George meredith (1828-1845) tomas hardy (1840-1928)

THE END OF THE 19^TH CENTURIY IN ENGLAND
PLAN

1. 
   GEORGE MEREDITH (1828-1845)
   
2. 
   TOMAS HARDY (1840-1928)
   
3. 
   OSCAR WILDE (1854-1900)
   

INTRODUCTION
By 1880 England had become the first had become the first modern industrial empire. Its large, urban manufacturing centers produced goods that went by rail and then by steamship to consumers all over the world. British investments and energy were expanding and served for the defense of the Empire. Queen Victoria lived until January 1901. Her son, Edward VII, was nearly sixty years old when he was crowned, and reigned only nine years. These nine years in the history of England are called the Edwardian period. Despite the brevity of the Edwardian period, it saw the development t of a national conscience that expressed itself in important social legislation (including the first old - age pensions). It laid the groundwork for the English welfare state. On the other hand, the second half of the 19th century in England gave rise to a rapid growth of social contradictions. Those contradictions found their reflection in literature, too. It was reflected in literature by the appearance of different trends. A great number of writers continued the realistic traditions of their predecessors. It was represented by such writers as George Meredith, Samuel Butler and, Tomas Hardy. The novelists gave a truthful picture of the contemporary society. was reflected in literature by the the writers of another trend , by way of protest against severe reality, tried to lead the reader away from life into the world of dreams and fantasy , into the realm of beauty . They idealized the patriarchal way of life and criticized the existing santraestheticism. Russian society chiefly for its anti – aestheticism. Russian literary critics called them decadents. (English and American literary critics call them the writers belonging to the Aesthetic trend) . The decadent art, or the art belonging to the aesthetic trend appreciated the outer form of art more than the content. Inner world facts though the decadent writers saw the vices of the surrounding world, and in some of their works we find a truthful and critical description of contemporary life; in the whole their inner world lacks depth. They were firm in their opinion that it was impossible to better the world. They conveyed the idea that everyone must strive for his own private happiness, avoid suffering and enjoy life at all costs. The decadent writers created their own cult of beauty and proclaimed the theory of "pure art "; their motto was "art for art's more than art for 10 was "art for, art's sake "The second half of the 19th century witnessed a rapid growth of social contradictions which were caused by a deep economic crisis. This period was characterized by a crisis in bourgeois culture, too. Artists, poets, novelists, musicians and all the intellectuals hated this heartless world, which disturbed the development of the human personality. The crisis in bourgeois culture was reflected in literature by the appearance of the two trends — progressive and regressive. The representatives of the progressive trend continued the traditions of such writers as Dickens, Thackeray, the Bronte sisters and others. They were: George Eliot, George Meredith, Oscar Wilde and Thomas Hardy. These novelists showed in their books a realistic picture of contemporary society.
CHAPTER 1
GEORGE MEREDITH

1.1 EARLY LIFE (1828-1845)

Decorative Initial George Meredith was born on February 12, 1828. His first home was in Portsmouth, where his father was a tailor. When George was only five years old, his mother died. His childhood after her death was not happy. His father, Augustus Meredith, had inherited a failing business and heavy debts from his own father. In 1837, Augustus was forced to declare himself bankrupt. He went to London to earn a living, and George was sent to stay with relatives in the country and eventually to boarding school. In 1841, partly to protect George's small inheritance, Augustus made him a ward in Chancery. In 1842, when George Meredith was 15, he attended the Moravian school at Neuwied on the Rhine. Although he was there for less than two years, Meredith was to refer to this period as the only real education he had. The school stimulated his intellect and taught him to respect rationality, self-respect, sincerity and courage. The time spent there also left him with a love of German music, poetry and the German countryside. It marked the end of his formal schooling.

1.2 PROFESSIONAL BEGINING AND EARLY LIFE (1846-62)

Although George Meredith was apprenticed to a solicitor, Richard Stephen Charnock, there is no evidence that Meredith studied law or did any work towards entering the legal profession. Instead, with the encouragement of Charnock and his literary friends, Meredith began to write poetry and helped organize a monthly manuscript magazine.
Among the people in Charnock's circle, Meredith met Edward Peacock and his beautiful sister, the widowed Mary Ellen Nicolls. All accounts agree that this daughter of Thomas Love Peacock had the lively intelligence and wit that was to characterize many of Meredith's heroines. Even though she was 7 years his senior and he was in no position to support a family, Mary Ellen and George married on August 9, 1849.
The marriage was not a success. They were both intelligent, demanding and impatient. Meredith, though he greatly admired witty women as social companions, did not find in Mary Ellen the uncritical support that he craved. Mary Ellen, for her part, certainly needed more from the marriage than a self-absorbed husband who could not even earn a living. Frequent pregnancies and miscarriages cannot have added to the Meredith’s happiness. Their one child, Arthur, was born on June 13, 1853.
Meanwhile, George Meredith was doing his best to make a career for himself as a writer. His first poem had been published by Chamber's Edinburgh Journal in 1849, shortly before his marriage. From that point on he earned a small, irregular income from his contributions (both verse and prose) to various magazines.
His first book of poetry came out in 1851. In 1855 he published The Shaving of Shagpat, a fantasy, which got fairly good reviews even though it did not achieve popular success. He followed this with Farina (1857) which was even less successful.
The Meredith marriage continued to deteriorate until, in 1858, Mary Ellen Meredith eloped with the artist Henry Wallis. Interestingly, although he never forgave Mary Ellen, Meredith nevertheless seems to have understood what drove her to elopement. In the Modern Love poems (1862), which are largely autobiographical, he does not push blame on the woman but rather shows how both partners contribute to the failure of the marriage. In his novels he more than once portrayed sympathetically the witty woman trapped in a relationship with a self-centered man. Throughout his career, Meredith was to display in his fiction insights that he implicitly denied in his real life. Self-knowledge was perhaps too painful unless he contained it in a work of the imagination.
1.3 HIS NOVELS


The Ordeal of Richard Feverel: A History of Father and Son (1859) is the earliest full-length novel by George Meredith; its subject is the inability of systems of education to control human passions.
“The Ordeal of Richard Feverel”, which came out in June 1859, was the first of Meredith's novels with a strongly personal psychological component. Sir Austin Feverel's wife elopes at the beginning of the novel, hurting Sir Austin's pride and leading him to become completely absorbed in the rearing of his son, Richard, much as Meredith himself was, for a time, absorbed in raising Arthur. Though Sir Austin is far from being a portrait of Meredith himself, the issues raised by the novel are issues that Meredith must have been confronting in his personal life around the time that he wrote the novel. That he is able to distance himself from Sir Austin and deal with both him and Richard critically is an example of Meredith's ability to distance himself, through his fiction, from intensely painful incidents in his life.
Unfortunately, the public was not ready for The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. Mudie's library, convinced that the novel displayed a "low moral tone" and would not be appropriate reading for families, refused to circulate the book. Several book clubs followed Mudie's lead. Although there were some positive reviews in the press, the suggestion that the work might be indecent effectively destroyed its chance of success.
Meredith's next novel, Evan Harrington, was published as a serial in Once a Week from February to October 1860. The novel draws heavily on Meredith family history for its characters, and it is generally considered one of the most readable of Meredith's works. Though it was not a huge success,Evan Harrington brought the author a decent income and made his name better known than before. From 1860 onwards, circumstances began to improve for George Meredith.
It was around 1860 also that Meredith took on the job of reader for Chapman and Hall. Until 1894 it was Meredith who read every manuscript submitted to the publishers and advised for or against publication. Although he made some mistakes --he rejected Samuel Butler's Erewhon, for example — he also "discovered" and encouraged such writers as George Gissing and Thomas Hardy. In later years Hardy told of the excellent advice that Meredith had given him — advice which, Hardy couldn't resist mentioning, Meredith himself did not always follow. In 1861, Mary Ellen Meredith died from what was probably a form of Bright's disease. George had never forgiven her for her desertion, but he grudgingly allowed Arthur to visit his mother, especially during her last days. It has been argued that Mary Ellen was the great love of Meredith's life. Certainly his relationship with her inspired some of his most insightful work, from Modern Love to The Egoist.
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, which came out in June 1859, was the first of Meredith's novels with a strongly personal psychological component. Sir Austin Feverel's wife elopes at the beginning of the novel, hurting Sir Austin's pride and leading him to become completely absorbed in the rearing of his son, Richard, much as Meredith himself was, for a time, absorbed in raising Arthur. Though Sir Austin is far from being a portrait of Meredith himself, the issues raised by the novel are issues that Meredith must have been confronting in his personal life around the time that he wrote the novel. That he is able to distance himself from Sir Austin and deal with both him and Richard critically is an example of Meredith's ability to distance himself, through his fiction, from intensely painful incidents in his life.
Unfortunately, the public was not ready for The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. Mudie's library, convinced that the novel displayed a "low moral tone" and would not be appropriate reading for families, refused to circulate the book. Several book clubs followed Mudie's lead. Although there were some positive reviews in the press, the suggestion that the work might be indecent effectively destroyed its chance of success.
Meredith's next novel, Evan Harrington, was published as a serial in Once a Week from February to October 1860. The novel draws heavily on Meredith family history for its characters, and it is generally considered one of the most readable of Meredith's works. Though it was not a huge success, Evan Harrington brought the author a decent income and made his name better known than before. From 1860 onwards, circumstances began to improve for George Meredith.
It was around 1860 also that Meredith took on the job of reader for Chapman and Hall. Until 1894 it was Meredith who read every manuscript submitted to the publishers and advised for or against publication. Although he made some mistakes --he rejected Samuel Butler's Erewhon, for example — he also "discovered" and encouraged such writers as George Gissing and Thomas Hardy. In later years Hardy told of the excellent advice that Meredith had given him — advice which, Hardy couldn't resist mentioning, Meredith himself did not always follow.

Mary Ellen (1821-1861) married George Meredith in 1849 but their marriage was troubled. The couple met Wallis in the early 1850s and posed for several of his works.

In 1861, Mary Ellen Meredith died from what was probably a form of Bright's disease. George had never forgiven her for her desertion, but he grudgingly allowed Arthur to visit his mother, especially during her last days. It has been argued that Mary Ellen was the great love of Meredith's life. Certainly his relationship with her inspired some of his most insightful work, from Modern Love to The Egoist.

1.4 MILD AGE AND SECOND MARRIAGE (1862-1884)

Meredith's second wife, Marie Vulliamy, was as unlike Mary Ellen as possible. Marie was a practical, domestic woman who was willing to put her husband's needs and interests ahead of her own. Though by no means stupid or uneducated, she did not have the demanding intelligence and sharp wit that had characterized Peacock's daughter. They met in 1863 and were married (after some difficulty persuading Marie's father that Meredith would make a good husband) on September 20, 1864.
The marriage seems to have been very successful. Marie was a good housekeeper and a competent hostess. In 1868 they settled in Flint Cottage on Box Hill, near Dorking which was to be Meredith's home until he died. They had two children, William (b. 1865) and Mariette (b. 1874). Though Meredith wrote sympathetically of women who, like the heroine of Diana of the Crossways, went beyond the traditional domestic roles, he apparently realized that for a man of his demanding temperament, the right wife was one whose sense of self-worth lay in the role of helpmeet.
While it is tempting for modern readers to be critical of Meredith for wanting a wife who would cater to his ego, we should remember not only that he lived in different times, but that this was a man who had been deprived of maternal care at a very early age.
Publicly, Meredith gave an impression of self-confidence and ease, but many who knew him well recognized that it was only a mask. Creative, insecure people of either sex are generally happier with a spouse that supports rather than competes.
From 1862 when Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside was published to 1885 when Diana of the Crossways finally brought him popular success, Meredith published seven novels, one more volume of poetry, and countless short works. At the same time he continued his work as a reader for Chapman and Hall, and he kept up with a growing circle of friends which at various times included Swinburne, the Rossetti brothers, Leslie Stephens, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Gissing and many others.
An extremely energetic man, he was fond of long walks and physical exertion, including, as a release for tension, the throwing around of a heavy weight that he called "the beetle. "Towards the end of the 1870s he began to develop symptoms of the locomotor ataxia which eventually crippled him, but he managed to conceal these from most of his acquaintance until the 1890s.
Of the seven novels published during this period, two are worthy of special attention. The Adventures of Harry Richmond appeared in The Cornhill from September 1870 to November 1871. The only one of Meredith's novels written in the first person, it has picaresque elements underlying the romantic comedy. The book, when published in October of 1871 was successful enough to go into a second edition. The critics said mildly positive things about it. Though not a great success, it got the best response of any of his novels up to that point.

The Egoist is a tragic, comical novel by George Meredith published in 1879. The novel recounts the story of self-absorbed Sir Willoughby Patterne and his attempts at marriage; jilted by his first bride-to-be, he vacillates between the sentimental Laetitia Dale and the strong-willed Clara Middleton.

Meredith's most carefully crafted novel, The Egoist, was published in 1879. If, as he described it shortly before publication, the novel was "a Comedy with only half of me in it," that half was surely the best half. The novel was written under the inspiration of a talk that he had given on February 1,1877 at the London Institute: On the Idea of Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit and published in the April, 1877 issue of The New Quarterly Magazine.
In an Essay on Comedy, as it later became known, Meredith emphasizes the importance of intelligence and insight to comedy. Focusing mainly on Moliere and Restoration drama, he identifies central elements of high comedy, speaking highly of the role of women in comedy and defining comedy as "the fountain of sound sense."
"Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life," begins the "Prelude" to The Egoist. In many ways a continuation of the Essay, the "Prelude," sets the tone for the whole novel. The Egoist is the most unified, controlled and carefully structured of Meredith's novels. It is pure comedy with a rich psychological component. For once his style was subordinated to and in harmony with his purpose. The ornate prose of the narrator works to emphasize the contrast between the trivial and the essential which is a central theme. The dialogue — always one of the things that Meredith did best--is both witty and convincing. The comment on society is sharp and delightful.
Though it was not the commercial success that Dianawould be six years later, The Egoist earned Meredith the approval of the most influential critics. It was the beginning of a growing fame, which some would argue, eventually grew much greater than the bulk of Meredith's work deserved.

1.5 SUCCESS AND OLD AGE (1885-1909)

Diana of the Crossways was a success in 1885 for three major reasons. One was that it displayed many of Meredith's strengths: good dialogue, a well-developed, psychologically believable main character, an emotionally intense plot. Another reason was that the public in the 1880s was more ready to appreciate Meredith's "cerebral" writing than it had been thirty.
Unfortunately, around this same time, Meredith was facing personal bereavement. Marie Meredith died of cancer on September 18, 1886. Meredith's own health was not good. In addition to being increasingly crippled by locomotor ataxia, he had poor digestion and gradually had to give up his physically active life. The death of his son, Arthur, in 1890 was another sorrow.
He did not stop writing. In the ten years after Diana, Meredith produced three more volumes of poetry, two novels, and some short fiction. Though little of this work was outstanding, his literary reputation continued to grow. By 1895 Meredith was much respected, one of the major literary figures of his age. He acquired disciples and literary followers. Writers like J. M. Barrie were later to tell of their pilgrimages to Box Hill to see the "great man." In 1892 he was elected president of The Society of Authors (a position that Tennyson had held before him). George Frederick Watts, painter of celebrities, painted his portrait in 1893. The publication, in the late 1890s, of a complete, revised edition of Meredith's work brought new critical attention to his work. An Essay on Comedy, for example, appearing in book form for the first time, was greeted with applause by George Bernard Shaw and other drama critics.
Even in old age, Meredith was known as a great conversationalist, a riveting storyteller who could talk for hours without boring his listeners. Although, as he grew older, Meredith became increasingly deaf and so crippled that at times he could not stand up, visitors to Box Hill continued to come until the end of his life.
After 1895 he stopped writing prose, but he continued writing poetry. His last collection of poems A Reading of Life, with Other Poems was published in 1901. In 1905 he was awarded the Order of Merit. He died on May 18, 1909..
CHAPTER 2
TOMAS HARDY (1840-1928)

2.1 EARLY LIFE AND CAREER
Thomas Hardy was born on 2 June 1840 in Higher Bockhampton (then Upper Bockhampton), a hamlet in the parish of Stinsford to the east of Dorchester in Dorset, England, where his father Thomas (1811–1892) worked as a stonemason and local builder, And married his mother Jemima ( Hand [4] 1813–1904) in Beaminster, towards the end of 1839.[5]. Jemima was well - read, and she educated Thomas until, he went to his first school at Bockhampton at the age of eight. For several years he attended Mr. Last's Academy for Young Gentlemen in Dorchester, where he learned Latin and demonstrated academic potential. [6] Because Hardy's family lacked the means for a university education, his formal education ended at the age of sixteen, when he became apprenticed to James Hicks, a local architect. [7]
Hardy trained as an architect in Dorchester before moving to London in 1862; there he enrolled as a student at King's College London. He won prizes from the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Architectural Association. He joined Arthur Blomfield's practice as assistant architect in April 1862 and worked with Blomfield on All Saints' parish church in Windsor, Berkshire, in 1862–64. A reredos, possibly designed by Hardy, was discovered behind panelling at All Saints' in August 2016. [8][9] In the mid-1860s, Hardy was in charge of the excavation of part of the graveyard of St Pancras Old Church prior to its destruction when the Midland Railway was extended to a new terminus at St Pancras .[10]

Thomas Hardy's birthplace and cottage at Higher Bockhampton, where Under the Greenwood Tree and Far from the Madding Crowd were written.
Hardy never felt at home in London, because he was acutely conscious of class divisions and his social inferiority. During this time, he became interested in social reform and the works of John Stuart Mill. He was introduced by his Dorset friend Horace Moule to the works of Charles Fourier and Auguste Comte. Mill's essay On Liberty was one of Hardy's cures for despair, and in 1924 he declared that "my pages show harmony of view with" Mill. [11] He was also attracted to Matthew Arnold's and Leslie Stephen's ideal of the urbane liberal freethinker. [12] After five years, concerned about his health, he returned to Dorset, settling in Weymouth, and decided to dedicate himself to writing.
2.2 MARRIAGE AND WRITING
In 1870, while on an architectural mission to restore the parish church of St Juliot in Cornwall, [13] Hardy met and fell in love with Emma Gifford, whom he married in Kensington in late 1874.[5][14][15] renting St David's Villa, Southborough (now Surbiton) for a year. In 1885 Thomas and his wife moved into Max Gate in Dorchester, a house designed by Hardy and built by his brother. Although they later became estranged, Emma's subsequent death in 1912 had a traumatic effect on him and after her death, Hardy made a trip to Cornwall to revisit places linked with their courtship; his Poems 1912–13 reflect upon her death. In 1914, Hardy married his secretary Florence Emily Dugdale, who was 39 years his junior. He remained preoccupied with his first wife's death and tried to overcome his remorse by writing poetry. In his later years, he kept a Wire Fox Terrier named Wessex, who was notoriously ill-tempered. Wessex's grave stone can be found on the Max Gate grounds. [16][17] In 1910, Hardy had been appointed a Member of the Order of Merit and was also, for the first time nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was nominated again for the prize 11 years later. [18] [19]
2.3 HARDY AND THEATRE
Hardy's interest in the theatre dated from the 1860s. He corresponded with various would-be adapters over the years, including Robert Louis Stevenson in 1886 and Jack Grein and Charles Jarvis in the same decade. [20] Neither adaptation came to fruition, but Hardy showed he was potentially enthusiastic about such a project. One play that was performed, however, caused him a certain amount of pain. His experience of the controversy and lukewarm critical reception that had surrounded his and Comyns Carr's adaptation of Far From the Madding Crowd in 1882 left him wary of the damage that adaptations could do to his literary reputation. So it is notable that, in 1908, he so readily and enthusiastically became involved with a local amateur group, at the time known as the Dorchester Dramatic and Debating Society, but that would become the Hardy Players. His reservations about adaptations of his novels meant he was initially at some pains to disguise his involvement in the play. [21] However, the international success [22] of the play, The Trumpet Major, led to a long and successful collaboration between Hardy and the Players over the remaining years of his life. Indeed, his play The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall at Tintagel in Lyonnesse (1923) was written to be performed by the Hardy Players. [23]
2.4 HARDY’S NOVELS
Hardy's first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, finished by 1867, failed to find a publisher. He then showed it to his mentor and friend, the Victorian poet and novelist George Meredith, who felt that The Poor Man and the Lady would be too politically controversial and might damage Hardy's ability to publish in the future. So Hardy followed his advice and he did not try further to publish it. He subsequently destroyed the manuscript, but used some of the ideas in his later work. [30] In his recollections in Life and Work, Hardy described the book as "socialistic, not to say revolutionary; yet not argumentatively so."[31]
After he abandoned his first novel, Hardy wrote two new ones that he hoped would have more commercial appeal, Desperate Remedies (1871) and Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), both of which were published anonymously; it was while working on the latter that he met Emma Gifford, who would become his wife. [30] In 1873 A Pair of Blue Eyes, a novel drawing on Hardy's courtship of Emma, was published under his own name. A plot device popularized by Charles Dickens, the term "cliffhanger" is considered to have originated with the serialized version of A Pair of Blue Eyes (published in Tinsley's Magazine between September 1872 and July 1873) in which Henry Knight, one of the protagonists, is left literally hanging off a cliff.[32][33] Elements of Hardy's fiction reflect the influence of the commercially successful sensation fiction of the 1860s, particularly the legal complications in novels such as Desperate Remedies (1871), Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and Two on a Tower (1882). [34] In Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy first introduced the idea of calling the region in the west of England, where his novels are set, Wessex. Wessex had been the name of an early Saxon kingdom, in approximately the same part of England. Far from the Madding Crowd was successful enough for Hardy to give up architectural work and pursue a literary career. Over the next 25 years, Hardy produced 10 more novels.
Subsequently, the Hardy moved from London to Yeovil, and then to Sturminster Newton, where he wrote The Return of the Native (1878). [35] In 1880, Hardy published his only historical novel, The Trumpet-Major. A further move to Wimborne saw Hardy had written two on a Tower, published in 1882, a romance story set in the world of astronomy. Then in 1885, they moved for the last time, to Max Gate, a house outside Dorchester designed by Hardy and built by his brother. There he wrote The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), The Woodlanders (1887), and Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), the last of which attracted criticism for its sympathetic portrayal of a "fallen woman", and initially it was refused publication. Its subtitle, A Pure Woman: Faithfully Presented, was intended to raise the eyebrows of the Victorian middle classes.

THE LITERARY WORK: A novel set in southwest England from about 1855-85; published in serial form in Harper’s Magazine in 1894-95, in book form in 1895.
SYNOPSIS: Jude Fawley, an orphan from a remote rural village in Dorsetshire, experiences professional and personal frustrations that lead to the extinction of his dreams.
Jude the Obscure, published in 1895, met with an even stronger negative response from the Victorian public because of its controversial treatment of sex, religion and marriage. Its apparent attack on the institution of marriage caused strain on Hardy's already difficult marriage because Emma Hardy was concerned that Jude the Obscure would be read as autobiographical. Some booksellers sold the novel in brown paper bags, and Walsham How, the Bishop of Wakefield, is reputed to have burnt his copy.[27] In his postscript of 1912, Hardy humorously referred to this incident as part of the career of the book: "After these [hostile] verdicts from the press its next misfortune was to be burnt by a bishop – probably in his despair at not being able to burn me".[36] Despite this, Hardy had become a celebrity by the 1900s, but some argue that he gave up writing novels because of the criticism of both Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure.[37] The Well-Beloved, first serialized in 1892, was published in 1897.
2.5 POETRY

Wessex Poems and Other Verses (often referred to simply as Wessex Poems) is a collection of fifty-one poems set against the bleak and forbidding Dorset landscape by English writer Thomas Hardy. It was first published in 1898 by New York: Harper and contained a number of illustrations by the author himself.

In 1898, Hardy published his first volume of poetry, Wessex Poems, a collection of poems written over 30 years. While some suggest that Hardy gave up writing novels following the harsh criticism of Jude the Obscure in 1896, the poet C. H. Sisson calls this "hypothesis" "superficial and absurd".[37][41] In the twentieth century Hardy published only poetry.
Thomas Hardy wrote in a many variety of poetic forms, including balladas, lyrics, satire, dramatic monologues, and dialogue, as well as a three-volume epic closet drama The Dynasts (1904–08). [ 42] And though in some ways a very traditional poet, because he was influenced by balladas and folksong,[43] he "was never conventional," and "persistently experiment [44] with different, often invented, stanza forms and metres, [44] and made use of "rough-hewn rhythms and colloquial diction". [45]
Hardy wrote a number of significant war poems that relate to both the Boer Wars and World War I, including "Drummer Hodge", "In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'", and "The Man He Killed"; his work had a profound influence on other war poets such as Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon. [46] Hardy in these poems often used the viewpoint of ordinary soldiers and their colloquial speech. [46] A theme in the Wessex Poems is the long shadow that the Napoleonic Wars cast over the 19th century, as seen, for example, in "The Sergeant's Song" and "Leipzig". [47] The Napoleonic War is the subject of The Dynasts.
Some of Hardy's more famous poems are from "Poems of 1912–13", part of Satires of Circumstance (1914), written following the death of his wife Emma in 1912. They had been estranged for 20 years, and these lyric poems express deeply felt "regret and remorse".[46] Poems like "After a Journey", "The Voice", and others from this collection "are by general consent regarded as the peak of his poetic achievement".[42] In a recent biography on Hardy, Claire Tomalin argues that Hardy became a truly great English poet after the death of his first wife Emma, beginning with these elegies, which she describes as among "the finest and strangest celebrations of the dead in English poetry."[48]
2.6 FINAL YEARS
Hardy was horrified by the destruction caused by the First World War, pondering that "I do not think a world in which such fiendishness is possible to be worth the saving" and "better to let western 'civilization' perish, and let the black and yellow races have a chance."[24] He wrote to John Galsworthy that "the exchange of international thought is the only possible salvation for the world."[24]
Hardy became ill with pleurisy in December 1927 and died at Max Gate just after 9 pm on 11 January 1928, having dictated his final poem to his wife on his deathbed; the cause of death was cited, on his death certificate, as "cardiac syncope", with "old age" given as a contributory factor. His funeral was on 16 January at Westminster Abbey, and it proved a controversial occasion because Hardy had wished for his body to be interred at Stinsford in the same grave as his first wife, Emma. His family and friends concurred; however, his executor, Sir Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, insisted that he be placed in the abbey's famous Poets' Corner. A compromise was reached whereby his heart was buried at Stinsford with Emma, and his ashes in Poets' Corner. [25] Hardy's estate at death was valued at £95,418 (equivalent to £5,900,000 in 2020). [26]
Shortly after Hardy's death, the executors of his estate burnt his letters, and notebooks, but twelve notebooks survived, one of them containing notes and extracts of newspaper stories from the 1820s. And researched into these has provided insight into how Hardy used them in his works.[27] In the year of his death Mrs Hardy published The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1841–1891, compiled largely from contemporary notes, letters, diaries, and biographical memoranda, as well as from oral information in conversations extending over many years.
Hardy's work was admired by many younger writers, including D. H. Lawrence, [28] John Cowper Powys, and Virginia Woolf. [29] In his autobiography Goodbye to All That (1929), Robert Graves recalls meeting Hardy in Dorset in the early 1920s and how Hardy received him and his new wife warmly, and was encouraging about his work.

CHAPTER 3

OSCAR WILDE (1854-1900)

ABSTRACT
Oscar Wilde, in full Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, (born October 16, 1854, Dublin, Ireland—died November 30, 1900, Paris, France), Irish wit, poet, and dramatist whose reputation rests on his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and on his comic masterpieces Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). He was a spokesman for the late 19th-century Aesthetic movement in England, which advocated art for art’s sake, and he was the object of celebrated civil and criminal suits involving homosexuality and ending in his imprisonment (1895–97).

3.1 EARLY LIFE AND CAREER
Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on 16th October 1854. Wilde’s father, William Wilde, was an admired doctor and was awarded for his work for Irish Censuses as a medical advisor. Later Wilde founded his own hospital, St. Mark’s Ophthalmic Hospital, to treat the poor people of the city. The mother of Oscar Wilde, Jane Francesca Elgee, was a poet. She was also closely associated with the 1848’s Young Irelanders Rebellion. The linguist skills of Wilde’s mother had greatly influenced his writing.
Wilde attended Portora Royal School at Enniskillen. There, he started taking a deep interest in Roman and Greek studies. He graduated in 1871and was awarded the scholarship to attend Trinity College in Dublin. In 1872, he was placed first in the classics examination at school and received the Foundation Scholarship from schools. He graduated from Trinity College in 1874 and received the Berkeley Gold Medal for the best student in Greek. He then attended Magdalen College in Oxford. He graduated from college in 1878.
After graduation, Oscar Wilde shifted to London to live with his friend Frank Mile. Frank Miles was a famous portraitist in London. Wilde, in London, continued writing poetry. In 1881, he published his first collection Poems. Though the collection did not receive much admiration, it established Wilde to be the next up-coming writer. In 1882, Wilde traveled to New York on the board for an American lecture tour. In the period of one month, he delivered an astonishing 140 lectures.
He also met some leading American literary figures and scholars, including Walt Whitman, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry Longfellow. When his tour ended, he started another lecture circuit of Ireland and England, which lasted till the mid of 1884. Through his early poetry and lectures, Wilde made a reputation as the foremost advocate of the aesthetic movement. He supported the theory of art and literature that is concerned with the search for beauty for the sake of beauty rather than to endorse any social and political stance.

3.2 MARRIAGE AND IMPROSENMENT

Wilde married Constance Lloyd on 29th March 1884. Constance Lloyd was a wealthy Englishwoman. In 1885, their first son was born named Cyril, where the second son Vyvyan was born the following year. In 1885, Wilde was appointed as an editor in the popular magazine Lady’s World. During his tenure at the magazine, Oscar Wilde invigorated that magazine and extended its coverage not to not only to deal with what women of his time wear but also what they feel. He tried to make it a platform to express the opinion of women on different subject art, literature, and modern life.
Wilde’s seven-years of creativity began in 1888. During that time, Wilde wrote the majority of his most famous literary works. In 1888, Wilde published The Happy Prince and Other Tales, seven years after the publication of Poems. The collection The Happy Prince and Other Tale contains the stories of children. He published an essay collection in 1891 titled as Intentions. In this collection, Oscar Wilde argues about the principles of aestheticism. In the same year, he also published his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Indeed, in today’s time, the novel is regarded as one of the greatest works of classics. However, at the time of its publication, the apparent lack of morality in the novel made the critics outrageous.
In 1892, Wilde published his first play Lady Windermere’s Fan. The play received critical acclaim and widespread popularity. Encouraged by the success of his first play, Oscar Wilde adopted playwriting as his main literary form. Over the course of a few years, Oscar Wilde published his great plays that were highly satirical, witty, and contained comedies of manner and dark and serious undertones. The most notable plays he wrote during this time were An Ideal Husband, A Woman of No Importance, and The Importance of Being Earnest.
At the time when his literary career was at its peak, Oscar Wilde charged the lover of his father Marquess of Queensberry for criminal defamation. Quesenberry was upset with his daughter’s affair with Oscar Wilde, and sent him a letter titled “Oscar Wilde: Posing Somdomite.” Somdomitte is a misspelling of the sodomite. The defamation trial made Oscar Wilde drop his charges against Marquess and caused his own arrest for indecency with men. The charge against Wilde was proved, and he was put into hard labor for two years (1895-1897).
In 1897, Wilde was released from prison. Emotionally exhausted and physically depleted, he went to France and never returned to England and Ireland. In France, he lived in the apartments of friends and in cheap hotels. He also reunited with his wife for a short time. During these years, Wilde did not write much. The only notable work he wrote was “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” It was published in 1898 and dealt with Wilde’s experiences in prison.
Oscar Wilde died on 30th November 1900 due to meningitis at the age of 46. Oscar Wilde stayed committed to his aesthetic principles. He expounded these principles through his literary works and lectures.

3.3 OSCAR WILDE’S WRITING STYLE

In his writings, Oscar Wild had oft time talked about his opinion that in art, substance, and sincerity are overshadowed by style. For example, in his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, he paid more attention to nuances of words and form than anything else. Along with being the essay on decorative art, the novel was a piece of ornamented art that is composed of the cautiously selected phrases.
Oscar Wilde was so determined in writing a perfect that when someone asked him to write a story of a hundred thousand words – beautiful words, he complained that in the English language, they do not have one hundred thousand beautiful words.

3.4 MIXTURE OF REALISM AND FANTASY AND IMAGERY IN WILDE’S WORKS

Oscar Wild incorporated the features of both realism and fantasy in his works with phenomenal ability. He merged the two opposing genres through realistic dialect and thoughtful imagery into an interestingly melancholic tale.
Wilde also outshined other writers in the use of imagery. He illustrates different situations and people by employing different types of literary devices. His most favorite and frequently employed imagery is the morbid one. On the art of morbidity, he has an astonishing command and mastery. By the use of morbid imagery, he describes unusual images of blood, murder, and corpse that would compete with any other imagery in the modern cinema. For example, in the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, he gives wonderful morbid imagery as :“He rushed at him and dug the knife into the great vein that is behind the ear, crushing the man’s head down on the table and stabbing again and again. There was a stifled groan and the horrible sound on someone choking with blood. Three times the outstretched arms shot up convulsively, waving grotesque stiff-fingered hands in the air. He stabbed him twice more, but the man did not move. Something began to trickle on the floor. He waited for a moment, still pressing the head down. He could hear nothing, but the drip, drip on the threadbare carpet.”
The above passage is in a haunting illustration of a horrible murder, and even draws a horrifying picture of the most unimaginative mind.
The views of the reader vary in the atmosphere and style of Oscar Wilde. The early reviewers found the style and atmosphere of Oscar while deeply distasteful. According to Richard Ellman, the favorite poem of Oscar Wilde, “Charmides,” is sexually suggested, and the same thing also, can be related to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.

3.5 DIALOGUES AND IDEAS

Another writing style prevalent in Wilde’s works is the prominence of dialogue and ideas than actions. Oscar Wilde draws his plot in a way that his characters are sitting in a room and engage in casual talk about various things. He does not show his characters in action. Moreover, in his plays, there is a clash between ideas than a clash between characters that lead to violent actions. Primarily through language in his writing, Oscar Wilde appears to be motivated to arouse the musical and visual arts.

3.5 PARADOX

The writing style of Oscar Wilde is characterized by the use of paradox, both dialogic and descriptive. He employed a self-contradictory statement to express the truth. The employing paradox in his works is his favorite stylistic device. For example, in the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, the characters such as Dorian, Basil, and Lord Henry constantly exchange paradoxes. Even Lord Henry was called “Prince Paradox.”
Similarly, his play The Importance of Being Earnest is also full of puns and paradoxes. In the play, Wilde employed paradoxes to make commentaries on society. For example, at the start of the play Jack, the protagonist of the play, is ready to propose Gwendolen. However, Algernon, the cousin of Gwendolen, has some doubts. Jack introduces him to Gwendolen’s family as being “Ernest,” meaning sincere and honest. The paradox lies in what Jack claims himself to be and what his actions are.
The contemporary critics immediately identified the technique of paradox in his writing and tried to depreciate it. They argued that Wilde’s paradox was based on “the convertibility of terms” with no meaning intended. However, his style was soon admired by lots of critics.
In the Free Review, Ernest Newman appreciated the writing style of Wilde by saying that it is surprising to hear any paradox employed by Wilde independently without context, however, when they are studied it makes us recognize that they are based on reality or truth that is ignored.
3.6 CONTENT OF WILDE’S WORKS
The writing style of Oscar Wilde shows his mastery of showing evil and morbidity. Wilde has a remarkable hold on the reality of human nature. He also focuses on the darkness that is present in the soul of every individual. Oscar Wilde, unlike his contemporary writer, was more concerned with the dark sides of things. He acknowledges the human’s lust for immortality. He exemplifies these things in writing. For example, in his novel, the greed of Dorian for everlasting youth eventually causes his soul to deteriorate, which can be seen in his portrait.
Oscar Wilde had also acknowledged the evilness of human nature. Few writers of his time can portray these things in their works. Wilde has mastered his insight into evil and described it in his works with unbelievable ease.
3.7 SUMMARY
To sum up, in the history of English literature and playwriting, in particular, only a few writers have skills like Oscar Wilde. Though morbidity has been mastered by Stephen King, he fails to get a hold on the rhetoric and eloquence that is a prominent feature of Wilde’s style. Similarly, Charles Dickens has the same eloquent style as that of Oscar Wilde. However, Oscar Wilde outshines him in imagery. The writing style of Oscar Wilde is a complete package, and no writer to date has been able to imitate his unique and slightly disturbing writing.