Examiners’ commentaries 2016

Examiners’ commentaries 2016

EN3035/2035 Augustans and Romantics

Advice to candidates on how Examiners calculate marks

It is important that candidates recognise that in all papers, three questions
should be answered in order to get the best possible mark (ensuring that the
rubric for the paper has been followed accordingly).
Examiners follow a simple mathematical formula when awarding a final overall
mark: they give each answer a mark out of 100 (up to three answers only, as
required by the examination paper); they then total all available marks; and
finally they divide the total by three, thus giving an average overall mark.
So, if your first answer is given 57%, your second answer is given 56%, and your
third answer 50%, then the calculation will look like this:
57 + 56 + 50 = 163
163 ÷ 3 = 54.3
Overall mark: 54%
Two good essays and no third essay will always bring the mark down. So, if in
the example above a third answer was not given, the calculation would look
like this:
57 + 56 = 113
113 ÷ 3 = 37.6
Overall mark: 38%
In this case, even if the candidate had written a ‘poor’ third answer getting
a mark of 40% their overall mark would be higher than not attempting an
answer at all:
57 + 56 + 40 = 153
153 ÷ 3 = 51
Overall mark: 51%
Note in the example above how the 40% mark, while low, still enables the
candidate to achieve an overall mark in the Lower Second category, which is
in keeping with their first two marks of 57% and 56%. Not answering a third
question would see the candidate lose considerable marks and drop two
whole classes. It could also mean the difference between a pass and a fail.
Candidates are thus strongly advised to give equal attention across the paper,
plan their time accordingly, and attempt to provide three answers of roughly
the same length and as full as possible. Candidates are also reminded that it
is totally unnecessary to copy out the question again into the answer book;
a question number in the margin is sufficient enough, and this will also save
valuable minutes.

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Examiners’ commentaries 2016

EN3035/2035 Augustans and Romantics

General remarks
The examiners’ general observations will be brief. The commentary on
individual questions is extensive, and contains matters of broad principle
as well as detailed indications of what might be expected in response to
particular questions. This year’s batch of papers contained some bright,
perceptive essays, which were a credit to the candidates, and the overall
improvement in results, which has been noted in recent years, was sustained.
Answers that confront the question and are not selective in addressing some
terms of the rubric, or a given quotation, will always be rewarded. By the same
token, answers that use the question as a peg upon which to hang a prepared,
one-size-fits-all account cannot expect to be admired for an ability to focus. As
a positive conclusion, we would like to acknowledge a continuing confidence
in the responses to Question 1, where the demand to be comparative, in
attempting to establish what is characteristic, has been met more consistently.
Therefore, it may appear a little counter-intuitive to see a disproportionate
amount of space devoted to this very exercise. However, we do not believe in
there being too much of a good thing.

Comments on specific questions

Section A
Question 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. Elizabeth Thomas, from The True Effigies of a Certain Squire: Inscribed to Clemena, 1722
In past commentaries, it has been frequently suggested that the titles of
passages are worth scrutinising for clues regarding genre and tone. In this
case, two words seem to merit consideration: ‘Effigies’ and ‘Clemena’. An effigy
is usually a representation of a person, in the form (as the OED has it) of ‘a
sculptured figure or a dummy’. Reference is also made to common phrases,
such as to burn, or to hang ‘in effigy’. Already we have the perception of a
target, possibly a caricature that will be subject to ridicule. Candidates who
drew attention to the theatricality of the description had a good point to
make. The tradition of Restoration Comedy continued well into the 18th
century, and figures such as this ‘Certain Squire’ were typical. Hence, by
association, the title carries more than a hint of satiric intent, not least when
we consider that the ironic strategies of this drama were designed to expose
gender inequalities and the obtuseness of men. Later, gentler, versions
might include Goldsmith’s Tony Lumpkin. When Thomas refers to her cousin
as ‘Clemena’, we are again in familiar territory. The ‘pastoralising’ habit was
characteristic of the time, be it for serious or ironic purposes. In The Rape of the
Lock, the nuanced ‘shepherdesses’, Belinda and Clarissa, are also surrounded
by preening, gauche ‘heroes’. Furthermore, the conjunction of the ‘idealised’

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addressee and the awkward squire carries hints of that mock-heroic irony that
informs so much Augustan writing. Candidates were quick to highlight the
references to the ‘Muse’, to ‘Caesar’ and ‘Marathon’, but whether these details
justify describing the poem as a mock-heroic is a moot point. It is better,
perhaps, to characterise these lines as a satire that employs some mock-heroic
techniques: a suggestion which would profit from examples of a contrasting
vernacular lexicon (for instance, ‘sparables’, ‘doily stuff’, ‘muckenders’). There
was a general sensitivity to the oppressive nature of 18th century patriarchy,
with examples provided from Pope, Fielding and Wortley Montagu. Candidates
felt that while it was possible to find an abundance of misogynistic portraits
of empty-headed women in 18th century writing, there was a counterpoint of
would-be fashionable ‘clowns’, more at home in their stables than in a library,
who were dismissive of, and unnerved by, women’s intellectual ambitions. The
ironic reduction of such figures to a medley of objects (a snuffbox, a golden
watch, a comb, a handkercher) was also deemed to be typical of this satirical
method, as witnessed by Belinda’s dressing table in The Rape.
b. William Melmoth, from Letters of Sir Thomas Fitzosborne on several subjects, 1742–49
Comment upon the title can be brief. A number of candidates noted
Melmoth’s use of a nom de plume, and cited, among other essayists, Addison’s
Sir Roger de Coverley in The Spectator and Steele’s Isaac Bickerstaff in The
Tatler. The suggestion that this was a common satirical ploy seemed worth
making (Bickerstaff had been invented by Swift, after all), but without more
information Melmoth’s intention would remain speculation. There were
occasional misreadings of parts of this piece, but, as suggested in some
discussions, the complexity of dependent clauses, which are characteristic
of this type of periodic prose, provided support to the intended ironic
juxtapositions in the passage. Candidates rightly identified the contemporary
nature of this debate upon the legitimacy of satire, and were quick to highlight
‘indignation’ as one of the declared sources of Swift’s writings. Pope was also
enlisted as a poet who was very concerned to justify his satire on the ground
of his being a ‘friend to virtue’. Typical of this position is his response to a query
about his ‘provocation’. It is, as he says in the Epilogue to the Satires, ‘the strong
Antipathy of Good to Bad’, then, directly to the reader:
‘When Truth or Virtue an Affront endures,
The Affront is mine, my friend, and should be yours’.
Melmoth’s idea that even those who are contemptuous of ‘divine
prohibitions’ might be vulnerable to ‘well-directed ridicule’, is echoed by
Pope when he (vaingloriously) declares:
‘Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to see
Men not afraid of God, afraid of me’.
For further discussion on this theme, we refer candidates to the E0001
Explorations in Literature subject guide (Chapter 5, Introduction:
Contemporary positions).
For a variety of reasons – political, philosophical, literary – the potential for
anarchy associated with satire had made it a nervous vocation, and Melmoth’s
alignment with religious and legislative authority is a common defence. The
more extreme position – that a satirist must needs be a morally scrupulous
individual – was certainly debated, but less easy to sustain. References to
Horace and Juvenal were signposted by most candidates as role models for
aspiring Augustan ironists. The fact that the author felt no need to supply a
translation also marked out the period.

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c. Charlotte Smith, from Beachy Head: with Other Poems, 1807

Most candidates, rightly looking for comparative material amongst
contemporary writers, lighted upon Wordsworth’s verse as the best example.
However, we would suggest that many of the themes and states of being
that are explored by Smith could be mirrored in the work of other Romantic
authors. Comments upon the use of blank verse were, with qualification, to the
point; but it is worth noting that most of the best-regarded Romantic poetry
finds its voice in lyric and ode. There are exceptions, like Keats’ narrative myths
in Endymion and Hyperion, but the long, contemplative poem which invokes
English country life is usually associated with Wordsworth’s The Prelude (and
to a lesser extent, The Excursion). It may be useful to recall the importance
of historical perspective in this sort of exercise by making reference to
Cowper’s The Task, an earlier discursive poem about a writer’s rural existence,
which was also set in blank verse and, like Smith and Wordsworth, spoken
in the first person singular. The subtitle of The Prelude – ‘Growth of a Poet’s
Mind’ – establishes the Romantic connection. Smith sets out on a similar
autobiographical journey, contemplating the idea of her own happiness
by seeing herself (the first person is italicised in line 56) in relation to rustic
children and her own remembered past. This is a world of uncompromised
innocence, where pleasures are instinctual and death unimagined. All too
soon, ‘the village girl’ will be deserted by her feckless lover, and the drumming
boy will become a drummer-boy. Such is the world of ‘experience’ that we
find in Blake and in Wordsworth’s ‘Intimation Ode’. Other conjunctions are
also familiar. Smith contrasts the ‘upland solitudes’ of her youth, where
solitariness was an expression of liberty, with the ‘polluted smoky [...] streets’
that symbolise her adult life where she suffers the loneliness of ‘guiltless exile’.
These are common themes in works like ‘Tintern Abbey’ and Coleridge’s ‘Frost
at Midnight’; and they receive a more apocryphal treatment in Blake’s ‘pastoral’
visions of urban oppression. The suggested ‘sublimity’ of the closing lines,
where the Atlantic waves thundered upon the rocky coast of the Isle of Wight,
was duly noticed.
d. Richard Woodhouse, from a letter to John Taylor, 1818
Some candidates suggested (with commendable boldness) that Woodhouse
presented some confusing overlaps in his attempts to offer precise definitions
in the realm of poetic composition. A particularly sharp insight might
include the point that the construction of such a hierarchy (‘gradations in
poetry and poets’) was a peculiarly ‘Augustan’ habit, although the somewhat
cursory reference to those that ‘reason in poetry’ or are ‘witty’, hinted at a
dismissiveness common to ‘Romantic’ opinions about 18th century verse. The
‘purely descriptive’ was offered with an equal lack of enthusiasm, despite what
is popularly felt to be a Romantic strength, and could be justified from some
of Keats’ famous comments upon the subject: ‘Scenery is fine – but human
nature is finer’ (Letter, 13 March 1818), or ‘descriptions are bad at all times’
(Letter, 27 June 1818). The thematic centre of this piece lay in its attempts to
come to grips with various ideas about the operations of the imagination,
and in this Woodhouse clearly keeps company with the theoretical, as well as
the poetical writings of, especially, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats.
The first examples of the soaring imagination find some close parallels in
Coleridge’s description, in Biographia Literaria, of ‘the occasion of the Lyrical
Ballads’. It had been agreed that Wordsworth was to illuminate mundane lives
in such a way that they became magically more than ‘ordinary’, while Coleridge
would encompass the ‘supernatural’, endowing it with a human truth, which
the readers could recognise in themselves, even if the incidents were beyond
all experience. Woodhouse then seems to suggest an ascent, by way of
what looks like dramatic character creation, to a higher level of imaginative

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identification where the poet loses all sense of personal identity. His own
reference to Keats might prompt a memory of the poet’s desire to submerge
himself in his garden’s wildlife: ‘if a Sparrow come before my Window I take
part in its existince and pick about the Gravel’ (Letter, 22 November 1817), and,
of course, his plaintive longing to escape with a nightingale. The vocabulary
which follows, with allusions to ‘ideal personages’, ‘powers’, ‘essences’, ‘ideas’ and
Shakespeare’s ‘forms of things unknown’, possesses a strong Platonic flavour
and might encourage a candidate to explore both Shelley’s poetry and his
Defence of Poetry, where the imagination becomes a vehicle of transcendence.

Section B
Answer ONE question. For the purposes of this examination, Jane Austen will be deemed a 19th
century author.

Question 2
What qualities have you discovered in the writings of ONE 18th century satirist which have the
power to engage a reader’s interest beyond the immediate time and location of their publication?
A number of candidates were aware of and argued from Fielding’s declaration
that he ‘describe[d] not men but manners; not an individual but a species’
(Joseph Andrews, III, i). It is a quotation that affirms the power of the satirist’s
art to metamorphose particular personalities into representative ‘types’.
The context of Swift’s ‘Modest Proposal’ may have grown out of the political
moment, but the inhumanity of the ‘proposer’ – the economic theoretician
– has a lexicon of cruelty that politely encourages society to feed upon
itself. These are the enduring attitudes of barbarism, which we would all do
well to recognise and resist. In Gulliver’s Travels, there well may be a case for
identifying the Tramecksan and the Slamecksan with the Tories and the Whigs,
and for discovering the doctrinal conflicts between the Catholics and the
Protestants in the egg-cutting preferences of the Big-Endians and the Little-
Endians. However, in general terms, these cameos are about the absurdity
of religious and political tribalism. They survive the centuries as prancing
examples of bigotry, partisanship, and self-interest. Pope’s amphibious
creature, Sporus, is doubtless Lord Hervey (Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot), but it is that
corrupt, two-faced insidiousness which outlives the man to infect the years to
come. Attempts to find specific modern parallels were of limited success.

Question 3
Prudence, of old a sacred term, implied
Virtue, with godlike wisdom for her guide;
But now in general use is known to mean
The stalking-horse of vice, and folly’s screen.
(CHARLES CHURCHILL)
Write an essay on ANY ONE author of the period, whose work concerns itself with the apparently
contradictory meanings of ‘prudence’: a conflict, suggested in Churchill’s lines, between moral
wisdom and self-interest.
One successful approach would be to take, as a starting point, Fielding’s
distinction between the conflicting versions of ‘prudence’ found in Churchill’s
lines. The contrast lay between ‘the Art of Living’ and ‘the Art of Thriving’, such
that, in an ideal world, the perspicacity of the first would be a defence against
the cunning of the second. The point could be made that the contradictory
reading of the same word, which Churchill set out in his couplets, was fairly
typical of the Augustan habit of proceeding through antithesis. An example
might be the opposition of two characters. Tom Jones learns to govern his

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indiscreet sexual appetites, and his reward is possession of Sophia (wisdom).

However, Blifil is ‘prudently’ self-seeking and duplicitous: he is clever but not
wise, and is inevitably unmasked. Fielding’s narratives are structured around
this sort of debate, but his commitment to ‘godlike wisdom’, to a sacred version
of prudence, is never in doubt. Defoe, on the other hand, offers an alternative
perspective in which ‘thriving’ and ‘living’ come ambiguously close to each
other. His characters are located in hostile surroundings where self-interest and
survival become synonymous. The author does not advocate ‘folly’ and ‘vice’,
but he is sensitive to need and admires ingenuity. As he famously says in the
Review and in Moll Flanders, ‘Give me not poverty, lest I steal’.

Question 4
It has been observed that, during this period, ‘the novel appeared as a contribution to a discourse
about the value of women not as financial so much as social assets [and about] what made a
woman desirable’ (W. A. SPECK). Consider the work of ONE writer of the period whose novels could
be said to confirm OR challenge this suggestion.
This question offered a broad platform from which to review various examples
of patriarchal oppression. Again, echoing the comment above, Defoe provided
a contentious voice. His understanding of women’s disadvantaged position in
society was apparent, but the conclusions to be drawn from the experiences
of Moll Flanders remained debatable. Here was a woman exploited from her
first encounter with a man who quickly evaluated her own financial value
in terms of male desire and sex. Her capital worth became her social asset,
and her ambition was to remain the sole shareholder (until she met Jemmy).
Austen’s heroines proved to be the popular choice. It was noted how many of
them were circumscribed by straightened circumstances (the Dashwoods, the
Bennets, Fanny and Anne), a fact which forced upon them the need to offer
a value unrelated to inheritance, and one which would allow them to be true
to themselves. Their narratives explored the attractiveness of intelligence, wit,
vitality and moral discretion in a world driven by masculine acquisitiveness.

Question 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. periodical essays
b. elegiac verse
c. pastoral verse
As ever, it remains difficult to tempt candidates into these specialised areas.
Periodic essays, especially in the 18th century, provided a backcloth of
cultural commentary, which made a connection with many different genres.
Their declared intention of popularising and ‘educating’ brought their
readership closer to the issues being explored by the more demanding authors
of the period. Their ironic tone found echoes in the satire, and their didactic
discussions provided formal contributions for the novel. Elegiac verse might
be described as a niche market; nonetheless, the so-called ‘Graveyard School’,
arising out of Gray’s Elegy, would offer a signpost to the emerging taste for
gothic thrills and the melancholic thread that runs through so many Romantic
veins. Pastoral verse tends to be identified with 18th century rococo, and
hence ignored. However, despite his scorn for such ‘gaudiness’, it is worth
remembering that Wordsworth was also engaged in ‘pastoral’ poetry, albeit
of a different type, as were his fellow Romantics. His subtitle of ‘a Pastoral’,
appended to ‘Michael’, is no accident. Perhaps the reader is invited to supply
the missing epithet, ‘new’.

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Question 6
Discuss the ways in which ONE author attempted to moderate what has been described as ‘the
exploration of tearful neuroses by the proponents of sensibility’ (ANDREW SANDERS).
For whatever reason, Sheridan always outstrips Goldsmith in popularity,
despite such questions rarely being restricted to comic drama. For instance,
The Vicar of Wakefield might be read as a celebration of honest feeling, or a wry
contemplation of emotional excess. The hugely sentimental Man of Feeling by
Mackenzie would be an instructive exemplum of the sorts of target quoted
in the question. In the event, candidates opted for The Rivals, which offers a
delicately balanced counterpoint between the lachrymose and the ironic.

Question 7
Write a critical introduction to the writings of ONE of the following, which engages with the
debate concerning their so-called ‘Augustan’ AND/OR ‘Romantic’ allegiances: Gray, Collins, Smart,
Cowper.
The examiners live in hope, but such questions remain unvisited. The idea of
a ‘critical introduction’ offers a broad canvas, and the suggested debate is the
substance of the course. One day, perhaps.

Question 8
‘During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours our conversations turned
frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader
by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by
the modifying colours of the imagination’ (SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE).
Discuss the poetry of ONE writer who is concerned to explore the relationship between these ‘two
cardinal points’.
Perhaps prompted by the quotation, Wordsworth and Coleridge proved
to be the most popular authors for discussion. A noteworthy exception
was an analysis of Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’, which, it was suggested, is itself
a long meditation on the relationship between the human mind and the
natural world it apprehends. On occasion, essays became too bound up with
demonstrating the descriptive qualities of a poet in the name of ‘truth to
nature’, while neglecting to explore the ‘modifying’ power of the imagination.
Wordsworth’s landscapes are full of visual detail, and this was used in evidence
(although it was too easily assumed that ‘nature’ referred solely to the external
variety). In ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads, he had spoken of the imagination
‘colouring’ ordinary things, in order to present them ‘in an unusual aspect’;
in fact, this had been his brief in the original plan (see comments above at
Question 1d). One example might be had from the ascent of Snowdon (The
Prelude, Bk.14) where mountain-tops emerging from the mist are transmuted
into islands in an ocean, a dramatic metaphor for the imagination itself.
Coleridge, equally, believed in the creative power of perception, and in
‘Dejection’ declares that ‘we receive but what we give/And in our life alone
does nature live’, reflecting Wordsworth’s belief that the world is something
that we ‘half create’ in our perception of it (‘Tintern Abbey’).

Question 9
In The Four Ages of Poetry (1820), Thomas Love Peacock launched an ironic attack on the
pretensions of ‘the Lake Poets’ who, he claimed, ‘wrote verses on a new principle; saw rocks and
rivers in a new light; and remaining studiously ignorant of history, society, and human nature,
cultivated the phantasy only at the expence of the memory and the reason [and] can never make
a philosopher, nor a statesman, nor in any class of life an useful or rational man’. To what extent
would you wish to challenge this indictment? Your discussion should enlist the work of ONE
Romantic poet writing before or after the publication date of Peacock’s essay.

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In so far as Peacock’s wry critique provoked a response from Shelley, it might

be appropriate to turn to the Defence of Poetry to fund a challenge. Peacock is
sceptical of the social value and utility of poetry (and art generally) in an age of
science and fact: or, as Bentham would say, it produces nothing. It recalls Plato’s
mocking suggestion (Republic), that no-one reads Homer to learn carpentry or
generalship. It is an ironic echo, because Shelley, in both the Defence and in his
verse, invokes Plato to express the transcendental nature of poetry. As he says, a
poem deals in the ‘unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind
of the Creator’. Furthermore, ‘poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the
world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar’; and here we
return to the Romantic principles laid out in the previous question. The authors
Peacock has in his sights would insist upon the power of fictionality. Readers are
not instructed in navigation by the Ancient Mariner, nor do they learn garden
design from Kubla Khan, but such works might cause them to agree with Shelley
that ‘the great instrument of moral good is the imagination’.

Section C
Answer ONE question.
Your answer in this section should refer to AT LEAST TWO DIFFERENT authors. For the purposes of
this examination, Jane Austen will be deemed a 19th century author.

Question 10
Write an essay on the ways in which the idea of class mobility was explored in TWO OR MORE works
by DIFFERENT authors of the period.
Predictably, Austen was at the forefront of most discussions. It was noted
that her heroines shared a common context of absent authority figures:
Messrs Dashwood, Bennet, Price, Woodhouse and Elliot having either died or
‘withdrawn’. Furthermore, for a variety of reasons, their economic futures were
uncertain, with the exception of Emma whose wealth encouraged a form of
class mobility by proxy. It would be difficult to deny that such predicaments
were the product of a male-dominated society; however, it would be
injudicious to rewrite the question in terms of patriarchal oppression. A
mother’s desperation to arrange a ‘good’ marriage is easily ridiculed in the
21st century, but one senses in Austen’s portraits of Charlotte Lucas, Marianne
Dashwood and Miss Bates both a sympathy and a warning. Her attitudes
towards ‘mobility’, in particular, are nuanced. The Eltons’ ambitions are
condemned, Harriet luckily comes to see the error of Emma’s aspirations on
her behalf, but Elizabeth’s thought that ‘to be mistress of Pemberley might
be something!’, seems to be approved. Austen’s society is becoming more
fluid, but her perspectives are fairly conservative, and the novels, with the
exception of Persuasion, are resolved in the traditions and orderliness of house
and estate. There is a similar resistance to radical change in Fielding’s fictions,
where bloodlines and inheritance are discovered and reaffirmed. Even Defoe’s
petty-bourgeois arrivistes were more about private desires than social reform:
as has been famously suggested, they wanted to own the world, not change it.

Question 11
‘These [writers] prized the virtues of elegance and proportion, the virtues of a highly mannered
art, not because of any easy complacency about the eventual triumph of sanity and decorum,
but because they everywhere saw the forces of Chaos and Dark Night threatening to overwhelm
them’ (MARTIN C. BATTESTIN). Discuss the works of TWO 18th century satirists in the light of this
observation.
There is, in the work of 18th century satirists, an implicit sense of dystopia,
of an apocalypse waiting in the wings. The locus classicus of this vision is the
closing lines of Pope’s Fourth Book of The Dunciad. Here, the light of creation,
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the Logos, is finally snuffed out by ‘the forces of Chaos and Dark Night’.
Candidates who attempted this question came up with some fine examples
of their own. There was the disorderliness (in every sense of the word) of
Swift’s urban pastorals, the Second Flood of ‘A City Shower’ full of ‘dung, guts
[...] drowned puppies, stinking sprats’, and the nightmare of fricasseed babies
in ‘A Modest Proposal’. Gay’s Trivia was cited as a cityscape of detritus, mud,
violence and corruption, and even Pope’s Rape of the Lock discovered a grim
underworld where wretches are quickly hanged so that the jury might dine
well. This is Chaos, towards which civilization is constantly dragged. The writers’
wit, ironic intelligence, sense of structure, moral discrimination and even the
buttress of iambic couplets, may be society’s last, best hope.

Question 12
Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of ONE OR MORE forms of narrative voice in the prose
writings of TWO authors of the period.
The emergence of ‘the new thing’ – the novel – during this period prompted
experiments in narrative technique and ‘voice’. There were good discussions
of first person narrators, usually Defoe’s, although some candidates tended
to forget that the rubric spoke of ‘strengths and weaknesses’. Moll’s history, in
particular, raised the issue of ‘the unreliable narrator’. It was generally agreed
that first-hand accounts of her dubious escapades created an immediacy
and dramatic present tense that reflected the character’s vitality. However,
when the moral landscape of the narrative was scanned, issues arose. ‘Moll’s
muddle’, as it has been called, lay with the single perspective offered by her
sole voice. In fact, it has been suggested that the reader hears at least three
voices: the self-justifying thief and harlot, the celebratory survivalist, and the
elderly moralist. The technique may lack finesse, or it may accurately reflect
the moral confusions of someone attempting to thrive in a predatory society.
Similar problems exist in Richardson’s Pamela, an epistolary novel whose single
letter-writer too often evades scrutiny. However, such ambiguities are ‘solved’
in Clarissa by the introduction of multiple correspondents. Fielding’s cordial,
ironic omniscient narrator provides a constructive contrast in method. He is no
‘editor’ of others’ histories, but a creator who is glad to have his art on display,
especially when it allows him to tease the reader, provide partial clues, and to
guarantee closure without ever letting on how it will be achieved. There were
references to Austen’s use of ‘free indirect speech’, a sophisticated variant of the
third person, but candidates struggled to demonstrate its effects.

Question 13
To what extent is it possible to distinguish between an Augustan and a Romantic landscape? Your
discussion should be illustrated from the verse of TWO poets of the period.
Most Augustan poetic excursions into the countryside could be gathered
under the general heading of the English georgic. This phrase sets up certain
expectations. Typically for the period there is a classical model, and the poets
who choose to extend this tradition will be exploring contemporary issues in
the light of Virgil’s original. Works like Pope’s Windsor Forest, Thomson’s Seasons,
Philips’s Cyder, and Dyer’s Fleece, come to the landscape with an agenda. They
create, amongst other things, versions of an English Arcadia where Greece and
Rome are deliberately invoked to enhance a vision of peace, plenty, imperial
power, and mercantile endeavour. They are poems of national identity: public
statements rather than a personal aesthetic. The Romantic poets’ response
to rural England introduces a world of personal emotion where external and
internal become blurred. The general vistas of the earlier period, painted in
pastoral and often epic vocabulary, give way to precise, sensuous detail, forays
into the supernatural and sublimely transfigured landscapes. These are easily

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indentified in the works of all the Romantic poets. Such contrasts are distinct,
but it also might be worth considering the extent to which, say, Wordsworth’s
rustic poor bring a political dimension to these scenes.

Question 14
A deep distress hath humaniz’d my soul. (WILLIAM WORDSWORTH). Explore the verse of TWO
Romantic poets whose work might, in whole or in part, be characterised by this quotation.
In his Defence, Shelley claims that, to succeed, a poet must identify with
‘others’, for ‘the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own’:
hence the primacy of the imagination. This is the ‘annihilation’ of the self that
Keats describes (see comments above at Question 1d), and even if his desire
to enter the consciousness of a sparrow on the terrace is a little coy, it is his
power of empathy that causes him to explore the pains of transience and
mortality throughout the great odes. The inadequacies of art and beauty are
distressing, but the fruitful and cyclical visions of ‘To Autumn’ are a reassuring
counterpoint. Some candidates were inclined to catalogue narratives of
misery in Keats and other poets, but remained rather vague with regard to
the claimed humanising effect of such experiences. Wordsworth, in ‘Tintern
Abbey’, can be quite explicit. Much of his poetry is concerned with a sense
of loss when he conjures the intense but fading passions of his youth; yet
in contemplating this loss, he learns ‘the still, sad music of humanity’ and
finds himself in tune with something ‘elevated’ and ‘sublime’. Discovering the
‘humanising’ effect of Coleridge’s alienated figures (the Mariner and Christabel)
would be challenging, but worthwhile.

Question 15
Write an essay on what might be described as a revolt against authority in the work of TWO
authors of the period.
It was once popular to talk of the ‘Romantic Revolution’, and, however much
the phrase simplifies a period, it is the case that many writers perceived
themselves in revolt against various forms of an ancien régime. There
were good commentaries on Blake, whose verse was seen to be in radical
opposition to the political and religious institutions of his time. Mercantile
greed oppressed the innocent and the poor, while love was infected by the
moralists. Authority was persistently life-denying. Strangely, there was less
comment upon Blake’s rejection of literary authority, to be seen in his re-
invention of Biblical pastoral in his ballads and songs at a time when couplets
and classical odes still held sway. The ballad form, with its attendant folk
culture, can also been seen as a radical gesture against formality in the poems
of Wordsworth and Coleridge. For a more complex negotiation between
authority and personal freedom, candidates also successfully enlisted a
number of Austen’s heroines, whose happiness was acknowledged (perhaps
too often) to depend upon compromise.

Question 16
‘A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions,
time and place and number are not’ (PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY). To what extent do the writings of
TWO authors of the period subscribe to this yearning for transcendence?
Candidates seemed to have a confident grasp of the idea of transcendence,
even if, occasionally, the definition was loose enough to include anything with
an upward movement. Shelley’s Defence, the source of the question’s quotation,
was designed to defend poetry against a crude utilitarianism and makes
much of the imagination’s power to access those ‘unchangeable forms’ that
lie at the heart of Platonic philosophy. One such ascent is plotted in Shelley’s
‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, and another informs the poet’s apprehension of
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 Examiners’ commentaries 2016

the mountain in ‘Mont Blanc’, part substance, part idea. Keats’ yearning after
‘the eternal, the infinite’ is apparent in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, and it marks out
the path of his exploration throughout those odes where he attempts to be
reconciled with the unavoidable fact of process and mortality. A different type of
transcendent pathway is trodden in his Hyperion. In ‘Frost at Midnight’, Coleridge
imagines his infant child communing with the natural world where he will
experience ‘the lovely shapes and sounds intelligible/Of that eternal language,
which thy God/Utters’. For a more esoteric, but illuminating expression of such
ideas, we would recommend the lines from Sir John Davies, which Coleridge
quotes at the end of Chapter 14 in Biographia Literaria.

Question 17
Write an essay which explores the significance and treatment of ONE of the following in the work
of TWO writers:
a. order
b. nostalgia
c. horror
Thematic and generic questions of this sort are less popular than might be
expected, given the very open nature of the rubric. Nonetheless, it is worth
pointing out that the request for comment on ‘significance’ and ‘treatment’ is
not the same as asking for a description.
Order: In the most general terms, this is a concept usually associated with
the 18th century. The evidence supplied might include an autocratic political
system, a society committed to class structure, and a literary culture which
was happy to ally itself with an inherited classical tradition. Genre theory
subscribed to the idea of hierarchy; language was subject to the demands
of decorum; and the heroic couplet expressed a sense of desired stability.
An interesting discussion might acknowledge some partial truths in this
description, but then get to grips with the satirists’ perception that such
order was fragile at best, and, at worst, probably tyrannical. There is also the
conundrum that much satire, apparently devoted to reordering, drew its
vitality and success from some very dubious liaisons with Chaos.
Nostalgia: This is a state of mind which seems to emerge in the mid-18th
century, perhaps associated with the elegiac tradition found in a poem like
Gray’s Elegy. As poets turned inward to contemplate their own lives (Cowper,
Wordsworth, Keats) rather than public affairs, the emotional landscape altered.
Childhood, a symbol of innocence, quickly became an image of something
lost, and nostalgia in Romantic verse creates a bridge over which the poetic
imagination can find a way back to the Garden.
Horror: This topic did find favour, and candidates were happy to recreate the
obsessive dread associated with the Gothic novel. As was suggested in the
first sentence, some of the essays fell victim to the descriptive habit. There
was a discussion to be had about the needs being served by the vogue for
Gothic horror. Contemplations of heightened individualism, of a freedom from
regulation, of sexual liberty and even of the tremors created by Continental
revolution were all seen as the source of various neuroses and anxieties being
worked out in this genre. The novels form an interesting tradition, but we close
with a recommendation to consider poetic horrors in Coleridge’s Christabel
and Keats’ ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’.

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