Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Edition: Sonnets from the Portuguese

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett's correspondence began with Elizabeth's critical praise of one of Browning's poems. Browning reciprocated with a letter returning his compliments about her work--and boldly proclaiming that he loved her. Perhaps because Elizabeth at the time was six years Browning's senior (at 40) and physically weak due to a chronic condition, she was hesitant during their courtship years. Sonnets from the Portuguese was written during the years of their courtship, from 1845-1846. She did not, however, present Browning with these sonnets until 1849, after their marriage and their son was born. Sonnets from the Portuguese was published in November of 1850, after Elizabeth Barrett Browning was up for the Poet Laureate alongside Tennyson.

"Portuguese" was a pet name for Elizabeth, though the name's use in the title was also a way to dampen the sense of personal intimacy of the sonnets since it suggests they may be sonnets in translation.

SUMMARY/OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS:
Many of the sonnets pair death and love, seemingly signaling the sense of an individual's "death" when becoming joined with another. The very first sonnet dramatizes the closeness between the two by staging Barrett's confusion: she is pulled back by her hair, "And a voice said in mastery, while I strove,-- / "Guess now who holds thee?" -- "Death," I said. But there, / The silver answer rang, --"Not Death, but Love." In Sonnet 3, "Death must dig the level where these agree," referring to the agreement between two unlike individuals; in Sonnet 18, she thought that "the funeral shears / Would take this first" (referring to her lock of hair) "but Love is justified,--/Take it thou." Sometimes the link between death and love is less about their equivalency, as in Sonnet 23, in which she wonders if union in love means that her lover too would lose some of his life if she should die.

The presence of God weaves through the sonnets as a part of their relationship. This presence usually serves to validate their love, as in Sonnet 2, where "only three in all God's universe / Have heard this word thou hast said," meaning themselves plus God. The most famous sonnet--"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways"--actually ends with a conditional interruption from God: "I love thee with the breath, / Smiles, tears, of all my life! -- and, if God choose, / I shall love thee better after death." In other sonnets, God is paired with Robert, and this works with the closeness of love and death as well since love takes her to Robert and death to God. In sonnet 42, she describes herself turning to "the white throne of God," but "instead, saw thee, not unallied / To angels in thy soul."

The sonnets repeatedly figure love as a struggle which necessarily involves some sort of mutual violation. As Isobel Armstrong has pointed out, there is a recurrence of door and threshold images, barriers which are violated by love. Sonnet 4 dramatizes how their personal "songs" or music (acknowledging the essence of both of them as poets) cross such barriers:

And dost thou lift this house's latch too poor
For hand of thine? and canst thou think and bear
To let thy music drop here unaware
In folds of golden fulness at my door?

These lines begin with the question as to whether he would enter into her house, but then the rest of the lines stress that it is a mutual violation. He must "think and bear" to let his music "drop here unaware" as if his music will be caught unknowingly at her door. Sonnet 29 shows a different figuration of struggle and violation: her thoughts twine around him (he is a tree) nearly until he has disappeared under her leaves. This becomes problematic, however, because she can no longer see him--"I am too near thee," she writes. Thus, she tells him "Rather, instantly, / Renew thy presence; as a strong tree should." This image shows a process of mutual struggle where as she twines him with leaves and vines, he must always struggle even if to "burst, shatter" them away.


Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnets stage over and over a kind of willful abjection, a term I've chosen because it contains contradiction. Armstrong writes how "Sonnets from the Portuguese is about idolatry, dependency, the temptation to disappear before the object of adulation." Yet, such a disappearance isn't purely abjection, the language struggles to "dissolve categories" like the "master-slave" category and "attempt[s] to coalesce into new forms." The wish to idolize her lover is often matched with a reluctance and then a desire which overcomes this reluctance: Sonnet 6 reads--"Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand / Henceforward in thy shadow."In Sonnet 8 she calls his giving an "unexpected largesse" and her own "very poor," and ends the poem with lines that ask her lover to "Go farther" than to take her as a pillow for his head but "let it serve to trample on." Though abjection, the willful is contained in the strong command in the imperative "Go farther." In a similar formulation, sonnet 17 asks how he will "have me for most use," gives some possibilities, and then ends with the imposing one-word imperative, "Choose." Finally, sonnet 16 provides one of the clearest phrases signaling this yoking together of abjection and willfulness: "Conquering / May prove as lordly and complete a thing / In lifting upward, as in crushing low," explaining that love raises, while also conquering much in the same way as crushing low.

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

Edition: Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Waiting for Godot was originally written in French in 1948, and its first stage production was in Paris in 1953. Beckett himself undertook to translate the play into English, and subsequently the play was produced in London (1955), the United States (1956), and worldwide thereafter.

SUMMARY:
Act 1: The setting is a country road with a tree in the evening. Estragon is trying to take off his boots as Vladimir is talking to him. Estragon is annoyed that Vladimir won't help him; Vladimir takes off his hat and makes as if to shake something out but nothing comes out. When Estragon succeeds finally in getting his boots off, they launch into a conversation about repetance, the Bible, and how strange it is that only one of the four apostles thought that one of the two thieves on the cross with Christ was saved. Around this point in the conversation we learn that the two of them are waiting for Godot. They can't decide, however, whether or not they came to the same spot yesterday to wait for him, nor can they quite decide what day it is.

The men seem to have no small degree of affection for one another, they have pet names for each other, Gogo and Didi. They decide that they should hang themselves while waiting but the plan is aborted after some discussion of who should go first. Vladimir gives Estragon a carrot to chew on. Soon, Pozzo comes on stage with Lucky. Pozzo has Lucky on a rope and whips and chokes him when Lucky does not do as he bids. At first, Estragon mishears and thinks that it is Godot. Vladimir and Estragon are indignant at the way Pozzo treats Lucky. Pozzo eats from a basket that Lucky has brought and casts aside his chicken bones, which Estragon hungrily goes after. Pozzo tells him the bones belong to Lucky and so Estragon should ask Lucky if he wants them or not. Lucky is silent, so Estragon takes the bones.

Vladimir asks why Lucky doesn't put down his bags. Pozzo gives the strange explanation that Lucky doesn't want to because he wants to keep Pozzo around as a master. During Pozzo's explanation, Lucky starts crying and Estragon approaches Lucky to wipe his eyes, but Lucky kicks him. Pozzo thinks me may soon take his departure but asks if he can do anything for the men. Estragon would like some money, but Vladimir is ashamed of Estragon for asking. They agree instead that Lucky will entertain them by doing a dance. After Lucky dances, they decide to have Lucky to "think" and when Vladimir puts a hat on him, Lucky launches into a long stream of consciousness speech which does not stop until the hat is removed. Pozzo and Lucky depart shortly thereafter, and a boy appears as a messenger to let Vladimir and Estragon know that Godot will not be coming that night but will come tomorrow. At the close of the act, the two men decide to leave but somehow they still remain there.

Act 2: At the opening of the act, the conversation between Estragon and Vladimir suggests that Estragon has been beaten up by ten people the night before. Conversation about the motive is deflected though. Estragon seeks comfort in being together with Vladimir, and for a moment they say they are happy together, but then they wonder what comes next. They discuss conversation as a way to keep off the abyss of death. They talk about how they are unsure if they were in this same place yesterday. Vladimir suggests Estragon show him his leg wound from yesterday (when Lucky struck out at him) and Pozzo's language infects Vladimir's as he calls Estragon a pig. To pass the time further, Estragon tries on the boots that are on the stage (he isn't sure if they are his from before). Again, the men seem happy with each other for a moment, Estragon remarking: "We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?"

Estragon falls asleep, dreams, and is comforted by Vladimir when he wakes up. Vladimir never wants to hear Estragon's dreams though. They find Lucky's hat, and they go through some complicated moves in which they switch and reswitch the hats they have (Lucky's, Vladimir's, and Estragon's). Next, they "play" at Pozzo and Lucky, but as Vladimir pretends he is Lucky, Estragon goes off, suddenly thinking he's being chased. Vladimir proclaims that Godot has come but he's wrong of course. Estragon hides behind the tree, then soon comes out and says he will try not to lose his calm again. They get into an argument about who should speak first when they accidentally speak out at the same time. They shower each other with insults, culminating in Estragon calling Vladimir a "Crritic!" They make up.

Pozzo and Lucky arrive again, but this time Pozzo is blind. Pozzo falls (and can't get up), and Vladimir and Estragon talk about helping him up. Then Vladimir makes a speech about doing something "while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed." Suddenly, it seems that even their "waiting for Godot" seems purposive. Vladimir helps the fallen Pozzo, and Vladimir also falls and can't get up. He asks Estragon for help but Estragon says that he's going. Estragon stretches out his hand finally but also falls. While down, Vladimir and Estragon get annoyed with Pozzo, and Vladimir kicks Pozzo in the crotch. This seems a bit harsh and so after Pozzo crawls away, they call him back, and to pass the time, try some other names on him (specifically, Abel and Cain). Eventualyl, Vladimir and Estragon discover that they can actually get up on their own. They then help Pozzo up, and Pozzo wonders where "his menial" is so Estragon goes to fetch Lucky. Pozzo tells him to kick Lucky, and Estragon does. Pozzo doesn't remember their meeting yesterday, and he and Lucky exit.

Vladimir and Estragon are left unsure whether that was Pozzo or not. Vladimir starts to expect a sort of cycle, and when he sees the boy arrive again, he expects that the message is that Godot won't come but will come the next day. Vladimir tells the boy to tell Godot that he saw him (though this might be impossible since the boy doesn't remember him from before). Estragon is asleep during this exchange. Night falls, and Estragon wonders what would happen if they "dropped" Godot. Vladimir says that he would punish them. Again, they consider hanging themselves, but they have no rope and Estragon's belt is not strong enough. They agree to hang themselves the next day unless Godot comes and saves them. The play closes with Vladimir telling Estragon to pull his pants on, Estragon mishears him saying that he wants his pants off, but then discovers his pants are already off. They decide to go but as before, they do not move.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS/APPROACH:
As many have noted, Waiting for Godot evades conventions of narrative through the lack of what would traditionally be considered "incident" in stories. There are no cause-effect links, and such questions as why they are waiting for Godot are conspicuously absent. The setting has no historical, cultural, or geographical specificity. It cannot even be said that things happen, since the characters repeatedly express their uncertainty about "yesterday." Waiting for Godot rejects plot, causality, setting, happenings, as well as any sense of the past or the future.

James H. Reid points out that Frederic Jameson's exegesis on postmodernism, though more focused on the historical effects of late stage capitalism, bears many connections to the effects explored in Beckett's Waiting for Godot: 

• Embedded in Godot are major elements of Jameson's postmodernist discourse: negation of linear historical time and action and imprisonment within an ahistorical, saturated, and commodified discursive space. But whereas Jameson calls this spatialization a real historical totality and attributes it to a necessary ruse of  capitalist history, Godot attributes it to a purely discursive strategy that its characters construct and deconstruct" ("Allegorizing Jameson's Postmodernist Space," Romantic Review).

In other words, in Waiting for Godot the characters, through what they say (and what they don't say), create the conditions of ahistoricality which Jameson says that late capitalism produces.    

I am not sure whether or not Waiting for Godot is a kind of allegory for the postmodern condition; it seems that any such critical position on Godot is resisted by Estragon's strident denunciation of "crritics!" I guess I'll just end with something I felt about the text as I was reading: the withholding of narrative conventions didn't just seem to "annoy" me but rather I think it made the moments where narrative potentiality surfaces to be more poignant in a tragic sort of way (maybe this is where the "tragicomedy" comes in). The audience desires the "relief" of narrative, or perhaps even to give narrative to these deeply unhappy characters who keep returning to wanting to hang themselves. But of course, just as Godot, narrative just never actually comes. One such moment of narrative potentiality is at the very end, when Estragon asks what will happen if they "drop" Godot. Vladimir provides this "cause" with an "effect"--that Godot will punish them. They then decide that they will hang themselves unless Godot saves them, setting up a conditional cause-effect chain. The audience has been trained though, by the rest of the play, that Godot won't come, and that here it seems that Vladimir and Estragon, in talking about punishing and saving have confused Godot with God. The moment feels tragic, I think, because of the sudden narrative potentiality amidst a landscape where nothing can happen.

Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf

Edition: Between the Acts

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Woolf began Between the Acts, initially titled Pointz Hall in 1938. The process of writing continued through the Dunkirk evacuation in May 1940, the Battle of Britain, and the London Blitz. The book, set in the summer of 1939, is about as "of its moment" as possible.

Woolf's suicide in March 1941 left the manuscript without final revisions. Leonard published her manuscript posthumously later that year.  

SUMMARY:

The novel opens with Bartholomew Oliver, Mrs. Haines, and her son Rupert (a gentleman farmer), at the Olivers' countryside estate known as Pointz Hall. They are discussing a cesspool, and the year is 1939. Isa, the wife of Giles Oliver (a stockbroker and Bart's son) interrupts the conversation and her thoughts indicate that she is in love with Rupert. The narration skips to describe Mrs. Swithin, Bart's widowed sister who stays with them in the summer. Mrs. Swithin is fascinated by a book, The Outline of History, which details the history of the earth in geologic terms, stretching back to prehistoric times. It soon becomes clear that she is very different from her brother: he is rational, reasonable, and reads the Times, and she is pious, imaginative, interested in superstition, and reads about London in prehistoric times. Consequently, they get into a bit of a quarrel wherein Bart snubs Mrs. Swithin's faith and superstitious tendencies.

Isa interrupts Bart as he is reading the Times to let him know that she has ordered a fish but that she worries it is not fresh. In her mind, Isa repeats lines of poetry. When she glances at the newspaper, reflecting on how newspapers were the literature of the day and not books, she is for a moment imaginatively transfigured by some lines describing a sexual assault of a woman in the barracks. Meanwhile, Mrs. Swithin is preparing for an annual pageant which she puts on; the cook, Mrs. Sands is preparing in the kitchen, and some class tensions are revealed when Mrs. Swithin tries to help out in the kitchen. Mrs. Manresa, a cosmopolitan, gossipy woman who lives in London has stopped by Pointz Hall with William Dodge (a younger man whom she says is an artist, though he keeps rejecting this label). Though many of the characters at Pointz Hall resent Mrs. Manresa's forwardness and uncensored speech, she is a kind of breath of fresh air at the otherwise stagnant Pointz Hall.

Giles Oliver arrives at Pointz Hall. Giles bears a silent rage against Aunt Lucy because she seems "foolish, free" while he has ended up as a stockbroker. He would have wanted to be a farmer. When Giles arriges, Mrs. Manresa and Bart are talking about some old portraits, one of an ancestor of Bart's, and one depicting a lady which Bart bought simply because he had liked it. Some tensions are apparent from their seemingly lighthearted conversation; Giles is attracted to Mrs. Manresa's charm, Isa is jealous and feels love and hate for Giles at the same time, Giles feels hatred towards Mr. Dodge whom the narration hints is gay. Meanwhile, Miss La Trobe, the producer of the pageant, is busy directing the preparations. Miss La Trobe has sexually transgressive qualities, a Slavic look, and a mysterious occupational history--like Mrs. Manresa, they don't quite fit in with the rest of the villagers. 

The conversational tensions prove too much for Isa, who keeps thinking that she desires a beaker of cold water. Mrs. Swithin decides to get up and show the house to the guests; only Mr. Dodge follows. Mrs. Swithin shows Dodge the rooms where she grew up, and in a moment of intimacy, Dodge wishes he might confess his life to her, but he doesn't. While the two of them are up at the house, the pageant begins. It is to be a pageant which traces the great scenes of English history and literature, and a little girl begins, calling herself England. She is shortly replaced by a slightly older girl who is England at the time of the Canterbury Tales. Villagers sing in the background, and the history moves into the Elizabethan era, in which a play within the play is acted out. The play within the play tells of a baby left in a basket and an old crone in later years recognizing that the baby is the rightful heir. Between the acts, the audience shuffles, talks, laughs, and snippets are given of their conversations.

The end of the Elizabethan era is followed by an "Interval." The audience disperses as the grammophone repeatedly wails, "Dispersed are we." Giles, full of lust for Mrs. Manresa, and hatred for Lucy and William Dodge, sees a snake choking on a toad which it cannot swallow. He crushes the head of the snake and the toad, feeling that "[a]ction relieved him." The audience members commence tea at the barn; behind the scenes (or perhaps, "between the acts") servants prepare everything. Mrs. Manresa and the gentry are the first to take their teas. At the barn, Mrs. Swithin is fascinated by the movement of swallows up above. Isa continues to recite poetry to herself as others talk about what they read in the newspapers. Dodge looks upon Giles and seems transfixed by his virility. Mrs. Manresa, too, is interested in Giles and brings him over to the Barn--she feels snubbed, however, when Giles leaves the barn on account of avoiding Mrs. Swithin, who is there talking of swallows with Bart. Isa and William reach a kind of unspoken understanding, as they are both "seekers after hidden faces" (for both, their authentic lives are lived inside). 

The play begins again, with a Restoration comedy. In the comedy, an older lady tries to sell out her niece by getting a male conspirator to marry her niece and then share the niece's inheritance with her. The niece, however, runs away and marries her lover, and so the aunt asks her conspirator if perhaps they should just marry. The conspirator leaves her in disgust, and moreover, her servant leaves her too. During the play, nature supplements in the form of cows bellowing--the affect of their "primeval voice" actually helps retain the emotion of the play even when its words are snatched away by the wind. At the end of this act, Miss La Trobe frantically gets her players in order for the Victorian Age; between the acts, Mrs. Manresa and Giles go off together and Isa looks on jealously.

As the Victorian Age plays out, older women of the village remember bits and pieces of the era, trying to piece together whether what they were seeing was faithful to their remembrances or not. They note the loss of a community in the present-day. The pageant's representation of the Victorian era is satirical: a constable waves his truncheon, speaking of empire, English purity, and prosperity; a young woman confesses that it is her life struggle to "convert the heathen"; an older woman is obsessed about marrying her daughters off to the new clergyman. The gramophone blares out "there's no place like home," celebrating Victorian domesticity. 

The final act of the pageant is "present day," and for a while, the audience is left pondering why nothing is happening. They fidget, and Miss La Trobe panics that she is losing her audience. Suddenly, it rains, and once again (as with the bellowing cows), "nature...had taken her part." Following this, children rush out holding scraps of metal, using them as mirrors to capture the faces of the audience. The audience is indignant, and most of them turn away, except Mrs. Manresa, who uses the occasion to powder her face.   Miss La Trobe's voice rings out in a didactic speech which suggests that all are sinners, regardless of class or position in life, but that also there is kindness to be found everywhere too. She says that they are all "orts, scraps, and fragments"--to recognize this requires an act of humility. After La Trobe's speech ends, a clergyman hesitatingly gives his interpretation and collects money to go to the lighting of his church. After the effect that the pageant has had on the audience, his words seem inadequate and his project trivial. The audience eventually disperses, and as they leave, the people make critical remarks about the play, trying to assay its meaning and its worth. They return to their ordinary lives, speaking also of logistical issues like parking. 

Back at Pointz Hall, Lucy Swithin and Bart disagree again: Lucy would like to thank Miss La Trobe for the performance, but Bart thinks that all La Trobe will want to do is to seek shelter at a tavern. It turns out Bart is right, for that is in fact what she does. Lucy looks upon the lily pool, and imagines the lilies on the surface are nations: she imagines also the depths below, of faith, mystery, and the primeval past. The narration gives that the two of them will remain opposed to one another: "He would carry the torch of reason till it went out...For herself, every morning, kneeling, she protected her vision." Isa and Giles end the novel with their strange reconciliation--though she knows (and he knows that she knows) that he has lusted for Mrs. Manresa, in the dark, "they must fight; after they had fought, they would embrace." 

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:

As many critics have noted, completed just before WWII, Between the Acts is closely concerned with questions of history, and history in relation to art. As Woolf's biography bears out, it was an anxious period of time for herself and Leonard--she had made suicide plans that were contingent on if the Germans should occupy England. We should be cautioned, however, against back-reading bleaker commentaries in Woolf's novel as prophetically critical and opposed to "grand" history; alongside revisionist critical accounts like Jed Esty's, I think that Woolf's novel reveals a hopeful turn towards "cultural solidarity" (even if it is a rather strange and cautious one).

And now to some more specifics on this. Miss La Trobe's pageant, which follows history through literary genres and subjects, deliberately opposes the history of wars, conquests, and commercial advances which are part and parcel of "grand" history. This tension between literary and grand history is loosely mapped in the oppositional relationships which structure the novel "between the acts": Lucy versus Bart, Isa versus Giles, Dodge versus Mrs. Manresa. Lucy, Isa, and Dodge are united in their contrapuntal attitudes towards grand history. Isa's focus on a fragment from the Times and digestion of this fragment into the world of her poetics and imagination resists the masculine, national, jingoistic ideology of the newspaper. Lucy reads Wells's Outline of History which offers another alternative history, one which traces primeval forces which underly all relationships and considers humans as part of rather than separate from nature. Though Dodge doesn't literally "read" as Isa and Lucy do, what he senses (or knows?) about his own sexuality counters the masculine scripts by which Giles and Bart abide. 

It seems, both in the momentary unity which Miss La Trobe effects upon her audience ("Dispersed are we, who have come together") made up of "orts, scraps, and fragments," and the intimacy which underlies Bart and Lucy's as well as Isa and Giles's quarrels with one another, that a kind of synthesis is possible. The final coming together of Isa and Giles which ends the novel is violent but it is the violence that is a necessary requisite for the embrace. The terms of such a cultural synthesis which the novel imagines is fraught, messy, and ambiguous, but nevertheless there.

The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon

Edition: The Lonely Londoners (Longman Caribbean Writer Series)
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
The Lonely Londoners was published in 1956, a time when Britain was beginning to close the door to Commonwealth citizens. Prior to the mid-1950s and after WWII, the British government encouraged immigration to help fill in labor gaps created during war; the mass immigrations during this period from Afro-Caribbean areas became known collectively as the "windrush generation." Selvon's text thus registers the disheartening arrival and subsequent experiences of immigrants coming after Britain was closing its doors. Selvon's characters are of working-class background.

The sequel to The Lonely Londoners is Moses Ascending.

SUMMARY:
The novel is narrated in third person, in a West-Indian inflected dialect of English. Though the third person narration enables focalizations of different characters throughout, it most closely follows Moses Aloetta, a rather jaded older man who has lived in London longer than any of the others. At the start of the novel, Moses goes to meet "a fellar named Henry Oliver" at Waterloo station who has just arrived from Trinidad. At the same time, Moses's friend Tolroy is at the station meeting his family who have just arrived from Jamaica (it turns out that more of them have arrived than he has bargained for). Tanty, Tolroy's mother, is an outspoken woman who from the moment of arriving, gets her way in having a reporter take a picture of her whole family when he had planned to just take one of her.

Upon his arrival, Henry Oliver seems overly confident about his prospects, and Moses thinks he is naive.  Moses gives him the epithet "Sir Galahad" and offers him a place to stay for the night. Moses offers to help him find work, but Galahad, wanting to give off the impression that "everything all right," decides to go find work for himself. Once he sets off to the employment exchange, Galahad begins to feel out of place and confused: "Everybody doing something or going somewhere, is only he who walking stupid." He doesn't get far before he runs into Moses again and so Moses ends up going with him to the exchange, where Galahad obtains an unemployment card.

The next section of the novel introduces Cap, a Nigerian who came to London to study law but who ended up instead spending money on cigarettes and women. Cap manages to get along in London on his charm, at times getting into trouble and needing Moses to bail him out. Cap is dating an Austrian girl, who tells him he should try harder to get a job. Cap pretends that he gets a job at night, but instead he "went off to hustle woman as usual" and lies to her. At another point, he steals a watch from an English girl to finance a relationship with a German girl. He also ends up marrying a French girl, and borrowing money from his friend Daniel in order to take her out until fortuitously, she gets a job at a store. Sometimes, Cap gets himself into comical situations. In a particularly humorous episode, once Cap and Moses went out on Bayswater Road between the Arch and the Gate, and Cap accidentally takes home a "woman" who was actually a man. In short, Cap gets in all sorts of trouble, but "still Moses have compassion on him."

The following section tells about another character, Bart, in a similarly episodic manner. Bart, lighter skinned than the others, seems to have an easier time assimilating. He jealously guards his own money, and rarely lends it out. Bart gets into a relationship with a white girl and he is invited to meet her parents. Before Bart can tell the lie that he is Latin-American, the girl's father kicks him out because he "don't want no curly-hair children."

Meanwhile, in Tolroy's family, Lewis (Tolroy's sister's husband) finds work alongside Moses at a factory and imagines that his wife, Agnes, is unfaithful to him while he is away. When he returns home every night, he beat her and so eventually she left him. Tanty, shunned by her family for her naivete about London, actually scores some successes of her own: at a local store, she manages to get her way, insisting on paying on credit, and then later even setting up a system for other visitors to the store to do so as well. In another successful episode, Tanty rides the tube to retrieve a key from Agnes at her work.

Galahad is getting on better than might have been expected, and Moses looks on knowingly as Galahad revels in the dropping the names of landmarks in London (like "Charing Cross") to signal a sort of ownership over the city. Galahad manages to get a night job, and even take a white girl, Daisy, on a date to a movie and dinner. Afterwards, he has her over and though she's a bit prejudiced against his way of making tea and his West Indian English, Galahad tells Moses that the date has gone swimmingly.

Big City, also from Trinidad, likes to cuss a lot and to tell people that he is no small town fellow (hence his nickname). Big City has trouble with English forms after he gets into a car accident involving himself and a bus and needs help from Moses to "full" them up.

After this particular episodic character sketch, the narration switches into a lengthy passage in stream of consciousness without punctuation. This passage gives impressions of London nightlife in the summer, and tells of various adventures the men have (usually with women), including one in which Moses takes a girl home and is terrified of what the police will do to him when she seems to be getting sick under his watch. The narration's blurring and accelerated effects might be encapsulated in these final lines: "and Moses sigh a long sigh like a man who live life and see nothing at all in it and who frighten as the years go by wondering what it is all about."

The narrative then snaps back into character sketches, introducing a character from Barbados called "Five Past Twelve" because he is blacker than midnight itself. In this section, Harris who likes to think he is in the know as far as English customs go, throws a party at St. Pancras. At the party, Harris is embarrassed by his fellow immigrants, afraid that they will "make rab and turn the dance into a brawl." Tolroy brings his whole family including Tanty, and once again, Tanty is her outspoken self when she puts Harris in his place about his shame.

In a particularly bad season for work, Galahad's hunger reduces him to catching a pigeon in the park to roast. A white woman is horrified, and insensitively calls him a monster and calls the police. Moses and Galahad talk about their difficult lives in London, yet oddly once they've been there for a while, they don't want to go back to their home countries. They wonder if it has to do in part with the mistaken notion of London as a place of opportunity. In a "p.s. episode," Cap also catches seagulls from his windowsill for food.

The final scene is slightly more uplifting; the boys go to Moses's place every Sunday as if it were a kind of church, showing that in their talking over girls, the difficulty of getting work, and feelings of alienation, there is a kind of valuable community that coheres. The novel closes with Moses looking out upon the Thames and sensing a kind of sublimity while thinking about the vastness of London life: "it had a greatness and a vastness in the way he was feeling tonight, like it was something solid after feeling everything else give way." He even imagines whether he might ever write a book.  

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS: (A previous essay I wrote on print culture in The Lonely Londoners and its sequel, Moses Ascending)

As noted by James Procter in Dwelling Places, the characters in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners use the discursive power of naming (and re-naming) places in London to derive a sense of belonging. For characters like Galahad who are new to London, to be an Englishman in London is a matter of recognizing and using a number of sign systems in relation to categories such as “music and song, film, literature, conversation.”[1] In this essay I wish to highlight the importance of one particular sign system in Selvon’s fiction, namely, the sign system of newspapers and print-journalism. With Benedict Anderson’s idea of print-culture’s power in the facilitation of imagined communities in mind, I suggest that Moses Aloetta’s eventual displacement within the house that he owns in Moses Ascending is paralleled by his resistance to newspapers and print-journalism and consequent resistance to imagined communities that are made available to him.

London’s vastness as a metropolis necessitates an imagined community; in The Lonely Londoners, West Indians with memories of tight-knit communities in their home nations are acutely aware of this necessity. To the new, West Indian Londoner, the metropolis “divide up in little worlds, and you stay in the world you belong to and you don’t know anything about what happening in the other ones except what you read in the papers.”[2] Selvon’s boys recognize that newspapers allow strangers in the metropolis to form links with one another by way of a shared readership.

For the most part, Selvon’s characters in Lonely Londoners believe in the power of shared-readership as a means for gaining at least partial acceptance into the larger community. Big City tells his friends that he attended a party with “bigshots” that one would read about in the Evening Standard, thereby legitimating the very imagined community that would never print his name.[3] Though Big City is aware of his own exclusion, he suggests that his involvement with a print-worthy event signifies at least partial belonging. The narrator’s description of how Harris, meticulous about significations of Englishness, dresses, with “bowler hat and umbrella, and briefcase tuck under the arm with The Times fold up in the pocket so the name would show” demonstrates newcomer complicity in legitimizing the power of print-culture’s signage in representing the dominant, white, literate, imagined community.

In Moses Ascending, however, Selvon’s boys become more critical of the white monopoly over print-culture and the imagined community which it produces. Galahad, more confident now in his place in the metropolis, has joined the Black Power movement, whose members aspire to produce their own newspaper to counter the “untruths” borne from the traditionally accepted, white newspapers. “You know these English papers does only have contorted views of the scene. If we get our own, we can tell people the truth.”[4] What Galahad does not realize is that in supporting the new paper, he is merely complying in the creation of another imagined community, whose print-narrative may be as “contorted” as that of the white newspapers.

Moses demonstrates that he is critical of both representation white-London print and Black Power print. Of newspapers written by whites, Moses remarks, “The first crocus in the spring is seen by a black man, and he harks to the cuckoo long before all them other people what write to newspapers to say they was the first.”[5] On the other hand, Moses wants nothing to do with Brenda’s Black Power newspaper either, preferring that his white man-servant appear on the front page instead of himself. Galahad tells Moses that in writing a memoir, he must report on “what’s happening” socially and politically, but Moses resists because he wants to write something “personal and intimate” which does not cling to the imagined communities of social and political happenings, the stuff of print-culture.[6] To be sure, Moses is ambivalent—he proudly boasts about reading the Times, News of the World, and the Observer while his white man-servant reads comics and he also gives Galahad’s suggestion a try by taking his reporter’s pad to the Paki’s sheep slaughter and the Black Power rally. However, his ambivalence renders him unable to whole-heartedly embrace either the imagined community of white-London or that of Black Power.

Unfortunately, because he resists both imagined communities that are available to him, Moses ends up without a comfortable place in his own house. Brenda’s success in creating a new imagined community in opposition to the one of white-London by printing a newspaper for Black Power is followed upon by her ascension to a more desirable place in the house. Bob, who has gained acceptance into this newly minted imagined community by getting his picture onto the front page of the first issue, has also ascended in the house. Moses, who resists accepting the imagined communities made available (or partially available) to him, is “displaced” into the basement of his own home.

---

[1] James Procter, “Dwelling Places,” in Dwelling Places, Postwar Black British Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 52.

[2] Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (New York: Longman Publishing Group, 1985), 74.

[3] Ibid., 101.

[4] Sam Selvon, Moses Ascending (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1984), 13.

[5] Ibid., 7.

[6] Ibid., 42.

Belcaro by Vernon Lee

Edition: Belcaro
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Vernon Lee's (Violet Paget) first major publication was her Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880). Belcaro: Being Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions followed close behind, published in 1881. In the first chapter of Belcaro she explains the intellectual relationship between these two works.


SUMMARY:
"The Book and it's Title" is a dedication to Mary Robinson, with whom Vernon Lee had a long-term relationship. This dedication explains Lee's own development from being first interested in a specific body of art (she had previously written a book on eighteenth-century Italy) and later more interested aesthetic theory more generally. Lee also explains that the title of the book refers merely to the fact that while she was writing these essays, she kept thinking of their time together seeing the battlements of Belcaro. Lee cautions that the following collection of essays did not make up "a system" of thought, but were "mere fragmentary thinkings out of aesthetic questions." She does, however, give some inklings as to how these essays nevertheless manage to hang together, stressing among other things:

• The importance of trying to get back to a childish enjoyment of art after being subjected to the modern tendency of studying art historically, psychologically, and scientifically)
• The need to attend to art's formal properties and qualities independent of invested (historical, psychological, scientific, etc) meanings
• The importance of thinking through the aesthetic question of what value art may have for the public and the world more broadly

"The Child in the Vatican": Lee muses on how the gray, stone statues must be uninteresting to a modern child. Eventually, we acquire enough learning to appreciate these statues but even then, she contends that real enjoyment is probably pretty momentary. To explore what unadulterated enjoyment of art might look like, Lee comes up "Fairy Tale" in which the statues choose a child to teach a "secret" to. The secret is that "the only intrinsic perfection of art is the perfection of form." Before revealing this, however, Lee goes through the description of the Niobides statues, showing how here the object of the artist has been to present as beautiful of a form possible. For this reason, there is no pursuing Apollo and Artemis included because they would upset the balance. Lee contends that the story and the psychological details all come from the "outside." The beauty of form is simply from the materiality of physical embodiment intermixed with the artist's intellectual conception - both of these forces act upon/limit each other. 

"Orpheus and Eurydice: The Lesson of the Bas Relief." Lee mistakes the identity of Winckelmann statue, Antiope, Amphion, and Zeus as Orpheus, Eurydice, and Hermes. She explains how this doesn't matter though, because these are conceptions that are outside of the form. The form just "tells us the fact of its beauty, and that fact is vital, eternal, and indissolubly connected with it." Shequalifies that not all associations of meaning are bad, but that her contemporaries should generally restrain these in order to better appreciate form. 

"Faustus and Helena": This essay explores the relationship between art and the supernatural. Lee contends that both Goethe's and Marlowe's accounts of Faustus make the supernatural too definite and concrete, and that is why they fail in "getting at" the supernatural. She writes, "[f]or the supernatural is necessarily essentially vague, and art is necessarily essentially distinct: give shape to the vague and it ceases to exist." In Hellenic art, the supernatural disappeared when gods were given distinct human shapes, as this negated the vagueness of the supernatural. Art should be in the service of creating beauty, and not the supernatural.

"Chapelmaster Kreisler": Here Lee explores music, and also makes the case for musical form. In the modern era, she charges that "the time when men sought in music only for music's own loveliness is gone by." Unlike speech, "music owes its power over the heart to its sensuous elements as given by nature" and is not dependent on outside meanings. Musical form consists of the intellectual and the sensuous (this is a refiguration of the intellectual concept and the physical material in the form of statues).  The metaphor that she gives is that physical sound is a "tiger" and composer's organization is the "grate" behind which it must stand. The story of Chapelmaster Kreisler is of a man who plays only a few chords (since the rest of his piano strings have snapped) and accompanies these chords with lot of speech. This story shows how it is the things that he says that add anything at all to the chords; without the speech, these chords are "formless and meaningless." 

"Cherubino: A Psychological Art Fancy" tells of female Spanish singer who sings "Voi Che Sapete" from Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro. The listener finds that there is no "Cherubino" character at all in her singing. Lee explains that it is because it is impossible to represent Cherubino in music, because his character is too varied to indicate. The musical form which does not contain him might, however, contain some aspects of him, and these aspects then might pair together with the performer's varied modes of expression to yield Cherubino. The Spanish singer though, has followed Mozart too closely, and so there is no Cherubino.

"In Umbria: A Study of Artistic Personality: The essay begins with descriptions of the beautiful countryside of Umbria, then focusing on how there is really one unique school of thought and one mode of art here, "only one theme, one type, one idea, one feeling." Specifically, this mode was associated with Perugino. Lee describes Perugino's aesthetic as conveying an "abstract, devotional feeling," an "intense passive contemplation of the unattainable good,"in which "souls purged of every human desire or will, isolated from all human affection and action," are "raised above the limits of time and space..." Vasari's biography of Perugino, however, tells of a man who deliberately commercialized the process of making this one type, and also that he was a "cynic" and "atheist." This fact spurs a contemplation of whether a artist's character need to match the art which he creates--after a number of considerations on the relationship between the character of the artist and the character of art, Lee concludes that the part of man which actually creates a painting is separate from his bad character. This too is based on the notion that art is purely form: all that its creation requires is the physicality of the part of the man which literally makes the form. The case of the poet is different, however, because a poet's materials are often human thoughts and feelings (whereas a painter's are morally neutral materials of color, form).

"Ruskinism: The Would-Be Study of a Conscience": At first, it seems Lee praises Ruskin for his noble conceptions of art. Unlike other art theorists, Ruskin tries to expand aesthetic morality to broader life concepts. Lee soon becomes much less generous, saying that this is actually just a result of Ruskin feeling the conflict of art versus moral duty and trying to draw links between art and morality that are not there. His mission became to justify whatever he felt to be instinctively beautiful as moral. This results in a "false system." Beauty comes from form, and morality from ideas and so these realms need to be kept separate. This "false system" additionally does harm: it leads to historical misconceptions, because Ruskin finds it necessary to "postulate that every period which has produced bad art has been a period of moral decay." Finally, Lee qualifies that this isn't to say that art doesn't have moral value: "For though art has no moral meaning, it has a moral value; art is happiness, and to bestow happiness is to create good."

"A Dialogue on Poetic Morality" is conducted  between a young poet (Cyril) and an older mentor figure (Baldwin). Baldwin espouses most of Lee's views on aesthetics, and Cyrils questions enable him to develop them. The debate is once again on the place of art in relation to morality and duty. Cyril laments that poets of today are no longer "legislators of the world" as in the time of Shelley, but merely writers for leisurely intellectual elites. Baldwin explains that there are two things to do in this (modern) world: to destroy evil and to create good. Science and most "practical" occupations aim to destroy evil and art creates good. He contends that "art in general not to meddle with the work of any of our other energies." He further explains that the poet alone of all artists must use his moral faculties -- his materials are "justice and injustice, good and evil, purity and foulness" just as a painter's materials are his paints. Baldwin condemns the growing sense of relativity in the world, and the accompanying tendency to call things which are not beautiful, beautiful -- absolute poetic judgments must be made. The essay ends with Baldwin asking Cyril if he is "too good for poetry," or perhaps that "poetry [has] become too good for you?" Cyril is unsure, but it seems that he will soon follow Baldwin's observations.

Postscript or Apology: In this final section, Lee tells of being in a mood of thinking all this theorizing has been dwarfed by the experience of the beauty of her surroundings (nature). She makes another plea for the enjoyment of art without "deliberate mental gymnastics," but finally admits that a life of "fancy and feelings" might be supreme even over art: "I will confess to you that more nearly appealing to me, dearer also, than antique bas-relief or song of Mozart, has been the vague remembrance, evoked by trivial word or sight, of that early winter afternoon" (referring to the afternoon shared with Robinson in Belcaro).

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Like Pater, Lee writes against contemporaries who would intellectualize art by associating or miring it within such things as historical or moral contexts. These things Lee pithily does away with as "outside" of form. Both Pater and Lee also make clear that their positions on art do not mean that there is no moral value to art. On this point, Lee is very directly engaged; her critique of Ruskin's "false system" is bold, and she very clearly articulates the notion that art creates good. She shows morality and art as occupying separate spheres, but logically points out that their separation does not mean that they work against one another. She comes up with a total vision for the world which includes both art and morality in describing how people may either work on destroying evil, or creating good. To do one when you are equipped to do the other is to be counterproductive to the overall project. The silent assumption behind this vision which Lee does not mention is much like Wilde's (as articulated in "The Soul of Man Under Socialism"): individuals are constitutionally suited through their innate talents to different tasks.

Howards End by E.M. Forster

Edition: Howards End (Norton Critical Editions)
*By the way, I think this is simply a beautiful book. If you only have limited time to read, this is one to spend it on.

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Forster's fourth novel was first published in November 1910 and met with immediate critical acclaim and general success. Forster's journals and letters reveal some important details about the composition of the work; he early on planned his novel to be primarily about the "spiritual cleavage" between the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes, but other directions for the novel (such as the ending) seemed to come about more during the composition process itself.

Howards End was  based on his childhood home in Rooksnest. (Source: Norton Introduction, Armstrong)

SUMMARY:
During some time abroad, the well-off, intellectual, and London-cultivated Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, make the acquaintance of the Wilcox family. Howards End begins with an embarrassing incident, in which back in England, Helen develops a brief attachment to the youngest Wilcox son, Peter, while staying with them at Howards End, their country estate. Helen sends a telegram about the attachment, but the engagement is soon broken off; unfortunately, however, Margaret has already despatched their Aunt Juley to investigate the situation. An unpleasant altercation ensues, which the Schegel sisters afterwards refer to as a lot of "telegrams and anger."

In the meantime, the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes break off their contact. At a concert at Queens Hall, Helen accidentally takes the umbrella of a insurance company clerk by the name of Leonard Bast. When Margaret asks for Bast's address in hopes to send back the umbrella, Bast, in his comparative poverty, is suspicious and hesitates. Noting this, Margaret summons him to come to their place (Wickham) instead. Bast pays them a visit and sharply feels his own poverty as hindrance to his "acquiring culture" in the way that the Schlegel sisters have. Back at home, Bast snubs his lover, Jacky.

The Schlegel sisters are dismayed to find that the Wilcoxes have actually moved across the street from them in London. Margaret and Mrs. Wilcox end up developing a friendship; the two women seem to recognize each other as kindred spirits, and Margaret seems to deeply admire Mrs. Wilcox's quiet and mysteriously simple stoicism even when her other London friends find her uninteresting. When Margaret goes Christmas shopping with Mrs. Wilcox, Mrs. Wilcox invites her to Howards End and at first Margaret refuses but then changes her mind when she realizes that the house is really important to Mrs. Wilcox. Unfortunately, Margaret doesn't actually get to visit Howard's End before Mrs. Wilcox suddenly dies. A note written before her death tells her husband that she would like to bequeath Howards End to her, but the Wilcox family ignore this request; after all, it isn't legally binding and she wrote it when she was sick. Mr. Wilcox does give Margaret Mrs. Wilcox's silver vinaigrette though, acknowledging the friendship between the two women.

One night, Jacky makes the mistake of thinking Bast was out visiting Wickham because he is out late and she has seen Margaret's card lying around. Bast was actually just walking around during the night, and he goes to apologize to Margaret and Helen, who don't remember him. Margaret and Helen take an interest in Bast, thinking he must have a poetic soul if he enjoyed the adventure of walking around all night long, and they engage their friends at a discussion club as to how one ought to help one such as Mr. Bast, whose poverty seems a hindrance to his intellectual and spiritual advancement: should they offer him money? Offer him partial tutelage and things? Pay for his greater comfort without him knowing? Later, when Margaret asks Mr. Wilcox what he might think on such issues, he offers the very practical insider information that Bast's insurance company is going to go under, ever the good capitalist who doesn't think such larger philosophical principles worthwhile. Margaret and Helen try to warn Bast but he is offended, thinking that they are trying to pump him for information about his business.

Soon, Evie Wilcox marries, and at the same time, Schlegels are looking for a new house because their lease at Wickham up. Mr. Wilcox offers their place at Ducie (from which Evie has moved out) and when Margaret visits the house, he offers her a marriage proposal. Margaret agrees, thinking that she might be able to "save" Henry from his single-minded, materialistic views on life as not much more than laissez faire capitalism. Margaret goes to Howards End for the first time after her engagement to Mr. Wilcox, and immediately falls in love with it. The couple, however, are set to move to Oniton, a countryside town closer to London. Evie's wedding is at Oniton, and after the proceedings, Helen happens to show up with the Basts in tow, claiming that the Basts have been ruined by Mr. Wilcox's advice since Leonard ended up leaving the insurance company to find a new job at a bank which proved no good. At Oniton, Jacky recognizes Henry Wilcox as her former lover in Cyprus--it turns out that he has been unfaithful to Mrs. Wilcox ten years ago. Margaret chooses to forgive Henry, meanwhile, Helen goes abroad to Germany and tries to grant the Basts five-thousand pounds, which they reject.

After they are married, Margaret and Henry decide to build a house at Sussex to live in. In a bit of a mix up, Miss Avery, the old woman who is overseeing things at Howards End (empty, since the tenant went abroad) unpacks the furniture from Wickham place, preparing the place for the new Mrs. Wilcox. Margaret tells Miss Avery, however, that they will not live there. When Aunt Juley falls ill, Margaret is perplexed that Helen is reluctant to visit and as soon as Aunt Juley gets better, Margaret asks Henry to help her find a way to see Helen. Henry comes up with a scheme to entrap her at Howards End, and Margaret finds Helen is pregnant. In an act of sisterly solidarity against the men who do not understand them and their "inner life," Margaret shuts out Henry and the doctor. At Howards End, the sisters reconcile with one another and Helen asks if she might stay in the house for a night before returning to Germany; Henry unwisely turns her down and Margaret and he have a fight in which she points out his hypocrisy in being unwilling to forgive Helen when Margaret has forgiven him for a similar transgression.

Margaret and Helen stay at Howards End anyways, and in the morning, Charles Wilcox goes to confront them. While he is there, Leonard Bast has made his way to Howards End after enquiring after Margaret's whereabouts, intending to apologize for the night of his transgression with Helen. Charles strikes Leonard with the hilt of a sword which belonged to Mr. Schlegel, and unexpectedly, Leonard dies (it is later revealed that he had a heart condition). Leonard never finds out that he has a son. At this point, the Schlegel sisters and the Wilcoxes are estranged from one another to such an extent that Margaret plans to go away with Helen to Germany permanently. However, these plans fall through when they find out that Charles has been charged with manslaughter. Henry is a broken man, and asks Margaret to do with him as she will. Though Margaret hasn't forgiven him, she takes him to Howards End, where she, Henry, Helen, and her baby end up staying for longer than they mean to. In the end, Henry is a changed man--he begins to "notice things" and "connect." Surprisingly, they find that they can all live together at Howards End as a family. Henry bequeaths Howards End to Margaret after all, and after Margaret's death, Howards End is to go to Leonard Bast and Helen's son.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS/APPROACH:
The novel's famous epigraph, "Only connect..." belies the novel's complexity with respect to what it reveals about human connection. The question as to how to connect is an exceedingly difficult one. To be sure, Forster seems largely sympathetic to the Schlegel sisters' attempt to live life through personal connections, a recognition of people's "inner" lives that are not contingent on wealth, class, gender, or race, in opposition to the material, laissez-faire capitalism of the Wilcox men, who believe that there will always be rich and poor and the two kinds of people are simply irreconcilable. Margaret and Helen's universalism, by the way, is the old Victorian liberalism (except now mapped on the female subject, probably much to Arnold's chagrin had he been around), who believe that individual "best selves" might transcend material contingencies.

However, Howards End (and the Schlegel sisters themselves) is highly sensitive to the problems and limitations of such a philosophy of personal connection. Leonard Bast's material wants determine his personality and thoughts much more than the Schlegel sisters imagine--in the end, the narrator tells us that he feels abject and thoroughly blames himself for his transgression with Helen, not even thinking that she might also be to blame because of his class. At a certain point, Bast aligns with Mr. Wilcox in accepting that there will always be the rich and the poor, implying that personal responsibility and the free "inner life" are pretty mythologies. Forster's inability to penetrate the consciousness of Jacky and the Schlegel's sister's inability to see her as anything but ugly and degraded is a concession that the well-off can't truly represent the destitute. Finally, as Margaret herself frequently admits, it is the Wilcoxes who have "made" the "outer world"--the British empire, the metropolis, the capitalist system which enables greater and greater technologies on a scale previously unimaginable to mankind. At one point in the novel, Margaret concedes that both kinds of people are necessary.

And yet, it is no easy "balance" or even fusion between the Germanic idealism and universalism of the Schlegel sisters and the English pragmatism which might "solve" England's problems at the turn of the century. the condition of England." Max Levenson suggests a synecdochal relationship, in which Germanic universalism is capacious enough to contain the imagination of the English capitalist, but even so, such ways of seeing are only intermittently realized and they constantly falter.

The ending of the novel provides a rich ground for thinking through the complexity of where connection--whether between people free of their sociocultural matrices, or between the sociocultural matrices themselves--fails and where it succeeds. Margaret and ultimately the son of Leonard Bast gets Howards End, so in a way, there is a sort of poetic justice that balances out Mr. Wilcox's crime against  the lower class (his affair with Jacky). Yet, "London is creeping" at the end of the novel, and one wonders if Howards End will even be around later on. Howards End is no safe retreat from the metropolis, but yet another territory to be conquered by it. Throughout the novel, London's houses are being converted to flats by an alarming rate, and the idea that one would live in the same home their entire lives is all but gone. Still, "the goblin footfalls" remain, which the narrator describes are the dark side of metropolitan expansion and capitalist growth--the poverty and very real (because material) sufferings that threaten to topple it. Considered all together, it isn't clear at all whether the strange melding of the Wilcoxes and the Schlegels at Howards End will mean anything more than a temporary synthesis. Nevertheless, the temporary connection experienced both on a personal level (Henry Wilcox indeed seems a changed man, who begins to "notice" aspects of the inner life) and on the class level (since Leonard's son is set to inherit Howards End) is an optimistic and rather compelling one. And finally, it might be worth considering that this temporary synthesis at the end is oddly evacuated of anyone's intention; though Helen may attribute it to Margaret, none of them ever thought it would quite turn out in this way--after all, Margaret had not forgiven Henry, and was set to leave England for Germany, had unknown forces not brought Leonard to Howards End and consequently Charles to prison. Forster is deliberately vague about these kinds of unknown forces--they are sometimes naturalistic, sometimes supernatural, or sometimes they are somewhere in between or fate-like, as when he describes human life as a pack of cards in which it isn't known what card will trump what other card). We may as well end with Mrs. Wilcox, though, as the unknown force who continues through the novel as a kind of ghostly presence who possibly brings about the ending, finally arranging everything so that Margaret does end up getting Howards End even if Mrs. Wilcox's own family tries to prevent this. If Mrs. Wilcox did it all, the novel consolidates the personal and spiritual connection which she makes with Margaret, because the inheritance of Howards End ends up, at least for the time being, passing by way of such a connection rather than the more traditional ones of blood or money.

Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
In the winter of 1835, publishing house Chapman and Hall approached the young Dickens and asked if he would write some serials to accompany the sporting plates of one Robert Seymour, a comic artist at the time. The idea was to call this ensemble the "Nimrod Club" in which a group of sportsmen would become entangled in different humorous situations. Dickens managed to secure an agreement more favorable to his own terms--namely, for monthly publication of "The Pickwick Papers" by February. The first monthly part of "Pickwick" (full title: "The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club") appeared on March 31st. The advertisement in the Times characterized the work as "containing a faithful record of the Perambulations, Perils, Travels, Adventures, and Sporting Transactions of the Corresponding Members."

"Pickwick," however, was not an instant success. The publishers only printed 1,000 copies of the first installment, and as a result of only a moderate response, they sent in a print order for only 500 for the second installment. In April, Seymour committed suicide, and there was a bit of a scuffle between Dickens and his widow as to who was the originator of "Pickwick." Meanwhile, Dickens sought a new illustrator, and finally settled on Hablot K. Browne ("Phiz" to Dickens's "Boz"). See David Perdue's site for Seymour and Phiz's prints. "Pickwick" finally met with greater success by the fifth installment in 1836, with sales rocketing up to 40,000 for the 15th installment.

In describing the importance of "Pickwick" to the everyday lives of the English reading public, G.K. Chesterton has famously wrote: "In the days when Dickens's work was coming out in serial, people talked as if real life were itself the interlude between one issue of "Pickwick" and another." (SOURCE: Fadiman Introduction)

SUMMARY/KEY FEATURES:
Literary critical reception of Pickwick has generally focused on its "accidental" and episodic nature, especially in the context of its unpredicted rise to popularity. Dickens didn't set out to write a novelistic plot, though Pickwick would come to be known as an originary moment for Dickens's novel writing methods. As Jonathan Grossman has observed in his first book on the English law courts and the novel form, however, a novelistic plot does in fact gain momentum in Pickwick, specifically, one which issues forth from the case Mrs. Bardell mounts against Pickwick, eventually leading to the narrative arc of his incarceration in the Fleet debtor's prison and later release.

Pickwick's premise is that an editor, whose voice predominantly takes on the point of view of a good-humored, third person narrator throughout, has come upon a nine-year old archive of a traveling group of gentleman. The narrative which follows is an account which draws from the information found in these archives. The Pickwickian travelers (comprising of the genial, good-hearted Mr. Pickwick, Mr. Winkle, a sportsman, Mr. Snodgrass, a melancholy poet, and Mr. Tupman, an older man with nonetheless the "ardour of a boy") commence on a journey around English towns and villages, meeting with various and sundry adventures along the way.

Immediately upon commencing their journey to Golden Cross in a cab, Pickwick accidentally offends the cabman, who thinks he is taking notes to inform against him. They get into a bit of a scuffle, and emerge from this scuffle when a man in a green coat, Alfred Jingle, brings Pickwick and his friends into an Inn. Jingle accompanies the Pickwickians to Rochester; Jingle seems friendly enough but soon becomes a source for trouble for the Pickwickians. At Rochester, Jingle convinces Tupman to attend a ball with him, asking Tupman to steal Winkle's clothing so that he might have the proper attire for the event. At the ball, Jingle offends a military officer, who remembers the Pickwickian label on Winkle's coat, and so the next day Winkle is summoned to a duel. When the military man realizes the mistake, all turns out fine for Winkle.

Mr. Pickwick and his friends receive an invitation from Mr. Wardle, a fine country gentleman, to visit him at Manor Farm in Dingley Dell. On the way to Dingley Dell, Pickwick and his friends are involved in a slight accident because they do not know how to ride horses. They arrive eventually, and make the acquaintance of Mr. Wardle's sassy old mother, his spinster sister, and his two daughters, Isabella and Emily. Mr. Tupman falls in love with Miss Rachel, the spinster sister, but ends up being thwarted by Jingle's machinations. Rachel elopes with Jingle to London, and Pickwick follows him, at last finding him at the White Hart where Pickwick first makes the acquaintance of Sam Weller as he is cleaning some boots. Sam directs Pickwick and Wardle to the room where Rachel and Jingle are staying, and the confrontation leads to Jingle letting Rachel go after securing money from Wardle.

Pickwick's own troubles begin when he thinks about hiring Sam as his personal manservant: when he goes to let his landlady at Goswell Street (Maria Bardell) know, she mistakes his proposition as one for marriage. Overwhelmed, Maria faints into his arms, and unfortunately, Pickwick's travel companions are made witness of this strange encounter. After the close of this episode, Pickwick engages Sam, and the group travels to Eatanswill to see an election. At Eatanswill, Pickwick and his friends attend a costume party, where they meet with Jingle once again, who now calls himself Captain Fitz-Marshall. Jingle runs away from them, but Pickwick and his friends decide to pursue him at Bury St. Edmunds, in order to prevent him from conning others. Sam meets a servant, Job Trotter, who now travels with Jingle, and mistakes Job's professions of wanting to leave Jingle as true. Job tells Sam that Jingle will elope with a young lady from a seminary, luring Pickwick into an awkward situation wherein he trespasses on the seminary grounds at night. Meanwhile, Jingle and Job escape from the town.

At Mr. Wardle's, the friends are engaged to shoot birds, and because Pickwick has been slightly injured from his tresspassing encounter, and he is left behind in a wheelbarrow after consuming a large amount of cold punch. A neighbor of Wardle's finds Pickwick asleep and thinks him to be a poacher--again, it turns out that Pickwick has tresspassed because the Pickwickians had unwittingly wandered into this neighbor's ground. Pickwick is taken away to the Pound, where Sam finds him later and rescues him. Sam Weller's father, a coachman, now comes onto the scene, and actually offers a clue as to Jingle's whereabouts. The older Mr. Weller has married a widow, whom the narrative refers to as Sam's "mother-in-law," who is none too good to him, choosing to spend much of her time with a church man (the "shepherd") who is a leech on Weller's money and hospitality. Sam's father carries Pickwick and his friends to Ipswich in order that they might continue in pursuit of Jingle. At Ipswich, Pickwick is involved in another unfortunate incident, where he accidentally stumbles into a room already occupied by a middle aged lady; though Pickwick is very apologetic, she will not hear him and throws him out of the room. Pickwick is arrested when a misunderstanding ensues from the revelation that the lady is their new friend's (Peter Magnus) fiancee. The magistrate, Mr. Lupkin, happens to be in the company of Jingle and Job, and Pickwick manages to distract from his own case by exposing Jingle to be an impostor.

At this point in the narrative, Pickwick can no longer ignore the suit that Maria Bardell has began against him for a breach of promise, since she has thought he would marry her. She hires the profit-motivated Dodson and Fogg to represent her. At Pickwick's trial in London, the lawyers force Pickwick's friends to give testimony against him. The result is that Pickwick must pay damages to Mrs. Bardell, but on principle, Pickwick refuses. Pickwick refuses to pay, and goes off for a short and relaxing two month stay at Bath. Upon his return, he is committed to Fleet Prison, the debtor's prison, where he witnesses many a sad scene. Pickwick generously provides fellow prisoners with some comforts, including food and money, and is surprised to find Jingle and Job in the prison, now much humbled. Pickwick, seeing them humbled, actually pays their debts and arranges for Jingle to go to the West Indies; Job follows.

Sam is an equally devoted manservant: he devises a scheme whereby he becomes indebted to his father and joins Pickwick in prison. When Pickwick is in prison, his friends meet with some further adventures--Winkle is busy courting Arabella Allen, the sister of a medical man, Benjamin Allen. Ben, however, would like Arabella to become engaged to his friend Bob Sawyer, and so Arabella runs away with Winkle. Snodgrass, apparently, continues to write love letters to Emily Wardle.

Pickwick's situation comes to be resolved when Mrs. Bardell too is sent to Fleet, because she cannot pay the high fees which Dodson and Fogg require from her. Pickwick then agrees to pay all the costs, on the condition that his name be cleared.

The narrative ends happily after--and with a number of marriages: between Mr. Winkle and one Arabella Allen (for whom Pickwick intercedes, convincing Mr. Winkle's father to accept the marriage), between Emily Wardle and Mr. Snodgrass, and between Sam and Arabella's pretty servant, Mary.  Pickwick retires to a villa in Dulwich, satisfied that his travels were over.
---
Note: This main narrative is interpolated by many stories; I haven't included a summary of them here but for a good discussion see Patten, "The Art of Pickwick's Interpolated Tales" in ELH. My own reading of the often sensationalistic interpolated tales are that they provide a way of imagining interiority and time which the Pickwick narrative disallows--the stories give insight into character psychologies (e.g., "The Madman's Story") and also sometimes entire life histories (the convict's story). Pickwick's story is very much caught up in the dialogue and actions of the characters (as we might experience them in real life, without privilege into deeper interiors) and also the circumstances of their serialization underscored the "present" of Dickens's audience as each installment came out.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS/APPROACH:
Reading against the common assumption of Pickwick haphazard and accidental, there have been suggestions that the work is a picaresque novel, or perhaps because of the "archive," a historical novel. Grossman reads against both suggestions. He points out that if Pickwick is a picaresque, it does not follow the sequential progress of a journey--rather, Pickwick and his friends don't go very far at all, they travel less than one hundred miles, circulating within the regional, passenger transport system of stagecoaches and cabs. By the 1830s, this regional transport system had already experienced rapid expansion due to the railways, so Pickwick and his friends are rather quite limited in their journeying. If Pickwick makes a nod to the historical novel, the archive is only nine years old. Thus Pickwick makes a joke of both genres rather than adopting them. 

I agree that thinking of Pickwick as haphazard due to its serialization tends to preclude understandings of potentially coherent logics within the work. Just because Pickwick wasn't intended from the first as a novel as defined by plot development doesn't mean that Dickens didn't imagine the series as integral on other levels. I imagine that these integrities may be made up of quite a number of different possibilities. Here are a couple that I'll posit:

• Pickwick Papers abounds in "paper"--most prominently, legal documents drive the plot, but there are also letters, wills, newspapers (e.g., the electioneering chapter), and old leaflets bearing stories, to name a few others. The "Pickwick Papers" seem to counter the official documents which control modern life: legal documents, newspapers. Unlike these latter documents, the Pickwick Papers bring out the whimsical, the pathetic, the "everyday" human (rather than say, institutional) contingencies of the lives they chronicle. The Pickwick papers critique the twisted accounts of legal documents, and the rushed and partial accounts of the newspapers (incidentally, the "villain" of the story, Jingle, seems to speak in reporter's shorthand, which Dickens would have been well-versed in through his work as a Parliamentary reporter just previous to writing Pickwick). The Pickwick papers tell of everyday privations suffered by husbands who marry widows, of romantic machinations and mishaps, of clandestine kisses, of dinners, toasts, drinking, and hearing stories.    
• Pickwick was contemporary with the volume re-publications of Sketches by Boz and also of Oliver Twist. And yet, the three seem pretty different as far as their overall effects go, even if they might bear some obvious similarities. The institutional critiques--of marriage, law courts, prison, for example--so scathing in Oliver Twist and later novels are in Pickwick, and the anecdotal, contained stories of Sketches are replicated in the episodic aspects of the main narrative of Pickwick and even more so in the interpolated tales. Yet what I mean about their overall effects is that Oliver Twist comes across as seriously moralistic bordering on allegorical, Sketches is journalistic but with a similarly moralistic bent, but Pickwick comes across as comic and light, even in the darkest scenes such as when Pickwick is in Fleet Prison, and hardly moralistic, even if there are embedded critiques. Unlike Sketches or Oliver, these critiques are never scathing nor calculated to strike deep emotional chords.
• Pickwick and his gang, however, ask for sympathy as much as Oliver or the characters in Sketches do, but I think that it's of a generally different quality. We like Pickwick not because he is generous, but because his generosity is naive and sincere (this is why Sam likes him too, and we like Sam because he serves this sincerity even when he can see its role in getting Pickwick in trouble). Similarly, we like the others because of their recognizable limitations and foibles (especially when it comes to their romantic altercations). Even Pickwick is by no means a hero, his "good humor" and his incapacity for cynicism even when he begins to learn of "the ways of the world" is infectious--to the point where even Jingle and Job turn out reformed when they reach the West Indies.