracy Chevalier: Finding the story inside the painting

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ovelist, journalist and translator Mary Ann Evans, better known, of course, by her pen name George Eliot, is remembered primarily for Middlemarch, praised by Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people". Yet the Victorian writer wrote seven novels in total, as well as short stories and poems that deserve a look-in too - Eliot's biographer Clare Carlisle suggests some good places to start.

The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot. Photograph: Wordsworth Classics

The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot's second and most autobiographical novel, features a passionate, intelligent young heroine stuck in small-town Middle England. While Maggie Tulliver longs for wider horizons, her dim-witted mother obsesses about her linen cupboard, her prized silver sugar tongs and her sister's expensive new hat. As in Middlemarch, comedy ensues when high ideals and all-too-human pettiness collide. Be warned, this novel is a tragedy - it is also "The one that will make you cry" - but poor Maggie's dreadful aunts are among Eliot's funniest creations.

George Eliot's first works of fiction were a series of three stories, all starring hapless provincial vicars. They were originally published in Blackwood's Magazine, then collected in a book titled Scenes of Clerical Life. In the third story, Janet's Repentance, Eliot really hits her stride. Like her mature novels, this is a dark marriage drama: its heroine, Janet Dempster, is abused by her violent husband and descends into an alcoholic spiral of shame and despair. One night she is thrown out of her house and shivers barefoot on the doorstep in a skimpy nightie, drunkenly wishing herself dead. It's all a far cry from Jane Austen's drawing rooms. This brilliant novella showcases Eliot's dramatic flair, philosophical sensibility and deep emotional intelligence. It was based on real life, she told her publisher when he asked her to "soften" the story - and she refused to change it. The real Dempster, she said, "was far more disgusting than mine; the real Janet, alas!, had a far sadder end than mine."

Romola, set in Renaissance Florence, is Eliot's challenging middle work. Written in the 1860s, its tall, dreamy, red-haired heroine would not be out of place in a pre-Raphaelite painting. In this ambitious novel Eliot flexed her creative powers, assembling a hybrid cast of fictional and historical characters - the philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli, the artist Piero di Cosimo, the firebrand monk Savonarola. Impress your friends by explaining how this highbrow novel uses its 15th-century setting to explore grand Victorian themes: the loss of faith, the fragility of patriarchal power. Just make sure you pronounce "Romola" right - as Eliot told one of her fans, stress the first syllable, and the second "o" is short. (Think "gondola", not "tombola".)

Most of Eliot's novels are uplifting and melancholy, and Silas Marner is particularly tender-hearted. This small masterpiece probes human failure while allowing human goodness to shine through. Its fairytale quality is deceptively simple, though. Eliot wrote it while she was plotting Romola and preparing to become a stepmother to her partner's teenage sons. Daunted by both tasks, she poured into Silas Marner her anxieties about combining love and work, motherhood and creativity. In the novel, love and motherhood triumph. In the author's life, not surprisingly, things turned out to be more complicated.

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Rufus Sewell as Will Ladislaw in the 1994 TV adaptation of Middlemarch. Photograph: Shaun Higson/Culture/Alamy

Middlemarch, of course. This is deservedly considered not just Eliot's masterpiece, but one of the finest English novels ever written. It is funny, wise, grand, intimate and deeply philosophical. Eliot's portraits of two disastrous marriages are exquisitely drawn, while the relationship between the Brooke sisters - proud, naive Dorothea and sweet, sharp Celia - is sheer delight. When Middlemarch was published in 1872, The Times declared it a "perfect" work of art. While a few reviewers grumbled that not a lot happens over its 800 pages, Edith Simcox, an astute young critic who was soon to become Eliot's close friend and unrequited lover, realised that this novel opened a new "epoch" in literature by taking its drama "from the inner life." For this reason, as so many devoted readers have found, nothing is lost on re-reading - and something new is gained every time. It is just breathtakingly good.

What does an author write after Middlemarch? While a lesser artist would have rested on her laurels, George Eliot conceived a new novel even more daring and ambitious: Daniel Deronda. She defied the Victorian reading public by vesting the story's moral weight in Jewish characters and experimented with a literary form inspired by Kabbalist philosophy. The result is flawed, yet dazzling. Spirited Gwendolen Harleth is Eliot's most compelling heroine: shallow and complex, symbolic and believable, very far from perfect and totally irresistible. Gwendolen's horrifying marriage to a ruthlessly controlling man mirrors Eliot's vision of an upper-class English culture that conceals moral hypocrisy, sexual violence, and the cruelties of empire beneath its polite veneer. Unlike her other novels, set in a nostalgia-tinged past, Daniel Deronda is bracingly modern and looked towards a new century. It depicted hysteria, neurosis and childhood trauma before Freud made those concepts mainstream. For me, a child of the 80s, Harleth prefigures Diana Spencer: charismatic, unstable, at once ordinary and archetypal. She shines in the limelight, secretly desperate in her fabulous clothes, destined to be trapped in a pathologically English marriage.

The Marriage Question: George Eliot's Double Life by Clare Carlisle is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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ovelist, journalist and translator Mary Ann Evans, better known, of course, by her pen name George Eliot, is remembered primarily for Middlemarch, praised by Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people".

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Origins Of The Industrial Revolution | Rise Of The Machines

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The Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Revolutionaries (BBC Documentary) Part 1

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How to become the person everyone comes to for advice - BBC Reel

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One of the key underrated skills that most people think they can master is providing critical feedback and communicating effectively in thorny situations. A career coach, a choreographer, a chef and a dragon boat captain offer advice and collaborative methods to enable people to better express their thoughts to their peers.

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How This Painting Campaigned for Women’s Rights | TateShots

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The Frankenstein's monsters of the 21st Century?

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Artificial intelligence always seems to be about 30 years away: for decades, futurists and scientists have been predicting within a generation the development of human-like intelligence in machines. Given that even self-driving cars can't yet look after themselves, it doesn't seem as though we need to worry about being ruled by sentient machines for a while yet. In fact, the only place where man-made humans have thrived is in the world of fiction.
More like this:
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Two hundred years ago, 20-year-old Mary Shelley won a bet with her future husband Percy Shelley and his friend Lord Byron to write a horror story: she created Frankenstein, the story of a Genevan scientist who created artificial life - and regretted it for the rest of his days. Shelley created more than she knew: her story is not just considered to be the first science-fiction novel, but has spawned an army of monstrous descendants.

What is it that continues to draw writers, particularly those who don't usually write science fiction, to create artificial humans? How do writers use these characters to tell us about ourselves? What does the 21st-Century Frankenstein's monster look like?

In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the creature says: "If I cannot inspire love I will cause fear" (Credit: Alamy)

It's worth reminding ourselves first what Frankenstein - slandered by Hollywood into a monster-mania freak show - is actually about. (One definition of a classic, after all, is a book that still has the power to surprise you.) In the novel, inquisitive student Victor Frankenstein gives life to "the creature", which then absconds and sets about a rampage of murder. "His soul is as hellish as his form," concludes Victor, rejecting his creation, "full of treachery and fiendlike malice". But the reader is forced to reshape their view of the creature when he speaks directly of his experiences: his longing for human society, his perpetual rejection, his turning against first himself - "I am solitary and abhorred... I was not made for the enjoyment of pleasure" - and then against Victor's family, as a surrogate for his despised creator. "If I cannot inspire love I will cause fear."

We learn that the real monster is both of them: Victor for his cruel refusal to make a female companion to assuage his creation's loneliness, and the creature for the trail of death he leaves before heading for his final solitude on the Arctic seas.

Ever since Shelley set the trend, other writers have enthusiastically explored quasi-human creations, all the better to explore what makes us human. One of the latest is Paul Braddon, whose debut novel The Actuality was published last month and has already been optioned for a TV series by BBC Studios.

The Actuality is set around 150 years from now, and told from the viewpoint of Evie, one of two surviving, highly advanced Artificial Autonomous Beings (AABs), when such creations have been outlawed due to problems with earlier models. She lives in hiding with her human husband, and initially believes herself to be human: "She'd persisted in denying the truth even when the evidence had begun to stack and stack". (Ironically, a very human trait.) The tension in the story comes both from her own growing discovery of her true nature, and from her pursuit by the authorities and her need to flee or fight to protect her existence.

Braddon tells BBC Culture that he sees parallels between Frankenstein and Evie's story. "Like the monster, she becomes an outcast; people fear her because they assume the worst. Like Frankenstein's monster, in theory Evie has the potential to be anything, but is limited by how her maker made her. She has to escape the bonds of her existence."

The Actuality offers a rich contemplation of ethical and philosophical questions about artificial life and intelligence. Where does life begin and end? If an AAB like Evie can simulate consciousness, does she have rights? Conversely, if she kills a real human being, can she be held responsible? In the story Evie is modelled after a real woman and, explains Braddon, "she is regulated by her programming to emulate someone she has never met and behave as they would - her 'unforgiving quest to be second best' - but even so, she must still choose between right and wrong". When Evie is on the run, her decisions "have life or death consequences", says Braddon. "At times it felt that I was making Evie too nice for her own good, but by the end I believe I found enough of her dark side to balance things out!"
A chaotic blend
Of course for an artificial human to be realistic, to match the rest of us, it has to be a chaotic blend of right and wrong, to find its way by picking through the wreckage of its own bad decisions. Another recent example is the creature called the Whatitsname in Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad, which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2018. In war-torn Iraq in the early 2000s, a junk dealer called Hadi assembles a being from the body parts of people killed in the conflict. "I made it complete so it wouldn't be treated as rubbish, so it would be respected like other dead people and given a decent burial."

But the Whatitsname goes missing, and sets about a retributive rampage, like the original Frankenstein's monster. Saadawi's vision is satirical, the blackest of comedy about tit-for-tat killings and the dehumanisation of people in war: the creature finds that as it avenges each death, its corresponding body parts fall off, so it has to kill more people to replace them. Eventually "he knew his mission was essentially to kill, to kill new people every day, but he no longer had a clear idea who should be killed or why". This most modern of monsters even gives a press conference to justify his actions and mock his creator, a child rebelling against his parent: "You were just a conduit, Hadi. Think how many stupid mothers and fathers have produced great men in history."

For Saadawi, the monster is "the mirror image of us as a whole", reflecting how people in Iraq "became either active participants in the killing or indifferent toward scenes of death". Speaking to BBC World Service's The Cultural Frontline, he said that "we like to see ourselves as victims and see others as aggressors, but in this case [the Whatsitsname] was both the aggressor and the victim" - much like Victor Frankenstein's creation - and he represents the "monster inside everybody - not just in Iraqis but everywhere".

The stitched-together creature, in other words, is a patchwork of our best and worst human characteristics. How could it be otherwise? In Frankenstein, the human society that rejected the monstrous-looking creature triggered his killing spree. Paul Braddon had this in mind too when writing The Actuality: "I do have concerns as to how we as humans would interact with such a class."

Central to these stories is not only the relationship of the artificial human to their creator but also the purpose of their creation. Victor Frankenstein made his creature out of the noble spirit of scientific inquiry. (We never find out how Frankenstein made his monster, ostensibly because he doesn't want anyone to emulate his mistake, though it handily absolved Mary Shelley from having to dream up the mechanics.) In The Actuality, on the other hand, the driving forces behind Evie's creation are less honourable. No spoilers but "it all comes down to what motivates mankind", says Braddon, "which could be reduced in the simplest sense to money, power and sex". Can a woman be made by men? Can she consent to sex? Like all of us, Evie is constrained by the circumstances of her birth.

Sex, indeed, is something no human - or artificial human - story would be complete without, and Jeanette Winterson's 2019 novel Frankissstein makes the most of it, with her typical boldness and wit. Winterson's story splices the origins of how Mary Shelley came to write Frankenstein with an alternative present where artificial humans are being built as sexbots.

Winterson, whose prescience means she was writing about artificial sex ("teledildonics") as long ago as her 1992 novel Written on the Body, is not surprised to see humanity barrelling down the path she predicted. "Because we are profoundly stupid," she has said, "we are going to share the planet with a self-created non-biological lifeform smarter than we are. Well done, human race!" But Frankissstein, perhaps uniquely among the AI novels featured here, is very funny. "The world is so dire at the moment, it's important to make people laugh. It isn't an escapist response, it's a way of managing it."

A more compliant non-human appeared on the bookshelves this month, as Kazuo Ishiguro published Klara and the Sun, his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. Klara is an Artificial Friend, a quasi-human device created to prevent teenagers from becoming lonely. As with Evie's story, Klara's is written from the non-human viewpoint.

How did Ishiguro go about this? "Well," he tells BBC Culture, "I just kind of plunged in rather recklessly to see what would happen". He laughs. "But I've always been drawn to slightly oddball narrators." As a narrator, he says, Klara has "a great advantage in being technically not human. So it puts these questions very naturally in the reader's mind: What does it mean to be human? What do humans mean when they say they love somebody? So it's a very good way of being able to ask those questions without seeming contrived or pretentious."

And although Klara is less likely to go rogue than the other creations described here, Ishiguro similarly uses his Artificial Friend to represent the full breadth of human life, just as he did with clones in Never Let Me Go. As her story proceeds, Klara undergoes a real-time process of learning about how humans think and feel. "This is a narrator that could hold, I thought, an incredibly complex mixture of sophistication and naivety," Ishiguro says. "And I thought you could get an entire human lifespan into her approach, just within the few years that this machine existed. She could go from being a toddler to being a teenager to be something like a parent, to empty nest syndrome, where she feels she's done what she's supposed to do."

The modern Frankenstein's monster, then, is as diverse as the humans who create them: as fictional devices, they are vehicles for satire, thriller, horror or allegory, even if, as Ian McEwan puts it in his android-affair novel Machines Like Me, they ultimately represent "a monstrous act of self-love". But in all cases, they stand or fall on how real humans treat them, which is something their programming and AI learning can never overcome.

The Turing Test for artificial intelligence says that if we cannot tell the difference between an artificial mind and a human mind, we should treat the artificial mind as a human mind. But the human characters in these novels - driven by very human prejudice - don't do this, fearful of the creatures' otherness, or just resentful of their perfection. In Shelley's novel, Frankenstein's monster had the potential to be better than most of us - he looked up to the peaceable lawmakers of Plutarch's Lives as his model - but was driven to the very lowest of human impulses by how others behaved towards him.

Mary Shelley's creature helped readers explore what it really means to be human - just as its modern-fiction equivalents do now (Credit: Alamy)

This is all terrible news for artificial humans, but good for literature: it's our moral uncertainty that makes not just these stories live and thrive. Creatures who are not quite like us can enhance our understanding of ourselves, even if the results aren't always pretty. In fact in McEwan's Machines Like Me, the android character Adam comments that in a world run by artificial humans, without emotional turmoil, without the eternal mysteries of the human heart, most literature would be irrelevant and superfluous. Just as well it's not going to happen for around 30 years, really, isn't it?
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro is published by Faber; The Actuality by Paul Braddon is published by Sandstone Press Love books? Join If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. BBC Culture Book Club on Facebook, a community for literature fanatics all over the world.

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The Frankenstein's monsters of the 21st Century

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Artificial intelligence always seems to be about 30 years away: for decades, futurists and scientists have been predicting within a generation the development of human-like intelligence in machines. Given that even self-driving cars can't yet look after themselves, it doesn't seem as though we need to worry about being ruled by sentient machines for a while yet.

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In the Battle Against Coronavirus, Humanity Lacks Leadership | Time

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In the Battle Against Coronavirus, Humanity Lacks Leadership

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Yuval Noah Harari on what humanity needs to defeat an epidemic like the coronavirus and why countries need to trust each other.

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UN chief slams 'myths, delusions and falsehoods' around inequality

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The UN secretary general will today deliver one of his most stinging speeches to date, attacking the "myths, delusions and falsehoods" around international progress on equality.

In an unusually strongly worded speech, António Guterres urged major reform to the UN security council, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, to address systemic inequalities exposed by the coronavirus pandemic.

The health crisis had revealed the world's fragility and "laid bare risks we have ignored for decades: inadequate health systems; gaps in social protection; structural inequalities; environmental degradation; the climate crisis", he said.

He said the pandemic was exposing "fallacies and falsehoods everywhere: the lie that free markets can deliver healthcare for all. The fiction that unpaid care work is not work, the delusion that we live in a post-racist world, the myth that we are all in the same boat."

The anger of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements were a measure of "utter disillusionment with the status quo", Guterres said, while colonialism and patriarchy were historical sources of inequality.

Black Lives Matter protesters in Washington. Photograph: Leah Millis/Reuters

"Let's not fool ourselves. The legacy of colonialism still reverberates. We see this in economic and social injustice, the rise of hate crimes and xenophobia; the persistence of institutionalised racism and white supremacy.

"We see this in the global trade system. Economies that were colonised are at greater risk of getting locked into the production of raw materials and low-tech goods - a new form of colonialism. And we see this in global power relations."

Speaking from the UN's New York headquarters, Guterres was delivering the annual Nelson Mandela lecture - on what would have been Mandela's 102nd birthday -, to an online audience for the first time in its 18-year history.

Africa, Guterres said, had been a "double victim", first because of colonialism and second, because African countries were underrepresented in the international institutions set up after the second world war.

The former South African president at the Nelson Mandela lecture in 2008, on his 90th birthday. Photograph: Mike Hutchings/Reuters

"The nations that came out on top 70 years ago have refused to contemplate the reforms needed to change power relations in international institutions. The composition and voting rights in the UN security council and the boards of the Bretton Woods system are a case in point. Inequality starts at the top: in global institutions. Addressing inequality must start by reforming them."

More advanced countries, he said, had failed to deliver the support needed for the developing world in these "dangerous times". He called for a new global deal, based on fairness and a revamped social contract, to deliver universal health cover and the possibility of a universal basic income.

His comments follow those of the UN's outgoing special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, who described the World Bank's $1.90 (£1.50) a day international poverty line as a " scandalously unambitious benchmark " that had painted a false picture of "heroic gains" against poverty.

Guterres said the world had been brought to its knees by a microscopic virus that had set back progress on eradicating poverty and narrowing inequality by years. He warned that it could bring famines of "historic proportion" and push 100 million people into extreme poverty.

"We face the deepest global recession since world war two, and the broadest collapse in incomes since 1870," he said. Workers in the informal economy, small and medium businesses, and people with caring responsibilities, mostly women, had been hit worst.

"Deep disparities begin before birth, and define lives - and early deaths," he said.

Protest against police brutality in Nairobi, Kenya. Photograph: Khalil Senosi/AP

More than 70% of the world's people were living with rising income and wealth inequality, he said, while the 26 richest people held as much wealth as half the global population. In developed countries, more than 50% of 20-year olds were in higher education, a figure that dropped to 3% in less developed countries.

"Even more shocking: some 17% of the children born 20 years ago in countries with low human development have already died."

Everyone suffered the consequences, he said, because inequality was linked to economic instability, corruption, financial crises, crime, and physical and mental health.

Guterres said the climate crisis and digital transformation were "seismic shifts" that would define the 21st century and heralded a new movement for racial equality, human rights and the rights of future generations. Young climate activists were on the frontline, he said.

"This movement rejects inequality and division, and unites young people, civil society, the private sector, cities, regions and others behind policies for peace, our planet, justice and human rights for all. It is already making a difference.

"Now is the time for global leaders to decide: will we succumb to chaos, division and inequality? Or will we right the wrongs of the past and move forward together, for the good of all?

"We are at breaking point. But we know which side of history we are on."

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UN chief slams 'myths, delusions and falsehoods' around inequality

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The UN secretary general will today deliver one of his most stinging speeches to date, attacking the "myths, delusions and falsehoods" around international progress on equality. In an unusually strongly worded speech, António Guterres urged major reform to the UN security council, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, to address systemic inequalities exposed by the coronavirus pandemic.

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Slavery and Salvation - History Of Africa with Zeinab Badawi [Episode 17]

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Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night: Great Art Explained

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Monet's Water Lilies: Great Art Explained

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'Self-deprecating' black Tiktokker agency challenges prejudices in Italy

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hen Aida Diouf Mbengue made her debut on TikTok in 2019, it was partly to show solidarity with a Moroccan classmate who was being mocked for her dance clips on the social media app, but also to challenge prejudices.

The 15-second sketch features Mbengue, who was born in Senegal and has lived in Bergamo, northern Italy, since the age of three, wearing her hijab on a street and looking at her phone. Her sister, who filmed the video, asks: "Aida, show me a photo of your ex." Mbengue, 19, quips: "There's no need ... here's my ex", before jauntily turning around and pointing to a huge pile of rubbish. The two girls burst into giggles.

The video went viral, attracting 900,000 views in three days. Mbengue then branched out to YouTube and Instagram, going on to become known as "the first Italian Tiktokker with a veil" as well as the most high-profile member of the team at Afro Influencers, an agency created last year to promote social media influencers of African origin and the wider African community in Italy.

"Being an actress and making videos has always been my dream," said Mbengue. "But whenever I told people this they would laugh and say: 'Nobody would be interested in watching a girl with a hijab.' It was as if a black girl with a hijab could never succeed in doing certain things."

Afro Influencers was founded last year by Moustapha Thiam, a 22-year-old IT analyst from Bergamo, and has a core team of nine of the most-followed Tiktokkers, Instagrammers and YouTubers in Italy. The agency, the first of its kind in Europe, offers advice and contacts to influencers while giving free courses to newcomers. Another objective is to help influencers achieve their ambitions of working in the entertainment industry.

"I created this to make our voice heard," said Thiam, also an actor and comedian known as Musty TV. "Italy was a difficult place to grow up, as there was always this ignorant perception. Things have got better, but still today it is difficult to find work, as prejudices still exist. But we don't want to play the victims of racism - we are self-deprecating, and the idea is to try to bring about change."

Mbengue has used humour not only to make her voice heard, but to change people's perception of Muslim women. In another TikTok video, she wears all her colourful hijabs at the same time. She has more than 300,000 followers on the platform, 24,300 subscribers on YouTube and 70,800 followers on Instagram. She said all of her YouTube subscribers were Italian, while she has a big following from Senegal on Instagram.

"My first TikTok video attracted comments like 'I've never seen such a nice girl with a hijab' or 'girls with hijabs actually have style'," she said. "From this, I understood that something had to change. I wanted to show that the hijab is not a symbol of oppression. Just because I'm wearing one it doesn't mean I'm not free."

Mbengue is still subjected to insults online but responds with irony. "It's almost like fun activism," she said. "The main objective is not to have loads of followers but to send a message to young people, who will one day become parents, that helps to open their minds."

Moustapha Thiam founded Afro Influencers in 2020: 'Things have got better, but prejudices still exist'

Afro Influencers held a well-attended launch event at Milan's Piazza del Duomo last summer, and the agency has received dozens of requests to join from established or budding black influencers across Europe, including the UK, France and Spain. "I would like to create a big Europe-wide group," Thiam said.

He said the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement and the thousands of protests across the world, including in Italy, last summer, in response to the police killing of George Floyd, had shifted companies' focus towards sponsoring black influencers.

"BLM helped to entice big companies to also invest in the black community," he said. "The companies understood they needed to change their message and be more inclusive."

Mbengue found that, as her profile grew, she attracted the attention of several big brands. "I hope this continues," she said. "BLM has helped, and many things are starting to change."

Thiam's next step is to open Afro House, a home in Milan for the Afro Influencers team. Its social media stars include Xanax 404, C.Black, King Nigg, and Topher & Betta.

He said a key to being a successful influencer was to post regularly. "You have to keep it up," he said. "But the most important thing is to be yourself, never change."

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'Self-deprecating' black Tiktokker agency challenges prejudices in Italy

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hen Aida Diouf Mbengue made her debut on TikTok in 2019, it was partly to show solidarity with a Moroccan classmate who was being mocked for her dance clips on the social media app, but also to challenge prejudices.

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GCSE English Literature podcasts - Frankenstein - BBC Bitesize

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Learn more about Frankenstein in this GCSE podcast from BBC Bitesize.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIYiThAyY8s

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I Changed Astronomy Forever. He Won the Nobel Prize for It. | 'Almost Famous' by Op-Docs

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Inside Jane Austen's House With Lucy Worsley

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Inside Jane Austen's House With Lucy Worsley

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Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen is 200 years old, but the story still resonates. Why?

This month in a very special edition, we're celebrating that most English of novelists Jane Austen.

It's two hundred years this month since the publication of Pride and Prejudice and we've invited bestselling British novelist and Jane Austen aficionado PD James, along with Anglo-Pakistani writer Moni Mohsin, also a great Austen fan and from Australia Susannah Fullerton, President of the Australian Jane Austen Society, all here to share with us their passion for this much loved classic English novel.

We'll also be hearing from other writers from around the world - AS Byatt, Colm Toibin, Nii Parkes, Kamila Shamsie, to name a few, why the razor-sharp wit of Elizabeth Bennet and the cool hauteur of the gorgeous Mr Darcy are still drawing in more readers than ever across the globe in the twenty-first century.

Susannah Fullerton is the author of Happily Ever After: Celebrating Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

Image: Jane Austen, Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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BBC World Service - World Book Club, Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice

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Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen is 200 years old, but the story still resonates. Why? This month in a very special edition, we're celebrating that most English of novelists Jane Austen.

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Captain Cook has been celebrated, wrongly, as the first European to discover Australia but many now believe it is time to reappraise his legacy particularly in light of the devastating effect it had on the native Aboriginal people of Australia. Professor John Maynard is a Worimi man and Director of Aboriginal History at The Wollotuka Institute. He joins the podcast to explain what Cook's landing at Botany Bay meant for the Aboriginal people at the time and right through the generations to today and into the future. He believes it's time that we had an honest reckoning with Cook's legacy and that this is essential for reconciliation and creating a better way forward.

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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captain cook: the aboriginal perspective

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‎Dan Snow's History Hit: Captain Cook: The Aboriginal Perspective su Apple Podcasts

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‎Captain Cook has been celebrated, wrongly, as the first European to discover Australia but many now believe it is time to reappraise his legacy particularly in light of the devastating effect it had on the native Aboriginal people of Australia. Professor John Maynard is a Worimi man and Director of...

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The Untold Story Of Jane Austen | Behind Closed Doors | Timeline

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William Blake: Biography offers glimpse into artist and poet's visionary mind

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One day in 1801, when William Blake was living on the Sussex coast, he went on a long country walk when he got into an argument with a thistle.

The artist, poet and musician, who experienced beatific visions throughout his 69 years on Earth, wasn't wandering lonely as a cloud, like some of his Romantic peers.

On this occasion, the prickly plant he encountered also took the form of a hectoring old man. For all Blake could see, the two were inseparable.

The London shopkeeper's son (who didn't go to school) would also regularly see God, angels and demons, and often spoke with the spirit of his dead brother Robert. His wife Catherine once commented: "I see very little of my husband, he's always in paradise."

These divine and mind-bending experiences informed Blake's world view and inspired his deeply philosophical illustrated texts like Jerusalem and Milton.

As a result, though, he was deemed mad by much of 18th and 19th Century England, and died penniless and largely unheralded.

Nowadays, he is widely considered one of UK's most influential and respected artists and poets. And in a new biography, William Blake vs the World, author John Higgs argues we are now far better placed to understand what was going on inside his head.

'Mythological system'

"Blakeans have been touchy about the subject historically," Higgs tells the BBC. "There was the one exhibition he gave in his lifetime and it sold no paintings, and it got one review which referred to him as 'an unfortunate lunatic'. And so this accusation of madness followed him around in his day.

"Van Gogh scholars are quite happy to admit he had mental health issues, and that adds to their understanding of him. [But] Blake scholars have been traditionally keen to insist that he was not mad, that there is reason and logic and worth in this system that he created - this mythological system."

He adds: "I think now we're in a position where we can say, yeah absolutely he was [sane]. But there was a period where he had poor mental health. In his letters there were references to melancholy, as a disease, and depression, and also later incidents that show signs of paranoia."

Those mental health issues arose around the year 1800. "It was just a period in his life and you can see at the end of his life how he had come through it, with the help of his wife, and was just in a very blissful state," Higgs continues.

Blake's high regard for contrary states, as evidenced in his Songs of Innocence and Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, suggests he knew that what goes up must come down.

The key to achieving timeless bliss, he believed, was to re-balance the imagination (or The Four Zoas) so the left-brain - the part that deals with logic, reason and language - was less dominant, unlocking the potential of the right side, which deals with creativity, emotions and physical pleasure.

The polymath underlined the importance of viewing things through one's mind's eye, rather than merely through the organs on either side of your nose. In his book, Higgs cites the work of neuroscientist Dr Adam Zeman, who has studied the imagination for decades. He first described in 2015 the condition of aphantasia, where some people were found to be unable to visualise mental images. In other words, they had no mind's eye.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, those with extremely vivid imaginations were said to have hyperphantasia.

Dr Zeman, who released his latest research findings last month - with the help of his colleagues at the University of Exeter and around 70 volunteers willing to have their brain activity scanned - agrees with Higgs that rather than meaning he was unhinged, Blake's visions strongly suggest hyperphantasia.

"[Blake] seems to live in the world of his own imagination to a great degree," Dr Zeman says. "Some people [with hyperphantasia] say that it is hard for them to be sure whether they've imagined something, or it actually happened because their imagining is very vivid."

Neither extremes, which are believed to affect millions of people around the world, are viewed as disorders, he notes. They are more like interesting variations of perspective, each with their own pluses and minuses.

Hyperphantasics tend to be more open and have abundant mental imagery, research shows, but can be more vulnerable to emotions that images fuel - like regret, disgust or longing.

Aphantasics tend to be more introverted, have thin autobiographical memoires - relying more on facts - and often miss being unable to picture loved ones they have lost. However, many highly imaginative people, including Pixar animations co-founder Ed Catmull, Mozilla Firefox co-creator Blake Ross and leading scientists Oliver Sacks and Craig Venter have all lacked imagery.

There is some evidence to suggest that very vivid imagery can put people at the risk of psychosis, Dr Zeman says, if they lose sense of the boundary between what's real and what's imaginary - which Blake's contemporaries clearly thought he had done.

But he thinks Blake, who died almost 200 years ago, may have been an early adopter of the increasingly accepted idea in psychology and cognitive neuroscience today that "all our experience, in a sense, is imaginative".

"Although we aren't aware of it, a huge amount is happening in our brains all the time to enable us to see, hear or make sense of anything," Dr Zeman says. "An experience itself is a creative act, let alone the echo of experience that you get in the mind's eye.

"I think Blake had a sense that all of all our whole mental lives - not just the mind wandering, daydreaming, creativity and the artistic sense, but simply having an experience - is a creative and imaginative act."

Or as Blake himself put it: "The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself."

The limited, rational or logical part of our brains, which Blake characterised as Urizen, is actually only a model of how we understand the world, Higgs explains.

"We think it's real, we think it's true," he says. "When it feels under threat, it lashes out and tries to defend itself.

"You can see on social media, people have a desperate need to be thought of as right. For Blake, it's all about being able to step outside that and just see the rational brain for what it is, as a sort of quite limited small part of a much larger mental experience."

Albert Einstein once remarked on "the stubbornly persistent illusion of the passing of time", which was also depicted by Blake in the form of Los.

The artist's conviction that concepts like time, God, heaven and hell were all internal creations, Higgs feels, also salvages theological debates for today's more secular UK society.

"If you know someone who has been living through hell, the idea that Blake was in paradise becomes a little bit more plausible," he says.

The doors of perception

William Blake is by no means the only historical figure to have reported on such ineffable experiences. And his apparent capacity to access parts of the imagination that were beyond the realm of the average person, and the importance he placed on free love, sex and bashing the establishment, were of great appeal in the swinging late 60s.

Jim Morrison's band The Doors even named themselves after a famous line from a Blake poem: " If the doors of perception were cleansed then everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite."

The likes of Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley championed the use of psychedelic drugs to help achieve Blake-like states of consciousness.

For people with aphantasia, Dr Zeman notes, hallucinogens sometimes help them to generate imagery, but it doesn't seem to outlast the drug effect. Higgs compares the practice, as well as that of transcendental meditation, to "micro-dosing in Blake's eternity".

It's not impossible that Blake may have dabbled in magic mushrooms, the author concedes, but recreational use was not believed to have been common at the time, and he had been chronicling his visions from childhood until old age.

Blake believed we could all work on our imaginations, just like our abs or biceps, and aspire to joining him in "eternity".

Dr Zeman's studies suggest that while it may be possible to strengthen the mind's eye, ear or fingertip with magnetic pulses, there is a biological and possibly genetic limit to how far along the imagination spectrum each individual can travel. But we should celebrate that difference, he says, and not medicalise it.

He is hopeful that one day we will be able to know it better, and ultimately solve the age-old Cartesian conundrum of how consciousness can be generated from that grey, jelly-like lump of tissue in our heads.

To give Blake the final word on the matter: " What is now proved was once only imagined."

William Blake versus the World, by John Higgs, is out now

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William Blake: Biography offers glimpse into artist and poet's visionary mind

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One day in 1801, when William Blake was living on the Sussex coast, he went on a long country walk when he got into an argument with a thistle. The artist, poet and musician, who experienced beatific visions throughout his 69 years on Earth, wasn't wandering lonely as a cloud, like some of his Romantic peers.

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Fake News: Fact and Fiction - Fake news in the age of coronavirus

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The Age of Innocence is a masterclass in sexual tension

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arly on in The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton tells us that the people in New York high society in the 1870s "lived in an atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies". It's a phrase so arresting that it's tempting to linger over it - and it is also provides a useful guide to reading The Age of Innocence. As Wharton goes on to explain, these people are able to understand each other "without a word", able to hear that which is left unsaid as loudly as that which is spoken aloud. Which means, in turn, that if we readers want to understand this world, we need to be on the alert.

Observe, for instance, Newland Archer, the apparent hero of the novel. We first meet him at the opera where he sees a "slim figure ... a new young woman" entering a box across the room. We are told that this arresting presence is "poor Ellen" Olenska, a countess and the cousin of Archer's fiancee, May Welland. Madame Olenska creates an immediate stir of disapproval among the great and good at the opera simply by allowing herself - a woman who is in retreat from a broken marriage - to be seen in public. But that's not all that is stirring.

Is the ripple of disapproval enough to explain Archer's "strange state of embarrassment" when he first sees Olenska? Does the "rush" he feels come from "indignation" alone? When we are told that "the way her dress (which had no tucker) sloped away from her thin shoulders shocked and troubled him", is he troubled because of her offence against conventional taste and form? Partly, yes. But, it's also clear, even if it isn't said directly, that Olenska's thin shoulders that have set the blood bounding in Archer's veins.

And so it goes on. It's a long time before we are told that Archer has a raging crush on Ellen. In fact, we are more directly informed about his ongoing regard for May, with her "radiant eyes". Olenska, in contrast, continues to "shock" and worry him. But it becomes more and more clear that he's dizzy with desire - and Wharton ramps up the tension brilliantly until we reach a remarkable moment. Archer and Olenska start talking at a party. May comes into the room and Olenska suggests that Archer will want to "hurry away to her". He replies that she's already been surrounded by other people and Wharton writes:

'Then stay with me a little longer,' Madame Olenska said in a low tone, just touching his knee with her plumed fan. It was the lightest touch, but it thrilled him like a caress."

This is surely one of the horniest moments in 20th-century literature. The tension has been building so steadily, and we have been primed for every word to be charged with meaning - so this light touch with a fan feels extraordinarily explicit. At last, there has been physical contact. At last, there is release.

Every small moment takes on huge significance. Archer and May's brief disagreements over whether or not windows should be left open somehow say more about the state of their relationship than any number of screaming rows might have done. There are all kinds of similar telepathies with flowers sent and not sent, envelopes left empty, parties attended and avoided. There's also a blink-and-you'll-miss-it "tremble" in a library that changes the destiny of all the main characters in an instant. As a reader, the very act of decoding these messages immerses you ever deeper in the attitudes and customs of this strange world. It makes for a fascinating, engrossing experience.

The other happy effect of so much being conveyed by faint implication is that when something is expressed more directly, it can have huge impact. Madame Olenska has a particular ability to pop the bubble. It's impossible not to love her when she declares that a particular duke, over whom all of New York has been fawning, is "the dullest man I ever met". Impossible not to sympathise when she demands: "Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!" For she has to come to understand that "simplehearted kindly New York, on whose larger charity she had apparently counted, was precisely the place where she could least hope for indulgence". High society may pretend to be delicate but actually, these people are brutal. More on that next week.

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The Age of Innocence is a masterclass in sexual tension

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arly on in The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton tells us that the people in New York high society in the 1870s "lived in an atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies". It's a phrase so arresting that it's tempting to linger over it - and it is also provides a useful guide to reading The Age of Innocence.

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The British Empire began in the late 1500s under Queen Elizabeth I.

By 1913 the empire had grown to rule over 400 million people, making it the largest empire in history.

British government and society benefitted economically from the empire.

The people colonised by the British had British laws and customs imposed upon them, lost their ability to govern themselves and were, in many cases, violently oppressed.

The British Empire had its origins in the late 1500s.

In 1585, Queen Elizabeth I gave Walter Raleigh permission to set up a on Roanoke Island, now part of the modern-day USA. The settlers had lost most of their supplies on the journey and struggled to find food when theirs ran out. They were at first reliant on local for food, but there was a lack of trust between the two groups and the relationship descended into violence.

All of the settlers' attempts to set up a colony on Roanoke Island failed and they eventually abandoned the land in 1590. The first successful colony was set up in 1607 in Jamestown, which is now part of the state of Virginia in the USA.

Britain decided to build an empire for several reasons. These included:

To gain more money

To gain more power

To spread Christianity and British ways of life

Spain built its empire in the 1500s. It controlled 80 per cent of the world's silver because it conquered several colonies in Latin America, such as Peru and Mexico. England wanted the money and power that the Spanish had, but this would require a lot of violence and force.

The empire existed for nearly 400 years in total. It spread from the Americas to include colonies in Africa, Asia and Australasia. During this time Britain lost and gained colonies.

During the early years of the British Empire, 13 colonies in North America were established by the British. These colonies went to war against Britain in 1775 to achieve their freedom, declaring themselves independent on 4 July 1776. Britain formally recognised the United States of America as an independent country in 1783.

After losing the 13 colonies Britain did not want its empire to shrink again, and decided to make it even bigger.

From 1757 onwards, the British East India Company began to establish control over much of India. The money the British made by local rulers and workers funded the continuing progress of the Industrial Revolution . In 1858, India became an official colony of the British Empire. It was considered the 'jewel in the crown' of the British Empire.

Ruling India was economically very beneficial for Britain, because the British authorities exploited India's resources and population.

India had a population of around 300 million people, which meant the British could export and trade goods to this huge market. India also produced goods Britain could sell at home and worldwide for a huge profit.

India also had a strong army, which Britain was able to use. The Indian Army fought alongside British troops in several conflicts. Indian soldiers fought in the Second Boer War in South Africa from 1899 - 1902, and in both world wars.

In the 1880s the 'Scramble for Africa' took place and Britain came to control 30 per cent of the African population, with several destroyed in the process. For example, when the British colonised the Kingdom of Benin , they the kingdom's leaders, Benin treasures, burned much of Benin city to the ground and killed many people.

The Benin Bronzes are elaborate sculptures made from metals like bronze and brass, as well as ivory. Following the invasion of Benin, many of the Benin Bronzes were stolen by British soldiers and sailors.

Today, the Benin Bronzes can be viewed in museums all over the world. However, many people have campaigned for the return of these cultural treasures to their country of origin, which is modern-day Nigeria. As of 2022, museums and institutions in Britain, the USA and Germany have agreed to return some of the bronzes to Nigeria.

As the empire grew, Britain became more powerful. It was then more difficult for a country to fight against colonisation.

The colonies were generally run by British government officials who lived in the colony and not by the indigenous people. British laws were brought to colonies that often did not take into account cultural differences between the people of the colonies and the British. Taxes on colonised people were often high and the British exploited natural resources for their own financial gain.

In the 1700s and 1800s, India experienced several devastating famines. These famines were partly caused by the weather, and the region had suffered from famine before British rule, but British policies often made the situation worse. Under British rule, Indians were pushed to produce crops, such as tea, that Britain could sell for high prices. Therefore when poor weather affected the harvests, there were food shortages resulting in famines across India. During many of these famines Britain did not organise a large enough relief effort, and millions died across India.

Punishments for uprisings and protest were harsh. They could include executing people and even firing openly onto crowds of civilians, for example during the Amritsar Massacre.

On 13 April 1919, over 10,000 men, women and children gathered in an enclosed park, the Jallianwala Bagh, in Amritsar. It had only one accessible exit. Orders had been given that banned large meetings of people, but not everyone had been made aware of this. Some of the people who had gathered were protesting against British rule. Many others had gathered to celebrate a Sikh festival. Without warning, the British general Dyer had his troops block the only exit and fire openly on the unarmed crowd.

It was initially estimated that over 350 people were killed and over a thousand more injured. However some historians now suggest that the death toll may be higher. Reports of the massacre spread across the world. This helped to gain a lot of support for the Indian independence movement.

For some people living in Britain, the British Empire meant that they were able to migrate to different colonies and take positions of authority or obtain land. For those who could not afford to leave and stayed in Britain, there were many more jobs available in factories because merchants were bringing back valuable items, such as cotton, to make into products that would be sold across the empire.

From the 1750s onwards, there were huge developments in technology in Britain. New machinery and railway technology meant that goods could be produced and transported much faster. This reduced the amount of physical labour needed to produce goods and made more money for those in charge.

After introducing this in India, Britain introduced this same technology in other colonies. This technology was left in the colonies after they became independent.

While there was a lot of support in Britain for the empire at the time, there was always some opposition to it. Some people argued that colonies had their own cultures and traditions before the arrival of the British, and that it was wrong to force a different way of life or religion on people.

There was opposition to the transatlantic slave trade in Britain during the 1700s and 1800s. This came from members of parliament, like William Wilberforce, as well as religious organisations, such as the . Olaudah Equiano , a formerly-enslaved man who settled in London, campaigned against slavery and published an autobiography detailing his experiences of enslavement.

In terms of size, the British Empire was at its largest in the years following World War One, when it gained some of Germany's former colonies. This was because Germany had lost World War One, and its former colonies were given to other European countries through the Treaty of Versailles .

In 1926 the was set up between Britain and all of its dominion states. This was an agreement that all of the in the Commonwealth were considered equal.

In the mid-1900s, Britain's situation changed completely. By the end of World War Two in 1945 it became clear that:

Britain could no longer afford to maintain its empire

British attitudes were changing, as more people began to believe that having an empire was wrong and that Britain had no right to rule over other states by force

Independence movements were growing in many different colonies. This included the Quit India campaign, led by Mohandas Gandhi

Countries like the USA and the Soviet Union, who had been Britain's allies during World War Two, supported decolonisation

Then, in 1947, following years of campaigning, British India was partitioned into two independent nations, India and Pakistan. This followed many years of protesting and fighting.

This inspired several other countries across Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and elsewhere to push for their own freedom.

One of the first African countries to become independent from Britain following World War Two was Ghana, in 1957. One of the last countries to gain full independence from Britain was Belize, in Central America, in 1981.

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The British Empire began in the late 1500s under Queen Elizabeth I. By 1913 the empire had grown to rule over 400 million people, making it the largest empire in history. British government and society benefitted economically from the empire.

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Bram Stoker's Dracula - Animated Short Film (2022)

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Commentary
and link https://youtu.be/Pic4PS8o41M

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commentary: Ted Hughes

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from Poetry Foundation

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Walt Whitman is America's world poet-a latter-day successor to Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare. In Leaves of Grass (1855, 1891-2), he celebrated democracy, nature, love, and friendship. This monumental work chanted praises to the body as well as to the soul, and found beauty and reassurance even in death. Along with Emily Dickinson, Whitman is regarded as one of America's most significant 19th-century poets and would influence later many poets, including Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Simon Ortiz, C.K. Williams, and Martín Espada.

Born on Long Island, Whitman grew up in Brooklyn and received limited formal education. His occupations during his lifetime included printer, schoolteacher, reporter, and editor. Whitman's self-published Leaves of Grass was inspired in part by his travels through the American frontier and by his admiration for Ralph Waldo Emerson. This important publication underwent eight subsequent editions during his lifetime as Whitman expanded and revised the poetry and added more to the original collection of 12 poems. Emerson himself declared the first edition was "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed."

Whitman published his own enthusiastic review of Leaves of Grass. Critics and readers alike, however, found both Whitman's style and subject matter unnerving. According to The Longman Anthology of Poetry, "Whitman received little public acclaim for his poems during his lifetime for several reasons: this openness regarding sex, his self-presentation as a rough working man, and his stylistic innovations." A poet who "abandoned the regular meter and rhyme patterns" of his contemporaries, Whitman was "influenced by the long cadences and rhetorical strategies of Biblical poetry." Upon publishing Leaves of Grass, Whitman was subsequently fired from his job with the Department of the Interior. Despite his mixed critical reception in the US, he was favorably received in England, with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne among the British writers who celebrated his work.

During the Civil War, Whitman worked as a clerk in Washington, DC. For three years, he visited soldiers during his spare time, dressing wounds and giving solace to the injured. These experiences led to the poems in his 1865 publication, Drum-Taps, which includes, " When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," Whitman's elegy for President Lincoln.

After suffering a serious stroke in 1873, Whitman moved to his brother's home in Camden, New Jersey. While his poetry failed to garner popular attention from his American readership during his lifetime, over 1,000 people came to view his funeral. And as the first writer of a truly American poetry, Whitman's legacy endures.

You can read and inspect many of Whitman's books, letters, and manuscripts at the Walt Whitman Archive, a digital edition at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, directed by Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price.

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Walt Whitman is America's world poet-a latter-day successor to Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare. In Leaves of Grass (1855, 1891-2), he celebrated democracy, nature, love, and friendship. This monumental work chanted praises to the body as well as to the soul, and found beauty and reassurance...

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Emily Dickinson is one of America's greatest and most original poets of all time. She took definition as her province and challenged the existing definitions of poetry and the poet's work. Like writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, she experimented with expression in order to free it from conventional restraints. Like writers such as Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she crafted a new type of persona for the first person. The speakers in Dickinson's poetry, like those in Brontë's and Browning's works, are sharp-sighted observers who see the inescapable limitations of their societies as well as their imagined and imaginable escapes. To make the abstract tangible, to define meaning without confining it, to inhabit a house that never became a prison, Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized. Like the Concord Transcendentalists whose works she knew well, she saw poetry as a double-edged sword. While it liberated the individual, it as readily left him ungrounded. The literary marketplace, however, offered new ground for her work in the last decade of the 19th century. When the first volume of her poetry was published in 1890, four years after her death, it met with stunning success. Going through 11 editions in less than two years, the poems eventually extended far beyond their first household audiences. Dickinson is now known as one of the most important American poets, and her poetry is widely read among people of all ages and interests.

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1830 to Edward and Emily (Norcross) Dickinson. At the time of her birth, Emily's father was an ambitious young lawyer. Educated at Amherst and Yale, he returned to his hometown and joined the ailing law practice of his father, Samuel Fowler Dickinson. Edward also joined his father in the family home, the Homestead, built by Samuel Dickinson in 1813. Active in the Whig Party, Edward Dickinson was elected to the Massachusetts State Legislature (1837-1839) and the Massachusetts State Senate (1842-1843). Between 1852 and 1855 he served a single term as a representative from Massachusetts to the U.S. Congress. In Amherst he presented himself as a model citizen and prided himself on his civic work-treasurer of Amherst College, supporter of Amherst Academy, secretary to the Fire Society, and chairman of the annual Cattle Show. Comparatively little is known of Emily's mother, who is often represented as the passive wife of a domineering husband. Her few surviving letters suggest a different picture, as does the scant information about her early education at Monson Academy. Academy papers and records discovered by Martha Ackmann reveal a young woman dedicated to her studies, particularly in the sciences.

By the time of Emily's early childhood, there were three children in the household. Her brother, William Austin Dickinson, had preceded her by a year and a half. Her sister, Lavinia Norcross Dickinson, was born in 1833. All three children attended the one-room primary school in Amherst and then moved on to Amherst Academy, the school out of which Amherst College had grown. The brother and sisters' education was soon divided. Austin was sent to Williston Seminary in 1842; Emily and Vinnie continued at Amherst Academy. By Emily Dickinson's account, she delighted in all aspects of the school-the curriculum, the teachers, the students. The school prided itself on its connection with Amherst College, offering students regular attendance at college lectures in all the principal subjects- astronomy, botany, chemistry, geology, mathematics, natural history, natural philosophy, and zoology. As this list suggests, the curriculum reflected the 19th-century emphasis on science. That emphasis reappeared in Dickinson's poems and letters through her fascination with naming, her skilled observation and cultivation of flowers, her carefully wrought descriptions of plants, and her interest in "chemic force." Those interests, however, rarely celebrated science in the same spirit as the teachers advocated. In an early poem, she chastised science for its prying interests. Its system interfered with the observer's preferences; its study took the life out of living things. In "'Arcturus' is his other name" she writes, "I pull a flower from the woods - / A monster with a glass / Computes the stamens in a breath - / And has her in a 'class!'" At the same time, Dickinson's study of botany was clearly a source of delight. She encouraged her friend Abiah Root to join her in a school assignment: "Have you made an herbarium yet? I hope you will, if you have not, it would be such a treasure to you." She herself took that assignment seriously, keeping the herbarium generated by her botany textbook for the rest of her life. Behind her school botanical studies lay a popular text in common use at female seminaries. Written by Almira H. Lincoln, Familiar Lectures on Botany (1829) featured a particular kind of natural history, emphasizing the religious nature of scientific study. Lincoln was one of many early 19th-century writers who forwarded the "argument from design." She assured her students that study of the natural world invariably revealed God. Its impeccably ordered systems showed the Creator's hand at work.

Lincoln's assessment accorded well with the local Amherst authority in natural philosophy. Edward Hitchcock, president of Amherst College, devoted his life to maintaining the unbroken connection between the natural world and its divine Creator. He was a frequent lecturer at the college, and Emily had many opportunities to hear him speak. His emphasis was clear from the titles of his books, like Religious Truth Illustrated from Science (1857). Dickinson found the conventional religious wisdom the least compelling part of these arguments. From what she read and what she heard at Amherst Academy, scientific observation proved its excellence in powerful description. The writer who could say what he saw was invariably the writer who opened the greatest meaning to his readers. While this definition fit well with the science practiced by natural historians such as Hitchcock and Lincoln, it also articulates the poetic theory then being formed by a writer with whom Dickinson's name was often later linked. In 1838 Emerson told his Harvard audience, "Always the seer is a sayer." Acknowledging the human penchant for classification, he approached this phenomenon with a different intent. Less interested than some in using the natural world to prove a supernatural one, he called his listeners and readers' attention to the creative power of definition. The individual who could say what is was the individual for whom words were power.

While the strength of Amherst Academy lay in its emphasis on science, it also contributed to Dickinson's development as a poet. The seven years at the academy provided her with her first "Master," Leonard Humphrey, who served as principal of the academy from 1846 to 1848. Although Dickinson undoubtedly esteemed him while she was a student, her response to his unexpected death in 1850 clearly suggests her growing poetic interest. She wrote Abiah Root that her only tribute was her tears, and she lingered over them in her description. She will not brush them away, she says, for their presence is her expression. So, of course, is her language, which is in keeping with the memorial verses expected of 19th-century mourners.

Humphrey's designation as "Master" parallels the other relationships Emily was cultivating at school. At the academy she developed a group of close friends within and against whom she defined her self and its written expression. Among these were Abiah Root, Abby Wood, and Emily Fowler. Other girls from Amherst were among her friends-particularly Jane Humphrey, who had lived with the Dickinsons while attending Amherst Academy. As was common for young women of the middle class, the scant formal schooling they received in the academies for "young ladies" provided them with a momentary autonomy. As students, they were invited to take their intellectual work seriously. Many of the schools, like Amherst Academy, required full-day attendance, and thus domestic duties were subordinated to academic ones. The curriculum was often the same as that for a young man's education. At their "School for Young Ladies," William and Waldo Emerson, for example, recycled their Harvard assignments for their students. When asked for advice about future study, they offered the reading list expected of young men. Thus, the time at school was a time of intellectual challenge and relative freedom for girls, especially in an academy such as Amherst, which prided itself on its progressive understanding of education. The students looked to each other for their discussions, grew accustomed to thinking in terms of their identity as scholars, and faced a marked change when they left school.

Dickinson's last term at Amherst Academy, however, did not mark the end of her formal schooling. As was common, Dickinson left the academy at the age of 15 in order to pursue a higher, and for women, final, level of education. In the fall of 1847 Dickinson entered Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Under the guidance of Mary Lyon, the school was known for its religious predilection. Part and parcel of the curriculum were weekly sessions with Lyon in which religious questions were examined and the state of the students' faith assessed. The young women were divided into three categories: those who were "established Christians," those who "expressed hope," and those who were "without hope." Much has been made of Emily's place in this latter category and of the widely circulated story that she was the only member of that group. Years later fellow student Clara Newman Turner remembered the moment when Mary Lyon "asked all those who wanted to be Christians to rise." Emily remained seated. No one else did. Turner reports Emily's comment to her: "'They thought it queer I didn't rise'-adding with a twinkle in her eye, 'I thought a lie would be queerer.'" Written in 1894, shortly after the publication of the first two volumes of Dickinson's poetry and the initial publication of her letters, Turner's reminiscences carry the burden of the 50 intervening years as well as the reviewers and readers' delight in the apparent strangeness of the newly published Dickinson. The solitary rebel may well have been the only one sitting at that meeting, but the school records indicate that Dickinson was not alone in the "without hope" category. In fact, 30 students finished the school year with that designation.

The brevity of Emily's stay at Mount Holyoke-a single year-has given rise to much speculation as to the nature of her departure. Some have argued that the beginning of her so-called reclusiveness can be seen in her frequent mentions of homesickness in her letters, but in no case do the letters suggest that her regular activities were disrupted. She did not make the same kind of close friends as she had at Amherst Academy, but her reports on the daily routine suggest that she was fully a part of the activities of the school. Additional questions are raised by the uncertainty over who made the decision that she not return for a second year. Dickinson attributed the decision to her father, but she said nothing further about his reasoning. Edward Dickinson's reputation as a domineering individual in private and public affairs suggests that his decision may have stemmed from his desire to keep this particular daughter at home. Dickinson's comments occasionally substantiate such speculation. She frequently represents herself as essential to her father's contentment. But in other places her description of her father is quite different (the individual too busy with his law practice to notice what occurred at home). The least sensational explanation has been offered by biographer Richard Sewall. Looking over the Mount Holyoke curriculum and seeing how many of the texts duplicated those Dickinson had already studied at Amherst, he concludes that Mount Holyoke had little new to offer her. Whatever the reason, when it came Vinnie's turn to attend a female seminary, she was sent to Ipswich.

Dickinson's departure from Mount Holyoke marked the end of her formal schooling. It also prompted the dissatisfaction common among young women in the early 19th century. Upon their return, unmarried daughters were indeed expected to demonstrate their dutiful nature by setting aside their own interests in order to meet the needs of the home. For Dickinson the change was hardly welcome. Her letters from the early 1850s register dislike of domestic work and frustration with the time constraints created by the work that was never done. "God keep me from what they call households," she exclaimed in a letter to Root in 1850.

Particularly annoying were the number of calls expected of the women in the Homestead. Edward Dickinson's prominence meant a tacit support within the private sphere. The daily rounds of receiving and paying visits were deemed essential to social standing. Not only were visitors to the college welcome at all times in the home, but also members of the Whig Party or the legislators with whom Edward Dickinson worked. Emily Norcross Dickinson's retreat into poor health in the 1850s may well be understood as one response to such a routine.

For Dickinson, the pace of such visits was mind-numbing, and she began limiting the number of visits she made or received. She baked bread and tended the garden, but she would neither dust nor visit. There was one other duty she gladly took on. As the elder of Austin's two sisters, she slotted herself into the expected role of counselor and confidante. In the 19th century the sister was expected to act as moral guide to her brother; Dickinson rose to that requirement-but on her own terms. Known at school as a "wit," she put a sharp edge on her sweetest remarks. In her early letters to Austin, she represented the eldest child as the rising hope of the family. From Dickinson's perspective, Austin's safe passage to adulthood depended on two aspects of his character. With the first she was in firm agreement with the wisdom of the century: the young man should emerge from his education with a firm loyalty to home. The second was Dickinson's own invention: Austin's success depended on a ruthless intellectual honesty. If he borrowed his ideas, he failed her test of character. There were to be no pieties between them, and when she detected his own reliance on conventional wisdom, she used her language to challenge what he had left unquestioned.

In her letters to Austin in the early 1850s, while he was teaching and in the mid 1850s during his three years as a law student at Harvard, she presented herself as a keen critic, using extravagant praise to invite him to question the worth of his own perceptions. She positioned herself as a spur to his ambition, readily reminding him of her own work when she wondered about the extent of his. Dickinson's 1850s letters to Austin are marked by an intensity that did not outlast the decade. As Austin faced his own future, most of his choices defined an increasing separation between his sister's world and his. Initially lured by the prospect of going West, he decided to settle in Amherst, apparently at his father's urging. Not only did he return to his hometown, but he also joined his father in his law practice. Austin Dickinson gradually took over his father's role: He too became the citizen of Amherst, treasurer of the College, and chairman of the Cattle Show. In only one case, and an increasingly controversial one, Austin Dickinson's decision offered Dickinson the intensity she desired. His marriage to Susan Gilbert brought a new "sister" into the family, one with whom Dickinson felt she had much in common. That Gilbert's intensity was of a different order Dickinson would learn over time, but in the early 1850s, as her relationship with Austin was waning, her relationship with Gilbert was growing. Gilbert would figure powerfully in Dickinson's life as a beloved comrade, critic, and alter ego.

Born just nine days after Dickinson, Susan Gilbert entered a profoundly different world from the one she would one day share with her sister-in-law. The daughter of a tavern keeper, Sue was born at the margins of Amherst society. Her father's work defined her world as clearly as Edward Dickinson's did that of his daughters. Had her father lived, Sue might never have moved from the world of the working class to the world of educated lawyers. Sue's mother died in 1837; her father, in 1841. After her mother's death, she and her sister Martha were sent to live with their aunt in Geneva, New York. They returned periodically to Amherst to visit their older married sister, Harriet Gilbert Cutler. Sue, however, returned to Amherst to live and attend school in 1847. Enrolled at Amherst Academy while Dickinson was at Mount Holyoke, Sue was gradually included in the Dickinson circle of friends by way of her sister Martha.

The end of Sue's schooling signaled the beginning of work outside the home. She took a teaching position in Baltimore in 1851. On the eve of her departure, Amherst was in the midst of a religious revival. The community was galvanized by the strong preaching of both its regular and its visiting ministers. The Dickinson household was memorably affected. Emily Norcross Dickinson's church membership dated from 1831, a few months after Emily's birth. By the end of the revival, two more of the family members counted themselves among the saved: Edward Dickinson joined the church on August 11, 1850, the day as Susan Gilbert. Vinnie Dickinson delayed some months longer, until November. Austin Dickinson waited several more years, joining the church in 1856, the year of his marriage. The other daughter never made that profession of faith. As Dickinson wrote to her friend Jane Humphrey in 1850, "I am standing alone in rebellion."

To gauge the extent of Dickinson's rebellion, consideration must be taken of the nature of church membership at the time as well as the attitudes toward revivalist fervor. As shown by Edward Dickinson's and Susan Gilbert's decisions to join the church in 1850, church membership was not tied to any particular stage of a person's life. To be enrolled as a member was not a matter of age but of "conviction." The individuals had first to be convinced of a true conversion experience, had to believe themselves chosen by God, of his "elect." In keeping with the old-style Calvinism, the world was divided among the regenerate, the unregenerate, and those in between. The categories Mary Lyon used at Mount Holyoke ("established Christians," "without hope," and "with hope") were the standard of the revivalist. But unlike their Puritan predecessors, the members of this generation moved with greater freedom between the latter two categories. Those "without hope" might well see a different possibility for themselves after a season of intense religious focus. The 19th-century Christians of Calvinist persuasion continued to maintain the absolute power of God's election. His omnipotence could not be compromised by an individual's effort; however, the individual's unquestioning search for a true faith was an unalterable part of the salvific equation. While God would not simply choose those who chose themselves, he also would only make his choice from those present and accounted for-thus, the importance of church attendance as well as the centrality of religious self-examination. Revivals guaranteed that both would be inescapable.

As Dickinson wrote in a poem dated to 1875, "Escape is such a thankful Word." In fact, her references to "escape" occur primarily in reference to the soul. In her scheme of redemption, salvation depended upon freedom. The poem ends with praise for the "trusty word" of escape. Contrasting a vision of "the savior" with the condition of being "saved," Dickinson says there is clearly one choice: "And that is why I lay my Head / Opon this trusty word -" She invites the reader to compare one incarnation with another. Upending the Christian language about the "word," Dickinson substitutes her own agency for the incarnate savior. She will choose "escape." A decade earlier, the choice had been as apparent. In the poems from 1862 Dickinson describes the soul's defining experiences. Figuring these "events" in terms of moments, she passes from the soul's "Bandaged moments" of suspect thought to the soul's freedom. In these "moments of escape," the soul will not be confined; nor will its explosive power be contained: "The soul has moments of escape - / When bursting all the doors - / She dances like a Bomb, abroad, / And swings opon the Hours,"

Like the soul of her description, Dickinson refused to be confined by the elements expected of her. The demands of her father's, her mother's, and her dear friends' religion invariably prompted such "moments of escape." During the period of the 1850 revival in Amherst, Dickinson reported her own assessment of the circumstances. Far from using the language of "renewal" associated with revivalist vocabulary, she described a landscape of desolation darkened by an affliction of the spirit. In her "rebellion" letter to Humphrey, she wrote, "How lonely this world is growing, something so desolate creeps over the spirit and we don't know its name, and it won't go away, either Heaven is seeming greater, or Earth a great deal more small, or God is more 'Our Father,' and we feel our need increased. Christ is calling everyone here, all my companions have answered, even my darling Vinnie believes she loves, and trusts him, and I am standing alone in rebellion, and growing very careless. Abby, Mary, Jane, and farthest of all my Vinnie have been seeking, and they all believe they have found; I can't tell you what they have found, but they think it is something precious. I wonder if it is?"

Dickinson's question frames the decade. Within those 10 years she defined what was incontrovertibly precious to her. Not religion, but poetry; not the vehicle reduced to its tenor, but the process of making metaphor and watching the meaning emerge. As early as 1850 her letters suggest that her mind was turning over the possibility of her own work. Extending the contrast between herself and her friends, she described but did not specify an "aim" to her life. She announced its novelty ("I have dared to do strange things-bold things"), asserted her independence ("and have asked no advice from any"), and couched it in the language of temptation ("I have heeded beautiful tempters"). She described the winter as one long dream from which she had not yet awakened. That winter began with the gift of Ralph Waldo Emerson's Poems for New Year's. Her letters of the period are frequent and long. Their heightened language provided working space for herself as writer. In these passionate letters to her female friends, she tried out different voices. At times she sounded like the female protagonist from a contemporary novel; at times, she was the narrator who chastises her characters for their failure to see beyond complicated circumstances. She played the wit and sounded the divine, exploring the possibility of the new converts' religious faith only to come up short against its distinct unreality in her own experience. And finally, she confronted the difference imposed by that challenging change of state from daughter/sister to wife.

Lacking the letters written to Dickinson, readers cannot know whether the language of her friends matched her own, but the freedom with which Dickinson wrote to Humphrey and to Fowler suggests that their own responses encouraged hers. Perhaps this sense of encouragement was nowhere stronger than with Gilbert. Although little is known of their early relations, the letters written to Gilbert while she was teaching at Baltimore speak with a kind of hope for a shared perspective, if not a shared vocation. Recent critics have speculated that Gilbert, like Dickinson, thought of herself as a poet. Several of Dickinson's letters stand behind this speculation, as does one of the few pieces of surviving correspondence with Gilbert from 1861-their discussion and disagreement over the second stanza of Dickinson's "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers." Writing to Gilbert in 1851, Dickinson imagined that their books would one day keep company with the poets. They will not be ignominiously jumbled together with grammars and dictionaries (the fate assigned to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's in the local stationer's). Sue and Emily, she reports, are "the only poets."

Whatever Gilbert's poetic aspirations were, Dickinson clearly looked to Gilbert as one of her most important readers, if not the most important. She sent Gilbert more than 270 of her poems. Gilbert may well have read most of the poems that Dickinson wrote. In many cases the poems were written for her. They functioned as letters, with perhaps an additional line of greeting or closing. Gilbert's involvement, however, did not satisfy Dickinson. In 1850-1851 there had been some minor argument, perhaps about religion. In the mid 1850s a more serious break occurred, one that was healed, yet one that marked a change in the nature of the relationship. In a letter dated to 1854 Dickinson begins bluntly, "Sue-you can go or stay-There is but one alternative-We differ often lately, and this must be the last." The nature of the difference remains unknown. Critics have speculated about its connection with religion, with Austin Dickinson, with poetry, with their own love for each other. The nature of that love has been much debated: What did Dickinson's passionate language signify? Her words are the declarations of a lover, but such language is not unique to the letters to Gilbert. It appears in the correspondence with Fowler and Humphrey. As Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has illustrated in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (1985), female friendships in the 19th century were often passionate. But modern categories of sexual relations do not fit neatly with the verbal record of the 19th century. "The love that dare not speak its name" may well have been a kind of common parlance among mid-19th-century women.

Dickinson's own ambivalence toward marriage-an ambivalence so common as to be ubiquitous in the journals of young women-was clearly grounded in her perception of what the role of "wife" required. From her own housework as dutiful daughter, she had seen how secondary her own work became. In her observation of married women, her mother not excluded, she saw the failing health, the unmet demands, the absenting of self that was part of the husband-wife relationship. The "wife" poems of the 1860s reflect this ambivalence. The gold wears away; "amplitude" and "awe" are absent for the woman who meets the requirements of wife. The loss remains unspoken, but, like the irritating grain in the oyster's shell, it leaves behind ample evidence.

She rose to His Requirement - dropt
The Playthings of Her Life
To take the honorable Work
Of Woman, and of Wife -

If ought She missed in Her new Day,
Of Amplitude, or Awe -
Or first Prospective - Or the Gold
In using, wear away,

It lay unmentioned - as the Sea
Develope Pearl, and Weed,
But only to Himself - be known
The Fathoms they abide -

Little wonder that the words of another poem bound the woman's life by the wedding. In one line the woman is "Born-Bridalled-Shrouded."

Such thoughts did not belong to the poems alone. Writing to Gilbert in the midst of Gilbert's courtship with Austin Dickinson, only four years before their marriage, Dickinson painted a haunting picture. She began with a discussion of "union" but implied that its conventional connection with marriage was not her meaning. She wrote, "Those unions, my dear Susie, by which two lives are one, this sweet and strange adoption wherein we can but look, and are not yet admitted, how it can fill the heart, and make it gang wildly beating, how it will take us one day, and make us all it's own, and we shall not run away from it, but lie still and be happy!" The use evokes the conventional association with marriage, but as Dickinson continued her reflection, she distinguished between the imagined happiness of "union" and the parched life of the married woman. She commented, "How dull our lives must seem to the bride, and the plighted maiden, whose days are fed with gold, and who gathers pearls every evening; but to the wife, Susie, sometimes the wife forgotten, our lives perhaps seem dearer than all others in the world; you have seen flowers at morning, satisfied with the dew, and those same sweet flowers at noon with their heads bowed in anguish before the mighty sun." The bride for whom the gold has not yet worn away, who gathers pearls without knowing what lies at their core, cannot fathom the value of the unmarried woman's life. That remains to be discovered-too late-by the wife. Her wilted noon is hardly the happiness associated with Dickinson's first mention of union. Rather, that bond belongs to another relationship, one that clearly she broached with Gilbert. Defined by an illuminating aim, it is particular to its holder, yet shared deeply with another. Dickinson represents her own position, and in turn asks Gilbert whether such a perspective is not also hers: "I have always hoped to know if you had no dear fancy, illumining all your life, no one of whom you murmured in the faithful ear of night-and at whose side in fancy, you walked the livelong day." Dickinson's "dear fancy" of becoming poet would indeed illumine her life. What remained less dependable was Gilbert's accompaniment.

That Susan Dickinson would not join Dickinson in the "walk" became increasingly clear as she turned her attention to the social duties befitting the wife of a rising lawyer. Between hosting distinguished visitors (Emerson among them), presiding over various dinners, and mothering three children, Susan Dickinson's "dear fancy" was far from Dickinson's. As Dickinson had predicted, their paths diverged, but the letters and poems continued. The letters grow more cryptic, aphorism defining the distance between them. Dickinson began to divide her attention between Susan Dickinson and Susan's children. In the last decade of Dickinson's life, she apparently facilitated the extramarital affair between her brother and Mabel Loomis Todd. Regardless of outward behavior, however, Susan Dickinson remained a center to Dickinson's circumference.

As the relationship with Susan Dickinson wavered, other aspects in Dickinson's life were just coming to the fore. The 1850s marked a shift in her friendships. As her school friends married, she sought new companions. Defined by the written word, they divided between the known correspondent and the admired author. No new source of companionship for Dickinson, her books were primary voices behind her own writing. Regardless of the reading endorsed by the master in the academy or the father in the house, Dickinson read widely among the contemporary authors on both sides of the Atlantic. Among the British were the Romantic poets, the Brontë sisters, the Brownings, and George Eliot. On the American side was the unlikely company of Longfellow, Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Emerson. With a knowledge-bound sentence that suggested she knew more than she revealed, she claimed not to have read Whitman. She read Thomas Carlyle, Charles Darwin, and Matthew Arnold. Her contemporaries gave Dickinson a kind of currency for her own writing, but commanding equal ground were the Bible and Shakespeare. While the authors were here defined by their inaccessibility, the allusions in Dickinson's letters and poems suggest just how vividly she imagined her words in conversation with others.

Included in these epistolary conversations were her actual correspondents. Their number was growing. In two cases, the individuals were editors; later generations have wondered whether Dickinson saw Samuel Bowles and Josiah Holland as men who were likely to help her poetry into print. Bowles was chief editor of the Springfield Republican; Holland joined him in those duties in 1850. With both men Dickinson forwarded a lively correspondence. To each she sent many poems, and seven of those poems were printed in the paper-"Sic transit gloria mundi," "Nobody knows this little rose," "I Taste a liquor never brewed," "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers," "Flowers - Well - if anybody," "Blazing in gold and quenching in purple," and "A narrow fellow in the grass." The language in Dickinson's letters to Bowles is similar to the passionate language of her letters to Susan Gilbert Dickinson. She readily declared her love to him; yet, as readily declared that love to his wife, Mary. In each she hoped to find an answering spirit, and from each she settled on different conclusions. Josiah Holland never elicited declarations of love. When she wrote to him, she wrote primarily to his wife. In contrast to the friends who married, Mary Holland became a sister she did not have to forfeit.

These friendships were in their early moments in 1853 when Edward Dickinson took up residence in Washington as he entered what he hoped would be the first of many terms in Congress. With their father's absence, Vinnie and Emily Dickinson spent more time visiting-staying with the Hollands in Springfield or heading to Washington. In 1855 after one such visit, the sisters stopped in Philadelphia on their return to Amherst. Staying with their Amherst friend Eliza Coleman, they likely attended church with her. The minister in the pulpit was Charles Wadsworth, renowned for his preaching and pastoral care. Dickinson found herself interested in both. She eventually deemed Wadsworth one of her "Masters." No letters from Dickinson to Wadsworth are extant, and yet the correspondence with Mary Holland indicates that Holland forwarded many letters from Dickinson to Wadsworth. The content of those letters is unknown. That Dickinson felt the need to send them under the covering hand of Holland suggests an intimacy critics have long puzzled over. As with Susan Dickinson, the question of relationship seems irreducible to familiar terms. While many have assumed a "love affair"-and in certain cases, assumption extends to a consummation in more than words-there is little evidence to support a sensationalized version. The only surviving letter written by Wadsworth to Dickinson dates from 1862. It speaks of the pastor's concern for one of his flock: "I am distressed beyond measure at your note, received this moment, -I can only imagine the affliction which has befallen, or is now befalling you. Believe me, be what it may, you have all my sympathy, and my constant, earnest prayers." Whether her letter to him has in fact survived is not clear. There are three letters addressed to an unnamed "Master"-the so-called "Master Letters"-but they are silent on the question of whether or not the letters were sent and if so, to whom. The second letter in particular speaks of "affliction" through sharply expressed pain. This language may have prompted Wadsworth's response, but there is no conclusive evidence.

Edward Dickinson did not win reelection and thus turned his attention to his Amherst residence after his defeat in November 1855. At this time Edward's law partnership with his son became a daily reality. He also returned his family to the Homestead. Emily Dickinson had been born in that house; the Dickinsons had resided there for the first 10 years of her life. She had also spent time at the Homestead with her cousin John Graves and with Susan Dickinson during Edward Dickinson's term in Washington. It became the center of Dickinson's daily world from which she sent her mind "out upon Circumference," writing hundreds of poems and letters in the rooms she had known for most of her life. It was not, however, a solitary house but increasingly became defined by its proximity to the house next door. Austin Dickinson and Susan Gilbert married in July 1856. They settled in the Evergreens, the house newly built down the path from the Homestead.

For Dickinson, the next years were both powerful and difficult. Her letters reflect the centrality of friendship in her life. As she commented to Bowles in 1858, "My friends are my 'estate.' Forgive me then the avarice to hoard them." By this time in her life, there were significant losses to that "estate" through death-her first "Master," Leonard Humphrey, in 1850; the second, Benjamin Newton, in 1853. There were also the losses through marriage and the mirror of loss, departure from Amherst. Whether comforting Mary Bowles on a stillbirth, remembering the death of a friend's wife, or consoling her cousins Frances and Louise Norcross after their mother's death, her words sought to accomplish the impossible. "Split lives-never 'get well,'" she commented; yet, in her letters she wrote into that divide, offering images to hold these lives together. Her approach forged a particular kind of connection. In these years, she turned increasingly to the cryptic style that came to define her writing. The letters are rich in aphorism and dense with allusion. She asks her reader to complete the connection her words only imply-to round out the context from which the allusion is taken, to take the part and imagine a whole. Through her letters, Dickinson reminds her correspondents that their broken worlds are not a mere chaos of fragments. Behind the seeming fragments of her short statements lies the invitation to remember the world in which each correspondent shares a certain and rich knowledge with the other. They alone know the extent of their connections; the friendship has given them the experiences peculiar to the relation.

At the same time that Dickinson was celebrating friendship, she was also limiting the amount of daily time she spent with other people. By 1858, when she solicited a visit from her cousin Louise Norcross, Dickinson reminded Norcross that she was "one of the ones from whom I do not run away." Much, and in all likelihood too much, has been made of Dickinson's decision to restrict her visits with other people. She has been termed "recluse" and "hermit." Both terms sensationalize a decision that has come to be seen as eminently practical. As Dickinson's experience taught her, household duties were anathema to other activities. The visiting alone was so time-consuming as to be prohibitive in itself. As she turned her attention to writing, she gradually eased out of the countless rounds of social calls. Sometime in 1858 she began organizing her poems into distinct groupings. These "fascicles," as Mabel Loomis Todd, Dickinson's first editor, termed them, comprised fair copies of the poems, several written on a page, the pages sewn together. By 1860 Dickinson had written more than 150 poems. At the same time, she pursued an active correspondence with many individuals. For Dickinson, letter writing was "visiting" at its best. It was focused and uninterrupted. Other callers would not intrude. It winnowed out "polite conversation." The correspondents could speak their minds outside the formulas of parlor conversation. Foremost, it meant an active engagement in the art of writing. If Dickinson began her letters as a kind of literary apprenticeship, using them to hone her skills of expression, she turned practice into performance. The genre offered ample opportunity for the play of meaning.

By the late 1850s the poems as well as the letters begin to speak with their own distinct voice. They shift from the early lush language of the 1850s valentines to their signature economy of expression. The poems dated to 1858 already carry the familiar metric pattern of the hymn. The alternating four-beat/three-beat lines are marked by a brevity in turn reinforced by Dickinson's syntax. Her poems followed both the cadence and the rhythm of the hymn form she adopted. This form was fertile ground for her poetic exploration. Through its faithful predictability, she could play content off against form. While certain lines accord with their place in the hymn-either leading the reader to the next line or drawing a thought to its conclusion-the poems are as likely to upend the structure so that the expected moment of cadence includes the words that speak the greatest ambiguity. In the following poem, the hymn meter is respected until the last line. A poem built from biblical quotations, it undermines their certainty through both rhythm and image. In the first stanza Dickinson breaks lines one and three with her asides to the implied listener. The poem is figured as a conversation about who enters Heaven. It begins with biblical references, then uses the story of the rich man's difficulty as the governing image for the rest of the poem. Unlike Christ's counsel to the young man, however, Dickinson's images turn decidedly secular. She places the reader in a world of commodity with its brokers and discounts, its dividends and costs. The neat financial transaction ends on a note of incompleteness created by rhythm, sound, and definition. The final line is truncated to a single iamb, the final word ends with an open double s sound, and the word itself describes uncertainty:

You're right - "the way is narrow"
And "difficult the Gate" -
And "few there be" - Correct again -
That "enter in - thereat" -

'Tis Costly - so are purples!
'Tis just the price of Breath -
With but the "Discount" of the Grave -
Termed by the Brokers - "Death"!

And after that - there's Heaven -
The Good man's - " Dividend" -
And Bad men - "go to Jail" -
I guess -

The late 1850s marked the beginning of Dickinson's greatest poetic period. By 1865 she had written nearly 1,100 poems. Bounded on one side by Austin and Susan Dickinson's marriage and on the other by severe difficulty with her eyesight, the years between held an explosion of expression in both poems and letters. Her own stated ambitions are cryptic and contradictory. Later critics have read the epistolary comments about her own "wickedness" as a tacit acknowledgment of her poetic ambition. In contrast to joining the church, she joined the ranks of the writers, a potentially suspect group. Distrust, however, extended only to certain types. If Dickinson associated herself with the Wattses and the Cowpers, she occupied respected literary ground; if she aspired toward Pope or Shakespeare, she crossed into the ranks of the "libertine." Dickinson's poems themselves suggest she made no such distinctions-she blended the form of Watts with the content of Shakespeare. She described personae of her poems as disobedient children and youthful "debauchees."

The place she envisioned for her writing is far from clear. Did she pursue the friendships with Bowles and Holland in the hope that these editors would help her poetry into print? Did she identify her poems as apt candidates for inclusion in the "Portfolio" pages of newspapers, or did she always imagine a different kind of circulation for her writing? Dickinson apologized for the public appearance of her poem "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass," claiming that it had been stolen from her, but her own complicity in such theft remains unknown. Her April 1862 letter to the well-known literary figure Thomas Wentworth Higginson certainly suggests a particular answer. Written as a response to his Atlantic Monthly article "Letter to a Young Contributor" -the lead article in the April issue-her intention seems unmistakable. She sent him four poems, one of which she had worked over several times. With this gesture she placed herself in the ranks of "young contributor," offering him a sample of her work, hoping for its acceptance. Her accompanying letter, however, does not speak the language of publication. It decidedly asks for his estimate; yet, at the same time it couches the request in terms far different from the vocabulary of the literary marketplace:

Mr. Higginson,

Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?

The Mind is so near itself-it cannot see, distinctly-and I have none to ask-

Should you think it breathed-and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude-

If I make the mistake-that you dared to tell me-would give me sincerer honor-toward you-

I enclose my name-asking you, if you please-Sir-to tell me what is true?

That you will not betray me-it is needless to ask-since Honor is it's own pawn-

Higginson's response is not extant. It can only be gleaned from Dickinson's subsequent letters. In them she makes clear that Higginson's response was far from an enthusiastic endorsement. She speaks of the "surgery" he performed; she asks him if the subsequent poems that she has sent are "more orderly."

Higginson himself was intrigued but not impressed. His first recorded comments about Dickinson's poetry are dismissive. In a letter to Atlantic Monthly editor James T. Fields, Higginson complained about the response to his article: "I foresee that 'Young Contributors' will send me worse things than ever now. Two such specimens of verse as came yesterday & day before-fortunately not to be forwarded for publication!" He had received Dickinson's poems the day before he wrote this letter. While Dickinson's letters clearly piqued his curiosity, he did not readily envision a published poet emerging from this poetry, which he found poorly structured. As is made clear by one of Dickinson's responses, he counseled her to work longer and harder on her poetry before she attempted its publication. Her reply, in turn, piques the later reader's curiosity. She wrote, "I smile when you suggest that I delay 'to publish'-that being foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin." What lay behind this comment? The brave cover of profound disappointment? The accurate rendering of her own ambition? Sometime in 1863 she wrote her often-quoted poem about publication with its disparaging remarks about reducing expression to a market value. At a time when slave auctions were palpably rendered for a Northern audience, she offered another example of the corrupting force of the merchant's world. The poem begins, "Publication - is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man" and ends by returning its reader to the image of the opening: "But reduce no Human Spirit / To Disgrace of Price -."

While Dickinson spoke strongly against publication once Higginson had suggested its inadvisability, her earlier remarks tell a different story. In the same letter to Higginson in which she eschews publication, she also asserts her identity as a poet. "My dying Tutor told me that he would like to live till I had been a poet." In all likelihood the tutor is Ben Newton, the lawyer who had given her Emerson's Poems. His death in 1853 suggests how early Dickinson was beginning to think of herself as a poet, but unexplained is Dickinson's view on the relationship between being a poet and being published. When she was working over her poem "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers," one of the poems included with the first letter to Higginson, she suggested that the distance between firmament and fin was not as far as it first appeared. As she reworked the second stanza again, and yet again, she indicated a future that did not preclude publication. She wrote to Sue, "Could I make you and Austin-proud-sometime-a great way off-'twould give me taller feet." Written sometime in 1861, the letter predates her exchange with Higginson. Again, the frame of reference is omitted. One can only conjecture what circumstance would lead to Austin and Susan Dickinson's pride. That such pride is in direct relation to Dickinson's poetry is unquestioned; that it means publication is not. Given her penchant for double meanings, her anticipation of "taller feet" might well signal a change of poetic form. Her ambition lay in moving from brevity to expanse, but this movement again is the later reader's speculation. The only evidence is the few poems published in the 1850s and 1860s and a single poem published in the 1870s.

This minimal publication, however, was not a retreat to a completely private expression. Her poems circulated widely among her friends, and this audience was part and parcel of women's literary culture in the 19th century. She sent poems to nearly all her correspondents; they in turn may well have read those poems with their friends. Dickinson's poems were rarely restricted to her eyes alone. She continued to collect her poems into distinct packets. The practice has been seen as her own trope on domestic work: she sewed the pages together. Poetry was by no means foreign to women's daily tasks-mending, sewing, stitching together the material to clothe the person. Unremarked, however, is its other kinship. Her work was also the minister's. Preachers stitched together the pages of their sermons, a task they apparently undertook themselves.

Dickinson's comments on herself as poet invariably implied a widespread audience. As she commented to Higginson in 1862, "My Business is Circumference." She adapted that phrase to two other endings, both of which reinforced the expansiveness she envisioned for her work. To the Hollands she wrote, " My business is to love. ... My Business is to Sing." In all versions of that phrase, the guiding image evokes boundlessness. In song the sound of the voice extends across space, and the ear cannot accurately measure its dissipating tones. Love is idealized as a condition without end. Even the "circumference"-the image that Dickinson returned to many times in her poetry-is a boundary that suggests boundlessness. As Emerson's essay "Circles" may well have taught Dickinson, another circle can always be drawn around any circumference. When, in Dickinson's terms, individuals go "out upon Circumference," they stand on the edge of an unbounded space. Dickinson's use of the image refers directly to the project central to her poetic work. It appears in the structure of her declaration to Higginson; it is integral to the structure and subjects of the poems themselves. The key rests in the small word is. In her poetry Dickinson set herself the double-edged task of definition. Her poems frequently identify themselves as definitions: "'Hope' is the thing with feathers," "Renunciation-is a piercing Virtue," "Remorse-is Memory-awake," or "Eden is that old fashioned House." As these examples illustrate, Dickinsonian definition is inseparable from metaphor. The statement that says "is" is invariably the statement that articulates a comparison. "We see-Comparatively," Dickinson wrote, and her poems demonstrate that assertion. In the world of her poetry, definition proceeds via comparison. One cannot say directly what is; essence remains unnamed and unnameable. In its place the poet articulates connections created out of correspondence. In some cases the abstract noun is matched with a concrete object-hope figures as a bird, its appearances and disappearances signaled by the defining element of flight. In other cases, one abstract concept is connected with another, remorse described as wakeful memory; renunciation, as the "piercing virtue."

Comparison becomes a reciprocal process. Dickinson's metaphors observe no firm distinction between tenor and vehicle. Defining one concept in terms of another produces a new layer of meaning in which both terms are changed. Neither hope nor birds are seen in the same way by the end of Dickinson's poem. Dickinson frequently builds her poems around this trope of change. Her vocabulary circles around transformation, often ending before change is completed. The final lines of her poems might well be defined by their inconclusiveness: the "I guess" of "You're right - 'the way is narrow'"; a direct statement of slippage-"and then - it doesn't stay"-in "I prayed, at first, a little Girl." Dickinson's endings are frequently open. In this world of comparison, extremes are powerful. There are many negative definitions and sharp contrasts. While the emphasis on the outer limits of emotion may well be the most familiar form of the Dickinsonian extreme, it is not the only one. Dickinson's use of synecdoche is yet another version. The part that is taken for the whole functions by way of contrast. The specific detail speaks for the thing itself, but in its speaking, it reminds the reader of the difference between the minute particular and what it represents. Opposition frames the system of meaning in Dickinson's poetry: the reader knows what is, by what is not. In an early poem, " There's a certain Slant of light, (320)" Dickinson located meaning in a geography of "internal difference." Her 1862 poem " It was not Death, for I stood up, (355) " picks up on this important thread in her career.

Emily Dickinson died in Amherst in 1886. After her death her family members found her hand-sewn books, or "fascicles." These fascicles contained nearly 1,800 poems. Though Mabel Loomis Todd and Higginson published the first selection of her poems in 1890, a complete volume did not appear until 1955. Edited by Thomas H. Johnson, the poems still bore the editorial hand of Todd and Higginson. It was not until R.W. Franklin's version of Dickinson's poems appeared in 1998 that her order, unusual punctuation and spelling choices were completely restored.

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Emily Dickinson is one of America's greatest and most original poets of all time. She took definition as her province and challenged the existing definitions of poetry and the poet's work. Like writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, she experimented with...

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Illusions of empire: Amartya Sen on what British rule really did for India

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he British empire in India was in effect established at the Battle of Plassey on 23 June 1757. The battle was swift, beginning at dawn and ending close to sunset. It was a normal monsoon day, with occasional rain in the mango groves at the town of Plassey, which is between Calcutta, where the British were based, and Murshidabad, the capital of the kingdom of Bengal. It was in those mango groves that the British forces faced the Nawab Siraj-ud-Doula's army and convincingly defeated it.

British rule ended nearly 200 years later with Jawaharlal Nehru's famous speech on India's "tryst with destiny" at midnight on 14 August 1947. Two hundred years is a long time. What did the British achieve in India, and what did they fail to accomplish?

During my days as a student at a progressive school in West Bengal in the 1940s, these questions came into our discussion constantly. They remain important even today, not least because the British empire is often invoked in discussions about successful global governance. It has also been invoked to try to persuade the US to acknowledge its role as the pre-eminent imperial power in the world today: "Should the United States seek to shed - or to shoulder - the imperial load it has inherited?" the historian Niall Ferguson has asked. It is certainly an interesting question, and Ferguson is right to argue that it cannot be answered without an understanding of how the British empire rose and fell - and what it managed to do.

Arguing about all this at Santiniketan school, which had been established by Rabindranath Tagore some decades earlier, we were bothered by a difficult methodological question. How could we think about what India would have been like in the 1940s had British rule not occurred at all?

The frequent temptation to compare India in 1757 (when British rule was beginning) with India in 1947 (when the British were leaving) would tell us very little, because in the absence of British rule, India would of course not have remained the same as it was at the time of Plassey. The country would not have stood still had the British conquest not occurred. But how do we answer the question about what difference was made by British rule?

To illustrate the relevance of such an "alternative history", we may consider another case - one with a potential imperial conquest that did not in fact occur. Let's think about Commodore Matthew Perry of the US navy, who steamed into the bay of Edo in Japan in 1853 with four warships. Now consider the possibility that Perry was not merely making a show of American strength (as was in fact the case), but was instead the advance guard of an American conquest of Japan, establishing a new American empire in the land of the rising sun, rather as Robert Clive did in India. If we were to assess the achievements of the supposed American rule of Japan through the simple device of comparing Japan before that imperial conquest in 1853 with Japan after the American domination ended, whenever that might be, and attribute all the differences to the effects of the American empire, we would miss all the contributions of the Meiji restoration from 1868 onwards, and of other globalising changes that were going on. Japan did not stand still; nor would India have done so.

While we can see what actually happened in Japan under Meiji rule, it is extremely hard to guess with any confidence what course the history of the Indian subcontinent would have taken had the British conquest not occurred. Would India have moved, like Japan, towards modernisation in an increasingly globalising world, or would it have remained resistant to change, like Afghanistan, or would it have hastened slowly, like Thailand?

These are impossibly difficult questions to answer. And yet, even without real alternative historical scenarios, there are some limited questions that can be answered, which may contribute to an intelligent understanding of the role that British rule played in India. We can ask: what were the challenges that India faced at the time of the British conquest, and what happened in those critical areas during the British rule?

here was surely a need for major changes in a rather chaotic and institutionally backward India. To recognise the need for change in India in the mid-18th century does not require us to ignore - as many Indian super-nationalists fear - the great achievements in India's past, with its extraordinary history of accomplishments in philosophy, mathematics, literature, arts, architecture, music, medicine, linguistics and astronomy. India had also achieved considerable success in building a thriving economy with flourishing trade and commerce well before the colonial period - the economic wealth of India was amply acknowledged by British observers such as Adam Smith.

The fact is, nevertheless, that even with those achievements, in the mid-18th century India had in many ways fallen well behind what was being achieved in Europe. The exact nature and significance of this backwardness were frequent subjects of lively debates in the evenings at my school.

An insightful essay on India by Karl Marx particularly engaged the attention of some of us. Writing in 1853, Marx pointed to the constructive role of British rule in India, on the grounds that India needed some radical re-examination and self-scrutiny. And Britain did indeed serve as India's primary western contact, particularly in the course of the 19th century. The importance of this influence would be hard to neglect. The indigenous globalised culture that was slowly emerging in India was deeply indebted not only to British writing, but also to books and articles in other - that is non-English - European languages that became known in India through the British.

Figures such as the Calcutta philosopher Ram Mohan Roy, born in 1772, were influenced not only by traditional knowledge of Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian texts, but also by the growing familiarity with English writings. After Roy, in Bengal itself there were also Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Madhusudan Dutta and several generations of Tagores and their followers who were re-examining the India they had inherited in the light of what they saw happening in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. Their main - often their only - source of information were the books (usually in English) circulating in India, thanks to British rule. That intellectual influence, covering a wide range of European cultures, survives strongly today, even as the military, political and economic power of the British has declined dramatically.

I was persuaded that Marx was basically right in his diagnosis of the need for some radical change in India, as its old order was crumbling as a result of not having been a part of the intellectual and economic globalisation that the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution had initiated across the world (along with, alas, colonialism).

There was arguably, however, a serious flaw in Marx's thesis, in particular in his implicit presumption that the British conquest was the only window on the modern world that could have opened for India. What India needed at the time was more constructive globalisation, but that is not the same thing as imperialism. The distinction is important. Throughout India's long history, it persistently enjoyed exchanges of ideas as well as of commodities with the outside world. Traders, settlers and scholars moved between India and further east - China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and elsewhere - for a great many centuries, beginning more than 2,000 years ago. The far-reaching influence of this movement - especially on language, literature and architecture - can be seen plentifully even today. There were also huge global influences by means of India's open-frontier attitude in welcoming fugitives from its early days.

Jewish immigration into India began right after the fall of Jerusalem in the first century and continued for many hundreds of years. Baghdadi Jews, such as the highly successful Sassoons, came in large numbers even as late as the 18th century. Christians started coming at least from the fourth century, and possibly much earlier. There are colourful legends about this, including one that tells us that the first person St Thomas the Apostle met after coming to India in the first century was a Jewish girl playing the flute on the Malabar coast. We loved that evocative - and undoubtedly apocryphal - anecdote in our classroom discussions, because it illustrated the multicultural roots of Indian traditions.

The Parsis started arriving from the early eighth century - as soon as persecution began in their Iranian homeland. Later in that century, the Armenians began to leave their footprints from Kerala to Bengal. Muslim Arab traders had a substantial presence on the west coast of India from around that time - well before the arrival of Muslim conquerors many centuries later, through the arid terrain in the north-west of the subcontinent. Persecuted Bahá'ís from Iran came only in the 19th century.

At the time of the Battle of Plassey, there were already businessmen, traders and other professionals from a number of different European nations well settled near the mouth of the Ganges. Being subjected to imperial rule is thus not the only way of making connections with, or learning things from, foreign countries. When the Meiji Restoration established a new reformist government in Japan in 1868 (which was not unrelated to the internal political impact of Commodore Perry's show of force a decade earlier), the Japanese went straight to learning from the west without being subjected to imperialism. They sent people for training in the US and Europe, and made institutional changes that were clearly inspired by western experience. They did not wait to be coercively globalised via imperialism.

ne of the achievements to which British imperial theorists tended to give a good deal of emphasis was the role of the British in producing a united India. In this analysis, India was a collection of fragmented kingdoms until British rule made a country out of these diverse regimes. It was argued that India was previously not one country at all, but a thoroughly divided land mass. It was the British empire, so the claim goes, that welded India into a nation. Winston Churchill even remarked that before the British came, there was no Indian nation. "India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the equator," he once said.

If this is true, the empire clearly made an indirect contribution to the modernisation of India through its unifying role. However, is the grand claim about the big role of the Raj in bringing about a united India correct? Certainly, when Clive's East India Company defeated the nawab of Bengal in 1757, there was no single power ruling over all of India. Yet it is a great leap from the proximate story of Britain imposing a single united regime on India (as did actually occur) to the huge claim that only the British could have created a united India out of a set of disparate states.

That way of looking at Indian history would go firmly against the reality of the large domestic empires that had characterised India throughout the millennia. The ambitious and energetic emperors from the third century BC did not accept that their regimes were complete until the bulk of what they took to be one country was united under their rule. There were major roles here for Ashoka Maurya, the Gupta emperors, Alauddin Khalji, the Mughals and others. Indian history shows a sequential alternation of large domestic empires with clusters of fragmented kingdoms. We should therefore not make the mistake of assuming that the fragmented governance of mid-18th century India was the state in which the country typically found itself throughout history, until the British helpfully came along to unite it.

Even though in history textbooks the British were often assumed to be the successors of the Mughals in India, it is important to note that the British did not in fact take on the Mughals when they were a force to be reckoned with. British rule began when the Mughals' power had declined, though formally even the nawab of Bengal, whom the British defeated, was their subject. The nawab still swore allegiance to the Mughal emperor, without paying very much attention to his dictates. The imperial status of the Mughal authority over India continued to be widely acknowledged even though the powerful empire itself was missing.

When the so-called sepoy mutiny threatened the foundations of British India in 1857, the diverse anti-British forces participating in the joint rebellion could be aligned through their shared acceptance of the formal legitimacy of the Mughal emperor as the ruler of India. The emperor was, in fact, reluctant to lead the rebels, but this did not stop the rebels from declaring him the emperor of all India. The 82-year-old Mughal monarch, Bahadur Shah II, known as Zafar, was far more interested in reading and writing poetry than in fighting wars or ruling India. He could do little to help the 1,400 unarmed civilians of Delhi whom the British killed as the mutiny was brutally crushed and the city largely destroyed. The poet-emperor was banished to Burma, where he died.

As a child growing up in Burma in the 1930s, I was taken by my parents to see Zafar's grave in Rangoon, which was close to the famous Shwedagon Pagoda. The grave was not allowed to be anything more than an undistinguished stone slab covered with corrugated iron. I remember discussing with my father how the British rulers of India and Burma must evidently have been afraid of the evocative power of the remains of the last Mughal emperor. The inscription on the grave noted only that "Bahadur Shah was ex-King of Delhi" - no mention of "empire" in the commemoration! It was only much later, in the 1990s, that Zafar would be honoured with something closer to what could decently serve as the grave of the last Mughal emperor.

n the absence of the British Raj, the most likely successors to the Mughals would probably have been the newly emerging Hindu Maratha powers near Bombay, who periodically sacked the Mughal capital of Delhi and exercised their power to intervene across India. Already by 1742, the East India Company had built a huge "Maratha ditch" at the edge of Calcutta to slow down the lightning raids of the Maratha cavalry, which rode rapidly across 1,000 miles or more. But the Marathas were still quite far from putting together anything like the plan of an all-India empire.

The British, by contrast, were not satisfied until they were the dominant power across the bulk of the subcontinent, and in this they were not so much bringing a new vision of a united India from abroad as acting as the successor of previous domestic empires. British rule spread to the rest of the country from its imperial foundations in Calcutta, beginning almost immediately after Plassey. As the company's power expanded across India, Calcutta became the capital of the newly emerging empire, a position it occupied from the mid-18th century until 1911 (when the capital was moved to Delhi). It was from Calcutta that the conquest of other parts of India was planned and directed. The profits made by the East India Company from its economic operations in Bengal financed, to a great extent, the wars that the British waged across India in the period of their colonial expansion.

What has been called "the financial bleeding of Bengal" began very soon after Plassey. With the nawabs under their control, the company made big money not only from territorial revenues, but also from the unique privilege of duty-free trade in the rich Bengal economy - even without counting the so-called gifts that the Company regularly extracted from local merchants. Those who wish to be inspired by the glory of the British empire would do well to avoid reading Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, including his discussion of the abuse of state power by a "mercantile company which oppresses and domineers in the East Indies". As the historian William Dalrymple has observed: "The economic figures speak for themselves. In 1600, when the East India Company was founded, Britain was generating 1.8% of the world's GDP, while India was producing 22.5%. By the peak of the Raj, those figures had more or less been reversed: India was reduced from the world's leading manufacturing nation to a symbol of famine and deprivation."

While most of the loot from the financial bleeding accrued to British company officials in Bengal, there was widespread participation by the political and business leadership in Britain: nearly a quarter of the members of parliament in London owned stocks in the East India Company after Plassey. The commercial benefits from Britain's Indian empire thus reached far into the British establishment.

The robber-ruler synthesis did eventually give way to what would eventually become classical colonialism, with the recognition of the need for law and order and a modicum of reasonable governance. But the early misuse of state power by the East India Company put the economy of Bengal under huge stress. What the cartographer John Thornton, in his famous chart of the region in 1703, had described as "the Rich Kingdom of Bengal" experienced a gigantic famine during 1769-70. Contemporary estimates suggested that about a third of the Bengal population died. This is almost certainly an overestimate. There was no doubt, however, that it was a huge catastrophe, with massive starvation and mortality - in a region that had seen no famine for a very long time.

This disaster had at least two significant effects. First, the inequity of early British rule in India became the subject of considerable political criticism in Britain itself. By the time Adam Smith roundly declared in The Wealth of Nationsthat the East India Company was "altogether unfit to govern its territorial possessions", there were many British figures, such as Edmund Burke, making similar critiques. Second, the economic decline of Bengal did eventually ruin the company's business as well, hurting British investors themselves, and giving the powers in London reason to change their business in India into more of a regular state-run operation.

By the late 18th century, the period of so-called "post-Plassey plunder", with which British rule in India began, was giving way to the sort of colonial subjugation that would soon become the imperial standard, and with which the subcontinent would become more and more familiar in the following century and a half.

ow successful was this long phase of classical imperialism in British India, which lasted from the late 18th century until independence in 1947? The British claimed a huge set of achievements, including democracy, the rule of law, railways, the joint stock company and cricket, but the gap between theory and practice - with the exception of cricket - remained wide throughout the history of imperial relations between the two countries. Putting the tally together in the years of pre-independence assessment, it was easy to see how far short the achievements were compared with the rhetoric of accomplishment.

Indeed, Rudyard Kipling caught the self-congratulatory note of the British imperial administrator admirably well in his famous poem on imperialism:

Take up the White Man's burden -

The savage wars of peace -

Fill full the mouth of famine

And bid the sickness cease

Alas, neither the stopping of famines nor the remedying of ill health was part of the high-performance achievements of British rule in India. Nothing could lead us away from the fact that life expectancy at birth in India as the empire ended was abysmally low: 32 years, at most.

The abstemiousness of colonial rule in neglecting basic education reflects the view taken by the dominant administrators of the needs of the subject nation. There was a huge asymmetry between the ruler and the ruled. The British government became increasingly determined in the 19th century to achieve universal literacy for the native British population. In contrast, the literacy rates in India under the Raj were very low. When the empire ended, the adult literacy rate in India was barely 15%. The only regions in India with comparatively high literacy were the "native kingdoms" of Travancore and Cochin (formally outside the British empire), which, since independence, have constituted the bulk of the state of Kerala. These kingdoms, though dependent on the British administration for foreign policy and defence, had remained technically outside the empire and had considerable freedom in domestic policy, which they exercised in favour of more school education and public health care.

The 200 years of colonial rule were also a period of massive economic stagnation, with hardly any advance at all in real GNP per capita. These grim facts were much aired after independence in the newly liberated media, whose rich culture was in part - it must be acknowledged - an inheritance from British civil society. Even though the Indian media was very often muzzled during the Raj - mostly to prohibit criticism of imperial rule, for example at the time of the Bengal famine of 1943 - the tradition of a free press, carefully cultivated in Britain, provided a good model for India to follow as the country achieved independence.

Indeed, India received many constructive things from Britain that did not - could not - come into their own until after independence. Literature in the Indian languages took some inspiration and borrowed genres from English literature, including the flourishing tradition of writing in English. Under the Raj, there were restrictions on what could be published and propagated (even some of Tagore's books were banned). These days the government of India has no such need, but alas - for altogether different reasons of domestic politics - the restrictions are sometimes no less intrusive than during the colonial rule.

Nothing is perhaps as important in this respect as the functioning of a multiparty democracy and a free press. But often enough these were not gifts that could be exercised under the British administration during imperial days. They became realisable only when the British left - they were the fruits of learning from Britain's own experience, which India could use freely only after the period of empire had ended. Imperial rule tends to require some degree of tyranny: asymmetrical power is not usually associated with a free press or with a vote-counting democracy, since neither of them is compatible with the need to keep colonial subjects in check.

similar scepticism is appropriate about the British claim that they had eliminated famine in dependent territories such as India. British governance of India began with the famine of 1769-70, and there were regular famines in India throughout the duration of British rule. The Raj also ended with the terrible famine of 1943. In contrast, there has been no famine in India since independence in 1947.

The irony again is that the institutions that ended famines in independent India - democracy and an independent media - came directly from Britain. The connection between these institutions and famine prevention is simple to understand. Famines are easy to prevent, since the distribution of a comparatively small amount of free food, or the offering of some public employment at comparatively modest wages (which gives the beneficiaries the ability to buy food), allows those threatened by famine the ability to escape extreme hunger. So any government should be able stop a threatening famine - large or small - and it is very much in the interest of a government in a functioning democracy, facing a free press, to do so. A free press makes the facts of a developing famine known to all, and a democratic vote makes it hard to win elections during - or after - a famine, hence giving a government the additional incentive to tackle the issue without delay.

India did not have this freedom from famine for as long as its people were without their democratic rights, even though it was being ruled by the foremost democracy in the world, with a famously free press in the metropolis - but not in the colonies. These freedom-oriented institutions were for the rulers but not for the imperial subjects.

In the powerful indictment of British rule in India that Tagore presented in 1941, he argued that India had gained a great deal from its association with Britain, for example, from "discussions centred upon Shakespeare's drama and Byron's poetry and above all ... the large-hearted liberalism of 19th-century English politics". The tragedy, he said, came from the fact that what "was truly best in their own civilisation, the upholding of dignity of human relationships, has no place in the British administration of this country". Indeed, the British could not have allowed Indian subjects to avail themselves of these freedoms without threatening the empire itself.

The distinction between the role of Britain and that of British imperialism could not have been clearer. As the union jack was being lowered across India, it was a distinction of which we were profoundly aware.
Adapted from Home in the World: A Memoir by Amartya Sen, published by Allen Lane on 8 July and available at guardianbookshop.com
This article was amended on 29 June 2021. Owing to an editing error, an earlier version incorrectly referred to Karl Marx writing on India in 1953. The essay was written in 1853.

Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here.

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Amartya Sen: what British rule really did for India

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The long read: It is true that before British rule, India was starting to fall behind other parts of the world - but many of the arguments defending the Raj are based on serious misconceptions about India's past, imperialism and history itself

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Eminent Victorians: 19th-century celebrity portraits – in pictures

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Eminent Victorians: 19th-century celebrity portraits - in pictures

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As a new picture of Billy the Kid goes on sale for $1m, these photographs showcase some of the most significant people of the 19th century to be captured on camera

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Palaces of Pleasure by Lee Jackson review – how the Victorians were amused

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Palaces of Pleasure by Lee Jackson review - how the Victorians were amused

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From tightrope walkers with firework hats to raunchy music hall songs - an engaging account of how mass entertainment was invented in the 19th century

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"The Depiction of Dualism in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" 

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"The Depiction of Dualism in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" 

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BY EMILY DICKINSON

I started Early – Took my Dog –

And visited the Sea –

The Mermaids in the Basement

Came out to look at me –

And Frigates – in the Upper Floor

Extended Hempen Hands –

Presuming Me to be a Mouse –

Aground – opon the Sands –

But no Man moved Me – till the Tide

Went past my simple Shoe –

And past my Apron – and my Belt

And past my Boddice – too –

And made as He would eat me up –

As wholly as a Dew

Opon a Dandelion's Sleeve –

And then – I started – too –

And He – He followed – close behind –

I felt His Silver Heel

Opon my Ancle – Then My Shoes

Would overflow with Pearl –

Until We met the Solid Town –

No One He seemed to know –

And bowing – with a Mighty look –

At me – The Sea withdrew –

“I started Early—took my Dog” reprinted electronically by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed. J520, Cambridge, Mass.:

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What we can learn from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's years in lockdown

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he expression of frustration could have been sent from any tier in travel-restricted Britain: "Where do you go in July? For me, I cant answer. I am longing to go to London, & hoping to the last. That is all. For the present, ... certainly the window has been opened twice - an inch - but my physician shakes his head or changes the conversation (which is worse) whenever London is mentioned. But if it becomes possible, I shall go - will go! Putting it off to another summer is like a never."

In fact, it was mailed from Torquay in June 1840, by someone who had already spent two years in virtual lockdown there. Its recipient was Richard Hengist Horne, a literary man about town. Horne has since fallen into obscurity, but the letter writer would go on to become world famous as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, author of many pioneering works, including one of the best-known poems ever written, "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways".

For now, though, she was an emerging talent struggling to keep any sense of herself as a writer alive. The success of her The Seraphim and Other Poems two years earlier had been eclipsed by the onset of severe illness that prompted her medical evacuation from the polluted capital. As a result she was feeling isolated, and left behind. As she confided to another friend: "What claim had I in my solitude & sadness & helpless hopeless sickness upon a literary man overwhelmed with occupation & surrounded by friends & fitnesses of all sorts in London?"

Elizabeth shared a 'bubble' with an aunt, a sister and brother, 'quenching the energies of their lives' in a limited existence

In fact, she wasn't alone in her isolation. Bad health was good business for 19th-century Torquay. Wealthy invalids flocked to the south Devon town for its sunshine and sea air. Local landlords and tradesmen profited from the absence of any effective cure for illnesses as various as gout, tuberculosis and plain old asthma. So did doctors, whose quack remedies included cupping, bleeding and herbal decoctions. The 34-year-old was among many incomers settling round its picturesque harbour. Here she shared a family "bubble" with an aunt, sister and favourite brother, all "quenching the energies of their lives" in this frustratingly limited existence; her wider social and professional life would remain entirely virtual for years. In 1845 she would still be writing to Robert Browning, "As for me, I have done most of my talking by the post of late years - as people shut up in dungeons, take up with scrawling mottos on the walls."

Like many wealthy invalids of the 19th century, Elizabeth fled to Torquay for its sunshine and sea air. Photograph: Ading Audah/GuardianWitness

Elizabeth had lived with chronic illness, self-isolating on and off, for much of her adult life. The emergency that precipitated her flight to Torquay was coughing up blood. Unlike John Keats, however, she seems to have had not tuberculosis, but bronchitis and asthma that, without modern clinical treatments, eventually merged into pneumonia, to kill her at 55. For this brilliant woman, who was writing poems at six and French dramas at 10, and whose first book was published at 14, "the straitness of my prison" was becoming intolerable.

As a robust, outdoorsy child she had planned (in no particular order) to become the greatest female poet ever, to help liberate Greece from Ottoman rule, and to become Lord Byron 's girlfriend. But when she was 15, she and her sisters caught an undiagnosed illness, quickly followed by measles, which in Elizabeth turned to months of headaches and whole-body muscular spasms. Today, her diagnosis would probably be viral illness and post-viral syndrome. Unfortunately, medicine of the time used the spine as a metonym for any systemic illness - and treated it accordingly. The teenager was confined to a spinal sling for nine months. She emerged scarcely able to walk, and her health never fully recovered.

In 2018, when I started writing the first biography of Barrett Browning in three decades, a mysterious respiratory illness that clinicians were helpless to understand or alleviate appeared remote, colourfully old-fashioned. And she seemed a most unlikely role model. I'd absorbed the cultural cliche of the neurasthenic poetess in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Rudolf Besier's Broadway hit that spawned three films and seven TV dramas. Now I found myself wading through theoretical and fictional speculation about psychosomatic symptoms, a feminist retreat to the couch, or all-round privileged weediness. Just like the pandemic conspiracy theories that were beginning to crop up on my social media, these speculations seemed obsessed with avoiding the brutal truth of human vulnerability: denying the fact of illness which, though today clinically manageable in the west, still kills millions in the absence of, for example, antibiotics or steroid inhalers.

By 2020, as I continued to track her lifelong search for the clean, warm air that would let her breathe, Barrett Browning's struggle for life took on an ugly new meaning. It became increasingly hard to spend days thinking about someone racked with coughing, fighting for breath and profoundly frustrated in all she wanted to do, when every time I stood up from my work table it was to hear more of the same. Her oscillation between frustration and fear became comprehensible, immediate and at times almost overwhelming. To write biography is after all to take on your subject on her own terms - and, like all writing, that means putting your self in the frame, whether you mean to or not.

Lockdown taught her actively to embrace the freedom to travel when it came: something I recognise in the travel plans friends are sharing now

Yet the same material was also offering me a fascinating insight into how to cope with what was going on in my own world. Elizabeth was one of the first cultural influencers to understand how a virtual existence offers escape from daily life, "The escape from pangs of heart & bodily weakness ... when you throw off yourself ... what you feel to be yourself ... into another atmosphere & into other relations, where your life may spread its wings out new," as she explained it to Browning. She escaped via paper rather than a screen, of course; but her grasp of self-invention through a kind of "second life" reminded me of all the friendships we were suddenly reconfiguring on Zoom. I also realised how closely her practice prefigured today's digital communicators: not just the teenagers and geeks, bloggers and TikTok stars, but citizen journalists, activists and those policed by authoritarian regimes too.

For in creating this virtual presence Barrett Browning went further than just building a form of personal freedom. In 1844 she published Poems, the book that consolidated her reputation and would lead to her nomination for poet laureate (though it took Britain another century and a half to actually appoint a woman). It also ushered in her modernising style, with its conversational language, story-telling drive - and ethical imperatives. Together with Alfred Tennyson and, later, Browning, she was signalling the end of Romanticism and the start of a distinctively Victorian way of writing for a new, mass audience. Changing the course of literary history, from this point on she would achieve international celebrity, and influence writers as varied as Emily Dickinson, John Ruskin, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling and Virginia Woolf.

Key to her new way of writing was its use of influence. Barrett Browning might be confined to her room but, like Charles Dickens, she deployed her fame, and rapidly widening readership, to advocate against key injustices of her day. Her still-shocking "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" was published in an abolitionist fundraiser in 1848; she also wrote fundraiser poetry for the Ragged Schools movement giving poor kids an education, and had published an impassioned condemnation of child labour, "The Cry of the Children", in the mass-circulation Blackwood's Magazine. In "The Runaway Slave" and in Aurora Leigh she condemned rape and forced prostitution - rather than their victims. Finally, "Casa Guidi Windows" and other late poems forced the Italian anti-imperial struggle on the attention of British readers, and it's for this that she would receive a hero's funeral in Florence.

Freedom in Florence ... when they married, Elizabeth and Robert Browning ran away to Italy together. Photograph: Mira/Alamy

Elizabeth's life story isn't just a useful guide to working around isolation, though. There was, eventually, an end to lockdown. Poems (1844) had also inspired the young Robert Browning to contact her. When the pair eventually married, it was to Italy that they ran away together. The next 15 years, though latterly marred by the recurrence of Elizabeth's ill-health, were a period of glorious nomadism. Working from abroad and searching about to create their ideal lifestyle, first in Pisa and then in Florence - with stays in Rome, Paris, London and Le Havre - the Brownings lived the life of perpetual adventure that today's digital nomads have rediscovered.

From the first moment, "it was all glorious, & past speaking of". A southern climate, fresh air and fresh food allowed Elizabeth to get really well for the first time in her adult life. The couple stayed in a medieval collegio, in spa towns and Tuscan villas, eventually settling on the first floor apartment in a palazzo near Florence's Boboli Gardens that Elizabeth would name Casa Guidi. They adopted Italian habits including the evening passeggiata, while tapping into the expat community's local knowledge. Food was a particular revelation: "We dine our favorite way on thrushes & Chianti with a miraculous cheapness - It is a continental fashion, which we never cease commending. Then at six we have coffee & rolls of milk - made of milk, I mean: & at nine, our supper (call it supper, if you please) of roast chesnuts & grapes - "

British visitors have embraced the Med since the days of the grand tour. What differentiated the Brownings was that they continued to send work back to publishers in London and the US; and to keep up with fellow writers and artists through mail and visits. Elizabeth proved as determined to sustain her writing life as she had been to carve it out. In the model she created in Florence - of a home from home, in which to work fromhome - I think she found the perfect response to her lockdown life. Necessary as that had been, it taught her actively to embrace the freedom to travel when it came: something I recognise in the travel plans friends are sharing now for "when this is all over".

Besides, the shadow cast by those years of isolation was surely what made her pay such passionate attention when she found herself in Italy, and campaign so hard for the country's future: rather as we debate organising society differently from now on. When our lockdown ends, I've realised, we could do worse than throw ourselves into campaigning for change, whether for social justice or the planet we find ourselves on. Just like that remarkable pioneer Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

* Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning by Fiona Sampson is published by Profile on 18 February.

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What we can learn from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's years in lockdown

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he expression of frustration could have been sent from any tier in travel-restricted Britain: "Where do you go in July? For me, I cant answer. I am longing to go to London, & hoping to the last. That is all. For the present, ...

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A woman sits engrossed in her reading, long hair hanging lose at her shoulders, feet slung over the arm of a chair. However you imagine George Eliot, it's probably not like this. The few existing portraits of the novelist fix her in an era far removed from our own, conveying an ethereal gravity that jives with the reverential image peddled after her death in 1880. It was thanks largely to a capacious biography by her financial advisor and, briefly, husband, John Cross that Eliot came to be posthumously lauded as what literary biographer Lyndall Gordon dubs a "wise angel", one whose shadow would for a long time obscure the earthier, more radical aspects of her personality and experience. Yet for her fellow writer and sometime housemate, William Hale White, she remained fixed in his memory as the kind of woman who thought nothing of assuming that most un-Victorian of poses. "She was really one of the most sceptical, unusual creatures I ever knew," he recalled, describing her sitting in this way and calling her an "insurgent" writer.

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On the bicentenary of her birth, White's impressions serve as a reminder that while her novels are enduringly essential, certain aspects of Eliot's life - its challenges, its scandals, its joys - convey equally timeless wisdom. In her fiction, she gave us unforgettable female characters whose travails continue to inform readers about ambition, love, and the importance of resisting convention; through her life, she teaches us about daring to grasp happiness even when it comes at a cost, about staying true to yourself and believing that it's never too late - and about the importance of an open mind.

She was born Mary Ann Evans on 22 November 1819, the youngest child of a mill owner's daughter and the manager of the Arbury Hall Estate in Warwickshire. Home was Griff House in the countryside close to Nuneaton, though she was sent to boarding school at just five years old. Following her mother's death, she left education to become her father's housekeeper at the age of 16, and at 21, moved with him to Coventry. It was his belief that she needed to marry but she was instead taken under the wing of Charles and Cara Bray, whose house, Rosehill, was a hub of radical views, and whose guests included Ralph Waldo Emerson. Through the friendship and support of the Rosehill circle, she began to feel her way into a life very different from anything she'd been schooled to imagine. Higher education for women was still decades off, but translation was one entry point into intellectual society, and she began translating works of liberal theology and writing book reviews.
Challenging convention
In 1850, by which time she was signing herself 'Marian' Evans, she moved to London, lodging on the Strand in the home of publisher John Chapman. Complications ensued - there was a flirtation, possibly more, between Eliot and Chapman, who was already living in a ménage-à-trois with his wife and the governess of his children. This doomed attachment was followed by another, to polymath Herbert Spencer, whose works, including The Synthetic Philosophy, collectively sold around a million copies.

As they spent more and more time together platonically, Spencer feared that Eliot might fall in love with him - conceited, perhaps, but then that's exactly what happened. Understanding that he would never feel the same way (she frequently sent up her own supposedly uncomely visage in youthful letters), she nevertheless proposed to him, hoping that their intellectual companionship might be enough. The pluck that this took is matched only by her subsequent determination, once spurned, to maintain the friendship.

That period of Eliot's life, when she was a social outcast, became her most productive

Eventually, she fell for another writer, George Henry Lewes. Urbane and famously ugly, he was trapped in a marriage to a wife who'd long been the lover of another man and had even borne children by him. Yet it was Eliot who truly scandalised society when she decided to openly cohabit with the still-married Lewes. So lurid was the moral stain that Eliot couldn't risk seeing female friends without tarring their reputations by association. Her bravery should not be underestimated: without the legal protection of marriage, the danger of being abandoned was great.

It was by all accounts a harmonious, productive union of minds and temperaments. Judging from comments made to the artist Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, Eliot was quite satisfied with the physical side of her relationship, too. (As Lena Dunham jubilantly tweeted of the author's Wikipedia entry in 2013: "she was ugly AND horny!")

That period of Eliot's life, when she was a social outcast, became her most productive. It's delved into deeply in Kathy O'Shaughnessy's newly published debut novel, In Love with George Eliot. The title is instructive. Eliot aficionados may not engage in the same fancy-dress shenanigans as Janeites, but her work nevertheless has an intense impact on its fans.

As New Yorker journalist Rebecca Mead wrote in her own lucid biblio-memoir, The Road to Middlemarch: My Life with George Eliot, "There are books that seem to comprehend us just as much as we understand them, or even more." Ever since Mead read it as a teenager, Middlemarch has been just such a book, and it's the same for O'Shaughnessy, who explains: "To this day I recall breaking up with a boyfriend, and feeling terrible and very alone, and the way Eliot's voice in that book kept me company. She was, I felt, understanding and sympathetic - as no one in life had yet been."

It was through her writing that Eliot would slowly reclaim her reputation. In 1857, she published her first fiction in Blackwood's Magazine, using the now-famous male nom de plume by which she's remembered, and which would stick even after her cover was blown.
Cult fiction
Then, in the year she turned 40, she published Adam Bede, her first novel and a bestseller - even Queen Victoria was a fan. It was followed immediately by The Mill on the Floss, whose restless, defiant protagonist Maggie Tulliver became a cult figure for women in the 1860s, Emily Dickinson and Henry James's niece among them.

For O'Shaughnessy, Eliot's life and work embody two contradictory traits: her ability to think and act for herself to an unusual degree, and her sensitivity to the world's opinion. That last characteristic ties in with the explanation Gordon conjures up for Eliot's decision to style herself "Mrs Lewes". She may have rebelled against society, but she still had a very human need for acceptance. An awareness of that quality in herself in turn fed a dislike of righteous judgement, which is what O'Shaughnessy found most relatable about Eliot when she began researching her own novel. "To me, the roots of her stories have to do with the fundamental need of each human being to try to understand with and sympathise with other human beings; to avoid the easy habit of condemnation from a height - as in, 'There but for the grace of God go I' - is part of her giftedness," she says. It's notable that Eliot seemed unfazed by the set-up chez Chapman, and that as a reader of Charlotte Bront ë, she took a dim view of Jane Eyre's refusal to live with Mr Rochester while his insane wife was still alive.

Yes, she became a genius, but her life was a willed act of becoming, lived in response to a question that had barely begun to be asked: what can a woman be?

It's perhaps not surprising that having shocked society by not marrying Lewes, in 1880 she went on to cause a second scandal (and baffle future scholars), this time by marrying. She was by then 60, and Lewes had been dead little more than 18 months. Her husband, John Walter Cross, was her friend and financial advisor. He was also 20 years her junior. This fact, coupled with a peculiar incident on their Venetian honeymoon, when Cross leapt from a window into the Grand Canal, has given rise to all manner of pruriently Freudian theories. In the end, their marriage was cut starkly short by Eliot's death in December of that year.

Eliot's novels will always be her single greatest achievement, and they stand independent of the passion and pain that nourished them and marked her days. All the same, it's impossible to overstate the tenacity and sheer nerve required to transform herself from her father's provincial 'little wench' to a leading urban intellectual - and this at a time when feminine ambition was so circumscribed by gender, never mind the headaches, insecurity and depression that dogged her. Yes, she became a genius, but her life was a willed act of becoming, lived in response to a question that had barely begun to be asked: what can a woman be? There was joy to her grit, too. She once assured White that it was worth learning French if only to read one book, Rousseau's Confessions. As O'Shaughnessy says, one of the most important lessons to take from Eliot's life is this: "To keep up one's interest in the world and in people through knowledge, reading and study, and understanding, friendship and love".

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George Eliot: The genius who scandalised society

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A woman sits engrossed in her reading, long hair hanging lose at her shoulders, feet slung over the arm of a chair. However you imagine George Eliot, it's probably not like this. The few existing portraits of the novelist fix her in an era far removed from our own, conveying an ethereal gravity that jives with the reverential image peddled after her death in 1880.

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