First Paper Assignment

DUE: Friday October 24th

DIRECTIONS: Write a five-page essay that addresses the following assignment directly. Please turn the essay in at Professor Cronin's or Professor Dubrulle's office. If you choose the Late Paper Option, your paper will be due on Monday, October 27th.
Your essay will cover two texts (see below), which you will need to quote, paraphrase and refer to in order to support your essay's claims.

ASSIGNMENT: The class readings and discussion have suggested that Mid-Victorian England was experiencing a state of transition. Although they treat this idea in different ways, the texts we've studied describe the present in terms of its relationship to the past and its potential for future progress through reform, renewal, or action.

For one pair of texts listed below, discuss the writers' evaluations of the present as a transitional moment related to both past and future. In doing so, you should make sure to address these questions, in some way: What defines or characterizes the present, in each text? What represents the past? Where is the future headed? How or why will it get there? Through what values or images does each writer express these ideas?

Your pair of texts may essentially agree on this vision, or they may express differing or opposing views of the relationship of present to past and future. In either case, your essay should be unified in content, logic, and style; that is, it should not sound like two separate essays tacked together about a common topic. Therefore, you should give serious thought to the pair of texts you choose, considering their commonalities and diverging perceptions. You may refer to other texts from the course to support and amplify your points, but your essay will focus primarily on the pair of texts you choose.

Choose one pair from the following list:

  • Cranford and Nightingale, "Letters from Egypt" and/or Martineau, "Eastern Life, Past and Present"
  • Smith, The Wealth of Nations and Palmerston, "Civis Romanus Sum"
  • Smith and Carlyle, "The Nigger Question"
  • Smith and Mill, "The Spirit of the Age"
  • Matthew Arnold, "Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse" and Tennyson's "Ulysses" or "In Memoriam"
  • Arnold, "To Marguerite" and "Dover Beach"
  • Arnold, "Dover Beach" and Tennyson, "Ulysses"
  • Tennyson, "Ulysses" and Burton, "Travels in Arabia and Africa" and/or "First Footsteps in East Africa"
  • Carlyle, "The Nigger Question" and Mill "The Negro Question"
  • Martineau and/or Nightingale and Burton's lectures
  • Arnold, Literature and Dogma and Wilberforce, A Practical View . . .
  • Arnold, L & D and Jowett, "On the Interpretation of Scripture"
  • Arnold, L & D and Carlyle, Past and Present
  • Sturt, The Wheelwright's Shop and Ure, Philosophy of Manufactures
  • Carlyle, Past and Present and Mill, "The Spirit of the Age"
  • The Times on the Great Exhibition and Engels, The Condition of the Working Classes
  • Ure and Smiles, Self-Help

CITING SOURCES IN THIS ASSIGNMENT: Many of the readings for this course have been provided to you without accompanying bibliographic information. For this essay, please cite your sources in parenthetical references within the body of your essay. These parenthetical references should include the author's last name [comma] the title of the work [no comma] page number. If you have used the author's last name in the sentence, you may omit that element in the parenthetical reference. If there is no author of the piece, use only title of the work and the page number in the parenthetical reference. If there are no page numbers, why then, leave them out.

So when you quote, paraphrase or refer to a text, do it like this:

Example 1:
According to the Religious Census of 1851, Jews made up 4,150 of the total number of attendants at religious service (Mann, "Religious Worship in England and Wales" 91).

Example 2:
Macaulay argues that the idea of a "Protestant government" or "Christian government" is absurd, saying that such a phrase makes no more sense than the notion of "Protestant cookery" or "Christian horsemanship" ("Civil Disabilities of the Jews" 81-82).

Example 3:
An opponent remarked that this comment was "a witticism unworthy of [Macaulay's] great genius and of his private and public personal character" ("Removal of Jewish Disabilities").

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Copyrighted by Hugh Dubrulle and Meg Cronin, 2006.