Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Novel

Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre is the novel by Charlotte Bronte that was first published in 1847 under the pen-name Currer Bell. Women writers of the period often used male or neutral pseudonyms to avoid prejudice against female authors, and Bronte's choice is a well-known example. The first edition appeared in three volumes, the three-decker format that was standard for Victorian fiction issued by circulating libraries. The novel is narrated in the first person by its heroine, Jane Eyre, who recounts her own life. Its most famous minor character, Bertha Mason, is Rochester's first wife, who is confined in the attic of Thornfield Hall and never narrates her own story. The protagonist works as a governess at Thornfield, and the plot centres on her position in that household and her complicated relationship with Mr Rochester. Feminist and gothic critics, most famously Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), read the novel as a critique of heterosexual romance, marriage and domestic confinement, and they use the figure of the confined madwoman to examine women's rage and restriction. In the idiom 'beside oneself', the adjective phrase means emotionally overwrought and unable to control one's feelings, as in 'She was beside herself with grief.' Narrators in Victorian first-person fiction often use such idioms to show agitation, and the idiom should not be confused with a literal spatial sense.

Dickens's novels

Charles Dickens is the great novelist of Victorian England, and his works were usually published in monthly or weekly serial parts before appearing as volumes. His novels expose social problems such as the workhouse system, debtors' prisons and child labour, and they often use vivid comic and grotesque characters. The workhouse episode in Oliver Twist, in which a young orphan boy asks for a second helping of food, is one of the best-known scenes in English fiction. Dickens's novel The Old Curiosity Shop was serialised in the early 1840s and is one of his early major works. When a question asks you to identify a Dickens novel, you should distinguish his titles from those of other writers: Arnold Bennett wrote The Old Wives' Tale (1908), William Congreve wrote the Restoration comedy The Old Bachelor, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). Other famous passages from the period are often confused with Dickens's work. Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay Self-Reliance, Francis Bacon's essay Of Studies, and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, which opens with a striking image of a clock, are all by authors other than Dickens.

Fictional characters and their authors

Many questions test whether you can link a fictional character with the author who created him. Phileas Fogg and his servant Passepartout belong to Jules Verne's adventure novel Around the World in Eighty Days. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza were created by Miguel de Cervantes in Spanish, and Candide and Pangloss belong to Voltaire's philosophical satire Candide. Dogberry and Verges are the comic constables of Shakespeare's comedy Much Ado About Nothing. Uriah Heep, the oily clerk, is a character from Charles Dickens's David Copperfield. Stephen Dedalus is the autobiographical hero of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and reappears in Ulysses. Bazarov, the nihilist protagonist, is from Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, and Raskolnikov, the murderer who tests his theory of extraordinary men, is from Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. The safest method is to memorise each character with his novel or play and then with the author, because nationalities and dates often help eliminate wrong options. For example, Russian novelists such as Turgenev and Dostoevsky are easily separated from the English Dickens and the Irish Joyce.

Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness was published in 1899 and narrates a journey up a river in the Congo, where European agents exploited the land and people in the name of commerce and civilisation. Its most famous line, 'The horror! The horror!', is spoken by Kurtz, the ivory agent who dies during the journey. Other fictional deaths are sometimes confused with this line. Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare's Macbeth, Captain Ahab in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Jonathan Harker in Bram Stoker's Dracula do not utter these words as their last speech, so they must be eliminated in such questions. The words express a final moral recognition on Kurtz's part, a sense that he has seen the full evil of the imperial enterprise that he served and that he has himself become corrupted by it. The passage therefore presents an individual's moral degeneration and his late awareness of imperial brutality, rather than an economic failure, a political collapse or an environmental disaster. Students should note that the novella's horror is psychological and moral, which is why the answer to such interpretive questions emphasises the recognition of imperialism's evil.

George Eliot's fiction

George Eliot is the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, the Victorian novelist who wrote realist novels with a strong psychological and moral interest. Her early works include Adam Bede (1859) and The Mill on the Floss (1860), and her later masterpiece Middlemarch was published in serial form in 1871 and 1872. Dorothea Brooke and her husband Edward Casaubon are the central pair of Middlemarch, while Hetty Sorel is a character in Adam Bede and Stephen Guest appears in The Mill on the Floss. All four characters therefore belong to Eliot's fiction and not to the novels of the Brontes, Austen or Scott. Eliot also published Scenes from Clerical Life (1858), a collection of short stories set among provincial clergy, and it is a work of fiction in prose rather than a play. The distractors in such questions are often well-known dramas: Thomas Kyd's revenge play The Spanish Tragedy, Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House and Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children are all plays, so they can be excluded by recognising their authors.

Colonialism in Sherlock Holmes

Arthur Conan Doyle's stories about Sherlock Holmes reflect the presence of the British Empire in ordinary London life, although the detective fiction seldom makes empire its explicit theme. Colonialism can appear as objects, such as the opium dens of London, which were linked to the opium trade that the British had developed in Asia. It can also appear as events: Dr Watson's career as an army doctor includes service in the Second Anglo-Afghan War, a conflict that reflects British imperial campaigns in Central Asia. Colonial travel and trade also appear in the animals of the stories, as in 'The Adventure of the Speckled Band', where the pet animals brought back from India suggest the traffic between Britain and its empire. By contrast, The Hound of the Baskervilles draws on an English folk legend of the Dartmoor moors, so its supernatural animal is not a colonial symbol. When answering questions of this type, identify whether an item is an object, event, place, animal, fear or desire tied to imperial contact, and do not accept an item merely because it is set in Victorian England.