English Music is the sixth novel by Peter Ackroyd. Published in 1992, it is both a bildungsroman and, in the words of critic John Barrell, "partly a series of rhapsodies and meditations on the nature of English culture, written in the styles of various great authors." [1] As with all Ackroyd's previous novels, it focuses on London, although on this occasion partly as a backdrop for English culture in general.
The plot is split between a continuous narrative and a series of self-contained stories, all related to the main tale.
The novel opens in the early 1920s, and is for the most part told in the first person of Timothy Harcombe, aged nine at the beginning of the narrative. Timothy lives with (and is home-educated by) his widowed father Clement, a faith healer whose performances at the Chemical Theatre, Hackney, involve Timothy as his assistant. Clement Harcombe instills a vivid sense of English culture in Timothy, principally through selected readings of classic works like Robinson Crusoe and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland . Timothy's life is suddenly turned upside-down by the arrival of his maternal grandfather, who takes Timothy away to live with him and his grandmother in Wiltshire. After an abortive attempt by several of Harcombe's acquaintances to reunite Timothy with his father, Timothy is returned to Wiltshire where he attends the local school and befriends a disabled boy, Edward Campion. It becomes evident that Timothy possesses skills akin to those performed onstage by his father, as he cures his grandmother of a debilitating nervous shake.
Time passes and Timothy does not hear from his father again during most of his schooldays. On leaving school he returns to London where he finds his father, recently separated from his girlfriend, Gloria Patterson. He is virtually destitute and making ends meet by carrying house-calls as a healer, with largely unsuccessful results. Finding his father's finances in chaos he decides to accompany him on his healing visits, and Harcombe's skill miraculously reappears. Timothy becomes briefly infatuated with Gloria, whom he encounters by chance, and whose callous, scheming attitude both repels and arouses him. He also discovers that his father had been pressured into sending him to Wiltshire by the educational authorities, whose concerns about Timothy's unorthodox schooling were exacerbated when they discovered that his father had been using him as part of a theatrical performance.
Becoming increasingly unsatisfied with his existence, Timothy decides he needs to move on and secures a job as an art gallery security guard, courtesy of another of his father's acquaintances from their theatre days, Stanley Clay. In the intervening period, he loses touch with his father again. Growing unsatisfied once more, he briefly entertains the idea of further education before deciding to return to his grandparents in Wiltshire. It is there that he discovers that his father is now a magician with a travelling circus, and his grandparents inform him that this had been Harcombe's job before Timothy was born. Once again father and son team up with spectacular results, and Harcombe manages to heal the disabled Edward, but at the cost of his own life. Timothy continues the circus act after his father's death, until he inherits his grandparents' cottage after they die. After he is drafted in the Second World War, Timothy continues living at the cottage until old age.
Interspersed with Timothy's story are a series of dream sequences which occur to him either as he sleeps, falls unconscious or ill. Each story involves aspects of English culture, derivatively through stylistic imitation, direct quotation or as an original story. Some stories involve characters from literature or the real-life authors, artists and composers. All the short stories involve Timothy's character or a version of him, and are told in the third person.
2. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland , Through the Looking-Glass (Alice, The Red Queen, The White Rabbit, The Mad Hatter) The Pilgrim's Progress (Christian)
4. Great Expectations (Pip, Miss Havisham, Estella Havisham, Orlick), Charles Dickens
6. Sherlock Holmes
8. The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe , Gulliver's Travels , A Journal of the Plague Year
10. William Byrd
12. William Hogarth ( The Rake's Progress , Beer Street and Gin Lane )
14. Paintings by Richard Wilson ( Hounslow Heath ), Thomas Gainsborough, John Constable, Joseph Wright of Derby, John Martin ( Landscape with a Castle ), J. M. W. Turner, Samuel Palmer, Ford Madox Brown, James McNeill Whistler ( Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge). The Canterbury Tales and the novels Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (Pamela Andrews, Mr B), The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (Jack Hatchway, Commodore Trunnion), Tristram Shandy , A Sentimental Journey (Parson Yorick), The Mill on the Floss , Wuthering Heights (Catherine Earnshaw).
16. A long poem in the style of William Blake, celebrating English poetry from Cædmon to Ernest Dowson.
18. Le Morte d'Arthur (Fisher King, Merlin). T.S. Eliot
Reaction to the novel was largely negative. [2] Many critics found Ackroyd's nationalist tone narrow and conservative, in particular the suggestion that the variety of writers, composers and artists were serving a homogenous vision. Critics also noted that female writers and artists (brief allusions to the works of George Eliot and Emily Brontë aside) were largely absent.
Critics have noted a strong similarity between Ackroyd's perspective of English culture as a single narrative with T.S. Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent", where Eliot argues that the classics of the Western canon form an "ideal order among themselves". [3] Whilst Ackroyd's cultural view was seen to mirror that of Eliot, his postmodern handling of the material was identified as radically different. Others noticed a similarity between Ackroyd's structure and that employed by Virginia Woolf in Between the Acts . [4]
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is an 1865 English children's novel by Lewis Carroll, a mathematics don at Oxford University. It details the story of a young girl named Alice who falls through a rabbit hole into a fantasy world of anthropomorphic creatures. It is seen as an example of the literary nonsense genre. The artist John Tenniel provided 42 wood-engraved illustrations for the book.
Robinson Crusoe is an English adventure novel by Daniel Defoe, first published on 25 April 1719. Written with a combination of Epistolary, confessional, and didactic forms, the book follows the title character after he is cast away and spends 28 years on a remote tropical desert island near the coasts of Venezuela and Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before being rescued. The story has been thought to be based on the life of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish castaway who lived for four years on a Pacific island called "Más a Tierra" which was renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966. Pedro Serrano is another real-life castaway whose story might have inspired the novel.
Alice is a fictional character and the main protagonist of Lewis Carroll's children's novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1871). A child in the mid-Victorian era, Alice unintentionally goes on an underground adventure after falling down a rabbit hole into Wonderland; in the sequel, she steps through a mirror into an alternative world.
Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel by Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel. It depicts the education of an orphan nicknamed Pip. It is Dickens' second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person. The novel was first published as a serial in Dickens's weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861, Chapman & Hall published the novel in three volumes.
The Cheshire Cat is a fictional cat popularised by Lewis Carroll in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and known for its distinctive mischievous grin. While now most often used in Alice-related contexts, the association of a "Cheshire cat" with grinning predates the 1865 book. It has transcended the context of literature and become enmeshed in popular culture, appearing in various forms of media, from political cartoons to television, as well as in cross-disciplinary studies, from business to science. Often it is shown in the context of a person or idea that is purposefully confusing or enigmatic. One distinguishing feature of the Alice-style Cheshire Cat is the periodic gradual disappearance of its body, leaving only one last visible trace: its iconic grin. He belongs to the Duchess.
The Hatter is a fictional character in Lewis Carroll's 1865 book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its 1871 sequel Through the Looking-Glass. He is very often referred to as the Mad Hatter, though this term was never used by Carroll. The phrase "mad as a hatter" pre-dates Carroll's works. The Hatter and the March Hare are referred to as "both mad" by the Cheshire Cat, in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in the sixth chapter titled "Pig and Pepper".
This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1862.
Thomas Hood was an English humorist, playwright and author. He was the son of the poet and author Thomas Hood. Pen and Pencil Pictures (1857) was the first of his illustrated books. His most successful novel was Captain Master's Children (1865).
The Swiss Family Robinson is a novel by the Swiss author Johann David Wyss, first published in 1812, about a Swiss family of immigrants whose ship en route to Port Jackson, Australia, goes off course and is shipwrecked in the East Indies. The ship's crew is lost, but the family and several domestic animals survive. They make their way to shore, where they build a settlement, undergoing several adventures before being rescued; some refuse rescue and remain on the island.
The title character in a narrative work is one who is named or referred to in the title of the work. In a performed work such as a play or film, the performer who plays the title character is said to have the title role of the piece. The title of the work might consist solely of the title character's name – such as Michael Collins or Othello – or be a longer phrase or sentence – such as The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Alice in Wonderland, or The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The title character is commonly – but not necessarily – the protagonist of the story. Narrative works routinely do not have a title character, and there is some ambiguity in what qualifies as one.
Lewis Carroll's books Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) have been highly popular in their original forms, and have served as the basis for many subsequent works since they were published. They have been adapted directly into other media, their characters and situations have been appropriated into other works, and these elements have been referenced innumerable times as familiar elements of shared culture. Simple references to the two books are too numerous to list; this list of works based on Alice in Wonderland focuses on works based specifically and substantially on Carroll's two books about the character of Alice.
Sébastien Japrisot was a French author, screenwriter and film director. His pseudonym was an anagram of Jean-Baptiste Rossi, his real name. Renowned for subverting the rules of the crime genre, Japrisot broke down the established formulas "into their component pieces to re-combine them in original and paradoxical ways." Some critics argue that though Japrisot's work may lack the explicit experimental element present in the novels of some of his contemporaries, it shows influences of structuralist theories and the unorthodox techniques of the New Novelists.
The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean (1857) is a novel written by Scottish author R. M. Ballantyne. One of the first works of juvenile fiction to feature exclusively juvenile heroes, the story relates the adventures of three boys marooned on a South Pacific island, the only survivors of a shipwreck.
Fushigi no Kuni no Alice is an anime adaptation of the 1865 novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland which ran on the TV Tokyo network and other local stations across Japan from October 10, 1983 to March 26, 1984. The series was a Japanese-German co-production between Nippon Animation, TV Tokyo and Apollo Films. The series consists of 52 episodes, however, only 26 made it to the US.
William Shakespeare's Hamlet is a tragedy, believed to have been written between 1599 and 1601. It tells the story of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark—who takes revenge on the current king for killing the previous king and for marrying his father's widow —and it charts the course of his real or feigned madness. Hamlet is the longest play—and Hamlet is the largest part—in the entire Shakespeare canon. Critics say that Hamlet "offers the greatest exhibition of Shakespeare's powers".
The Waste Land is a poem by T. S. Eliot, widely regarded as one of the most important English language poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry. Published in 1922, the 434-line poem first appeared in the United Kingdom in the October issue of Eliot's magazine The Criterion and in the United States in the November issue of The Dial. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruellest month", "I will show you fear in a handful of dust", and "These fragments I have shored against my ruins".
Hawksmoor is a 1985 novel by English writer Peter Ackroyd. It won Best Novel at the 1985 Whitbread Awards and the Guardian Fiction Prize. It tells the parallel stories of Nicholas Dyer, who builds seven churches in 18th-century London for which he needs human sacrifices, and Nicholas Hawksmoor, detective in the 1980s, who investigates murders committed in the same churches. Hawksmoor has been praised as Peter Ackroyd's best novel and an example of postmodernism.
Peter Ackroyd is an English biographer, novelist and critic with a specialist interest in the history and culture of London. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, William Blake, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot, Charlie Chaplin and Sir Thomas More, he won the Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards. He is noted for the volume of work he has produced, the range of styles therein, his skill at assuming different voices, and the depth of his research.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a ballet in three acts by Christopher Wheeldon with a scenario by Nicholas Wright, based on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. It was commissioned by The Royal Ballet, Covent Garden, and the National Ballet of Canada, and had its world premiere on Monday, 28 February 2011. The music by Joby Talbot is the first full-length score for the Royal Ballet in 20 years. It is also the first full-length narrative ballet commissioned by The Royal Ballet since 1995.
"And They Lived..." is the thirteenth episode and series finale of the Once Upon a Time spin-off series Once Upon a Time in Wonderland. Written by Edward Kitsis, Adam Horowitz, and Zack Estrin, and directed by Kari Skogland, it premiered on ABC in the United States on April 3, 2014. A week prior to this episode's release, it was announced by ABC Studios that the series was canceled.
