About the author
I was born in Croydon. Not even in Croydon itself, but in a suburb of a suburb. In January, on what has recently been calculated to be the most miserable day of the year. It rained all the night I was supposed to be appearing. I don't think I've ever got over the trauma of popping out into the pouring rain in Croydon in the late 60s. Unlike most Brits, I don't actually believe the sun shone more when I was young. Obsessed with sun from a very early age, I have nurtured a brooding sense of indignation at repeated summers to meet my rather exacting standards. The skies still owe me, and it's only when we have a proper scorcher that I feel they are starting to make recompense.
My first ambition was to be a streaker. It gets you outside, and you don't need any qualifications (read about it here), but that didn't last long. I eventually got to university. In Lampeter, in the middle of West Wales, the Foreign Legion of the University world. When I got there students and staff were wearing badges saying 'Free the Lampeter 750'. I must have been very naughty, as I ended up staying there 6 years. I did my PhD there on, as legend has it, Victorian works on the perils of self-abuse. I did read a lot of those works, and am an expert on Victorian masturbation (should anyone need one).
I then somehow managed to land a fellowship in English Literature at Merton College, Oxford. And the sun shone for the whole time I was there. Honestly, my time at Oxford boasted 4 scorching summers (94-97 inclusive. Incidentally, the photo to the left is not me in Oxford, but me in Florence, pretending to be in a Room With a View, and taken in 1986, and is there principally to show off my tan. Let me assure you I did not dress like that in Oxford in the mid 90s; anyone who did would have deserved a good kicking from the Cowley road skins)). I know this because I had to tear myself away from the sun to sit in libraries working on what eventually became a book about Victorian Gothic fiction. Yes, bizarrely a sunshine obsessive wrote about the dark side first. I'm sure there's some reason for this, some deep seated psychological need to face ones demons and embrace ones opposite inclinations, but really I wrote about the Gothic because there isn't half a load of old tosh written about it by academics. It was an easy target, and boy did I enjoy annoying people with that book.
After Oxford I became the editor of the Penguin Classics series, and I even edited a few of them myself (details below), then drifted into the world of branding and design. But still writing. Sunshine is a book I've wanted to write for years. My other publications are A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction (Oxford University Press, 1999); an edition of Oscar Wilde's poems for Everyman paperbacks; the Penguin Classics editions of Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray and Stevenson's Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (they can all be found on Amazon by searching for Mighall). The common denominator in all these projects, including Sunshine is Romanticism. My current project, just to prove this point, is a short, very short biography of Keats for the Hesperus Books Brief Lives series. That'll be out in spring next year. Over and out.
