 Hello and welcome back to another GCSE revision lesson now. Carrying on the AQA World and Lives Perture Anthology series, I now want to move on to the poem called In a London Drawing Room by George Elliot. What I want to begin by doing is going over all the context that you need to know and understand for this poem. And then afterwards I'll do a detailed line-by-line analysis of the poem, especially if you're studying this as part of AQA's Perture Anthology. So of course, as you can see behind me, I've created a mind map containing all the contextual information that you need to understand before studying this poem. So let's go over it, okay? Now remember that In a London Drawing Room is written by George Elliot. However, that's not the real name of the author, okay? So the author isn't actually a man even if the name sounds manly. The real author is called Mary Ann Evans. However, she adopted this name, George Elliot, for all of her writing as she lived in the Victorian era, which was a society that tended to look down on writing by women, okay? So as I said, she's a Victorian writer who lived between 1819 to 1880 and she's originally from Warwickshire. However, later in her life she moved to London, okay? Now, as I mentioned, she decided to call herself George Elliot, which is a pseudonym, okay? So this was her pen name. And she used this male pseudonym because she knew during this very, very sexist society, a lot of her writing as a woman wouldn't be taken seriously, especially if her readers knew that it was a woman that wrote the poetry and the books that she had published, okay? So because she lived in a very patriarchal society that was very much dominated by men, she decided that the best and cleverest thing that she could do so that her writing could be read more widely was to adopt this male pseudonym, okay? Now, as I said, she initially and originally was from rural Warwickshire, okay? However, she later decided to move to the city. She first moved to Coventry so that she could look after her sick father and then she eventually moved to London to pursue her writing career, okay? As a woman, this was seen as a very radical move, okay? Remember, during Victorian society, women tended to follow very strict roles, especially women who came from upper-class society like her, they were expected to simply marry, just look after children and just be these passive wives, okay? So her being very active in not only leaving her country or rather leaving her city and then moving to London, which is very far away from Warwickshire at the time, okay, by horse and carriage, this was seen as a very radical move as an independent woman, okay? Women were not expected to be independent. They were expected to actually to be very dependent firstly on their families then on their husbands, okay? So she really went against this trend. Now, when it came to this shift from the country to the city, okay, so this is George Eliot's shift from the countryside to the city, this shift actually echoed and copied a wider trend where during this time, especially in the Victorian era, it was at the height of the Industrial Revolution, okay? The Industrial Revolution was a time when Britain moved from being predominantly farm-based and rural-based to being city and factory-based, okay? So much like a lot of the rural farm workers who were moving, leaving the farm and finding jobs in London and all these big cities like Manchester, which was springing around, Eliot's move echoed and copied this Industrial Revolution, okay? And of course, these aspects of the Industrial Revolution are really explored within a London drawing room, okay? So also the effects of the Industrial Revolution, especially on the city and this distance between the city and nature is something that's explored within this poem. Now, remember that also one of the reasons a more scandalous reason that George Eliot may have left her home in rural Warwickshire, which also highlights also her independence and she was kind of a woman a little bit ahead of her time is she also left because of her scandalous affair with a married man called George Henry Lewis, okay? So he was a married man and it was very, very scandalous and so arguably she also left for London because she wanted to escape this terrible reputation that she'd gathered as formal society basically excluded her, they ostracized her and so she probably wanted to move to London so that she can be a bit more anonymous and kind of wipe this late clean in terms of her reputation, okay? Now, the final thing to bear in mind when it comes to understanding in the London drawing room is this poem was written in 1869 obviously when she was still alive. However, it remained unpublished and it was eventually published in 1959 after the Second World War, okay? So there was a huge gap between when it was originally written and when it was eventually published. Now, the final thing to bear in mind is when you consider the person who's in this drawing room already the title hints at the upper class status of this individual in the drawing room because remember, not everybody has a drawing room and especially during this time in the Victorian era only very wealthy people had drawing rooms and a drawing room is simply a room where visitors tend to be entertained, okay? So again, this is a time of the Industrial Revolution where lots of people, majority of people in the city of London barely had even a room to themselves, right? Rooms tended to be shared by seven to 14 people if not more whilst the speaker and the person in a London drawing room not only are they there solitary in their own drawing room but they're looking out to the city, okay? So of course you wanna bear this in mind as you're reading this poem. Now that you've got this information and this kind of contextual background for in a London drawing room, let's literally now dive into the poem and do a line by line analysis.