Novel Approaches10 Elo 2025

'Our Mutual Friend' by Charles Dickens

'Our Mutual Friend' was Dickens’s last completed novel, published in serial form in 1864-65. The story begins with a body being dredged from the ooze and slime of the Thames, then opens out to follow a wide array of characters through the dust heaps, paper mills, public houses and dining rooms of London and its hinterland. For this episode, Tom is joined by Rosemary Hill and Tom Crewe to make sense of a complex work that was not only the last great social novel of the period but also gestured forwards to the crisp, late-century cynicism of Oscar Wilde. They consider the ways in which the book was responding to the darkening mood of mid-Victorian Britain and the fading of the post-Waterloo generation, as well as the remarkable flexibility of its prose, with its shifting modes, tenses and perspectives, that combine to make 'Our Mutual Friend' one of the most rewarding of Dickens’s novels. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠ Next time on Novel Approaches: 'The Last Chronicle of Barset' by Anthony Trollope Further reading in the LRB: John Sutherland on Peter Ackroyd's Dickens: ⁠https://lrb.me/nadickens1⁠ David Trotter on Dickens's tricks: ⁠https://lrb.me/nadickens2⁠ Brigid Brophy on Edwin Drood: ⁠https://lrb.me/nadickens3⁠ LRB Audiobooks Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksna

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(15)

‘New Grub Street’ by George Gissing

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 of l...

29 Joulu 202516min

'A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens

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 w...

24 Joulu 202533min

‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ by Thomas Hardy

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. Eve...

1 Joulu 202512min

‘Kidnapped’ by Robert Louis Stevenson

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. Set in the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobit...

3 Marras 202516min

‘The Portrait of a Lady’ by Henry James

In The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James borrows from Eliot, Austen, folktales and potboilers, but ‘the thing that he took from nowhere was Isabel Archer’. James transformed the 19th-century novel throu...

5 Loka 202513min

‘The Last Chronicle of Barset’ by Anthony Trollope

Trollope enthusiasts Tom Crewe and Dinah Birch say they could have chosen any one of his 47 novels for this episode, so it’s no wonder Elizabeth Bowen called him ‘the most sheerly able of the Victoria...

7 Syys 202516min

‘The Mill on the Floss’ by George Eliot

The Mill on the Floss is George Eliot’s most autobiographical novel, and the first she published after her identity as a woman was revealed. A ‘dreamscape’ version of her Warwickshire childhood, the b...

13 Heinä 202516min