David Alfred Bywaters's Crossword Cavalcade & Fortnightly Victorian Novel Recommender. Every Saturday! Either a new language-torturing puzzle or an old novel by an unjustly neglected Victorian author. Why waste time on other amusements?

Crossword 184: On End

Walter Crane, Diana and Endymion
Walter Crane, Diana and Endymion

Did you ever have to read Moby Dick?  It was justly panned by discriminating contemporaries (an “ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact . . . disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English,” said the Athenaeum; “the soliloquies and dialogues of Ahab, in which the author attempts delineating the wild imaginings of monomania, and exhibiting some profoundly speculative views of things in general, induce weariness or skipping,” said the Spectator).  But then some misguided cabal of English professors, at some point in the 20th century, contrived to make it required reading, and generations of students have paid a heavy price.  53 Across is a terse comment on the incalculable suffering induced by ill-judged curricular decisions.

Download this week’s crossword:

184-On-End.puz

184-On-End.pdf

Solve this week’s crossword online:

184 On End