ENNC 3120 – Victorian Poetry & Prose
Herbert Tucker
Fall 2015
Bryan Hall 415
W 10:30-12:30, Th 10-11
tucker@virginia.edu; 924-6677
TEXTBOOKS:
Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford
Victorian Literature 1830-1900, ed Mermin & Tucker
T 8/26
Tennyson: The Kraken
Browning: Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister
C Rossetti: Winter: My Secret
Hardy: The Darkling Thrush
Th 8/28
M&T Preface and Contents (v-xx); Chronology (1102-13)
The Condition of England (intro 3-6)
Carlyle: Signs of the Times
Macaulay: History of England
self-guided textbook tour; library book show & tell
T 9/1
The Condition of England (6-39)
Carlyle: Midas, Gospel of Mammonism (from Past and Present)
Ruskin: The Nature of Gothic
Th 9/3
Burn: Autobiography of a Beggar Boy letters 1, 11, 13
Martineau: Domestic Service
Barrett Browning: The Cry of the Children
Smiles: Self-Help
Procter: Homeless
Wilde: Impression du Matin
T 9/8
Th 9/10
scansion due in class
Barnes: all selections
Barrett Browning: The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point
Victoria: Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands
Kipling: Tommy; The Widow at Windsor
1st essay due in class
T 9/15
Faith, Doubt, and Knowledge (41-80)
Keble: all selections
Newman: The Tamworth Reading Room; Apologia pro Vita Sua ch 5
Th 9/17
C Rossetti: Up-Hill; A Better Resurrection; Good Friday; The Lowest Place;
Everything that is born must die
Hopkins: Heaven-Haven; The Habit of Perfection; God’s Grandeur; The Windhover;
Pied Beauty; No worst, there is none; That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire;
Notebooks (1000-4)
scansion due in class
1
T 9/22
Mill: from On Liberty (304-9)
Darwin: Origin of Species
Spencer: Progress: Its Law and Cause
Huxley: Evolution and Ethics
Th 9/24
Carlyle: from The Hero as Divinity (182-84)
Tennyson: Tithonus; Demeter and Persephone
Browning: Amphibian
Clough: Hymnos Ahymnos
Arnold: Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse
Swinburne: Hymn to Proserpine; A Forsaken Garden
Hardy: Hap
scansion due in class
T 9/29
Tennyson: In Memoriam
Th 10/1
Browning: The Bishop Orders His Tomb; Caliban upon Setebos
Brontë: No coward soul is mine
Procter: A Lost Chord
Hardy: In Tenebris I
D G Rossetti: My Sister’s Sleep
Meredith: Lucifer in Starlight
Housman: Now hollow fires burn out
F 10/2
2nd essay due at noon
Fall Break
Th 10/8
Gender and Sexuality (81-104)
Martineau: Political Non-Existence of Women
Mill: The Subjection of Women
Darwin: The Descent of Man
Nightingale: Cassandra
Cobbe: Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors
Webster: An Irrepressible Army
T 10/13
Barrett Browning: Bertha in the Lane; from Aurora Leigh; Lord Walter’s Wife
Gaskell: Life of Charlotte Brontë
Victoria: Letters to Princess Victoria
Oliphant: Autobiography
C G Rossetti: In an Artist’s Studio; A Triad; Love from the North; After Death
Webster: By the Looking-Glass; The Happiest Girl in the World; A Castaway
Coleridge: The Other Side of a Mirror; The Witch; The White Women
Levy: Xantippe
2
Th 10/15
Tennyson: Mariana; Rizpah
Browning: Porphyria’s Lover; Count Gismond; A Woman’s Last Word
D G Rossetti: Jenny
Morris: The Defence of Guenevere
Swinburne: The Leper; Hermaphroditus
Hardy: The Ruined Maid
Wilde: The Harlot’s House
T 10/20
Barrett Browning: Sonnets from the Portuguese
Meredith: Modern Love
Th 10/22
Browning: My Last Duchess
D G Rossetti: The Blessed Damozel
Swinburne: Anactoria
Field: all selections
Housman: When I was one-and-twenty; Look not in my eyes
Yeats: The Song of Wandering Aengus
Dowson: Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae
F 10/23
3rd essay due at noon
T 10/27
Empire and Travel (105-130)
Macaulay: Minute on Indian Education
Martineau: First Sight of Slavery; The Hareem
FitzGerald: The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
Darwin: The Voyage of the Beagle
Kipling: The Ballad of East and West; Mandalay; Recessional; The White Man’s Burden
Th 10/29
Tennyson: The Charge of the Light Brigade; To the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava
Browning: Love Among the Ruins; An Epistle. . . of Karshish
D G Rossetti: The Burden of Nineveh
Hardy: Drummer Hodge
Housman: 1887; On Wenlock Edge
T 11/3
Barrett Browning: Hiram Powers’ “Greek Slave”; A Curse for a Nation; Mother and Poet
Tennyson: Ulysses; Tears, idle tears; Enoch Arden
Browning: “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”
Webster: Circe
Th 11/5
T 11/10
Th 11/12
Gaskell: Cranford chs 1-4
Cranford chs 5-12
finish Cranford
F 11/13
4th essay due at noon
3
T 11/17
The Function of Poetry (131-53)
Tennyson: The Higher Pantheism
Lear: all selections
C Rossetti: Sing-Song
Carroll: all selections
Morris: The Blue Closet; The Tune of Seven Towers; Two Red Roses Across the Moon
Swinburne: The Higher Pantheism in a Nutshell, Sonnet for a Picture, Poeta Loquitur
Mill: What Is Poetry?; A Crisis in My Mental History (from Autobiography)
Arnold: The Study of Poetry
Th 11/19
Tennyson: The Eagle; Hendecasyllabics
Browning: Meeting at Night; Memorabilia
Meredith: Dirge in Woods
D G Rossetti: The Woodspurge; Sudden Light
Swinburne: The Roundel
Field: Cyclamens
Wilde: Symphony in Yellow
Housman: Loveliest of trees
Coleridge: Impromptu; L’Oiseau Bleu
Yeats: He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
T 11/24
Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest
Thanksgiving
T 12/1
Clough: Amours de Voyage
Th 12/3
C Rossetti: Goblin Market
T 12/8
Tennyson: Maud: A Monodrama
Th 12/10
Final Examination 2-5
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Do your best to read everything far enough ahead of our meeting time that you can draw
connections within and among texts, identify spots where you want help from the rest of us, and just
plain think over what you’ve read, both in itself and in relation to how we live now. Keeping abreast of
the reading, and opening mental space for it early in the semester, will be the best way of preparing for
the final exam, which will be cumulative and will determine one-third of your course grade.
The syllabus specifies four Fridays as due dates for papers, of which you must submit three. One
essay should concentrate on prose, one on verse; one should center on comparison between something
from a Contexts section of our anthology and something from a Major Author; one should be about
2000 words long, the other two about 1000. I read essays thoroughly for content and technique alike.
Indeed, since I don’t believe content and technique are separable for long in any writing worth returning
to, I record your errors, offer prose therapy inside and outside class for free, and expect you to show
improvement. The paper results will together determine one-half of your course grade.
One-sixth of your grade remains undetermined. I bet you noticed that already. Think of this
unaccounted fraction as your incentive to make the course work as an active learning opportunity in our
hours together. This may mean raising questions of your own for the group to consider, or pursuing
your classmates’ proposals, or answering questions I pose from the head of the class. If you’re
customarily bashful in public, this is your chance to break the shackles of custom. If you’re pathologically
bashful in public, then you should find other ways – an e-mail correspondence, regular office hour visits
– to show me that, and what, you are thinking about the wise or beautiful or provoking literature before
us this semester. To rehearse your ideas out loud, and to practice responding to other people’s ideas in
discussion, are among the best ways to extend the quality of the insights that ground your papers. But
these are also skills in their own right, which this course invites you to cultivate.
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