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.
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‘Kidnapped’ by Robert Louis Stevenson
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.
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‘The Portrait of a Lady’ by Henry James
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.
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:
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
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‘The Last Chronicle of Barset’ by Anthony Trollope
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
Discover audiobooks from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiobooksna
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'Our Mutual Friend' by Charles Dickens
'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
Clare Bucknell, Thomas Jones and guests discuss a selection of 19th-century (mostly) English novels from Mansfield Park to New Grub Street, looking in particular at the roles played in the books by money and property.
Novels covered:
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
Ireland