Reading ‘doing its work’

Reading ‘doing its work’

At rare off-duty times during lockdown, two moments from novels have repeatedly come to mind. One is Arthur Clennam’s imprisonment in the Marshalsea towards the close of Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit: ‘None of us clearly know to whom or to what we are indebted …...
Reading ‘doing its work’

Spenser in the Lockdown: Means of Gladsome Solace?

Lockdown reading takes many forms, from the rediscovery of the attractions of Jane Austen’s socially enclosed worlds, to the recognition of the predictive power of texts like Camus’s La Peste, or Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End. As a specialist in Renaissance...