Peter Robins

A.D. Harvey in The Spectator – a little tribute to Eric Naiman’s ‘When Dickens met Dostoevsky’

Beginning with what he finds to be a rather implausible account of a meeting between Dickens and Dostoevsky, Eric Naiman’s recent essay for the Times Literary Supplement spins out an astonishing story of suspect scholarship. I very much recommend reading it if you haven’t already.

At the centre of the mystery is an independent historian named A.D. Harvey, and a bewildering variety of other names from letters pages and scholarly journals – Stephanie Harvey, John Schellenberger, Trevor McGovern, Leo Bellingham – that may or may not belong to him. The piece raises all sorts of questions. If you work for a magazine, however, it raises one question with particular urgency: did any of these people write to us?

Well, we’ve looked – or rather the indefatigable Jonathan Jones has –  and the only one of Naiman’s names that crops up in our archives is that of Harvey himself. He wrote an enjoyable short piece in 2003 on damage to Leonardo’s ‘The Last Supper’, without any concealed revelations that I can see, and has contributed choice scraps from the Public Record Office to Allan Massie’s ‘Life and Letters’ column in much the same way as Naiman describes him doing to the Litt Supp‘s ‘NB’.

His most interesting appearance, though, may be his first: a letter from an A.D. Harvey of St John’s college, Oxford, in July 1967 that adds something to Naiman’s portrait of a clever but perhaps somewhat bitter outsider:

“Sir: Not having been privileged to go to a public school, I am not qualified to criticise Mr Simon Raven’s amusing article. However, apart from pointing out that most grammar schools finish before four o’clock (confer ‘six o’clock as the grammar school boy starts his journey home’), I do feel that somebody ought to remind Mr Simon Raven that grammar school boys are alive, too.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in