19Th Century Essayists

The ETS makes a big to-do about the figures contained herein. The study books published by Princeton Review and REA handle this subject concisely, so I suggest you look there to find a more adequate treatment of the subject.  To this list, Princeton Review adds Matthew Arnold who I have included with the Romantic poets.

John Ruskin

Rushkin invented the term "pathetica fallacy," so if you see it on the exam, you'll know you're looking at Ruskin.In literary criticism, the pathetic fallacy is the description of inanimate natural objects in a manner that endows them with human emotions, thoughts, sensations, and feelings.

Examples of the pathetic fallacy include: * "The stars will awaken / Though the moon sleep a full hour later" (Percy Bysshe Shelley) * "The fruitful field / Laughs with abundance" (William Cowper) * "Lo, the most excellent sun so calm and haughty" (Walt Whitman) * "Nature abhors a vacuum" (John Ruskin's translation of the well-known Medieval saying natura abhorret a vacuo, in his work Modern Painters.)

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

English philosopher and political economist, was an influential liberal thinker of the 19th century. He was an advocate of utilitarianism. His notable works include:

(1859) On Liberty:

Perhaps the most memorable point made by Mill in this work, and his basis for liberty, is that "Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign". Mill is compelled to say this due to what he calls the "tyranny of the majority" (a line from Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America), wherein through control of etiquette and morality, society is an unelected power that can do horrific things.

(1869) The Subjection of Women: a progressive work in which Mill changes the mistreatment of women from a philosophical, moral, and economic perspective.

"What is poetry" -- This is an essay in which Mill defines poetry athe expression of the self to the self.

John Henry, Cardinal Newman

Newman was widely considered the best writer of prose in his day, as Stephen Daedulus in A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man argues to his peers.

Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Latin, "A defence of one's life") is the classic defence of the religious opinions of John Henry Newman, published in 1864 in response to what he saw as an unwarranted attack on Roman Catholic doctrine by Charles Kingsley.

The Idea of a University -- As the title suggests, in this work Newman addresses the idea of the universityas "the high protecting power of all knowledge and science, of fact and principle, of inquiry and discovery of experiment and speculation."

Thomas Carlyle

Carlyle's major work, Sartor Resartus (meaning 'The tailor re-tailored'), purported to be a commentary on the thought and early life of a German philosopher called Diogenes Teufelsdröckh (which translates as 'god-born devil-shit'), author of a tome entitled "Clothes: their Origin and Influence." Teufelsdröckh's Transcendentalist musings are mulled over by a skeptical English editor who also provides fragmentary biographical material on the philosopher.

Sartor Resartus, published in 1833, was intended to be a new kind of book: simultaneously factual and fictional, serious and satirical, speculative and historical. It ironically commented on its own formal structure (as Tristram Shandy had, long before), while forcing the reader to confront the problem of where 'truth' is to be found. The imaginary "Philosophy of Clothes" holds that meaning is to be derived from phenomena, continually shifting over history, as cultures reconstruct themselves in changing fashions, power-structures, and faith-systems.

A few names to associate with the work:

Blumine Dumbdrudge Hofrath Heuschrecke Weissnichtwo