Richard Crockatt | Contributors to Slightly Foxed literary review magazine

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Richard Crockatt spent several years working in bookshops and as an English teacher before becoming Professor of American History at the University of East Anglia. He retired in 2011. His article, published in Issue 59, was the joint winner of the 2018 Slightly Foxed writers’ competition.

The numbers in square brackets refer to the issue of the quarterly in which the article appears.
The unbracketed numbers refer to the starting page of the article.
For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

articles by, [59] 20; [68] 64; [83] 45

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So Far Yet So Near

Richard Crockatt on Jane Austen, Persuasion

You do not have to be a paid-up member of the Janeite club to find yourself returning repeatedly to her novels. The urge to idolize Jane Austen is understandable but (in the spirit of the author herself) careful observation from a distance may serve us better. What is remarkable about her writing is not merely the vividness of her creations but the skill with which she inclines us to enter worlds whose manners and morals are in so many respects alien to our own. I cannot be the only reader who has found himself nodding in agreement with actions and expressions of opinion which would cause ructions in today’s world. Which is no more than to say that she is a past master at getting us to suspend our disbelief – or, to put it another way, to persuade us that her world is somehow ours.

Scaling Gibbon’s Everest

Richard Crockatt on Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788) must rank among the best known of unread or partly read books. At over 3,000 pages it is written in the sometimes convoluted style of the eighteenth century and lingers over details which mean little now to most readers, not least disputes over the nature of the Holy Trinity. Yet this Everest of a book asks to be scaled and in the end retirement offered me leisure and the necessary oxygen to make the attempt.

A Peak Experience

Richard Crockatt on Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

If literary critics are to be believed, understanding literature requires an analytical approach. We all know, however, that our experience of a particular book or author is often bound up with where we happen to be in life. In that sense, reading is as much about self-discovery as discovery of what the author meant. Perhaps the great books are those which can accommodate the widest possible range of reader experiences of whatever time and place. Certainly the circumstances in which I read Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) bore little relation to those of its first German readers in the era of the Weimar Republic. Yet connections emerged in the most surprising ways.

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