Shaping the English
character
Performer - Culture & Literature
Marina Spiazzi, Marina Tavella,
Margaret Layton © 2012
Bartholomew
Dandridge,
A Lady reading
Belinda beside
a fountain, 1745.
Yale Center for
British Art,
New Haven
Shaping the English character
1. The first Hanoverian king
• Queen Anne (1702–1714) had succeeded her brotherin-law, William III, and her sister Mary.
• After her death, her cousin, the Duke
of Hanover, became King George I.
During his reign:
1. the powers of the monarchy
diminished;
2. Ministers met without the King in the
cabinet led by the Prime Minister;
3. the actual power was held by Sir
Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime
minister.
Performer - Culture&Literature
George I, c. 1714
Shaping the English character
2. The House of Hanover
Performer - Culture&Literature
Shaping the English character
3. 1707: The Act of Union
The Act of Union
became official during Queen Anne’s reign
It abolished the
Scottish Parliament
It gave the Scots a proportion of
the seats at Westminster
The majority of Scots accepted their new role in a kingdom
united under the title Great Britain.
A renewal of Scottish nationalism must await the 20th
century.
Performer - Culture&Literature
Shaping the English character
4. The Whigs and the Tories
The Whigs
The first
political
parties
in Britain
The Tories
Performer - Culture&Literature
Descendants
Parliamentarians
Supported by
the wealthy and
commercial classes
Fought for
 commercial development
 a vigorous foreign policy
 religious toleration
Descendants
Royalists
Supported by
the Church of
England the landowners
Fought for
the divine right of
the king
Shaping the English character
5. A golden age
The 18th-century key concepts were:
• political stability;
• individualism;
• liberal thought and free will;
• optimism;
• reason and common sense;
• desire for balance, symmetry, refinement.
Performer - Culture&Literature
Shaping the English character
6. The reading public
The increase of the reading public
in the Augustan Age was due to
The growing
importance of the
middle class
The individual’s
trust in his own
abilities
The practice
of reason and
self-analysis
Most readers
were
middle-class
women
They used to
borrow books
from circulating
libraries
Coffee-houses
allowed the
circulation of
news, opinions
Performer - Culture&Literature
Shaping the English character
6. The reading public
Coffee-houses
1. were attended by fashionable and artistic people;
2. became gathering points where people
exchanged ideas and gossip;
3. let public opinion and journalism evolve;
4. were exclusively attended by men.
Performer - Culture&Literature
Shaping the English character
6. The reading public
The interest of middle-class people in literature gave rise to
journalism
‘The Tatler’and‘The
Spectator’the first English
newspapers
Their style  simple, lively
Their aim didactic
Performer - Culture&Literature
the novel
where the belief in the power of
reason and the individual’s trust
in his own abilities found
expression
Shaping the English character
7. The novelist
1. The spokesman of the middle class.
1. The fathers of the English novel:
• Daniel Defoe
the realistic novel
• Samuel Richardson
the sentimental novel
• Henry Fielding
the mock-epic novel
• Jonathan Swift
the satirical novel
Performer - Culture&Literature
Shaping the English character
8. The novelist’s aim
• To be understood widely
way.
He wrote in a simple
• Realism
not only linked to the life presented, but to
the way it was shown.
• Speed and copiousness
His most important
economic virtues since it was the bookseller and not the
patron who rewarded him.
Performer - Culture&Literature
Shaping the English character
9. The characters
The hero
A bourgeois, self-made,
self-reliant man
The mouthpiece of the
author
The reader is expected to
sympathise with him
All the
characters
Performer - Culture&Literature
have contemporary
names and surnames
Robinson
Crusoe
They struggle
for survival or
social
success
Shaping the English character
10. The setting
• Chronological sequence of events.
• References to particular times of the year or of the day.
‘I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York’
Robinson Crusoe
• Specific references to names of countries, towns and
streets.
• Detailed descriptions of interiors
to make the
narrative more realistic.
Performer - Culture&Literature
Shaping the English character
11. The narrative technique
Performer - Culture&Literature
Shaping the English character
12. Themes
1.
Real life.
1.
Everything that could alter a social status.
1. The sense of reward and punishment
linked to the Puritan ethics of the middle class.
Performer - Culture&Literature