Nottingham, evidently, is in a parlous way.
“It is well known that Dr. Barrie’s start was like that of so many others who have won their way to greatness in the Republic of Letters: a brief spell of journalism, and then—the plunge into literature.”
One can hear Dr. Barrie splashing about for dear life.
“It had never occurred to him [Barrie] that his task lay so near his hand; that to turn the lives of his fellow-townsmen into literature was the way that God had chosen for him to make the age to come his own.”
I should think not, indeed!
“In Barrie’s case it was comparatively a short struggle, and two or three years after the time when he found that Scots dialect was enough to damn a book, he had succeeded in making it an attraction; presently its charm became the most striking feature of contemporary letters, and what we may call the Barrie school arose to accomplish feats unique in the literary history of the nineteenth century.”
Prodigious!
“Sydney Smith was witty; so, too, was Sheridan; Dickens was a humourist; Hood, like Barrie, was at once a wit and a humourist.”
Who would have thought it?
“The noblest book which Barrie has given to the world is none other than Margaret Ogilvy, in which—to use the vile and vulgar phrase—he has made ‘copy’ of his mother.… If he had done nothing more than draw that sweet picture of a good woman’s humble, happy life, he would have deserved well of his generation. It was a delicate, almost an impossible, task to take up, and only an artist of the first order could have dared to hope for success in it.… There is no passage in all that Barrie has written more essentially Scottish in character than the delightfully humorous account of his mother on the prospect of his election to a well-known London club, for which he had been nominated by the good fairy of his literary life—Frederick Greenwood.”