William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare - born April 1564; baptised April 26, 1564; died April 23, 1616 (O.S.), May 3, 1616 (N.S.)—has a reputation as the greatest writer the English language has ever known. Indeed, the English Renaissance has often been called "the age of Shakespeare". As a playwright, he performed the rare feat of excelling in both tragedy and comedy. He also wrote 154 sonnets, two narrative poems, and a handful of shorter poems; several of his plays feature songs that are among the finest lyric poems in English. These arguably feature amongst the most brilliant pieces of English literature ever written, because of Shakespeare's ability to rise beyond the narrative and describe the innermost and the most profound aspects of human nature.

Shakespeare wrote his works between 1588 and 1613, although the exact dates and chronology of the plays attributed to him remain relatively uncertain in many instances.
William Shakespeare (National Portrait Gallery), in the famous Chandos portrait, artist and authenticity unconfirmed.

Shakespeare's influence on the English-speaking world shows in the ready recognition afforded many quotations from Shakespearean plays, the titles of works based on Shakespearean phrases, and the many adaptations of his plays. Other indicators of contemporary influence include his appearance in the top ten of the "100 Greatest Britons" poll sponsored by the BBC, the frequent productions based on his work, such as the BBC Television Shakespeare, and the success of the fictional account of his life in the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love.

Biography

Most historians agree that William Shakespeare - actor, playwright and poet - was a single person, one for whom we have considerable historical records. (Note that Elizabethan English did not use standardised spelling; although his surname most commonly appears as Shakespeare, Shakespere also recurs frequently, and the name sometimes appears as Shakespear, Shaksper and even Shaxberd.

Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, in April 1564, the son of John Shakespeare, a glove-maker, and of Mary Arden. His baptismal record dates to April 26 of that year and (given traditional timings of baptisms) tradition considers April 23 as his birthday. Shakespeare's father, prosperous at the time of William's birth, was prosecuted for participating in the black market in wool, and later lost his position as an alderman. Some evidence exists that both sides of the family had Roman Catholic sympathies.

As the son of a prominent town official, William Shakespeare most likely attended the Stratford grammar school, which provided an intensive education in Latin grammar and literature. There is no evidence that his formal education extended beyond this.

Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior, on November 28, 1582 at Temple Grafton, near Stratford. Two neighbors of Anne, Fulk Sandalls and John Richardson, posted bond that there were no impediments to the marriage. There appears to have been some haste in arranging the ceremony: Anne was three months pregnant. After his marriage, William Shakespeare left few traces in the historical record until he appeared on the London literary scene.

On May 26, 1583 Shakespeare's first child, Susanna, was baptised at Stratford. There soon followed on February 2, 1585 the baptisms of a son, Hamnet, and of a daughter, Judith.

By 1592 Shakespeare had enough of a reputation for Robert Greene to denounce him as "an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey." (The italicised line parodies the phrase, "Oh, tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" which Shakespeare used in Henry VI, part 3.)

In 1596 Hamnet died; he was buried on August 11, 1596. Because of the similarities of their names, some suspect that his death provided the impetus for Shakespeare's The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

By 1598 Shakespeare had moved to the parish of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, and appeared top of a list of actors in Every man in his Humour written by Ben Jonson.

Shakespeare became an actor, writer and ultimately part-owner of an acting company known as The Lord Chamberlain's Men — the company took its name, like others of the period, from its aristocratic sponsor, the Lord Chamberlain. The group became sufficiently popular that after the death of Elizabeth I and the coronation of James I (1603), the new monarch adopted the company and it became known as The King's Men.

Various documents recording legal affairs and commercial transactions show that Shakespeare grew increasingly affluent in his London years. He did well enough to buy a property in Blackfriars, London, and owned the second-largest house in Stratford, New Place.

In 1609 he published his sonnets, love poems variously addressed: some to a 'dark lady', and some to a young man (or 'fair lord').

Shakespeare retired in approximately 1611 and died in 1616, on April 23 — perhaps part of the reason behind the tradition of his birthday being this same day. He remained married to Anne until his death. His two daughters, Susannah and Judith, survived him. Susannah married Dr John Hall, and later became the subject of a court case.

His tombstone reads, "Blest be the man who cast these stones, and cursed be he that moves my bones." Popular myth claims that unpublished works by Shakespeare may lie within the bard's tomb, but no-one has ever verified these claims, perhaps for fear of the curse included in the quoted epitaph.

Reputation

Main article: Shakespeare's reputation

During his lifetime and shortly after his death, Shakespeare was well-regarded, but not considered the supreme poet of his age. He was included in some contemporary lists of leading poets, but he lacked the stature of Edmund Spenser or Philip Sidney. It is more difficult to assess his contemporary reputation as a playwright: plays were considered ephemeral and even somewhat disreputable entertainments rather than serious literature. The fact that his plays were collected in an expensively produced folio in 1623 (the only precedent being Ben Jonson's Workes of 1616) and the fact that that folio went into another edition within nine years, indicate that he was held in unusually high regard for a playwright.

After the Interregnum stage ban of 1642—1660, the new Restoration theatre companies had the previous generation of playwrights as the mainstay of their repertory, most of all the phenomenally popular Beaumont and Fletcher team, but also Ben Jonson and Shakespeare. Old plays were often adapted for the Restoration stage, and where Shakespeare is concerned, this undertaking has seemed shockingly respectless to posterity. A notorious example is Nahum Tate's happy-ending King Lear of 1681, which held the stage until 1838. In the early 18th century, Shakespeare took over the lead on the English stage from Beaumont and Fletcher, never to relinquish it again.

In literary criticism, by contrast, Shakespeare held a unique position from the start. The unbending French neo-classical "rules" and the three unities of time, place, and action never really caught on in England, and and practically all critics gave the more "correct" Ben Jonson second place to "the incomparable Shakespeare" (John Dryden, 1668), the follower of nature, the untaught genius, the great realist of human character. The long-lived myth that the Romantics were the first generation to truly appreciate Shakespeare and to prefer him to Ben Jonson is contradicted by accolades from Restoration and 18th-century writers such as John Dryden, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, and Samuel Johnson. The 18th century is also largely responsible for setting the text of Shakespeare's plays. Nicholas Rowe created the first truly scholarly text for the plays in 1709, and Edmund Malone's Variorum Edition (published posthumously in 1821] is still the basis of modern editions of the plays.

At the beginning of the 19th century, Romantic critics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge raised admiration for Shakespeare to adulation or bardolatry, in line with the Romantic reverence for the poet as prophet and genius.

Identity and authorship

Main article: Shakespearean authorship

As noted above, there is considerable historical evidence of the existence of a William Shakespeare who lived in both Stratford-upon-Avon and London. The vast majority of academics identify this Shakespeare as the Shakespeare, contrary to the theories of some who believe that there were two different Shakespeares, one an actor, the other a playwright; or that some other writer used the name "Shakespeare" as a pseudonym; or that the alternative spellings of Shakespeare's surname were actually legitimate spellings of two different names.

In part, this debate stems from the scarcity and ambiguity of many of the historical records of this period; even the painting that accompanies this article (and that appears above the name "William Shakespeare" in the National Portrait Gallery, London) may not depict Shakespeare at all. Various fringe scholars have suggested writers such as Sir Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere, Christopher Marlowe and even Queen Elizabeth I as alternative authors or co-authors for some or all of "Shakespeare"'s work. The proponents of such claims necessarily rely on conspiracy theories to explain the lack of direct historical evidence for them.

A related question in mainstream academia addresses whether Shakespeare himself wrote every word of his commonly-accepted plays, given that collaboration between dramatists routinely occurred in the Elizabethan theatre. Serious academic work continues to attempt to ascertain the authorship of plays and poems of the time, both those attributed to Shakespeare and others. See academic Shakespearean authorship debates.

Works

Plays and their categories
Shakespeare's plays first appeared in print as a series of folios and quartos, and scholars, actors and directors continue to study and perform them extensively. They form an established part of the Western canon of literature.

One could categorise his dramatic work as follows:

Tragedies
Romeo and Juliet
Macbeth
King Lear
Hamlet
Othello
Titus Andronicus
Julius Caesar
Antony and Cleopatra
Coriolanus
Troilus and Cressida
Timon of Athens
Comedies
The Comedy of Errors
All's Well That Ends Well
As You Like It
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Much Ado About Nothing
Measure for Measure
The Tempest
Taming of the Shrew
Twelfth Night or What You Will
The Merchant of Venice
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Love's Labour's Lost
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Pericles, Prince of Tyre
Cymbeline
The Winter's Tale
The Two Noble Kinsmen
Histories
Richard III
Richard II
Henry VI, part 1
Henry VI, part 2
Henry VI, part 3
Henry V
Henry IV, part 1
Henry IV, part 2
Henry VIII
King John
Some scholars of Shakespeare break the category of "Comedies" into "Comedies" and "Romances". Plays in the latter category would include Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, Pericles Prince of Tyre, and The Tempest.

Dramatic collaborations

Like most playwrights of his period, Shakespeare did not always write alone, and scholars believe a number of his plays collaborative. Some of the following attributions, such as for The Two Noble Kinsmen, have well-attested contemporary documentation; others, such as for Titus Andronicus, remain more controversial, depending on linguistic analysis by modern scholars.

Cardenio, a lost play; reports suggest Shakespeare collaborated on it with John Fletcher.
Henry VI, part 1, possibly the work of a team of playwrights, whose identities we can only guess at. Some scholars argue that Shakespeare wrote less than 20% of the text.
Henry VIII, generally considered a collaboration between Shakespeare and John Fletcher.
Macbeth: Thomas Middleton may have revised this tragedy in 1615 to incorporate extra musical sequences.
Measure for Measure may have undergone a light revision by Thomas Middleton at some point after its original composition.
Pericles Prince of Tyre may include the work of George Wilkins, either as collaborator, reviser, or revisee.
Timon of Athens may result from collaboration between Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton; this might explain its incoherent plot and its unusually cynical tone.
Titus Andronicus may be a collaboration with, or revision of, George Peele.
The Two Noble Kinsmen, published in quarto in 1654 and attributed to John Fletcher and William Shakespeare; each appears to have written about about half of it.

Plays possibly by Shakespeare
Edward III Some scholars have recently chosen to attribute this play to Shakespeare, based on the style of its verse. Others refuse to accept it, citing, among other reasons, the mediocre quality of the characters. If Shakespeare had involvement, he probably worked as a collaborator.
Sir Thomas More, a collaborative work by several playwrights, possibly including Shakespeare. That Shakespeare had any part in this play remains uncertain.

Lost plays by Shakespeare
Love's Labour's Won A late sixteenth-century writer, Francis Meres, and a scrap of paper (apparently from a bookseller), both list this title among Shakespeare's recent works, but no play of this title has survived. It may have become lost, or it may represent an alternate title of one of the plays listed above, such as Much Ado About Nothing or All's Well That Ends Well.
Cardenio, a late play by Shakespeare and Fletcher, referred to in several documents, has not survived. It re-worked a tale in Cervantes' Don Quixote. In 1727, Lewis Theobald produced a play he called Double Falshood, which he claimed to have adapted from three manuscripts of a lost play by Shakespeare that he did not name. Double Falshood does re-work the Cardenio story, and modern scholarship generally agrees that Double Falshood represents all we have of the lost play.

Other works
Shakespeare's other literary works include:

Sonnets
Longer poems:
Venus and Adonis
The Rape of Lucrece
The Passionate Pilgrim
The Phoenix and the Turtle
A Funeral Elegy by W.S. (?). For a period many believed, on the basis of stylistic evidence researched by Don Foster, that Shakespeare wrote a Funeral Elegy for William Peter. However most scholars, including Foster, now conclude that this evidence was flawed and that Shakespeare did not write the Elegy, which is more likely from the pen of John Ford.

Shakespeare and the textual problem

Unlike his contemporary Ben Jonson, Shakespeare did not have direct involvement in publishing his plays. The problem of identifying what Shakespeare actually wrote became a major concern for most modern editions. Textual corruptions stemming from printers' errors, misreadings by compositors or simply wrongly scanned lines from the source material litter the Quartos and the First Folio. Additionally, in an age before standardised spelling, Shakespeare often wrote a word several times in a different spelling, and this may have contributed to some of the transcribers' confusion. Modern editors have the task of reconstructing Shakespeare's original words and expurgating errors as far as possible.

In some cases the textual solution presents few difficulties. In the case of Macbeth for example, scholars believe that someone (probably Thomas Middleton) adapted and shortened the original to produce the extant text published in the First Folio, but that remains our only authorised text. In others the text may have become manifestly corrupt or unreliable (Pericles or Timon of Athens) but no competing version exists. The modern editor can only regularise and correct erroneous readings that have survived into the printed versions.

The textual problem can, however, become rather complicated. Modern scholarship now believes Shakespeare to have modified his plays through the years, sometimes leading to two existing versions of one play. To provide a modern text in such cases, editors must face the choice between the original first version and the later, revised, usually more theatrical version. In the past editors have resolved this problem by conflating the texts to provide what they believe to be a superior Ur-text, but critics now argue that to provide a conflated text would run contrary to Shakespeare's intentions. In King Lear for example, two independent versions, each with their own textual integrity, exist in the Quarto and the Folio versions. Shakespeare's changes here extend from the merely local to the structural. Hence the Oxford Shakespeare, published in 1986, provides two different versions of the play, each with respectable authority. The problem exists with at least four other Shakespearean plays (Henry IV, part 1, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, and Othello ).

Specialist acting companies and theatres

John Bell's Bell Shakespeare Company in Australia
Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon
Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon
Utah Shakespearean Festival in Cedar City, Utah
The Shakespeare Theater in Washington, DC
Shakespeare by the Sea, various companies of this name in Canada and the US

Samuel Pepys

Samuel Pepys (February 23, 1633 - May 26, 1703) was a 17th century English civil servant, famous for his diary. (His surname was then pronounced "Peeps", although some modern relatives with the name pronounce theirs "Pep-iss".) The diary is a fascinating combination of personal revelation and eyewitness accounts of great events, such as the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London.

Pepys was born in London in 1633, the son of a tailor. He was educated at St Paul's School, London, and Magdalene College, Cambridge. In 1655 he married, and in the following year entered the household of his cousin Admiral Edward Montagu.

On January 1, 1660 he started his diary. The same year he became Clerk of the Acts to the Navy Board. In May 1669 his diary came to a sudden conclusion, owing to the weak state of Pepys' eyes. His wife died the same year.
Samuel Pepys

In 1672 he was appointed Secretary to the Admiralty, an appointment he held with one interruption of four years at the end of Charles II's reign until the Glorious Revolution when he retired from public life and was later succeeded by his former clerk Josiah Burchett. As well as being one of the most important civil servants of his age, he was a widely cultivated man, taking a learned interest in books, music, the theatre and science. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1665 and later served as President. He died childless in 1703. His contemporary John Evelyn remembered him as "universally beloved, hospitable, generous, learned in many things". Pepys' character seems encapsulated in his Latin motto mens cujusque is est quisque, which can be translated as "The Mind is the Man".

Pepys was a lifelong bibliophile and carefully nurtured his large collection of books, manuscripts and prints, which totalled exactly 3,000 volumes at his death. These comprise one of the most important surviving 17th-century private libraries, with remarkable holdings of incunabula, manuscripts and printed ballads. Pepys made elaborate provisions in his will for the preservation of the library, and since 1724 it has been kept intact in Pepys' original bookcases as The Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, carefully following Pepys' instruction that "the placing as to heighth be strictly reviewed and where found requiring it more nicely adjusted".

Amongst the most important items in the Library are the original bound manuscripts of Pepys' diary. The six volumes were written in one of the many forms of shorthand used in Pepys' time, but after his death they were thought to be ciphered. After finding the specific shorthand book in Pepys' library, John Smith was able to put the diaries in plain English (1819 to 1822). A shortened (and expurgated) publication appeared in 1825; the complete diary of more than 3800 pages appeared in 1893.

Pepys recorded his daily life for almost ten years in breathtaking honesty; the women he pursued, his friends, his dealings are all laid out. His diary reveals his jealousies, insecurities, trivial concerns, and his fractious relationship with his wife. It is an important account of London in the 1660s. Included are his personal account of the restoration of the monarchy, the Great Plague of 1665, the Great Fire of London of 1666, and the arrival of the Dutch fleet, 1665-1667.

His job required that he meet with many people to dispense monies and make contracts. He often laments over how he "lost his labour" having gone to some appointment at a coffee house or tavern, there to discover that the person he was seeking was not within. This was a constant frustration to Pepys.

The diary similarly gives a detailed account of Pepys' personal life. He liked wine and plays, and was a womanizer. He also spent a great deal of time evaluating his fortune and his place in the world. He was always curious and often acted on that curiosity, as he acted upon almost all his impulses.

Periodically he would resolve to cut down on drinking and womanizing and to devote more time to those endeavors where he thought his time should be spent. For example, this entry on New Year's Eve, 1661, "I have newly taken a solemn oath about abstaining from plays and wine..." The following months reveal his lapses to the reader as by February 17 "And here I drank wine upon necessity, being ill for the want of it."

The diary gives a detailed account of the pattern of Pepys' life. Reading it, one cannot help thinking how very much we must all be alike. His characteristic closing sentence was: "And so to bed."

In 2002, Claire Tomalin won the 2002 Whitbread Book of the Year for writing the biography Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self. The awarders called it a "rich, thoughtful and deeply satisfying" account that "unearth[s] a wealth of material about the uncharted life of Samuel Pepys", notably providing context for the Diaries and an account of the 34 years of his life following their end.

In December 2003, his diary, which was at the time being serialised as a weblog run by Phil Gyford, won an award in The Guardian's Best of British Blogs, in the specialist-blog category.

Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl (September 13, 1916–November 23, 1990) was a British novelist and short story author of Norwegian descent, famous both as a writer of children's fiction as well as adult and horror fiction. Among his most popular books are Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Kiss Kiss.

Biography

Childhood
Roald Dahl was born in Llandaff, Wales in 1916 to Norwegian parents, Harald Dahl and Sofie Magdalene Dahl (née Hesselberg). His father, who died in 1920, was adamant that his children be educated in English schools, but because the family still lived in Wales his first school was Llandaff Cathedral School.
Patricia Neal and Roald Dahl, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1954

At Llandaff he was fond of a sweets (candy) shop which would later influence Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Thereafter he was sent to several boarding schools, which was an unpleasant experience for him. His dislike for boarding schools due to the intimidation that children experienced and the bullying by co-students, is reflected in his book Matilda.

When Roald Dahl was 9, he was sent to St Peter's Preparatory school in Weston-super-Mare, and from 13 he was educated at Repton School, where he was a fag (personal servant) for a prefect, became captain of the school Fives team and developed an interest in photography. During his childhood he spent his summer holidays in his parents' native Norway. His childhood is the subject of his autobiographical work, Boy: Tales of Childhood.

Adult life
After finishing his schooling, he spent three weeks hiking through Newfoundland with a group called the Public Schools' Exploring Society. In July 1934 he joined the Shell Oil Company. Following two years of training in the UK he was transferred to Dar-es-Salaam, Tanganyika. Along with only two other Shell employees in the entire territory, he lived in luxury in the Shell House outside Dar-es-Salaam, with a cook and personal servants. While supplying oil to customers across Tanganyika, he faced mambas and lions, amongst other wildlife.

In August 1939, as World War II was imminent, plans were made to round up the hundreds of Germans in Dar-es-Salaam. The fifteen or so Englishmen in Dar-es-Salaam, including Dahl, were made officers each commanding a platoon of askaris of the King's African Rifles. Dahl was uneasy about this and having to round up hundreds of German civilians, but managed to complete his orders.

It was soon after this incident, in November 1939, that he joined the Royal Air Force. After a 600-mile car journey from Dar-es-Salaam to Nairobi, he was accepted for flight training with 16 other men, 13 of whom would later die in air combat. With 7 hours and 40 minutes experience in his De Havilland Tiger Moth he flew solo, and hugely enjoyed watching the wildlife of Kenya during his flights. He continued on to advanced flying training at the huge Habbaniya base (100 miles south of Baghdad) in Iraq. Following six months of flying Hawker Harts he was made a Pilot Officer and assigned to 80 Squadron, flying obsolete Gloster Gladiators. Dahl was surprised to find that he would not be trained in aerial combat, or even how to fly the Gladiator.

On September 19, 1940, Dahl was to fly his Gladiator from Abu Suweir in Egypt, on to Amiriya to refuel, and again to Fouka in Libya for a second refuelling. From there he would fly to 80 Squadron's forward airstrip 30 miles south of Mersah Matruh. On the final leg, he could not find the airstrip and, running low on fuel and with night approaching, he was forced to attempt a landing in the desert. Unfortunately, the undercarriage hit a boulder and the plane crashed, fracturing his skull, smashing his nose in, and blinding him. He managed to drag himself away from the blazing wreckage and passed out. Later, he wrote about the crash for his first published work (see below). It was found in a RAF inquiry into the crash that the location he had been told to fly to was completely wrong, and he had mistakenly been sent instead to the no man's land between the British and Italian forces.

Dahl was rescued and taken to a first-aid post in Mersah Matruh, where he regained conciousness (but not his sight), and was then taken by train to the Royal Navy hospital in Alexandria. There he fell in love with a nurse, Mary Welland, who was the first person he saw when he regained his sight after eight weeks. The doctors said he had no chance of flying again, but in February 1941, five months after he was admitted to the hospital, he was discharged and passed fully fit for flying duties. By this time, 80 Squadron were at Elevsis, near Athens, Greece, fighting alongside the British Expeditionary Force against the Axis forces with no hope of defeating them. By this time they had upgraded to the Hawker Hurricane. In April 1941 Dahl flew in one across the Mediterranean Sea to finally join his squadron in Greece, six months after becoming a member.

There he met a cynical Corporal who questioned how long his brand-new aircraft would survive, along with just 14 other Hurricanes and four Bristol Blenheims in the whole of Greece, against around a thousand enemy aircraft. 80 Squadron's Squadron Leader was similarly unenthusiastic about having just one new pilot. However, he became friends with David Coke, who, had he not been killed later in the war, would have become the Earl of Leicester.

Dahl saw his first action over Chalcis, where Junkers Ju 88s were bombing shipping. With just his lone Hurricane against the six bombers, he managed to shoot one down. He writes about all these incidents in his autobiographical and yet hilarious book- Going Solo.

He later saw service in Syria. He ended the war as a Wing Commander.

He began writing when in 1942 he was transferred to Washington as Assistant Air Attache. His first published work, in the 1 August 1942 issue of the Saturday Evening Post was Shot Down in Libya, describing the crash of his Gloster Gladiator. His original title for the work was A Piece of Cake - the title was changed to sound more dramatic, despite the fact the crash had nothing to do with enemy action.

He was married to Hollywood actress Patricia Neal (The Day the Earth Stood Still, Hud) from 1953 to 1983. They had five children, including author Tessa Dahl. Tessa's daughter, and inspiration for the "helpmate" character in The BFG is model and author Sophie Dahl. In 1983 he married Felicity Ann Crosland (née d'Abreu).

He died at home, Gipsy House, in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire and is buried in the cemetery at the parish church of St Peter and St Paul there. In his honour, the Roald Dahl Children's Gallery was opened at Bucks County Museum in nearby Aylesbury. Dahl's charitable commitments in the fields of neurology, haematology and literacy have been continued after his death by his literary estate, through the Roald Dahl Foundation. In 2005 the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre will open in Great Missenden to celebrate the work of Roald Dahl and advance his work in literacy.

Writing

Inspired by a meeting with C. S. Forester, Dahl's first published work was Shot Down Over Libya, a story about his wartime adventures, which was bought by the Saturday Evening Post for $1,000 and propelled him into a career as a writer.

His first children's book was The Gremlins, about mischievous little creatures that were part of RAF folklore. The book was commissioned by Walt Disney for a film that was never made, and published in 1943. Dahl went on to create some of the best-loved children's stories of the 20th century, such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda and James and the Giant Peach.

He also had a successful parallel career as the writer of macabre adult short stories, usually with a dark sense of humour and a surprise ending. Many were originally written for American magazines such as Ladies Home Journal, Harper's and The New Yorker, then subsequently collected by Dahl into anthologies, gaining world-wide acclaim for the author. Dahl wrote more than 60 short stories and they have appeared in numerous collections, some only being published in book form after his death. See List of Roald Dahl short stories.

One of his more famous adult stories, The Smoker (also known as Man from the South), was filmed as an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. His short story collection Tales of the Unexpected was adapted to a successful eponymous TV series. A number of his short stories are supposed to be extracts from the diary of his (fictional) Uncle Oswald, a rich gentleman whose sexual exploits form the subject of these stories.

For a brief period in the 1960s Dahl wrote screenplays to make money. Two of his screenplays—the James Bond film You Only Live Twice and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang—were adaptations of novels by Ian Fleming, and he adapted his own work into Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971).

Memories with Food at Gipsy House, written with his wife Felicity and published posthumously in 1991, is a mixture of recipes, family reminiscences and Dahl's musings on favourite subjects such as chocolate, onions, and claret.

Many of his children's books have illustrations by Quentin Blake.

Interestingly, he shared a birthday, September 13, with Milton S. Hershey, chocolate entrepreneur and founder of the Hershey Chocolate Company.

Children's fiction

Children's stories
The Gremlins (1943)
James and the Giant Peach (1961) Made into a live-action/animated film in 1996.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964)
The Magic Finger (1966)
Fantastic Mr Fox (1970)
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1972) A sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Danny the Champion of the World (1975) Made into a live-action film, starring Jeremy Irons in 1989.
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More (1977)
The Enormous Crocodile (1978)
The Twits (1980)
George's Marvelous Medicine (1981)
The BFG (1982) Made into an animated film in 1989.
The Witches (1983) Made into a film The Witches starring Anjelica Huston in 1990.
The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me (1985)
Matilda (1988) Made into a live-action film 'Matilda' in 1996.
Esio Trot (1989)
The Great Switcheroo (1990)
The Minpins (1991)
The Vicar of Nibbleswicke (1991)

Children's poetry
Revolting Rhymes (1982)
Dirty Beasts (1983)
Rhyme Stew (1989)

Adult fiction

Novels
Sometime Never: A Fable for Supermen (1948)
My Uncle Oswald (1979)

Short story collections
Over to You: Ten Stories of Flyers and Flying (1946)
Someone Like You (1953)
Kiss Kiss (1960)
Twenty-Nine Kisses from Roald Dahl (1969)
Switch Bitch (1974)
Tales of the Unexpected (1979)
More Tales of the Unexpected (1980)
The Best of Roald Dahl (1978)
Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories (1983). Edited with an introduction by Dahl.
Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life: The Country Stories of Roald Dahl (1989)
The Collected Short Stories of Dahl (1991)
Two Fables (1986). "Princess and the Poacher" and "Princess Mammalia".
The Great Automatic Grammatizator (1997). (Known in the USA as The Umbrella Man and Other Stories).
The Mildenhall Treasure (2000)
See List of Roald Dahl short stories.

Non-fiction

Boy – Tales of Childhood (1984. An autobiography up to the age of 16, looking particularly at schooling in Britain in the early part of the 20th century)
Going Solo (1986). Continuation of his autobiography, in which he goes to work for Shell and spends some time working in Tanzania before joining the War effort and becoming one of the last Allied pilots to withdraw from Greece during the German invasion.
Memories with Food at Gipsy House (1991)
Roald Dahl's Guide to Railway Safety (1991)
My Year (1993)

Play
The Honeys (1955). Produced at the Longacre Theater on Broadway.

Film scripts
You Only Live Twice (1967)
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968)
The Night Digger (1971)
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)

Peter Cook

Peter Edward Cook (November 17, 1937 - January 9, 1995) was a British satirist, writer and comedian who is widely regarded as the father of the British satire boom of the 1960s. He is closely associated with an anti-establishment style of comedy that emerged in the late 1950s in the depths of the Cold War.

Cook was himself 'establishment' educated, at Radley and Pembroke College, Cambridge, and it was at the latter that he first performed and wrote comedy sketches.

On graduation, he wrote professionally for, amongst others, Kenneth Williams, before finding fame in his own right as a star of the satirical stage show, Beyond the Fringe, with Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett and Dudley Moore. Peter Cook, one of the most influential British comedians
Working with others such as Eleanor Bron, John Bird, and John Fortune, he broadened the scope of television comedy and pushed out the hitherto restricted boundaries of the BBC.

Peter Cook's first regular television spot was on Granada_Television's Braden Beat with Bernard Braden, where he featured perhaps his most enduring comic character, the static, dour, and monotone E. L. Wisty.

His comedy partnership with Dudley Moore, led to the popular and critically feted television show Not Only... But Also. Using few props, and with musical interludes performed by Moore, they created a new style of dry absurdist televison which found a place in the mainstream. Here Cook showcased characters like Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling and Pete and Dud. Other memorable sketches include '"Superthunderstingcar", a send-up of the popular Gerry Anderson marionette TV shows and Cook's parody of silent star Greta Garbo.

Although now recognised as one of the classics of TV comedy, the BBC erased most of the videotapes of the first two series. Only fragments of these programs remain, although much of the soundtracks (which were released on record) have survived. Only the final series, most of which was shot on colour film, has survived largely intact.

With his star firmly in the ascendant he opened The Establishment Club in Soho which allowed him to associate with the big stars of the day. He became a friend and supporter of Australian comedian and actor Barry Humphries, who began his British career at the Establishment Club, and Dudley Moore's acclaimed jazz trio (which included Australian-born drummer Chris Karan) played there regularly for many years in the Sixties.

Both Peter Cook and Dudley Moore acted in films, and Cook worked with Moore in such films as The Wrong Box (1966). Their best work on film was probably the cult comedy Bedazzled (1967), now widely regarded as a classic. Directed by Stanley Donen, it was co-written by Cook and Moore and starred Cook as George Spigot (The Devil) who tempts frustrated short-order cook Stanley Moon (Moore) with the promise of gaining his heart's desire -- the love of the unattainable Margaret Spencer (Eleanor Bron) -- in exchange for his soul, but repeatedly tricks him in a variety of ways. The film features cameo appearances by Barry Humphries ('Envy') and Raquel Welch ('Lust'). Moore's trio backed Cook on the theme, a parodic anti-love song, which Cook delivers in a monotonous, deadpan voice, and which includes his classic putdown "You fill me with inertia". Moore went on to Hollywood stardom in the 1970s and 1980s, which was a cause of some bitterness to Cook.

In 1970 Cook took over a project initiated by David Frost for a satirical film about an opinion pollster who rises to become President of Great Britain. Under Cook's guidance the character became modelled on Frost himself; the resulting film, The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer was not a great commercial success but is notable for the cast containing many notable names of the period.

Peter Cook also provided financial backing for the satirical magazine, Private Eye, supporting the publication through a number of difficult periods, particularly when the magazine was punished financially in the wake of a number of high-profile libel trials. Cook both invested his own money and solicited for investment from his show business friends and colleagues.

Later, the more risque humour of the Pete and Dud characters was taken to excess on long-playing records whereon the names "Derek and Clive" were used. One of these audio recordings was also filmed and the long running tensions between the duo are seen to rise to the surface.

One of Cook's best (but least known) comedy projects in the Seventies was his tour-de-force performance (playing multiple roles) on the cult 1976 Godley & Creme concept album Consequences.

A mixture of spoken-word comedy and progressive rock music with an environmental subtext, Consequences began with a single that Godley and Creme made to demonstrate their new invention (an electric guitar effect called The Gizmo) but it gradually grew into a triple LP boxed set. The comdey sections of the album were originally intended to be performed by an all-star cast including Spike Milligan and Peter Ustinov, but after meeting Peter Cook, Godley and Creme realised that he could perform most of the parts himself.

The storyline centres on the impending divorce of the tremulous Walter Stapleton (Cook) and his French wife Lulu (Judy Huxtable), whose meeting with their respective lawyers, the bibulous Mr Haig and overbearing Mr Pepperman (both played by Cook), is interrupted by a series of bizarre and mysterious happenings that are somehow connected to Mr Blint (also played by Cook), a musician living in the apartment below Haig's office, and which is connected to it by a large hole in the floor.

The hugely ambitious triple album was a total commercial failure and was savaged by the critics, but it gathered (and retains) a small but dedicated cult following. Interestingly, the script and storyline include many elements that appear to be drawn from Cook's own life, including Beyond The Fringe (Walter sounds like Cook's former colleague Alan Bennett), Cook's alcoholism (Mr Haig's constant drinking) and the clear parallel between the fictional divorce of Walter and Lulu and Cook's messy real-life divorce from his first wife Wendy.

In 1978 Cook was invited to perform at the Secret Policeman's Ball a charity event for Amnesty International. On the second night Cook largely improvised a parody of the biased summing up by the Judge in the case of Jeremy Thorpe which continues to be hailed as a comedy classic by critics.

Cook was an avid media follower, reading nearly all the British newspapers every day and following TV and radio programmes with vigour. He even gained a regular slot on a night-time London radio programme, where he would phone in using a pseudonym (Sven from Swiss Cottage) and entertain listeners with his complaints and musings.

Cook is an acknowledged influence on a long stream of comedians who have followed him from the amateur dramatic clubs of British universities to the Edinburgh festival and from thence to the radio and television studios of the BBC. Notable fans include the members of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and, more recently, the controversial satirist Chris Morris with whom Cook worked briefly in his final years.

Together with Spike Milligan, Cook broke so much new ground in the 1950 to 1965 period, that some feel that later comics had relatively little ground left to break. Some have seen Cook's life as tragic, insofar as the brilliance he exhibited in his youth did not lead to the recognition many thought he deserved.

His death in 1995 was as a result of internal haemhorraging caused by alcoholism.

UK chart singles:-

"The Ballad Of Spotty Muldoon" (1965)
"Goobye-ee" (1965) with Dudley Moore

Filmography

The Wrong Box (1966)
Alice in Wonderland (1966)
Bedazzled (1967)
Monte Carlo Or Bust, also called Those Daring Young Men in Their Jaunty Jalopies (1969)
The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970)
Find the Lady (1976)
The Secret Policeman's Private Parts (1981)
Yellowbeard (1983)
The Princess Bride (1987): The Impwessive Clergyman
Whoops Apocalypse (1988)
Getting It Right (1989)
The Best of Amnesty: Featuring the Stars of Monty Python (1999)

Mary Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (August 30, 1797–February 1, 1851) was an English writer who is, perhaps, equally-famously remembered as the wife of Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and as the author of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.

Biography

Mary Shelley was born on August 30, 1797 in London, England, the only daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and the famous liberal philosopher, anarchic journalist and atheist dissenter, William Godwin.

She met Percy Bysshe Shelley, a free-thinker like her father, on June 26, 1814 at her mother's gravestone. They eloped to France a month later, on July 27, with Mary's stepsister, Jane Clairmont. This was the poet's second elopement and, later, second marriage (his first wife, Harriet Westbrook committing suicide in 1816).
Mary Shelley

Percy Shelley is renowned for his deep desire for 'true love' in his life. He was, evidently, more than satisfied with his young bride, exultant that she was "one who can feel poetry and understand philosophy".

At about this time, Mary had probably become quite influenced by the classics which her husband had taken to reading after they returned to London towards the end of the year. But this was also the time that Percy Shelley wrote "Alastor" and "The Spirit of Solitude", in which he counsels aginst the loss of "sweet human love" in exchange for the activism that he himself was to promote and indulge in for much of his life.

During May of 1816, the couple, with Jane (now Claire) Clairmont in tow, took to the Geneva lakeside to meet Lord Byron, with whom Claire had been conducting an affair.

In terms of English literature, it was a to be a halcyon summer. Percy began work on "Hymn To Intellectual Beauty" and "Mont Blanc". Mary, in the meantime, had been inspired to write Frankenstein.

The group had decided to have a ghost-telling contest. Another guest, Dr John Polidori, came up with "The Vampyr", later to become a strong influence on Bram Stoker's Dracula. Mary's story proved to be more successful.

Mary had incorporated a number of different sources into her work, not the least of which was the Promethean myth from Ovid. The influence of John Milton's Paradise Lost, the book the 'monster' finds in the cabin, is also clearly evident within the novel.

Also, both the Shelley's had read William Beckford's Vathek (a Gothic novel that has been likened to an Arabesque). Can one miss the darkling reflection of the Beckford character's "insolent desire to "penetrate the secrets of heaven" in both "Alastor" ("I have made my bed In charnels and on coffins") and Mary's acclaimed piece ("Who shall perceive the horrors ...as I dabbled among the unhallowed damp of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay")?

Indeed, many, if not most, commentators take this "desire" to be a major theme of Frankenstein.

Returning to England in September of 1816, Shelley withstood the self-drowning of his wife Harriet and married Mary (now with her family's consent). Then, during the spring of the following year, Frankenstein became a finished article.

Following on from a number of Percy's literary and personal ups and downs, the Shelley troupe moved to Lerici, a town close to La Spezia in Italy. There, on July 8, 1822, in the midst of writing a shadowy work called "The Triumph Of Life", the young poet drowned, along with Edward Williams, on a boat trip back from Livorno.

Mary was tireless in promoting her late husband's work, including editing and annotating unpublished material. But she also found occasions to write a few more novels, including Valperga, The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck and Falkner.

Critics say these works do not begin to approach the power and fame of Frankenstein; The Last Man, a pioneering science fiction novel of the human apocacalypse in the distant future, is, however, sometimes considered her best work.

Mary Shelley died on February 1, 1851 in London and was interred at St. Peter's Churchyard in Bournemouth, in the English county of Dorset.

Lewis Carroll

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (January 27, 1832–January 14, 1898), better known by the pen name Lewis Carroll, was a British author, mathematician, Anglican clergyman, logician, and amateur photographer.

His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the comic poem The Hunting of the Snark. He also wrote many short pieces, including Euclid and his Modern Rivals and The Alphabet Cipher.

His facility at word play, logic, and fantasy has delighted audiences ranging from the most naïve to the most sophisticated. His works have remained popular since they were published and have influenced not only children's literature, but also a number of major 20th century writers such as James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges.

Upbringing

Dodgson's family was predominantly northern English, with some Irish connections. Conservative and High Church Anglican, most of Dodgson's ancestors belonged the two traditional English upper-middle class professions: the army and the Church. His great-grandfather, also Charles Dodgson, had risen through the ranks of the church to become a bishop; his grandfather, another Charles, had been an army captain, killed in action in 1803 while his two sons were hardly more than babies.

The elder of these—yet another Charles—reverted to the other family business and took holy orders. He went to Westminster School, and thence to Christ Church, Oxford. He was mathematically gifted and won a double first degree which could have been the prelude to a brilliant academic career. Instead he married his cousin in 1827 and retired into obscurity as a country parson.

Young Charles was born in the little parsonage of Daresbury in Cheshire, the oldest boy but already the third child of the four-and-a-half old year marriage. Eight more were to follow and, incredibly for the time, all of them—seven girls and four boys—survived into adulthood. When Charles was 11 his father was given the living of Croft-on-Tees in north Yorkshire, and the whole family moved to the spacious Rectory. This remained their home for the next 25 years.

Dodgson senior made some progress through the ranks of the church: he published some sermons, translated Tertullian, became an Archdeacon of Ripon Cathedral, and involved himself, sometimes influentially, in the intense religious disputes that were dividing the Anglican church. He was High Church, inclining to Anglo-Catholicism, an admirer of Newman and the Tractarian movement, and he did his best to instill such views in his children.

Young Charles grew out of infancy into a bright, articulate boy. In the early years he was educated at home. His "reading lists" preserved in the family testify to a precocious intellect: at the age of seven the child was reading The Pilgrim's Progress. It is often said that he was naturally left-handed and suffered severe psychological trauma by being forced to counteract this tendency, but there is no documentary evidence to support this. At twelve he was sent away to a small private school at nearby Richmond, where he appears to have been happy and settled. But in 1845, young Dodgson moved on to Rugby School, where he was evidently less happy, for as he wrote some years after leaving the place:

I cannot say ... that any earthly considerations would induce me to go through my three years again ... I can honestly say that if I could have been ... secure from annoyance at night, the hardships of the daily life would have been comparative trifles to bear.
The nature of this nocturnal 'annoyance' will probably never now be fully understood, but it may be that he is delicately referring to some form of sexual abuse. Scholastically, though, he excelled with apparent ease. "I have not had a more promising boy his age since I came to Rugby" observed R.B. Mayor, the Maths master.

Academics

He left Rugby at the end of 1849 and, after an interval which remains unexplained, went on in January 1851 to Oxford: to his father's old college, Christ Church. He had only been at Oxford two days when he received a summons home. His mother had died of "inflammation of the brain"—perhaps meningitis or a stroke—at the age of forty-seven.

Whatever Dodgson's feelings may have been about this death, he did not allow them to distract him too much from his purpose at Oxford. He may not always have worked hard, but he was exceptionally gifted and achievement came easily to him. The following year he received a first in Honour Moderations, and shortly after he was nominated to a Studentship (the Christ Church equivalent of a fellowship), by his father's old friend Canon Edward Pusey.

His early academic career veered between high-octane promise and irresistible distraction. Through his own laziness, he failed an important scholarship, but still his clear brilliance as a mathematician won him the Christ Church Mathematical Lectureship, which he continued to hold for the next 26 years. The income was good, but the work bored him. Many of his pupils were stupid as well as older and richer than he was, and almost all of them were disinterested. They didn't want to be taught, he didn't want to teach them. Mutual apathy ruled.

Photography

In 1856, Dodgson took up the new art form of photography. He excelled at it and it became an expression of his very personal inner philosophy; a belief in the divinity of what he called beauty, by which he seemed to mean a state of moral or aesthetic or physical perfection. He found this divine beauty not simply in the magic of theatre, but in the poetry of words, in a mathematical formula; and perhaps supremely, in the human form; in the body-images that moved him.

When he took up photography he sought with his own representations to combine the ideals of freedom and beauty into the innocence of Eden, where the human body and human contact could be enjoyed without shame. In his middle age, he was to re-form this philosophy into the pursuit of beauty as a state of Grace, a means of retrieving lost innocence. This, along with his lifelong passion for the theatre, was to bring him into confrontation with Victorian morality and his own family's High Church beliefs.

His favorite subjects for photography were portraits of famous persons, such as Ellen Terry, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, as well as little girls, both with and without clothing. Dodgson either destroyed or returned the nude photographs to the families of the girls he'd photographed. They were long presumed lost, but four nudes have surfaced.

Dodgson's practice of photographing or sketching nude girls has led to speculation that he was a paedophile, see below.

Character

The young adult Charles Dodgson was about six foot tall, slender and handsome in a soft-focused dreamy sort of way, with curling brown hair and blue eyes. At the unusually late age of seventeen he suffered a severe attack of whooping cough which left him with poor hearing in his right ear and was probably responsible for his chronically weak chest in later life, but the only overt defect he carried into adulthood was what he referred to as his "hesitation"—a stammer he had acquired in early childhood and which was to plague him throughout his entire life.

The stammer has always been a potent part of the myth. It is part of the mythology that Carroll only stammered in adult company, and was free and fluent with children, but there is nothing to support this idea. Many children of his acquaintance remembered the stammer; many adults failed to notice it. It came and went for its own reasons, but not as a clichéd manifestation of fear of the adult world. Dodgson himself was far more acutely aware of it than most people he met. Although his stammer troubled him—even obsessed him sometimes—it was never bad enough to stop him using his other qualities to do well in society.

He was naturally gregarious and egoistic enough to relish attention and admiration. At a time when people devised their own amusements, when singing and recitation were required social skills, this youth was well-equipped as an engaging entertainer. He could sing tolerably well and was not afraid to do so in front of an audience. He was adept at mimicry and story-telling. He was something of a star at charades. He could be charming, pushy, and manipulative, with the kind of ready sensitivity vulnerable women are apt to find irresistible.

There are brief hints at a soaring sense of the spiritual and the divine; small moments that reveal a rich and intensely-lived inner life. 'That is a wild and beautiful bit of poetry, the song of "call the cattle home",' he suddenly observed, in the midst of an analysis of Charles Kingsley's novel Alton Locke:

I remember hearing it sung at Albrighton: I wonder if any one there could have entered into the spirit of Alton Locke. I think not. I think the character of most that I meet is merely refined animal... How few seem to care for the only subjects of real interest in life.
He was also quite nakedly socially ambitious, anxious to make his mark on the world in some way, as a writer, as an artist. His scholastic career was only a stop-gap to other more exciting attainments that he wanted hungrily.

Writing career

During his academic career, Carroll wrote poetry and short stories, sending them to various magazines and already enjoying moderate success. Between 1854 and 1856, his work appeared in the national publications, The Comic Times and The Train, as well as smaller magazines like the Whitby Gazette and the Oxford Critic.

Most of his output was funny, sometimes satirical. But his standards and his ambitions were exacting. "I do not think I have yet written anything worthy of real publication (in which I do not include the Whitby Gazette or the Oxonian Advertiser), but I do not despair of doing so some day," he wrote in July 1855. Years before Alice, he was thinking up ideas for children's books that would make money: 'Christmas book [that would] sell well...Practical hints for constructing Marionettes and a theatre'. His ideas got better as he got older, but the canny mind, with an eye to income, was always there.

In 1856 he published his first piece of work under the name that would make him famous. A very predictable little romantic poem called "Solitude" appeared in the Train under the authorship of 'Lewis Carroll'. This pseudonym was a play on his real name, Lewis being the anglicised form of Ludovicus, which was the Latin for Lutwidge, and Carroll being an anglicised version of Carolus, the Latin for Charles.

In the same year, a new Dean, Henry Liddell, arrived at Christ Church, bringing with him a young wife and children, all of whom would figure largely in Dodgson's life over the following years. He became close friends with the mother and the children, particularly the three sisters—Ina, Alice and Edith. It seems there became something of a tradition of his taking the girls out on the river for picnics at Godstow or Nuneham.

It was on one such expedition, in 1862, that Dodgson invented the outline of the story that eventually became his first and largest commercial success—the first Alice book. Having told the story and been begged by Alice Liddell to write it down, Dodgson was evidently struck by its potential to sell well. He took the MS—at this stage entitled Alice's Adventures Under Ground—to Macmillan the publisher, who liked it immediately. After the possible alternative titles Alice Among the Fairies and Alice's Golden Hour were rejected, the work was finally published as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865, under the pen-name Dodgson had first used some nine years earlier—Lewis Carroll.

With the launch and immediate, phenomenal success of Alice, the story of the author's life becomes effectively divided in two: the continuing story of Dodgson's real life and the evolving myth surrounding "Lewis Carroll." Carroll quickly became a rich and detailed alter ego, a persona as famous and deeply embedded in the popular psyche as the story he told. To him belongs a large part of the image of 'little girls' and strange otherworldliness that we know from the author of Alice. Dodgson's reality remained and remains largely obscure. It has been ignored, even by the most recent and reputed of modern biographers in all but its briefest outline.

It is undisputed that throughout his growing wealth and fame, he continued to teach at Christ Church until 1881, and that he remained in residence there until his death. He published Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice Found There in 1872; his great Joycean mock-epic The Hunting of the Snark, in 1876, and his last novel, the two-volume Sylvie and Bruno, in 1889 and 1893 respectively. He also published many mathematical papers under his own name, courted scandal through his associations with women, toured Russia and Europe on an extended visit (in 1867) and bought a house in Guildford, where he died suddenly of violent pneumonia on January 14, 1898, leaving mystery and enigma behind him.

Allegations of paedophilia

Dodgson’s undeniable fondness for children — and especially his photographs of nude or semi-nude girls, and his sketchbooks featuring his own drawings of nude or seminude girls — have led to speculation that he was a paedophile.

The issue is contentious, with some noting that there is no evidence that Dodgson abused girls, or arguing that child nudes were not uncommon during the era.

The first hints on Dodgson's alleged paedophilia seem to have appeared in 1932, in The Life of Lewis Carroll by Langford Reed. Reed apparently was the first to claim that all of Carroll's female friendships ended when the girls reached puberty, the claim being later caught up by other biographers despite the evidence of the contrary. Before publication of complete Dodgson's diaries in 1953, the view of Dodgson as having no adult life and being preoccupied with children persisted among his biographers, including Florence Becker Lennon (Victoria Through the Looking-Glass (UK title Lewis Carroll), 1945) and the highly influential Alexander Taylor (The White Knight, 1952). After the diaries were published, revealing that many prior notions on Dodgson's life were incorrect, subsequent biographers tended to take an "apologetic" stance, arguing that Dodgson had been a latent deviant.

The issue was rekindled in 1995 with Lewis Carroll, a Biography by Morton Cohen, which deals with the issue much in the line of The White Knight by Alexander Taylor. Cohen writes: “We cannot know to what extent sexual urges lay behind Charles’s preference for drawing and photographing children in the nude. He contended the preference was entirely aesthetic. But given his emotional attachment to children as well as his aesthetic appreciation of their forms, his assertion that his interest was strictly artistic is naive. He probably felt more than he dared acknowledge, even to himself. Certainly he always sought to have another adult present when nude prepubescent modeled for him.” Cohen notes that the children’s mothers were encouraged to be present, and asks if these precautions were the result of Dodgson “insuring himself against slipups.” (p 228–229) Cohen concedes that Dodgson “apparently convinced many of his friends that his attachment to the nude female child form was free of any eroticism,” but adds that “later generations look beneath the surface.” (p229)

Factual material on Dodgson's nude photography is scant. Having taken up photography in 1856, Dodgson recorded brief notice in his diary of his first nude in 1867. Robert Taylor has written that Dodgson’s nude photographs were “limited to eight sessions spread over thirteen years” and are “not the record of a habitual voyeur, pornographer or paedophile, but the response of an overtly sentimental bachelor to the innocent beauty and grace of childhood. Whether this type of photography was Dodgson's way of satisfying or sublimating his sexual desires can never be known and will always remain fruitless speculation.”

The only instance of trouble associated with the nudes was Dodgson's experience with the Mayhew family. In 1879, Dodgson wrote what have been called "several curious letters ... to the family of Andrew Mayhew, an Oxford colleague ... He asked permission to take nude photographs of the three Mayhew daughters, ages 6, 11, and 13, with no other adults present." The Mayhew parents, who had previously allowed Dodgson to photograph their children, refused, and Cohen notes this same period saw a "sudden break in the friendship" between Dodgson and the Mayhew family. (p. 170)

Julia Margaret Cameron was another Victorian-era photographer who made several images of nude children. More recently, the contemporary portraitist Sally Mann has made nude images of her daughter Jessie and other children.

Jack the Ripper theories

In 1996 author Richard Wallace published a book titled Jack the Ripper, Light-Hearted Friend accusing Lewis Carroll and his colleague Thomas Vere Bayne of being Jack the Ripper. It was largely based upon anagrams Wallace constructed from Carroll's writing. Carroll and Bayne have strong alibis for most of the nights of the Ripper murders, and Wallace's theory has not found support from other scholars. For more information, see the Jack the Ripper, Light-Hearted Friend article.

Carroll did show some interest in the Jack the Ripper case, however. A passage in his diary dated August 26, 1891, reports that he spoke that day with an acquaintance of his about his "very ingenious theory about 'Jack the Ripper'". No other information about this theory has been found.

Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343-1400) was an English author, philosopher, diplomat, and poet, and is best known and remembered as the author of The Canterbury Tales. He is sometimes credited with being the first author to demonstrate the artistic legitimacy of the English language.

He was a contemporary of Giovanni Boccaccio and Christine de Pizan. Although born as a son of a vintner, he became a page at the court of Edward III of England. He was in the service of first Elizabeth de Burgh, Countess of Ulster, and then Lionel of Antwerp, son of Edward III.

He travelled from England to France, Spain, Flanders, and Italy (Genoa and Florence), where he came into contact with medieval continental poetry. Geoffrey Chaucer

Around 1366 Chaucer married Philippa (de) Roet, a lady-in-waiting to Edward III's queen, Philippa of Hainault, and a sister of Katherine Swynford, who later (ca. 1396) became the third wife of Chaucer's friend and patron, John of Gaunt.

Chaucer wrote poetry as a diversion from his job as Comptroller of the Customs for the port of London, and also translated such important works as The Romance of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris (extended by Jean de Meun), and Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius' De consolatione philosophiae. However, while many scholars maintain that Chaucer did indeed translate part of the text of The Romance of the Rose, others claim that this has been effectively disproved. He also wrote the Parlement of Foules, the House of Fame, and Chanticleer and the Fox, the latter based on a story by Marie de France. However, he is best known as the writer of Troilus and Criseyde and of The Canterbury Tales, a collection of stories (told by fictional pilgrims on the road to the cathedral at Canterbury) that would help to shape English literature.

In the history of English literature, he is considered the introducer of continental accentual-syllabic metre as an alternative to the alliterative Anglo-Saxon metre. He also helped to standardise the southern accent (London area) of the Middle English language.

After the overthrow of his patron Richard II, Chaucer vanished from the historical record. He is believed to have died of unknown causes on October 25, 1400, and there is speculation that he was murdered by enemies of Richard II. He is buried at Westminster Abbey in London. In 1556 his remains were transferred to a more ornate tomb, making Chaucer the first writer interred in the area now known as Poets' Corner.

Ian Fleming

Ian Lancaster Fleming (May 28, 1908 - August 12, 1964) was a British author, best remembered for the James Bond series of novels.

Biography

Born in Mayfair, London, Ian Fleming was the younger brother of the travel writer, Peter Fleming. He was educated at Eton College and Sandhurst military academy, then went to university on the Continent to study languages. He worked as a journalist and stockbroker before the Second World War. On the eve of war he was recruited as personal assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, Rear-Admiral John Godfrey.

Fleming's background in intelligence work gave him the background and experience to write somewhat convincing spy novels. The first James Bond story, Casino Royale, was published in 1953. Ian Fleming

It is believed that in this initial story he based the female character "Vesper Lynd" on real life SOE agent, Christine Granville. As for the inspiration behind James Bond, one of the strongest candidates is said to have been Merlin Minshall, who worked for Fleming as a spy during the Second World War. Another is a fictional character called Duckworth Drew, created by writer and journalist William Le Queux.

Besides the twelve novels and nine short stories he wrote featuring James Bond, Fleming is also known for the children's story, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Ian Fleming is interred in the Church yard cemetery at the village of Sevenhampton, near Swindon, next to his wife Ann Geraldine Mary Fleming (1913-1981) and son, Caspar Robert Fleming (1952-1975).

Actor Christopher Lee is his cousin. Fleming wanted Lee to play the first Bond film villain, Dr No. (Some sources say Lee was also considered for the role of Bond as well.) Lee later played the title villain in The Man with the Golden Gun.

Fleming worked in UK Naval Intelligence during World War II, and was author of a plan — not in the end carried out — for capturing Naval Enigma material: Operation Ruthless.

In the book The Man Who Was M: The Life of Charles Henry Maxwell Knight by Anthony Masters, ISBN 0-631-13392-5 it is claimed that during the war Fleming conceived the plan that successfully lured Rudolf Hess to fly into captivity in Britain. There's no other source for these claims.

The typewriter used by Fleming to write his Bond novels is presently in the possession of James Bond actor Pierce Brosnan.

Selected works

James Bond novels
Casino Royale (1953; first U.S. publication title: You Asked for It)
Live and Let Die (1954)
Moonraker (1955; first U.S. publication title: Too Hot to Handle)
Diamonds Are Forever (1956)
From Russia with Love (1957)
Dr. No (1958)
Goldfinger (1959)
For Your Eyes Only (a collection of short stories, 1960)
Thunderball (1961)
The Spy Who Loved Me (1962)
On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963)
You Only Live Twice (1964)
The Man With The Golden Gun (1965; allegedly finished by Kingsley Amis)
Octopussy and The Living Daylights (a collection of short stories, 1966)
For Your Eyes Only contained the short stories: "From A View to a Kill," "For Your Eyes Only," "Risico," "Quantum of Solace", and "The Hildebrand Rarity." Octopussy and the Living Daylights was initially published with just the two short stories, "Octopussy" and "The Living Daylights" as the book title suggests. The 1967 paperback edition saw the title shortened to Octopussy and a third story, "Property of a Lady" added. In the 1990s, the longer version of the book title was restored and beginning with new editions published in 2002, the book includes a fourth short story, "007 in New York."

Children's story
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1964)

Non-fiction
The Diamond Smugglers (1957)
Thrilling Cities (1963; American editions contain the Bond short story, "007 in New York")

Hans Christian Andersen

Hans Christian Andersen, (April 2, 1805 - August 4, 1875) was a Danish author and poet famous for his fairy tales.

Upbringing

Andersen was born in Odense, Denmark, on the April 2, 1805. He was the son of a sickly young shoemaker of twenty-two and his several years older wife. The whole family lived and slept in one little room.

Hans Christian showed imagination early, which was fostered by the indulgence of his parents and by his mother's superstition. In 1816, the shoemaker died and the child was left entirely to his own devices. Hans Christian ceased to go to school.

He built himself a little toy-theatre and sat at home making clothes for his puppets, and reading all the plays that he could borrow; among them were those of Ludvig Holberg and William Shakespeare. Andersen, throughout his childhood, had a passionate love for literature. He was known to memorize entire Shakespeare plays and recite them using his wooden dolls as the characters.

King Frederick VI was interested in the strange boy and sent him for some years, free of charge, to the grammar-school at Slagelse. Before he started for school, Andersen published his first volume, The Ghost at Palnatoke's Grave (1822). Andersen, a very backward and unwilling pupil, actually remained at Slagelse and at another school in Elsinore until 1827. These years, he says, were the darkest and bitterest in his life. Collin at length consented to consider him educated, and Andersen came to Copenhagen.

Life as an author

In 1829, Andersen had considerable success with a fantastic volume entitled A Journey on Foot from Holmen's Canal to the East Point of Amager, and he published in the same season a farce and a book of poems. Thus, he suddenly came into request at the moment when his friends had decided that no good thing would ever come out of his early eccentricity and vivacity. He made little further progress, however, until 1833, when he received a small traveling stipend from the king, and made the first of his long European journeys. At Le Locle, in the Jura, he wrote Agnete and the Merman; and in October 1834 he arrived in Rome.

Early in 1835, Andersen's first novel, The Improvisatore, appeared, and achieved real success. The poet's troubles were at an end at last. In the same year, Andersen published the earliest installment of his immortal Fairy Tales (Danish: Eventyr). Other parts, completing the first volume, appeared in 1836 and 1837. The value of these stories was not at first perceived, and they sold slowly. Andersen was more successful for the time being with a novel, O.T. (1836), and a volume of sketches, In Sweden. In 1837, he produced the best of his novels, Only a Fiddler.

Andersen now turned his attention, with but ephemeral success, to the theatre, but was recalled to his true genius in the charming miscellany of 1840, the Picture-Book without Pictures the fame of his Fairy Tales had been steadily rising; a second series began in 1838; a third in 1845.

Andersen was now celebrated throughout Europe, although in Denmark itself there was still some resistance to his pretensions. In June 1847, he paid his first visit to England and enjoyed a triumphal social success. When he left, Charles Dickens saw him off from Ramsgate pier (Shortly thereafter Dickens published David Copperfield, in which the character Uriah Heep is said to have been modeled on Andersen—a left-handed compliment, to say the least).

After this, Andersen continued to publish much as he still desired to excel as a novelist and a dramatist, which he could not do. He disdained the enchanting Fairy Tales, in the composition of which his unique genius lay. Nevertheless, he continued to write them, and in 1847 and 1848 two fresh volumes appeared. After a long silence, Andersen published another novel in 1857, To be or not to be. In 1863, after a very interesting journey, he issued another of his travel-books, In Spain.

His Fairy Tales continued to appear, in installments, until 1872, when, at Christmas, the last stories were published. In the spring of that year, Andersen fell out of bed and severely hurt himself. He was never again quite well, but he lived until the 4th of August 1875, when he died very peacefully in the house called Rolighed, near Copenhagen. He is interred in the Assistens Cemetery, in Copenhagen, Denmark.

In the English-speaking world, the stories of The Ugly Duckling, The Emperor's New Clothes, and The Princess and the Pea, are cultural universals; everyone knows them, though few could tell you their author. They have become part of the common heritage, and, like the tales of Charles Perrault, are not distinguished from actual folk-tales such as those of the Brothers Grimm.

Fairy tales

His best-known fairy tales include:

The Emperor's New Clothes
The Ugly Duckling
The Swineherd
The Real Princess
The Shoes of Fortune
The Fir Tree
The Snow Queen
The Leap-Frog
The Elderbush
The Bell
The Old House
The Happy Family
The Story of a Mother
The False Collar
The Shadow
The Little Match Girl
The Dream of Little Tuk
The Naughty Boy
The Red Shoes, Fairytale
The Little Mermaid
Thumbelina

Daphne Du Maurier

Dame Daphne du Maurier (May 13, 1907 - April 19, 1989) was one of the most successful Cornish novelists of all time. Her best-known work, Rebecca (1938), is a literary classic and was the inspiration for an Oscar-winning film.

She was born in London in 1907, the daughter of the actor-manager Gerald du Maurier, and granddaughter of the author George Du Maurier. These gave a head start to her literary career, and her first novel, The Loving Spirit, was published in 1931.

Although married for many years to Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick "Boy" Browning and the mother of one son and two daughters, du Maurier undoubtedly had lesbian tendencies, and had intimate relationships with several women, including Gertrude Lawrence.

Her writing went from strength to strength. She is most noted for the novel Rebecca which has been filmed on several occasions. Besides Rebecca, several of her other novels were made into films, including Jamaica Inn (1936), Frenchman's Creek (1942), and My Cousin Rachel (1951). The Alfred Hitchcock film The Birds is based on a treatment of one of her short stories, as is the film Don't Look Now. She also wrote non-fiction. One of her most imaginative works, The Glass-Blowers, traces her French ancestry.

She was named a Dame of the British Empire, and died in 1989, at her home in Cornwall, in a region which had been the setting for many of her books. As per her desire, Dame Daphne's body was cremated and her ashes were scattered on the cliffs near her home.

Charles Dickens

Charles John Huffam Dickens (February 7, 1812 - June 9, 1870), pen-name "Boz", was an English novelist of the Victorian era. The popularity of his books during his lifetime and to the present is demonstrated by the fact that none of his novels has ever gone out of print.

Childhood

Charles was born in Portsmouth, England, to John Dickens, a naval pay clerk, and his wife Elizabeth Barrow. When Charles was five, the family moved to Chatham, Kent. When he was ten, the family relocated to Camden Town in London.

His early years were an idyllic time for him. He described himself then as a “very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of-boy”. He spent his time in the out-doors, reading voraciously with a particular fondness for the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding. He talked in later life of his extremely strong memories of childhood and his continuing photographic memory of people and events help bring his fiction to life.

His family was moderately well off and he received some education at a private school but all that changed when his father, after spending too much money entertaining and retaining his social position, was imprisoned for debt. At the age of twelve Charles was deemed old enough to work and began working for 10 hours a day in Warren’s boot-blacking factory located near the present Charing Cross railway station. He spent his time pasting labels on the jars of thick polish and earned six shillings a week. With this money he had to pay for his lodging and help support his family who were incarcerated in the nearby Marshalsea debtors' prison.

After a few years his family’s financial situation improved, partly due to money inherited from his father's family. His family were able to leave the Marshalsea but his mother did not immediately remove him from the boot-blacking factory which was owned by a relation of hers. Charles never forgave his mother for this and resentment of his situation and the conditions working-class people lived under became major themes of his works. Dickens wrote, "No advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no support from anyone that I can call to mind, so help me God!"

In May 1827 Dickens began work as a law clerk, a junior office position with potential to become a lawyer. He did not like the law as a profession and after a short time as a court stenographer he became a journalist, reporting parliamentary debate and travelling Britain by stagecoach to cover election campaigns. His journalism informed his first collection of pieces Sketches by Boz and he continued to contribute to and edit journals for much of his life. In his early twenties he made a name for himself with his first novel, The Pickwick Papers.

On April 2, 1836 Charles married Catherine Hogarth, with whom he was to have ten children. In 1842 they traveled together to the United States; the trip is described in the short travelogue American Notes and is also the basis of some of the episodes in Martin Chuzzlewit.

Dickens’ writings were extremely popular in their day and were read extensively. His popularity allowed him to buy Gad's Hill Place, in 1856. This large house in Rochester, Kent was very special to Dickens as he had walked past it as a child and had dreamed of living in it. The area was also the scene of some of the events of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, part 1 and this literary connection pleased Dickens.

Later life

Dickens separated from his wife in 1858. In Victorian times divorce was almost unthinkable particularly for someone as famous as Charles Dickens and he continued to maintain her in a house for the next twenty years until she died. Although they were initially happy together, Catherine did not seem to share quite the same boundless energy for life which Dickens had. Her job of looking after their ten children and the pressure of living with and keeping house for a world famous novelist certainly did not help. Catherine's sister Georgina moved in to help her but there were rumours that Charles was romantically linked to his sister-in-law. An indication of his marital dissatisfaction was when in 1855 he went to meet his first love Maria Beadnell. Maria was by this time married as well but she seems to have fallen short of Dickens' romantic memory of her.

On the 9th April, 1865 while returning from France to see Ellen Ternan, Dickens was involved in the Staplehurst train crash in which the first six carriages of the train plunged off of a bridge that was being repaired. The only first-class carriage to remain on the track was the one Dickens was in. Dickens spent some time tending the wounded and dying before rescuers arrived; before finally leaving he remembered the unfinished manuscript for Our Mutual Friend and he returned to his carriage to retrieve it.

Dickens managed to avoid an appearance at the inquiry into the crash, as it would have become known that he was travelling that day with Ellen Ternan and her mother, which could have caused a scandal. Ellen, an actress, had been Dickens' companion since the break-up of his marriage and as he had met her in 1857 she was most likely the ultimate reason for that break-up. She continued to be his companion, and probably mistress, until his death.

Although unharmed he never really recovered from the crash, which is most evident in the fact that his normally prolific writing shrank to completing Our Mutual Friend and starting the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Much of his time was taken up with public readings from his best-loved novels. The shows were incredibly popular and on December 2, 1867 Dickens gave his first public reading in the United States at a New York City theatre. The effort and passion he put into these readings with individual character voices is also thought to have contributed to his death.

Exactly five years to the day after the Staplehurst crash, on June 9, 1870, he died. He was buried in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. The inscription on his tomb reads: "He was a sympathiser to the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is lost to the world."

In the 1980s the historic Eastgate House in Rochester, Kent was converted into a Charles Dickens museum, and an annual Dickens Festival is held in the city. The house in Portsmouth in which Dickens was born has also been made into a museum.

Novels

Dickens' writing style is florid and poetic, with a strong comic touch. His satires of British aristocratic snobbery — he calls one character the "Noble Refrigerator" — are wickedly funny. Comparing orphans to stocks and shares, people to tug boats or dinner party guests to furniture are just some of Dickens' flights of fancy which sum up situations better than any simple description could.

The characters themselves are amongst some of the most memorable in English literature. Certainly their names are. The likes of Ebenezer Scrooge, Fagin, Mrs Gamp, Micawber, Pecksniff, Miss Havisham, Wackford Squeers and many others are so well known they can easily be believed to be living a life outside the novels, but their eccentricities do not overshadow the stories. Some of these characters are grotesques; he loved the style of 18th century gothic romance, though it had already become a bit of a joke (see Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey for a parodic example). One character most vividly drawn throughout his novels is London itself. From The coaching inns on the out-skirts of the city to the lower reaches of the Thames all aspects of the capital are described by someone who truly loved London and spent many hours walking its streets. See also: List of Dickens characters.

Most of Dickens' major novels were first written in monthly or weekly instalments in journals such as Household Words and later collected into the full novels we are familiar with today. These instalments made the stories cheap and more accessible and the series of cliff-hangers every month made each new episode more widely anticipated. Part of Dickens' great talent was to incorporate this episodic writing style but still end up with a coherent novel at the end. The monthly numbers were illustrated by, amongst others, "Phiz" (a pseudonym for Hablot Browne).

Among his best-known works are Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and A Christmas Carol. David Copperfield is argued by some to be his best novel — it is certainly his most autobiographical. However, Little Dorrit, a masterpiece of acerbic satire masquerading as a rags-to-riches story, is on a par with the very best of Jonathan Swift and should not be overlooked.

Dickens' novels were, among other things, works of social commentary. He was a fierce critic of the poverty and social stratification of Victorian society. Throughout his works, Dickens retained an empathy for the common man and a scepticism for the fine folk.

Dickens was fascinated by the theatre as an escape from the world, and theatres and theatrical people appear in Nicholas Nickleby. Dickens himself had a flourishing career as a performer, reading scenes from his works. He travelled widely in Britain and America on stage tours.

Much of Dickens' writing seems sentimental today, like the death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop. Even where the leading characters are sentimental, as in Bleak House, the many other colourful characters and events, the satire and subplots, reward the reader. Another criticism of his writing is the unrealistic and unlikeliness of his plots. This is true but much of the time he was not aiming for realism but for entertainment and to recapture the picaresque and gothic novels of his youth. When he did attempt realism his novels were often unsuccessful and unpopular. The fact that his own life story of happiness, then poverty, then an unexpected inheritance, and finally international fame was unlikely shows that unlikely stories are not necessarily unrealistic.

All authors incorporate autobiographical elements in their fiction, but with Dickens this is very noticeable, particularly as he took pains to cover up what he considered his shameful, lowly past. The scenes from Bleak House of interminable court cases and legal arguments could only come from a journalist who has had to report them. Dickens' own family was sent to prison for poverty, a common theme in many of his books, in particular the Marshalsea in Little Dorrit. Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop is thought to represent Dickens' sister-in-law, Nicholas Nickleby's father is certainly Dickens' own father and the snobbish nature of Pip from Great Expectations is similar to the author himself.

At least 180 movies and TV adaptations have been based on Dickens' works.

Anti-Semitism

Like those of several of his contemporaries, some of his works, in today's context, are perceived as being marred by anti-Semitism. For example, the character Fagin in Oliver Twist is depicted as a stereotypical Jew, with passages describing his hooked nose and greedy eyes. Dickens, it should be remembered, lived in a time which preceded the Holocaust, and it can be argued that he was writing for dramatic effect: Fagin, when all is said and done, is a caricature, one of the great pantomime villains of fiction.

Dickens had few dealings with flesh and blood Jews until 1860 when he sold his home, Tavistock House, to a Mr. Davis, a Jewish banker. His journal entries are initially deprecatory; the subsequent conduct of the banker and the ease with which the transaction was effected caused him to rethink and revise his whole position in this area.

Dickens' response to the (mild) criticism of Fagin emanating from the Mrs. Davis (the wife of the self-same banker), writing in the Jewish Chronicle, is revealing:

"Fagin, in Oliver Twist, is a Jew, because it unfortunately was true of the time to which the story refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew ... and secondly, that he is called 'the Jew' not because of his religion but because of his race."
It should be noted that in an 1867 revision of the text, most of the Jewish references were excised. Fagin should also be balanced against the sympathetic portrayal of the Jew Riah in Our Mutual Friend, his last complete novel. It has been argued by some that this represents a process of change in Dickens' approach to issues relating to ethnicity.

Mrs. Davis was pleased with Dickens' creation of a good Jew and sent him a copy of a new translation of the Hebrew Bible. Dickens was gratitude personified in his response, asserting:

"There is nothing but good will left between me and a People for whom I have a real regard and to whom I would not wilfully have given an offence or done an injustice for any worldly consideration. Believe me, Very faithfully yours, Charles Dickens."

Quotation

"Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
"Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail." —"A Christmas Carol"

Trivia

The word boredom first appeared in print in Bleak House.
Since their publishing, not one single Dickens novel has gone out of print in England.

Works

Major novels
The Pickwick Papers (1836)
Oliver Twist (1837-1839)
Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839)
The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1841)
Barnaby Rudge (1841)
The Christmas Books:
A Christmas Carol (1843)
The Chimes (1844)
The Cricket on the Hearth (1845)
The Battle for Life (1846)
Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1844)
Dombey and Son (1846-1848)
David Copperfield (1849-1850)
Bleak House (1852-1853)
Hard Times (1854)
Little Dorrit (1855-1857)
A Tale of Two Cities (July 11, 1859)
Great Expectations (1860-1861)
Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865)
The Mystery of Edwin Drood (unfinished) (1870)

Selected other books

Sketches by Boz (1836)
American Notes (1842)
A Child's History of England (1851-1853)

Short stories

"A Christmas Tree"
"A Message From The Sea"
"Doctor Marigold"
"George Silverman's Explanation"
"Going Into Society"
"Holiday Romance"
"Hunted Down"
"Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy"
"Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings"
"Mugby Junction"
"Perils of Certain English Prisoners"
"Somebody's Luggage"
"Sunday Under Three Heads"
"The Child's Story"
"The Haunted House"
"The Haunted Man And The Ghost's Bargain"
"The Holly-Tree"
"The Lamplighter"
"The Seven Poor Travellers"
"The Trial For Murder"
"Tom Tiddler's Ground"
"What Christmas Is As We Grow Older"
"Wreck Of The Golden Mary"

Anthony Horowitz Biography

Anthony Horowitz (born April 5, 1955) is a British author and television scriptwriter. His most successful work has included creating and writing the series Foyle's War for ITV and writing several episodes of another ITV series, Midsomer Murders. Both of these are detective murder mystery series. He is also the author of the highly successful Alex Rider series of adventure novels for children.

He began writing for television in the 1980s, contributing to Granada Television's anthology series Dramarama, and also writing for the popular fantasy series Robin of Sherwood. His association with murder mysteries began with the adaptation of several Hercule Poirot stories for ITV's popular Agatha Christie's Poirot series during the 1990s.

Often his work has a comic edge, such as with the comic murder anthology Murder Most Horrid (BBC TWO, 1991) and the comedy-drama The Last Englishman (1995), starring Jim Broadbent. In 2001 he created a drama anthology series of his own for the BBC, Murder in Mind, an occasional series which deals with a different set of characters and a different murder every one-hour episode.

He is also less-favourably known for the creation of two short-lived and generally derided science-fiction shows, Crime Traveller (1997) for BBC ONE and The Vanishing Man (pilot 1996, series 1998) for ITV. The successful launch of the Second World War-set detective series Foyle's War in 2002 helped to restore his reputation as one of Britain's foremost writers of popular drama.

He is also the writer of a feature film screenplay, The Gathering, which was released in 2002 and starred Christina Ricci.

Paula Radcliffe

Paula Jane Radcliffe (December 17, 1973) is an English long-distance runner and is currently the World Record holder for the marathon, which she set during the 2003 London Marathon, with a time of 2:15.25.

Radcliffe was born in Northwich, Cheshire, and studied modern languages at Loughborough University.

Radcliffe is not known for her sprint finish, and so to win a race must attack and leave her competitors behind, as was seen in the 10,000 metres at the 2000 Olympic Games, when despite leading for 24 laps out of 25, she finished fourth.

She also holds the world records for 10, 20 and 30km on roads. She twice won gold at the World Cross-Country championships (in 2001 and 2002), and in December 2003 became European Cross-Country champion for the second time, the only woman to have achieved this feat in the event's ten-year history. Forced out of the Paris World Athletics Championships because of injury in 2003, her greatest moment on the track has been European gold at 10,000m in 2002. She has proved herself an incredible runner at distances as low as 5000m, too, running 14:31.42, just three seconds behind the world record, to win gold at the 2002 Commonwealth Games.

She was awarded an MBE in June 2002, and later in the year became the BBC Sports Personality of the Year.

Radcliffe was the favourite to win the gold medal in the marathon at the 2004 Olympic Games. However the Athens heat appeared to get to Radcliffe and having fallen into fourth place, Radcliffe retired from the race in tears at the 36km mark. Five days later, she started in the 10,000 metres but still suffering from the effects of the marathon, did not run well and again retired with 8 laps remaining after falling behind her competitors.

In her next competitive marathon she won the 2004 New York Marathon in a time of 2 hours 23 minutes 10 seconds.

Her athletic ability and commitment to training are accompanied by a strong belief in playing by the rules. She has frequently made high-profile condemnations of drug-cheating in athletics, most famously at the World Athletics Championships in Edmonton in 2001, when Radcliffe and team-mate Hayley Tullett held up a sign protesting against the reinstatement of Russian athlete Olga Yegarova, after Yegarova had tested positive for the banned substance EPO. Radcliffe also wears a red ribbon when competing to show her support for blood testing as a method of catching drugs cheats.