Lives of Victorian Literary Figures, Part III:

Elizabeth Gaskell, the Carlyles and John Ruskin

The volumes in this third set of anthologies focus on writers for whom ‘the centre’ was a pressing concern. Ruskin grew up in suburban London ; in later life, he settled in the Lake District . Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle moved in the opposite direction – from rural Scotland to London’s Cheyne Walk. Elizabeth Gaskell lived and worked near Manchester all her life; by doing so she became a writer with a national reputation who enjoyed contacts throughout London’s literary world. These different trajectories are all responses to the dominance of London over Victorian literary culture and Victorian society more generally. Should one retreat and so avoid the distractions of the literary world? Should one take part in and seek to dominate that world? Should one maintain a provincial identity, neither backing away from nor immersing oneself in the capital’s agenda? The lives of these authors epitomise these questions. They reveal the various different, viable ways of making a writing career that these difficulties impose.

• Complete texts or substantial extracts reproduced
• Digitally enhanced facsimile texts
• Includes many rare items from scattered collections
• General introduction, volume introductions, headnotes, consolidated index

Contents

Volume 1
Elizabeth Gaskell
Includes:
Henry James, ‘Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell’, Nation (22 February 1866); [Harriet Parr], ‘The Works of Mrs Gaskell’, British Quarterly Review, pp. 399–429 (April 1867); Mat Hompes, ‘Mrs Gaskell’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, pp. 124–38 (August 1895); Edna Lyall, ‘Mrs Gaskell’, Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign: A Book of Appreciations, ed. Mrs Oliphant et al, pp. 119–45 (1897); Eliza Lynn Linton, My Literary Life: Reminiscences of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, pp. 92–3 (1899); Mrs Richmond Ritchie, ‘Mrs Gaskell’, Cornhill Magazine, Volume XXI, pp. 757–66 (December 1906); Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, ‘Mrs Gaskell’ (1906), Gathered Leaves from the Prose of Mary E Coleridge, with a Memoir by Edith Sichel, pp. 186–93 (1910); Memorials of two Sisters: Susanna and Catherine Winkworth ed. Margaret J Shaen, pp. 23–5, 29–32, 39, 100–1, 103–4 (1908); Letters by Harriet Martineau, Matthew Arnold and Thomas and Jane Carlyle; Margaret Oliphant, ‘Modern Novelists – Great and Small’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, pp. 559–60 (May 1855); Margaret Oliphant, The Victorian Age of English Literature (with F R Oliphant), Volume I, pp. 325–8 (1892); Extracts from The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence (1932)
Volume 2
Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle
Includes:
Charles and Frances Brookfield, Mrs Brookfield and her Circle (1905); Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits (1856); Francis Espinasse, Literary Recollections and Sketches (1893); Henry James Senior, ‘Some Personal Recollections of Carlyle’, Atlantic Monthly (May 1881); Henry Larkin, ‘Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle: A Ten-Years’ Reminiscence’, British Quarterly Review (July 1881); William MacCall, ‘Almost a Romance’, Pall Mall Gazette (December 1884); Harriet Martineau, Autobiography (1877); David Masson, Memories of London in the ‘Forties (1908); Margaret Oliphant, ‘Mrs Carlyle’, Contemporary Review (May 1883); John Tyndall, New Fragments (1892); George Venables, ‘Carlyle in Society and at Home’, Fortnightly Review (1888)
Volume 3
John Ruskin
Includes:
William Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1905); E T Cook, The Life of John Ruskin (1912);W G Collingwood, The Life and Work of John Ruskin (1893); J A Hobson, John Ruskin: Social Reformer (1898); William Bell Scott, Autobiographical Notes (1892); Frederic Harrison, John Ruskin (1903); J A Froude, Carlyle’s Life in London (1884); Friedrich Max-Müller, Auld Lang Syne (1878);W H Mallock, The New Republic (1877); Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, Browning (1892); Henry Scott Holland, ‘Gladstone and Ruskin’, The Commonwealth (1896); Dr George Harley, ‘account of Ruskin’s first attack of insanity’, British Medical Journal (1900); A C Benson, Memories and Friends (1924)

Related titles

• The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell

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