With that in mind, Simon T of Stuck in a Book recently proposed a UK book bloggers meet up, so that a gang of us blog types could get together and meet IRL (as the techy bods say) and chew the literary cud without the aid of little 1s and 0s.

Of course, I jumped at the chance, and now I’m spreading the word. We are meeting in London on Saturday 8 May! For more detailed information, please email Simon, and he’ll give you the low down.

It would be lovely to see more bloggers in person, and there will also be a book swap, so come prepared to foist a copy of something (new, old, second hand, it doesn’t matter) you love onto someone else. At the very least you’ll come away with something new to read on the train home.

But do you know what’s really cool? Yesterday Boyfriend and I were wandering in London, and we ended up here. It’s the shop! The Black Books shop! And it’s really a bookshop too!

Unfortunately it was also a closed bookshop. But in the window there was this little beauty: what looks like an early edition of The Waves by Virginia Woolf.

I did also manage to visit an open bookshop while I was in the area. The London Review Bookshop on Bury Place (the Black Books shop is on Leigh Street). I was very good and didn’t buy a thing, though there was much to be tempted by. I’m trying to restrain my book buying self at least until after Christmas.

What I do know is that it’s been really nice to have my weekends back for the first time in ages. Take Sunday, for instance. Boyfriend and I decided to pootle off in the car somewhere for the day. I couldn’t have done THAT three weeks ago! We had a marvellous day pottering about in and around Richmond. First stop was Eel Pie Island:

It’s a funny little place, and over the years has been host to lots and lots of famous musicians, including Pink Floyd and The Who. I believe Charles Dickens also talked about it as a place to go dancing, though I might be making that up. Trevor Bayliss, inventor of the wind-up radio still lives on the island, I believe.

Then we moved on the Royal Botanical Gardens, at Kew. I’d never been before, and it was really quite marvellous, even at this time of year. The trees were turning that gorgeous orangey-red colour, and we even found some holly with its berries all ready and looking very Christmassy.

Sorry the photos are a bit blurry. They were taken on my iPhone, and I’m really not very good at taking photos. Anyway, we walked around the gardens for a couple of hours, and even braved it up the 60ft tall treetop walkway. I’m not good with heights. It was a bit windy, and it swayed. Gah. I did not enjoy the experience, I admit.

The only downside of Kew was that it lies right slap-bang in the Heathrow flight path. Or, at least, it does after 3pm, and we were there about 4pm. So, every 90 seconds a plane went overhead, lowering its landing gears in the process. That aside, I’m pleased I finally went, and next time we’ll go earlier in the day so we can take in more of the gardens. I especially want to see the badger sett and the wildlife observation area.

We finished the day in Hampton, just because we’d been through it before, and thought it was pretty. Oh, and David Gilmour has a houseboat-studio there, and Boyfriend wanted to be a fanboy and touch the front door (he did). Bonus, though, was David Garrick’s Temple to Shakespeare, right on the side of the Thames.

We finished up in a nice little pub called The Bell Inn (very helpful staff, by the way) before pootling back to Oxford. A very nice day out all round.

Given that a good portion of Sunday’s sojourn was music-related for Boyfriend (not that I was in any way complaining), next weekend we’re off the Highgate Cemetery so I can do some literary (and otherwise) grave spotting. George Eliot AND Douglas Adams – not to mention Karl Marx – in one day! I’ll report back.

• Pollard by Laura Beatty
• The Gate of Air by James Buchan
• The Legend of Colton H. Bryant by Alexandra Fuller
• Selected Poems by Ian McDonald
• Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History by Adam Nicolson
• The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum by Sarah Wise

I am very pleased to see Sarah Wise’s book on the East End on London on the shortlist. While I haven’t read the whole thing cover to cover, I did read a significant portion of it for my most recent essay, and it really is a marvellous read. I’m looking forward to being able to go back and read the rest of it eventually.  It’s historically rigorous, and opinionated without being overbearing. I also have a copy of her first book, The Italian Boy: Murder and Grave Robbery in 1830s London, thanks to Catherine (Victorian Geek and friend of Other Stories).

The prize’s judges are Selina Hastings, Philip Hensher, and Peter Porter. The winner will be announced at a dinner at The Travellers Club in London on Monday, 18 May.

Dicky Perrott, the child of the novel’s title, is around 8 or 9 years old when we first meet him, though he looks several years younger. The Old Jago – based on the Old Nichol – is an area of slums that practically has its own laws and codes of honour. Policemen never venture in unless they are bolstered by numbers, and only then if one of the regular running battles turns particularly nasty. The novel follows Dicky as he grows up in his massively deprived surroundings, and as he falls into a life of petty crime, beginning with his stealing a watch and running home to show his father proudly what he had done.  Then Father Sturt, the local parish priest, arrives and tries to offer the residents of the Jago a way out of crime and violence by encouraging them to go to Church. He sees potential in Dicky and arranges for him to work for a local shopkeeper – living in the Jago is enough to put perspective employers off so this is a real opportunity indeed. Sadly, though, Dicky’s job is sabotaged, and he ends up back where he began.

This is a relatively short book (173 pages in my edition) and it is unrelenting in its portrayal of the desperation prevalent in the Jago. Interspersed with that deprivation, though, are some really touching scenes which demonstrate that Dicky is far from “all bad”, and in fact is not really bad at all but actually only an innocent victim of the inescapable poverty that infects everyone in the slums. For instance, after stealing a clock from a neighbour’s dwelling, he is overcome by guilt and so steals a small music box from a nearby shop and hides it amongst the neighbour’s belongings as they move rooms. Similarly, Dicky finds a rare glimpse of comfort in telling all his woes and worries to a donkey that belongs to another Jago resident.

Early in the novel an elderly resident of the Jago takes Dicky aside and tells him that the only way out of the Jago is to become one of the High Mob – or a successful criminal – because he’ll never be able to get a job coming from the slums. Dicky seems to want to prove him wrong, and indeed he does find another way out. But not a happy one.

A Child of the Jago is raw and angry in many places, and is probably more successful even than The Nether World in portraying the stark realities of the London slums. It was seemingly very widely read at the time – indeed Jack London makes reference to it in his 1902 non-fiction account of the slums The People of the Abyss – but Morrison has since fallen off the radar. Not a huge amount is known about his life, in part because Morrison seems to have given conflicting stories of his past to different people. Now, just over 100 years later, it is interesting to compare images of poverty then and now, especially in the light of the news that child poverty in the UK actually went up over the last year or so, despite promises from the government that they would get rid of it completely. It seems that now we have different ways of trying to deal with poverty – the welfare state; minimum wage – but it isn’t working. A Child of the Jago reminds us that these are problems that we have alwyas had. Kids with knives (for instance) aren’t a modern phenomena; they have been with us for centuries… and we still haven’t found a way to stop it.

It’s bleak and angry vision of the late nineteenth-century London slums (in this case, those in Clerkenwell) and of the damage that poverty, violence, and alcohol wreak on families forced to live therein. Believe me, there are no happy endings here.

We have the Snowdons – grandfather Michael and grandaughter Jane – living together in modest rooms. But there’s more to Michael Snowdon than meets the eye, and his secret has ramifications on several lives around him. There is Jane’s estranged father Joseph and his awful wife Clem, who are constantly trying to outwit each other. There are the Hewetts: John, daughter Clara, son Bob, and three younger children. Clara desperately tried to escape her deprived circumstances but inescapable fate pulls her right back down to the bottom. There’s Penelope ‘Pennyloaf’ Candy, who on her wedding night (she marries Bob Hewett) lies beside her new husband, who has passed out from all the booze, listening to her mother being savagely beaten by her father in the street outside, all the while knowing she’ll have to pawn her wedding ring the next day.

The novel makes for compulsive but uneasy reading, and more than once did I find myself welling up while reading it. The most striking thing about it is the futility of anyone trying to escape their hideous circumstances, because every time someone tries to make a bid for freedom from the slums, something or someone contrives to drag them back down. Life is hideously difficult and money is hideously scarce: at one point the narrator notes that the only good thing to happen to one couple is the death of their youngest child. It’s one less mouth to feed.

It’s the anger about poverty and the misguided attempts to give charity from “the upper world” that saves the novel from mawkishness. There is tragedy, but these tragedies are everyday tragedies, and sad as they are, these are the realities of the conditions. Gissing obviously feels the injustices of the conditions very strongly – in his own life, his first wife was an alcoholic who died of her affliction in 1888. The Nether World was published the next year.

“Find your 5th photo file folder, then the 5th photo in that file folder. Then pass the meme to 5 people.”

Here’s my photo:

It’s not the greatest photograph ever taken, and I’m sure experts will balk at the lack of light or perspective or something, but I rather like this snap. It is, of course, the Albert Memorial in South Kensington, London.

It was taken in early May 2008, when I took a full two weeks off work and John and I went on a bit of a jaunt to various places in England we’d always wanted to go to. Our main stops were in Haworth, York, and then down to Bath. We also spent a day in London – yes, we had been there before, rather a lot! – but we’d not been to many of the museums. The amazing Natural History Museum is very close to both the Albert Memorial and the Royal Albert Hall* (the Albert Hall was behind me as I took this photo) so we stopped off here first.

It’s an incredible memorial – some information about it can be found here – and my abiding memory of being there that day is that I’d forgotten just how big it is. Similarly, the Royal Albert Hall was much smaller than I remembered it.

I’m not sure how much people like being tagged, so I tag you all. All of you! And let me know in the comments if you do it so I can be nosy and have a look.

*Random Kirsty trivia fact: I realised I didn’t believe in God – my anti-Damascene conversion as I like to call it – inside the Royal Albert Hall. I was 14 and at a Methodist Youth Association rally (said rally was also filmed for Songs of Praise, and I like to think that my lightbulb moment is captured on film somewhere). Don’t think it was quite what my mother intended to happen when she packed me off to it…

Just before we set off, we found out that at midday there would be a plaque unveiled at what had been The Establishment Club on Greek Street in Soho. This was the club co-founded by Peter Cook, and where lots of interesting cultural things happen, like Private Eye being worked on there. Above the club was also the photographic studio where the infamous picture of Christine Keeler on The Chair was taken. The plaque was dedicated to Peter Cook, and there would be various luminaries there, so we decided to pop along and watch the unveiling.

Here’s the club, under its new name of Zebrano, with the plaque covered by a green sheet.

In a true comedy style, however, the wind blew the covering off the plaque before the unveiling could happen:

So some poor sod had to creep out in a death-defying shimmy to replace the sheet:

Cue many of the assembled journos and photographers shouting “Don’t jump!” etc. The official unveiling by veteran DJ Mike Read took place shortly after, though we’d all seen the plaque already. Whoopsie. Never mind.

We then wandered off and made our way to the South Bank, which is well-known as my Favourite Place in London Ever. As well as having the National Theatre, the British Film Institute, a branch of Foyles (one of my favourite bookshops), the Tate Modern, and The Globe, the South Bank also has rows of second hand bookstalls under a bridge:

Just looking at that makes me feel slightly weak at the knees (and also makes my bank manager quiver in panic). I bought five books: The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler, another biography of Charlotte Bronte (because a girl never can have enough), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, On Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham, and Letters from a Fainthearted Feminist by Jill Tweedie. As ever, with and essay and a dissertation looming I have no idea when I’ll actually read them, but at the moment I’m hoping to block out a few weeks in 2037.

By the way, Happy World Book Day everyone!

From John, my beloved, I got two books which he knew I’d been after, plus one excellent guess on his part. Thames: Sacred River by Peter Ackroyd and The Middle Class: A History  by Lawrence James he knew I wanted, but he pulled a blinder from left field when he got me Historic London: An Explorer’s Companion by Stephen Inwood. It’s a book of London walking tours divided by type. There’s Dickens’s London, London’s Underworld, and my personal favourite, Historic London Pubs. I fear we may be doing that one first – and soon.

I also received a signed copy of Theatres of Glass by Rebecca Stott, about the woman who introduced aquariums (aquaria?) to London – thank you kindly, Academic Friend Lauren. From my brother I got a book of Aubrey Beardsley drawings, and a collection of Edith Wharton stories called The Ghost-Feeler: Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. I also got, from John’s mum and step-dad, the Norton Critical Edition of Jane Eyre (my favourite book, alongside Mrs Dalloway) and the DVD of the recent BBC adaptation of Little Dorrit – hooray! I have countless editions of Jane Eyre, but I’m a complete geek about it, and love to read all the critical material I can get my hands on about it. So, I was chuffed with that.

Then to the book tokens (thanks mum!). I went a bit mad and spent all of them in one go, and came home with a non-fiction stack of joy: The Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen, Singled Out by Virginia Nicholson – about the thousands of women who lost their husbands etc in the First World War and how they went on to make lives without men – Necropolis: London and its Dead by Catharine Arnold, The Kit-Cat Club by Ophelia Field, 52 Ways of Looking at  a Poem by Ruth Padel, and the wonderfully titled An Utterly Impartial History of Britain (or, 2000 Years of Upper Class Idiots in Charge) by John O’Farrell.

Phew! I have no idea at the moment when I’m going to get a chance to read all these, especially as I’m about to dive headfirst into another essay (this time on Thomas Hardy’s poetry), quickly followed by my MA dissertation, which will be 15,000 words on the New Woman writers and motherhood. I’m feeling a bit light-headed just thinking about it all to be honest.

As for my current reading, at the moment I unsurprisingly have my head stuck in a book of Thomas Hardy poems. I’ve also got two more novels to read for class. The first is King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard. I fear it might not be My Thing, but the reading list decrees it, so it shall be read. At least it’s short. Finally for the term I have Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad lined up. I have read that one before, back in the dim and distant days of my undergraduate, though I have managed to remember very little about it, other than largely thinking at the time how much I prefered The Secret Agent. I do, of course, have to have a non-university book on the go, otherwise I’d go bonkers, and at the moment it’s Claire Tomalin’s biography of Mary Wollstonecraft. I’m not far into it yet, but she’s such a wonderful writer that I already know that it will be an excellent book to relax with.

Having read quite a lot about (specifically 19th century) psychiatric reform  in 2007 for an essay I was writing, which compared Colney Hatch Asylum in Middlesex with The Great Exhibition of 1851. It’s not as bizarre as it sounds, by the way, I got a pretty decent mark for it. But anyway, I have for a while been interested in the ways in which the mad were perceived and treated. This book did much to fill in the gaping abysses in my knowledge, tracing the story of Bedlam from the 13th century, and it threw up lots of head-shakingly-interesting anecdotes and portraits of patients through the centuries. For example, the American marine, William Norris, who was kept chained to a wall for twelve solid years, until his intestines burst. Urgh.

Above: From William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress, where the Rake ends up in Bedlam.

There is an interesting chapter on women and madness too, and while you may not learn anything new if you’ve already read Elaine Showalters’s fantastic book The Female Malady, Arnold brings the salient points together, and gives an illuminating comparison of two archtypal “mad women” in literature: Miss Haversham from Great Expectations and Bertha Mason from Jane Eyre. While I didn’t read anything in that chapter that I didn’t already know, I’m pleased that it’s there and that the unfair treatment shown to women in psychiatric hospitals (especially in the supposedly more-humane Victorian era) is given the space and consideration it deserves. Women in the mental health system (if you could call it that in history) have always had a bad time of it. Even the Ancient Greeks thought that women’s wombs sent them mad by coming loose within their bodies and (literally) choking them. And we thought them classical fellas knew everything…

There is also a vivid account of anti-Catholic rioting, which lapped at the walls of Bedlam (not to mention Newgate Prison and goodness knows how many other famous institutions) in 1780, and while I’m not totally convinced that Arnold’s claim that the riots were symptomatic of a wider sense of madness within London – I rather think that the madness was confined to the rioters, even though there were thousands of them – it’s always good to read about historical and cultural context. I also think that the section towards the end of the book on shell shock during and after The Great War could have been tied more specifically to Bedlam, like the rest of the book, but I certainly don’t think it was badly written by any manner of means. It’s all fascinating stuff. I just wondered how many shell shock patients Bedlam itself ended up with, and how they treated them.

These minor niggles aside, I was impressed with the book, and despite its less-than-cheery subject matter, it was very easy to read. Catharine Arnold has also written Necropolis: London and its Dead, which Catherine recently reviewed over at Victorian Geek, and which is already sitting on my Amazon Wishlist.