James Metcalf on the fictionality of the latest archaeological page-turners
Stephen Puddicombe looks at the unusual appeal of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot
Ciaran Rafferty investigates the science of book classification
We’ve got ghosts, galleries, and alterative literary prizes to end the year with a bang for all you culture vultures.
Readers have been getting to grips with the ghosts that haunt Charles Dickens’s fiction. The Museum of London is host to a new exhibition entitled Dickens and London; an exhibition that grapples with just why the city was to become the writer’s maddening muse. The first major museum exhibition of the author in over four decades, it features manuscripts of his work alongside paintings of London. And this is the London that drove Dickens to distraction; a city of opium dens and lost orphans, of grime and vice, and of extremes of great wealth and poverty. It’s the city in which his characters lived, worked, loved, schemed, and died.
The British Library, meanwhile, is exploring the author’s addiction to unsettling his readers in Dickens and the Supernatural. Toying with the supernatural throughout his life, Dickens even practised mesmerism on a friend’s wife in Italy. Playing on fear, the texts nudge readers to haunt themselves, with their own fears and imagination. Displayed at the exhibition is the ink-stained manuscript of Great Expectations; a manuscript that has now been reproduced on the printed page for the first time. With his print deadlines looming, this reproduction will allow readers to get physically closer to the immediacy and urgency of Dickens’s scribbling.
The Scottish National Portrait Gallery has reopened in Edinburgh, following a £7.6 million revamp. The world’s first dedicated portrait gallery, it now tells a chronological story stretching back to the Reformation, and forwards to the stars of today. It features Scottish philosophers, writers, painters, economists, soldiers and industrialists. Among its most interesting features are the death masks of Victorian body snatchers Burke and Hare, as well as those of Voltaire and Romantic poet Keats. Elsewhere in the North, the Saltire Society’s Scottish Book of the Year awards received a less than enthusiastic reception. None of the shortlisted writers in fact attended the £5,000 prize-giving. Even its winner, Alasdair Gray, had refused top prize in advance of the ceremony. But, undeterred, the society (and his wife) insisted on his acceptance, to which a reluctant Gray finally gave in.
Finally, there’s the award that writers definitely don’t want to win. David Guterson has been named this year’s winner of the bad sex in fiction award for his novel Ed King. The Literary Review accolade, bestowed upon him by Barbara Windsor, has been highlighting the ‘crude, tasteless, and often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in contemporary novels’ since 1993. Among those shortlisted was Stephen King. Not one for the mantelpiece, then?
Check back with The Yorker over Christmas for a cultural look at the year that was.
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