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Файл:Английский язык. Литературное наследие Великобритании XIX в.. Практикум для бакалавров укрупненных групп направлений подготовки «Науки об обществе», «
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A College Breakfast Party (1879)
The Death of Moses (1879)
From a London Drawing Room (1879)
Count That Day Lost (1879)
Useful resources about Eliot:
http://www.britannica.com/biography/George-Eliot
http://www.biography.com/people/george-eliot-9286017
http://www.online-literature.com/george_eliot/
Comprehension assignments:
1. Give the brief summary of Eliot’s life.
2. Highlight the literary styles of the author.
3. Eliot’s most memorable works.
4. Write the brief summary of one of Eliot’s works.
Anthony Trollope
(Энтони Троллоп)
Anthony Trollope was one of the most successful, prolific and respected
English novelists of the Victorian era.
Anthony Trollope was born on 24 April, 1815 in Bloomsbury, London,
the fourth son of Thomas Anthony Trollope and Frances (née Milton). His father, who suffered from bouts of depression, was an unsuccessful lawyer and
farmer. The family’s humiliating state of poverty formed a lasting impression on
Trollope, who was a tall, lanky, poorly dressed unhappy lad amongst the aristocratic youth of the famous schools he attended. Trollope had no money and no
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friends. The conflict between his family’s social background and its relative
poverty would cause misery to Anthony Trollope as a boy. At the age of twelve,
he fantasized daydreamed, constructing elaborate imaginary worlds. In 1827 his
mother Frances Trollope moved to America with Trollope’s three younger
siblings. His mother returned in 1831 and rapidly made a name for herself as a
writer, soon earning a good income. His father’s affairs, however, went from
bad to worse. He gave up his legal practice entirely and failed to make enough
income from farming to pay rents to his landlord. In 1834 he fled to Belgium to
avoid arrest for debt. The whole family moved to a house near Bruges, where
they lived entirely on Frances’s earnings.
While living in Belgium, Anthony worked as an assistant teacher in a
school with a view to learning French and German. Then he obtained a position
as a civil servant in the British Post Office through one of his mother’s family
connections, and returned to London on his own. Post Office work provided an
occupation, but not a well-paid job. He made little progress in his career until
the post office sent him to Ireland in 1841. There he married an Englishwoman,
Rose Heseltine, the daughter of bank manager. They had two sons. They lived in
Ireland until 1859 and then they moved back to England. Trollope found the life
in Ireland jolly and he liked Irish people, considering them to be good-humored,
hospitable, intelligent and clever. He wrote his earliest novels while working as
a post office inspector, many of his earliest novels have Ireland background.
Though Trollope had decided to become a novelist, he had accomplished very
little writing during his first three years in Ireland. At the time of his marriage,
he had only written the first of three volumes of his first novel, The Macdermots
of Ballycloran. Within a year of his marriage, he finished that work. Trollope
wrote four novels about Ireland.
By the mid-1860s, Trollope had reached a fairly senior position within the
post office hierarchy. He had by this time also started to earn a substantial
income from his novels. He had overcome the awkwardness of his youth, made
good friends in literary circles, and hunted enthusiastically. He left the post
office in 1867 to run for Parliament as a Liberal candidate in 1868. After he lost,
he concentrated entirely on his literary career. Soon he edited the Saint Paul’s
Magazine, which published several of his novels in serial form.
His first major success came with The Warden (1855), the first of six
novels set in the fictional county of Barsetshire (often collectively referred to as
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the Chronicles of Barsetshire), usually dealing with the clergy. Although the
profits were not large, the book received notices in the press, and brought
Trollope to the attention of the novel-reading public. The comic masterpiece
Barchester Towers (1857) has probably become the best-known of these.
Trollope’s popularity and critical success diminished in his later years, but
he continued to write prolifically, and some of his later novels have acquired a
good reputation.
In 1871 Trollope made his first trip to Australia, with his wife and their
cook. They visited their younger son, Frederic, who was a sheep farmer near
Grenfell, New South Wales. He wrote his novel Lady Anna during the voyage.
In Australia he spent a year and two days. On his return, Trollope published a
book, Australia and New Zealand (1873).
In particular, critics generally acknowledge the sweeping satire The Way
We Live Now (1875) as his masterpiece. In all, Trollope wrote approximately
four-dozen novels, as well as dozens of short stories and a few books on travel.
He also wrote perceptive novels on political, social and gender issues, and on
other topical matters.
Trollope returned to Australia in 1875 to help his son close down
his failed farming business. In 1880 Trollope moved to the village of South
Hartingin West Sussex. He spent some time in Ireland in researching his last,
unfinished, novel, The Landleaguers. It is said that he was extremely distressed
by the violence of the Land War.
He died in London in 1882, and is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery,
near the grave of his contemporary, Wilkie Collins. After his death Trollope’s
Autobiography appeared and was a best-seller in London.
Famous quotations by Trollope:
The natural man will probably be manly. The affected man cannot be so.
A man’s own dinner is to himself so important that he cannot bring
himself to believe that it is a matter utterly indifferent to every one else.
She rides to hounds, and talks Italian, and writes for the Times.
There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.
A man who is supposed to have caused a disturbance between two
married people, in a certain rank of life, does generally receive a certain meed of
admiration.
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Passionate love, I take it, rarely lasts long, and is very troublesome
while it does last. Mutual esteem is very much more valuable.
Never think that you’re not good enough. A man should never think
that. People will take you very much at your own reckoning.
And though it is much to be a nobleman, it is more to be a gentleman.
Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can
afford it.
Popular works by Trollope:
Chronicles of Barsetshire:
The Warden (1855)
Barchester Towers (1857)
Doctor Thorne (1858)
Framley Parsonage (1861)
The Small House at Allington (1864)
The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867)
Novels:
The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847)
The Kellys and the O’Kellys (1848)
La Vendée: An Historical Romance (1850)
The Three Clerks (1858)
The Bertrams (1859)
Castle Richmond (1860)
Orley Farm (1862)
The Struggles of Brown, Jones & Robinson (1862)
Rachel Ray (1863)
Miss Mackenzie (1865)
The Belton Estate (1866)
The Claverings (1867)
He Knew He Was Right (1869)
The Golden Lion of Granpère (1872)
Lady Anna (1874)
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The Way We Live Now (1875)
The American Senator (1877)
Is He Popenjoy? (1878)
John Caldigate (1879)
Useful recources about Trollope:
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Anthony_Trollope
http://biography.yourdictionary.com/anthony-trollope
http://www.online-literature.com/anthony-trollope/
Comprehension assignments:
1. Give the brief summary of Trollope’s life.
2. Highlight the literary styles of the author.
3. Trollope’s most memorable works.
4. Write the brief summary of one of Trollope’s works.
Robert Browning
(Роберт Браунинг)
Robert Browning, an English poet and playwright whose mastery of the
dramatic monologue made him one of the foremost Victorian poets.
Robert Browning was born in May, 7, 1812 in Walworth in the parish of
Camberwell, Surrey. He was the only son of Sarah Anna and Robert Browning.
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His father was a well-paid clerk for the Bank of England. Browning’s mother
was the daughter of a German ship owner. Browning had one sister, Sarianna.
Robert’s father, a literary collector, amassed a library of around 6,000 books,
many of them were rare. So Robert was raised in a household of significant
literary resources. It is believed that he was already proficient at reading and
writing by the age of five. His mother, to whom he was very close, was a
talented musician. His younger sister, Sarianna, also gifted, became her
brother’s companion in his later years, after the death of his wife in 1861. His
father encouraged his children’s interest in literature and the arts. A bright and
anxious student, Browning learned Latin, Greek and French by the time he was
fourteen. From fourteen to sixteen he was educated at home, attended to by
various tutors in music, drawing, dancing and horsemanship.
At the age of twelve he wrote a volume of Byronic verse entitled Incondita.
Robert was so much impressed by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetry, that he asked
for his thirteenth birthday to buy Shelley’s collection of works.
Despite this early passion, he apparently wrote no poems between the
ages of thirteen and twenty. In 1828 Browning enrolled at the University of
London, but he soon left, anxious to read and learn at his own pace.
In 1833 Browning anonymously published his first major published work,
Pauline which brought him to the attention of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and in
1840 he published Sordello, which was widely regarded as a failure. The long
poem Pauline was followed by Paracelsus, which was praised by Words worth
and Dickens. He also tried his hand at drama, but his plays, including Strafford,
Bells and Pomegranates series were for the most part unsuccessful.
Nevertheless, the techniques he developed through his dramatic monologues –
especially his use of diction, rhythm, and symbol – are regarded as his most
important contribution to poetry, influencing such major poets of the twentieth
century as T. S. Eliot and Robert Frost.
After reading Elizabeth Barrett’s Poems (1844) and corresponding with
her for a few months, Browning met her in 1845. They were married in 1846,
against the wishes of Barrett’s father. The couple moved to Pisa and then
Florence, where they continued to write. They had a son, Robert Wiedemann
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Barrett Browning, nicknamed ‟Penini” or ‟Pen”, in 1849, the same year his
Collected Poems was published. Elizabeth inspired Robert’s collection of poems
Men and Women (1855), which he dedicated to her. Now regarded as one of
Browning’s best works, the book was received with little notice at the time; its
author was then primarily known as Elizabeth Barrett’s husband. The collection
Dramatis Personae and the book-length epic poem The Ring and the Book made
him a leading British poet. During his life Browning was awarded many
distinctions. He was made LL.D. of Edinburgh, a life Governor of London
University, and had the offer of the Lord Rectorship of Glasgow. But he turned
down anything that involved public speaking.
Unusually for a poet, the Browning Society was founded while he still
lived. In 1882 he was awarded honorary degrees by Oxford University and the
University of Edinburgh in 1884.
Robert Browning died at his son’s home in Venice on 12 December 1889,
on the same day that his final volume of verse, Asolando, was published.
His poems are known for their irony, characterization, dark humor, social
commentary, historical settings and challenging vocabulary and syntax. He was
buried in Poets’ Cornerin Westminster Abbey; his grave now lies immediately
adjacent to that of Alfred Tennyson.
Famous quotations by Browning:
Motherhood: All love begins and ends there.
Love is energy of life.
A minute’s success pays the failure of years.
Love, hope, fear, faith – these make humanity. These are its sign and
note and character.
Grow old along with me!
A man’s reach should exceed his grasp.
Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure.
My sun sets to rise again.
The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life: Try to be Shakes-
peare, leave the rest to fate!
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Popular works by Browning:
Asolando: Fancies and Facts (1889)
Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850)
Complete Poetic and Dramatic Works of Robert Browning (1895)
Dramatic Idyls (1879)
Jocoseria (1883)
Men and Women (1855)
New Poems by Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1914)
Paracelsus (1835)
Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession (1833)
Robert Browning: The Ring and the Book (1971)
The Brownings to the Tennysons (1971)
Browning to His American Friends (1965)
Robert Browning and Julia Wedgwood: A Broken Friendship as Revealed
in Their Letters (1937)
Thomas Jones, The Divine Order: Sermons (1884)
Aristophanes’ Apology (1875)
Bells and Pomegranates. No. I – No. VIII (1841–1846)
Fifine at the Fair (1872)
Strafford: An Historical Tragedy (1837)
Useful recources about Browning:
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/robert-browning
http://www.poeti.biz/avtobiografiya/anglijskie_poetj/brauning_robert.html
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-browning
http://www.online-literature.com/robert-browning/
Comprehension assignments:
1. Give the brief summary of Browning’s life.
2. Highlight the literary styles of the author.
3. Browning’s most memorable works.
4. Write the brief summary of one of Browning’s works.
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George Meredith
(Джордж Мередит)
George Meredith was a major Victorian novelist whose career developed
in conjunction with an era of great change in English literature during the
second half of the nineteenth century. George Meredith was born on February
12, 1828. His first home was in Portsmouth, where his father was a tailor. When
George was only five years old, his mother died. His childhood after her death
was not happy. His father, Augustus Meredith, had inherited a failing business
and heavy debts from his own father. In 1837 Augustus was forced to declare
himself bankrupt. He went to London to earn a living, and George was sent to a
Moravian School in Neuwied, Germany, where he had to stay with relatives in
the country for two years. The school stimulated his intellect and taught him to
respect rationality, self-respect, sincerity and courage. The time spent there also
made him be interested in German music, poetry and the German culture.
As he entered his early twenties, Meredith began writing poetry, influenced in
particular by John Keatsand Lord Tennyson. He refused all the professions and
were interested in journalism and poetry. He became acquainted with Edward
Peacock and Mary Nicolls, the son and widowed daughter of the satirist Thomas
Love Peacock, a man he admired. With the younger Peacock he collaborated
on the publication of a privately circulated literary magazine, the Monthly
Observer, to which he submitted his own poetry and critical essays. The
relationship with Nicolls culminated in their marriage in 1849, but the marriage
was neither a happy nor a lasting one, in part due to Meredith’s financial
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situation. Although his father-in-law offered to secure him an office position,
Meredith preferred to try to make his living by his pen. However, his first book,
Poems, a volume published at his own expense, attracted little notice and never
recouped printing costs. Nicolls in its turn with her father’s published a
successful cookbook. In 1853, with pregnant Nicolls, the couple’s financial
difficulties forced them to move to Thomas Peacock.
By 1856 Meredith and his wife were living apart, and in 1858 she left for
Italy with another man, leaving Meredith alone with five-year-old Arthur. When
she returned to England years later, alone and seriously ill, Meredith refused
to let her see their son until shortly before her death. Meredith’s lifetime was out
of discussion though critics maintain that the sonnet cycle Modern Love,
actually chronicles that event. He fell in love with a much younger woman but
her parents refused to consider him a suitable match for their daughter. Meredith
lived alone or with male friends for years, traveling extensively in Switzerland,
France and Italy. Upon his second marriage in 1864 Meredith settled at Box
Hill, Surrey, where he lived the rest of his life.
During the 1850s Meredith began to receive an income from magazine
writing and was thus encouraged to attempt a longer prose work. His first work
of fiction, The Shaving of Shagpat: An Arabian Entertainment, is a lighthearted
fantasy that contains a number of themes that recur throughout Meredith’s
career, and where a central character is a young man whose growth to maturity
is aided by a woman. The favorable assessment of Shagpat inspired Meredith to
write a serious novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel: A History of Father and
Son. In this partially autobiographical work, a man is abandoned with an infant
son by his wife and brings up the child according to a strict scientific system designed to insure that the boy will accept his father’s social, political and ideological beliefs, and will ultimately select an ideal mate who will prove faithful. The
novel contained a great deal of irony at the expense of both the characters and
the conventions of Victorian society and created a stir due to its sarcastic tone
and freethinking atheism.
On 20 September 1864 Meredith married Marie Vulliamy. They had two
children William and Mariette. Marie died of cancer in 1886.
Meredith’s most critically acclaimed work is An Essay on Comedy and the
Uses of the Comic Spirit, printed in the New Quarterly Magazine and published
separately twenty years later. Meredith did not discuss comedy in general terms,
but rather expounded on the comic approach that characterized his own fiction.
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