Rowson Martin - Curiosities of literature: a feast for book lovers

1. What is the connection between Carters Little Liver Pills and George Moores novel , Esther Waters?

The novelist Pearl Craigie (1867-1906), the most accomplished Catholic novelist of the nineteenth century, was born into an American family, enriched by their patent medicine, Carters Little Liver Pills (motto: Wake up your liver bile!). The family moved to London where Pearl was brought up. She published her first story aged nine. Like George Eliot, she chose to write under a masculine pseudonym, John Oliver Hobbes. After a disastrous marriage, in which her cad husband infected her with venereal disease (no pills for that, alas, in 1890), she took up with the novelist, George Moore, best known to posterity as the author of Esther Waters , the story of a sexually abused woman.

A more principled novelist than he was a human being, Moore too, proved caddish, and the couple spent many years writing revenge novels about each other, to the huge amusement of those in their circle in the know.

A believer in education for women (but not votes for them) Craigie/Hobbes endowed a prize for essay writing in the English department, at UCL - the first department in the country to admit women undergraduates (only allowed on campus with chaperone until the twentieth century; see Theodora Bosanquet, p.149). Winners of the Hobbes routinely assume their award is named after the author of Leviathan .

No one reads John Oliver Hobbes any more nor, apart from Esther Waters , George Moore. Nor does anyone cure themselves with the patent medicine which made Craigies life so materially comfortable. The US Federal Trade Commission, in April 1951, determined that the pills relationship to the liver was remote (the active ingredient, bisacodyl, is principally a laxative). Under protest the product was renamed Carters Little Pills, languished on the shelf, and died.

2. What is the connection between the film Reservoir Dogs and a best-selling novel by Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton?

In 1828, Bulwer-Lytton published a fashionable novel, Pelham: Or the Adventures of a Gentleman , which took London by storm. In it, the dandy hero decrees that a gentleman should only wear dark, funereally dark, suits. Exit the colourful finery of the Regency.

As Carlyle sarcastically observed in his Body Dandiacal digression in Sartor Resartus (a satire on the extravagances of fashion), Pelham s injunction was taken as holy writ. It still rules today. The dark suit is, of course, the hallmark of the criminal gang in Quentin Tarantinos 1992 film

3. What pallor connects Clint Eastwood and the mass poisoner Graham Young?

Clint Eastwood plays the murderous Preacher in the 1985 Western (directed by Eastwood) Pale Rider . The mass poisoner Graham Young (memorialised in the 1995 film, The Young Poisoners Handbook ) was, it is often suggested, inspired to use his toxin of choice, the undetectable and lethal thallium, by Agatha Christies 1961 novel, The Pale Horse . Christie was famously good on poisons. Young was dubbed the teacup murderer by the tabloid press - the friendly cuppa being his preferred way of administering thallium to his luckless victims. Clint kills his victims more straight forwardly, with the most powerful handgun in the world.

4. What vowel separates the poet Robert Brownings only published obscenity and a childrens book by Roald Dahl?

In his poem Pippa Passes Robert Browning used the word twat under the misapprehension that it referred to an item of nuns attire:

Then owls and bats
Cowls and twats
Monks and nuns in a cloisters moods
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry.

The poet, intending no naughtiness, had been misled by a sarcasm about an ambitious churchman in the seventeenth-century poem, Vanity of Vanities:

They talkd of his having a Cardinals Hat
Theyd send him as soon an Old Nuns Twat.

Roald Dahl published his superselling book for children, The Twits (illustrated by Quentin Blake), in 1980.

5 . Which is the only major railway station in Britain to be named after a novel?

Waverley Station, in Edinburgh, is named after the title of Scotts 1814 novel. The name is particularly appropriate, since the GNER station is a main terminus for the London/Edinburgh, English/Scottish connection. Edward Waverley fights (wavers) under both flags in the novel, and can justly be called an Anglo-Scot.

6. What do the following novels have in common (apart from the fact you havent read them)?: His Family, The Secret City, Raintree County, Something to Answer For? What, partneringly, do My Antonia, Night and Day, The Naked and the Dead, The French Lieutenants Woman have in common (other than the fact that you have read them)?