Lesson 47. Revolutions in Britain
From the 15th century, ordinary people had the same protection under the law as lords. But nobody imagined that ordinary workers had real power. Only people with money could vote for politicians or join Parliament. Poor people did what they were told.
But then, in the late 18th century, Britain began to change. Historians now call the changes ‘revolutions’ because they were so important. There were new types of job, new towns and new ways to travel. And there were also new powers and protections for ordinary people of Britain.
Revolutions in the country
Until the 19th century, most people in Britain worked on the land. They grew plants for food and kept farm animals. They produced butter and cheese. And in their homes they turned sheep’s wool into cloth. English cloth was popular everywhere in Europe.
Farmers couldn’t use all their fields every year. After a few years, the plants became unhealthy, so they left the field empty for a year. But in the 18th century, people found new ways to grow food. Farmers never had to leave a field empty, so they could produce more food.
The new ideas for farmers could only work on large areas of land and most farmers had small areas in different fields. In the 2nd half of the 18th c., the government agreed to give a lot of land to the most powerful landowners. Many poorer farmers were left with nothing.
Revolution in towns
Also in the 18th c. there were changes in the cloth-making business. New machines helped to make cloth much faster than before. The machines were too big to keep at home. The world’s first factories were built.
These factories employed many of the farmers who lost their land to the big landowners. Soon large towns grew around the factories. Manchester and Leeds , for example, grew in this way.
The factories made cloth from local wool, and also from American cotton. British cloth became even more popular in Europe than before. When the French emperor Napoleon, Britain’s great enemy, invaded Russia, his soldiers were wearing coats of British cloth.
British factories were soon copied in other European countries and then empires, and the world changed for ever. But these wonderful new machines didn’t help the ordinary people of Britain.
Many factory owners in the late 18th and early 19th c. controlled their workers’ lives in a similar way to the Norman land 700 years earlier. Workers weren’t paid with money, but with cards that were only accepted in the factory shop. Adults were paid too little to feed a family. So their children worked in the factory too, some for 18 hours a day, and there were a lot of accidents. The factory owners built houses for their workers, but most of these were cheap and small, with no clean water. Illness travelled quickly through the new towns.
The factory owners grew richer and richer. But their workers got no more money when the factory was successful. If workers started a trade union, they lost their jobs. If they refused to work, they weren’t paid. Then their families had no food.
Better laws for workers
Workers became very angry. There were a lot of demonstration, and some people wanted a violent British revolution like the revolution of 1789 in France. It was difficult for workers to change things in any other way. Ordinary workers didn’t own their own houses, so they couldn’t vote. Some cities, like Manchester and Birmingham, had no politicians because they were too new. But old towns with small populations had two politicians.
Politicians didn’t want a revolution, so they slowly gave workers more control over their lives. After a change in the law in 1825, workers could finally form trade unions. In 1832 the new cities got their own politicians and more men could vote. Children’s hours of work were also controlled in the 1830s, and the Government offered children a few hours a day of free school lessons. From 1870, all children had to go to school. Child workers disappeared from British factories.
Votes for all
In the 19th c. more and more men were given vote, but women still had no power. The Suffragettes were a group of women who wanted to change this. In the early 20th c. they went on violent demonstrations. They shouted at politicians in Parliament. In prison they refused to eat. One woman was killed when she threw herself under the King’s horse during a race. But when WWI started in 1914, these women stopped fighting the Government. They did the jobs of the men who were away at war. When the war ended, some women over age of 30 and all men over the age of 21 could vote. Finally, in 1928, the rules for women and men became the same.
Lesson 48.
John Milton, 1608-1674
Conspicuous above all his contemporaries as the representative poet of Puritanism, and, by almost equally general consent, distinctly the greatest of English poets except Shakespeare, stands John Milton. His life falls naturally into three periods: 1. Youth and preparation, 1608-1639, when he wrote his shorter poems. 2. Public life, 1639-1660, when he wrote, or at least published, in poetry, only a few sonnets. 3. Later years, 1660-1674, of outer defeat, but of chief poetic achievement, the period of 'Paradise Lost,' 'Paradise Regained,' and 'Samson Agonistes.'
Milton was born in London in December, 1608. His father was a prosperous scrivener, or lawyer of the humbler sort, and a Puritan, but broad-minded, and his children were brought up in the love of music, beauty, and learning. At the age of twelve the future poet was sent to St. Paul's School, and he tells us that from this time on his devotion to study seldom allowed him to leave his books earlier than midnight. At sixteen, in 1625, he entered Cambridge, where he remained during the seven years required for the M. A. degree, and where he was known as 'the lady of Christ's' [College], perhaps for his beauty, of which all his life he continued proud, perhaps for his moral scrupulousness. Milton was never, however, a conventional prig, and a quarrel with a self-important tutor led at one time to his informal suspension from the University. His nature, indeed, had many elements quite inconsistent with the usual vague popular conception of him. He was always not only inflexible in his devotion to principle, but--partly, no doubt, from consciousness of his intellectual superiority--haughty as well as reserved, self-confident, and little respectful of opinions and feelings that clashed with his own. Nevertheless in his youth he had plenty of animal spirits and always for his friends warm human sympathies.
To his college years belong two important poems. His Christmas hymn, the 'Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity,' shows the influence of his early poetical master, Spenser, and of contemporary pastoral poets, though it also contains some conceits--truly poetic conceits, however, not exercises in intellectual cleverness like many of those of Donne and his followers. With whatever qualifications, it is certainly one of the great English lyrics, and its union of Renaissance sensuousness with grandeur of conception and sureness of expression foretell clearly enough at twenty the poet of 'Paradise Lost.' The sonnet on his twenty-third birthday, further, is known to almost every reader of poetry as the best short expression in literature of the dedication of one's life and powers to God.
Milton had planned to enter the ministry, but the growing predominance of the High-Church party made this impossible for him, and on leaving the University in 1632 he retired to the country estate which his parents now occupied at Horton, twenty miles west of London. Here, for nearly six years, amid surroundings which nourished his poet's love for Nature, he devoted his time chiefly to further mastery of the whole range of approved literature, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and English. His poems of these years also are few, but they too are of the very highest quality.
'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso' are idealized visions, in the tripping Elizabethan octosyllabic couplet, of the pleasures of suburban life viewed in moods respectively of light-hearted happiness and of reflection.
'Comus,' the last of the Elizabethan and Jacobean masks, combines an exquisite poetic beauty and a real dramatic action more substantial than that of any other mask with a serious moral theme (the security of Virtue) in a fashion that renders it unique. 'Lycidas' is one of the supreme English elegies; though the grief which helps to create its power sprang more from the recent death of the poet's mother than from that of the nominal subject, his college acquaintance, Edward King, and though in the hands of a lesser artist the solemn denunciation of the false leaders of the English Church might not have been wrought into so fine a harmony with the pastoral form.
Milton's first period ends with an experience designed to complete his preparation for his career, a fifteen months' tour in France and Italy, where the highest literary circles received him cordially. From this trip he returned in 1639, sooner than he had planned, because, he said, the public troubles at home, foreshadowing the approaching war, seemed to him a call to service; though in fact some time intervened before his entrance on public life.
The twenty years which follow, the second period of Milton's career, developed and modified his nature and ideas in an unusual degree and fashion. Outwardly the occupations which they brought him appear chiefly as an unfortunate waste of his great poetic powers. The sixteen sonnets which belong here show how nobly this form could be adapted to the varied expression of the most serious thought, but otherwise Milton abandoned poetry, at least the publication of it, for prose, and for prose which was mostly ephemeral. Taking up his residence in London, for some time he carried on a small private school in his own house, where he much overworked his boys in the mistaken effort to raise their intellectual ambitions to the level of his own. Naturally unwilling to confine himself to a private sphere, he soon engaged in a prose controversy supporting the Puritan view against the Episcopal form of church government, that is against the office of bishops. There shortly followed the most regrettable incident in his whole career, which pathetically illustrates also the lack of a sense of humor which was perhaps his greatest defect. At the age of thirty-four, and apparently at first sight, he suddenly married Mary Powell, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a royalist country gentleman with whom his family had long maintained some business and social relations. Evidently this daughter of the Cavaliers met a rude disillusionment in Milton's Puritan household and in his Old Testament theory of woman's inferiority and of a wife's duty of strict subjection to her husband; a few weeks after the marriage she fled to her family and refused to return. Thereupon, with characteristic egoism, Milton put forth a series of pamphlets on divorce, arguing, contrary to English law, and with great scandal to the public, that mere incompatibility of temper was adequate ground for separation. He even proceeded so far as to make proposals of marriage to another woman. But after two years and the ruin of the royalist cause his wife made unconditional submission, which Milton accepted, and he also received and supported her whole family in his house. Meanwhile his divorce pamphlets had led to the best of his prose writings. He had published the pamphlets without the license of Parliament, then required for all books, and a suit was begun against him. He replied with 'Areopagitica,' an, eloquent and noble argument against the licensing system and in favor of freedom of publication within the widest possible limits. (The name is an allusion to the condemnation of the works of Protagoras by the Athenian Areopagus.) In the stress of public affairs the attack on him was dropped, but the book remains, a deathless plea for individual liberty.
Now at last Milton was drawn into active public life. The execution of the King by the extreme Puritan minority excited an outburst of indignation not only in England but throughout Europe. Milton, rising to the occasion, defended the act in a pamphlet, thereby beginning a paper controversy, chiefly with the Dutch scholar Salmasius, which lasted for several years. By 1652 it had resulted in the loss of Milton's eyesight, previously over-strained by his studies--a sacrifice in which he gloried but which lovers of poetry must always regret, especially since the controversy largely consisted, according to the custom of the time, in a disgusting exchange of personal scurrilities. Milton's championship of the existing government, however, together with his scholarship, had at once secured for him the position of Latin secretary, or conductor of the diplomatic correspondence of the State with foreign countries. He held this office, after the loss of his eyesight, with Marvell as a colleague, under both Parliament and Cromwell, but it is an error to suppose that he exerted any influence in the management of affairs or that he was on familiar terms with the Protector. At the Restoration he necessarily lost both the position and a considerable part of his property, and for a while he went into hiding; but through the efforts of Marvell and others he was finally included in the general amnesty.
In the remaining fourteen years which make the third period of his life Milton stands out for subsequent ages as a noble figure. His very obstinacy and egoism now enabled him, blind, comparatively poor, and the representative of a lost cause, to maintain his proud and patient dignity in the midst of the triumph of all that was most hateful to him, and, as he believed, to God. His isolation, indeed, was in many respects extreme, though now as always he found the few sympathetic friends on whom his nature was quite dependent. His religious beliefs had become what would at present be called Unitarian, and he did not associate with any of the existing denominations; in private theory he had even come to believe in polygamy. At home he is said to have suffered from the coldness or more active antipathy of his three daughters, which is no great cause for wonder if we must credit the report that he compelled them to read aloud to him in foreign languages of which he had taught them the pronunciation but not the meaning. Their mother had died some years before, and he had soon lost the second wife who is the subject of one of his finest sonnets. In 1663, at the age of fifty- four, he was united in a third marriage to Elizabeth Minshull, a woman of twenty-four, who was to survive him for more than fifty years.
The important fact of this last period, however, is that Milton now had the leisure to write, or to complete, 'Paradise Lost.' For a quarter of a century he had avowedly cherished the ambition to produce 'such a work as the world would not willingly let die' and had had in mind, among others, the story of Man's Fall. Outlines for a treatment of it not in epic but in dramatic form are preserved in a list of a hundred possible subjects for a great work which he drew up as early as 1640, and during the Commonwealth period he seems not only to have been slowly maturing the plan but to have composed parts of the existing poem; nevertheless the actual work of composition belongs chiefly to the years following 1660. The story as told in Genesis had received much elaboration in Christian tradition from a very early period and Milton drew largely from this general tradition and no doubt to some extent from various previous treatments of the Bible narrative in several languages which he might naturally have read and kept in mind. But beyond the simple outline the poem, like every great work, is essentially the product of his own genius. He aimed, specifically, to produce a Christian epic which should rank with the great epics of antiquity and with those of the Italian Renaissance.
In this purpose he was entirely successful. As a whole, by the consent of all competent judges, 'Paradise Lost' is worthy of its theme, perhaps the greatest that the mind of man can conceive, namely 'to justify the ways of God.' Of course there are defects. The seventeenth century theology, like every successive theological, philosophical, and scientific system, has lost its hold on later generations, and it becomes dull indeed in the long expository passages of the poem. The attempt to express spiritual ideas through the medium of the secular epic, with its battles and councils and all the forms of physical life, is of course rationally paradoxical. It was early pointed out that in spite of himself Milton has in some sense made Satan the hero of the poem--a reader can scarcely fail to sympathize with the fallen archangel in his unconquerable Puritan-like resistance to the arbitrary decrees of Milton's despotic Deity. Further, Milton's personal, English, and Puritan prejudices sometimes intrude in various ways. But all these things are on the surface. In sustained imaginative grandeur of conception, expression, and imagery 'Paradise Lost' yields to no human work, and the majestic and varied movement of the blank verse, here first employed in a really great non-dramatic English poem, is as magnificent as anything else in literature. It cannot be said that the later books always sustain the greatness of the first two; but the profusely scattered passages of sensuous description, at least, such as those of the Garden of Eden and of the beauty of Eve, are in their own way equally fine. Stately and more familiar passages alike show that however much his experience had done to harden Milton's Puritanism, his youthful Renaissance love of beauty for beauty's sake had lost none of its strength, though of course it could no longer be expressed with youthful lightness of fancy and melody. The poem is a magnificent example of classical art, in the best Greek spirit, united with glowing romantic feeling. Lastly, the value of Milton's scholarship should by no means be overlooked. All his poetry, from the 'Nativity Ode' onward, is like a rich mosaic of gems borrowed from a great range of classical and modern authors, and in 'Paradise Lost' the allusions to literature and history give half of the romantic charm and very much of the dignity. The poem could have been written only by one who combined in a very high degree intellectual power, poetic feeling, religious idealism, profound scholarship and knowledge of literature, and also experienced knowledge of the actual world of men.
'Paradise Lost' was published in 1677. It was followed in 1671 by 'Paradise Regained,' only one-third as long and much less important; and by 'Samson Agonistes' (Samson in his Death Struggle). In the latter Milton puts the story of the fallen hero's last days into the majestic form of a Greek drama, imparting to it the passionate but lofty feeling evoked by the close similarity of Samson's situation to his own. This was his last work, and he died in 1674. Whatever his faults, the moral, intellectual and poetic greatness of his nature sets him apart as in a sense the grandest figure in English
From Paradise Lost
'Fall'n Cherub, to be weak is miserable,
Doing or suffering: but of this be sure,
To do aught good never will be our task,
But ever to do ill our sole delight,
As being the contrary to his high will
Whom we resist. If then his providence
Out of our evil seek to bring forth good,
Our labor must be to pervert that end,
And out of good still to find means of evil;
Which ofttimes may succeed, so as perhaps
Shall grieve him, if I fail not, and disturb
His inmost counsels from their destined aim.
But see the angry Victor hath recalled
His ministers of vengeance and pursuit
Back to the gates of heav'n; the sulphurous hail
Shot after us in storm, o'erblown hath laid
The fiery surge, that from the precipice
Of heav'n received us falling, and the thunder,
Winged with red lightning and impetuous rage,
Perhaps hath spent his shafts, and ceases now
To bellow through the vast and boundless deep.
Let us not slip th' occasion, whether scorn
Or satiate fury yield it from our Foe.
Seest thou yon dreary plain, forlorn and wild,
The seat of desolation, void of light,
Save what the glimmering of these livid flames
Casts pale and dreadful? Thither let us tend
From off the tossing of these fiery waves,
There rest, if any rest can harbour there,
And reassembling our afflicted powers,
Consult how we may henceforth most offend
Our Enemy, our own loss how repair,
How overcome this dire calamity,
What reinforcement we may gain from hope;
If not, what resolution from despair.'
Lesson 49 - 50
The British Empire
The British Empire was at its largest and most powerful around 1920, when about 25% of the world's population lived under British rule and over a quarter of the land in the world belonged to Britain. It was said that it was an empire 'on which the sun never sets'.
The building of the Empire
The growth of the British Empire was at first the result of competition among European nations, especially Britain, France, Spain and the Netherlands, for new areas in which to trade and new sources of raw materials. Explorers visited the Americas and the Far East, and in the 16th century trading companies, such as the Dutch and English East India Companies, were set up. Many colonies (= places taken over by a foreign country and settled by people from that country) began as trading centres, or were founded to protect a trade route, and were run for the profit of the mother country. Some colonies were founded by people trying to make a new life for themselves, others were originally penal colonies (= places where people were sent as a punishment).
Britain gained its first foreign possessions in the late 15th century. Newfoundland, now part of *Canada, was claimed for England in 1497. Canada itself was won in 1763 after war with the French. During the 17th and 18th centuries colonies were established on the east coast of North America, including Plymouth Colony founded by the Pilgrim Fathers. In the 1770s people in the American colonies became angry with Britain, mainly because of taxes they had to pay. This resulted in the American Revolution and later the independence of the United States.
The wealthiest area in the early days of empire was the *West Indies because of money made from sugar cane and tobacco. Britain's colonies included Barbados, Antigua and Montserrat and Jamaica. Later, other islands were added. *Slaves were brought to the West Indies from Africa to work in the plantations. The slave trade was abolished (=ended) in the British Empire in 1807, though slavery did not end in the West Indies until 1838.
India was controlled for many years by the wealthy English East India Company. After the Company expanded into Bengal, the British Government began to see India as important politically and took a greater interest in the territory. Roads and railways were built to make trade easier and improve contact with more remote districts, a Governor-General was put in charge, and British civil servants and troops were sent to the region.
Australia, discovered for Britain by Captain Cook, was first settled as a penal colony. The first prisoners and their guards reached *Botany Bay in 1788. Originally there were six colonies, including New South Wales and Tasmania, but in 1901 these joined together and became a federation. New Zealand became a colony in 1840.
From 1801 the expanding empire was managed from London by the Colonial Office. District officers and civil servants were sent out to administer the colonies on behalf of Britain. Regular imperial conferences were held in Britain to discuss matters of general concern, such as trade, defence and foreign policy.
Expansion
The second period of empire-building took place in the late 19th century. At that time Britain was one of the leading economic and political powers in the world, and wanted to protect her interests and also increase her international influence by obtaining new lands. It was also thought by some people to be a matter of moral obligation and destiny to run poorer, less advanced countries and to pass on European culture to the native inhabitants. This was what Rudyard Kipling called 'the white man's burden'.
Hong Kong was important both for trade with China and for strategic (= political and military) reasons, and became a British colony in 1842. It later became an important business centre.
In 1858, following the *Indian Mutiny, India was placed under the direct control of the British Government and a viceroy replaced the Governor-General. British influence in India had expanded from a few trading stations into the Raj (= British rule). India brought Britain great wealth and strategic advantage, and was called 'the jewel in the crown' of the Empire. Local Indian rulers were allowed to remain in power provided they were loyal to the viceroy. Many British people spent years working in India as civil servants, engineers, police officers, etc. and took their families with them. By about 1880 the British in India had developed a distinct lifestyle which is described in E M Forster's A Passage to India and Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet.
In Africa, the Cape of Good Hope was important to Britain because it was on the sea route to India. It was bought from the Boers in 1815, and British settlers went out to live there alongside the Boers. There were many problems between them and in 1836 the Boers left to found the Orange Free State, Transvaal and Natal. In 1889 Cecil Rhodes formed the British South Africa Company which took over land further north in what came to be called Rhodesia. In 1910, after the second Boer War, the Cape, Natal, the Transvaal and Orange Free State formed the Union of South Africa.
Between about 1870 and 1900 Britain, Belgium, France, Italy and Germany took part in what came to be called the scramble for Africa. The journeys of explorers and missionaries (= religious teachers) like David Livingstone encouraged interest in the interior of Africa, and gaining control of these areas became important for national pride as well as providing new opportunities for trade. In 1884 the European nations, in an attempt at cooperation, agreed spheres of influence. Britain's colonies in West Africa were the Gold Coast (now Ghana), Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Gambia. In East Africa, countries that were acquired as protectorates (= states controlled and protected by Britain) included the East African Protectorate (now Kenya), Uganda, Somaliland, Zanzibar, Northern and Southern Rhodesia (now Zambia and Zimbabwe) and Nyasaland (now Malawi). After World War I Britain also administered the former German colony of Tanganyika which later joined with Zanzibar to form Tanzania.
Independence
In the 19th century the Empire was a source of pride for Britain. During the 20th century it became expensive to run and also an embarrassment. The middle of the century was a time of changing values and it was morally no longer acceptable to take over other countries and cultures and to exploit them. Many colonies had growing nationalist movements for independence.
Canada, Australia and New Zealand had already become dominions (= self-governing regions) in 1907 and South Africa in 1910. Each had a British governor advised by local ministers. They gained full independence in 1931.
The Indian National Congress under Mahatma Gandhi led the movement for independence in India, but the situation was complicated by hostility between Hindus and Moslems. When India was given independence in 1947 parts of the north-west and north-east became West and East Pakistan. After a civil war in 1971 they became separate countries, Pakistan and *Bangladesh.
Lesson 51. Test
Lesson 52
The story of a nation's literature ordinarily has its beginning far back in the remoter history of that nation, obscured by the uncertainties of an age of which no trustworthy records have been preserved. The earliest writings of a people are usually the first efforts at literary production of a race in its childhood; and as these compositions develop they record the intellectual and artistic growth of the race. The conditions which attended the development of literature in America, therefore, are peculiar. At the very time when Sir Walter Raleigh ‐‐ a type of the great and splendid men of action who made such glorious history for England in the days of Elizabeth ‐‐ was organizing the first futile efforts to colonize the new world, English Literature, which is the joint possession of the whole English‐speaking race, was rapidly developing. Sir Philip Sidney had written his Arcadia, first of the great prose romances, and enriched English poetry with his sonnets; Edmund Spenser had composed The Shepherd's Calendar; Christopher Marlowe had established the drama upon heroic lines; and Shakespeare had just entered on the first flights of his fancy. When, in 1606, King James granted to a company of London merchants the first charter of Virginia, Sidney and Spenser and Marlowe were dead, Shakespeare had produced some of his greatest plays, the name of Ben Jonson, along with other notable names, had been added to the list of our great dramatists, and the philosopher, Francis Bacon, had published the first of his essays. These are the familiar names which represent the climax of literary achievement in the Elizabethan age; and this brilliant epoch had reached its full height when the first permanent English settlement in America was made at Jamestown in 1607. On New Year's day, the little fleet commanded by Captain Newport sailed forth on its venturesome and romantic enterprise, the significance of which was not altogether unsuspected by those who saw it depart. Michael Drayton, one of the most popular poets of his day, later poet laureate of the kingdom, sang in quaint, prophetic verses a cheery farewell:
"You brave heroic minds,
Worthy your country's name,
That honor still pursue,
Go and subdue,
Whilst loitering hinds
Lurk here at home with shame.
"And in regions farre,
Such heroes bring ye forth
As those from whom we came;
And plant our name
Under that star
Not known unto our north.
"And as there plenty grows
Of laurel everywhere,
Apollo's sacred tree,
You it may see,
A poet's brows
that may sing there."