Book Reviews – Page 16 – Interesting Literature

The Time Machine: Notes Towards an Analysis of Wells’s Novella

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the lasting appeal of H. G. Wells’s first great ‘scientific romance’

In some ways, H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) is a ‘timeless’ text: it continues to enjoy huge popularity (as witnessed by big film adaptations in 1960 and 2002, as well as the fact that the novel itself has never been out of print and is available in a range of editions), it continues to exert a considerable influence on the literature and cinema produced since, and its very narrative structure – with much of the action of the novel taking place in a time that hasn’t happened yet, the year 802,701 – in a sense absenting it from its own context.

The Joys of a Regional Poem: The Oxford Book of Local Verses

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads The Oxford Book of Local Verses, chosen by John Holloway

In the small seaside town of Bideford in Devon, you can find this three-line epitaph adorning the gravestone of a woman named Mary Sexton:

Here lies the body of Mary Sexton,
Who pleased many a man, but never vex’d one,
Not like the woman who lies under the next stone.

The verse expands, each line getting longer as the sentence reaches its venomous tip, the rhymes of Sexton’s name getting more and more Byronic and absurd. Behind the triplet there is a story, though precisely what the story is, the verse is content to hint at rather than state: in what capacity did Mary ‘please many a man’? Is it fortuitous that her name contains ‘Sex’? Who is the woman lying in the neighbouring grave? One is tempted to suspect a family plot of both kinds: was there some sort of sibling rivalry at work here?

The Fascinating World of Authorisms: Words Created by Writers

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads Paul Dickson’s Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers

All words have to start somewhere, of course. But many of them are of anonymous authorship. The small amount of success I’ve had in getting the word ‘bibliosmia’ into general circulation has demonstrated that, even if a word has a clear origin and originator, this is soon of less consequence than the usefulness of the word itself. Yet some words do have clear origins and clear creators. Sometimes, a famous word was also coined by a famous person. And it’s of little surprise that writers have been especially proficient at coining new words.

Paul Dickson’s Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers, is the kind of book that was bound to get written eventually, and in a way it’s surprising that it took until 2014 for someone to do so. Dickson offers, if you like, a lexicon with a difference, running the whole gamut of author-coined words and phrases from ‘A man got to do what he got to do’ through to ‘zombification’. There’s also an epilogue and an appendix, which sees Dickson addressing the far-from-simple question of how many words and phrases Shakespeare, often considered the master neologist of the English language, actually coined. He gets the credit for a vast number, but

Frankenstein, 200 Years On: Why Mary Shelley’s Novel Remains So Relevant

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle revisits Mary Shelley’s misunderstood parable and founding text of science fiction

Frankenstein is one of a handful of nineteenth-century fictional creations that went truly global and became ingrained in the popular consciousness. Along with Sherlock Holmes and Dracula, Mary Shelley’s character has flown free of the text which spawned it: Frankenstein has become synonymous with biological experimentation, the creation of hybrid ‘monsters’, and the perils of playing God. The Oxford English Dictionary includes the prefix ‘Franken-’, used to denote nouns implying genetic modification, most famously ‘Frankenfoods’. The OED also records ‘Frankenstein’ itself, in extended use, as both a noun and a verb.

The Imperfect Imagist: The Poetry of Richard Aldington

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle celebrates the rough edges of one of modernist poetry’s most rebellious voices

Richard Aldington (1892-1962) is a figure who tends to be mentioned alongside his more famous contemporaries: as an imagist he usually figures less highly in histories of the movement than his sometime wife, H. D., while as a novelist of the Great War he comes behind Ernest Hemingway, Ford Madox Ford, and Erich Maria Remarque. As a poet-critic he is mentioned after people like T. S. Eliot and William Empson. Richard Aldington was many things: poet, editor, critic, biographer, novelist, modernist, anti-modernist. He was a rebel even within the rebellious movement to which he nominally belonged.

Not long after her poetry began to appear in print, H. D. was labelled ‘the perfect imagist’. If that is the case, Richard Aldington might be given the complementary sobriquet, ‘imperfect imagist’. This is not so much because his work lacks polish (although it sometimes does) as because he refused to conform to Ezra Pound’s directives for imagism – his famous ‘A Few Don’ts’ – and instead forged his own looser, rougher kind of verse which