Geoffrey Tillotson

First published in 1954, Thackeray is intended as a reminder that Thackeray is, after all, a great novelist. Professor Tillotson, admiring the novels as great literature, explores their common characteristics and those they share with the rest of Thackeray’s writings – for he sees Thackeray’s work as all of a piece. He is particularly interested in Thackeray’s methods of narration and in the philosophic commentary which forms a sort of trellis for almost everything he put out. He sees him mainly as a writer who, subtle as he is, address himself to readers honoured as ordinary human beings. In two appendices, Professor Tillotson deals with two particular modern opinions – that Thackeray spoiled his novels by an ‘infiltration’ into them of his own biography, and that he has no place in the great novel tradition. This book will be of interest to students of literature and history.

First published in 1954, Thackeray is intended as a reminder that Thackeray is, after all, a great novelist. Professor Tillotson, admiring the novels as great literature, explores their common characteristics and those they share with the rest of Thackeray’s writings – for he sees Thackeray’s work as all of a piece. He is particularly interested in Thackeray’s methods of narration and in the philosophic commentary which forms a sort of trellis for almost everything he put out. He sees him mainly as a writer who, subtle as he is, address himself to readers honoured as ordinary human beings. In two appendices, Professor Tillotson deals with two particular modern opinions – that Thackeray spoiled his novels by an ‘infiltration’ into them of his own biography, and that he has no place in the great novel tradition. This book will be of interest to students of literature and history.

The re-emergence into critical esteem of the literature of the English mid-nineteenth century has been one of the post-war excitements for students and general readers. Mid-nineteenth century literature is not simply the best body of literature the English have produced. It happens also to be literature that has a practical interest for ourselves. We live so plainly in its wake. The problems being faced a hundred years ago are the problems still facing ourselves, such as the continued supremacy of science and its methods and the consequently progressive disappearance of what was called the supernatural. Nineteenth-century literature, however, is interesting for other reasons than extended topicality, offering infinite aesthetic riches, as Geoffrey Tillotson discusses in this volume of essays.

This collection of lectures, broadcasts, reviews, and articles (several of which have not previously been published) embraces many aspects of the English literary scene in the middle of the nineteenth century. Though various in origin the collection has this unity: it has been the constant concern of its authors for many years that the great and lasting contribution of the mid-Victorian period to our literature should be fully vindicated, and its appraisal based upon secure foundations of critical scholarship. The book has moreover an obvious connection with the volume on the mid-nineteenth century which the Tillotsons are preparing for the Oxford History of English Literature, though the items included here are not samples of that history but rather ‘milestones, or halting places, in the several ways that lead towards it’. There are important studies of Carlyle, John Henry Newman, Tennyson, Clough, Matthew Arnold, and George Eliot. These, however, represent only one side of the book’s interest, for there are accounts of writers famous in their day, as Harriett Mozley and Charlotte M. Yonge, but since the cross-currents at work in the period, notably ‘Writers and Readers in 1851’, which vividly convey much of the quality of the momentous years in which so many masterpieces were produced. At several points indeed the volume demonstrates that the truth about the literature of the nineteenth century, in distinction (for the most part) to that of earlier centuries, may be recovered complete.

This volume makes conveniently available to students and others the group of chapters in Professor Geoffrey Tillotson’s Augustan Studies in which he deals with the poetic theory and practice of the Augustan age as a whole, rather than with particular works. Augustan poetry as defined by Professor Tillotson is the ‘poetry written by most poets from Elizabethan times into the nineteenth century’ and though this may appear at first sight an inconveniently wide definition it enables the author to show that the great eighteenth-century masters who are his chief concern here are in the main course of English poetry.

It is still true that most readers of eighteenth-century poetry approach it by way of nineteenth-century poetry; they know what Wordsworth said about Pope before they read Pope. This means that when they read Pope and other eighteenth-century poets, they apply the wrong criteria. An eighteenth-century poet did not have to create the taste by which he was enjoyed to the same extent as a nineteenth-century poet was conscious of having to. The kinds were ready waiting for him, and, if the rules of poetic diction for the kinds of which he elected to write were properly complied with, the products were recognisable: epic, tragedy in verse, Pindaric, elegy, heroic and familiar epistle, pastoral, georgic, occasional verse, translation and imitation. This book, a collection of essays by Dr Tillotson, examines these types of eighteenth-century poetry with particular focus on poetic diction, as well as discussing works such as Pope’s letters and Johnson’s dictionary.

Originally published in 1954, this volume analyses the works of Thackeray, providing a detailed critical exposition which sheds light on his authorial approach. Taking as its point of departure Thackeray's singularity of vision, the text moves through the various formal techniques used in the novels before putting forward some more general conclusions regarding his philosophical position. A large number of quotations are used, including numerous long extracts, reflecting a firm basis in textual analysis. Illustrations and a chronological table of Thackeray's life are also present. This is a highly readable book that will be of value to anyone with an interest in nineteenth-century literature, satire, and the history of the novel.