Literature Archives - Page 7 of 10

Black And White And Read All Over

Oct 242013

By David Innes.

The imminent clock change signals the approach of winter, with its darkness, greyness, drizzle, sleet, and dangerously-slippery leaves when walking or cycling.

Then there’s the misery of snow, frost and ice, not to mention the obtrusive overkill of that big commercial event six days before we enter 2014.

Christmas, for that is what I’m alluding to, does however allow book fanatics to indulge their habit.

Whatever your taste, pitch black evenings provide ideal conditions for reading, with inhospitable weather rattling the panes and the chimney can, and the TV cold in the corner due to the lack of anything worth watching.

My list for Santa is already at the rough draft stage with Mark Lewisohn’s The Beatles Biography sitting in pole position.

The end of year festival also encourages publishers to launch titles, to catch the Christmas market and also, one hopes, to encourage us away from the fridge, the internet and the pub.

Our friends at Black & White Publishing have sent us a review copy of Maud loon Jack Webster’s A Final Grain of Truth, a further autobiographical account of his eventful journalistic career. It’s currently being digested and we’ll carry a review in Voice soon.

The author will be signing copies on

Saturday 26^th October at 13:00 in Waterstone’s, Union Bridge, Aberdeen, and
Saturday 2^nd November at 13:00 in WH Smith, St Nicholas Centre, Aberdeen.

Also in from Black & White is Bob Jeffrey’s intriguing Peterhead: The inside story of Scotland’s toughest prison. That’ll be reviewed in Voice too.

Bob Jeffrey will be signing copies on

Saturday 30^th November at 13:30pm in Waterstones, Union Bridge, Aberdeen.

Dickens Fellowship And The Topicality Of Bleak House

Aberdeen City, Featured, Information No Responses »

Oct 172013

October’s monthly meeting of the Aberdeen Dickens Fellowship had a celebratory air about it.
Not only were we to discuss a further aspect of Bleak House, considered to be Dickens’s crowning glory as a novelist, we were also treated to the news that the Aberdeen group has been awarded its charter.
Aberdeen’s is now the only Dickens Fellowship in Scotland, and part of a global fellowship of thousands, united in their admiration of Dickens and his prodigious legacy of unsurpassed writing.

Further good news is that Aberdeen’s offer to host the 2016 Dickens Fellowship International Conference is the only offer received so far by the Dickens Fellowship Council and the bid is finding favour with Council members. What larks, indeed.

So, to the evening’s theme, The Topicality of Bleak House.

What were the contemporary events during Dickens’s planning, writing and publishing his ninth novel?

Dickens began writing Bleak House, for publication in monthly parts, in December 1852, the year after The Great Exhibition, the first time that thousands travelled to a centrally-organised event.
Stephenson’s Rocket had made its first journey in 1829. By 1840, thousands of miles of railway tracks criss-crossed Britain. So inadequate was the road system that Dickens’s first journey to Edinburgh in 1834 had been made by boat.
Whilst outwardly proclaiming to improve democracy, the much-anticipated 1832 Reform Act had done little to increase the franchise and improve representation.
The Exhibition was as much a celebration of the fact that the European revolutions of 1848 had not been replicated in Britain and it was a popular self-promoting celebration of the ‘transformational, dynamic prosperity’ of a mature industrial age.
Dickens hated it, and considered it ‘vulgar’. Bleak House, from its opening chapter’s evocation of an environment of mud and fog is almost deliberately ‘uncreative’ in contrast to the Exhibition’s boastful celebration of British creativity and global influence.
Chancery, the central bureaucratic monolith of Bleak House, originally devised as a charity to assist the less well-off access to legal representation, was failing. Myriad is the evidence of its failure to act on the behalf of the disadvantaged, as costs associated with never-ending cases swallowed whole estates and inheritances. The Times of the 1850s was running a campaign critical of Chancery. Dickens himself had fallen foul of the lack of protection as his work was plagiarised. The generations-old Jarndyce and Jarndyce case, the novel’s all -pervading brooding presence is, from Dickens’s pen, representative of all that was wrong in Britain in the 1850s.

Whilst it comprises 67 chapters in 20 books, this is an economical novel. Every character, sub-plot and dialogue is a contribution to the whole. Loose ends are not left untied or are clipped neatly. It is a work of supreme inter-connectivity.

Rather than join in the popular clamour of approval for establishment spin doctors’ views of British success, Dickens used Bleak House to shine a light on the vapid, self-consuming nature of public services, to address social deprivation, rounding on the privileged, and on rule-makers and enforcers,

‘Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us, every day.’

he thunders on the pathos-laden death of Jo, the crossing sweeper. We agreed that as a social commentator Dickens had earned the right to address those in power who were shirking their social and community responsibilities.

He populates Bleak House with dysfunctional families, where children act as ‘parents’ to their own neglectful or inadequate parents, where the burden of orphanry is widespread, and in contrast to the celebration of free-market capitalism of 1851, floats the message that we have responsibility for looking after each other. He might have written, ‘We’re all in this together’.

Esther Summerson, in her narrator role, despite the bad hand she’s been dealt as a start to life, is the moral touchstone of Bleak House, demonstrating how to survive and prosper despite hardship and how not to exploit others in the process.

It was quite a night. It’s quite a book.

If this has whetted your appetite, new friends are always welcome to attend meetings. Membership of the Fellowship costs £20 for the 2013-14 period, or non-members can attend by paying £3 per meeting on entry.

The programme for the rest of the session is

Tuesday 12 November 2013, a lecture by Dr Dan Wall on The Serialisation of Bleak House, followed by a discussion seminar on numbers 11-15, chapters 33–49.

Tuesday 3 December 2013, Dr Paul Schlicke will, again lecture on the theme, Plots and Detecting in Bleak House, followed by a discussion seminar on numbers 16–20, chapters 50–67.

Tuesday 17 December, Dr Paul Schlicke will read A Christmas Carol

Tuesday 4 February, readings of favourite passages from Dickens’s writings by members of the local Fellowship

Tuesday 4 March, Malcolm Andrews lecture, ‘The Speech of the Sea is Various: Dickens, Turner and the Sea’.

Tuesday 8 April, seminar on selected journalism. Texts available on-line on John Drew’s website http://www.djo.org.uk/

Tuesday 13 May: Fellowship banquet

A warm welcome will be extended to all comers, and lively questioning and debate is almost certainly guaranteed. You can be added to the mailing list by e-mailing Dr Paul Schlicke, Fellowship Chairman at p.schlicke@abdn.ac.uk

For more information, visit https://sites.google.com/site/aberdeendickensfellowship/

– David Innes

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Six Degrees Of Separation: Tea Trolleys And Space Exploration

History, Information 2 Responses »

Oct 042013

Somewhat surprisingly, the humble tea trolley is still available at a high street outlet or an online store near you, writes Duncan Harley. For readers under 25 years old this fact will perhaps mean little, but the Cambridge Dictionary Online is helpful as always and defines a tea trolley ‘as a small table on wheels, sometimes with an upper and a lower shelf, for serving drinks and food’.

Cambridge Dictionary Online uses cookies and invites the casual enquirer requiring more information to read its Privacy and Cookies Policy.

The irony of using cookies may be lost on those who have never encountered the tea trolley first hand.

Suffice it to say that no tea party was ever complete without cakes, currant buns and
indeed cherry-topped cookies gracing the lower shelf.

The US definition is seemingly ‘a tea wagon or cart’ which seems more laidback given the pinkie-raised image of the afternoon tea trolley-equipped brigade of mid-20th century Scottish middle class suburbia.

All of this, however, meant little to HG Wells. Indeed he may never have used or even seen a tea trolley.

A prolific writer and former drapery assistant, Wells penned hundreds of stories, ranging from War of the Worlds to The Time Machine, during his lifetime. Born in 1866 during the reign of Queen Victoria, many of his books are still in print and his stories remain in the popular imagination as cultural icons.

A key figure in scientific and popular fiction, Wells wrote about rockets, submarines and amazing discoveries. He gathered a readership that, in the main, could never have imagined such impossible ideas as time travel and the invasion of earth from outer space. Aliens and monsters of the deep were his currency and his readers could not get enough of the stuff!

Cremated at Golders Green Crematorium on August 16 1946, he lived just long enough to see the end of the second war to end all wars and indeed the beginnings of space travel, as Hitler’s rocket scientists were feted and recruited into the US Space Programme. This was just months after they had been working on the so called Wonder Weapons which the German military believed would turn the tide of defeat into a victory surge for the Nazi regime.

But The History of Mr Trolley must surely be Wells’s greatest and lasting literary achievement.

According to some sources, Mr Trolley is based on the author’s early experiences in the drapery trade. Alfred Trolley is a bumbling and directionless young man with an innate sense of epithet. He uses phrases like ‘dejected angelosity’ when referring to the stone carving on a cathedral and ‘the shoveacious cult’ when referring to youth.

The tea trolley remains one of the great cultural icons of the 20th Century

George Orwell, in Coming Up For Air, portrays a man breaking out of the mould, just for the one day.

Wells writes about Mr Trolley in a similar vein.

Mr Trolley hates his wife, hates his shop and in general hates ‘that vast mass of useless, uneducated, and altogether pitiable people that we contemplate when we use the term, Lower Middle Class’.

The comments leave no doubt at all about Mr Trolley’s views on humanity.

The novel is perhaps a parody of Wells’s own life. Encouraged into the drapery business by a devoted father, Wells had failed academically. His numerous affairs and failed marriages are testament to his unrest.

In 1934 he wrote ‘I was never a great amorist, though I have loved several people very deeply’.

The tea trolley remains one of the great cultural icons of the 20th Century as indeed it should. Cakes and high tea are a part of the true Scottish heritage.

Mr Trolley may, of course, be an anachronism in the 21st Century.

However, it does seem somehow reassuring that Argos, Ikea and Tesco Direct still offer the aficionados of pinkie-raised taking of tea the option to use the things.

Available at £39.99 or below, and in various shades of grey, the tea trolley continues to amaze and delight those who still take tea of an afternoon.

A quick search on Google failed to return any useful results regarding how many tea trolleys are being manufactured in the UK these days, but there is little doubt that in some factory, in some god- forsaken district in China, there are lines of workers diligently assembling the ‘small table on wheels’ at the rate of dozens per hour.

As for Wells, he would have taken tea with the best of us.

With grateful thanks to HG Wells, Michael Rayne, Ikea and Golders Green Crematorium.
Photo credit: Janice Rayne

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Rock And Roll Busker – David Innes Reviews

Articles, Opinion 2 Responses »

Oct 042013

For some semi-pro musicians, it’s not unusual for the phone to buzz on Thursday night and the conversation to go along the lines of,

“Davie min….”

“Aye?”

“Got a gig the morn?”

“No, Saturday at The Cragshannoch, Sunday at The Argo”.

“Can you fill in with us at The Bilermakers? Cash in hand, start at 9 o’clock, after the bingo”.

“Aye, go on then, send me your set list. Keys will help. Is Shake Rattle and Roll still in bloody Bb to accommodate your sax player?”

Dave Innes reflects, from fraught experience, on such rattlings and rollings as he flicks through the pages of Graham Forbes’ Rock And Roll Busker.

It was ever thus. Busking, you see, is not solely the preserve of the Oasis-obsessed fellow outside John Lewis’s, or of the tasteful Eastern European accordionist flourishing the bellows in St Nicholas Street.

Busking, to those in the know, is playing along brazen frontedly, with songs you half-know without anything as decadent as a rehearsal, making an intuitive contribution, often taking a leap of faith with chords or fingering, and always having the fallback default option of “muffled E” if you’re a bass player.

This is a seat of the pants world where bum notes are ‘jazz licks’ and mis-timed cues are ‘a bit of funk syncopation’. Audiences never notice. Sssssshhh….

That’s where the yarns in Graham Forbes’s third book will chime with jobbing musos, who share the author’s obsession with playing to an audience, not for the cash but for the buzz that only live performance can impart.

Glaswegian by birth, Forbes grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, when, if players were prepared to travel, they could be playing live every night. As well as traversing Scotland with a series of bands of rock n roll misfits, semi-alcoholic soulmen and cabaret tearaways, Forbes played in a credible line-up of the Incredible String Band and on sessions by household names.

Beyond this, however, his desire was always just to turn up, plug in and rock out.

The associated tales are hilarious, fascinating, and will ring true with anyone who experienced those crazy days and their financially-meagre but often otherwise hedonistically-satisfying rewards, destroyed forever by pub DJs and bloody karaoke.

Forbes is forthright, opinionated and passionate. Those he loves and respects are described affectionately, but he reserves harsh words and a fine level of splenetic disdain for money-obsessed managers, lazy, unreliable band members, young acts concerned only with record deals and for music stands onstage. He likes 1950s valve amplifiers, tanned, long-legged American girls, mountaineering, Fenders and skiing.

As he brings Rock And Roll Busker up to date, he divides his time between Florida and Glasgow, always on the lookout for a gig, whether for the well-heeled in the humid clubs of Saratosa, or the formica-chic of Paisley’s Patter Bar offering punters a few hours respite from the grim deprivation of life in the put-upon West of Scotland. Accounts of his experiences in these starkly-diverse situations show that his love affair with entertaining has diminished none.

My favourite rock n roll books are Deke Leonard’s twin behemoths Maybe I Should’ve Stayed In Bed? and Winos, Rhinos and Lunatics. Rock And Roll Busker is every bit as entertaining and nostalgic and has earned the right to be slotted in next to those seminal tomes on my bookshelves.

ROCK AND ROLL BUSKER
Graham Forbes
(MCNIDDER & GRACE)
282 pp

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A Tour Of Bleak House

Aberdeen City, Information No Responses »

Sep 272013

I have a friend who divides the population into two categories, those who have read Steinbeck’s East of Eden and those for whom that is a pleasure in prospect. I’m pretty much of the same opinion, but with Bleak House as the tome in question.

So, it was with delight that I read chapters 1-16/numbers 1-5, pretty much untouched since I first read it in awe as an undergraduate in 1978. It was with even more delight that my fellow Dickens fans and I absorbed the wisdom of Aberdeen Dickens Fellowship’s guest Professor Grahame Smith, who effortlessly drew contributions from the Dickens devotees attending, enthused by his own passion for the author and the book. David Innes reports on the latest get-together of the Aberdeen Dickens Fellowship.

Grahame was obviously delighted to attend and to return to Aberdeen, where he studied, meeting friends old and new who share his enthusiasm for the master of novel-writing.
Bleak House, most Dickens readers would agree, sees the man at the peak of his powers as a novelist. Grahame pointed out that it followed David Copperfield in the author’s canon and that since he had honed his writing to literary perfection in that semi-autobiographical masterpiece, Bleak House gave him the confidence to experiment.

The use of a narrator, interwoven with chapters by the main character and conscience of the novel, Esther Summerson, was bold, although as one contributor on the night pointed out, Dickens had to be careful not to alienate a large and appreciative readership as a consequence of experimentation.

Radiohead and the transition from OK Computer to Kid A is the best contemporary comparison I could make.

Is Esther credible, too good to be true? We mused on this. One of our number commented that her background of psychological abuse was similar to that experienced by many young people with whom he has contact, and her reactions and motives are not untypical of similarly unfortunate young people in the 21st century.

She is also fairly unique, it was agreed, in being a strong female character and major protagonist in Dickens’s fiction.

As well as his Dickens scholarship, Grahame also has a fascination for the cinematic. He believes that the best potential Dickens film adaptations might have been directed by Orson Welles, which is no longer a possibility, sadly. He feels that perhaps Spike Lee could do Dickens justice, a controversial view perhaps, but one which chimed with some of the Fellowship who shared Grahame’s interest in cinema.

It really was the best of times.

Bleak House is the biggie, of course, and in more ways than one, given its labyrinthine plot, range of characters and ground-breaking fiction-writing technique. It’s also large in volume. To do it justice, therefore, the next three meetings will consider it further, and allow those of us with limited reading time to read it cover to cover. That is no hardship.

The Fellowship’s programme between now and the end of 2013 will be:

Tuesday 15 October 2013: lecture by Paul Schlicke, on the topicality of Bleak House, followed by seminar on numbers 6-10, chapters 17–32.
Tuesday 12 November 2013: lecture by Dan Wall, on the serialisation of Bleak House, followed by seminar on numbers 11-15, chapters 33–49.
Tuesday 3 December 2013: lecture by Paul Schlicke, on plots and detecting in Bleak House, followed by seminar on numbers 16–20, chapters 50–67.
Tuesday 17 December 2013: Paul Schlicke will read A Christmas Carol

All meetings will be held in Grampian Housing Association’s offices, situated at the corner of Huntly Street and Summer Street, Aberdeen, where there is ample free parking. Each evening’s proceedings will start at 19:00 and finish at 21:00. We’ll be delighted to see you.

The Aberdeen Fellowship intends to affiliate to the International Dickens Fellowship. We’ll carry details of that here when everything’s finalised, but https://sites.google.com/site/aberdeendickensfellowship/ is the place to go to keep up to date.

To be added to the circulation list for information on local Fellowship activities, contact Dr Paul Schlicke p.schlicke@abdn.ac.uk , newly elected chair of the Aberdeen Dickens Fellowship.

Life Cycle: A Bike Ride Round Scotland And Back to Childhood

Articles, Opinion No Responses »

Sep 132013

On a whim and a wave of memories of his love for his childhood bike, Gary Sutherland calls his younger brother Stewart and proposes that they go for a wee run, just like they did as bairns. This time it’s not a Christmas morning 5-mile round trip to Duffus from their home village of Hopeman on brand new bikes. This time it’s around Scotland. Despite neither having been astride a bike for years, the response is, ‘Yeah, OK’. And so it begins. David Innes reviews.

Part travelogue, part buddy movie storyboard, Life Cycle celebrates the simple pleasures and sense of achievement to be had by travelling, seeing the world from a different perspective and all via self-generated pedal power.

Sutherland’s narrative captures the joys of achievement, cholesterol-stuffed Scottish breakfasts, pints and companionship, even when he and Stewart are struggling with the gradients between Ullapool and Durness.

He dislikes hills. He grimaces at headwinds. He detours miles to visit a good coffee shop. He’s a proper cyclist all right.

Although sometimes the in-family anecdotes and snatches of conversation veer into ‘you had to be there’ territory, there are some gems.

Gary and Stewart have found a Callander bakery selling butteries. Yes, civilisation and Ambrosian lard-laden soul food that far south.

‘Do you think butteries are good for you?’ asked Stewart
‘Oh aye,’ I said, even though they’re nothing but butter and salt, ‘I reckon you could power your way round Scotland on butteries alone’.
‘I’d like to see you give it a go’.
‘I reckon I’d be able to do 10 miles to the buttery’.
‘That’s pretty impressive’.
‘It’s also a lot of butteries’.

Although two-wheeled trainspotterly stattoes like me would love to have had daily progress charts, tables of averages and maps of the journey included as an illustration of the tour, that isn’t the purpose of Life Cycle. In some places it’s almost cathartic as the struggle to self-motivate each morning and the mental and physical anguish of tortuous hill climbs are described.

Life Cycle is a tale of a couple of weeks one summer re-affirming life’s simplicity and familial ties. No more, no less. This is encapsulated in the description of a long and welcome descent after a day of excruciating climbing in Sutherland.

‘My eyes were fixed on my wee brother, flying free amid this majestic landscape. It was one of the finest sights I’d ever seen. It was all worth it for this.’

Now and again there can be too much seemingly-anodyne detail given, but on publication of A Journal Of The Plague Year and Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe was acclaimed for bringing journalistic verisimilitude to the fledgling novel genre. Gary Sutherland is in good company.

So, as we cyclists feel winter on the back of some chillier September mornings, as the shorts are consigned to the back of the drawer and the winter gloves are looked out, what better time to reflect on the pleasures of summer cycling and take inspiration for one’s own road trip once the days lengthen again? You may find it between the easily-read pages of Life Cycle.

Life Cycle: A Bike Ride Round Scotland and Back to Childhood. Gary Sutherland.
Birlinn Books. 214pp. £9.99

Facile Scotland

Articles, Opinion 3 Responses »

Sep 062013

Having seen a book entitled Fascist Scotland (Birlinn Books, 256 pages) at the library I thought I’d check it out as the name of the author, Gavin P Bowd, seemed oddly familiar. This proved to be correct as he wrote an article in Scotland on Sunday earlier this year linking Scottish Nationalism with Nazism for which he allegedly received ‘death threats’. Having read this awful book I can imagine the alleged ‘death threats’ can only have come from serious historians who have seen their profession dragged into the gutter and their status reduced to that of a third-rate fairground barker, writes Dave Watt.

Basically, the book implies that there has been a major connection between Scotland and Fascism since the 1920s.

It is shotgun mudslinging of the lowest order, even implying that Rudolf Hess arrived in Scotland because he knew the place was full of Nazi sympathisers and that the wartime government was afterwards involved in some sort of major cover-up.

He uses a ludicrous quote from an Evelyn Waugh’s Officers and Gentlemen, in which a lunatic alleged Scottish nationalist Miss Carmichael, an avid admirer of Hitler, proclaims that, ‘When the Germans land in Scotland, the glens will be full of marching men come to greet them, and the professors themselves at the universities will seize the towns’, as his basis for showing that Scotland was just waiting for the word to go Nazi during the war.

Presumably the 50000 Scottish servicemen and women who died in the Second World War were all rushing to join the Wehrmacht when they absent-mindedly forgot that they had rifles in their hands and the Germans were obliged to kill them.

Bowd also claims that although 549 people in Scotland volunteered to fight for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, and only one (yes, that’s right, one) went to fight for the Fascists, there were many Franco sympathisers in Scotland and, at one point, refers to us as ‘Mosley’s Lost Legion’.

Based on this kind of statistical interpretation I could state that there are many sympathisers in Scotland for the notion that the Earth is flat.

One of the more surreal pieces in the book alleges that the Protestant League in Scotland initially supported the Spanish Republic since they were kicking out priests from Spanish schools, but goes on to state that they all changed their minds as the Civil War went on and supported the Fascists as a consequence of becoming suddenly impressed with Hitler.

No evidence is supplied for this abrupt alleged Scottish Protestant devotion to Hitler, there are no voting statistics, no pictures of Orange banners with Adolf crossing the Rhine on a white dobbin on the 12th of July, no radio broadcasts from Ibrox with the crowd singing ‘Hello, Hello, We Are The Falangist Boys’ and stating that they were ‘up to their knees in Anarcho-Syndicalist blood’.

Nope. Nothing like that. It happened like that just because he says so.

Paralleling the surreal observation about Scottish support for Franco, he seems to imply that since the National Front got 0.08% of the vote in 2011, there is a huge secret groundswell towards Fascism in Scotland. The obvious corollary to this is that if the evil Jocks gets independence it will be concentration camps all over the shop and you won’t be able to get a quiet latte in Costa for people standing on chairs singing Tomorrow Belongs To Me.

This book is appalling. I don’t know if the smug-looking cock (see pic) did any serious research apart from cherry-picking anything, no matter how tenuous, to make his spurious point but he seems to be unable to relate his findings to his own statistics.

Don’t buy this book. Don’t bother reading it. It’s crap.

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Rosemary Goring, After Flodden – A Review

Featured, Opinion No Responses »

Sep 062013

We’re a week away from the 500th anniversary of the ill-starred Battle of Flodden, where ten thousand Scottish deaths robbed the nation of the cream of its youth and its respected and progressive monarch James IV. It is a half-millennium-old scar on the Scottish psyche that refuses to heal. Bringing a human and emotional focus to that dreadful afternoon and its immediate aftermath is the triumph of Rosemary Goring’s first novel. Voice’s David Innes reviews.

It is all too easy to read military history and to become tied up in weaponry, strategy, tactics and numbers, forgetting the individual human outcomes and emotional fallout of major, traumatic events.

After Flodden time-shifts effortlessly and expertly, moving between the preparation for battle, a harrowing account from a participating character and, majorly, a Kidnapped-style post-battle journey across the threatening Border Marches as far south as Durham, to deal with a familial issue of national importance.

Whilst this is going on, the English noose threatens to tighten around the Borders, regarded as an anarchic free-booting hotbed of crime and hostility to authority.

Of course, constrained by accounts of historical events and by the actual cast list of 1513, the author has to fit within the timeframe and the presence of major contemporary political characters. This does not curb her narrative imagination, however, and the plot and sub-plots are populated by protagonists with whose emotions, motives and actions it is easy to identify.

Emotions? Character traits? Are mistrust, subterfuge, passion, intrigue, betrayal, guilt and remorse enough to be going on with? Paniter, Crozier, Torrance, Louise, Benoit and even the vixen are memorable and credible imaginative creations, even where Goring’s own obvious fictional instincts have to be tempered by historical fact and evidence.

This is a fascinating and illuminating page-turner, especially for a debut novel, and readers will hope that there is more to come from the skilful, artful pen of Rosemary Goring.

ROSEMARY GORING – After Flodden
(POLYGON) 331 pp £14.99

Dickens Fellowship: Autumn Events Announced

Aberdeen City, Events, Information No Responses »

Jul 262013

With thanks to Dr Paul Schlicke.

The exhibition on 19^th century journalism, trailed in Angela Joss’s recent article will be on display in the foyer of the Duncan Rice Library at the University of Aberdeen for the remainder of the summer.

It really is worth visiting for an insight into how the goings-on at a time of great political upheaval were documented.

In a time where there is an overbearing 21^st century political and constitutional question to be answered, the exhibition provides a means of gauging how journalism has changed, even if the fervour of political argument is no less intense.

The exhibition was brought to Aberdeen largely due to the considerable efforts of Dr Paul Schlicke who is also working hard to have a Dickens Fellowship established in the city. He has been in touch with details of the autumn programme which looks to be extremely rewarding for Dickens addicts.

Dr Schlicke says,

“Our schedule for autumn is now firmed up, and you should all get cracking with your reading of what is arguably Dickens’s greatest novel, Bleak House.

“Taking the cue from members who participated in the seminars on Hard Times in spring, each of the meetings will be prefaced by an informal lecture.

“I’m delighted to announce that Grahame Smith, Professor Emeritus from Stirling, has agreed to give the opening lecture. Professor Smith is a graduate of the University of Aberdeen, and for several years has been external examiner for the University’s Department of English. He is also past president of the international Dickens Fellowship.

“He has written books, articles and reviews on Dickens, most notably Dickens, Money and Society (1968), Charles Dickens: Bleak House (1974), Dickens: A Literary Life (1996), and Dickens and the Dream of Cinema (2003). It is a great pleasure to welcome him back to Aberdeen.

“Other speakers will be myself and Dan Wall, recent PhD from the University of Aberdeen and specialist in 19^thcentury periodicals.”

All meetings will take place on Tuesday evenings, 7–9 pm, in the Grampian Housing office, at the corner of Huntly St and Summer St, with plenty of free parking in the Grampian Housing car park. There is no charge for attending the seminars.

Tuesday 17 September 2013 – lecture by Professor Grahame Smith, introduction to Bleak House, followed by seminar on numbers 1-5, chapters. 1–16.
Tuesday 15 October 2013 – lecture by Dr Paul Schlicke, the topicality of Bleak House, followed by seminar on numbers 6-10, chapters 17–32.
Tuesday 12 November 2013 – lecture by Dr Dan Wall, the serialisation of Bleak House, followed by seminar on numbers 11-15, chapters 33–49.
Tuesday 10 December 2013, – lecture by Dr Paul Schlicke, plots and detecting in Bleak House, followed by seminar on numbers 16–20, chapters 50–67.

A warm welcome will be extended to all comers, and lively questioning and debate is almost certainly guaranteed. You can be added to the mailing list by e-mailing Dr Schlicke at p.schlicke@abdn.ac.uk

For more information, visit https://sites.google.com/site/aberdeendickensfellowship/

Historic Exhibition Graces University

Aberdeen City, Information No Responses »

Jul 182013

There were no Hard Times at all last week when the latest Charles Dickens exhibition came to the University of Aberdeen’s Sir Duncan Rice Library. By Angela Joss.

Entitled ‘Dickens, Journalism and Fellowship: An Exhibition, Lectures and an Online Tour’, this event was jointly hosted by the Aberdeen branch of the Dickens Fellowship, The University of Aberdeen Centre For the Novel and The Friends of Aberdeen University Library.
A wine reception gave attendees the chance to have a relaxed browse around a fascinating display of 19th century journalism, devised by Anthony Burton, former Director of the Forster Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Originally devised for a 2012 conference at the University of Birmingham, the exhibition places Dickens in the midst of a thriving journalistic tradition devoured by anyone at the time who was literate and had the necessary ha’penny to buy the weekly or monthly publications as they came hot off the press. They were frequently much anticipated.

Aberdeen University’s own Dr Paul Schlicke introduced two visiting Dickens scholars, John Drew, Professor of English at the University of Buckingham and Director of Dickens Journals Online, and Dr Tony Williams, formerly joint honorary secretary of the International Dickens Fellowship.

Professor Drew’s lecture followed on from the exhibition by underlining Dickens’s original contribution to the written word. This was almost exclusively as a parliamentary reporter and journalist, before he branched out into periodical publications, providing him with a platform for his burgeoning campaigning views, as well as his subsequent fictional works. The latter seemingly served to combine all those passions.

Dr Williams then provided an illuminating history of the Dickens Fellowship, which began in 1902, thirty years after the author’s death, meaning that many of its original members either knew the author personally, or had been present at the dramatic readings of his own works. Fellowship has always been the keynote of this Dickens movement, with a tradition of providing support for waifs and strays whilst preserving the writings of Charles Dickens.

As attendees were being informed that the Fellowship’s publication, The Dickensian, provides a 108- year record of members’ activities, with only seven editors during that whole span, the call to vacate the library ahead of closing time was heard, leaving them, like modern day Olivers, definitely wanting more.

Fortunately, like Dickens’s journals, The Dickensian is now available online and whilst the exhibition has been removed for a short period, it will be reinstated in the Sir Duncan Rice Library during the last week of July.

It can be visited by the public from then and for the whole of August.

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