High Romanticism

Keeping awake here is a bit of a challenge, but, as ever, reading "Detectives Beyond Borders" offers a good antidote to sleepiness.

Today I've been set thinking about why I was so pleased to study English Literature after leaving secondary school. At that time, I was far from being the nervous reader who now dances gingerly round demanding subjects here. Nerves of steel seem to be the lot of the young and I was an enthusiast for Poe, Baudelaire, Dickens and all the other writers like the Brontës and Wilkie Collins who peopled the first half of the 19th century with deluded and befuddled characters, often drug addicted and given to wild fantasies in the best tradition of High Romanticism.

The late 19th Century is more to my taste these days, but I'm aware of the watered down sentiments and the social concern that makes writers like Zola less frenetic and a tad more pedestrian than those already mentioned.

Proust keeps a sense of frenzy alive and certainly all descriptions of his vapour filled room where visitors had to breath in strange odours, perhaps drug laden,
makes me wonder if all writers should not live a little on the edge. Having lived through the 1960s and formed a very low opinion of the effects of narcotics in general, it is interesting to go back to a time when opium was a common cure for toothache and gin was the scourge of a nation.

Virtual travel through books is quite enough for me.
I would not like to have lived in those times.


Tales of Terror and Romance are fine as entertainment and at the moment the BBC is
offering quite a selection of stories on Radio Four for the Christmas season.

Let's enjoy...