Okay, so what I wanted to do today was to start with while people are
arriving is to give you, once you've enjoyed my wonderful presentation
picture, is to give you a spelling test and once we have enough people then
we can actually start with the tutorial. So I will say things and you have
to write them, you see. For example, Rosetti, Christina Rosetti. Let me
write Christina Rosetti. No! Wrong! Haha! Terrible thing, I'm telling you
about something else. Rosetti. Two s's two t's. And Christina Rosetti, you
know, Yeah, you're going to be thinking about it more, aren't you? Say
Christina, good, with a C-H. What about Percy Bysshe Shelley? Especially
the Bysshe. No, well, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Percy Bysshe Shelley? No? Percy
Shelley, ah, but you need to have the Bysshe in. That gives you an extra
point. Hi, Julio. What we're doing while we're waiting for people to join
us is we're having a little bit of a spelling test. And Diego is not acing
it so far. Okay, Julio, can you spell Wordsworth? Julio, can you spell
Wordsworth? Diego, can you spell Wordsworth? Can anybody spell Wordsworth?
Oh, dear, the door's open. Marina! Can you open the door? It's open.
Wordworth, good. One point. Okay. The Tiger. Oh, Julio didn't like that.
It's gone. Good. One point. Coolridge. Very good. Brocklehurst. Oof.
Brocklehurst. Yes, oof. Definitely oof. No? Oof. Brocklehurst. Okay. The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Hi, Elena. While we're waiting for people like
you to join us, we're having a little bit of a spelling test. We've lost
one person so far by our spelling test, but anyway. The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, very good. Okay, Elena, can you spell the Windhover? Can you spell
the Windhover? The Windhover, the last poem that we looked at last week by
Gerald Manley Hopkins, whose face you can see on the screen, looking very
Windhovery. No? Diego, the Windhover. Yes! One point. The Windhover. You
don't need to put a question mark behind them all. Okay, Elena,
doppelganger. Was ist doppelganger? I don't know how to say, how do you
spell doppelganger in German? Doppelganger, ah, but that's the cheaty form.
The real form, the form where you get extra points, is doppelganger.
Doppelganger, with umlaut on the A. Okay, what about... Künstlerroman.
Pardon, Kunstlerroman. Kunstlerroman? No, Kunstlerroman. Kunstlerroman is
the story of the development of an artist, as in Aurora Lee. Okay,
Charlotte, as in the Lady of? Charlotte, as in the Lady of? Yes, good! One
L, two Ts. Um, St. John. As in St. John River. St. John, as in St. John
Rivers. St. John is written like that, St. John, I'm afraid. Okay, so we've
only got five people, but I didn't care, I'm going to start. So, um, there
you have what I have, whoa, closed please, noticed over the years as the
biggest problems. Uh, getting the Barrett right. I'm going to start with
the double-double in Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Gerald Manley. Hopkins
with an E before the Y. Lord Byron, less of a problem I think. Ode on a
Grecian Urn. Grecian. Percy Bysshe Shelley you mentioned. The Rhyme of the
Ancient Mariner. St John Rivers. The Tiger. Tinson Abbey. People seem to
have a lot of problems spelling Abbey correctly. Uh, as in Jane Eyre or
John Eyre. Helen Burns 1L Brocklehurst Ode to a Nightingale The Reeds Eliza
Reid Sarah Reid John Reid Coolridge There's the cow The Lady of Shlott To a
Skylark Alfred Tennyson With a Y Christina with an H Rosetti with Doubles
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Dorothy Wordsworth Not Dorothy Aurora Lee Misogyny
Kustum Roman Doppelganger Okay, so I will probably post that separately on
the forum anyway, just so that you can make sure you're happy about all of
those. Right, well what I'm going to do is a mixture of talking about ideas
and then putting things in chronological order. I hope it works. I don't
know. It's what has been is the result of my week of thinking about all of
this and we'll see if it works or it doesn't. So our period when that
period that we're interested in this term is 1790 to 1880 can be
characterized as the incorporation of ideas thrown up by the American and
French revolutions into mainstream thought. There is a revolt against the
restrictive patterns of the past and ancient privileges. Above all, it is
the age in which rights are universalized. Women, children, laborers,
slaves and animals are all increasingly perceived as having rights. Women
are increasingly recognized as capable of refined thought. Think about Jane
Eyre and what she says to Rochester and capable of creating serious
literature as a result and as being the deserving subject of literature. So
we have people like Tennyson writing about specifically women protagonists
and things like Mariana and the Lady of Shalott or the portrait of the
Duchess in My Last Duchess. Children are increasingly considered innocents
and childhood is cherished. And we see that in Jane Eyre, in Aurora Lee, in
Great Expectations. By the way, there are some sort of mentions of Dickens
and Great Expectations in the course without you actually having to read
it. I am planning on, I don't know whether I'll do a video or just publish
some notes, but it's on the relationship between Great Expectations and the
rest of the stuff on the course, probably in the middle of next week. But I
will give you something on Great Expectations so that you can mention it in
relation to other things. There will not be a question directly about Great
Expectations, so don't worry about that. The slave trade was made illegal
in 1807. Slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1837, and it was
pursued by the British Empire. To make amends for having made so much money
out of slavery, the British dedicated a fleet in the 1840s to pursuing
other people's slave ships from other countries and liberating the people
who were on board. And remember, in relation to this, Elizabeth Barrett and
her problems with her father because the family money came from slavery.
There's an increasing rejection of blood sports and even of vivisection.
Remember that Christina Rossetti was again actively against vivisection and
an idea of reverence towards animals increasingly found amongst the
literati. began to think about things like the tiger, the skylark, Oath to
a Skylark, Photo Nightingale, and the windhover. Such processes were
accompanied by the end of a dominance of the Renaissance tradition. So
there's a rejection of patrician values. From the Roman times, there's this
idea that the aristocracy are literally the first, the most, the best
people. And they are the best and natural leaders and they are the best and
natural subject for literature. Those ideas are now being thoroughly
questioned and the nobility is increasingly portrayed as ignoble.
Apparently in the work of somebody like Thackeray, I think there are no
good aristocrats. And in terms of what we've studied directly, it's a
portrait of the Duke of Ferrara in My Last Duchess, somebody who's very
artistically refined, but is a psychopath and a tyrant. So there is this
rejection of all things that come from the Renaissance in one sense,
especially the patrician values. But at the same time, there is a great
anxiety about what it means to be a trick. to be a gentleman or a
gentlewoman and we can see that in Jane Eyre and we see it even more in
Great Expectations. Do feel free to interrupt and ask me a question. So,
the values that come out of the American and French revolutions are to some
extent the tenets of Romanticism. Talk to me. There you have some which
should coincide with what I'm saying. I found this slide, I like the
picture, after I'd written my tenets so you can see to what extent they
coincide or not. The first one is oneness and pantheism. The universe is a
single unified whole and all life is connected and valuable. That idea of
oneness we saw for example in The Realm of the Ancient Mariner, the idea of
killing the albatross gratuitously, is a moral crime. Rationalism radically
falsifies reality by breaking it up into disconnected, lifeless entities
and of course that is an accusation that we could carry on into the
Victorian educational system which to some extent we have inherited. Nature
is full of different expressions of deity. From this we get the interest
amongst the Romantics in Hinduism and all of those ideas of polytheism.
Another tenet of Romanticism refers to emotions, dreams and visions. We
should heed our emotions rather than trying to be logical and rational. The
subconscious offers insights beyond the reach of rationalism. And here it
will probably be a good idea to mention negative capability. Whose idea was
negative capability? Who talked about negative capability? Negative
capability is one of our key concepts. You have to be able to talk about
negative capability. Keats. The idea that you can appreciate something
without fully understanding basically. If you go back to the Keats notes,
you will find a page full of definitions of negative capability. You should
be aware of that. The consequences of rejecting rationalism is accepting
our subjective experience and all of this can be seen as a reaction to
neoclassicism. Another tenet is the value of wild nature, a source of
inspiration, wisdom, solace and regeneration, especially in its sublime
aspects. Oneness with nature allows the individual to connect with eternity
and to escape the decay of mundane existence. The sublime in nature meant
one could lose oneself and escape time. And a lot of this emphasis can be
seen as a reaction to the industrial revolution. Another tenet is the value
of children and the common people. Humble people and ordinary language have
their own dignity. Innocence, especially in children and rustics, is a lost
golden age. This can be seen as a reaction against the soul-destroying
reality of industrial labour. The importance of the individual. It was
important to be one's own man and yes I'm saying man as opposed to person
because the romantics were pretty masculine in their attitude. And not be
part of the crowd. And this links in with the whole concept of the Byronic
hero. This is a reaction against the anonymity of urban life. Truth was
found intuitively within the individual. It was personal and unique. So
there's a rejection of the ideas of some people like Locke and this idea
that truth is subjective. Society was seen as an evil force. That stunted
the individual. The rejection of society and the appeal of wild nature
meant that the locus of literature tended to shift away from the city.
Transcendence. We are in a transcendental struggle against time and
material decay. By perceiving the oneness of life we can transcend
mortality and experience eternity in the moment. Which nowadays hippie
types would call mindfulness. So let's have a look at some of the
chronology of that first period so that you're hanging things correctly.
One of the problems that we have in this course is because we're looking at
different movements at different times, the chronology of things can become
somewhat convoluted. So our starting date can be 1789. When the French
Revolution starts, the most important event in the early modern period. Bar
none I think. And in the same year Blake publishes Songs of Innocence which
includes Infant Joy. So our first poem coincides with the French
Revolution. Four and a half years later in 1793 1793. Revolutionary France
declares war on Britain. 1794 the next year Blake publishes Songs of
Experience which includes Infant Sorrow and The Tiger. And in 1795 Wesley
breaks the Methodists from the Church of England and so the religious
panorama changes quite substantially. 1795. 1797 we get Austen writes First
Impressions, her first version of Pride and Prejudice. So you can see how
that is actually in the middle of a lot of what we're talking about in
terms of Romantics. 1798 the big year supposedly in the Romantic movement
with publication of lyrical ballads by Wordsworth and Coolridge which
includes lines written a few miles above Tinton Abbey. 1798 and the Rime of
the Ancient Mariner. The political situation changes again in 1801 with the
Act of Union and from then on we can talk about the United Kingdom. In 1807
Wordsworth publishes Poems Volume Two which includes I Wandered Lonely as a
Cloud also known as Daffodils. 1813 we have the publication of Pride and
Prejudice. Which is from the previous course but as you can see is in the
middle of the Romantic period. 1815 the Battle of Waterloo and Napoleon is
defeated. 1818 Mary Shelley publishes Frankenstein again which we saw last
term not this term. So this is a book cover we just decided to put the book
cover in there. And that pretty much from 1789 to 1819 is the Romantic
period. And that last year is hugely important. 1819 is the year in which
we see Keats writing Odes to a Nightingale, Odes to a Grecian Urn and to
Autumn. Shelley writes, Odes of the Skylark and Ode to the West Wind, And
Lord Barron publishing the first Canter of Don Juan. So more than half of
the Romantic literature that you are asked to study actually happens in
that one year 1819. So bear that in mind if that's relevant. Nothing at all
happens in the 20s, in the 1820s. apart from lots of dead Romantic poets
and we in 1830 we get Tennyson publishing poems chiefly lyrical which
includes Mariana, in 1832 Tennyson publishes poems, just poems which
includes the Lady of Shalott and in 1837 Queen Victoria ascends the throne
and by enormous coincidence the Victorian age starts. So we can describe
the 1830s as the Mariana Trench you know what the Mariana Trench is? It's a
very silly pun I don't know Mariana is written in 1830, the Mariana Trench
is a very deep channel in the Pacific Ocean and this is again the age of
the machine so two things take place in this period. One is that there is a
great democratisation of literature the Romantics were men writing for an
intellectual elite which they largely conceived of as men by the end of the
century writers were both men and women almost more women than men and
their audience covered a very wide demographic. Everybody could read and
most of the novels and some of the poetry in the period were printed in
periodicals and were cheap and easy to get hold of. So culture by the end
of the period was in the hands of the many. Wilkie Collins described the
High Victorian age as the age of journals and most people encountered, as I
say, literature through those journals if it's in the case of novels in
serialised form. But at the same time, socially this is very very much the
age of the machine. In 1829 Thomas Carlyle began a series of articles on
contemporary society about the mechanical age known as Silence of the
Times. The essay developed in the the consequences of machine dominated
society and machine inspired ways of thinking and acting. Although national
wealth had increased so had the division between the rich and the poor in
the industrialised cities where still a machine mindset was beginning to be
applied to relationships, attachments and opinions. My tea is here!
Hallelujah! Thank you! And so what we have is a situation in the 50 years
between 1830 and 1880 Britain becomes immensely richer but it takes half a
century for the benefits to trickle down to the majority of the population.
So during those decades the question of progress for whom is urgent in
society. And in literature. And of course you can see those ideas which are
questioning the benefits of industrialisation and of machines as directly
related to what was coming out of Frankenstein and to all of those romantic
tenets and a lot of the nostalgia about the middle ages as well. Thank you!
The first thing I want to say is that the literary reaction to all of this
is what was called the Condition of England novel. I'll write that down I'm
sure you can understand it but I'll write it down anyway. So in the 1840s
and 1850s many novelists reacted against the appalling conditions in the
great industrial cities by writing Condition of England novels for example
Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton 1848 and North and South 1855 Charles
Kingsley's Alton Locke 1850 and Charles Dickens Hard Times 1854 There are
others but those are probably the most important ones. In 1845 the Israeli
described England as two nations the rich and the poor so there is a
general recognition the Israeli of course is a novelist who becomes a
politician and there is a great deal of interest in the literary sense and
in the political sense in this problem of the redistribution of wealth. Of
course the Victorians are terrified that there will be revolutions like
there have been in Europe at the time. While all this is going on Robert
Browning publishes dramatic lyrics which includes My Last Duchess which in
one sense ignores all the problems but in another sense responds to some of
the problems of aristocracy and received privileges these types of things.
Apologies for my strange behaviour but I have some type of problem with my
tendon or my nerve in my arm and it's very similar to the sciatica I had
last year but in my arm and so what I'm doing is trying to stretch my arm
to try to relieve that a little bit but I'm not going completely mad it's
just me trying to reduce pain. The high Victorian age is the period between
1840 and 1862 and I have characterised that as Tartism, Tractarianism and
Bildungsromanie Bildungsromanie is the plural of Bildungsromanie and so
what we have in this period is the rise and then the decline in the 1850s
of Tartism this movement for democratic reforms to get the votes for at
least in the first instance pretty much all men and that is the second
reform act I think of 1860 largely solved that problem for a generation
Tractarianism, what's Tractarianism? another name for Tractarianism?
anybody? well Tractarianism is also known as the Oxford movement and it is
a strengthening of the hand of what has been called the High Church in
England so it is those people who are considered Anglo-Catholics who are
Catholics except for the fact that they still are part of the Anglican
Church like Newman in his first phase and so we have the Anglican Church
being undermined from the Protestant side if you like by the Methodists and
from the Catholic side by the Oxford movement so the established church
becomes considerably weaker and about this time there is a survey in which
they discover that most people in the country do not go to church and
they're rather shocked by this you'd think they'd have noticed but we have
a situation where most people don't go to church and in some parts of the
country like Scotland the number of people who go to Anglican churches is
really quite small unless there are more people going to dissenter
churches, to Presbyterian churches and things than there are going to
Anglican churches so there is this whole decline of faith and an attempt to
reassert that faith outside or on the edges of the Anglican Church and part
of that of course is related to Darwinism and the publication of the