Clare Bucknell, Thomas Jones and guests discuss a selection of 19th-century (mostly) English novels from Mansfield Park to New Grub Street, looking in particular at the roles played in the books by money and property. Novels covered: 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
Novel Approaches
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Podcast Overview
Clare Bucknell, Thomas Jones and guests discuss a selection of 19th-century (mostly) English novels from Mansfield Park to New Grub Street, looking in particular at the roles played in the books by money and property. Novels covered: 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
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1/5/2025
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Recent Episodes
December 29, 2025
‘New Grub Street’ by George Gissing
George Gissing’s novels, Orwell once said, could be described in three words: ‘not enough money’. Writing is a matter of survival for the cast of ‘New Grub Street’ (1891), which follows a handful of literary men and women in London in the early 1880s. All of them have different ideas about success, love and personal fulfilment, and all those ideas – even the most brutally pragmatic – are subverted by the pressures of sexuality and the marketplace. In the final episode of Novel Approaches, Clare Bucknell and Tom Crewe discuss Gissing’s great portrait of London at its shabbiest. They explore Gissing’s unrelenting realism, his gift for writing nuanced characters, and why, in Tom’s words, if the novel is gloomy, it’s ‘an invigorating gloom’. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna Further reading from the LRB: Frank Kermode on George Gissing: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v05/n02/frank-kermode/squalor Rosemarie Bodenheimer on Gissing’s life: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v31/n13/rosemarie-bodenheimer/give-us-a-break Jane Miller on Gissing’s letters: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v13/n05/jane-miller/gissing-may-damage-your-health Ian Hamilton on a new ‘New Grub Street’: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v05/n02/ian-hamilton/diary Patricia Beer on Gissing’s women: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v02/n14/patricia-beer/new-women AUDIO GIFTS Close Readings and audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiogifts
December 24, 2025
'A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens
Did Dickens ruin Christmas? He was certainly a pioneer in exploiting its commercial potential. A Christmas Carol sold 6,000 copies in five days when it was published on 19 December 1843, and Dickens went on to write four more lucrative Christmas books in the 1840s. But in many ways, this ‘ghost story of Christmas’ couldn’t be less Christmassy. The plot displays Dickens’s typical obsession with extracting maximum sentimentality from the pain and death of his characters, and the narrative voice veers unnervingly from preachy to creepy in its voyeuristic obsessions with physical excess. The book also offers a stiff social critique of the 1834 Poor Law and a satire on Malthusian ideas of population control. In this bonus episode from ‘Novel Approaches’, part of our Close Readings podcast, Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell join Tom to consider why Dickens’s dark tale has remained a Christmas staple. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna AUDIO GIFTS Close Readings and audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiogifts
December 1, 2025
‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ by Thomas Hardy
After drunkenly selling his wife and child at auction, a young Michael Henchard resolves to live differently – and does so, skyrocketing from impoverished haytrusser to mayor of his adoptive town. Every unexpected disaster and sudden reversal in The Mayor of Casterbridge stems from its opening, in a plot which draws as much from realist fiction as Shakespearean tragedy and the sensation novel. Mary Wellesley and Mark Ford join Clare Bucknell to unpick the many strands in Thomas Hardy’s first Wessex novel. They explore how the novel – at once ‘algorithmic’, theatrical and fatalistic – is suffused with Hardy’s class anxieties, affinity with Dorset and fascination with pagan England. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna Further reading and listening from the LRB: Mary and Mark discuss Hardy’s medievalism on the LRB Podcast: https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/thomas-hardy-s-medieval-mind Mark discusses Poems of 1912-13 with Seamus Perry in Love and Death: https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/close-readings/love-and-death-poems-of-1912-13-by-thomas-hardy James Wood on Hardy’s life: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n01/james-wood/anxious-pleasures Hugh Haughton on Hardy’s ghosts: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v07/n21/hugh-haughton/ghosts Next episode: New Grub Street by George Gissing.
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