How to use this Page

At the height of his career - during the time he was writing Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend - Dickens wrote a series of sketches, mostly set in London, which he collected as The Uncommercial Traveller. The persona of the 'Uncommercial' allowed Dickens to unify his series of occasional articles by linking them through a shared narrator.

The post Dickens’ fascination with London [map] appeared first on OUPblog.

Add a Comment

We're just over a fortnight away from the end of our third season of the Oxford World's Classics Reading Group. It's still not too late to join us as we follow the story of young Pip and his great expectations. If you're already stuck in with #OWCReads, these discussion questions will help you get the most out of the text.

The post Discussion questions for Great Expectations by Charles Dickens appeared first on OUPblog.

Add a Comment

A new film adaptation of Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy was recently released, starring Carey Mulligan as the beautiful and spirited Bathsheba Everdene and Matthias Schoenaerts, Tom Sturridge, and Michael Sheen as her suitors.

The post Book vs. Movie: Far From the Madding Crowd appeared first on OUPblog.

Add a Comment

Last week we announced the launch of the Oxford World’s Classics Reading Group, and the first book, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. Helen Small, editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the book, has put together some helpful discussion questions that will help you gain a deeper understanding of the text as you read it and when you finish it.

1. Even the early critics who were revolted or dismayed by the violence of Wuthering Heights admitted the ‘power’ of the novel. What seems to you to be the best explanation of that power?

2. How ‘moral’ a story is Wuthering Heights? More specifically, is moral justice a concern in the shaping of the story and its characters?

3. Catherine Earnshaw comes across as many things: passionate, rebellious, full of laughter and of scorn for others, driven by social ambition but careless of social expectations, self-seeking but ultimately self-destructive (willing herself to die). Is it a problem for our reading of her that we never hear her voice unmediated? How far did you feel inclined to trust what you are told of her by others?

4. One critic has speculated that the ‘second generation’ story was an afterthought, written to fill the gap created in a three volume set (Wuthering Heights, Charlotte’s The Professor, Anne’s Agnes Grey) after Charlotte withdrew. How cogently does the Catherine/Linton/Hareton narrative seem to you to fit with the first half of the novel?

5. Does Heathcliff’s story hold the novel together? Does it make sense to read it as, in its own fashion, a Bildungsroman (telling the story of the building of a character over time, through education and experience)?

6. Wuthering Heights is in many respects lawless, but it is also a novel in which the law (and what people do with it) is crucial to the plot. What do you make of its interest in, especially, property law? How does it compare with other Victorian novels you may have read (Dickens? Trollope?) which have an interest in how the law seeks to regulate ownership of land, houses, even people (wives and children)?

7. This is a famously difficult book to place within any wider story about the development of the English novel. Does it seem to you a ‘bookish’ work or primarily an oral tale?

8. How important is supernaturalism to the novel’s effects? And how closely tied to religion is the supernaturalism explored here?

Heading image: Top Withens by John Robinson. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Discussion questions for Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights appeared first on OUPblog.

Add a Comment

Though he’s largely forgotten today, Walter Savage Landor was one of the major authors of his time—of both his times, in fact, for he was long-lived enough to produce major writing during both the Romantic and the Victorian eras. He kept writing and publishing promiscuously through his long life (he died in his ninetieth year) which puts him in a unique category. Maybe the problem is that he outlived his own reputation. Byron, Shelly and Keats all died in their twenties, and this fact somehow seals-in their importance as poets. Landor’s close friend Southey died at the beginning of the 1840s. Landor lived on, writing and publishing poetry, prose, drama, English and Latin. He forged friendships now with men like Robert Browning—who was deeply influenced by Landor’s writing—John Forster and Charles Dickens (Dickens named his second son Walter Savage Landor Dickens in his friend’s honour). His Victorian reputation was higher than his sales; but and if we’re puzzled by how completely his literary reputation was eclipsed during the 20^th century in part that may simply be a function of his prolixity. Landor’s Collected Works was published between 1927 and 1936 in sixteen fat volumes; and even that capacious edition doesn’t by any means contain everything Landor published. It omits, for instance, his voluminous Latin writing—for Landor was the last English writer to produce a substantial body of work in that dead language. In late life he once said ‘I am sometimes at a loss for an English word; for a Latin—never!’

His most substantial prose writings were the Imaginary Conversations: dozens and dozens of prose dialogues between famous historical figures, and occasionally between fictionalised versions of living individuals, varying in length from a few pages each to seventy or eighty. The prose is exquisite, balanced, beautifully mannered and expressed and full of potent epigrams and apothegms on art, society, history, morals and religion. Nobody reads the Imaginary Conversations any more. Then there are the epics—his masterpiece, Gebir (1798), an heroic poem of immense ambition, was greeted by bafflement and ridicule on its initial publication. Landor’s experimental epic idiom was simply too obscure for his readers even to understand—though Lamb claimed the poem has ‘lucid interludes’, and Shelley loved it. Critic William Gifford was less kind: he called the poem ‘a jumble of incomprehensible trash; the effusion of a mad and muddy brain.’ Landor decided to address the question of the poem’s obscurity the best way he knew: by translating the entire epic into Latin (Gebirus, 1803). Ah, those were the days!

He wrote shoals of beautiful lyrics and elegies. He wrote volumes-full of plays, all cod-Shakespearian blank-verse dramas. He wrote historical novels, one of which (Pericles and Aspasia, 1836) is very good. He wrote classical idylls, pastoral poetry—he was a passionate gardener—epigrams and epitaphs in English and Latin. The sheer amount of work he produced may explain the decline in his reputation; for looking new readers surveying the cliff-face of text to climb may find it offputting.

It’s worth the ascent, though. Landor was a choleric individual, given to sudden rages, whilst also magnanimous, kind-hearted and loyal to his friends. Dickens wrote him into Bleak House as the character Boythorn; and a Boythorn-ish energy and vitality very often breaks through the classical refinement of the verse. Unhappily married (he and his wife separated in 1835) he lived through a series of towering, unrequired passions for other, married women. This hopelessness, paradoxically, gives force to some of the best poetry Landor ever wrote: love poems in which the impossibility of love only magnifies the intensity of affection. It’s idea Landor understands better almost than any other writer: that the strongest feelings are predicated upon absence rather than presence.  Here’s his short lyric ‘Dirce’ (1831):

Stand close around, ye Stygian set,

With Dirce in one boat convey’d,

Or Charon, seeing, may forget

That he is old, and she a shade.

This says that Dirce is so beautiful that, were he to see her, Charon might ‘forget himself’, and presumably ignore the obstacles of his own dotage and the fact that she is ‘a shade’ to make erotic advances.  But in fact the ‘forgetting’ in this lyric involves a much more complex mode of amnesia.  It’s tempting to read the poem as being about a particular affect: the melancholy, hopeless desire of an old man for the ideal of youthful female beauty.  Desire haunted by the sense that, really, it would be better not to feel desire at all—that to desire is in some sense to ‘forget yourself.’  That idiom is an interesting one, actually; as if an old man feeling sexual desire is in some sense ‘forgetting’ not just that he is old, and that young girls aren’t interested in clapped-out old codgers, but more crucially forgetting that he isn’t the sort of person who feels in that way at all.  Perhaps we tend to think of desire not as something to be remembered or forgotten, but as something experienced directly.  In its compact way this poem suggests otherwise.

Renunciation is another of Landor’s perennial themes.  One of his most famous quatrains runs:

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;

Nature I loved; and next to Nature, Art.

I warmed both hands before the fire of life;

It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

Written in 1849, on the occasion of Landor’s 74^th birthday, this has a certain clean dignity, both stylistically and in terms of what it is saying; although it takes part of its force from the knowledge that (as I mention above) Landor actually strove with people all the time, all through his life: personally, cholerically, in law courts, in print and face-to-face.  The second line of the poem, by (it seems to me) rather pointedly omitting ‘people’ from the things that Landor has spent his life loving, rather reinforces this notion.  One consequence of a man, particularly a large man like Landor, standing in front of the fire to warm his hands is to block off the heat from everybody else in the room. And that seems appropriate too, somehow.

Featured image credit: ‘Inscription from Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864) to Robert Browning (1812-1889)’ by Provenance Online Project. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr

The post The works of Walter Savage Landor appeared first on OUPblog.

Add a Comment

Anthony Trollope’s autobiography is a classic study of the working life of one of English literature’s best-known writers. His strong opinions on working practices, contracts, deadlines, and earnings have divided opinion ever since. Below is an extract from Trollope’s An Autobiography and Other Writings, edited by Nicholas Shrimpton, in which he shares his views on literary criticism and the critics themselves.

Literary criticism in the present day has become a profession,—but it has ceased to be an art. Its object is no longer that of proving that certain literary work is good and other literary work is bad, in accordance with rules which the critic is able to define. English criticism at present rarely even pretends to go so far as this. It attempts, in the first place, to tell the public whether a book be or be not worth public attention; and, in the second place, so to describe the purport of the work as to enable those who have not time or inclination for reading it to feel that by a short cut they can become acquainted with its contents. Both these objects, if fairly well carried out, are salutary. Though the critic may not be a profound judge himself; though not unfrequently he be a young man making his first literary attempts, with tastes and judgment still unfixed, yet he probably has a conscience in the matter, and would not have been selected for that work had he not shown some aptitude for it. Though he may be not the best possible guide to the undiscerning, he will be better than no guide at all. Real substantial criticism must, from its nature, be costly, and that which the public wants should at any rate be cheap. Advice is given to many thousands, which, though it may not be the best advice possible, is better than no advice at all. Then that description of the work criticised, that compressing of the much into very little,—which is the work of many modern critics or reviewers,—does enable many to know something of what is being said, who without it would know nothing.

I do not think it is incumbent on me at present to name periodicals in which this work is well done, and to make complaints of others by which it is scamped. I should give offence, and might probably be unjust. But I think I may certainly say that as some of these periodicals are certainly entitled to great praise for the manner in which the work is done generally, so are others open to very severe censure,—and that the praise and that the censure are chiefly due on behalf of one virtue and its opposite vice. It is not critical ability that we have a right to demand, or its absence that we are bound to deplore. Critical ability for the price we pay is not attainable. It is a faculty not peculiar to Englishmen, and when displayed is very frequently not appreciated. But that critics should be honest we have a right to demand, and critical dishonesty we are bound to expose. If the writer will tell us what he thinks, though his thoughts be absolutely vague and useless, we can forgive him; but when he tells us what he does not think, actuated either by friendship or by animosity, then there should be no pardon for him. This is the sin in modern English criticism of which there is most reason to complain.

It is a lamentable fact that men and women lend themselves to this practice who are neither vindictive nor ordinarily dishonest. It has become ‘the custom of the trade,’ under the veil of which excuse so many tradesmen justify their malpractices! When a struggling author learns that so much has been done for A by the Barsetshire Gazette, so much for B by the Dillsborough Herald, and, again, so much for C by that powerful metropolitan organ the Evening Pulpit, and is told also that A and B and C have been favoured through personal interest, he also goes to work among the editors, or the editors’ wives,—or perhaps, if he cannot reach their wives, with their wives’ first or second cousins. When once the feeling has come upon an editor or a critic that he may allow himself to be influenced by other considerations than the duty he owes to the public, all sense of critical or of editorial honesty falls from him at once. Facilis descensus Averni.  In a very short time that editorial honesty becomes ridiculous to himself. It is for other purpose that he wields the power; and when he is told what is his duty, and what should be his conduct, the preacher of such doctrine seems to him to be quixotic. ‘Where have you lived, my friend, for the last twenty years,’ he says in spirit, if not in word, ‘that you come out now with such stuff as old-fashioned as this?’ And thus dishonesty begets dishonesty, till dishonesty seems to be beautiful. How nice to be good-natured! How glorious to assist struggling young authors, especially if the young author be also a pretty woman! How gracious to oblige a friend! Then the motive, though still pleasing, departs further from the border of what is good. In what way can the critic better repay the hospitality of his wealthy literary friend than by good-natured criticism,—or more certainly ensure for himself a continuation of hospitable favours?

Some years since a critic of the day, a gentleman well known then in literary circles, showed me the manuscript of a book recently published,— the work of a popular author. It was handsomely bound, and was a valuable and desirable possession. It had just been given to him by the author as an acknowledgment for a laudatory review in one of the leading journals of the day. As I was expressly asked whether I did not regard such a token as a sign of grace both in the giver and in the receiver, I said that I thought it should neither have been given nor have been taken. My theory was repudiated with scorn, and I was told that I was strait-laced, visionary, and impracticable! In all that the damage did not lie in the fact of that one present, but in the feeling on the part of the critic that his office was not debased by the acceptance of presents from those whom he criticised. This man was a professional critic, bound by his contract with certain employers to review such books as were sent to him. How could he, when he had received a valuable present for praising one book, censure another by the same author?

While I write this I well know that what I say, if it be ever noticed at all, will be taken as a straining at gnats, as a pretence of honesty, or at any rate as an exaggeration of scruples. I have said the same thing before, and have been ridiculed for saying it. But none the less am I sure that English literature generally is suffering much under this evil. All those who are struggling for success have forced upon them the idea that their strongest efforts should be made in touting for praise. Those who are not familiar with the lives of authors will hardly believe how low will be the forms which their struggles will take:—how little presents will be sent to men who write little articles; how much flattery may be expended even on the keeper of a circulating library; with what profuse and distant genuflexions approaches are made to the outside railing of the temple which contains within it the great thunderer of some metropolitan periodical publication! The evil here is not only that done to the public when interested counsel is given to them, but extends to the debasement of those who have at any rate considered themselves fit to provide literature for the public.

Headline image: Classical writing © Creativeye99, via iStock

The post Anthony Trollope on literary criticism appeared first on OUPblog.

Add a Comment

What I learned from She by H(enry) Rider Haggard: There is nothing more horrible than a woman of great beauty unless it is a woman who is old and ugly. Actually there is, but I’ll get to that later.

Ah those crazy Victorians and their adventure stories filled with misogyny, racism and classism and all kinds of other isms. All in all, it comes down to being a really silly adventure story in which two British gentlemen like to shoot animals and marvel at the backwardness of the natives who, because they are not British and wear animal skins for clothes and use mummies as torches, are obviously savages. But, I get ahead of myself.

Haven’t read She? Let’s see if I can summarize it for you. Newly minted Cambridge professor Horace Holly is visited late one night by his friend and colleague Vincey. Vincey is ill and tells Holly he will die soon. He makes Holly promise that he will take on the guardianship of Vincey’s five-year-old son, Leo. He then spins a tale about how ancient his ancestry is and leaves Holly a locked iron box he is not to open until Leo turns 25.

Holly raises Leo as promised. Leo turns out to be smart and tall and very blond and so beautiful that people refer to him as a Greek god. Every woman who sees him falls madly in love, which Leo finds mildly amusing. The day of his 25th birthday arrives and Holly brings out the iron box. Inside are all kinds of goodies that include writing in uncial Greek and also Latin, which our narrator Holly is kind enough to reproduce and then translate each one into English for us. The main prize is the Sherd of Amenartas. It tells the tale of the beautiful Amenartas running away from Egypt with the equally as beautiful Kallikrates. They end up in the clutches of Ayesha who falls in love with Kallikrates, demanding he abandon Amenartas and stay with her. But Kallikrates refuses and Ayesha in her rage kills him. Amenartas escapes. It turns out she is pregnant, bears a son, and then passes down from son to son the story of Kallikrates and the injunction to one day take revenge upon Ayesha, who, while not immortal, has a lifespan of thousands or years.

Can Holly and Leo believe such a fantastic story? Holly doubts it but Leo, bold and brave like a lion, is eager to find out. So they set off with their trusty servant, Job, to the wild lands of Africa. After their ship sinks and they get lost in the swamps, they are rescued by savages sent by She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. These savages are the Amahagger who pretty much worship She and do her bidding. These savages do savage things like allow their women to be in charge. Almost immediately, Leo is claimed by Ustane. Young Leo is tickled by the whole idea of women being in charge — what a lark! —and goes along especially since Ustane is attractive and uh — shall we say attentive to his manly needs? Holly is too old and ugly to be of interest but servant Job is approached and offends the woman and the whole tribe with his proper British manners.

The savages are also cannibals and decide that they are going to take a bit of revenge on their guests by eating Mahomed, the ship captain who survived with them. The Amahagger don’t end up killing Mahomed, but Holly does. Aiming at the female agressor who holding him while a man is about to put a burning hot pot on top of Mahomed’s head, Holly somehow shoots the woman and Mahomed. Oops! is pretty much as grief stricken as Holly gets about that.

Anyway, Leo turns out to be the spitting image of the dead-for-two-thousand-years Kallikrates. She believes in reincarnation, she has been waiting around all those years for Kallikrates to return to her. Holly at first had a hard time figuring this out. He could not believe that She was immortal or even close to it because

The person who found it [near immortality] could no doubt rule the world. He could accumulate all the wealth in the world, and all the power, and all the wisdom that is power. He might give a lifetime to the study of each art or science. Well, if that were so, and this She were practically immortal, which I did not for one moment believe, how was it that, with all these things at her feet, she preferred to remain in a cave amongst a society of cannibals? This surely settled the question. The whole story was monstrous, and only worthy of the superstitious days in which it was written.

If you were nearly immortal your goal would be to rule the world, right?

Holly’s lack of imagination weaves its way all through this book where he repeatedly excuses himself from describing things because, well he simply cannot. For instance, when She removes her veil and he sees her face:

I gazed above them at her face, and—I do not exaggerate—shrank back blinded and amazed. I have heard of the beauty of celestial beings, now I saw it; only this beauty, with all its awful loveliness and purity, was evil—at least, at the time, it struck me as evil. How am I to describe it? I cannot—simply I cannot! The man does not live whose pen could convey a sense of what I saw.

Holly is really good at long moralizing passages though. Here’s a short snip:

Soon I gave up thinking about it, for the mind wearies easily when it strives to grapple with the Infinite, and to trace the footsteps of the Almighty as he strides from sphere to sphere, or deduce His purpose from His works. Such things are not for us to know. Knowledge is to the strong, and we are weak.

Of course, both Holly and Leo fall under the spell of She’s beauty. They lose their will, they can’t help themselves. Only when She steps back into the flame that gave her long life to discover that standing in it a second time takes it away and she shrinks into a hideous shriveled thing the size of monkey and then dies, are the two men released from her spell. Then Holly quickly tosses a robe over her horrible ugliness before the stunned Leo can see what happened.

Even with She dead, the two men have the chance to become nearly immortal themselves. The moralizing Holly of course refuses. Leo also refuses because he does not have the patience to wait two thousand years for She to return. And men call women fickle and inconstant!

This is a ridiculously terrible book. I have no idea why it caught the popular imagination and has been so influential. There is even a sequel called Ayesha, the return of She. But now I’ve read it and I don’t know if I am glad or wish I could wash it off my eyeballs. There is the real horror right there. It’s not She or the cannibals but the book itself that is horrible, which of course makes it more than appropriate for the RIP Challenge.

Filed under: Books, Challenges, Gothic/Horror/Thriller, Reviews, Victorian Literature

Add a Comment

On 31 March 1855 – Easter Sunday – Charlotte Brontë died at Haworth Parsonage. She was 38 years old, and the last surviving Brontë child. In this deeply moving letter to her literary advisor W. S. Williams, written on 4 June 1849, she reflects on the deaths of her sisters Anne and Emily.

My dear Sir

I hardly know what I said when I wrote last—I was then feverish and exhausted—I am now better—and—I believe—quite calm.

You have been informed of my dear Sister Anne’s death—let me now add that she died without severe struggle—resigned—trusting in God—thankful for release from a suffering life—deeply assured that a better existence lay before her—she believed—she hoped, and declared her belief and hope with her last breath.—Her quiet Christian death did not rend my heart as Emily’s stern, simple, undemonstrative end did—I let Anne go to God and felt He had a right to her.

I could hardly let Emily go—I wanted to hold her back then—and I want her back hourly now—Anne, from her childhood seemed preparing for an early death—Emily’s spirit seemed strong enough to bear her to fullness of years—They are both gone—and so is poor Branwell—and Papa has now me only—the weakest—puniest—least promising of his six children—Consumption has taken the whole five.

For the present Anne’s ashes rest apart from the others—I have buried her here at Scarbro’ to save papa the anguish of return and a third funeral.

I am ordered to remain at the sea-side a while—I cannot rest here but neither can I go home—Possibly I may not write again soon—attribute my silence neither to illness nor negligence. No letters will find me at Scarbro’ after the 7th. I do not know what my next address will be—I shall wander a week or two on the east coast and only stop at quiet lonely places—No one need be anxious about me as far as I know—Friends and acquaintance seem to think this the worst time of suffering—they are sorely mistaken—Anne reposes now—what have the long desolate hours of her patient pain and fast decay been?

Why life is so blank, brief and bitter I do not know—Why younger and far better than I are snatched from it with projects unfulfilled I cannot comprehend—but I believe God is wise—perfect—merciful.

I have heard from Papa—he and the servants knew when they parted from Anne they would see her no more—all try to be resigned—I knew it likewise and I wanted her to die where she would be happiest—She loved Scarbro’—a peaceful sun gilded her evening.

Yours sincerely
C. Brontë

The Oxford World’s Classics edition of Charlotte Brontë’s Selected Letters is edited by Margaret Smith, with an introduction by Janet Gezari.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter, Facebook, or here on the OUPblog. Subscribe to only Oxford World’s Classics articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only literature articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: Anne Brontë – drawing in pencil by Charlotte Brontë, 1845. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The post “A peaceful sun gilded her evening” appeared first on OUPblog.

Add a Comment

By Peter W. Sinnema

Self-help isn’t what it used to be. At least, its early renditions were cast in a style alien to the contemporary ear.

The concept was first named (and voluminously expounded) by Samuel Smiles in his 1859 best-seller, Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance. Erstwhile apothecary, railway secretary, newspaper editor, and biographer, Smiles’ birth in Haddington, Scotland marks its bicentennial on December 23. If this populist Victorian sage is worth remembering for anything, it must be for his original self-help book, translated into Dutch, French, German, Italian, Danish, Japanese, Croatian, Czech, Arabic, Turkish, and various native languages of India within his own lifespan, and purchased by more than a quarter-million readers by the time of the author’s death in 1904.

Smiles’ own moral and professional diligence embodied the cardinal virtue of his homespun philosophy: perseverance. He outlined his gospel of “energetic individualism” in refreshingly simple terms, encouraging humble mechanics and beleaguered artisans to own and cultivate the “power of self-help, of patient purpose, resolute working, and steadfast integrity” as they struggled to improve their lot in the new age of mass industry. Smiles promoted self-help as practiced or habitual independence, a disciplined husbandry of the inner man “effected by means of … action, economy, and self-denial.”

Given that Smiles published his aphoristic opus at a time when the nascent welfare state was represented by the grim apparatus of the workhouse—that infamously unpleasant asylum for the destitute reorganized under the oppressive Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834—present-day readers may be taken aback by the animosity with which Smiles condemned all “help from without”: states and statutes could do nothing to “make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober.” Smiles denied the power of institutions to ameliorate individual vice and ignorance, and in anticipation of Margaret Thatcher’s notorious declaration that “there is no such thing as society,” he regarded nations as nothing more than aggregates of individual conditions. The remedy for social evil and decay thus resided “not so much in altering laws and modifying institutions, as in helping and stimulating men to elevate and improve themselves by their own free and independent individual action.”

Smiles ran with his self-help idea for some forty years, enjoying social and commercial success with books on related themes such as Character (1871), Thrift (1875), and Duty (1880). Dying only three years after the state funeral of Queen Victoria, Smiles was quickly typecast as a spokesman for the worst hypocrisies of his era. In his socialist masterpiece The Ragged-Torusered Philanthropists (1906), Robert Tressell lambasted Self-Help as bourgeois propaganda “suitable for perusal by persons suffering from almost complete obliteration of the mental faculties,” while more recently E. J. Hobsbawm added Smiles to his list of “self-made journalist-publishers who hymned the virtues of capitalism” (The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848: 1961). Surely these are justifiable indictments of a man whose best-known work opens with the parsimonious bromide, “Heaven helps those who help themselves”!

Before we relegate Smiles’ invocation of self-mastery and laborious endurance to the dustbin of history, however, we’d do well to recall the singular contribution made by his account of “indefatigable industry” to our contemporary culture of self-help. True, Smiles’ highly repetitive and at-times cumbrous tribute to the “spirit of self-help” can read like a naïve, even perverse plumping of mere doggedness in the face of a hostile world. But then, repetition is of decisive rhetorical importance for Smiles, just as it is for any effective self-help author of the twenty-first century.

Smiles’ secular hagiography of “labourers in all ranks and conditions of life, cultivators of the soil and explorers of the mine, inventors and discoverers, manufacturers, mechanics and artisans, poets, philosophers, and politicians” derives its affective grit, its capacity to inspire and reform, from iterative structure. Self-Help’s biographical exemplars (there are literally hundreds of them, from Charles Abbott and Peter Abelard to John Ziska and Francesco Zuccarelli) are invariably martyred—to unsympathetic wives, malicious priests, ruthless state functionaries, failed technologies—but ultimately to the requisites of gripping narrative and readerly pleasure. In the end we want to emulate these suffering stalwarts because, as Smiles himself pointed out in his revised 1866 preface to Self-Help, the redundant plotline of affliction-perseverance-success “proved attractive … by reason of the variety and anecdotal illustrations of life and character which it contains, and the interest which all more or less feel in the labours, the trials, the struggles, and the achievements of others.”

Even the most erudite self-help guru must embrace the compositional obligations of repetition and (auto)biographical exemplarity that originated with Smiles. Kathleen Norris’s moving exploration, at once recondite and unsentimental, of the acedia that grips our Western culture, the spiritual torpor that is self-help’s universal, symptomological object, is a case in point. Her study of the “restless boredom, frantic escapism, commitment phobia, and enervating despair that plagues us today,” driving millions to the bottle or the therapist’s office, acquires its poignancy from her insistence that the pressing question, “Why care?” can only be answered “by relating [her] personal history with acedia, telling stories from … infancy, childhood, and adolescence” (Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life: 2008). Norris’ self, exposed, diagnosed, and at least partly healed through the telling of personal history, is the modern-day version of Smiles’ paradigmatic, self-motivated individual in expectant pursuit of “elevation of character, without which capacity is worthless and worldly success is naught.”

Peter W. Sinnema is Professor of English at the University of Alberta. His teaching and research focuses on Victorian literature and culture. He is the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Self-Help by Samuel Smiles. A bestseller immediately after its publication in 1859, Self-Help propelled its author to fame and rapidly became one of Victorian Britain’s most important statements on the allied virtues of hard work, thrift, and perseverance.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only literature articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: By Samuel Smiles (d. 1904) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The post Self-help isn’t what it used to be appeared first on OUPblog.

Add a Comment

You already know about Dickens making frequent use of repetition in A Tale of Two Cities and you also know how much I was enjoying it. Now that I have finished I am not sure what else to say. Fantastic. A page turner. Two thumbs up. Let’s see what else I can winkle out of it.

You may or may not know, that the two cities are London and Paris and that the story takes place during the lead up to and as far as the middle of the French Revolution. We start out going back and forth between London and Paris and eventually all things converge on Paris where the various tributaries of the story finally merge into one rushing river.

I realized that Dickens, in all his exuberance, really is the master of small, seemingly inconsequential details or characters turning out to be important later on. I know he wrote his books for serial publication, but he must have had an outline ahead of time to be able to work the plot marvels that he does.

Dickens, we all know, is quite good at describing the downtrodden:

The mill which had worked them down, was the mill that grinds young people old; the children had ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them, and upon the grown faces, and ploughed into every furrow of age and coming up afresh, was the sigh, Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere.

Those are the poor in Paris who will later rise up, and in a breathtaking scene, take the Bastille. I cheered. I loved the Defarges and all the Jaques, I was terrified one or more would die. And even in the aftermath I continued to be afraid for them. But then things begin to turn as those who were oppressed become the new oppressors and set about killing as many who belonged to the aristocracy or had any association with them as they possibly can. Anyone who questions what is happening is a sympathizer and also sent to the guillotine:

Above all, one hideous figure grew as familiar as if it had been before the general gaze from the foundations of the world—the figure of the sharp female called La Guillotine. It was the popular theme for jests; it was the best cure for headache, it infallibly prevented the hair from turning grey, it imparted a peculiar delicacy to the complexion, it was the National Razor which shaved close: who kissed La Guillotine, looked through the little window and sneezed into the sack.

And so those with whom I was so sympathetic to begin with slowly become cruel and horrible people. Madame Defarge is the one it was most distressing to see change. She is a strong, female character who plots and plans with her husband, is equal to her husband, who leads a charge of women against the Bastille. She is

Of a strong and fearless character, of shrewd sense and readiness, of great determination, of that kind of beauty which not only seems to impart to its possessor firmness and animosity, but to strike into others an instinctive recognition of those qualities; the troubled time would have heaved her up, under any circumstances. But, imbued from her childhood with a brooding sense of wrong, and an inveterate hatred of a class, opportunity had developed her into a tigress. She was absolutely without pity. If she had ever had the virtue in her, it had quite gone out of her.

It is that sense of wrong that she has harbored nearly all her life that turns her from being a sympathetic character into zealot who doesn’t know when to stop. It is terribly frightening and sad. And I think with her and the residents of St. Antoine (the district of the most violent uprising), Dickens has shown us how this story of the French Revolution is still relevant today; how one can assume that because a person belongs to Group A he must therefore be bad because Group A is the enemy. There is no account taken of individuals, no bothering to notice that some people in the hated group are supporters of the other group&rsq

Add a Comment

In that far-off time superstition clung easily round every person or thing that was at all unwonted, or even intermittent and occasional merely, like the visits of the pedlar or the knife-grinder. No one knew where wandering men had their homes or their origin; and how was a man to be explained unless you at least knew somebody who knew his father and mother? To the peasants of old times, the world outside their own direct experience was a region of vagueness and mystery: to their untravelled thought a state of wandering was a conception as dim as the winter life of the swallows that came back with the spring; and even a settler, if he came from distant parts, hardly ever ceased to be viewed with a remnant of distrust.

George Eliot has been added to my list of writers with amazing powers of description who know just the perfect detail that evokes so much more. The quote above is about the town of Raveloe where Silas Marner, a stranger to the town, arrives after being betrayed by those he trusted most. Marner is a weaver, a very good weaver, and he sets up house in a little place on the edge of a deserted stone-pit. It suits him just fine to be all alone. He’s been deeply wounded by the betrayal and the only interactions he wants to have with people are in relation to his work. He doesn’t do anything to earn the trust of the community, to try and fit in or make friends. He is so solitary and hunched and near-sighted from all his weaving that he looks older than he is and not a little bit crazy.

He used to be an outgoing and friendly man who gave a good portion of his earnings to his church. But now, in his solitude, his earnings have nothing to be spent on and Marner turns into a miser, hoarding his coins and taking pleasure in watching their number increase.

And then his money is stolen. But soon after the theft of his gold guineas, a golden-haired child arrives at his hearth, her mother dead nearly on Marner’s doorstep. Marner calls her Eppie after his much-loved and deceased younger sister. Eppie becomes Marner’s salvation and redemption:

By seeking what was needful for Eppie, by sharing the effect that everything produced on her, he had himself come to appropriate the forms of custom and belief which were the mould of Raveloe life; and as, with reawakening sensibilities, memory also reawakened, he had begun to ponder over the elements of his old faith, and blend them with his new impressions, till he recovered a consciousness of unity between his past and present.

Eppie rescues Marner from his solitude, brings him back to life, connects him to the town of Raveloe. Marner believes that his lost money was actually a payment of sorts for Eppie. And Eppie of course grows into a kind and beautiful young woman.

But Marner is faced with one more test, as is Eppie. Eppie’s “real” father comes to claim her. He is a well-respected, comfortably situated man in Raveloe who knew all along Eppie was his child but didn’t dare say anything for a variety of selfish reasons. Marner doesn’t want to give Eppie up but he wants what is best for her and understands that her biological father could give her much more than he ever could. So he tells Eppie that if she wants to go she can. Eppie’s love for Marner never waivers for a second, she and Marner will not be separated. And so they are rewarded with the return of the money that was stolen all those years ago, found on a dead man when the water at the bottom of the stone-pit was drained for irrigation purposes.

Silas Marner is one of those wonderful stories in which everyone gets what they deserve. This means it is heavily moralistic, but the writing itself is so marvelous that I mostly didn’t mind. How could I mind with descriptions like this:

Mrs. Crackenthorp—a small blinking woman, who fidgeted incessantly with her lace, ribbons, and gold chain, turning her head about and making subdue

Add a Comment

Are there many people who haven’t seen one of the many adaptations of H.G. Wells’ book War of the Worlds? When I was a kid I saw the old black and white movie version on some Saturday afternoon TV program that ran old movies. I also knew about the Orson Welles’ radio adaptation that scared the pants off quite a few people when it aired because they had missed the beginning and thought it was real. And then of course there is the movie The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension in which it is discovered that Welles’ radio play was not fiction, but that aliens had indeed landed and have been living among us. And even if you have never seen a movie version you still probably know the plot:

Martians invade. Kill a lot of people. Humans are helpless against them. Things look grim. But then the Martians catch the flu or the common cold or some other earthly bug and they all keel over. Humanity wins!

While the book is definitely a fun, and short, Victorian page-turner, there are still some interesting things that go on in it. Humanity doesn’t have the ability to fight back. Our weapons are pretty much useless against the Martians and their heat-ray and black clouds that kill instantly. And at one point the narrator has an epiphany:

For that moment I touched an emotion beyond the common range of men, yet one that the poor brutes we dominate know only too well. I felt as a rabbit might feel returning to his burrow and suddenly confronted by the work of a dozen busy navvies digging the foundations of a house. I felt the first inkling of a thing that presently grew quite clear in my mind, that oppressed me for many days, a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel. With us it would be as with them, to lurk and watch, to run and hide; the fear and empire of man had passed away.

But while he feels beaten down he is still determined to survive. He spends time with a curate who goes increasingly insane wondering what sins humanity had committed to deserve such wrath from God. Our narrator ends up aiding in the curate’s death by Martian and only feels mildly guilty about it because he had done it in order to save his own life.

Our narrator also spends time with an artilleryman who has escaped death and who goes on and on about how the two of them will put together a rebel group of humans who will live underground and survive while all the people who are “useless and cumbersome and mischievous” can just die. Our narrator goes along for a little while until he realizes that the artilleryman is as nutty as the curate.

When the Martians finally die, the epiphany goes out the window. Suddenly humans deserved to live because we had been fighting a war already for all those hundreds of years against the bacteria that killed the Martians. Humans deserved to live because

By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.

And then our narrator imagines the human race going out into space and conquering new worlds!

The one thing that bothered me about the book is that the narrator dumps his wife at the cousin’s in Leatherhead and then spends the rest of the book without her. Oh, he insists that he is trying to get to Leatherhead but each time he says that he ends up going in the opposite direction and eventually ends up in London where he still is when the Martians die and where he still insists that he is trying to get to Leatherhead. His wife survives. He goes to their house near Woking and she shows up looking to see if he is still alive. We are then supposed to believe

Add a Comment

Happy 200th Birthday, Mr. Dickens!  Thanks for creating some of the most pathetically appealing child characters in English literature.  Oliver Twist?  David Copperfield?  Pip?  Little Dorrit?  Yep, these are some hard luck kiddies!  So appealing, so (insert your favorite adjective here) plucky, sweet, goodhearted, naive, clueless, fragile, ethereal, hardworking, optimistic, forgiving, consumptive, clever, adorable, prescient - the list of endearing qualities goes on and on.

Charles Dickens' first novel came out during the first year of Queen Victoria's reign.  This makes Mr. Dickens THE Victorian novelist, capturing the crimes of the age on every page.  After reading Dickens, Kingsley and Nesbit, I wonder why people are enamored of the Victorian age.  The inequities between classes seemed so huge.  The city streets were so filthy.  People died of things we shrug about today.  For many, hygiene was non-existent or impossible to maintain.  Even food was drab and hard to come by.

In some ways it was much like today: poor people are poor and suffer; rich people are rich and insufferable; money rules and ruins equally. This is what makes Dickens so timeless.

Dickens' books are like graphic novels but with words, not pictures. (Lots and lots and LOTS of words.  He was paid by the word, you know.) The sweet, the grasping, the groveling, the snobs, every stereotype of every class comes to life in Dickens' work.  His characters have enriched our language.  It is so easy to say someone is a "Uriah Heep" or  a "Fagin" and most people, even people who haven't read Dickens, will understand what you are talking about.

And what does this have to do with Kids Book Website Tuesday?  Well, I just can't let Dickens' birthday go by without pontificating on his contributions, (unlike 2 million other book bloggers out there). 

Since I seem to have a theme going here this week, I offer you The Children's Nursery and Its Traditions, a site dedicated to 19th century children's literature.  Be warned: This site is absolutely rife with advertisements!  But it offers a legion of full text books from the 19th century.  (When writing about Victorians, it does one proud to write like a Victorian!)  So if you can't find your copy of Andrew Lang's The Brown Fairy Book, there's a copy, complete with illustrations, on this site.  Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, Heidi, they are all available on this site.

You can even find the 1835 edition of Hoyle's here, when an argument on how to play conkers arises.  (I'm not sure that Hoyle's includes conkers in its compendium of games, though.  I use that game solely as an illustration.)  The rules of such games as Speculations, Draughts, Matrimony, even Horse-Racing are included in this book.  0 Comments on Victorians! as of 1/1/1900