Identifier: traillsocialengl06trai (find matches)
Title: Social England : a record of the progress of the people in religion, laws, learning, arts, industry, commerce, science, literature and manners, from the earliest times to the present day
Year: 1901 (1900s)
Authors: Traill, H. D. (Henry Duff), 1842-1900 Mann, James Saumarez, 1851-
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Publisher: New York : Putnam
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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of readers ; and it was among their interests andoccupations that he sought the material of his art. He has leftthe field of the stronger and more primitive passions, thevotum, timor, ira^ of humanitj-, to others; and it is from thevolujjtas, gavdia, diwursus—the jileasures, ambitions, )iursuitsof society, with the activities they stinudate, the weaknessesthey foster, and the virtues which occasionally redeem them,that he collected the farrago of his books. But among thesehe moves a supreme and unapproachable master; the possessorof a far more limited domain than Dickens, but traversing it ( i.e. the passions of desire, fear, anger. The reference is to Juvenal I., 8.i ) 1865) LITEUATURE. 389 with a far surer foot and surveying it with a far more pene-trating eye. In the second year of our period an unlcnown writerpubHshed under the pseudonym of Currer Bell the remark-able novel Jane Eyre, which at once excited the surprisedadmiration of the critical world. It was followed in 1849 by
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CH.VIILOTTK liUO.NlE.(AJier Ciimjc Tliclmwml, Tl.A.) Shirley, and in i.S.52 by Villette. AVIien the secret of theirauthorship was revealed they were found to be the work ofCharlotte Bronte (1816-55), the eldest of the three daughtersof a Yorkshire clergyman, all of whom, though none of themlived to attain the age of forty, made themselves a name inliterature; the second sister, Emily (1818-48), displaying in Wuthering Heights an amount of power which mightperhaps, if she had lived, have carried her even further thanCharlotte. As it is, however, her elder sisters remains thegreater name, though the far less striking character of her 390 THE IWLE OF THE MIDDLE CLASS. (1846 Mrs.Gaskell. GeorgeEliot. G. H.Lewes. second and third efforts, as compared with her first, suggests thereflection that, brief as was her Hfe, its breAity may not haveill-served her reiJutation. Jane Eyre is after all but aglorified example of the one novel which everybody is said to have in him. It is not quite certa

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