内容

知识点 1   The historical background of the Victorian Age

知识点 2   Literary trend in the Victorian Age

知识点 3   The representative novelists of the Victorian Age

Charles Dickens

William Makepeace Thackeray

Thomas Hardy

Module 7 Unit 1 Dickens, Thackeray and Hardy PPT 图片来源

1 ￡? Historical background 1

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2. Historical background 2

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3. Literary trend 2

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4. Literary trend 3

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5. Literary trend 5

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6. Charles Dickens 1

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7. Charles Dickens 2

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8. Charles Dickens 4

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9. Charles Dickens 5

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10. Charles Dickens 6

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11. Charles Dickens 7

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12. Charles Dickens 9

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13. William Thackeray 1

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14. William Thackeray 2

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15. William Thackeray 3

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16. William Thackeray 4

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17. William Thackeray 5

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18. William Thackeray 6

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19. William Thackeray 7

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20. William Thackeray 8

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21. Thomas Hardy 1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Thomashardy_restored.jpg

22. Thomas Hardy 2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Thomas_Hardy%27s_Cottage,_Bockhampton,_Dorset.jpg

23. Thomas Hardy 4

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24. Thomas Hardy 5

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25. Thomas Hardy 6

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26. Thomas Hardy 7

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27. Thomas Hardy 8

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28. Thomas Hardy 9

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29. Thomas Hardy 10

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30. Thomas Hardy 11

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31. Thomas Hardy 12

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讲义  

I. The background of the Victorian Period

Chronologically the Victorian period roughly coincides with the reign of Queen Victoria who ruled over England from 1836 to 1901. The period has been generally regarded as one of the most glorious periods in the English history.

The early years of the Victorian England was a time of rapid economic development as well as serious social problems.

•  After the Reform Bill of 1832, the Industrial Revolution soon geared up.

•  Towards the mid-century, England reached its highest point of development as a world power.

•  And yet beneath the great prosperity and richness, there existed widespread poverty and wretchedness among the working class ， which finally gave rise to the Chartist movement (1836-1848). This was the first mass movement of the English working class and the early sign of the awakening of the poor, oppressed people.

•  The last three decades of the century witnessed the decline of the British Empire and the decay of the Victorian values.

•  Ideologically, the Victorians experienced fundamental changes. The rapid development of science and technology, new inventions and discoveries in geology, astronomy, biology and anthropology drastically shook people's religious convictions.

II. Literary trend in the Victorian period

Victorian literature, as a product of its age, naturally took on its quality of magnitude and diversity. It was many-sided and complex, and reflected both romantically and realistically the great changes that were going on in people's life and thought. Great writers and great works abounded.

First, in this period, novel became the most widely read and the most vital and challenging expression of progressive thought. Among the famous novelists of the time were the critical realists like Charles Dickens, William Makepeace thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, and Mrs. Gaskell. and in the last few decades there also appeared George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy.

Second, the Victorian age also produced a host of great prose writers: Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, John Henry Newman, John Ruskin, and Thomas Henry Huxley. Many of them joined forces with the critical realist novelists in exposing and criticizing the social reality.

Finally, the poetry of this period was mainly characterized by experiments with new styles and new ways of expression. Among those famous experimental poets were Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Browning, and so on. All of them made their respective attempts at poetic innovations and helped open up new ways for the twentieth-century modern poetry.

Critical realism is one of the literary genres that flourished mainly in this period. It revealed the corrupting influence of cash upon human nature. The critical realists were strongly critical of the social reality of their day but did not want to overthrow the existing social order and so could not see a way out of the terrible situation.  

Victorian literature, in general, truthfully represents the reality and spirit of the age. The high-spirited vitality, the down-to-earth earnestness, the good-natured humor and unbound imagination are all unprecedented. In almost every genre it paved the way for the coming century, where its spirits, values and experiments were to witness their bumper harvest.

III. The three representative novelists of the Victorian period.

1. Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

  Life

Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth in 1812. When his father was imprisoned for debt in 1824, Dickens was forced to support himself by working in a shoe-polish factory.

A resulting sense of humiliation and abandonment haunted him for life, and he later described this experience, with only slight alteration, in his novel David Copperfield.

In 1833 Dickens published the first of a series of original descriptive sketches of daily life in London, using the pseudonym Boz.

A London publisher commissioned a volume of similar sketches to accompany illustrations by celebrated artist George Cruikshank. The success of this work, Sketches by Boz (1836), led to the proposal of a similar publishing venture.

Dickens transformed this particular project from a set of loosely connected vignettes into a comic narrative, The Pickwick Papers (1836-1837). Its success made him famous and began the soon-popular form of publishing novels in inexpensive monthly installments.

Dickens also edited weekly periodicals, wrote travel books, administered charitable organizations, managed a theatrical company, and pressed for many social reforms.

In general, Dickens was a prolific writer who contributed to readers over 20 novels.

Works

His works mainly include:

Pickwick Papers

Oliver Twist

A Christmas Carol

Dombey and Son

David Copperfield

Bleak House

Hard Times

A Tale of Two Cities

Great Expectations

Writing features

•  The unique character-portrayal, especially the painting of a picture of pathos about some characters.

•  The penetrating effect of satire with the successful use of irony or exaggeration.

•  The complicated and involved plot which envelopes the whole story in mystery until the end of the novel.

•  The adroit use of language.

Appreciation of an excerpt from A Tale of Two Cities

It wa s the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way. 
    这是最美好的时代，也是最糟糕的时代；这是明智的年代，这是愚昧的年代；这是信任的纪元，这是怀疑的纪元；这是光明的季节，这是黑暗的季节；这是希望的春日，这是失望的冬日；我们面前应有尽有，我们面前一无所有；我们都将直上天堂，我们都将直下地狱。

2. William Makepeace Thackeray

Life

He was born in Calcutta, India in 1811.

•  In 1829 he entered the University of Cambridge.

•  He left the university without taking a degree and edited a short-lived journal before studying art in Paris.

•  In 1847 Thackeray began the serial publication of his great satirical novel Vanity Fair , an elaborate study of social relationships in early 19th-century England , which finally gained widespread acclaim.

Writing features

•  Truthful reflection of social reality

•  Skillful character-portrayal

•  Abundant use of wit and humor

•  Subtle humor and sharp sarcasm together with superb diction

•  Humorous and ironic portrayals of the middle and upper social classes of his time

Works

His works mainly include

The Book of Snobs

Vanity Fair

Henry Esmond

The Virginians

The Newcomes

Among them the masterpiece is Vanity Fair or A Novel without a Hero. It was published in 1847-48, satirizing the society in early 19th-century Britain. Does anyone know the reference of the title “Vanity Fair”? Yes, thanks! It comes from John Bunyan 's allegorical story The Pilgrim's Progress .

The central theme of the book is that if the hero of the novel is no other than the whole English society of early 19th century, then the predominant feature of that society is the struggle for money, by everybody against everybody else, among the upper classes.

Appreciation of an excerpt of the novel Vanity Fair .

Chapter 36 How to Live Well on Nothing a Year

The truth is, when we say of a gentleman that he lives elegantly on nothing a year, we use the word nothing to signify something unknown; meaning, simply, that we don't know how the gentleman in question defrays the expenses of his establishment.

我们形 容某某 先生全无收入而过得舒服，事实上“全无收入”的意思就是“来路不明的收入”，也就是说这位先生居然能够开销这么一个家庭，简直使我们莫名其妙。

Thackeray was most often compared with Charles Dickens . In the Victorian Age, Dickens was more popular of the two. As satirists, they both made great contributions to Victorian literature.

3. Thomas Hardy

Life

Thomas Hardy is an outstanding novelist and poet. He received early education at local schools until he was 15 years old. Then he practiced architecture, while continuing his education on his own by reading and studying at night. He started his literary career by writing poetry, but soon turned to novel writing.

Living most of his life in Dorchester, Hardy was very close to the English peasantry. On the one hand, he shared the exact and detailed knowledge and the intimate feelings of his fellow countrymen; on the other hand, superior to most country people in education, he stood detached from them and saw in their actions a significance they could not perceive. In his novels, he touched upon effect of industrialism on the country and what the new belief in scientific evolution would do to old beliefs. These ideas are the major themes of his novels and poetry.

In Hardy's later life, he devoted most of his time and energy to poetry. And his success in verse is comparable to that in prose fiction. Though he is better known as a novelist, he himself preferred the title of poet to that of novelist. On the whole, no other English writer had equaled Hardy's achievement as both a novelist and a poet.

Literary Career

Hardy himself divided his novels into three groups:

1. Romances and fantasies

2. Novels of ingenuity

Novels of character and environment

The third series contains the most significant of his works, including his best known works.

Works

Under the Greenwood Tree 《树荫下》 (1872)

Far from the Madding Crowd 《远离尘嚣》 (1874)

The Return of the Native 《还乡》 (1878)

The Mayor of Casterbridge 《卡斯特桥市长》 (1886)

Tess of the D'Urbervilles 《德伯家的苔丝》 (1891)

Jude the Obscure 《无名的裘德》 (1895)

In Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy emphatically describes the fine qualities of the simple rural folk in contrast with the wickedness and brutality of the rich land-owners or those who are tainted with the evil effects of the bourgeois city-civilization.

The Return of the Native is one of the best known and most widely read of Hardy's novels. Here we may see Hardy's pessimistic philosophy. It accentuates the active part played by the mysterious force of chance and external circumstances upon human lives.

In The Mayor of Casterbridge, the hero Michael Henchard is truly a man of the people and the story is about the rise of this simple person to mayorship and about his decline and death as a result of antagonistic social forces.

In Tess of the D'Urbervilles, the heroine Tess is a peasant girl; her misfortunes and final tragedy are inevitably linked up with the disintegration of the peasantry which reached its final stage in England at Hardy's time. The tragic fate of Tess and her family is not that of an individual or a family, but is symbolic of the destruction of the English peasantry toward the end of the 19th century.

Jude the Obscure is the last of Hardy's longer novels. It is perhaps the most pessimistic. The story is essentially one of the defeated hopes and unrealized aspirations of the hero who belongs to the laboring masses. Yet the realism which carries sharp social criticism with it is surely a great contribution to literature and should earn for Hardy a prominent place in literary history.

Appreciation an excerpt from Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Tess was conscious of neither time nor space. The exaltation which she had described as being producible at will by gazing at a star, came now without any determination of hers; she undulated upon the thin notes of the second-hand harp, and their harmonies passed like breezes through her, bringing tears into her eyes. The floating pollen seemed to be his notes made visible, and the dampness of the garden the weeping of the garden's sensibility. Though near nightfall, the rank-smelling weed-flowers glowed as if they would not close for intentness, and the waves of color mixed with the waves of sound.

苔丝既想不到时间，也想不到空间了。她以前所描绘的那种由凝望星星而产生的超然升腾的意境，现在不请自来了。她全身随着旧竖琴的细弱曲调荡漾起伏，和谐的旋律像清风一般沁入她的心田，使她眼中噙满泪水。飘拂的花粉仿佛是旋律的化身，湿润的庭园也好像是受了感动而哭得泪水涟涟。虽然夜幕即将笼罩大地，那气味浓烈的野花却大放异彩，仿佛过于热切而无法闭合。色彩的波浪和声音的波浪融汇一体。

Writing features

Thomas Hardy's writing has the following features:

1. Language: Hardy's language has the simplicity of a countryman's speech coupled with the sophisticated vocabulary of an educated man.

2. Symbolism: Symbolism is an important feature of Hardy's works, so that many objects, natural phenomena and characters in the novels are given symbolic meanings.

3. Pessimism: In Hardy's novels, there is a strong note of pessimism. The cause of the persons' tragedy is not man's own behavior or his own fault but the supernatural forces that rule his fate. According to Hardy, man is not the master of his destiny; he is at the mercy of indifferent forces which manipulate his behavior and his relations with others.

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the Victorian era

The Victorian era of  British history  was the period of  Queen Victoria ‘s reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence for Britain.[ citation needed ] Some scholars date the beginning of the period in terms of sensibilities and political concerns to the passage of the  Reform Act 1832 .

The era was preceded by the  Georgian period  and followed by the  Edwardian period . The latter half of the Victorian age roughly coincided with the first portion of the  Belle Époque  era of continental Europe and the Gilded Age  of the United States.

Culturally there was a transition away from the  rationalism  of the Georgian period and toward  romanticism  and mysticism with regard to religion, social values, and the arts. In international relations the era was a long period of peace, known as the  Pax Britannica , and economic, colonial, and industrial consolidation, temporarily disrupted by the  Crimean War  in 1854. The end of the period saw the  Boer War . Domestically, the agenda was increasingly liberal with a number of shifts in the direction of gradual  political reform , industrial reform and the widening of the  voting franchise .

Two especially important figures in this period of British history are the prime ministers Gladstone and Disraeli, whose contrasting views changed the course of history. Disraeli, favoured by the queen, was a gregarious Tory. Gladstone, his rival distrusted by the Queen, a Liberal, served more terms and oversaw much of the overall law-making of the era.

The  population of England  almost doubled from 16.8 million in 1851 to 30.5 million in 1901. Scotland's population also rose rapidly, from 2.8 million in 1851 to 4.4 million in 1901. Ireland's population decreased rapidly, from 8.2 million in 1841 to less than 4.5 million in 1901, mostly due to the  Great Famine . At the same time, around 15 million  emigrants  left the United Kingdom in the Victorian era and settled mostly in the United States, Canada, and Australia.

During the early part of the era, the  House of Commons  was headed by the two parties, the  Whigs  and the Tories . From the late 1850s onwards, the Whigs became the  Liberals ; the Tories became the  Conservatives . These parties were led by many prominent statesmen including  Lord Melbourne , Sir  Robert Peel ,  Lord Derby ,  Lord Palmerston ,  William Ewart Gladstone ,  Benjamin Disraeli , and  Lord Salisbury . The unsolved problems relating to  Irish Home Rule  played a great part in politics in the later Victorian era, particularly in view of Gladstone's determination to achieve a political settlement. Indeed, these issues would eventually lead to the  Easter Rising  of 1916 and the subsequent  domino effect  that would play a large part in the fall of the empire.

•  A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities  ( 1859 ) is a  novel  by  Charles Dickens , set in  London  and  Paris  before and during the  French Revolution . With well  over 200 million copies sold , it ranks among the most famous works in the history of fictional literature.

The novel depicts the plight of the French peasantry demoralized by the French  aristocracy  in the years leading up to the revolution, the corresponding brutality demonstrated by the revolutionaries toward the former  aristocrats  in the early years of the revolution, and many unflattering social parallels with life in London during the same time period. It follows the lives of several  protagonists  through these events. The most notable are  Charles Darnay  and Sydney Carton . Darnay is a French once-aristocrat who falls victim to the indiscriminate wrath of the revolution despite his virtuous nature, and Carton is a dissipated English  barrister  who endeavours to redeem his ill-spent life out of his  unrequited love  for Darnay's wife.

•  Tess of the D'Urbervilles 赏析

Tess appeared on the threshold - not at all as he had expected to see her - bewilderingly otherwise, indeed. Her great natural beauty was, if not heightened, rendered more obvious by her attire. She was loosely wrapped in a cashmere dressing-gown of gray-white, embroidered in half-mourning tints, and she wore slippers of the same hue. Her neck rose out of a frill of down, and her well-remembered cable of dark-brown hair was partially coiled up in a mass at the back of her head and partly hanging on her shoulder - the evident result of haste. 

He had held out his arms, but they had fallen again to his side; for she had not come forward, remaining still in the opening of the doorway. Mere yellow skeleton that he was now he felt the contrast between them, and thought his appearance distasteful to her. 

“Tess!”he said huskily, `can you forgive me for going away? Can't you—come to me? How do you get to be—like this?' 

“It is too late,”said she, her voice sounding hard through the room, her eyes shining unnaturally. 

“I did not think rightly of you —I did not see you as you were!”he continued to plead. “I have learnt to since, dearest Tessy mine!” 

“Too late, too late!”she said, waving her hand in the impatience of a person whose tortures cause every instant to seem an hour. “Don't come close to me, Angel! No— you must not. Keep away.” 

“But don't you love me, my dear wife, because I have been so pulled down by illness? You are not so fickle —I am come on purpose for you —my mother and father will welcome you now!” 

“Yes —O, yes, yes! But I say, I say it is too late.” She seemed to feel like a fugitive in a dream, who tries to move away, but cannot. “Don't you know all—don't you know it? Yet how do you come here if you do not know?” 

“I inquired here and there, and I found the way.” 

“I waited and waited for you,” she went on, her tones suddenly resuming their old fluty pathos. “But you did not come! And I wrote to you, and you did not come! He kept on saying you would never come any more, and that I was a foolish woman. He was very kind to me, and to mother, and to all of us after father's death. He—”   

“I don't understand.” 

“He has won me back to him.” 

Clare looked at her keenly, then, gathering her meaning, flagged like one plague-stricken, and his glance sank; it fell on her hands, which, once rosy, were now white and more delicate. 

She continued— 

“He is upstairs. I hate him now, because he told me a lie— that you would not come again; and you have come! These clothes are what he's put upon me: I didn't care what he did wi' me! But—will you go away, Angel, please, and never come any more?” 

They stood fixed, their baffled hearts looking out of their eyes with a joylessness pitiful to see. Both seemed to implore something to shelter them from reality. 

“Ah - it is my fault!” said Clare. 

But he could not get on. Speech was as inexpressive as silence. But he had a vague consciousness of one thing, though it was not clear to him till later; that his original Tess had spiritually ceased to recognize the body before him as hers - allowing it to drift, like a corpse upon the current, in a direction dissociated from its living will. 

A few instants passed, and he found that Tess was gone. His face grew colder and more shrunken as he stood concentrated on the moment, and a minute or two after he found himself in the street, walking along he did not know whither.