Lives of Victorian Literary Figures, Part I:
George Eliot, Charles Dickens and Alfred, Lord Tennyson by their Contemporaries
Series Editor: Ralph Pite
Volume Editors: Matthew Bevis, Gail Marshall, John Mullan and Corinna Russell
Consulting Editor: John Mullan
Lives of Victorian Literary Figures
978 1 85196 759 9: 234x156mm: £275.00/$495.00
The Victorian period was the heyday of biography and writers of the time received at least their fair share of biographical attention - Froude’s Carlyle, Forster’s Dickens, Mrs. Gaskell’s Charlotte Bronte and Hallam Tennyson’s portrait of his father, have all become classic examples of the form.
This edition draws together a wide range of unofficial biographies,bringing out the distinctiveness of character often hidden within the decorous, public portrait. And, taken as a whole, they show in the case of each writer, how a received picture gradually forms out of the fluid variety and inconsistency of the living person. They reveal, in other words, Victorian biography - with its expectations and conventions - starting to leave its mark on the perception and mediation of a particular personality. Reputations are visibly being established and the place of these writers within the literary canon is being confirmed.
- Complete texts or substantial extracts printed
- Digitally enhanced facsimile texts
- Includes many rare items from scattered collections
- General introduction, volume introductions, headnotes
Contents
Volume 1
George Eliot
Alexander Main, Wise, Witty and Tender Sayings in Prose and Verse, selected from the Works of George Eliot (1871); Algernon Charles Swinburne, A Note on Charlotte Brontë (1877); Beatrice Webb, diary entry for 2 February 1881, in The Diary of Beatrice Webb (pub 1982); Edith Simcox, ‘George Eliot’, The Nineteenth Century, 9 (1881); William Hale White, The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford (1881); Mathilde Blind, George Eliot (1883); J W Cross, ed., George Eliot's Life, as related in her letters and journals (1885); Henry James, ‘George Eliot’s Life’, Atlantic Monthly, 55 (1885); Mrs Oliphant, ‘The Life and Letters of George Eliot’, Edinburgh Review, 161 (1885); R H Hutton, ‘George Eliot’, Contemporary Review (1885); Charles Bray, Phases of Opinion and Experience during a Long Life: an Autobiography (1885); Alice James, diary entry for 28 June 1889, in The Diary of Alice James, ed. by Leon Edel (pub 1982); Thomas Adolphus Trollope, What I Remember (1887); Oscar Browning, George Eliot (1890); C E Raimond [Elizabeth Robins], George Mandeville's Husband (1894); Bessie Rayner Belloc, In a Walled Garden (1895); Eliza Lynn Linton, ‘George Eliot’, in Mrs Oliphant et al., Women Novelists of Queen Victoria's Reign: A Book of Appreciations (1897); Leslie Stephen, George Eliot (1902); Herbert Spencer, An Autobiography (1904); Virginia Woolf, ‘George Eliot’, TLS, 20 November 1919, reprinted in The Common Reader (1925)
Volume 2
Charles Dickens
John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens (1872); Charles Dickens, ‘Autobiographical Fragment’, first published in Forster (1872); Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1849–50); J C Hotten, Charles Dickens: The Story of His Life (1870); Robert Langton, The Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens (1883); F B Perkins, Charles Dickens: A Sketch of His Life and Works (1870); James T Fields, Yesterdays With Authors (1872); J H Friswell, Modern Men of Letters, Honestly Criticised (1870); G H Lewes, ‘Dickens in Relation to Criticism’, Fortnightly Review, XVII (1872); G A Sala, Charles Dickens (1870); William R Hughes, A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land (1891); John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens (1872); Charles Dickens, ‘Personal’, Household Words, 12 June 1858; ‘Mr Charles Dickens’, The Times, 7 June 1858; ‘Mr C Dickens’, Reynold's Newspaper, 13 June 1858; from The Court Circular, 12 June 1858; ‘The Dickens Domestic Affair’, published in the New York Tribune, 16 June 1858; W M Thackeray , ‘C D and his friends in Cornwall’ (1842), reprinted in J W T Ley, The Dickens Circle (1919); Kate Perugini, ‘Thackeray and My Father’, Pall Mall Magazine, XLVII (1911); J C Hotton, Charles Dickens: The Story of His Life (1870); Edmund Yates, Recollections and Experiences (1884); F G Kitton, Charles Dickens; By Pen and Pencil (1890); W T Shore, Charles Dickens and His Friends (1909); J C Hotton, Charles Dickens: The Story of His Life (1870); Edmund Yates, Recollections and Experiences (1884); Percy Fitzgerald, Memories of Charles Dickens (1913); Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, Recollections of Writers (1878); Sir Henry Fielding Dickens, Memories of My Father (1928); James T Fields, Yesterdays With Authors (1872); Kate Field, Pen Photographs of Charles Dickens’s Readings (1868); George Dolby, Charles Dickens as I Knew Him (1885); Mary (Mamie) Dickens, My Father As I Recall Him (1897); John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens (1872); ‘Death of Charles Dickens’, The Times, 10 June 1870; Blanchard Jerrold, A Day With Charles Dickens (1871); ‘Charles Dickens’, Punch, 18 June 1870; Sir Arthur Helps, ‘In Memoriam’, Macmillan's Magazine, XXII (July 1870)
Volume 3Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir (1897); Frances M Brookfield, The Cambridge “Apostles” (1906); Aubrey de Vere, ‘Early Reminiscences’, in Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir (1897); Thomas Carlyle, ‘Carlyle's Unpublished Letters to Miss Wilson’, The Nineteenth Century, 89 (May 1921); Thomas Carlyle, New Letters of Thomas Carlyle, ed. by Alexander Carlyle (1904); Thomas Carlyle, The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson 1834–1872 (1883); Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Carlyle: A History of his Life in London, 1834–1881, ed. by J A Froude (1884); Jane Welsh Carlyle, Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed. by J A Froude (1883); Jane Welsh Carlyle, Jane Welsh Carlyle: Letters to Her Family, 1839–1863, ed. by Leonard Huxley (1924); Letters and Literary Remains of Edward FitzGerald, ed. by William Aldis Wright (1902); Some New Letters of Edward FitzGerald, ed. by F R Barton (1923); A FitzGerald Friendship, ed. by Neilson Campbell Hannay (1932); Willingham F Rawnsley, ‘Personal Recollections of Tennyson – I’, The Nineteenth Century, 97 (January 1925); Elizabeth Barrett Browning, The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. by Frederic G Kenyon (1897); William Michael Rossetti, ‘Portraits of Browning – I’, The Magazine of Art, 13 (1890); William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters, with a Memoir (1895); Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), ‘A Visit to Tennyson’, Strand Magazine, 21 (1901); William Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1905); J A Symonds, ‘Recollections of Lord Tennyson: An Evening at Thomas Woolner’s’, Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, 46 (1893); James Knowles, ‘Aspects of Tennyson II: A Personal Reminiscence’, The Nineteenth Century, 33 (1893); Blanche Warre-Cornish, ‘Memories of Tennyson I & II’, London Mercury, 5 (January 1922); Edmund Gosse, Portraits and Sketches (1912); Arthur Warren, London Days: A Book of Reminiscences (1920); Agnes Grace Weld, Glimpses of Tennyson and Some of His Relations and Friends (1903); Mary Gladstone, Her Diaries and Letters, ed. by Lucy Masterman (1930); Henry James, The Middle Years (1917); William Allingham, The Diaries, ed. by H Allingham and D Radford (1907); Charles Villiers Stanford, Studies and Memories (1908); H D Rawnsley, Memories of the Tennysons (1900); Anne Ritchie, Records of Tennyson, Ruskin and Browning (1892); Rev. William Boyd Carpenter, Some Pages of My Life (1911); Maisie Ward, The Wilfrid Wards and the Transition (1934); Wilfrid Ward, Problems and Persons (1903); E F Benson, As We Were: A Victorian Peep Show (1930); Walt Whitman, ‘A Word about Tennyson’, The Critic, 1 January 1887; Benjamin Jowett, ‘Notes on Characteristics of Tennyson’, in Tennyson and his Friends, ed. by Hallam Tennyson (1911); The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett, by Evelyn Abbot and Lewis Campbell (1897); ‘The Dead Laureate's Last Resting Place’, Daily Graphic, 12 October 1892; ‘The Burial of Lord Tennyson’, Pall Mall Budget, 13 October 1892; ‘Tennyson Crossing the Bar’, Punch, 15 October 1892; The Spectator, 15 October 1892; The Saturday Review, 15 October 1892; Edmund Gosse, in Philip Henderson, Tennyson: Poet and Prophet (1978); Mary Anderson Navarro, A Few More Memories (1936); Dante Gabriel Rossetti, drawing of Tennyson reading Maud (1855); James Mudd, portrait of Tennyson (1857); Julia Margaret Cameron, ‘The Dirty Monk’ photograph (1865); Julia Margaret Cameron, photograph of Tennyson (1869); Carlo Pellegrini (‘Ape’), drawing of Tennyson in Vanity Fair (22 July 1871); Punch, cartoon of Tennyson (22 December 1883); William Barraud, portrait of Tennyson (1888); Max Beerbohm, ‘Mr Tennyson Reading “In Memoriam” to his Sovereign’, The Poet's Corner (1904)
Reviews
'these exemplary anthologies will draw students and scholars back to take a closer look at these often neglected texts...each volume is eminently, engrossingly browsable, and offers a useful way to introduce graduate students to the excitement and pitfalls of research among the primary sources for Victorian literary biography, few of which are as easily accessible in even the best research libraries.’
– Patrick Leary, Australasian Victorian Studies Journal