by Peter Raby Bill Bailey’s Jungle Hero, a documentary about Alfred Russel Wallace in the year that marks the centenary of his death (BBC 2, April 21st and 28th) proved to be even more than the sum of its parts, which were considerable. Bill Bailey’s knowledge about Wallace and about Indonesia, and his wittily expressed enthusiasm and admiration, were supported by excellent camera-work, illuminating use of documents from the archive at the Natural History Museum, and a dazzling cast of
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Will Abberley, ‘To Make a New Tongue’: Natural and Manufactured Language in the Late Fiction of William Morris
In 1885 William Morris wrote that poetry had become near-impossible in the modern age, since ‘language is utterly degraded in our daily lives, and poets have to make a new tongue each for himself: before he can even begin his story he must elevate his means of expression from the daily jabber to which centuries of degradation have reduced it’ (IIB 483). Abberley explores the intellectual influences that shaped Morris’s belief in such linguistic degradation, and how his late fiction
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