English Music (novel)

Published in 1992, it is both a bildungsroman and, in the words of critic John Barrell, "partly a series of rhapsodies and meditations on the nature of English culture, written in the styles of various great authors.

Clement Harcombe instills a vivid sense of English culture in Timothy, principally through selected readings of classic works like Robinson Crusoe and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

It becomes evident that Timothy possesses skills akin to those performed onstage by his father, as he cures his grandmother of a debilitating nervous shake.

Finding his father's finances in chaos he decides to accompany him on his healing visits, and Harcombe's skill miraculously reappears.

Once again father and son team up with spectacular results, and Harcombe manages to heal the disabled Edward, but at the cost of his own life.

Paintings by Richard Wilson (Hounslow Heath), Thomas Gainsborough, John Constable, Joseph Wright of Derby, John Martin (Landscape with a Castle), J. M. W. Turner, Samuel Palmer, Ford Madox Brown, James McNeill Whistler (Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge).

The Canterbury Tales and the novels Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (Pamela Andrews, Mr B), The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (Jack Hatchway, Commodore Trunnion), Tristram Shandy, A Sentimental Journey (Parson Yorick), The Mill on the Floss, Wuthering Heights (Catherine Earnshaw).

[2] Many critics found Ackroyd's nationalist tone narrow and conservative, in particular the suggestion that the variety of writers, composers and artists were serving a homogenous vision.

Critics also noted that female writers and artists (brief allusions to the works of George Eliot and Emily Brontë aside) were largely absent.