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Francis PALGRAVE
Walter PATER
Anne PRATT
Adelaide PROCTER
Sir Walter RALEIGH
Charles READE
W W READE
William RUSSELL
Mark RUTHERFORD
James RYMER
George Augustus SALA
Henry SWEET
Francis PALGRAVE (1824-97)
If he’d had a penny for every copy…
The Palgrave poetry anthology first appeared in 1861 and was reprinted in many forms and revisions for more than a century. The first edition was The Golden Treasury of Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language and although the spines of subsequent editions used snappier titles they were mainly called the ‘Golden Treasury’. Palgrave himself compiled the first major revision: that Second Edition, in 1897, abandoned the restrictions of his first, limited to poems published before 1850 and to poets no longer alive in 1861. 20th century revisions added later poets.
Palgrave himself was the son of a barrister, a Cohen who converted to Christianity, and, partly as a result of his book, he became Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1885. Far less common than his anthology (can there be a second-hand bookshop without one?) are the few volumes of his own verse: Idylls and Songs (1854) was the first, Amenophis (1892) the last, together with a few prose works and his early, part autobiographical work, The Passionate Pilgrim (1858).
Walter PATER (1839-94) Pater was the high priest of aestheticism, a controversial Oxford don (controversial both in his views and, on at least one occasion, in his over-friendly relationship with a male student) whose motto could have sprung from his best book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873): ‘To burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.’ From the same book comes his almost infamous ‘art for its own sake’ doctrine, taken up in the late 19th century as an axiom by the Decadents and aesthetes. Pater taught that a man should treat his own life as a work of art, rather than be a slave to society’s rules. As well as his authoritative writings on art and philosophy (much of it in journals, later anthologised) he wrote some literary fiction including Marius the Epicurean (1885) and Gaston de Latour (1896, unfinished). Of the various collections, Plato and Platonism (1893) is perhaps the most interesting today, with its bold (for the time) defence of Greek philosophy and homoeroticism.
Anne PRATT (1839-94) One of the best-known Victorian botanical writers and illustrators, she had honed her drawing skills while confined as a sickly child. Her first book was the superbly illustrated Flowers and Their Associations (1828) and ten years later came The Field, the Garden, and the Woodland, or Interesting Facts Respecting Flowers and Plants in General: Designed for the Young. Later works include The Pictorial Catechism of Botany published by Suttaby in 1842, with The Garden Flowers of the Year and its companion, Wild Flowers of the Year, later that decade from the RTS. The SPCK produced her next and major work, a six volume Ferns of Great Britain and Their Allies the Club-Mosses, Pepperworts, and Horsetails from 1850-60. The smaller Chapters on Common Things of the Sea-side and Things on the Sea Coast intervened, followed by a two-volume Wild Flowers and Our Native Songsters, a bible at the time for bird-watchers. In this prolific period she expanded to include a work under the direction of the Committee of General Literature and Education: Poisonous, Noxious, and Suspected Plants of our Fields and Woods (SPCK, 1857) along with Haunts of Wild Flowers for Routledge in 1863. That year also saw a republication of her The Excellent Woman as Described in Proverbs Chapter 31:10:31 Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies, originally published by the RTS in 1847. In 1866, at the age of sixty (!) she married and stopped writing.
There’s lots and lots more about Victorian Women Writers in my latest book:
A Popular Encyclopaedia of Victorian Women Writers
Adelaide (Anne) PROCTER not Proctor as sometimes given (1825-64) Her most famous poem, ‘The Lost Chord’ – set to music by Sir Arthur Sullivan and sung in a million drawing rooms – is but one part of her enormous output. Barely out of her teens when first published, she became the poet most often seen in Dickens’s Household Words, sometimes writing as Mary Berwick. She appeared often in other magazines, and among her collections were two volumes of Legends and Lyrics (1858 & 61), A Chaplet of Verses (1862) and The Message (1892). She was one of the best-selling poets (arguably the best-selling) of the 19th century. Though a good deal of her poetry was devotional and all of it conventional (she had converted to Catholicism in 1851) she was more feminist than these works would suggest, and she allowed this to show at times in her work. (She had, after all, helped found the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, and was an active member of the Langham Place Circle, campaigning for poor and ‘fallen’ women.) She gave all the proceeds from A Chaplet of Verses to a homeless women’s refuge, and edited an anthology of poetry, Victoria Regia (1861) for Emily Faithfull’s Victoria Press. As the daughter of the poet B W Procter who wrote as Barry Cornwall she had been brought up in a busy literary household, meeting the major literary figures of the day. Despite cramming so much work into her life her health had never been good and she retired to Malvern in 1862. She died of consumption and was buried at Kensal Green.
There’s lots and lots more about Victorian Women Writers in my latest book:
A Popular Encyclopaedia of Victorian Women Writers
Sir Walter RALEIGH (1861-1922) He did not lay down his cloak for the queen to walk on. This Sir Walter was a respected critic and biographer whose Style (1897) was a writers’ bible in its day, though it reads fustily today. He wrote The English Novel: From the Earliest Times to the Appearance of Waverley in 1891, a biography of Stevenson in 1895 and another of Milton in 1900. More were to follow in the 20th century.
Charles READE (1814-84) Prolific playwright and reforming novelist, at times too reformist for his own good. He didn’t begin writing till in his thirties but, once he started, he plunged right in. He first dramatised Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle (1851), then switched direction by converting his own play Masks and Faces into a novel, Peg Woffington (1853). With successes both in the theatre and in print he began on the first of his reforming novels, Christie Johnstone (1853) urging the reform of prisons. It Is Never To Late To Mend (1856) beat louder on that same drum (he would later convert the novel into a play) just as another of his plays that year, Gold, became the novel Foul Play in 1869. Meanwhile he had moved in with the actress Mrs Seymour, with whom he would live some 15 years until her death, while he continued writing, writing. The Autobiography of a Thief and Jack of all Trades both appeared in 1858; Love Me Little, Love Me Long, in 1859; and his most famous novel, The Cloister and the Hearth, in 1861. Then came Hard Cash (1863), a novel scheduled for publication in 1862 but delayed, perhaps due to illness but more likely because the over-committed Reade had got into a tangle with the story. When it did appear, serialised in Dickens’s All The Year Round, the novel turned out to be a shocker – not shockingly bad but shocking in its reformist scenes and propaganda. Reade had turned his attention to the abuses of patients in private asylums, writing of forcible incarceration and showing in great detail the cruelties inflicted on inmates by callous staff. Not only was his tale too hot – too uncomfortable – for Dickens’s readers, but it was far too long. Reade had the bit between his teeth and was heading for the horizon. Cut it short, cried Dickens, and Reade reluctantly agreed. He scrambled together a hasty ending, only to find his final episode accompanied by a large-print paragraph from Dickens disavowing editorial responsibility. In 1866 Reade was again in hot water. His fine novel, Griffith Gaunt, exposed marital fault lines: a young wife dallies with her priestly advisor and her husband abandons her to contract a bigamous marriage. For this novel Reade found himself in court and, when he turned to Dickens for help, Dickens turned aside. But Reade was tough enough to defend himself – as he had to on other occasions. His Put Yourself In His Place (1870) attacked dubious practices in trade unions (for whom he normally had sympathy). The Simpleton (1873) provoked a libel trial. His play, The Wandering Heir (1873) was clearly based on the Tichborne affair of 1871. His epistolatory Hang in Haste, Repent at Leisure (1877) led to the reprieve of four people condemned to death for murder. In short, he was a trouble-seeker – irascible, hot-tempered and, although he over-wrote and loaded his pages with too much evidence, he was a far more incisive and informative writer than one would assume from the near absence of his novels in bookshops now.
William Winwood READE (1838-75) The nephew of Charles Reade above. A real-life explorer, he would have been a shining moral example were it not for his attacks upon religion. His explorations were detailed in Savage Africa (1863), The African Sketchbook (1873) and The Story of the Ashanti Campaign (1874). But his unwelcome atheism in The Matyrdom of Man (1872) horrified many – though not all and certainly not H G Wells, who would later describe it as an ‘inspiring presentation of human history as one consistent process.’ Reade died young, not from anything caught in Africa, nor from a bullet in the Ashanti War, but in Wimbledon, of consumption.
William Henry RUSSELL (1820-1907)
Mark RUTHERFORD (1831 – 1913) Mark Rutherford was the pseudonym of William Hale White, and some of the books he wrote appeared as autobiographies of the fictional Rutherford. White used the books to reveal and discuss the intellectual struggles of religious dissent; he himself had abandoned the ministry (in 1854) because of both his own religious doubts and his revulsion from church hypocrisy. (He had previously, in 1851, been expelled from college for challenging religious orthodoxy.) Years later, in 1881, he published his Autobiography of Mark Rutherford, Dissenting Minister and the book caught the attention of a public struggling to keep up in the debate between faith and rationalism. White followed it with several more books, all as Rutherford, although in 1905 he did produce a biography of Bunyan under his own name. The Rutherford books remain important as windows into 19th century dissent.
James Malcolm RYMER (1804-84)
One of the great 19th century writers for Penny Dreadfuls, whose full-length stories (and full-length with Rymer could mean 1,000 pages) include The Black Monk (1844), The White Slave and Amy (1844) and Varney the Vampire (serialised, it seemed, for ever in the mid-1840s). His prodigious output was as unbelievable as were his plots. Rymer not only wrote for the Penny Dreadfuls, he edited Lloyd’s Penny Weekly Miscellany. Later, in the ’50s and ’60s he wrote for Reynolds’ Miscellany and the London Miscellany. Hackwork as it is, there is something hypnotic about Rymer’s rapid prose:
The storm has ceased — all is still. The winds are hushed; the church clock proclaims the hour of one: a hissing sound comes from the throat of the hideous being and he raises his long gaunt arms — the lips move. He advances. The girl places one small foot from the bed on the floor. She is unconsciously dragging the clothing with her. The door of the room is in that direction — can she reach it?
from Rymer’s Varney the Vampire
Rymer also wrote under the pseudonyms (anagrams of his name): M J Errym and Malcolm Merry.
George Augustus SALA (1828-96)
One of the best-known Victorian journalists, beginning his career as editor of Chat in 1848, working for Dickens at Household Words in the 1850s, moving on to the Daily Telegraph and writing several travel books and novels on the side. A man of wide interests who could, it seemed, write on anything, Sala had, before his literary career, trained as an artist – again encompassing the entire field, as he worked both as a miniaturist and a scene painter in the theatre. (Inevitably, he was a book illustrator too, though he might prefer you to ignore some of the pulp titles – such as Heads of the Headless – he illustrated for the publisher Edward Lloyd.) As a journalist he followed in the wake, but without the glory, of W H Russell, reporting from both the Crimea and the American Civil War, but his scope was wider than Russell’s. His books include A Journey Due North (about Russia, 1858), Twice Around the Clock (about the London social scene, 1859), My Diary in the Midst of War (about the Crimea, 1865), and Things I Have Seen and People I Have Known (reminiscences, 1894).
Henry SWEET (1845-1912) It is given to few to find fame as a phonetician but Sweet achieved his on two counts, both of which would have surprised him. First, he had the OUP publish the Philological Society’s new dictionary – which became the Oxford English Dictionary. Second, he was used by Shaw as the basis for Henry Higgins in Pygmalion. Sweet might have hoped his fame would arise from his fine History of English Sounds (1874) or his Anglo-Saxon Reader (1876), or even his Handbook of Phonetics (1877), but 1877 was the year he approached the OUP, and the rest has become history.
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Victorian Lines 