LICEO SCIENTIFICO DELLE SCIENZE APPLICATE

CLASSE V

INGLESE

- The Gothic Literature

- Mary Shelley and Frankenstein

- Robert Louis Stevenson and the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

- Oscar Wilde and the Picture of Dorian Gray

- Edgar Allan Poe

- James Joyce and Ulysses

- T. S. Eliot and The Waste Land

- Virginia Woolf

- Siegfried Sassoon

- George Orwell

- Samuel Beckett

- Should or Ought to?

- May, Might and Could

- Present Perfect Continuos

- Past Perfect Simple

- Past Perfect Continuos

THE GOTHIC LITERATURE

What Is Gothic Literature? Gothic literature is a deliciously terrifying blend of fiction and horror with a little romance thrown in. The Gothic novel has a long history, and although it has changed since 1765 when it began with Walpole's Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, it has maintained certain classic Gothic romantic elements, through Shelley's Frankensteinof 1818 and Stoker's infamous Dracula of 1897, until today, with authors like Stephen King. "Gothic Fiction" Is Often Called "Gothic Horror" Elements and Conventions of Gothic Literature

• Dark, Abandoned, Decaying Settings. “Gothic” also alludes to a style of grand, ornate architecture in France in the 12th century. In Gothic lit, you see lots of haunted houses, cobwebbed castles, derelict churches, and other once-glorious architecture that has fallen into disrepair. You also see dark, cramped, and claustrophobic interiors with hidden doors and secret passageways, settings with hidden skeletons. The outside world in Gothic literature is usually portrayed as being a dark, wild, and treacherous place full of wrathful weather, malevolent forests, and ghostly graveyards.

• Romanticized Past. In line with its settings, Gothic lit often romanticizes and revisits the past.

• Plot conventions. Common Gothic plots include revenge, familial secrets, prophecies, and curses. The past is somehow still living, breathing, and controlling the drama.

• Horror. Gothic lit often elicits intense, suspenseful feelings of fear, shock, dread, or disgust in the reader.

• Supernatural Beings. Monsters, demons, witches, ghosts, banshees, vampires, and other supernatural creatures often play parts in Gothic fiction.

• Explorations of Romance and Sexuality. During uptight Victorian times, Gothic lit gave authors and readers an opportunity to explore romance and sexuality, and transgressive thoughts, desires, and impulses, although usually in fairly heteronormative ways. Gothic sexuality is usually somewhat repressed—women are expected to be pure and somewhat helpless while men

are expected to be quietly predatory. It's also patriarchal, with men making moves and women reacting to them.

• Anti-Heroes. The Gothic protagonist is often portrayed as a flawed, lonesome, isolated, or outcast figure who has to overcome obstacles in order to rejoin society.

• Heavy Reliance on Symbolism. Characters, settings, and objects are weighted heavily with symbolic meaning in Gothic literature.

• Common Devices, Themes, and Motifs: Curses, prophecies, hauntings, insanity, psychological flips and twists, damsels in distress, women as victims, doppelgängers, fallen societies. . . you see these often in Gothic lit.

Characteristics of the Gothic Villain or Antagonist

• The Villain Is Dark and Alluring. The Gothic villain—usually male—is often extremely handsome, intelligent, successful, talented, and/or charming, although there is usually some telltale warning sign to warn us that his looks are deceiving. Gothic villains often pose as innocents or victims. (Think Lord Dracula, Heathcliff, and Dorian Gray.)

• Anti-Villain. Just as the hero or protagonist is typically flawed in Gothic lit, the villain often has extremely attractive qualities. Gothic lit likes to flirt with the boundary between good and evil and keep us guessing which is which. So the good guy might look like a monster when the bad guy is a total heart- breaker. Sometimes, you'll see a villain whose complex, conflicting psychology makes him the most interesting and likable character in the story. (See Byronic hero and Satanic hero.)

• Hero-Villain. A Gothic bad guy oftentimes has such such a sympathetic psychology and past that readers stop thinking in simple terms of black and white. He becomes a hybrid between bad and good.

What Is American Southern Gothic Literature? Southern Gothic is a sub-genre of American Gothic fiction set in the South that uses ironic and macabre characters and scenes to highlight the South's implicit values and beliefs. So the purpose of Southern Gothic literature is to address the underlying

social and cultural issues of the South, and this makes it slightly more political than American Gothic literature in general. Themes of Southern Gothic Literature Southern Gothic lit often examines falls from former glory into decay, despair, and madness, the lasting effects of slavery and racism, the trials of a dispossessed Southern aristocracy, xenophobia, and class. Southern Gothic Settings You'll see many rural or antique Southern settings, plantations, grand antebellum houses, and old churches. Examples of Southern Gothic:

• Dorothy Allison: Bastard Out of Carolina

• Truman Capote: Other Voices, Other Rooms

• Harry Crews: The Gospel Singer

• William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury

• Charlaine Harris: Sookie Stackhouse True Blood series

• Cormac McCarthy: Child of God, Blood Meridian

• Carson McCullers: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

• Toni Morrison: Beloved, The Bluest Eye

• Edgar Allan Poe: short stories like "Fall of the House of Usher"

• Anne Rice: The Vampire Chronicles series

• Eudora Welty: her novels and short stories Where Did Gothic Literature Come From? In many ways, the Gothic novel is a direct response to eighteenth century ideals of formal realism, which is why it is essential to understand formal realism in order to understand Gothic literature.

Formal realism is about creating a reality through the experience of one single character. It explores an individual's internal (rather than the external) drama and individual consciousness and perception. Furthermore, formal realism uses diction that is less elaborate and ornate than the literature of the past in order to reflect everyday life. Its overall goal is to educate the reader on both how to read and how to behave. In Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel, he claims that Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Daniel Defoe are the authors of works that were the very beginnings of formal realism and the rise of the novel in eighteenth century England. He highlights how Richardson and Fielding in particular viewed themselves as the originators of a new form of writing as they turned away from the old romances. Furthermore, Watt says that "if the novel were realistic merely because it saw life from the seamy side, it would only be an inverted romance; but in fact it surely attempts to portray all the varieties of human experience, and not merely those suited to one particular literary perspective: the novel’s realism does not reside in the kind of life it presents but in the way it presents it." Richardson's infamous novel, Pamela, and Fielding's Joseph Andrews are both clear examples of formal realism and how it portrays reality through they way the story is presented more than in the story itself.

Pamela is about the titular servant girl who finds herself in the service of a gentleman who attempts to seduce her. In the end, she gets married and becomes nobility, which is highly unrealistic for the times. However, it is presented in a series of letters with censored information (her lord is only ever called Mr. B), which seemed so real to audiences at the time that they actually believed Pamela Andrews existed.

Joseph Andrews is a response to Pamela in the form of a parody of sorts. Joseph is Pamela's brother and undergoes the same challenges in preserving his chastity as she does. In the end, he discovers he is actually of noble birth and marries a poor woman who is just as virtuous as he is. Unlike Pamela, this novel is in the form of a story told directly to the reader by the author. The use of a direct voice for the storyteller and references to the amount of research it took to find this story helps to make it seem like a real life story rather than fiction.

In the end, we must remember that Gothic lit is a response to formal realism and it strives to work in almost the complete opposite direction that formal realism did. The very basic aspect of Gothic fiction is that it does not strive to reflect everyday life, like the works of Fielding and Richardson. This is why, while reading a Gothic novel,

you can expect to find ghosts and other supernatural features absent from the works of formal realism. Elements of a Gothic Novel

• Supernatural imagery. If asked to describe Gothic Literature, you might first think of dark and/or supernatural imagery, which are key devices used against the confines of realism.

• Elaborate diction. Where formal realism uses simple diction, Gothic novels go elaborate.

• External drama. Where formal realism focuses on the inner workings of the individual, Gothic novels home in on the environment and how all the character's actions come into play.

• Romance. A Gothic novel is something of an inverted romance, as it tends to see things from the seamy side.

• Blend of Fantasy and Realism. However, what makes Gothic Literature unique is not in the type of life it sees and represents but in how it blends the real with the imaginary. This blend produces terror because of the suspense and unpredictability associated with the paranormal and unknown and also makes the characters within Gothic Literature even more realistic than those in novels from other genres.

• Real People in Unreal Situations. No matter how fantastical and insane the situation is, a Gothic novel's characters always react in ways that are truer to everyday responses to these circumstances than the circumstances themselves, even providing natural explanations for what the reader knows is supernatural. This is a key element in Gothic Literature. Its blend of realism and fantasy means that the characters are developed as true to what they would be in the real world while they are place in situations that are completely unreal. To put it simply, Gothic Literature is about how real people react in unreal situations. For example, if a monk is offered a deal with the Devil he can't refuse, will he take it or just walk away?

In the end, it's pretty safe to say that the works of Gothic literature do everything formal realism would not even touch, which can either delight those readers who hate formal realism or disgust them with stories that seem too ridiculous to take seriously.

MARY SHELLEY AND FRANKENSTEIN

Life Mary Shelley, born on 30 August, 1797, was a prominent, though often overlooked, literary figure during the Romantic Era of English Literature. She was the only child of Mary Wollstonecraft, the famous feminist, and William Godwin, a philosopher and novelist. She was also the wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Mary's parents were shapers of the Romantic sensibility and the revolutionary ideas of the left wing. Mary, Shelley, Byron, and Keats were principle figures in Romanticism's second generation. Whereas the poets died young in the 1820's, Mary lived through the Romantic era into the Victorian. Mary was born during the eighth year of the French Revolution. From infancy, Mary was treated as a unique individual with remarkable parents. High expectations were placed on her potential and she was treated as if she were born beneath a lucky star. Godwin was convinced that babies are born with a potential waiting to be developed. From an early age she was surrounded by famous philosophers, writers, and poets. A peculiar sort of Gothicism was part of Mary's earliest existence. Most every day she would go for a walk with her father to the St. Pancras churchyard where her mother was buried. Godwin taught Mary to read and spell her name by having her trace her mother's inscription on the stone. At the age of sixteen Mary ran away to live with the twenty-one year old Percy Shelley, the unhappily married radical heir to a wealthy baronetcy. To Mary, Shelley personified the genius and dedication to human betterment that she had admired her entire life. Although she was cast out of society, even by her father, this inspirational liaison produced her masterpiece, Frankenstein. She conceived of Frankenstein during one of the most famous house parties in literary history when staying at Lake Geneva in Switzerland with Byron and Shelley. Interestingly enough, she was only nineteen at the time. She wrote the novel while being overwhelmed by a series of calamities in her life. The worst of these were the suicides of her half-sister, Fanny Imlay, and Shelly's wife, Harriet. After the suicides, Mary and Shelley, reluctantly married. Fierce public hostility toward the couple drove them to Italy. Initially, they were happy in Italy, but their two young children died there. Mary never fully recovered from this trauma. (Their first child had died shortly after birth early in their relationship.) Nevertheless, Shelley empowered Mary to live as she most desired: to enjoy intellectual and artistic growth, love, and freedom. When Mary was only twenty-four Percy drowned, leaving her penniless with a two year old son.

For her remaining twenty-nine years she engaged in a struggle with the societal disapproval of her relationship with Shelley. Poverty forced her to live in England which she despised because of the morality and social system. She was shunned by conventional circles and worked as a professional writer to support her father and her son. Her circle, however, included literary and theatrical figures, artists, and politicians. She eventually came to more traditional views of women's dependence and differences, like her mother before her. This is not a denial of her courage and integrity but derived from socialization and the conventions placed on her by society. Mary became an invalid at the age of forty-eight. She died in 1851 of a brain tumour with poetic timing. The Great Exhibition, which was a showcase of technological progress, was opened. This was the same scientific technology that she had warned against in her most famous book, Frankenstein. The "Birth" of a Monster

Frankenstein can be read as a tale of what happens when a man tries to create a child without a woman. It can, however, also be read as an account of a woman's anxieties and insecurities about her own creative and reproductive capabilities. The story of Frankenstein is the first articulation of a woman's experience of pregnancy and related fears. Mary Shelley, in the development and education of the monster, discusses child development and education and how the nurturing of a loving parent is extremely important in the moral development of an individual. Thus, in Frankenstein, Mary Shelley examines her own fears and thoughts about pregnancy, childbirth, and child development.

Pregnancy and childbirth, as well as death, was an integral part of Mary Shelley's young adult life. She had four children and a miscarriage that almost killed her. This

was all before the age of twenty-five. Only one of her children, Percy Florence, survived to adulthood and outlived her. In June of 1816, when she had the waking nightmare which became the catalyst of the tale, she was only nineteen and had already had her first two children. Her first child, Clara, was born prematurely February 22, 1815 and died March 6. Mary, as any woman would be, was devastated by this and took a long time to recover.

Mary's second child, William, was born January 24, 1816. (William died of malaria June 7,1819). Thus, at the time that Mary conceived of the story, her first child had died and her second was only 6 months old. There is no doubt that she expected to be pregnant again and about six months later she was. Pregnancy and child-rearing was at the forefront of Mary's mind at this point in her life.

Frankenstein is probably the first story in Western literature that expresses the anxieties of pregnancy. Obviously male writers avoided this topic and it was considered taboo and in poor taste for a woman to discuss it. Mary's focus on the birth process allowed men to understand female fears about pregnancy and reassured women that they were not alone with their anxieties. The story expresses Mary's deepest fears; What of my child is born deformed? Could I still love it or would I wish it were dead? What if I can't love my child? Am I capable of raising a healthy, normal child? Will my child die? Could I wish my own child to die? Will my child kill me in childbirth? Mary was expressing her fears related to the death of her first child, her ability to nurture, and the fact that her mother died having her. All of this is expresses in Victor Frankenstein's complete failure in parenting.

Victor Frankenstein laboured on the creation of his "child". Finally on a "dreary night in November: he witnesses the "birth":

"I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs."

Instead of reaching out to his child, Victor rushes out of the room disgusted by the abnormality of his creation. When the creature follows after him, Victor runs away in horror completely abandoning his child.

While creating his child, Victor never considered whether this creature would even want to exist. He also didn't take enough care with the creature's appearance. He could not take the time to make small parts so he created a being of gigantic size. Victor never considered how such a creature would be able to exist with human beings. He did not take time with the features either and created a being with a horrifying appearance. Unable to accept his creation, Victor abandons his "child" and all parental responsibility. He even wishes that his "child" were dead.

"I gnashed my teeth, my eyes became inflamed, and I ardently wished to extinguish that life which I has so thoughtlessly bestowed"

From the moment of the creature's birth, Victor thought of it as demonical and abused it. Frankenstein represents the classic case of an abused and neglected child growing up to be a abuser. The monster's first murder victim is a small child that he wished to adopt. As Mary Shelley wrote the novel, she began to focus more closely on the plight of the abandoned child. The heart of the novel is the creature's discussion of his own development.

The creature, himself, realizes that a child that is deprived of a loving family becomes a monster. The creature repeatedly insists that he was born good but compelled by others to do evil. Mary Shelley bases this argument in Rousseau'sEmile and Second Discourse. Mary's account of the creature's mental and moral development follows the theories of David Hartley and John Locke.

Mary Shelley read Rousseau's Emile in 1816. Rousseau stated that:

God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil."

Rousseau specifically attributed moral failings to the lack of a mother's love. Without mothering and a loving education " a man left to himself from birth would be more of a monster that the rest."

Thus, Mary Shelley is suggesting that a rejected and unmothered child can become a killer, especially a killer of its own family.

Even without the proper nurturing the creature manages to get an education. Mary alludes to Rousseau's theory of the natural man as a noble savage, born free but in chains and corrupted by society. In the battle of nature vs. nurture for development, Mary definitely sides with nurture. The creature is Rousseau's natural man, a creature no different from the animals responding only to physical needs. It is only later through contact with the DeLaceys (society) that the creature develops a consciousness and realizes that he is a societal outcast. While alluding to a couple of Rousseau's ideas, in particular the natural man, Mary Shelley utilized the theories of Hartley and Locke for the development and education of the creature.

The creature's moral development follows David Hartley's theories in Observations of Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations(1749) and Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding(1690). David Hartley argued that early sensitive experience determines adult behaviour and John Locke argued that man is neither innately good nor innately evil but is rather a "blank slate" on which sensations creates impressions which later become conscious experience. The creature first experiences the physical sensations of light, dark, heat, cold, hunger, and pain. This was his period of infancy where he felt the sensations but had no conscious

expression of them. Through time and experience the creature eventually learns to distinguish the various sensations and how to remedy them. He learns to gather food, clothe himself, and acquire shelter. In other words, his sensitive experiences cause him to learn for them and provide for his basic necessities. The creature obtains a moral and intellectual education through his observation of the DeLacey family, who lived in the cottage adjoining his hovel. The DeLacey's provide the creature with an example of a loving, kind, and virtuous family. They stimulate his emotions and inspire him to do good deeds for others (he secretly collects firewood for the family). Through the creature's observation of the DeLacey family, the creature is also stimulated intellectually and is introduced to spoken and written language. Mary Shelley traces the linguistic development of the creature from his earliest acquisition to his ability to grasp abstract concepts and eventually read and write.

Not only does the creature learn morality and virtue from the DeLacey family but also acquires a small library, which enlarges his knowledge of human vice and virtue. From Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Romans he learns about human virtue, heroism, and civil justice. In his reading of Milton's Paradise Lost, he learns the origins of good and evil as well as the roles of the sexes. Finally, in Goethe's The Sorrows of Werther he learns of the range of emotions, from love to depression and despair. The creature also read and received moral lessons from Aesop's Fables and The Bible.

The creature received an excellent education but unfortunately this caused greater distancing from his previous state of "natural man". Once the creature left the state of nature and learned the language and laws of society, he gained a self-consciousness; a self-consciousness of his own isolation from humanity.

I learned that the possessions most esteemed by your fellow-creatures were, high and unsullied descent united with riches...but...I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. I was, besides, endowed with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome;...When I looked around, I saw and heard of none like me... I cannot describe to you the agony that these reflections inflicted upon me; I tried to dispel them, but sorrow only increased with knowledge. Oh, that I had ever remained in my native wood, nor known or felt beyond the sensations of hunger, thirst, and heat! p. 115

After being rejected by Victor Frankenstein, his father, the DeLacey family, and society, the creature abandons all good and lives out a course of vengeance against Frankenstein. He murders those close to Frankenstein and eventually leads Victor on a journey that will destroy both of them. Even though the creature received a moral and intellectual education, the lack of a nurturing and loving parent as well as companionship and acceptance from society led him to reject morality and instead destroy. The creature as well as the reader realized that he would have been better off without the education. If he wasn't going to have love and acceptance, it would have

probably been best for him to live in an animal like state without a developed consciousness that made him realize how alone he was. Victor never realizes that his lack of parental love and guidance is what led to the creature's murderous path. He only felt guilt from having created the creature. If Victor had only been a loving parent, the creature could have probably overcome all other obstacles and remained moral.

Mary Shelley and the Desire to Acquire Knowledge: As Demonstrated in the Novel Frankenstein Through the study of Mary Shelley's journals and her biography, one becomes aware of how important study and research were to her. Her biography tells how the influence of her literary parents and husband provided her with a unique educational experience and how she was encouraged to conduct research. She had a great love of research and knowledge and used her studies in her creative output.

The voice of Victor Frankenstein provides evidence that Mary Shelley did not believe that all knowledge was "good" knowledge and instead thought that there were some areas that were beyond human understanding and should not be pursued. Obviously, Victor Frankenstein's desire to explore the mystery of biological creation belonged to the realm of knowledge that should not pursued and that can only lead to dire consequences. Walden was also following the same quest in his search for a passage through the Arctic regions. Only by hearing the tale of Frankenstein is he dissuaded from his pursuit and turns back toward home rather than placing his crew members in mortal danger.

Many of the works that Mary Shelley studied are evident in the voice and character of Frankenstein's monster and through this character the reader is given a demonstration of the pursuit of knowledge as related to one's search for his origins.

The most significant mark of the monster's alienation from society was his lack of a name. The absence of a name denies the monster the knowledge of who he is, his familial origins, and a connection to successive generations (Duyfhuizen, 480). The monster's lack of a name and place in society, which caused him such distress, is shown in the following passage when he his narrating his experiences to Victor.

Mary may have also felt, at times, as the monster does in the above passage. She was human, like all others, but had parents who were political radicals, had a singular educational experience, had the origin of her own creation published for the entire world to read, and ran off with a married man. The combination of the above experiences set Mary apart from society and caused her to feel the isolation and alienation of an outcast; an outcast like her monster and Milton's Satan. She differs

from the monster in that she is notorious for her name, not her appearance, while the monster has no name and is instead an outcast due to the differences in the way he appears to others. In many ways Mary Shelley saw herself as the monster that she created and identified further with the monster by having him read the same works that she did.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON AND THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE

Early Life Stevenson was the only son of Thomas Stevenson, a prosperous civil engineer, and his wife, Margaret Isabella Balfour. His poor health made regular schooling difficult, but he attended Edinburgh Academy and other schools before, at age 17, entering Edinburgh University, where he was expected to prepare himself for the family profession of lighthouse engineering. But Stevenson had no desire to be an engineer, and he eventually agreed with his father, as a compromise, to prepare instead for the Scottish bar.

He had shown a desire to write early in life, and once in his teens he had deliberately set out to learn the writer’s craft by imitating a great variety of models in prose and verse. His youthful enthusiasm for the Covenanters (i.e., those Scotsmen who had banded together to defend their version of Presbyterianism in the 17th century) led to his writing The Pentland Rising, his first printed work. During his years at the university he rebelled against his parents’ religion and set himself up as a liberal bohemian who abhorred the alleged cruelties and hypocrisies of bourgeois respectability.

In 1873, in the midst of painful differences with his father, he visited a married cousin in Suffolk, England, where he met Sidney Colvin, the English scholar, who became a lifelong friend, and Fanny Sitwell (who later married Colvin). Sitwell, an older woman of charm and talent, drew the young man out and won his confidence. Soon Stevenson was deeply in love, and on his return to Edinburgh he wrote her a series of letters in which he played the part first of lover, then of worshipper, then of son. One of the several names by which Stevenson addressed her in these letters was “Claire,” a fact that many years after his death was to give rise to the erroneousnotion that Stevenson had had an affair with a humbly born Edinburgh girl of that name. Eventually the passion turned into a lasting friendship.

Later in 1873 Stevenson suffered severe respiratory illness and was sent to the French Riviera, where Colvin later joined him. He returned home the following spring. In July 1875 he was called to the Scottish bar, but he never practiced. Stevenson was frequently abroad, most often in France. Two of his journeys produced An Inland Voyage (1878) and Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879). His career as a writer developed slowly. His essay “Roads” appeared in the Portfolio in 1873, and in

1874 “Ordered South” appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine, a review of Lord Lytton’s Fables in Song appeared in the Fortnightly, and his first contribution (on Victor Hugo) appeared in The Cornhill Magazine, then edited by Leslie Stephen, a critic and biographer. It was these early essays, carefully wrought, quizzically meditative in tone, and unusual in sensibility, that first drew attention to Stevenson as a writer.

Stephen brought Stevenson into contact with Edmund Gosse, the poet and critic, who became a good friend. Later, when in Edinburgh, Stephen introduced Stevenson to the writer W.E. Henley. The two became warm friends and were to remain so until 1888, when a letter from Henley to Stevenson containing a deliberately implied accusation of dishonesty against the latter’s wife precipitated a quarrel that Henley, jealous and embittered, perpetuated after his friend’s death in a venomous review of a biography of Stevenson.

In 1876 Stevenson met Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne, an American lady separated from her husband, and the two fell in love. Stevenson’s parents’ horror at their son’s involvement with a married woman subsided somewhat when she returned to California in 1878, but it revived with greater force when Stevenson decided to join her in August 1879. Stevenson reached California ill and penniless (the record of his arduous journey appeared later in The Amateur Emigrant, 1895, and Across the Plains, 1892). His adventures, which included coming very near death and eking out a precarious living in Monterey and San Francisco, culminated in marriage to Fanny Osbourne (who was by then divorced from her first husband) early in 1880. About the same time a telegram from his relenting father offered much-needed financial support, and, after a honeymoon by an abandoned silver mine (recorded in The Silverado Squatters, 1883), the couple sailed for Scotland to achieve reconciliation with the Thomas Stevensons. Romantic Novels Soon after his return, Stevenson, accompanied by his wife and his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, went, on medical advice (he had tuberculosis), to Davos, Switzerland. The family left there in April 1881 and spent the summer in Pitlochry and then in Braemar, Scotland. There, in spite of bouts of illness, Stevenson embarked on Treasure Island (begun as a game with Lloyd), which started as a serial in Young Folks, under the title The Sea-Cook, in October 1881. Stevenson finished the story in Davos, to which he had returned in the autumn, and then started on Prince Otto (1885), a more complex but less successful work. Treasure Island is an adventure presented with consummate skill, with atmosphere, character, and action

superbly geared to one another. The book is at once a gripping adventure tale and a wry comment on the ambiguity of human motives.

Robert Louis Stevenson, 1880.

In 1881 Stevenson published Virginibus Puerisque, his first collection of essays, most of which had appeared in The Cornhill. The winter of 1881 he spent at a chalet in Davos. In April 1882 he left Davos; but a stay in the Scottish Highlands, while it resulted in two of his finest short stories, “Thrawn Janet” and “The Merry Men,” produced lung hemorrhages, and in September he went to the south of France. There the Stevensons finally settled at a house in Hyères, where, in spite of intermittent illness, Stevenson was happy and worked well. He revised Prince Otto, worked on A Child’s Garden of Verses (first called Penny Whistles), and began The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses (1888), a historical adventure tale deliberately written in anachronistic language.

The threat of a cholera epidemic drove the Stevensons from Hyères back to Britain. They lived at Bournemouth from September 1884 until July 1887, but his frequent bouts of dangerous illness proved conclusively that the British climate, even in the south of England, was not for him. The Bournemouth years were fruitful, however. There he got to know and love the American novelist Henry James. There he revised A Child’s Garden (first published in 1885) and wrote “Markheim,” Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The poems in A Child’s Garden represent with extraordinary fidelity an adult’s recapturing of the emotions and sensations of childhood; there is nothing else quite like them in English literature. In Kidnapped the fruit of his researches into 18th-century Scottish history and of his feeling for Scottish landscape, history, character, and local atmosphere

mutually illuminate one another. But it was Dr. Jekyll—both moral allegory and thriller—that established his reputation with the ordinary reader.

In August 1887, still in search of health, Stevenson set out for America with his wife, mother, and stepson. On arriving in New York, he found himself famous, with editors and publishers offering lucrative contracts. He stayed for a while in the Adirondack Mountains, where he wrote essays for Scribner’s and began The Master of Ballantrae. This novel, another exploration of moral ambiguities, contains some of his most impressive writing, although it is marred by its contrived conclusion. Life In The South Seas In June 1888 Stevenson, accompanied by his family, sailed from San Francisco in the schooner yacht Casco, which he had chartered, on what was intended to be an excursion for health and pleasure. In fact, he was to spend the rest of his life in the South Seas. They went first to the Marquesas Islands, then to Fakarava Atoll, then to Tahiti, then to Honolulu, where they stayed nearly six months, leaving in June 1889 for the Gilbert Islands, and then to Samoa, where he spent six weeks.

During his months of wandering around the South Sea islands, Stevenson made intensive efforts to understand the local scene and the inhabitants. As a result, his writings on the South Seas (In the South Seas, 1896; A Footnote to History, 1892) are admirably pungent and perceptive. He was writing first-rate journalism, deepened by the awareness of landscape and atmosphere, such as that so notably rendered in his description of the first landfall at Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas.

In October 1890 he returned to Samoa from a voyage to Sydney and established himself and his family in patriarchal status at Vailima, his house in Samoa. The climate suited him; he led an industrious and active life; and, when he died suddenly, it was of a cerebral hemorrhage, not of the long-feared tuberculosis. His work during those years was moving toward a new maturity. While Catriona (U.S. title, David Balfour, 1893) marked no advance in technique or imaginative scope on Kidnapped, to which it is a sequel, The Ebb-Tide (1894), a grim and powerful tale written in a dispassionate style (it was a complete reworking of a first draft by Lloyd Osbourne), showed that Stevenson had reached an important transition in his literary career. The next phase was demonstrated triumphantly in Weir of Hermiston (1896), the unfinished masterpiece on which he was working on the day of his death. “The Beach of Falesá” (first published 1892; included in Island Night’s Entertainments, 1893), a story with a finely wrought tragic texture, as well as the first part of The Master of Ballantrae, pointed in this direction, but neither approaches Weir. Stevenson achieved in this work a remarkable richness of tragic

texture in a style stripped of all superfluities. The dialogue contains some of the best Scots prose in modern literature. Fragment though it is, Weir of Hermiston stands as a great work and Stevenson’s masterpiece. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Inspiration and writing

Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson had long been intrigued by the idea of how human personalities can affect how to incorporate the interplay of good and evil into a story. While still a teenager, he developed a script for a play about Deacon Brodie, which he later reworked with the help of W. E. Henley and which was produced for the first time in 1882. In early 1884, he wrote the short story "Markheim", which he revised in 1884 for publication in a Christmas annual. According to his essay, "A Chapter on Dreams" (Scribner's, Jan. 1888), he racked his brains for an idea for a story and had a dream, and upon wakening had the intuition for two or three scenes that would appear in the story Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Biographer Graham Balfour quoted Stevenson's wife Fanny Stevenson:

In the small hours of one morning,[...]I was awakened by cries of horror from Louis. Thinking he had a nightmare, I awakened him. He said angrily: "Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale." I had awakened him at the first transformation scene.

Lloyd Osbourne, Stevenson's stepson, wrote: "I don't believe that there was ever such a literary feat before as the writing of Dr Jekyll. I remember the first reading as though it were yesterday. Louis came downstairs in a fever; read nearly half the book

aloud; and then, while we were still gasping, he was away again, and busy writing. I doubt if the first draft took so long as three days."

Inspiration may also have come from the writer's friendship with Edinburgh-based French teacher Eugene Chantrelle, who was convicted and executed for the murder of his wife in May 1878. Chantrelle, who had appeared to lead a normal life in the city, poisoned his wife with opium. According to author Jeremy Hodges, Stevenson was present throughout the trial and as "the evidence unfolded he found himself, like Dr Jekyll, 'aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde'." Moreover, it was believed that the teacher had committed other murders both in France and Britain by poisoning his victims at supper parties with a "favourite dish of toasted cheese and opium".

Louis Vivet, a mental patient who was suffering from dissociative identity disorder, caught Frederic W. H. Myers's attention and he wrote to Stevenson after the story was published. Stevenson was polite in his response but rejected that reading. As was customary, Mrs Stevenson would read the draft and offer her criticisms in the margins. Robert Stevenson was confined to bed at the time from a haemorrhage. Therefore, she left her comments with the manuscript and Robert in the toilet. She said that in effect the story was really an allegory, but Robert was writing it as a story. After a while, Robert called her back into the bedroom and pointed to a pile of ashes: he had burnt the manuscript in fear that he would try to salvage it, and in the process forced himself to start again from nothing, writing an allegorical story as she had suggested. Scholars debate whether he really burnt his manuscript; there is no direct factual evidence for the burning, but it remains an integral part of the history of the novella.

Stevenson re-wrote the story in three to six days. A number of later biographers have alleged that Stevenson was on drugs during the frantic re-write; for example, William Gray's revisionist history A Literary Life (2004) said he used cocaine while other biographers said he used ergot. However, the standard history, according to the accounts of his wife and son (and himself), says he was bed-ridden and sick while writing it. According to Osbourne, "The mere physical feat was tremendous and, instead of harming him, it roused and cheered him inexpressibly". He continued to refine the work for four to six weeks after the initial re-write. The novella was written in the southern English seaside town of Bournemouth, where Stevenson had moved due to ill health, to benefit from its sea air and warmer southern climate.

The name Jekyll was borrowed from Reverend Walter Jekyll, a friend of Stevenson and younger brother of horticulturalist and landscape designer Gertrude Jekyll.

Plot Gabriel John Utterson and his cousin Richard Enfield reach the door of a large house on their weekly walk. Enfield tells Utterson that months ago he saw a sinister-looking man named Edward Hyde trample a young girl after accidentally bumping into her. Enfield forced Hyde to pay £100 to avoid a scandal. Hyde brought them to this door and provided a cheque signed by a reputable gentleman (later revealed to be Doctor Henry Jekyll, a friend and client of Utterson). Utterson is disturbed because Jekyll recently changed his will to make Hyde the sole beneficiary. Utterson fears that Hyde is blackmailing Jekyll. When Utterson tries to discuss Hyde with Jekyll, Jekyll turns pale and asks that Hyde be left alone. One night in October, a servant sees Hyde beat to death Sir Danvers Carew, another of Utterson's clients. The police contact Utterson, who leads officers to Hyde's apartment. Hyde has vanished, but they find half of a broken cane. Utterson recognizes the cane as one he had given to Jekyll. Utterson visits Jekyll, who shows Utterson a note, allegedly written to Jekyll by Hyde, apologising for the trouble that he has caused. However, Hyde's handwriting is similar to Jekyll's own, leading Utterson to conclude that Jekyll forged the note to protect Hyde. For two months, Jekyll reverts to his former sociable manner, but in early January, he starts refusing visitors. Dr Hastie Lanyon, a mutual acquaintance of Jekyll and Utterson, dies of shock after receiving information relating to Jekyll. Before his death, Lanyon gives Utterson a letter to be opened after Jekyll's death or disappearance. In late February, during another walk with Enfield, Utterson starts a conversation with Jekyll at a window of his laboratory. Jekyll suddenly slams the window and disappears. In early March, Jekyll's butler, Mr. Poole, visits Utterson and says Jekyll has secluded himself in his laboratory for weeks. Utterson and Poole break into the laboratory, where they find Hyde wearing Jekyll's clothes and apparently dead from suicide. They find a letter from Jekyll to Utterson. Utterson reads Lanyon's letter, then Jekyll's. Lanyon's letter reveals his deterioration resulted from the shock of seeing Hyde drink a serum that turned him into Jekyll. Jekyll's letter explains that he had indulged in unstated vices and feared discovery. He found a way to transform himself and thereby indulge his vices without fear of detection. Jekyll's transformed personality, Hyde, was evil, self-indulgent, and uncaring to anyone but himself. Initially, Jekyll controlled the transformations with the serum, but one night in August, he became Hyde involuntarily in his sleep. Jekyll resolved to cease becoming Hyde. One night, he had a moment of weakness and drank the serum. Hyde, furious at having been caged for so long, killed Carew. Horrified, Jekyll tried more adamantly to stop the transformations. Then, in early January, he transformed involuntarily while awake. Far from his laboratory and hunted by the police as a murderer, Hyde needed help to avoid capture. He wrote to

Lanyon (in Jekyll's hand), asking his friend to bring chemicals from his laboratory. In Lanyon's presence, Hyde mixed the chemicals, drank the serum, and transformed into Jekyll. The shock of the sight instigated Lanyon's deterioration and death. Meanwhile, Jekyll's involuntary transformations increased in frequency and required ever larger doses of serum to reverse. It was one of these transformations that caused Jekyll to slam his window shut on Enfield and Utterson. Eventually, one of the chemicals used in the serum ran low, and subsequent batches prepared from new stocks failed to work. Jekyll speculated that one of the original ingredients must have some unknown impurity that made it work. Realizing that he would stay transformed as Hyde, Jekyll decided to write his "confession". He ended the letter by writing, "I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end." With these words, both the document and the novella come to a close. Characters Gabriel John Utterson Gabriel John Utterson, a lawyer and loyal friend of Jekyll and Lanyon, is the main protagonist of the story. Utterson is a measured and at all times emotionless, bachelor – who nonetheless seems believable, trustworthy, tolerant of the faults of others, and indeed genuinely likable. Utterson has been close friends with Lanyon and Jekyll. However, Utterson is not immune to guilt, as, while he is quick to investigate and judge the faults of others even for the benefit of his friends, Stevenson states that "he was humbled to the dust by the many ill things he had done". Whatever these "ill things" may be, he does not partake in gossip or other views of the upper class out of respect for his fellow man. Often the last remaining friend of the down-falling, he finds an interest in others' downfalls, which creates a spark of interest not only in Jekyll but also regarding Hyde. He comes to the conclusion that human downfall results from indulging oneself in topics of interest. As a result of this line of reasoning, he lives life as a recluse and "dampens his taste for the finer items of life". Utterson concludes that Jekyll lives life as he wishes by enjoying his occupation. Utterson is a good, kind, loyal and honest friend to Henry Jekyll. Dr Henry Jekyll/Mr Edward Hyde Dr Jekyll is a "large, well-made, smooth-faced man of fifty with something of a slyish cast", who occasionally feels he is battling between the good and evil within himself, leading to the struggle between his dual personalities of Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde. He has spent a great part of his life trying to repress evil urges that

were not fitting for a man of his stature. He creates a serum, or potion, in an attempt to mask this hidden evil within his personality. However, in doing so, Jekyll transformed into the smaller, younger, cruel, remorseless, evil Hyde. Jekyll has many friends and an amiable personality, but as Hyde, he becomes mysterious and violent. As time goes by, Hyde grows in power. After taking the potion repeatedly, he no longer relies upon it to unleash his inner demon, i.e., his alter ego. Eventually, Hyde grows so strong that Jekyll becomes reliant on the potion to remain conscious. Richard Enfield Richard Enfield is Utterson's cousin and is a well known "man about town." He first sees Hyde at about three in the morning in an episode that is well documented as Hyde is running over a little girl. He is the person who mentions to Utterson the actual personality of Jekyll's friend, Hyde. Enfield witnessed Hyde running over a little girl in the street recklessly, and the group of witnesses, with the girl's parents and other residents, force Hyde into writing a cheque for the girl's family. Enfield discovers that Jekyll signed the cheque, which is genuine. He says that Hyde is disgusting looking but finds himself stumped when asked to describe the man. Dr Hastie Lanyon A longtime friend of Jekyll's, Hastie Lanyon disagrees with Jekyll's "scientific" concepts, which Lanyon describes as "...too fanciful". He is the first person to discover Hyde's true identity (Hyde transforms himself back into Jekyll in Lanyon's presence). Lanyon helps Utterson solve the case when he describes the letter given to him by Jekyll and his thoughts and reactions to the transformation. When Lanyon witnesses the transformation process (and subsequently hears Jekyll's private confession, made to him alone), Lanyon becomes critically ill and later dies of shock. Mr Poole Poole is Jekyll's butler who has lived with him for many years. Upon noticing the reclusiveness and changes of his master, Poole goes to Utterson with the fear that his master has been murdered and his murderer, Mr Hyde, is residing in the chambers. Poole serves Jekyll faithfully and attempts to do a good job and be loyal to his master. Yet events finally drive him into joining forces with Utterson to find the truth.

Inspector Newcomen Utterson joins this Scotland Yard inspector after the murder of Sir Danvers Carew. They explore Hyde's loft in Soho and discover evidence of his depraved life. Sir Danvers Carew, MP A kind, white-haired old man and a Member of Parliament. The maid claims that Hyde, in a murderous rage, killed Carew in the streets of London on the night of 18 October (sometime between 11 pm and 2 am by the testimony of the maid). At the time of his death, Carew is 70 years old and is carrying on his person a letter addressed to Utterson, and they find one half of one of Jekyll's walking sticks on his body. As a result, they later go and investigate in Jekyll's house, but cannot find him; they later enter a house where Hyde has been living and find the other half of the stick in one of Hyde's rooms. Maid A maid, whose employer Hyde had once visited, is the only person who claims to have witnessed the murder of Sir Danvers Carew. She states that she saw Hyde murder Carew with Jekyll's cane and his feet. Having fainted after seeing what happened, she then wakes up and rushes to the police, thus initiating the murder case of Sir Danvers Carew. Dualities The novella is frequently interpreted as an examination of the duality of human nature, usually expressed as an inner struggle between good and evil, with variations such as human versus animal, civilization versus barbarism sometimes substituted, the main thrust being that of an essential inner struggle between the one and other, and that the failure to accept this tension results in evil, or barbarity, or animal violence, being projected onto others. In Freudian theory, the thoughts and desires banished to the unconscious mind motivate the behaviour of the conscious mind. Banishing evil to the unconscious mind in an attempt to achieve perfect goodness can result in the development of a Mr Hyde-type aspect to one's character. In Christian theology, Satan's fall from Heaven is due to his refusal to accept that he is a created being (that he has a dual nature) and is not God. This idea is suggested when Hyde

says to Lanyon, shortly before drinking the famous potion, "...and your sight shall be blasted by a prodigy to stagger the unbelief of Satan." This is because in Christianity, pride (to consider oneself as without sin or without evil) is a sin, as it is the precursor to evil itself. In his discussion of the novel, Vladimir Nabokov argues that the "good versus evil" view of the novel is misleading, as Jekyll himself is not, by Victorian standards, a morally good person in some cases. Public vs private The work is commonly associated today with the Victorian concern over the public and private division, the individual's sense of playing a part and the class division of London. In this respect, the novella has also been noted as "one of the best guidebooks of the Victorian era" because of its piercing description of the fundamental dichotomy of the 19th century "outward respectability and inward lust", as this period had a tendency for social hypocrisy.

Scottish nationalism vs union with Britain Another common interpretation sees the novella's duality as representative of Scotland and the Scottish character. In this reading, the duality represents the national and linguistic dualities inherent in Scotland's relationship with the wider Britain and the English language, respectively, and also the repressive effects of the Church of Scotland on the Scottish character. A further parallel is also drawn with the city of Edinburgh itself, Stevenson's birthplace, which consists of two distinct parts: the old medieval section historically inhabited by the city's poor, where the dark crowded slums were rife with all types of crime, and the modern Georgian area of wide spacious streets representing respectability. Publication The book was initially sold as a paperback for one shilling in the UK and for one dollar in the U.S. These books were called "shilling shockers" or penny dreadfuls. The American publisher issued the book on 5 January 1886, four days before the first appearance of the UK edition issued by Longmans; Scribner's published 3000 copies, only 1250 of them bound in cloth. Initially, stores did not stock it until a review appeared in The Times on 25 January 1886 giving it a favourable reception. Within the next six months, close to forty thousand copies were sold. As Stevenson's biographer Graham Balfour wrote in 1901, the book's success was probably due rather to the "moral instincts of the public" than to any conscious

perception of the merits of its art. It was read by those who never read fiction and quoted in pulpit sermons and in religious papers. By 1901, it was estimated to have sold over 250,000 copies in the United States.

The stage version of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Although the book had initially been published as a "shilling shocker", it was an immediate success and one of Stevenson's best-selling works. Stage adaptations began in Boston and London and soon moved all across England and then towards his home country of Scotland. The first stage adaptation followed the story's initial publication in 1886. Richard Mansfield bought the rights from Stevenson and worked with Boston author Thomas Russell Sullivan to write a script. The resulting play added to the cast of characters and some elements of romance to the plot. Addition of female characters to the originally male-centered plot continued in later adaptations of the story. The first performance of the play took place in the Boston Museum in May 1887. The lighting effects and makeup for Jekyll's transformation into Hyde created horrified reactions from the audience, and the play was so successful that production followed in London. After a successful ten weeks in London in 1888, Mansfield was forced to close down production. The hysteria surrounding the Jack the Ripper serial murders led even those who only played murderers on stage to be considered suspects. When Mansfield was mentioned in London newspapers as a possible suspect for the crimes, he shut down production.

OSCAR WILDE AND THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

Life Oscar Wilde, in full Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, (born October 16, 1854, Dublin, Ireland—died November 30, 1900, Paris, France), Irish wit, poet, and dramatist whose reputation rests on his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and on his comic masterpieces Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). He was a spokesman for the late 19th-century Aesthetic movement in England, which advocated art for art’s sake, and he was the object of celebrated civil and criminal suits involving homosexuality and ending in his imprisonment (1895–97).

Wilde was born of professional and literary parents. His father, Sir William Wilde, was Ireland’s leading ear and eye surgeon, who also published books on archaeology, folklore, and the satirist Jonathan Swift. His mother, who wrote under the name Speranza, was a revolutionary poet and an authority on Celtic mythand folklore.

After attending Portora Royal School, Enniskillen (1864–71), Wilde went, on successive scholarships, to Trinity College, Dublin (1871–74), and Magdalen College, Oxford (1874–78), which awarded him a degree with honours. During these four years, he distinguished himself not only as a Classical scholar, a poseur, and a wit but also as a poet by winning the coveted Newdigate Prize in 1878 with a long poem, Ravenna.He was deeply impressed by the teachings of the English writers John Ruskin and Walter Pater on the central importance of art in life and particularly by the latter’s stress on the aesthetic intensity by which life should be lived. Like many in his generation, Wilde was determined to follow Pater’s urging “to burn always with [a] hard, gemlike flame.” But Wilde also delighted in affecting an aesthetic pose; this, combined with rooms at Oxford decorated with objets d’art, resulted in his famous remark, “Oh, would that I could live up to my blue china!”

In the early 1880s, when Aestheticism was the rage and despair of literary London, Wilde established himself in social and artistic circles by his wit and flamboyance. Soon the periodical Punch made him the satiric object of its antagonism to the Aesthetes for what was considered their unmasculine devotion to art. And in their comic opera Patience, Gilbert and Sullivan based the character Bunthorne, a “fleshly poet,” partly on Wilde. Wishing to reinforce the association, Wilde published, at his own expense, Poems(1881), which echoed, too faithfully, his discipleship to the poets Algernon Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and John Keats. Eager for further acclaim, Wilde agreed to lecture in the United States and

Canada in 1882, announcing on his arrival at customs in New York City that he had “nothing to declare but his genius.” Despite widespread hostility in the press to his languid poses and aesthetic costume of velvet jacket, knee breeches, and black silk stockings, Wilde for 12 months exhorted the Americans to love beauty and art; then he returned to Great Britain to lecture on his impressions of America.

Oscar Wilde, 1882.

In 1884 Wilde married Constance Lloyd, daughter of a prominent Irish barrister; two children, Cyril and Vyvyan, were born, in 1885 and 1886. Meanwhile, Wilde was a reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette and then became editor of Woman’s World (1887–89). During this period of apprenticeship as a writer, he published The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), which reveals his gift for romantic allegory in the form of the fairy tale.

In the final decade of his life, Wilde wrote and published nearly all of his major work. In his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (published in Lippincott’s Magazine, 1890, and in book form, revised and expanded by six chapters, 1891), Wilde combined the supernatural elements of the Gothic novel with the unspeakable sins of French decadent fiction. Critics charged immorality despite Dorian’s self-destruction; Wilde, however, insisted on the amoral nature of art regardless of an apparently moral ending. Intentions(1891), consisting of previously published essays,

restated his aesthetic attitude toward art by borrowing ideas from the French poets Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire and the American painter James McNeill Whistler. In the same year, two volumes of stories and fairy tales also appeared, testifying to his extraordinary creative inventiveness: Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, and Other Stories and A House of Pomegranates.

But Wilde’s greatest successes were his society comedies. Within the conventions of the French “well-made play” (with its social intrigues and artificial devices to resolve conflict), he employed his paradoxical, epigrammatic wit to create a form of comedy new to the 19th-century English theatre. His first success, Lady Windermere’s Fan, demonstrated that this wit could revitalize the rusty machinery of French drama. In the same year, rehearsals of his macabre play Salomé, written in French and designed, as he said, to make his audience shudder by its depiction of unnatural passion, were halted by the censor because it contained biblical characters. It was published in 1893, and an English translation appeared in 1894 with Aubrey Beardsley’s celebrated illustrations.

Oscar Wilde, cartoon in Punch, March 5, 1892.

A second society comedy, A Woman of No Importance (produced 1893), convinced the critic William Archer that Wilde’s plays “must be taken on the very highest plane of modern English drama.” In rapid succession, Wilde’s final plays, An Ideal

Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, were produced early in 1895. In the latter, his greatest achievement, the conventional elements of farce are transformed into satiric epigrams—seemingly trivial but mercilessly exposing Victorian hypocrisies.

I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it simply a tragedy.

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.

I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.

In many of his works, exposure of a secret sin or indiscretion and consequent disgrace is a central design. If life imitated art, as Wilde insisted in his essay “The Decay of Lying” (1889), he was himself approximating the pattern in his reckless pursuit of pleasure. In addition, his close friendship with Lord Alfred Douglas, whom he had met in 1891, infuriated the marquess of Queensberry, Douglas’s father. Accused, finally, by the marquess of being a sodomite, Wilde, urged by Douglas, sued for criminal libel. Wilde’s case collapsed, however, when the evidence went against him, and he dropped the suit. Urged to flee to France by his friends, Wilde refused, unable to believe that his world was at an end. He was arrested and ordered to stand trial.

Wilde testified brilliantly, but the jury failed to reach a verdict. In the retrial he was found guilty and sentenced, in May 1895, to two years at hard labour. Most of his sentence was served at Reading Gaol, where he wrote a long letter to Douglas (published in 1905 in a drastically cut version as De Profundis) filled with recriminations against the younger man for encouraging him in dissipation and distracting him from his work.

In May 1897 Wilde was released, a bankrupt, and immediately went to France, hoping to regenerate himself as a writer. His only remaining work, however, was The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), revealing his concern for inhumane prison conditions. Despite constant money problems, he maintained, as George Bernard Shaw said, “an unconquerable gaiety of soul” that sustained him, and he was visited by such loyal friends as Max Beerbohm and Robert Ross, later his literary executor; he was also reunited with Douglas. He died suddenly of acute meningitis brought on by an ear infection. In his semiconscious final moments, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church, which he had long admired.

The Picture of Dorian Gray The Picture of Dorian Gray is a Gothic and philosophical novel by Oscar Wilde, first published complete in the July 1890 issue of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. Fearing the story was indecent, the magazine's editor deleted roughly five hundred words before publication without Wilde's knowledge. Despite that censorship, The Picture of Dorian Gray offended the moral sensibilities of British book reviewers, some of whom said that Oscar Wilde merited prosecution for violating the laws guarding public morality. In response, Wilde aggressively defended his novel and art in correspondence with the British press, although he personally made excisions of some of the most controversial material when revising and lengthening the story for book publication the following year. The longer and revised version of The Picture of Dorian Gray published in book form in 1891 featured an aphoristic preface—a defence of the artist's rights and of art for art's sake—based in part on his press defences of the novel the previous year. The content, style, and presentation of the preface made it famous in its own right, as a literary and artistic manifesto. In April 1891, the publishing firm of Ward, Lock and Company, who had distributed the shorter, more inflammatory, magazine version in England the previous year, published the revised version of The Picture of Dorian Gray. The only novel written by Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray exists in several versions: the 1890 magazine edition (in 13 chapters), with important material deleted before publication by the magazine's editor, J. M. Stoddart; the "uncensored" version submitted to Lippincott's Monthly Magazine for publication (also in 13 chapters), with all of Wilde's original material intact, first published in 2011 by Harvard University Press; and the 1891 book edition (in 20 chapters). As literature of the 19th century, The Picture of Dorian Gray "pivots on a gothic plot device" with strong themes interpreted from Faust. Plot Dorian Gray is the subject of a full-length portrait in oil by Basil Hallward, an artist impressed and infatuated by Dorian's beauty; he believes that Dorian's beauty is responsible for the new mood in his art as a painter. Through Basil, Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton, and he soon is enthralled by the aristocrat's hedonistic world view: that beauty and sensual fulfilment are the only things worth pursuing in life.

Newly understanding that his beauty will fade, Dorian expresses the desire to sell his soul, to ensure that the picture, rather than he, will age and fade. The wish is granted, and Dorian pursues a libertine life of varied amoral experiences while staying young and beautiful; all the while, his portrait ages and records every sin. Summary The Picture of Dorian Gray begins on a beautiful summer day in Victorian era England, where Lord Henry Wotton, an opinionated man, is observing the sensitive artist Basil Hallward painting the portrait of Dorian Gray, a handsome young man who is Basil's ultimate muse. While sitting for the painting, Dorian listens to Lord Henry espousing his hedonistic world view and begins to think that beauty is the only aspect of life worth pursuing, prompting Dorian to wish that his portrait would age instead of himself. Under Lord Henry's hedonistic influence, Dorian fully explores his sensuality. He discovers the actress Sibyl Vane, who performs Shakespeare plays in a dingy, working-class theatre. Dorian approaches and courts her, and soon proposes marriage. The enamoured Sibyl calls him "Prince Charming", and swoons with the happiness of being loved, but her protective brother, James, warns that if "Prince Charming" harms her, he will murder him. Dorian invites Basil and Lord Henry to see Sibyl perform in Romeo and Juliet. Sibyl, too enamoured with Dorian to act, performs poorly, which makes both Basil and Lord Henry think Dorian has fallen in love with Sibyl because of her beauty instead of her acting talent. Embarrassed, Dorian rejects Sibyl, telling her that acting was her beauty; without that, she no longer interests him. On returning home, Dorian notices that the portrait has changed; his wish has come true, and the man in the portrait bears a subtle sneer of cruelty. Conscience-stricken and lonely, Dorian decides to reconcile with Sibyl, but he is too late, as Lord Henry informs him that Sibyl has killed herself. Dorian then understands that, where his life is headed, lust and beauty shall suffice. Dorian locks the portrait up, and over the following eighteen years, he experiments with every vice, influenced by a morally poisonous French novel that Lord Henry Wotton gave him. One night, before leaving for Paris, Basil goes to Dorian's house to ask him about rumors of his self-indulgent sensualism. Dorian does not deny his debauchery, and takes Basil to see the portrait. The portrait has become so hideous that Basil is only able to identify it as his by the signature he affixes to all his portraits. Basil is horrified, and beseeches Dorian to pray for salvation. In anger, Dorian blames his fate on Basil and stabs him to death. Dorian then calmly blackmails an old friend, the scientist Alan Campbell, into using his knowledge of chemistry to destroy the body of Basil Hallward. Alan later kills himself.

A 19th century London opium den (based on fictional accounts of the day)

To escape the guilt of his crime, Dorian goes to an opium den, where James Vane is unknowingly present. James had been seeking vengeance upon Dorian ever since Sibyl killed herself, but had no leads to pursue: the only thing he knew about Dorian was the name Sibyl called him, "Prince Charming". In the opium den however he hears someone refer to Dorian as "Prince Charming", and he accosts Dorian. Dorian deceives James into believing that he is too young to have known Sibyl, who killed herself 18 years earlier, as his face is still that of a young man. James relents and releases Dorian, but is then approached by a woman from the opium den who reproaches James for not killing Dorian. She confirms that the man was Dorian Gray and explains that he has not aged in 18 years. James runs after Dorian, but he has gone.

James then begins to stalk Dorian, causing Dorian to fear for his life. However, during a shooting party, a hunter accidentally kills James Vane, who was lurking in a thicket. On returning to London, Dorian tells Lord Henry that he will live righteously from now on. His new probity begins with deliberately not breaking the heart of the naïve Hetty Merton, his current romantic interest. Dorian wonders if his newfound goodness has reverted the corruption in the picture, but when he looks at it, he sees only an even uglier image of himself. From that, Dorian understands that his true motives for the self-sacrifice of moral reformation were the vanity and curiosity of his quest for new experiences, along with the desire to restore beauty to the picture.

Deciding that only full confession will absolve him of wrongdoing, Dorian decides to destroy the last vestige of his conscience and the only piece of evidence remaining of his crimes—the picture. In a rage, he takes the knife with which he murdered Basil Hallward and stabs the picture. The servants of the house awaken on hearing a cry from the locked room; on the street, a passerby who also heard the cry, calls the police. On entering the locked room, the servants find an unknown old man stabbed in the heart, his figure withered and decrepit. The servants identify the disfigured

corpse by the rings on its fingers, which belonged to Dorian Gray. Beside him, the portrait is now restored to its former appearance of beauty.

Characters Oscar Wilde said that, in the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), three of the characters were reflections of himself:

Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry is what the world thinks of me: Dorian is what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.

The painter Basil Hallward and the aristocrat Lord Henry Wotton observe the picture of Dorian

Gray.

The characters of the story are

• Dorian Gray – a handsome, narcissistic young man enthralled by Lord Henry's "new" hedonism. He indulges in every pleasure and virtually every 'sin', studying its effect upon him, which eventually leads to his death.

• Basil Hallward – a deeply moral man, the painter of the portrait, and infatuated with Dorian, whose patronage realises his potential as an artist. The picture of Dorian Gray is Basil's masterpiece.

• Lord Henry "Harry" Wotton –an imperious aristocrat and a decadent dandy who espouses a philosophy of self-indulgent hedonism. Initially Basil's friend, he neglects him for Dorian's beauty. The character of witty Lord Harry is a critique of Victorian culture at the Fin de siècle – of Britain at the end of the 19th century. Lord Harry's libertine world view corrupts Dorian, who then successfully emulates him. To the aristocrat Harry, the observant artist Basil says, "You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing." Lord Henry takes pleasure in impressing, influencing, and even misleading his acquaintances (to which purpose he bends his considerable wit and eloquence) but appears not to observe his own hedonistic advice, preferring to study himself with scientific detachment. His distinguishing feature is total indifference to the consequences of his actions. Scholars generally accept the character is partly inspired by Wilde's friend Lord Ronald Gower.

• Sibyl Vane – a talented actress and singer, she is a beautiful girl from a poor family with whom Dorian falls in love. Her love for Dorian ruins her acting ability, because she no longer finds pleasure in portraying fictional love as she is now experiencing real love in her life. She kills herself on learning that Dorian no longer loves her; at that, Lord Henry likens her to Ophelia, in Hamlet.

• James Vane – Sibyl's brother, a sailor who leaves for Australia. He is very protective of his sister, especially as their mother cares only for Dorian's money. Believing that Dorian means to harm Sibyl, James hesitates to leave, and promises vengeance upon Dorian if any harm befalls her. After Sibyl's suicide, James becomes obsessed with killing Dorian, and stalks him, but a hunter accidentally kills James. The brother's pursuit of vengeance upon the lover (Dorian Gray), for the death of the sister (Sibyl) parallels that of Laertes vengeance against Prince Hamlet.

• Alan Campbell – chemist and one-time friend of Dorian who ended their friendship when Dorian's libertine reputation devalued such a friendship. Dorian blackmails Alan into destroying the body of the murdered Basil Hallward; Campbell later shoots himself dead.

• Lord Fermor – Lord Henry's uncle, who tells his nephew, Lord Henry Wotton, about the family lineage of Dorian Gray.

• Adrian Singleton – A youthful friend of Dorian's, whom he evidently introduced to opium addiction, which induced him to forge a cheque and made him a total outcast from his family and social set.

• Victoria, Lady Henry Wotton – Lord Henry's wife, whom he treats disdainfully; she later divorces him.

Allusions Faust About the literary hero, the author Oscar Wilde said, "in every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or Faust." As in the legend of Faust, in The Picture of Dorian Gray a temptation (ageless beauty) is placed before the protagonist, which he indulges. In each story, the protagonist entices a beautiful woman to love him, and then destroys her life. In the preface to the novel (1891), Wilde said that the notion behind the tale is "old in the history of literature", but was a thematic subject to which he had "given a new form". Unlike the academic Faust, the gentleman Dorian makes no deal with the Devil, who is represented by the cynical hedonist Lord Henry, who presents the temptation that will corrupt the virtue and innocence that Dorian possesses at the start of the story. Throughout, Lord Henry appears unaware of the effect of his actions upon the young man; and so frivolously advises Dorian, that "the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing." As such, the devilish Lord Henry is "leading Dorian into an unholy pact, by manipulating his innocence and insecurity." Shakespeare In the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Wilde speaks of the sub-human Caliban character from The Tempest. In chapter five, he writes: "He felt as if he had come to look for Miranda and had been met by Caliban". When Dorian tells Lord Henry about his new love Sibyl Vane, he mentions the Shakespeare plays in which she has acted, and refers to her by the name of the heroine of each play. Later, Dorian speaks of his life by quoting Hamlet, a privileged character who impels his potential suitor (Ophelia) to suicide, and prompts her brother (Laertes) to swear mortal revenge. Joris-Karl Huysmans The anonymous "poisonous French novel" that leads Dorian to his fall is a thematic variant of À rebours (1884), by Joris-Karl Huysmans. In the biography, Oscar Wilde (1989), the literary critic Richard Ellmannsaid that:

Wilde does not name the book, but at his trial he conceded that it was, or almost [was], Huysmans's À rebours ... to a correspondent, he wrote that he had played a "fantastic variation" upon À rebours, and someday must write it down. The references in Dorian Gray to specific chapters are deliberately inaccurate.[13]

Literary significance Possible Disraeli influence Some commentators have suggested that The Picture of Dorian Gray was influenced by the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli's (anonymously published) first novel Vivian Grey (1826) as, "a kind of homage from one outsider to another." The name of Dorian Gray's love interest, Sibyl Vane, may be a modified fusion of the title of Disraeli's best known novel (Sybil) and Vivian Grey's love interest Violet Fane, who, like Sibyl Vane, dies tragically. There is also a scene in Vivian Grey in which the eyes in the portrait of a "beautiful being" move when its subject dies.

Publication history The Picture of Dorian Gray originally was a novella submitted to Lippincott's Monthly Magazine for serial publication. In 1889, J. M. Stoddart, an editor for Lippincott, was in London to solicit novellas to publish in the magazine. On 30 August 1889, Stoddart dined with Oscar Wilde, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and T. P. Gill at the Langham Hotel, and commissioned novellas from each writer. Conan Doyle promptly submitted The Sign of the Four (1890) to Stoddart, but Wilde was more dilatory; Conan Doyle's second Sherlock Holmes novel was published in the February 1890 edition of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, yet Stoddart did not receive Wilde's manuscript for The Picture of Dorian Gray until 7 April 1890, nine months after having commissioned the novel from him.

The literary merits of The Picture of Dorian Gray impressed Stoddart, but, as an editor, he told the publisher, George Lippincott, "in its present condition there are a number of things an innocent woman would make an exception to. ..." Among the pre-publication deletions that Stoddart and his editors made to the text of Wilde's original manuscript were: (i) passages alluding to homosexuality and to homosexual desire; (ii) all references to the fictional book title Le Secret de Raoul and its author, Catulle Sarrazin; and (iii) all "mistress" references to Gray's lovers, Sibyl Vane and Hetty Merton.

The Picture of Dorian Gray was published on 20 June 1890, in the July issue of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. British reviewers condemned the novel's

immorality, and said condemnation was so controversial that the W H Smith publishing house withdrew every copy of the July 1890 issue of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine from its bookstalls in railway stations. Consequent to the harsh criticism of the 1890 magazine edition, Wilde ameliorated the homoerotic references, to simplify the moral message of the story. In the magazine edition (1890), Basil tells Lord Henry how he "worships" Dorian, and begs him not to "take away the one person that makes my life absolutely lovely to me." In the magazine edition, Basil concentrates upon love, whereas, in the book edition (1891), Basil concentrates upon his art, saying to Lord Henry, "the one person who gives my art whatever charm it may possess: my life as an artist depends on him."

The magazine edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) was expanded from thirteen to twenty chapters; and the magazine edition’s final chapter was divided into two chapters, the nineteenth and twentieth chapters of the book edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). Wilde's textual additions were about "fleshing out of Dorian as a character" and providing details of his ancestry that made his "psychological collapse more prolonged and more convincing."

The introduction of the James Vane character to the story develops the socio-economic background of the Sibyl Vane character, thus emphasising Dorian's selfishness and foreshadowing James's accurate perception of the essentially immoral character of Dorian Gray; thus, he correctly deduced Dorian’s dishonourable intent towards Sibyl. The sub-plot about James Vane's dislike of Dorian gives the novel a Victorian tinge of class struggle. With such textual changes, Oscar Wilde meant to diminish the moralistic controversy about the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Preface Consequent to the harsh criticism of the magazine edition of the novel, the textual revisions to The Picture of Dorian Gray included a preface in which Wilde addressed the criticisms and defended the reputation of his novel. To communicate how the novel should be read, in the Preface, Wilde explains the role of the artist in society, the purpose of art, and the value of beauty. It traces Wilde's cultural exposure to Taoism and to the philosophy of Chuang Tsǔ (Zhuang Zhou). Earlier, before writing the preface, Wilde had written a book review of Herbert Giles's translation of the work of Zhuang Zhou. The preface was first published in the 1891 edition of the novel; nonetheless, by June 1891, Wilde was defending The Picture of Dorian Gray against accusations that it was a bad book. In the essay The Artist as Critic, Oscar Wilde said that:

The honest ratepayer and his healthy family have no doubt often mocked at the dome-like forehead of the philosopher, and laughed over the strange perspective of the landscape that lies beneath him. If they really knew who he was, they would tremble. For Chuang Tsǔ spent his life in preaching the great creed of Inaction, and in pointing out the uselessness of all things. Criticism In the 19th century, the critical reception of the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) was poor. The book critic of The Irish Times said, The Picture of Dorian Gray was "first published to some scandal." Such book reviews achieved for the novel a "certain notoriety for being 'mawkish and nauseous', 'unclean', 'effeminate' and 'contaminating'." Such moralistic scandal arose from the novel's homoeroticism, which offended the sensibilities (social, literary, and aesthetic) of Victorian book critics. Yet, most of the criticism was personal, attacking Wilde for being a hedonist with a distorted view of conventional morality of Victorian Britain. In the 30 June 1890 issue of the Daily Chronicle, the book critic said that Wilde's novel contains "one element ... which will taint every young mind that comes in contact with it." In the 5 July 1890 issue of the Scots Observer, a reviewer asked "Why must Oscar Wilde 'go grubbing in muck-heaps?'" In response to such criticism, Wilde obscured the homoeroticism of the story and expanded the personal background of the characters. Textual revisions After the initial publication of the magazine edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Wilde expanded the text from 13 to 20 chapters and obscured the homoerotic themes of the story. In the novel version of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), chapters 3, 5, and 15 to 18, inclusive, are new; and chapter 13 of the magazine edition was divided, and became chapters 19 and 20 of the novel edition.[27] In 1895, at his trials, Oscar Wilde said he revised the text of The Picture of Dorian Gray because of letters sent to him by the cultural critic Walter Pater.

Passages revised for the novel

• (Basil about Dorian) "He has stood as Paris in dainty armour, and as Adonis with huntsman's cloak and polished boar-spear. Crowned with heavy lotus-blossoms, he has sat on the prow of Adrian's barge, looking into the green,

turbid Nile. He has leaned over the still pool of some Greek woodland, and seen in the water's silent silver the wonder of his own beauty."

• (Lord Henry describes "fidelity") "It has nothing to do with our own will. It is either an unfortunate accident, or an unpleasant result of temperament."

• "You don't mean to say that Basil has got any passion or any romance in him?" / "I don't know whether he has any passion, but he certainly has romance," said Lord Henry, with an amused look in his eyes. / "Has he never let you know that?" / "Never. I must ask him about it. I am rather surprised to hear it."

• (Basil Hallward described) "Rugged and straightforward as he was, there was something in his nature that was purely feminine in its tenderness."

• (Basil to Dorian) "It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. Somehow, I had never loved a woman. I suppose I never had time. Perhaps, as Harry says, a really grande passion is the privilege of those who have nothing to do, and that is the use of the idle classes in a country."

• (Basil confronts Dorian) "Dorian, Dorian, your reputation is infamous. I know you and Harry are great friends. I say nothing about that now, but surely you need not have made his sister's name a by-word." (The first part of this passage was deleted from the 1890 magazine text; the second part of the passage was inserted to the 1891 novel text.)

Passages added to the novel

• "Each class would have preached the importance of those virtues, for whose exercise there was no necessity in their own lives. The rich would have spoken on the value of thrift, and the idle grown eloquent over the dignity of labour."

• "A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do. That is the one use of the idle classes of a country. Don't be afraid."

• "Faithfulness! I must analyse it some day. The passion for property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away, if we were not afraid that others might pick them up."

The uncensored edition

In 2011, the Belknap Press published The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition. The edition includes text that was deleted by JM Stoddart, Wilde's initial editor, before the story's publication in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in 1890

EDGAR ALLAN POE

Edgar Allan Poe, (born January 19, 1809, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.—died October 7, 1849, Baltimore, Maryland), American short-story writer, poet, critic, and editor who is famous for his cultivation of mystery and the macabre. His tale “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) initiated the modern detective story, and the atmosphere in his tales of horror is unrivaled in American fiction. His “The Raven” (1845) numbers among the best-known poems in the national literature. Life Poe was the son of the English-born actress Elizabeth Arnold Poe and David Poe, Jr., an actor from Baltimore. After his mother died in Richmond, Virginia, in 1811, he was taken into the home of John Allan, a Richmond merchant (presumably his godfather), and of his childless wife. He was later taken to Scotland and England (1815–20), where he was given a classical education that was continued in Richmond. For 11 months in 1826 he attended the University of Virginia, but his gambling losses at the university so incensed his guardian that he refused to let him continue, and Poe returned to Richmond to find his sweetheart, (Sarah) Elmira Royster, engaged. He went to Boston, where in 1827 he published a pamphlet of youthful Byronic poems, Tamerlane, and Other Poems. Poverty forced him to join the army under the name of Edgar A. Perry, but, on the death of Poe’s foster mother, John Allan purchased his release from the army and helped him get an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Before going, Poe published a new volume at Baltimore, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829). He successfully sought expulsion from the academy, where he was absent from all drills and classes for a week. He proceeded to New York City and brought out a volume of Poems, containing several masterpieces, some showing the influence of John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He then returned to Baltimore, where he began to write stories. In 1833 his “MS. Found in a Bottle” won $50 from a Baltimore weekly, and by 1835 he was in Richmond as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. There he made a name as a critical reviewer and married his young cousin Virginia Clemm, who was only 13. Poe seems to have been an affectionate husband and son-in-law.

Poe was dismissed from his job in Richmond, apparently for drinking, and went to New York City. Drinking was in fact to be the bane of his life. To talk well in a large company he needed a slight stimulant, but a glass of sherry might start him on a spree; and, although he rarely succumbed to intoxication, he was often seen in public when he did. This gave rise to the conjecture that Poe was a drug addict, but according to medical testimony he had a brain lesion. While in New York City in 1838 he published a long prose narrative, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, combining (as so often in his tales) much factual material with the wildest fancies. It is considered one inspiration of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. In 1839 he became coeditor of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in Philadelphia. There a contract for a monthly feature stimulated him to write “William Wilson” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” stories of supernatural horror. The latter contains a study of a neurotic now known to have been an acquaintance of Poe, not Poe himself.

Later in 1839 Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque appeared (dated 1840). He resigned from Burton’s about June 1840 but returned in 1841 to edit its successor, Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine, in which he printed “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”—the first detective story. In 1843 his “The Gold Bug” won a prize of $100 from the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper, which gave him great publicity. In 1844 he returned to New York, wrote “The Balloon Hoax” for the Sun, and became subeditor of the New York Mirror under N.P. Willis, thereafter a lifelong friend. In the New York Mirror of January 29, 1845, appeared, from advance sheets of the American Review, his most famous poem, “The Raven,” which gave him national fame at once. Poe then became editor of the Broadway Journal, a short-lived weekly, in which he republished most of his short stories, in 1845. During this last year the now-forgotten poet Frances Sargent Locke Osgood pursued Poe. Virginia did not object, but “Fanny’s” indiscreet writings about her literary love caused great scandal. His The Raven and Other Poems and a selection of his Tales came out in 1845, and in 1846 Poe moved to a cottage at Fordham (now part of New York City), where he wrote for Godey’s Lady’s Book (May–October 1846) “The Literati of New York City”—gossipy sketches on personalities of the day, which led to a libel suit.

Poe’s wife, Virginia, died in January 1847. The following year he went to Providence, Rhode Island, to woo Sarah Helen Whitman, a poet. There was a brief engagement. Poe had close but platonic entanglements with Annie Richmond and with Sarah Anna Lewis, who helped him financially. He composed poetic tributes to all of them. In 1848 he also published the lecture “Eureka,” a transcendental “explanation” of the universe, which has been hailed as a masterpiece by some critics and as nonsense by others. In 1849 he went south, had a wild spree in Philadelphia, but got safely to Richmond, where he finally became engaged to Elmira Royster, by then the widowed Mrs. Shelton, and spent a happy summer with only one or two

relapses. He enjoyed the companionship of childhood friends and an unromantic friendship with a young poet, Susan Archer Talley.

Poe had some forebodings of death when he left Richmond for Baltimore late in September. There he died, although whether from drinking, heart failure, or other causes was still uncertain in the 21st century. He was buried in Westminster Presbyterian churchyard in Baltimore.

Legacy

Poe’s work owes much to the concern of Romanticism with the occult and the satanic. It owes much also to his own feverish dreams, to which he applied a rare faculty of shaping plausible fabrics out of impalpable materials. With an air of objectivity and spontaneity, his productions are closely dependent on his own powers of imagination and an elaborate technique. His keen and sound judgment as an appraiser of contemporary literature, his idealism and musical gift as a poet, his dramatic art as a storyteller, considerably appreciated in his lifetime, secured him a prominent place among universally known men of letters.

The outstanding fact in Poe’s character is a strange duality. The wide divergence of contemporary judgments on the man seems almost to point to the coexistence of two persons in him. With those he loved he was gentle and devoted. Others, who were the butt of his sharp criticism, found him irritable and self-centred and went so far as to accuse him of lack of principle. Was it, it has been asked, a double of the man rising from harrowing nightmares or from the haggard inner vision of dark crimes or from appalling graveyard fantasies that loomed in Poe’s unstable being?

Much of Poe’s best work is concerned with terror and sadness, but in ordinary circumstances the poet was a pleasant companion. He talked brilliantly, chiefly of literature, and read his own poetry and that of others in a voice of surpassing beauty. He admired Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. He had a sense of humour, apologizing to a visitor for not keeping a pet raven. If the mind of Poe is considered, the duality is still more striking. On one side, he was an idealist and a visionary. His yearning for the ideal was both of the heart and of the imagination. His sensitivity to the beauty and sweetness of women inspired his most touching lyrics (“To Helen,” “Annabel Lee,” “Eulalie,” “To One in Paradise”) and the full-toned prose hymns to beauty and love in “Ligeia” and “Eleonora.” In “Israfel” his imagination carried him away from the material world into a dreamland. This Pythian mood was especially characteristic of the later years of his life.

More generally, in such verses as “The Valley of Unrest,” “Lenore,” “The Raven,” “For Annie,” and “Ulalume” and in his prose tales, his familiar mode of evasion from the universe of common experience was through eerie thoughts, impulses, or fears. From these materials he drew the startling effects of his tales of death (“The Fall of

the House of Usher,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” “The Premature Burial,” “The Oval Portrait,” “Shadow”), his tales of wickedness and crime (“Berenice,” “The Black Cat,” “William Wilson,” “The Imp of the Perverse,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Tell-Tale Heart”), his tales of survival after dissolution (“Ligeia,” “Morella,” “Metzengerstein”), and his tales of fatality (“The Assignation,” “The Man of the Crowd”). Even when he does not hurl his characters into the clutch of mysterious forces or onto the untrodden paths of the beyond, he uses the anguish of imminent death as the means of causing the nerves to quiver (“The Pit and the Pendulum”), and his grotesque invention deals with corpses and decay in an uncanny play with the aftermath of death.

Poe, Edgar Allan: “The Pit and the Pendulum”Depiction of a scene from “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1843)

On the other side, Poe is conspicuous for a close observation of minute details, as in the long narratives and in many of the descriptions that introduce the tales or constitute their settings. Closely connected with this is his power of ratiocination. He prided himself on his logic and carefully handled this real accomplishment so as to impress the public with his possessing still more of it than he had; hence the would-be feats of thought reading, problem unraveling, and cryptography that he

attributed to his characters William Legrand and C. Auguste Dupin. This suggested to him the analytical tales, which created the detective story, and his science fictiontales.

The same duality is evinced in his art. He was capable of writing angelic or weird poetry, with a supreme sense of rhythm and word appeal, or prose of sumptuous beauty and suggestiveness, with the apparent abandon of compelling inspiration; yet he would write down a problem of morbid psychology or the outlines of an unrelenting plot in a hard and dry style. In Poe’s masterpieces the double contents of his temper, of his mind, and of his art are fused into a oneness of tone, structure, and movement, the more effective, perhaps, as it is compounded of various elements.

As a critic, Poe laid great stress upon correctness of language, metre, and structure. He formulated rules for the short story, in which he sought the ancient unities: i.e., the short story should relate a complete action and take place within one day in one place. To these unities he added that of mood or effect. He was not extreme in these views, however. He praised longer works and sometimes thought allegories and morals admirable if not crudely presented. Poe admired originality, often in work very different from his own, and was sometimes an unexpectedly generous critic of decidedly minor writers.

Poe’s genius was early recognized abroad. No one did more to persuade the world and, in the long run, the United States, of Poe’s greatness than the French poets Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé. Indeed his role in French literature was that of a poetic master model and guide to criticism. French Symbolism relied on his “The Philosophy of Composition,” borrowed from his imagery, and used his examples to generate the theory of pure poetry.

JAMES JOYCE AND ULYSSES

James Joyce, in full James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, (born February 2, 1882, Dublin, Ireland—died January 13, 1941, Zürich, Switzerland), Irish novelist noted for his experimental use of language and exploration of new literary methods in such large works of fiction as Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). Early Life Joyce, the eldest of 10 children in his family to survive infancy, was sent at age six to Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boarding school that has been described as “the Eton of Ireland.” But his father was not the man to stay affluent for long; he drank, neglected his affairs, and borrowed money from his office, and his family sank deeper and deeper into poverty, the children becoming accustomed to conditions of increasing sordidness. Joyce did not return to Clongowes in 1891; instead he stayed at home for the next two years and tried to educate himself, asking his mother to check his work. In April 1893 he and his brother Stanislaus were admitted, without fees, to Belvedere College, a Jesuit grammar school in Dublin. Joyce did well there academically and was twice elected president of the Marian Society, a position virtually that of head boy. He left, however, under a cloud, as it was thought (correctly) that he had lost his Roman Catholic faith. He entered University College, Dublin, which was then staffed by Jesuit priests. There he studied languages and reserved his energies for extracurricular activities, reading widely—particularly in books not recommended by the Jesuits—and taking an active part in the college’s Literary and Historical Society. Greatly admiring Henrik Ibsen, he learned Dano-Norwegian to read the original and had an article, “Ibsen’s New Drama”—a review of the playWhen We Dead Awaken—published in the London Fortnightly Review in 1900 just after his 18th birthday. This early success confirmed Joyce in his resolution to become a writer and persuaded his family, friends, and teachers that the resolution was justified. In October 1901 he published an essay, “The Day of the Rabblement,” attacking the Irish Literary Theatre (later the Abbey Theatre, in Dublin) for catering to popular taste.

Joyce was leading a dissolute life at this time but worked sufficiently hard to pass his final examinations, matriculating with “second-class honours in Latin” and obtaining the degree of B.A. on October 31, 1902. Never did he relax his efforts to master the art of writing. He wrote verses and experimented with short prose passages that he called “epiphanies,” a word that Joyce used to describe his accounts of moments

when the real truth about some person or object was revealed. To support himself while writing, he decided to become a doctor, but, after attending a few lectures in Dublin, he borrowed what money he could and went to Paris, where he abandoned the idea of medical studies, wrote some book reviews, and studied in the Sainte-Geneviève Library.

Recalled home in April 1903 because his mother was dying, he tried various occupations, including teaching, and lived at various addresses, including the Martello Tower at Sandycove, which later became a museum. He had begun writing a lengthy naturalistic novel, Stephen Hero, based on the events of his own life, when in 1904 George Russell offered £1 each for some simple short stories with an Irish background to appear in a farmers’ magazine, The Irish Homestead. In response Joyce began writing the stories published as Dubliners (1914). Three stories—“The Sisters,” “Eveline,” and “After the Race”—had appeared under the pseudonym Stephen Dedalus before the editor decided that Joyce’s work was not suitable for his readers. Meanwhile, Joyce had met Nora Barnacle in June 1904; they probably had their first date, and first sexual encounter, on June 16, the day that he chose as what is known as “Bloomsday” (the day of his novel Ulysses). Eventually he persuaded her to leave Ireland with him, although he refused, on principle, to go through a ceremony of marriage. They left Dublin together in October 1904. Early Travels And Works Joyce obtained a position in the Berlitz School at Pola in Austria-Hungary (now Pula, Croatia), working in his spare time at his novel and short stories. In 1905 they moved to Trieste, where James’s brother Stanislaus joined them and where their children, George and Lucia, were born. In 1906–07, for eight months, he worked at a bank in Rome, disliking almost everything he saw. Ireland seemed pleasant by contrast; he wrote to Stanislaus that he had not given credit in his stories to the Irish virtue of hospitality and began to plan a new story, “The Dead.” The early stories were meant, he said, to show the stultifying inertia and social conformity from which Dublin suffered, but they are written with a vividness that arises from his success in making every word and every detail significant. His studies in European literature had interested him in both the Symbolists and the realists of the second half of the 19th century; his work began to show a synthesis of these two rival movements. He decided that Stephen Hero lacked artistic control and form and rewrote it as “a work in five chapters” under a title—A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—intended to direct attention to its focus upon the central figure. In 1909 he visited Ireland twice to try to publish Dubliners and set up a chain of Irish cinemas. Neither effort succeeded, and he was distressed when a former friend told

him that he had shared Nora’s affections in the summer of 1904. Another old friend proved this to be a lie. Joyce always felt that he had been betrayed, however, and the theme of betrayal runs through much of his later writings.

When Italy declared war in 1915 Stanislaus was interned, but James and his family were allowed to go to Zürich. At first, while he gave private lessons in English and worked on the early chapters of Ulysses—which he had first thought of as another short story about a “Mr. Hunter”—his financial difficulties were great. He was helped by a large grant from Edith Rockefeller McCormick and finally by a series of grants from Harriet Shaw Weaver, editor of the Egoist magazine, which by 1930 had amounted to more than £23,000. Her generosity resulted partly from her admiration for his work and partly from her sympathy with his difficulties, for, as well as poverty, he had to contend with eye diseases that never really left him. From February 1917 until 1930 he endured a series of 25 operations for iritis, glaucoma, and cataracts, sometimes being for short intervals totally blind. Despite this he kept up his spirits and continued working, some of his most joyful passages being composed when his health was at its worst.

Unable to find an English printer willing to set up A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for book publication, Weaver published it herself, having the sheets printed in the United States, where it was also published, on December 29, 1916, by B.W. Huebsch, in advance of the English Egoist Press edition. Encouraged by the acclaim given to this, in March 1918, the American Little Review began to publish episodes from Ulysses, continuing until the work was banned in December 1920. An autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist traces the intellectual and emotional development of a young man named Stephen Dedalus and ends with his decision to leave Dublin for Paris to devote his life to art. The last words of Stephen prior to his departure are thought to express the author’s feelings upon the same occasion in his own life:

Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. Ulysses After World War I Joyce returned for a few months to Trieste, and then—at the invitation of Ezra Pound—in July 1920 he went to Paris. His novel Ulysses was published there on February 2, 1922, by Sylvia Beach, proprietor of the bookshop Shakespeare and Company. Ulysses is constructed as a modern parallel to Homer’s Odyssey. All of the action of the novel takes place in Dublin on a single day (June 16, 1904). The three central characters—Stephen Dedalus (the hero of

Joyce’s earlier Portrait of the Artist), Leopold Bloom, and his wife, Molly Bloom—are intended to be modern counterparts of Telemachus, Ulysses, and Penelope. By the use of interior monologue, Joyce reveals the innermost thoughts and feelings of these characters as they live hour by hour, passing from a public bath to a funeral, library, maternity hospital, and brothel.

The main strength of Ulysses lies in its depth of character portrayal and its breadth of humour. Yet the book is most famous for its use of a variant of the interior monologue known as the stream-of-consciousness technique. Joyce claimed to have taken this technique from a largely forgotten French writer, Édouard Dujardin, who had used interior monologues in his novel Les Lauriers sont coupés (1888; We’ll to the Woods No More), but many critics have pointed out that it is at least as old as the novel, though no one before Joyce had used it so continuously. Joyce’s major innovation was to carry the interior monologue one step further by rendering, for the first time in literature, the myriad flow of impressions, half thoughts, associations, lapses and hesitations, incidental worries, and sudden impulses that form part of the individual’s conscious awareness along with the trend of his rational thoughts. This stream-of-consciousness technique proved widely influential in much 20th-century fiction.

The technical and stylistic devices in Ulysses are abundant, particularly in the much-praised “Oxen of the Sun” chapter (Episode 14), in which the language goes through every stage in the development of English prose from Anglo-Saxon to the present day to symbolize the growth of a fetus in the womb. The effect of these devices is often to add intensity and depth, as, for example, in the “Aeolus” chapter (Episode 7) set in a newspaper office, with rhetoric as the theme. Joyce inserted into it hundreds of rhetorical figures and many references to winds—something “blows up” instead of happening, people “raise the wind” when they are getting money—and the reader becomes aware of an unusual liveliness in the very texture of the prose. The famous last chapter of the novel, in which we follow the stream of consciousness of Molly Bloom as she lies in bed, gains much of its effect from being written in eight huge unpunctuated paragraphs.

Ulysses, which was already well known because of the censorship troubles, became immediately famous upon publication. Joyce had prepared for its critical reception by having a lecture given by Valery Larbaud, who pointed out the Homeric correspondences in it and that “each episode deals with a particular art or science, contains a particular symbol, represents a special organ of the human body, has its particular colour…proper technique, and takes place at a particular time.” Joyce never published this scheme; indeed, he even deleted the chapter titles in the book as printed. It may be that this scheme was more useful to Joyce when he was writing than it is to the reader.

Finnegans Wake In Paris Joyce worked on Finnegans Wake, the title of which was kept secret, the novel being known simply as “Work in Progress” until it was published in its entirety in May 1939. In addition to his chronic eye troubles, Joyce suffered great and prolonged anxiety over the mental healthof his daughter, Lucia. What had seemed her slight eccentricity grew into unmistakable and sometimes violent mental disorder that Joyce tried by every possible means to cure, but it became necessary finally to place her in a mental hospital near Paris. In 1931 he and Nora visited London, where they were married, his scruples on this point having yielded to his daughter’s complaints.

James Joyce, photograph by Gisèle Freund, 1939.

Meanwhile he wrote and rewrote sections of Finnegans Wake; often a passage was revised more than a dozen times before he was satisfied. Basically the book is, in one sense, the story of a publican in Chapelizod, near Dublin, his wife, and their three children, but Mr. Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (often designated by variations on his initials, HCE, one form of which is “Here Comes Everybody”), Anna Livia Plurabelle, Kevin, Jerry, and Isabel are every family of mankind, the archetypal family about whom all humanity is dreaming. The 18th-century Italian Giambattista Vico provides the basic theory that history is cyclic; to demonstrate this the book begins with the end of a sentence left unfinished on the last page. It is thousands of dreams in one. Languages merge: Anna Livia has “vlossyhair”—włosy being Polish for “hair”; “a bad of wind” blows, bâd being Turkish for “wind.” Characters from literature and history appear and merge and disappear as “the intermisunderstanding minds of the anticollaborators” dream on. On another level, the protagonists are the city of Dublin and the River Liffey—which flows

enchantingly through the pages, “leaning with the sloothering slide of her, giddygaddy, grannyma, gossipaceous Anna Livia”—standing as representatives of the history of Ireland and, by extension, of all human history. And throughout the book Joyce himself is present, joking, mocking his critics, defending his theories, remembering his father, enjoying himself. After the fall of France in World War II (1940), Joyce took his family back to Zürich, where he died, still disappointed with the reception given to his last book.

Legacy James Joyce’s subtle yet frank portrayal of human nature, coupled with his mastery of language and brilliant development of new literary forms, made him one of the major figures of literary Modernism and among the most commanding influences on novelists of the 20th century. Ulysses has come to be accepted as a masterpiece, two of its characters, Leopold Bloom and his wife, Molly, being portrayed with a fullness and warmth of humanity that is arguably unsurpassed in fiction. Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is also remarkable for the intimacy of the reader’s contact with the central figure and contains some astonishingly vivid passages. The 15 short stories collected in Dubliners mainly focused upon Dublin life’s sordidness, but “The Dead” is one of the world’s great short stories. Critical opinion remains divided over Joyce’s last work, Finnegans Wake, a universal dream about an Irish family, composed in a multilingual style on many levels and aiming at a multiplicity of meanings, but, although seemingly unintelligible at first reading, the book is full of poetry and wit, containing passages of great beauty. Joyce’s other works—some verse (Chamber Music, 1907; Pomes Penyeach, 1927; Collected Poems, 1936) and a play, Exiles (1918)—though competently written, added little to his international stature.

T.S. ELIOT AND THE WASTE LANDS

T.S. Eliot, in full Thomas Stearns Eliot, (born September 26, 1888, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.—died January 4, 1965, London, England), American-English poet, playwright, literary critic, and editor, a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry in such works as The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943). Eliot exercised a strong influence on Anglo-American culture from the 1920s until late in the century. His experiments in diction, style, and versification revitalized English poetry, and in a series of critical essays he shattered old orthodoxies and erected new ones. The publication of Four Quartets led to his recognition as the greatest living English poet and man of letters, and in 1948 he was awarded both the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for Literature. Early Years Eliot was descended from a distinguished New England family that had relocated to St. Louis, Missouri. His family allowed him the widest education available in his time, with no influence from his father to be “practical” and to go into business. From Smith Academy in St. Louis he went to Milton, in Massachusetts; from Milton he entered Harvard in 1906; he received a B.A. in 1909, after three instead of the usual four years. The men who influenced him at Harvard were George Santayana, the philosopher and poet, and the critic Irving Babbitt. From Babbitt he derived an anti-Romantic attitude that, amplified by his later reading of British philosophers F.H. Bradley and T.E. Hulme, lasted through his life. In the academic year 1909–10 he was an assistant in philosophy at Harvard. He spent the year 1910–11 in France, attending Henri Bergson’s lectures in philosophy at the Sorbonne and reading poetry with Alain-Fournier. Eliot’s study of the poetry of Dante, of the English writers John Webster and John Donne, and of the French Symbolist Jules Laforguehelped him to find his own style. From 1911 to 1914 he was back at Harvard, reading Indian philosophy and studying Sanskrit. In 1913 he read Bradley’s Appearance and Reality; by 1916 he had finished, in Europe, a dissertation entitled “Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley.” But World War I had intervened, and he never returned to Harvard to take the final oral examination for the Ph.D. degree. In 1914 Eliot met and began a close association with the American poet Ezra Pound.

Early Publications Modernist writer T.S. Eliot reading the first three stanzas of his poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” 1915.Vincent Voice Library, Michigan State University Eliot was to pursue four careers: editor, dramatist, literary critic, and philosophical poet. He was probably the most erudite poet of his time in the English language. His undergraduate poems were “literary” and conventional. His first important publication, and the first masterpiece of Modernism in English, was “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915):

Although Pound had printed privately a small book, A lume spento, as early as 1908, “Prufrock” was the first poem by either of these literary revolutionists to go beyond experiment to achieve perfection. It represented a break with the immediate past as radical as that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads (1798). From the appearance of Eliot’s first volume, Prufrock and Other Observations, in 1917, one may conveniently date the maturity of the 20th-century poetic revolution. The significance of the revolution is still disputed, but the striking similarity to the Romantic revolution of Coleridge and Wordsworth is obvious: Eliot and Pound, like their 18th-century counterparts, set about reforming poetic diction. Whereas Wordsworth thought he was going back to the “real language of men,” Eliot struggled to create new verse rhythms based on the rhythms of contemporary speech. He sought a poetic diction that might be spoken by an educated person, being “neither pedantic nor vulgar.”

For a year Eliot taught French and Latin at the Highgate School; in 1917 he began his brief career as a bank clerk in Lloyds Bank Ltd. Meanwhile, he was also a prolific reviewer and essayist in both literary criticism and technical philosophy. In 1919 he published Poems, which contained the poem “Gerontion,” a meditative interior monologue in blank verse; nothing like this poem had appeared in English. The Waste Land And Criticism With the publication in 1922 of his poem The Waste Land, Eliot won an international reputation. The Waste Land expresses with great power the disenchantment, disillusionment, and disgust of the period after World War I. In a series of vignettes, loosely linked by the legend of the search for the Grail, it portrays a sterile world of

Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table.…

panicky fears and barren lusts, and of human beings waiting for some sign or promise of redemption. The poem’s style is highly complex, erudite, and allusive, and the poet provided notes and references to explain the work’s many quotations and allusions. This scholarly supplement distracted some readers and critics from perceiving the true originality of the poem, which lay rather in its rendering of the universal human predicament of man desiring salvation, and in its manipulation of language, than in its range of literary references. In his earlier poems Eliot had shown himself to be a master of the poetic phrase. The Waste Land showed him to be, in addition, a metrist of great virtuosity, capable of astonishing modulations ranging from the sublime to the conversational. The Waste Land consists of five sections and proceeds on a principle of “rhetorical discontinuity” that reflects the fragmented experience of the 20th-century sensibility of the great modern cities of the West. Eliot expresses the hopelessness and confusion of purpose of life in the secularized city, the decay of urbs aeterna (the “eternal city”). This is the ultimate theme of The Waste Land, concretized by the poem’s constant rhetorical shifts and its juxtapositions of contrasting styles. But The Waste Land is not a simple contrast of the heroic past with the degraded present; it is, rather, a timeless simultaneous awareness of moralgrandeur and moral evil. The poem’s original manuscript of about 800 lines was cut down to 433 at the suggestion of Ezra Pound. The Waste Land is not Eliot’s greatest poem, though it is his most famous.

Eliot said that the poet-critic must write “programmatic criticism”—that is, criticism that expresses the poet’s own interests as a poet, quite different from historical scholarship, which stops at placing the poet in his background. Consciously intended or not, Eliot’s criticism created an atmosphere in which his own poetry could be better understood and appreciated than if it had to appear in a literary milieu dominated by the standards of the preceding age. In the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” appearing in his first critical volume, The Sacred Wood (1920), Eliot asserts that tradition, as used by the poet, is not a mere repetition of the work of the immediate past (“novelty is better than repetition,” he said); rather, it comprises the whole of European literature, from Homer to the present. The poet writing in English may therefore make his own tradition by using materials from any past period, in any language. This point of view is “programmatic” in the sense that it disposes the reader to accept the revolutionary novelty of Eliot’s polyglot quotations and serious parodies of other poets’ styles in The Waste Land.

Also in The Sacred Wood, “Hamlet and His Problems” sets forth Eliot’s theory of the objective correlative:

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which

shall be the formula for that particular emotion; such that, when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

Eliot used the phrase “objective correlative” in the context of his own impersonal theory of poetry; it thus had an immense influence toward correcting the vagueness of late Victorian rhetoric by insisting on a correspondence of word and object. Two other essays, first published the year after The Sacred Wood, almost complete the Eliot critical canon: “The Metaphysical Poets” and “Andrew Marvell,” published in Selected Essays, 1917–32 (1932). In these essays he effects a new historical perspective on the hierarchy of English poetry, putting at the top Donne and other Metaphysical poets of the 17th century and lowering poets of the 18th and 19th centuries. Eliot’s second famous phrase appears here—“dissociation of sensibility,” invented to explain the change that came over English poetry after Donne and Andrew Marvell. This change seems to him to consist in a loss of the union of thought and feeling. The phrase has been attacked, yet the historical fact that gave rise to it cannot be denied, and with the poetry of Eliot and Pound it had a strong influence in reviving interest in certain 17th-century poets.

The first, or programmatic, phase of Eliot’s criticism ended with The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)—his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard. Shortly before this his interests had broadened into theology and sociology; three short books, or long essays, were the result: Thoughts After Lambeth (1931), The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948). These book-essays, along with his Dante (1929), an indubitablemasterpiece, broadened the base of literature into theology and philosophy: whether a work is poetry must be decided by literary standards; whether it is great poetry must be decided by standards higher than the literary.

Eliot’s criticism and poetry are so interwoven that it is difficult to discuss them separately. The great essay on Dante appeared two years after Eliot was confirmed in the Church of England(1927); in that year he also became a British subject. The first long poem after his conversion was Ash Wednesday (1930), a religious meditation in a style entirely different from that of any of the earlier poems. Ash Wednesday expresses the pangs and the strain involved in the acceptance of religious belief and religious discipline. This and subsequent poems were written in a more relaxed, musical, and meditative style than his earlier works, in which the dramatic element had been stronger than the lyrical. Ash Wednesday was not well received in an era that held that poetry, though autonomous, is strictly secular in its outlook; it was misinterpreted by some critics as an expression of personal disillusion.

Later Poetry And Plays Eliot’s masterpiece is Four Quartets, which was issued as a book in 1943, though each “quartet” is a complete poem. “Burnt Norton” was the first of the quartets; it had appeared in the Collected Poems of 1936. It is a subtle meditation on the nature of time and its relation to eternity. On the model of this, Eliot wrote three more poems—“East Coker” (1940), “The Dry Salvages” (1941), and “Little Gidding” (1942)—in which he explored through images of great beauty and haunting power his own past, the past of the human race, and the meaning of human history. Each of the poems was self-subsistent, but when published together they were seen to make up a single work, in which themes and images recurred and were developed in a musical manner and brought to a final resolution. This work made a deep impression on the reading public, and even those who were unable to accept the poems’ Christian beliefs recognized the intellectual integrity with which Eliot pursued his high theme, the originality of the form he had devised, and the technical mastery of his verse. This work led to the award to Eliot, in 1948, of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

An outstanding example of Eliot’s verse in Four Quartets is the passage in “Little Gidding” in which the poet meets a “compound ghost,” a figure composite of two of his masters: William Butler Yeats and Stéphane Mallarmé. The scene takes place at dawn in London after a night on duty at an air-raid post during an air attack; the master speaks in conclusion:

From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire Where you must move in measure, like a dancer. The day was breaking. In the disfigured street He left me, with a kind of valediction, And faded on the blowing of the horn.

The passage is 72 lines, in modified terza rima; the diction is as near to that of Dante as is possible in English; and it is a fine example of Eliot’s belief that a poet can be entirely original when he is closest to his models.

Eliot’s plays, which begin with Sweeney Agonistes (published 1926; first performed in 1934) and end with The Elder Statesman (first performed 1958; published 1959), are, with the exception of Murder in the Cathedral (published and performed 1935), inferior to the lyric and meditative poetry. Eliot’s belief that even secular drama attracts people who unconsciously seek a religion led him to put drama above all other forms of poetry. All his plays are in a blank verse of his own invention, in which the metrical effect is not apprehended apart from the sense; thus he brought “poetic drama” back to the popular stage. The Family Reunion (1939)

and Murder in the Cathedral are Christian tragedies—the former a tragedy of revenge, the latter of the sin of pride. Murder in the Cathedral is a modern miracle play on the martyrdom of Thomas Becket. The most striking feature of this, his most successful play, is the use of a chorus in the traditional Greek manner to make apprehensible to common humanity the meaning of the heroic action. The Family Reunion (1939) was less popular. It contains scenes of great poignancy and some of the finest dramatic verse since the Elizabethans, but the public found this translation of the story of Orestes into a modern domestic drama baffling and was uneasy at the mixture of psychological realism, mythical apparitions at a drawing-room window, and a comic chorus of uncles and aunts.

After World War II, Eliot returned to writing plays with The Cocktail Party in 1949, The Confidential Clerk in 1953, and The Elder Statesman in 1958. These plays are comedies in which the plots are derived from Greek drama. In them Eliot accepted current theatrical conventions at their most conventional, subduing his style to a conversational level and eschewing the lyrical passages that gave beauty to his earlier plays. Only The Cocktail Party, which is based upon the Alcestis of Euripides, achieved a popular success. In spite of their obvious theatrical defects and a failure to engage the sympathies of the audience for the characters, these plays succeed in handling moral and religious issues of some complexity while entertaining the audience with farcical plots and some shrewd social satire.

Eliot’s career as editor was ancillary to his main interests, but his quarterly review, The Criterion(1922–39), was the most distinguished international critical journal of the period. He was a “director,” or working editor, of the publishing firm of Faber & Faber Ltd. from the early 1920s until his death and as such was a generous and discriminating patron of young poets.

Eliot rigorously kept his private life in the background. In 1915 he married Vivien Haigh-Wood. After 1933 she was mentally ill, and they lived apart; she died in 1947. In January 1957 he married Valerie Fletcher, with whom he lived happily until his death and who became his literary executor. She was responsible for releasing a range of editions of Eliot’s work and letters, and she also approved Andrew Lloyd Webber’s adaptation of Eliot’s light verse from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) into the musical Cats (1981).

From the 1920s onward, Eliot’s influence as a poet and as a critic—in both Great Britain and the United States—was immense, not least among those establishing the study of English literature as an autonomous academic discipline. He also had his detractors, ranging from avant-garde American poets who believed that he had abandoned the attempt to write about contemporary America to traditional English poets who maintained that he had broken the links between poetry and a large popular audience. During his lifetime, however, his work was the subject of much

sympathetic exegesis. Since his death (and coinciding with a wider challenge to the academic study of English literature that his critical precepts did much to establish), interpreters have been markedly more critical, focusing on his complex relationship to his American origins, his elitist cultural and social views, and his exclusivist notions of tradition and of race. Nevertheless, Eliot was unequaled by any other 20th-century poet in the ways in which he commanded the attention of his audience.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

Virginia Woolf, original name in full Adeline Virginia Stephen, (born January 25, 1882, London, England—died March 28, 1941, near Rodmell, Sussex), English writer whose novels, through their nonlinear approaches to narrative, exerted a major influence on the genre.

While she is best known for her novels, especially Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse(1927), Woolf also wrote pioneering essays on artistic theory, literary history, women’s writing, and the politics of power. A fine stylist, she experimented with several forms of biographical writing, composed painterly short fictions, and sent to her friends and family a lifetime of brilliant letters. Early Life And Influences Born Virginia Stephen, she was the child of ideal Victorian parents. Her father, Leslie Stephen, was an eminent literary figure and the first editor (1882–91) of the Dictionary of National Biography. Her mother, Julia Jackson, possessed great beauty and a reputation for saintly self-sacrifice; she also had prominent social and artistic connections, which included Julia Margaret Cameron, her aunt and one of the greatest portrait photographers of the 19th century. Both Julia Jackson’s first husband, Herbert Duckworth, and Leslie’s first wife, a daughter of the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, had died unexpectedly, leaving her three children and him one. Julia Jackson Duckworth and Leslie Stephen married in 1878, and four children followed: Vanessa (born 1879), Thoby (born 1880), Virginia (born 1882), and Adrian (born 1883). While these four children banded together against their older half siblings, loyalties shifted among them. Virginia was jealous of Adrian for being their mother’s favourite. At age nine, she was the genius behind a family newspaper, the Hyde Park Gate News, that often teased Vanessa and Adrian. Vanessa mothered the others, especially Virginia, but the dynamicbetween need (Virginia’s) and aloofness (Vanessa’s) sometimes expressed itself as rivalry between Virginia’s art of writing and Vanessa’s of painting. The Stephen family made summer migrations from their London town house near Kensington Gardens to the rather disheveled Talland House on the rugged Cornwall coast. That annual relocation structured Virginia’s childhood world in terms of opposites: city and country, winter and summer, repression and freedom, fragmentation and wholeness. Her neatly divided, predictable world ended, however, when her mother died in 1895 at age 49. Virginia, at 13, ceased writing amusing

accounts of family news. Almost a year passed before she wrote a cheerful letter to her brother Thoby. She was just emerging from depression when, in 1897, her half sister Stella Duckworth died at age 28, an event Virginia noted in her diary as “impossible to write of.” Then in 1904, after her father died, Virginia had a nervous breakdown.

While Virginia was recovering, Vanessa supervised the Stephen children’s move to the bohemian Bloomsbury section of London. There the siblings lived independent of their Duckworth half brothers, free to pursue studies, to paint or write, and to entertain. Leonard Woolf dined with them in November 1904, just before sailing to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to become a colonial administrator. Soon the Stephens hosted weekly gatherings of radical young people, including Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, and John Maynard Keynes, all later to achieve fame as, respectively, an art critic, a biographer, and an economist. Then, after a family excursion to Greece in 1906, Thoby died of typhoid fever. He was 26. Virginia grieved but did not slip into depression. She overcame the loss of Thoby and the “loss” of Vanessa, who became engaged to Bell just after Thoby’s death, through writing. Vanessa’s marriage (and perhaps Thoby’s absence) helped transform conversation at the avant-garde gatherings of what came to be known as the Bloomsbury group into irreverent, sometimes bawdy repartee that inspired Virginia to exercise her wit publicly, even while privately she was writing her poignant“Reminiscences”—about her childhood and her lost mother—which was published in 1908. Viewing Italian art that summer, she committed herself to creating in language “some kind of whole made of shivering fragments,” to capturing “the flight of the mind.” Early Fiction Virginia Stephen determined in 1908 to “re-form” the novel by creating a holistic form embracing aspects of life that were “fugitive” from the Victorian novel. While writing anonymous reviews for the Times Literary Supplement and other journals, she experimented with such a novel, which she called Melymbrosia. In November 1910, Roger Fry, a new friend of the Bells, launched the exhibit “Manet and the Post-Impressionists,” which introduced radical European art to the London bourgeoisie. Virginia was at once outraged over the attention that painting garnered and intrigued by the possibility of borrowing from the likes of artists Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso. As Clive Bell was unfaithful, Vanessa began an affair with Fry, and Fry began a lifelong debate with Virginia about the visual and verbal arts. In the summer of 1911, Leonard Woolf returned from the East. After he resigned from the colonial service, Leonard and Virginia married in August 1912. She continued to work on her first novel; he wrote the anticolonialist novel The Village in

the Jungle (1913) and The Wise Virgins (1914), a Bloomsbury exposé. Then he became a political writer and an advocate for peace and justice. Between 1910 and 1915, Virginia’s mental health was precarious. Nevertheless, she completely recast Melymbrosia as The Voyage Out in 1913. She based many of her novel’s characters on real-life prototypes: Lytton Strachey, Leslie Stephen, her half brother George Duckworth, Clive and Vanessa Bell, and herself. Rachel Vinrace, the novel’s central character, is a sheltered young woman who, on an excursion to South America, is introduced to freedom and sexuality (though from the novel’s inception she was to die before marrying). Woolf first made Terence, Rachel’s suitor, rather Clive-like; as she revised, Terence became a more sensitive, Leonard-like character. After an excursion up the Amazon, Rachel contracts a terrible illness that plunges her into delirium and then death. As possible causes for this disaster, Woolf’s characters suggest everything from poorly washed vegetables to jungle disease to a malevolent universe, but the book endorses no explanation. That indeterminacy, at odds with the certainties of the Victorian era, is echoed in descriptions that distort perception: while the narrative often describes people, buildings, and natural objects as featureless forms, Rachel, in dreams and then delirium, journeys into surrealistic worlds. Rachel’s voyage into the unknown began Woolf’s voyage beyond the conventions of realism.

Woolf’s manic-depressive worries (that she was a failure as a writer and a woman, that she was despised by Vanessa and unloved by Leonard) provoked a suicide attempt in September 1913. Publication of The Voyage Out was delayed until early 1915; then, that April, she sank into a distressed state in which she was often delirious. Later that year she overcame the “vile imaginations” that had threatened her sanity. She kept the demons of mania and depression mostly at bay for the rest of her life.

In 1917 the Woolfs bought a printing press and founded the Hogarth Press, named for Hogarth House, their home in the London suburbs. The Woolfs themselves (she was the compositor while he worked the press) published their own Two Stories in the summer of 1917. It consisted of Leonard’s Three Jews and Virginia’s The Mark on the Wall, the latter about contemplation itself.

Since 1910, Virginia had kept (sometimes with Vanessa) a country house in Sussex, and in 1916 Vanessa settled into a Sussex farmhouse called Charleston. She had ended her affair with Fry to take up with the painter Duncan Grant, who moved to Charleston with Vanessa and her children, Julian and Quentin Bell; a daughter, Angelica, would be born to Vanessa and Grant at the end of 1918. Charleston soon became an extravagantly decorated, unorthodox retreat for artists and writers, especially Clive Bell, who continued on friendly terms with Vanessa, and Fry, Vanessa’s lifelong devotee.

Virginia had kept a diary, off and on, since 1897. In 1919 she envisioned “the shadow of some kind of form which a diary might attain to,” organized not by a mechanical recording of events but by the interplay between the objective and the subjective. Her diary, as she wrote in 1924, would reveal people as “splinters & mosaics; not, as they used to hold, immaculate, monolithic, consistent wholes.” Such terms later inspired critical distinctions, based on anatomy and culture, between the feminine and the masculine, the feminine being a varied but all-embracing way of experiencing the world and the masculine a monolithic or linear way. Critics using these distinctions have credited Woolf with evolving a distinctly feminine diary form, one that explores, with perception, honesty, and humour, her own ever-changing, mosaic self.

Proving that she could master the traditional form of the novel before breaking it, she plotted her next novel in two romantic triangles, with its protagonist Katharine in both. Night and Day(1919) answers Leonard’s The Wise Virgins, in which he had his Leonard-like protagonist lose the Virginia-like beloved and end up in a conventional marriage. In Night and Day, the Leonard-like Ralph learns to value Katharine for herself, not as some superior being. And Katharine overcomes (as Virginia had) class and familial prejudices to marry the good and intelligent Ralph. This novel focuses on the very sort of details that Woolf had deleted from The Voyage Out: credible dialogue, realistic descriptions of early 20th-century settings, and investigations of issues such as class, politics, and suffrage.

Woolf was writing nearly a review a week for the Times Literary Supplement in 1918. Her essay“Modern Novels” (1919; revised in 1925 as “Modern Fiction”) attacked the “materialists” who wrote about superficial rather than spiritual or “luminous” experiences. The Woolfs also printed by hand, with Vanessa Bell’s illustrations, Virginia’s Kew Gardens (1919), a story organized, like a Post-Impressionistic painting, by pattern. With the Hogarth Press’s emergence as a major publishing house, the Woolfs gradually ceased being their own printers.

In 1919 they bought a cottage in Rodmell village called Monk’s House, which looked out over the Sussex Downs and the meadows where the River Ouse wound down to the English Channel. Virginia could walk or bicycle to visit Vanessa, her children, and a changing cast of guests at the bohemian Charleston and then retreat to Monk’s House to write. She envisioned a new book that would apply the theories of “Modern Novels” and the achievements of her short stories to the novel form. In early 1920 a group of friends, evolved from the early Bloomsbury group, began a “Memoir Club,” which met to read irreverent passages from their autobiographies. Her second presentation was an exposé of Victorian hypocrisy, especially that of George Duckworth, who masked inappropriate, unwanted caresses as affection honouring their mother’s memory.

In 1921 Woolf’s minimally plotted short fictions were gathered in Monday or Tuesday. Meanwhile, typesetting having heightened her sense of visual layout, she began a new novel written in blocks to be surrounded by white spaces. In “On Re-Reading Novels” (1922), Woolf argued that the novel was not so much a form but an “emotion which you feel.” In Jacob’s Room (1922) she achieved such emotion, transforming personal grief over the death of Thoby Stephen into a “spiritual shape.” Though she takes Jacob from childhood to his early death in war, she leaves out plot, conflict, even character. The emptiness of Jacob’s room and the irrelevance of his belongings convey in their minimalism the profound emptiness of loss. Though Jacob’s Room is an antiwar novel, Woolf feared that she had ventured too far beyond representation. She vowed to “push on,” as she wrote Clive Bell, to graft such experimental techniques onto more-substantial characters. Major Period At the beginning of 1924, the Woolfs moved their city residence from the suburbs back to Bloomsbury, where they were less isolated from London society. Soon the aristocratic Vita Sackville-West began to court Virginia, a relationship that would blossom into a lesbian affair. Having already written a story about a Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf thought of a foiling device that would pair that highly sensitive woman with a shell-shocked war victim, a Mr. Smith, so that “the sane and the insane” would exist “side by side.” Her aim was to “tunnel” into these two characters until Clarissa Dalloway’s affirmations meet Septimus Smith’s negations. Also in 1924 Woolf gave a talk at Cambridge called “Character in Fiction,” revised later that year as the Hogarth Press pamphlet Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. In it she celebrated the breakdown in patriarchal values that had occurred “in or about December, 1910”—during Fry’s exhibit “Manet and the Post-Impressionists”—and she attacked “materialist” novelists for omitting the essence of character. In Mrs. Dalloway (1925), the boorish doctors presume to understand personality, but its essence evades them. This novel is as patterned as a Post-Impressionist painting but is also so accurately representational that the reader can trace Clarissa’s and Septimus’s movements through the streets of London on a single day in June 1923. At the end of the day, Clarissa gives a grand party and Septimus commits suicide. Their lives come together when the doctor who was treating (or, rather, mistreating) Septimus arrives at Clarissa’s party with news of the death. The main characters are connected by motifs and, finally, by Clarissa’s intuiting why Septimus threw his life away.

Woolf wished to build on her achievement in Mrs. Dalloway by merging the novelistic and elegiac forms. As an elegy, To the Lighthouse—published on May 5,

1927, the 32nd anniversary of Julia Stephen’s death—evoked childhood summers at Talland House. As a novel, it broke narrative continuity into a tripartite structure. The first section, “The Window,” begins as Mrs. Ramsay and James, her youngest son—like Julia and Adrian Stephen—sit in the French window of the Ramsays’ summer home while a houseguest named Lily Briscoe paints them and James begs to go to a nearby lighthouse. Mr. Ramsay, like Leslie Stephen, sees poetry as didacticism, conversation as winning points, and life as a tally of accomplishments. He uses logic to deflate hopes for a trip to the lighthouse, but he needs sympathy from his wife. She is more attuned to emotions than reason. In the climactic dinner-party scene, she inspires such harmony and composure that the moment “partook, she felt,…of eternity.” The novel’s middle “Time Passes” section focuses on the empty house during a 10-year hiatus and the last-minute housecleaning for the returning Ramsays. Woolf describes the progress of weeds, mold, dust, and gusts of wind, but she merely announces such major events as the deaths of Mrs. Ramsay and a son and daughter. In the novel’s third section, “The Lighthouse,” Woolf brings Mr. Ramsay, his youngest children (James and Cam), Lily Briscoe, and others from “The Window” back to the house. As Mr. Ramsay and the now-teenage children reach the lighthouse and achieve a moment of reconciliation, Lily completes her painting. To the Lighthouse melds into its structure questions about creativity and the nature and function of art. Lily argues effectively for nonrepresentational but emotive art, and her painting (in which mother and child are reduced to two shapes with a line between them) echoes the abstract structure of Woolf’s profoundly elegiac novel.

In two 1927 essays, “The Art of Fiction” and “The New Biography,” she wrote that fiction writers should be less concerned with naive notions of reality and more with language and design. However restricted by fact, she argued, biographers should yoke truth with imagination, “granite-like solidity” with “rainbow-like intangibility.” Their relationship having cooled by 1927, Woolf sought to reclaim Sackville-West through a “biography” that would include Sackville family history. Woolf solved biographical, historical, and personal dilemmas with the story of Orlando, who lives from Elizabethan times through the entire 18th century; he then becomes female, experiences debilitating gender constraints, and lives into the 20th century. Orlando begins writing poetry during the Renaissance, using history and mythology as models, and over the ensuing centuries returns to the poem “The Oak Tree,” revising it according to shifting poetic conventions. Woolf herself writes in mock-heroic imitation of biographical styles that change over the same period of time. Thus, Orlando: A Biography (1928) exposes the artificiality of both gender and genre prescriptions. However fantastic, Orlando also argues for a novelistic approach to biography.

In 1921 John Maynard Keynes had told Woolf that her memoir “on George,” presented to the Memoir Club that year or a year earlier, represented her best writing. Afterward she was increasingly angered by masculine condescension to female talent. In A Room of One’s Own(1929), Woolf blamed women’s absence from history not on their lack of brains and talent but on their poverty. For her 1931 talk “Professions for Women,” Woolf studied the history of women’s education and employment and argued that unequal opportunities for women negatively affect all of society. She urged women to destroy the “angel in the house,” a reference to Coventry Patmore’s poem of that title, the quintessential Victorian paean to women who sacrifice themselves to men.

Having praised a 1930 exhibit of Vanessa Bell’s paintings for their wordlessness, Woolf planned a mystical novel that would be similarly impersonal and abstract. In The Waves (1931), poetic interludes describe the sea and sky from dawn to dusk. Between the interludes, the voices of six named characters appear in sections that move from their childhood to old age. In the middle section, when the six friends meet at a farewell dinner for another friend leaving for India, the single flower at the centre of the dinner table becomes a “seven-sided flower…a whole flower to which every eye brings its own contribution.” The Waves offers a six-sided shape that illustrates how each individual experiences events—including their friend’s death—uniquely. Bernard, the writer in the group, narrates the final section, defying death and a world “without a self.” Unique though they are (and their prototypes can be identified in the Bloomsbury group), the characters become one, just as the sea and sky become indistinguishable in the interludes. This oneness with all creation was the primal experience Woolf had felt as a child in Cornwall. In this her most experimental novel, she achieved its poetic equivalent. Through To the Lighthouse and The Waves, Woolf became, with James Joyce and William Faulkner, one of the three major English- language Modernist experimenters in stream-of-consciousness writing.

SIEGFRIED SASSOON

Siegfried Sassoon is best remembered for his angry and compassionate poems of the First World War, which brought him public and critical acclaim. Avoiding the sentimentality and jingoism of many war poets, Sassoon wrote of the horror and brutality of trench warfare and contemptuously satirized generals, politicians, and churchmen for their incompetence and blind support of the war. His later poems, often concerned with religious themes, were less appreciated, but the autobiographical trilogy The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston won him two major awards. Born into a wealthy Jewish family, sometimes called the "Rothschilds of the East" because the family fortune was made in India, Sassoon lived the leisurely life of a cultivated country gentleman before the First World War, pursuing his two major interests, poetry and fox hunting. His early work, which was privately printed in several slim volumes between 1906 and 1916, is considered minor and imitative, heavily influenced by John Masefield (of whose work The Daffodil Murderer is a parody). Following the outbreak of the First World War, Sassoon served with the Royal Welch Fusiliers, seeing action in France in late 1915. He received a Military Cross for bringing back a wounded soldier during heavy fire. After being wounded in action, Sassoon wrote an open letter of protest to the war department, refusing to fight any more. "I believe that this War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it," he wrote in the letter. At the urging of Bertrand Russell, the letter was read in the House of Commons. Sassoon expected to be court-martialed for his protest, but poet Robert Graves intervened on his behalf, arguing that Sassoon was suffering from shell-shock and needed medical treatment. In 1917, Sassoon was hospitalized. Counter-Attack and Other Poems collects some of Sassoon's best war poems, all of which are "harshly realistic laments or satires," according to Margaret B. McDowell in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. The later collection The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon included 64 poems of the war, most written while Sassoon was in hospital recovering from his injuries. Public reaction to Sassoon's poetry was fierce. Some readers complained that the poet displayed little patriotism, while others found his shockingly realistic depiction of war to be too extreme. Even pacifist friends complained about the violence and graphic detail in his work. But the British public bought the books because, in his best poems, Sassoon captured the feeling of trench warfare and the weariness of British soldiers for a war that seemed never to end. "The

dynamic quality of his war poems," according to a critic for the Times Literary Supplement, "was due to the intensity of feeling which underlay their cynicism." "In the history of British poetry," McDowell wrote, "[Sassoon] will be remembered primarily for some one hundred poems ... in which he protested the continuation of World War I."

After the war, Sassoon became involved in Labour Party politics, lectured on pacifism, and continued to write. His most successful works of this period were his trilogy of autobiographical novels, The Memoirs of George Sherston. In these, he gave a thinly-fictionalized account, with little changed except names, of his wartime experiences, contrasting them with his nostalgic memories of country life before the war and recounting the growth of his pacifist feelings. Some have maintained that Sassoon's best work is his prose, particularly the first two Sherston novels. Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man was described by a critic for the Springfield Republican as "a novel of wholly fresh and delightful content," and Robert Littrell of Bookman called it "a singular and a strangely beautiful book."

That book's sequel was also well received. The New Statesman critic called Memoirs of an Infantry Officer "a document of intense and sensitive humanity." In a review for the Times Literary Supplement, after Sassoon's death, one critic wrote: "His one real masterpiece, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer ... is consistently fresh. His self scrutiny is candid, critical, and humourous.... If Sassoon had written as well as this consistently, he would have been a figure of real stature. As it is, English literature has one great work from him almost by accident."

Sassoon's critical biography of Victorian novelist and poet George Meredithwas also well received. In this volume, he recounted numerous anecdotes about Meredith, portraying him vividly as a person as well as an author: "The reader lays the book down with the feeling that a great author has become one of his close neighbors," wrote G. F. Whicher in the New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review. The critical portions of the book were also praised, though some found the writing careless. But the New Yorker critic noted Sassoon's "fresh and lively literary criticism," and the reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement declared that "Mr. Sassoon gives us a poet's estimate, considered with intensity of insight, skilfully shaped as biography, and written with certainty of style."

In 1957 Sassoon became a convert to Catholicism, though for some time before his conversion, his spiritual concerns had been the predominant subject of his writing. These later religious poems are usually considered markedly inferior to those written between 1917 and 1920. Yet Sequences (published shortly before his conversion) has been praised by some critics. Derek Stanford, in Books and Bookmen, claimed that "the poems in Sequences constitute some of the most impressive religious poetry of this century."

Speaking of Sassoon's war poetry in a 1981 issue of the Spectator, P. J. Kavanagh claimed that "today they ring as true as they ever did; it is difficult to see how they could be better." Looking back over Sassoon's long literary career, Peter Levi wrote in Poetry Review: "One can experience in his poetry the slow, restless ripening of a very great talent; its magnitude has not yet been recognised.... He is one of the few poets of his generation we are really unable to do without."

GEORGE ORWELL

George Orwell, pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair, (born June 25, 1903, Motihari, Bengal, India—died January 21, 1950, London, England), English novelist, essayist, and critic famous for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), the latter a profound anti-utopiannovel that examines the dangers of totalitarian rule.

Born Eric Arthur Blair, Orwell never entirely abandoned his original name, but his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, appeared in 1933 as the work of George Orwell (the surname he derived from the beautiful River Orwell in East Anglia). In time his nom de plume became so closely attached to him that few people but relatives knew his real name was Blair. The change in name corresponded to a profound shift in Orwell’s lifestyle, in which he changed from a pillar of the British imperial establishment into a literary and political rebel. Early Life He was born in Bengal, into the class of sahibs. His father was a minor British official in the Indian civil service; his mother, of French extraction, was the daughter of an unsuccessful teak merchant in Burma (Myanmar). Their attitudes were those of the “landless gentry,” as Orwell later called lower-middle-class people whose pretensions to social status had little relation to their income. Orwell was thus brought up in an atmosphere of impoverished snobbery. After returning with his parents to England, he was sent in 1911 to a preparatory boarding school on the Sussex coast, where he was distinguished among the other boys by his poverty and his intellectual brilliance. He grew up a morose, withdrawn, eccentric boy, and he was later to tell of the miseries of those years in his posthumously published autobiographical essay, Such, Such Were the Joys (1953). Orwell won scholarships to two of England’s leading schools, Wellington and Eton, and briefly attended the former before continuing his studies at the latter, where he stayed from 1917 to 1921. Aldous Huxley was one of his masters, and it was at Eton that he published his first writing in college periodicals. Instead of matriculating at a university, Orwell decided to follow family tradition and, in 1922, went to Burma as assistant district superintendent in the Indian Imperial Police. He served in a number of country stations and at first appeared to be a model imperial servant. Yet from boyhood he had wanted to become a writer, and when he realized how much against their will the Burmese were ruled by the British, he felt increasingly ashamed of his

role as a colonial police officer. Later he was to recount his experiences and his reactions to imperial rule in his novel Burmese Days and in two brilliant autobiographical sketches, “Shooting an Elephant” and “A Hanging,” classics of expository prose. Against Imperialism In 1927 Orwell, on leave to England, decided not to return to Burma, and on January 1, 1928, he took the decisive step of resigning from the imperial police. Already in the autumn of 1927 he had started on a course of action that was to shape his character as a writer. Having felt guilty that the barriers of race and caste had prevented his mingling with the Burmese, he thought he could expiate some of his guilt by immersing himself in the life of the poor and outcast people of Europe. Donning ragged clothes, he went into the East End of London to live in cheap lodging houses among labourers and beggars; he spent a period in the slums of Parisand worked as a dishwasher in French hotels and restaurants; he tramped the roads of England with professional vagrants and joined the people of the London slums in their annual exodus to work in the Kentish hopfields. Those experiences gave Orwell the material for Down and Out in Paris and London, in which actual incidents are rearranged into something like fiction. The book’s publication in 1933 earned him some initial literary recognition. Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days (1934), established the pattern of his subsequent fiction in its portrayal of a sensitive, conscientious, and emotionally isolated individual who is at odds with an oppressive or dishonest social environment. The main character of Burmese Days is a minor administrator who seeks to escape from the dreary and narrow-minded chauvinism of his fellow British colonialists in Burma. His sympathies for the Burmese, however, end in an unforeseen personal tragedy. The protagonist of Orwell’s next novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), is an unhappy spinster who achieves a brief and accidental liberation in her experiences among some agricultural labourers. Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) is about a literarily inclined bookseller’s assistant who despises the empty commercialism and materialism of middle-class life but who in the end is reconciled to bourgeois prosperity by his forced marriage to the girl he loves.

Orwell’s revulsion against imperialism led not only to his personal rejection of the bourgeois lifestyle but to a political reorientation as well. Immediately after returning from Burma he called himself an anarchist and continued to do so for several years; during the 1930s, however, he began to consider himself a socialist, though he was too libertarian in his thinking ever to take the further step—so common in the period—of declaring himself a communist.

From The Road To Wigan Pier To World War II Orwell’s first socialist book was an original and unorthodox political treatise entitled The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). It begins by describing his experiences when he went to live among the destitute and unemployed miners of northern England, sharing and observing their lives; it ends in a series of sharp criticisms of existing socialist movements. It combines mordant reporting with a tone of generous anger that was to characterize Orwell’s subsequent writing. By the time The Road to Wigan Pier was in print, Orwell was in Spain; he went to report on the Civil War there and stayed to join the Republican militia, serving on the Aragon and Teruel fronts and rising to the rank of second lieutenant. He was seriously wounded at Teruel, with damage to his throat permanently affecting his voice and endowing his speech with a strange, compelling quietness. Later, in May 1937, after having fought in Barcelona against communists who were trying to suppress their political opponents, he was forced to flee Spain in fear of his life. The experience left him with a lifelong dread of communism, first expressed in the vivid account of his Spanish experiences, Homage to Catalonia (1938), which many consider one of his best books. Returning to England, Orwell showed a paradoxically conservative strain in writing Coming Up for Air (1939), in which he uses the nostalgic recollections of a middle-aged man to examine the decency of a past England and express his fears about a future threatened by war and fascism. When World War II did come, Orwell was rejected for military service, and instead he headed the Indian service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). He left the BBC in 1943 and became literary editor of the Tribune, a left-wing socialist paper associated with the British Labour leader Aneurin Bevan. At this period Orwell was a prolific journalist, writing many newspaper articles and reviews, together with serious criticism, like his classic essays on Charles Dickens and on boys’ weeklies and a number of books about England (notably The Lion and the Unicorn, 1941) that combined patriotic sentiment with the advocacy of a libertarian, decentralist socialism very much unlike that practiced by the British Labour Party. Animal Farm And Nineteen Eighty-Four In 1944 Orwell finished Animal Farm, a political fable based on the story of the Russian Revolution and its betrayal by Joseph Stalin. In the book a group of barnyard animals overthrow and chase off their exploitative human masters and set up an egalitarian society of their own. Eventually the animals’ intelligent and power-loving leaders, the pigs, subvert the revolution and form a dictatorship whose

bondage is even more oppressive and heartless than that of their former human masters. (“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”) At first Orwell had difficulty finding a publisher for the small masterpiece, but when it appeared in 1945, Animal Farm made him famous and, for the first time, prosperous.

Animal Farm Dust jacket for the first American edition (1946) of George Orwell's Animal Farm, which was first published in 1945 in Great Britain.Advertising Archive

Animal Farm was one of Orwell’s finest works, full of wit and fantasy and admirably written. It has, however, been overshadowed by his last book, Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), a novel he wrote as a warning after years of brooding on the twin menaces of Nazism and Stalinism. The novel is set in an imaginary future in which the world is dominated by three perpetually warring totalitarian police states. The book’s hero, the Englishman Winston Smith, is a minor party functionary in one of those states. His longing for truth and decency leads him to secretly rebel against the government, which perpetuates its rule by systematically distorting the truth and continuously rewriting history to suit its own purposes. Smith has a love affair with a like-minded woman, but then they are both arrested by the Thought Police. The ensuing imprisonment, torture, and reeducation of Smith are intended not merely to

break him physically or make him submit but to root out his independent mental existence and his spiritual dignity until he can love only the figure he previously most hated: the apparent leader of the party, Big Brother. Smith’s surrender to the monstrous brainwashing techniques of his jailers is tragic enough, but the novel gains much of its power from the comprehensive rigour with which it extends the premises of totalitarianism to their logical end: the love of power and domination over others has acquired its perfected expression in the perpetual surveillance and omnipresent dishonesty of an unassailable and irresistible police state under whose rule every human virtue is slowly being suborned and extinguished. Orwell’s warning of the potential dangers of totalitarianism made a deep impression on his contemporaries and upon subsequent readers, and the book’s title and many of its coined words and phrases (“Big Brother is watching you,” “newspeak,” “doublethink”) became bywords for modern political abuses.

Orwell wrote the last pages of Nineteen Eighty-four in a remote house on the Hebridean island of Jura, which he had bought from the proceeds of Animal Farm. He worked between bouts of hospitalization for tuberculosis, of which he died in a London hospital in January 1950.

SAMUEL BECKETT

Samuel Beckett, in full Samuel Barclay Beckett, (born April 13?, 1906, Foxrock, County Dublin, Ireland—died December 22, 1989, Paris, France), author, critic, and playwright, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. He wrote in both French and English and is perhaps best known for his plays, especially En attendant Godot (1952; Waiting for Godot). Life Samuel Beckett was born in a suburb of Dublin. Like his fellow Irish writers George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats, he came from a Protestant, Anglo-Irish background. At the age of 14 he went to the Portora Royal School, in what became Northern Ireland, a school that catered to the Anglo-Irish middle classes. From 1923 to 1927, he studied Romance languages at Trinity College, Dublin, where he received his bachelor’s degree. After a brief spell of teaching in Belfast, he became a reader in English at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1928. There he met the self-exiled Irish writer James Joyce, the author of the controversial and seminally modern novel Ulysses, and joined his circle. Contrary to often-repeated reports, however, he never served as Joyce’s secretary. He returned to Ireland in 1930 to take up a post as lecturer in French at Trinity College, but after only four terms he resigned, in December 1931, and embarked upon a period of restless travel in London, France, Germany, and Italy. In 1937 Beckett decided to settle in Paris. (This period of Beckett’s life is vividly depicted in letters he wrote between 1929 and 1940, a wide-ranging selection of which were first published in 2009.)

As a citizen of a country that was neutral in World War II, he was able to remain there even after the occupation of Paris by the Germans, but he joined an underground resistance group in 1941. When, in 1942, he received news that members of his group had been arrested by the Gestapo, he immediately went into hiding and eventually moved to the unoccupied zone of France. Until the liberation of the country, he supported himself as an agricultural labourer.

In 1945 he returned to Ireland but volunteered for the Irish Red Cross and went back to France as an interpreter in a military hospital in Saint-Lô, Normandy. In the winter of 1945, he finally returned to Paris and was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his resistance work.

Production Of The Major Works There followed a period of intense creativity, the most concentratedly fruitful period of Beckett’s life. His relatively few prewar publications included two essays on Joyce and the French novelist Marcel Proust. The volume More Pricks Than Kicks (1934) contained 10 stories describing episodes in the life of a Dublin intellectual, Belacqua Shuah, and the novel Murphy (1938) concerns an Irishman in London who escapes from a girl he is about to marry to a life of contemplation as a male nurse in a mental institution. His two slim volumes of poetry were Whoroscope (1930), a poem on the French philosopher René Descartes, and the collection Echo’s Bones (1935). A number of short stories and poems were scattered in various periodicals. He wrote the novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women in the mid-1930s, but it remained incomplete and was not published until 1992.

During his years in hiding in unoccupied France, Beckett also completed another novel, Watt,which was not published until 1953. After his return to Paris, between 1946 and 1949, Beckett produced a number of stories, the major prose narratives Molloy (1951), Malone meurt (1951; Malone Dies), and L’Innommable (1953; The Unnamable), and two plays, the unpublished three-act Eleutheria and Waiting for Godot.

It was not until 1951, however, that these works saw the light of day. After many refusals, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil (later Mme Beckett), Beckett’s lifelong companion, finally succeeded in finding a publisher for Molloy. When this book not only proved a modest commercial success but also was received with enthusiasm by the French critics, the same publisher brought out the two other novels and Waiting for Godot. It was with the amazing success of Waiting for Godot at the small Théâtre de Babylone in Paris, in January 1953, that Beckett’s rise to world fame began. Beckett continued writing, but more slowly than in the immediate postwar years. Plays for the stage and radio and a number of prose works occupied much of his attention. (This period of Beckett’s life is treated in a second volume of letters, published in 2011, covering the years 1941–56.)

Beckett continued to live in Paris, but most of his writing was done in a small house secluded in the Marne valley, a short drive from Paris. His total dedication to his art extended to his complete avoidance of all personal publicity, of appearances on radio or television, and of all journalistic interviews. When, in 1969, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, he accepted the award but declined the trip to Stockholm to avoid the public speech at the ceremonies. A substantial selection of archival and epistolary material was published as Dear Mr. Beckett: Letters from the Publisher, the Samuel Beckett File (2016), offering readers insight into his process.

Continuity Of His Philosophical Explorations Beckett’s writing reveals his own immense learning. It is full of subtle allusions to a multitude of literary sources as well as to a number of philosophical and theological writers. The dominating influences on Beckett’s thought were undoubtedly the Italian poet Dante, the French philosopher René Descartes, the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Arnold Geulincx—a pupil of Descartes who dealt with the question of how the physical and the spiritual sides of man interact—and, finally, his fellow Irishman and revered friend, James Joyce. But it is by no means essential for the understanding of Beckett’s work that one be aware of all the literary, philosophical, and theological allusions. The widespread idea, fostered by the popular press, that Beckett’s work is concerned primarily with the sordid side of human existence, with tramps and with cripples who inhabit trash cans, is a fundamental misconception. He dealt with human beings in such extreme situations not because he was interested in the sordid and diseased aspects of life but because he concentrated on the essential aspects of human experience. The subject matter of so much of the world’s literature—the social relations between individuals, their manners and possessions, their struggles for rank and position, or the conquest of sexual objects—appeared to Beckett as mere external trappings of existence, the accidental and superficial aspects that mask the basic problems and the basic anguish of the human condition. The basic questions for Beckett seemed to be these: How can we come to terms with the fact that, without ever having asked for it, we have been thrown into the world, into being? And who are we; what is the true nature of our self? What does a human being mean when he says “I”?

What appears to the superficial view as a concentration on the sordid thus emerges as an attempt to grapple with the most essential aspects of the human condition. The two heroes of Waiting for Godot, for instance, are frequently referred to by critics as tramps, yet they were never described as such by Beckett. They are merely two human beings in the most basic human situation of being in the world and not knowing what they are there for. Since man is a rational being and cannot imagine that his being thrown into any situation should or could be entirely pointless, the two vaguely assume that their presence in the world, represented by an empty stage with a solitary tree, must be due to the fact that they are waiting for someone. But they have no positive evidence that this person, whom they call Godot, ever made such an appointment—or, indeed, that he actually exists. Their patient and passive waiting is contrasted by Beckett with the mindless and equally purposeless journeyings that fill the existence of a second pair of characters. In most dramatic literature the characters pursue well-defined objectives, seeking power, wealth, marriage with a desirable

partner, or something of the sort. Yet, once they have attained these objectives, are they or the audience any nearer answering the basic questions that Beckett poses? Does the hero, having won his lady, really live with her happily ever after? That is apparently why Beckett chose to discard what he regarded as the inessential questions and began where other writing left off.

This stripping of reality to its naked bones is the reason that Beckett’s development as a writer was toward an ever greater concentration, sparseness, and brevity. His two earliest works of narrative fiction, More Pricks Than Kicks and Murphy, abound in descriptive detail. In Watt, the last of Beckett’s novels written in English, the milieu is still recognizably Irish, but most of the action takes place in a highly abstract, unreal world. Watt, the hero, takes service with a mysterious employer, Mr. Knott, works for a time for this master without ever meeting him face to face, and then is dismissed. The allegory of man’s life in the midst of mystery is plain.

Most of Beckett’s plays also take place on a similar level of abstraction. Fin de partie (one-act, 1957; Endgame) describes the dissolution of the relation between a master, Hamm, and his servant, Clov. They inhabit a circular structure with two high windows—perhaps the image of the inside of a human skull. The action might be seen as a symbol of the dissolution of a human personality in the hour of death, the breaking of the bond between the spiritual and the physical sides of man. In Krapp’s Last Tape (one-act, first performed 1958), an old man listens to the confessions he recorded in earlier and happier years. This becomes an image of the mystery of the self, for to the old Krapp the voice of the younger Krapp is that of a total stranger. In what sense, then, can the two Krapps be regarded as the same human being? In Happy Days (1961), a woman, literally sinking continually deeper into the ground, nonetheless continues to prattle about the trivialities of life. In other words, perhaps, as one gets nearer and nearer death, one still pretends that life will go on normally forever.

In his trilogy of narrative prose works—they are not, strictly speaking, novels as usually understood—Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, as well as in the collection Stories and Texts for Nothing (1967), Beckett raised the problem of the identity of the human self from, as it were, the inside. This basic problem, simply stated, is that when I say “I am writing,” I am talking about myself, one part of me describing what another part of me is doing. I am both the observer and the object I observe. Which of the two is the real “I”? In his prose narratives, Beckett tried to pursue this elusive essence of the self, which, to him, manifested itself as a constant stream of thought and of observations about the self. One’s entire existence, one’s consciousness of oneself as being in the world, can be seen as a stream of thought. Cogito ergo sum is the starting point of Beckett’s favourite philosopher, Descartes: “I think; therefore, I am.” To catch the essence of being,

therefore, Beckett tried to capture the essence of the stream of consciousness that is one’s being. And what he found was a constantly receding chorus of observers, or storytellers, who, immediately on being observed, became, in turn, objects of observation by a new observer. Molloy and Moran, for example, the pursued and the pursuer in the first part of the trilogy, are just such a pair of observer and observed. Malone, in the second part, spends his time while dying in making up stories about people who clearly are aspects of himself. The third part reaches down to bedrock. The voice is that of someone who is unnamable, and it is not clear whether it is a voice that comes from beyond the grave or from a limbo before birth. As we cannot conceive of our consciousness not being there—“I cannot be conscious that I have ceased to exist”—therefore consciousness is at either side open-ended to infinity. This is the subject also of the play Play (first performed 1963), which shows the dying moments of consciousness of three characters, who have been linked in a trivial amorous triangle in life, lingering on into eternity. The Humour And Mastery In spite of Beckett’s courageous tackling of the ultimate mystery and despair of human existence, he was essentially a comic writer. In a French farce, laughter will arise from seeing the frantic and usually unsuccessful pursuit of trivial sexual gratifications. In Beckett’s work, as well, a recognition of the triviality and ultimate pointlessness of most human strivings, by freeing the viewer from his concern with senseless and futile objectives, should also have a liberating effect. The laughter will arise from a view of pompous and self-important preoccupation with illusory ambitions and futile desires. Far from being gloomy and depressing, the ultimate effect of seeing or reading Beckett is one of cathartic release, an objective as old as theatre itself. Technically, Beckett was a master craftsman, and his sense of form is impeccable. Molloy and Waiting for Godot, for example, are constructed symmetrically, in two parts that are mirror images of one another. In his work for the mass media, Beckett also showed himself able to grasp intuitively and brilliantly the essential character of their techniques. His radio plays, such as All That Fall (1957), are models in the combined use of sound, music, and speech. The short television play Eh Joe! (1967) exploits the television camera’s ability to move in on a face and the particular character of small-screen drama. Finally, his film script Film (1967) creates an unforgettable sequence of images of the observed self trying to escape the eye of its own observer.

Beckett’s later works tended toward extreme concentration and brevity. Come and Go (1967), a playlet, or “dramaticule,” as he called it, contains only 121 words that

are spoken by the three characters. The prose fragment “Lessness” consists of but 60 sentences, each of which occurs twice. His series Acts Without Words are exactly what the title denotes, and one of his last plays, Rockaby, lasts for 15 minutes. Such brevity is merely an expression of Beckett’s determination to pare his writing to essentials, to waste no words on trivia.

SHOULD OR OUGHT TO?

Should: forms Affirmative form Should comes first in the verb phrase (after the subject and before another verb):

I should go home now.

Should cannot be used with another modal verb:

It should probably be sunny at that time of year.

Not: It should may be sunny … or It may should be sunny … Negative form The negative form of should is shouldn’t. We don’t use don’t, doesn’t, didn’t with should:

There shouldn’t be many people at the beach today.

We use the full form should not in formal contexts or when we want to emphasis something:

We should not forget those who have given their lives in the defence of freedom. Question form The subject and should change position to form questions.

Warning:

We don’t use do, does, did:

Should I turn on the air conditioning?

Not: Do I should I turn on the air conditioning?

Shouldn’t you be studying now?

We use should and shouldn’t in question tags:

I shouldn’t have told her that, should I?

They should be getting back on Sunday, shouldn’t they?

Should: uses What is ideal or desired We use should most commonly to talk about what is the ideal or best thing to do in a situation:

There should be more public hospitals.

They should reduce the price of petrol. It’s so expensive.

There should be four more candles on the cake.

We use should have + -ed form to talk about things that were ideal in the past but which didn’t happen. It can express regret:

Everyone knows that this is a busy restaurant. They should have made a reservation.

I should have studied harder when I was young. I wish I had gone to college. Advice and suggestions We often use should to give advice and make suggestions:

You should tell him what you think.

We should leave it until tomorrow; it’s late now. What is likely to happen We also use should to talk about what is likely to happen:

Shall we start? Luke’s delayed but he says he should be here in ten minutes.

There should be a very big crowd at the party. Mary has so many friends. Conditional sentences Warning:

We sometimes use should in hypothetical conditional clauses with if to express possibility. It is formal:

[information leaflet in a hotel room]

If you should wish to use the Internet, there is a code available at the reception desk.

If you should decide not to go on the trip, you will get a full refund.

Warning:

We can also use Should you as an alternative to If you should in these situations by changing the order of the subject and the verb. Compare these two sentences with the examples above. They have the same meaning and they are also formal:

Should you wish to use the Internet, there is a code available at the reception desk.

Should you decide not to go on the trip, you will get a full refund. Thanking Spoken English: In speaking, we often say you shouldn’t have when someone gives us a gift:

A:

I got you something from Texas. A cowboy hat.

B:

Oh Ken, you shouldn’t have! Surprise or regret We sometimes use should to express surprise or regret about something that happened: I’m amazed that he should have done something so stupid.

I’m sorry that he should be so upset by what I said. Should and would We use should as a more formal alternative to would with I and we in conditional clauses.

Compare

formal neutral

I/We should love to meet her again if I/we had a chance.

I/We would love to meet her again if I/we had a chance.

We use should as a more formal alternative to would when we want to be less direct.

Compare

formal neutral

I should think that a lot of people will be interested.

I would think that a lot of people will be interested.

Should and ought to Should and ought to have similar meanings and uses. Ought to is more formal and less common than should: We should clean up the garden.

We ought to clean up the garden.

Should is much more common in negatives and questions than ought to:

Should we keep a seat for Margaret? (more common than Ought we to keep a seat …?)

He shouldn’t speak to his parents in that way. (more common than He oughtn’t/ought not to speak …)

Ought to Ought to is a semi-modal verb because it is in some ways like a modal verb and in some ways like a main verb. For example, unlike modal verbs, it is followed by to, but like modal verbs, it does not change form for person:

I ought to phone my parents. It ought to be easy now. Ought to: form Affirmative Ought to comes first in the verb phrase (after the subject and before another verb):

We ought to do more exercise.

Ought to cannot be used with another modal verb:

Medicine ought to be free.

Not: Medicine ought to can be free. or Medicine can ought to be free. Negative The negative is formed by adding ‘not’ after ought (ought not to). It can be contracted to oughtn’t to. We don’t use don’t, doesn’t, didn’t with ought to: We ought not to have ordered so much food.

Not: We don’t ought to have ordered so much food.

You oughtn’t to have said that about his mother.

Not: You didn’t ought to have said that about his mother.

The negative of ought to is not common. We usually use shouldn’t or should not instead:

You shouldn’t speak to your father like that. (preferred to You oughtn’t to speak …) Questions The subject and ought to change position to form questions. We don’t use do, does, did: Ought she to call the police?

Not: Does she ought to call the police?

Ought we to be more worried about the environment?

Not: Do we ought to be more worried about the environment?

Warning:

The question form of ought to is not very common. It is very formal. We usually use shouldinstead. Ought to: uses What is desired or ideal We use ought to when talking about things which are desired or ideal:

They ought to have more parks in the city centre.

We ought to eat lots of fruit and vegetables every day.

We use ought to have + -ed form to talk about things that were desired or ideal in the past but which didn’t happen. It can express regret:

We ought to have locked the gate. Then the dog wouldn’t have got out. (The ideal or desired thing was that we locked the gate, but we didn’t.)

I often think that I ought to have studied medicine not pharmacy. (I would be happier now if I had studied medicine.)

What is likely

We can use ought to when we talk about what is likely or probable:

The concert ought to only take about two hours so we’ll be home by 12 pm.

There ought to be some good films at the cinema this weekend. Ought to or should? Ought to and should are similar in meaning. Should is more common than ought to. Ought to is more formal than should: There ought to be more street lights here. (means the same as There should be more street lights here.)

I really ought to walk my dog more. He’s so fat. (means the same as I really should walk my dog more. He’s so fat.)

Spoken English:

In speaking, we normally use should as a tag for clauses with ought to:

There ought to be a speed limit here, shouldn’t there? (preferred to There ought to be a speed limit here, oughtn’t there?)

We ought not to have to pay for basic medicines, should we? (preferred to We ought not to have to pay for basic medicines, ought we?)

MAY, MIGHT AND COULD

May May: forms Affirmative (+) form May comes first in the verb phrase (after the subject and before another verb): It may be possible for him to get home tonight. May can’t be used with another modal verb: This may hurt you. Not: This may could hurt you. or This could may hurt you. Negative (−) form The negative form of may is may not. We don’t use don’t/doesn’t/didn’t with may: We may not have enough information at the moment. Not: We don’t may have enough information at the moment. Warning: We don’t use mayn’t as the contracted form of may not: We may not yet know what is safe to eat. Not: We mayn’t yet know what is safe to eat. Question (?) form Warning: The subject and may change position to form questions. We don’t use do/does/did: May we drop you at your hotel? Not: Do we may drop you at your hotel? May I leave the room, please? Not: Do I may leave the room please? May: uses Permission We use may to ask for, give and refuse permission. It is quite formal.

asking for permission giving permission refusing permission

May I leave the room? Yes, you may. No, you may not.

May we use your phone? Yes, you may. No, you may not.

Can, could and may are all used to ask for permission. May is the most formal/polite and could is more formal and polite than can. Possibility We use may to refer to weak possibility in the present and future: The economy may go up or down in the next year. (I think both are possible, the economy going up or the economy going down. I am not making either one a strong possibility.) I think I may go to the doctor today and try to get some antibiotics. (I am not very sure yet if I will go to the doctor.) General truths We use may in formal writing, especially academic English, to describe things which the speaker thinks are generally true or possible. In this case, it is a more formal equivalent of can. Compare

A typical farmer’s cottage can be seen in the Ulster Folk Museum.

Both sentences express what the speaker believes to be a general truth about where the cottage is located. The speaker knows that there is a cottage in the museum and a visitor is able to see them there if they want to. May is more formal.

A typical farmer’s cottage maybe seen in the Ulster Folk Museum.

Accepting a different view or opinion We often use may to accept a different view or opinion, especially with well, and/or followed by but:

One month may well be too long to go away on holiday. I may be wrong but I am going to tell the police about it. The couch may well cost more but it’s going to be different. Might Might: forms Affirmative (+) form Might comes first in the verb phrase (after the subject and before another verb): She might sell her house. This might be true. Not: That might can be true. or That can might be true. Negative (−) form The negative form of might is might not or mightn’t. We don’t use don’t/doesn’t/didn’t with might: There might not be anyone in the house. (or There mightn’t be …) Not: There doesn’t might be anyone in the house. Question (?) form The subject and might change position to form questions. Warning: We don’t use do/does/did: Might this be the key? Not: Does this might be the key? Mightn’t this be the key? Not: Doesn’t might this be the key? We can use might and mightn’t in question tags, but they’re not very common: That might not be a bad idea, might it? That plant might do better by the window, mightn’t it? Might: uses Possibility We use might most often to refer to weak possibility: I might go to Japan for a month to study Japanese.

The dog might bark when we pass by the gate. They might not like very hot food. Permission We use might to refer to permission. It is very formal and is not used very often: Might I ask your name? Might I interrupt you for a moment? Warning: The reply to these will not contain might: A: Might I ask your address? B: Yes. It’s 41 Ross Avenue. A: Might I ask you a question? B: Yes. Of course. Not: Yes. You might. Suggestions We can use might to give advice or make a suggestion sound more polite or less direct, especially when used together with like, prefer or want: [A waiter politely suggesting a dessert to a customer.] You might like to try one of our wonderful desserts. Criticism We often use might have + -ed form to express disapproval or criticism: You might have told me you weren’t coming home for dinner. (you didn’t tell me) You might have tidied your room. Might: reporting may We use might as the past form of may in indirect reports: ‘That may not be true’, she said. She said that it might not be true. Might: typical error

• We don’t use might for ability; we use can or could: Although you can visit these places, if you are tired, you’re welcome to stay in the hotel.

Not: Although you might visit these places … I could hear the noise of an engine. Not: I might hear the noise of an engine. Could Could: form Affirmative (+) form Could comes first in the verb phrase (after the subject and before another verb): We could have lunch early. Could cannot be used with another modal verb: We could drive to France Not: We could might drive to France. or We might could drive to France. Negative (−) form The negative form of could is couldn’t. We don’t use don’t/doesn’t/didn’t with could: He couldn’t lift that. It’s too heavy. Not: He didn’t could lift that … We can use the full form could not in formal contexts or when we want to emphasise something: Fabio was frightened. He could not move his arm. It was stuck. Question (?) form The subject and could change position to form questions. We don’t use do/does/did: Could I pay by credit card? Not: Do I could pay by credit card? We use could and couldn’t in question tags: I could come back tomorrow, couldn’t I? Could: uses Possibility We often use could to express possibility in the present and the future.

Compare

It’s blue. I am certain that it is blue. It’s a fact.

It could be blue. (present) I’m not certain that it is blue.

The storm will get worse. I’m certain that the storm will get worse.

The storm could get worse. (future) I’m not certain that the storm will get worse.

Suggestions We often use could to make suggestions: A: Will’s party is fancy-dress. B: It’s Halloween. C: Oh right. I could go as Julius Caesar. B: Again? How many times have you done that? A: I’ve got to be in the meeting at 10 and the train doesn’t get in until 10.15. B: Could you get an earlier train? Permission We use could to ask for permission. Could is more formal and polite than can: Could I ask you a personal question? Warning: We don’t use could to give or refuse permission. We use can: A: Could I leave early today? B: Yes, you can./No, you can’t. Not: Yes, you could./No, you couldn’t. Could: past We don’t usually use could to talk about single events that happened in the past.

Past achievement When actual past achievements are mentioned, we usually use was/were able to or managed to but not could in affirmative clauses. This is because they are facts, rather than possibilities: I was able to/managed to buy a wonderful bag to match my shoes. Not: I could buy a wonderful bag to match my shoes. We hired a car and we were able to/managed to drive 1,000 miles in one week. Not: We hired a car and we could drive 1,000 miles in one week. Ability We use could to talk about past ability: When I was young, I could easily touch my toes. Possibility We use could have + -ed form to talk about possibility in the past: I could have been a lawyer. They could have taken a taxi home instead of walking and getting wet. Janette couldn’t have done any better. Guessing and predicting: couldn’t as the negative of must When we want to guess or predict something, we use couldn’t as the negative form of must. We use couldn’t have + -ed form as the negative form of must have + -ed. Couldn’t and couldn’t have + -ed form express strong possibility: She must have made a mistake. It couldn’t be true. A firework couldn’t have done all that damage. Could + smell, taste, think, believe, etc. We use could to refer to single events that happened in the past, with verbs of the senses (smell, taste, see, hear, touch, etc.) and mental processes (think, believe, remember, understand etc.): The food was terrible. I could taste nothing but salt. We knew they were in there. We could hear voices inside. He came and spoke to me, but I couldn’t remember his name. Reporting can We use could when reporting clauses with can as past events:

They told us we could wait in the hallway. (The original words were probably: ‘You can wait in the hallway.’) She said we could book the tickets online. (The speaker remembers hearing ‘You can book the tickets online.’) Criticism We often use could have + -ed form to express disapproval or criticism: You could have called to say you would be late. (You didn’t call – I think you should have called.) You could have tidied your room. Regret We use could have + -ed form to talk about things that did not happen and sometimes to expresses regret: He could have been a doctor. I could have been famous. We often use the expression how could you/she/he/they? to show disapproval (to show that we don’t like what someone has done): Grandfather, how could you? How could you leave me? How could you have gone without telling me? A: We had to give away our dog when we moved to England. B: Oh, how could you?

PRESENT PERFECT CONTINUOS

Present perfect continuous: form We use have/has + been + the -ing form of the verb.

+ she, he, it

I, you, we, they

has

have been working.

− she, he, it

I, you, we, they

(full form)

has not

have not

been working.

she, he, it

I, you, we, they

(short form)

hasn’t

haven’t

? + Has

Have

she, he, it

I, you, we, they

been working?

? −

(full form)

Has

Have

she, he, it

I, you, we, they

not been working?

(short form)

Hasn’t

Haven’t

she, he, it

I, you, we, they

Present perfect continuous: uses Recent past activities We use the present perfect continuous to talk about a finished activity in the recent past. Using the present perfect continuous focuses on the activity.

We don’t give a specific time. Even though the activity is finished, we can see the result in the present:

I’ve just been cleaning the car. (The car is wet and clean.)

It’s been snowing. (The ground is covered in snow.)

What have you been buying? One continuing event We use the present perfect continuous for a single activity that began at a point in the past and is still continuing: I’ve been reading your book – it’s great. (I’m still reading it.)

He’s been living in the village since 1995. (He is still living in the village.)

She has been writing her autobiography since 1987. Repeated continuing events We use the present perfect continuous to talk about repeated activities which started at a particular time in the past and are still continuing up until now: I’ve been going to Spain on holiday every year since 1987.

I haven’t been eating much lunch lately. I’ve been going to the gym at lunchtimes.

She’s been playing tennis on and off for three years. How long …? We often use the present perfect continuous to ask and answer questions about the duration of an activity. We use the question How long …+ present perfect continuous: A:

How long have you been waiting for me?

B:

About ten minutes. Not too long. (I’ve been waiting for about ten minutes.)

PAST PERFECT SIMPLE Past perfect simple: form We use had + the -ed form of the verb.

+ I, she, he, it, you, we, they (full form) had

worked.

I, she, he, it, you, we, they (short form) ’d

− I, she, he, it, you, we, they (full form) had not

worked.

I, she, he, it, you, we, they (short form) hadn’t

? + Had I, she, he, it, you, we, they worked?

? − (full form) Had I, she, he, it, you, we, they

not worked?

(short form) Hadn’t I, she, he, it, you, we, they

Past perfect simple: uses Time up to then The past perfect refers to time up to a point in the past (time up to then), just as the present perfect refers to something that happened in the time up to the moment of speaking (time up to now): I’d seen all of Elvis Presley’s movies by the time I was 20! Compare

I’d been to five countries in Europe by 2001. Past perfect: ‘time up to then’ (2001).

I’ve been to five countries in Europe. Present perfect: ‘time up to now’.

Reported clauses We commonly use the past perfect in reported clauses where the reporting verb (underlined) is in the past: “Mr Hammond drove through a red light.” The policeman said Mr Hammond had driven through a red light. No one told me that the shop had closed. I phoned Katie and she said the kids had had a day off school so she’d taken them ice skating. We also use the past perfect when the reporting verb is a verb of perception and is in the past tense: My Dad was really angry because he heard I hadn’t come home until 3 am! I saw she’d bought the DVD so I asked if I could borrow it. The doctor felt my mother had got worse since last week. Talking about changed states We often use the past perfect to refer to situations which have changed. In speaking, had is often stressed: A: Are you going anywhere today? B: I had planned to go to the beach but look at the rain! (had is stressed; the meaning is ‘I have now changed my mind’)

I’m very happy working as an engineer but I had wanted to be an actor when I was younger. The past perfect in conditional clauses We must use the past perfect when we imagine a different past in a clause with if: I would have helped to paint the house if you’d asked me. (You didn’t ask me.) Sarah couldn’t come with us to the cinema. She would have loved it if she had been there. (She wasn’t there.) Warning: We don’t use the past perfect in the main clause of a conditional sentence. It is only used in the conditional clause: [conditional clause]If we had seen you walking, [main clause]we would have stopped to give you a lift. Not: If we had seen you walking, we had stopped …

PAST PERFECT CONTINUOS

Past perfect continuous: form We use had + been + the -ing form of the verb.

+ I, she, he, it, you, we, they

(full form)

had been working.

I, she, he, it, you, we, they

(short form)

’d

− I, she, he, it, you, we, they

(full form)

had not been working.

I, she, he, it, you, we, they

(short form)

hadn’t

? + Had I, she, he, it, you, we, they

been working?

? − (full form)

Had I, she, he, it, you, we, they

not been working?

(short form)

Hadn’t I, she, he, it, you, we, they

Past perfect continuous: uses Continuing events in the past We use the past perfect continuous to talk about actions or events which started before a particular time in the past and were still in progress up to that time in the past: It was so difficult to get up last Monday for school. I had been working on my essays the night before and I was very tired. (The past perfect continuous focuses on the activity of working on the essays up to a particular time in the past.)

A:

Why did you decide to go travelling for a year?

B:

Well, I’d been reading an amazing book about a woman who rode a horse around South America. I was just halfway through the book when I decided I had to go travelling and that was it. I just took a year out of work and went. (The past perfect continuous focuses on the activity of reading the book at the time when she made her decision. She hadn’t finished the book when she made her decision.)

We can use the past perfect continuous to talk about events which started before a time in the past and which finished, but where the effects or results were still important at a point in the past:

It had been raining and the ground was still wet. Past perfect simple or past perfect continuous? Past perfect simple = I had worked Past perfect continuous = I had been working We use the past perfect simple with action verbs to emphasise the completion of an event. We use the past perfect continuous to show that an event or action in the past was still continuing.

Compare

The builders had put up the scaffolding around the house.

Past perfect simple emphasises the completion of the action (the scaffolding is up).

The builders had been putting upthe scaffolding when the roof fell in.

Past perfect continuous emphasises a continuing or ongoing action.

We use the past perfect simple to refer to the completion of an activity and the past perfect continuous to focus on the activity and duration of the activity. Compare

I’d waited an hour for the bus.

Past perfect simple emphasises the completion of the activity (the waiting is over).

I’d been waiting an hour for the bus.

Past perfect continuous focuses on the duration of the activity.

The past perfect simple suggests something more permanent than the past perfect continuous, which can imply that something is temporary. Compare

She’d always lived with her parents. We don’t know how long.

She’d been living with her parents. Suggests a temporary situation.

Some verbs are not used very often in the continuous form. We don’t use the continuous form with some verbs of mental process (know, like, understand, believe) and verbs of the senses (hear, smell, taste): We’d known for a long time that the company was going to close.

Not: We’d been knowing … We’d tasted the milk and had decided it was bad, so we threw it away. Not: We’d been tasting the milk … We don’t use the continuous form with actions that are completed at a single point in time (start, stop): Had they started the game on time? Not: Had they been starting the game on time?