Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history
Date:         Fri, 10 Apr 1992 09:49:00 EDT
From:         DGPAZ@CLEMSON.BITNET
Subject:      Re: films & history

On Fri, 10 Apr 1992 08:59:32 EDT Ken Koester <MAINT2@ERS.BITNET> said:

> Provide the text.  Quote it.  At least give page and edition.         number

Here it is. Forgive me for the length of this message. I bet you're
sorry you asked.

some ladies and gentlemen of the newest fashion, who have set
up a dandyism, in religion. . .  Who in mere lackadaisical want of an
emotion have agreed upon a little dandy talk about the vulgar wanting
faith in things in general, meaning in the things that have been tried
and found wanting, as though a low fellow should unaccountably lose
faith in a bad shilling after finding it out!  Who would make the vulgar
very picturesque and faithful by putting back the hands upon the clock
of time and cancelling a few hundred years of history.
:fn.
Charles Dickens, :cit.Bleak House:ecit. (New York and Toronto, 1964;
orig. pub. 1852-53), p. 174.
:efn.

:p.In contrast, however, Mrs. Oliphant, with her eye for reality, made
Frank Wentworth, the perpetual curate of St. Roque>s, a sympathetic
figure. Both Frank and his brother Gerald were Anglo-Catholics, but
while Gerald swam the Tiber, Frank remained loyal to the Church. Many
people in Carlingford thought that Frank was :q.a dilettante
Anglican, given over to floral arrangements and ecclesiastical
upholstery,:eq. but Mrs. Oliphant makes him the only middle-class
character who really knew what life was like in the town>s
Wharfside slum, the only character who was trying to do something
concrete to alleviate human needs.
:fn.
Oliphant, :cit.Perpetual Curate:ecit., p. 10.

> Then show that the point is unique to THIS time and not               some
> more general argument non-specific to any one time.

A good question. Here is an example.
Martin Tupper was one of the widest read and best selling poets in
the nineteenth century. His poetry is clearly related to current
events.
In :q.Tintern Abbey,:eq. perhaps the best and most thoughtful of
his poems, Tupper rejected Wordsworth>s and Turner>s romantic visions
of the monastic ruins, instead declaring that their derelict state
was cause for celebration. He writes the sonnet not only with
literary history in mind (those who have gone before him), but
with current events of the mid-Victorian era--the rise of militant,
ultramontane, triumphalist Roman Catholicism. This poem could have
been written only after Wordsworth and Turner, and when the Rom.Cath.
Church was in revival.

Look on these ruins in a spirit of praise:
   Not only with the painter>s well-pleased eye,
   Nor with a poet>s glance at times gone by
And all his gilded thoughts of olden days;
But, thankfully regard them as a phase
   Of just Emancipation for the Soul;
For, as the feudal dungeon and its chains
Prison>d the Body of Man, and would again,
   Had English freedom left them strong and whole,~
   So held these glorious abbeys grim control
      Over man>s Heart and Mind, enslaving both
   To crafty monk and superstitious rite:
      Therefore, to find them crush>d be little loth,
   But note their ruins with a new delight.
:fn.
Martin F. Tupper, :cit.Three Hundred Sonnets:ecit. (London, 1860), p. 5.

For a good example of reading against the context of the times
(in this case, painting), I recommend
Lindsay Errington, :cit.Social and Religious Themes in English Art,
1840-1860:ecit. (New York, 1984).
Also, be sure to order my book, _Popular Anti-Catholicism in
Mid-Victorian England_, Stanford Univ. Press, forthcoming 1992,
unless I spend so much time on this affinity group that I forget
to finish the camera-ready copy.

> For that matter,
> distinguish clearly between the time the story is set in and the time the
> author is writing it.                                                 have no

This is a very good question. Take Dickens' _Barnaby Rudge_ (1839).
It is a novel set in 1780, and is ostensibly about the Gordon
Riots. But the sub-text is about Chartism, a movement of the late
1830s and '40s. This point is not, alas!, original with me.

God! I love the Victorians!

Denis Paz
Department of History
Clemson University
South Carolina, U.S.A.
dgpaz@clemson.bitnet
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