THIS PAPER IS NOT TO BE REMOVED FROM THE EXAMINATION HALLS
EN2035
UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
BA/DIPLOMA OF HE EXAMINATION (New Regulations)
COMBINED DEGREE SCHEME
ENGLISH
Group B Advanced Unit/Level 5 Course: Augustans and Romantics
Friday 5 May 2017: 10.00 – 13.15
3 hours and 15 minutes
[Including15 minutes reading time, during which students may write notes in the answer
book but not on the question paper. Any notes in the answer book(s) should be crossed
out.]
Answer THREE questions, ONE from EACH section (all three questions carry equal
marks). Candidates may NOT discuss the same text in more than one answer, in this
examination or in any other Advanced Level Unit/Level 5/Level 6 examination.
© University of London 2017
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SECTION A
1. Write on ONE of the following passages, indicating those qualities which you think
make it characteristic of its period. Pay particular attention to the subject, the form,
and the use of language and image.
a) Paulus vel Cossus vel Drusus moribus esto. JUVENAL (Sat., viii)1
‘Well—of all plagues which make mankind their sport,
Guard me, ye Heav’ns! from that worst plague—a court.
’Midst the mad mansions of Moorfields2, I’d be
A straw-crown’d monarch, in mock majesty,
5 Rather than sovereign rule Britannia’s fate,
Curs’d with the follies and the farce of state.
Rather in Newgate walls, O! Let me dwell,
A doleful tenant of the darkling cell,
Than swell, in palaces, the mighty store
10 Of fortune’s fools, and parasites of pow’r.
Than crowns, ye gods! be any state my doom,
Or any dungeon, but—a drawing-room.
‘Thrice happy patriot! whom no courts debase,
No titles lessen, and no stars disgrace.
15 Still nod the plumes o’er the brainless head;
Still o’er the faithless heart the ribband spread.
Such toys may serve to signalize the tool,
To gild the knave, or garnish out the fool;
While you, with Roman virtue arm’d, disdain
20 The tinsel trappings and the glitt’ring chain:
Fond of your freedom spurn the venal fee,
And prove he’s only great—who dares be free.’
Thus sung Philemon in his calm retreat,
Too wise for pow’r, too virtuous to be great.
25 ‘But whence this rage at courts?’ reply’d his grace,
‘Say, is the mighty crime, to be in place?
Is that the deadly sin, mark’d out by Heav’n,
For which no mortal e’er can be forgiv’n?
1 Paulus [...] esto: ‘Be as Paulus, Cossus and Drusus in moral character’. The three named were military
men of honour who served Rome with distinction.
2 Moorfields: a poor area of London, just north of Bethlem Hospital, notorious for brothels and highwaymen.
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Must all, all suffer, who in courts engage,
30 Down from lord steward, to the puny page?
Can courts and places be such sinful things,
The sacred gifts and palaces of kings?’ [...]
What courts are sacred, when I tell your grace,
Manners alone must sanctify the place?
35 Hence only each its proper name receives;
Haywood’s a brothel; White’s3 a den of thieves:
Bring whores and thieves to court, you change the scene,
St. James’s turns the brothel, and the den.
(PAUL WHITEHEAD, from Manners: A Satire, pub. 1739)
b) But because human judgment, though it be gradually gaining upon certainty, never
becomes infallible; and approbation, though long continued, may yet be only the
approbation of prejudice or fashion; it is proper to inquire, by what peculiarities of
excellence Shakespeare has gained and kept the favour of his countrymen.
5 Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general
nature. Particular manners can be known to few, and therefore few only can judge
how nearly they are copied. The irregular combinations of fanciful invention may
delight a-while, by that novelty of which the common satiety of life sends us all in
quest; but the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted, and the mind can
10 only repose on the stability of truth.
Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of
nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life.
His characters are not modified by the customs of particular places, unpractised by
the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate
15 but upon small numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary
opinions: they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will
always supply, and observation will always find. His persons act and speak by the
influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated,
and the whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a
20 character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a
species.
It is from this wide extension of design that so much instruction is derived. It is this
which fills the plays of Shakespeare with practical axioms and domestick wisdom. It
was said of Euripides4, that every verse was a precept; and it may be said of
3 Haywood’s [and] White’s: fashionable coffee-houses.
4 Euripides: tragedian of the 5th century BC.
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25 Shakespeare, that from his works may be collected a system of civil and
oeconomical prudence. Yet his real power is not shewn in the splendour of particular
passages, but by the progress of his fable, and the tenour of his dialogue; and he
that tries to recommend him by select quotations, will succeed like the pedant in
Hierocles5, who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his pocket as
30 a specimen.
[...] Shakespeare has no heroes; his scenes are occupied only by men, who act
and speak as the reader thinks that he should himself have spoken or acted on the
same occasion: Even where the agency is supernatural the dialogue is level with life
[...] Shakespeare approximates the remote, and familiarizes the wonderful[.]
(SAMUEL JOHNSON, from Preface to Shakespeare, 1765)
c) Letter IX
Yesterday I received your letter, in which you accuse me of describing with too much
enthusiasm the public rejoicings in France, and prophesy that I shall return to my
own country a fierce republican. In answer to these accusations, I shall only observe,
that it is very difficult, with common sensibility, to avoid sympathizing in general
5 happiness. My love of the French revolution, is the natural result of this sympathy,
and therefore my political creed is entirely an affair of the heart; for I have not been
so absurd as to consult my head upon matters of which it is so incapable of judging.
Letter XXVI
Every visitor brings me intelligence from France full of dismay and horror. I hear of
nothing but crimes, assassinations, torture, and death. I am told that every day
10 witnesses a conspiracy; that every town is the scene of a massacre; that every street
is blackened with a gallows, and every highway deluged with blood. I hear these
things, and repeat to myself, Is this the picture of France? Are these the images of
that universal joy, which called tears into my eyes, and made my heart throb with
sympathy? — To me, the land which these mighty magicians have suddenly covered
15 with darkness, where, waving their evil wand, they have reared the dismal scaffold,
have clotted the knife of the assassin with gore, have called forth the shriek of
despair, and the agony of torture; to me, this land of desolation appeared dressed in
additional beauty beneath the genial smile of liberty. The woods seemed to cast a
more refreshing shade, and the lawns to wear a brighter verdure, while the carols of
20 freedom burst from the cottage of the peasant, and the voice of joy resounded on
the hill, and in the valley.
5 Hierocles: Stoic philosopher of the 1st century AD.
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Must I be told that my mind is perverted, that I am become dead to all sensations
of sympathy, because I do not weep with those who have lost a part of their
superfluities, rather than rejoice that the oppressed are protected, that the wronged
25 are redressed, that the captive is set at liberty, and that the poor have bread? Did
the universal parent of the human race, implant the feelings of pity in the heart, that
they should be confined to the artificial wants of vanity, the ideal deprivations of
greatness; that they should be fixed beneath the dome of the palace, or locked within
the gate of the chateau; without extending one commiserating sigh to the wretched
30 hamlet, as if its famished inhabitants, though not ennobled by man, did not bear, at
least, the ensigns of nobility stamped on our nature by God.
(HELEN MARIA WILLIAMS, from Letters Written in France, 1790)
d) Far better never to have heard the name
Of zeal and just ambition, than to live
Thus baffled by a mind that every hour
Turns recreant to her task6 [...]
5 Like a false steward7 who hath much received
And renders nothing back.—Was it for this
That one, the fairest of all Rivers, lov’d
To blend his murmurs with my Nurse’s song,
And from his alder shades and rocky falls,
10 And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice
That flow’d along my dreams? For this, didst Thou,
O Derwent! travelling over the green Plains
Near my ‘sweet Birthplace’8, didst thou, beauteous Stream,
Make ceaseless music through the night and day
15 Which with its steady cadence, tempering
Our human waywardness, compos’d my thoughts
To more than infant softness, giving me,
Among the fretful dwellings of mankind,
A foretaste, a dim earnest, of the calm
20 That Nature breathes among the hills and groves.
When, having left his Mountains, to the Towers9
Of Cockermouth that beauteous River came,
6 Wordsworth has been reviewing heroic themes appropriate to a grand poetical work, but nothing has
captured his imagination.
7 false steward: parable in Matthew 25:14-30.
8 ‘sweet Birthplace’: from Coleridge’s Frost at Midnight.
9 Towers: Cockermouth Castle.
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Behind my Father’s House he pass’d, close by,
Along the margin of our Terrace Walk.
25 He was a Playmate whom we dearly lov’d.
Oh! many a time have I, a five years’ Child,
A naked Boy, in one delightful Rill,
A little Mill-race sever’d from his stream,
Made one long bathing of a summer’s day,
30 Bask’d in the sun, and plunged, and bask’d again
Alternate all a summer’s day, or cours’d
Over the sandy fields, leaping through groves
Of yellow grunsel10, or when crag and hill,
The woods, and distant Skiddaw’s lofty height,
35 Were bronz’d with a deep radiance, stood alone
Beneath the sky, as if I had been born
On Indian Plains, and from my Mother’s hut
Had run abroad in wantonness, to sport,
A naked Savage, in the thunder shower.
(WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, from The Prelude, 1805, pub. 1850)
10 grunsel: ragwort, a common weed.
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SECTION B
Answer ONE question. For the purposes of this examination, Jane Austen will be
deemed a nineteenth-century author.
2. It has been suggested that ‘Augustanism’ can be characterized by Pope’s instruction
to ‘Avoid Extremes’ (Essay on Criticism). How easily does this principle sit with the
violence and excess which fill the pages of eighteenth-century satire? You should
refer to the writings of one author.
3. Consider the contribution made by one or more other literary forms to the novels of
this period. Reference should be made to one or more works by one author.
4. In the opening lines of ‘Epistle I’ of An Essay on Man, Pope describes his ambition
to ‘Expatiate free o’er all this scene of Man; / A mighty maze! but not without a plan.’
Discuss the work of one author of the period whose writing embodies a similar
aspiration.
5. Write an essay which considers the nature and treatment of one of the following in
the work of one author of the period:
(a) patriotism
(b) myth
(c) primitivism.
6. Consider the ways in which one author of the period explores the distinctions which
were perceived to exist between sentiment, sensibility, and sentimentality.
7. For all that meets the bodily sense I deem
Symbolical [...]
That we may learn with young unwounded ken
The substance from its shadow.
(SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE)
Discuss the verse of one Romantic poet whose imagination was engaged with such
relationships between ‘sense’ and ‘symbol’, ‘substance’ and ‘shadow’.
8. To what extent does one writer of the period successfully create poetry out of
contemporary issues?
9. Consider the ways in which classical mythology is employed by one writer of the
period.
SECTION C
Answer ONE question.
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Your answer in this section should refer to AT LEAST TWO authors. For the
purposes of this examination, Jane Austen will be deemed a nineteenth-century
author.
10. In 1715, Gay published The What d’ye call it which carried the sub-title A Tragi-Comi-
Pastoral Farce. Twenty-seven years later, Fielding would describe Joseph Andrews
as ‘a comic epic poem in prose’. How successfully does eighteenth-century satire
exploit this habit of hybridization? Refer to the works of at least two authors.
11. ‘One of the special pleasures of neo-classical art — and, for many in a time of
howling anarchy, perhaps its chief consolation — is the sense conveyed of the
triumph of form, a dynamic variety of materials having been reduced to order by the
shaping intelligence’ (MARTIN BATTESTIN). Consider the work of at least two
eighteenth-century authors who might, to a greater or lesser extent, lay claim to such
an achievement.
12. ‘“He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman’s daughter; so far we are equal”’ (JANE
AUSTEN). To what extent do the novels of at least two authors of the period
challenge and/or affirm the class structures of their society?
13. ‘Fictional encounters with real or imaginary spirits provided opportunities for
representing feelings excited by fear, horror, madness and even ecstasy’ (J. R. de
J. JACKSON). In the light of this quotation, discuss the works of at least two authors
writing in verse and/or prose.
14. In 1742, Gray declared that ‘the language of the age is never the language of poetry’.
Some sixty years later, Wordsworth dismissed much eighteenth-century poetry as
marked by its ‘gaudiness and inane phraseology’ and vowed to employ ‘the real
language of men’. Explore these apparently contradictory attitudes in a discussion
of the poetic language of one Augustan poet and one Romantic.
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15. ‘Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that which is most
beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed; it marries exultation
and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change’ (PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY).
Discuss the verse of at least two Romantic poets who attempted to reconcile such
opposites.
16. Discuss the verse of at least two writers whose work is illuminated by Keats’s
insistence that the poet should be ‘capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries,
doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’.
17. Consider the nature and treatment of one or more of the following in the works of
at least two authors:
(a) Orientalism
(b) the cult of the South
(c) mediaevalism.
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