• 76-236 Course Description:

This course focuses on the “Condition of England Question”—the discourse surrounding the great social, economic and political upheavals following the Napoleonic wars and before the halcyon days of mid-Victorianism. We will explore the set of issues represented by this complex phrase, from various social locations and socio-political positions. William Cobbett, Thomas Hodgskin, Thomas Carlyle, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, Benjamin Disraeli and Charles Dickens are among the authors whose works we will examine. We will also read poetry, including that by Alfred Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth and Robert Browning, James Thomson, B.V., and others.

76-334/734 LIST OF TEXTS

• Primary Readings (from Bookstore)
• Carlyle, Thomas, A Carlyle Reader, G. B. Tennyson, ed. (Acton, Mass.: Copley Publishing, 1997).
• Dickens, Charles, Hard Times ( New York: Bantam, 2004); 1854.
• Disraeli, Benjamin, Sybil, Or the Two Nations (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); 1845.
• Engels, Friedrich The Condition of the Working Class in England (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1987); 1844.
• Gaskell, Elizabeth, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (New York: Penguin Books, 1996); 1848.
• Marx, Karl, The Communist Manifesto: A Norton Critical Edition (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1988); 1848.
• O’Gorman, Francis, ed., Victorian Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004).
  
• Primary Texts ( handouts or online versions)
  • Carlyle, Thomas, Chartism (1839).
  • Cobbett, William, A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland (selections)
  • Cobbett, William, Rural Rides (1830) (Selections)
  • Hodgskin, Thomas, Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital (1825)
  • Shuttleworth, James Phillip Kay, The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester (London: Frank Cass and Company, 1970); 1832.
    
• Secondary Texts (selections--handouts)
  • Abrams, M. H., et al, eds., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 2, 4 th edition (New York, London: W.W. Norton
    & Co., 1979).
  • * Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison ( New York : Pantheon Books, 1977).
  • Levin, Michael, The Condition Of England Question : Carlyle, Mill, Engels ( New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998).
  • *Poovey, Mary, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830-1864 (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1995).
  • Thompson, Dorothy, The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution ( New York : Pantheon Books, 1984).
  • Ulrich, John McAllister, Signs Of Their Times: History, Labor, and the Body in Cobbett, Carlyle, and Disraeli ( Athens , Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2002).

  *Graduate students (only) will need to buy these books marked with an asterisk; undergraduate students can purchase these books and read the graduate assignments if they so desire. Copies are available on Amazon.com and at Barnes and Noble.com. The later edition of Discipline and Punish is fine.

• Syllabus (The syllabus includes the complete course description, list of texts, assignment due dates/daily schedule, and more).
• 76-334/734, Fall 2005
  
• Assignments
  • Mid-term paper (Close reading)
    
• Writing and Reading Resources
• Citation Format Guide
• Paper Style Sheet: This is the definitive style guide for papers written in this class. Please follow it closely.


• Required Online Readings, roughly in order of class coverage (updated regularly: see syllabus for full bibliographic citation and dates of reading assignments)
  • Thomas Hodgskin, Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital Or the Unproductiveness of Capital proved with Reference to the Present Combinations amongst Journeymen (1825)
  • William Cobbett, Rural Rides (1830) (Selections)
  • James Phillip Kay-Shuttleworth, The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester
  • Thomas Carlyle, "Signs of the Times" (1829) (also in Carlyle Reader)
  • Thomas Carlyle, "Characteristics" (1831) (also in Carlyle Reader)
  • Benjamin Disraeil, Sybil, or the Two Nations (free online version)
    
• Web Resources
  • General
    • The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) online
    • The Gutenberg Project (The most amazing collection of etexts on the web: see the catalog).
    • Bartleby.com: THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE
    • Spartacus Educational (British History, 1500-1980)
    • BBC History Site
    • The Scholarly Journal Archive (JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization with a dual mission to create and maintain a trusted archive of important scholarly journals, and to provide access to these journals as widely as possible. JSTOR offers researchers the ability to retrieve high-resolution, scanned images of journal issues and pages as they were originally designed, printed, and illustrated. Content in JSTOR spans many disciplines. For lists of currently available titles and collections, please refer to: http://www.jstor.org/about/collection.list.html).
    • The Serials Master File is an innovative Web reference service for serials and collection development librarians, historians, bibliographers, scholars and students, providing access to information on over 37,000 serials.
      
  • Nineteenth Century
  • The Victorian Web (web resources for everything Victorian: political history, social history, gender matters, philosophy, religion, science, literature, etc.)
  • Victorian Studies (leading periodical on the Victorian period, some issues available online)
  • Victorian Links: links on Victorian history, literature, art, religion
  • Joseph Sramek, The Development of the British Working Class, A Debate: Part I (abstract)
  • Poole's Plus: The Digital Index of the Nineteenth Century (enter from Carnegie Mellon Library databases page): a master file of published works in the 19th century
  • The Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals: 1800-1900 (index, history and information on periodicals--requires registration)
  • Bronte: Discussion group dedicated to the lives and works of the Bronte family (Yahoo egroup, requires registration)
  • William Paley, Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (1802)
  • Robert Owen (writings and resources)
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley, "England in 1819" (1819)
  • Benjamin Disraeil, Sybil, or the Two Nations (free online version)
  • George Holyoake
  • Victorian Social Literature: A Chronology
    
  • Nineteenth-Century Science
    • Science and Popular Culture in the Nineteenth Century: Research Methods Guide (by Anne Secord)
    • British Journal for the History of Science (recent issues available online)
    • Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical (The Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical (SciPer) project is jointly organised by the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies in the Department of English Literature at the University of Sheffield and the Division of History and Philosophy of Science in the School of Philosophy at the University of Leeds...The aim of the project is to identify and analyse the representation of science, technology and medicine, as well as the inter-penetration of science and literature, in the general periodical press in Britain between 1800 and 1900.")
    • The History of Phrenology
  • Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (v. 1-3) (1830-33)
  • Auguste Comte, Introduction to the Positive Philosophy trans. from Cours de Philosophie Positive (1830-1842)
  • Herbert Spencer, from Reasons for Dissenting from the Philosophy of M. Comte (1862-96).
  • Charles Darwin
    • On the Origin of Species, lst edition (1859)
    • THE DESCENT OF MAN, AND SELECTION IN RELATION TO SEX, 2nd edition, 1882 (originally published 1871).
  • John Tyndall, "The Belfast Address"
  • Thomas Huxley, "Science and Culture" (1880).
  • Matthew Arnold, "Literature and Science" (1882).
  • C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures (first printed 1959)
  • Robert M. Young, Darwin's Metaphor: Nature's Place in Victorian Culture (1985)
    
  • Late 18th Century Background
  • Some pre-Victorians included in the Victorian Web
  • The Romantics Page (On this page you'll find links to course syllabi, information, bibliographies, faculty and other web sites related to British and American Romanticism).
  • Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
  • Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1791-2)
  • Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
  • William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)
  • Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798)
    
    
  • Other assorted and miscellaneous sites that I have found curious and useful
    • The Dead Sociologists Society (links to important--and dead--sociological thinkers, including Comte, Marx and Spencer)
    • The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson
    • The Sociology of Knowledge
    • Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944) from Dialectic of Enlightenment: "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" (read for interesting parallels with Carlyle's "Signs of the Times)."