Thomas Hardy – Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented

Thirty-five years after witnessing the last public hanging of a woman in Dorset, Thomas Hardy set out to show how an innocent soul can be so let down by the cruelties and hypocrisies of our society as to end up on the gallows. Tess herself may well be more a representation of an ideal than …

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Elsewhere in 1891

Firsts: Basketball, The London—Paris telephone system, the removable pneumatic bicycle tire, New Scotland Yard, the Tesla coil, the Swiss Army Knife and Stanford University. Carnegie Hall has its grand opening and first public performance, with Tchaikovsky as guest conductor. Disasters: The Springhill Mining Disaster. The SS Utopia, carrying Italian migrants to New York, sinks in …

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James McNeill Whistler – The Gentle Art of Making Enemies

James McNeill Whistler is mainly known these days as a painter, albeit one sometimes found in books of witty quotations reprimanding Oscar Wilde for plagiarism, but at the time of his death he was arguably better known for this scandalous book in which he recounts in biting, sarcastic detail  his libel case against John Ruskin …

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Oscar Wilde – The Picture of Dorian Gray

I first read The Picture of Dorian Gray aged 18 and found it to be life-changing. Not for the witticisms which Wilde is so famous for, but for the philosophy of art and morality which it expressed. When I got to university I enlarged the preface and put it up on the wall of my …

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William Morris — News from Nowhere

Better known these days for his artistic contributions to the Arts & Crafts movement, William Morris was also a prolific author and prominent socialist thinker. News From Nowhere is a glimpse at a utopian future – or rather it is a novel-length thesis on how things should be, presented in novel format, with the convenient …

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Arthur Machen – The Great God Pan

“”The Great God Pan” is, I have no hesitation in saying, a perfectly abominable story”… …Why should he be allowed, for the sake of a few miserable pounds, to cast into our midst these monstrous creations of his diseased brain?” – Harry Quilter “No one could begin to describe the cumulative suspense and ultimate horror …

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