Blogs & News

: Online Event: A Victorian Christmas with Lucinda Dickens Hawksley

Get ready to step back in time for the ultimate festive treat! We’re thrilled to invite you to a cozy online evening with the wonderful Lucinda Dickens Hawksley. As the great-great-great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens, Lucinda doesn’t just know Christmas —it’s in her DNA! Book Now Ever wondered why we send cards, pull crackers or decorate trees? It turns out we have the Victorians (and a certain Mr. Dickens) to thank for so much we love about the festive

: Online Event: Elizabeth Gaskell V George Eliot – The Moorland Cottage V The Mill on the Floss

In the mid-19th century, two titans of English literature - Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot - set out to explore the tension between personal yearning and family duty. But while their novels shared a common rural landscape, the women themselves couldn't have been more different. Book Now George Eliot was private and intellectual, while Elizabeth was outgoing, gossipy and deeply shocked by the scandal of her fellow writer’s personal life. Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Moorland Cottage introduced the quiet

: Online Talk: Victorian Gothic – Haunted Houses and Night-time Terrors

Cross the threshold into a world of flickering gaslight and cold stone. Step beyond the velvet curtains of the Victorian home to discover the era’s greatest Gothic writers, from the atmospheric dread of Wuthering Heights to the suffocating psychology of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. Book now Find out more about the psychological stories of terror written by Elizabeth Gaskell's contemporaries where crumbling buildings reflect unravelling psyches. We'll consider terrifying tales about ancestral curses, haunted railways, dead

: Online Talk: Mary Shelley Beyond Frankenstein

The spark of life was only the beginning. Whilst popular culture remembers the lightning flash and the stitched-together creature, Frankenstein remains one of the most searching meditations on science, loneliness, and what it means to be human. Remarkably, Mary Shelley was still a teenager when she wrote it. Book now From the icy wastes of the Arctic in Frankenstein to the uncanny resurrections and transformations of her shorter fiction, this online event celebrates the enduring imagination of the so-called “Mother

: Online Talk: The Shadows of Salem – Myth V Reality in Lois the Witch and Other Tales

Does literature reveal the truth behind history or does it simply create a more haunting story? Discover how Elizabeth Gaskell drew on the real Salem Witch Trails of 1692 to write her 1859 novella, Lois the Witch. Then take a look at other witchy tales from the dark side. Book now Join us for an evening of historical unmasking as we explore the tragic story of Lois Barclay, an English orphan caught in a whirlwind of Puritan fanaticism