English 2476X0 Victorian Studies

Winter Term Essay

8 January 2008

This essay assignment is similar to the assignment you completed last term.  Once again, I would like you to work with library materials.  Please choose one topic listed below and write an essay of 2000 words.  Consult two books, two journals physically in the library, and two Internet sources for this paper.  These sources may be specific to the author and/or work on which you are focusing or they may provide you with background information and/or a theoretical context for your argument  Be certain that your essay is focused by a clear thesis and that you refer directly through quotation and paraphrase to the primary texts with which you are working.  The citation method should be MLA or Chicago.  Document your sources carefully to maintain academic integrity and avoid plagiarism.

Due: 18 March 2008

1.      "The Cry of the Children" and Hard Times give us insight into nineteenth-century factory life and the trials of the worker.  Ellen Johnston was a factory worker herself, and her view of the factory and of that particular way of life in “Lines to Ellen” and “The Working Man” differs from the views offered by Barrett Browning and Dickens.  Identify the overall view of the factory in each of these works and discuss the techniques through which the authors convey factory life. 

2.     Discuss John Stuart Mill's the Subjection of Women, Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," and Barrett Browning's "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" from a Feminist perspective

3. With reference to TWO of the depictions of Sappho (by Hemans, Landon, Norton, and Rossetti), as well as Rossetti's "In an Artist's Studio" and Siddal's "Lust of the Eyes," explain how poetry by women reflects the difficult position of women in the nineteenth century.

        4. Discuss the views of the working class offered by Henry in “Two Hundred Men and Eighteen Killed,” Hood in “The Song of the Shirt,” and Dickens in Hard Times.

        5. Discuss the ways in which Carlyle, Mayhew, Dickens (in "A Walk in the Workhouse") and Arnold in "East London" and "West London" convey the effect of industrialization on Victorian society.

        6. Trace the emerging views of the poet and poetry in Tennyson's "The Palace of Art," Mill's "What is Poetry," Ruskin's Modern Painters, and Pater's The Renaissance.

        7. Compare and contrast the perspective on love presented in two of the Sappho poems with the perspective on love presented in "The Blessed Damozel."