Clare Bucknell is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. She is the author of The Treasuries, a social history of poetry anthologies.
One of Joseph Wright of Derby’s favourite subjects was Vesuvius erupting by night, which he painted more than thirty times. The drama and peril of the scene attracted him, but he was also drawn to extreme manifestations of light and dark: lava, fire, lightning, smoke. He found that lava in particular could be difficult to paint, because it needed to look fluid, not stiff and static....
‘Teresa Guiccioli’ by Henry William Pickersgill.
Teresa Gamba Ghiselli married Count Alessandro Guiccioli in 1818. She was 18 or 19; he was 57. It was his third marriage and they had met once before. In The Last Attachment: The Story of Byron and Teresa Guiccioli (1949), Iris Origo describes how the bargain was struck:
[Teresa] stood in the middle of the room, curtsying, as her...
In later life, the worst thing you could call Robert Frost was ‘literary’. ‘If I’m somewhat academic (I’m more agricultural) and you are somewhat executive, so much the better,’ he wrote to Wallace Stevens teasingly in 1935. ‘It is so we are saved from being literary … Our poetry comes choppy, in well-separated poems, well interrupted by...
Three of Rachel Ruysch’s paintings feature pineapples. In Still Life of Exotic Flowers on a Marble Ledge (c.1735), the fruit is hidden in a chaotic mass of stems and blooms, easy to miss behind an immense white flower head. In A Still Life with Devil’s Trumpet Flowers, Peonies, Hibiscus, Passion Flowers and Other Plants in a Brown Stoneware Vase (1700), you can see it clearly in...
Did Dickens ruin Christmas? He was certainly a pioneer in exploiting its commercial potential. A Christmas Carol sold 6,000 copies in five days when it was published on 19 December 1843, and Dickens...
George Gissing’s novels, Orwell once said, could be described in three words: ‘not enough money’. Writing is a matter of survival for the cast of ‘New Grub Street’ (1891), which follows a handful...
After drunkenly selling his wife and child at auction, a young Michael Henchard resolves to live differently – and does so, skyrocketing from impoverished haytrusser to mayor of his adoptive town. Mary...
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped began life serialised in a children’s magazine, but its sophistication and depth won the lifelong admiration of Henry James. In Stevenson’s hands, a straightforward...
On one level, Mansfield Park is a fairytale transposed to the 19th century: Fanny Price is the archetypal poor relation who, through her virtuousness, wins a wealthy husband. But Jane Austen’s 1814 novel...
In the final episode of their series, Colin and Clare arrive at Muriel Spark, who would never have considered herself a satirist though her writing was as bitingly satirical as any 20th-century novelist's. A...
Byron’s early poems – his so-called ’dark tales’ – have been dismissed by critics as the tawdry, slapdash products of an uninteresting mind. Clare Bucknell talks to Tom about her recent piece...
The story of Macmillan’s marketing and its advertising of a ‘GOLDEN TREASURY SERIES’ of volumes is not just a piece of publishing history, but part of the shift from sacred to secular culture in...
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