bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Why doesn’t the Reverend Irwine speak up for Hetty?
Authors: Rowson Martin 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
When the Reverend Irwine informs Adam Bede that Hetty has been charged with infanticide, the young man reacts with understandable violence. Adam’s first response is an explosive ‘It can’t be!’ (p. 408), by which the honest fellow means that, for all he has done, Hetty is still a virgin. Of course, as her intended husband in a couple of weeks (the very day she goes to the gallows, as it turns out), the general scurrilous assumption may well be that he is the father of Hetty’s murdered baby and that she ran away and smothered it rather than spend the rest of her life as Mrs Adam Bede.
When Irwine persuades him –– by means of the magistrate’s letter –– that the awful news from Stoniton is probably true, Adam extracts from the parson an assurance that he will inform the Poysers that he, Adam, is innocent of seducing Hetty.
What, precisely, does Miss Gwilt’s purple flask contain?
Authors: Rowson Martin 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Wilkie Collins wrote Armadale under an unusual set of pressures. As the follow-up to his all-conquering The Woman in White, he had been offered a huge sum by the publisher George Smith for the new novel–– £5,000. ‘Nobody but Dickens has made as much’, he jubilantly told his mother. Smith wanted Armadale for serialization in his all-conquering Cornhill Magazine. Collins would have to be on his mettle to keep company with such works as Trollope’s Framley Parsonage and George Eliot’s Romola. Unfortunately, Collins –– whose health was chronically poor and not helped by his addiction to narcotics –– suffered a health collapse as he prepared to embark on his new novel. Originally scheduled to start serialization in January 1863, Armadale was postponed for almost two years, the first instalment not appearing in Cornhill until November 1864. And even when he was in a position to start composition (around June 1864), Collins was not as well prepared as he would have liked to be for such a challenge.
Is Black Beauty gelded?
Authors: Rowson Martin 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
If one takes the autobiography of a horse ‘translated from the original equine’ at face value, it is clear that Black Beauty must be gelded at some point around chapter 5 but, as the World’s Classics editor puts it, ‘delicacy prevents Anna Sewell from making any reference at all to the painful surgery’ (p. xxiv). Clearly, in the series of tasks that Black Beauty is called on to perform during his working life (running in harness with the sprightly mare Ginger, for instance), his masters would not want him distracted by wayward sexual urges. But even the most oblique allusion to how these urges were normally dealt with in the Victorian horse-trade was problematic. When, infamously, Anna Sewell sold the copyright of Black Beauty for £20, it was to a publisher, Jarrold’s, specializing in books for children –– who have traditionally made up a loyal element in the novel’s readership. The pas devant rule would certainly extend to the castrating shears, however familiar the instrument might be in the stable. Had Miss Sewell included a reference to Black Beauty’s removed bodily parts, it too would have been removed. Victorians were as expert at gelding texts (‘bowdlerizing’) as livestock. It remains a delicate subject, at least in popular entertainment. How many fllm-goers, for example, could say offhand whether Trigger, Champion, or Silver are stallions, mares, or geldings?
Wanted: deaf-and-dumb dog feeder
Authors: Rowson Martin 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Edmund Wilson scored some easy points against The Hound of the Baskervilles in his amusing essay ‘Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!’ It is not hard to poke holes in this most Gothic of the great detective’s cases. What is more interesting, perhaps, is to see Arthur Conan Doyle himself doing running patchwork on some of those holes, as they became apparent to him while writing and serializing his story in the Strand Magazine.
The ‘gigantic hound’ of the title is built up in the reader’s imagination by the horrible legends attaching to it and by the fact that to see it is manifestly to risk death by heart attack (as happens with Sir Charles Baskerville). Holmes and Watson’s first physical encounter with the beast does not disappoint:
Whose daughter is Nancy?
Authors: Rowson Martin 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The Good Soldier is, Eugene Goodheart claims, ‘one of the most puzzling works of modern fiction’. It is notoriously hard to make sense of Ford’s characters, their backgrounds, and their actions. There is critical dissension on such issues as whether the title (in so far as it refers to Captain Edward Ashburnham’s ‘goodness’) is ironic or not. The narrative is speckled with what look like factual contradictions (about such crucial data as when and where the Dowells first met the Ashburnhams). Close inspection reveals that the chronology is awry at almost every point. ‘Is this’, Martin Stannard asks, ‘Fordian irony or simply carelessness about details?’ Should we lay the inconsistencies at the door of an artfully unreliable narrator (John Dowell), or at the door of a slipshod writer (Ford Madox Ford)? Some critics, Vincent Cheng for instance (who has assembled a convincing chronology of The Good Soldier), believe that Ford is writing in ‘the French mode of vraisemblance’, and that it is legitimate to ask ‘what actually happens?’ with a reasonable expectation of getting ‘right’ answers.
Who has Susan been talking to?
Authors: Rowson Martin 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
According to Coleridge, the three best-constructed plots in world literature are Oedipus Rex, The Alchemist, and Tom Jones. In Fielding’s novel the chapters in the inn at Upton show the plot-wright’s art at its most virtuosic. Few now read his plays, but the novelist’s long apprenticeship on the stage must have prepared him in handling the intricate plot machinery of Books 9 and 10 –– a section of the narrative which, as Tony Richardson’s 1963 film showed, adapts wonderfully to the conventions of high-speed theatrical farce.
To summarize: the Upton sequence begins with Tom taking a leisurely farewell from the Man of Hill at dawn, before starting on his way. The two gentlemen enjoy a philosophic view of the early morning landscape from a neighbouring eminence, Mazard Hill. (Partridge, who is not philosophical, has elected to stay in bed.) The idyll is disturbed when Tom spies a lady being murdered (or worse than murdered) in a thicket. The would-be murderer turns out to be none other than the hero’s old foe, Northerton (who escapes to do more bad things). The voluptuous victim is –– although Tom does not know it –– Mrs Waters, alias our old friend Jenny Jones.
How do the Cratchits cook Scrooge’s turkey?
Authors: Rowson Martin 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
At Christmas 1997 I set ten puzzles from Dickens’s Christmas Carol for the readers of The Sunday Telegraph, offering a small prize (a ‘shiny half-crown’) for the best answers. The puzzles were:
When Scrooge goes to his ‘empty house’ on Christmas Eve, there is ‘a small fire in the grate; spoon and basin ready; and the little saucepan (Scrooge had a cold in his head) upon the hob’. Who has lit his fire and prepared his supper? The house is clearly deserted when the ghost of Marley appears –– otherwise Scrooge’s first act would be to ring for his servant.
What happens to the destitute woman and child collapsed opposite Scrooge’s house in the small hours of the morning. The 1951 Alistair Sim-starring film gets round the problem by having her expire during the night. Which means that we should visualize a regenerate Scrooge blithely ordering his turkey from the ‘clever boy’ across two corpses. Dickens says nothing more of her. Has she, like Jo in Bleak House, been ‘moved on’? Or was she, like the ‘wandering spirits’, visionary?
Does Carker have false teeth?
Authors: Rowson Martin 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Dentists, as I observed in the previous chapter, read novels differently. Under their specialist gaze, nineteenthcentury fiction, particularly, reveals itself as even coyer about teeth –– particularly artificial dentures –– than about sex. The point is made by John Woodforde in his delightful chronicle, The Strange Story of False Teeth:
Embarrassment dates from the nineteenth century. By about 1840 laboured attempts at a natural appearance had brought false teeth into the category of the modern male toupeé: however blatantly artificial and loose, they had to be passed off as the work of nature . . . The trials of wearers were made the more embarrassing by post-Regency puritanism which decreed it a vanity, like dyeing one’s sidewhiskers, to resort to artificial teeth at all.
Lucy Snowe, cement-mixer
Authors: Rowson Martin 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
One of the most emotionally charged scenes in Villette is that in Chapter 26 (‘A Burial’). Lucy Snowe discovers that Madame Beck has invaded her bureau and has read her ‘triply-enclosed packet of five letters’ from Dr John. Not quite love letters, they are none the less dear to Lucy And she is apprehensive that her ruthless enemy will again steal her letters and show them to M. Emmanuel. Rather than destroy them (to do so would be to destroy part of herself), Lucy determines to secrete the letters where the prying eyes of Madame Beck can never find them.
The act is highly ritualistic. First she makes a ‘little roll’ of her precious letters, wraps them in ‘oiled silk’, and binds them with twine. In one of the town’s pawnshops she discovers what she next needs, ‘a thick glass jar or bottle’. She inserts her little roll, then gets ‘the old Jew broker to stopper, seal, and make it air-tight’. He looks at her suspiciously while doing so, as well he might.
What kills Lady Dedlock?
Authors: Rowson Martin 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
A recent disagreement between two Dickensian critics highlights a central puzzle in Bleak House. In a 1983 article, entitled ‘The Fever of Bleak House’, Fred Schwarzbach noted that ‘disease plays a central part’ in the novel’s plot, ‘as both subject and metaphor’. Few readers will disagree. Many characters in Bleak House die, of many ailments, ranging from opium poisoning, through cerebral stroke, to that most controversial of causes of death, ‘spontaneous combustion’. But ‘What is not clear; and has puzzled modern critics’, Schwarzbach notes, ‘is why Dickens has Jo contract smallpox. Should he not have written instead about cholera, the most feared of all fevers in midVictorian England, which recently had ravaged the nation in the epidemic of 1848–9?’
Why doesn’t Laura tell her own story?
Authors: Rowson Martin 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The Woman in White opens with Walter Hartright’s startlingly original declaration of how the subsequent narrative will be laid out:
As the Judge might once have heard it, so the Reader shall hear it now. No circumstance of importance, from the beginning to the end of the disclosure, shall be related on hearsay evidence. When the writer of these introductory lines (Walter Hartright by name) happens to be more closely connected than others with the incidents to be recorded, he will describe them in his own person. When his experience fails, he will retire from the position of narrator; and his task will be continued, from the point at which he has left it off, by other persons who can speak to the circumstances under notice from their own knowledge, just as clearly and positively as he has spoken before them. (p. 5)
Wilkie Collins’s reportage style of narration was to be central in the evolution of the ‘Sensation Novel’, and its influence can still be felt as far afield as contemporary docufiction. The Woman in White is, in terms of its narrative technique, one of the most innovative novels of the nineteenth century.
Why was Pip not invited to Joe’s wedding?
Authors: Rowson Martin 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Malcolm Hurwitt writes to ask ‘if you are aware of the puzzle which I feel exists in Great Expectations? It may be described as “Why was not Pip invited to the Wedding?”.’ Mr Hurwitt goes on:
It is, as Mr Hurwitt rightly says, odd; and it gets odder the closer one looks at the episode. After Magwitch’s euthanasia, during a ‘cold and dusty spring’ (p. 453), Pip falls into a ‘fever’–– the dreaded ‘jail-fever’, as we apprehend. (The OED defines the disease as ‘a virulent type of typhus-fever, formerly endemic in closed jails, and frequent in ships and other confined places.’) The illness is the last of Magwitch’s gifts to Pip, and the most fatal.
Does Dickens know his train signals?
Authors: Rowson Martin 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Departing from his normal practice, Dickens offers at the end of the serialized Our Mutual Friend a ‘Postscript: in lieu of Preface’. This afterword reminds readers of what most of them must have well known –– that there almost was no concluding part of the novel. Everything after Chapter 51 was, in a sense, a ‘postscript’, because thereafter Mr Charles Dickens was living on borrowed time.
Dickens gives here a vivid thumbnail account of the terrible Staplehurst accident, in which ten less fortunate passengers perished and forty were seriously injured. The
train from Folkestone to London (Dickens had been in France) crashed at speed on a viaduct under repair. The system of red-flag warnings (it was daylight) had failed.
Is Franklin Blake a thief and a rapist?
Authors: Rowson Martin 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The Moonstone has an honoured place in literary history as, to quote no less an authority than T. S. Eliot, ‘the first, longest and best of English detective novels’. Many detective novels have been written since Eliot’s accolade (offered, it is pleasing to note, in the first World’s Classics edition of The Moonstone). But Collins’s novel still retains the power to delight and to surprise.
The story, a version of the ‘locked room mystery’, hinges on a jewel theft. A fabulous Indian gem, the Moonstone, is left to Rachel Verinder. So nervous is she on getting possession of it that she keeps it safely secreted in her bedroom suite at night. None the less, it is stolen. The thief must be someone in the household. Sergeant Cuff of Scotland Yard is called in. There is a likely looking clue. Whoever stole the diamond must have brushed against some wet paint on the door to Rachel’s boudoir. But the incriminatingly stained garment is never found.
How criminal is Melmotte and when is he criminalized?
Authors: Rowson Martin 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Novelists, from Henry Fielding to Jeffrey Archer, are perennially fascinate by great swindlers –– the most adventurous of criminals. For the Victorians, the most notorious such ‘buccaneer’ was John Sadleir (1814–56). One of the few financier-criminals (along with Robert Maxwell) to earn an entry in the DNB, the Irish-born Sadleir rose to fame, power, and high political office on the immense bubble of speculative wealth created by his fraudulent banking activities. When the Tipperary Bank collapsed in February 1856, Sadleir was found to have embezzled £200,000 of its funds and to have ruined legions of widows and children. A couple of days later his body was found on Hampstead Heath, alongside a phial of prussic acid.
What English novel is Anna reading?
Authors: Rowson Martin 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
If Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina had ended a fifth of the way through, at the end of Chapter 29, we would have a bittersweet short story with a happy ending. In this chapter Anna is returning from Moscow to her home, her beloved son Seriozha, and her less-than-beloved husband, Alexei, in Saint Petersburg. She has been in the capital to sort out the marriage problems of her hapless sister-in-law, Dolly
In Moscow, Anna has fallen under the spell of the dashing cavalry officer, Count Vronsky. But she has not surrendered to temptation. She is still a virtuous wife and matron. By no means entirely happy: but virtuous.
Clinical disagreement
Authors: Ebrahim Shah 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Whenever two or more doctors are asked to assess the same patient it is unlikely that they will agree completely on their clinical findings. This phenomenon is well recognized in several fields of medicine, ranging from taking a history (Cochrane et al. 1951), examination of the pedal pulses (Meade et al. 1968), chest examination (Spiteri et al. 1988), to interpretation of exercise electrocardiograms (Blackburn et al. 1968). It is not surprising, therefore, that in the assessment of stroke patients agreement is not absolute. Information on which doctors disagree can be considered in terms of its importance to diagnosis, management, and prognosis. If the information is crucial, every effort must be made to reduce dis agreements; if the information is of little value, there is no point in wasting time collecting it, much less trying to improve its reliability. For example, if two clinicians disagree on the presence of a carotid bruit the patient may or may not be exposed to the risk of angiograms (or denied the benefits of investigation and treatment) depending on one’s point of view. Disagreements on factors that determine rehabilitation potential (e.g. mental state, severity of stroke, pre-stroke ability) may lead to patients being denied access to therapy and discharged to nursing homes inappropriately or before their full potential has been achieved.
Severity
Authors: Ebrahim Shah 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Is it a bad stroke? The severity of disease can be described in many different ways, ranging from the patient’s perception, the degree of physiological disturbance, the consequent disability, and handicap caused, to the burden on society (Stein et al. 1987). The severity of a stroke may be assessed in terms of the amount of brain damaged, the size of the lesion(s) demonstrated on CT scanning, or the number and severity of the neurological impairments. At the level of disability, the severity of a stroke may be measured by ability to walk, the ability to climb stairs, or the ability for self-care. At the level of handicap, severity may be measured by impact on work, enjoyment of usual sex life, or social engagement. The aetiological and pathogenetic differences between types of stroke, together with the wide range of possible consequences, make a simple classification of severity difficult.
Minimal access surgery
Authors: Majeed Ali , Carmody Matthew J 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Minimal access surgery (MAS) is a term introduced relatively recently into the surgical literature to indicate techniques where there is a substantial reduction in the size of the access wounds through which a surgical procedure is performed. Initially, this type of procedure was called ‘minimally invasive’ until it was realized that it was only the trauma of access that was reduced; the procedure and the ‘invasion’ into the patient remained the same. The old adage that ‘big surgeons make big incisions’ has been superseded by the rapid pace of development of sophisticated instruments and techniques. It must be remembered that whatever the route of access, the procedure performed remains the same and that the safety of the patient is paramount. If an attempt at minimal access surgery is found to give inadequate access, then it is prudent to make a standard incision to help achieve a safe resolution. Persisting with inadequate access is indefensible.
Trauma
Authors: Anderson lain D 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Accidental injury is a major yet neglected health problem. Trauma is the principle cause of hospital admission in males aged less than 35 years and is the most common cause of death in males and females between 1 and 34 years of age. In Britain, 40 deaths a day occur from accidents of all kinds and 100 deaths per week result from road traffic accidents alone. Trauma results in the loss of more economically productive years than cancer and heart disease combined. Trauma patients over 65 years of age are twice as likely to die and cost twice as much as young patients to treat. Deaths, however, are only the tip of the iceberg, with more than half a million patients surviving hospital admission as a result of trauma each year. Unlike other serious illnesses, some 80 per cent of trauma patients can be returned to full productive and unrestricted life if high-quality care can be provided.
Philosophy and Psychology —Worlds and Minds
Authors: Cutting J 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In the beginning there was multiplicity. There was no concept of any of the modes of human existence which we now take for granted. Primitive man recognises no clear-cut difference between the familiar and the strange, an inner and an outer world, life and death, soul and body. For him soul and body are neither of them well defined and demarcated areas. What he does recognise, in him and all around him, is a world of strange forces with a quality of ‘otherness’ … For the most part one would have to speak of several different souls manifesting themselves in man rather than of a soul … The soul is never simply immaterial, because the world is never simply material … For primitive people the world has become something more than just what happens in the course of nature.
The purpose of medical audit
Authors: Schofield Theo 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In 1983 the Royal College of General Practitioners launched its Quality Initiative with the following aims: 1. Each general practitioner should describe his or her current work and should be able to say what services his or her practice provides for the patients. 2. Each general practitioner should define specific objectives for the care of his or her patients and should monitor the extent to which these objectives are met. One of the central proposals in the British Government’s 1989 White Paper on the reform of the National Health Service (NHS) was that all doctors should participate in regular and systematic medical audit (Secretaries of State 1989). This was welcomed by leaders of the medical profession as it was in line with their previously stated policies.
Introduction: Preparing the ground
Authors: Havelock Peter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The introduction of audit into a practice can be fraught with difficulties. To maximize the chances of success an essential first step is for the practice team to take an inward look to see if it is capable of and ready for the challenge. The mood of the whole practice needs to be right. Successful audit requires members of the team to have confidence in each other, an ability to work together, enthusiasm and energy, the ability to accept criticism, and a wish to improve. It is not always possible to produce entirely the right mood in the practice before starting audit. Sometimes there are seemingly insuperable obstacles. For instance, a difficult partner or practice manager, an overwhelming workload, or terrible premises, can make individuals feel discouraged before starting. But it is quite feasible to start in a very modest way, either alone or with another person of like mind. Looking at the quality of care and trying to improve it can be an introduction to a whole new way of working in the practice. Audit can often be the first truly shared activity in the practice and many others can follow.