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piano   Reference library

Oxford Reader's Companion to George Eliot

...played willingly for G. H. *Lewes , for his family, and for friends, and was a ready accompanist. For George Eliot, to have a piano was a necessity. She hired one for her own use while staying with the *D'Albert Durades in *Geneva , and, upon arriving at John *Chapman 's establishment in the Strand in January 1851 , immediately hired one for her room. After she had incensed both Chapman's wife and mistress by giving him a private Mozart recital, a second, household piano was hired. A new grand piano which George Eliot had chosen with care in 1861 was...

travel and exploration   Reference library

F. S. Schwarzbach

Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens

...pursue careers: see children of Dickens ; several characters in David Copperfield become successful colonists in Australia.) Often, these motives generated linked actions and effects: scientific exploration would pave the way for commercial exploitation, followed by the establishment of emigrant settlements, all under the protection of the Royal Navy and Army should force prove necessary to control indigenous populations (as it often did). Dickens was no great supporter of imperial expansion, arguing that domestic needs must be addressed before wasting...

marriage and divorce   Reference library

Oxford Reader's Companion to Trollope

...antecedents. This is why the people of Basle-hurst ( RR ) caution Dorothea Prime against marriage to Mr Prong , because they fear he will run away with the money once he has married her. There were, however, ways to circumvent the financial stringencies of the law, in the establishment of settlements and trusts, and the rich always had access to good advice on such services. In Barchester Towers Mrs Arabin has kept control of the money left to her by her first husband, and Lady Glencora has all the spending of her enormous wealth, a significant issue...

London   Reference library

Oxford Reader's Companion to Hardy

...Ruined Maid’, also dated 1866 , links with humour and even cynicism the city that was his adopted home and the rural world he had left behind. The Life admits to his having ‘once at least visited’ Evans's supper-rooms … in an underground hall in Covent Garden' ( LW 43)—an establishment with a somewhat louche reputation—and the later poem ‘Reminiscences of a Dancing Man’ recalls the celebrated dance-halls, the Argyll Rooms and the Cremorne Gardens. As the Life reminds us ( LW 43), the London of Hardy's youth was still *Dickens 's London: Our Mutual...

Household Words   Reference library

John Drew

Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens

...ever after be ‘familiar in his mouth as household words’ ( Henry V , IV. iii). Announcements of the journal's launch appeared in the national press from January 1850 , and premises were leased at No 16 Wellington Street North, in the Covent Garden area of London for the establishment of a Household Words office. Although the rooms where the staff worked were spartan enough, Dickens also had at his disposal three upper-storey bedrooms, two bow-windowed sitting-rooms, and a kitchen, scullery, and wine cellar, which were fitted up for his occasional...

publishing, printing, bookselling: modes of production   Reference library

Robert Patten

Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens

...book publisher, Richard Bentley , combined a number of the advantages separately represented in earlier firms. Though by 1837 Bentley was only in publishing, from 1819 to 1829 he had been in partnership with his elder brother, Samuel , who owned a substantial printing establishment in Dorset Street. Samuel continued to print many of Bentley's publications, including the magazine he initiated in January 1837 , Bentley's Miscellany , and portions of the three-volume edition of Oliver Twist . That Richard Bentley owned a periodical gave him access to...

Dickens, Charles   Reference library

Paul Schlicke and John Drew

Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens

...case the intense awareness which he possessed of his presence in the public eye, as transmitted by the medium of his writings and performances, was in many ways a defining influence. His remarks about the dignity of literature as a calling, and his emphasis as narrator on the establishment of intimate relations with his readers suggest a man whose ideal of public life was uniquely realized by his position as a popular periodical author, whose works were in circulation, month after month, for over thirty years. Nevertheless, the evidence which emerges from...

London   Reference library

Andrew Sanders, Andrew Sanders, Andrew Sanders, Andrew Sanders, Paul Schlicke, David Parker, Andrew Sanders, David Parker, Andrew Sanders, Andrew Sanders, Anne Humpherys, and David Parker

Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens

...River’, ‘The Steam Excursion’). As the population of London burgeoned, so too did the variety and extent of its provision of entertainment. Although no new theatres were built in the metropolis between 1843 and 1866 , for most of Dickens's lifetime there were about 30 establishments licensed for theatrical entertainment—a figure which does not include private theatres, penny gaffs, song and supper clubs, and taverns in which entertainers performed. Dickens, who went to the theatre nearly every night as a young man, knew them all and wrote numerous drama...

Hudson, W[illiam] H[enry] (1841–1922)   Reference library

Oxford Reader’s Companion To Conrad

...Graham . After their first contact in March 1899 , he and Conrad met periodically—mainly in Garnett and Mont Blanc circles—and perhaps shared a feeling of being at the periphery of the Edwardian literary establishment. Conrad read and admired Hudson’s work, had a special liking for Idle Days in Patagonia ( 1893 ), and remained a permanent admirer of his style. In A Glance at Two Books’ ( Last Essays ), he reviewed Green Mansions ( 1904 ) in the year of its publication, comparing Hudson to Turgenev and admiring ‘the presence of a fine and...

reading   Reference library

Oxford Reader’s Companion To Conrad

...Gide , Valéry Larbaud , and, in later life, Marcel Proust. For further details on Conrad’s reading of French writers, see Hervouet, especially 233–56. When Conrad the apprentice writer gave up the sea and settled permanently in Britain in 1894 , he was immensely fortunate in the kind of initial foothold he secured in the literary establishment. Had he attempted to make his way into the profession via Grub Street, he would almost certainly not have survived. In the event, he was taken up, and his path eased, by several influential literary friends— Edward...