Victorian era

condition to make people feel bad and give money to them. Poverty plays a major roll in Dickens writings, he shows people that no matter how a person appears, you should treat them with the same respect that you treat yourself with. The people of Victorian London in that time didn’t have all the things that we have today, they had to play in alleys, while we play in our yards and they had to dress with what we considered rags, while we can choose whatever we want to wear. Beggars were seen…

A significant piece of Victorian literature, North and South, is a novel published in 1855. Gaskell portrays to us the conflicts of different worlds; the rural south vs. the industrial north, mill owners vs. workers, and women private world vs. men public world. The novel’s protagonist Margaret Hale, one of the strongest female characters in English literature and the heroine of North and South, embodies the true spirit of a heroine. Margaret Hale proves herself continuously to be a strong and…

1. Introduction Ireland, as the “oldest British colony” (Canny 25) experienced the colonization for almost seven centuries, what lead to the emergence of the postcolonial literature, which deals with the feeling of oppression. Besides the oppression from the dominant imperial centre, among this British Empire-colony parallel, there is another one, which must be mentioned, namely man-woman parallel. In the book A Double Colonization: Colonial and Post-Colonial Women’s Writing the editors Kirsten…

systematized in the Companies Act of 1862 (Cole and Postgate 334), there was a theoretical rise in the buoyancy of business entities. The mid 1860s was, to put it plainly, the time of theory. Dickens states: "As is outstanding to the shrewd in their era, activity in Shares is the one thing to need to do with in this world" (114). The development of joint-stock venture created a ton of nouveaux wealth. Having "no predecessors, no settled character, no development, no thoughts, no conduct," and…

In the novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll is attempting to show Alice maturing from a child to a young adult. Before Alice’s tumble down the Rabbit hole and trip to Wonderland, she had gone through a phase in which she believed that everything could be explained and all questions had a reasonable answer. In the real world this was the case, but not in Wonderland. This leads to the inevitable outcome of her confusion between the real world and the “imaginary” world of…

patriarchy / patrimony is seen as "the source of tyranny, wars and diseases".Margaret Fuller, one of the first representatives of cultural feminism, defended the organic worldview in his book Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), focusing on the intuitive, emotional and spiritual aspects of knowledge, beyond the rational and legal implications of liberal feminism. And he argued that beyond the rationality of the woman, there are intuitive sense of extreme emotions. Fuller tended to become…

British India, major producer and trader of spices and other material goods, is believed to have been one of the British Empire’s most valuable colonies, both for their abundance of valuable natural resources and large population. The British leaders who chose to take control of India certainly had multiple reasons to do so, most of those falling into the categories of exploitation of resources and propagation of European culture. These motivations are clearly seen in many actions taken or…

Madame Defarge goes from a seemingly peaceful character to one that symbolizes the chaos of the French Revolution. Dickens describes her as someone who: “. . . did not often make mistakes against herself in any of the reckonings over which she presided” (Dickens 31). Madame Defarge’s attitude realistically changes from a sense of self-control, unperturbed by others, to bloodlust and frustration shown when she tries to advocate to her husband why they should fight as hard as they can no matter…

The excerpt chosen from Hard Times by Charles Dickens is about a speaker sharing his view of an educational system that runs solely on teaching facts to students. Since the speaker is sharing his view with the schoolmaster and a third grown person, he speaks in a formal language. However, his formality and character makes him the target of the satirical passage as shown in the second paragraph of the excerpt where the narrator provides a description of the speaker. By referring to the speaker’s…

In Charlotte Bronte’s novel, Jane Eyre, Bronte uses bird imagery that parallels Jane’s journey as she becomes a woman. The birds symbolize how Jane is trapped, like a caged bird, in the beginning and then develops into a mature young woman who has the strength to ‘set off on her own’. In the end of the novel, Jane returns to Mr. Rochester to start a family, much like birds return to their nest. Through the use of bird imagery such as doves, Bronte allows the readers to gain insight into who Jane…