Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell was born in London on Setpember 29th, 1810 to William and Elizabeth Stevenson. Her father William was a former Unitarian minister who, after retiring from the ministry, “combined farming, writing, and teaching before being appointed Keeper of the Records to the Treasury" (Allott 10). Her mother, Elizabeth died just over a year after giving birth and, consequently, while still an infant, Gaskell was sent off to live with her aunt, Hannah Lumb who resided in Heathside, Knutford. Throughout her young life, up until her 1832 marriage, Gaskell lived in various places around England including Stratford-on-Avon, where she received some education, Newcastle, Edinburgh, and Manchester. It was in Manchester that she met her husband, William Gaskell, a minister’s assistant, “who was eventually to [become] Senior Minister and remain at Cross Street [Unitarian Chapel in Manchester] for the rest of a long, active life (Allott 11).” From 1832 to 1848, after her marriage to William Gaskell, Mrs. Gaskell lived a life of domesticity, giving birth to 6 children, with 4 surviving. Besides raising the 4 surviving children, Gaskell worked with her husband to aid, comfort, and minister to the poor of Manchester. In 1845, Gaskell suffered the haunting loss of her only son to scarlet fever at just nineteen months old. With the encouragement of her husband, Gaskell turned her grief towards writing, and her literary career began.
Over the course of her literary career, Gaskell wrote “six novels, several nouvelles, a biography, about thirty short stories, a number of sketches and articles, and a few poems (Allott 8).” The novels, in chronological order were Mary Barton (1848), Cranford (1853), Ruth (1853), North and South (1855), Slyvia’s Lovers (1863), and Cousin Phillis (1864). The biography was of her good friend and fellow authoress, Charlotte Brontë, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857). Gaskell’s career included two controversies, one over her portrayal of the fallen woman in society in Ruth the other over accusations of libel from portrayals in The Life of Charlotte Brontë. Despite these controversies, Gaskell remained a popular literary figure throughout her life, even enjoying a friendship and working relationship with perhaps the most popular writer of the day, Charles Dickens, to whose Household Words publication she became a frequent contributor. When Gaskell passed away in 1865, The Athenaeum “rated [Gaskell] ‘if not the most popular, with small question, the most powerful and finished female novelist of an epoch singularly rich in female novelists’(Victorian Web).
In Stephen Dunn’s 2003 poem, “Charlotte Bronte in Leeds Point”, the famous author of Jane Eyre is placed into a modern setting of New Jersey. Although Charlotte Bronte lived in the early middle 1800’s, we find her alive and well in the present day in this poem. The poem connects itself to Bronte’s most popular novel, Jane Eyre in characters analysis and setting while speaking of common themes in the novel. Dunn also uses his poem to give Bronte’s writing purpose in modern day.
Out of all the industrialized countries in the world, the United States is the only one that doesn’t have a universal health care plan (Yamin 1157). The current health care system in the United States relies on employer-sponsored insurance programs or purchase of individual insurance plans. Employer-sponsored coverage has dropped from roughly 80 percent in 1982 to a little over 60 percent in 2006 (Kinney 809). The government does provide...
In her autobiography, “The Life of an Ordinary Woman, Anne Ellis describes just that; the life of an ordinary woman. Ellis reveals much about her early—ordinary if you will—life during the nineteenth-century. She describes what daily life was like, living a pioneer-like lifestyle. Her memoir is ‘Ordinary’ as it is full of many occurrences that the average woman experiences. Such as taking care of her children, cleaning, cooking the—world’s greatest—meals. It also contains many themes such as dysfunctional families, insensitive men, and negligent parents that are seen in modern life. The life of Anne Ellis is relatable. Her life is relatable to modern day life, however, very different.
The first story is of Randy Knapp. He was eighteen years old and with two friends he decided to summit Mt. Hood on New Year’s Day. Equipped with appropriate supplies for 10 days, Randy and his friends were doing well until they were hit by a blinding snow storm and decided to head home. Having left their map in the truck, they mistakenly headed in the wrong direction and were lost in the snow storm. They spent the next 13 nights, for a total of 16 days, in a snow cave before they crawled out and were spotted by searchers.
Health care is one of the most debated issues in the United States today and it 's necessary to understand the basics of this problem. Approximately 50 million people living in the United
The need for universal health care within the United States has been evident, and needed to be addressed. The old healthcare system was plagued with issues, including expensive premiums that were on the rise, along with an inflated average infant mortality rate and limited average life expectancy, which ultimately led to many people being left uninsured (“Affordable” 2). In the 2012 presidential election, one key issue was how to reform America’s broken health care system, and to instate a successful universal healthcare system that has resolved the previous issues. Being one of the last influential and competitive countries in the world without universal healthcare, the pressure was on for the United States to develop their own system. Since Barack Obama became president, Obamacare, instead of the proposed Romneycare, was born.
The Center of Disease Control and Prevention (2013) reported that, more than 35% of U.S. adults are obese and suffer metabolic syndrome which can include heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and a variety of cancers, causing the US more than hundreds of billion dollars for their medical care. It makes some wonder whether the health care Americans have chosen to support our country was the right choice. A managed health care system might not be the most efficient at times but compared to a Universal plan, Managed care looks golden. America’s managed health care dates back to the 19th century when rural American workers agreed to a set fee for physicians to deliver care to them and their families. After World War II however, hospitals and clinics started popping up all over our country enrolling more than half a million people. By the 1970’s healthcare became common place and the choice of HMO, PPO etc... were formed. Employers began to see managed care as a necessity for their employees and now healthcare comes as a job benefit (Tufts Managed Care Institute, 1998). Having a health care plan through work The alternative choice to a managed healthcare is a Universal healthcare which is a government-funded program. This health care system dates back just as far as managed health care however, this has never been much of a success in the American System (Karen S. Palmer,1999).
Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Brontë, was published in 1847 by Smith, Elder & Company, in London. This year is exactly ten years into Queen Victoria’s sixty-four year reign of the British Empire. The Victorian Era was renowned for its patriarchal Society and definition by class. These two things provide vital background to the novel, as Jane suffers from both. Jane Eyre relates in some ways to Brontë’s own life, as its original title suggest, “Jane Eyre: An Autobiography”. Charlotte Brontë would have suffered from too, as a relatively poor woman. She would have been treated lowly within the community. In fact, the book itself was published under a pseudonym of Currer Bell, the initials taken from Brontë’s own name, due to the fact that a book published by a woman was seen as inferior, as they were deemed intellectually substandard to men. Emily Brontë, Charlotte’s sister, was also forced to publish her most famous novel, Wuthering Heights, under the nom de plume of Ellis Bell, again taking the initials of her name to form her own alias. The novel is a political touchstone to illustrate the period in which it was written, and also acts as a critique of the Victorian patriarchal society.
In “A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson,” Mary Rowlandson, a Puritan mother from Lancaster, Massachusetts, recounts the invasion of her town by Indians in 1676 during “King Philip’s War,” when the Indians attempted to regain their tribal lands. She describes the period of time where she is held under captivity by the Indians, and the dire circumstances under which she lives. During these terrible weeks, Mary Rowlandson deals with the death of her youngest child, the absence of her Christian family and friends, the terrible conditions that she must survive, and her struggle to maintain her faith in God. She also learns how to cope with the Indians amongst whom she lives, which causes her attitude towards them to undergo several changes. At first, she is utterly appalled by their lifestyle and actions, but as time passes she grows dependent upon them, and by the end of her captivity, she almost admires their ability to survive the harshest times with a very minimal amount of possessions and resources. Despite her growing awe of the Indian lifestyle, her attitude towards them always maintains a view that they are the “enemy.”
By 4 PM we had conquered most of the peaks. As we were climbing what we thought was our sixth peak, Big Red, a storm struck. It was a cold driving rain that froze us as we struggled up the mountain. We reached the top jubilant, but exhausted. As the crew tried to get a bearing I came to the slow realization that we were not on Big Red, but another peak. We had two peaks to climb, and in freezing rain! With no options, we hiked on.
Though the photographers would often stage their photographs, they are still witness to real events (Trachtenberg 73). What the photograph depicted originated, as everyone understood, in the world itself, not in the imagination-even if objects must be moved to realize the photographer’s intention (Trachtenberg 83). It defined and perhaps even helped unify the nation through an unrehearsed and uns...
Definitive criteria for judging the success or failure of a work of fiction are not easily agreed upon; individuals almost necessarily introduce bias into any such attempt. Only those who affect an exorbitantly refined artistic taste, however, would deny the importance of poignancy in literary pieces. To be sure, writings of dubious and fleeting merit frequently enchant the public, but there is too the occasional author who garners widespread acclaim and whose works remain deeply affecting despite the passage of time. The continued eminence of the fiction of Emily Bronte attests to her placement into such a category of authors: it is a recognition of her propensity to create poignant and, indeed, successful literature.
In 1847, Charlotte Bronte, although a woman, published her semi autobiographical Jane Eyre. She wrote her novels in Thornton, Yorkshire, England. This novel later became a classic literature novel. ( Bronte) She wrote in the 1800’s and her novel reflects the time period, which she wrote in with the various techniques and themes. In the novel Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte uses literary devices such as, imagery and themes like religion and feminism to demonstrate the time period in which she wrote.
In chapter three, Lockwood opens a window to Catherine Earnshaws childhood through perusing through her books “Catherine’s library was select…scarcely one chapter had escaped a pen-and-ink commentary…scrawled in an unformed childish hand” we can see that her collection of books was limited but nevertheless well used. Two voices also come to the fore one being Lockwood’s and the other the autobiographical elements of Emily Brontë’s voice, ‘pen-and-ink commentary’ and ‘unformed childish’ the pre-modifiers reveal that the Brontë sisters also wrote in the margins of the novels they owned as paper was a scarce material.
Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre, is not a book that can easily be viewed through one critical theory. However, by knowing the historical background of when Bronte developed her novel, readers are able to understand Jane Eyre on a deeper level. The Victorian era was a time of change, and what authors like Charlotte Bronte did was help increase the change by shedding light into problems in Victorian society. Jane Eyre touches on many of the issues in Victorian society like feminist issues, class struggles, and the relationship between Britain and its colonies. Not only can readers see how much society has changed, but also the similarities. By understanding the novel at a historical level, readers can understand the novel through the lense