The Little Professor

Brief observation: Ghostwritten

Commenting on Zadie Smith and Salman Rushdie, Simon Joyce argues that "a recognizable stylistic inheritance from Dickens in terms of characterization, plot, narrative persona, and sheer scale is overlaid onto a postcolonial politics that seeks to foreground the repressed connections between Britain and its imperial possessions, and to rewrite the canonical British novel so as to acknowledge its submerged colonial subtexts" [1].  This blog's gentle readers may remember that I have long been on a crusade against the adjective "Dickensian," but Joyce's understanding of the "neo-Dickensian" novel usefully warns us away from the Pavlovian habit of trotting out "Dickensian" whenever we encounter a neo-Victorian novel featuring a lot of eccentrics roaming about in the seamier side of urban England (or, for that matter, a contemporary novel featuring a lot of eccentrics roaming about in the seamier side of urban England).  David Mitchell's first novel, Ghostwritten (1999), may be the most neo-Dickensian novel I've read in some time--both in what it appropriates from Dickens' strategies, and in what it chooses to explode.

Ghostwritten consists of first-person narratives set in a bewildering variety of locations across the globe, ranging from Mongolia to New York City.  Each character manages to wind up connecting to one or more other characters, mostly by sheer coincidence (a phone call to the wrong person, a near-miss taxi accident); moreover, even when characters don't encounter each other physically, they may overlap through repeated images, anxieties, or cultural references (jazz, for example, or a painting by Delacroix).   Anyone who spends enough time reading Victorian novels--especially Victorian novels by Dickens--soon recognizes just how integral coincidence is to nineteenth-century plotting, especially coincidences that map out interlocking relationships across generations, social classes, and urban/rural spaces.  Dickens' novels offer some of the most complex examples of coincidence at work--think Bleak House--but providence disguised as coincidence also underpins novels like Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (e.g., Jane's encounter with her cousins, which has infuriated legions of undergraduates across the globe) [2].     Ghostwritten blows up the available narrative "space" for coincidence to encompass not just the entire globe, but also the distance between physical and noncorporeal (and, as it happens, inorganic) intelligences.  The six degrees of separation between characters, however, does not result in a utopian vision of global community...

The novel's movement towards near-apocalypse derives, in part, from its rejection of a standard Dickensian moment: the climactic point at which a character (or characters) reconstructs the overarching plot that has been revealed by all those coincidences.  (Detective fiction is also fond of these moments, of course: think Hercule Poirot explaining his solution to a mystery before an attentive audience, the criminal usually included.)  At one point, the novel's professional ghostwriter has a would-be philosophical conversation with his publisher:

Tim chuckled up to the ceiling.  "We're all ghostwriters, my boy.  And it's not just our memories.  Our actions, too.  We all think we're in control of our own lives, but really they're pre-ghostwritten by forces around us."
"So where does that leave us?"
"How well does the thing read?" [....] (287)

The ghostwriter--the real author concealed behind the nominal author's name--turns out to be the novel's eternally missing figure, the authoritative (possibly omniscient) narrator capable of organizing the plot's unruly strands.  In Dickens, there's always somebody capable, somewhere, of finding the plot and explaining it to others, whether it's Pip and Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations or Inspector Bucket in Bleak House.  In Ghostwritten, however, the plots keep dissipating.  A good chunk of the novel builds up to what appears to be the organizing plot, which also happens to be a criminal plot, but that plot simply unravels after its climax.  (The novel's genres similarly refuse to coalesce: depending on where you are, the novel is picaresque, romance, detective fiction, thriller, and/or SF.)  And when we encounter what ought to be the ultimate organizing intelligence at the end, a nearly (but not quite) omniscient and omnipotent product of a possibly good idea run awry, it too turns out to have some  existential difficulties on the subject of ethical decision-making...and, more importantly, on the subject of absolute control over its actions.  In this novel, there is always a ghostwriter, and the explanation of the plot ("the" plot) is always deferred to another point in time and space. 

[1] Simon Joyce, The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror (Ohio UP, 2007), 141-42.
[2] As Thomas Vargish points out, "for readers sympathetic to the providential aesthetic [...] the invitation issued by coincidence is not an arbitrary superimposition of a dogmatic construct.  Instead, it provides an aesthetic transition from ignorance to knowledge, from confusion to order."  The Providential Aesthetic in Victorian Fiction (UP of Virginia, 1985), 9-10.

This Week's Acquisitions

(More super-cheap secondhand books, mostly...)

• Ronald Wright, A Scientific Romance: A Novel (Picador, 1999).   Hey, is that H. G. Wells' time machine I see before me? (Amazon [secondhand])
• Susan Swan, The Wives of Bath (Penguin, 1993).  Adolescent angst in a Canadian boarding school for girls, c. 1963.  (eBay)
• Friedrich Durrenmatt, The Pledge, trans. Joel Agee (University of Chicago, 2006).  Avant-garde Swiss detective novel.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country (Modern Library, 2008).  Reworked, one-volume version of Matthiessen's Watson trilogy.  (Lift Bridge)
• Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose (Penguin, 2000). A historian studies his own family.  (Lift Bridge)
• Christopher Lane, Hatred and Civility (Columbia, 2004).  The myriad ways in which the Victorians disliked each other.  (eBay)
• David Hey, ed., Oxford Companion to Family and Local History (OUP, 2008).  New edition of this reference work.  (OUP [review copy])

Star Trek XII: The Wrath of the Search for the Voyage of Finals Week

[As the scene opens, we see many STUDENTS scrambling through the halls of an unidentified COLLEGE CAMPUS.  There are FACULTY visible through the open doors of several offices, as well as DEPARTMENT SECRETARIES and WORK-STUDY STUDENTS.  In the midst of all this activity, a transporter beam shimmers, and three VULCANS in STARFLEET uniforms materialize.  They look around, puzzled.]

SPOCK: I believe there has been a transporter malfunction.  This does not look like the Klingon ambassador's birthday party.  [Peers at a STUDENT who runs by in a state of obvious terror] Of course, given the general atmosphere of fear, it is possible that someone is running amok with the pain sticks.

TUVOK: Fascinating.  The clothing and visible electronic gear indicate that this is early twenty-first century Terra.  Note the primitive communications equipment [pointing to a STUDENT's iPhone] and the bulky computers [gesturing at a Mac Air].  We appear to have encountered yet another warp in the space-time continuum, without which many script writers would be entirely lost.

SOLOK: No doubt the TECH experienced a TECH when the TECH TECHED during the TECH.

SPOCK: No doubt.  [They move down the hall] Observe also that we are entirely invisible to them. 

SOLOK: Or, these being inferior, unobservant humans, they are entirely oblivious to us.  [Stares in distaste at a weeping STUDENT] I cannot imagine what crisis is responsible for these...disgusting...displays of emotion.

TUVOK: I believe that we have stumbled upon an ancient human rite of passage known as "finals week."  My human colleagues have often spoken of this rite in hushed whispers, but I am unsure what it involves.

[A sudden burst of chatter from behind them.  The VULCANS turn to look.]

STUDENT ONE: Gawd, my hand is, like, about ready to drop off.  Can you believe Dr. Imsotuff? That exam was positive torture. 

STUDENT TWO: Yeah, he's definitely second cousin to Jigsaw.  Next thing you know, the profs will penalize us for going over the time limit by dropping Norton anthologies on our heads.

STUDENT ONE: I think they eat students for breakfast during finals.

SOLOK: This ancient rite involves...severing limbs and inflicting agonizing pain? And cannibalism?!  Appalling! These humans are even more barbaric than I first thought. 

SPOCK: I believe the students were speaking figuratively.  As we appear to be in an English literature department, it would hardly be shocking if these young people were utilizing idiomatic language.  

TUVOK: Perhaps if we locate Dr. Imsotuff, we will be able to ascertain the nature of this rite more precisely.  That would appear to be his office over there...

[They move over to DR. IMSOTUFF's  OFFICE, where the gentleman in question is talking to a very GOTH-LOOKING STUDENT.]

DR. IMSOTUFF: Yes, I know we talked about how literary texts are open to multiple interpretations, but you cannot argue that Dracula is the good guy. 

GOTH-LOOKING STUDENT: But, see, it's like those Twilight novels, only Van Helsing doesn't really get that Dracula doesn't want to drink Lucy's and Mina's blood, he's just passionately in love with them...

DR. IMSOTUFF: [smothered wailing sound]

SOLOK [looking askance at the GOTH-LOOKING STUDENT's black eyeliner, lipstick, and nail polish]: Are these morbid-looking cosmetics an essential part of the rite? [Looking sideways at Spock] It is almost as if this student shared the makeup department of your era's obsession with blue eyeshadow. 

SPOCK: Indeed.  Although I find blue eyeshadow infinitely preferable to your makeup, which makes you appear to be the illegitimate child of Kermit the Frog and Arwen the Elf.

TUVOK [before SOLOK can start spluttering]: This rite obviously involves the study of hermeneutics.  Clearly, we are observing a clash of interpretations involving texts from multiple sacred traditions.  Although...I am unsure if the professor's agony derives from the challenge to his authority, or from some other, unknown factor.

SPOCK: But is this the first part of the rite? Perhaps we have failed to begin our observations from the beginning.  Let us examine this room over there.

[They move over to a CLASSROOM and peer through the WINDOW.  Inside, there are STUDENTS bent industriously over their bluebooks, while a PROFESSOR sits at the front of the room, checking her e-mail on a netbook.]

SOLOK: This process seems most primitive.  What are those things in their hands?

TUVOK: I believe the technical term is a "ballpoint pen."

[Several STUDENTS shake their hands out, wincing.]

SOLOK: It would appear that I was right, after all...and as usual.  They are in pain! This is an act of torture.  The woman sitting in the front of the room shows not the slightest remorse.

SPOCK: Most intriguing.  There must be an endurance component to these "finals," although I am at a loss to explain why the professor wishes to test the student's hands.

[The PROFESSOR signals that the STUDENTS should stop writing, and picks up their bluebooks.  SHE exits the CLASSROOM, walking right through the VULCANS outside.  They follow her.]

PROFESSOR: Well, I guess I'd better bite the bullet.  [The VULCANS, baffled, look around for a gun]  Where's my red pen...Let's see, mix-and-match questions.  The author of The Origin of Species is...Lord Tennyson?!

[The PROFESSOR proceeds to jump around her office in hysterics, throwing bluebooks around and invoking the names of various deities.]

TUVOK: Astonishing.  This rite of "biting the bullet," which apparently involves neither biting nor bullets, incorporates both calisthenics and what I believe to be...magical incantations?

SOLOK: I fail to see how tossing those stapled sheets of paper around will accomplish anything, aside from cluttering an already cluttered office.  But then, humans are incapable of organizing a workspace with anything resembling logic.  This one has put the stapler at least 3.5" away from its ideal location.

SPOCK [looking, for a Vulcan, slightly irritated]: Have I mentioned, Solok, that I am half human?

SOLOK [sounding, for a Vulcan, somewhat tart]: 232 times in the past six-point-three weeks.  It explains much.

TUVOK [intervening before SPOCK can drop SOLOK with a neck pinch]: I suggest that the solution to this mystery may lie in the "department office," up ahead.

[They enter the DEPARTMENT OFFICE, where several ANXIOUS STUDENTS are hassling the innocent WORK-STUDY STUDENT.]

ANXIOUS STUDENT ONE: I really need to know my grade in Dr. Whosits' class.

WORK-STUDY STUDENT: Well, final grades aren't due until the end of next week.  You can just check online then...

ANXIOUS STUDENT ONE: But I have to know now.  The suspense is killing me!

WORK-STUDY STUDENT: There's not much I can do.  Have you e-mailed him?

ANXIOUS STUDENT TWO: He told us that he would get to our grades after he had finished doing his Christmas shopping.  I think he was going to buy complete DVD sets of all four Star Trek series, or something equally geeky.

WORK-STUDY STUDENT: You know, he did come in on Halloween wearing Vulcan ears and doing the "live long and prosper" routine.

[All three students giggle.]

TUVOK: We are...a fashion statement? I feel a great disturbance in the force.  [SOLOK and SPOCK turn to stare at him]  I mean, this is highly illogical.

SPOCK: Humans have long demonstrated a fascination with Vulcan...physiques.  You will note that they have cast a sex symbol as the young me in the most recent Star Trek film, as is only appropriate.

TUVOK: This must explain why I was allowed to appear bare-chested on an episode of Voyager.  [To SOLOK] You, however, dressed up in a bizarre baseball uniform.

SOLOK [defensively]: Mr. Garak told me that I looked most fetching in it!

TUVOK: At any rate, we have now ascertained that the ultimate purpose of this rite is to produce "grades."  I wonder if these grades come with any tangible rewards?

[Another PROFESSOR enters the OFFICE, carrying a plate of TRIPLE CHOCOLATE FUDGE COOKIES.]

PROFESSOR: Hey, folks, I've got some leftover cookies from my final exam.  Have at 'em!  Remember: according to the Rules of Academic Calories, cookies left in the department office have no calories!

ASSORTED STUDENTS: Woo-hoo! [They descend on the cookies.]

SOLOK: The reward for grades is...a triple chocolate fudge cookie? Only humans would prefer triple chocolate fudge cookies to the true contentment to be derived from intellectual achievement.

[SPOCK and TUVOK would answer him, except that they are chewing triple chocolate fudge cookies.]

Then again...we are missing the Klingon ambassador's birthday party.  And triple chocolate fudge cookies are much tastier than candied gagh.

[He joins in.  Screen fades to black.]

 

The Glass of Time

Michael Cox's The Glass of Time: A Novel (2008) is the sequel to his The Meaning of Night: A Confession (2006); like the first novel, it is a neo-Victorian novel in the sensationalist mode.  In the first novel, the variously-surnamed Edward G. discovers his true identity as the heir to the Tansor estate, finds himself thwarted in his attempts to appropriate the property, and winds up murdering the forger-cum-poet who does inherit, Phoebus Daunt.  The Glass of Time is told from the first-person POV of Edward's daughter, Esperanza Gorst, who has been raised to unquestioningly carry out a mysterious "Great Task"--which turns out to be marrying the eldest son of Edward's traitorous beloved, Emily (later Lady Tansor), in order to marry into the estate and thus complete Edward's quest.  Needless to say, there are...complications.

The Glass of Time is keyed very closely to specific Victorian antecedents, especially Wilkie Collins' Armadale.   Cox takes both the initial murder and the marriage plot from Armadale, along with some aspects of Lydia Gwilt--which are here incorporated into Emily Carteret.  Some of Armadale's themes carry over as well, especially the problem of identity faced by a murderer's child.  Esperanza herself, "an avid collector of facts" (47), becomes a detective along the lines of the protagonist in The Law and the Lady.  There are also some similarities to Charles Dickens' Bleak House, particularly the Lady Dedlockish Emily Carteret and the equally Inspector Bucketish Gully; Esperanza's devotion to "Duty," given the duty under discussion, parodies that of Esther Summerson ("duty, duty, Esther").    Unlike The Meaning of Night, set before the sensation novel emerges as a significant genre, The Glass of Time is a post-sensation narrative, and its narrator is not only an enthusiast for Collins, but has actually read Armadale.  And yet, she does not appear to notice that she is in Armadale's plot...

In fact, The Glass of Time is more explicitly a parody of sensation fiction than The Meaning of Night.  To begin with, Esperanza frequently turns out to be a lousy detective, making multiple errors of judgment about other characters--and, the alert reader will note at the end, failing to draw an obvious conclusion about her husband's new publisher.    Moreover, while Esperanza appears to be a more reliable narrator than her father, she so enthusiastically enters into his project for revenge (even after she learns his true identity) that the reader may wonder just who the villain is supposed to be here.   (The circumstances of Lady Tansor's end are especially problematic, given how Esperanza goes out of her way to justify her own behavior.)  The plot itself relies on a series of spectacularly "Victorian" coincidences, none of them justified by divine providence, ranging from a protective cab driver who keeps popping up at opportune moments to incriminating documents that just happen to be preserved intact.  And Esperanza never seems to be in any real danger, despite all the time she spends eavesdropping, following blackmailers around, and the like (which is arguably the novel's greatest flaw). 

In many ways, Esperanza spends most of the novel as her father's willing puppet, downgrading herself to the "collector of facts" rather than asserting herself as the agent of her own narrative.  And yet, when she delights in "the now certain knowledge of who I truly was" (539), this triumphant claim of self-possession--not to mention the possession of the Tansor property--merely completes her father's goal.  As I said in my post on the first novel, "Edward occupies a failed fairytale, playing the role of the dispossessed heir, raised in poverty, who returns to seek his birthright and assume his proper identity.  But by insisting on the authenticity of that other life, Edward dismantles any chance he has to succeed in his own 'story.'"  Esperanza is the protagonist of a purportedly successful fairytale, rising from (fictional) orphan to lady's-maid to companion to Lady Tansor, but this transformation still rests on a number of rather cheerfully-dismissed corpses.  Esperanza herself notes uneasily at the end that there may be something illusionary about her new public and private identity: "We can never escape the legacy of what has been, especially here, in this house, where the past saturates the very air we breathe.  Try as we may, for the sake of our son, we find that we are unable wholly to break free from the fetters that bind us to our former selves" (580-81).   This is quintessential Gothic, the past always threatening to reassert itself, but Esperanza's decision to complete her father's quest binds her to "what has been"; in the end, she has bought into the "fetters" that her father has forged for her, even as she insists that "I shall be ruled by him no longer" (582).    

Blame game

The most recent Profession featured two essays that addressed the culture of academic complaint--about undergraduate writing, that is.  First, David Gold:

Obviously we cannot reach all students.  And certainly it is frustrating when students do not share our conviction that writing is important, that we are important, that we have something to offer.  But that frustration is part of the background noise of teaching.  Many students also do not believe that math or science or foreign languages are important.  But do Spanish teachers publish editorials lamenting their students' inability to use the subjunctive? Indeed, does any other profession so openly mock the     population it serves? Blaming the victim is not just misguided, it's unethical.  [1]

Next, Marshall Gregory:

I am making a strong argument about this point [attitudes to students] because there is no community more toxic to the professional socialization of graduate students and new professors than the community of professors bonded together by the belief that students are not adequately prepared.  This community is toxic because new professors seduced by its appeal inoculate themselves against either self-inquiry or student criticism for the rest of their careers.  Just as Wonder Woman deflects a volley of bullets with her magic bracelets, the professor who begins a teaching career with the expectation that few students will be prepared arms himself or herself with a magical deflection of all self-blame for any teaching failures.  All problems with teaching will always be the fault of the unprepared student.  [2]

Gold points out that some of the complainers inadvertently indict their own pedagogy, like the professor who does little to help, let alone accomodate, a badly floundering student (89-90), while Gregory notes that undergraduate complaints about "boring" coursework may actually mean that the student has not been told either how or why to complete the assignment (126).  Both authors call for greater self-reflexivity on the instructor's part, not to mention an end to nostalgia for the halcyon days of yore, when all undergraduates (supposedly) entered college writing perfectly grammatical essays and performing exquisite close readings of John Donne.  We tend to forget that students know when instructors don't like them, and tend to perform accordingly.  Contempt breeds yet more contempt.       

[1] David Gold, "Will the Circle Be Broken: The Rhetoric of Complaint against Student Writing," Profession (2008): 90.
[2] Marshall Gregory, "Do We Teach Disciplines or Do We Teach Students? What Difference Does It Make?" Profession (2008): 123-24.

This Week's Acquisitions

(Hey, books  for $1.)

• Roberto Bolano, 2666: A Novel, trans. Natasha Wimmer (FSG, 2008).  Bolano's last finished (maybe) novel, involving a wild goose chase, academics, and many narrative games.  (BOMC)
• Jem Poster, Rifling Paradise (Sceptre, 2006).  Near the  end of the nineteenth century, somebody treks to Australia.  (eBay)
• ---, Courting Shadows (Overlook, 20008).  Victorian Church architect has issues.  (eBay)
• Thomas Wharton, Salamander (M&S, 2001).  An odd group of folks go off in search of a very special book.  (eBay)
• George Bowering, Burning Water (Penguin, 1994).  Reprint of Bowering's prize-winning novel about Capt. Vancouver's travels in Canada.  (eBay)
• Arthur Phillips, The Egyptologist (Random House, 2005).  In search of lost tombs.  (Lift Bridge)
• Samuel F. Pickering, The Moral Tradition in English Fiction, 1785-1850 (Dartmouth/New England, 1976).  Study of the influence of various religious reform movements on the novel.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Margaret  Homans, Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837-1876 (Chicago, 1999).  The Queen in literature, photography, pop culture, etc.  (eBay)

My Year in Books

• Favorite academic books: Ian Duncan, Scott's Shadow; Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan; James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction; Billie Melman, The Culture of History; Herbert Tucker, Epic.
• Favorite fiction: Howard Sturgis, Belchamber; Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity; Joseph O'Connor, Redemption Falls.  
• Hmmmm: Sabina Murray's A Carnivore's Inquiry.  Not quite sure whether I liked it or not, but I was intrigued enough to buy another one of her books.  
• Most pleasant surprise, in a manner of speaking: Richard Rhodes' The Ungodly. 
• Absolutely the worst novel in the history of nineteenth-century British fiction, even including Queen-Hoo Hall: Mrs. Robertson's Florence; Or, the Aspirant. 
• Novel containing what is quite possibly the silliest moment in Victorian religious fiction: Richard Cobbold's Freston Tower.  
• Oddest religious novel: "Christmas Eve" with the Spirits, an Anglo-Catholic take on A Christmas Carol. 
• Yes, Virginia, even Victorian religious fiction has sex in it: in one Catholic novel, the resident Nasty Protestant very obviously orders his wife to go out and prostitute herself to support him. 
• Best religious novel: Lady Georgiana Fullerton's Constance Sherwood.  
• Detective novel most enjoyed by freshmen: Dee Goong-An (Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee).
• Victorian novel that proved hardest to teach: Charlotte Bronte's Shirley.  
• Victorian novel that improved most on rereading: Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.  
• Amazingly, my freshmen did not defenestrate me for making them read this: Alain Robbe-Grillet's The Erasers. 
• This was a movie tie-in?: Robert Mack's edition of The String of Pearls, a.k.a. Sweeney Todd.
• You book-buyer, me doorstop: Franco Moretti, The Novel, Volume 2; Adrian Hastings, The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought; Herbert Tucker, Epic.  
• Most likely to make non-specialists say "What on earth...?!": Warwick Gould and Marjorie Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.  
• Academic publishing trend deserving of further encouragement: Cambridge UP has been reprinting some of its backlist in relatively affordable (e.g., in the $30s) paperback editions.
• Academic publishing trend deserving of further encouragement II:  Ohio State UP making books from its OOP backlist available for free online. 
• I could have sworn that one of the reasons to review a book was to get a free copy: Choice twice asked me to review books I had already bought.
• What is that whirring sound coming from your internal hard drive?: I managed to walk into a bookstore and buy a book I already owned not once, not twice, but three times. 
• Book I had to return because reviewing a monograph by the director of your dissertation is really not quite the thing: Elizabeth Helsinger, Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts. 
• Ewwww: Patrick McCabe, Winterwood.  (Not bad...just ewwww.)
• AWOL character in a detective series: Reginald Hill seems to have mislaid Edwin Digweed somewhere. 
• Niftiest antiquarian book: Charlotte Maria Pepys, The Diary and Houres of the Ladye Adolie: A Faythfulle Childe, 1552 (1853).
• Most consistently interesting reprints: The NYRB Classics. 
• Best gift from a colleague: An omnibus edition of William Combe's Doctor Syntax poems. 
• Still in transit: I'm sure Transit of Venus is in the house somewhere, but goodness knows where.
• Most likely to cause severe eye trauma: the teensy-tiny font in my copy of Eleanor Agnew's Geraldine.  
• Best eBay deal: Agnes Strickland's Lives of the Queens of England (8 vols.) for about $50.
• Trend that should be nipped in the bud immediately: Selling ARCs as "paperbacks."  Technically, yes, but otherwise, no.  Especially when you've advertised the book as something else.
• Book responsible for satirical blog post: a "very good" (hah!) copy of Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism prompted this. 
• The slightest breeze will lead to my immediate collapse: The Union Review and The Girl's Week-Day Book, both of which are practically looseleaf. 

Bemused scholarly observation of the day

There really isn't all that much work on Barnaby Rudge, is there? For a novel by Dickens, I mean.  When it comes to CD, one always expects to be swamped in a sea of scholarship.  (Where, no doubt, one asphyxiates in alliteration.)

Yes, writing something on BR for Book Two.