Neighboring Lives

By Thomas M. Disch, Charles Naylor, Tom Disch

Book Overview

Carlyle, Swinburne, John Stuart Mill . . . Rossetti, Whistler, Lewis Carol . . . these and other characters come vividly to life in this extraordinary novel. Set within a few square blocks along the Thames, in Chelsea, Neighboring Lives is a glorious re-creation, based on historical fact, of the private and working lives of many of the nineteenth century's greatest artists and writers.

Thomas Carlyle, the future Saga of Chelsea, and his wife, Jane, come to Chelsea in 1834. Leigh Hunt, already a danified failure, lives in squalor nearby. John Stuart Mill appears with his mistress. Chopin arrives dying. Lewis Carroll pursues his Alice. Whistler tries to elude his mother. Neighboring Lives makes us part of their world. Rich, exuberant, superbly written, it is at once a look at daily life and private secrests and a joyful excursion into a world of ideas.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801842190
• ISBN13: 9780801842191
• Release Date: June 1991
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 8.9"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

A wonderful way to get to know Bohemian Chelsea

The neighbors of the title are all the famous and romantic people who lived in Chelsea, London from Thomas Carlyle, who was one of the first to move there, to the PreRaphaelites and Oscar Wilde. The research is superb, the relationships wonderfully done and while the book is more than this, it has the engaging readability of one of those family saga blockbusters. This, of course, is a literary novel and the authors are interested in revealing the characters, as they perceive them, of some of the most famous and influential people of the 19th century. This is a book to love and read over and over again!

Disch does Carlyle

If you buy this thinking that it's going to be science fiction, poetry, or horror or any of the other things that Disch excels in, you're wrong, but what you do have is an involved historical epic into the life of English figure and writer-Thomas Carlyle. You can smell the Thames off the pages.