UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON

EXAMINATION FOR INTERNAL STUDENTS

MODULE CODE

ENGL3007

ASSESSMENT
PATTERN

ENGL3007A

MODULE NAME

The Victorian Period

DATE

14-May-15

TIME

10:00

TIME ALLOWED

3 Hours 0 Minutes

2014/15-ENGL3007A-001-EXAM-77
2014 University College London

TURN OVER

Answer three questions, one from Section A and two from Section B. Unless otherwise
stated, each question in Section B must be answered with reference to at least two
works. The 'period' means 1830 to 1900.
You may include in your answers in Section B discussion of set works not used in
answering Section A. For example, if you have not answered on Great Expectations in
Section A, and choose to answer on Dickens in Section B, you may include Great
Expectations in your discussion.
If you have written your Section A answer on Great Expectations, you may refer to
Dickens's works in answering a question in Section B, providing you do not base your
answer primarily on Dickens.
In the case of Tennyson, Browning, and Christina Rossetti, where 'set works' refers to
a volume of selected poems, you may base an answer in Section B on the work of any
of these poets without restriction, provided you have not answered on that poet in
Section A.
Candidates must not present substantially the same material in any two answers,
whether on this paper or in other parts of the examination.

SECTION A

1.

Either: (a)

THOU who stealest fire,

From the fountains of the past,
To glorify the present.
(Tennyson, 'Ode to Memory')
Discuss the role of memory in Tennyson's poetry. You may if
you wish confine your answer to In Memoriam.

Or:

2.

(b)

Either: (a)

Write an essay on dreams, or on enchantment, in Tennyson's

poetry.
The poet's habitual use of various pasts allowed him, among
other things, to displace contemporary social and political
debates onto alternative sites.
(Jennifer McDonnell)
Discuss Browning's use of t~e past.

TURNOVER

Or:

(b)

In 1871 R. H. Hutton wrote that

Mr Browning rushes upon you with a sort of intellectual

douche, half stuns you with the abruptness of the shock,

repeats the application in a multitude of swift various
jets from unexpected points of the compass, and leaves
you at last giddy and wondering where you are.
Discuss ways in which Browning's poems challenge and shock
the reader.
3.

Either: (a)

Somewhere or other there must surely be,

The face not seen, the voice not heard,
The heart that not yet - never yet - ah me!
Made answer to my word.
(Christina Rossetti, 'Somewhere or Other')
Discuss yearning or disappointment in Christina Rossetti's writing.

Or:
4.

(b)

Either: (a)

Or:

(b)

In what ways is Christina Rossetti a playful poet?

Philip Davis describes Villette as the 'account of a plain single woman
faced with the shame of needing love'. Do you agree?
At that instant she did not wear a woman's aspect, but
rather a man's. Power of a particular kind strongly
limned itself in all her traits, and that power was not my
kind of power.

(Villette)
What kinds of power do you find expressed in Villette?

5.

Either: (a)

After visiting Newgate Prison, Pip thinks 'how strange it was

that I should be encompassed by all this taint of prison and
crime'. Discuss the treatment of criminality in Great

Expectations.
Or:

(b)

George Eliot complained that Dickens encouraged 'the

miserable fallacy that high morality and refined sentiment can
grow out of harsh social relations, ignorance and want'. Does
Great Expectations challenge or encourage this 'fallacy'?

CONTINUED

6.

Either: (a)

[Bulstrode] was simply a man whose desires had been stronger

than his theoretic beliefs, and who had gradually explained the
gratification of his desires into satisfactory agreement with
those beliefs. If this be hypocrisy, it is a process which shows
itself occasionally in us all.

(Middlemarch)

In what ways does Eliot show beliefs being shaped by desires in

Middlemarch?
I have always exercised a severe watch against anything that
could be called preaching, and if I have ever allowed myself in
dissertation or in dialogue anything which is not part of the
structure of my books, I have there sinned against my own
laws.
(George Eliot)

Or: (b)

Does Middlemarch comply with George Eliot's own laws?

7.

Either: (a)

One of the first reviews of Tess of the d' Urbervilles claimed

that
the great theme of the book is the incessant penalty paid
by the innocent for the wicked, the unsuspicious for the
crafty, the child for its fathers.
How valid is this reviewer's claim about the novel?

Or:

(b)

'What was comedy to them was tragedy to her', the narrator

tells us in Tess of the D'Urbervilles. What role does comedy
play in the novel?

SECTION B

8.

To Mr. Collins belongs the credit of having introduced into fiction those most
mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors.
(Henry James, review of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Aurora Floyd)
Discuss in relation to Collins, Braddon, or any other novelist or novelists of the
period.

TURNOVER

9.

He took a bunch of keys from his pocket, singled out by the candle
light the key he wanted, and then, with a candle in his hand, went to a
bureau or escritoire, unlocked it, touched the spring of a little secret
drawer.
(Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood)
Write an essay on secrets, and the discovery of secrets, in Victorian fiction.

10.

The emancipation of woman will only be possible when woman can

take part in production on a large, social scale, and domestic work no
longer claims anything but an insignificant amount of her time.
(Friedrich Engels)
Either: (a)

Discuss Victorian literature's concern with the emancipation of

women.

Or:

Discuss literary representations of women in the home, or at

work, or both.

(b)

11.

How do two or more works of the period describe a movement from the
country to the city, or from the city to the country?

12.

'We were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way'
(Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities). In what ways is any writing of the
period shaped by faith and doubt?

13.

Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal

struggle for life, or more difficult - at least I found it so - than
constantly to bear this conclusion in mind.
(Charles Darwin)
Discuss ways in which one or more works of the period seem conscious of
'the universal struggle for life'.

14.

Pleasure in the other sex, however objective it may seem, is yet merely
disguised instinct, i.e. sense of the species, striving to maintain its type.
(Arthur Schopenhauer)
Discuss ways in which literature of the period conceives of pleasure in the
other sex, or of pleasure in the same sex.

15.

Peter Thorns claims that in Victorian fiction, detection 'often seems more
concerned with proving innocence than proving guilt'. Write about detection
in the work of one or more writers of the period in the light of this quotation.

CONTINUED

16.

Doubtless, the idea, the intellectual element, is the spirit and life of art.
Still, art is the triumph of the senses and the emotions.
(Walter Pater)
Either: (a)

Discuss the relationship between the intellectual and the

sensuous in Victorian ideas about art.

(b)

How did debates about art shape literature of the period?

Or:
17.

To what serves mortal beauty - dangerous; does set danc

ing blood
(Gerard Manley Hopkins)
How does any writing of the period represent the dangers of beauty?

18.

In what ways might the work of any poet or poets of the period be thought
formally experimental?

19.

In what ways did serialization shape any fiction of the period? You may, if
you wish, focus on one work.

20.

It is beginning to be recognised that the sexes do not or should not

normally form two groups hopelessly isolated in habit and feeling
from each other.
(Edward Carpenter)
How distinct are the sexes in literature of the period?

21.

By this he knew she wept with waking eyes:

That, at his hand's light quiver by.her head,
The strange low sobs that shook their common bed
Were called into her with a sharp surprise.
(George Meredith, 'Modern Love')
Discuss unhappy marriages in literature of the period.

22.

Yes, the house must be inhabited, and we will see by whom; for
imagination is a licensed trespasser: it has no fear of dogs, but may
climb over walls and peep in at windows with impunity. Put your
face to one of the glass panes in the right-hand window: what do
you see?
(George Eliot, Adam Bede)
Discuss the ways in which any novelist or novelists of the period address
themselves to the reader.

TURNOVER

23.

Christopher Ricks finds in Victorian nonsense-verse 'the very opposite of that

escapism which is often laid at Victorian poetry's door'. Do you agree?

24.

On receiving his inmate again, the proprietor of the Asylum

acknowledged that he had observed some curious personal changes in
her. Such changes no doubt were not without precedent in his
experience of persons mentally afflicted.
(Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White)
Either: (a)

Or:

(b)

Discuss ways in which madness is observed and understood in

literature of the period.
Discuss the role of incarceration in literature of the period.

How much kinder is God to us than we are willing to be to ourselves!

At the loss of every dear face, at the last going of every well-beloved
one, we all doom ourselves to an eternity of sorrow, and look to waste
ourselves away in an ever-running fountain of tears.

25.

(Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers)

How did Victorian writers deal with loss?
Swinburne was a thinker. It is inaccurate and unjust to say that in his
poetry the sound obscures the sense.

26.

(Cecil Y. Lang)

27.

Either: (a)

Discuss the ways in which a poet of the period may be

described as a 'thinker'.

Or:

Discuss the relationship between sound and sense in the work

of one or more poets of the period.

(b)

Every quarter of an hour, the mark and presence of man, the power
with which he has transformed nature, became more obvious.
(Hippolyte Taine, Notes on England)
Discuss how literature of the period reflects the transformations of nature by
industry.

28.

A review of North and South praised 'Mrs. Gaskell's style, naturally flowing
and musical', for having 'attained its maturity'. Consider ways in which the
work of any writer of the period matures or develops.

29.

'Come, let us go - to a land wherein gods of the old time wandered' (Arthur
Hugh Clough, Amours de Voyage). What did writing of the period seek to find
in other lands?

CONTINUED

30.

She had reason to cry, because the only man she ever loved - or ever
could love, so she said - was going to India; and India, as everyone
knows, is divideci equally between jungle, tigers, cobras, cholera, and
sepoys.
(Rudyard Kipling, Plain Tales from the Hills)
How do writers of the period challenge or satisfy their readers' expectations
about imperial locations?

END OF PAPER