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usual routine with guest lecturers:
    â€˜. . . distinguished critic . . . sensitive insights . . . how honoured we are by his visit.’
    This done, Professor Belville-Smith gathered together his papers, and walked up to the stage. Dimly he perceived, for his eyes were not good, the rows of check shirts and jeans, the well-developed girls in the bright flowered frocks contrasting with the general dullness of the front row. Common to all, though this he did not see, was the glazed expression of the unwilling audience, the uninterested audience, the over-lectured-to audience. Nor could he see that some at the back of the room were writing their weekly letters home.
    Clearing his throat, he began with the familiar and well-worn words, which he had penned in his youth.
    â€˜To enter the enchanted world of Mrs Gaskell’s novels demands from the reader of today no common effort. To pass from our world of telephones and motor-cars, of dirt and bustle, a world where one may eat breakfast in London and dinner in Paris’ (so meaningless had the words becomeby now to their author that he would have been surprised if it had been suggested to him that this opening, penned in the twenties, might benefit from a little updating) ‘into the never-failing charm and courtesy of her world of Cranford, with its maiden ladies, or into the hierarchical certainties of the delightful Wives and Daughters , is a privilege which only the sensitive and the tolerant can enjoy to the full.’
    And so it flowed on. Even the diligent students put down their poised pens and settled into a dim, tranced state. The others sank further and further down into their seats. This was exactly the type of thing they had expected. Professor Wickham wondered if it would be noticed if he closed his eyes. Lucy Wickham leaned forward, apparently with rapt attention, but actually meditating vigorous measures to make apparent her displeasure to the lecturers who would be intruding on her party that night. One of her rural guests began to snore and she nudged him as if involuntarily with her elbow.
    Merv Raines screwed up his mouth and whispered to Bill Bascomb: ‘They don’t make lectures like that any more.’
    â€˜Life must have been easy for lecturers in those days,’ whispered Bill. ‘That sort of muck just writes itself.’
    So somnolent did the prevailing atmosphere become that not all Professor Belville-Smith’s audience noted a rather remarkable passage in his lecture, which occurred after about twenty minutes. He had torn himself, reluctantly, away from the maiden ladies of Cranford, and was dealing gingerly with the topic of Mrs Gaskell as social critic:
    â€˜Important though the subject of unmarried mothers must have seemed to her when she wrote Ruth ; and important though the subject of the ills of industrial England undoubtedly was at the time — and indeed, is now — it was not in those subjects that her true genius displayed itself,and it is not to Mary Barton , or North and South, or Ruth , that the lover of Mrs Gaskell returns with anticipations of rare pleasure. For when the magic of her timeless Cranford world evaporates, she becomes — dare one say it? — a little pedestrian. What we remember her for is not the manufactured excitements of Mary Barton’s attempt to save her worthy but dull lover, but the hilarious satire of her portrait of Mrs Bennet. Many have felt Jane Austen’s satire of Elizabeth’s mother unkind — nay, even cruel. But here I would beg to differ . . .’
    At this point a slightly puzzled frown wafted briefly over the face of Professor Belville-Smith. He gazed at his notes. Had something happened? But the familiar words exerted their usual drug-like spell, and he continued for a further half-hour with his well-known attempt to rob Jane Austen of malice, intelligence and common-sense. His audience did not all adapt so