Category Archives: Victorian / Romantic English
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Thomas Hardy 1886 (The fortunes of a strong-willed hay-trusser prove to be as volatile as he is.) Michael Henchard is an unemployed field laborer who, under the influence of rum at a fair, impulsively starts to auction off his wife and baby daughter, to much laughter. His wife stands. A hush falls as a sailor actually puts five […]
Arnold’s early poems
Matthew Arnold 1840-1849 (A man of intellect and of spiritual sensitivity contemplates the purpose of life and its struggles.) “Unwelcome shroud of the forgotten dead,/ Oblivion’s dreary fountain, where art thou”. What a dark way to begin one’s poetical efforts, at 18 years of age! And we need read no further to suspect (correctly) that in Matthew […]
Lyrical Ballads, and other early poems
William Wordsworth 1785-1799 (A poetic sage takes lessons on goodness and beauty from nature.) A man of wisdom, a poet of nature, is Wordsworth. These are the goals to which he aspires, goals that are discernable in his work from a very early age. He wrote many of his greatest poems in the years covered […]
Great Expectations
Charles Dickens 1860-1861 (Pip tells us of his lifelong love, the unexpected rise and fall of his fortunes, and the lessons he learned about what makes a gentleman.) In describing a novel, everyone, myself included, seems to have as the central focus an explanation of what the book is about, whether plotwise or themewise. So it […]
The Time Machine
October 18, 2020 / 1 Comment on The Time Machine
H. G. Wells 1895 (A push on a lever, a blurry dizziness, a clap of thunder… and a veil falls away to reveal the world of our far distant descendants.) Breaking the rule that you have to proceed constantly forward in time at precisely one second per second is as old as the human imagination, […]
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