Thus, the naive Candide and his philosopher-master Pangloss get instructively caught up in the Lisbon earthquake, an event of such destructiveness – 30,000 dead – and of such philosophical and theological aftershock as to make 9/11 look like a minor incident. This disaster had occurred as recently as November 1755; while the Inquisition's response to the calamity, that of an auto-da-fé designed to prevent further earthquakes (the heretic-hunt sweeps up Candide and Pangloss) took place in June 1756.

This effect would have been emphasised by the novel's mode: that of the extreme satirical picaresque. It is not – does not try to be – a realistic novel on the level of plot: the narrative proceeds by means of incredible coincidences and enormous reversals of fortune; characters are left for dead, and then improbably revived a few pages later when the argument requires their recall. In this genre, the participants are even more subject than usual to the whims of the puppeteer-novelist, who requires them to be here to demonstrate this, and there to demonstrate that. They have opinions, and represent philosophical or practical responses to life's fortunes and misfortunes; but have little textured interiority.

Woolf's childhood came to an abrupt end in 1895

I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper forlandlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seemto have the best title to the children.

ents. Woolf s meditations on art's ability to express life, present in Lily's painting (mother and child "reduced" to a purple shadow), but also in other analogies in the novel, are seen as incorporating Fry's theory of an art which does not "seek to imitate form, but to create form; not to imitate life, but to find an equivalent for lif

A culture of enlightenment is “almost inevitable” if only there is “freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters” (8:36).