Selections from Mysteries of London by G.W.M. Reynolds

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
G.W.M. Reynolds, having lived in France as a journalist for some time before returning to England, was inspired by the popular French series known as the Mysteries of Paris by Eugene Sue. The Mysteries of London commenced publication in 1844 as penny issue installments and ran uninterrupted until 1856. There ended up being a total of 624 weekly numbers. Each weekly issue was eight pages of double-columned text and an accompanying woodcut. Other types of editions included a monthly issue of four weekly parts stitched together and an annual volume of 52 numbers.

SUMMARY (Selections from the First Volume):
Prologue: The prologue introduces London as a "city of strange contrasts," in which the greatest civilization also has the greatest vices. It asks the reader to imagine two youths, one taking the path of "noisome dens of crime, chicanery, dissipation, and voluptuousness" and the other "amidst rugged rocks and acclivities...but on the wayside are the resting places of rectitude and virtue."

Chapter I-V: The first chapter sets the scene with a thunderstorm. Amidst the storm, an effeminate youth with chestnut colored hair has lost his way in a bad neighborhood of London (Smithfield). Afraid, he dashes into what seems to be an abandoned house. The room which he enters has a black square in the middle of it, and he hurries to a back room where there is a trapdoor. Two "ruffians" soon enter the first room, and the youth finds that he has no escape. He can do nothing but to listen to how the two ruffians are planning a heist at the Markham house, and to hear them tell tales of how the place they were in used to be the haunts of Jonathan Wild, perhaps the most infamous criminal of the 18th-century. The fearful youth overhears the two men telling stories about how many people must have been plunged to their death through the trap door. The youth is soon discovered as he tries to escape, and he is so paralyzed by fear that he cannot run and faints. The two ruffians drag him back in, and indeed drop him through the black square, presumably to his death. Later, however, the Markham residence receives an anonymous tip letting them know of a potential heist. The next chapter begins with the meeting of two brothers, Richard Markham (age 15) and Eugene Markham (age 19) issuing from the house and meeting at the top of a hill. Eugene has been home to beg his father to help him settle debts that he had incurred after joining a regiment, promising that he would from then on not give in to the dissipations that placed him into debt. Their father refused, however, and Eugene resolves to go forth and make his own fortune in the world. Richard and Eugene agree to meet again in twelve years at this same spot, to compare who has done better in the world. It so happens that four years later, the father dies, and leaves his fortune to Richard. One day, Richard (who has generally kept to himself, sheltered) makes the acquaintance of the Honorable Archur Chichester, who introduces him to aristocratic life, in which (Chichester says) it is okay for single gentleman to take mistresses. Chichester invites Richard to meet his baronet friend, and also his baronet friend's mistress, Mrs. Arlington.

Chapters VI-X:
Chapter VI introduces the setting of a boudoir in a beautiful villa where the paraphernalia of men and women's toilette are mixed up. A woman occupies the boudoir reading as a female servant enters. The woman is under the guardianship of one Mr. Stephens, who requires her to dress up as "Walter" (hence the male toilette items) even though she is "Eliza," the real Walter's sister. In the course of a conversation with one George Montague, who also knows the secret that she is in fact female, she reveals that she is the youth at the beginning in the thunderstorm. She had survived her plunge and escaped. She also tells how she once went to an opera and won an invitation to Mrs. Arlington's, and made the acquaintance of Richard Markham there. The narrative then flashes back to Richard Markham in Chapter X, telling how he falls in love with Mrs. Arlington who then tells him her own sad life story, in which George Montague tricked her father out of all of his money (asking her father to give him money for speculation) and then left her afterwards. Richard promises to restore her to honor.

Chapters XIII-XIX: Markham continues his "learning" about the many sordid experiences in London life. Among other places, he is taken to "The Hell," a gambling house where he witnesses the devastating scene of a young officer losing all of his money and then shooting himself in the head. The description of this act is lurid--the man blows his brains out and falls over in a pool of blood. A police officer shows up and shines lantern on Markham's face; though innocent, Markham manages to get himself taken to Newgate.

Chapter XVII-XXIII:
In a "den of horrors" (before commencing with this story, the narrator makes some polemical statements about how what is to follow is not exaggeration), a mother beats her two children, a boy of seven and a girl of five, for not bringing back enough money from a day of begging. When the father comes home, she concocts a plan for him to take the boy on burglary heists. Her other plan is to blind the eyes of her daughter so that she will draw more compassion to herself and hence more money. She doesn't get a chance to do this (thankfully); after coming back from a night of drinking, the father hits her for berating him and murders her when she turns against the children. When he hits her in the head, she falls over and hits her eye on the edge of the table and fractures her skull. The father pretends he is going to fetch a doctor and leaves his children with the corpse of their mother.

Chapters XXIII-XXIX:
Back at the Old Smithfield House, the scene of the first chapter, the "ruffians" Dick and Tom hide Bill Bolton, the man who has murdered his wife, in a vault below the house, adjacent to where "Walter" had made his escape. Markham meanwhile has landed in Newgate, where his idealistic notions of the English system of justice are broken. Even before they are judged, prisoners endure privations in Newgate. The narration laments that he can only talk to his advocate, Mr. Monroe (friend of his father's) through grates. The other prisoners talk about which judges are lenient, how to act in their own best interests, and also which judges can be bribed and so forth. Markham is slightly cheered, however, by Monroe's visit. At Newgate, Markham meets a "Republican," Thomas Armstrong, who tells him how he was let down by George Montague who took his charity and then revealed all of his political secrets to the government. Armstrong is a noble man who speaks out against the wrongs of government and social institutions and has hence landed himself in jail. When Markham says that he knows Montague, Armstrong's superior character leads him to say that he forgives Montague. Markham also meets someone quite different, a "resurrection man" or a body-snatcher (someone who digs up bodies from the grave and sells them for science experiments). The body-snatcher involves Markham in shady dealings, asking him to accept packages for him. Meanwhile, in his dungeon, Bill receives food from Dick, though Bill is kind of losing it, imagining many scary visions including hallucinations that he sees his murdered wife. He hears that officials have offered 100,000 pounds for his capture so he must nevertheless stay put. One time he comes up the stairs to receive food from Dick, and the officers catch sight of him. Bill thinks Dick has sold him out, and kills Dick with a knife he has just asked for. Bill find out that it is actually the resurrection man that has sold him out. Bill is taken to Newgate, of course.

Chapters XLII-LVI:
At The Dark House tavern in Spitalfields, Markham, having found his way out of jail, goes in seek of the resurrection man to square away his own innocence through paying him. At the tavern, the resurrection man is late, and he manages to get his innocence signed away by Pocock (actually Mr. Talbot, another crook and friend of the baronet) and consequently doesn't need to pay the resurrection man. In another chapter, the work of the body-snatchers is given in detail through a description of a heist performed by the resurrection man and his gang for the surgeon. They have precise and exacting methodologies and successfully exhume a body without signs of the grave being violated. In later chapters, we are introduced to one poor Ellen Monroe and her father; they are so poor that she agreed to work as a seamstress earning only sixpence for seventeen hours of work. Ellen's story is one of compelled ruin: forced by circumstances of poverty and wanting to help her poor father, she listens to a hag's advice and allows her face to be used for a statuary making plaster casts. From there, she poses half-naked for a sculptor, and then eventually, fully nude for a photographer. One day, she finds that she is no longer pure or chaste of mind. The narration blames the old hag for deliberately leading her down a "road to ruin."

Chapters LVIII-LX: This section has one of Reynolds's most famous depictions of upper class corruption: on New Year's Day, 1839, the resurrection man and the "cracksman" sends a young boy into Buckingham Palace in order to find out enough information about the palace so that a heist may be planned. The young boy successfully penetrates the interior of Buckingham palace and even sits on the throne when no one is looking. Queen Victoria is kind of a dupe in Reynolds's treatment of her; her advisers seem to keep the knowledge of suffering subjects from her. The chapter on New Year's Day takes a quick detour from narrative to wax polemical on the subject of the wealthy versus the poor. A social chart with the industrious classes at the bottom, and the sovereign at the top illustrates the unethical burden placed on the "industrious classes" to support the few rich members of society. The differences between their meals on New Year's Day are included to illustrate the central theme of "contrasts" with which the prologue began.

[Mysteries of London in its entirety is about 4.5 million words in length; the wrapping up of its plot includes Eugene (who has been a liar and a cheater under many assumed identities) dying at last in his brother's arms. The one brother turns out good and honorable, and the other evil and selfish, though they have both threaded their way through the labyrinth of London. Eugene ends up marrying Ellen Monroe, after she essentially becomes a depraved villain who blackmails Eugene into marriage. In a much happier ending, Richard Markham helps an Italian state, Castelcicala succeed in its struggle for independence, and ends up marrying Isabella, the daughter of the new ruler.]

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Reynolds's work has not generally been included in the Victorian canon for obvious reasons of its status as "lowbrow" literature, but recent scholars have taken up his works in order to study the cultural moment which its popularity reflected. Generic sources for Mysteries are pretty clear: the Newgate novel, melodrama, and gothic writing. In particular, the 1840s experienced a kind of "mystery writing" craze, and Reynolds's Mysteries perhaps reflects this movement's apogee.

The antagonism between Dickens and Reynolds largely reflects how the two men viewed approaches to solving social problems. Reynolds was not afraid to be polemical; certainly, the bold declaration of the contrasts between wealth and poverty in the prologue and elsewhere throughout the series makes Reynolds much more of a radical. The sensational aspects of his literature were calculated specifically to inspire the "masses"--Reynolds did not want to be a respectable writer for the middle-class reading public. Dickens, for his part, said that he held Reynolds's "name with which no lady's, and no gentleman's, should be associated," referring specifically to Reynolds's participation in an unruly Chartist open-air meeting in 1848. Yet, to modern audiences, one can't help but to point to many similarities between Dickens's serial writing and Reynolds's. Oliver Twist showcases Dickens's own indebtedness to the Newgate novel, and many contemporaries commented too on the melodramatic aspects of Dickens's stories. Both men importantly explored the notion of the Victorian poor as being compelled by circumstance towards evil ends, countering dominant discourses of the reform era which located evil as endemic amongst the poor. Thus, though these men imagined themselves as deeply at odds, the line between what was a respectable way of expressing such notions and what was not wasn't always clear. Reynolds used many of the same techniques as Dickens to appeal to his audiences's sympathies, only that he stretched them further and aimed at inspiring a more radical social movement.

The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett

Edition: The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories (Signet Classics)
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
The Country of the Pointed Firs was originally published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1896. Chapters 1-7 appeared in January, 8-11 in March, 12-15 in July, and 16-19 in September. The eventual book publication included some additions, including the two final chapters. Due to the success of Country, Jewett published a few more Dunnet Landing stories over the course of her lifetime. Country is widely considered to be Jewett's best work and has earned her a place in the canon of American regionalism, a late nineteenth-century literary movement in which authors detailed the history, topography, customs, and lives in a particular locality.

SUMMARY:
The novel opens with the narrator revisiting the coastal town of Dunnet in Maine where she had been two or three summers ago which she describes as "unchanged" and with "the same quaintness of the village with its elaborate conventionalities." She lodges with a Mrs. Todd, an eccentric herbalist and widow who had for a long time been in love with someone other than her husband, a man above her station that she had been unable to marry. The narrator is a writer, and in order to get work done, she frequently takes herself away to an old schoolhouse. One time, after the funeral of an old woman named Mrs. Beggs, the narrator is interrupted at the schoolhouse by one Captain Littlepage, an old, retired sea-captain who many regard as a bit "flighty" in his advanced age. Captain Littlepage makes an audience of the narrator, telling her a story about when he was once shipwrecked while on their way to Fort Churchill on the Hudson Bay. There, he was rescued at an old missionary station, where he lodged with a man named Gafett, who told him a story about how his own ship had been wrecked, after he and his men met with some strange encounters in the arctic. They had seen a foggy town beyond where ships usually ventured, with foggy-shaped men: Gaffet posited that it was a sort of purgatory for souls crossing to the next world. The story clearly affects the narrator, though she is inclined to view his story as apocryphal.

One morning, the narrator agrees to accompany Mrs. Todd to Green Island, where her eighty-six year old mother lived. They take a boat out, catching a haddock fish on their way. The narrator spends some pleasant times at Green Island, meeting the bashful but gentle William, Mrs. Todd's brother, in addition to her mother the gracious hostess. They make chowder together, drink tea, and at Mrs. Todd's suggestion, they sing some songs. It seems that there is evidence of some strain between Mrs. Todd and William's relationship; the sister is much more sociable and living at Green Island wouldn't be enough for her, as pleasant as it is. At Green Island, Mrs. Todd shows the narrator some old daguerrotypes of her family and also shows her a spot where she and her husband Nathan frequented during their courtship. Nathan had been lost at sea before he could find out that her heart had already belonged to someone else.

A visitor named Mrs. Fosdick, whom the narrator describes as like a "strange sail" come upon the horizon, arrives at Mrs. Todd's. Though Mrs. Fosdick proves inconsiderate as far as her not giving exactly when she was going to arrive, she is an old girlhood friend of Mrs. Todd's. Together, they reminisce on old times and tell the narrator a story about "poor Joanna." Joanna was a cousin of Nathan Todd's, who decided after being jilted by her young lover to live all alone on an island called Shell-Heap Island. No one could convince her to live elsewhere, and she made do all alone, with friends sometimes sending her some gifts. Mrs. Todd recalls visiting her once soon after her marriage to Nathan. Joanna received her kindly, but reiterated her commitment to staying on the island as a kind of penance for having committed sin of being apart from everyone else. Sometime after Mrs. Fosdick's visit, the narrator, out of curiosity, visits the place of Joanna's old dwelling on Shell-Heap Island. There, she muses how in everyone "there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness."

In the third section, the narrator tells of going on a "great expedition" out to the Bowden family reunion. Mrs. Blackett, Mrs. Todd's mother, has come for the occasion. Together, the three women ride out on a country road over to the Bowden family reunion. The reunion is a grand affair, showcasing the "hidden fire of enthusiasm in the New England nature," an occasion for sharing old family anecdotes, history, and touching base with old acquaintances. The narrator is impressed particularly with some baked goods with "elaborate reading matter" on them pertaining to the Bowden family. Leaving the reunion, the narrator feels as if she has been amongst old acquaintances as well and muses on how "it is the old who really value such opportunities [as reunions]; as for the young, it is the habit of every day to meet their comrades--the time of separation has not yet come."

The final two chapters tell of the narrator getting to know an old fisherman, Elijah Tilley, near the end of the summer. He isn't used to much company after his wife died eight years ago, and up until that afternoon, the narrator and others had found men such as himself inaccessible and secretive. The two end up becoming friends, however, in the brief span of the afternoon. It is soon time for the narrator to depart for the summer was over. Mrs. Todd doesn't allow for an emotional goodbye, but takes care to put together all of the narrator's packages neatly, including with them a coral pin which she was supposed to have given Joanna years ago during her visit, but which Joanna refused. Joanna had told Mrs. Todd to wear it and to remember her by, for the "love of both of us" (referring to Nathan and herself).

CRITICAL ANALYSIS/APPROACH:
The Country of the Pointed Firs is classed as an exemplary piece of local color fiction or regionalism, genres which are generally thought of as builders of national identity after the trauma of the civil war. Such works often detail the diversity of the American landscape, sketching out the customs, landscapes, and peoples of a particular local area, often referring to these locales with a sense of reverence, nostalgia, and sentimental feeling.

Characteristic of local color fiction, Country has no sense of an unfolding plot, but reads more like a series of sketches, and certainly the narrator embodies much nostalgia for the kind of community which she describes. According to Willa Cather later on, Jewett had referred at times to her work as the "Pointed Fir Papers" and "sketches," but not ever as stories. These designations are important because they give the sense of the work as a kind of archival account of a particular area at a particular time--in this case, the dying, maritime coastal communities of Maine. Jewett's narrator's goal in compiling this archive of her summer amongst the inhabitants of Dunnet is not, however, a project to revive or bring back a way of life which she comes to have so much affection for. The community's valuation of old acquaintances, tradition, old family stories, and the imaginative accounts which come out of a wandering maritime life deeply strikes a chord with the narrator, but she does not seek to carry these values back to her city life. As she steams away from Dunnet after the summer, she makes a point of how the Dunnet coasts were "lost to [her] sight." Indeed, it seems that it is Dunnet's isolation, its difference and disconnection from modern city life that makes it special for the narrator. The story of Joanna might serve as a kind metonym for Dunnet: Joanna's story is more precious for the fact that she had chosen to remain alone until her death. Captain Littlepage's account of the isolated arctic town, or the life of Elijah Tilley might be additional metonyms that convey a similar sense of affective power which adheres in isolation. Looking at Mrs. Todd from a distance as the narrator departs, she finds her "mateless and appealing," ascribing an almost mystical sense to her apartness and wholeness, though unmarried and disconnected. As an "archive," these "papers" mimic this contradiction of affective cohesiveness and isolation: they tell of a deeply moving experience, but at the same time the "past-ness" of this experience isolates it from the world to which the narrator will return.

It is interesting, finally, to think about this kind of archival account of New England in relation to earlier, pre-civil war ones like Hawthorne's. Hawthorne's accounts (see entry on Twice Told Tales) are less nostalgic and instead posit a kind of living history, in which ghosts of the American past continue to haunt the present. Stories are passed on from generation to generation; an assumption of historical continuity underlies them. Nostalgia (as opposed to continuity) in Jewett's post-civil war era work posits a break with the past. This important difference suggests Jewett recalibrates contemporary America's relationship to New England, the place of its origins, as one which values yet definitively breaks with the past.

Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Uncle Tom's Cabin was originally published as installments in an abolitionist newspaper of small circulation called the National Era based in Washington D.C. It was edited by a friend of Beecher Stowe's, Gamaliel Bailey. The original subtitle for the installments was "The Man that Was a Thing," but when the first installment appeared on June 5, 1851, the subtitle was changed to "Life Among the Lowly." Uncle Tom's Cabin was not slated to be more than three or four numbers spanning two or three weeks, Stowe having previously only written a few sketch-like pieces. It ended up being more than forty numbers, stretching over a period of a year, gaining a wide and loyal readership. The book edition met with considerable success on both sides of the Atlantic; during the first year of publication in America, over 300,000 copies were sold (though Stowe and her husband did not end up making much from the profits because they didn't have enough money to invest in the copyright at the time of the publishers approached them).

Stowe's arguments in Uncle Tom's Cabin became a rallying point for the abolitionists after the recent passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850.

SUMMARY:
Mr. Shelby, a kind slave-owner in Kentucky, is indebted to a slave-trader, Mr. Haley and must sell his most loyal slave, Tom, and a young woman named Eliza's little boy. Eliza overhears that the transaction will happen, and decides to run away. Recently, Eliza has just heard from her husband George, who works under a cruel master and was no longer able to take it. George told Eliza that he would be running away to Canada and that he hoped to buy her and his son one day. With the help of Mrs. Shelby and the other slaves working for Mr. Shelby, Mr. Haley misses catching Eliza, who jumps into the frozen river and escapes to Ohio just in time. On the other side, she is directed by a friend to the house of the senator Mr. Bird and his wife, who have just been discussing the Fugitive Slave Law, which Mr. Bird supported but his wife did not. When Eliza arrives at their house, cut up and in need of help, Mr. Bird abandons his principles and agrees to help her, driving her in a carriage to safety at a man's house in the woods. This man used to be a slaveowner before his conscience led to his freeing all of them.

Tom takes leave of Aunt Chloe (his wife), who cooks him a final meal. Tom bears up against his fate. At a tavern in Kentucky, there is a notice out for George. George, who is white enough to pass as Spanish, disguises himself and runs into Mr. Wilson, a manufacturer whom he had worked with at some point. Mr. Wilson had taught George how to read, and taken a kind interest to him, so he does not blow George's cover. Meanwhile, Mr. Haley takes Tom on boat to the slave market. On the boat, a young woman drowns herself after her child is taken away from her and sold. The account flashes back to Eliza, who has arrived at a Quaker settlement. There, she has the great luck of being reunited with George, who has also taken refuge there. Traveling down Mississippi towards New Orleans, Tom makes the acquaintance of a little girl named Eva and her father Augustine St. Clare while on the boat. Eva is a kind and playful child who takes a liking to Tom. When she falls overboard, Tom saves her. Eva begs her father to buy Tom. St. Clare is an indulgent father, and trusting the good instincts of his rather exceptional little girl, he buys Tom to be their coachman. St. Clare lives in a mansion in New Orleans with his high-maintenance and vain wife Marie who imagines herself to have numerous sicknesses and is generally confined to bed. He had been in love with a woman before who ended up being forced to marry someone else. When he had found out that she still loved him and had been forced, it was too late and he had married Marie. St. Clare is kind and genial towards his slaves, and allows Eva to love them as her own family. Marie is of a very different opinion, and thinks that distinctions ought to be maintained between classes of people. In order to help out with raising Eva and managing other duties on the mansion, St. Clare brings his New England cousin Miss Ophelia to New Orleans: though the very opposite of St. Clare in terms of her strict, orderly, and industrious New England ethics, the two seem to appreciate each other and work well together in a kind of complementary way.

George and Eliza make their way towards Canada, but are stopped by Tom Loker and his gang hired by Haley to pursue them. George wounds Tom, and in the scuffle, the other men desert him. The injured Tom is taken to a Quaker settlement to recover, and George and Eliza continue on their way. Meanwhile, at the St. Clare's, a sad story is revealed about a slave in a neighboring estate, Prue, who gets drunk in order to alleviate her pain. Prue ends up whipped to death by her master; the story has a great effect on Eva. St. Clare and Ophelia engage in a lengthy debate on their beliefs, Ophelia berating him for being part of such an unjust system as slavery, and St. Clare showing up Ophelia as an unknowing and righteous northerner who doesn't know just how ingrained the system is. St. Clare feels that to keep his slaves happy and well-provided for is the best he can do. As a kind of challenge to Miss Ophelia, St. Clare mischievously buys a young, wild, and fiery girl named Topsy who has been mistreated, charging Ophelia with reforming her and essentially bringing her up. Topsy overwhelms Miss Ophelia, stealing things and asserting that she is just "bad" because she is black, something which she has had drummed into her. 

In the meanwhile, Chloe receives a letter from Tom, and decides to makes cakes to sell in order to earn money to go towards buying Tom back--Mrs. Shelby agrees to this plan. Back at the St. Clare's, Eva has contracted tuberculosis, and her health wears away. Even as she weakens, however, the child's goodness has a healing effect on those around her. For example, when the St. Clares summer at Lake Pontchartrain, Eva manages to soften her cousin Henrique towards his slave, Dodo. At Lake Pontchartrain, St. Clare and his brother Alfred argue over their views on slavery--Alfred takes the view that Africans are lower on the scale of human development and hence are rightfully subjugated. Back at home, Eva reforms Topsy by telling her that she loves her, and that Topsy must be good for her sake though she will soon be gone to heaven. Eva gives a lock of her hair to Topsy and also to all of the slaves on her father's estate, asking them to remember to be good to one another and to love one another when she has gone. Miss Ophelia overhears the conversation between Topsy and Eva and realizes she has not loved Topsy, and strives to be more like Eva. Eva dies, with a vision of heaven on her lips. After her death, St. Clare tries to come to the faith which has been so natural to his child, but try as he might, fails. Tom very nearly convinces him, and Tom promises him that he will not leave him until he comes to know God as well. Miss Ophelia, inspired to make Topsy her own, asks for legal custody of Topsy. Things seem to be going well as St. Clare prepares to free Tom (since it was Eva's wish), but unfortunately St. Clare is stabbed at a cafe while breaking up a fight. He dies, and true to Tom's word, he comes to God in his dying moment while Tom is around. St. Clare calls out to his mother in his dying breath, a woman with a Christ-like capacity to love, much like Eva.  

After St. Clare's death, Marie sends the slaves to a slave warehouse, despite Miss Ophelia's pleas. At the warehouse with Tom are two women named Susan and Emmeline, mother and daughter, who become separated in the auction. The tyrannical and cruel Simon Legree buys both Tom and Emmeline. Legree runs his place with an iron fist, brutalizing his slaves and teaching them to brutalize each other as well. He has two trained overseers, Sambo and Quimbo, whom he pits against each other in order to maximize his own power. Legree tries to make Tom into a brutal overseer as well, but Tom remains true to his faith. When he refuses to whip a woman named Lucy who hasn't filled her cotton sack quota for the day, Tom takes a brutal beating from the overseers, ordered by Legree. A half-black, half-white slave by the name of Cassy comes to make him feel better, bringing him water and nursing his wounds. Cassy is intensely cynical and doesn't believe in God because of what she has suffered--she was brought up well, only to marry a young lawyer who ditched her. Subsequently, she and her children were separately sold into slavery. She ended up at Legree's as kind of his mistress; Emmeline has come to replace Cassy since she is now older. Legree is revealed as not such a brave man, and highly superstitious: when the overseers bring to him Eva's golden lock (confiscated from Tom), he is deeply afraid because his pious mother once sent him a lock of hers upon her death, hoping that he would mend his evil ways.

George Harris and Eliza reach Canada, and Tom Loker becomes a reformed man after being nursed back to health by the Quakers. At Legree's, Cassy wants to kill Legree but Tom prevents her, telling her that the Lord has enjoined them to love all fellow men. Cassy and Emmeline hatch a plan to escape instead, which capitalizes on Legree's fear of ghosts. Cassy installs a bottle hanging from a rope in the garret so that howling sounds are made when the wind blew through the garret. Cassy and Emmeline then run away conspicuously, returning to hide in the garret, where Legree will not venture. Legree sends all of his men on a wild goose chase, thinking Cassy and Emmeline have taken towards the swamp. Legree in his rage tries to get an answer out of Tom and failing to do so, essentially beats him to death. In his dying breath, however, Tom manages to make converts out of Sambo and Quimbo. The young George Shelby too, has finally managed to locate Tom, and manages to have a final exchange with Tom before he dies. George gives Tom a good burial, and leaves to go home. It turns out that he is on the same boat as Cassy and Emmeline and some important discoveries are made: Cassy is Eliza's mother, and another woman on the boat, Madame de Thoux, is George Harris's sister. The group hatches a plan for a reunion in Canada. The reunited family eventually decide to resettle in Liberia and Emmeline goes with them as well, having found a good husband. The narrative includes an eloquent appeal from George as to his reasons for resettling: he wants to be a free man who also has his own African nation to be loyal to. Back in America, George Shelby frees all of his slaves and has them work for him as freemen receiving wages. Topsy also does well, eventually becoming a missionary to Africa.  

The final chapter is a kind of epilogue in which Harriet Beecher Stowe affirms that the stories she has given are drawn from real life examples. She provides various testimonies of true events which parallel the stories which she has given. She ends with an appeal to both northerners and southerners to band together to eliminate the unjust, un-Christian institution of slavery. She also stresses the importance of giving a Christian education to the freed slaves in order that they may then return to Africa and establish their own free Christian nation.  

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Uncle Tom's Cabin offers a really interesting case of how the periodical press shaped the content and purposes of the work as it was being published. As I mentioned above in the publication history section, Stowe's original ambitions for her text seemed much smaller. In terms of how the story unravels, the small-scale appeal of the work as a series of "sketches" (see Irving, an inaugural sketch-writer in America) is much more apparent in the earlier part of the work; the idea that a larger work of fiction might have weighty moral and political effects doesn't really crystallized until in the work. The earlier sections contain more addresses to the reader, and a sense that the narrator is taking the reader through the various scenes in order to show him/her the different aspects of slavery in the south. Later sections of the book contain fewer direct addresses to the reader since the work becomes markedly more novelistic, concentrating more on dialogue, characterization, and the unraveling of the plot, but the addresses that remain are markedly more bold in suggesting a correct Christian morality.
 
Stowe's preface for the first edition of the book publication interestingly tries to link together the small-scale beginnings as a series of "sketches" with its eventual large-scale impact. She writes directly that "The object of these sketches is to awaken sympathy and feeling for the African race." Her decision to maintain that Uncle Tom's Cabin is a collection of mere sketches, I argue, importantly has to do with the sketch's closer connection to the "real life" element. Novels are the realm of romance and unreality, while journalistic sketches show a reader what happens in everyday life where s/he may not be able to experience it directly. Elsewhere in the preface, Stowe makes clear the importance of the connection between her fiction and real life: "The poet, the painter, and the artist now seek out and embellish the common and gentler humanities of life, and, under the allurements of fiction, breathe a humanizing and subduing influence, favorable to the development of the great principles of Christian brotherhood." In the final chapter, she offers testimonies of the real life characters including an "official" account from reformer Horace Mann and her husband's documentation of successfully educated blacks to stress the reality on which her fiction was based. In this final chapter, she calls fiction a "dramatization of reality" which would lead to healthful, moral effects--markedly distancing her fiction from anything romanticized or sensational.

Selections from Christina Rossetti

“Goblin Market,” Rossetti's most famous poem, tells the story of Laura and Lizzie, two sisters, one of which is tempted by the goblin's fruit and one who saves her sister after she has fallen. The poem begins catchy adverstising jingle of the goblins: "Morning and evening / Maids heard the goblins cry: / Come buy, come buy our orchard fruits, / Come buy come buy." Laura is tempted by their catchy phrases, and wants to partake of the fruits but has no coin. The goblins answer that she might cut off one of her golden locks in exchange for fruit. She agrees and sensually enjoys the fruits she buys. Back at home, Lizzie tries to warn Laura away from the goblin men, reminding her of "Jeanie, / How she met them in the moonlight" and then "pined and pined away." This is, of course, what ends up happening to Laura and so Lizzie must save her. Lizzie goes herself to the goblins, tosses them a penny and asks them to toss her some fruit. The goblins don't allow her to leave and they harass and assault her. Lizzie withstands the attack, "White and golden Lizzie stood / Like a lily in a flood," maintaining her chastity and refusing to eat the fruits which are shoved into her mouth. Triumphant, Lizzie goes back to Laura back at home and allows Laura to kiss her on the mouth. Having licked the fruits off of her pure sister's mouth, Laura is cured. In the end, though the poem strongly suggests the primacy of sisterhood over male-female relationships, the two of them marry. Still, they pass on the importance of sisterhood to their daughters, telling them of the story of the goblin man: joining hands, the children would chant, "For there is no friend like a sister / In calm or stormy weather; / To cheer one on the tedious way, / To fetch one if one goes astray, / To lift one if one totters down, / To strengthen whilst one stands." The poem seems to suggest that men are really only needed in order that women might have children (and specifically, daughters)--otherwise, Lizzie and Laura's triumph against the male sex seems rather complete. Additionally, the male sex (via the goblins and their advertising jingle) is associated with an unhealthy economy of buying and selling and delirious consumption which the women successfully resist by reaffirming less "modern" relationships and traditions (sisterhood, and cautionary tales passed down through the generations).  

“The Prince’s Progress” is the story of a prince who takes a long time to get to his waiting bride. When he reaches her finally at the end, she has died (apparently, ten years have passed). Along the way, the Prince encounters a milkmaid enchantress (“Was it milk now, or was it cream? / Was she a maid, or an evil dream?”) from whom he begs a glass of milk. In return, she exacts from him the price of keeping her company for one day. Next, the prince encounters a “land of chasm and rent, a land / of rugged blackness.” Needing shelter, he finds a cave in which an old man is stirring a pot. The old man says he is preparing the elixir of life, and tells the prince he may stay with him if he helped him with the potion. The old man dies before he can take a draught of the potion; the prince takes a phial of it, thinking that his bride would forgive his delay if he brought her the elixir. Finally, the prince nearly drowns on his journey, and is recovered by unknown beings (“Kind hands do and undo, / Kind voices whisper and coo”). When he finally reaches the bride’s palace, he meets with her funeral: she wears poppies in her hair, which has turned from brown to silver.

“Song [‘When I am dead my dearest’]”: In this short poem of sixteen lines, the speaker asks her lover to sing no songs for her after she is dead, negating also the usual tributes of roses or cypresses on her grave. She would rather he be the “green grass above [her]” and charges him to remember or forget, as he will. The second stanza explains that this is because she will not experience earthly sensory experiences such as shadows, rain, or the nightingale and that she too will either forget or remember after death. 

“In an Artist’s Studio” describes how "one face" haunts the canvases of a (male) artist's works. The ending reveals that the face in its various contexts is "Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright; / Not as she is, but as she fills his dream," suggesting the actual woman's separation from the image, which seems subordinated to the life of the male artist. 

“A Better Resurrection” consists of three stanzas, each of which metaphorize the speaker's fallen condition and the need for Jesus Christ to bring her out of this condition. The first stanza says that her heart is like a stone, "numbed too much for hopes and fears" and her life is a "falling leaf" so she exhorts Jesus to "quicken" her. The second stanza says that her life is as barren as a "harvest dwindled to a husk," so she exhorts Jesus to "rise" in her. Finally the speaker imagines herself as a cracked bowl that needs to be repaired by the fire of Christ in order that he may drink from it. The progression suggests that the third metaphor is the most effective--it is more violent, less naturalistic, and more subservient, as the bowl needs to be repaired in order to serve Chris. 

“Christian and Jew: A Dialogue” imagines a Christian speaker describing the various joys in perceiving God while the Jewish speaker fails to perceive these joys. The stanzas alternate between the Christian's joy and the Jew's denial--for example, the first stanza reads, "'Oh happy happy land! / Angels like rushes stand / About the wells of light.' -- 'Alas I have not eyes for this fair sight: / Hold fast my hand.'" Finally the Christian tells the Jew, "Be not afraid, arise, be no more dumb; / Arise, shine / For thy light has come." The solution which the poem offers is that God will "blot out their sin / Let life begin." The poem's overall structure sets up a problematic relation, and answers that God alone (and not the Christian) can do the work of saving the Jew from his sins.

In “The Iniquity of the Fathers upon the Children [Under the Rose],” the speaker is Margaret, an illegitimate child born to an unknown father. She begins by telling that she was born "under the rose," knowing her mother but not her father. Because of the shame of her birth, she was sent away to a village where dwelt "my Lady at the Hall," a well-to-do, unmarried lady who did not stint anyone who needed something from her. When Margaret's old nurse dies, Margaret receives a ring which holds the secret of her birth. Saddened by her old nurse's death, Margaret also begins to waste away, but the lady comes to sit by her bedside. Gradually, Margaret comes to see that the lady is her mother, though this relation must remain unspoken. When Margaret gets better, she becomes a maid (really a "friend, servant, child," she says) at the lady's hall. There, she lives without acknowledging the relation, though in the end she does not blame her mother but curses her father, and makes the radical statement that she'll not own any man's name: "I'll not blot out my shame / With any man's good name / But nameless I stand, / My hand is my own hand, / And nameless as I came go to the dark land." This final line signals that the only "equality" that might be available is that of when everyone goes to their grave, but this is better than submitting to the inequalities perpetuated by society.

“The Lowest Room” contrasts two sisters: the speaker reflects on the heroism and passion of the classical age, having read Homer, and her sister dismisses past heroism and is content with the life of the pious, contemporary Christian wife. The speaker protests that in classical times, "They hated with intenser hate / And loved with fuller love," living life with a greater passion than today. The sister shrugs off these sentiments and answers that "To me our days seem pleasant days, / Our home a haven of pure content...Homer, though greater than his gods, / With rough hewn virtues was sufficed / And rough hewn men: but what are such / To us who learn of Christ?" The poem breaks after the sister hears her name called outside in the garden; presumably it is her lover, and she immediately forgets the subject at hand. After the break, the speaker says that twenty years have passed, her sister now a happy wife. The speaker, in contrast, has accepted a very different fate: "While I? I sat alone and watched; / My lot in life, to live alone, / In mine own world of interests, / Much felt but little shown." In a word, she has accepted the "lowest place." Interestingly, the poem ends on a Christian note, despite the speaker feeling more of a penchant for the classical world, and this Christian note suggests she believes that her version of Christianity to be truer than her sister's conventional version: Yea, sometimes still I lift my heart / To the Archangelic trumpet-burst, / When all deep secrets shall be shown, / And many last be first." She, in the "lowest place" will be first, as God has so promised in Matthew 20:16. 

“A Christmas Carol [In the bleak mid-winter’]” expresses how a "stable place sufficed / To Lord God Almighty Jesus Christ" even though neither Heaven nor Earth can hold or sustain him. This spurs the speaker to wonder what the speaker can offer God. Realizing that what seemed so humble (a stable, or "a breastful of milk" and "a mangerful of hay") was enough, the speaker offers his heart.

“A Birthday” is a short, lighthearted poem in easy tetrameter in which a speaker says that it is the "birthday of [her] life" because "my love is come to me." This seems a conventional love poem, but the imagery suggests a religious meaning. She says that she is "gladder" than a bird with a nest on a watered shoot, an apple-treat bent over with ripe fruit, a rainbow shell on a halcyon sea--all images of nature which seem rather precarious. Instead, the speaker desires to be adorned with clothing which alludes to Christ's sovereignty, which seems far more substantial than the (pagan) images of nature (though not that they aren't also powerful): "Raise me a dais of silk and down; / Hang it with vair and purple dyes..."  

Mrs. Warren's Profession by George Bernard Shaw

Edition: Mrs. Warren's profession
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
George Bernard Shaw finished writing Mrs. Warren's Profession in 1893, but it was not produced on stage until 1903. Not surprisingly for its subject matter at the time, the play was met with controversy and unkind reviews labeling the work as immoral.


SUMMARY:
Act I:
Mr. Praed, a friend of Mrs. Kitty Warren's, arrives at a cottage garden and finds Vivie Warren, Mrs. Warren's 22-year old daughter reading books in a hammock. He informs her that Mrs. Warren has promised him a meeting with her and that she will also be presently arriving. Vivie shocks Praed with her firm masculine handshake, practical desire to be a law clerk, and her claim that she won a prize at Cambridge only because her mother promised her 50 pounds for it. Indeed, Praed finds that Vivie acts out the part of a young professional man: she affirms, "I like working and getting paid for it. When I'm tired of working, I like a comfortable chair, a cigar, a little whisky, and a novel with a good detective story in it." Soon, Mrs. Warren arrives, with another older man who is her friend, George Crofts. In a private conversation with one another, the somewhat sleazy Crofts tells Praed that he thinks he might be Vivie's father and he is worried because he is attracted to her. Meanwhile, Frank Gardner, a young and sporty young man arrives at the cottage as well. He is the son to a clergyman who tries to be an authoritative figure but thoroughly fails to do so, and a suitor to Vivie. When Mrs. Warren sees the Reverend Gardner, it is revealed that she is well-acquainted with him.

Act II:
Inside the cottage, Crofts and the Reverend counsel Frank against marrying Vivie (ostensibly because they all know Mrs. Warren's "profession"). When Vivie and Praed return from a walk together, it seems that she may have learned of her mother's profession from him. She tries to get Frank alone to talk to him, but his flippant flirtatiousness leads to her giving up having a serious conversation with him. Crofts, meanwhile, tells Mrs. Warren that it might be best if he marry Vivie, because then they could keep the secret of her profession within the family. Mrs. Warren resents Crofts's sleaziness. When Vivie and Mrs. Warren have a moment alone, Mrs. Warren finally explains her profession to her daughter, offering a compelling story that her circumstances led to there being no other option. Both Mrs. Warren and her sister Liz decided to capitalize on their appearances, indignantly refusing to "let other people trade in [their] good looks by employing [them] as shopgirls, or barmaids, or waitresses, when [they] could trade in them [them]selves and get all the profits instead of starvation wages." Vivie comes to understand her mother's position as a result of the limited options offered to women and admits: "My dear mother: you are a wonderful woman: you are stronger than all England." Thus, mother and daughter reconcile, Vivie feeling that they are both unconventional, independent women.

Act III:
The act opens the next morning at the Reverend's place. Praed and Crofts have stayed with him overnight, and apparently in his drunken state the previous evening, the Reverend had suggested inviring Mrs. Warren and her daughter over. This will be displeasing to the Reverend's wife, Frank's mother, for Mrs. Warren is not a "nice" woman (even if his wife may not know of his previous liaisons with Mrs. Warren). The wife decides to go out of town. When Vivie and her mother arrive, she has a chance to speak with Frank and to tell him that she has come to an understanding with her mother. Vivie also speaks with Crofts, who offers a marriage proposal which she naturally rejects, Crofts's offers of money and security not being particularly attractive to a person like Vivie who wants to hold her own. Vengefully, Crofts reveals to Vivie that her mother is still involved in the business of prostitution, trafficking other girls for profits. Moreover, Crofts was her business partner. He also reveals to Vivie and Frank that they are half sibilings, the Reverend being Vivie's father. Frank raises his rifle to shoot Crofts, but Vivie stops him. Vivie runs out and decides to seek work at Honoria Fraser's chambers as a kind of escape.

Act IV:
Frank eventually goes to the chancery after Vivie. There, he finds that she has become a partner at the firm. He tries to convince her to go out with him for a Saturday afternoon so that they may talk, but she refuses. Praed also shows up at the chancery, and together, Frank and Praed try to convince Vivie that she wants something more than the practical life she has chosen, but she resists both of their attempts to make her more "romantic" than she really is: "There are two subjects I want dropped, if you don't mind. One of them [to Frank] is love's young dream in any shape or form: the other [to Praed] is the romance and beauty of life, espcially Ostend and the gaiety of Brussels...If we three are to remain friends, I must be treated as a woman of business." Subsequently, Vivie reveals to the two of them what has happened and what her mother's profession has been and continues to be. The men are shocked, and leave off only to find that Mrs. Warren has arrived. Since Vivie has run off for a moment, the men try to convince Mrs. Warren to cancel her visit, but she decides to stay. When Vivie meets with her mother, she berates her for continuing her business, and lets her know that she wants nothing to do with her money. It isn't because of the profession's taint, Vivie says, but because her mother's continuance in the business reveals her to be a "conventional woman at heart" who desires the same trappings as any rich woman might desire: a life of leisure, nice clothes, operas, and diamonds. Vivie disowns her mother, and turns back to her work.

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
While George Bernard Shaw wrote in his 1902 preface that "Mrs. Warren's Profession was written in 1894 to draw attention to the truth that prostitution is caused, not by female depravity and male licentiousness, but simply by underpaying, undervaluing, and overworking women so shamefully that the poorest of them are forced to resort to prostitution to keep body and soul together," it is clear that this isn't all that the play reveals. Mrs. Warren doesn't turn out to be the heroine who only engages in prostitution because she is pressed by circumstances (Augusta Webster's "castaway" is, by contrast). Mrs. Warren may have started her profession because circumstances allowed her no other way of maintaining as much freedom as possible, but later on she continues in the business of prostitution in order to live a conventional life of leisure. In valuing the trappings of a lady of leisure, Mrs. Warren has entrapped herself and lost her freedom.

Vivie might come closest to being the heroine of the story, in that she is able to reject the conventions  of living as a lady of leisure. However, Shaw seems to suggest that the only other alternative is yet another trap: Vivie ends up "trapped" in the capitalist (masculine) economy of working "to make more money than I spend." In that sense, Vivie acknowledges that she is like her mother, only that her mother cares more for spending than she does. Vivie seems completely absorbed in the task of working and money making for the sake of the task itself. There is something very unsatisfying about Vivie's final, "matter-of-fact" behavior--is this machine-like state truly the only sort of radical freedom available?

Portraits by Augusta Webster

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Augusta Webster's collection of monologues, Portraits was published in 1870. Portraits constitutes some of her her most major works. Although the collection has often been characterized as consisting of "dramatic monologues," Webster's poems in this collection often lack a silent listener so might be more aptly referred to as interior monologues or soliloquies.

SUMMARY/MAJOR THEMES:
Women in a world which favors men
"Medea in Athens," the poem which opens the collection, begins (as many of the poems will later on) in a disorienting way for the reader because the speaker seems to be in the middle of a long train of thought. "Dead, is he?" Medea begins, referring to her lover Jason who has left her to make a political marriage to Glauce. In Greek myth, Medea killed her two children in revenge and eventually marries King Aegeus of Athens. The poem seems to be the occasion of hearing of Jason's death after her new marriage. Medea  finds it strange that the news of Jason's death doesn't "seem either good or ill" to her but merely "strange." From here, she launches into imagining a prophecy "a god breathed by my mouth," musing vividly on Jason's thoughts as he is shipwrecked on the sea. She imagines him looking upon her beauty, appreciating her worth, and rejecting Glauce's: "Medea, with her skills, her presciences, / Man's wisdom, woman's craft, her rage of love / That gave her serve me strength next divine, / Medea would have made what I would; / Glauce but what she could." Like most male figures in Webster's poetry, Jason here appreciates women for what she can do for his own ambitions. Yet, one can easily imagine, from the exaggerated nature of Jason's repentance towards Medea that Jason's thoughts are Medea's own desires, rather than the "prophecy" which she says she gives. Finally, Medea says she sees Jason's death; he breathes out "Medea's prophecy" with his expiring breath. Having gone through his death in her mind, Medea then berates herself for dwelling on it: "Medea! / What, is it thou? What, thou, this whimpering fool, / This kind meek coward!" She thinks how she wants him still alive only that he might dream and yearn for her--these things he "did," but since he is dead, he is no longer. It turns out that the greatest part of her lament is that his death has allowed him to forget her. In certain moments, Medea again bursts out that she loved Jason, painfully detailing her hurt and how he had ruined her calm, how he "Didst burn [her] cheek with kisses hot and strange," forever robbing her of her innocent composure and goodness. The poem ends antagonistically, asserting that Jason has been the author of his own children's death, and that he shall have no one on earth to remember him by. This is her ultimate revenge against a man with great ambitions--to forget him after his death.

"Circe" begins with a description of a coming storm; it isn't clear from the beginning that this is a monologue. This becomes clear in the line, "Oh welcome, welcome, though it rend my bowers," signaling Circe's own happiness that change is coming to her calm isle (this is the storm during which Odysseus's and his men come to her isle). Circe is bored by the monotony of her perfect, pleasant isle (an allegory for the kinds of lives Victorian women are supposed to relish within the home?). "Give me some change. Must life be only sweet, / All honey-pap as babes would have their food?" About sixty lines into the poem, she reveals that it is a soulmate that she longs for. She turns over the nature of her soulmate's relationship to her in her mind, thinking how he may be the answer to the question of why she is fair, and even more extremely, how his existence answers the question of her existence: "Why am I who I am? / But for the sake of him whom fate will send / One day to be my master utterly." The notion that women come to see their own existence only through seeing how men see them finds repeated expression in Webster's poetry. Like Medea, Circe has prophetic abilities and sees Odysseus's men coming to her isle where they will drink of her wine and turn into beasts. She clarifies, however, that they will not be turning into beasts, exactly, but that they will merely be revealing their true selves. The poem ends with the approaching "speck" of the men's ship.

"The Happiest Girl in the World" is an unnamed individual, who thinks aloud of her lover's promises to return just a week ago. Love has made the passing of time strange to her, and herself strange to herself: "I am so other than I was, so strange...And I think nothing, only hear him think." She expresses something similar to Circe in how loving a man forces women see themselves as they are seen by the man. Her love is somewhat uncertain, she thinks, because she can't tell when it began. In another moment of thinking about herself through his eyes, she imagines the vision of herself that he saw as he saw her in her field: "And while he watched the yellow lights that played / With the dim flickering shadows of the leaves / Over my yellow hair and soft pale dress..." She worries that this strange reflexivity in which the supposed moment of love at first sight is actually, for her, seeing herself as he sees her (rather than seeing him), means that she doesn't love him. She struggles with "forgetting myself in him," and fittingly, her lover has told her that he sees that she loves him when she is asleep (and hence probably the only state in which she forgets to think about herself through his gaze). Her questionings of loved aren't worked out before her lover approaches at the end of the poem.  

"A Castaway" is the longest poem in the collection and boldly imagines a high-class prostitute's monologue. Webster's castaway breaks the stereotypes (as evident from Rossetti's speakers' assumptions about Jenny, for example) of the prostitute as either disempowered and victimized, or debased and evil. The prostitute here is a kind of free-thinker; she chooses her profession because she hates the available, conventional roles for women, and needs to make a living. Her position is not apparent from the beginning of the monologue, where she reflects on the "simple thoughts" of her past self, writing mundane tasks down in her diary like "Studied French for an hour," "Read Modern History," and "Trimmed up my grey hat." Such activities, she later realizes, make up the prisoner-like life which women are expected to inhabit. Above all, she is disgusted with society's hypocrisy, going through how each profession--preacher, doctor, journalist, and tradesman all are hypocritical in their own way. She claims herself free of such hypocrisy, however, in admitting she is equal to the lower-class prostitute, only that she deals in "choicer ware." Housewives are self-righteous in their "virtue," "glass-case saints / Dianas under lock and key" of whom the speaker asks, "what right / More than the well-fed helpless barn-door fowl / To scorn the larcenous wild-birds?" Though she has been cast away from society, she is free and importantly, she asserts, "I have looked coolly on my what and why, / And I accept myself"--more than what most people can do in Victorian society. The speaker tackles the issue of "surplus women" in this period, acerbically blaming "God himself / Who puts too many women in the world." In the same tone with which she challenges the patriarchal systems of society, she boldly challenges God to make it right by killing off his extra women. Her critique is sharp and widespread, covering such topics as the female education system, society's logic that a woman's worth fades with her youth, the nature of love between men and women as actually "all selfishness" on the part of men, and the indifference of modern society. The poem ends with an interruption by visiting female company, the only thing which seems to relieve her from the emotional toll that her intellectualizing has taken.

"Faded" is a female speaker's address to a portrait of herself in younger days. At first, she resents the portrait for its unfading beauty--like other women in Webster's poetry, coming to the sad conclusion that a woman's worth fades with her beauty and youth. She protests that society allows men who continue to be ambitious, "wast[ing]" their tired brains on schemes a child should laugh at" but that women "must give ruin welcome, blaze our fact / Of nothingness." She ends with a thought that brings her solace, however: that the portrait too will eventually decay, though it will take a long time to do so. The portrait and herself will have a shared fate: "Both shall have had our fate...decay, neglect, / Loneliness, and then die and never a one / In the busy world the poorer for our loss." Like "The Castaway" the poem's heavy reflections are interrupted by cheery female company.

Religious faith and doubt
In "A Soul in Prison" a "Doubter lays aside his book" and begins to speak, yearning for the "teacher" (the learned man who has written the book) to help him believe. Try as he might, however, he cannot believe--he can't find the ledges with which to climb out of the prison. He feels that the teacher has forsaken him, whereas he hasn't forsaken murderers, thieves, cozeners, and harlots. The speaker provocatively points out that doubt is actually a very humble state which very much desires faith: "Doubt's to be ignorant, not to deny: / Doubt's to be wistful after perfect faith." A bit later in the poem, a similar sentiment is expressed in "I love not God, because I know Him not, / I do but long to love Him--long and long / With an ineffable great pain of void." The central problem of the poem is that the strong desire to love God doesn't help someone get closer to loving God. As the poem draws to a close, the speaker becomes more and more dismissive of the "teacher": "Our doubt is consciousness of ignorance, / Your faith unconsciousness of ignorance."


"A Preacher" reflects on the need for someone to preach to him because though he has an impact on the faith of others, he feels that he has lost something of his own faith in the process of enabling other people to believe. "I who am no more / Than steward of an eloquence God gives / For others' use not mine." Like the speaker in "A Soul in Prison" the preacher has a "longing to love" but somehow he feels his own falseness. Try as he might, he can't awaken his sleeping heart. He considers if he might be able to terrorize himself into faith, reading "scriptural terrors" but realizes that this is a false kind of method. Though he genuinely feels "thrilled to see [his sermon] moved the listeners" he can't help but to perceive the thoughts in his well-written sermon to be nothing more than "habit," something rote and not alive.


Individuals out of joint
"Tired" is a monologue given by an older man musing on his peasant wife, whom he has idealized as somehow more "natural" than the women of greater social standing. He has discovered that she is just the same, and cares as much for conventions as any other woman: "She is just a bird / Born in a wicker cage and brought away / Into a gilded one." He admits, however, that it is his own hypocrisy as well that has made her thus. He tried to make his "violet" into a "rose," deeply caring to ensure that the other wives wouldn't laugh at her and that she would fit in. Thus, the speaker sadly admits that "my poor Madge / Has unawares informed me of myself" in that she has shown him that he was not free from the artificial cares of social convention. Moving on from thinking about Madge, the speaker expresses his weariness in an age where it seems, from the surface, that things are cleaner, more charitable, and "better," but that in reality "underneath" there are "spreading foulnesses." Hypocrisy rules the day, and men are not men but "types and portraitures / And imitative shadows." A more sensitive man than most, the speaker admits that "we make our women's lives" a "round / Of treadmill ceremonies, mimic tasks." Yet, he is too tired to fight against it all.

In "Coming Home," a soldier returns from the Crimean war, catching the train and thinking about how his family will have changed. Rather, he thinks that they will not have changed--his father will be reading the Times, his mother and sisters will be "tender" and "foolish," and his brother Hugh, a parish priest, will patiently offer his blessings. Only little Maude, he anticipates, will have changed because grown into a woman. He muses on the "dingy cross" that he has won in battle and decides that he will not bring it out to show his mother because "she'll prize it more / That a life saved went to the winning it," that she will not approve of the bloodiness of war. The speaker himself moves into a subtle critique of war, thinking of how he will know more of the war's purposes when he sits down to read accounts and newspapers than when he was actually fighting: while a soldier, "I only know my part / And theirs with whom I waited at our post / Or dashed at the word." War is a vast system and he only a cog in the machine. He winces when he thinks that he'll have to visit the wife of his dead friend. Here, his reflections end and he sees his house between the trees.

"In An Almshouse" features another speaker who feels out of joint with the "modern age," which is "anxious," "driven half mad with work, / It bids us all work, work; no need, no room / For contemplating sages that count life / A time allowed for solving problems in / And its own self a problem to be solved." He, however, is a thinker on such issues and refuses to "work," and hence he has ended up where he is. His love interest has married herself off, "a busy prudent farmwife all the week" and he feels alone, apart, but unable to live out the demands of modern life.

"A Dilettante" speaks his mind to his angsty friend, telling him that he ought to make his life easier by thinking not so much and simply accepting things with a passive sort of resignation: "And God has made a world that pleases Him, / And when He wills then He will better it; / Let it suffice us as He wills it now." The dilettante partakes of his natural surroundings and refuses to judge whether men and women around him are good or evil. Since his friend might think him callous or selfish, he offers a parable in which a little brook which readily fed a household water and the flowers it daily passed was re-directed into a "sandy arid waste" which needed water for corn to grow. The brook was too small for such a task, and it ran out. The tale is supposed to warn people that their actions against the way things were intended do more harm than good. In the end, the dilettante suggests that he and his angsty friend might not be so different: though the friend might be a "great boisterous wind," he is a "small fluttering breeze / To coax the roses open" and "perhaps [he has his] use no less than [the friend]."


Marriage and the artist in modern life
"A Painter" and "An Inventor" tell similar stories of how marriage levels an economic burden which is often at odds with the freedom of doing true creative work. Poor men, the painter says, must "have a sort of aptness for the style" of the day in order to earn his keep. He can't be independent; to achieve one's "masterpiece" means to wear oneself out because of the economic hardships that follow from being true to oneself rather than to the market. His poor wife (other than speaking her acknowledgment that she may have been a burden on him) seems silenced by the speaker asserting that she is happy in her supporting him and his work, yet another woman behind the scenes who is expected to live for her husband's ambitions. The speaker in "An Inventor" monomaniacally pursues his task and struggle to find the "secret" that will unravel the "petty flaw" in his great work of his life. Similarly, this monomaniacal ambition means "Stolen days; / Yes, from the little ones and grave pale wife / Who should have every hour of mine made coin / To buy them sunshine." The inventor laments that one needs to make such a choice as this: to be "traitor" to one's work, or to be "traitor" to one's family. There's a third consideration, he realizes--to be "traitor" to oneself. This just makes it all the more complicated and he decides to turn back with fervor to his task.

The Way of all Flesh by Samuel Butler

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
The Way of All Flesh, though written in the years between 1872 and 1884, was not published until 1903, after Butler's death. This was likely because the novel drew heavily from Butler's own upbringing in a strictly religious and patriarchal household. At the same time he was writing The Way of All Flesh, Butler was working on Life and Habit, a scientific work which challenges the assumption of random variation in Darwin's Origin of Species. Though an orthodox Darwinian in earlier years, Butler came to believe in the idea of "hereditary memory," unconsciously inherited from one's parents and shaped/modified throughout the generations. R.A. Streatfield, friend of Butler's and first publisher of The Way of All Flesh, suggests that the novel "ight be "taken as a practical illustration of the theory of heredity embodied in that book."


The publication ushered in Butler's reputation as an "anti-Victorian" and a "proto-modernist." His admirers have included late Victorians George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells as well as D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, and James Joyce.

SUMMARY:
The Way of All Flesh is narrated by a family friend of the Pontifexes, one Mr. Overton who came to be a sort of guardian and friend of Ernest Pontifex, the oldest son of Theobald Pontifex, himself the son of George Pontifex, who made a sizable fortune as a publisher and savvy advertiser of religious texts. Though Ernest is the novel's hero, the first part of the book expends a considerable amount of space to introduce Theobald Pontifex. Theobald was the second son of George, whose strained relations with his father are in part told by the inclusion of letters between father and son. George wanted Theobald to be a clergyman, and when Theobald weakly protests, George quashes his rebellion with a threat of disinheritance. Theobald give in, and soon becomes trapped by the matchmaking Mrs. Allaby into a marriage with Christina Allaby, a woman of rather overblown romantic attachments to religion which the narrator constantly ironizes. Theobald gains a position as the rector at Battersby, and the narrator strongly suggests that Theobald isn't particularly happy with his position or his marriage, but as a generally timid character, finds a way to settle into it.

Ernest was born to Christina and Theobald in 1835. In a rather pathetic scene, George Pontifex rushes into the cellar to retrieve some water from Jordan which he had collected for the purposes of baptizing his first grandson, only to trip on a hamper and break the bottle in his haste. George's servant resourcefully sops up the water with a sponge, and at a ridiculously pompous dinner to celebrate the occasion of Ernest's birth, George pretends like nothing of the sort has happened. At this point, the somewhat secretive narrator reveals that he was in love with Alethea, Theobald's sister, but that "it is impossible for me to explain how it was that she and I never married" though "we knew that neither of us would marry anyone else." The narrator is severely critical of Ernest's upbringing: "Before Ernest could well crawl he was taught to kneel; before he could well speak he was taught to lisp the Lord's prayer, and the general confession." He offers an instance of Theobald's unjust cruelty when he beats Ernest for his inability to pronounce the word "come" (the young boy was only able to stammer out "tum"). Nevertheless, the narrator does allow that Theobald and Christina brought him up as they thought best for him.  

Christina had two more children, Joseph and Charlotte. During the unsuccessful birth of her fourth, she writes an overblown and highly melodramatic letter to Ernest and Joseph, entreating them to be pious and dutiful to their father and their God because she thought she might die. It is later revealed that Ernest wanted the narrator to include this letter (which Ernest eventually gets after Christina's actual death much later) in his account, so he does so--next to the narrator's commentary, Christina's letter is severely undercut and made light of. Soon, the Pontifexes decide to send the young Ernest to study with Dr. Skinner, the Cambridge man whom everyone knew to be a "genius" (though really a pedant, as the narrator reveals). At Dr. Skinner's in Roughborough, Ernest is subjected to monotonous and strict training in Latin and Greek. While Ernest is at Roughborough, his aunt Alethea decides to visit him, and determines also to take him on as one of her own cares. The two of them bond over their mutual interest in music, and Alethea encourages Ernest to build his own organ (hoping, secretly, that this will also help him bulk up a little and have a little more confidence as a result). Alethea even decides to move to Roughborough to further suss out if Ernest might be worthy of receiving her own money upon her death.

When Alethea falls ill suddenly, the narrator is called upon to be the executor of her will. Her conditions are that Mr. Overton would accept in trust everything which she had minus £5000 until Ernest reached the age of twenty-eight. If Ernest were to go bankrupt before then, Mr. Overton could keep the money. Additionally, Mr. Overton would be charged with investing the remaining £5000 in ways that he sees fit; these earnings would go to Ernest with Mr. Overton taking a small cut for his troubles. Back at Battersby after Alethea's death, the Pontifexes all believe that Alethea has left everything to Overton, and Theobald berates Ernest for not earning his aunt's trust enough to get her money. Ernest has some trouble in school, spending his pocket money on drinking and smoking and receiving less than ideal report cards (which the narrator includes as part of his account). Back at home for the holidays, Ernest meets a pretty servant named Ellen who, during the time when Ernest is home, gets pregnant and is sent away. Ernest doesn't know why she has been sent away, but feels bad for her, deciding to give her a silver watch (which his aunt gave him) and some money. Unfortunately, Ernest lies about what happened to the watch and his money, and his father finds out later what has happened through a pawnbroker who has received the watch from Ellen. Needless to say, he gets in no small amount of trouble with his father.


Ernest manages to make his way to Cambridge, where he does much better than at Roughborough. The narrator relays that Cambridge in 1858 was a time of relative calm, though Ernest would encounter a low-church, religiously evangelical group known as the Simeonites. Ernest at first makes fun of the Simeonites for their deliberately poor dress and austere ways, until he hears a sermon by a characteristic preacher. Ernest suddenly becomes intensely evangelical himself, experiencing a sort of sudden religious awakening which alarms his father. Ernest is soon ordained a deacon, but his religious beliefs again take a dramatic turn when he falls prey to a boy named Pryer's high church ideas when he serves as a curate. Along with Pryer, Ernest wholeheartedly embraces the idea that the masses need priestly mediation, that an elite should only have access to the Bible, and that a spiritual transformation of society on a grand scale was necessary. Their idea is to erect a "College of Spiritual Pathology" founded on systematic, scientific notions of how best to spiritually transform society. Ernest idealistically takes himself up amongst the London poor, comically trying to convert his neighbors, one of whom ends up knowing more than he does about theology. Things take a bad turn when the money Ernest gives to Pryer to put into the stock exchange is squandered and when Ernest visits a prostitute in hopes to "convert" her. In a misunderstanding of the situation, Ernest gets arrested and sentenced to six months labor. In prison, he falls ill and learns that Pryer has not only lost all of his money but also disappeared. 


In prison, Ernest turns to a more rationalistic way of looking at life. He also importantly comes to the realization that he must cut off ties with his parents, who have been responsible for his inability to have an independent mind of his own. The narrator concurs, and contends that this is actually the most Christian thing that Ernest has ever done: he was "giving up [his] father and mother for Christ's sake." After he leaves prison, Ernest decides to work his way up from the bottom of the social ladder, learning how to be a tailor. He experiences some slow but steady success. Back in London, Ernest runs into Ellen, and he ends up marrying her. The narrator reveals that he and Ellen "instinctively" don't get along; affirming how homosocial bonds inevitably become frayed when either member of a homosocial bond gets married. This antagonism that the narrator has against Ellen seems to one of the most psychologically and emotionally revealing aspects of his character thus far. The narrator's "instincts" toward Ellen turn out to be correct when Ellen ends up being an alcoholic and a bigamist--she had already been married to (and pregnant by) John, Theobald's former coachman. Between himself and Ellen, Ernest has two children, whom he sends away to be cared for, using money which Overton tell him as being from his aunt's estate. With the financial support of Overton, Ernest gets along okay, turning his attention to building up his income again and turning to literary pursuits in his spare time. Ernest even ends up making enough money to travel on the continent, and to engage in a brief (but failed) stint writing for the periodical press. Ernest is soon twenty-eight, and he inherits the money from his aunt's estate plus the profits from Overton's smart and steady investment, totaling £70,000. 


Soon after he has been made comfortable by his inheritance, Ernest receives a letter from his dying mother. He decides to visit Battersby, and finds that everything there seems the same, whereas he has changed much. He finds that subtle cutting remarks from Charlotte, Joey, or his father no longer affect him. Back in London after his mother's death, Ernest turns to writing unorthodox books "in which he insisted on saying things which no one else would say even if they could, or could even if they would." His first book proves the most successful, an anonymous collection of essays on theological and social subjects "purporting to have been written by six or seven different people," because the reviews were kept guessing that it might have been written by someone famous. Ernest books don't turn out to be successful, the narrator says, because they are "impractical," and because he didn't belong to any sort of literary "set" or "club." Ernest's only response is "wait," signaling his belief that his writings will be important to later generations. The novel concludes with the narrator calling Ernest an "advanced Radical," the first to have broken free from the molds and conventions which have shaped his family through the generations.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS/APPROACH:
Butler's "anti-Victorianisms" are fairly apparent: he critiques patriarchal austerity (Theobald and George), romantic religiosity (Christina), family and marriage (tellingly, both Ernest and the narrator end up bachelors), educational systems which stunt natural development (Dr. Skinner), religious movements/fads amongst university elites (Simeonites, Pryer), and the periodical press and its reviewers, to name just a few of Butler's obvious major targets.

Butler's "proto-modernism," however, seems less apparent. I want to approach the question of The Way of All Flesh's purported proto-modernism through a view of its form. I will focus particularly on its first person narrator, his compilation techniques of letters and other historical documents from Ernest Pontifex's life, and the ways in which the account is a "bildungsroman" of Ernest Pontifex. Overall, while these different aspects of the text contribute to a potential sense of its fragmentary nature, to place Butler's work into a genealogy which culminates in Woolf or Joyce seems a bit forced. However, to say, at least, that experimental elements in Butler's novel loosens the conventions of the Victorian novel seems appropriate to what Ernest ends up doing in becoming an "advanced Radical."

The First-Person Narrator/Chronicler: All that we really know about the narrator is that he is a bachelor (though it's "impossible" for him to say why), a writer of popular burlesque drama, godfather to Ernest, and someone who has always taken a critical view of how things were done in the Pontifex family. It isn't clear why he should turn family chronicler, or why he should offer this account of Ernest as his "hero" at all. For the most part, the narrator tries to maintain some sense of distance from the story, in his telling the story through the inclusion of documents, or withholding information about his own romantic attachment to Alethea. The moment where he seems the most emotionally invested and close is his anger when Ernest marries Ellen. He concludes that his hatred for her is "instinctive" and seems to strongly indicate that he favors homosocial relationships between bachelors, and more specifically, seems to regard his relationship with Ernest as one such homosocial relationship (before this moment, the narrator styles his role as primarily guardian to Ernest). Additionally, the narrrator's attitude towards Ellen's demise is fairly callous; indeed his portrayals of other women (Christina and Charlotte, for example), with the exception of the unmarried Alethea, seem equally callous and unsympathetic. We can safely say, I think, that the narrator favors homosocial relationships between bachelors as the most enabling relationships. The homosocial desire of the narrator complicates our view of his account of Ernest: how much influence does Mr. Overton in fact have on Ernest? He suggests that Ernest ends up a bachelor free-thinker on his own, that Mr. Overton lets him "fall," and simply helps him along when it becomes absolutely necessary to do so. That Ernest ends up exactly as the narrator does, however, tends to cast some suspicion on Mr. Overton as being much more of a "guardian" than he might admit to. One wonders, finally, how sufficient of a substitute "family" this kind of homosocial community might be--after all, Alethea's bequeathal is a necessary part of what makes this possible, and also it seems good that Ernest has children who end up being productive member of society in "conventional" ways (George becomes a bargeman, and Alice marries well).

Compilations/Documents: The narrator compiles letters, report cards, sermons, musical notations, and epitaphs to support his chronicle. One letter in particular, Christina's to her sons when she thought she was going to die, is one which Ernest tells the narrator to include, which suggests a kind of collaborative aspect to the work (this notion is strengthened by the various moments where the narrator tells of how Ernest "winces" at the narrator's inclusions, as if Ernest had much to do with the narrator's writing process). This suggestion of collaboration and the inclusion of other documents don't really contribute to an overall sense of greater objectivity--practically without exception, the documents occupy a place in the narrator's text as caricatures of people who produce them or the ideologies that they represent. Christina's letter caricatures her own melodramatic religiosity, and the report card from Skinner's school tallying the number of times each boy drank or smoked satirizes its own strict inflexibility. Thus The Way of All Flesh fails to be heteroglossic in the way that many Victorian realist novels strive to be--the account is through and through Mr. Overton's because his editorship and controlling commentary subordinate these lesser texts to his master narrative.

Bildungsroman: The irony with which Overton treats Ernest's development from Roughborough to Cambridge to his "epiphany" in prison and finally to his failed marriage makes the account feel much like Joyce's Portrait of an Artist at times. Like Stephen Dedalus, Ernest gets really into certain beliefs (his Simeonite period, his high-church principles, the collaborative marriage with Ellen), only to realize suddenly that these beliefs are false. The ending reveals Ernest to be triumphant in his artistic self, a bachelor and an "advanced Radical" who cared not for the market or the present-day audience, but only to convey the ideas which he thought right despite their being likely too unorthodox for the current generation. Ernest's triumph and final incarnation is actually much more certain than Dedalus's; there isn't a "fall" coded into his name. The only potential check to this triumph is that as in the case of Bulwer-Lytton's comedy, Ernest is only finally be the kind of independent artist that he wants to be because he has the money to do so, which came to him through no exertions of his own.