Goblin Stories and Haunted Men: Dickens’ Other Christmas Books

My latest for the Wordsworth Blog, on the stories that followed A Christmas Carol... As the fairy lights go up and we max out our credit cards, I think we can all agree that Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Consuming it in some form is as much of a tradition as…

Life in London from Egan to Dickens: Regency Innocence versus Victorian Experience

If you do not want to dwell with evil-doers, do not live in London (1) I. Innocence: Pierce Egan’s Life in London. When the Victorians wanted to attack an author, they would invariably draw comparisons with the Regency writer Pierce Egan (1772 – 1849).  John Forster, for instance, in a damning Examiner review of W.H.…