Those of you who have already bought a copy of my new The Book Lover’s Almanac (thank you) will have noticed that while some entries are longer than others, they’re nearly all reasonably short, mostly ranging from a couple of lines to half a dozen (pictured above are the first four pages of October).
But I was keen to vary the reading experience so that it wasn’t the literary equivalent of a rat-a-tat-tat Tim Vine comedy set. For example, the entry for February 4 focuses on the occasion of Keats, Shelley, and Leigh Hunt meeting up for dinner at Hunt’s home and competing to see who could write the best sonnet about the river Nile in 15 minutes. I felt it would be interesting for the readers to see their respective entries and whether they agreed on who was named the winner.
Indeed, in my original pitch to the British Library, quoted verbatim below, I suggested three suggested options in terms of length:
* Each day has one main focus (see attached, February focus doc, ‘February 14: Charles Dickens is honoured at the Boz Ball in New York’), perhaps opening with a quotation, followed by explanatory text, and a footer of three or four other items of interest from that day.
* Each month has multiple entries of varying lengths (see attached, February shorts doc). This could still correspond to a day per page or could run longer/shorter depending on space.
and slightly cheekily
* Considering the huge amount of source material, the almanac could be an annual diary-like publication, with time-sensitive dates in each edition e.g. the 2022 almanac features the long list/short list/ceremony dates for the 2023 International Booker Prize
As you’ve gathered we went for option 2. But I thought you’d be interested to see what the book could have looked like if we’d plumped for option 1, so below is the original longer-form February 14 entry submitted as part of that pitch, almost double what eventually made it into the book.
February 14: Charles Dickens is honoured at the Boz Ball in New York
“The scene on our entrance was very striking. There were three thousand people present in full dress; from the roof to the floor, the theatre was decorated magnificently; and the light, glitter, glare, show, noise, and cheering, badle my descriptive powers.”
Charles Dickens, letter to John Forster, 17 February, 1842
Oliver Twist, The Pickwick Papers, and The Old Curiosity Shop had launched Charles Dickens to the peak of his popularity at home and abroad when he made his first trip to America in 1842.
As soon as Dickens arrived for his tour of the US and Canada he was greeted with what newspapers dubbed ‘Bozmania’, a nod to his pen name. "I can do nothing that I want to do, go nowhere where I want to go, and see nothing that I want to see. If I turn into the street, I am followed by a multitude,” he wrote to his friend and literary critic John Forster.
Dickens had serious reasons for his trip, scrutinising conditions for prisoners and low-paid workers, visiting schools and libraries, and calling for international copyright laws. But there was also time for celebrations. The chief of these was a Valentine’s Day event in the writer’s honour in New York which became known as the Boz Ball.
The great and the good of the city descended on the Park Theatre to celebrate. “The splendor of the interior of the Theatre, cannot be adequately described,” wrote George Lippard in the daily newspaper Spirit of the Times two days later. “Flags, statues, festoons, wreaths of flowers, portrait of Boz, medallions of the President, fancy scenes, mirrors, chandeliers, tableau from Boz's works, &c., all combined to render the scene one of oriental enchantment.The supper was equal to that given by Cleopatra to Anthony.”
It was indeed. Writer Washington Irving was among the 3,000 diners who paid $5 for the night’s entertainment which extravagantly celebrated Dickens and his books. One contemporary account estimated that the great and the good consumed 50,000 oysters, 10,000 sandwiches, 40 hams, 76 tongues, 50 rounds of beef, 50 jellied turkeys, 50 pairs of chickens and 25 of ducks, 2,000 fried Mutton Chops, and "12 Floating Swans, a new device" (it’s not clear what this was). Even the small fire that broke out at one point did not halt the fun.
“Such was the tom-foolery of silly-minded Americans,” added Lippard, “and such the ridiculous homage paid to a foreigner, who will in all probability return home and write a book abusing the whole nation for the excesses of a few consummate blockheads.” This is almost exactly what Boz did in his American Notes for General Circulation published later that year, though he returned for a triumphant reading tour of the US 25 years later.
Also on this day: 1900: the events of Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay unravel; 1975: Death of PG Wodehouse; 1989: A fatwa on Salman Rushdie is announced while Rushdie attends novelist and travel writer Bruce Chatwin’s memorial service in London.
It is of course available from the British Library’s own bookshop, your local independent bookseller, and the usual bigger folk.