At an early period he was drawn into the Pre-Raphaelite movement, for he was keenly alive to its studied beauty and rather extreme medievalism. The Defence of Guenevere (1858), written in this manner, was received with neglect. The poems are laboriously fantastic, but they show great beauty and a sense of restrained passion. The Life and Death of Jason (1866) is a long narrative poem on a familiar theme, written in the heroic couplet in a manner suggestive of Chaucer, but easy and melodious to an extent that makes the tale almost monotonous. The Earthly Paradise (1868–70) develops this narrative method still further, and is a collection of twenty-four tales on various subjects of classical and medieval origin. In meter the poems vary, but the couplet is prominent. In range and vivacity the work is extraordinary, and the framework into which the tales are set is both ingenious and beautiful. Poems by the Way (1891) contains some fine miscellaneous pieces. A brief extract from his poems will be found on p. [514].
Morris also busied himself with the composition of long prose tales, produced in great quantity during the later years of his life. The tales are written in a curious headlong, semi-rhythmical, semi-archaic style. Much reading of it tends to give the reader mental indigestion, but the vigor and skill of the prose are very considerable. Some of the tales are The House of the Wolfings (1889), The Roots of the Mountains (1890), The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891), and The Sundering Flood (1898).
8. Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) had a long life and his poetical work was in proportion to it. Of aristocratic lineage, he was educated at Eton and Oxford. He left Oxford (1860) without taking a degree, and for the rest of his life wrote voluminously, if not always judiciously. He was a man of quick attachments and violent antagonisms, and these features of his character did much to vitiate his prose criticisms, of which he wrote a large number. In his later years, from 1879 onward, he lived with his friend Theodore Watts-Dunton at Putney Hill, where he died.
Atalanta in Calydon (1865), an attempt at an English version of an ancient Greek tragedy, was his first considerable effort in poetic form, and it attracted notice at once. At a bound the young poet had attained to a style of his own: tuneful and impetuous movement, a cunning metrical craftsmanship, and a mastery of melodious diction. The excess of these virtues was also its bane, leading to diffuseness, breathlessness, and incoherence. Poems and Ballads (1866), a second extraordinary book, was, owing to its choice of unconventional subjects, criticized as being wicked. In it the Swinburnian features already mentioned are revealed in a stronger fashion. Only a few of his later poetical works can be mentioned here: Songs before Sunrise (1871), a collection of poems chiefly in praise of Italian liberty, some of them of great beauty, but marred by his reckless defiance of the common view; Erectheus (1876), a further and less successful effort at Greek tragedy; and Tristram of Lyonesse (1882), a narrative of much passion and force, composed in the heroic couplet. Some of his shorter poems were reproduced in two further series of Poems and Ballads in 1878 and 1889, but they are inferior to those of his prime.
Swinburne wrote a large number of plays, of which the most noteworthy are The Queen Mother and Rosamond (1860), with which he began his career as an author; three plays on the subject of Mary Queen of Scots, called Chastelard (1865), Bothwell (1874), and Mary Stuart (1881); Locrine (1887); and The Sisters (1892). The gifts of Swinburne are lyrical rather than dramatic, and his tragedies, like those of most of his contemporaries, are only of literary importance. His blank verse is strongly phrased, and in drama his diffuseness—that desire for mere sound and speed which was his greatest weakness—has little scope.
9. Arthur Edward O’Shaughnessy (1844–81) was born in London, of Irish descent. In 1861 he joined the staff of the British Museum Library, where a promising career was cut short by his early death. He wrote little, and his books came close upon each other: The Epic of Women (1870), Lays of France (1872), Music and Moonlight (1874), and Songs of a Worker (1881), the last appearing after his death. His longer poems have a certain haziness and incoherence, but the shorter pieces have a musical and attractive style and a certain half-mystical wistfulness. His ode beginning “We are the music-makers” is often quoted, and other poems quite as good are A Neglected Heart and Exile.
CHARLES DICKENS (1812–70)
1. His Life. Dickens was born near Portsea, where his father was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office. Charles, the second of eight children, was a delicate child, and much of his boyhood was spent at home, where he read the novels of Smollett, Fielding, and Le Sage. The works of these writers were to influence his own novels very deeply. At an early age also he became very fond of the theater, a fondness that remained with him all his life, and affected his novels to a great extent. In 1823 the Dickens family removed to London, where the father, an improvident man of the Micawber type, soon drew them into money difficulties. The schooling of Charles, which had all along been desultory enough, was temporarily suspended. The boy for a time worked in a blacking factory while his father was an inmate of the debtors’ prison of the Marshalsea. After a year or so financial matters improved; the education of Charles was resumed; then in 1827 he entered the office of an attorney, and in time became an expert shorthand-writer. This proficiency led (1835) to an appointment as reporter on the Morning Chronicle. In this capacity he did much traveling by stage-coach, during which a keen eye and a retentive memory stored material to exploit a greatness yet undreamed of. Previously, in 1833, some articles which he called Sketches by Boz had appeared in The Monthly Magazine. They were brightly written, and attracted some notice.
In 1836 Messrs. Chapman and Hall, a firm of publishers, had agreed to produce in periodical form a series of sketches by Seymour, a popular black-and-white artist. The subjects were of a sporting and convivial kind, and to give them more general interest some story was needed to accompany them. Dickens was requested to supply the “book,” and thus originated The Pickwick Papers (1836). Before the issue of the second number of the prints Seymour committed suicide, and Hablot K. Browne, who adopted the name of “Phiz,” carried on the work. His illustrations are still commonly adopted for Dickens’s books.
The Pickwick Papers was a great success; Dickens’s fame was secure, and the rest of his life was that of a busy and successful novelist. He lived to enjoy a reputation that was unexampled, surpassing even that of Scott; for the appeal of Dickens was wider and more searching than that of the Scottish novelist. He varied his work with much traveling—among other places to America (1842), to Italy (1844), to Switzerland (1846), and again to America (1867). His popularity was exploited in journalism, for he edited The Daily News (1846), and founded Household Words (1849) and All the Year Round (1859). In 1858 Dickens commenced his famous series of public readings. These were actings rather than readings, for he chose some of the most violent or affecting scenes from his novels and presented them with full-blown histrionic effect. The readings brought him much money, but they wore him down physically. They were also given in America, with the greatest success. He died in his favorite house, Gad’s Hill Place, near Rochester, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.