English Literature research seminar

Well known for its citational and intertextual quality, the novel’s influences include Charles Reade’s It Is Never Too Late To Mend (1856), with its sensational documentation of convict brutality and the hardships of colonial life in Australia, and Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (1862) and its sympathetic treatment of the convict Jean Valjean. Clarke was also a keen student of writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bret Harte, Charles Dickens and Honore de Balzac. Not so well documented, however, is the influence of a British popular author of the 1850s and 60s who, after foregoing novel writing to concentrate on journalism, would become the most popular correspondent of the age, George Augustus Sala. This paper will trace the effect of Sala’s neglected novels and Bohemian journalism on For the Terms of His Natural Life. In the process the paper will seek to determine how a colonial ex-sheep farmer from Melbourne was able to outdo his London and Parisian counterparts and produce the masterpiece that Sala and his fellow Bohemians were never able to achieve.

Bio

Dr Peter Blake’s research has focused primarily on the prolific nineteenth century journalist George Augustus Sala, who wrote essays for a wide variety of newspapers and periodicals including the Daily Telegraph and Charles Dickens’s Household Words magazine.

He completed his PhD thesis, fully funded by the AHRC and entitled 'George Augustus Sala: The Personal Style of a Public Writer', in 2010 from the University of Sussex. He spent four weeks working in the Sala Archives at Yale University’s Beinecke Library and has given conference papers on the subject of Sala and Dickens in London and America. Dr. Blake taught as an Associate Tutor at the University of Sussex from 2008 and was appointed Lecturer at the University of Brighton in 2011.