If You Love, Love Openly
Twenty monks and one nun, who was named Eshun, were practicing meditation with a certain Zen master.
Eshun was very pretty even though her head was shaved and her dress plain. Several monks secretly fell in love with her. One of them wrote her a love letter, insisting upon a private meeting.
Eshun did not reply. The following day the master gave a lecture to the group, and when it was over, Eshun arose. Addressing the one who had written her, she said: "If you really love me so much, come and embrace me now."
My Thoughts: Zen is a meditation. Practicing your mind to get rid of external thoughts. You need to focus on your inside. LOVE, similar to anger, happiness, etc. is just a feeling which comes out of a chemical reactions in body. Ofcourse this reaction is initiated by our thoughts towards the externals. Zen is practicing your mind....its not so easy to control it...it takes long time. Eshun, by asking the monk to embrace her was not to proove his love for her but to remind him that he need to overcome the external thoughts.
சனி, 4 ஜூலை, 2009
No Loving - Kindness
No Loving - Kindness
There was an old woman in China who had supported a monk for over twenty years. She had built a little hut for him and fed him while he was meditating. Finally she wondered just what progress he had made in all this time.
To find out, she obtained the help of a girl rich in desire. "Go and embrace him," she told her, "and then ask him suddenly: 'What now?'"
The girl called upon the monk and without much ado caressed him, asking him what he was going to do about it.
"An old tree grows on a cold rock in winter," replied the monk somewhat poetically. "Nowhere is there any warmth."
The girl returned and related what he had said.
"To think I fed that fellow for twenty years!" exclaimed the old woman in anger. "He showed no consideration for your need, no disposition to explain your condition. He need not have responded to passion, but at least he could have evidenced some compassion;"
She at once went to the hut of the monk and burned it down.
My Thoughts: Zen is a pratice of getting rid of thoughts and emotions. It is foolishness to expect love or concerns from a zen monk. Please do not misinterpret this as zen hate people. They are heading towards absolute nothingness.
There was an old woman in China who had supported a monk for over twenty years. She had built a little hut for him and fed him while he was meditating. Finally she wondered just what progress he had made in all this time.
To find out, she obtained the help of a girl rich in desire. "Go and embrace him," she told her, "and then ask him suddenly: 'What now?'"
The girl called upon the monk and without much ado caressed him, asking him what he was going to do about it.
"An old tree grows on a cold rock in winter," replied the monk somewhat poetically. "Nowhere is there any warmth."
The girl returned and related what he had said.
"To think I fed that fellow for twenty years!" exclaimed the old woman in anger. "He showed no consideration for your need, no disposition to explain your condition. He need not have responded to passion, but at least he could have evidenced some compassion;"
She at once went to the hut of the monk and burned it down.
My Thoughts: Zen is a pratice of getting rid of thoughts and emotions. It is foolishness to expect love or concerns from a zen monk. Please do not misinterpret this as zen hate people. They are heading towards absolute nothingness.
Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens
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Charles Dickens
Born Charles John Huffam Dickens
7 February 1812(1812-02-07)
Landport, Hampshire, England
Died 9 June 1870 (aged 58)
Gad's Hill Place, Higham, Kent, England
Occupation Novelist
Notable work(s) Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Hard Times
Influences[show]
Honoré de Balzac, Miguel de Cervantes, Victor Hugo, Washington Irving, William Shakespeare
Influenced[show]
T. Coraghessan Boyle, Fyodor Dostoevsky, George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, John Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Tom Wolfe, G. K. Chesterton, George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, Mervyn Peake
Signature
Charles John Huffam Dickens, FRSA (pronounced /ˈtʃɑrlz ˈdɪkɪnz/; 7 February 1812–9 June 1870), pen-name "Boz", was the most popular English novelist of the Victorian era and one of the most popular of all time. He created some of literature's most memorable characters. His novels and short stories have never gone out of print.[1][2]
Much of his work first appeared in periodicals and magazines in serialised form, a favoured way of publishing fiction at the time. Dickens, unlike others who would complete entire novels before serial publication commenced, often wrote his in parts, in the order in which they were meant to appear. The practice lent his stories a particular rhythm, punctuated by one cliffhanger after another to keep the public eager for the next instalment.[3]
A concern with what he saw as the pressing need for social reforms runs throughout his work.
Critics and fellow-novelists such as George Gissing and G. K. Chesterton have applauded Dickens for his mastery of prose, and for his teeming gallery of unique characters, many of whom have acquired iconic status in the English-speaking world. Others such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf have accused him of sentimentality and implausibility.[4]
Life
[edit] Early years
Marshalsea
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Richard Cox · John Dickens
John Eliot · John Gerard
Hannah Glasse
John Baptist Grano
Nicholas Grimald
Charlotte Hayes
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Ben Jonson · George Morland
Nicholas Owen · Sally Salisbury
John Selden · Richard Shelley
Ralph Sherwin
Robert Wingfield
George Wither
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Dickens was born on 7 February 1812, in Landport, Portsmouth, in Hampshire, the second of eight children to John Dickens (1786–1851), a clerk in the Navy Pay Office at Portsmouth, and his wife, Elizabeth (née Barrow, 1789–1863).[5] He was christened at St Mary's Church in Portsea on 4 March 1812. When he was five, the family moved to Chatham, Kent. In 1822, when he was ten, the family relocated to 16 Bayham Street, Camden Town, in London.
Ordnance Terrace, Chatham - Dickens's home from 1817 to 1821Although his early years seem to have been an idyllic time, he thought himself then as a "very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy".[6] He spent time outdoors, but also read voraciously, with a particular fondness for the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding. He talked, later in life, of his extremely poignant memories of childhood, and of his continuing photographic memory of the people and events that helped to bring his fiction to life. His family's early, moderate wealth provided the boy Dickens with some private education at William Giles's School, in Chatham.[7] This time of prosperity came to an abrupt end, however, when his father, after having spent beyond his means in entertaining, and in retaining his social position, was imprisoned at Marshalsea debtor's prison. Shortly afterwards, the rest of his family (except for Charles, who boarded in Camden Town at the house of family friend Elizabeth Roylance), realizing no other option, joined him in residence at Marshalsea.[8] This provided the setting of one of his works, 'Little Dorrit' in which the title character's father was imprisoned.
Just before his father's arrest, the 12-year-old Dickens had begun working ten-hour days at Warren's Blacking Warehouse, on Hungerford Stairs, near the present Charing Cross railway station. He earned six shillings a week pasting labels on jars of thick shoe polish. This money paid for his lodgings with Mrs Roylance and helped support his family. Mrs. Roylance, Dickens later wrote, was "a reduced old lady, long known to our family," and whom he eventually immortalized, "with a few alterations and embellishments," as "Mrs. Pipchin," in Dombey & Son. Later, lodgings were found for him in a "back-attic...at the house of an insolvent-court agent, who lived in Lant Street in the borough...he was a fat, good-natured, kind old gentleman...lame, with a quiet old wife; and he had a very innocent grown-up son, who was lame too"; these three were the inspiration for the Garland family in The Old Curiosity Shop.[9] The mostly unregulated, strenuous—and often cruel—work conditions of the factory employees (especially children), made a deep impression on Dickens. His experiences served to influence later fiction and essays, and were the foundation of his interest in the reform of socio-economic and labour conditions, the rigours of which he believed were unfairly borne by the poor.[citation needed]
As told to John Forster (from The Life of Charles Dickens):
The blacking-warehouse was the last house on the left-hand side of the way, at old Hungerford Stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscoted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old gray rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again. The counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal-barges and the river. There was a recess in it, in which I was to sit and work. My work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking; first with a piece of oil-paper, and then with a piece of blue paper; to tie them round with a string; and then to clip the paper close and neat, all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary's shop. When a certain number of grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label, and then go on again with more pots. Two or three other boys were kept at similar duty down-stairs on similar wages. One of them came up, in a ragged apron and a paper cap, on the first Monday morning, to show me the trick of using the string and tying the knot. His name was Bob Fagin; and I took the liberty of using his name, long afterwards, in Oliver Twist.[9]
After only a few months in Marshalsea, John Dickens was informed of the death of his paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Dickens, who had left him, in her will, the sum of £450. On the expectation of this legacy, Dickens petitioned for, and was granted, release from prison. Under the Insolvent Debtors Act, Dickens arranged for payment of his creditors, and he and his family left Marshalsea for the home of Mrs. Roylance.
Although Dickens eventually attended the Wellington House Academy in North London, his mother did not immediately remove him from the boot-blacking factory. 'The incident must have done much to confirm Dickens's determined view that a father should rule the family, a mother find her proper sphere inside the home. "I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back." His mother's failure in his eyes [at this time], requesting Charles return to the blacking factory, contributed towards his demanding and dissatisfied attitude towards women.' [10]Resentment stemming from his situation and the conditions under which working-class people lived became major themes of his works, and it was this unhappy period in his youth to which he alluded in his favourite, and most autobiographical, novel, David Copperfield:[11] "I had no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no assistance, no support, of any kind, from anyone, that I can call to mind, as I hope to go to heaven!" The Wellington House Academy as it turned out was not a good school. ' Much of the haphazard, desultory teaching, poor discipline punctuated by the headmaster's sadistic brutality, the seedy ushers and general run-down atmosphere, are embodied in Mr. Creakle's Establishment in David Copperfield.' [12]
In May 1827 Dickens began work in the law office of Ellis and Blackmore, attorneys, of Holborn Court, Gray's Inn, as a junior clerk. He remained there until November 1828. Then, having worked energetically in his spare time to acquire Gurneys system of shorthand, he left to become a freelance reporter. A distant relative, Thomas Charlton, was a freelance reporter at Doctors' Commons, and Dickens was able to share his box there in order to report the legal proceedings.[13] Here in a court near St. Pauls he was to listen for nearly four years to rambling, involved cases. This education informed works such as Nicholas Nickleby, Dombey and Son, and especially Bleak House—whose vivid portrayal of the endless machinations, lethal manoeuvrings, and strangling bureaucracy of the legal system of mid-19th-century Britain did much to enlighten the general public, and was a vehicle for dissemination of Dickens's own views regarding, particularly, the injustice of chronic exploitation of the poor forced by circumstances to "go to Law."
In 1830, Dickens met his first love, Maria Beadnell. It is believed that she was the model for the character Dora in David Copperfield. Maria's parents disapproved of the courtship and effectively ended the relationship by sending her to school in Paris.
[edit] Journalism and early novels
An 1839 portrait of a young Charles Dickens by Daniel MacliseIn 1834, Dickens became a political journalist, reporting on parliamentary debate and travelling across Britain by stagecoach to cover election campaigns for the Morning Chronicle. His journalism, in the form of sketches which appeared in periodicals from 1833, formed his first collection of pieces Sketches by Boz which was published in 1836 and led to the serialization of his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, in March 1836. He continued to contribute to and edit journals throughout much of his subsequent literary career. Dickens's keen perceptiveness, intimate knowledge and understanding of the people, and tale-spinning genius were quickly to gain him world renown and wealth.
On 2 April 1836, he married Catherine Thomson Hogarth (1816 – 1879), the daughter of George Hogarth, editor of the Evening Chronicle. After a brief honeymoon in Chalk, Kent, they set up home in Bloomsbury. They had ten children:[14]
Charles Culliford Boz Dickens C. C. B. Dickens, later known as Charles Dickens, Jr, editor for All the Year Round, author of the Dickens's Dictionary of London (1879).
Mary Dickens
Kate Macready Dickens
Walter Landor Dickens
Francis Jeffrey Dickens
Alfred D'Orsay Tennyson Dickens
Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens
Sir Henry Fielding Dickens
Dora Annie Dickens
Edward Dickens Emigrated to Australia.
Catherine's sister Mary entered Dickens's Doughty Street household to offer support to her newly married sister and brother-in-law. It was not unusual for a woman's unwed sister to live with and help a newly married couple. Dickens became very attached to Mary, and she died in his arms after a brief illness in 1837. She became a character in many of his books, and her death is fictionalized as the death of Little Nell.[15]
Also in 1836, Dickens accepted the job of editor of Bentley's Miscellany, a position that he would hold for three years, when he fell out with the owner. At the same time, his success as a novelist continued, producing Oliver Twist (1837–39), Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), The Old Curiosity Shop and, finally, Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty as part of the Master Humphrey's Clock series (1840–41)—all published in monthly instalments before being made into books. Dickens had a pet raven named Grip which, when it died in 1841, Dickens had stuffed (it is now at the Free Library of Philadelphia).[16]
Dickens made two trips to North America. In 1842, he travelled with his wife to the United States and Canada, a journey which was successful in spite of his support for the abolition of slavery. He called upon President John Tyler at the White House.[citation needed] At this time Georgina Hogarth, another sister of Catherine, joined the Dickens household to care for the young family they had left behind. She remained with them as housekeeper, organiser, adviser and friend until her brother-in-law's death in 1870.
During this visit, Dickens spent time in New York City, where he gave lectures, raised support for copyright laws, and recorded many of his impressions of America. He toured the City for a month, and met such luminaries as Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant. On 14 February 1842, a Boz Ball (named after his pseudonym) was held in his honour at the Park Theater, with 3,000 of New York’s elite present. Among the neighbourhoods he visited were Five Points, Wall Street, The Bowery, and the prison known as The Tombs.[17]
The trip is described in the short travelogue American Notes for General Circulation and is also the basis of some of the episodes in Martin Chuzzlewit. Shortly thereafter, he began to show interest in Unitarian Christianity, although he remained an Anglican, at least nominally, for the rest of his life.[18] Dickens's work continued to be popular, especially A Christmas Carol written in 1843, the first of his Christmas books, which was reputedly a potboiler written in a matter of weeks to meet the expenses of his wife's fifth pregnancy.
After living briefly abroad in Italy (1844) and Switzerland (1846), Dickens continued his success with Dombey and Son (1848); David Copperfield (1849–50); Bleak House (1852–53); Hard Times (1854); Little Dorrit (1857); A Tale of Two Cities (1859); and Great Expectations (1861). Dickens was also the publisher and editor of, and a major contributor to, the journals Household Words (1850–1859) and All the Year Round (1858–1870). A recurring theme in Dickens's writing, both as reportage for these publications and as an inspiration for his fiction, reflected the public's interest in Arctic exploration: the heroic friendship between explorers John Franklin and John Richardson gave the idea for A Tale of Two Cities, The Wreck of the Golden Mary and the play The Frozen Deep.[19] After Franklin died in unexplained circumstances on an expedition to find the North West Passage it was natural for Dickens to write a piece in Household Words defending his hero against the discovery in 1854, some four years after the search began, of evidence that Franklin's men had, in their desperation, resorted to cannibalism.[20] Without adducing any supporting evidence he speculates that, far from resorting to cannibalism amongst themselves, the members of the expedition may have been "set upon and slain by the Esquimaux...We believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel."[20] Although publishing in a subsequent issue of Household Words a defence of the Esquimaux, from another author who had actually visited the scene of the supposed cannibalism, Dickens refused to alter his view.[21]
[edit] Middle years
At his desk in 1858In 1856, his popularity had allowed him to buy Gad's Hill Place. This large house in Higham, Kent, had a particular meaning to Dickens as he had walked past it as a child and had dreamed of living in it. The area was also the scene of some of the events of Shakespeare's Henry IV, part 1 and this literary connection pleased him.
In 1857, in preparation for public performances of The Frozen Deep, a play on which he and his protégé Wilkie Collins had collaborated, Dickens hired professional actresses to play the female parts. With one of these, Ellen Ternan, Dickens formed a bond which was to last the rest of his life. The exact nature of their relationship is unclear, as both Dickens and Ternan burned each other's letters, but it was clearly central to Dickens's personal and professional life. On his death, he settled an annuity on her which made her a financially independent woman. Claire Tomalin's book, The Invisible Woman, set out to prove that Ellen Ternan lived with Dickens secretly for the last 13 years of his life, and was subsequently turned into a play, Little Nell, by Simon Gray.
When Dickens separated from his wife in 1858, divorce was almost unthinkable, particularly for someone as famous as he was, and he financially supported her long afterwards. Although they appeared to be initially happy together, Catherine did not seem to share quite the same boundless energy for life which Dickens had. Nevertheless, her job of looking after their ten children, the pressure of living with a world-famous novelist, and keeping house for him, certainly did not help.
An indication of his marital dissatisfaction may be seen when, in 1855, he went to meet his first love, Maria Beadnell. Maria was by this time married as well, but seemed to have fallen short of Dickens's romantic memory of her.
[edit] Rail accident and last years
Crash scene after the accidentOn 9 June 1865, while returning from France with Ternan, 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 trying to help the wounded and the dying before rescuers arrived. Before leaving, he remembered the unfinished manuscript for Our Mutual Friend, and he returned to his carriage to retrieve it. Typically, Dickens later used this experience as material for his short ghost story The Signal-Man in which the central character has a premonition of his own death in a rail crash. He based the story around several previous rail accidents, such as the Clayton Tunnel rail crash of 1861.
Dickens managed to avoid an appearance at the inquest into the crash, as it would have become known that he was travelling that day with Ellen Ternan and her mother, which could have caused a scandal. Ellen had been Dickens's companion since the breakdown of his marriage, and, as he had met her in 1857, she was most likely the ultimate reason for that breakdown. She continued to be his companion, and likely mistress, until his death. The dimensions of the affair were unknown until the publication of Dickens and Daughter, a book about Dickens's relationship with his daughter Kate, in 1939. Kate Dickens worked with author Gladys Storey on the book prior to her death in 1929, and alleged that Dickens and Ternan had a son who died in infancy, though no contemporary evidence exists.[22]
Dickens, though unharmed, never really recovered from the Staplehurst crash, and his normally prolific writing shrank to completing Our Mutual Friend and starting the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood after a long interval. Much of his time was taken up with public readings from his best-loved novels. Dickens was fascinated by the theatre as an escape from the world, and theatres and theatrical people appear in Nicholas Nickleby. The travelling shows were extremely popular. In 1866 a series of public readings were undertaken in England and Scotland. The following year saw Dickens give a series of readings in England and Ireland. Dickens was now really unwell but carried on, compulsively, against his doctor's advice.
Photograph of Dickens taken by Jeremiah Gurney in New York, 1867 or 1868Later in the year he embarked on his second American reading tour, which continued into 1868. During this trip, most of which he spent in New York, he gave 22 readings at Steinway Hall between 9 December 1867 and 20 April 1868, and four at Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims between 16 January and 21 January 1868. In his travels, he saw a significant change in the people and the circumstances of America. His final appearance was at a banquet at Delmonico’s on 18 April 1868, when he promised to never denounce America again. Dickens boarded his ship to return to Britain on 23 April 1868, barely escaping a Federal Tax Lien against the proceeds of his lecture tour.[17]
Statue of Dickens in PhiladelphiaDuring 1869, his readings continued, in England, Scotland, and Ireland, until at last he collapsed, showing symptoms of mild stroke. Further provincial readings were cancelled, but he began upon The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Dickens's final public readings took place in London in 1870. He suffered another stroke on 8 June at Gad's Hill, after a full day's work on Edwin Drood, and five years to the day after the Staplehurst crash, on 9 June 1870, he died at his home in Gad's Hill Place. He was mourned by all his readers.
Contrary to his wish to be buried in Rochester Cathedral, he was laid to rest in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. The inscription on his tomb reads: CHARLES DICKENS Born 7th February 1812 Died 9th June 1870.[23] Dickens's 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 located in Clark Park in the Spruce Hill neighbourhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the United States.
[edit] Literary style
Dickens's writing style is florid and poetic, with a strong comic touch. His satires of British aristocratic snobbery—he calls one character the "Noble Refrigerator"—are often popular. Comparing orphans to stocks and shares, people to tug boats, or dinner-party guests to furniture are just some of Dickens's acclaimed flights of fancy. Many of his character's names provide the reader with a hint as to the roles played in advancing the storyline, such as Mr. Murdstone in the novel David Copperfield, which is clearly a combination of "murder" and stony coldness. His literary style is also a mixture of fantasy and realism.
[edit] Characters
Charles Dickens used his rich imagination, sense of humour and detailed memories, particularly of his childhood, to enliven his fiction.Dickensian characters—especially their typically whimsical names—are among the most memorable in English literature. The likes of Ebenezer Scrooge, Fagin, Mrs. Gamp, Charles Darnay, Oliver Twist, Micawber, Abel Magwitch, Newman Noggs, Samuel Pickwick, Miss Havisham, Wackford Squeers, Uriah Heep and many others are so well known and can be believed to be living a life outside the novels that their stories have been continued by other authors.[citation needed]
Dickens loved the style of 18th century gothic romance,[citation needed] although it had already become a target for parody.[citation needed] One "character" vividly drawn throughout his novels is London itself. From the coaching inns on the outskirts of the city to the lower reaches of the Thames, all aspects of the capital are described over the course of his body of work.
[edit] Episodic writing
As noted above, most of Dickens's major novels were first written in monthly or weekly instalments in journals such as Master Humphrey's Clock and Household Words, later reprinted in book form. These instalments made the stories cheap, accessible and the series of regular cliff-hangers made each new episode widely anticipated. American fans even waited at the docks in New York, shouting out to the crew of an incoming ship, "Is Little Nell dead?"[24][25][26] Part of Dickens's great talent was to incorporate this episodic writing style but still end up with a coherent novel at the end. The monthly numbers were illustrated by, amongst others, "Phiz" (a pseudonym for Hablot Browne). Among his best-known works are Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, Bleak House, Nicholas Nickleby, The Pickwick Papers, and A Christmas Carol.
"Charles Dickens as he appears when reading." Wood engraving from Harper's Weekly, 7 December 1867Dickens's technique of writing in monthly or weekly instalments (depending on the work) can be understood by analysing his relationship with his illustrators. The several artists who filled this role were privy to the contents and intentions of Dickens's instalments before the general public. Thus, by reading these correspondences between author and illustrator, the intentions behind Dickens's work can be better understood. What was hidden in his art is made plain in these letters. These also reveal how the interests of the reader and author do not coincide. A great example of that appears in the monthly novel Oliver Twist. At one point in this work, Dickens had Oliver become embroiled in a robbery. That particular monthly instalment concludes with young Oliver being shot. Readers expected that they would be forced to wait only a month to find out the outcome of that gunshot. In fact, Dickens did not reveal what became of young Oliver in the succeeding number. Rather, the reading public was forced to wait two months to discover if the boy lived.
Another important impact of Dickens's episodic writing style resulted from his exposure to the opinions of his readers. Since Dickens did not write the chapters very far ahead of their publication, he was allowed to witness the public reaction and alter the story depending on those public reactions. A fine example of this process can be seen in his weekly serial The Old Curiosity Shop, which is a chase story. In this novel, Little Nell and her Grandfather are fleeing the villain Quilp. The progress of the novel follows the gradual success of that pursuit. As Dickens wrote and published the weekly instalments, his friend John Forster pointed out: "You know you're going to have to kill her, don't you." Why this end was necessary can be explained by a brief analysis of the difference between the structure of a comedy versus a tragedy. In a comedy, the action covers a sequence "You think they're going to lose, you think they're going to lose, they win". In tragedy, it is: "You think they're going to win, you think they're going to win, they lose". The dramatic conclusion of the story is implicit throughout the novel. So, as Dickens wrote the novel in the form of a tragedy, the sad outcome of the novel was a foregone conclusion. If he had not caused his heroine to lose, he would not have completed his dramatic structure. Dickens admitted that his friend Forster was right and, in the end, Little Nell died.[27]
[edit] Social commentary
Dickens's novels were, among other things, works of social commentary. He was a fierce critic of the poverty and social stratification of Victorian society. Dickens's second novel, Oliver Twist (1839), shocked readers with its images of poverty and crime and was responsible for the clearing of the actual London slum that was the basis of the story's Jacob's Island. In addition, with the character of the tragic prostitute, Nancy, Dickens "humanised" such women for the reading public; women who were regarded as "unfortunates," inherently immoral casualties of the Victorian class/economic system. Bleak House and Little Dorrit elaborated expansive critiques of the Victorian institutional apparatus: the interminable lawsuits of the Court of Chancery that destroyed people's lives in Bleak House and a dual attack in Little Dorrit on inefficient, corrupt patent offices and unregulated market speculation.
[edit] Literary techniques
Dickens is often described as using 'idealised' characters and highly sentimental scenes to contrast with his caricatures and the ugly social truths he reveals. The story of Nell Trent in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) was received as incredibly moving by contemporary readers but viewed as ludicrously sentimental by Oscar Wilde:"You would need to have a heart of stone," he declared in one of his famous witticisms, "not to laugh at the death of Little Nell."[28] (although her death actually takes place off-stage). In 1903 G. K. Chesterton said, "It is not the death of Little Nell, but the life of Little Nell, that I object to."[29]
In Oliver Twist Dickens provides readers with an idealised portrait of a young boy so inherently and unrealistically 'good' that his values are never subverted by either brutal orphanages or coerced involvement in a gang of young pickpockets. While later novels also centre on idealised characters (Esther Summerson in Bleak House and Amy Dorrit in Little Dorrit), this idealism serves only to highlight Dickens's goal of poignant social commentary. Many of his novels are concerned with social realism, focusing on mechanisms of social control that direct people's lives (for instance, factory networks in Hard Times and hypocritical exclusionary class codes in Our Mutual Friend).[citation needed]
Dickens also employs incredible coincidences (e.g., Oliver Twist turns out to be the lost nephew of the upper class family that randomly rescues him from the dangers of the pickpocket group). Such coincidences are a staple of eighteenth century picaresque novels such as Henry Fielding's Tom Jones that Dickens enjoyed so much. But, to Dickens, these were not just plot devices but an index of the humanism that led him to believe that good wins out in the end and often in unexpected ways.[citation needed]
[edit] Autobiographical elements
All authors might be said to incorporate autobiographical elements in their fiction, but with Dickens this is very noticeable, even though he took pains to mask what he considered his shameful, lowly past. David Copperfield is one of the most clearly autobiographical but the scenes from Bleak House of interminable court cases and legal arguments are drawn from the author's brief career as a court reporter. Dickens's own father was sent to prison (where he was joined by his wife and younger children) for debt, and this became a common theme in many of his books, with the detailed depiction of life in the Marshalsea prison in Little Dorrit resulting from Dickens's own experiences of the institution. Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop is thought to represent Dickens's sister-in-law,[citation needed] Nicholas Nickleby's father and Wilkins Micawber are certainly Dickens's own father, just as Mrs. Nickleby and Mrs. Micawber are similar to his mother.[citation needed] The snobbish nature of Pip from Great Expectations also has some affinity to the author himself. Childhood sweethearts in many of his books (such as Little Eml’y in David Copperfield) may have been based on Dickens’ own childhood infatuation with Lucy Stroughill.[30] The character of Fagin is believed to be based upon Ikey Solomon, a 19th century Jewish criminal of London and later Australia. It is reported that Dickens, during his time as a journalist, interviewed Solomon after a court appearance and that he was the inspiration for the gang leader in Oliver Twist. When the work was published in 1838 the unpleasant, to modern eyes,[31][32] stereotype of the Jewish character "Fagin" as fence and corrupter of children reflected only the endemic view of the time. The characterisation aroused no indignation, or even comment, and it seems to have been written without conscious anti-semitic intent.[33][34] By 1854, however, Dickens was moved to defend himself against mild reproof in The Jewish Chronicle by reference to his "strong abhorrence of...persecution of Jews in old time" expressed in his book A Child's History of England.[35] His sensitivity on the subject increased: in 1863 he was explaining that the character Fagin was "called a 'Jew', not because of his religion, but because of his race."[35] He took pains to include in Our Mutual Friend of 1864 the sympathetic Jewish character "Riah".
Dickens may have drawn on his childhood experiences, but he was also ashamed of them and would not reveal that this was where he gathered his realistic accounts of squalor. Very few knew the details of his early life until six years after his death when John Forster published a biography on which Dickens had collaborated. A shameful past in Victorian times could taint reputations, just as it did for some of his characters, and this may have been Dickens's own fear.
[edit] Legacy
Stamp in "The Centenary Edition of The Works of Charles Dickens in 36 Volumes."
A scene from Oliver Twist, from an early 20th-century edition
'Dickens's Dream' by R.W. BussA well-known personality, his novels proved immensely popular during his lifetime. His first full novel, The Pickwick Papers (1837), brought him immediate fame, and this success continued throughout his career. Although rarely departing greatly from his typical "Dickensian" method of always attempting to write a great "story" in a somewhat conventional manner (the dual narrators of Bleak House constitute a notable exception), he experimented with varied themes, characterisations, and genres. Some of these experiments achieved more popularity than others, and the public's taste and appreciation of his many works have varied over time. Usually keen to give his readers what they wanted, the monthly or weekly publication of his works in episodes meant that the books could change as the story proceeded at the whim of the public. Good examples of this are the American episodes in Martin Chuzzlewit which Dickens included in response to lower-than-normal sales of the earlier chapters. In Our Mutual Friend, the inclusion of the character of Riah was a positive portrayal of a Jewish character after he was criticised for the depiction of Fagin in Oliver Twist.[35]
Although his popularity has waned a little since his death, he continues to be one of the best known and most read of English authors. At least 180 motion pictures and TV adaptations based on Dickens's works help confirm his success.[36] Many of his works were adapted for the stage during his own lifetime and as early as 1913 a silent film of The Pickwick Papers was made. His characters were often so memorable that they took on a life of their own outside his books. Gamp became a slang expression for an umbrella from the character Mrs Gamp and Pickwickian, Pecksniffian, and Gradgrind all entered dictionaries due to Dickens's original portraits of such characters who were quixotic, hypocritical, or emotionlessly logical. Sam Weller, the carefree and irreverent valet of The Pickwick Papers, was an early superstar, perhaps better known than his author at first. It is likely that A Christmas Carol stands as his best-known story, with new adaptations almost every year. It is also the most-filmed of Dickens's stories, with many versions dating from the early years of cinema. This simple morality tale with both pathos and its theme of redemption, sums up (for many) the true meaning of Christmas. Indeed, it eclipses all other Yuletide stories in not only popularity, but in adding archetypal figures (Scrooge, Tiny Tim, the Christmas ghosts) to the Western cultural consciousness. A Christmas Carol was written by Dickens in an attempt to forestall financial disaster as a result of flagging sales of his novel Martin Chuzzlewit. Years later, Dickens shared that he was "deeply affected" in writing A Christmas Carol and the novel rejuvenated his career as a renowned author.
At a time when Britain was the major economic and political power of the world, Dickens highlighted the life of the forgotten poor and disadvantaged at the heart of empire. Through his journalism he campaigned on specific issues—such as sanitation and the workhouse—but his fiction probably demonstrated its greatest prowess in changing public opinion in regard to class inequalities. He often depicted the exploitation and repression of the poor and condemned the public officials and institutions that not only allowed such abuses to exist, but flourished as a result. His most strident indictment of this condition is in Hard Times (1854), Dickens's only novel-length treatment of the industrial working class. In this work, he uses both vitriol and satire to illustrate how this marginalised social stratum was termed "Hands" by the factory owners; that is, not really "people" but rather only appendages of the machines that they operated. His writings inspired others, in particular journalists and political figures, to address such problems of class oppression. For example, the prison scenes in The Pickwick Papers are claimed to have been influential in having the Fleet Prison shut down. As Karl Marx said, Dickens, and the other novelists of Victorian England, "...issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together...".[37] The exceptional popularity of his novels, even those with socially oppositional themes (Bleak House, 1853; Little Dorrit, 1857; Our Mutual Friend, 1865) underscored not only his almost preternatural ability to create compelling storylines and unforgettable characters, but also ensured that the Victorian public confronted issues of social justice that had commonly been ignored.
His fiction, with often vivid descriptions of life in nineteenth century England, has inaccurately and anachronistically come to symbolise on a global level Victorian society (1837 – 1901) as uniformly "Dickensian," when in fact, his novels' time span spanned from the 1770s to the 1860s. In the decade following his death in 1870, a more intense degree of socially and philosophically pessimistic perspectives invested British fiction; such themes stood in marked contrast to the religious faith that ultimately held together even the bleakest of Dickens's novels. Dickens clearly influenced later Victorian novelists such as Thomas Hardy and George Gissing, however their works display a greater willingness to confront and challenge the Victorian institution of religion. They also portray characters caught up by social forces (primarily via lower-class conditions), but they usually steered them to tragic ends beyond their control.
Novelists continue to be influenced by his books; for instance, such disparate current writers as Anne Rice, Tom Wolfe, and John Irving evidence direct Dickensian connections. Humorist James Finn Garner even wrote a tongue-in-cheek "politically correct" version of A Christmas Carol, and other affectionate parodies include the Radio 4 comedy Bleak Expectations. Matthew Pearl's novel The Last Dickens is a thriller about how Charles Dickens would have ended Edwin Drood.
Although Dickens's life has been the subject of at least two TV miniseries and two famous one-man shows, he has never been the subject of a Hollywood "big screen" biography.
[edit] Name 'Dickens'
Charles Dickens had, as a contemporary critic put it, a "queer name".[38] The name Dickens was used in interjective exclamations like "What the Dickens!" as a substitute for "devil". It was recorded in the OED as originating from Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor. It was also used as a substitute for "deuce" as in the phrase "to play the Dickens" in the meaning "to play havoc/mischief".[39]
[edit] Adaptations of readings
There have been several performances of Dickens readings by Emlyn Williams, Bransby Williams, Clive Francis performing the John Mortimer adaptation of A Christmas Carol and also Simon Callow in the Mystery of Charles Dickens by Peter Ackroyd.
[edit] Museums and festivals
Bleak House, Broadstairs in Broadstairs, Kent, where Dickens wrote some of his novels. The house was for many years a Dickens museum, and visitors would leave notes addressed to him in the desk-drawer in his former study, overlooking harbour and sea.There are museums and festivals celebrating Dickens's life and works in many of the towns with which he was associated.
The Charles Dickens Museum, in Doughty Street, Holborn is the only one of Dickens's London homes to survive. He lived there only two years but in that time wrote The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby. It contains a major collection of manuscripts, original furniture and memorabilia.
Charles Dickens' Birthplace Museum in Portsmouth is the house in which Dickens was born. It has been re-furnished in the likely style of 1812 and contains Dickens memorabilia.
The Dickens House Museum in Broadstairs, Kent is the house of Miss Mary Pearson Strong, the basis for Miss Betsey Trotwood in David Copperfield. It is visible across the bay from the original Bleak House (also a museum until 2005) where David Copperfield was written. The museum contains memorabilia, general Victoriana and some of Dickens's letters. Broadstairs has held a Dickens Festival annually since 1937.
The Charles Dickens Centre in Eastgate House, Rochester, closed in 2004, but the garden containing the author's Swiss chalet is still open. The 16th century house, which appeared as Westgate House in The Pickwick Papers and the Nun's House in Edwin Drood, is now used as a wedding venue.[40] The city's annual Dickens Festival (summer) and Dickensian Christmas celebrations continue unaffected.
The Cashier's Office, Chatham Dockyard.The Dickens World themed attraction, covering 71,500 square feet (6,643 m2), and including a cinema and restaurants, opened in Chatham on 25 May 2007.[41] It stands on a small part of the site of the former naval dockyard where Dickens's father had once worked in the Navy Pay Office.
Dickens Festival in Rochester, Kent. Summer Dickens is held at the end of May or in the first few days of June, it commences with an invitation only ball on the Thursday and then continues with street entertainment, and many costumed characters, on the Friday, Saturday and Sunday.Christmas Dickens is the first weekend in December- Saturday and Sunday only.
Dickens festivals are also held across the world.
Four notable ones in the United States are:
A child, dressed in appropriate attire, at the Dickensian Festival in Ulverston, Cumbria.The Riverside Dickens Festival in Riverside, California, includes literary studies as well as entertainments.
The Great Dickens Christmas Fair (http://www.dickensfair.com/) has been held in San Francisco, California, since the 1970s. During the four or five weekends before Christmas, over 500 costumed performers mingle with and entertain thousands of visitors amidst the recreated full-scale blocks of Dickensian London in over 90,000 square feet (8,000 m2) of public area. This is the oldest, largest, and most successful of the modern Dickens festivals outside England. Many (including the Martin Harris who acts in the Rochester festival and flies out from London to play Scrooge every year in SF) say it is the most impressive in the world.
Dickens on The Strand in Galveston, Texas, is a holiday festival held on the first weekend in December since 1974, where bobbies, Beefeaters and the "Queen" herself are on hand to recreate the Victorian London of Charles Dickens. Many festival volunteers and attendees dress in Victorian attire and bring the world of Dickens to life.
The Greater Port Jefferson-Northern Brookhaven Arts Council (http://www.gpjac.org) holds a Dickens Festival in the Village of Port Jefferson, NY each year. In 2007, the Dickens Festival is 30 November, 1 December, and 2 December. It includes many events, along with a troupe of street performers who bring an authentic Dickensian atmosphere to the town.
[edit] Other memorials
Charles Dickens was commemorated on the Series E £10 note issued by the Bank of England which was in circulation in the UK between 1992 and 2003. Dickens appeared on the reverse of the note accompanied by a scene from The Pickwick Papers.[42]
[edit] Notable works by Charles Dickens
Main article: Bibliography of Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens published over a dozen major novels, a large number of short stories (including a number of Christmas-themed stories), a handful of plays, and several non-fiction books. Dickens's novels were initially serialised in weekly and monthly magazines, then reprinted in standard book formats.
[edit] Novels
The Pickwick Papers (Monthly serial, April 1836 to November 1837)[43]
The Adventures of Oliver Twist (Monthly serial in Bentley's Miscellany, February 1837 to April 1839)
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (Monthly serial, April 1838 to October 1839)
The Old Curiosity Shop (Weekly serial in Master Humphrey's Clock, 25 April 1840, to 6 February 1841)
Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty (Weekly serial in Master Humphrey's Clock, 13 February 1841, to 27 November 1841)
The Christmas books:
A Christmas Carol (1843)
The Chimes (1844)
The Cricket on the Hearth (1845)
The Battle of Life (1846)
The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848)
The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (Monthly serial, January 1843 to July 1844)
Dombey and Son (Monthly serial, October 1846 to April 1848)
David Copperfield (Monthly serial, May 1849 to November 1850)
Bleak House (Monthly serial, March 1852 to September 1853)
Hard Times: For These Times (Weekly serial in Household Words, 1 April 1854, to 12 August 1854)
Little Dorrit (Monthly serial, December 1855 to June 1857)
A Tale of Two Cities (Weekly serial in All the Year Round, 30 April 1859, to 26 November 1859)
Great Expectations (Weekly serial in All the Year Round, 1 December 1860 to 3 August 1861)
Our Mutual Friend (Monthly serial, May 1864 to November 1865)
The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Monthly serial, April 1870 to September 1870. Only six of twelve planned numbers completed)
[edit] Short story collections
Sketches by Boz (1836)
The Mudfog Papers (1837) in Bentley's Miscellany magazine
Reprinted Pieces (1861)
The Uncommercial Traveller (1860–1869)
Christmas numbers of Household Words magazine:
What Christmas Is, as We Grow Older (1851)
A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire (1852)
Another Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire (1853)
The Seven Poor Travellers (1854)
The Holly-Tree Inn (1855)
The Wreck of the "Golden Mary" (1856)
The Perils of Certain English Prisoners (1857)
A House to Let (1858)
Christmas numbers of All the Year Round magazine:
The Haunted House (1859)
A Message From the Sea (1860)
Tom Tiddler's Ground (1861)
Somebody's Luggage (1862)
Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings (1863)
Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy (1864)
Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions (1865)
Mugby Junction (1866)
No Thoroughfare (1867)
[edit] Selected non-fiction, poetry, and plays
The Village Coquettes (Plays, 1836)
The Fine Old English Gentleman (poetry, 1841)
Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi (1838)
American Notes: For General Circulation (1842)
Pictures from Italy (1846)
The Life of Our Lord: As written for his children (1849)
A Child's History of England (1853)
The Frozen Deep (play, 1857)
Speeches, Letters and Sayings (1870)
[edit] Notes
^ "What the Dickens?", by Simon Swift. The Guardian, Wednesday 18 April 2007. "Dickens's books have never gone out of print."
^ "Victorian squalor and hi-tech gadgetry: Dickens World to open in England". Bloomberg News. 23 May 2007. "He created some of English literature's most memorable characters and his work, which has never gone out of print, continues to bring the poverty of 19th-century London to life for future generations."
^ Stone, Harry. Dickens' Working Notes for His Novels, Chicago, 1987
^ Henry James, "Our Mutual Friend", The Nation, 21 December 1865- a scathing review
^ [1] Dickens Family Tree website
^ John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, Book 1, Chapter 1
^ Jordan, John (2001). "Chronology". The Cambridge companion to Charles Dickens. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. p. xvi. ISBN 0-521-66964-2.
^ Pope-Hennessy, Una (1945). "The Family Background". Charles Dickens 1812-1870. London: Chatto and Windus. p. 11.
^ a b Project Gutenberg's Life of Charles Dickens (James R. Osgood & Company, 1875), by John Forster, Volume I, Chapter II, accessed 2 August 2008
^ Angus Wilson The World of Charles Dickens ISBN 0-14-00.3488-9
^ eNotes.com "Charles Dickens", accessed 15 November 2007
^ Angus Wilson The World of Charles Dickens ISBN 0-14-003488-9
^ Pope-Hennessy (1945: 18)
^ [2] Dickens Family Tree website
^ victorianweb.org - Mary Scott Hogarth, 1820–1837: Dickens's Beloved Sister-in-Law and Inspiration
^ RE: Cremains / Ravens
^ a b Kenneth T. Jackson: The Encyclopedia of New York City: The New York Historical Society; Yale University Press; 1995. P. 333.
^ Charles Dickens
^ Glancy, Ruth F (2006). "The Frozen Deep and other Biographical Influences". Charles Dickens's A Tale Of Two Cities: A Sourcebook. Abingdon, England: Routledge. pp. 14. ISBN 0415287596.
^ a b Dickens, Charles (1854-12-02). "The Lost Arctic Voyagers". Household Words: A Weekly Journal (London: Charles Dickens) 10 (245): 361 et sec. http://books.google.com/books?id=DOQRAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA433&dq=%22Charles+Dickens%22+esquimaux&ei=zKtvSP_4H6HQjgGJvPDbAQ&client=firefox-a#PPA361,M1. Retrieved on 2008-07-05.
^ Rae, John (1854-12-30). "Dr Rae's report". Household Words: A Weekly Journal (London: Charles Dickens) 10 (249): 457–458. http://books.google.com/books?id=DOQRAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA433&dq=%22Charles+Dickens%22+esquimaux&ei=zKtvSP_4H6HQjgGJvPDbAQ&client=firefox-a#PPA458,M1. Retrieved on 2008-08-16.
^ Tomalin (1995). "The Invisible Woman: The Story of Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan". http://www.laits.utexas.edu/farrell/documents/Dickens%20and%20Ternan.pdf. Retrieved on 2009-03-13.
^ Staff writers (2007). "Charles Dickens". Westminster Abbey from 1065 to today. The Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey. http://www.westminster-abbey.org/visitor/plan-of-the-abbey/12164. Retrieved on 2009-02-19.
^ Boz Will Be Boz - TIME
^ A Dickens of a fuss - theage.com.au
^ And They All Died Happily Ever After - New York Times
^ Dickens, Charles; Stone, Harry (1987). Dickens' working notes for his novels. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226145905.
^ In conversation with Ada Leverson. Quoted in Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), p. 469.
^ G. K. Chesterton, Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens, Chapter 6: Curiosity Shop
^ Everybody in Dickens by George Newlin
^ Mendelsohn, Ezra (1996). Literary strategies: Jewish texts and contexts. Studies in Contemporary Jewry. XII. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 221. ISBN 0-19-511203-2.
^ Valman, Nadia (2005). Levy, Richard S.. ed. Antisemitism A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution. Santa Barbara CA: ABC-CLIO. pp. 176. ISBN 1-85109-439-3.
^ Newey, Vincent (2004). The Scriptures of Charles Dickens. Aldershot, England: Ashgate. pp. 103. ISBN 1859284345.
^ Tillotson, Kathleen (ed); Gill, Stephen (1999). Oxford World's Classics: Oliver Twist. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. xxii. ISBN 0192833391.
^ a b c Cohen, Derek; Heller, Deborah (1990). Jewish Presences in English Literature. Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen's University Press. pp. 41. ISBN 0773507817.
^ IMDB entry for Charles Dickens as writer accessdate 2009-06-02
^ Marx, Karl (1 August 1954). "The English Middle Classes". New York Tribune. Marxists Internet Archive. http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1854/08/01.htm. Retrieved on 2007-06-10.
^ Unnamed writer (January 1849). "The Haunted Man review". Macphail's Edinburgh Ecclesiastical Journal (Edinburgh) vi: 423. "Mr Dickens, as if in revenge for his own queer name, does bestow still queerer ones upon his fictitious creations.".
^ John Bowen (2000) Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit, ISBN 0199261407, p. 36
^ Medway Council - Eastgate House
^ Hart, Christopher (20 May 2007). "What, the Dickens World?". The Sunday Times. Times Online. http://travel.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/travel/holiday_type/family/article1803247.ece. Retrieved on 2007-06-02.
^ "Withdrawn banknotes reference guide". Bank of England. http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/denom_guide/index.htm. Retrieved on 2008-10-17.
^ Serial publication dates from Chronology of Novels by E. D. H. Johnson, Holmes Professor of Belles Lettres, Princeton University. Accessed 11 June 2007.
Born Charles John Huffam Dickens
7 February 1812(1812-02-07)
Landport, Hampshire, England
Died 9 June 1870 (aged 58)
Gad's Hill Place, Higham, Kent, England
Occupation Novelist
Notable work(s) Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Hard Times
Influences[show]
Honoré de Balzac, Miguel de Cervantes, Victor Hugo, Washington Irving, William Shakespeare
Influenced[show]
T. Coraghessan Boyle, Fyodor Dostoevsky, George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, John Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Tom Wolfe, G. K. Chesterton, George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, Mervyn Peake
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Charles Dickens
Born Charles John Huffam Dickens
7 February 1812(1812-02-07)
Landport, Hampshire, England
Died 9 June 1870 (aged 58)
Gad's Hill Place, Higham, Kent, England
Occupation Novelist
Notable work(s) Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Hard Times
Influences[show]
Honoré de Balzac, Miguel de Cervantes, Victor Hugo, Washington Irving, William Shakespeare
Influenced[show]
T. Coraghessan Boyle, Fyodor Dostoevsky, George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, John Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Tom Wolfe, G. K. Chesterton, George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, Mervyn Peake
Signature
Charles John Huffam Dickens, FRSA (pronounced /ˈtʃɑrlz ˈdɪkɪnz/; 7 February 1812–9 June 1870), pen-name "Boz", was the most popular English novelist of the Victorian era and one of the most popular of all time. He created some of literature's most memorable characters. His novels and short stories have never gone out of print.[1][2]
Much of his work first appeared in periodicals and magazines in serialised form, a favoured way of publishing fiction at the time. Dickens, unlike others who would complete entire novels before serial publication commenced, often wrote his in parts, in the order in which they were meant to appear. The practice lent his stories a particular rhythm, punctuated by one cliffhanger after another to keep the public eager for the next instalment.[3]
A concern with what he saw as the pressing need for social reforms runs throughout his work.
Critics and fellow-novelists such as George Gissing and G. K. Chesterton have applauded Dickens for his mastery of prose, and for his teeming gallery of unique characters, many of whom have acquired iconic status in the English-speaking world. Others such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf have accused him of sentimentality and implausibility.[4]
Life
[edit] Early years
Marshalsea
Notable prisoners
Edmund Bonner · Henry Chettle
Richard Cox · John Dickens
John Eliot · John Gerard
Hannah Glasse
John Baptist Grano
Nicholas Grimald
Charlotte Hayes
Denzil Holles, 1st Baron Holles
Ben Jonson · George Morland
Nicholas Owen · Sally Salisbury
John Selden · Richard Shelley
Ralph Sherwin
Robert Wingfield
George Wither
Related articles
Marshalsea Court
Related prisons
King's Bench · Fleet
Borough Compter
Tower of London
Prison reformers
James Oglethorpe
John Howard
Related categories
Category:Marshalsea
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Dickens was born on 7 February 1812, in Landport, Portsmouth, in Hampshire, the second of eight children to John Dickens (1786–1851), a clerk in the Navy Pay Office at Portsmouth, and his wife, Elizabeth (née Barrow, 1789–1863).[5] He was christened at St Mary's Church in Portsea on 4 March 1812. When he was five, the family moved to Chatham, Kent. In 1822, when he was ten, the family relocated to 16 Bayham Street, Camden Town, in London.
Ordnance Terrace, Chatham - Dickens's home from 1817 to 1821Although his early years seem to have been an idyllic time, he thought himself then as a "very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy".[6] He spent time outdoors, but also read voraciously, with a particular fondness for the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding. He talked, later in life, of his extremely poignant memories of childhood, and of his continuing photographic memory of the people and events that helped to bring his fiction to life. His family's early, moderate wealth provided the boy Dickens with some private education at William Giles's School, in Chatham.[7] This time of prosperity came to an abrupt end, however, when his father, after having spent beyond his means in entertaining, and in retaining his social position, was imprisoned at Marshalsea debtor's prison. Shortly afterwards, the rest of his family (except for Charles, who boarded in Camden Town at the house of family friend Elizabeth Roylance), realizing no other option, joined him in residence at Marshalsea.[8] This provided the setting of one of his works, 'Little Dorrit' in which the title character's father was imprisoned.
Just before his father's arrest, the 12-year-old Dickens had begun working ten-hour days at Warren's Blacking Warehouse, on Hungerford Stairs, near the present Charing Cross railway station. He earned six shillings a week pasting labels on jars of thick shoe polish. This money paid for his lodgings with Mrs Roylance and helped support his family. Mrs. Roylance, Dickens later wrote, was "a reduced old lady, long known to our family," and whom he eventually immortalized, "with a few alterations and embellishments," as "Mrs. Pipchin," in Dombey & Son. Later, lodgings were found for him in a "back-attic...at the house of an insolvent-court agent, who lived in Lant Street in the borough...he was a fat, good-natured, kind old gentleman...lame, with a quiet old wife; and he had a very innocent grown-up son, who was lame too"; these three were the inspiration for the Garland family in The Old Curiosity Shop.[9] The mostly unregulated, strenuous—and often cruel—work conditions of the factory employees (especially children), made a deep impression on Dickens. His experiences served to influence later fiction and essays, and were the foundation of his interest in the reform of socio-economic and labour conditions, the rigours of which he believed were unfairly borne by the poor.[citation needed]
As told to John Forster (from The Life of Charles Dickens):
The blacking-warehouse was the last house on the left-hand side of the way, at old Hungerford Stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscoted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old gray rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again. The counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal-barges and the river. There was a recess in it, in which I was to sit and work. My work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking; first with a piece of oil-paper, and then with a piece of blue paper; to tie them round with a string; and then to clip the paper close and neat, all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary's shop. When a certain number of grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label, and then go on again with more pots. Two or three other boys were kept at similar duty down-stairs on similar wages. One of them came up, in a ragged apron and a paper cap, on the first Monday morning, to show me the trick of using the string and tying the knot. His name was Bob Fagin; and I took the liberty of using his name, long afterwards, in Oliver Twist.[9]
After only a few months in Marshalsea, John Dickens was informed of the death of his paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Dickens, who had left him, in her will, the sum of £450. On the expectation of this legacy, Dickens petitioned for, and was granted, release from prison. Under the Insolvent Debtors Act, Dickens arranged for payment of his creditors, and he and his family left Marshalsea for the home of Mrs. Roylance.
Although Dickens eventually attended the Wellington House Academy in North London, his mother did not immediately remove him from the boot-blacking factory. 'The incident must have done much to confirm Dickens's determined view that a father should rule the family, a mother find her proper sphere inside the home. "I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back." His mother's failure in his eyes [at this time], requesting Charles return to the blacking factory, contributed towards his demanding and dissatisfied attitude towards women.' [10]Resentment stemming from his situation and the conditions under which working-class people lived became major themes of his works, and it was this unhappy period in his youth to which he alluded in his favourite, and most autobiographical, novel, David Copperfield:[11] "I had no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no assistance, no support, of any kind, from anyone, that I can call to mind, as I hope to go to heaven!" The Wellington House Academy as it turned out was not a good school. ' Much of the haphazard, desultory teaching, poor discipline punctuated by the headmaster's sadistic brutality, the seedy ushers and general run-down atmosphere, are embodied in Mr. Creakle's Establishment in David Copperfield.' [12]
In May 1827 Dickens began work in the law office of Ellis and Blackmore, attorneys, of Holborn Court, Gray's Inn, as a junior clerk. He remained there until November 1828. Then, having worked energetically in his spare time to acquire Gurneys system of shorthand, he left to become a freelance reporter. A distant relative, Thomas Charlton, was a freelance reporter at Doctors' Commons, and Dickens was able to share his box there in order to report the legal proceedings.[13] Here in a court near St. Pauls he was to listen for nearly four years to rambling, involved cases. This education informed works such as Nicholas Nickleby, Dombey and Son, and especially Bleak House—whose vivid portrayal of the endless machinations, lethal manoeuvrings, and strangling bureaucracy of the legal system of mid-19th-century Britain did much to enlighten the general public, and was a vehicle for dissemination of Dickens's own views regarding, particularly, the injustice of chronic exploitation of the poor forced by circumstances to "go to Law."
In 1830, Dickens met his first love, Maria Beadnell. It is believed that she was the model for the character Dora in David Copperfield. Maria's parents disapproved of the courtship and effectively ended the relationship by sending her to school in Paris.
[edit] Journalism and early novels
An 1839 portrait of a young Charles Dickens by Daniel MacliseIn 1834, Dickens became a political journalist, reporting on parliamentary debate and travelling across Britain by stagecoach to cover election campaigns for the Morning Chronicle. His journalism, in the form of sketches which appeared in periodicals from 1833, formed his first collection of pieces Sketches by Boz which was published in 1836 and led to the serialization of his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, in March 1836. He continued to contribute to and edit journals throughout much of his subsequent literary career. Dickens's keen perceptiveness, intimate knowledge and understanding of the people, and tale-spinning genius were quickly to gain him world renown and wealth.
On 2 April 1836, he married Catherine Thomson Hogarth (1816 – 1879), the daughter of George Hogarth, editor of the Evening Chronicle. After a brief honeymoon in Chalk, Kent, they set up home in Bloomsbury. They had ten children:[14]
Charles Culliford Boz Dickens C. C. B. Dickens, later known as Charles Dickens, Jr, editor for All the Year Round, author of the Dickens's Dictionary of London (1879).
Mary Dickens
Kate Macready Dickens
Walter Landor Dickens
Francis Jeffrey Dickens
Alfred D'Orsay Tennyson Dickens
Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens
Sir Henry Fielding Dickens
Dora Annie Dickens
Edward Dickens Emigrated to Australia.
Catherine's sister Mary entered Dickens's Doughty Street household to offer support to her newly married sister and brother-in-law. It was not unusual for a woman's unwed sister to live with and help a newly married couple. Dickens became very attached to Mary, and she died in his arms after a brief illness in 1837. She became a character in many of his books, and her death is fictionalized as the death of Little Nell.[15]
Also in 1836, Dickens accepted the job of editor of Bentley's Miscellany, a position that he would hold for three years, when he fell out with the owner. At the same time, his success as a novelist continued, producing Oliver Twist (1837–39), Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), The Old Curiosity Shop and, finally, Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty as part of the Master Humphrey's Clock series (1840–41)—all published in monthly instalments before being made into books. Dickens had a pet raven named Grip which, when it died in 1841, Dickens had stuffed (it is now at the Free Library of Philadelphia).[16]
Dickens made two trips to North America. In 1842, he travelled with his wife to the United States and Canada, a journey which was successful in spite of his support for the abolition of slavery. He called upon President John Tyler at the White House.[citation needed] At this time Georgina Hogarth, another sister of Catherine, joined the Dickens household to care for the young family they had left behind. She remained with them as housekeeper, organiser, adviser and friend until her brother-in-law's death in 1870.
During this visit, Dickens spent time in New York City, where he gave lectures, raised support for copyright laws, and recorded many of his impressions of America. He toured the City for a month, and met such luminaries as Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant. On 14 February 1842, a Boz Ball (named after his pseudonym) was held in his honour at the Park Theater, with 3,000 of New York’s elite present. Among the neighbourhoods he visited were Five Points, Wall Street, The Bowery, and the prison known as The Tombs.[17]
The trip is described in the short travelogue American Notes for General Circulation and is also the basis of some of the episodes in Martin Chuzzlewit. Shortly thereafter, he began to show interest in Unitarian Christianity, although he remained an Anglican, at least nominally, for the rest of his life.[18] Dickens's work continued to be popular, especially A Christmas Carol written in 1843, the first of his Christmas books, which was reputedly a potboiler written in a matter of weeks to meet the expenses of his wife's fifth pregnancy.
After living briefly abroad in Italy (1844) and Switzerland (1846), Dickens continued his success with Dombey and Son (1848); David Copperfield (1849–50); Bleak House (1852–53); Hard Times (1854); Little Dorrit (1857); A Tale of Two Cities (1859); and Great Expectations (1861). Dickens was also the publisher and editor of, and a major contributor to, the journals Household Words (1850–1859) and All the Year Round (1858–1870). A recurring theme in Dickens's writing, both as reportage for these publications and as an inspiration for his fiction, reflected the public's interest in Arctic exploration: the heroic friendship between explorers John Franklin and John Richardson gave the idea for A Tale of Two Cities, The Wreck of the Golden Mary and the play The Frozen Deep.[19] After Franklin died in unexplained circumstances on an expedition to find the North West Passage it was natural for Dickens to write a piece in Household Words defending his hero against the discovery in 1854, some four years after the search began, of evidence that Franklin's men had, in their desperation, resorted to cannibalism.[20] Without adducing any supporting evidence he speculates that, far from resorting to cannibalism amongst themselves, the members of the expedition may have been "set upon and slain by the Esquimaux...We believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel."[20] Although publishing in a subsequent issue of Household Words a defence of the Esquimaux, from another author who had actually visited the scene of the supposed cannibalism, Dickens refused to alter his view.[21]
[edit] Middle years
At his desk in 1858In 1856, his popularity had allowed him to buy Gad's Hill Place. This large house in Higham, Kent, had a particular meaning to Dickens as he had walked past it as a child and had dreamed of living in it. The area was also the scene of some of the events of Shakespeare's Henry IV, part 1 and this literary connection pleased him.
In 1857, in preparation for public performances of The Frozen Deep, a play on which he and his protégé Wilkie Collins had collaborated, Dickens hired professional actresses to play the female parts. With one of these, Ellen Ternan, Dickens formed a bond which was to last the rest of his life. The exact nature of their relationship is unclear, as both Dickens and Ternan burned each other's letters, but it was clearly central to Dickens's personal and professional life. On his death, he settled an annuity on her which made her a financially independent woman. Claire Tomalin's book, The Invisible Woman, set out to prove that Ellen Ternan lived with Dickens secretly for the last 13 years of his life, and was subsequently turned into a play, Little Nell, by Simon Gray.
When Dickens separated from his wife in 1858, divorce was almost unthinkable, particularly for someone as famous as he was, and he financially supported her long afterwards. Although they appeared to be initially happy together, Catherine did not seem to share quite the same boundless energy for life which Dickens had. Nevertheless, her job of looking after their ten children, the pressure of living with a world-famous novelist, and keeping house for him, certainly did not help.
An indication of his marital dissatisfaction may be seen when, in 1855, he went to meet his first love, Maria Beadnell. Maria was by this time married as well, but seemed to have fallen short of Dickens's romantic memory of her.
[edit] Rail accident and last years
Crash scene after the accidentOn 9 June 1865, while returning from France with Ternan, 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 trying to help the wounded and the dying before rescuers arrived. Before leaving, he remembered the unfinished manuscript for Our Mutual Friend, and he returned to his carriage to retrieve it. Typically, Dickens later used this experience as material for his short ghost story The Signal-Man in which the central character has a premonition of his own death in a rail crash. He based the story around several previous rail accidents, such as the Clayton Tunnel rail crash of 1861.
Dickens managed to avoid an appearance at the inquest into the crash, as it would have become known that he was travelling that day with Ellen Ternan and her mother, which could have caused a scandal. Ellen had been Dickens's companion since the breakdown of his marriage, and, as he had met her in 1857, she was most likely the ultimate reason for that breakdown. She continued to be his companion, and likely mistress, until his death. The dimensions of the affair were unknown until the publication of Dickens and Daughter, a book about Dickens's relationship with his daughter Kate, in 1939. Kate Dickens worked with author Gladys Storey on the book prior to her death in 1929, and alleged that Dickens and Ternan had a son who died in infancy, though no contemporary evidence exists.[22]
Dickens, though unharmed, never really recovered from the Staplehurst crash, and his normally prolific writing shrank to completing Our Mutual Friend and starting the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood after a long interval. Much of his time was taken up with public readings from his best-loved novels. Dickens was fascinated by the theatre as an escape from the world, and theatres and theatrical people appear in Nicholas Nickleby. The travelling shows were extremely popular. In 1866 a series of public readings were undertaken in England and Scotland. The following year saw Dickens give a series of readings in England and Ireland. Dickens was now really unwell but carried on, compulsively, against his doctor's advice.
Photograph of Dickens taken by Jeremiah Gurney in New York, 1867 or 1868Later in the year he embarked on his second American reading tour, which continued into 1868. During this trip, most of which he spent in New York, he gave 22 readings at Steinway Hall between 9 December 1867 and 20 April 1868, and four at Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims between 16 January and 21 January 1868. In his travels, he saw a significant change in the people and the circumstances of America. His final appearance was at a banquet at Delmonico’s on 18 April 1868, when he promised to never denounce America again. Dickens boarded his ship to return to Britain on 23 April 1868, barely escaping a Federal Tax Lien against the proceeds of his lecture tour.[17]
Statue of Dickens in PhiladelphiaDuring 1869, his readings continued, in England, Scotland, and Ireland, until at last he collapsed, showing symptoms of mild stroke. Further provincial readings were cancelled, but he began upon The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Dickens's final public readings took place in London in 1870. He suffered another stroke on 8 June at Gad's Hill, after a full day's work on Edwin Drood, and five years to the day after the Staplehurst crash, on 9 June 1870, he died at his home in Gad's Hill Place. He was mourned by all his readers.
Contrary to his wish to be buried in Rochester Cathedral, he was laid to rest in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. The inscription on his tomb reads: CHARLES DICKENS Born 7th February 1812 Died 9th June 1870.[23] Dickens's 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 located in Clark Park in the Spruce Hill neighbourhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the United States.
[edit] Literary style
Dickens's writing style is florid and poetic, with a strong comic touch. His satires of British aristocratic snobbery—he calls one character the "Noble Refrigerator"—are often popular. Comparing orphans to stocks and shares, people to tug boats, or dinner-party guests to furniture are just some of Dickens's acclaimed flights of fancy. Many of his character's names provide the reader with a hint as to the roles played in advancing the storyline, such as Mr. Murdstone in the novel David Copperfield, which is clearly a combination of "murder" and stony coldness. His literary style is also a mixture of fantasy and realism.
[edit] Characters
Charles Dickens used his rich imagination, sense of humour and detailed memories, particularly of his childhood, to enliven his fiction.Dickensian characters—especially their typically whimsical names—are among the most memorable in English literature. The likes of Ebenezer Scrooge, Fagin, Mrs. Gamp, Charles Darnay, Oliver Twist, Micawber, Abel Magwitch, Newman Noggs, Samuel Pickwick, Miss Havisham, Wackford Squeers, Uriah Heep and many others are so well known and can be believed to be living a life outside the novels that their stories have been continued by other authors.[citation needed]
Dickens loved the style of 18th century gothic romance,[citation needed] although it had already become a target for parody.[citation needed] One "character" vividly drawn throughout his novels is London itself. From the coaching inns on the outskirts of the city to the lower reaches of the Thames, all aspects of the capital are described over the course of his body of work.
[edit] Episodic writing
As noted above, most of Dickens's major novels were first written in monthly or weekly instalments in journals such as Master Humphrey's Clock and Household Words, later reprinted in book form. These instalments made the stories cheap, accessible and the series of regular cliff-hangers made each new episode widely anticipated. American fans even waited at the docks in New York, shouting out to the crew of an incoming ship, "Is Little Nell dead?"[24][25][26] Part of Dickens's great talent was to incorporate this episodic writing style but still end up with a coherent novel at the end. The monthly numbers were illustrated by, amongst others, "Phiz" (a pseudonym for Hablot Browne). Among his best-known works are Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, Bleak House, Nicholas Nickleby, The Pickwick Papers, and A Christmas Carol.
"Charles Dickens as he appears when reading." Wood engraving from Harper's Weekly, 7 December 1867Dickens's technique of writing in monthly or weekly instalments (depending on the work) can be understood by analysing his relationship with his illustrators. The several artists who filled this role were privy to the contents and intentions of Dickens's instalments before the general public. Thus, by reading these correspondences between author and illustrator, the intentions behind Dickens's work can be better understood. What was hidden in his art is made plain in these letters. These also reveal how the interests of the reader and author do not coincide. A great example of that appears in the monthly novel Oliver Twist. At one point in this work, Dickens had Oliver become embroiled in a robbery. That particular monthly instalment concludes with young Oliver being shot. Readers expected that they would be forced to wait only a month to find out the outcome of that gunshot. In fact, Dickens did not reveal what became of young Oliver in the succeeding number. Rather, the reading public was forced to wait two months to discover if the boy lived.
Another important impact of Dickens's episodic writing style resulted from his exposure to the opinions of his readers. Since Dickens did not write the chapters very far ahead of their publication, he was allowed to witness the public reaction and alter the story depending on those public reactions. A fine example of this process can be seen in his weekly serial The Old Curiosity Shop, which is a chase story. In this novel, Little Nell and her Grandfather are fleeing the villain Quilp. The progress of the novel follows the gradual success of that pursuit. As Dickens wrote and published the weekly instalments, his friend John Forster pointed out: "You know you're going to have to kill her, don't you." Why this end was necessary can be explained by a brief analysis of the difference between the structure of a comedy versus a tragedy. In a comedy, the action covers a sequence "You think they're going to lose, you think they're going to lose, they win". In tragedy, it is: "You think they're going to win, you think they're going to win, they lose". The dramatic conclusion of the story is implicit throughout the novel. So, as Dickens wrote the novel in the form of a tragedy, the sad outcome of the novel was a foregone conclusion. If he had not caused his heroine to lose, he would not have completed his dramatic structure. Dickens admitted that his friend Forster was right and, in the end, Little Nell died.[27]
[edit] Social commentary
Dickens's novels were, among other things, works of social commentary. He was a fierce critic of the poverty and social stratification of Victorian society. Dickens's second novel, Oliver Twist (1839), shocked readers with its images of poverty and crime and was responsible for the clearing of the actual London slum that was the basis of the story's Jacob's Island. In addition, with the character of the tragic prostitute, Nancy, Dickens "humanised" such women for the reading public; women who were regarded as "unfortunates," inherently immoral casualties of the Victorian class/economic system. Bleak House and Little Dorrit elaborated expansive critiques of the Victorian institutional apparatus: the interminable lawsuits of the Court of Chancery that destroyed people's lives in Bleak House and a dual attack in Little Dorrit on inefficient, corrupt patent offices and unregulated market speculation.
[edit] Literary techniques
Dickens is often described as using 'idealised' characters and highly sentimental scenes to contrast with his caricatures and the ugly social truths he reveals. The story of Nell Trent in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) was received as incredibly moving by contemporary readers but viewed as ludicrously sentimental by Oscar Wilde:"You would need to have a heart of stone," he declared in one of his famous witticisms, "not to laugh at the death of Little Nell."[28] (although her death actually takes place off-stage). In 1903 G. K. Chesterton said, "It is not the death of Little Nell, but the life of Little Nell, that I object to."[29]
In Oliver Twist Dickens provides readers with an idealised portrait of a young boy so inherently and unrealistically 'good' that his values are never subverted by either brutal orphanages or coerced involvement in a gang of young pickpockets. While later novels also centre on idealised characters (Esther Summerson in Bleak House and Amy Dorrit in Little Dorrit), this idealism serves only to highlight Dickens's goal of poignant social commentary. Many of his novels are concerned with social realism, focusing on mechanisms of social control that direct people's lives (for instance, factory networks in Hard Times and hypocritical exclusionary class codes in Our Mutual Friend).[citation needed]
Dickens also employs incredible coincidences (e.g., Oliver Twist turns out to be the lost nephew of the upper class family that randomly rescues him from the dangers of the pickpocket group). Such coincidences are a staple of eighteenth century picaresque novels such as Henry Fielding's Tom Jones that Dickens enjoyed so much. But, to Dickens, these were not just plot devices but an index of the humanism that led him to believe that good wins out in the end and often in unexpected ways.[citation needed]
[edit] Autobiographical elements
All authors might be said to incorporate autobiographical elements in their fiction, but with Dickens this is very noticeable, even though he took pains to mask what he considered his shameful, lowly past. David Copperfield is one of the most clearly autobiographical but the scenes from Bleak House of interminable court cases and legal arguments are drawn from the author's brief career as a court reporter. Dickens's own father was sent to prison (where he was joined by his wife and younger children) for debt, and this became a common theme in many of his books, with the detailed depiction of life in the Marshalsea prison in Little Dorrit resulting from Dickens's own experiences of the institution. Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop is thought to represent Dickens's sister-in-law,[citation needed] Nicholas Nickleby's father and Wilkins Micawber are certainly Dickens's own father, just as Mrs. Nickleby and Mrs. Micawber are similar to his mother.[citation needed] The snobbish nature of Pip from Great Expectations also has some affinity to the author himself. Childhood sweethearts in many of his books (such as Little Eml’y in David Copperfield) may have been based on Dickens’ own childhood infatuation with Lucy Stroughill.[30] The character of Fagin is believed to be based upon Ikey Solomon, a 19th century Jewish criminal of London and later Australia. It is reported that Dickens, during his time as a journalist, interviewed Solomon after a court appearance and that he was the inspiration for the gang leader in Oliver Twist. When the work was published in 1838 the unpleasant, to modern eyes,[31][32] stereotype of the Jewish character "Fagin" as fence and corrupter of children reflected only the endemic view of the time. The characterisation aroused no indignation, or even comment, and it seems to have been written without conscious anti-semitic intent.[33][34] By 1854, however, Dickens was moved to defend himself against mild reproof in The Jewish Chronicle by reference to his "strong abhorrence of...persecution of Jews in old time" expressed in his book A Child's History of England.[35] His sensitivity on the subject increased: in 1863 he was explaining that the character Fagin was "called a 'Jew', not because of his religion, but because of his race."[35] He took pains to include in Our Mutual Friend of 1864 the sympathetic Jewish character "Riah".
Dickens may have drawn on his childhood experiences, but he was also ashamed of them and would not reveal that this was where he gathered his realistic accounts of squalor. Very few knew the details of his early life until six years after his death when John Forster published a biography on which Dickens had collaborated. A shameful past in Victorian times could taint reputations, just as it did for some of his characters, and this may have been Dickens's own fear.
[edit] Legacy
Stamp in "The Centenary Edition of The Works of Charles Dickens in 36 Volumes."
A scene from Oliver Twist, from an early 20th-century edition
'Dickens's Dream' by R.W. BussA well-known personality, his novels proved immensely popular during his lifetime. His first full novel, The Pickwick Papers (1837), brought him immediate fame, and this success continued throughout his career. Although rarely departing greatly from his typical "Dickensian" method of always attempting to write a great "story" in a somewhat conventional manner (the dual narrators of Bleak House constitute a notable exception), he experimented with varied themes, characterisations, and genres. Some of these experiments achieved more popularity than others, and the public's taste and appreciation of his many works have varied over time. Usually keen to give his readers what they wanted, the monthly or weekly publication of his works in episodes meant that the books could change as the story proceeded at the whim of the public. Good examples of this are the American episodes in Martin Chuzzlewit which Dickens included in response to lower-than-normal sales of the earlier chapters. In Our Mutual Friend, the inclusion of the character of Riah was a positive portrayal of a Jewish character after he was criticised for the depiction of Fagin in Oliver Twist.[35]
Although his popularity has waned a little since his death, he continues to be one of the best known and most read of English authors. At least 180 motion pictures and TV adaptations based on Dickens's works help confirm his success.[36] Many of his works were adapted for the stage during his own lifetime and as early as 1913 a silent film of The Pickwick Papers was made. His characters were often so memorable that they took on a life of their own outside his books. Gamp became a slang expression for an umbrella from the character Mrs Gamp and Pickwickian, Pecksniffian, and Gradgrind all entered dictionaries due to Dickens's original portraits of such characters who were quixotic, hypocritical, or emotionlessly logical. Sam Weller, the carefree and irreverent valet of The Pickwick Papers, was an early superstar, perhaps better known than his author at first. It is likely that A Christmas Carol stands as his best-known story, with new adaptations almost every year. It is also the most-filmed of Dickens's stories, with many versions dating from the early years of cinema. This simple morality tale with both pathos and its theme of redemption, sums up (for many) the true meaning of Christmas. Indeed, it eclipses all other Yuletide stories in not only popularity, but in adding archetypal figures (Scrooge, Tiny Tim, the Christmas ghosts) to the Western cultural consciousness. A Christmas Carol was written by Dickens in an attempt to forestall financial disaster as a result of flagging sales of his novel Martin Chuzzlewit. Years later, Dickens shared that he was "deeply affected" in writing A Christmas Carol and the novel rejuvenated his career as a renowned author.
At a time when Britain was the major economic and political power of the world, Dickens highlighted the life of the forgotten poor and disadvantaged at the heart of empire. Through his journalism he campaigned on specific issues—such as sanitation and the workhouse—but his fiction probably demonstrated its greatest prowess in changing public opinion in regard to class inequalities. He often depicted the exploitation and repression of the poor and condemned the public officials and institutions that not only allowed such abuses to exist, but flourished as a result. His most strident indictment of this condition is in Hard Times (1854), Dickens's only novel-length treatment of the industrial working class. In this work, he uses both vitriol and satire to illustrate how this marginalised social stratum was termed "Hands" by the factory owners; that is, not really "people" but rather only appendages of the machines that they operated. His writings inspired others, in particular journalists and political figures, to address such problems of class oppression. For example, the prison scenes in The Pickwick Papers are claimed to have been influential in having the Fleet Prison shut down. As Karl Marx said, Dickens, and the other novelists of Victorian England, "...issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together...".[37] The exceptional popularity of his novels, even those with socially oppositional themes (Bleak House, 1853; Little Dorrit, 1857; Our Mutual Friend, 1865) underscored not only his almost preternatural ability to create compelling storylines and unforgettable characters, but also ensured that the Victorian public confronted issues of social justice that had commonly been ignored.
His fiction, with often vivid descriptions of life in nineteenth century England, has inaccurately and anachronistically come to symbolise on a global level Victorian society (1837 – 1901) as uniformly "Dickensian," when in fact, his novels' time span spanned from the 1770s to the 1860s. In the decade following his death in 1870, a more intense degree of socially and philosophically pessimistic perspectives invested British fiction; such themes stood in marked contrast to the religious faith that ultimately held together even the bleakest of Dickens's novels. Dickens clearly influenced later Victorian novelists such as Thomas Hardy and George Gissing, however their works display a greater willingness to confront and challenge the Victorian institution of religion. They also portray characters caught up by social forces (primarily via lower-class conditions), but they usually steered them to tragic ends beyond their control.
Novelists continue to be influenced by his books; for instance, such disparate current writers as Anne Rice, Tom Wolfe, and John Irving evidence direct Dickensian connections. Humorist James Finn Garner even wrote a tongue-in-cheek "politically correct" version of A Christmas Carol, and other affectionate parodies include the Radio 4 comedy Bleak Expectations. Matthew Pearl's novel The Last Dickens is a thriller about how Charles Dickens would have ended Edwin Drood.
Although Dickens's life has been the subject of at least two TV miniseries and two famous one-man shows, he has never been the subject of a Hollywood "big screen" biography.
[edit] Name 'Dickens'
Charles Dickens had, as a contemporary critic put it, a "queer name".[38] The name Dickens was used in interjective exclamations like "What the Dickens!" as a substitute for "devil". It was recorded in the OED as originating from Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor. It was also used as a substitute for "deuce" as in the phrase "to play the Dickens" in the meaning "to play havoc/mischief".[39]
[edit] Adaptations of readings
There have been several performances of Dickens readings by Emlyn Williams, Bransby Williams, Clive Francis performing the John Mortimer adaptation of A Christmas Carol and also Simon Callow in the Mystery of Charles Dickens by Peter Ackroyd.
[edit] Museums and festivals
Bleak House, Broadstairs in Broadstairs, Kent, where Dickens wrote some of his novels. The house was for many years a Dickens museum, and visitors would leave notes addressed to him in the desk-drawer in his former study, overlooking harbour and sea.There are museums and festivals celebrating Dickens's life and works in many of the towns with which he was associated.
The Charles Dickens Museum, in Doughty Street, Holborn is the only one of Dickens's London homes to survive. He lived there only two years but in that time wrote The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby. It contains a major collection of manuscripts, original furniture and memorabilia.
Charles Dickens' Birthplace Museum in Portsmouth is the house in which Dickens was born. It has been re-furnished in the likely style of 1812 and contains Dickens memorabilia.
The Dickens House Museum in Broadstairs, Kent is the house of Miss Mary Pearson Strong, the basis for Miss Betsey Trotwood in David Copperfield. It is visible across the bay from the original Bleak House (also a museum until 2005) where David Copperfield was written. The museum contains memorabilia, general Victoriana and some of Dickens's letters. Broadstairs has held a Dickens Festival annually since 1937.
The Charles Dickens Centre in Eastgate House, Rochester, closed in 2004, but the garden containing the author's Swiss chalet is still open. The 16th century house, which appeared as Westgate House in The Pickwick Papers and the Nun's House in Edwin Drood, is now used as a wedding venue.[40] The city's annual Dickens Festival (summer) and Dickensian Christmas celebrations continue unaffected.
The Cashier's Office, Chatham Dockyard.The Dickens World themed attraction, covering 71,500 square feet (6,643 m2), and including a cinema and restaurants, opened in Chatham on 25 May 2007.[41] It stands on a small part of the site of the former naval dockyard where Dickens's father had once worked in the Navy Pay Office.
Dickens Festival in Rochester, Kent. Summer Dickens is held at the end of May or in the first few days of June, it commences with an invitation only ball on the Thursday and then continues with street entertainment, and many costumed characters, on the Friday, Saturday and Sunday.Christmas Dickens is the first weekend in December- Saturday and Sunday only.
Dickens festivals are also held across the world.
Four notable ones in the United States are:
A child, dressed in appropriate attire, at the Dickensian Festival in Ulverston, Cumbria.The Riverside Dickens Festival in Riverside, California, includes literary studies as well as entertainments.
The Great Dickens Christmas Fair (http://www.dickensfair.com/) has been held in San Francisco, California, since the 1970s. During the four or five weekends before Christmas, over 500 costumed performers mingle with and entertain thousands of visitors amidst the recreated full-scale blocks of Dickensian London in over 90,000 square feet (8,000 m2) of public area. This is the oldest, largest, and most successful of the modern Dickens festivals outside England. Many (including the Martin Harris who acts in the Rochester festival and flies out from London to play Scrooge every year in SF) say it is the most impressive in the world.
Dickens on The Strand in Galveston, Texas, is a holiday festival held on the first weekend in December since 1974, where bobbies, Beefeaters and the "Queen" herself are on hand to recreate the Victorian London of Charles Dickens. Many festival volunteers and attendees dress in Victorian attire and bring the world of Dickens to life.
The Greater Port Jefferson-Northern Brookhaven Arts Council (http://www.gpjac.org) holds a Dickens Festival in the Village of Port Jefferson, NY each year. In 2007, the Dickens Festival is 30 November, 1 December, and 2 December. It includes many events, along with a troupe of street performers who bring an authentic Dickensian atmosphere to the town.
[edit] Other memorials
Charles Dickens was commemorated on the Series E £10 note issued by the Bank of England which was in circulation in the UK between 1992 and 2003. Dickens appeared on the reverse of the note accompanied by a scene from The Pickwick Papers.[42]
[edit] Notable works by Charles Dickens
Main article: Bibliography of Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens published over a dozen major novels, a large number of short stories (including a number of Christmas-themed stories), a handful of plays, and several non-fiction books. Dickens's novels were initially serialised in weekly and monthly magazines, then reprinted in standard book formats.
[edit] Novels
The Pickwick Papers (Monthly serial, April 1836 to November 1837)[43]
The Adventures of Oliver Twist (Monthly serial in Bentley's Miscellany, February 1837 to April 1839)
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (Monthly serial, April 1838 to October 1839)
The Old Curiosity Shop (Weekly serial in Master Humphrey's Clock, 25 April 1840, to 6 February 1841)
Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty (Weekly serial in Master Humphrey's Clock, 13 February 1841, to 27 November 1841)
The Christmas books:
A Christmas Carol (1843)
The Chimes (1844)
The Cricket on the Hearth (1845)
The Battle of Life (1846)
The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848)
The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (Monthly serial, January 1843 to July 1844)
Dombey and Son (Monthly serial, October 1846 to April 1848)
David Copperfield (Monthly serial, May 1849 to November 1850)
Bleak House (Monthly serial, March 1852 to September 1853)
Hard Times: For These Times (Weekly serial in Household Words, 1 April 1854, to 12 August 1854)
Little Dorrit (Monthly serial, December 1855 to June 1857)
A Tale of Two Cities (Weekly serial in All the Year Round, 30 April 1859, to 26 November 1859)
Great Expectations (Weekly serial in All the Year Round, 1 December 1860 to 3 August 1861)
Our Mutual Friend (Monthly serial, May 1864 to November 1865)
The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Monthly serial, April 1870 to September 1870. Only six of twelve planned numbers completed)
[edit] Short story collections
Sketches by Boz (1836)
The Mudfog Papers (1837) in Bentley's Miscellany magazine
Reprinted Pieces (1861)
The Uncommercial Traveller (1860–1869)
Christmas numbers of Household Words magazine:
What Christmas Is, as We Grow Older (1851)
A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire (1852)
Another Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire (1853)
The Seven Poor Travellers (1854)
The Holly-Tree Inn (1855)
The Wreck of the "Golden Mary" (1856)
The Perils of Certain English Prisoners (1857)
A House to Let (1858)
Christmas numbers of All the Year Round magazine:
The Haunted House (1859)
A Message From the Sea (1860)
Tom Tiddler's Ground (1861)
Somebody's Luggage (1862)
Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings (1863)
Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy (1864)
Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions (1865)
Mugby Junction (1866)
No Thoroughfare (1867)
[edit] Selected non-fiction, poetry, and plays
The Village Coquettes (Plays, 1836)
The Fine Old English Gentleman (poetry, 1841)
Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi (1838)
American Notes: For General Circulation (1842)
Pictures from Italy (1846)
The Life of Our Lord: As written for his children (1849)
A Child's History of England (1853)
The Frozen Deep (play, 1857)
Speeches, Letters and Sayings (1870)
[edit] Notes
^ "What the Dickens?", by Simon Swift. The Guardian, Wednesday 18 April 2007. "Dickens's books have never gone out of print."
^ "Victorian squalor and hi-tech gadgetry: Dickens World to open in England". Bloomberg News. 23 May 2007. "He created some of English literature's most memorable characters and his work, which has never gone out of print, continues to bring the poverty of 19th-century London to life for future generations."
^ Stone, Harry. Dickens' Working Notes for His Novels, Chicago, 1987
^ Henry James, "Our Mutual Friend", The Nation, 21 December 1865- a scathing review
^ [1] Dickens Family Tree website
^ John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, Book 1, Chapter 1
^ Jordan, John (2001). "Chronology". The Cambridge companion to Charles Dickens. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. p. xvi. ISBN 0-521-66964-2.
^ Pope-Hennessy, Una (1945). "The Family Background". Charles Dickens 1812-1870. London: Chatto and Windus. p. 11.
^ a b Project Gutenberg's Life of Charles Dickens (James R. Osgood & Company, 1875), by John Forster, Volume I, Chapter II, accessed 2 August 2008
^ Angus Wilson The World of Charles Dickens ISBN 0-14-00.3488-9
^ eNotes.com "Charles Dickens", accessed 15 November 2007
^ Angus Wilson The World of Charles Dickens ISBN 0-14-003488-9
^ Pope-Hennessy (1945: 18)
^ [2] Dickens Family Tree website
^ victorianweb.org - Mary Scott Hogarth, 1820–1837: Dickens's Beloved Sister-in-Law and Inspiration
^ RE: Cremains / Ravens
^ a b Kenneth T. Jackson: The Encyclopedia of New York City: The New York Historical Society; Yale University Press; 1995. P. 333.
^ Charles Dickens
^ Glancy, Ruth F (2006). "The Frozen Deep and other Biographical Influences". Charles Dickens's A Tale Of Two Cities: A Sourcebook. Abingdon, England: Routledge. pp. 14. ISBN 0415287596.
^ a b Dickens, Charles (1854-12-02). "The Lost Arctic Voyagers". Household Words: A Weekly Journal (London: Charles Dickens) 10 (245): 361 et sec. http://books.google.com/books?id=DOQRAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA433&dq=%22Charles+Dickens%22+esquimaux&ei=zKtvSP_4H6HQjgGJvPDbAQ&client=firefox-a#PPA361,M1. Retrieved on 2008-07-05.
^ Rae, John (1854-12-30). "Dr Rae's report". Household Words: A Weekly Journal (London: Charles Dickens) 10 (249): 457–458. http://books.google.com/books?id=DOQRAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA433&dq=%22Charles+Dickens%22+esquimaux&ei=zKtvSP_4H6HQjgGJvPDbAQ&client=firefox-a#PPA458,M1. Retrieved on 2008-08-16.
^ Tomalin (1995). "The Invisible Woman: The Story of Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan". http://www.laits.utexas.edu/farrell/documents/Dickens%20and%20Ternan.pdf. Retrieved on 2009-03-13.
^ Staff writers (2007). "Charles Dickens". Westminster Abbey from 1065 to today. The Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey. http://www.westminster-abbey.org/visitor/plan-of-the-abbey/12164. Retrieved on 2009-02-19.
^ Boz Will Be Boz - TIME
^ A Dickens of a fuss - theage.com.au
^ And They All Died Happily Ever After - New York Times
^ Dickens, Charles; Stone, Harry (1987). Dickens' working notes for his novels. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226145905.
^ In conversation with Ada Leverson. Quoted in Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), p. 469.
^ G. K. Chesterton, Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens, Chapter 6: Curiosity Shop
^ Everybody in Dickens by George Newlin
^ Mendelsohn, Ezra (1996). Literary strategies: Jewish texts and contexts. Studies in Contemporary Jewry. XII. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 221. ISBN 0-19-511203-2.
^ Valman, Nadia (2005). Levy, Richard S.. ed. Antisemitism A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution. Santa Barbara CA: ABC-CLIO. pp. 176. ISBN 1-85109-439-3.
^ Newey, Vincent (2004). The Scriptures of Charles Dickens. Aldershot, England: Ashgate. pp. 103. ISBN 1859284345.
^ Tillotson, Kathleen (ed); Gill, Stephen (1999). Oxford World's Classics: Oliver Twist. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. xxii. ISBN 0192833391.
^ a b c Cohen, Derek; Heller, Deborah (1990). Jewish Presences in English Literature. Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen's University Press. pp. 41. ISBN 0773507817.
^ IMDB entry for Charles Dickens as writer accessdate 2009-06-02
^ Marx, Karl (1 August 1954). "The English Middle Classes". New York Tribune. Marxists Internet Archive. http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1854/08/01.htm. Retrieved on 2007-06-10.
^ Unnamed writer (January 1849). "The Haunted Man review". Macphail's Edinburgh Ecclesiastical Journal (Edinburgh) vi: 423. "Mr Dickens, as if in revenge for his own queer name, does bestow still queerer ones upon his fictitious creations.".
^ John Bowen (2000) Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit, ISBN 0199261407, p. 36
^ Medway Council - Eastgate House
^ Hart, Christopher (20 May 2007). "What, the Dickens World?". The Sunday Times. Times Online. http://travel.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/travel/holiday_type/family/article1803247.ece. Retrieved on 2007-06-02.
^ "Withdrawn banknotes reference guide". Bank of England. http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/denom_guide/index.htm. Retrieved on 2008-10-17.
^ Serial publication dates from Chronology of Novels by E. D. H. Johnson, Holmes Professor of Belles Lettres, Princeton University. Accessed 11 June 2007.
Born Charles John Huffam Dickens
7 February 1812(1812-02-07)
Landport, Hampshire, England
Died 9 June 1870 (aged 58)
Gad's Hill Place, Higham, Kent, England
Occupation Novelist
Notable work(s) Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Hard Times
Influences[show]
Honoré de Balzac, Miguel de Cervantes, Victor Hugo, Washington Irving, William Shakespeare
Influenced[show]
T. Coraghessan Boyle, Fyodor Dostoevsky, George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, John Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Tom Wolfe, G. K. Chesterton, George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, Mervyn Peake
John Keats
John Keats
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"Keats" redirects here. For other uses, see Keats (disambiguation).
John Keats
Born 31 October 1795(1795-10-31)
London, England
Died 23 February 1821 (aged 25)
Rome, Papal States
Occupation Poet
Literary movement Romantic
John Keats (pronounced /ˈkiːts/; 31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English poet who became one of the key poets of the English Romantic movement during the early nineteenth century. During his very short life, his work received constant critical attacks from periodicals of the day, but his posthumous influence on poets such as Alfred Tennyson and Wilfred Owen has been immense. Elaborate word choice and sensual imagery characterize Keats' poetry, including a series of odes that were his masterpieces and which remain among the most popular poems in English literature. Keats's letters, which expound on his aesthetic theory of "negative capability",[1] are among the most celebrated by any writer.
Born 31 October 1795(1795-10-31)
London, England
Died 23 February 1821 (aged 25)
Rome, Papal States
Occupation Poet
Literary movement Romanti
[edit] Life
John Keats was born in 1795 at 85 Moorgate in London, England, where his father, Thomas Keats, was a hostler. The pub is now called "Keats at the Globe", only a few yards from Moorgate station. Keats was baptized at St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate and lived happily for the first seven years of his life. The beginnings of his troubles occurred in 1804, when his father died of a fractured skull after falling from his horse. A year later, in 1805, Keats' grandfather died. His mother, Frances Jennings Keats, remarried soon afterwards, but quickly left the new husband and moved herself and her four children (a son had died in infancy) to live with Keats' grandmother, Alice Jennings. There, Keats attended a school that first instilled a love of literature in him.
Keats' grave in RomeIn 1810 his mother died of tuberculosis, leaving him and his siblings in the custody of their grandmother who appointed two guardians to take care of her new "charges", one of whom was Richard Abbey. The relationship between Keats and Abbey was never a happy one; Abbey thought Keat's dream of becoming a poet was silly, and later on in life Keats and his sister, Fanny, came to look upon him as a monster. These two appointed guardians removed Keats from his old school to become a surgeon's apprentice at Thomas Hammond's apothecary shop in Edmonton[2] (now part of the London Borough of Enfield). This continued until 1814, when, after a fight with his master, he left his apprenticeship and became a student at Guy's Hospital (now part of King's College London, University of London). During that year, he devoted more and more of his time to the study of literature. Keats traveled to the Isle of Wight in the spring of 1819, where he spent a week. Later that year he stayed in Winchester. It was here that Keats wrote "Isabella", "St. Agnes' Eve" and "Lamia". Parts of "Hyperion" and the five-act poetic tragedy "Otho the Great" were also written in Winchester.
Following the death of his grandmother, he soon found his brother, Tom Keats, entrusted to his care. Tom was suffering, as his mother had, from tuberculosis. Finishing his epic poem Endymion, Keats left to walk in Scotland and Ireland with his friend Charles Armitage Brown. However, he too began to show signs of tuberculosis infection on that trip, and returned prematurely. When he did, he found that Tom's condition had deteriorated, and that Endymion had, as had Poems before it, been the target of much abuse from the critics. On 1 December 1818, Tom Keats died of his disease, and John Keats moved again, to live in Brown's house in Hampstead, next to Hampstead Heath. There he lived next door to Fanny Brawne, who had been staying there with her mother. He then quickly fell in love with Fanny. However, it was overall an unhappy affair for the poet; Keats's ardour for her seemed to bring him more vexation than comfort. The later (posthumous) publication of their correspondence was to scandalise Victorian society. In the diary of Fanny Brawne was found only one sentence regarding the separation: "Mr. Keats has left Hampstead." Fanny's letters to Keats were, as the poet had requested, destroyed upon his death. However, in 1937, a collection of 31 letters, written by Fanny Brawne to Keats's sister, Frances, was published by Oxford University Press. While these letters revealed the depth of Brawne's feelings toward Keats and in many ways attempted to redeem her rather promiscuous reputation, it is arguable whether or not they succeeded.
Life and Death masks in RomeThis relationship was cut short when, by 1820, Keats began showing serious signs of tuberculosis, the disease that had plagued his family. On the suggestion of his doctors, he left the cold airs of London behind and moved to Italy with his friend Joseph Severn. Keats moved into a house, which is now a museum that is dedicated to his life and work, The Keats-Shelley House, on the Spanish Steps, in Rome, where, despite attentive care from Severn and Dr. John Clark, the poet's health rapidly deteriorated.
Portrait, Keats' grave in RomeHe died on 23 February 1821 and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome. His last request was to be buried under a tombstone reading, "Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water." His name was not to appear on the stone. Despite these requests, however, Severn and Brown also added the epitaph: "This Grave contains all that was mortal, of a YOUNG ENGLISH POET, who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his heart, at the Malicious Power of his enemies, desired these words to be Engraven on his Tomb Stone" along with the image of a lyre with broken strings.
Shelley blamed Keats' death on an article published shortly before in the Quarterly Review, with a scathing attack on Keats' Endymion. The offending article was long believed to have been written by William Gifford, though later shown to be the work of John Wilson Croker. Keats's death inspired Shelley to write the poem Adonais. Byron later composed a short poem on this theme using the phrase "snuffed out by an article." However Byron, far less admiring of Keats's poetry than Shelley and generally more cynical in nature, was here probably just as much poking fun at Shelley's interpretation as he was having a dig at his old fencing partners the critics. (see below, Byron's other less than serious poem on the same subject).
The largest collection of Keats's letters, manuscripts, and other papers is in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Other collections of such material can be found at the British Library; Keats House, Hampstead; The Keats-Shelley House, Rome; and the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.
The Eve of St. Agnes
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This article is about the poem by John Keats. For information on the saint, see Saint Agnes.
Madeleine undressing, painting by John Everett Millais"The Eve of St. Agnes" is a long poem (42 stanzas) by John Keats, written in 1819 and published in 1820. It is widely considered to be amongst his finest poems and was influential in 19th century literature.
The title comes from the day (or evening) before the feast of Saint Agnes (or St. Agnes' Eve). St. Agnes, the patron saint of virgins, died a martyr in fourth century Rome. The eve falls on January 20; the feast day on the 21. The divinations referred to by Keats in this poem are referred to by John Aubrey in his Miscellanies (1696) as being associated with St. Agnes' night.
[edit] Background
The flight of Madeline and Porphyro, painting by William Holman HuntKeats based his poem on the superstition that a girl could see her future husband in a dream if she performed certain rites on the eve of St. Agnes; that is she would go to bed without any supper, undress herself so that she was completely naked and lie on her bed with her hands under the pillow and looking up to the heavens and not to look behind. Then the proposed husband would appear in her dream, kiss her, and feast with her.
In the original version of this poem, Keats emphasized the young lovers' sexuality, but his publishers, who feared public reaction, forced him to tone down the eroticism.
[edit] Plot
On a bitterly chill night, an ancient beadsman performs his penances while in the castle of Madeline's warlike family, a bibulous revel has begun. Madeline pines for the love of Porphyro, sworn enemy to her kin. The old dames have told her she may receive sweet dreams of love from him if on this night, St. Agnes' Eve, she retires to bed under the proper ritual of silence and supine receptiveness.
As we might expect, Porphyro makes his way to the castle and braves entry, seeking out Angela, an elderly woman friendly to his family, and importuning her to lead him to Madeline's room at night where he may but gaze upon her sleeping form. Angela is persuaded only with difficulty, saying she fears damnation if Porphyro does not afterward marry the girl.
Concealed in an ornate carven closet in Madeline's room, Porphyro watches as Madeline makes ready for bed, and then, beholding her full beauty in the moonlight, creeps forth to prepare for her a feast of rare delicacies. Madeline wakes and sees before her the same image she has seen in her dream, and thinking Porphyro part of it, receives him into her bed. Awakening in full and realizing her mistake, she tells Porphyro she cannot hate him for his deception since her heart is so much in his, but that if he goes now he leaves behind "A dove forlorn and lost / With sick unpruned wing".
Porphyro declares his love for Madeline and promises her a home with him over the southern moors. They escape the castle past insensate revelers, and flee into the night. The beadsman, "His thousand Aves told / For aye unsought-for slept among his ashes cold".
Ode on a Grecian Urn
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A Tracing of an Engraving of the Sosibios Vase by John Keats"Ode on a Grecian Urn" is a poem by John Keats written in May 1819 and published in January 1820. It was one of Keats's "Five Great Odes of 1819" which included "Ode on Indolence", "Ode on Melancholy", "Ode to a Nightingale", and "To Autumn". Its inspiration is partly considered to be a visit by Keats to the exhibition of the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum, and partly to the aesthetic theories of the poet's friend, the painter Benjamin Haydon, and Haydon's collection of Grecian prints.
The lyric poem is divided into five stanzas, each with ten lines, and reflects upon the images of the Ancient Greeks depicted on a Grecian urn to whom the narrator addresses his discourse. The poem transitions from a scene depicting a lover eternally pursuing a beloved without fulfillment to a scene that describes village people about to perform a sacrifice. The final lines of the poem declare that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," -that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know", a line which has provoked critical consideration.
Poem
In the first and last stanza of Ode on a Grecian Urn the poet addresses the urn itself from an outward perspective, allowing the narrator to speak directly to the object and to the reader at once. In the middle three stanzas, the poem focuses on the individuals painted on the urn and the relationship between the individual and art. [12]. The narrator silences the urn by describing it as the "bride of quietness", which allows him to speak for it using his own impressions [13] . The narrator addresses the urn by saying:
Thou still unravished bride of quietness!
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time (lines 1-2)
because it is born from stone and made by the hand of an artist who does not communicate through words. As stone, it is able to slow time and become an eternal piece of artwork. As eternal, the urn is capable of producing a story that is outside of time, and that "sylvan historian" expresses[14]
A flow'ry tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? (lines 4-10)
The questions are too ambiguous to create a definite scene, but elements of it are revealed. There is a pursuit and a strong sexual element.[15]
The melody accompanying the pursuit is intensified in the second stanza:[16]
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: (lines 11-14)
There is a hint of a paradox in which indulging causes someone to only want more and a soundless music is desired by the soul. There is also a stasis that prohibits the characters on the urn from ever being fulfilled:[16]
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal -yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! (lines 17-20)
In the third stanza, the narrator begins by speaking to a tree, which will ever hold its leaves and will not “bid the Spring adieu.” The paradox of life versus lifelessness extends beyond the lover and the fair lady and takes a more temporal shape as three of the ten lines begin with the word “forever.” J. W. Myns Carr describes this phenomenon in “The Artistic Spirit of Modern Poetry”
Men and women perfect in the flesh, with their feet on perfect flowers, move across his fancy as in twilight. The poet has reached to their perfection, and returns laden with rich memories of the senses, but, being of his time, he could not cast off the somber uncertain cloud that hid the sun.[17]
The unheard song never ages and the pipes are able to play forever, which leads to the lovers, nature, and all involved to be[16]
For ever panting and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.(lines 28-30)
A new paradox arises in these lines because, according to Harold Bloom, "A mouth that has no moisture and no breath may be able to summon breathless mouths, but it can as easily be called death-in-life as life-in-death".[18]
In order to overcome this merged life and death paradox, the poem shifts to a new scene with a new perspective:[18]. The fourth stanza opens with the sacrifice of a virgin cow, an image that appeared in the Elgin Marbles, and Douglas Bush suggests that Keats could be drawing this image from the "lowing heifer" in the marbles, from Claud's Sacrifice to Apollo, or Raphael's cartoon "The Sacrifice at Lystra", which was also on display at the British Gallery in the spring of 1819 [19].
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea-shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.(lines 31-40)
All that exists in the scene is a procession of individuals, and the narrator conjectures on the rest. The altar and town exist as part of a world outside of art, and the poem challenges the limitations of art through describing their possible existence. The questions are unanswered because there is no one who can ever know the true answers, because the locations are not real.[20]
With the final stanza, according to Bloom, "Keats begins... by reminding himself that it is only the artifice of eternity before him" when he says:[21].
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold pastoral! (lines 41-45)
There is a limit within the audience to comprehend the eternal scene, but the silent urn is still able to speak. The story it tells is both cold and passionate, and it is able to help mankind:[21]
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," -that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (lines 45-50)
[edit] Themes
First Known Copy of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" transcribed by George Keats in 1820Although the poem does not include the subjective involvement of the poet, the urn within the poem requires a human observer, as Walter Jackson Bate puts it: "the very origin of the urn presupposed the hope that it would be rescued into full existence by some later 'greeting of the Spirit'."[22] The poem captures aspects of Keats's idea of "Negative Capability", as the reader does not know who the figures are on the urn, what they are doing, or where they are going. Instead, the speaker revels in this mystery, as he does in the final couplet, which does not make immediate, ascertainable sense but continues to have poetic significance nonetheless. The ode ultimately deals with the complexity of art's relationship with real life.
Throughout the poem, other paradoxes emerge as the narrator compares his world with that of the Ancient Grecians on the urn. In the opening line, he refers to the urn as a “bride of quietness”, which causes Cleanth Brooks to argue that Keats contrasts the urn with the structure of the ode, which was originally intended to be sung.[23]. Likewise, he points to another paradox that arises when the narrator finds immortality on the side of an urn meant to carry the ashes of the dead.
In her study of Ode on a Grecian Urn, Lila Melani lists four paradoxes that lead to the ending lines on truth and beauty:
the discrepancy between the urn with its frozen images and the dynamic life portrayed on the urn
the human and changeable versus the immortal and permanent,
participation versus observation
life versus art [24]
Because the ending couplet is in direct contrast to many of Keats' poems, for example "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" or "Lamia", in which a man is deceived by a woman's beauty, literary critics have begun interpreting it in a new way. Critics such as Sonia Sikka conclude that the narrator, representative of Keats, is criticizing the Urn as he says that all it will ever need to know is that beauty is truth and truth beauty.[25] This reading of the text suggests levels of both jealousy and disdain as the narrator admires the simplicity of the world depicted by the urn but finds it incapable of providing deeper meaning.
Poem
In the first and last stanza of Ode on a Grecian Urn the poet addresses the urn itself from an outward perspective, allowing the narrator to speak directly to the object and to the reader at once. In the middle three stanzas, the poem focuses on the individuals painted on the urn and the relationship between the individual and art. [12]. The narrator silences the urn by describing it as the "bride of quietness", which allows him to speak for it using his own impressions [13] . The narrator addresses the urn by saying:
Thou still unravished bride of quietness!
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time (lines 1-2)
because it is born from stone and made by the hand of an artist who does not communicate through words. As stone, it is able to slow time and become an eternal piece of artwork. As eternal, the urn is capable of producing a story that is outside of time, and that "sylvan historian" expresses[14]
A flow'ry tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? (lines 4-10)
The questions are too ambiguous to create a definite scene, but elements of it are revealed. There is a pursuit and a strong sexual element.[15]
The melody accompanying the pursuit is intensified in the second stanza:[16]
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: (lines 11-14)
There is a hint of a paradox in which indulging causes someone to only want more and a soundless music is desired by the soul. There is also a stasis that prohibits the characters on the urn from ever being fulfilled:[16]
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal -yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! (lines 17-20)
In the third stanza, the narrator begins by speaking to a tree, which will ever hold its leaves and will not “bid the Spring adieu.” The paradox of life versus lifelessness extends beyond the lover and the fair lady and takes a more temporal shape as three of the ten lines begin with the word “forever.” J. W. Myns Carr describes this phenomenon in “The Artistic Spirit of Modern Poetry”
Men and women perfect in the flesh, with their feet on perfect flowers, move across his fancy as in twilight. The poet has reached to their perfection, and returns laden with rich memories of the senses, but, being of his time, he could not cast off the somber uncertain cloud that hid the sun.[17]
The unheard song never ages and the pipes are able to play forever, which leads to the lovers, nature, and all involved to be[16]
For ever panting and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.(lines 28-30)
A new paradox arises in these lines because, according to Harold Bloom, "A mouth that has no moisture and no breath may be able to summon breathless mouths, but it can as easily be called death-in-life as life-in-death".[18]
In order to overcome this merged life and death paradox, the poem shifts to a new scene with a new perspective:[18]. The fourth stanza opens with the sacrifice of a virgin cow, an image that appeared in the Elgin Marbles, and Douglas Bush suggests that Keats could be drawing this image from the "lowing heifer" in the marbles, from Claud's Sacrifice to Apollo, or Raphael's cartoon "The Sacrifice at Lystra", which was also on display at the British Gallery in the spring of 1819 [19].
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea-shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.(lines 31-40)
All that exists in the scene is a procession of individuals, and the narrator conjectures on the rest. The altar and town exist as part of a world outside of art, and the poem challenges the limitations of art through describing their possible existence. The questions are unanswered because there is no one who can ever know the true answers, because the locations are not real.[20]
With the final stanza, according to Bloom, "Keats begins... by reminding himself that it is only the artifice of eternity before him" when he says:[21].
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold pastoral! (lines 41-45)
There is a limit within the audience to comprehend the eternal scene, but the silent urn is still able to speak. The story it tells is both cold and passionate, and it is able to help mankind:[21]
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," -that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (lines 45-50)
[edit] Themes
First Known Copy of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" transcribed by George Keats in 1820Although the poem does not include the subjective involvement of the poet, the urn within the poem requires a human observer, as Walter Jackson Bate puts it: "the very origin of the urn presupposed the hope that it would be rescued into full existence by some later 'greeting of the Spirit'."[22] The poem captures aspects of Keats's idea of "Negative Capability", as the reader does not know who the figures are on the urn, what they are doing, or where they are going. Instead, the speaker revels in this mystery, as he does in the final couplet, which does not make immediate, ascertainable sense but continues to have poetic significance nonetheless. The ode ultimately deals with the complexity of art's relationship with real life.
Throughout the poem, other paradoxes emerge as the narrator compares his world with that of the Ancient Grecians on the urn. In the opening line, he refers to the urn as a “bride of quietness”, which causes Cleanth Brooks to argue that Keats contrasts the urn with the structure of the ode, which was originally intended to be sung.[23]. Likewise, he points to another paradox that arises when the narrator finds immortality on the side of an urn meant to carry the ashes of the dead.
In her study of Ode on a Grecian Urn, Lila Melani lists four paradoxes that lead to the ending lines on truth and beauty:
the discrepancy between the urn with its frozen images and the dynamic life portrayed on the urn
the human and changeable versus the immortal and permanent,
participation versus observation
life versus art [24]
Because the ending couplet is in direct contrast to many of Keats' poems, for example "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" or "Lamia", in which a man is deceived by a woman's beauty, literary critics have begun interpreting it in a new way. Critics such as Sonia Sikka conclude that the narrator, representative of Keats, is criticizing the Urn as he says that all it will ever need to know is that beauty is truth and truth beauty.[25] This reading of the text suggests levels of both jealousy and disdain as the narrator admires the simplicity of the world depicted by the urn but finds it incapable of providing deeper meaning.
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"Keats" redirects here. For other uses, see Keats (disambiguation).
John Keats
Born 31 October 1795(1795-10-31)
London, England
Died 23 February 1821 (aged 25)
Rome, Papal States
Occupation Poet
Literary movement Romantic
John Keats (pronounced /ˈkiːts/; 31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English poet who became one of the key poets of the English Romantic movement during the early nineteenth century. During his very short life, his work received constant critical attacks from periodicals of the day, but his posthumous influence on poets such as Alfred Tennyson and Wilfred Owen has been immense. Elaborate word choice and sensual imagery characterize Keats' poetry, including a series of odes that were his masterpieces and which remain among the most popular poems in English literature. Keats's letters, which expound on his aesthetic theory of "negative capability",[1] are among the most celebrated by any writer.
Born 31 October 1795(1795-10-31)
London, England
Died 23 February 1821 (aged 25)
Rome, Papal States
Occupation Poet
Literary movement Romanti
[edit] Life
John Keats was born in 1795 at 85 Moorgate in London, England, where his father, Thomas Keats, was a hostler. The pub is now called "Keats at the Globe", only a few yards from Moorgate station. Keats was baptized at St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate and lived happily for the first seven years of his life. The beginnings of his troubles occurred in 1804, when his father died of a fractured skull after falling from his horse. A year later, in 1805, Keats' grandfather died. His mother, Frances Jennings Keats, remarried soon afterwards, but quickly left the new husband and moved herself and her four children (a son had died in infancy) to live with Keats' grandmother, Alice Jennings. There, Keats attended a school that first instilled a love of literature in him.
Keats' grave in RomeIn 1810 his mother died of tuberculosis, leaving him and his siblings in the custody of their grandmother who appointed two guardians to take care of her new "charges", one of whom was Richard Abbey. The relationship between Keats and Abbey was never a happy one; Abbey thought Keat's dream of becoming a poet was silly, and later on in life Keats and his sister, Fanny, came to look upon him as a monster. These two appointed guardians removed Keats from his old school to become a surgeon's apprentice at Thomas Hammond's apothecary shop in Edmonton[2] (now part of the London Borough of Enfield). This continued until 1814, when, after a fight with his master, he left his apprenticeship and became a student at Guy's Hospital (now part of King's College London, University of London). During that year, he devoted more and more of his time to the study of literature. Keats traveled to the Isle of Wight in the spring of 1819, where he spent a week. Later that year he stayed in Winchester. It was here that Keats wrote "Isabella", "St. Agnes' Eve" and "Lamia". Parts of "Hyperion" and the five-act poetic tragedy "Otho the Great" were also written in Winchester.
Following the death of his grandmother, he soon found his brother, Tom Keats, entrusted to his care. Tom was suffering, as his mother had, from tuberculosis. Finishing his epic poem Endymion, Keats left to walk in Scotland and Ireland with his friend Charles Armitage Brown. However, he too began to show signs of tuberculosis infection on that trip, and returned prematurely. When he did, he found that Tom's condition had deteriorated, and that Endymion had, as had Poems before it, been the target of much abuse from the critics. On 1 December 1818, Tom Keats died of his disease, and John Keats moved again, to live in Brown's house in Hampstead, next to Hampstead Heath. There he lived next door to Fanny Brawne, who had been staying there with her mother. He then quickly fell in love with Fanny. However, it was overall an unhappy affair for the poet; Keats's ardour for her seemed to bring him more vexation than comfort. The later (posthumous) publication of their correspondence was to scandalise Victorian society. In the diary of Fanny Brawne was found only one sentence regarding the separation: "Mr. Keats has left Hampstead." Fanny's letters to Keats were, as the poet had requested, destroyed upon his death. However, in 1937, a collection of 31 letters, written by Fanny Brawne to Keats's sister, Frances, was published by Oxford University Press. While these letters revealed the depth of Brawne's feelings toward Keats and in many ways attempted to redeem her rather promiscuous reputation, it is arguable whether or not they succeeded.
Life and Death masks in RomeThis relationship was cut short when, by 1820, Keats began showing serious signs of tuberculosis, the disease that had plagued his family. On the suggestion of his doctors, he left the cold airs of London behind and moved to Italy with his friend Joseph Severn. Keats moved into a house, which is now a museum that is dedicated to his life and work, The Keats-Shelley House, on the Spanish Steps, in Rome, where, despite attentive care from Severn and Dr. John Clark, the poet's health rapidly deteriorated.
Portrait, Keats' grave in RomeHe died on 23 February 1821 and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome. His last request was to be buried under a tombstone reading, "Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water." His name was not to appear on the stone. Despite these requests, however, Severn and Brown also added the epitaph: "This Grave contains all that was mortal, of a YOUNG ENGLISH POET, who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his heart, at the Malicious Power of his enemies, desired these words to be Engraven on his Tomb Stone" along with the image of a lyre with broken strings.
Shelley blamed Keats' death on an article published shortly before in the Quarterly Review, with a scathing attack on Keats' Endymion. The offending article was long believed to have been written by William Gifford, though later shown to be the work of John Wilson Croker. Keats's death inspired Shelley to write the poem Adonais. Byron later composed a short poem on this theme using the phrase "snuffed out by an article." However Byron, far less admiring of Keats's poetry than Shelley and generally more cynical in nature, was here probably just as much poking fun at Shelley's interpretation as he was having a dig at his old fencing partners the critics. (see below, Byron's other less than serious poem on the same subject).
The largest collection of Keats's letters, manuscripts, and other papers is in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Other collections of such material can be found at the British Library; Keats House, Hampstead; The Keats-Shelley House, Rome; and the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.
The Eve of St. Agnes
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This article is about the poem by John Keats. For information on the saint, see Saint Agnes.
Madeleine undressing, painting by John Everett Millais"The Eve of St. Agnes" is a long poem (42 stanzas) by John Keats, written in 1819 and published in 1820. It is widely considered to be amongst his finest poems and was influential in 19th century literature.
The title comes from the day (or evening) before the feast of Saint Agnes (or St. Agnes' Eve). St. Agnes, the patron saint of virgins, died a martyr in fourth century Rome. The eve falls on January 20; the feast day on the 21. The divinations referred to by Keats in this poem are referred to by John Aubrey in his Miscellanies (1696) as being associated with St. Agnes' night.
[edit] Background
The flight of Madeline and Porphyro, painting by William Holman HuntKeats based his poem on the superstition that a girl could see her future husband in a dream if she performed certain rites on the eve of St. Agnes; that is she would go to bed without any supper, undress herself so that she was completely naked and lie on her bed with her hands under the pillow and looking up to the heavens and not to look behind. Then the proposed husband would appear in her dream, kiss her, and feast with her.
In the original version of this poem, Keats emphasized the young lovers' sexuality, but his publishers, who feared public reaction, forced him to tone down the eroticism.
[edit] Plot
On a bitterly chill night, an ancient beadsman performs his penances while in the castle of Madeline's warlike family, a bibulous revel has begun. Madeline pines for the love of Porphyro, sworn enemy to her kin. The old dames have told her she may receive sweet dreams of love from him if on this night, St. Agnes' Eve, she retires to bed under the proper ritual of silence and supine receptiveness.
As we might expect, Porphyro makes his way to the castle and braves entry, seeking out Angela, an elderly woman friendly to his family, and importuning her to lead him to Madeline's room at night where he may but gaze upon her sleeping form. Angela is persuaded only with difficulty, saying she fears damnation if Porphyro does not afterward marry the girl.
Concealed in an ornate carven closet in Madeline's room, Porphyro watches as Madeline makes ready for bed, and then, beholding her full beauty in the moonlight, creeps forth to prepare for her a feast of rare delicacies. Madeline wakes and sees before her the same image she has seen in her dream, and thinking Porphyro part of it, receives him into her bed. Awakening in full and realizing her mistake, she tells Porphyro she cannot hate him for his deception since her heart is so much in his, but that if he goes now he leaves behind "A dove forlorn and lost / With sick unpruned wing".
Porphyro declares his love for Madeline and promises her a home with him over the southern moors. They escape the castle past insensate revelers, and flee into the night. The beadsman, "His thousand Aves told / For aye unsought-for slept among his ashes cold".
Ode on a Grecian Urn
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A Tracing of an Engraving of the Sosibios Vase by John Keats"Ode on a Grecian Urn" is a poem by John Keats written in May 1819 and published in January 1820. It was one of Keats's "Five Great Odes of 1819" which included "Ode on Indolence", "Ode on Melancholy", "Ode to a Nightingale", and "To Autumn". Its inspiration is partly considered to be a visit by Keats to the exhibition of the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum, and partly to the aesthetic theories of the poet's friend, the painter Benjamin Haydon, and Haydon's collection of Grecian prints.
The lyric poem is divided into five stanzas, each with ten lines, and reflects upon the images of the Ancient Greeks depicted on a Grecian urn to whom the narrator addresses his discourse. The poem transitions from a scene depicting a lover eternally pursuing a beloved without fulfillment to a scene that describes village people about to perform a sacrifice. The final lines of the poem declare that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," -that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know", a line which has provoked critical consideration.
Poem
In the first and last stanza of Ode on a Grecian Urn the poet addresses the urn itself from an outward perspective, allowing the narrator to speak directly to the object and to the reader at once. In the middle three stanzas, the poem focuses on the individuals painted on the urn and the relationship between the individual and art. [12]. The narrator silences the urn by describing it as the "bride of quietness", which allows him to speak for it using his own impressions [13] . The narrator addresses the urn by saying:
Thou still unravished bride of quietness!
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time (lines 1-2)
because it is born from stone and made by the hand of an artist who does not communicate through words. As stone, it is able to slow time and become an eternal piece of artwork. As eternal, the urn is capable of producing a story that is outside of time, and that "sylvan historian" expresses[14]
A flow'ry tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? (lines 4-10)
The questions are too ambiguous to create a definite scene, but elements of it are revealed. There is a pursuit and a strong sexual element.[15]
The melody accompanying the pursuit is intensified in the second stanza:[16]
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: (lines 11-14)
There is a hint of a paradox in which indulging causes someone to only want more and a soundless music is desired by the soul. There is also a stasis that prohibits the characters on the urn from ever being fulfilled:[16]
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal -yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! (lines 17-20)
In the third stanza, the narrator begins by speaking to a tree, which will ever hold its leaves and will not “bid the Spring adieu.” The paradox of life versus lifelessness extends beyond the lover and the fair lady and takes a more temporal shape as three of the ten lines begin with the word “forever.” J. W. Myns Carr describes this phenomenon in “The Artistic Spirit of Modern Poetry”
Men and women perfect in the flesh, with their feet on perfect flowers, move across his fancy as in twilight. The poet has reached to their perfection, and returns laden with rich memories of the senses, but, being of his time, he could not cast off the somber uncertain cloud that hid the sun.[17]
The unheard song never ages and the pipes are able to play forever, which leads to the lovers, nature, and all involved to be[16]
For ever panting and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.(lines 28-30)
A new paradox arises in these lines because, according to Harold Bloom, "A mouth that has no moisture and no breath may be able to summon breathless mouths, but it can as easily be called death-in-life as life-in-death".[18]
In order to overcome this merged life and death paradox, the poem shifts to a new scene with a new perspective:[18]. The fourth stanza opens with the sacrifice of a virgin cow, an image that appeared in the Elgin Marbles, and Douglas Bush suggests that Keats could be drawing this image from the "lowing heifer" in the marbles, from Claud's Sacrifice to Apollo, or Raphael's cartoon "The Sacrifice at Lystra", which was also on display at the British Gallery in the spring of 1819 [19].
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea-shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.(lines 31-40)
All that exists in the scene is a procession of individuals, and the narrator conjectures on the rest. The altar and town exist as part of a world outside of art, and the poem challenges the limitations of art through describing their possible existence. The questions are unanswered because there is no one who can ever know the true answers, because the locations are not real.[20]
With the final stanza, according to Bloom, "Keats begins... by reminding himself that it is only the artifice of eternity before him" when he says:[21].
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold pastoral! (lines 41-45)
There is a limit within the audience to comprehend the eternal scene, but the silent urn is still able to speak. The story it tells is both cold and passionate, and it is able to help mankind:[21]
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," -that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (lines 45-50)
[edit] Themes
First Known Copy of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" transcribed by George Keats in 1820Although the poem does not include the subjective involvement of the poet, the urn within the poem requires a human observer, as Walter Jackson Bate puts it: "the very origin of the urn presupposed the hope that it would be rescued into full existence by some later 'greeting of the Spirit'."[22] The poem captures aspects of Keats's idea of "Negative Capability", as the reader does not know who the figures are on the urn, what they are doing, or where they are going. Instead, the speaker revels in this mystery, as he does in the final couplet, which does not make immediate, ascertainable sense but continues to have poetic significance nonetheless. The ode ultimately deals with the complexity of art's relationship with real life.
Throughout the poem, other paradoxes emerge as the narrator compares his world with that of the Ancient Grecians on the urn. In the opening line, he refers to the urn as a “bride of quietness”, which causes Cleanth Brooks to argue that Keats contrasts the urn with the structure of the ode, which was originally intended to be sung.[23]. Likewise, he points to another paradox that arises when the narrator finds immortality on the side of an urn meant to carry the ashes of the dead.
In her study of Ode on a Grecian Urn, Lila Melani lists four paradoxes that lead to the ending lines on truth and beauty:
the discrepancy between the urn with its frozen images and the dynamic life portrayed on the urn
the human and changeable versus the immortal and permanent,
participation versus observation
life versus art [24]
Because the ending couplet is in direct contrast to many of Keats' poems, for example "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" or "Lamia", in which a man is deceived by a woman's beauty, literary critics have begun interpreting it in a new way. Critics such as Sonia Sikka conclude that the narrator, representative of Keats, is criticizing the Urn as he says that all it will ever need to know is that beauty is truth and truth beauty.[25] This reading of the text suggests levels of both jealousy and disdain as the narrator admires the simplicity of the world depicted by the urn but finds it incapable of providing deeper meaning.
Poem
In the first and last stanza of Ode on a Grecian Urn the poet addresses the urn itself from an outward perspective, allowing the narrator to speak directly to the object and to the reader at once. In the middle three stanzas, the poem focuses on the individuals painted on the urn and the relationship between the individual and art. [12]. The narrator silences the urn by describing it as the "bride of quietness", which allows him to speak for it using his own impressions [13] . The narrator addresses the urn by saying:
Thou still unravished bride of quietness!
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time (lines 1-2)
because it is born from stone and made by the hand of an artist who does not communicate through words. As stone, it is able to slow time and become an eternal piece of artwork. As eternal, the urn is capable of producing a story that is outside of time, and that "sylvan historian" expresses[14]
A flow'ry tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? (lines 4-10)
The questions are too ambiguous to create a definite scene, but elements of it are revealed. There is a pursuit and a strong sexual element.[15]
The melody accompanying the pursuit is intensified in the second stanza:[16]
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: (lines 11-14)
There is a hint of a paradox in which indulging causes someone to only want more and a soundless music is desired by the soul. There is also a stasis that prohibits the characters on the urn from ever being fulfilled:[16]
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal -yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! (lines 17-20)
In the third stanza, the narrator begins by speaking to a tree, which will ever hold its leaves and will not “bid the Spring adieu.” The paradox of life versus lifelessness extends beyond the lover and the fair lady and takes a more temporal shape as three of the ten lines begin with the word “forever.” J. W. Myns Carr describes this phenomenon in “The Artistic Spirit of Modern Poetry”
Men and women perfect in the flesh, with their feet on perfect flowers, move across his fancy as in twilight. The poet has reached to their perfection, and returns laden with rich memories of the senses, but, being of his time, he could not cast off the somber uncertain cloud that hid the sun.[17]
The unheard song never ages and the pipes are able to play forever, which leads to the lovers, nature, and all involved to be[16]
For ever panting and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.(lines 28-30)
A new paradox arises in these lines because, according to Harold Bloom, "A mouth that has no moisture and no breath may be able to summon breathless mouths, but it can as easily be called death-in-life as life-in-death".[18]
In order to overcome this merged life and death paradox, the poem shifts to a new scene with a new perspective:[18]. The fourth stanza opens with the sacrifice of a virgin cow, an image that appeared in the Elgin Marbles, and Douglas Bush suggests that Keats could be drawing this image from the "lowing heifer" in the marbles, from Claud's Sacrifice to Apollo, or Raphael's cartoon "The Sacrifice at Lystra", which was also on display at the British Gallery in the spring of 1819 [19].
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea-shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.(lines 31-40)
All that exists in the scene is a procession of individuals, and the narrator conjectures on the rest. The altar and town exist as part of a world outside of art, and the poem challenges the limitations of art through describing their possible existence. The questions are unanswered because there is no one who can ever know the true answers, because the locations are not real.[20]
With the final stanza, according to Bloom, "Keats begins... by reminding himself that it is only the artifice of eternity before him" when he says:[21].
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold pastoral! (lines 41-45)
There is a limit within the audience to comprehend the eternal scene, but the silent urn is still able to speak. The story it tells is both cold and passionate, and it is able to help mankind:[21]
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," -that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (lines 45-50)
[edit] Themes
First Known Copy of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" transcribed by George Keats in 1820Although the poem does not include the subjective involvement of the poet, the urn within the poem requires a human observer, as Walter Jackson Bate puts it: "the very origin of the urn presupposed the hope that it would be rescued into full existence by some later 'greeting of the Spirit'."[22] The poem captures aspects of Keats's idea of "Negative Capability", as the reader does not know who the figures are on the urn, what they are doing, or where they are going. Instead, the speaker revels in this mystery, as he does in the final couplet, which does not make immediate, ascertainable sense but continues to have poetic significance nonetheless. The ode ultimately deals with the complexity of art's relationship with real life.
Throughout the poem, other paradoxes emerge as the narrator compares his world with that of the Ancient Grecians on the urn. In the opening line, he refers to the urn as a “bride of quietness”, which causes Cleanth Brooks to argue that Keats contrasts the urn with the structure of the ode, which was originally intended to be sung.[23]. Likewise, he points to another paradox that arises when the narrator finds immortality on the side of an urn meant to carry the ashes of the dead.
In her study of Ode on a Grecian Urn, Lila Melani lists four paradoxes that lead to the ending lines on truth and beauty:
the discrepancy between the urn with its frozen images and the dynamic life portrayed on the urn
the human and changeable versus the immortal and permanent,
participation versus observation
life versus art [24]
Because the ending couplet is in direct contrast to many of Keats' poems, for example "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" or "Lamia", in which a man is deceived by a woman's beauty, literary critics have begun interpreting it in a new way. Critics such as Sonia Sikka conclude that the narrator, representative of Keats, is criticizing the Urn as he says that all it will ever need to know is that beauty is truth and truth beauty.[25] This reading of the text suggests levels of both jealousy and disdain as the narrator admires the simplicity of the world depicted by the urn but finds it incapable of providing deeper meaning.
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