My Top Ten Favourite Posts (from the first decade of this site)

10th May is the ten year anniversary of grubstlodger and I felt that I needed to mark a decade of blogging in some way…

After all, it’s been;

10 years

425 posts

328,000 words

So I thought I’d use the opportunity to make a countdown of my top ten favourite pieces I’ve written for this blog and explain why.

 (Number 11 would be my two part gush about Tom Jones, part one and two)

10: Lydia the Locksmith’s Widow

Not my best piece of writing in any way, this is a short excerpt of my 18th Century pastiche novel, ‘Odes to the Big City’. I originally posted it in the nano-wri-mo forums because I thought it was a funny little snippet that put across the tone of the narrator. I later found out that I’d been sampled on a tumblr compiling ‘shit nano work’ and lightly mocked. They took great objection to my cheap three-cornered hat.

However, the reason I include it is because this is the most commented piece on this website. Not that the comments are genuine ones, they are almost all bots advertising locksmiths in various places. It’s not a place for scintillating comments but it’s a wonderful place to find a locksmith.

9: Dear Mr Spectator

I’ve included this piece as a representative of the various performances I’ve reviewed on the blog. This is one of the stranger things I’ve visited (and I’ve seen a one-man show of Tristram Shandy), a dinner-performance inspired by the Spectator magazines. I dragged along my sister because no-one else would come. I think I represent the shaky start, the unusual food combinations and the way the night fell into place as it continued. The tale of the dodgy pirate night is true though…

8: Behind the Scenes at the Museum of London

Since 2015, I have been attending, and writing-up, the Dr Johnson’s Reading Circle in Gough Square. I've only missed one for the stupid reason that I forgot what day I was in. Rather than including a write-up of one of the events, I thought I’d include one of our trips out. 

The Museum of London is one of my favourite museums and there was a real thrill of being allowed backstage. Combine that with the utter pleasure I had listening to an expert talk engagingly about a topic I don’t know much about and I was a very happy bunny. I think the joy of the evening radiates in the writing and I love the photo of me peering up a potentially deadly dress.

7: Under the Glass...Three - Castles in the Air

The series ‘under the glass’ is probably my most favourite. I love how a quote can be detached from context and used as a way to look at life. By accident, these pieces have probably become the most personal on the blog as using a quote to look at my life reveals something about it.

I had difficulty choosing which particular ‘under the glass’ to choose. While ‘we never are abandoned, quite’, is probably my favourite quote, I’ve picked this piece because it’s probably the most personal. I am still constructing my castle in the air and I still hope it is hanging together as a piece.

I’m pleased to say that over the ten years I have been writing grubstlodger, my personal situation has become far more comfortable and secure. I’ve even picked up little successes for my writing, occasionally receiving nice little comments for my write-ups and having written things I’m proud of. I still hope for more of course.. but who doesn’t?

6: A Visit to Bath (Part one and two)

I’ve visited a number of wonderful places with eighteenth century links but I’m probably proudest of my two entries on Bath. (Cheating I know).

I’m particularly fond of the flow of these pieces, the way the ideas develop and the way they successfully put across my experience of the city. I don’t know how these come across to a reader, but for me, they evoke a wonderful couple of days very successfully.

5: The Canting Crew

This entry started out as a tangent on my review of ‘The Fatal Tree’ and spun itself out into it’s own piece. It came at a time where I happened to read a number of works that had employed ‘flash’ slang into the texts with various degrees of success. I was puzzling over how to turn a spirited and interesting tangent into it’s own piece when I overheard bravura explosions of modern slang whilst on a train to Staines. I wish I’d written down more of what they’d said, as the control and skill of the language was something I could never replicate. 

It was also in writing this piece that I properly understood what it was that had worked or not about the slang in the books which gave me pointers on how to handle slang in the future and helped me to remember how great properly expressed slang is. It’s a t’riffic piece.

4: Rasselas

I needed some Sammy Johnson talk in here somewhere, and my initial review of Rasselas is one of my more favourite ones. Looking back, I’m surprised how definite my conception of the novel is and how it doesn’t completely match other people’s view of it. I still maintain there’s a lot of laughs in Rasselas if you look at it right. What’s more, this is the piece that lead to one of my strangest ‘real world’ experiences connected with the eighteenth century. 

I distinctly remember attending a Gresham lecture, being a little early and sitting on the floor of a corridor with a book as the other attendees started to gather. They were of retirement age, with fluting ‘well-schooled’ voices and each looked at me with surprise and distrust. I was not welcome at this lecture. What’s more the lecture itself started with an assertion about Johnson I simply do not agree with (that he was a misanthrope) and then proceeded to give the most surface-level readings of him and his work I could imagine. Most talks on Samuel Johnson have a few laughs, this did not. Then came Rasselas and I started to warm to the talk. The lecturer was far more positive about it, finding little moments of fun and jokes in it much as I had. Indeed, many were the exact same ones I had found. Then this image of a pyramid came up.

I recognised that, the mis-centred text, that’s clearly one of my shoddy works. What’s more, the whole Rasselas part of the lecture seemed to agree with me and be rather out of place with the rest of the talk. 

When I left, I was viewed with as many side-eyes as before but I left smug in the knowledge that the best part of the lecture had come from me. (Though it may have been a coincidence and the lecturer may have just found and used my image from google).

3: The Complete Essays of Michel de Montaigne

Like many people, 2020 wasn’t exactly my most productive year. I’d started it full of high hopes of finishing the first draft of a novel by Easter, and as Easter 2021 has just passed, I am nowhere near this goal.

Yet I did tackle this beast. It pretty much took me the year, dealing with it in three main chunks. I’d taken a lot from it, filling page after page with notes and quotes but how was I going to organise this most digressive of works into a sane and readable piece?

 I think I succeeded, not only that, but I think I get across the feeling of progression that comes from reading the whole book. If anything, this piece is here to remind me of how I have developed as a writer, being able to organise my notes and ideas and express them clearly. This piece reflects my greater skill and also the greater confidence I have in being able to wrestle a beast down and re-present it fairly. 

I also love how the review builds to the same beautiful conclusion that Montaigne came to, that ‘life is its own objective’. It’s a message that I think is important in general, but in the strange non-year that was 2020, I feel it was more important still. 

I’m also childishly amused at the penis tally.

2: Bethlem Museum of the Mind

This is the review where I first managed to understand, for myself, what I want from an exhibition and first started to be able to talk about them in a way that goes beyond listing the interesting ‘stuff’. It’s when I first realised the (probably obvious) point that an exhibition has a throughline, almost a story.

I was struck with how the museum didn’t present itself chronologically but thematically and how this choice meant it argued the rather disturbing point that although we know more of how the brain works, we haven’t really progressed very far in the field of mental health at all. We may not chain people up but we put them under chemical restraint, we may have a vast lexicon of medical-sounding words but they are no more specific than old playground taunts, we still don’t know how to make people happy. It’s a sobering thought and persuasively argued and I’ve found more chronological exhibitions to be a little insipid since.

And my favourite piece I’ve written for this site in the last ten years is…

1: Keep Trudging On

When I agreed to take an overnight bus to Scotland to clamber up Ben Nevis on a whim, I knew it would provide some material. Yet, when it came to write it, I was blocked. Though the piece itself took an evening to write, it took a month for it to shuffle together properly in my mind. As a placeholder, I even had a request to send trepanning tools because there was something worthwhile lodged in my head and I couldn’t get it out.

I’m glad I did.

If all my grubstlodger writings were wiped off the face of the earth with only one piece allowed to survive, this is that piece. It does what I’ve always wanted this blog to do, to unite my reading in (and of) the eighteenth century with experiences of my own modern life. 

In comparing my long, tedious struggle up the mountain, overtaken by all members of the ‘going up community’ with Samuel Johnson's views of life, I think I have ended up with a piece that touches on something universal. Like my walking up the path, sometimes we live each day simply because that is the thing we are doing. The experience of reaching the summit and feeling absolutely nothing but a kind of watery disappointment and the knowledge that it’s just more trudging to get down, is one that is embarrassingly common when we reach our goals - as Samuel Johnson said, we move ‘from hope to hope’. It’s a dour piece but probably my most thoughtful and fully realised.

I like it anyway.

Video: Muppet Treasure Island

 

Having got back on the video-making bicycle with my review of The Wild Life, I very quickly (well, in a month) managed to make one for the joyous film that is Muppet Treasure Island.

It's time to play the music...

Review: 'The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock' by Imogen Hermes Gowar

I find it interesting that both good and bad reviews for the book point out the beauty of the writing compared to the relative sluggishness of the characters and meandering plot, as if those things were not inextricably linked. This is a book where the prose threatens to sink the novel as a whole. 

It’s narrated in third person omniscient but present tense, not an impossible feat but immediately setting up something of a tightrope that needs to be carefully walked for the entire 500 page novel. Omniscient narrators work best (to my mind) when they are strong and characterful, like Fielding in Tom Jones, teasing the reader with that omniscience. Similarly, I feel that present tense works better in the first person, where the immediacy of one complements the other. To have third person omniscience and present tense together, without an intrusive narrative voice, means the book seems to drift around without an anchor.

Combine this with the distancing affect of self-consciously ‘beautiful’ writing and the book seriously detaches the reader from the plot and characters. In the first chapter’s eleven paragraphs, two are dedicated to describing a cat playing with a mouse. The cat returns in the next chapter where a description of a cat crunching on a mouse’s skull is mixed with the character of Mr Hancock filling with hope, which makes it seem like it is the cat’s crunching that enlivens him.

The author has a fondness for unusual words. A woman speaks ‘stertorously’ and has an ‘apneonic doze’, a crow has ‘bombazine’ feathers and many people ‘fossick’. These word choices seem not so much attention-grabbing as attention-seeking. They aren’t part of an attempt to create a period language, as words like ‘fossick’ come from the Australian gold rush, nearly a hundred years after the book is set. Whilst a reader can decipher the meaning of a phrase like ‘apneonic doze’, it would pull them out of the book far less if a simpler phrase like ‘interrupted sleep’ was used. 

Another example of attention-seeking writing came in the first transition between the locations on the London Docks and the richer houses of the West End. The conceit is of a crow flying from one to the other (it’s the crow with bombazine feathers no-less). This is cinematic and is a more interesting way to introduce the second main location than just ‘cutting’ to it but the narrator then quibbles about whether a crow would indeed fly such a distance but then decides not to quibble as the bird is only a ‘conjectured crow’ and not a real one. A whole paragraph about a crow that the text itself admits is imaginary. This may have worked if the narrator made frequent quibbles and interruptions, but this is the only one of the kind.

And yet…

Maybe the writing style calmed down, maybe I started to jibe with its rhythms but I started to get into the story and grew to quite enjoy it. Although the characters were never quite real to me (or enjoyably false) I did grow interested in their situations. 

Jonah Hancock is a lonely widower, haunted by imaginings of his stillborn son who is given a mermaid by the captain of one of his ships. It’s a shrivelled, monstrous thing, like the Feejee Mermaid in the Horniman museum, unlike any beautiful creature of legend. He finds himself in the unlooked for position of showman, displaying his monster with the aid of his sensible and intelligent niece, Sukie. 

Meanwhile, Angelica Neal finds herself in a free but precarious position after her long-term keeper, a rich duke, has died. She’s eager to get back on the town and make the most of her beauty before it fades. She’s aided by Mrs Frost, her grumpy charwoman. She’s also hassled by Mrs Chappell, her former bawd, who wants her to rejoin her brothel. 

I don’t wish to go any more into the plot but they include a mermaid-themed sex party, political machinations within the brothels, sudden reversals of fortunes and a hunt for a real mermaid.

 I particularly enjoyed the chapters with Mrs Chappell, who was probably the most interesting character. I could never work out whether she was a hard-nosed businesswoman wrapping up sordid deeds in ribbons of altruism, or whether she was a generally well-intentioned woman who found herself forced into being harsher than she would like. I suspect I was supposed to find her the former, but I found her the latter, especially compared to Mr Frost when she set herself up as a bawd. Mrs Chappell wasn’t shown to have whips on the wall to discipline her girls (though she did have a flagellation machine for punters). That Mrs C gets an extremely brutal comeuppance seemed rather unfair.

As for the main characters, I found Jonah Hancock to be a little mopey and he became mopier still as the book progressed. I couldn’t quite see why he falls in love with Angelica beyond viewing her as a prize. Similarly, I found her vain and rather shallow, seeming to cling to him as a port in a storm. That they marry and rub along reasonably together, I could understand, neither of them were so unlikeable that they couldn’t get on but it didn’t exactly seem a love story for the ages. 

As for mermaids, occasionally we had a mermaidy chapter. These were in italics and the mermaid/mermaids say vague things about ‘something about to happen’ and other mystical, easily ignorable things. I assume these were there to remind the reader that mermaids actually exist in the world of the book. When one is caught, I found it depicted really interestingly. The mermaid is part of the water, a shoal of almost invisible parts that give off the ‘feel’ of mermaid more than the sight. The mermaid also infects the air of everywhere she is with a deep melancholy and a number of characters fall under her spell. I thought this mermaid was a much better choice than having Daryl Hannah moping in a tank and worked well as a metaphor for nostalgia, and the past as a baggage, which the main characters had to deal with before building a future together. 

Overall, I enjoyed The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock more than I expected from the opening few chapters, and I would be interested in reading what Imogen Hermes Gowar writes next. Only, for my taste, I’d prefer it if she leaned into it less as a writer and more as a novelist.

London: A Social History at the Dr Johnson Reading Circle

 

Last night Doctor Johnson’s Reading Circle met on Zoom to talk about Roy Porter’s London: A Social History. But before it did, there were a couple of other things that happened first. We were given sneak-peeks at the programme for next year (our seventh) including books from both ends of the long eighteenth century. And we welcomed our newest and youngest member. Currently five days short of her first birthday, she did not seem to have enjoyed London: A Social History as her attention quickly turned to Rod Campbell’s Dear Zoo. And to be fair, the rest of the group didn’t enjoy it much either.

That it was rather dull and was too full of lists was the general complaint. There was a pleasure in seeing a known person or place mentioned and there were some little details that were interesting, such as the ludicrous introduction of flocks of sheep into public squares to make them more ‘rural’. There was even a recognition that it was good to have a history of how the city was governed rather than another run-down of the same tired stories (though Pepys and his cheese did get a mention in here as well). 

It seems that what we wanted from a social history, is one that provided an in-depth look at how people lived with the nitty-gritty, revealing details that entails. Porter’s, however, is a social history in the sense of society in general. It’s a history of ‘the people’ rather than ‘people’. As such, this is a generally broad-strokes story of how London was formed and grew into the baggy conurbation it now is and how its governance always lagged behind.

In many ways, the book resembled the city it was trying to describe. While the lists of streets, of people, of jobs, of leisure activities - lists that went on for paragraphs and pages, seemed to exist to show the sheer size and fullness of London – they were allowed to spill over all the pages and were not governed or controlled by the author. 

Despite the dense foliage of lists, there is an argument through the book, that London has long developed due to economic and market forces and that those forces have created something huge and stupendous but also something that leaves the poor behind. The last couple of chapter contains a forceful polemic against Thatcher’s disbanding of the GLC and calling for a London that is properly governed in the future.

Perhaps this book would have been more pleasurably read by a politics reading group, or a group of town planners, but the more literature-focused Dr Johnson’s Reading Circle didn’t enjoy it very much. It did make us question what we would want from a history of London, and we generally though it too big a topic to write satisfyingly on without a more specific focus. Perhaps in a time before the internet was common (this book was published in 1994) a book such as this provided a good source of information that may now be googled. 

We also wondered what Roy Porter would make of today’s London, which has (so far) avoided the decline he predicted and has even created a more comprehensive form of governance in the democratically elected mayor. 

From there we started to reflect on the lost Londons we had known, whether pitted with bomb sites, receiving milk or beer by horse-drawn cart, or remembering what a telephone box was once actually used for. It will be interesting, as the grip of coronavirus lessens, to see what kind of city it will be now - and very exciting to return to Gough Square in EC4 and once again meet in Dr Johnson’s House.

Video: Robinson Crusoe - an animated version

 This short video was almost two years in the making, mainly because there wasn't as much to say as I was hoping. I do like the fact about the goats though and the sneaky flume edit.

Review: Memoirs of Emma Courtney by Mary Hays

 

Memoirs of Emma Courtney is one of those books where the story around the novel is as interesting (or in this case, more interesting) than the novel itself. 

Mary Hays was an interesting person, born in Southwark to a dissenting family, not far from where a young Mary Wollstonecraft has also lived. She had to fight her family to allow her to marry the man of her choice and right when she convinced them to finally let them marry, he died. She became friend with a group of radicals, including William Godwin, who would be her mentor. Writing a selection of essays, she attracted the admiration of mathematician William Frend who she completely fell for. She wrote him a number of love letters but her love was unrequited. Filled with emotion, with nowhere to release it, William Godwin recommended she used her letters as the basis of fiction as a means to work through her feelings and produce something interesting. Memoirs of Emma Courtney is that novel.

The novel is framed as letters from Emma Courtney to Augustus Harley, a young man who has been pestering her for some details from her life. The retelling begins interestingly if a little conventionally. She was born in a loveless marriage where her mother died shortly after. He father being too invested in his playboy lifestyle, she is shipped off to her auntie and uncle. (They are incidentally called Melmoth, which made me smile considering the later 1820 work.) There is is loved and loves in return, she shows a prodigious love of play and stories which develops into a love of reading. In her grief when her uncle dies, she claims to read 10-14 novels a week. She claims that her happy childhood and devotion to her aunt and uncle taught her “that lively propensity to attachment, to which I have through my life been a martyr.” Her aunt sees this and, on her deathbed, gives a lengthy warning for Emma to keep her emotions in greater check. A warning so lengthy and so verbose it comes off as comic. This is an accident, there is nothing in the slightest bit playful or funny in this book.

The point of all this, other than to pad out the text, is to show the education Emma receives in childhood. It seems, from the amount of times she quotes him, that Mary Hays was a huge fan of a French philosopher called Claude Adrien Helvétius. He took ideas from Locke and expanded them. If people are blanks slates in which sense impressions from consciousness and intelligence, then all humans (male and female) are born with equal potential which is shaped and limited by childhood experiences. This also linked very well with Wollstonecraft’s writing about how women were intentionally stunted, physically, mentally and spiritually by their education and it was through learning that women could learn to develop into rational equally able to participate with men. 

It’s important to Emma Courtney, that she had a different upbringing than many women and unlike them had a chance to develop skills of rational argument and logic, something which greatly informs how she behaves in the rest of the book.

After the death of her uncle, aunt and father, she goes to live with another uncle. They keep table with Mr Francis, our William Godwin stand-in and Mr Montague, a flighty young man who alternately flirts with her and her two cousins. She also strikes up a friendship with Mrs Harley, a widow who talks repeatedly about her wonderful son. Emma falls in love with these stories and the picture of him kept in the woman’s house. 

In a rare exciting scene in the novel, she is summoned by Mrs Harley who is sick. Mr Montague accompanies her out of gallantry and they rush off in a carriage that bumps into a figure on the road and starts to teeter. Mr Montague leaps out the carriage to save his own skin and is run over by a back wheel, then the whole thing overturns. Emma is okay and takes off the man who was bumped to nurse him back to health. Of course he is Mrs Harley’s perfect son, Augustus. As he heals she spends time with him and he teaches her, she falls even more in love but although he is kind and seems to love her, he just won’t commit.

This is where the real love letters come into play. It’s interesting that in the novel, Harley has a very good reason he can’t commit to her (and a deathbed confession of love). In reality, the recipient just wasn’t that into her and it’s easy to see why.

The first letter is excusable, it’s a gushing declaration of love that details all the ways in which she thinks he is wonderful and offering her complete devotion in return. I am certainly guilty of sending such an embarrassing letter to someone who didn’t reciprocate and was probably turned off. What I didn’t do, was follow it up with a series of increasingly long, dull and bludgeoning series of letters, which is exactly what Emma Courtney does and Mary Hays did. 

If these really are versions of love letters she sent, then they are the most astonishingly wrong-headed, passion-killing love letters of all time. They veer between the oddly boastful (“I would give myself to you - the gift is not worthless.”) to the knuckle-gnawingly pedantic. The worst example is one where she lists the four main reasons he may not want to enter into a relationship with her and uses facts and logic to take apart those reasons. I can see her angle, to show that she’s not like other girls, that she can wield a logical argument but it is so leaden, so dull, there’s no twinkling of fun or pleasure. I’m not saying women should pretend to be bimbos to win men, only that even in the eighteenth century (or especially in, if you’ve read much around it) there’s an element of romantic intercourse in which both parties try and please the other. The love letters are ultimate passion killers. 

They are also book killers, any momentum is ground to a halt for a hundred pages and the parts linking her letters only talk of depressive lethargy. She’s very good at the details, talking about how she moved “restless and dissatisfied, from seat to seat.” When I went through a depressive phase on leaving university, I called this restlessness ‘moop’ and made a video to show it.

 

After a long period of depression and empty philosophising, she finds out the reason he can’t respond. Then the plot kicks into high gear; in 30 pages she becomes bankrupt, marries a second best and has an uneasy marriage as a result, is cheated on, there’s also infanticide and suicide - then the book ends. Had the love letters been omitted and this material been explored, it could have been a really interesting, dark novel but they weren’t and it isn’t.

In some ways the book is like an earlier By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept but if the passions of that book been funnelled through a university logic class. It’s turgid and awkward and really only interesting for how it was written than what was written.

As a complete aside, this is possibly the third Oxford World’s Classics edition of a novel I’ve read recently that seems a little sloppy in the editing. In this case, the text seems to have been (digitally?) converted from an older print copy and on three occasions the long ’s’ has been converted into an ‘f’. This means at a critical point at the novel, a character lets out ‘convulsive fobs’.

Brothers of the Quill by Norma Clarke at the Dr Johnson Reading Circle

This month Dr Johnson’s Reading Circle met with Norma Clarke to discuss her book about Oliver Goldsmith and his fellow Grub Street writers. Like many of the writers we’ve met before, Norma told us that she hadn’t revisited the book since it was released and being asked to speak to the group gave her the courage to do so. 

The book seeks to explore Oliver Goldsmith in context as an Irish-immigrant writer for hire and to use him as a way to ‘pay attention to the way cultural factors affect writers’ from within the big system of print and print culture that he and others were caught in. It’s less a biography and more of a sociological exploration. Goldsmith isn’t the bumbling ‘poor Goldsmith’ of Boswell’s writing, nor is he the unworldly innocent as he appears in the Victorian imagination: he is a canny player with a keen sense of what his audience wants to read.

It is Goldsmith’s talent, his ability to create quality work fast and in a range of styles and genres that allowed him to ascend in the writersphere. He never fully left the grind of writing behind him, but as the book points out, nor did Joshua Reynolds leave the grind of daily painting. Goldsmith’s reputation for foolishness and awkwardness seem to come partly from his efforts to negotiate the minefield of respect and reputation that was the shifting literary market at the time. No supporters of patrons, he took one in Nugent. A railer against the anonymous compilers and compendium creators of his time, the vast body of his work consists of compilations of histories. He wrote a novel with a seemingly innocent tone which has all sorts of barbs buried in it where the moral at the end is spoken by a conman. 

What’s more, he longed to please and amuse, as a writer and as a person. He may have had strong views about the situation of Ireland and the Irish, about the evils of slavery or the corruption of luxury - but he was not going to risk the enjoyment of his reader to create haranguing works. He was also prepared to tell jokes at his own expense, jokes that people like Boswell (who could never have told a joke against himself) didn’t understand.

If Goldsmith was a man of contradictions, he was one living in an age of contradiction. The rich and the poor moved through the same streets, MPs fighting for civil liberty at home fought for slavery abroad, Grub Street filled pages with works both ephemeral and eternal. Whether he was drinking with Samuel Derrick (editor of Dryden’s work and a popular ‘What Prostitute?’ guide), or he was secretly writing scripts for masques at Mrs Cornelys (love of Casanova, exclusive club owner and eventual donkey-milk street seller), Goldsmith navigated an unstable world with relative success.

Certainly more successfully than fellow Irish writer, Jack Pilkington. Son of the infamous Laetitia (subject of another book by Norma Clarke), he had helped her edit the last volumes of her tell-all memoirs (Laetitia’s rather than Norma’s, that is - although Norma recently published her own wonderful memoir, Not Speaking) and decided to write one of his own. He built up an impressive list of subscribers, partly by threatening to expose those who didn’t subscribe within the pages of the book. Shortly after the book was released, he ran to Europe to escape creditors and never came back. 

Brothers of the Quill also included some of the most interesting discussions of slavery the Reading Circle has had in some time, as it presented the topic from many different angles. Goldsmith himself was against slavery, but he wasn’t against receiving gifts and support from Robert Nugent the MP of Bristol who defended the trade that supported so much of his constituency. Then there was James Grainger, another Irish writer who went to St Kitts where he worked as a plantation manager and doctor. He wrote The Sugar Cane, a West Indian georgic poem which raises small questions about slavery but ultimately can’t see a way without it. Smollett, the writer of Roderick Random and Humphry Clinker (which the Reading Circle read in 2019) could set himself up as a gentleman writer on the funds of his wife, a Jamaican heiress.

As well as providing a more human Goldsmith who is more than a fool with a golden pen, as well as providing different ways of looking at how writers were shaped by their circumstances, the book is also a fount of so many of those little anecdotes that remind me of why I love the London of eighteenth-century writers. Whether it’s Paul Hiffernan being robbed by a man he’s just resuscitated from the gallows, Derrick being put up at a friend’s and having nowhere to sleep but in a cot with his feet poking out, or Richard Pockrich with his musical glasses - there’s always an outrageous story lurking round the corner. We were entertained and informed and the evening was a fast-paced and lively one and we all thoroughly enjoyed meeting Norma Clarke.