The Reasoning Power in Man is

an Incrustation over my
Immortal/Spirit

Reason vs. Emotion

Mind or heart?
Which is best way to understand self?
Philosophes touted mind and reason.
Romantics favored the heart and sensation.
Mystics like Swedenborg and Blake sought
(discovered) direct connectedness with the
divine

Immanuel Kant
(1724-1804)
We cannot know
ultimate reality
Our knowledge is
limited to the
phenomenal world
We can have no
knowledge of a
thing-in-itself

Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel
(1770-1831)
Absolute truth is
knowable
Thing-in-itself is
knowable
Absolute Spirit

Hegel
The art, science, philosophy, religion,
politics and leading events are so
interconnected that the period may be seen
to possess an organic unity.
There is a purpose and an end to history: the
unfolding of Absolute Spirit

Hegel
Spirit manifests itself in history through a
dialectical confrontation between opposing
forces
The clash of opposites gains in intensity,
eventually ending in a resolution that unifies
both opposing views

Without Contraries is no progression.

Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and
Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary
to Human existence.

Clash of Contraries
While Blake and Hegel barely overlapped,
their chains of thought shared links in
common.
common.
These links connect eventually to Dickens
These links connect eventually to Dickens

Industrial Revolution

Britain Leads the World

Textile production
(1839) 2.4 million yards
(1849) 42 million yards

Iron production
(1849) Englands production = rest of world

Rail
(1830) 0 miles
(1850) 7,000 miles

Population
Doubled in 50 years
Bradford 13,000-104,000 from 1801-1861

Thoughtful People
Thomas Malthus
1766-1834

David Ricardo
1772-1823

Widespread suffering and death are inevitable.

Population, when unchecked, increased in a
geometrical ratio,
and subsistence for man in an arithmetical ratio.
Best way to control population is starvation
http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~stephan/malthus/malthus.0.html

Wages must be just

high enough to
permit a worker to
survive

Lord Lansdowne
One million Irish will die before the famine
is over.
Cut back funding on famine relief program
One million Irish did die in the famine
between 1845 and 1847

Contraries
There exists in England two nationswho
are as ignorant of each others habits,
thoughts, and feelings, as if they wereof
different planets; who are formed by
different breeding, are fed by a different
food, are ordered by different manners, and
are not governed by the same laws. These
two nations are the rich and the poor.
Benjamin Disreali, 1845

Nicholas Nickleby 1837

The rags of the squalid ballad-singer fluttered in
the rich light that showed the goldsmiths
treasures, pale and pinched-up faces hovered
about the windows where was tempting food,
hungry eyes wandered over the profusion guarded
by one thin sheet of brittle glassan iron wall to
themLive and death went hand in hand; wealth
and poverty stood side by side; repletion and
starvation laid them down together.

 Without contraries is no progression

Spirit manifests itself in history through a
dialectical confrontation between opposing
forces
There is a purpose and an end to history: the
unfolding of Absolute Spirit

Purpose and End to History

Perhaps that Absolute Spirit has other names,
other manifestations
Woolfs flashes of insight
"sudden shocks," and
"exceptional moments,"
"a revelation of some order" behind "the cotton wool of
daily life,"
"a token of some real thing behind appearances" to
which she gives body "by putting it into
words." (Nelson)

Woolfs intuition
proves that one's life is not confined to
one's body and what one says and does; one
is living all the time in relation to certain
background rods or conceptions. Mine is
that there is a pattern hid behind the cotton
wool.
Woolfs art was to reveal that pattern.

Dickenss art
Like Woolfs, is to reveal and revel in that
pattern of connectedness.
(Repeated again in Borges & Calvino)
Dickens [] had a lively interest in
occurrences and phenomena that seem to
show a web of connections among different
minds of which we are largely unconscious.

Universal Spirit~~Providence
I think the business of art is to [] show,
by a backward light, what everything has
been working to--but only to suggest, until
the fulfillment comes.
These are the ways of Providence, of which
ways all art is but a little imitation.

Charles Dickens
February 7, 1812
June 9, 1870

Early childhood
2nd child of John and Elizabeth
Many small towns
Happy childhood

Early misfortune

Family moved to London 1823

Dickens 11
Father imprisoned for debt
Charles employed labeling shoe polish
(blacking house)
Felt abandoned by parents
Featured orphans in his writing.

Sibling Rivalry
While thus employed, eldest sister Francis still
attended the Royal Academy of Music where she
was awarded a silver medal for excellent playing
and singing.
Attending the awards ceremony, Dickens felt
neglected and humiliated
After father released from prison, Dickens
enrolled in school in London from age 12-15
Mother did not understand his desire to attend
school
Dickens resentful, never really forgave her.

"Whoever is devoted to an art

must be content to deliver
himself wholly up to it, and to
find his recompense in it."

Apprentice
finished high school at 15,
prize in Latin,

No University; spent time at the library of the

British Museum.
Read voraciously, esp. Shakespeare
Source of plot, character, theme.
Two years: clerk in law office
Four years: shorthand reporter for lawyers,
Parliament
1834 Began two years as reporter for the Morning
Chronicle, covering politics and law.

Review
Brushes with poverty
While peers excel
Early skills with shorthand lead to exposure
to bombast and pandemonium of politics
Developed eye and ear for crowded
communication

Works

1836 "Dinner at Poplar Walk"

____. Sketches by Boz text
1836-37 Pickwick Papers
1837-39 Oliver Twist
1838-39 Nicholas Nickleby
1840-41 The Old Curiosity Shop
1841 Barnaby Rudge
1842 American Notes
1843 Martin Chuzzlewit
____. A Christmas Carol
1844 The Chimes
1845 The Cricket and the Hearth
1846 The Battle of Life
1846-48 Dombey and Son

1848 The Haunted Man

1849-50 David Copperfield
1851-53 Bleak House
1854 Hard Times
1855-57 Little Dorrit
1857 The Frozen Deep
1857 "The Perils of Certain English
Prisoners" (with Wilkie Collins)
1859 A Tale of Two Cities
1860-61 Great Expectations
1864-65 Our Mutual Friend
1869-70 The Mystery of Edwin
Drood

Hard Times

Cold
Harsh
Unsympathetic
Unjovial
Socialist
UnDickensian

Real
Accurate Satire
Honest
Humorous
Most Dickensian