Thackeray's comic masterpiece, Vanity Fair, is a Victorian novel looking back to Regency England as an object both of satire and nostalgia. Thackeray’s disdain for the Regency is present throughout the book, not least in the proliferation of hapless characters called George, yet he also draws heavily on his childhood experiences to unfold a complex story of fractured families, bad marriages and the tyranny of debt. In this episode, Colin Burrow and Rosemary Hill join Tom to discuss Thackeray’s use of clothes, curry and the rapidly changing topography of London to construct a turbulent society full of peril and opportunity for his heroine, Becky Sharp, and consider why the Battle of Waterloo was such a recurrent preoccupation in literature of the period.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠

Read more in the LRB:

John Sutherland on Thackeray: ⁠https://lrb.me/nathackeray1⁠

Rosemary Hill on 'Frock Consciousness': ⁠https://lrb.me/nathackeray2⁠

Audiobooks from the LRB:

⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksna⁠⁠⁠⁠

When Wuthering Heights was published in December 1847, many readers didn’t know what to make of it: one reviewer called it ‘a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors’. In this episode of ‘Novel Approaches’, Patricia Lockwood and David Trotter join Thomas Jones to explore Emily Brontë’s ‘completely amoral’ novel. As well as questions of Heathcliff’s mysterious origins and ‘obscene’ wealth, of Cathy’s ghost, bad weather, gnarled trees, even gnarlier characters and savage dogs, they discuss the book’s intricate structure, Brontë’s inventive use of language and the extraordinary hold that her story continues to exert over the imaginations of readers and non-readers alike.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠

Read more in the LRB:

David Trotter: Heathcliff Redounding https://lrb.me/nabronte1

John Bayley: Kitchen Devil https://lrb.me/nabronte2

Alice Spawls: If It Weren’t for Charlotte https://lrb.me/nabronte3

Patricia Lockwood: What a Bear Wants https://lrb.me/nabronte4

Audiobooks from the LRB:

⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksna⁠⁠⁠

Thomas Love Peacock didn’t want to write novels, at least not in the form they had taken in the first half of the 19th century. In Crotchet Castle he rejects the expectation that novelists should reveal the interiority of their characters, instead favouring the testing of opinions and ideas. His ‘novel of talk’, published in 1831, appears largely like a playscript in which disparate characters assemble for a house party next to the Thames before heading up the river to Wales. Their debates cover, among other things, the Captain Swing riots of 1830, the mass dissemination of knowledge, the emerging philosophy of utilitarianism and the relative merits of medieval and contemporary values. In this episode Clare is joined by Freya Johnston and Thomas Keymer to discuss where the book came from and its use of ‘sociable argument’ to offer up-to-date commentary on the economic and political turmoil of its time.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠

Read more in the LRB:

Thomas Keymer on Peacock

⁠https://lrb.me/napeacock1⁠

Paul Foot: The not-so-great Reform Act

⁠https://lrb.me/napeacock2⁠

LRB Audiobooks

Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksna⁠

On one level, ‘Mansfield Park’ is a fairytale transposed to the 19th century: Fanny Price is the archetypal poor relation who, through her virtuousness, wins a wealthy husband. But Jane Austen’s 1814 novel is also a shrewd study of speculation, ‘improvement’ and the transformative power of money.

In the first episode of Novel Approaches, Colin Burrow joins Clare Bucknell and Thomas Jones to discuss Austen’s acute reading of property and precarity, and why Fanny’s moral cautiousness is a strategic approach to the riskiest speculation of all: marriage.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠

Further reading from the LRB:

John Mullan: Noticing and Not Noticing

⁠https://lrb.me/naausten1⁠

Colm Toíbìn: The Importance of Aunts

⁠https://lrb.me/naausten2⁠

W.J.T. Mitchell: In the Wilderness

⁠https://lrb.me/naausten3⁠

Clare Bucknell is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and hosted the Close Readings series On Satire with Colin Burrow. The Treasuries, her social history of poetry anthologies, was published in 2023.

Thomas Jones is a senior editor at the LRB and host of the LRB Podcast. With Emily Wilson, he hosted the Close Readings series Among the Ancients.

LRB Audiobooks

Discover audiobooks in the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiobooksna

Clare Bucknell and Thomas Jones introduce their new Close Readings series, Novel Approaches. Joined by a variety of contemporary novelists and critics, they'll be exploring a dozen 19th-century British novels from ‘Mansfield Park’ to ‘New Grub Street’, paying particular (though not exclusive) attention to the themes of money and property.

Clare Bucknell is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and hosted the Close Readings series On Satire with Colin Burrow. The Treasuries, her social history of poetry anthologies, was published in 2023.

Thomas Jones is a senior editor at the LRB and host of the LRB Podcast. With Emily Wilson, he hosted the Close Readings series Among the Ancients.

To listen to the full series, sign up:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠

The full list of texts for the series:

Mansfield Park (1814) by Jane Austen

Crotchet Castle (1831) by Thomas Love Peacock

Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë

Vanity Fair (1847) by William Makepeace Thackeray

North and South (1854) by Elizabeth Gaskell

Aurora Leigh (1856) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Mill on the Floss (1860) by George Eliot

Our Mutual Friend (1864) by Charles Dickens

The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867) by Anthony Trollope

Washington Square (1880)/Portrait (1881) by Henry James

Kidnapped (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) by Thomas Hardy

New Grub Street (1891) by George Gissing