English Literature in Contradiction

• Published in: English literature in transition, 1880-1920 Vol. 63; no. 4; pp. 644 - 650
• Main Author: Gagnier, Regenia
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Greensboro ELT Press 01.01.2020
• Subjects: 19th century; Aesthetics; American literature; Armed forces; Children & youth; Childrens literature; English as a second language instruction; English literature; Ewing, Juliana Horatia Gatty (1841-1885); Hinduism; Melville, Herman (1819-1891); Modernization; Naturalism; Realism; Twain, Mark (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835-1910); Writers; United Kingdom > UK
• ISSN: 0013-8339

Part II uses this occasion, the final volume of ELT, to reflect on the internal complexities of the Transition Period: humanitarianism and empire; Aesthetes, Naturalists, realists; micro and macro; Christian chivalry and race domination; moralism and immorality. Aunt Judy's Magazine (1866-1885), the popular organ of children's literature edited first by her mother Margaret Gatty and then by Ewing and her sister, Horatia Eden, also published the nineteenth century's preeminent illustrators Randolf Caldecott and George Cruikshank as well as writers as popular and seemingly timeless as Hans Christian Andersen and Lewis Carroll. The main reason Ewing's symbols-of topaz-eyed toads, noble soldiers, gardeners who gratuitously sow flower seeds throughout the countryside, obsessive gift-givers, and deluded little girls and their mamas-work themselves deep into our memories is due to her realism, her meticulous observation of everyday life among ordinary people and their environments on the Yorkshire moors, what she called the "small facts" that Dillingham believes influenced the reliably observant narrators in Kipling. The British empire, from Ewing's Christian emphasis on the value of every individual soul, no matter how humble, to Wilde's "Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul" in The Picture of Dorian Gray, affected most cultures in its purview, for good and/or ill.