Fun fact: if you nominate some Doyle work to this prize, it will be read by a panellist who lives in the actual Southsea, in the next street over from where Doyle once attended a patient. That’s got to be worth something.

Sorry, I meant in the last two years (so, 2024 and 2025). Get nominating through the link in the top left! acdsociety.com/Honors/Honor...

After the interval, we then move to Derrida, usually looking closely at the first page of *The Death Penalty*. This half is perhaps inevitably a bit quieter, but students see that writing which had previously seemed overly cryptic is, in fact, raising exactly the same issues they did.

(It's really interesting at this point how some of the No votes start to move towards Yes)

I then start to challenge the justifications on both sides. What if capital punishment were only followed in cases where guilt was not in doubt? Don't some crimes invite the death penalty? Doesn't suggesting that some killing is allowed undermine wider moral claims?

Certain themes appear - is execution cruel? Who or what gives the government the right to kill people? Are there exceptional cases? Is the legal system reliable? What about the executioners?

I then ask the group overall for justifications for their position. Because everyone has opinions on the general question, discussion contributions go right up.

It's 2 hours, but in the first we don't go anywhere near Derrida. Instead, I ask students if they agree with the death penalty, and to write their response down. There's always a majority for No, but a significant number for Yes, though I make it clear I'm not looking for a particular response.

Amazingly, the US paperback of Roth's *American Pastoral* does the same thing.

(If, of course, he means general mysticism, then that's a slapdash use of terminology which suggests he's not the most rigorous critic)

The Spiritualism question - I'm not sure if this guy means table rapping, or just general mysticism. If the former, his argument is way off - this Spiritualism didn't emerge until the end of the 1840s, and Dickens was scathing about it, especially in *Household Words.*

Apparently so.

In fact, the two books immediately preceding *A Christmas Carol* are *Martin Chuzzlewit* - which famously has an extensive American section - and, um, *American Notes for General Circulation*. So even assuming that *Carol* includes American phraseology, this proves nothing about authorship.

The guy's main point is that the MS of *A Christmas Carol* contains American expressions. Aside from the issue of having to have had compared two distinct and extensive linguistic corpora to make that claim, there's also the fact that Dickens spent a lot of time in the US in the early 1840s...