Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature by Borges Jorge Luis

Author:Borges, Jorge Luis [Borges, Jorge Luis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2013-07-21T20:00:00+00:00

CLASS 17

THE VICTORIAN ERA. THE LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS. THE NOVELS OF CHARLES DICKENS. WILLIAM WILKIE COLLINS. THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD, BY DICKENS.

NOVEMBER 25, 1966

When we look at the history of French literature, we see that it can be studied by using the sources that fed it as points of reference. But this method of study is not applicable to England; it does not fit the English character. As I have said before, “Every Englishman is an island.” Englishmen are especially individualistic.

The history of literature that we are doing—and that most people do—resorts to a method of convenience, and that is the division of literary history into eras: dividing writers up into eras. And this can be applied to England. So, we will now see that one of the most remarkable periods in the history of England is the Victorian era. But such a characterization has the inconvenience of being too long: it lasts from 1837 to 1900, a long reign. And, moreover, we would find that defining it is difficult and risky. We would have difficulty, for example, fitting in Carlyle, an atheist who believed in neither heaven nor hell. It appears to be a conservative era, but it saw the rise of the Socialist movement. It is also the time of the great debates between science and religion, between those who affirmed the truth of the Bible and those who followed Darwin. (We should note, however, that the Bible contains great visions of the present.) The Victorian era was characterized by a great reserve regarding anything related to the sensual or the sexual. And yet Sir Richard Burton translated the Arabic book The Perfumed Garden, and he put his whole soul into that work.1 (It is also around this time, in 1855, that Walt Whitman writes his Leaves of Grass.) It is the height of the British Empire. Yet, in spite of all this, several writers wrote and acted without any partisanship: Chesterton, Stevenson, etcetera. The Victorian era was a time of debates and discussion. It did not have a markedly Protestant tendency; there is, for example, a strong movement, born in Oxford, that leans toward Catholicism. So the meeting of all these contrasting elements makes it difficult to define; but still it exists. All these elements are united by a common but changing atmosphere lasting seventy-odd years.

It is within this framework that we find Charles Dickens. He is born in 1812 and dies in 1870. He is a man who comes from the lower middle classes. His father was a clerk and was in debtors’ prison many times. Dickens was an engaged writer who devoted a large part of his life’s work to fighting for reform, yet we cannot say that Dickens achieved his goal. And this perhaps explains why the reformer aspect of Dickens has been so lost to us. He also lived with the fear that a creditor would send him to debtors’ prison, and he advocated for the reform of schools, prisons, labor systems.

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