I could have said “Hopes and Fears” but those vague aspirates (phonetic sense) emerged first. In either case the apparent contrast comes with a simple premise: that hopes and fears, anxiety and aspiration, emerge from the same source. Utopian hopes are inspired by the same stimuli that inform most dystopias. Each reveals the other, and each will give us access to the common culture of a period. Attached to this unremarkable premise may be the open question of what the common culture shares—or fails to share—with individual impulses. Central texts: Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (1864-5) John Stuart Mill On Liberty (1859) and On the Subjection of Women (1869). We will read selections from major texts on either side of Dickens and in order to explore the premise and the ancillary question while we track the broad outlines of Victorian England. The crises surrounding the urgent modernization of England in the 1860s feed fin de siècle fantasies of Stevenson and Wm. Morris which will permit us to reconstitute the period..

Texts will include:
Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (1864-5) Penguin Books isbn 0 14 04 3497
J. S. Mill, On Liberty (1859), The Subjection of Women (1869) from On Liberty and Other Writings Cambridge University Press isbn 0 521 37917 2
R. L. Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1887) Dover Books isbn 0 486 26688 5
William Morris, News from Nowhere (1891) Penguin Books isbn 0 14 043330 9
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland Dover Books ISBN 0486416585****
Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market,Dover Books ISBN 0486280551*****

Selections from Carlyle, Ruskin, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Eliot on Electronic Reserve.