A vision destroyed : the wasteland worlds of Augustus and Victoria

Author

Evelyn Swanson Kennedy

Date of Award

8-1988

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

Richard M. Kelly

Committee Members

Harry C. Rutledge, Bain T. Stewart

Abstract

Literature often presents life in the metropolis not only as a bleak existence bereft of the pleasures associated with the idyllic beauty and innocence of the countryside but moreover as the terrifying reality from which no mortal is allowed to escape. The man in the city knows only penury, suffering, alienation, and the horrors of violence and finally death, and both writers living in Augustan Rome and poets in Victorian England present this frightening picture to their readers. In neither pinnacle of civilization do the sun's rays ever offer the urban inhabitant any consolation since he is doomed to a life of shadows and misery.

This study investigates these feelings expressed by the ancients and the Victorians and reveals strong similarities in their reactions to and portrayals of the wicked, heartless city. Among the Romans discussed are Vergil, Horace, Juvenal, Lucretius, Petronius, and Seneca. The Victorians are represented by Arnold, Tennyson, Clough, and several other poets of lesser renown. Finally, the climax of antiurban Victorian poetry is reached in James Thomson's The City of Dreadful Night, in which the necropolis becomes the true Lucretian wasteland.

The presentations of the city by these two cultures so separated by time and location are much the same not only because of certain undesirable aspects of the very nature of urban life but also because of the stringent classical background demanded by the educational system of nineteenth-century England. However, the Victorians convey a depth of compassion for human suffering which the Romans do not openly admit but rather prefer to stand aloof and merely to observe the pain experienced by their fellowmen. Certainly, all of the writers discussed herein depict the metropolis as a place of filth and despair where only the rich and powerful may bask in their vulgar pastimes and lascivious hedonism, yet sincere concern for the victim of the heartless city is more conspicuous in Victorian poetry than in the literature of ancient Rome.

Recommended Citation

Kennedy, Evelyn Swanson, "A vision destroyed : the wasteland worlds of Augustus and Victoria. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 1988.
https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/11900