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Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth on the 7th of February, 1812. He was the second child and the eldest son of John and Elizabeth Dickens. John Dickens was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office.
After a short period in London, John Dickens in 1817 was transferred to the dockyard at Chatham, and here the family remained until 1822. These were the happiest years of Charles Dickens’s childhood and youth. Here Dickens went to a small day-school. He also learnt much from his mother, who was a well-educated woman, and from the books she gave him to read.
It was here, years later, when he was at the height of his fame, that he returned to live, buying Gad’s Hill place, the very house that he and his father had so often admired when out walking.
The little boy, eager, bright, sensitive, energetic but not really robust, found life opening out for him wonderfully during these years at Chatham.
His recollections of these years, seen in the golden haze of childhood, played a very important part in his work. If he had not had this happy time, brightening his childhood, the novels of Dickens would have been darker.
When Charles was about ten, the family left Chatham as John Dickens had been recalled to London.
John Dickens had left Chatham in debt, even after selling off some of his furniture, and nobody in London came to the rescue of John and Elizabeth Dickens and their six children. Everything that could be was given to the pawnshop, and young Charles was often sent on errand of this sort, for he was no longer going to school. He had done well at school in Chatham. But his parents had made no plans for him to continue his education in London.
A friend of the family helped Charles find work at a blacking warehouse. His parents instantly agreed. Charles had to paste labels on the jars of blacking. He received six shillings a week.
Only a few days after Charles started work at the blacking warehouse, his father was arrested and sent to the debtors’ prison, the Marshalsea. John Dickens was a happy-go-lucky, irresponsible man, and he usually spent more than he earned. As a result of such living he was thrown into the debtors’ prison. Later, Mrs Dickens and the younger children joined him. Little Charles did not live in the prison. He had to live in miserable lodgings and to feed himself.
It came to an end when a relative of the family left Mr Dickens a legacy which was enough to pay his debts and leave the prison. When his father was set free, Charles was sent to a private school where he remained for three years. He was fifteen when his education ended, and he was sent again to earn his living this time as a clerk in a lawyer’s office in London. All his spare time he spent in learning shorthand and visiting the British Museum Library filling up the gaps in his education by reading. Just before his seventeenth birthday Charles became a reporter. Soon he was recognized to be one of the best reporters in the whole country. He was invited to join several papers. When he was nineteen he was able to do some reporting in the House of Commons for newspapers.
Finally in 1834 he became the star reporter of the Morning Chronicle.
Young Dickens, with his restless energy and illimitable curiosity, went everywhere and noticed everything. His power of observation and memory were phenomenal.
He went all over the country getting news, writing up stories, meeting people ad using his eyes. These early days of a reporter made very deep impressions on his mind and provided him with material for his books.
| 6.3. Charles Dickens’s literary work |
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Charles Dickens began his literary career in 1833. He wrote some sketches under the title Sketches by Boz. Boz was his pen-name. It was a nickname of his younger brother. The work was warmly received, but it was in 1836 that Chares Dickens rose to fame with the publication of The Pickwick Papers. A new firm of publishers, Chapman and Hall, asked Dickens to write some sort of humorous text, describing sporting misadventures, to support the drawings made by a popular comic artist called Seymour. Dickens agreed, but only on his own terms. These were that the drawings must illustrate the text, not the text the drawings.
The first installment of Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (the full title of the book) came into being and brought the author world-wide fame.
Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club is a humorous description of funny adventures and misadventures of the members of the Pickwick Club which was founded by Mr Pickwick, a rich old gentleman, who had retired from business. The purpose of the club, according to its members, was “for the observations of character and manners”. All the members, like Mr Pickwick, are rather well-to-do; they spend their time in traveling and in looking for mild adventures.
Long abefore the twentieth and last number of the paper with The Pickwick Papers came out, the country was Pickwick-mad. The name was given to all manner of things, from coats and hats to canes and cigars.
Dickens became famous all over the world, especially in America and in Russia.
Encouraged by his success Dickens set to work as a novelist. His next novel Oliver Twist (1838) deals with social problems. It is the story of a little boy born in a workhouse and left an orphan.
The boy kind and honest by nature finds himself in the environment of thieves and lives through terrible hardships.
As Dickens believes in the inevitable triumph of good over evil, it is only natural, therefore, that Oliver Twist overcomes all difficulties. The novel ends happily which has become a characteristic feature of the greater part of Dickens’s works.
With Oliver Twist still in hand, Charles Dickens began to work on his next novel Nicholas Nickleby (1839). The book deals with another burning question of the day – that of the education of the children in English private schools.
Nicholas Nickleby becomes a teacher of a typical English boarding-school for children of parents of modest means.
There is no question of real education at the “school”. Its half-starved pupils are used by the master of the school and his wife for domestic work. Its master, Mr Squeers, is very cruel to the children and his only aim in life is to have as much profit as possible out of his establishment.
The scenes of the children’s life were so realistic and true to life that a school reform was carried out in England after the publication of the novel.
Dickens’s next novel was The Old Curiosity Shop (1841). It is a story of the sufferings and hardships of an old man named Trent, and his granddaughter, Nell, who live in London.
Dickens’s first historical novel Barnaby Rudge (1841) was published before his visit to America in the autumn of 1841. There were many good reasons for going to America. He wanted to lecture on his works as he knew he would have a large admiring public there. Besides, he wanted to meet some American writers, especially Washington Irving, with whom he had exchanged enthusiastic letters.
After his return from America Dickens wrote American Notes (1842) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1844) which created a sensation in America. They were social satires of the American way of life.
Between 1843 and 1848 Dickens published his Christmas Books – A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth. In 1846 he visited Switzerland and Italy. There he began Dombey and Son (1848). In the fifties and sixties the most profound novels were written – David Copperfield (1850), Bleak House (1853), Hard Times (1854) and others.
David Copperfield is, to a great extent, an autobiographical novel. In the character of David Copperfield, Dickens shows many features of his own life. The hero of the novel is a young man who lives through hardships and injustice but in the end achieves well-being.
Bleak House is a bitter criticism of England’s courts of justice. Hard Times is a novel depicting the conditions of the working class in England.
Little Dorrit (1855-1857) is the story of a little girl whose parents are thrown into a debtor’s prison.
With A Tale of Two Cities (1859) Dickens returned to the historical novel. It is devoted to the events of the French Revolution of 1789-1794.
The beginning of the sixties saw the publication of Great Expectations (1860-1861) and Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865).
Dickens died in 1870, leaving his last work The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished.
From 1858 and 1868 Dickens gave dramatic readings of his novels in England and America. He was a brilliant reader of his novels, but he overworked and died at the age of fifty-eight. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Charles Dickens was one of the greatest novelists that ever put pen to paper. His novels are now translated into most languages and are highly valued for their realism, their humor and their just criticism of English life.
| 6.5. William Thackeray (1811-1863) |
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William Makepeace Thackeray was the second representative of realism in English literature of the 19th century. Dickens and Thackeray were such close contemporaries that their work was often compared, but Thackeray’s life was different from that of Charles Dickens.
William Makepeace Thackeray was born into a prosperous middle-class family. His father was a well-to-do English official in Calcutta, India, where he was born. When his father died, the boy, aged six, was sent to England where he attended the famous Charterhouse School. In 1828 Thackeray entered Cambridge University. While a student, he was clever at drawing cartoons and writing verses, chiefly parodies. He did not stay long at the University. The stagnant atmosphere of the place suffocated him. Besides, his wish to become an artist, and therefore he left the University without graduating and went to Germany, Italy and France to study art.
Intending to complete his education, Thackeray returned to London and began a law course in 1833. Meanwhile, the Indian bank in which the money Thackeray inherited from his father was invested went bankrupt, and Thackeray was left penniless. Thus, he was obliged to drop the studies to earn his living. For a long time he hesitated about whether to take up art or literature as a profession. At last he decided to try his hand as a journalist. He wrote humorous articles, essays, reviews and short stories which he sent to London magazines. He illustrated his work with amusing drawings.
The first book which attracted attention was The Book of Snobs (1847), which deals with the upper classes and their followers in the middle classes, whose vices the author criticizes with the sharp pen of satire.
The book draws a gallery of English snobs of different circles of English society. In Thackeray’s view a snob is a person who bows down to and flatters his social superiors and looks down with contempt on his social inferiors.
In his book the author declares war against snobbery, vanity and selfishness.
It was followed by Vanity Fair (A Novel without a Hero) – the peak of social realism, which brought great fame to the novelist, and remains his most-read work up to the present day.
It appeared first in twenty-four monthly installments which Thackeray illustrated himself, and then in 1848, as a complete book.
The novels of the later period, The Рistory of Pendennis (1850) and The Newcomes (1855) are realistic, but they show the gradual reconciliation of the author with reality.
In the other novels, Henry Esmond (1852), and The Virginians (1859) Thackeray turned to historical themes, showing a remarkable knowledge of history.
Thackeray’s last novel, Denis Duval, remained unfinished, for Thackeray died in 1863.
Numerous other works written by Thackeray include essays, short stories, sketches, satirical poems. These were popular during the writer’s life-time but, for the most part, forgotten by the next generation of readers.
Thackeray is at bottom a satirist. In his novels he gives a vivid description of the upper classes of society, their mode of life, manners and tastes. His knowledge of human nature is broad. His criticism is acute, his satire is sharp and bitter. Thackeray used to say that he wished to describe men and women as they really were.
Thackeray’s books are often very sad. He tells us clearly that not only people are often wicked, vain and unjust, but that they can be only what they are due to existing conditions. As Thackeray had no hope of change, many of the pages he wrote are filled with sorrow for the world’s evils.
The picture of the life of the ruling classes of England created by Thackeray remains a classic example of social satire to this very day.
| 6.7. The Brontё Sisters |
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There were three Brontёs – novelists: Charlotte (1816-1855), Emily (1818-1848) and Anne (1820-1849). Their father was an Irish protestant, a clergyman in Yorkshire. Their mother died when the girls were little. The children were entirely devoted to reading, writing, drawing, wandering over the open moors and playing a game of story-telling about their imaginary heroes. The sisters received their education at a charity school and worked as governesses. Private teaching was the only profession open to educated women, and the Brontёs needed to earn their living.
Their life was hard, and they tried to create a new world of their imagination. The sisters turned to literature though they knew of the difficulties a woman writer had to face when it came to publication. Their first volume of verse was published under a masculine pseudonyme – poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (1846).
Nowadays Charlotte and Emily rank among the greatest realists of the 19th century. Anne is less known, though her Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall cannot be ignored either.
Charlotte Brontё (1816-1855)
Charlotte Brontё’s first attempt at prose writing, the novel The Professor (1847) was rejected by publishers. But the young author was not discouraged and began her next novel Jane Eyre (1847) which brought her fame and placed her in the rank of the foremost English realistic writers.
She was personally acquainted with Dickens and Thackeray, and the latter greatly influenced her literary method.
In 1849 Charlotte Brontё published Shirley. The novel dealt with the life of workers at the time of the Luddites’ movement.
The author’s sympathies are with the working people. The last novel by Charlotte Brontё, Vilette, which came out in 1853, is a realistic description of her experiences at a boarding school in Brussels.
In her novels Charlotte Brontё combined scenes from her own life with the far richer and more romantic experiences which she imagined. She aimed to make her novels a realistic picture of society but she also added to her realism elements of romanticism. The main subject of her books is the soul of a woman, a governess or a teacher. Her heroines are generous, intelligent, modest and gentle. Charlotte Brontё attacks the greed and lack of culture of the ruling class and sympathizes with the common people. She is convinced that society can be reformed by means of education.
Emily Brontё (1818-1848)
Emily Brontё wrote only one novel Wuthering Heights – her prose-poem. This book is regarded as one of the most remarkable novels in English literature.
It is a novel of passion, an early psychological novel. The central characters, Cathy and Heathcliff live out their passion in the windy, rough countryside of Yorkshire, and the landscape is as wild as their relationship. The novel is very original in the way it is written, moving backward and forward in time, and in and out of the minds of the characters. Again it presents a new view of women and their emotions.
The book is strange. On the one hand the plot is full of mystery. On the other hand the novel is very concrete: the time of the action, the landscape, geography and climate are realistic. The author of the book makes no difference between the supernatural and natural. Both work together to serve her artistic purpose. The mystery and the supernatural are used as romantic elements in her original study of violent characters.
Emily Brontё’s characters and actions may seem unbelievable but they convince us. They are unique, and their violent emotions are connected with the Yorkshire moors where the action takes place. The moors are varying to suit the changing moods of the story, and they are beautifully described in all seasons.
Emily Brontё very skilfully shows the reader her heroes’ psychology and moral conflicts, their desires, passions, temperaments and human weaknesses.
Anne Brontё (1820-1849)
The youngest Brontё sister, Anne, wrote The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) also with an unusual central female character and involving complex relationships and problems.
All three Brontё sisters introduced these kinds of problems into the novel with unusual courage and directness, and together they changed the way the novel could present women characters: after the Brontёs, female characters were more realistic, less idealized and their struggles became the subject of a great many novels later in the 19th century.
| 6.9. George Eliot (1819-1881) |
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George Eliot is the pen-name of Mary Ann Evans, who began writing fiction when she was already middle-aged. Until then she had worked as a journalist. Mary’s father was a land agent. She was born some twenty miles from Stratford-on-Avon, but spent her childhood on a farm in the Midlands. The girl studied at two private schools for young ladies. After her mother’s death she left school at the age of seventeen. Since that time to almost thirty she kept house for her widowed father. Along with her work in the house, she found time to study languages, biology and other sciences. Mary read a great deal and became interested in social and philosophical problems. She became one of the most learned women of her time. After she had moved to London she translated some philosophical works from German into English and acted as assistant editor of Westminster Review.
George Eliot’s best works are: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Silas Marner (1861). These books are a wonderful study of English provincial life. They deal with rural society – the farmers, the small landlords and the clergy of Warwickshire. Eliot’s works are also rich in descriptions of the English countryside, drawn with exactness and a deep love of nature. The persons she writes of are for the most part the common people of the country and village, whom she knew from her earliest years.
George Eliot very skillfully reveals to the reader her heroes’ psychology and moral conflicts. Their desires, passion, temperament and human weaknesses are always struggling with their moral duty. That is why in her novels George Eliot deals mostly with the problems of religion and morality. Eliot shows an emotional sympathy and tenderness towards her heroes, praising their human dignity, unselfishness, honesty and frankness, and at the same time pitilessly unmasking the hypocrisy and wickedness of those who make them suffer.
The works of the later period – Romola (1863), Felix Holt, The Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876) – are much weaker. They contain less observation and inspiration.
But George Eliot must be judged by the books in which she gave her talent, the books that brought her fame and made her one of the most distinguished English novelists of the period.
George Eliot’s work belongs to the later period of the 19th century novel. She has sometimes been described as the first modern English novelist. Her great merit is a deep psychological analysis of the characters she portrays and a keen observation of their inner world.
| 6.10. English literature at the end of the 19th century |
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The end of the 19th century witnessed a rapid growth of social contradictions which were caused by a deep economic crisis. This period was characterized by a crisis in culture, too. Artists, poets, novelists, musicians and all the intellectuals hated this heartless world, which disturbed the development of the human personality.
The crisis in culture was reflected in literature by the appearance of the two trends.
The representatives of one trend continued the traditions of such writers as Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontёs and others. They were: George Eliot, George Meredith, Samuel Butler and Thomas Hardy. These novelists showed in their books a realistic picture of contemporary society.
Their greatest merit is a deep psychological analysis of the characters they portray, and a keen observation of their inner world. However, the criticism of these novelists is not so sharp as that of their predecessors.
Other writers looked for another way out of severe reality. For instance, Rudyard Kipling was influenced by the philosophy of the “right of the strong”, Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad offered escape from unattractiveness of everyday life into a romantic adventure world. These writers were called neo-romanticists.
The writers of this trend by way of protest against severe reality tried to lead the reader away from life into the world of dreams and beauty. At the end of the century this theory found its expression in decadence. A decadent trend in literature first appeared in France at the end of the 19th century. The French word “decadence” means “decline” (of art or of literature).
The decadent writers rejected realism in art, they created their own cult of beauty and proclaimed the theory of “pure art”. Their motto was “art for art’s sake”. The supporters of the theory were representatives of aestheticism. The aestheticists who belonged to this trend came to the wrong conclusion that art should not reflect reality but only give pleasure. They considered the beautiful form to be more important than the contents, the essence of the work of art. They denied the educational value of art and literature. In their opinion, art was isolated from life.
Aestheticists rejected both the social and the moral function of art. One of the leaders of the aesthetic movement put forward the thesis: “Art is indifferent to what is moral and what is immoral”. Aestheticists tried to lead the reader away from the problems of the day.
One of the best-known English aestheticists was Oscar Wilde who is regarded as the leader of the English aesthetic movement. However, he unmasked the decadent idea that beauty was a stranger to morals.
Another write who appeared on the literary scene in the 19th century was Lewis Carroll. He gave his readers the most brilliant mixture: the greatest nonsense stories ever written, intellectual games with logic and words, private jokes and jokes on English society of the time.
| 6.11. Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) |
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The real name of Lewis Carroll, the author of the Alice stories, was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. He was born in Darisbury, England in 1832. He studied at Richmond and then at Rugby School. He graduated in Mathematics at Oxford in 1854 and he remained at the University as a lecturer until 1881.
He received Holy Orders in 1861, but never became a priest. He never married and lived the rather secluded life of a bachelor within the University.
He corresponded widely and had many friends in the literary and academic world. Fascinated by logarithms and mathematical problems as a child, many of the riddles and unsolvable problems in Wonderland reflect his scientific interests.
Carroll always loved children. As a child himself, he engaged in complex games with animals, built a puppet theatre and wrote little plays for the benefit of his nine sisters and two brothers. As an adult, he enjoyed playing with children, going on trips with them and corresponding with children. His favourite child was Alice Liddell, the daughter of the Dean of his College, for whom he often invented stories and who became the model for Alice. And it all happened by chance.
One hot day in the summer of 1862 he, an adult friend and three small sisters were going up Oxford’s River Isis for a picnic.
The youngest girl, Alice Liddell, was Dodgson’s special love. She was bore on this trip. To keep her and others amused, Dodgson began a story.
“Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having norhing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversations?’”
He invented the rest as he went along. That night he wrote it down. Later he added to it. Two years after, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published. It was the product of several afternoons of story-telling with the Liddell children.
Before anything else, the book is fun. It is full of delicious nonsense. But the nonsense appeals to the adult as much as to the child. Alice finds herself in Wonderland. She is confused. In a tree she sees the huge, grinning Cheshire Cat and asks for help:
"Cheshire Puss... Would you tell me please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to”, said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where...,” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“...so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added.
“Oh, you are sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”
Carroll loved playing with words and ideas. In one section of Alice in Wonderland, the Mock Turtle is telling Alice what he studied at school.
“Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with, and then the different branches of Arithmetic – Ambition, Distraction, Uglification and Derision...” It was a school where they studied “Ten hours a day, nine the next and so on...”
Notice the named of different subjects. In order they should be reading and writing, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, Carroll thought children at school learner only ambition, distraction from the real world, uglification of themselves, and derision that comes with failure.
Carroll’s view of childhood is significant. To him it is a time of innocence when a child is protected and free from care. The child lives happily unaware of its future. This is clearly said in the serious poem at the beginning of Through the Looking Glass.
Published in 1865 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland quickly became a classic. Critics, academics and intellectuals have often battled to understand the meaning of the story, searching for a single solution to the book, but the genius of Lewis Carroll is his ability to keep the reader guessing.
Certainly the story is far more that the witty and wonderful adventures of a little girl who falls down the rabbit hole into a strange, upside-down world. The book presents the themes of anger and alienation, of frustration and intolerance, malice and violence.
The story is absurd and plays on the absurdity of language and people to create the plot, which is really just a series of absurd encounters and adventures.
Lewis Carroll loved riddles, puns, unanswered questions and jokes that depend on the uses or misuses of certain words or expressions.
Nothing is certain in Wonderland except that nothing is what it seems to be. As Alice moves through this odd landscape, the reader becomes aware of the malign character of the world, where cruelty and uncertainty exist everywhere, and only Alice can really recognize the absurdity of it all.
Lewis Carroll plays with reality, language and logic in ways that are both comic and frightening.
His most popular works are Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Alice through the Looking Glass (1872) and The Hunting in the Snark (1876).
| 6.12. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) |
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Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh. His father was a civil engineer. The boy’s health was poor, and later on he often spoke about it in his poems.
Stevenson studied law and engineering at the University of Edinburgh, but never practiced them. Since childhood he had dreamt of literary career. His life was a heroic struggle with a lung disease, and he spent much time abroad. Stevenson’s last years of life passed in Samoa. He loved the land and its oppressed people. When he died, he was carried to his grave by the natives who mourned for him as their friend and protector. A bronze tablet on his tomb bears the epitaph he wrote for himself.
The charm of Stevenson’s personality is reflected in his poems for children A Child’s Garden of Verse (1885). These poems reveal a child’s freshness, directness and naivety of though. His other volumes of poetry are The Underwoods (1887), Ballads (1890) and Songs of Travel (1896).
Stevenson first won fame with the publication of a novel entitled Treasure Island. It was immediately popular with the public. Treasure Island was followed by the historical novels The Black Arrow (1888), Kidnapped (1886), and Catriona (1893). The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) shows the battle of good and evil in man’s heart. Stevenson is also the author of The Master of Ballantrae (1889), The Wrong Box (1889) and a number of mystery stories. At his death he was working on Weir of Hermiston. This unfinished novel is considered to be the best of Stevenson’s whole work.
Robert Louis Stevenson is generally referred to as a neo-romanticist. Neo-Romanticism was a trend in literature which came into being at the end of the 19th century. The writers of this literary trend turned to the past or described exotic travels and adventures.
Stevenson was attracted to the romance of adventure and freedom, of risky undertakings in lonely seas and exotic countries. He idealized the strong and brave men who went down to these lands in ships. In his novels Stevenson told his readers about life full of novelty, about high passions and thrilling sensations. He was a gifted and original writer. Stevenson considered art superior to life for art could create a new and better reality.
| 6.13. Oscar Wilde (1856-1900) |
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Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin on October 16, 1856. His father was a famous Irish surgeon and his mother was a poetess. In his youth he was very much influenced by his mother, who was a highly educated woman. He received a very good education at Trinity College in Dublin and Oxford University. At school he was a brilliant pupil and later at Oxford he displayed considerable gifts in art and humanities. The young man received a number of classical prizes, and graduated with first-class honours. While at the University, under the influence of his teacher, the writer John Ruskin, Wilde joined the then young “aesthetic movement”, which came into being as a protest against hypocrisy in the society. The future writer became a most sincere supporter of this movement.
After graduating from the University, Wilde turned his attention to writing, traveling and lecturing. The “aesthetic movement” became popular, and Oscar Wilde earned the reputation of being the leader of the movement and an apostle of beauty.
In 1881 he went to America to lecture on the “aesthetic movement” in England. His lecture tours were triumphantly successful. The next ten years saw the appearance of all his main works. In 1881 Oscar Wilde published his Poems. The beautiful fairy tales The Happy Prince and Other Tales appeared in 1888, his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1891. Oscar Wilde won his fame as a dramatist. The most significant of his comedies are: Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1899), An Ideal Husband (1895), The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).
Oscar Wilde’s sparkling comedies of fashionable life still attract many theater-goers. They reveal the selfishness, vanity and corruption of English higher society in a playful manner. The plays are notable for their brilliant dialogues, witty paradoxes and entertaining plots. Wilde also wrote poems, essays, reviews, political tracts, letters on every subject he considered worthy of attention – history, drama, painting and others – some of them serious, some satirical. At home and abroad Wilde attracted the attention of his audience by the brilliance of his conversation, the scope of his knowledge, and the force of his personality.
At the height of his popularity tragedy struck. He was accused of immorality and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. In prison Oscar Wilde wrote his powerful poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1989). The hero is a young man who has killed his unfaithful sweetheart. The ballad tells of cruelty, injustice, corruption. When released from prison Oscar Wilde went to France. He died in Paris on November 30, 1900 and is buried there.
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ДОМАШНЕЕ ЗАДАНИЕ:
Questions on the topic 6 “English Literature of the Victorian Period"
1. What is the main idea of critical realism as a trend in literature?
2. Which facts from the biography of Charles Dickens influenced his literary work?
3. What can you say about Charles Dickens’s literary work?
4. Why has Charles Dickens become famous in the whole world?
5. What talents did William Thackeray use in his work?
6. What can you say about Thackeray’s depiction of characters and social issues?
7. Describe the contents of Vanity Fair.
8. What is the main topic in the works of Brontё sisters? Who of them is more and who is less famous?
9. What is the significance of Jane Eyre as a literary work?
10. Enumerate the most distinguished features of George Eliot’s works.
11. What new trends in literature appeared in the second half of the 19th century?
12. Enumerate the factors that cause great interest to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.
13. What were the main themes in the works of Robert Louis Stevenson?
14. Tell about the literary work of Oscar Wilde and note its significance for literature.
Подготовьте доклад по одной из перечисленных ниже тем:
Victorian Poetry (A. Tennyson, the Brownings and others).
1. Chartist Literature (E.Ch. Jones, Th. Hood).
2. Early Victorian Literature. Realistic Novel (Ch. Dickens, W.M. Thackeray, Bronte sisters, E. Gaskell).
3. Late Victorian Literature. Positivism (G. Eliot, G. Meredith and others).
4. Decadence. Aestheticism in English Literature. Poetry of the Period.
5. O. Wilde’s Literary Work. Poems, Tales, Comedies.
6. Neoromanticism (J. Conrad, R.L. Stevenson, R. Kipling).
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