The Victorian Age: Industry and Empire

English 356
Section 2399
Spring 2008
Tuesday 7pm–9:45pm
Instructor: Dr. Hilary Englert
Office: Karnoutsos 319
Office Hours: Tuesday 5pm–7pm and by appointment
Phone: X3099
e-mail: henglert@njcu.edu
hilaryenglert@comcast.net

Course Description:

British imperial holdings expanded so significantly during the nineteenth century that historians have referred to the period as B ritain ’s “imperial century.” Indeed, by Queen Victoria’s death in 1901, the British Empire ruled over a quarter of the earth’s population and covered nearly a quarter of the earth’s total land area. This imperial expansion, combined with unprecedented industrial growth at home led to both great national economic prosperity and widespread urban poverty among laborers, causing social theorists to argue that England could be best understood as two separate nations, that of the wealthy or middle classes and that of the poor. In this course, we will examine several dimensions of the cultural, political, and literary history of the British Victorian period with an emphasis on the ways in which literary works negotiate the domestic and global events that shaped British national identity during the period.

Course Objectives:

By the end of the semester, students will be expected to have cultivated a familiarity with the most significant historical events, cultural formations, literary movements and key terms of the Victorian period. In addition, students will be expected to have sustained a high degree of competence in close-reading, critical thinking, historicist analysis, and formal writing about works of literature, broadly defined. Finally, students will be expected to be able to identify characteristics of Victorian-era literary works, and to discuss the ways in which individual works exemplify concerns and/or formal elements characteristic of the period.

Required Texts:

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone
H. Rider Haggard, She
Arthur Morrison, Tales of Mean Streets
George Bernard Shaw, “Mrs. Warren’s Profession”
James R. Simmons, Jr. ed., Factory Lives: Four Nineteenth-Century Working-Class Autobiographies

Requirements:

1. READING

You are required to complete all of the reading assigned, to read closely, and to keep up with the pace set by the syllabus. Before you firmly commit to taking the course, carefully consider what that will entail – the reading load is manageable, but, because we meet only once a week, will require careful planning and organization. Moreover, the historical remoteness and formal complexity of some of our materials – and the fact that we will be reading several different kinds of pieces each week -- will require you to cultivate patience and perseverance as readers. You will need to be particularly vigilant in your efforts not to fall behind on the reading schedule.

2. READING RESPONSES and PARTICIPATION

You are required to attend class and to engage with the concerns generated in and by the class. In an effort to encourage this engagement, I ask that you generate a two-page written response to some aspect of each week’s reading, to be handed in each class session. You must carefully organize, type, and proof-read these pieces, which will constitute the most preliminary critical work that you do with the reading material each week, and which we may use to frame discussion on any given day. Note: this type of participation is a requirement. This task is designed to remind you that your reading process is always an active one – that you think things as you read and that those thoughts are a meaningful part of your basic understanding not to mention your interpretation of the materials we cover. If you are not already in the habit of annotating your text as you read, please start – the notes that you take during your first encounter with a text will frequently provide the richest source for the more formal critical work that you do with it later (including that of the reading response). Note: the reading response is formal writing and should adhere to the conventions of formal writing: you should avoid self-referential statements (e.g. “it seems to me,” “in my opinion,” “this character reminds me of my mom,” etc.), characterize the text in the present tense, and be sure to provide ample textual evidence in support of your claims.

If you are unsure of whether or not you are approaching this assignment properly, the most important thing to keep in mind is this: you should learn something about the text through the process of writing the reading response.

Suggested approaches:

--examine the way a work treats a particular concept, term, or phenomenon

--explore a question or point of confusion about a text that occurs to you as you are reading; try to articulate the critical problem that’s nagging at you and formulate some provisional responses

--discuss or analyze a particularly striking feature, passage, pattern, or idea in a text

--examine the connections between two or more texts’ formal modes, themes, representational strategies, historical contexts, ideological implications or arguments, or relationship to tradition

--advance an interpretive claim or suggestion about the meaning or significance of a text

To review:

The objective of the reading response is not merely to demonstrate that you have done the reading, but also to begin thinking analytically and in writing about the material on the syllabus that week. By definition, then, it must be completed and submitted by its deadline. Be sure to type your reading responses, and to bring them to class, ready to draw on them during discussion.

Your reading responses will be evaluated on the basis of:

--the evidence they demonstrate of your thoughtful, if preliminary, engagement with the texts

--the evidence they demonstrate of your efforts to address limitations to your writing (especially grammatical and/or mechanical problems) that have been identified on previous reading responses over the course of the semester

--their timely submission

3. WRITING ASSIGNMENTS

In addition to completing the reading responses described above, you are required to compose three formal essays on topics that I will provide during the course of the semester. I will accept revisions of the first two of these.

Your formal essays will be evaluated on the basis of:

--the clarity of your prose;

--the persuasiveness of your argument (that is, the effectiveness of your use of evidence and of the organizational framework of your discussion);

--the thoughtfulness of your engagement with the materials concerned;

--the closeness of your engagement with the question posed.

Policies:

1. EXTENSIONS: If you are unable to finish an assignment in the allotted time, you must request an extension before the deadline, rather than simply granting one to yourself or failing to show up with the work completed. Absence is no excuse for missing a deadline. When deadlines have not been extended, late papers will not be read.

2. ATTENDANCE: More than four absences and/or chronic lateness may result in a lowered final grade.

3. OFFICE HOURS: Please feel free to drop by my office hours, to call me, to see me after class or to set up an appointment outside of regular office hours to discuss academic questions, assignments, plans etc. You need not have a specific problem or clearly formulated agenda to greatly benefit from a visit.

4. EVALUATION: Your grade will be based primarily on improvement of written work, though attendance and participation will be reflected. Because I want you to regard the thinking and the writing you do in the course as a developmental process and not as a collection of finite assignments or exercises, your grade will be calculated with emphasis on persistent effort, progress and sustained achievement. Nonetheless, the mathematical formula I will use to calculate your final grade looks like this:

25% -- Participation/Effort/Engagement (including reading responses, in-class writing,

workshops, class discussion, evidence of thoughtful reading)

75% -- Three Formal Essays

5. PLAGIARISM: The NJCU student handbook defines plagiarism as the attempt: “to pass off ideas or words of another as one’s own,” “to use material without crediting the source” and/or “to present as new and original an idea, phrase or statement derived from an existing source.” In other words, if you submit an essay that you did not write, or an essay containing a passage – even one sentence – or a substantial idea that you have copied from an internet or print source without using quotation marks, footnotes, parenthetical citations, a bibliography and/or a works cited page to document that source, you have plagiarized. Because the English department considers plagiarism a flagrant violation of academic integrity, plagiarism in this or any English course will result in an automatic dismissal from the course, a grade of F for the course, and a report of the incident to the Dean of Students. Note: For all assignments in this course, you will be best off limiting the texts you engage to the primary and secondary material assigned. In other words, a typical google search on any of the works on the syllabus will be more likely to confuse the issue and lead you astray from the concerns of the course than to provide clarification or insight.

Semester Schedule:

Week One – Introductions
January 15

Week Two –
January 22

Richard Altick, “The Power of the Press” from Victorian People and Ideas (xerox)
Mary Hamer, “Serial Fiction in the Nineteenth Century” from Writing by the
     Numbers: Trollope’s Serial Fiction (xerox)
Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (Prefaces; Prologue; First Period Chapters 1-3)

Week Three –
January 29

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (First Period Chapters 4-7)
Frederich Engels, from The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844
     (xerox)
Thomas Carlyle, from Past and Present (xerox)
Mary Poovey, “Domesticity and Class Formation: Chadwick’s 1842 Sanitary 
     Report” from Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830-1864
     (xerox)
Elizabeth Gaskell, from Mary Barton: a Tale of Manchester Life (xerox)

Week Four –
February 5

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (First Period Chapters 8-11)
Henry Mayhew, from London Labour and the London Poor (xerox)
Gertrude Himmelfarb, “The Culture of Poverty” from The Idea of Poverty: England
     in the Early Industrial Age (xerox)

Week Five –
February 12

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (First Period Chapters 12-15)
William Dodd, “A Narrative of the Experience and Sufferings of William Dodd,
     a Factory Cripple. Written by Himself” from James R. Simmons, Jr. ed.,
     Factory Lives: Four Nineteenth-Century Working-Class Autobiographies
James Myles, “Chapters in the Life of a Dundee Factory Boy” from James
R. Simmons, Jr. ed., Factory Lives: Four Nineteenth-Century Working-Class
     Autobiographies

Week Six –
February 19

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (First Period Chapters 16-20)
Thomas Carlyle, “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question” (xerox)
John Stewart Mill, “The Negro Question” (xerox)
Anthony Trollope, “The West Indies and the Spanish Main” (xerox)
Simon Gikandi, “Carlyle, Mill, and the Question of Blackness,” from Maps of
     Englishness (xerox)

Week Seven –
February 26

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (First Period Chapters 21-23)
Frances Trollope, from Domestic Manners of the Americans (xerox)
Anthony Trollope, from North America (xerox)
Anthony Trollope, “An Unprotected Female at the Pyramids” (xerox)

Week Eight –
March 4

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (Second Period, First Narrative Chapters 1-4)
Alfred Lord Tennyson, “The Princess” (xerox)

Week Nine – Spring Break
March 11

University Closed

Weeks Ten –
March 18

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (Second Period, First Narrative Chapters 5-8 and
     Second Narrative)
George Eliot, “The Lifted Veil” (xerox)

Week Eleven –
March 25

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (Second Period, Third Narrative Chapters 1-5)
H. Rider Haggard, She; a History of Adventure

Week Twelve –
April 1

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (Second Period, Third Narrative Chapters 6-10)
H. Rider Haggard, She; a History of Adventure

Week Thirteen –
April 8

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (Second Period, Fourth Narrative)
H. Rider Haggard, She; a History of Adventure
Mike Davis, “India: the Modernization of Poverty” from Late Victorian
     Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (xerox)

Week Fourteen –
April 15

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (Second Period, Fifth Narrative)
Arthur Morrison, from Tales of Mean Streets

Week Fifteen –
April 22

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (Second Period, Sixth Narrative, Seventh
     Narrative, Eighth Narrative)
George Bernard Shaw, “Mrs. Warren’s Profession”

Week Sixteen –
April 29

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (Epilogue)
George Bernard Shaw, “Mrs. Warren’s Profession”

Week Seventeen – Final Exam
May 6