Musings on Victorian Literature

As I sit at the information desk in our apartment building, I am currently enjoying the BBC's excellent mini-series of Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters via Netflix's Watch Instantly feature. I also found, saved on my desktop, a witty little story that some friends of mine wrote while studying for our Victorian Literature final exam last fall. Every person mentioned is an author we studied; their works are mentioned in the paragraphs as well. Being quite ill at the time with flu and pneumonia, I can take none of the credit for this--it all goes to Amber, Eryn, and Meredith.

A Day in the Musings on Victorian Literature

by Euphemia Gray Ruskin Millais

At dawn, Elizabeth Gaskell rose from her bed, and met with the Wives and Daughters of England Club at the Towers. She went with her best friends Ruth and Mary Barton.

At ten in the morning, Tennyson was “Crossing the Bar” and thinking about In Memoriam when he met “The Lady of Shalott” and “Mariana” in “The Palace of Art.”

Meanwhile, Robert Browning was sitting “By the Fireside” in his “House” having “Home-Thoughts from Abroad” while watching the “Development” of “My Star” when “My Last Duchess” walked in and brought him some “Memorablia” of “Porphyria’s Lover” aka strands of blond hair. His friends, “Andrea del Sarto” and “Fra Lippo Lippi” came in carrying their new paintings “Youth and Art” and talked dramatic monologues about the new sculpture “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church” for a week. Then “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came,” and Childe Roland and Browning talked about their immense “Prospice.”

E.B.B. came into the room with the men and screamed, “There’s a “Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”!” Hurry, read “Sonnets from the Portuguese” to hear about “The Cry of the Children”.”

On the other side of London, Thomas Carlyle was talking about the Past and Present of the famous author/actor Shakespeare, who was going to be featured in the new film On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History. Meanwhile, there was a crowd gathering outside in protest of Carlyle’s new film, so they were screaming “SARTOR RESARTUS, SARTOR RESARTUS!”

Helping his sister, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was visiting Highgate and talking to a prostitute, “Jenny,” “The Blessed Damozel.” At twelve, “My Sister’s Sleep” was interrupted by a wombat.

The wombat dragged my sister Christina Rossetti to the “Goblin Market” where they tried to sell her things in a Sing-Song voice.

In William Morris’ afternoon newspaper, there was news about a trial going on in “The Defence of Guenevere.” It was held in “The Haystack in the Floods.” The verdict was ambiguous.

As John Stuart Mill was reading the same newspaper, someone ran by his window and screamed, “WHAT IS POETRY?” Mill was so confused that he decided to write a disturbed Autobiography in which he argued On Liberty and On the Subjection of Women.

That afternoon, Matthew Arnold was at “Dover Beach,” visiting his father’s tomb at “Rugby Chapel.” “The Scholar-Gipsy” danced by singing “Stanzas from the Grande Chartruese.” Arnold ignored him and stared at his father’s grave, thinking about “The Buried Life.” Taking a break from his musings, he picked up the journal Literature and Science and read a critical article on The Study of Poetry and decided to write the “Preface to the First Edition of Poems” for his Swiss lover Marguerite.

At sunset, I was sitting with John Ruskin on The Stones of Venice, and he declared me imperfect. I stood up, kissed my illicit painter lover and yelled at Ruskin as we rode away into the fiery sunset, Unto This Last!