iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Thomas Ruys Smith @thomasruyssmith.com · 02/11/2025

In next month’s BBC History Magazine 🎅👍

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Thomas Ruys Smith @thomasruyssmith.com · 09/09/2025

An exciting arrival today from @christmaspast.bsky.social! Congratulations Brian - order your copies now!

The delightful cover of Brian Earl’s new book, Of Christmases Long, Long Ago: Surprising Traditions from Christmas Past.

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Thomas Ruys Smith @thomasruyssmith.com · 05/09/2025

🎅🔎 Searching for Santa Claus, my collection of the stories, poems and illustrations that shaped a global icon, has a cover (by the amazing Studio GRRR)! Available for preorder from @bhousepress.bsky.social now! 🎅👉 www.boilerhouse.press/product-page...

The cover image for Searching for Santa Claus, edited by Thomas Ruys Smith and published by Boiler House Press.

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Thomas Ruys Smith @thomasruyssmith.com · 05/08/2025

And here are some kind words from two of our wonderful advance readers!

"This splendid edition will allow new readers of all ages to enjoy Hawthorne’s high-spirited, inventive retellings of ancient myths. The Introduction helpfully relates the collection both to Hawthorne’s own life and times and to today’s remarkable upsurge of interest in classical mythology." - Professor Sheila Murnaghan, editor of Childhood and the Classics: Britain and America, 1850-1965 (Oxford University Press 2018).

"This is an excellent edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s A Wonder Book for Boys and Girls that will appeal to children and adults alike. The editors do an excellent job in their thorough introduction and the educational resources for teachers, including prompts, questions, exercises, and projects, are quite impressive. All in all, this is a delightful companion to Hawthorne studies and to children’s studies." - Professor Monika Elbert, Editor, Nathaniel Hawthorne Review

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Thomas Ruys Smith @thomasruyssmith.com · 05/08/2025

Coming soon! Our new @uniofeastanglia.bsky.social edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne's A Wonder-Book for Girls & Boys - his groundbreaking collection of mythological stories retold for younger readers, first published in 1851! More here 👉 www.ueapublishingproject.com/product-page...

Front cover of the new UEA Publishing Project edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne's A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys - featuring a charming Pegasus in flight.

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Thomas Ruys Smith @thomasruyssmith.com · 23/07/2025

Went to visit Hank (closed on Wednesdays 🚫).

A plaque outside Lamb House in Rye marking it as the residence of Henry James, where he wrote many of his novels.

Lamb House in Rye, one-time residence of Henry James - sadly closed to visitors on Wednesdays. Is that Jamesian? Probably.

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Thomas Ruys Smith @thomasruyssmith.com · 09/07/2025

I love a choice block quote - I love letting my subjects speak! Letting their voice breathe again!

Unpopular opinion meme guy, here voicing a preference for a block quote.

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Thomas Ruys Smith @thomasruyssmith.com · 13/06/2025

Anyway, I'll be talking about her and Anna and Norfolk and the world's most famous literary horse at the @redwingsuk.bsky.social Book Festival this Saturday if you want to know more!

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Thomas Ruys Smith @thomasruyssmith.com · 13/06/2025

Mary Sewell - mother of Anna Sewell of Black Beauty fame, and a remarkable woman in her own right - wrote this to a friend a couple of months before her death at the age of 87 and it remains one of the most inspiring little snippets that I know.

Old Catton, February 5, 1884. It is only about three weeks since I regained the use of my hand, and then fell ill, so that breathing often became a business, not an insensible pleasure. I think I have now started afresh, and there is so much to do, even for the aged, that I really grudge to be idle; and life and thought and action are so intense and interesting, and so various, that going to sleep (that is, die, if there be such a thing, which I do not believe, feels postponable, while there is any capacity left to help or comfort any one. I believe this does not sound right at my age, which I ought to be longing to depart.

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Thomas Ruys Smith @thomasruyssmith.com · 29/03/2025

Looking forward to talking about Anna and Mary Sewell at this year’s @redwingsuk.bsky.social Book Festival! Saturday June 14th. Tickets on sale now! shop.redwings.org.uk/products/red...

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Thomas Ruys Smith @thomasruyssmith.com · 27/01/2025

Week 1 of teaching Children's Literature, starting strong...

A woodcut of the Grimms' fairy tale "The Juniper Tree": a child peers into a wooden chest while his step-mother holds up a suspiciously heavy-looking lid. Cuts of meat hang ominously in the background. You'll never believe what happens next...

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Thomas Ruys Smith @thomasruyssmith.com · 17/01/2025

About to give a talk at Time and Tide Museum in Great Yarmouth about Mary and Anna Sewell.

Time and Tide Museum of Great Yarmouth Life

Blue plaque attached to 56 Southtown Road in Great Yarmouth, one-time residence of Mary Sewell, author and mother of Anna Sewell.

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Thomas Ruys Smith @thomasruyssmith.com · 13/01/2025

Move over Melville, Mary Sewell got there first in Walks With Mamma (1824) and she did it in words of one syllable:

An extract from Mary Sewell's Walks With Mamma (1824): The large whale and the fierce shark both live in the sea. From the whale we get the oil which we burn in our lamps to give us light. The shark has a large mouth and sharp teeth, so large and sharp that he could eat a man

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Thomas Ruys Smith @thomasruyssmith.com · 01/01/2025

Coming attractions: this is how 2025 is shaping up… More soon.

A copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Wonder-Book next to a vintage postcard of Santa descending a chimney.

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Thomas Ruys Smith @thomasruyssmith.com · 15/12/2024

Forget Die Hard, starting a campaign to get A Little Princess recognised as a Christmas book. One Christmas is specifically mentioned. Plus: a guy clambers across wintry rooftops and sneaks into bedrooms in order to bring presents to sleeping children. Yes, Ram Dass is Santa Claus.

Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess (Penguin Classics edition). By the way, when did they switch to cheap print on demand editions?

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Thomas Ruys Smith @thomasruyssmith.com · 10/12/2024

This guy has been in our family since about 1920.

A vintage cut out of Santa Claus / Father Christmas sitting in his sleigh being pulled along by a single deer.

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Thomas Ruys Smith @thomasruyssmith.com · 02/12/2024

I’m in this month’s UN Today magazine, writing about Christmas traditions around the globe 🎅🌍👉 untoday.org/magazine/#df...

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Thomas Ruys Smith @thomasruyssmith.com · 29/11/2024

Here’s one I found in a British newspaper - 1889. Not as fun as Dodge’s!

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Thomas Ruys Smith @thomasruyssmith.com · 18/11/2024

Teaching these two tomorrow in separate seminars but believe it or not there are some significant affinities between them!

Copes of Little Lord Fauntleroy by Frances Hodgson Burnett and Owen Wister’s The Virginian

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Thomas Ruys Smith @thomasruyssmith.com · 18/11/2024

Really thrilled to say that A Juvenile Miscellany: An Anthology of Lydia Maria Child’s Writing for Children, edited by me and @hilaryemmett.bsky.social in collaboration with final year undergraduates and the UEA publishing project (@bhousepress.bsky.social) won a Literary Encyclopedia Book Prize!

The cover of Hilary Emmett and Thomas Ruys Smith, A Juvenile Miscellany: An Anthology of Lydia Maria Child’s Writing for Children (UEA Publishing Project, 2023)

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Thomas Ruys Smith @thomasruyssmith.com · 11/11/2024

Recording a podcast about this guy today 🎅 and excited to see that @christmaspast.bsky.social is here!

A Thomas Nast illustration of Santa Claus from 1881.

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Thomas Ruys Smith @thomasruyssmith.com · 09/11/2024

Shall I pivot to becoming a full-time dog guy in our brave new Bluesky world?

Winifred Smith, miniature schnauzer, aged 3.

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Thomas Ruys Smith @thomasruyssmith.com · 08/11/2024

Yes things are bad but you still need to do your Christmas shopping… 🎅 🎁 Christmas Past: An Anthology of Seasonal Stories from Nineteenth-Century America a.co/d/a6ahWsC The Last Gift: The Christmas Stories of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman a.co/d/baiIlok

Christmas Past: An Anthology of Seasonal Stories from Nineteenth-Century America https://a.co/d/a6ahWsC

The Last Gift: The Christmas Stories of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman https://a.co/d/baiIlok

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Thomas Ruys Smith @thomasruyssmith.com · 07/11/2024

Trying to channel this energy 🎅

Christmas for Ever! An illustration of, probably, Father Christmas holding a wassail bowl flanked by Christmas greenery.

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Thomas Ruys Smith @thomasruyssmith.com · 28/10/2024

I’m in this month’s National Geographic History magazine talking about the significance of Clement Clarke Moore’s A Visit from St Nicholas 🎅

'Twas the Poem Behind an American Christmas
"A Visit From St. Nicholas" contains the recipe for a classic American Christmas. Though the festive words spawned a new holiday culture, they also sparked a centuries-long controversy.

"It gives readers a perfect template of what a domestic Christmas should look like," says Thomas Ruys Smith, a professor of American literature and culture at the University of East Anglia who studies the history of Christmas

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Thomas Ruys Smith @thomasruyssmith.com · 26/10/2023

🎪 🏖️ Just published open access in Coastal Studies & Society, the first fruits of our new research project: “Circus at the seaside: Building the Great Yarmouth Hippodrome, 1903” 👉 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

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Thomas Ruys Smith @thomasruyssmith.com · 04/10/2023

Here are some very kind words of praise for the collection:

“Thomas Ruys Smith’s edition of Freeman’s Christmas stories is a revelation! All our presumptions about holiday stories being drenched in sentimentality are demolished by the ways in which Freeman probes the multiple meanings inherent in the acts of giving and receiving gifts and exposes the forms of both solitude and communion inherent in Christmas. This collection transforms our understanding of the season and enhances the literary reputation of this remarkable author.” ~Alfred Bendixen, executive director of the American Literature Association
“A lovely and varied collection of Freeman’s often-neglected Christmas stories. Smith’s lively introduction contextualizes Freeman’s portrayal of the holiday season, in all of its complexity, and the domestic tensions that Christmas evoked for nineteenth-century women.” ~Leah Blatt Glasser, author of In a Closet Hidden: The Life and Work of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
“The Last Gift will prove anyone wrong who once said with Mark Twain, ‘I hate Xm

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Thomas Ruys Smith @thomasruyssmith.com · 04/10/2023

Publication day! It was a true pleasure putting this collection together and my rediscovery of one of these stories was the kind of pure research thrill you don’t get very often. This Christmas, discover why Freeman is an endlessly enjoyable and surprising writer! 🎅👉 lsupress.org/978080718016...

The Last Gift: The Christmas Stories of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, edited by Thomas Ruys Smith. Available now from
Louisiana State University Press.

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Thomas Ruys Smith @thomasruyssmith.com · 19/09/2023

Author copies are here! Release date is October 4 - just in time for Christmas shopping 🎄🎅🎄

The front cover of The Last Gift: The Christmas Stories if Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, edited by Thomas Ruys Smith and published by Louisiana State University Press.

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Thomas Ruys Smith @thomasruyssmith.com · 13/09/2023

Back in my Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter era.

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Thomas Ruys Smith @thomasruyssmith.com · 15/08/2023

The website is live so I’m happy to say that our anthology of Lydia Maria Child’s writing for children is slated for publication in November: www.ueapublishingproject.com/produc…

The front cover of the forthcoming collection: A Juvenile Miscellany: An Anthology of Lydia Maria Child’s Writing for Children.

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