Books To Make Space For On The Bookshelf: John Halifax, Gentleman
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 16 March 2021
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dinah Mulock Craik achieved fame and fortune as the author of the 1856 bestselling novel John Halifax, Gentleman. New Generation Thinker Clare Walker Gore reads this rags-to-riches tale of an orphan boy who rises in the world through sheer hard work and sterling character and her essay looks at the way it encapsulates the most cherished values of its period – but, she argues, both it and the author are more subversive than they first appear. Though she was seen as an icon of the self-improving, respectable middle-classes, Craik had a colourful, often unconventional private life. She supported her husband through her writing and adopted a foundling, but was dogged by her father, who was a dissenting preacher put into debtor's prison more than once, whilst her novels explore disability, forbidden desire, familial dysfunction, and the dark side of her culture’s celebration of self-made success.
Clare Walker Gore is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year who can turn their research into radio programmes. She teaches at the University of Cambridge and is the author of Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth Century Novel.
You can hear Clare talk about this research in the Free Thinking episode Depicting Disability https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000p02b
She contributed to Radio 3's Essay Series Women Writers to Put Back on the Bookshelf profiling the author Margaret Oliphant https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000fws4
She has also written an Essay about a 19th-century tiger-hunting MP, who was born without hands and feet - Politician and Pioneer: Writing the Life of Arthur Kavanagh https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06ns10g
Producer: Emma Wallace
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps |
| 0:21.2 | it. It's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream |
| 0:26.1 | van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. I'm Claire Walker |
| 0:33.0 | Gore and in this essay episode of the Arts and Ideas podcast, I'm going to talk about one of the writers I think you should make space for on your bookshelves, |
| 0:42.5 | Dinah Mullet Crake. |
| 0:45.3 | When Dinah Crake died in 1887, |
| 0:49.0 | her widower received condolences not only from the poet laureate |
| 0:52.8 | and a host of other literary celebrities, but from |
| 0:55.7 | Queen Victoria herself. Such royal recognition was only fitting for a novelist who'd been commissioned |
| 1:02.5 | by the palace to write the official history for the Golden Jubilee that very year, and there'd |
| 1:07.8 | been nothing surprising in Her Majesty's choice of author. Though she's |
| 1:11.8 | little known today, Crake was then a household name. She had been, ever since the publication of |
| 1:17.5 | John Halifax's Gentleman in 1856, a smash hit with the public that had sold over a quarter of a million |
| 1:24.4 | copies by the turn of the century. |
| 1:28.3 | Why did this novel enjoy such spectacular success? |
| 1:32.3 | Some of Craig's jealous contemporaries declared themselves baffled by the public's enthusiasm |
| 1:38.3 | for this apparently straightforward account of its heroes rise from ragged orphan to prosperous mill owner, stable family man, |
| 1:46.8 | and universally acknowledged gentleman, as the title has it. |
| 1:51.1 | I think the secret of its success lies in how powerfully it channels one of the key narratives of |
| 1:58.1 | the 1850s, that the Industrial Revolution had made England a land |
| 2:03.1 | of opportunity where anyone could triumph through hard work and talent. Somewhere a gentleman |
| 2:09.1 | was not born but made and self-made at that. Through John's life story, the novel offers a version of English history between the 1780s and 1830s, |
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