A presentation of the contemporary human condition in Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach and William Holman Hunt’s Our English Coasts, 1852 (Strayed Sheep) by Alexandra Mayson

More than just lyrically and visually pleasing icons of their age, ‘Dover Beach’ and ‘Our English Coasts’ also invoke the contemporary human condition. Comparison of both artefacts reveals different concerns of consequences arising out of this condition, yet at the same time also reveals similarities in the underlying cause of those concerns. Thus, through discussions of their imagery, metaphor, allegory and revolutionary presentation, the comparison yields a tangible understanding of the human condition in the early 1850s.