Hard Times by Dickens

Philosophical background

Hard Times is a criticism of Jeremy Bentham's ethical philosophy, Utilitarianism, which proposed that an action is right if it ensures the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people. The State decides what is welfare for the majority and individuals are not included in this rule-based calculation and they must look after their own self-interest. Dickens' novel is a criticism of the greed of Victorian industrial society and its misapplied utilitarian philosophy.

The novel is a critique of the utilitarian philosophy that prioritized facts, efficiency and self-interest over creativity and sociability. For the author, the application of this philosophy to Gradgrind's children dehumanised them.

The economic principles of Adam Smith, foundations of our present neo-liberal economy which proposes that the market should be left to regulate itself, are also apparent in the novel. Dickens appears to take a pre-marxist stand by satirising Bounderby, the false self-made man, and by portraying the class divisions between the factory owners and the workers.

Historical background 

Dickens used the Industrial Revolution as a backdrop to Oliver Twist (1838) and Hard Times (1854). He favours the underdogs such as Stephen Blackpool and shows how they were exploited by a new mercantile class for their own profit. He presents Coketown as a Hell for the 'hands' who worked in its factories and compares it with the natural surroundings where society's leaders, the Bounderbys and Gradgrinds, live. The characters are also seen travelling to and fro through a desolate landscape in the iconic industrial machine: the steam engine.

Literary background.                              

Dickens formed part of the European Realist literary tradition which was critical of contemporary moral and social values. This tradition is exemplified in Spain by Leopold Alas' La Regenta, in France by Flaubert's Madame Bovary, in Russia by Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina where individuals seek their own self-interest, transgressing ethics.

The Realist literary tradition was a reaction against the previous Romantic era which had favoured imagination. In the characters he paints Dickens seems partly to hearken back to that emphasis on fancy and artistry in his criticism of a utilitarian hyperrational insistence on facts and calculations and the egoism of self-interest.

Discussion

Vanity Fair by W.M. Thackeray

  

Historical background

In Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) penned a critical review of contemporary Victorian England, focused on the new class of leisured gentry who emerged thanks to the Industrial Revolution and the Empire. The author uncovers the Victorian façade of morality which masked a society of acquisition and pretence at home and abroad.

The international backdrop to the book is succinctly summarised in the Battle of Waterloo which is experienced by most characters as an opportunity to dine and dance in Brussels. However, brief descriptions of their fear of defeat and the bloodiness of the conflict also pinpoint their superficiality.

Literary context 

Industrialisation and urbanisation precipitated social changes in the UK. Dickens criticised them from the underdogs' viewpoint; Thackeray recorded them through the particularly British upper-class system. Both authors were part of the Realist movement, a European literary trend which endeavoured to portray contemporary society candidly. Writers such as Balzac in his novel sequence La Comédie humaine, Pérez Galdós' historical Episodios Nacionales, Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Tolstoy's War and Peace were engaged in exploring social issues and presented characters drawn from real life.

Discussion

'Vanity Fair' draws on some of the established ways of narrating a novel. The author varies the narrator's voice using letters to allow several characters to speak, as Richardson and several European authors did. The protagonist of the story follows the traditional picaresque style in the main character, the social climber Becky Sharp, who certainly lives up to her surname. As with Dickens' novels, Vanity Fair was published in monthly installments, so cliffhangers abound at the end of each episode to encourage readers to read on next month.

However, Thackeray also shows a determined innovation in his presentation of the novel. He opens the story with a preface addressed to the reader, advising that his characters are puppets in the hands of a stage manager. Here he discards the pretence of many of his predecessors that his narrative is based on facts or documents. In a further difference with the traditional novel format he invites the reader not to focus on the plot, but on his critical portrayal of contemporary high society, and so the narrator often interrupts the storyline to comment on the characters he is puppeteering.

The book's subtitle underlines the fact that it is a "novel without a hero". This sets it apart from many 18th. century novels whose main character was their hero, such as Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver or Tom Jones. On the contrary, the protagonists in this narrative are a whole host of characters caught up in the superficial social whirlwind of Vanity Fair. More than a tale, it is social commentary, driven by a description of relationships rather than by plot. In some chapters it is plain gossip, focusing on people, not ideas. This makes it a romp of a read.

The Scarlet letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Outline

Historical context

In the 19th. century the U.S. was marked by westward expansion, increasing national consciousness, political organisation and regional competition. The Monroe Doctrine brought many of these different strands together in 1823. It stated that the western hemisphere was no longer open to European colonisation, under threat of aggressive reaction by the U.S. This was a political response to the cultural search for identity coursing through the country and culminating in civil war in the middle of the century. The Scarlet Letter can be seen as part of the historical search for personal and national identity.

Hawthorne set the scenario of his novel in the Puritanical era of 17th. century Boston. It can be argued that this harks back to a family identity interest, since his great grandfather, John, was a prominent judge in the infamous Salem witch trial of the 1600s. This part of Puritan history is the backdrop to the social mores depicted in The Scarlet Letter.

Literary context

Hawthorne subtitled his book A Romance, a reference to the European tradition of fantastical stories of knights. The “historical romance” was a subgenre that fictionalized historical events. The first modern historical romance was Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley, published in 1814, the first of a series. Scott’s historical romances were popular in the United States and provided early authors there with a model for writing about their own country. They used their narratives to develop a sense of national identity and pride, and to help readers understand their own history. 

In The Custom House preface to his book Hawthorne clarifies that it is not a novel, but a Romance, which takes readers to a different place and time where facts and fiction mix. The Scarlet Letter is clearly a fictional history aiming to inform on the past cultural identity of the country and so help present-day readers understand where they come from. 

Hawthorne's book is influenced by Transcendentalism, a radical, optimistic expression of Romanticism, which emerged to combat the dehumanising effects of industrialism. It was also a reaction against the established religious practice, based on harsh Calvinism, by preaching a more expressive, personal and humanistic form of religion.

Hawthorne's Romanticism took a more pessimistic view of human fallibility and proclivity for sin. Both the Romantic and Transcendental movements were a reaction against convention and formal classicism, placing emphasis on inspiration, emotion and subjectivity. For instance, the narrator in The Scarlet Letter is quick to support the main character's independent beliefs against those in authority, who are criticised and condemned. 

Discussion 

The historical background to The Scarlet Letter is a search for personal and national identity by the author. Nineteenth century USA was marked by westward expansion, increasing national consciousness, political organisation and regional competition. This led to a cultural search for identity, culminating in civil war in the middle of the century. Hawthorne also had a family interest in his book, since his great grandfather had been a prominent judge in the infamous Salem witch trials of the 1600s. This part of Puritan history is the backdrop to the social mores depicted in The Scarlet Letter.

The author subtitled his book A Romance, a reference to the European tradition of fantastical stories of knights. The “historical romance” was a subgenre that fictionalised historical events and the first modern historical romance was Walter Scott’s Waverley. Scott’s historical romances provided early authors in the US with examples for writing about their own country. Hawthorne used this narrative model to develop a sense of national identity in his countrymen.

The novel follows a double structure with the first chapter as an autobiographical introduction together with a fictional reference for the main plot to follow: the supposed finding of a manuscript telling the story of the scarlet letter, a narrative pretence also used in El Quijote. The binary construction of the novel continues in the moral opposition of good and evil seen in the characters of Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, who also represent two opposed ways of thinking: religious emotionalism and scientific analysis. The reverend Dimmesdale himself plays a double role, a social one as revered minister and a personal one as participant in the sin of adultery. Hawthorn also constructs the whole novel by offsetting the historical events, seen through the Puritans' behaviour, versus the narrator's Romance vision of the story.                         

The main character is Hester Pryrne, who is shunned and shamed by the Puritan community for adultery by having to wear the large red letter A on her clothes. However, the narrator describes her in a favourable light as a martyr for the cause of freedom, since her ostracism liberated her from the small-minded rules of her Puritan society. She returns insults with charitable works, appearing as morally better than her oppressors. Her daughter Pearl is also presented as a bright and positive child by the narrator, yet considered elfish by the Puritan neighbours.

The theme of social criticism lays bare the crude patriarchal theocracy of the first US colony, governed by a strict Puritan code, but which allowed bond servants as slaves. The narrator thus draws a distinction between outward appearances and inward morality, suggesting that the society's ethics were in fact hypocritical. The eagle, as a symbol of the independent U.S., is described, not in tender terms, but as apt to claw at her nestlings. The identity Hawthorne draws for his countrymen and women is double-edged: raw, yet hopeful.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

 

Discussion

Social background

Wuthering Heights (1847) was published a decade into the Victorian Age when the UK was changing from a mainly agrarian society into an industrial economy. Millions moved into the factory cities to find work. Meanwhile Emily Brontë (1818–1848) grew up in the final days of rural Yorkshire.

Victorian society was conservative and the Brontë sisters published under male pseudonyms due to the Victorian public's patriarchal belief that women were primarily moral influences and homekeepers. The novel also received negative criticism for its supposed immorality. When Charlotte revealed Emily's identity after her death critics were surprised that the novel could have been written by an inexperienced woman in rural surroundings and indeed that the violence and passion of the novel were conceived by a female. There was even a failed attempt to prove that Emily's brother, Branwell, had composed the novel.

Respectable Victorian society was linked to landlordship. Both the Lintons and Earnshaws were landed gentry. Catherine tells Nelly that she couldn't marry Heathcliff since both would be beggars, but she married Linton to help Heathcliff. Property passed from father to son or nearest male relative. On Edgar's death Thrushcross Grange passes to Cathy's husband, Linton and then to his father Heathcliff.

The stormy climate and expanse of the Yorkshire moors is present in the novel of all three Brontë authoresses. It is particularly used by Emily as a background for her novel. The local folklore about ghosts and fairies is also incorporated into her writing. These may have inspired the episodes of Lockwood's spectral dream at the beginning of the novel and his later nightmare about the 490 part sermon.

Illness and death due to the adverse climate were an accepted part of life and Emily's older sisters died young of tuberculosis. Edgar and Linton also die of wasting diseases in her fiction.

The Brontë's father was a clergyman and religion has influenced the novel. Joseph is a hellfire and brimstone character, probably based on an ecclesiastical instructor. These educators appear frequently in the novel as teachers to the young characters like Cathy and Linton. 

Literary tradition

Wuthering Heights is not in the sedate tradition of Victorian literature and belongs more to that of the gothic novel. (Mary Shelley had published Frankenstein (1818) and Valperga (1823) during Emily's childhood.)

At the time of writing the novel of the Romantic movement, inspired by the French Revolution of 1789, with its themes of nature, the individual, irrationality, freedom and mysticism were in vogue in European literature. Walter Scott's Rob Roy (1817), also set in the wild border country with characters from landed gentry, has parallels with Emily Brontë's romance. Both female main characters, Cathy and Diana, are also equally out of place among their coarse families. 

Byron's sexually attractive, passionate, proud and malevolent heroes were taken up by Charlotte Bronte and closely resemble the portrait of Heathcliff described by Emily. 

Religion in Wuthering Heights also extends to a primal experience of the spiritual which was important to the Romantic movement. Heathcliff is a dark-skinned demonic figure, though his ill-treatment at the hands of Hindley and rejection by the Lintons are reminders of how Frankenstein's monster became evil through social repudiation.

Frankenstein by Mary Shellley

Discussion

Social and economic background

The French Revolution in 1789 was a reference point for the Romantic movement. It marked the shift of economic power from the aristocracy to the middle classes, provoked by the rise in industrialism. Advances in technology also alarmed the working classes who saw their jobs in jeopardy, replaced by machines. With the rise of Napoleon war broke out between the UK and France, ending in 1815. However the economic and social problems of the country were not addressed due to a laissez-faire government policy which favoured deregulation and did not attempt to solve the economic shift from an agricultural to an industrial society. This led to poor wages and conditions for the working class who were forbidden by law to unionise. Eventually the workers turned to violence to protest and the Luddite movement was born.

Literary thinkers, like Shelley's father, grasped the opportunity to argue for a more equal distribution of property. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), demanding equality between the sexes.

As well as technological advances scientific ideas also matured and one of the most significant was Erasmus Darwin’s thinking on biological evolution, which prefigured his grandson Charles' later research. Mary Shelley joined discussions in Byron's house on Erasmus' notions. She was also influenced by Crosse's galvanism, the study of electrical experiments.

The Gothic Novel

By the second half of the eighteenth century Walpole's gothic novel The Castle of Otranto (1764) had appeared. It deviated from the traditional novelistic theme of fictional realism, pretending to describe the world as it exists. The gothic novel ignored the contemporary Augustan Age neoclassical culture of rationalism and gentility and its rejection of enthusiasm and superstition. 

Yet, the gothic novel was widely read at the time, possibly as a reaction against the culture of restraint and the Protestant ethic. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1811) carried over the gothic tradition into the next century as the novel of experimental science.

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

Discussion

Historical context

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Augustan Age continued its advances in capitalism and industrialism, legitimised by the economic theories of Adam Smith. This boom would also help lead to the rise of the Empire in the same century.

Literary context

The end of the eighteenth century was characterised by a growth in literacy promoted by charity schools, increased opportunities for women and the tradition of circulating libraries. This period also saw a questioning of the Enlightenement movement by gothic novelists and some poets. This led to the triumph of individualism and the Romantic movement.

Jane Austen (1775-1817) harked back to the Age which has already passed. Her novels are the final ones of the Enlightenment and her characters are the landed gentry whose desire was for stability in an era of change. They are portrayed as only interested in issues that concern themselves: social position managed through marriage and inheritance. 

Along with Walter Scott (1771-1832), Austen is an historic anomaly. She summarises the concerns of the Augustan Age, while Scott is spokesman for the new Romantic era. Both chose to exclude the Industrial Revolution, the wars waged in their own times and the social revolution in which the middle class replaced the gentry. Their narratives can be seen as an assertion of traditional values in a turbulent time. 

The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith

Discussion

Historical Background

When The Vicar of Wakefield was published in 1766 the British Empire was in expansion and the Industrial Revolution had begun. However, despite the rising economic activity in British cities, rural areas like that of Goldsmith's childhood remained untouched, as is reflected in his prose and poetry.

The 18th. century applied the tools of the scientific revolution, empirical observation and research, to law, religion, economics and politics. This replaced the traditional faith in divine revelation as the source of knowledge.

Revolutionary ideas opposing the Absolute Monarchy and replacing it with accountability, were led by Locke in the UK the previous century and Rousseau in the 18th. They argued that authority came from the people, not from God. French soldiers returning home from the US war of independence (1775-1783), where they had supported the colonies against the British, brought republican values. Inspired in the Enlightenment these ignited France and led to the revolution of 1789 that abolished the absolute monarchy. 

In economics Adam Smith complained about mercantilism, the prevailing model of economic isolation, instead of trade. He proposed the novel theories of supply and demand, laissez-faire capitalism and minimum market regulation. The aim was that countries produce what they manufactured well and import what they did not. These ideas set a basis for neoliberalism in modern economic thinking.

In art there was a reaction to the previously Baroque and Rococo extravagances. The neoclassical movement looked to the Greco-Roman artistic ideals. This return to simplicity and harmony fitted well with the 18th. century philosophical vision based on rationality. The novel format arose, too, in this century with its insistence on fictional realism, consistent with contemporary scientific objectivity.

The Enlightenment debate also attempted to overcome traditional thinking by integrating the physical and the metaphysical. These were expressed in philosophical terms by British empiricism and French metaphysicians.

Literary background

The Vicar of Wakefield is a prime example of the sentimental novel, a late 18th-century genre, that traced the emotional responses of characters and readers to their situations.

It was a reaction to the previous century's rationalism, in line with novels like Ricardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). This tradition laid the way for later Gothic and Romantic novels.

The Vicar of Wakefield is similar to Tristram Shandy in its satire of the clichés of the sentimental novel which mixed tearful scenes and morality and where a pure heart is portrayed in characters' feelings about the beauties of nature and empathy with the sorrows of others. Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1811) would later develop this satire with its sharp criticism of sentimentalism.

Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne

Discussion

 

1. Literary background

Narrative presentation:

In Don Quixote (1605 & 1615) the knight lives out his own fiction by re-enacting fictions of chivalric romances. Following Cervantes' lead, Tristram, another fictional character, writes his own fictional autobiography in Tristram Shandy (1759-1767). Both books are metafictions: fictions about fiction. This is Sterne's 18th. century comment on reality, which is not something solid, but a construct of perceptions, narratives, fictions. The lesson for readers is that this applies, not only to Tristram's thoughts, but to their own thinking.

Applying the novel's traditional approach of characters over plot Richardson presented his narrative in realistic fashion by showing the momentary thoughts, feelings and gestures of his characters, who are more important than the plot. 

Fielding's realism, on the other hand, followed the aristotelian design of plot over characters by focusing on the verisimilitude of his storyline and relying for credibility on probability.

Sterne found a way of bringing together both plot and characters by presenting Tristram as biographer of his autobiography, thus joining his character's perception from inside and outside.

However, what sets Sterne's narrative apart is that it parodies the new approach of the novel: formal realism. Tristram Shandy is a novel satirising the novel's pretended realism, just as Cervantes satired Don Quixote's knightly identity as a fantasy.

The hero

Tristram is the focus of Sterne's ironical characterisation. Trist(ram) is his name and defines his sad character. His novelistic identity is fused with his naming, yet his personal identity is a puzzle. 

Time

The passing of time in the novel depends, not on the clock, but on the narrator's stream-of-consciousness. This links Sterne's novel to Richardson's timing, which was expressed in the present tense in his characters' epistles. However, Tristram is also recounting his personal 'life and opinions' which allows him to adapt to a longer timeline, similar to Defoe's autobiography in Robinson Crusoe. Sterne also emulates Fielding's chronology, correlating his fiction with such family dates as those of Uncle Toby's battles in Flanders. Nevertheless, Tristram Shandy goes even further and presents a correspondence between literature and reality by offering the reader an hour's reading matter for every hour in his fictional life. This, of course, reduces the fictional realism of the novel to an absurdity since Tristram will employ more than an hour to pen an hour of his experiences: the more he writes the more the reader's time recedes.

Narration

Fielding organised his narrative sequences into scenes which counterpoint each other ironically. This occasionally appears overmanipulative on the author's part. Sterne, on the contrary, can manipulate all he wants without losing authenticity because his narrator is inside his own head and so unconcerned with external chronology. A chaotic narration is accepted by the reader since it is the reflection of the narrator's mental disorder.

Thematics

Richardson's Clarissa has ideal goodness as a central theme. Sterne presents Uncle Toby in the same manner, as the embodiment of goodness. Fielding, of course, criticised Richardson's ideal as Shamela and Sterne, too, introduces an opposite to goodness: the villainous Widow Wadman.

Characterisation

Tristram Shandy owes much to Don Quixote's main characters who are dualistic representations of realism in Sancho and idealism in Don Quixote himself. Tristram's story also incarnates ideas and sensory input, but in one person. Sterne, following Cervantes, suggests that truth is neither completely external, as science would have it, nor only introspective, as humanism perceives it, but that reality is a collection of different narratives.

Richardson was distinguished from Fielding by their differing emphasis on the individual and the social. This double realism in the novel is later exemplified in French literature by Balzac's sociological emphasis on the exterior and Proust's psychological analysis Yet both are considered realists. Sterne synthesises both approaches since he explores both the inner and outer worlds from inside Tristram's head. 

2. Philosophical background

The dualistic approaches to knowledge go back to the realism and idealism of platonic ideals and aristotelian pragmatism.

However, the Enlightenment emphasised this distinction further in Descartes' dualistic vision of inner and outer: "I think therefore I am." The philosophical problem led, logically, to the question of how the inner I could know the exterior world.

Novelists, however, though recognising the differences between interior and exterior have chosen to accept both as 'real' and focus on the problematic relationships between them. Defoe's memoir style is especially suited to displaying the tensions between inner and outer worlds. He uses the Cartesian individualistic view to define both the internal and external worlds more clearly. Later Proust also presented both the Third Republic and his personal introspective analysis.

Locke defined identity through memory of the past, which enables a continuity of self-awareness. Hume continued this theme when he analysed the development of personal identity as causation, the perception of previous cause and later effect which are not related in reality, only through perception. Sterne's Shandy is conscious of his own personality through the comparison of past and present experiences, but in the end is unsure of who he is.