blacking- shoe or boot polish. As a child Dickens was employed at Warren's Blacking factory. blind man's buff- popular parlor game in which the contestant is blindfolded and then must catch another player and then guess who he had caught. The game dates from ancient times. Blind man's b...
Style of speech used by a Cockney. The best known Cockney in Dickens is Samuel Pickwick's servant Sam Weller in The Pickwick Papers.Coketown - fictionalized name of the town of Preston in Lancashire.collier - ship carrying coal. constable - a British policeman appointed by the parish to keep...
undergirded my thoughts as I go about my days and provoked excellent, chewy conversations about craft and pleasure, empire and resistance. While I’m a little haunted by the violence publishers seem to be doing to the very concept of a series — claiming sequels are stand-alones, while ins...
Being more drawn to music than sports (which goes to show how skilled Kwame is at introducing a reader to unfamiliar territory),Solois my favourite of Kwame’s novels, particularly when taken in audio format, co-delivered by his musical collaborator Randy Preston. This story of a washed-up ...
Scrapbook,” http://www.fractiousfiction.com/manhattan_transfer.html. T. S. Matthews,New Republic, 25 July 1928, 259. The most famous predecessor for the “scrapbook” novel is Bram Stoker’sDracula(1897); for a literal example, seeThe Scrapbook of Frankie Prattby Caroline Preston (201...
25.Winchelseaby Alex Preston (2022) – Library, England, 18th century, NA 26.Fortuneby Amanda Smyth (2021) – OC, Trinidad, 20th century (1920s), NA 27.The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesleyby Sean Lusk (2022) – NG, England, Turkey, 18th century, NA, magical realism ...
Humans and domestic animals make up 96% of the mass of the world’s mammals. The outlook for wildlife remains terrible, writes philosopher Christopher J. Preston. But he describes signs of hope in his well-travelled, thoughtful study of recoveries. He visits farmland, grassland, rivers, forest...