A Victorian Miscellany

Selected and edited by Thomas W. Parrott

Read by Denis Daly

During the Victorian era, many authors tried their hand at a range of literary genres, including poetry. Many of the authors whose work is represented in this collection are famous for their activity in other genres, eg, Macaulay as a historian, Stevenson as a writer of classic adventure novels, John Henry Newman as a theologian, and Kingsley and Thackeray as novelists. The most notable contributors who are known primarily as poets are Arnold and Swinburne.

While Victorian verse is often less elegant and graceful than the lyric productions of earlier centuries, it has a distinctive note of earnestness and humanistic charm.

Contents

1—Introduction by Thomas W. Parrott

2—3 poems by Matthew Arnold

3—4 poems by Walter Savage Landor

4—The Sea by Bryan Wallace Proctor

5—The Battle of Naseby by Thomas Babington Macaulay

6—3 poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

7—The End of the Play by William Makepeace Thackeray

8—2 poems by Charles Kingsley

9—2 poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

10—Riding Together by William Morris

11—3 poems by Algernon Charles Swinburne

12—2 poems by Robert Louis Stevenson

13—Lead Kindly Light by John Henry Newman

14—Recessional by Rudyard Kipling

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The Cavalier Poets

Collected and edited by Thomas W. Parrott

Read by Denis Daly

The poets whose work is included in this collection were contemporaries of John Milton and were active during the reigns of Charles I and Charles II, as well as the intervening period of the Commonwealth. While Milton expressed his disdain for these light-hearted lyrics, they display a compelling and ingenious charm which has been rarely equalled.

Contents

1—Introduction by Thomas W. Parrott

2—To his Mistress the Queen of Bohemia by Sir Henry Wotton

3—Ask me no more by Thomas Carew

4—Two poems by Sir John Suckling

5—Two poems by Richard Lovelace

6—Six Poems by Robert Herrick

7—On a Girdle by Edmund Waller

8—Two poems by George Herbert

9—Peace by Henry Vaughan

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An Elizabethan Miscellany

Selected and edited by Thomas W. Parrott

Read by Denis Daly

Shakespeare’s dominance during the Elizabethan era has overshadowed the works of many of his truly gifted contemporaries. This collection features poems covering a wide range of subjects, including love songs, wedding songs, and meditations on death, presented in a variety of forms.

1—Introduction by Thomas W. Parrott

2—My True Love hath my Heart by Sir Philip Sidney

3—Rosalind’s Madrigal by Thomas Lodge

4—In Time of Pestilence by Thomas Nash

5—The Passionate Shepherd to His Love by Christopher Marlowe

6—O Sweet Content by Thomas Dekker

7—Two poems by Ben Jonson

8—Good Morrow by Thomas Heywood

9—Lines on the Tombs in Westminster by Francis Beaumont

10—Roses, Their Sharp Spines Being Gone, by John Fletcher

11—Two poems by Michael Drayton

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Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was the most notable literary figure of his time, just as John Dryden (1631-1700) had been of the preceding age. He was born in London, the son of a prosperous linen merchant, and to his dying day, he remained the poet of the town rather than of the country.

Pope’s poetic activity began at an early age and continued, despite lifelong ill health, until the end. His extensive output includes epistles, pastorals, satires, and translations from the classics. His best-known works are The Rape of the Lock, The Essay on Criticism, The Essay on Man, The Dunciad, translations of both the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer, and his various Epistles. All these works are written in highly polished verse, generally in the form of heroic couplets, and are noted for their wit, succinctness, and brilliance.

Contents:

• An Essay on Criticism
• The Rape of the Lock
• Windsor Forest
• Eloisa to Abelard
• Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady
• Moral Essays
• Essay on Man
• Epigrams and Epitaphs
• Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot
• The Dunciad

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Epithalamion is an ode included in an anthology, Amoretti, first published in 1595. Spenser’s purpose was to celebrate his courtship of Elizabeth Boyle whose marriage with him is glorified in the Epithalamion.

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Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came

By Robert Browning

Narrated by Denis Daly

This poem, rich in its palette of human emotions, is couched in simple narrative language. Some critics have sought to interpret the poem as an allegory and find a specific meaning for every phrase and picture, but the richness of its symbolism is not favorable to this kind of treatment. In some ways, it resembles a piece of music. Each mind can draw from it a personal, and, to the individual, satisfactory interpretation. Many will be able to see the poem as a symbol of fate which forces a truth-seeker to realize the falsity of ideals once thought absolute. However, in the face of the loss of those ideals, the individual can still find the courage to press on to the heights of aspiration.

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James Allen (1864-1912) was a philosopher and pioneer of the New Thought movement. A prolific author, his works have become a fundamental source for many of the concepts used today in motivational and self-help programs. The Mastery of Destiny is Allen’s treatise on the apparent conflict between fate and free will. He states that there is a method by which these opposing forces can be reconciled, “Between apparently conflicting extremes there is always a ‘middle way’ of balance, justice, or compensation which, while it includes both extremes, cannot be said to be either one or the other, and which brings both into harmony; and this middle way is the point of contact between two extremes.”

Allen’s method, if it can be described as such, involves the continual monitoring of one’s thoughts and attitudes to develop the awareness that all changes in personal circumstances are generated from internal rather than external forces. As he states in the foreword to his most famous book, As a Man Thinketh, “Mind is the master-weaver, both of the inner garment of character and the outer garment of circumstance, and that, as men may have hitherto woven in ignorance and pain they may now weave in enlightenment and happiness.”

Contents:

• Deeds, Character, and Destiny
• The Science of Self-Control
• Cause and Effect in Human Conduct
• Training of the Will
• Thoroughness
• Mind-Building and Life-Building
• Cultivation of Concentration
• Practice of Meditation
• The Power of Purpose
• The Joy of Accomplishment

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Early Poems

By Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Narrated by Denis Daly

The selection of eighteen poems is taken from Tennyson’s first collection, published in 1830.

The most famous poem in the collection is Mariana, a dramatic narrative, which, like The Lady of Shalott, describes the tragic fate of an abandoned woman.

All the poems feature the elegant euphony for which Tennyson’s verse has become famous.

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Memory

How to develop, train, and use it.

By William Walker Atkinson

Narrated by Denis Daly

Although the many works of New Thought author William Walker Atkinson (1862-1932) have generally been classified as self-help texts, their true focus tends to be self-development.

This book on memory is not a catalogue of mnemonic techniques but rather a survey of its whole structure and operation. In the first chapter, Atkinson writes: “We see that the cultivation of memory is far more than the cultivation and development of a single mental faculty—it is the cultivation and development of our entire mental being—the development of our selves.”

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The Dunciad

In Four Books

Edited by George Gilfillan

By Alexander Pope

Read by Denis Daly

Alexander Pope was fiercely critical of writers whom he considered to have little talent and whom he liked to nominate as dunces. His most encyclopedic examination of these apostles of dullness is the Dunciad, a long satirical saga first published in a three-book version in 1728. A variorium edition followed shortly afterwards in 1729. In 1742, Pope added a fourth book, and a new, complete edition was published in 1743.

The concept of an excoriation of dullness in mock heroic form appears to have been inspired by John Dryden’s MacFlecknoe or, A satyr upon the True-Blue-Protestant Poet, T.S. (1682). Dryden’s target was the poet and lowbrow playwright, Thomas Shadwell, who later replaced Dryden as Poet Laureate in 1688.

In Pope’s view, dullness is at war with reason, and he nominates Lewis Theobald and Colley Cibber as the champions of insipidity.

In the words of editor George Gilfillan, “The Dunciad” is in many respects the ablest, the most elaborate, and the most characteristic of Pope’s poems. In embalming insignificance and impaling folly, he seems to have found, at last, his most congenial work.”

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The Invisible Man

A Grotesque Romance

by H. G. Wells

Presented by Voices of Today

Narrated by Graham Scott, Andy Harrington, Denis Daly, Patrick Barker, and Lillian Rachel

The Invisible Man was the fourth sci-fi novel written by Wells in the 1890s. The main character, Griffin, is one of the intimidating villains in all popular literature. The archetypal “mad scientist,” Griffin devotes himself to an obsessive study of optics and realizes his ambition to render livings things permanently invisible. After making a cat invisible, he successfully applies the procedure to himself. After causing chaos in London, he travels to the village of Iping in Sussex and takes up residence in a local hotel. He attempts to conceal his invisibility by wearing gloves, bandages on his face, and a false nose. However, due to his irascible and impulsive temperament, the inhabitants soon become aware that he is invisible, and Griffin decides to institute a reign of terror in the neighborhood.

The Invisible Man has become one of Well’s most popular works and has been adapted multiple times for presentation in film, television, and in graphic novels.

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An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard

By Thomas Gray

Narrated by Denis Daly

Today, Thomas Gray is remembered almost solely for this melancholy meditation on the inevitability of death and the insignificance of fame. Samuel Johnson thought little of Gray’s other works but found the ‘Elegy’ to be “abounding with images which find a mirror in every mind and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.”

The poem was originally thought to have been inspired by the death of Gray’s close friend, Richard West, but modern critics think this to be unlikely.

Retiring by nature, Gray did not want the elegy to be published, but his hand was forced by an unscrupulous editor who planned to publish the poem without permission.

The polished elegance of the versification and the inclusion of lines whose fame has become proverbial have ensured that the poem has retained its appeal over the centuries.

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