Change Ringing in Literature and Television
The mystery novel The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers (1934) contains a great deal of information on change-ringing. Her fictional detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, demonstrates his skill at ringing, and the solution to the central puzzle of the book rests in part upon his knowledge of the patterns of change ringing.
Connie Willis, who frequently and overtly references Sayers in To Say Nothing of the Dog (1997), features bell ringers in her earlier novel Doomsday Book (1992); a group of American women led by a Mrs. Taylor frequently appears practising for or ringing both handbells and changes.
The British television series Midsomer Murders aired an episode in the fifth season on a series of murders within a bell-ringing team, in Ring Out Your Dead.
In the science-fiction novel Anathem by Neal Stephenson (2008) changes are rung in a cloistered monastery for mathematicians to signal different ceremonies.
Read more about this topic: Change Ringing
Famous quotes containing the words change, ringing, literature and/or television:
“Heat of blood makes young people change their inclinations often, and habit makes old ones keep to theirs a great while.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You’ve got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house. The ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven’s “Pastoral.” A letter scribbled on her office stationery that you carry around in your pocket because it smells of all the lilacs in Ohio.”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“The literature of women’s lives is a tradition of escapees, women who have lived to tell the tale.”
—Phyllis Rose (b. 1942)
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)