Category Archive: Classic Books
Izaac Walton – The Compleat Angler
Izaak Walton (born 9 August 1593) wrote one of the best goofing-off books ever. First published in 1653, the full title was: The Compleat Angler or the Contemplative Man’s Recreation, divided into two parts: I, “Being a Discourse of Rivers, Fish-ponds, Fish and Fishing”; II, “Being Instructions how to Angle for a Trout or Grayling in a Clear Stream”. As Walton confessed in a preface, “…most Readers may receive so much pleasure or profit by it, as may make it worthy the time of their perusal, if they be not too grave or too busie men…I have in several places mixt…
Continue Reading →Watership Down by Richard Adams
Nuthanger Farm. Visited by the rabbits on their odyssey.
“Bright eyes, burning like fire…” O sorry, where were we? I was lost in contemplation of the ugly film animation of this story – I don’t think that the term “bright eyes” appears at all in the classic children’s book. And these rabbits wouldn’t like the fire simile at all. The rabbits of Sandleford Warren have got to get out of there. Led by intrepid Hazel and little Fiver (a seer, no less) a small but feisty party sets off for a new home which is way way too far off, across too many hazards. On the way we learn that pet rabbits become lazy and dull, that to…
Continue Reading →The “loose, baggy monster” (Charles Dickens)
Charles Dickens (7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) It is important to remember that many of Dickens’ books were serialised, hence their great bulk crept-up on the audience, so intent on the trees that they forgave the tangled, unstructured wood. Peter Ackroyd, in his massive (and borderline prurient) biography, noted that, in America for example, his readers “greeted the arrival of the latest sheets of The Old Curiosity Shop with cries of “Is Little Nell dead?”” It is all very well to be snobbish about Dickens – F.R. Leavis calling him a genius but only a genius as an ‘entertainer’…
Continue Reading →Robert Louis Stevenson
Painting of RLS by Count Girolamo Nerli (1892)
Born 13 November 1850 Stevenson went from the writer of ‘Boy’s Own’ stories and developed into an accomplished and beloved writer who is likely to have got better and better had he not died from chronic ill health aged 44. J. P. Priestey wrote in Literature and Western Man (1960) “Stevenson’s enormous popularity, partly the result of his narrative gift but also the reward of his style, which has an unusual and very personal grace and charm (and some of his sourer critics might try to learn something from it before dismissing it as a mere trick), has now lasted…
Continue Reading →Wish We’d Said That
Photo of Wilde by Napoleon Sarony (1882)
Oscar Wilde (16 October 1854 to 30 November 1900) The Divine Oscar is recalled daily by defamation lawyers, cautioning their prospective clients. But we prefer to recall his playfulness, his essential kindness, and gargantuan wit. Richard Ellmann, in his biography of Wilde (1987), said of him that he “had to live his life twice over, first in slow motion, than at top speed. During the first period he was a scapegrace, during the second a scapegoat…His language is his finest achievement. It is fluent with concession and rejection. It takes what has been ponderously said and remakes it according to…
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