Mariana
For this Thursday’s core-course class (the last of this term) we will be discussing Millais’ lovely painting ‘Mariana’ (1851). By way of preparation it would make sense to (a) have a look at the picture, there; and (b) read the Tennyson poem, ‘Mariana’, upon which it is based. If you’re feeling keen, have a look at Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, from which play Tennyson took the character of Mariana.
Also useful is this (not very long) introductory piece by Andrew Leng about Millais’ picture: check that out too. But mostly, look carefully at the painting.
[Note: Leng mentions Ruskin's 1878 essay 'Three Colours of Pre-Raphaelitism'; you can find this online in several places, if you're interested. Google books have it here (the Millais stuff starts on p.334 right at the bottom: Ruskin's section 244).
[AR]
Aestheticism visuals – Swinburne
Dear Aesthetes,
The artworks that accompany this week’s texts are the Hellenistic statue of Hermpahrodite in the Louvre and Whistler’s ‘The Little White Girl: Symphony in White No.2′ (1864).
Images of both of these can be found in an archive post from last year – click on Aestheticism (under Categories in the right-hand toolbar) and scroll down until you find the Swinburne entry.
I look forward to hearing what you make of Algie (or Algae, as the Modernists liked to call him),
Vicky
Aestheticism & Decadence reading: Rossetti
Dear Aesthetes,
I will bring excerpts from Hollander’s criticism to class, so you don’t need to hunt him up for yourselves (unless you’re interested, and do go ahead if so – the books I will be talking about are Vision and Resonance: two senses of poetic form and The Gazer’s Sprit: poems speaking to silent works of art.
DO look up the set Rossetti texts (paintings and poems) on The Rossetti Archive online. Texts are available from a list of subheadings at http://www.rossettiarchive.org/exhibits/index.html.
If your interest is stimulated, have a look at a few more of the ‘Double Works’ (works that appear as both paintings and poems) under that particular subheading – we can talk about these in class also. I’m going to see if I can book us a room with technology for the second hour so we can work with the Archive during our discussion – so make a note of any works that particularly interest you, and we can look them up on the day.
All best, and get in touch if you have any questions,
Vicky
Aestheticism and Decadence reading Wk 7
Dear All,
I look forward to meeting you this week and beginning our ‘Poetry and Painting’ segment of the Aestheticism course.
The Tennyson texts are easy to get hold of; there is an online copy of Arnold’s 1853 Preface at http://www.telelib.com/words/authors/A/ArnoldMatthew/verse/Poems/preface.html
Best wishes and see you on Thursday,
Vicky
Tonight! (Monday 9th Nov): George Eliot and the Classics
Tonight is the annual Dabis lecture at 6pm in the Windsor Auditorium Main Lecture Theatre. Dr Margaret Reynolds (QMW) will speak on ‘George Eliot and the Classics.’ Reynolds is always interesting, and good value, and admittance is free: why not go along? [AR]
Hard Times 2: Preston Lock Out
A pendant to my earlier Hard Times post, I’ve just found (online) this lovely cache of three hand-drawn and coloured contemporary cartoons of the Preston Lock Out. They’re owned by the Lancashire Evening Post, and this is what their website says about them:
One of five [er, actually three] cartoons produced during a strike by cotton workers in Preston, Lancashire in 1853 and 1854. The strike resulted in a lock-out by the employers and Irish workers were brought in to break the strike by the larger mill owners. These workers, who appear to be mostly women and children, are caricatured as lazy and ignorant with Irish accents. After the strike was settled, they were sent back to Ireland.
These people, ’scabs’ in modern parlance, were called ‘knobsticks’ in the idiom of the day. You may not be able to make out the writing below, but if you click on this link [pdf] you can have a detailed look at big enlargements of all the cartoons.
This, the legend at the foot of the image tells us, is ‘THE WARPING AND WINDING ROOM HANOVER ST MILL’ The chap on the left in the top-hat is called ‘THE MASTER’ and he says: ‘I am quizzing you, my beauties’. The fellow in green is ‘THE OVERLOOKER’, and is saying (presumably to the little boy in red who’s shinned up the loom): ‘I say you young devil come down you are sure to be kilt’. And the red-haired woman is saying: ‘Sure a now the devils skure to yes Mike come down wid yes’.
Here’s another, sadly in black and white (you can see the full colour version at the pdf link mentioned above):
You can see he’s pulling stick-figure workers out of a container labelled ‘a box full of new knobsticks’. Fascinating stuff. Incidentally, I’m not aware of any critical work on this (this fairly well-known article, ‘Dickens, Gaskell and the Preston Strike’, doesn’t mention it, for instance): it might make a nice topic, or at least a nice angle, for a Hard Times essay …) [AR]
Hard Times
Tomorrow’s novel class (the last before reading week) is on Hard Times, of which novel it is probably fair to say: CD’s contemporaries thought little of it, though Leavis and later critics have loved it! To quote Grahame Smith:
Even in the general climate of disappointment generated by the later, so-called ‘dark’ novels, Hard Times stands out in the meagre response it elicited from Victorian reviewers and in the lack of serious consdieration it had received until the middle of the twentieth-century. It was admired by a great contemporary, John Ruskin, and found a passionate advocate in George Bernard Shaw at a later stage, but it had to wait until 1948 for a full-scale rehabilitation, although of a qualified kind, by F R Leavis in The Great Tradition. Leavis praise the novel for the absence of those very qualities which to many readers have seemed most Dickensian: that is, richness of detail, comic exuberance and an apparently cavalier attitude to the more rigorous aspects of literary form. … Leavis’s revaluation paved the way for later appreciations which have grasped that the intense seriousness of the novel’s critique of its social world is not, in fact, incompatible with the linguistic energy and comic verve that seem so central to Dickens’s achievement. There is exuberance here, too, and although its brevity precludes the large-scale structural complexity of Bleak House and Little Dorrit, the brilliance of Hard Times’s pared-down language is hardly less impressive in its wit and variety.
Here are a few links that you might find useful, in terms of getting a handle on the novel: you’re not required to read them before class, but they might help. Utilitarianism is usually seen as an important context for Hard Times; as is Industrialism. Dickens claimed he conceived and started writing the novel before the Preston Lock-out, but it’s good to have a sense of what that example of loggerheads industrial relations entailed. Some interesting articles:
That last one picks up on what we were saying in last week’s core course class about metaphor and metonomy … [AR]
David Copperfield and Fairy Stories
Just, briefly, to draw your attention to a brief post on Dickens and Fairy Tales occasioned by a stimulating seminar discussion on that very topic with the undergraduate third-year ‘Dickens Special Option’ crowd. I’ve just posted it at The Valve. [AR]
Victorian Zombies
I think we can file this post under ’shameless self-publicity’: but I’m just shameless enough to go along with that. I Am Scrooge, a mash-up Christmas Carol and Zombie novel, is in the shops now. You could buy a copy if you liked. I wouldn’t mind.
What’s that? You want to know what the reviews say? Well, I’ll tell you: ‘Imagine a historical Shaun of the Dead written with as many bad zombie puns as you can think of – if you’ve got a long memory, add that it’s been written by the I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again team – and you’ve got an idea of the tone … Given that Roberts is a professor of 19th Century literature, it’s hardly surprising that there are multiple references to different stories, some well-known, others obscure … Ranks alongside Blackadder’s Christmas Carol as a great comic take on Dickens.’ [AR]
BL ‘Victorian Values’ event, 20th Nov
Dear MA students,
The British Library is holding a fun night of Victoriana on the evening of the 20th November.
http://www.bl.uk/whatson/events/event95861.html
Admission (£7.50) includes the chance to view their Points Of View: Capturing the 19th Century in Photographs exhibition, which includes some materials that Hannah Lewis-Bill, one of last year’s Victorian MA students, worked on as part of her internship at the BL.
Thanks to Hannah for drawing this event to our attention.
All best,
Vicky
