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 […]
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Chatterton the Teenage Romantic
In a previous post, we spoke of Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto as, effectively, ‘the forgery that began Gothic literature’. Another important forgery from the 1760s was the work of an adolescent, Thomas Chatterton. Born in Bristol in 1752, Chatterton started writing poetry at an early age, […]
Five Facts about Moby-Dick
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 – […]