Alex Clark writes that The Lord of the Rings “is, strictly speaking, a trilogy” (Move over Middlemarch! Readers’ top 100 novels, 6 June). Strictly speaking, it isn’t a trilogy but a single work of fiction originally published in three volumes for practical reasons. None of the three volumes can stand alone. Compare, for example, the late David Lodge’s Changing Places, Small World, and Nice Work – a proper (and still sharply entertaining) “campus” trilogy.
Prof Chris Walsh
Hawarden, Flintshire
• Critics should read Bleak House in full before condemning it as miserable: the demise of Mr Krook by spontaneous human combustion must be one of the most darkly hilarious scenes in 19th-century literature, concluding with an appropriate warning from Dickens for contemporary corrupt administrations.
Noel Kavanagh
Cambridge
