Henry Mayhew interviews a former London pickpocket, turned patterer; grew up in Shropshire, father a Wesleyan minister:
"...I have read Paine, and Valney, and Holyoake, those infidel writers, and have also read the works of Bulwer, Dickens and numbers of others..."
Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: anon Print: Book, Serial / periodical
[Letter to Aunt dated 3 February 1832] I do not think any books so bad to read as a newspaper. [...]If you ever read novels, do send for Eugene Aram. Miss Hobart and I have just read it, and thought it well done. ...'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Anne Lister Print: Book
[A Sheffield Survey organised by Arnold Freeman in 1918, assessing 816 manual workers, gives the following case:] 'Private in an infantry regiment, formerly a skilled painter, age eighteen. Spends evenings painting, reading, working on model airplanes. Has attended art school....Patronizes Free Library. Has read The Pickwick Papers, The Old Curiosity Shop, David Copperfield, Bulwer Lytton, Ballantyne, Henty, Robinson Crusoe, Quentin Dirward, Ivanhoe, Waverley, Kidnapped, Treasure Island and Two Years before the Mast, as well as the travels of David Livingstone, Fridtjof Nansen, Matthew Peary and Scott of the Antarctic'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: questionaire respondent Print: Book
Emily Bronte, diary paper for 26 June 1837: 'Monday evening June 26 1837
A bit past 4 o'clock Charolotte [sic] working in Aunts room Branwell reading "Eugene Aram" to her ...'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Branwell Bronte Print: Book
'I have been seeking 'Falkland' here for a long time without success. Those beautiful extracts of it which you showed me at Tealby haunted me incessantly.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson Print: Book
'I don't know whether I shall lose your good opinion forever if I tell you a true thing; but I had rather you knew the worst: - that I am intensely enjoying, this day or two, "The Lost Tales of Miletus".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Harriet Martineau Print: Book
'Struggling away at "Fables in Song" .'
Unknown
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson
'All right, I'll see what I can do. Before I could answer, I had to see the book; and my good father, after trying at all our libraries, bought it for me. I like the book; that is, some of it; and I'll try to lick up four or five pages for the "Fortnightly."'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson Print: BookManuscript: Letter
?Friday. I have got on rather better with the ?Fables?; perhaps it won?t be a failure, though I still fear...Saturday...I just finished some of the deedest rubbish about Lord Lytton?s ?Fables?, that an intelligent editor ever shot into his waste paper basket.?
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson Print: Book
Elizabeth Barrett to Lady Margaret Cocks, 30 August 1832:
'As soon as breakfast is over, I read a chapter from the Hebrew Bible [...] and then I hear my
brothers read Greek; at two we are so patriarchal as to dine: and afterwards I go out upon a
donkey [...] & read Pelham, & do many idle things'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Book
Elizabeth Barrett to Julia Martin, 14 December 1832:
'I have been reading Bulwer's novels & Mrs Trollope's libels, & Dr Parr's works [...] [Mrs
Trollope] has neither the delicacy nor the candour which constitute true nobility of mind [...]
Bulwer has quite delighted me: he has all the dramatic talent which Scott has: & all the
passion which Scott has not -- and he appears to me to be besides a far profounder
discriminator of character. There are some very fine things in his Denounced [sic].'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Book
Elizabeth Barrett to Mary Russell Mitford, 17 March 1842:
'In regard to Zanoni, I think with you that there is much in it, one wd yearn to see cast out of it,
in reverence to the unity of the whole [goes on to comment on text in further detail]'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Book
Robert Browning to Alfred Domett, 13 July 1842:
'Sir L. Bulwer has just published a set of sing-songs -- I read two, or one, in a Review -- &
thought them abominable.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Browning Print: Serial / periodical
Robert Browning to Alfred Domett, 5 March 1843:
'Here we are sound asleep. Bulwer's new Novel, "The Last of the Barons," is to be, he says,
the last of Bulwer's -- and seems a poor affair, if one may judge by the single extract I have
seen.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Browning Print: Serial / periodical
'How detestably Sir Edward Bulwer speaks of Shelley in his life of Schiller. - he thinks to gain popularity by truckling to the times - and mistakes the spirit of the times, & casts an indelible stain on his own name, as long as it survives.'
[letter to Edward Moxon]
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Shelley Print: Book
Elizabeth Barrett to Mary Russell Mitford, 21 March 1843:
'Notwithstanding my admiration of Bulwer, I had the hardest & most laborious work passing
through his "Last of the Barons" (May it be the last of his romances wrought after such a
fashion!) [...] There are threads of golden beauty [...] the sub-stuff being strong, & stiff, &
useful -- very good stout history [...] but as for romance & poetic Art, the Goddess of useful
knowledge has set her face against them.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Book
Robert Browning to Elizabeth Barrett, letter postmarked 15 August 1845:
'I have read those novels [i.e. Alice, and Ernest Maltravers, mentioned by Barrett in letter postmarked 13 August] -- but I must keep that word of words, "genius" -- for something different -- "talent" will do here surely.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Browning Print: Book
Robert Browning to Elizabeth Barrett, letter postmarked 15 August 1845:
'I have read those novels [i.e. Alice, and Ernest Maltravers, mentioned by Barrett in letter postmarked 13 August] -- but I must keep that word of words, "genius" -- for something different -- "talent" will do here surely.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Browning Print: Book
Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Arabella Moulton-Barrett, 12 March 1850:
'Robert is reading "the Caxtons" & is much pleased with the book. [italics]I[end italics] am reading "Shirley", and am interested -- only it does not seem to me equally suggestive of power (so far) with Jane Eyre.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Browning Print: Book
'My mother started to read to me when I was very young indeed. She read aloud beautifully and never got tired, and she would never, from the first, read anything that she could not enjoy herself, which cut out all the poor quality writing which every right-minded child loves when he can get it. Her only concession was one weekly comic, "Rainbow". But apart from that, I was reared on a fine mixed diet of Beatrix Potter, A.A. Milne, Dickens, Stevenson, Hans Andersen, Kenneth Grahame and Kipling – especially Puck of Pook’s Hill whose three magnificent stories of Roman Britain were the beginning of my own passion for the subject, and resulted in the fullness of time in The Eagle of the Ninth. Hero myths of Greece and Rome I had, in an unexpurgated edition which my mother edited herself as she went along, and Norse and Saxon and Celtic legends. There were Whyte Melville’s The Gladiators and Bulwer Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii and Weigal’s Egyptian Princess; for my mother loved historical novels – history of any kind, though her view of it was always the minstrel’s rather than the historian’s.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Rosemary Sutcliff Print: Book
John Gibson Lockhart to John Wilson Croker, 6 August 1846:
'The "Modern Timon" is not, I think, by a [italics]poet[end italics], but it is the work of a clever man, and who understands the construction of lines and the rhythm, and in short, all that people can learn without inspiration. I should suspect the Timon to be by Bulwer or Disraeli, or possibly Dicky Milnes'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Gibson Lockhart Print: Book
19 May 1854:
'My birthday [...] No cause of congratulations to me, alas, to have completed another year, when more than ever I should wish to be as young as I feel ... The chapter in My Novel [by Bulwer-Lytton] on courage and patience is admirable. It ought to be useful to me.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Lady Charlotte Guest Print: Unknown
Charlotte Bronte to her publisher, W. S. Williams, 19 November 1849:
'I have read the "Caxtons," I have looked at "Fanny Hervey," I think I will not write what I think of either — should I see you I will speak it.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charlotte Brontë Print: Book
'Still here [in camp] doing nothing and enjoying books. One book Ernest Maltravers by Lytton has impressed me very much.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: John Owen Maddox Print: Book
'On many nights I would sit beside the kitchen fire, listening to my father reading or telling tales. There was no wireless then and no gramophones, and our fireside talk was little different from that which had been going on for generations by any Connaught fireside ... At other times my father would read to me from a book. These tales were usually of the "creepy" variety—Thrawn Janet; or one of Marion Crawford's uncanny stories; or Green Tea, or The Watcher, by that master of the macabre, Sheridan Le Fanu; or the most vivid ghost story in English, Bulwer Lytton's The Haunted and the Haunters; and many another tooth-chattering tale, as Stevenson called them.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Desmond Malone Print: Book
'Harold'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Sarah Good Print: Book
'I've been frightfully lazy today: it's been
too hot to do anything. Pater was a gem: he
brought my breakfast up about 9.30 and I didn't
get up until eleven. I read "Getting Together",
a pro-American little book by Ian Hay—he
has been out to America for the Government to
establish a feeling of goodwill and the book is
what he has discovered about the Yankees. Have
been reading Bulwer-Lytton's "Last Days of
Pompeii" this afternoon. It is awfully
interesting, especially as I have seen
Pompeii.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Dora Willatt Print: Book
