THE DECLINE OF THE EMPIRE

Greenwood, James (1833-1923).

English novelist, author of The True History of a Little Ragamuffin (1866).

Carroll, Lewis (1832-98), English author, mathematician, and logician, best known for his creation of the immortal fantasy Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Carroll was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson in Daresbury, Cheshire, on January 27, 1832, and was educated at Rugby and at Christ Church College, University of Oxford. From 1855 to 1881 he was a member of the faculty of mathematics at Oxford. He was the author of several mathematical treatises, including Euclid and His Modern Rivals (1879). In 1865 he published under his pseudonym Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, appeared in 1871. These were followed by Phantasmagoria and Other Poems (1869), The Hunting of the Snark (1876), and a novel, Sylvie and Bruno (2 volumes, 1889-93). He died at Guildford, Surrey, on January 14, 1898.

Always a friend of children, particularly little girls, Carroll wrote thousands of letters to them, delightful flights of fantasy, many illustrated with little sketches. They have been collected and published as The Letters of Lewis Carroll (2 volumes, 1979) by Morton N. Cohen and Roger L. Green. Carroll gained an additional measure of fame as an amateur photographer. Most of his camera portraits were of children in various costumes and poses, including nude studies; he also did portraits of adults, including the actress Ellen Terry and the poets Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Apparently because his posing of children was criticized, he abandoned photography in 1880.

The Alice stories, which have made the name Lewis Carroll famous throughout the world, and have been translated into many languages, were originally written in 1862 for Alice Liddell, a daughter of Henry George Liddell, dean of Christ Church College. On publication, the works, illustrated by the English cartoonist Sir John Tenniel, became immediately popular as books for children. Their subsequent appeal to adults is based upon the ingenious mixture of fantasy and realism, gentle satire, absurdity, and logic. The names and sayings of the characters, such as the March Hare, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat, and the White Knight, have become part of everyday speech.

(1876 – 1916)

13.1. Эпоха “тысячи течений” в английской литературе. Пессимизм и переживание глобального кризиса системы европейских ценностей, конфликта между культурой и цивилизацией. Концепция трагического в романах Томаса Гарди, неприятие пуританской морали. Лирика Гарди. Социальная критика в произведениях Джона Голсуорси, Сомерсета Моэма.

"The modern spirit," Matthew Arnold observed in 1865, "is now awake." In 1859 Charles Darwin had published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Historians, philosophers, and scientists were all beginning to apply the idea of evolution to new areas of study of the human experience. Traditional conceptions of man's nature and place in the world were, as a consequence, under threat. Walter Pater summed up the process, in 1866, by stating that "Modern thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the relative spirit in place of the absolute." The economic crisis of the 1840s was long past. But the fierce political debates that led first to the Second Reform Act of 1867 and then to the battles for the enfranchisement of women were accompanied by a deepening crisis of belief.

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was born in Dorsetshire and educated in local schools and later privately. His father, a stonemason, apprenticed him early to a local architect engaged in restoring old churches. As a young man in his early twenties, Hardy worked for an architect in London and later continued to practice architecture, despite ill health, in Dorset. Meanwhile, he was writing poetry with little success. He then turned to novels as more salable, and by the age of 34 he was able to support himself by writing.

This is also the year (1874) that Hardy married his first wife, Emma Gifford. Their marriage lasted until her death in 1912, which prompted Hardy to write his collection of poems called Vestiges of an Old Flame. These poems are some of Hardy's finest and describe their meeting and his subsequent loss. Florence Dugdale became Hardy's second wife and she wrote his biography after he died in January, 1928.

Hardy anonymously published two early novels in 1871 and 1872. The next two, in his own name, were well received. Those novels are not invested with the tragic gloom of his later novels. Some lesser works followed, including two volumes of short stories.

Hardy's best realistic novels are The Return of the Native (1878), which is his most closely knit narrative; The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886); Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891); and Jude the Obscure (1895). All are pervaded by a belief in a universe dominated by the determinism of the biology of Charles Darwin and the physics of the 17th-century philosopher and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton. Occasionally the determined fate of the individual is altered by chance, but the human will loses when it challenges necessity. Through intense, vivid descriptions of the heath, the fields, the seasons, and the weather, Wessex attains a physical presence in the novels and acts as a mirror of the psychological conditions and the fortunes of the characters. These fortunes Hardy views with irony and sadness.

In Victorian England, Hardy did indeed seem a blasphemer, particularly in Jude, which treated sexual attraction as a natural force unopposable by human will. Criticism of Jude was so harsh that Hardy announced he was “cured” of writing novels.

At the age of 55 Hardy returned to writing poetry, a form he had previously abandoned. He wrote lots of lyrical poems, some of them very fine. Here is one of them.

IN TIME OF THE ‘BREAKING OF NATIONS’

Only a man harrowing clods

In a slow silent walk

With an old horse that stumbles and nods

Half asleep as they walk.

Only thin smoke without flame

From the heaps of couch-grass;

Yet this will go onward the same

Though Dynasties pass.

Yonder a maid and her wight

Come whispering by:

War’s annals will cloud into night

Ere their story die.

In The Dynasts, Hardy created what some consider his most successful poetry. An epic drama in 19 acts and 130 scenes, it deals with the role of England during the Napoleonic Wars. Hardy's vision is the same as in his novels: History and the actors, who are racked by feeling, are nevertheless dominated by necessity.

Galsworthy, John (1867-1933), English novelist and playwright, who was one of the most popular English novelists and dramatists of the early 20th century. He was educated at Harrow School and the University of Oxford. He was admitted to the bar at 23 but soon (1891) abandoned law for writing. Galsworthy wrote his early works under the pen name John Sinjohn.

His realistic fiction is concerned principally with English upper middle-class life; his dramas frequently find their themes in this stratum of society, but also often deal, sympathetically, with the economically and socially oppressed and with questions of social justice. Most of his novels deal with the history, from Victorian times through the first quarter of the 20th century, of an upper middle-class English family, the Forsytes. The principal member of the family is Soames Forsyte, who exemplifies the drive of his class for the accumulation of material wealth, a drive that often conflicts with human values.

The Forsyte series includes The Man of Property (1906), the novelette “Indian Summer of a Forsyte”, In Chancery, Awakening, and To Let. These five titles were published as The Forsyte Saga. The Forsyte story was continued by Galsworthy in The White Monkey, The Silver Spoon, and Swan Song, which were published together under the title A Modern Comedy. These were followed in turn by Maid in Waiting, Flowering Wilderness, and Over the River, published together posthumously as End of the Chapter. Galsworthy was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in literature.

Maugham, W(illiam) Somerset (1874-1965), English author, whose novels and short stories are characterized by great narrative facility, simplicity of style, and a disillusioned and ironic point of view. Maugham was born in Paris and studied medicine at the University of Heidelberg and at Saint Thomas's Hospital, London. His first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), is based on his early experiences.

His partially autobiographical novel Of Human Bondageis generally acknowledged as his masterpiece and is one of the best realistic English novels of the early 20th century. The Moon and Sixpence is a story of the conflict between the artist and conventional society, based on the life of the French painter Paul Gauguin; other novels are The Painted Veil, Cakes and Ale, Christmas Holiday , The Hour Before the Dawn, The Razor's Edge, and Cataline: A Romance.

Among the collections of his short stories are The Trembling of a Leaf (1921), which includes “Miss Thompson,” later dramatized as Rain. He also wrote satiric comedies, essays, and two autobiographies.

13.2. Символизм и эстетизм в литературе. Жизнь и творчество Оскара Уайльда. «Портрет Дориана Грея». Уайльд как драматург, поэт и критик.

Wilde, Oscar (1854-1900), Irish-born writer and wit, who was the chief proponent of the aesthetic movement, based on the principle of art for art’s sake. Wilde was a novelist, playwright, poet, and critic.

He was born in Dublin, and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. As a youngster he was exposed to the brilliant literary talk of the day at his mother’s Dublin salon. Later, as a student at the University of Oxford, he excelled in classics, wrote poetry, and incorporated the Bohemian life-style of his youth into a unique way of life.

At Oxford Wilde came under the influence of aesthetic innovators such as English writers Walter Pater and John Ruskin. As an aesthete, the eccentric young Wilde wore long hair and velvet knee breeches. His rooms were filled with various objects of art such as sunflowers, peacock feathers, and blue china; Wilde claimed to aspire to the perfection of the china. His attitudes and manners were ridiculed in the comic periodical Punch and even satirized in the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera. Nonetheless, his wit, brilliance, and flair won him many devotees.

Wilde’s first book was Poems. His first play, Vera, or the Nihilists, was produced in New York City, where he saw it performed while he was on a highly successful lecture tour. Upon returning to England he settled in London and married in 1884 a wealthy Irish woman, with whom he had two sons. Thereafter he devoted himself exclusively to writing.

In 1895, at the peak of his career, Wilde became the central figure in one of the most sensational court trials of the century. The results scandalized the Victorian middle class; Wilde, who had been a close friend of the young Lord Alfred Douglas, was convicted of sodomy. Sentenced in 1895 to two years of hard labor in prison, he emerged financially bankrupt and spiritually downcast. He spent the rest of his life in Paris, using the pseudonym Sebastian Melmoth. He died of meningitis in Paris on November 30, 1900.

Wilde’s early works included two collections of fairy stories, which he wrote for his sons, The Happy Prince and A House of Pomegranates, and a group of short stories, Lord Arthur Saville’s Crime (1891).

His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), is a melodramatic tale of moral decadence, distinguished for its brilliant, epigrammatic style. Although the author fully describes the process of corruption, the shocking conclusion of the story frankly commits him to a moral stand against self-debasement.

Wilde’s most distinctive and engaging plays are the four comedies Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest, all characterized by adroitly contrived plots and remarkably witty dialogue. Wilde, with little dramatic training, proved he had a natural talent for stagecraft and theatrical effects and a true gift for farce. The plays sparkle with his clever paradoxes, among them such famous inverted proverbs as “Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes” and “What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.”

While in prison Wilde composed De Profundis (From the Depths; 1905), an apology for his life. Some critics consider it a serious revelation; others, a sentimental and insincere work. The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), written just after his release and published anonymously in England, is the most powerful of all his poems. The starkness of prison life and the desperation of people interned are revealed in beautifully cadenced language. For years after his death the name of Oscar Wilde bore the stigma attached to it by Victorian prudery. Wilde, the artist, now is recognized as a brilliant social commentator, whose best work remains worthwhile and relevant.

Yeats, William Butler (1865-1939), Irish poet and dramatist, and Nobel laureate, who was a leader of the Irish Renaissance and one of the foremost writers of the 20th century. Yeats was born in Dublin, the son of the noted Irish painter John Butler Yeats. He was schooled in London and in Dublin, where he studied painting, and vacationed in county Sligo, which inspired his enthusiasm for Irish tradition. At 22 he moved with his family to London and became interested in Hinduism, theosophy, and occultism.

He wrote lyrical, symbolic poems on pagan Irish themes, in the romantic melancholy tone he believed characteristic of the ancient Celts. He also wrote The Celtic Twilight (1893) and The Secret Rose, which deal with Irish legends.

On a visit to Ireland he met the beautiful Irish patriot Maud Gonne, whom he loved unrequitedly the rest of his life. She inspired much of his early work and drew him into the Irish nationalist movement for independence.

Yeats returned to Ireland in 1896. He became a close friend of the nationalist playwright Lady Gregory, whom he visited often at her estate at Coole Parke and with whom he traveled in Italy. With Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory he helped found the famous Abbey Theatre. As its director and dramatist, he helped develop the theater into one of the leading theatrical companies of the world, and a center of the Irish literary revival called the Irish Renaissance.

In his poetry of this period, Yeats strove to abandon his earlier self-conscious softness and facility. His work, now less mystical and symbolic, became clearer and leaner. As Yeats grew older, he turned to practical politics, serving in the Senate of the new Irish Free State. He also accomplished the feat, rare among poets, of deepening and perfecting his complex styles as the years advanced. His later writings are generally acknowledged to be his best. They were influenced by Georgie Hyde-Lees, his wife, who had a medium's gift for automated writing. Yeats also wrote short plays on the Celtic legendary hero Cuchulain, combined as Four Plays for Dancers. He received the Nobel Prize in 1923. Yeats died in France and was buried in Sligo, Ireland.

13.3. Неоромантическая традиция в английской литературе. Творчество Роберта Льюиса Стивенсона. Неоромантизм Редьярда Киплинга. Тема «бремени белого человека» в его творчестве и ее аллегорическое осмысление в «Книге джунглей».

Stevenson, Robert Louis Balfour (1850-1894), Scottish novelist, essayist, and poet, who contributed several classic works to children's literature.

Born in Edinburgh, Stevenson studied engineering and then law at the University of Edinburgh. Since childhood, however, Stevenson's natural inclination had been toward literature, and he eventually started writing seriously.

Stevenson suffered from tuberculosis and often traveled in search of warm climates to ease his illness. His earliest works are descriptions of his journeys—for example, about a canoe trip through Belgium and France, and an account of a journey on foot through mountains in southern France.

He traveled to California, where he married Frances Osborne, an American divorcee. In 1888 they sailed from San Francisco on a cruise across the South Pacific. They settled in Samoa on the island of Upolu in a final effort to restore Stevenson's health, but he died there.

Stevenson's popularity is based primarily on the exciting subject matter of his adventure novels and fantasy stories. Treasure Island is a swiftly paced story of a search for buried gold involving the boy hero Jim Hawkins and the evil pirates Pew and Long John Silver. In the horror story The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), the extremes of good and evil appear startlingly in one character when the physician Henry Jekyll discovers a drug that changes him, first at will and later involuntarily, into the monster Hyde. Stevenson's other adventure stories include The Black Arrow and The Master of Ballantrae.

Stevenson wrote skillfully in a variety of genres. He employed the forms of essay and literary criticism, and wrote travel and autobiographical pieces. A Child's Garden of Verses, containing some of Stevenson's best-known poems, is regarded by many as one of the finest collections of poetry for children. His other verse collections include Ballads (1890). Stevenson's short stories were published in The New Arabian Nights and Island Nights' Entertainments. He also collaborated with his stepson, American writer Lloyd Osborne, in writing novels.

Kipling, (Joseph) Rudyard (1865-1936), English writer and Nobel laureate, who wrote novels, poems, and short stories, mostly set in India and Burma (now known as Myanmar) during the time of British rule. Kipling was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, and at age six, was sent to be educated in England. He returned to India and edited and wrote short stories for the Civil and Military Gazette of Lahore, India. At 23 he published Departmental Ditties, satirical verse dealing with civil and military barracks life in British colonial India, and a collection of his magazine stories called Plain Tales from the Hills.

Kipling's literary reputation was established by six stories of English life in India, published in India, that revealed his profound identification with, and appreciation for, the land and people of India. Thereafter he traveled extensively in Asia and the United States, married Caroline Balestier, an American, lived briefly in Vermont, and finally settled in England. He was a prolific writer; most of his work attained wide popularity. He received the 1907 Nobel Prize in literature, the first English author to be so honored.

Kipling is regarded as one of the greatest English short-story writers. As a poet he is remarkable for rhymed verse written in the slangused by the ordinary British soldier. His writings consistently project three ideas: intense patriotism, the duty of the English to lead lives of strenuous activity, and England's destiny to become a great empire. His insistent imperialism was an echo of the Victorian past of England.

Among Kipling's important short fictional works are The Jungle Book, and The Second Jungle Book, collections of animal stories, which many consider his finest writing; Just So Stories for Little Children. The highly popular novels or long narratives include The Light That Failed (1891), about a blind artist; Captains Courageous, a sea story; Stalky & Co., based on his boyhood experiences at the United Services College; and Kim, a picaresque tale of Indian life that is generally regarded as his best long narrative. Among his collections of verse are Barrack-Room Ballads (1892), which contains the popular poems “Danny Deever,” “Mandalay,” and “Gunga Din”; and The Five Nations, with the well-known ballad “The Recessional.”

13.4. Утопии и антиутопии конца XIX века. Различные способы критики социальной действительности в произведениях Герберта Уэллса, Бернарда Шоу, Уильяма Морриса.

Shaw, George Bernard (1856-1950), Irish-born writer, considered the most significant British dramatist since Shakespeare. In addition to being a prolific playwright (he wrote 50 stage plays), he was also the most trenchant pamphleteer since the Irish-born satirist Jonathan Swift and the most readable music critic and best theater critic of his generation. He was also one of literature’s great letter writers.

A visionary and mystic, inwardly shy and quietly generous, Shaw was at the same time the antithesis of a romantic; he was ruthless as a social critic and irreverent toward institutions. Leavening even his most serious works for the stage with a comic texture, he turned what might have been treatises in other hands into plays animated by epigrams and lively dialogue.

Shaw was born in Dublin. His impractical father, an unsuccessful merchant, had emerged from the Protestant Irish gentry; for extra income his mother taught voice pupils. When his parents’ marriage failed, his mother and sisters went to London, and Shaw joined them there in 1876.

The next decade was one of frustration and near poverty. Neither music criticism (written under the name of a family friend) nor a telephone company job lasted very long, and only two of the five novels Shaw wrote found publishers. By the mid-1880s Shaw discovered the writings of Karl Marx and turned to socialist polemics and critical journalism. He also became a firm (and lifelong) believer in vegetarianism, a spellbinding orator, and tentatively, a playwright. He was the force behind the newly founded Fabian Society, a middle-class socialist group that aimed at the transformation of English government and society. Shaw’s early journalism ranged from book reviews and art criticism to brilliant music columns. Shaw became the champion of the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen, about whom he had already written his influential The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891).

Shaw’s first play, Widowers’ Houses (produced 1892), combined Ibsenite devices and aims with a flouting of the romantic conventions that were still being exploited in the English theater. It was eventually published in his Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant. These first seven works for the stage (the others were Candida, The Philanderer, Arms and the Man, The Man of Destiny, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, and You Never Can Tell) received brief runs at best or no productions at all. Mrs. Warren’s Profession was banned by the censor as obscene. One of his Three Plays for Puritans (The Devil’s Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra, and Captain Brassbound’s Conversion), fared slightly better. The Devil’s Disciple, a spoof of 19th-century sentimental melodrama set in America during the Revolution, became a success in the United States because of its wit and the very melodramatic elements Shaw had set out to satirize.

Shaw’s next work, Man and Superman, transformed the Don Juan legend into a play, and play-within-a-play. Although on the surface it was a comedy of manners about love and money, its action gave Shaw the opportunity to explore the intellectual climate of the new century in a series of discussions; these are the substance of the nonrealistic, almost operatic, third act, “Don Juan in Hell,” often since produced independently. Man and Superman was in repertory with John Bull’s Other Island, originally written for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin but rejected as a slur on the Irish character; the pair established Shaw’s popular reputation in London as playwright and sage.

Shaw’s comic masterpiece, Pygmalion, was claimed by its author to be a didactic play about phonetics; it is, rather, about love and class and the exploitation of one human being by another.

The intellectual watershed of World War I caused the difference. Attempting to find his way out of postwar pessimism, Shaw next wrote five linked parable-plays under the collective title Back to Methuselah; they explore human progress from Eden to a science-fiction future. Despite some brilliant writing, the cycle is uneven in its theatrical values and seldom performed.

For Saint Joan, Shaw received the 1925 Nobel Prize in literature. In Shaw’s hands Joan of Arc became a combination of practical mystic, heretical saint, and inspired genius. Shaw continued to write into his 90s. His last plays turned, as Europe plunged into new crises, to the problem of how people might best govern themselves and release their potential. These were themes he had handled before, but he now approached them with a tragicomic and nonrealistic extravagance that owed more to the ancient Greek comedies of Aristophanes than to Ibsen.

Wells, Herbert George (1866-1946), English author and political philosopher, most famous for his science-fantasy novels with their prophetic depictions of the triumphs of technology as well as the horrors of 20th-century warfare.

Wells was educated at the Normal School of Science in London, to which he won a scholarship. He worked as a draper's apprentice, bookkeeper, tutor, and journalist until 1895, when he became a full-time writer. In the next 50 years he produced more than 80 books. His first novel The Time Machine (1895) mingled science, adventure, and political comment. Later works in this genre are The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, and The Shape of Things to Come; each of these fantasies was made into a motion picture.

Wells also wrote novels devoted to character delineation. Among these are Kipps and The History of Mr. Polly, which depict members of the lower middle class and their aspirations. Both recall the world of Wells' youth; the first tells the story of a struggling teacher, the second portrays a draper's assistant.

Many of Wells' other books can be categorized as thesis novels. Among these are Ann Veronica, promoting women's rights; Tono-Bungay, attacking irresponsible capitalists.

Throughout his long life Wells was deeply concerned with and wrote voluminously about the survival of contemporary society. For a time he was a member of the Fabian Society. He envisioned a utopia in which the vast and frightening material forces available to modern men and women would be rationally controlled for progress and for the equal good of all. His later works were increasingly pessimistic.

Morris, William (1834 – 1896), English designer, craftsman, poet, and early Socialist, whose designs for furniture, fabrics, stained glass, wallpaper, and other decorative products revolutionized Victorian taste.

Morris was born in an Essex village on the southern edge of Epping Forest, a member of a large and well-to-do family. In 1853 Morris went to Exeter College at Oxford. It was the writings of John Ruskin on the social and moral basis of architecture that came to Morris “with the force of a revelation.”

He came under the powerful influence of the Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante G. Rossetti, who persuaded him to give up architecture for painting. As a poet, he first achieved fame and success with the romantic narrative The Life and Death of Jason.

Morris began his revolutionary experiments with vegetable dyes, which resulted in their finest printed and woven fabrics, carpets, and tapestries. Morris gave public lectures and founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in an attempt to combat the drastic methods of restoration then being carried out on the cathedrals and parish churches of Great Britain.

Morris joined Democratic (later Social Democratic) Federation and began his tireless tours of industrial areas to spread the gospel of Socialism. But he was considerately treated by the authorities, even when leading a banned demonstration to London's Trafalgar Square on “Bloody Sunday” (Nov. 13, 1887), when the police, supported by troops, cleared the square of demonstrators. On this occasion he marched with the playwright George Bernard Shaw at his side. But by this time Morris had formed the Socialist League, with its own publication, in which his two finest romances, A Dream of John Ball and News from Nowhere (1891), an idyllic vision of a Socialist rural utopia, appeared.

Morris is now regarded as one of the great men of the 19th century, though he turned away from what he called “the dull squalor of civilization” to romance, myth, and epic. Morris defined beauty in art as the result of man's pleasure in his work and asked, “Unless people care about carrying on their business without making the world hideous, how can they care about Art?” To Morris, art included the whole man-made environment.

In his own time William Morris was most widely known as author and for his designs for wallpapers, textiles, and carpets. Since the mid-20th century it is as a designer and craftsman, rather than as poet or politician, that Morris is valued most, though future generations may esteem him more as a social and moral critic, a pioneer of the society of equality.