The Essay: Books to Make Space For on the Bookshelf

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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

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The Essay Podcast

The Essay

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week - insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.

The Essay: Books to Make Space For on the Bookshelf: John Halifax, Gentleman

John Halifax, Gentleman

Books to Make Space For on the Bookshelf

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, Books to Make Space For on the Bookshelf, John Halifax, Gentleman

Clare Walker Gore explains how Dinah Mulock Craik subverted Victorian expectations.

The story of an orphan made good, narrated by his disabled friend, became a best seller in 1856. New Generation Thinker Clare Walker Gore profiles the novelist and her core themes.

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, supporting her husband with her writing and adopting a foundling, but dogged by her father, who was a dissenting preacher put into debtor's prison more than once; and 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 Open University 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

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Five New Generation Thinkers each propose a novel they consider worthy of reappraisal.

Five current New Generation Thinkers, on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, each propose a novel they consider worthy of reappraisal.

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