Classic books are considered with a fresh eye. Returning to the authors' original manuscripts and letters, expert writers and performers bring their personal insights to these great works.In the new series of The Secret Life of Books, we explore another eclectic selection of literary masterpieces: a memoir of drug addiction, an epic Elizabethan poem, a collection of nonsense verse, a Victorian classic, a children's adventure tale, and a nostalgic hymn to rural life.
Tony Jordan, chief scriptwriter on EastEnders for 15 years and creator of Life on Mars and Hustle, brings his writer's insight to a popular classic - Charles Dickens's Great Expectations.Dickens serialised his novels and, says Jordan, his brilliant characterisation and cliffhangers make him a godfather to contemporary television writers: 'He's a populist, through and through. He wrote for a mass audience - and they adored him for it'.Jordan investigates why Dickens decided to change the ending of Great Expectations and what this decision reveals about the writer and the man.By examining original texts and manuscripts to piece together Dickens's troubled life at the time, Jordan discovers how the author's own personal story may have influenced whether his hero Pip would have a future with Estella.
In Shakespeare's day, original manuscripts of plays were thrown away after use. If it wasn't for one printed volume, The First Folio (1623), many of his greatest works, such as Macbeth and The Tempest, would have been lost forever. Actor Simon Russell Beale has long been obsessed with the collection - and what secrets it might give up about its author.'What can we learn from this wonderful book?' asks Russell Beale. A surprising amount, it seems. 'We can learn that he collaborated, worked with his fellow playwrights and actors, that those great words were not always his. We can learn that his plays changed during his own lifetime. And, more controversially, I think we can find out something about Shakespeare the man, his biography'.With privileged access to this rare volume, expert testimony from director Sam Mendes, and Nicholas Hytner, director of the National Theatre, plus wonderful solo performances by Russell Beale, the shadowy figure of William Shakespeare comes more into focus.
Award-winning writer Alexandra Harris shows how Virginia Woolf's classic work Mrs Dalloway completely re-imagined what a novel might be.Woolf came of age as an author after Europe had been shattered by the First World War. 'Everything was going to be new,' says Harris of Woolf's literary ambitions. 'Everything was going to be different. Everything was on trial'.The result was a new, free-form style of writing that responded to the post-war climate of confusion and uncertainty. Radically, Woolf's central characters - socialite Clarissa Dalloway and shell-shocked survivor Septimus Smith - never meet, while the novel also pioneers a flowing stream-of-consciousness style.Using original manuscripts, diaries and notebooks to 'catch a glimpse of a great writer at work', Harris argues that the novel also allowed Woolf to creatively channel her own mental illness into the character of Septimus Smith, and in so doing helped keep herself sane.
Cerys Matthews tells the extraordinary story of one of the great literary treasures of the medieval world - the Mabinogion. Its ancient tales, once recited aloud by storytellers, were later translated from Welsh by a Victorian enthusiast, Lady Charlotte Guest, bringing them to an international audience. Their influence can still be detected in works such as JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones.'When I was growing up I had a Mabinogion poster, the illustrations were almost psychedelic', says Matthews, who was enchanted. 'I'd fallen in love with the unpredictable plots, the beautiful language and the larger than life characters'.Here were unforgettable creations - a king who could stride across the Irish Sea, a woman made entirely of flowers, goats that mysteriously changed into wild boars and the first ever appearance of King Arthur. As Matthews delves deeper into these strange tales, she examines some of the original, ancient manuscripts and visits some of the locations in Wales which first inspired many of the stories.
Journalist and novelist Bidisha was fascinated by Bronte's Jane Eyre as a teenager, but re-reading the story as an adult left her feeling uncomfortable. What Bronte had to say about sex and race was darker and more disturbing than she remembered.For the young Bidisha, Jane Eyre's perilous, but ultimately liberating, passage into adulthood showed that a young woman could find happiness without compromising her principles. Jane got to have it all. Or did she?Revisiting this classic Victorian novel seventeen years on, Bidisha sees her erstwhile role model, and the society which spawned her, through very different eyes. Is Jane Eyre really the spirited, independent woman Bidisha admired as a young reader? Is the supposedly dashing Mr Rochester little more than a bully and an abuser? What does the characterisation of Bertha, the mad creole woman in Rochester's attic tell us about Bronte's colonial attitudes?To better understand her sometime heroine and to search for clues, Bidisha travels to the Bronte's family home in Yorkshire and visits the British Library to examine Bronte's original manuscript and uncover intimate letters written by Charlotte Bronte to a married professor, believed by many to be the man who inspired the character of the abusive Rochester.Bringing a fresh and critical eye to this classic work, Bidisha reassesses one of literature's most memorable heroines.
Some 200 years since it was written, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is now shorthand for the horrors of science run amok. But when author and anatomist Professor Alice Roberts returns to the 18-year-old Mary's manuscripts, she finds someone concerned with the very act of creation itself. She also discovers clues of another writer's influence, someone very close to Mary.Alice's travels take her to the Villa Diodati in Geneva, where Mary and her partner Percy spent time with Lord Byron and she conceived the idea of Victor Frankenstein's creature. By showing the disastrous results of the obsessive Victor's attempts to create life, Mary is seen to be critiquing the Romantic ideal of the solitary, creative genius, a notion associated with poets Percy Shelley and Byron. Surprisingly, when examining Mary's original manuscript at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, Alice also sees written evidence of Percy's collaborative role in the creation of Victor.In considering the influence of Mary's parents - her father was the radical philosopher William Godwin and her mother Mary was the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women - Alice further shows that the ideas informing Frankenstein make the novel much more than a simple horror story. Mary's account does deal in death, but ultimately it provokes us to ask questions about how we live.
Dr Janina Ramirez unravels Edmund Spenser's Elizabethan epic The Faerie Queene to reveal how this fantasy world of elves, nymphs and questing knights was written in the midst of the brutal Tudor occupation of Ireland, and how the writer's growing disillusionment with the conflict was coded into the poem's restless vers
Nicholas Parsons, a lifelong fan of Edward Lear, revisits the book that gave the world The Owl and the Pussycat to explore the fine line between joy and melancholy in Lear's writing and discover how the epileptic, bronchial, asthmatic depressive pioneered a new kind of poetry that married brilliant wordplay with astonishing artwork.
Edith Nesbit is probably best known these days for The Railway Children, but her earlier book Five Children and It was even more influential, its blend of magic and the everyday paving the way for the Narnia stories and Harry Potter. A classic fantasy story about a group of siblings who discover a creature that can grant wishes, Nesbit's warm, witty children's fable was shaped by her own troubled family life.In this film, actress and Nesbit fan Samantha Bond discovers how a rootless childhood and terrible personal tragedy influenced Five Children and It, delving into the origins and legacy of a book that can be arguably said to have kick-started modern children's fiction.
Written in 1862 by the Reverend Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies tells the story of a young chimney sweep called Tom who finds redemption amongst the pulsing life of the open ocean when he is transformed into an aquatic creature. Church of England vicar and former pop star Reverend Richard Coles dives beneath the surface of this children's classic to reveal the revolutionary science behind the story, the influence it had on social reform in Victorian England, and how the author's racist viewpoints impacted its reputation.Charles Kingsley was a man of endless contradictions - as changeable as the tide. He was a passionate outdoorsman who had to lock himself away during bouts of depression; an inspirational public speaker who suffered from a lifelong stammer; a social reformer who distrusted democracy; and a sensitive scholar with the instincts of a street-fighter. And his most famous book, The Water-Babies, is every bit as eccentric and utterly compelling as he was.Richard finds out how the book was born out of a sense of outrage at the suffering of young sweeps, and how its popular success led to a change in the law. He grapples with the dark side of The Water-Babies, exploring how the book's 'muscular Christianity' was tainted by racial prejudice. And he discovers how, at the same time, Kingsley's classic contained a sense of feminine spirituality seemingly at odds with whiskery Victorian stereotypes.Richard meets author and geneticist Prof Steve Jones to discuss the close friendship between Charles Kingsley and Charles Darwin, whose On the Origin of Species Kingsley had been one of the first to praise. He also talks to fellow Church of England priest Reverend Marie-Elsa Bragg about the book's mystical, mysterious side, and visits the Hampshire rectory where Kingsley wrote the first chapter of the work in half an hour under the insistence of his young son.
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Multi-award-winning actor and director Fiona Shaw explores the genesis of her all-time favourite book, The Mill on the Floss, and discovers how the scandal that caused George Eliot (born Mary Ann Evans) to take a male pen name was also played out in the plot of her classic novel about a woman's thwarted intellectual ambitions and conflicting sexual desires.
Performance poet and former heroin addict John Cooper Clarke explores Thomas de Quincey's autobiographical classic Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and discovers how his fellow Mancunian's addiction memoir avoids the cliches of modern 'misery-lit' in favour of something much more unsentimental and psychologically complex.
Best-selling chronicler of modern country life, Joanna Trollope traces the roots of her favourite book Cider with Rosie to uncover how Laurie Lee blended fact and fiction in his wistful elegy to a disappeared rural world - and reflect on why a book with such dark, hard-edged undercurrents continues to have such a popular appeal.
Former journalist and keen amateur sailor John Sergeant takes to the water in the wake of the plucky young heroes of Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons, and learns how a globe-trotting foreign correspondent and acquintance of Lenin and Trotsky came to perfect a new, more authentic kind of children's literature that featured real children doing real things in real places.