Clare Bucknell is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. She is the author of The Treasuries, a social history of poetry anthologies.
How would a child know that Jesus was a special kind of adult? In early modern depictions of Christ blessing little children, it’s conventional for even the smallest babies to be aware that there’s something different about this man, their faces turned trustfully towards his as they clutch apples or dolls or their parents’ hands. Nicolaes Maes’s version of the theme...
An Instagram post is a small square picture, roughly seven centimetres by seven on an average phone screen. If covered in text it has space for about 25 lines of poetry in a font size you can read without squinting. This is an Instagram poem by Rupi Kaur:
if you are not enough for yourselfyou will never be enoughfor someone else
Kaur is so famous that parodies of her verse trend on Twitter:...
William Godwin’s attack on aristocratic oppression in the Enquiry concerning Political Justice didn’t pull its punches. ‘Each man,’ he wrote, ‘should be wise enough to govern himself, without the intervention of any compulsory restraint; and, since government, even in its best state, is an evil, the object principally to be aimed at is, that we should have as...
The professions open to younger sons of the aristocracy and gentry at the beginning of the 19th century could be counted on the fingers of one hand. In Sense and Sensibility Edward Ferrars, who has chosen to do nothing for a living and regrets it, reels off four possibilities:
I always preferred the church, as I still do. But that was not smart enough for my family. They recommended the...
It’s opening night at the National Theatre. The radical writer and director Amma Bonsu, snubbed for decades by the cultural establishment for her uncompromising work (FGM: The Musical; Cunning Stunts), is about to astonish audiences with a new play. The Last Amazon of Dahomey has sold out before the run begins; it features 18th-century lesbian West African warriors, ‘thunderous...
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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