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...English Bible Charles Dickens and his readers Jane Austen’s readers A famous novel and its readers: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) Childhood reading in the 1870s and 1880s: the recollections of Molly Hughes Reading and World War I Reading places Reading while travelling Samuel Pepys: diarist, book collector and reader Robert Louis Stevenson’s reading Reading...

...English people were importunate for dramatic entertainments. The court took offence easily at political allusions, and attempted to suppress them. The Puritans, a growing and energetic party, and the religious among the Anglican church, would suppress them. But the people wanted them. Inn-yards, houses without roofs, and extemporaneous enclosures at country fairs, were...

...English inn, such as I did not so nearly realize anywhere else. The ideal was a little impaired by the electric light in our bedrooms, but it was not a very brilliant electric light, and there was a damp cold in the corridors which allowed no doubt of its genuineness. In the dining-room, which was also the reading-room, there was an admirable image of a fire in the grate,...

...English summer has suffered often if not severe discouragements. It has really only two months out of the year to itself, and even July and August are not always constant to it. To be sure, their defection cannot spoil it, but they dispose it to the slights of September in a dejection from which there is no rise to those coquetries with October known to our own summer....

...English, whose ignorance of black people shocked me. (Selvon in Nasta and Rutherford, 1995, pp. 58–9) It was as a consequence of encountering migrants from other West Indian islands that Selvon for the first time became ‘aware of the richness and diversity of Caribbean speech’ (Sandhu, 2003, p. 145), an important factor in the writing strategies adopted in The...

...What does our interest in writers' belongings, manuscripts or other artefacts say about us? In this short film, Nicola Watson, Professor of English Literature at The Open University, gives a brief summary of some of the popular artefacts that people have visited at writers' houses since the phenomenon began... The Secret Life of Books - Find out more about the series....