Secret Life of Books

Nobody expects the Victorian wombats! Given the title, listeners won’t be hugely surprised to hear there are goblins in today’s episode, but wombats!?!?
Yes, the sleeper hits of this episode are our round, furry friends from Australia. Or, as the poet Christina Rossetti would put it in a poem to her family pet, gli umobatti. “Goblin Market” is already going to 11 on the weirdness scale, and we’ve said nothing of the fairies, goblins, sexual repression, feminine hysteria, class anxiety and evangelism coming your way. If you’re into High Victorian weirdness then, boy, this is the SLoB episode for you.
Christina Rossetti was the daughter of an exiled Italian radical and sister of the famous painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and “Goblin Market” is her hit poem from 1862. 1862 was, incidentally, the same year in which, across the Atlantic, Emily Dickinson sent her poems to T.W. Higginson (asking if they breathe) and Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, improvised a story about a girl called Alice going underground.

“Goblin Market” is a bizarre, rollicking, long poem about a young woman called Laura who “sucked and sucked and sucked” the “fruit globes” of some goblins - which is just an unnecessary erotic way of saying she ate some fruit - and wasted away, until saved by her sister Lizzie in a truly bizarre ceremony in which she licks sticky juice off her face.

Rossetti was inspired by John Keats and his theory of negative capability, and she was at the heart of London’s bohemian artistic elite, the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood. But she was also neurotic, austere and devoutly religious, turning her back on her brother’s louche goings-on in his house in Chelsea, where aesthetes slid naked down the bannisters and cavorted with his collection of exotic pets.

But she did not turn her back on Gabriel Rossetti’s pet wombat, Top, named after his great university friend, the radical designer and writer William Morris. Come for the fruit globes, stay for the wombats in this edge-of-your seat SLOB episode.
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In April 1819, the poet John Keats, aged 23, told his brother George that he was done with poetry. A few days later, he smashed out the first poem in what is arguably the greatest streak in literary history, with "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." This was followed in quick succession by four odes, including "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode to a Grecian Urn." And then as summer faded, he had a thing to say about the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness in "To Autumn." Throughout this, he also wrote one of his most under-rated longer poems - the mini epic Lamia. All that in six months!
God only knows what marvels 1820 might have had in store, but at the start of the year he suffered his first lung haemorrhage, confirming his fears of tuberculosis, and announced to his friend Charles Browne that he was dying - as indeed he was.
Not only do Keats' Odes stand amongst the greatest in the English language, but their influence was unparalleled in that century. Tennyson, the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetic Movement that we associate with Walter Pater, William Morris and Oscar Wilde directly descend from Keats’ work, frequently quoting the final lines of "Ode to a Grecian Urn" as their credo: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’.
So the big question in this episode is simply ‘how?’. How did the 23-year-old Keats manage to do it? What was going on in his life and his art, his friendships as well as the world at large to enable this to happen? And what is it that makes these poems so truly unforgettable? We’re going to be talking about madness, revolution and medicine in Regency England. We’re going to run through a brief history of birds - particularly nightingales - in English literature, and explain what an ode is and where it comes from? There’s love, friendship, laughter, despair, and something called Negative Capability, which is more exciting than it sounds.

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In 1751, a little-known Cambridge academic called Thomas Gray published “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” and became a household name. His poem was a funeral elegy about the sun going down over the graves of long-forgotten people whom Gray didn’t know. They happened to be buried in the same small country churchyard as his aunt and mother (and, eventually, himself), in the village of Stoke Poges. It was an instant smash, topping the literary charts and going into multiple reprints, editions, and translations - and spawning a minor sub-industry of satires and parodies.
If you’ve ever heard of the “graveyard school” of poetry, Thomas Gray is its genius, and “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by far its most famous and influential poem.
Gray had a huge impact on the Romantic poets - Wordsworth, Colerdige, Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Tennyson, Browning, T.S. Eliot and Philip Larkin were all indebted to him – and countless others.
Generations of British schoolchildren know Gray’s poem by heart, so today Sophie and Jonty are digging up the dirt on this graveyard poem to ask what all the fuss is about. Why is this one of the most important and prized works in English poetry, and which heavy-hitter authors came before Gray, paving the way for this poetic game-changer?

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A special collaboration between Sophie and the celebrated writer and podcaster Gretchen Rubin, of Happier with Gretchen Rubin, recorded live from New York City. Join Sophie and Gretchen on a literary pilgrimage to the Upper East Side of New York, where they celebrate a shared favourite children's book, From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, by the extraordinary E.L Konigsburg.
Sophie and Gretchen walk out on the streets of Manhattan and through the galleries of the Met, visiting favorite landmarks from the novel, and discussing what makes this children's book so perfect, both a glorious product of its time and place, and an immortalizing of the Met and New York City for future generations of children and their parents.
It's part of a series Gretchen and her sister are doing called MOVE 26 in '26, to get readers and listeners exercising for at least 26 minutes a day, during 2026!
Check it out here, and sign up:
https://gretchenrubin.com/move26in26/
And learn more about Gretchen and her work on a happier life here:
https://gretchenrubin.com/

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Talent shows like The X Factor, Got Talent and their many spin offs began in the 1380s, not the 1980s! They were invented by Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote his masterpiece The Canterbury Tales at the end of a successful and glamorous diplomatic career in medieval Europe.
This is the literary pilgrimage to top all literary pilgrimages, the imagined story of a group of medieval odds and sods, who meet up to in a London pub and walk to Canterbury Cathedral. The owner of the pub, a local MP named Harry Bailey (a real guy), decides that they’ll have a storytelling competition to pass the time while they travel. The winner will get dinner at, you guessed it, Harry's pub.
No one had ever written anything remotely like this before, and Chaucer’s version of pub-mike night became a literary sensation.
The Canterbury Tales is one of the most famous works of English Literature ever, and a perennial favorite on "Intro to English Lit" syllabuses. It's written in Middle English, which isn't an easy read now, but has a lot of fascinating local color that has disappeared from modern English. In the first installment of our “Long(ish) Poems” series, Sophie and Jonty explain why the Canterbury Tales remains an evergreen literary staple, what makes Chaucer’s characters so brilliant, and what’s important about the "General Prologue" that kick-starts the whole tale cycle. [Editor's note: work on your titles, Geoffrey!]

Here is Harvard's easy to use version of the Canterbury Tales in Middle English with a modern English translation: https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/general-prologue-0

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