ESSAYS ON 19TH CENTURY LITERATURE & THE GOTHIC
A new post for the Wordsworth Editions blog In the United States, one of the first – if not the first – critics to discover the talented new British author Charles Dickens was Edgar Allan Poe. Poe reviewed Dickens’ first book, Sketches by ‘Boz’ in the June 1836 number of the Southern Literary Messenger, the year… Continue reading When Poe Met Dickens
A new post for the Wordsworth Editions blog It is not widely known nowadays that T.S. Eliot had a passion for detective stories. He held Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie in particularly high regard, and kept up with the evolving contemporary genre, frequently reviewing new tales of mystery and detection in The Criterion, the… Continue reading The Moonstone: The First Modern Detective Story
A new post for the Wordsworth Editions blog Like James Bond and Doctor Who, everyone has their favourite version of Ebenezer Scrooge, the actor that defines the role for them, probably from whatever version of A Christmas Carol they first saw as a kid. I have seen many polls on social media inviting us to… Continue reading Filming A Christmas Carol
My latest for the Wordsworth Editions Blog Much as letters were carefully preserved in the 19th century, it was the custom of the children of eminent Victorians to dutifully produce a biography of their departed parent. This was usually but not exclusively their father – Sara Coleridge, for example, wrote a beautiful memoir of her… Continue reading The Woman in White
Extract from new post for the Wordsworth Editions Blog… When Bram Stoker died after a series of strokes on April 20, 1912, his obituary in The Times made only a single and cursory reference to Dracula noting that ‘He was the master of a particularly lurid and creepy kind of fiction’. The book that we regard as… Continue reading The Real Count Dracula
This episode, Paul and I are delighted to welcome to the podcast Dr Stephen Carver, author, biographer and recipient of one of the ACD Society’s Inaugural Doylean Honours for his excellent Wordsworth Editions blog on the Professor Challenger stories. We talk with Stephen about the appeal of Professor Challenger to readers and to Conan Doyle, The Land of… Continue reading Conan Doyle and Professor Challenger (Podcast)
Extract from new post for the Wordsworth Editions Blog… As the nights grow longer and colder and we move inexorably towards Halloween, the readerly mind turns naturally towards the ghost story. And while pumpkins are carved and displayed as an invitation to trick-or-treaters, let us not forget that their original purpose was to ward off the evil… Continue reading J.S Le Fanu & The Golden Age of the Ghost Story
Extract of a my latest piece for the Wordsworth Editions Blog… Literary legend has it that Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde originated, quite appropriately, from his unconscious. He dreamed it. This was during one of many periods when he was confined to bed because of his haemorrhaging lungs, or ‘Bluidy Jack’… Continue reading The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
If anyone was wondering, this is what I'm currently writing. This project grew out of a panel I spoke on at The Bradford Literature Festival in 2019... THE OPIUM EATERS: High Literature and the Art of Addiction (Morton Books) When the brilliant Oxford drop-out and freelance journalist Thomas De Quincey published his seminal article ‘Confessions of… Continue reading The Opium Eaters – A Work in Progress
Extract of a piece I wrote for Wordsworth Editions just before Christmas on The Picture of Dorian Gray... ...As a narcissist and living work of art, in Nietzschean terms Dorian is an ‘Apollonian’ figure and Hallward also paints him as Adonis, Narcissus, Paris, and Antinous. Against nature, he has the cold edge of the purely aesthetic;… Continue reading The Picture of Dorian Gray
Ainsworth & Friends 