Novel Approaches

George Gissing’s novels, Orwell once said, could be described in three words: ‘not enough money’. Writing is a matter of survival for the cast of ‘New Grub Street’ (1891), which follows a handful of literary men and women in London in the early 1880s. All of them have different ideas about success, love and personal fulfilment, and all those ideas – even the most brutally pragmatic – are subverted by the pressures of sexuality and the marketplace.

In the final episode of Novel Approaches, Clare Bucknell and Tom Crewe discuss Gissing’s great portrait of London at its shabbiest. They explore Gissing’s unrelenting realism, his gift for writing nuanced characters, and why, in Tom’s words, if the novel is gloomy, it’s ‘an invigorating gloom’.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠

Further reading from the LRB:

Frank Kermode on George Gissing:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v05/n02/frank-kermode/squalor

Rosemarie Bodenheimer on Gissing’s life:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v31/n13/rosemarie-bodenheimer/give-us-a-break

Jane Miller on Gissing’s letters:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v13/n05/jane-miller/gissing-may-damage-your-health

Ian Hamilton on a new ‘New Grub Street’:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v05/n02/ian-hamilton/diary

Patricia Beer on Gissing’s women:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v02/n14/patricia-beer/new-women

AUDIO GIFTS

Close Readings and audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiogifts

Did Dickens ruin Christmas? He was certainly a pioneer in exploiting its commercial potential. A Christmas Carol sold 6,000 copies in five days when it was published on 19 December 1843, and Dickens went on to write four more lucrative Christmas books in the 1840s. But in many ways, this ‘ghost story of Christmas’ couldn’t be less Christmassy. The plot displays Dickens’s typical obsession with extracting maximum sentimentality from the pain and death of his characters, and the narrative voice veers unnervingly from preachy to creepy in its voyeuristic obsessions with physical excess. The book also offers a stiff social critique of the 1834 Poor Law and a satire on Malthusian ideas of population control.

In this bonus episode from ‘Novel Approaches’, part of our Close Readings podcast, Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell join Tom to consider why Dickens’s dark tale has remained a Christmas staple.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠

AUDIO GIFTS

Close Readings and audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiogifts

After drunkenly selling his wife and child at auction, a young Michael Henchard resolves to live differently – and does so, skyrocketing from impoverished haytrusser to mayor of his adoptive town. Every unexpected disaster and sudden reversal in The Mayor of Casterbridge stems from its opening, in a plot which draws as much from realist fiction as Shakespearean tragedy and the sensation novel.

Mary Wellesley and Mark Ford join Clare Bucknell to unpick the many strands in Thomas Hardy’s first Wessex novel. They explore how the novel – at once ‘algorithmic’, theatrical and fatalistic – is suffused with Hardy’s class anxieties, affinity with Dorset and fascination with pagan England.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠

Further reading and listening from the LRB:

Mary and Mark discuss Hardy’s medievalism on the LRB Podcast:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/thomas-hardy-s-medieval-mind⁠

Mark discusses Poems of 1912-13 with Seamus Perry in Love and Death:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/close-readings/love-and-death-poems-of-1912-13-by-thomas-hardy⁠

James Wood on Hardy’s life:⁠

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n01/james-wood/anxious-pleasures⁠

Hugh Haughton on Hardy’s ghosts:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v07/n21/hugh-haughton/ghosts⁠

Next episode: New Grub Street by George Gissing.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped began life serialised in a children’s magazine, but its sophistication and depth won the lifelong admiration of Henry James. Set in the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite rising, Kidnapped follows young lowlander David Balfour’s flight across the Highlands with the rebel Alan Breck Stewart. In Stevenson’s hands, a straightforward adventure story becomes a vivid exploration of friendship, the body, and social and political division.

In this episode of Novel Approaches, Clare Bucknell is joined by Stevenson fans Andrew O’Hagan and Tom Crewe. They explore Stevenson’s startlingly modern handling of perspective and pacing, his approach to the art of fiction, and the value of being ‘betwixt and between’.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠

Further reading in the LRB:

Andrew O’Hagan on Stevenson’s life:

⁠⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v27/n04/andrew-o-hagan/in-his-hot-head⁠⁠

...his circle:

⁠⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n10/andrew-o-hagan/bournemouth⁠⁠

...and his home in Edinburgh:

⁠⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n01/andrew-o-hagan/diary⁠⁠

P.N. Furbank on R.L.S.’s letters:

⁠⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n16/p.n.-furbank/what-sort-of-man⁠⁠

Matthew Bevis on Treasure Island:

⁠⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n20/matthew-bevis/kids-gone-rotten⁠⁠

Next episode: The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy.

In The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James borrows from Eliot, Austen, folktales and potboilers, but ‘the thing that he took from nowhere was Isabel Archer’. James transformed the 19th-century novel through his evocation of Isabel, a woman who wants and suffers in a profoundly new (and American) way.

Deborah Friedell and Colm Toíbín join Tom to discuss the novel that established Henry James as ‘the Master’. They dissect James’s and his characters’ complicated motivations, the significance of his 1905-6 revisions, and the ways in which a ‘primitive plot’ irrupts in a painstakingly subtle and stylish novel.

Get 50% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code 'SUMMER50' at checkout when you sign up here:

https://lrb.me/travel26pod

Further reading in the LRB:

Colm Toíbín on Henry James:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n01/colm-toibin/a-man-with-my-trouble⁠

Ruth Bernard Yeazell on Henry James’s life and notebooks:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n01/ruth-bernard-yeazell/the-henry-james-show⁠

James Wood on The Portrait of a Lady:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n19/james-wood/perfuming-the-money-issue⁠

Next time on Novel Approaches: 'Kidnapped!' by Robert Louis Stevenson.

LRB Audiobooks

Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksna

Trollope enthusiasts Tom Crewe and Dinah Birch say they could have chosen any one of his 47 novels for this episode, so it’s no wonder Elizabeth Bowen called him ‘the most sheerly able of the Victorian novelists’. They settled on The Last Chronicle of Barset: a model example of Anthony Trollope’s gift for comedy, pathos, social commentary and masterful dialogue.

At the heart of Last Chronicle is a mystery: how did the impoverished Reverend Crawley get his hands on a cheque for £20 that no one can account for, and is he capable of theft? The scandal has dire repercussions not only for Reverend Crawley, but the whole county: his ostracision raises broader questions about inequity in the church; it sparks rifts between his daughter, her would-be husband and his parents; and it gives his young relative Johnny Eames an excuse to flee the entanglements of London high society for the continent, in search of the only man who may be able to solve the puzzle. Although it’s the final book in the Barchester series, Last Chronicle can be read as a standalone novel, and Tom and Dinah join Thomas Jones to explore its sensitivities, ambivalences and sheer readability.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠

Further reading in the LRB:

John Sutherland: Trollopiad

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n01/john-sutherland/trollopiad⁠

Richard Altick: Trollope’s Delight

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n08/richard-altick/trollope-s-delight⁠

Next time on Novel Approaches: 'The Portrait of a Lady' by Henry James.

LRB Audiobooks

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'Our Mutual Friend' was Dickens’s last completed novel, published in serial form in 1864-65. The story begins with a body being dredged from the ooze and slime of the Thames, then opens out to follow a wide array of characters through the dust heaps, paper mills, public houses and dining rooms of London and its hinterland. For this episode, Tom is joined by Rosemary Hill and Tom Crewe to make sense of a complex work that was not only the last great social novel of the period but also gestured forwards to the crisp, late-century cynicism of Oscar Wilde. They consider the ways in which the book was responding to the darkening mood of mid-Victorian Britain and the fading of the post-Waterloo generation, as well as the remarkable flexibility of its prose, with its shifting modes, tenses and perspectives, that combine to make 'Our Mutual Friend' one of the most rewarding of Dickens’s novels.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠

Next time on Novel Approaches: 'The Last Chronicle of Barset' by Anthony Trollope

Further reading in the LRB:

John Sutherland on Peter Ackroyd's Dickens: ⁠https://lrb.me/nadickens1⁠

David Trotter on Dickens's tricks: ⁠https://lrb.me/nadickens2⁠

Brigid Brophy on Edwin Drood: ⁠https://lrb.me/nadickens3⁠

LRB Audiobooks

Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksna

The Mill on the Floss is George Eliot’s most autobiographical novel, and the first she published after her identity as a woman was revealed. A ‘dreamscape’ version of her Warwickshire childhood, the book is both a working-through and a reimagining of her life.

Ruth Yeazell and Deborah Friedell join Tom to discuss the novel and its protagonist Maggie Tullliver, for whom duty – societal, familial, self-imposed – continually conflicts with her personal desires. They explore the book’s submerged sexuality, its questioning of conventional gender roles, and the way Eliot’s satirical impulse is counterbalanced by the complexity of her characters.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠

Further reading in the LRB:

Rachel Bowlby on reading George Eliot: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/naeliot1⁠⁠

Dinah Birch on Eliot’s journals: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/naeliot2⁠⁠

Rosemary Ashton on Eliot and sex: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/naeliot3⁠⁠

Gordon Haight’s speech on Eliot at Westminster Abbey: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/naeliot4⁠⁠

Audiobooks from the LRB:

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

‘I want to write a poem of a new class — a Don Juan, without the mockery and impurity,’ Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote to a friend in 1844, ‘and admitting of as much philosophical dreaming and digression (which is in fact a characteristic of the age) as I like to use.’ The poem she had in mind turned out to be her verse novel, Aurora Leigh, published in 1854, and described by Ruskin as the greatest long poem of the 19th century. It tells the story of an aspiring poet, Aurora, born in Florence to an Italian mother and an English father, who loses both her parents as a child and moves to England and the care of her aunt. From there she pursues her poetic ambitions to London, Paris, Italy and back to England while negotiating a traumatic love triangle between the vicious Lady Waldemar, the impoverished seamstress Marian, and the austere social-reformer Romney. In this episode, Clare is joined by Stefanie Markovits and Seamus Perry to discuss the wide range of innovations Barrett Browning deploys to fulfil her commitment to immediacy and narrative drive in the poem, and the ways in which she uses her characters to explore the extent of her own emancipatory politics.

Read the poem: ⁠https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/56621/pg56621-images.html⁠

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠

Read more in the LRB:

John Bayley: ⁠https://lrb.me/nabrowning1⁠

Ruth Yeazell: ⁠https://lrb.me/nabrowning2⁠

Audiobooks from the LRB:

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

In ‘North and South’ (1855), Margaret Hale is uprooted from her sleepy New Forest town and must adapt to life in the industrial north. Through her relationships with mill workers and a slow-burn romance with the self-made capitalist John Thornton, she is forced to reassess her assumptions about justice and propriety. At the heart of the novel are a series of righteous rebels: striking workers, mutinous naval officers and religious dissenters.

Dinah Birch joins Clare Bucknell to discuss Gaskell’s rich study of obedience and authority. They explore the Unitarian undercurrent in her work, her eye for domestic and industrial detail, and how her subtle handling of perspective serves her great theme: mutual understanding.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠

Read more in the LRB:

Dinah Birch: The Unwritten Fiction of Dead Brothers: https://lrb.me/nagaskell1

Rosemarie Bodenheimer: Secret-keeping https://lrb.me/nagaskell2

John Bayley: Mrs G: https://lrb.me/nagaskell3

Audiobooks from the LRB:

⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksna⁠⁠⁠⁠

Thackeray's comic masterpiece, Vanity Fair, is a Victorian novel looking back to Regency England as an object both of satire and nostalgia. Thackeray’s disdain for the Regency is present throughout the book, not least in the proliferation of hapless characters called George, yet he also draws heavily on his childhood experiences to unfold a complex story of fractured families, bad marriages and the tyranny of debt. In this episode, Colin Burrow and Rosemary Hill join Tom to discuss Thackeray’s use of clothes, curry and the rapidly changing topography of London to construct a turbulent society full of peril and opportunity for his heroine, Becky Sharp, and consider why the Battle of Waterloo was such a recurrent preoccupation in literature of the period.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠

Read more in the LRB:

John Sutherland on Thackeray: ⁠https://lrb.me/nathackeray1⁠

Rosemary Hill on 'Frock Consciousness': ⁠https://lrb.me/nathackeray2⁠

Audiobooks from the LRB:

⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksna⁠⁠⁠⁠

When Wuthering Heights was published in December 1847, many readers didn’t know what to make of it: one reviewer called it ‘a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors’. In this episode of ‘Novel Approaches’, Patricia Lockwood and David Trotter join Thomas Jones to explore Emily Brontë’s ‘completely amoral’ novel. As well as questions of Heathcliff’s mysterious origins and ‘obscene’ wealth, of Cathy’s ghost, bad weather, gnarled trees, even gnarlier characters and savage dogs, they discuss the book’s intricate structure, Brontë’s inventive use of language and the extraordinary hold that her story continues to exert over the imaginations of readers and non-readers alike.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠

Read more in the LRB:

David Trotter: Heathcliff Redounding https://lrb.me/nabronte1

John Bayley: Kitchen Devil https://lrb.me/nabronte2

Alice Spawls: If It Weren’t for Charlotte https://lrb.me/nabronte3

Patricia Lockwood: What a Bear Wants https://lrb.me/nabronte4

Audiobooks from the LRB:

⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksna⁠⁠⁠

Thomas Love Peacock didn’t want to write novels, at least not in the form they had taken in the first half of the 19th century. In Crotchet Castle he rejects the expectation that novelists should reveal the interiority of their characters, instead favouring the testing of opinions and ideas. His ‘novel of talk’, published in 1831, appears largely like a playscript in which disparate characters assemble for a house party next to the Thames before heading up the river to Wales. Their debates cover, among other things, the Captain Swing riots of 1830, the mass dissemination of knowledge, the emerging philosophy of utilitarianism and the relative merits of medieval and contemporary values. In this episode Clare is joined by Freya Johnston and Thomas Keymer to discuss where the book came from and its use of ‘sociable argument’ to offer up-to-date commentary on the economic and political turmoil of its time.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠

Read more in the LRB:

Thomas Keymer on Peacock

⁠https://lrb.me/napeacock1⁠

Paul Foot: The not-so-great Reform Act

⁠https://lrb.me/napeacock2⁠

LRB Audiobooks

Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksna⁠

On one level, ‘Mansfield Park’ is a fairytale transposed to the 19th century: Fanny Price is the archetypal poor relation who, through her virtuousness, wins a wealthy husband. But Jane Austen’s 1814 novel is also a shrewd study of speculation, ‘improvement’ and the transformative power of money.

In the first episode of Novel Approaches, Colin Burrow joins Clare Bucknell and Thomas Jones to discuss Austen’s acute reading of property and precarity, and why Fanny’s moral cautiousness is a strategic approach to the riskiest speculation of all: marriage.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠

Further reading from the LRB:

John Mullan: Noticing and Not Noticing

⁠https://lrb.me/naausten1⁠

Colm Toíbìn: The Importance of Aunts

⁠https://lrb.me/naausten2⁠

W.J.T. Mitchell: In the Wilderness

⁠https://lrb.me/naausten3⁠

Clare Bucknell is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and hosted the Close Readings series On Satire with Colin Burrow. The Treasuries, her social history of poetry anthologies, was published in 2023.

Thomas Jones is a senior editor at the LRB and host of the LRB Podcast. With Emily Wilson, he hosted the Close Readings series Among the Ancients.

LRB Audiobooks

Discover audiobooks in the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiobooksna

Clare Bucknell and Thomas Jones introduce their new Close Readings series, Novel Approaches. Joined by a variety of contemporary novelists and critics, they'll be exploring a dozen 19th-century British novels from ‘Mansfield Park’ to ‘New Grub Street’, paying particular (though not exclusive) attention to the themes of money and property.

Clare Bucknell is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and hosted the Close Readings series On Satire with Colin Burrow. The Treasuries, her social history of poetry anthologies, was published in 2023.

Thomas Jones is a senior editor at the LRB and host of the LRB Podcast. With Emily Wilson, he hosted the Close Readings series Among the Ancients.

To listen to the full series, sign up:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠

The full list of texts for the series:

Mansfield Park (1814) by Jane Austen

Crotchet Castle (1831) by Thomas Love Peacock

Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë

Vanity Fair (1847) by William Makepeace Thackeray

North and South (1854) by Elizabeth Gaskell

Aurora Leigh (1856) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Mill on the Floss (1860) by George Eliot

Our Mutual Friend (1864) by Charles Dickens

The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867) by Anthony Trollope

Washington Square (1880)/Portrait (1881) by Henry James

Kidnapped (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) by Thomas Hardy

New Grub Street (1891) by George Gissing