Chaplin by Roger Manvell

Introduction

Chaplin is a book written by Roger Manvell. Roger Manvell, a television executive, broadcaster, educator, and author, was best known as a film scholar and prolific author who served twelve years as director of the British Film Academy. He was also a regular broadcaster for the British Broadcasting Corporation, appeared on television in many countries, served on juries of international film festivals, and lectured widely. He joined Boston University's College of Communications in 1975 and was named a professor in 1982. Manvell's work encompassed two distinct fields: film and theater and the history of the Third Reich. In both areas, Manvell received critical praise.

Discussion

The book is the biography of a character named Chaplin. Throughout his career, Chaplin drew upon personal experience and his inherited mining tradition for his fiction. His first volume of short stories, The Leaping Land (1946), describes the trials of life for mining families in northern England. His subsequent volumes received critical praise for their realistic portrayal of British mining families and the hardships and dilemmas they face. In the title story of A Thin Seam and Other Stories (1968), a miner's son is torn between taking an opportunity to attend college to perhaps find a better life or returning to his village to work in the pit: "I saw that the primrose path was open to me and that not a soul would ever condemn me for taking it, just the same I knew that all the time I would be supported on the bowed sweated shoulders of my father and brothers and others like them (John, pp. 20).

Chaplin, in addition to his fiction, also wrote for the National Coal Board, Coal Magazine, and Coal News, and he was an occasional contributor to the Guardian newspaper. Critic Michael Standen, when comparing him to ...