Summer’s here: my past year’s listening & new routs

Dear friends and readers, What do you mean summer’s here? It’s the beginning of May. Well, arguably from the point of view of weather, here in Northern Virginia we have two seasons: the cold (or maybe it would be more accurate nowadays to say the mostly cool and chilly) where days are short, and the [...]

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Charles Dickens and Sandy Welch’s Our Mutual Friend: A book of a river

Filmic rendition in Welch’s movie of the famous opening scenes of Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend: opening shot of movie; Lizzie (Keeley Hawes) at center; John Harmon (Steven Mackintosh) back from the dead and drowned the last Dear friends and readers, Over the past 10 weeks I’ve been listening to Mil Nicolson (Librivox) read aloud Dickens’s [...]

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Back to Trollope: A proposal on the story-telling art of the original illustrations

Carrie Brattle, “castaway,” her hands appealing to someone inside a closed window (from The Vicar of Bullhampton, vignette by Henry Woods) Dear friends and readers, A couple of months ago I saw a Call for Papers on Patrick Leary’s Victoria listserv for a Northeast Victoria Society Association (NVSA) conference to be held at Columbia University, [...]

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Books in art and science: Sharp (3): community identities through books (Australia, South Africa, in libraries); book illustration (Phiz & Millais)

Children’s reading club, circa 1910, Children’s Museum, NY or NJ Dear friends and readers, A third instalment of my experience of the Sharp conference last weekend. What unites these sessions is the belief that people form social identities through reading books and magazines and create social networks and capital (Bourdieu’s term) by setting up and [...]

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Lilian Nayder’s Life of Catherine Hogarth (aka The Other Dickens)

Catherine Hogarth Dickens, a photo of her later in life Dear friends and readers, Last week I finished reading Lilian Nayder’s The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth. Were it to be read widely, its content genuinely taken in and disseminated, the book has the potential to alter the common perception of Catherine Hogarth [...]

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Dickens’s “Signalman:” The Trauma of Technology; or Victorian Gothic

The train that thunders through (Dicken’s “The Signal-man” as adapted in the 1975 film) Dear friends and readers, I’ve another gothic from my Exploring the Gothic class to discuss: for this past Friday my class and I read and discussed Charles Dickens’s unusual and brief ghost story, “The Signalman.” I’ve written about Andrew Davies’s 1976 [...]

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Andrew Davies’s Signalman (Dickens ghost story) and Henry Herbert’s Malachi’s Cove (Trollope nature parable as 1970s film)

Denholm Elliot when first seen close up as the signalman Veronica Quilligan when first seen in medium shot as Mally loading her donkey with seaweed Dear Readers and friends, Over the past couple of weeks now I’ve been watching movies where the screenplay (and often much else) is by Andrew Davies. I’m on my 12th [...]

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