Several things more or less make a post, no?

[oursin]

Dept of Drumming Up Controversy:
J'Accuse! Elizabeth Gaskell's The Moorland Cottage (1850) Versus George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860)
Get ready for academic feathers to fly! The former editor of The Gaskell Journal Jo Pryke has long suspected that one of
the greatest and most revered of nineteenth-century novelists
George Eliot may have - shock, horror - stolen the idea for her
celebrated semi-autobiographical novel The Mill on the Floss
(1860) from Elizabeth Gaskell's novella The Moorland Cottage (1850).
And now Jo is getting ready to set out her case: to an audience of Gaskell
and Eliot researchers, enthusiasts, students and academics.
....
Did Gaskell's 1850 tale of Maggie and Edward Browne's sibling woe provide the blueprint for Eliot's childhood epic of Maggie and Tom Tulliver

(That would be, childhood epic based on her relationship with her brother Isaac, as eny fule no.) How hmmmmm am I about this? Quite a lot: it seems to me to be buying into the whole bigging stuff up by making it seem a lot more conspiratorial/radical/innovative/sensational than it is.

Plus, could you get away with this if the Gaskell story were not a fairly obscure piece? If someone riffs on a theme or plot that's in a well-known work it's influence or tribute or, possibly, band-wagoning: back in the Upper Palaeolithic when I was at university, was informed that the Esther Summerson narrative in Bleak House was Dickens capitalising on the recent popularity of first-person female narrators, like Jane Eyre.

Also, there is no property in plots, right? Taint wot u do, itz teh wai that u do it.

This is not the first instance I have encountered of someone not merely bigging up their own pet Victnovelist, but doing so by dissing Ms Evans. We think this is So Not On as a strategy.

***

Dept of Academyk Hedjog: stopping in yesterday on account of Builderz, have now got a pretty solid draft of paper for the Berks done. Needs a fair amount of tweakery, and at the moment it's probably Too Long for a 20 minute panel slot, and I have to footnote. But I have something there that I can fiddle around with, yay.

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Dept of ToLToL incongruity: passing through Euston Square, there were a couple in wedding garb, handing out stuff. At first I thought this was some kind of Radical Protest, but as I got closer I saw they were wearing sashes saying Daily Mail. The WTF factor was ramped up as neither half of the couple was, shall we say, what one thinks of as DM demographic, neither being pinko-grey (hat-tip to E M Forster).

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Dept of Awww: hedgehog resists the papparazzi, go hedgehog!

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