Girl-Power in Great Ormond Street

On February 24th, we continued this term's focus on the latter part of the century with a discussion of the last novel of 'Mark Rutherford' (William Hale White), Clara Hopgood (1896), in which a pair of extraordinarily independent sisters embark on an uncertain adult life in lodgings in Great Ormond Street. We found this text's historical frame often sensitively done but sometimes unconvincing, though we all agreed that setting the text in the 1840s provoked some fascinating friction between contrasting cultural norms. The depiction of proto-New Women, the treatment of dissenting religion, the form of the narrative and its literary style, the representation of the relationship between sprawling city and still-distinct countryside, the inclusion of Italian nationalism and the figure of Mazzini, and the novel's autobiographical imperative, all resulted in lively conversation and the occasional contention. Reviews from the time of its first publication were thought by some of us to be rather harsh, and by others, spot on. Whether Hale White's 'rambling' way of writing a novel deserves disapprobation for its 'clumsy construction' or praise for anticipating the modernism of figures like D. H. Lawrence seems set to remain up in the air for the foreseeable future...

William Morris's News from Somewhere

On Thursday January 27th 2011 we turned to William Morris's News from Nowhere which features an utopian post-revolutionary Bloomsbury, in the form of a surviving relic of the past: the British Museum. We found the book particularly interesting in the way it married a genuinely rigorous interest in abstract ideas with an autobiographical dimension that was clearly palpable throughout, and indeed discernable in the text's geography as much as anything else. We discussed the book's proto-ecological aspects, and also turned to its rather problematic relationship to the aesthetic, especially when discussing the human (and more often than not, female) form, which led to the rather fascinating query whether this book can be seen within a social-Darwinist (and possibly fascist) tradition as much as a Marxist one...

Spring Term 2011 - Dates for your diary

For the next term we are moving back to the English Department of UCL, in Foster Court, as the British Museum has cut back late opening, unfortunately. We'll be reading three texts from the latter part of the nineteenth century in these next few months:

Thursday 27th January - William Morris, News From Nowhere (1890)
Thursday 24th Febrary - 'Mark Rutherford' (William Hale White), Clara Hopgood (1896)
Thursday 24th March - 'George Paston' (Emily Morse Symonds), A Writer of Books (1898)

Looking forward to seeing you from 6pm on these dates in the (Big) Common Room, along with whatever nibbles and beverages you care to bring with you...

Braddon in Bohemia

November 4th's session was a 'sensational' success, in the main because of the (at times) thrilling yarn Mary Elizabeth Braddon provided us in Eleanor's Victory (1863), written while she was living in 26 Mecklenburgh Square. Featuring a vivid, even sensual, portrait of The Colonnade, a cobbled mews road that can be found still between two much grander streets between Russell and Brunswick squares, the novel found in 1850s Bloomsbury a bohemianism we might have imagined did not feature until a few decades later. Exploring reviews from the period proved particularly fun, and we found not a few points of congruence, both in terms of critique for its plot and character implausibilities, as well as praise for its stylistic fluency and emotional intelligence. The ideologically and generically driven ending means that Eleanor might not quite be a female Hamlet, though, we felt she makes a very valiant attempt at such a role.

Gissing in Gower Place

On Thursday 7th October, we had the grim satisfaction of discussing Gissing's first novel, Workers in the Dawn (1880), in the vicinity of the Reading Room he made his own in New Grub Street - grim, in that the Bloomsbury he offered us was generally rainy, alcoholic, and with few obvious means of amelioration; satisfying, in that the convivial atmosphere of the Old Sanskrit Library meant that by constrast we felt noticeably less alienated and desperate than the protagonist Arthur Golding does towards the end of the novel. We had the pleasure of comparing London Library editions with the new paperback out in Broadview Press, another plug for which excellent commodity seems justified, seeing as one of our regulars, Professor Richard Dennis, has contributed a map to it...

Dates for Autumn Term 2010

Following a very successful move to the Old Sanskrit Room in the British Museum - with thanks to Joanna Bowring - we've decided to stay there for the coming term, as well as continuing with Thursday rather than Monday. There will be three sessions before the end of 2010 as follows:

Thursday October 7th: George Gissing's Workers in the Dawn (1880) - new Broadview paperback edition recommended, as it contains a cartographical contribution from one of our reading group regulars, Professor Richard Dennis.

Thursday November 4th: Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Eleanor's Victory (1863)

Thursday December 2nd: William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890)

The sessions begin at 6pm and are always over by 8pm - some refreshments will be provided, though you are welcome, as always, to bring more.

Dickens in the British Museum - July 15th 2010

I'm very pleased to announce that the next session for the reading group has been scheduled for Thursday July 15th 2010, 6pm, and will take place in a new venue - the Old Sanskrit Library, in the British Museum. Dickens used the Museum's reading rooms throughout his writing career, whose full stretch will be represented in the texts chosen for this occasion - we'll be discussing two short stories from the early 1830s ('The Boarding House' and 'The Bloomsbury Christening') that can be found in his Sketches by Boz (1836-7) as well as his great and stimulatingly incomplete last novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). Apologies again to those of you who've already done this reading and have been itching to talk about it since the session back in May was unfortunately postponed - hopefully the prospect of being shown the precise place where Dickens tended to work will go some way to compensate for this wait.