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Anna Sabine, Liberal Democrat MP for Frome and East Somerset, has discovered what happens when a politician loses her voice: "There’s a thing about: do I seem weak now? Like, does this make me seem weaker? Which is another reason to be really clear: I will do national media, and I will carry on campaigning."

"The council’s constitution, which sets out how it is run, says it must have a cabinet and a leader at the top and this is required by UK law. The local authority is also required to have an elected member overseeing children’s services. The absence of this and the length of time the council has had no one in charge is what has led officers to make the highly unusual declaration the council is breaking the law." Edward Barnes reports from Oldham, where the elected councillors have failed to agree who should run the borough council after May's elections.

Alazne Mountjoy says women suffer because of the systemic misogyny in medical research and practice: "Women undergoing surgery are significantly more likely to experience complications, and even die, when the surgeon is a man as opposed to a woman. This is in conjunction with the fact that surgeons are overwhelmingly male, with fewer than a fifth of surgeons being female."

Anna Verhamme and John Britton, in a report for the Higher Education Policy Institute, say universities are their professional and support staff and then paying consultants more to provide these services.

"From Browne’s first instalment, featuring the character Sam Weller, sales for Pickwick rose and kept rising. Browne would go on to become Dickens’s principal illustrator, and Pickwick – helped enormously by his comic illustrations – became a literary sensation that revolutionised Victorian book publishing." Michael John Goodman looks at the relationship between Charles Dickens and his illustrator Hablot Knight Browne ('Phiz') and reminds us how strange it is that we now publish Victorian novels without their illustrations.

"Chris Isaak has carved out a singular career doing one thing so hauntingly well, it’s become his signature. He’s built a cathedral from heartbreak and despair, lit by the flickering neon of 3 a.m. regrets, and its served him well for over four decades." James Kenney on Chris Isaak and the art of staying sad.

David Alton, Andy Burnham and telescopic radicalism

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It struck me that if Mrs. Jellyby had discharged her own natural duties and obligations before she swept the horizon with a telescope in search of others, she would have taken the best precautions against becoming absurd, but I need scarcely observe that I kept this to myself. – Bleak House, Charles Dickens.

Mrs Jellyby goes in for what Dickens call "telescopic philanthropy", in that she devotes her energies to promoting a philanthropic project in far-off Borrioboola-Gha while her own children fall into the grate. We've all known political households like that.

You can also have telescopic radicalism. In the distant era when David Alton was a Liberal, then a Liberal Democrat, and a Liverpool MP, one commentator pointed out that he was idealistic about issues that were a long way away, but hard-headed when they were close to home.

It seems we now have a telescopic radical for a prime minister. 

Yesterday, Andy Burnham wrote a courageous article for the Guardian, explaining the sanctions his government is rightly imposing upon Israel for its illegal actions in the occupied territories.

But, back in Britain, masked, uniformed fascists are roaming the streets and closing down ports without a word from our new prime minister.

Charles Masterman and Charles Dickens on 19th-century poverty

Here's a book review that features my favourite writers on Victorian poverty – the two Charlies. That's Charles Masterman and Charles Dickens.

The book reviewed is Dying for Victorian Medicine: English Anatomy and Its Trade in the Dead Poor, c.1834-1929 by Elizabeth Hurren, the reviewer is John Prebble, and it appears in the London Review of Books for 5 October 2012:

Like everyone who has written about Victorian poverty, she’s obstructed by the problem identified by the Liberal politician Charles Masterman in 1902. "We are very silent," the collective poor say in Masterman's From the Abyss; "so very silent that no one to this hour knows what we think ... or why we think it."

That remains true even now. From all the multitude of workhouse voices, not one has yet been recovered that says "this is how it was," "this is what we did," "this is how I felt." Victorian poverty is mute either because, in Masterman's words, it was "living for the most part with no articulate expression", or because it was too ashamed to speak. 

The Victorians who wrote about it were strangers in its midst: either middle-class missionaries, philanthropists and sociologists perceiving the London slums as "the undiscovered country of the poor" and "the dark continent ... within easy walking distance of the General Post Office", and casting themselves as intrepid explorers or scientific investigators; or slumming journalists (James Greenwood, Jack London, Robert Sherard and, later, Orwell) trying to share an experience that they could never penetrate because they knew they could always escape. 

And there was Dickens, who lived in denial about his childhood labour in a blacking factory and displaced his trauma onto martyred surrogates in other hells – the workhouse, Yorkshire schools, Lancashire mills, slums like Tom-all-Alone's. Dickens confronting his own past is Oliver Twist confronting his. Having escaped into bourgeois security, Oliver revisits the town of his childhood, but he sees the workhouse only from outside, and his old acquaintances only as faces at the windows.

Robert Sherard, as we saw a few months ago, was the grandson of the fearsome Lord Harborough and Oscar Wilde's first biographer. 

Marjory Allen encounters the ban on child actors in British films

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Returning to Marjory Allen's memoirs after my holiday, I've come across a passage that refers to it being illegal to employ actors aged under 13 in a British film until the early Sixties.

One of Lady Allen's many wartime good works was chairing the Advisory Council on Children's Entertainment Films between 1944 and 1950. She writes that J. Arthur Rank had launched Saturday morning film shows "to help relieve war stress amongst school-age children".

The problem was that no one was sure what sort of films children enjoyed, so Rank set up the advisory council that Lady Allen chaired to tell him. It found that what they most liked was films about other children.

Lady Allen continues:

We were in some difficulty over one of the complaints made by our alert and outspoken young critics. They insisted that all children's parts ought to be acted by children of the right age, but we were constrained by the government and local regulations which made it extremely hard to employ child actors at all. 

The rules were not so strict in other countries and the problem was partly solved, after the war, by making some of our films abroad.

And I do recall seeing an old adult film with a precocious girl as a character on Talking Pictures TV. Something seemed odd about the actress, and when I checked her credits on IMDb she turned out to be pushing 30.

As I showed in an earlier post, this law was blatantly ignored by some producers, to the extent that two films with a child in the title role – Oliver Twist and Sammy Going South – were chosen for the Royal Film Performance before it was relaxed.

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"Someone who attended a private school in London or the South East is 24 times more likely to become a permanent secretary than someone educated at a state school in the North. For a seat in the House of Lords, the gap is 23-fold. That is not class inequality plus regional inequality. It is what happens when they multiply." Nick Harrison asks if No 10 North will change who runs Britain.

Janice Mak says American schools are increasingly questioning whether every student needs a laptop: "This distinction between passive consumption and purposeful use is increasingly shaping school policy. Updated policies also reflect an emerging emphasis on age-appropriate screen use, student well-being and ensuring that technology can support, rather than replace, direct instruction and student collaboration."

Adam Sherwin reports on the plans to turn off Freeview television and the threat that poses to Talking Pictures TV.

Scott Barry Kaufman argues that the role of luck in successful lives is far greater than we realise.

"Do not be lulled into complacency by the family-film aesthetics. When Mom the Sheepdog instructed Babe the Pig to dominate other animals by abusing them, demeaning them, and telling them what to do, and Babe refused because disrespecting another living creature would be wrong? That moment might have radicalised a generation." Roxana Hadadi discusses the politics of Babe (1995).

"From the end of the Victorian period, Broadstairs was strategically marketing its Dickensian connections through postcards, guide books and festivals. In 1897 Alfred Harmsworth (founder of the Daily Mail) was one of the organisers of a ‘Dickens Village’, which recreated scenes including Defarge’s wine shop, Peggotty’s boat, the Great White Hart at Ipswich and the Old Curiosity Shop. The festival was successful enough to be repeated the following year." Carolyn Oulton on the long history of Dickens tourism in Broadstairs.

An Ian Christie lecture about Gothic London on film

This a terrific lecture by Ian Christie, whose writings did much to bring the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger back to prominence.

His Gothic London begins with early Dickens adaptations, made because there was a ready public for them. And Dickens, after all, was a cinematic novelist before cinema was invented.

Then we go though Jekyll and Hyde, Jack the Ripper and the London fog to reach the early Hitchcock. The exoticism of Limehouse, with its opium dens and Chinese population, also figures. 

Next we take in the Blitz and this blog's favourite topic of bombsites, before returning to Dickens in the shape of David Lean's peerless Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. Carol Reed's 1970 film of Lionel Bart's Oliver!, says Christie, was the first colour adaptation of a Dickens novel.

And we end with some modern Gothic takes of London, including Death Line and From Hell.

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"In many cases, lack of coordination and administrative errors in the Home Office cause failed removals. Complications around booking flights, arranging escorts and other practicalities have all been found to prevent deportations, as well as procedural issues such as lack of travel documents. But continued misrepresentation in the media and political rhetoric means the ECHR has continued to be a scapegoat." Sarah Singer argues that the government's new immigration and asylum bill won't work.

"'I’m Northern Irish', I would say with indignation, every time an English person referred to me as Irish. Growing up in Newtownards in the 1990s there was never any question of my Britishness. British passport, Union Jacks on every lamppost, and fully immersed in British pop culture." Yet Claire JC is now campaigning for a United Ireland – she explains why.

Nick Baird thinks the Liberal Democrats' proposed scheme for Defence Bonds is a bad idea.

"Picked up by the stump microphone as England’s batting unravelled at Trent Bridge, the Kiwis summed up what a lot of us are thinking: 'What are they doing?' It was aimed at the batters in front of them. But by the end of what was an extraordinary, shocking and chaotic day, it felt like the question that summed up English cricket from top to bottom." Elizabeth Ammon asks if anyone in English cricket knows what they are doing.

Timothy Ott on Charles Dickens's visit to Washington: "Dickens and an unnamed official, 'having twice or thrice rung a bell which nobody answered,' simply entered the White House and attempted to find the president on their own."

Nigel Andrew on the forgotten genius of Ivy Compton-Burnett: "The critic Norman Shrapnel wrote: 'Of the two candidates for greatness among comic novelists of our time, Evelyn Waugh and Ivy Compton-Burnett, it is her prospect that looks the more secure.'"

Lord Bonkers: "Something less terrible than the truth"

G.K. Chesterton was a brilliant literary critic and there's an observation of his on Dickens that I've quoted more than once in print:

It seems almost as if these grisly figures, Mrs. Chadband and Mrs. Clennam, Miss Havisham, and Miss Flite, Nemo and Sally Brass, were keeping something back from the author as well as from the reader. When the book closes we do not know their real secret. They soothed the optimistic Dickens with something less terrible than the truth.

I have an uneasy feeling that Lord Bonkers sometimes soothes me with something less terrible than the truth.

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"The big red 'stop nudes' button is appealing because it’s a lot easier than investing in proper services to protect children and in the kind of education that will help them grow up in the world as it exists rather than the sterile bubble of Starmer's imagination. Bad actors will circumvent these measures while ordinary people's privacy is undermined, and health information and even art is censored. The design choices that have led to this environment are the same choices that the government courts when it tries to partner with these tech companies." Mic Wright looks at the media's uncritical coverage of government plans to prevent children viewing or sharing nude images online.

Claire Jones analyses the creeping misogyny of Reform's agenda: "To enshrine women’s demotion to second class citizens, Reform has pledged to drop the 2010 Equalities Act which provides legal recourse for maternity leave, sexual assault, domestic abuse and employment discrimination. Reform also plans to ditch the ECHR thus thwarting it’s use by women as another court of appeal. You can hear the sound of doors closing."

David Eddy asks who is protecting our drinking water as an energy company seeks permission to drill through the chalk aquifer beneath the Yorkshire Wolds in search of gas.

"You may heard that if you’re under 25, your brain isn’t fully developed yet. It's an adage supposing that individuals under 25 can’t think things through or make rational decisions, and so are less responsible than older folk. This logic has now formed the basis of official government advice, sentencing, and more. The only problem with this fact is... it’s not a fact. Never has been. No matter how many TikTokers insist otherwise." Dean Burnett takes aim at a scientific myth.

Oliver Bray has been to an exhibition at the Dickens Museum in London: "It reframes Dickens not only through the women he knew, but through the theatrical culture they collectively inhabited. Stepping outside, I felt his familiar voice linger, now joined by the sense that the women behind the scenes were finally stepping into the light – something the dramatist in Dickens might have appreciated." 

"On one level, this is a song about a man who, losing his mother, seeks to make his lover a surrogate maternal figure. On a larger level, it is about the need to find an escape, a haven, from the brutal realities of life. But it must be mentioned that this is a song about the power and necessity of movies... that was written for a movie." Another Paul on That's Why God Made the Movies, one of my favourite Paul Simon songs.

How David Lean's Oliver Twist broke the law

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Here's a remarkable thing. Between 1933 and 1963, it was illegal in Britain for a child under 12 to appear in an entertainment production on stage or on screen. And that explains the following press cuttings.

Here's the Weekly Dispatch, 9 November 1947:

One of the best-kept secrets of the British film industry is revealed at last by producer Ronald Neame’s announcement that John Howard Davies, cast as Oliver Twist Cineguild's screen version of Charles Dickens’s famous novel, has been playing the part at Pinewood Studios for the last four months. [John Howard Davies was nine.] 

the Evening News, 25 February 1948:

I am able to reveal to-day the name of another of those juvenile lawbreakers who act in films under the age of fifteen: Carol Reed, who finishes directing The Lost Illusion” to-day. gives me permission to say that the important part of the small boy who becomes involved in a murder case has been played for the past two months by Bobbie Henrey, an attractive eight-year-old with blond wavy hair. [The Lost Illusion was retitled The Fallen Idol before release.]

and the Birmingham Mail, 16 November 1951:

It is three months since watched a scene being shot on the floor at Pinewood Studios for the new Dirk Bogarde thriller Hunted. The unechoing spaces of a sound stage have their own special atmosphere especially when carpenters and jobbers are silenced for shooting but on this occasion the sense of hush was almost tangible. 

It was in fact hush-hush for through a door at the back of the set – a typical transport drivers' cafe halt – came Dirk Bogarde and small blond child. At my elbow a whisper informed me that no mention could made of the boy: not until the film was finished completely cut and polished ready for screen.

That is the way the law or rather the evasion of the law works in the British film industry Child actors are not supposed to do this work therefore as far as everyone but those intimately involved the making of the film are concerned they do not exist I think 1 am right in saying that the law prohibits the employment of children under 12 years of age. And here was 6½-year-old Jon Whiteley in middle of perhaps the longest screen role a child has ever attempted.

And, come to think of it, though there were popular British child stars in the years before these three productions – Elizabeth Taylor, Freddie Bartholomew, Roddy McDowall – they made their films in Holywood.

In 1948 it had been expected that an amendment to the Cinematograph Films Act 1938 would relax the rules on young performers and remove the need for this subterfuge, but it was unexpectedly ruled out of order by the speaker.

I've even seen it suggested that the very public search for an Oliver Twist was designed to reassure the authorities that the producers were intending to cast an older boy, when they had already chosen John Howard Davies, the son of a well-known scriptwriter. The story goes that one of the production team had seen him when he was invited to dinner by the boy's parents.

There were a few prosecutions for employing child actors, but for the most part the 1933 law was ignored until it was superseded by the 1963 Children and Young Person’s Act. You can read more in article by Richard Farmer.

Alexander McCall Smith on publishing novels in serial form

Occasionally a writer will still publish a novel in instalments as the Victorians did. In the preface to his 44 Scotland Street, Alexander McCall Smith describes the genesis of the book in his meeting Armistead Maupin at a party in California. Maupin had originally published the first five of his celebrated Tales from the City books in this manner. 

On his return to Scotland, McCall Smith wrote an article about this meeting in The Scotsman, saying it was a shame that newspapers no long published serialised novels. The newspaper’s editorial staff took up the implicit challenge and, over an optimistic lunch, he found himself agreeing to publish a novel in that paper's pages in daily instalments:

The real challenge in writing a novel that is to be serialised in this particular way – that is, in relatively small segments – is to keep the momentum of the narrative going without becoming too staccato in tone. … Above all, a serial novel must be entertaining. This does not mean that one cannot deal with serious topics, or make appeal to the finer emotions of the reader, but one has to keep a light touch.

When the serial started to run, I had a number of sections already completed. As the months went by, however, I had fewer and fewer pages in hand, and towards the end I was only three episodes ahead of publication. This was very different, then, from merely taking an existing manuscript and chopping it up into sections. The book was written while it was being published. An obvious consequence of this was that I could not go back and make changes – it was too late to do that.

McCall has now written written 17 volumes in this 44 Scotland Street series, but I don’t know if he published any in serial form beyond the first two.

Dickens was never a slog for the Victorians: Are we reading him the wrong way?

That Guardian list of the 100 best novels of all time has given the anti-Dickens tendency fresh legs. They tried him at school and hated him. He was paid by the word – that's why his books are so long.

I will admit that my love of Dickens has probably been helped by the fact that I didn't study him much at school. There was a play based on the early chapters of Nicholas Nickleby when I was 12 (I read Wackford Squeers as it happens) and a passage from Hard Times three of four years later. That was all.

But if you had too much Dickens when you were too young, here's a thought: maybe the judgements you made when you were 15 shouldn't be allowed to last a lifetime?

I remember our O-level English teacher trying us with a Joseph Conrad short story, The Secret Sharer. None of us – not me, not Allison Pearson – could get anything from it. He had the sense to abandon the attempt and move on to something else.

So for years I remembered Conrad as a difficult writer. But when, in my forties and after the 7/7 bombings, I decided to read his The Secret Agent for its insights into terrorism, I found that I loved it.

No, Dickens wasn't paid by the word, but the great thick books we now consume weren't the way his original readers experienced him.

Dickens published his novels in 20 monthly instalments, with the last two appearing together. So the Victorians took 19 months to read, say, Bleak House and never experienced it as an intimidating peak they had to scale.

His later novels were carefully planned before he began to write, but that was not the case with the earlier ones. There's a chapter in Oliver Twist where Dickens pauses to try to make sense of its complicated plot - and fails. Martin Chuzzlewit wasn't selling well, so he sent its hero off to the United States to spark new interest. And in The Old Curiosity Shop, he soon changed the nature of one character and dropped another altogether when he realised he wasn't necessary.

And the books had illustrations; indeed, The Pickwick Papers was written to fit existing engravings. After that, Dickens was careful in his choice of artists and always worked closely with them. To him, the illustrations were an important part of the book, but today his novels are often published without them, either to save money or out of a strange disapproval of pictures in a novel for adults.

That disapproval is even stranger in the case of Thackeray's wonderful Vanity Fair, which he illustrated himself. Sometimes the text tells you one thing and the illustration says another, and you instinctively believe the picture rather than the words. So leaving out those pictures fundamentally changes how you experience the book.

So, go on you antis: give Dickens another try.

A Sense of Carol Reed (2006)

A short documentary on the great British film director Carol Reed, focusing on his trilogy of great films of the late 1940s – Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol and The Third Man – and Oliver!, for which he won an Oscar late in his career.

Bobby Henrey, the boy from The Fallen Idol, is still with us and can be heard talking about his experience of making the film on an edition of the Soho Bites podcast.

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Chris Dillow lays bare the stupidity of Westminster politics: "If your final shortlist for a job comprises Mandelson, George Osborne (and maybe Bear Grylls) but not anyone with direct relevant experience such as career diplomats then you’ve probably not even bothered to do a detailed job description; you’ve not asked 'what’s the shape of the hole we want to fill and who is that shape?' One of the most prestigious jobs in government seems to have been filled with less care than an investment bank would take over the hiring of a junior analyst."

"Every child is met at the door with a handshake and direct eye contact. This is one of the strategies we use to 'fill the emotional piggy bank' - a deliberate, personal connection that ensures every child feels seen as a human being, not just a data point. We’ve doubled down on the 'analogue' joys of childhood. We try to prioritise the outdoors and Forest School, getting muddy, play and physical movement. Every one of our pupils plays a musical instrument every single day." Primary school headteacher Ruth McManus on educating digital-native children.

Alissa Walker brings good news from France: "Paris's school streets are effectively sculpting out instant parks in the locations where they'll provide immense public health benefits to the city's most vulnerable populations. But it's true, they really stand for something else entirely: a city brave enough to prioritise children."

Amanda Cole has found there's not just prejudice against regional accents by people in the South East of England, there's also prejudice against the wrong sort of South-Eastern accent.

"The Ipcress File (the book) came out around the same time as Dr No (the movie). Reviews of the novel pointed out the contrast between the glamour of James Bond and the grime of Deighton’s spy world: there are no Aston Martins or high-rolling casinos in The Ipcress File, just ‘a little grey rusting Morris 1000’ and a grimy strip-joint on Wardour Street." Thomas Jones explores the world of Len Deighton.

Emma Linford sees Great Expectations as an early exploration of the effects of romance fraud.

The rise and fall and (slight) rise of Lionel Bart

By my calculation, this edition of The South Bank Show dates from 1994. As much of my politics come from reading Oliver Twist too young, and as Oliver! is the great British musical. I had to watch it.

And there is much to enjoy, beginning with Lionel Bart's adventures in the new world of pop music with Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard.

Then there's Oliver!, whose first night was just as triumphant as Bart makes it sound. On to the film, where I note that Mark Lester was still giving the impression that he sang in it. He didn't.

The disaster of Twang!! caused the crash of Bart's career, but maybe the warning signs were there with his musical Blitz!, which Noel Coward claimed was "twice as loud and twice as long as the real thing".

Note the presence of Mark Steyn, who had yet to reinvent himself as a commentator on geopolitics. As I wrote of him in 2008:

Steyn is a good film critic, able to write intelligently about unintelligent films. But the fact that for several years his was the predominant voice on foreign affairs in the British Conservative press was simply bizarre.

If you enjoy this, it gives me the excuse to give another plug for the superlative South Bank Show on the London production of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. 

A BFI Q&A with members of the cast of Oliver! (1968)

This session was recorded in 2012, three years before Ron Moody died. As well as Moody, who played Fagin in the 1968 film of Oliver! having first created the role on stage, it features Kenneth Cranham, who was Noah Claypole, and Mark Lester, who was Oliver himself.

As Kenneth Cranham says, it was Moody's reinvention of Fagin that made the film's worldwide success possible by moving the story away from the medieval antisemitism that Dickens drew upon. I wrote about this aspect of the novel in a book chapter a few years ago - there a short extract in another post on this blog.

But then Dickens long ago lost control of Oliver Twist. Such is the power of the novel that it has entered folklore and, like a folk tale, it now changes with every telling of its story. I wrote more about this in 2015 when Ron Moody died.

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"As need has grown and reform and resources have stalled, 1.9 million people in England alone provided a 'full-time' (defined as 35 hours or more) week of care in 2023-24 – that’s 70 per cent more than 20 years ago. Others have to fit caring responsibilities around their jobs: dropping off the kids at school, going to the office and then helping their elderly parents bathe and eat." Frances Ryan asks who will care for the carers.

Ari Berman names the far-right conspiracists who are urging Trump to take control of the mid-term elections. 

Tao Wang says a study of  the prohibition of absinthe in France in 1915 can teach us about modern day blaming and shaming. "Scapegoating operates as a powerful social mechanism. It often turns uncertainty, fear or political conflict into social blaming directed at certain persons or groups, based on thin, selective or simply false stories being told or repeated as if they were true."

Caitlin Chatterton argues that though female fans can make a musician's career, they are not taken seriously: "Perennial sexism in the music industry has often seen female fans stereotyped as hysterical. Rooted in Ancient Greek, 'hysteria' has long been used to portray women as somehow innately unstable, and therefore incapable of critical thought. It’s what kept us out of politics for so long, and it’s why our opinions are still being discredited."

"Though supported by the Parish Council and pressing need, this modest plan for six council houses aroused fierce opposition. William Maclean Homan, the town’s historian, argued it would cause Winchelsea to become a 'third-rate modern village'. He favoured, instead, a proposal to build private rented housing on low-lying land away from the town at the bottom of the hill on a site rejected by the Council because of its poor drainage." Municipal Dreams on the battle to build council housing in Winchelsea.

Adam Roberts wonders why no one reads Walter Scott any more: "Back then, everybody read him. He was the first global superstar of the novel. It's the Rule 34 of 19th-century literary studies: Everybody read Scott, no exceptions. ... Dickens's great dream, when he began writing fiction, was to do what Scott did."

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Christopher M. Cruz says US Democrats have failed to offer a vision of a liberal education: "This is not just bad for Democrats, but bad for the world as we have seen the country slip into chaos. If liberals want to see things change in 2028, they (and everyone else) should concern themselves more forcefully with the role of the liberal arts in educational institutions and invest to become the primary champion of books in the public square."

"This is not what I wanted to write. I wanted to write about how I’m about to go on book tour for my new book in a few days. Instead I am writing about the fact that I was just informed that my first book Let’s Pretend This Never Happened was banned from the high school library of a nearby town I love and visit often." Jenny Lawson on how we should respond to censorship.

Adam Stanaland and Andrea Vial find that gender conformity starts young and that boys and girls fall in line in different ways.

The Argumentative Old Git takes on Dickens' detractors: "It is entirely characteristic of him that, after the comedy of Pickwick Papers, he wanted to try his hand at something quite different. Oliver Twist is, admittedly, highly melodramatic, and teeters at times on the edge of sentimentality. But nonetheless, it projects a very real sense of menace. And I cannot really think of any other novel so crammed full of iconic scenes and images."

"Because Lee plays him like this, resisting every temptation to wink at the audience, or signal his villainy, refusing to give Howie or the audience any purchase on what he really is, Lord Summerisle becomes one of the most quietly frightening villains in British cinema history." Adam Page argues that The Wicker Man provided Christopher Lee with his greatest film role.

"First published in 1999, when Elizabeth Jane Howard was nearing the twilight of her career, Falling was inspired by real-life events. When Howard was in her seventies, she fell for the charms of a con man – a seemingly attentive man who took advantage of the fact that she was unattached and vulnerable yet receptive to admiration." JacquiWine praises Howard's late masterpiece.

The railway comes to Camden: Happy birthday Charles Dickens

It's Charles Dickens' birthday. He was born on 7 February 1812 in Portsmouth – you can visit the house where he was born.

To celebrate the day, here is his description of the effect the building of the London to Birmingham railway had on Camden:

The first shock of a great earthquake had, just at that period, rent the whole neighbourhood to its centre. Traces of its course were visible on every side. Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood. 

Here, a chaos of carts, overthrown and jumbled together, lay topsy-turvy at the bottom of a steep unnatural hill; there, confused treasures of iron soaked and rusted in something that had accidentally become a pond. Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere; thoroughfares that were wholly impassable; Babel towers of chimneys, wanting half their height; temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the most unlikely situations; carcases of ragged tenements, and fragments of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding, and wildernesses of bricks, and giant forms of cranes, and tripods straddling above nothing. 

There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the air, mouldering in the water, and unintelligible as any dream. Hot springs and fiery eruptions, the usual attendants upon earthquakes, lent their contributions of confusion to the scene. Boiling water hissed and heaved within dilapidated walls; whence, also, the glare and roar of flames came issuing forth; and mounds of ashes blocked up rights of way, and wholly changed the law and custom of the neighbourhood.

This is all one paragraph in Dombey and Son, but I feel sure that Dickens would use shorter ones if he were writing a blog post.

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"The fallout from the latest revelations has again put survivors secondary to the actions of powerful men. Mandelson, who maintained a friendship with Epstein after his 2008 conviction, initially declined to apologise to Epstein’s victims and distance himself from any knowledge of the financier’s sex crimes." Victims have told us the worst of Epstein’s crimes for decades – and  but they are still being ignored, says Lindsey Blumell.

Stephanie Burt on the organised opposition to ICE in Minnesota: "In January a horde of masked thugs arrived in the Twin Cities as part of Donald Trump’s Operation Metro Surge to brutalise, kidnap and deport undocumented residents. The goons soon found themselves outnumbered, as well as watched, followed, tracked and sometimes stymied by rapidly organised networks of civilians, who use text chains, plastic whistles, car horns and in one case a trombone to discomfit the would-be kidnappers and warn their potential victims."

Anna Fazackerley and Tam Patachako travel to Southend to see what happens to a city when its university closes.

"The 'laissez-faire' of free trade was ... less an ideological commitment to the free market or a desire to give free rein to rich capitalists as it was an effort to feed the poor, foster world peace and cosmopolitan friendship, and erode the baleful and unjustly got power of land-owning aristocrats." Paul Crider speaks up for Manchester Liberalism.

"She may have been a child of Victorian Wales but she saw nudity as natural." Jonathan Jones goes to see the Gwen John exhibition at the National Museum, Cardiff.

Cavan Scott encounters Charles Dickens and Winnie the Pooh in New York.