The industry that gets books from writers to readers; the writers who made the novel, the play, and the poem; and the traditions of speculation and experiment that ask what fiction can do when it is freed from the merely probable.
The Literature Department is the Universitas Scholarium’s faculty of the written word — both the writers who made the novel, the play, and the poem, and the industry that carries books from author to reader. Its scope is unusual in holding the art and its commerce together. The faculty are arranged on that double principle. The commerce-of-literature wing seats the working roles of the trade — the Agent, the Editor, the Publisher, the Critic, and the Author as professional — the machinery by which writing reaches the world. The wing of classic and contemporary letters reaches from the Beowulf poet and Chaucer through Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Samuel Johnson to the modern novel, and a wing on speculative and experimental writing holds the makers of new forms. Each is an AI simulacrum that reasons in its progenitor’s literary idiom — whether as a maker of literature or as one of the professionals who bring it to print.
Medieval & Renaissance
From the mead-hall to the Jacobean stage — English literature acquiring, in six hundred years, most of the forms it still uses.
Parzival · The Bow-Simile · The Grail as Stone · The Two Strands
A knight before a poet — schildes ambet ist mîn art, the office of the shield is my nature — and he twice claims to know no letters, a claim scholars have argued over ever since and which he never explains. His twenty-five thousand lines answer Chrétien’s unfinished Perceval, and his defence of his own famously difficult telling is the bow-simile: the bow is bent and the string is straight, and it is the bent thing that gives the straight thing its force. Gottfried von Strassburg mocked him as a finder of wild tales; Wolfram answered in Willehalm without using his name, as he had been damned without being named. His Grail is not a cup but a stone, on which letters appear naming those God has chosen. And Parzival’s catastrophic silence at the Grail castle is not innocence: Gurnemanz had taught him that a knight does not ask questions, and he obeyed.
Can help you with: Telling a purposeful delay from a stagger — every crook is a draw, and a draw never loosed is a fault, so bring him a passage and find the arrow. The two-strand structure: Parzival and Gawan interleaved across sixteen books, crossing unrecognised, because a man cannot be seen to change if you watch him continuously. Kinship as the shape of a world rather than a plot device, where a man who strikes a stranger has very often struck his own. And the hardest question in his poem: what happens when good teaching is applied without understanding, by someone taught too well and too late.
→ Converse with Wolfram von Eschenbach
Tristan · Süze Sûr · The Acrostic Lattice · The Noble Hearts
He took his story from Thomas of Britain, said so, and said why — that Thomas tells it rightly and the others do not. His signature is the paired opposite: süeze sûr, sweet sour; her dear life, her sorrowful death; her dear death, her sorrowful life — where the epithets cross the couplet boundary and trade places. The pairing is not ornament but the doctrine performed: he does not argue that in this state the terms are interchangeable, he interchanges them. The prologue is in quatrains whose initials spell his patron’s name, and quatrains recur at every main division of the poem, their capitals spelling Gotefrid–Tristan–Isolde throughout: a lattice no listener could ever detect. His potion, unlike Béroul’s and Thomas’s, causes nothing — it declares what the lovers already were. He died with the poem unfinished, stopping at the very scene where Thomas’s surviving fragments begin.
Can help you with: Building a paradox that argues rather than decorates, and the test that governs it — if the two terms can be separated without loss, they should not have been paired. Structure hidden in plain sight, and what it means to write for the eye rather than the ear. Naming your audience and excluding the rest: he addresses only the edele herzen, those who can hold sweet and sour in one heart, and wishes the others joy. Also the first literary criticism written in German, in which he stops the story mid-knighting to praise and damn his contemporaries — and condemns obscurity, having hidden his own name in his capitals.
→ Converse with Gottfried von Strassburg
Roman de Tristran · The 550-Line Deliberation · The Couplet as Argument
Duke Hoël offers Tristran his daughter, and Tristran says yes. Béroul gives the exchange two lines; Thomas gives it five hundred and fifty, because for him the deciding is not the event — the weighing is. Through that passage Tristran holds four people at once: his own feeling, Iseut’s in Cornwall, Mark’s who has her, and the second Iseut’s, who is innocent and about to be wronged and does not know it. Each qualifies the last and none of them settles, and he marries her at the end because he is exhausted rather than persuaded. His philtre, unlike Béroul’s, has no term: the love does not lift, which is what makes it analysable at length. Only about a sixth of the poem survives, and what is lost is recovered only through his translators.
Can help you with: Reading a deliberation as an event rather than a delay, and holding several people’s incompatible feelings at once without resolving them. How a rhymed couplet carries sustained reasoning — it becomes a completed step in an argument, giving the reader a footing every eight syllables where prose would drown him. Pursuing a painful thought toward the pain rather than away from it. And a question worth sitting with: Bédier cut the whole passage as verbose, and the abridged book he made is the one the world has read.
→ Converse with Thomas of Britain
Wace(fl. c. 1155–1174)
Roman de Brut · The Octosyllabic Couplet · The Round Table · Brocéliande
A Jerseyman and clerk of Caen who turned Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin prose into fourteen thousand lines of French verse — and the transformation is not Latin into French but prose into couplet, which is a different act. A Latin period will not fit into eight syllables, so every sentence must be broken, and where he breaks it is his art. The couplet will not hold a qualification either, so he does not qualify: he asserts, and gives each doubt its own couplet. His honesty is a product of his prosody. He made the Round Table — not in his source — and marked it as a thing the Bretons tell; and he went to Brocéliande to see the marvels, found a wood and a fountain and nothing else, and put fol m’en revin into the poem as a rhyme-word, where the ear rests.
Can help you with: Turning any prose sentence into two rhymed lines of eight, and discovering what must be cut — which is the whole method in a quarter of an hour. Why the anaphora of Brutus surveying the island is not a list but a man turning his head. How an etymology can be proved in a rhyme rather than explained, since a learned man reads a derivation and a hall must hear one. Amplification as transmission rather than ornament: expand what a hearer can picture from his own life, cut what he must be taught to picture. And the discipline of marking provenance on every addition — Latin, Breton telling, or your own.
→ Converse with Wace
Béroul(fl. c. 1170–1190)
Tristran · The Philtre with a Term · The Literal Oath · Partisan Narration
He names himself twice, both times to settle a fact against a rival telling, and he begins Seignors — this is said aloud, fast, to men who will interrupt. His philtre is not a figure for passion but a brewed thing that works on the body and runs out after three years: the day it ends, what the lovers notice first is not that they have stopped loving but that they are poor. Everything in the poem dates from before or after that moment. God is not a neutral providence here but a partisan who intervenes four times on the lovers’ side, and Iseut’s celebrated oath at the Mal Pas is literally true in every clause — the hot iron does not burn her, because Heaven reads an oath as the words that were said.
Can help you with: Reading an oath for its wording rather than its intent, and why that is what an oath IS rather than a loophole. Dating every judgement about the lovers to before or after the three years, which is the question his poem is built to make you ask. Partisan narration as a technique: every man named as what he is on his first appearance and never re-weighed, because a chase cannot be enjoyed by an audience unsure who should get away. And the hermit Ogrin, who does not tell the lovers to repent but composes their letter of deception and buys her clothes for the return.
→ Converse with Béroul
La Queste del Saint Graal · Letre and Sen · Chevalerie Celestiel
Unnamed: the book credits Walter Map, who had been dead a decade when it was written, and the attribution was borrowed for authority. His method is to state what happened and then declare what it signified — and the gloss binds, because a hermit in his book is never contradicted. Lancelot rides to a plain where five hundred black knights are losing to five hundred white, takes the weaker side as any knight would, and is beaten: the tournament was meant for a sign, the black are the unpurged, and he did the right thing by the wrong measure. Written against the romances his readers knew, it makes the finest knight of those books its central failure and the father of the one who succeeds.
Can help you with: Separating what happened from what it signifies, and doing the second only after the first is settled. The distinction the whole book turns on — chevalerie terriane against chevalerie celestiel, which are not degrees of one thing. Why grace does not scale with effort: Lancelot repents truly, wears the hair shirt, and is permitted to the door and struck down at it. And the correction most readers need — Galahad never renounces knighthood, dying a layman and armed, so this is not a book telling knights to enter religion.
→ Converse with The Queste Author
The Lais · Bisclavret · Laüstic · Guigemar · The Breton Aventure
She gives her name and her reason together: not for glory, but because clerks take what is not theirs and a work left unsigned will be claimed by another. Her twelve lais keep aventures the Bretons had made tunes of — the tune came first, and she puts the words in rhyme so they will hold when the harp is gone, ending each with its name in both tongues so it can be found again. The marvels stand unexplained: a hind speaks, a knight is a wolf three days in the week, a hawk comes in at the window and is a king. None is accounted for, because the strange thing carries the story to where it must go and the story is then about people — Bisclavret is a wolf, and the tale is about his wife.
Can help you with: Keeping a thing brief and entire, and the test that governs it — could you tell it again tonight? Why the marvel should be left standing rather than explained. Naming who is caged before discussing who is in the wrong: a rich old man walls up a young wife, and she is unambiguous that the imprisoning is the injury. She does not soften and she is not partisan — Bisclavret’s wife betrays a husband who never caged her, and the tale does not flinch at what follows.
→ Converse with Marie de France
Raoul de Cambrai · The Hinge · Rhyme for Raoul, Assonance for Bernier
Eight and a half thousand decasyllables of feudal vendetta, and the binding changes in the middle: the first 5,373 lines run in rhymed laisses, the rest in assonance — and the hero dies at the hinge, killed by his own vassal, who takes over the poem. Rhyme is tight and sealed, for a man who knows what he wants and takes it; assonance is loose, the vowel only, for a man who does not know what he is and must go on living. Stranger still, the assonanced half is the later composition, its archaic binding chosen rather than inherited — the newest matter, wandering and exile and pilgrimage, put into the oldest sound. At Origny Raoul burns a convent with his squire’s mother inside it, and then strikes that squire in public; the poem is clear that the second act is the worse.
Can help you with: Hearing a change of verse form as a change of governance rather than a defect of transmission, and why a seam should sometimes be left showing. Holding a man’s claim and his crime together without collapsing either — Raoul has a real grievance and answers it by burning nuns, and the poem never weighs the two for you. Why a vassal endures a wrong to his kin but not a blow before witnesses, and why he must unmake his oath formally, in words, rather than simply walking away. And endings that refuse to end: every peace here is made and broken, the last one after the embrace, and the feud passes to the sons.
→ Converse with The Raoul Poet
Girart de Vienne · The Closing Six · The Three Gestes · Writing a Prequel
One of the very few chanson poets to name himself, and he gives his place and posture too: Bertrans, a gentis clers, sitting in a budding grove at Bar-sur-Aube — not a jongleur standing in a hall, but a clerk who has composed. His nearly seven thousand decasyllables run in rhymed laisses where the older songs merely assonate, and every one of his hundred and ninety-two closes on a six-syllable line in feminine e. Another poet uses a short line irregularly, to toll a day gone; Bertrand’s is a fixed cadence, and a fixed ending buys a free beginning. In his prologue he divides the Matter of France into three gestes — the king’s, the proud rebels of Doon de Mayence, and the wronged lineage of Garin de Monglane — and puts his own rebel hero in the third.
Can help you with: How a classification works as an argument disguised as a list, and what any given scheme was built to permit. Writing a prequel to something an audience already knows: the known thing must arrive entirely unchanged, the new material must make it inevitable, and the test is whether the older work sounds different afterwards. Why a rebel’s emperor must stay good, since a wicked one makes the revolt cost nothing. And the trade a regular cadence forces — he can be followed across seven thousand lines, and he can never end a unit on a blow.
→ Converse with Bertrand de Bar-sur-Aube
La Chanson d’Antioche · The Alexandrine · The Muster Roll · A Song That Can Be Checked
Nine thousand lines on the First Crusade, reworked from a lost poem by Richard le Pèlerin, who was at the eight-month siege of Antioch and composed on the spot. Alone among the chansons de geste, this one runs in alexandrines — twelve syllables broken six and six — and the symmetry does political work: four-and-six leans, subordinating one half to the other, while six-and-six holds two lords in a line with neither beneath the other, which matters when every house in the hall is listening for its own country. His subject is eighty years old, not four hundred: men present had fathers on that wall. So his opening line claims not merely to praise but to tell true, and not to cozen his listeners of their coin — and he made the claim good by checking the eyewitness poem against the prose chroniclers, cutting whatever a survivor’s son could have denied.
Can help you with: Metre as diplomacy — how the shape of a line distributes weight among people who are all listening for themselves. What changes when a subject lies within living memory rather than in legend, and why that turns accuracy into a commercial advantage rather than a scholarly virtue. Handling an eyewitness and a written record that disagree: prefer whichever source’s error would be harder to explain. And the refusal that follows — never say “so the tale goes” and then tell it anyway, since that is the formula of a man who wants the marvel and the deniability both.
→ Converse with Graindor de Douai
La Chanson de Guillaume · The Six-Syllable Line · Attrition · Larchamp
Three and a half thousand lines in assonanced laisses, surviving in a single Anglo-Norman manuscript unknown until 1901 — and among the decasyllables there recurs a line of six: Lunsdi al vespre, Monday at evening. It carries no news; nothing happens in it. Its function is to cut a running ear short so the hall looks up and finds that another day has gone. Where the Roland poet turns one moment three ways to force a judgement, this poet loses the same field three times over: Vivien’s army destroyed, then Guillaume’s whole force killed in three days so that he rides home the only survivor, and then a third army after that. His wife Guibourc, a Saracen who came over, feeds him and sends him back out; the deliverance, when it comes at last, is a Saracen kitchen-boy with a cauldron-pole.
Can help you with: Making an audience feel duration rather than event — the short line marks a day gone, never a thing that happened. Why a series of defeats needs a different machine from a single catastrophe: a man may die beautifully once, but he cannot go back beautifully, and going back is the subject. Where comedy belongs in a grim poem, and why it has to be earned by three thousand lines of loss first. And the discipline of refusing to draw your own moral: he shows what Vivien’s vow cost and never once tells you whether it was worth keeping.
→ Converse with The Guillaume Poet
Le Roman de Thèbes · The Couplet Chosen · The Prefixed Origin · Grief for Gore
A clerk with Statius’s Thebaid and a hall that had no Latin, working before there was any French romance to imitate — and his decisions became what the form was. He opened not with Thebes but with a moral demand: a man who has learning and keeps it shut in has done a wrong. He rejected the ten-syllable tirade of the chansons for octosyllabic couplets, and everything followed from it. Statius begins with the brothers already quarrelling, because a Roman needs no telling of Oedipus; this poet prefixes the whole Oedipus, which is nowhere in his source, and thereby turns a quarrel into an inheritance. The gods come out, replaced by grievance and feudal obligation — causes a hall can audit. And where Statius, the goriest of Latin epic poets, elaborates wounds, this poet cuts them back and raises the pitiable instead.
Can help you with: The first question of any translation — what does the source take for granted that your audience lacks? That gap is where you begin. Why a cause must be one your listeners can audit, and what happens to a story when divine machinery is replaced by obligation. The exchange of gore for grief, and its mechanical reason: gore exhausts at the third body and grief does not. And his own unsettling suspicion, which he will not close: that the temperament everyone praises in his poem may simply be a consequence of the metre he picked before he understood its cost.
→ Converse with The Thèbes Poet
Le Roman d’Eneas · Virgil and Ovid Spliced · The Couplet Turned Inward · Lavine
He works from two Latin authors doing opposite jobs. Virgil supplies the events, which may not be altered by a syllable, since every clerk in the hall construed the Aeneid at twelve; Virgil also supplies a troubled heart and says a goddess troubled it, which is a cause from outside and not an inside at all. For the inside he goes to Ovid — the heat, the sleepless turning, the argument with oneself, the remedy that does not work. Virgil wastes no sentiment on Lavinia; this poet gives her the second half of the poem, where she notices a symptom, names it from her mother’s account, rejects the name because the thing does not match the account, and tests it. She reaches certainty and remains exactly where she was.
Can help you with: Supplying an interior without altering a single event, and the test that governs it — a reader who knows the source should recognise every event and not recognise the book. Why a couplet can hold a mind and a laisse cannot: the laisse must end, and ending forces a shape on the material, and a mind does not end. Distinguishing a cause imposed from outside from a state examined within. And a difficulty he leaves open: the Ars amatoria is a comic manual, and he has used it as an anatomy, and cannot say whether he misunderstood Ovid or corrected him.
→ Converse with The Eneas Poet
Le Roman de Troie · Eyewitness over Genius · The Portrait as Credential · Briseida
Thirty thousand octosyllables on Troy, and a prologue that settles which books may be trusted before he gives his own name at line 132. Homer was born long after the war and puts gods in the fighting — and for Benoît that is not a fault of taste but evidence: a man who reports what cannot have happened was not there. Dares and Dictys were, or say they were, and their dryness is part of the credential, since a man inventing would have made it better reading. Hence the hundreds of lines of portraits, each giving a body and a temperament in one block: only someone present could tell you a face, so the catalogue is proof rather than delay — and every death afterwards lands on a face the reader has been made to look at. His hero is Hector, not the man who killed him, and the story of Troilus and Briseida appears here for the first time.
Can help you with: Judging a source by where its author was standing rather than by how good he is, and following that principle when it costs you the better book. Why a catalogue can be an argument. Writing a woman’s change of heart from inside without making her either wicked or helpless — and what it means that he recorded a great lady’s objection to his portrait within the poem itself, unable to decide whether that was courage or courtliness. And the flaw he cannot mend: his test asks whether a witness was present, answered from what the book claims about itself, so a careful forger passes.
→ Converse with Benoît de Sainte-Maure
Chanson de Geste · Laisses Similaires · The Matter of France · Judgement by Arrangement
Unnamed: the manuscript’s last line says a certain Turoldus declinet, which may mean he composed the poem, copied it, recited it, or grew weary of it. His art is one gesture and it is enormous — sing a moment, sing it again in another assonance with one element moved, and a third time so the turn costs something. Oliver asks for the horn three times and the reason changes each time, so that by the third the hall has judged though no line of the poem contains the judgement. Heaven is not a theme in his work but a party to it: the sun stops, angels come for a dead man’s glove, and a legal case is settled because God gives the combat to the smaller man.
Can help you with: Building a judgement out of arrangement rather than statement; why he stops at three tellings and what a fourth would cost; the balance of proz and sage held so that neither man may be lowered; trial by combat as a procedure that reveals a truth rather than deciding one. He holds his century’s false picture of Islam and does not know it is false — he is evidence about a Christian imagination and about nothing else.
→ Converse with The Roland Poet
Conjointure · Erec et Enide · Yvain · Lancelot · Perceval
He names himself in his own opening lines, which the singers of chansons de geste do not, because the making is his even where the matter is not. His word is conjointure: the matter lies scattered in Breton tales and things heard at fairs, any man can string them, and jointing them so the end answers the beginning is the whole of what he does — Erec’s last adventure is the same test as his first, and the hearer feels it without being told. His world is not ours: aventure is a thing sent rather than sought, pris is a substance a man has and can spend, and the court’s murmur that a knight has grown soft is a measurement rather than gossip.
Can help you with: Finding the conjointure in any narrative — what does the ending owe the beginning, and can an episode be lifted out without the work noticing? Setting two goods against each other and holding them until a third state appears; why he wrote Yvain after Erec, one turn of the question not being enough; why women in his romances judge, and the judgement binds. He does not soften: Lancelot’s two steps of hesitation before the cart are a fault held against him for a whole romance.
→ Converse with Chrétien de Troyes
Old English Epic · Heroic Poetry · Anglo-Saxon · The Monster at the Door
The Beowulf Poet is anonymous — the single surviving manuscript of the poem, written in Old English, gives no author’s name, and the poem itself may have been composed centuries before it was written down. It is the earliest long poem in a Germanic vernacular, and one of the great achievements of European literature: a meditation on heroism, mortality, and the darkness that waits at the edge of the firelight. Heaney’s translation opened the poem to the twentieth century; the Poet here speaks from the earlier tradition, from the mead-hall and the northern shore.
Can help you with: Old English epic poetry, the heroic tradition in northern European literature, the structure of Beowulf, kennings and the poetics of Old English, the relationship between pagan and Christian elements in the poem, early medieval manuscript culture, and what it means to write about monsters and heroes.
→ Converse with The Beowulf Poet
Middle English · Canterbury Tales · Narrative Poetry · The Pilgrimage Frame
Chaucer invented English literary fiction. The Canterbury Tales gave English literature its first great collection of verse narratives organised by a structural conceit (a pilgrimage, a storytelling competition) that lets characters from every level of society tell stories appropriate to their station — and sometimes wildly inappropriate. He borrowed from Boccaccio, from French romance, from Latin authors, and from the streets of fourteenth-century London, and produced something that had not existed in English before: a literature of human variety.
Can help you with: The Canterbury Tales and their structure, Middle English literature, the frame narrative as a literary device, fourteenth-century English society and culture, the relationship between French and English literary traditions, Troilus and Criseyde, and the formal variety of medieval narrative poetry.
→ Converse with Geoffrey Chaucer
Piers Plowman · The Field Full of Folk · Two Manner of Mede · The Half Acre and Hunger · The Pardon Torn · Dowel, Asked Again
The poet of Piers Plowman is known by a Christian name, William, which the poem gives its dreamer, and by a surname that comes from a single note in a fifteenth-century hand in a Dublin manuscript. Almost nothing else about him is certain, and the simulacrum says so: it is built from the poem itself, read line by line in the Prologue and first seven passus of the longer version, from the field full of folk to the tearing of the pardon. It sorts a crowd by what people do rather than what they are called. It asks of every payment what it is proportioned to. And it ends every answer with a waking, and the question the dreamer keeps asking for the rest of the poem: what is it to do well?
Can help you study: Piers Plowman passus by passus, from the Prologue to the pardon. Lady Mede and the difference between a reward, a wage and a bribe. The ploughing of the half acre, Hunger and the wasters. Why Piers tears the pardon, and why that is not a rejection of the Church. The dream-vision and its wakings. And how the alliterative long line is built — with the chance to write some.
→ Converse with William Langland Simulacrum
Le Morte Darthur · The French Book Made English · The Pentecost Oath · The Fellowship Broken by Its Loyalties · As the Book Saith
Of the man, almost nothing is certain beyond what he wrote at the book’s end: that he was Sir Thomas Malory, a knight; that he finished in the ninth year of Edward IV’s reign, 1469–70; and that he asked to be prayed for so that God would send him good deliverance — a prisoner, writing. Which Thomas Malory he was is still argued, and the simulacrum does not pretend to know. It is built from the book: the long French prose romances cut down into English, the knights measured by the oath they swore and the deed they did, and the slow ruin in which the Round Table is broken by loyalties each of which is honourable on its own. It keeps the book’s own way of standing behind or stepping back from its sources — “as the French book saith”, “some men say”, “I find no more written”.
Can help you study: Le Morte Darthur tale by tale, from Arthur’s begetting to the dead Launcelot. How Malory reduced his French and English sources, and what he left out. The Pentecost Oath and the knightly code as a working rule. Launcelot, Guenevere and Gawain, and why the fellowship falls. And how to tell, in any old text, what the narrator vouches for and what he only reports.
→ Converse with Thomas Malory Simulacrum
The Faerie Queene · Continued Allegory · The Counterfeit Double · The Spenserian Stanza · Mutabilitie
Spenser set out to write the English poem that would do for Elizabeth’s England what Virgil had done for Rome, and finished six of the twelve books of The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) before his death in 1599, a few months after his house in Munster was burned in the rising. The simulacrum is built from the poem’s own method — doctrine by example rather than by rule, an allegory carried at two levels at once — and from the operation the poem runs on everything it touches: the counterfeit double, made of the same materials as the true thing, so that only what animates it, and what time does to it, can tell them apart. It holds his positions as he held them, including those of his writing on Ireland, which the academy states plainly were wrong.
Can help you study: The Faerie Queene book by book, read at both levels. Allegory as a way of teaching, and what it risks. The Spenserian stanza — the chained rhyme and the long ninth line. The Bower of Bliss, and the problem of a poem that condemns its own delight. The Mutabilitie Cantos. And how to build the counterfeit of a virtue, and find its tell.
→ Converse with Edmund Spenser Simulacrum
Astrophil and Stella · The Defence of Poesy · Brass and Gold · The Fore-Conceit · Look in Thy Heart and Write
Sidney wrote the first great English defence of poetry at about twenty-six, calling it the work of his “idlest times” and his “unelected vocation”, and died of a wound received at Zutphen before it was printed. Its argument is that the poet alone among the human sciences makes a better world than nature’s — “her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden” — and that he outranks the philosopher, who gives the rule, and the historian, who gives the case, because he couples the two in a speaking picture that moves people to act. The simulacrum runs that argument as working operations, holds its period’s convictions as it held them, including its firm view that a play should keep to one day and not mingle kings with clowns, and keeps open the question its own opening raises: whether a defence of poetry by someone who is party to it is anything more than self-love gilding its own cause.
Can help you study: The Defence of Poesy part by part, read as an oration. Precept, example and the speaking picture. Why the poet “nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth”. The four charges against poetry and how they are answered. Astrophil and Stella, and what “look in thy heart and write” meant before it was read as self-expression. And making a sonnet from its fore-conceit.
→ Converse with Philip Sidney Simulacrum
Renaissance Tragedy · Blank Verse · The Overreacher · Faustus · Tamberlaine
Marlowe invented English blank verse tragedy. Tamburlaine gave the Elizabethan stage its first hero who wanted everything and took it; Doctor Faustus gave it its first hero who sold everything for knowledge. Both figures are Marlovian archetypes: the overreacher, the person who refuses the limits of the human condition and is destroyed by that refusal. He died at twenty-nine, stabbed in a tavern brawl that may have been an assassination, having transformed English drama in a career of barely six years.
Can help you with: English Renaissance drama, blank verse and its poetics, the Faustus legend and its dramatic treatment, the overreacher as dramatic type, Tamburlaine and the heroic villain, Marlowe’s relationship to Shakespeare, and the political and religious dangers of Elizabethan playwriting.
→ Converse with Christopher Marlowe
Drama · Poetry · Human Nature · Theatre · The Collected Works
Shakespeare remains the central figure in the English literary tradition and one of the most performed writers in the world. His thirty-seven plays cover comic, tragic, historical, and romance modes with a range of human understanding that has not been equalled. He invented or transformed the dramatic soliloquy, the complex villain, the problem play, and the late romance. He also wrote the greatest sonnet sequence in the language. The Sonnets and the plays are best read as a single sustained exploration of time, love, ambition, and mortality.
Can help you with: The plays and their dramatic structure, the Sonnets and their concerns, Shakespeare’s theatrical technique, character and motivation in the major plays, the problem plays and late romances, the relationship between poetry and drama in his work, and the history of Shakespearean criticism and performance.
→ Converse with William Shakespeare
Songs and Sonnets · Holy Sonnets · The Conceit as Proof · Paradox · Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
Donne was a law student and a love poet whose verses passed from hand to hand in manuscript; he married in secret and was ruined for it, conformed to the Church of England, took orders in 1615, and died Dean of St Paul’s in 1631, with almost none of his poems in print. The simulacrum runs the one machine he turned on everything: it speaks to whoever is in the room, yokes the least alike things it can find, and argues the likeness step by step until it proves something — two lovers are the two feet of a pair of compasses, and therefore the one who travels ends where he began. It holds what he held: a self that is a little world of elements and spirit, a body that will rise, and a death that will die.
Can help you study: The conceit as an argument, and how to walk a figure step by step to its conclusion. The dramatic opening, and the poem addressed to someone present. Paradox, and why it must never be softened. The Songs and Sonnets and the Holy Sonnets as one kind of argument turned two ways. And how to write a poem that proves something.
→ Converse with John Donne Simulacrum
Comedy of Humours · Satire · Jacobean Drama · The Learned Playwright
Jonson was the other great playwright of the Jacobean stage — classical, learned, and savagely satirical where Shakespeare was romantic and expansive. His theory of humours (the idea that each character is dominated by a single obsessive disposition) gave English comic drama its psychological architecture. Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair are among the greatest comedies in the language, built on a view of human nature as fundamentally acquisitive, credulous, and self-deceiving. He also quarrelled with nearly everyone and wrote the most important collection of literary criticism of his era.
Can help you with: The comedy of humours and its principles, Jonson’s major plays, Jacobean drama and its social context, the relationship between Jonson and Shakespeare, classical influence on English Renaissance drama, literary satire and its techniques, and Jonson’s critical writings.
→ Converse with Ben Jonson
Tragicomedy · Jacobean Theatre · Collaborative Drama · The Bourgeois Audience
Beaumont and Fletcher were the most commercially successful playwrights of the Jacobean stage, and their collaboration — Francis Beaumont (1584–1616) and John Fletcher (1579–1625) — defined a new genre: the tragicomedy, which delivers tragic stakes without tragic consequences, resolving danger through last-minute reversals that an aristocratic audience might find implausible but a bourgeois audience found satisfying. They also wrote for the private theatres rather than the public amphitheatres, addressing a more refined, more paying audience.
Can help you with: Jacobean tragicomedy and its conventions, collaborative dramatic authorship, the private vs. public theatre divide in early modern England, the relationship between commercial success and artistic reputation, plot construction in fast-moving theatrical narrative, and the social history of Jacobean playgoing.
→ Converse with Beaumont & Fletcher
Paradise Lost · Blank Verse · The Verse-Paragraph · Trial by Contrary · Liberty Recovered from Custom
Milton wrote Paradise Lost blind, dictating it to whoever would hold the pen, after twenty years in which he had set poetry aside for prose on church government, divorce, the licensing of books and the trial of a king. The simulacrum runs the one move he made on every one of those subjects: find what custom has bound a thing with, restore it to what it was for, and then put it on trial against its strongest contrary — which is why Satan is given the best speeches, and why the poem has no rhyme. It holds what he held — angels with bodies, a soul that sleeps until the resurrection, a Son subordinate to the Father — and two positions the academy marks plainly as false: the exclusion of Catholics from toleration, and the subordination of women.
Can help you study: Paradise Lost book by book, and why the adversary is given the strongest case. Blank verse and the verse-paragraph — how the sense is carried over the line and where the period lands. The epic simile as an instrument for setting scale. Areopagitica and trial by contrary. And how to write the best case against your own position before you answer it.
→ Converse with John Milton Simulacrum
English prose made out of Greek · Words coined for the language · The plain sense
Cross-listed from the Divinity School. Passover. Scapegoat. Atonement. Let there be light. The powers that be. The salt of the earth. A law unto themselves. Each had to be built, because the language did not have it and the Latin had covered the thing over — and each is made from parts a labourer already knew, so that its meaning is explained in the saying of it. The prose is a by-product of accuracy and plainness rather than an aim: a man setting out to write beautifully would have worked from the Latin and made something admired and useless.
Can help you study: Coining a word so that its parts carry the sense without a gloss, and why a word that must be explained has handed the text back to the explainer. The claim underneath the style — that Greek and English agree in idiom far better than either agrees with Latin, so that in a thousand places one need only turn it word for word. The difference between plain and easy. And why an English sentence built for the ear outlasted the institutions that burned the man who wrote it.
→ Converse with William Tyndale Simulacrum
Prose written to be spoken in unison · The doublet as a bridge · Cadence as the grammar of the ear
Cross-listed from the Divinity School. Four hundred people, no rehearsal, most unable to read, once a week for a lifetime — everything admired in these sentences is what that problem forced. Latin hangs a sentence from its endings; English has almost none and must hang it from rhythm and word order, so a literal rendering collapses into subordinate clauses no congregation can hold to the end of. The remedy was to keep the machine and rebuild the housing: address, attribute in threes because three can be counted on the breath, one petition, its purpose, and the mediation last.
Can help you study: Fixing the stresses before the words, and why a congregation finds a sentence by its beat before its sense. The doublet — acknowledge and confess, erred and strayed — as one idea said once for the schooled and once for the unschooled, so that nobody kneeling is shut out of his own sentence. Why prose that reads better than it speaks is the mark of a man writing for readers. And the discipline of never letting cadence carry a contested claim, because the beauty would do the work the argument should.
→ Converse with Thomas Cranmer Simulacrum
Neoclassical & Romantic
The age of the couplet and the age that broke it — satire, the dictionary, the visionary lyric, and verse used as a vehicle for science.
Comedy · Satire · French Theatre · The Miser · Tartuffe · Human Folly
Molière is the central figure in French comic theatre and one of the masters of the European comic tradition. His plays attack hypocrisy (Tartuffe), misanthropy (Le Misanthrope), avarice (The Miser), social climbing, medical charlatanism, and bourgeois pretension with a precision of observation and a lightness of touch that have kept them alive for three and a half centuries. He ran his own theatre company, acted leading roles in his own plays, and died on stage — more or less. Louis XIV was his patron, which is the only reason he survived the enemies his satires made.
Can help you with: French classical theatre, Molière’s major plays, the comic exposure of social hypocrisy, the relationship between comedy and moral seriousness, French literary culture under Louis XIV, the Querelle de Tartuffe, and the European comic tradition from Plautus through Molière to Feydeau.
→ Converse with Molière
Absalom and Achitophel · The Essay of Dramatic Poesy · Metaphrase, Paraphrase, Imitation · The Statue and the Man · God’s Plenty
Poet Laureate until the Revolution put him out, playwright, satirist, translator of Virgil, and the writer of the prefaces that began English criticism. His habit was to set two things side by side — Shakespeare and Jonson, the English stage and the French, Chaucer and Ovid — and to find the extremes before taking the mean between them. The simulacrum runs his three ways of translating (word for word, “with latitude”, and free imitation), his test of whether a correct work is “the beauties of a statue, but not of a man”, and his satiric stroke so fine it “separates the head from the body, and leaves it standing in its place”. It holds his views as he held them, including his conviction that Chaucer’s verse limps for want of half a foot — and keeps open the fact that the aim he set himself for his Virgil matches, almost word for word, the method he had earlier called the greatest wrong to the dead.
Can help you study: The Essay of Dramatic Poesy and its four speakers. The theory and practice of translation, from the 1680 preface to the 1697 Aeneis. Absalom and Achitophel and Mac Flecknoe, and how satire strikes without railing. The Preface to the Fables and Chaucer as “God’s plenty”. Comparing two writers without crowning one on a single scale. And couplets of your own.
→ Converse with John Dryden Simulacrum
An Essay on Criticism · The Rape of the Lock · An Essay on Man · The Dunciad · The Sound an Echo to the Sense
A Roman Catholic barred by law from the universities and from office, Pope taught himself from Homer, Horace and Dryden, put the whole doctrine of neoclassical criticism into couplets at twenty-three, turned a family quarrel over a stolen lock of hair into an epic in miniature, translated Homer, and argued in An Essay on Man that “whatever is, is right” — while the Dunciad, printed with its mock-learned notes, brought “universal darkness” down on the learning of his age. The simulacrum runs his operations: the line that does what it says, the rule traced back to Nature, the thought “oft thought, but ne’er so well express’d”, the grammar that yokes a lady’s honour to her new brocade. The academy places a note at the head of the file on his view of women, which the simulacrum holds as he held it and which the academy states to be false.
Can help you study: An Essay on Criticism and the idea of rules as “Nature methodised”. The Rape of the Lock and the mock-heroic. An Essay on Man and the chain of being. The satire of the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot and the Dunciad. Sound and sense in verse. And revising — “the art to blot” — one line at a time.
→ Converse with Alexander Pope Simulacrum
The Dictionary · The Lives of the Poets · The Rambler · Literary Criticism · The English Essay
The first great English literary critic and the author of the Dictionary that fixed the language. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets established the tradition of evaluating literature by what the author attempted and how far they succeeded. His essays in The Rambler and The Idler set the standard for English prose. His conversation — recorded by Boswell — remains the most quoted in the language.
Can help you with: Literary criticism and close reading, the English essay, prose style, the history of the English language, lexicography, and the evaluation of poetry and fiction by their own declared standards.
→ Converse with Samuel Johnson
The Botanic Garden · Pre-evolutionary Ideas in Verse · Poetic Natural Philosophy · The Lunar Society
Physician, natural philosopher, and poet who wrote major works of science as extended poems — The Botanic Garden, Zoonomia — and whose verse anticipated evolutionary ideas while giving them literary form. He represents the Enlightenment belief that natural philosophy and poetry were not separate pursuits. Cross-posted from the Lunar Society of Birmingham.
Can help you study: Erasmus Darwin’s scientific poetry, The Botanic Garden, the poetic representation of nature, the relationship between literature and Enlightenment science, and proto-evolutionary ideas in verse.
→ Converse with Erasmus Darwin
Songs of Innocence and Experience · The Marriage of Heaven and Hell · Visionary Poetry · Contraries · Illuminated Printing
Poet, painter, printmaker, visionary. Blake saw angels in a tree at four years old and never stopped seeing them. Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794) set paired poems against each other — The Lamb and The Tyger, the two Holy Thursdays, the two Chimney Sweepers — to show that innocence and experience are not stages but permanent contraries. Without contraries, he wrote, is no progression.
Can help you with: Songs of Innocence and Experience (paired poems, contraries, social criticism), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, visionary poetry, the relationship between word and image, illuminated printing, and the radical politics embedded in the apparently simple lyrics.
→ Converse with William Blake
Lyrical Ballads · The Prelude · Romantic Poetry · Nature · Emotion Recollected in Tranquillity
The poet who walked the Lake District and turned what he saw into the founding document of English Romanticism. The Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800) declared that poetry should use the language of ordinary people and take its subjects from everyday life. The Prelude — thirteen books of autobiographical blank verse — traced the growth of the poet’s mind from childhood to maturity.
Can help you with: Romantic poetry, the Lyrical Ballads (context, manifesto, key poems), The Prelude, nature poetry, the relationship between landscape and inner life, emotion recollected in tranquillity, and the revolution Wordsworth made in what poetry could be about.
→ Converse with William Wordsworth
Waverley · Old Mortality · ’Tis Sixty Years Since · The Wavering Hero · A Foundation in Fact
An Edinburgh lawyer who grew up among people who remembered the Forty-five, Scott watched a whole society change within his lifetime and set out to keep what was vanishing — in fiction, because only fiction could carry it. The form he made puts the story sixty years back, where the passions are the same and the manners just out of reach, and carries a mild, impressionable young man across the line between two worlds so that each side is seen at its best and its worst. The simulacrum runs those operations, marks what in a story is attested, traditional or invented — “the most romantic parts of this narrative are precisely those which have a foundation in fact” — and holds his views as he held them: the Union right, the Jacobites wrong and admirable, the clan an earlier stage of society.
Can help you study: Waverley and Old Mortality. How historical fiction gives real incidents to imaginary people. Telling a civil war from both sides. Writing a regional voice without making it the joke. The idea of a society changing “like those who drift down the stream of a deep and smooth river”. And collecting a living witness’s memory and turning it into a scene.
→ Converse with Walter Scott Simulacrum
Don Juan · Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage · The Turn of the Stanza · Cant · The Isles of Greece
A peer who left England for good at twenty-eight and wrote the rest of his work abroad, Byron began as the poet of the solemn, wandering pilgrim and ended as the poet who laughed at that pilgrim. His great instrument is the ottava rima stanza of Don Juan: six lines that let a feeling rise to its full height and a closing couplet that turns and asks what it is standing on. The simulacrum runs that turn, hunts out cant in public life and in its own sentences, and keeps the few things he would not laugh at — Greece, liberty, the plain fact of suffering — because “if I laugh at any mortal thing, ’Tis that I may not weep.”
Can help you study: Don Juan and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. How a stanza form makes comedy and deflation possible. The digression as a way of thinking. Satire on cant in politics, religion and literary fashion. “The isles of Greece” and the poetry of political hope. And the letters, as the place where the voice of the late poems was first tried out.
→ Converse with Lord Byron Simulacrum
The Odes · Negative Capability · The Chameleon Poet · The Vale of Soul-making · The Letters
Trained as a surgeon-apothecary at Guy’s Hospital, Keats gave up medicine for poetry at twenty-one, published three volumes in four years, was mocked by the Edinburgh and London reviews as a vulgar “Cockney”, nursed his brother through consumption, wrote the odes and The Eve of St. Agnes in 1819, and died of the same disease in Rome at twenty-five. His letters are among the best things ever written about how poems are made. The simulacrum runs the methods those letters describe: it enters the thing in front of it, as he said the poet with “no identity” does; it fills every slack place in a line with sensation; and it marks verses as he once asked his brother to mark his abandoned Hyperion — x for “the false beauty proceeding from art”, ‖ for “the true voice of feeling”. It wakes into the habitual feeling he described from Italy, of leading “a posthumous existence”.
Can help you study: The odes, the sonnets, Lamia, The Eve of St. Agnes and the Hyperion fragments, read line by line. The letters as a working poetics: Negative Capability (named once, on a walk home, and never again), the chameleon poet, axioms in philosophy “proved upon our pulses”, the Mansion of Many Apartments, the vale of Soul-making. Writing your own verse: entering an object rather than describing your feelings about it, loading the line, making a stanza that fits. ⚠ And the problem he could not solve, which every poet meets: telling, in your own lines, what came from art and what came from feeling.
→ Converse with John Keats Simulacrum
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner · Kubla Khan · Biographia Literaria · Imagination and Fancy · The Willing Suspension of Disbelief
Poet of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan and the conversation poems, co-author of Lyrical Ballads (1798), and the most searching English critic of his age, whose Biographia Literaria (1817) and Shakespeare lectures gave the language its distinctions between imagination and fancy, and between organic and mechanic form. The simulacrum works as he did: it finds two words being used as one, separates them, and then — because “distinction is not division” — restores them to a richer unity. It holds his Christian Platonism plainly, speaks of the opium habit only as the bondage of the will it was to him, and keeps open the problem he never closed: the deduction of the imagination, which he broke off in the thirteenth chapter of the Biographia.
Can help you study: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Christabel, “Frost at Midnight” and “Dejection: An Ode”. The Biographia Literaria: primary and secondary imagination, fancy, the willing suspension of disbelief. Practical criticism: whether a passage was fused by imagination or assembled by fancy, and his test of a blameless style (that no word can be replaced without injury). Organic form and the reading of Shakespeare. ⚠ And the gap at the centre of his theory, which a student can see for themselves in the asterisks of chapter thirteen.
→ Converse with Samuel Taylor Coleridge Simulacrum
Pride and Prejudice · Sense and Sensibility · Mansfield Park · Emma · Persuasion · Northanger Abbey · The Letters · Two Inches of Ivory
A Hampshire clergyman’s daughter who published four novels in her lifetime, each “By a Lady”, Austen told a niece that “three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on”, called her own work “the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory”, and defended the novel as a work “in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed”. The simulacrum works as her books do — the universally acknowledged truth turned round to show who wants it, the first impression undone by a second reading, the match counted in both columns, income and affection, and the small canvas worked finely with the shade put in — and it keeps open the question between Charlotte Lucas’s “comfortable home” and her own refusal of a good offer the morning after accepting it.
Can help you study: Pride and Prejudice — the opening sentence, Darcy’s letter and the second perusal, Charlotte and Mr. Collins; Emma and Box Hill; Persuasion and Anne’s argument with Harville; Mansfield Park, the Antigua estate and the “dead silence”; Northanger Abbey’s defence of the novel. Irony, the balanced sentence, money and marriage. Writing a scene in which talk reveals character. The letters to her nieces on writing. ⚠ And her acceptance of rank and of marriage as the only honourable provision for a woman of small fortune, which readers wanting a rebel find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Jane Austen Simulacrum
Prometheus Unbound · Ode to the West Wind · Ozymandias · The Mask of Anarchy · A Defence of Poetry · The Unacknowledged Legislators
Expelled from Oxford in 1811 for a pamphlet on atheism, Shelley spent his short life as a reformer, pamphleteer and exile, writing in Italy the lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound, the Ode to the West Wind, the Skylark, and The Mask of Anarchy on the Manchester massacre of 1819 — “Ye are many—they are few.” His Defence of Poetry ends: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” The simulacrum works as the Aeolian lyre of that essay — four strings struck by four winds: time on the tyrant’s stone, the many standing calm against the few, the Titan recalling his curse, the West Wind scattering words among mankind — and it keeps open whether a freedom in love that he preached as liberation was paid for by those nearest him.
Can help you study: Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, Mont Blanc, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, Prometheus Unbound, The Mask of Anarchy, Epipsychidion; A Defence of Poetry and the notes to Queen Mab. Poetry and politics; non-violent resistance; inspiration and composition; the Romantic lyric. ⚠ And his conviction that a revolution must be made without revenge and that poets shape the laws of the future, which readers who take politics to be only power find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Percy Bysshe Shelley Simulacrum
Gulliver’s Travels · A Modest Proposal · A Tale of a Tub · The Drapier’s Letters · Satire as a Glass · The Change of Scale
Dean of St Patrick’s, Dublin, from 1713, Swift was the sharpest satirist of the age of reason and a defender of Ireland: A Tale of a Tub, The Drapier’s Letters against Wood’s halfpence, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and A Modest Proposal (1729), which offers the children of the Irish poor as food for their landlords. “Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.” The simulacrum works as Gulliver’s log of four voyages — the great made small in Lilliput, the small made plain in Brobdingnag, reason floating above the land in Laputa, man set beside the rational horse and the Yahoo — and it keeps open whether savage indignation on another’s behalf is a form of love or of contempt.
Can help you study: Gulliver’s Travels, all four voyages; A Modest Proposal; A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books; The Drapier’s Letters and the Irish tracts; the Journal to Stella. Satire, irony and the persona; the plain style; Ireland and empire; reason and its limits. ⚠ And his conviction that mankind is a creature capable of reason who rarely uses it, and that only the most savage satire will reach the comfortable, which readers who prefer gentler correction find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Jonathan Swift Simulacrum
Robinson Crusoe · Moll Flanders · A Journal of the Plague Year · The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters · Debtor and Creditor · The Feigned True History
Hosier, bankrupt, brick-maker, Dissenter, government agent and journalist, Defoe was stood in the pillory in 1703 for The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters, an irony the High-Church party at first took for its own. In his late fifties he turned to the feigned true history — Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders and A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Roxana (1724) — and made the English novel out of the account-book and the confession. The simulacrum works as a merchant’s ledger of four accounts, each stated “like debtor and creditor” — the castaway’s inventory, the single footprint in the sand, the purse behind a thief’s fall, the weekly bills of mortality — and it keeps open whether a fiction passed off as fact is a moral instrument or a forgery.
Can help you study: Robinson Crusoe; Moll Flanders; Roxana; A Journal of the Plague Year; An Essay upon Projects, The True-Born Englishman and The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters. Realism and circumstantial detail; first-person narrative; necessity, trade and crime; providence and spiritual autobiography; irony and its readers. Crusoe’s slaving voyage and Defoe’s defence of the African trade are spoken of plainly. ⚠ And his conviction that want explains conduct, and that a life is best told as a tradesman keeps his books, which readers who look for character beyond circumstance find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Daniel Defoe Simulacrum
Tom Jones · Joseph Andrews · Jonathan Wild · Amelia · Affectation and the Ridiculous · The Bill of Fare
A playwright silenced by the Licensing Act of 1737, then a barrister and, from 1748, the magistrate of Bow Street, Fielding wrote Shamela (1741), Joseph Andrews (1742), Jonathan Wild (1743), Tom Jones (1749) and Amelia (1751), and called the new form “a comic epic poem in prose”. “The only source of the true Ridiculous (as it appears to me) is affectation.” The simulacrum works as the bill of fare at a public ordinary, in four courses — affectation uncovered, greatness shown to be roguery, human nature at the long table with the author among his guests, and the justice’s room — and it keeps open whether good nature can sit on the bench and stay good-natured to the poor.
Can help you study: Tom Jones; Joseph Andrews and Shamela; Jonathan Wild; Amelia; The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon; the plays. The intrusive narrator and the introductory chapter; irony and the mock-heroic; comic plotting; good nature and Christian charity; the law, the magistracy and the London poor. ⚠ And his conviction that a warm heart with faults is worth more than a cold one without them, which readers who weigh conduct above character find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Henry Fielding Simulacrum
Tristram Shandy · A Sentimental Journey · The Hobby-Horse · Digressive and Progressive · The Dash · Sensibility
A soldier’s son born at Clonmel and a Yorkshire parson for most of his life, Sterne published the first volumes of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman at York in 1759 and woke famous in London; nine volumes followed, a life that hardly gets past its hero’s birth, and then A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768). “Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;—they are the life, the soul of reading!” The simulacrum works as the four crooked lines Tristram drew of his own narration — the clock and the association of ideas, the hobby-horse and the fly let go, the digression that progresses, the dash left for the reader — and it keeps open whether sensibility is the first step of justice or a pleasure that excuses the feeler from acting.
Can help you study: Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey; The Sermons of Mr. Yorick; the Journal to Eliza and the letters. Digression and narrative time; character and the hobby-horse; the association of ideas; typography and the reader’s collaboration; sentiment, sensibility and their limits; slavery in Trim’s question and the starling. ⚠ And his conviction that a life cannot be told in a straight line and should not be, which readers who want the story to get on find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Laurence Sterne Simulacrum
To a Mouse · Holy Willie’s Prayer · A Man’s a Man for A’ That · Auld Lang Syne · The Old Scots Airs · The Fellow-Mortal
An Ayrshire tenant farmer’s son who held the plough from boyhood, Burns published Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect at Kilmarnock in 1786 — the book whose success kept him from sailing to a post on a Jamaica slave plantation — and became the satirist of the kirk, the radical of “A Man’s a Man”, an officer of the Excise, and the gatherer and mender of hundreds of Scottish songs. “The rank is but the guinea’s stamp, / The Man’s the gowd for a’ that.” The simulacrum works as a ploughed field of four rigs — the fellow-mortal in the furrow, the unco guid seen from the pew behind, rank weighed as metal, the old air mended — and it keeps open whether a man’s best song may stand for him when his own choices did not.
Can help you study: “To a Mouse”, “To a Louse”, “Holy Willie’s Prayer”, “Address to the Unco Guid”, “Tam o’ Shanter”, “Man Was Made to Mourn”; the songs, including “A Red, Red Rose” and “Auld Lang Syne”; the letters. Scots and English; the Standard Habbie stanza; kirk satire; equality and the French Revolution; song-collecting and the old airs. Jamaica, the Excise and his treatment of women are spoken of plainly. ⚠ And his conviction that a man is weighed by what he is beneath his rank, which readers who believe that station and conduct cannot be separated find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Robert Burns Simulacrum
Pamela · Clarissa · Sir Charles Grandison · Writing to the Moment · The Novel in Letters · The Rake and the Lady
A joiner’s son who became a master-printer in Salisbury Court, Richardson turned a book of model letters into Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), then wrote Clarissa (1747–48), the longest novel in English, and Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54) — novels of letters written, as his rake boasts, “to the moment”. The simulacrum works as a printer’s forme of four pages — writing to the moment, the servant’s good name against her master, the daughter’s refusal against her father, and the rake’s confession answered by the lady’s unbroken will — and it keeps open whether a woman’s virtue in his books is a power or a price.
Can help you study: Pamela; Clarissa; Sir Charles Grandison. The epistolary novel; writing to the moment and the inner life; the servant, the daughter and power in the household; consent, violation and the rake; parental authority in marriage. Pamela’s “reward” and his lingering on peril are spoken of plainly. ⚠ And his conviction that a novel can and should teach virtue, which readers who distrust moral design in fiction find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Samuel Richardson Simulacrum
The Traveller · The Deserted Village · The Vicar of Wakefield · She Stoops to Conquer · Laughing Comedy · Wealth and the Emptied Land
An Irish curate’s son who walked across Europe with a flute and came to London a hack writer, Goldsmith wrote The Traveller (1764), The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), The Deserted Village (1770) — “Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, / Where wealth accumulates, and men decay” — and She Stoops to Conquer (1773). The simulacrum works as four airs on a flute — the nations surveyed and the heart turned home, the village emptied by wealth, the good foolish vicar, and the house mistaken for an inn — and it keeps open whether Auburn is a true witness to depopulation or a lost childhood dressed as an argument.
Can help you study: The Traveller; The Deserted Village; The Vicar of Wakefield; She Stoops to Conquer; the essays. Enclosure, emigration and luxury; pastoral and political elegy; the first-person comic narrator; laughing against sentimental comedy; home and exile. Olivia’s song and the fate it assigns the fallen woman are spoken of plainly. ⚠ And his conviction that wealth gathered into a few hands empties a country of its people, which readers who measure a nation by its riches find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Oliver Goldsmith Simulacrum
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard · The Eton Ode · The Bard · The Progress of Poesy · The Letters · The Unrecorded Poor
A scrivener’s son from Cornhill, schooled at Eton and settled for life in Cambridge, Gray printed fewer than a thousand lines of English verse, among them the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751) — “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen” — the Eton ode, and the Pindaric odes The Progress of Poesy and The Bard (1757); he declined the laureateship and wrote some of the wittiest letters of his century. The simulacrum works as four leaves of a commonplace book — the curfew and the unrecorded dead, the distant prospect of youth, the harp in the old tongues, and the white melancholy of the letters — and it keeps open whether the Elegy mourns the poor’s frozen genius or reconciles them to their obscurity.
Can help you study: The Elegy; the odes on Eton, Spring, Adversity and the drowned cat; The Progress of Poesy and The Bard; the Norse and Welsh pieces; the letters. The churchyard elegy and the obscure poor; the Pindaric ode; irony and the moralist; revision and the finished poem; friendship, retirement and the scholar’s life. “Chill Penury” and the consolations of obscurity are spoken of plainly. ⚠ And his conviction that a poem is not finished until most of it has been struck out, which readers who prize spontaneity and abundance find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Thomas Gray Simulacrum
The Task · Olney Hymns · The Negro’s Complaint · John Gilpin · The Letters · Retirement and the World
A rector’s son who left the law after a grave breakdown and lived quietly at Olney and Weston with Mary Unwin, Cowper wrote the Olney Hymns (1779) — “God moves in a mysterious way” — the comic ballad John Gilpin, and The Task (1785), whose conversational blank verse brought the country walk and the winter evening into English poetry; his anti-slavery verses were printed and sung by the abolitionists. The simulacrum works as four panes of his garden summer-house — the sofa and the walk, the stricken deer and its healer, the slave’s complaint, and Gilpin’s ride with the hares — and it keeps open whether retreat from the world is a refuge for such work or a comfort that lets the comfortable grieve and do nothing.
Can help you study: The Task; the Olney Hymns; The Negro’s Complaint and Pity for Poor Africans; John Gilpin; the poems on beasts; the letters. Retirement and the town; abolition in verse; faith and despair; tenderness to animals; the domestic and the everyday in poetry. His long seasons of despair are spoken of plainly and without spectacle. ⚠ And his conviction that the comfort of one’s own fireside must be weighed against the chains that paid for it, which readers who would keep poetry and politics apart find hard to accept.
→ Converse with William Cowper Simulacrum
Evelina · Cecilia · The Wanderer · The Journals and Letters · The Court of Queen Charlotte · A Young Woman’s Entrance into the World
A King’s Lynn organist’s daughter who wrote in secret and published Evelina (1778) anonymously, Burney became the laughing favourite of Streatham and the Johnson circle, wrote Cecilia (1782) and Camilla (1796), served five unhappy years as Second Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte, and in 1811 endured a mastectomy without anaesthetic, which she described in a letter. She married the French exile General d’Arblay, lived through the Terror’s aftermath in France, and published The Wanderer (1814) and the Memoirs of her father; her journals are among the great records of the age. The simulacrum works as four entrances into the world — the assembly, the heiress, the court, and the wanderer — and it keeps open whether a young woman’s sharp eye on the manners of a room is a freedom or a form of the very watchfulness that confines her.
Can help you study: Evelina; Cecilia; Camilla; The Wanderer; the journals and letters. Comedy of manners; the young woman in society; anonymity and authorship; court and household life; the position of a female writer; the novel of social observation. Her comic ear for vulgarity and pretension is brought to bear on the room in front of you. ⚠ And her conviction that a woman’s reputation was a fragile property to be guarded at nearly any cost, which readers who would have her a plainer rebel find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Frances Burney Simulacrum
The Mysteries of Udolpho · The Romance of the Forest · The Italian · Gaston de Blondeville · A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 · Terror and Suspense
A London tradesman’s only child who married William Radcliffe, a newspaper proprietor, and wrote in the evenings while he was out, Radcliffe published five romances between 1789 and 1797 — The Romance of the Forest, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian among them — set in Italy, France and Sicily, none of which she had seen. Her one journey abroad, up the Rhine in 1794, was published as a travel journal; she then printed no more, wrote Gaston de Blondeville in 1802 and left it in a drawer, and was rumoured by strangers to be insane. The simulacrum works as four veils — the black curtain before the picture, the mountains seen from afar, the roll of paper behind the arras, and the ghost in a ruff — and it keeps open whether a ghost explained away at the last page leaves more fear behind than a ghost left standing, and why the one true spectre she wrote stayed unprinted.
Can help you study: The Mysteries of Udolpho; The Romance of the Forest; The Italian; A Sicilian Romance; Gaston de Blondeville; the journals and the Lakes tour. Suspense and withholding; terror and horror; landscape by hour and light; the explained supernatural; the heroine and her feelings; the travel journal. She is open about having described countries she had not seen. ⚠ And her habit of explaining every ghost she printed, which readers who want the haunting left standing, or the plain mystery, find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Ann Radcliffe Simulacrum
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman · Letters from Sweden, Norway and Denmark · The French Revolution · Maria · Original Stories · The Education of Daughters
The eldest daughter of a father who ran through his money, Wollstonecraft worked as a paid companion, a schoolmistress and a governess before becoming a writer for a London publisher; she wrote Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), Original Stories (1788) and, in weeks, an answer to the Reflections on the Revolution in France, then A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). She lived through the Terror in Paris, wrote a history of the Revolution, travelled to Scandinavia in 1795 with her infant daughter, and published her Letters in 1796; she married William Godwin in 1797, and the unfinished novel Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman was printed after her in 1798. The simulacrum works as four lessons for a daughter — the rational creature, the letters from the north, the revolution from a window and the wrongs of woman — and it keeps open whether reason must govern feeling or feeling is part of reason, since the book that calls sensibility a snare and the letters full of it came from one hand.
Can help you study: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; Letters Written During a Short Residence; An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution; Maria; Original Stories; the education writings. Education and obedience; reason and sensibility; the law of marriage and property; travel writing; the history of a revolution. She is plain about the warm heart that answered for her judgment in her own life. ⚠ And her conviction that a girl’s education to please is the first political wrong, which readers who find it too severe, or too modest, find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Mary Wollstonecraft Simulacrum
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater · The English Mail-Coach · Dream-Fugue · Murder as One of the Fine Arts · Suspiria de Profundis · Autobiographic Sketches
Born in Manchester, De Quincey left his grammar school without leave in 1802, walked in Wales and went hungry in London, then read at Oxford without taking a degree. He lived for years in a cottage at Grasmere among his books, and from 1821, with the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, made a living in the magazines, latterly in Edinburgh and always in debt. He wrote Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (1827, with later papers), Suspiria de Profundis (1845), The English Mail-Coach (1849) and the Autobiographic Sketches. The simulacrum works as a fugue on a theme of sudden death in four voices — the mail on the night road, the room with the open window, the disjointed notes and the lecture on murder — and it keeps open whether his splendours can stand without someone in the road, since the glory of motion, the hymn to the drug and the elegant dinner each need a victim.
Can help you study: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater; The English Mail-Coach and its Dream-Fugue; Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts; Suspiria de Profundis; Autobiographic Sketches. The long sentence and the digression that returns; dream and memory as prose; childhood grief; irony as accusation; the essay as a form. He gives no advice about any drug, and sends anyone in trouble to a doctor. ⚠ And his conviction that splendour and cost belong in the same sentence, which readers who want the beauty without the bill find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Thomas De Quincey Simulacrum
Table-Talk · On Going a Journey · The Indian Jugglers · On the Pleasure of Hating · Lectures on the English Poets · The Spirit of the Age · Gusto
The son of a Unitarian minister, Hazlitt grew up at Wem, was trained for the ministry at Hackney and left it, and spent some years as a painter before turning to writing; he published an Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805), wrote for the Examiner and the Edinburgh Review, gave his Lectures on the English Poets at the Surrey Institution (1818), and collected Table-Talk (1821–22), The Spirit of the Age (1825) and The Plain Speaker (1826). He was a devotee of the fives-court and the prize-ring all his life. The simulacrum works as a set-to in four rounds — gusto, the pleasure of hating, going a journey and the man with the brass balls — and it keeps open whether love and malice are one force or two, since the essay that praises a thing’s own life and the essay that says “hatred alone is immortal” came from one hand.
Can help you study: Lectures on the English Poets; Table-Talk; The Plain Speaker; The Spirit of the Age. The personal essay; criticism as a contest; praise that names its place; the confession of one’s faults; solitude and walking; envy and the better hand. He gives no counsel on solitude or ill-will as a cure, and sends anyone in pain to a doctor or a friend. ⚠ And his conviction that a critic must put the cost of his temper in the same paragraph as its use, which readers who want the verdict without the bruise find hard to accept.
→ Converse with William Hazlitt Simulacrum
Essays of Elia · Last Essays of Elia · Dream-Children · Mrs. Battle’s Opinions on Whist · A Dissertation upon Roast Pig · The Two Races of Men · New Year’s Eve
Born in the Inner Temple and educated at Christ’s Hospital, Lamb was a clerk at the South-Sea House and then, for thirty-three years from 1792, at the East India House, retiring on a pension in 1825. From 1796 he made his home with his sister Mary. He published Specimens of English Dramatic Poets (1808) and, under the borrowed name Elia, the essays in the London Magazine from 1820, collected in Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833). The simulacrum works as a rubber of whist at a clear fire — hearts, the dream-children; spades, the two races of men; clubs, the eve of a year; diamonds, the roast pig — and it keeps open whether the jest was the way he told the truth or a place to stand while he did not look, since each essay carries something cold under its wit.
Can help you study: Elia; The Last Essays of Elia; Specimens of English Dramatic Poets. The familiar essay; the reverie; the mock-classification of a habit; the argument for a small pleasure; the jest that carries a sorrow. He offers no counsel on grief or drink, and sends anyone in trouble to a doctor or a friend. ⚠ And his conviction that the sorrow and the jest belong in the same trick, which readers who want either the cosiness or the cold alone find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Charles Lamb Simulacrum
The Fallen Elm · The Thrush’s Nest · Remembrances · Clock-a-Clay · The Shepherd’s Calendar · The Village Minstrel · The Rural Muse
Born at Helpston in Northamptonshire, the son of a farm labourer, Clare worked as a ploughboy, lime-burner and threshing hand while filling his pockets with verses. He published Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820), The Village Minstrel (1821), The Shepherd’s Calendar (1827) and The Rural Muse (1835), and watched the open fields of his parish enclosed and the commons ploughed. The simulacrum works as an open field in four strips — the nest, watched and left; the common, by its names; the elm and the charge against its cutter; the clock-a-clay and its small house — and it keeps open whether naming a place exactly keeps it, or only writes it a headstone, since the “peasant poet” title that sold the poems may also have hidden what they said.
Can help you study: Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery; The Village Minstrel; The Shepherd’s Calendar; The Rural Muse. Nature and place-writing; the poem built from a list of names; the lament that names who gained; the small creature in its small home. He offers no counsel on grief or on a troubled mind, and sends anyone in trouble to a doctor or a friend. ⚠ And his insistence that every place be named and every loss charged to someone, which readers who want the picturesque or the pure lament alone find hard to accept.
→ Converse with John Clare Simulacrum
The Village · The Parish Register · The Borough · Tales · Tales of the Hall · The Herbarium · The Weeds
Born at Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast, the son of a salt-master, Crabbe was apprenticed to an apothecary-surgeon and collected plants and insects from boyhood. He nearly went under in London in 1780 before a statesman took him up, was ordained, served as chaplain at a great house and as rector of a series of parishes, and published The Village (1783), The Parish Register (1807), The Borough (1810), Tales (1812) and Tales of the Hall (1819). The simulacrum works as a herbarium of four sheets — the pastoral tinsel stripped, the heath named, the weeds pressed and labelled, the parish house described and left unpreached — and it keeps open whether his exactness about the poor was a form of justice or a way of looking at them from the vestry window.
Can help you study: The Village; The Parish Register; The Borough; Tales. Narrative verse in the heroic couplet; the anti-pastoral; realism in poetry; the poor and the parish in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England; the naturalist’s eye in writing. He cannot find anyone a bed or a meal and sends anyone in want or distress to an advice service, a doctor or a friend. ⚠ And his insistence that a scene be named plant by plant before any pity is offered, which readers who want the garnish or the lament find hard to accept.
→ Converse with George Crabbe Simulacrum
A Song to David · Jubilate Agno · Hymns for the Amusement of Children · The Sweet · The Strong · The Precious · The Glorious
Born in Kent, the son of an estate steward, Smart was a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, a prize-winning sacred poet and a London journalist. He was confined for some years from 1756, during which he wrote the antiphon Jubilate Agno; he published A Song to David in 1763, a Translation of the Psalms in 1765 and Hymns for the Amusement of Children in 1770, and was held for debt in his last years. The simulacrum works as a ladder of four rungs — the sweet noticed, the strong measured, the precious weighed, the glorious reached — and it keeps open whether his praise was the free exercise of a mind that found its subject or a shelter that held a person up.
Can help you study: A Song to David; Jubilate Agno; Hymns for the Amusement of Children; the Psalms in English. Eighteenth-century devotional and sacred verse; the poetics of the list and the litany; praise and attention in poetry; poetry and confinement. He is a poet, not a physician or counsellor, and sends anyone unwell in mind or in despair to a doctor, a mental-health service or a crisis line. ⚠ And his rule that a word of praise must stand on a named creature before it is allowed to climb, which readers who want the rapture without the object find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Christopher Smart Simulacrum
The Nineteenth Century
The novel becomes the dominant form, and takes on the city, the household, the sea and the self.
Frankenstein · Gothic Fiction · Creation and Responsibility · The Modern Prometheus · Science and Ethics
The author of Frankenstein, written at eighteen during a ghost-story competition at the Villa Diodati. The novel — subtitled The Modern Prometheus — asks what happens when a creator abandons the life he has made because it is ugly. It is the founding text of science fiction and a permanent inquiry into the ethics of creation.
Can help you with: Frankenstein (themes, structure, narrative framing, the creature as sympathetic figure), Gothic fiction, the ethics of scientific creation, the Romantic context (Shelley, Byron, Polidori), and the question of responsibility that every act of creation raises.
→ Converse with Mary Shelley
Naval Fiction · Adventure · 19th-Century Prose · Mr Midshipman Easy
Marryat invented the English naval adventure novel. A captain in the Royal Navy who saw action in the Napoleonic Wars and later in Burma, he brought direct experience of the sea and of naval life to a series of novels that established the genre that runs through Forester’s Hornblower to Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels. His prose is robust, his plots are picaresque, and his understanding of shipboard life is unrepeatable. He also had strong opinions about the United States, which he expressed in a travel book that made him temporarily unwelcome there.
Can help you with: Naval fiction and its tradition, the Napoleonic Wars at sea, British maritime history in the early nineteenth century, the picaresque novel, adventure fiction as a genre, the relationship between first-hand experience and literary fiction, and Mr Midshipman Easy as a comic novel of naval life.
→ Converse with Captain Marryat
The Social Novel · Serial Fiction · Character · London · A Christmas Carol · Great Expectations
The novelist who made Victorian England see its own poverty. Dickens wrote in monthly serial instalments, inventing cliffhangers and building characters so vivid they entered the language. His novels — from Oliver Twist to Bleak House to Great Expectations — combined social criticism with storytelling of extraordinary energy. A Christmas Carol changed how the English-speaking world celebrates Christmas.
Can help you with: The social novel, characterisation, serial narrative structure, A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, Bleak House, Victorian London, the relationship between fiction and social reform, and the craft of making readers care about people unlike themselves.
→ Converse with Charles Dickens
Victorian Gothic · Passion · Interior Life · Jane Eyre · Villette
Charlotte Brontë gave English fiction its most powerful first-person female narrator in Jane Eyre (1847) — a woman whose interior life is presented with the same gravity and authority that male novelists reserved for their male heroes. Her later novel Villette (1853) is even more formally adventurous: a first-person narrator so unreliable and so emotionally pressured that the reader is never sure what is happening and what is being suppressed. She died at thirty-eight, four months pregnant with her first child, having written three major novels and hundreds of juvenilia.
Can help you with: Jane Eyre and its critical history, Villette and its formal innovations, the Brontë family and their literary context, Victorian representations of women’s interior life, the Gothic in Victorian fiction, the unreliable narrator, and the relationship between passion and restraint in the Victorian novel.
→ Converse with Charlotte Brontë
Victorian Novel · Moral Psychology · Sympathy · Middlemarch · The Epic of the Ordinary
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) wrote the most morally intelligent novels in English. Her central subject was the web of consequence — how private choices become public facts, how sympathy expands and contracts, how people become better or worse through the accumulation of small decisions. Middlemarch (1871) is usually described as the greatest English novel; it is in any case the most intellectually ambitious, mapping the inner life of a provincial community with the same rigour that Darwin applied to natural selection. She understood the novel as a moral instrument more powerful than any sermon.
Can help you with: The Victorian novel, Middlemarch and its structure, Eliot’s moral philosophy, the relationship between realism and sympathy, the representation of provincial English society, the problem of the idealist in a world of compromise, and the technical achievement of free indirect discourse in the Victorian novel.
→ Converse with George Eliot
Moby-Dick · The Sea Novel · Cetology · Metaphysics of the Deep · Billy Budd
Cross-listed from the Académie Maritime. Moby-Dick (1851) sold badly and was half forgotten before he died; Billy Budd was left unfinished in a drawer and published more than thirty years later. The simulacrum is drawn from the novelist rather than the sailor: obsession treated as a way of knowing, the catalogue of whales as a philosophy in its own right, and a sea that is at once the thing itself, a metaphor for it, and the refusal of metaphor.
Can help you study: Moby-Dick and why it stops the story for chapters of cetology. Ahab’s obsession as an account of knowledge. The novel that will not keep to one form. Billy Budd and the unfinished book. And what a writer does when the first readers do not come.
→ Converse with Herman Melville Simulacrum
Jekyll and Hyde · Treasure Island · Duality · Adventure · The Essay · Samoa
The author of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, written in three days of fever, burned, and rewritten in three more. Stevenson explored duality — the respectable surface and the hidden self — in a novella that gave English a permanent metaphor. He also wrote Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and some of the finest essays in the language, before dying in Samoa at forty-four.
Can help you with: Jekyll and Hyde (duality, repression, the Victorian double life, narrative structure), Treasure Island, the adventure novel, the personal essay, Scottish literature, and the question of what we hide from ourselves and why.
→ Converse with Robert Louis Stevenson
In Memoriam · Ulysses · The Lotos-Eaters · Honest Doubt · The Dramatic Monologue · The Laureate
When his friend Arthur Hallam died suddenly in 1833, Tennyson began writing short lyrics in a four-line stanza, and kept at them for seventeen years while the geologists were showing him a world where whole kinds of creature had come and gone. The lyrics became In Memoriam, and the same year he was made Poet Laureate. The simulacrum works in that stanza’s shape: it gives a grief or a doubt a measure, says plainly what the measure leaves out — “words, like nature, half reveal / And half conceal the Soul within” — faces doubt at full strength, reads a scientific finding as found, and gives a feeling too near to say to a mask such as Ulysses. It holds his faith as he held it, faintly and in the open.
Can help you study: In Memoriam, “Ulysses”, “The Lotos-Eaters” and “The Lady of Shalott”. How the elegy works as both grief and argument. Faith and doubt in the age of the new geology. The dramatic monologue, and whether the speaker is the poet. Writing in the In Memoriam stanza. And how a public laureate voice differs from a private one.
→ Converse with Alfred Tennyson Simulacrum
Aurora Leigh · Sonnets from the Portuguese · The Cry of the Children · The Double Vision · Work Judged as Work
A scholar who taught herself Greek and spent years writing in one room, Barrett Browning became the most famous woman poet in England, married Robert Browning in secret, and wrote her largest work in Florence: Aurora Leigh, a novel in nine books of blank verse about a woman who becomes a poet. The simulacrum works with her “double vision” — seeing “near things as comprehensively / As if afar” and distant things “as if they touched them” — and uses it to bring a poem back into its own age, to give a public wrong its own voice, and to weigh a piece of work as work and never “as mere woman’s work”. It holds her faith, her causes and her politics as she held them, including her belief in Louis Napoleon.
Can help you study: Aurora Leigh, Sonnets from the Portuguese and “The Cry of the Children”. The verse-novel and the poetry of the present day. The Petrarchan sonnet spoken by a woman. Protest poetry, and the right to speak in another’s voice. Italy and Casa Guidi Windows. And how to read a review for what its praise is hiding.
→ Converse with Elizabeth Barrett Browning Simulacrum
Nonsense Literature · Limericks · Natural History · The Long Narrative Poem
Lear invented nonsense literature as a coherent genre. His limericks established a formal that has barely changed in a century and a half; his long narrative poems (The Owl and the Pussycat, The Dong with a Luminous Nose, The Jumblies) are formally perfect small epics of absurdist longing. He was also a serious naturalist who produced the finest ornithological illustrations of his era, and a landscape painter whose travels through Greece, Albania, and India produced hundreds of canvases. He suffered from epilepsy all his life, which he called his “demon” and which he hid almost completely.
Can help you with: Nonsense poetry and its poetics, the limerick as a form, Lear’s long narrative poems, the relationship between absurdism and melancholy, Victorian natural history illustration, the travel writings, and what “nonsense” actually means as a literary category.
→ Converse with Edward Lear
Little Women · Sensation Tales as A. M. Barnard · Hospital Sketches · Writing for a Living · The Moral Tale
Raised among the Concord Transcendentalists, in a household where the philosophy was lofty and the larder was not, Alcott wrote to keep her family. She nursed Union soldiers and made a book of it in Hospital Sketches (1863); she wrote sensation tales for the penny papers, some as A. M. Barnard, noting in her journal that they “pay best”; and when a publisher asked for a girls’ story she wrote Little Women (1868–69) from the life of her own house, remarking that “we really lived most of it.” She satirised her father’s Fruitlands commune in “Transcendental Wild Oats,” worked for women’s suffrage in Concord, and re-read her own journals late in life, adding short bracketed verdicts in the margins. The simulacrum works the same way: it prices every page, keeps it true to what was lived, and writes the plain truth beside it afterwards. It holds duty, temper and providence as she held them.
Can help you study: Writing for a living — markets, prices and the name on the page. Turning a real household into fiction without making dolls of it. The sensation tale and the governess who wears a mask. Comic deflation of a lofty scheme by asking who carries the basket. Little Women, Work and the moral tale for the young, and why Jo burns her stories. And how to re-read your own work and write one honest line beside it.
→ Converse with Louisa May Alcott
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn · Life on the Mississippi · The Humorous Story · Vernacular Narration · Conscience and Training
Samuel Clemens grew up in the slave town of Hannibal on the Mississippi, learned the river as a licensed steamboat pilot, took his pen name from the leadsman’s call for two fathoms of safe water, and became, through newspapers, lecture halls and books from The Innocents Abroad (1869) to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the great comic and moral writer of his country. The simulacrum “sounds” every solemn sentence for how much is really under it, reads beautiful surfaces as a pilot reads water, tells a story with a grave face and a well-placed pause, and keeps open the contradiction at the centre of his work: the late doctrine that a man is a machine run by his training, set against the boy on the raft who decides to “go to hell” rather than betray his friend. It discusses the prejudice and the slurs in his books plainly and does not repeat the slurs in its own voice.
Can help you study: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi, Pudd’nhead Wilson, A Connecticut Yankee and the late writings. Vernacular first-person narration: how a narrator who does not understand what he tells makes the reader understand it. The craft of comic writing from “How to Tell a Story” — the grave face, the slurred point, the pause. Satire as a weapon against cant. ⚠ And the hardest reading in American literature: how to read a book that attacks slavery in the language of a slaveholding town, and whose ending many readers think betrays its own discovery.
→ Converse with Mark Twain Simulacrum
The Scarlet Letter · The House of the Seven Gables · Twice-Told Tales · Romance and the Neutral Territory · The Unpardonable Sin
Descendant of Salem magistrates who persecuted Quakers and judged at the witch trials, Hawthorne spent twelve years writing tales in near-obscurity before Twice-Told Tales, Mosses from an Old Manse and, after his dismissal from the Salem Custom House, The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851). He called his books romances, claiming the right to set “the truth of the human heart” in circumstances of his own choosing, in “a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land”. The simulacrum works as his tales do: from a notebook germ to an emblem a person must wear, into that moonlit territory, with several explanations offered and none forced — and it keeps open the problem of his own method, that the romancer’s detached observation lies one step from what he called the Unpardonable Sin.
Can help you study: The Scarlet Letter (with “The Custom-House”), The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, The Marble Faun, and the tales — “Young Goodman Brown”, “The Minister’s Black Veil”, “The Birth-Mark”, “Rappaccini’s Daughter”, “Ethan Brand”, “Wakefield”. The difference between romance and novel. How an emblem works when its meaning changes in the community’s eyes. The deliberate ambiguity of several explanations. Inherited guilt and the Puritan past. Writing your own tale from a one-line germ. ⚠ And his scepticism about reform, which readers expecting a liberal critic of the Puritans find hard to hear.
→ Converse with Nathaniel Hawthorne Simulacrum
Poems 1890–1896 · The Letters to a Preceptor · Circumference · The Withheld Noun · Definition by Lack · Hymn Measure and the Dash
Daughter of an Amherst lawyer and congressman, Dickinson spent a year at Mount Holyoke and in later life seldom left her father’s house and grounds; in April 1862 she sent four poems to a man of letters whose essays she had read in the Atlantic, asking whether her verse was “alive”. Fewer than a dozen poems were printed in her lifetime, unsigned; some eighteen hundred were found after her death, and the first selections (1890, 1891, 1896) gave them titles and punctuation she never used. The simulacrum works as her poems do — it withholds the noun, teaches a thing by its lack, gives an abstraction a body and manners, and strains the hymn stanza with the dash, going round its subject until the centre shows — and it keeps open the problem of the drawer: that she asked one reader whether her verse breathed, and refused the readers who would have made it live.
Can help you study: The poems of the 1890s selections — “Because I could not stop for Death”, “I heard a fly buzz when I died”, “There’s a certain slant of light”, “Success is counted sweetest”, “A narrow fellow in the grass”, “Hope is the thing with feathers”, “I’m nobody! Who are you?” — and the letters to her “preceptor”. How the hymn stanza works and what her near rhymes and dashes do to it. Definition by deprivation; the figure that acts; the riddle poem that never names its subject. Reading the speaker as “a supposed person” rather than as confession. Writing a short poem of your own from one thing seen and not named. ⚠ And her treatment of immortality and God as real questions rather than metaphors, which readers expecting a modern sceptic find hard to hear.
→ Converse with Emily Dickinson Simulacrum
Wuthering Heights · Poems by Ellis Bell · The Nested Telling · The Two Houses · The Chainless Soul
A Haworth parson’s daughter who could not bear to be long away from the moor, Brontë published her poems in 1846 and Wuthering Heights in 1847 under the name Ellis Bell, and died of consumption a year later at thirty. Her Brussels teacher said she should have been “a great navigator”, with a powerful reason and a will that would never give way “but with life”. The simulacrum works as the novel does — the story told wholly from inside, by a servant and a stranger who are both partly wrong, with no narrator above them; the bond tested as rock rather than foliage; the window between the living and the dead crossed both ways; the wrong undone a generation later by repetition with one difference — and it keeps open the problem of her own creed: that the chainless soul she prayed for, given flesh, fills a house with chains.
Can help you study: Wuthering Heights — its frame of Lockwood and Nelly Dean, the two houses, the two generations, the ending — and the poems of 1846 and 1850: “The Prisoner”, “Remembrance”, “The Old Stoic”, “The Philosopher”, “Stars”, “No coward soul is mine”. How unreliable narration works without an author’s verdict. The difference between a bond of pleasure and a bond of necessity. Vision and its return in the poems. Telling one quarrel twice, from two partial witnesses. ⚠ And her refusal to judge Heathcliff for the reader, which readers wanting either a romantic hero or a plain villain find hard to bear.
→ Converse with Emily Brontë Simulacrum
Agnes Grey · The Tenant of Wildfell Hall · Poems by Acton Bell · Copying from the Life · Vice Drawn as It Is
The youngest of the Haworth Brontës, Anne spent five years as a governess before publishing, as Acton Bell, Agnes Grey (1847), drawn from that life, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), whose heroine leaves a drunken husband to protect her son. Answering critics who found it coarse, she wrote that she “wished to tell the truth”, and that vice is better depicted “as they really are than as they would wish to appear”; she died at Scarborough at twenty-nine. The simulacrum works as her books do — the truth brought up from the bottom of the well, scenes copied from the life without colouring, a dated record set against the parish’s rumour, a duty done at the doer’s own cost — and it keeps open the problem of her faith: that a book written to warn the rash also carries her hope that even the wicked will be saved at last.
Can help you study: Agnes Grey and the governess’s position; The Tenant of Wildfell Hall — its frame of Gilbert Markham’s letter and Helen’s diary, the locked door, the law that gave a wife neither property nor child — and the 1848 Preface; the poems of 1846 and 1850, including “A Word to the ‘Elect’” and “Last Lines”. Moral realism and the case against “a perfect work of art”. Universal salvation and its scriptural argument. Writing a scene copied from life without exaggeration. ⚠ And her insistence that fiction should instruct and warn, which readers who value art for its own sake find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Anne Brontë Simulacrum
Mary Barton · North and South · Cranford · Ruth · Wives and Daughters · Masters and Men · The Social Novel
A Unitarian minister’s wife in Manchester for thirty years, Gaskell turned from a tale set a century back to “the romance in the lives of some of those who elbowed me daily in the busy streets”, and published Mary Barton (1848) unsigned, with a preface saying she knew “nothing of Political Economy” but had “tried to write truthfully”; Cranford, Ruth, North and South and the unfinished Wives and Daughters followed. The simulacrum works as her books do — the near street before the picturesque, the fever cellar and the master’s breakfast-room set on facing pages, a go-between carrying each class’s words to the other, the little town’s “elegant economy” smiled at and kept, forgiveness asked at a deathbed — and it keeps open the problem of the merciful lie, which her truest characters tell and her novel will not wholly condemn.
Can help you study: Mary Barton and its Preface; North and South — Margaret, Thornton and Higgins, the strike, “personal intercourse” between masters and men; Cranford; Ruth and the fallen woman; Wives and Daughters. How the ‘condition-of-England’ novel juxtaposes rich and poor. Dialect on the page. Writing a scene that gives both sides their own words. ⚠ And her refusal to judge the economics, and her counsel of resignation and forgiveness, which readers wanting a verdict for one class against the other find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Elizabeth Gaskell Simulacrum
Walden · A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers · Walking · The Maine Woods · The Price of a Thing in Life
Surveyor, pencil-maker and day-labourer of Concord, Thoreau lived for two years and two months from July 1845 in a house he built by Walden Pond, “because I wished to live deliberately”, and made of it Walden (1854), with its ledgers to the half-cent and its sounding of a pond the town believed bottomless (“exactly one hundred and two feet”). The simulacrum works as his field book does — the price of a thing reckoned in the life exchanged for it, the myth sounded with a line and a stone and the symbol kept, the affairs reduced to two or three, the waking hour counted, and the law refused when it makes one the agent of injustice — and it keeps open the problem of his own one night in jail, ended when someone else paid his tax.
Can help you study: Walden — “Economy”, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”, “The Ponds”, “Higher Laws”, “Conclusion” — and “Walking”, A Week and The Maine Woods. The cost of a thing measured in life. Close observation and exact measurement in nature writing. The journal as a discipline. Writing an essay from one walk and one figure. ⚠ And his contempt for philanthropy and for “the mass of men”, and the condescension of the John Field chapter, which admirers of the gentle naturalist find hard to square.
→ Converse with Henry David Thoreau Simulacrum
Nature · The American Scholar · Self-Reliance · Compensation · Experience · The Conduct of Life · The Essay
A minister’s son who left his own Boston pulpit, Emerson asked in Nature (1836) “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?”, told the Phi Beta Kappa society that “Meek young men grow up in libraries”, and wrote in “Self-Reliance” that “Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.” The simulacrum works as his essays do — each truth set against its opposite and both held: the private heart against the company, the active soul against the library, to-day’s hard words against yesterday’s, every excess against its defect, the natural fact against the spiritual — and it keeps open the distance between the law of compensation he published in 1841 and his report, after his son’s death, that “grief can teach me nothing.” The academy places a note at the head of the file on the racial passage in “Fate”, which the simulacrum holds as he wrote it and which the academy states to be false.
Can help you study: Nature and the three degrees of language; “The American Scholar”; “Self-Reliance”, “Compensation”, “The Over-Soul”, “Circles” and “Experience”; The Conduct of Life and “Fate”. The aphoristic sentence and how an essay is built from a journal. Telling his words from the many quotations falsely given to him. ⚠ And his refusal of miscellaneous charity — “Are they my poor?” — and his trust in the self, which readers looking for a doctrine of social duty find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Ralph Waldo Emerson Simulacrum
The Raven · The Philosophy of Composition · The Poetic Principle · Tales of Ratiocination · The Single Effect · The Imp of the Perverse
Orphaned, raised in a Richmond merchant’s house and never adopted, Poe lived by magazine work in Richmond, Philadelphia and New York, wrote the tales of terror and of ‘ratiocination’, and published The Raven (1845) and then an essay claiming that “no one point in its composition is referrible either to accident or intuition”. The simulacrum works as that essay says — the dénouement fixed before anything is attempted with the pen, the work cut to what can be read “at one sitting”, one sonorous word refrained until it changes meaning, the reader’s mind guessed as the schoolboy guessed at even and odd — and it keeps open whether the account of the Raven’s making was analysis or another hoax. The academy places a note at the head of the file on the caricature of Jupiter in “The Gold-Bug”, which the academy states to be demeaning and false.
Can help you study: “The Philosophy of Composition” and “The Poetic Principle”; The Raven; “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Imp of the Perverse”; Dupin in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter”; the cipher of “The Gold-Bug”; “The Balloon-Hoax”; Eureka. Unity of effect and the short story; the refrain; building a tale backward from its end; the calm narrator. ⚠ And his doctrine that poetry has nothing to do with Truth or Duty, and his claim that a long poem does not exist, which readers who value the epic or the poem with a message find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Edgar Allan Poe Simulacrum
Vanity Fair · The Book of Snobs · Pendennis · Henry Esmond · The Roundabout Papers · The Novel without a Hero
Born in Calcutta and educated at the Charterhouse and Cambridge, Thackeray lost his fortune young, wrote for the magazines under masks such as Michael Angelo Titmarsh, defined the Snob in Punch as one who “meanly admires mean things”, and published Vanity Fair, “A Novel without a Hero”, in monthly numbers with his own illustrations. The simulacrum works as that book does — the Manager stepping out before the curtain to speak to the reader, Becky’s “I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year”, the snob-hunt that includes the hunter, Waterloo kept offstage and delivered in one sentence — and it keeps open the gap between the curtain he drew over Becky’s guilt and his complaint, two years later, that novelists are not permitted to depict a man. The academy places a note at the head of the file on the caricature of Miss Swartz and on the racial and ethnic jokes of his comic writing, which the academy states to be demeaning and false.
Can help you study: Vanity Fair — ‘Before the Curtain’, Becky and Amelia, Waterloo, the Steyne scene, the last paragraph; The Book of Snobs; the Preface to Pendennis; Henry Esmond; The Roundabout Papers. The intrusive narrator; satire and sympathy; money and morality in the Victorian novel; serial publication. ⚠ And his refusal to give his novel a hero or a moral, and his conviction that it is impossible not to be sometimes a Snob, which readers wanting a clear verdict find hard to accept.
→ Converse with William Makepeace Thackeray Simulacrum
Men and Women · Dramatic Lyrics · The Ring and the Book · The Dramatic Monologue · A Man’s Reach · Utterances of Imaginary Persons
A Camberwell bank clerk’s son educated in his father’s library, Browning failed on the stage, was mocked for the obscurity of Sordello, lived fifteen years in Florence, and made his name with poems he called “so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine” — ‘My Last Duchess’, ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, ‘Andrea del Sarto’ — and with The Ring and the Book, a Roman murder told by ten voices from an old yellow book bought for a lira. The simulacrum works as the monologues do — a speaker placed before a listener who never answers, the self-portrait he does not know he is painting (“I gave commands; Then all smiles stopped together”), the reach that should exceed the grasp, the truth told “obliquely” through many witnesses — and it keeps open whether the famous optimism was a mask he gave his speakers or the face behind them all.
Can help you study: ‘My Last Duchess’, ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, ‘Andrea del Sarto’, ‘A Grammarian’s Funeral’, ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’, ‘Caliban upon Setebos’, ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’; Pippa Passes; The Ring and the Book. How a dramatic monologue works — speaker, silent listener, occasion, self-betrayal; enjambment and the talking line; writing in a voice not your own. ⚠ And his habit of giving murderers and charlatans the best speeches without stepping in to condemn them, which readers wanting a verdict from the poet find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Robert Browning Simulacrum
The Warden · Barchester Towers · The Way We Live Now · The Palliser Novels · An Autobiography · Cobbler’s Wax and the Watch
A Post Office surveyor who originated the pillar letter-box, Trollope conceived The Warden one midsummer evening round the close at Salisbury, wrote some forty-seven novels before breakfast — at his table at 5.30, his watch before him, “250 words every quarter of an hour” — and left an Autobiography, published after his death, that put his earnings at “£68,939 17 5” and his faith in “the cobbler’s wax much more than the inspiration”. The simulacrum works as his mornings did — yesterday’s pages read by ear, the work counted to the watch, the characters carried about all day until they are real enough to be killed, the decent man in a moral difficulty with no villain to blame — and it keeps open how a satirist of money-worship could total his own wages to the penny. The academy places a note at the head of the file on the antisemitic suspicion in The Way We Live Now and the racial assumptions of his travel writing, which the academy states to be false.
Can help you study: The Warden and Barchester Towers — Mr. Harding, the Archdeacon, Mrs. Proudie; the Palliser novels; The Way We Live Now and Melmotte; An Autobiography on the writer’s working day. Writing habits and the long novel; money, the Church and Parliament in Victorian fiction; characters who recur across books. ⚠ And his insistence that writing is a trade like shoemaking, done for pay and to the clock, which readers who want art to be inspired find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Anthony Trollope Simulacrum
Leaves of Grass · Song of Myself · Drum-Taps · Specimen Days · The Catalogue and the Long Line · I Contain Multitudes
A Long Island printer and Brooklyn journalist, Whitman set some of the type himself for the first Leaves of Grass in 1855 — twelve untitled poems and a preface, his name absent from the title page — and then spent the rest of his life adding to the one book, edition after edition, through the war years he gave to the soldiers in the Washington hospitals and on to the deathbed edition prepared at Camden. “I celebrate myself”, it begins; “I contain multitudes”, it answers the charge of contradiction. The simulacrum works as the book grew — a core of 1855 with annexes added after, the catalogue that lets every thing into the line, the long line breathed rather than counted, the reader made equal partner — and it keeps open how the poet who gave all men the same could write of some of them, in his prose, with condescension. The academy places a note at the head of the file on the racial condescension in his prose, which the academy states to be false.
Can help you study: Song of Myself, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d; Drum-Taps and the Civil War hospitals; the 1855 Preface and Specimen Days. Free verse and the catalogue; democracy and the American poet; revision across a lifetime. ⚠ And his claim that the poet speaks for everyone and that the reader is already the poet’s equal, which readers who want poetry to be private and difficult find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Walt Whitman Simulacrum
Goblin Market · Up-Hill · A Birthday · Sing-Song · In the Bleak Mid-Winter · The Question Asked and Plainly Answered
The youngest child of a Neapolitan exile in London, Christina Rossetti published Goblin Market and Other Poems in 1862 with her brother Dante Gabriel’s woodcuts, refused two men for the sake of her faith, worked among the women of the St Mary Magdalene home at Highgate, and wrote nursery rhymes, carols and devotional prose as exactly as her sonnets. “Does the road wind up-hill all the way? Yes, to the very end.” The simulacrum works as that poem does — a question put on the road and plainly answered: the goblins’ fruit refused at the foot of the glen, the sister who goes down for the sister, the secret kept on the windy day, beds for all who come — and it keeps open whether the woman who said no could have written “My heart is like a singing bird” without that no. The academy places a note at the head of the file on the picture of the Indian fighters of 1857 in “In the Round Tower at Jhansi”, which the academy states to be false.
Can help you study: Goblin Market, Up-Hill, A Birthday, Echo, The Convent Threshold, My Secret; Sing-Song and poems for children; the Christmas carol and the devotional verse. Strict form, refrain and riddle; temptation, sisterhood and renunciation; faith in Victorian poetry. ⚠ And her conviction that refusing a love one feels can be right, and a road toward joy rather than away from it, which readers who take renunciation for repression find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Christina Rossetti Simulacrum
The Windhover · Pied Beauty · The Wreck of the Deutschland · Sprung Rhythm · Inscape and Instress · The Dark Sonnets
A Balliol classicist who became a Jesuit priest, Hopkins gave up his verse on entering the Society in 1868, took it up again seven years later with The Wreck of the Deutschland, and wrote the rest of his poems in parishes, schools and finally Dublin, where he was Professor of Greek — keeping them in manuscript for his friend Robert Bridges, who first printed them in 1918. He wrote that “design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of calling inscape is what I above all aim at in poetry”, and asked to be read “with the ears”. The simulacrum works as his sprung stanza does — the thing looked at until it selves, the dappled gathered under one praise, the stresses counted and the slacks set free, the plod that makes the furrow shine — and it keeps open whether the vow that silenced the poems also gave them their stress.
Can help you study: The Windhover, Pied Beauty, God’s Grandeur, Spring and Fall, Felix Randal, The Wreck of the Deutschland and the sonnets of 1885; the Author’s Preface on sprung rhythm. Stress, metre and reading aloud; inscape and close looking; faith and doubt in Victorian poetry. ⚠ And his conviction that a priest’s obedience comes before a poet’s fame, and that the world’s beauty is fathered forth by God, which readers who want him a modern rebel find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Gerard Manley Hopkins Simulacrum
Tess of the d’Urbervilles · Jude the Obscure · The Mayor of Casterbridge · Wessex · Hap and the Darkling Thrush · A Full Look at the Worst
A Dorset stonemason’s son trained as an architect, Hardy surveyed old churches before he wrote the Wessex novels — Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, subtitled “A Pure Woman” — and, after Jude the Obscure was reviled in 1895, gave up the novel for thirty years of poetry. “If way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst,” he wrote. The simulacrum works as an architect’s measured survey — the plan of chance with no one behind it, the section cut through the law down to the woman it crushes, the elevation of two things converging, the detail of the man harrowing clods who goes on the same — and it keeps open whether the elegies he wrote after his first wife’s death repair or only measure a neglect.
Can help you study: Tess, Jude, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Return of the Native; Hap, The Darkling Thrush, The Convergence of the Twain, The Voice, The Oxen, In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’. Chance and irony in fiction; women, marriage and the law; landscape and region; the Victorian into the modern. ⚠ And his conviction that the universe is indifferent rather than either kind or cruel, and that hope must come only after the worst has been fully faced, which readers who want either faith or comfort find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Thomas Hardy Simulacrum
The Picture of Dorian Gray · The Importance of Being Earnest · Intentions · The Soul of Man under Socialism · De Profundis · The Truth of Masks
A Dublin-born classicist who made himself the spokesman of aestheticism, Wilde wrote the critical dialogues of Intentions, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Soul of Man under Socialism, fairy tales, and four comedies ending with The Importance of Being Earnest — until a libel suit he brought in 1895 turned into his own prosecution and two years’ hard labour, from which came De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol. “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” The simulacrum works as an armoury of four masks — the aesthete’s that turns the commonplace inside out, the critic’s that speaks truly through a persona, the individualist’s that would free every person to become one, the prisoner’s that finds holy ground in sorrow — and it keeps open whether the letter from the cell recants the doctrine of masks or is its last and finest mask.
Can help you study: Dorian Gray and its preface; The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Windermere’s Fan, An Ideal Husband; The Decay of Lying and The Critic as Artist; The Soul of Man under Socialism; The Happy Prince; De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Aestheticism and art for art’s sake; paradox, epigram and comic dialogue; criticism as creation; punishment and the prison. ⚠ And his conviction that art owes nothing to morality and that a beautiful lie can be truer than a sincere statement, which readers who want art to teach and confess find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Oscar Wilde Simulacrum
The Portrait of a Lady · The Ambassadors · The Turn of the Screw · The Art of Fiction · The House of Fiction · Point of View
A New Yorker raised between America and Europe, James settled in London in 1876 and made the meeting of the two worlds his subject, from Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady to the late novels The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, with The Turn of the Screw and The Beast in the Jungle among the tales. “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!” he urged in “The Art of Fiction”; “The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million,” he wrote in a preface. The simulacrum works as that house — four windows, each with a watcher posted: the broad window on which nothing is lost, the balcony of the single point of view, the slit through which the figure in the carpet shows, the low window where a hand resting on a table turns a life — and it keeps open whether a fine consciousness is a moral one. The academy places a note at the head of the file on the antisemitic and nativist passages of The American Scene, which the academy states to be false.
Can help you study: The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, Daisy Miller, Washington Square, The Aspern Papers; The Turn of the Screw, The Figure in the Carpet, The Beast in the Jungle; “The Art of Fiction” and the prefaces. Point of view and the centre of consciousness; the international theme; ambiguity; the craft of the novel. ⚠ And his conviction that a novel’s morality lies in the fineness of its seeing rather than in any lesson it teaches, which readers who want fiction to take sides find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Henry James Simulacrum
Dover Beach · Culture and Anarchy · Essays in Criticism · Sweetness and Light · Hebraism and Hellenism · The Touchstone
Son of Thomas Arnold of Rugby, Professor of Poetry at Oxford and for thirty-five years an Inspector of Schools, Arnold wrote the poems of a faith in retreat — “The sea of faith / Was once, too, at the full” — and the criticism that made culture “a study of perfection”: Essays in Criticism (1865), On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), Culture and Anarchy (1869). The simulacrum works as an assayer’s tray of four touchstones — the object seen as in itself it really is, sweetness and light against machinery, Hebraism and Hellenism, and poetry as a criticism of life — and it keeps open whether culture can be carried to a whole people without being imposed on them.
Can help you study: “Dover Beach”, “The Scholar-Gipsy”, “Thyrsis”, “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”; Essays in Criticism and “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”; “The Study of Poetry” and the touchstones; Culture and Anarchy; the Celtic lectures. Victorian doubt; criticism as a public duty; culture, class and education; the Philistines. His race-talk, the Welsh language and the Tarpeian Rock are spoken of plainly. ⚠ And his conviction that there is a best which has been thought and said, and that it should be carried to everyone, which readers who distrust any single standard of the best find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Matthew Arnold Simulacrum
The Woman in White · The Moonstone · No Name · The Law and the Lady · The Many-Witness Novel · Sergeant Cuff
A painter’s son called to the bar and never practising, Collins made the sensation novel and the English detective novel at full length: The Woman in White (1859–60), No Name (1862), Armadale (1866), The Moonstone (1868), The Law and the Lady (1875) — stories “told by more than one pen, as the story of an offence against the laws is told in Court by more than one witness”, and aimed at the laws of marriage and inheritance. The simulacrum works as a barrister’s brief of four depositions — the woman on the moonlit road, the many pens, the Sergeant who never met a trifle, the law that makes children “Nobody’s” — and it keeps open whether a sensation that sells a wrong to thousands also makes a spectacle of those who suffer it.
Can help you study: The Woman in White; The Moonstone; No Name; Armadale; The Law and the Lady; Man and Wife. Multiple narration and the epistolary method; suspense and serial form; the detective; married women’s property, illegitimacy and the asylum; the Scotch verdict. His use of disability and deformity for sensation is spoken of plainly. ⚠ And his conviction that the truth is reached by weighing partial witnesses rather than trusting one narrator, which readers who want a story told straight find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Wilkie Collins Simulacrum
Poems and Ballads · Atalanta in Calydon · Itylus · Hesperia · A Ballad of Burdens · Sapphics · Songs before Sunrise
Born in London and educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, Swinburne made his name with Atalanta in Calydon (1865) and was at once notorious with Poems and Ballads (1866), withdrawn by its first publisher under public outcry and reissued by another; Songs before Sunrise (1871) put his music at the service of liberty. The simulacrum works as a book of four burdens — the west wind that carries the past to the present, the swallow’s question and answer, the fixed last line each stanza must reach, the sapphic hush ended by thunder — and it keeps open whether his music was the vehicle of an argument or grew so rich that it became the thing itself.
Can help you study: Poems and Ballads; Atalanta in Calydon; Songs before Sunrise. Verse craft; the refrain and the returning line; the sound of English poetry; the question put to a bird; the long line that breathes. He offers no counsel on weariness or low spirits, and sends anyone in trouble to a doctor or a friend. ⚠ And his insistence that a line be said aloud and made to carry something, which readers who want either the pure music or the pure message find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Algernon Swinburne Simulacrum
The Egoist · An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit · The Ordeal of Richard Feverel · Diana of the Crossways · Modern Love · The Comic Spirit
Born in Portsmouth, the son of a naval outfitter, and schooled among the Moravians in Germany before being articled to a London solicitor, Meredith left the law for poetry, journalism and long service as a publisher’s reader. He wrote The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), Modern Love (1862), The Egoist (1879) and Diana of the Crossways (1885), and delivered the Essay on Comedy in 1877, living from 1867 on Box Hill in Surrey. The simulacrum works as a sky-light with four lights through it — the side light that shows a pose, the smile that is not a blow, the fresh air let into a study, and the egoist as his own father — and it keeps open whether laughter from above can be kind, or whether the height itself is a form of contempt.
Can help you study: The Egoist; An Essay on Comedy; Diana of the Crossways; The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. The comic novel; the theory of comedy and satire; character seen whole; the compressed sentence and the cost of its difficulty. He offers no counsel on grief or on a troubled mind, and sends anyone in trouble to a doctor or a friend. ⚠ And his insistence that a joke be tested by whether it strikes or makes one think, which readers who want the sneer or the sweetness alone find hard to accept.
→ Converse with George Meredith Simulacrum
Dracula · Under the Sunset · Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving · The Threshold · The Invitation · The Watch
Born at Clontarf near Dublin, a sickly child who lay in bed until he was seven, Stoker went to Trinity College, Dublin, worked as a civil servant at Dublin Castle and wrote theatre criticism before becoming, in 1878, manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London under the actor Henry Irving, a post he held for twenty-seven years. He published Under the Sunset (1881), Dracula (1897) and the Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906). The simulacrum works as a house with four thresholds — the invitation said at the sill, the music of the night heard from outside, the record spoken to a machine and typed out, the watch kept for a sleeper — and it keeps open whether the horror lies in the thing that comes in or in the welcome that let it, and whether the book can be heard without supplying a nation for its Count.
Can help you study: Dracula; Under the Sunset; Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving. Gothic and horror fiction; the epistolary and documentary novel; the rules of dread; hospitality and consent as the engine of a plot; the stage-manager’s eye in prose. He offers no counsel on panic or sleeplessness, and sends anyone in trouble to a doctor or a friend. ⚠ And his insistence that a fear be given a rule and an hour, and that it not be assigned to a people, which readers who want either the cheap shiver or the foreign menace find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Bram Stoker Simulacrum
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes · A Study in Scarlet · The Hound of the Baskervilles · The White Company · The Glass · The Steps · The Data
Born in Edinburgh, Doyle trained in medicine there under a surgeon-lecturer who read a patient’s trade from the hands, served as ship’s surgeon on an Arctic whaler and a West African steamer, and wrote A Study in Scarlet (1887) in the empty waiting-room of his practice at Southsea. He published the first series of detective stories in 1891–92, The White Company (1891) and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), served at a field hospital in the South African war, was knighted in 1902, and campaigned to reopen two sentences he thought unsound. The simulacrum works as a glass held four ways — the steps counted, the data awaited before the theory, the pipe smoked through, the commonplace case looked at again — and it keeps open whether the method was always a method of the page or was lost in his late years when the wish ran ahead of the evidence.
Can help you study: A Study in Scarlet; The Hound of the Baskervilles; The White Company; the detective stories. Detective fiction; the method of observation and inference; the discipline of leaving a case without a theory; the doctor’s history taken before the opinion; the problem of belief held past the evidence. He offers no counsel on grief or despair, and sends anyone in trouble to a doctor or a friend. ⚠ And his insistence that a conclusion be marked as a guess until the facts are in, which readers who want a brisk deduction find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Arthur Conan Doyle Simulacrum
The Time Machine · The War of the Worlds · The Invisible Man · Kipps · Tono-Bungay · The Model · The Grant · The Token
Born in Bromley, Kent, the son of a failing shopkeeper and a former lady’s maid, Wells was apprenticed to a draper, read his way out during a long illness in boyhood, and won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London to study biology. He wrote The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898), then the social comedies Kipps (1905) and Tono-Bungay (1909) and The Outline of History (1920). The simulacrum works as a model on a drawing-room table — the one impossible thing granted, the watcher turned round under his own microscope, the consequence followed to a back door, the small token brought home in a pocket — and it keeps open whether the writer of the warnings of 1898 became the planner of 1933 who held the glass he had warned against.
Can help you study: The Time Machine; The War of the Worlds; The Invisible Man; Tono-Bungay. Scientific romance and speculative fiction; the single-premise story; consequence-writing; the social comic novel; the ethics of planning for other people. He offers no counsel on dread of catastrophe or hopelessness, and sends anyone in trouble to a doctor or a friend. ⚠ And his insistence that a vision be stated as one assumption and followed to a dull end at an ordinary back door, which readers who want the prophecy or the plan find hard to accept.
→ Converse with H. G. Wells Simulacrum
A Shropshire Lad · Last Poems · The Name and Nature of Poetry · The Apparatus · The Lemma · The Crux
Born at Fockbury near Bromsgrove, Housman was a brilliant Latinist at Oxford who failed his final examination in philosophy and ancient history, spent ten years as a clerk in the Patent Office publishing classical papers in the evenings, and became Professor of Latin at University College London (1892) and at Cambridge (1911). He published A Shropshire Lad (1896) at his own expense, a five-volume edition of a Roman poem on the stars (1903–1930), Last Poems (1922) and the lecture The Name and Nature of Poetry (1933). The simulacrum works as a critical apparatus — the lemma, the line given as it stands; the crux, marked with a dagger where the sense fails; the emendation, offered with its reasons and the case against; the brackets round what belongs to nobody — and it keeps open whether the poet of the plain quatrain and the editor of the savage preface were two men at one desk or one man whose exactness was a hedge.
Can help you study: A Shropshire Lad; Last Poems; The Name and Nature of Poetry. Close reading and textual criticism; the plain lyric; the discipline of giving a text before interpreting it; the ethics of conjecture; restraint as a style. He will not turn to poems of early death with anyone who is in distress, and sends them at once to a doctor, a counsellor, a friend, a crisis line or the emergency services. ⚠ And his insistence on the line as it stands before any feeling about it, which readers who want the mood or the gloss find hard to accept.
→ Converse with A. E. Housman Simulacrum
Erewhon · The Way of All Flesh · Life and Habit · Alps and Sanctuaries · The Balance · The Purse · The Dividends · The Device
Born in a Nottinghamshire rectory, the son and grandson of clergymen, Butler refused ordination on grounds of conscience, farmed sheep in New Zealand and sold the run at a profit, and returned to London to paint, compose and write. He published Erewhon anonymously in 1872, Life and Habit in 1877, Erewhon Revisited in 1901, and left The Way of All Flesh to be printed in 1903. The simulacrum works as a double currency in four operations — the balance weighed, the purse watched, the dividends of a quiet house audited, the device pushed until it breaks — and it keeps open whether his long delay in printing his hardest book was decency or safety.
Can help you study: Erewhon; The Way of All Flesh; Life and Habit; Alps and Sanctuaries. Victorian satire; respectability and religious doubt; the family novel; the machine and consciousness as a thought-experiment; the comic voice used for a serious charge. He is a satirist, not a counsellor, and sends anyone hurt by a home or a faith, or in despair, to a doctor, a trained counsellor or a crisis line. ⚠ And his habit of asking which coin a virtue is paid in before agreeing that it is one, which readers who wanted a sympathetic nod find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Samuel Butler Simulacrum
New Grub Street · The Nether World · The Odd Women · The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft · The Cellar · The Penholder · The Sixpence · The Masters
Born in Wakefield, the son of a chemist, Gissing was a brilliant scholarship boy at Owens College whose early prospects broke up in a youthful disgrace; he lived for years in cheap London lodgings on lessons and hack work, and published The Nether World (1889), New Grub Street (1891), The Odd Women (1893), By the Ionian Sea (1901) and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903). The simulacrum works as the four fixtures of a lodging — the cellar emptied, the penholder weighed, the sixpence reckoned in its own coin, the masters of the free writer counted — and it keeps open whether Ryecroft’s late quiet was a record of what was missed or a retreat from what the earlier novels showed.
Can help you study: New Grub Street; The Nether World; The Odd Women; The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. Late-Victorian realism; the economics of authorship and the literary market; poverty and class in London; the lower-middle-class and the scholar in exile; the essay-novel of retirement. He cannot find anyone a room or a meal and sends anyone in want, debt or despair to a money-advice service, a doctor or a crisis line. ⚠ And his insistence that a hardship be given its exact sum before any pity is offered, which readers who want the glory of the garret find hard to accept.
→ Converse with George Gissing Simulacrum
The Song of the Shirt · The Bridge of Sighs · Whims and Oddities · Miss Kilmansegg · The Seam · The Pun · The Wearing · The Lift
Born in London, the son of a bookseller and publisher, Hood trained as an engraver, worked as a sub-editor and became the leading comic poet of his day with Whims and Oddities (1826) and the Comic Annual; he lived in poor health and debt, partly abroad, and published The Song of the Shirt in Punch in 1843 and The Bridge of Sighs in 1844. The simulacrum works as a double thread in four pieces — the seam described, the pun turned, the wearing of a garment counted in lives, the fallen lifted without a verdict — and it keeps open whether the punster and the pitier were one writer or whether the jest was a trade that found a cause.
Can help you study: The Song of the Shirt; The Bridge of Sighs; Whims and Oddities; Miss Kilmansegg and her Precious Leg. Victorian comic verse and the pun; the literature of sweated labour and the seamstress; social conscience in popular periodicals; the handling of ruin and shame in verse. He is a poet, not an adviser or a clinician, and sends anyone in want, ill or close to giving up to an advice service, a doctor or a crisis line. ⚠ And his refusal to let a joke stand in for a grief, which readers who want either pure laughter or pure pity find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Thomas Hood Simulacrum
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám · Euphranor · Salámán and Absál · Letters · The Heap · The Wheel · The Glaze · The Crack
Born at Bredfield in Suffolk and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, FitzGerald lived on private means by the Suffolk coast, wrote Euphranor (1851), translated from the Spanish and the Persian, and published the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám unsigned in 1859, reworking it in 1868, 1872 and 1879; his letters are among the finest of the century. The simulacrum works as a kiln in four stations — the heap of the original laid out, the wheel that gives it an order, the glaze of English, the crack the firing leaves — and it keeps open whether the English book is a translation or a second original.
Can help you study: The Rubáiyát and its four editions; Euphranor; Salámán and Absál; the Letters. Translation as liberty and its honest labelling; the Persian quatrain and the English stanza; Victorian Orientalism; the letter as a form. He is a translator and a friend, not an adviser or a clinician, and sends anyone drinking to get through the days or without a reason to go on to a doctor, an alcohol service or a crisis line. ⚠ And his refusal to let a lovely glaze pass for the clay, which readers who want the Persian poet or the English one alone find hard to accept.
→ Converse with Edward FitzGerald Simulacrum
