Today I have learnt that the OED’s first evidence of the noun ‘butterfingers’ is from the New Monthly Magazine in 1835 (in Chapter IX of Theodore Hook’s Gilbert Gurney). The crowd heckles an executioner who when holding up a decapitated head lets it slip. It’s wild out here.

‘I thought to myself, there is no plum-pudding to be found here; and went home chop-fallen, to dine on a solitary chop.’ - ‘Lorenzo Lanksides’

It is March 1898. A young reporter Edward Le Breton-Martin, with Pearson’s Magazine, goes out onto the streets of London with a photographer & writes an article about the way people hold their hands as they walk along. Here for your delectation is a thread on London hands.

We are pleased to present our full programme for 'Feeling in the Long Nineteenth Century', 13-14 January 2023! 🎉 In-person registration is now OPEN: feelinginthelong19c.eventbrite.co.uk (all instructions below). Join us for what promises to be an astonishing event at Trinity College.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s remark that breakfast is ‘the nurse of a myriad essays’ in ‘An Essay on Breakfasts’ may seem delightful (I can picture him writing it munching a crumpet) but it’s 3.30pm and I’m now convinced I can’t possibly write until breakfast tomorrow

What we could all be doing right now if we followed the diary of an amateur idler, from Thomas Charles Morgan’s essay ‘Idleness’ (1825): ‘Half-past eleven. Sunk in an arm-chair, with a novel, read the same page three times over, and fell asleep.’ Sounds rather lovely.

The English Faculty Library (EFL) copy of Wordsworth’s The Excursion contains one scribble and one scribble only: ‘too much emotion’. Breathtaking.

everyone else: a good Stilton Charles Lamb: 'the delicatest rain-bow-hued melting piece'

Charles Dickens died on 9th June 1870, aged only 58. This image was created by John Everett Millais the following day immortalising the literary genius in this final deathbed scene. Dickens's daughter Mamie recalled cutting a lock of hair from her father's "beautiful, dead head".

Hazlitt Society Annual Lecture, UCL, 16th Sep. 2023 Vidyan Ravinthiran (Harvard), ‘Hazlitt (with Ramanujan) and Opinion’ eventbrite.co.uk/e/hazlitt-soci…

a lovely few days of writing in beautiful box ! thanks to Arts and Humanities Research Council for keeping us supplied with biscuits, wine & very good company🍷

If you find yourself travelling through Surbiton Station GET OFF THE TRAIN and check out the beautifully restored Blake mosaics on the platform bridge. You will not regret it!

Super pumped for tonight's launch of the Rent Cultures Network at QM 6pm, a roundtable on 'Writing Rent Now', featuring Holly Pester, Rachael Allen, Ushashi Dasgupta et moi. Tickets still available. Gwan cmon & bring your lived experience of tenancy along. eventbrite.com/e/writing-rent…

We are delighted to have Dr Ushashi Dasgupta (Oxford) joining us on 12th March to discuss a historical house collapse and fiction’s structural responsibilities. 6pm, Senate House. literarylondonrg.wordpress.com/2024/02/02/dic…

A couple of fun things I've been working on recently for Genealogies of Modernity! Putting all those hours listening to modernist poetry recordings to good use, and explaining why you should too... Part I : genealogiesofmodernity.org/journal/readin…