In 1836 he married Isabella Shawe who bore him three daughters. After giving birth to the third child she got mentally ill. Thackeray travelled with his wife from one health resort to another but she never regained her health; however, she outlived her husband by many years.
The early period of Thackerays literary activity are the years 1830s the first half of the 1840s. His articles and sketches, literary parodied were published in the weekly Punch. In the poem Georgiuses he gave a satire of four English kings. In Miss TickletobysLectures on the History of England (1842) he displayed a lack of respect for the traditional authorities in English history and his disagreement with the idea that history is made by kings and heroes. Thackeray uses the device of a double parody: the parody of the lecturers style and historical novels or works by historians who established the cult of the hero.
Thackerays first notable book was The Book of Snobs (1846-1847). It is a satirical description of different circles of English society. It is made up by sketches, each dedicated to a certain phenomenon of social or private life and together presenting a panorama of the English life of the period. The characteristic feature of English society in Thackerays work is snobbishness. A snob is the one who looks up with adoration at his superiors and down with despise at his social inferiors. There are snobs among all social classes: aristocratic and military snobs, clerical snobs and Great City Snobs, University snobs and others. At the top of the pyramid of snobbery is the king George IV. The gallery of snobs in the book convinced the reader that snobbishness was one of the most characteristic features of the ruling classes of England at that time: How can we help snobbishness, with such prodigious national institutions erected for its worship... whose heart would not throb with pleasure if he could be seen walking arm in arm with a couple of Dukes down Pall-Mall? No; its impossible, in our condition of society, not to be sometimes a snobYou who despite your neighbour, are a snob; you who forget your own friends, merely to follow after those of a higher degree, are a snob; you who are ashamed of your poverty, and blush for your calling, are a snob; as are you who boast of your pedigree or are proud of your wealth
The Book of Snobs may be regarded as a prelude to his masterpiece, Vanity Fair, which can be called the peak of critical realism in England. It first appeared in 24 monthly parts which Thackeray illustrated himself. In 1848 it came out as a book, Vanity Fair (A Novel Without a Hero). In theme and range Vanity Fair can be compared to War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. The novel attracted much attention, but it did not sell. The public did not know what to make of it, as one reader recalled after Thackerays death. It was difficult to reach the public after Dickenss effects. Just after the second number of Vanity Fair was issued Thackeray read the latest instalment of Dombey and Son describing the death of Paul Dombey. Theres no writing against such power as this, he exclaimed in despair.
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Vanity Fair is difficult to categorize: it has satire, realism, parody, history, and morality tale. The book was found by the public cynical and unpleasant. It is a pitiless investigation of lives balanced on the edge of moral, social and financial disaster. Perhaps only a man well acquainted with the fall from prosperity and the struggle up to it could have written such a book.
First Thackeray thought about episodic satire rather than a novel with fully developed characters. The first working title was Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society. The shift in the intentions took place when a second working title was adopted: A Novel Without a Hero. Later it became a subtitle. The title Vanity Fair was prompted by John Bunyards novel, Pilgrims Progress. The hero of Bunyards novel, Christian, comes to a fair, wherein should be sold all sorts of vanity: at this fair there are all such merchandise sold as houses, countries, kingdoms, lands, trades, places, honours, preferments, lusts, pleasures and delights of all sorts as wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not at this fair there are at all times to be seen jugglings, cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and rogues, and that of every kind.
Bunyards vision becomes the controlling metaphor of Thackerays novel. Everything in Bunyards fair can be found in Thackerays novel, and also in the real world of his readers, as Thackeray repeatedly reminds them. One inevitably passes through the Vanity Fair: He that will go to the City, and yet not go through this Town must go out of the world. Not even the supposedly good characters of the novel are immune.
Bunyard took the name of his town from Ecclesiastes: Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, Vanity of vanities: all is vanity. Vaenitas vanitatum, one of Thackerays favourite phrases, brings the novel to a close. Vanity is used in the novel in two meanings: love of oneself and the things of the world and emptiness and world-weariness. The two meanings are brought together in the image of the looking-glass, the instrument of vanity in the worldly sense. The image of the looking-glass is also an adaptation of Swifts definition of satire: a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybodys face but their own, which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.
The cover illustration for the monthly numbers shows the metamorphosed Preacher of Ecclesiastes. He is a clown standing on a tub and speaking to a congregation, representing the characters of the novel. All are wearing long-eared caps, as is the Preacher himself. The crowd is mostly cheerful and inattentive. The Preacher obviously does not expect to have any effect. Although Thackeray said it was a novelists duty to be a weekday preacher the novel is too indirect and ambiguous to be a sermon and does not deliver a simple moral message.
Thackeray sets the novel in the Napoleonic period. Vanity Fair tells the story of two girls from the time they leave school to their middle age, a few years before the time the novel was written. In the opening sentence Thackeray says: The present century was in its teens. For the first readers it was recent history. In the month of March, Anno Domini 1815, Napoleon landed at Cannes, and Louis XVIII fled, and all Europe was in alarm, and the funds fell, and old John Sedley was ruined. The readers would have remembered the time, and to make his story more authentical Thackeray accumulated period detail. By the late 1840s the world was different but the readers could see the origins of their contemporary society in his novel. Using a narrative commentary, which related past to present, Thackeray did not only show the changes in attitudes that had taken place over a generation, but also the similarities. He was the first to show the effect of a historical event on the life of an individual. The war is shown off stage. But the Battle of Waterloo, where George was killed, ruined Amelias happiness: No more firing was heard at Brussels the pursuit rolled miles away. Darkness came down on the field and city; and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.
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The composition of the novel is rather simple. It is built up on a system of contrasts at the centre of which are Amelia Sedley and Becky Sharp. The interrelation between these sharply opposed women, who are yet intimately linked, sets the plot in motion. Round them are grouped different other characters who make up balanced opposites: old Sedley and old Osborne, George and Rawdon, old Sir Pitt and Marquis of Steyne. To avoid the monotony of a too formal pattern Thackeray introduces cross-groupings: George Osborne and Dobbin, Rawdon and young Sir Pitt, etc. At the same time there is a symmetry and balance of action. When one set rises on the Wheel of the Fortune, the other goes down. The characters are drawn mainly from the City merchant class with Indian nabobs as their offsprings, and partly from the landed and titled gentry with military officers as their offsprings in their turn. The author attacks the corruption and pretentions of the aristocracy (the Crawleys and Marquis Steyne), the narrow-mindedness and greed of the bourgeoisie (the Osbornes, the Sedleys), exposes the snobbishness, hypocrisy, money-worship of all those who form the bulwark of society.
Though Thackeray is indebted to the English novelists of the 18th century (Fielding, first of all) he broke away from them as no other novelist before him. He swept away the whole mechanism of mystery as dubious births, missing heirs, suppressed wills, etc. The movement of the plot comes entirely from the characters and their interrelations. Thackeray concentrated on the complexity of character rather than plot. It is impossible to sum up any of the characters and rest in certainly about them. Early readers and critics objected to that complaining that the bad characters were too attractive, the good ones, stupid and dreary; not only was there no hero, but one of the heroines had no heart and the other no head.
The subtitle shows the authors intention not to describe separate individuals, but English bourgeois-aristocratic society as a whole. This Novel without a Hero was designed to do away with the idea of the hero as a romantic ideal. The idea of the hero is replaced by the idea of the gentleman. In Vanity Fair the gentleman is not identified by breeding, wealth, good looks, polished manners or elevated status in life. The Crawleys are coarse and insensitive. George Osborne, who is taken by Amelia for a hero, is shown to be in Beckys works a selfish humbug who had neither wit, nor manners, nor heart. The new model of the true gentleman in the novel is William Dobbin with a yellow face and lisp. The major was a spooney, but his thoughts were just, his brains were fairly good, his life was honest and pure, and his heart warm and humble. This bundle of unalluring attributes could never be mistaken for a romantic hero.
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The lady of the novel is Amelia who is kind to children and servants, and cares for her poor old parents. Her failing, which is viewed as very grave, is her elevation of George Osborne into a hero. Her romanticism prevents her from making sensible judgment and blights her own life and that of Dobbin. Amelia is a lady but not a heroine. Becky is certainly not a lady; she is self-seeking, hypocritical and hard-hearted. But she can be good-natured and takes life as it comes. After her fall from a higher society she enjoys the life of an exile more than the heights of social success. She is a gamble and needs danger for stimulation. She is witty and amusing. She knows better than Amelia how to make a man happy providing a good dinner and witty conversation. She is capable of disinterested kindness: she sings to poor Lady Steyne and tells Amelia the truth about her husband. She is attractive due to her talents, self-knowledge and self-mockery. The reader is assured she could be different were the life more gracious to her. Becky muses: It isnt difficult to be a country gentlemans wife. I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand pounds a year. I could dawdle about in the nursery, and count the apricots on the wall. I could water plants in a green house, and pick off dead leaves from the geraniums, I could ask old women about their rheumatism and order half a crowns worth of soup for the poor. I shouldnt miss it much out of five thousand a year.
Thackeray undermines the status of fiction as a representation of reality, saying the story might have taken a different turn. Direct appeals to the readers experience draw him into the action, and dissolve the boundaries between past and present, fiction and reality.
The novels of the later period of Thackerays creative activity include The History of Pendennis (1850), The Newcomes (1854), Henry Esmond (1852), The Virginians (1859) ( a sequel of Henry Esmond).
GEORGE ELIOT (1819 1880)
George Eliot is the pen-name of Mary Ann Evans. Between 1860 and 1870 she was regarded as the chief English novelist. Her motto was faithfulness to lifes routine along with uplifting moral lessons to her readers. Her purpose in writing was a conscientious study of all strata of contemporary society and a contribution to an ethical system that would bring about a large-scale improvement of the world. She had a gift of observation, and displayed a deep insight into life in the country or in small-town England, portraying its values and social system. In her prose she employed the method of parallel action and the principles of contrast. To avoid the authors intrusions Eliot characterized her personages indirectly, through their speech and gestures.
George Eliotwas born at Arbury, Warwickshire, where her father was a land-steward to Mr. Newdigate. When she was 20 she moved with her father into Coventry. On the one hand, she was a typical Victorian woman, a caring and loyal daughter who devoted herself to her father after her mothers death. At the same time she was a woman of a new epoch. She welcomed the French Revolution and starting with 1842 she refused to go to church (though she didnt lose faith). Despite her provincial background she became one of the most learned persons of the age. Her first important literary endeavours were the translation of Strausss Life of Jesus (1846) and Feuerbach`s Essence of Christianity (1854). In 1851 she settled in London as assistant editor of the advanced Westminster Review, and so was brought into contact with most of the eminent writers and thinkers of the day, among them George Henry Lewis, biographer, translator, and historian of philosophy. Their union was a source of happiness and intellectual inspiration to both, though circumstances prevented a legitimate marriage. It was Lewis who encouraged her to try novel writing.
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In 1857 appeared the first of the three novels forming the Scenes of Clerical Life. These novels as well as Adam Bede (1858), The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Silas Marner (1861), all depend on their subject matter on her memories of childhood and young womanhood in Warwickshire. The novels of the first period are novels of everyday life; the characters are middle and lower class people.
Adam Bede draws realistic pictures of English countryside at the turn of 18th century. Eliot lovingly depicts the patriarchal relations unaffected by bourgeois civilization. Adam Bede, a village carpenter, is the central character of the novel. He is an upright and industrious man, always ready to help the weak and the suffering. His character is contrasted to that of Arthur Donnithorne, a light-minded and selfish aristocrat. The book is affected by the positivist philosophy; according to Eliot, the moral principles of man are closely connected with religion, the religion of the heart.
Silas Marner is a story of a weaver, who, suspected of stealing church property and banished from his native town, settles in an isolated hut on the outskirts of a remote village. He suffers a mental stupor until he adopts a little child who wanders to his door one cold winter evening. The advent of the child into his life softens his unfeeling heart and he recaptures his desire to take up the struggle of existence again.
The Mill on the Floss in its earlier chapters is largely autobiographical. Scenes of rural nature and the life of peasants form the background against which the author traces the fate and the development of a girl whose aspirations run counter to the philistine narrow-mindedness and incomprehension of those surrounding her.
Along with a minute and realistic description of life and manners of new rural England, Eliot laid a special stress on the shaping of character by the environment. She was among the first English novelists to analyse the factors that contribute to a persons formation and to show them at work. She was keenly interested in Darwins teaching on the one hand, and in the sociological theories of the period, on the other. Thus, The Mill on the Floss is a novel of ideas and these are acted out in concrete terms of characters and events. Like Eliots other books it is a wonderful study of English provincial life, rural speech and characters. The main characters of the novel are Tom Tulliver and his sister Maggie. Maggie (whose character is supposed to the largely autobiographical) is a generously ardent person, devoted to her brother and ready for self-sacrifice. Tom is unimaginative and shallow. This difference is viewed as the result of the interaction of heredity and environment in the formation of the childrens minds.
Story overview: The novel has its setting in an English countryside. Tom and Maggie Tulliver are children of a well-to-do miller, owner of Dorlcote Mill. Mr. Tullivers wife and her three married sisters Mrs. Deane, Mrs. Glegg, and Mrs. Pullet form the philistine narrow-minded surrounding, portrayed by the author with a touch of irony and humour which borders on satire.
In contrast to this environment, Maggie Tulliver is lively, bright, and full of aspirations and ideals. She lives among people who suppress her every mood and action. Even her brother Tom, for whom her devotion lasts throughout her life, scoffs at her poetical nature.
Tom is practical-minded, industrious, but narrow-minded. He takes little interest in his studies, as sport alone absorbs all his fancies. His education in the house of a private tutor, Mr. Stelling, is interrupted by a sudden change for the worse in his father's affairs: a law-suit of long-standing is decided against Mr. Tulliver who is unable to cope with shrewd lawyers headed by his sworn enemy, Mr. Wakem. Tom arrives home to find his father laid up with an illness. Shortly afterwards Tulliver dies. Tom swears to revenge on the Wakem family. He secures employment with his uncle, Mr. Deane, does well in business and eventually puts aside a sufficient capital to buy the mill back from Mr. Wakem.
Several years go by. Maggie is grown into a beautiful girl. She becomes infatuated with Mr. Wakem's son Philip, Tom's old schoolmate. Tom learns of their secret meetings, insults Philip, and makes Maggie promise not to see their family's enemy any more. One day, while visiting her cousin Lucy, Maggie meets Stephen Guest, a rich young suitor of her cousin. Stephen falls in love with Maggie. He implores her to marry him, but in the face of Lucy's misery she rejects his suit and repents her own folly. Maggie's relation with Stephen evokes Tom's displeasure. Infuriated at her behaviour, which he regards as immoral, he drives her out of the house. However, Maggie bears no grudge against Tom, whom she has always loved. The reconciliation between brother and sister takes place during a terrible disaster. The country is flooded and Maggie, having learned of the danger that threatens her brother, tries to save him. Both perish in the overflowing waters of the Floss.
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The clever and passionate Maggie feels acutely the limitedness of her environment. Still the struggle in Maggies heart ends in the moral sense of duty taking an upper hand. Maggie renounces her own love and quest for happiness. She humiliates herself seeking the forgiveness of her brother. All this is in keeping with the conciliatory concept of Eliot who fails to preserve the integrity of her heroines character to the end. But despite Eliot's wish the tragic doom to which she brings her fascinating heroine virtually shows the irreconcilability of a gifted and noble-minded personality with bourgeois reality.
The novels of the second period (1863-1876) are philosophical, scientific, and analytical. They deal with social, political, economical, and aesthetical problems of the time, such as struggle for election reform, development of sciences, etc. They have a marked purpose. Among them are Ramola (1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), poems The Spanish Gypsy and others (1868-1874), Middlemarch (1871), Daniel Deronda (1876). These works do not have either the warmth or vigour of Eliots previous novels. Ramola, a story on the Italian Renaissance, is a work of erudition, not of genius; scientific comments take the place of vivid descriptions and instead of flexibility of psychological portrayal the reader is faced with abstract ethic reasonings. In Felix Holt, the Radical Eliot reverted to the pressing problems of contemporaneity: labour movement, socialism, and Chartism. The action takes place in the thirties of the 19th century. The theme of the novel is the political struggle in the country, just after the Reform Bill of 1832. Felix Holt, a young worker, protests against the exploitation of his class. Organized revolutionary struggle of the working people, however, is alien to him: Eliot believed that evil could be eradicated through humaneness and fraternal love. In Daniel Deronda the author presents the ideas of neo-Judaism. Middlemarch shows a town as a social organism whose parts are interconnected.
In her later works Eliot became the advocate of the strictest union of love and marriage: no love without marriage and no marriage without love. In May 1880 she married John Cross and died on December of the same year.
THOMAS HARDY (1840-1928)
Hardy is an outstanding representative of the 19th-century realism in England, the last of the Victorians. In his works Hardy lived in the past yet in many ways he was ahead of his times. He was a feminist, critical of social conventions that could make marriage a prison for a woman; he was modern enough to take an unsentimental, un-Victorian view of life, love and religion. His masterful evocation of life in the rural south and west of England and his rather fatalistic point of view, outside the mainstream of Victorian intellectual life, combine to produce some of the most memorable novels of the age.
Hardy was born in Dorcherster, Dorsetshire, in the south of England into the family of a stonemason. At 16 he became apprenticed to an architect. At 22 he went to London and worked under Sir Reginald Bloomfield, who specialized in Gothic architecture. He also attended evening classes of Kings College. At 27 he returned to his native countryside, worked as an architect for several years, got married to a local girl and settled near Dorchester in a house that he himself had designed. The first story that he published was a success and in 1874 he gave up architecture and began to live on the income from his novels.
Hardy first became famous with Under the Greenwood Tree (1872). It is a simple love story set up in an apparently untroubled village peopled by simple and rather amusing peasants. It is his happiest novel. The other novels are more tragic. Hardy criticizes philistine complacency and false morality reigning in society. But he does not believe in any radical changes. According to Hardy, mankind is under the sway of an arbitrary mysterious force, which predetermines the fate of people and plays havoc with their lives. Hardys novels are almost all tragic love stories and the lovers are tragic heroes and heroines of a timeless, classical kind.
The most important group of his novels Hardy is called Novels of Character and Environment. They are also known as Wessex novels . The scene is laid in what Hardy called Wessex, using the ancient name for Dorsetshire, Wiltshire and some other peculiarly English southwest counties. The novels truthfully depict the impoverishment and decay of small farmers who became hired field hands and roamed the country in search of seasonal jobs. Hardy was pained to see the deterioration of the patriarchal mode of life in rural England. This was one of the reasons for the growing pessimistic vein in his novels.
The Wessex theme begins in Far From Madding Crowd. The scene of is the prosperous farm of the beautiful Bathsheba Everdene. The story tells of three loves for her on the part of three different men: Gabriel, her loyal shepherd, a wealthy neighbour and the handsome, wayward Sergeant Troy.
The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) is the second of the great Wessex novels. It shows the downfall of a respectable man, Henchard, the Mayor. The story has a country-town setting. Henchard has been called Hardys grandest hero but one with a fatal weakness of character for which he is judged by Nature and brought down.
In Woodlanders (1887) Hardy represents the turning of the seasons both comforting and painful. The novel testifies an increase in Hardys pessimism. The hero, Marty South, does not tempt Fate. He only wants to be happy and for this he is judged.
Tess of the DUrbervilles (1890) is the summit of Hardys work, and one of the saddest novels ever written. The novel depicts farm-life such as it was in Dorsetshire in the early Victorian days, and tells the story of a noble-minded country girl, Tess Durbeyfield (of the dUrbervilles). The tragedy of her life has social motivation, but Hardy sets down her ruin to the forces of fate.
The subject of Tess is stated clearly by Hardy as, the fate of a pure woman; in fact it is the destruction of the English peasantry. More than any other 19th-century novel it has the quality of a social document. It is a novel with a thesis, and the thesis is that in the course of the 19th century the disintegration of the peasantry reached its final and tragic stage. With the extension of capitalist farming the old yeoman class of small holders or peasants with their traditions of independence, was bound to disappear. Tess is the story and the symbol of the destruction. There is an insistent emphasis on historical processes already in the opening chapters of the novel. The discovery of John Durbeyfield of his ancestry is not just a comic scene. It states the basic theme of the novel what the Durbeyfields were and what they have become. They have fallen on hard times, their horse is killed in an accident and the sense of guilt over this accident allows Tess to be persuaded by her mother into visiting the Trantridge DUrbervilles to claim kin with a more prosperous branch of the family. And from this visit the whole tragedy derives. The sacrifice of Tess is symbolic of the historical process at work The DUrbervilles are in fact the nouveau riches Stoke family, capitalists who have bought their way into the gentry. When Tess sees their estate she cries out: I thought we were an old family; but this is all new. The cry carries a world of irony.
From the moment of her seduction by Alec DUrberville, Tesss story becomes a hopeless struggle against overwhelming odds to maintain her self-respect. After her childs death she becomes a labourer at a dairy form. She falls in love with Angel Clare and through marriage to him thinks to escape her fate. But the intellectual Angel turns out more cruel than DUrberville, the sensualist. When his dream of rustic innocence is shattered he abandons Tess and her degradation continues. With the death of her father the Durbeyfields are expulsed from their cottage: John Durbeyfield had been a life holder. The need to support her family forces Tess back to Alec DUrberville. And when the penitent Angel returns Tess kills Alec. The policemen take her from the alter at Stonehedge and the black flag, signifying an execution, is run up on Winchester jail.
For Hardy country life is not merely a setting for his characters. From his standpoint the unity of Man and Nature in rural life is the only way to true morality and happiness. His love of nature and simple people combined with a keen eye for exact and concrete detail heighten the realistic effect of his descriptive passages. Although it is Under the Greenwood Tree that Hardy called a rural painting of the Dutch school, this definition suits many passages in his other novels as well. In Tess he describes with great precision harvesting: every participant, either living or inanimate, receives an appropriate share of the writers attention: the mist, the sun, the cottages, the reaping-machine and its attendants, the field animals that are put to death as the wheat falls, the sheaf-binders and the heroine of the novel toiling among them. Such passages reveal the extreme richness of Hardys vocabulary.
An architect by profession, he gave to his novels a design that was almost architectural, employing each circumstance in the narrative to one accumulated effect. The final impression was of a malign Fate functioning in mens lives, corrupting their possibilities of happiness, and beckoning them towards tragedy. But while he sees life as cruel and purposeless, he does not remain a detached spectator. He has pity for the puppets of Destiny. It is a compassion which extends from man to the earthworms and the diseased leaves on the trees.
