This is one of those amazing books that you cannot put down until you reach the end. And why? Because it deals so deeply, persuasively with the essence of what it is to be human: to have a deep abiding need for wholeness, for inner certainty, no matter what the deflections on this path. Silas…
Category: Nineteenth
Charles Dickens Hard Times- Week 6
Hello All, well I am hoping that Dickens’ core message about the ailments plaguing 19thC England and about his vision of a cure, are becoming clearer to you now that we have listened hard to voice of Mt Thleary and have heard what poor Louisa had to endure under her father’s care. Now we begin…
Victorianism and Charles Dickens
What a fabulous week to be able to jump in and explore all those amazing connections between the Victorian Age and Sydney our home city: The Queen Victoria Building, Victoria Road, Albert Road, The Palace Gardens… the list goes on. And it is important to stress that Sydney actually grew into a city exactly in…
Jane Austen and the dissolution of Emma’s ego.
Jane Austen’s Emma may on the surface seem to be a book about the privileged middle and upper class society of the late 18th and early 19th Century in England. Yes, on its surface it seems to be a typical novel about the upper-echelons of the English moneyed class. However, a close reading of the drama…
Nineteenth Century Literature 2017
Hello All, We have had a wonderful start to our Autumn semester in Sydney: temperatures are still hovering around the mid twenties but we have had lashings of rain which has kept our burgeoning bush alive and free from the ravages of late summer bush fires! And for me it is just wonderful to be…
MidWinter Spring!
Little Gidding I Midwinter spring is its own season Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown, Suspended in time, between pole and tropic. When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire, The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches, In windless cold that is the heart’s heat, Reflecting in a watery mirror A…
Top 19th Century Lit ePortfolios ACU 2016
There were some truly outstanding ePortfolios in this group of ACU students celebrating their experience and insight into the work of Romantic poets and the fiction of Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Tolstoy among others. The focus questions underpinning these ePortfolios were Writers and artists in the 19th Century were preoccupied with trying to solve the…
Best Blogs from OZ LIT 2016
Hi All, I have a fabulous bag full of wonderful OZ LIT ePortfolios for you to enjoy. These are the very best of the bunch; all earned a High Distinction for their efforts. There is some wonderful material here reflecting on the literature and art of Australia from ancient times right up to the present. Students…
Tolstoy’s Short Fiction
What a wonderful treat we have had to finish off our Nineteenth Century Literature with these two masterworks, “The Death of Ivan Illych” and “Master and Man”. Both stories present with such wonderful insight the ways in which humans delude themselves into believing in the self they carry around with them all day. Ivan Illych…
David Malouf- Fly Away Peter
This is such a wonderful novel to teach because it deals with such simple matters so deeply and movingly. The scene at the end of the novel where Imogen Harcourt is grieving over Jim Saddler would have to be one of the most amazing moments in Australian literature: It was that intense focus of his…
Best ePortfolios from last semester
Please take a look here at the following sample if you want some inspiration: https://michaelgriffith1.com/2015/11/27/best-eportfolioblogs-spring-2015/
George Eliot and Leo Tolstoy
Two nineteenth century masters of creative prose, both these amazing authors focussed on the inner lives of their characters and tried to show what it takes to become more fully human. Their interest was psychological and spiritual. They sought to document what it is that closes the soul up and inhibits the growth of the…
George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning & Matthew Arnold:Responses to the Condition of England.
All art, at its heart tries to rectify the destructive conditions of existence on this planet. In the words of the Australian poet A.D. Hope: Arguably, the writers and artists of the 19th Century were all, in their own way, attempting to maintain “the frame and order of the world”, trying to resolve the huge…
Education of the inner self: Dickens, Mill, Arnold, Newman
The Nineteenth Century was as “distracted from distraction by distraction“as we all are in the early years of the Twenty First Century. The messages sent to us by the “poets” of the inner-self in Victorian England (Dickens, Arnold, Newman … and others) are as relevant to us now as they were then. Matthew Arnold had…
Shakespeare/ Victorianism & Charles Dickens – Week 6
Thomas Carlyle the great Victorian historian, close friend of Charles Dickens wrote these wonderful words which have been carved in stone in the foyer to the Mitchell ( State Library) in Sydney. This is where many of us visited the Shakespeare Room this week. But for those of studying Charles Dickens and Victorianism, these words…
NSW Art Gallery Visits 2016
This week is the week all my literature units visit the Art Gallery of NSW. What a wonderful storehouse it is of aesthetic wonders and inspirational ideas. A visit to the gallery provides a total wrap-around, hands-on experience of what was going on in a particular literary period. For all prospective teachers I cannot recommend…
Oscar Wilde and Victorianism
It has been so good to look back at all the features of Victorianism from the end of the century perspective provided by Oscar Wilde! I wonder how the Wilde of 2090 will review the shenanigans of the first decades of the 21st century? An interesting speculation! At all events, with Wilde’s hindsight one can…
End of Week 3: The Importance of Being Earnest: A Backward Glance at the Nineteenth Century.
What a buzz for us all to see The Importance of Being Earnest performed by an utterly world-class production by the National Theatre of London. David Suchet as Lady Bracknell would have to be one of the most GROTESQUE stage presences we have seen in a long time And this hard angular, masculine, pompous, utterly self-important…
Week Two Summer/ Autumn: Tintern Abbey
Wordsworth in his poem “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” (Norton 288) offers a powerful insight into the state of mind that meditating on and in nature produced in him. Clearly what he describes in the following lines is the substance of what he tries to tell his friend in the poem “Expostulation…
Great Start to Semester One
Hi All, I am not sure whether to call this autumn or summer semester! We are having the best summer for a long time and we are well into Autumn! Global warming??? At all events we have had a fabulous start to the semester in all literature units. The one blog topic for this week…
How to Create a New Category in WordPress
Hi All, those of you doing Nineteenth Century Literature or Shakespeare this semester who already have a WordPress site set up from last year have been asking me: “How do I set up a new category so that all my 19thC Lit OR Shakespeare Blogs appear under these new categories”. Easy Peasy!!! Please follow these…
Best WordPress ePortfolios for Autumn 2015: Shakespeare and the Nineteenth Century
These students have been blogging as they have been studying Nineteenth Century Literature and The Age of Shakespeare. Some of these students have been doing both courses. They each had to showcase their best blogs and also write a Summative Comment explaining what they have learned from the course and how the content still has…
Bush Walking, Literature: An Introduction, Nineteenth, Shakespeare Plus, Visionary Blake, x Blogging
Grounding the Sacred: Don’t Miss This Event- Musicians, Artists, Novelists, Poets Engaging With the Sacred
Please Click to Register for this Amazing Conference Learn more at Grounding the Sacred through Literature and the Arts Conference.
Budjwa Bay: Muoagamarra Nature Reserve Near Cowan, NSW- Early Sunday Morning Walk
The image at the top of this site is Budjwa Bay as it manifested itself on this cold, wet winter morning. But the stillness, the freshness was deafening, except for the multi-coloured calls of the Lyre Birds from across the water. Here is a place to sit and absorb the quiet round about and hear the quiet inside. What…
Winter is upon us! But the Bush is still a fabulous place to enter…
Made it to the top of the ridge above Galston, early on Saturday morning. The air was fresh and there were beautifully icy mists swirling up from the Gorge to the valley tops (click on all images to get stunning resolutions): On the ridge tops there was an amazing array of winter flowering plant life:…
Literature: An Introduction, Nineteenth, NSW Art Gallery, Performances, Shakespeare Plus, x Blogging
Final Night Clemente/ Catalyst Students at Mission Australia Surry Hills: Shakespeare
Arthur Enfield (Stained Glass) The Seven Ages of Man (Shakespeare As You Like It), State Library of NSW. What a fabulous outcome! All our doubts, uncertainties, wrestling with difficult words, produced an amazing and satisfying presentation of sections of As You Like It. This was the culmination of our course Introduction to Literature which ran for 12 weeks: 4…
Han Solo & Princess Leia visit Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw
Let the Force Be with You Two Star-War Celebrities, Princess Leia and Han Solo visited and adjudicated the 8 performances from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest and Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession today in Murray Hall. The association between Star Wars and these two classic drama pieces is completely random although one could argue that George…
Wilde, Shaw, Jagger and the Challenge to a Dysfunctional Society
Oscar Wilde’s biographer Richard Ellman tells us that “From as early as 1881 … literary London was put out of countenance by this outrageous Irishman … who declared he was a socialist and hinted he was a homosexual, while patently mocking wise saws on all subjects. He declined, in a public and ceremonious manner, to live…
An Event Not to be Missed: Grounding the Sacred in Literature and the Arts at ACU July 23-26th
In July this year (23-26) we are co-ordinating an international conference on the links between Literature, the Arts and the Sacred. We have an amazing line-up of participants including David Malouf, Genevieve Lacey, Kevin Hart, Vivien Johnson, Kathleen Deignan, David Jasper, Imam Afroz Ali, Maeve Heaney, Carmel Bird, Michael McGirr, Joelene Griffith and many more.…
All the World’s a Stage – and are we really nothing but players?? Rehearsals! Clemente/Catalyst students
In 3 weeks time the Clemente/ Catalyst students have to present extracts from As You Like It to a public audience at the MAC (Mission Australia Centre) Surry Hills. We are going to begin with a dramatised reading of Jacques’s speech (perhaps the most famous speech in all of Shakespeare): “All the world’s a stage, And all…
Oscar Wilde- the Mick Jagger of the Late 19th Century
Oscar Wilde was undoubtedly an earlier version of Mick Jagger in his daring to confront a staid middle class with outrageous dress and demeanour. As has been noted: “The Rolling Stones were in the vanguard of the British Invasion of bands that became popular in the US in 1964–65. At first noted for their longish hair as much…
Leo Tolstoy and the Search for Truth
Tolstoy was passionate about uncovering those aspects of a human being in society that prevented him or her making contact with something true or real. He saw people in the law courts, in families acting out a kind of public drama which put each person centre-stage, totally ignorant of the other. It was like a…
Shakespeare’s Falstaff and Henry IV
Today we had some fabulous tutorials exploring the kind of language Shakespeare uses in the opening scenes of Henry IV. Here is the king trying to bind together his empire with a proposal that all the civil warmongering British unite in one force and go on a crusade to rescue Jerusalem from the “infidels”. This is such…
Top Blogs- First Cull Autumn 2015
My students are performing miracles with their blogs. They are grasping and extending the content of the literature they are studying in the most creative ways. Poems and prose creations -giving expression to their own experience- are being grounded on traditional models from Shakespeare through to Charles Dickens & Matthew Arnold. Along with this they are…
Thomas Hardy’s Clym Yeobright: Madman? Heretic? or Blasphemer?
In the last two pages of Return of the Native Hardy alludes to the fact that Clym preaching to the “heathmen and women” on Rainbarrow, just before his 33rd birthday echoes Jesus’s work on the Sermon on the Mount. Is this how Hardy wants us to see Clym, as a saviour to the unenlightened rustics of…
Thomas Carlyle’s Wonderful Words Celebrating the Continuing Importance of the Printed Word
At the State Library Today, we also genuflected in front of these amazing words from that extraordinary 19th Century wordsmith, the historian Charles (to whom Dickens dedicated his Hard Times). To anyone who still reads and benefits from the written word, these words carved in Sydney sandstone inside the vestibule to the Mitchell Library will have a…
Thomas Hardy: Searching for Ballast in a Crazy World!
Egdon Heath (with Rainbarrow on the right) photographed May 2014- on location (Click to enlarge) Thomas Hardy, when describing Egdon Heath, the physical setting for his novel Return of the Native, describes it as “ballast to the mind adrift on change, and harassed by the irrepressible New.” For Hardy this was clearly a profound reality: experience of…
The Invention of the Wrist Watch: The Work of the Devil?
In 1853 (the year that Dickens published Hard Times and Matthew Arnold published “The Scholar Gypsy” the Boston Watch Company was formed. This was the first company to begin developing that device that keeps us all chained to linear clock time, intensifying our stress and anxiety levels and robbing us of the childhood capacity to ignore…
Queen Victoria’s Railway Carriage and Charles Dickens’ Challenge!
This is where Queen Victoria sat in her carriage- a gold plated dunny, with decor matching the carriage as a whole: It is no wonder that Dickens and artists concerned with the “Condition of England” were disturbed at the discrepancy between such opulence and the conditions that 9/10ths of the English population had to endure…
Heathcliffe: Daemon or Demon – Withering Frights
Daemon = a divinity or supernatural being of a nature between gods and humans. Demon = an evil spirit or devil, especially one thought to possess a person or act as a tormentor in hell. Which of these words most aptly describes Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights? Heathcliff is a foundling who is cared for by old…
Pan daemon ium Week 2- the Power of Impressions.
The Romantics were searching deeply for the inner spirit, in themselves, in those around them, in the natural world… As William Blake put it so succinctly “To see a World in a Grain of Sand/ And a Heaven in a Wild Flower/ Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/ And Eternity in an hour”…
Sunday Morning Walk to Cobah Point (Hawkesbury River)
This morning’s walk began at dawn over Kuring-gai Chase On the track to Cobah Point- early morning mist; while the temperature is already in the low 20s there is a definite sense of autumn in the air with all this mist, and – as you will see- with all the early morning spiders: Here the…
Nineteenth Century (Romanticism and Victorianism) Week 1
William Blake’s “The Garden of Love” and William Wordsworth’s two poems “Expostulation and Reply” and “The Tables Turned” provided a real gateway into some of the central insights of the Romantic Movement: their disaffection with mere book learning, with conventional morality and their belief in the power of nature and the resources of childhood to vanquish the…
Autumn Semester 2015
Hi All, I am looking forward very much to working with you in all of the following units: Nineteenth Century Literature (ENGL200); Shakespeare & The Renaissance (ENGL210); Introduction to Literature (Clemente- Mission Australia Students, ENGL104); Learning in the Community (HUMA247)and (ARTS232). This is the space where I will be posting my weekly reflections on our…
Michael Griffith: Home Page- Literature and Life Spring 2025 
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