Restoration Drama
FROM 1642 onward for eighteen years, the theaters of England remained nominally closed. There was of course evasion of the law; but whatever performances were offered had to be given in secrecy, before small companies in private houses, or in taverns located three or four miles out of town. No actor or spectator was safe, especially during the early days of the Puritan rule. Least of all was there any inspiration for dramatists. In 1660 the Stuart dynasty was restored to the throne of England. Charles II, the king, had been in France during the greater part of the Protectorate, together with many of the royalist party, all of whom were familiar with Paris and its fashions. Thus it was natural, upon the return of the court, that French influence should be felt, particularly in the theater. In August, 1660, Charles issued patents for two companies of players, and performances immediately began. Certain writers, in the field before the civil war, survived the period of theatrical eclipse, and now had their chance. Among these were Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant, who were quickly provided with fine playhouses.
APPEARANCE OF WOMEN ON THE ENGLISH STAGE
It will be remembered that great indignation was aroused among the English by the appearance of French actresses in 1629. London must have learned to accept this innovation, however, for in one of the semi-private entertainments given during the Protectorate at Rutland House, the actress Mrs. Coleman took the principal part. The Siege of Rhodes, a huge spectacle designed by Davenant in 1656 (arranged in part with a view of evading the restrictions against theatrical plays) is generally noted as marking the entrance of women upon the English stage. It is also remembered for its use of movable machinery, which was something of an innovation. The panorama of The Siege offered five changes of scene, presenting "the fleet of Solyman the Magnificent, his army, the Island of Rhodes, and the varieties attending the siege of the city."
DISAPPEARANCE OF NATIONAL TYPES
By the time the theaters were reopened in England, Corneille and Racine in France had established the neo-classic standard for tragedy, and Molière was in the full tide of his success. These playwrights, with Quinault and others, for a time supplied the English with plots. The first French opera, Cadmus and Hermione, by Lully and Quinault, performed in Paris in 1673, crossed the channel almost immediately, influencing Dryden in his attempts at opera. The romantic, semi-historical romances of Madame Scudéry and the Countess de la Fayette afforded a second supply of story material, while Spanish plays and tales opened up still another. Sometimes the plots of Calderón or Lope de Vega came to the English at second-hand through French versions. Whatever the case, it was now evident that the national type of play had ceased to be written. From this time on every European nation was influence by, and exerted an influence upon, the drama of every other nation. Characters, situations, plots, themes--these things traveled from country to country, always modifying and sometimes supplanting the home product.
PERSISTENCE OF ELIZABETHAN PLAYS
With this influx of foreign drama, there was still a steady production of the masterpieces of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. The diarist Samuel Pepys, an ardent lover of the theater, relates that during the first three years after the opening of the playhouses he saw Othello, Henry IV, A Midsummer Night's Dream, two plays by Ben Jonson, and others by Beaumont, Fletcher, Middleton, Shirley, and Massinger. It must have been about this time that the practice of "improving" Shakespeare was begun, and his plays were often altered so as to be almost beyond recognition. From the time of the Restoration actors and managers, also dramatists, were good royalists; and new pieces, or refurbished old ones, were likely to acquire a political slant. The Puritans were satirized, the monarch and his wishes were flattered, and the royal order thoroughly supported by the people of the stage.
Richard Boyle, Earl of Orrery (1621-1679), seems to have the doubtful glory of re-introducing the use of rhymed verse. Boyle was a statesman, as well as a soldier and a dramatist. During the ten years or so following the Restoration, he wrote at least four tragedies on historical or legendary subjects, using the ten-syllabled rhymed couplet which (at the moment) he borrowed from France. It runs like this:
"Reason's a staff for age, when nature's gone;
But youth is strong enough to walk alone."
No more stilted sort of verse could well be contrived for dialogue. Monotonous as well as prosy, it was well suited to Orrery's plots. He took a semi-historical story, filled it with bombastic sentiments and strutting figures, producing what was known as "heroic drama." Dryden, who identified himself with this type of play, described it as concerned not with probabilities but with love and valor. A good heroic play is exciting, with perpetual bustle and commotion. The characters are extricated out of their amazing situations only by violence. Deaths are numerous. The more remote and unfamiliar the setting the better; and the speech should be suited to the action: hence the "heroic couplet." Pepys saw Guzman, by Orrery, and with his engaging frankness said it was as mean a thing as had been seen on the stage for a great while.
PARODY OF HEROIC DRAMA
Other writers, Davenant, Etherege, and Sir Robert Howard, had also produced specimens of heroic plays, and by the time The Conquest of Granada reached the stage these clever gentlemen had grown tired of the species. Compared to Dryden they were nobodies in the literary world; but among them they contrived a hilarious burlesque called The Rehearsal, in which these showy but shallow productions were smartly ridiculed. Dryden is represented as Bayes (in reference to his position as poet laureate), and his peculiarities of speech and plot are amusingly derided. Though The Rehearsal was condemned as "scurrilous and ill-bred," yet it served a useful turn in puncturing an empty and overblown style.
NATURE OF RESTORATION COMEDY
In almost every important respect, Restoration drama was far inferior to the Elizabethan. Where the earlier playwrights created powerful and original characters, the Restoration writers were content to portray repeatedly a few artificial types; where the former were imaginative, the latter were clever and ingenious. The Elizabethan dramatists were steeped in poetry, the later ones in the sophistication of the fashionable world. The drama of Wycherley and Congreve was the reflection of a small section of life, and it was like life in the same sense that the mirage is like the oasis. It had polish, an edge, a perfection in its own field; but both its perfection and its naughtiness now seem unreal.
The heroes of the Restoration comedies were lively gentlemen of the city, profligates and loose livers, with a strong tendency to make love to their neighbors' wives. Husbands and fathers were dull, stupid creatures. The heroines, for the most part, were lovely and pert, too frail for any purpose beyond the glittering tinsel in which they were clothed. Their companions were busybodies and gossips, amorous widows or jealous wives. The intrigues which occupy them are not, on the whole, of so low a nature as those depicted in the Italian court comedies; but still they are sufficiently coarse. Over all the action is the gloss of superficial good breeding and social ease. Only rarely do these creatures betray the traits of sympathy, faithfulness, kindness, honesty, or loyalty. They follow a life of pleasure, bored, but yawning behind a delicate fan or a kerchief of lace. Millamant and Mirabell, in Congreve's Way of the World, are among the most charming of these Watteau figures.
Everywhere in the Restoration plays are traces of European influence. The Plain Dealer of Wycherley was an English version of The Misanthrope of Molière; and there are many admirable qualities in the French play which are lacking in the English. The Double Dealer recalls scenes from The Learned Ladies (Les femmes savantes); and Mr. Bluffe, in The Old Bachelor, is none other than our old friend Miles Gloriosus, who has traveled through Latin, Italian and French comedy. The national taste was coming into harmony, to a considerable extent, with the standards of Europe. Eccentricities were curbed; ideas, characters, and story material were interchanged. The plays, however, were not often mere imitations; in the majority of them there is original observation and independence of thought. It was this drama that kept the doors of the theater open and the love of the theater alive in the face of great public opposition.
WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS
Soon after the Restoration women began to appear as writers of drama. Mrs. Aphra Behn (1640-1689) was one of the first and most industrious of English women playwrights. Her family name was Amis (some writers say Johnson). As the wife of a wealthy Dutch merchant she lived for some time in Surinam (British Guiana). Her novel, Oroonooko, furnished Southerne with the plot for a play of the same name. After the death of her husband, Mrs. Behn was for a time employed by the British government in a political capacity. She was the author of eighteen plays, most of them highly successful and fully as indecent as any by Wycherley or Vanbrugh. Mrs. Manly and Mrs. Susannah Centlivre, both of whom lived until well into the eighteenth century, also achieved success as playwrights. The adaptations from the French, made by Mrs. Centlivre, were very popular and kep the stage for nearly a century.
COLLIER'S ATTACK ON THE STAGE
Although the Puritans had lost their dominance as a political power, yet they had not lost courage in abusing the stage. The most violent attack was made by the clergyman Jeremy Collier in 1698, in a pamphlet called A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, in which he denounced not only Congreve and Vanbrugh, but Shakespeare and most of the Elizabethans. Three points especially drew forth his denunciations: the so-called lewdness of the plays, the frequent references to the Bible and biblical characters, and the criticism, slander and abuse flung from the stage upon the clergy. He would not have any Desdemona, however chaste, show her love before the footlights; he would allow no reference in a comedy to anything connected with the Church or religion; and especially would he prohibit any portrayal of the clergy. Next to the men in holy orders, Collier had a tender heart for the nobility. He said in effect that if any ridicule or satire were to be indulged in, it should be against persons of low quality. To call a duke a rascal on the stage was far worse than to apply such an epithet to plain Hodge, almost as libellous as to represent a clergyman as a hypocrite. Collier made the curiously stupid error of accusing the playwrights of glorifying all the sins, passions, or peculiarities which they portrayed in their characters. He had no understanding of the point of view of the literary artist, nor any desire to understand it.
Collier's attack, unjust as it was, and foolish as certain phases of it appear today, yet it made an impression. The king, James II, was so wrought up over it that he issued a solemn proclamation "against vice and profaneness." Congreve and Vanbrugh, together with other writers, were persecuted, and fines were imposed on some of the most popular actors and actresses. Dryden, Congreve and Vanbrugh made an attempt at a justification of the stage, but it did little good. D'Urfey, Dennis, and others entered the controversy, which raged for many years. The public buzzed with the scandal set forth in The Short View, but did not stay away altogether from the playhouses. The poets answered the attack not by reformation, but by new plays in which the laughter, the satire, and the ridicule were turned upon their enemies.
The Pilgrim's Progress
John Bunyan
Themes, Motifs & Symbols
Themes
Knowledge Gained Through Travel
The Pilgrim's Progress demonstrates that knowledge is gained through travel by portraying Christian and his companions learning from their mistakes on their journey. Pilgrimage depends on travel, and so a pilgrim must be a voyager prepared to go far and wide. Yet in Bunyan's book, voyage in itself does not make a traveler a pilgrim. The pilgrim must advance spiritually as he or she advances geographically. The key factor is knowledge, which must increase as the pilgrim proceeds forward. Christian never makes the same mistake twice or meets the same foe twice, because he learns from his experiences. Once he experiences the Slough of Despond, he never needs to be despondent again. Other pilgrims who lack understanding may advance fairly far, like Heedless and Too-bold, who almost get to the Celestial City; however, they do not understand what they undergo, and so they only babble nonsense and talk in their sleep. They are travelers but are not pilgrims because they cannot verbalize or spiritually grasp what they have been through.
The Importance of Reading
The importance of reading is emphasized throughout The Pilgrim's Progress because the pilgrims reach salvation and happiness by understanding the Bible. The pilgrims who have not read and do not understand the Bible are viewed as disappointments, who will not gain entry to the Celestial City. For example, when Christian dismisses the good lad Ignorant, he does so only because Ignorant cannot grasp divine revelation as conveyed by the Bible. In effect, he rejects Ignorant because he cannot read. Another example is in the first stage of the book when the narrator falls asleep and first glimpses Christian, who is crying and holding a book. The book is the Bible and it strikes pain into the heart of the believer who has strayed from its message. Though pilgrims may read the Bible, they also must believe its message and apply it to their everyday lives. Reading is necessary even for death. When Christiana receives her summons to the Master and takes leave of the world, the summons is sent in the form of a letter. If she could not read it, she would never meet her maker. Reading is not merely a skill in life but the key to attaining salvation.
The Value of Community
The value of community is portrayed in Part II through Christiana's journey to the Celestial City with her children and a few other companions. As a result, Christiana experiences pilgrimage itself as a communal activity. Every time she makes a stop and picks up more pilgrims to accompany her, the group grows substantially. Her strengths as a pilgrim involve reaching out to others, as when caring for her children, receiving weak or disabled pilgrims into her group, and marrying off her sons. In contrast, Part I portrays pilgrimage as a solitary activity. Though Christian finds companions in Faithful and Hopeful, he never seems to need them. He could progress just as well without them. In fact, when Christian experiences his original spiritual crisis and decides to leave his home and city, he does so alone, as if solitude were necessary to feel the divine word. Yet when Christian cries after the four mistresses of the Palace Beautiful ask why he left his family, he displays a hidden longing for his family. Bunyan emphasizes here that spirituality is best when it is communal. Christian does not end up in solitary bliss wandering alone in heaven but in the Celestial City filled with happy throngs of residents. His community is a large group of similar-minded people. Yet Christiana instinctively knows what Christian learns in the end: spiritual existence should involve togetherness.
Motifs
Sleep
Sleep represents a symbol that can either be inspirational or paralyzing on a pilgrim's journey toward the Celestial City. Whenever the pilgrims grow sleepy on their journey, danger awaits. The Enchanted Ground threatens to lull travelers into sleepy forgetfulness of their spiritual mission and derail their salvation. Indeed the two saddest failed pilgrims that Christiana meets on her journey are Too-bold and Heedless, who make it to the very outskirts of the Celestial City only to fall asleep in the deceitful arbor. Their sleep appears more than a natural failing and seems like a spiritual disaster. When they babble incoherently in their sleep, their guide explains that they have lost the use of their reason and thus cannot attain their spiritual goals. Sleep here symbolizes loss of direction and spiritual bankruptcy. But loss of direction can also be positive, and sleep can spur pilgrims on their spiritual journey. The narrator has lost his direction in life at the very beginning of the book, but when he falls asleep, sleep brings him a vision of spiritual improvement. He cannot dream without sleeping.
The Wilderness
The pilgrims in Bunyan's book begin in a city and end in a city, and in between they wander through huge stretches of wilderness. The wild outdoors frame the journeys they undertake throughout most of the book. The motif of the wilderness has famous biblical precedents. Christ spent forty days in the wilderness, and the Israelites wandered through it for forty years. The uncivilized outdoors symbolize not just solitude but a place of spiritual test, a place of despair and hardship that strengthens faith. The difference between the biblical instance of wilderness and Bunyan's wilderness lies in their locations. In the Bible, wilderness is an actual desert, a physical locale. In The Pilgrim's Progress, wilderness shines as a motif of an inward state, except perhaps at the very beginning when the narrator says he wandered in the wilderness before dreaming of Christian. However, in every example of wilderness that follows, from the Slough to the hill of Difficulty, the outdoors remains a symbol of inner struggle, the hard path that the soul must follow every day. When Christian almost drowns and fails to reach the Celestial City in the end, he recalls his faith in Jesus Christ and is suddenly filled with renewed strength and hope to reach the Celestial City. These inner struggles in the wilderness test the pilgrims and separate the spiritually strong from the weak.
Sensual Pleasure
The Pilgrim's Progress portrays sensual pleasure both negatively and positively. In one way the pleasure of the senses are devalued in the book. Christian and Christiana and her group hardly express any wish to stop and reflect on their previous lives because an important journey lies ahead. Examples of sensual pleasure often threaten to thwart the pilgrims' advancement, as when Christiana's son enjoys the taste of the devil's fruit and then falls sick, or when Madam Bubble tempts Standfast with sensual pleasures. Bunyan seems to affirm the basic Puritan attitude toward all pleasures of the flesh, which views the senses as dangerous diversions for the soul that must be rejected. However, Bunyan actually admits that in the right circumstances, sensual pleasure can be acceptable and even beneficial for pilgrims. When the pilgrims stop at the Palace Beautiful, sensual beauty surrounds them, and they eat tasty food with no danger to their immortal souls. When they rest with the shepherds in the Delectable Mountains, they are free to hear the birds sing and savor the whole experience. And finally the Celestial City itself is as a strong affirmation of sensual pleasures, including fragrant flowers and golden streets. Sensual enjoyment is perfectly acceptable if it is in the service of spiritual progress.
Symbols
Houses
Pilgrimage means travel and movement, but even the houses in The Pilgrim's Progress serve an important and necessary function for travelers. Certainly many houses in the book are places of imprisonment; places where movement is denied and salvation rejected. Giant Despair's Doubting Castle exemplifies a house that thwarts pilgrims' movement forward by holding them hostage. But other houses are necessary way stations in which the pilgrims have the opportunity not only to take rest and nourishment but also to process the knowledge they have acquired along the way. Christian needs the house of the Interpreter to learn how to read his own experience and to interpret what he sees on his journey. Similarly, he needs the Palace Beautiful not just to relax but also to receive counsel and weapons from the mistresses. Christian could have continued onward in unending movement, bypassing these houses. But if he had, he would have missed crucial learning opportunities. Pilgrimage demands understanding as well as travel. Houses often provide the necessary down time in which to process the experiences of one's travels and convert them into understanding.
Christian's Certificate
Christian's certificate, or the roll that he receives from the one of the three Shining Ones after losing his burden, symbolizes Christian's first accomplishment toward salvation. Appearing right after the burden drops to the ground, the certificate symbolically exchanges that burden as Christian's worldly cares are replaced by a spiritual mission. But the certificate is not a guarantee that he will enter the Celestial City. As a pilgrim, he can only rely on his own strength and fortitude to make it that far. Yet if he does arrive there, his certificate symbolizes his readiness to enter. Significantly it appears to be a written document, a rolled-up manuscript presumably penned by the Shining Ones that delivered it. Christian never tries to read it or even to sneak a peek at its message. He reads other written documents, like the book he holds at the beginning of the narrator's dream, but some writing is not for human viewing or comprehension. The certificate speaks about Christian, yet not to him. His only duty is to carry the certificate. As such, the certificate symbolizes the nature of every devout pilgrim, trying as hard as possible, but knowing that much of his or her success relies on powers beyond individual control and effort.
Gates
Gates test spiritual faith and commitment. To reach the Celestial City, Christian and Christiana not only have to avoid a number of dangerous creatures and slippery sloughs and hills, but they must pass through two gates. These gates are important because not just anyone can pass, as seen with other characters, such as Ignorance. In Part I, when Goodwill commands the Wicket Gate to allow Christian through, Goodwill lets him pass because Christian states he is traveling to Mount Zion. Goodwill is a good judge of character and lets him pass. Many other characters, such as Formalist and Hypocrisy, would not gain entry because they cheat throughout their journey, as seen when they climb over the wall of Salvation. Christian also possesses a certificate of entry, which allows him entry to the Celestial City gates. He has earned his certificate because he maintained a spiritual journey and did not fall victim to any of the characters who tried to pull him off course. In contrast, when Christiana approaches the gate leading to the Celestial City, she and her group are immediately allowed entry after she mentions she is Christian's wife. Christian's story is so widely known on the outskirts of the Celestial City that Christiana need only say his name, and she is allowed in. Without Christian's name, the gatekeeper tells them he judges the pilgrims who seek entry by how they react to his ferocious dog. The two gates leading to and into the Celestial City represent a new life and journey that not every pilgrim can access. These gates might also be compared to the gates of heaven. After all, those allowed past the gates of heaven have been judged before Christ and allowed entry because of the good that they represent.
The graveyard school of poetry
genre of 18th-century British poetry that focused on death and bereavement. The graveyard school consisted largely of imitations of Robert Blair's popular long poem of morbid appeal, The Grave (1743), and of Edward Young's celebrated blank-verse dramatic rhapsody Night Thoughts (1742-45). These poems express the sorrow and pain of bereavement, evoke the horror of death's physical manifestations, and suggest the transitory nature of human life. The meditative, philosophical tendencies of graveyard poetry found their fullest expression in Thomas Gray's “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751). The poem is a dignified, gently melancholy elegy celebrating the graves of humble and unknown villagers and suggesting that the lives of rich and poor alike “lead but to the grave.” The works of the graveyard school were significant as early precursors of the Romantic Movement.
the "Graveyard School" refers to a group of primarily 18th Century poets and writers — mostly male, which is why we here at LitGothic tend to think of them, affectionately, as "the Boneyard Boys" — whose writings frequently touched on themes of death, mortality, religion, and melancholy. Often elegiac in tone (and title) — an elegy is, by the 18th Century, simply a poem in lament of a death — their poems make frequent use of funereal or gloomy imagery, though their purpose was rarely sensationalist; they were typically very Christian writers — many were in fact clergymen — who used the imagery of night, death, and gloom in spiritual contemplations of human mortality and our relation to the divine.
Quite popular even into the early years of the C19, the Graveyard School was, not surprisingly, an important factor in the development of the Gothic novel, helping to create not only a vocabulary of gloomy imagery but a popular taste that recognized the emotional, moral, and even "psychological" value of that imagery. In their frequent emphasis on the lives of ordinary, even unidentified individuals and the death of those individuals, the Graveyard School writers are sometimes taken as precursors of the Romantic interest in the commonplace, and the melancholic introspection of many Graveyard School works prefigures and contributes to the Romantic fondness for self-scrutiny of various emotional states, including "negative" states; see, for example, Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode" or Keats' "Ode on Melancholy."
Want more? There's a substantial (if somewhat buggy) discussion of Graveyard Poetry at the International Dictionary of Literary Terms. You can find a short overview of the movement at Franz Potter's Graveyard School page. Here's a thumbnail description from the Columbia Encyclopedia at Bartleby.com. See also this overview of melancholy in C18 poetry.
Here, in alphabetical order, are the Graveyard School poets represented at LitGothic:
Mark Akenside
James Beattie
Robert Blair
Elizabeth Carter
William Collins
William Cowper
Thomas Gray
James Hervey
James Macpherson
William Mason
David Macbeth Moir
Thomas Parnell
William Shenstone
James Thomson
Joseph Warton
Thomas Warton
Henry Kirke White
Edward Young
Clarissa
Samuel Richardson
(sentimentalist - the develop of English prose)
Context
Born in 1689 in Mackworth, Derbyshire, Samuel Richardson was the son of a carpenter and had little formal education. Although his parents hoped he would enter the priesthood, financial troubles forced him to find paid work in the printing business. Richardson joined the trade as an apprentice in 1706, and set up his own printing shop thirteen years later. He printed several periodicals, most of which were political in nature, such as the Tory publication the True Britain, newspapers the Daily Gazeteer and the Daily Journals, as well as the House of Commons' Journals. Around this time, coffeehouses were becoming popular, and they served as places where men of different professions gathered to read, talk, and argue. Some historians have located the rise of a democratic public sphere in these coffeehouses and in the periodicals that were read in them.
Richardson married in 1721 and, after the deaths of five children, lost his wife ten years later. In 1733, he remarried and had four surviving children with his second wife. That same year, he published The Apprentice's Vade Mecum, a guide to moral behavior for men who worked as apprentices. Major issues addressed in Richardson's first writing venture would infuse the rest of his work as an author—namely, the importance of morality in an increasingly debauched society and the new complications of a rising middle class.
Richardson's first novel was written almost by accident. As a printer, Richardson was asked to construct a set of “familiar letters,” models to help country people write to their families. Some of these letters were supposedly from a servant girl to her parents, asking what she should do when faced with her master's sexual advances. Richardson's friends enjoyed this plot and asked for more of it, and he published Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded in 1740. According to Richardson, Pamela was a new form of fiction writing altogether, an exercise in instruction through entertainment. The novel was an instant sensation. Its moral precepts formed the themes of church sermons as well as newspaper debates, while its plot and characters inspired musical adaptations, continuations, operas, and even waxworks. Pamela also received its share of criticism and parodies, most notably Fielding's Shamela and Haywood's Anti-Pamela.
Following this success, Richardson undertook a more ambitious project when he began Clarissa. While almost all of the letters in Pamela are written by Pamela, there are four principal writers in Clarissa, resulting in a more complex plot as well as a much longer novel. Richardson also set out to raise the social level of his story. Instead of the voice of a spunky servant girl, he adopts the language of the upper classes and sprinkles the novel with members of the peerage. He takes his goal of moralizing through entertainment further than he had in Pamela, writing a story that is less of a conduct book and more of a Christian parable.
Richardson's works, along with those of Defoe and Fielding, are widely considered to have helped legitimize novels as serious literature. The rise of the mercantile class of the eighteenth century contributed to increased reading among women and servants, who tended to favor novels more than men did. Novels had a bad reputation at the beginning of the century; they were considered feminine ephemera, silly if not dangerous. Countering this, Richardson's novels claimed that they entertained in order to instruct and were realistic and decent rather than scandalous fantasies.
Released in serialized form, Clarissa's first two volumes were published in 1747, and all seven were in print by the end of 1748. The novel won much admiration, but Richardson was disappointed with some aspects of its reception. Before the last volumes were published readers besieged him with letters begging for a happy ending, and after Richardson stuck to his tragic plan, at least one woman, Lady Bradshaigh, wrote a replacement ending. To Richardson, the demand that the story end with a wedding signified that his readers were blind to the novel's moral structure, and he almost immediately began revising in an effort to control this response. Some readers thought Clarissa was too prudish; others, that she was a tease. Worst of all, readers adored Lovelace, the villainous rake.
The third edition of Clarissa, published in 1751, is two hundred pages longer than the first, including editorial footnotes that interpret the characters' actions and motivations. Lovelace's character is also much nastier in the third edition, while Clarissa's is even purer. Richardson also added a table of contents that summarizes each letter and compiled a “Collection of Moral Sentiments” to add to the final volume. Organized by category, this lengthy index includes extracts and paraphrases of moralistic sayings on topics like “repentance” and “adversity.” Samuel Johnson included many quotations from Clarissa in his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, but all of these come from the “Collection” rather than the text. Johnson called Clarissa “the first book in the world for the knowledge it displays of the human heart,” but he also noted that “if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself.” For Johnson and many other contemporary readers, the value of Clarissa lay much less in its plot and characters than in the moral sentiments it encoded.
Along with revising Clarissa, Richardson rounded out his novelist's career by publishing a book with a male protagonist, Sir Charles Grandison, in 1753-1754. This book was admired by such readers as Jane Austen, but it has proved much less influential over time than either Pamela or Clarissa. Richardson died in 1761 in London, leaving a bold mark on the British novel and on European culture as well. In the year of Richardson's death, Jean-Jacques Rousseau published Julie, ou la Nouvelle Heloise, explicitly modeled on Clarissa, and Diderot an Eloge de Richardson. In Germany, Goethe and Lessing claimed Richardson as an influence, while in America John Adams declared in 1804 that “democracy is Lovelace and the people is Clarissa.” To this date, Clarissa is believed to be the longest novel written in the English language (internationally, it comes in below Proust's In Search of Lost Time but well above Tolstoy's War and Peace).
Tom Jones
Henry Fielding
(realist - the develop of English prose)
Context
Henry Fielding was born in 1707 to Lieutenant George Fielding and his wife Sarah, who was herself the daughter of nobility. Socially, the family hovered at the edges of high society, but they had decidedly middle-class means. Fielding lost his mother in 1718, and his father remarried just a year later and began immediately to raise a new family. That same year Fielding began his education at Eton.
Fielding seems to have been an avid reader and an overly lively student, often flogged for his amorous escapades. Fielding's pursuit of women did not, however, prevent him from absorbing vast quantities of Greek and Latin, or from pursuing the beginnings of a career in drama. His first play, Love in Several Masques, was produced in February of 1728 at the Drury Lane Theater, with encouraging results. Fielding would go on to write over twenty plays and farces, the most successful of which was The Tragedy of Tragedies, or, The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great. In the meantime, however, Fielding spent some time between 1728 and 1729 in Holland at the University of Leyden as a law student. His father may have been unable to support him through the completion of his degree, and so Fielding was forced to fall back on his talents as a writer and theater manager to support himself.
Fielding's life took a major turn in 1734 with his marriage to Charlotte Cradock. Fielding loved Cradock passionately, and their short life together was marked by intense affection and, at times, intense misery. Despite the responsibilities Fielding faced as a father and husband, his extravagant and reckless nature kept him and his family wavering on the edge of destitution. In order to provide for them, Fielding hurriedly finished his study of the law, and in 1740 was called to the bar. He began to eke out a living as a barrister, supplementing this work with extensive writings for political journals such as The Champion and later, the Jacobite's Journal.
Fielding's first major novel, The Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his Friend, Mr. Abraham Adams, was published in 1742. The novel was conceived as a satire poking fun of the insanely popular novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded by Fielding's rival Samuel Richardson, but its characters and plot developed independently of that text. Two years later, Fielding's wife Charlotte succumbed to a fever and died. Although Fielding remained heart-broken, he eventually married Mary Daniel, the faithful housekeeper who had looked after him and his first wife even in their moments of extreme poverty. This marriage was a happy one, but Fielding never stopped loving Charlotte, and he would model his two major female characters, Sophia and Amelia, on her.
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling was published in 1749. Almost every aspect of Fielding's own life is apparent in the novel, from the love and reverence he had for his first wife to his extensive knowledge of the Southwestern part of England. Even Tom Jones himself clearly shows the markings of Fielding, exhibiting the same careless good nature as well as a deeply entrenched awareness of poverty and the reversals of fortune.
In this same year, Fielding was appointed magistrate for Middlesex. Although he had satirized the law and lawmakers throughout his career as a dramatist and novelist, Fielding appears to have been an exemplary magistrate. He was honest, and wrote several influential tracts that reveal his deep interest in alleviating the widespread problems of poverty and crime in England. As evidenced by Tom Jones, Fielding was also extremely interested in English politics, particularly in the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, when the displaced Stuart family attempted to restore themselves to the throne by ousting George II.
Despite the demands of a family, a profession, and his rapidly deteriorating health, Fielding managed to publish his last novel, Amelia, in 1751. Although it is considered inferior to Fielding's two earlier novels, Amelia was an immediate commercial success, and Fielding's own favorite among his writings.
Fielding's work as a magistrate began to take up more of his time and energy—he engaged in an apparently successful campaign against robber gangs in London in 1753 and published an extensive Proposal for making effective provision for the Poor. His health was rapidly deteriorating dues to a devastating combination of gout, asthma, jaundice, and dropsy. Fielding's doctor advised him to avoid England's harsh winters, and Fielding decided to go to Portugal. Leaving behind the children from his second marriage, accompanied only by his wife, his first daughter Harriet, and two servants, Fielding left England in the summer of 1754. Ever industrious, he documented his final travels in what would be published posthumously as The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, and the account took him almost to the moment of his death. Henry Fielding died on October eight of the same year, in Junqueira, near Lisbon.
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley
Context
Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me Man, did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?
In the summer of 1816, a young, well-educated woman from England traveled with her lover to the Swiss Alps. Unseasonable rain kept them trapped inside their lodgings, where they entertained themselves by reading ghost stories. At the urging of renowned poet Lord Byron, a friend and neighbor, they set their own pens to paper, competing to see who could write the best ghost story. The young woman, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, took the prize, having composed a story creepy enough not only to take its place alongside the old German tales that she and her Alpine companions had been reading, but also to become a bestseller in her time and a Gothic classic that still resonates with readers almost two centuries later.
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born on August 30, 1797, in London, of prime literary stock. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a feminist tract encouraging women to think and act for themselves. Wollstonecraft died giving birth to Mary, leaving her daughter in the care of her husband, William Godwin, a member of a circle of radical thinkers in England that counted Thomas Paine and William Blake among its ranks. Mary's upbringing in this rarefied atmosphere exposed her at an early age to cutting-edge ideas, and it forged useful connections for her to such notables as Lord Byron.
Another of the literary types that Mary met as a teenager was Percy Bysshe Shelley, a dashing young poet. Sparks flew, and, in 1814, they ran away together for a tour of France, Switzerland, and Germany—Mary escaping her family and Percy his wife. At first blissful, their affair soon came under strain. Percy's relationship with Mary waxed and waned with the demands of his wife, Harriet; meanwhile, Mary busied herself with another man. Despite these distractions, the relationship endured and was eventually formalized under scandalous circumstances: Harriet, pregnant with Percy's child, drowned herself in London in November of 1816; Mary and Percy were married weeks later.
The union between Mary and Percy was not only romantic but also literary. Percy edited Mary's manuscript for Frankenstein and is commonly supposed to have written the preface under her name. Frankenstein was published on January 1, 1818, and became an immediate bestseller. Unfortunately for Mary, this success was a single bright spot amid a series of tragedies. From 1815 to 1819, three of her four children died in infancy; in 1822, Percy drowned off the shore of Tuscany, leaving Mary a widow and single mother. Mary turned to her husband's poetry and prose, editing and publishing his Posthumous Poems in 1824 and his Poetical Works and Letters in 1839. She spent the rest of her time on her own writing, publishing Valperga in 1823, The Last Man in 1826, The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck in 1830, Lodore in 1835, and Falkner in 1837. Serious illness plagued Mary, and she died in London in February 1851.
