Literature

Wilkie Collins’ haunting mystery of false identity and female instability reflected one of the lunacy panics of the age. Sarah Wise looks at three events that inspired The Woman in White.

Patricia Fara explores the scientific education of Mary Shelley and how a work of early science fiction inspired her best-known novel Frankenstein.

The messages sent by British soldiers of the First World War to their loved ones back home have long been valued for what they tell us about daily life in the trenches. But their authors were often at pains not to reveal too much of the horror they endured. Anthony Fletcher considers what these documents reveal about the men’s inner lives.

Samuel Johnson was admired for his insight and humanity, qualities forged in the darker and less well-analysed episodes of his life.

Sex, scandals and celebrity were all part of a blame and shame culture that existed in the 18th century, one that often fed off the misfortune of women at the hands of men. Prostitutes, courtesans and ladies with injured reputations took up the pen in retaliation.

Christians have long relied on scribes’ copies of Biblical texts; J. K. Elliot describes how the Codex Sinaiticus, discovered in 1844, dates from the fourth century.

Simon Yarrow reviews a title on John Wyclif and Lollardism.

Bartitsu – rather than Baritsu – was a hybrid martial art that flourished in fin de siècle London. As an amateur boxer, Arthur Conan Doyle was fascinated.

Janet Copeland introduces one of the most important feminist figures in twentieth-century history.

The most influential of 19th-century Russian wits was born on 31 March 1809.