Victorian literature

English as a second language, English studies, Joseph Conrad, English studies.

Victorian Prose, General Semantics, General Semantics Survey of History of the English Language, Introduction of Phonetics, Linguistics, Literary Criticism, Milton, The Modern English Language, grammar, principles of persuasion, remedial English, Shakespeare, speech communication, word building, world literature, written expression, freshman composition,

It seems like the subject or the courses that you had started with, or perhaps others emanated from it, was English, the study of English, the beauty of the English language, the structure and where it is.

You seem to really are filled with that topic.

But people, let's start with the reading.

I'm going to read you today an act, very old-fashioned story in very old Victorian English.

It's classic gothic horror.

novel, Dracula by Bram Stoker.

It's good, yes, it's very good, but it's written in a very descriptive, very old-fashioned Victorian language, but I'm here to fight against it because it's my sandbox and you can try with me.

Let's go in three, two, one, go! Okay, people, we are online, I can see the, you can see me, you can hear me, and you can hear me, and I know that you can hear me, because I can see the colors of my audio mixer, my dynamic mic, sure, and we can start.

Okay, Dracula chapter 9. by Bram Stoker.

It was very hard to read.

Right.

And, um, he- So he comes up at a time when Victorian literature is didactic to a, a, to a degree that you guys can't even imagine.

All right? Like, one of the things Charles Dickens was so mad about was that the Temperance Society was rewriting fairy tales-

Yes

And even if he didn't read French literature in French, a lot of it was in translation.

There's references throughout Victorian literature to people reading French novels.

It's in Wilkie Collins, Dickens, Trollope.

I mean, I don't think that we can discount the possibility that French and even other languages influenced British literature.

So, you know, the, these, these are direct influences.

But, you know, Newman received Gerard Manley Hopkins, the, the greatest poet of the Victorian era, into the Church in 1866.

And his influence, when I wrote my book Literary Converts, his influence over the whole host of converts to the Catholic faith from the 1850s, 1840s right through to, you know, well after the Second World War, and indeed today.

I mean, I, I'm, I'm, I'm not worthy to be considered in the same breath as, as these great writers, but reading Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua was an, a major milestone on my own conversion back in the 1980s.

I mean, he's capable of so much with that beautiful palette.

Absolutely.

And I love your imagery of a painting because, you know, several leading critics and writers have stated their belief, which I am, you know, very comfortable in agreeing with, that Newman was the greatest prose stylist of the Victorian era.

Now, think about that.