James Wood
speaker
815 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 15 Sep
James Wood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
This is much more miniature, but it has similar ambitions.
And it also has, interestingly, sort of minor flat characters that aren't exactly...
Well, they are somewhat Dickensian.
We might say that the difference being that Dickens repeats these characters so that the sort of leitmotif thing that we associate with Dickens' characters.
can come back again and again and again and precisely repeat, whereas Woolf tends to use a flat character in a satirical portrait only once.
But they're quite Dickensian.
Let me give you some examples of these flattish characters.
Some of whom we only glimpse once, some of whom, like Dr. Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw, these two famous society doctors, we glimpse more often.
So here is one character who we only hear of in this one occasion, Mr. Bowley, who had rooms in the Albany and was sealed with wax over the deeper sources of life.
The aforementioned Dr. Holmes, who treats the morbidly depressed Septimus Warren Smith, a victim of the First World War.
Dr. Holmes's approach essentially is eat more porridge.
I think he also says to Septimus Warren Smith, you're in a bit of a funk, aren't you?
We encounter Hugh Whitbread, a friend of the Dalloways.
He's in their social circle.
He has some sort of silly job as a courtier, sort of works for the king, and is one of those people who are expert at writing letters to the Times and sort of
greasing the imperial machine.
Or as Wolfe puts it, he had been afloat on the cream of English society for 55 years.
That then follows a hilariously minimizing description of what Hugh Whitbread has actually done in those 55 years.
And this is summarized as the improvement of shelters and the protection of owls in Norfolk.
Clarissa has a formidable old aunt, Aunt Helena, who is mentioned several times through the book but really makes a major appearance at the end of the book at the party.
Showing 601–620 of 815 · page 31 of 41
← Previous
Next →