Welcome to the latest issue of my newsletter. If you subscribe I’ll send you a free copy of my Microcosmos Fiction Magazine, containing five original stories. Thanks for reading.

My new novel is finally available on the Amazon store (it will be on other platforms in a few months). I say ‘finally’ because it’s been a long time coming. The book began as a weekly serial on Substack back in 2024. I’d never written in serial form before, I wanted to give it a go, and Substack seemed like a good place to try it. I soon found out that Substack is geared towards non-fiction and not fiction. There are no genre categories on the platform, so everything comes under the broad heading of ‘Fiction’, which is obviously useless for commercial fiction writers. But anyway, it was an interesting, often exhilarating, often terrifying experiment, even with the minuscule audience I had on Substack. I’ve spent much of the last year revising and expanding that original story — and fixing plot holes — and now it’s ready. Here’s the description:

The secret powers of the human mind may transform the world — for good or for evil.

1900. Great Britain is the heartland of the greatest empire the world has ever seen. It is also a country of extremes — of wealth and poverty, of modern science and occult forces, of naked power and hidden intrigues. London, the modern Babylon, is its capital. But something terrible is happening. Across the city, young people with psychic powers are going missing. Who is taking them and why?

Peggy Lock didn’t expect to become an orphan at sixteen. When her uncle and now guardian Arthur Lock asks her to leave Ireland and go to England with him, she agrees, though with a divided heart. But when, not long after her parents’ funeral, someone breaks into her house and steals her father’s research notebooks, Peggy’s world is shaken once more.

Arthur soon realizes that the theft of the notebooks, which detail Peggy’s father’s ESP research, is connected with several missing person cases in London. But what kind of conspiracy is this and who is behind it?

As Arthur and Peggy investigate, they uncover a group of clever, ruthless men who will stop at nothing to achieve their ends. Forced to improvise, Arthur recruits a band of young people with diverse talents to combat the secret organization and rescue the captives. But as the investigation progresses, the group learns that the enemy is more formidable than they thought and possesses powers they can barely conceive of.

The World Unseen is the first season of The Cryptic Branch, originally published in serial form. If you like historical fantasy with intriguing characters and rich settings, then you’ll love Valentine Wyatt’s thrilling story.

Buy Now on the Amazon store.

Jeremy Bentham, philosopher and social reformer, gave explicit instructions in his will for the treatment of his body post-mortem. When he died, which he did in 1832, his ‘dear friend’ Doctor Southwood Smith was to ‘take my body under his charge and take the requisite and appropriate measures for the disposal and preservation of the several parts of my bodily frame in the manner expressed in the paper annexed to this my will and at the top of which I have written Auto Icon’. He was to be dissected and his head preserved ‘in the manner of the New Zealanders’. Then his skeleton was to be clad, with his mummified head atop, and displayed in a wooden case, ‘in the attitude in which I am sitting when engaged in thought in the course of time employed in writing’. He coined the term ‘Auto-Icon’ for his transmuted body.

I took these photos a few years ago, when Bentham’s Auto-Icon could be found, brightly lit and seated in a grand wooden case, in University College London’s Wilkins Building. Back then, he looked as neat as a pin in his hat and gloves, his walking stick propped against his knee, his writing instruments on a tiny table close by. Quite the Enlightenment gentleman, at ease in his symbolic afterlife. Since then he has been rehoused in a glass case in the Student Centre, an altogether more sterile enclosure.

Unfortunately, Bentham’s head did not emerge from the preservation process looking very well, and it was replaced with a wax model. The original was also on display for many years until, after several kidnappings by students, it was placed in more secure storage. It currently resides in a climate-controlled area of the UCL Institute of Archaeology. There are several myths about the Auto-Icon, most of which are debunked on the UCL website, but there’s no doubt that the institution regards the figure as something more than just a model of a dead man.

Bentham was a rationalist and an atheist. He thought it important that scientists and physicians had a steady stream of bodies for dissection and study. But in a work published posthumously, Auto-Icon; Or, Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living, he also argued that the large-scale adoption of Auto-Iconism would have environmental and cultural benefits: ‘there would no longer be needed monuments of stone or marble, — there would be no danger to health from the accumulating of corpses,— and the use of churchyards would gradually be done away’. The practice ‘would diminish the horrors of death, by getting rid of its deformities: it would leave the agreeable associations, and disperse the disagreeable’. Perhaps not entirely seriously, he also asserted that Auto-Icons would make attractive garden ornaments.

The literal meaning of auto-icon is self-image. I wonder why he chose this term. Surely even a materialist like Bentham would have accepted that there is more to the self than one’s skin, flesh and bones. Does the Auto-Icon in some way preserve the self and not just the body? However detached and rational you try to be, there is something unsettling about coming face to face with the figure in the cabinet. Far from providing reassurance about the state of death it seems, in some inexplicable way, to flout it.

In his paper on ‘The Uncanny', Sigmund Freud postulated that the sense of uncanniness arises when we encounter something familiar which, through repression or ‘surmounting’, has become unfamiliar. Interestingly, he cites the severed head as an example of this, ‘springing from’ the repression of castration anxiety. He argued that ‘primitive’ forms of thought, such as the notion of the dead coming to life, although ‘surmounted’ in everyday life, can seem, in certain circumstances not impossible, leading to the feeling of uncanniness. Whatever you think of Freud’s theory, meeting Bentham’s Auto-Icon provokes a genuine sense of the uncanny.

John Drinkwater’s Robinson of England is a very peculiar novel indeed. I don’t mean funny-peculiar, but peculiar in the sense of being curious. It is, to use a word that Drinkwater’s contemporaries might have employed in the circumstances, a queer book. I suspect it was peculiar even when it was published in 1937, and from a distance of over eighty years it appears even more so. But I’m not using ‘peculiar’ as a pejorative term. The book is certainly an oddity, but with a charm all of its own.

The central character — to call him a protagonist would give an impression of drama which is virtually absent, though he is a kind of hero — is an Englishman in his fifties called Robinson Dare. His biography occupies the first fifth of the novel. He is born in Oxford, the son of an ironmonger, wins a scholarship to St John’s College, where he takes a double first in Classics, and wins ‘the Newdigate Prize for a poem on Confucius’. He also excels as an athlete. After graduation, he turns down several job offers, accepts a position on a national newspaper in London but finds journalism to be a dirty business and returns to Oxford.

After much heart-searching and restless brooding around the Oxfordshire landscape, Drake resolves to become a full-time writer, telling his sceptical father:

This is 1906, a long-ago time when Cotswold cottages could be had for three and sixpence a week and a man could live on a pound a week. Dare decamps to the Golden Valley near Stroud and spends the years up until the Great War writing books and exploring England:

I’ve quoted that extended passage to give a notion of Dare’s — and Drinkwater’s — lyrical patriotism. One of the most notable things about Dare’s excursions into English history and topography is that London is absent, that reference to Smithfield excepted. Dare’s England is provincial rather than metropolitan. These travels prompt reflections on English character, English exceptionalism, English genius, and fuel his writing. And so, by the early 1930s, Drake has settled into a bachelor existence in his Cotswold fastness. He served in the Great War, was decorated for bravery, naturally, and doesn’t talk about it, naturally. He has published several books and had a failed love affair. But all of this is a prelude to the main events, such as they are, of the book.

One Christmas, Dare’s two nieces and nephew come to stay with him for the holidays. What follows is an exercise in didacticism, a survey of English history and culture for the children, inevitably idiosyncratic and selective, but even more interesting for that. They visit the local manor house and the local blacksmith, they travel to Civil War battlefields and a football match, they watch fox hunting and whippet racing. Dare tells them about stoneware, slavery, and alehouse tokens, quotes great chunks of poetry, including some of Drinkwater’s own, and rhapsodises on the English landscape.

Though his vision of England is romantic and even a little pessimistic, Dare is no Tory, but a liberal and an atheist. The book’s dedication is to Ramsay MacDonald, an unusual choice in the late 1930s. His heroes, like Drinkwater’s, are Cromwell and Lincoln. All this didacticism could be exhausting for the reader and the children, but Dare — or is it Drinkwater? — pulls it off. As with any book that’s over sixty years old, there’s a subtlety, allusiveness, and breadth of learning that’s altogether missing from modern fiction, whether literary or commercial.

I’ve hinted that Dare and Drinkwater are almost interchangeable and I think they are, almost. This is not really a novel at all but an extended love letter to England. John Drinkwater, known in his time as a playwright and poet, is an obscure figure in the present age, (though he has a dedicated website, clearly a labour of love on someone’s part). His ODNB entry notes that ‘in later life he frequently expressed regret and embarrassment at not having had a university education’. Robinson of England was Drinkwater’s last book, published posthumously, and I can’t help feeling that the figure of Robinson Dare is the man he wished he might have been: a gentleman-scholar, living in unencumbered seclusion amid his books and collections, financially secure and able to ignore the literary mainstream.

Arguably, it’s the second and third rank novels that give the greatest insight into an era. There is a between-the-wars wistfulness about this book, an implicit sorrowful sense that the best days of England are behind it, the stuffing knocked out of it by a combination of industrialisation, mass culture, and a coarsening of the national imagination. Dare and the children attend the local church one Sunday, not because he is a believer but because he thinks the practice has a social and cultural value. Afterwards, they wander in the churchyard: