Do not speak ill of the dead: so runs a familiar injunction, often recalled when it is already too late, and ill has been spoken. And sometimes the dead themselves set a terrible example.
Consider the case of the Sunday Times critic John Carey, who died in December. There is much to admire in Carey’s reviewing, as with his scholarly work on John Milton, his critical books about John Donne and William Golding, and so on. The internet, alas – specifically, Matthew Lyons’s newsletter on Substack, The Broken Compass – has also reminded us of the time when Carey mauled Rosemary Sullivan’s biography of Elizabeth Smart.
Smart’s writing, Carey judged, “is not much known, and, to be honest, does not deserve to be”. Despite her social and financial advantages, he added, “she was not very good at anything”. Carey couldn’t resist a swipe at Smart’s sometime partner, the poet George Barker: “a minor English poet who enjoyed some vogue in the 1930s … [who] is, one gathers, still alive”. The review appeared on October 27, 1991. Barker died later that day.
Already forced to apologize for his harshness, the reviewer was cornered, literally, at the Sunday Times Christmas party by Barker’s daughter, Raffaella, and widow, Elspeth: as they approached him, Lyons writes, “Carey panicked and tried to clamber over a nearby table to escape. Unfortunately, on the other side of the table was a wall”. Some displeasure, it seems, was then “forcefully conveyed”.
On Substack, Mr Lyons’s account has rightly attracted many comments. Among them is one from Raffaella Barker herself (“it’s excellent to read and remember all the above”), recalling the “savage pleasure” of hunting a critic. Collectively, meanwhile, considerable nostalgia is here expressed for Carey-esque bluntness – for which the “pretty milky and bland” nature of modern reviewing is a pallid replacement. May we call that a draw?
What’s wrong with the theatre nowadays? Its “overtly political” plays, apparently. In some people’s eyes (and as the Telegraph reported last month), London has had quite enough dramatic productions about “transgender identity, the Palestine-Israel conflict, the founding of the NHS and a non-binary Joan of Arc” – meaning Otherland and Christmas Day at the Almeida Theatre, at Nye at the National Theatre and I, Joan at Shakespeare’s Globe, respectively. Enter Old Sovereign, a publisher of classic literature in the form of volumes hand-bound in leather, in Edinburgh, to remedy the situation.
As a counter to what its director calls theatrical “navel-gazing”, Old Sovereign wants to “take back the stage from the agitprop” and replace it with “a more serious form that is focused on the stage as a place to perform art”. To that revolutionary end, the publisher has launched a new competition, worth $2,500 to the winner. (Why the prize money is given in dollars on the Old Sovereign website, we couldn’t say.) Non-navel-gazers are invited to submit the first act of a play inspired by the Lives of Plutarch – “which was a major source of inspiration for William Shakespeare”, the Telegraph adds. Any aspect of Plutarch. “No matter how small an anecdote, we want you to turn it into an entire world of human life and emotion.”
The new competition is modestly named the Great Panathenaea, in homage to the ancient Athenian festival. It will culminate in two finalists’ entries being performed at a London venue by a theatre company called the Base, which, according to its website, stages “readings of fascinating plays from the western cannon [sic] with a response from a renowned thinker”. The winner will then be “acclaimed on the theatre floor by the entire audience of a large London stage and crowned with the laurels of victory”. Where all this will take place is yet to be confirmed, but we’re guessing that it won’t be the Almeida, the National Theatre, or Shakespeare’s Globe.
The deadline for entries to the Great Panathenaea is August 3, and further details appear on Old Sovereign’s website. The winner will also receive a book deal, although would-be restorers of the stage should be sure to read the small print, in which that dangerous word “perpetuity” figures. For their part, theatre audiences are advised to avoid all those overtly political plays as best they can. You know the ones we mean – plays like Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, or Coriolanus …
Held in a private collection, the oil painting of which a detail is reproduced here is a double portrait: on the left is Mary “Mamey” Dickens; on the right is Catherine “Katey” Dickens. These two children of Charles and Catherine Dickens are here seen in the conservatory of Gad’s Hill Place, the author’s Kentish mansion. The unknown artist is thought to be someone in Katey’s circle of artist friends.
This painting goes on display for the first time at the Charles Dickens Museum this month. Extra/Ordinary Women runs from February 11 until September 6; it celebrates the real-life women in Dickens’s life as well as his fictional ones (such as Agnes Wickfield in David Copperfield, inspired by Angela Burdett-Coutts, and Bella Wilfer in Our Mutual Friend, inspired by Katey). Visitors should also look out for the silver teaspoon that Dickens’s mother, Elizabeth, is said to have pawned regularly, in order to pay off the family’s debts.
Some dates for fans of the redoubtable Oxford Bibliographical Society and its regular series of talks: February 12 (when Francesca Galligan will speak about “reconstructing an Elizabethan library”); March 12 (Sarah Cusk and Sophie Floate, “Printed books from the libraries of some early Oxford humanists”); May 21 (Alice Wickenden, “The ‘sticky’ materiality of early-modern book provenances”); and June 11 (Borna Izadpanah, “Printing the Qur’an across empires”). These talks start at 5:15pm; venues vary, so check the OBS website (oxbibsoc.org.uk) for further details. Everyone is welcome, we gather, either in person or on Zoom.
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