Seaside sestina: A Folkestone romance

These poems are based on my research into the history of the Folkestone Free Library (https://www.kent-maps.online/19c/19c-folkestone-free-library/) in Kent and the seaside romances readers might have accessed in the newspaper reading room. The library regularly featured in the local press and had a close relationship with the nearby Holbein Visitors’ List and Folkestone Journal. In this sense the poems are intended to complement my book Down From London: Seaside Reading in the Railway Age (Liverpool UP, 2022). However they also respond to the threatened closure of the library, following flood damage in December 2022. A local campaign to save the library is currently underway

Ouida and Victorian popular culture

Review of Jane Jordan & Andrew King (eds.). Ouida and Victorian Popular Culture. Farnham, UK & Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013

“licking the chops of memory”: plotting the social sins of Jekyll and Hyde’

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is hierarchical in its very title – alphabetically Hyde precedes Jekyll, but Jekyll’s superior education and culture are associated with social status where Hyde’s ‘Mr’ is a courtesy title often hedged in with demonic or animalistic terms. But despite the division insisted on in the title, Jekyll’s wilful complicity in the fate that overtakes him is suggested in a series of clues, ranging from his symbolic association with vivisection to the ostentatious exclusion of a female voice (typically the source of spiritual guidance or inspiration in Victorian fiction). As Hyde engages in an ascending scale of brutal acts, beginning with the assault of a child, the middle class male peer group attempts to exculpate or protect Jekyll from association with this rebarbative and criminal figure. But following the murder of Sir Danvers Carew, the climactic discovery of Hyde’s body provides the final evidence against Jekyll himself – in rejecting the possibility of religious salvation he has deliberately chosen the evil that his final statement presents as the ‘assault’ of an ungovernable temptation

‘Making literature ridiculous’: Jerome K. Jerome and the new humour

The New Humour of the 1890s was often depicted as a mania or disease attacking unreflecting or susceptible readers. However like the figure of the New Woman (which it often attacked), New Humour both incurred and resisted simplistic definitions. As the most successful of the New Humourists Jerome K. Jerome was uniquely placed to exploit the ambivalent status of fin de siècle comic fiction. His weekly journalTo-day adroitly responds to press attacks, notably through provocative suggestions that he and his contributors are writing in the tradition of Dickens. Inviting readers to see themselves as loyal members of a club, Jerome surely had Household Words in mind when he said of To-day, ‘there can be few journals that have established so close and intimate a relationship with their readers.’ In Jerome’s account it is not the quality of modern fiction, but the snobbery of the critics themselves that is ‘making literature ridiculous’. Nonetheless his writing from these years shows him asking serious questions about the relationship of a writer to his published work, while conflicted feelings about his own literary status haunt his fin de siècle writing

Found in the library

These poems are based on my research into the history of the Folkestone Free Library (https://www.kent-maps.online/19c/19c-folkestone-free-library/) in Kent and the seaside romances readers might have accessed in the newspaper reading room. The library regularly featured in the local press and had a close relationship with the nearby Holbein Visitors’ List and Folkestone Journal. In this sense the poems are intended to complement my book Down From London: Seaside Reading in the Railway Age (Liverpool UP, 2022). However they also respond to the threatened closure of the library, following flood damage in December 2022. A local campaign to save the library is currently underway

‘”Coquetting amid incredible landscapes”: Women on the river and the railway’ 1862-1922

The opening of the first direct railway line from London to the Kent coast in 1862 challenged traditional dichotomies between town and country, and contributed to a growing nostalgia associated with the river. Fin de siècle writers used the apparent opposition between rail and river, city and country, to ask new questions about the place of women in a rapidly changing world; the transition to a new century further strained the traditional dichotomy between feminised pastoral and masculinised industrial, a tension reflected in the problematic portrayal of rail and water in the work of E. Nesbit

‘Who wrote this script?' Pickwick in Stepney

In 2016 the Dickens Museum in London acquired the manuscript minute-book of a Stepney-based ‘Pickwick Club’ operating in the 1830s and early 1840s. This volume offers a unique record of Boz’s reception by a radical, working-class community comprised largely of legal clerks. The voices presented in the weekly record both mock and seem complicit in the representation of working-class behaviour as irresponsible and in need of control. But they also deploy a flexible range of linguistic markers to position themselves as political and social critics in their own right. The club test the limits of social and literary hierarchies through discussions of Pickwick alongside plagiarised spin-offs. At one point they consider co-authoring their own work, under the title Adventures of a Lawyer’s Clerk, with each member writing a chapter. The young men who participated in these debates would themselves have been old in the 1880s and ‘90s, when the rage for ‘literary pilgrims’ began to capitalise on Dickens’s exuberant early work. They would not in any case have recognised the sanitised version of Pickwick that was being presented by the emerging heritage industry. For that very reason, their immediate responses to the work are a good place to start