‘From the Author’s own Original Manuscript’

2020 ◽  
pp. 59-77
Author(s):  
Jennifer Batt
Keyword(s):  
Reading Public ◽  
Publishing Activity ◽  
Original Manuscript ◽  
Stephen Duck ◽  
Unauthorized Reproduction

This chapter explores the frantic burst of publishing activity that followed Queen Caroline’s patronage of Stephen Duck. This activity was instrumental in shaping how Duck and his work would be viewed during his life and beyond. Duck’s verse was initially published without his, or his patrons’, consent; as it quickly became a bestseller, it was followed onto the market by a slew of rival, pirated, and spurious pamphlets. Duck and his patrons had very little control over how work issued in his name was presented to the reading public, and, as this chapter reveals, their complaints very quickly became embroiled in a fiercely contested dispute about authority, authenticity, and accuracy. Duck’s patrons and supporters found it difficult to gain a hearing; their sincere statements were crowded out by competing assertions issued by energetic, innovative, and financially motivated booksellers and printers. As this chapter argues, the more that Duck’s supporters tried to object to the unauthorized reproduction of Duck’s verse, the more opportunities they created for others to raise doubts about Duck’s capabilities as a poet.

Wilde Crimes: The Art of Murder and Decadent (Homo)Sexuality in Gyles Brandreth's Oscar Wilde Series

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-182
Author(s):  
Susanne Gruss
Keyword(s):  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
The Real ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Historical Detail

Gyles Brandreth's Oscar Wilde novels (2007–12) appropriate Wilde for a neo-Victorian crime series in which the sharp-witted aestheticist serves as a detective à la Sherlock Holmes. This article explores Brandreth's art of adapting Wilde (both the man and the works) and English decadent culture on several levels. The novels can, of course, be read as traditional crime mysteries: while readers follow Wilde as detective, they are simultaneously prompted to decipher the ‘truth’ of biographical and cultural/historical detail. At the same time, the mysteries revolve around Wilde's scandalous (homo)sexuality and thus his masculinity. The novels remain curiously cautious when it comes to the depiction of Wilde as homosexual: all novels showcase Wilde's marriage, Constance's virtues, and Oscar's love for his children, and the real ‘Somdomites’ are the murderers he pursues. By portraying these criminals and their crimes, the novels evade the less comfortable, transgressive aspects of Wilde's sexuality and help to reduce him to a thoroughly amusing decadent suitable for a general reading public. Brandreth's novels can therefore be read as a decidedly conservative account of Wilde's masculinity for the market of neo-Victorian fiction.

25. A Christmas conundrum: What ailed Tiny Tim?

2007 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 41
Author(s):  
L. Bogle
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Renal Tubular Acidosis ◽  
Medical Science ◽  
Personal Health ◽  
Original Manuscript ◽  
Renal Tubular

Tiny Tim Cratchit is the captivating soul of one of the English language’s most beloved stories, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. His mysterious crippling disorder is quite the medical enigma, being intermittent, unilateral and fatal if left untreated. His tiny stature can also be counted amongst his symptoms. However, the most startling aspect of his condition is its ability to be cured in 1840s London with Ebenezer Scrooge’s limitless funds. While Tim is saved after Scrooge’s reformation, Dickens never mentions what disease afflicted the little youngster. Upon examining Dickens personal health and previous literary talent of describing diseases unknown to medical science at the time, the ailment is validated as an accurate depiction of a real malady. Two major theories exist as to the nature of the disease. Tuberculosis and renal tubular acidosis are offered as explanations to the interesting symptoms Tim experienced. The debate hinges on the interpretation of the original manuscript that, ‘Tiny Tim did not die.’ While survival is possible from the more common tuberculosis in 1843, a full cure was available from renal tubular acidosis via the alkali tonics available at that time. The debate may rage on indefinitely. Callahan C. Tiny Tim remembered. Am J Dis Child 1991; 145:1355-6. Jones P. Dickens’ literary children. Aust Pediatr J 1972; 8:233-45. Lewis D. What was wrong with Tiny Tim? Am J Dis Child 1992; 146:1403-1407.

Working-Class Fictions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Realism ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Industrial Community ◽  
Working People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Exciting Wave

This chapter explores why working-class fictions flourished in the period from the late 1950s through to the early 1970s and the distinctive contributions that they made to the post-war British and Irish novel. These writers of working-class fiction were celebrated for their bold, socially realistic, and often candid depictions of the lives and desires of ordinary working people. Their works were seen to herald a new and exciting wave of gritty social realism. The narrative focus on the individual signalled a shift in the history of working-class writing away from the plot staples of strikes and the industrial community, striking a chord with a post-war reading public keen to see ordinary lives represented in books in a complex and realistic manner. The cultural significance of such novels was enhanced as they were adapted in quick succession for a mass cinema audience by a group of radical film-makers.

The History of ‘the Reading Public’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Collini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Reading Matter ◽  
History Of ◽  
Victorian Periodicals

This chapter argues that accounts of ‘the reading public’ are always fundamentally historical, usually involving stories of ‘growth’ or ‘decline’. It examines Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public, which builds a relentlessly pessimistic critique of the debased standards of the present out of a highly selective account of literature and its publics since the Elizabethan period. It goes on to exhibit the complicated analysis of the role of previous publics in F. R. Leavis’s revisionist literary history, including his ambivalent admiration for the great Victorian periodicals. And it shows how Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy carries an almost buried interpretation of social change from the nineteenth century onwards, constantly contrasting the vibrant and healthy forms of entertainment built up in old working-class communities with the slick, commercialized reading matter introduced by post-1945 prosperity.

Class, Patronage, and Poetry in Hanoverian England

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Batt
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Complex Interplay ◽  
Public Identity ◽  
Royal Patronage ◽  
Agricultural Labourer ◽  
Career Opportunities ◽  
Stephen Duck

This book explores the complex and contested relationships that existed between class, patronage, and poetry in Hanoverian England by examining the life and work of Stephen Duck, the ‘famous Threshing Poet’. In 1730, Duck became the most famous agricultural labourer in the nation when his writing won him the patronage of Queen Caroline. The man, and the writing he produced, intrigued contemporaries. How was it possible, they asked, for an agricultural labourer to become a poet? What would a thresher write? Did he really deserve royal patronage, and what would he do with such an honour? How should he be supported? And was he an isolated prodigy, or were there others like him, equally deserving of support? Duck’s remarkable story reveals the tolerances, and intolerances, of the Hanoverian social order. This book sheds new light on the poet’s early life, revealing how the farm labourer developed an interest in poetry; how he wrote his most famous poem, ‘The Thresher’s Labour’; how his public identity as the ‘famous Threshing Poet’ took shape; and how he came to be positioned as a figurehead of labouring-class writing. It explores how the patronage Duck received shaped his writing; how he came to reconceive his relationship with land, labour, and leisure; and how he made use of his newly acquired classical learning to develop new friendships and career opportunities. And it reveals how, after Duck’s death, rumours about his suicide came to overshadow the achievements of his life. Both in life, and in death, this book argues, Duck provided both opportunity and provocation for thinking through the complex interplay of class, patronage, and poetry in Hanoverian England.

Delhi in Transition, 1821 and Beyond

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
English Translation ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Multiple Sources ◽  
Original Manuscript ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
The Times ◽  
First Time ◽  
The City

Commissioned by the English East India Company to write about contemporary nineteenth-century Delhi, Mirza Sangin Beg walked around the city to capture its highly fascinating urban and suburban extravaganza. Laced with epigraphy and fascinating anecdotes, the city as ‘lived experience’ has an overwhelming presence in his work, Sair-ul Manazil. Sair-ul Manazil dominates the historiography of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century compositions on Delhi in Persian and Urdu, and remains unparalleled in its architecture and detailed content. It deals with the habitations of people, bazars, professions and professionals, places of worship and revelry, and issues of contestation. Over fifty typologies of structures and several institutions that find resonance in the Persian and Ottoman Empires can also be gleaned from Sair-ul Manazil. Interestingly, Beg made no attempt to ‘monumentalize’ buildings; instead, he explored them as spaces reflective of the sociocultural milieu of the times. Delhi in Transition is the first comprehensive English translation of Beg’s work, which was originally published in Persian. It is the only translation to compare the four known versions of Sair-ul Manazil, including the original manuscript located in Berlin, which is being consulted for the first time. It has an exhaustive introduction and extensive notes, along with the use of varied styles in the book to indicate the multiple sources of the text, contextualize Beg’s work for the reader and engage him with the debate concerning the different variants of this unique and eclectic work.

The Monk

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Lewis
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Young Girl ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Ghost Stories ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Black Magic ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Profound Insight

‘He was deaf to the murmurs of conscience, and resolved to satisfy his desires at any price.’ The Monk (1796) is a sensational story of temptation and depravity, a masterpiece of Gothic fiction and the first horror novel in English literature. The respected monk Ambrosio, the Abbot of a Capuchin monastery in Madrid, is overwhelmed with desire for a young girl; once having abandoned his monastic vows he begins a terrible descent into immorality and violence. His appalling fall from grace embraces blasphemy, black magic, torture, rape, and murder, and places his very soul in jeopardy. Lewis’s extraordinary tale drew on folklore, legendary ghost stories, and contemporary dread inspired by the terrors of the French Revolution. Its excesses shocked the reading public and it was condemned as obscene. The novel continues to beguile and shock readers today with its gruesome catalogue of iniquities, while at the same time giving a profound insight into the deep anxieties experienced by British citizens during one of the most turbulent periods in the nation’s history.

Henry James, The Outcry, and the Possibilities of Connoisseurship

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Deli
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Henry James ◽  
The United States ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Art Objects ◽  
Cultural Power ◽  
Cultural Hero

Abstract This article reveals Henry James’s commitment to professional connoisseurship as a means of asserting control over a mass reading public. Focusing on The Outcry (1911), James’s last published novel, it demonstrates the author’s deployment of connoisseurial strategies to produce a text that, perhaps surprisingly, turns away from the performance of authorial nuance. A related strand of analysis situates The Outcry within the cultural and social context of the Edwardian art drain, the period of time when a significant number of British-owned art objects were sold to museums and private collectors, most often in the United States. I argue that in this text, James seizes upon the figure of the professional connoisseur as a cultural hero and proxy for the novelist author. At the same time, he makes a point of celebrating and promoting the autocratic power exercised by this figure. Although The Outcry is often disregarded as a simple, even superficial work, these moves articulate a complex manifestation of class conflict, aesthetic training, and cultural power. They simultaneously reflect James’s late-in-life conviction that connoisseurship might itself serve as a literary strategy for seeing and shaping meaning.

Development of a Commercial Wireline Retrievable Coring System

1998 ◽  
Vol 1 (06) ◽  
pp. 489-495 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tommy Warren ◽  
Jim Powers ◽  
David Bode ◽  
Eric Carre ◽  
Lee Smith
Keyword(s):  
Economic Evaluation ◽  
Coalbed Methane ◽  
Technical Conference ◽  
The Core ◽  
Core Recovery ◽  
Drilling Equipment ◽  
Original Manuscript ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Conventional Drilling ◽  
Target Depth

This paper (SPE 52993) was revised for publication from paper SPE 36536, first presented at the 1996 SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition, Denver, 6-9 October. Original manuscript received for review 11 October 1996. Revised manuscript received 22 September 1998. Paper peer approved 23 September 1998. Summary A Wireline retrievable coring system for use with conventional drilling equipment is described. The coring system was developed and tested for application in evaluating coalbed methane prospects where a large quantity of core is required, and it is essential that the core is processed soon after it is cut. A drill plug allows for alternation between coring and drilling without tripping the drillstring. The system is particularly advantageous for coring long intervals, multiple zones relatively close together, or when the exact target depth is unknown. The system has been used to core more than 4940 m (15,057 ft) in Poland, Germany, and France, with a combined core recovery of 94%. In addition, the impact of varying rig costs on total savings is factored into the overall economic evaluation of the system. P. 489

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