A History of English Literature

Too rare, too rare, grow now my visits here! ’Mid city noise, not, as with thee of yore, Thyrsis! in reach of sheep-bells is my ...

is more than girlish. Her much-anthologized songs such as ‘When I am dead, my dearest’, ‘My heart is like a singing bird’ and ‘D ...

designed to induce maudlin despair. His versions of the 15th-century criminal poet Villon have lasted better. The octosyllabics ...

that the alliteration on mouldand meltand on gloryand glean, and the extraordinary rhyming on Saviour, seem functional. He liked ...

nFurther reading Armstrong, I.,Victorian Poetry, Poetics and Politics(London: Routledge, 1993). Richards, B. (ed.),English Verse ...

Overview The super-productive Dickens is the dominant figure of the Victorian novel, combining elements of the Gothic – a genre ...

used to advance a religious thesis, as by Kingsley, Wiseman and Newman, or a social reform, as by Dickens. Disraeli’s Sybil; or, ...

This is Sybil, the daughter of Walter Gerard, who is to lead the Chartists. Sybil is a religious sister, and a source of spiritu ...

Jane’s righteousness is at times reminiscent of that in Jane Austen’s teenage parody of Mrs Radcliffe,Love and Freindship. Some ...

also through the later, more realist novels. Of these,Villette is the best, though the reformer Harriet Martineau thought it too ...

attitudes remain inscrutable. In its combination of ferocity, imagination, perspective and control,Wuthering Heights is unique. ...

‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual ex ...

moral: privation, constriction, dirt; hypocrisy, servility, meanness; devotion, philan- thropy. We weep less easily than the Vic ...

derived from the parable of Dives and Lazarus in the Gospel of Luke, 16. After the elaborate Dombey and Son (1006 pages),the nov ...

metaphors, symbols and fables of good and evil, of sympathy and cunning. One indicator of this is the symbolic suggestiveness of ...

Great Expectations Dickens best combines narrative and analysis in Great Expectations, a story with a single focus of consciousn ...

actors, gesticulating and performing on their own. Yet he can be over-praised or wrongly praised. In the contests run by critics ...

in Jane Austen, buoyant in Disraeli, and thoroughly canvassed by Trollope. The clas- sic satire on this famous English preoccupa ...

as good a lady as ever I see. You’ve got more brains in your little vinger than any baronet’s wife in the county. Will you come? ...

sneer, / And one on a milliner’s snivel.’ The historian may have been piqued by their popularity. Anthony Trollope Like Thackera ...