All

Alice's Adventures in WonderlandBy Lewis CarrollBook Summary The novel is composed of twelve brief chapters; it can be read in an afternoon. Each of the brief chapters, furthermore, is divided into small, individual, almost isolated episodes. And the story begins with Alice and her sister sitting on the bank of a river reading a book which has no pictures or dialogue in it. " . . . and what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?" Thus, we find many pictures and read much dialogue (although very little of it makes sense) in this novel. After introducing us to one of the creatures in Wonderland, the Gryphon, for instance, the narrator tells us, "If you don't know what a Gryphon is, look at the picture." As noted earlier, Wonderland is filled with strange animals, and Alice's encounters with these creatures, all of whom engage her in conversations, confuse her even more whenever she meets yet another inhabitant of this strange country. Slowly losing interest in her sister's book, Alice catches sight of a white rabbit. However, he is not merely a rabbit; he will be the "White Rabbit," a major character in the novel. In this first paragraph, then, we learn about the protagonist, Alice, her age, her temperament, and the setting and the mood of the story. In a dream, Alice has escaped from the dull and boring and prosaic world of adulthood — a world of dull prose and pictureless experiences; she has entered what seems to be a confusing, but perpetual springtime of physical, if often terrifying, immediacy. The White Rabbit wears a waistcoat, walks upright, speaks English, and is worrying over the time on his pocket watch. Alice follows him simply because she is very curious about him. And very soon she finds herself falling down a deep tunnel. For a few minutes, she is frightened; the experience of falling disorients her. Soon, however, she realizes that she is not falling fast; instead, she is falling in a slow, almost floating descent. As she falls, she notices that the tunnel walls are lined with cupboards, bookshelves, maps, and paintings. She takes a jar of orange marmalade off a shelf. But finding the jar empty, she replaces it on a lower shelf, as though she were trying to maintain a sense of some propriety — especially in this situation of absolute uncertainty. As she reflects on the marmalade jar, she says that had she dropped the jar, she might have killed someone below. Alice is clearly a self-reflective young girl — and she's also relatively calm; her thinking reveals a curiously mature mind at times. But like an ordinary little girl, she feels homesick for her cat, Dinah. In that respect, she is in sharp contrast with conventional child heroines of the time. Although Alice may be curious and sometimes bewildered, she is never too nice or too naughty. But she is always aware of her class-status as a "lady." At one point, she even fears that some of Wonderland's creatures have confused her for a servant, as when the White Rabbit thinks that she is his housekeeper, Mary Ann, and orders Alice to fetch his gloves and fan. Thus, in Chapter I, Carroll prepares us for Alice's first major confrontation with absolute chaos. And note that Alice's literal-minded reaction to the impossible is always considered absurd here in Wonderland; it is laughable, yet it is her only way of coping. As she falls through the rabbit-hole, for instance, she wonders what latitude or longitude she has arrived at. This is humorous and ridiculous because such measurements — if one stops to think about it — are meaningless words to a seven-year-old girl, and they are certainly meaningless measurements of anything underground. In Chapter II, Alice finds herself still in the long passageway, and the White Rabbit appears and goes off into a long, low hall full of locked doors. Behind one very small door, Alice remembers that there is "the loveliest garden you ever saw" (remember, she saw this in Chapter I), but now she has drunk a liquid that has made her too large to squeeze even her head through the doorway of the garden. She wishes that she could fold herself up like a telescope and enter. This wish becomes possible when she finds a shrinking potion and a key to the door. The potion reduces her to ten inches high, but she forgets to take the key with her (!) before shrinking, and now the table is too high for her to reach the key. To any young child, this is silly and something to be laughed at, but on another level, there's an element of fear; for children, the predictable proportions of things are important matters of survival. Yet here in Wonderland, things change — for no known reason — thus, logic has lost all its validity. Then Alice eats a cake that she finds, and her neck shoots up until it resembles a giraffe's. Suddenly, she is a distorted nine feet tall! Clearly, her ability to change size has been a mixed blessing. In despair, she asks, "Who in the world am I?" This is a key question. Meanwhile, the rapid, haphazard nature of Alice's physical and emotional changes has created a dangerous pool of tears that almost causes her to drown when she shrinks again. Why has she shrunk? She realizes that she has been holding the White Rabbit's lost white gloves and fan — therefore, it mustbe the magic of

the fan that is causing her to shrink to almost nothingness. She saves herself by instantly dropping the fan. But now she is desperate; in vain, she searches her mind for something to make sense out of all this illogical chaos, something like arithmetic and geography, subjects that are solid, lasting, and rational. But even they seem to be confused because no matter how much she recites their rules, nothing helps. At the close of this chapter, she is swimming desperately in a pool of her own tears, alongside a mouse and other chattering creatures that have suddenly, somehow, appeared. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is full of parody and satire. And in Chapter III, Victorian history is Carroll's target. The mouse offers to dry the other creatures and Alice by telling them a very dry history of England. Then, Carroll attacks politics: the Dodo organizes a Caucus-race, a special race in which every participant wins a prize. Alice then learns the mouse's sad tale as Carroll's editor narrates it on the page in the shape of a mouse's very narrow, S-shaped tail. The assembled, unearthly creatures cannot accept ordinary language, and so Alice experiences, again, absolute bafflement; this is linguistic and semantic disaster. Indeed, much of the humor of this chapter is based on Alice's reactions to the collapse of three above-ground assumptions: predictable growth, an absolute distinction between animals and humans, and an identity that remains constant. We might also add to the concept of a constancy of identity a conformity of word usage. But in Wonderland, Alice's previous identity and the very concept of a permanent identity has repeatedly been destroyed, just as the principles of above-ground are contradicted everywhere; here in Wonderland, such things as space, size, and even arithmetic are shown to have no consistent laws. In Chapter IV, the confusion of identity continues. The White Rabbit insists that Alice fetch him his gloves and his fan. Somehow, he thinks that Alice is his servant, and Alice, instead of objecting to his confusion, passively accepts her new role, just as she would obey an adult ordering her about above-ground. On this day when everything has gone wrong, she feels absolutely defeated. In the rabbit's house, Alice finds and drinks another growth potion. This time, however, she becomes so enormous that she fills up the room so entirely that she can't get out. These continuing changes in size illustrate her confused, rapid identity crisis and her continuous perplexity. After repulsing the rabbit's manservant, young Bill, a Lizard (who is trying to evict her), Alice notices that pebbles that are being thrown at her through a window are turning into cakes. Upon eating one of them, she shrinks until she is small enough to escape the rabbit's house and hide in a thick wood. In Chapter V, "Advice From a Caterpillar," Alice meets a rude Caterpillar; pompously and dogmatically, he states that she must keep her temper — which is even more confusing to her for she is a little irritable because she simply cannot make any sense in this world of Wonderland. Alice then becomes more polite, but the Caterpillar only sharpens his already very short, brusque replies. In Wonderland, there are obviously no conventional rules of etiquette. Thus, Alice's attempt at politeness and the observance of social niceties are still frustrated attempts of hers to react as well as she can to very unconventional behavior—at least, it's certainly unconventional according to the rules that she learned above-ground. Later, Alice suffers another bout of "giraffe's neck" from nibbling one side of the mushroom that the Caterpillar was sitting on. The effect of this spurt upward causes her to be mistaken for an egg-eating serpent by an angry, vicious pigeon. In Chapters VI and VII, Alice meets the foul-tempered Duchess, a baby that slowly changes into a pig, the famous, grinning Cheshire-Cat, the March Hare, the Mad Hatter, and the very, very sleepy Dormouse. The latter three are literally trapped (although they don't know it) in a time-warp — trapped in a perpetualtime when tea is being forever served. Life is one long tea-party, and this episode is Carroll's assault on the notion of time. At the tea-party, it is always teatime; the Mad Hatter's watch tells the day of the year, but not the time since it is always six o'clock. At this point, it is important that you notice a key aspect of Wonderland; here, all these creatures treat Alice (and her reactions) as though she is insane — and as though they are sane! In addition, when they are not condescending to her or severely criticizing her, the creatures continually contradict her. And Alice passively presumes the fault to be hers — in almost every case — because all of the creatures act as though their madness is normal and not at all unusual. It is the logical Alice who is the queer one. The chapter ends with Alice at last entering the garden by eating more of the mushroom that the Caterpillar was sitting on. Alice is now about a foot tall. Chapters VIII to X introduce Alice to the most grimly evil and most irrational people (and actions) in the novel. Alice meets the sovereigns of Wonderland, who display a perversely hilarious rudeness not matched by anyone except possibly by the old screaming Duchess. The garden is inhabited by playing cards (with

arms and legs and heads),who are ruled over by the barbarous Queen of Hearts. The Queen's constant refrain and response to seemingly all situations is: "Off with their heads!" This beautiful garden, Alice discovers, is the Queen's private croquet ground, and the Queen matter-of-factly orders Alice to play croquet. Alice's confusion now turns to fear. Then she meets the ugly Duchess again, as well as the White Rabbit, the Cheshire-Cat, and a Gryphon introduces her to a Mock Turtle, who sings her a sad tale of his mock (empty) education; then the Mock Turtle teaches her and the Gryphon a dance called the 'LobsterQuadrille." Chapters XI and XII concern the trial of the Knave of Hearts. Here, Alice plays a heroic role at the trial, and she emerges from Wonderland and awakens to reality. The last two chapters represent the overthrow of Wonderland and Alice's triumphant rebellion against the mayhem and madness that she experienced while she was lost, for awhile, in the strange world of Wonderland. This story is characterized, first of all, by Alice's unthinking, irrational, and heedless jumping down the rabbit-hole, an act which is at once superhuman and beyond human experience — but Alice does it. And once we accept this premise, we are ready for the rest of the absurdities of Wonderland and Alice's attempts to understand it and, finally, to escape from it. Confusion begins almost immediately because Alice tries to use her world of knowledge from the adult world above-ground in order to understand this new world. Wonderland, however, is a lawless world of deepest, bizarre dream unconsciousness, and Alice's journey through it is a metaphorical search for experience. What she discovers in her dream, though, is a more meaningful and terrifying world than most conscious acts of intelligence would ever lead her to. Hence, "Who in the world am I?" is Alice's constant, confused refrain, one which people "above-ground" ask themselves many, many times throughout their lifetimes. Throughout the story, Alice is confronted with the problem of shifting identity, as well as being confronted with the anarchy and by the cruelty of Wonderland. When Alice physically shrinks in size, she is never really small enough to hide from the disagreeable creatures that she meets; yet when she grows to adult or to even larger size, she is still not large enough to command authority. "There are things inAlice," writes critic William Empson, "that would give Freud the creeps." Often we find poor Alice (and she is often described as being either "poor" or "curious") in tears over something that the adult reader finds comic. And "poor Alice" is on the verge of tears most of the time. When she rarely prepares to laugh, she is usually checked by the morbid, humorless types of creatures whom she encounters in Wonderland. Not even the smiling Cheshire-Cat is kind to her. Such a hostile breakdown of the ordinary world is neverfunny to the child, however comic it might appear to adults. But then Wonderland would not be so amusing to us except in terms of its sheer, unabated madness. One of the central concerns of Alice is the subject of growing up — the anxieties and the mysteries of personal identity as one matures. When Alice finds her neck elongated, everything, in her words, becomes "queer"; again, she is uncertain who she is. As is the case with most children, Alice's identity depends upon her control of her body. Until now, Alice's life has been very structured; now her life shifts; it becomes fragmented until it ends with a nightmarish awakening. Throughout the novel, Alice is filled with unconscious feelings of morbidity, physical disgrace, unfairness, and bizarre feelings about bodily functions. Everywhere there is the absurd, unexplainable notion of death and the absolute meaninglessness of death and life. Alice's final triumph occurs when she outgrows nonsense. In response to the Queen's cry at the Knave's trial: "sentence first — verdict afterward," Alice responds: "Stuff and nonsense! Who cares for you?You're nothing but a pack of cards!" At last, Alice takes control of her life and her growth toward maturity by shattering and scattering the absurdity of the playing cards and the silly little creatures who are less rational than she is. In waking from her nightmare, she realizes that reason can oppose nonsense, and that it can — and did — win. And now that the dream of chaos is over, she can say, from her distance above-ground, "It was a curious dream," but then she skips off thinking that — for a strange moment — what a wonderful dream it was.

Character AnalysisTom Sawyer As the title of the novel suggests, Tom Sawyer is the central character of the novel. Tom appears in almost every scene as the chief character. The one major exception occurs when Tom and Becky are lost in McDougal's Cave and the focus of the novel switches to Huck Finn's search for Injun Joe. Central to Tom's character is his age. Twain deliberately did not specify his age. For many readers, Tom's age fluctuates from scene to scene. Most readers like to view Tom's age as approaching puberty--around eleven or twelve years old. If he were younger, he would not be so interested in Becky Thatcher. His fondness for Becky, while still marked by his youth (turning somersaults and otherwise acting foolish to get her attention, passing "love notes" back and forth in school, and so on), exhibits a caring and maturity that goes beyond only "puppy love." Consider, for example, his protective attitude toward her when he took the blame and punishment for her and how he cared for her in the cave episode. Tom's character is a dynamic one, that is he moves from enjoyment in the most famous of boyhood games--playing "Indians and Chiefs," pretending to be Robin Hood, and so on--to actions that require a high degree of moral integrity. Consider, for example, his highly moral decision to break the boyish oath he took and to reveal Injun Joe's guilt in murdering Dr. Robinson--an act that freed an innocent man and placed Tom, himself, in jeopardy. Most readers then choose to see Tom as a dynamic character who occasionally reverts to childish pranks, but one who essentially moves from early childish endeavors and, when called upon to do so, matures to the point where he can make highly moral decisions and commitments, as he did in revealing Injun Joe's guilt and in protecting Becky while lost in the cave. Character Analysis Injun Joe Next to Tom Sawyer, Injun Joe is the most important character in the novel. During a boy's maturation, he must sometimes encounter evil in its most drastic form, and it is through Tom's reactions to Injun Joe that we most clearly see Tom's growth from a boy into a young man. Injun Joe is a thieving, dishonest, wicked person who achieves most of his evil goals because he is also clever and resourceful. He kills young doctor Robinson without qualms and for no discernible reason except for pure evil pleasure. He frames old Muff Potter, and he is shrewd enough to make the townspeople believe his story is true. When proof of his part in the murder is about to be revealed, he reacts quickly and decisively at the trial: He takes immediate action and jumps out the window and escapes and cannot be found by the search parties. In addition, his reputation is such than none of the citizens will confront him with his evil. Although all the citizens of St. Petersburg know that he is evil, each is too frightened to confront him because they, like Tom and Huck, know that he will retaliate in a violent manner. Injun Joe is a static character, that is, he is the same at the end as he is in the beginning. He does not change through the course of the events in which he is involved. He is the essence of evil when we first see him murdering Dr. Robinson and framing Muff Potter for the crime, and he remains the essence of evil throughout. Consider, for example, his plan to mutilate the Widow Douglas in retaliation for something her late husband did years earlier. Injun Joe is central to the novel's primary adventure and appears in some of the most important scenes in the novel: He is first seen murdering Dr. Robinson and framing the innocent Muff. He flees justice at Muff Potter's trial. He is the central figure in the search for buried treasure; he shows up, disguised as a deaf and mute Spaniard, in a haunted house where Tom and Huck are hiding upstairs. Later, he displays his extreme cruelty as seen in his plans to revenge himself on the Widow Douglas. When he threatens to kill his partner if the latter refuses to help him mutilate Widow Douglas, he simply reinforces his evilness. Tom encounters Injun Joe in the cave, where he is finally trapped with his ill-gained gold and dies a befitting but horrible death. Character Analysis Huck Finn The adults look upon Huck Finn as a disgrace and as a bad influence upon their sons and daughters. The youngsters look at him with envy because he has complete freedom to do whatever he likes. His only living

relative is his father (Pap) who is the town drunkard and absent most of the time. When Pap is present, he uses Huck as a punching bag. Huck has no formal education; therefore, he looks to Tom and his booklearning as superior in intelligence to his own common sense. He admires Tom's fanciful notions about how to play games and readily joins in and is content to let Tom be the leader while he himself plays the lesser parts. Huck's only clothes are the worn-out rags that others have discarded and that seldom fit him. He lives without bathing except in the Mississippi River during warm weather, has no bed to sleep in, and no regular food--only that which he can obtain by his own wits. He does not attend school or church, and he has no regular chores to perform. Because he is completely free to do anything he likes, boys admire him, and all the boys enjoy his company. Although Tom is the central or most dynamic character in the novel and the one who changes the most, we should not dismiss the change that occurs in Huck Finn. Huck is an outcast, and he conducts himself as an outcast. Until Mr. Jones the Welshman invites and welcomes Huck into his home, Huck has never been invited into anyone's house. He is realistic, knowing that he does not belong. Because he exists on the periphery of society, Huck's character acts as a sort of moral commentator on society--a role he resumes in Twain's great American masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Nevertheless, when the outward layers and superficial forms of society are stripped away, the reader sees another dimension of Huck's character revealed. Near the end of the novel he proves his nobility when he risks his own life to protect the Widow Douglas, and unlike the typical boy, he does not want praise or recognition. Nevertheless, Huck is very uncomfortable living in a decent house, sleeping in a good bed, wearing decent clothes and shoes, eating good food, and not being allowed to curse, swear, or smoke. Huck is centrally involved in the Muff Potter story, the Jackson's Island adventure, and the story of Injun Joe and the treasure. And it is he who stops Injun Joe from mutilating the Widow Douglas. These final actions win the admiration of the community that had earlier spurned him. Character AnalysisBecky Thatcher Becky is not a well-developed character. Instead she is the symbol of the beautiful, unapproachable girl--"a lovely little blue-eyed creature with yellow hair plaited into two long tails, white summer frock and embroidered pantalettes." Her striking looks capture Tom immediately. Yet even though she is not a fully developed character, her influence on Tom Sawyer is immense, and it is this outward effect on Tom that is important. Tom's attraction to Becky is one of the charms of the novel. It is the typical case of puppy love and infatuation. It exposes the more mature side of Tom's character. Becky is very pretty, proud, and jealous, and she seems to appreciate Tom's devotion only after he allows himself to be punished in her stead. When she and Tom are lost in the cave, however, we see that she is not strictly a static character, that is one who never changes. To the contrary, Becky is indeed worthy of the affections that Tom showers on her. Although fearful of death in the cave, she fully trusts Tom and does not blame him for their terrible predicament. She actually shows more courage and stamina than the reader would have expected under the circumstances as she faces death with a serene bravery.

Introduction The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, first published in 1876, is a child's adventure story; it is also, however, the story of a young boy's transition into a young man. In some ways, it is a bildungsroman, a novel whose principle subject is the moral, psychological, and intellectual development of a youthful main character. It is not a true bildungsroman, however, because Twain did not take Tom into full manhood. One of America's best-loved tales,Tom Sawyer has a double appeal. First, it appeals to the young adolescent as the exciting adventures of a typical boy during the mid-nineteenth century, adventures that are still intriguing and delightful because they appeal to the basic instincts of nearly all young people, regardless of time or culture. Second, the novel appeals to the adult reader who looks back on his or her own childhood with fond reminiscences. In fact, in his preface to the first edition, Twain wrote, "Although my book is intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and girls el part of my plan has been to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and

what they felt and thought." Thus, the novel is a combination of the past and the present, of the well-remembered events from childhood told in such a way as to evoke remembrances in the adult mind. Whether or not one has read the novel, many of the scenes are familiar and have become a part of our cultural heritage: Consider for example, the scene in which Tom manipulates others to paint a fence he himself was to have painted, the scene with Tom and Becky lost in the cave, and the scene of the boys in the graveyard. Twain captures the essence of childhood, with all its excitement, fear, and mischievousness. Likewise, the characters--Tom himself, Becky Thatcher, Huck Finn, Injun Joe, and Aunt Polly--have become part of our American heritage. Although Tom Sawyer is set in a small town along the western frontier on the banks of the legendary Mississippi River sometime during the 1840s, readers from all parts of the world respond to the various adventures experienced by Tom and his band of friends. The appeal of the novel lies mostly in Twain's ability to capture--or recapture--universal experiences and dreams and fears of childhood. Structure and Setting of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer In terms of the novel's structure, some critics have dismissed it as being simply a series of episodes. And it is true that there are many seemingly extraneous scenes; nevertheless, each scene contributes to building a broad picture of the lives of these youths. In the broadest sense, the novel concentrates basically on Tom's--and to a lesser degree, Huck's--development from carefree childish behavior to one that is filled with mature responsibility. Furthermore, the primary adventure--which features the murder the boys witness and its aftermath--provides a single event that begins in the graveyard and runs throughout the plot of lesser adventures. The lesser adventures are more episodic, which is typically Twain. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for example, is a series of episodes connected by the adventure to free the slave Jim. Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, a dusty, quiet town built on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River about eighty miles north of St. Louis. This is the town--renamed St. Petersburg in the novel--that Tom and Huck and the other characters inhabit. The Jackson's Island of Tom Sawyer (which also appears in Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) is an actual island located just south of the town, close to the Illinois side of the river. The cave that Injun Joe inhabited still exists, as do the houses that the Widow Douglas and Aunt Polly supposedly inhabited. Twain's Hannibal was surrounded by large forests which Twain himself knew as a child and in which his characters Tom Sawyer and Joe Harper often play "Indians and Chiefs." The steamboats that passed daily were the fascination of the town, and Tom and Huck would watch their comings and goings from the bluff overlooking the Mississippi. The Satire of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Twain does not confine himself to telling a simple children's story. He is, as always, the satirist and commentator on the foibles of human nature. As the authorial commentator, Twain often steps in and comments on the absurdity of human nature. In Tom Sawyer, he is content with mild admonitions about the human race. For example, after Tom has tricked the other boys into painting the fence for him, the voice of Twain, the author, points out the gullibility of man: ". . . that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain." There are stronger satires. Twain is constantly satirizing the hypocrisy found in many religious observances. For example, in the Sunday school episode, there are aspects of religion satirized, as Twain points out that one boy had memorized so many verses of the Bible so as to win prizes--more Bibles elegantly illustrated--that "the strain upon his mental faculties was too great, and he was little better than an idiot from that day forward." The adults' reaction to Injun Joe and his malevolence is a typical Twain commentary on society. The adults create petitions to free Joe who has already killed, so it was believed, five "citizens of the village, but what of that? If he had been Satan himself there would have been plenty of weaklings ready to scribble their names to a pardon petition, and drip a tear on it from their permanently impaired and leaky waterworks." Twain criticizes the adult attitudes and behaviors throughout the novel. That is part of the conflict: the maturation of a youth (Tom) into adulthood conflicting with the disapproval of the adult behaviors that exist. It is this double vision that raises the novel above the level of a boy's adventure story. Back to Top

Tom Sawyer The main character of the novel. Everything revolves around him, and, except for a few brief chapters, he is present in every chapter. Aunt Polly Tom's aunt and legal guardian. She loves Tom dearly, but she does not know how to control him. Sidney Tom's half brother who plays the role of the obedient boy but who is, in reality, a sneak and a tattletale. Mary Tom's cousin. She likes Tom very much but wants to change him and resorts to bribing him to be good. Becky Thatcher The pretty new girl to whom Tom is attracted. When trapped in the cave, she proves to be resolute and worthy of Tom's affections. Huckleberry Finn (Huck) The son of the town drunk, Huck has been the outcast from society his entire life. The adults look upon him as a disgrace and a bad influence; the youngsters look at him with envy because he has complete freedom to do whatever he likes. Widow Douglas The wealthiest person in the town, she is good, kindhearted, and generous. Because of her nature, Injun Joe's planned revenge--mutilating her--becomes that much more horrible. She is saved by the activities of Huck Finn and becomes his guardian. Injun Joe He is the villain, the essence of evil in the novel. Muff Potter The harmless old drunk who is framed for Dr. Robinson's murder (which was actually committed by Injun Joe). Joe Harper Tom's closest friend and second in command in Tom's adventures. He is not as clever as Tom is, nor is he the leader that Tom is. On Jackson's Island, Joe is the first to want to return to the security of home. Judge Thatcher (and Mrs. Thatcher) Becky's parents who are highly esteemed members of the community. The Judge uses his authority to seal up the opening to the cave to protect other youngsters and, in doing so, inadvertently seals up Injun Joe. Mr. Dobbins The schoolmaster. At the end of the school year, the entire school conspires to play a trick on him. Mr. Walters The Sunday school superintendent who is overly dedicated to his job. The Reverend Mr. Sprague The pastor of the village church. Alfred Temple A new boy from St. Louis. Becky uses him to make Tom jealous. Willie Mufferson The "model boy" for all of the parents and a despicable creature to all the boys. Amy Lawrence Tom's sweetheart--until he meets Becky Thatcher. Dr. Robinson The young doctor who is murdered while trying to obtain a body for medical studies. Mr. Jones (or the Welshman) He and his sons are instrumental in saving the Widow Douglas from the vicious Injun Joe.

Full Synopsis Whilst heavily pregnant with him, David Copperfield’s widowed mother receives an unexpected visit at her home in Norfolk from her late husband’s aunt, Betsey Trotwood. Trotwood, however, departs in disgust when the baby turns out to be male. David’s early childhood is idyllic, and he is the apple of the eyes of his weak-willed, silly, pretty mother and the family’s devoted servant Clara Peggotty. Their happiness is shattered when Mrs. Copperfieldstarts to accept the attentions of the grim Edward Murdstone. David is packed off for a holiday at Yarmouth with Peggotty’s relations, who live on the beach in an upturned ship that fascinates him. Her family consists of Daniel, a kindly fisherman, his niece Emily (known as Little Em’ly), her cousin Ham and the comically pessimistic Mrs. Gummidge. David develops a childish love for Little Em’ly. Upon returning home David is dismayed to learn that his mother is now Mrs. Murdstone. Murdstone is extremely strict and terrifies David. His sister Jane Murdstone becomes housekeeper and is similarly stern and forbidding. When young David fails to fulfil his stepfather’s demands in maths lessons, he bites his hand and is imprisoned in his room for five days before being packed off to Salem House school in London. Barkis, the coachman who drives him there, is smitten by Peggotty and asks David to convey to her the cryptic message "Barkis is willin'". David is miserable at Salem House, which is run by the sadistic Mr. Creakle, who relies largely upon the rod for disciplining his charges. David quickly falls under the spell of an arrogant, charismatic older boy called James Steerforth and also befriends the hapless and victimised Tommy Traddles, a target for Steerforth’s bullying. During his second term David learns that his mother has died in childbirth, and that Peggotty has been sacked. She accepts Barkis’s proposals of marriage. David, meanwhile, is promptly removed from Salem House and put to work in Murdstone’s warehouse. At this time of loneliness and humiliation his only comfort comes from the shabby family with whom he lodges, the Micawbers. Wilkins Micawber is incapable of financial responsibility, buoyed only by a constant conviction that "something will turn up". Mrs. Micawber supports him unreservedly and constantly vows never to leave him. When the Micawbers leave London, David’s unhappiness becomes such that he runs away in the hope of finding his greataunt in Dover. En route he is beset with bad luck, and is reduced to selling his clothes to buy food. Eventually he tramps exhaustedly up to Trotwood’s front door. She is astounded to see him and, despite an initially frosty manner, soon shows herself to be soft-hearted. Taking into consideration the advice of her simple-minded lodgerMr. Dick, she decides to fight David’s stepfather for custody of him. Following a triumphant interview with the Murdstones, this is achieved. David is now sent to a school in Canterbury, under the headmastership of the kindly Dr. Strong. Here he lodges with Mr. Wickfield (a solicitor) and his beautiful daughter Agnes. He also meets the repulsively self-effacing clerkUriah Heep, whose mantra-like professions of humility conceal ruthless calculation. Heep steadily asserts himself over the mildly bibulous Wickfield, and is deeply disliked upon first sight by David. Leaving the school, David meets and befriends Steerforth again, and visits Mrs. Steerforth’s home in Highgate, where he encounters the oddly spiteful and bitter Rosa Dartle, her paid companion. David and Steerforth visit Yarmouth at the former’s instigation, and find Ham and Little Em’ly celebrating their engagement. Steerforth is universally liked there, concealing his contempt for such simple, uneducated folk under a slick veneer of charm. He is attracted to Little Em’ly, who has grown up to be beautiful. David resists Agnes Wickfield’s advice to steer well clear of Steerforth. Back in London David again encounters Traddles, who is now reading for the bar and lodging with the Micawbers. Opting to become a solicitor, David is articled to the firm of Spenlow and Jorkins in the city at Trotwood’s expense. He falls in love at first sight with Mr. Spenlow’s flighty daughter Dora, whose chaperone is none other than Miss Murdstone. Hearing that Barkis has fallen seriously ill, David returns to Yarmouth. Barkis dies, and then Steerforth elopes with Little Em’ly. Vowing not to rest until he succeeds, Daniel Peggotty sets off to travel the world in search of her. Visiting the steely Mrs. Steerforth together, Daniel and David are told flatly that a marriage between Em’ly and Steerforth will never receive her sanction. During the visit Dartle demonstrates her violent and still unexplained temper. Meanwhile Betsey Trotwood reveals to David that she has suddenly lost all of her money, which was invested with Wickfield. As

result David is obliged to resign his articles. He promptly finds work, however, as secretary to Dr. Strong. Micawber also finds work, as clerk to the firm of Wickfield and Heep, the latter having slithered into partnership. Heep reveals designs on Agnes that enrage David. Spenlow dies suddenly and David becomes engaged to Dora after a comic courtship largely negotiated by her excitable friend Julia Mills. After initial bliss their marriage begins to founder, as David increasingly observes signs of petulance and immaturity in his young bride. Meanwhile, with the assistance of the prostitute Martha Endell, Daniel and David locate Little Em’ly in London. She has found her way back to England from the continent where Steerforth, who has unsuccessfully tried to palm her off onto his sinister, inscrutable manservant Littimer, had abandoned her. Daniel decides to emigrate to Australia with her, and start a new life. In Canterbury Heep is exposed as a fraud by Micawber with the help of Traddles, who supplies the requisite legal acumen. Micawber finally orders his affairs and Betsey Trotwood (discovering that she has not been ruined after all) pays for his family’s passage to Australia. Following these dramas Dora dies in childbirth and Ham loses his life in a terrible storm at Yarmouth whilst attempting unsuccessfully to save a stricken sailor, who turns out to be Steerforth. These tragedies prompt David to travel for three years, at the end of which he is able finally to confront a deep truth: he has always loved Agnes. Heep and Littimer become model prisoners in an institution presided over by Creakle. Rosa (who has revealed her own affair with Steerforth) ekes out life in mourning with the unendingly bitter Mrs. Steerforth. Agnes and David marry and live idyllically with Betsy, Peggotty and Mr. Dick. Years later they are visited by Daniel, who provides encouraging news of all the emigrants.

Symbolism and Imagery There are several very consistent images and symbols in David Copperfield. We are told immediately that David is born with a caul (a foetal membrane that covers the head and is believed to provide safety at sea], creating an instant association with the sea, an image that also threads through Dombey and Son. As the novel progresses we appreciate increasingly how appropriate this is- the sea claims Ham and Steerforth, permits Little Em’ly’s elopement and the various emigrations, and is the backdrop to the vital Yarmouth passages, for example. A consistent feature of the novel’s symbolism is the use of smell to evoke a sense of place. Many of David’s experiences are described by smells- examples include the "mouldy air" of his home’s larder, the "smell of fish" at the Peggottys’, the "strange unwholesome smell" of Salem House, the "bad air" of Martha’s seedy boarding house, and the "smoke from damp fuel" that fills the air as David journeys to Yarmouth for the final, cataclysmic storm, itself an overarching symbol. Dickens’s habit of animalising characters can be clearly seen in David Copperfield. Mr. Murdstone is likened to a "deep-mouthed and black-haired" dog, and in turn compares David to "an obstinate horse or dog" when he beats him. David later comments that "he ordered me like a dog, and I obeyed like a dog". The association deepens when he is forced to wear a plaque reading "Take care of him. He bites" upon arriving at Salem House. The most animalistic character is Uriah Heep, and Dickens loses no opportunity to drum this home. He is variously compared to a snail, frog, vulture, fish, baboon, fox, conga-eel and mongrel-cur, and it is implied that he has a supernatural communion with animals- David sees him "breathing into [a] pony’s nostrils … as if he were putting some spell on him", for example. Another theme worth considering is the use of objects as mirrors for reflecting the novel’s action. For example, as Murdstone quashes Mrs. Copperfield’s spirit, David mentions "some shrubs that were drooping their heads in the cold". When David is alone at Salem House before term begins he imagines characteristics of his future classmates from their names, carved into an old door. As Mr. Dick flies his kite David "used to fancy… that it lifted his mind out of its confusion, and bore it… into the skies. As he wound the string in… until it fluttered to the ground, and lay there like a dead thing… I pitied him with all my heart". A final example is the wreck of Steerforth’s ship at the end, "a maze of sail and rigging… a wild confusion of broken cordage" that acutely reflects the ruin of the Peggottys, who themselves live in a safely beached ship. GREAT EXPECTATIONS

Following the overwhelmingly oppressive tone of the novels preceding it (Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorritand A Tale of Two Cities), Great Expectations is a return to Dickens’s more lively tone, although it lacks the exuberance of the early novels. Psychologically it is his most consistently convincing work, having a coherence lacking in David Copperfield. Additionally, it contains some of Dickens’s finest comedy, including set pieces such as Wopsle’s "Hamlet" (chapter 31) and the Christmas lunch (chapter 4), and characters such as the hypocritical Pumblechook and the impudent Trabb’s Boy. The grotesque count is low, although in Miss Havisham we have perhaps the ultimate example. The novel is concerned with the corrupting influence of money, the true meaning of gentility and the ease with which people can distance themselves from that which is truly important to them. These are themes pursued at greater length in Dickens’s next novel, Our Mutual Friend. It is more focused and realistic than its predecessors and demonstrates an especial advance in Dickens’s treatment of women. Mrs Joe is described with untypical restraint as ‘not a good-looking woman’, and the general lack of excess in the descriptions of her role as Pip’s childhood ogre make her far more realistic than the fairy- tale doppelgangers inDavid Copperfield, the Murdstones. When the novel’s abundant sense of poetic justice sees her being incapacitated by Orlick’s assault (the weapon being a discarded leg-iron, itself a symbol of Pip’s guilt) we do not miss her as we would if she was a funnier ‘bad’ character because she is so grimly credible. It is a tribute to Dickens’s powers that Miss Havisham transcends her superficial resemblance to a fairy-tale goblin to attain tragic credibility. A gross monument to the sterility of money and the hollowness of expectation, she tries to block out time and nature in her home, but is ravaged in the attempt. Estella has been called Dickens’s first credible heroine, and whilst she is too passionless to be truly realistic she remains a powerful representation of the fragility of genteel society, increasingly unhappy in her attempts to maintain the sang-froid that has been bred in her. She is a beautiful husk who has been reared only to be superficial and superficially admired ("Is she beautiful, graceful, well- grown? Do you admire her?" Miss Havisham asks Pip insistently, as if Estella is a prize turnip). There is no thematic satire in Great Expectations. Although there are glimpses of it- the police’s suspicion of Joe as his wife’s attacker and the appalling village school to which Pip is sent, for example- most of the novel’s venom is aimed at human rather than institutional shortcomings. Principal among these are false gentility and the harm done by attaching too much importance to money. The concepts of class and of happiness stemming from material prosperity are ridiculed. David’s fragile social pretensions are so successfully mocked by Trabb’s Boy when he is having clothes fitted that he actively seeks to avoid him when returning to the town later in the book. Mrs. Pocket’s pathetic insistence on a tenuous connection to a duchess makes her ‘highly ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless’. Drummle and Orlick demonstrate that brutality is not a socially exclusive characteristic, and at the end Joe and Biddy represent the triumph of simple, open acceptance of social position. The final irony concerning class is delivered when Pip learns that the Estella, who once derived such pleasure from calling him a "common labouring-boy", is in fact of lowlier birth than he is. Money is shown to be as unattractive a motivating force as snobbery. The grotesque vultures who lurk about Satis House attempting to attract Miss Havisham’s favour are the novel’s least attractive characters, alongside the mean, hypocritical Pumblechook and the toadying tailor Trabb. Despite Pip’s riches, ultimately it is Joe who pays his debts, and Miss Havisham’s legacy is ultimately of greater worth to him - the lesson that emotions cannot be manipulated by material wealth. When he apprehends how wrong-headed he has been in his mistaken assumption that she is his benefactress, he feels no anger towards her because she has exposed him to many of his worst characteristics. Although there are positive uses of money in the book (Miss Havisham’s payment of Pip’s indentures and Pip’s helping Herbert in business, for example), the overwhelming moral is that money should not be an end in itself. This is crystallised when Pip tries to buy Provis off with two crisp, virgin pound notes; he contemptuously burns them. Pip’s final rejection of financial aid and his self-reliance with Herbert in the East show how disillusioned he has become with inherited wealth. Although fundamentally fantastical, more realism permeates the novel than is customary for Dickens. Unpleasant sights, sounds and smells constantly contribute towards the sense of grimy claustrophobia that runs throughout Great Expectations. The manacled convicts with whom Pip shares a coach smell of "bread-poultice, baize, rope-yarn and hearth-stone", a remarkably detailed description. The air in the hotel room in which Pip and Estella have their dejected tea smells of ‘a strong combination of stable with soup

stock’, the squalid lodging house in which Pip spends the night when advised to lie low is insect-ridden and smells "of cold soot and hot dust" and the inn at the end is "a dirty place enough" in which "we found the air as carefully excluded… as if air were fatal to life". These sordid details typify the unromantic atmosphere of the novel.

Gulliver's TravelsBy Jonathan swift Gulliver's Travels is an adventure story involving several voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon, who, because of a series of mishaps en route to recognized ports, ends up, instead, on several unknown islands living with people and animals of unusual sizes, behaviors, and philosophies, but who, after each adventure, is somehow able to return to his home in England where he recovers from these unusual experiences and then sets out again on a new voyage. Book I: When the ship Gulliver is traveling on is destroyed in a storm, Gulliver ends up on the island of Lilliput, where he awakes to find that he has been captured by Lilliputians, very small people — approximately six inches in height. Gulliver is treated with compassion and concern. In turn, he helps them solve some of their problems, especially their conflict with their enemy, Blefuscu, an island across the bay from them. Gulliver falls from favor, however, because he refuses to support the Emperor's desire to enslave the Blefuscudians and because he "makes water" to put out a palace fire. Gulliver flees to Blefuscu, where he converts a large war ship to his own use and sets sail from Blefuscu eventually to be rescued at sea by an English merchant ship and returned to his home in England.
Summary On this voyage, Gulliver goes to the sea as a surgeon on the merchant ship, Antelope. The ship is destroyed during a heavy windstorm, and Gulliver, the only survivor, swims to a nearby island, Lilliput. Being nearly exhausted from the ordeal, he falls asleep. Upon awakening, he finds that the island's inhabitants, who are no larger than six inches tall, have captured him. After the inhabitants examine Gulliver and provide him with food, the Emperor of this country orders his subjects to move Gulliver to a little-used temple, the only place large enough to house him.

In this chapter, the Imperial Majesty (the Emperor) and Gulliver carry on a conversation as best they can. After the Emperor's visit, six Lilliputians shoot arrows at Gulliver. Gulliver retaliates by pretending to eat the little archers and then releases them. This clemency, and Gulliver's cooperation, so impress the Imperial Council that they debate whether or not to free Gulliver. An officer takes inventory of Gulliver's possessions, which will be held until Gulliver's fate is settled upon.
Summary The Lilliputian emperor is pleased that Gulliver is friendly and cooperative, so he rewards him with some court diversions. The diversions, however, prove to be quite different than one might expect. It is the Lilliputian court custom that men seeking political office demonstrate their agility in rope dancing, among other things. How long and how skillfully a candidate can dance upon a rope determines his tenure in office. Of the candidates, two are particularly adept: Reldresal, Gulliver's friend, and Flimnap, the treasurer. Other diversions include noblemen competing for official favor by crawling under or leaping over a stick, a feat for which they are then rewarded with various colored threads. Gulliver also reviews the Emperor's troops; he stands, legs apart, while the tiny men march through. As a result of Gulliver's cooperation, a pact between Gulliver and the Emperor is agreed on. Gulliver is granted limited freedom on certain conditions. In return for abiding by the conditions, he will receive food sufficient for 1,728 Lilliputians. Gulliver swears to the articles in proper form, and the Emperor frees him. Summary After Gulliver's visit to the Emperor's palace at Mildendo, Reldresal, Lilliput's Principal Secretary of Private Affairs, pays a visit to Gulliver and explains the faction quarrels between the High Heel Party and the Low Heel Party. The conflict, he says, started over a religious question: At which end should the faithful break their eggs: at the big end or at the little end? The Blefuscudians break theirs, in the original style, at the big end. But, by royal edict, the Lilliputians must break their eggs at the little end. There are rebels in Lilliput, Reldresal says, and already 11,000 of them — Big Endians — have been put to death; others have fled to the court of Blefuscu. He explains further that the Lilliputians have lost 40 ships in the war. The dilemma seems hopeless, for Lustrog, the prophet of their religion, has said, "All true believers shall break their eggs at the convenient end."

Summary Gulliver saves Lilliput from a Blefuscudian invasion by dragging the Blefuscudian ships to Lilliput. In gratitude, the Lilliputian emperor rewards Gulliver with the title Nardac. Gulliver is pleased with his new title, but he is not the Emperor's dupe. He rejects a plan to destroy Blefuscu completely and argues for a reasonable peace treaty. Gulliver's moderation in dealing with the Blefuscudians gives Flimnap and Skyresh Bolgolam a chance to slander him. The Emperor listens to the accusations and is cold to Gulliver when he grants him permission to visit Blefuscu in the future. Later, a fire in the palace breaks out, and Gulliver puts out the fire by urinating on it. There is a law against anyone passing water in the royal palace, however, and the Empress is so horrified by Gulliver's fire-fighting techniques that she never forgives Gulliver. The Emperor softens, though, and promises Gulliver a pardon for his crime. Summary Gulliver provides the reader with information regarding Lilliputian culture and the personal treatment that he receives from the Lilliputians. Regarding the Lilliputian system of laws, Gulliver says that treason is severely punished, which is not particularly surprising, but other laws are. These laws punish an unsuccessful accuser as severely as a traitor; fraud is most frequently punished with death; and any innocent man who is vindicated of a charge is rewarded. Interestingly, ingratitude is a capital offense. Moral, rather than clever men, are appointed to powerful positions, and atheists are barred from all government offices. Explaining the seeming contradiction between these good laws and the rope-dancing corruptions, Gulliver says that the latter were instituted by the present Emperor's grandfather. The Lilliputians believe that parents marry out of sexual desire rather than love of children. Therefore they deny any filial obligation and establish public schools for children. Parents with children in school pay for each child's maintenance and are forced to maintain those that they breed. The schools for young nobles are spartan, and students are trained in honor, justice, courage, modesty, clemency, religion, and patriotism. The schools for tradesmen and ordinary gentlemen are like those of the nobles, but the duration of schooling is shorter. The Lilliputians educate women to be reasonable, agreeable, and literate. Workers and farmers have no schools. Resuming his tale, Gulliver describes the visit of the Emperor and his family. They come to dine with Gulliver and bring Flimnap with them. The dinner proves to be a disaster because Flimnap, the royal treasurer, is appalled when he reckons the cost of feeding and housing Gulliver. What's more, Flimnap charges, his wife is attracted to Gulliver and has visited him secretly. Summary Gulliver learns that Flimnap, Skyresh Bolgolam, and others have approved articles of treason against him. His crimes include putting out the fire in the palace, refusing to devastate Blefuscu, speaking to the peace embassy from Blefuscu, and preparing to take advantage of the Emperor's permission to visit Blefuscu. The Emperor accepts the charges, but he refuses to kill Gulliver. Instead, he "mercifully" decides to blind Gulliver and save money on his upkeep by starving him slowly. On learning this, Gulliver escapes to Blefuscu. Summary A few days after his arrival at Blefuscu, Gulliver sees a large overturned ship floating in the bay and hauls it to port. While he is restoring the ship for his return home, a Lilliputian envoy presents a note demanding that Gulliver be returned as a traitor. The Blefuscudian emperor refuses to do so, hoping that Gulliver will stay as a war deterrent between the two countries. Gulliver refuses, however, and sets sail for home. Eventually a British merchant ship picks him up and returns him to England where he is reunited with his wife and family.

Character AnalysisLemuel Gulliver

Gulliver is the undistinguished third of five sons of a man of very modest means. He is of good and solid — but unimaginative — English stock. Gulliver was born in Nottinghamshire, a sedate county without eccentricity. He attended Emmanuel College, a respected, but not dazzling, school. The neighborhoods that Gulliver lived in — Old Jury, Fetter Lane, and Wapping — are all lower-middle-class sections. He is, in short, Mr. British middle class of his time. Gulliver is also, as might be expected, "gullible." He believes what he is told. He is an honest man, and he expects others to be honest. This expectation makes for humor — and also for irony. We can be sure that what Gulliver tells us will be accurate. And we can also be fairly sure that Gulliver does not always understand the meaning of what he sees. The result is a series of astonishingly detailed, dead-pan scenes. For example, when Gulliver awakens in Lilliput, he gradually discovers, moving from one exact detail to another, that he is a prisoner of men six inches tall. In Book I, Gulliver's possesses moral superiority to the petty — and tiny — Lilliputians, who show themselves to be a petty, cruel, vengeful, and self-serving race. Morally and politically, Gulliver is their superior. Here, Swift, through Gulliver, makes clear that the normal person is concerned with honor, gratitude, common sense, and kindness. The representative person (a Lilliputian) is a midget, figuratively and literally, compared with a moral person (Gulliver). In Brobdingnag (Book II), Gulliver is still an ordinary moral man, but the Brobdingnagians are moral giantmen. Certainly they are not perfect, but their moral superiority is as great to Gulliver as is their physical size. In his loyalty to England, we see that Gulliver is, in deed, a very proud man and one who accepts the madness and malice of British politics and society as the natural and normal standard. For the first time, we see Gulliver as the hypocrite — he lies to the Brobdingnagian king in order to conceal what is despicable about his native England. Gulliver's moral height can never reach that of the Brobdingnagians. Swift reinforces the idea of the giant's moral superiority by having Gulliver identify the English with the Lilliputians. This association also makes Gulliver ridiculous. It demonstrates the folly and self-deception that Gulliver practices in identifying himself with the moral giants. Gulliver's pride is at the root of his trouble. Swift dramatizes this with the mirror Gulliver cannot bear to look into. In Book IV, Gulliver represents the middle ground between pure reason (as embodied by the Houyhnhnms) and pure animalism (as embodied by the depraved Yahoos), yet Gulliver's pride refuses to allow him to recognize the Yahoo aspects in himself. Therefore, he identifies himself with the Houyhnhnms and, in fact, tries to become one. But the horses are alien to Gulliver; yet Gulliver thinks of the Yahoos as alien and animal. Separating himself from his naturally depraved cousins, the Yahoos, Gulliver also separates himself from the European Yahoos. He is near to madness — because of pride. Gulliver has "reasoned" himself into rejecting his species and his nature: Gulliver is virtually a madman. His attitudes when he arrives in London make him a source of derision, for Gulliver seeks to change his basic nature by thinking; reason becomes the sole guide of his life. In the end, Gulliver is still trying to acclimate himself to life as — and among — the Yahoos. Concluding, he confesses that he could be reconciled to the English Yahoos "if they would be content with those Vices and Follies only which Nature hath entitled them to. I am not in the least provoked at the sight of a Lawyer, a Pick-pocket, a Colonel, a Fool, a Lord, a Gamster, a Politician, a Whoremunger, a Physician, . . . or the like: This is all according to the due Course of Things: but, when I behold a Lump of Deformity, and Diseases both in Body and Mind, smitten with Pride, it immediately breaks all the Measures of my patience." The Lilliputians The Lilliputians are men six inches in height but possessing all the pretension and self-importance of fullsized men. They are mean and nasty, vicious, morally corrupt, hypocritical and deceitful, jealous and envious, filled with greed and ingratitude — they are, in fact, completely human. Swift uses the Lilliputians to satirize specific events and people in his life. For example, Swift's model for Flimnap was Robert Walpole, the leader of the Whigs and England's first prime minister in the modern sense. Walpole was an extremely wily politician, as Swift shows, by making Flimnap the most dexterous of the rope dancers. Reldresal, the second most dexterous of the rope dancers, probably represents either Viscount Townshend or Lord Carteret. Both were political allies of Walpole.

The articles that Gulliver signs to obtain his freedom relate the political life of Lilliput to the political life of England. The articles themselves parallel particular English codes and laws. Similarly, the absurd and complicated method by which Gulliver must swear to the articles (he must hold his right foot in his left hand and place the middle finger of his right hand on top of his head with the right thumb on the tip of his ear) exemplifies an aspect of Whig politics: petty, red-tape harassing. Swift also uses the Lilliputians to show that English politicians were bloody-minded and treacherous. In detail, he records the bloody and cruel methods that the Lilliputians plan to use to kill Gulliver; then he comments ironically on the mercy, decency, generosity, and justice of kings. The Lilliputian emperor, out of mercy, plans to blind and starve Gulliver — a direct reference to George's treatment of captured Jacobites, whom he executed — after parliament had called him most merciful and lenient. By the end of Book I, Swift has drawn a brilliant, concrete, and detailed contrast between the normal, if gullible, man (Gulliver) and the diminutive but vicious politician (the Lilliputian); the politician is always a midget alongside Gulliver. The Old Man and the SeaBy Ernest HemingwayBook Summary For 84 days, the old fisherman Santiago has caught nothing. Alone, impoverished, and facing his own mortality, Santiago is now considered unlucky. So Manolin (Santiago's fishing partner until recently and the young man Santiago has taught since the age of five) has been constrained by his parents to fish in another, more productive boat. Every evening, though, when Santiago again returns empty-handed, Manolin helps carry home the old man's equipment, keeps him company, and brings him food. On the morning of the 85th day, Santiago sets out before dawn on a three-day odyssey that takes him far out to sea. In search of an epic catch, he eventually does snag a marlin of epic proportions, enduring tremendous hardship to land the great fish. He straps the marlin along the length of his skiff and heads for home, hardly believing his own victory. Within an hour, a mako shark attacks the marlin, tearing away a great hunk of its flesh and mutilating Santiago's prize. Santiago fights the mako, enduring great suffering, and eventually kills it with his harpoon, which he loses in the struggle. The great tear in the marlin's flesh releases the fish's blood and scent into the water, attracting packs of shovel-nosed sharks. With whatever equipment remains on board, Santiago repeatedly fights off the packs of these scavengers, enduring exhaustion and great physical pain, even tearing something in his chest. Eventually, the sharks pick the marlin clean. Defeated, Santiago reaches shore and beaches the skiff. Alone in the dark, he looks back at the marlin's skeleton in the reflection from a street light and then stumbles home to his shack, falling face down onto his cot in exhaustion. The next morning, Manolin finds Santiago in his hut and cries over the old man's injuries. Manolin fetches coffee and hears from the other fisherman what he had already seen — that the marlin's skeleton lashed to the skiff is eighteen feet long, the greatest fish the village has known. Manolin sits with Santiago until he awakes and then gives the old man some coffee. The old man tells Manolin that he was beaten. But Manolin reassures him that the great fish didn't beat him and that they will fish together again, that luck doesn't matter, and that the old man still has much to teach him. That afternoon, some tourists see the marlin's skeleton waiting to go out with the tide and ask a waiter what it is. Trying to explain what happened to the marlin, the waiter replies, "Eshark." But the tourists misunderstand and assume that's what the skeleton is. Back in his shack, with Manolin sitting beside him, Santiago sleeps again and dreams of the young lions he had seen along the coast of Africa when he was a young man Character List Santiago The novella's central character. A dedicated fisherman who taught Manolin everything he knows about fishing, Santiago is now old and poor and has gone 84 days without a catch. Manolin A young man from the fishing village who has fished with Santiago since the age of five and now cares for the old man. Manolin recently began fishing with another fisherman whom his parents consider luckier than Santiago. Martin The owner of the Terrace (his name is Spanish for St. Martin), he sends food and drink to Santiago through Manolin. Rogelio A man of the village who on occasion helps Santiago with the fishing net.

Perico A man at the bodega (his name is Spanish for St. Peter, an apostle and fisherman) who gives Santiago newspapers to read. Marlin An eighteen-foot bluish billfish and a catch of legendary proportions. Mako A mackerel shark (dentuso in Spanish) that is a voracious and frightening killer known for its rows of large, sharp teeth. Shovel-nosed sharks The scavenger sharks (galanos in Spanish) that destroy the marlin. Pedrico A fisherman in the village who looks after Santiago's skiff and gear and receives the marlin's head to use in fish traps. Tourists A man and woman at the Terrace who see the marlin's skeleton and, misunderstanding a waiter's explanation of what happened, think the skeleton is that of a shark. Character AnalysisSantiago Santiago is an impoverished old man who has endured many ordeals, whose best days are behind him, whose wife has died, and who never had children. For 84 days, he has gone without catching the fish upon which his meager existence, the community's respect, and his sense of identity as an accomplished fisherman all depend. As a result, the young man who is like a son to him (the young man who, since the age of five, has fished with him and learned from him) now fishes, at the behest of his parents, with another fisherman. Indeed, Santiago's philosophy and internal code of behavior make him unconventional in his society (as critics such as Bickford Sylvester have mentioned). Santiago's dedication to his craft (beyond concerns of material gain or survival) separates him from the pragmatic fishermen motivated by money. He stands apart from Cuba's evolution to a new materialism and a village fishing culture converting to a fishing industry. He remains dedicated to a profession he sees as a more spiritual way of life and a part of nature's order in the eternal cycle that makes all creatures brothers in their common condition of both predator and prey. What Santiago desperately wants is one epic catch — not just to survive, but to prove once more his skill, reassert his identity as a fisherman, secure his reputation in the community, and ensure for all time that Manolin will forever honor his memory and become his successor in what matters most in life. For Santiago, what matters most in life is to live with great fervor and nobility according to his beliefs, to use his skills and nature's gifts to the best of his ability, to struggle and endure and redeem his individual existence through his life's work, to accept inevitable destruction with dignity, and to pass on to the next generation everything of value that he has gained. In these desires, he reflects the desires of us all. What makes Santiago special is that despite a lifetime of hardships that have hurt him (as the morning sun has always hurt his eyes), he is still a man in charge and an expert who knows the tricks of his fisherman's craft. His eyes remain young, cheerful, and undefeated. He knows how to rely on the transcendent power of his own imagination to engender the inspiration and confidence he needs and to keep alive in himself and others the hope, dreams, faith, absorption, and resolution to transcend hardship. Manolin Manolin is Santiago's last and deepest human relationship, his replacement in the generational cycle of human existence, the one to whom he wishes to entrust his skill as a fisherman, the transforming power of his vision, and his memory. As Santiago is mentor, spiritual father, and the old man or old age, Manolin is pupil, son, and the boy or youth. Manolin loves and cares for Santiago, and at the story's end, he professes his faith in Santiago and everything Santiago represents. Living up to his name, which is the diminutive of Manuel (Spanish for Emmanuel, the Redeemer), Manolin articulates for Santiago the true meaning of his great struggle, which has brought him the intangibles he craves. Three times, Manolin professes his faith in Santiago. In accepting the marlin's spear, Manolin demonstrates once and for all that he clearly understands and accepts all that Santiago wishes to bequeath him — and all that comes with that inheritance. Marlin The marlin is more than a great fish locked in an evenly balanced and protracted battle with an accomplished fisherman. It is also a creature onto whom Santiago projects the same qualities that he possesses, admires, and hopes to pass on: nobility of spirit, greatness in living, faithfulness to one's own identity and ways, endurance, beauty, and dignity. As Santiago and the marlin remain locked in battle for three days, they become intimately connected. Santiago first pities and admires the fish and then empathizes and identifies with it. He recognizes that just as the marlin was born to be a fish, he was born to

be a fisherman. They are brothers in the inevitability of their circumstances, locked in the natural cycle of predator and prey. The marlin's death represents Santiago's greatest victory and the promise of all those intangibles he so desperately hopes for to redeem his individual existence. Yet, like the marlin, Santiago also must inevitably lose and become the victim. After the mako shark's attack, Santiago eats the marlin's flesh to sustain himself, completing the natural cycle in which the great creature passes on something of itself to Santiago. Not only are all creatures predator and prey, but all also nourish one another. Allusions to the crucified Christ that were previously associated with the marlin (images that represent suffering, apparent defeat, and the endurance through which one redeems an individual life within nature's tragic cycle) are transferred to Santiago (as critics such as Philip Young and Arvin Wells have suggested). The marlin's brave and unavailing struggle to save its own life becomes Santiago's brave an unavailing struggle to save the marlin from the scavenger sharks. The scavenger sharks strip the marlin of all material value, leaving only its skeleton lashed to Santiago's skiff. But before that skeleton ends up as so much garbage to be washed out with the tide, it becomes a mute testimony to Santiago's greatness and the vehicle for those intrinsic values Santiago craves to give his existence meaning and dignity. The fisherman who measures the marlin's skeleton reports that it is 18 feet long — evidence of the largest fish the villagers have ever known to come out of the Gulf. And when Manolin accepts the marlin's spear, he accepts for all time everything that Santiago wishes to bequeath him. Robinson CrusoeBy Daniel DefoeBook Summary Robinson Crusoe, as a young and impulsive wanderer, defied his parents and went to sea. He was involved in a series of violent storms at sea and was warned by the captain that he should not be a seafaring man. Ashamed to go home, Crusoe boarded another ship and returned from a successful trip to Africa. Taking off again, Crusoe met with bad luck and was taken prisoner in Sallee. His captors sent Crusoe out to fish, and he used this to his advantage and escaped, along with a slave. He was rescued by a Portuguese ship and started a new adventure. He landed in Brazil, and, after some time, he became the owner of a sugar plantation. Hoping to increase his wealth by buying slaves, he aligned himself with other planters and undertook a trip to Africa in order to bring back a shipload of slaves. After surviving a storm, Crusoe and the others were shipwrecked. He was thrown upon shore only to discover that he was the sole survivor of the wreck. Crusoe made immediate plans for food, and then shelter, to protect himself from wild animals. He brought as many things as possible from the wrecked ship, things that would be useful later to him. In addition, he began to develop talents that he had never used in order to provide himself with necessities. Cut off from the company of men, he began to communicate with God, thus beginning the first part of his religious conversion. To keep his sanity and to entertain himself, he began a journal. In the journal, he recorded every task that he performed each day since he had been marooned. As time passed, Crusoe became a skilled craftsman, able to construct many useful things, and thus furnished himself with diverse comforts. He also learned about farming, as a result of some seeds which he brought with him. An illness prompted some prophetic dreams, and Crusoe began to reappraise his duty to God. Crusoe explored his island and discovered another part of the island much richer and more fertile, and he built a summer home there. One of the first tasks he undertook was to build himself a canoe in case an escape became possible, but the canoe was too heavy to get to the water. He then constructed a small boat and journeyed around the island. Crusoe reflected on his earlier, wicked life, disobeying his parents, and wondered if it might be related to his isolation on this island. After spending about fifteen years on the island, Crusoe found a man's naked footprint, and he was sorely beset by apprehensions, which kept him awake many nights. He considered many possibilities to account for the footprint and he began to take extra precautions against a possible intruder. Sometime later, Crusoe was horrified to find human bones scattered about the shore, evidently the remains of a savage feast. He was plagued again with new fears. He explored the nature of cannibalism and debated his right to interfere with the customs of another race.

Crusoe was cautious for several years, but encountered nothing more to alarm him. He found a cave, which he used as a storage room, and in December of the same year, he spied cannibals sitting around a campfire. He did not see them again for quite some time. Later, Crusoe saw a ship in distress, but everyone was already drowned on the ship and Crusoe remained companionless. However, he was able to take many provisions from this newly wrecked ship. Sometime later, cannibals landed on the island and a victim escaped. Crusoe saved his life, named him Friday, and taught him English. Friday soon became Crusoe's humble and devoted slave. Crusoe and Friday made plans to leave the island and, accordingly, they built another boat. Crusoe also undertook Friday's religious education, converting the savage into a Protestant. Their voyage was postponed due to the return of the savages. This time it was necessary to attack the cannibals in order to save two prisoners since one was a white man. The white man was a Spaniard and the other was Friday's father. Later the four of them planned a voyage to the mainland to rescue sixteen compatriots of the Spaniard. First, however, they built up their food supply to assure enough food for the extra people. Crusoe and Friday agreed to wait on the island while the Spaniard and Friday's father brought back the other men. A week later, they spied a ship but they quickly learned that there had been a mutiny on board. By devious means, Crusoe and Friday rescued the captain and two other men, and after much scheming, regained control of the ship. The grateful captain gave Crusoe many gifts and took him and Friday back to England. Some of the rebel crewmen were left marooned on the island. Crusoe returned to England and found that in his absence he had become a wealthy man. After going to Lisbon to handle some of his affairs, Crusoe began an overland journey back to England. Crusoe and his company encountered many hardships in crossing the mountains, but they finally arrived safely in England. Crusoe sold his plantation in Brazil for a good price, married, and had three children. Finally, however, he was persuaded to go on yet another voyage, and he visited his old island, where there were promises of new adventures to be found in a later accoun Character List Robinson Crusoe The narrator of the story. Crusoe sets sail at nineteen years of age, despite his father's demand that he stay at home and be content with his "middle station" in life. Crusoe eventually establishes a farm in Brazil and realizes he is living the life his father planned for him, but he is half a world away from England. Crusoe agrees to sail to the Guinea Coast to trade for slaves, but when a terrible storm blows up, he is marooned on an island, alone. He spends 35 years there, and his time on the island forms the basis of the novel. Captain's Widow The wife of the first captain to take young Crusoe under his wing. Crusoe leaves his savings with the widow, who looks after his money with great care. Crusoe sees her again after he leaves the island and returns to England; she encourages him to settle in England. Xury A servant on the ship on which young Crusoe is a slave; Xury is loyal to Crusoe when the two escape. Xury's devotion to Crusoe foreshadows the role Friday later plays, although young Crusoe later sells Xury back into slavery for a profit. the Captain of the Ship The captain of the ship that rescues young Crusoe and Xury; this man befriends young Crusoe and offers him money and guidance. They reunite after Crusoe's 35 years on the island. Friday A "savage" whom Crusoe rescues from certain death at the hands of cannibals. Friday is handsome, intelligent, brave, and loyal, none of which are qualities usually associated with "savages." He serves Crusoe faithfully throughout his life. Treasure IslandBy Robert Louis StevensonBook Summary An old sailor, calling himself "the captain" but really called Billy Bones, comes to lodge at the Admiral Benbow Inn on the English coast during the mid 1700s, paying the innkeeper's son, Jim Hawkins, a few pennies to keep a lookout for "seafaring men." One of these shows up, frightening Billy (who drinks far too much rum) into a stroke, and Billy tells Jim that his former shipmates covet the contents of his sea chest. After a visit from another man, Billy has another stroke and dies; Jim and his mother (his father has died only a few days before) unlock the sea chest, finding some money, a journal, and a map. The local physician, Dr. Livesey, deduces that the map is of an island where the pirate Flint buried a vast treasure. The district squire, Trelawney, proposes buying a ship and going after the treasure, taking Livesey as ship's doctor and Jim as cabin boy.

Several weeks later, Trelawney sends for Jim and Livesey and introduces them to Long John Silver, a Bristol tavern-keeper whom he has hired as ship's cook. They also meet Captain Smollett, who tells them that he does not like the crew or the voyage, which it seems everyone in Bristol knows is a search for treasure. After taking a few precautions, however, they set sail for the distant island. During the voyage the first mate, a drunkard, disappears overboard. And just before the island is sighted, Jim overhears Silver talking with two other crewmen and realizes that he and most of the others are pirates and have planned a mutiny. Jim tells the captain, Trelawney, and Livesey, and they calculate that they will be seven to nineteen against the mutineers and must pretend not to suspect anything until the treasure is found, when they can surprise their adversaries. But after the ship is anchored, Silver and some of the others go ashore, and two men who refuse to join the mutiny are killed — one with so loud a scream that everyone realizes there can be no more pretense. Jim has impulsively joined the shore party, and now in running away from them he encounters a half-crazy Englishman, Ben Gunn, who tells him he was marooned here and can help against the mutineers in return for passage home and part of the treasure. Meanwhile Smollett, Trelawney, and Livesey, along with Trelawney's three servants and one of the other hands, Abraham Gray, abandon the ship and come ashore to occupy a stockade. The men still on the ship, led by the coxswain Israel Hands, run up the pirate flag. One of Trelawney's servants and one of the pirates are killed in the fight to reach the stockade, and the ship's gun keeps up a barrage upon them, to no effect, until dark, when Jim finds the stockade and joins them. The next morning Silver appears under a flag of truce, offering terms that Captain Smollett refuses, and revealing that another pirate has been killed in the night (by Ben Gunn, Jim realizes, although Silver does not). At Smollett's refusal to surrender the map, Silver threatens an attack, and, within a short while, the attack on the stockade is launched. After a battle, the surviving mutineers retreat, having lost six men, but two more of the captain's group have been killed and Smollett himself is badly wounded. When Livesey leaves in search of Ben Gunn, Jim runs away without permission and finds Gunn's homemade boat. After dark, he goes out and cuts the ship adrift. The two pirates on board, Hands and O'Brien, interrupt their drunken quarrel to run on deck, but the ship — with Jim's boat in her wake — is swept out to sea on the ebb tide. Exhausted, Jim falls asleep in the boat and wakens the next morning, bobbing along on the west coast of the island, carried by a northerly current. Eventually, he encounters the ship, which seems deserted, but getting on board, he finds O'Brien dead and Hands badly wounded. He and Hands agree that they will beach the ship at an inlet on the northern coast of the island. But as the ship is finally beached, Hands attempts to kill Jim, and Jim shoots and kills him. Then, after securing the ship as well as he can, he goes back ashore and heads for the stockade. Once there, in utter darkness, he enters the blockhouse — to be greeted by Silver and the remaining five mutineers, who have somehow taken over the stockade in his absence. Silver and the others argue about whether to kill Jim, and Silver talks them down. He tells Jim that, when everyone found the ship was gone, the captain's party agreed to a treaty whereby they gave up the stockade and the map. In the morning Dr. Livesey arrives to treat the wounded and sick pirates, and tells Silver to look out for trouble when they find the site of the treasure. After he leaves, Silver and the others set out with the map, taking Jim along. Eventually they find the treasure cache — empty. Two of the pirates charge at Silver and Jim, but are shot down by Livesey, Gray, and Ben Gunn, from ambush. The other three run away, and Livesey explains that Gunn has long ago found the treasure and taken it to his cave. In the next few days they load the treasure onto the ship, abandon the three remaining mutineers (with supplies and ammunition) and sail away. At their first port, where they will sign on more crew, Silver steals a bag of money and escapes. The rest sail back to Bristol and divide up the treasure. Jim says there is more left on the island, but he for one will not undertake another voyage to recover it. Character List Jim Hawkins Twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy, an innkeeper's son. Jim is the novel's protagonist and chief narrator. Mr. and Mrs. Hawkins Jim's parents. Billy Bones ("the captain") An old sailor; a pirate. Dr. David Livesey Local physician and district magistrate; Livesey is a minor narrator in Chapters 16–18.

Black Dog Billy Bones' old shipmate; another pirate. Pew A blind beggar; another pirate. Mr. Dance A revenue officer, tax collector. Squire John Trelawney A country squire; a wealthy man who finances the trip to Treasure Island. Tom Redruth Trelawney's gamekeeper. Hunter Another of Trelawney's servants. Joyce Another of Trelawney's servants, apparently the valet who takes care of his clothes and grooming aids. Long John Silver A Bristol tavern-keeper; ship's cook; another pirate. Captain Alexander Smollett The new captain of the Hispaniola, the ship Trelawney has bought. Mr. Arrow First officer of the Hispaniola; a drunkard. Abraham Gray An honest seaman who is carpenter's mate on the Hispaniola. Tom An honest seaman who defies Silver; Silver kills him. Alan A third honest seaman who is killed by the pirates. Job Anderson The boatswain (officer in charge of the deck crew, anchors, boats, and so on) on theHispaniola; a pirate. Israel Hands The coxswain (officer in charge of the ship's main boat and usually acting as its helmsman or steersman) on the Hispaniola; another pirate. Tom Morgan, George Merry, O'Brien, Dick (and nine more unnamed) Crewmen on the Hispaniola; all are pirates and mutineers. Ben Gunn The "man of the island," who has been marooned there three years before; a reformed pirate. John Trelawney John Trelawney is a typical example of the cheerful country squire. His name is an old one in parts of England, yet common enough apparently that Stevenson felt able to use it without seeming to refer to anyone in particular. He belongs to the landed gentry, is lower in social rank than those with hereditary titles, yet definitely of a higher class than Jim Hawkins' family, any of the villagers, and even Dr. Livesey (who is Trelawney's social equal because of education and manners, but does not own inherited wealth). Class and breeding are important to a man like the squire — far too important for him to flaunt his. Stevenson does not specify his age, only that he cheerfully calls himself an "old" bachelor, which probably means that he is well out of his twenties but not dangerously close to fifty or even the middle forties. He will marry when the right time comes, and will probably choose a woman much younger than himself, if only to hand on his name and estate to a son. He is a sportsman — his most trusted servant is his head gamekeeper, and he is a good shot and has a cool head when necessary. He has what his own time would have called a sanguine disposition: He is optimistic, friendly, believes the best of people, is not in the habit of worrying. He can afford not to worry; he can pay people to do that for him. Trelawney's function in the novel is simple: He exists, first, to finance the treasure hunt, and second, to be the gullible, garrulous ship owner who will allow Silver to direct the whole venture by hiring a crew of pirates and a useless first officer. Does he — or does anyone else — learn from his mistakes, become a different person, develop at all? There is no evidence for this in the novel. Yet when Stevenson's biographer Ian Bell says that "personality" in this book is "dispensable," he is not quite correct. Character is dispensable; such as it is, it exists only to further the plot. But character and personality are not exactly the same thing. Trelawney, for example, has plenty of personality, which is all he needs to make the reader believe in him, for readers do believe in him and never question his motivation. In great part, the reader's belief in Trelawney is due to Stevenson's gift for language. Not a word comes out of Trelawney's mouth or emerges (in his letter to Livesey and Redruth) from his pen that could have been said by any other character in the book. From his very first remark ("Mr. Dance, you are a very noble fellow. And as for riding down that black, atrocious miscreant, I regard it as an act of virtue, sir, like stamping on a cockroach" — this without ever before having heard of Pew) to his last ("John Silver, . . you're a prodigious villain and imposter — a monstrous imposter, sir"), he is blustering, overstated, selfimportant, and rather silly. In fact, Silver's having directly or indirectly caused the deaths of nineteen men angers Trelawney, but not much more than his having presented himself as an honest seaman and fooled

Trelawney. Thus, although you cannot know the squire as a character in his own right, you do know him as a personality, true to his type. Jim Hawkins Jim Hawkins, the young narrator, is neither a stock character nor a personality type. His actions throughout the book tell readers a few things about him: He tries to warn Billy Bones of Black Dog's arrival; he fears Pew but goes back to the inn with his mother; he fantasizes (he tells readers) about the upcoming voyage; he bullies the boy who has taken his job at the inn upon realizing that he is not indispensable there; he takes two extremely foolish chances on impulse, when he leaves the ship and later leaves the stockade (part of his function in the novel is to do these things, although his greater function is to tell the story). He fights for his life with Israel Hands on the Hispaniola, and kills Hands by accident (but he was ready to kill him on purpose; about this he says nothing). He occasionally bursts into tears, and once, witnessing Silver's murder of the crewman Tom, nearly faints. Throughout, he reports every incident faithfully, revealing very little about his own feelings. At the end, he says he wants no more of Treasure Island, but he does not explain why. About all you can glean from all this is that Jim is a smart, goodhearted, and relatively courageous adolescent boy, one who is writing a report and not baring his soul. Thus Jim is entirely believable as a character — the world is full of people about whom you know no more than you do about Jim — but he is almost entirely closed. Or perhaps one should say he is almost entirely open — to the reader's imagination. You can put yourself in Jim Hawkins' place and can easily identify with him, because there is no evidence of anything in this character that may distance readers from him. This is the book's great strength as a narrative that engages readers and holds them spellbound. You see all of the action through Jim's eyes, and his openness allows you to see it through your own. Jim as narrator is the chief reason you do not question the merely surface description of other characters, for the others are seen through his eyes. Jim tells readers what they do and say but very rarely what he thinks or feels about what they may think or feel. Treasure Island is an adventure story and not a novel of character, because Jim Hawkins is its narrator and Stevenson chooses to have him tell it as he tells it. He is a character whom his author chooses not to reveal. But Jim's strength as an engaging, open narrator leaves him a rather flat, predictable character. Nothing he does surprises readers, who are prepared even for his impulsive actions by the early reckless curiosity he displays in rising from his hiding place to see what the pirates are doing at the inn. There is no inner conflict for Jim; he is never tempted to join the mutineers. The same can be said of almost every other character in the book. They're all either obviously "good" or obviously "bad" people — even Ben Gunn, who has recently switched sides — which makesTreasure Island to that extent a pure action adventure, a story of how the good characters by luck and fortitude defeat the evil ones. Character AnalysisLong John Silver Long John Silver is the book's most powerful and developed character, one whose motivation is believable but not unambiguous and whose complexity makes Treasure Island a true work of genius. Silver is much more than a type; he is a genuine individual, attractive and repellent by turns, frightening at times and at other times nearly sympathetic, always compelling. Unlike the other characters, Silver is presented in specifics: You know his age, his appearance, and something of his history. He is the only one who seems to have a life outside the novel, a past and a future for which there is actual evidence in the text. And he is the only character who is presented against type; Jim describes him as "intelligent and smiling . . . clean and pleasant-tempered" — very different from what he expects a pirate to be. Silver further convinces Jim (and perhaps the reader, too) that he is not Billy Bones' "seafaring man with one leg" by sending runners out of his tavern after Black Dog and going back with Jim to report on the incident. He is frugal, plans ahead, speaks respectfully to Trelawney and the others, and is known for being sober and abstemious in his habits. In other words, although you may see Long John Silver now as the archetypal pirate, complete with peg leg and parrot (and maybe an eye-patch thrown in), he was certainly not that to Stevenson's first readers. Silver is portrayed in the round, from various angles. His honesty and forthrightness are convincing to Livesey and Jim at first because he truly is honest and forthright, hiding his true motive but not his true personality. He controls the other mutineers as well as anyone can by force of his personality, his strength of mind, his courage, and his real cheerfulness. He has supreme control of himself, physically and mentally.

Even his brutality is controlled; when he takes the reluctant crewman Tom apart from the others it is clear that he wants to persuade the man, not to kill him; but, when they hear the others kill Alan, Silver knows he must be rid of Tom, too, and he accomplishes this so swiftly and coldly that the reader's shock is nearly as great as Jim's. Is Silver fond of Jim, does he feel affection for the boy who could be the age of his son (if he has a son; Black Dog has said he does, and that boys need discipline)? If Silver did not like Jim he would ignore him, for his first motive in arranging this voyage and mutiny is cash ("all that blunt"), and Jim can be of no use to him in that regard. The turning point in the relationship between Jim and Silver — at least as far as Silver is concerned — is Jim's bravado admission to having hidden the ship and killed Hands. Silver does not doubt him; one may guess that he sees something of his own courage and sense of purpose in the boy. And now he stands by Jim at the risk of his own life, when he could easily give him up to the others or kill Jim himself (as he has killed Tom, a much longer acquaintance, apparently without a qualm). He tells his men that Jim is a hostage and tells Jim that he is a potential witness in his favor, but Jim is a liability to him really. Still, he says, "Ah, you that's young. You and me might have done a power of good together." One cannot doubt the affection and regret in this statement. But a half-day later, under the spell of the treasure, he is ready to kill Jim and get on with it. Which is the real Silver? Probably, they both are. Another Stevenson novel speculates famously that there are at least two sides to every person and most likely a lot more than two. Real people are selfcontradictory, although the basis of the contradiction may be a deeper consistency. Silver intends to live comfortably and well; he hates Trelawney, and one may guess this is because Trelawney, foolish as he is, was born to wealth and Silver was not. He wants the freedom and luxury to live his old age openly and happily, and the peculiar set of experiences that his life so far has brought him allows him to commit the darkest crimes to gain these things. Note that in the 1934 film, it is Jim, not Ben Gunn, who helps Silver to escape, but Stevenson's Jim cannot be so self-contradictory; his morality, like the others', is conventional, black and white. Silver is amoral, or perhaps he is true to his own strange morality. Ultimately, it is Stevenson himself who allows Silver to escape, sending the others ashore and giving him leave. Like Jim, the reader is glad to see him go. Critical EssaysThemes in Treasure Island , Treasure Island is the story of a quest. . The quest hero goes on a journey, often to a strange and dangerous place, in pursuit of something valuable. On his way, he encounters one or more threshold guardians — human, animal or even supernatural — that may try to keep him from gaining his object or may only provide tests that he must pass in order to approach it; some of these may be helpful figures and others may be adversaries he must defeat. The hero is forced to test his courage, intelligence, strength, and worthiness, and sometimes encounters evidence of previous seekers who failed the tests. Sometimes, rituals (magical or otherwise) are involved, initiating the hero into esoteric secrets. The successful hero passes each test and, in the process gains some internal good — often wisdom or self-knowledge — as well as the object he sought. (You can find many modern variations of the quest theme; Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea is a quest novel in which the questing hero brings back an object now worthless — the skeleton of the great fish he caught — but also brings home a reassurance of his own strength.) The hero of such a story is often very young and innocent, in which case the quest is also a coming-of-age adventure. Jim Hawkins' quest for Flint's treasure fits this pattern admirably, which may be one reason Treasure Island is so enduringly popular; some schools of psychology hold that the pattern is a figurative reflection of universal human experience and that such stories are thus deeply satisfying to readers at an unconscious level. Jim's quest begins at the first appearance of Billy Bones, who is his initial helping figure, telling him in veiled terms about the map, the treasure, and the ritual of "the black spot." Black Dog and Pew are the first adversarial threshold guardians Jim encounters, and he successfully takes the map in spite of them. Silver appears at the outset to be another helper, but he is soon revealed as a more dangerous threshold guardian. By luck and stealth, however, Jim passes the difficult test of recognizing the danger Silver presents, when, from the apple barrel, he overhears Silver's revelations. Invited into the cabin to tell his story, Jim is given a glass of wine, ritually "initiating" him into the company of the men.

Jim encounters a second helping figure in Ben Gunn, who gives him information, again in veiled terms. Jim is tested a second time when the mutineers attack the stockade and a third time when he cuts theHispaniola adrift and, on board the ship, strikes the pirates' colors. This third test so enrages the final threshold guardian, Israel Hands, that Jim is faced with his most challenging test of courage. His test of worthiness comes when, having given his word to Silver, Jim refuses to run away from the pirates' stronghold. This is the decision, made in spite of his fear, that figuratively (and perhaps literally) saves him and delivers the treasure to his friends. After he has survived that test, Jim encounters the skeleton of the man (an unsuccessful treasure seeker) whom Flint killed and left as a marker. Ben Gunn had earlier pointed out the graves where he buried the man's five companions. However, Jim's quest is for more than treasure. This is a coming-of-age story, and Jim is a boy who at its outset loses his father (which is, in psychological terms, the first step in his becoming his own man). During his journey, Jim examines and rejects several figurative replacements: Dr. Livesey, whom he already respects but whom he must finally disobey (when Livesey urges him to break his word and run away from Silver); Squire Trelawney, who takes Jim as a sort of surrogate son but who also proves to be a fool; Captain Smollett, another authority figure, whom Jim finds too repressive; the "bad father," Hands, whose flag Jim strikes; and finally Silver himself, to whom Jim is most drawn (in the 1934 film, true in this to the book's spirit, Jim invites Silver to live with him and his mother) but whom he must ultimately reject. By the end of the novel Jim seems to have come of age entirely, symbolized, perhaps, by his recounting of the story and his refusal of further adventure. Treasure Island has been called a "novel of greed," and certainly greed is a minor theme of the book. But the chief theme is Jim Hawkins' quest to bring home something of great value and to gain his own moral adulthood, a treasure in itself.

Kidnapped is a historical fiction adventure novel by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson. The central character and narrator is a young man named David Balfour (Balfour being Stevenson's mother's maiden name), young and naive but resourceful, whose parents have recently died and who is out to make his way in the world. He is given a letter by the minister of Essendean, Mr. Campbell, to be delivered to the House of Shaws in Cramond, where David's uncle, Ebenezer Balfour, lives. On his journey, David asks many people where the House of Shaws is, and all of them speak of it darkly as a place of fear and evil. David arrives at the ominous House of Shaws and is confronted by his paranoid Uncle Ebenezer, armed with a blunderbuss. His uncle is also niggardly, living on "parritch" and small ale, and indeed the House of Shaws itself is partially unfinished and somewhat ruinous. David is allowed to stay, and soon discovers evidence that his father may have been older than his uncle, thus making himself the rightful heir to the estate. Ebenezer asks David to get a chest from the top of a tower in the house, but refuses to provide a lamp or candle. David is forced to scale the stairs in the dark, and realizes that not only is the tower unfinished in some places, but that the steps simply end abruptly and fall into the abyss. David concludes that his uncle intended for him to have an "accident" so as not to have to give over his inheritance. David confronts his uncle, who promises to tell David the whole story of his father the next morning. A ship's cabin boy, Ransome, arrives the next day, and tells Ebenezer that Captain Hoseason of the brig Covenant needs to meet him to discuss business. Ebenezer takes David to Queensferry, where Hoseason awaits, and David makes the mistake of leaving his uncle alone with the captain while he visits the shore with Ransome. Hoseason later offers to take them on board the brig briefly, and David complies, only to see his uncle returning to shore alone in a skiff. He is then immediately struck senseless. David awakens bound hand and foot in the hold of the ship. He becomes weak and sick, and one of the Covenant's officers, Mr. Riach, convinces Hoseason to move David up to the forecastle. Mr. Shuan, a mate on the ship, finally takes his routine abuse of Ransome too far and murders the unfortunate youth. David is repulsed at the crew's behaviour, and learns that the Captain plans to sell him intoservitude in the Carolinas. David replaces the slain cabin boy, and the ship encounters contrary winds which drive her back toward Scotland. Fog-bound near theHebrides, they strike a small boat. All of its crew are killed except one man, Alan Breck {Stewart}, who is brought on board and offers Hoseason a large sum of money to drop him off on the mainland. David later overhears the crew plotting to kill Breck and take all his money. The two barricade themselves in the round house, where Alan kills the murderous Shuan and David wounds Hoseason. Five of the crew are killed outright, and the rest refuse to continue fighting. Alan is a Jacobite who supports the claim of the House of Stuart to the throne of Scotland. He is initially suspicious of the pro-Whig David, who is also loyal to King George. Still, the young man has given a good account of himself in the fighting and impresses the old soldier. Hoseason has no choice but to give Alan and David passage back to the mainland. David tells his tale of woe to Alan, and Alan explains that the country of Appin where he is from is under the tyrannical administration of Colin Roy of Glenure, a Campbell and Government agent. Alan vows that, should he find the "Red Fox," he will kill him. The Covenant tries to negotiate a difficult channel without a proper chart or pilot, and is soon driven aground on the notorious Torran Rocks. David and Alan are separated in the confusion, with David being washed ashore on the isle of Erraid near Mull, while Alan and the surviving crew row to safety on that same island. David spends a few days alone in the wild before getting his bearings. David learns that his new friend has survived, and has two encounters with beggarly guides: one who attempts to stab him with a knife, and another who is blind but an excellent shot with a pistol. David soon reaches Torosay where he is ferried across the river and receives further instructions from Alan's friend Neil Roy McRob, and later meets a Catechist who takes the lad to the mainland. As he continues his journey, David encounters none other than the Red Fox (Colin Roy) himself, who is accompanied by a lawyer, servant, and sheriff's officer. When David stops the Campbell man to ask him for directions, a hidden sniper kills the hated King's agent. David is denounced as a conspirator and flees for his life, but by chance reunites with Alan. The youth believes Breck to be the assassin, but Alan denies responsibility. The pair flee from Redcoat search parties until they reach James (Stewart) of the Glens,

whose family is burying their hidden store of weapons and burning papers that could incriminate them. James tells the travellers that he will have no choice but to "paper" them (distribute printed descriptions of the two with a reward listed), but provides them with weapons and food for their journey south, and David with a change of clothes (which the printed description will not match). Alan and David then begin their flight through the heather, hiding from Government soldiers by day. As the two continue their journey, David's health rapidly deteriorates, and by the time they are set upon by wild Highlanders who serve a chief in hiding, Cluny Macpherson, he is barely conscious. Alan convinces Cluny to give them shelter. The Highland Chieftain takes a dislike to David, but defers to the wily Breck's opinion of the lad. David is tended by Cluny's people and soon recovers, though in the meantime Alan loses all of their money playing cards with Cluny, only for Cluny to give it back. As David and Alan continue their flight, David becomes progressively more ill, and he nurses anger against Breck for several days over the loss of his money. The pair nearly come to blows, but eventually reach the house of Duncan Dhu, who is a brilliant piper. While staying there, Alan meets a foe of his, Robin Oig—son of Rob Roy MacGregor, who is a murderer and renegade. Alan and Robin nearly fight a duel, but Duncan persuades them to leave the contest to bagpipes. Both play brilliantly, but Alan admits Robin is the better piper, so the quarrel is resolved. Alan and David prepare to leave the Highlands and return to David's country. In one of the most humorous passages in the book, Alan convinces an innkeeper's daughter from Limekilns that David is a dying young Jacobite nobleman, in spite of David's objections, and she ferries them across the Firth of Forth. There they meet a lawyer of David's uncle, Mr. Rankeillor, who agrees to help David receive his inheritance. Rankeillor explains that David's father and uncle had once quarrelled over a woman, David's mother, and the older Balfour had married her, informally giving the estate to his brother while living as an impoverished school teacher with his wife. This agreement had lapsed with his death. David and the lawyer hide in bushes outside Ebenezer's house while Breck speaks to him, claiming to be a man who found David nearly dead after the wreck of the Covenant and is representing folk holding him captive in the Hebrides. He asks David's uncle whether to kill him or keep him. The uncle flatly denies Alan's statement that David had been kidnapped, but eventually admits that he paid Hoseason "twenty pound" to take David to "Caroliny". David and Rankeillor then emerge from their hiding places and speak with Ebenezer in the kitchen, eventually agreeing that David will be provided two-thirds of the estate's income for as long as his wicked uncle survived. The novel ends with David and Alan parting ways, Alan going to France, and David going to a bank to settle his money. At one point in the book, a reference is made to David's eventually studying at the University of Leyden, a fairly common practice for young Scottish gentry seeking a law career in the eighteenth century. [

Themes The Foreign Shylock is a foreigner in Venice and is derided for being so. It is not surprising that he is so filled with anger - he is ridiculed in the street, shamed for doing his job, and even the laws are stacked against him, as we see at the end of the play. Venice was founded on the trade of foreigners. It is therefore an apt setting for a play that, in some ways, reveals the narrow- mindedness and xenophobia of the supposedly merciful Christian society. It is arguable that had the Christians showed more mercy to Shylock, he would have showed more to Antonio in the court scene. Bassanio uses Shylock as the source of the money he needs to marry Portia. He is therefore recognizing the power of money - without it he would be unable to tie himself to the woman he loves. Shylock is bullied by Bassanio and his cohorts. It therefore seems unreasonable that he should expect Shylock to loan him money without taking anything in return. It is obvious that it is more Shylock's foreignness that is resented by the Christians than his particular actions. Shylock is by far the most powerful male character in the play. Bassanio is a foppish playboy and Antonio a humourless, sexually ambiguous wimp. Only Portia comes near him as a character. The Old Testament world which Shylock lives in commands him to set a great deal by the word of the law. Some would claim that this is his only real sin in the play. More convincing, though, we might admit that he commits an unnerving number of deadly sins: avarice, envy, pride, and - crucially - wrath. In the play, Shylock deserves everything he gets - he has chosen to play a rather suspect kind of hardball with justice. However, that this is an unfair portrait of a Jew is unquestionable. The risk for the critic and student of the play is to prejudice a discussion of the play with disgust at Shakespeare's decision to ridicule a Jew and read it inaccurately as a result. Doubling Antonio and Shylock are doubled throughout the play. At the beginning, Antonio is a dispirited Christian; at the end, Shylock is a dispirited Christian. At the beginning, Shylock is a wealthy Jew; at the end, Antonio is wealthy and looking after Shylock's money. Shylock is emasculated by the Christians; Antonio is emasculated by his own total lack of sexuality. The references to sheep further stress the doubling: they are always, however, in Shylock's favour. Whilst the victory at the end might seem to be Antonio's, he is left just as lonely and tied to the ups and downs of his economic situation as Shylock. Marriage Many of Shakespeare's plays end with marriage as the 'happy ending'. Shakespeare seems to see marriage as the ultimate aim of all his characters. It is those characters that are not married who come off worse in this play - Shylock and Antonio. Portia has to give up everything she is and has when she marries Bassanio. The institution of marriage is therefore an ultimately anti-feminist concept. Shakespeare is equating happiness and resolution with the crushing of the feminist spirit. In her marriage to Lorenzo, Jessica has to give up her faith and sever her links from her parents - stealing from her father and giving away her mother's ring. Marriage is a series of defeats for the women in this play. romeo and Juliet the audience is introduced to the long-running feud between the two most important families of Verona, the Capulets and the Montagues. The first quatrain (the first four lines) tells us the old argument has blown up again; the second that it will be resolved only through the deaths of 'a pair of star-crossed lovers', Romeo and Juliet, the children of these families. THEMES

Realism and love in romeo and Juliet To the romantic lovers, marriage is a matter of love; to Capulet, marriage is a transaction best arranged by the father rather than left to the daughter concerned. Juliet's parents do not seem to have a loving marriage. Lady Capulet is curt towards her husband, who is much older than she is. She takes rather a cold view of marriage, and like her husband, cannot understand why Juliet would be unwilling to accept the opportunity offered by Paris, to move up in Veronese society. Benvolio also offers a more practical stance on love. He tries to make Romeo see how excessive and unnecessary is his love for Rosaline, and is unable to understand his cousin's strength of feeling. Admittedly, it becomes clear that Romeo's love is not really love, but it is clear that if Benvolio had known of his friend's love for Juliet, he would apply the same common sense to the situation. Hate The love of Romeo and Juliet is set against a background of feuding and hate. We are made aware of this before the lovers are introduced, and what the Chorus first mentions in the Prologue. Because the audience is never told of its origins, we cannot take sides, but its effects are immense. The tragic events of the play can all be traced back to the in-fighting between the Montagues and Capulets. And ultimately it justifies the lovers' rejection of their family and friends in pursuit of happiness while others may offer advice on the subject of love, their obsessive hatred for the enemy negates all their good sense. Juliet and Romeo are the only ones removed from this prejudice and want no part of it. Their love is transforming and the audience is in no doubt as to who is in the right. Love poetry Petrarch (1304-74), the medieval Italian poet, was a huge influence on writers of the Renaissance. His poetry established literary conventions of behaviour in love. Romeo is a typical Petrarchan lover, expressing his sorrow over Rosaline with convoluted and elaborate language, obsessed and overwhelmed with feeling. Mercutio ridicules Romeo in pointing to how fashionable his behaviour is: 'Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in' (II.4.38-9). As a foil to Romeo's exaggerated idealistic view of love, Mercutio undermines the seriousness of Romeo's declarations with bawdy comments and cool pragmatism. Romeo seems to be in love with the idea of love rather than Rosaline. Sexual love The play opens with Sampson and Gregory making bawdy jokes, and this humour is a major feature of the play. Romeo and Juliet's love is frequently contrasted with lewdness. The Nurse makes sexual puns and shows no concept of a more spiritual love (she suggests Juliet commit bigamy and sees sex as the main part of a relationship between men and women). For the lovers, however, sexual desire is the expression of their depth of feeling rather than the point of love, as the Nurse sees it. Mercutio is also earthy and ribald. He mocks his friend and suggests that Romeo's high-minded love is being used to disguise what is merely lust. Fate Shakespeare's conception of fate in Romeo and Juliet is that of the lovers as victims of circumstances. The plot progresses through awful coincidences and creates the impression that a hostile fate is at work. This is enforced by the description of the lovers at the beginning - the Chorus alludes to the 'pair of star-crossed lovers' and we know they are fated to die before the play has even begun. The lovers themselves suspect as much: to Benvolio's warning, 'Away, be gone. The sport is at the best', Romeo replies, 'Ay, so I fear', voicing his worry that things are too good to last (I.5.119-20). When Juliet learns of Romeo's identity, she asserts 'Prodigious birth of love it is to me / That I must love a loathed enemy' (I.5.140-1). An Elizabethan audience would know fate would be unable to resist Romeo's challenge in Act II: 'Then love-devouring

death do what he dare' (II.6.7). Throughout the play references to fate increase our sense of foreboding, that there is nothing Romeo and Juliet can do to avoid death. The Friar roots this in Act V: 'A greater power than we can contradict / Hath thwarted our intents' (V.3.153-4), Mercutio's curse as he lay dying in Act III, scene 1 - 'A plague a 'both your houses' enough for an Elizabethan audience to believe in the inevitability of the terrible ending.

A Summary of the Action of The Adventures of Oliver Twist or, The Parish Boy’s Progress from the Charles Dickens CD Oliver Twist is born in a workhouse in a provincial town. His mother has been found very sick in the street, and she gives birth to Oliver just before she dies. Oliver is raised under the care of Mrs. Mann and the beadle Mr. Bumble in the workhouse. When it falls to Oliver’s lot to ask for more food on behalf of all the starving children in the workhouse, he is trashed, and then apprenticed to an undertaker, Mr. Sowerberry. Another apprentice of Mr. Sowerberry’s, Noah Claypole insults Oliver’s dead mother and the small and frail Oliver attacks him. However, Oliver is punished severely, and he runs away to London. Here he is picked up by Jack Dawkins or the Artful Dodger as he is called. The Artful Dodger is a member of the Jew Fagin’s gang of boys. Fagin has trained the boys to become pickpockets. The Artful Dodger takes Oliver to Fagin’s den in the London slums, and Oliver, who innocently does not understand that he is among criminals, becomes one of Fagin’s boys. When Oliver is sent out with The Artful Dodger and another boy on a pickpocket expedition Oliver is so shocked when he realizes what is going on that he and not the two other boys are caught. Fortunately, the victim of the thieves, the old benevolent gentleman, Mr. Brownlow rescues Oliver from arrest and brings him to his house, where the housekeeper, Mrs. Bedwin nurses him back to life after he had fallen sick, and for the first time in his life he is happy. However, with the help of the brutal murderer Bill Sikes and the prostitute Nancy Fagin kidnaps Oliver. Fagin is prompted to do this by the mysterious Mr. Monks. Oliver is taken along on a burglary expedition in the country. The thieves are discovered in the house of Mrs. Maylie and her adopted niece, Rose, and Oliver is shot and wounded. Sikes escapes. Rose and Mrs. Maylie nurse the wounded Oliver. When he tells them his story they believe him, and he settles with them. While living with Rose and Mrs. Maylie Oliver one day sees Fagin and Monks looking at him in through a window. Nancy discovers that Monks is plotting against Oliver for some reason, bribing Fagin to corrupt his innocence. Nancy also learns that there is some kind of connection between Rose and Oliver; but after having told Rose’s adviser and friend Dr. Losberne about it on the steps of London Bridge, she is discovered by Noah Claypole, who in the meantime has become a member of Fagin’s gang, and Sykes murders her. On his frantic flight away from the crime Sykes accidentally and dramatically hangs himself. Fagin and the rest of the gang are arrested. Fagin is executed after Oliver has visited him in the condemned cell in Newgate Prison. The Artful Dodger is transported after a court scene in which he eloquently defends himself and his class. Monks’ plot against Oliver is disclosed by Mr. Brownlow. Monks is Oliver’s half-brother seeking all of the inheritance for himself. Oliver’s father’s will states that he will leave money to Oliver on the condition that his reputation is clean. Oliver’s dead mother and Rose were sisters. Monks receives his share of the inheritance and goes away to America. He dies in prison there, and Oliver is adopted by Mr. Brownlow. Back...

Major themes

In Oliver Twist, Dickens mixes grim realism and merciless satire as a way to describe the effects of industrialism on 19th-century England and to criticise the harsh new Poor Laws. Oliver, an innocent child, is trapped in a world where his only options seem to be the workhouse, Fagin's gang, a prison, or an early grave. From this unpromising industrial/institutional setting, however, a fairy tale also emerges. In the midst of corruption and degradation, the essentially passive Oliver remains pure-hearted; he steers away from evil when those around him give in to it, and in proper fairy-tale fashion, he eventually receives his reward — leaving for a peaceful life in the country, surrounded by kind friends. On the way to this happy ending, Dickens explores the kind of life an orphan, outcast boy could expect to lead in 1830s London.[8] [edit]Poverty and social class

Poverty is a prominent concern in Oliver Twist. Throughout the novel, Dickens enlarges on this theme, describing slums so decrepit that whole rows of houses are on the point of ruin. In an early chapter, Oliver attends a pauper's funeral with Mr. Sowerberry and sees a whole family crowded together in one miserable room. This ubiquitous misery makes Oliver's few encounters with charity and love more poignant. Oliver owes his life several times over to kindness both large and small.[9] The apparent plague of poverty that Dickens describes also conveyed to his middle-class readers how much of the London population was stricken with poverty and disease. Nonetheless, in Oliver Twist he delivers a somewhat mixed message about social caste and social injustice. Oliver's illegitimate workhouse origins place him at the nadir of society; as an orphan without friends, he is routinely despised. His "sturdy spirit" keeps him alive despite the torment he must endure. Most of his associates, however, deserve their place among society's dregs and seem very much at home in the depths. Noah Claypole, a charity boy like Oliver, is idle, stupid, and cowardly; Sikes is a thug; Fagin lives by corrupting children; and the Artful Dodger seems born for a life of crime. Many of the middle-class people Oliver encounters—Mrs. Sowerberry, Mr. Bumble, and the savagely hypocritical "gentlemen" of the workhouse board, for example—are, if anything, worse. Oliver, on the other hand, who has an air of refinement remarkable for a workhouse boy, proves to be of gentle birth. Although he has been abused and neglected all his life, he recoils, aghast, at the idea of victimizing anyone else. This apparently hereditary gentlemanliness makes Oliver Twist something of a changeling tale, not just an indictment of social injustice. Oliver, born for better things, struggles to survive in the savage world of the underclass before finally being rescued by his family and returned to his proper place—a commodious country house. Oliver Twist
As the child hero of a melodramatic novel of social protest, Oliver Twist is meant to appeal more to our sentiments than to our literary sensibilities. On many levels, Oliver is not a believable character, because although he is raised in corrupt surroundings, his purity and virtue are absolute. Throughout the novel, Dickens uses Oliver’s character to challenge the Victorian idea that paupers and criminals are already evil at birth, arguing instead that a corrupt environment is the source of vice. At the same time, Oliver’s incorruptibility undermines some of Dickens’s assertions. Oliver is shocked and horrified when he sees the Artful Dodger and Charley Bates pick a stranger’s pocket and again when he is forced to participate in a burglary. Oliver’s moral scruples about the sanctity of property seem inborn in him, just as Dickens’s opponents thought that corruption is inborn in poor people. Furthermore, other pauper children use rough Cockney slang, but Oliver, oddly enough, speaks in proper King’s English. His grammatical fastidiousness is also inexplicable, as Oliver presumably is not well-educated. Even when he is abused and manipulated, Oliver does not become angry or indignant. When Sikes and Crackit force him to assist in a robbery, Oliver merely begs to be allowed to “run away and die in the fields.” Oliver does not present a complex picture of a person torn between good and evil—instead, he is goodness incarnate.

Nancy
A major concern of Oliver Twist is the question of whether a bad environment can irrevocably poison someone’s character and soul. As the novel progresses, the character who best illustrates the contradictory issues brought up by that question is Nancy. As a child of the streets, Nancy has been a thief and drinks to excess. The narrator’s reference to her “free and agreeable . . . manners” indicates that she is a prostitute. She is immersed in the vices condemned by her society, but she also commits perhaps the most noble act in the novel when she sacrifices her own life in order to protect Oliver. Nancy’s moral complexity is unique among the major characters inOliver Twist. The novel is full of characters who are all good and can barely comprehend evil, such as Oliver, Rose, and Brownlow; and characters who are all evil and can barely comprehend good, such as Fagin, Sikes, and Monks. Only Nancy comprehends and is capable of both good and evil. Her ultimate choice to do good at a great personal cost is a strong argument in favor of the incorruptibility of basic goodness, no matter how many environmental obstacles it may face. Nancy’s love for Sikes exemplifies the moral ambiguity of her character. As she herself points out to Rose, devotion to a man can be “a comfort and a pride” under the right circumstances. But for Nancy, such devotion is “a new

means of violence and suffering”—indeed, her relationship with Sikes leads her to criminal acts for his sake and eventually to her own demise. The same behavior, in different circumstances, can have very different consequences and moral significance. In much of Oliver Twist, morality and nobility are black-and-white issues, but Nancy’s character suggests that the boundary between virtue and vice is not always clearly drawn.

Fagin
Although Dickens denied that anti-Semitism had influenced his portrait of Fagin, the Jewish thief’s characterization does seem to owe much to ethnic stereotypes. He is ugly, simpering, miserly, and avaricious. Constant references to him as “the Jew” seem to indicate that his negative traits are intimately connected to his ethnic identity. However, Fagin is more than a statement of ethnic prejudice. He is a richly drawn, resonant embodiment of terrifying villainy. At times, he seems like a child’s distorted vision of pure evil. Fagin is described as a “loathsome reptile” and as having “fangs such as should have been a dog’s or rat’s.” Other characters occasionally refer to him as “the old one,” a popular nickname for the devil. Twice, in Chapter 9 and again in Chapter 34, Oliver wakes up to find Fagin nearby. Oliver encounters him in the hazy zone between sleep and waking, at the precise time when dreams and nightmares are born from “the mere silent presence of some external object.” Indeed, Fagin is meant to inspire nightmares in child and adult readers alike. Perhaps most frightening of all, though, is Chapter 52, in which we enter Fagin’s head for his “last night alive.” The gallows, and the fear they inspire in Fagin, are a specter even more horrifying to contemplate than Fagin himself.

Character List

he narrative opens with Mr Bingley, a wealthy, charming and social young bachelor, moving into Netherfield house in the neighbourhood of the Bennet family. Mr Bingley is soon well received, while his friend Mr Darcy makes a less favorable first impression by appearing proud and condescending at a ball that they attend. Mr Bingley singles out Elizabeth's elder sister, Jane, for particular attention, and it soon becomes apparent that they have formed an attachment to each other. By contrast, Darcy slights Elizabeth, who overhears and jokes about it despite feeling a budding resentment. On paying a visit to Mr Bingley's sister, Jane is caught in a heavy downpour, catches cold, and is forced to stay at Netherfield for several days. Elizabeth arrives to nurse her sister and is thrown into frequent company with Mr Darcy, who begins to perceive his attachment to her. Mr Collins, a clergyman, pays a visit to the Bennets. Mr Bennet and Elizabeth are much amused by his obsequious veneration of his employer, the noble Lady Catherine de Bourgh, as well as by his selfimportant and pedantic nature. It soon becomes apparent that Mr Collins has come to Longbourn to choose a wife from among the Bennet sisters and Elizabeth has been singled out. At the same time, Elizabeth forms an acquaintance with Mr Wickham, a militia officer who claims to have been very seriously mistreated by Mr Darcy, despite having been a ward of Mr Darcy's father. This tale, and Elizabeth's attraction to Mr Wickham, adds fuel to her dislike of Mr Darcy. At a ball given by Mr Bingley at Netherfield, Mr Darcy becomes aware of a general expectation that Mr Bingley and Jane will marry, and the Bennet family, with the exception of Jane and Elizabeth, make a public display of poor manners and decorum. The following morning, Mr Collins proposes marriage to Elizabeth, who refuses him, much to her mother's distress. Mr Collins recovers and promptly becomes engaged to Elizabeth's close friend Charlotte, a homely woman with few prospects. Mr Bingley abruptly quits Netherfield and returns to London, and Elizabeth is convinced that Mr Darcy and Mr Bingley's sister have conspired to separate him from Jane. In the spring, Elizabeth visits Charlotte and Mr Collins in Kent. Elizabeth and her hosts are frequently invited to Rosings Park, home of Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Darcy's aunt; coincidentally, Darcy also arrives to visit. Darcy again finds himself attracted to Elizabeth and impetuously proposes to her. Elizabeth, however, has just learned of Darcy's role in separating Mr Bingley from Jane from his cousin Colonel Fitzwilliam. She angrily rebukes him, and a heated discussion follows; she charges him with destroying her sister's happiness, with treating Mr Wickham disgracefully, and with having conducted himself towards her in an ungentleman-like manner. Mr Darcy, shocked, ultimately responds with a letter giving a good account of (most of) his actions: Wickham had exchanged his legacies for a cash payment, only to return after gambling away the money to reclaim the forfeited inheritance; he then attempted to elope with Darcy's young sister, thereby to capture her fortune. Regarding Mr Bingley and Jane, Darcy claimed he had observed no reciprocal interest in Jane for Bingley. Elizabeth later came to acknowledge the truth of Darcy's assertions. Elizabeth tells her father that Darcy was responsible for uniting Lydia and Wickham. This is one of the two earliest illustrations of Pride and Prejudice.[3]The clothing styles reflect the time the illustration was engraved (the 1830s), not the time the novel was written or set. Some months later, Elizabeth and her Aunt and Uncle Gardiner visit Pemberley, Darcy's estate, believing he will be absent for the day. He returns unexpectedly, and though surprised, he is gracious and welcoming. He treats the Gardiners with great civility; he introduces Elizabeth to his sister, and Elizabeth begins to realise her attraction to him. Their reacquaintance is cut short, however, by news that Lydia, Elizabeth's sister, has run away to elope with Mr Wickham. Elizabeth and the Gardiners return to Longbourn, where Elizabeth grieves that her renewed acquaintance with Mr Darcy will end because of her sister's disgrace. Lydia and Wickham are soon found, then married by the clergy; they visit Longbourn, where Lydia lets slip that Mr Darcy was responsible for finding the couple and negotiating their marriage—at great expense to himself. Elizabeth is shocked but does not dwell further on the topic due to Mr Bingley's return and subsequent proposal to Jane, who immediately accepts. Lady Catherine de Bourgh later bursts in on Longbourn; intending to thwart local rumour, she warns Elizabeth against marrying Mr Darcy. Elizabeth refuses her demands. Disgusted, Lady Catherine leaves and drops by to inform her nephew on Elizabeth's abominable behaviour. However, this lends hope to

Darcy that Elizabeth's opinion of him may have changed. He travels to Longbourn and proposes again; and now Elizabeth accepts. [edit]Main characters Elizabeth Bennet
Elizabeth Bennet is the protagonist of the novel. The reader sees the unfolding plot and the other characters mostly from her viewpoint. The second of the Bennet daughters, she is 20 years old and is intelligent, lively, attractive and witty but with a tendency to judge on impression and perhaps to be a little upon which she bases her judgments. As the plot begins, her closest relationships are with her father; her sister, Jane; her aunt, Mrs Gardiner; and her best friend, Charlotte Lucas. As the story progresses, so does her relationship with Fitzwilliam Darcy, who belongs to a higher social class than Elizabeth. The course of Elizabeth and Darcy's relationship is ultimately decided when Darcy overcomes his pride, and Elizabeth overcomes her prejudice, leading to them both surrendering to the love they have for each other.

[edit]Mr Darcy[4]
Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy is the male protagonist of the novel. Twenty-eight years old and unmarried, Mr Darcy is also the wealthy owner of the famous family estate of Pemberley in Derbyshire, and is rumoured to be worth at least ten thousand pounds a year (which, in 2010, amounts to about one million dollars a year). Handsome, tall, and intelligent, but rather anti-social, his aloof decorum and rectitude are seen by many as an excessive pride. He makes a poor impression on strangers, such as the landed gentry of Meryton, but is valued by those who know him well. Throughout the progression of the plot, Darcy and Elizabeth are forced to be in each other's company, causing each character to see the other in a different light. At the end of the work, both overcome their differences and judgements to fall in love with each other.

[edit]Mr Bennet
Mr Bennet is the patriarch of the Bennet family, a gentleman of modest income with five unmarried daughters. Mr. Bennet has a sarcastic, cynical sense of humor that he uses to purposefully irritate his wife. Though he loves his daughters (Elizabeth in particular), he often fails as a parent, preferring to withdraw from the never-ending marriage concerns of the women around him rather than offer help.

[edit]Mrs Bennet
Mrs Bennet is the wife of her social superior Mr. Bennet and mother of Elizabeth and her sisters. She is frivolous, excitable, and narrow-minded, and she imagines herself susceptible to attacks of tremors and palpitations. Her public manners and social climbing are embarrassing to Jane and Elizabeth. Her favourite daughter is the youngest, Lydia, who reminds her of herself when younger. Her main ambition in life is to marry her daughters off well.

Lady Catherine confronts Elizabeth about Darcy, on the title page of the first illustrated edition. This is the other of the first two illustrations of the novel. [edit]Jane Bennet
Jane Bennet is the eldest Bennet sister. Twenty-three years old when the novel begins, she is considered the most beautiful young lady in the neighbourhood. Her character is contrasted with Elizabeth's as sweeter, shyer, and equally sensible, but not as clever; her most notable trait is a desire to see only the good in others. Jane is closest to Elizabeth, and her character is often contrasted with that of Elizabeth. She is favoured by her mother because of her beauty. She grows to be in love with Mr Bingley, a rich man who recently moved to Hertfordshire. Throughout the novel she is hurt by Mr Darcy, Mr Bingley's best friend, as he feels their love is not equal and he doesn't want to see Bingley get hurt. Thanks to Elizabeth, Mr Darcy realises his wrong doing and brings back Bingley who then marries Jane. Jane is the second Bennet to marry.

Charles Bingley
Charles Bingley is a handsome, good-natured, and wealthy young gentleman of 22, who rents Netherfield Park near Longbourn. He is contrasted with his friend Mr Darcy as being kinder and more charming and having more generally pleasing manners, although not quite so clever. He lacks resolve and is easily influenced by others.

A major theme in much of Austen's work is the importance of environment and upbringing on the development of young people's character and morality.[6] Social standing and wealth are not necessarily advantages in her world, and a further theme common to Jane Austen's work is ineffectual parents. In Pride and Prejudice, the failure of Mr and Mrs Bennet as parents is blamed for Lydia's lack of moral judgment; Darcy, on the other hand, has been taught to be principled and scrupulously honourable, but he is also proud and overbearing.[6] Kitty, rescued from Lydia's bad influence and spending more time with her older sisters after they marry, is said to improve greatly in their superior society.[7] Love
Pride and Prejudice contains one of the most cherished love stories in English literature: the courtship between Darcy and Elizabeth. As in any good love story, the lovers must elude and overcome numerous stumbling blocks, beginning with the tensions caused by the lovers’ own personal qualities. Elizabeth’s pride makes her misjudge Darcy on the basis of a poor first impression, while Darcy’s prejudice against Elizabeth’s poor social standing blinds him, for a time, to her many virtues. (Of course, one could also say that Elizabeth is guilty of prejudice and Darcy of pride—the title cuts both ways.) Austen, meanwhile, poses countless smaller obstacles to the realization of the love between Elizabeth and Darcy, including Lady Catherine’s attempt to control her nephew, Miss Bingley’s snobbery, Mrs. Bennet’s idiocy, and Wickham’s deceit. In each case, anxieties about social connections, or the desire for better social connections, interfere with the workings of love. Darcy and Elizabeth’s realization of a mutual and tender love seems to imply that Austen views love as something independent of these social forces, as something that can be captured if only an individual is able to escape the warping effects of hierarchical society. Austen does sound some more realist (or, one could say, cynical) notes about love, using the character of Charlotte Lucas, who marries the buffoon Mr. Collins for his money, to demonstrate that the heart does not always dictate marriage. Yet with her central characters, Austen suggests that true love is a force separate from society and one that can conquer even the most difficult of circumstances.

The plot of The Time Machine, like much speculative fiction, exists as a frame for the ideas that the novel (or more correctly, novella) seeks to explore. Indeed, many of the concepts that the novel tackles are explicitly discussed by the narration of the Time Traveller himself, as he describes his experiences with the time machine. The book opens in a scene of an after-dinner discussion between a group of professional gentlemen: a Psychologist, a Medical Man, a Provincial Mayor, a Very Young Man, the Narrator, a man named Filby and the Time Traveller himself. The Time Traveller is holding forth on his theories of time travel: "There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it" [Wells' italics] is the essential basis of his argument. The Time Traveller then produces a model of what he claims to be "a machine... that shall travel indifferently in any direction of Space and Time." He gets the Psychologist to push a lever on the model, and it promptly vanishes, causing consternation (and a fair degree of scepticism) amongst his guests. The Time Traveller claims that the model had travelled in time, and then shows his guests a larger machine in which he intends to travel. The following week, the Psychologist, Medical Man and the Narrator gather at the Time Traveller's house, along with an Editor, a Journalist, and a Silent Man. The Time Traveller is not present, but they follow instructions to begin their meal. Halfway through the meal the Time Traveller appears, dishevelled and halflame, and begins his remarkable story. The Time Traveller tells of his sensations as he travelled through thousands of years into the future in his recently finished time machine. Upon stopping he finds himself next to an enormous sphinx-like statue set upon a bronze pedestal. The year, we later learn from the dials of his machine, is 802,701 AD. The Time Traveller then encounters "a very beautiful and graceful creature... indescribably frail." He then meets more of these creatures, which he is later to discover are called Eloi. They live carefree lives in an apparent Utopian paradise of a future "Golden Age". He appears to have "happened upon humanity on the wane" where biological evolution through natural selection has taken the humanity of a world purged of troubles and dangers to produce a future-race characterised by indolence and lack of intellect. After dinning - on fruit - with the Eloi and beginning to explore this future world, the Time Traveller discovers his machine has disappeared - apparently dragged into the bronze pedestal through a doorway that he is unable to open. He then rescues a female Eloi from drowning. He discovers her name is Weena, and over the course of his adventure, he is to become quite attached to her. After a couple of half-sightings, the Time Traveller discovers that this future world is also the home of another species of future-man who live underground, emerging at night from a series of wells that rise up from the ground. He speculates that the two species of man have evolved from "the gradual widening of the present merely social difference between Capitalist and Labourer," played out over an evolutionary timeframe. Convinced that the under-world creatures - Morlocks - have taken his machine, the Time Traveller descends to their underground caverns but has to escape, empty- handed. Like the upper-worlders the Time Traveller comes to fear the dark and loathe the Morlocks. He considers the relationship between the two races and realises that the once-subservient Morlocks now prey upon the Eloi, who have become "mere fatted cattle." The Time Traveller takes Weena to explore a large Palace of Green Porcelain, but it is further than he thought and, with darkness approaching, his and Weena's fear of the Morlocks grows. They spend the night safely, but the Time Traveller resolves to devise a way to ward off the Morlocks. In the palace, which turns out to be a ruined museum, the Time Traveller finds matches, camphor and a metal bar to use against the Morlocks. Returning from the museum, the Time Traveller and Weena are forced through tiredness to rest in a forest. Although the Time Traveller sets fire to the trees to ward off the Morlocks, the two are attacked and Weena is taken. The Morlocks, however, are blinded by the raging fire. The Time Traveller returns to the Eloi and finds his time machine. The Morlocks attempt to trap him, but he escapes. The Time Traveller goes on through the future to discover a world where the sun
has grown large and red, and the earth appears to be populated by giant crab-like creatures. Moving further on in time, he discovers a bitterly cold, almost lifeless earth with a dying sun. The only signs of life left are lichens and mosses, and a black "round thing, the size of a football... hopping fitfully about" on the shore. Feeling faint, he climbs back onto the machine and returns to his own time.

The Time Traveller's guests greet his tale with scepticism, and his meagre evidence of flowers from the year 802,701 fails to convince them. "What a pity it is you're not a writer of stories!" says the Editor. The next day, the Narrator visits the Time Traveller again, only to witness what appears to be his disappearance from his workshop. The Time Traveller never returns and the Narrator reflects on what might have befallen him as well as considers his own view of the future which appears a little more optimistic than that of the Time Traveller, though mainly simply one of the unknown.

Themes Pride and Prejudice Pride and Prejudice is based on an earlier novel of Austen's called First Impressions. This could be taken as a working title of the later novel, and helps inform an approach to the text. How we judge others is a related theme - to do so without enough knowledge invites prejudice. And Austen goes on to show how the extent to which we know other people is directly correlated with the extent to which we know ourselves. Thus Elizabeth is more prone to siding with Wickham because of her prejudice against Darcy; but both characters come to a greater understanding of themselves as they work through their faults, this process eventually serving to draw them closer together. It is easy to label Darcy as being the character symbolic of pride, and Elizabeth of prejudice. Darcy takes pride in his rank, and his arrogance colours his assessment of the people of Longbourn. Elizabeth and the neighbourhood are prejudiced against Darcy from the beginning, taking offence at his low opinion of them. However, it becomes clear that these qualities infect the portrayal of other characters in the book. Lady Catherine displays ridiculous pride in her status; Mrs Bennet is ridiculously prejudiced in her views. Pride and prejudice seep through all of the characters, and in many guises. Love and marriage Pride and Prejudice is most easily defined as a romantic comedy, but Austen stresses that the first flush of romantic love will not sustain a marriage and is no basis for happiness. Mr Bennett is described as being 'captivated' by Mrs Bennett's 'youth and beauty' on first meeting her, but this is inadequate for a relationship to last. Similarly, Lydia and Wickham's elopement is, on the face of it, very romantic, driven as they are by passionate feeling. But Austen charts the effect of such recklessness on others, and we see this intensity start to decline as it is brought into the mundane practicality of the everyday. If Austen is keen to stress the need for passion and attraction to be tempered, she is just as critical of marriages devoid of love and intimacy. Elizabeth angers her mother by refusing the hand of Mr Collins; but while Mrs Bennett see the practical, materialistic considerations of this union outweighing the absence of love, for Elizabeth, money is no recompense for feeling. This is why she is shocked by Charlotte Lucas's unsentimental detachment: "I am not a romantic... I ask only a comfortable home." But this example of marriage is just as unsatisfactory as one based on passion. In Pride and Prejudice, a happy marriage springs from both physical attraction and compatibility. So while Bingley may have been drawn to Jane's beauty, it is their 'general similarity of feeling and taste' that will ensure their marriage lasts. Their love has deepened through their shared setbacks. On the other hand, Darcy and Elizabeth's love only arises once misunderstanding, and blinding pride and prejudice, is overcome. They are made to examine why they love each other with practicality and reason. Role of Women In the eighteenth century a woman's role in society was determined by her father and husband. Convention demanded that women were submissive and modest. Their educational opportunities were inferior to men's and they were not expected to think for themselves. On the surface, Austen's fiction would appear to perpetuate this. Marriage is deemed the most a woman can hope to achieve, and her novels end happily with this confirmation. Yet Austen heavily criticizes the ignorance endorsed by popular expectation. Mrs Bennet's comic fickleness and absurd hypochondria result from her narrow mind and 'mean understanding'.

Lydia may be spirited but she is also 'ignorant' and 'idle'. Caroline Bingley and Lady Catherine may have status and rank, but they reveal their deficiency in failing to appreciate reading and music. However, it is through Elizabeth and her relationship with Darcy that Austen betrays most her resentment at the restraint upon women. Elizabeth is contemptuous of idle small chat, preferring to converse with the gentlemen. She possesses wit and intelligence far removed from the conventional representations of women at the time, and especially those in the romantic novels Austen's fiction is said to resemble. Critics have drawn out parallels between the portrait of Elizabeth and the views of early feminists such as Mary Wollstonecraft. She argued that in order for women to achieve equality they must think independently with reason. Yet for all her spirit and quick wit, Elizabeth still conforms to expectation. She may have been prepared to reject one of the richest men in England, but at the end of the novel she is keen to assume her role as mistress of Pemberley. Indeed, it could be argued that her visit to the great estate marks the change in her feelings for Darcy.
ClassThe relationship between gentry and trade is pivotal in understanding the implications of social interaction in the novel. Darcy's pride springs from his gentleman status; Elizabeth's connection with trade is one of the reasons why initially he has reservations about marrying her. However, Elizabeth does not doubt her fitness to mix with the upper classes, smartly answering Lady Catherine's rejection of her as suitable for Darcy: 'He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman's daughter; so far we are equal.' Miss Bingley conveniently forgets that the family fortune came from trade; similarly, Sir William Lucas tries to mask his trade background by aspiring to be a country gentleman. Austen shows personality to be the mark of class. The true gentility of the Gardiners impresses the previously contemptuous Darcy, and they show no shame in their living. This is neatly offset by the vulgar arrogance of Lady Catherine de Bourgh whose manners demonstrate how unworthy she is of her status. Towards the end of the novel class boundaries are necessarily crossed for the good of others. The gentleman, Darcy, works with the tradesman, Mr Gardiner, so that Lydia and the Bennetts will not be disgraced. Elizabeth and Darcy's marriage, then, both subverts and conforms to the social order. Austen is not asking that convention should be upset, only reinvigorated for a new and more assertive generation.