journalists as characters Reference library
Oxford Reader's Companion to Trollope
...low-class scandalmonger whose vocation is to expose corruption in the establishment even if he has to invent it. Slide appears in Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux as the nemesis of Phineas, running against him for Parliament and then attempting to discredit him socially as well as politically. In The Prime Minister Slide attacks the Duke of Omnium and his coalition government in retaliation for a social snub. Trollope disparages the integrity of Nicholas Broune , Alfred Booker , and Ferdinand Alf , three editors with whom the hack novelist Lady...
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward (1803–73) Reference library
Adam Roberts
Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens
...friendship with Dickens, however, did not really blossom until 1850 when the two men founded the Guild of Literature and Art together. This enterprise shows the extent to which they considered the career of the writer a serious vocation. As a means of contributing to the establishment of what they both called ‘our Order’, Bulwer wrote a play ( Not So Bad As We Seem ) which was produced (and acted in) by Dickens several times during 1851 ( see amateur theatricals ). The Guild may eventually have come to nothing, but the friendship between Bulwer-Lytton...
Marion Fay Reference library
Oxford Reader's Companion to Trollope
...political friends, George Roden , a well-conducted clerk in the Post Office. Her father and stepmother are horrified, but she remains firm. Worse is to come. Hampstead falls in love with Roden's neighbour Marion Fay, whose Quaker father is a clerk in a modest commercial establishment. Hearing this news, Lady Kingsbury decides that Hampstead is a traitor to his class and begins to long for his death. But Marion refuses Hampstead's offer. Though she loves him, she is rightly convinced that an early death from consumption will be her fate. Her death leaves...
Lady Anna Reference library
Oxford Reader's Companion to Trollope
...the outrage of his colleagues and the general curiosity of the legal community. He ignores legal etiquette, holds irregular meetings with the opposing parties, and seems, awful thought, to be acting for the general good rather than simply for his own client. The bemused legal establishment speculates that he will ruin his career. Unusual among Trollope 's barristers in following inner light and conviction, in the end he manages everyone and everything in the light of ‘truth’, and establishes harmony, which culminates in his benignly furthering the marriage of ...
Stephen, Leslie (1832–1904) Reference library
Oxford Reader's Companion to Hardy
...with Stephen began, Hardy appears not to have objected to altering his work to suit the Cornhill 's readership. This willingness to compromise his artistic aims may have been urged on by the blandishments of higher returns for his work and exposure to a well-heeled establishment audience. However, increased confidence about the integrity of his art and methods, and, possibly, the popular success of Far from the Madding Crowd , eventually emboldened him to refuse to make concessions. Thus when he offered Stephen The Return of the Native in 1877 ,...
women and women's issues Reference library
Ella Westland
Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens
...calmly efficient, was charged with the vital function of holding together the middle-class home, that essential foundation of the Victorian social structure. In promoting the image of the ‘Home Goddess’ ( OMF 2.13), Dickens was therefore playing an influential role in the establishment of a new set of values which underpinned the growing power of the middle classes. Many readers have been critical of Dickens's perfect heroines and disappointingly conservative attitudes. However, these negative views do not give enough weight to Dickens's public involvement...
textual studies Reference library
Oxford Reader's Companion to Hardy
...of justifiable texts they might produce, so long as the process involved is fully explained and all the textual evidence presented. Much depends upon the editor's own theoretical orientation. The imminent advent of interactive electronic editions will render editorial establishment of any text unnecessary. The primary issues in editing Hardy's fiction have been two. Since the publication of Gatrell's ‘Hardy, House-Style, and the Aesthetics of Punctuation’ (in Anne Smith (ed.), The Novels of Thomas Hardy ( 1979 ), 169–92) it has been accepted by most...
readership: literacy and the reading public Reference library
Rosemarie C. Sultan
Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens
...his novels as an index to the relative empowerment of characters as a whole. We might take as an example Our Mutual Friend , a novel particularly concerned with issues of literacy. As the narrator says early on in the book (Dickens's idiosyncratic punctuation emphasizing the weightiness of the point): ‘No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot’ (1.3). In that novel literacy equals empowerment in a straightforward way: Gaffer Hexam 's unconsidered hostility to the very idea of himself or his children being taught...
Paris Reference library
Andrew Sanders
Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens
...essays suggest a man both haunted by, and darkly speculative about what he had seen. On one occasion he claims to have been intrigued by the body of ‘a large dark man whose disfigurement by water was in a frightful manner comic’; when he later swims at one of several bathing-establishments on the river he suddenly feels nauseous at having taken some water into his mouth, ‘for I fancied that the contamination of the creature was in it’. The disturbing image continues to haunt him at a fencing display in the Rue St Honoré, as he gazes in shop-windows in the...
urbanization Reference library
F. S. Schwarzbach
Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens
...social change as well. Robert Vaughan triumphantly proclaimed the 19th century ‘The Age of Great Cities’ in his optimistic 1843 book of the same title, but contemporary writers were more likely to respond with panic to the vast terrae incognitae of urban England. The rhetoric of contrast between city and country—vice and virtue, disease and health, misery and happiness, and so on—is as old as the establishment of the first city, but in the 1820s and following decades it became charged with urgency. Much of the impetus came from fear of revolutions,...
Church of England Reference library
The Oxford Companion to the Brontes
...notice of Jane Eyre in the Church of England Journal ( 16 Dec. 1847 ) gratified her because, she told W. S. Williams , ‘I love the Church of England. Her Ministers, indeed I do not regard as infallible personages, I have seen too much of them for that—but to the Establishment, with all her faults—the profane Athanasian Creed excluded—I am sincerely attached’ (Smith Letters , 1. 581). The Brontës had no love for the High Church tendencies of the Oxford Movement , but like Anne, Charlotte admired some unorthodox liberal Anglicans. Of all the...
reputation of Dickens Reference library
Adam Roberts
Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens
...version of Dickens) decides to take up the cause of Hiram's Hospital in his latest book. This sense of Dickens as vulgar, driven by Popular Sentiment rather than truth, liable to exaggeration and caricature, is in a sense the flip-side of his reputation as the greatest popular entertainer of his day. In one instance a reviewer criticized Dickens in Little Dorrit for straying beyond the bounds of mere entertainer and for libelling the upper classes and establishment, which provoked a waspish reply in Household Words . The review, entitled ‘The License...
Our Mutual Friend Reference library
Paul Schlicke
Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens
...have stifled and darkened my invention.’ Six months later he wrote again to Forster to say that he doubted whether he ‘could force an original book out’ ( 5 October 1862 ). The better part of a year passed, and on 9 August 1863 he lamented to Wilkie collins , ‘I am always thinking of writing a long book, and am never beginning to do it’. In October he told Forster that he was ‘exceedingly anxious to begin my new book’, and insisted that ‘I see my opening perfectly’, but wanting to have at least five numbers in hand before he began publishing feared lest he...
essayists Reference library
John Drew
Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens
...by the sharper attacks of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine , in which the pens of J. G. lockhart and John wilson proved their proverbial superiority over the sword, in the wounds they inflicted on the ‘Cockney School’ of Romantic poets and essayists in England. The establishment of the London Magazine in the final year of the Regency provided an opportunity for essayists such as Hazlitt , Leigh hunt , Charles lamb , and Thomas hood to retaliate, but they did so by celebrating their city's folklore and eccentricities in a studiedly whimsical...
emigration and colonization Reference library
Leon Litvack
Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens
...fictional, and personal interests in emigration and colonization. The years of his life saw the development of Australia , the settling of New Zealand, the Durham Report, Canadian Confederation, the expansion of South Africa, the exploration of tropical Africa, the establishment of coastal colonies, the extension of British rule in India , and an uprising against colonial rule in Jamaica ( see Eyre, Edward John ). By the later 1840s circumstances such as the increased pressures of industrial labour, coupled with bourgeois apprehension over the poor,...
Dombey and Son Reference library
Paul Schlicke
Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens
...appears in a letter to Forster , nine days after the launch of the Daily News : ‘I have been revolving plans in my mind this morning for quitting the paper and going abroad again to write a new book in shilling numbers’ ( 30 January 1846 ). On 9 February he resigned his editorship and the next month wrote to the Countess of Blessington of ‘vague thoughts of a new book’ which had him ‘wandering about at night in the strangest places, according to my usual propensity at such a time—seeking rest, and finding none’ ( 2 March 1846 ). On 31 May he left London with...
Time's Laughingstocks Reference library
Oxford Reader's Companion to Hardy
...morality: see ‘The Dark-Eyed Gentleman’, a clever pastiche of a bawdy folksong; the satirical mockery of ‘The Conformers’; and ‘The Christening’, with its challenge to conventional marriage. Hardy might be able to get away with these avant-garde ideas in his poetry, but the Establishment was still capable of showing its displeasure. When a new Poet Laureate was needed in 1913 , Hardy was passed over in favour of Robert Bridges , a conventional minor poet. It was the same with the Nobel Prize, which during the years of Hardy's greatest fame was awarded to a...
Haworth Reference library
The Oxford Companion to the Brontes
...Mechanics' Institute , had attended a night school while apprenticed to a silk-reed maker in Macclesfield, and when he later became a woolcomber and then a reed-maker in Haworth he pursued his studies in mathematics and applied sciences by reading far into the night. The establishment of the Haworth Mechanics' Institute in 1849 showed that there was an interest in such further education; and the eagerness of the members to acquire copies of Charlotte's novels in 1850 is evidence of both literacy and local pride. There was also justifiable local pride in...
Macdermots of Ballycloran, The Reference library
Oxford Reader's Companion to Trollope
...the country and its people led to a series of letters to the Examiner (March–June 1850) and took him back to Ireland for his last book, The Landleaguers , unfinished at his death. ‘It has been my fate to have so close an intimacy with Ireland’, he wrote, ‘that when I meet an Irishman abroad, I always recognize in him more of a kinsman than I do in an Englishman’ ( NA 2, XVI). Feeling distanced from the English establishment, and sensing affinity with the wildness and recklessness of the Irish, were part of that early recognition. Riding from village to...
Doctor Thorne Reference library
Oxford Reader's Companion to Trollope
...independent- minded and deferential, she has traits in common with both her uncles: her ‘spirit of democracy’ maintains that a person be respected for ‘absolute, intrinsic, acknowledged, individual merit’, while her ‘spirit of aristocracy’ upholds the claims of the establishment (VI). Henry James , in his famous ‘partial portrait’ of the author, lists Mary first among Trollope 's ‘affectionate’ gallery of heroines ( Partial Portraits ( 1888 ), 128). Her standing up to Lady Arabella (XXIX) is worthy of Elizabeth Bennet 's defiance of Lady...
