Interesting Literature

Five Fascinating Facts about Dystopian Fiction

Interesting facts about dystopian novels and the history of the genre

In a previous post, we recommended 10 of the best early dystopian novels and offered some insight into how they came about. This might be considered a follow-up post to that earlier one, offering a brief history of dystopian fiction in five interesting facts.

1. The word ‘dystopia’ is older than you might think – but then, so is the genre. The word ‘dystopia’ has been traced back to 1747, where it appears as ‘dustopia’, but is clearly being used with the same meaning as the modern ‘dystopia’. Although dystopian fiction itself is sometimes said to have begun with the 1908 Jack London novel The Iron Heel, there are several Victorian novels which qualify as dystopian fiction, at least of sorts. One of these is Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon – the title, almost the word ‘nowhere’ backwards, explicitly signals its intention to reverse the idea of utopia (which literally means ‘no-place’) – in which Butler satirises the imaginary utopian world he depicts.

D. R. Geraint Jones, ‘Let Me Not See Old Age’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) In the latest post for our occasional series on neglected poems (see Anna Seward’s brilliant poem ‘An Old Cat’s Dying Soliloquy’ for a previous title in the series), we thought we’d share with you this little-known poem written by a young Welsh poet, David Rhys Geraint Jones, during the … Read more

10 Very Short Victorian Poems Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The Victorians often liked their poems much the way they liked their novels: the bigger the better. And yet, just as there are some great Victorian short stories (they helped to pioneer the ghost story and the detective story, for instance), so there are some short poetic gems to be found among Victorian poetry anthologies.

Robert Browning gave us the vast The Ring and the Book but he also gave us the two-line poem included below; Tennyson devoted several thousand lines to his Idylls of the King but also penned the six-line classic ‘The Eagle’. The ten Victorian poems that follow are all no longer than ten lines, and one is only two words long.

A Short Analysis of Isaac Rosenberg’s ‘The Troop Ship’

A brief introduction to a powerful short WWI poem by Isaac Rosenberg

According to Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg was one of the three poets of significance who died during the First World War. Although his reputation has been overshadowed by Wilfred Owen (who died in 1918, the same year as Rosenberg), he was an important voice during WWI, as his short poem ‘The Troop Ship’ demonstrates. Here is the poem, followed by a brief analysis of its features.

The Troop Ship

Grotesque and queerly huddled
Contortionists to twist
The sleepy soul to a sleep,
We lie all sorts of ways
And cannot sleep.

Five Fascinating Facts about Elizabeth Gaskell

Interesting facts from the life of Mrs Gaskell, Victorian novelist, author of North and South

1. She wrote her first novel to console herself when she was grieving for the death of her son. The Gaskells’ only son Willie died of scarlet fever in 1845. Partly as a response to his death, Mrs Gaskell – she is still often known by the married title, although some readers now refer to her as Elizabeth Gaskell – set about writing Mary Barton, her ‘tale of Manchester life’. It was published in 1848 to huge acclaim.