Most students of Victorian literature know that John Henry Newman had a once prominent younger brother named Francis William, the erudite professor of Latin at University College, London, whose translation of Homer provoked an essay in protest by Matthew Arnold. Few, however, seem aware that there was a third Newman brother named Charles Robert, one year younger than John, the story of whose eccentric life has come to be known in any detail only since 1948, thanks to the researches of Maisie Ward and of Sean O'Faolain. Francis Newman passed it over on one page of his strange little “corrective” book on the Cardinal, calling it a wasted life, better left in silence. John Henry did his best to keep hidden from public curiosity what he called the “aimless, profitless, forlorn” life of his brother, even to the point of buying up from a virtual blackmailer a batch of Charles's letters, after his death in 1884, to prevent their coming to popular attention.

Zola's relation to music has been discussed by various critics and biographers, all of whom readily admit that he was not in any way a technically competent musician. Beyond this obvious fact, they split into two sharply opposed camps, one of which states that, in spite of a transfer of his theatrical ambitions to the lyric theater late in his life, he actually knew little and cared less about the art of music, while the other insists that he did have a genuine interest in music and an innate though untrained sensitivity to it. Both camps are largely biographical in their approach, and in spite of their differences in emphasis and interpretation, they agree on the obvious facts—that as a schoolboy at Aixen-Provence, Zola played a clarinet in the band (in order to make himself eligible for certain special privileges enjoyed by its members), but gave it up after he went to Paris; that when collaborating with the composer Alfred Bruneau on an operatic version of L'AUaque du moulin, in 1893, he bought a piano (or a harmonium); that at about the same time he began to attend concerts, which he had previously ignored; that he questioned his friends Henry Ceard and Bruneau about the mysteries of music and got a good deal of information from them; that his sense of pitch was poor; that his interest, whether great or small, was largely confined to vocal music; and that he was influenced in some way by the ideas and works of Wagner, though opinions as to the date and extent of this influence vary widely.

The first series of Essays in Criticism was one of four works growing directly out of the lectures which Matthew Arnold delivered at Oxford between 1857 and 1867. The so-called “inaugural series,” on the “modern element” in literature, survives only in fragments—one whole lecture and part of another. A second series, on the translation of Homer, was begun even before the first was completed, and the lectures on Celtic literature wound up Arnold's professorship, except for the valedictory “Culture and Its Enemies.” Crowded into the interstices of this ambitious program were the pieces which were to make up the bulk of the Essays in Criticism of 1865.

Mörike's only novel, Maler Nolten, was published in August 1832; the conception of the story dates from 1827; some writing was done in 1828, and the manuscript was finished in 1831. By 1850, probably earlier though not recorded, Mörike began to entertain the idea of revising his novel; and from that time till his death in 1875 he worked on the revision intermittently and in desultory fashion, though, as his correspondence shows, at times he regarded it as his main literary concern. Thus for a quarter of a century the revision of Maler Nolten was on the author's mind. His frequent illnesses and in the latter part of the period the domestic infelicities which eventually resulted in separation from his wife were contributory causes of delay. Doubtless in the main, however, he was hindered by the inherent difficulty of the undertaking. At his death he left the task still unfinished.

In the first edition of Leaves of Grass occur these puzzling lines, kept in the third edition, but later eliminated:

In his Preface to The Princess Casamassima James tells us that “the simplest account” of the origin of this novel is that it “proceeded quite directly … from the habit and interest of walking the streets.” He goes on to tell how his perambulations suggested to him the creation of “some individual sensitive nature or fine mind,” a product of those streets yet capable of profiting from all of the civilization that London afforded—all the “freedom and ease, knowledge and power, money, opportunity and satiety, … but … with every door of approach shut in his face.” In sum, “I arrived so at the history of little Hyacinth Robinson—he sprang up for me out of the London pavement.”

The Promulgation, in 1812, of the Constitution of Cadiz provoked throughout Spain and her domains a bitter controversy between the opponents and the partisans of that liberal and innovative body of legislation. Among the supporters in Mexico City was José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi (1776–1827), who, as soon as the Constitution went into effect there, established a sheet, El Pensador Mexicano (1812–14), with the avowed purpose of defending the new form of government and of praising its liberal provisions, particularly those granting freedom of the press and abolishing the Inquisition. His first article began with an exlamation: “¡Gracias a Dios y la nueva Constitutión que ya nos vamos desimpresionando de algunos errores que nos tenían enterrados nuestros antepasados!” But, in spite of the freedom of the press, the Viceroy ordered his arrest, and some months in jail dampened his enthusiasm; he continued, however, his periodical as well as its successor, the Alacena de Frioleras (1815), with articles of a less controversial nature, until the end of that year. Continually in difficulty with the censors after 1814, when the Constitution was abrogated by Ferdinand VII, he finally limited himself to the writing of fiction until the reestablishment of the Constitution in 1820. During this period he produced four novels, one of which, El Periquillo Sarniento (1816), is his masterpiece. While the characters and setting of this novel are definitely Mexican, with certain autobiographical elements, the mold in which it is cast is that of the Spanish picaresque. Like its prototype in general, the Periquillo is concerned with matters of a purely ethical nature; but this aspect of the novel is less impressive—in contrast, for example, with Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache or the novels of Francisco Santos—than the wealth of ideas in regard to definite reforms that the author believes would contribute to the general welfare. These ideas, interwoven with incidents in the life of a picaro, did not originate with the author but reflect wide reading in many fields. To point out the sources of these ideas, and thereby fathom the intellectual background of Lizardi, is the object of this article.

From one standpoint, the major theme of Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge is not “character is fate” or “man against himself,” but rather it is the conflict between generations. This is a very ancient subject matter, one of the archetypal themes noted by the Jungian literary psychologist Maud Bodkin, who traces it in classical Greek drama and in Shakespeare's Hamlet and King Lear? In Hardy's novel the conflicting generations are represented by Michael Henchard, the middle-aged corn factor and mayor, and Donald Farfrae, the energetic young Scotchman whose two-fold abilities, “the commercial and the romantic” (p. 162), while exercised with the best of intentions, prove deadly to his patron. Because of the ineluctability of this theme, it is necessary that the affection between the two men should turn to hate and that Henchard, as the older, should go under. The special bitterness of Henchard's inevitable failure is perhaps Hardy's characteristically pessimistic contribution. But we might also relate this quality of bitterness to the lack—increasingly in Hardy's time and almost totally in ours—of a generally accepted religious outlook which could transform Henchard's sufferings into a mitigating ritual and his death into a sacrificial symbol. Whereas Lear dies in the bosom of his family, as it were, surrounded by both his living and dead relatives, in full view of an awed and edified audience, Henchard's death is hidden from the eyes of all men except the faithful “fool” Whittle, whose report is necessarily limited to a few concrete particulars. Under the circumstances, Elizabeth–Jane's “what bitterness lies there!” (p. 337) is, at least on one level of the narrative, a final comment which every reader must echo.

In Dickens' novels, characters are cast in detailed and purposeful social situations, and an evaluated social world is created. Yet even those critics who agree roughly that this is so, and agree further on the stature of these novels, disagree markedly as to Dickens' own politics or view of society—disagree in fundamental respects, that is, on what disposition of mind lies behind and shapes these novels. Sometimes the disagreement has in part to do with personal conviction. G. K. Chesterton, a Catholic with mixed politics of his own, bolsters as he can Dickens' orthodoxy. T. A. Jackson, a naive Marxist with insufficient respect for brute fact, attempts to show that Dickens was a Communist in all but name, and “that the really fundamental incompatibility between Dickens and his wife lay in the complete antithesis of their convictions about contemporary society as a whole.”

Few critics have ever been very happy with the Excursion. Even those who support or justify Wordworth's turn to traditional attitudes have read it with no apparent enthusiasm or care. And for most modern readers who come to it after reading the Prelude, the Excursion can be no more than a painful anticlimax. It is hard for them not to suffer a sense of shock as they read its pious platitudes and realize that the poem was originally intended to embody and develop the fresh perceptions of the opening books of the Prelude. No wonder modern critics have been almost obsessed by the question: what happened to cause the narrowing and hardening of Wordsworth's attitudes? Why this timid compromise with orthodoxy rather than a bolder exploration of naturalism? And there have been nearly as many suggestions as critics. Perhaps because they have too readily accepted the Fenwick notes and taken the poem for granted as reflecting only the results of a change in the poet's attitudes, they have tended to neglect or to misinterpret the record in the poem itself of the state of mind which helped cause the change.