Neil Bartlett

As is so often the case with Charles Dickens's writing, characters and situations from his 1837-39 novel Oliver Twist seem to have found life apart from the text: little Oliver's asking for "more," Bumble's pomposity, Fagin's treachery, and the Artful Dodger's shenanigans have become standard literary and cultural reference points. Generations of readers have found different elements to savor - from the melodramatic alternation between sentimentality and terror to the fairy-tale plot to the cast of remarkable characters. And of course there's the novel's social implications: Dickens pointedly maintained in his preface to the book's 1841 edition that Oliver Twist was important precisely because of its realistic, uncompromising account of the harshness and cruelty of life in early Victorian England. In this engaging study of Dickens's sccond book (it initially appeared as a magazine serial), Richard J.^ Dunn uses the author's admission that he put his "whole heart and soul" into the novel's writing to explore the connections between Dickens's own adversity - having to work under wretched conditions in a blacking factory as a boy - and the dire and often life-threatening situations the bastard child Oliver must endure before, as Dickens put it, "trimumphing at last." Taking a controversial and timely subject - England's poor laws, whose debates in Parliament he covered as a court reporter - and a child as his hero, Dickens, Dunn contends, drew together two worlds: the destitute London slums that served as a breeding ground for criminal activity and the innocent world we associate with childhood. Dunn points out that Oliver's "progress" from dark world to light shows, almost paradoxically, that these worlds are linked and will always coexist, however secure one may feel in the latter.^ The colorful array of characters that either help along or hinder Oliver's progress Dunn analyzes in detail, but to the book's most controversial character, the sinister yet only-all-too-human Fagin, he devotes an entire chapter. Dunn observes that Oliver, though the novel's "hero," in many ways functions as a blank sheet of paper on which the impressions of Dickens's richly drawn personalities, particularly Fagin, are cast. Such characters, Dunn notes, provide us wide the clues to the wholeness of thought to which Oliver aspires. Dunn underscores the importance of the George Cruikshank drawings that accompanied the serialized Oliver Twist, considering these visual renderings (four of which are reprodueed here) as more of a collaborative than a purely illustrative effort. And to round out this lively study, Dunn examines the myriad stage and screen adaptations of Oliver Twist, which found new life in Oliver!, the Academy Award-winning film of the 1960s.

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From Goodreads: A deeply romantic evocation of gay life, this stunning first novel by celebrated British gay writer Neil Bartlett gives a tender, erotic, brutally explicit portrayal of love between men. In a dark corner of the best bar in the city, two lovers fall into each other's arms. The bar has been called many names, but it is now known simply as The Bar. Its proprietor is the aging, still glamourous Madame. Its clientele is gay. The two who fall in love are Boy, a beautiful nineteen-year-old, and the handsome, forty-something "Older Man" referred to as "O" by the regulars of The Bar. This is the story of Boy's and O's courtship and marriage, of Madame's role in the affair, and of the man called "Father," who threatens to come between them. Searingly honest in its deception of gay culture and ritual, this gripping novel is at once a moving celebration of love and a stark picture of life for gay men today.

In this novel, Mr Page takes the reader from the brittle glamour of the 20s to the violent repression of the 50s; from Mayfair dining rooms to the steam room of a Turkish bath; from the ordinary world of Mr Page to the strange and unsettling world of Mr Clive.

From Goodreads: The author reflects on the links between the homosexual of the 1980s and his counterparts of a century ago--between gay lives today and those of Oscar Wilde, his friends, lovers, and acquaintances.

Reggie Rainbow is an angry young man who treads the backstage corridors of down-at-heel theatres for a living. Childhood polio has left him with a limp, but his strong arms and nimble fingers are put to perfect use behind the scenes, helping the illusionist Mr Brookes to 'disappear' a series of glamorous assistants twice nightly. But in 1953, bookings for magic acts are scarce, even in London. So when Mr Brookes is unexpectedly offered a slot at the Brighton Grand, Reggie finds himself back out on the road and living in a strange new town. The sea air begins to work its own peculiar kind of magic, and, as the bunting goes up in the streets outside the theatre for the Grand's forthcoming Coronation spectacular, Reggie begins to wonder just how much of his own life is an act--and what might have happened to somebody who disappeared from that life long ago.