Essay proposals

Hi people! this link will take you to a selection of the essay proposals (paper 2) that are related to character development or character analysis.
We will be analizing them in class 2morrow, so if you can, check them out.

c u Julie.

http://www.box.net/shared/n3xh7jt6hg

Bazalgette

At the time, the Thames was little more than an open sewer, devoid of any fish or other wildlife, and an obvious health hazard to Londoners. Bazalgette's solution (similar to a proposal made by painter John Martin 25 years earlier) was to construct 83 miles (134 km) of underground brick main sewers to intercept sewage outflows, and 1,100 miles (1,800 km) of street sewers, to intercept the raw sewage which up until then flowed freely through the streets and thoroughfares of London. The outflows were diverted downstream where they were dumped, untreated, into the Thames. Extensive sewage treatment facilities were built only decades later.

The system was opened by Edward, Prince of Wales in 1865, although the whole project was not actually completed for another ten years.

Bazalgette's foresight may be seen in the diameter of the sewers. When planning the network he took the densest population, gave every person the most generous allowance of sewage production and came up with a diameter of pipe needed. He then said 'Well, we're only going to do this once and there's always the unforeseen.' and doubled the diameter to be used. Every Londoner should be grateful for this foresight as the then unforeseen was the tower block. If he had used his original, smaller pipe diameter the sewer would have overflowed in the 1960s. As it is they are still in use to this day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Bazalgette#Sewer_works

SOCIAL CODES PUNCH

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (6 March 1806 – 29 June 1861) was one of the most prominent poets of the Victorian era.

Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett was born on 6 March 1806, in Coxhoe Hall, between the villages of Coxhoe and Kelloe in County Durham, England. Her parents were Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett and Mary Graham Clarke; Elizabeth was the eldest of their 12 children (eight boys and four girls). All the children lived to adulthood except for one girl, who died at the age of four when Elizabeth was eight. The children in her family all had nicknames: Elizabeth's was "Ba". The Barrett family, some of whom were part Creole, had lived for centuries in Jamaica, where they owned sugar plantations and relied on slave labour. Elizabeth's father chose to raise his family in England while his fortune grew in Jamaica. The Graham Clarke family wealth, also derived in part from slave labour, was also considerable.

Elizabeth was baptized in 1809 at Kelloe Parish Church, though she had already been baptized by a family friend in the first week after she was born. Later that year, after the fifth child, Henrietta, was born, their father bought Hope End, a 500-acre (2.0 km²) estate near the Malvern Hills in Ledbury, Herefordshire. Elizabeth had "a large room to herself, with stained glass in the window, and she loved the garden where she tended white roses in a special arbour by the south wall"^[2] Her time at Hope End would inspire her in later life to write Aurora Leigh. She was educated at home and attended lessons with her brother's tutor. This gave her a good education for a girl of that time; she read passages from Paradise Lost and Shakespearean plays, among other works, before the age of ten. During the Hope End period, she was an intensely studious, precocious child.^[3] Her intellectual fascination with the classics and metaphysics was balanced by a religious intensity which she later described as "not the deep persuasion of the mild Christian but the wild visions of an enthusiast." ^[4][5] The Barretts attended services at the nearest Dissenting chapel, and Edward was active in Bible and Missionary societies. Elizabeth was very close to her siblings and had great respect for her father: she claimed that life was no fun without him, and her mother agreed, probably because they did not fully understand what the business really was that kept him when his trips got longer and longer.

Interesting information on themes, motifs and symbolism

You might have already received the box notice. In case you couldn't see it, this is the link that will take you there.

http://www.box.net/shared/2c4jgxl5gc

See you 2morrow. Julie.

Why Did People Enter the Workhouse?

People ended-up in the workhouse for a variety of reasons. Usually, it was because they were too poor, old or ill to support themselves. This may have resulted from such things as a lack of work during periods of high unemployment, or someone having no family willing or able to provide care for them when they became elderly or sick. Unmarried pregnant women were often disowned by their families and the workhouse was the only place they could go during and after the birth of their child. Prior to the establishment of public mental asylums in the mid-nineteenth century (and in some cases even after that), the mentally ill and mentally handicapped poor were often consigned to the workhouse. Workhouses, though, were never prisons, and entry into them was generally a voluntary although often painful decision. It also carried with it a change in legal status — until 1918, receipt of poor relief meant a loss of the right to vote.

The operation of workhouses, and life and conditions inside them, varied over the centuries in the light of current legislation and economic and social conditions. The aims of many pre-1834 workhouses are well expressed in this 1776 sign above the door of Rollesby workhouse in Norfolk:

The emphasis in earlier times was more towards the relief of destitution rather than deterrence of idleness which characterized many of the institutions set up under the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act.

Entering the Workhouse

Whatever the regime inside the workhouse, entering it would have been a distressing experience. New inmates would often have already been through a period of severe hardship. It was for good reason that the entrance to the Birmingham union workhouse was through an arch locally known as the "Archway of Tears".

The Admission Procedure

Admission into the workhouse first required an interview to establish the applicant's circumstances. This was most often undertaken by a Relieving Officer who would visit each part of the union on a regular basis. However, the workhouse Master could also interview anyone in urgent need of relief.

Formal admission into the workhouse proper was authorised by the Board of Guardians at their weekly meetings, where an applicant could summoned to justify their application. This would no doubt have been an intimidating experience — the heroine of the 1840s novel Jessie Phillips collapsed on the board-room floor. Half a century later, however, a cartoon in Punch showed how times and attitudes had changed in the intervening years.

Prior to their formal admission into the main workhouse, new arrivals would be placed in a receiving or probationary ward. There the workhouse medical officer would examine them to check on their state of health. Those suffering from any infectious illness would be placed in a sick ward.

Each new arrival at the workhouse would go through a fairly involved admission procedure. After all the necessary paperwork had been completed, paupers were stripped, bathed, and issued with a workhouse uniform. Children (although not adults) could be required to have their hair cut. An inmate's own clothes would be washed and disinfected and then put into store along with any other possessions they had and only returned to them when they left the workhouse.

Leaving the Workhouse

While residing in a workhouse, paupers were not allowed out without permission. Short-term absence could be granted for various reasons, such as a parent attending their child's baptism, or to visit a sick or dying relative. Able-bodied inmates could also be allowed out to seek work. Although there was often little to physically prevent a pauper from walking out of the workhouse, to do so without permission would result in a charge of the theft of union property — his workhouse uniform. Any pauper could, however, on giving "reasonable notice" — typically three hours — discharge himself from the workhouse. His clothes would then be fetched from the store and more administrative paperwork would need to be completed. In the case of a man with a family, the whole family would have to leave if he left.

Despite the lengthy admission and discharge procedures, some paupers treated the workhouse as a free lodging, leaving and departing as the fancy took them. It was not unknown for a pauper to discharge himself in the morning and then return demanding re-admission the same evening, possibly the worse for wear from drink. In 1901, one 81-year-old woman named Julia Blumsun recorded 163 separate admissions to the City of London workhouse, while a 40-year-old man in the Poplar workhouse had been in and out 593 times over the period since 1884. These were the most extreme examples of what became known as the "ins-and-outs". Because of the amount of time they took to deal with, became the bane of the workhouse staff's life. Eventually, in the early 1900s, new regulations were introduced to lengthen the amount of notice required depending on how recently an inmate had previously discharged himself.

Perhaps a more typical example of the ins-and-outs is provided by seven-year-old Charlie Chaplin who in 1896 briefly became an inmate of the Lambeth union workhouse, together with his mother, Hannah, and his older half-brother Sydney. After a three-week probationary period, the two children were then transferred to the Central London District School at Hanwell. Two months later, the children were returned to the workhouse where they were met at the gate by Hannah, dressed in her own clothes. In desperation to see them, she had discharged herself from the workhouse, along with the children. After a day spent playing in Kennington park and visiting a coffee-shop, they returned to the workhouse and had to go through the whole admissions procedure once more, with the children again staying there for a probationary period before returning to Hanwell.

Many inmates were, however, to become long-term residents of the workhouse. A Parliamentary report of 1861 found that, nation-wide, over 20 percent of inmates had been in the workhouse for more than five years. These were mostly consisted of elderly, chronically sick, and mentally ill paupers. Fifteen inmates in the survey had been workhouse residents for sixty years or more. Institutionalization of inmates, particularly women, was something that was to continue right until the end of the workhouse era. In the past few years, whilst visiting a number of former workhouses that now operate as care homes for the elderly, I have been told on two separate occasions that one of the establishment's current residents had been there since the 1920s.

Punch magazine! 2

Note: Michael Faraday (22 September 1791 – 25 August 1867) was an English chemist and physicist (or natural philosopher, in the terminology of the time) who contributed to the fields of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. (From the wikipedia entry)

Punch magazine!

The first edition of Punch was published on July 17, 1841, four years after Queen Victoria came to the throne. Its founders, wood engraver Ebenezer Landells and writer Henry Mayhew, got the idea for the magazine from a satirical French paper, Charivari (indeed, the first issue was subtitled, "The London Charivari").

Landells insisted that Punch should be less bitter than other British comic publications and of a higher literary standard. The name was hit upon at an early meeting – someone remarked that the magazine should be like a good Punch mixture – nothing without Lemon (referring to Mark Lemon, the magazine’s first editor), whereupon Mayhew shouted “ A capital idea! Let us call the paper Punch!”

The magazine was set up with capital of £25… and the future soon looked bleak. The circulation refused to rise, money ran short and it began to look as if Lemon would have the same success with Punch as he did with his previous enterprise, a pub which went bankrupt.

But then he had the bright idea of publishing a big annual issue called the Almanack which sold an astonishing 90,000 copies and Punch was on the map. In the medium term, however, it continued to struggle for survival until it was taken over by the printing firm of Bradbury and Evans (which became Bradbury and Agnew in 1872).

The magazine then entered its golden age, a period in which it enjoyed great success for decades. When a magazine becomes identified with a period it very often fails to survive it. The readers of the Strand Magazine in Edwardian days, or of Life between the wars or of Picture Post just after, would have been unable to imagine those household names ever vanishing, yet vanished they have.

So what was the secret of Punch's survival?

More than anything, it was its ability to find the wavelength of an age. Even in Victorian days Punch did not stand still. In its early years, the years of the Chartists and the unrest that swept through Europe in 1848, it was radical. The most famous example of this was Thomas Hood's "Song of the Shirt", which moved people's consciences over sweated labour. But by the 1860s it had become milder, less inclined to attack the Establishment or support the underdog, and this too was in tune with the rising middle class and the feeling that the British Empire had come to stay.

A succession of superb artists on Punch ensured that the manner in which it played safe was brilliant. The drawings of Leech, Keene, du Maurier, Tenniel and many only slightly lesser men may not have prompted any revolutions or moves to man the barricades, but they still represent the most authentic and memorable picture of Victorian England that we have left. And it is forgotten that Punch was one among many humorous magazines in the nineteenth century it was not even, in fact, the only one called Punch.

It was, however, the only one of the breed that continued to flourish for another hundred years, almost as if it was a national institution that could not be allowed to die. This status as a part of British history is a source both of great pride and huge annoyance to Punch, a millstone as well as a medal.

Each time Punch has made a significant advance in tune with the times - when Malcolm Muggeridge introduced a sharper, more acid note, when Bernard Hollowood finally abandoned the old cover, when William Davis engineered such coups as a full-scale parody of Playboy - critics have grumbled that this isn't how a national institution should behave.

What they forget is that Punch only survived and flourished by changing its reality as well as its image. The magazine was bought from Bradbury and Agnew in 1969 by United Newspapers (only the second time it had changed hands).

A promotional booklet produced in 1974 was full of confidence for the future: "It has found new security within a large organisation and an added confidence to combat the gloom of the 1970s with cheerfulness, humour and even optimism." By the late Eighties, however, circulation had dropped to an alarmingly low level and three editors in three years failed to arrest the decline. Punch was eventually closed by United in 1992 and it looked like the end for a title which had become loved around the world.

Salvation came in the form of Harrods proprietor, Mohamed Al Fayed, who relaunched the magazine with a glittering party at Harrods in September 1996. The magazine soon positioned itself as a thorn in the side of the Establishment, with a series of irreverent exposes. These included Murdoch by his butler, the most intimate look yet at the world's leading media mogul, and The Mandelson Files, a mouldbreaking investigation into Peter Mandelson, then the most feared member of the New Labour government.

Sadly, the magazine failed to regain its place in the hearts of the British public and closed again in 2002, leaving a legacy of over 160 years of humour and wit unsurpassed in publishing history.

The pictures shown are those of the first and the last number of the magazine.

DARWIN PUNCH CARTOON

London Expo 1851

The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations or The Great Exhibition, sometimes referred to as the Crystal Palace Exhibition in reference to the temporary structure in which it was held, was an international exhibition that took place in Hyde Park, London, from 1 May to 15 October 1851. It was the first in a series of World's Fair exhibitions of culture and industry that were to become a popular 19th-century feature. The Great Exhibition was organized by Henry Cole and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, the spouse of the reigning monarch, Victoria. It was attended by numerous notable figures of the time, including Charles Darwin, members of the Orléanist Royal Family and the writers Charlotte Brontë, Lewis Carroll, and George Eliot

Official title: The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations

Exhibition site: Hyde Park

Area: 10.5 hectares, of which 7.2 hectares for the Crystal Palace

Exhibition area: 8.7 hectares

Duration: 1 May – 11 October 1851

Exhibitors: 14,000 with over one million exhibits, 6,900 from England

Foreign participants: from 25 countries and 15 British colonies

Visitors: 6,039,205

Entrance fees: variable, between one shilling and
one pound

Classification: 4 sections and 30 classes

Jury: 314 members, half from England, half foreign

Prizes: 5,130 awards in three categories. Awards of the first category go mainly to Britain (46 percent) and France (33 percent)

Cost: 913,000 pounds

Profit: 150,000 pounds

The Bourgeois Family

If a twentyfirst
century returned to Victorian England in a time machine, the traveler
would immediately notice any number of differences between our world and theirs; the smells
London would be remarkable to the modern sensibility: horsedung
and straw in the streets, the
smells of fatty foods frying, and the sweaty smell of workers and servants who had no access to
bathing beyond the kitchen tap to name two. The smell of flaring gas from the street lighting
system before electricity arrived would have been very noticeable. Arguably, the noise pollution
6
of the Victorian age might surpass the streets of modern New York. There would be no jet
aircraft or boom boxes, but the clatter of hundreds of thousands of horse hooves drawing cabs,
carriages, and freight wagons created an assault on the ears. Before the 1870s, one would be
surprised at the darkness of the evening away from the gaslighted
main streets.
On the other hand, one might well notice that everyone wore very wellmade
hats and
welltailored
clothing, even workers. The Rail Service was excellent and completely
dependable. The Royal Post provided four or five swift deliveries per day and the postmen wore
resplendent uniforms—red coats with gold piping. One would notice that the populace was
remarkably homogenous aside from a few Lascar sailors or visitors from India. The sight of an
African American or a Native American on the sidewalk would have been considered exotic.
One would have also noted “the terrifying inadequacy of medical and dental care.”
Terrible teeth, toothache pain, halitosis were manifest in public every day. Along with this
evidence one would see children’s coffins being trundled in glasssided
hearses along the
cobblestone streets testifying to the prevalence of infant mortality. One would see ragamuffin
children, children working as chimney sweeps, and active in every sort of labor imaginable. One
would also have noticed the everpresent
evidence of class distinctions and deference to the
social hierarchy. Cockney’s would instinctively “knuckle their foreheads” in the presence of a
Lady or a Gentleman. A dozen things at once would show us that the Victorian Age was utterly
alien to our own. “But the greatest, and the most extraordinary difference [would be] the
difference between women, then and now.” (A. N. Wilson, pp. 30708)
No age ever praised the virtues of family life more thoroughly than our Victorian
ancestors. The Victorian family was patriarchal, bound by unspoken rules and the wife was seen
as the domestic angel who provided a safe haven for her husband and a strong, moral example
for the children. Although the middle class wife was in no way the equal of her husband in the
sense that she shared access to education or political and civil rights, she did exert power over
other people. The Victorian wife was the household manager, responsible for the moral
instruction of the servants as well as the children. Families were large, and the average wife
spent “about 15 years in a state of pregnancy and nursing children in the first year of life.”
After infancy, children were expected to be seen but not heard. The alternative would have been
bedlam. Victoria and Albert's marriage was a true lovematch.
Victoria gave birth three times in
the first three years of marriage, six times in her first eight years of marriage. In all, the Royal
couple had nine children. Although all of her children lived to adulthood, she did not enjoy
childbearing: “What you say of the pride of giving life to a soul is very fine my dear,” she wrote
to her oldest daughter, "but I think much more of our being like a cow or a dog at such moments
when our poor nature becomes so very animal and unecstatic.”
Feminist scholars have deconstructed the language of patriarchy in Victorian literature and
culture. They have also pointed out that even the fashions in respectable feminine clothing
reflected the strict boundaries imposed on women. We should remember however, that all those
hoop skirts, corsets, and petticoats were also outward signs of wealth and social status —of
“respectability.” Armored as she was, the middle class wife could scarcely have done physical
labor even if she wanted to do so.
It is perfectly legitimate to read the message of female subservience writ on the page of
female fashions, but I would also suggest that something else is work here: that profound
Victorian fear of the natural personality. It is not really necessary to deconstruct the message of
patriarchy in Victorian literature; it was everywhere. Young women were taught to aspire to
ideal of femininity popularized by writers like the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson:
7
Man for the field and woman for the hearth:
Man for the sword and for the needle she:
Man with the head and woman with the heart:
Man to command and woman to obey;
All else confusion. (Spielvogel)
Victorian psychology taught that men were more animalistic than women, more tied to their
primitive natures. Perhaps the most Victorian of all novels might be Robert Louis Stevenson's
classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: the novel of a man who gives in to the beast within us all.
Victorians like Dr. Thomas Bowdler believed that it was impossible to overstate the importance
of morality; indeed good behavior and good morality was the only defense available to society in
a time of economic and political upheaval. One must be ever vigilant lest the beast within burst
the bonds of law and custom. Edmund Burke expressed the idea well: “Manners are of more
importance than law. The law touches us but here and there and now and then. Manners are
what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant,
steady, uniform, and insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in.” (Gertrude
Himmelfarb, p. 282). Because of this, men's sexual escapades were tolerated as inevitable; those
of women were never tolerated. All of this amounted to a double standard. Women were
expected to live a life of utter purity, yet young ladies at finishing school were taught to flirt and
manipulate the men in their lives.
The Victorians elevated genderdefined
roles to the status of universal truths, at least for
middle class women. Many respectable women aspired to the ideal of domesticity expressed by
one book of advice to young wives:
Where want of congeniality impairs domestic comfort, the fault is generally
chargeable on the female side. it is for woman, not for man, to make the sacrifice.
She must be plastic herself, to mold others. There is, indeed, something unfeminine
in independence. It is contrary to nature, and therefore it offends. A really sensible
woman feels her dependence. She does what she can; but she is conscious of
inferiority, and therefore grateful for support. She knows that she is the weaker
vessel, and that as such she should receive honor. (Spielvogel)
Many middle class wives were caught in a nowin
situation. For the sake of her
husband's career, she was expected to maintain her public image as the idle wife, freed
from demeaning physical labor and able to pass her time in ornamental pursuits. In many
ways, the great symbol of all this was Queen Victoria herself

http://www.suu.edu/faculty/ping/pdf/VictorianBritain.pdf

gustave doré scketches

Paul Gustave Doré( January 6, 1832 –; January 23, 1883) was a French artist, engraver, illustrator and sculptor, he was the most popular illustrtor of the time.

Doré was born in Strasbourg and his first illustrated story was published at the age of fifteen. At age five he was a prodigy artist already creating drawings. When he turned 12 he began to carve his art in stone. Doré began work as a literary illustrator in Paris. Doré commissions include works by Rabelais, Balzac, Milton and Dante. In 1853 Doré was asked to illustrate the works of Lord Byron. This commission was followed by additional work for British publishers, including a new illustrated English Bible. In 1863, Doré illustrated a French edition of Cervantes's Don Quixote, and his illustrations of the knight and his squire Sancho Panza have become so famous that they have influenced subsequent readers, artists, and stage and film directors' ideas of the physical "look" of the two characters. Doré also illustrated an oversized edition of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven", an endeavor that earned him 30,000 francs from publisher Harper & Brothers in 1883.^[1]

Doré's English Bible (1866) was a great success, and in 1867 Doré had a major exhibition of his work in London. This exhibition led to the foundation of the Doré Gallery in New Bond Street. In 1869, Blanchard Jerrold, the son of Douglas William Jerrold, suggested that they work together to produce a comprehensive portrait of London. Jerrold had gotten the idea from The Microcosm of London produced by Rudolph Ackermann, William Pyne, and Thomas Rowlandson in 1808. Doré signed a five-year project with the publishers Grant & Co that involved his staying in London for three months a year. He was paid the vast sum of £10,000 a year for his work. He was mainly known for his paintings, contrary to popular belief about his wood carvings. His paintings are world renowned, but his woodcuts are where he really excelled.

Hi People!

This is the link that will take you to the sound files we recorded today on Dr. J and Mr. H.

http://www.box.net/shared/zyfnlut5om

Remember that you need to write what you organized to say on a word document so we can put it all together and share it. It will be great if you could modify it based on the group assessment held after each oral while it's still fresh in your minds.
Come the individual orals, you will be grateful to have it in black and white.

C u on Monday, Julie.