George Charles Moore Smith (1858 1940) was a renowned literary scholar who graduated from St John's College, Cambridge, with a first-class degree in the classics in 1881. In 1896 he was made professor of English language and literature at Firth College, Sheffield, and he played a key role in building up the social and academic position of the institution after it became the University of Sheffield in 1905. College Plays Performed in the University of Cambridge (1923) includes a chronological table of the Latin plays performed by scholars at the university in the sixteenth and seventeenth...

J. Tyrwhitt Brooks was a pseudonym of the nineteenth-century publisher and journalist, Henry Vizetelly (1820 94). Born in London, Vizetelly was apprenticed to a wood engraver as a young child. He entered the printing business and helped found two successful but short-lived newspapers, the Pictorial Times and the Illustrated Times. His Four Months among the Gold-Finders, published in 1849, was a commercial and critical success on both sides of the Atlantic. It purported to be a genuine diary about the Californian Gold Rush, and was widely accepted as such. However, he admits in his 1893...

Sir Leslie Stephen (1832 1904) was founding Editor of the Dictionary of National Biography (NBD). Also a writer on philosophy, ethics, and literature, he was educated at Eton, King's College, London, and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he remained as a Fellow and a tutor for a number of years. Though a sickly child, he later became a keen and successful mountaineer, taking part in first ascents of nine peaks in the Alps. These biographical essays and critiques were written originally for the National Review and published as two two-volume sets in 1898 and 1902. These vignettes show that,...

Successors such as Wordsworth and Coleridge admired yet overshadowed William Cowper (1731 1800). Troubled by mental instability, he retreated from both the legal profession and the woman he had hoped to marry, seeking out a quiet existence in the country. In spite of his struggles, he made a translation of Homer's Iliad, produced a considerable body of poetry, and maintained many epistolary contacts. This four-volume biography, compiled by his friend and fellow poet William Hayley (1745 1820), appeared between 1803 and 1806, bringing together selected letters and unpublished poems to...

The humorously self-styled 'late' Thomas Pennant (1726 98) published this short autobiographical survey in 1793. A prominent Welsh naturalist and antiquary, he was known more for his energy and meticulous methodology than for original scientific genius. Yet he helped popularise natural history with beautifully illustrated works such as his History of Quadrupeds, the third edition of which is also reissued in this series. Moreover, he is credited with preserving thorough records of antiquities that were later damaged or destroyed. Samuel Johnson, who toured Scotland after Pennant, praised him...

An 1863 collection of essays on morality, literary style, psychology, politics and readership by hugely popular Victorian novelist Bulwer Lytton.

A leading figure in Romanticism and a political campaigner committed to social reform, Lord Byron (1788 1824) is regarded as one of the greatest of British poets. First published in 1922, this two-volume work is a compilation of letters Byron wrote between 1808 and 1824 to some of his close friends, including Lady Melbourne, John Cam Hobhouse, a fellow-student at Cambridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The introduction and biographical notes by the publisher John Murray IV (1851 1928), grandson of Byron's own publisher John Murray II, supplement the letters and restore their narrative thread....

This four-volume edition of the letters of Mrs Elizabeth Montagu (1718 1800), the 'Queen of the Bluestockings', was edited by her nephew and adopted son Matthew (1762 1831) and published in 1809 13. The daughter of wealthy parents, and well educated in history and languages, at the age of twenty-one she married Edward Montagu, a grandson of the earl of Sandwich whose income derived from northern estates and coal mines, and began to establish a London salon attended by the intellectual cream of British society, including Johnson, Burke, Garrick, Hannah More and Hester Chapone. The letters (and...

This four-volume edition of the letters of Mrs Elizabeth Montagu (1718 1800), the 'Queen of the Bluestockings', was edited by her nephew and adopted son Matthew (1762 1831) and published in 1809 13. The daughter of wealthy parents, and well educated in history and languages, at the age of twenty-one she married Edward Montagu, a grandson of the earl of Sandwich whose income derived from northern estates and coal mines, and began to establish a London salon attended by the intellectual cream of British society, including Johnson, Burke, Garrick, Hannah More and Hester Chapone. The letters (and...

Clara Lucas Balfour (1808 1878) published Sketches of English Literature in 1852. The work surveys the development of English literature from the revival of letters in the fourteenth century to the literary controversies of the mid-nineteenth. Balfour places a special focus on the work of women writers. The first chapters consider the impact of the Renaissance and Reformation, the development of printing, and the publication of early vernacular Bibles on English literature; and examine the work of a number of Elizabethan writers, including Spenser and Shakespeare. The survey continues with...