Dubliners (1 of 4) & The Old Curiosity Shop (15 of 18)
Tiger-turtles, shite and onions
Dear classics reader,
In this week’s dreadful, gloomy pit you will find:
A report from our discussion of The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea at the Hatchards Classics Book Club last night;
Rainer Maria Rilke at 150;
This week’s new classics, including a new translation of the Danish novella Natalja’s Stories;
A preview of coming attractions;
Our fifteenth instalment of The Old Curiosity Shop – with a guest appearance from Daniel Maclise;
And our first discussion of James Joyce’s Dubliners – including a gazetteer of place names.
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The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea Book Club
Last night we had an excellent discussion of The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea at Hatchards. Here is my report:
And here are links to all our The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea posts:
The Schedule (17 October)
Yukio Mishima (31 October)
0. Postcards from Yokohama (7 November)
1. Part One, ‘Summer’ – and Bushidō, the Way of the Warrior (14 November)
2. Part Two, ‘Winter’ – and Lewis John Carlino’s film (21 November)
If you would like to come to our next book club discussion, you’d be very welcome! We will be discussing James Joyce’s Dubliners on Thursday 8th January.
We meet downstairs at Hatchards (187 Piccadilly, London) on the first Thursday of every month at 6.30pm – tickets cost £5 with a free Hatchards Reward Card and include a glass (or two) of wine.
Happy Birthday Rainer Maria Rilke
In other news, yesterday was Rainer Maria Rilke’s 150th birthday. Why not mark the occasion by reading his beautiful Letters to a Young Poet – a slim book that is still as fresh and wise as it was a century ago.
After an uncomfortable childhood, in which his father wanted him to become a soldier and his mother pretended he was a girl, René Maria Rilke dedicated his life to poetry. He travelled restlessly around Europe, meeting Tolstoy in Russia, working as Rodin’s secretary in Paris, enjoying aristocratic patronage from Marie von Thurn und Taxis and finally settling in a medieval Swiss tower not much larger than a hermit’s cell.
He is best remembered for his poetry and he wrote one Expressionist novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910). He married once, briefly, and fell in love with a married woman, Lou Andreas-Salomé, who remained an important confidante throughout his life. She persuaded him to spell his name in the Germanic style, ‘Rainer’, and told him about her experiences of studying under Sigmund Freud.
Rilke died of leukaemia, though one story says he expired after pricking his finger on a rose. His epitaph, which he wrote himself, reads: ‘Rose, oh the pure contradiction, delight / of being no one’s sleep under so many lids.’
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (written 1902-08, published in 1929)
Between 1902 and 1908, Rilke corresponded with Franz Xaver Kappus, a young officer cadet and aspiring poet. Rilke wrote ten letters to Kappus with profound and lyrical advice on poetry, love, sex and suffering. In 1929, after Rilke’s death, Kappus published the letters and they have since become a touchstone for aspiring writers and artists.
[UK / US] Penguin Classics | 81 pages | translated by Charlie Louth | introduced by Lewis Hyde
What’s new this week?
December is a quiet month for classics reissues, but there were a few new titles published this week.
Kappa by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1927)
In early 20th-century Japan, a lone hiker falls through a hole in the ground into Kappaland. This is a place ruled by amphibious creatures who share characteristics with tigers and turtles, but who, for all their strangeness, shed light on the human condition. In Kappaland children choose whether or not to be born, intellectuals think nothing of drinking themselves to death as part of a cultural demonstration, unemployed workers are saved the bother of supporting themselves by being turned into sandwich meat, and artistic rebels from the human realm are enshrined in the Great Tabernacle as saints. Gruesome as life is there in some ways, the Kappas are refreshingly honest about their practices, and it’s a return to the world above that drives the narrator insane and sends him to the mental asylum.
[UK] Pushkin Press Classics | 144 pages | translated by Geoffrey Bownas | introduced by G. H. Healey
[US] New Directions | 96 pages | translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda & Allison Markin Powell
The Lord by Soraya Antonius (1986)
Set in Mandatory Palestine during the 1936 Arab Revolt against the British colonial authorities, The Lord is the story of Tareq, a young man from Jaffa who is capable, or so it seems, of performing Christ-like miracles. It is also the story of Miss Alice Rhodes, an English missionary who teaches Tareq as a boy, and who recounts Tareq’s life to a journalist in the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. With The Lord, Soraya Antonius recreates the extraordinary richness and vivacity of Palestinian life before the Nakba, painting a portrait of Palestinian society at once panoramic and intimate. A clear-eyed examination of a chapter of British colonial history that laid the groundwork for the conflicts that continue to rack the Middle East, The Lord remains as timely and poignant now as ever.
[UK / US] NYRB Classics | 240 pages | introduced by Selma Dabbagh
Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1815-1830 by François-René Chateaubriand (1815-30)
In 1815—with Bonaparte on the isle of Elba and the Napoleonic era at an end—François-René de Chateaubriand seemed poised, like the Bourbon royal family he’d so long supported, to wield unprecedented power in France. Already one of the country’s most celebrated writers, he now became an ambassador (with posts in Berlin, London, and Rome) and, for a time, minister of foreign affairs. Yet as passionate as Chateaubriand was about the cause of the Bourbons in theory, in reality he was a recalcitrant subject. Part liberal, part ultraconservative, a warmonger with his head in the clouds, he quarrelled with both Louis XVIII and Charles X and eventually tendered his resignation altogether, just in time for the July Revolution, which brought the Restoration to a close and allowed Chateaubriand to go back to praising the Bourbons, now safely exiled in the realm of the ideal.
[UK / US] NYRB Classics | 646 pages | translated by Alex Andriesse
[This is the third volume in the NYRB edition of Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: previous volumes have covered the years 1768-1800 and 1800-1815.]
Natalja’s Stories by Inger Christensen (1988)
This is the story of a young woman who is spirited away to St. Petersburg from Copenhagen by a lovestruck admirer. When she dies after the Revolution, her ashes are carried back to Denmark, igniting a chain reaction of further stories, told and retold by the women in her family against a shifting ground of meaning. We meet murderers and fable-like characters, such as the hilarious and unsettling Viktor Blanke, who manages to seduce not one but three generations of mothers and daughters. Natalja, we discover, cannot be held in one place. Rather than giving in to the tragedy that befalls her, she wills herself to become someone else, reinventing her family’s narrative one irresistible tale at a time. Tantalizing and full of wit, this remarkable, shape-shifting novel is available in English for the first time.
[UK] Penguin International Writers | 96 pages | translated by Denise Newman
[US] New Directions | 96 pages | translated by Denise Newman
The book descriptions above are taken from the publishers’ online blurbs.
Coming Attractions
For a sneak preview of our upcoming monthly read-alongs, you can take a peak here.
Over the course of 2026, we will be reading The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, from January to December. This read-along will be available for free for all subscribers. Here are the details.
And if – like me – you’re panicking about Christmas presents, panic no more! I am delighted to recommend the Hatchards Classic Book Club annual book subscription.
You (or a friend) can receive all the books we read each month here on Read the Classics, beautifully gift-wrapped and delivered to your door, anywhere in the world, as well as a year’s complimentary subscription to Read the Classics, so you can choose to read along with us, if you wish.
To find out more, follow this link or email Hatchards directly: subscriptions@hatchards.co.uk
The Old Curiosity Shop (15 of 18)
This month we’ve read another four issues of Dickens’s Master Humphrey’s Clock – our next instalment of The Old Curiosity Shop. Here are my thoughts:
I’d love to hear yours!
This month’s instalment finished with a particularly striking illustration – of the sexton showing Nell the disused well in the church crypt – that ‘black and dreadful place’.
This is the novel’s only illustration by the Irish artist Daniel Maclise, who was Dickens’s close friend.
Dickens persuaded his friend to provide this single illustration to The Old Curiosity Shop, despite the fact that Maclise was not a fan of Little Nell. The critic Jane Rabb Cohen wrote that
despite his sincere appreciation of his friend’s writing, Maclise did not share Dickens’s fondness for girls Nell’s age, whom he considered ‘most insipid’.
Here is what Philip V. Allingham says about Maclise’s illustration on the ever reliable Victorian Web:
Maclise does not make Nell Trent merely young; he makes her vulnerable. This is no road-hardened adolescent who has been the custodian of her addle-pated grandfather. Maclise makes Nell the epitome of child-like innocence, and costumes her in delicate, respectable fashion. His bald-headed sexton does not appear seventy-nine years old, but in his dark monk’s habit and with his knowing gesture he is an ominous contrast. Nell, discretely holding her hand to her bosom to stifle her anxieties about what the well signifies (death and oblivion) is framed in the light that streams through the receding gothic arches, whereas Maclise makes the sexton [. . .] a black figure against a black background. Thus, psychologically the sexton does not represent the wisdom and experience of age, but the fate of an untimely death that Dickens suggests is Nell’s.
I look forward to reading the next ten chapters of The Old Curiosity Shop and discussing them in a month’s time. On Friday 9 January, we’ll discuss Chapters 56-65.
These chapters were originally published in five weekly issues of Master Humphrey’s Clock as follows:
No.36 (5 December) Chapters 56-57
No.37 (12 December) Chapters 58-59
No.38 (19 December) Chapters 60-61
No.39 (26 December) Chapters 62-63
No.40 (2 January) Chapters 64-65
Here are links to our previous Old Curiosity Shop posts:
The Schedule (14 March 2025)
Charles Dickens (28 March)
0. Forster’s Life of Dickens (4 April)
1. Master Humphrey’s Clock No.1 – and Gog and Magog (11 April)
2. Master Humphrey’s Clock No.2 – and G. K. Chesterton (18 April)
3. Master Humphrey’s Clock No.3 – and Edgar Allan Poe (25 April)
4. Master Humphrey’s Clock No.4 – and the Old Curiosity Shop (2 May)
6. Master Humphrey’s Clock No.6 – and St. Dunstan-in-the-West (16 May)
7. Master Humphrey’s Clock No.7 – and Jack Bamber’s Tale (23 May)
9. Chapters 6-8 – and Master Humphrey, from His Clock-Side in the Chimney Corner (20 June)
10. Chapters 9-16 – and Punch and Judy (18 July)
11. Chapters 17-24 – and Old Giants and Dwarfs (15 August)
12. Chapters 25-32 – and Jarley’s Wax-Work (12 September)
13. Chapters 33-39 – and Sampson and Sally Brass (10 October)
14. Chapters 40-47 – and the Black Country (7 November)
Dubliners (1 of 4)
This week we’ve also read the first six stories in Dubliners by James Joyce. Here are my impressions:
