84, Charing Cross Road
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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- This is about the book. For the film see 84 Charing Cross Road (film)
84 Charing Cross Road is a 1970 book by Helene Hanff, later made into a stage play and film, about the twenty-year correspondence between her and Frank Doel of Marks & Co., antiquarian booksellers located at the titular address in London, England.
Hanff, in search of obscure classics and British literature titles she had been unable to find in New York City, noticed an ad in the Saturday Review of Literature and first contacted the shop in 1949, and it fell to Doel to fulfill her requests. In time, a long-distance friendship evolved, not only between the two, but between Hanff and other staff members as well, with an exchange of Christmas packages, birthday gifts, and food parcels to compensate for post-World War II food shortages in England. Their letters included discussions about topics as diverse as the sermons of John Donne, how to make Yorkshire Pudding, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
Hanff postponed visiting her English friends until too late; Doel died in December 1968 from peritonitis from a burst appendix, and the bookshop eventually closed. Hanff did finally visit Charing Cross Road and the empty but still standing shop in the summer of 1971, a trip recorded in her 1973 book The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street. A circular brass plaque on the building that now stands on the shop's former site acknowledges the story.
Bibliography
Partial list of the books Helen Hanff ordered from Marks & Co. but mentioned in 84 Charing Cross Road:
- Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice, (1813)
- Arkwright, Francis trans. Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon
- Belloc, Hillaire. Essays.
- Catullus - Loeb Classics
- Chaucer, Geoffrey The Canterbury Tales translated by Hill, published by Longmans 1934)
- Delafield, E.M., Diary of a Provincial Lady
- Dobson, Austen ed.. The Sir Roger De Coverley Papers
- Donne, John Sermons
- Elizabethan Poetry
- Graham, Kenneth, The Wind in the Willows
- Greek New Testament
- Grolier Bible
- Hazlitt, William. Selected Essays Of William Hazlitt 1778 To 1830, Nonesuch Press edition.
- Horace - Loeb Classics
- Hunt, Leigh. Essays.
- Johnson, Samuel, On Shakespeare, 1908, Intro by Walter Raleigh
- Jonson, Ben. Timber
- Lamb, Charles. Essays of Elia, (1823).
- Landor, Walter Savage. Vol II of The Works and Life of Walter Savage Landor (1876) - Imaginary Conversations
- Latin Bible
- Latin New Testament
- Latin Vulgate Dictionary
- Leonard, R. M. ed. The Book-Lover's Anthology, (1911).
- Newman, John Henry. Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Education. Addressed to the Catholics of Dublin- "'Idea of a University" (1852 and 1858)
- Pepys, Samuel. Pepys Diary - 4 Volume Braybrook ed. (1926, revised ed)
- Plato's Four Socratic Dialogues, 1903
- Quiller-Couch, Arthur, The Oxford Book Of English Verse
- Quiller-Couch, Arthur, The Pilgrim's Way
- Quiller-Couch, Arthur, Oxford Book of English Prose
- Sappho - Loeb Classics
- St. John, Christopher Ed. Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw : A Correspondence / The Shaw - Terry Letters : A Romantic Correspondence
- Sterne, Lauence, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, (1759)
- Stevenson, Robert Louis. Virginibus Puerisque
- de Tocqueville, Alexis Journey to America (1831–1832)
- Wyatt, Thomas. Poems of Thomas Wyatt
- Walton, Izaak. The Compleat Angler . J Major's (2nd ed., 1824).
- Walton, Izaak. The Lives of - John Donne - Sir Henry Wotton - Richard Hooker - George Herbert & Robert Sanderson
- Woolf, Virginia, the Common Reader, 1932.
Adaptations
Hugh Whitemore adapted 84 Charing Cross Road for a BBC teleplay broadcast as part of the series Play for Today. Starring Frank Finlay and Anne Jackson, it was first broadcast on 4 November 1975.
In 1981, James Roose-Evans adapted it for the stage in a two-character version first produced at the Salisbury Playhouse. With Rosemary Leach and David Swift, it transferred to the West End, where it opened to universally ecstatic reviews.
After fifteen previews, the Broadway production opened on 7 December 1982 at the Nederlander Theatre with Ellen Burstyn and Joseph Maher. Due perhaps in part to a mediocre review by Frank Rich in the New York Times, it ran for just 96 performances.
Whitemore returned to the project to write the screenplay for the 1987 film adaptation starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins. The dramatis personae were expanded to include Hanff's Manhattan friends, the bookshop staff, and Doel's wife Nora, played by Judi Dench. Bancroft won a BAFTA Award as Best Actress; Whitemore and Dench were nominated for direction and supporting performance.
Roose-Evans adapted the play again for a 2007 radio production starring Gillian Anderson and Denis Lawson, broadcast on Christmas Day on BBC Radio 4.
