Lippencott's Magazine Article

In addition, Henry does not easily overcome the social mores of 1942; again something MacLeod says that “bad” historical fiction makes it seem easy to overcome the social mores of the era.

Having a career in science and medicine was a big deal during this time. Dr. Jekyll is an educated, wealthy, and well-respected man. Through the eyes of the public, he is seen as a perfect, ideal Victorian man. He is a “large, well-made, smooth-faced man of fifty, with something of a slyish cast perhaps, but every mark of capacity and kindness” (31). Because of his status in society, Dr. Jekyll is obligated to hide his pleasures and show the society his caring, affectionate, and loyal virtues.

In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, written by Mark Twain, there exists a clear incongruence between nobility and the lower class. While knights and landlords live lavishly without a concern for acquiring basic necessities, peasants often struggle to feed themselves and their families. With so few individuals holding such a large portion of the wealth, a vast gap between the rich and the poor plagues society. For the most part, King Arthur remains completely oblivious to these issues that the lower class faces every day. He ineffectively governs, failing to consider the needs of all people. King Arthur’s interactions with the lower class and his inability to understand peasants’ lifestyles demonstrate the flaws of the monarchy system.

Today donating to charitable causes is a widespread among the world’s wealthy people. Some are contributing the majority of their vast fortunes, “Warren Buffett, who has committed 99 percent of his fortune to charity upon his death, along with Bill and Melinda Gates, who have given more than $28 billion to their foundation and say they plan to give a significant portion of their remaining wealth to good causes.” (Yen). In The Great Gatsby a large amount of Gatsby’s wealth is wasted on lavish parties for people who are indifferent about him. The Buchanan’s are even more selfish. Tom frequently sees the poor when he visits his mistress Myrtle, yet he never feels an obligation to help them. It appears as though the affluent people of today feel that helping the less fortunate is more of their responsibility than the rich of the Roaring 20s did. While the wealthy still don’t support the destitute to their full abilities, noblesse oblige is much more present today in America than it ever has been.

Gatsby, who acquired his wealth through organized crime (distributing illegal alcohol, trading in stolen securities, and bribing police officers), is part of this new element of society. As such, he can never participate in the arrogant, inherited “old wealth” of Tom and Daisy Buchanan, who live in East Egg (present day Manhasset and Port Washington), the playground of the upper-class, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans (Tunc 69).

Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn all explore the effects of wealth and class on society. On closer inspection, a common strand seems to form between these three classic novels. The idea that wealth (and the social class that comes with it) determines a person is refuted via the use of deep characterization. In the end, it seems, wealth and class don’t determine a person’s moral integrity and value, but rather how they interact those two things. Ultimately, Twain makes a case for the lower-classes, that even the poor (and enslaved) can be truly good, setting a better example than the wealthy. Fitzgerald, on the other hand, shows that rich aren’t entirely superficial, rather, that they can be great men. Bronte’s Jane Eyre is a bit more of an oddball than the other two novels, focusing instead on a protagonist that leaps from riches (under the supervision of a cruel aunt), to rags, then back to riches once again. Still, this common strand holds true between the three books: no class, poor or rich, is entirely exempt from moral bankruptcy. A poor person like Pap Finn can be morally corrupt, while a rich man like Jay Gatsby can be good. All character-based judgments in these books lay solely on the person they are judging, blind of the class and wealth that surrounds them.

Jane Austen’s Persuasion challenges the notion that one’s social class determines one’s happiness. In the novel there is the upper class, which includes Sir Walter Elliot and his family; the nouveau rich, such as Admiral Croft and Captain Wentworth; and the poor

Class, gender, and race are just a few of the classifications that have directly impacted one’s financial, legal, and personal freedoms throughout history. There are several examples in Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition and Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth that will shed light to the many situations in which the characters find themselves that display the sort of inequality that was quite common in the 20th century.

In The Turn of the Screw, Henry James employs class divisions through clothing, representing how the characters are inclined to act through their degree of conformity to societal expectations. First published in 1898, by Collier’s Weekly, a magazine company that had a reputation of reporting on integral societal events and topics people considered important to their lives, the magazine commissioned the help of famous writers to write on pressing historical events of the time (Elduff). It grew to be one of the most widely read magazines in the United States by 1892, which allowed James to write a novella that hit on concerns regarding social mobility on a larger scale platform. Since the Victorian era was marked by prosperity and innovations in technology, incomes rose leading to the growing of the middle class. This had a drastic impact on the culture and the elites who feared the middle class movement for “they had many reasons for resenting their practical stigmatization as second class citizens” (Best 238). James highlights this concern through pointing out clothing which denotes which class a characters associated with and coupling this with immoral actions of the times.

Fear consumes people. Fear controls actions, commands people, and dominates society. In the 1700’s the British ruling class were the ones to fear, one mistake and they were dead like the Grand Vizier. Fear caused commoners to stand in line, march with the beat, and never question those above them. English satirist Joseph Addison creates a character that is the epitome of satire, in that people must fear him, however, he is facile and superficial. Addison comments on the ruling class of Britain with hidden satire because he must also fear those above him.

Quality of life is defined as the standard of health, freedom, comfort and happiness experienced by an individual or group. In the Elizabethan World Reference Library, historians often describe the wealthy and noble as those who held great power and frequently lived colourful and extravagant lives; as compared to the poor, who have been described as uneducated and intensely labored. Through the respective descriptions of their everyday life, it is evident that the superior quality of life should be held by those who posses the higher social rank. However, King Henry IV, Sir John Falstaff and the King of France, in fact demonstrate the opposite in William Shakespeare’s “Henry IV Part I”, “Henry IV Part II” and “Henry V”. Quality of life is inversely proportional to an individual’s level of status in society.

The Importance of Reputation and Social Status in the Victorian Era In this essay, I am going to stereotype the ideals of the Victorian era and use this knowledge to examine Robert Stevenson’s, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Oscar Wilde’s, The Importance of Being Earnest. I will argue that Jack in The Importance of Being Earnest and Dr. Jekyll in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were both highly influenced by their own reputation, along with their families, and social status. I will discuss Victorian values and how they affected Dr. Jekyll’s and Jack’s reputation. The paper will continue to argue how and why Jack and Dr. Jekyll were influenced by their ideals to improve their reputation and their social status.

The nineteenth century was a time of significant upheaval, embodied by individuals challenging the institutions of the Victorian era and striving to achieve self determination. The conflicting relationship between the individual and society becomes apparent through analysing the individual’s confrontation with the orthodox economic and philosophical Victorian paradigms. Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel, North and South (1855), Richard Redgrave’s painting The Outcast (1851) and Ada Nield Chew’s letter A living Wage for Factory Girls at Crewe (1894) critique the dominant attitudes of society, emphasising the importance of the individual to seek autonomy for social progression to occur as well as self satisfaction.

It is no secret that the world we inhabit today is divided amongst social classes. However, while the boundaries between those classes have become blurred over time concerning personal relationships, the same cannot be said about the society in which our principal characters exist in Pamela; Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740). Readers encounter Pamela, Mr. B, and Lady Davers in a world where the elite only associate with other elite, and furthermore even expect to be granted certain privileges over those beneath them. The actions of these three characters perfectly reflect the attitudes of the era in which this novel is set. It is their respective social classes that lead to the behaviors of the characters, from the physical and emotional

The subject of class and wealth has remained a constant area of discussion, analysis and criticism for most of human history. The conflicts between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ have played themselves out in numerous plays, novels, movies and many other aspects of literature. The determinates of status have been investigated time and time again but the topic has not becoming boring. There are many different ways to present status in literature, as we see in Candide and Coriolanus, and there are even more ways to dissect the complexities of status and wealth. The prevalence of status and wealth in literature shows that these are topics with many differing connotations, perspectives, and ideas. In Candide and Coriolanus, status is a key part