Truth and Consequences Blake to Dickens

The Reasoning Power in Man is an Incrustation over my

Immortal/Spirit

Reason vs. Emotion

•  Mind or heart? •  Which is best way to understand self? •  Philosophes touted mind and reason. •  Romantics favored the heart and sensation. •  Mystics like Swedenborg and Blake sought

(discovered) direct connectedness with the divine

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

•  We cannot know ultimate reality

•  Our knowledge is limited to the phenomenal world

•  We can have no knowledge of a thing-in-itself

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

(1770-1831)

•  Absolute truth is knowable

•  Thing-in-itself is knowable

•  Absolute Spirit

Hegel

•  The art, science, philosophy, religion, politics and leading events are so interconnected that the period may be seen to possess an organic unity.

•  There is a purpose and an end to history: the unfolding of Absolute Spirit

Hegel

•  Spirit manifests itself in history through a dialectical confrontation between opposing forces…

•  The clash of opposites gains in intensity, eventually ending in a resolution that unifies both opposing views

Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary

to Human existence.

Clash of Contraries

•  While Blake and Hegel barely overlapped, their chains of thought shared links in

common. •  These links connect eventually to Dickens common.

•  These links connect eventually to Dickens

Industrial Revolution

Britain Leads the World

•  Textile production –  (1839) 2.4 million yards –  (1849) 42 million yards

•  Iron production –  (1849) England’s production = rest of world

•  Rail –  (1830) 0 miles –  (1850) 7,000 miles

•  Population –  Doubled in 50 years –  Bradford 13,000-104,000 from 1801-1861

Thoughtful People

Widespread suffering and death are inevitable. Population, when unchecked, increased in a

geometrical ratio, and subsistence for man in an arithmetical ratio. Best way to control population is starvation http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~stephan/malthus/malthus.0.html

Thomas Malthus 1766-1834

Wages must be just high enough to permit a worker to survive

David Ricardo 1772-1823

Lord Lansdowne

•  One million Irish will die before the famine is over.

•  Cut back funding on famine relief program •  One million Irish did die in the famine

between 1845 and 1847

Contraries

•  There exists in England “two nations…who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were…of different planets; who are formed by different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.” These two nations are the rich and the poor.

– Benjamin Disreali, 1845

Nicholas Nickleby 1837

•  The rags of the squalid ballad-singer fluttered in the rich light that showed the goldsmith’s treasures, pale and pinched-up faces hovered about the windows where was tempting food, hungry eyes wandered over the profusion guarded by one thin sheet of brittle glass—an iron wall to them…Live and death went hand in hand; wealth and poverty stood side by side; repletion and starvation laid them down together.

•  Without contraries is no progression •  Spirit manifests itself in history through a

dialectical confrontation between opposing forces…

•  There is a purpose and an end to history: the unfolding of Absolute Spirit

Purpose and End to History

•  Perhaps that Absolute Spirit has other names, other manifestations

•  Woolf’s flashes of insight –  "sudden shocks," and –  "exceptional moments," –  "a revelation of some order" behind "the cotton wool of

daily life," –  "a token of some real thing behind appearances" to

which she gives body "by putting it into words." (Nelson)

Woolf’s intuition

•  “proves that one's life is not confined to one's body and what one says and does; one is living all the time in relation to certain background rods or conceptions. Mine is that there is a pattern hid behind the cotton wool.”

•  Woolf’s art was to reveal that pattern.

Dickens’s art

•  Like Woolf’s, is to reveal and revel in that pattern of connectedness.

(Repeated again in Borges & Calvino) •  Dickens […] had a lively interest in

occurrences and phenomena that seem to show a web of connections among different minds of which we are largely unconscious.

Universal Spirit~~Providence

•  I think the business of art is to […] show, by a backward light, what everything has been working to--but only to suggest, until the fulfillment comes.

•  These are the ways of Providence, of which ways all art is but a little imitation.

Charles Dickens

February 7, 1812 -

June 9, 1870

Early childhood

•  2nd child of John and Elizabeth •  Many small towns •  Happy childhood

Early misfortune

•  Family moved to London 1823 •  Dickens 11 •  Father imprisoned for debt •  Charles employed labeling shoe polish

(blacking house) •  Felt abandoned by parents •  Featured orphans in his writing.

Sibling Rivalry

•  While thus employed, eldest sister Francis still attended the Royal Academy of Music where she was awarded a silver medal for excellent playing and singing.

•  Attending the awards ceremony, Dickens felt neglected and humiliated

•  After father released from prison, Dickens enrolled in school in London from age 12-15

•  Mother did not understand his desire to attend school

•  Dickens resentful, never really forgave her.

"Whoever is devoted to an art must be content to deliver

himself wholly up to it, and to find his recompense in it."

Apprentice •  finished high school at 15,

–  prize in Latin, •  No University; spent time at the library of the

British Museum. •  Read voraciously, esp. Shakespeare •  Source of plot, character, theme. •  Two years: clerk in law office •  Four years: shorthand reporter for lawyers,

Parliament •  1834 Began two years as reporter for the Morning

Chronicle, covering politics and law.

Review

•  Brushes with poverty •  While peers excel •  Early skills with shorthand lead to exposure

to bombast and pandemonium of politics •  Developed eye and ear for crowded

communication

Works •  1836 "Dinner at Poplar Walk"

____. Sketches by Boz text •  1836-37 Pickwick Papers •  1837-39 Oliver Twist •  1838-39 Nicholas Nickleby •  1840-41 The Old Curiosity Shop •  1841 Barnaby Rudge •  1842 American Notes •  1843 Martin Chuzzlewit •  ____. A Christmas Carol •  1844 The Chimes •  1845 The Cricket and the Hearth •  1846 The Battle of Life •  1846-48 Dombey and Son

•  1848 The Haunted Man •  1849-50 David Copperfield •  1851-53 Bleak House •  1854 Hard Times •  1855-57 Little Dorrit •  1857 The Frozen Deep •  1857 "The Perils of Certain English

Prisoners" (with Wilkie Collins) •  1859 A Tale of Two Cities •  1860-61 Great Expectations •  1864-65 Our Mutual Friend •  1869-70 The Mystery of Edwin

Drood

Hard Times

•  Cold •  Harsh •  Unsympathetic •  Unjovial •  Socialist •  UnDickensian

•  Real •  Accurate Satire •  Honest •  Humorous •  Most Dickensian