Lecture Summary: see accompanying material for second lecture
| Date | Events in Britain | Events in America | Literary production in Britain | Literary Production in America |
| 1835 - 40 | - Queen Victoria crowned; marries Albert | - Cherokees moved from Appalatian mountains | Wordsworth, Yarrow Revisited Dickens, Sketches by Boz; Barnaby Rudge |
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in
America Emerson, ‘The American Scholar’ Poe, Tales of the Grotesque |
| 1841 - 45 | - Cholera, typhus and typhoid epidemics - Irish famine - The Oxford Movement |
- Annexation of Texas | Dickens, American Notes Carlyle, On heroes and hero-worship |
Margaret Fuller, Women in the Nineteenth
Century Emerson, Experience |
| 1846 - 50 | - Corn Law Repeal - Public Health Act |
- Mexican-American War - Californian Gold rush - Compromise Act - Fugitive Slave Act |
Dickens, Pictures from Italy Brontë, Jane Eyre E.B. Browning, Poems Tennyson, In Memoriam Wordsworth, The Prelude |
Mrs E.D.E.N. Southworth,
Retribution Parkman, The Oregon Trail Emerson, Representative Men Susan B. Warner, The Wide, Wide World Melville, Redburn Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter |
| 1851 - 55 | - Great Exhibition - Crimean War |
- Major immigration from Britain (267,000) &
Ireland (781,000) - Petitions for women's suffrage presented to NY legislature |
Dickens, Hard Times; Bleak
House Tennyson, Ode on the Death of General Wellington Gaskell, Ruth; Cranford Arnold, Poems |
Melville, Moby-Dick Thoreau, Walden Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin Whitman, Leaves of Grass Longfellow, Hiawatha |
| 1856 - 60 | - Indian Mutiny | - Supreme Court denies citizenship to Black
Americans - John Brown's Raid at Harper's Ferry |
Charles Darwin, Origin of Species George Eliot, Adam Bede |
Emerson, English Traits Hawthorne, The Marble Faun |
| 1861 - 65 | - Death of Prince Albert | - Secession of Southern states; Civil War - Klu Klux Klan formed - Assassination of President Lincoln |
Kingsley, Water Babies Dickens, Great Expectations |
Whitman, Drum-Taps |
| 1866 - 70 | - Education Act | - Blacks given vote - Emancipation of slaves and Reconstruction - National Women's suffrage Assoc. |
Eliot, Felix Holt, The Radical Carlyle, Shooting Niagara |
Melville, Battle-Pieces Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass Alcott, Little Women |
| 1871 - 75 | - Public Health Act | - Reconstruction - Gold rush in Black Hills; Sioux revolt and deteat Custer in Battle of the Little Big Horn |
George Eliot, Middlemarch | Whitman, Democratic Vistas |
| 1876 - 80 | - Queen proclaimed Empress of India - Telephone invented by Bell |
- Edison invents the light bulb - End of Reconstruction |
Eliot, Daniel Deronda Swinburne, Poems and Ballads |
Twain, Tom Sawyer James, The American |
| 1881 - 85 | R.L. Stevenson, Treasure Island Arnold, Discourses in America |
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn |
||
| 1886 - 90 | - Irish Home Rule Bill | - Haymarket riot - the ‘Black Laws’ |
Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde | James, Bostonians Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes Dickinson, Poems William James, Principles of Psychology |
| 1891 - 95 | Chace Act allows foreigners to obtain copyright in USA | - Closing of the Frontier | Conan Doyle, Hound of the
Baskervilles Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure |
Crane, Red Badge of Courage Zangwill, Children of the Ghetto |
| 1896 - 1900 | - Boer War | - Spanish-American War | Rudyard Kipling, The White Man's Burden | Chopin, The Awakening Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class |
| 1901 - 05 | Death of Queen Victoria | - Roosevelt elected President - US Steel Corporation established |
Yeats, Poems Kipling, Kim |
Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk James, The Ambassadors Jack London, Call of the Wild |
Bell, Michael Davitt, The Development of American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation (1980)
Berthoff, W., The Ferment of Realism (1965)
Chase, Richard, The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957)
Dekker, George, The American Historical Romance (1987)
De Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America (1835, 1840)
Douglas, Ann, The Feminization of American Culture (1977)
Fiedler, L., Love and Death in the American Novel (1960)
Folson, J.K., The American Western Novel (1966)
Herbert, T. Walter, Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle Class Family
McKelvey, B, The Urbanization of America, 1860 – 1915 (1963)
Martin, J., Harvests of Change: American Literature 1865 – 1914 (1967)
Poirier, Richard, A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature (1967)
Rowe, J.C., The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James (1985)
St Armand, Barton Levi, Emily Dickinson and Her Culture: The Soul’s Society
Santayana, George, Selected Critical Writings of George Santayana, 2 vols ed. Henfrey (1968)
Trilling, Lionel, The Liberal Imagination (1950)
Tanner, Tony, The Reign of Wonder (1965)
Wilson, E, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962)
1. Perhaps the time is already come when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertion of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions, arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves.
(R.W. Emerson, ‘The American Scholar,’ 1837)
2. Small productions will be more common than bulky books; there will be more wit than erudition, more imagination than profundity; and literary performances will bear marks of an untutored and rude vigour of thought – frequently of great variety and singular fecundity. The object of authors will be to astonish rather than to please, and to stir the passions more than to charm the sense.
(Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1840)
3. There is scarcely an ore which contributes to the wealth of the author, that is found, here, in veins as rich as in Europe. There are no annals for the historian; no follies (beyond the most vulgar and commonplace) for the satirist; no manners for the dramatist; no obscure fictions for the writer of romance; no gross and hardy offences against decorum for the moralist…
The effect of a promiscuous assemblage any where, is to create a standard of deportment; and great liberty permits every one to aim at its attainment. I have never seen a nation so much alike in my life, as the people of the United States, and what is more, they are not only like each other, but they are remarkably like that which common sense tells them they ought to resemble.
(James Fenimore Cooper, Notions of the Americans)
4. Italy, as a site of his Romance, was chiefly valuable to him as affording a sort of poetic or faery precinct, where actualities would not be so terribly insisted upon as they are, and must needs be, in America. No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloom wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land. It will be very long, I trust, before romance-writers may find congenial and easily handled themes, either in the annals of out stalwart republic, or in any characteristic and probably events of our individual lives. Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens, and wall-flowers, need ruin to make them grow.
(Hawthorne, Preface to The Marble Faun, 1860)
5. The negative side of the spectacle on which Hawthorne looked out … might, indeed, be made almost ludicrous; one might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should be come a wonder to know what was left. No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities, nor public schools – no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class – no Epsom nor Ascot!
(Henry James, Hawthorne, 1879)
6. When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel. The latter form is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience. The former – while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart – has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances … of the writer’s own choosing or creation. If he think fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture. He will be wise, no doubt, to make a very moderate use of the privileges here stated, and, especially, to mingle the Marvellous rather as a slight, delicate, and evanescent flavor, than as any portion of the actual substance of the dish offered to the public. He can hardly be said, however, to commit a literary crime even if he disregard this caution.
(Hawthorne, Preface to The House of the Seven Gables, 1851)
7. My father died and left me his blessing and his business. His blessing brought no money into my pocket; and as to his business it soon deserted me: for I was busy writing poetry, and could not attend to law; and my clients, though they had great respect for my talents, had not faith in a poetical attorney. I lost my business therefore, spent my money, and finished my poem.
For my part, I confess it with shame, I was an incorrigible laggard. I have always had the poetical feeling, that is to say, I have always been an idle fellow and prone to play the vagabond.
(Washington Irving, Tales of a Traveller, 1822)
8. They would take neither the glow of passion nor the tenderness of sentiment, but retained all the rigidity of dead corpses, and stared me in the face with a fixed and ghastly grin of contemptuous defiance. ‘What have you to do with us?’ that expression seemed to say. ‘The little power you might once have possessed over the tribe of unrealities is gone! You have bartered it for a pittance of the public gold. Go, then, and earn your wages!’
(Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 1850)
9. Another voice, however, haunts the mind of the narrator throughout his Custom House stay: it is that of his puritan forefathers, illustrious judges of the early days of the New England colony, soldiers, legislators and persecutors of witches:
No aim, that I have ever cherished, would they recognise as laudable; no success of mine – if my life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever been brightened by success – would they deem otherwise than worthless, if not positively disgraceful. ‘What is he?’ murmurs one gray shadow of my forefathers to the other. ‘A writer of story-books! What kind of a business in life, -- what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation, -- may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!’
(Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter)
10. It is from the clergy only that the women of America receive that sort of attention which is so dearly valued by every female heart throughout the world. With the priests of America the women hold that degree of influential importance which in the countries of Europe is allowed them throughout all orders and ranks of society … and in return for this they seem to give their hearts and souls into their keeping. I never saw or read of any country where religion had so strong a hold upon the women or a slighter hold upon the men.
(Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, 1832)
11. … one half of the American mind, that not occupied intensely in practical affairs, has remained … slightly becalmed; it has floated gently in the backwater, while, alongside, in invention and industry and social organization, the other half of the mind was leaping down a sort of Niagara Rapids. The division may be found symbolized in American architecture: a neat reproduction of the colonial mansion – with some modern comforts introduced surreptitiously – stands beside the skyscraper.. The American Will inhabits the skyscraper; the American Intellect inhabits the colonial mansion. The one is the sphere of the American man; the other, at least predominantly, of the American woman. The one is all aggressive enterprise; the other all genteel tradition.
(George Santayana, ‘The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,’ 1911)
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