In this issue, Jeanette Winterson talks with Jane Davis about her recently published memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?,  (Jonathan Cape, October 2011)  a title which is taken from the question Jeanette’s stepmother asked her when as a teenager she decided to leave home so as to live with the woman she loved. In this searching interview she talks movingly about the book’s main subject matter, her suicidal breakdown and the search for her birth mother that followed on from it. Extracts from the book are interspersed throughout making a dazzling introduction to the book and a valuable insight into this author.

We have fine poetry from Peter Robinson and Julie-Ann Rowell, and Kate Miller is the latest to take us behind the scenes of her poetry in ‘Poet on her Work’.

In fiction, Gabriel Josipovici gives us a Christmas story with a twist, while in ‘Shine’, B. J. Epstein writes a modern Cinderella story. Keeping up the festive spirit Ian McMillan takes us back to his early Christmases. To help parents and our readers with young friends, we recommend seasonal books for children of all ages. Who could resist this face?

We have a diverse assortment of subjects in our essays, with Brigid Lowe Crawford talking about taking time out from work to raise her family and the objections she meets from disapproving (mostly male) former colleagues. Malcolm Bennett writes on ear wax and Alan Wall continues his series on the oddities of language.

Click here to buy a copy for yourself and one as the perfect Christmas present for the literature-lover in your life…   

Buck’s Quiz 28
Be It Ever So Humble…

1.      ‘Home is the sailor, home from the sea/ And the hunter home from the hill’. Whose lines are these?
2.      Who owned and lived in Manderley?
3.      What was the name of the house bequeathed to Margaret Schlegel?
4.      Which author lived at 48 Doughty Street?
5.      Which gentleman of fortune came to live at Netherfield Park?
6.      Which fictitious diarist lived in Brickfield Terrace, Holloway?
7.      Who was the butler at Darlington Hall?
8.      Who lived at Wragby Hall with her husband who had been disabled in WW1?
9.      Where did Isabella and Edgar Linton live?
10.    Who lived in Abbots Ford until his death in 1832?
11.    Whose address was 17 Gough Square from 1748-1759?
12.    Naulakha was the name of which English author’s home in Vermont?
13.    Where did the Marchmain family live?
14.    Where did Ada Clare and her companion Esther go to live?
15.    In which play does the heroin, Nora forge the signature of her dying father as security for a loan?
16.    On 16th June 1904, where did Leopold Bloom live?
17.    Whose aunt lived at Brinkley Court, Brinkley-cum-Snodsfield-in-the-Marsh, Nr Market Snodsbury, Worcs?
18.    Who lived in a Robin Reliant in Gloucester Crescent, Camden Town?
19.    Which 13yr old girl’s home was ‘bright orange brick, squat, lead paned baronial Gothic’ and had a fountain in the garden with ‘a half-scale reproduction of Bernini’s Triton in the Piazza Barberini in Rome’?
20.    Who sings ‘Thou thy worldly task hast done,/ Home art gone and ta’en thy wages’?

We will print the answers in a few days…

Buck’s Quiz 28
Be It Ever So Humble…

1.      ‘Home is the sailor, home from the sea/ And the hunter home from the hill’. Whose lines are these?
2.      Who owned and lived in Manderley?
3.      What was the name of the house bequeathed to Margaret Schlegel?
4.      Which author lived at 48 Doughty Street?
5.      Which gentleman of fortune came to live at Netherfield Park?
6.      Which fictitious diarist lived in Brickfield Terrace, Holloway?
7.      Who was the butler at Darlington Hall?
8.      Who lived at Wragby Hall with her husband who had been disabled in WW1?
9.      Where did Isabella and Edgar Linton live?
10.    Who lived in Abbots Ford until his death in 1832?
11.    Whose address was 17 Gough Square from 1748-1759?
12.    Naulakha was the name of which English author’s home in Vermont?
13.    Where did the Marchmain family live?
14.    Where did Ada Clare and her companion Esther go to live?
15.    In which play does the heroin, Nora forge the signature of her dying father as security for a loan?
16.    On 16th June 1904, where did Leopold Bloom live?
17.    Whose aunt lived at Brinkley Court, Brinkley-cum-Snodsfield-in-the-Marsh, Nr Market Snodsbury, Worcs?
18.    Who lived in a Robin Reliant in Gloucester Crescent, Camden Town?
19.    Which 13yr old girl’s home was ‘bright orange brick, squat, lead paned baronial Gothic’ and had a fountain in the garden with ‘a half-scale reproduction of Bernini’s Triton in the Piazza Barberini in Rome’?
20.    Who sings ‘Thou thy worldly task hast done,/ Home art gone and ta’en thy wages’?

We will print the answers in a few days…

The Untold Truth:
Poetry of the First World War

Angela Macmillan

On March 4th 2002, The Times carried an article about the proposed construction of a road in Belgium which would desecrate six First World War cemeteries. Harry Patch, aged 103, one of the very last survivors of the Great War, had not spoken of it for eighty years, but felt so strongly that the dead should be left in peace that he broke silence to tell of the deaths of his three closest comrades during the Third Battle of Ypres: ‘A shell came over and burst among us. I was wounded, it killed my three mates, although I didn’t know it at the time. Nothing was found of them, they were simply blown to pieces… I’ve never forgotten them’.

More than 200,000 British Empire soldiers died on that Belgian stretch of the Western Front. 200,000 voices forever silenced, and Harry Patch representing just one of many survivors unwilling to speak the unspeakable. The disturbance of that memory prompted this old man to give voice to untold truths at last. His simple language, made eloquent by the gravity of its subject, outlines only bare facts. The rest remains in an eighty year silence.

Many of us, if we care to look back through our family history, will find we have grandfathers, great-grandfathers, great-uncles, someone, who took part in The Great War. If we are fortunate there will be some personal, written testimony in the form of diaries, letters or notebooks but these will rarely record more than day to day concerns – the weather, the food, the waiting about, the messages of love and hope. The awful reality was rarely communicated. What many of us now know of the soldier’s experience of war comes from the literature of the time and in particular from the poets. For when the terrible enormity of actual experience goes beyond the powers of human understanding, perhaps then the only adequate response is poetry. The best of the war poets, most of whom were already writing poetry before the war, realized that the function of poetry itself had to be reconsidered in the face of experience, as Wilfred Owen famously declared in the summer of 1918 in his Preface to a book never completed:

       This book is not about heroes. English Poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War.
       Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
       My subject is War and the pity of War.
       The Poetry is in the pity.
       Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.

Poetry now had to be a response to real experience rather than an aesthetic response to the muse or to abstract ideas. At Craiglockhart, the hospital for wounded minds, Owen began to find the means to express the very thing that was threatening to silence him. Taking war as his subject, he saw how the reality of suffering forces a new imperative in the use of language:

I have made fellowships –
Untold of happy lovers in old song.
For love is not the binding of fair lips
With the soft silk of eyes that look and long,

By joy, whose ribbon slips, –
But wound with war’s hard wire whose stakes are strong;
Bound with the bandage of the arm that drips;
Knit in the webbing of the rifle-thong.

In the first five lines of this extract from ‘Apologia pro Poemate Meo’, poetic language aesthetically heightens the experience of love. But in the last three lines, in crucial reversal, it is the very experience of love that lends real significance to language of war – barbed wire, bandages, blood and guns, ultimately affirming and honouring the stronger bonds. In other words the poet does not go outside the experience in order to present it in purely poetic image or metaphor, but stays purposefully within it. This poem descends from the remote, foreign language of its title to a familiar, authentic language that all soldiers speak and comprehend.

Owen never simply abandoned the poetic tradition he knew and loved. After 1917 his poetry would assimilate to war the images and idiom of the Romantic poets. Thus ‘My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / my sense’ becomes in ‘Exposure’:

Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us…
Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent…
Low drooping flares confuse our memories of the salient…
Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous,
       But nothing happens.

The first line carries distorted echoes of a Keatsian voice and an impression of a lost fluency of language and of rhythm. Words (‘Merciless iced east’) sit uncomfortably beside one another, not only conveying the sense of unease but a refusal to let poetry betray the reality of experience. ‘Knive us’ rhymes only half-fittingly with ‘nervous’ as if language is able only partly to convey the reality of trench warfare. ‘My heart aches’ is transformed into ‘Our brains ache’ the vital difference being the movement from the subjective ‘my’ to the collective ‘our’: the we who have the experience.

Owen did not survive the war. For many of the soldiers who did, home meant the loss of that fellowship of ‘our’; they returned to their old lives only to find themselves as strangers there. From his retirement home Harry Patch’s singular, private experience is further enforced by his unusual longevity:

After I came out of the Army I never saw a war film; I never spoke of the war for 80 years. Occasionally we get 40 or 50 people here with a pianist and they sing old wartime songs. It amuses them. They don’t realise the memories they bring back to me:

Keep the Home Fires burning,
While your hearts are yearning
Though the lads are far away
They dream of home.

What ‘they’ don’t realise, of course, is the chasm of difference between the amusing songs of ‘lads’ far away, and the actual experience of that far away dream of home. ‘Exposure’ continues:

Slowly our ghosts drag home: glimpsing the sunk fires, glozed
With crusted dark-red jewels; crickets jingle there;
For hours the innocent mice rejoice: the house is theirs;
Shutters and doors, all closed: on us the doors are closed, –
                  We turn back to our dying.

Since we believe not otherwise can kind fires burn;
Nor ever suns smile true on child, or field, or fruit.

The soldiers’ glimpse of home fires being allowed to die out and of homes from which they find themselves locked out does not, paradoxically, alter their belief in sacrificing themselves in order to keep the home fires burning and they turn back in a body of ‘we’ as if instinctively to the exclusive responsibility of brothers in arms and the real business of war – the dying. This poem is hard to understand, for what it says seems not to make sense. Yet war does not make sense and the best of the war poets realise that paradox and contradiction are their very subjects. If things are inconsistent and confused then poetry can respond to the inconsistency and confusion not explaining, not justifying, not trying to resolve ambiguities, but creatively expressing the otherwise inexpressible. Nor should poetry be expected to provide answers. Owen’s questions reveal others behind and ahead, as if all that questioning can do is breed more questions simultaneously bewildering for the soldier and powerful for the warning poet:

But what say such as from existence’ brink
Ventured but drave too swift to sink,
The few who rushed in the body to enter hell,
And there out-fiending all its fiends and flames
With superhuman inhumanities,
Long-famous glories, immemorial shames –
And crawling slowly back, have by degrees
Regained cool peaceful air in wonder –
Why speak not they of comrades that went under?

(‘Spring Offensive’)

It is a mistake to think of Wilfred Owen as simply speaking for the common soldier, who cannot or will not speak. What he does instead is to incorporate the question ‘Why speak not they’ into the theme of his poetry. The unanswered question is poised at the very end of this poem of Apocalyptic vision. Its position on ‘existence’ brink’ suggests it is finally unanswerable and yet in asking it at all, various and multiple possible reasons ‘why’ echo in the answering silence: the gulf between those who had the experience and those who did not: the impossibility of humanly representing the inhumanity of war, of speaking the unspeakable, of making sense of the senseless; a callous and indifferent world: the silent and unprotesting ranks of soldiers; the fear; the shame; the love for comrades.

In September 1918 Wilfred Owen sent a draft of ‘Spring Offensive’ to Siegfried Sassoon saying ‘Is this worth going on with? I don’t want to write anything to which a soldier would say “No Compris!” In 2002, is Harry Patch’s eighty-year silence his validation?

The Junction tells the story of Captain Peter Scott, paralysed and dying of a nervous disorder, just as the First World War is coming to an end. After losing consciousness in the Mawdsley Hospital Peter wakes to find himself in a mysterious village called The Junction, where he encounters intense recollections from his past. Curiously, the inhabitants of The Junction seem to have been expecting him…

In Mary’s own words:

The thought behind this story came to me when I was in the Wallasey tunnel, on my way to one of my Get into Reading groups, in the summer of 2005. I don’t know where it came from, or what to call it – an intuition, delusion, realisation or fantasy.

The idea was that if there was an afterlife, most of the stuff that I think of as me wouldn’t get there. Even the most spiritual-seeming parts of myself are rooted in the psycho-physical being that’s going to end when I die. If there’s anything more to me…would I even know what it was?

The good thing about writing fiction is that it means you don’t have to translate ideas like that into a world view or religious belief – you can just make a story around it. Originally The Junction was a 70,000 word long novel. In 2007, Phil Davis asked me to turn it into a three to five episode serial. At first I thought I would be able to do it by condensing and cutting. It was his advice to stop the first episode where it stops now that made me understand the whole shape of the story was going to have to change – this taught me more about plot than anything else I’d ever heard or read.

 

Download The Junction here

(You can find more information, plus how to subscribe to the magazine here.)

READING A DIFFICULT POEM
Robert Browning’s ‘Two in the Campagna’

Sarah Coley

It’s inevitable that at some point you will be faced by a poem that scares you with its remoteness and difficulty. There’s no predicting what kind of poem it will be since all readers are different, but that feeling of a mind that simply won’t grasp hold of the words should be familiar to everyone. What can you do? How can you make your mind start to work in the poem? Here’s a difficult poem to be going on with, in which the poet himself seems to be pursuing a thought or sensation that is eluding him:

Two in the Campagna

I
I wonder do you feel to-day
As I have felt, since, hand in hand,
We sat down on the grass, to stray
In spirit better through the land,
This morn of Rome and May?

II
For me, I touched a thought, I know,
Has tantalised me many times,
(Like turns of thread the spiders throw
Mocking across our path) for rhymes
To catch at and let go.

III
Help me to hold it: first it left
The yellowing fennel, run to seed
There, branching from the brickwork’s cleft,
Some old tomb’s ruin: yonder weed
Took up the floating weft,

IV
Where one small orange cup amassed
Five beetles, – blind and green they grope
Among the honey-meal, – and last
Everywhere on the grassy slope
I traced it. Hold it fast!

V
The champaign with its endless fleece
Of feathery grasses everywhere!
Silence and passion, joy and peace,
An everlasting wash of air –
Rome’s ghost since her decease.

VI
Such life there, through such length of hours,
Such miracles performed in play,
Such primal naked forms of flowers,
Such letting Nature have her way
While Heaven looks from its towers.

VII
How say you? Let us, O my dove,
Let us be unashamed of soul,
As earth lies bare to heaven above.
How is it under our control
To love or not to love?

VIII
I would that you were all to me,
You that are just so much, no more –
Nor yours, nor mine, – nor slave nor free!
Where does the fault lie? what the core
Of the wound, since wound must be?

IX
I would I could adopt your will,
See with your eyes, and set my heart
Beating by yours, and drink my fill
At your soul’s springs, – your part, my part
In life, for good and ill.

X
No. I yearn upward – touch you close,
Then stand away. I kiss your cheek,
Catch your soul’s warmth, – I pluck the rose
And love it more than tongue can speak –
Then the good minute goes.

XI
Already how am I so far
Out of that minute? Must I go
Still like the thistle-ball, no bar,
Onward, whenever light winds blow,
Fixed by no friendly star?

XII
Just when I seemed about to learn!
Where is the thread now? Off again!
The old trick! Only I discern –
Infinite passion and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.

When a poem or a book fills your head with numbing fear, it’s the whole sense that is lost – the underground impact or the precisely urgent feeling that the poem was a bid to convey. The details on the other hand stick around and look confusing. So you’re left struggling with scraps of alliteration, or rhyme, or the tense in which the poem’s written, while your more honest mind is saying that you do not know how to begin.

But there has to be a beginning. If the poem is in stanza form, it may help to give each stanza a kind of ‘chapter heading’ by taking a phrase from each verse that impulsively seems central. ‘Two in the Campagna’ could go into these headings: I. ‘Do you feel?’; II. ‘I touched a thought’; III. ‘Help me to hold it’; IV. ‘Everywhere… I traced it’, and so on. Settle quickly on the phrase and write it down, or underline it on your copy. There has to be a way to make the tangled experience manageable and direct, and to isolate patterns of thought and feeling. Look at how words that are related to one another develop. So it’s interesting here how ‘Two in the Campagna’ splits into the separate threads of ‘you’, ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘it’. There’s something dynamic or at least unequal in the relationship that the poet is trying to use to get his own mind working.

There are other things you can do, but at this stage, it’s important to say that you must trust your impulse, even if it’s an angry rejection of the poem. Your impulse came in response to the poem and it doesn’t matter if that response was conscious or instinctive, you have to take it seriously.

You might well think, ‘I don’t like this poem, it’s got too many words in it… He’s too much in his own head.’ He is thinking restlessly throughout the poem and that is striking in a poem about a love relationship. So he writes about spontaneity in a way that makes it seem not quite simple feeling: ‘How is it under our control / To love or not to love?’ Though at the same time, it does appear that it’s the simple feeling he wants. On the other hand you might react against the poet’s almost too-full responses, his ‘primal naked forms of flowers’ and his ‘Silence and passion, joy and peace, / An everlasting wash of air’. Why can’t he just say plainly what he means? That actually would be a terrific question to ask of this poem.

So let’s ask it. Why can’t he be plain? Something seems to be preventing him from saying simply what he wants to say. It’s a rare and fleetingly private thought and yet it’s as if he needs the other person to see and feel it too in order to be sure of it. ‘I wonder do you feel to-day… For me, I touched a thought, I know, / Has tantalised me many times…’ It is exactly that appeal to be understood, but contradictorily, the phrase itself evades sense. He uses the physical word ‘touched’ to show direct contact with mental stuff, and only recovers the language of mind, ‘I know’, when he’s talking about the earlier remembered encounters with the thought. It’s as if the sense of the idea were too fresh to sustain knowledge. It’s only when it belongs in the past that he can talk securely about it. He can’t be plain because the idea is too young or too full of its own energy to settle into words, and his language – for all its zest – comes helplessly after the event.

That’s better isn’t it? He’s not being willfully obscure but struggling to entice the experience into words. In many ways, it feels as if the outward relationship between ‘you’ and ‘I’ is really a secret way to tangle with that inward relationship between the poet and the tantalising sense. It’s a tremendously active poem, in which the ‘I’ is trying to get the spider-thread sense into open present tense.

Just as with the chapter heading idea, try tracing the ways in which the poet attempts to capture the thought: ‘Help me to hold it’, ‘Hold it fast!’ The first attempts are grasping, and it’s a wonderfully physical picture, a kind of butterfly-netting expedition in which the lady is asked to assist: ‘it left / The yellowing fennel, run to seed / There…’. Then later in the poem, almost as soon as he’s said ‘Hold it fast!’, two things happen that over-turn those terms. She gets equal billing (‘us’ now rather than ‘you’ and ‘I’), and the attempt becomes a matter of alignment to the colossal pattern of the universe rather than that tableau of nineteenth-century playfulness: ‘Let us; O my dove, / Let us be unashamed of soul, / As earth lies bare to heaven above. / How is it under our control / To love or not to love’.

It’s grand language. I’m not altogether sure what it means, but it’s fine in its expression. It feels as though he has got something clear – though from this position, perhaps it is really a poem of seduction rather than a poem about that fleeting thread of feeling. Whichever it is, it’s a big arrival to understand that the desired element comes where the mind stops trying, as something beyond ‘our control’. It’s true about reading poetry too. It’s when you read without distance, unashamed of soul, hearing in the poem your own immediate worries and wants, that the poem really is getting read. Then the difficulty is not that of hard language only, but the more serious difficulty of life-size attention. Being scared, in that context, makes perfect sense.

The turn-out on Saturday morning was fantastic! Once everyone had settled with coffee, croissants, and new acquaintances, Jane Davis kicked things off with an introductory chat before Clare read out an extract from her novel Poppy Shakespeare, which acted as the basis for group discussion about her work.   

After the informal group discussions, Book at Breakfasters had the opportunity to direct any questions or thoughts about the novel to Clare Allan: both audience questions and Clare’s answers providing more thought-provoking possibilities for discussion.  

Those attending were extremely impressed with what the morning had to offer, with most compliments focussing on the fact that the event ‘takes people out of their everyday lives to engage with stimulating discussions’; ‘makes people aware of mental health issues’; and, simply, how they were ‘inspired’, both by Clare Allan and by the lively discussions her presence initiated. 

A big thank-you to Clare for being part of our event, her honesty and good humour made for a thoroughly enjoyable and stimulating breakfast. Thanks also to all those who attended: you helped to ensure the morning was the huge success it turned out to be.

Literary magazines have been fairly slow to adapt to the online world. The economics of running them have never been good and those with the longest histories have always been well supported by grants, donations, or gifts. In some ways they have been isolated from the pressures of having to reach a large readership because nobody ever expected them to be read by millions. But good writing needs to be read by as many people as possible and this is one area of publishing that could benefit enormously from the shift online. The Reader magazine will continue to be offered as a high quality printed volume, but earlier this year we began publishing a free full-content download edition, which can be found at scribd to read online and also as a downloadable pdf for you to keep.

For new magazines the choice to go online is much easier. The cost of producing a paper publication is high in proportion to the likely readership and for a magazine starting from scratch it makes very little sense to chase after a hard-to-reach small market rather than an easy-to-reach big one. In recent weeks three new online-only literary magazines have caught my eye:

Hamish Hamilton, UK publisher of McSweeney’s, has just published issue two of Five Dials, which is free to download in pdf format and is intended for printing out. I find it works well on my iPod Touch.

Taking a more web-based approach Salt Publishing has revived the title Horizon, a ‘small magazine’ originally published by Cyril Connolly in the 1930s. Editor Jane Holland says:

As a reader, my ideal literary magazine is one where ideas and style matter equally, where the creative dynamics are allowed to shift from issue to issue, keeping readers entertained, informed, and provoked. As an editor, I want to stretch and challenge contributors as much as readers, to give writers considerably more scope for daring and ingenuity than they might get from a print magazine.

Of course publishers have ready access to established writers as well as to hopefuls wanting to impress, which makes these two extremely promising prospects.

The most recent of this new crop of online magazines is The Manchester Review, based at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. Edited by John McAuliffe and Ian McGuire, the Manchester Review has big ambitions:

The Manchester Review … uses online media to show and sponsor the interplay of poetry, fiction, music, visual art and essays by new and established practitioners. We hope that it will find new readers and audiences for exciting and innovative creative work, which is steeped in traditional virtues.

Those are sentiments we heartily endorse. As online publishing becomes easier and more respectable the future for literary magazines and for high quality writing, on page and on screen, looks brighter than ever.

Get The Reader magazine free in pdf format or click the banner below to subscribe to the magazine.

Posted by Chris Routledge

Our recommendations for a reading group season

Choose from the following:

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë (Issue 30).

A High Wind in Jamaica, Richard Hughes (Issue 19)

Shakespeare’s Othello (Issue 10) or The Winter’s Tale (Issue 30)

Small Island, Andrea Levy (Issue 20)

The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton (Issue 23)

Gilead, Marilynne Robinson (Issue 24)

Runaway, Alice Munro (Issue 27)

A Pair of Blue Eyes, Thomas Hardy (Issue 25)

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy (Issue 22) (recommend 2 sessions at least for this colossal book)

Stuart A Life Backwards, Alexander Masters (Issue 24). Sara Pendergast reviewed this book for us here too.

Hester, Mrs Oliphant (Issue 24)

Cousin Henry, Anthony Trollope (Issue 28)

Here are four essays about reading groups published in the magazine. We’re going to be publishing some of these here on the blog over the next few weeks:

1. ‘Looking Up’ by Ann Stapleton (Issue 24)
2. ‘The Inner Anthology’ by Mark Crees (Issue 14)
3. ‘The Place of the Implicit’ by Philip Davis (Issue 10)
4. ‘Reading Groups: The Crucial Factor’ by Angela Macmillan (Issue 28)

And here’s a reminder that the previous issue of the magazine (currently Reader no. 29) is available free from our downloads page.

Posted by Sarah Coley

Lot No: 67

DOYLE (ARTHUR CONAN)

A Study in Scarlet… Containing also Two Original Plays for Home Performance [in Beeton's Christmas Annual. Twenty-Eighth Season], FIRST PRINTING OF THE FIRST SHERLOCK HOLMES STORY, wood-engraved frontispiece and illustrations by D.H. Friston and W.M.R. Quick, title and contents leaf with advertisements on verso, some staining to pages 1 and 16/17, bookplate of George Arthur Hodgson, bound with 4 other Christmas special issues in contemporary half morocco, spine gilt (lettered “Christmas Annuals”), without original wrappers and advertisements, front hinge split, contents working loose [De Waal 416; Lilly, Detective Fiction 16], 8vo (207 x 130mm.), Ward, Lock & Co., [1887]

Doyle sold the rights to this story for £25. The current issue of The Reader magazine features an article of mine about A Study in Scarlet which you can read here. Full details of issue 29 of the magazine are available here.

[edit] A tipsy wink to The Bunburyist, for spotting this one.