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Frederick Daniel Hardy, Children Playing at Doctors
Most 15x15 crosswords have just four or five theme answers. This puzzle has ten theme answers! Ten!! That’s twice the usual complement!!! Are you grateful? Are you wondering how to let me know how grateful you are?? Watch this space!!!! Next week I’ll tell you how.
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Atkinson Grimshaw, Arriving at the Hall
J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873), an Irish journalist and novelist, wrote some 20 novels beginning in 1845; he specialized in the creation of eerie atmosphere.
Though sometimes strained and improbable, this novel “is rather to be taken as a highly wrought romance than as a picture of mere every-day life and its issues. Enough that the novel is well-written, paints some strongly-wrought dream figures, and one or two very well-drawn characters of real substantial life, that it also excites curiosity, and sustains a very strong interest from the beginning to the end." Examiner, December 24, 1864.
“Mr. Le Fanu has the gift of working upon the imagination of his readers, until every description of still life—a room, a picture, a piece of furniture, the entire house—becomes instinct with significance. . . . The author’s artistic imagination touches every object, however small or apparently insignificant, giving them a meaning like a song without words.” Athenaeum, January 7, 1865.
La Fanu “is feverishly intent on producing a series of Rembrandt effects. . . . Seen through this ghostly medium, all the characters, from the principals to the merest supernumerary, appear more or less weird or unearthly.” Saturday Review, February 4, 1865.
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https://archive.org/details/unclesilastaleof00lefa_0
Sir John Everett Millais, Speak! Speak!
Beware! On the outside you’ll find pleasant phrases about this and that (Biblical dogs, dairy farmers, Hibernian patriots, luxury homes, intoxicated birds) but oh! what lurks within? Your spine will tingle, your flesh will creep; it will be weeks before you again dare to work a crossword alone.
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Alfred Elmore, Supplication
Julia Cecilia Stretton (1812-1878) wrote some eleven novels in middle age, between 1855 and 1869. In this, a good style and several entertaining minor characters make up for a sometimes strained plot with a sentimental conclusion.
It is “impossible to get through its first chapter without experiencing an unwonted degree of interest which will grow” as the reader proceeds. “The author departs . . . from established custom in not making marriage the climax of the story.” Spectator, November 12, 1859
“A novel of great merit, exhibitng the constructive faculty of the author in a very high degree, and written in an easy, practised style.” Observer, November 14, 1859
“Very agreeable . . . full of interest, and totally without . . . affectation.” Literary Gazette, November 26, 1859
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v.1 https://archive.org/details/mrmrsasheton01stre
v.2 https://archive.org/details/mrmrsasheton02stre
v.3 https://archive.org/details/mrmrsasheton03stre
Albert Joseph Moore, The Dreamers
This puzzle contains only 72 words. I think that’s fewer than any other on this site. It has 5 theme entries, which account for 51 of its 191 letters. 34 blocks take up the remainder of its 225 squares. I’ll leave you to calculate its merit on the basis of these statistics.
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Louise Rayner, Oxford
Frank Smedley (1818-1864), a journalist and editor, wrote only four novels before succumbing to ill health in middle age. This, his first (serialized 1846-48) features amusing (if flat) characters, a pleasant style, and an often silly but usually entertaining plot. (The novel, by the way, is partly set in Cambridge, not Oxford—but I like this painting.)
The characters “are nicely and unaffectedly marked. They . . . get into scrapes in a manner sufficiently easy and natural.” The author’s “style is clear of trick and vulgarity” and “his scenes are alive.” Athenaeum, April 27, 1850
A “humorous and right-minded” novel “full of Pickwickian fun.” The plot “contains sufficient of adventure to carry it on with due interest,” and the characters “are well contrasted and developed.” It will suit “the merry and wise of the old school of English readers.” New Monthly Magazine, June, 1850
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https://books.google.com/books?id=YENWAAAAcAAJ&pg=PP2#v=onepage&q&f=false
Edward Wilkins Waite, Autumn
It seems only yesterday we were celebrating the spring with horrible puns; here we are already celebrating the fall with hidden words in nonsense phrases. Nothing makes time’s winged chariot hurry faster than Victorian novels and language-torturing crosswords.
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A puzzle of mine will appear Tuesday, October 16, on David Steinberg’s Puzzle Society Crossword site, and comments on his blog. And another puzzle of mine will appear Thursday, October 18, in The Wall Street Journal.
Charles Lock Eastlake, The Lily—Portrait of Miss Bury (Lady Charlotte Bury's daughter)
Lady Charlotte Bury (1775-1861), daughter of the sixth Duke of Argyll and herself the mother of nine children, wrote, in addition to poems and scandalous memoirs, some sixteen novels. In addition to the complex, convincing title character she provides here a leisurely series of subplots—a few of them exaggerated, but many successfully comic, and some genuinely moving.
Bury shows a “full and wise reliance on nature as it exists in itself” and a “happy skill in putting the commonplaces of life and character in an uncommonplace point of view”; the resulting novel is “ true to English life and nature as they actually exist in our own day.” New Monthly Magazine, July, 1842
“She is many degrees nearer to Miss Austen, than any of her contemporaries.” Athenaeum, July 2, 1842
“The quiet unexaggerated pictures, the lively dialogues, the nice discrimination of various kinds of weakness, the contrasts of folly and vice, the dangers of a false education and a half morality, were chiefly noticeable in the writer’s first production, and present themselves in this with unabated freshness." Examiner, July 9, 1842
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v. 1 https://archive.org/details/manuvringmother01bury
v. 2 https://archive.org/details/manuvringmother02bury
v.3 https://archive.org/details/manuvringmother03bury
Frederick Daniel Hardy, Preparing for Dinner
This puzzle was inspired by 31 Across, which came to me as an airline ticket locator code. Was this the hand of a benevolent Providence reaching down to interfere directly in human affairs?
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Thomas Benjamin Kennington, Reading the Letter
Arthur R. Conder (1876-1901), barely out of college when he wrote this novel, died shortly after its completion of heart failure. Read it, and you will join contemporary reviewers in their regret that he did not live to enjoy a long career.
“The plot is entirely diverting if not altogether probable. . . . The writer regards his characters with a whimsical sympathy and has been able to make them eccentric and lovable at the same time. . . . The quaint architecture of this little book is beyond criticism—compact, peculiar, facetious.” Chicago Tribune, July 18, 1901
“It is full of quiet humor, keen characterization and a certain freshness which is all too rare among the novels of the day.” Baltimore Sun, August 15, 1901
“The plot . . . is good, and the interest is well maintained; but it is in the freshness of the treatment, the briskness of the narrative, the excellent characterisation—a certain individualizing of every-day characters—that the great charm and merit of the book lie.” Bookman, October 1901
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Helen Allingham, Baking Bread
I once made a cd for a friend with 24 distinct recorded versions of the song on which this puzzle is based. He hasn’t spoken to me in years. Do you think there’s a connection?
The original title of this puzzle—which almost no one understood—was “Put on the Skillet! Put on the Lid!” The final, much superior, title was the inspiration of Ralph Bunker, who, along with a man who prefers to be called “Bob Kerfuffle,” has been test-solving my puzzles for months. I’ll take this occasion to express my profound gratitude to both. Would you also like to test-solve my puzzles? Send me an email! The qualifications are minimal: an unerring sense of which Roman numerals correspond to which Arabic numerals would do (I find myself surprisingly shaky on this subject). The compensation, however, is even more minimal: nothing whatsoever!
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045-No-Matter-How-You-Slice-It.puz
045-No-Matter-How-You-Slice-It.pdf
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A puzzle of mine appears today, and another will appear Thursday, October 4, in The Wall Street Journal.
Thomas Francis Dicksee, Distant Thoughts
Beatrice May Butt (1856-1918) published some fifteen works of fiction between 1876 and 1908; in this she offers a quiet plot, some vivid characters, and a subtle sense of personal relationships.
“A pretty story, with a happy blending of the poetical and the prosaic.” Times, November 9, 1883
“Those who like a quiet story, without sensationalism of any kind, but yet, at the same time, an admirable study of the inner life and its affections, will find undoubted pleasure in this work. . . . The author’s style is smooth and pleasant, and occasionally rises into dignity and pathos.” Academy, November 10, 1883
“The heroine’s pure and affectionate though passionate nature is well exhibited.” Athenaeum, December 1, 1883.
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John Atkinson Grimshaw, Shipping on the Clyde
The great John Atkinson Grimshaw and the famous Paul Cézanne were almost exact contemporaries. I would wager that anyone uncorrupted by a course of art history or a habit of gallery visiting would prefer the moodily atmospheric genius of Grimshaw to the blotchy dullness of Cézanne, if presented with samples of each. Yet Cézanne is celebrated, Grimshaw obscure. It’s rigged no doubt—but by whom, and for what purpose?
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Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Comparisons
Eliza Lynn Linton (1822-1898), who wrote some 27 novels beginning in 1846, was well known as a journalist and social critic as well as a novelist: her essays on “the girl of the period”—a vain, loud creature obsessed with fashion and indifferent to domestic virtue—were notorious. Here she arranges some vividly hateful, yet believable, characters in a gripping plot.
“An acute and serious study of certain phases of English society . . . written in a very clear, lively, and interesting style, with a pleasant effervescence of satire and epigram”; it has “enough . . . of graphic portraiture and witty observation to furnish materials for half-a-dozen novels of the everyday kind.” Saturday Review, November 21, 1874
“A very clever and well-constructed story” which “climbs at the last to a very powerful and well-managed situation. . . The characters are distinct, the individuality of each man and woman being put together bit by bit with pains and care.” Times, December 5, 1874
“A rousing heart-stirring novel. . . . Even those readers who do not care for social questions, will enjoy Mrs. Lynton’s excellent character-drawing.” Morning Post, December 18, 1974
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https://archive.org/details/patriciakemballn00lind
Lord Frederic Leighton, The Return of Persephone
Wait! Come back! Not you!—the “L.” Everybody’s welcome here at David Alfred Bywaters’s Weekly Crossword Cavalcade—even you. As so often before, we at “The Cavalcade” have taken something unpleasant, a phrase that may perhaps evoke bitter memories, and made it—fun! (By “we” I mean, of course, “I.”)
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A puzzle of mine appears today in The Wall Street Journal.
Walter Crane, The Moat and Bishop’s Palace, Wells Cathedral
Thomas Cobb (1854-1932) wrote some 86 works of fiction beginning in 1887. He specialized in breezy comedies like this one.
“A book of ingenious complications and bright dialogue . . . the story is human and pure comedy.” Academy, February 2, 1901
The author “is saving us the trouble and humiliation of always going to France for good light fiction. There are few English authors who have the art of being light without being empty.” This novel “shows no falling off in interest and vivacity. . . . We read it on the South Eastern Railway, and forgot where we were.” Speaker, February 16, 1901
It has “a clever, novel plot in its way” with “an air of light comedy.” Athenaeum, February 23, 1901
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http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/OXVU1:LSCOP_OX:oxfaleph014873955
Francis Danby, The Deluge
30 Down is based on a very old, very bad joke, one I must have heard, and should have got over, in early childhood.
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A puzzle of mine appeared yesterday in The Los Angeles Times (and The Chicago Tribune, The Houston Chronicle, The San Francisco Chronicle, etc.)
Richard Buckner, Emily, 1st Viscountess Hambleden, and her Daughter
The anonymous author is known to have written two novels, of which this was the first. Some sources (I don’t know the origin of the claim) identify her with Emma Willsher Atkinson, the author of last week’s novel; Troy Bassett finds no basis for this, and the novel seems to me by another hand entirely. Read both and make up your own mind. Whoever she (or he) may be, she (it seems the likelier choice) provides an involving, sophisticated analysis of the consequences of Victorian marital failure.
It is “told . . . with great strength of feeling, is well written, and has a plot that is by no means commonplace.” Examiner, September 16, 1858
It has “the freshness of inexperience.” Though the plot “verges upon melodrama,” the characters are “distinctly drawn, and often wear an appearance of individuality.” Spectator, October 2, 1858
“The subject and structure of the story are well chosen and well planned, the conversations are natural, and the characters neither hackneyed nor untrue.” Literary Gazette, October 23, 1858
“It is not in every novel we can light upon a style so vigorously graceful—upon an intelligence so refined without littleness, so tenderly truthful, which has sensibility rather than poetry; but which is also most subtly and searchingly powerful.” Dublin University Magazine, April. 1859
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Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, Dignity and Impudence
In is out! That's the kind of upside-down, through-the-looking-glass sort of a wonderland world this bold new puzzle creates. And just so you don’t get too comfortable, at least one in . . . is still in! You won’t find that feature in many other puzzles.
The above painting refers to a subtheme, daringly embedded in baffling cross-references.
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Frederick Daniel Hardy, The Clergyman's Visit
Emma Willsher Atkinson (1826-1900) is known to have written only one novel—this one. Despite some sentimentalism and didacticism (especially near the end), she gives us several striking characters and sharply defined social and moral dilemmas.
The author “has performed a very difficult task creditably”; she “has not shrunk from showing that extremes with a little friendly mediation will sometimes meet.’“ Leader and Saturday Analyst, October 15, 1859
"The novel may offend readers of either extreme, being itself of none, yet it is wholesome and kindly in its tone. It is a little touched with excess of feminine sentiment, but at the same time has feminine perceptions of character, and is not without humour” Examiner, November 26, 1859
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