The Secret Library – Page 43 – Interesting Literature

Dickens’s Most Neglected Book: A Child’s History of England

In this week’s Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle celebrates Dickens’s forgotten history book for children

A Child’s History of England (1851-3) occupies a unique place among Dickens’s works. The only one written specifically for children, and the only book-length work of history he wrote, it is the most neglected of all his books, and has long been overlooked by both critics and readers.

There has been no scholarly edition of A Child’s History of England published by any of the leading publishers, and few studies of Dickens’s writing – even his non-fiction writing – provide any sustained analysis or treatment of the book. Critical opinion has generally been unfavourable: epithets including ‘puerile’ and ‘weak’ have been used to describe it.

Lucian: The Syrian Satirist Who Invented Science Fiction

In this week’s Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle looks at the work of the master of the comic dialogue, Lucian of Samosata

It all started with a Syrian writer about whom he know virtually nothing. He was born in around AD 120 and died in 180, or thereabouts. His hometown was Samosata, on the bank of the Euphrates in what is now Turkey but was at the time part of the Roman province of Syria. He is known as ‘Lucian of Samosata’ – or, more frequently, Lucian – and he has a claim to being the inventor of two literary genres, though his claim to one is somewhat more robust than the other.

The first is easy enough to make a case for. When Lucian was writing, the fashion among Greek writers was to draw on older literary styles from some five or six centuries earlier, recalling Herodotus in his Histories, or Plato’s philosophical dialogues. Lucian’s contribution to this literary renaissance was to give the Platonic dialogue a comic spin. In the process, he invented the comic dialogue which would later be used by Renaissance writers such as Erasmus, though perhaps most famously among modern writers, by Oscar Wilde in ‘The Decay of Lying’, ‘The Critic as Artist’, and the other witty debates that make up his 1891 volume Intentions.

Lois Austen-Leigh’s Incredible Crime

In this week’s Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle returns to the Golden Age of detective fiction with this crime classic Before Colin Dexter breathed new life into the genre with his Inspector Morse novels published from 1975 onwards, the Oxbridge crime novel was already a sizeable subgenre within detective fiction: there was … Read more

J. C. McKeown’s Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities

In this week’s Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle opens a delightful cabinet of surprising facts from the healing arts of Greece and Rome

‘A doctor should not quote poetry in support of his opinions, for such earnest zeal suggests incompetence.’ This quotation from Hippocrates, the father of medicine, is one of the epigraphs to J. C. McKeown’s eye-opening (and occasionally eye-watering) A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the Healing Arts of Greece and Rome.

May Sinclair’s The Dark Night: The Imagist Verse Novel

In this week’s Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reassesses an experimental work from the 1920s by an underrated author

When he reviewed the published facsimile and drafts of The Waste Land in 1971, the poet-critic William Empson remarked that ‘I would never have believed that the Symbolist programme could be made to work at all, if it had not scored a few resounding triumphs, such as this.’