ESSAYS ON 19TH CENTURY LITERATURE & THE GOTHIC
A new post for the Wordsworth Editions Blog… The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts is the house that Edith Wharton built. She designed it as an elegant retreat from New York society in which she could write and her mentally ill husband, Teddy, could hopefully find some peace. The couple lived within its white stuccoed walls from 1902… Continue reading The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton
The conclusion of a new blog for Wordsworth Editions Part Two: Boston, 1924 Growing increasingly bitter in his grief, Houdini never tired of exposing mediums, even while touring at the height of his fame. As he told a reporter from the Los Angeles Times, ‘It takes a flimflammer to catch a flimflammer.’ So it was… Continue reading Houdini and Doyle (Part 2)
Extract from new post for the Wordsworth Editions Blog… To read Frankenstein is to enter a realm of intersecting myths. It is there immediately in the novel’s original subtitle ‘The Modern Prometheus’, a comparison between the Faustian Victor Frankenstein and the Titan who stole fire from the gods and was punished horribly for gifting it to humanity.… Continue reading Frankenstein and the Romantic Hero
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… What would Christmas be without a good ghost story? Tales of haunted houses, vengeful revenants, and, for the more delicate constitution, spiritual redemption, are as much a part of the Christmas ritual as Midnight Mass, the Queen’s speech, presents, carols, and the occasional small sherry. And whether one… Continue reading The Ghost Stories of E.F. Benson
New post for the Wordsworth Editions Blog… Although Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) sent shockwaves through the Victorian scientific and religious establishments (until then unproblematically linked), the book’s conclusion is remarkably optimistic: …from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production… Continue reading The Island of Dr Moreau
New post for the Wordsworth Editions Blog… When Voltaire’s Candide, ou l'Optimisme was (pseudonymously) published in February 1759, it was simultaneously released in the three great publishing centers of Continental Europe: Geneva, Amsterdam, and Paris. This was in part to shift as many copies as possible before it was pirated, but mostly to make it difficult for the… Continue reading Candide
New post for the Wordsworth Editions Blog… Sometime between 1845 and 1846, the literary journalist William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) drafted a few short pieces entitled Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society (illustrated by himself), which he hoped would constitute the opening chapters of an as yet unspecified longer work. ‘The truth forces itself upon me,’ he… Continue reading Vanity Fair
Extract of a piece originally written for the Wordsworth Editions Blog... ...Although a recognised essayist and travel writer, Treasure Island was Stevenson’s first novel, discounting some unfinished juvenilia which he had burned. This was in the hope of making his craft pay, because, as he later wrote in ‘My First Book’: By that time I… Continue reading Treasure Island
Ainsworth & Friends 