Personal Terms

Sir:
I'm not sure whether it's the smugness of the tone of Frederic Raphael's attacks on Tom Paulin or the personal nastiness of their limited content that is the more offensive, but either way his articles are unworthy of PN Review.



Back to Bleak House

Sir:
I like your editorial in PNR 168, especially for what you say about Eliot and Lawrence Rainey's views of T.S.E.

The principal reason that I write is to compliment Neil Powell on his 'Mr Boythorn's Canary'. My wife and I have just seen the BBC's dramatisation of Bleak House. It moved me to try to recover my old edition of the novel ( 'borrowed') and then to buy another copy; as yet I haven't addressed the novel again. I first read it in 1964, so my memory of it is vague, kept clear in a few respects (owing to my interest in the form of aggressive dementia known as the Smallweed syndrome) but, in general, foggy. I want to compliment Mr Powell on his comprehensive reading of the novel juxtaposed against the television serial. I greatly admire this incisive piece, especially its succinct economy but wide range of reference. The one jarring note is the author's taking up of the dangling adverb more importantly (for more important), one of the American press's latest solecisms that has spread, plague-like, as quickly as did famously.

I hope that Mr Powell will write again on Bleak House, the greatest of English novels if Middlemarch is not.

I salute you both for these pieces - and for your work in general on PN Review.



Melchior Vulpius

Sir:
Would any reader of PN Review know when Melchior Vulpius's hymn-melody was attached to Henry Vaughan's 'My soul, there is a country...'? If anybody does, I should be very grateful if they could e-mail me at: tjgh1025@herb.ocn.ne.jp