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Literary Journeys CONNECTING IDEAS

LITE RARY AN D G LOBAL COM PETE NCE S

CROSS-CU R R ICU LAR TH E M E S

VI SUAL R EVI S ION S

LEAR N I NG WITH TH E AUTHOR

From the Origins to the Romantics

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Literary Journeys Connecting Ideas

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Connect, extend, challenge Before reading this chapter, look at the picture on this page and read the text below.

THE VICTORIAN AGE 1837-1901

CONNECT 1. Look closely at the map, finding

as many details as possible. Then, answer the question: How are the ideas and information you gathered from the map connected to what you already know about Great Britain?

EXTEND by R. Kipling and answer the questions.

• Charles Dickens, The best-loved novelist in the English language.

• Robert Louis Stevenson, xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx • Oscar Wilde, The writer as a self-promoting artist

THEMES CHILDHOOD ▶

▶

CHALLENGE 3. In this chapter, do you expect

to engage in material you will find challenging? What kind of challenges might they be?

PROF. ARTURO CATTANEO

VIDEO LESSONS

2. Now read the lines written

1 What new ideas did you get from the poem that extended your thinking in different directions? 2 How can you relate the words ‘palm and pine’ from the poem to the map?

HOR T AU

NING WI TH LEAR

THINKING ROUTINE

▶ ▶ ▶ ▶ ▶ ▶

Blake, The Lamb and The Chimney Sweeper Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality Dickens, Hard Times Eliot, The Mill on the Floss Kipling, Kim Twain, Huckleberry Finn McEwan, The Cement Garden Carter, The Werewolf

EDUCATION ▶

God of our fathers, known of old, Lord of our far-flung battle-line, Beneath whose awful Hand we hold Dominion over palm and pine —

▶ ▶ ▶ ▶

Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Dickens, Hard Times Eliot, The Mill on the Floss Shaw, Pygmalion Huxley, Brave New World

▶

Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

THE NEW WOMAN ▶

▶ ▶ ▶

▶

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre Christina Rossetti, Echo Elizabeth Barrett Browning, If Thou Must Love Me, Let It Be for Naught George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

GOTHIC AND THE SUPERNATURAL ▶ ▶ ▶

Beowulf Marlowe, Dr Faustus Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan

Recessional (1897), Rudyard Kipling

Connect, extend, challenge Before reading this chapter, look at the picture on this page and read the text below.

THE VICTORIAN AGE 1837-1901

CONNECT 1. Look closely at the map, finding

as many details as possible. Then, answer the question: How are the ideas and information you gathered from the map connected to what you already know about Great Britain?

EXTEND by R. Kipling and answer the questions.

• Charles Dickens, The best-loved novelist in the English language.

• Robert Louis Stevenson, xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx • Oscar Wilde, The writer as a self-promoting artist

THEMES CHILDHOOD ▶

▶

CHALLENGE 3. In this chapter, do you expect

to engage in material you will find challenging? What kind of challenges might they be?

PROF. ARTURO CATTANEO

VIDEO LESSONS

2. Now read the lines written

1 What new ideas did you get from the poem that extended your thinking in different directions? 2 How can you relate the words ‘palm and pine’ from the poem to the map?

HOR T AU

NING WI TH LEAR

THINKING ROUTINE

▶ ▶ ▶ ▶ ▶ ▶

EDUCATION ▶

God of our fathers, known of old, Lord of our far-flung battle-line, Beneath whose awful Hand we hold Dominion over palm and pine —

▶ ▶ ▶ ▶

Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Dickens, Hard Times Eliot, The Mill on the Floss Shaw, Pygmalion Huxley, Brave New World

▶

Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

THE NEW WOMAN ▶

▶ ▶ ▶

▶

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre Christina Rossetti, Echo Elizabeth Barrett Browning, If Thou Must Love Me, Let It Be for Naught George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

GOTHIC AND THE SUPERNATURAL ▶ ▶ ▶

Beowulf Marlowe, Dr Faustus Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan

Recessional (1897), Rudyard Kipling

The Victorian Age

HISTORY

The British Empire and The Commonwealth • Watch the video Into the times • Revise with the map and the presentation • Access the listening exercises • Read the extra texts INTO THE TIMES

throne during a difficult political period. Relations with Ireland worsened during her reign, owing to recurrent famines, especially the potato blight of 1845. Since the Irish economy and people’s diet were mostly based on potatoes, when the crops failed, emigration to the United States or to England was the only alternative to starvation. A movement for Irish independence began, led by Charles S. Parnell (1846-91), who asked for Home Rule (self-government) for Ireland. He convinced Prime Minister Gladstone to present the Irish Home Rule Bill in the Houses of Parliament (1886), but it was rejected twice.

• Language: Words from the Empire

John Wood Approaching Bombay by Joseph Heard, c. 1850.

Colonial policy During the reign of Queen Victoria the British Empire greatly expanded. The Empire grew out of two complementary processes: the impulse to consolidate overseas markets and the population surplus at home. Australia and New Zealand became flourishing centres for rearing cattle and sheep. Many people also went to Canada, part of which was already occupied by the French. The British government also took over from the East India Company and ruled India directly, which for the first time in its history was united under one single power. The territories controlled actually included today’s India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Among the colonies, India was ‘the jewel in the crown’, in Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli’s words, the richest and most exotic part of the Empire – especially when in 1876 Queen Victoria became Empress of India. In Africa the British occupied Uganda, Kenya, Rhodesia (today’s Zimbabwe), and the Niger territories. They also obtained the majority of the shares of the Suez Canal, excavated between 1859 and 1869, a crucial route between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean. In the Cape Colony (South Africa), relations between the descendants of the Dutch colonists (called Boers) and the British were never good. The Boer War (1899-1902) was won by Britain, which gained control over Orange and Transvaal, rich in gold and diamonds. The Empire was not, however, just a military and a commercial concern. It was generally believed that having an empire was a necessary duty: Britain had to shoulder ‘the white man’s burden’, in writer Rudyard Kipling’s famous phrase (▶ p. 137).

Production: UK Direction: Stephen Frears Written by: Lee Hall Starring: Judi Dench, Ali Fazal

I am anything but insane!

Internal policy: The Irish question Queen Victoria (1837-1901) came to the

European policy Britain’s European policy from 1830 to 1851 was shaped by the Liberal Lord Palmerston, then Britain’s foreign minister. He was convinced that British interests – identified with political liberalism and free trade – were opposed to those of European monarchies such as Austria and Russia, which were absolutist and protectionist. Britain therefore set herself at the head of the liberal forces in Europe. A conflict came with the Crimean War (1854-56), due to a dispute between Turkey and Russia over their border. Britain and France sided with Turkey, and Russia was finally defeated. EXTRA TEXTS

CONNECTING VICTORIA&ABDUL (2017)

HISTORY

Read about the film

Film corner This film explores the real-life relationship between Queen Victoria and her Indian Muslim servant Abdul Karim. The Queen develops a close friendship with the young man and promotes him to the rank of Munshi, or ‘teacher’: Abdul teaches her the Urdu language, as well as the Koran. She treats Abdul as a son, but her family resents this and plot to send him back home. Yet, despite many difficulties, Abdul will remain at Victoria’s side to the very end.

Britain’s commercial power The Empire was of supreme importance for Great Britain. A large proportion of all British industrial exports went to the Empire (over a third by 1914). Victoria’s Golden and Diamond Jubilees, celebrating the 50th and 60th anniversaries of the Queen’s accession, in 1887 and 1897, were occasions for the display of Britain’s commercial and financial greatness. At the end of the 19th century, roughly one third of the world’s financial and commercial transactions were carried out in Britain. However, two powerful rivals were emerging. Germany under Bismarck’s guidance was beginning to challenge Britain’s naval and industrial supremacy, especially after defeating France in the war of 1870-71. The United States, after recovering from the Civil War (1861-65), was now almost on a par with Britain with regards to its industrial production: the expansion of the railway system to Canada and the West, rich in grain, meant lower prices and much greater production, neither of which Britain could match.

WORK OUT

CONNECT

1. Read the definitions and find the words in the text.

3. DEBATE Work in small groups and discuss the pros

1 2

a disease that kills plants 3 a way across land or sea 4

and cons of British colonialism in the Victorian era. Half of the group will defend colonialism, the other half will criticise it. Consider the following points:

to enter into competition at the same level as

2. Answer the questions. 1

What were the effects of the potato blight?

Why did the Empire expand so rapidly?

Why was it generally thought that the Empire was a duty?

What did Victoria’s Golden and Diamond Jubilees turn out to be?

Why did Germany become a rival for Britain?

colonialism strengthened the British economy; brought technological and medical advances; weakened the economy of colonised lands; damaged human health by spreading diseases, etc.

4. FILM CORNER Watch the scene when Victoria

discusses her role as a Queen after her personal decision to give Abdul a knighthood and answer the questions.

1 2

What does this scene tell you about Victoria’s perception of herself as a woman and as a historical figure? Why do you think the Queen needs to specify that she is not insane?

The Victorian Age

HISTORY

The British Empire and The Commonwealth • Watch the video Into the times • Revise with the map and the presentation • Access the listening exercises • Read the extra texts INTO THE TIMES

• Language: Words from the Empire

John Wood Approaching Bombay by Joseph Heard, c. 1850.

Production: UK Direction: Stephen Frears Written by: Lee Hall Starring: Judi Dench, Ali Fazal

I am anything but insane!

Internal policy: The Irish question Queen Victoria (1837-1901) came to the

CONNECTING VICTORIA&ABDUL (2017)

HISTORY

Read about the film

WORK OUT

CONNECT

1. Read the definitions and find the words in the text.

3. DEBATE Work in small groups and discuss the pros

1 2

a disease that kills plants 3 a way across land or sea 4

and cons of British colonialism in the Victorian era. Half of the group will defend colonialism, the other half will criticise it. Consider the following points:

to enter into competition at the same level as

2. Answer the questions. 1

What were the effects of the potato blight?

Why did the Empire expand so rapidly?

Why was it generally thought that the Empire was a duty?

What did Victoria’s Golden and Diamond Jubilees turn out to be?

Why did Germany become a rival for Britain?

colonialism strengthened the British economy; brought technological and medical advances; weakened the economy of colonised lands; damaged human health by spreading diseases, etc.

4. FILM CORNER Watch the scene when Victoria

discusses her role as a Queen after her personal decision to give Abdul a knighthood and answer the questions.

1 2

What does this scene tell you about Victoria’s perception of herself as a woman and as a historical figure? Why do you think the Queen needs to specify that she is not insane?

HISTORY

The Victorian Age

From Empire to Commonwealth As early as the 19th century, some colonies enjoyed some form of independence. Between 1840 and 1872, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Cape Colony (South Africa) achieved ‘dominion status’. This meant that they were free from direct British control in their internal affairs, though not in matters of foreign policy and defence. They retained Queen Victoria as Head of State, and made up the British Commonwealth of Nations. In 1949, after the end of the Second World War and the dismantling of the British Empire, this developed into the modern Commonwealth of Nations. Many of the original members were former British colonies. India, for instance, became a republic in 1949 but still wished to remain a part of the association. Since then, other countries in Africa, Asia, the Pacific, the Americas and Europe have become members.

HISTORY

WORK OUT

CONNECT

1. Answer the questions.

2. Go to www.thecommonwealth.org and choose a

1 2 3 4 5 6

What did ‘dominion status’ mean for countries like Canada? When did the modern Commonwealth emerge? What is its main aim? What kind of countries does it include? What do member states discuss at their meetings? Why does the UK have four separate teams at the Commonwealth Games?

country in the Commonwealth.

Prepare a short presentation for your class. Be sure to mention one key fact about the country’s geography and climate, society and history.

3. Surf the Internet and find out about the Commonwealth Games.

Prepare an oral presentation, answering all the questions: What was their origin? When are they held and what teams take part? What sports are included?

WHAT IS THE COMMONWEALTH? Today, the Commonwealth is an association of 54 independent countries, which are ‘free and equal members of the Commonwealth of Nations, freely co-operating in the pursuit of peace, liberty and progress’ – as stated in the London Declaration of 1949. As the official website states, the association is ‘home to some 2.4 billion people’ and includes ‘some of the world’s largest, smallest, richest and poorest countries, spanning five regions. Thirty-two of its members are small states, many of them island nations’. These include Mauritius, the Seychelles, Singapore, the Maldives, Fiji, Cyprus and Malta. The member States, which still recognise King Charles III as Head of the Commonwealth, meet every two years to discuss issues of mutual concern, mainly commercial and cultural. One important event is the Commonwealth Games, a multisport event held every four years in which all Commonwealth members participate. The home nations of the United Kingdom send their own separate teams – England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

1876

Coronation of Queen Victoria

Crimean War

Queen Victoria is proclaimed Empress of India

1845 Great Famine in Ireland

1 2 3

Pidgin English is a mixture of English . It is used by people who do not share a common language to . ‘Singlish’ is often used for conversations in Singapore. Pidgin English is most commonly used in the former in West Africa.

TO SUM UP

TIMELINE

1854-56

1901

US Civil War

Queen Victoria dies

5 6 7 8

It originally allowed British to communicate with local African traders. Pidgin is not an language anywhere in the Commonwealth. Between million Nigerians speak Pidgin English as their primary language. Up to million people in Nigeria use it as their second language.

Internal policy: ‘Irish Question’ • potato blight (1845) caused mass emigration, mostly to the US • the Irish requested Home Rule, but this was rejected by Westminster (1886)

European policy • Britain: liberalism and free trade • Crimean War (1854-56): victory for Britain and France over Russia

Victoria’s reign (1837-1901)

1861-65

Quality education

000 FIRST LISTENING PART 2 Listen to the recording and complete each sentence with 1-3 words and/or a number.

1838

AGENDA 2030

CONNECTING PIDGIN ENGLISH

Colonial policy • British Empire grew in order to consolidate overseas markets (import from / export to colonies)

and address the population surplus at home • Britain consolidated its control over India (‘jewel of the crown’, including modern-day

Pakistan and Bangladesh), Africa, Suez Canal (1859-69) to open up a route to the Indian Ocean and fought the Boer War (1899-1902) for control of South Africa • the Empire was the source of Britain’s commercial power, also when compared with Germany which challenged British naval supremacy and the US which was on a par with British industrial production • Commonwealth of Nations: Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa became ‘dominions’ (1840-72). They were free from British control in internal affairs; the Commonwealth has continued to grow and now includes 54 member states, all former colonies

HISTORY

The Victorian Age

HISTORY

WORK OUT

CONNECT

1. Answer the questions.

2. Go to www.thecommonwealth.org and choose a

1 2 3 4 5 6

country in the Commonwealth.

Prepare a short presentation for your class. Be sure to mention one key fact about the country’s geography and climate, society and history.

3. Surf the Internet and find out about the Commonwealth Games.

Prepare an oral presentation, answering all the questions: What was their origin? When are they held and what teams take part? What sports are included?

1876

Coronation of Queen Victoria

Crimean War

Queen Victoria is proclaimed Empress of India

1845 Great Famine in Ireland

1 2 3

TO SUM UP

TIMELINE

1854-56

1901

US Civil War

Queen Victoria dies

5 6 7 8

Internal policy: ‘Irish Question’ • potato blight (1845) caused mass emigration, mostly to the US • the Irish requested Home Rule, but this was rejected by Westminster (1886)

European policy • Britain: liberalism and free trade • Crimean War (1854-56): victory for Britain and France over Russia

Victoria’s reign (1837-1901)

1861-65

Quality education

000 FIRST LISTENING PART 2 Listen to the recording and complete each sentence with 1-3 words and/or a number.

1838

AGENDA 2030

CONNECTING PIDGIN ENGLISH

Colonial policy • British Empire grew in order to consolidate overseas markets (import from / export to colonies)

and address the population surplus at home • Britain consolidated its control over India (‘jewel of the crown’, including modern-day

The Victorian Age

SOCIETY

The poor and social reforms The poor endured terrible conditions. The Poor Law

An age of industry and reforms • Access the listening exercises • Read the extra texts

SOCIETY

of 1834 was not a solution to the problem: the poor were amassed in workhouses where they did very unpleasant jobs in return for food and shelter and where living conditions were terrible. In large cities, the filth, misery and moral degradation of urban slums were often denounced by contemporary newspaper reports, essays, novels, paintings and engravings. However, during the Victorian Age some important social reforms were carried out. The most important were the Mines Act (1862), which made the employment of women and children in mines illegal, and the Trade Union Act (1875), which made the activities of the unions of workers legal. As a result, the unions came to play an important role in internal policy.

The Chartist Movement and the Reform Bills Britain’s political and economic situation was far from stable. Though the Reform Bill of 1832 had partly given the middle class the right to vote, the working class endured very poor conditions. Workers’ meetings and demonstrations were common and revolution often seemed around the corner, as in the rest of Europe in 1848. The largest organized workers’ movement was that of the Chartists, so called because they drew up a People’s Charter (1838) asking for the extension of the right to vote to the working class. However, it was only in 1867 that a second Reform Bill was passed: it gave town workers the right to vote, but still excluded miners and agricultural workers. A third Reform Bill in 1884 finally granted the right to vote to all male workers.

The new political parties It was in Victoria’s reign that Britain’s modern-day parties came into being: the Conservatives evolved from the old Tories, and the Liberals from the Whigs. Both parties alternated in power and great prime ministers came from each. The great political novelty, however, was the foundation of the Labour Party in 1900, a sign of the growing importance of the working class. After this, workers’ representatives were able to sit in Parliament for the first time.

Free trade and the Great Exhibition With the end of the Napoleonic Wars and Iron and Coal by William Bell Scott, 1861.

the growing international character of modern industry and finance, protectionism was abandoned in favour of free trade. Thanks to its overseas possessions Britain’s industrial and commercial power was extending worldwide. In 1851 the Great International Exhibition of London was opened by Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert. It was the first World Expo in history, displaying to an admiring world the wonders of industry and science as well as proclaiming Britain as the world’s leading political and economic power.

Industry and science Thanks to the invention of the steam

TIMELINE

1834

1862

1875

1900

Poor Law

Mines Act

Trade Union Act

The Labour Party

CONNECT

1. Answer the questions.

000 Listen to the description of the picture Iron and Coal, then answer the questions. On first looking at the painting, what strikes you most: people or things? Which elements of the painting would you relate to industry and which to commerce? Would you call this painting realistic or symbolic? Why?

What did the Chartist Movement aim to achieve? Was it successful?

What were the practical applications of new inventions?

How were working conditions improved during the Victorian Age?

How did the party system change?

TO SUM UP

locomotive, the Victorian Age became the age of the railway, which by 1848 covered much of the country and made the triumph of industry possible. By 1849 regular steamboat services also linked Britain with America and the rest of the world. Scientific research was increasingly applied to the invention and construction of machines: following modern studies of electricity, for instance, the American Samuel Morse invented the telegraph. In 1816 London was the first city in the world to boast gas lighting in city streets.

WORK OUT

1867

1884

Great International Exhibition of London

Second Reform Bill, giving workers the right to vote

Third Reform Bill, universal male suffrage

the Great International Exhibition of London. Write 200-250 words about your findings.

Political: Reform Bills • 1832 → middle class could vote • 1867 → under pressure from the Chartist Movement (1830s), industrial

workers could finally vote as well • 1884 → all male workers could vote

Reforms

1851

3. Surf the Internet and find some information about

Social • Poor Law (1834) → created workhouses where the poor could live • Mines Act (1862) → made it illegal to employ women and children in mines • Trade Union Act (1875) → made trade unions legal

New political parties • Conservatives (old Tories) and Liberals (old Whigs) alternated in power • Labour Party was founded in 1900 to represent the working class

The Victorian Age

SOCIETY

The poor and social reforms The poor endured terrible conditions. The Poor Law

An age of industry and reforms • Access the listening exercises • Read the extra texts

SOCIETY

Free trade and the Great Exhibition With the end of the Napoleonic Wars and Iron and Coal by William Bell Scott, 1861.

Industry and science Thanks to the invention of the steam

TIMELINE

1834

1862

1875

1900

Poor Law

Mines Act

Trade Union Act

The Labour Party

CONNECT

1. Answer the questions.

What did the Chartist Movement aim to achieve? Was it successful?

What were the practical applications of new inventions?

How were working conditions improved during the Victorian Age?

How did the party system change?

TO SUM UP

WORK OUT

1867

1884

Great International Exhibition of London

Second Reform Bill, giving workers the right to vote

Third Reform Bill, universal male suffrage

the Great International Exhibition of London. Write 200-250 words about your findings.

Political: Reform Bills • 1832 → middle class could vote • 1867 → under pressure from the Chartist Movement (1830s), industrial

workers could finally vote as well • 1884 → all male workers could vote

Reforms

1851

3. Surf the Internet and find some information about

New political parties • Conservatives (old Tories) and Liberals (old Whigs) alternated in power • Labour Party was founded in 1900 to represent the working class

SOCIETY

The Victorian Age

Opposition to evolution came not only from religious quarters but also from other scientists who believed that Darwin’s theories were unsound. In general, Victorian writers were particularly interested in the ethical issues raised by the enormous progress of science. This is visible in a novel like Dr ]ekyll and Mr Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson (▶ p. 83), and in the science fiction that developed towards the end of the century.

The Victorian compromise The Victorian establishment refused to admit the

EXTRA TEXTS • D51 John Ruskin, The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, The Sky Is Covered with Grey Cloud

existence of a materialistic philosophy of life and tried to cover the unpleasant aspects of progress under a veil of respectability and facile optimism. Utilitarian philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), for instance, claimed that everything had to be judged according to standards of utility and how much it promoted the material happiness of the greatest number of people. However, this led to unrestrained competition and to the exploitation of human and natural resources. The upper and middle classes could not tolerate the word ‘leg’ spoken in polite society – both women’s and table legs were covered with long skirts – but didn’t care about the social conditions that pushed women into prostitution. This was the so-called ‘Victorian compromise’.

The decline of Victorian values As the century advanced, Victorian moral standards began to break down. This was particularly true of the family, which had been the stronghold of Victorian respectability. Women felt more and more stifled by being confined to the home most of the time and some writers began to expose the fundamental hypocrisy of Victorian society. The outward strictness of Victorian morals and behaviour was felt to be inconsistent with what was actually happening in society.

Liberal and socialist concern about the working class The reaction to industrialism

Construction of the Metropolitan District Railway, Blackfriars, London, c. 1869.

Aestheticism More typical of the latter years of the century were a relaxed attitude to life and a less strict observance of social customs. During the so-called ‘Nineties’, highly-refined, decadent poses were adopted by upper-class people and artists, who had extravagant tastes and affected boredom with life – a feeling that came to be known as fin de siècle (end-of-century) or aestheticism, most famously in connection with Oscar Wilde (▶ p. 108).

and liberalism was strong, even among the liberals themselves. The best minds of the age feared that Britain was becoming what Conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81) aptly defined as ‘the two nations’, a society made up of only two classes, the rich and the poor. Different thinkers, such as Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), the philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill (1806-73), and the art critic and writer John Ruskin (1819-1900), were all concerned with the damage industrialization was bringing to man and the environment. The miserable condition of the British working class greatly contributed to the revolutionary theories of Karl Marx (1818-83) and Friedrich Engels (1820-95), who both lived in England and together wrote The Communist Manifesto (1848). Even a religious movement like Evangelicalism greatly contributed to social reforms: it was based on a democratic conception of life and on a strict moral code that condemned the irresponsible exploitation of men at work. the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859) by Charles Darwin (1809-82). In proclaiming that man was the result of gradual evolution, scientists challenged the Christian belief in the creation of man by God as told by the Bible. An even greater shock was caused by Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871), which stressed the similarities between man and certain animals and postulated the idea that man was only an evolved ape.

WORK OUT 1. Answer the questions. 1 2 3 4

Who was Jeremy Bentham and what did he claim? What did Carlyle, Mill and Ruskin have in common? Why did Darwin’s theories challenge religious beliefs? What was Victorian hypocrisy founded on?

TO SUM UP

Science and Evolutionism Victorian morals and religion were deeply shaken by

SOCIETY

Why was aestheticism a reaction against Victorian values?

CONNECT 2. Write a paragraph on the Victorian compromise. Focus on the contradictions of the age.

Industry and science • trade, industry and science celebrated in the first World Expo in

London (1851) • advances of industry and technology: railways and

steamboats; electricity, gas lighting, the telegraph

‘Victorian compromise’

TIMELINE

1795-1881

1819-1900

1859

Thomas Carlyle

John Ruskin

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species

Progress and cultural trends

attempt at reconciling the pursuit of material happiness and the exploitation of human and natural resources under a moralistic façade

Concern about the working classes • socialist → Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto (1848) • religious → Evangelicalism

Evolutionism

1819-1900 John Stuart Mill

1848

1871

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto

Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man

• promoted by Charles Darwin • life results from evolution and natural selection • man is descended from apes → greatly opposed by the Church

SOCIETY

The Victorian Age

The Victorian compromise The Victorian establishment refused to admit the

EXTRA TEXTS • D51 John Ruskin, The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, The Sky Is Covered with Grey Cloud

Liberal and socialist concern about the working class The reaction to industrialism

Construction of the Metropolitan District Railway, Blackfriars, London, c. 1869.

WORK OUT 1. Answer the questions. 1 2 3 4

Who was Jeremy Bentham and what did he claim? What did Carlyle, Mill and Ruskin have in common? Why did Darwin’s theories challenge religious beliefs? What was Victorian hypocrisy founded on?

TO SUM UP

Science and Evolutionism Victorian morals and religion were deeply shaken by

SOCIETY

Why was aestheticism a reaction against Victorian values?

CONNECT 2. Write a paragraph on the Victorian compromise. Focus on the contradictions of the age.

Industry and science • trade, industry and science celebrated in the first World Expo in

London (1851) • advances of industry and technology: railways and

steamboats; electricity, gas lighting, the telegraph

‘Victorian compromise’

TIMELINE

1795-1881

1819-1900

1859

Thomas Carlyle

John Ruskin

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species

Progress and cultural trends

attempt at reconciling the pursuit of material happiness and the exploitation of human and natural resources under a moralistic façade

Concern about the working classes • socialist → Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto (1848) • religious → Evangelicalism

Evolutionism

1819-1900 John Stuart Mill

1848

1871

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto

Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man

• promoted by Charles Darwin • life results from evolution and natural selection • man is descended from apes → greatly opposed by the Church

EUROPEAN LITERATURES

US HISTORY & SOCIETY

The political and economic growth of the US

The myth of the modern city French novelists In the course of the 19th century French novelists created the myth of Paris, the great metropolis. Three images, which will become typical of representations of the modern city, characterize it:

From coast to coast: the growth of the US In the course of the 19th century the United States steadily gained important new territories. Between 1816 and 1821 six new States were created: Indiana (1816), Mississippi (1817), Illinois (1818), Alabama (1819), Maine (1820) and Missouri (1821). In 1819 the US also obtained Florida and in 1846 Oregon was acquired after a treaty between England and the United States, which finally fixed the Canadian-American border. After defeating Mexico in the war of 1846-48, the United States obtained Texas, California and huge territories in the area called New Mexico, roughly equivalent to today’s Nevada and Utah. In 1853 new territory south of Arizona and New Mexico was bought from Mexico. The United States now spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

• the image of the labyrinth, indicating the intricate interconnections of individual lives and the danger of new relationships; • the image of the jungle, indicating the violent struggle for existence that goes on in it; • the image of the ant-hill, indicating both the high numbers of people and the standardization of the individual. In the face of the modern city the writer feels a mixture of fascination for its vitality and repulsion for its degraded conditions. Paris is at the centre of the novels of La comédie humaine by Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), of Les misérables (1862) by Victor Hugo (1802-1885), which contrasts the city of narrow dirty alleys with the city of splendid palaces, and of the naturalistic novels of Émile Zola (1840-1902), peopled by workers, prostitutes and outcasts. Touching poetic descriptions of city life and its human variety are also found in the ‘Parisian Pictures’ by the great symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-67), especially in his masterpiece Les fleurs du mal (1857).

Russian and Italian novelists Though less obviously conscious of man and the environment as a social problem, other European writers vividly described the turmoil of the modern city. For the great Russian novelists – Lev Tolstoy (1828-1910), Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-81) – the metropolitan image was split into Moscow and St Petersburg. In Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1867), in particular, St Petersburg emerges

The American Frontier and the Gold Rush Both the population and the economy Children of the Streets of Paris by Friedrich Karl Hausmann, 1852.

of the United States grew enormously in the 19th century. This was because the millions of immigrants coming from Europe were often farmers, skilled craftsmen and specialized workers. Most of the immigrants went to the new territories, generally known as ‘the Frontier’. The Frontier was both a physical and a symbolic entity: as such it kept moving westward with the acquisition and colonization of new territory. People from all over the continent rushed to California after gold was discovered there in 1848 in what was called the Gold Rush. The new economy was powerful and varied: the South was mainly agricultural and grew cotton, rice, sugar and tobacco; the North had textile industries and manufacturing industries as well as a flourishing shipping trade. The progress of westward expansion strengthened national unity and political cohesion. This culminated in the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine (1823, from the name of the American President James Monroe), according to which any external interference in American affairs would be considered as a sign of hostility against the US, and no European power could regard the US as a subject for future colonization.

as an immense city where poor people easily get lost, physically and morally. In Italian literature, the lesson of the French Naturalists was followed by the writers of the Milanese Scapigliatura; some of them wrote together Il ventre di Milano. Fisiologia della capitale morale (1888), a book about Milan’s urban slums clearly modelled on Zola’s Le ventre de Paris (1873).

1. Answer the questions. 1 2 3 4

When was the myth of Paris created and what images were used to convey it? In which famous French novels was Paris celebrated? How did the image of the great metropolis take shape for Russian writers? Give examples. What Italian city was described in terms similar to those of the French novelists?

THEMES

Oliver Twist

Milanese Scapigliatura

Dostoyevsky,

Crime and Punishment

Tolstoy, War and Peace

FRENCH De Balzac, La comédie humaine Hugo, Les misérables Zola, Le ventre de Paris Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal

TIMELINE

RUSSIAN

questions.

1 2 3 4

What was the Gold Rush? What were the causes of the Civil War? What event caused war to break out? What were the negative consequences of this growth? Why was the US considered a promised land?

1816-21

1846-48

1860-65

1865

New States are created: Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama, Florida, Maine, and Missouri

Mexican-American War US obtains Texas, New Mexico, and California

Presidency of Abraham Lincoln

Slavery is abolished with the 13th Amendment

1846 Oregon is acquired from England

1. Answer the

saw the northern and southern States of the Union wage war on each other. The conflict arose over the question of slavery, legally practised in the South and opposed in the North. The conflict was in fact also one of different economies: the industrial North and the agricultural South. The situation precipitated in 1860 after the election of Abraham Lincoln, a declared enemy of slavery, as President (1860-65). In April 1861 the Civil War began. It lasted four years (1861-65) and it ended with the defeat of the South. Slavery was officially abolished in 1865 by the 13th amendment to the Constitution.

Dickens, Hard Times and

THE MYTH OF THE MODERN CITY

WORK OUT

The Civil War (1861-65) Despite the nation’s patriotism, the second half of the century

ENGLISH ITALIAN

Access the listening exercises

1848 The ‘Gold Rush’ to California begins

1861-65 American Civil War

EUROPEAN LITERATURES

US HISTORY & SOCIETY

The political and economic growth of the US

The American Frontier and the Gold Rush Both the population and the economy Children of the Streets of Paris by Friedrich Karl Hausmann, 1852.

1. Answer the questions. 1 2 3 4

THEMES

Oliver Twist

Milanese Scapigliatura

Dostoyevsky,

Crime and Punishment

Tolstoy, War and Peace

FRENCH De Balzac, La comédie humaine Hugo, Les misérables Zola, Le ventre de Paris Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal

TIMELINE

RUSSIAN

questions.

1 2 3 4

What was the Gold Rush? What were the causes of the Civil War? What event caused war to break out? What were the negative consequences of this growth? Why was the US considered a promised land?

1816-21

1846-48

1860-65

1865

New States are created: Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama, Florida, Maine, and Missouri

Mexican-American War US obtains Texas, New Mexico, and California

Presidency of Abraham Lincoln

Slavery is abolished with the 13th Amendment

1846 Oregon is acquired from England

1. Answer the

Dickens, Hard Times and

THE MYTH OF THE MODERN CITY

WORK OUT

The Civil War (1861-65) Despite the nation’s patriotism, the second half of the century

ENGLISH ITALIAN

Access the listening exercises

1848 The ‘Gold Rush’ to California begins

1861-65 American Civil War

US HISTORY & SOCIETY

The Victorian Age

LITERATURE The economic rise of the United States By the late

Fur Merchants Descending the Missouri River by George Caleb Bingham, 1845.

CONNECT 2. Prepare a 5-minute

presentation of the political growth of the US in the 19th century. Use the map.

1 2 3

000 Listen to the description of the picture, then answer the qu aboveestions. What can you see in the foreground? What is depicted in the background? Which adjectives best describe the general atmosphere?

19th century, the United States had caught up with Britain as the leading global industrial power, thanks to new technologies (such as the telegraph), an expanding railroad network, and abundant natural resources such as coal, timber, oil and farmland. It was an era of wild economic growth, especially in the North and West, attracting more than 20 million immigrants from continental Europe. In 1867 the meatpacking industry of Chicago was one of the first industrial assembly lines to be utilized in the United States. Workers would stand at fixed stations where a pulley system would bring the meat to each worker and they would complete one task. The Ford Motor Company (described by Forbes as ‘the most important industrial company in the history of the United States’) was founded in 1903, and in 1914 an assembly line worker could buy a Model T Ford car with four months’ pay. Such tremendous growth, however, was also accompanied by social and interracial problems that would erupt in the next century though they were hidden behind a declared optimism. It was a refusal to admit that there was another side to the country’s opulence that recalls the Victorian Compromise.

The American Dream America was a dream to millions of emigrants from all over the world. The US Declaration of Independence (1776) already contained the essence of ‘The American Dream’, stating that ‘all men are created equal’ and ‘endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights’ including ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’. Millions of Europeans headed for a ‘better place farther west’, beyond the Atlantic Ocean, to become American citizens on their journey to what was depicted as a new promised land. The journey west was physical as much as mental: thousands of miles of railway across America made it possible, and the myth of the Frontier, with its ideas of freedom and unlimited possibilities, gave rise to a new, truly American genre: the Western, in books and, later, in films and comics, soon to become very popular all over the world. A welcome sight for the countless immigrants at the end of their epic ocean voyage was the Statue of Liberty, which towers over the entrance to New York Harbour. Designed by F.A. Bartholdi and built by Gustave Eiffel (who had also built the Eiffel Tower in Paris), it was given to the United States by France in 1886.

TO SUM UP

Political Growth of the US

Territorial expansion

Civil War (1861-65)

• New States • myth of the ‘Frontier’

• North → industries and trade;

→ mass immigration from Europe usually heading West and ‘Gold Rush’ (1848) which attracts even more people to California

little reliance on slavery • South → agriculture; complete reliance on slavery • War broke out after Abraham Lincoln, an abolitionist, was elected President (1860) • North won and slavery was abolished in 1865 (13th amendment)

Economic Growth

Leading global power by the end of 19th century Good use of new technologies, rich in natural resources and farmland, efficient industry relying on assembly lines The ‘American Dream’→ right to the pursuit of happiness and new ‘promised land’ for millions of Europeans

Victorian poetry Early Victorian poetry Between Queen Victoria’s accession and about 1850, two outstanding poets emerged and became fundamental models for the poets of the second half of the century: Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning. Unlike the Romantic poets, they did not believe in a life vision. They used indirect ways of dealing with the scientific, religious and social problems which were widely discussed in their time. Formally, the most typical example of this tendency is the dramatic monologue (▶ p. 30)– a fairly long poem in which only one character, usually a historical figure, speaks about himself / herself or something important that has happened to him / her. The best use of this form was by Robert Browning (▶ p. 46).

• Revise with the map and the presentation • Read the extra texts

Poetry of sensuous dreaming The most representative poet of the age was Alfred Tennyson (▶ p. 40) who was made Poet Laureate after Wordsworth’s death. His verse has a musical grace tinged with sadness and a desire for a lost world, often set in a dreamy past. Typical of Tennyson’s poetry is Ulysses (1842), a dramatic monologue where the classical hero expresses a Romantic restlessness and desire to break conventions but at the same time is sadly disillusioned about the possibility of heroism. For Tennyson’s Ulysses, as for its author, the world of epic action is over. Tennyson’s poetry, with its languid melody and sensuality, leads to Aestheticism in the last part of the century. In Italy, Giovanni Pascoli felt its influence (▶ European literatures, The myth of Ulysses, p. 43).

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded by a group of artists and poets in 1848. They were so called because they advocated a return to the purity of late medieval Italian art, before the stylization that set in with Raphael and his followers. Their watchword was ‘Back to nature!’, by which they meant a return to the simplicity tempered with mysticism of the Middle Ages, when spiritual values were held high and mechanization had not yet destroyed individual creativity. To the materialism and ugliness of industrial England the Pre-Raphaelites opposed the legendary age of chivalry and of Celtic fables. The outstanding figure of this group was Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82), a poet and a painter. He was the son of the Italian patriot Gabriele Rossetti, from Vasto, Abruzzo, who after the failure of the Neapolitan Carbonari insurrection of 1821 had fled to England; his mother was half-English half-Italian. The Rossetti household in London was a centre of artistic and literary discussion, as well as of liberal politics. Rossetti’s first important poem was The Blessed Damozel, inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven and by Keats’ medieval compositions. He also translated Dante’s Vita Nova between 1845 and 1849. His sister, Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-94), was also a talented poet: her poems are full of passion but also restrained, their dominant note being death, often seen in visions and half-awake reveries. Other important members of the Pre-Raphaelite movement were William Morris (1834-96) and Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909). Morris’ main concern was to revive the way of life of the Middle Ages, when the same creative impulse was behind the humble craftsman and the great artist: he believed this could be an antidote to the mechanization and lack of beauty of the modern world. His interest for the corporate life of the Middle Ages, for a society in which art could be common property, was the origin of his socialism. He wrote a utopic tale, News from Nowhere (1890), where he imagines a future communist England.

EXTRA TEXTS • D52 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, If Thou Must Love Me, Let It Be for Naught • D53 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Woodspurge • D54 Christina Georgina Rossetti, Echo • D55 Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty

US HISTORY & SOCIETY

The Victorian Age

LITERATURE The economic rise of the United States By the late

Fur Merchants Descending the Missouri River by George Caleb Bingham, 1845.

CONNECT 2. Prepare a 5-minute

presentation of the political growth of the US in the 19th century. Use the map.

1 2 3

TO SUM UP

Political Growth of the US

Territorial expansion

Civil War (1861-65)

• New States • myth of the ‘Frontier’

• North → industries and trade;

→ mass immigration from Europe usually heading West and ‘Gold Rush’ (1848) which attracts even more people to California

Economic Growth

• Revise with the map and the presentation • Read the extra texts

LITERATURE

WORK OUT 1. Answer the questions.

Which three American novelists are highly representative of the process of literary independence from English models? What kind of fiction did they write? Why is Whitman considered the father of American poetry? What are the main themes of Emily Dickinson’s poems?

2 3 4

CONNECT 2. Choose one of the

American novelists mentioned on the previous page and find information about one of his novels. Take notes, then write a short description of it, presenting its plot and main themes.

The Victorian Age

WRITERS AND TEXT

His poetry is an enthusiastic celebration of America: its races with their speeches and songs (I Hear America Singing, ▶ p. 50), its rivers, trees, cities, shops. Emily Dickinson (▶ p. 53) was in many ways the opposite as a poet: she concentrated on the small world that surrounded her, with no epic or heroic ambitions, but giving it universal value. Her themes are love and death, the joy and the pain of living, natural scenery and its impact on the senses and feelings. In her Poems (1890, posthumous) a natural object easily becomes a universal symbol.

Transcendentalism The cultural and philosophical movement that played a dominant role in shaping America throughout the 19th century was Transcendentalism. With its mixture of mysticism and naturalism and its stress on the individual’s consciousness and power, it represented an intellectual trend shared by different American thinkers who voiced their desire for spiritual renewal. Transcendentalism dominated the cultural life of Boston, Harvard and Concord Universities, which were the most active intellectual centres of the time. It also greatly influenced the literary production of the period: from 1830 to 1860, in fact, all the protagonists of the so-called ‘Flowering of New England’ – from Hawthorne to Longfellow, from Whitman to Melville – had some contact with the transcendentalists. The major theorist of the movement was Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82). Optimism and criticism of established conventions were the leading themes of his works, and his stress on free will and on the perfectibility of man helped to shape the American myth of the self-made man. The necessity of focussing on actual American problems was affirmed in The American Scholar, the conference he delivered to the Phi Beta Kappa (the oldest society for the liberal arts and sciences in the United States) in 1837, which was then defined as ‘the declaration of intellectual independence of the American people’.

Bogard, Batiste, and I, Traveling through a Missouri Bottom by George Catlin, 1837-39.

TO SUM UP

American literature

Alfred Tennyson (1809-92) Life and works Alfred Tennyson was born in 1809 in Somersby, Lincolnshire. In Cambridge, where he went to study, his poetry developed quickly, especially through contact with the ‘Apostles’, an undergraduate group of writers and intellectuals. The leading figure among them was Arthur Hallam, who strongly influenced Tennyson’s Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1833). Hallam’s sudden death in 1833 in Vienna was deeply felt by Tennyson, and he wrote about it in the poems published in 1850 under the title In Memoriam. This brought him national fame: he was made Poet Laureate in the same year, after Wordsworth’s death. He was also made a peer in 1884 – the only English poet ever to have been given a peerage for artistic merit. He died in 1892 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Tennyson’s poetry Tennyson’s fame had been steadily growing since 1842, when the two volumes of his Poems came out – a collection which was praised by Wordsworth who acclaimed its author as ‘the first of our living poets’. It included the ballad The Lady of Shalott and the dramatic monologue Ulysses (▶ p. 41). The first four books of the Idylls of the King (1859), an epic poem inspired by the Arthurian cycle, finally established his popularity. What made Tennyson dear to his contemporaries was the musical grace of his verse and his eclecticism, which combined Romantic motifs with a classical atmosphere.

Tennyson’s mild pessimism and sensuality Tennyson’s subjects are often taken from the Middle Ages or the classical past, as in his most famous poem, Ulysses. The past is revived through dreaming and imagination rather than through a faithful historical reconstruction. Tennyson’s Ulysses, for instance, is a complex figure: he is the fierce Homeric warrior who has fought at Troy; he is a restless spirit ever open to new knowledge and experience; and he is also Dante’s more ambiguous but fascinating Ulysses of Inferno XXVI, whose endless searching becomes a dangerous desire for forbidden experience. With his Ulysses, Tennyson creates one of the great late Romantic figures, filled at the same time with enthusiasm and doubt – as such, his hero served as a model to many European poets, including Giovanni Pascoli (▶ European literatures, The myth of Ulysses, p. 43). For Tennyson’s Ulysses, as for its author, the world of epic action is over. Tennyson’s pessimism, in fact, never leads to radical solutions: it always touches on themes of regret, loss, and the ultimate meaninglessness of life in a purposeless world. Tennyson is a poet of sensation rather than thought. His poetry, with its languid melody and sensuality leads to the Aestheticism of the last part of the 19th century.

WORK OUT

CONNECT

1. Answer the questions.

2. What do you know about. Lincolnshire? Surf the

Prose

Poetry

Transcendentalism

• Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter →

• Walt Whitman → glorification

historical novel about Puritan society

of the self and celebration of America • Emily Dickinson → elevates dayto-day objects and events to universal symbols

Spiritual renewal, criticism of established conventions, myth of the free-spirited, self-made man (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

• Herman Melville, Moby Dick → epic of sea-

faring, struggle between good and evil • Mark Twain → humorous coming-of-age novels

Revise with the map

2 3 4 5

Where did Tennyson study and who was he particularly influenced by as a young poet? What traumatic event determined a deep crisis in him and was at the origin of his collection of poems In Memoriam? Which stylistic features did his contemporaries appreciate in his poems? What was the role of the past in Tennyson’s poems? What was his worldview?

Internet to find some interesting information about its traditions and historical places. Discuss your findings with your classmates.

LITERATURE

WORK OUT 1. Answer the questions.

2 3 4

CONNECT 2. Choose one of the

American novelists mentioned on the previous page and find information about one of his novels. Take notes, then write a short description of it, presenting its plot and main themes.

The Victorian Age

WRITERS AND TEXT

Bogard, Batiste, and I, Traveling through a Missouri Bottom by George Catlin, 1837-39.

TO SUM UP

American literature

WORK OUT

CONNECT

1. Answer the questions.

2. What do you know about. Lincolnshire? Surf the

Prose

Poetry

Transcendentalism

• Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter →

• Walt Whitman → glorification

historical novel about Puritan society

of the self and celebration of America • Emily Dickinson → elevates dayto-day objects and events to universal symbols

Spiritual renewal, criticism of established conventions, myth of the free-spirited, self-made man (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

• Herman Melville, Moby Dick → epic of sea-

faring, struggle between good and evil • Mark Twain → humorous coming-of-age novels

Revise with the map

2 3 4 5

Internet to find some interesting information about its traditions and historical places. Discuss your findings with your classmates.

WRITERS AND TEXTS

Alfred Tennyson

TXXX

Alfred Tennyson

Ulysses Alfred Tennyson, Poems (1842)

• Listen to the texts • Practise with the Karaoke

In the autumn of 1833, when his depression over the death of his dearest friend Hallam was at its deepest, Tennyson wrote this dramatic monologue centred on the mythical figure of Ulysses. The Greek hero gives a full account of his own nomadic nature and contrasts it with his son’s commitment to building up a stable, civilized society in Ithaca. He has more in common with his old mariners, the faithful companions of countless adventures who still feel the urge to sail away into the unknown, than with his stay-athome son. Old Ulysses cannot accept the monotonous and boring life at Ithaca that suits his son Telemachus so well.

000 It little profits 1 that an idle 2 king By this still hearth, 3 among these barren 4 crags, 5 Matched 6 with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, 7 5 That hoard, 8 and sleep, and feed, 9 and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel; I will drink Life to the lees. 10 All times I have enjoyed Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when Through scudding drifts 11 the rainy Hyades 12 Vexed 13 the dim sea. I am become a name; For always roaming 14 with a hungry heart Much have I seen and known – cities of men And manners, climates, councils, governments, 15 Myself not least, but honoured of them all – And drunk delight of battle with my peers, Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy, I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough 16 Gleams 17 that untravelled world whose margin fades Forever and forever when I move. 18 How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnished, 19 not to shine in use! 20 As though to breathe were life! [...]. This is my son, mine own Telemachus, To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle – Well-loved of me, discerning 21 to fulfil This labour, by slow prudence to make mild A rugged 22 people, and through soft degrees 23 Subdue 24 them to the useful and the good. 25 Most blameless 26 is he, centred in the sphere Of common duties, decent 27 not to fail In offices of tenderness, 28 and pay 29 Meet 30 adoration to my household gods, When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

1. It little profits: it is nearly useless. 2. idle: ozioso. 3. still hearth: cold fireplace. 4. barren: sterili. 5. crags: cliffs. 6. Matched: married. 7. I mete ... race: I measure out, administer rewards and punishments to a wild people. 8. hoard: amass riches. 9. feed: eat. 10. to the lees: fino alla feccia, cioè fin proprio alla fine. 11. scudding drifts: winddriven showers of rain. 12. rainy Hyades: a group of five stars in the constellation Taurus, whose rising was believed to announce the spring rains. 13. Vexed: troubled. 14. roaming: wandering. 15. Much ... governments: Ulysses was, in Homer’s famous presentation of him, the man who had known many men and cities.

16. wherethrough: through which. 17. Gleams: luccica debolmente. 18. whose ... move: the more I travel, the more it becomes indistinct. 19. unburnished: not polished (said of swords). 20. How dull ... in use: Ulysses compares himself to a weapon which has not been used in war for a long time. 21. discerning: who knows how. 22. rugged: rozzo. 23. through soft degrees: by slow degrees. 24. Subdue: sottomettere. 25. This labour ... good: the labour Telemachus can accomplish is to make mild a rugged people (see ‘savage race’ at line 4) and to make them understand that submitting to the law may be good and useful for a people. Telemachus represents a more ‘civilized’, complex social organization of the state; Ulysses stands for a more individualistic, heroic civilization. 26. blameless: irreprensibile. 27. decent: respectful. 28. Most ... tenderness: Telemachus knows his duties as a king. Consequently, he is respectful enough to observe all social and religious practices and customs (‘offices of tenderness’). 29. pay: show, observe. 30. Meet: proper, just.

Head of Odysseus from a Greek 2nd century BC marble group representing Odysseus blinding Polyphemus.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs 31 her sail; There gloom 32 the dark, broad seas. My mariners, Souls that have toiled, 33 and wrought, 34 and thought with me – That ever with a frolic 35 welcome took The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed Free hearts, free foreheads – you and I are old; Old age hath yet his honour and his toil. Death closes all; 36 but something ere 37 the end, Some work of noble note, 38 may yet be done, Not unbecoming 39 men that strove 40 with Gods. The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks; The long day wanes; 41 the slow moon climbs; 42 the deep 43 Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, 44 and sitting well in order smite 45 The sounding furrows; 46 for my purpose holds 47 To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, 48 until I die. It may be that the gulfs 49 will wash us down; It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, 50 And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Though much is taken, much abides; 51 and though We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are 52 – One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. 53

WRITERS AND TEXTS

31. puffs: gonfia. 32. gloom: show in semi-darkness 33. toiled: worked hard. 34. wrought: operato. 35. frolic: gioioso. 36. Death closes all: unlike Tennyson, Ulysses seems not to believe in life after death. 37. ere: before. 38. note: fama. 39. unbecoming: indegni. 40. strove: fought. 41. wanes: declines. 42. climbs: rises. 43. deep: sea. 44. Push off: let’s go. 45. smite: strike (with oars). 46. furrows: waves. 47. holds: is. 48. the baths ... stars: taking your place at the oars, in the boat. 49. gulfs: sea abysses. 50. Happy Isles: the Islands of the Blessed or Elysian Fields, the abode of the heroes after death. They were believed to be beyond the Strait of Gibraltar. 51. abides: remains. 52. that ... we are: what we are is still enough. 53. yield: give in, surrender.

COMPREHENSION

1. Ulysses is the Latin name of the Greek hero Odysseus, whose deeds are narrated by Homer. What do you know 2.

about him? Who is speaking here? Where is he now? Is he young or old?

3. The four stanzas correspond to four different topics in his monologue. Identify them. 1 2 3 4

His memory of past glory contrasted to present inactivity. His appeal to his mariners to set off on a new voyage. His dissatisfaction with his present situation. His crowning of his son as the new, perfect king for his realm.

Stanza Stanza Stanza Stanza

ANALYSIS

4. Consider the way Ulysses describes his present situation in the first stanza and the words he uses to describe himself, his wife and house, his country and his people. What sort of life do his words evoke?

5. Underline all the expressions in the second stanza referring to what he did in the past. Then compare them to his present situation, pointing out similarities and/or differences.

6. Which metaphors are used to refer to the following topics? Find them and explain them. • his desire to live life to the full • experience and knowledge

• fighting • inactivity

7. How does Telemachus contrast with his father? 8. The fourth stanza contains an appeal to his mariners. What does he think they have in common? 9. How does he try to convince them to leave with him? Underline the corresponding lines and explain them. 39

WRITERS AND TEXTS

Alfred Tennyson

TXXX

Alfred Tennyson

Ulysses Alfred Tennyson, Poems (1842)

• Listen to the texts • Practise with the Karaoke

Head of Odysseus from a Greek 2nd century BC marble group representing Odysseus blinding Polyphemus.

WRITERS AND TEXTS

COMPREHENSION

1. Ulysses is the Latin name of the Greek hero Odysseus, whose deeds are narrated by Homer. What do you know 2.

about him? Who is speaking here? Where is he now? Is he young or old?

3. The four stanzas correspond to four different topics in his monologue. Identify them. 1 2 3 4

Stanza Stanza Stanza Stanza

ANALYSIS

5. Underline all the expressions in the second stanza referring to what he did in the past. Then compare them to his present situation, pointing out similarities and/or differences.

6. Which metaphors are used to refer to the following topics? Find them and explain them. • his desire to live life to the full • experience and knowledge

• fighting • inactivity

EUROPEAN LITERATURES

The myth of Ulysses

TODAY’S WRITERS T110

How Penelope Sees It Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad (2005)

Ulysses’ search for knowledge The figure of Ulysses was particularly dear to European poets in the 19th century. In the Iliad and the Odyssey, Ulysses is already a hero whose intelligence and cunning are equal to his strength and courage. Nineteenth-century versions of the Ulysses story, however, rather than following the Homeric myth describe the hero as an old indomitable warrior who, after coming back to Ithaca, still thirsts for new adventures and knowledge, and is ready to sail away once more.

The Penelopiad is a novella in which Penelope gives her own version of the story told in the Odyssey and retold many times in the last three thousand years, but always from a man’s point of view: Homer, Dante, Tennyson, Pascoli, D’Annunzio (▶ European literatures, p. XXX). Predictably, it is a different story. In this passage Penelope describes her son Telemachus leaving Ithaca in search of his father, and then Ulysses’ return to Ithaca disguised as an old beggar. Both heroes, father and son, are seen in a quite different light from the one shed on them by centuries of myth.

Dante’s Ulysses The model for this reading of the Ulysses myth was found in Dante’s Inferno XXVI, where the Greek hero is portrayed as an evil counsellor – Dante blamed him for having caused the fall of Troy with the wooden horse. Dante’s Ulysses is a restless soul: not content with past adventures and his new-found home, he goes forth again on a last voyage. With his ship he comes to the Pillars of Hercules, the mythical boundaries of the ancient world, beyond which no one had ever dared to go. Ulysses exhorts his men not to be afraid but to pass on to the forbidden and the unknown, in some of Dante’s most famous lines: ‘Fatti non foste a viver come bruti / ma per seguir virtude e conoscenza’. Ulysses’ ship, however, sinks into a stormy sea when they are in sight of Mount Purgatory.

Dante and Virgil meet Ulysses, scene from Canto XXVI from the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, Venetian miniature, 14th century.

D’Annunzio and Pascoli Late Romantic poems oscillate between a heroic and a melancholic rendering of the figure of Ulysses. In the first group we find the portrait drawn by Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863-1938) in his Laus Vitae (1903), who stressed the elements of willpower and activism. Giovanni Pascoli’s (1855-1912) long narrative poem L’ultimo viaggio (published in the collection Poemi conviviali, 1904) instead stresses the melancholic aspect of Ulysses, as a man who is always trying to overcome the mystery of life and is constantly restrained by it. Like Tennyson’s Ulysses, he is restless in Ithaca and he too feels compelled to wander. Pascoli’s Ulysses finally drowns in sight of the Sirens, just when he hoped to hear the ultimate truth from their song.

1. PROJECT Ulysses has been a mythological

THEMES

Consult your History of Art textbook to find some paintings or statues related to Ulysses and his adventurous life. Then show and explain the material you have found to the rest of the class.

ENGLISH

• Read about Margaret Atwood, her life and main works • Listen to the text

ordeal: prova. omens: premonitions. single-handedly: alone. take over the reins: take control. 5. making scenes: fare scenate. 6. a rash way: impulsively. 7. shambled: walked in a somewhat uncoordinated way. 8. appraised: evaluated. 9. grab: capture. 10. wrinkles: rughe. 1. 2. 3. 4.

Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’ James Joyce, Ulysses

ITALIAN Dante, Inferno XXVI D’Annunzio, Laus Vitae Pascoli, L’ultimo viaggio

creature since Homer wrote about him in his epic poem. Artists have always celebrated his character in their works and have contributed to the expansion of his myth to the present.

000 Now began the worst period of my ordeal. 1 I cried so much I thought I would turn into a river or a fountain, as in the old tales. No matter how much I prayed and offered up sacrifices and watched for omens, 2 my husband still didn’t return. To add to my misery, Telemachus was now of an age to start ordering me around. 5 I’d run the palace affairs almost single-handedly 3 for twenty years, but now he wanted to assert his authority as the son of Odysseus and take over the reins. 4 He started making scenes 5 in the hall, standing up to the Suitors in a rash way 6 that I was certain was going to get him killed. […] Twenty years of my prayers had gone unanswered. But, finally, not this one. 10 No sooner had I performed the familiar ritual and shed the familiar tears than Odysseus himself shambled 7 into the courtyard. The shambling was part of a disguise, naturally. I would have expected no less of him. Evidently he’d appraised 8 the situation in the palace – the Suitors, their wasting of his estates, their murderous intentions towards Telemachus, their 15 appropriation of the sexual services of his maids, and their intended wife-grab 9 – and wisely concluded that he shouldn’t simply march in and announce that he was Odysseus, and order them to vacate the premises. If he’d tried that he’d have been a dead man within minutes. So he was dressed as a dirty old beggar. He could count on the fact that most of the Suitors had no idea 20 what he looked like, having been too young or not even born when he’d sailed away. His disguise was well enough done – I hoped the wrinkles 10 and baldness were part of the act, and not real – but as soon as I saw that barrel chest and those short legs I had a deep suspicion… […] I didn’t let on I knew: It would have been dangerous for him. Also, if a man takes pride in his disguising skills, 25 it would be a foolish wife who would claim to recognize him: it’s always an imprudence to step between a man and the reflection of his own cleverness.

COMPREHENSION

THE MYTH OF ULYSSES

1. xxxxxxxxx 2. xxxxxxx

1 xxxxxxx

GREEK Homer, Iliad and Odyssey

ANALYSIS

3. xxxxx 4. xxxx

EUROPEAN LITERATURES

The myth of Ulysses

TODAY’S WRITERS T110

How Penelope Sees It Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad (2005)

Dante and Virgil meet Ulysses, scene from Canto XXVI from the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, Venetian miniature, 14th century.

1. PROJECT Ulysses has been a mythological

THEMES

Consult your History of Art textbook to find some paintings or statues related to Ulysses and his adventurous life. Then show and explain the material you have found to the rest of the class.

ENGLISH

• Read about Margaret Atwood, her life and main works • Listen to the text

Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’ James Joyce, Ulysses

ITALIAN Dante, Inferno XXVI D’Annunzio, Laus Vitae Pascoli, L’ultimo viaggio

creature since Homer wrote about him in his epic poem. Artists have always celebrated his character in their works and have contributed to the expansion of his myth to the present.

COMPREHENSION

THE MYTH OF ULYSSES

1. xxxxxxxxx 2. xxxxxxx

1 xxxxxxx

GREEK Homer, Iliad and Odyssey

ANALYSIS

3. xxxxx 4. xxxx

TO SUM UP

Revise with the map.

Alfred Tennyson (1809-92) LIFE

Becomes a member of an (1) group, the ‘Apostles’, where he meets Arthur Hallam, who influences his poetry. affects Tennyson deeply.

He is made both Poet Laureate and a peer.

WORKS

Editions: • first works: Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1833). • Poems (1842) include famous works like The Lady of Shallott and

Ulysses. • In Memoriam (1850), the poem for Hallam’s death, brings him to national (3) . • Idylls for the King (1869), an Arthurian-inspired epic, confirm his fame.

Features: • musical (4)

Robert Browning (1812-1889) Early life, travels and marriage Robert Browning was born in 1812 into a rich family

Leaves Lincolnshire to study at Cambridge

Hallam’s sudden (2)

WRITERS AND TEXT

, combining Romantic and classical

aspects. • subjects taken from the Classics and the Middle Ages, but (5) . • For example, Ulysses is a complex figure: a fierce (a) , a restless (b) , and a symbol of the dangerous desire for (c) . • pessimism filled with regret, loss, and a sense of the (6) of life. • sensation over (7) , and a sensuality paving the way for Aestheticism.

in Camberwell, near London. He was mostly educated at home and was a voracious reader. He liked music, sports, travelling – in 1833 he was in Russia, and the following year visited Italy for the first time, staying in Venice and Asolo. In 1846 he married Elizabeth Barrett. The circumstances were truly Romantic: she was a semi-invalid, six years older than he was, already famous as a poet and dominated by a tyrannical father. The courtship was conducted partly by letter, and in secret. Finally, they ran away to Italy in 1846 and lived there for the next fifteen years. Perhaps Browning’s greatest collection of poems, Men and Women (1855), dates from this period. Elizabeth died in Florence in 1861.

Works and fame After Elizabeth’s death, Browning returned to England to live in London. He then became a public figure, known for his conversation and wit. Dramatis Personae, a collection of dramatic monologues – whose subjects are often taken from Italian medieval and Renaissance history – appeared in 1864. Browning never remarried. Echoes of his wife’s death, the greatest crisis in his life, are to be found in his major work, The Ring and the Book (1868-69) – a long poem about a murder case that had taken place in 17th-century Italy. He died in 1889 in Venice, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Although Browning owes much to Shelley’s prophetic force, his poetry is highly original. Running counter to the typical Romantic mode of self-expression in first-person lyrics, in his poems ‘the story is told by some actor in it, not by the poet himself’, as he himself said. This ‘actor’ is a single character faced with an ethical problem; the language is colloquial and the rhythms as abrupt as those of real live speech. In My Last Duchess (1842) the ‘actor’ is the Duke, though the poem centres on his dead wife. Here, as in many other monologues by Browning, the speaker is a man who is powerful but unhappy in his private life, though he refuses to admit it. Browning’s modernity In speaking their minds,

Revise with the map

Portrait of Eleonora Gonzaga, Duchess of Urbino, by Tiziano, c.1537 ca.

Browning’s characters reveal their personalities through unexpected mental associations. His unconventional use of language, syntax and metre and his conviction that personality is not a single aspect, but is rather a multiplicity of selves, often incoherently mixed, were to exert a very great influence on early 20th-century modernist poetry.

WORK OUT 1. Answer the questions. 1

What is the subject matter of Browning’s dramatic monologues?

2 In what way did his poetry influence modern literature?

1. COMPLETE THE MAP Use the words below to fill in the gaps in the map (1-7). You do not need all of the words.

thought • death • grace • reality • fame • intellectual • meaninglessness • political • reimagined

2. ENRICH THE MAP Fill in the description of Ulysses’s character (a-c). 42

TO SUM UP

Revise with the map.

Alfred Tennyson (1809-92) LIFE

Becomes a member of an (1) group, the ‘Apostles’, where he meets Arthur Hallam, who influences his poetry. affects Tennyson deeply.

He is made both Poet Laureate and a peer.

WORKS

Editions: • first works: Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1833). • Poems (1842) include famous works like The Lady of Shallott and

Ulysses. • In Memoriam (1850), the poem for Hallam’s death, brings him to national (3) . • Idylls for the King (1869), an Arthurian-inspired epic, confirm his fame.

Features: • musical (4)

Robert Browning (1812-1889) Early life, travels and marriage Robert Browning was born in 1812 into a rich family

Leaves Lincolnshire to study at Cambridge

Hallam’s sudden (2)

WRITERS AND TEXT

, combining Romantic and classical

Revise with the map

Portrait of Eleonora Gonzaga, Duchess of Urbino, by Tiziano, c.1537 ca.

WORK OUT 1. Answer the questions. 1

What is the subject matter of Browning’s dramatic monologues?

2 In what way did his poetry influence modern literature?

1. COMPLETE THE MAP Use the words below to fill in the gaps in the map (1-7). You do not need all of the words.

thought • death • grace • reality • fame • intellectual • meaninglessness • political • reimagined

2. ENRICH THE MAP Fill in the description of Ulysses’s character (a-c). 42

Charles Dickens

WRITERS AND TEXT

Charles Dickens (1812-70) Charles Dickens is something apart from other writers. He may not be the best in terms of artistry and learning, and he may not be the greatest technical innovator, but he is certainly the best-loved novelist in the English language. He was the first popular writer in the modern sense of the word: he was mostly self‑taught, a man of many jobs before he became a famous novelist; he was an acclaimed public figure and he had an unprecedented direct relation with his readers, of whom there were millions. They would follow his novels from one instalment to the next, eagerly waiting for the story to go on. He was also the first English writer to present the main social and ethical issues of the age in terms easily understood by all readers.

Education

The best-loved novelist in the English language.

LEARNING WITH THE AUTHOR

VIDEO LESSONS Watch the video lesson and find out about Charles Dickens with the author of your book

p. XXX

DICKENS’ THEMES Social satire p. XXX

What was Dickens life like as a child? Charles Dickens’ life as a child was not a stable one. He was born in Portsmouth, on the south coast of England, in 1812. He was the second of eight children. His father John, a clerk in the Naval Pay Office, moved his family from place to place trying to improve the family’s financial position, which instead steadily worsened. In 1817, however, the family moved to Chatham, in Kent, and the five years spent there proved the happiest of Dickens’ life. The countryside, the busy River Medway, the cathedral town of Rochester seem to have become a sort of idyllic interlude throughout the rest of Dickens’ life – he would frequently escape to Kent in later life when the pressure seemed too much to bear, and the characters in his novels often go there.

What traumatic experience deeply influenced him as a young boy and, later, as a writer? In 1822 his father, now in serious financial difficulties, moved to London, where the family lived in poor conditions in Camden Town. To help his family, when he was twelve Charles was forced to leave school and sent to work in a blacking factory near the site of the present Charing Cross Station. The experience proved traumatic. The strong industrial smell, the rats, the rough people he had to work with, were a painful contrast to the pastoral idyll of the Kent he had known.

LIFE AND WORKS

1812

1822

1826

Dickens is born in Portsmouth

Dickens’ family moves to London

Dickens goes to work in a law firm

1817 Dickens’ family moves to Chatham, Kent

Childhood

p. XXX

1824 To help with his father’s debts, Dickens goes to work in a factory

1836-37

1837-38

1840-41

The Pickwick Papers (monthly)

Oliver Twist (monthly)

The Old Curiosity Shop (monthly)

1836 Dickens marries Catherine Hogarth and publishes Sketches by Boz

WRITERS AND TEXTS

Shortly after, his father was sent to the Marshalsea debtors’ prison, and Charles’ misery was complete: the family was broken up and he was sent to live alone in very poor lodgings. His visits after work to his father and family, together with what he daily saw of life in London’s poor quarters, gave him an early experience of the misery of 19thcentury society. Prison, the poor quarters of London, life in the city streets and the other boys working at the factory remained in his mind and profoundly influenced his novels. Moreover, these impressions of massive social and human dereliction were linked in Dickens’ mind to his own feelings of having been abandoned by his family. This feeling formed the basis for characters such as Oliver Twist, the young David Copperfield, Pip in Great Expectations: all of them suffer unjustly for having been cast away.

How did his first job experiences lead to his becoming a novelist? At the age of fourteen Dickens went to work as a clerk in a legal office. There he soon developed a contempt for lawyers and the law as an institution – another major theme in his novels. He also began to work as a free-lance reporter and journalist, which enabled him to meet a wide range of people and to empathise with the feelings and reactions of his readers. In 1836 he adopted the pen name of ‘Boz’ and wrote Sketches by Boz, short articles describing London people and scenes published in instalments, which were immensely popular. This success led to The Pickwick Papers, his first novel, relating the adventures of a group of eccentric people travelling on the English roads – where the comic and picaresque elements are mixed. It was published in monthly instalments between 1836 and 1837, and made Dickens famous in Britain and in the United States among all social classes: the young Queen Victoria read both Pickwick and Oliver Twist, staying up until midnight to discuss them. These were crucial years for Dickens: in 1836 he married Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of the editor of one of the newspapers he worked for – they would raise a large family of seven sons and two daughters. The Packing Warehouse at Day & Martin’s Blacking Factory, London, 1842.

1844-45 Dickens lives in Italy and sympathizes with the Unification of Italy

1858

1852-53

Dickens separates from his wife, generating huge scandal

Bleak House (monthly)

1864-65

1870

Our Mutual Friend (weekly)

Dickens dies of a stroke

1838-39

1843

1849-50

1854

1860-61

1867

Nicholas Nickleby (monthly)

A Christmas Carol

David Copperfield (monthly)

Hard Times (weekly)

Great Expectations (weekly)

Dickens visits America on a literary tour

Charles Dickens

WRITERS AND TEXT

Education

The best-loved novelist in the English language.

LEARNING WITH THE AUTHOR

VIDEO LESSONS Watch the video lesson and find out about Charles Dickens with the author of your book

p. XXX

DICKENS’ THEMES Social satire p. XXX

LIFE AND WORKS

1812

1822

1826

Dickens is born in Portsmouth

Dickens’ family moves to London

Dickens goes to work in a law firm

1817 Dickens’ family moves to Chatham, Kent

Childhood

p. XXX

1824 To help with his father’s debts, Dickens goes to work in a factory

1836-37

1837-38

1840-41

The Pickwick Papers (monthly)

Oliver Twist (monthly)

The Old Curiosity Shop (monthly)

1836 Dickens marries Catherine Hogarth and publishes Sketches by Boz

WRITERS AND TEXTS

1844-45 Dickens lives in Italy and sympathizes with the Unification of Italy

1858

1852-53

Dickens separates from his wife, generating huge scandal

Bleak House (monthly)

1864-65

1870

Our Mutual Friend (weekly)

Dickens dies of a stroke

1838-39

1843

1849-50

1854

1860-61

1867

Nicholas Nickleby (monthly)

A Christmas Carol

David Copperfield (monthly)

Hard Times (weekly)

Great Expectations (weekly)

Dickens visits America on a literary tour

WRITERS AND TEXTS

Charles Dickens

Coalbrookdale by Night by Philip James de Loutherbourg, 1801.

Charles Dickens

WRITERS AND TEXTS

Did Dickens also write about other countries and peoples? Yes, he did. He was a great traveller, both curious about other peoples and places and eager to promote his work abroad. He made two triumphal reading tours of the United States, in 1842 and 1867. His American impressions (often quite critical of the country) are described in a travelogue, American Notes for General Circulation. There Dickens includes a powerful condemnation of slavery, which he had attacked as early as The Pickwick Papers, linking the emancipation of the poor in England with the abolition of slavery abroad. For one year (1844-45) Dickens also lived in Italy, a country he much liked – as shown in his Pictures from Italy (1846). He declared his support for Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini, helping raise funds for their campaigns, and stated that ‘a united Italy would be of vast importance to the peace of the world’ and that ‘I feel for Italy almost as if I were an Italian born.’

What were Dickens’ last years like? In his last years Dickens wrote less for a

How were Dickens’ middle years the most productive in his career? Dickens possessed an incredible physical energy. The result was an amazing literary output, all written in conjunction with travelling abroad, journalistic work, public speaking, philanthropic work, amateur theatre. The range of his material is vast, and covers the whole of his life and experience. Between 1837 and 1850 he published most of the novels he is now famous for. Nicholas Nickleby (monthly, 1838-39) is an attack on the scandal of the private schools to which unscrupulous parents often consigned unwanted children. The Old Curiosity Shop (weekly, 1840-41) is typical for its great sentimental scenes, culminating in the death of one of Dickens’ best-loved characters, Little Nell, the sensation of the age. Martin Chuzzlewit (monthly, 1843-44) contains satirical portraits of the American people and manners, material from his first visit to the USA. Dombey and Son (monthly,1846-48), an attack on Victorian society’s love of money and lack of disinterested affections, was the first of his novels to have been planned in advance, and not just carried on from one instalment to the next. This procedure would characterize all his subsequent work. At this stage in his career, Dickens also turned to semi-autobiographical themes, as in David Copperfield (monthly, 1849-50), often considered his masterpiece: it is one of the greatest portraits in English literature of the loves, pains and wonders of childhood – it is, essentially, a Bildungsroman, or novel about growing up. Dickens confessed: ‘Like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield.’

What were Dickens’ late novels like? Dickens’ novels of the 1850s form a much more serious group exploring darker themes of social injustice, the iniquities of the legal system, and the destruction of human hope by impersonal social and industrial forces. Bleak House (monthly, 1852-53) deals with the scandalous bureaucratic system of the Court of Chancery in London, showing how the delays and complications of the law can destroy the lives of ordinary people. Hard Times (weekly, 1854) discusses the dehumanizing effects of life in the factories of the industrial north of England. Little Dorrit (monthly, 1855-57) is Dickens’ analysis of the iniquities of the law of debt – something which he painfully remembered from his childhood experience. His next novel, Great Expectations (weekly, 1860-61), by some considered his greatest, also deals with the law, namely with the iniquities of the penal system. It is also again on the theme of ‘growing up’.

number of reasons. In the first place, it would have been hard for any writer to keep writing at such a pace. Secondly, in 1858 he separated from his wife and his life and work changed, becoming more complicated. He became involved with an actress, Ellen Ternan, and the collapse of his marriage brought about a huge scandal: there was a feeling that the nation had been betrayed by its best-loved family novelist. To pay for his two families now, Dickens embarked on a long series of public readings (mostly from his own novels but also from Shakespeare’s plays): they paid very well but were so exhausting that his doctor finally ordered him to stop. In the 1860s he only published Our Mutual Friend (monthly, 1864-65) and the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood (monthly, 1870, only 6 of the 12 instalments completed). After decades of overwork his health was precarious and he died suddenly, of a stroke, in June 1870.

SERIAL STORYTELLING In the Victorian Age novels were usually published by instalments in magazines. This meant that the public followed the story from week to week, like a modern TV serial. The novelist could adjust the writing to the audience, and was influenced by it in how the plot progressed. With serial publication, sales were very high – tens of thousands for bestsellers. Serial publication was usually regarded as less ‘artistic’; it was objected that, for instance, Dickens often interrupted a crucial scene at the end of a chapter, to increase suspense for the next instalment – what today is called ‘cliff-hanger’. More recently, however, critics have come to recognize that serial publication also had advantages, such as building narrative tension and forcing the writer to stay in touch with the outside world. Dickens was the first important English novelist to publish his works regularly in this way, which also meant his (especially early) novels would often overlap: the first instalment of Oliver Twist appeared nine months before Pickwick Papers was finished, and the second

half of Oliver Twist was written concurrently with the beginning of Nicholas Nickleby. In this period most novels were published in three volumes and cost six or seven guineas, a price which only the rich could afford. By publishing monthly parts, costing sixpence or a shilling, the readership could be greatly expanded, and give novelists the truly popular audience they desired. This system also had the great advantage of giving the novelist instant feedback from the sales figures – if they fell, readers were clearly not happy. Also important for Dickens was the emotional bond that this method of publication created with his readers: he sometimes received thousands of letters from them about particular episodes in the story. A famous instance was the death of Little Nell, the heroine of The Old Curiosity Shop. She was described as lying sick and close to death, and thousands of readers wrote to implore Dickens not to ‘kill’ her. The next instalment described Little Nell’s death, while the nation wept and many readers protested that Dickens should not have killed her.

WRITERS AND TEXTS

Charles Dickens

Coalbrookdale by Night by Philip James de Loutherbourg, 1801.

Charles Dickens

WRITERS AND TEXTS

What were Dickens’ last years like? In his last years Dickens wrote less for a

WRITERS AND TEXTS

Charles Dickens

What typically Victorian social issues are present in Dickens’ works? Dickens was deeply

London, Dr. Samuel Johnson giving money to the poor. Street scene, 18th century.

conscious of social injustice, political incompetence, the poverty and suffering of the masses, and the class conflicts of Victorian England. Child exploitation, legal injustice, the fate of orphans, the misery of the poor, the fall into prostitution of many poor women were major themes in his novels. He dealt with these issues in his novels, which show an increasingly critical attitude towards contemporary society. An example is Oliver Twist (1837-38, ▶ p. 60), which recounts the sufferings of an orphan brought up in a workhouse who runs away to London and joins a gang of thieves made up of children. In Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) Dickens attacks cruelty in boarding schools – the Victorian equivalent of today’s bullying. In Hard Times (1854, ▶ p. 66) he deals with the sufferings of the factory system and the harm done by the Utilitarian philosophy. His writings inspired others, in particular journalists and political figures, to address the social problems he described so vividly. The prison scenes in The Pickwick Papers are claimed to have been influential in having the Fleet Prison shut down. And Karl Marx asserted that Dickens made clear to the world ‘more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together.’

What are the settings of Dickens’ novels? Dickens’ novels present a variety of settings: the countryside and Merry Old England of The Pickwick Papers; the provincial towns which figure in most of his stories; the industrial settlements of the North in Hard Times. However, Dickens’ most typical setting is London: the vast, crowded city where different classes and social groups live alongside each other and yet do not communicate. He knew the city from first-hand experience – his night walks through London were celebrated – and he was the first writer to see the modern city as a microcosm of all human life and (especially) misery. As a writer, Dickens was also instrumental in creating a peculiar kind of setting: the image of the Victorian Christmas that survives to this day on Christmas cards and advertising all over the world. He wrote a series of ‘Christmas Books’, of which A Christmas Carol (1843, ▶ p. 71) and The Cricket on the Hearth (1845) are the most famous. In them, a mixture of the supernatural and the sentimental is combined with a powerful moral lesson.

WRITERS AND TEXTS

or for worse, however, they remain unforgettable, often because they are associated with a repeated set of gestures and phrases. For example, Mr Grandgrind in Hard Times, who believes in nothing but facts, is always identified with the squareness of his ideas and even his physical attributes (shoulders, head).

In what does Dickens’ celebrated humour consist? The main strength of Dickens’ style is his humour, through which he makes the strong points of his novels unforgettable, and also manages to hide – or make more acceptable – his weaknesses: melodramatic or openly didactic passages. He is also very good at mixing social criticism with lively portraits of universal characters – combining the pathetic with the comic. His ability to create dialogue is unmatched by any other English novelist.

WORK OUT

Was Dickens a typical Victorian writer?

1. Answer the questions.

What were Dickens’ main strengths and weaknesses as a writer?

What makes Dickens different from all the other English novelists?

How did his childhood influence his choices as a writer?

What did he do before becoming a novelist? And what did he learn by doing these jobs that he would use later as a writer?

Which of his characters was he particularly fond of? Why ?

CONNECT 2. DEBATE Reading a novel in instalments could be

compared – in the way the story is split into episodes – to watching a TV series nowadays. Work in small groups and discuss the pros and cons of TV series compared to movies.

THEMES Chaucer,

Orwell,

Canterbury Tales

Animal Farm

Wilde,

The Importance of Being Earnest

Shakespeare,

SOCIAL SATIRE

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Why are Dickens’ characters so unforgettable? Dickens created a fictitious world that for millions of readers has become real. His characters are mainly from the lower and middle classes, and their physical features, clothes, gestures and accents are perfectly captured by Dickens. Upper class and aristocratic characters, on the other hand, are not portrayed so well and tend to fall into stereotypes. Another fault sometimes found with his characters is that they are too easily divided – particularly in his early novels – into good and bad, to the point of becoming almost purely symbolic. For better

Swift, Dickens,

Hard Times

Gulliver’s Travels

Byron,

Don Juan

WRITERS AND TEXTS

Charles Dickens

What typically Victorian social issues are present in Dickens’ works? Dickens was deeply

London, Dr. Samuel Johnson giving money to the poor. Street scene, 18th century.

WRITERS AND TEXTS

WORK OUT

Was Dickens a typical Victorian writer?

1. Answer the questions.

What were Dickens’ main strengths and weaknesses as a writer?

What makes Dickens different from all the other English novelists?

How did his childhood influence his choices as a writer?

What did he do before becoming a novelist? And what did he learn by doing these jobs that he would use later as a writer?

Which of his characters was he particularly fond of? Why ?

CONNECT 2. DEBATE Reading a novel in instalments could be

compared – in the way the story is split into episodes – to watching a TV series nowadays. Work in small groups and discuss the pros and cons of TV series compared to movies.

THEMES Chaucer,

Orwell,

Canterbury Tales

Animal Farm

Wilde,

The Importance of Being Earnest

Shakespeare,

SOCIAL SATIRE

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Swift, Dickens,

Hard Times

Gulliver’s Travels

Byron,

Don Juan

WRITERS AND TEXTS

Charles Dickens

Oliver Twist (1837-38)

Oliver Twist came out in instalments and tells the adventures of an orphan who manages to preserve his almost angelic character despite a very hard life in London’s poorest quarters. It is a perfect example of the best qualities of Dickens’ art: he combines the sentimental, melodramatic story of an orphan child exploited by a gang of thieves with keen social satire and realism.

What are the novel’s social concerns? The novel’s social concerns are clear: the bad treatment of orphans in workhouses and the gangs of child-thieves in London. The comic element helps Dickens to tackle important and recent social issues, such as the New Poor Law (1834) which assigned poor people to workhouses. These were institutions where persons unable to support themselves were supposed to find accommodation and employment but where living conditions, in fact, resembled those of a prison. Some workhouses also ran at a profit by using the inmates as a source of free labour. How did children suffer from the corruption of the institutions? Dickens’ satirical portrait of workhouse Illustration from Oliver Twist by George Cruikshank.

THE STORY Oliver is a foundling. When he is nine, he is taken back to the workhouse in which he was born, where he lives a miserable life, is underfed and receives no education. He then runs away and meets a young pickpocket on the road. Oliver thinks he has found a friend and follows him to London, where he is introduced to other ‘friends’, who say they will give him food and lodging. The new friends turn out to be a gang of young criminals led by Fagin, an old Jew who is one of Dickens’ best characterizations. The thieves force Oliver to help them in their criminal activities. Oliver is rescued by Mr Brownlow, a benevolent gentleman, but some members of the gang kidnap the boy. After many incidents, some involving a mysterious character called Monks – reminiscent of the dark hero of Gothic tales – the gang is caught by the police and Oliver is discovered to be a relation of Mr Brownlow’s. He has finally found a family.

officials is also very effective in denouncing early Victorian England’s serious problem of starving children. In chapter 2 of Oliver Twist he bitterly comments on the workhouse’s Board of Directors’ real intentions: ‘So they established the rule that all poor people should have the alternative ... of being starved by a gradual process in the house, or by a quick one out of it.’ To solve this problem free schools for the poorest children were instituted, but according to contemporary reports they were little better than the streets those children came from – that is why they were called ‘Ragged Schools’.

WORK OUT 1. Answer the questions. 1 2 3 4 5

Why is Oliver Twist a good example of Dickens’s art at its best? After reading the plot, divide the characters into good and bad ones. Why is Oliver Twist generally considered as a social novel? What were the so-called ‘workhouses’? Why and how did Dickens use satire? Give an example.

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WRITERS AND TEXTS

Oliver Is Taken to the Workhouse Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1837-38) Oliver Twist is a frightened, weak, delicate child brought up in a house for orphans under the leadership of Mrs Mann, who is cruel to the children she is supposed to look after. On Oliver’s ninth birthday Mr Bumble, the parish officer, comes to the house to talk to Mrs Mann about Oliver: the time has come for Oliver to be taken to the workhouse. Poor Oliver appears only in the last part of the extract when he is called in to answer a few questions. The passage is taken from the second chapter of the novel.

000 “And now about business,” said the beadle, 1 taking out a leathern pocket-book. 2 “The child that was half-baptized Oliver Twist, is nine year old today.” “Bless him!” interposed Mrs Mann, inflaming 3 her left eye with the corner of her apron. 4 5 “And notwithstanding 5 a offered reward of ten pound, which was afterwards increased 6 to twenty pound, – notwithstanding the most superlative, and, I may say, supernat’ral exertions 7 on the part of this parish,” said Bumble, “we have never been able to discover who is his father, or what was his mother’s settlement, 8 name, or condition.” 10 Mrs Mann raised her hands in astonishment; but added, after a moment’s reflection, “How comes he to have any name at all, then?” The beadle drew himself up with great pride, and said, “I invented it.” “You, Mr Bumble!” “I, Mrs Mann. We name our foundlings 9 in alphabetical order. The last was 15 a S, – Swubble, I named him. This was a T, – Twist, I named him. The next one as comes will be Unwin, and the next Vilkins. I have got names ready made to the end of the alphabet, and all the way through it again, when we come to Z.” “Why, you’re quite a literary character, 10 sir!” said Mrs Mann. “Well, well,” said the beadle, evidently gratified with the compliment; “perhaps I 20 may be, – perhaps I may be, Mrs Mann.” He finished the gin-and-water, and added, “Oliver being now too old to remain here, the board 11 have determined to have him back in the house, 12 and I have come out myself to take him there, – so let me see him at once.” “I’ll fetch him directly,” said Mrs Mann, leaving the room for that purpose. 25 And Oliver, having had by this time as much of the outer coat 13 of dirt, which encrusted his face and hands, removed, as could be scrubbed 14 off in one washing, was led into the room by his benevolent protectress. “Make a bow 15 to the gentleman, Oliver,” said Mrs Mann. Oliver made a bow, which was divided between the beadle on the chair and the 30 cocked hat 16 on the table. “Will you go along with me, Oliver?” said Mr Bumble in a majestic voice. Oliver was about to say that he would go along with anybody with great readiness, when, glancing 17 upward, he caught sight of Mrs Mann, who had got behind the beadle’s chair, and was shaking her fist at him with a furious countenance. 18 He 35 took the hint 19 at once, for the fist had been too often impressed upon his body not to be deeply impressed upon his recollection. 20 “Will she go with me?” inquired poor Oliver. “No, she can’t,” replied Mr Bumble. “But she’ll come and see you sometimes.”

• Listen to the texts • Practise with the Karaoke

1. beadle: parish officer. 2. pocket-book: small book. 3. inflaming: artfully causing tears in. 4. apron: grembiule. 5. notwithstanding: despite. 6. increased: raised, augmented. 7. exertions: efforts. 8. settlement: estate, property. 9. foundlings: trovatelli. 10. character: poet or writer. 11. board: Board of Directors (Consiglio dei Direttori). 12. house: workhouse. 13. outer coat: external covering. 14. scrubbed: wiped. 15. bow: inchino. 16. cocked hat: tricorno. 17. glancing: looking. 18. countenance: face. 19. hint: suggestion. 20. recollection: memory.

WRITERS AND TEXTS

Charles Dickens

Oliver Twist (1837-38)

WORK OUT 1. Answer the questions. 1 2 3 4 5

TXXX

WRITERS AND TEXTS

• Listen to the texts • Practise with the Karaoke

WRITERS AND TEXTS

21. make a feint of: pretend. 22. ill-usage: maltreatment. 23. a great deal: much. 24. lest: per timore che. 25. brown-cloth: di panno scuro. 26. wretched: horrible. 27. gloom: melancholy. 28. grief: deep sorrow. 29. sank into: reached.

Charles Dickens

This was no very great consolation to the child; but, young as he was, he had sense enough to make a feint of 21 feeling great regret at going away. It was no very difficult matter for the boy to call tears into his eyes. Hunger and recent ill-usage 22 are great assistants if you want to cry; and Oliver cried very naturally indeed. Mrs Mann gave him a thousand embraces, and, what Oliver wanted a great deal 23 more, a piece of bread and butter, lest 24 he should seem too hungry when he got to the workhouse. With the slice of bread in his hand, and the little browncloth 25 parish cap on his head, Oliver was then led away by Mr Bumble from the wretched 26 home where one kind word or look had never lighted the gloom 27 of his infant years. And yet he burst into an agony of childish grief 28 as the cottagegate closed after him. Wretched as were the little companions in misery he was leaving behind, they were the only friends he had ever known; and a sense of his loneliness in the great wide world sank into 29 the child’s heart for the first time.

THEMES

Blake,

Carter,

The Lamb and The Chimney Sweeper

The Werewolf

Wordsworth,

McEwan,

Intimations of Immortality

The Cement Garden

CHILDHOOD Dickens,

Hard Times

Twain,

Huckleberry Finn

Kipling, Kim

Eliot,

The Mill on the Floss

COMPREHENSION

1. The text can be divided into two sequences, ll. 1-29 and ll. 30-52. Give each a title. 2. What information can we find out about the boy? Complete the table. • Name • Age

• Father • Mother

• His treatment at Mrs Mann’s house

3. How did he get his name? 4. How does he feel about being taken away?

ANALYSIS

5. How would you describe Mrs Mann’s behaviour in the presence of Mr Bumble? Choose one or more adjectives. spontaneous • affected • exaggerated • naive • inauthentic • genuine • kind • ostentatious • adulatory

6. Through Oliver’s eyes, we soon see Mrs Mann’s real nature. When does this happen? 7. Does Oliver’s behaviour always mirror his true feelings in this passage? Give examples from the text. 8. Highlight the phrases in the text which express humour (green) and sentimentality (red).

YOUR TURN 9. Mrs Mann is supposed to look after the orphaned children in her care, but instead she makes them miserable. Literature and fairy tales often present a sad orphan as their main character. Choose one and prepare a presentation.

TXXX

WRITERS AND TEXTS

Oliver Asks for More Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1837-38) The following passage also comes from Chapter 2 of the novel and it follows shortly after the previous one. Oliver is now living in the workhouse, where he is supposed to be taken care of, educated and fed. None of this, in fact, happens and he and his unfortunate fellow boarders are starving. When the children cast lots for who should go to the master and ask for more food, it falls to poor Oliver.

000 The room in which the boys were fed, was a large stone hall, with a copper 1 at one end: out of which the master, dressed in an apron for the purpose, and assisted by one or two women, ladled the gruel 2 at mealtimes. [...]. Boys have generally excellent appetites. Oliver Twist and his companions suffered the 5 tortures of slow starvation for three months: at last they got so voracious and wild with hunger, that one boy, who was tall for his age, and hadn’t been used to that sort of thing (for his father had kept a small cook-shop), hinted darkly 3 to his companions, that unless he had another basin of gruel per diem, he was afraid he might some night happen to eat the boy who slept next him, who happened to 10 be a weakly youth of tender age. He had a wild, hungry eye; and they implicitly believed him. A council was held; lots were cast 4 who should walk up to the master after supper that evening, and ask for more; and it fell to Oliver Twist. The evening arrived; the boys took their places. The master, in his cook’s uniform, stationed himself at the copper; his pauper assistants ranged themselves 15 behind him; the gruel was served out; and a long grace 5 was said over the short commons. 6 The gruel disappeared; the boys whispered each other, and winked at Oliver; while his next neighbours nudged 7 him. Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger, and reckless with misery. He rose from the table; and advancing to the master, basin and spoon in hand, said, somewhat alarmed at his own temerity: 20 “Please, sir, I want some more.” The master was a fat, healthy man; but he turned very pale. He gazed in stupefied astonishment on the small rebel for some seconds, and then clung for support to the copper. The assistants were paralysed with wonder; the boys with fear. “What!” said the master at length, 8 in a faint voice. 25 “Please, sir,” replied Oliver, “I want some more.” The master aimed a blow 9 at Oliver’s head with the ladle; pinioned 10 him in his arm; and shrieked aloud for the beadle. 11 The board 12 were sitting in solemn conclave, when Mr. Bumble rushed into the room in great excitement, and addressing the gentleman in the high chair, said, 30 “Mr. Limbkins, I beg your pardon, sir! Oliver Twist has asked for more!” There was a general start. Horror was depicted on every countenance. 13 “For more!” said Mr. Limbkins. “Compose yourself, Bumble, and answer me distinctly. Do I understand that he asked for more, after he had eaten the supper allotted 14 by the dietary?” 35 “He did, sir,” replied Bumble. “That boy will be hung,” said the gentleman in the white waistcoat. 15 “I know that boy will be hung.” Nobody controverted the prophetic gentleman’s opinion. An animated discussion took place. Oliver was ordered into instant confinement; 16 and a bill was next

1. copper: copper pot. 2. ladled the gruel: scooped the porridge. 3. hinted darkly: said menacingly. 4. lots were cast: they tossed the coin to decide. 5. grace: prayer. 6. commons: little food they received. 7. nudged: slightly pushed. 8. at length: after a while. 9. aimed a blow: hit. 10. pinioned: held. 11. beadle: a parish officer. 12. board: directive committee. 13. countenance: face. 14. allotted: designated. 15. waistcoat: panciotto. 16. confinement: detention.

WRITERS AND TEXTS

Charles Dickens

THEMES

Blake,

Carter,

The Lamb and The Chimney Sweeper

The Werewolf

Wordsworth,

McEwan,

Intimations of Immortality

The Cement Garden

CHILDHOOD Dickens,

Hard Times

Twain,

Huckleberry Finn

Kipling, Kim

Eliot,

The Mill on the Floss

COMPREHENSION

1. The text can be divided into two sequences, ll. 1-29 and ll. 30-52. Give each a title. 2. What information can we find out about the boy? Complete the table. • Name • Age

• Father • Mother

• His treatment at Mrs Mann’s house

3. How did he get his name? 4. How does he feel about being taken away?

ANALYSIS

TXXX

WRITERS AND TEXTS

17. anybody who ... parish: anybody who would take the burden of Oliver Twist away from the parish. 18. apprentice: a person who learns a job.

Charles Dickens

morning pasted on the outside of the gate, offering a reward of five pounds to anybody who would take Oliver Twist off the hands of the parish. 17 In other words, five pounds and Oliver Twist were offered to any man or woman who wanted an apprentice 18 to any trade, business, or calling. “I never was more convinced of anything in my life,” said the gentleman in the white waistcoat, as he knocked at the gate and read the bill next morning: “I never was more convinced of anything in my life, than I am that that boy will come to be hung.”

Film corner Roman Polanski’s version of Oliver Twist, written by Ronald Harwood, and based on the 1838 novel of the same name by Charles Dickens, was preceded by numerous film and TV adaptations, and a stage musical (Oliver!) that became an Academy Award-winning film. Polanski was anxious to make a film his children could enjoy, when he realized nearly forty years had passed since Oliver Twist had been adapted for a feature film. Polanski and Harwood opted for a major shift from the novel eliminating the part about Oliver’s origins completely, making him just another anonymous orphan like the rest of Fagin’s gang.

WRITERS AND TEXTS

Hard Times is set in Coketown, an industrial city in the North of England (the fictitious name means ‘town of coke’, coke being a kind of coal used in industry). It is Dickens’ only novel centred on the treatment of the industrial working class.

1. Answer the

Hard Times (1854) What are the novel’s main issues? The novel is built around two, much debated issues at the time. The first was the inhumanity of the factory system – the workers were called ‘Hands’ by the factory owners, that is, not really ‘people’ but rather functions of the machines they operated. The second was the application of the principles of the Utilitarian philosophy – which judged the value of everything according to its practical value – to school teaching.

CONNECTING OLIVER TWIST (2005) Do you know what I consider the greatest sin in the world my dear? Ingratitude.

Charles Dickens

Read about the film

Production: UK Direction: Roman Polanski

What was the Utilitarian philosophy about? The Utilitarian philosophers, especially Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), claimed that everything had to be judged according to standards of utility and how much it promoted the material happiness of the greatest number of people. As it happened, in fact, the greatest number of people – the working classes – did not benefit from the material happiness that was enjoyed by a small minority – the upper classes and the aristocracy. In the passage you are going to read, set in a classroom (▶ p. 67), the Utilitarian teaching method is presented through lively and convincing characters.

questions.

Where is the novel set? Why is the name of the town quite revealing? What is Thomas Gradgrind’s job? And what is important for him? How does he change in the course of the story?

2. Summarize in

your own words Bentham’s Utilitarian philosophy.

Written by: Ronald Harwood Starring: Ben Kingsley, Jamie Foreman, Barney Clark

COMPREHENSION

1. Read the text and find information about: setting, characters and time of the day. 2. The text can be divided into two sequences. Identify them and give them each a title. 3. Oliver’s request for more food causes a chain of reactions. Describe them. 4. What are the extreme consequences of poor Oliver’s actions?

ANALYSIS

5. Find the expressions that are used in the first part of the text to describe the children’s extreme hunger.

The Cotton Industry. Carding, drawing and roving, engraving, 1835.

6. The boys use a series of gestures to indicate that Oliver has to find the courage to take action. Find the verbs used to express them.

7. Overall, how would you describe the characters’ responses to Oliver’s request? disproportionate • adequate • paradoxical • fair • unfair • merciful • just • harsh • acceptable

8. Find examples of contrast, repetition, hyperbole and humour. 9. Identify the narrator. Who does he side with? Justify your answer. 10. What is Dickens criticizing? Choose one or more answers. a b c d e

The impudence of children in workhouses. The inadequacy of Victorian institutions. The living conditions of poor people in Victorian cities. The management of children in workhouses. The self-righteousness of people working in Victorian institutions.

THE STORY Thomas Gradgrind has founded a school where his educational theories are put into practice: children are taught nothing but facts, and he educates his own children, Louisa and Tom, in the same way, neglecting their imagination and affections. He also adopts an orphan, Sissy Jupe, whose father worked in a circus before his death. Mr Gradgrind suggests his daughter should marry Josiah Bounderby, a rich factory-owner

and banker much older than she is. Louisa, wishing to help her brother Tom in his career, consents to the marriage. Tom is given a job in Bounderby’s bank, and eventually steals some money from it. Discovered, he hides among the circus folk, who show kindness and sympathy by sheltering him. In the end Gradgrind understands the damage caused by his narrow-minded and materialistic philosophy.

WRITERS AND TEXTS

17. anybody who ... parish: anybody who would take the burden of Oliver Twist away from the parish. 18. apprentice: a person who learns a job.

Charles Dickens

WRITERS AND TEXTS

1. Answer the

CONNECTING OLIVER TWIST (2005) Do you know what I consider the greatest sin in the world my dear? Ingratitude.

Charles Dickens

Read about the film

Production: UK Direction: Roman Polanski

questions.

Where is the novel set? Why is the name of the town quite revealing? What is Thomas Gradgrind’s job? And what is important for him? How does he change in the course of the story?

2. Summarize in

your own words Bentham’s Utilitarian philosophy.

Written by: Ronald Harwood Starring: Ben Kingsley, Jamie Foreman, Barney Clark

COMPREHENSION

ANALYSIS

5. Find the expressions that are used in the first part of the text to describe the children’s extreme hunger.

The Cotton Industry. Carding, drawing and roving, engraving, 1835.

6. The boys use a series of gestures to indicate that Oliver has to find the courage to take action. Find the verbs used to express them.

7. Overall, how would you describe the characters’ responses to Oliver’s request? disproportionate • adequate • paradoxical • fair • unfair • merciful • just • harsh • acceptable

WRITERS AND TEXTS

Charles Dickens

TXXX

Charles Dickens

A Classroom Definition of a Horse

Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854) The following passage from Chapter 2 highlights the principles of the Utilitarian philosophy applied to schools and focuses on the differences between Sissy and Bitzer. The two children represent two opposite sets of values: Sissy stands for spontaneity, emotion, imagination and simplicity, while Bitzer stands for rationality, materialism and utilitarianism. Mr Gradgrind, the teacher, is all for facts and figures as opposed to feelings and good sense. Through lively dialogue and a style rich in humour Dickens clearly satirises the pedantic dictionary definition of a horse provided by Bitzer and praised by the teacher.

eye-teeth, 20 and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy 21 countries, sheds hoofs, 22 too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. 23 Age known by marks in mouth.” Thus 24 (and much more) Bitzer. “Now girl number twenty,” said Mr Gradgrind. “You know what a horse is.” She curtseyed again, and would have blushed deeper, if she could have blushed deeper than she had blushed all this time. Bitzer, after rapidly blinking at Thomas Gradgrind with both eyes at once, and so catching the light upon his quivering 25 ends of lashes that they looked like the antennae of busy insects, put his knuckles 26 to his freckled forehead, and sat down again.

THEMES

20. eye-teeth: canini. 21. marshy: paludosi. 22. hoofs: zoccoli. ‘Hooves’ in modern English. 23. shod with iron: ferrati. 24. Thus: so, this. 25. quivering: trembling. 26. knuckles: nocche.

Wollstonecraft,

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Salinger,

The Catcher in the Rye

000 “Girl number twenty”, said Mr Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his square forefinger, “I don’t know that girl! Who is that girl?” “Sissy Jupe, sir,” explained number twenty, blushing, standing up, and curtseying. 2 “Sissy is not a name,” said Mr Gradgrind. “Don’t call yourself Sissy. Call yourself 5 Cecilia.” “It’s father as calls me Sissy, sir,” returned the young girl in a trembling voice, and with another curtsey. “Then he has no business 3 to do it,” said Mr Gradgrind. “Tell him he mustn’t. Cecilia Jupe. Let me see. What is your father?” 10 “He belongs to the horse-riding, if you please, sir.” Mr Gradgrind frowned, 4 and waved off the objectionable calling with his hand. “We don’t want to know anything about that, here. You mustn’t tell us about that, here. Your father breaks 5 horses, don’t he?” “If you please, sir, when they can get any to break, they do break horses in the 15 ring, 6 sir.” “You mustn’t tell us about the ring, here. Very well, then. Describe your father as a horse-breaker. He doctors sick horses, I dare say?” “Oh yes, sir.” “Very well, then. He is a veterinary surgeon, 7 a farrier 8 and horse-breaker. Give 20 me your definition of a horse.” (Sissy Jupe was thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.) “Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!” said Mr Gradgrind, for the general behoof 9 of all the little pitchers. “Girl number twenty possessed of no facts, in reference to one of the commonest of animals! Some boy’s definition of a horse. 25 Bitzer, yours.” The square finger, moving here and there, lighted 10 suddenly on Bitzer because he chanced to sit in the same ray of sunlight which, darting in at one of the bare windows of the intensely white-washed 11 room, irradiated Sissy. [...] But, whereas 12 the girl was so dark-eyed and dark-haired, that she seemed to receive 30 a deeper and more lustrous 13 colour from the sun when it shone upon her, the boy was so light-eyed and light-haired that the self-same rays appeared to draw 14 out of him what little colour he ever possessed. [...] His short-cropped hair might have been a mere continuation of the sandy 15 freckles on his forehead and face. His skin was so unwholesomely 16 deficient in the natural tinge, 17 that he looked as 35 though, if he were cut, he would bleed white. “Bitzer,” said Thomas Gradgrind. “Your definition of a horse.” “Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely 18 twenty-four grinders, 19 four

WRITERS AND TEXTS

Dickens,

Hard Times

1. squarely: directly. 2. curtseying: facendo un inchino. 3. business: right. 4. frowned: si accigliò. 5. breaks: doma. 6. ring: recinto. 7. surgeon: chirurgo. 8. farrier: maniscalco. 9. behoof: advantage, instruction. 10. lighted: settled. 11. white-washed: imbiancata. 12. whereas: while. 13. lustrous: bright. 14. draw: absorb. 15. sandy: yellowish red. 16. unwholesomely: unhealthily. 17. tinge: colour. 18. namely: that is. 19. grinders: molari.

EDUCATION Huxley,

Brave New World

Eliot,

Shaw,

The Mill on the Floss

Pygmalion

COMPREHENSION

1. Complete the summary with the missing words. The scene is set in a (1) where Mr Gradgrind, the (2) , asks a girl what her (3) about her father’s (4) and then invites her to define a (5) . The girl is (6) Gradgrind turns to another (7) , who gives the requested (8) .

is, enquires to do it, so Mr

ANALYSIS

2. How does Sissy react when Mr Gradgrind first calls on her? What does her reaction indicate? 3. Why do you think he doesn’t want the girl to call herself Sissy? 4. Mr Gradgrind refers to her as ‘girl number 20’, even after he learns her name. What does this behaviour suggest? a Respect and formality.

The ultimate display of authority.

Fondness and even affection.

5. Bitzer is called to answer Mr Gradgrind’s question. How would you describe the definition the boy provides? 6. Focus on the descriptions of Sissy and Bitzer. 1 The difference between the two children’s physical appearance is highlighted by the effect the same natural element has on them. What element is this? 2 Find the expressions used to describe their eyes, hair and complexion.

7. Sissy and Bitzer’s descriptions are contrasting. Which one is positive and which one is negative? Underline the expressions that create these connotations using different colours.

8. Mr Gradgrind is a rational man who is only interested in facts and practical things which can be measured. Which words and expressions reinforce this image?

9. Dickens uses irony to express his criticism. Find some examples. 10. In line 23 the students are called ‘little pitchers’. Can you think of a reason why? 11. Focus on Mr Gradgrind’s name, which can be considered a compound of ‘grade’ and ‘grind’. Check their meaning and explain why, in your opinion, Dickens may have chosen to call the teacher by this name.

YOUR TURN

12. CRITICAL THINKING In your opinion, what kind of atmosphere contributes to a successful learning

experience? What do you think the main purpose of education should be? Is it represented, even only partially, 67 in the passage you have just read?

WRITERS AND TEXTS

Charles Dickens

TXXX

Charles Dickens

A Classroom Definition of a Horse

THEMES

20. eye-teeth: canini. 21. marshy: paludosi. 22. hoofs: zoccoli. ‘Hooves’ in modern English. 23. shod with iron: ferrati. 24. Thus: so, this. 25. quivering: trembling. 26. knuckles: nocche.

Wollstonecraft,

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Salinger,

The Catcher in the Rye

WRITERS AND TEXTS

Dickens,

Hard Times

EDUCATION Huxley,

Brave New World

Eliot,

Shaw,

The Mill on the Floss

Pygmalion

COMPREHENSION

is, enquires to do it, so Mr

ANALYSIS

The ultimate display of authority.

Fondness and even affection.

7. Sissy and Bitzer’s descriptions are contrasting. Which one is positive and which one is negative? Underline the expressions that create these connotations using different colours.

8. Mr Gradgrind is a rational man who is only interested in facts and practical things which can be measured. Which words and expressions reinforce this image?

YOUR TURN

12. CRITICAL THINKING In your opinion, what kind of atmosphere contributes to a successful learning

experience? What do you think the main purpose of education should be? Is it represented, even only partially, 67 in the passage you have just read?

WRITERS AND TEXTS

Charles Dickens

TXXX

Coketown

Charles Dickens

WRITERS AND TEXTS

COMPREHENSION

1. Read the first 14 lines. What elements of the town are described in the text?

Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854)

2. What kind of life do people live there?

The passage comes from Chapter 5 of Hard Times. It describes the setting of the novel: Coketown, a typical Victorian industrial town where the air is polluted by smoke and ash, and filled with the poisonous smell from the canal and the river. As such, it is a perfect example of a city planned and built according to the principles of practical utility dear to the Utilitarians. The monotonous, melancholy and hard life of the people is highlighted by the comparison between the town and its people, and is emphasized by the repetition of words.

3. Read the rest of the passage. List the buildings mentioned by the author. What do they look like?

ANALYSIS

4. The town is described using imagery connected to the senses. Find elements in the text to complete the table. Sight (colours) Hearing Smell

5. Coketown is characterised by extreme pollution. Find evidence in the extract and underline the corresponding 1. as matters stood: stando così le cose. 2. never got uncoiled: never stopped. 3. ill-smelling dye: tintura maleodorante. 4. rattling: tintinnìo. 5. workful: made for work. 6. persuasion: sect. 7. warehouse: magazzino. 8. steeple: campanile. 9. for ... contrary: per quello che si poteva vedere. 10. graces: features. 11. M’Choakumchild school: the kind of school run according to the principles of the Utilitarian philosophy, all based on the practical value of things and on the learning of facts at the expense of intelligence, intuition and feeling. 12. design: the building itself. 13. lying-in: maternity.

000 It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but, as matters stood 1 it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. 2 It had a black canal in it, and a river that 5 ran purple with ill-smelling dye, 3 and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling 4 and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people 10 equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next. [...] You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. 5 If the members 15 of a religious persuasion 6 built a chapel there – as the members of eighteen religious persuasions had done – they made it a pious warehouse 7 of red brick, with sometimes (but this only in highly ornamented examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of it. The solitary exception was the New Church; a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple 8 over the door, terminating in four short pinnacles 20 like florid wooden legs. All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or 25 both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary 9 in the graces 10 of their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the 30 immaterial. The M’Choakumchild school 11 was all fact, and the school design 12 was all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in 13 hospital and the 35 cemetery.

lines.

6. Highlight in red all the expressions that stress the excruciating monotony of Coketown. What device is used to emphasise this aspect?

7. Find the metaphors and similes in lines 1-14. What do they have in common? What is the author trying to tell us?

Metaphor(s) Simile(s)

8. Focus on the name of the town and on that of the school. What do they evoke? 9. Identify the type of narrator.

YOUR TURN

10. Dickens denounced pollution in Victorian cities, but the problem still hasn’t been solved. Although in a

different form, damage to the environment is still a central issue in our society. What are the main forms of pollution nowadays? What is being done to prevent further problems? Do you feel personally involved? Discuss these questions with your classmates.

CONNECTING TOWARDS A GREENER LONDON

AGENDA 2030

Affordable and clean energy

000 INVALSI LISTENING Listen to the recording and answer the questions using a maximum of 4 words. There is an example at the beginning (0). 0 1 2

When should London become net-zero carbon? By the year 2050. What should this slow down? What is the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the UK?

How much will car mileage have to be reduced?

What aspect of buildings will have to be improved?

What kind of energy will replace that from gas and electricity grids?

6 7 8 9

What will most cars in the streets be like? What could increase public transport capacity? How will the city change in terms of density? Apart from solar panels, what will you find on the rooftops of houses?

WRITERS AND TEXTS

Charles Dickens

TXXX

Coketown

Charles Dickens

WRITERS AND TEXTS

COMPREHENSION

1. Read the first 14 lines. What elements of the town are described in the text?

Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854)

2. What kind of life do people live there?

3. Read the rest of the passage. List the buildings mentioned by the author. What do they look like?

ANALYSIS

4. The town is described using imagery connected to the senses. Find elements in the text to complete the table. Sight (colours) Hearing Smell

lines.

6. Highlight in red all the expressions that stress the excruciating monotony of Coketown. What device is used to emphasise this aspect?

7. Find the metaphors and similes in lines 1-14. What do they have in common? What is the author trying to tell us?

Metaphor(s) Simile(s)

8. Focus on the name of the town and on that of the school. What do they evoke? 9. Identify the type of narrator.

YOUR TURN

10. Dickens denounced pollution in Victorian cities, but the problem still hasn’t been solved. Although in a

CONNECTING TOWARDS A GREENER LONDON

AGENDA 2030

Affordable and clean energy

000 INVALSI LISTENING Listen to the recording and answer the questions using a maximum of 4 words. There is an example at the beginning (0). 0 1 2

When should London become net-zero carbon? By the year 2050. What should this slow down? What is the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the UK?

How much will car mileage have to be reduced?

What aspect of buildings will have to be improved?

What kind of energy will replace that from gas and electricity grids?

6 7 8 9

WRITERS AND TEXTS

Charles Dickens

A Christmas Carol (1843)

TXXX

WRITERS AND TEXTS

No Christmas Time for Scrooge Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843)

Dickens’ novella First published on 19 December 1843, the novella (or long short story) A Christmas Carol was an instant success and it has remained one of Dickens’ most popular works, enjoying many film, stage, musical and comic adaptations. It is the story of a nasty and bitter old miser named Ebenezer Scrooge who hates Christmas and the acts of generosity that usually go with it, but is transformed into a gentle and generous man after visitations by several ghosts (including those of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come, that is Future). As such, A Christmas Carol owes something to the ghost stories of the Gothic tradition and also to the revival of carol singing and the new customs of Christmas cards and Christmas trees of the time. It is also likely that Dickens’ painful childhood experiences of poverty and humiliation went into his description of the meagre Christmas of many poor families.

THE STORY There he witnesses one of his employees, Bob Cratchit and his family preparing a Christmas celebration in their poor home; and he meets the family’s courageous little crippled boy, Tiny Tim, who touches Scrooge’s cold heart. Finally, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows Scrooge some people expressing relief at the death of an unnamed man. From the tombstone in the cemetery Scrooge discovers this to be his own grave. He then implores the ghost to alter his fate and, upon awakening, he is relieved to discover that he has time to redeem himself. Scrooge sends a giant Christmas turkey to the Cratchit household and attends his own nephew’s family party. And in subsequent years, Scrooge treats Tiny Tim as a son; gives gifts to the poor; and honours the Christmas celebration every year.

A miserly old business man named Ebenezer Scrooge rejects Christmas as ‘humbug’ (rubbish). Despite his considerable wealth he will not give his employees or their families any gifts. But one Christmas Eve, Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his dead business partner, Jacob Marley, who warns him of the punishments that await him: to walk the earth eternally in heavy chains, unless he changes his greedy and selfish ways. To save Scrooge from the same fate as Marley, three spirits visit him. The Ghost of Christmas Past takes him to see his past Christmases; his childhood and his engagement to Belle, a woman who left him because of his avarice. Scrooge feels sadness and remorse over his past behaviour. Next, the Ghost of Christmas Present accompanies Scrooge through that year’s Christmas in London.

WORK OUT 1. Answer the questions. 1 2 3 4 5

When was this novella first published? Was it immediately successful? And is it still popular now? How may Dickens’ childhood have influenced his writing this story? Who is the protagonist of this novella? And how does he change in the course of the story? Where can we see the influence of the gothic tradition?

2. Put the events of A Christmas Carol into chronological order.

Scrooge hopes the spirit can alter his own fate.

b c d e f g h i j

The Ghost of Christmas Present takes Scrooge through London. Scrooge is visited by Jacob Marley’s ghost. Scrooge treats Tiny Tim as if he were his own child. Scrooge was a mean man who did not like Christmas. Scrooge will be visited by three ghosts. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows him his own death. Scrooge sees Bob Cratchit’s crippled son Tiny Tim in their poor home. The Ghost of Christmas Past escorts Scrooge into his childhood and his engagement with Belle. Scrooge sends a Christmas turkey to the Cratchits.

This passage from the beginning of A Christmas Carol sets the stage for the whole story. Scrooge’s character is already well-sketched in this initial scene: he is a miser, a mean old man, who not only resents other people’s joy and generosity at Christmas, but does not want to rejoice in the celebrations himself. When his nephew comes in to ask him to his family’s Christmas dinner, Scrooge scornfully turns down the invitation. Scrooge’s nephew is representative of the average person who believes in love and friendship, the feelings that Scrooge too learns to cherish by the end of the story.

000 Once upon a time – of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve 1 – old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house. 2 It was cold, bleak, 3 biting 4 weather, foggy withal, 5 and he could hear the people in the court outside, go wheezing 6 up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them. [...] 5 The door of Scrooge’s counting-house was open that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, 7 who in a dismal 8 little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying letters. Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk’s fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal. 9 But he couldn’t replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own room. [...] 10 “A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!” cried a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge’s nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach. 10 “Bah!” said Scrooge, “Humbug!” 11 He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this nephew of 15 Scrooge’s, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again. “Christmas a humbug, uncle!” said Scrooge’s nephew. “You don’t mean that, I am sure.” “I do,” said Scrooge. “Merry Christmas! what right have you to be merry? what 20 reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.” “Come, then,” returned the nephew gaily. “What right have you to be dismal? what reason have you to be morose? 12 You’re rich enough.” Scrooge having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, 13 said, “Bah!” again; and followed it up with “Humbug.” 25 “Don’t be cross, 14 uncle,” said the nephew. “What else can I be” returned the uncle, “when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon 15 merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in 30 ‘em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? 16 [...] “Uncle!” pleaded the nephew. “Nephew!” returned the uncle, sternly, 17 “keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.” “Keep it!” repeated Scrooge’s nephew. “But you don’t keep it.” 35 “Let me leave it alone, then,” said Scrooge. “Much good may it do you! Much good it has ever done you!” “There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have

1. Christmas Eve: the day before Christmas. 2. counting-house: commercial office. 3. bleak: gloomy. 4. biting: harsh. 5. withal: as well. 6. wheezing: breathing heavily. 7. clerk: office worker. 8. dismal: depressing. 9. coal: piece of burning carbon. 10. who came ... approach: who had approached so quickly that Scrooge hadn’t noticed. 11. Humbug: nonsense. 12. morose: gloomy. 13. on the ... moment: on the spot. 14. cross: angry. 15. Out upon: to hell. 16. balancing ... against you: to balance the financial report and see that it has been negative the whole year. 17. sternly: rigorously.

WRITERS AND TEXTS

Charles Dickens

A Christmas Carol (1843)

TXXX

WRITERS AND TEXTS

No Christmas Time for Scrooge Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843)

WORK OUT 1. Answer the questions. 1 2 3 4 5

2. Put the events of A Christmas Carol into chronological order.

Scrooge hopes the spirit can alter his own fate.

b c d e f g h i j

18. by one consent: they all agree. 19. fellow-passengers ... journeys: metaphor of life as a journey: Scrooge’s nephew is saying that at Christmastime all men are equal, so fellow-travellers. 20. scrap: little piece. 21. sensible: conscious. 22. situation: job. 23. I wonder: I ask myself why. 24. went ... expression: he completed the whole sentence. 25. he would ... first: he would rather meet him in hell. 26. growled: grunted. 27. party: part of. 28. trial: attempt.

Revise with the map.

Charles Dickens

not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew: “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round [...] as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent 18 to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. 19 And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap 20 of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!” The clerk in the tank involuntarily applauded: becoming immediately sensible 21 of the impropriety, he poked the fire, and extinguished the last frail spark for ever. “Let me hear another sound from you” said Scrooge, “and you’ll keep your Christmas by losing your situation. 22 You’re quite a powerful speaker, sir,” he added, turning to his nephew. “I wonder 23 you don’t go into Parliament.” “Don’t be angry, uncle. Come! Dine with us to-morrow.” Scrooge said that he would see him – yes, indeed he did. He went the whole length of the expression, 24 and said that he would see him in that extremity first. 25 “But why?” cried Scrooge’s nephew. “Why?” “Why did you get married?” said Scrooge. “Because I fell in love.” “Because you fell in love!” growled 26 Scrooge, as if that were the only one thing in the world more ridiculous than a merry Christmas. “Good afternoon!” “Nay, uncle, but you never came to see me before that happened. Why give it as a reason for not coming now?” “Good afternoon,” said Scrooge. “I want nothing from you; I ask nothing of you; why cannot we be friends?” “Good afternoon,” said Scrooge. “I am sorry, with all my heart, to find you so resolute. We have never had any quarrel, to which I have been a party. 27 But I have made the trial 28 in homage to Christmas, and I’ll keep my Christmas humour to the last. So A Merry Christmas, uncle!” “Good afternoon!” said Scrooge. “And A Happy New Year!” “Good afternoon!” said Scrooge.

COMPREHENSION

1. Find information about: time, place, weather and characters. 2. What is Scrooge doing at the beginning of the passage? 3. What is the reason for his nephew’s visit? 4. How does Scrooge react to his nephew’s offer? Does his nephew get angry?

ANALYSIS

Charles Dickens (1812-70) LIFE

Works in a factory at the age of 12, then apprenticed to a lawyer.

TO SUM UP

WRITERS AND TEXTS

Works as a journalist and writes under the penname ‘Boz’. Has great success as a writer from 1836 onwards, then also as a public speaker.

WORKS

Key aspects

Central issues of the Victorian period: (a) exploitation, (b) and legal injustice, poverty. Memorable characters: perfectly captured features, although slightly (c) . Humorous style: (d) features, although with some (e)

Production

criticism and comical passages.

Early years • (1) • (2) • (3)

: description of London life and characters : picaresque depiction of country life : sentimental story rich in social satire

Middle years • (4) • (5)

: attack on private schools : autobiographical coming-of-age novel

Late years • (6) • (7) • (8)

: attack on bureaucracy and the law : attack on the effects of factory work : attack on the criminal court system

5. Avarice and obsession with money appear as the key elements in Scrooge’s personality. Find examples in the text.

6. Focus on the way Scrooge treats his clerk. Underline the corresponding lines in the text and explain them. 7. Look at the description of the nephew. Which adjectives are used? Do they have positive or negative connotations?

8. Scrooge and his nephew have very different views about Christmas. Explain with specific references to the text.

YOUR TURN 72

9. What does Christmas represent for you? What is its role in contemporary society? Write an essay (300 words). 10. THINKING ROUTINE Work in pairs. Talk about how meaningful / meaningless Christmas is by adopting either Scrooge’s viewpoint or his nephew’s.

1. COMPLETE THE MAP Use the novel titles below to fill in the gaps (1-8) in the map. Nicholas Nickleby • Hard Times •The Pickwick Papers • Oliver Twist • Bleak House • Sketches by Boz • Great Expectations • David Copperfield

2. ENRICH THE MAP Completing the box that describes the key features (a-e) of Dickens’ writing. 73

Revise with the map.

Charles Dickens

COMPREHENSION

ANALYSIS

Charles Dickens (1812-70) LIFE

Works in a factory at the age of 12, then apprenticed to a lawyer.

TO SUM UP

WRITERS AND TEXTS

Works as a journalist and writes under the penname ‘Boz’. Has great success as a writer from 1836 onwards, then also as a public speaker.

WORKS

Key aspects

Production

criticism and comical passages.

Early years • (1) • (2) • (3)

: description of London life and characters : picaresque depiction of country life : sentimental story rich in social satire

Middle years • (4) • (5)

: attack on private schools : autobiographical coming-of-age novel

Late years • (6) • (7) • (8)

: attack on bureaucracy and the law : attack on the effects of factory work : attack on the criminal court system

5. Avarice and obsession with money appear as the key elements in Scrooge’s personality. Find examples in the text.

8. Scrooge and his nephew have very different views about Christmas. Explain with specific references to the text.

YOUR TURN 72

2. ENRICH THE MAP Completing the box that describes the key features (a-e) of Dickens’ writing. 73

CROSS-CURRICULAR THEMES

COLLOQUIO ORALE

The Gender Divide in the Hollywood Film Industry

PHILOSOPHY VISUAL ARTS

Wollstonecraft

Sadler

Mill

Rossetti French Impressionists

HISTORY

Films like Thelma & Louise (1991) and A League of Their Own (1992) have established Geena Davis as an international celebrity. The American actress, however, has also made a name for herself as one of the most critical voices when it comes to addressing the issue of gender imbalances in the Hollywood film industry. When her daughter was little, Ms. Davis couldn’t help noticing that male characters vastly outnumbered female characters in children’s TV and movies. She was aware of gender disparity in the real world; but this was the world of fiction, she thought: why shouldn’t it be 50/50? And it wasn’t just the numbers, but also how women were represented – how they were sexualized, for instance. ‘Hollywood creates our cultural narrative – its biases trickle down to the rest of the world,’ Ms. Davis said in This Changes Everything, the 2018 documentary she produced about gender inequity in the film industry. Long before ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ became common catchphrases, Geena Davis began mentioning this gender divide whenever she had an industry meeting. ‘Everyone said, ‘No, no, no: it used to be like that, but it’s been fixed,’’ she explained. ‘I started to wonder: what if I got the data to prove that I’m right about this?’ Ms. Davis then made it her mission to collect data. Exactly how bad is the gender gap in the film industry? In what other ways does it play out? She wasn’t the first to highlight disparities in popular entertainment. But by making the most of her reputation and resources, she made a hazy truth concrete. Two decades have passed since the establishment of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media and the findings it has

144

THEME 1 THE NEW WOMAN

Industrial Revolution Colleges for Women

EUROPEAN LITERATURE De Staël, Sand

ENGLISH LITERATURE

Serao, Deledda made over the course of these years are quite impressive. In the 101 top-grossing films from 1990 to 2005, just 28 percent of speaking characters were female. Even in crowd scenes, male characters vastly outnumber female ones. In the 56 topgrossing films of 2018, women portrayed in positions of leadership were four times more likely than men to be shown naked. Among other things, the Geena Davis Institute collaborates with the University of Southern California’s Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory, which uses software and machine learning to analyze scripts and other media. One tool born of that collaboration, Spellcheck for Bias, employs AI to scan scripts for stereotypes and other problematic choices. Still, progress has been mixed: in 2019 and 2020, the institute reported that gender parity for female lead characters had been achieved in the 100 highest-grossing family films and in the top children’s television shows. But in 2022 women still represented only 18 percent of directors working on the top 250 films.

Romantic heroines

Flaubert

THE NEW WOMAN

Christina Rossetti,

Tolstoy, Ibsen

Elizaberth Barrett Browning George Eliot

THINKING ROUTINE WORD, PHRASE, SENTENCE Read the article ‘The Gender Divide in the Hollywood Film Industry’ and select: • a WORD that captured your attention • a PHRASE that moved, engaged or provoked you • a SENTENCE that you think is particularly meaningful because it captures the core idea/s of the article Share your ideas with your friends, following your teacher’s instructions.

TIPS FOR THE ORAL EXAM PRESENTATION TUTORIAL Read the presentation showing you how to make connections on the theme of The New Woman based on the mind-map above.

MIND MAPS Download the mind map and get ready to prepare your own presentation for the oral Exam. You can add other connections if you want.

145

CROSS-CURRICULAR THEMES

COLLOQUIO ORALE

The Gender Divide in the Hollywood Film Industry

PHILOSOPHY VISUAL ARTS

Wollstonecraft

Sadler

Mill

Rossetti French Impressionists

HISTORY

144

THEME 1 THE NEW WOMAN

Industrial Revolution Colleges for Women

EUROPEAN LITERATURE De Staël, Sand

ENGLISH LITERATURE

Romantic heroines

Flaubert

THE NEW WOMAN

Christina Rossetti,

Tolstoy, Ibsen

Elizaberth Barrett Browning George Eliot

TIPS FOR THE ORAL EXAM PRESENTATION TUTORIAL Read the presentation showing you how to make connections on the theme of The New Woman based on the mind-map above.

MIND MAPS Download the mind map and get ready to prepare your own presentation for the oral Exam. You can add other connections if you want.

145

CROSS-CURRICULAR THEMES

FINAL REVISION

The Rising Popularity of Eco-Thrillers

1. Complete the sentences with the missing information.

4. Match one sentence in column A with one in column B.

A 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 B a b c d e f g

The conditions for the

Despite all the real-life horror across the planet, the appetite for shows exploring the fictional biological destruction of civilisation appears to be growing. After The Last of Us (2023), an American drama series describing a lethal fungus attack, and the Scottish sci-fi thriller The Rig (2023), in which an unnatural fog conceals a deadly parasite from the ocean floor, now comes The Swarm, based on an internationally bestselling book by German novelist Frank Schätzing. This series immerses audiences in a near future in which species start changing their behaviour and scientists have to put the clues together. It soon becomes clear that these strange developments are taking place in response to the things humans have done to the deep sea. The three series just mentioned are only some recent examples of ‘ecothrillers’: TV dramas that include a strong element of sci-fi, but draw upon real science and current environmental concerns. In a way, these dramas seem to function as a form of self-punishment, as audiences are invited to sit down and face the imagined consequences of mankind’s wide-scale exploitation of the Earth’s natural resources. The Swarm has even been described as ‘a monster movie in which we discover that the monster is us’. While eco-thrillers primarily remain a form of entertainment, they can educate the public about genuine environmental problems, the importance of scientific collaboration, and the possible impact of human actions.

Find more revision questions on HUB Test

of 1832 had partly satisfied the , but hadn’t helped improve living .

The passed in failed to improve the terrible living conditions of .

The heralded the birth of the Chartist movement in . The Chartists asked for the extension of the right to vote to the .

The of 1875 the activities of the unions of

6 Reform Bill in extended to

a second Bill was passed. It gave the right to vote. .

was finally granted by a third . Suffrage was .

Turner Doré Architecture (the Christal Palace, the Clifton Suspension Bridge)

EUROPEAN LITERATURE Balzac Hugo Zola Baudelaire Dostoyevsky Tolstoy

146

an indifference to moral and social issues. deal with Romantic love. the practical bent of the Age. combines vivid realism with allegory. the relations between the British and the Indians. the inhumanity of the factory system. strikes at the core of the Victorian Compromise.

5. Complete the summary with the words given. operas • patterns • upper classes • George Bernard Shaw • melodrama • dialogues

2. Find the words related to the Victorian Compromise and circle them. Then, explain what the Victorian Compromise is to the rest of the class.

objectivity • hypocrisy • equality • prudery • no moral views • Utilitarianism • moral strictness • Industrial Revolution • beautiful towns • standard view of society

COLLOQUIO ORALE VISUAL ARTS

The Victorian novel reflected Dickens’ Hard Times deals with The novels of Emily and Charlotte Brontë. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray proclaims Rudyard Kipling’s works explore Melville’s Moby Dick

PHILOSOPHY Carlisle

3. Find out the poet or movement each statement refers

Mill

to.

Marx & Engels

THEME 2 MAN AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Theatre-going was very popular during the Victorian Age. (1) was the genre most in vogue. It tended to follow the (2) of the Victorian novel – Dickens was the favourite author. Comic (3) were also appreciated. It was, however, with the plays by Oscar Wilde and (4) that the era of modern British drama began. Wilde’s plays deal with the superficiality and shallowness of the English (5) Wit and sparkling (6) are two of the main features of Wilde’s comedies.

HISTORY Industrial Revolution

1. Answer the questions.

His poetry is characterized by musical grace and a verbal sensuousness.

1 2

One features of his poetry is Italian medieval and Renaissance history.

It advocated a return to the purity of late medieval Italian art.

Its most representative members were Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde.

His poetry leads to the Aestheticism of the last part of the 19th century.

They were dissatisfied with mechanization.

Ruskin Kingsley

GET READY FOR YOUR TEST

Poor Laws

ENGLISH LITERATURE

Hedonistic living was the only way to combat the meaninglessness of existence.

Dickens

4 5

Provide a short overview of the Victorian Age. How did serial publication affect the structure and popularity of the novel? Which were Dickens’s two main issues in Hard Times? Which characters best embody them? In what sense is The Picture of Dorian Gray a manifesto of British Aestheticism? Talk about Hardy’s pessimism in opposition to the optimism of the Victorian Age in general.

2. CHALLENGING 1 2

Illustrate the theme of ‘the double personality’ as related to the Victorian mindset and reflected in the works of the authors you have studied. Compare the ideal of beauty and perfection as expressed in the Aesthetic works of the period to the cult of image that characterizes modern times. Express your opinion.

147

CROSS-CURRICULAR THEMES

FINAL REVISION

The Rising Popularity of Eco-Thrillers

1. Complete the sentences with the missing information.

4. Match one sentence in column A with one in column B.

A 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 B a b c d e f g

The conditions for the

Find more revision questions on HUB Test

of 1832 had partly satisfied the , but hadn’t helped improve living .

The passed in failed to improve the terrible living conditions of .

The heralded the birth of the Chartist movement in . The Chartists asked for the extension of the right to vote to the .

The of 1875 the activities of the unions of

6 Reform Bill in extended to

a second Bill was passed. It gave the right to vote. .

was finally granted by a third . Suffrage was .

Turner Doré Architecture (the Christal Palace, the Clifton Suspension Bridge)

EUROPEAN LITERATURE Balzac Hugo Zola Baudelaire Dostoyevsky Tolstoy

146

5. Complete the summary with the words given. operas • patterns • upper classes • George Bernard Shaw • melodrama • dialogues

2. Find the words related to the Victorian Compromise and circle them. Then, explain what the Victorian Compromise is to the rest of the class.

objectivity • hypocrisy • equality • prudery • no moral views • Utilitarianism • moral strictness • Industrial Revolution • beautiful towns • standard view of society

COLLOQUIO ORALE VISUAL ARTS

PHILOSOPHY Carlisle

3. Find out the poet or movement each statement refers

Mill

to.

Marx & Engels

THEME 2 MAN AND THE ENVIRONMENT

HISTORY Industrial Revolution

1. Answer the questions.

His poetry is characterized by musical grace and a verbal sensuousness.

1 2

One features of his poetry is Italian medieval and Renaissance history.

It advocated a return to the purity of late medieval Italian art.

Its most representative members were Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde.

His poetry leads to the Aestheticism of the last part of the 19th century.

They were dissatisfied with mechanization.

Ruskin Kingsley

GET READY FOR YOUR TEST

Poor Laws

ENGLISH LITERATURE

Hedonistic living was the only way to combat the meaninglessness of existence.

Dickens

4 5

2. CHALLENGING 1 2

147