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“... curator none other than Marjorie Quennell. This is the intellectual background to Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson’s ambitious A Day at Home in Early Modern England. Although they are firmly empirical in their approach and never cite Bourdieu or Lefebvre, they are strongly committed to the study of what they call ‘materiality’: Hamling is an ...”

“... To the Hermitage takes as its incitement Diderot’s journey to St Petersburg, in 1773, to meet Catherine the Great. In search of pet intellectuals (she had also tried to lure d’Alembert and Voltaire to her court), she offered to print the Encyclopédie, when Diderot was having problems finding a French publisher, and later began subsidising him. In 1765 ...”

“... that they virtually become synonymous with one another. Whenever Heathcliff is incarcerated, Catherine starves; the two motifs converge in Catherine’s eerie cry, “Ellen, shut the window. I’m starving!”’ A footnote helpfully informs us that the ‘starving’ in this context primarily means ‘freezing’. But ...”

“... and most significant of the external letters which the editor includes. It was written by his wife Catherine to Richard Hengist Horne, a rather rackety literary man, author of the forgotten epic ‘Orion’, who had been a friend of the young Meredith; and it describes, with that striking domestic vividness of which even the most commonplace Victorians seem to ...”

“... Anglo-French borderlands south of Calais, into an apotheosis of conspicuous consumption. As Glenn Richardson notes in his minutely detailed book, relatively abundant surviving sources – documenting everything from the designs for the sprawling tent complexes to the provisioning of food and drink for 12,000 guests (particular attention was paid to the beer ...”

“... has taken examples from canonical English novels published before her cut-off date of 1914. Scott, Richardson, Jane Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Mrs Gaskell, Hardy and James figure largest. She argues that the early 19th-century collapse in norms of taste, and changes in fiction itself, opened many new territories for exploration: ‘It is not only that the social ...”

“... the 1850s as a soda-water manufacturer). Also from Manchester is the argumentative Reginald Jones Richardson, another Chartist convict from 1840, whose faith in good old Saxon freedoms led him eventually to work for the Ancient Foot Paths Association. The wonderfully melodramatic Dr Peter McDouall, who urged on the General Strike in 1842, gets space, too. In ...”

“... in the Thirties and Stalin’s Ambassador to Washington after the war. John Carswell is the son of Catherine Carswell, who was Ivy’s best friend until she followed her husband to Russia in 1920. In 1959, after Catherine and Litvinov were dead, Ivy got permission to visit her native land and turned up on John Carswell’s ...”

“... composition, but finishing a book made Cheyne physically sick. Late in his life, he told Samuel Richardson that ‘I never wrote a Book in my Life but that I had a Fit of Illness after.’ Neglect and bad reviews made his spirits ‘jumbled and turbid’, throwing him into a ‘vertiginous Paroxysm’ so dizzying that he was forced ‘to lay hold on the ...”

“... Heights, by contrast, is a tragedy (one of the astonishingly few tragic novels in England between Richardson and Hardy) because no such reconciliation is possible. These childhood texts are almost all fantasy and extravaganza, with few allusions to the dreary conditions of life experienced by their authors. ‘Nasty factories,’ the young Charlotte tells us ...”

“... the famous bluestocking Mary Delany – a cherished mentor of Burney’s who had corresponded with Richardson and Swift – accused her of lying, and made caustic asides about ‘Madame d’Arblay’s well-earned position as a writer of fiction’. ‘Frances d’Arblay’ by Edward Burney (c.1784) But Victorian Britain came round to the Diary and ...”

“... was formulated by Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel (1957), who found in the writing of Defoe, Richardson and Fielding a new and radical preoccupation with the here-and-now. The name Watt gave this preoccupation was ‘formal realism’: the premise, or primary convention, that the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience, and is therefore ...”

“... a ‘shock effect’. Thus William Hogarth’s first encounter with Johnson at the home of Samuel Richardson: While he was talking, he perceived a person standing at a window in the room, shaking his head and rolling himself about in a strange ridiculous manner. He concluded that he was an idiot whom his relations had put under the care of Mr ...”

“... been to move their own special machinery into place on him. But it has happened with Swift, with Richardson, with Dickens and the Romantic poets, and it is now happening with Jane Austen. Not that Tony Tanner’s study is wilfully abstract or – except for his use of the unnecessary term ‘discourse’ – filled with modern jargon. It is, on the ...”

“... seems to have wanted to do was to write a successful shocker. Instead he produced what Maurice Richardson describes as ‘a kind of incestuous, necrophilous, oral-anal-sadistic all-in wrestling match’. Something for everyone, in other words. In particular, there was sex. This is from Jonathan Harker’s Transylvanian journal: The fair girl went on her ...”