This post began life as a post on Henry Morley and Francis T. Palgrave as two classic examples of 19th century literary scholars. However, my happy discovery of the Byrdcliffe edition of The Golden Treasury courtesy of Lowell Thing, bookseller and fellow collector, changed my focus — but only slightly. I have long been fascinated by 19th-century approaches to literary judgement, which Palgrave exemplifies.
Today’s graduate work in literature seems to be all about literary theory. One unhappy semester spent reading James Joyce’s “Eveline” according to a different literary theory each week left me with a Clockwork Orange-like aversion to the entire book. It didn’t matter whether you tried structuralism, post-structuralism, post-colonialism, queer theory, reader response, or feminist (both French and American). SPOILER ALERT: She never got on that wretched boat.
Morley and Palgrave were exemplars of the older school of academic literary criticism that all these ‘isms’ were reacting against. Morley and Palgrave’s criticism was all about text, with any literary judgement beginning and ending with their sensitivity of selections.
Henry Morley was who was one of the earliest professors of English literature in Great Britain. A contributor to Dickens’ journals, Morley’s principal work was r, was the 10 volume English Writers, and his First Sketch of English Literature (which Byrdcliffe also had a copy of) sold more than 34,000 copies during his lifetime.
Palgrave’s career straddled literature and politics. He began as an assistant private secretary to Gladstone, but returned to Oxford the next year and took a first class in Literae Humaniores. From 1847 to 1862 he was fellow of Exeter College, and in 1849 entered the Education Department at Whitehall. He resigned his position in 1884, and became professor of poetry at Oxford.
Palgrave published both criticism and poetry. His best-known work was his Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics (1861), Palgrave followed it with a Treasury of Sacred Song (1889), and a second series of the Golden Treasury (1897), and the book continues to be published still under Palgrave’s name.
Both scholars’ careers bridged the new nineteenth-century divide between amateur and professional scholarship. As Philippa Levine explains in The Amateur and the Professional , the antiquary was a gentleman amateur, concerned with the relics of the past (whether documents, artifacts or monuments), whereas the historian working professionally in the university was concerned with the narrative of the past and its lessons for the present. The skills of the antiquary tended to be those of the critical examination and interrogation of his sources, whereas those of the historian were those of the philosophical and literary reinterpretation of received narratives.
I freely admit that my taste has always been for the collectors, rather than the literary theorists. That may be why I find the most natural way to engage with the colony I live in is by collecting the same books — and when I can, the very edition they read and loved.
You must be logged in to post a comment.