Setting in Longer Works: Study Guide (English Literature 3.3)

Setting is a world, not only a place

In Topic 1.2 you studied setting as the time and place in which events occur. In a longer work the idea widens. Setting also includes the social, cultural and historical situation: the rules of a family, the divisions of a class system, the customs of a community, the conditions of an age. A reader asks not only Where are we? but What world is this, and what does it ask of the people in it?

Specific details of setting do two jobs. They depict a time and place, and they convey the values associated with it. A room arranged so that the favoured children sit by the fire says something about what the household values.

Reading setting in a longer work

1. Time. Notice the period, the season and the way time is organised (by a bell, a whistle, a ritual).
2. Place. Notice the larger geography (a city, a house, a hill) and smaller spaces (a drawing-room, a window-seat).
3. Arrangement. Who sits, stands or lives where? Position often equals rank.
4. Customs and rules. What is expected, permitted or forbidden, and who enforces it?
5. Contrast. Setting is often built from contrasts between places: warm and cold, inside and outside, public and private.
6. Effect. What difference does the setting make to what the characters can do and how they relate to one another?

Setting in drama

A play usually has no narrator, so setting is conveyed by:

• stage directions (the stage description at the start of a scene or act),
• scenery, props and costume,
• the use of space (who enters from where, who stays on stage),
• and what characters say about where they are.

A single object can carry the setting’s meaning: a table set for one too many, a coat on a chair. Readers should treat stage directions as evidence in the same way as description in a novel.

Worked example 1: a social and historical setting set out in a Prologue (public-domain play)

William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (about 1595) opens with a Prologue, spoken before the action, that sets the scene (Project Gutenberg text):

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

Step 1: Time and place. “In fair Verona, where we lay our scene”: a named city. The word “fair” gives it a pleasing first description. “Ancient grudge” places the feud in the past, so the time is one in which an old quarrel still shapes the present.

Step 2: Social situation. “Two households, both alike in dignity” sets out a world of rank and family honour: two houses of equal standing. The pairing “both alike” prepares the reader for rivalry between equals.

Step 3: Cultural and historical situation. “From ancient grudge break to new mutiny” shows a feud that continues across generations: old quarrel, new violence. The line “civil blood makes civil hands unclean” turns the idea of “civil” (of citizens) against itself: ordinary citizens are stained by blood in the city’s own quarrels.

Step 4: Effect on what follows. The setting states the conflict before a single character speaks. It limits what the lovers can do: any bond between the families runs against a city-wide hostility.

Step 5: Value conveyed. The setting values family loyalty and honour so highly that they overpower safety and love.

Model sentence: “The Prologue sets the play in ‘fair Verona’ but fills the setting with the ‘ancient grudge’ of ‘two households, both alike in dignity’, so the social situation of family honour and inherited hostility is established as the world in which the lovers must act.”

Worked example 2: social setting in a public-domain novel

In Chapter 1 of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), the narrator, Jane, describes a winter afternoon at her aunt’s house (Project Gutenberg text):

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further outdoor exercise was now out of the question.

… The said Eliza, John, and Georgiana were now clustered round their mama in the drawing-room: she lay reclined on a sofa by the fireside, and with her darlings about her (for the time neither quarrelling nor crying) looked perfectly happy. Me, she had dispensed from joining the group …

Later she says that, instead, she “slipped” into the breakfast-room and sat in a window-seat “shrined in double retirement”.

Step 1: Time and place. A winter afternoon in an English country house: “leafless shrubbery”, “cold winter wind”, “rain so penetrating”. The weather is unwelcoming and shuts the children indoors.

Step 2: Place within the house. There are two spaces. The drawing-room has a “sofa by the fireside” and a mother surrounded by “her darlings”. The breakfast-room and its window-seat are where Jane goes, half hidden by a curtain.

Step 3: Social situation. The household is arranged by favour. Mrs. Reed’s children “clustered round their mama” in the warmest room. Jane is “dispensed from joining the group” and is told to remain silent “until you can speak pleasantly”. She is a dependent child who is both inside the house and outside the family circle.

Step 4: Contrast. Warm drawing-room against the cold weather outside and Jane’s retreat; family closeness against Jane’s separateness. The contrasts are made by arrangements of place.

Step 5: Effect on character and conflict. The setting shows Jane’s position before she says anything about her feelings. It also places her in conflict with the household: she is excluded for being “a questioner”. The window-seat, a place of retreat, becomes where she reads and where the events of the chapter begin.

Step 6: Value conveyed. The household values obedience, a “sociable and childlike disposition”, and favours those who fit it. A child who asks “What does Bessie say I have done?” is treated as forbidding.

Model paragraph opening: “Brontë builds the social setting of Gateshead through the arrangement of rooms. The favoured children are ‘clustered round their mama’ by the fireside, while Jane is ‘dispensed from joining the group’ and retreats to a curtained window-seat, so the spatial contrast of warm centre and half-hidden edge conveys a household that values compliance and excludes questioning.”

Strong and weak statements about setting in longer works

Weak	Why it is weak	Stronger
“The book is set in a big house.”	States the place; no analysis	“The arrangement of drawing-room and window-seat shows a household in which favour decides who is included.”
“The weather is gloomy.”	Describes; no function	“The ‘penetrating’ rain keeps the children indoors, which puts Jane in the same room as the people who exclude her.”
“Verona is where the play happens.”	Names the place	“‘Fair Verona’ contrasts with the ‘ancient grudge’ that makes the city a place of inherited hostility.”

Checking your inference

1. Have you named the social or historical situation? The text may not name it directly, so show it from details.
2. Have you separated place from what it conveys? A place can be described; its values must be argued.
3. Have you said what difference it makes? To a character’s options or to the conflict.
4. Have you used only what the text provides? Do not import outside history that the passage does not support.

Common misconceptions

• “Setting is the same as place.” Time and the social, cultural and historical situation are part of setting.
• “Weather is only decoration.” In these passages it forces characters indoors and shapes who meets whom.
• “I need to know the history of the period.” The text’s details are your evidence.
• “Setting only matters at the start.” In a longer work it develops across scenes, and a change of setting can mark a change in a character’s situation.
• “A play has no setting because there is no narrator.” Stage directions, props and space provide it.
• “The setting is the author’s opinion of the age.” Say what the setting shows within the work.

Where this leads

Try the practice questions, then use the checklist and revision notes. The next topic, Significant events in a plot, considers the events that happen in these settings. For setting in short fiction, see Setting: details that convey a time and place.