Melvyn Bragg: The book that changed the world

Until next Saturday (19th March) you can catch this fascinating hour long programme on BBC iPlayer. Melvyn Bragg sets out to persuade us that the King James Bible has driven the making of the English speaking world over the last 400 years, often in the most unanticipated ways.

He travels to historic locations in the UK and USA where the King James Bible has had a deep impact, including Gettysburg and the American Civil War and Washington's Lincoln Memorial, site of Martin Luther King's famous speech.

He argues that while many think our modern world is founded on secular ideals, it is the King James Version which had a greater legacy. The King James Bible not only influenced the English language and its literature more than any other book, it was also the seedbed of western democracy, the activator of radical shifts in society such as the abolition of the slave trade, the debating dynamite for brutal civil wars in Britain and America and a critical spark in the genesis of modern science.

If you are studying English, the opening sections are particularly useful in relating some of Shakespeare’s ideas to their scriptural background.

Crossref-it.info will fill in the other gaps!

The world they lived in

Nineteenth century English novels

Are you studying Hard Times, Great Expectations or Tess of the d’Urbervilles this year? It is likely that a lot of current A Level Eng Lit students are examining texts like these, which demonstrate the rapid changes in social organisation that took place during the nineteenth century.

Such novels depict the huge shift of the population from rural to city living. They chart the dislocation experienced when intimate communities and familiar landscapes are left behind for faceless streets. In cities it is easier to sink into oblivion without the watchful care of those who have known someone from birth.

The opportunity to develop

Yet cities also offer the chance for change, for re-definition. There are opportunities for a ‘nobody’ to become a ‘somebody’, to escape the social position of their family. New friendships established in new locations mean that people learn to judge others according to their material markers, rather than who their parents were.

Today’s obsession with ‘location, location, location’ is a direct descendant of the nineteenth century’s urban expansion, with its stress on living in a ‘respectable neighbourhood’. If you are studying the era for History, you will have a good grasp of this process and its impact.

No time?

However, for those who don’t have the time to research it for themselves, there are two new articles from Crossref-it.info. Part of an entire section about the world of the Victorians, these give you a useful overview of the situation in Britain that created the backdrop for your set texts. Go to

• World of Victorian writers > Town and country life
• World of Victorian writers > Urbanisation and the Suburbs

Remember, examiners give you marks when you can demonstrate understanding of the significance and influence of the contexts in which literary texts were written and received (AO4).

All about fiction

Just in time to be of huge help to any students studying for exams this summer, or still facing university interviews to study English, are three TV programmes currently airing. Yes, you really can justify sitting in front of the screen to ‘help you study’!

Wider reading and success

One of the things that a crammed term of revision no longer allows time for is wider leisure reading. And yet something that always impresses examiners and interviewers is a candidate’s ability to refer to more than just the set texts they have studied in class. If you can link your ideas on a particular text to other literature of the time, or trace the concerns of the novelist to the social movements of their era, you will be heading for an A*.

Speedy literary context help

Now the Beeb is running a season on fiction and there are some really illuminating programmes to catch:

• Faulks on Fiction - At 9pm Saturday on BBC2, author Sebastian Faulks is tracing the development of various types of character that recur in novels. So far he has covered ‘Heroes’ and ‘Lovers’, demonstrating how our perceptions of what makes a literary hero or lover have changed through the last three centuries. Lots of clips from TV adaptations bring his observations to life. Catching it on BBC i-player means that you don’t have to sacrifice your social life!
• Birth of the British Novel - At 9pm Monday on BBC4 an even more helpful series is being fronted by Henry Hitchins. This charts developments in novel writing from the earliest Robinson Crusoe to the present day. It is great for demonstrating how authors created, then adapted, different prose genres, either reflecting or subverting the literary context of their times. Again there are numerous drama clips as illustration.

English Language help

If you are taking AS/A2 English Language, another literary themed broadcast focuses on text production:

The Beauty of Books – Just before the Birth of the British Novel, at 8.30pm Monday on BBC4, as this series moves through the centuries it becomes ever more pertinent to the AS/A2 Development of Language modules. Already the second episode has considered the implications of moving from hand scribed manuscripts into print, thereby creating a medieval best seller with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

Handy social context help

Meanwhile (in case you didn’t already know), Crossref-it.info has got lots of helpful articles about the worlds inhabited by Chaucer, Shakespeare, the Romantics and Victorians. They will help you to make links between your set texts and the political, social and philosophical movements of the day. Lots of brownie points there!

Every success!

Invisible barriers

One of the hardest aspects to understand about a culture are the unspoken values that govern it – the things that nobody makes clear but everybody assumes. English literature inevitably reflects English culture, which in turn has been shaped by the nation’s position as a democracy, its Protestantism and its geographical location, among other things.

It is hard to gauge how far this history has influenced British attitudes, yet it is surely part of the desire to look outward, to express individual opinions and be self determining, which we see in characters like Elizabeth Bennet, Pip, Jane Eyre and the Mayor of Casterbridge.

Class wars

However, all these literary creations also encountered another invisible value that shaped their existence – that of social class. How one sector of the population judges another is usually a mystery to the outsider, but the problems it poses are real enough. Class can determine:

> who one can marry

> what employment is acceptable

> where one may live.

Of course, encountering such obstacles has provided great material for the English novel in particular. Can the labourer Pip ever really be a gentleman? Should clergyman’s daughter Margaret Hale be united with a cotton manufacturer? Will Miss Bennet’s vulgar mother always ruin her chances in marriage?

Does it matter?

When today’s society is much more mobile and egalitarian, it may seem hard to understand what all the fuss is about. That’s why at Crossref-it.info there is now a helpful article on English class and hierarchy to guide readers through the minefield of these invisible attitudes. Next time you wonder just why Angel Clare’s parents are anxious about his marrying Tess, why not check it out?

The status of girls

Fighting for their rights

Mass demonstrations in Egypt. Our screens are filled with men and women demanding that their democratic rights are actually reflected in the way their country is governed. These are remarkable scenes, but all the more so when you realise that just 60 years ago there would have been no women involved, because before 1956, Egyptian females were not allowed to vote!

Today, girls in the UK have the same rights in law as their male counterparts:

• They can vote once eighteen
• They can get a job in almost any sphere of employment
• They are paid an equal rate as lads for comparable work
• They can have their own bank accounts, get their own mortgages, possess their own property.

But of course!

The long struggle

In fact it has taken a long time to reach this level of equality. A new Crossref-it.info article on Female emancipation gives you the gen.

The novels Crossref-it.info has featured recently demonstrate just how vulnerable young women have been in the past:

• The new guide to Wide Sargasso Sea depicts how Antoinette Cosway can be handed over as part of a financial transaction to marry a man she hardly knows. It demonstrates her anger and fear as she sees him become the possessor of all that had once been hers, while incarcerating his wife in the process.
• In the Jane Eyre guide, we see how an orphan whose relatives reject her is at the mercy of a capricious employer. When she has to escape his attentions, she can only become a vagrant. With no male to protect her or provide references for alternative employment she is powerless to change her situation, other than relying on charity.

How we got there

No girl today would expect to find themselves in the same situation, but that is owing to the long struggle by women to achieve parity with men. But if you think it’s all over, watch out for the forthcoming Crossref-it.info guide on Margaret Attwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale …

Taking time out and defying convention

Delayed publication

The author of Wide Sargasso Sea, on which Crossref-it.info has just launched an A Level guide, had quite a job in getting her manuscript to a point of publication:

• In 1957 Jean Rhys told her editor, Diana Athill, that it would be ready in six to nine months time, claiming that a large part of it was already written
• In fact, the writing of Wide Sargasso Sea was not finished until the end of March 1966
• Diana Athill wrote to Jean about ‘the labour and torment’ that had gone into its writing. No doubt she was referring to herself as the editor, as well as to its author!

A new approach

Rhys was writing using innovative forms and a variety of perspectives. It took her a while to work out how these could be utilised to create a narrative whole. During that time, her life and work disappeared from popular view.

At Crossref-it.info we too have had to take some time and work out a different approach with our guide to Wide Sargasso Sea.

Like you, we know that the future of literary study lies on-line rather than in a book-case. That’s why we developed a web-based English Literature resource and that’s why it has proved so popular worldwide. For each text we have covered that is not in the public domain, the author’s publisher has understood the power of the medium and granted permission to quote from their text.

Problems and solutions

However, we faced a problem when Rhys’ publisher seemed anxious about having her novel analysed on-line.

What to do? We knew how important it was that the text wasn’t once again rendered invisible to a new generation of students, whose automatic port of call is the internet. It has taken a while, but the whole guide has been re-worked, aiming to be as clear and specific as possible in its explanation of Wide Sargasso Sea, without actually using Rhys’ words. Not so easy for a novel that doesn’t have numbered chapters!

Result

It was worth waiting for Rhys’ masterpiece.

Hopefully everyone who uses the new Crossref-it.info guide on Wide Sargasso Sea will agree that it was worth waiting for this as well!

Why not check it out now?

Wide Sargasso Sea

Some authors are defined by one particular work which overshadows the rest of their output:

• Joseph Heller will forever be identified with his satirical masterpiece, Catch 22
• J. D. Salinger is known primarily as the creator of Holden Caulfield, narrator of The Catcher in the Rye
• Margaret Mitchell did write another novel, but nothing to match Gone with the Wind.

Until the late 60’s few people would have heard of Jean Rhys, who had produced a few collections of short stories and novellas in the 1920s and 30s. By the end of the 1950s many were not even sure if she was still alive. Then in 1966 Wide Sargasso Sea appeared.

For all sorts of reasons Wide Sargasso Sea became the work with which Rhys is for ever identified. It had a huge impact:

• With its multiple viewpoints and disjointed narrative, it echoed the multilayered interpretations of modernism, yet was also post-modern before the term had become recognised.
• Its perspective on a ‘colonial’ account (Jane Eyre), from the viewpoint of the colonised, helped to wake literate Britain up to the role of Britain’s economic world dominance within its literature
• It was revisionist in its handling of a well loved cultural icon, Mr Rochester, shaking forever the unthinking adulation of Brontë’s romantic hero
• It created a woman’s narrative voice at variance with the clear female voice of Jane Eyre herself, whom generations had learnt to love.

All these reasons and more make Wide Sargasso Sea a distinctive novel, and a popular choice on A Level syllabuses, especially when set in conjunction with Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

At Crossref-it.info a comprehensive guide to Brontë’s classic has already been available for a couple of years. Now we are about to launch one to help students studying Rhys’ most famous work.

Watch this space!