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Reading Guides are available for the following Vintage Classics titles - click on any title to read the guide.
Brighton Rock
Pinkie Brown is the newly appointed leader of the rival to the Colleoni race gang in Brighton. The gang’s previous leader, Battling Kite, for whom Pinkie was right-hand man, was murdered by the Colleoni gang, because of information supplied by Fred Hale, a reporter turned informer. In revenge Pinkie murders Hale. The murder is rash and Pinkie spends the remainder of the novel trying to cover up the small mistakes that tie him to the murder. Every cover-up effort Pinkie makes fails to solve the problem entirely, leading him to make further murders which result in further cover ups.
Ida Arnold, an easy-going demimondaine who Hale befriends on the last day of his life in an attempt to stave off his potential killers, turns detective when she discovers discrepancies in the events surrounding his death and doggedly pursues Pinkie in her search for justice.
Rose is a young waitress who stumbles upon a major flaw in Pinkie’s alibi. In order to ensure her silence Pinkie marries her and then coerces her into a suicide pact. When Ida realises that she will not gain her evidence against Pinkie she sets her heart to saving Rose instead.
‘The most ingenious, inventive and exciting of our novelists…
A master of storytelling’
The Times
‘I read Brighton Rock when I was about thirteen.
One of the first lessons I took from it was
that a serious novel could be an exciting novel -
that the novel of adventure could also be the novel of ideas’
Ian McEwan
‘Graham Greene had wit and grace and character
and story and a transcendent universal compassion
that places him for all time in the ranks of world literature’
John le Carre
‘A superb storyteller with a gift for provoking controversy’
New York Times
Henry Graham Greene was born on October 2, 1904 in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. He was the fourth of six children and his father was headmaster of his high school for which he was tormented by fellow pupils. After a number of unsuccessful suicide attempts he was sent to a therapist who encouraged him to write as a means of healing.
Greene went on to Balliol College where he studied Modern History. It was here that Greene gained experience as an editor at The Oxford Outlook; developed an interest in politics after joining the Communist Party; and honed his skills at writing, with one novel Anthony Sant complete before he graduated.
After graduating with a BA in 1925, Greene was employed as a subeditor at the Nottingham Journal after two abortive positions at other companies. His dislike of Nottingham's seediness manifested in his later novel Brighton Rock.
Greene moved on to a job as a subeditor at The Times in London. There he married Vivien Dayrell-Browning in October 1927 and with her had a daughter, Lucy Caroline, and a son Francis. After a number of years he gave up his much-loved job to become a full time writer.
Greene began his world-renowned travelling in part to satisfy his lust for adventure, and in part to seek out material for his writing. A trip to Sweden resulted in England Made Me. An exhausting 400-mile trek through the jungles of Liberia not only gave Greene a near brush with death, but provided fodder for Journey Without Maps. During World War II, he worked for the Secret Intelligence Service in Sierra Leone, which became the setting for The Heart of the Matter. His journey to Mexico to witness the religious purges in 1938 was described in The Lawless Roads. Greene's horror of the Catholic persecution in Mexico led him to write The Power and the Glory, arguably the best novel of his career. It was both acclaimed (being the Hawthornden Prize winner in 1941) and condemned (by the Vatican). The frenetic globetrotting to troubled areas of the world continued until Greene was physically unable to do so in his later years.
Greene's financial success as an author enabled him to associate with many famous figures of his time: T.S. Eliot, Herbert Read, Evelyn Waugh, Alexander Korda, Ian Fleming, Noel Coward, among others. He had many extra-marital affairs, and confessed he was "a bad husband and a fickle lover", although he never revealed his affairs in his two autobiographies. He separated from his wife in 1948 but they never divorced. Towards the end of his life, Greene lived in Vevey, Switzerland with his companion Yvonne Cloetta. He died there peacefully on April 3, 1991.
STARTING POINTS FOR YOUR DISCUSSION
- Does Pinkie have a morbid and deluded imagination, or is he right in his view of the world?
- Do you believe that Pinkie would be satisfied/happy and consider himself successful if he had managed to: silence Rose, move out of the room he rents at Frank’s, gain control of the race track and somehow manage to run Colleoni out of Brighton?
- Do you feel that it is unrealistic how easily Ida seems to come across evidence and clues that will lead her to her goal of justice (even gaining help from the ‘spirit world’ via the Ouija Board) while Pinkie seems to be thwarted at every turn (relying on greater risks to secure his innocence in the Hale murder)?
- Pinkie constantly reminds Rose that he isn’t afraid of anything, he fears nothing, yet his actions betray his words; he is willing to do almost anything to avoid going to jail. Does Pinkie fear damnation in the afterlife? Or is he more afraid of physical pain, embarrassment and jail?
- When and how does Pinkie change from being the hunter "before the kill" to being the hunted?
- Do you feel that Rose does what Pinkie wants out of Love or out of her Duty as a wife? Is she not too young to know and understand true love and therefore confuses the two?
- The Title of Brighton Rock is chosen by Greene as analogy for human nature; the idea that human’s never change. With this pessimistic view in mind do you think that people can only be born good or that that they have the free will to change? Can we blame experiences in his youth and the poverty into which Pinkie was born on the development of evil within him when Rose herself is from a similar background and is clearly not evil?
- How far would you agree that the novel is not so much about Brighton, as about heaven and hell?
- To what extent do you think this book is about guilt?
OTHER BOOKS BY GRAHAM GREENE
NOVELS
Babbling April (1925)
The Man Within (1929)
The Name of Action (1930)
Rumour at Nightfall (1932)
Stamboul Train ( Orient Express ) (1932)
It's a Battlefield (1934)
England made Me (1935)
The Bear Fell Free (1935)
A Gun for Sale ( This Gun for Hire ) (1936)
Brighton Rock (1938)
The Confidential Agent (1939)
The Power and The Glory ( The Labyrinthine Ways ) (1940)
The Ministry of Fear (1943)
The Heart of the Matter (1948)
The Third Man (1950)
The End of the Affair (1951)
The Quiet American (1955)
Our Man in Havana (1958)
A Burnt-Out Case (1961)
A Sense of Reality (1963)
The Comedians (1966)
Travels with My Aunt (1969)
The Honorary Consul (1973)
The Human Factor (1978)
Dr. Fischer of Geneva, or The Bomb Party (1980)
Monsignor Quixote (1982)
Getting to Know the General (1985)
The Tenth Man (1985)
The Captain and the Enemy (1988)
SHORT STORIES
A Little Place Off the Edgware Road (1941)
All But Empty (1947)
Awful When You Think of It
Beauty
Chagrin in Three Parts
Cheap in August
The Destructors
Doctor Crombie
The End of the Party
The Invisible Japanese Gentlemen
May We Borrow Your Husband?
Mortmain
The Over-Night Bag
The Root of All Evil
A Shocking Accident
Two Gentle People
The Last Word and Other Stories
Collected Short Stories (1987)
TRAVEL
Journey without Maps (1936)
The Lawless Roads ( Another Mexico ) (1939)
In Search of a Character
Getting to Know the General
ESSAYS
Yours etc.
Reflections
Mornings in the Dark
Collected Essays
PLAYS
The Potting Shed (1957)
The Return Of A.J. Raffles (1975)
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
A Sort of Life (1971)
Ways of Escape (1980)
Fragments of an Autobiography
A World of my Own
CHILDREN'S BOOKS
The Little Train
The Little Horse-Bus
The Little Steamroller
The Little Fire Engine
Heart of Darkness ~ Joseph Conrad
The Thirty-Nine Steps ~ John Buchan
The Unconsoled ~ Kazuo Ishiguro
John Le Carré
Brighton Rock film (1947) starring Richard Attenborough, Carol Marsh, Hermione Baddeley, William Hartnell, Nigel Stock
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/greene.htm
http://www.universalteacher.org.uk/prose/brightonrock.htm#top
http://members.tripod.com/~greeneland/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Greene
BUtterfield 8
BUtterfield 8 chronicles the fast life and quick demise of Gloria Wandrous, the ultimate New York party girl. The novel is set in Manhattan in the early 1930s – a time when The Prohibition and The Great Depression dominated everyone’s lives and was the ubiquitous backdrop to society. As a result of The Prohibition, New York became riddled with illegal underground bars known as speakeasies. These speakeasies were Gloria’s haunt, the places she went to dull the emotional pain that she carried with her since childhood.
Growing up, Gloria was emotionally neglected by her mother and sexually molested by two men she should have been able to trust. The demons from her childhood follow her everywhere from one speakeasy to another, from one man’s bed to the next – preventing her from ever loving herself or any man. One Sunday morning, she wakes up in Weston Ligget’s bed, a married man, and after examining his family home, takes his wife’s mink coat. The consequences of this simple act are far-reaching and change the course of Gloria’s life.
Gloria Wandrous lives the ultimate hedonist’s life – shopping, drinking, dancing and bed-hopping – and looks set to carry on down this path of emotional self-destruction, but at the end of the novel she discovers her maternal side, and resolves to pull herself together, be respectable and keep regular hours. But beyond the simple act of making a decision that would help her and not harm her – she finally allows herself to love and be loved.
O’Hara based BUtterfield 8 on a true story – the mysterious death of New York socialite, Starr Faithfull. Her beautifully-dressed body was found washed up on a beach in Long Island and to this day her death remains a mystery – did she commit suicide, was she murdered or was it simply an accident? O’Hara used this real-life tragedy to recreate the life of an outwardly glamorous, and inwardly broken, young woman who meets her end in a decidedly abrupt, brutal and conspicuous way.
The characters are flawed and constantly contradict themselves in their actions and their thoughts – and ultimately this is what makes the novel a classic. It takes a magnifying lens to human behaviour and exposes issues that are every bit as relevant today as they were in the 1930s – alcoholism, pedophilia, abortion, infidelity, possession, addiction, broken families and the dark side of love.
"A man who knows exactly what he is writing about
and has written it marvelously well"
Ernest Hemingway
"O’Hara understood better than any other American writer
how class can both reveal and shape character"
Fran Lebowitz
O'Hara occupies a unique position...
He is the only American writer to whom America presents itself
as a social scene in the way it once presented itself
to Henry James, or France to Proust
Lionel Trilling, New York Times
John O’Hara was born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania on 31 January 1905. Three decades after his death, O'Hara is chiefly remembered for two novels, Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8 and for several collections of short stories. His literary accolades have, however, been largely overshadowed by the legend of his snobbish and belligerent demeanour: his drinking, his propensity for violence and his overt social climbing.
His critics may be divided in their judgement of his character but one thing remains undisputed – O’Hara had a knack for capturing natural dialogue and was able to paint the portrait of American social class beautifully.
He died in April 1970 and the epitaph on his tombstone, which he wrote himself, reads: "Better than anyone else, he told the truth about his time, the first half of the twentieth century. He was a professional. He wrote honestly and well."
There is no author interview with John O'Hara available.
STARTING POINTS FOR YOUR DISCUSSION
- Why do you think Gloria really took Emily Ligget’s mink coat? Was it to make sure that Weston contacted her again?
- Do you think that had Gloria had a stronger mother – a mother who protected her and believed her claims of molestation – she would have led a different life?
- At one point in the novel Gloria says to Eddie: ‘I know what’s right. But I’m so strongly tempted’. Why does she find it so hard to resist temptation?
- Gloria epitomizes freedom and adventure, something Weston craves as a middle-aged, unhappily married man. Do you think that Weston really ever loved Gloria?
- How do you explain Ligget’s tireless pursuit of the mink coat, even after Gloria’s death?
- The novel is rich in detail and O’Hara paints an intricate portrait of life in Manhattan in the early 1930s. Do you think that O’Hara’s portrayal of human relationships is particular to this time in American history, given The Great Depression and the Prohibition, or is he writing about universal and intrinsically human characteristics?
- Why does Gloria not bring charges against Dr Reddington for his sexual exploitation of her?
- Do you think that Dr Reddington suffers any kind of retribution at the end of the novel? Is his a happy ending?
Appointment in Samarra (1934)
Hope of Heaven
Pal Joey (1940)
A Rage to Live (1949)
Ten North Frederick (1955)
NON-FICTION
The Art Of Burning Bridges. A Life of John O'Hara ~ Geoffrey Wolff
FICTION
Appointment In Samarra ~ John O’Hara
The Great Gatsby ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
Revolutionary Road ~ Richard Yates
FILM
BUtterfield 8 (1960). Directed by Daniel Man. Starring Elizabeth Taylor and Laurence Harvey.
Cider With Rosie
At all times wonderfully evocative and poignant, Cider With Rosie is a charming memoir of Laurie Lee's childhood in a remote Cotswold village, a world that is tangibly real and yet reminiscent of a now distant past.
In this idyllic pastoral setting, unencumbered by the callous father who so quickly abandoned his family responsibilities, Laurie's adoring mother becomes the centre of his world as she struggles to raise a growing family against the backdrop of the Great War.
The sophisticated adult author's retrospective commentary on events is endearingly juxtaposed with that of the innocent, spotty youth, permanently prone to tears and self-absorption.
Rosie's identity from the novel Cider with Rosie was kept secret for 25 years. She was Rose Buckland, Lee's cousin by marriage. The memoir has sold more than six million copies.
'An enchanting book, an exquisite farewell, not only to childhood,
and boyhood,
but also to an England that has vanished.'
JB Priestly
'Remains as fresh and full of joy and gratitude for youth
and its sensations as when it first appeared.
It sings in the memory'
Sunday Times
'It has got… a marvellous morning freshness…
There is hardly a sentence in it that does not set the
sense of touch and smell, as well as sight and hearing, tingling'
Daily Mail
'He had a nightingale inside him, a capacity for sensuous, lyrical
precision'
Guardian
'Lee was a poet whose deft passage into prose carried
with it much of the rhythm and accuracy of the poet's language'
Mignon Khargie, Art Director of Salon
Laurie Lee was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, in 1914, and was educated at
Slad village school and Stroud Central School. In his teens Lee had already
began to write poems. He had met two sisters who encouraged him in his writing
aspirations. At the age of nineteen he walked to London and then travelled on
foot through Spain, where he was trapped by the outbreak of the Civil War. He
later returned by crossing the Pyrenees, as described in his book As I Walked
Out one Midsummer Morning. During World War II he made documentary films
for the General Post Office film unit (1939-40), and the Crown Film Unit (1941-43).
From 1944 to 1946 he worked as an editor at the Ministry of Information Publications.
In 1950 he married Catherine Polge and they had one daughter.
He died in May 1997.
An extract from his last radio interview with BBC Gloucestershire, with Mark Hurrell, on the novel:
"When I wrote it, I was writing it in order to set down things I remembered with pleasure about our small, local life in Slad.
But I remember towards the end thinking "why am I writing this in a world which is so threatened by the dark clouds and threats of cosmic destruction?" This is only a small story, it can only interest my family and a few neighbours.
What happened was unpredictable but it also reminded many readers of their beginnings and their family recollections.
I was getting letters saying 'I've read your book and it's just like what my grandmother used to tell me' or 'your mother does remind me of my mother' and long pages about returning to their recollections of their beginnings in similar circumstances.
I was reminding them of their lives and I think that was why it was read so much, but this was quite unintentional and unpredictable.
It was the end of a semi-feudal life and it was also the beginning of one's own life. And these I think were the reasons why so many people read it - of course it was beautifully written too!
Actually I take that back, it's not beautifully written, it's funny."
STARTING POINTS FOR YOUR DISCUSSION
- Consider the depiction of women in the book, and how this progresses from beginning to end as Lee grows up.
- At first glance the book appears to be idyllic and happy; full of pleasant, carefree images and anecdotes. Yet there are also many moments of darkness. Consider the dark side of the book, in reference to any disturbing episodes you can think of. On balance which feeling stays with you most by the end of the book?
- It might be said that the book is either about life or about death. What do you think - which does it concentrate on more?
- Consider Lee's use of humour throughout the book. In what way does it occur and what purpose do you think it serves?
- To what extent was Lee's mother a good mother, or role model for Lee?
- A major issue within the book is that of tradition, and the old country
life, versus modernisation. Discuss Lee's attitude to both, and where you
think he falls in support of most by the end.
Selected works:
The Sune My Monument, 1944
Land at War, 1945
The Bloom of Candles, 1947
We Made a Film in Cyprus, 1947 (with R. Keene)
Peasant's Priest, 1948 (play)
The Voyage of Magellan, 1948 (play, radio play in 1946)
An Obstinate Exile, 1951
ed.: New Poems, 1954 (with C. Hassall, R. Warner)
A Rose for Winter, 1955
My Many-Coated Man, 1955
Poems, 1960
Man Must Move / The Wonderful World of Transport, 1960 (with D. Lambert)
The Firstborn / Two Women, 1964
As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, 1969
Pergamon Poets 10, 1970 (with C. Causley. ed. by E. Owen)
I Can't Stay Long, 1976
Innocent in the Mirror, 1978
Two Women, 1983
Selected Poems, 1983
A Moment of War, 1991
SCREENPLAYS
Cyprus is an Island, 1946
A Tale in a Teacup, 1947
Cider With Laurie: Laurie Lee Remembered ~ Barbara Hooper
The Go-between ~ L.P. Hartley
My Family and Other Animals ~ Gerald Durrell
To Kill a Mockingbird ~ Harper Lee
The Catcher in the Rye ~ J.D. Salinger
David Copperfield
David Copperfield or The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (which he never meant to publish on any account) is the first person account of the life of the eponymous hero, David Copperfield. It was the first of Dickens’ novels to be told entirely in the first person, and is generally accepted to be the most autobiographical of his works. As an author noted for the resonant and symbolic names he gives his characters, it may be significant that David Copperfield shares the same initials, reversed, with Charles Dickens.
The novel was said by Dickens to be his “favourite child” and it contains some of the most memorable characters of all of his work, including several, particularly Uriah Heep, who have passed into the popular consciousness and whose names are known even to those who have never read the novel. Richard Carter, MD, has even described “Uriah Heep Syndrome” in the journal World Journal of Surgery, noting that Dickens’ portrayal of the villain accurately describes a real medical condition; primary palmar hyperhidrosis, the most common cause of which is emotional stress. References to the novel pepper literature, from Catcher in the Rye by Holden Caulfield, to What Katy Did at School by Susan Coolidge.
The story opens with David’s birth, he is a posthumous son, as his father has died some months previously. Present at his birth are his aunt, Betsy Trotwood, later a key figure in the novel, and the family servant Pegotty. Miss Trotwood is convinced that the baby will be a girl (and decides that she should also be called Betsy). When David is born, clearly a boy, she leaves the house in disgust.
His early life is idyllic: he spends happy holidays with Pegotty’s brother and his family by the sea, including the pretty little Emily. But when David is still a small boy his mother remarries the terrifying Mr Murdstone. Mr Murdstone and his equally formidable sister soon reshape the household to suit their own purposes, easily subduing David’s charming but frail mother. David’s life becomes a misery; forbidden to socialise with his mother, but equally forbidden to shelter in his room he becomes a timid shadow. When he finally lashes out and bites Mr Murdstone, his step-father seizes the chance to send him away to a harsh boarding school, where he makes two influential friends, Steerforth and Traddles.
Shortly after his mother gives birth to Mr Murdstone’s son, but she never fully recovers from the birth, and finally news is sent to David at school to tell him that both she and his baby brother have died.
From here David is effectively abandoned; he is sent to work in a factory part-owned by Mr Murdstone, a section of the narrative thought to be influenced by Dickens’ own experiences in a factory as a young boy. It is a miserable existence, but David finds some comfort with his landlord Mr Micawber and his eccentric family. Like Dickens’ father, Mr Micawber is in permanent financial crisis, and is eventually imprisoned for debt. David is left homeless and friendless, and in desperation makes up his mind to run away and seek help from Betsy Trotwood. He walks all the way from London to her house at Dover, and finds her at home. She agrees to shelter him, and later becomes deeply fond of her adopted son, sending him to the best school in the locality, where he meets more life-long friends, Dr Strong and Agnes Wickfield, as well as the sinister Uriah Heep, and finally Betsy establishes David in a legal career in London.
It is here that the second part of the novel effectively begins – where the first part is the account of an unhappy, abandoned childhood, the second part is much more a story of success. Copperfield establishes himself in the legal profession and later becomes a successful and even acclaimed author, in another mirror of Dickens’ life. He also meets, woos and marries his first love, Dora. His adult life is not free from heartbreak – his friends’ troubles are his troubles too, and he has his own share of sadness when Dora suffers a miscarriage, sickens, and eventually dies.
Throughout the second half of the novel David’s life intertwines with the characters Dickens established in the first half, and we follow the fortunes of his friends – Agnes and Mr Wickfield, Dr Strong, Pegotty, Mr Pegotty, Ham and Little Emily, Mr Dick and Betsy Trotwood, the Micawbers, Thomas Traddles, and the morally ambiguous James Steerforth – as well as his enemies – Mr and Miss Murdstone and Uriah Heep. By crossing these different narrative strands Dickens achieves some of the great dramatic moments of the novel – Copperfield introduces Steerforth to the Pegotty family, only for him to seduce and almost ruin Little Emily. And when Uriah Heep turns his malevolent intent on to Mr Micawber and Betsy Trotwood, out of hatred for Copperfield, it proves his ultimate undoing.
In the final pages Dickens provides David with a resolution, and gives a satisfying and just ending for almost all the characters. But a few villains are left unpunished, most significantly Mr and Miss Murdstone, perhaps Dickens’ illustration of the fact that it is in childhood that we are at our most vulnerable, and its ogres are the hardest to vanquish.
‘In this book of David Copperfield,
[Dickens] has created creatures who cling to us and tyrannise over us,
creatures whom we would not forget if we could,
creatures whom we could not forget if we would,
creatures who are more actual than the man who made them.’
G. K. Chesterton
‘He’s a marvellous writer’
William Trevor
‘There is no one Dickens novel I could pick over all the others.
Dickens is huge—like the sky.
Pick any page of Dickens and it is immediately recognisable as him,
yet he might be doing social satire, or farce, or horror,
or a psychological study of a murderer—or any combination of these’
Susannah Clarke
Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812 in Landport in Portsmouth, the second of eight children, and when he was five the family relocated to Chatham in Kent, and later to Camden Town in London.
By most accounts his early childhood seems to have been happy, but he received an abrupt introduction to the harsher realities of life when he was twelve years old and his father was imprisoned for debt. Dickens was sent to work in a shoe polish factory where he earned six shillings a week pasting labels on the jars of thick polish. This money paid for his lodgings in Camden Town and helped him to support his family. It is believed that the experience fed into his later vivid depictions of child-labour and exploitation in his novels.
At the age of seventeen, he became a court stenographer and, in 1830, he met his first love, Maria Beadnell. It is believed that she was the model for the character Dora in David Copperfield, which is regarded as Dickens’ most autobiographical work and was his own favourite. However, unlike Copperfield, Dickens did not marry his first love; the courtship was ended when Maria's parents sent her to school in Paris.
The Pickwick Papers, his first commercial success, was published in 1836, the same year that he married Catherine Hogarth. After a brief honeymoon in Chalk, Kent, they set up home in Bloomsbury, where they produced ten children. His ninth child, born in 1851, was named Dora. His descendents include the novelist Monica Dickens (his great-grandaughter, via his son Henry Fielding Dickens).
His marriage to Catherine does not seem to have been entirely happy; they separated in1858 at a time when divorce was almost unthinkable, particularly for someone in Dickens’ position. Critics have pointed to a meeting he sought in 1855 with his first love, Maria Beadnell, as an indication of his marital dissatisfaction.
The serialisation of Oliver Twist began in 1837 while The Pickwick Papers was still running and Dickens went on to write over a dozen novels, including Hard Times and Bleak House. David Copperfield was, like many of Dickens’ novels, also originally published in the form of a serialisation, and only later published in book form. The serialisation ran from 1849 until 1850.
In 1853, Dickens gave his first public reading in Birmingham of A Christmas Carol and The Cricket on the Hearth. A year later in Bradford, Dickens performed for an audience of 3,700 people. Between 1858 and his death in 1870, Dickens performed hundreds of public readings of his work, which were a massive popular and financial success. By the late 1860's Dickens' readings had become so eagerly anticipated that sometimes thousands had to be turned away.
On 9 June 1865, while returning from France, Dickens was involved in the Staplehurst rail crash in which the first seven carriages of the train plunged off a cast iron bridge that was being repaired. The only first-class carriage to remain on the track was the one in which Dickens was travelling. Dickens spent some time tending to the wounded and the dying before rescuers arrived. Before leaving, he remembered the unfinished manuscript for Our Mutual Friend, and returned to his carriage to retrieve it.
Dickens died on 9 June 1870 leaving his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished. He is buried in Westminster Abbey. Dickens' will stipulated that no memorial be erected to honour him. The only life-size bronze statue of Dickens, cast in 1891 by Francis Edwin Elwell, is in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the United States.
There is no author interview available.
STARTING POINTS FOR YOUR DISCUSSION
- ‘In this book of David Copperfield, [Dickens] has created creatures who cling to us and tyrannise over us, creatures whom we would not forget if we could’ GK Chesterton. Do you agree with Chesterton’s assessment of the characters in David Copperfield? Which of the characters do you personally find most memorable and lasting?
- As previously discussed, Uriah Heep is one of the most famous villains in Dickens’ novels. Why do you think he is so memorable? What traits does he share with Copperfield, and why do you think the two have such an intense mutual animosity?
- A major theme of the novel is that of impulse versus discipline, and the phrase ‘undisciplined heart’ is a constantly recurring one, particularly towards the end of the novel. What do you think Dickens means by the repeated phrase ‘an undisciplined heart’? In what ways does Dickens portray the effect of this with different characters throughout the novel and do you think David succeeds in disciplining his own heart by the end?
- a) David’s life, like that of many characters in literature and fairy-tales, is made up of a deeply unhappy childhood, rewarded by a happy and fulfilled adulthood. Why do you think this pattern is so common in literature and what other examples can you think of?
b) Given a choice, would you prefer a happy childhood followed by an unhappy adult life, or the reverse?
- David Copperfield is often cited as an example of a Bildungsroman; a novel which generally describes the growth of the protagonist to adulthood, and illustrates the psychological and moral shaping of their personality in the process. Do you agree with this classification? If so, what is Copperfield’s moral journey and what do you think Dickens was trying to say?
- Dickens often uses his novels to address social and political issues, such as child labour and exploitation. What issues do you find addressed in David Copperfield? Do modern authors use their novels in this way or do you think the practice is dying out?
- Marriages in different forms are constantly portrayed and contrasted throughout the novel, and are often analysed and depicted in great detail. Why do you think Dickens returns to this theme so frequently in David Copperfield and what do you think he is trying to say? Which of the marriages in the novel do you consider to be successful and why?
OTHER BOOKS BY CHARLES DICKENS
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club – known as The Pickwick Papers (1837)
The Adventures of Oliver Twist (1838)
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1839)
Barnaby Rudge (1841)
Master Humphrey's Clock (1841)
The Old Curiosity Shop (1841)
A Christmas Carol (1843)
The Chimes (1844)
The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1844)
The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home (1845)
The Battle of Life (1846)
The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848)
Dombey and Son (1848)
David Copperfield (1850)
Bleak House (1853)
Hard Times (1854)
Little Dorrit (1857)
A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
The Uncommercial Traveller (1860)
Great Expectations (1861)
Our Mutual Friend (1865)
No Thoroughfare (1867) (with Wilkie Collins)
The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870)
The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices (1890) (with Wilkie Collins)
Oliver Twist ~ Charles Dickens
Great Expectations ~ Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre ~ Charlotte Bronte
Dickens ~ Peter Ackroyd (Vintage, 2002)
London ~ Peter Ackroyd (Chatto and Windus, 2000)
The Dickens Fellowship
The Dickens page
The Dickens Museum (situated at his former home in Doughty Street, London)
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Stories
How thin is the line between good and evil?
Dr Jekyll has been experimenting with his identity. He has developed a drug which separates the two sides of his nature and allows him to occasionally abandon himself to his most corrupt inclinations as the monstrous Mr Hyde. But gradually he begins to find that the journey back to goodness becomes more and more difficult, and the risk that Mr Hyde will break free entirely from Dr Jekyll’s control puts all of London in grave peril.
‘Stevenson’s short stories are certain to retain their position in English literature. His serious rivals are few indeed’
Arthur Conan Doyle
‘Mr Hyde's sordid and perhaps deviant excesses are rendered more suggestive through being left undescribed’
Sarah Waters
‘A fable that lies nearer to poetry than to ordinary prose fiction’
Vladimir Nabokov
‘Robert Louis Stevenson.was a storyteller, that's what I'd like to be, that's what I'm trying to be’
Quintin Jardine
‘Jekyll and Hyde, in particular, is such an important novel in terms of suspense and setting a perfect scene for crime’
Alanna Knight
‘Another genius Scottish take on the theme of split personalities. Needs no further introduction’
Maggie O'Farrell
Robert Louis Stevenson was born on 13 November 1850 in Edinburgh, Scotland to a family of lighthouse designers and engineers. He studied at Edinburgh University from the age of seventeen in the hopes of following in his fathers footsteps and becoming an engineer, however he soon realized that his passion was for literature.
He travelled extensively in Europe and began his writing career during these years. He met his future wife, Fanny, in France in 1876 and they were married in 1880. Between the years 1880-1887 despite his developing illness Stevenson produced his best known works, Treasure Island (1883), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and two volumes of verse, A Child's Garden of Verses (1885) and Underwoods (1887). Stevenson died on December 3rd, 1894 at the age of 44 in Samoa, South Pacific.
STARTING POINTS FOR YOUR DISCUSSION
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The story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde has often been adapted for film and cinema. How do you think the book differs from the adaptations? Has your opinion of the story changed? Discuss using one example. (eg. the recent BBC series starring James Nesbitt, or the film Mary Reilly)
- The main narrative is provided by Utterson, how does this evoke suspense?
- How do you think the environment of Victorian Britain, which provides the setting for the story, emulates the dark themes portrayed by Stevenson?
- Do you think the duality represented through Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde represents an element of everyone’s inner psyche? Does everyone have a good and evil side?
- Mr Hyde is often described in biblical terms, e.g. ‘Satan’s signature’. What significance do you think these Biblical references bear to the plot?
- Dr Jekyll talks about the pleasures he wished to experience through his transformation. What pleasures do you think he was talking about?
- In modern society drug related crime is more apparent than ever. What parallels do you think one can draw from Dr Jekyll experience with narcotics in relation to modern times?
- The book has been describes as ‘one of the best guide books of Victorian times.’ Do you agree with this statement?
- In the final chapter, through the letter from Henry Jekyll to Utterson we are able to hear an account of events from the inside. What affect does this have on your feelings towards Dr Jekyll? Does it make you empathise with his character or add to your disdain?
- Why do you think, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde has remained such a classic since its first release in 1886?
NOVELS
Treasure Island (1883)
Prince Otto (1885)
The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses(1884)
Kidnapped(1886)
The Master of Ballantrae (1889)
The Wrong Box (1889)
The Wrecker (1892)
Catriona(1893)
The Ebb Tide (1894)
Weir of Hermiston (1896)
St. Ives: Being the Adventures of a French Prisoner in England (1897)
SHORT STORIES
A Lodging for the Night (1877)
The Sire De Malétroits Door (1877)
An Old Song (1877)
Edifying Letters of the Rutherford Family (1877)
Later-day Arabian Nights (1878)
Providence and the Guitar (1878)
The Pavilion on the Links (1880)
The Story of a Lie (1882)
The Merry Men (1882)
The Body Snatcher (1884)
Markheim (1885)
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)
Will O' the Mill (1887)
Thrawn Janet (1887)
Olalla (1887)
The Treasure of Franchard (1887)
The Misadventures of John Nicholson: A Christmas Story (1887)
The Bottle Imp (1891)
The Beach of Falesa (1893)
The Isle of Voice (1893)
POETRY
A Child's Garden of Verses (1885)
My Shadow and The Lamplighter
Underwoods (1887),
Songs of Travel and Other Verses (1896)
Ballads (1891)
TRAVEL WRITING
An Inland Voyage (1878)
Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879)
The Silverado Squatters (1883)
Across the Plains (written in 1879–80, published in 1892)
The Amateur Emigrant (written 1879–80, published 1895)
Frankenstein ~ Mary Shelley
The Turn of the Screw ~ Henry James
The Woman in White ~ Wilkie Collins
The Woman in Black ~ Susan Hill
The Picture of Dorian Grey ~ Oscar Wilde
Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs ~ Irvine Welsh
Dracula ~ Bram Stoker
Murders in the Rue Morgue ~ Edgar Allan Poe
Hear A L Kennedy reading from Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Ian Rankin investigates: Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde
HighBeam Encyclopedia – includes a list of articles about the book
Dracula
Jonathan Harker is an ambitious young lawyer, sent by his employer on an assignment to a client in Transylvania. He is welcomed by the gracious, aristocratic Count but soon finds himself imprisoned by his mysterious host and menaced by a predatory coterie of women. As the shadows close in he begins to realise that the Count does not intend for him to return home…
Back in England his fiancée Mina Murray and her friend Lucy Westenra are menaced by a malevolent, debilitating force which seems intent on causing suffering and destruction. Can the devil really have arrived on England’s shores? And what is it that he hungers for so desperately?
Slowly the patchwork narrative of diary entries, letters and newspaper clippings begins to reveal a terrifying answer, and Mina, Lucy and their friends must band together to save themselves, if they can.
‘An exercise in masculine anxiety and nationalist paranoia,
Stoker’s novel is filled with scenes which are staggeringly lurid and perverse’
Sarah Waters
Abraham “Bram” Stoker was born in a suburb of Dublin on 8th November 1847, the third of seven children. His parents were Abraham Stoker and the feminist Charlotte Mathilda Blake Thornley. Stoker was a delicate child and said of himself, "In my babyhood I used, I understand, to be often at the point of death. Certainly till I was about seven years old I never knew what it was to stand upright. I was naturally thoughtful, and the leisure of long illness gave opportunity for many thoughts which were fruitful according to their kind in later years."
As he grew he made a complete recovery and eventually went up to Trinity College, Dublin in 1864, where in addition to his studies he excelled as an outstanding athlete. He graduated in 1870, but maintained ties with the college, and later became friendly with the Wilde family when Oscar Wilde entered the college in 1871.
After university Stoker worked as a civil servant at Dublin Castle, combining his duties with writing in his spare time. He wrote his first book, Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland, and worked for a time as drama critic for the Dublin Evening Mail. His review of Hamlet came to the attention of the actor Henry Irving, who arranged a meeting. They became close friends, and eventually in 1878 Irving asked Stoker to become his manager.
In December of the same year Stoker married the famous belle Florence Balcombe (whose previous admirers included Oscar Wilde). The couple moved to London, where Stoker took up a position as business manager of Henry Irving's Lyceum Theatre and Florence gave birth to their only child, a son, born 31st December 1879. They named him Irving Noel for as a tribute to Henry Irving.
Stoker was to work for Irving for almost thirty years, but always found time to write alongside his day job, supplementing his income by producing short stories, novels and supernatural thrillers, as well as a biography Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (published in 1906, the year after the actor’s death). His association with Irving gave him access to London society, but the relationship was complex. According the biographer Barbara Belford, "Stoker indentured himself to Irving in the same way as Renfield bound himself to Dracula." It is also said that Stoker’s son, originally christened Irving Noel but always known as Noel, dropped the use of his first name out of exasperation and resentment of his father’s employer.
Bram Stoker died on 20th April 1912, and was cremated. His ashes are interred at Golders Green Crematorium, in the same urn as those of his son Noel.
Background to the novel
Stoker is thought to have begun research for a vampire novel as early as 1890, and there are many rumours surrounding the origins of the tale. Stoker’s son Noel apparently claimed that the novel originated in a nightmare his father had had after eating too much dressed crab. Others have said that a visit to Slains Castle at Cruden Bay was the inspiration for the story and that Stoker began writing the novel in Cruden Bay. Others point to the figure of Vlad Tepes or Vlad the Impaler as the inspiration for Count Dracula. However all these versions of events have been disputed by critics, and appropriately for a horror novel the true inspirations for the Count seem shrouded in mystery.
Certainly much of novel seems to originate in Stoker’s reading. He never visited Transylvania, despite the vivid descriptions in Dracula, and took all his local colour and accounts of local legends from research. The characterisations of the vampires, particularly the women, owe something to Sheridan Lefanu’s 1871 novel Carmilla, and it has been suggested that the epistolary form of the novel was influenced by Wilkie Collin’s The Woman in White, which is also told in diary form. However Stoker’s use of “supporting documentation” in the form of letters and fictional newspaper articles, adds to the form.
The novel was published in 1897, but as late as May of that year Stoker was using his original title “The Un-dead” – a term he coined and one that is indelibly associated with Dracula to this day.There is no interview available.
STARTING POINTS FOR YOUR DISCUSSION
- Over the years different critics have claimed that Dracula and the figure of the vampire is an allegory for different forms of evil – from aristocratic greed, to male aggression, to female emancipation, to sexually transmitted disease. What does Dracula mean to you and what do you find most frightening about him?
- The writer Sarah Waters has described Dracula as ‘An exercise in masculine anxiety and nationalist paranoia’. Do you agree? What anxieties do you think Bram Stoker was expressing through the character of Dracula?
- What aspects of the novel do you think would have been most shocking and frightening to contemporary readers, and how does this contrast with a modern reading of the novel?
- A critic at The New York Times wrote of Dracula, ‘Those who cannot find their own reflection in Bram Stoker’s still-living creature are surely the undead.’ Do you think this is true? What aspects of yourself do you find in the character of Dracula?
- Dracula is one of the most filmed and adapted novels of all time and almost everyone has encountered the character of Dracula in some form or other, even if they’ve never read the book. Did you have an idea of Dracula before you read the novel and how was it different to Bram Stoker’s character?
- Why do you think the character of Dracula has endured so well?
- What effect does contact with Dracula have on the various characters in the novel? How does their behaviour change? Does this differ between the men and the women?
- “We Szekelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flow the blood of many brave races who fought as the lion fought… Is it a wonder that we were a conquering face, that we were proud?”Dracula (p31-2)
Class is a strong theme throughout the novel; is it important that Dracula is a feudal landlord and what effect does it have on our reading of his character? How does Stoker characterise the peasants in Transylvania and the working-class of Whitby?
- The novel is, like Wuthering Heights and A Woman in White, not a straightforward narrative. Instead it is written in the form of diary entries, letters and ‘newspaper clippings’. Why do you think Stoker chose to frame the story in this way, and how successful do you think he is at evoking the different voices?
- Dracula is not the only character to live on in other novels – Mina Murray is also immortalised in the graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. The story has her leading a team of superheroes including the Invisible Man and Doctor Jekyll, after the death of her husband. The story suggests she has picked up more from Dracula than Stoker admits…
Do you agree Mina and Dracula are the most interesting characters in the novel, and do you find Mina an unconventional heroine?
For a full bibliography see Wikipedia
His most popular novels today include:
The Snake’s Pass (1890)
The Jewel of the Seven Stars (1903)
The Lady of the Shroud (1909)
The Lair of the White Worm (1911)
NOVELS:
Carmilla ~ Sheridin Lefanu (Soft editions)
Interview with the Vampire ~ Anne Rice (Time Warner)
The Historian ~ Elizabeth Kostova (Time Warner)
Frankenstein ~ Mary Shelley (Vintage) – read our guide
GRAPHIC NOVELS
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen ~ Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill (Titan)
BIOGRAPHY:
From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker ~ Paul Murray (Jonathan Cape)
Bram Stoker and the Man Who Was Dracula ~ Barbara Belford (Da Capo Press/Alfred Knopf)
Great Expectations
Pip, a young orphan boy, lives with his bad-tempered older sister and her kindly husband, Joe, in the marshes of Kent. Visiting his parents’ grave one day Pip encounters a vicious escaped convict, Magwitch, who he helps by providing him with a file and food; the convict is captured nevertheless but protects the young boy by claiming that it was he who stole the items. Pip is then hired as a playmate for Estella, the adopted daughter of the eccentric Miss Havisham; falling in love with the beautiful, but haughty young woman he dreams of becoming a gentleman worthy of her. Although wealthy Miss Havisham does nothing to intervene when Pip is apprenticed to Joe as a common labourer when he is informed that he has a secret benefactor and must move to London immediately to begin his education as a gentleman he assumes that it is Miss Havisham. He moves to the city of London with great expectations of increasing his social status and during this metamorphosis neglects his friendships with his family and former friends and begins a life of wealth and privilege.
Several years pass and, to Pip’s horror, his true benefactor is revealed to be Magwitch, rather than Miss Havisham. It transpires that the convict was so touched by young Pip’s kindness when he was on the run that when he was exiled from England he dedicated his life to making a fortune and rewarding the boy who helped him. Now, however, he needs Pip’s help again to evade the police and his former partner in crime. As Pip begins to see the good in a man he once despised, the truth about Estella’s parentage and the mystery of the man who jilted Miss Havisham so many years before are slowly revealed and the many strands of this spell-binding, classic novel come together.
‘He’s a marvellous writer’
William Trevor
‘A story of the traumas of sex and class.
My favourite moment is the one where Magwitch makes his stumbling way
up the shadowy staircase towards an unnerved but unsuspecting Pip:
the halting but inexorable rise of the repressed “from the darkness beneath”’
Sarah Waters
‘There is no one Dickens novel I could pick over all the others.
Dickens is huge—like the sky.
Pick any page of Dickens and it’s immediately recognizable as him,
yet he might be doing social satire, or farce, or horror,
or a psychological study of a murderer—or any combination of these’
Susannah Clarke
Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812 in Landport in Portsmouth, the second of eight children, and when he was five the family relocated to Chatham in Kent. When he was twelve years old he was sent to work in a shoe polish factory because his father had been imprisoned for debt. He earned six shillings a week pasting labels on the jars of thick polish and this money paid for his lodgings in Camden Town and helped him to support his family. At the age of seventeen, he became a court stenographer and, in 1830, he met his first love, Maria Beadnell. It is believed that she was the model for the character Dora in David Copperfield, which is regarded as Dickens’ most autobiographical work and was his own favourite. Maria's parents disapproved of the courtship and effectively ended the relationship when they sent her to school in Paris.
The Pickwick Papers, his first commercial success, was published in 1836, the same year that he married Catherine Hogarth. After a brief honeymoon in Chalk, Kent, they set up home in Bloomsbury, where they produced ten children. The serialisation of Oliver Twist began in 1837 while The Pickwick Papers was still running and Dickens went on to write over a dozen novels, including Hard Times and Bleak House. In 1853, Dickens gave his first public reading in Birmingham, England of A Christmas Carol and The Cricket on the Hearth. A year later in Bradford, Dickens performed for an audience of 3,700 people. Between 1858 and his death in 1870, Dickens performed hundreds of public readings of his work, which were a massive popular and financial success. By the late 1860's Dickens' readings had become so eagerly anticipated that sometimes thousands had to be turned away.
On 9 June 1865, while returning from France, Dickens was involved in the Staplehurst rail crash in which the first seven carriages of the train plunged off a cast iron bridge that was being repaired. The only first-class carriage to remain on the track was the one in which Dickens was travelling. Dickens spent some time tending to the wounded and the dying before rescuers arrived. Before leaving, he remembered the unfinished manuscript for Our Mutual Friend, and returned to his carriage to retrieve it
Dickens died on 9 June 1870 leaving his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished. He is buried in Westminster Abbey. Dickens' will stipulated that no memorial be erected to honour him. The only life-size bronze statue of Dickens, cast in 1891 by Francis Edwin Elwell, is in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the United States.
There is no author interview available.
STARTING POINTS FOR YOUR DISCUSSION
- Discuss the theme of ‘expectations’ – how are Pip’s expectations in life different from those of his brother-in-law Joe, Estella, Miss Havisham and Herbert Pocket?
- How different do you think Pip’s life would have been had he never left the forge and travelled to London? Are the lessons he learnt on his journey necessary for him to be happy in his later life?
- Why do you think Pip falls in love with Estella when she is so cruel to him, and what keeps him loving her despite her apparent indifference to him? Compare Estella and Biddy’s characters, and Biddy and Joe’s relationship with that of Estella and Pip.
- Great Expectations explores themes of suffering and guilt but there are also many moments of irony and humour. Were you surprised that in a serious novel the author included more humorous characters like Wemmick and his Aged Parent?
- Consider the characterisation of Miss Havisham and her treatment of Estella: do you feel sorry for her and the way she ended her life?
- Discuss how Dickens creates a sense of atmosphere: which settings were most vivid to you?
- How important is the theme of social class to the novel? Do you think Pip’s desire to be a gentleman to win Estella’s hand is still relevant today?
- Why do you think Magwitch is so affected by Pip’s behaviour that he dedicates his life to making him into a gentleman?
- Who was your favourite character in the novel?
- In the novel’s original conclusion, Estella and Pip were finally separated from one another, but on the suggestion of a friend Dickens changed the ending to the present one: do you think he was right to follow his friend’s advice? Which ending do you prefer?
OTHER BOOKS BY CHARLES DICKENS
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1837)
aka The Pickwick Papers
The Adventures of Oliver Twist(1838)
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1839)
Barnaby Rudge(1841)
Master Humphrey's Clock (1841)
The Old Curiosity Shop (1841)
A Christmas Carol(1843)
aka Being a Ghost Story of Christmas
The Chimes (1844)
aka A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In
The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1844)
The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home(1845)
The Battle of Life (1846)
The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848)
aka A Fancy for Christmas-Time
Dombey and Son (1848)
David Copperfield (1850)
Bleak House (1853)
Hard Times: For These Times (1854)
Little Dorrit (1857)
A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
The Uncommercial Traveller (1860)
Great Expectations (1861)
Our Mutual Friend (1865)
No Thoroughfare (1867) (with Wilkie Collins)
The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870)
The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices (1890) (with Wilkie Collins)
Middlemarch ~ George Eliot (Vintage Classics, 2007) - read our guide
Dickens ~ Peter Ackroyd (Vintage, 2002)
London ~ Peter Ackroyd (Chatto and Windus, 2000)
Great Expectations ~ 1917, 1946 and 1998 film versions
Gulliver's Travels: and Alexander Pope's Verses on Gulliver's Travels
Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World, or Gulliver’s Travels, was published pseudonymously in 1726. Swift’s masterpiece took him over six years to write.
The book opens with Lemuel Gulliver, a ship’s surgeon, shipwrecked on the island of Lilliput, whose inhabitants are only six inches tall and who regard him as a dangerous ‘man-mountain’. Being so small, the Lilliputians’ social customs and pomp seem absurd, and their petty political debates (should an egg be broken at the big or small end?) are likewise appropriate to their stature. Gulliver travels on to encounter the giants of Brobdingnag, whose king is disgusted by what Gulliver tells him about England; the cerebral scientists and philosophers of Laputa and Lagado, who are so engrossed in thought that they have to be ‘flapped’ awake during conversations and who employ all their knowledge uselessly trying to extract sunshine from cucumbers and return excrement to its original food-stuffs; and the unfortunate Struldbrugs, who are immortal but extremely old.
In the final section, Gulliver travels to the land of the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos. The Houyhnhnms are horses blessed with reason and virtue, and are so incapable of lying and deceit that they have no word for it in their language. They demonstrate to Gulliver that reason alone is sufficient for the proper conduct of life. Alongside them live the anthropoid Yahoos, who look human but live in a state of brutal degeneracy.
Gulliver develops a violent dislike towards the Yahoos, and, when he is repatriated to England, is so disgusted by the ‘civilised’ Yahoos around him that he spends his days with horses rather than living with his own family.
‘Swift's world-famous satire was an instant bestseller…
his vision is dark, often verging on the obscene’
Robert McCrum, Guardian
Jonathan Swift was born in 1667 in Dublin, and educated at Trinity College in that city. He was a distant cousin of John Dryden. Swift’s father was a lawyer who had gone to Ireland after the Restoration, but he died before his son’s birth. Little is known about Swift’ early life, but it is thought that his English-born mother returned to England after his birth, leaving him to be raised by his father’s family. In 1688 he left Ireland for England where he became secretary to Sir William Temple, however he returned to Ireland two years later for health reasons.
Over the next few years he travelled between Ireland and England, and obtained an MA from Hertford College, Oxford, in 1692. Eventually he was ordained to the Church of Ireland, and in 1713 he became dean of St Patrick’s in Dublin. During this time he wrote many pamphlets in support of Irish causes, including A Modest Proposal (1729), a savage satire proposing that the poor of Ireland support themselves by selling their children to the rich for consumption as meat. He also began work on Gulliver’s Travels.
Although nominally a Whig, Swift became editor of the Tory journal, the Examiner, and political satire forms a large part of his life’s work. Gulliver’s Travels is the only book for which he received any money (£200).
Swift gave one-third of his income to charities and he left the bulk of his fortune to fund St Patrick’s Hospital for Imbeciles. He was himself thought by many to be insane in his later years.
It is unclear whether Swift ever formally married, but he was very close to Esther Johnson, known as Stella, whom he had originally met through William Temple when she was 8 years old. Some claim that they married secretly in 1716 but this has never been proved. After his death in 1745, he was buried beside her in St Patrick’s, Dublin.
There is a memorial to Swift in St Patrick’s Cathedral, bearing a Latin epitaph, that he composed himself. In translation it reads: ‘Here lies the body of Jonathan Swift, D.D., dean of this cathedral, where burning indignation can no longer lacerate his heart. Go, traveller, and imitate if you can a man who was an undaunted champion of liberty.’
W B Yeats composed his own translation which runs:
Swift has sailed into his rest.
Savage indignation there
cannot lacerate his breast.
Imitate him if you dare,
world-besotted traveller.
He served human liberty.
Jonathan Swift
"I have employd my time… in finishing correcting, amending, and Transcribing my Travels, in four parts Compleat newly Augmented, and intended for the press when the world shall deserve them, or rather when a Printer shall be found brave enough to venture his Eares…the chief end I propose to my self in all my labors is to vex the world rather than divert it, and if I could compass that designe without hurting my own person or Fortune I would be the Indefatigable writer you have ever seen…I have ever hated all Nations professions and Communityes and all my love is towards individuals for instance I hate the tribe of Lawyers, but I love Councellor such a one, Judge such a one for so with Physicians – I will not Speak of my own Trade – Soldiers, English, Scotch, French; and the rest but principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I hartily love John, Peter, Thomas and so forth. This is the system upon which I have governed my self many years (but do not tell) and so I shall go on till I have done with them…Upon this great foundation of Misanthropy…the whole building of my Travels is erected."
Taken from a letter by Swift to Alexander Pope, 29 September 1725
STARTING POINTS FOR YOUR DISCUSSION
- Gulliver’s Travels has frequently been adapted for children, and according to Swift’s friend and contemporary John Gay it was read ‘from the cabinet council to the nursery’. Do you think the novel in its original form is suitable for children? Why do you think so many people have wanted to adapt children’s versions?
- Swift was a political pamphleteer before writing Gulliver’s Travels and the book was conceived as a satire upon the state of European government. What political points do you think Swift was trying to make with each of the lands? Are his criticisms still relevant? If so, what does each land have to tell us about human nature and politics today?
- The novel is highly structured in terms of Gulliver’s personal journey and the nature of the lands he travels through. For example each land can act as a contrasting pair with another land (big/small, complex/simplistic). What other forms of structure and progression can you see in the novel?
- The Vintage edition is published with many archaic spellings (for example rouzed for roused, publick for public, and tryal for trial). Did you enjoy this or did you find it distracting? What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of modernising texts?
- ‘I have ever hated all Nations professions and Communityes and all my love is towards individuals for instance I hate the tribe of Lawyers, but I love Councellor such a one…I hate and detest that animal called man, although I hartily love John, Peter, Thomas and so forth.’ Taken from Jonathan Swift’s letter to Alexander Pope (1725). What evidence for this can you find in Gulliver’s Travels? Do you agree with Swift?
- Which land would you most like to visit yourself?
- Some critics have described Gulliver’s Travels as proto-Science Fiction. How far does it fit the genre? What elements of Sci-Fi can you find in the novel?
- Several feminist writers, including Davy King and Alison Fell, have written about the role of Mrs Gulliver. Why do you think they decided to do this? Were you interested in Mrs Gulliver’s character?
- Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travels, according to a letter he wrote to Pope, ‘to vex the world, not to divert it.’ Do you think he succeeded?
The Battle of the Books (1704)
An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708)
Journal to Stella (1710–13)
A Modest Proposal (1729)
Verses on the Death of Dr Swift (1739)
Jonathan Swift, A Hypocrite Reversed: A Critical Biography ~ David Nokes
The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift (5 volumes)
The Life and Strange and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe ~ Daniel Defoe
Candide ~ Voltaire
The Rape of the Lock ~ Alexander Pope
Atomised ~ Michel Houellebecq - read our guide
The Mistress of Lilliput ~ Alison Fell
Gulliver's Travels ~ retold by Martin Jenkins (a modernised version)
Interesting biography of Swift, fuller bibliography and some portraits and photographs
E-text of Swift’s A Modest Proposal
Essays on Swift’s life, religious and political beliefs, together with useful resources on the historical and political context for his writing.
I Capture The Castle
I Capture the Castle was first published in 1949 and is set in the British countryside of the 1930s. 'I write this sitting in the kitchen sink' is the famous first line of this witty and moving classic about a girl reaching adulthood and experiencing love for the first time.
Cassandra Mortmain lives in a crumbling castle in the middle of nowhere and records her extraordinary life with her bohemian and impoverished family in a series of journals. She vividly, and frankly, depicts her life with her odd and enchanting family. The household consists of her little brother Thomas, her beautiful, bored sister, Rose, her fadingly glamorous stepmother, Topaz, who enjoys walking the grounds naked at night, and her eccentric novelist father who keeps them all in poverty as a result of his writer's block. Finally, there is Stephen, dazzlingly handsome and consumed with unrequited love for Cassandra.
Cassandra's journals describe how the Mortmain's isolated existence is radically altered when the American heirs to the castle arrive, bringing new romantic opportunities for both sisters.
The Vintage edition includes an introduction by Valerie Grove who has also written a biography of Dodie Smith called Dear Dodie. I Capture the Castle sold over a million copies after its first publication by Heinemann and was made into a major film in 2003 - www.capturethecastlemovie.com.
'This book has one of the most charismatic
narrators I've ever met'
J. K. Rowling
'I know of few novels - except Pride
and Prejudice - that inspire as much fierce lifelong
affection in their readers'
Joanna Trollope
'A delicious, compulsively readable novel
about young love and its vicissitudes'
Erica Jong
'It's as fresh as if it were written this morning
and as classic as Jane Austen. I'm very happy to have met it'
Donald Westlake
'A good story, flourishing characters,
and the most persuasive narrative voice.
This is a clever book, beneath the surface
simplicity…It is Cassandra's voice, a marriage of
artlessness and shrewd perception, that is the
touch of genius.'
Penelope Lively, Guardian
'To say that I couldn't put it down is hardly original,
but true…I think it is a book that will be much lived
in by many people, because you can live inside it, like Dickens.'
Christopher Isherwood
'A sparkling novel, a work of wit, irony and
feeling…uncork the
champagne for I Capture the Castle'
Los Angeles Times
'Dreamy and funny...an odd, shimmering
timelessness clings to its pages.
A thousand and one cheers for its reissue'
Entertainment Weekly
Dodie Smith was a dramatist, novelist and writer for children. She was born
in Lancashire on May 3,1896, grew up in Manchester and trained at RADA. She
began her playwriting career in 1931 when she scored a hit with her play Autumn
Crocus. In 1939, she went to US with her manager Alec Beesley whom she later
married. There she wrote for Hollywood, made a close friend of Christopher Isherwood
and acquired the first of her beloved Dalmatian dogs. Her bestselling novel,
I Capture the Castle, was published in 1949. The Beesleys returned to
the UK in 1954 and, in 1956, the fantastically successful, The One Hundred
and One Dalmatians was published. Between 1974 and 1985 Dodie Smith wrote
four volumes of memoirs; Look Back With Love, Look Back With Mixed
Feelings, Look Back With Astonishment and Look Back With Gratitude.
She died in November, 1990.
There is no author interview with Dodie Smith available.
STARTING POINTS FOR YOUR DISCUSSION
- As I Capture the Castle is made up of Cassandra's diaries, she is
'captured' in the novel just as much as she herself endeavours to 'capture'
life in the castle. In what ways does Cassandra change during the months the
novel covers?
-
' "Which would be nicest - Jane with a touch of Charlotte, or Charlotte with a touch of Jane?"' Cassandra repeatedly refers to Pride and Prejudice and two of the reviews quoted above also make a connection between I Capture the Castle and Jane Austen. Can you identify examples of the influence of Jane Austen and/or Charlotte Brontë in Dodie Smith's writing? How do the other references to literature in the novel affect your reading?
-
Consider the attitudes to class depicted in the novel. In what ways can the Mortmains be seen to be a particularly modern family and in what ways do their attitudes reflect the standards of the time?
-
'The only Henry James novel I ever tried to read was What Maisie Knew, when I was about nine - I expected it to be a book for children.' I Capture the Castle is seen as a classic example of crossover literature which appeals to both adults and children. What other examples of this sort of writing have you come across and how do they compare with I Capture the Castle?
-
Compare Cassandra's feelings about her home and the countryside with her experiences in London?
-
'It is a pity that Simon is the heir, because Rose thinks the beard is disgusting; but perhaps we can get it off.' How do you feel about the way men are portrayed in this novel?
PLAYS
Autumn Crocus, 1931
Service, 1932
Touch Wood, 1934
Call It A Day, 1935
Bonnet Over the Windmill, 1937
Dear Octopus, 1938
Lovers and Friends, 1943
Letter from Paris, 1952
FICTION
The New Moon with the Old, 1963
The Town in Bloom, 1965
It Ends with Revelations, 1967
A Tale of Two Families, 1970
The Girl from the Candle-lit Bath, 1978
CHILDREN'S FICTION
The Hundred and One Dalmations, 1956
The Starlight Barking, 1967
The Midnight Kittens, 1978
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Look Back with Love, 1974
Look Back with Mixed Feelings, 1978
Look Back in Astonishment, 1979
Look Back with Gratitude, 1985
Dear Dodie ~ Valerie Grove
Cider with Rosie ~ Laurie Lee
My Family and Other Animals ~ Gerald Durrell
To Kill a Mockingbird ~ Harper Lee
Pride and Prejudice ~ Jane Austen
Lost Years ~ Christopher Isherwood
Jane Eyre
Orphaned at a young age, Jane Eyre is sent to live with her aunt, Mrs. Reed. Bullied by her cousins and aunt, Jane lashes out one day and is sent away to Lowood School as punishment. She is very unhappy at Lowood School, where she is treated cruelly by the staff, particularly the headmaster Mr Brocklehurst, an abusive and hypocritical man. Jane befriends Helen Burns, who is subsequently killed by a tuberculosis epidemic that sweeps the school. The epidemic also brings Brocklehurst’s cruelty to light, and after he is replaced, Jane spends 8 happy years at Lowood – 6 as a student, 2 as a teacher.
Deciding at last to leave Lowood, Jane accepts a post as governess at Thornfield Hall, a nearby estate, caring for Adele, the French charge of Mr. Rochester. Though Rochester is an ugly, bad-tempered man, he is Jane’s equal in passion and ungovernable spirit, and Jane falls in love with him. She saves Rochester from a fire in his bedroom one night, which he intimates was started by a drunken servant named Grace Poole. But Grace Poole continues to work at Thornfield, and other violent and unexplained occurrences bring Jane and Mr Rochester closer, while deepening the mystery that surrounds Thornfield. Jane sinks into despondency when Rochester brings home a beautiful but vicious woman named Blanche Ingram. Jane expects Rochester to propose to Blanche. But Rochester instead proposes to Jane, who accepts almost disbelievingly.
The wedding day arrives, and as Jane and Mr. Rochester prepare to exchange their vows, Rochester’s friend Mr. Mason cries out that Rochester already has a wife. Mason introduces himself as the brother of that wife—a woman named Bertha. Rochester does not deny Mason’s claims, but he explains that Bertha has gone mad. He takes Jane back to Thornfield, where they witness the insane Bertha Mason scurrying around on all fours and growling like an animal. Bertha was the real cause of the mysterious fire earlier in the story. Knowing that it is impossible for her to be with Rochester, Jane flees Thornfield.
Penniless and hungry, Jane is forced to beg and to sleep in the open. At last, a curate,St. John and his sisters Mary and Diana and take her in. They become friends, though Jane refuses to tell them anything of her past. St John gives her the post of mistress at the village school, and after secretly inquiring into her history, he reveals they are cousins, and that Jane has inherited £20,000 from her uncle.
St. John, a gifted, devout but cold man, is determined to travel to India as a missionary, and, judging Jane to be a suitable companion, he asks her to marry him. Jane instinctively refuses, as they do not love one another, but St.John is convinced it is her duty. While tormented by indecision, Jane hears a supernatural voice, Mr Rochester’s, calling to her across the Moors. Jane rushes back to Thornfield to find that it has been burned to the ground, that Bertha Mason died in the blaze and that Rochester was crippled and blinded in his attempt to save her. As his essential companion and true love, Jane is at last Rochester’s equal partner, and they marry at last.
‘One of the most perfectly structured novels of all time’
Sarah Waters
‘At the end we are steeped through and through
with the genius, the vehemence, the indignation of Charlotte Brontë’
Virginia Woolf
Charlotte Brontë was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, the third of six children, to Patrick Brontë and his wife, Maria Branwell. Maria died of cancer in 1821, leaving five daughters and a son to the care of her sister Elizabeth Branwell. In August 1824, Charlotte was sent with three of her sisters, Emily, Maria, and Elizabeth, to the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge in Lancashire (which she would describe as Lowood School in Jane Eyre). Its poor conditions, Charlotte maintained, permanently affected her health and physical development and hastened the deaths of her two elder sisters, who died of tuberculosis in 1825 soon after they were removed from the school.
Charlotte continued her education at Roe Head School in Mirfield. During this period she wrote her novella The Green Dwarf under the name of Wellesley. Charlotte returned as a teacher from 1835 to 1838. In 1839 she took up the first of many positions as governess to various families in Yorkshire, a career she pursued until 1841. In 1842 she and Emily travelled to Brussels to enroll in a pensionnat. In return for board and tuition, Charlotte taught English and Emily taught music. Charlotte finally returned to Haworth in January 1844 and later used her time at the pensionnat as the inspiration for some of The Professor and Villette.
In May 1846, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne published a joint collection of poetry under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Although the book failed to attract interest (only two copies were sold), the sisters decided to continue writing for publication and began work on their first novels. Charlotte continued to use the name 'Currer Bell' when she published her first two novels.
Charlotte's brother, Branwell, the only son of the family, died of chronic bronchitis in 1848. Emily and Anne both died of pulmonary tuberculosis in December 1848 and May 1849, respectively. Charlotte and her father were now left alone. In view of the enormous success of Jane Eyre, she was persuaded by her publisher to visit London occasionally, where she revealed her true identity and began to move in a more exalted social circle, becoming friends with Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Makepeace Thackeray and G. H. Lewes. However, she never left Haworth for more than a few weeks at a time as she did not want to leave her aging father's side.
In June 1854, Charlotte married Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father's curate, and became pregnant very soon thereafter. Her health declined rapidly during this time. Charlotte and her unborn child died March 31, 1855.There is no interview with Charlotte Bronte available.
STARTING POINTS FOR YOUR DISCUSSION
- How much difference does it make to Jane Eyre that it is told in the first person? What sort of voice does Jane have? Do you trust her as a narrator?
- Jane is not a typical Victorian heroine – she has no wealth, family, social position or beauty. In what ways is she a true heroine? Which other literary heroines does she remind you of?
- Several religious or moral figures appear in Jane Eyre. How do you think they are represented? Think in particular of Helen Burns, St John and Mr. Brocklehurst.
- Is Mr. Rochester an attractive character? What makes Jane fall in love with him?
- Is Jane Eyre a feminist novel? If so, why?
- Jane has several homes during the course of the novel, which she is either forced to leave or runs away from. Why do you think this is? Does she ever really belong anywhere?
- How does Jane’s character grow and change? How important is her childhood and education to her adult self? Does she change when she is at Thornfield?
- Why do you think that Bertha, once beautiful, has become insane and violent? how do you think Rochester would treat Jane if she became insane? Would it be different from how he treated Bertha?
OTHER BOOKS BY CHARLOTTE BRONTE
FICTION
The Green Dwarf, 1833
Shirley, 1849
Villette, 1853
The Professor, 1857
POETRY
Apostasy
Evening Solace
Frances
Gilbert
Life
Mementos
On The Death Of Anne Bronte
Parting
Passion
Pilate's Wife's Dream
Preference
Presentiment
Regret
Stanzas
The Letter
The Missionary
The Teacher's Monologue
The Wife's Will
The Wood
Winter Stores
Thirteenth Tale ~ Diane Setterfield
Wide Sargasso Sea ~ Jean Rhys
Rebecca ~ Daphne du Maurier
Mansfield Park ~ Jane Austen
North & South ~ Elizabeth Gaskell
Wuthering Heights ~ Emily Bronte
Agnes Grey ~ Anne Bronte
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall ~ Anne Bronte
The Life of Charlotte Bronte ~ Elizabeth Gaskell
The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination ~ Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar
The Brontë Parsonage Museum and Brontë Society website
Mrs Dalloway
Mrs Dalloway portrays the events of a single June day in London in 1923. As Clarissa Dalloway prepares for a party she is to give that evening, her alter-ego, Septimus Warren- Smith, a shell-shocked war-veteran descends into madness. Using stream-of-consciousness technique, Virginia Woolf explores the thoughts, emotions and relationships of these two characters and others connected with them. The narrative gently flows from one character's mind to another's, so that we are offered many different perspectives of the world. As Septimus's fate unravels - though he and Clarissa Dalloway never meet - we come to see that this young man functions as a kind of other self for Mrs Dalloway and the ensuing events that unfold in Septimus's life strike a melancholy chord of truth deep in her soul that she cannot deny.
'Mrs Dalloway contains some of the most beautiful, complex,
incisive and idiosyncratic sentences ever written in English,
and that alone would be reason enough to read it.
It is one of the most moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century'.
Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours
Virginia Woolf was a great writer. Her voice is distinctive;
her style is her own…Woolf was not an imitator. She was an innovator
who redefined the novel and pointed
the way towards its future possibilities'
Jeanette Winterson, author of Oranges are Not the Only Fruit
'In her writing, even her light writing, central control entered.
She was master of her complicated equipment, and though most of us like
to write sometimes seriously and sometimes in fun, few of us can so manage
the two impulses that they speed each other up, as hers did.'
E.M. Forster
'None of that company -except, perhaps T.S Eliot…
did more to establish the possibilities of literary innovation'
Frank Kermode
'There is something magnificent as well as touching about her
achievement [in Mrs Dalloway]'
Claire Tomalin, former literary editor of Sunday Times
Virginia Woolf was born on 25 January 1882 in London to Leslie Stephen and
Julia Jackson Duckworth. Her father Leslie Stephen, a former clergyman, was
a journalist, biographer and historian of ideas and Virginia grew up in a wealthy,
privileged environment with continual access to her father's library, his writing
talent and his intellectual conversation. Virginia suffered from unstable mental
health throughout her life. She suffered from three major mental breakdowns,
the first occurring after the death of her mother in 1895. Following the death
of her father in 1904, Virginia suffered her second breakdown and attempted
to commit suicide by jumping out of a window. Following her father's death,
Woolf and her siblings moved to Bloomsbury and it was here that she met The
Bloomsbury Group including E.M. Forster and Lytton Strachey. The Bloomsbury
group were dedicated above all to the liberal discussion of politics and art
and, in 1912, Woolf married a fellow member, Leonard Woolf. In 1917, Leonard
founded The Hogarth Press in order for them to be able to freely publish their
own works. Subsequently, in 1913 Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out
was published and an extraordinary literary output of ground-breaking material
was to follow this over the course of her life. Her most notable publications
included Night and Day, Jacob's Room, Mrs Dalloway, To
the Lighthouse, Orlando, A Room of One's Own, The Waves,
The Years and Between the Acts. Virginia's compulsive drive to
work and her natural fragile state may have contributed to the mental breakdowns
she suffered during her life, indeed her third breakdown occurred the year her
first book was published. Sadly, in March 1941, Woolf committed suicide by drowning
herself in the river Ouse, leaving a note behind for her husband and sister.
She feared her madness was returning and that she would not be able to continue
writing.
Author interview not available (here are some comments by Virginia Woolf instead)
On Mrs Dalloway
'I adumbrate here a study of insanity and suicide, the world seen by the sane
and the insane, side by side'.
'In this book I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense.'
Extracts taken from A Passionate Apprentice: the early journals - Virginia Woolf, Pimlico, February 2004
'Descriptive writing is dangerous & tempting. It is easy, with little expense of brain power, to make something. One seizes some broad aspect, as of water or colour, & makes a note of it. This single quality gives the tone of a piece. As a matter of fact, the subject is probably infinitely subtle, no more amenable to impressionistic treatment than the human character. What one records is really the state of ones own mind.'
Woolf wishes to discover 'some real thing behind appearances'. These 'moments of being' she describes as blows of 'sledge-hammer force' 'as one gets older one has a greater power through reason to provide an explanation; and this explanation blunts the sledge-hammer force of the blow…the shock receiving capacity is what makes me a writer. I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. I feel that I have had a blow…it is, or will become a revelation of some order; it is some token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost it's power to hurt me; it gives me…a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me.'
'To be socially great, I believe, is a really noble ambition - for consider what it means. You have, for a certain space of time to realise as nearly as can be, an ideal…You come to a party meaning to give pleasure; therefore you leave your sorrows and worries at home - for the moment…The truth is, to be successful socially one wants the courage of a hero. There is nothing really so desperately difficult, I am sure, as laughter. The whole pressure of the world is to make you take things seriously…It is a luxury to most people to express their emotions. Society is the most bracing antidote for this kind of thing; to be successful I think one must be a Stoic with a heart.'
Her suicide note (addressed to her husband Leonard Woolf and her sister, Vanessa Bell):
'I have a feeling I shall go mad. I cannot go on any longer in these terrible times. I hear voices and cannot concentrate on my work. I have fought against it but cannot any longer. I owe all my happiness to you but cannot go on and spoil your life.'
STARTING POINTS FOR YOUR DISCUSSION
- Virginia Woolf describes her stream-of-consciousness technique as a 'tunnelling
process'. 'I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters…I tell
the past in instalments as I have need of it.' How do you think the use
of the stream of consciousness technique affects your reading of Mrs Dalloway?
- Clarissa's insight that Septimus 'was somehow like her' may seem radical in light of their differences in social standing, gender and background. How can Septimus be seen as Mrs Dalloway's alter-ego or other self in the novel?
-
Mrs Dalloway may be read as a critique of a post-war society that kills the soul and that has lost all sense of value and direction. Think about Septimus's descent into madness, his medical treatment and Mrs Dalloway's response to his suicide ('Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate.'), in light of these ideas.
-
Virginia Woolf examines the nature of our sense of self in Mrs Dalloway. Mrs Dalloway is aware that she cannot be compartmentalized into a single person 'She alone knew how different the parts were', 'she would not say of anyone in the world now that they were this or they were that'. Examine the idea of sense of self in Mrs Dalloway in light of these characters and any other characters you may wish to bring into the discussion.
-
Conversion is seen as a constant threat in the novel. Which characters wish to convert others, and what are they trying to convert others to? Are some characters more susceptible to conversion than others?
-
Nature is referred to many times throughout the novels. Look at they way certain characters relate to the natural world. What does this tell you about them?
The Voyage Out 1915
Night and Day 1919
Jacob's Ladder 1922
To the Lighthouse 1927
Orlando 1928
A Room of One's Own 1929
The Waves 1931
Flush 1933
The Years 1937
Three Guineas 1938
Roger Fry 1940
Between the Acts 1941
Virginia Woolf ~ Hermione Lee
Tristram Shandy ~ Laurence Sterne
The Hours ~ Michael Cunningham
North and South
When Margaret Hales’ cousin, Edith, marries Captain Lennox, and, her aunt, Mrs Shaw, moves to warmer climates for her health, she returns home from Harley Street to rejoin her parents in Helstone, Hampshire. Enjoying the quieter life of her father’s parish, Margaret thinks that nothing can spoil the peace. However a surprise proposal from Edith’s brother-in-law, barrister Mr Henry Lennox, and a dramatic decision by her father occur on the same day, which change her settled life forever.
Mr Hale has a crisis of faith therefore decides to leave the church to become a tutor in Milton, an industrial town in Northern England. Milton is sooty and noisy, centred around the cotton mills that employ most of its inhabitants. Arriving from a rural idyll in the south, Margaret is initially shocked by the social unrest – especially the workers’ strike - and poverty she finds in her new hometown. Yet as she begins to befriend her neighbours, the Higginses, and her stormy relationship with the mill-owner John Thornton develops, she starts to see Milton in a different light. However, her mother does not react so well to her new life and becomes ill.
As the workers’ strike intensifies, Mrs Hale worsens and the doctor informs Margaret that her mother will not recover. To ease her mother’s pains, she must procure a waterbed from the Thorntons. As she walks to Mr Thornton’s cotton mill and residence, she realises that something is seriously wrong. She is ushered into the Thornton’s house as the workers breakdown the gate and demand to see Mr Thornton, who has employed Irish workers to run the mill while those in Milton strike thus enraging them. As he tries to command their attention, Margaret rushes out to guard him from harm. After this selfless and caring act, Mr Thornton proposes to her only to be turned down.
As Mrs Hale deteriorates and her husband and her loyal servant, Dixon, sit by her side, Margaret arranges for her brother, Frederick, who is in exile after leading a mutiny in the Navy, to visit in secret. On the day Frederick arrives their mother dies. Even as they grieve, the Hales realise how dangerous it is for Frederick to be in England especially with a large bounty out for his arrest. He must return to Spain – and soon. Before he leaves Mr Hale and Margaret persuade him to talk to Mr Lennox about the likelihood of him being acquitted at a Court Marshal.
As Margaret and Frederick spend their last few minutes together before his train to London, Mr Thornton rides by, assuming they are lovers he leaves them in peace doing his best to ignore the injury to his feelings. However the loving goodbye between the siblings is shattered when Leonards, an old acquaintance of Fredrick’s, recognises him. A struggle ensures and Leonards falls, later dying of his injuries. In a bid to keep her brother’s visit and identity a secret, Margaret lies to the police about being at the station when Leonards was pushed and Mr Thornton, a magistrate of the town, does not expose her lie. Embarrassed by her behaviour, she cannot bear to face Mr Thornton or bring herself to explain what happened.
Mr Hale takes up the invitation of Mr Bell, Margaret’s godfather, to visit him in Oxford in an attempt to raise his spirits – while he is there Mr Hale passes away peacefully in his sleep. Left alone in Milton and now an orphan, Margaret is soon joined by her aunt Shaw, who persuades her to come and live with herself, Edith, Captain Lennox and their young family, who have recently returned from Corfu. Edith agrees and enters a life she once knew, but is now very alien to her.
Back in Milton, Mr Thornton’s fortunes crumble as Margaret’s bloom; upon the death of Mr Bell she inherits properties in Milton and an income. Hearing of Mr Thornton’s difficulties, she resolves to help him financially. The pair meet in London and soon realise their true feelings. The book ends end in a proposal, and the promise of a happier future together.
‘Pah! to Dickens. Eat your heart out, Little Nell.
That Elizabeth Gaskell could write a death scene to make your socks melt’
Scotsman
‘Gaskell saw the emotional and economic realities of
ordinary life with a steely honesty’
The Times
‘One of the most perceptive novels of the mid-Victorian era’
Glasgow Herald
‘North and South explores themes that still seem strikingly modern.
One hundred and fifty years after it appeared, the North-South divide -
and the social and economic gulf it implies - remains intact’
Daily Mail
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (née Stevenson) was born on 29 September 1810 in Chelsea, London. Her father William, was a civil servant. Her mother, Eliza, died on 29 October 1811 and she was brought up by Hannah Lumb, her aunt, in Knutsford, Cheshire, a small town near Manchester which later became the basis for Cranford.
In 1832 she married William Gaskell, who was a Unitarian minister and they settled in the industrial city of Manchester. They had several children: a stillborn daughter in 1833, followed by Marianne (1834), Margaret Emily (1837), known as Meta, Florence Elizabeth (1842), William (1844-1845) and Julia Bradford (1846).
After