In Competition No. 2879 you were invited to follow in the footsteps of Hilary Mantel and provide a scene that shows a well-known villain from history or literature in an uncharacteristically kindly light.
Mantel has said that she was driven by a ‘powerful curiosity’ rather than by any desire to rehabilitate Cromwell. ‘I do not run a Priory clinic for the dead,’ she wrote, which is a nice way of putting it.
You plundered Dickens for baddies in need of a makeover — Fagin made repeated appearances alongside Daniel Quilp and Josiah Bounderby. Judas Iscariot and Dr Crippen were also popular choices. The standard was on the patchy side, but honourable mentions go to Carolyn Thomas-Coxhead, G.M. Davis, Barry Baldwin and Imke Thormählen.
D.A. Prince’s green-fingered Grendel pipped Basil Ransome-Davies’s touching portrait of Tricky Dicky at a moral crossroads to the extra fiver.
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