LECTURE 3-4 (3d COURSE)
THE ROMANTIC PERIOD (1798 - 1832)
a) The First Generation of the Romantics (William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake)
b) The Second Generation of the Romantics (Lord George Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats)
THE NOVEL IN THE PERIOD OF ROMANTICISM
Scott was a powerful force in the popularization of both Romantic poetry and the Romantic novel. His Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-1803) capitalized on the widening interest in old ballads and folktales, especially of the rural type.
Scott turned to the novel as an act of self-defense when Byron became so popular that the verse of other poets could no longer command an adequate market. The publication of Waverley: Or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since (1814), the first of the so-called Waverley novels—all set in the past and many providing insightful visions of historical events and people — depicted wild Scottish scenery and vigorous actions performed by impossibly virtuous heroes in the defense of improbably sweet heroines. Scott’s talent for characterization was NEVER highly PRAISED, except in his portraits of lower-class characters such as thieves, pirates, and gypsies, but his powers of description were UNEQUALED in his day. In his better works, such as The Heart of Midlothian (1818) and The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), he attained gothic effects that rival those in any of the novels in the genre, even the works of Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) and Charles Robert Maturin (1780-1824).
While verse was the prevailing form during the Romantic period, the novel was still popular; the growth of the population, especially in cities, and the proliferation of lending libraries permitted a wider dissemination of fiction and thus greater economic rewards for writing and publishing novels. There was, however, still a stigma (when people disapprove of something, especially when this is unfair, ганьба) attached to both the writing and the reading of fiction. Scott published his first several novels anonymously, and Jane Austen took considerable pains to conceal from all but members of her family that she was writing novels.
An additional aspect of the novel in this era was the fairly new emphasis on regional fiction. Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849) dealt with the problems, charms, and complexities of life in Ireland with sensitivity and perception. Relations between Ireland and England had been strained since the time of Elizabeth I. In response, Edgeworth offered some penetrating arguments in favour of the Irish side of the question, most notably on the injustice of the English practice of absentee landlordism (a person who rents out a house, apartment or farm to someone, but never or almost never visits it).
Although satire was not the predominant tone of the fiction of the period, the novels of Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866) provide an entertaining vision of the romance as seen through more modern eyes, with lively touches of humor. The very titles of some of his most popular works indicate the nature of his approach: Headlong Hall (1816), Nightmare Abbey (1818), and Crotchet Castle (1831).
HISTORICAL NOVEL, a *NOVEL in which the action takes place during a specific historical period well before the time of writing (often one or two generations before, sometimes several centuries), and in which some attempt is made to depict accurately the customs and mentality of the period. The central character—real or imagined—is usually subject to divided loyalties within a larger historic conflict of which readers know the outcome. The pioneers of this * GENRE were Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper; Scott's historical novels, starting with Waverley (1814), set the pattern for hundreds of others:
SIR WALTER SCOTT
Born: Edinburgh, Scotland; August 15, 1771 – Died: Abbotsford, Scotland; September 21, 1832
Also known as: First Baronet Scott
Principal long fiction
Waverley: Or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since, 1814
Guy Mannering, 1815
The Antiquary, 1816
The Black Dwarf, 1816
Old Mortality, 1816
Rob Roy, 1817
The Heart of Midlothian, 1818
The Bride of Lammermoor, 1819
Ivanhoe, 1819
A Legend of Montrose, 1819
The Abbot, 1820
The Monastery, 1820
Kenilworth, 1821
The Pirate, 1821
The Fortunes of Nigel, 1822
Peveril of the Peak, 1823
Quentin Durward, 1823
St. Ronan’s Well, 1823
Redgauntlet, 1824
The Betrothed, 1825
The Talisman, 1825
Woodstock, 1826
The Fair Maid of Perth, 1828
Anne of Geierstein, 1829
Castle Dangerous, 1831
Count Robert of Paris, 1831
The Siege of Malta, 1976
Other literary forms
Sir Walter Scott’s first published work was a translation of two ballads by Gottfried August Burger, which appeared anonymously in 1796. In 1799, he published a translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1773 drama Gotz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand (Goetz of Berlichingen, with the Iron Hand). In 1802, the first two volumes of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border appeared, followed by the third volume in 1803. This was a collection of popular ballads, annotated and often emended and “improved” with a freedom no modern editor would indulge in. A fascination with his country’s past, formed in his early years and lasting all his life, led him to preserve these ballads, the products of a folk culture that was disappearing. In 1805 came The Lay of the Last Minstrel, the first of the series of long narrative poems that made Scott the most widely read poet of the day. It was followed by Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field (1808). The Lady of the Lake (1810) brought him to the height of his popularity as a poet. The later poems were less successful, and Scott was gradually eclipsed by Lord Byron.
In 1813, he completed the manuscript of a novel he had laid aside in 1805. This was Waverley, which appeared anonymously in 1814. (Scott did not publicly admit authorship of his novels until 1827.) It created a sensation and launched him on the series that remained his chief occupation until the end of his life. Other important works were his editions of John Dryden (1808) and of Jonathan Swift (1814); a series of lives of the English novelists, published in 1825; and The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte: Emperor of the French, with a Preliminary View of the French Revolution, begun in 1825 and published in nine volumes in 1827. Chronicles of the Canongate (1827) comprises three short stories: “The Highland Widow,” “The Two Drovers,” and “The Surgeon’s Daughter.”
Achievements
The central achievement of Sir Walter Scott’s busy career is the series of novels that is conventionally designated by the title of the first of them. The sheer bulk of the Waverley novels is in itself impressive, as is the range of the settings the novels present. For example, Ivanhoe is set in twelfth century England, The Talisman in the Holy Land of the Third Crusade, Quentin Durward in fifteenth century France, The Abbot in the Scotland of Queen Mary, Kenilworth in the reign of Elizabeth I, and The Fortunes of Nigel in that of James I. In spite of his wide reading, tenacious memory, and active imagination, Scott was not able to deal convincingly with so many different periods. Moreover, he worked rapidly and sometimes carelessly, under the pressures of financial necessity and, in later years, failing health. Some of the novels are tedious and wooden, mechanical in their plots and stilted in their dialogue. Scott himself was aware of their flaws, and he sometimes spoke and wrote slightingly of them. Most readers, however, find that even the weaker novels have good things in them, and the best of them have a narrative sweep and a dramatic vividness that render their flaws unimportant. The best of them, by common consent, are those set in Scotland as far back as the latter part of the reign of Charles II. When Scott attempted to go further back, he was less successful, but in such novels as the four discussed below—Waverley, Old Mortality, Rob Roy, and The Heart of Midlothian — Scott’s sense of history is strong. They are among the most impressive treatments of his great theme, the conflict between the old and the new, between Jacobite and Hanoverian, between the heroic, traditional, feudal values of the Tory Highlands and the progressive commercial interests of the Whig Lowlands, between stability and change. Though some of the other novels offer historical conflict of a comparable kind (Ivanhoe and Quentin Durward, for example), the Scottish novels present the conflict with particular insight and force and convey a strong sense of the good on both sides of it.
Scott values the dying heroic tradition even as he recognizes the benefits that change brings. Earlier writers had mined the past to satisfy a market for the exotic, the strange, or the merely quaint. Scott saw the past in significant relation to the present and created characters clearly shaped by the social, economic, religious, and political forces of their time, thus providing his readers with the first fictions that can properly be called historical novels.
JANE AUSTEN
December 16, 1775 – July 18, 1817
Principal long fiction
Sense and Sensibility, 1811
Pride and Prejudice, 1813
Mansfield Park, 1814
Emma, 1816
Northanger Abbey, 1818
Persuasion, 1818
Lady Susan, 1871 (novella)
The Watsons, 1871 (fragment)
Sanditon, 1925 (fragment), 1975 (completed by Anne Telscombe)
Achievements
Jane Austen, who published her novels anonymously, was not a writer famous in her time, nor did she wish to be. From the first, however, her novels, written in and largely for her own family circle, gained the notice and esteem of a wider audience. Among her early admirers were the Prince Regent and the foremost novelist of the day, Sir Walter Scott, who praised Austen as possessing a “talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with.”
Her talent was the first to forge, from the eighteenth century novel of external incident and internal sensibility, an art form that fully and faithfully presented a vision of real life in a specific segment of the real world. Austen’s particular excellences— the elegant economy of her prose, the strength and delicacy of her judgment and moral discrimination, the subtlety of her wit, the imaginative vividness of her character drawing—have been emulated but not surpassed by subsequent writers.
Analysis
Jane Austen’s novels—her “bits of ivory,” as she modestly and perhaps half-playfully termed them—are unrivaled for their success in combining two sorts of excellence that all too seldom coexist. Meticulously conscious of her artistry (as, for example, is Henry James), Austen is also unremittingly attentive to the realities of ordinary human existence (as is, among others, Anthony Trollope). From the first, her works unite subtlety and common sense, good humor and acute moral judgment, charm and conciseness, deftly marshaled incident and carefully rounded character. Austen’s detractors have spoken of her as a “limited” novelist, one who, writing in an age of great men and important events, portrays small towns and petty concerns, who knows (or reveals) nothing of masculine occupations and ideas, and who reduces the range of feminine thought and deed to matrimonial scheming and social pleasantry. Though one merit of the first-rate novelist is the way his or her talent transmutes all it touches and thereby creates a distinctive and consistent world, it is true that the settings, characters, events, and ideas of Austen’s novels are more than usually homogeneous.
Her tales, like her own life, are set in country villages and at rural seats from which the denizens venture forth to watering places or to London. True, her characters tend to be members of her own order, that prosperous and courteous segment of the middle class called the gentry. Unlike her novel-writing peers, Austen introduces few aristocrats into the pages of her novels, and the lower ranks, though glimpsed from time to time, are never brought forward. The happenings of her novels would not have been newsworthy in her day. She depicts society at leisure rather than on the march, and in portraying pleasures her literary preference is modest. Austen was in a position to know a broad band of social classes, from the local lord of the manor to the retired laborer subsisting on the charity of the parish. Some aspects of life that she did not herself experience she could learn about firsthand without leaving the family circle. Her brothers could tell her of the university, the navy in the age of Horatio Nelson, or the world of finance and fashion in Regency London. Her cousin (and later sister-in-law) Eliza, who had lost her first husband, the comte de Feuillide, to the guillotine, could tell her of Paris during the last days of the Old Regime.
In focusing on the manners and morals of rural middle-class English life, particularly on the ordering dance of matrimony that gives shape to society and situation to young ladies, Austen emphasizes rather than evades reality. The microcosm she depicts is convincing because she understands, though seldom explicitly assesses, its connections to the larger order. Her characters have clear social positions but are not just social types; the genius of such comic creations as Mrs. Bennet, Mr. Woodhouse, and Miss Bates is that each is a sparkling refinement on a quality or set of qualities existing at all times and on all levels. A proof of Austen’s power (no one questions her polish) is that she succeeds in making whole communities live in the reader’s imagination with little recourse to the stock device of the mere novelist of manners: descriptive detail. If a sparely drawn likeness is to convince, every line must count. The artist must understand what is omitted as well as what is supplied.
MARIA EDGEWORTH
Born: Black Bourton, Oxfordshire, England; January 1, 1768 – Died: Edgeworthstown, Ireland; May 22, 1849
Principal long fiction
Castle Rackrent: An Hibernian Tale, 1800
Belinda, 1801
Leonora, 1806
Ennui, 1809
The Absentee, 1812
Vivian, 1812
Patronage, 1814
Harrington, 1817
Ormond, 1817
Helen, 1834
Achievements
During her long lifetime, Maria Edgeworth helped to make possible the Victorian novel. Reared with a rich background in the high achievements of Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, and Tobias Smollett, she began towrite at a time when female novelists were just beginning to be accepted; a few of them, such as Fanny Burney and Elizabeth Inchbald, managed to attain some popularity. The novel of manners was the prevailing genre produced by these “lady writers.” It had affinities with the lachrymose novel of sensibility (the classic example of which, The Man of Feeling, was penned in 1771 by a man, Henry Mackenzie), and the tight focus and excessively delicate feelings exhibited in this form limited its appeal and artistic possibilities. It lay to Jane Austen to instill clever and penetrating satire, along with a much greater sense of realism in regard to human behavior, and to Maria Edgeworth to extend its bounds of character depiction, to include persons of the lower classes, and to broaden its range: Men are seen at the hunt, in private conference, and in all manner of vigorous activity unknown in Austen’s fiction.
Edgeworth is, of course, bound to be compared with Austen, to the former’s derogation; there can be no doubt that the latter is the greater novelist, from an artistic standpoint. This judgment should not blind the reader to Edgeworth’s accomplishment, however. As P.N.Newby has observed, although “Jane Austen was so much the better novelist,” yet “Maria Edgeworth may be the more important.” Her significance rests chiefly on two achievements: She widened the scope of the “female” novel (the emphasis on female sensibility in her work is considerably less than in Austen’s novels, though it can be detected), and, as Newby has noted, in her careful and detailed treatment of Ireland and its people she “gave dignity to the regional subject and made the regional novel possible.”
Today, readers tend to take for granted the insightful historical works of, for example, Sir Walter Scott; they often do not realize that, had it not been for Edgeworth, Scott might not have attempted the monumental effort that he began in Waverley: Or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since (1814), in the preface of which he gives Edgeworth full credit for inspiring him to essay the regional fiction in which his work became a landmark. It has also been claimed that such disparate figures as Stendhal and Ivan Turgenev were influenced by Edgeworth’s sympathetic treatment of peasants. Some critics and literary historians have gone so far as to claim for her the title of the first intelligent sociological novelist in English literature. More than any author up to her time, Edgeworth revealed human beings as related to, and partially formed by, their environments.
Analysis
The novels of Maria Edgeworth are, to the modern reader, an odd combination of strengths and weaknesses. This phenomenon is not really very strange, given the times in which she lived and the progress of fiction writing in the early nineteenth century. The work of all the novelists of that period may be considered strongly flawed and yet often unexpectedly effective (Sir Walter Scott is the obvious example, but the same might even be said of much of the work of Charles Dickens).
What is perhaps more surprising is that Edgeworth herself was aware of the defects of her work. She knew, for example, that her writings were didactic to an often annoying degree. Her father, who had a great deal to do with her conviction that fiction should aim to elevate the morals of its readers, even comments on the fact in one of his prefaces to her novels and claims that a severe attempt had been made to subdue the moralistic features. By modern standards, the attempts never fully succeeded in any of Edgeworth’s novels. One reason for the “failure” is simply the prevalence of the late eighteenth century belief that behavior can be modified by edifying reading and that character can be formed and, possibly more important, reformed by acts of the will. Those of Edgeworth’s tales titled with the name of the central character, such as Ormond, Belinda, and Vivian, are thus the stories of how these young people come to terms with society and their responsibilities— in short, how they grow up to be worthy citizens.
What is distressing in Edgeworth’s “moral tales” (and those of many other writers of the era) are the improbable turns of plot such as those by which poor but honest people are suddenly discovered to be heirs to great properties, those believed to be orphans are revealed as the offspring of noble houses, and so forth.
Richard Edgeworth was blamed, perhaps unjustly, for the excess of didacticism in his daughter’s novels. To his credit, however, Richard Edgeworth is now known to have done a great deal to provide his daughter with ideas for stories and plot sequences. Perhaps the most important artistic flaw to which the younger Edgeworth pleaded guilty was a lack of invention, and critics over the decades have noticed that she depends to excess on details and facts, many of which she collected from her own family’s records and memoirs.
The rest she gathered by direct (and penetrating) observation, as in the realistic farm scenes in the Irish tales and the believable pictures of society gatherings in London and Paris. One of the most obvious indications of Edgeworth’s failure to devise plots artfully is her reliance on the retrospective strategy of having a character reveal his or her background by telling it to another. Certainly, the review of her own life that Lady Delacour provides for Belinda is not without interest and is necessary to the story, yet it seems cumbersome, appearing as it does in two chapters that occupy more than thirty pages near the opening of the novel.
The two types of novels that Edgeworth wrote—the Irish tales and, as the title of one collection indicates, the Tales of Fashionable Life (1809-1812)—manifest the poles of her thematic interest. She believed, as did her father, that Ireland could benefit and even prosper from a more responsible aristocracy, landowners who lived on their property and saw that it was fairly and efficiently managed. In her three best Irish tales, Castle Rackrent, The Absentee, and Ormond, Edgeworth underlines the virtues of fair play with tenants, caution in dealing with hired estate managers (the wicked Nicholas Garraghty in The Absentee should be warning enough for any proprietor), and close attention to details of land and equipment.
The years that Edgeworth spent aiding her father at Edgeworths town bore impressive fruit in her grasp of the problems and difficulties faced by owners of large estates.Because the sectarian, political, and economic problems that faced Ireland have tended to persist into the present, while the aspects of fashionable life have not, the “society” novels in Irish literature are almost unknown by the reading public today. In any case, Edgeworth was much more intellectually involved in the politics and social problems of her homeland than she was in the vagaries and evils of society life in big cities. Much as she believed that a great deal can be learned about the proper way to live one’s life by observing society closely, she was personally never so involved in that topic as she was in such concerns as the injustices created by absentee landlords and the abuse of tenants by land agents hired by the absentees and given enormous power.
Edgeworth usually dealt with events and conditions in the fairly recent past; as such, she can be considered a historical novelist. Her emphasis on what can be viewed as an international theme, however (the relationship between English and Irish characters and attitudes), is thought by many to be the most significant aspect of her novels.
THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK
October 18, 1785 – January 23, 1866
Also known as: T. L. Peacock
Principal long fiction
Headlong Hall, 1816
Melincourt, 1817
Nightmare Abbey, 1818
Maid Marian, 1822
The Misfortunes of Elphin, 1829
Crotchet Castle, 1831
Gryll Grange, 1860
Other literary forms
Before turning his talents to the satiric novel, Thomas Love Peacock wrote poetry. His early works include Palmyra, and Other Poems (1806), The Genius of the Thames (1810), The Philosophy of Melancholy (1812), and Sir Proteus: A Satirical Ballad (1814). When his principal efforts turned to prose, Peacock continued to produce the occasional elegant lyric or rousing song, many of them incorporated into his novels. His long narrative poem Rhododaphne (1818), “a nympholeptic tale,” attracted considerable contemporary attention and has retained a measure of continued critical esteem; his satiric Paper Money Lyrics (1837), topical and crochety, is largely ignored.
Early in his literary career Peacock also wrote two farces, “The Dilettanti” and “The Three Doctors,” both of which were unpublished. Throughout his life, and particularly during the periods when his responsibilities at the East India Company precluded sustained literary projects, Peacock wrote essays and reviews, the most famous being his unfinished but incisive “Essay on Fashionable Literature,” in The Four Ages of Poetry (1820), the satiric critique of contemporary poetry’s debasement that provoked Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A Defense of Poetry (1840) and Peacock’s four-part Memoirs of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1858-1862), which the reserved and fastidious Peacock, who deplored the publication of private matters, wrote grudgingly, as a corrective to the muddled enthusiasms and posthumous scandal-retailing that admirers and acquaintances of Shelley were offering as literary biography.
Achievements
From the beginning of his career as a satiric novelist, Thomas Love Peacock always had an attentive audience but never a wide one. His career in several ways has invited comparison with that of his contemporary Jane Austen. Both writers set out to please themselves, uninfluenced by desire for fame or gold. Both swam against the Romantic mainstream. Each produced a slim shelf of novels distinguished by elegance, irony, and limited scope. Whereas Austen limited herself to matters suitable to the notice of a lady, Peacock restricted himself yet more narrowly. Except for Maid Marian and The Misfortunes of Elphin, respectively set in the picturesque past of “Merrie England” and Arthurian Wales, Peacock’s novels take place in an idyllic country-house world where conversation —varied by singing, dining, drinking, flirtation, and sightseeing— is the chief activity. The dense if oblique topicality of these conversations is something of an obstacle for the twentieth century reader.
Another hurdle for the general public in any age is Peacock’s learning: Only those who share Peacock’s passion for the past, especially classical antiquity, can enjoy the novels’ esoterica and allusions, and only readers nurtured in Greek and Latin (or possessing editions whose annotations compensate for such deficiency) can smile at the puns and scholarly jokes Peacock presents in the names and adventures of his characters. Peacock attained in his own time the respect of Shelley and Lord Byron.
Analysis
A writer with strong intelligence but weak invention is not likely to become a novelist. His or her talents would seem to be most serviceable elsewhere in the literary realm. Even so, the example of Thomas Love Peacock suggests that such a deficiency need not be fatal to a writer of fiction. True, his plots are often insignificant or implausible, and his characters tend to be sketches rather than rounded likenesses or, if three-dimensional, to have more opinions than emotions. His novels are nevertheless readable and rereadable, for he excels in anatomizing the follies, philosophies, and fashions that the age presents to his satiric eye.
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