Charles Dickens
(1812 – 1870)
Charles Dickens (Charles John Huffam Dickens) was born in Landport,
Portsmouth, on February 7, 1812. Charles was the second of eight children to
John Dickens (1786–1851), a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, and his wife Elizabeth
Dickens (1789–1863). The Dickens family moved to London in 1814 and two years
later to Chatham, Kent, where Charles spent early years of his childhood. Due
to the financial difficulties they moved back to London in 1822, where they
settled in Camden Town, a poor neighborhood of London.
The
defining moment of Dickens's life occurred when he was 12 years old. His
father, who had a difficult time managing money and was constantly in debt, was
imprisoned in the Marshalsea debtor's prison in 1824. Because of this, Charles
was withdrawn from school and forced to work in a warehouse that handled
'blacking' or shoe polish to help support the family. This experience left
profound psychological and sociological effects on Charles. It gave him a
firsthand acquaintance with poverty and made him the most vigorous and
influential voice of the working classes in his age.
After a few months Dickens's father was released from prison and Charles was
allowed to go back to school. At fifteen his formal education ended and he
found employment as an office boy at an attorney's, while he studied shorthand
at night. From 1830 he worked as a shorthand reporter in the courts and
afterwards as a parliamentary and newspaper reporter.
In 1833 Dickens began to contribute short stories and essays to periodicals. A
Dinner at Popular Walk was Dickens's first published story. It appeared in
the Monthly Magazine in December 1833. In 1834, still a newspaper
reporter, he adopted the soon to be famous pseudonym Boz. Dickens's
first book, a collection of stories titled Sketches by Boz, was
published in 1836. In the same year he married Catherine Hogarth, daughter of
the editor of the Evening Chronicle. Together they had 10 children
before they separated in 1858.
Although Dickens's main profession was as a novelist, he continued his
journalistic work until the end of his life, editing The Daily News, Household
Words, and All the Year Round. His connections to various magazines
and newspapers gave him the opportunity to begin publishing his own fiction at
the beginning of his career.
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club was published in monthly
parts from April 1836 to November 1837. Pickwick became one of the most popular
works of the time, continuing to be so after it was published in book form in
1837. After the success of Pickwick Dickens embarked on a full-time career as a
novelist, producing work of increasing complexity at an incredible rate: Oliver
Twist (1837-39), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39), The Old Curiosity
Shop and Barnaby Rudge as part of the Master Humphrey's Clock
series (1840-41), all being published in monthly instalments before being made
into books.
In
1842 he travelled with his wife to the United States and Canada, which led to
his controversial American Notes (1842) and is also the basis of some of
the episodes in Martin Chuzzlewit. Dickens's series of five Christmas
Books were soon to follow; A Christmas Carol (1843), The Chimes
(1844), The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life
(1846), and The Haunted Man (1848). After living briefly abroad in Italy
(1844) and Switzerland (1846) Dickens continued his success with Dombey and
Son (1848), the largely autobiographical David Copperfield
(1849-50), Bleak House (1852-53), Hard Times (1854), Little
Dorrit (1857), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and Great Expectations
(1861).
In 1856 his popularity had allowed him to buy Gad's Hill Place, an estate he
had admired since childhood. In 1858 Dickens began a series of paid readings,
which became instantly popular. In all, Dickens performed more than 400 times.
In that year, after a long period of difficulties, he separated from his wife.
It was also around that time that Dickens became involved in an affair with a
young actress named Ellen Ternan. The exact nature of their relationship is
unclear, but it was clearly central to Dickens's personal and professional
life.
In the closing years of his life Dickens worsened his declining health by
giving numerous readings. During his readings in 1869 he collapsed, showing
symptoms of mild stroke. He retreated to Gad's Hill and began to work on Edwin
Drood, which was never completed.
Charles Dickens died at home on June 9, 1870 after suffering a stroke. Contrary
to his wish to be buried in Rochester Cathedral, he was buried in the Poets'
Corner of Westminster Abbey. The inscription on his tomb reads:
"He was a sympathiser to the poor, the
suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest
writers is lost to the world."
Charles
Dickens
William "Snob" Makepeace Thackeray
(1811-1868)
William Makepeace Thackeray was born 18 July
1811, first and only child of Richmond Thackeray and Anne Becher Thackeray. He
was born in India, where his father worked for the East India Company, and sent
to school in England, as was the fashion for colonial-born children, in 1817.
His father had died in 1815, and shortly after William left, she remarried to
her first love, Captain Henry Carmichael-Smyth2. They joined William in England in 1820.
Like most English children, William was miserable
at school. He wasn't good at sports, though he was fairly popular in spite of
that, and suffered through two poor headmasters. He also had his nose broken
during a boxing match with another student named George Venables. While in
school he developed two habits that were to stay with him all his life:
sketching and reading novels4.
He later attended Cambridge, where he lost a poetry contest to one Alfred
Tennyson, though several of William's satirical poems were published around
this time. William also met Edward FitzGerald who remained his best friend to
the end of his life.
William never quite took a degree in anything. He
started studying law, though he never actually got anywhere with it. He
supported himself by selling sketches and working at a bill discounting firm6. He'd fallen in with a bad crowd on
the Continent, and he had some rather large gambling debts to pay off. After a
brief flirtation with running his own newspaper, William was even more briefly
an art student before falling in love with one Isabella Shawe. Since he needed
enough money to marry on, William's mother and stepfather, mostly broke due to
an economic collapse in India (where they'd left most of their money), scraped
together all of the funds they could find and started a newspaper called the Constitution.
William was appointed the paper's Paris correspondent at £450 per year. He'd
also had a little book of satirical essays on the ballet published8. After a few rocky patches, William
and Isabella were married on 20 August 1836.
Their first child, Anne Isabella, was born in
June of 1837. Her birth was rapidly followed by the collapse of the Constitution.
The sketch market had pretty much dried up9,
so William began writing as many articles as humanly possible and sending them
to any newspaper that would print them. This was a precarious sort of existence
which would continue for most of the rest of his life. He was fortunate enough
to get two popular series going in two different publications10. His personal life, however, wasn't
going so well. His second daughter died at less than a year old, and though a
third daughter, Harriet Marian, was born in 1840 and thrived, Isabella did not.
She fell victim to some sort of mental illness and after a few months was so
suicidal and difficult to control that she was placed in a private institution.
She remained in one institution or another for the rest of her life and
outlived her husband by thirty years.
Now William's life got really busy. Over the next
few years, he wrote The History of Henry Esmond, The Newcombes,
and Vanity Fair, made two lecture tours of America, carried on a
protracted (but probably innocent) flirtation with one Jane Brookfield, wife of
an old school friend, and stood as an independent candidate in an Oxford
by-election. Through all this, he was continually ill with recurrent kidney
infections caused by a bout with syphillis in his youth, but he still managed
to have an impressive house built and settle generous dowries on his daughters.
In 1859, he and a friend named George Smith started an inexpensive monthly
called the Cornhill Magazine, which set a first issue sales record at
over 110,000 copies. William, besides editing, contributed a great series of
essays called the Roundabout Papers.
In 1863, William, who felt his health was now
seriously bad, travelled around visiting old haunts and friends to say goodbye.
Sure enough, on Christmas Eve, 1863, he died of a cerebral effusion (a burst
blood vessel). His funeral drew around 2,000 mourners, including Dickens.
William's recently widowed mother continued to stay with his daughters and was
a terrible burden on them until she died in 1864 and was buried next to
William. Minnie, the younger daughter, married Leslie Stephen, had one
daughter, and died suddenly at 35. Leslie, besides editing Cornhill,
later remarried and had another daughter who became Virginia Woolf.
William "Snob" Makepeace
Thackeray
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
(1809 –1892)
Alfred, Lord Tennyson was Poet Laureate of the
United Kingdom during much of Queen Victoria's reign and remains one of the
most popular poets in the English language.
Tennyson excelled at penning short
lyrics, such as "In the Valley of Cauteretz",
"Break,
Break, Break", "The Charge of the Light Brigade", "Tears, Idle Tears"
and "Crossing
the Bar". Much of his verse was based on classical
mythological themes, such as Ulysses, although In
Memoriam A.H.H. was written to commemorate his best friend Arthur Hallam, a
fellow poet and fellow student at Trinity College, Cambridge, who was engaged to Tennyson's
sister, but died from a brain haemorrhage before they could marry. Tennyson
also wrote some notable blank
verse including Idylls
of the King, "Ulysses," and "Tithonus." During
his career, Tennyson attempted drama, but his plays enjoyed little success.
A number of phrases from Tennyson's
work have become commonplaces of the English language, including "Nature,
red in tooth and claw", "'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than
never to have loved at all", "Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but
to do and die", "My strength is as the strength of ten, / Because my
heart is pure", "Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers", and
"The old order changeth, yielding place to new". He is the ninth most
frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.
Early life
Tennyson was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, a rector's son and fourth of 12
children. He derived from a middle-class line of Tennysons, but also had noble
and royal ancestry.
His father, George Clayton Tennyson (1778–1831), was rector of
Somersby (1807–1831), also rector of Benniworth and Bag Enderby, and vicar
of Grimsby (1815). The
rector was the elder of two sons, but was disinherited at an early age by his
father, the landowner George Tennyson (1750–1835) (owner of Bayons Manor and
Usselby Hall), in favour of his younger brother Charles, who later took the
name Charles Tennyson d'Eyncourt. Rev. George Clayton Tennyson
raised a large family and "was a man of superior abilities and varied
attainments, who tried his hand with fair success in architecture, painting,
music, and poetry. He was comfortably well off for a country clergyman and his
shrewd money management enabled the family to spend summers at Mablethorpe and Skegness, on the
eastern coast of England." Alfred Tennyson's mother, Elizabeth Fytche (1781–1865),
was the daughter of Stephen Fytche (1734–1799), vicar of St. James Church, Louth (1764) and rector of Withcall (1780),
a small village between Horncastle and Louth.
Tennyson's father "carefully attended to the education and training of his
children."
Tennyson and two of his elder brothers were writing poetry in
their teens, and a collection of poems by all three were published locally when
Alfred was only 17. One of those brothers, Charles Tennyson Turner later married Louisa Sellwood, the
younger sister of Alfred's future wife; the other was Frederick
Tennyson. Another of Tennyson's brothers, Edward Tennyson, was
institutionalised at a private asylum, where he died.
Education and first publication
Tennyson was first a student of Louth Grammar School for four
years (1816–1820) and then attended Scaitcliffe School, Englefield Green and King Edward VI Grammar School, Louth. He
entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1827, where he joined a secret
society called the Cambridge
Apostles. At Cambridge Tennyson met Arthur
Henry Hallam, who became his closest friend. His first publication
was a collection of "his boyish rhymes and those of his elder brother
Charles" entitled Poems by Two Brothers published in 1827.
In 1829 he was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal at Cambridge for one of his first pieces,
"Timbuctoo".
Reportedly, "it was thought to be no slight honour for a young man of
twenty to win the chancellor's gold medal." He published his first solo
collection of poems, Poems Chiefly Lyrical in 1830. "Claribel"
and "Mariana",
which later took their place among Tennyson's most celebrated poems, were
included in this volume. Although decried by some critics as overly
sentimental, his verse soon proved popular and brought Tennyson to the
attention of well-known writers of the day, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Tennyson with his wife Emily (1813–1896) and
his sons Hallam (1852–1928) and Lionel (1854–1886).
In the spring of 1831 Tennyson's father died, requiring him to
leave Cambridge before
taking his degree. He returned to the rectory, where he was permitted to live
for another six years, and shared responsibility for his widowed mother and the
family. Arthur
Hallam came to stay with his family during the summer and became
engaged to Tennyson's sister, Emilia Tennyson.
In 1833, Tennyson published his second book of poetry, which
included his well-known poem, The
Lady of Shalott. The volume met heavy criticism, which so
discouraged Tennyson that he did not publish again for 10 years, although he
continued to write. That same year, Hallam died suddenly and unexpectedly after
suffering a cerebral haemorrhage while on vacation in Vienna. Hallam's sudden and
unexpected death in 1833 had a profound impact on Tennyson, and inspired
several masterpieces, including "In the Valley of Cauteretz" and In
Memoriam A.H.H., a long poem detailing the 'Way of the Soul'.
After Wordsworth's death in 1850, and Samuel Rogers' refusal,
Tennyson was appointed to the position of Poet Laureate, which he held until
his own death in 1892, by far the longest tenure of any laureate before or
since. He fulfilled the requirements of this position by turning out
appropriate but often uninspired verse, such as a poem of greeting to Alexandra of Denmark when she arrived in Britain to marry the
future King Edward VII. In 1855, Tennyson produced one of
his best known works, "The Charge of the Light Brigade", a
dramatic tribute to the British cavalrymen involved in an ill-advised charge on 25 October 1854, during the Crimean War. Other
esteemed works written in the post of Poet Laureate include Ode on the Death
of the Duke of Wellington and Ode Sung at the Opening of the
International Exhibition.
Queen Victoria was an ardent admirer of
Tennyson's work, and in 1884 created him Baron Tennyson, of Aldworth in the County of Sussex and of Freshwater in the Isle of Wight. Tennyson initially declined a
baronetcy in 1865 and 1868 (when tendered by Disraeli), finally
accepting a peerage in 1883 at Gladstone's earnest solicitation. He took his seat in the
House of Lords on 11 March 1884.
Tennyson also wrote a substantial quantity of non-official
political verse, from the bellicose "Form, Riflemen, Form", on the French
crisis of 1859, to "Steersman, be not precipitate in thine act of
steering", deploring Gladstone's Home Rule Bill.
Tennyson continued writing into his eighties. He died on 6
October 1892 at Aldworth, aged 83. He was buried at Westminster Abbey. A
memorial was erected in All Saints' Church, Freshwater. His last words
were; "Oh that press will have me now!"
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Charlotte Brontë
(1816 – 1854)
Charlotte
Brontë was born in 1816, the third daughter of the Rev. Patrick Brontë and his
wife Maria. Her brother Patrick Branwell was born in 1817, and her sisters
Emily and Anne in 1818 and 1820. In 1820, too, the Brontë family moved to
Haworth, Mrs. Brontë dying the following year.
In 1824 the
four eldest Brontë daughters were enrolled as pupils at the Clergy Daughter's
School at Cowan Bridge. The following year Maria and Elizabeth, the two eldest
daughters, became ill, left the school and died: Charlotte and Emily,
understandably, were brought home.
In 1826 Mr.
Brontë brought home a box of wooden soldiers for Branwell to play with.
Charlotte, Emily, Branwell, and Ann, playing with the soldiers, conceived of
and began to write in great detail about an imaginary world which they called
Angria.
In 1831
Charlotte became a pupil at the school at Roe Head, but she left school the
following year to teach her sisters at home. She returned returns to Roe Head
School in 1835 as a governess: for a time her sister Emily attended the same
school as a pupil, but became homesick and returned to Haworth. Ann took her
place from 1836 to 1837.
In 1838,
Charlotte left Roe Head School. In 1839 she accepted a position as governess in
the Sidgewick family, but left after three months and returned to Haworth. In
1841 she became governess in the White family, but left, once again, after nine
months.
Upon her return
to Haworth the three sisters, led by Charlotte, decided to open their own
school after the necessary preparations had been completed. In 1842 Charlotte
and Emily went to Brussels to complete their studies. After a trip home to
Haworth, Charlotte returned alone to Brussels, where she remained until 1844.
Upon her return
home the sisters embarked upon their project for founding a school, which
proved to be an abject failure: their advertisements did not elicit a single
response from the public.
In 1845 Charlotte
discovered Emily's poems, and decided to publish a selection of the poems of
all three sisters: 1846 brought the publication of their Poems, written under
the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Charlotte also completed The Professor, which
was rejected for publication. The following year, however, Charlotte's Jane Eyre,
Emily's Wuthering
Heights,
and Ann's Agnes
Grey were all published, still under the Bell pseudonyms.
In 1848
Charlotte and Ann visited their publishers in London, and revealed the true
identities of the "Bells." In the same year Branwell Brontë, by now
an alcoholic and a drug addict, died, and Emily died shortly thereafter. Ann
died the following year.
In 1849
Charlotte, visiting London, began to move in literary circles, making the
acquaintance, for example, of Thackeray. In 1850 Charlotte edited her sister's
various works, and met Mrs. Gaskell. In 1851she visited the Great Exhibition in
London, and attended a series of lectures given by Thackeray.
The Rev. A. B.
Nicholls, curate of Haworth since 1845, proposed marriage to Charlotte in 1852.
The Rev. Mr. Brontë objected violently, and Charlotte, who, though she may have
pitied him, was in any case not in love with him, refused him. Nicholls left
Haworth in the following year, the same in which Charlotte's Villette was
published. By 1854, however, Mr. Brontë's opposition to the proposed marriage
had weakened, and Charlotte and Nicholls became engaged. Nicholls returned as
curate at Haworth, and they were married, though it seems clear that Charlotte,
though she admired him, still did not love him.
In 1854
Charlotte, expecting a child, caught pneumonia. It was an illness which could
have been cured, but she seems to have seized upon it (consciously or unconsciously)
as an opportunity of ending her life, and after a lengthy and painful illness,
she died, probably of dehydration.
1857 saw the
posthumous publication of The Professor, which had been written in 1845-46, and
in that same year Mrs. Gaskell's Life
of Charlotte Brontë was published.
Charlotte
Brontë
Sir Walter Scott, 1st
Baronet
(1771 – 1832)
Scott's childhood at Sandyknowes, in the
shadow of Smailholm
Tower, introduced him to the tales and folklore of the Scottish Borders.
Born in College Wynd in the Old
Town of Edinburgh
in 1771, the son of a solicitor, Scott survived a childhood bout of polio in 1773 that left him lame. To cure his
lameness he was sent in 1773 to live in the rural Borders region at his
grandparents' farm at Sandyknowe, adjacent to the ruin of Smailholm Tower, the
earlier family home. Here he was taught to read by his aunt Jenny, and learned
from her the speech patterns and many of the tales and legends that
characterised much of his work. In January 1775 he returned to Edinburgh, and
that summer went with his aunt Jenny to take spa treatment at Bath in England, where
they lived at 6 South
Parade. In the winter of 1776 he went back to Sandyknowe, with
another attempt at a water cure at Prestonpans during the
following summer.
In 1778 Scott returned to Edinburgh for private education to
prepare him for school, and in October 1779 he began at the Royal High School
of Edinburgh. He was now well able to walk and explore the city and the
surrounding countryside. His reading included chivalric romances, poems,
history and travel books. He was given private tuition by James Mitchell in
arithmetic and writing, and learned from him the history of the Kirk
with emphasis on the Covenanters.
After finishing school he was sent to stay for six months with his aunt Jenny
in Kelso, attending the local grammar school where he met James and John
Ballantyne who later became his business partners and printed his books.
Scott began studying classics at the University of Edinburgh
in November 1783, at the age of only 12, a year or so younger than most of his
fellow students. In March 1786 he began an apprenticeship in his father's
office to become a Writer to the Signet. While at the university Scott had become
a friend of Adam Ferguson, the son of Professor Adam Ferguson who
hosted literary salons. Scott met the blind poet Thomas Blacklock who lent him
books as well as introducing him to James Macpherson's Ossian cycle of poems. During the
winter of 1786–87 the 15-year-old Scott saw Robert Burns at one of
these salons, for what was to be their only meeting. When Burns noticed a print
illustrating the poem "The Justice of the Peace" and asked who had
written the poem, only Scott knew that it was by John Langhorne, and was
thanked by BurnsWhen it was decided that he would become a lawyer, he returned
to the university to study law, first taking classes in Moral Philosophy and
Universal History in 1789–90.
After completing his studies in law, he became a lawyer in
Edinburgh. As a lawyer's clerk he made his first visit to the Scottish
Highlands directing an eviction. He was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in 1792. He had an unsuccessful love suit
with Williamina Belsches of Fettercairn, who married Scott´s friend Sir William Forbes, 6th Baronet.
Literary
career launched
As a boy, youth and young man, Scott was fascinated by the
oral traditions of the Scottish Borders. He was an obsessive collector of
stories, and developed an innovative method of recording what he heard at the
feet of local story-tellers using carvings on twigs, to avoid the disapproval
of those who believed that such stories were neither for writing down nor for printing.
At the age of 25 he began to write professionally, translating works from
German his first publication being rhymed versions of ballads by Gottfried August Bürger in 1796. He then published an
idiosyncratic three-volume set of collected ballads of his adopted home region,
The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.
This was the first sign from a literary standpoint of his interest in Scottish
history.
In 1796, Scott's friend James Ballantyne founded
a printing press in Kelso, in the Scottish Borders. Through Ballantyne, Scott
was able to publish his first works and his poetry then began to bring him to
public attention. In 1805, The Lay of the Last Minstrel captured wide
public imagination, and his career as a writer was established in spectacular
fashion. He published many other poems over the next ten years, including the
popular The Lady of the Lake, printed in 1810 and set in the Trossachs. Portions of
the German translation of this work were set to music by Franz Schubert. One of
these songs, Ellens dritter Gesang, is popularly labelled as
"Schubert's Ave Maria". Marmion, published
in 1808, produced some of his most memorable lines. Canto VI.
In 1809, Scott persuaded James Ballantyne and
his brother to move to Edinburgh and to establish their printing press there.
He became a partner in their business. As a political conservative and advocate
of the Union with England, Scott helped to found the Tory Quarterly Review,
a review journal to which he made several anonymous contributions.
In 1813 he was offered the position of Poet Laureate. He declined, and the position
went to Robert
Southey.
Scott's first success was his poetry. Since childhood, he had
been fascinated by stories in the oral tradition of the Scottish Borders. This
drew him to explore the writing of prose. Hitherto, the novel was accorded
lower (and often scandalous) social value compared to the epic poetry that had
brought him public acclaim. In an innovative and astute action, he wrote and
published his first novel, Waverley, under
the guise of anonymity. It was a tale of the Jacobite rising of
1745 in the Kingdom of Great Britain. Its English protagonist was Edward
Waverley, by his Tory upbringing sympathetic to the Jacobite cause.
Becoming enmeshed in events, however, he eventually chooses Hanoverian
respectability. There followed a succession of novels over the next five years,
each with a Scottish historical setting. Mindful of his reputation as a poet,
Scott maintained the anonymity he had begun with Waverley, always
publishing the novels under the name Author of Waverley or attributed as
"Tales of..." with no author. Even when it was clear that there would
be no harm in coming out into the open, he maintained the façade, apparently
out of a sense of fun. During this time the nickname The Wizard of the North
was popularly applied to the mysterious best-selling writer. His identity as
the author of the novels was widely rumoured, and in 1815 Scott was given the
honour of dining with George, Prince Regent, who wanted to meet "the author of
Waverley".
In 1819 Ivanhoe,
a historical romance set in 12th-century England, marked a move away from a
focus on the history and society of Scotland. Ivanhoe features a sympathetic
Jewish character named Rebecca, considered by many critics to be the book's
real heroine. This was remarkable at a time when the struggle for the Emancipation of the Jews in England was
gathering momentum, and arguably reflects Scott's deep-seated sense of natural
and humanistic justice. It too was a success, and he wrote several others along
similar lines.
Scott wrote The Bride of Lammermoor based on a true story of two
lovers, in the setting of the Lammermuir Hills. In
the novel, Lucie Ashton and Edgar Ravenswood exchange vows, but Lucie's mother
discovers that Edgar is an enemy of their family. She intervenes and forces her
daughter to marry Sir Arthur Bucklaw, who has just inherited a large sum of
money on the death of his aunt. On their wedding night, Lucie stabs the
bridegroom, succumbs to insanity, and dies. Donizetti's opera Lucia
di Lammermoor was based on Scott's novel.
His fame grew as his explorations and interpretations of
Scottish history and society captured popular imagination. Impressed by this,
the Prince Regent (the future George IV) gave Scott permission to search for
the fabled but long-lost Crown Jewels ("Honours
of Scotland"), which had last been used to crown Charles II and
during the years of the Protectorate under Cromwell had been squirrelled away.
In 1818, Scott and a small team of military men unearthed the honours from the
depths of Edinburgh Castle. A grateful Prince Regent granted Scott the title of
baronet. Later, after George's accession to the throne, the city government of
Edinburgh invited Scott, at the King's behest, to stage-manage the King's entry
into Edinburgh. With only three weeks for planning and execution, Scott created
a spectacular and comprehensive pageant, designed not only to impress the King,
but also in some way to heal the rifts that had previously destabilised Scots
society. He used the event to contribute to the drawing of a line under an old
world that pitched his homeland into regular bouts of bloody strife. He, along
with his 'production team', mounted what in modern days could be termed a PR
event, in which the (rather tubby) King was dressed in tartan, and was greeted
by his people, many of whom were also dressed in similar tartan ceremonial
dress. This form of dress, previously proscribed after the 1745 rebellion
against the English, subsequently became one of the seminal, potent and
ubiquitous symbols of Scottish identity
Financial woes and death
In 1825 and 1826, a banking crisis swept through the cities of
London and Edinburgh. The Ballantyne printing business, in which he was heavily
invested, crashed, resulting in his being very publicly ruined. Rather than
declare himself bankrupt, or to accept any kind of financial support from his
many supporters and admirers (including the King himself), he placed his house
and income in a trust belonging to his creditors, and determined to write his
way out of debt. He kept up his prodigious output of fiction, as well as
producing a biography of Napoleon
Bonaparte, until 1831. By then his health was failing.
Notwithstanding this, he undertook a grand tour of Europe, being welcomed and
celebrated wherever he went. He returned to Scotland and, in September 1832
died (under unexplained circumstances) at Abbotsford, the home he had designed
and had built, near Melrose in the Scottish Borders. Though he died owing
money, his novels continued to sell and the debts encumbering his estate were
eventually discharged.
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet
William Wordsworth
(1770 –1850)
William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who,
with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English
literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads.
Wordsworth's magnum
opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a
semiautobiographical poem of his early years which he revised and expanded a
number of times. It was posthumously titled and published, prior to which it
was generally known as the poem "to Coleridge". Wordsworth was
Britain's Poet
Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.
Early life
The second of five children born to John
Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Wordsworth House in
Cockermouth, Cumberland—part of the scenic region in northwest England, the Lake District.
Wordsworth's father, although rarely present, did teach him
poetry, including that of Milton,
Shakespeare
and Spenser, in addition
to allowing his son to rely on his own father's library.
After the death of their mother, in 1778, his father sent
William to Hawkshead Grammar School in Lancashire and Dorothy to live with
relatives in Yorkshire; she and
William would not meet again for another nine years. Although Hawkshead was
Wordsworth's first serious experience with education, he had been taught to
read by his mother and had attended a tiny school of low quality in
Cockermouth. After the Cockermouth school, he was sent to a school in Penrith
for the children of upper-class families and taught by Ann Birkett, a woman who
insisted on instilling in her students traditions that included pursuing both
scholarly and local activities, especially the festivals around Easter, May
Day, and Shrove
Tuesday. Wordsworth was taught both the Bible and the Spectator,
but little else. It was at the school that Wordsworth was to meet the
Hutchinsons, including Mary, who would be his future wife.
Wordsworth made his debut as a writer in 1787 when he
published a sonnet in The European Magazine. That same year he began attending St John's College, Cambridge, and received his B.A. degree in
1791. He returned to Hawkshead for his first two summer holidays, and often
spent later holidays on walking tours, visiting places famous for the beauty of
their landscape. In 1790, he took a walking tour of Europe, during which he
toured the Alps extensively, and
visited nearby areas of France, Switzerland, and Italy.
Relationship with Annette Vallon
In November 1791, Wordsworth visited Revolutionary France and became enthralled with the Republican movement. He fell in love with a
French woman, Annette Vallon, who in 1792 gave birth to their child, Caroline.
Because of lack of money and Britain's tensions
with France, he returned alone to England the next year. The circumstances of
his return and his subsequent behaviour raise doubts as to his declared wish to
marry Annette, but he supported her and his daughter as best he could in later
life. The Reign
of Terror estranged him from the Republican movement, and war
between France and Britain prevented him from seeing Annette and Caroline again
for several years. There are strong suggestions that Wordsworth may have been
depressed and emotionally unsettled in the mid-1790s.
First publication and Lyrical Ballads
In his "Preface to Lyrical Ballads", which is called the
"manifesto" of English Romantic criticism, Wordsworth calls his poems
"experimental." The year 1793 saw Wordsworth's first published poetry
with the collections An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. He
received a legacy of £900 from Raisley Calvert in 1795 so that he could pursue
writing poetry. That year, he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Somerset. The two poets quickly
developed a close friendship. In 1797, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy
moved to Alfoxton
House, Somerset, just a few miles away from Coleridge's home in Nether Stowey.
Together, Wordsworth and Coleridge (with insights from Dorothy) produced Lyrical Ballads
(1798), an important work in the English Romantic movement. The
volume gave neither Wordsworth's nor Coleridge's name as author. One of
Wordsworth's most famous poems, "Tintern Abbey", was published in the work, along with Coleridge's
"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". The
second edition, published in 1800, had only Wordsworth listed as the author,
and included a preface to the poems, which was augmented significantly in the
1802 edition. This Preface to Lyrical Ballads is considered a central
work of Romantic literary theory. In it, Wordsworth discusses what he sees as
the elements of a new type of poetry, one based on the "real language of
men" and which avoids the poetic diction of much 18th-century poetry.
Here, Wordsworth gives his famous definition of poetry as "the spontaneous
overflow of powerful emotions recollected in tranquility: it takes its origin
from emotion recollected in tranquility." A fourth and final edition of Lyrical
Ballads was published in 1805.
The Borderers
From 1795 to 1797, he wrote his only play, The Borderers,
a verse tragedy during the reign of King Henry III of England when Englishmen of the north country
were in conflict with Scottish rovers. Wordsworth attempted to get the play
staged in November 1797, but it was rejected by Thomas Harris, theatre manager
of Covent Garden, who
proclaimed it "impossible that the play should succeed in the
representation". The rebuff was not received lightly by Wordsworth, and the
play was not published until 1842, after substantial revision.
Germany and move to the Lake District
Wordsworth, Dorothy and Coleridge travelled to Germany in the
autumn of 1798. While Coleridge was intellectually stimulated by the trip, its
main effect on Wordsworth was to produce homesickness. During the harsh winter
of 1798–99, Wordsworth lived with Dorothy in Goslar, and, despite extreme stress
and loneliness, he began work on an autobiographical piece later titled The
Prelude. He wrote a number of famous poems, including "The Lucy poems".
He and his sister moved back to England, now to Dove Cottage in Grasmere in the Lake
District, and this time with fellow poet Robert Southey nearby.
Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey came to be known as the "Lake Poets".
Through this period, many of his poems revolve around themes of death,
endurance, separation and grief.
Autobiographical work and Poems in Two Volumes
Wordsworth had for years been making plans to write a long
philosophical poem in three parts, which he intended to call The Recluse.
He had in 1798–99 started an autobiographical poem, which he never named but
called the "poem to
Coleridge", which would serve as an appendix to The Recluse.
In 1804, he began expanding this autobiographical work, having decided to make
it a prologue rather than an appendix to the larger work he planned. By 1805,
he had completed it, but refused to publish such a personal work until he had
completed the whole of The Recluse. The death of his brother, John, in
1805 affected him strongly.
The source of Wordsworth's philosophical allegiances as
articulated in The
Prelude and in such shorter works as "Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey" has
been the source of much critical debate. While it had long been supposed that
Wordsworth relied chiefly on Coleridge for philosophical guidance, more recent
scholarship has suggested that Wordsworth's ideas may have been formed years
before he and Coleridge became friends in the mid 1790s. While in Revolutionary
Paris in 1792, the 22-year-old Wordsworth made the acquaintance of the
mysterious traveller John "Walking" Stewart (1747–1822),
who was nearing the end of a thirty-years' peregrination from Madras, India, through Persia and Arabia, across Africa and all of
Europe, and up through the fledgling United States. By the time of their
association, Stewart had published an ambitious work of original materialist
philosophy entitled The Apocalypse of Nature (London, 1791), to which
many of Wordsworth's philosophical sentiments are likely indebted.
The Prospectus
In 1814 he published The Excursion as
the second part of the three-part The Recluse. He had not completed the
first and third parts, and never would. He did, however, write a poetic
Prospectus to "The Recluse" in which he lays out the structure and
intent of the poem. The Prospectus contains some of Wordsworth's most famous
lines on the relation between the human mind and nature.
The Poet Laureate and other honours
Wordsworth received an honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree in
1838 from Durham
University, and the same honour from Oxford University the next
year. In 1842 the government awarded him a civil list pension amounting to £300
a year. With the death in 1843 of Robert Southey, Wordsworth became the Poet
Laureate. He initially refused the honour, saying he was too old, but accepted
when Prime Minister Robert Peel assured him "you shall have nothing
required of you" (he became the only laureate to write no official
poetry). When his daughter, Dora, died in 1847, his production of poetry came
to a standstill.
Death
William Wordsworth died by re-aggravating a case of pleurisy on 23 April
1850, and was buried at St. Oswald's church in Grasmere. His widow
Mary published his lengthy autobiographical "poem to Coleridge" as The Prelude
several months after his death. Though this failed to arouse great interest in
1850, it has since come to be recognised as his masterpiece.
William Wordsworth
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