A History of English Literature

‘That is, a parson – a parson first, you know, and a bishop afterwards. If I had begun, I’d have stuck to it. But, on the whole, ...

recollection of early experience a moral influence from nature, an organic process. The complex inwardness of Romantic poetry he ...

post-Romantic narrative mode of virtual autobiography, as in Oliver Twist. Dickens’s attack on social abuses draws its emotional ...

to ‘we’ (who used to call robins ‘God’s birds’), into ‘I’ musing in a wood, and out again to ‘we’ the readers, Humanity. Third-p ...

traced from their beginnings, gradually combining into a drama which gathers intense human and moral interest. Themes emerge nat ...

Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of wh ...

of James’s own art, following French examples, make George Eliot’s openness look solidly provincial. James’s handling of narrati ...

How cheerfully he seems to grin, How neatly spreads his claws, And welcomes little fishes in, With gently smiling jaws! Further ...

great literature is, at bottom, a criticism of life’. Victorians also had more time for their children. nFurther reading Gaskell ...

Overview The last decades of the reign saw a disintegration of the middle ground of readership. Writers went along with or rose ...

George Moore, George Gissing and Arthur Conan Doyle, who show the specializa- tion of the age. An author who had intellectual pr ...

mention the divine, shows a post-Calvinist interest in evil spirits, as does R. L. Stevenson, whom he admired. Many were taken u ...

Shaw, a founder of the Fabian Society. After hearing Shaw speak, Oscar Wilde wrote The Soul of Man under Socialism, which is, ho ...

Vinci’s Mona Lisa breathes strange longings. Leonardo’s painting (also called La Gioconda, ‘The Smiling Lady’), Pater wrote, emb ...

The medievalism of Pugin and the Pre-Raphaelites, dominant in Victorian culture for a generation, was now to become one of the p ...

JACK: I am afraid I really don’t know. The fact is, Lady Bracknell, I said I had lost my parents. It would be nearer the truth t ...

This comedy of manners is not satire, for it is not mimetic. ‘Good society’ is a pretext for an imaginary world, though Wilde’s ...

runs a chain of brothels; her Cambridge-educated daughter Vivie happily becomes a cigar-smoking actuary. Mrs Warren defends soci ...

and situation act upon them. His novels build up to climactic scenes. His mixing of genres invokes a greater variety of dimensio ...

of class, gender, morality and the supernatural do not work; and that it is natural for Tess to attract Alec and Angel, and may ...