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 University of Cambridge 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

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 fee - Politician and Pioneer: Writing the Life of Arthur Kavanagh https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06ns10g

Producer: Emma Wallace