CHARLES DICKENS: HOW THE AUTHOR’S LIFE WAS FICTIONALISED AFTER HIS DEATH

When Charles Dickens died on June 9 1870, newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic framed his loss as an event of national and international mourning. They pointed to the fictional characters Dickens had created as a key part of his artistic legacy, writing how “we have laughed with Sam Weller, with Mrs. Nickleby, with Sairey Gamp, with Micawber”. Dickens himself had already featured as the subject of one piece of short biographical fiction published during his lifetime. Yet, in the years following his death, he would be increasingly appropriated as a fictional character by the Victorians, both in published texts and in privately circulated fan works.

Dickens’s private family funeral at Westminster Abbey created a gap in knowledge which some journalists chose to fill with a fictional scene they considered more emotionally satisfying. The London Penny Illustrated Paper visually re-imagined the funeral, publishing a large illustration depicting a crowded public event.

Under the sub-heading: “A National Honour Due to Charles Dickens”, the accompanying text acknowledges that the image is fictional, but argues that:

A ceremony such as is depicted in our Engraving would unquestionably have best represented the national feeling of mourning occasioned by the lamented death.

It was the publication of John Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens in 1872–74, though, that marked a watershed in fictionalisations of Dickens. Victorian readers now had a full-length birth-to-death Dickens biography to draw on, written by a friend who had known him for his entire adulthood. Dickens’s Preface to his 1849–50 novel David Copperfield had encouraged readers to interpret it as semi-autobiographical. However, it was only with Forster’s biography that the full extent of the similarities between Dickens and the fictional Copperfield was made public.

The revelation that Dickens had performed child labour in a blacking warehouse when his father was imprisoned for debt, before rising to international fame in his twenties, gave him a life story that the press described as rivalling Dickens’s “most popular novel”.

Rags to riches

The Household Edition of Forster’s Life, published by Chapman & Hall in 1879, included 28 new illustrations of the biography by Fred Barnard. Among them was an emotive image of Dickens as a young boy in the blacking warehouse.

Dickens wrote a private account of this time, for which Forster’s biography is our only remaining source. In this autobiographical fragment, Dickens describes how he was brought down to work among other boys in the warehouse. He was careful not to let them see his suffering, and to make sure that he worked as hard as them. Yet what Barnard pictures is a scene of solitude, visible despair or perhaps exhaustion at the warehouse that is not described in this fragment. The image bears a closer resemblance to Dickens’s fictionalisation of the first day at the warehouse in David Copperfield.

In the novel, the young Copperfield writes that: “I mingled my tears with the water in which I was washing the [blacking] bottles.” Barnard heightens and externalises the private emotion that Dickens wrote about in the autobiographical fragment to create a fictional scene. In doing so, he further blurs the boundaries between Dickens and the fictional Copperfield.

The practice of Grangerization – the art of extending and customising a published book with inserted material – was popular among Victorian readers. Additional fictionalised illustrations of Dickens’s life, created by the Dickens illustrator Frederick W. Pailthorpe, are revealed in a 14-volume Grangerization of Forster’s Life, held in the British Library.

Some of these seem to have been created for personal interest and private circulation among fellow Dickens enthusiasts, rather than for publication. One sketch shows Dickens as a boy making a low bow to a friend of his

Biographical fiction and ‘real-person fiction’

In the 21st century, readers have commented on the resemblances between the fictional stories which the young Brontë siblings wrote about real-life contemporary figures such as the Duke of Wellington, and 20th and 21st-century forms of fan fiction. Oscar Wilde’s 1889 story, The Portrait of Mr W.H., focuses on a series of men whose biographical speculations about the life of Shakespeare verge on fictionalisation.

Nevertheless, recent scholarly work on biographical fiction has described it as coming into being “mainly in the 20th century”. Press articles on the form of fan fiction known as “real person fiction” have largely focused on it as a product of internet culture (while noting briefly that many of Shakespeare’s plays also fictionalise real-life figures).

Archival work on the Victorian press, and on semi-private forms of reader response such as Grangerized books, can flesh out our understanding of the role that biographical fictionalisation played in Victorian culture. It demonstrates a longer and more varied history of the human desire to appropriate and imaginatively recreate famous contemporary figures. And it shows that part of Dickens’s creative legacy, as well as his own works, was the fictional forms that his life inspired others to create.

WORLD ENGLISH OLYMPIAD

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Wheebox- World English Olympiad platform provides in depth analytical reports that comprises of nation wide and state wide toppers in English

International Booker Prize 2020

 

The International Booker Prize for the year 2020 has been announced. The coveted award was won by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld for The Discomfort of Evening. It has been translated from Dutch by Michele Hutchison. The book centres around a 10-year-old girl Jas who is infuriated with her brother Matthies for not being permitted to go for ice-skating with him. This occurs at the onset of the novel. Her wish turns true and he dies. The debut novel then is a fascinating case study of grief

   About The Discomfort of Evening

Marieke Lucas Rijneveld
Translated by Michele Hutchison from Dutch
Published by Faber & Faber
       Jas lives with her devout farming family in the rural Netherlands. One winter’s day, her older brother joins an ice skating trip. Resentful at being left alone, she makes a perverse plea to God; he never returns. As grief overwhelms the farm, Jas succumbs to a vortex of increasingly disturbing fantasies, watching her family disintegrate into a darkness that threatens to derail them all. A bestselling sensation in the Netherlands by a prize-winning young poet, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s debut novel lays everything bare. It is a world of language unlike any other, which Michele Hutchison’s striking translation captures in all its wild, violent beauty.

About the Author

      Marieke Lucas Rijneveld was born in Nieuwendijk, Netherlands, in April 1991 and uses ‘they’ pronouns. They grew up in a Reformed farming family in North Brabant before moving to Utrecht. One of the greatest new voices in Dutch literature, their first poetry collection, Caulf’s Caul, was awarded the C. Buddingh’ Prize for best poetry debut in 2015, with the newspaper de Volkskrant naming them literary talent of the year. In 2018, Atlas Contact published their first novel, The Discomfort of Evening, which won the prestigious ANV Debut Prize and was a national bestseller. Alongside their writing career, Rijneveld works on a dairy farm. They live in the Netherlands.

 

A Meta-List of the Books You Should Read in Coronavirus Quarantine

Describing conditions characteristic of life in the early 21st century, future historians may well point to such epidemic viral illnesses as SARS, MERS, and the now-rampaging COVID-19. But those focused on culture will also have their pick of much more benign recurring phenomena to explain: topical book lists, for instance, which crop up in the 21st-century press at the faintest prompting by current events. As the coronavirus has spread through the English-speaking world over the past month, pandemic-themed reading lists have appeared in all manner of outlets: Time, PBS, the Hollywood Reporter, the Guardian, the Globe and Mail, Haaretz, Vulture, Electric Literature, and others besides.

As mankind's oldest deadly foe, disease has provided themes to literature since literature's very invention. In the European canon, no such work is more venerable than The Decameron, written by Renaissance humanist Giovanni Boccaccio in the late 1340s and early 1350s. "His protagonists, seven women and three men, retreat to a villa outside Florence to avoid the pandemic," writes The Guardian's Lois Beckett, referring to the bubonic plague, or "Black Death," that ravaged Europe in the mid-14th century. "There, isolated for two weeks, they pass the time by telling each other stories" — and "lively, bizarre, and often very filthy stories" at that — "with a different theme for each day."

A later outbreak of the bubonic plague in London inspired Robinson Crusoe author Daniel Defoe to write the A Journal of the Plague Year. "Set in 1655 and published in 1722, the novel was likely based, in part, on the journals of the author’s uncle," writes the Globe and Mail's Alec Scott. Defoe's diarist "speaks of bodies piling up in mass graves, of sudden deaths and unlikely recoveries from the brink, and also blames those from elsewhere for the outbreak." A Journal of the Plague Year appears on these reading lists as often as Albert Camus' The Plague, previously featured here on Open Culture. "Camus’ famous work about the inhabitants of an Algerian town who are stricken by the bubonic plague was published back in 1947," writes PBS' Courtney Vinopal, "but it has struck a chord with readers today living through the coronavirus."

Of novels published in the past decade, none has been selected as a must-read in coronavirus quarantine as often as Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven. "After a swine flu pandemic wipes out most of the world’s population, a group of musicians and actors travel around newly formed settlements to keep their art alive," says Time. "Mandel showcases the impact of the pandemic on all of their lives," weaving together "characters’ perspectives from across the planet and over several decades to explore how humanity can fall apart and then, somehow, come back together." Ling Ma's darkly satirical Severance also makes a strong showing: Electric Literature describes it as "a pandemic-zombie-dystopian-novel, but it’s also a relatable millennial coming-of-age story and an intelligent critique of exploitative capitalism, mindless consumerism, and the drudgery of bullshit jobs."

Since a well-balanced reading diet (and those of us stuck at home for weeks on end have given much thought to balanced diets) requires both fiction and nonfiction, several of these lists also include works of scholarship, history, and journalism on the real epidemics that have inspired all this literature. Take Richard Preston's bestseller The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus, which Gregory Eaves at Medium calls "a hair-raising account of the appearance of rare and lethal viruses and their 'crashes' into the human race." For an episode of history more comparable to the coronavirus, there's John M. Barry's The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, "a tale of triumph amid tragedy, which provides us with a precise and sobering model as we confront the epidemics looming on our own horizon."

Below you'll find a meta-list of all the novels and nonfiction books included on the reading lists linked above. As for the books themselves — libraries and bookstores being a bit difficult to access in many parts of the world at the moment — you might check for them in our collection of books free online, the temporarily opened National Emergency Library at the Internet Archive, and our recent post on classic works of plague literature available to download. However you find these books, happy reading — or, more to the point, healthy reading.

Fiction

·         Ammonite by Nicola Griffith

·         The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton

·         Beauty Salon by Mario Bellatin

·         Bird Box by Josh Malerman

·         Blindness by José Saramago

·         The Book of M by Peng Shepherd

·         The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin

·         Bring Out Your Dead by J.M. Powell

·         The Child Garden by Geoff Ryman

·         The Children’s Hospital by Chris Adrian

·         The Companion by Katie M. Flynn

·         The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio

·         The Dog Stars by Peter Heller

·         The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

·         The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker

·         Earth Abides by George R. Stewart

·         The Eyes of Darkness by Dean Koontz

·         Find Me by Laura van den Berg

·         The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

·         Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

·         Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe

·         Journal of the Plague Years by Norman Spinrad

·         The Last Man by Mary Shelley

·         The Last Town on Earth by Thomas Mullen

·         Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

·         My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George

·         My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

·         The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell

·         Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

·         Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter

·         The Passage trilogy by Justin Cronin

·         The Plague by Albert Camus

·         The Power by Naomi Alderman

·         Real Life by Brandon Taylor

·         The Road by Cormac McCarthy

·         Room by Emma Donoghue

·         Severance by Ling Ma

·         Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

·         The Stand by Stephen King

·         They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell

·         The Training Commission by Ingrid Burrington and Brendan Byrne

·         The Transmigration of Bodies by Yuri Herrera

·         The White Plague by Frank Herbert

·         Wilder Girls by Rory Power

·         World War Z by Max Brooks

·         The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

·         Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks

·         The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson

·         Zone One by Colson Whitehead

 

 

Chronicles of death foretold

 

                                                                   What literature tells us about pandemics

In this period of isolation, one turns to literature and art to come to terms with reality, and place it in the context of history. As I continue to stay indoors because of the pandemic, spring has given way to summer. I follow the turn of seasons with elation — I look out of my window and see flowers blooming and the changing shades of green on trees. Yet this tranquil radiance invites dark thoughts as scenes of pandemic recorded in literature — bodies piled sky-high waiting for burial, cries of pain searing through the London smog — crowd the mind.

This worldwide pandemic is certainly not the first. Nor will it be the last.

In denial

The work that comes most readily to mind is, of course, Camus’s ThePlague, that bleak parable illustrating the human condition. Like the French army marching into Algeria, the plague descends on the Algerian town of Oran, where one “never hear[s] the beat of the wings or the rustle of leaves.” The plague “rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views”. Although people “fancied themselves free”, the novel tells us that “no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.”

But The Plague is not merely an allegory; it is also the tale of a devastating natural calamity. Dr. Bernard Rieux decides to stay back in Oran to tend to the sick, accepting a life of “exile and imprisonment” that is the inherent fallout of every pandemic. Camus writes at the beginning of the novel that “everybody knows... pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our head from a blue sky.”

Indeed, the initial response to any pandemic has always been denial, with the state machinery playing down the number of fatalities to conceal the seriousness of the situation. This happened in the early days of the Great Plague in London in 1664 — Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year testifies to the common practice of the state spreading misinformation and manipulating the media to suit its interests. From our own experience of the way some states round the world have reacted to the COVID-19 crisis, we know this all too well by now.

One can trace a few patterns: the U.S.’s recent denunciation of China echoes the efforts of the KGB to hold the U.S. responsible for the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. Nearly two millennia ago, Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius held the Christians culpable for the smallpox affliction in his empire. During successive plagues, Jews were accused of poisoning the wells of Europe. Defoe underscores the bigotry and xenophobia that underlie this tendency. Racist bias is apparent in the haunting figure of a hooded man surreptitiously contaminating public places.

Living to tell the tale

Pandemics spare no one, rich or poor. “The vast cities of America, the fertile plains of Hindostan, the crowded abodes of the Chinese, are menaced with utter ruin,” writes Mary Shelley in her dystopian sci-fi novel, The Last Man (1826). This is the story of the plague in Constantinople in 2092, lasting a year and returning in spring in a more virulent avatar. People rush to churches and mosques to appease the gods. While legislatures vacillate on taking suitable action, human achievements in the fields of arts, commerce and agriculture gradually decline. At the end, wandering in the ruins of Rome, the narrator comes across a manuscript in Italian and decides to write a book, The History of the Last Man, dedicated to the dead. It will have no readers.Modelling his plot on Mary Shelley’s, Jack London wrote the post apocalyptic novel, The Scarlet Plague, in 1912.

The protagonist here, a professor of English literature, is among the handful who live to tell the tale. Looking out across San Francisco, he says, “Where four million people disported themselves, the wild wolves roam to-day.” His grandsons have no idea what money is: he finds it difficult to explain to them how, as the plague arrived in the world run by capitalists, trains stopped, stores were looted, and huge swathes of population starved and died while the wealthy fled to their farms or islands.

If we come through this pandemic, many would perhaps be inspired to write about their personal tragedies and future fears. “All a man could win in the conflict between plague and life,” says Camus, “was knowledge and memories.” History repeats itself, with none growing wiser with experience. Only literature continues to fight for a more equitable world, where healthcare is a right not a privilege and transparency in governance is a justified expectation not a pipe dream.

 

 

Literature and Pandemics

What makes pandemics similar across geographic locations and time is not the presence of germs and viruses but that the human response follows the same pattern. All three literary works inform us that the initial human response to the outbreak is typically one of denial. Furthermore, our response to a pandemic tends to be slow and the authorities often provide false numbers about the infected cases and deaths

As we are confined within the four walls of our homes under lockdown in the wake of Covid-19, literature helps break the barriers, connecting us across different historical periods and time zones with others who have experienced similar tragedies. More importantly, literature shows us that we have a lot in common with others who are from distant lands and different times, encouraging us to appreciate the fact that we are not the only ones who are dealing with the worldwide devastation wrought by the pandemic.

Throughout history, there have been people who have dealt with crises that caused untold suffering. In this op-ed, I will briefly examine three highly influential literary works on pandemics: Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed, and Albert Camus’ The Plague to show the striking similarities between the current Covid-19 pandemic and the historical outbreaks of plagues across time. What makes pandemics similar across geographic locations and time is not the presence of germs and viruses but that the human response follows the same pattern regardless of culture and time.

All three literary works inform us that the initial human response to the outbreak is typically one of denial. Furthermore, our response to a pandemic tends to be slow and the authorities often provide false numbers about the infected cases and deaths in order to either deny the existence of the pandemic or to minimize its impact. In 1722, Daniel Defoe wrote A Journal of the Plague Year, which is still regarded as one of most authoritative and illuminating works of literature on contagion and human behavior. In this book, Defoe describes the bubonic plague of 1665, which wreaked havoc on London in what became known as the Great Plague of London.

According to Defoe, the local authorities in some London neighborhoods tried hard to show the number of plague deaths much lower than the actual numbers by inventing diseases as the recorded cause of death. According to Defoe, the authorities’ figures were always low when the facts on the ground showed something very different: “The next Bill was from the 23rd of May to the 30th, when the Number of The Plague was 17: But the Burials in St Giles’s were 53, a frightful Number! Of whom they set down but 9 of the Plague.” Later it was discovered at least 20 more “were really dead of the plague,” but had been “set down of the Spotted-Feaver or other Distempers, besides others concealed.” Defoe tells us Londoners were subjected to the most aggressive measure taken by the city of London in 1665 by forcing all infected individuals to be locked in their homes with their families even if their family members were not sick.

The lockdown “had very great inconveniences in it, and some that were very tragical,” Defoe acknowledges, “but it was authorised by a law, it had the public good in view as the end chiefly aimed at, and all the private injuries that were done by the putting it in execution must be put to the account of the public benefit.” Defoe’s book emphasizes that the most prevalent way the contagion spread was via asymptomatic individuals who carried it. “It was very sad to reflect how such a person as this,” he writes, “had been a walking destroyer perhaps for a week or fortnight before that; how he had turned those that he would have hazarded his life to save, and had been breathing death upon them, even perhaps in his tender kissing and embracings of his own children.” The relationship between Defoe’s novel and what we are experiencing now is so startingly clear that it feels indeed strange to remember that Defoe was describing a pandemic that happened 355 years ago. In the 1827 novel, The Betrothed, an enormously popular work about the outbreak of the bubonic plague in 1630 that killed roughly half of the population of Milan, Verona, and Venice, the Italian writer, Alessandro Manzoni, describes the people of Milan’s anger at the official response to the plague. Despite all the medical evidence, the authorities in Milan ignored the threat posed by the disease and even refused to cancel a local prince’s birthday celebration. Manzoni shows how the plague spread rapidly because the restrictions were insufficient, the enforcement was lax, and the local people didn’t bother to heed them. Manzoni shares with us how the general public, medical doctors and even the Tribunal of Health in Milan chose to either ignore or made light of the threat that the plague posed.

According to Manzoni, local people “heard with a smile of incredulity and contempt any who hazarded a word on the danger, or who even mentioned the plague.” A few Italian doctors who had warned of the impending disaster in the form of plague were met with derision or apathy. He writes, “most of the physicians joined with the people in laughing at the unhappy presages and threatening opinions of the smaller number of their brethren.” He reports on how the corrupt government health officials at Milan’s Tribunal of Health chose to actively conceal evidence of the number of cases of the plague by blaming the numbers on other grounds. The medical reports were falsified and concealed by the health officers who were charged with inspecting the dead bodies. Manzoni wrote that wild conspiracy theories were doing the rounds as the scale of infection became impossible to control. The local people of Milan started blaming if not foreign soldiers, then witches, or shadowy “poisoners.”

The strength of The Betrothed lies in educating us about the psychological stages in a pandemic beginning with denial and scapegoating to displacement and, finally, belated recognition of the risks and the panic driven reactions of the public to the pandemic. With the outbreak of Covid-19 worldwide, Albert Camus’ The Plague has become a best seller again after its first publication in 1947. My purpose here is not to write a criticism of the book nor discuss its philosophical aspects. My focus is entirely on some of the major insights from the book as they relate to the Covid-19 pandemic we are facing right now. In The Plague, Camus shows us how, in the 1940s, people in the French Algerian town of Oran failed to prepare for a threat from a plague because most of them simply could not believe that it could happen to them. “It’s impossible it should be the plague, everyone knows it has vanished from the West,” a character says. “Yes, everyone knew that,” Camus adds, “except the dead.” Camus’ The Plague helps us understand that denial is a common reaction to any kind of epidemic or pandemic. We may anticipate mortal sickness in our lifetime.

However, when it strikes us, we tend not to accept it. For Camus, we are always living in the fear of death. At any moment, we could die. Whether there is threat of plague or not, death is inevitable. As he puts it, it’s truly an inescapable “underlying condition.” What Camus is trying to tell us that if we accept the fragility of our lives, there is freedom. It can move us from feelings of angst and helplessness to a state of joy and gratitude. Camus isn’t trying to scare us but he’s preparing us to accept the fact that there can never be safety. There will be a plague or some other epidemic will happen again. This is why it is critically important for us to realize that it is a shared grief and shared struggle that calls for collective action. Camus forces us to think about our responsibilities to the people around us. He draws out the conflict between our pursuit of individual happiness and moral obligation to our fellow beings. The important message in The Plague is that although pandemics have a way of upending our lives, they force us to live in the present moment. Nothing else really matters when our very day-to-day survival is at stake. There’s just the here and now for us, and as the narrator in The Plague, Dr Bernard Rieux, says, “We’re all involved in it.” What Dr Rieux implies is that we should all see ourselves as members of a community and not as atomized individuals. This means when we are combating Covid-19, we simply cannot think selfishly only of ourselves, but we must seriously ponder how our actions will affect others. In The Plague, Dr Rieux is driven by the virtues of empathy, love and solidarity in his fight against the contagion. If we learn these lessons now in our moment of crisis, we may be better off in our fight against Covid-19.

 

FIVE EYE-CATCHING GRAPHIC NOVELS THAT DEFINE THE GENRE

For someone who teaches about the graphic novel, compiling an all-time top five list is challenging. It’s not just the way that such a list is compiled, making agonising decisions over which favourites to exclude, but also because it raises tricky questions of definition. That the term refers not just to fiction but to life-writing, as in all manner of memoirs, diaries and so on, is accepted – but beyond that there is little consensus.

If there are multiple volumes (as with Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman or the Hernandez brothers’ Love and Rockets series), should the whole series be counted as one epic graphic novel, or should only individual volumes be eligible?

And what about a book like Phoebe Gloeckner’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl(2002), which tells the story of an authorial alter-ego, Minnie, through a combination of prose diary entries, illustrations with captions, comic-strip narratives, letters, poems and photographs? Or Joe Sacco’s comic-strip documentary journalism?

I’ve chosen five books that I (and many others) regard as central to the graphic novel canon. They are all richly textured, powerful, nuanced books that are immediately arresting but also reward repeated re-reading.

1. Watchmen (1987)

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen works on so many levels – it is, among other things, a whodunnit, a love story, a commentary on Cold War politics and an exploration of fundamental philosophical and ethical questions.

Watchmen is an homage to – and a deconstruction of – the classic superhero comic-strip narrative, which in turn has inspired numerous subsequent revisions of the genre, from Pixar’s The Incredibles (2004) to the Marvel Comics (and later MCU’s) Avengers civil war storyline.

Shifting points of view, disrupting chronology, layering texts within texts, Watchmen is a hugely ambitious narrative that discloses new details with every fresh reading. It’s also a real page-turner.

2. Maus (1991)

Art Spiegelman’s masterpiece, Maus, probably did more than any other graphic novel to make readers and critics take this genre seriously.

It’s the story of the author’s father, Vladek, who survived Auschwitz, as well as the story of Spiegelman’s relationship with him. Controversially representing Jews as anthropomorphised mice, preyed upon by German cat-people and often betrayed by Polish pig-people, Maus nevertheless resists stereotypes. The novel represents both its author and his father as flawed, complex individuals who struggle in different ways to deal with the legacy of a trauma that makes itself felt in every aspect of their lives.

3. Ghost World (1997)

Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World is the shortest – and at first glance the most straightforward – of my choices. It’s a bittersweet tale of the friendship, and gradual estrangement, of recent high-school graduates Enid and Becky.

Cynical and vulnerable, with a sardonic sense of humour and a nostalgic streak, Enid is, in part, a portrait of the artist as a young girl grappling with her sexuality, ethnicity and her conflicting expectations of herself.

But Ghost World is also a powerful evocation of what it is like to drift, ghost-like, through a nondescript, soulless urban environment that is itself ghostly. Full of quirky characters and memorable images, Ghost World manages, paradoxically, to represent boredom and ennui vividly and entertainingly.

4. Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth (2000)

Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan was the first graphic novel to be awarded major literary prizes on both sides of the Atlantic – the American Book Award and The Guardian First Book Award.

Like Watchmen, Jimmy Corrigan has a complex, non-linear structure and subverts conventional notions of (super)heroism. Like Maus, it is a book about fathers and sons; and like Ghost World, it has a protagonist who is drifting aimlessly through life, alienated from the world around him.

Yet it is visually and formally more radical than any of the other books on this list. Chris Ware’s dark palette and landscape format and his use of diagrams, instructions and definitions make the book, as an object and text, highly unusual. In terms of narrative, too, Ware is a great innovator – the absence of exposition and page numbering, the abrupt transitions between a historical narrative focusing on Jimmy’s grandfather and the present-day narrative focusing on Jimmy, the use of surreal dream sequences and the disruption of conventional panel sequencing all make Jimmy Corrigan challenging.

But it’s well worth the effort. It is a beautiful, heartbreaking story that has been much imitated but never bettered.

5. Fun Home (2006)

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is a self-consciously literary coming of age novel that pays homage to James Joyce, Marcel Proust and Oscar Wilde, among others.

It is a moving memoir about the author’s relationship with her father, whose queer sexuality finds an echo in her lesbianism, and whose (possible) suicide haunts the book.

Adapted as an award-winning musical, Fun Home reached an audience that might never have encountered the bestselling graphic novel. Yet while Fun Home the musical is fun, just like the film adaptations of Watchmen and Ghost World, it can’t quite do justice to the complexity of the original.