Escaping from Houdini

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Simon Joyce

"As London became the first major city of the nineteenth century, new models of representation emerged in the journalism, poetry, fiction, and social commentary of the period. Simon Joyce argues that such writing reflected a persistent worry about the problem of crime but was never able to contain it. Commentators such as Wordsworth, Dickens, Mayhew, Stevenson, Conan Doyle, Booth, and Wilde all struggled with the same questions about how to represent London and the relations among its varied populations, yet their accounts often undermined one another." "Whereas Victorian social science presumed a correlation between criminal activity, geographical residence, and social class, the popular literature of the period often sought just as strenuously to deny the link, giving rise to privileged and pathological offenders like Dorian Gray and Dr. Jekyll. This in turn shifted attention away from the urban slums that had been the setting for the so-called Newgate novels of the 1830s and 1840s. By 1900 crime appears as a distinctively modern problem, requiring large-scale solutions and government intervention in place of an older approach rooted in personal morality or philanthropic paternalism." "Illustrating "literary geography"--In which physical space is not merely a backdrop for the plot but an integral element in shaping textual meaning - Joyce's Capital Offenses reveals how certain geographical patterns not only give weight to interpretive meanings already suggested in the texts but also enable us to read them in a new and surprising light."--Jacket.

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Derek Beaven

The year is 1959 and Ralph is traveling on a ship with his mom and her lover. They have deserted his father back in London and are determined to make a new life in Australia. In his later years, Ralph struggles to make sense of that voyage. He searches for information on the ship they took from London to Australia only to find all records have mysteriously disappeared.

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Philip Callow

"There are many Stevensons behind the initials RLS, but the one that has endeared him to so many readers for so long is surely the fighter, battling to stay alive. Jorge Luis Borges described Stevenson's brief life as courageous and heroic. In Philip Callow's new biography, one can see why.". "Doctors, called repeatedly to what should have been his deathbed, would find a scarecrow, twitching and alive. A sickly child, Louis became in turn a bohemian dandy, a literary gypsy traipsing through the mountains of France with a donkey, and at twenty-eight the lover of an American woman ten years his senior, the fabulous Fanny.". "He escaped his Scottish town, his family, his friends who had mapped out a literary career for him in London, and instead went chaotically across the Atlantic and overland to California in poverty and despair to reach his beloved, wherupon he escaped into marriage and committed himself to being a nomad. He sailed the Pacific and dreamed of being an explorer; his restlessness was Victorian. All the while he was composing some of the most treasured tales in the English language."--BOOK JACKET.

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Terry Deary

Prometheus steels fire from the gods and while on the run from Zeus's avenging eagle hides out in Victorian Eden city, where he befriends a cheeky orphan named Jim.