By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
One of the most celebrated pubs for writers is the Eagle and Child in Oxford. This public house on St Giles’, known informally as the ‘Bird and Baby’, was the place where the Inklings met during the mid-twentieth century. The ‘Inklings’ were a group of writers living in Oxford who would meet on a weekly basis to read and discuss each other’s work.
The word ‘catchphrase’ first appears in print around 1850 (according to the OED), and so the birth of the phenomenon of the catchphrase (at least as a labelled and understood term) coincides somewhat with Charles Dickens’s own career as a writer. One of the biggest catchphrases of the 1830s and 1840s, when Dickens was starting out as a novelist, was the following enigmatic Cockneyism: ‘Has your mother sold her mangle?’
1. Herman Melville’s novel, Moby-Dick (note the hyphen, which many people omit), was subtitled The Whale and appeared in 1851. It signalled a change in the author’s fortunes, but not of the good kind: although he had been critically and commercially successful prior to the publication of Moby-Dick, this – which is now considered his … Read more
The man who, among many other achievements, inspired two television programmes, Big Brother and Room 101, and painted a chilling dystopian portrayal of a totalitarian state in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, also unofficially provided the blueprint for many of the pubs in modern Britain.
It’s one of the most famous concepts in fiction: the idea of the dual personality. Robert Louis Stevenson cannot take the credit for inventing it – Edgar Allan Poe and Dostoyevsky had both written tales about ‘the double’ in the 1840s, some forty years before Stevenson put pen to paper – but he can certainly be applauded for giving us the definitive literary ‘type’. Whenever we talk about someone leading a dual life, we reach for ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ as an illustrative literary shorthand.