One of the critics who suspects that Jane Austen took the surname of Mrs Norris in Mansfield Park from Captain Robert Norris, “a hateful slave-trading author” (Devoney Looser, December 12, 2025), is John Wiltshire (see his magisterial Cambridge Edition of Mansfield Park, p. xlvi).
As to Mary Bennet, now amazingly a candidate for rehabilitation, I well remember John reading out Mary’s response to Mr Collins’s letter announcing his arrival at Longbourn: “In point of composition … the letter does not seem defective. The idea of the olive branch is not new, yet it is well expressed”. Mary, John ruefully admitted, is the academic in the room – eager to parade her learning, completely missing the point.
But, if I can continue to play the role of Mary for a moment, on the question of Austen’s influence on George Eliot, the subject of Edward Whitley’s book in the review, is it possible that Eliot drew on Mr Collins in her portrait of Mr Casaubon? Mr Collins, proposing in person to Elizabeth:
Almost as soon as I entered the house I singled you out as the companion of my future life. But before I am run away with my feelings … perhaps it will be advisable for me to state my reasons for marrying … My reasons for marrying are, first …
Mr Casaubon, proposing by letter to Dorothea:
I am not, I trust, mistaken in the recognition of some deeper correspondence than that of date in the fact that a consciousness of need in my own life had arisen contemporaneously with the possibility of my becoming acquainted with you … in the first hour of meeting you, I had an impression of your eminent and perhaps exclusive fitness to supply that need… and each succeeding observation has given the impression an added depth by convincing me more emphatically of that fitness which I had preconceived …
Both men are mansplaining narcissists, though there are important differences: Mr Collins is a figure of fun, no less dangerous for that; Mr Casaubon, also dangerous, the near-destroyer of Dorothea, is a tragic character. I apologize if this is well known, and to the author of the book under review if he mentions it.
Iain Topliss
La Trobe University, Melbourne
Ludwig Wittgenstein
I wonder how Nigel Warburton, reviewing my biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein (December 26), managed to conclude that the man was a generous patron of the arts. When Wittgenstein unburdened himself of his vast fortune in 1919, he did not “mak[e] sure that much of it went to artists, musicians, philosophers and architects”. As my book explains, he gave all of it to three of his equally rich siblings. He had on one occasion given some money to artists and the like, but also ten times more than that to the Austrian army for a huge mortar that was never built.
Speaking of generosity, your reviewer takes me to task for scarcely mentioning Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein or two other books “on which this one is partly built”. If he had read the footnotes instead of glancing at the index, he would have found records of the instances in which I relied on those books or on any of the many English and German sources to emerge in the thirty-five years that have passed since Monk’s fine work.
Anthony Gottlieb
New York
Ice
Sophie Pinkham’s review of the new English translation of the Polish writer Jacek Dukaj’s novel Ice (December 12) describes a story the premiss of which bears striking similarities to Vladimir Sorokin’s Ice trilogy of novellas (Ice, Bro and 23,000, published 2002, 2004 and 2005 in Russian; English translation 2011): namely, continent-wide supernatural consequences in the wake of a fictional scientific expedition to the very real gigantic impact crater that appeared suddenly in Tunguska, Siberia, in 1908.
In Sorokin’s version, the crater marks the landing spot of a concatenation of gnostic spirits from a distant galaxy who distribute themselves into the bodies of 23,000 humans and, once activated by a hammer blow from a fellow spirit, ally themselves with darker Nazi and Soviet political powers in their goal to reunite in 100 years and leave the prison of this planet and their hated flesh behind. With its echoes of Vladimir Nabokov’s The Gift and artful imitation of the conventions of the nineteenth-century Russian novel, this fantastical fable of twentieth-century history unfolds as a young man joins a scientific expedition to Siberia, only to discover that he, too, is possessed by one of the gnostic invaders.
All my online search for Sorokin’s possible influences on Dukaj managed to reveal was the disquieting number of misreads the Russian writer’s novels generated in AI and human reviewers alike. In an interview on the Bloomsbury website, Dukaj acknowledges as his sole influence an article by the Polish philosopher Tadeusz Kotarbiński, followed by a further determination that the ideas powering his novel could only be cast in the mould of a nineteenth-century Russian novel.
Even though it’s likely that the plethora of esoteric legends surrounding the Tunguska event, along with its approaching centenary in 2008, inspired these two authors independently of each other, I can’t help wondering if the collective of extraterrestrial gnostic wraiths who made their debut in Sorokin’s Ice may not have thrown off their detested flesh suits only to find themselves transformed into Dukaj’s magical element, “tungetitum”.
Victoria Nelson
Berkeley CA
Quantum 2.0
In Jim Al-Khalili’s otherwise excellent review of Paul Davies’s Quantum 2.0 (December 12), he unfortunately glides over a significant error on page 61. Davies claims that the Industrial Revolution “stemmed from a debate among physicists” over whether “heat is an invisible fluid or microscopic motion”, and that “clarifying this relationship led to the formulation of thermodynamics and thence to the invention of the steam engine”. This is wrong on timing, causation and sequence: Davies has the story almost exactly backwards.
The Industrial Revolution was a long structural transformation driven by mutually reinforcing innovations: mechanized production and factory organization, new labour disciplines, widening markets and falling transport costs (turnpikes, canals, railways), underpinned by expanding credit and insurance. Its protagonists were empiricists and practical improvers, fuelled by profit and competitive advantage, not by the application of theory. Abraham Darby’s coke-smelted iron at Coalbrookdale (1709) provided a key material base; Richard Arkwright’s Cromford mill (1771), the progenitor of the factory system, was water-powered; and cotton depended on Britain’s already mature maritime and financial networks, an existing colonial political and economic apparatus, and slavery.
Thomas Newcomen’s “fire engines” were in use from 1712, and for James Watt – especially once partnered with Matthew Boulton – the commercial prize was cheaper power deployable beyond water sites and scalable across mines, mills and the new industrial towns. Watt’s key patent of 1769 is explicitly “a method of lessening the consumption of steam and fuel in fire-engines”: a coal-saving redesign rooted in observation and engineering practice, certainly informed by Joseph Black’s work on latent and specific heat. But Davies’s “debate among physicists” belongs later: Count Rumford and Humphry Davy’s friction work dates to the 1790s; Nicolas Carnot’s Réflexions appears in 1824; James Joule’s work–heat equivalence is in the 1840s; and Rudolf Clausius and Baron Kelvin formalize thermodynamics in the 1850s. The caloric vs motion controversy belongs to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, not to Watt’s 1760s. Thermodynamics helped to theorize critical aspects of the industrializing world; it did not ignite it.
Stephen Feber
London E3
In Jim Al-Khalili’s review of Paul Davies’s Quantum 2.0, we are told how quantum sensors help in analysing certain neurological disorders such as autism, epilepsy and dementia. That is indeed useful, but a far cry from Al-Khalili’s scary claim that quantum sensors “can read your thoughts”.
Even if a systematic correlation exists between particular thoughts and certain neurological patterns, to reach the (un)happy state of thoughts-reading, experimenters need to build up a data bank by having numerous participants reveal their thoughts while neural activities are monitored. Human dignity and relationships, though, surely require people to keep many of their thoughts to themselves, so let us resist the temptation to participate in such data-building or, if we must participate, at least jumble our thoughts.
Peter Cave
London W1
Personal pronouns
Liliane Haegeman (Letters, December 12) draws attention to how Agatha Christie sometimes omitted subject pronouns as a way of styling her characters. Identifying Hercule Poirot as an exception in this regard, she points out that Poirot’s use of English is heavily influenced by French, in which such omission is not likely to occur.
In fact, Christie’s characterization of Poirot goes beyond this; another result of applying French grammatical rules to English leads to the detective’s overuse of reflexive pronouns, inserting them inappropriately where they do not belong. French, like other Romance languages, makes extensive use of reflexive verbs, while English verbs indicate when somebody is both subject and object through the addition of reflexive pronouns (myself, yourself, etc). Both English and French students frequently struggle with reflexive structures that operate in a different fashion to those they are accustomed to, so Poirot’s urging “Do not disquiet yourself” cannot be an uncommon error.
Christie, who spent two years at school in Paris, would have been well aware of the comical, sometimes puzzling outcome of word-for-word translation from one’s mother tongue, and employs this effect to maintain the “foreign” aspect of Poirot’s speech through his striving for precision. In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, for example, he says “You mock yourself at me”, where the correct phrase would be “You’re making fun of me”. It would be easy to mistake such errors as a cartoonish trope to designate a foreigner with a shaky grasp of English, whereas in reality they reflect Christie’s skilful character development. Those with an awareness of the idiosyncrasies of different languages are likely to find that in examining Poirot’s idiolect, they may add a whole new level of interest to their reading.
Rory McDowall Clark
Hastings, East Sussex
The US Supreme Court
I certainly appreciated Lawrence Douglas’s essay about the sorry state of the current US Supreme Court (November 14). But I would caution against casting the current moment as a declension, and against romanticizing a court “graced in yesteryear”, as Alastair Conan put it (Letters, November 28). This is the same august body, after all, that ruled in Dred Scott that Black Americans had no legal existence at all (1857); made “separate but equal” racial segregation the law of the land (1896); gave states the right to forcibly sterilize women in 1927; and ratified Franklin Roosevelt’s internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans, roughly two-thirds of them US citizens, in its Korematsu decision in 1944.
Few Americans beyond Tucker Carlson and J. D. Vance would defend those decisions today, and I suspect that subsequent generations will look back on the decisions of the Roberts court with a similar queasiness and shame. But the history of Supreme Court decisions over 200 years is hardly an uninterrupted and triumphal march towards fairness and justice.
Steven Conn
Miami University, Oxford OH
On Pedantry
Peter Thonemann’s review of Arnoud S. Q. Visser’s history of pedantry (December 12) raises some important points for academics trying to get by in the contemporary university. As someone who has spent a professional lifetime working in fields in which a highly curated neuroatypicality has passed itself off as academic rigour, I have become acutely sensitive to the line between having a commitment and having a condition. Much of my recent professional re-education has centred on dealing with intractable colleagues who in a past life might simply have been dismissed as pedants, but who are now covered by The Americans with Disabilities Act. Should we consider pedantry in the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders? Shakespeare’s Holofernes and Professor Thonemann’s colleague “whose conversation consists, in its entirety, of interesting etymologies” might merit a syndrome. Thonemann writes: “The psychopathology of pedantry would be a fascinating topic for another day”. May I suggest that it become part of the diversity training for aspiring academics?
Seth Lerer
University of California at San Diego
Lucio Fumi asks (Letters, December 26) why so many Britons and Americans do not realize that media and data are plural words. The answer is surely that they have had no classical education.
As the BBC’s first dedicated media correspondent, I was always aware that my job title included a plural, and always wrote my scripts accordingly. But then I had once been forced to take Latin O-level. Many people working in the media sector evidently had no grounding in Latin, for they thought the word was singular (“radio is a very intimate media …”).
The same seemed to be true of the wider population. So when it came to other -um words derived from Latin, such as stadium, I avoided a grammatically correct plural on the grounds that many would find a word like stadia baffling. Better to add an s to the -um and risk the wrath of the pedants: at least everyone would know what I meant.
The pedants duly obliged, incidentally. One anonymous correspondent was particularly offensive. I have waited more than thirty years for this opportunity to reply.
Nick Higham
London N16
BC and AD
I enjoyed Robert Bartlett’s article on the invention of the modern system for dating the years, “Dennis’s dating application” (November 28). It might be worth adding that because they were using Roman numerals, which do not allow a zero, the year AD1 follows directly after 1BC. There is no “Year dot”. I think it is impossible to put this right.
Robin Minney
Durham
Authors’ archives
Michael Alec Rose (Letters, December 26) is right to say that it’s perfectly possible to consult material at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, without being murdered. Awarded a fellowship in 2017, I survived to tell the tale. Nevertheless, researchers at the Center are informed, after the edicts on pens and water bottles and dirty hands, that it is forbidden to store a handgun in the lockers.
Oliver Soden
London W4
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